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

[RobDownSouth]

We won't hear a damn thing from the Usual Suspects (Vetty, AJ, Right Field) because there's a lag time of a day or so for the Reich Wing to come up with their inevitable "but...but...radish prices!" editorials to downplay the economic growth. As soon as these editorials are available I'm sure we'll see them cut-n-pasted here as "proof" of our continuin' economic decline.

Sure, it's not based in reality, but a lack of facts never slowed the boys down before!

 

[Sean Renaud]

Edited to add: Oops, Sean, we're both wrong...
The past two months, December and January, the BLS final adjusted numbers were adjusted UPWARD substantially.



LINK

I stand corrected. Maybe it just feels like it always gets adjusted down. I admit I don't always double check these things since the adjustments seem to in general be minor enough that I don't need to take back anything I said from the initial estimate when the final adjusted numbers hit.

 

[RobDownSouth]

I stand corrected. Maybe it just feels like it always gets adjusted down. I admit I don't always double check these things since the adjustments seem to in general be minor enough that I don't need to take back anything I said from the initial estimate when the final adjusted numbers hit.

Oh they were adjusted downward for something like 12 months in a row previous to the upticks, a fact that Vetteman of course was crowing about.

Now that we're definitely in a recovery, though, the cowardly Marine is no where to be seen.

 

[garbage can]

Now that we're definitely in a recovery, though, the cowardly Marine is no where to be seen.

I agree 100%... we're definetely in a recovery, watch for gasoline prices to drop, along with food prices. We need to spend a few billion more in green energy, where our future is.

Everyone knows the Keystone pipeline needs to be stopped, we need to know the real environmental impact.

The 5 military guys that burned the Korans, need to be punished, as Karzi suggests. And I would suggest that our brave military, who takes a bullet to save a Muslim, be awarded the Obama medal of honor.

 

[Sean Renaud]

I agree 100%... we're definetely in a recovery, watch for gasoline prices to drop, along with food prices. We need to spend a few billion more in green energy, where our future is.

Everyone knows the Keystone pipeline needs to be stopped, we need to know the real environmental impact.

The 5 military guys that burned the Korans, need to be punished, as Karzi suggests. And I would suggest that our brave military, who takes a bullet to save a Muslim, be awarded the Obama medal of honor.

Why would gasoline or food prices drop in a recovery?

The Keystone Pipleline will happen but we do need to know the enviromental impact. The men who burned the Korans need to be punished. I'd personally recommend an Other than Honorable Discharge. And fuck yeah if a member of our military takes a bullet to save a Muslim they should get a Medal of Honor. As well as giving that civillian some sort of award.

 

[mercury14]

I stand corrected. Maybe it just feels like it always gets adjusted down. I admit I don't always double check these things since the adjustments seem to in general be minor enough that I don't need to take back anything I said from the initial estimate when the final adjusted numbers hit.

The adjustment is downward about 60% of the time. But lately it's been upward.

 

[mercury14]

I agree 100%... we're definetely in a recovery, watch for gasoline prices to drop, along with food prices. We need to spend a few billion more in green energy, where our future is.

Everyone knows the Keystone pipeline needs to be stopped, we need to know the real environmental impact.

The 5 military guys that burned the Korans, need to be punished, as Karzi suggests. And I would suggest that our brave military, who takes a bullet to save a Muslim, be awarded the Obama medal of honor.

The Dems, including Obama, are for the Keystone pipeline. They just want the environmental assessment to be completed first and for the exact route to be planned before they vote for it. Republicans are forcing theatrical votes to score political points.

 

[RightField]

William Voegeli
Not a Penny More
The case for antitax absolutism
Winter 2012

During last summer’s debt-ceiling negotiations, David Brooks of the New York Times wrote that Republicans who rejected “trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred billion dollars of revenue increases” would reveal themselves as “fanatics” with “no sense of moral decency”—clearly “not fit to govern.” In November, after the failure of the congressional “supercommittee” spawned by the debt-ceiling crisis, the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson made much the same point: bringing the federal debt under control without higher taxes made sense only “in the parallel universe inhabited by GOP ideologues, a place where the laws of arithmetic do not apply.” The problem, according to Robinson, was that among today’s Republicans, “tax cuts are not a matter of policy but of faith.”

