Recession 2 “Summer of Recovery” 0

The government is about to confirm what many people have felt for some time: The economy barely has a pulse.
The Commerce Department on Friday will revise its estimate for economic growth in the April-to-June period and Wall Street economists forecast it will be cut almost in half, to a 1.4 percent annual rate from 2.4 percent.
That’s a sharp slowdown from the first quarter, when the economy grew at a 3.7 percent annual rate, and economists say it’s a taste of the weakness to come. The current quarter isn’t expected to be much better, with many economists forecasting growth of only 1.7 percent.
Such slow growth won’t feel much like an economic recovery and won’t lead to much hiring. The unemployment rate, now at 9.5 percent, could even rise by the end of the year.
“The economy is going to limp along for the next few months,” said Gus Faucher, an economist at Moody’s Analytics. There’s even a one in three chance it could slip back into recession, he said.
The report confirms the economy has lost significant momentum in recent months. Most analysts expect the nation’s GDP will continue to grow at a similarly weak pace in the current July-to-September quarter and for the rest of this year.
The economy has grown for four straight quarters, but that growth has averaged only 2.9 percent, a weak pace after such a steep recession. The economy needs to expand at about 3 percent just to keep the unemployment rate, currently 9.5 percent, from rising.
According to data released earlier this week, home prices fell as much as five percent across the country in the month of July, and existing home sales fell 27%.

The worst in 15 years.

But if you listen to the liberals and their pundits, it slow but it’s all good. You just to have more hope. Give it more time. Don’t be so impatient.
So what if GDP growth has gone for 5% in the last quarter of 2009 to 1.6% now it’s still improving!
And you wouldn’t to hand the keys back over to Bush now would you!
After all, Bush was Republican and all Republicans are Bush. (a gold star to anyone who can spot the logical fallacy in that statement ) But isn’t that what the Democrats ARE saying…
Cue Sisyphus!


Will the economy actually enter a double dip, with G.D.P. shrinking? Who cares? If unemployment rises for the rest of this year, which seems likely, it won’t matter whether the G.D.P. numbers are slightly positive or slightly negative.
All of this is obvious. Yet policy makers are in denial. Why are people who know better sugar-coating economic reality? The answer, I’m sorry to say, is that it’s all about evading responsibility.(Paul Krugman)

After all, it’s Bush’s Fault! and you wouldn’t want Republicans! they’ll just wreck the car again like they did before!
After all, Bush was Republican and all Republicans are Bush.
And as Mr Krugman also says, showing his liberal roots,”The administration has less freedom of action, since it can’t get legislation past the Republican blockade.”
The Democrats currently have an overwhelming majority in the House and 59/100 seats in the Senate and The Presidency.
Yet, it’s a “republican blockade”.

The problem is that the Democrats can’t get all the Democrats to vote for all of this crap so they have to blame the minority party for it!
It sure as hell can’t possibly be their fault!
So, if November happens as predicted and the Democrats are the minority, it will be the tyranny of the majority then right? They will be the victims yet again, as they are now in the majority.
Perpetual Victimization!

But the Democrats will focus again on the 1 tree in the forest that isn’t on fire and say that’s you’re hope and change, just be patient, socialism wasn’t built in a day!


On Thursday, Standard & Poor’s said action is needed soon if the U.S. is to keep the much-coveted AAA bond rating that lets the government borrow in global markets at the lowest rates possible.
S&P’s warning came just days after Morgan Stanley asserted that the U.S., along with a number of other developed nations, is likely to default on some debt. Such defaults are “inevitable,” it said, given the growing number of retirees in developed nations who will have to be taken care of by a shrinking pool of workers.
The sovereign debt crisis “is not over,” said the investment bank’s Arnaud Mares, and that includes in the U.S.
What worries Wall Street is a public debt-to-GDP ratio of around 53%. That’s high enough as it is, but it’s about to go a lot higher. By 2020, recent data suggest, the ratio will top 100% — a red line that virtually all economists agree is dangerous.
In raw numbers, we owed roughly $7.5 trillion at the start of this year. By 2020 that explodes to $23.5 trillion, according to an analysis of Congressional Budget Office data by economist Brian Riedl.
What do these numbers mean? To begin with, we spend $187 billion a year, or 1.3% of GDP, to pay our debts now. Just 10 years from now, that will surge to $1.1 trillion, or 4.8% of estimated GDP. Fiscally speaking, we’ll be gasping for air.
Debt can be a good thing, but in big doses it’s poison. If, as some fear, the U.S. should simply say it can’t pay its debts and default — or do a de facto default by printing money to retire our debt — the consequences would be dire.
No nation would want our bonds in their portfolios. To entice them to buy, we’d have to offer a much higher risk premium — that is, higher interest rates.
That means our debt service could go even higher, squeezing out even more of our economy’s spending.
The dollar would implode, and prices for foreign goods — which now make up 15% of our economy — would soar. Private investment would shrink and, along with it, private-sector GDP
Americans’ standard of living, once the envy of the world, would recede into the pack of mediocre, government-run nations.
It doesn’t have to be this way. All this is due to unrestrained spending. The federal government now spends about $29,000 per household. That will rise to $38,000 by 2020. If you think “the rich” will, or can, pay for it all, think again.
Unless we begin to control spending, we can kiss our American lifestyles goodbye. It’s that simple.
Sadly, the White House is unwilling to see reality. Which may explain why, as our debts mount to ruinous heights, Vice President Joe Biden — President Obama’s point man on the recovery — can burble, “This is a chance to do something big, man!”
Yeah, man, something big — like wreck a country.
Warnings about America’s impending financial car wreck are being sounded, loud and clear. The only question is whether those driving the car will slam on the brakes before it’s too late.(IBD)

Got the car out of the ditch and drove it straight off a cliff and into a bottomless pit!
Way to go Barack & Co!
Yours is the Superior Intellect!

Stop Me Before I Lie Again!

A Democrat advocacy group that was essential to the passage of ObamaCare has come out with a new Powerpoint presentation on how to sell ObamaCare, aka sell a 5-gallon jug of water to a drowning man.
And the most interesting revelation: They Lied!
Shocking though that may seem, it seems that in this presentation on the last page of “don’t”s they don’t wanna anyone to talk about the cost savings, deficit reduction, and the lower premiums that was there mantra for 15 months as they crammed it down everyone’s throat in the most partisan vote in memory.
It seems, they might have ‘misspoke’

The presentation also concedes that the fiscal and economic arguments that were the White House’s first and most aggressive sales pitch have essentially failed. “Many don’t believe health care reform will help the economy,” says one slide.

When you see this first panel, think Alinksy’s Rules for Radicals, Rule 2: Never go outside the experience of your people. The result is confusion, fear, and retreat.

It’s hard to overstate how important the Congressional Budget Office (CBO)—which makes the official judgments on how much bills cost and save—is in Washington. “I consider CBO God around here,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, ranking Republican on the Finance Committee, recently said during the Health Care Debate.(Newsweek– our “islamophobic” fear mongers)

I wonder if he feels the same way after yesterday’s report that showed what the deficit spending has done to the economy?
“We think the numbers are now pretty well set from CBO,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said. “We think it will post the largest deficit reduction of any bill that we’ve adopted in the Congress since 1993.”

