Showing posts with label Economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Economy. Show all posts

Monday, April 02, 2012

Seriously: Chevy Volts Recalled Again, This Time Because XM Radios Won't Pick Up... Fox News [Update: Nope, Leftover April Fool's Day Joke]

Update: Well, I got pwnt. This was a leftover April Fool's Day, according to Seton.


I s*** you not. I'm sure it's just a coincidence. This makes, what, recall #3 (after the exploding batteries and melting power cords)?

The North American based automaker Chevrolet has recently announced a recall for the popular Volt model, because of a problem with its XM satellite radio.

After the Chevrolet Volt has been under an NHTSA investigation, not too long ago, because of a potential fire risk on its battery pack, influencing its sales targets, the “green” model is once again placed into the spotlights, in another negative light, because of a problem with its XM satellite radio. Even if this might seem like a minor issue on the Volt, the fact that it was investigated by the NHTSA because of a fire risk, adding the problem with the satellite radio can only decrease the model’s sales.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, owners of the Chevrolet Volt with XM satellite radio installed can’t pick up the Fox station and after some complaints were received by GM from loyal Fox News audience, the recall became a possibility. We won’t say anything about “life threating situations, injuries or crashes” related to this incident because this is not the case. Owners of the Chevy Volt, with the XM satellite radio installed, will be notified soon by the car manufacturer, and they will have to take a trip back to the dealers where the problem will be solved free of charge.

Oh, and more good news from Government Motors: the Volt manufacturing shutdown just got extended another week.


JP Morgan: Obamanomics Has Vaporized 15 Million Jobs

Is this chart racist?

A much-needed reminder that despite the recent upturn in the jobs market, there is still an awfully big employment hole to fill, as JPMorgan economist James Glassman points out:


A useful way to assess the challenge for the US economy is to ask, How many jobs would need to be created to recover the ground lost in this last recession. Focusing only on official unemployment, currently 12,806,000 million are classified as officially unemployed. In a normal, fully-employed economy, the unemployment rate would be expected to be 4.5 to 5.0 percent. In that case, the natural number of unemployed people would be 7 to 8 million, respectively. So, for the unemployment rate to fall from 8.3 percent to 4.5 to 5.0 percent, the economy would need employ 6 million to 5 million people, respectively, of those who currently are unemployed.

What about the larger picture that includes the hidden unemployed? How many jobs are needed to restore the ratio of employed people to the total population back to where it was in 2007, prior to the economic downturn. Under normal circumstances, there would be 153,000,000 jobs, including parttime jobs that people hold voluntarily. Currently, however, the number of full-time jobs and those who are holding part-time jobs voluntarily stand at 138,189,000.


In other words, to restore the job market to the state it was in back in 2007, before the recession, would require the creation of 14.8 million jobs in today’s terms, a daunting task to say the least.

I'm trying to determine whether the apropos "Food Stamp President" or the simple yet elegant "SCOAMF" is the better tagline.

I'm leaning towards the latter.



Sunday, April 01, 2012

Change

Esquire calls the policies of deficit spending and wealth redistribution a "War Against Youth."

Youth should be the only issue of the 2012 election, because all the subsidiary issues — inequality, the rising class system in America, the specter of decline, mass unemployment, the growing debt — are all fundamentally about the war against young Americans. But the choice young Americans face is between a party that claims to represent their interests but fails to and a party that explicitly opposes their interests and actively works to disenfranchise them...


...By bus and train and car pool, they will follow the gerontocracy to Tampa and Charlotte, the cities with the utter misfortune of hosting the presidential nominating conventions. Then we'll see if the people inside the convention centers can find the youth anything better to do.

We'll see then how the flowers of rage, planted and nurtured so carelessly for three decades, have sprung up and who will harvest them.

Which is why it is our job to teach America's young that the only antidote to the suicidal policies of Statism is Constitutional Conservatism.

It is our responsibility to return America to a lawful, civil society that recognizes the sovereignty of the individual and forces government to live within its means, like each of us must do in our own lives.


Hat tip: American Digest.

Friday, March 30, 2012

Congratulations, Democrats: U.S. Now Has Highest Corporate Tax Rate In the World

And progressives still can't figure out why global companies won't repatriate their cash to the United States. Cause they're smart like that.

This April Fool’s Day, the joke is on all of us. That’s because as of April 1, the U.S. now has the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world.

