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

Sunday, May 27, 2012

The Two Charts President Obama Never Wanted You to See

When President Obama used a risible column by MarketWatch's Rex Nutting to claim to be a deficit hawk, even the Associated Press couldn't keep a straight face.

Of course, Obama, Nutting and the rest of the sycophants avoid the real comparison: actual deficits rung up by each president's policy choices (and those of Congress). In the case of President Obama's first two years in office, Democrat super-majorities in the House and the Senate helped him enact a virtual wish-list of Fabian socialism, from the Stimulus, to multiple attempts to fix the housing market, to "financial reform", to Obamacare.

The real comparison, then, is appropriately illustrated as follows.

Over the past 50 years, 10 U.S. presidents have made annual budget requests to Congress, projecting deficits both big and small. But no other president compares to Barack Obama when it comes to the size and scale of the current budget deficit facing the United States.


The country is facing an 8.3 percent estimated average national deficit of a two-term Obama administration — the biggest of the past 50 years.

As for the Left's claims that President George W. Bush "lied us into wasting an unfathomable amount of money on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan", let's ignore for the moment the so-called lies (we know that both military actions had overwhelming support from both parties). But let's ignore that duplicity for the moment.

In the last decade, how much federal spending actually went to national defense?

A striking chart showing that, over the last decade, 65 percent of federal expenditures went to pay for entitlement commitments, not wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, defense, or national security:


"About 65 percent of federal expenditures over the last ten years have gone towards entitlements," Paul Miller writes. "By comparison, about 15 percent has gone towards national defense, excluding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraq has cost three percent, and only about one percent has gone towards the war in Afghanistan (including the cost of ongoing military operations and all reconstruction and stabilization assistance combined), according to my analysis of figures from OMB."

In other words, Miller says, "Afghanistan is the second-cheapest major war in U.S. history as a percentage of GDP, according to the Congressional Research Service."

Iraq and Afghanistan represent a pittance, a rounding error, for this federal leviathan.

And yet another Democrat myth gets obliterated like the propaganda it is. One day these clowns might actually get something right, though that would require kicking the Marxist-Progressive Fifth Column out of the party.


Saturday, May 26, 2012

Horrifying Stat: Nearly Half of U.S. Households Dependent on at Least One Government Program

Friends, if this statistic gets much over 50 percent, you can stick a fork in America. Because it will be done.

Half of U.S. Lives in Households Getting Benefits

49.1%: Percent of the population that lives in a household where at least one member received some type of government benefit in the first quarter of 2011...

Cutting government spending is no easy task, and it’s made more complicated by recent Census Bureau data showing that nearly half of the people in the U.S. live in a household that receives at least one government benefit, and many likely received more than one.

The 49.1% of the population in a household that gets benefits is up from 30% in the early 1980s and 44.4% as recently as the third quarter of 2008.

...The more people who receive benefits, the harder it’s going to be to make cuts, and it’s never popular to raise taxes. In some respects that argues for letting a combination of tax increases and spending cuts that is set to automatically hit in 2013 take effect. There’s just one problem: the Congressional Budget Office says it would sink the economy into recession.

Well, I've got a news flash for these clowns. We have to cut spending sometime soon, because otherwise the entire system will collapse.

Did you ever see the movie Road Warrior? I only ask because that's what a complete economic collapse will look like, except without the cool cars.


Imagine there's no country. It's easy if you try.

Imagine that FDR's New Deal had ended the Great Depression prior to World War II.

Imagine that all of the money contributed by Americans to FDR's Social Security system over the decades hadn't been stolen by Congress, leaving the system now underfunded by tens of trillions of dollars.

Imagine that LBJ's "Great Society" program -- consisting of endless housing projects and massive wealth transfers -- had propelled poor inner-city residents to prosperity.

Imagine that Democrats' efforts to legalize 'Chain Migration' had not dramatically increased illegal immigration and hadn't resulted in the the Balkanization of large swaths of the United States.

Imagine that LBJ's Medicare program had been designed for competition, efficiency and cost-effectiveness; and it had not resulted in $100 billion a year in fraudulent payments; and its trust fund had not been stolen by Congress and spent with no regard for future needs.

Imagine that the Democrats' multi-decade push for welfare benefits hadn't resulted in an endemic culture of dependency; hadn't increased urban blight and poverty; hadn't encouraged more single-parent families; and hadn't resulted in more inner-city violence, crime and imprisonment.

Imagine that the United States Post Office is a paragon of efficiency, generating profits for taxpayers year after year.

