Friday Fun Video: Hayek Versus Keynes Rap

Via Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiw comes this hilarious video about Keynes and Hayek (ummm, sorry, Cine-Sib, I'm talking about FRIEDRICH, not SALMA):

Satire Alert: Dave Barry's 2009 in Review

Here is a hilarious look back at 2009.

So This Is Why Our Stock Market and Economy Stink

This was the scene at the opening bell on Wall Street this morning. It all makes sense now.

Satire Alert: SNL and the Obama-Hu Jintao Press Conference

Via Ms.Underestimated is the link of Saturday Night Live's hilarious potshot at Obama's visit to China. Oh, it's funny. It's funny because the critique is true.

Political Humor of the Day: Jon Stewart Has Some Advice

And here is another example of why Stewart can make me smile.

Have even the liberal cheerleaders begun to lose patience with the Obama Show? Enough already mucking about making pretentious speeches and grand gestures. There's a lot of show-offery in the Obama Show, isn't there? Then again, his proposed economic and domestic policies are so catastrophically unwise and economically suicidal that maybe it's not SUCH a bad thing to have him cavorting around waxing eloquent about Pakistani cooking and Urdu poetry.


That's Great Now Fix the Economy

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Joke of the Day

Satire Alert: US Government Sells Gold Reserves for Cash

Oh, how I do love the Onionistas:


US To Trade Gold Reserves For Cash Through Cash4Gold.com

Bailout Humor: the Death Star is Too Big to Fail

Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiw has this hilarious picture. Click to enlarge:

Bail us out you will!

RELATED POST: Well, they don't call it the Debt Star for nothing.

UPDATE: Great minds think alike! (Alternate proverb: "Fools never differ.") Either way, blogfriend Lumpy has the same link. Birds of a (nerdy) feather flock together!

Awesome Ads for German Job-Hunters

Via AdverBox comes a link to JobsInTown.de, a German employment website has some truly fantastic ads. Click here for a photo gallery of all of JobsInTown's advertisements!

I give you of my favorites -- an ad that appears on the side of a coffee vending machine. Clever!

By the way, the slogan of the ad campaign? "Das Leben ist zu kurz für den falschen Job" -- "Life's too short for the wrong job." Ain't that the truth!

Satire Alert: In Attempt to Close Deficit, Government Introduces New Tax on Taxes

The newest satire is online. Enjoy!

Communism Rising in Japan? Plus, Manga Marx

Hmmmm. How can you tell this is a Japanese story? Here's a piece of it:

Publishers have also produced a manga, or comic, version of Das Kapital, Karl Marx's treatise on how capitalism would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

Hey, everyone, AGAIN: Communism has never worked. It doesn't work now. It will never work.

I appreciate the fact that people are upset about the recession, but turning to outdated, discredited old dogma isn't going to help.

Here's a reminder of what's what:

Satire Alert: Tim Geithner and Bank Stress Tests

From the TaxProf Blog comes this amusing link from Saturday Night Live:

A Modest Proposal for Fixing the Economy

This is pretty good -- and very funny:

Dear Mr. President:

Please find below my suggestion for fixing America's economy.

Instead of giving billions of dollars to companies that will squander the money on lavish parties and unearned bonuses, use the following plan.

You can call it the Patriotic Retirement Plan:

There are about 40 million people over 50 in the work force.

Pay them $1 million apiece severance for early retirement with the following stipulations:


1) They have to retire.

--> Forty million job openings.

--> Unemployment fixed.


2) They have to buy a new American CAR.

--> Forty million cars ordered.

--> Auto Industry fixed.


3) They have to either buy a house or pay off their mortgage.

--> Housing Crisis fixed.

It can't get any easier than that!

Quirky Euro Files: Berlin's New Underwear Model

Nope, it's not Heidi Klum. It's German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Sort of. The image is basically a Photoshop, but it's an amusing advertisement done by an underwear company. Check it out.