Our high corporate tax rate has long made the U.S. an uncompetitive place for new investment. This has driven new jobs to other, more competitive nations and meant fewer jobs and lower wages for all Americans. Other developed nations have been cutting their rates for over 20 years. The U.S. did nothing.

Hey, libs: let's try raising corporate tax rates to, say, 100 percent. That should really help revenues, right?

Hashtag EpicFail.


Surprise! Obamacare already added $17 trillion in unfunded liabilities to America's balance sheet

It should come as no surprise that a bill which 72 percent of Americans believe is unconstitutional, which numbers over 2,200 pages, and which not one person in Congress bothered to read turns out to have a terrifying price tag for future generations.

The federal government’s unfunded health care obligations have grown by a whopping $17 trillion since the passage of President Obama’s controversial reform bill, a new study has found....

Staff at the Senate Budget Committee, which calculated the figure using methods based on those used by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), found that total unfunded obligations for federal health care programs have jumped from $65 trillion in 2009 to $82 trillion in 2011... Added to the government’s existing obligation for entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the total now comes to almost $100 trillion.

That is almost seven times the United States’ annual gross domestic product (GDP).

[And the] total cost of the health care law, as calculated by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), has risen dramatically since its passage, dwarfing the $900 billion figure touted by the president and Congressional Democrats in 2009... CBO now estimates the law will cost taxpayers $1.76 trillion over the next decade.

The only good news: America will be bankrupt long before all of these debts come due.


Thursday, March 29, 2012

Oh, my: Obamacare caused health care premiums to necessarily skyrocket

It seems so, eh, inconceivable that a massive, 2,300-page bill -- which no one bothered to read before Democrats passed it into law -- could result in unintended consequences.

Leaving ObamaCare in place while striking its individual mandate isn't good enough. The full plan must be scrapped before it drives health premiums even higher.

ObamaCare is wildly unpopular with Americans. Even a new CBS-New York Times poll finds two-thirds want it shot down.

...The cost of an average family premium shot up 9.5% in 2011 — the highest rate in seven years and three times the rate of overall inflation, finds a major new survey of employer plans by Kaiser Family Foundation.

Just before Obama signed his health overhaul, he vowed it would "bring down the cost of health care for families, for businesses and for the federal government." In December, he told CBS' "60 Minutes" he was "putting in place a system that's going to lower health care costs."

In fact, there's evidence ObamaCare is fanning medical inflation.

Kaiser attributes the premium spike to "changes from the new health reform law." The 200-page study explains: "Significant percentages of firms made changes in their preventive care benefits and enrolled adult children in their benefits plans in response to provisions in the new health reform law."

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., notes that Obama, as a candidate, promised he'd slash family premiums by $2,500 a year by the end of his first term... The concern is that as ObamaCare becomes a massive Medicaid program that limits reimbursements to providers, it will shift costs massively to those who remain in the private health-insurance market.

Already, Obama's so-called Affordable Care Act has not lived up to its name. It's been anything but affordable — and the worst inflation is yet to come.

Oh, and then there's this:

Despite the [Obamacare individual] mandate, there will still be 27 million uninsured a decade from now, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The promised uninsured rate — 10% in 2022 — isn't much better than in 1980, when it was 12%, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

The law also tries to cut the uninsured population by making it illegal for insurers to deny coverage because of preexisting conditions, called "guaranteed issue"...

...But fewer than 4% cited poor health as a reason for not getting coverage, according to the CBO. Meanwhile, 71% cited the high cost of premiums.

....A recent CBO report, for example, says that premiums over the next 10 years will rise at a faster rate than they have for the past five.

Gee, I'm shocked. You mean to say that massive, centrally-planned economies like those of North Korea and Zimbabwe don't work?

Democrats == Schmucks.

As an aside: if there's a better newspaper in America than Investors Business Daily, I have yet to discover it.


This is six-year old Aliyah Shell, one of 10 killed and 50 wounded last weekend in Chicago. So where are the professional race-baiters?

At 3:00pm on Saturday afternoon, 6-year old Aliyah Shell was sitting with her mother and sister on the front porch of her home in the 3100 block of South Springfield Avenue. A pickup truck drove by, slowed to a near stop and the passenger side window rolled down. Shots rang out.

Aliyah Shell was killed by the gunfire as the truck drove off.