CBO told lawmakers that the health package would cost $940 billion over the next decade, reducing the deficit by $130 billion. It will reduce the deficit by $1.2 trillion in the second decade of the plan’s implementation, according to those who have seen the score.
“We are absolutely giddy” about the score, Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) said during an interview on Fox News on Thursday. About the deficit-reduction figures, he added, “This is great news for the American people.”(The Hill)
So without further adieu…

Key White House allies are dramatically shifting their attempts to defend health care legislation, abandoning claims that it will reduce costs and deficit and instead stressing a promise to “improve it.”
The messaging shift was circulated this afternoon on a conference call and PowerPoint presentation organized by Families USA — one of the central groups in the push for the initial legislation. The call was led by a staffer for the Herndon Alliance, which includes leading labor groups and other health care allies. It was based on polling from three top Democratic pollsters: John Anzalone, Celinda Lake and Stan Greenberg.
The confidential presentation, available in full here and provided to POLITICO by a source on the call, suggests that Democrats are acknowledging the failure of their predictions that the health care legislation would grow more popular after its passage, as its benefits became clear and rhetoric cooled. Instead, the presentation is designed to win over a skeptical public, and to defend the legislation — and in particular the individual mandate — from a push for repeal.
The presentation concedes that groups typically supportive of Democratic causes — people under 40, non-college-educated women and Hispanic voters — have not been won over by the plan. Indeed, it stresses repeatedly that many are unaware that the legislation has passed, an astonishing shortcoming in the White House’s all-out communications effort.
“Straightforward ‘policy’ defenses fail to [move] voters’ opinions about the law,” says one slide.  ”Women in particular are concerned that health care law will mean less provider availability — scarcity [is] an issue.”
The presentation also concedes that the fiscal and economic arguments that were the White House’s first and most aggressive sales pitch have essentially failed.
“Many don’t believe health care reform will help the economy,” says one slide.
The presentation’s final page of “Don’ts” counsels against claiming “the law will reduce costs and deficit.”
The presentation advises, instead, sales pitches that play on personal narratives and promises to change the legislation.
“People can be moved from initial skepticism and support for repeal of the law to favorable feelings and resisting repeal,” it says.  “Use personal stories — coupled with clear, simple descriptions of how the law benefits people at the individual level — to convey critical benefits of reform.”

In other words, get ready for more grandma has to use someone else’s dentures stories!  Get out the hankies, it’s America’s Most Outrageous Sob Stories Season 2!.
Appeals to emotions, not logic.
Hmmm, the exact opposite of the Ground Zero Mosque where the supporters are totally devoid and deaf to emotions. Curiouser and Curiouser..
Could it be manipulative?  Nahh….


The presentation also counsels against the kind of grand claims of change that accompanied the legislation’s passage.
“Keep claims small and credible; don’t overpromise or ‘spin’ what the law delivers,” it says, suggesting supporters say, “The law is not perfect, but it does good things and helps many people. Now we’ll work [to] improve it.”

The “free” Miracle Cure is just snake oil after all. But don’t tell the customer who had it force down their throat that.


The Herndon Alliance, which presented the research, is a low-profile group that coordinated liberal messaging in favor of the public option in health care. Its “partners” include health care legislation’s heavyweight supporters: AARP, AFL-CIO, SEIU, Health Care for America Now, MoveOn and the National Council of La Raza, among many others.
Let’s see, A Seniors advocacy group that has it’s own Health Insurance arm, Government Unions who have been getting most of the bailouts, Liberal advocacy group funded by a Billionaire Socialist, “The Race” (La Raza) a racist hatemongers group of Latinos who believe in (amongst other things) giving parts of Arizona and New Mexico back to Mexico and are as Open Borders as it gets.
Interesting grouping…


The presentation cites three private research projects by top Democratic pollsters: eight focus groups by Lake; Anzalone’s 1,000-person national survey; and an online survey of 2,000 people by Greenberg’s firm.
“If we are to preserve the gains made by the law and build on this foundation, the American public must understand what the law means for them,” says Herndon’s website. “We must overcome fear and mistrust, and we must once again use our collective voice to connect with the public on the values we share as Americans.” (Ben Smith-Politico)


Water anyone?
“We thought the best thing to do now was to remind people why they personally wanted reform in the first place.”–Spokesman for Families USA.
Wanted it? It was running at 66% against when it was passed and that hasn’t improved one  bit since.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 55% of U.S. Likely Voters favor repeal of the health care bill. That’s down from 59% a week ago, but support for repeal has ranged from 52% to 60%since the law was passed by Congress in March.

I guess follows my new rule that if 60+% of the people are against it, the Democrats are for it and you should be too!   (Health Care, Ground Zero Mosque, Deficit Spending, Continued Bailouts…et al)

A recent Government Accountability Report (GAO), finding that each job ‘created’ by the stimulus bill costs an average of $194,213.
But, fear not! The Government is here to save you…money!
Just over 70 days. I can see November from my house…

The Ditch

Congressional Budget Office (CBO), in its mid-year budget update, has projected that the 2010 budget deficit will be the second highest on record since the end of World War II, eclipsed only by the deficit of 2009.
The CBO says that the total 2010 deficit will reach $1.3 trillion, down slightly from 2009’s $1.4 trillion record. All told, CBO projects that the government will run up a total of $6.2 trillion in new deficits between 2011 and 2020.
Making it over $20 Trillion, double what it was in 2007 and 4 times what it was 20 years prior! a 400% rise in a generation!
But don’t worry it’s all George W Bush and The Republicans Fault! 

During his speech, the president likened Republicans to the “folks who drove the car into the ditch.”
“And so we decided, you know what, we’re going to do the responsible thing,” he said. “We put on our boots, we got into the mud, we got into the ditch. We pushed, we shoved, we’re sweating. They’re standing on the sidelines sipping a Slurpee, sort of watching us, saying, ‘Well, you’re not pushing hard enough,’ or ‘Your shoulder is not positioned the right way,’ giving us a whole bunch of advice on how to push — not lifting a finger to help.
“And finally we get this car up back on the road again, and finally we’re ready to move forward again,” Obama said. “And these guys turn around and say, ‘Give us the keys.’ Well, no, you can’t have the keys back — you don’t know how to drive.”–President Obama

So, children, you can’t hand the keys back to those morons. You have to trust me, I know what I’m doing.
And I’m so much smarter, and so much better than you!
Yeah, the car is back on the road alright, it has a whole in the gas tank, the fuel system is running rich, the steering wheel veers violently to the Left, the muffler has a hole in it and is dragging on the ground. The windows are broken, the transmission needs an overhaul,  and the tires are bald.
But it runs. And you should have more respect and reverence for your Elite Superiors, you ungrateful louts!
And it’s all George W Bush’s Fault after all!
Relative to the size of the economy, the 2010 deficit will reach 9.1 percent of the Gross Domestic Product, according to the CBO’s projection. The deficit in 2009 was 9.9 percent of GDP.
“As was the case last year, this year’s deficit is attributable in large part to a combination of weak revenues and elevated spending, associated with the economic downturn and the policies implemented in response to it,” the CBO explained.
The current economic downturn is expected to last for several more years, the non-partisan office said, predicting that unemployment will not fall to around a healthy 5 percent until at least 2014.
Oh goody, just in time for the Health Care Mandate and the other taxes to start kicking in!!!
Rejoice!!
After a year and half of “stimulus” and bailouts gone bad, what has the shift towards higher government spending and an encroaching nanny state cost you? This year, it has cost you 231 days out of your life, or 63 percent of 2010.
Every year, the Americans for Tax Reform Foundation and its Center for Fiscal Accountability calculate the day on which the average American has paid off his burden of federal, state and local spending and regulations. This year that day falls on August 19, a full eight days later than last year’s date.
That was yesterday folks! Rejoice!
Federal spending, always the largest contributor to the Cost of Government Day, cost taxpayers 104 days this year. This is up from 90 days in 2008, when Cost of Government Day fell on July 16. This is to say that the ill-conceived spending policies of the past two years have cost taxpayers over a month of their lives, and show few signs of abating.
President Obama has proposed spending $3.8 trillion in 2011, a 40 percent increase from pre-bailout, pre-“stimulus” levels. (Daily Caller)
And they want to raise taxes in a recession…sorry “Summer of Recovery”.  Hope 2.0…Recovery from what? a Marxist drunken stupor?
Does it kind of remind you of Hollywood rehab, where they go and attend a rehab then come out and do it all over again and go back to rehab and then come and do it again, ad nauseum…?
But don’t worry, if you’re mad about it,remember  it’s all George W. Bush’s Fault you islamophobic,racist,insensitive, ignorant low country moron!
Listen to your Masters, the Insufferably Superior Left.
They are just better, smarter, more tolerant, and sensitive than you could ever be.
And that’s just the facts, ma’am.