Satire Alert: Bruce Wayne Hard Hit By Recession

Hilarious! Enjoy:

Nerd Analysis: Taxes May Double in Future

Brace yourself for some panic-inducing reading via the TaxProf Blog. NOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Here's a bit of sharp economic humor as a chaser (satire alert -- though there is a very real point to it). Note the puns in the names of "accountants"! Or, you can jump to the piquantly humorous fake tax form here. It's either laugh or cry at this point, baby.

Friday Fun Video and Satire Alert: "Treasury Department Issues Emergency Recall of All US Dollars"

The humorists at the Onion are inspired. Enjoy!


Treasury Department Issues Emergency Recall Of All US Dollars

Financial Apocalypse Soundtrack, Song 24: Kathleen Stewart

OK, OK, I'm a day late and a dollar short -- but I only found it right now, OK?

This Tax Day song's just too good to ignore, though. Enjoy Kathleen Stewart's jazzy potshot at Tax Day with "The 1040 Blues." (song available free for listening online at the link)

Lyrics include: "The IRS has made a servant out of me . . . The more I make, the more the bureaucrats take . . . I got the 1040 blues."

Sing it, woman!

Oh, and she has more. Check out her song to the government: "It Ain't Your Money to Spend!"

It's Tax Day 2009

Oh, maddening tax code, how from hell's heart I stab at thee!

So much going on today. Feel like a tea party? (By the way, the media coverage has been pretty bad, both in terms of some outlets blatantly dumping on the idea -- most of the MSM, I'm talking to you -- and other outlets blatantly promoting it -- and that's you, Fox News.) Check out one law prof's take on the tea party movement.

Tax Day and the entire tax structure and industry are just begging to be satirized. Maybe we can laugh our way through our W-2s and 1040s with a little help from the indispensable Onion. Satire Alert -- take a look at its fake (and slightly Kafka-flavored) news story, "2008 Tax Records Reveal Sasha Obama Made $136 in Allowance Money."

Is the entire idea of high (and practically confiscatory) taxes (plus a ballooning and increasingly interventionist government) a type of collectivism? Not to mention statism. Blurb (though the whole thing's worth a look):

Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights. Your life, your existence, your interests and the product of your labor now belongs to the group. If the group needs a bailout, health care, green cars, low mortgage rates, a job, an education—anything at all, it now becomes your responsibility to provide it, whether you want to or not.

You see it in both the redistributive legislation, which takes money from people who’ve earned it and give it to those who have not, along with the language itself. Phrases like “we’re all in it together”, “I am my brother’s keeper” and “shared sacrifice” boil down to the same frightening reality: You are here to serve. And unlike the charity of volunteerism, the “will of the people” is implemented by force, not by voluntary trade.

This is a profoundly anti-American ideal. From the original Boston Tea party came the Declaration of Independence, which articulates the morality of individual rights. In this country, you are born free with the absolute moral right to make of your life what you will.

“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” refers to your life, your liberty and your happiness. America was a truly revolutionary country because, for the first time in history, every man was born not with a duty to serve the king, the senate or society, but with a moral right to live his own life and pursue his own happiness. The Tea Parties are protests against government power and in support of a society in which man has the right to live selfishly for his own sake, not sacrifice himself for the “common good.”

But for collectivists, sacrifice is seen as absolute. You’re expected to sacrifice for your neighbor, your government, your country. For AIG and Citigroup, deadbeat homeowners or auto workers, whatever or whomever the geniuses in Washington decide has more rights than the rest of us. The individual has a value only as a means to the end for society. His life, his dreams, his income, are Uncle Sam’s to marshal and allocate.

Yuck! (Sounds like it's time to "go Galt"?)

On other fronts, I have some tax-errific video for you too:




Oh, and people? Getting the hapless, tin-eared Joe "Gaffemeister" Biden to cheerlead for higher taxes is a really, really dumb idea.


