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

[4est_4est_Gump]

It's in our hands and we have to wait until November to make our will clear...

 

[JohnnySavage]

No, it's not. He controls the Senate and he has laid down to Harry what he will and will not veto.

He is not about to listen to the will of the people and when we speak out in the polls he entrenches even deeper like a picked-at tick...

Nobody in Congress will vote to eliminate the cap on Social Security contributions, raise the retirement age, or open Medicare to everyone. Which, are the three simple fixes that would solve 90% of the fiscal problems.

 

[RobDownSouth]

No, it's not. He controls the Senate and he has laid down to Harry what he will and will not veto.

He is not about to listen to the will of the people and when we speak out in the polls he entrenches even deeper like a picked-at tick...

Government by poll...tres Glibertarian.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Nobody in Congress will vote to eliminate the cap on Social Security contributions, raise the retirement age, or open Medicare to everyone. Which, are the three simple fixes that would solve 90% of the fiscal problems.

zero-based budgeting

Let them go back to actually doing their job.

Raising the cap is just more plundering of the sort I am wholly at odds with...

 

[RobDownSouth]

zero-based budgeting

Let them go back to actually doing their job.

Raising the cap is just more plundering of the sort I am wholly at odds with...

Once again, with regard to your beloved "zero-based budgeting", the federal government tried that from Carter through Clinton's first term. The result was an extra layer of management added throughout the federal government tasked with doing cost-benefit analyses of programs on a yearly basis.

 

[JohnnySavage]

zero-based budgeting

Let them go back to actually doing their job.

Raising the cap is just more plundering of the sort I am wholly at odds with...

The budget is illusory because most of the spending is set by law. In fact, the budget has no weight of law, it's the appropriation bills that legally spend the money.

You want to cut the budget? To do that you have to cut the appropriations. To do that you have to change the entitlement laws. To do that you have to have political parties that put the people before the party. The house of cards falls from the very first premise.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

The budget is illusory because most of the spending is set by law. In fact, the budget has no weight of law, it's the appropriation bills that legally spend the money.

You want to cut the budget? To do that you have to cut the appropriations. To do that you have to change the entitlement laws. To do that you have to have political parties that put the people before the party. The house of cards falls from the very first premise.

That's why we prep.

That's why I have gold.

When both sides refuse to relinquish the power, it will vanquish them.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

California A.D. 476 update:

After five years, I quit riding my rural tri-weekly rides and will confine them to the Sierra, as 14 days ago I was attacked and bitten by dogs on a major rural avenue—no licenses, no vaccinations, no leashes, and presumed owners had no English and no apparent worries over their unleashed pets—and am waiting patiently for the animal control officers to tell me the biters are still tied up and still healthy and that I don’t have to go through rabies shots. Time to accept these landscapes of my half-century remembrance are forever changed.

While driving back from postmodern Palo Alto on this week’s trip, I zoomed over Pacheco Pass and heard these two tragedies on radio as I entered our premodern Valley. I had been listening to Bay Area accounts of Joe Biden warning the NAACP about voter ID laws, the supposedly new poll tax, when more familiar valley radio news came on.

You see, in our environs the issue is not that residents should have to show driver’s licenses to vote, but rather whether they need to have licenses at all to drive—with tragically fatal results for anyone on foot or in a wheelchair unfortunate enough to be caught in their reckless paths. Here are two items I heard last Thursday; both show the indifference to driver’s licenses in the new California (emphases below added):

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/beware-the-ides-of-october/?singlepage=true

Animae eorum et animae omnium fidelium defunctorum per Dei misericordiam requiescant in pace …

And God help us all as the world out here struggles with a new uncertain age.

Victor Davis Hanson, PJMedia

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Regulations don't hurt, they HELP!

Tami Hurley stood beside Union Mill Road waving a sign in the hot mid-summer sun Saturday afternoon, awaiting President Obama's arrival at Centreville High School. She was not alone. The Fairfax County businesswoman was one of more than 200 protesters who responded to the announcement of an "emergency rally" sent out by the Northern Virginia Tea Party. On her American flag T-shirt, Hurley displayed a pin that concisely summarized her situation in the Obama era: "Officially Screwed: Small Business Owner." She explained that her family runs a heating and air-conditioning business that employs 14 people, a business that the Democrat's administration seems determined to destroy.

"They're going to increase all of our prices," Hurley said, explaining that regulations enacted recently by the Environmental Protection Agency mandated a 40 percent decrease in the manufacture of R22, a refrigerant commonly used in air-conditioning systems. "Our price doubled in January, and we have to pass that along to our customers."

