What happened to all of the doom and gloom economic threads?

mercury14 said:

It's a microscopic amount of money relative to the US budget.

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4est_4est_Gump said:

You mean like the tax on the rich?

If we add up every single item that you disregard as tiny when it comes to government largess, then we actually get into some real, actual money..

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mercury14 said:

No not even a little bit like that.




No, not really. Medicare/Medicaid/Defense/retirement/social security simply make up far too much of the budget for anything else to matter much.

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4est_4est_Gump said:

That's why we can't fix anything...



Either spending is mandatory (third-rail stuff when your party is in power) or it is inconsequential (like UN Resolutions)...

http://reason.com/blog/2012/07/27/why-are-keynesians-of-all-people-calling

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mercury14 said:

The US gives about $2.5 billion total to the UN ($2.1 billion of which goes to peacekeeping which given our history we might end up doing ourselves if there wasn't a UN). The solution to the deficit isn't going to be found here, especially when you account for the political, social, military, and economic costs associated with withdrawing from the UN.

Meanwhile the CBO put the expiration of the Bush tax cuts on the rich at $719 billion through 2022; about twenty-nine times the value of the UN budget. It's bizarre that you insist on comparing the costs of these two things when they're on two completely different scales.





Tell me again how Republicans got mandatory spending under control when they had all branches of government. The fact is, not even Tea Party constituents want it curtailed.

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4est_4est_Gump said:

You keep acting like I supported Republican spending...


Did you not see the Cassandra line in the text of the link or are you still only answering to the voices in your head?

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4est_4est_Gump said:

Now I did support the partial privatizing of SS so that the common man could benefit from the FED inflation the same as the rich man...

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Dances With Falsehoods said:

TurboTax TIMMAH!
Liberal definition of Private sector: My boss gets paid by the government therefore he is Public Sector, but then, he pays me, so I am in the PRIVATE SECTOR!

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RobDownSouth said:

AJ just loves to assign positions to libruls...and then criticize them for "their" position.

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mercury14 said:

Not to mention he edited out my last couple comments in the exchange he just C&P'd. He finds it much more convenient to assign me a position rather than respond to my actual one.

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busybody said:

Hey Yo, FAG FENDY


Its time for the beating to begin

C'mere....the NIGGERZ be lookin fo you

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vetteman said:

Most of your "positions" are deflections anyway.

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busybody said:

the WAPO fact check gives em 4 PIN OH! KIN OZ for some of the ads,

so what?

they keep running em


THEY KNOW THE LIE

The PEEPS DONT CARE.....THE PEEPZ ARE NIGGERZ

Hey FAG FENDY

LOOK AT MY SIG

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San Bernardino, California – On the front door of the San Bernardino city hall is a sign that reads: “Out of Order.” Broke city, broken door: There’s a certain pleasing symmetry in the fact that the San Bernardino city council meets behind a door that, like the city government itself, does not work and is in need of replacement. On this particular evening in late July, the council has met to make public what everybody already knows: Intellectually bankrupt, morally bankrupt — the city is under criminal investigation for sundry financial shenanigans — San Bernardino is above all old-fashioned bankrupt bankrupt, a pitiful penniless pauper that cannot even afford a cup of coffee: Seriously — the coffee guy wants cash up front now and has stopped serving the municipal office building until the city makes good on its latte liabilities. This is a paddle-free scato-riparian fiscal expedition of the first order.

...

San Bernardino spends about 75 percent of its general-fund budget on salaries, benefits, and pensions, with the vast majority of those expenses coming from one class of employee: public-safety workers, meaning cops and firemen, who earn as much as $230,000 a year with overtime. Their pensions, as will not surprise anybody who has been paying attention to government finances in recent years, are extraordinarily generous. In 2007, a consulting firm warned the city that its budget was in trouble because its personnel costs were growing considerably more quickly than revenue, and the city’s response was #. . .# to offer even more generous pensions in the same year. The firemen are fat and happy in the California sunshine, but the rest of San Bernardino is not doing as well: “When times were good, my wife and I didn’t go hog-wild and play the let’s-get-a-bigger-house game,” says Mike Potter, who works for a local construction firm. “But now times aren’t good. At my company, 50 percent of the employees have been laid off, and I’ve taken a 15 percent pay cut. I was the head of engineering, and now I’m also a part-time receptionist and janitor.” He is one of the lucky ones — the local unemployment rate runs around 15 percent — and he is blunt on the subject of what encumbers San Bernardino and other bankruptcy-bound California cities: “The public-employee unions are killing us. They are killing our cities, our states, and our country.”