This religion, all right-thinkers know, has a leader: Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) since the organization’s founding in 1985. Norquist and ATR are best known for the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge,” which, at the federal level, binds politicians to oppose both higher marginal income-tax rates on individuals and business and “any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates.” In the GOP, only six congressmen and seven senators have not signed the pledge; only three of the 246 elected Democrats on Capitol Hill have signed it. The pledge, Garry Wills thundered in The New York Review of Books, “means that most Republicans in Congress . . . have left behind their consciences in the pocket of Grover Norquist.” Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick has even charged that “the Republican strategy is to drive America to the brink of fiscal ruin and then argue that the only way out is to cut spending for the powerless. Taxes—a dirty word thanks to Norquist’s ‘no new taxes’ gimmick—are made to seem beyond the pale.”

These critics would have you believe that the antitax movement is nothing but belligerent extremism. The truth, however, is that you don’t have to embrace Norquist’s famous ambition—to shrink government until it’s small enough to be drowned in a bathtub—to conclude that opposing tax increases is both smart politics and wise policy. Nor do you have to make the maximalist supply-side assertion that tax cuts always pay for themselves. In rejecting tax hikes, Republicans aren’t trading in fanaticism. Rather, they’re confronting a governing failure—an abiding lack of candor about what our welfare state costs—that voters grasp but Democrats refuse to admit.

The debate over closing the federal budget deficit has seen volleys of certitudes. Speaking to an Americans for Tax Reform meeting last April, Republican senator Orrin Hatch said, “We don’t have a revenue problem. We all know we have a spending problem.” Two months later, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka insisted, “We don’t have an entitlement problem. We have a revenue problem.” Who’s right? Do we spend too much, or do we tax too little?

In terms of balancing the budget, there’s no way to answer that question—no mathematical basis for declaring either spending or revenues the problem. Sure, the 2010 federal budget would have been balanced if the government had cut spending by $1.293 trillion to equal its revenues of $2.163 trillion. But it would have been just as balanced if the government had increased revenues by $1.293 trillion to cover its total expenditures of $3.456 trillion.

What we can say is that over the last 40 years, government revenues have kept pace with economic growth while government spending has run steadily ahead of it. If you look at federal finances from the dawn of the Great Society in 1965 to the beginning of the Great Recession in 2008 (see the chart below), you’ll notice that Gross Domestic Product and federal revenues, both expressed in per-capita terms and adjusted for inflation, were about two and a half times as large at the end of the period as at the beginning. Federal expenditures were three times as large.

Not only has spending risen faster than GDP or revenues over the years; a particular kind of spending has led the charge. Let’s divide all federal spending into three broad categories. One is national defense. The second, the welfare state, includes Social Security; other income-support programs, such as disability insurance and unemployment compensation; Medicare; other health programs, such as Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program; and all programs in education, job training, and social services. I call the third “housekeeping,” meaning everything else that the federal government does: federal courts, prisons, prosecutors, and the FBI; Amtrak and air-traffic control; national parks and the EPA; embassies and consulates; veterans’ programs; NASA; and so on.

Here’s the scorecard. Spending on national defense, adjusted for inflation and population, was 42 percent higher in 2008 than in 1965, while housekeeping outlays were 76 percent higher (see the chart below). Both, in other words, grew far less rapidly than the economy or federal revenues—both of which, remember, were about 150 percent higher in 2008 than in 1965. But welfare-state expenditures were 583 percent higher. In fact, the welfare state became the core of the federal government, growing from 26 percent of federal outlays in 1965 to 61 percent in 2008.

Even the fact that the welfare state has grown relentlessly does not, in itself, mean that the growth has been excessive. What does begin to suggest that conclusion is the lack of candor with which the growth has been promoted. For years, the Democratic Party’s raison d’être has been to establish, defend, and expand the welfare state. The Democrats could have told us all along—forthrightly, scrupulously, and unambiguously—that their project would cost a lot of money and that, should economic growth be insufficient to pay for it, big tax increases would be necessary. Had they done so, they would be in a strong position to argue that the terms of the deal they struck with yesterday’s voters oblige today’s Americans to pay higher taxes.

