Items on this page are in
chronological order or in order of discovery. Previous years in
left column . . .
DNC Chair Kaine Admits Obama Was Too Busy
With His Socialist Agenda To Care About Jobs
Related:Top House Republican
Predicts "Significant" Bipartisan Support for Health Care Law Repeal
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One Second Of National Debt
Andrew Malcolm
says if you're like most people
not involved with drug trafficking, you don't often actually see U.S.
money with more than one or two zeroes on it, as in $50 or $100.
Thus, Monday's news that the national debt was approaching the legal
limit of $14.294 trillion creates a Clint Eastwood-style political
showdown in the soggy streets of Washington.
On one side is Obama
and his Democratic gang, who'd like the limit raised so their government
can keep operating. On the other end of Main Street is the newly
enlarged posse of Republicans, who are feeling their enhanced leverage
and want spending-cut commitments before going along with the usually
pro forma limit-raising.
The national debt flew past $14 trillion
last Friday. That's a galactic sum that's difficult for any average
American to imagine or even grasp. But let's try:
Fourteen
trillion is 14-thousand billions. A billion is a thousand millions. A
million is a thousand thousands.
A trillion has so many zeroes it
won't fit in your checkbook -- 12 zeros, to be exact.
Last June 1
doesn't really seem all that long ago. The Gulf oil disaster was barely
half-spilled. Obama and Pancho Biden were still promising amazing job growth by summer's end. The Senate was confirming Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court. CIA Director Leon Panetta still wasn't sure
where Osama bin Laden was. Al and Tipper, and Tiger and Elin, were still
married to each other.
Here's why we mention June 1. On that day
the national debt was "only" $13 trillion. It's 214 days from June 1
through last Friday, Dec. 31. That's 5,136 hours or 308,160 minutes or
18,489,600 seconds.
In those seven short months the national debt
increased by $1,000,000,000,000.
That works out to be a growth in
national debt of $54,084 borrowed during every single one of those
18,489,600 seconds.
The
Obama administration has borrowed $4 trillion since taking power!
That's a trillion dollars every six months. And Austan Goolsbee,
Obama's economic adviser
wants to borrow MORE!
John Hinderaker
says
a Reuters/Ipsos poll finds that by a 71-18 percent margin, Americans do
not want the federal debt ceiling raised. I am not sure whether that is
a viable option, but the message the public is trying to send is clearly
correct. The country's debt has been rising at an accelerating rate for
some time. Whatever one may have thought of the debt prior to the time
the Democrats took control of Congress in January 2007, it is beyond
dispute that the debt we have been racking up since that time is
unsustainable. At The Corner, Veronica DeRugy offers this graph, which
charts both federal debt and the statutory debt limit:
click image for larger chart
The problem, obviously, is the debt, not the debt
limit. But the public's focus on the debt ceiling presents both an
opportunity and a hazard for Republicans -- an opportunity, if they can
extract substantial spending cuts and other relief in exchange for what
I assume is an inevitable increase in the limit; and a hazard if they
can't, and if voters perceive an extension of the limit as evidence that
Republicans aren't following through on their promises.
House GOP Gives Obama An Ultimatum On Debt
Ceiling
Emily Miller says that House Republicans demand
that Obama significantly cut government spending in exchange for
Congress raising the national debt ceiling. The GOP blames Obama
and the former Democratic Congress for the out-of-control government
spending that led to the rapid increase in debt.
The United
States now has a record-setting $14 trillion in debt, and will hit the
current statutory debt limit of $14.3 trillion as early as March.
The House GOP spent the weekend on a retreat in Baltimore discussing
the upcoming fiscal battle with Obama.
"President Obama and
Congressional Democrats have been on a job-destroying spending spree
that has left us with nothing but historic unemployment and the most
debt in U.S. history," Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) told
the 218 House Republicans at the retreat.
Boehner said that
Obama’s request for a higher debt limit will require changes in the way
Democrats operate. "If they want us to help pay their bills, they
are going to have to start cutting up their credit card. Cutting
up the credit cards means cutting spending -- and implementing spending
reforms to ensure we keep on cutting," he told his Members on Saturday.
(For years, Boehner has used the metaphor of a credit card when
talking about the nation’s debt. He often holds up the electronic
voting card, which Members use to record their votes, and refers to it
as "the most dangerous credit card in the history of the world.")
The Republicans have Obama over a barrel because if Congress does
not pass a bill to increase the debt ceiling, the United States will
default on its loans. The debt ceiling is the legal amount the
U.S. Government can borrow on credit.
Federal Debt Up $463.6 Billion In Last
Three Months
CNSNews.com says the national debt jumped
$463.6 billion in the first quarter of fiscal year 2011 (Oct. 1 to Dec.
31), the Treasury Department reports.
That means the government
borrowed approximately an additional $1,500 for every one of the
308,745,538 men, women and children in the United States as counted by
the 2010 Census.
If government debt continues to accumulate at
that pace through the remaining three quarters of the fiscal year, total
new debt for the year would amount to approximately $1.85 trillion -- or
about $6,000 for every person in the country.
That would rival
the $1.89 trillion in new debt the government piled up in fiscal
2009–the greatest debt-accumulation year in the history of the country
-- when the federal government bailed out some of the nation’s largest
banks and Barack Obama signed his economic stimulus package.
So
far, fiscal 2010 (which ended on Sept. 30) ranks second after fiscal
2009, for the greatest federal debt accumulation -- with the government
adding $1.65 trillion in new debt that year.
Mary Walsh says Policy makers are working
behind the scenes to come up with a way to let states declare bankruptcy
and get out from under crushing debts, including the pensions they have
promised to retired public workers.
Unlike cities, the states
are barred from seeking protection in federal bankruptcy court.
Any effort to change that status would have to clear high constitutional
hurdles because the states are considered sovereign.
But
proponents say some states are so burdened that the only feasible way
out may be bankruptcy, giving Illinois, for example, the opportunity to
do what General Motors did with the federal government’s aid.
Beyond their short-term budget gaps, some states have deep structural
problems, like insolvent pension funds, that are diverting money from
essential public services like education and health care. Some
members of Congress fear that it is just a matter of time before a state
seeks a bailout, say bankruptcy lawyers who have been consulted by
Congressional aides.
Bankruptcy could permit a state to alter
its contractual promises to retirees, which are often protected by state
constitutions, and it could provide an alternative to a no-strings
bailout. Along with retirees, however, investors in a state’s
bonds could suffer, possibly ending up at the back of the line as
unsecured creditors.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting Barack
Obama will call for new government spending on infrastructure, education
and research in his State of the Union address Tuesday, sharpening his
response to Republicans in Congress who are demanding deep budget cuts,
people familiar with the speech said.
Obama will argue that the
U.S., even while trying to reduce its budget deficit, must make targeted
investments to foster job growth and boost U.S. competitiveness in the
world economy. The new spending could include initiatives aimed at
building the renewable-energy sector (enviros) -- which received
billions of dollars in stimulus funding -- and rebuilding roads to
improve transportation (unions), people familiar with the matter said.
Money to restructure the No Child Left Behind law's testing mandates and
institute more competitive grants (NEA) also could be included.
While proposing new spending, Obama also will lay out significant budget
cuts elsewhere, people familiar with the plans say, though they will
likely fall short of what Republican lawmakers have requested.
Gerry Broome
totes up the jobs from Obama's stimulus.
By January 2011, the
stimulus bill was supposed to have lowered the unemployment rate to 7
percent. The current unemployment rate actually stands at 9.4
percent. Democrats have lambasted Republicans for years for
believing in "Voodoo economics."
Well, the evidence is mounting
that economic superstition is alive and well in the nation's political
circles, though it has nothing to do with a fondness for tax cuts.
It's instead the crazy belief that the government can spend its way to
prosperity for the rest of us. Underscoring this conclusion, the
Ways and Means Committee in the new GOP-majority House released a report
titled, "It's Official: On Unemployment and Jobs, Democrats' 2009
Stimulus Was a Huge Failure."
The Ways and Means report provides
a number of striking reminders about the predictions the White House
made in January 2009 while urging the passage of their $814 billion
Keynesian spending bill. By January 2011, the stimulus bill was
supposed to have lowered the unemployment rate to 7 percent. It
now stands at 9.4 percent, and the report notes that "the unemployment
rate would be 11.3 percent if it included all the 'invisible unemployed'
-- American workers who have simply given up looking for work."
The report also claimed that the stimulus would create 3.7 million jobs
by now, for a total of 137.6 million jobs in the American economy.
Currently, there are 130.7 million jobs. Since passage of the
stimulus, 47 of the 50 states have lost jobs; overall, the private
sector has seen 1.8 million jobs disappear.
Note as well that
unemployment is slightly above what the White House predicted it would
be if the Obama stimulus program was not passed as emergency
legislation. Any honest assessment of the stimulus has to consider
the possibility that flawed economics, kickbacks to unions and other
Democratic special interests, corruption and an inefficient bureaucracy
simply swallowed all the jobs for which those billions were supposed to
pay. In fact, job creation exceeded the White House's expectations
in only one area: The District of Columbia created almost twice as many
jobs as the White House anticipated. In other words, thanks to the
stimulus, the only sector creating new jobs is the federal government.
In response to the failure of Obamanomics, the Ways and Means
Committee report offers four solutions to get the economy going again:
Streamline the tax code; pass pending free-trade agreements so American
companies can easily sell goods overseas; repeal and replace ObamaCare
with reforms that actually lower insurance costs; and get spending under
control so the national debt doesn't threaten the economy.
Democrats may call this voodoo economics, but to most Americans it
probably sounds like a popular and common-sense plan to get the economy
going again. After two years of Obamanomics, almost anything would
be a welcome change.