The Safety Net

“It’s very sad. I think it’s just illustrating what dire straits our federal government budget is in,” said Sheila Zedlewski, director of the Urban Institute’s Income and Benefits Center. “It’s unprecedented to raid one safety net program to feed another.”
Democrats who reluctantly slashed a food stamp program to fund a state aid bill may have to do so again to pay for a top priority of first lady Michelle Obama.
The House will soon consider an $8 billion child nutrition bill that’s at the center of the first lady’s “Let’s Move” initiative. Before leaving for the summer recess, the Senate passed a smaller version of the legislation that is paid for by trimming the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps.

The proposed cuts would come on top of a 13.6 percent food stamp reduction in the $26 billion Medicaid and education state funding bill that President Obama signed this week.
Food stamps have made multiple appearances on the fiscal chopping block because Democrats have few other places to turn to offset the cost of legislation.
Party leaders raided the budget to find off-setting tax increases and spending cuts to pay for their top legislative priorities, including the roughly $900 billion health care law.
Democrats have turned to the food stamp program because funding increases enacted in the stimulus package last year were already scheduled to phase out over time. The changes proposed in the state aid and nutrition bills would simply cut off that increase early, in March 2014. Because the cuts would not take effect for more than three years, Democratic leaders have voiced the hope that they will be able to stop them in future legislation.
But House liberals are balking now, saying that while they swallowed the food stamp cuts to pay for urgent funding for Medicaid and teachers, they will not vote for more cuts in the child nutrition bill.
A House leadership aide noted that the food stamp decrease approved in the state aid bill will not take effect right away and will leave the program at the same funding level it was at before the stimulus law was signed. “That doesn’t mean many Democrats are not concerned about the issue, but this is a process which gives us time to deal with immediate issues (like jobs) and helping the economy grow, while giving you time to deal with the food stamp issue,” the aide said. (The Hill)

In other words, the card shuffling rob Peter-to-Pay-Paul-Wimpy-I’ll Pay you tomorrow for a hamburger (or food stamp)-today economics may be running a bit thin.
The idea that you can pay for massive spending with cuts 3 years from now in the hope that everything will be fine and and you won’t have to cut them in 3 years is some how saving money now is just wrong.
And these were eliminating increases that that they’d already passed!
Sounds like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic after it’s hit the iceberg!
But when you have The Agenda, and the Agenda must be passed and the end justifies the means, you’ll do and say anything to make it happen.

The deeper food stamp reductions in the Senate version would set an earlier date — in November 2013 — for eliminating the increased benefits passed last year.  A family of four would see their benefit reduced by $59 a month, or about 9 percent. The bill would also cut funding for nutrition education programs aimed at low-income neighborhoods and households.
But don’t worry, It will still be George W Bush’s fault if the cuts actually happen. Or evil rich people. Or Class warfare. It certainly won’t be there fault. And it’s just cutting an increase anyhow so no big deal (unless you’re the Bush Tax cuts where not increasing taxes is bad).
The truth is certainly not endangered.


I like this comment made on the article, it was suitably sarcastic:
No big deal. Just put a “cancel” on any payments from the treasury to cover charges for the Obama family’s entertainment amd travel budget. It would onlly take a few months of austerity in the White House to jumpstart the economy, balance the budget, and slash the deficit. If that doesn’t do it, garnish Obama’s salary, eliminate his empire of czars, and fire “Bozo” Gibbs. The first two measures would be sacrifices, and the third would be a sign of at least some intelligent life in the White House.

Now why would they want to interrupt their latest lavish vacation to do that? Gee, they are the elites and they are the ruling family why would they want to show any restraint?
They deserve it. They are better than you.
I guess we could always Eat their words…


Congress’ rationale for eliminating the 2003 Bush tax cuts is deficit reduction. This position would be more credible were congress not teeing-up additional discretionary spending programs in the form of various stimuli packages for union members and favored political allies whom Democrats need to please in order to ensure their re-election in November. The deficit can never be reduced if Congress doesn’t stop non-essential spending. (or this kind of Wimpy-I’ll-pay-tomorrow-for-what-I-spend-today economics).

Currently, it is not clear if the confiscatory tax policies proposed by Democrats are designed to reduce the deficit by increasing the government’s revenue or if they are designed to punish political opponents and those whose don’t share the flawed, Democrat, wealth-redistribution ideology. Increasingly, it’s looking as if the goal is to punish.
Low tax rates incentivize economic growth and investment. This has been proven time after time. But, Democrats prefer to focus, instead, on taxes on the “rich”, using inflammatory rhetoric that plays on our deepest fears and ego, fear that someone might be better than we are, have more than we do, rhetoric that encourages schadenfreude, a smug pleasure that those who have more than we, might be brought low by confiscatory tax policies.
The Democrat leaders in congress advocating against the Bush tax cuts are looking for a bogeyman—the rich—to be blamed for the failed Democrat fiscal and job creation policies. Punishing the “rich” is a campaign strategy that they hope will play well with voters this fall. (Townhall.com)

Let them EAT the “rich”. Meanwhile, the apparatchiks are being porked out of their minds.
And you, get to pay for it either way.


Oh, and just in case you didn’t know, their was another stimulus (aka bribe) recently also:
WASHINGTON (AP) — A check from Uncle Sam gets your attention, even if the money doesn’t help that much with the bills.
More than 750,000 Medicare recipients with high prescription costs each got a $250 government check this summer, and 3 million-plus more checks are going out to people who land in the program’s anxiety-inducing coverage gap.
Democrats, running scared in an election year, are trying to overcome older people’s mistrust of the new health care law, which expands coverage for younger generations by cutting Medicare payments to hospitals and insurers.
Will the ploy work?
“It’s like a teaser,” says Virginia Brant, 65, of Glendale, Ariz. “You go to Vegas and they give you the free spin on the wheel. We have had our teaser — the $250 — for us to say, ‘Gee, look at what we have coming.’”
Brant spent hers to help pay down a credit card she keeps for medications.
The checks arrive with a letter addressed directly to each beneficiary and signed by Kathleen Sebelius, President Barack Obama’s health secretary.
The money is “to bring you some needed relief on your prescription drug costs … the first step toward closing your coverage gap,” Sebelius says. Then comes the pitch: “Stay tuned for more information … on how this new law will help make Medicare more financially secure and provide you with higher quality and more affordable health care.”
Ooh, $250 bucks! Wow! that makes The Health Care Mandate  and the cuts in Medicare Advantage  (which is used for prescriptions mostly ) so much more palatable and makes me want to vote for a Democrat so they can continue to pork people without regard to the consequences!
I guess they could always cut food stamps again to pay for it….
So The democrats want to demagogue the rich, pay off their apparatchiks with your money and bribe people to vote for them in November.
Well at least some things haven’t changed in the swamp.

Putting Government First

I have not always had much love for Pat Buchanan, but this article he wrote recently is brilliant. So I give him props for it.
The Topic: the lastest bailout of Obama apparatchiks (even though they don’t call them bailouts anymore because they don’t “bailout” anyone anymore. I guess it depends on your definition of “bailout”)

Where a man’s purse is, there his heart will be also.
If you would know where the heart of the Obama party is today, consider. In the dog days of August, with temperatures in D.C. rising above 100, Nancy Pelosi called the House back to Washington to enact legislation that could not wait until September.
Purpose: Vote $26 billion to prevent layoffs of state, municipal and county employees whose own governments had decided they had to be let go if they were to meet their constitutional duty to balance their books.
Workers their own governments thought expendable, Congress decided were so essential, it borrowed another 26 thousand million dollars from China to keep them on state and local payrolls.

