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To Pay for our Debts
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on March 27, 2009 at 07:01 AM in Film | Permalink
Comments
Funny stuff. Unfortunately "the voice of reason" on this episode was also speaking nonsense.
Posted by: josh at Mar 27, 2009 7:54:05 AM
I've been laughing for five minutes at the ending.
Posted by: David Pinto at Mar 27, 2009 8:23:18 AM
The ending is hilarious.
Posted by: Andy at Mar 27, 2009 8:45:28 AM
Wow. Amazing.
Posted by: Brian Moore at Mar 27, 2009 10:41:43 AM
Bailout!
Posted by: athelas at Mar 27, 2009 10:42:19 AM
The ending is funny, but its the humor of exasperation that a free man/woman might feel when being sold down the river; its what Obama, grinning on 60 Minutes, called "gallows humor". Only he has it wrong because he does describe himself as the one who is doing the selling.
Posted by: indiana jim at Mar 27, 2009 10:45:59 AM
correction:
does NOT in the above
Posted by: indiana jim at Mar 27, 2009 10:48:52 AM
I liked the side plot of the mortgage industry better:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBETqjlDMNc
Posted by: Chris at Mar 27, 2009 11:13:00 AM
Of course, don't look to Congress or to the White House for solutions!
Posted by: T. Shaw at Mar 27, 2009 11:49:56 AM
Oh gawd, the ending was just inspired!
Posted by: Rajan R at Mar 27, 2009 12:43:19 PM
Watch the entire episode, it's a classic. Should be required TV watching for pretty much everyone.
Posted by: Shaun at Mar 27, 2009 12:43:55 PM
Love the "small but noticeable upturn" and the new margaritaville.
Posted by: A christian at Mar 27, 2009 12:51:01 PM
Thanks for the pointer to The Austrian Economists blog.
Posted by: fish on a bicycle at Mar 27, 2009 1:09:00 PM
Maybe South Park believes in rational expectations?
Posted by: Rational Expectations at Mar 27, 2009 1:27:03 PM
I watched the clip, not the whole show, but what do you mean, "no solutions"? They depicted exactly the solution the administration is using -- put it on the kid's credit card.
Posted by: MichaelG at Mar 27, 2009 6:33:21 PM
I still like their solution to the "dey took er jawbs" problem....
Posted by: Eric Crampton at Mar 27, 2009 6:49:30 PM
Now we just need to find somebody to buy all our personal debt. If we had a Kyle to wipe the slate clean, our country's consumption could recover and we could avoid deflation.
Really, in a half-assed manner they came up with the exact correct idea. Only it would be easier to just do a one-off debt forgiveness. The companies that Americans owe their debt to are all getting cash infusions from the government, so not paying them back isn't going to break their backs.
Posted by: Lysol at Mar 27, 2009 7:44:17 PM
MichaelG is correct that Southpark accurately illustrated the
administration's solution: "put it on the kid's credit card."
Southpark didn't need to think of an outlandish solution because
the reality under Obama is itself outlandish: kick the burden of a
massive current government spending spree down the road onto our
children and grandchildren.
Posted by: indiana jim at Mar 27, 2009 10:33:31 PM
But Obama did say that Reagan had some good ideas, like putting his big spending and increased entitlements on his grandkids credit card, so why are you complaining that Obama is adopting some of Reagan's trademark fiscal policies?
Not to mention the massive increase in entitlements that Bush added, following in Reagan's conservative footsteps.
While Reagan did increase the costs of Social Security, the real cost burden is Medicare and Medicaid which no conservative has done more than make the future burden worse. The growth in health care costs in the US not only outstrips the growth in the economy, it also outstrips by a wide margin the growth in costs in nations that deliver better health outcomes for 30-50% less.
South Park is a good refuge from the reality of the economic disaster that conservative politics have brought on the nation and the world. Of for the hoorible Clinton years of balanced budgets which conservatives kept arguing wasn't balanced, even as they proposed massive tax cuts and increased entitlements, with conservative Cheney proclaiming, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter."
Posted by: mulp at Mar 28, 2009 2:39:01 AM
Mulp wrote: "South Park is a good refuge from the reality of the economic disaster that conservative politics have brought on the nation and the world."
There is no doubt that Reagan ran a deficit, but then again he, arguably, won the Cold War. Obama is fighting the Talaban Afghanistan, which I hope even Mulp has the sense to realize is no USSR (then again, I could be wrong about Mulp).
Posted by: indiana jim at Mar 28, 2009 5:57:04 PM
Remind me again, indiana, who won the Soviet-Afghan war? ;)
And as far as Reagan winning "the Cold War": ha ha, please! The USSR collapsed because of the economic and political limitations of communism, not because Reagan gave a little speech or plowed billions into futuristic weapons systems that were never used and never worked. Reagan could have gathered all the money in one big pile and burned it - it would have accomplished exactly the same thing.
Posted by: Slim Jim at Mar 28, 2009 7:40:18 PM
Slim,
I was hoping someone would pose the point about the war between Afghanistan and the USSR.
Of course YOU are conveniently forgetting who was on the side of the Afghani resistence; that
would be the USA in case you've been smoking something that impairs your otherwise clever mind.
Reagan's predictions and confidence that the USSR would fail were based on his understanding of
economics; the point is that he knew, as Danesh points out in is book on Reagan, before many of the "wise men" of economics. This too is no surprise; as the good book warns: pride goeth before a fall.
Posted by: indiana jim at Mar 28, 2009 10:28:01 PM
"There is no doubt that Reagan ran a deficit, but then again he, arguably, won the Cold War."
Oh, noez! Can I haz my thred unhijakked!
Posted by: blunt ax at Mar 29, 2009 12:16:31 AM
"Oh, noez! Can I haz my thred unhijakked!"
If it had been "hijakked" you couldn't have posted the above.
Posted by: indiana jim at Mar 29, 2009 11:04:47 AM
I thought the show usefully reduced abstract concepts such as securitization into concrete situations involving human agents. For example, Stan tried to return his father's loan-financed margarita machine and had to visit bankers who had securitized the debt and no longer much cared whether his father would pay or not, nor could they return the machine even if they wanted to. Moral hazard and incompetence become easier to recognize when we can use our hard-wired empathy circuits, so this seems like a place where art can be especially useful. The formula would be: Instantiate abstractions into specific concrete examples, thereby improving our intuitions of the concepts.
Posted by: Rob Zahra at Mar 29, 2009 7:27:44 PM
