Greece, America, And Economic Implosion

Do we really want to follow Obama's plan to economically emulate Europe?

In America, we are beginning to sense a nasty reality that President Obama must acknowledge: Our worst economic problems lie ahead, and fixing those problems is going to hurt -- plenty. Our federal government now runs a con game that promises people a level of financial security impossible to deliver. Honoring Medicare and Social Security obligations alone will require confiscatory taxation capable of killing off prosperity. And so it is time to cure our nanny-state insanity and get back to basics.

Current events in Greece illustrate the misery that comes from ignoring the basics. The Greek economy is collapsing. A rampant entitlement mentality and the resulting government expansion have ballooned publicly-held debt to 121 percent of the country's 2010 economic output. (America could exceed the 100-percent debt-to-output threshold in 2011.) The European Community's reaction to the Greek tragedy? Mixed. French Prime Minister Sarkozy says the euro block will help "if needed." German Chancellor Merkel offers no aid. A senior member of Merkel's party suggests that Greece sell some of its islands to raise money.

Greece's Prime Minister Papandreou says that Greece has become "a laboratory animal in the battle between Europe and the markets." Progressives view society as their laboratory. Just as President Obama preaches to Americans too dim to swallow his wisdom, Euro-progressives want to force foolishness on a people's unreceptive leader.

Greece needs to address its own problems, the first of which is reality-blind union workers violently whining for government to hand over money the government doesn't have. But the E.C., observes Manhattan Institute's Nicole Gelinas, cannot bear to let Greece solve Greek problems. Too risky. Greece is too big to fail. Gelinas writes, "The empty purse is Papandreou's best tool for keeping public resolve strong in the face of crippling strikes by public workers." In other words, forcing bratty children to take the hit for bankrupting mom and dad is just the right medicine. In Greece, severe pain just might spark sane policies.

In America, we'd first have to purge Washington of most of that asylum's patients; otherwise, sanity would remain a pipe dream. Buffoonery abounded in our 2008 economic crash -- partly induced by over-borrowing induced by over-lending induced by everybody-must-own-a-house nonsense. Even now, Barney Frank and other starry-eyed congressional ideologues still deny that lending to moneyless borrowers assures disaster.

To deal with our American disaster, experts call for our economy to be "transformed." President Obama wants a "fundamental" transformation. But what America really needs is a transformation that would undo a century of malignant progressivism that perverted the free-market capitalism on which our nation was founded. Returning to those free-market basics will not be painless.

New America Foundation fellow Reihan Salam compares our current jam to the early 1980s recession. He finds that the economic restructuring that President Reagan and Federal Reserve Chairman Volcker implemented "subjected American families to extreme economic pain, and hundreds of thousands of industrial jobs evaporated and never returned." By reducing taxes and not interfering with business and financial market shakeouts that must occur in economic down cycles, Reagan and Volcker allowed failing companies to fail, disappearing jobs to disappear, and worthless investments to remain worthless.

Not much fun, but the solution worked. Reagan's phased-in tax cuts gradually eased America's economic pain and freed up capital to ignite the most prosperous twenty years in modern times. Had Reagan chosen the course elected later by George W. Bush and Barack Obama, doing "everything in their power to preserve the economy," Salam believes that America "would be an economic backwater." It's hard to escape the feeling that Salam had Obama's fundamental transformation in mind.

Still, America does need change. Economists Brian Wesbury and Robert Stein point out, "Even if Greece, Illinois, California, or the U.S. itself ... declared it would make zero [debt] payments ... it would still have substantial annual budget deficits. At that point, the only fix would be to cut spending because potential lenders would go on strike." So the reality is that even before considering loan payments, Washington spends more taxpayer money than Form 1040 grabs -- a modus operandi that Obama wants to turbo-charge.

To clean up our economic mess, we must face up to its causes. The subprime mortgage meltdown played a role, but the biggest driver was enormous government spending -- not just on welfare state entitlements, but also on corporatism that rewarded favored big businesses and motivated Wall Street to create the flimsiest investment schemes ever. Then, when subprime mortgages and investments derived from those mortgages collapsed, Washington rejected anything resembling back-to-basics and also did nothing to unburden the small business engine that could quickly restart the economy. Instead, Bush and Obama threw trillions of future taxpayer dollars at big business bailouts and phony "job-saving" programs, thus delaying the inevitable: the liquidation of bad investments and bad companies allowed by Reaganesque tough love.

Other presidents successfully applied tough love. In 1914, Calvin Coolidge noted, "Self-government means self-support ... History reveals no civilized people among whom there was not a highly educated class and large aggregations of wealth"[1]. Such honesty about how freedom breeds inequality of results is rare in American politics. Coolidge acknowledged the importance of industrious individuals garnering large rewards and creating wealth from which all individuals benefit proportionate to individual contribution. As president, Coolidge helped engineer a quick recovery from the early 1920s recession by continuing President Harding's tax-cutting and spending reduction. Americans agree with Coolidge: A moral government frees people to account for themselves.

After decades of fiscal irresponsibility, there's going to be pain no matter what.  The question is: will we gut through the pain short-term in order to enact real solutions that bring about the next mountaintop economic boom, or do we suffer the pain ongoing as a new sort of permanent existence, thus transforming a miserable valley into a plain of desolation for as far as the eye can see?

Obama and the Democrats are rushing us headlong toward the plain of desolation.  If they are allowed to succeed, they will bring America to its knees using the same policies that is causing Greece to implode right before our eyes.

There's my two cents.

I Believe The Word They're Looking For Is 'American'

Have you received your 2010 Census notification letter yet?  I have, and it irritated the crap out of me.  The thing that most rubbed me the wrong way is that, in the space of a few short sentences, the letter mentioned it was important that I fill out my census form so that I get "my fair share" of government money.  Twice.  Can we say dependence, or what?  Gag me with a wooden spoon.

