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What happened to all of the doom and gloom economic threads?
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Beco
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and four more years of misery for a lot of familes...sad to say
phrodeau
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No, that would be the candidate who promises such.
richard_daily
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Why should I feel bad about white power families?
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richard_daily
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*Chuckles, shakes head*
God Damn you're dumb.³
The only ones that are going to be "suffering" under Obama's next 4 years due to it being Obama in office, are those who subscribe to the white power ideology.
Also, I think you missed AJs memo where he declared the
emoticon to be the sign of liberalism.It's ok, I understand you didn't get it, it hasn't been posted up on the drudge report yet.
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richard_daily
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So now, we're measuring suffering based on the price of a gallon of gas?
You must get tired from running all over the place carrying those goal posts.
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richard_daily
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People like you complain about it.
If you're too broke to afford gas, let me know, I could loan you some money, at a reasonable rate.
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Sean
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Well, going on the available evidence, GDP goes up, GNP goes up, employment goes up, standard of living goes up, food prices go down.
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richard_daily
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Figured you for a being a big stupid dummy with nothing to contribute.
Here what it does, clown:
A Simple Rule Of Thumb Regarding Oil And How It Impacts The Economy
Joe Weisenthal | Feb. 24, 2011, 4:10 PM
From Deutsche Bank, this is useful:
According to our analysis, a $10 increase in oil prices translates into roughly a 25 cent increase in retail gasoline prices. Every one penny increase in gasoline is then worth about $1 billion in household energy consumption. (In decimal terms, it is actually $1.4 billion.) Therefore, a sustained $10 increase in oil prices translates into $25 billion in additional household energy spending. Assuming this price rise crowds out spending elsewhere in the economy, effectively acting as a tax, means that a sustained $10 rise in oil prices reduces annual real GDP growth by 0.2%.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/oil-impact-on-the-economy-
2011-2#ixzz1nLTGQOrq
Another reference here:
http://pragcap.com/what-is-the-impact-of-rising-gasoline-prices
Joe Weisenthal couldn't be wrong about anything.....
could he?
http://wealth.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Picture-99.png
Sean
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VoteForMe
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Normally we have apples and oranges, now you bring in Kumquats.
I love me those kumquats. Just can't find the good ones anymore.
RightField
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The once-invincible Obama campaign team has become mistake-prone
BY: Matthew Continetti - February 24, 2012
The sound and fury of the Republican primary has distracted political observers from one of the most interesting political developments of the cycle thus far: President Obama’s reelection campaign is a pallid imitation of his 2008 juggernaut.
The merits and importance of that campaign have been exaggerated, of course. Show me a candidate from the out-party running in an environment in which the incumbent averages 29 percent approval in the run-up to the election, in which the economy is in a recession and credit crisis, in which U.S. troops are deployed overseas in two unpopular wars, and I’ll show you a winner. The fact that Obama’s general election opponent chose to ignore his greatest vulnerability only eased his passage to the White House. The favorable political landscape and the media’s hosannas obscured weaknesses—Obama’s remoteness, his dependence on scripts, his partisanship, and his inflated sense of his powers of persuasion—that would harm him after the Inauguration.
Obama for America 2008 may not have been, as the president put it on Election Night, the “best political campaign, I think, in the history of America.” Nor was it, as a former editor of the New Republic once wrote, “the political equivalent of crossing a Lamborghini with a Hummer.” But Obama’s first presidential run was formidable in at least this aspect: The then-senator and his top lieutenants were careful in projecting a “good-government,” squeaky-clean halo over his candidacy. Obama pledged to operate within the system of public financing. No lobbyists were allowed to donate to the campaign. No lobbyist, it was said, would be allowed to serve in an Obama administration. Such an administration, moreover, would be committed to “creating an unprecedented level of openness in government.”
Such promises, more than any specific policies, were crucial to the burgeoning conceit that Obama’s candidacy was “potentially transformational.” That Obama held to a supposedly higher standard than Hillary Clinton or John McCain added to his “cool” factor and helped him excite young voters. But the pledges lasted only as long as they were politically useful. As soon as the Obama campaign realized that it could raise more money outside than inside the public system, it revealed how empty its rhetoric had been. Obama, an outspoken supporter of campaign finance reform, became the first candidate in the post-Watergate era to reject the public financing system.
The Republicans working against Obama’s candidacy in 2008 were both frustrated and impressed by his campaign’s thoroughness in quashing potential scandals. Try as they might, Republican researchers four years ago could not uncover any major lapses in the Obama campaign’s vetting procedures for donors and bundlers. Sure, the Republicans uncovered minor mistakes here and there, but the material was small fry. Chicago was fastidious. And the money came flowing in: $750 million, the most money raised by any candidate for office in American history.
