A Summary of Gold Bugs

At Marketwatch, via Ritholtz:

We’ve been out-Chinese-ed, out-German-ed and India-ed. Those economies are the envy of the world. Chinese banks haven’t made any bad loans and it’s a Shanghai-La as long as you can live on $6,000 a year and aren’t one of the billions of people who can’t speak or move about freely. And talk about opportunity: Who wouldn’t want their 10-year-olds working in a factory stripping copper from old computer monitors? Everyone works.
And how about the Germans. Germany’s export boom will go on infinitely even as the euro rises. The Germans are so rich, they’re bailing out the rest of Europe even though their own debt-to-GDP is 79%.
India is the best place in the world to do business, except for the overcrowding, corruption, dependence on agriculture, and the fact that 25% of its people are below the poverty line. India is running double-digit inflation and has a infant-mortality rate higher than Zimbabwe, Mongolia, North Korea and Namibia. Sad, but it means more farm jobs for the living.
Buy gold.
It’s the only thing that will be valuable when the New World Order shows itself. Right now, the Illuminati, Trilateral Commission and the Freemasons are planning for the end and they won’t be satisfied until they have world. domination or a better public relations firm.
Buy gold.
Because you’re a patriot. Gold hires people. It takes a chance on an idea. It believes that, for all of our politicians and corporate missteps, we have a dynamic country that can compete with anyone. Gold makes a statement. It says “I think the American people work as hard and are as resourceful as anyone on the planet,” and then adds “but for now, I’m just going to hide out in this bunker and eat Spam until someone else has the guts to create a new business with a great idea and gives me a job.”
Gold looks good and does nothing. And isn’t that how it should be? Look at all these people trying to “do” something: putting out fires, doing our taxes, teaching our kids, giving us check-ups, taking care of our elderly, serving us our meals, reporting the news, constructing casinos, delivering our packages, building our roads, making solar panels — what a bunch of morons. They should be buying gold!
Those idiots will know who’s boss when the economy comes crashing down and we’re left in a total state of anarchy. You can imagine the scene: busted businesses, poverty everywhere, road signs in Chinese. They’ll be the ones working for yuan and euros to pay for their government homes and the rest of us will be standing on top laughing at them. We were the ones who saw it coming, loaded up on guns and Oreos, and put our money to good use. Look who’s laughing at our ruined society now. Ha! We were smart enough to heed the words.
Buy gold.

I have a little gold for two reasons.  One, I think shiny coins are cool, and two, gold bugs are crazy enough to bid it much higher than what I bought it at quite a few years ago.  Otherwise, it is pretty damn useless.  At $1500 an ounce, I need to find a bar that will accept 0.00067 ounces of gold to buy a dollar beer, then come up with more for a tip, if I don't want to pay for the transaction in dollars.  Also, the gold standard really makes it hard to grow the economy.

A Populism History Lesson

Joseph Thorndike, via Mark Thoma:

Tax avoidance is legal and tax evasion is not. Simple distinction, but not always relevant, at least not in politics. Consider the recent burst of outrage over corporate tax avoidance generally and General Electric's tax bill in particular. In some years, GE's tax schemes might have escaped public notice. But in other years -- especially hard ones -- they get plenty of attention. And it was ever thus.

Consider the lessons of 1933. Wall Street investigator Ferdinand Pecora hauled J.P. Morgan, Jr. before the Senate banking committee. Pecora had been charged with uncovering malfeasance on Wall Street, but he focused much of his attention on tax issues. In particular, he forced Morgan to acknowledge from the witness chair that he had paid no income taxes in 1931 and 1932.
Morgan provided a reasonable explanation: stock trading losses in the great market crash had wiped out his other sources of taxable income (such losses were fully deductible in those days). But the revelation still shocked the nation, and Morgan's explanation carried little weight with Pecora -- and pretty much none with the general public.

"The country, in 1933, was in no mood for nice distinctions between tax 'evasion' and tax 'avoidance,' " Pecora later recalled. "Approved by the existing tax authorities or not, the public could not see the justice or equity of financial giants paying nothing, while Tom, Dick, and Harry scraped the bottom of their modest purses to meet their tax obligations to the Government.” (Ferdinand Pecora, Wall Street under Oath; the Story of Our Modern Money Changers,1939).

The Pecora investigation sparked a powerful drive to clamp down on tax avoidance, producing (among other things), new limits on the deductibility of capital losses. More generally, it kicked off a decade of high-profile campaigns to boost effective tax rates on the rich, including a remarkably ambitious effort to revamp corporate income taxation from the ground up.

I think we could use some serious adjustments to the tax code, which would boost effective tax rates on the rich and revamp corporate income taxation from the ground up.  Too bad one party is too cowardly to pursue this, while the other is too stupid and bought and paid for.

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