Showing posts with label Pelosi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pelosi. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Welcome to Weimar, District of Columbia

Economist David Rosenberg of Gluskin-Sheff passes along an email from an old business associate.

I don’t know if you remember but we worked together at Merrill. I ran emerging markets from 1985 to 1996. I’ve always been a loyal fan and kept up with your writings.

As you know, I used to specialize in what we called then toxic waste countries. Reality has obviously taken a turn and what was toxic now is golden and the prime is now toxic. Our best countries are being run like banana republics and the famed moral hazard issues are now at the individual level with the strategic mortgage defaults. Keep in mind that in Mexico, it moved to wholesale credit card defaults at the last stage of the correction.

It is interesting to note that back then (the 80s) without currency zones but a fixed dollar, the order was devaluation, default, restructuring and budget balance with exports beginning the process of recovery. It was not until Summers’ bailout of Mexico that we entered this ridiculous world of constant bailouts, raising the size of them at every turn and lowering the bar to what constitutes risk.

Now, it’s worst than ever. The developed economies have huge fiscal deficits with no state assets to sell. The balance sheets of the developed nations are over leveraged. The deficits have taken a permanence to them. In the case of Europe with no individual devaluation alternative and their new massive debt load, the EU must now make huge fiscal cuts to get credibility. This is very reminiscent of the pre-depression year. If the EU follows through it will push a weak world into a severe double dip and bring the question of capacity to repay to the forefront anyways.

Monetization or printing may end up being the only end alternative. I know, and agree with you, that to have inflation you need demand. Where I disagree is that you can’t have inflation with such a significant slack in the economy. For those of us that lived or worked in the hyperinflationary South American zone of the seventies and eighties, inflation comes when people lose faith in the currency and see material goods as a store of value. Because commodities rise and the goods can no longer be expected to be made at the same cost structure, people assume that they will be worth more in the future creating a self fulfilling upward spiraling effect. You can anticipate that these state governments will introduce price controls as well as potentially fixing exchange rates worsening the situation.

My biggest fear is that these politicians and advisors have little experience in this area and are more concerned about controlling the political short term without regard to the longer term implications. I see this like an attempt at covering holes in a cracking dam with your fingers while the cracks are spreading. Bonds in the thirties were not a safe haven because they were restructured into 30 to 40 year bonds at 1.0-2.0% interest. Ultimately spending habits must decline, debt must be restructured, and growth must be promoted through the private sector.

Political interests must be aligned with long term economic objectives and I don’t see that any time soon. Obviously, I’m very negative right now. What am I missing?


Related: Don't Cry For Me, America.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Perfect timing for Democrats' health care cramdown as 'Medicare begins to implode'

The Houston Chronicle reports that the Medicare system in the state of Texas has flatlined. That's the same system Democrats ignored, presumably because they were too busy ramming an unconstitutional socialized medicine bill down the throats of taxpayers.

What do you call a Midas Touch with a slight twist -- anything that the person touches turns to diarrhea? Yes, it's an unpleasant image, but perfectly apt for the modern, Obama-Pelosi Democrats.

Texas doctors are opting out of Medicare at alarming rates, frustrated by reimbursement cuts they say make participation in government-funded care of seniors unaffordable.

Two years after a survey found nearly half of Texas doctors weren't taking some new Medicare patients, new data shows 100 to 200 a year are now ending all involvement with the program.

This new data shows the Medicare system is beginning to implode,” said Dr. Susan Bailey, president of the Texas Medical Association. “If Congress doesn't fix Medicare soon, there'll be more and more doctors dropping out and Congress' promise to provide medical care to seniors will be broken.”

...The largest number of doctors opting out comes from primary care, a field already short of practitioners nationally and especially in Texas. Psychiatrists also make up a large share of the pie, causing one Texas leader to say, “God forbid that a senior has dementia.”

The opt-outs follow years of declining Medicare reimbursement that culminated in a looming 21 percent cut in 2010.

These deadly changes represent only the tip of the administration's central planning iceberg, the real goal of which is to implement a single-payer system.