How NOT To Create Jobs
Word is that Obama will focus on jobs in his
State of the Union speech on Tuesday. No surprise there: jobs are
the American people's top public policy concern. Obama reportedly
will propose new and expanded federal spending programs as the means of
job creation. No surprise there either: what else do liberals have
to offer?
Yet,
says
John Hinderaker, if there is one thing we know with an empirical
certainty, it is that increasing federal spending will not, on balance,
create more jobs. Of course, whenever the government spends money
someone is employed, or, at least, gets to cash a check. This is
what Obama had in mind when he said -- in a moment of supreme
cluelessness -- "spending equals stimulus." What Obama apparently
does not understand is that government spending consumes resources,
often inefficiently, that could better be used elsewhere. Whenever
the government wastes resources, the country grows poorer and job growth
is suppressed. This, in crude terms, is why the ballooning public
expenditures of recent years have not caused a boom in the job market.
To illustrate this point, I created this simple chart. It
plots federal spending from 1998 through FY 2011, on a scale of $1
trillion to $4 trillion, against the total number of non-farm jobs in
January of each year, in thousands, as reported by the Bureau of Labor
Statistics.
It is blindingly obvious that spending does not
equal stimulus, and increasing federal spending will not create jobs.
There are two possibilities here. One is that Obama is one of the
last people in America who have not figured this out. The other is
that Obama knows his proposals are dumb, from an economic standpoint,
but doesn't care. The one thing that more government spending will
accomplish is to slide more money to Barack Obama's cronies and to
various constituencies of the Democratic Party. Maybe that is all
Obama ever wanted.
The union
treasuries are flush with the tax-monies that Obama poured in as
Stimulus money. It all will come flowing back out during Election
2012.
Obama The Destroyer
Jim Hoft
asks, "Can we all agree that this administration really doesn’t care
about jobs?"
Obama
announced that he would limit new oil drilling
in the Gulf of Mexico. Barack Obama knew his offshore drilling
moratorium would cost at least 23,000 jobs but went ahead with it
anyway. After all, what’s another 23,000 jobs when you’ve lost several
million already?
It was even
reported that Team Obama fudged a report to support
their drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico.
But this didn’t stop the Obama Administration. These radical
leftists still have not lifted their deepwater-drilling moratorium. This
week a federal judge
ruled the Obama Administration was in contempt for
continuing the job-killing stunt.
As oil prices continue to climb, a backlog of more than 100 offshore
drilling plans for the Gulf of Mexico are awaiting approval from the
Obama administration, according to federal data.
The federal
government has
not approved a single new exploratory drilling plan in
the Gulf of Mexico since lifting its deepwater drilling moratorium on
Oct. 12. There are currently 103 plans awaiting review by the
Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement in an area
that
accounts for more than 25 percent of domestic oil production.
Obama's Environmental Protection Agency
pulled the plug on a massive
mountaintop-removal coal mine in West Virginia that the Bush
administration had signed off on in 2007. The move was the agency’s
first-ever retroactive veto of a coal mine permit
And on, and on, and on.
Obama Regime's Cynical Exploitation and
Callous Indifference
Steve McCann
says it has become more difficult as each day dawns to listen to the
ramblings coming out of Washington D.C. It is either a case of
abject ignorance or a deliberate attempt to find out how naive and
ignorant the American people are. In the case of Obama it is a
combination of both in the case of the Federal Reserve it is the latter.
Today Obama announced that U.S. business leaders had an obligation,
yes an obligation, to the country to hire more workers, pay better wages
and keep jobs in the country. He is now calling on American
companies to see themselves as partners with the government saying:
"That government and businesses have a mutual responsibilities; and that
if we fulfill these obligations together, it benefits us all."
Yet, according to the actions of Obama and the Democrats, the
obligations are solely those of American business.
There is no
word coming out of the White House on any plan to: tackle the massive
government deficit and debts; eliminate tens of thousands of pages of
regulations; abandon new carbon controls; repeal of ObamaCare;
significantly reduce the highest corporate taxes in the world.
Those issues simply move forward while the businesses Obama expects to
fulfill his new edict compete with the rest of the world with an anchor
(all the above) attached.
These words are meant for political
consumption. As jobs creation continues to stagnate due solely to
the policies of the Obama administration, he will point to business
saying he asked them to fulfill their obligations to the people and
those greedy capitalists did not. This is a blatant attempt to
shift the blame. American business's only obligation is to its
shareholders and to a lesser degree its current employees to make a
profit and remain afloat. This administration is without any honor
or integrity and is only concerned with itself not the American people.
In another part of Washington D.C., Ben Bernanke vehemently denies
that the quantitative easing (essentially printing money) by the Federal
Reserve has had an impact on world-wide food prices. He stated
instead that these impoverished third world countries can control these
costs by controlling excess demand within the country.
"Excess
demand" -- how does that apply to feeding a population when up to 50% or
more of the income goes into just buying basic food items for themselves
and their families?
Bernanke offered as a solution: "They can for
example, use monetary policy [interest rates] of their own. They
can adjust their exchange rates, which is something they've been
reluctant to do in some cases"
Not since Marie Antoinette
suggested to the starving peasants in France "let them eat cake" has so
callous a statement been made. This might be a fine strategy in
the theoretical world of the classroom, but by raising interest rates or
adjusting exchange rates, these countries would only succeed in making
food items even more expensive, not to mention potentially triggering
even more inflation.
The fact of the matter is that by
essentially printing another trillion dollars, and flooding the world
with greenbacks, the Fed has pushed capital inflows into commodities
(which are priced in dollars) and into emerging markets. There is
little these emerging countries can do to hold back this tidal wave as
food prices and shortages will soon engulf the planet creating more
uncertainty and ultimately riots.
This is the leadership the
United States now has under Obama: callous indifference and cynical
exploitation.
8 Shocking, Funny And Revealing Things
Obama Told The Chamber
"I'm here in the interest of being more
neighborly. Maybe we would have gotten off on a better foot if
I had brought over a fruitcake when we first moved in."
"I
understand the significance of your obligations to your
shareholders. I get it. But as we work with you to make
America a better place to do business, ask yourselves what you can
do for America."
"I want to put more people to work
rebuilding crumbling roads and bridges."
"To make room for
these investments in education, innovation, and infrastructure,
government also has a responsibility to cut the spending that we
just can't afford. That's why I've promised to veto any bill
larded up with earmarks."
"We're trying to run the government
more like you run your businesses -- with better technology and
faster services. In the coming months, my administration will
develop a proposal to merge, consolidate, and reorganize the federal
government in a way that best serves the goal of a more competitive
America."
"The perils of too much regulation are matched by
the dangers of too little."
"If we're fighting to reform the
tax code and increase exports to help you compete, the benefits
can't just translate into greater profits and bonuses for those at
the top. They should be shared by American workers."
"We can create a virtuous cycle."
Commie In Chief Flunks Business 101
In his address to the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, Obama demonstrates that he never took "Introduction to Business 101"
while he was attending all those Ivy League schools by saying that
corporate profits should "be shared by American workers."
No,
they don't. Corporate profits are distributed to the
share-holders, the people who have risked their money by investing in
the corporation. American workers benefit via their wages and
benefits. Risk-taking investors benefit by "sharing profits."
Corporate officers are not paid from "profits," and their
primary responsibility is to make money for
their stockholders, not "share the wealth."
Obama Debt Now Equals The Entire Economy
Stephen Dinan says Obama‘s budget, released
Monday, was conceived as a blueprint for future spending, but it also
paints the bleakest picture yet of the current fiscal year, which is on
track for a record federal deficit and will see the government’s overall
debt surpass the size of the total U.S. economy.
Obama‘s budget
projects that 2011 will see the biggest one-year
debt jump in history, or nearly $2 trillion, to reach $15.476
trillion by Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year. That would be
102.6 percent of GDP -- the first time since World War II that dubious
figure has been reached.
And the budget projects the government
will run a deficit of $1.645 trillion this year, topping 2009’s previous
record by more than $230 billion. By contrast, 2007’s deficit was
just $160 billion altogether.
Still, amid the other staggering
numbers in the budget Obama sent to Congress on Monday, the debt stands
out because Congress will need to vote to raise the debt limit later
this year, and because the numbers are so large.
In one
often-cited study, economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff have argued
that when a nation’s gross debt passes 90 percent it hinders overall
economic growth. The government measures debt several ways.
Debt held by the public includes the money borrowed from Social
Security’s trust fund.
Actual debt held by the public will reach
72 percent of GDP in 2011 and will climb as the Social Security trust
fund’s finances continue to deteriorate.
Related:Obama’s Budget: Taxes, Taxes,
and More Taxes…
We've Piled Up A Whole Bunch Of Debt
Jim Hoft
says Obama just increased the US National Debt by $4 trillion or 28%
in 2 years.
After adding $4 trillion to the national debt in only
two years Obama told reporters today that, "We’ve racked up a whole
bunch of debt" -- Via
The Leader Board -- at a press conference
yesterday, Obama said:
"We’ve Piled Up -- We’ve Racked Up A Whole
Bunch Of Debt."
10.6 Trillion Dollars -- Debt Level On Day One
Of Obama Administration
14.1 Trillion Dollars -- Debt Level
Today
26.3 Trillion Dollars -- Debt Level Set By New White
House Budget
What's all this WE stuff, Obama? YOU did that.
The Damage Obama Has Done
Dick Morris And Eileen McGann
say
the ObamaMedia does not cover the full extent of the damage the
Obama Administration has inflicted on this country. Even FoxNews
often doesn’t have the time to go into sufficient depth to explain what
is happening:
January 2009
Today
% chg
Source
Avg. retail price/gallon gas in U.S.
$1.83
$3.104
69.6%
1
Crude oil, European Brent (barrel)
$43.48
$99.02
127.7%
2
Crude oil, West TX Inter. (barrel)
$38.74
$91.38
135.9%
2
Gold: London (per troy oz.)