At least 10 people were killed, including a 6-year-old girl, in shootings over the weekend in Chicago... The slain were among at least 49 people wounded in shootings from 5 p.m. Friday to 6 a.m. Monday...

So where are the professional race-baiters like Al "Not So" Sharpton and Jesse Jerkson?

Where is MSNBS, ABS, CBS and NBS Nightly News?

Where are the New Black Panthers and the other thugs seeking to profit from Trayvon Martin's death?

They don't give a crap about Aliyah Shell, or the hundreds of others killed and wounded every year in Obama's hometown of Chicago.

No, they care only about fomenting hatred, division and dissent. They studiously avoid the ramifications of their failed policies, from the "Great Society" to the "War on Poverty".

All Americans -- citizens of every race, creed, religion and color -- should reject the Democrat Party and its vicious marketing of racial hatred.


Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Obama administration unveils 'Cash for Codgers' program; aims to save billions on health care for seniors

In light of new reports that health care premiums are rising three times faster than they did prior to the passage of Obamacare and that overall costs will tally hundreds of billions higher than predicted, Cub Reporter Biff Spackle files this exclusive report:

As part of the federal government's efforts to rein in health care spending, the Department of Health and Human Services has instituted a generous offer available to all U.S. residents.

The Senior Euthanasia Reimbursement Program (euphemistically known as "Cash for Codgers") will offer each family a cash honorarium for any senior residing in their household aged 65 and over. Said seniors will be dispensed with humanely, in accordance with the recommendations of Ezekiel "Doctor Death" Emanuel.

In these tough economic times, what's better than solving the entitlement crisis and addressing senior health care issues -- simultaneously? It very well could be the final solution to the fiscal challenges of government-run health care.


Monday, March 26, 2012

I've got good news and bad news regarding the unelected, unaccountable fourth branch of government

I refer, of course, to Barack Obama's massive administrative state.

First, the good news: a federal judge, appointed by Barack Obama, just eviscerated the EPA for trying to shut down a massive coal-mining operation.

In yet another court case to limit what has been termed an Obama administration EPA power grab, a ruling has resulted in yet another court saying that the EPA is arrogating too much power.

The March 23 ruling by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in the case of Mingo Logan Coal v. EPA came two days after the Supreme Court against the EPA in Sackett v. EPA.

This case -- like Sackett -- involved the EPA's enforcement of the Clean Water Act. Here, the EPA tried to withdraw permission to use two streams as discharge sites. The permission was granted three years earlier by the Army Corps of Engineers.

Just as the Supreme Court ruled in Sackett, the District Court ruled that the EPA's interpretation of its authority to enforce the CWA was erroneous.

Mingo Logan filed the lawsuit because the company believed that the EPA did not have the authority to modify or revoke the permit. They also thought the revocation was unlawful and the permit was still valid.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an Obama appointee, wrote that the "EPA exceeded its authority." She also made the observation that the EPA's action was extraordinary.

"This attempt to withdraw the specification of discharge sites after a permit has been issued is unprecedented in the history of the Clean Water Act," she wrote.

The court ruling has received praise from several quarters -- most notably a Democrat governor and a Democrat senator.

And, now:

The bad news: "HHS Strong Arms Insurers in Nine States".

Top 10 Rejected Obamacare Slogans

10. Why choose an expensive treatment when pain-pills will do?
9. Assisted Suicide: Do it for the Children
8. We Put the Rash in Rationing
7. Ask Us About Our Discount Placebo Program!
6. Only Selfish People Beg for CAT Scans.
5. Take a Number! The Bureau of Health Waiting Rooms reports the average wait time is now down to 123 minutes (in some locations)
4. Quack isn't just the sound a duck makes: we're importing medical experts from Mexico as part of our new Health Amnesty Program!
3. Shut up, take a seat and wait for your number to be called, Mr. GB21708-4.
2. David Axelrod reviewing your medical records: what could go wrong?
1. Sound mind, sound body -- take your pick.
As health reform heads to the U.S. Supreme Court, the federal government is going full bore on insurers who hike premiums to cover health care’s soaring costs, increases that ironically continue to rise in part due to health reform.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) late last week denied rate increases from two health insurers covering more than 42,000 Americans in nine states because they were too high, deeming them “unreasonable” premium hikes...

...The clampdown by HHS raises anew the debate over the role of the federal government in setting the costs of health insurance premiums, and why health reform has not stopped the rise in health-care costs, which continue to rise even after parts of the new law have already kicked in...