Two other things annoyed me, too.  The first is that advertisement phrase at the bottom of the form being printed in several different languages.  Now, I realize that we're a melting pot and all that, but shouldn't everyone in this country be well-versed in English?  That's kind of the primary language here, you know.  There's no reason to use multiple languages on this thing other than pure political pandering.  Second is the entire premise of the letter itself - do we really need a letter telling us that we're about to receive a letter on the 2010 census? 

Apparently, I'm not alone in that one:

The Census has sent me a letter telling me that they're going to send me a letter.  Brilliant!

I'm having a difficult time deciding if this letter is:

1. Supposed to be helpful or informative in some way.
2. A joke.
3. Some sort of Obama stimulus plan for the postal workers
4. My imagination.

I'm betting on option 3.

Probably from the TARP or 'stimulus' slush funds, I'm guessing.

Mark Krikorian offers an outstanding suggestion:

I haven't gotten my letter from the Census Bureau yet asking me to make sure I fill out the questionnaire. But when I do fill it out, I'll use it to send a message.

Fully one-quarter of the space on this year's form is taken up with questions of race and ethnicity, which are clearly illegitimate and none of the government's business (despite the New York Times' assurances to the contrary on today's editorial page). So until we succeed in building the needed wall of separation between race and state, I have a proposal. Question 9 on the census form asks "What is Person 1's race?" (and so on, for other members of the household). My initial impulse was simply to misidentify my race so as to throw a monkey wrench into the statistics; I had fun doing this on the personal-information form my college required every semester, where I was a Puerto Rican Muslim one semester, and a Samoan Buddhist the next. But lying in this constitutionally mandated process is wrong. Really — don't do it.

Instead, we should answer Question 9 by checking the last option — "Some other race" — and writing in "American." It's a truthful answer but at the same time is a way for ordinary citizens to express their rejection of unconstitutional racial classification schemes. In fact, "American" was the plurality ancestry selection for respondents to the 2000 census in four states and several hundred counties.

Sounds good to me!  In fact, "American" was the fastest growing ancestry group in the previous decade.

Michelle Malkin reminds us of Teddy Roosevelt's excellent thoughts on the subject:

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all… The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic… There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.

Let's make the numbers jump off the page this time around.  Pass the message along to everyone you know.

The word we're looking for is "American".  That's it.  Period.

There's my two cents.

Heroes

The news has been pretty oppressively negative lately, so I wanted to take a brief moment to share some stories of heroism.

First, we have a story about the four-footed kind of hero (h/t Jawa Report):

Yolanda Segovia heard a knock on her door one morning, just before 8 a.m.

Her neighbor was on the porch, with a dog and a story.

Stacey Savige had found the little dog in front of an elementary school. He wasn't very big, looked like some sort of terrier. Burrs clung to his belly. His honey fur was caked in mud.

He didn't have a collar. Stacey had taken him to the vet and he didn't have a chip, either.

Now Stacey had to go to work. Could Yolanda keep him?

Yolanda is 47. She's a divorced mom with two boys. In recent years she has survived breast cancer and cervical cancer, lost her dark hair and eyelashes to chemo. A hairdresser, she hasn't worked since 2006.

"You can leave the dog here," Yolanda told Stacey. "But just for today."

They took photos of the dog and made a FOUND flier. Stacey ran off 4,000 color copies. She and Yolanda stuffed mailboxes, put ads on Craigslist.

Yolanda took her boys to the dollar store and bought a collar, leash, ball and brown bed. Her 10-year-old, Azaiah, decided to call the dog RaeLee, pronounced "Riley." He said he had heard it on TV. All afternoon, he walked the dog, threw the ball, laughed while the dog licked his face.

"Don't fall in love with him," Yolanda kept warning.

Her elder son, Christian, 21, watched through the window. Christian has Down syndrome and an array of other ailments. He has had heart surgery, a kidney transplant. He can't speak or bathe himself.

That night, when the boys climbed into their bunk beds, the dog dragged his new bed from Yolanda's living room, down the long hall, into their room.

——

Four days later, they still had the dog. He was starting to answer to his new name.

He loved roughhousing with Azaiah, knew to be gentle with Christian. He almost never barked.

On Saturday, Azaiah went to his dad's house. Christian retreated to his room to watch a Barney video. The dog dozed beside him.

Yolanda had just stepped onto her porch to water the plants when the dog flung himself into the screen door, barking madly.

As she opened the door, the dog sprinted across the living room, into the boys' room.

Yolanda screamed. Christian was slumped over, his body writhing in a seizure, blood streaming from his nose and mouth.

The dog ran to the boy, still yelping. But as soon as Yolanda bent to cradle her son, the dog went silent.

"If he hadn't come to get me," Yolanda told Stacey later, "the neurologist said Christian would have choked on his own blood and died."

Since no one had claimed the dog, Yolanda decided to keep him.

The dog's owner eventually made contact, but after hearing the story, he allowed Yolanda to keep him.


Next, we have two stories of genuine heroes. The first is a British pilot:

Flight Lieutenant Ian Fortune, 28, had flown in to pick up casualties as a firefight raged between American and Afghan forces and heavily-armed rebels near Garmsir in Helmand Province.

He circled until troops reported incoming fire had calmed down.

But as Ian flew in the helicopter came under attack - which continued as casualties were being loaded.

Then as he lifted off Ian was shot.

A bullet hit a metal rail on the front of his helmet which is used to attach night vision goggles.

The round then penetrated his helmet hitting him between the eyes. It knocked his head back and caused severe bleeding.

More bullets followed, hitting the Chinook's controls and shutting down the stabilisation system.

But with blood pouring into his eyes, Ian battled with the controls to stop the chopper from spiralling out of control.

Then with the aircraft lurching from side to side he continued flying for eight minutes before landing at Camp Bastion.

Ian was taken to the field hospital and treated for his wound.

It is the first time in the nine-year war in Afghanistan a pilot has been shot while in the air.

Fortune's incredible flying saved the lives of 20 soldiers.