$853.25
$1,369.50
60.5%
2
Corn, No.2 yellow, Central IL
$3.56
$6.33
78.1%
2
Soybeans, No. 1 yellow, IL
$9.66
$13.75
42.3%
2
Sugar, cane, raw, world, lb. fob
$13.37
$35.39
164.7%
2
Unemployment rate, non-farm, overall
7.6%
9.4%
23.7%
3
Unemployment rate, blacks
12.6%
15.8%
25.4%
3
Number of unemployed
11,616,000
14,485,000
24.7%
3
Number of fed. employees, ex. military (curr
= 12/10 prelim)
2,779,000
2,840,000
2.2%
3
Real median household income (2008 v 2009)
$50,112
$49,777
-0.7%
4
Number of food stamp recipients (curr =
10/10)
31,983,716
43,200,878
35.1%
5
Number of unemployment benefit recipients (curr
= 12/10)
7,526,598
9,193,838
22.2%
6
Number of long-term unemployed
2,600,000
6,400,000
146.2%
3
Poverty rate, individuals (2008 v 2009)
13.2%
14.3%
8.3%
4
People in poverty in U.S. (2008 v 2009)
39,800,000
43,600,000
9.5%
4
U.S. rank in Economic Freedom World Rankings
5
9
n/a
10
Present Situation Index (curr = 12/10)
29.9
23.5
-21.4%
11
Failed banks (curr = 2010 + 2011 to date)
140
164
17.1%
12
U.S. dollar versus Japanese yen exchange rate
89.76
82.03
-8.6%
2
U.S. money supply, M1, in billions (curr =
12/10 prelim)
1,575.1
1,865.7
18.4%
13
U.S. money supply, M2, in billions (curr =
12/10 prelim)
8,310.9
8,852.3
6.5%
13
National debt, in trillions
$10.627
$14.052
32.2%
14
Just take this last item: In the last two years we
have accumulated national debt at a rate more than 27 times as fast as
during the rest of our entire nation’s history. Over 27 times as
fast! Metaphorically, speaking, if you are driving in the right
lane doing 65 MPH and a car rockets past you in the left lane 27 times
faster . . . it would be doing 1,755 MPH!
(1) U.S. Energy Information Administration; (2) Wall
Street Journal; (3) Bureau of Labor Statistics; (4) Census Bureau; (5)
USDA; (6) U.S. Dept. of Labor; (7) FHFA; (8) Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller;
(9) RealtyTrac; (10) Heritage Foundation and WSJ; (11) The Conference
Board; (12) FDIC; (13) Federal Reserve; (14) U.S. Treasury
A Complete And Total Joke
The Economic Collapse blog is asking if Barack
Obama is trying to play a joke on all of us? The budget that the
Obama administration has submitted for fiscal 2012 is so out of touch
with reality that it may as well be a budget for "Narnia", "Fantasy
Island", "Atlantis" or some other mythical land.
You can view
the hard numbers for Barack Obama's 2012 budget
right here. Obama's budget assumes that the U.S. will
experience economic growth of over 5 percent for most of the coming
decade. That is so far-fetched that "optimistic" is not the right
word for it. It also assumes that U.S. government income
(primarily made up of taxes on all of us) will more than double over the
next ten years. For 2011, the budget projects that the U.S.
government will take in a total of 2.1 trillion dollars, and for 2021
the budget projects that the U.S. government will take in a total of 4.9
trillion dollars.
For the Obama administration to assume that
the federal government will be able to drain an extra 2.8 trillion
dollars per year out of the American people by the year 2021 is
ridicul0us beyond belief. In his new budget Barack Obama does
propose some very, very modest spending cuts that he knows have no
chance of getting through Congress. Barack Obama's budget for 2012
also does not even attempt to make any cuts to entitlement programs such
as Social Security and Medicare. In essence, you can sum up Barack
Obama's budget proposal for 2012 by saying that it is a complete and
total joke. This budget is so delusional and so out of touch with
reality that it is hard to imagine anyone taking it seriously.
Oh, but Obama is really trying to sell it hard. When Obama
unveiled this new $3.7 trillion budget for 2012 at a middle school in
Baltimore, he insisted that his plan will make it "so that every
American is equipped to compete with any worker anywhere in the world."
Well, that is a nice sound bite, but as I have written about
previously, unless Barack Obama suddenly finds a way to stop
multinational corporations from paying slave labor wages to their
workers on the other side of the globe the job losses in America are
going to continue.
But that is a topic for another day.
Getting back to the 2012 budget, Obama is proposing to cut more than a
trillion dollars from federal budget deficits over the next ten years.
That sounds really good until you figure out that means that the
cuts only amount to about $100 billion a year. Considering the
fact that Obama's budget is projecting that we will have a $1.6 trillion
budget deficit this year alone, that really is not a whole heck of a lot
to be cutting.
The truth is that Barack Obama should be proposing
spending cuts that are at least ten times as large if he was actually
serious about addressing our budget woes.
But at least Obama is
not proposing an increase in spending.
Gallup
says U.S. Unemployment is up to 10.0% in Mid-February, as
underemployment surged to 19.6%, from 18.9% at the end of January .
The percentage of part-time workers who want
full-time work worsened considerably in mid-February, increasing to 9.6%
of the workforce from 9.1% in January.
Obama Has Borrowed $30K Per Household
Terence P. Jeffrey
says the federal government has borrowed an additional $29,660 per
household in the United States since Barack Obama signed his economic
stimulus law two years ago.
That brings the total national debt
to a frightening $125,475.18 per household.
At the close of
business on Feb. 17, 2009, the day Obama signed the $787-billion law,
the national debt stood at $10.79 trillion ($10,789,783,760,341.41),
according the Bureau of the Public Debt. At the close of business
on Feb. 16, 2011, the national debt stood at $14.13 trillion
($14,129,889,690,377.50) -- an increase of $3.34 trillion
(3,340,105,930,036.09)
The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that
there are a total of 112,611,029 households in the United States, which
average about 2.6 people per household. That means that the new
debt accumulated in the two years since Feb. 17, 2009, when Obama signed
his economic stimulus law, equals about $29,660.55 per household.
The current total national debt of $14.13 trillion can be divided
into equal portions of $125,475.18 for each of the 112,611,029
households in the country.
Inflation Making a Comeback
Economics 101: Socialism always creates inflation.
Economics 201: Communism does it with an iron fist.
Weasel Meister points to
an item in The Washington Times that reports inflation is making a
quick comeback after touching the lowest levels in decades last fall.
Fast-rising prices for food, fuel and other basic necessities,
stoked by rapid growth in emerging countries, are coming home to
American consumers despite reluctance by U.S. businesses to raise their
prices.
A report from the Labor Department on Thursday showed
consumer prices rose by 0.4 percent in each of the past two months -- or
a 4 percent annual rate over the last quarter fed by the biggest gains
in food prices in two years and surging energy prices.
The report
also showed a broadening of price pressures as airlines jacked up their
fares by an average of 2.2 percent to pass on the cost of higher fuel
and retailers raised clothing prices by 1 percent to reflect the higher
costs of cotton and other fabrics.
Jobs Created And Saved By Stimulus Cost
$228,055 Each
Matt Cover
says the jobs created and saved by the economic stimulus law that
Barack Obama signed on Feb. 17, 2009 cost at a minimum an average of
$228,055 each, according to data released yesterday by the Congressional
Budget Office (CBO).
In a report released Wednesday -- "Estimated
Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on Employment and
Economic Output from October Through December 2010" -- the CBO said it
now estimates the stimulus law cost a total of $821 billion, up from
CBO’s original estimate that the stimulus would cost $787 billion.
In the same report, the CBO estimated that in the fourth quarter of
2010 there were somewhere between 1.3 million and 3.5 million people who
were then employed who would not have been had the stimulus not been
enacted. "CBO estimates," says the report, "that ARRA’s policies
had the following effects in the fourth quarter of calendar year 2010: …
Increased the number of people employed by between 1.3 million and 3.5
million."
This estimate seeks to state the net impact the
stimulus had on the number of people employed in the United States as a
result of the stimulus, taking into account not only the new jobs
believed to be created and the existing jobs believed to be killed by
the stimulus, but also the existing jobs that were saved that otherwise
would have been lost.
The CBO’s estimate that there were 1.3
million to 3.5 million people employed in the fourth quarter of 2010 who
would not have been were it not for the stimulus represents a decline
from the 1.4 million to 3.6 million people CBO estimated were employed
as a result the stimulus during the third quarter of 2010. (See
Table 1 in the report.) In fact, CBO now estimates that the apogee
of the stimulus’s net job-creating-and-saving power occurred in the
third quarter of 2010 when it believes somewhere between 1.4 million and
3.6 million people had jobs they would not have had except for the
stimulus.
Thus, the $821 billion cost of the stimulus divided by
the maximum of 3.6 million jobs the CBO believes the stimulus may have
saved or created equals an average of $228,055 per job.
At the
lower end of the CBO’s top job-creating-and-saving estimate for the
stimulus -- 1.4 million jobs -- the jobs would cost an average of
$586,428 a piece.
In February 2009, when Obama signed the
stimulus law the national unemployment rate was 8.2 percent, according
to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In January 2011, the national
unemployment rate was 9.0 percent.
Insane Or Evil -- Or Both -- Your Call
Julian Pecquet
says Obama reiterated his call for Congress to invest in the
nation's long-term future in his weekly address Saturday, at times
repeating almost to the word what he said during his State of the Union
address last month.
"Invest"
-- that's ObamaSpeak for SPEND, SPEND, SPEND.
As
lawmakers prepare to take up a stop-gap budget bill to keep the
government funded past the end of next week, Obama again linked the twin
goals of out-educating and out-innovating the rest of the world while
getting the nation back on sound fiscal footing.