//

A nation whose national debt is approaching the size of its gross national product, that goes abroad to borrow money to keep non-essential workers on government payroll is a nation on the way down and out.
And anyone who thinks this Obama party is ever going to cull the armies of tens of millions of government workers or scores of millions of government beneficiaries to put America’s house in order is deluding himself.
As long as this Congress and White House remain in power, a U.S. default on its national debt is inevitable. The only question is when.
Nor is this the first time the Obama administration has rushed to save workers whom their own state, city and county governments were prepared to let go. Among the reasons the $800 billion stimulus failed is that so little of it was directed to firing up the locomotive of the economy, the private sector, and so much of it was spent to ensure that government workers did not have to share in the national sacrifice.
Why Pelosi & Co felt compelled to return to D.C., to ensure that state and local government payrolls were not pared, is not hard to understand.
Which party does the American Federation of Teachers; the National Education Association; and the American Federation of State, Municipal and County Employees usually contribute to, work for, vote for? At which of the two party conventions are teachers and government employees hugely over-represented?
Consider, too, the states deepest in debt and facing the largest cuts in employee ranks, pay and benefits: California, Illinois, New York.
In these states, public employees earn at least $10,000 per year more in pay and benefits than the average America worker, who is bailing them out.
Hence, we have a situation where private sector workers in Middle America are being taxed, their children being driven ever deeper into debt to China, so government employees who have greater job security than they do, and earn more in pay and benefits than they will ever earn, can stay in Fat City.
And folks wonder why so many Americans detest government.
In the same week Congress came back to prevent AFSCME from taking a haircut, the Wall Street Journal reported that, in 2009, only three of 52 metro areas with over 1 million in population saw “net earnings and the broader measure of personal income both rise.”
Are you surprised to learn Washington, D.C., was among the three?
That same day, USA Today had a startling report on how, during the last decade, U.S. Government workers, like Wall Street bankers, left their fellow Americans in the dust.
“Federal workers have been awarded bigger average pay and benefit increases than private employees for nine years in a row. The compensation gap between federal and private workers has doubled in the past decade.
“Federal civil servants earned average pay and benefits of $123,049 in 2009 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation. … The Federal compensation advantage has grown from $30,415 in 2000 to $61,998 last year.”
Remarkable. U.S. government workers, who enjoy the greatest job security of any Americans, now earn twice as much in pay and benefits as the average American. This is not the D.C. some of us grew up in.
Nor is this all Obama’s doing. For most of the fat years of the federal work force came while Washington was being run by a Congress of Big-Government Conservatives and a White House of Bush-Cheney Republicans.
No wonder the tea party is targeting both parties.
Nevertheless, it is impossible to believe that the Obamaites, who intervened twice and massively with bailouts to prevent minor layoffs of local and state government employees, have the stomach to do the major surgery needed to cut the federal monolith down to size.
For the vast majority of the tens of millions of government workers vote Democratic, as do the vast majority of the scores of millions of beneficiaries of federal, state and local programs.
What Pelosi & Co. were saying with that $26 billion bailout this week is, “We are going to protect our own.”
Which is why either Obama, Pelosi, Reid & Co. go, or we are gone. (Human events).

Brilliantly said.
Especially, in light of the “payment” for that government employee bailout was to raid Food Stamps in 2014.
What I called a few days ago a the Wimpy (from Popeye) style economics. I will pay you in four years (china) for the burger (bailout) today.
A bailout several states didn’t even need or want!
It’s largess for everyone in government, on the tax payers paid for by China. (Do you actually think in 2014 with the Health Care Mandate kicking people in the teeth that they will cut Food Stamps? Yeah right…)
Obama has to protect his apparatchiks though.
Screw everyone else.

Boo Hoo Economics

Michelle “Antionette” Obama’s husband signed a Union Apparatchiks Bailout bill on Tuesday. It gave $26 Billion to state employees, primarily teachers (4 states of which that don’t even need it because there is no shortage!) and being the political animals in an election year what did they do to “offset” that spending?
They cut Food Stamps.
Or so the bill signed says (wait for the punchline, it’s coming).

Which prompts the liberal Boston Globe to complain:

ON TUESDAY, President Obama signed a $26 billion bill to help state and local governments cover Medicaid payments and avoid having to lay off teachers and other public employees. In what passes for high drama in Washington, the House of Representatives was called back from its summer recess to vote on the package, and the successful outcome was hailed as a major Democratic victory. “We can’t stand by and do nothing while pink slips are given to the men and women who educate our children or keep our communities safe,’’ Obama said. “That doesn’t make sense.’’

No, it doesn’t. But only by the occluded standards of contemporary Washington could this aid package be considered a victory. What began three months ago as a $50 billion emergency spending bill limped to the president’s desk at half that size and was largely paid for — “offset’’ in the clinical terminology of the budget — by cutting $12 billion from the food stamp program. In other words, a measure designed to help one group struggling in the recession came at the expense of another that is even worse off — and growing rapidly.

The number of people receiving food stamps stands at a record 41 million, or one out of every eight Americans. Driven by the downturn, that number has risen every month for the past 18 months. Last year alone, it grew by 20 percent. It’s grown by 50 percent since the recession began.

Then they say : The “good news’’ from an economic standpoint is that food stamps are a terrific vehicle for stimulus, because recipients spend them quickly.

Is that related to Nancy Pelosi’s unemployment comment that benefits are actually “Job creating” and that unemployment benefits “Create jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name.”

Bad news is Good News and Good News is Good News. Orwell would be proud of them.

But I find this “offset” target very curious. And makes me wonder just how politically motivated it was, as in, they picked something that made it look like they were being “responsible” knowing they’d never really do it.

And it was less than they wanted to begin with, so they were being more “responsible”.

But the truth is, it was in part a Campaign Slush Fund transfer anyhow.

Along with a bailout of his apparatchiks.

It goes like this, they give these Billions to teachers unions and then the teachers unions turn some of that money right back around as PAC contributions to Democrats running for re-elections. So it’s free campaign money.

They have effectively porked their own candidates without actually looking like it.

Now isn’t that just peachy.  

According to the Washington, D.C.-based Labor Union Report, the National Education Association in 2009 “raked in a whopping $355,334,165 in ‘dues and agency fees’ from (mostly) teachers around the country.” It spent close to $11 million more than it took in — $50 million of which union leaders poured into “political activities and lobbying” for exclusively left-wing and Democratic partisan causes and candidates.
Its primary mission? No, not educational excellence. Not “the children.” Political self-preservation.
Last July, the National Education Association’s retiring top lawyer, Bob Chanin, speaking at the NEA’s annual meeting in July, made the union’s true interests transparent: “Despite what some among us would like to believe it is not because of our creative ideas. It is not because of the merit of our positions. It is not because we care about children, and it is not because we have a vision of a great public school for every child. NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have power.
“And we have power because there are more than 3.2 million people who are willing to pay us hundreds of millions of dollars in dues each year, because they believe that we are the unions that can most effectively represent them, the unions that can protect their rights and advance their interests as education employees . . .
“This is not to say that the concern of NEA and its affiliates with closing achievement gaps, reducing dropout rates, improving teacher quality and the like are unimportant or inappropriate. To the contrary.
“These are the goals that guide the work we do. But they need not and must not be achieved at the expense of due process, employee rights and collective bargaining. That simply is too high a price to pay.”
Left-wing radical Saul Alinsky taught his education acolytes well. Teacher organizers, he counseled, must commit to a “singleness of purpose.” No, not serving children’s needs, but serving the “ability to build a power base.” If that isn’t the dictionary definition of “special interest,” what is? (Michelle Malkin)

Back to the Boo-Hoo Globe: The justification offered by proponents was that food prices haven’t risen as much as Congress expected them to, and therefore cutting benefits to hungry kids isn’t really so bad, especially since the cuts won’t take effect until 2014.

Ta Da!  there’s the magic bullet!!

So they are cutting food stamps 4 years from now to pay for a Union Stimulus now!

Kinda sounds like Wimpy from The Popeye cartoons, “I will pay you tomorrow for a hamburger today”.

That’s Liberal economics for ya.

Which leads to….

The U.S. government spent itself deeper into the red last month, paying nearly $20 billion in interest on debt and an additional $9.8 billion to help unemployed Americans.

Federal spending eclipsed revenue for the 22nd straight time, the Treasury Department said Wednesday. The $165.04 billion deficit, while a bit smaller than the $169.5 billion shortfall expected by economists polled by Dow Jones Newswires, was the second highest for the month on record. The highest was $180.68 billion in July 2009.

The government usually runs a deficit during July, which is the 10th month of the fiscal year. So far in fiscal 2010, the government spent $1.169 trillion more than it made. That figure is about $98 billion lower than during the comparable period a year earlier.

For all of fiscal 2009, the U.S. ran a record $1.42 trillion deficit. Fiscal 2010 might run a little higher—the Obama administration sees $1.47 trillion.