Finally, we have an American hero, Navy SEAL Michael Monsoor, who threw himself on a grenade to save his warrior brothers:

Especially poignant is this:

"During the service, as Monsoor's coffin was taken from the hearse to the gravesite, Navy SEALs lined up in two columns. As the coffin passed, video shows each SEAL slapping down the gold Trident from his uniform and deeply embedding it in Monsoor's wooden coffin...."

No matter how dark the horizon, no matter how brutal the day, true heroes still exist and shine, protecting and inspiring us all.

There's my two cents.

Daily Must-Reads

How we got to the point where the EPA can dictate energy policy without Congressional approval, and what will happen if they do it.

Obama invents Bush's idea.

Hold the champagne on military commissions...it's a head fake.

Why the Palestinians don't want their own state.

Our $76.4 Trillion Fiscal Gap

Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid: "It's a good day. Only 36,000 people lost their jobs."  Yes, that's an actual quote.  Mr. Reid is rocketing toward a premature retirement for a reason.  Hopefully the Democrat majority will follow him because he was merely stupid enough to say what they were all thinking, anyway. ***UPDATE*** After realizing this was one of the most monumentally stupid statements of all time, Reid attempted to re-write history, instead calling the news of 36,000 new jobless Americans 'devastating'.  Yeah, that's sincere compassion for ya'.

SNL wakes up and realizes DemCare is really, really unpopular.

Iran to begin mass production of cruise missiles.  Yippee.  Thank you, President Incompet...no, I mean, President Dangerou...no, wait, that should be President Stern Finger-Shaking.  You really are doing a wonderful job.

The end of the road for Barack Obama?

Celebrities photographed in secure White House Situation Room...!  This should understood for what it is: proof of the Obama administration's view on national security.  Not only do they give tours through this top-secret room, but they allow photos to be taken there!  Inexcusable.

Iraq holds another election, experiences huge turnout.  But the war was lost, and Bush was wrong, you see.

CBO Officially Informs Washington Of What Everyone Else Already Knows

It's mind-boggling how this apparently comes as a revelation to the super-geniuses in Washington:

This only comes as news to people who haven't worked in the private sector, of course — which means the entirety of the Obama administration and most of the Democratic leadership in Congress.  It takes a CBO analysis for them to understand that increasing costs on businesses means increasing costs on their customers — or forcing them out of business altogether.  This time, the CBO explains the impact of raising fees on financial institutions to the clueless:

President Obama's proposed fee on the country's biggest banks receiving taxpayer bailout money would ultimately result in costs to the firms' customers, employees, and investors, a non-partisan Congressional watchdog said today. …

But the Congressional Budget Office today warned that "the ultimate cost of a tax or fee is not necessarily borne by the entity that writes the check to the government."

"The cost of the proposed fee would ultimately be borne to varying degrees by an institution's customers, employees, and investors," the CBO said today in a letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley.

"Customers would probably absorb some of the cost in the form of higher borrowing rates and other charges, although competition from financial institutions not subject to the fee would limit the extent to which the cost could be passed to borrowers. Employees might bear some of the cost by accepting some reduction in their compensation, including income from bonuses, if they did not have better employment opportunities available to them. Investors could bear some of the cost in the form of lower prices of their stock if the fee reduced the institution's future profits."

The availability of credit – already a problem for some consumers and businesses – could also be limited by the proposed fee, the CBO said.

Er, yeah.  In other words, water is wet, too.  This doesn't even qualify as Econ 101; anyone not already knowing this would get tossed out of King Banaian's excellent lectures at St. Cloud State University.

Let's make sure we extrapolate this for everyone onto other public policies, while we're at it:

• Increasing the minimum wage forces businesses to pay more for labor.  Either they hire fewer people or they raise prices — which undermines the buying power of those who make the least amount of money.
• A carbon tax or cap-and-trade bill will force energy producers to either raise prices to its customers or scale back power production, which will force businesses to either raise prices or cut back production, which will mean more cost or more scarcity for consumers — both of which are inflationary.
• Higher fees on insurers, medical-device manufacturers, and other goods and services in the health-care industry mean higher prices for consumers in the form of increased premiums or in greater scarcity as suppliers fail to come to market.

Imposing higher costs on business means higher costs for consumers.  It means fewer jobs, less consumer choice, less innovation, and economic decline.  I'd be surprised if the CBO analysis itself doesn't end with the word duh in the last sentence.

I suppose it's better late than never that this is officially entered into the Washington consciousness, but still...  *sigh*

Anyway, this illustrates precisely why every single program that Obama and the Dems in Congress have done or proposed is wreaking havoc on job growth and economic stability.  It also illustrates their fundamental lack of understanding (or their willful ignorance) of basic economics, because they continue to propose bigger and bigger programs that will require higher and higher taxes.  Maybe not taxes that directly hit taxpayers (like income tax), but it is certain that these new taxes will flow through businesses and end up taking more money out of the pockets of consumers, and that's what's stifling the economy right now.

With the CBO report being released, now it's official, and even Washingtonians have no excuse for not understanding this.

There's my two cents.

It's The Jobs, Stupid

Heritage really knocks the ball out of the park (again) with this post from late last week:

Last week President Barack Obama hosted a seven-and-a-half-hour televised health care summit. This week the President launched his "final" campaign for passage of his health care plan. Next week, President Obama will travel to Missouri and Pennsylvania to continue this "final" effort to jam his unpopular plan through Congress. With this all-health-care-all-the-time White House agenda it seems like eons ago that the Obama administration announced, following the complete rejection of its health care plan in the Massachusetts Senate special election, that President Obama's first State of the Union would mark a "pivot" from health care and to a "razor sharp focus on jobs". So how is that pivot to jobs going? Well, the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly jobs report

So why is our economy having such a tough time pulling out of recession? Here are the facts: the most recent data available show that the U.S. economy actually lost fewer jobs during this recession than were lost during the 2001 recession. Specifically, 50.8 million jobs were lost through the first six months of the '01 recession while 48.2 million jobs were lost through the first six months of this recession.

