Say W-h-a-a-a-t?

Below are some of the wildest,boldest, and most surprising stories we ran across this week. Thanks toall who shared their favorites. Keep them coming! This is a weeklyseries, so we’ll be back with more next Friday.

The following quote comes to us from famed economist Oliver Blanchard, IFM chief economist, Tuesday, September 20, 2011. He said: “What is needed to sustain growth is that households and firms increase their demand as fiscal deficits are being rolled back,” said Oliver Blanchard, IMF chief economist, on Tuesday. “What we observe is that this is not going well.”

Sarah Palin — yes,the momma grizzly herself — makes some shockingly insightful remarks about crony capitalism and the dangers of mixing money and politics. “This is not the capitalism of free men and freemarkets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk,” shesaid of the crony variety. She added: “It’s the collusion of big government andbig business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest — to the littleguys.”

The former Democraticgovernor of Michigan played the austerity game. Now she admits that herpolicies just made matters worse — and only the federal government can turn thetide. “Everything that is hitting the country hit Michigan first,”Ms. Granholm said in an interview, reflecting on eight years in office in whichthe state’s economic crisis overshadowed all else. Her response to the crisis,she said, was to cut spending, cut government jobs, cut taxes – the veryapproach now being promoted elsewhere, particularly after Republican victoriesin statehouses around the country in 2010.

“We tried all of those prescriptions,too,” said Ms. Granholm, whose final term ended with the start of thisyear. “We did everything that people would want us to do, and yet itdidn’t work.” “I think thereare ways to stop it but it can only happen with a partnership with the federalgovernment, because individual states simply do not have the tools to competeagainst China or the globe.”

In a piece published on Monday, September 19, 2011, Dean Baker lent some credence to Rick Perry’s insane argument about Social Security: “The way in which Social Security is ostensibly similar to a Ponzi scheme is that it depends on new workers in the future to meet obligations that it incurs today. This also happens to be true of any debt issued by either the government or the private sector.”