Geithner was laughed at in China. Too bad he and Obama's Health Plan are both laughable.

http://tinyurl.com/oh69mu
****TV news reports had Chinese students laughing more than "tittering" at Geithner's claims of solidity of debt. Chinese reported to be incredulous at Fed's large buying of long-term Treasury paper***
Geithner's China Pitch The Treasury Secretary's 'fiscal sustainabiility' tour. ...This week the Treasury Secretary has been traveling to China to assure America's leading creditor that it should keep buying American T-bills because, well, because . . . let's hope his private chats were more persuasive than his public argument.The world's most important bond salesman told a Peking University audience Monday that "in the United States, we are putting in place the foundations for restoring fiscal sustainability." News reports said the audience tittered at that one, and no wonder. The Chinese are well aware of the great American fiscal and monetary blowout, with the 2009 federal budget deficit set to reach 13% of GDP, if we catch a break or two.
Mr. Geithner portrayed this as a virtuous case of policy necessity to end the recession, after which the U.S. is determined to swear off the sauce and quickly get back to a deficit of "roughly 3% of GDP." Promising that with a straight face is called taking one for the Obama team. The Chinese must have been especially startled to hear Mr. Geithner add that the U.S. plans to "put in place comprehensive health-care reform that will bring down the growth in health-care costs, costs that are the principal driver of our long-run fiscal deficit." So by adding another few trillion dollars in new health entitlements, the U.S. will "bring down" the cost of health care. The Chinese will have to consult their Washington embassy on that fiscal puzzler.****Ah, so! Western mind must have advanced beyond Aristotelian logic.(see below# for more on this perversion of logic and commonsense.)***...pushing "balanced trade" as an elixir for economic prosperity. Treasury Secretaries aplenty have tried this formula without success, but no matter.,,,one hitch: The U.S.-China trade imbalance didn't cause the current financial crisis....the original sinner was the Fed, which flooded the world with dollars that stirred global (and especially U.S.) demand for credit and goods....with a low domestic propensity to consume, China ramped up its export machine to meet that demand....dollar reserves, China didn't invest them at home but sent them back to the U.S. to purchase T-bills and Fannie Mae mortgage-backed securities. Voila -- the housing bubble...."imbalances" resulted more from reckless monetary policy than from spendthrift American consumers or Chinese exchange-rate policy....inflation risks -- that is, danger of a debased dollar and dollar assets -- Mr. Geithner didn't help by advising China Monday to allow "greater exchange-rate flexibility." ...Mr. Geithner really means is that he wants the yuan to appreciate vis-a-vis the dollar....signal to the Chinese that the U.S. may secretly want the dollar to decline,...Chinese are reportedly investing in commodities in part as a hedge against a falling dollar. This may also explain why Treasury bond yields have recently been rising at the long end, as the world's investors demand a higher return as a hedge against future inflation risk....China's version of "stimulus" has been arguably more responsible than America's, with more of it going to public works projects than simply to transfer payments for short-term consumption....He'll find the U.S. has more credibility if it proves to the world it has no intention of inflating away its rising debt burden./////////
#Why the Health Care Rush? Democrats don't think their bill can stand public inspection.
http://tinyurl.com/pn4k9r
...Obama seems to view his health-care program..."If we don't get it done this year," he said..."we're not going to get it done." Well, why? If laying "a new foundation" for 18% of the economy really is as important as the President claims it is, then surely it could withstand more than fleeting inspection...Democrats are trying to rush the largest entitlement expansion since LBJ into law with a truncated debate and as little public scrutiny as possible....health overhaul will run up a 13-figure price tag at a time when spending and deficits are already at epic levels and hook up the middle class to an intravenous drip of government health subsidies for generations to come...not realities...Democrats want the American people to mull over for very long.... might get scared off if they were allowed the chance to realize that Democrats will do almost nothing to restrain rising health spending...legislation will hone in on traditional liberal concerns of social equity -- covering the uninsured...."The Economic Case for Health Care Reform,"...argues that slowing the growth rate of U.S. health costs by 1.5 percentage points would increase real GDP by more than 2% in 2020 and nearly 8% in 2030. But it presents no plan for actually slowing the growth rate of U.S. health costs. Christina Romer's study is a political argument disguised as an economic one...need for speed comes from the fact that "stakeholders" -- doctors, hospitals, insurers, pharmaceutical and device makers, etc. -- still seem to be experiencing Stockholm Syndrome....once the policy details of Mr. Obama's new foundation are poured ...even shell-shocked CEOs might stir up their courage to resist. Democrats are of course acutely aware of how industry opposition chewed through HillaryCare in 1994....Better to grab what they will portray as a major domestic achievement while President Obama is at the height of his popularity and before anyone understands what it will mean in practice. The consequences and the cost can be explained later.