The turnabout on public financing, meanwhile, set the pattern for future reversals. First comes the flowery profession of left-wing ideals. Then the grubby realities set in and Obama and his team backtrack on earlier pledges. The switch causes a brief news sensation in which partisan Democrats declare that Obama was forced into abandoning his position because of Republican perfidy. The media herd nods its collective head and the breach is quickly forgotten. A few true believers turn against the administration by closing their pocketbooks.
Obama is a pro at delivering empty promises. Since the launch of his presidential odyssey, he not only has reversed course on public financing but also on the individual health care mandate and the public option and the release of sensitive documents pertaining to interrogations. He was unable to satisfy his base by closing Guantanamo or by giving Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a civilian trial. The supposed civil libertarian has embraced preventive detention and the extrajudicial killing of American citizens involved in terrorist networks. Lobbyists were granted waivers and provided loopholes to serve in the administration. The White House’s record on transparency was clouded at best. None of this was sufficient to alienate Obama’s core supporters, who despite the occasional griping were content with their man’s clichéd paeans to fairness and public investments and green energy economics.
This lack of serious intra-party criticism encouraged the Obama political team to become lazy. The president relied too heavily on the unions, who were fighting rearguard actions to prevent common sense pension and benefit reforms. His unpopular policies—stimulus, healthcare—contributed to a steady decline in his approval ratings. He failed to expand the ranks of potential contributors. He failed to enact climate change legislation, angering the green lobby, but did sign the Dodd-Frank monstrosity into law, angering his friends on Wall Street. Other allies discovered that cronyism does not always pay.
As a result, Obama has found it more difficult to raise money. He has $140 million so far, suggesting that it will be hard for his campaign to match its 2008 numbers, much less its ridiculous rumored projection of $1 billion. The campaign has become more desperate as the money has dried up. You see it in the U-turn on Super PACs, which have gone from threatening democracy to being an integral part in the president’s reelection effort. You see it in the questionable characters that show up in the lists of Obama donors and bundlers: The two brothers of a Mexican fugitive; the former Democratic congressman and registered lobbyist who says he was never a lobbyist; a king of short sales connected to the call girl for client number nine; the founder of Def Jam Records; and Anna Wintour.
Moreover, what, exactly, is the president’s message? Obama ran on hope and change and an end to the war in Iraq in 2008. He pledged to reform health care and Wall Street and change the tone in Washington. But the geniuses in Chicago have yet to come up with a 2012 slogan that is anywhere near as intoxicating. “Obama 2012: It Could Be Worse” just won’t cut it. Nor will singing. Right now, the media are content to focus on Republican infighting. They are happy to assist Obama in the suggestion that Election Day 2012 will somehow decide the future of contraception in America. But there is a long way to go before the vote. And at some point voters are bound to wonder what a second Obama term will bring.
Declining fundraising, suspect supporters, and the absence of an affirmative message—these are all signs of a campaign that is nowhere as strong as we have been led to believe. They undermine the notion that the 2008 campaign was all that impressive to begin with. And they point to a fact that soon will be impossible to ignore: President Obama has gotten sloppy.
BY: Matthew Continetti - February 24, 2012
The sound and fury of the Republican primary has distracted political observers from one of the most interesting political developments of the cycle thus far: President Obama’s reelection campaign is a pallid imitation of his 2008 juggernaut.
The merits and importance of that campaign have been exaggerated, of course. Show me a candidate from the out-party running in an environment in which the incumbent averages 29 percent approval in the run-up to the election, in which the economy is in a recession and credit crisis, in which U.S. troops are deployed overseas in two unpopular wars, and I’ll show you a winner. The fact that Obama’s general election opponent chose to ignore his greatest vulnerability only eased his passage to the White House. The favorable political landscape and the media’s hosannas obscured weaknesses—Obama’s remoteness, his dependence on scripts, his partisanship, and his inflated sense of his powers of persuasion—that would harm him after the Inauguration.
Obama for America 2008 may not have been, as the president put it on Election Night, the “best political campaign, I think, in the history of America.” Nor was it, as a former editor of the New Republic once wrote, “the political equivalent of crossing a Lamborghini with a Hummer.” But Obama’s first presidential run was formidable in at least this aspect: The then-senator and his top lieutenants were careful in projecting a “good-government,” squeaky-clean halo over his candidacy. Obama pledged to operate within the system of public financing. No lobbyists were allowed to donate to the campaign. No lobbyist, it was said, would be allowed to serve in an Obama administration. Such an administration, moreover, would be committed to “creating an unprecedented level of openness in government.”