"Investments in
education, innovation, and infrastructure are an essential down payment
on our future," he said. "But ... the only way we can afford these
investments is by getting our fiscal house in order. Just like any
family, we have to live within our means to make room for things we
absolutely need."
"Live
within our means..." -- That statement right there makes me lean towards
"insane." Obama has been demonstrably profligate in both his
personal and public life forever. If it isn't his, he'll spend it
Investments in
education" -- This serves two ends. The first is more money for the
American Federation of Teachers and associated unions so they can spend
it during Obama's 2012 campaign in support of Obama. The second is
to indoctrinate America's school children -- and you had better believe
that's what they are up to. Obama wants American children to grow
up hating America, for its "racism," and capitalism. Obama and his
buddies have been working on this for more than 20 years
"Innovation" -- Gazillions more for windmills. More still for
solar panels. More and more for biomass, geothermal, and biofuels.
Any hair-brained scheme -- as long as it isn't oil, coal, gas, or
nuclear based. Obama is out to put those energy sources out of
business.
"Infrastructure" -- Bazillions for union jobs, and
big-city Democratic boondoggles.
Fiscal conservatives
criticized Obama's budget proposal last week for running up the national
deficit to a record $1.6 trillion this year while punting on solutions
to the problem of growing entitlement spending.
In his weekly
address, Obama defended his proposal to freeze domestic spending over
the next five years, which he said would cut non-security discretionary
spending down to a share of the economy "lower than it was under Ronald
Reagan."
But, this statement
makes me lean towards out-and-out evil. Look what this maniac
WANTS to cut!
Obama called on Congress to propose
cuts to "defense spending, spending in Medicare and Medicaid, and
spending through tax breaks and loopholes."
Defense (the military) and
healthcare (old people) are SOL in ObamaWorld.
Obama Still Blames Dubya
Jim Hoft
says there’s a reason why the state-run media won’t show you this
chart.
Barack Obama tripled the national deficit in his first
year in office. His second year in office the deficit was at $1.29
Trillion dollars. This year he will top it again. This chart
was updated to reflect the recent news that the deficit will reach $1.6
trillion this year.
At the National Governors Association Meeting at
the White House, Obama said:
Making these necessary investments would be
hard at any time. But it’s that much harder at a time when resources
are scarce. After living through a decade of deficits and a historic
recession that made them worse, we can’t afford to kick the can down
the road any longer. So the budget debate that we’re having is going
to be critical here in Washington. And so far, most of it’s been
focused almost entirely on how much of annual domestic spending --
what in the parlance we all domestic discretionary spending -- that
we should cut. There’s no doubt that cuts in discretionary spending
have to be a part of the answer for deficit reduction.
Hoft predicts Obama will blame Bush after he raises
the deficit by another $300 billion this year too, and says, "This is
not an honest man."
Obama Seeks Billions More For War Against
Cars
The Washington Examiner asks us to remember
Obama's $787 billion stimulus program. Obama defended that
unprecedented spending spree, which included legions of allegedly
"shovel-ready" transportation projects, by promising the explosion of
government outlays would jump-start the economy.
But after
"investing" billions of borrowed dollars in transportation just two
years ago, why is Obama now asking for an 84 percent increase in the
Department of Transportation (DoT) budget over 2010 levels? As
Ronald Utt of the Heritage Foundation pointed out earlier this week,
Obama included a $48.1 billion spending increase for DoT in his 2012
budget proposal. If Obama gets his way, Utt calculates,
transportation outlays will increase more than 10 times faster than all
other federal spending. The man Obama appointed in 2009 to manage
the Transportation Department is former Illinois Republican Rep. Ray
LaHood, who a few months ago promised to put cars and bicycles on "an
equal footing" in federal funding decisions.
In an October 2010
interview, LaHood denigrated the "traditional people in Congress who
like the idea that we continue to build roads and bridges and things
like that," as opposed to the "big things" he and Obama support,
including enormously expensive high-speed rail, unprofitable low-speed
Amtrak, and other forms of government-subsidized mass transit.
LaHood has become an outspoken proponent of what rabid environmentalists
misleadingly call "livability." That's a rhetorical device used by
Democratic officials and political activists, as well as liberals in the
mainstream media, to justify using government funding to force people
now living in the suburbs to move back into densely packed central
cities where they would have to depend upon mass transit rather than
privately owned vehicles. While that might not seem like such a
big difference, it is, because cars enable people to go where they
choose when they choose. With mass transit, government decides for
you where and when you go.
A prime example of the livability
fantasy is the Dulles Rail project now under construction in Northern
Virginia. The federal government is spending $900 million for
Phase 1 of a Metrorail extension that even the Federal Transit
Administration admits will attract only 10,000 new daily transit riders
and will have virtually no effect on the area's notorious traffic
congestion. As Utt points out, federal transportation programs
always become political slush funds used by professional politicians to
reward unionized labor, which jacks up the costs of rail and other
construction projects by almost 10 percent.
Policies that reduce
Americans' mobility also dramatically shrink their access to new job
opportunities, which is crucial to wealth production in a dynamic
economy. Mobility equals freedom, but under the Obama
administration's latest transportation proposal, taxpayers will pay more
for less of both.
After he signed the
short-term bill yesterday, Obama said in a statement:
"I’m calling on Democratic and Republican
leaders of Congress to begin meeting immediately with the Vice
President, my Chief of Staff, and Budget Director so we can find
common ground on a budget that makes sure we are living within our
means."
Saying that this country must live within its means
is an audacious statement coming from Obama who championed an $814
billion failed stimulus bill, all of which was paid for with deficit
spending. It’s audacious coming from his administration that is
leading the country into another consecutive year with a deficit over a
trillion dollars. And it’s audacious coming from a White House
that proposed a budget for the following fiscal year that grows the debt
to $20 trillion in five years and never once in a decade spends less
than it’s taking in.
And he’s not done. He wants a 62% increase in
spending for Transportation -- 62%!
Let’s see, that’s about $93
billion per year in new spending over that time. Yet when
Republicans proposed cutting a bit more than that across the whole
federal government it’s draconian. But spending another half
billion dollars we don’t have? Why that’s how things are done,
it’s for the unions after all.
Oh, that’s right….its not spending
it’s "investing"
You'll
notice, Obama never said that HE had to.
Unemployment Hits 10.3% In February
Dennis Jacobe, Gallup's Chief Economist
says unemployment, measured without seasonal adjustment, hit 10.3%
in February -- up from 9.8% at the end of January. The U.S. unemployment
rate is now essentially the same as the 10.4% at the end of February
2010.
Underemployment, a measure that combines part-time
workers wanting full-time work with those who are unemployed, surged in
February to 19.9%. This resulted from the combination of a sharp
0.5-point increase since the end of January in the percentage unemployed
and a 0.5-point increase in the percentage working part time but wanting
full-time work. Underemployment is now higher than it was at this point
a year ago (19.7%).
The percentage of part-time workers who want
full-time work worsened considerably in February, increasing to 9.6% of
the workforce from 9.1% at the end of January. A larger percentage of
the U.S. workforce is working part time and wanting full-time work now
than was the case a year ago (9.3%).
Obama's Record -- Bureaucrats Up, Private
Sector Down
Zip
says, since December 2007, the federal work force is up 11.7%.
The private sector has plummeted to 6.6%.
Since the beginning of the last recession (December
2007) the private sector workforce has shrunk by 6.6% while shedding
more than 7.5 million jobs. Over that same time period, the
federal government workforce (excluding Census and Postal workers) has
grown by 11.7% while adding 230,000 jobs.
This trend has
continued throughout the Obama Administration. Since Barack Obama
was sworn into office, the private sector workforce has shrunk by 2.6%,
shedding 2.9 million jobs, while the federal workforce (excluding Census
and Postal workers) has grown by 7% while adding more than 144,000 jobs.
Barack Obama told
Americans Saturday in his Weekly Address,
"We need a government that lives within its
means."
But, that was Saturday -- today we found out that
Obama’s February deficit topped Bush’s Deficit for all of 2007.
Barack Obama tripled the national deficit in his first year in office.
In his second year the deficit was again a record $1.29 Trillion.
This year the deficit will be even higher.
The Washington Times reported the federal
government posted its largest monthly deficit in history in February at
$223 billion, according to preliminary numbers the Congressional Budget
Office released Monday morning.
That figure tops last February’s
record of $220.9 billion, and marks the 29th straight month the
government has run in the red -- a modern record. The last time
the federal government posted even a monthly surplus was September 2008,
just before the financial collapse.
Last month’s federal deficit
is nearly four times as large as the spending cuts House Republicans
have passed in their spending bill, and is more than 30 times the size
of Senate Democrats’ opening bid of $6 billion.
But don’t worry
-- Democrats
are willing to cut a .28% from their record budget.
Obama Wants You To Pay More At The
Pump
American Solutions is re-launching Drill
Here, Drill Now, Pay Less for one big reason: Obama’s continuing war on
American energy is dramatically increasing the price of gas and diesel.
To be fair, Obama is in favor of drilling…but just not in the United
States.
His numerous bans, restrictions, and proposed taxes are
hamstringing America’s ability to produce more oil and gas and are
thereby increasing gas and diesel prices. In fact, even the
federal government projects that domestic oil production will drop by
220,000 barrels per day in 2011 due to the President’s anti-drilling
agenda. Production in 2012 will drop even more.
If we produce
less oil, we will produce less gasoline, which means higher prices at
the pump.
By increasing
gas and diesel prices, Obama is ensuring the price of EVERYTHING will
increase. In America, EVERYTHING we buy is delivered by trains,
planes and trucks.
Obama's energy policy results in a hidden tax
on EVERYTHING we buy, and then he won't even admit his policies are
creating run-away inflation.
