Brown, Leg Ignore Crashing Economy

John Seiler:

Wasn’t Gov. Jerry Brown supposed to be the all-knowing, all-seeing wise man, the Guru of Tofu, Jerry the Magnificent?

He reminds me of Carnac the Magnificent, the old Johnny Carson skit. Except Jerry the Magnificient isn’t funny.

He doesn’t even see what’s under his eyes. The same with the Legislature.

What’s happening is that the economy is crashing again. Inflation, especially of gas and food, already has increased taxes on Californians. A new tax increase, as Brown and the Democratic majority in the Legislature want, would be a second tax increase to hammer Californians.

There’s even more bad news, indicating that the U.S. economy is crashing again, taking California down with it. Neither Brown, nor his predecessor Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, nor the Legislature prepared us for this, as they ought to have. Here’s the latest:

* National unemployment is up again:

Initial claims for state jobless benefits increased 1,000 to 427,000, the Labor Department said….

The rise kept first-time claims perched above the 400,000 mark for the ninth week in a row. Analysts normally associate a level below that with steady job growth.

“It’s the same dismal trend continuing. It’s not getting worse, but it’s not getting better either,” said Keith Hembre, chief economist at Nuveen Asset Management in Minneapolis.

* Famed investor Jim Rogers warns that the economy is collapsing:

The U.S. is approaching a financial crisis worse than 2008, Jim Rogers, chief executive, Rogers Holdings, warned CNBC Wednesday.

“The debts that are in this country are skyrocketing,” he said. “In the last three years the government has spent staggering amounts of money and the Federal Reserve is taking on staggering amounts of debt.

“When the problems arise  next time…what are they going to do? They can’t quadruple the debt again. They cannot print that much more money. It’s gonna be worse the next time around.”

* The national debt soon will be higher than the whole national economy. It’s like running up your credit card debt higher than your family income. No way that turns out well.

* The stock market has dropped 6 percent since April.

A tax increase during this crashing economy would be the height of economic insanity. Yet Brown and the other tax obsessives are determined to take us down even further than we already are.

June 9, 2011