The EPA's mandate is part of Obama's environmental agenda, enforcing an international anti-global-warming treaty called the Montreal Protocol. Hurley sees the president pushing a different sort of "climate change," creating a climate that is hostile to free enterprise. "Obamacare is going to really hurt us, as well," Hurley said, expressing a widespread concern among small business owners that the president's health care program will impose costly mandates, decrease the quality of treatment, and require massive new taxes to fund it. Hurley pointed out that one of her young sons has epilepsy. Her son was also among the crowd of protesters who turned out Saturday in Centreville, waving a hand-lettered sign that said, "Obama = No Hope."

Hostility to small business owners is unmistakably a matter of policy for the Obama administration, and Hurley is not deceived by the president's rhetorical attempts to portray himself as a champion of the middle class. That was the central focus of Obama's message during his recent campaign swing through Virginia, as he slammed his GOP opponent Mitt Romney as a greedy capitalist concerned only with defending the privileges of the rich. Inside the gymnasium at Centreville High, the president told his supporters that Republicans have only two ideas: "If we cut taxes trillions of dollars, mostly for those at the very top ... that somehow that's going to be good for everybody. ... Their second big idea is if you eliminate regulations on oil companies or insurance companies or credit card companies or polluters, that somehow that will free up the engine of growth." Deriding this as a "trickle-down" policy, Obama told the crowd: "We don't need more top-down economics. I believe in a middle-out economics, a bottom-up economics. I believe that when hardworking Americans are doing well, everybody does well.… That's why I ran for president -- to fight on behalf of the middle class and those who are striving to get into the middle class."

http://spectator.org/archives/2012/07/16/battleground-virginia

 

[RobDownSouth]

That's why we prep.

That's why I have gold.

And a tomato garden too! Don't forget the tomatos!

LOL...AJ teh survivalist.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Two cheers to Mitt Romney for his performance last week at the NAACP convention in Houston. "Any policy that lifts up and honors the family is going to be good for the country and that must be our goal," Romney said. "As president I will promote strong families -- and I will defend traditional marriage." That was the big-applause line. More tellingly, however, he also told this potentially hostile audience: "As you may have heard from my opponent, I am also a strong believer in the free enterprise system. I believe it can bring change where so many well-meaning government programs have failed. I've never heard anyone look around an impoverished neighborhood and say, 'You know, there's too much free enterprise around here. Too many shops, too many jobs, too many people putting money in the bank.'"

Even so, this was -- as NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous said -- "a missed opportunity." It was a missed opportunity to deliver a crushing blow to the intellectual claptrap that passes for enlightened thinking in the NAACP -- and not just there, but in the larger nexus of elitist thinking to be found in our nation's college campuses, the mainstream media, Hollywood, and, not least, the Obama White House.

Who better to deliver that much-needed blow than Frederic Bastiat, the great free-market French economist who loved liberty and spoke out against "socialism" -- which he defined as "legalized plunder"? Bastiat died 162 years ago -- on December 24, 1850. But his words are as timely today as they were back then (two years after the publication of Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto"). Long before Hayek, Bastiat recognized government as the greatest single threat to liberty. He wrote:

Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on. All these plans as a whole -- with their common aim of legal plunder -- constitute socialism.

Bastiat hated the arrogance of the progressive (i.e. progress as defined and controlled by government), let's-play-God mindset: "Socialists look upon people as raw material to be formed into social combinations. To them… the relationship between persons and the legislator appears to be the same as the relationship between the clay and the potter." And again he said of the do-gooders' belief in exalted government: "Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."

Here then is how the acerbic Frenchman might have addressed the NAACP convention if he had awoken from a prolonged Rip van Winkle-like slumber.

http://spectator.org/archives/2012/07/16/bastiat-to-the-naacp-dont-pull

 

[RobDownSouth]

http://spectator.org/archives/2012/07/16/bastiat-to-the-naacp-dont-pull

Bustin' out the Bastiat! Derp!

 

[BotanyBoy]

And a tomato garden too! Don't forget the tomatos!

LOL...AJ teh survivalist.

Hey man don't knock the practicality of a good veggie patch, and a couple yard birds come high prices or Z day.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

George Orwell is often credited with writing, "Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them." As it happens, Orwell didn't pen those words. That much-used aphorism merely paraphrases a pithy but somewhat less glib observation he made in a 1945 essay titled, "Notes on Nationalism." Still, it nicely captures a proclivity peculiar to the luminaries of academia, the "news" media and progressive think tanks: a willingness to believe things that no ordinary person would be foolish enough to credit. A textbook case of this phenomenon can be found in a recent column published in the New Republic by Jonathan Gruber.