Obama Sends American Jobs And Money To
Brazil
This remark, from Obama's speech in Rio, is the latest sign of
Obama's desire to bankrupt America:
"In particular, with the new oil finds off
Brazil, President Rousseff has said that Brazil wants to be a major
supplier of new stable sources of energy, and I've told her that the
United States wants to be a major customer, which would be a win-win
for both our countries."
John Hinderaker
says
that under Obama's new, post-industrial order, petroleum
engineering and exploration, drilling and refining are more jobs
Americans won't do. Instead, others create wealth and we pay them
for it. With what? That doesn't seem to be a question that
occurs to Barack Obama.
Related:Obama approves Brazilian
floating oil storage in the U. S. Gulf of Mexico, but blocks American
firms from drilling there.
Related:There are more than 1,000 in Obama's Brazil retinue.
Now we know why
Obama
gave $2 billion to finance oil exploration off Brazil.
Win-win? He wants Brazil to be the supplier, and America the
customer. Sounds to me like that's a loss for us and a win for Marxist
Brazil.
More American dollars leaving the country, while Obama sits on our own
oil.
That's your money that the Marxist Obama is
spending to hand
over America's oil industry to Brazil's Marxist ex-guerilla, Dilma Rousseff..
Obama has more in common with her than with most
Americans.
US Approaching Insolvency, Fix To Be
"Painful"
CNBC.com
is reporting that the
United States is on a fiscal path towards insolvency and policymakers
are at a "tipping point," a Federal Reserve official said on Tuesday.
"If we continue down on the path on which the fiscal authorities put
us, we will become insolvent, the question is when," Dallas Federal
Reserve Bank President Richard Fisher said in a question and answer
session after delivering a speech at the University of Frankfurt.
"The short-term negotiations are very important. I look at this as
a tipping point."
But he added he was confident in the Americans'
ability to take the right decisions and said the country would avoid
insolvency.
"I think we are at the beginning of the process and
it's going to be very painful," he added.
Fisher earlier said the
US economic recovery is gathering momentum, adding that he personally
was extremely vigilant on inflation pressures.
"We are all
mindful of this phenomenon. Speaking personally, I am concerned
and I am going to be extremely vigilant on that front," Fisher said in
an interview with CNBC.
Fisher added that the U.S. Federal
Reserve had ways to tighten its monetary policy other than interest
rates, including by selling Treasurys, changing reserves levels and
using time deposits.
He added that he does not support the Fed
embarking on an additional round of quantitative easing (printing
money).
"Barring some
extraordinary circumstance I cannot forsee ... I would vote against a
QE3," Fisher told CNBC. "I don't think it's necessary.
Again, we have a self-sustaining recovery."
Obama's Economic Recovery
Theresa McCabe says participation in the
U.S. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as
the Food Stamp Program, reached an all-time high in January.
The
number of SNAP recipients nationwide ticked up to 44.2 million in
January, 2011, or about one in seven Americans, from 44.1 million in
December, 2010, according to data released by the U.S. Agriculture
Department's Food and Nutrition Service on Friday.
The number of
recipients grew by 4.8 million from 39.4 million recorded in January
last year, and 32 million in the same month in 2009.
The total
cost related to the food stamp program dropped about $21.4 million to
$5.87 billion from a month earlier, as the average monthly benefit for
each recipient in January decreased slightly to $132.81 from $133.61 in
December, 2010.
The overall cost of the program in January 2011
was up $614.6 million to $5.87 billion from $5.25 billion in the same
month a year before.
The total number of U.S. households in SNAP
in January 2011 climbed above 20.7 million from just below that level in
the month prior and 18.1 million in the same period in 2010.
The
U.S. Food and Nutrition Service said the total number of persons
enrolled in SNAP in fiscal 2011 sits at 43.8 million, up from 40.3
million in 2010 and 33.5 million in 2009.
And they're all bussed to the polls
by the community organizers from ACORN to vote Democrat.
Who's Turning U.S. Into The Third World?
Investors.com says that Obama says Republicans,
if they get their way, will turn the U.S. into a "Third World" nation.
Has he looked recently at the course he's set us on? As psychologists
say, it sounds like projection to us.
One of the cheapest tricks
in political rhetoric is to accuse your opponents of doing something bad
that you yourself are doing. That's exactly what Obama did when he
charged that GOP efforts to restore fiscal responsibility would turn us
into "a nation of potholes, and our airports would be worse than places
... that we used to call the Third World."
Never mind that most
of what he's talking about -- like "potholes" and airports -- have
always been local priorities, and Obama is not a mayor. But what
stuck in our craw was that "Third World" crack. Excuse us, isn't
that the way we've been heading under Obama? Consider for a moment these
trends:
• Real earnings have fallen for five
straight months, and are down 1% since the end of last year.
• Consumer price inflation is growing at a 6.1% annual rate
over the last three months, while producer prices are rising an
even-faster 13%. According to John Williams of the Shadow
Government Statistics website, if we measure consumer prices the way
we did before 1992, inflation is now running at 10% a year.
•
The U.S. has added $6 trillion to its debt under Obama, a sure sign
of being on the road to Third World status. Three years ago,
the U.S. had $7.9 trillion in debt. Today, we have $14
trillion. Bankrupt, hyperinflated Zimbabwe couldn't do any better.
• The U.S. dollar has fallen so much and foreign nations
have so little confidence in our ability to run our fiscal affairs
that the "BRIC" nations -- the mostly fast-growing former Third
World nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China -- are talking
about replacing the U.S. dollar in foreign trade with the Chinese
yuan.
• Just 45.4% of Americans had jobs last year, the
lowest since 1983, according to census data crunched by USA Today.
Among men, just 66.8% had work last year, the lowest ever.
•
Obama touts the "recovery" that supposedly began in June of 2009,
but a look at the data show that last year's real private sector GDP
was in fact still down 1.1% from its peak in 2007 -- so all of the
"expansion" has been in government, not the private sector.
•
While we're at it, under Obama, spending has risen farther and
faster than at any time in history. At current rates,
government at all levels will take up more than half of all economic
activity by 2050.
Can't happen here, you say? In 1920,
Argentina was one of the five richest countries on Earth. Then it
followed policies similar to Obama's -- kowtowing to unions, government
control of industry, price controls. It crashed, burned and never
really recovered.
We're headed down that road. Today,
government spending is at a record 25% of GDP, while government
regulation costs the U.S. economy $1.7 trillion a year. As Vice
President Biden might say, "That's real Third World, man."
To Retire National Debt, We Must Retire
Obama
David Limbaugh says everyone but the blind and
reckless agrees that the United States faces a dire financial crisis.
But only one of the two major political parties is offering a plan that
has a reasonable chance of averting this crisis and restoring the nation
to financial health.
Obama's ever-changing proposals, allegedly
designed to tackle the problem, simply could not work. One of the
following must be true: He doesn't agree that the crisis is grave,
doesn't understand that his policies can't work, doesn't have the same
vision about America as most of us, or doesn't intend for his policies
to work.
Some people believe he's intentionally damaging
America, because they believe he's too smart not to know that we face a
crisis and that his policies can't work.
I don't pretend to
comprehend the inner child of his past that apparently impels him to
pursue this current path of destruction. My educated guess is that
his leftist ideology blinds him to the inefficacy of failed liberal
prescriptions but also that this same ideology tells him that if things
don't get appreciably better, then that's OK, too, because America's had
more than its fair share of prosperity anyway.
Think about it.
Through every fiber of his being runs a sense of injustice at what he
perceives to be a grossly inequitable distribution of income in America.
He largely blames these inequities on capitalism. Please don't
call me an extremist for saying that, either; I hear it in almost
everything he says and see it in what he does.
I correspond with
liberals like Obama every day, whose angst reflexively attaches to those
who have succeeded under our system: villainous corporations, oil
companies, fat-cat bankers, and wealthy individuals. It's not just
that capitalism is inherently flawed for fostering a climate that
guarantees such disparities in prosperity but also that those who have
exploited these flaws are evil.
As the leftists' sense of
fairness and "economic justice" tells them that people's incomes in this
country should be more equitably distributed, it likewise tells them
that the wealth of the world's nations should be more equitably
distributed. Call it "balance," the administration's most recent
euphemism of choice.
I only indulge in this brief inquiry into
Obama's mindset because it enables us to see that he doesn't view the
nation's financial problems with the same degree of urgency as most of
us do. To him, the stakes don't seem quite so high, because if we
fail, the worst that could happen is that we get our comeuppance and/or
become a European socialist state -- and what's so bad about that?
Floyd and Mary Beth Brown
say while Barack Obama spends his time running victory laps around
the country over the killing of Osama Bin Laden, the American economy is
careening toward a dangerous cliff. Royal Weddings, Obama’s
multiple birth certificates, and absurd arguments about the NFL lockout
dominate the news while daily Americans get poorer.
Obamanomics
is a disaster. A greater disaster hasn’t been visited on the
United States in our economic history because we are taking no
substantial steps toward recovery. The real news, which should be
screaming from every television and newspaper isn’t pro Obama,
therefore, it is ignored.
Here are the stories on which we should
be focusing. The US dollar has slumped to a record low against
major currencies. Since we have devastated our manufacturing base
over the last two decades, this will result in Americans paying
substantially more for goods on the store shelves in retailers from
Walmart to Costco. The outlook for the recovery has diminished to
almost zero. If you subtract the impact of inflation, many
economists believe we are actually still in a recession. When I
talk to my friends and neighbors outside of Washington DC, we
unanimously agree we are still in recession.
Here are some
statistics which will help you understand the pain. More Americans
are on food stamps today than at any other time in history. That’s
right -- the most in history. The number of persons on food stamps
is 44.2 million according a recent report from the U.S. Department of
Agriculture. Those not on food stamps feel a different pain when
they buy groceries. We see unbelievably high prices at the grocery
store. The cost of living in the U.S. rose at its fastest pace
since December 2009 in the 12 months ended in March. Wheat, meat,
vegetables and other grains are all surging in price.