The health-reform law caps how much insurers can spend on expenses and take for profits. Starting next year, health plans will have a regulated "floor" on their medical-loss ratios, which is the amount of revenue they spend on medical claims. Insurers can only spend 20% of their premiums on running their plans if they offer policies directly to consumers or to small employers. The spending cap is 15% for policies sold to large employers...

...Restrictions on how insurers can spend money are compounded by simultaneous constraints on how they can manage their costs. Beginning in 2014, a new federal agency will standardize insurance benefits, placing minimum actuarial values on medical policies. There are also mandates forcing insurers to cover a lot of expensive primary-care services in full. At the same time, insurers are being blocked from raising premiums...

...The Obama health plan puts expensive new mandates on doctors, such as a requirement to purchase IT systems and keep more records. Overhead costs already consume more than 60% of the revenue generated by an average medical practice, according to a 2007 survey by the Medical Group Management Association. At the same time, reimbursement under Medicare is falling. Some specialists, such as radiologists and cardiologists, will see their Medicare payments fall by more than 10% next year. Then there's the fact that medical malpractice premiums have risen by 10%-20% annually for specialists like surgeons, particularly in states that haven't passed liability reform.

Unintended consequences like these are the inevitable result of central planning. Which masterminds among us could possibly predict the impact of these dictates upon hundreds of millions of affected individuals? Nancy Pelosi? Bart Frickin' Stupak? Harry Flipping Reid? Barack Milhaus Obama?

Not only is the free market the only system that has ever worked to improve the human condition, it is also the only system codified in our Constitution and Declaration. Indeed, it is the only system consistent with American values.

Everyone knows that ObamaCare is doomed to failure. The only open question is how much damage it does before patriots can put the brakes on.


Hat tip: Memeorandum. Linked by Michelle Malkin. Thanks!

Sunday, May 16, 2010

Zero Hedge Calculates Real Unemployment (12.2%) and Underemployment (22%) Rates; Democrats Shrug: 'You F***ed Up! You Trusted Us!'

Tyler Durden has carefully reexamined the nation's unemployment situation using population growth statistics that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) routinely ignores. The results are astonishing as he finds that real unemployment in the U.S. could be worse than that of Spain.

At 65.2%, the civilian employment participation rate is significantly lower than the 66.4% 20-year average.

But the U.S. population isn't static. The nearly straight line, above, represents the nation's population. But the second line, the civilian labor force, has grown at a much slower pace. The gap represents a growing class of the permanently unemployed and those who work under the table (e.g., illegal immigrants and others who pay no taxes). The group also represents an increasing pool of welfare and social service recipients who must be supported by a lower percentage of taxpayers.

Durden believes that the BLS has biased the data to skew the unemployment numbers -- and using the real population data, unemployment (U-3) is actually 12.7% (nearly 30% higher than the "official" 9.9%).

The underemployment (or U-6) rate is even more dire. It represent the "real" unemployment rate that many other countries use in their calculations. Durden states that our true unemployment measure is 22%; 34 million people who are "unemployed, marginally attached, plus total employed part time for economic reasons."

The average duration of unemployment is now a record high of 33 weeks (nearly eight months). Nearly half of the unemployed have been out of work for more than six months.

And the chart shows that this average out-of-work duration continues to skyrocket.

Democrats took a serious but typical recession and turned it into an utter disaster. Spending program upon spending program, debt upon debt, welfare payment upon welfare payment, earmark upon earmark, entitlement upon entitlement -- unemployment payments without end and always more regulations, more government-controlled industries and more taxes.

This level of irresponsibility is unprecedented in American history. It really is November or never to throw these bums out of office.


Fire Pelosi: Show your support with Harris, Nunnelee, Pearce, Guinta, Chabot & Stivers Blog Widgets

Herein I present six (count 'em: six) blog widgets using my patented "Double Your Vote" theme. Each points to the respective GOP challenger in a key House race. If you don't have a blog yourself, please pass the link on to friends who do. Needless to say, if you have a blog -- get to steppin'.

And, either way, if you can spare a couple of bucks, click on the links and donate.

