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

[RobDownSouth]

Sequestration was designed as a failsafe to ensure that government spending was unilaterally reduced across-the-board in the event that Republican intransigence prevented a budget deal.

Both sides agreed to it and it was signed into law.

Now, with the Republicans refusing to compromise, it seems that there is a chance that sequestration may in fact be triggered.

Since virtually everyone knows that it's the Republicans who are unilaterally refusing to negotiate in good faith, they will bear the brunt of the blame for the unilateral cuts to the military, exposing for everyone to see how they place a higher priority on budget games than America's security.

Naturally, they've sent out their political shock troops to attempt to lay the blame on President Obama, which is why we have feckless cowards here nattering about "Obama's sequestration".

As usual, they are attempting to avoid personal responsibility for their actions.

Personal responsibility to a Rapepublican is like garlic to a vampire.

 

[Sean Renaud]

The primary purpose of our government is to defend the nation.

Neither here nor there, the question is: Why is Obama encouraging the defense industry to break the law, if not to conceal the effect of his sequestration policy on the American people before the election?

That's exactly why he's doing it.

The Defense Industry however is threatening to fire everybody because they see the potential gains. If Obama was a man he'd call their bluff and cut their contracts January 1st but he's a bitch.

 

[koalabear]

Sequestration was designed as a failsafe to ensure that government spending was unilaterally reduced across-the-board in the event that Republican intransigence prevented a budget deal.

Both sides agreed to it and it was signed into law.

Now, with the Republicans refusing to compromise, it seems that there is a chance that sequestration may in fact be triggered.

Since virtually everyone knows that it's the Republicans who are unilaterally refusing to negotiate in good faith, they will bear the brunt of the blame for the unilateral cuts to the military, exposing for everyone to see how they place a higher priority on budget games than America's security.

Naturally, they've sent out their political shock troops to attempt to lay the blame on President Obama, which is why we have feckless cowards here nattering about "Obama's sequestration".

As usual, they are attempting to avoid personal responsibility for their actions.

Personal responsibility to a Rapepublican is like garlic to a vampire.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Why September's Unemployment Number is Suspicious
Randall Hoven
October 9, 2012

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said the unemployment rate dropped from 8.1% in August to 7.8% in September, after having been over 8% for the previous 43 months. In fact, this latest figure puts the unemployment rate exactly back to where it was in the month of President Obama's inauguration.

On its face, that is not necessarily suspicious. First, the rate had been trending downward since reaching its peak in October 2009. And a drop of 0.3 percentage points is not unprecedented. In fact, since 1948 it has dropped at least that much 63 times, including as recently as January 2011.

The change in total non-farm jobs in the Establishment Survey was also in line with expectations. The "expert" consensus was an increase of about 111,000. My own prediction was 99,000. The BLS figure was 114,000 -- not all the different from expectations.

The seasonal adjustment to the employment level used in the unemployment rate calculation was also not out of line. The adjustment to the employment level was downward, and by a bigger amount for any September from 1985 through 2009. So this does not look like a case of magical seasonal adjustment.

But here is what I do think is suspicious: the raw employment level of the Household Survey. That number gets seasonally adjusted and then goes into the unemployment rate calculation. If that raw number is off, the unemployment rate will be off. And that number is certainly off if we judge by history.

The August-to-September change, +775,000, was the largest upward Aug-Sep change in the history of the Household Survey.
That was the largest difference between the Household Survey and the Establishment Survey (Aug-Sep change) in the history of the Household Survey.
That was the only time ever that the Household Survey showed a greater increase in September than the Establishment Survey.

We have been assured by "budget wonks" that "It's a statistical anomaly, not a conspiracy." If so, that was quite a statistical anomaly: the biggest in history, meaning the biggest in 65 years (for the Aug-Sep change).

I'll do some math for you. Based on the previous 64 years (and assuming Aug-Sep changes are independent of each other year to year), the chances of seeing an increase that big in the Household Survey in September was 0.14%. That is well outside most reasonable statistical "confidence intervals." In short, most statistical tests would say this was not a "statistical anomaly."

Of course, nothing can be proved. Rare and improbable events can happen. It's possible that an event that is expected to occur only once about every 700 years happened to occur for the first time in 65 years just one month before a presidential election.