But that’s not what they did. When the House Ways and Means Committee drafted Medicare in 1965, it predicted that the hospital-insurance part of the program would cost $9 billion by 1990. The actual figure was $67 billion. In 1987, Congress anticipated that a federal program to assist hospitals serving large numbers of Medicaid patients would require $1 billion by 1992. The final figure: $17 billion. One small Great Society Program, the Teacher Corps, never figured out what it was supposed to be and never accomplished any of the goals that it did set for itself, according to the political scientist Thomas E. Cronin; yet its budget quadrupled in its first seven years. Examples could be multiplied.

A more recent version of politicians’ deceptiveness about the costs of government is the Democratic insistence on calling government programs “investments.” Spending isn’t really spending, you see, because government outlays will be returned to the nation in multiples. The 2008 Democratic platform committed the party to “investing” more government money in areas as general as health, education, and energy and in programs as specific as women-owned small businesses, financial literacy, “alternative livelihoods to poppy-growing for Afghan farmers,” and the “long-term development of the Pashtun border region.” In endorsing bigger international programs, the platform also promised to “invest in our common humanity,” which doesn’t rule out much.

When Democrats do talk about taxes, they are often equally disingenuous. In 2004, John Kerry ran for president promising to raise taxes on families with incomes above $200,000 per year and to cut taxes for the other 98 percent of the population. Four years later, Barack Obama ran for president promising that the government could meet all its existing obligations and take on many new ones, while confining tax increases to individuals making more than $200,000 and families making more than $250,000.

Do these vows hold water? A 2010 study by the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, found that reducing federal deficits by the second half of this decade to a reasonable 2 percent of GDP, while keeping Obama’s promise, would require increasing the rate in the second-highest federal income-tax bracket from 33 percent to 85.7 percent, the rate in the highest bracket from 35 percent to 90.9 percent, and the capital-gains tax rate from 15 percent to 39 percent. The study, Desperately Seeking Revenue, pointed out that such tax rates would give the prosperous a strong incentive to defer income, shift it to nontaxable forms, or spend it on deductible items, like charitable contributions. The resulting revenue shortfall would necessitate even higher tax rates or might simply make reducing deficits to 2 percent of GDP impossible. Even Jonathan Chait, who has devoted hundreds of New Republic blog posts over the years to advocating higher taxes on the rich, conceded after the August 2011 debt-ceiling agreement, “It has become clear that Obama’s pledge not to raise taxes at all on anybody earning less than $250,000 a year is no longer compatible with even the minimal demands of government over the next decade.”

That’s just the latest example of a half-century of dishonesty. Having dissembled for decades about the true costs of their agenda, Democrats now bring to their most urgent political task—securing large tax increases that will prevent a sweeping reorganization of the welfare state—all the moral authority of a bait-and-switch salesman.

The Democrats’ calculation was that when the debt hit the fan, voters and even the opposition party would fall in line to keep the welfare state intact and growing. It was a reasonable assumption. After all, the Democrats were accustomed to the genteel Republicans of yore, who had always joined them in decorously avoiding the topic of how much social-welfare programs had grown in the past when deliberating how much they should grow in the future. Back then, both sides implicitly accepted a baseline rising steadily and eternally; negotiations were merely about how quickly it should rise.

But the Democratic Party didn’t count on the antitax revolution. At the heart of the Norquist Republicans’ truculent fanaticism is the insistence that citizens can question and alter the endless growth of the welfare state, rather than submit to it as though it were a law of nature. No wonder, then, that so many liberal pundits and politicians are so furious at the newly obstinate GOP. Democrats must finally fight for what they spent long, happy decades taking for granted—a steadily growing supply of dollars to finance new and expanded government programs.

When Democrats conduct that fight by calling Republicans nihilists, they really seem to believe that the alternative to higher taxes is the end of civilization as we know it. “The GOP may not acknowledge that it wants to privatize public schools or drive students of limited means out of the universities, or eliminate tax-funded health care and social services for the poor, or destroy the last vestiges of publicly supported transit or shut the parks,” Peter Schrag, a veteran California journalist, has written. “But that clearly is what it’s accomplishing.”

