Something there is that does not love a [fence]

Dear Dr. Bones,

I have rather neglected our old ideobuddy

(( Dr. Pressbeater of the Seeper Institution ))

lately, probably because Baron Izatsu has retired, or fallen prey to cyberassassination, and no longer brightens the mammonological

(( dismal swamp ))

by raising urchinworthy doubts about His Imperial Majesty’s latest wardrobe propensities.

Returning after an absence of a week or ten days, then, Paddy and Eye were greeted by a virtual barbed-wire fence bearing the admonition "(Only one link allowed per comment)."

As you know, sir, I have always been a devotee of Mr. Thurber's maxim "Where there is a ‘will’, there is a ‘won't’." So here, without more ado, as is my wont, . . . :

Defending President Obama and the 1 Percent Saturday, 14 April 2012 08:14 There are plenty of reasons to bash President Obama and even more to bash the richest 1 percent of the income distribution, but it is possible to go off track. The _Post_ did so today in citing a study by that shows the top 1 percent got 93 percent of the income gains from 2009-2010. This is highly misleading because the vast majority of these income gains were capital gains due to the rebound of the stock market following its collapse in 2008-2009. Using this same measure of income, the top 1 percent suffered 49 percent of the income losses in the recession. While it is reasonable to include capital gains in a measure of income growth over a long-term (this is money that people have at their disposal), the short-term fluctuations give a very misleading measure of distribution of income. President Bush was not a hero to the bottom 99 percent because the stock market crashed under his watch and President Obama is not a >>> SOP <<< for the rich because it recovered while he was in office. (Now bailing out Wall Street is a different matter.) (( ... ))

_Ad quem responduisset Patricius Tammaniodes_:

"President Obama is not a sop for the rich" (( fold here )) A failed stab at ‘sap’, Internet Critic guesses that must be. If the consumer of prose were really being solicited to compare and contrast how the TopPercenters would be doing today, had J. Sidney McCain won the last election and handed his Classmates the whole loaf instead of half a dunked doughnut, there would have been some ancillary stage business. With the proposed emendation, no mindreading is required. Dr. Pressbeater would then be marching in the middle of a familiar donkey parade that stepped off when Comrade Carville wished he could ‘pass’ and be reincarnated as the Bond Market, so as to be able get a little of the President's attention. Less seriously, Mr. O'Bama's $800K of taxable take-home boodle may look like riches to an ignorant lay sheep, yet half was salary, one reads, and the other half literary royalties--nothing to do with capital gains and the dread B. M.

A certain ‘Paul’ glossed Comrade Pressbeater's latest as follows:

Obama Should Be Praised for the Stock Market Doubling in Value written by Paul, April 14, 2012 9:51 PM (( snip edifying quotation from St. Maynard of Keynes )) One of the strongest forces driving the increasing propensity to consume has been the massive rally in the stock markets which has now run more than 3 years and looks ripe for more gains. Since consumption increases are essential to our economic recovery, criticizing Obama for Wall Street's recovery is simply ludicrous. (( ... ))

I daresay it is my own skipping class that leaves me unable to decide whether this e-person is spoofing us or not when he refers to three years of "increased propensity to consume" as of the closing bell last Friday afternoon, 13 April 2012.

¡Internet Critic would definitely be kidding, though, if *EYE* said that!

It is possible, however, that the premiss of my hypothetical tomfoolery, viz. that ScroogeBank and the Goldman-Saxons and so on have long been just sitting on vast dragon-hoards of bucks, is mistaken. Whight or ’rong, I assume that the refusal of those goodvolks to disgorge a little is a major reason why there have NOT been any consumption propensities worth writing home about lately amongst the "small people."

(( ADDENDUMB. Before you start shouting that you detect no Bray State angle here, sir, let me quote a little more of the Urtext:

At one point in discussing Mitt Romney's record as governor of Massachusetts [some booby or another] tells readers: Average weekly wages for workers rose slightly more than they did nationally while Romney was in charge. In Massachusetts, wages went up 4.1 percent from 2002 to 2006, adjusting for inflation. Nationally, they rose 3.2 percent. Inflation in the Northeast was 1.9 percentage points higher over this period than for the nation as a whole. If the calculation of real wages used for this comparison simpl[y] used the nationwide inflation rate to measure the growth of real wages, then it would be seriously misleading. The regional CPI would imply that wage growth in Massachusetts lagged the nationwide average by roughly a percentage point, instead of exceeding it by 0.9 percentage points. (Of course, Romney's ability to influence wage growth in a 4-year stint as governor would be very limited in any case.)

Naturally œconomic ignoramuses like Paddy and Eye have no business agreeing or disagreeing with anything so pro and tech and wonk as that passage. Perhaps we may observe, however, that Dr. Pressbeater and the Seeper Institution do not seem

(( to give a hoot ))

whether our dear MA be exceptional or not. ))


Happy days.