Sparks Will Fly!
Apparently the next chair of the House Monetary Policy Subcommittee is slated to be [drum roll]… Ron Paul.
Maybe he won’t want it. Maybe Boehner won’t want him to take it. But gotta say, I kind of hope this happens, just for the sheer entertainment value.
(h/t Weigel).
Ambiance 
amba12 said,
November 3, 2010 at 5:03 pm
Cool!
When else was there a father-and-son pair in Congress?
Icepick said,
November 4, 2010 at 8:21 pm
Ron Paul vs. The Fed! My money’s on The Fed for now, but changes will start coming rapidly in the next year or two, and there’s no telling who or what will survive.
wj said,
November 5, 2010 at 8:54 am
The Fed has the advantage that what they are currently doing is authorized in law. So if Mr. Paul wants to change what they are doing, he has to get a bill to that effect written, passed thru both houses, and signed. So he can doubtless make some kind of change, but probably not a vast amount or very quickly.
Icepick said,
November 6, 2010 at 11:18 am
wj, the real advantage The Fed has is tat they have the complete backing of the country’s financial elites – the law simply codifies the reality.
But the changes I’m referring to have to do with the ongoing realization that we’re completely fucked financially. The bursting of the housing bubble didn’t take me by surprise, but the financial collapse that followed did – I didn’t realize that Wall Street (for lack of a better term) had bet such huge sums on everything going up indefinitely.
But the collapse in tax revenues coupled with the ever increasing liabilities in government pension programs, SS and Medicare/Medicaid was something else I had foreseen, and that’s going to happen even sooner than I had imagined. I’m not sure if a divided Congress will make the fall happen more quickly or less quickly, but that time is upon us. It should start at the state and local levels (what we’re seeing now are just a few gusts before the storm) and work its way up the ladder. Not sure how long it will take but absent concerted and extensive responses we’ll be way deep in the shit by 2018. In other words, the fun just started in 2008, and we’re just catching a quick breathe now.
Personally I’m going to be interested in how the various American constituencies react when they discover that everybody can’t have everything indefinitely.