But if out economy is losing fewer jobs this time, then why is our unemployment rate so much higher under President Obama's stewardship of the economy? The answer: job creation. Or actually the lack thereof. Back to the BLS data: through the first six quarters of the 2001 recession 47.6 million jobs were created, while only 40.3 million jobs have been created through the second quarter of 2009. That's a 7.9 million jobs gap. The reason our unemployment rate is so much higher now is low job creation, not high job loss. So why aren't businesses creating jobs? Here is what entrepreneurs have been trying to tell the Obama administration:

• At one of President Obama's many jobs summits, Fred Lampropoulos told The New York Times that businesses were uncertain about investment because "there's such an aggressive legislative agenda that businesspeople don't really know what they ought to do." That uncertainty, he added, "is really what's holding back the jobs."
• Dan DiMicco, CEO of steelmaker Nucor Corp,  told the Wall Street Journal: "Companies large and small are saying, 'I am not going to do anything until these things — health care, climate legislation — go away or are resolved.'"
• Porta-King CEO Steve Schulte told USA Today his company is not investing because "proposals in Congress to tackle climate change and overhaul health care would raise costs."
• The New York Post's Charles Gasparino reported on the 600 companies stock analyst Peter Sidoti covers: "'There hasn't been one bankruptcy,' he tells me. How did they survive the recession? By cutting costs and hoarding cash, not expanding their business and hiring more people, even as the economy now is starting to recover. During other recoveries, Sidoti says, firms like these would be hiring workers in droves as demand picks up for goods and services. This time around, they're not — because 'they don't know what their costs are going to be.'"
• National Federation of Independent Business chief economist Bill Dunkelberg writes: "The horizon is filled with cost unknowns, from healthcare to cap and trade to yawning deficits and the need to come to grips with them, from paid family and medical leave to card check, from expiration of the Bush tax cuts to state decisions about their finances. Washington cannot expect small business owners, facing difficult economic circumstances anyway, to commit themselves to investing in new employees or equipment and vehicles without acknowledging and revealing the policy-inspired costs that will be imposed on them. It is all about uncertainty and confidence."

Our economy's job creators have been trying to send a message to the Obama administration for months: stop creating so much uncertainty in the tax and regulatory environment so that we can figure out how to invest our money and start creating jobs. Stop taking over car companies. Stop shedding financing contracts. Stop taking over 1/6th of our economy. Stop raising taxes on our energy sector. Just stop.

Our economy will eventually recover and start producing jobs again, probably very soon. But that recovery has already been delayed by an administration that saw this recession as an opportunity to fundamentally rewrite our nation's relationship with the federal government. Unless this administration completely abandons its far reaching transformation agenda, this recovery will be a very slow one.

The bottom line is that until the jobs come back, this recession will remain with us.  Barack Obama is doing nothing to create an environment in which jobs can be created; to the contrary, he is implementing policies and issuing rhetoric that do precisely the opposite.  For example, he continues to tout so-called 'green jobs' like Europe has while somehow neglecting to mention how those 'green jobs' actually kill the economy of the nations who strive to achieve them.

On top of that, his own economic projections continue to be proven false and misleading:

The US budget deficit will be $1.2 trillion more than predicted by the administration.

CBO Deficit Estimate
But, don't worry. Team Obama was only off by a mere $600 billion in 2020, give or take $50 billion.

The CBO announced today that the US longterm deficit picture is even worse than originally predicted.
The AP reported:

A new congressional report released Friday says the United States' long-term fiscal woes are even worse than predicted by President Barack Obama's grim budget submission last month.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts that Obama's budget plans would generate deficits over the upcoming decade that would total $9.8 trillion. That's $1.2 trillion more than predicted by the administration.

The agency says its future-year predictions of tax revenues are more pessimistic than the administration's. That's because CBO projects slightly slower economic growth than the White House.

The CBO predicted that the federal deficit would hit $1.5 trillion in 2010 under President Barack Obama's proposals. This tops last year's record deficit and is more than three times the deficit during George W. Bush's last year in office.

Again, the key here is jobs.  Without jobs, the economy won't recover; without a recovery, consumer spending won't go back up; without consumer spending, tax revenues will not go back up; without tax revenues, the budget will come out even further short than the CBO is estimating.

This guy is an absolute disaster, and the longer he has a compliant Congress and media, he will continue to systemically destroy this country.  That's not an opinion, either...with each passing day, we see again and again that it is a fact in progress.  It's got to stop before this nation is irreparably damaged.

There's my two cents.

This Week In DemCare-land

Setting the DemCare tone for the week is just one link and a straight shooting explanation of the reconciliation head fake.

A central part of the DemCare plan is to give every American health insurance similar to the current Medicaid program. Unfortunately, people in Tennessee can tell you it's a disastrous idea, as they tried it in the mid-1990s and saw a 146% increase in cost and a decline in the quality of care. Yeah, that'll work well on a national scale, don't you think? It's like the car dealership that claimed they lose money on every car, but they'd make it up in volume.

Now, what's the deal with this reconciliation business? Well, if you haven't checked out my previous attempt to explain this, you might want to do that first. Now that you're caught up, listen to Rush Limbaugh as he addresses the reconciliation head fake and why it will be so difficult to repeal DemCare if it becomes law:

Excellent stuff! So, while repeal is a critical Plan B to have, the simple fact is that once DemCare goes into law, it may very well be unrepealable in its entirety. The Dems know this; that's why they are calculating that it's worth a November slaughter for gaining permanent control over your health care. That's why the best option we've got is to prevent it from ever becoming law in the first place.

As Limbaugh said, the real key is House Democrats. Gear up for some phone calls to your House Rep -- especially if they're a Dem -- because this thing is coming to a close soon one way or another.

There's my two cents.

