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

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Gee, libs, if health care's a right, then who's going to be delivering that "right" if 83 percent of doctors quit?

I love how liberals pretend that government can grant infinite "rights" to you that involve compelling others to deliver those "rights".

Except when they won't.

83% Of Doctors Have Considered Quitting Thanks To Obamacare

Eighty-three percent of American physicians have considered leaving their practices over President Barack Obama’s health care reform law, according to a survey released by the Doctor Patient Medical Association.

The DPMA, a non-partisan association of doctors and patients, surveyed a random selection of 699 doctors nationwide. The survey found that the majority have thought about bailing out of their careers over the legislation, which was upheld last month by the Supreme Court.

Even if doctors do not quit their jobs over the ruling, America will face a shortage of at least 90,000 doctors by 2020.

Oh. And it gets better.

The DPMA found that many doctors do not believe the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will lead to better access to medical care for the majority of Americans, co-founder of the DPMA Kathryn Serkes told TheDC.

“Doctors clearly understand what Washington does not — that a piece of paper that says you are ‘covered’ by insurance or ‘enrolled’ in Medicare or Medicaid does not translate to actual medical care when doctors can’t afford to see patients at the lowball payments, and patients have to jump through government and insurance company bureaucratic hoops,” she said.

So "healthcare is a right"? Well, who's going to deliver that health care service if 83 percent of doctors quit?

For you drones: that's a rhetorical question, which means you can't answer it.

Because you're drones.

Postscript - Article 42 of the Soviet Constitution of 1936:

Article 42. Citizens of the USSR have the right to health protection.

This right is ensured by free, qualified medical care provided by state health institutions; by extension of the network of therapeutic and health-building institutions; by the development and improvement of safety and hygiene in industry; by carrying out broad prophylactic measures; by measures to improve the environment; by special care for the health of the rising generation, including prohibition of child labour, excluding the work done by children as part of the school curriculum; and by developing research to prevent and reduce the incidence of disease and ensure citizens a long and active life.



Sunday, July 08, 2012

Boom: States that elected GOP governors in 2010 saw 50 percent lift in employment over U.S. average

Well, consider these even more data points that reinforce the policy positions of fiscal conservatism: low tax burdens and decreased regulations boost real employment. I know, it's fifth grade logic, which mean it's certain to be ignored by the dug-in, hard-left, radical Sixties Marxist retreads controlling the modern Democrat Party.

In 2010, influenced by the Tea Party and its focus on fiscal issues, 17 states elected Republican governors. And, according to an Examiner.com analysis, every one of those states saw a drop in their unemployment rates since January of 2011. Furthermore, the average drop in the unemployment rate in these states was 1.35%, compared to the national decline of .9%, which means, according to the analysis, that the job market in these Republican states is improving 50% faster than the national rate...

On the other hand, the unemployment rate in states that elected Democrats in 2010 dropped, on average, as much as the national rate decline and, in some states such as New York, the unemployment rate has risen since January of 2011.

This is yet another example of how the so-called “blue state” model is not working.

But, if you're soon-to-be-ex-Democrat National Committee chairperson Dee Wasserman Snider, the latest abysmal jobs report is just swell. Awesome, in fact.

And they say Mitt Romney is out of touch?


Hat tip: BadBlue.com.

Ohio's Radical Leftist Senator Sherrod Brown Tells Ohio's Voters He Despises Them and Their Petty Concerns With Jobs and Health Care

As recently as last year, facing a difficult reelection, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown was ranked America's fifth most liberal Senator by National Journal.

Of course, Brown was probably attempting to reach out to Ohio's famously centrist voters, because in 2010, he had been rated the most liberal Senator in the country.


So in an attempt to further broaden his appeal among Ohio independents, Brown has embraced a wildly popular and successful politician:


Yes. That's Al. Freaking. Franken.

A walking, talking embarrassment.

Sherrod Brown isn't worthy of representing Ohio's voters. He's a radical Leftist and his voting record demonstrates an utter disregard for Ohioans.

What can you do? If you have a few extra bucks, I'd encourage you to support Josh Mandel for Senate (who is also endorsed by Jim DeMint's invaluable Senate Conservatives Fund).