MD-01

DOUBLE YOUR VOTE: ELECT HARRIS
FIRE KRATOVIL & PELOSI


MS-01

DOUBLE YOUR VOTE: ELECT ALAN NUNNELEE
FIRE TRAVIS CHILDERS AND NANCY PELOSI


NM-02

DOUBLE YOUR VOTE: ELECT PEARCE
FIRE TEAGUE & PELOSI


NH-01

DOUBLE YOUR VOTE: ELECT GUINTA
FIRE PELOSI & SHEA-PORTER


OH-01

DOUBLE YOUR VOTE: ELECT CHABOT
FIRE NANCY PELOSI AND STEVE DRIEHAUS


OH-15

DOUBLE YOUR VOTE: ELECT STIVERS
FIRE PELOSI & KILROY


Saturday, May 15, 2010

IMF: Say, Sparky, right about now wouldn't exactly be the best time to increase federal spending -- unless you wanted to trigger an economic collapse

The latest edition of the International Monetary Fund's Fiscal Monitor (PDF) was made public on Friday. Even the terse, spare prose of economists living on various governments' tabs could not conceal the ominous message: this ain't exactly the time for any country -- least of all the United States -- to take on more debt.

In terms of adding both gross debt and overall deficit (as a percentage of total economic output, or GDP), the U.S. is outspending Portugal, Great Britain, Italy and -- wait for it -- Greece. This level of deficit spending, on the heels of massive borrowing in 2009, is simply unsustainable.

Canada is reducing its debt.

Italy's borrowing has increased recently, though at a much slower rate than prior years.

Even Japan, which sells its debt primarily to its citizens, has begun to slow the rate of growth.

The United Kingdom has reined in its debt growth as well, as evidenced by the flattened hump.

Meanwhile, the United States' deficit spending looks like a moonshot.

Despite all of the TARP spending and so-called "fiscal stimulus" programs, the U.S. and other developed countries suffer from dramatic downturns in revenue. For you drones out there, that means the real, private economy is flat on its back. Real businesses like energy, insurance, manufacturing, etc. You know, the ones that you Marxists hate.

This year alone, the U.S. has bonds (debt) representing 21.2% of its entire economic output coming due (maturing). This means that new debt must be issued. Heard of a Treasury Auction? That's a sale of debt and the amounts that must be refinanced are staggering.

The risks are immense. Consider Greece and the panic it caused. The chart directly above depicts interest rates on various countries' debt from November 2008 to May 2010. As investors lost confidence that the Greek government could make its bond payments (service the debt), interest rates skyrocketed. This helped precipitate the 1,000-point drop in the Dow that we experienced little more than a week ago. The risk for the U.S. is stark: should investors conclude that the federal government will be unable to make its bond payments, our interest rates will necessarily skyrocket. The result would be hyperinflation and economic catastrophe, not dissimilar to the pre-Hitlerian days of the Weimar Republic when the German economic system melted down and its currency became worthless.

The cost to insure yourself against a governmental default -- a failure to make its interest payments -- is called a CDS spread and is represented here. You can clearly see what occurred to the price of Italy, France and the U.K. CDS when Greece began to implode.

The IMF also attempted to predict the effect of new deficits, based not only on projected spending but also entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare, etc.) that will suffer from massive growth as the population ages. Based on this measure, the U.S. fiscal situation is the worst in the world. Its projected budgets are, by far, the most irresponsible on the planet.

And as for the Keynesian School of Economists -- the Paul Krugmans of the world who believe that governments should grow unchecked and spend their way out of recessions -- this graph shows that the Obama-Democrat plan for spending was doomed from the start, as we conservatives predicted. Put simply, the lower the deficit spending, the better your economy will grow.

That's what our founders knew. That's why they tried to restrain what the federal government could do with specifically enumerated powers. You know, that living-and-breathing contract with America called the Constitution.

Even the IMF is trying to tell us to stop the insanity: "If governments fail to signal a credible commitment to reduce debt ratios, the resulting increase in interest rates (and decline in growth rates) could increase the [possibility of a dangerous financial condition]... fiscal adjustment will require a sizable, and sometimes unprecedented, effort."