Wednesday’s monthly Treasury statement said U.S. government revenues in July totaled $155.55 billion, compared with $151.48 billion in July 2009.

Spending was higher, totaling $320.59 billion. July 2009 spending amounted to $332.16 billion.

Year-to-date revenues were $1.75 trillion, compared with $1.74 trillion in the first 10 months of fiscal 2009. Spending so far in this fiscal year is $2.92 trillion, versus $3.01 trillion in the prior period.

Spending for benefits for the unemployed year to date totaled $121.4 billion; for July, the tab was $9.8 billion, the Treasury statement said.

Years of deficit spending by Washington have led to a mounting national debt. Interest payments so far in fiscal 2010 amount to $185.25 billion; by contrast, corporate taxes collected by the government during the same 10 months were $139.71 billion. Interest payments in July alone were $19.9 billion. (WSJ)

But don’t worry, this was all George W. Bush’s Fault! He made them do it!!  

Then Boston Globe ends with this sobbing whine: But the idea that they’ve won anything overall is hard to sustain. They sacrificed the most effective form of stimulus and capitulated to the Republican idea that deficits matter above all else. Their decision about who should bear the brunt of the offsets, and the silence that greeted it, suggests a moral capitulation as well. It may be a victory. But it’s nothing to brag about.

They have to be dishonest even to themselves in their Insufferable Perceived Moral Superiority and Outrage.

The cuts aren’t until 2014 ya dirtbags! You know, the same year the Health Care Mandate kicks in!   

So they are sobbing about cutting something 4 years from now to pay for pork spending now and they are boo-hooing “it’s so unfair” about it.

Meanwhile the Deficit is climbing towards 15 Billion dollars and they just can’t stop the addiction to spending, especially on their own apparatchiks.

But that’s all George W. Bush’s Fault!

Where’s that Industrial Strength Barf Bag…

The Ideological Deficit

The Democrats have found a new “religion”.
Complain about spending too much, only if it’s against their ideology.
And for no other reason.
Take the “Bush” Tax cuts.
The democrats know that the tax increases from this will hurt the economy badly, but because it’s Bush, they can’t stomach extending them so they play the “deficit” card which is hilarious since they just spent weeks bashing the Republicans for being “mean” and “heartless” because they wanted the unemployment benefits extension paid for instead of adding to the deficit!
In the end, the Democrats just passed it anyhow.
So they can raise the deficit for unemployment benefits (now going over 100 weeks straight with the average being 37) but keeping a tax cut with Satan’s name attached to it is not worth adding to their massive spending.
New estimates from the White House on Friday predict the budget deficit will reach a record $1.47 trillion this year. The government is borrowing 41 cents of every dollar it spends.
That’s taking partisan ideologicial politics to a new low.
The Democrats are effectively saying, if it doesn’t benefit them politically it’s not worth doing.
I also think they want to saddle the Republicans with it.
They know they are going to lose massively in November so what better way to play it than stick your opponent with the mess and then when the 2012 tax season rolls around and people are hit full-on in the face with the 2011 income tax increases you can have “sympathy” for them in the 2012 Presidential election and make it look like it was all the Republicans fault.
Or Bush’s fault.
Now is that too cynical?  I think not.

Fiscal Policy: Many voters are looking forward to 2011, hoping a new Congress will put the country back on the right track. But unless something’s done soon, the new year will also come with a raft of tax hikes — including a return of the death tax — that will be real killers.
Through the end of this year, the federal estate tax rate is zero — thanks to the package of broad-based tax cuts that President Bush pushed through to get the economy going earlier in the decade.
But as of midnight Dec. 31, the death tax returns — at a rate of 55% on estates of $1 million or more. The effect this will have on hospital life-support systems is already a matter of conjecture.
Resurrection of the death tax, however, isn’t the only tax problem that will be ushered in Jan. 1. Many other cuts from the Bush administration are set to disappear and a new set of taxes will materialize. And it’s not just the rich who will pay.
The lowest bracket for the personal income tax, for instance, moves up 50% — to 15% from 10%. The next lowest bracket — 25% — will rise to 28%, and the old 28% bracket will be 31%. At the higher end, the 33% bracket is pushed to 36% and the 35% bracket becomes 39.6%.
Yes, it raises taxes on anyone who pays taxes, Period. Even the “poor”. So I guess he wants  to pander to the 47% who don’t pay taxes, women, and minorities in his apparatchik class and everyone else can just screw themselves…
But the damage doesn’t stop there.
The marriage penalty also makes a comeback, and the capital gains tax will jump 33% — to 20% from 15%. The tax on dividends will go all the way from 15% to 39.6% — a 164% increase.
Both the cap-gains and dividend taxes will go up further in 2013 as the health care reform adds a 3.8% Medicare levy for individuals making more than $200,000 a year and joint filers making more than $250,000. Other tax hikes include: halving the child tax credit to $500 from $1,000 and fixing the standard deduction for couples at the same level as it is for single filers.
Letting the Bush cuts expire will cost taxpayers $115 billion next year alone, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and $2.6 trillion through 2020.
But even more tax headaches lie ahead. This “second wave” of hikes, as Americans for Tax Reform puts it, are designed to pay for ObamaCare and include:
The Medicine Cabinet Tax. Americans, says ATR, “will no longer be able to use health savings account, flexible spending account, or health reimbursement pretax dollars to purchase nonprescription, over-the-counter medicines (except insulin).”
The HSA Withdrawal Tax Hike. “This provision of ObamaCare,” according to ATR, “increases the additional tax on nonmedical early withdrawals from an HSA from 10% to 20%, disadvantaging them relative to IRAs and other tax-advantaged accounts, which remain at 10%.”
Brand Name Drug Tax. Makers and importers of brand-name drugs will be liable for a tax of $2.5 billion in 2011. The tax goes to $3 billion a year from 2012 to 2016, then $3.5 billion in 2017 and $4.2 billion in 2018. Beginning in 2019 it falls to $2.8 billion and stays there. And who pays the new drug tax? Patients, in the form of higher prices.
Economic Substance Doctrine. ATR reports that “The IRS is now empowered to disallow perfectly legal tax deductions and maneuvers merely because it judges that the deduction or action lacks ‘economic substance.’”
A third and final (for now) wave, says ATR, consists of the alternative minimum tax’s widening net, tax hikes on employers and the loss of deductions for tuition:
• The Tax Policy Center, no right-wing group, says that the failure to index the AMT will subject 28.5 million families to the tax when they file next year, up from 4 million this year.
• “Small businesses can normally expense (rather than slowly deduct, or ‘depreciate’) equipment purchases up to $250,000,” says ATR. “This will be cut all the way down to $25,000. Larger businesses can expense half of their purchases of equipment. In January of 2011, all of it will have to be ‘depreciated.’”
• According to ATR, there are “literally scores of tax hikes on business that will take place,” plus the loss of some tax credits. The research and experimentation tax credit will be the biggest loss, “but there are many, many others. Combining high marginal tax rates with the loss of this tax relief will cost jobs.”
• The deduction for tuition and fees will no longer be available and there will be limits placed on education tax credits. Teachers won’t be able to deduct their classroom expenses and employer-provided educational aid will be restricted. Thousands of families will no longer be allowed to deduct student loan interest.
Then there’s the tax on Americans who decline to buy health care insurance (the tax the administration initially said wasn’t a tax but now argues in court that it is) plus a 3.8% Medicare tax beginning in 2013 on profits made in real estate transactions by wealthier Americans.
Not all Americans may fully realize what’s in store come Jan. 1. But they should have a pretty good idea by the mid-term elections, and members of Congress might take note of our latest IBD/TIPP Poll (summarized above).
Fifty-one percent of respondents favored making the Bush cuts permanent vs. 28% who didn’t. Republicans were more than 4 to 1 and Independents more than 2 to 1 in favor. Only Democrats were opposed, but only by 40%-38%.
The cuts also proved popular among all income groups — despite the Democrats’ oft-heard assertion that Bush merely provided “tax breaks for the wealthy.” Fact is, Bush cut taxes for everyone who paid them, and the cuts helped the nation recover from a recession and the worst stock-market crash since 1929.
Maybe, just maybe, Americans remember that — and will not forget come Nov. 2. (IBD)


And there’s always the Tax that isn’t a Tax because it’s a “penalty” but in court it’s a Tax– The Health Care Mandate.