Saturday, July 07, 2012

The So-Called Recovery in One Chart

Greg Mankiw posts the following chart without a single word of explanation.


Because no caption is needed for yet another product of SCOAMF Industries™.


Friday, July 06, 2012

Oh, my: GM's super-happy fun results achieved through the magic of Obama's typical tactics: cheating

Recall that the president has but two supposed achievements to call his own after countless failed programs. He: (a) he gave the order to cap Bin Laden (a stunningly straightforward decision for any president not named B.J. Clinton); and (b) he "saved" General Motors (never mind that it still owes the American taxpayer $35 billion).

It turns out that the National Legal and Policy Center has a more accurate description of GM's "impressive results".

...government purchases of GM vehicles rose a whopping 79% in June.

The discovery of the pick-up in government fleet purchases at the taxpayers' expense comes just weeks before GM announces its second quarter earnings. Overall fleet sales (which are typically less profitable than retail sales) at Government Motors rose a full 36% for the month, helping to drive decent sales improvements year over year.

GM claimed that sales increases did not rely on incentive spending, which appeared to remain in check, but one analyst during GM's sales conference call questioned whether the company's "stair step" incentive spending was accurately depicted. This incentive spending kicks in after dealerships report final sales figures for the month and may be yet another deceptive way for GM to fudge its numbers. Not mentioned was GM card rewards programs that do not get counted as incentive spending.


The government's increased spending on GM vehicle purchases presents yet another conflict of interest as Treasury refuses to sell taxpayers' stake in GM and Obama campaigns on the auto bailouts. It does not appear that any members of Congress (from either party) are questioning the increased spending...

...The pressure is on Government Motors to appear financially strong as this may be the last earnings report before November elections and sets the stage for how "successful" GM is. One of GM's past tricks to help fudge earnings numbers has been to stuff truck inventory channels. Old habits die hard at GM. According to a Bloomberg report, "GM said inventory of its full-size pickups, which will be refreshed next year, climbed to 238,194 at the end of June, a 135 days supply, up from 116 days at the end of May." 135 days supply is huge, the accepted norm is a 60 day supply. The trick here is that GM records revenue when vehicles go into dealership inventories, not when actually sold to consumers.

...GM's earnings announcement comes on August 2nd... Expect Government Motors to put a positive spin on its financial health as the stakes are now at their highest. The long-term health of GM remains in question and the true financial picture may not surface until well after voters decide who will be running our country...

Anything this administration says needs to be scrutinized for accuracy, and that includes the words 'the', 'and', and 'or'.


The Horrifying Employment Charts You Were Never Supposed to See

We all know that vintage media won't publish charts that reflect the true state of the economy. The media have a theme to promote (that Obama is competent) and are on a mission (to reelect him). And nothing will get in their way, save a few brave souls at Fox News, on talk radio, and in the conservative blogosphere.

As Calculated Risk reports:

...job growth has really slowed over the last three months with only 225,000 payroll jobs added (a 900,000 annual pace), and only 274,000 private sector jobs (a 1.1 million annual pace). This is very sluggish employment growth.

The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) was essentially unchanged at 8.2 million. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.

The unemployment rate was unchanged at 8.2% in June The household survey showed a another increase in employment (128,000 jobs added), and since the participation rate was unchanged at 63.8%, that was just enough to keep with the increase in the labor force...

This graph shows the job losses from the start of the employment recession, in percentage terms - this time aligned at maximum job losses.

U-6, an alternate [Ed: and superior] measure of labor underutilization that includes part time workers and marginally attached workers, increased slightly to 14.9%...

In short, the real unemployment rate remains at the horrific level of 15 percent.

And the "recovery" (if you believe that's what we're experiencing) is the worst for job growth in modern American history.

Other low-lights of the jobs report (or, as I like to call it, the no-jobs report):

Disability claims outpace new job creation since Obama took office

The unemployment rate for blacks increased to 14.4 percent

Hispanic unemployment is unchanged at 11 percent

And for something like 40 months in a row, the Obama White House has used virtually the same quote on its website ("it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report") over and over and over again. Because they care.


Between the vacations, the golf, the campaigning, the fundraising, and the buck-passing (blaming Bush, ATMs, tsunamis, earthquakes, the EU meltdown, etc.), it's clear that Barack Obama has the worst jobs record of any president in American history.

