It’s that time of the year again.

No, not Christmas. It’s the time of the year when the state of California starts paying its bills in IOU’s.

 California lawmakers passed a bill to let recipients use state IOUs to pay fees and taxes owed to the government in Sacramento, if the warrants are issued.

  The bill, from Assemblyman Joel Anderson, a San Diego Republican, passed the Senate unanimously. It requires all state agencies to accept registered warrants issued to pay for goods and services. The Assembly unanimously approved the measure in September.

 The state could start handing out these IOU’s as soon as two weeks from today.

 One thing you can count on is that blame and suggestions on how to fix the budget mess will start flying fast and furious. Some ideas will be crazy. Some reasonable, but long on image and short on impact. Many good ideas will never be considered.

  What is also sure to happen is you will see a blizzard of numbers. Some will be created out of thin air. Most will be half-truths. Almost none of them will give you an honest perspective on what the actual problems are.

 That’s why I am presenting this essay, so that you can make a rational judgment for yourself.

  A relatively obscure case in Norway shows just how different the United States is from the rest of the industrialized world.

  The Oslo Stock Exchange was halted by unusual trade action. It seems two Norwegians were trying to manipulate stock prices.

 We believe the two are behind a number of cases of price manipulation. They have set purchase and sales orders that have not been real, because they have had another motive, namely to move prices, “said Stenberg.

 In other words, they did exactly what every single bank on Wall Street does every single day. In New York it is called High Frequency Trading. In Oslo it is called getting six years of jail time for breaking the law.

 So who is right? Is Norway some Socialist Hell for not allowing the free market to work, allowing faster traders to skim profits from slower traders? Or are laws in the United States too lax, allowing people to take money from the system without adding any value, thus destabilizing the economy?

  To answer that we need to look at a couple more examples.

  Perhaps the worst insult you can hurl at a politician these days is to give him the middle name of “Hoover”.

  Such as George Hoover Bush and Barack Hoover Obama. 80 years later Herbert Hoover is still the standard for the “do-nothing” president in the face of economic collapse.

 Like most easy comparisons, these examples lack details. That’s because the names are there for the purpose of accusation, rather than enlightenment.

 However, if you dig down into the individual economic policies of Hoover, Bush, and Obama, the story gets much more interesting.

 As Mark Twain once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” I’m not going to try and find direct connections in this essay, just broad picture comparisons. If the reader confuses the two, then that will only mean I was justified in writing this.

Dear diary,

  the first thing I noticed when I stepped out of my home today was the thick layer of smoke from burning American flags. The liberals never take a day off from expressing their hatred of America.

  As I walked to my Dodge pickup I was spotted by my neighbor. She was pointing and laughing at me. “Look kids,” she said to her fourteen, dirty-faced children, “there is someone dumb enough to work for a living rather than collect welfare and buy a new cadillac every year like us.” Then they all started pointing and laughing at me. Some of the kids began throwing dirt clods at me.

  I wanted to say something, but I was already running late for work.

  Three years ago this past Saturday the economic crisis struck.

That’s why the comments by Alan Greenspan on the very same day on Meet the Press are worth noting.

 “There is no doubt that the federal funds rate can be fixed at what the Fed wants it to be but which the government has no control over is long-term interest rates and long-term interest rates are what make the economy move. And if this budget problem eventually merges to the point where it begins to become very toxic, it will be reflected in rising long-term interest rates, rising mortgage rates, lower housing. At the moment there is no sign of that because the financial system is broke and you can not have inflation if the financial system is not working.”

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

  The financial system is still broken three years later!?! Think about that for a moment. We’ve thrown trillions of dollars at the financial system and we’ve fixed nothing.

  The obvious conclusion from this reality is that we haven’t addressed the real causes of the crisis, and instead are only dealing with symptoms. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s recent “unusually uncertain” comments before Congress proves that the so-called experts simply don’t understand what the problem is.