John Magness, the biggest real-estate developer in San Bernardino, is bearish on the city’s near-term prospects. “No respectable developer would risk its relationships by getting its clients to locate in a city with this risk,” he says. He estimates that his company’s projects have added $1 billion to the city’s tax base and about 5,000 jobs over the past decade, but finds himself “reluctant to encourage customers to come here in this uncertain environment.” He spoke in favor of the bankruptcy filing and fiscal emergency, arguing that it would give the city an opportunity to run a river of reform through the Augean stables of its finances, renegotiating contracts and rewriting the city charter. The local business leaders were nearly unanimous in endorsing the measures.

...

The citizens, as usual, were a mixed bag: One argued that the city’s economic prospects could be turned around by recruiting a Trader Joe’s to open, while another argued that the city’s most pressing problem was the official harassment of “legitimate cannabis-based businesses.” While a bottle of Trader Joe’s Three-Buck Chuck and a few bong hits might take some of the sting out of the city’s straits, its problems go much deeper. San Bernardino, like many California cities, like the state of California, and like the United States at large, is finding out the hard way that it is not as rich as it thought it was ten years ago. It’s rich, of course — and California is fabulously rich — but it’s like the rich guy who has taken out a $10 million mortgage on a house that turns out to be worth only $1 million: A million-dollar house is still a lot of house, but you have to make some adjustments. In 1999, at the peak of the dot-com stock-market bubble, California reformulated its pensions and other public-employee-compensation practices, making them much, much more liberal than they had been. The state’s Democrat-run legislature did this on the theory that pension investments would keep offering double-digit returns more or less forever, which led elected officials to make big promises and set aside approximately zilch to make good on them. If borrowing money to acquire an asset based on the theory that the appreciation of that asset will more than offset the cost of financing the borrowing sounds to you like the woeful tale of a million subprime mortgages, then they really could have used you in the California legislature a decade or so ago, or at Fannie Mae. In bubble after bubble after bubble, the country keeps repeating the practice that everybody swore off after the great market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression: investing on margin. California took out something very much like an adjustable-rate mortgage, financing present political consumption by in effect borrowing against future returns on the assets in its pension system — but the returns didn’t materialize. CalPERS, the gigantic statewide pension system, was until a few weeks ago projecting 7.5 percent returns on its investments. Real returns: just over 1 percent. The entirety of the state’s finances are from top to bottom exactly what one San Bernardino resident called his city’s fiscal charade: a shell game.

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While the city faces a great deal of trouble with its personnel costs, an even more toe-curling potential calamity awaits in the form of hundreds of millions of dollars of liabilities in economic-development grants, according to Warner Hodgdon, an astringent critic of the city government. The city offered the development concessions in the belief that the state would be picking up the tab, but Sacramento has some hairy fiscal problems of its own and is getting ready to leave San Bernardino and other cities twisting in the hot desert wind on those liabilities. Nobody seems to appreciate the irony that San Bernardino’s economic future has been nuked by over-ambitious economic-development programs, and Hodgdon doubts whether the fiscal emergency and bankruptcy will be sufficient to deal with that problem. “I question whether this is a wise move,” he said. “I spent ten years as chair of the economic-development agency. We were an all-American city, not all-American buffoons.”

