The comics you post are now too small and blurry to be readable on a 1280 x 1024 monitor.

I had to use zoom - but it was worth it.

I must be getting used to it cause I have to do it more and more often. Pretty sure I could led a couple of grades harder if I could see the holds too!

As reported by Think Progress.org:


Meanwhile, we've been making a profit from the bailout:

Well, if presidential advisor Austan Goolsbee says it is so, I guess it's not propaganda.

So Alice, whom do you favor for 2012?

This from someone who swallowed all the bullshit that Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Ashcroft, Bolton spewed.

The numbers here will always be fuzzy regarding the effects of the stimulus, but the consensus view is that it has helped some and will continue to help some as infrastructure spending picks up over the next two quarters. The benefits do, of course, have to be weighed against the long-term consequences of increased debt. But some would argue that it's hard to pay back debt if the economy sucks, so that has to be addressed first.

As for the financial bailout, it looks like TARP may break even. It certainly won't be anywhere near the $700 billion hole its critics feared. And that's not even considering what the economy would be like today if the banks failed and the economy completely collapsed. Avoiding that scenario would have been worth losing money on because we would have been even worse off both personally and as taxpayers.

And that's not even considering what the economy would be like today if the banks failed and the economy completely collapsed. Avoiding that scenario would have been worth losing money on because we would have been even worse off both personally and as taxpayers.

Some have said that such an event would have a cleansing effect, sweeping clean all that has been foul in the financial sector. Of course that foulness might reoccur afterwards, but likely not in our lifetimes. Who knows?

I think it's a legitimate argument. And some people argue that rescuing entities that are "too big to fail" creates the environment for more bad risk-taking (the so-called "moral hazard"). But there's also the argument that we were faced with another major depression which outweighs these concerns.

The Great Depression resulted in regulation to reduce the chances of it recurring. If there had been no regulation, I doubt there would have been a "cleansing effect," or at least one that would have lasted very long. People are greedy, and that won't change. So I'm skeptical that letting everything fail would have been to the long-term good.

But if we don't follow up this crisis with a retooling of our financial system, there's little reason to think that this event won't recur either.

More meat, less fat. All the better for Kodos's plans for a "consumption" society!