To see why that argument is wrong, think all the way back to 1995, when America had social insurance for the elderly, health care and welfare for the poor, and various other appurtenances of a welfare state, to say nothing of public schools and colleges, mass transit, public parks, and lots more. Since then, the federal government’s total revenues, adjusted for changes in population and inflation, have grown, despite the recession. In other words, to duplicate now the revenue stream that paid for the 1995 menu of government services would mean cutting taxes, not increasing them. Tax-fighting Republicans aren’t ripping the social safety net to shreds; rather, they’re alerting voters to the simple fact that America is spending more and more money to render worse and worse services.

Nor does it make sense for the GOP to accede to tax increases in order to win concessions, such as caps on government spending. There is overwhelming historical evidence that the politicians who establish such limits never shrink from using their clout to evade them. In an age when market and voter apprehensions about sovereign debt constrain borrowing, the refusal to raise taxes is a spending limit, one far more effective than any parchment barriers that politicians can devise. Norquist once said that “grand bargains” combining spending cuts and tax increases recalled the deals that “the Soviet Union was offering as it left Eastern Europe. And every time we didn’t give them an answer they kept asking for less.” By restricting the fiscal oxygen supply that sustains a fundamentally flawed system, Republicans are hastening our welfare state’s perestroika.

At the same time, they’re playing smart politics. When they refuse to raise taxes, Republicans force Democrats to make a deeply unpersuasive argument. Major expansions of the welfare state are indispensable, this argument goes; but the $5.08 trillion of federal, state, and local government outlays in 2010—35 percent of GDP—is already being spent on its very best uses; therefore, our new government endeavors will require corralling more of the 65 GDP percentage points that now roam contentedly beyond the fence.

Such a platform would be helpful for any candidate seeking the presidency—so long as it was the presidency of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. But no Democratic politician will ever use it successfully to win over a large, diverse electorate residing outside our blue ghettos, which is why Democratic presidential candidates avoid it and instead promise not to raise taxes. This silence is a deafening testament to Democrats’ morose conviction that Americans don’t like their party’s agenda enough to give it the only endorsement that really matters: voting to pay for it. It’s hard to see what incentive Republicans have to extricate Democrats from this dilemma.

 

[RobDownSouth]

I agree 100%... we're definetely in a recovery, watch for gasoline prices to drop, along with food prices. We need to spend a few billion more in green energy, where our future is.

If you had attended an accredited college, you might have learned in Economics 101 that the price of gasoline often rises in an economic recovery, outpacing the rate of inflation, as more people going back to work places a temporarily high demand on gasoline, causing rising prices until refinery output can be raised to accomodate demand.

But you didn't, and you didn't.

 

[RightField]

If you had attended an accredited college, you might have learned in Economics 101 that the price of gasoline often rises in an economic recovery, outpacing the rate of inflation, as more people going back to work places a temporarily high demand on gasoline, causing rising prices until refinery output can be raised to accomodate demand.

But you didn't, and you didn't.

Here are a few additional notes on gas prices and the politics and economics of it.

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson...inglepage=true

The Gaseous Policies of Barack Obama
March 5, 2012 - 12:05 pm - by Victor Davis Hanson

“They” Did It (Again)!

There are no “oil men” in the White House. So the Obamites cannot, as in the past, blame Halliburton, BP, or Exxon for rigging gas prices out of the Oval Office. Which leads to the question: why then are prices now climbing when the Bush-oil company connection is no longer the narrative? The new answer? “Wall Street” (e.g., the fat-cat bankers, corporate jet owners, those who don’t know when not to profit, etc.) raised prices.

But if true, who let them get away with that? The Chinese, who are scrounging every barrel they can on the world market? The Indians, who follow suit? Maybe it’s the Obama administration Treasury that has borrowed $5 trillion in three years, not only eroding the buying power of the world-traded dollar but also sending a message to oil producers that even more debt is coming and their petrodollars will only be worth less and less?

Or perhaps it is growing world tension, as in Iran, that caused the panic? But then who snubbed the Green revolution in Iran in the spring of 2009, sought “outreach” and “reset” with the theocracy, and leveled five serial demands to stop Iranian enrichment (or else!) to the point that Iran no doubt understood 2009-2012 was a once-in-a-lifetime exempt window of opportunity to get the bomb and to control the Gulf?