Democrats in Congress are not reducing or stabilizing debt... they are increasing debt to heights never before seen in world history, including a new entitlement program that threatens to capsize the fiscal ship of state.

Call it an Obonzi Scheme that puts this country on the precipice of disaster.

It's November or never, my friends.


Friday, May 14, 2010

People's Republic of California Commissar Schwarzenegger Announces "Absolutely Terrible" Budget Cuts

Today, California announced that it's bankrupt. Governor Schwarzenegger stated that he'd been forced to take an "axe" to an out-of-control stage budget. As an aside, aren't Democrat-controlled Utopias cool?

Several things have changed since the last budget:

• The legislators didn't come up with enough savings.

• Expected $6.9 billion from the federal government... received around half.

• Federal judges have blocked changes to health and human services, prevented us from using the "scalpel" and now have to use the "axe"

Eliminating major programs:

CalWORKS, most child-care programs, In-Home Supportive Services, Health Families program...

Includes a 5% pay cut for state workers.

To be fair to Democrats, who could possibly have anticipated that encouraging unchecked illegal immigration -- with amazingly rich welfare benefits -- might cause a fiscal, eh, imbalance?

...Schwarzenegger on Friday called for eliminating California's welfare-to-work program, one of the deep cuts he proposed to close a $19 billion budget deficit in the coming fiscal year... Slashing the welfare program would affect 1.4 million people, two-thirds of them children.

...the state's 12.6 percent unemployment rate ranks among the highest in the nation and tax revenue remains low. In April, personal income tax was $3 billion less than projected... The state's general fund spending will be $83.4 billion for the new fiscal year, the lowest level in six years. The deficit accounts for more than 20 percent of all projected spending...

...Gina Jackson, a single mother who lives in Fremont in the San Francisco Bay area, said she would not be able finish her college degree in political and social science without the state's assistance. She currently receives about $1,000 a month to cover after-school care for two of her four children... "I certainly can't take my kids to school with me every single day," said Jackson, 45, who was laid off from her job as an administrative assistant two years ago.

...On Friday, the governor made good on his threat from earlier this year to eliminate the state's welfare-to-work program unless the federal government gave California an additional $6.9 million [sic -- they meant billion], which Schwarzenegger maintains is its fair share. So far, the state has received nearly $3 billion... ...Democrats want to close tax credits and loopholes, noting that the state allows $50 billion worth of tax deductions.

"We will not pass a budget that eliminates CalWORKS. We will not be party to devastating families," said Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento. "What kind of civilized society maintains business tax breaks and eliminates child care? That's not the California I take pride in living in."

Never mind that the public sector unions continue to brutalize the taxpayer. In the formulations of Democrats, government needs to grow and grow and grow, no matter what shape the private sector is in. Call it Miracle-Grow for Government:

To help close the budget gap, the governor is asking lawmakers to change the way the state calculates education funding to save the state more than $2 billion, which would hold year-over-year spending roughly flat for public schools. Overall funding for K-12 schools and community colleges has already dropped by 12 percent over the past three years.

The governor also wants to eliminate state subsidies for child care, which would affect 142,000 children...

Schwarzenegger [also] proposed cutting $15 million from the program and shifting more of the costs to recipients, including raising the co-payment for emergency room visits from $15 to $50...

The governor also proposed to move non-violent felons to county jails. I don't see how anything could go wrong with that, can you?

...Schwarzenegger will revive a plan to house 15,000 nonviolent felons in county jails instead of state prisons, a cost-cutting move that likely would result in some inmates leaving jail early.

...Local law enforcement agencies vigorously opposed a similar idea that Schwarzenegger floated in January, in part because the state would not have reimbursed counties for housing inmates. That proposal would have saved the state $291.6 million...

Now: imagine this sort of fiscal catastrophe at the national level.

Because that's what's happening at this very moment with the Obama-Democrats.

...the administration's release of its 10-year budget - the most irresponsible federal document ever released - ...plans for unsustainable debt and does not even propose a path out.