After all, known communist and fired “green Jobs czar” Van Jones recently said:
While the federal government sinks deeper into debt than any time since World War II, former White House “green jobs” adviser Anthony Van Jones said it was time to stop worrying about budget deficits and pressure Washington to take more money from American businesses to fund larger social and infrastructure projects.
“This is a rich country. We have plenty of money, and if you don’t believe me, ask Haliburton,” Jones told a group of progressive bloggers and activists at the Netroots Nation (Think Far Left Hatefest) convention Friday. “There’s plenty of money out there; don’t fall into the trap of this whole deficit argument.”
“The only question is how to spend it,” he added.

Speaking of spending remember TARP, that bailout that was supposed to save the universe and create jobs?
Well, not so much.
How’s that Troubled Asset Relief Program going? Not so well. A review of TARP found that homeowners aren’t avoiding foreclosure and the decisions to close car dealerships were politically based.
The Home Affordable Modification Program, infused last year with $50 billion in TARP money by the Obama administration, was supposed to help 3 million to 4 million mortgage holders with their problem loans.
But according to a government audit, it has failed to “put an appreciable dent in the foreclosure filings.”
Neil Barofsky, special inspector general for the $787 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, told Congress on Wednesday that fewer than 400,000 homeowners have had their mortgages permanently modified under the program.
“It’s just not a program that’s working for homeowners,” Elizabeth Warren, chairwoman of a panel charged with overseeing the bailout, also told Congress on Wednesday.
“It’s not a program in some cases that’s working for investors. And most importantly, it’s not a program that’s working for the economy over all.”
Warren, who resides on the other side of the idea spectrum from us, said the problem with the program is “It’s too slow. It’s too small.”
But at least we have $20 Billion dollars in signs touting how great it is (each sign cost $10,000 a piece).
Her position is based on a faulty assumption: that the federal government, which is rife with fraud, waste and corruption, is able to effectively implement even a small program. She is expecting an unwieldy bureaucracy to do something that it cannot — and should not — do.
Another function of TARP, the auto dealership closing program, also took criticism in the review. More than 2,000 dealerships were closed as a cost-cutting measure in Washington’s bailout of Chrysler and General Motors. But the closings weren’t business decisions. They were political.
And they cost jobs.
“Treasury made a series of decisions that may have substantially contributed to the accelerated shuttering of thousands of small businesses and thereby potentially adding tens of thousands of workers to the already lengthy unemployment rolls — all based on a theory and without sufficient consideration of the decisions’ broader economic impact,” said Barofsky’s 45-page report.
According to the audit, the Treasury Department, which administers TARP, simply failed to show how the dealership closings were “either necessary for the sake of the companies’ economic survival or prudent for the sake of the nation’s economic recovery.”
The Barofsky report says some GM “dealerships were retained because they were recently appointed, were key wholesale parts dealers, or were minority- or woman-owned dealerships.”
Further underscoring TARP’s institutional problems is Barofsky’s finding that the government has been throwing taxpayers’ money at the country’s financial system that it wasn’t authorized to spend.
“Indeed, the current outstanding balance of overall federal support for the nation’s financial system has actually increased more than 23% over the past year, from approximately $3 trillion to $3.7 trillion — the equivalent of a fully deployed TARP program,” says the report.
The money has been allocated “largely without congressional action, even as the banking crisis has, by most measures, abated from its most acute phases.” Worse, much of the unauthorized expenditures was doled out to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the quasi-government mortgage institutions that are largely responsible for the 2007-08 financial meltdown.
Fannie and Freddie were explicitly excluded from the “financial reform” package.
It’s no coincidence that TARP has been a big part of one of the ugliest economic eras in American history.
We wouldn’t be surprised if historians one day look back and find that TARP was a significant contributor to the depth and length of the current slump.
Unless you’re a Journo-List Media biased ideological “journalists” or historian that distorts the facts to suit Big Brother’s Ideological Agenda that is.

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Can I have My "Hope and Change" back, Mr. President?

But first, see this video by Gov. Brewer on the Obama Administration response to her meeting with them:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=remz27VJjH4

President Obama at the G20, where the European Socialists told him to piss off about more spending.
President Obama on controlling the debt: “Somehow people say, why are you doing that, I’m not sure that’s good politics. I’m doing it because I said I was going to do it and I think it’s the right thing to do. People should learn that lesson about me because next year when I start presenting some very difficult choices to the country, I hope some of these folks who are hollering about deficits and debt step-up because I’m calling their bluff. We’ll see how much of that, how much of the political arguments that they’re making right now are real and how much of it was just politics.”
So Hope and Change is now Fear & Threat.
“Yes He Can”
But what’s really telling also is the statement that I’m doing it because I said I would. And he did say he would.
But the Mainstream Media/Ministry of Truth shouted down anyone who dared to challenge him on it in the campaign.
You were a “racist” a “moron”, an “idiot”, etc.
Now, he’s run up the debt to the point of countrywide bankruptcy and now just wait, in 6 months, the hard work begins!
OOOOOHHHH!!! Scary!
Likely by then he’ll have a Republican Congress that he claim it all on.
But that’s next year.
He still has to pass Cap & Trade and Amnesty if he can before that.
The government already owns Health Care, slowly but surely, that starts accelerating next year too.
As do all the new tax increase, which, what do you bet the Liberals and the Media will blame that on the Republicans.
I’m Mr. Tough Guy!


Alinsky Rules for Radicals Rule 4: Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. “You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”

He’s well aware of the political price and he wants the Republicans to take the blame for it.
And he wants your anger at the Democrats to make it so.
Perverse isn’t it?
Which means we do it in spades and then we pass the tax cuts, the pro-growth measures and it works and then He can try and run on it’s success in 2012 but the Democrats will be left out in the cold. It’s not like their leftist base will be smart enough to “get it”.
They’ve been waiting generations for this guy.

So he’s going to make “tough decisions” next year. What about the last 18th months?
He’s going to wait 2 years to make “tough decisions”??
I Guess 3 Stimulus, 18 months of Unemployment spending, Taking over GM,Chrysler,AIG,Banks, Health Care, and now Wall Street and Private Businesses was the easy part.
Making you pay for it, that’s the “tough decision”.
But since it’s likely to be a Republican Congress that will have to pull the trigger, it will be their fault.
It was their fault he had to everything he has done. So trying to undue it must therefore be their fault too!!
because if they were hard choices why doesn’t he make them now?
Oh, right this Congress wouldn’t dare.
Alinsky Rules for Radicals Rule 4: Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. “You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”
The Ministry of Truth will surely pound them them 24/7 so hard it will be the only thing they talk about for the next 2 years.
The 2012 campaign continues. (It never stopped).
But all those who want wanted “Hope & Change”, got “Despair and Socialist Change”.
Now you get “Fear and Change”.

Obama has proposed freezing spending on an array of domestic programs for the next three years and has named a special commission to recommend ways to curb spiraling debt and deficits. The panel is to report back by December 1. Obama will review the recommendations and decide how to go forward sometime early next year.
So when the “commission” recommends massive tax hikes and crushing regulations his hands will be clean and he’ll just do what they advised.
But it won’t come out until AFTER the election.
And this was the stated reason for the Democrats not passing a Budget.
“We’ve got to look at a tax system that is messy and unfair in a whole range of ways,” Obama said. (reuters)
Aka, screw the rich.
After all nearly 50% of the people don’t pay any taxes, so he has to hit the ones who do even harder.

“A strong and durable recovery also requires countries not having an undue advantage,” he said. “As I told (Chinese) President Hu Jintao yesterday, the United States welcomes China’s decision to allow its currency to appreciate in response to market forces. We will be watching very closely in the months ahead.”
Everyone is equal. None is better than anyone else.
Sound familiar?