Fun And Frivolity: Exploding Whale, Obamamotors' New Masterpiece, And Vader's Cat

No, these three things really aren't related...other than the fact that they all amuse me.

Exploding whale

The 40th anniversary of a landmark event revisits a rather foolish plan...

Hahahahahahahaha...!!!!! Really? No one saw this possibility??


Obamamotors' new masterpiece

Hillbuzz posted this a while ago, and I couldn't help linking it:



The caption underneath extols the virtues of Obamamotors' new masterpiece:

The New GM (Government Motors)
Proudly Introduces
The 2010 Obama
This car runs on hot air, bull-s*** and broken promises.
It has three wheels that speed the vehicle through tight left turns.
It comes complete with two teleprompters programmed to help the occupants talk their way out of any violations.
The transparent canopy reveals the plastic smiles still on the faces of all the happy owners.
Comes in S, M, L, XL and 2XL (pictured)
It won’t get you to work, but hey, there aren’t any jobs anyway!

Brilliant! Let's hope (for all our sakes) that their satire remains satire rather than becoming prophecy.


Vader's cat

This just makes me laugh:



Now that's just AWESOME!

Have a great weekend!

If You Work In The Private Sector, It Sucks To Be You

At least compared to government workers, that is.  USA Today:

Federal employees earn higher average salaries than private-sector workers in more than eight out of 10 occupations, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data finds.

Accountants, nurses, chemists, surveyors, cooks, clerks and janitors are among the wide range of jobs that get paid more on average in the federal government than in the private sector.

Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available.

A 12% raise simply for changing employers and doing the exact same job sounds pretty good to me...how about you?  But that's only scratching the surface (emphasis mine):

These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

So, let's see.  When you roll the entire compensation package into one big happy number, we get these average salaries:

Government workers: $108,476
Private sector workers: $69,928

And this is happening at the same time as our federal government is redefining reckless fiscal irresponsibility??

Add to that the fact that of the mere handful of jobs created in the past year, the vast majority of them were government jobs, and we have a true crisis of the private sector on our hands because of the unprecedented expansion of government influence and reach.  Given that government does everything badly, expensively, and to the utmost inefficiency -- not to mention based on shifting political winds rather than any rational reason -- this is a problem of mammoth proportions.

Our government MUST be brought under control.  It starts this November, by throwing out all of the bums who accelerated the train off the tracks.

There's my two cents.

Onward, He Said, Regardless

Reader Melekiop directs me to yet another outstanding article on DemCare by Charles Krauthammer.  Read the whole thing:

So the yearlong production, set to close after Massachusetts' devastatingly negative January 19 review, saw the curtain raised one last time. Obamacare lives.

After 34 speeches, three sharp electoral rebukes (Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts), and a seven-hour seminar, the president announced Wednesday his determination to make one last push to pass his health-care reform.

The final act was carefully choreographed. The rollout began a week earlier with a couple of shows of bipartisanship: a February 25 Blair House "summit" with Republicans, followed five days later with a few concessions tossed the Republicans' way.

Show is the operative noun. Among the few Republican suggestions President Obama pretended to incorporate was tort reform. What did he suggest to address the plague of defensive medicine that a Massachusetts Medical Society study showed leads to about 25 percent of doctor referrals, tests, and procedures being done for no medical reason? A few ridiculously insignificant demonstration projects amounting to one-half of one-hundredth of 1 percent of the cost of Obama's health-care bill.

As for the Blair House seminar, its theatrical quality was obvious even before it began. The Democrats had already decided to go for a purely partisan bill. Obama signaled precisely that intent at the end of the summit show — then dramatically spelled it out just six days later in his 35th health-care speech: He is going for the party-line vote.

Unfortunately for Democrats, that seven-hour televised exercise had the unintended consequence of showing the Republicans to be not only highly informed on the subject, but also, as even Obama was forced to admit, possessed of principled objections — contradicting the ubiquitous Democratic/media meme that Republican opposition was nothing but nihilistic partisanship.

Republicans did so well, in fact, that in his summation, Obama was reduced to suggesting that his health-care reform was indeed popular because when you ask people about individual items (for example, eliminating exclusions for pre-existing conditions or capping individual out-of-pocket payments), they are in favor.

Yet mystifyingly they oppose the whole package. How can that be?

Allow me to demystify. Imagine a bill granting every American a free federally delivered ice cream every Sunday morning. Provision 2: steak on Monday, also home delivered. Provision 3: A dozen red roses every Tuesday. You get the idea. Would each individual provision be popular in the polls? Of course.

However — life is a vale of howevers — suppose these provisions were bundled into a bill that also spelled out how the goodies are to be paid for and managed — say, half a trillion dollars in new taxes, half a trillion in Medicare cuts (cuts not to keep Medicare solvent but to pay for the ice cream, steak, and flowers), 118 new boards and commissions to administer the bounty-giving, and government regulation dictating, for example, how your steak was to be cooked. How do you think this would poll?

Perhaps something like three-to-one against, which is what the latest CNN poll shows is the citizenry's feeling about the current Democratic health-care bills.

Late last year, Democrats were marveling at how close they were to historic health-care reform, noting how much agreement had been achieved among so many factions. The only remaining detail was how to pay for it.

Well, yes. That has generally been the problem with democratic governance: cost. The disagreeable absence of a free lunch.

Which is what drove even strong Obama supporter Warren Buffett to go public with his judgment that the current Senate bill, while better than nothing, is a failure because the country desperately needs to bend the cost curve down and the bill doesn't do it. Buffett's advice would be to start over and get it right.

Obama has chosen differently, however. The time for debate is over, declared the nation's seminar-leader-in-chief. The man who vowed to undo Washington's wicked ways has directed the Congress to ram Obamacare through, by one vote if necessary, under the parliamentary device of "budget reconciliation." The man who ran as a post-partisan is determined to remake a sixth of the U.S. economy despite the absence of support from a single Republican in either house, the first time anything of this size and scope has been enacted by pure party-line vote.