The buffoonery is epidemic. Little places such as Mammoth Lakes have gone fiscally toes up, as have bigger cities such as Vallejo. Bankrupt Stockton, one of the most dangerous cities in the country, has substantially reduced its police force, and signs of disorder are everywhere: garbage, police tape, vandalized properties. In the city’s Garden Acres neighborhood — a.k.a. “Okieville” — tattooed young men ape the style and mannerisms of Sinaloa gangsters. But like a lot of cities burdened with gigantic pension liabilities, Stockton is paying so many police so much not to police that it can’t afford to pay police to police. Just outside Los Angeles, the city of Compton is probably bankruptcy-bound, too. Compton, once synonymous with ghetto gangsterism, had been making something of a comeback, but like San Bernardino it grossly (and perhaps criminally) mismanaged its finances, shuffling money around from special-fund accounts to pay general-fund bills, leaving it with a looming deficit almost equal to its annual budget. Its bonds are junk, and its auditing firm, Mayer Hoffman McCann, was fined $300,000 for failing to detect irregularities leading up to a 2010 corruption scandal in Bell, Calif. And even that firm won’t sign off on the city’s current financials: It quit rather than publish an opinion on the statements, citing unresolved fraud allegations. Mayer Hoffman McCann: Straight outta Compton.

...

“The enemy isn’t Democrats or Republicans,” says San Jose city councilman Sam Liccardo. “The enemy is algebra.” Liccardo, a Democrat, is bracingly honest when it comes to his fellow partisans in Sacramento: “The fact is the unions own the Democratic party,” he says, and San Jose’s pension-and-personnel reforms have not made the city’s Democratic elected officials any friends in Sacramento. “Party orthodoxy is much more strictly enforced at the state level, because the unions decide who wins and who loses,” Liccardo says. San Jose mayor Chuck Reed, also a Democrat, has been out front on the pension issue, and he’s maybe had a little easier time with it than have the authorities in Compton or San Bernardino. His city is the capital of Silicon Valley, and his base of affluent Northern California professionals are not sending love letters to Paul Ryan, but they know how money works. “They may be liberal,” he says, “but at some point you have to decide: Are we going to provide services or not?”

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Rodney Hailey started Clean Green Fuel in March 2009 to sell biodiesel credits to companies trying to meet their quotas for renewable-fuel production. Situated within a market that is required by law to expand ever year, Hailey’s company seemed poised to prosper. And it did, at least on paper, selling 32.2 million credits worth $9 million. Translated, that means that Clean Green Fuel was under agreement to produce about 21.4 million gallons of biodiesel.

On June 25, federal courts convicted Hailey of fraud, the first such case associated with the sale of RINs, or renewable identification numbers. It appears that, after founding Clean Green Fuel, he rented a garage and bought pipes and blending equipment. But the one-man, one-shed operation never blended any biomass-based biofuel. His pipes were connected to nothing. Hailey now faces up to 484 years in prison.

RINs were created by the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, which mandated that companies that refine, import, or blend fossil fuels (the “obligated parties,” in the bill’s legalese) blend a certain, annually increasing amount of biomass-based diesel from 2008 to 2022. RINs are a way of tracking how much biodiesel these companies create. One gallon of corn-starch ethanol is worth one RIN; of agri-biodiesel, 1.5 RINs; and of cellulose ethanol, 2.5 RINs.

The numbers are transferable. Whenever a gallon of biodiesel changes hands, so does the RIN associated with it. The numbers can also be purchased. A company — a mining company, say — that blends fuels but doesn’t deal primarily in fossil fuels might blend its own biodiesel and then sell the associated RINs to an obligated party. In this case, RINs serve the same function as carbon credits — a way for companies to pay others to be environmentally friendly.

As the annual biodiesel mandates have risen over the years, so has each company’s quota and, no surprise, the value of RINs. At the outset, one credit was worth about $0.15. By 2010 the cost had risen to about $0.50. In 2011, it reached $1.38. In effect, if a gallon of diesel qualified for a RIN credit, it cost $1.38 less than another gallon of diesel. On top of the biodiesel tax credit (worth $1.00 per gallon of biomass-based diesel), RINs became an increasingly attractive option. Between 2008 and 2010, about 350 million credits were generated annually. Last year, there were 1.6 billion.

