Journalists are stupid: Consumer spending

Where I went to college the journalism program was where all the failures went.

If you found out that whatever major you started out in was too tough for you, Journalism was one of the main choices to fail out to.

Yet in the US today the press considers itself a 4th branch of government. Some sort watchdog of the government. The same seems to be true in every country of the world where the is not controlled by the government.

That is pretty dangerous.

When people are given the sort of power that the press has in the world,

the ability to come into every home daily and deliver their opinions

to decide what news story we hear

to decide which "experts" we hear from

the power to spin th news,

the need to make all news bad, dollar goes up, that's bad, dollar goes down, that's bad. Everything is a crisis, every thing is bad.

the power to choose which words to use in the news.....Is 120 point drop in the DOW a landslide, or a minor dip?

The MSM's fascination with consumer spending is one good example. These people who "educate" us every day have no clue about economics. No knowledge of the world of finance, yet they scare us every night with their uneducated opinons of the economy.


Media myth: Without excessive consumer spending especially at Christmastime the U.S. economy will collapse.


Consumer recession. That sure sounds scary. Journalists have been worrying about consumer spending for months even before warning about a lukewarm Christmas shopping season.

On November 6, Erin Burnett of CNBC was concerned about gas prices impacting retail sales this Christmas: Consumers like us account for two-thirds of the economy, and if we don’t spend all of our money at the department stores and Target and Wal-Mart this shopping season, we could have a recession. So gas prices are a crucial part of that, Burnett said on NBC’s Today.

Just a couple weeks later, Burnett warned that if consumers really start to pull back, that is what will turn us from the r-word of resilience to the r-word of recession, on November 26 NBC Nightly News. Now reporters have even invented the term consumer recession and have warned about that too.

But it wasn’t just Burnett. It was ABC’s Dan Harris, Chris Cuomo and others.




Truth: Holiday spending wasn’t as ho-hum as journalists had worried. Despite predictions of a gray Friday, Black Friday and Saturday sales combined saw a 7.2-percent sales increase, rising to $16.4 billion.

But what happens if we don’t spend all of our money, as Burnett warned?
Economists like Arnold Kling and BMI adviser Gary Wolfram are just two experts who disagree with the overemphasis on consumer spending.

According to Kling, The idea that the economy needs consumer profligacy is not nearly as entrenched among scholars as it is among journalists, politicians, and other citizens. In fact, there is a strong case to be made that we would be better off if we had less consumer spending and more saving.

As for a consumer recession, Dr. Gary Wolfram, a Hillsdale College professor of economics, tackled that question.

I suspect what they mean is that the economy will slow because consumers stop buying, Wolfram told BMI. But if they stop buying, then they must be saving. And the bears have been complaining that consumers are in too much debt, so they should be happy that consumers are reducing their debt.

And if money not spent on Christmas, for example, were put in banks
that’s good for the economy, too.
I think it is more valuable to look at what is happening to producers investing. If they are investing what consumers are saving, then the economy will be expanding, not contracting, Wolfram said.