Surprised? You can only be disillusioned if you were once illusioned.

Which, if you were a reader of 2cents, you were not.  Way to be ahead of the game!

There's my two cents.

Once Again, We Have To Re-Interpret The Jobs Numbers

(This is almost becoming a regular feature...)

Hot Air:

Given the spin that the Obama administration applied to expectations this week on unemployment numbers, the reality looks rosy by comparison.  Larry Summers talked about the severe impact on employment from the mid-Atlantic snowstorms in February, but the unemployment rate held steady at 9.7%.  However, employment dropped by another 36,000:

In February, the number of unemployed persons, at 14.9 million, was essentially unchanged, and the unemployment rate remained at 9.7 percent. (See table A-1.)

Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (10.0 percent), adult women (8.0 percent), whites (8.8 percent), blacks (15.8 percent), Hispanics (12.4 percent), and teenagers (25.0 percent) showed little to no change in February. The jobless rate for Asians was 8.4 percent, not seasonally adjusted. (See tables A-1, A-2, and A-3.)

The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) was 6.1 million in February and has been about that level since December. About 4 in 10 unemployed persons have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more. (See table A-12.)

In February, the civilian labor force participation rate (64.8 percent) and the employment-population ratio (58.5 percent) were little changed. (See
table A-1.)

Did the weather contribute to the drop of 36,000 jobs, more than January's 26,000-job loss (a revision downward from the originally-reported 20,000)?  Perhaps, but the BLS notes that construction losses (64,000) match the pattern of losses over the previous six months.  The information sector lost 18,000 jobs, almost certainly unlikely to have been weather-related.  Retail employment flattened out, negating one of the bright spots from January.

More worrisome is a 500,000 increase in workers forced into part-time work by economic conditions:

The number of persons working part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) increased from 8.3 to 8.8 million inFebruary, partially offsetting a large decrease in the prior month. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job. (See table A-8.)

And the number of marginally attached and discouraged workers continued to climb:

About 2.5 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force in February, an increase of 476,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. (See table A-16.)

Among the marginally attached, there were 1.2 million discouraged workers in February, up by 473,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them. The remaining 1.3 million persons marginally attached to the labor force had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey for reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities.

Once again, the topline unemployment rate is masking the fact that we're still losing jobs.  Remember that population growth requires around 100K-125K new jobs opening every month just to maintain the status quo.  We're still losing jobs, and we're pushing more people out of the work force.

Bottom line: Obamanomics is an epic fail because it was never meant to help the economy.  Its primary objective is to expand government and government control over the private sector through wholesale destruction and decline.

Success!

There's my two cents.

About That Barack Obama Guy...

I came across a couple of excellent perspective pieces on the character and motivations of Barack Obama in the context of the DemCare suicide-in-progress that I thought were well worth considering.  The first is by Slublog at Hot Air.  It begins with the observation that Obama is essentially begging liberal Democrats to walk the plank on DemCare...for the sake of his Presidency!  The commentary:

What Obama doesn't seem to realize is that his presidency is already damaged, no matter what happens with health care. If he manages to persuade enough Democrats to pass such a profoundly unpopular bill, the Democrats will pay in November. However, if he doesn't pass it, the Democratic base will regard him as weak. Since those Democrats are basically all that are propping up his approval ratings, it's hard to figure out which scenario is worse.

The true measure of how far Obama has fallen, though, is how Democrats regard him. Few seem to be asking him to campaign for them, and his approval ratings aren't at record lows, but they are likely nowhere near where Obama thought he would be at this point in his presidency.

Of course, Obama has no one but himself to blame for this. He campaigned as a moderate who could bring the country together, but lurched toward hard liberalism almost as soon as he took office, and is now urging Democrats to embrace the very ideology that crushed his approval rating. Obama underestimated how angry voters who believed his campaign rhetoric would get once they realized he was lying to them.

Obama's approval ratings fell because Americans don't like being lied to, and for that reason, those ratings are unlikely to improve until the president shows a willingness to respond to popular opinion. Frankly, given how Obama has governed to this point, I am not optimistic. I hope the American people deliver a firm rebuke in November, but more importantly I hope Obama gets the message. If he doesn't, then it may be time to start worrying about his ability to acknowledge political reality.

I think this can be summed up in a two-word description of Obama: lying ideologue.

This blog is literally chock full of examples of his backtracking on essentially every campaign promise he made, deception on statement after statement he has issued on darn near every policy there is, and the outright lies he has spoken over and over and over.  While the die-hard Kool-Aid crowd will never acknowledge this reality, those with clearer heads are reluctantly coming to grips with the fact that their hero -- their messiah -- is a lying ideologue bent on his own agenda at the expense of all else.  It's always hard to admit you're wrong; it's even harder to admit that your mistake is leading to such tremendous damage to you and everything you hold dear.

And that leads us to the second piece, which delves into the psyche of Obama.  Quin Hillyer dares to take the leap at The American Spectator, and does an admirable job, I think, of showing the root cause of Obama's failures:

There is something way off balance in the character of Barack Obama. Something in the realm of zealotry, with a touch of megalomania, and perhaps an authoritarian impulse too. He combines  Alinskyite tactics and outlook with an air of self-assumed moral superiority in a way that fails to respect the usual, small 'r' republican limits on American presidents. All presidents, of course, think at some level that they know best about policy choices. But almost none of them (Woodrow Wilson perhaps excepted) were so willing to disdain, in pursuit of such radical policy upheavals, such intense and overwhelming public opinion as has been evident in the current health takeover attempt.

Grandiose plans are one thing. Most presidents fall prey to them. It's another thing entirely, though, to refuse to accept the ordinary republican restraints on implementing grandiosities without public support, and furthermore to do so by A) bending existing rules; B) directly violating multiple personal pledges; C) ignoring constitutional limits; D) directly lying; and E) demanding that other politicians sacrifice their own political careers.

A little humility would be nice. So would a sense that he answers to the public rather than to some self-proclaimed (and self-determined) imperative of history and/or call of destiny.