A small but growing cottage industry has sprouted around RIN credits, including everything from producers and buyers of the credits to RIN consultants and verification websites. Representative Tim Murphy (R., Pa.) estimates that 10,000 jobs are associated with RINs.

Because of cases like Hailey’s, this market might soon collapse. Absolute Fuel, by contrast, at least tried to produce biodiesel. The company lost $500,000 between 2009 and January 2010 while attempting to generate biofuel out of a plant in Texas. A second batch made in August 2010 in a different Texas plant was deemed unusable. But that didn’t stop Absolute Fuel from selling an estimated $40 million worth of credits, representing approximately 36 million gallons of biodiesel.

All told, Clean Green and Absolute Fuel sold credits to 30 companies, including BP, ConocoPhillips, Citgo, Exxon Mobil, Shell, and Sunoco. In April, the EPA fined these 30 obligated parties — the amounts of the fines ranged from $3,000 to $350,000 — for not meeting their quotas. Add the 60 million invalid credits sold by the company Green Diesel and the total of invalid credits reaches 140 million. And that number could double, according to a letter to EPA administrator Lisa Jackson from House Energy chairman Fred Upton (R., Mich.), Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee chairman Cliff Stearns (R., Fla), Energy and Power Subcommittee chairman Ed Whitfield (R., Ky.), and Representative Michael C. Burgess (R., Texas).

On July 13, at a hearing that the House Energy Committee held to discuss RIN fraud, a number of industry leaders said that the problem had created a crisis of confidence, costing them $200 million and threatening the very existence of the industry. They blamed the EPA for exacerbating the fraud by allowing companies under investigation to continue dealing in what were revealed to be invalid credits. It took a year for the EPA to gather enough evidence to convict Clean Green Fuel, for example.

In response, Phillip Brooks, director of the EPA’s air-enforcement division, said that the obligated parties had not done due diligence. Beyond assuming guilt before it had gathered evidence, the EPA could have done little to stop these three companies until it formally issued notices of violation. For that reason, the administration plans to revise its procedure for vetting entrants into the market and prosecuting cases of fraud, but the administration hasn’t guaranteed that it will have a plan in place for 2013.

Ken Greene of the American Enterprise Institute thinks this verification problem might simply be endemic to all energy-credit trading. “Fraud has permeated virtually all of these kinds of credit-trading systems, because they create a situation where you can capture the rents at relatively little risk of being caught,” he says. “So, you claim to produce solar power, but instead, you just set up diesel generators and pump power into the grid, claiming the higher price guaranteed for renewables.” It’s the “same with biofuels.”

And so fixing the biodiesel-credit program may prove to be infeasible. In 2007, RINs looked like an adequate instrument for measuring renewable production. But if the flaws in the system leave the government no way to monitor that instrument, biodiesel credits will become an increasingly unlikely means for the EPA to regulate the renewable-fuel standard.

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4est_4est_Gump said:

Penniless in Paradise
Kevin D. Williamson, NRO
July 30, 2012



But California, whose "balanced" budget this year is based upon a robust recovery is doing just fine under Democratic leadership!

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The White House cut its outlook for U.S. growth in 2012 and 2013 on Friday, hours after data showed the economy grew at a tepid pace in the second quarter, raising concerns about a slowdown that could mar President Barack Obama's re-election chances.

In its semi-annual budget review, the White House said it expected gross domestic product to rise 2.3 percent this year and 2.7 percent again next year - less than the 2.7 percent and 3.0 percent growth projections it made in February.

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Ulaven_Demorte said:

I stopped at the salary claims for fire and police in California.

$200K a year as a cop or fireman in California? Right, I have to call bullshit. The "author" is using the absolute top salary paid to a fire and a police chied and acting as if that is the average wage.

Just a tad disingenuous. I'd imagine the rest is just as "factual"..

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4est_4est_Gump said:

Show us your proof, not your imagination...