To paraphrase William Tecumseh Sherman, Obama might as well rail at the wind. The administration’s current panic mode arises because we are nearing $5 a gallon. (I just filled up two miles away in West Selma, with a supposed 21% unemployment rate and a per capita income of about $14,000, and the price today was $4.27.) It is only early March. Obama may blame Wall Street, but he is savvy enough to do the following calculus: by August, people will want to drive more than they do in March; the Chinese will suddenly not wish to buy less oil this summer; he has no federal leases that he approved in January 2009 that will be coming on line after three-and-a-half years; Volts will not be going into hyper-production mode; and prices will only go up just as the campaign and the weather heat up. There is about an hour’s worth of Obama administration past quotes on gas prices that should make some interesting campaign ads.

High Gas Prices Are Good...no Bad ...or (high gas prices used to be good, but now are bad).

So what exactly is the administration’s reaction to skyrocketing gas prices? That should be an absurd question — except that we know administration officials are either on record as indifferent to the high cost of gasoline, or in fact hoping for higher prices.

Consider also the cancellation of the Keystone pipeline; the restrictions of new federal oil leases in the West, Alaska, offshore, and in the Gulf; Obama’s prior promises that energy prices would skyrocket because of his efforts to enact cap and trade; his boast to help Brazil out by importing its new offshore oil finds; his worries only over the abrupt rate of gas increases in 2011 rather than his desire for gradual, steadier escalation; Energy Secretary Chu’s various statements that high prices were not such a concern and indeed that he wished to see gas reach European levels (e.g., $8-10 a gallon); Interior Secretary Salazar’s insistence that even $10 gas would not open up new federal oil lands; and on and on.

I think that such words and deeds translate into some technocratic “never waste a crisis” dream in which we adapt to mass transit, begin to pile into Smart cars and subsidized government Volts, arrange our power use around the cycles of the Sun and wind, and in general consume far less as dictated by those in the technocratic overseer class, the waiting-Escalades-on-the-tarmac bunch who by needs must consume far, far more to save us from ourselves. The financiers of Solyndra and other failed subsidized firms are somehow exempt from the sorts of invective leveled at those who produce oil, as if we like those who lose our money and end up producing nothing but despise those who make a profit, pay taxes, and get us to work in the morning.

“Skyrocketing” for Thee, “Orchid-Growing” Temperatures for Me

I say technocratic because only those who work for government or live in larger cities or do not depend on driving vans, pick-up trucks, tractors, or semis could think it was wise for an oil- and natural gas-rich nation not to exploit fully its own natural resources. (Can any of you readers recall a civilization that in the past voluntarily chose not to exploit a valuable natural resource when it could be done safely, without damage, and to great profit?)

Whatever the level that the price of gas reaches, Barack Obama and Steven Chu and the technocracy won’t feel it all that much. Do you remember Obama’s first day in office when he abruptly ordered the temperature in the White House dialed up? (Had that “oil man” Bush been too energy-conscious?) David Axelrod himself complained that one could grow orchids at Obama’s new presidentially mandated heat: “skyrocketing” prices for us, but orchid growing for the president?

Think of some of the ramifications of this faculty lounge policy (I use that term empirically rather than as invective, given I taught among faculty for 21 years). Americans must borrow even more billions to import ever-higher priced oil that enriches many of our enemies, all of which will be pumped abroad under far more lax environmental conditions than had we developed our own resources here at home. (What happened to “Planet Earth”?)

Increased gas costs will also simply transfer lots of dollars that might have been spent in America to foreign governments, and will curb consumer consumption of other goods in an economic downturn. Is the driving force then some philosophical desire to restrict crass American materialism in order to return to a preferable pre-carbon dioxide Golden Age past? And if so, are the president’s sudden complaints about high gas prices and considerations to draw again from the strategic petroleum reserve entirely cynical, in the sense that once reelected, he and Secretary Chu will accelerate their restrictionist policies in hopes of keeping gas prices even higher? (We are already halfway on the road to “European levels.”) Or of making subsidized Solyndra- and Volt-like projects at last viable?