The most deserving person of a pink-slip in this economy is Barack Hussein Milhaus Obama. Anyway you measure it, he's The Job-Killing President™.



Ezra Klein: victim of congenital thyroid deficiency... or poisonous, left-wing propagandist? You make the call!

A cretin is a person of limited cognitive abilities often "due to a congenital thyroid deficiency." Based upon Ezra Klein's latest embarrassing screed (doing further damage to the reputation of the already-mortally wounded Washington Post), it's apparent that Klein is either a cretin or a demented left-wing ideologue.

The reason I bring this up is because of the following headline o' the day, spotted over at Ricochet via the invaluable BadBlue.com.

Just Imagine The Mess Obama Will Inherit If He's Reelected!

When the June jobs report came out, showing 80,000 net new jobs and the unemployment rate stuck at 8.2%, Washington Post wunderkind Ezra Klein sarcastically responded:

It's times like this when I'm glad we're not employing hundreds of thousands of workers to rebuild the nation's infrastructure.

And super glad that we fired those 600,000 state and local workers. Our economy has more than enough jobs/demand as is!

Completely leaving aside the fact that Democratic legislators passed and President Obama signed a massive $800 billion spending bill meant to create those "shovel-ready jobs" (ha ha!) is the left's argument for bad numbers really  that we need a larger government? How out of touch with reality can one be?

[Another tweet] I have to share. From Frank J. Fleming:Has Obama considering solving unemployment through a not having a job tax?

You read that correctly: Ezra Klein is still yearning for even more deficit spending to fund make-work "infrastructure" jobs as our nation teeters on the edge of a fiscal abyss. Hell, everyone from former Obama adviser Peter Orszag to more sensible economists have warned we have just a couple of years left to save the country from economic disaster.

So what does Klein pine for? Borrowing trillions more from generations yet unborn -- an act of unbridled child abuse, mind you -- to spend on union-only jobs that launder money into Democrat campaign coffers.

Now, even a fifth-grade analysis of the economy would tell you that stealing money from the private -- productive -- sector and laundering it through countless layers of wasteful bureaucracy and known fraud, cronyism and payoffs -- detracts from the real economy. You know, Ezra, stealing from the country's producers, who create wealth, not steal it. Who employ people, who invest in capital equipment, who create new products and services. Who are, in effect, the opposite of government.

Year after year, Obama and his drone-like, nincompoop sycophants offer the same failed programs: spend now, pay later. These tactics will work no better in your private life than they do for government. In fact, when the government's involved, the outcome is considerably worse, because it's not their money. They spend your money like drunken GSA accountants on a taxpayer-subsidized jaunt to Vegas.

In Ezra Klein's world, full employment would be defined as half the population digging potholes in roads and the other half following close behind, filling them in. It's just embarrassing for everyone involved with this nut.

No wonder The Washington Post is headed for the dustbin of newspaper history. When cretins like Klein get a forum at your paper, you know you're toast.


Tuesday, July 03, 2012

Helpful flowchart: do I qualify for the Obamacare mandate-tax-penalty surcharge fee?


Hat tip: Adapted from a chart found at Noisy Room.

Good news: GM now owes taxpayers $35 billion (and by the way, how are those electric cars working out in DC?)

Well, the meme that the Obama campaign and its spokespeople in vintage media continue to promote is that a heroic Barack Obama saved General Motors.

Of course, as Andrew Malcolm reports today, it was the American taxpayer that saved GM -- at huge and needless expense.

General Motors shares fell to a fresh 2012 closing low of 19.57 on Monday. The stock hit 19 in mid-December, the lowest since the auto giant came public at $33 in November 2010 following its June 2009 bankruptcy.

Normally you might say, tough luck investors. But this is Government Motors. The Treasury still owns 26.5% of GM, or 500 million shares. Taxpayers are still out $26.4 billion in direct aid. Shares would have to hit $53 for the government to break even.

Those shares were worth about $9.8 billion as of Monday. That would leave taxpayers with a loss of $16.6 billion.