Leaders of 20 major industrial and developing countries generally sided with cutting spending and raising taxes, despite warnings from President Barack Obama that too much austerity too quickly could choke off the global recovery.
“Serious challenges remain,” they cautioned in a closing statement. “While growth is returning, the recovery is uneven and fragile, unemployment in many countries remains at unacceptable levels, and the social impact of the crisis is still widely felt,” according to the document from the Group of 20 major industrial and developing nations.
Obama told a news conference he was satisfied with the outcome, saying he recognized that countries had to proceed at their own pace in either emphasizing growth or budget austerity.
“We can’t all rush to the exits at the same time,” Obama said after three days of economic summitry.
Boy, don’t you wish you could show him the exit sooner!

You Can Lie with Spin

Government these days isn’t about making the hard choices. It’s about making the choice that will sell, either to “your base” (thus ignoring everyone else) or by spin (which is inevitably deceitful) because it will benefit you or one of your “sides” interests.

They write 2000+ bills they won’t read. But expect everyone to follow.
They can’t be bothered to read SB1070, at a minimalist 16 pages.
Much easier to just play on people fears, anxiety,biases, and divide and conquer.
And when that doesn’t work, just lie.
Then there’s the politician favorite phrase these days, “I misspoke”.
No, we have it on tape or audio.
But they “misspoke”.
Then you get stuff like this:
President Barack Obama, fresh from a win on a sweeping overhaul of Wall Street regulations, on Saturday urged Congress to take up his proposal for a $90 billion, 10-year tax on banks as the next step in reform.
Obama wants to slap a 0.15 percent tax on the liabilities of the biggest U.S. financial institutions to recoup the costs to taxpayers of the financial bailout.
“We need to impose a fee on the banks that were the biggest beneficiaries of taxpayer assistance at the height of our financial crisis — so we can recover every dime of taxpayer money,” Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address.
He does realize that a tax on business is passed onto the consumer right?
He doesn’t care. It sounds good.
It plays to his anti-capitalist base and the “wall street” anger that has been ginned up.
The fact that Congress in the 1990′s set up the roots of this problem and the Government agency in charge of monitoring them were too busy with Porn is not a matter for discussion.
And one of the biggest players in this whole mess, Fannie and Freddie were and are  ignored should be a sign.
Alinsky, Rules for Radicals:
Rule 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It’s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.
Rule 6: A good tactic is one your people enjoy. “If your people aren’t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.”
Rule 9: The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself.
Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.
Daniel Foster at the conservative National Review Online argues that the bill is filled with unnecessary or useless measures.
“There is much in the bill that has nothing to do with ‘Wall Street’ or the root causes of the crisis (i.e. debit card and interchange fee rules),” Foster writes. “There is little in it that will ‘reform’ too big to fail or change the incentives for the kind of behavior that led to the crisis (implicit subsidies and bailout authority galore); and it was a ‘compromise’ mostly between Democrats.”

Then you have VP Joe Biden, a one man gaffe machine:
VP Biden ran into an ice cream shot owner (in his shop) who aked him to lower the taxes and he called the guy a “smartass”
And it gets better:
Vice President Joe Biden gave a stark assessment of the economy Friday, telling an audience of supporters, “there’s no possibility to restore 8 million jobs lost in the Great Recession.”
Appearing at a fundraiser with Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) in Milwaukee, the vice president remarked that by the time he and President Obama took office in 2008, the gross domestic product had shrunk and hundreds of thousands of jobs had been lost.
“We inherited a godawful mess,” he said, adding there was “no way to regenerate $3 trillion that was lost. Not misplaced, lost.” (CBS)
Andrew Langer, The Daily Caller:

Ultimately, with election victory comes the responsibility of governance. That responsibility requires grappling with the excruciating problem of making tough choices. This is something all elected officials face at some time or another, and it is the caveat for anyone interested in pursuing a political career. Problems ensue when political leaders abdicate their responsibilities—and a case can be made that such abdication is an abuse of the public trust. And when it comes to domestic policy, there is no more important issue than the creation of a government’s annual budget.
For the past three years, there has been a disturbing trend of federal legislators essentially punting their responsibilities—whether it comes to oversight of federal agencies, understanding the constitutional implications of legislation, or, at its most basic, actually reading legislation being voted upon. This seemingly fundamental misunderstanding of the role of legislators in our republic has resulted in an unprecedented outpouring of public ire, from Tea Parties to very public “dressing downs” of congressmen at Town Hall meetings.
Congress should have gotten the message, yet as proof they are deaf to their constituencies, leaders in the House have recently done—or not done—something stunning. Congressional leaders have decided that they are unable to even propose, let alone pass, a federal budget this year.
They have ostensibly done this while they await the decision of President Obama’s “Deficit Commission,” a convenient fiction created to give cowardly Democrats the “cover” necessary for a tax increase following the 2010 elections. It is not their fault, they will argue when they eventually do propose a budget. They were forced to do this because of the recommendations of the commission.
It is an excuse that doesn’t hold water. Congress has the responsibility for the budget, which means that the majority party has the responsibility for getting it prepared and shepherded through the system and passed. It is, in fact, statutorily mandated. But without any consequences, the law has about as much real power as a Las Vegas illusionist: it’s great theatre, but it really doesn’t do what it claims.
The problem is that more and more government entities (including state and local governments) are shifting these powers to unelected commissions. While some might call it mere “punting”—moving the power to some other group of individuals—it’s more accurately a form of political surrender; the functional equivalent of throwing in the towel because, well, the job is just too darn hard, and, in an election cycle, these guys want the title but they don’t want the responsibilities to go along with it.
Spending and size of government are the two top issues going into this fall election, with healthcare reform playing a role in both. Voters not only are fed up with out-of-control spending, they’re genuinely fearful of the potential economic instability runaway spending creates. Controlling that spending is infinitely more complicated when government officials refuse to release a budget detailing just how that money is being spent. It was, interestingly enough, the continued secrecy of national budgets that brought Gorbachev to power as the Soviet Union’s last premier—and opening up those budgets to greater scrutiny one of the hallmarks of his Perestroika program. How ironic, then, that more than two decades later, America is moving in that direction—an entirely wrong direction—when it comes to budgets.
Americans are tired of cowardly politicians. They are tired of being lied to, of having polls say one thing and do quite the opposite. They are hungry for real leaders—leaders who mean what they say and say what they mean. Leaders who are willing to make the tough choices, like Gov. Chris Christie in New Jersey.
Whether it’s trying to shift responsibility or surrendering to the difficulties of governance, either way the result is the same: Americans’ government grows larger without anyone exercising fiscal restraint. Political leaders raise taxes to try and pay for their inability to control spending. Overall we all suffer. Unfortunately, in this case, waiting until January 2011 might just be too late.

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• The deficit will reach a stunning $1.5 trillion this year. Even after the recession ends, trillion-dollar deficits will persist, causing the national debt to double by 2020.
• Excessive spending—not low revenues—accounts for 92% of deficits by 2014 and 100% by 2017.
• Solutions that “split the difference” between tax hikes and spending cuts doesn’t really address the source of the problem: spending.
• Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest costs will surge by nearly $2 trillion by 2020. By comparison, the cost of extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts is 85% less at $404 billion.

Tax Increases Are Not the Solution

• Raising federal income taxes to pay for entitlement spending would require rates to double by 2050 and continue to rise thereafter.
• Balancing the budget with tax increases alone would increase the tax burden from an average of 18% of the economy to 30% by 2055.
• Layering on a value added tax (VAT)—a new national sales tax—would create a huge drag on the economy and family budgets.
• A VAT would cause the price of everything to rise by 15–20%. By 2019, 44 cents of every dollar would go to the federal government, compared to 15 cents today.

Tax Hikes Have Harmful Economic Consequences

• Tax increases take money from families and businesses, lowering savings and investment and killing jobs. This is especially harmful in the current economic climate.
• Future generations—who can’t yet vote—will be stuck paying the higher taxes and inheriting lower standards of living that go with it.
• Any new federal income taxes would be on top of state and local taxes, such as income, property, excise, fuel, and sales taxes.
• A VAT would become a cash cow for Congress to fund new spending and open the door for continued, stealthy rate increases.
• Twenty of 29 developed economies with a VAT have increased rates since passage. Denmark leads, having increased their VAT from 15 to 25% since it was enacted.