The Congressional Budget Office reported in the summary of its document, "The Long-Term Budget Outlook": "The federal budget is on an unsustainable path - meaning that federal debt will continue to grow much faster than the economy over the long run. ... Rising costs for health care and the aging of the U.S. population will cause federal spending to increase rapidly. ...

...In the face of financial ruin of the nation, it was unconscionable to pass a new health entitlement that almost all Americans know will add trillions to the debt.

It's November or never. Rally your neighbors, your families and friends. Vote for the most fiscally conservative Republicans you can.

Because the clock on the Democrats' deficit time-bomb for America is ticking. Be a real-life Jack Bauer and help defuse it.


ObamaCare Today: Democrats unveil National Abortion Database (NAD) to track all terminated pregnancies in the United States

One of the lesser known aspects of the Democrats' massive new health care bill is its mandate for a national health care database.

...it requires doctors to record patients' treatments in an electronic medical database and monitors doctors' decisions. Dr. David Blumenthal, the Obama administration's National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, explained in the New England Journal of Medicine last April that "embedded clinical decision support" — his euphemism for computers telling doctors what to do — will manage the quality of doctors' decisions.

ObamaCare dictates that every detail for every patient is recorded and maintained in a super-secure government database, which literally has zero chance of ever being compromised.

Feminists, who shouted "hands off my uterus" during the sixties' pro-abort demonstrations, are beginning to realize what the national health care database means.

Put simply, Democrats have put in place the mechanism for a National Abortion Database (NAD) to track all terminated pregnancies in the country.

But not to worry: the government is quite skilled at protecting personal information and would never, ever use that sort of personal information for political ends.

In fact, I hear rumors that NAD will be stored on a super-secure USB flash drive at the White House itself, where Rahm Emanuel will personally oversee security.


Thursday, May 13, 2010

President Obama in Buffalo: "You're welcome, America!"

The press release aggregator known as Politico offers its nominee for 2010's most hilarious lede.

Emboldened by positive jobs numbers and an uptick in his own polls, President Barack Obama stood squarely behind his economic record Thursday and accused Republicans of doing nothing to contribute to the growth.

Actually, it's hard to contribute when you're pimp-slapped to the curb, pilloried with a massive propaganda campaign and actually locked out of every substantive policy discussion.

Obama said he was empathetic to public concerns over bailouts but defended his administration’s unpopular spending spree on aid for the auto industry, Wall Street and the economy as a whole. He didn’t like the bailouts either, he told an audience in a hard-hit region of upstate New York. He cast his choices as noble ones in which he defied “the politics of the moment” to do “what the moment required.”

Noble choices, if you're a self-designated Marxist ideologue who visibly bristles at criticism.

...The president touted the gain of 290,000 jobs last month, giving credit to his administration. Despite the increase in unemployment last month to 9.9 percent, he unequivocally predicted economic growth every month going forward.

Gee, Mortie, if I subtract the Census jobs and the "birth-death" mathematical calculation from the official numbers, I come up with about 36,000 real jobs created. At this rate, we could recover the eight million jobs lost in the recession in, oh, a little under two decades.

I can say this beyond a shadow of a doubt: Today, we are heading in the right direction,” Obama said. “Those tough steps we took — they’re working. Despite all the naysayers who were predicting failure a year ago, our economy is growing again. Next month, it will be stronger than last month. And next year will be better than this year.”

The right direction -- if you're an Alinsky-ite bent on bringing the entire system down. In fact, I'm willing to bet a nice, shiny Kruggerand on precisely the opposite. We're headed for a major fiscal catastrophe unless we throw this government out in November. Even then, we're cutting it way too close for comfort.

As a reminder, consider yesterday's cheery headlines, which President Obama somehow forgot to mention in his Chavez-like speech.