Such promises, more than any specific policies, were crucial to the burgeoning conceit that Obama’s candidacy was “potentially transformational.” That Obama held to a supposedly higher standard than Hillary Clinton or John McCain added to his “cool” factor and helped him excite young voters. But the pledges lasted only as long as they were politically useful. As soon as the Obama campaign realized that it could raise more money outside than inside the public system, it revealed how empty its rhetoric had been. Obama, an outspoken supporter of campaign finance reform, became the first candidate in the post-Watergate era to reject the public financing system.
The Republicans working against Obama’s candidacy in 2008 were both frustrated and impressed by his campaign’s thoroughness in quashing potential scandals. Try as they might, Republican researchers four years ago could not uncover any major lapses in the Obama campaign’s vetting procedures for donors and bundlers. Sure, the Republicans uncovered minor mistakes here and there, but the material was small fry. Chicago was fastidious. And the money came flowing in: $750 million, the most money raised by any candidate for office in American history.
The turnabout on public financing, meanwhile, set the pattern for future reversals. First comes the flowery profession of left-wing ideals. Then the grubby realities set in and Obama and his team backtrack on earlier pledges. The switch causes a brief news sensation in which partisan Democrats declare that Obama was forced into abandoning his position because of Republican perfidy. The media herd nods its collective head and the breach is quickly forgotten. A few true believers turn against the administration by closing their pocketbooks.
Obama is a pro at delivering empty promises. Since the launch of his presidential odyssey, he not only has reversed course on public financing but also on the individual health care mandate and the public option and the release of sensitive documents pertaining to interrogations. He was unable to satisfy his base by closing Guantanamo or by giving Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a civilian trial. The supposed civil libertarian has embraced preventive detention and the extrajudicial killing of American citizens involved in terrorist networks. Lobbyists were granted waivers and provided loopholes to serve in the administration. The White House’s record on transparency was clouded at best. None of this was sufficient to alienate Obama’s core supporters, who despite the occasional griping were content with their man’s clichéd paeans to fairness and public investments and green energy economics.
This lack of serious intra-party criticism encouraged the Obama political team to become lazy. The president relied too heavily on the unions, who were fighting rearguard actions to prevent common sense pension and benefit reforms. His unpopular policies—stimulus, healthcare—contributed to a steady decline in his approval ratings. He failed to expand the ranks of potential contributors. He failed to enact climate change legislation, angering the green lobby, but did sign the Dodd-Frank monstrosity into law, angering his friends on Wall Street. Other allies discovered that cronyism does not always pay.
As a result, Obama has found it more difficult to raise money. He has $140 million so far, suggesting that it will be hard for his campaign to match its 2008 numbers, much less its ridiculous rumored projection of $1 billion. The campaign has become more desperate as the money has dried up. You see it in the U-turn on Super PACs, which have gone from threatening democracy to being an integral part in the president’s reelection effort. You see it in the questionable characters that show up in the lists of Obama donors and bundlers: The two brothers of a Mexican fugitive; the former Democratic congressman and registered lobbyist who says he was never a lobbyist; a king of short sales connected to the call girl for client number nine; the founder of Def Jam Records; and Anna Wintour.
Moreover, what, exactly, is the president’s message? Obama ran on hope and change and an end to the war in Iraq in 2008. He pledged to reform health care and Wall Street and change the tone in Washington. But the geniuses in Chicago have yet to come up with a 2012 slogan that is anywhere near as intoxicating. “Obama 2012: It Could Be Worse” just won’t cut it. Nor will singing. Right now, the media are content to focus on Republican infighting. They are happy to assist Obama in the suggestion that Election Day 2012 will somehow decide the future of contraception in America. But there is a long way to go before the vote. And at some point voters are bound to wonder what a second Obama term will bring.
Declining fundraising, suspect supporters, and the absence of an affirmative message—these are all signs of a campaign that is nowhere as strong as we have been led to believe. They undermine the notion that the 2008 campaign was all that impressive to begin with. And they point to a fact that soon will be impossible to ignore: President Obama has gotten sloppy.
RightField
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The title, author and date are posted at the top. I just found it interesting and thought I'd share it.
RightField
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'Stupid' and Oil Prices
Obama's Forrest Gump analysis of rising gas prices..
Wall Street Journal
Today.
'The American people aren't stupid," thundered President Obama yesterday in Miami, ridiculing Republicans who are blaming him for rising gasoline prices. Let's hope he's right, because not even Forrest Gump could believe the logic of what Mr. Obama is trying to sell.
To wit, that a) gasoline prices are beyond his control, but b) to the extent oil and gas production is rising in America, his energy policies deserve all the credit, and c) higher prices are one more reason to raise taxes on oil and gas drillers while handing even more subsidies to his friends in green energy. Where to begin?
It's true enough that oil prices can't be commanded from the Oval Office, so in that sense Mr. Obama's disavowal of blame is a rare show of humility in the face of market forces. Would that he showed similar modesty in trying to command the tides of home prices, car sales ("cash for clunkers"), or the production of electric batteries.