Imagine that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac hadn't gone bankrupt, and hadn't touched off one of the most catastrophic financial crises in American history; that it hadn't been a "job shop for connected Democrats"; that it hadn't been protected from audits by Barney Frank, Maxine Waters, and other Democrat politicians; and that it hadn't been mercilessly abused by Clinton administration cronies including Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelick and Jim Johnson.

Imagine that the SEC and other financial regulators had discovered Bernard Madoff's fraud before it imploded; that it hadn't somehow ignored the impending derivatives meltdown; and that it had adequately policed AIG, Goldman Sachs and other "too-big-to-fail" companies that were backstopped by the taxpayers.

* * * * * * * * *

Can you imagine a United States of America where all of these big government, social engineering programs were successful?

I can't. In fact, none of them have been successful. Not one. That's a .000 batting average.

Nor can they ever be successful. Central planning fails every time when you compare it to free markets, private property, individual liberty and the magnificent system of government our country's founders created.

We know central planning fails. We need only look at the "five-year plans" issued endlessly by the Soviet Union, by Cuba, by Venezuela, by North Korea, by Zimbabwe, and by Democrats in this country, that have failed, utterly and completely.

So how could anyone support the trillion-dollar "Stimulus" program, Cap-and-Trade, the EPA's out-of-control bureaucracy, Obamacare's socialized medicine, a 2,200-page "financial overhaul", and "comprehensive immigration reform" when Democrats rely upon big government to make things right?

We know with absolute certainty how all of these ill-fated programs will end up. They will be bankrupt, fraud-prone, maddeningly inefficient and reminiscent of the DMV at the end of the month. They will be used as political weapons, to reward and punish. To centralize ever more power in the hands of a few connected bureaucrats.

It's November or never to unwind them. Our children and grandchildren are depending upon us.


Inspired by: Mark Levin.

Oh, my: even the Associated Press mocks Obama's deficit hawk claims

When you're running a Democrat campaign and you've lost the Associated Press in one of their so-called 'fact checks', you know you've got big, big troubles. Someone in the Axelrod household woke up extra-cranky this morning.

FACT CHECK: Obama off on thrifty spending claim

By ANDREW TAYLOR
Associated Press


...The problem with [Obama's] rosy claim is that the Wall Street bailout is part of the calculation. The bailout ballooned the 2009 budget just before Obama took office, making Obama's 2010 results look smaller in comparison. And as almost $150 billion of the bailout was paid back during Obama's watch, the analysis counted them as government spending cuts.

It also assumes Obama had less of a role setting the budget for 2009 than he really did.

Obama rests his claim on an analysis by MarketWatch, a financial information and news service owned by Dow Jones & Co. The analysis simply looks at the year-to-year topline spending number for the government but doesn't account for distortions baked into the figures by the Wall Street bailout and government takeover of the mortgage lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

...Taken together, TARP and the takeover of Fannie and Freddie combine to give Obama an undeserved $317 billion swing in the 2010 figures and the resulting 1.8 percent cut from 2009. A fairer reading is an almost 8 percent increase.

...There's also the question of how to treat the 2009 fiscal year, which actually began Oct. 1, 2008, almost four months before Obama took office. Typically, the remaining eight months get counted as part of the prior president's spending since the incoming president usually doesn't change it much until the following October. The MarketWatch analysis assigned 2009 to former President George W. Bush, though it gave Obama responsibility that year for a $140 million chunk of the 2009 stimulus bill.

But Obama's role in 2009 spending was much bigger than that. For starters, he signed nine spending bills funding every Cabinet agency except Defense, Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security. While the numbers don't jibe exactly, Obama bears the chief responsibility for an 11 percent, $59 billion increase in non-defense spending in 2009. Then there's a 9 percent, $109 billion increase in combined defense and non-defense appropriated outlays in 2010, a year for which Obama is wholly responsible.

...If one assumes that TARP and the takeover of Fannie and Freddie by the government as one-time budgetary anomalies and remove them from calculations - an approach taken by Holtz-Eakin - you get the following picture:

-A 9.7 percent increase in 2009, much of which is attributable to Obama.

-A 7.8 percent increase in 2010, followed by slower spending growth over 2011-13. Much of the slower growth reflects the influence of Republicans retaking control of the House and their budget and debt deal last summer with Obama. All told, government spending now appears to be growing at an annual rate of roughly 3 percent over the 2010-2013 period, rather than the 0.4 percent claimed by Obama and the MarketWatch analysis.

That's not even counting the catastrophic deficits Obama rang up.

The only people who believed Obama's claim to be a deficit hawk -- after signing the Stimulus bill and driving more deficit spending than all previous presidents combined -- are either morons or just not paying attention. In the former case, we're talking about the hard-core members of the Democrat base anyhow. There's nothing that can sway the stupid, except maybe Flowers for Algernon-style medication and electroshock therapy.