• U.S. posts 19th straight monthly budget deficit
• U.S. must avoid Greece-style crunch: Orszag
• US More Bankrupt Than Ever - $83 Billion April Deficit Is Record
• California Now One Of The Top 10 Government Default Risks In The World
• The U.S. Government Is About To Get Hit With 'The Perfect Storm' Of Debt

And in the midst of this orgy of deficit spending that threatens to capsize the ship of state, Democrats in Congress and President Obama plan to ram $200 billion in new deficit spending through before the Memorial Day recess.

I urge you to call your Congressional representatives and thank them for President Obama's fine stewardship of the economy and his deft handling of Iran, North Korea, Syria and all of the Communists on the march in South America.


Monday, May 10, 2010

Fun with the Bureau of Labor Statistics Database

As Nancy Pelosi said months ago, it's all about "jobs, jobs, jobs and jobs."

That's why our beloved Democrat leaders have spent all of their time spending money borrowed from our children, creating new entitlement programs and impoverishing the taxpayers of America. If you need more proof, may I present Exhibit A, which I call It's Another Obama Record: 40 million on Food Stamps!?

And if you need still more proof that Democrats are concerned with only one thing -- power, power, power and more power -- allow me to present Exhibits B, C and D, courtesy of our friends at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. These are a little set of tables I like to call The slow-motion destruction of the American economy.

The number of long-term unemployed (six or more months) continues to rise, which translates to more foreclosures, more bad loans and more folks having to survive with public assistance.

The U-3, U-4, U-5 and U-6 unemployment measures all continue to rise. This means the economy -- in simple terms -- sucks. Say, Mr. Bernanke, I can't wait for the Bush tax cuts to expire! That ought to really help!

It's now been 18 months since the election, and unemployment among African-Americans continues to rise. The constituency that voted en masse for this President has been utterly failed by his policies. Utterly and completely failed.

Because socialism, wealth redistribution -- whatever you want to call it -- doesn't work, can't work and has never worked. It's a pity that so many people bought into the populist rhetoric that turned out to be pure mythology.


Obamanomics: Jobless are turning down work so they can surf the web, watch WWE RAW and collect unemployment

In Michigan, the state with the highest unemployment rate in the U.S., people are turning down job offers so they can continue collecting unemployment checks. With the recent federal extensions, those unemployment checks can run as long as 99 weeks (for you liberals, that's nearly two years). At which point it's not unemployment, it's yet another failed welfare-slash-redistribution scheme.

Members of the Michigan Nursery and Landscape Association "have told me that they have a lot of people applying but that when they actually talk to them, it turns out that they're on unemployment and not looking for work," said Amy Frankmann, the group's executive director. "It is starting to make things difficult."

Chris Pompeo, vice president of operations for Landscape America in Warren, said he has had about a dozen offers declined. One applicant, who had eight weeks to go until his state unemployment benefits ran out, asked for a deferred start date.

It's illegal to collect unemployment benefits after receiving a suitable job offer, but that hasn't stopped plenty of workers from doing so. Furthermore, fully 15% of Michigan's economy has been driven underground, with barter and cash transactions escaping government scrutiny. Boy, that Governor Granholm's doing a bang-up job!

The current federal jobless benefits extension "reduces the incentive to find work", according to David Littman, an economist at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. One unemployed landscaper confirms that assertion; he says he'll start searching for work when his benefits expire. He estimates that he only loses about $50 a week staying unemployed.

Gee, these Democrats are just phenomenal at central planning. They remind me of the guys running East Germany in the sixties.


Hat tip: Drudge.

Saturday, May 08, 2010

Internal AT&T presentation: we'll save $4.1 billion a year if we drop all employee health care benefits

You know how President Obama relentlessly marketed his health care takeover with the slogan 'If you like your current health care plan, you'll be able to keep it™'?

Here's a news flash that you won't see in the legacy media: he lied.

Someone inside AT&T leaked an internal Powerpoint presentation that measured the financial impact of DemCare.





AT&T estimates that it can save upwards of $4 billion annually by dropping health care coverage and paying the penalty tax instead.

They'd be foolish to keep their health care benefits and, in fact, shareholders should demand the company capture that income and return it in the form of increased dividends and R&D.

