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

[eyer]

The necessary financing for the final dive into American socialism lies just ahead...

Ignis US manager hails ‘staggering’ energy boom

A “staggering oil and gas boom” in the US will help the economy to rebound this year, according to Ignis Asset Management’s Terry Ewing.

...“America stands on the verge of a major change that puts it on course to near energy self-sufficiency,” said Mr Ewing.

..“This, combined with the oil boom, is providing a huge driver of growth in the economy and is a strong competitive cost advantage to users of gas. As many as one million new jobs may be created over the next 3 years through oil and gas development.”

...In addition, US banks are better-capitalised than their European counterparts, he said.

Corporate balance sheets are shifting from high levels of debt to high levels of free cashflow, while dividend rises and share repurchases have considerably increased in the past year.

http://www.ftadviser.com/2012/01/03...ergy-boom-0e0FUd4ALQWvmJJoFhFQjL/article.html

U.S. SHALE GAS FRENZY HEATS UP

Energy industry's bet on new energy source shows no sign of slowing in 2012

(TELEGRAPH) — Total, France’s biggest oil and gas company, will pay $2.32bn (£1.5bn) for a 25pc stake in a shale deposit in the east of Ohio.

Meanwhile, Sinopec, China’s largest energy company, plans to invest $2.26bn to become a partner in developing five natural gas and oil fields with US producer Devon Energy.

US, European, Chinese and Indian companies are scrambling to secure a slice of America’s shale gas deposits, which experts have forecast have the potential to become a central part of the world’s energy supply over the next half century as oil reserves dwindle. A study by PricewaterhouseCoopers last year estimated that the exploration of shale deposits could generate 1m jobs in the US, a prospect that has been seized on by its supporters.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/8990667/US-shale-gas-frenzy-heats-up.html

There's a Taliban office opening soon in Qatar with USSA political support and economic financing...

...next up is the Chinese Communist Party satellite office in Toledo.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I wonder what Merc, Throb and U_D will say if January slumps?

Republican obstruction?

If the Republicans have been so successful in obstructing the Obama rescue plan, Son of Stimulus, and the economy recovered, one might be tempted to suggest that in 2010, the voters got it right and Republican obstruction is that which is giving people hope for change...

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

There's definitely an uptick in the number of solicitors stopping at my home, and some bums setup camp in the nature park behind my house. Looks like we slipped into RECOVERY WINTER!

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Like any president, Mr. Obama will take credit for these economic gains. He’s doing that right now. And he has a case to make: A year ago the unemployment rate was 9.4 percent, and in 2011 it fell almost a percentage point. In the twelve months through December 2011, the economy produced 1.64 million new jobs, while in 2010, only 940,000 were created. On a monthly average basis, 137,000 new jobs per month were created in 2011, compared to only 78,000 a month in 2010. Things are getting better.

Now, whether this has anything to do with Barack Obama’s policies is quite another matter. After all, coming out of a deep recession, monthly jobs should be closer to 300,000 or 400,000, as they were during the Reagan recovery in 1983-84. The unemployment rate should be falling much faster. This should be the Republican message.

Ironically, while President Obama takes credit for better jobs today, his forecast at the time of the $800 billion stimulus package was for near 6 percent unemployment at this stage in the cycle. So the stimulus didn’t work. And in terms of recovery rates, pro-growth policies following a deep recession — as per the Reagan experience — might be creating 6 to 8 percent economic growth rather than the 2.5 percent tepid growth of the two-year Obama recovery.

...

What’s really driving today’s better economy is the resilience of America’s free-market capitalist system. In spite of the future threats from excess tax and regulatory actions coming out of Washington, the self-correcting American economy is in fact improving.

And that’s going to make defeating Obama tougher. Face it. That’s the reality.

Here’s another point: With better jobs, consumer incomes and spending power are actually rising about 5 percent annually right now. Corporate profits at 13 percent of GDP are the highest since 1950. And both companies and households have deleveraged substantially. So the economy could grow by 3 percent in 2012. And if Europe ever settles down, that could turn out to be a 4 percent growth rate with 2 percent or less inflation.

