Hope and Change---HAHAHAHAHA!!

h/t: Captain Capitalism

Can the news around here get any worse?

So many articles, so much news, so little time; here are the more interesting links from my weekend perusal:

1) According to this HuffPo report, the poverty rate has jumped along with the number of families in shelters. Hmm, it looks like Obamanomics is working to perfection. Soon we will all be much poorer and Democrats will come to the rescue with even more government social engineering and fiscal interventions. Happy days.


2) Randall Hoven over at American Thinker soberly summarizes the extent of debt and future fiscal liability that our country faces.

3) For some weird reason Obama gear is not selling as much as it used to. How strange.

4) Obama has installed another Keynesian hack, Austan Goolsbee, to pull levers and plan great big plans to “fix” our economy--at our expense, of course. God help us. Goolsbee has already started to create a narrative of low expectations by announcing that unemployment will stay high for a long time. Thanks a lot, dude. We have already figured that out by simply taking a gander at your economic policy to see that you are creating a train wreck. Goolsbee said this:

"This recession is the deepest in our lifetimes, the deepest since 1929…more than 8 million people lost their jobs. It's going to take a significant push on our part -- and time -- before that comes down…I don't anticipate it coming down right away."

Mr. Goolsbee, there is no doubt that this past recession was severe but we are no longer in a recession. The economy is in a slow lull caused by the anticipation of higher taxes, regulations, de-leveraging, and federal debt. It is obvious from the above quote that you will “push” for more government planning to solve a problem created by government. Please stop helping before it's too late.

It's time for another sales job!

The stimulus has not made much of a dent to private sector job creation, so Mr. Obama is on a propaganda tour to sell it to likely voters in the upcoming November elections. Isn't it interesting that a good chunk of the porkulus will get spent before mid-term elections?

Enjoy the decline!

Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out!

White House budget director Peter Orszag to step down:

The most visible members of President Barack Obama's economic team, will be leaving his post in July—the most senior official to leave the Obama administration, according to two knowledgeable administration officials.

Officials close to Mr. Orszag noted that he had served nearly four stressful years in similar posts, first as director of the Congressional Budget Office, then as Mr. Obama's first director of the Office of Management and Budget. Mr. Orszag helped steer through Congress a $797 billion economic-stimulus bill in his first weeks at the White House job before becoming one of the driving forces in shaping the health-care law.

One of the things about politics that drives me nuts is how hacks like Orszag can have such a negative impact on people that never voted for him. Orszag was one of the authors and advocates for the second "stimulus" package--a virtual porkfest--and he pushed ObamaCare like no other. Many generations of Americans will have their economic livelihoods diminished for many years while this guy will get a back slap and applause on his last day at his post.

They refuse to see...

This was my comment to this post:

There are three ways to increase aggregate demand:

1)”Prime the pump”–transfer wealth from the private economy to the public and then redistribute.

2) Have the central bank print more colored green paper.

3) Cut taxes.

Numbers one and two have been tried and we have little to show for it. Jan. 1, 2011 will be very interesting when taxes bump up again.

With less people working and paying taxes (the real unemployment rate is closer to 17% IMHO), those that are working will have to take up the slack with more taxes to pay for all the promises made by the political class. Somebody needs to stop shoveling before the hole gets too deep.

I have noticed on many liberal blogs of late an unmistakable air of denial on how policies by the Obama administration has essentially hurt our economic recovery. Instead, they have tried desperately to find an answer for the lack of job growth and the precipitous economic recovery. Some say that the stimulus wasn't enough, others say that this sluggish, limping growth is the "new normal" because of competition from China, Brazil and India---developing nations with economies that are half the size of the U.S. economy combined! (The total GDP of Brazil is roughly the GDP of the state of Texas!) I've even seen posts praising the Obama administration for saving us from the Great Depression (by the mastery of Tim Geithner!) that would have surely followed if a stimulus would not have been passed; this, of course, ignores the sad fact that the stimulus was essentially a giant wealth transfer scheme that pushed off the inevitable reckoning which fast approaches.

I am convinced that many of these liberal bloggers refuse to see the coming economic storm and the failure of Obama's interventions into the economy because it is simply too psychologically painful to admit that their man was wrong or that liberal fantasies of wealth distribution will not make us more prosperous. So it continues.

More on government failure

1) The number one book on Amazon is written by an economist. Thank you, Glenn Beck!

2) The Treasury reports that U.S. debt will rise to 19.6 trillion by 2015; someone should alert congress.

