Web Letters: Wall Street, Iraq and the Declining Dollar

By Ken Miller

June 12, 2007

Ken Miller's article is illuminating and very much on target. The crisis toward which we are drifting is one about which most Americans prefer to be willfully blind-- "Things will take care of themselves." Truth is, we cannot afford the waste of this war and it is simply foolishness to compare its cost percentage-wise to our GDP as a way of diminishing the shock of such colossal waste. Even Samuelson of the Washington Post has made this mistake. The shock will come. It is just now completely out of sight, not felt, not believed in. It will come.

Ernest G. Werner

Trumansburg, NY
06/22/2007 @ 08:15am
Boy, I sure do wish Mr. Miller had started off with his ending paragraph and spared me the usual left-wing economic shoehorning and rationalizations. So the dollar is down, and it's going to hurt oil's affordability just as it's availability is on the wane (although Daniel Yergan, who knows more about oil than a Wall Street salesman, would contest this) and it's Bush's fault, or at least some of the "symptoms" are. Never mind that the dollar was trending downward before Bush took office ever since the tech bubble, which attracted many a foreign currency, cracked in March 2000. Several billion sell orders later combined with a post 9/11 Fed rate accommodations and what's a foreigner to do with the greenback? Subsequently the price of oil, which is traded in dollars, sees less local currency bang for its translation buck, while at the same time the Asian contagion (that kept Clinton era oil below $20 a barrel) saw its fever break and economic growth. The result has been a substantial further weakening of the dollar. Considering the economic mess Bush inherited that alone is responsible for the deficit well before any tax cuts (oh, Krugman didn't mention this?) and the years it took for the NASDAQ and DOW to even hit bottom, one would think Mr. Miller would be grateful that the "consumer" held up so well. Or perhaps he's not because it speaks well of, or for left-wingers, less badly of Bush's handling of the economic mess? Lastly, what people are calling it "military Keynesianism"? I've never heard of that and I read all the mainstream economists. Hmmmm. Are these people really concerned about deficit spending that is now 1.2% of GDP? Are they concerned that printing presses have to work overtime to pay for a military that is 4% of GDP, less than several European countries? Then these same people must be losing a heck of a lot more sleep over the tens of trillions needed for our unfunded liabilities to entitlement transfer payments. Not to mention the trillions more being promised by every Democratic candidate on the stump today. This kind of spending makes Bush's military spending and his Medicare part D combined look like child's play. So tell us, who's gonna finance that?

Hugh Maguire

New York, NY
06/12/2007 @ 2:34pm

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