So just complaining about the economy is not a good GOP message. Better to focus more on a reelected Obama who will raise tax rates on entrepreneurs and successful earners and regulate businesses more heavily (that’s what the NLRB and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau flap is really about). Argue against redistribution, and in favor of opportunity and growth.

The GOP message has to be “We can do this better.” Growth at 2.5 percent with 8 percent unemployment should be replaced with 5 percent growth and 5 percent unemployment. Say that. And then say: Here’s how we will do it.

Larry Kudlow, NRO

Of course, this is a biased source and therefore wrong...

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Yet the adult employment participation rate dropped from 2010 thru 2011. That is, the total labor pool shrunk during 2011.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Why business may shrink back, again, in fear...

In sum, Obama dissolved the separation of powers, the framers’ ingenious bulwark against any government branch’s seizure of supreme power — and thus the Constitution’s bulwark against tyranny. The president claims the power to appoint federal officers without the Senate’s constitutionally mandated advice and consent. He does so by claiming unilateral powers to dictate when the Senate is in session, a power the Constitution assigns to Congress, and to decree that an ongoing session is actually a recess. This sheer ukase, he says, triggers the part of the Constitution we’re keeping because he likes it — viz., the executive power to fill vacancies without any vetting by the people’s representatives.

Mind you, a president is the only government official constitutionally required to swear that he will “preserve, protect and defend” that Constitution. We are talking here not just about Obama’s characteristically breathtaking arrogance. These are profound violations of his oath and of our fundamental law. But rest assured he will get away with them. For that, Republicans can thank themselves and their surrender to statism.

Obama is hot to move forward on two fronts. The first is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB is the monstrous Dodd-Frank’s crown jewel. Congress unconstitutionally delegated to it virtually unreviewable power to “dictate credit allocation in the U.S. economy,” as C. Boyden Gray put it. Not just bank lending — the law invests dictatorial power in a single CFPB director over thousands of American businesses. The CFPB is not just part of Obama’s design to splay the government’s tentacles throughout the private economy; it is also key to his reelection narrative: Leviathan, no longer shyly creeping but heroically swashbuckling through predatory capitalists to rescue the noble “99 percent.”

...

The president’s second front is, as ever, Big Labor. He also used his supposed recess power to appoint three members to the National Labor Relations Board. This will ensure that the NLRB will not lack for the necessary quorum to do the bidding of union bosses who, in turn, keep the campaign cash and direct-action services churning for the Democratic party. Obama was even more audacious on the NLRB appointees than on Cordray: He submitted two of the three names to the Senate on December 15, right on the eve of the recess that wasn’t a recess. There is not even a fig leaf of GOP obstructionism to complain about — the Senate was given no realistic opportunity to do background checks or hold committee hearings, much less hold an informed confirmation vote.

Again, however, Republicans have not even attempted to sound the alarm for folding up the NLRB, even after its unelected bureaucrats outrageously presumed to begin telling private businesses, like Boeing, where they would and would not be permitted to operate. The GOP is not making the overarching case for getting Americans out from under the statist thumb; they are saying they would apply the same thumb more benignly — by slow-walking enough confirmations, they figure the 2012 election will mean vacancies filled by Republican-preferred bureaucrats.

That is to say, the GOP has already surrendered on the greater constitutional transgression: the transfer of power from the people to the administrative state. To take another example, remember the Independent Payment Advisory Board? Like CFPB birthed by Dodd-Frank, the IPAB is an unaccountable, authoritarian panel created by Obamacare. It will ration health care through price controls. As Stanley Kurtz recounted in National Review, when the democracy-dissing Orszag was still working for Obama, he crowed that the IPAB is “the largest yielding of sovereignty from the Congress since the creation of the Federal Reserve.” That is supposed to cheer us, since Congress has lower ratings than Keith Olbermann. But Orszag was wrong: Congress is not the sovereign; you are. It’s your control over your life that your representatives are yielding to cadres of “expert” technocrats at the IPAB, the CFPB, the NLRB, and the rest of the faceless bureaucracy that bends inevitably to the statists who create and sustain them — a bureaucracy that coerces our besieged private sector to shift trillions of dollars from the production of value to compliance costs.

