This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Economy

  • Obama: National Catastrophe Looms

    Jon Ward at the Washington Times reports that the Obama weekly address is more doom and gloom crisis yammering;

    President Obama on Saturday morning warned the nation of a “national catastrophe” if Congress does not move quickly to pass and implement his economic rescue plan, even as he lauded the Senate’s movement toward passage of an $827 billion version of the bill.

    “Yesterday began with some devastating news with regard to our economic crisis,” Mr. Obama said, referring to the Labor Department report Friday showing the loss of nearly 600,000 jobs in January, which moved the national unemployment rate up to 7.6 percent.

    If yesterday’s news was so “devastating”, why did the markets do this;

    Apparently, the markets see something that Obama doesn’t see. The Democrat President, instead of leading depends on fear;

    “If we don’t move swiftly to put this plan in motion, our economic crisis could become a national catastrophe. Millions of Americans will lose their jobs, their homes, and their health care. Millions more will have to put their dreams on hold,” he said.

    Yes, $45 million dollars for fish barriers will solve this problem. A new waterpark in Florida is the longterm solution. Where is the bi-partisanship? Why aren’t the Democrats cutting the pork out of the bill to compromise with Republicans to get their votes?

    The Washington Post calls it “bipartisanship” when squishy Republicans vote with Democrats. That’s not really bipartisanship – when you see the Democrats move closer to the minority party, that’s bipartisanship. Convincing Susan Collins to vote with Democrats is like convincing a dog to eat a strip of bacon. It’s not a question of “if” she’ll eat it, it’s a question of whether you’ll still have your fingers when she’s done eating it.

    CNN reports that support for the stimulus has slipped since we began to learn what’s in it;

    Fifty-one percent of those questioned in a CBS News poll released Thursday evening approved of the stimulus package. That’s down 12 points from a poll taken January 11-15, the last time CBS asked the question. Thirty-nine percent opposed the plan, up 15 points from the previous poll, taken before President Barack Obama was inaugurated and before the House of Representatives passed an $819 billion stimulus package, with no Republican support, on January 28.

    Funny how that works – the longer the debate goes on, the more Americans find out about the stimulus and the less they like it.

    My son sent me this South Park clip (do I need to give a language warning?);

  • Change we can’t afford

    The President went on television and wrote in the Washington Post today to scare the bejeezus out of us over the shit sandwich he wants to cram down our collective throat. In the Post, he warned;

    And if nothing is done, this recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.

    (more…)

  • GOP promotes their own stimulous plan

    According to the Washington Times, the Congressional Republicans have decided to act like participants in the process rather than just an ideological barricade to the Democrats’ massive implementation of their their socialist programs;

    House Republicans, leery of being labeled naysayers after rejecting the $819 billion economic rescue bill, are launching a district-by-district message campaign to promote their own stimulus bill and highlight the huge taxpayer debt amassed by the Democrats’ spending plan.

    The data, including a calculation of the debt load that the House-passed plan would heap on each congressional district, is being disseminated by the Republican National Campaign Committee (NRCC) through blogs, talk radio and local media in the districts of vulnerable Democrats.

    “We plan to make the case on a micro level that targeted tax relief and eliminating wasteful spending in any stimulus bill is the right way forward for America,” said Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, Virginia Republican.

    That’s how they’ll bring me back to the party – actually provide an opposing plan to give Americans a choice between parties. It’s an especially effective plan when the Democrats are sending gumballs like this to get their particular message out (found at Ace of Spades);
    (more…)

  • Excuse me if I don’t care

    The Washington Times runs a story today about “remittances” to Mexico which have fallen in 2008 for the first time ever;

    The money sent home by Mexican migrants fell in 2008 for the first time on record, Mexico’s central bank said Tuesday part of a global trend that could worsen as emigrants from developing countries lose jobs in the global financial crisis.

    Remittances, Mexico’s second-largest source of foreign income after oil, plunged 3.6 percent to $25 billion in 2008 compared to $26 billion for the previous year, the central bank said.

    Now, that means that money that was earned in the US wasn’t being spent in the US, so it wasn’t doing the American economy any good. But, to think that money was Mexico’s second largest source of foreign income ought to be embarrassing to Mexicans – like they’re our 40-something son living in the basement upset that his allowance has been reduced.