But that's not the full tally. Obama let GM keep $45 billion in past losses to offset future profits. Those are usually wiped out or slashed, along with debts, in bankruptcy. But the administration essentially gifted $45 billion in write-offs (book value $18 billion) to GM. So when GM earned a $7.6 billion profit in 2011 (more on that below), it paid no taxes.

Include that $18 billion gift, and taxpayers' true loss climbs to nearly $35 billion.

Which brings me to Washington, DC, which is still suffering from days-long power outages after major thunderstorms rolled through the area. I wonder how those electric cars are working out in the DC area?

If you're in the DC area, are you happy you don't have an electric car? Yeah, with the power outages, are you happy you don't have an electric car? Because two million, five million, three schmillion, whatever. Aren't you glad you don't have an electric car? By the way, how are those windmills working out for you? How are the windmills and solar panels working out? Are they running your air-conditioning for you?

...It's a good thing you don't have an electric car or you couldn't get around, you couldn't escape. Isn't it amazing.

Thank goodness, the masterminds in D.C. are instructing GM and other automobile companies to create even more electric cars. Never mind they don't work for s***. Misery loves company.


Monday, July 02, 2012

Boom: U.S. Manufacturing Plummets ("Unexpectedly"), 0 of 70 Analysts Predicted the Recession-like Numbers

Funny, you wouldn't think policies that sow distrust, uncertainty and fear among businesses would result in this kind of disaster.

Economic activity in the manufacturing sector contracted in June for the first time since July 2009... "The PMI registered 49.7 percent, a decrease of 3.8 percentage points from May's reading of 53.5 percent, indicating contraction in the manufacturing sector for the first time since July 2009, when the PMI registered 49.2 percent.

...All 70 economists polled by Bloomberg came in on the high side. Collapses are never expected.


The above chart by Doug Short (annotations in red, green, and purple by Mish) shows the importance in not relying on a single indicator as strong evidence of a recession.

Since 1959, the ISM dipped substantially below the 50% mark on five occasions when there was no recession. Moreover, in the 70's oil crisis, a recession began with the ISM near 70. The reverse happened in the wake of the Dot-Com bust as a recession did not start until the ISM was near 40.

The only question that remains: whether the president will blame ATMs, Europe, the Japanese Tsunami, earthquakes, or some new devil for all of his ills.

In November, let's ensure that the "you broke it, you own it" rule applies to the SCOAMF.


Infographic: President Obama's Top 10 Broken Promises

Via Townhall and the RNC, this chart pretty much sums up the SCOAMF effect.


Say, how's the president's Simpson-Bowles debt commission coming along?


Sunday, July 01, 2012

Graph: the 10 grooviest new Obamacare taxes

It's a tax! It's a penalty! It's a mandate! Thanks, Chief Justice Roberts!

...Obamacare will impose higher taxes totaling $4 trillion between now and 2035, with substantial hits on working Americans. That works out to more than $1.7 trillion over a decade—more than triple the original 10-year score.


...Below is a list of 10 of Obamacare’s most costly taxes and fees, drawn from research by Heritage tax policy expert Curtis Dubay:

1. Hospital Insurance Tax. Beginning in 2013, Obamacare increases the Hospital Insurance (HI) portion of the payroll tax from 2.9 percent to 3.8 percent for families earning more than $250,000 a year and for single filers earning more than $200,000 annually...
2. Mandate Penalties. In 2014, Obamacare’s individual and employer mandates go into effect, forcing individuals to purchase coverage and employers to offer coverage to their workers. The penalties paid in association with these mandates are an estimated $65 billion between 2014 and 2019...
3. Health Insurance Provider Fee. Starting in 2014, Obamacare imposes an annual fee on health insurance providers...
4. “Cadillac” Tax. In 2018, Obamacare puts a new 40 percent excise tax on “Cadillac” health plans...
5. Prescription Drug Fees. Since 2011, Obamacare has put an annual fee on manufacturers and importers of branded drugs...
6. Ethanol Tax. ...This will hike taxes $24 billion from 2010–2019...
7. Medical Device Tax. Beginning in 2013, Obamacare imposes a 2.3 percent excise tax on medical device manufacturers...
8. Business Regulation Costs. Beginning in 2012, ...businesses will be required to report more information on their business activities. This will raise taxes $17 billion from 2012 to 2019.
9. Reducing Medical Deductions. In 2013, Obamacare raises the floor on itemized medical deductions...
10. FSA Limits. Starting in 2014, Obamacare limits the amount of pre-tax dollars that taxpayers can deposit in flexible savings accounts (FSAs) to $2,500 a year. This results in an extra $13 billion in taxes from 2014 to 2019...

