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You know, I really haven't been in the mood to be writing. I've been too busy screeching around San Andreas shooting up the place, updating my music files, and surfing around the Internet.

As a consequence, I haven't been posting Lonnie's fiskings of Gene Lyons. And to tell you the truth, they just haven't been that funny. Well, maybe I just haven't found them funny. Maybe some of you would think they were a laugh-riot. I guess we'll never know.

If you don't know, Lonnie will usually drop these off by the house, get a drink from the "water fountain" (that being the garden hose), and climb back into his '78 primer gray Camaro and peel out onto the highway. Usually he's blasting out some Lynyrd Skynyrd or Molly Hatchet or Blackfoot or some such, or will toodle his custom-made horn that plays La Cucaracha as he heads back out of town. That wasn't the case this time.

This time, I opened the front door up and found that he had left his typed manuscript in a old mailbox (God only knows where he got it). When I opened it, I found a hand-scrawled note telling me that he was tired of slaving away to fisk Gene's columns and then me not using them. It continued by warning me that I better post this one or things "would get ugly". In typical Lonnie fashion, it threatened that he "knew where I lived".

So, I'll bow to the inevitable and post this. As usual, what I write is in black, Gene's (unedited) column is in blue italics, and Lonnie's comments are in regular blue.

Kidding ourselves about high price of debt
Gene Lyons
Posted on Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Credit cards, as most people theoretically understand, can turn into the 21st century equivalent of sharecropping.

Oh, this oughtta be good.

First, you borrow from The Man

Isn't that supposed to be "The Man"? "Oops", "there" "I" "go" "again".

to get your cotton planted (or maybe to buy that new flat-screen HDTV).

Because the two are pretty much the same. Now, if you'll excuse me, my eyes just rolled out of my head and onto the floor, and I need to go pick them up.

Comes picking time (or the warranty runs out) and you’re likely to discover, in the words of an old country song, that you “owe your soul to the company store.”

Great. Now Gene is quoting old country songs, and not identifying who did it. Well, you can't teach an old yellow dog new tricks. (Wasn't that an old country song?)

Not to mention late fees and a big jump in the interest rate.

If only there was a big jump in the interest rate of Gene's columns. It's only the stupidity of them that keeps me coming back.

Meanwhile, you’re getting letters daily

I am? Better go check my mailbox!

offering you a new card at temptingly low rates for the first six months. Why not double down?

Why not indeed? Oh, wait, that's not a porno term. It means something else. Sorry, continue on.

Hey, your 15-year-old’s being offered a platinum card with the logo of his high school’s mascot. Shoot, I’ve got a Charolais calf named Layla

Oh, brother. He's named an animal after a song. Not just any song; a song that was used to seduce a woman from another (fellow) musician. Is there an irony here?

who’s probably eligible for EZ-Credit today. Basically, anybody who can walk and chew cud at the same time can end up owing a half-dozen company stores.

That explains why Gene isn't in debt.

But why worry?

Who, me?

Money?

What in the world is up with Gene's use of the question mark? Is he just now finding out that computers have them on the keyboard? I guess he must have gotten tired of using the quotation marks "key". Wait, stop that!

They’re practically giving it away.

Because money grows on trees, and the credit card companies have whole orchards of them. Oops, there go my eyes again. Just continue on, and I'll catch up to you.

And if the payments get too steep, what with $4-a-gallon gasoline and $5 milk, all you’ve needed to do over the past dozen years or so, in the immortal words of George W. Bush, is borrow more to “make the pie higher.”

Oh, that's droll, Gene. And timely. It just wouldn't be a Gene Lyons column without the Bush-bashing. It's sort of like his signature. Well, that, and the stupidity.

Refinance with an adjustable rate mortgage, pull some cash equity out of your house, pay off a couple of credit cards and then repay the home loan with tax-deductible cash. Sweet. See, you’re going to trade the dump in on a fancier house to borrow against before the interest rate resets anyway, pushing your monthly payment into the stratosphere. Because as everybody used to know, real estate can’t go anywhere but up.

I don't have anything snarky to say here, I just want to give a break here so that you can see this next sentence all by itself.

Until recently, spending money you didn’t have was your patriotic duty.

Okay, you can wrap the year up now, the year's dumbest sentence has just been written. No, sorry, no further contestants, please. Could somebody please give Gene his statue so we can continue?

Wasn’t it the same George W. Bush who advised Americans to respond to the 9/11 terrorist massacres by heading to the mall?

No. That's not what he said. His advice was to continue living our lives to show the terrorists that it was going to take a whole lot more than that to beat us.

And did you notice that Gene called 9/11 a "terrorist massacre"? Five years ago, it wouldn't have been identified as "terrorist" driven. I'm not dumb enough to figure out what Gene would have said. Perhaps how it was some kind of illegal act, but not terrorism. Whaddaya know? Is reality finally setting in among the liberals? Well, it's been seven years, so that sounds about right.

When the going gets tough, everybody laughed, the tough go shopping.

Which explains why Gene has never gone shopping.

Never mind that it was also Bush who inherited a $128 billion budget surplus

No. If Bush inherited a surplus, why didn't Al Gore run on how well the administration that he was a part of did economy-wise? He didn't, did he? Anybody remember the debate on the "lockbox"?