Kinda like the lady who had her mortgage and car loans paid off by President Obama after the 2008 election.


Related: The Five Charts You Must Show Every Undecided Voter You Know.

Ouch: Unions have blown $60 million on doomed effort to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker

The public sector union hacks bosses could have found a lot more productive ways to blow $60 million, if this report is accurate.

Barrett’s internal polling suggests his campaign is dead

Independent polls show Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker leading opponent Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett by 6 to 7 points in the June 5 recall vote. So what’s the public to do with Barrett’s own data — polls ... that show the recall is a statistical dead heat?

Veteran campaign staffers on the left and right will tell you Barrett’s internal polling suggests his campaign is dead.

Sometimes, the release of such internal polling is meant to bolster the sagging spirits of campaign staffers and volunteers looking into the oblivion of total defeat... But don’t take my word for it. Kristen Soltis, director of policy research and pollster for the Washington, D.C.-based Winston Group and contributor to the Huffington Post’s Pollster.com, defended the Barrett campaign and We Are Wisconsin pollsters... "[They are] very good pollsters who have rock-solid reputations on the Democratic side of the aisle.”

Then she offered sage counsel to the average consumer of internal polling data. “You have to remind yourself that pollsters only crunch the numbers,” Soltis told me. “It’s the people who are pushing these numbers out who have an agenda they must be served.”

In short, Wisconsin voters are going to march to the polls on Tuesday and repudiate the public sector unions' efforts to return to fiscal irresponsibility and wasteful spending.

And how much money have the unions spent?

In April, Gary Larson reported the total at $60 million:

Led by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and Wisconsin-based and other states' teachers unions, [the Democrats'] attack is aimed at sinking Gov. Walker and his Republican majority in the Wisconsin Assembly, thus to reclaim power over how taxpayer dollars are spent.

...To win, vituperative anti-Walker forces are putting up an estimated $60 million in ad dollars, all derived from union brethren from all parts of America. Call this solidarity. Last year union activists unleashed 3,000 recall petition carriers across Wisconsin, apparently not content to await the next election.

The good news? That's $60 million these Statist hacks won't be able to waste backing Barack Obama, the most destructive president in U.S. history.


Thursday, May 24, 2012

Double Whammy: Investors Business Daily Pimp-Slaps Rex Nutting's Pravda-Style Propaganda Piece at MarketWatch

Yesterday, James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute delivered a major-league rhetorical beat-down to some Obama drone named Rex Nutting. MarketWatch had somehow allowed Nutting to publish one of the more preposterous press releases from David Axelrod ever seen on a business news site.

The gist of the story is this. Obama is running from his spending record, using manipulated statistics to assign his block-buster "shovel-ready" Stimulus package to... wait for it... George W. Bush. Did Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and George W. Bush pass the Stimulus package? Obamacare? Cash-for-Clunkers? Green energy scams like Solyndra, First Solar, Solar Trust, etc.? So the Obama campaign is busy churning out propaganda that disavows all the work he took credit for in 2009 and Nutting simply regurgitates it, like a good little Marxist.

No human being in world history has deficit-spent like Barack Obama. And everyone knows it, including Rex "Leni Riefenstahl" Nutting.

Today, it's Investor's Business Daily's turn to pimp-slap Nutting. One simple chart is all it takes.

You wouldn't think that, after adding $5 trillion to the U.S.' debt, President Obama would seriously claim he's a fiscal hawk. But thanks to a misleading article on CBS' MarketWatch site, that's just what he's doing.

'Since I've been president, federal spending has risen at the lowest pace in nearly 60 years," Obama said on Wednesday. "Think about that."

Obama didn't turn to his own Office of Management and Budget to support this fact, or even the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

Instead, he went to a CBS MarketWatch column by Rex Nutting, which claims spending under Obama has risen by an average of just 1.4%.

"Federal spending," he wrote, "is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s."

Nutting even posted a chart to "prove" his case, which appears to show average annual spending hikes under Obama coming in well under that of his predecessors.

Not surprisingly, this "fact" lit up the left-wing blogosphere, with the White House quickly parading the article to dismiss GOP attacks.

There's just one problem. Nutting had it wrong... In fact, he made two significant mistakes that have the effect of hiding Obama's huge spending spree, mistakes that even Nutting's conservative critics missed...

IBD goes on to point out that, aside from the Stimulus scam and the litany of crap Obama pushed through a compliant Congress, TARP and GSE spending were incorrectly accounted for in Nutting's analysis. In other words, Nutting made giant mistakes, small mistakes, and everything in between.