These are just the top ten. There are 18 Obamatax hikes in all.

And I'm sure all of them will work out... perfectly.


Dave Winer: Economic Illiterate

Dave Winer is a technical pioneer and arguably one of the world's first bloggers (he says he started blogging in 1994). But when it comes to philosophy, law, and economics, it would appear that he is a complete illiterate.

Consider his "epic rant on health reform":

There's no reason that everyone you know who uses the Internet shouldn't know exactly what the Affordable Care Act does. Never mind whether you like it or don't. Everyone should know what's in it.

And how would that be possible, Dave? None of the members of Congress even read the 2,700-page monstrosity before voting on it. It was created in secret, without open committee hearings, without any participation from Republicans, and shielded completely from the public until a few hours before the vote.

Everyone should know what's in it.

Everyone. Should. Know. What's. In. It.

And why not. [sic]

Gee, Dave, I'm struggling with this concept.

How can anyone comprehend a 2,700-page bill that creates a massive, Rube Goldberg-like labyrinth of more than 160 agencies, offices, bureaucracies and directorates?

How can anyone hope to understand a government takeover of one-sixth of the U.S. economy that attempts to replace and centrally manage billions of individual choices and interactions by doctors, nurses, caregivers, facility owners, insurers, medical device manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies and patients?

How can anyone come to grips with a 15-person panel of "masterminds" -- the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) -- whose dubious mission is to "slow the growth in national health care expenditures while preserving or enhancing quality of care"?

How can anyone grasp the series of claims used to market the bill -- "if you like your health care plan, you can keep it" and "your health care premiums will go down by as much as $2,500 per year", for example -- which have already been proven utterly false?

What an outrage that insurance companies can cancel your insurance when you get sick. How convenient for them. Hard to believe that's even possible, but it is.

An insurance contract does not permit a company to arbitrarily "cancel" a policy. An insurance policy is a legal contract, plain and simple. It can't be canceled during the term of the contract. And for the vast majority of Americans who receive health care through their employers, such an act is virtually unheard of.

So if you have a way with words and infographics and want to help your country, let's do this.

You mean like Avik Roy's "How Obamacare Dramatically Increases the Cost of Insurance for Young Workers", which describes the massive redistribution of wealth from young to old? You mean like "paying for" Obamacare by stealing $500 billion from Medicare?

Here are my words, Dave:

Where's tort reform in Obamacare? Where's true, free market competition? Where are price controls -- which always result in negative, unintended consequences -- obliterated? Where is the plan to save Medicare, which is headed for fiscal collapse in only five short years? Where is the plan to rescue all of the other failed federal programs -- from Fannie Mae and Social Security to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation and the student loan program takeover -- that are now facing tens of trillions in red ink?

Who will pay for all of these programs, Dave?

And how much longer can the country survive trillion-dollar annual deficits, Dave?

I won't hold my breath waiting for answers. Because these insane, Utopian plans always fail. Always. And the very last thing this country needed was a massive, new entitlement when it can't even pay for all of the entitlements and wealth redistribution programs it already has.



Saturday, June 30, 2012

Fascinating Chart: Unemployment Trends, State-by-State

Courtesy of Tyler Durden, this chart from Tableau Software illustrates the history of unemployment by state since 1976...

...and specifically the difference from historical averages. What the chart shows is that as more and more people have migrated to populated coastal areas, or those areas hit hardest from the recent deleveraging mean reversion depression, it is the flyover states, typically considered the least interesting, that are actually performing by far the best, with some places like North Dakota, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Vermont paradoxically having better relative employment right now than during any time in the past 40 years

Gee. I'm flabbergasted that red states are thriving while Democrat-controlled Utopias are collapsing under the weight of public sector union control, endlessly ratcheted taxes, and ever-increasing regulations.


I'll alert the media.

Oh, wait. They don't give a crap.