Why would the president consider tapping the strategic oil reserve, but not start a breakneck effort at developing new sources? Is previously pumped oil less polluting; does it increase supply and lower prices in a way that freshly pumped oil does not? Does his mockery of “drill, drill, drill” suggest that “not drill, not drill, and not drill” is a wiser alternative? Does Obama realize that even an extra 3 to 4 million barrels a day produced here would earn the U.S. billions in extra revenue and help to stabilize world prices by taking a commensurate amount of American demand off the world market?

The Strange Case of Dr. Chu

Give credit to Steven Chu. He’s not backing down and most recently reiterated to Congress that high prices are not much of a concern of this administration. (But Mr. Chu: if they go up any more, you will soon be out of a job, yes?) In contrast, and faced with reelection, the president now brags that we are using less fuel and pumping more of it than when he took office. Again, examine that surreal logic: because unemployment is high and GDP growth low, there is less demand for gas, and that is suddenly a good thing? (Note how — for the first time? — Obama does not blame Bush for lowering gas demand as he had serially for causing the economic doldrums: “Bush wrecked the economy but I was smart enough to make it far worse to lower gas demand.”)

Then the president boasted further that domestic production is at an all-time high. Consider that weird reasoning as well: although he curtailed production on federal lands where there are now record levels of known oil and gas reserves, private industry has developed horizontal drilling and fracking — despite, rather than because of, the president — on mostly private land in the Dakotas and elsewhere. Is the reasoning, then, something like: “Congratulations to the oil industry for ignoring me”?

In sum, from January 2009 to January 2011 — in the pre-Climategate days before Al Gore was a “sex poodle” and when the Himalayan glaciers were to be swamps and polar bears extinct — new gas and oil production was considered “bad,” given that Obama was pushing wind, solar, and “alternative” energies. In those giddy cap-and-trade days, he could afford to pontificate because he was not up for reelection and world demand was sluggish, dropping oil prices at the wellhead. When the world economy began rebounding, demand picked up, prices spiked, and now Obama is in campaign mode: suddenly high gas prices are bad and he claims not that he wants his House-approved cap-and-trade bill pushed through his Democratically controlled Senate, but rather that all along he has encouraged private enterprise to drill while successfully persuading us to cut back our consumption (as if we did so because of the impressive oratory of Barack Obama rather than because he had managed to ensure millions of Americans now had no jobs to drive to work to).

The Omnipotent Mr. Obama

Why is it that Obama takes credit for the rebound of the stock market after the historic drops in September 2008, but sees the price of gas as extraneous in a way speculation on Wall Street is not? To say that gas prices have doubled under his watch is considered by sophisticates simplistic and reductionist, given all the factors beyond his control that contribute to such increases; to say that Wall Street has improved under his watch is to appreciate the brilliantly subtle and clever manner in which an omnipotent Obama has restored financial confidence and restored some of our lost 401(k) plans.

Obama keeps claiming that the oil companies are gouging us. Some of them may well be doing that; after all, they can profit well enough at the old $40-$50 a barrel levels on about 45% of our supply produced domestically, and “need” not receive $110 for their Texas or Dakota oil at the world price. But such thinking assumes that we all should sell our product at less than we might to help fellow Americans. The farmer who produces almonds need not sell his crop at $1 a pound off the tree because he does not “need” such profits, even though he realizes that world demand has forced the price up (from the old $.75 a pound) that he could receive by exporting his almonds. In other words, everything produced in the United States that has the potential to be exported has a “world” price in this globally interconnected world, and the fact that oil does too does not make its producers inherently evil. We might as well try to convince this new generation of gold miners to sell their product to fellow Americans at $500 an ounce to help lower the deficit rather than to “gouge” us at demanding a “world” price of $1500 an ounce that is well beyond what they “need” to profit from mining.

So here we are: as gas keeps spiraling the secretary of energy simply cannot any longer remark on the resulting deleterious effects since he is on record that they are not deleterious. And the president has urged us to consider, in lieu of Neanderthal drilling, our sizable algae reserves (does algae grow in the U.S. more abundantly than elsewhere?) in a manner that he once urged us to inflate our tires and “tune up” our electronic ignition cars.

 

[garbage can]

Here are a few additional notes on gas prices and the politics and economics of it.