    Let me say this before I continue; I’m sympathetic to the conditions of those who live south of our borders. I’ve spent a lot of time down there – and I love the culture and the language. But their conditions in that part of the world are mainly their own fault.

    They’ve become dependent on free US dollars sent by their largely illegal relatives in the US. Instead of investing that money in their futures, they squandered it – and that’s a cultural thing.

    The percentage drop is nearly twice what the government had expected for the year, and central bank official Jesus Cervantes said the decline will likely continue this year.

    Can you imagine the government keeping track of money coming into the country from relatives as if it were some sort of agricultural endeavor. The Mexicans blame a crackdown on immigration violators as well as the economic downturn. I guess that’s the cost of doing business, huh?

    “Remittances are the single strongest poverty-reduction tool that many countries have,” said Robert Meins of the Inter-American Development Bank. “This could translate into a great deal of hardship for a lot of people, which I think is underappreciated.”

    Excuse me if I don’t care. Oh, I’m sure that somehow I benefit from the cheap illegal labor since I’m surrounded by tens of thousands of immigrants in my neighborhood, many of whom I’m sure are here illegally, but those folks sitting outside of our borders depending on our jobs for their sustenance need to learn trades and rebuild their own countries. But, I’m pretty sure the most motivated workers have left their countries to come here, leaving behind the eternally indigent.

    The best thing we can do for those countries and our own country is to return those illegal immigrants to their homes so they can put to use that which they learned here, and build for themselves and their countries the life that they came to enjoy here. They’ve learned what is possible, and they’ve learned how to make that kind of life. And they know what a valuable partner the US can be.

    Added: Sort of related, Michelle Malkin writes that Harry Reid does his best to keep illegal aliens here by doing away with most of the ID requirements that might keep an illegal from getting into the SCHIP. Sweet.

  • Wanna fix the economy without a bailout?

    I’m not a particularly smart man, but I have an over-abundance of common sense. It seems to me that if the government really wanted to fix the economy, the first thing they’d do is open up our off-shore oil fields and allow drilling in Alaska.

    In the short term, the government would get all sorts of royalties from the oil companies for their efforts, thousands of people would be employed to not only build the pipelines and the inherent infrastructure, but steel orders would rise to support the effort which would put steel workers back to their business, truckers would have jobs to haul the new material to the job sites. Not to mention all of the ancillary businesses that spring up to do laundry, sell groceries – and all the while the government is getting money from the oil companies to fund this ill-conceived TARP crap and they can put money into alternate energy programs so they can feel good about themselves.

    In the long term, when the oil is flowing, we’d get off of foreign oil, there’d probably be an alternative source of energy funded by oil company money (without the mess of windfall profits taxes). And those annual royalty payments would flowing into the Treasury.

    So, how come we’re not doing it?

  • Broder on Bush’s “greatest moral failing”

    The Washington Post’s David Broder writes this morning on “The Call That Bush Didn’t Make“, a typically liberal whine that Bush failed in the war against terror. But Broder reaches for the far edge of the Bush Derangement Syndrome envelope;

    Iraq and Afghanistan are the main fronts in the fourth major war of my lifetime, following World War II, Korea and Vietnam, and the first in which nothing was asked of the civilian population — no higher taxes, nothing to disrupt the comfort of daily life.

    Yes, you read that correctly. We could’ve won the war against terror by now if only President Bush had raised our taxes. Let’s just set aside the fact that Korea and Vietnam were also wars that had little impact on the American homefront, and let’s look at the utter absurdity of the claim Broder makes.

    The comfort of my daily life has been disrupted by the media’s inability to accept even that terrorists can be called terrorists. The comfort of my daily life is disrupted by the fact that the Washington Post and the New York Times habitually leak classified information that puts me and my family in danger. But most of all, the comfort of my daily life is disrupted by dyed-in-the-wool liberal “journalists” who think that the only way the comfort of my daily life can be disrupted to an acceptable level is by raising my taxes.