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California police officers made, on average, $92,976, including overtime, incentive pay and payouts upon retirement during 2010, according to a Bee analysis of data from the state controller's office. Firefighters and engineers earned, on average, $113,882. Average pay for police captains across the state was $147,940; for fire captains, it was $141,525.

Use this database to see the average pay for firefighters, police officers and their supervisors in nearly every California city and county. Updated Feb. 14 with 2010 data.

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Ulaven_Demorte said:

You posted the article without a critical eye. It took me 2 minutes to find out that figure is bullshit.

You want me to prove you wrong? Again?

Research Cap'n..

You can start here..

http://gcc.sco.ca.gov/

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Where’s Mel Gibson When You Need Him?

George Miller’s 1981 post-apocalyptic film The Road Warrior envisioned an impoverished world of the future. Tribal groups fought over what remained of a destroyed Western world of law, technology, and mass production. Survival went to the fittest — or at least those who could best scrounge together the artifacts of a long gone society somewhat resembling the present West.

In the case of the Australian film, the culprit for the detribalization of the Outback was some sort of global war or perhaps nuclear holocaust that had destroyed the social fabric. Survivors were left with a memory of modern appetites but without the ability to reproduce the means to satisfy them: in short, a sort of Procopius’s description of Gothic Italy circa AD 540.

Our Version

Sometimes, and in some places, in California I think we have nearly descended into Miller’s dark vision — especially the juxtaposition of occasional high technology with premodern notions of law and security. The state deficit is at $16 billion. Stockton went bankrupt; Fresno is rumored to be next. Unemployment stays over 10% and in the Central Valley is more like 15%. Seven out of the last eleven new Californians went on Medicaid, which is about broke. A third of the nation’s welfare recipients are in California. In many areas, 40% of Central Valley high school students do not graduate — and do not work, if the latest crisis in finding $10 an hour agricultural workers is any indication. And so on.

Our culprit out here was not the Bomb (and remember, Hiroshima looks a lot better today than does Detroit, despite the inverse in 1945). The condition is instead brought on by a perfect storm of events that have shred the veneer of sophisticated civilization. Add up the causes. One was the destruction of the California rural middle class. Manufacturing jobs, small family farms, and new businesses disappeared due to globalization, high taxes, and new regulations. A pyramidal society followed of a few absentee land barons and corporate grandees, and a mass of those on entitlements or working for government or employed at low-skilled service jobs. The guy with a viable 60 acres of almonds ceased to exist.

Illegal immigration did its share. No society can successfully absorb some 6-7 million illegal aliens, in less than two decades, the vast majority without English, legality, or education from the poorer provinces of Mexico, the arrivals subsidized by state entitlements while sending billions in remittances back to Mexico — all in a politicized climate where dissent is demonized as racism. This state of affairs is especially true when the host has given up on assimilation, integration, the melting pot, and basic requirements of lawful citizenship.

Terrible governance was also a culprit, in the sense that the state worked like a lottery: those lucky enough by hook or by crook to get a state job thereby landed a bonanza of high wages, good benefits, no accountability, and rich pensions that eventually almost broke the larger and less well-compensated general society. When I see hordes of Highway Patrolmen writing tickets in a way they did not before 2008, I assume that these are revenue-based, not safety-based, protocols — a little added fiscal insurance that pensions and benefits will not be cut.

A coarsening of popular culture — a nationwide phenomenon — was intensified, as it always is, in California. The internet, video games, and modern pop culture translated into a generation of youth that did not know the value of hard work or a weekend hike in the Sierra. They didn’t learn how to open a good history book or poem, much less acquire even basic skills such as mowing the law or hammering a nail. But California’s Generation X did know that they were “somebody” whom teachers and officials dared not reprimand, punish, prosecute, or otherwise pass judgment on for their anti-social behavior. Add all that up with a whiny, pampered, influential elite on the coast that was more worried about wind power, gay marriage, ending plastic bags in the grocery stores — and, well, you get the present-day Road Warrior culture of California.

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