Durable Goods

It is still the pre-dawn of New Year's Eve so sometime today, before my wife and I get to go to a modest New Year's Eve party, I'll have to take a nap to make it through. I plan a quiet day.

I'll be all the calmer knowing that the "swells" are OK. Children aren't as fortunate and 1/7th of the population is on food stamps but by golly the swells are doing fine. They measure the economy and if they are good then we are all good. That there are only 10-20 thousand of them is just the way it is.

For some reason this handful, cutting up 20-30 billion in bonus money used to bother me and now it doesn't because they told me that it will all trickle down.  I think of refrigerators when someone tells me that. Refrigerators are durable goods because you just don't toss them out year over year.  You keep them and they are expected to last. Jobs are created when there is a demand for refrigerators and the companies that make them make more. To make more you have to hire more people and they get paid and indeed they eventually have enough money to buy refrigerators.  It is a nice cycle.

Putting 20 billion in the hands of a few thousand makes people rich but doesn't create demand.  See where I'm going with this?  I like it when things are so plain that you don't have to even finish a sentence.

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