No, what Bush inherited was a PROJECTED surplus. There was a whole lot of assumptions built into that projection. Part of that was that tax rates would remain the same over the next few years, tax revenues would remain the same, and government growth would remain at a constant rate. Whenever Bush cut taxes and gave a tax refund, that -drumroll please- changed the basic assumptions that were inherent in the government's projections. Suddenly, overnight, a projected surplus (that was a surplus only on paper) had some new math put into it.

And could somebody please explain to me why a surplus (projected or real) is a GOOD thing? Seems to me that whenever there is a surplus, that means that either we are being overtaxed or the government is not doing something right. Either way, the government has our -yours and mine- money and is not using it.

The "logic" that is at the heart of this attitude is not consistent. If Gene goes out and buys something at Wal-Mart for $2,000, and six months later he finds out he overpaid for it by $500, do you think he (or those others who protest tax rebates) will just shrug his shoulders and accept it? Or do you think he'll go to the customer service desk and try to find out why he was overcharged? Maybe even ask for a... oops, rebate?

So why is it okay for you to overpay the government, but overpaying the local business is different?

and turned it into a $482 billion deficit—an estimate, incidentally, that leaves out the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They’re off the books, a bit like Enron’s money-losing “partnerships.” In retrospect, the Enron collapse clearly predicted the fiscal consequences of Bushism.

Three guesses as to who donated a lot of money to the Democrats generally and the Clintons specifically during the 90's? Let's just say there was a lot of Lay-ing going on, in a whole lot of different senses of the word.

Psychiatrists call it magical thinking.

I'd think it would be magical if Gene did any thinking.

Today it defines American culture. For decades GOP propagandists have endlessly pushed the fantasy that cutting taxes invariably brings more revenue into the treasury.

Yeah, like that famous GOP propagandist John F. "A rising tide lifts all boats" Kennedy.

Because it’s so counterintuitive, it makes people who think Rush Limbaugh is an intellectual feel smart. So they get their big $247.32 tax cut;

It's $247.32 they didn't have before, and that the government doesn't have. Sounds like a good plan all around.

Scrooge McDuck gets a few millions more to paddle around in;

Psst, Gene? Scrooge McDuck is a cartoon figure. Keep that under your hat.

the pie theoretically gets higher and higher.

I'm starting to think that it isn't Gene's pie that getting HIGHer and HIGHer. I'll try not to be so BLUNT in my assessments, though. We'll have to TOKE about it, though.

It’s the Republican equivalent of Marxist cant about the “withering away of the state” under communism: An objectively false belief that’s repeated with ever more fervor as its bad consequences become harder to deny.

Good grief, did a liberal just admit that there is a Marxist belief that is false? That's absolutely stunning.

The effect of such self-delusion on individual lives was recently illustrated in a fascinating article by New York Times financial editor Gretchen Morgenson.

Stop the presses, Gene just identified a source. I'm so stunned, I may have to lie down on this couch for a little while.

She profiled a 47-year-old divorced Philadelphia woman, Diane McLeod, driven into bankruptcy by spiraling credit card debt, by mortgage rates that adjusted her right out of her home, by unforeseen medical expenses and by rapacious lenders equally indifferent to reality.

That, of course, is all Bush's fault. And the Republicans.

McLeod admitted being her own worst enemy.

That means she's a Republican!

She even put $19,000 on her credit cards buying expensive handbags and other useless gew-gaws on the Home Shopping Network while lying in bed recovering from surgery.

“In 2007,” Morgenson reports, “when she earned $48,000 before taxes, she was charged more than $20,000 in interest on her various loans.”

Those damned Republicans. And conservatives. It's all their fault.

To keep up, McLeod repeatedly re-financed her modest house to the point where, after the real estate bubble burst, she owed far more than it was now worth. Then she lost her job and couldn’t make payments.

The mortgage company is foreclosing and will itself lose maybe $100,000 on the deal;

Bush. Republicans. Conservatives.

hence, the need for a taxpayer bailout of Fannie and Freddie, the two giant public/private mortgage banks

How can a bank be both public AND private?

that find themselves holding untold amounts of worthless paper.

They're holding Gene's columns?

Also for decades, Republicans

See?

and many Democrats

But mostly Republicans. And conservatives. And Bush.

have pushed the equally fallacious notion that the financial industry needs no regulation because free markets correct themselves and because wise investors invariably exercise due diligence in advancing loans. In reality, Morgenson shows, many lenders no longer care about repayment.

So, is Morgenson saying that the investors were wise? Follow the "logic"; No market regulation -> wise investors exercise diligence in giving out loans -> lenders no longer care about repayment. I don't think Gene thought his clever story all the way through.

They make their money on “fees and charges generated when loans are made.” Their relationship to the world’s Diane McLeods is that of a coyote to a chicken.

Next, the loans get repackaged as securities and sold to investors just now waking up to the fact that they’re worthless. The upshot of it is that whether or not you and I and Layla have run up huge credit card debts, we’re paying for them anyway.

I've got this theory. I think the only reason Gene mentions these animals he's got is so that he can justify using his columns as cage liners. He puts multiple copies of his column out in the barn where the animals are, he reads it to them (or maybe vice versa), the animals poop on them, Gene writes it off as a business expense.

I challenge you to come up with a better explanation.

Okay, so that's all for today. I'll post something again, whenever I darn well feel like it. I'll try to let Lonnie have more fisking times. I've seen a number of letters to the editor and opinion columnists that I think would be pretty ripe fruit for him. Maybe I should sic him on them. That might mollify him somewhat.