...The increases now in coverage costs are due to what insurers must now provide under the new law, despite President Barack Obama’s vow that the new law “could save families $2,500 in the coming years.”

Uhm, those are called lies marketing on the president's part.

Say, I wonder if mandating "free" contraceptives, covering "children" up to age 26, coverage for any and all pre-existing condition, and other draconian requirements are impacting insurance premiums?

You know, making them "unreasonable"?

And I wonder how price controls, like those HHS is trying to impose, have worked out in other countries? Say Venezuela, Cuba, the Soviet Union, Italy and Greece?

Not too well, you say?

Oh, gee. But maybe our masterminds are just way smarter than their masterminds.


Two Charts That Illustrate How Obama, Pelosi and Reid Crushed the Economy

Two charts that depict the tragedy of lawless, temporary politicians whose poor decisions will take a terrible toll on countless, future generations*:

...The employment-to-population ratio displays a classic V-shape recession and recovery pattern in the 1970s and 1980s. In the recession and recovery of the early 1990s, however, the employment-to-population ratio instead displays a U shape, only returning to its pre-recession level three years after the peak in the unemployment rate. In the recession and recovery of the early 2000s, neither the participation rate nor the employment-to-population ratio returns to its previous level, so we see an incomplete U-shape pattern.

In the most recent cycle, the employment-to-population ratio traces out an L shape, but the unemployment rate falls because the participation rate declines substantially (a much more gradual decline was expected by many given the aging of the baby boomers); in other words, a larger share of the population is out of the labor force rather than participating and being unemployed.

I took the liberty of annotating the chart to illustrate a couple of salient details:


I added two vertical lines. The first line indicates the election of Barack Obama in November of 2008, when he and Bush 43 began collaborating on economic policies.

For instance, the initial bailout of GM and Chrysler (with TARP money for housing, mind you) was justified by both men in the name of preventing a complete collapse of the auto supply chain.

The second line, slightly to the right, represents the passage of the "Stimulus package".

It would appear that the policies of Obama and the 111th Congress made things worse, at least as compared to other major recessions.

And, based upon the labor-force participation rate, things haven't gotten any better, no matter how many times legacy media tries to shriek WE'RE IN A RECOVERY.


* The ludicrous hack Joe Weisenthal hardest hit.


Sunday, March 25, 2012

No wonder Obamacare forces insurers to cover "children" up to age 26: unemployment for 18-24 year olds is 46%

If we get a couple more years of Obamanomics, I see Kathleen Sebelius requiring health insurers to cover "children" up to age 45.

A month ago, Zero Hedge readers were stunned to learn that unemployment among Europe's young adults has exploded as a result of the European financial crisis, and peaking anywhere between 46% in the case of Greece all they way to 51% for Spain...

Which makes us wonder what the reaction will be to the discovery that when it comes to young adults 18-24) in the US, the employment rate is just barely above half, or 54%, which just happens to be the lowest in 64 years, and 7% worse than when Obama took office promising a whole lot of change 3 years ago.

Oh, and I forgot the main point of the Zero Hedge article, which wasn't unemployment.

Fitch discloses something rather troubling, namely that of the $1 trillion + in student debt outstanding, "as many as 27% of all student loan borrowers are more than 30 days past due." In other words at least $270 billion in student loans are no longer current. That this is happening with interest rates at record lows is quite stunning and a loud wake up call that it is not rates that determine affordability and sustainability: it is general economic conditions, deplorable as they may be, which have made the popping of the student loan bubble inevitable. It also means that if the rise in interest rate continues, then the student loan bubble will pop that much faster, and bring another $1 trillion in unintended consequences on the shoulders of the US taxpayer who once again will be left footing the bill.

Oh, and kids: you know better than anyone that student loans can't be discharged. Bankruptcy won't do it. Maybe death will.

And, of all age groups, "this is the one that has actually seen its wages drop the most under the Obama administration."


Exclusive Movie Trailer: The Crisis-Maker

Perfectly suitable for turning into a campaign ad, I suppose.


Friday, March 23, 2012

Tweet o' the Day: Hockeystick

Twitchy is tracking President Obama's new hashtag -- #ILikeObamacare -- which, curiously, was hijacked by conservatives.

One of the best responses:

This is what we mean when we say that "liberalism is the philosophy of the stupid."