But if you
don’t have a job, it is hard to shop for groceries.
Bloomberg
reported this week, "Applications for jobless benefits jumped by 43,000
to 474,000 in the week ended April 30, the most since August, Labor
Department figures showed today." This is a serious darkening in
the employment clouds just as the recovery was supposed to be
broadening.
The unprecedented easy money policies from the
Federal Reserve haven’t helped the real economy. Sure, they did
pump enough billions of dollars into Wall Street Banks and Government
Agencies to make sure the leather loafer wearing crowds in New York City
and Washington DC are still swimming in cash. But for the majority
of Americans, they have felt only the pain of higher food and energy
prices from the misallocation of dollars.
This week, as we fueled
a rental car near the San Diego airport, we paid fifteen dollars for
three gallons of gasoline. At these prices, Americans are spending
as much as $100 a week just to fuel the car to commute to work.
Why hasn’t Obama cleared the decks to deal with this energy crisis?
It is a crisis when it costs as much to commute to work as you make in
take home pay. Many Americans are already at this tipping point.
Obama mutters on about windmills and electric cars. We need off
shore drilling and increased production to ease this pain.
While
the nation shudders under unmanageable regulatory and monetary burdens,
Obama is oblivious. Obama is flying from city to city collecting
cash for his re-election drive. And don’t let us forget he is
spending over a hundred thousand dollars to a teleprompter coach.
And we thought standing and delivering a prepared text in front of a
teleprompter was a skill he had already mastered. How about a
coach on how to manage the American economy? Obama’s priorities
are obvious, and they aren’t on helping everyday Americans, but his
buddies and himself.
Obama’s Economy Is Making You Poor
Floyd and Mary Beth Brown
say
while Barack Obama spends his time running victory laps around the
country over the killing of Osama bin Laden, the American economy is
careening toward a dangerous cliff. Royal Weddings, Obama’s
multiple birth certificates, and absurd arguments about the NFL lockout
dominate the news while daily Americans get poorer.
Obamanomics
is a disaster. A greater disaster hasn’t been visited on the
United States in our economic history because we are taking no
substantial steps toward recovery. The real news, which should be
screaming from every television and newspaper isn’t pro-Obama;
therefore, it is ignored.
Here are the stories on which we should
be focusing. The U.S. dollar has slumped to a record low against
major currencies. Since we have devastated our manufacturing base
over the last two decades, this will result in Americans paying
substantially more for goods on the store shelves in retailers from
Wal-Mart to Costco.
The outlook for the recovery has diminished
to almost zero. If you subtract the impact of inflation, many
economists believe we are actually still in a recession. When I
talk to my friends and neighbors outside of Washington, D.C., we
unanimously agree we are still in recession.
Here are some
statistics which will help you understand the pain. More Americans
are on food stamps today than at any other time in history. That’s
right -- the most in history. The number of persons on food stamps
is 44.2 million, according a recent report from the U.S. Department of
Agriculture.
Those not on food stamps feel a different pain when
they buy groceries. We see unbelievably high prices at the grocery
store. The cost of living in the U.S. rose at its fastest pace
since December 2009 in the 12 months ended in March. Wheat, meat,
vegetables and other grains are all surging in price.
But if you
don’t have a job, it is hard to shop for groceries.
Bloomberg reported last week, "Applications for jobless benefits jumped
by 43,000 to 474,000 in the week ended April 30, the most since August,
Labor Department figures showed today." This is a serious
darkening in the employment clouds just as the recovery was supposed to
be broadening.
The unprecedented easy money policies from the
Federal Reserve haven’t helped the real economy. Sure, they did
pump enough billions of dollars into Wall Street banks and government
agencies to make sure the leather loafer wearing crowds in New York City
and Washington, D.C., are still swimming in cash. But for the
majority of Americans, they have felt only the pain of higher food and
energy prices from the misallocation of dollars.
This week, as we
fueled a rental car near the San Diego airport, we paid $15 for three
gallons of gasoline. At these prices, Americans are spending as
much as $100 a week just to fuel the car to commute to work. Why
hasn’t Obama cleared the decks to deal with this energy crisis? It
is a crisis when it costs as much to commute to work as you make in take
home pay. Many Americans are already at this tipping point.
Obama mutters on about windmills and electric cars. We need off
shore drilling and increased production to ease this pain.
While
the nation shudders under unmanageable regulatory and monetary burdens,
Obama is oblivious. Obama is flying from city to city, collecting
cash for his re-election drive. And don’t let us forget he is
spending over a hundred thousand dollars for a teleprompter coach.
And we thought standing and delivering a prepared text in front of a
teleprompter was a skill he had already mastered. How about a
coach on how to manage the American economy? Obama’s priorities
are obvious, and they aren’t on helping everyday Americans, but his
buddies and himself.
Obama Regime Brings Back Subprime Mortgages
Rush Limbaugh says: Now, I have a story here
that's simply unreal, and it's from last week. I purposely sat on
this story to see if I would see it anywhere else. I've had it in
the stack since May the 5th, almost a week. It's from Business
Week magazine, a story by Clea Benson, headline: "A Renewed Crackdown on
Redlining -- In the wake of the subprime implosion, the Obama
Administration has stepped up its scrutiny of disadvantaged
neighborhoods' credit access.
Community activists in St.
Louis became concerned a couple of years ago that local banks weren't
offering credit to the city's poor and African American residents.
So they formed a group called the St. Louis Equal Housing and Community
Reinvestment Alliance and began writing complaint letters to federal
regulators.
"Apparently, someone in Washington took notice.
The Federal Reserve has cited one of the group's targets, Midwest
BankCentre, a small bank that has been operating in St. Louis's
predominantly white, middle-class suburbs for over a century, for
failing to issue home mortgages or open branches in disadvantaged areas.
Although executives at the bank say they don't discriminate, Midwest
BankCentre's latest annual report says it is in the process of
negotiating a settlement with the US Justice Dept. over its lending
practices."
Can I translate this for you? They're
bringing
back subprimes. Bringing back the subprime mortgage. It's
simply unreal. While we're all being distracted by other news,
everybody but me, the regime and the Federal Reserve are again forcing
banks to give mortgages to people who cannot afford them, which is
exactly what got us into our current mess. That's 90% of why we're
where we are today. And you note here that the government's now
telling banks where they have to put their branches. The Justice
Department's telling this little bank company where they have to open
branches, just like the National Labor Relations Board told Boeing, "You
cannot open a plant in South Carolina." And it's being ramrodded
-- if I read the whole story to you, you'd hear this -- it's being
ramrodded by the same guy, Thomas Perez at the Justice Department, who
opposed prosecuting the New Black Panthers.
The guy at Holder's
Department of Justice who refused to prosecute the Black Panthers is
pushing this new loan program for people that can't afford it, minority
loans to people who can't pay them back. Thomas Perez was also the
lawyer in the Justice Department who led the charge against the Arizona
immigration law. So it looks to me like while everybody's focused
on all these other things, hello subprime mortgages again, hello
granting loans. This is exactly how it started in the first place.
I know a lot of people want to blame Wall Street, but this is exactly
how it started. Substitute the name Clinton for Obama in here and
Janet Reno for Holder, and it's exactly what happened. And they
are threatening all of these people in the banking business with untold
investigations and who knows what results they would provide if they
don't do this. And this group, the name of the group, the St.
Louis Equal Housing and Community Reinvestment Alliance. What do
you bet that's just ACORN under a new
name? So the cycle is continuing. Chew on that.
Subprime mortgages were the
Obama/Soetoro family business.
All of
Stanley Ann Dunham's biographies describe the woman as an
"anthropologist," but that's just another ObamaLie. Stanley Ann
She was an international banking consultant. She traveled around
Southeast Asia, pursuing a
career in international banking and rural development that took her
to Ghana, India, Thailand, Indonesia, Nepal and Bangladesh. She
facilitated the practice of "macrofinancing" -- making subprime
loans to people with poor credit and low incomes. You know the one,
exactly what the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac banks were pushing that
created the mortgage meltdown.
And
sonny-boy picked up where mom left off.
In a 1995 case known as Buycks-Roberson
v. Citibank, Obama and his fellow attorneys charged that Citibank was
making too few loans to black applicants whose credit was poor and won
the case. When the law forced them to lend money anyway, the
inevitable collapse occurred." As one commentator noted in May
2008, legal "successes" such as this
were responsible for the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2007 AND 2008.
Geithner Predicts Double-Dip If Congress
Fails To Lift Debt Ceiling
Stacy Kaper
is reporting that Treasury Secretary (and
tax-cheat) Tim Geithner said if Congress fails to lift the
debt ceiling and the U.S. defaults on its obligations "this abrupt
contraction would likely push us into a double dip recession," painting
the most explicitly dire prediction to date of the consequences of
inaction.
In a heavily-anticipated response to Sen. Michael
Bennet, D-Colo., who asked Geithner to document the economic and fiscal
impacts of failing to lift the statutory debt limit, the Treasury
secretary detailed a chain reaction that would cripple the economy,
costing jobs and income.
"A default would inflict catastrophic
far-reaching damage on our nation’s economy, significantly reducing
growth and increasing unemployment," said Geithner in the letter to
Bennet which was dated May 13. "Even a short-term default could
cause irrevocable damage to the economy."
Geithner has imposed an
August deadline for Congress to lift the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling,
but lawmakers are still negotiating over Republican demands to tie the
move to spending cuts. And a portion of the GOP still remains
skeptical about the need to act by the deadline at all, arguing that the
consequences have been overstates.
In the letter Geithner walked
through the doomsday scenario he has been describing on the Hill.
