Left Looney on Economics

The James Madison Institute reports on the Economic Literacy of Progressives and finds exactly what you might expect, a train wreck.

George Mason University Professor Daniel Klein and Zogby researcher Zeljka Buturovic surveyed 4,835 American adults on eight questions about basic economics. They also asked each of the respondents about their political leanings, grouping them into six categories: progressive/very liberal; liberal; moderate; conservative; very conservative; and libertarian. They wrote about their findings in The Wall Street Journal.

As Klein asserts, “The left has trouble squaring economic thinking with their political psychology, morals, and aesthetics.”

If you are like me, you run into this thinking everyday. If you take for example our current economic crisis, spearheaded in large measure by decades of socialist programs, most with good intentions, which are geared to assist fellow citizens, you find governmental initiatives that end up being entitlement programs that are drowning our financial system and placing Uncle Sam at the doorstep of bankruptcy. Going green, presented as a worthwhile effort to protect the environment masquerading as a global transfer of wealth, is a prime example of this. Current legislation proposed as the cap and trade bill, if voted into law, will likely be the event that does bankrupt the ole USA.

“We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice"
-F.A. Hayek

We recently had an example of a progressive politician, who really demonstrated what the study identified. Get a load of this recent interview on FOX News Neil Cavuto and Vermont Representative Peter Welch, and must I qualify that he is a Democrat:



That was brutal. Cavuto finally recognized that the progressives are lost in an economic sea. The Congressman simply cannot comprehend what the elimination of the dividends of British Petroleum (BP:NYSE) and other oil related companies would do to the pensions to most Americans.

So with a handful of economic idiots running things in Washington, what can we expect going forward in the marketplace? The worst is behind us according to President Barack Obama. Dr. Arthur Laffer, former economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, penned an article for The Wall Street Journal that is raising quite a few eyebrows among those on the periphery of the investor community. Art Laffer's colleague, Steve Moore of The Wall Street Journal, weighs in and you better sit down for this one.



Dr. Laffer has put this conclusion forward for a few months now, and when you couple the Gulf Oil Spill, an economic and environmental of unmeasurable magnitude, you put in some sell stops. You may still have some time for trades, but you have been warned.