Sarah Palin Channels Her Inner SLOB

On August 8, Sarah Palin posted an excellent piece on Facebook (H/T Hotair) that got me wondering what she and her staff are reading. The SLOBs, I decided. Some comparisons, first this August 8th tweet from Temple of Mut:

Tea Partiers weren’t “fiddling” while our country's fiscal house burned. We were grabbing extinguishers.

Compare to Palin's:

Blaming the Tea Party for our credit downgrade is akin to Nero blaming the Christians for burning Rome. Tea Party Americans weren’t the ones “fiddling” while our country’s fiscal house was going up in smoke.

In an earlier part of the post, Palin warns that our path is even less sustainable that Europe's.

European nations with less debt and smaller deficits than ours and with real “austerity” plans in place to deal with them have had their ratings downgraded. By what magical thinking did we figure we could run up perpetual trillion dollar deficits and still somehow avoid the unforgiving mathematics of a downgrade? Nothing is ever “too big to fail.”

Compare The Scratching Post's frequent analysis of the European situation and the power of math, this post from July 29.

To me, this doesn't make any sense at all. Austerity isn't a solution to a problem, it's a consequence of our actions. The math is simple.

If, up to now, you've lived like this:

Spending1 = Earning + Borrowing

and now your creditors won't lend you any more money, you have to live like this:

Spending2 = Earning.

This is simplified, but it's close enough. From these equations, it's naturally obvious that

Spending1 > Spending2.

On the theme of Obama's economic illiteracy, here is yours truly on June 1 of this year.

Here is why Obama should demand his money back from Columbia and Harvard for failing to educate him on basic economics. His administration's policies of propping up the housing market only prolonged the recession. Further, it was inevitable that the market couldn't be propped up forever.

Palin on the President's education:

And there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Didn’t we all learn that in our micro and macro econ classes? I did at the University of Idaho. How could Obama skip through Columbia and Harvard without learning that?

I find her quote especially effective because it drives the elites crazy, to question the hallowed halls of ivy league academia.

Here is Dean, critiquing Obama's energy subsidy policy last April.

Of course, you see what's going on here, right? "Subsidies" are for the oil industry, yet we "invest" in green energy. Subsidies, bad. Investments, good. Wash, rinse and repeat.

Look, you want to eliminate tax breaks and depreciation write-offs for the oil and gas industry? Fine by us but don't double down on stupid and insult our intelligence at the same time by taking this estimated $4 billion that Big Oil gets and pour it into the not-yet-ready-for-primetime green energy sector that also happens to be a mosh pit of crony capitalism and picking winners and losers. Whether it's oil and gas, wind turbines, solar panels, choo-choo trains or corn and milk, we're not really sure what the government is doing in the subsidies business in the first place.

Sarah Palin reaches a similar conclusion, with as much wit.

And we don’t need any more happy talk from the White House about “investing” in solar shingles and really fast trains. The White House shouldn’t even bother floating these new spending programs. We can’t afford them. Period.

I could probably go on, and I'm sorry if I missed some SLOBs. What I really like is that it is a really decent critique of our current issues and a straightforward way ahead to deal with them. Her swipes at Obama are spot on as well, but most importantly she doesn't offer magical solutions. Perhaps she is still a force to be reckoned with.