Congress has been mismanaging taxpayer dollars for decades. Can Washington really be trusted to use new revenues to close the deficit gap, or would they just spend the money on new programs? (heritage.org)

I would say no.
When you can just “misspeak” or “The previous administration…” or “the party of no” or just demonize someone else, why bother.
It is much easier to spend than to be responsible.
After all, it’s not the politician’s money.
It’s yours.
And you’ll always be there for them so why should they worry.

2011

People can change the volume, the location and the composition of their income, and they can do so in response to changes in government policies.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that the nine states without an income tax are growing far faster and attracting more people than are the nine states with the highest income tax rates. People and businesses change the location of income based on incentives.

John Fund of WSJ's Political Diary breaks down Tuesday's most interesting primary contests. Also, WSJ Columnist Mary Anastasia O'Grady translates the latest economic signals from Washington.

Likewise, who is gobsmacked when they are told that the two wealthiest Americans—Bill Gates and Warren Buffett—hold the bulk of their wealth in the nontaxed form of unrealized capital gains? The composition of wealth also responds to incentives. And it's also simple enough for most people to understand that if the government taxes people who work and pays people not to work, fewer people will work. Incentives matter.

People can also change the timing of when they earn and receive their income in response to government policies. According to a 2004 U.S. Treasury report, "high income taxpayers accelerated the receipt of wages and year-end bonuses from 1993 to 1992—over $15 billion—in order to avoid the effects of the anticipated increase in the top rate from 31% to 39.6%. At the end of 1993, taxpayers shifted wages and bonuses yet again to avoid the increase in Medicare taxes that went into effect beginning 1994."
Just remember what happened to auto sales when the cash for clunkers program ended. Or how about new housing sales when the $8,000 tax credit ended? It isn't rocket surgery, as the Ivy League professor said.
On or about Jan. 1, 2011, federal, state and local tax rates are scheduled to rise quite sharply. President George W. Bush's tax cuts expire on that date, meaning that the highest federal personal income tax rate will go 39.6% from 35%, the highest federal dividend tax rate pops up to 39.6% from 15%, the capital gains tax rate to 20% from 15%, and the estate tax rate to 55% from zero. Lots and lots of other changes will also occur as a result of the sunset provision in the Bush tax cuts.
Tax rates have been and will be raised on income earned from off-shore investments. Payroll taxes are already scheduled to rise in 2013 and the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) will be digging deeper and deeper into middle-income taxpayers. And there's always the celebrated tax increase on Cadillac health care plans. State and local tax rates are also going up in 2011 as they did in 2010. Tax rate increases next year are everywhere.

Now, if people know tax rates will be higher next year than they are this year, what will those people do this year? They will shift production and income out of next year into this year to the extent possible. As a result, income this year has already been inflated above where it otherwise should be and next year, 2011, income will be lower than it otherwise should be.

Also, the prospect of rising prices, higher interest rates and more regulations next year will further entice demand and supply to be shifted from 2011 into 2010. In my view, this shift of income and demand is a major reason that the economy in 2010 has appeared as strong as it has. When we pass the tax boundary of Jan. 1, 2011, my best guess is that the train goes off the tracks and we get our worst nightmare of a severe "double dip" recession.
In 1981, Ronald Reagan—with bipartisan support—began the first phase in a series of tax cuts passed under the Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA), whereby the bulk of the tax cuts didn't take effect until Jan. 1, 1983. Reagan's delayed tax cuts were the mirror image of President Barack Obama's delayed tax rate increases. For 1981 and 1982 people deferred so much economic activity that real GDP was basically flat (i.e., no growth), and the unemployment rate rose to well over 10%.
But at the tax boundary of Jan. 1, 1983 the economy took off like a rocket, with average real growth reaching 7.5% in 1983 and 5.5% in 1984. It has always amazed me how tax cuts don't work until they take effect. Mr. Obama's experience with deferred tax rate increases will be the reverse. The economy will collapse in 2011.

Consider corporate profits as a share of GDP. Today, corporate profits as a share of GDP are way too high given the state of the U.S. economy. These high profits reflect the shift in income into 2010 from 2011. These profits will tumble in 2011, preceded most likely by the stock market.
In 2010, without any prepayment penalties, people can cash in their Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs), Keough deferred income accounts and 401(k) deferred income accounts. After paying their taxes, these deferred income accounts can be rolled into Roth IRAs that provide after-tax income to their owners into the future. Given what's going to happen to tax rates, this conversion seems like a no-brainer.
The result will be a crash in tax receipts once the surge is past. If you thought deficits and unemployment have been bad lately, you ain't seen nothing yet. (Mr. Arthur Laffer is the chairman of Laffer Associates and co-author of "Return to Prosperity: How America Can Regain Its Economic Superpower Status" (Threshold, 2010).)

And there's the "reduction" in the Deficit from The Government takeover of health care and those associated taxes.
Then the proposals for Cap & Trade that will tax your energy.
Fifty three of the Senate's 59 Democrats gave unelected, overpaid bureaucrats at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency a green light yesterday to do pretty much whatever they choose in their quixotic crusade against global warming. All 41 Republicans and six brave Democrats voted for Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski's resolution nullifying the EPA's recent usurpation of authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate the U.S. economy to combat greenhouse gases. Thankfully, this craven surrender of congressional authority isn't the last word on the issue, assuming that the November elections produce a Senate with enough backbone to reassert the legislature's rightful power.
In the meantime, it's vital to understand how bureaucracies function. Whatever else they may do, leading bureaucrats always do two things, regardless of which party controls the White House or Congress: They limit choices available to the rest of us by imposing regulations that increase government power and thus justify expanding their budgets and staffs; and they protect themselves and their turf by suppressing internal dissent, often at any costs.
As an example of the latter, consider career EPA scientist Alan Carlin. Last year, Carlin went through all the proper channels in submitting a study to the EPA's top leadership in which he raised serious questions about the credibility of scientific reports used to justify the agency's decision to regulate greenhouse gases. Carlin's study became public thanks to the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Carlin's reward was to be publicly pilloried by President Obama's EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson. His work was suppressed within the agency, and he was threatened with additional retaliation if he continued voicing his views. Rather than endure this bureaucratic muzzling, Carlin retired.
Similarly, EPA lawyers Allan Zabel and Laurie Williams -- a married couple living in San Francisco who between them have four decades of experience at the agency -- became so concerned last year about the EPA's support of cap-and-trade legislation that they created a YouTube video titled "The Huge Mistake" to explain their case. They made it clear that the video represented only their personal opinions, but the EPA still ordered them to change the video's content or face severe punishment.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., predicts that a suffocating new round of EPA regulations will soon descend upon the "one-fifth of our restaurants, one-fourth of our schools, two-thirds of our hospitals and doctor's offices, 10 percent of our churches, thousands of farms and millions of small businesses" that emit greenhouse gases. Considering how the EPA grandees mistreat their underlings, we wonder how the agency will respond to the soon-to-be-swelling ranks of critics on the outside.(Washington Examiner)

Then there's the bankruptcy of Social Security and Medicare.
But don't worry, you can be safe and secure and get the warm fuzzies...

BECAUSE IT'S ALL GEORGE W. BUSH's FAULT! :)

So have your Two Minute Hate (A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp-George Orwell) and go out and work 3 jobs just to put food on the table and a roof over your head.
The Guardian reported on June 2 that the UN was supporting a switch to a radical anti-meat agenda. “A global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change, a UN report said today,” wrote the paper.

Here’s how the group Vegan Action describes this extreme vegetarianism. “While vegetarians choose not to use flesh foods, vegans also avoid dairy and eggs, as well as fur, leather, wool, down, and cosmetics or chemical products tested on animals

The UN report is all about the environmental impact of “consumption and production,” or pretty much what humans do – eat and make stuff. It warns: “A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products."
So evil carnivores everywhere beware, the Politically Correct are gunning for you too!

Best rest assured, the government will be here to save you! :)

“We see it as a entrepreneurial bill - a bill that says to someone, if you want to be creative and be a musician or whatever, you can leave your work, focus on your talent, your skill, your passion, your aspirations because you will have health care.”-Speaker Nancy Pelosi
Doesn't that just make you feel so much better! :)