Financial manager Ed Butowsky appeared on Breitbart News Saturday to discuss the latest economic news, criticizing the “complicit media” for slanting its reporting on jobs to favor the Obama Administration.
“They don’t understand why we need new jobs. Let’s just lay it out there,” said Butowsky. “We have five hundred billion dollars that is our deficit. Actually, it’s already running $500 billion for this year. Assign half of the responsibility to make up that deficit to the federal income tax side of the ledger. We need $250 billion new dollars from the federal income tax side.”
“Now, the job number comes out 151,000,” he continued. “The media is reporting it this way: what was expected, or forecasted? But they’re not reporting what we need. What we need is 1.6 million new full-time jobs a month, for 12 months, to get us to $250 billion dollars.”
He explained this calculation came from figuring out the tax revenue on an average income of $50,000, taxed at roughly a 25 percent rate. Not only does the 151,000 jobs created last month fall far short of the new jobs required, but Butowsky pointed out that half of them weren’t even full-time positions.
“The point is, we got about four percent of what we needed yesterday, from the month of January,” he concluded. “And you’ve got the media all around the country applauding, and you’ve got the President out there, talking about what a great job his policies are doing.”
Butowsky thought one reason for the poor quality of economic reporting is that news organizations are busy with other matters, and eager to get headlines out quickly, so they tend to run government reports on matters like job creation without asking too many deep questions.
“We’re on our way to $20 trillion,” he said of the national debt. “We’re on our way to paying a third of what we bring in in revenue in just interest payments. We’ve got to stop and say, what do we need, not just what is forecasted.”
Butowsky criticized Democrats for claiming that fiscally responsible Republicans don’t want infrastructure improvements, or other spending items, when the serious question to be asked is how we can afford them, with the national debt headed for meltdown levels. Such questions become even more urgent when considering the state of global finances, which directly affect America’s ability to generate tax revenue.
We are just at the beginning of this global depression, and I don’t see any way out of this” he said, using admittedly strong language to describe the situation. “When you start seeing earnings on the S&P 500 companies missing, and missing dramatically – like 37 percent of the companies reported have missed, as reported, their earnings estimates. Those estimates have already been lowered. Well, why is that global? Because roughly 50 percent of the earnings growth of our companies come from outside the U.S. You see a global slowdown everywhere. You don’t see one green shoot anywhere in the world of things positive happening.
Butowsky mourned the inability of most politicians, including most presidential candidates, to understand or speak clearly about the severity of our financial situation – a particularly acute concern given the level of political control over the American economy. The younger generation is woefully unprepared to face the new global economy headed their way. Butowsky lamented that even people who basically agree with his bleak forecast usually can’t articulate exactly why they think bad times are ahead.
“There’s no one out there who’s talking about it the right way, and understands the pending doom we’re about to face,” he declared… a state of confusion disturbingly reminiscent of the shock in the financial markets when the 2008 crisis came crashing down upon us.
As Breitbart News host Alex Marlow noted, one of the primary reasons we’ve avoided a far more severe GDP and employment crisis during the Obama years was the fracking boom, and now the collapse of the global oil market is dimming even that lonely bright star in our financial firmament.
Improving public education on the economy, and media coverage of fiscal matters, will be a tall order. “They’re not teaching it in schools,” said Butowsky. “You’ve got guys from the New York Times, I can’t remember… [Paul] Krugman, he comes out and says he has a Nobel Prize, and he says things about Keynesian economics which has completely been proven to be incorrect… and people will listen to him.”
He also singled out former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who unwisely advised Europe to deal with its financial crisis by printing money… just as Japan’s stagnant, bankrupt, permanently doomed economy has been doing since 1992.
“What we really need to do is set up a Breitbart University,” he suggested. “A Breitbart Economic University, to teach people this, because there’s no centralized place to do it.”
Butowsky said he finds himself laughing at people who would be willing to vote for a big-spending Democrat like Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton under these conditions. “I can’t believe the breathe the same air as me,” he sighed.
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