3) The Congressional Budget Office has tacked on another $115 billion to ObamaCare. That brings the total cost to more than $1 trillion in the first ten years

4) Gold continues to hit new highs.

5) Strict European and federal requirements failed to spot cadmium in Shrek glasses. What else can’t they spot that could kill us?

6) A little hysteria and a vocal minority goes a long way. Federal officials now want to ban peanuts on airplanes. They might as well ban everything on board since there is bound to be at least one person or group that is allergic to something. Are you feeling safe yet?

Unemployment rate drops but most of the jobs created are temp jobs

From L.A. Times:

A burst of hiring of temporary census workers helped push down the unemployment rate in May, but the nation's private-sector employers added a mere 41,000 new jobs last month, the Labor Department said Friday.

The jobless rate edged down to 9.7% in May from 9.9% in April, but that was because the federal government added 411,000 jobs for the decade population count. Those jobs were expected and will disappear quickly over the summer.

Where are the green shoots?

So according to the BLS 431K jobs were created in May…41K were in the private sector and 390K were temporary government census workers. This is hardly good news particularly since this temporary bump will be short lived.

Based on employment patterns for the 2000 census, nearly all such census employment gains should reverse out of the data by the end of September, with June payrolls reflecting the first outright contraction in the reversal of current hiring.

Let's face facts, the "stimulus" was a very expensive joke that essentially pushed off the inevitable hardship that states are going to have to deal with sooner or later and that taxpayers are going to have to pay back with interest to China. And all the "green collar" jobs that Obama promised would save us all? It was all B.S. This is an epic train wreck.

The cold hard fact is that Obama's economic plan is not working and is not going to work: it's all a wealth transfer scheme while printing dollars in order to evoke the short-term Philips Curve. But this time, unlike other times, the coming (and current) tax burden to businesses and citizens due to massive debt is dampening economic growth.

The Big Payoff and the Big Comedown

This portion from Mortimer Zuckerman's article in the WSJ
needs some attention:

It is not an accident that in framing the national stimulus program in 2009 Congress directed a stunning $275 billion of the $787 billion as grants to the states to support public-service employees in health care, education, etc.

So now that stimulus funds have dried up, I guess states are going to have to do what they were able to push off with stimulus funds--make some deep cuts to state spending. The public sector workers and their unions got a sweet deal from Obama. Now it's time to sober up.

Another "Stimulus" failure

Now that stimulus funds are drying up, states are going to have to do what they should have done over a year ago--tighten their belts, come clean with residents. They were able to "kick the can down the road" waiting for a better tomorrow that hasn't come. Now the pain will be more severe.

This is one of the reasons why I was against the "stimulus" package. It was obvious to me that state politicians would much rather take the easy way out of not doing the unpopular task of cutting public services but accepting a federal crutch to buy time out of a financial disaster. The incentive to do the wrong thing was simply too juicy to pass up.

What ever happened to protesting being patriotic?

Partisan liberals are currently working hard (again!) on a smear campaign against Tea Party protestors. Here are two great excerpts of posts by conservative bloggers on the subject. The first one is Rossputin.com:

The narcissistic and condescending views of Presidents Obama and Clinton is not peculiar to them. Such views are an inherent part of being a true-believing Progressive. Progressivism is based on a fundamental lack of faith in individual citizens or in organizations of citizens to make the best decisions for themselves or for the nation. Progressivism’s key attribute is its insistence that the “smart people", the technocrats, the people who really “care", should be handling the levers of power over every important aspect of our lives, from education to resource allocation.

It is of no matter to a Progressive that every such political construct has failed in the past, with the size of the failure proportionate to the size of the implementation of Progressive (i.e. socialist) ideas. For a Progressive, past failures only mean that not-quite-smart-enough people were put in charge, or that the government domination of the private sector wasn’t complete enough for their plans to work.

The other is by our old friend Harrison Price at Just Politics:

Liberals across the country are on the ropes so it’s time to pull out the slander and lies and they are already trying to sell the story that Tea Party protesters (whom Obama said he was “amused by”) are violent and will cause violence.

During the presidency of George W. Bush “protest is patriotic” however during the time of Obama it is… seditious?

Links for today

1) My weekly guest post over at The Bobo Files is now posted. Subject: Obama and his Big Labor friends are getting snuggly by the day.

2) The Independent Bloghorn has excellent economic analysis from STRATFOR, an international affairs organization, on China that is worth your time.

3) Just Politics has very interesting comments on unemployment benefits.

Around The Horn...Newsworthy Links And Posts!

1) Good luck in trying to tax the rich to close the deficit.

2) Nearly half of U.S. homes escape taxes.

