It's really amazing sometimes when you see the shallow level of thought that goes into the current reporting on economics. Or for that matter what comes out directly from the economics community or our lawmakers. (No surprise on the latter.)
I came across this headline on Yahoo! Finance: "Can natural gas help America's trade balance?"
Apparently, like so many other people, the author is quite perturbed by the negative sign in front of our nation's trade balance. He's obviously been influenced by the rest of his colleagues in the mainstream media or by the usual, bullshit propaganda coming from the clueless economics profession or perhaps the greedy crooks and liars on Wall Street.
His"big idea" is to erase that horrible, terrible, negative sign in front of our nation's trade balance by selling off our cheap, abundant, supply of natural gas.
I'm always amazed at the lack of even the slightest bit of follow-through in the reasoning process of most people. They get some idea in their heads (usually planted there by some cynical, manipulative, person or entity) and rather than think it through all the way to its logical conclusion they'll just take it as given and run with it.
Hey, yeah...getting rid of that horrible, terrible, negative sign in front of our trade deficit would be great (that's what he's been told, of course), but he fails to follow through and see what the ultimate consequences of that plan would bring. Remember, his plan was to sell off a large portion or maybe even all, of our cheap, abundant, natural gas supply.
What these clowns are proposing (and FYI there is currently a bill floating around in Congress that proposes to do exactly this) is to rid ourselves of all of our cheap, abundant, natural gas, which we use as a fuel to power our electric generating plants, heat our homes and propel a large part of our municipal transportation fleet, so that we can have a plus sign in front of our trade balance. Can he not see the ridiculousness of this? Can others not see the ridiculousness of this? This is NOT how we look after our interests, it's how we IMPOVERISH ourselves!!
Look...the negative sign in front of our trade balance is really a positive to us in real terms. It means we get the stuff--clothes, cars, television sets, computers, electronics, fuel...in essence, all the things we use in our everyday lives and which define our standard of living--in exchange for our paper money that we can print all day long. It's the foreigners who are the clear losers in this, not us. Yet this guy and many others like him, including a majority of members of Congress along with our own president, want to turn it around the other way and send away our real assets for the benefit of foreigners so that we can earn some...yuan?? Really???
All I can say is, we are screwed.