Like the Soviet central planners of a bygone era, today's Democrats are marching us into an abyss of unintended consequences for our entire health care system. They're pushing us, shoving us, against our will, over a cliff of fiscal irresponsibility. They're killing a legacy of prosperity that we could otherwise bequeath to subsequent generations.

The modern, hard left Democrat Party leadership is intentionally trying to destroy the Republic: open borders, votes for felons, statehood for Puerto Rico -- using any and all means to gain the votes necessary to stay in power, no matter how catastrophic the effects are on the country.

As someone told me a while back: it's November or never.


Hat tip: William Teach.

Friday, May 07, 2010

Welcome to Athens, New Jersey: State Public Sector Unions Claim That Having to Pay 1.5% for their Health Care is 'Unconstitutional'

If Europe's economic meltdown hasn't convinced you that massive public sector unions lead to fiscal catastrophe, may I present Exhibit B? In New Jersey, the public employee unions are outraged that having to pay 1.5% of their salaries towards their health care benefits is 'unconstitutional'. On a salary of $80,000, that comes to $46 (pre-tax) per two-week pay period. And they refuse to pay it.

Governor Christie has vowed to press ahead with additional pension and health benefits changes for public workers despite two lawsuits challenging reforms he recently signed into law... Despite blowback from the unions, the new Republican governor promised to push for other reforms. They include a proposed 2.5 percent cap on local spending and property tax increases modeled on a Massachusetts law.

...Christie was swept into office on a wave of voter discontent over soaring property taxes, which average $7,300 per homeowner per year, the highest in the country.

...Christie has promised to stabilize — then reduce — New Jerseyans' tax burden. But to do it, he says he needs labor concessions and cost-cutting reforms that his Democratic predecessor, Jon Corzine, was unable to achieve... New Jersey's pension system is underfunded by about $46 billion and could one day be insolvent unless fixes are made.

The state's largest teachers union, the New Jersey Education Association, filed a lawsuit Wednesday to halt the reforms Christie signed last month. The state's police and firefighters unions filed a similar suit last week.

The unions claim the law requiring them to contribute 1.5 percent of their salaries towards health care benefits "interferes" with collective bargaining and is unconstitutional. NJEA's suit charges that the mandatory contribution amounts to an illegal salary reduction.

America's public sector unions and the Democrat Party -- but I repeat myself -- are propelling the country into an economic abyss.

Has any "journalist" asked President Obama why Greece is melting down?

Could one of our legacy media "reporters" look into the reason the bankrupt European Utopias, with their socialized medicine, their open immigration policies, and outrageous public sector unions, are the exact models for this President and this Congress?

Might Katie Couric or Brian Williams devote a 180-second background segment to the ties between Europe's strain of Socialism and its current economic condition?

I know, I know. I'm a dreamer. Real journalism has been delegated to true reporters like Malkin, Breitbart, Tapscott, Reynolds, Riehl, Hoft, York, Hanson, Morrissey, and the like.


It's the Obama Recovery! Removing Census Jobs and Other Chaff From Employment Numbers Reveals That Only 36K Jobs Were Added Last Month

The New York Times breathlessly reports the new 9.9% unemployment number as wonderful news, proclaiming that the "Economy Gains Impetus as U.S. Employers Add 290,000 Jobs!"

The world's dumbest blogger, in lockstep with the Times, joins the chorus, stating that "today’s numbers are actually good in the sense of 'consistent with the unemployment rate falling.'"

The Glute-master parrots the Times' spin with "today's jobs report [is] excellent."

Back in the little land we like to call reality, the numbers remain grim, while the Democrat-led malaise in California, Illinois, Michigan and New York is literally devastating entire communities. Tyler Durden's headline reads, "Fake +290K Payrolls "Added", Real Number Is 36K After Census And Birth-Death, Unemployment Goes Back To 9.9%, Underemployment At 17.1%"

Of the 290,000 jobs "added", census workers totaled 66,000 while the "Birth-Death Model" (the mathematical method by which the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates eligible workers) added 188,000 "jobs".

Unemployment is at 9.9% and the underemployment rate is 17.1%. Feeling stimulated yet?