3) Mortgage rates jump higher as Fed stops buying mortgage-backed securities.

4) Another liberal crusade and another evil chemical that they need to save us from.

5) Milton Friedman on hope.

6) Is the Tea Party like the KKK?

He is also fiscally challenged

A Disgruntled Republican asks, "Is Obama a Harvard educated financial illiterate?"

Coming soon: The spin on raising taxes

From CNN:

If President Obama's 2011 budget were put into effect as proposed, the U.S. federal government would add an estimated $9.8 trillion to the country's accrued debt over the next decade, according to a preliminary analysis from the Congressional Budget Office.

Of that amount, an estimated $5.6 trillion will be in interest alone.

Yes, fiscal conservatives know that the budget proposal's from the Obama administration are simply not sustainable. But the analysis doesn't stop there:

The CBO cited two big contributors to the jump in debt.

One is the president's proposal to extend the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the majority of Americans. The other is the proposal to protect middle- and upper-middle-income families from having to pay the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT).

Together those proposals would cost $3 trillion between 2011 and 2020.

Ahh, here is the meat of the matter. You see, the Obama administration has skilfully had the CBO score their proposed budgets (with bloated new entitlements like ObamaCare and Cap and Tax) along with the Bush tax cuts. What a better way to explain to citizens that taxes must rise in order to avoid a fiscal train wreck sometime in the future.

The administration has also called the budget trajectory unsustainable and the president has created a fiscal advisory commission to recommend ways lawmakers can get annual deficits down to 3% of GDP by 2015.

Yes, a blue ribbon commision will tell us what we already know...that taxes must go up and the Bush tax cuts must end. The commision runs interference for the administration and for liberal democrats who hate anything George W. Bush did. Wait for it, folks...wait for it.

They are more alike than many would like to know

Bush and Obama---cut from the same cloth? You decide.

Let the bad investments die already

From the Mercury News:

LAS VEGAS — President Obama unveiled a $1.5 billion program to aid the states hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis, a small but targeted effort to address a housing problem that continues to resist government solutions.

The program, which administration officials called an "innovation fund," is modest in size and reach and comes as the administration's chief foreclosure-prevention program faces criticism for not doing more to help borrowers.

Speaking to the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, Obama said the program would allow states to find new ways to help struggling homeowners. "That means that here in Nevada, we're going to be able to prevent some foreclosures that otherwise would have happened," he said Friday afternoon. "The goal is to target communities at the center of the crisis and to empower local agencies that know these communities best."

Obama made the same promise at a town hall meeting earlier in the day, telling about 1,700 people in Henderson, a suburb near Las Vegas, that "government has a responsibility to help deal with this problem."

VH: Here we go again. The Federal government riding the white horse over the hill to "help" out distressed homeowners. So instead of letting these bad investments go quickly to bankruptcy and clearing out the housing market, we have a vain attempt to prop up a market that shows very little signs of improvement. I don't see how this helps people who, after this small injection of public funds, will most likely lose their homes because they can't find a job or the value of their homes are much lower than what they are shelling out each month in mortgage payments. The irony in all this is that it was the Federal government that led all of these poor people down this path of destruction by implementing all sorts of "affordable housing" incentives. If the Feds want affordable housing now and they want a quick recovery of the housing market, why not let prices drop to their equilibrium? Instead, we get more public funds thrown at lost causes.

Change?

While Barack Obama slams lobbyists, the lobby industry in Washington has grown by leaps and bounds.

Around The Horn

Jeff Perren asks: Is Obama a Pragmatist?

Harrison Price: If Canada’s healthcare is so great…

Being "compassionate" with someone else's money

From Carpe Diem: Watching Obama and Biden on TV and hearing Obama talk proudly about their "leadership," I can't help but remember how relatively uncharitable and uncaring they have been in the past when it comes to spending their own money.

VH: This is not an unfair criticism of an administration that wants to take one group's money (usually groups that are branded as bad) to give to another group in an attempt to "spread the wealth" and which is supposed to then mean that government is therefore being "fair" or "compassionate." They want to be "compassionate" with other people's money. Ah, government.

The Pain Goes On

The national unemployment rate is now at 10.2%--highest since 1983. If the Obama regime believes that it is going to reflate the economy out of this recession without any consequences, they are going to have a rude awakening.

In other news, the state of California has started, on November 1st, withholding 10% more in taxes from workers to shore up the state's deficit. No debate amongst the public and little news about this in local papers. Another perfect example of how government looks out for itself and how it will always try to expand its power at all costs. So much for representative government.