MarketWatch had better, eh, watch itself. If it continues publishing trash like Nutting's excrement, it will become about as relevant as Daily Kos.


Oops! Democrat Narrative Fail: 1996 Socialist Advertisement Unearthed, With Barack Obama Headlining as a Featured Speaker

Gee, I guess he really is a socialist, despite all of the frequent denials.

And it looks like Andrew Breitbart's legacy -- including the great vetting of Obama that old media never bothered to do -- continues apace, this time courtesy of BuzzFeed (via Weasel Zippers):

It's a reminder that the President presented himself as much more progressive during his time in Chicago. In this little-seen advertisement that ran in the Hyde Park Herald in 1996, Obama was listed on a panel sponsored by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), University of Chicago Democrats, and University of Chicago DSA. He also supported gay marriage back then.


The Real Revo explains the strategy that Democrats have in mind. Hint: Obama's promise to "fundamentally transform" America? It's real.


Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Obama MarketWatch Propagandist Rex Nutting Gets B****-Slapped By James Pethokoukis

The old adage needs an upgrade. There's lies. There's damn lies. And then there's Rex Nutting.

Until Barack Obama took office in 2009, the United States had never spent more than 23.5% of GDP, with the exception of the World War II years of 1942-1946. Here’s the Obama spending record:

• 25.2% of GDP in 2009
• 24.1% of GDP in 2010
• 24.1% of GDP in 2011
• 24.3% (estimates by the White House ) in 2012

What’s more, if Obama wins another term, spending—according to his own budget—would never drop below 22.3% of GDP. If that forecast is right, average spending during Obama’s eight years in office would average 23.6% of GDP. That’s higher than any single previous non-war year.

Yet financial columnist Rex Nutting of MarketWatch tries to portray the president as being downright stingy in a piece entitled, stunningly, “Obama spending binge never happened”:

Of all the falsehoods told about President Barack Obama, the biggest whopper is the one about his reckless spending spree. As would-be president Mitt Romney tells it: “I will lead us out of this debt and spending inferno.” Almost everyone believes that Obama has presided over a massive increase in federal spending, an “inferno” of spending that threatens our jobs, our businesses and our children’s future. Even Democrats seem to think it’s true. Government spending under Obama, including his signature stimulus bill, is rising at a 1.4% annualized pace — slower than at any time in nearly 60 years.

And here’s the chart summarizing Nutting’s argument:


As the chart indicates, Nutting arrives at that 1.4% number by assigning 2009—when spending surged nearly 20%—to
George W. Bush...

What a lying sack of s***.

Gee, last time I checked, Nutter -- if that is your real name -- George W. Bush wasn't the guy who jammed the Stimulus package through Congress, which was tacked onto the 2009 budget.

Here is another way Nutting could have framed the spending issue:


The Obama spending record looks a little different now, yes?

Da-yam, Rex: you gonna put some ice on that?


Best I can tell, if you're a gun-owner, Bank of America would prefer you move your business to another bank. Immediately.

Papa B writes, "If you are not familiar with McMillan manufacturing, they are a large manufacturer of firearms stocks and components located in Phoenix, Arizona."

McMillan Fiberglass Stocks, McMillan Firearms Manufacturing, McMillan Group International have been collectively banking with Bank of America for 12 years.

Today Mr. Ray Fox, Senior Vice President, Market Manager, Business Banking, Global Commercial Banking (Bank of America) came to my office. He scheduled the meeting as an “account analysis” meeting in order to evaluate the two lines of credit we have with them... He spent five minutes talking about how McMillan has changed in the last five years and have become more of a firearms manufacturer than a supplier of accessories.

At this point I interrupted him and asked "Can I possibly save you some time so that you don’t waste your breath? What you are going to tell me is that because we are in the firearms manufacturing business you no longer want my business."

"That is correct", he says.


I replied, "That is okay, we will move our accounts as soon as possible. We can find a Second Amendment-friendly bank that will be glad to have our business. You won’t mind if I tell the NRA, SCI and everyone one I know that BofA is not firearms industry friendly?"

"You have to do what you must," he said.

"So you are telling me this is a politically motivated decision, is that right?"

Mr. Fox confirmed that it was. At which point I told him that the meeting was over and there was nothing left for him to say.

I think it is important for all Americans who believe in and support our Second amendment rights to keep and bear arms should know when a business does not support these rights. What you do with that knowledge is up to you.

When I don’t agree with a business’ political position I can not in good conscience support them. We will soon no longer be accepting Bank of America credit cards as payment for our products.

