#805 Zeal of Freshness

I like picking up news from the fringes—the little articles that often go unnoticed amidst the bigger headlines blaring about death and destruction.
The smaller stories are still getting reported, you just have to work a little to find the pepper amongst the fly poo.
This may or may not be one of them. It remains to be seen whether anyone will pick up it’s significance. Obama is raking in twice as many contributions as McCain. No surprise there, he’s enormously popular. But it’s where he’s picking it up at that level that’s amazing.
Wall Street.
Yep, even though Obama is on record saying he will raise capital gains and corporate taxes, financial industry biggies have forked over with incredible zeal.
Why?
Wall Street wants change too. Or at least some spare change. Because they’re broke. Because there’s an underlying tax-like thing that’s draining every last drop out of the economy at large. It’s the shrinking value of the dollar.
It’s worth about 35% less now than it was when the Bush administration began the war in Iraq. Since then, they’ve lowered taxes and spent more money. Forget about “tax and spend.” It’s “don’t tax and spend anyway” that’s causing the problem.
Because by continuing to spend huge amounts on a war and not raising taxes to pay for it, our country has had to borrow money. And the folks that are lending us money are foreign countries. And the value of our currency has gone down as a direct result.
So tell me, if I were to suggest taxing you 15% so you’d have 85 cents left on every dollar or shrinking your dollar to 65 cents, which would you opt for?
Yep.
Wall Street agrees. Plus, there’s a notion that Obama may help refuel the optimism of the 1990’s when, as one financial source put it, Bill Clinton led the largest economic expansion in history.
That’s back when Clinton pumped up consumer confidence and brought the egregious deficit spending of the Reagan/Bush years under control.
You know, when he was a fiscally conservative Democrat.
I don’t know about you, but the imagery of pump up seems so much better than trickle down...
America, ya gotta love it.