Your tax dollars at work: EPA hiring $180,000-a-year director of "environmental justice"

Environmental justice (EJ) refers to an equitable spatial distribution of burdens and benefits to groups such as racial minorities --Wikipedia

I'm delighted that a federal leviathan which borrows 40 cents of every dollar it spends is focusing on the nation's highest priorities:


It's November or never to save this Republic.

What can you do? If you have the wherewithal, support the most conservative candidates you can. Like Ted Cruz in Texas or Jim DeMint's Senate Conservatives Fund. My friends, we have work to do.


Hat tip: R.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Ban the word trillion

Andrew Tisch, co-founder of Loews, has an interesting idea to help restore fiscal sanity to federal budgeting decisions:

[There's] a tidy unit of measurement called a "trillion." We can get our heads around the word "trillion," and so we think we understand what we're looking at. In this case, it is the size of our national debt.

The thing is, it should be really hard to ever get our heads around a "trillion." Very few of us have ever seen a trillion of anything with our own eyes. Maybe a trillion grains of sand, but not a trillion trees or a trillion stars.

...As a nation, we spent $3.6 trillion last year on federal government services, and about one out of every three of those dollars was borrowed. That's a lot of money.

Just how much is a trillion dollars? Consider this: If you have a briefcase full of $100 bills, you'd have roughly $1 million. Few of us have ever seen that much money in one place, but we can at least imagine what it looks like. But a trillion dollars in $100 bills would weigh 22 million pounds!

Things get more interesting if you stack the $100 bills on top of each other, rather than pack them tight in a briefcase. You'd have only $10 billion by the time you got as high as a commercial jetliner cruises. Think about that next time you're up in the air.

If you want to see a trillion dollars of those Benjamin Franklins, you need to penetrate the Earth's atmosphere and keep on going—678 miles high. Our national debt, at 15.8 times that amount, would form a stack of $100 bills 10,712 miles high.

That's why this enormous number is trivialized by shortening it to a word that has only one more letter than its much more benign cousins, "million" or "billion."

So let's ban the word "trillion." It's a unit of measurement neither understood nor appreciated. If we must use the number, we should give it its proper due. Write it out with all its zeros—all 12 of them. So $15.8 trillion would be $15,800,000,000,000.

Or, from now on, if you want to say "trillion," say "one thousand billion" or "one million million," or "one thousand thousand thousand thousand." Our national debt, then, would go from $15.8 trillion to $15,800 billion. Doing this would show, among other things, that even cutting $100 billion from our debt would bring us down only to $15,700 billion.

Still, "billions" doesn't quite cut it. One billion dollars used to be a lot of money. Today no self-respecting dictator siphons less than that amount into his or her Swiss bank account. It simply wouldn't look good among peer dictators.

So what about expressing a trillion as "a million million"? By that standard, our deficit is now $15.8 million millions.

We can't keep piling more debt onto our children or our children's children or our children's children's children. Otherwise, the million million millions in debt will make their future worthless, worthless, worthless.

Indeed.



Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Today's Lesson

R. F. writes:

The Food Stamp Program, administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is actually proud of the fact it is distributing the greatest amount of free meals and food stamps ever.

In fact, it's now running ads across the U.S. (PDF) to encourage more use of food stamps.

Meanwhile, the National Park Service, administered by the U.S. Department of the Interior, asks us to "Please Do Not Feed the Animals."

The stated reason for the policy is because the animals soon grow dependent on handouts, forget how to fend for themselves, and starve to death if nobody is there to feed them.

Thus endeth today's lesson.

3 Graphs: How Obama's "Financial Reform" Crushed the Economy

These results are certainly apropos of any "financial reform" bearing the names of Barney Frank and Chris Dodd.

It is rare that a single law can have a significant adverse effect on the enormous U.S. economy. But there has never been anything like the Dodd-Frank Act. Signed into law by President Obama on July 21, 2010, its extraordinary effect in slowing the economy is coming into focus as its second anniversary approaches.

As shown in the chart below, the U.S. economy had a few reasonably good quarters of recovery after the crisis, particularly the third and fourth quarters of 2009 and the first quarter of 2010. These were not of Reagan quality, of course, but they suggested that the economy was beginning to heal.