Unlikely things can happen. Like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez getting re-elected and Saddam Hussein getting 100% of the vote. So maybe there's no reason to be suspicious.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/10/why_septembers_unemployment_number_is_suspicious.html

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Bankrupt California
Victor Davis Hanson, NRO
October 9, 2012

I thought of my fellow Californian Energy Secretary Steven Chu last week, when I paid $4.89 a gallon in Gilroy for regular gas — and had to wait in line to get it. The customers were in near revolt, but I wondered against what and whom. I mentioned to one exasperated motorist that there are estimated to be over 20 billion barrels of oil a few miles away, in newly found reserves off the California coast. He thought I was from Mars.

California may face the nation’s largest budget deficit at $16 billion. It may struggle with the nation’s second-highest unemployment rate at 10.6 percent. It will soon vote whether to levy the nation’s highest income and sales taxes, as if to encourage others to join the 2,000-plus high earners who are leaving the state each week. The new taxes will be our way of saying, “Good riddance.” And if California is home to one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients and the largest number of illegal aliens, it is nonetheless apparently happy and thus solidly for Obama, by a +24 percent margin in the latest Field poll. The unemployment rate in my hometown is 16 percent, the per capita income is $16,000 — and I haven’t seen a Romney sticker yet.

Shortly before taking office, Secretary Chu, remember, quipped that he would like to see American gas prices rise to European levels — presumably $9 or $10 a gallon — to discourage driving and thereby lower our carbon footprint. If $50 for half a fill-up is any indication, California is over halfway toward achieving Chu’s dream. If green bicycles are the ultimate aim of our central-planning regulators, then they are making headway. I’ve never seen so many new rural bike riders, though most of them out here in the San Joaquin Valley have a bad habit of riding on the wrong side of the road.

A refinery fire, a power outage, a uniquely Californian gasoline formula, years of regulating refineries into stasis — all that has finally caught up with the state, as prices soar at the pump. Yet what perplexes about California in extremis is the liberal ability for our state government simply to ignore its own regulations, which it has been using to paralyze businesses for years. For example, a panicked Governor Brown just asked the state air-resources board to suspend the law that requires gas stations to sell our special summer fuel formula through the month of October. The state asserted that a one-time suspension would increase supplies and yet not materially affect our air quality — which begs the question: Why, if that is true, would such a regulation have been passed in the first place?

California has the nation’s highest gas taxes and fuel prices, and the tightest supplies — and reputedly one of the worst-maintained infrastructures, with out-of-date, overcrowded, and poorly maintained freeways. When I head home each week from Palo Alto, I feel like an Odysseus fighting modern-day Lotus Eaters, Cyclopes, and Laestrygonians to reach Ithaka, wondering what obstacle will sidetrack me this trip — huge potholes, entire sections of the freeway reduced to one lane, or various poorly marked detours? If the nation’s highest gas taxes give us all that, what might the lowest bring?

Although the state is facing a $16 billion annual budgetary shortfall, Governor Brown is determined to press ahead with high-speed rail — estimated to cost eventually over $200 billion. Such is his zeal that he intends to override the environmental lawsuits that usually stymie private projects for years. The line is scheduled to pass a few miles from my farm, its first link connecting Fresno and Corcoran, home to the state prison that houses Charles Manson.

Yet a money-losing Amtrak line already connects Fresno and Corcoran. I often ride my bike near the tracks and notice the half-empty cars that zoom by. Most farmers here are perplexed about why the state would wish to borrow billions and destroy thousands of acres of prime farm land to duplicate this little-traveled link. Support for high-speed rail is strongest in the San Francisco Bay Area, but there is no support for beginning the project where the noise and dirty reality might be too close to home for green utopians.

California schools rate among the nation’s lowest in math and English, but our shrinking numbers of teachers are among the country’s highest paid. One-third of the nation’s welfare recipients live in California, and 8 out of the last 11 million people added to the California population are enrolled in Medicaid, but we are also the most generous state in sending remittances to foreign countries — we contribute a third to a half of the estimated $50 billion that leaves the U.S. each year for Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. It is puzzling in the small towns of the San Joaquin Valley to see both federal and state medical centers and nearby offices that specialize in cash transfers to Mexico. But no one seems to see any disconnect between the public need for free health care and the private desire to send money to Mexico.