Democrats under President Lyndon Baines Johnson implemented Medicare in 1964. Its costs have skyrocketed far beyond any of the highest estimates. It is headed for collapse.

And what do Democrats do? Not only do they demagogue and demonize men like Paul Ryan, who are earnestly trying to save these entitlement programs, but they also create new, even bigger entitlement programs that are guaranteed to bankrupt the country.

It can't be ignorance. It must be intentional.


Thursday, March 22, 2012

Democrats Give Americans the Gift That Keeps On Taking: U.S. Bankruptcy Likely In 30 Years (or Less)

The laws of mathematics are certain and irrefutable: a few more years of President Obama's trillion-dollar deficits will result in a fiscal apocalypse as surely as night follows day.

This new fiscal study—from Richard W. Evans and Kerk Phillips of Brigham Young University and Laurence Kotlikoff of Boston University—is worrisome, to say the least:

Most developed countries appear to be running unsustainable social policies. In the U.S., federal liabilities (off icial debt plus the present value of projected non-interest expenditures) exceed federal assets (the present value of projected taxes) by $211 trillion or 14 times GDP. Closing this fiscal gap requires an immediate and permanent 64 percent hike in all federal taxes. … Our simulations, calibrated to the U.S. economy, produce an average duration to game over of about one century, with a 35 percent chance of reaching the fi scal limit in about 30 years. … When our economy reaches game over, the government is forced to default on its promised payment to the contemporaneous elderly.

Is $211 trillion a legit number?

AEI’s Andrew Biggs thinks it is:

Generational accounting is a well-established methodology to measure the burden of government on specific generations. A generational account for any given generation measures the generation’s remaining lifetime net tax bill as a present value—what the generation will pay net of what it will receive, all valued as of today. This amount has to cover the government’s official debt plus the present value of all future government purchases of goods and services (discretionary spending). If it doesn’t, the difference that’s not covered is called the fiscal gap.

You don’t like Paul Ryan’s Path to Prosperity (and solvency), fine. Come up with something better. But plan beats no plan.

George W. Bush was a big spender, to be sure, but no one in world history has spent as much borrowed money as Barack Obama -- along with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid -- to push America perilously close to collapse.

That's quite a gift that Democrats and RINOs are bequeathing to the next generation.

It's the gift that keeps on taking. Taking from generation after generation, leaving America as close to a third-world country as one could imagine.


Hat tip: BadBlue.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Munchkin WaPo Journolist Ezra Klein Bashes Ryan Plan, Somehow Omits Fact That Marxist Democrats Haven't Passed a Budget in 1,030 Days

Folks, this is how societies collapse. I don't just mean the virulent spread of corrupt, Marxist politicians that launched a successful coup inside the modern Democrat Party (as The Blaze observes, progressivism has transformed itself into full-blown Communism). It's also the tacit approval of tyranny, the abdication of journalism, the complete endorsement of lawlessness by pencil-necked Leftist hacks like Ezra Klein.

The country is headed down the fiscal tubes. Everyone from Peter Orszag to the CBO, from the Medicare Actuaries to the Social Security Administration agree we're headed for an economic catastrophe.

And yet thoughtless kooks like Ezra ("The Constitution is, dude, like a hundred years old! Who can understand it?") Klein have massive, though thankfully diminishing, bully pulpits at DNC press release outlets such as The Washington Post.

Unless you're really feeling masochistic, I'll spare you from reading Klein's latest tripe, entitled "Why the Republican budgets make the poor pay". Suffice it to say that Klein tries to paint Paul Ryan's budget as some sort of extremist plan to shortchange the poor.

Hey, dumbass: how's African-American and Hispanic unemployment working out under the masterful Obama?

Hey, idiot: how'd that multi-trillion dollar "Stimulus" package help unemployment and underemployment?

Hey, schmuck: how do you think the poor and seniors will fare when the interest on the debt is a trillion dollars in just a handful of years?

Hey, crackpot: how do you think seniors will like having $575 billion pulled out of Medicare to pay for a new, insanely complex, Rube Goldberg experiment in central planning called "Obamacare"?

Oh, and hey, Leftist tool: did you know that the Party of Marxism -- your party -- hasn't passed a budget in 1,030 days or so? And you're complaining about a thoughtful attempt to save the country from fiscal collapse? How about some vitriol for this egregious, unlawful, treasonous failure by Democrats in Congress?