Gruber is a Professor of Economics at MIT and has been dubbed, by Avik Roy and others, "the intellectual father of Obamacare." Thus, it will come as no shock that he spends a good deal of his time defending the health care "reform" law. What does surprise is that Gruber, who is a first class economist and a genuine intellectual, continues to write astonishingly stupid things about the dangerous and destructive creature he sired. In his TNR piece, for example, he advises us, "[W]e know that the ACA will increase jobs in the medical sector in the short run, above and beyond any partial offsets from new excise taxes on that sector."

Assuming that Gruber isn't employing the majestic plural in that sentence, it begs the question: Who's "we"? He can't be including anyone actually working in health care. Those of us who labor in those vineyards know that his brainchild is actually killing medical sector jobs by the thousands. All across the nation, hospitals are slashing payrolls in preparation for the $155 billion in payment cuts to which industry lobbyists agreed in a 2009 Faustian bargain on Obamacare. The largest expense in any hospital's budget is labor, so they are reluctantly resorting to reductions in force (RIF) to balance the books.

In February, for example, officials at Jackson Memorial in Miami said the hospital would RIF more than 1,000 workers. Such layoffs have a profoundly negative effect on local economies, where hospitals often rank among the largest employers. Nonetheless, the list of casualties grows. RIFs have recently been announced at Pennsylvania's Crozer-Keystone Health System, New York's Sheehan Health Network, Tennessee's Erlanger Health System, Oregon's Silverton Health, Maryland's Adventist HealthCare, Arizona's Yuma Regional Medical Center, California's Queen of the Valley Medical Center, ad infinitum.

Somehow, one doubts that the victims of these RIFs would agree with Gruber's claim that "ACA will increase jobs in the medical sector." Moreover, despite his attempt to pass lightly over "new excise taxes," these will contribute greatly to the economic carnage. Obamacare levies a 2.3 percent tax on medical device manufacturers beginning in 2013. How do businesses react when a government raises the cost of doing business in this way? They go elsewhere. Last year Boston Scientific, which manufactures defibrillators, pacemakers, and stents, announced a RIF of 1,200 to 1,400 jobs and "disclosed it was… hiring 1,000 people in China."

So, Obamacare's medical device tax has forced Boston Scientific to outsource American jobs to a far away country whose Communist leaders are more business-friendly than the President of the United States. And this trend will continue. The Massachusetts Medical Device Industry Council estimates that about 90 percent of its members will cut back on "operational costs and jobs" after the tax takes effect. This is what Gruber calls "partial offsets from new excise taxes." The people who lose their jobs at Boston Scientific and other medical device manufacturers will likely employ less euphemistic terms like "layoff" and "bankruptcy."

How can Gruber be blind to all of this?

Find out: http://spectator.org/archives/2012/07/16/no-professor-gruber-obamacare

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Hey man don't knock the practicality of a good veggie patch, and a couple yard birds come high prices or Z day.

No good without canning supplies...



... those, we have.

 

[RobDownSouth]

Find out: http://spectator.org/archives/2012/07/16/no-professor-gruber-obamacare

Oh NOE! Obamacare isn't boostin' teh economy!

A direct violation of "profits over people"!

 

[koalabear]

Stocks drop on growth worries

 

[busybody..]

No doubt, NIGGERPOONZANDI and NIGGERUD and NIGGERPOOP,

Will scream

JPEE MORGAN???????*Points and laughs*




JPMorgan just gave a calamitous economic forecast for Obama

James Pethokoukis | July 16, 2012, 2:34 pm


Just out from JPMorgan:


This morning we lowered our tracking of Q2 GDP growth from 1.7% to 1.4%. For some time now we have noted that our Q3 GDP call — which was already below consensus at 2.0% — had risks that were skewed to the downside.

After the latest round of data we have decided to lower our projection for Q3 to 1.5%. The strength in inventories reported this morning suggests that businesses may have got caught offsides when final demand weakened this past spring. That inventory build should weigh on production growth in the third quarter as already-cautious businesses seek to work down stockpiles. Added to this downside, the weakness in June real consumer spending will make the arithmetic for Q3 consumption a little more challenging.