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson...inglepage=true

The Gaseous Policies of Barack Obama
March 5, 2012 - 12:05 pm - by Victor Davis Hanson

“They” Did It (Again)!

RF, I'll bet RDS knows all about that shit....

 

[RobDownSouth]

RF, I'll bet RDS knows all about that shit....

What? A bunch of speculation and random tangents in the usual Victor Davis Hanson spittle-flecked oratory?

Oh well, like Donald Rumsfeld famously opined, you play the cards you're dealt, not the cards you wish you were dealt.

 

[RightField]

It cost me $70 to fill up a couple days ago (car not SUV). I wonder when I'm going to get some of those Obamabucks to help pay for it?

 

[Sean Renaud]

Yeah. And it cost me seventy dollars under Bush as well. It sucks balls but it's life.

 

[mercury14]

It cost me $70 to fill up a couple days ago (car not SUV). I wonder when I'm going to get some of those Obamabucks to help pay for it?

That's... quite the large gas tank in your car.

 

[RightField]

That's... quite the large gas tank in your car.

Premium gas and the car does have a big tank. It's slmost all aluminum (engine, frame) so at least I get decent mileage.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Are you enjoying the best economy since the Great Depression?





(Well you have to consider how far we've come...)

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Still down 6 million jobs.

http://blogs.smartmoney.com/advice/2012/03/09/u-s-still-down-6-million-jobs/

Record trade deficit...

http://news.yahoo.com/us-trade-deficit-hits-52-6-billion-january-133525871.html


Sideshow Barry Barker 2012 Says: "It's NOT the economy, Stupid!" It's the Birthers! The Tea Party! SARAH PALIN!
Bush!
BAD LUCK!!
RACISM!!!
ATMs, KIOSKs & CORPORATE JETS!!!
TSUNAMIS, TORNADOS, & the ARAB SPRING!!!
EARTHQUAKES & HURRICANES!!!!!
EUROPE’s €PIIGS!!!!!!!!
OBSTRUCTION!!!
Americans have grown “Soft!”
MY LIMP STAFF
Greece is the word!
Roman Noodles!
Iran and the Jews!
You're all LAZY!
China Syndrome!
Come on WORK WITH ME HERE!
I killed a lot of people people!
http://pajamasmedia.com/tatler/files/2011/04/obama-wide-grin80.jpg
”’Shovel-ready’ was not as shovel-ready as we expected.” (Laughter)





... telephone operators...,


... the Internet...


Bush...

That wasn't me that gave drone technology to Iran!

Hey, can I blame Europe? anyone believing it's Europe's fault? Come on man! I know you hate the frogges...

 

[mercury14]

Are you enjoying the best economy since the Great Depression?





(Well you have to consider how far we've come...)

Exactly.

Oh and our portfolio exploded over the past couple years. In June we're buying a house. Cash, no financing.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

So the radioactivity part of the problem is largely over. But as long as Japan fails to restart its fleet of nuclear power plants, it will rush toward the precipice of financial ruin! The prototype of such a disaster was the largest municipal bankruptcy of the age before "Too Big to Fail" economics, the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS), more commonly referred to as WHOOPS! Meanwhile, Japan is driving the cost of gasoline in the United States higher due to its higher demand for oil. So saving Japan from financial ruin and lowering American gas prices are both readily achievable if Japan would only restart its fleet of nuclear power plants!

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012...ent_fuel_rods_at_fukushima.html#ixzz1oii05ufv

 

[mercury14]

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012...ent_fuel_rods_at_fukushima.html#ixzz1oii05ufv

Is that your opinion or someone else's?

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Exactly.

Oh and our portfolio exploded over the past couple years. In June we're buying a house. Cash, no financing.

After your big lying episode, we don't believe a word you say.

http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?t=800325

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

March 9, 2012
The U.S. Housing Market Crisis and the Faltering EU: The Bad Moon Keeps Rising
J. Robert Smith

Here at home, the Washington Post reports that President Obama intends to double-down on government-centered remedies (read "failures") to deal with the ongoing housing market depression. Our illustrious president, never shy to use Uncle Sam's grossly overleveraged credit cards, wants to extend government assistance to homeowners and real estate investors (with some caveats) who are "excessively indebted."