  It’s the economic timebomb that we all knew would go off, but kept hoping that a heavenly miracle would save us.

  Well, time is up, and miracles are in short supply.

 The report, a result of a survey by the National League of Cities, the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the National Association of Counties, showed local governments are moving to cut the equivalent of 8.6 percent of their workforces from 2009 to 2011. That suggests 481,000 employees will lose their jobs, according to the report, which said the tally may yet rise.

 That’s bad, but the real story is actually much worse.

“Remove justice and what are states but gangs of bandits on a large scale? And what

are bandit gangs but kingdoms in miniature?”

 – Augustine

  Hollywood has treated us to yet another over-produced Robin Hood movie. At least this time it won’t have Kevin Costner miscast as the lead.

  While watching the trailer I couldn’t help but noting how Robin Hood’s character has been slowly transformed over the years.

  The early Robin Hood was a yeoman, a commoner, fighting against a corrupt establishment in 14th Century sonnets. It wasn’t until several centuries later that Robin Hood transformed into a wronged aristocrat, loyal to King Richard, and fighting to restore the status quo.

  The whole “class war” thing was just forgotten.

  President Obama got up on the stage and gave the speech that we all wanted to hear.

 “I proposed a set of reforms to empower consumers and investors, to bring the shadowy deals that caused this crisis into the light of day, and to put a stop to taxpayer bailouts once and for all,” Obama said to supporters. “Today, thanks to a lot of people in this room, those reforms will become the law of the land.”

 It sounds really good. The problem is that it has no relationship at all to reality.

  The Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP) released a report within hours of the president giving his speech, and its finding portrayed something very different.

 “Indeed, the current outstanding balance of overall Federal support for the nation’s financial system…has actually increased more than 23% over the past year, from approximately $3.0 trillion to $3.7 trillion — the equivalent of a fully deployed TARP program — largely without congressional action, even as the banking crisis has, by most measures, abated from its most acute phases.

  There has been a lot of talk about a double-dip recession recently by people like Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini, how to define it, and what it means. What is missing from these discussions is the most obvious question of all: why won’t the economy recover?

  Capitalism is supposed to be self-correcting – or so we’ve been told – and a recession like the one we’ve had is supposed to be that reset button. So why aren’t businesses hiring?

  I’m going to try to answer that question in the simplest way possible.

 There are two primary reasons why the economy isn’t recovering, one reason is cyclical, the other is secular.

  It’s a rare event to see honesty for a major politician. So when it happens you should take note. Sen. John Kyl (R-Ariz.) clearly listed his priorities yesterday, and it wasn’t a pretty sight.

 WALLACE: We’re running out of time, so how are you going to pay $678 billion just on the tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 a year?

KYL: You should never raise taxes in order to cut taxes. Surely congress has the authority and it would be right, if we decide we want to cut taxes to spur the economy, not to have to raise taxes in order to offset those costs. You do need to offset the cost of increased spending. And that’s what republicans object to. But you should never have to offset cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.

  I’m going to make this a short diary in order to get straight to the point.

 As you probably know, the House has passed H.R. 4213, which would keep in place the unemployment extensions until the end of November.

 The Senate Republicans, with the help of Democrat Ben Nelson were able to filibuster the Senate version of the bill by a single vote. The reason why the Democrats were a vote short was because Senator Robert Byrd from West Virginia died.

  By the start of next week 2.5 million Americans will exhaust their unemployment benefits, 3.5 million by the end of the month.

  The most heated debate in Washington these days involves deficits and unemployment. There are lots of heated rhetoric, finger-pointing, and hyperbole.

  What there isn’t is a surplus of actual facts.

 For instance, this headline reads “U.S. should cut deficit to spur recovery, IMF says”. It implies that cutting the deficit would automatically increase economic growth.

  That sounds good to me. The problem is that the IMF never actually says that. In fact, the article spends most of its time warning about a drop in economic growth.

 The headline was misleading, as is just about everything said in this debate.