Republicans have accommodated themselves to that gross distortion of constitutional governance. Realizing this, President Obama calculates that the GOP will have little difficulty swallowing this latest, lesser indignity: He no longer deigns to consult them on the staffing of a sprawling, suffocating bureaucracy over whose control they’ve already abdicated. He has taken their measure. He knows that, after a few days of huffing, puffing, and reading the editorial pages, they’ll shrug their shoulders and move on — mumbling some drivel about how they only control one-half of one-third of the government (that would be the one-half of one-third without whose approval the beast could not be funded).

Andrew McCarthy, NRO

This is why I don't think the Republican Party is any longer a viable alternative.

This is why I will be voting for Obama, after the 2010 election neither the Democrats or the Republican elites learned a single fucking lesson, they just doubled down on their shared hatred of Libertarians and the "Tea Party" types.

America needs another healthy dose of Obama and a Democratic Congress.

One way or another, this all needs to come to an end.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Yet the adult employment participation rate dropped from 2010 thru 2011. That is, the total labor pool shrunk during 2011.

The numbers look good when you write off sections of the job universe in toto...

When you drop people arbitrarily from the ranks of the seeking because they've run out of benefits...

Then, the numbers are going to do pretty much whatever you want them to do while your Democratic press provides you all the cover you need; they desire one-party rule and salivate over the "Chinese Miracle" every bit as much as they used to salivate over Uncle Joe's economy, Hitler's Autobahn and Benito's train schedule...

... and yet, they are the noble defenders of American Liberty.

lol Shit Happens!

 

[patrick1]

The numbers look good when you write off sections of the job universe in toto...

When you drop people arbitrarily from the ranks of the seeking because they've run out of benefits...

Then, the numbers are going to do pretty much whatever you want them to do while your Democratic press provides you all the cover you need; they desire one-party rule and salivate over the "Chinese Miracle" every bit as much as they used to salivate over Uncle Joe's economy, Hitler's Autobahn and Benito's train schedule...

... and yet, they are the noble defenders of American Liberty.

lol Shit Happens!

This is the sort of point where sanity seems to leave the debate. Partisans in different parties manipulate unemployment figures to flatter their own side and have been doing so since statistics began. Here's a recent example of Fox news doing the precise opposite of what you're claiming here: rejecting criteria for Obama that they used to trumpet for Bush.

http://mediamatters.org/print/blog/201112120027

It is a miracle of logic to link such trivial spinning to Stalinism, Fascism and Nazism, so well done.

Patrick

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

This is the sort of point where sanity seems to leave the debate. Partisans in different parties manipulate unemployment figures to flatter their own side and have been doing so since statistics began. Here's a recent example of Fox news doing the precise opposite of what you're claiming here: rejecting criteria for Obama that they used to trumpet for Bush.

http://mediamatters.org/print/blog/201112120027

It is a miracle of logic to link such trivial spinning to Stalinism, Fascism and Nazism, so well done.

Patrick

I don't play for either team, therefore my examination, as such, is not partisan.

Note during the Bush years, if you go back, you will find some of our fellow posters decrying 5% as "feels like a recession," even if it's not a recession and now, they see 8.5% and cry victory forgetting for a lifetime that they were promised that massive debt would hold us to 8% unemployment.

Methinks they should have "jiggered" the books earlier.

And in the week(s) coming up, Obama is going to ask for the third debt ceiling increase to bring our debt obligations to $16,000,000,000,000.00...

Fucking chump change, no?

What's the daily vig on a number like that?

 

[eyer]

Trust us...

...we're the government's beancounters:

IRS estimate: 17 percent of taxes owed went unpaid

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9S3LR1O3.htm

The charge concerns 2006, "the most recent tax year for which data is available.", which I believe because the government being 5 years behind seems completely feasible.

The beancounters say 17% of due taxes went unpaid;"After IRS audits and other enforcement efforts, non-compliance shrank to 14 percent", which totaled $385 billion which, coincidently, just happened to be much larger than the $248 billion dollar federal budget deficit that same year.

Evidently, the mighty IRS only does this particular audit every 5 years, because the last year examined was 2001...

... allegedly.

When the mother of all tax collectors finally gets around to auditing 2011 in 2016, they'll probably find that year's deficit of $1.3 trillion would've been covered too if only the People were as honest as government itself...

 

[mercury14]

I don't play for either team, therefore my examination, as such, is not partisan.