California has built the nation’s largest prison system, but there is no room left in either state or county facilities for an increasing number of dangerous felons. The same day last week that I emptied my wallet for gas, my 15-hp ag irrigation pump simply quit during the night. Nocturnal copper-wire thieves had come into the vineyard and yanked out the electrical conduit. That’s the third theft of pump wire I’ve had this year — and it costs $1,500 each time to repair the damage. I’m told that Mexican national gangs go down to Los Angeles with their stolen copper to sell it to mobile recyclers. No one calls the sheriff any more. Instead, we swap stories about protective wire cages, spikes, cameras, lights, and booby traps. Barack Obama once thundered, “Rich people are all for nonviolence. . . . They don’t want people taking their stuff.” I plead guilty to his writ, at least for a while longer. But I don’t agree that copper conduit is mere “stuff” or that stealing it counts as social protest or that the thieves are necessarily poor.

The criminals have a sophisticated modus operandi, with lookouts who drive around and report by cell phone when the coast is clear — green-lighting comrade thieves who in a matter of minutes ride into the farm alleyways on bicycles, cut and pull the wire, and pedal out with little noise and no headlights. Two nights ago, when I returned to my farmhouse, an odd couple was sitting in a car — each one on a cell phone — next to my mailbox. They claimed they did not speak English, but after some harsh words they left — surprised and angry that I had dared to ask them to leave my property.

It’s a veritable war these days in rural central California — as copper-wire thieves, gangs, drug lords, and fencers run amuck in a bankrupt state that can no longer afford to keep its felons incarcerated. President Obama soars with talk of amnesty and the DREAM Act. But if we are going to waive federal statutes for each illegal alien who we feel may some day become a neurosurgeon or an experimental chemist, can’t we at least enforce the law against those not in school and up to no good in the here and now, like the two sitting in my driveway phoning directions for local thieves to yank out copper wire?

Open borders, redistributionist socialism, therapeutic and politicized public schools, and public-employee unions finally are proving a match even for Apple, Google, Facebook, the Napa Valley wine industry, Central Valley agribusiness, Hollywood, Cal Tech, Stanford, and Berkeley. In California, it is a day-by-day war between what nature and past generations have so generously bequeathed and what our bunch has so voraciously consumed.

On any given day, beautiful weather, the Pacific Coast, and the majestic Sierra Nevada are trumped by released felons, $5-a-gallon gas, and a 1970 infrastructure crumbling beneath a crowded 2012 state.

There are many lessons from California. One is that the vision of the present administration is already here — and it simply does not work.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Oh-oh-oh Domino!

Parla, Spain's 54th Largest City, Poised for Bankruptcy


Alarm bells and official denials about the state of affairs of Parla, Spain's 54th largest city, are ringing loud and clear today.

http://translate.google.com/transla...a-no-puede-hacer-frente-a-sus-acreedores.html

...

This is clearly an open-and-shut case. Parla is bankrupt. Expect to see more of these situations because they are 100% certain to happen.

Read more at http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/#AGXtlVSCwAzfM21Q.99

Push me over and then walk away...

 

[mercury14]

Oh-oh-oh Domino!


Read more at http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/#AGXtlVSCwAzfM21Q.99

Push me over and then walk away...

Did you just make a post to crow about Spain's 54th largest city having money problems?

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

STFU LT...



S'rious. Your mom is calling you to breakfast.

 

[mercury14]

STFU LT...



S'rious. Your mom is calling you to breakfast.

Parla, Spain? Looks like it's smaller than the sprawling metropolis of Mansfield, Ohio. And completely irrelevant to this thread. Good post, bro.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

In an acutely reasoned article for American Thinker, economist and member of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute Monty Pelerin warns that the United States is “one election away from tragedy.” Pelerin is not alone in mounting this argument; many commentators and political analysts are in agreement that November 6, 2012, may be one of the most fateful dates in the entire pageant of American history, no less crucial than another resonant date, April 12, 1861, when Abraham Lincoln responded to the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter. For there is a growing—though perhaps insufficient—consensus on the part of a notable segment of the American public, Republican candidates for office, and a number of disaffected Democrats that the coming election is essentially a plebiscite and that the future security, coherence, and prosperity of the nation will be decided on the first Tuesday of November of this year. “There are but a few weeks left,” writes Andrew McCarthy in a review of David Limbaugh’s The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama’s War on the Republic, “before the nation either dramatically alters course or cruises on to the abyss, perhaps irreversibly.”