On June 30, 2010, however, the Democrat-controlled House voted along party lines to adopt the House version of Dodd-Frank. That was expected, of course, but two weeks later two Republican Senators—Scott Brown of Massachusetts and Olympia Snowe of Maine—announced they would vote for cloture in the Senate. These two votes virtually assured that the bill would pass the Senate and eventually become law. Almost immediately, GDP growth in the third quarter of 2010 began to slow. It has never recovered.

...Although event studies like this are always subject to question, the fact that the same patterns are seen in overall GDP and in two major sectors of the economy lends support to the idea that they had the same cause. Moreover, no other event at the outset of the third quarter of 2010 can explain the two-year persistence of the decline that followed...

The act also had very substantial unintended consequences. In part, this was the result of the short shrift that the relevant congressional committees gave to specific provisions before adopting the law [which] was rushed through Congress only 18 months after the Obama administration took office and 13 months after the first draft of the law was available to Congress and the public. This would have been warp speed for any one of the major provisions in the act. For a law with dozens of complex, radical, and occasionally contradictory provisions, adopting it so quickly and with so little real understanding of its effects verged on dereliction of duty...

...For example, in the Title IX provisions on housing finance reform, two completely new and important concepts were introduced that had no clear meaning—the “Qualified Residential Mortgage” (QRM) and the “Qualified Mortgage” (QM)... now—almost two years after the act was signed into law—there is still no regulation that defines this key term... Similarly, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), another creation of the act, recently put off promulgating its definition of the QM until the end of 2012, conveniently after the election...

In short, like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Social Security, Medicare, "Great Society" and every other enormous, failed government program, Dodd-Frank is guaranteed -- that's right, I said it: guaranteed -- to fail.

One day, hundreds of years from now, historians will look upon this era's Democrat Party with amazement. How could any political party, they will ask, continue to pile program upon program without seriously evaluating the results of their prior failures?

The answer is simple. In their craven, white-knuckled death grip on power, Democrats are willing to promise anything, no matter how destructive it will be to society as a whole.


9 steps cities must take to save themselves from fiscal collapse

After negotiations with public sector unions and bondholders collapsed, the city of Stockton, California announced that it will file for bankruptcy.

Mike Shedlock says that the real reason for cities' burgeoning financial troubles revolve around unattainable pension promises, which he calls "a death trap for cities."

What's the Solution?

1. The immediate solution is bankruptcy. Expect to see more cities file. However, longer-term structural problems must also be addressed.
2. Untenable pension contracts need to be tossed out by the courts and benefits reduced. Every taxpayer not on the public dole should cheer bankruptcy, not resist it.
3. End defined benefit pension plans for public union workers.
4. End collective bargaining for public union workers. Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin has proven that can be done.
5. Scrap Davis-Bacon and all state prevailing wage laws.
6. Institute national right-to-work laws.
7. Merit pay for teachers
8. More competition from accredited online schools to drive education costs way down
9. Scrap student loan programs that only benefit administrators and educators, not the kids.

It's time to stop overpaying for all government-sponsored services including but not limited to police, fire, prison-workers, and education. The vicious, self-serving grip that unions and their political supporters have on this nation has to end. Governor Walker partially paved the way in Wisconsin. Other states must follow through. At the national level, we desperately need right-to-work laws while ending prevailing wages.

More and more municipalities -- unable to print money like their federal cousins -- will have to declare bankruptcy and wipe the slate clean.

Because sooner or later, the laws of mathematics will win out.


Related: A Brief, Illustrated History of the Public Sector Unions That, Together With The Democrat Party, Are Waging War on the Taxpayer.

The Rotting Racist Underbelly of the DNC Defectors

These folks all seem to have something in common:


That's right: they're all Democrats. And they're all skipping the Democrat National Convention.

If we used the "logic" of the Left (e.g., "The Rotting Racist Underbelly of the Tea Party Protests*"), it's clear that racism is the underlying problem with the DNC defectors.


* Never mind that that the Tea Party binds people of every race, creed, religion and color to protect the sovereignty of the individual. Never mind that the Tea Party and Constitutional Conservatives embrace the only system of human governance proven to offer more tolerance, more opportunity, and more freedom than any other system in history.