...And fifty angels lost their wings when these words were uttered.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Merc, I told you some time ago that I have no intention of humoring your silly little demands on conversation. There's absolutely no reason for me to expect you to carry on a discussion honestly, and even what you say in earnest is patently hostile.

For example, you have no idea exactly what I understand about Sharia, but insinuate that I have what appears to be an "unsophisticated view of Sharia Law," which is rather ironic, because the word Sharia itself means "law," so you just said I had an unsophisticated view of Law Law. To be fair, many make the same mistake and unlike you some of them are actually intelligent and friendly, and it's common to hear even from Muslims in the west. I probably did that a few times myself, but I always find it funny coming from people who claim to have higher insight into Sharia and how it's applied in the Islamic world.

But I digress.

The point is, you will stick to a lie so vehemently that you'll use alts to propagate it, and shriek with demands for apologies from people calling you on your BS. You bully, harass and engage in character assassination when you can't defeat people's arguments on the merit of reason. And do you offer your own apology after you're caught? Nope. You get ten time worse.

As far as I can tell, you're incapable of progressive discourse. If someone reasonable had come along and asked for information about my statements, and given an indication they were actually interested in a real conversation about it, I would have happily fetched some. I've got plenty.

But you don't fit that description.

Bye from Bahrain,
Ellie

What she said.

Elvis in Edmonton

 

[RobDownSouth]

I don't play for either team, therefore my examination, as such, is not partisan.

Yup, fair 'n balanced, albeit in a Fox News sorta way.....

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Throb, despite your deeply held prejudices and convictions, I don't watch Fox News...




To have adult conversation, you first need to either grow up or grow a pair.

 

[Wat_Tyler]

Standing erect on one's back legs is helpful, too.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

rosco, if you drop by this morning, this one's for you:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/01/how_to_win_power_by_selling_out_your_own_union.html

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Standing erect on one's back legs is helpful, too.

Brilliant observation.

 

[Wat_Tyler]

Brilliant observation.

Just tryin' to pay attention.


And watchin' out for sawzall-ready projects.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Of all the nifty tools the women have purchased for me, a saws-all is not in my possession. I shall have to remedy that by next Xmas...




Today we're going to pick up a new roto-tiller and radically expand our vegetable garden.

It pays to can! YES WE CAN!!!

 

[Wat_Tyler]

My experience: I have owned several types/makes (theft keeps my stocks depleted from time to time), and I am a big fan of the DeWalt smaller reciprocating saw. It's 9 amps, has plenty of ass, is manageable, and has the quick-release blade changer and a 4-position blade setting. It's $99 at the box store. My current one is several years old and has lived a fairly rough life, but it keeps on ticking.

http://www.toolandanchor.com/images/DW304PK.jpg

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I'll never buy DeWalt again.



I had two drills for all of about six months each. I'd use them for a bit, they would get to smoking and then they would quit and that wasn't even with over-use or abuse.



I stick with Craftsman now, not for the quality, but for the warranty.

 

[RobDownSouth]

Throb, despite your deeply held prejudices and convictions, I don't watch Fox News...
To have adult conversation, you first need to either grow up or grow a pair.

Yeah we saw your idea of "growing a pair" in the other thread, using your patented "kiddie shield" defense against mean ole Byron.

I guess that's the sorta "self defense" you learn at the "Black Belt" level.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

*chuckle*




That which is insult to Byron is a badge of honor to you.

That's the only reason you're not on ignore; you're too stupid to see it...

 

[Wat_Tyler]

I'll never buy DeWalt again.



I had two drills for all of about six months each. I'd use them for a bit, they would get to smoking and then they would quit and that wasn't even with over-use or abuse.



I stick with Craftsman now, not for the quality, but for the warranty.

I am not a DeWalt fan, believe me, but their saw has worked well for me. I'd have another.


I have a wee Bosch impact driver which is wonderful. If it would just hold a charge longer . . . .


By the way, battery saws blow grits. Batteries are better for drilling, and saws are better to be plugged into something . . . like Henry Gross.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

. . . .


By the way, battery saws blow grits. Batteries are better for drilling, and saws are better to be plugged into something . . . like Henry Gross.

Now that is what I call useful economic information.



Thanks!