That is his job, after all.  He's not a crusading king, he's an elected leader (though not in his own mind).  Big difference.  Anyway, Hillyer presses on to show how Obama's self-anointed elitism has blinded him to reality:

As Obama ignores public opinion while pushing for full-fledged Obamacare in one fell swoop, and as he insists that he knows best and that the public is too ill-informed to know what is good for it, he directly -- as the very symbol of the state -- reminds the public of what they distrust about government in the first place and of why they don't want government interfering in a realm as personal as health care. These feelings are especially fierce because Obama is trying not to change something with which most Americans are dissatisfied, but instead to change (and arguably take away) a system in which some four-fifths of the public remains generally satisfied with their own personal level of care.

For most Americans, Obama doesn't seem to be giving them something they don't have, but instead to be taking away something they already value.

And yet...he still knows best, you see.  Adding insult to injury isn't helping, either:

Worse, he and the increasingly unpopular Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are doing it while hectoring the public, insulting (at least by implication) the public by belittling the public's understanding of the issue, and treating opposition as if it is guided by evil motives rather than sincere concerns.

Hillyer's point is that both Obama's motivation and his method are directly counter to the American way of life:

They are turning American checks and balances on their heads. They are using temporary parliamentary advantages for a permanent power grab. The Obamites are dictating to Americans rather than representing them. Revolutionizing, not just evolving. Ruling, not serving.

And it's not just on health care. They work against public opinion on matters of criminal justice, terrorist treatment, race preferences, bank bailouts and corporate takeovers, overall spending, domestic welfare requirements, fossil fuel development, missile defenses, advocacy of American interests (and pride!) abroad, and on the whole panoply of oft-unstated attitudes that cohere as American exceptionalism.

This is not the way the system is supposed to work. This is not the American government we grew up with. This is not the national ethos that we love.

Yet Obama pushes on, perfectly cognizant of what he's doing, intentionally upending the American Way.

That's what Barack Obama promised in the campaign.  That's what he meant when he said that his mission was to 're-make' America.  His intent is nothing less than the wholesale modification of the fundamental American personality, from freedom, individual responsibility, and American exceptionalism to a state where the government -- which knows better, of course! -- dictates every aspect of your life, taking away the very freedom, individual responsibility, and exceptionalism that is in the core DNA of America.

Hillyer sounds a call to stop Obama's transformation using any and all possible legitimate means.  I couldn't agree more.  The conservative Right saw him for who he was long before the election, but too many people chose to listen to his pretty words and promises instead.  Now that those words have turned ugly and those promises have proven empty, the country on the whole is rejecting Barack Obama.  He does not stand for the things America was founded upon, and he does not represent what most Americans want their nation to be.

And thank God for that!  Now we just need to clean up our mistakes.

There's my two cents.

Various Friday Stuff

Here's a plateful of mental food for thought on a variety of important subjects.

Is Obama signing America up for global government?

Remember President Obama’s trip to Copenhagen last year? Not the failed Chicago Olympics bid, but the Climate Change Conference where he attempted to place America under a cooperative international climate treaty. Now, the President has turned his attention to other avenues of global entente, and the frustrated momentum of the climate treaty has been replaced with a move towards closer cooperation with the International Criminal Court. Committing the U.S. to international accords that threaten to undermine our nation’s sovereignty appears to be a temptation the current administration cannot resist. The ICC is just another example of this infatuation with global governance.

This is a huge deal. To subjugate American interests to international interests is the kiss of death for our nation's freedom and security. Some nations hate us outright; many others would simply join the typical-human-nature response of enjoying seeing the big kid on the block taken down; what few allies we really have left have been alienated by Obama. Do we really think it's wise to allow America's policies and interests to be dictated by anyone but America? Absolutely insane, and horrendously dangerous.

Perhaps most telling is the conclusion of this article:

It is highly ironic that the Obama Administration is warming up to the ICC, a court that does not guarantee American due process rights to American citizens, while at the same time insisting that terrorist suspects should have access to American civil courts, Miranda rights, and the right to trial by jury.

Irony is too tame a word; I'd call it a betrayal of the American people. Nothing good will come of this move toward globalism. Well, nothing good for America, that is.


The EMP is still a gigantic threat...so naturally, Obama ignores it

While Iran’s ballistic missile program continues to advance, a long-range nuclear missile might not be the biggest threat Iran presents to the United States. Iran could place a short-range ballistic missile on one of the thousands of commercial freighters sailing in the Pacific and detonate a warhead high above U.S. territory that could take down 75 percent of our nation’s electrical grid. As Heritage fellow Baker Spring explains such a Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack would “cause a cascade of failures throughout the broader infrastructure, including banking systems, energy systems, transportation systems, food production and delivery systems, water systems, emergency services, and–perhaps most damaging–cyberspace. Effectively, the U.S. would be thrown back to the pre-industrial age following a widespread EMP attack.”

Iran could also choose to give a nuke to one of their terrorist friends like bin Laden or Hamas, who would be happy to deliver it. We've talked about this before on 2cents. To me, this is probably the most frightening potential attack because it would be so easy to carry out. If we are successfully attacked again -- God forbid! -- I think this would be the method. Congress formed a commission to study it, and they have made recommendations for several years...but Obama is now ignoring their recommendations!

I truly mean it when I say that the single greatest danger facing America today is our very own President.


Amend it, baby!
RedState has the dish on a proposed Constitutional amendment that would be very, very beneficial to the nation:

...three conservatives in the House, Congressmen Jeb Hensarling (TX), Mike Pence (IN), and John Campbell (CA) introduced a constitutional amendment today to control spending by limiting it to one-fifth of the economy. The Spending Limit Amendment would keep spending as a percentage of GDP at the historical average since World War II, as it is set to more than double in the years ahead. There is an in-depth look here. (big PDF file)

The idea is to force a debate on the size and scope of the federal government now and gain a political will for a national budget of sorts. As they explained on C-SPAN yesterday morning, after years of battling against spending against both Republicans and Democrats, and offering specific proposals and budgets, they believe it is important to give the public a goal and to define what is fiscally sustainable, and what is not, and then get political buy-in. If Republicans manage to win back control of Congress, a proposal like this will give us a yardstick by which to keep their budgets accountable and ensure that they don’t sell us down the river again.