These are all rhetorical questions, because the device has yet to be invented that can measure the amount of intellectual honesty possessed by the likes of this hack.

Oh, and by the way, all of those names I called Klein are the terms he prefers, I hear.

Until legacy media erases its mastheads of thoughtless tools like Klein, they are flat-out doomed.


Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Tweet o' the Day: It's the New Math

For the supposed party of "science and knowledge", Democrats sure seem to need a lot of remedial math help.

Back-story here.


4 Charts: "Ryan’s tax plan is a powerful antidote to Obamanomics"

The quote, from Investors Business Daily, summarizes the battle between good and evil, fiscal sanity and economic collapse, Paul Ryan vs. Barack Obama.

Faced with the economic failures of a Democratic president, Rep. Paul Ryan is, like Ronald Reagan, "raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors." Ryan's Rx for America: a jobs-generating tax code.

...He would cut the top marginal tax rate from its current 35% to 25%. (A second Obama term could mean a big tax increase, with the top rate going back up to Bill Clinton's 39.6%, as President George W. Bush's tax cuts expire next year.) ... Instead of the six brackets under our current punitive tax code, Ryan gives us just two: 25% and 10%.

And America's corporate tax — at 35% the highest rate in the world, with the exception of Sub-Saharan Africa's one-party socialist state of Cameroon — is cut to 25%, and it largely eliminates the taxation of U.S. companies' overseas profits.

Individuals and businesses would be taxed $2 trillion less over 10 years under Ryan's plan than under President Obama's budget, while the federal government would spend more than $5 trillion less.

Ryan also scraps something politicians have been promising to get rid of for years, but haven't: the infamous Alternative Minimum Tax. The AMT was passed over 40 years ago to punish a tiny handful of tax-sheltering "super rich," but — surprise, surprise — soon started slamming the middle-class.

...Ryan's tax reform would help bring America back to what it could, and should, be. It may just be the best weapon in the GOP arsenal.

Where is the Democrats' budget?

For more than 1,000 days -- a record period of time -- the Party of Economic Suicide has failed to produce one.

Where is Obama's budget?

He doesn't have one. He even rejected all of the recommendations from his own "Deficit Commission".

Instead, Obama's "solution" is to demonize various productive members of society, including energy companies, doctors, health insurers, small business owners (the so-called "rich"), and the like.

So you won't see any charts or graphs produced by Democrats. Because they know that we are on the road to fiscal collapse or, as the modern Marxist Democrat Party likes to call it, "fundamental transformation".


Monday, March 19, 2012

Another Judicious Use of Taxpayer Funds: Obama Administration Spent $1 Billion On Propaganda in 2010

Just when you think that waste in government can't get any worse, you get a nice thwack in the forehead with a report like this:

Report: US government spent at least $945M on advertising in 2010


Federal agencies spent at least $945 million on contracts for advertising services in fiscal year 2010, and that sum doesn't include all public communications expenditures in the agencies reviewed or even all of the executive branch, a congressional report out last week shows.

Congressional Research Service reported that the calculation was incomplete since the total sum may never be fully known.

...The report says that advertising serves many purposes, including informing the public of its rights and entitlements; telling the public of the agency's activities; inviting public comment on proposed rules; warning the public of perils; and discouraging harmful or dangerous behaviors...

...Congress has criticized government spending on advertising on two recent occasions, [including] in August 2010, when House Republicans on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee faulted seven agencies for engaging in propaganda to promote the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Yes, it's of the utmost importance to advertise non-stop to the American people to ensure as many as possible become dependent on government before the 2012 elections.


Europe: Brace for Impact

Q: How's that austerity thingamabob working out in Europe?

A: It was only the "worst February for new car sales in Europe since the turn of the century."

Now, it is beginning to hurt: The European new car market crashed in February. According to data released by the European manufacturers’ association ACEA, new car sales were down 9.7 percent in February. Two months into the year, car sales in the EU are down 8.3 percent from the same period a year earlier.

...The harmless looking percentages hide the fact that this February was the worst of the millennium. Only 888,878 units changed hands in the EU27 in February, the lowest level since comparing months made sense (going back further is futile, the EU was much smaller then…) Even during carmageddon, European had not seen a February as bad as this one...

Hey, I've got an idea! Let's mimic the failed European social Democrat welfare state model like Paul Krugman says! I'll bet that'll work out super!


Hat tips: Mish and BadBlue.