Finally, the decline in gasoline prices — which had been seen as an important support to the economy — has partly reversed itself in recent weeks, thereby lessening the impetus to growth from that source. For 2012 as a whole, we are now looking for growth of around 1.7% on a Q4/Q4 basis, about the same as last year and 0.2%-point below our tracking last week. On a year-ago basis real GDP has been growing at a below-trend pace since early last year. If our forecast is anywhere near correct, that pattern will persist for at least another year, and perhaps even longer.



Basically, this is a forecast for stagnation for the rest of this year and through 2013. Also note that the forecast sees monthly job growth at just 100,000 a month in the third quarter with the unemployment rate averaging 8.2%.

The worst recovery since the Great Depression shows no signs of improving, and Team Obama should expect no last-minute lift from it.

 

[koalabear]

No doubt, NIGGERPOONZANDI and NIGGERUD and NIGGERPOOP,

Will scream

JPEE MORGAN???????*Points and laughs*




JPMorgan just gave a calamitous economic forecast for Obama

James Pethokoukis | July 16, 2012, 2:34 pm


Just out from JPMorgan:


This morning we lowered our tracking of Q2 GDP growth from 1.7% to 1.4%. For some time now we have noted that our Q3 GDP call — which was already below consensus at 2.0% — had risks that were skewed to the downside.

After the latest round of data we have decided to lower our projection for Q3 to 1.5%. The strength in inventories reported this morning suggests that businesses may have got caught offsides when final demand weakened this past spring. That inventory build should weigh on production growth in the third quarter as already-cautious businesses seek to work down stockpiles. Added to this downside, the weakness in June real consumer spending will make the arithmetic for Q3 consumption a little more challenging.

Finally, the decline in gasoline prices — which had been seen as an important support to the economy — has partly reversed itself in recent weeks, thereby lessening the impetus to growth from that source. For 2012 as a whole, we are now looking for growth of around 1.7% on a Q4/Q4 basis, about the same as last year and 0.2%-point below our tracking last week. On a year-ago basis real GDP has been growing at a below-trend pace since early last year. If our forecast is anywhere near correct, that pattern will persist for at least another year, and perhaps even longer.



Basically, this is a forecast for stagnation for the rest of this year and through 2013. Also note that the forecast sees monthly job growth at just 100,000 a month in the third quarter with the unemployment rate averaging 8.2%.

The worst recovery since the Great Depression shows no signs of improving, and Team Obama should expect no last-minute lift from it.

Yeah, but what about Romney's tax return!

 

[busybody..]

Yeah, but what about Romney's tax return!

the Fucking Horse ate it

or

maybe teh dog

 

[busybody..]

or maybe

the dog ate the horse and Obama ate teh dog?

 

[koalabear]

or maybe

the dog ate the horse and Obama ate teh dog?

He's Korean!

 

[koalabear]

Retail sales cut into stocks

 

[bra_man69]

The big growth in oil extracted from shale rock means the US will not need to import any crude within two decades, the former boss of BP has said. Lord Browne told a conference in Oxford the US would be "completely independent of imported oil, probably by 2030". He also said the amount of shale gas in the US was "effectively infinite".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18828714

 

[eyer]

The big growth in oil extracted from shale rock means the US will not need to import any crude within two decades, the former boss of BP has said. Lord Browne told a conference in Oxford the US would be "completely independent of imported oil, probably by 2030". He also said the amount of shale gas in the US was "effectively infinite".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18828714

That's the word down here in this part of the world...

...the Eagle Ford is far exceeding all expectations and spawning dreams of even more grandeur. Ranch land owners who just a year ago were pretty close to desolation are now multi-millionaires; any unemployed person who shows up and desires work finds work. Towns that once possessed no stoplight are turning into mini-metropoli; it is really booming in Texas (folks should really keep that in mind when pontificating about the Lone Stat state's future financial picture).

Unfortunately, though, since the USSA's entire economic existence now is completely anchored in fractional financing, this boom can completely go bust in an instant if/when the credit bubble bursts...

How Close Are We to New Great Depression?

The risk of a new depression — a sustained, severe recession — has struck fear into the heart of markets and driven monetary policy in developed economies since the current financial crisis began.

“We’re in a very unfortunate position to be here,” Richard Duncan, author of The New Depression, warned on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” Monday.

“When we broke the link between money and gold, this removed all constraints on credit creation. This explosion of credit created the world we live in, but it now seems that credit cannot expand any further because the private sector is incapable of repaying the debt it has already, and if credit begins to contract, there’s a very real danger that we will collapse into a new Great Depression,” he argued.

“If this credit bubble pops, the depression could be so severe that I don’t think our civilization could survive it.”

More here: http://www.cnbc.com/id/48193471