Kelly D. McMillan
Director of Operations
McMillan Group International, LLC
1638 W Knudsen Dr
Phoenix, Arizona 85027
McMillan Integrity-Global Vision

I later discovered that William Jacobson wrote about this incident a few weeks ago. You can confirm the letter's content on McMillan's Facebook page.

EPA-Driven Apocalypse Predicted for the Electric Grid (Just Don't Mention It In Public, Unless You Want to Get Audited by the Feds)

"Under my plan of a cap and trade system, [energy prices] would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad. Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it — whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was... [t]hey will pass that money on to consumers." --Barack Obama, 1 November 2008


He can run, he can hide, he can evade, he can blame Bush and James Buchanan. But this is one campaign promise Barack Obama actually followed through with. And you. Ain't. Seen. Nothing. Yet.

Clean Technica reports that the EPA's war on coal -- which produces the lion's share of electricity in the U.S. -- is working:

Power generation from coal is falling quickly...

...According to new figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, coal made up 36 percent of U.S. electricity in the first quarter of 2012 — down from 44.6 percent in the first quarter of 2011...

The U.S. coal industry if facing major headwinds... factors that will assist in pushing coal out of the electricity mix: An aging fleet of plants, cost-competitive renewables, new clean air regulations, and a strong anti-coal movement are working together to reduce the attractiveness of coal. Since 2010, plant operators have announced 106 retirements of coal facilities — representing 13 percent of the U.S. fleet, according to the Sierra Club.
Source: Clean Technica (http://s.tt/1bVMC)

What's this mean for you and me? Electricity prices are going to rise like nothing you've ever seen before (curiously, only after the 2012 elections).

Last week PJM Interconnection, the company that operates the electric grid for 13 states (Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia) held its 2015 capacity auction. These are the first real, market prices that take Obama’s most recent anti-coal regulations into account, and they prove that he is keeping his 2008 campaign promise to make electricity prices “necessarily skyrocket.”

The market-clearing price for new 2015 capacity – almost all natural gas – was $136 per megawatt. That’s eight times higher than the price for 2012, which was just $16 per megawatt. In the mid-Atlantic area covering New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and DC the new price is $167 per megawatt. For the northern Ohio territory served by FirstEnergy, the price is a shocking $357 per megawatt.

Why the massive price increases? Andy Ott from PJM stated the obvious: “Capacity prices were higher than last year's because of retirements of existing coal-fired generation resulting largely from environmental regulations which go into effect in 2015.” Northern Ohio is suffering from more forced coal-plant retirements than the rest of the region, hence the even higher price.

These are not computer models or projections or estimates. These are the actual prices that electric distributors have agreed to pay for new capacity. The costs will be passed on to consumers at the retail level.

The only thing that can stop this massive price hike now is an all-out effort to end Obama’s War on Coal and repeal this destructive regulatory agenda.

The Senate will have a critical opportunity to do just that when it votes on stopping Obama’s most expensive anti-coal regulation sometime in the next couple of weeks. The vote is on the Inhofe Resolution, S.J. Res 37, to overturn the so-called Utility MACT rule, which the EPA itself acknowledges is its most expensive rule ever.

This vote is protected from filibuster, and it will take just 51 votes to send a clear message to Obama that his War on Coal must end. ...Of course, Obama could veto the resolution and keep the rule intact, although that would force him to take full political responsibility for the massive impending jump in electricity prices.

That's not the only problem. Late last year, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation reported that new EPA regulations "threaten the stability of power grids". Blackouts, anyone?

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) released a report yesterday concluding that proposed EPA regulations “may significantly affect bulk power system reliability depending on the scope and timing of the rule implementation and the mechanisms in place to preserve reliability.”

As this 
Platts report notes, NERC says that these proposed rules could create “insufficient generating resources” and “threaten the stability of power grids in Texas and New England within the next decade.”

Not to mention job losses and economic ruin. Hooray!

And what do you think happened after the NERC reported its concerns over the stability of the electric grid? What do you think? It was, of course, investigated by another arm of the Obama administration for publicizing the truth. Seriously. Reminds one of the old Soviet Union, no?

Mark my words: should this egregious disaster of a president win a second term in November, I can predict exactly what will happen.

Electricity rates, as candidate Obama promised, would "necessarily skyrocket".

And the Democrats will blame the electric companies -- having sabotaged them through regulation and intimidation.

And they will then attempt to nationalize those companies, Chavez-style, under the banner of efficiency and "fairness".

Mark my words.

Tell your friends. Tell your family members. Tell your colleagues.

Unless we boot these Statist hacks out in November, America is destined to become a Third World country faster than you can say "Jeremiah Wright".


Update: Obama wants the Electric Reliability Corporation to stop assessing electric reliability

Visit: WarOnCoal.com to voice your concerns. Hat tip: Mark Levin.

