Your wingnut talking point du jour, courtesy of The Nation’s Newspaper:

Paychecks from private business shrank to their smallest share of personal income in U.S. history during the first quarter of this year, a USA TODAY analysis of government data finds.

At the same time, government-provided benefits — from Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps and other programs — rose to a record high during the first three months of 2010.

Those records reflect a long-term trend accelerated by the recession and the federal stimulus program to counteract the downturn. The result is a major shift in the source of personal income from private wages to government programs.

The trend is not sustainable, says University of Michigan economist Donald Grimes. Reason: The federal government depends on private wages to generate income taxes to pay for its ever-more-expensive programs. Government-generated income is taxed at lower rates or not at all, he says. “This is really important,” Grimes says.

Don’t make us hunt down the stat for real income since 1980, USA Today. We’re told that’s what real reporters do.

Private pay shrinks to historic lows as gov’t payouts rise [USA Today]

Hubris is one thing, but this is something altogether different… hubris, coupled with arrogance and an unbelievable contempt for the great unwashed masses that can’t possibly understand the things you do and so must be kept in the dark (lest they do themselves harm, you understand).

In 2004 a debate raged inside the Federal Reserve as to whether the U.S. was entering a dangerous housing bubble. Alan Greenspan’s response? Such discussions had to be suppressed. No word of these concerns should leave the ivory confines of the Federal Reserve. The natives, you see, just wouldn’t understand…

We run the risk, by laying out the pros and cons of a particular argument, of inducing people to join in on the debate, and in this regard it is possible to lose control of a process that only we fully understand.

Of course, in retrospect, the most absurd aspect thing about this quote is that Greenspan was worried he might “lose control” of something as irrationally driven and wildly out-of-control as an economic bubble. Was his “understanding” really any different from that of a witch doctor ordering virgins to be thrown into the mouth of a volcano, worried that if he should offend the gods by not doing so, the mountain will erupt?

Carl Levin to a former Goldman Sachs partner during a subcommittee hearing this morning: “How much of that shitty deal did you sell to your clients?”

[via TPM]

“Republicans are stepping up their criticism of the Securities and Exchange Commission following reports that senior agency staffers spent hours surfing pornographic websites on government-issued computers while they were supposed to be policing the nation’s financial system.” Um, during whose Administration? [AP/Yahoo]

William K. Black, Associate Professor of Economics and Law, the University of Missouri, Kansas City School of Law:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-HTylLzXu8

A used car salesman can’t get away with selling you a car that he secretly knows will fail just a few miles down the road, so why should your investment adviser be able to peddle stocks that he’s secretly betting will fail?

And yet this, according the New York Times is exactly what investment firm Goldman Sachs was doing to its clients at the height of the mortgage bubble. And it wasn’t just a case of an investment firm selling different types of securities that might, in some cases, have been at cross purposes. According to Federal investigators, Goldman set up many of its investors to fail precisely so the firm could profit: Read more »

This is from last week, but it’s worth a read as it reminds one how deeply ignorant most of our elite class is …

Since then, I have often wondered why nobody in Washington showed any interest in hearing exactly how I arrived at my conclusions that the housing bubble would burst when it did and that it could cripple the big financial institutions. A week ago I learned the answer when Al Hunt of Bloomberg Television, who had read Michael Lewis’s book, “The Big Short,” which includes the story of my predictions, asked Mr. Greenspan directly. The former Fed chairman responded that my insights had been a “statistical illusion.” Perhaps, he suggested, I was just a supremely lucky flipper of coins.

And Ayn Rand?  Fuck you.

I Saw the Crisis Coming. Why Didn’t the Fed? [NYT]