Default would cast doubt on the full faith and credit of the U.S., which
would scare away investors and enable those remaining to demand higher
interest rates on Treasury securities, which would have far-reaching
negative ramifications. Increased borrowing costs would extend to
families, businesses, and local governments, he said.
Because
Treasury securities set the benchmark interest rate for a variety of
consumer credit products, an increase in interest rates could drive up
the cost on everything from mortgages to car loans and business loans.
A default on our obligations would also sap household wealth,
threatening retirement savings; what's more, it could cut off Medicare
and Social Security payments and cause another financial crisis, the
letter said.
"A default on Treasury debt could lead to concerns
about the solvency of the investment and financial institutions that
hold Treasury securities in their portfolios, which could cause a run on
money market mutual funds and the broader financial system," Geithner
said in the letter.
Ultimately he said the biggest threat would
be a crisis of confidence in the United States. Confidence in the
America’s ability to meet its obligations creates demand for Treasury
securities in the first place, which lowers the borrowing costs for the
government and in turn consumers. It has made investments in Treasury
securities a safe haven for investors in times of panic.
"A
default would call into question the status of Treasury securities as a
cornerstone of the financial system, potentially squandering this unique
role and the economic benefits that come with it," Geithner said.
Gallup Chief Economist Dennis Jacobe says By a
47% to 19% margin, Americans say they would want their member of
Congress to vote against raising the U.S. debt ceiling, while 34% don't
know enough to say. Republicans oppose raising the debt ceiling by
70% to 8% and independents by 46% to 15%. Democrats favor raising the
ceiling by 33% to 26%.
These results are based on a May 5-8 Gallup poll,
which asked Americans about the issue but did not offer reasons for or
against raising the debt ceiling. The Congress is generally
expected to pass debt ceiling legislation, although it is unclear what
additional provisions will be needed in order to secure passage.
A majority of Americans (57%) say they are closely following the news
about "discussions to raise the U.S. debt ceiling, the maximum amount of
money the U.S. government can borrow by law." Republicans are
following the issue more closely than are Democrats and independents;
upper-income Americans are following it more closely than lower-income
Americans; and those with a postgraduate education more so than those
with a high school education or less.
Americans are more likely
to oppose than favor raising the debt ceiling, regardless of how closely
they are following the news about the issue. Among the 23% who are
following the debt ceiling discussion very closely, 62% are opposed and
25% are in favor of raising the current ceiling. Among those who
are following the issue less closely, opposition outnumbers support by
at least a 2-to-1 margin
At least a
majority of Democrats were honest in the poll, responding, "Don't know
enough to say." They're far too occupied agitating for more free
money.
A Verdict On Obama's "Stimulus" Plan
John Hinderaker
says
that economists Timothy Conley and Bill Dupor have studied the effects
of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the purported
stimulus bill, with great rigor. Earlier this week, they reported
their
findings in a paper titled "The American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act: Public Sector Jobs Saved, Private Sector Jobs Forestalled."
The paper is dense and rather lengthy, and requires considerable study.
Here, however, is the bottom line:
Our benchmark results suggest that the ARRA
created/saved approximately 450 thousand state and local government
jobs and destroyed/forestalled roughly one million private sector
jobs. State and local government jobs were saved because ARRA
funds were largely used to offset state revenue shortfalls and
Medicaid increases rather than boost private sector employment.
The majority of destroyed/forestalled jobs were in growth industries
including health, education, professional and business services.
So the American people borrowed and spent close to
a trillion dollars to destroy a net of more than one-half million jobs.
Does Obama understand this? I very much doubt it. When he
expressed puzzlement at the idea that the stimulus money may not have
been well-spent, and said that "spending equals stimulus," he betrayed a
shocking level of economic ignorance.
This chart, from Conley and
Dupor's report, shows how goods-producing industries have completely
failed to benefit from ARRA and the Obama administration's other
misguided policies; click to enlarge:
* HELP -- Health,
education, leisure and hospitality and business and professional
services (page 10 of .pdf).
One would have to conclude that
Obama is either completely incompetent or is purposefully destroying the
American economy. Either way, he gotta go!
Obama's Specious Decree To Business:
Hire Workers Already
Gary Bauer
says that after
hearing tales of economic woe from unemployed Americans at last
Thursday’s town hall event in Washington, D.C., Obama issued a decree to
American business: It’s time to "step up" and begin hiring new workers.
It’s as if Obama believes American businesses were just waiting for
him to green-light what many companies doubtless would like to do but
cannot -- largely because of Obama’s own job-stifling policies.
Obama's economic agenda is rooted in the
mistaken belief that government can do a better job of picking winners
and losers than can the free enterprise system.
But with the
unemployment rate climbing back over 9% last month and Obama’s approval
rating on the economy dipping to 34% -- the lowest level yet -- American
businesses and the public clearly see things differently.
Of
course, it’s the voters' job to pick political winners and losers, and
if these economic trends continue, Obama may find that his decrees won’t
be enough to save his presidency sorry ass.
Obama Is Associated With American Decline
"It seems that almost every bit of data about
the health of the U.S. economy has disappointed expectations recently,"
Mike Riddell, a fund manager at M&G Investments in London, told CNBC
yesterday. "U.S. house prices have fallen by more than 5 percent
year on year, pending home sales have collapsed and existing home sales
disappointed, the trend of improving jobless claims has arrested, first
quarter GDP wasn’t revised upwards by the 0.4 percent forecast, durables
goods orders shrank, manufacturing surveys from Philadelphia Fed,
Richmond Fed, and Chicago Fed were all very disappointing. And
that’s just in the last week and a bit," Riddell said.
Peter
Wehner
says the anemic and weakening state of the economy is now dominating
the news. The Wall Street Journal’s front page headline today is,
"Economic Outlook Darkens"; the Washington Post headline is, "Few
remedies left as recovery’s momentum lags." And the New York Times
front page story on the economy begins this way: "No American president
since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has won a second term in office when the
unemployment rate on Election Day topped 7.2 percent. Seventeen
months before the next election, it is increasingly clear that Obama
must defy that trend to keep his job."
What is so politically
dangerous for Obama are three things. First, his entire presidency
has been marred by a sick economy and a stunningly weak recovery (so
weak that roughly half of the public believes we’re either still in a
recession or now in a depression). Second, in many key areas the
trajectory is getting worse, not better. And third, the Obama
administration made promises early on that have either already been
broken (e.g. unemployment will not rise above 8 percent) or cannot
possibly keep (cutting the deficit in half, restoring millions of lost
jobs, etc.).
Obama has less time than he may think to turn
impressions around. The public is associating Barack Obama’s
tenure with American decline. And that is politically dangerous --
quite possibly politically lethal.
Unless the decline of America was
on his agenda -- see next item . . .
Towards The Economic Abyss
Nile Gardner
says that after 29 months of the most left-wing presidency in US
history, the American superpower is heading towards the economic abyss.
I imagine there are some very worried figures in the White House
today, including Obama himself. Today’s job figures are extremely
bad news for his administration, and as I noted in my last post, an
electoral disaster for Barack Obama in November 2012 is now looking like
a distinct possibility. According to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, unemployment has risen again to 9.1 percent, with private
employers adding a mere 54,000 jobs in May (half
at McDonalds). That’s up from 9 percent in April,
and 8.8 percent in March.
The White House’s chief economist
Austan Goolsbee has described the figures as a mere "bump in the road."
In reality they should be a massive wake-up call for an administration
that refuses to acknowledge the huge damage its big government policies
have done to the American economy, with 13.9 million Americans now out
of work.
Under Obama unemployment has remained above 8 percent
for every single month, with the exception of January 2009 when he
entered the Oval Office, rising as high as 10.1 percent in October 2009.
By any measure, this is a terrible track record, and as even The New
York Times acknowledged earlier this week, "no American president since
Franklin Delano Roosevelt has won a second term in office when the
unemployment rate on Election Day topped 7.2 percent."
The dire
jobs figures are just part of an extraordinarily grim picture for the US
economy, nearly two and a half years into his term. As ABC News
reported yesterday, "a cascade of negative economic reports this week is
leaving Americans wondering if this is really a recovery from the
recession that officially started December 2007 and ended June 2009."
And the housing market, in which 67 percent of Americans have a stake,
is in serious trouble, with home prices sinking to their lowest levels
since 2002, falling by 4.2 percent in the first quarter of 2011 and for
eight straight months in a row.
In addition, the White House is
paralyzed in the face of the nation’s towering debts, which reached 62
percent of GDP by the end of 2010, the highest percentage since the end
of World War II. The Congressional Budget Office warned last year
in its "alternative fiscal scenario" that "with significantly lower
revenues and higher outlays", the federal debt could grow to a
staggering 87 percent of GDP by 2020, rising to 109 percent by 2025 and
185 percent in 2035.
It is little wonder that 66 percent of
Americans now worry the federal government will finally run out of their
money, and Moody’s Investors Service is threatening to downgrade
America’s sterling credit rating unless it gets to grips with the debt
crisis. Undoubtedly, the very future of the United States’
position as the word’s only superpower is at stake in the next few
years. And as Congressman Paul Ryan, the Reaganite chairman of the
House Budget Committee warned in a superb speech last night to the
Alexander Hamilton Society in Washington:
The unsustainable
trajectory of government spending is accelerating the nation toward the
most predictable economic crisis in American history. Years of
ignoring the real drivers of our debt have left us with a profound
structural problem. In the coming years, our debt is projected to
grow to more than three times the size of our entire economy.
This trajectory is catastrophic. By the end of the decade, we will
be spending 20 percent of our tax revenue simply paying interest on the
debt -- and that’s according to optimistic projections… This
course is simply unsustainable. If we continue down our current
path, then a debt-fueled economic crisis is not a probability. It
is a mathematical certainty.