The oil price surge has several likely sources. One is the turmoil in the Middle East, especially new fears of a supply shock from a conflict with Iran. But it's worth recalling that Mr. Obama also blamed the last oil-price surge, in spring 2011, on the Libyan uprising. Moammar Gadhafi is now gone and Libyan oil production is coming back on stream, yet oil prices dipped only briefly below $90 a barrel and have been rising since October. Something else must be going on.
Mr. Obama yesterday blamed rising demand from the likes of Brazil and China, and there is something to that as well. But this energy demand is also not new, and if anything Chinese and Brazilian economic growth has been slowing in recent months.
Another suspect—one Mr. Obama doesn't like to mention—is U.S. monetary policy. Oil is traded in dollars, and its price therefore rises when the value of the dollar falls, all else being equal. The Federal Reserve throughout Mr. Obama's term has pursued the easiest monetary policy in modern times, expressly to revive the housing market. It has done so with the private support and urging of the White House and through Mr. Obama's appointees who are now a majority on the Fed's Board of Governors.
.
Oil staged its last price surge along with other commodity prices when the Fed revved up its second burst of "quantitative easing" in 2010-2011. Prices stabilized when QE2 ended. But in recent months the Fed has again signaled its commitment to near-zero interest rates first through 2013, and recently through 2014. Commodity prices, including oil, have since begun another surge, and hedge funds have begun to bet on commodity plays again. John Paulson says he's betting on gold, the ultimate hedge against a falling dollar.
Fed officials and Mr. Obama want to take credit for easy money if stock-market and housing prices rise, but then deny any responsibility if commodity prices rise too, causing food and energy prices to soar for consumers. They can't have it both ways, as not-so-stupid Americans intuitively understand when they buy groceries or gas. This is the double-edged sword of an economic recovery "built to last" on easy money rather than on sound fiscal and regulatory policies.
As for domestic energy, Mr. Obama rightly points to the rising share of U.S. oil consumption now produced at home. But this trend began in the late Bush Administration, which opened up large new areas on and offshore for oil and gas drilling that are now coming on stream. Mr. Obama sneered at expanded drilling as a candidate in 2008 and for most of his term has done little to expand it.
In early 2010, he proposed to open some new areas to drilling but shut that down after the Gulf oil spill. According to the Greater New Orleans Gulf Permits Index for January 31, over the previous three months the feds issued an average of three deep-water drilling permits a month compared to the historical average of seven. Over the same three months, the feds approved an average of 4.7 shallow-water permits a month, compared to the historical average of 14.7.
Approval of an offshore drilling plan now takes 92 days, 31 more than the historical average. And so far in 2012, an average of 23% of all drilling plans have been approved, compared to the average of 73.4%.
Oh, and don't forget the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have increased the delivery of oil from Canada and North Dakota's Bakken Shale to Gulf Coast refineries, replacing oil from Venezuela.
The reality is that most of the increase in U.S. oil and gas production has come despite the Obama Administration. It is flowing from the shale boom, which is the result of private technological advances and investment. Mr. Obama has seen the energy sun rise and is crowing like a rooster that he made it happen.
Mr. Obama yesterday also repeated his proposal that now is the time to raise taxes on oil and gas companies, as if doing so will make them more likely to drill. He must not believe the economic truism that when you tax something you get less of it, including fewer of the new jobs they've created.
***
We'd almost feel sorry for Mr. Obama's gas-price predicament if it weren't a case of rough justice. The President has deliberately sought to raise the price of energy throughout the economy via his cap-and-trade agenda. He is now getting his wish, albeit a little too overtly for political comfort. Mr. Obama has also spent three years blaming George W. Bush for every economic ill. If Mr. Obama now feels frustrated by economic events beyond his control, perhaps he should call Mr. Bush for consolation.
koalabear
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You don't need laws, all you need are executive orders. Go to the EPA website and search carbon credits, yellow neck.
mercury14
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That's because companies aren't asking for shallow water permits anymore. Why is this Obama's fault? The reality is that most of the shallow water easy oil is gone. Your author is a an idiot for leaving out this fact. Here's a tidbit from the BSEE:
Shallow water: To date, 112 new shallow water well permits have been issued since the implementation of new safety and environmental standards on June 8, 2010. Just 6 of these permits are currently pending; with 12 having been returned to the operator for more information. http://www.bsee.gov/Regulations-and-Guidance/Permits/Status-of-Gulf-of-Mexico-Well-Permits.aspx
This conflicts with the facts.
Getting rid of tax breaks for oil companies will never cause them to stop making good business decisions. They will drill just the same because it will remain a mega-profitable endeavor.
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