Meanwhile, the slow-motion dominoes continue to fall in the EU. London's The Telegraph has Ambrose Evans-Pritchard opining about how EU's elites are further fueling an historic folly-in-the-making. First, Greece, and now, very likely, Portugal are headed for crashes. Can Spain and Italy be far behind? And thereafter?

Here's the gist of Evans-Pritchard's alarm:

Last month the European Central Bank exercised its droit du seigneur, exempting itself from loses on Greek bonds. The instant effect was to concentrate more loss on other bondholders. "This has set a major precedent," said Marchel Alexandrovich from Jefferies Fixed Income. "It does not matter how often the EU authorities repeat that Greece is a 'one-off' case, nobody in the markets believes them."

The ECB holds €220bn (£185bn) of Greek, Portuguese, Irish, Spanish, and Italian bonds. Its handling of Greece implicitly subordinates private creditors in each country. All have slipped a notch down the pecking order.

Ah, yes, yet more proof that Europe's powers-that-be are massively offloading losses on bondholders. How's that for a confidence-boost in the bond markets?

President Obama has begun down a similar road to Europe's by pushing to dump some real estate debt on banks (the $25 billion foreclosure-abuse settlement with banks, as a prime example). But Mr. Obama is still glad to up Washington's enormous debt load in an attempt to stave off a potential pre-election disaster in the housing market.

It's really hard to get one's arms around the magnitude of the folly unfolding in Europe and the U.S. A very bad moon continues to rise.

The real solutions to the U.S.'s and Europe's economic woes have nothing to do with fleecing bondholders or grossly indebting nations. The real solutions in Europe and the U.S. are permitting acutely painful but necessary defaults, bankruptcies, and foreclosures to occur as quickly as possible to reset economies as quickly as possible. Likewise, there needs to be comprehensive systematic reforms in favor of far less government here at home and in Europe to avoid future disasters.

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[mercury14]

After your big lying episode, we don't believe a word you say.

http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?t=800325

Are you seriously seven years old? Are you such a childishly concrete thinker that you can't figure some really basic shit out? No of course you can. You've been caught in several lies recently and just want there to be something you can pin on someone else. That way you don't have to take responsibility for your own lies. Doesn't matter that I didn't lie, you say I did and that's all you need.

The fact of the matter is that during the recovery the stock market put on over 6000 points. You don't have anything more than a tiny 401km that's obvious (or wait, did you cash it out? You said both that you did and did not). But some people work hard and make money that they invest. And for us the market recovery has been something truly special.

Every time you SWEAR there's no recovery going on I just keep getting wealthier.

 

[RightField]

Still down 6 million jobs.

http://blogs.smartmoney.com/advice/2012/03/09/u-s-still-down-6-million-jobs/

Record trade deficit...

http://news.yahoo.com/us-trade-deficit-hits-52-6-billion-january-133525871.html


Sideshow Barry Barker 2012 Says: "It's NOT the economy, Stupid!" It's the Birthers! The Tea Party! SARAH PALIN!
Bush!
BAD LUCK!!
RACISM!!!
ATMs, KIOSKs & CORPORATE JETS!!!
TSUNAMIS, TORNADOS, & the ARAB SPRING!!!
EARTHQUAKES & HURRICANES!!!!!
EUROPE’s €PIIGS!!!!!!!!
OBSTRUCTION!!!
Americans have grown “Soft!”
MY LIMP STAFF
Greece is the word!
Roman Noodles!
Iran and the Jews!
You're all LAZY!
China Syndrome!
Come on WORK WITH ME HERE!
I killed a lot of people people!
http://pajamasmedia.com/tatler/files/2011/04/obama-wide-grin80.jpg
”’Shovel-ready’ was not as shovel-ready as we expected.” (Laughter)





... telephone operators...,


... the Internet...


Bush...

That wasn't me that gave drone technology to Iran!

Hey, can I blame Europe? anyone believing it's Europe's fault? Come on man! I know you hate the frogges...

I wonder what they'll have to use as the denominator next month to "fix" the unemployment rate at 8.2% so they can talk about continued "improvement"? My guess is that they make it 8.2%....what's your guess?