Years of profligate spending,
massive bailouts and useless stimulus measures have made America poorer,
not richer, and threaten the long-term economic foundations of this
great country. Obama’s big government experiment has been a
dangerous failure, only further proof that the deadening hand of federal
intervention is the last thing America needs at this time. The
United States needs more economic freedom, less government regulation
and spending, and lower taxes if it is to create jobs, wealth and
prosperity, a message that seems to have been lost on Obama as he drives
the United States towards the financial abyss.
Obama Monetary Policy Fueling Pain At The
Pump
John Rossomando
points out the Obama administration's monetary policies have added
approximately 56.5 cents to the price of every gallon of gas you pump,
according to a report by Republicans on the congressional Joint Economic
Committee report.
Estimates suggest that had the dollar
maintained the value it had when Obama came into office, gasoline would
cost approximately $3.40 per gallon instead of around $4 per gallon in
many parts of the country.
"Analysts and pundits often cite,
correctly or incorrectly, the turmoil in the Middle East, a
strengthening global economy, or speculation as the causes for the run
up in crude oil prices," the report said. "What is rarely
discussed as an important factor in the rise of the dollar price of oil
is the role played by the dollar itself."
The report attributes
this increase to the Federal Reserve's policy of increasing the money
supply through the purchasing trillions worth of bank notes, treasury
notes and mortgage-backed securities, known as quantitative easing,
which it says has fueled inflation.
Obama publicly defended the
Fed's decision to engage in quantitative easing last fall during the G20
Summit in India in the wake of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's decision to
print money to buy back $600 billion worth of government bonds in August
2010.
"It was designed to grow the economy," Obama told
Bloomberg, but former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, a former top Obama
economic adviser, warned last fall in an interview with Bloomberg that
these policies could end up fueling inflation.
Longtime Fed Chief
Alan Greenspan had a similar analysis, calling the Obama
administration's strategy that of "pursuing a policy of currency
weakening."
More Bumps
Last Friday, Obama's chief economist, Austan
Goolsbee downplayed a disappointing May jobs report that showed
unemployment inched up to 9.1 percent, calling the latest number one of
the "bumps on the road to recovery," adding unemployment is still
"unacceptably high."
Well, yesterday, Goolsbee, who's been with
Obama for years,
quit.
And Sam Youngman
says the daily economic briefings have disappeared from Obama's
White House schedule.
Former White House press secretary Robert
Gibbs announced at his own first daily briefing reporters that Obama
asked for the daily economic briefing, described then as comparable to
the daily intelligence briefing the president gets every morning.
"The president asked that this be added every day to his schedule,"
Gibbs said at the time. Gibbs added that Obama believed it is
"important that each day he receive the most up to date information as
it relates to the economy."
But at some point, the daily economic
briefings stopped showing up on Obama's daily schedule.
Who wants to hear bad news
day after day when Obama could be golfing. Politico is reporting
that Obama has played 71 rounds of golf since occupying the
Oval Office and still can't break 90.
Obama's Jobs Plan Takes A Page From Marx
Investor's Business Daily says Obama has
unveiled a plan to cut joblessness with an industrial policy from the
19th century. In this "new" economy, government will pick winners
and losers for industry. It didn't work then, it won't work now.
Taking a cue from classical Marxist theory as well as vintage union
organizing doctrine, both discounting the value of service work over
manufacturing, we now see Obama touting training for factory jobs over
all others, pushing government spending in that area and calling it a
jobs recovery plan.
"I see a future where we train workers who
make things here in the United States, and continue a important and
honorable tradition of folks working with their hands, creating value,
not just shuffling paper," he said Wednesday at Northern Virginia
Community College, urging students to pack up and go to ... Detroit.
As he announced his public-private "Skills for America" partnership
to train and credential 500,000 students for jobs in industries favored
by the Obama administration, it bears looking at how at odds this
approach is to both history and economic reality.
"We know it
means building the infrastructure, the roads and bridges, and
manufacturing new products here ... that create good jobs," Obama said.
"Above all, it means training and educating our citizens to out-compete
workers from other countries."
The Bill Moyers crowd has been
touting manufacturing-era nostalgia for years, claiming the world would
go back on its axis if America could just shut its market and put
everyone back into blue collars, turning gears and listening for the
lunch whistle.
Fact is, the more advanced the economy, the
greater percentage of the work force that moves out of manufacturing and
into services.
Economists call this the "tertiary progression" of
development -- from farming and fishing, to the Industrial Revolution,
to an advanced service economy. Every rich nation has followed
this path -- every one.
In the U.S., that move started not last
decade but more than 70 years ago. In the U.S. there are six times
more service workers than factory workers, boasting higher skills and
per capita income. U.S. trade data consistently show U.S.
surpluses in service exports across the board because that's America's
competitive advantage.
Now Obama wants us to "give back" all that
white collar development and return to a simpler sort of economy
premised on manufacturing -- one that's more characteristic of today's
China or Peru than a developed economy such as America.
In Obama's
scheme of things the training of 500,000 "students" has more to do with
indoctrination than the transfer of job skills.
Professor Disaster
Michael A. Walsh says Obama's theories are
killing the economy.
No billions or trillions needed.
Here's the simplest number to describe the dismal state of the US
economy -- one!
With the departure of chief economic adviser
Austan Goolsbee, that's the number of members from the original Obama
economic team still working for the administration, not quite three
years into the first term. Gone are Christina Romer, Larry
Summers, Peter Orszag. Headed out is Goolsbee, who abruptly
announced his resignation Monday to return to teaching at the University
of Chicago.
The Rats are saying goodbye to the ship of state.
With the water lapping over the gunwales, the lone holdout is Treasury
Secretary Tim Geithner, the former tax cheat, who sails grimly on.
The government racked up $5.3 trillion in new fiscal obligations
last year alone -- bringing the current unfunded tab for future expenses
on things like Medicare, Social Security and military medical and
retirement programs to a whopping $61.6 trillion, or $534,000 per
American household.
Then there's today's bills: We're borrowing
$125 billion a month that we have no hope of ever paying back on our
current course.
The growth in GDP declined to a measly 1.8
percent in the first quarter of 2011 as consumers hung desperately onto
their wallets. Job growth has completely collapsed. Fully 60
percent of the electorate thinks the country is on the wrong track.
No wonder the daily economic briefing, once on a par with the
intelligence briefing, has vanished from Obama's schedule.
And
now Obama says he's
not worried about a double-dip recession.
Dick Morris And Eileen McGann
say
that we are only now just beginning to see the true dimensions of the
economic damage Obama has inflicted on the nation. Will he get
re-elected? Not with what’s happening to the economy before our
eyes.
Washington is operating on a full forward throttle of
monetary stimulus and carrying a $1.5 trillion deficit and still we are
creeping along at a growth rate of under two percent.
But the
signs are that things are about to get much worse:
• The OPEC nations are determined to
hold the price of oil above $100.
• The Fed is about to
end the massive printing of money called Qualitative Easing-2 on
June 30, contracting the money supply.
• A growth rate
of under two percent triggers higher unemployment since it is less
than the combined rate of population growth and worker productivity.
• Interest rates are set to rise as the US needs to borrow
money from real lenders as QE-2 ends.
• Inflation is
gripping China at the same time that its real estate bubble is
bursting, impairing China as an engine of economic growth.
Can Obama get re-elected with stagflation like we
saw in the 70s? Could Carter? But the massive printing of
money by the Fed in the past two years is similar to that which Nixon
used to hold up the economy in the early 70s. And the stagflation
we are about to witness will be equal to that which ensued.
With
47% approving of the job Obama is doing according to the new Washington
Post poll but only 40% approving of his economic record, his ratings are
bound to fall. And to keep falling until Election Day. Any
good Republican will take him out.
Obama On Unemployment: Ignorance,
Arrogance & Blame
Carole
says another day another example of how, when it comes to job
growth, Barack Obama either doesn't get it or thinks the American people
don't. In his weekly radio address he once again touted more
government spending as a way to improve the nation's dismal unemployment
situation.
Referring to the American Graduation Initiative, a
10-year, $12 billion plan to invest in community colleges which he
unveiled last week, Obama declared, "If you're a company that's hiring,
you'll know that anyone who has this degree has the skills you're
looking for. If you're a student considering community college,
you'll know that your diploma will give you a leg up in the job market."
This latest
throw-other-people's-money-at-the-problem-and-put-the-nation-even-deeper-in-debt
plan might be something to consider if:
1. American companies did not possess
the ability to determine whether or not someone is qualified to work
for them, and
2. The 9.1 percent national unemployment
rate was caused by a lack of qualified workers to fill a surplus of
jobs available
Neither is true but worse than simply being false:
1. Insinuating the first shows
complete ignorance of and arrogance toward those who actually create
jobs, and
2. Insinuating the second shows a pathetic
attempt to blame the unemployment problem on the unemployed
themselves rather than on the administration's job killing policies.
In the Republicans' weekly address, Representative
Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois) took on those
policies saying that "taxes are too high,
regulations are too burdensome, and the
government won’t stop spending money it doesn’t
have." He went on to offer legitimate
solutions saying, "The road to refueling our
economy and creating jobs means tackling our
debt head on, simplifying the tax code, reining
in Washington's red tape factory, passing
pending trade agreements with Colombia, Panama,
and South Korea, and increasing domestic energy
production, making our nation more energy
secure, which would help lower costs at the
pump and create jobs here at home." (source)
Practical solutions to provide an economic
environment that would free the private sector
to create new jobs or more wasteful government
spending and interference to inhibit job growth
while blaming the unemployed for their plight?
The choice between the two parties has never
been clearer.
Obama -- By The Numbers
In this infographic,
JohnnyShop took a look at various statements and promises made
by Barack Obama (and a few others) during both the 2008 campaign and
early on in his presidency. These statements were then set against
current statistics and those from inauguration day or 2008 for annual
stats.
