Gene Morphis ' View

I was listening to the Michael Medved show yesterday. He does a nice job at talk radio. But he was worked up because the CBS News Poll showed that 72% of Americans surveyed think the U.S. is on the wrong track. (When I went to CBS' site, it looks to me like the number is 69%, but that's an insignicant difference). Medved's view is that income for the poorest citizens are rising (recent government data), unemployment is low, stock market is high, no cold war, so why so pessimistic? Here are my answers: Several of our young men and women are being killed every day in a war that we are getting sick of. The deficit is some unimaginable, staggering number that my generation is imposing on my children. Social Security is bankrupt and both Congress and the Administration (both previous and current, and both Republican and Democratic) are unwilling to face the issue. There are virulent infectious agents in hospitals that are resistent to essentially all antibiotics, and the drug co...

Senators and Congressmen are falling all over each other to introduce legislation to do something to China for any of a variety of presumed sins. Many of these are centered on the concept that the Chinese currency - generally called the renminbe - is artificially undervalued, and, if allowed to float on the open market, would zoom in price vs. the dollar, making U.S. exports etc. more competitive. Let's examine this policy from the opposite perspective - e.g. - the dollar would sink in value versus the Chinese currency. While this might be of some short-term value to some exporters, it is something of a crash diet, resulting in quick, but short-lived, weight loss. Hasn't a bedrock of U.S. policy since Alexander Hamilton was the first Secretary of the Treasury been a strong dollar? Do we think that a weak dollar is in the long-run best interest of America? Hardly. There are a number of constructive things Congress can do should it so chose. First, it could shave a couple of ...

Apparently, NJ Governor John Corzine joined 26 other state governors to sign a letter to Congress asking them to investigate the oil companies for price gouging. Since Corzine was a senior executive at Goldman Sachs, where he became a multimillionaire (if indeed not a billionaire), I expected that he had some fundamental grasp of supply and demand, and the price function in a market economy. Perhaps crashing at 90 miles an hour without a seat belt injured more than just his ribs....I can't believe he doesn't understand economics at that basic level...he is too honorable a man just to grandstand on this issue.....