Today's De-motivator: The Good Old Days


Hat tip: FWR.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

The Five Charts You MUST Show Every Undecided Voter You Know

There are plenty of folks we all know who don't pay as much attention to politics as you or I. They could be busy with kids, or helping out their elderly parents, working two jobs, or volunteering with church, school and sports. Nonetheless, I feel it's important to illustrate -- in simple form -- the real world impact of President Obama's policies.

1. The labor force participation rate, which tracks the percentage of working age Americans who are employed (source: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000):


2. Retail gas prices, the national average price-per-gallon as compiled by GasBuddy.com (source: http://www.gasbuddy.com/gb_retail_price_chart.aspx?time=24):


3. Medicare Reimbursements to Health Providers Have Been Slashed Since the Passage of Obamacare: by slashing payments to health care providers, costs are shifted to private insurers (source: Price Waterhouse Coopers Health). According to PWC, employer health costs are expected to rise an astonishing 8.5 percent nationally in 2012 (source: http://www.pwc.com/us/en/press-releases/2011/employer-medical-costs-expected-to-increase.jhtml).


4. Gold prices have skyrocketed since the President's Stimulus package was passed: as a measure of real inflation, many economists believe gold represents an excellent measure of the strength of the dollar. Because of the never-before-seen trillion-dollar annual deficits (and lack of budgets) since the 111th Congress and President Obama took office, rising gold prices represent an attendant weakness in the U.S. dollar (source: http://www.kitco.com/scripts/hist_charts/yearly_graphs.plx.


5. The 2009 Stimulus Package was built into the baseline budget - this recurring expenditure has become the cause of the largest budget deficits in American history.



* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

All of these graphs (and many more, like food stamp distribution and unpaid "green energy" loans) collectively represent why President Obama only talks about the future. His new slogan -- Forward -- is a tacit reminder not to look back!

There are trillions of reasons the President doesn't want to look back. Instead, he must promise more Utopian fantasies in the hope that enough Americans will fall for the same, 2008-era rhetoric all over again.

I urge you to share these five graphs with your friends, your family members and colleagues -- especially those who are uninterested in politics or otherwise disengaged.  This election is about you.  It is about individual sovereignty and containing government.  It is about saving this Republic.


Monday, May 21, 2012

Bummer: Obama's Reelection Intrade Odds Plummet Through 50- and 100-Day Moving Averages

Leave it to Jim Pethokoukis -- one of the few remaining real reporters in America -- to note the significance of this particular graph, which likely has David Axelrod replacing his Depends undergarments on an hourly basis.

Here’s the Intrade betting market contract for “Barack Obama to be re-elected President in 2012.”


As you can see, not only have the odds of reelection fallen, the contract has decisively broken through both its 50-day (brown line) and 100-day (purple line) moving averages. Now, I am not a professional technical analyst. But I am pretty sure that when stocks do that, it’s usually seen as a negative sign, especially if it happens on higher trading volume, the case here.

My personal suspicion is -- if we effectively marshal all of our family members, friends and colleagues -- that Barack Obama will lose in a, yes, historic landslide. It's not just a feeling. It's also data points like Obama edging out an imprisoned felon in a state primary.

We just need to do our part. We need to convince everyone we know the importance of this election. It's not an overstatement that the Republic hangs in the balance: even according to the CBO, a few more years of trillion-dollar deficits will destroy this country.


Oh, my: someone at the Washington Post just received a very special call on the Red Phone

I'm guessing that the Red Phone was first installed by FDR to ensure that Democrat talking points were effectively echoed by the hacks at 1150 15th St. NW. Which makes this particular report all the more anomalous and disturbing.

Someone at the Washington Post will surely have received a phone call from the White House today to have a conversation with Josh Hicks, who compares and contrasts the economic records of George Bush and Barack H. Obama (I added the H because it’s raaaaacist): Obama’s remarks on worst job growth: Did he end it or should he own it?. Josh spends quite a bit of time going through numbers and such, and finally concludes:

There’s no doubt that Bush owns an unimpressive record on job creation. But Obama comes in either last, second-to-last or in the bottom half among presidents since the Great Depression, depending on which way you look at the numbers.


The president said that policies from 2000 through 2008 produced the “most sluggish job growth we’ve ever seen.” Perhaps so, but the worst numbers on record occurred under his watch.

Obama chose a poor metric for measuring past administrations. To make his point with jobs data, he has to point to his own numbers and completely disavow much of them, or else ignore public-sector losses. We came close to thinking this was worth Three Pinocchios, but ultimately decided he was not necessarily including his record in the statement. Still, it’s a very fine line. The president should be much more careful about making such a sweeping claim.