Here's something a bit more comedic:

Satire Alert: Due to Popular Demand, IRS Introduces Taxpayer Earmarks

La Parisienne, this is for you!

As a follow-up to the newest iteration of my annual tax rant, I give you a fresh new satire. Enjoy.

By the way, I finished my taxes, filed online, and discovered that I'm supposed to get a little rebate. But don't expect me to feel grateful that I'm getting it -- because it was my own freaking money to begin with.

Nerd Journal: Taxation Vexation Rant

I am currently doing my taxes. The horror, the horror!

At least P.J. O'Rourke is here to poke fun at this annual paroxysm of government-endorsed financial vampirism:

As April 15 rolls around let us take a moment to recall why we Americans pay taxes: Because some of our country's good-for-nothing bums are too chicken to rob us at gunpoint. That would be members of Congress and the executive branch.

I mean, REALLY. Grad student fellowships get taxed, taxed, taxed. Any sort of measly, paltry income that nerds get in jobs or whatever gets taxed, taxed, taxed. And if you think grad students or lowly young academics don't count as "working poor," then it's because you've never been one. I counted the numbers, and we're paying a QUARTER of our income in state and federal taxes -- and by "we" I mean all the nobodies like me who are just scraping along.

But at least we're supporting ourselves without help from anybody! This is a mark of pride, as it should be. It means we have to watch our pennies carefully and behave responsibly and frugally -- and you'd think this is GOOD thing, right? Too bad the utterly reckless government can't seem to grasp this concept, much less encourage it among the citizenry! But noooooooo, enter bailout-a-palooza, mortgage plans, and more moral hazard and toxic policy than you can wrap your mind around.

So here I am juggling rent and bills and whatever -- some of my colleagues now have babies and little ones -- and trying to save pennies (while also shouldering a mound of school debt), and I'm watching an endless passion for debt, deficit, and spending from the hopelessly clueless government. I just don't know what to do or think. Well, every Tax Day I'm feeling peppery, but this time around, I'm more irate than ever. Not just at having to pay mountains of taxes to a government that I think is wasteful and foolish (if not corrupt), but at the knowledge that WAY TOO MANY high-profile Obamanauts have had problems not paying their own frickin' taxes. And one such egregiously disgraceful tax cheat is heading up the US Treasury, for goodness sake! (If the guy can't even manage his own finances, how's he supposed to manage such a far more complex sytem like the US economy?)

Maybe that's why the leftists don't mind hiking up taxes all the time, why they in fact LOVE doing that. They're not paying any taxes! Hey, do you know what happens if I don't pay MY taxes? No, I don't get invited to head the Treasury. I get the consolation prize of audits and fines and jail and all that fruit basket of happiness.

Oh, I'm not saying that I don't think we should pay no taxes at all. We need to fund infrastructure and the military, for instance. I will happily pay my taxes to support the armed services. But I absolutely am beginning to feel that the hard-working taxpayer is increasingly being regarded by tax-obsessed politicians not as the bedrock of the country and a citizen who should be respected, but as an all-you-can-eat buffet to feed an ever-increasing government. I'm foolish enough to think that the government should work for me, not the other way around. OK, even if -- let's be realistic here -- that won't happen, I'll settle for government leaving me alone as much as possible. But that doesn't look too likely either. Don't even get me started on statist policies.

While I'm looking at the insane ballooning of government, I can't help thinking of Maggie Thatcher's famous quote that the problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people's money. Crush the productive sector of society in order to feed the unproductive, and sooner or later the productive will give up -- or emigrate. (Then I guess we're finally achieve the Holy Grail of leftism, so-called FAIRNESS, when we're all equally poor and miserable. I'm an evil capitalist, and I prefer that "fairness" be turned into a world where everybody gets rich.)

Then there's this, with which I will end this rant and go back to my online tax filing:

Still one thing more, fellow-citizens—a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities. ~Thomas Jefferson, 1801 inaugural address