Oh look, it’s investment via clapping harder!
We've got a large wad of money shovelled away on the hopes that we'll survive until retirement age (and will then have a little something extra to make up for the Evil Party [ "We helped!" -- the Stupid Party ] looting of the US treasury. A lot of this money sits in mutual funds (which is about as useful as stuffing it into a mattress -- I watched my retirement funds climb steadily during the Clinton years, only to see those gains completely erased when the B*sh junta took over the country. But I digress,) which, as you can expect, are run by the parasitic classes that the B*sh junta caters to. In practical terms, this means very little beyond decade-long stretches of crappy returns, but in political terms it's very amusing.
Most of the mutual funds are operated by the parasitic class (they get their tax-free millions regardless of the performance of the stock,) so they've pretty much uniformly got a hard-on for the Coward in Chief. And they express their forbidden love for Maximum Leader Genius by wedging the occasional "everything is wonderful" letter into their embarrassing excuses for annual reports. Some of them have enough brain cells to realize that it might not be a good idea to piss off the 85% of the country that is not enjoying the benefits of the ongoing looting of the public purse, so they coach their mash notes in vague enthusastic terms ("well, yes, the airplane *did* crash and burn, but this means you don't have to wait at the baggage reclaim!") but occasionally their passion gets the better of them and you see something like The Hartford's attempt to get us to love the Evil Party.
We got The Hartford's "semi-annual report" just last week, and the cover of it has a little graphic of an Evil Party balloon and a Stupid Party ballon on it, with the title "Which is Better for Your INVESTMENTS? The Answer May Surprise You." This is suspicious to start with, because this year has seen a growing line of reports that say, not surprisingly, that the Stupid Party grows the economy better than the Evil Party does. You'd think that (a) The Hartford would be aware of this and (b) they'd not want to piss off their Evil Party customers (because if they did, those customers would realize that they weren't getting the so-called benefits of the wonderful™ Evil Party economy.) And, yes, the suspicions are well-placed, because the start of the report lists the increases in the stock market over the past 30 years (in a nicely biased fashion: The Evil Party did things that made the stock market go up, while the Stupid Party was just in power when the stock market mysteriously went up. Amazing how that works.)
But that's not the best part of it. No, the best part is this; the stock market has generally trended up over the past 30 years, except for one tremendous plunge that started after Maximum Leader Genius overthrew the US government and made the "no taxes for the rich" cargo cult the state religion. Now this is poison to the parasitic classes, because the Coward in Chief lowered taxes for the rich, and their Holy Book states explicitly that lowering taxes for the rich (and only for the rich; if hoi polloi had their taxes lowered then the government would have trouble borrowing enough money to cover the huge tax subsidies the rich already get) makes *everything* better in *every* way. So when you're looking at the B*sh junta and their approximately 2% increase in the stock market from 2001-2005, what to do?
Well, you take the list of presidents, show the stock market increase for the entire term of the rest of them, but you split the stock market results for the B*sh junta into two parts (one way down, one staggering back up to where it was) and blame the first two years on Clinton while claiming that the tax cuts for the rich was responsible for the (housing bubble-powered) increases in the second two years.
To quote Jonathan Schwarz, You just have to pray to god they know they're lying. (And that they'll continue to try gaming the system until you can get your money out of their hands and converted into a stable currency like rubles, Zimbabwean dollars, or the grey pebbles that the cloud-devils of Gliese C use as their currency.) It's as bad as the pretend Laffer Curve that the Wall Street Journal embarrassed itself with last month, but this embarrassment is being committed by people who actually have their hands on real money.