According to the president's own Bureau of Labor Statistics, the percentage of eligible Americans engaged in the labor force has dropped continuously since he took office.

As I've said time and time again, there is no recovery. There is only an ongoing malaise, courtesy of record deficit spending, currency devaluation, public sector union payoffs, crony capitalism, rampant fraud, and out-of-control bureaucracies like the EPA, NLRB, HHS, and Interior Department.

But November is coming.


Sunday, May 20, 2012

Obama poised to achieve another historic record: highest tax rate ever!

But I'm sure leeching even more money from the private sector will supercharge job creation and help the recovery accelerate even faster!

Americans are facing an unprecedented $494 billion tax hike on Jan. 1, 2013. It’s been dubbed “Taxmageddon” given the economic devastation it would cause.

...The bulk of Taxmageddon comes from expiration of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, but also means the child tax credit will be cut in half, the Alternative Minimum Tax patches end, the Death Tax returns to its 2001 level, and a handful of new Obamacare tax hikes take effect...


...Conservatives should applaud Boehner[*] for seeking a solution sooner rather than later. But without action from the do-nothing Senate, there’s little hope of stopping this enormous and unprecedented tax increase before November...

Wait just a second. Didn't California just try this same strategy and fail miserably?

Oh well, this is the Lightbringer we're talking about, so perhaps it'll be different this time. After all, he got the oceans to stop rising.


*I'll applaud Boehner when he actually stops Obama and doesn't wimp out.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Ruh Roh: Europe's Invisible Bank Run Accelerates

The inevitable result of the Left's policies -- unchecked deficit spending, powerful public sector unions, easy access to welfare, and open borders -- is now unfolding in Europe. The endgame is certain to be as profound as it is cataclysmic.

...Worries about a run on Greek banks have rattled Athens this week, after savers withdrew at least 700 million euros on Monday alone, according to minutes of Papoulias’s comments to political leaders posted on the presidency’s website.

It is not only Greeks who are worried about their savings. Data shows depositors have also taken flight from banks in Belgium, France and Italy. And on Thursday, Spain’s Bankia was reported to have seen more than 1 billion euros drained by its customers in the past week.

Greeks are afraid they could be hit by rapid devaluation if the country leaves the European single currency, while customers at Bankia have been rattled by the government’s takeover of the recently floated bank on May 9 and growing uncertainty about the final cost of Spain’s banking reforms... “The entire Greek banking system is in danger: The banks are now facing the worst of all outcomes, deposit flight,” said Arnaud Poutier, deputy CEO of IG Markets France.

...Greece’s banks have lost 72 billion euros in deposits since the start of 2010, or about 30 percent, according to data compiled by Thomson Reuters. Five of Greece’s top banks saw 37 billion euros taken out last year, including 12 billion from EFG Eurobank and 8-9 billion apiece at National Bank of Greece, Piraeus and Alpha Bank.

...Savers have shifted to property, gold and other banks, or stashed it privately. In Greece, this slow-speed run on deposits has not caused panic. But that could quickly change if there is a sudden loss of confidence in the banks.

Savers lost faith in Britain’s Northern Rock overnight in September 2008, queuing for hours in the days that followed to take out their cash, despite a guarantee safeguarding most deposits. The British government ended up nationalizing the bank.

...Cash flooded into Britain; more than 140 billion euros was deposited in four big banks alone. The U.K. benefits from its position outside the eurozone and its Asia-focused banks HSBC and Standard Chartered are seen as safe havens.

Other banks to see big inflows included Barclays, Germany’s Deutsche Bank, Switzerland’s Credit Suisse and UBS and Russia’s Sberbank and VTB.

All of these repudiations to collectivist policies should -- but won't -- serve as an object lesson to Democrats. That's because the modern Democrat Party is immune to introspection and unwilling to examine facts, logic, history and reason.

Which is why it must be politically obliterated in November -- before it's too late to save this precious Republic.


Is Taegan Goddard's "Political Wire" the Dumbest Political Site on the Web? One Thing's For Sure: It Has the Dumbest Commenters

Someone named "Taegan Goddard" -- if that is his real name -- runs a so-called news site named "PoliticalWire." Just so you're aware if you happen to vist: PoliticalWire is the news equivalent of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz: it's guaranteed to repetitively spew DNC talking points while attracting a certain -- how can I say this politely? -- clientele of low intellectual capacity. The shallow end of the gene pool, if you will.

