sonar love

Here’s a little grammar discussion to lighten the mood. It seems like I’m forever trying to sort out the ‘I and me’ conundrum and it never sticks. I guess me should hang around those who are dubbed ‘mavens’.

I heard an interesting interview on NPR this morning (the podcast is better than the written article) that looked at our current economic troubles and measured them against Japan’s in the 1990s. Since there aren’t many economic wonks around the Hilltop I’m not sure how strong the support is for the points put forth but they are intriguing. I would hope that if there’s a working, breathing example of what we’re experiencing, someone would grab it by the scruff of the neck and take a good, long look at it. The gist seems to be that if private spending disappears (in Japan the interest rates were lowered from 8% to zero in an attempt to bolster private money movement, but to no avail) something or somebody needs to step in and fill the void. The obvious, and only, choice is the government but this leads to more debt; and isn’t it rich that the word debt just scares the bejeezus out of people? In Japan, the government infused some money but just as quickly backed off due to the debt burden; they tried again, and again, and again over time but the false starts and intermittent chunks of cash probably did more harm than good. The problem, and theory of repair, is called balance sheet recession and the goals when clawing out of the hole is to keep the GDP up and unemployment down until there’s an end in sight. What happens is the government spends enough to keep the economy from collapsing – not necessarily growing – and takes on debt while the private sector struggles to get back on balance. Once the private sector gets its house in order then it takes over the spending and growth responsibility while the government backs off and starts to repay the increased debt. The great fear we all have is that the spending will happen but later on down the road the government won’t actually make the switch of payments and we’ll end up with lots of debt, tons of useless furniture, and we’ll slip underwater again.

I just realized that grammar isn’t really light discussion, is it? I’m showing my dorkapotomus colors. This one actually is light and funny and might help you get through the final hours of the day. I’ll tell you right up front that when I used to watch SuperFriends on Saturday mornings back in the 70s, my favorite superhero was….oh, nevermind. I feel used.



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