Did you know that a Balanced Budget Amendment is already in effect? Yeah, pretty crazy, huh? The GOP Congress and Bill Clinton signed it into law in the mid-1990s and actually adhered to it for a few years...until it became more convenient to ignore it. If I understand it correctly, the idea with this new amendment is to focus not on the deficit but on the level of spending directly. Check it out, and think seriously about calling your Rep to ask them to support it.

Even if this doesn't pan out, it's a move in the right direction, and we as responsible American citizens should demand precisely these sorts of things from our elected representatives. It's our nation, and we want to hand it down to future generations better than we received it; solving our long-term economic problem is one of the best ways to do that.

Related: Stop the Spending Now

There's my two cents.

Daily Must-Reads

The DOJ lawyers who voluntarily defended terrorists have now been outed.

The real jobs comparison between Bush and Obama:

Move over, Carnivore...it's time for Obama's flavor of domestic spying: Welcome, Einstein!

The Obama theme song: do as I say, not as I do.

Why trains in the 21st century are a ridiculously stupid idea.

How many government officials does it take to replace all your light bulbs? 37,221. No, seriously, that's how many.

The Reconciliation Head Fake

A new possible White House strategy is percolating out there about this entire notion of reconciliation.  The basic process of legislation is that a bill must be passed by both houses of Congress (the order doesn't matter); once a bill is passed by both, it goes to the White House for the President's signature.  Reconciliation would only come into play if there are differences between the bill passed by the House and the bill passed by the Senate (and technically, reconciliation is only allowable on purely budgetary legislation, not policy changes, but that's been covered in other posts).  Thus far, the most likely scenario is for the House to pass the Senate bill with the understanding that they would come back later to make changes that would make DemCare more palatable to members of the House.  But...if the House passes the Senate bill as is...that's it.  End of story.  The bill is finished, passed by both houses of Congress, and will go to the White House for Obama's signature.  Boom...we have DemCare as reality.

Hot Air:

Over the last few days, readers have sent a number of e-mails objecting to our focus on reconciliation as the big problem facing the opposition to ObamaCare.  Reconciliation is just a ruse, they warn.  The real danger is that the House will pass the Senate version of ObamaCare and that Barack Obama will sign it into law.  The Senate doesn't have to do anything at that point, except perhaps dodge the missiles tossed across the Capitol's parking lot from their colleagues in the House after stiffing them on fixing their concerns.

Sure, the House would be stark raving furious at the betrayal, but remember, Obama is only in it for himself.  There isn't anyone he hasn't been willing to throw under the bus yet, and there's no reason to think he wouldn't chuck the entire Democrat caucus in the House, too.  Also, Obama came from the Senate, which is a much more exclusive club than the House; I suspect he looks down on lowly Congressmen as being somehow inferior.  Congressmen are in office for two years rather than a Senator's six years, and thus much more easily replaced.  The House is looking more and more likely to swing back into GOP territory this November no matter what the Dems do, so it's pretty much a lost cause.  This potential betrayal of the House is slowly coming out in more and more places:

Sen. Judd Gregg: "They're using reconciliation to pass the great big bill," Gregg said during an appearance on CNBC. "Once they pass the great big bill, I wouldn't be surprised if the White House didn't care if reconciliation passed. I mean, why would they?"

Rep. Shelley Berkeley: "I am not inclined to support the Senate version," said Representative Shelley Berkley, Democrat of Nevada, who voted for the House bill in November. "I would like something more concrete than a promise. The Senate cannot promise its way out of a brown paper bag."

Rep. Bart Stupak (who is still talking tough on abortion, too): "You're going to make members vote for a bill that's going to be hung around your neck come Election Day," he said. "After sending so much legislation to the Senate, we just don't trust that they're going to do it."

What's there to lose for Obama?  Nothing.  If you're going to lose big anyway, maybe it's worth losing even bigger while passing your signature domestic legislation, right?  On the other hand, what's there to lose for Dems in the House?  Everything.  They will have compromised on their (ahem) principles and still been thrown out of office by furious voters.

The obvious weakness in the plan, of course, is that if there were enough votes to pass the Senate bill in the House they would have done it already.  They haven't, thus they don't.

Here's the other problem: there is no reconciliation bill.  Heritage:

But there is one huge difference between the Senate bill and what the President kept referring to as my/our proposal: the Senate bill actually exists. For all the talk in Washington about Democrats in the Senate using reconciliation to pass a final version of Obamacare, one key fact has been overlooked: no reconciliation bill exists. Not in the House. Not in the Senate. Nowhere. It simply has not yet been written, and there are plenty of reasons to believe it never will.

And remember those 'Republican ideas' that Obama reluctantly included after the summit charade in a fantastic show of bipartisanship?  None of those are in the Senate bill that passed on Christmas Eve.  They would only be added in the event of reconciliation.  He's not only lying to the entire contingent of House Dems, but he's lying to the American people about including any Republican ideas at all!

Quite the scam on everyone, huh?

Hot Air brings up one more, really scary point:

The real nightmare scenario isn't that the House might pass the Senate bill now, or in April.  It's that Democrats might get stymied now, and then pass the Senate bill after the midterms in late November, and allow Obama to sign it into law well after the time when voters have held them accountable for their radical agenda.

This would be after the election but before the new Republican majority would take office.

Feel like dialing the phone yet?  If your Representative in the House is a Democrat, they're the ones that need the pressure now.  Call and tell them to kill DemCare where it stands today.  Literally no one benefits from pushing forward except Barack Obama.

There's my two cents.