    Broder continues;

    [T]he president who asked nothing of the country continued to squander the budget surpluses he inherited while pressing larger and larger tax cuts on the wealthiest of his constituents and supporters. Tax cuts became the sovereign remedy for everything in the Bush years, even, or especially, when it became clear that the budgets had turned to deficits and we were borrowing abroad to finance these revenue giveaways.

    Geez, how long are these goofballs going to carry on about the “budget surpluses”? They were year-over-year surpluses, not some fat pile of money sitting in the Treasury building that Bush raided daily for pizza money. And it looks like Obama thinks that tax cuts are a “sovereign remedy”, too. They weren’t “revenue giveaways”, they were allowing people to keep the money they EARNED, you doofus.

    The upside-down logic of borrowing in order to cut taxes pervaded the rest of our public and private economic decision making, feeding the speculative booms that fueled unsustainable “bubbles” in financial and housing markets.

    Now the inevitable crash has come, and the nation is facing a deficit of more than $1.2 trillion — an unimaginable sum — in the current year.

    See that? It wasn’t helping people to buy houses they couldn’t afford that caused the “housing bubble” to burst, it was George Bush’s determination that people should keep their money. Letting us keep our money fed “the speculative boom” meaning that we’re too irresponsible when we’re allowed to keep our own money. No where does Broder advocate cutting government spending in his illogical screed – only making Americans pay for the inefficiency and waste of government regulation financed by more and more of our earnings.

    David Broder should turn off his IBM Selectric typewriter and retire to some park where he can yell his dated and insane rantings at passing ducks. George Bush never made the ducks suffer discomfort over the war against terror either.

  • A Merry Marxist Christmas

    I’m not what you might call a religious person. I rarely address religious issues here largely because I don’t understand the intricacies that separate the various sects and congregations. I only know what’s in my heart. And I know bullshit when I see it. A good way to make me think it’s bullshit early is to begin the conversation with a quote from Hugo Chavez on heaven to introduce the issue.

    Some member of the “Catholic Peace Movement” wrote a fairly lengthy line of BS that Christianity is the only thing missing from Marxism that’ll make Marxism work. He wrote it on Christmas Day;

    Christianity and Marxism are brothers of the same Father – Yahweh, the true God. The Christian message is that a new earth is achievable – the Kingdom of Heaven has blossomed among us. We have only to seize it by our faith and it will live in our hearts and in our societies because the God who guarantees it is trustworthy. The resurrection shows us the path beyond death. Christian faith is the missing key to socialist praxis. We can only achieve socialism through faith in God, not through economic determinism, which is an expression of the very dehumanization which socialism seeks to overcome.

    “The Marxist critique of anti-Utopian Christianity remains completely relevant and the image of God to which Marxist analysis now leads is no longer that of the supreme being but rather the God of the Christian message. This is a God within the human praxis of liberation, one who can provide Utopian praxis with a justification that goes beyond what is humanly achievable. From this perspective, something that is not humanly achievable can be declared achievable: the realm of freedom.

    Now, we all know that Marx demonized religion as the opiate of the people. We all know that the ACLU has been doing it’s level best to remove Christianity from the United States, so I’m guessing real Marxists are using the “Catholic Peace Movement” as a smoke screen to attract traditionally  Republican Christians towards the peace movement. Except that anyone that has watched Marxism practiced knows that Marxism is the exact opposite of freedom and guilding it with Christianity doesn’t make it any more attractive.

    The writer also makes the mistake of comparing Marxism to capitalism. Capitalism is not a form of government – but the Marxists have been making that mistake for nearly two centuries. They don’t dare compare Marxism to democracy because Marxism pales in the comparison. They prefer to talk in terms of economics instead of ideology.

    It’s beginning to appear to me that no aspect of the “Peace Movement” isn’t tinged by Marxists/Socialists/Communists.

  • Journalistic Karma

    Are you still getting your investment advice from the popular media? Why? Can you imagine publishing an article like this;

    On a day the market does this;

    After a month like this;

    Obviously, they don’t get paid for good investment advice, do they?

    I’m ready for the media to shut up about the stock market, actually. For five years, from 2002 until until last year, they barely said a word and my investments did exceptionally well. As soon as they started yapping about it, it tumbles.

    You could call it the Gore Effect for financial writers, i suppose.