The latest example of the site's drone-like insipidity is this delightful missive, entitled "Is GOP Trying to Sabotage the Economy?" [sic]

Associated Press: "Are Republican lawmakers deliberately stalling the economic recovery to hurt President Barack Obama's re-election chances? Some top Democrats say yes, pointing to GOP stances on the debt limit and other issues that they claim are causing unnecessary economic anxiety and retarding growth."


Regardless of whether the suspicions are right, "there's evidence that unceasing partisan gridlock and the prospect of big tax increases and spending cuts in January are causing some companies to postpone expansions."

Genius. So the greatest deficit spender in world history, whose own budgets have been repudiated by the nail-biting, bipartisan margin of 610 to nothing, and who had super-majorities in Congress for two years, blames the GOP for his epic failures?

• He jammed through the world's biggest "Stimulus" bill, roughly $800 billion that is now built into the baseline budget, because of Democrats' three-year failure to pass a budget.

• Using every political maneuver imaginable, he shoved Obamacare down the American people's throats -- a 2,700 page bill that not one person read before it was voted on.

• In an unsurprising turn of events, he slammed a "Financial Reform" bill into place -- thousands of pages of additional legislation that no one read -- that left the lynchpins of the financial crisis (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) unreformed.

• He presided over such egregious deficit spending that the U.S. lost its AAA credit rating for the first time.

• His EPA and Department of the Interior have repeatedly attempted to crush America's energy production: found in contempt of court for its illegal Gulf drilling ban, repudiated in federal court for exceeding its authority by revoking properly issued mining permits and killing the Keystone XL pipeline just for starters.

• He tacitly endorsed illegal immigration by issuing executive orders to implement a de facto DREAM Act and sued states for enforcing federal immigration law.

• Through his National Labor Relations Board, he's repeatedly intimidated large manufacturers like Boeing.

• He's wasted tens of billions on phony "green energy" companies like Solyndra that -- just coincidentally, I'm sure -- never failed to have ties to his campaign's biggest contributors.

Those items are just the tip of the iceberg.

But all of these failures -- Soviet-style, central planning on steroids -- are the Republicans' fault. Or at least Bush's.

With embarrassing drivel like this, I'm guessing Taegan Goddard and his collective commenting crew couldn't harness enough intellectual firepower to spark a stogie.


Topmost image: People's Cube.

Friday, May 18, 2012

Oh, my: Since Obama took office "red states have had a job growth rate of nearly twice that of blue states"

The DNC propagandists have some 'splainin to do:

Just 16 states have seen job growth since President Obama took office, according to state employment data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The remaining states have lost a combined 1.4 million jobs since January 2009.

Even 34 months after the recession officially ended in June 2009, there are still 11 states that have fewer people working now than at the start of the recovery... Meanwhile, 20 states have unemployment rates at or above 8%, including nine with unemployment at 9% or higher, according to the BLS.


At the other end of the spectrum, Texas has been the leader in job creation under Obama, with 240,000 more people working there than when he took office. Since the recovery started in June 2009, Texas has added 474,000 jobs, which accounts for one in four of all the jobs created during the recovery.

North Dakota takes the prize for fastest job growth rate, with employment climbing 13% since Obama took office, due largely to the oil boom there.

The biggest job loser under Obama is California, which as of April was down 285,000 job vs. January 2009, BLS data show.

...Looked at through the political prism, red states — those likely to vote for Mitt Romney this November — gained jobs, on average, under Obama. Blue states, in contrast, had an average job loss rate of almost 1%.

And since the recovery started, red states have had a job growth rate of nearly twice that of blue states.

Whoa, whoa, whoa! You mean to say that class warfare, increased taxes, uncontrolled regulations and massive growth in government doesn't help job creation?

I'll make a note of that for future generations.


Wednesday, May 16, 2012

The Three Charts That Bode Ill for the Democrat-Media Complex

From journalism's version of Paul Ryan, James Pethokoukis, comes this pithy economic update:

Vice President Joe Biden is telling Ohio voters today that “things really are starting to come back.”

Is one of those “things” the U.S. economy? Because as the following three charts show, the U.S. economy is struggling through an abysmal recovery not really worth the name:

1. Sickly Economic Growth


2. Falling Real Wages


3. A Shrunken Labor Force


[...But] perhaps President Obama can somehow argue things are going about as well as can be expected after a financial crisis. Then again, a recent CBS-New York Times poll found that 67% of Americans think the economy is “bad” and gave Mitt Romney a 46-43 lead over the president.

So far voters don’t seem to be really buying Biden’s — or Obama’s — comeback story. They may not have seen these three charts, but they sure are feeling them, unfortunately, in their everyday lives. From Gallup:<


There is no recovery, nor will there be one as long as this ego-maniacal ideologue remains in office.


Hat tip: BadBlue.com.