A victory for Mitt Romney would allow the nation to return, if only partially, to its historical roots as a constitutional republic and free market economy. But if Barack Obama should win re-election, America will inexorably go the way of the crushingly indebted, under-employed, imploding European Union, as well as gradually surrendering much of its autonomy to an advancing Islamic presence and the inroads of Shari’a law. It would continue to rely on the dubious expedient of soft power and international diplomacy (aka, accommodation and concession) to defend its interests, thus subsiding into political desuetude. A second term for this president will yield a nation drowning in debt, undergoing a rapidly declining material equity, and increasingly vulnerable to Islamic subversion.

To cite Roger Kimball’s objective recapitulation, this is the president who is defined by “the $16 trillion federal debt, the 8.3 percent unemployment when he promised to have it down to 5.6 percent, the annual deficit, which he promised to halve, hovering around $1.5 trillion,” as well as “the disaster that is Obama’s Islamophilic Mideast policy—our consulate overrun in Benghazi, our ambassador murdered, Obama is told 90 minutes into the assault, he goes to bed….” One might also mention Obama’s empowering of the anti-American Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the hospitality extended to Islamic organizations and individuals at home.

David Solway
http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-rebuke-of-sam-slick/?singlepage=true

 

[mercury14]

David Solway
http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-rebuke-of-sam-slick/?singlepage=true

Every time Pajamas references the Thinker a newborn kitten dies.

 

[fuckwaffle]

While the phony unemployment numbers went down...a new record was set - there are now more Americans on food stamps then ever before.

While the lowest unemployment rate of President Barack Obama’s tenure dominated weekend economic news, a less-welcome statistic for the White House — a record number 0f food-stamp recipients — slipped by with barely a notice.

About 46.68 million Americans received food stamps in July, the government said in a report released late on Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend, a traditional time for dumping bad news. The report for July, the most recent month that data was available, showed participation up by 11,532 from June and 2.9 percent higher than a year earlier.

 

[koalabear]

Stocks waver on slower growth

 

[RobDownSouth]

Did you just make a post to crow about Spain's 54th largest city having money problems?

AJ takes his doomin' and gloomin' wherever he can find it nowadays.

Precious little of it in America, that's for sure.

 

[richard_daily]

While the phony unemployment numbers went down...a new record was set - there are now more Americans on food stamps then ever before.

While the lowest unemployment rate of President Barack Obama’s tenure dominated weekend economic news, a less-welcome statistic for the White House — a record number 0f food-stamp recipients — slipped by with barely a notice.

About 46.68 million Americans received food stamps in July, the government said in a report released late on Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend, a traditional time for dumping bad news. The report for July, the most recent month that data was available, showed participation up by 11,532 from June and 2.9 percent higher than a year earlier.

The stats for food stamp recipients are phony!

Totally made up.

 

[koalabear]

Stocks tumble on growth worries

 

[koalabear]

Tech stocks pull the market lower

 

[IrezumiKiss]

Rich people still rich and buying expensive shit

 

[garbage can]

Rich people still rich and buying expensive shit

Expensive shit creates jobs for someone.

 

[richard_daily]

Expensive shit creates jobs for someone.

So does taking a dump.

Neither is an effective job creation strategy.

 

[garbage can]

So does taking a dump.

Neither is an effective job creation strategy.

It's part of the job creation strategy.

 

[richard_daily]

It's part of the job creation strategy.

Sure... One that's never worked historically, so that would make it an ineffective strategy.

 

[garbage can]

Sure... One that's never worked historically, so that would make it an ineffective strategy.

Oh, can you validate that?

Expensive things have always created jobs and been a force in the economy.

Do you remember the "expensive boat" fiasco a number of years ago?

 

[richard_daily]

Oh, can you validate that?

Expensive things have always created jobs and been a force in the economy.

Do you remember the "expensive boat" fiasco a number of years ago?

Trickle down economics have been widely dismissed as ineffective, and there is plenty of data to support that.

What sort of economic data would you like that would prove that to you?

GDP growth of presidents favoring trickle down economics vs. those who don't?

Wage growth/deflation under trickle down economics...

Job creation under trickle down economics?


Let me know what sort of metric you'd like to see, and I'll provide it to you.

 

[fuckwaffle]

Trickle down economics have been widely dismissed as ineffective, and there is plenty of data to support that.

What sort of economic data would you like that would prove that to you?

GDP growth of presidents favoring trickle down economics vs. those who don't?

Wage growth/deflation under trickle down economics...

Job creation under trickle down economics?


Let me know what sort of metric you'd like to see, and I'll provide it to you.

As apposed to the stellar performance of trickle down government.