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

[richard_daily]

His problem is understanding the answer.

No, the question wasn't answered...

Let me try again; What policies has the government implemented; through the EPA, OSHA, or any other government agency that have caused business to fail within the last 4 years?

You're all in a tizzy about how the EPA is destroying business, so surely you must have some evidence to back up your claim...


Or, perhaps you're just repeating the mantra that you've been conditioned to believe?

Again, some proof to support your viewpoints would be helpful.

 

[richard_daily]

You didn't actually READ the S&P report that listed one of the major reasons for the downgrade was political brinkmanship concerning the debt ceiling. The fact that the GOP pushed it right to the edge and that some were even willing to go into default. But then, once again, you don't worry about being wrong about much of anything do you? You just make up whatever bullshit makes you feel better and run with it. You'll pardon me if i take the word of S&P over what you "feel" was the cause.

The report named republicans by name as the cause for the downgrade... rightfield, powertone, and all the others have seen my posts about it, as they posted right afterwards, yet they willfully lie about it being other causes, because it suits their interests.

 

[HAL_9000]

Fact: Debt as a percentage of GDP is far below record levels.

If the USA was really in economic trouble would we be spending billions on foreign aid?

Fact : The world is a business. There are no Nations. No Countries.

Only supplies and demands.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Foreign aid is not as much as you might imagine...

FDA Killing Innovation

http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011...eed:+rss/magazines_fortune+(Fortune+Magazine)

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

SEPTEMBER 3, 2011 6:00 A.M.
A Tale of Two Declines
Even if the economy were to fix itself overnight, we'd still face sincere cultural challenges.

I was on a very long flight the other day and, to get me through it, I had two books: the new bestseller Of Thee I Zing by Laura Ingraham, and a book I last read twenty years ago, The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth. The former is the latest hit from one of America’s most popular talk radio hosts; the latter is an Austrian novel from 1932 by a fellow who drank himself to death just before the Second World War*, which, if you’re planning on drinking yourself to death, is a better pretext than most. Don’t worry, I’ll save the Germanic alcoholic guy for a couple of paragraphs, although the two books are oddly related.


Of Thee I Zing’s subtitle is “America’s Cultural Decline: From Muffin Tops To Body Shots.” If you are sufficiently culturally aware to know what a “muffin top” and a “body shot” are (and incidentally, if you don’t have time to master all these exciting new trends, these two can be combined into one convenient “muffin shot”), you may not think them the most pressing concerns as the Republic sinks beneath its multitrillion-dollar debt burden. But, as Miss Ingraham says, “Even if our economic and national security challenges disappeared overnight, we’d still have to climb out of the cultural abyss into which we’ve tumbled.”


Actually, I think I’d go a little further than the author on that. I’m a great believer that culture trumps economics. Every time the government in Athens calls up the Germans and says, okay, we’ve burned through the last bailout, time for the next one, Angela Merkel understands all too well that the real problem in Greece is not the Greek finances but the Greek people. Even somnolent liberal columnists grasp this: a recent Thomas Friedman column in the New York Times was headlined, “Can Greeks Become Germans?” I think we all know the answer to that. Any society eventually winds up with the finances you’d expect. So think of our culture as one almighty muffin shot, with America as a giant navel filled with the cheap tequila of our rising debt and#… #no, wait, this metaphor’s getting way out of hand.


These are difficult issues for social conservatives to write about. When we venture into this terrain, we’re invariably dismissed as uptight squares who can’t get any action. That happens to be true in my case, but Laura Ingraham has the advantage of being a “pretty girl,” as disgraced Congressman Charlie Rangel made the mistake of calling her on TV the other day in an interview that went hilariously downhill thereafter. So, she has a little more credibility on this turf than I would. She opens with a lurid account of a recent visit to a north Virginia mall — zombie teens texting, a thirtysomething metrosexual having his eyebrows threaded, a fiftysomething cougar spilling out of her tube top, grade-schoolers in the latest “prostitot” fashions — and then embarks on a lively tour of American cultural levers, from schools to social media to churches to Hollywood. If there is a common theme in the various rubble of cultural ruin, it’s the urge to enter adolescence ever earlier and leave it later and later, if at all. So we have skanky tweens “dry humping” at middle-school dances, and an ever greater proportion of “men” in their thirties living at home with their parents.


Adolescence, like retirement, is an invention of the modern age. If the extension of retirement into a multi-decade government-funded vacation is largely a function of increased life expectancy, the prolongation of adolescence seems to derive from the bleak fact that, without an efficient societal conveyor belt to move you on, it appears to be the default setting of huge swathes of humanity. It was striking, during the Hurricane Irene frenzy, to hear the Federal Emergency Management Agency refer to itself repeatedly as “the federal family.” If Big Government is a “family,” with the bureaucracy as its parents, why be surprised that the citizens are content to live as eternal adolescents?

Mark Steyn
NRO


* What was going on economically in Austria at the time?

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

SEPTEMBER 2, 2011 5:00 P.M.
A Reagan Moment
Stop our economic decline.

No sooner had President Obama shocked the political world with a gloomy economic forecast — projecting 9.1 percent unemployment for this year and a reelection-killing 9 percent for 2012 — than the dismal August jobs report arrived showing no gain in nonfarm payrolls. That’s right, no gain at all. Private jobs increased a scant 17,000, while hours worked and wages actually declined. Obama’s economic policies have failed.

Are we on the front end of yet another recession? This report alone suggests that we could be, although other data points disagree. But on the eve of President Obama’s so-called jobs speech, there’s a much bigger question here: Has the U.S. entered into long-term economic decline?

As a quintessential optimist who believes in American exceptionalism, I don’t even want to raise this issue. But the data tell me that I must.

For example, over the past ten years, the U.S. has actually lost jobs on a net basis. In August 2001, nonfarm payrolls calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics stood at 132 million. Through August 2011, payrolls stand at 131.1 million.

In fits and starts, a 4 percent unemployment rate has moved up to some kind of permanent 9 percent plateau. Following the Bush tax cuts of 2003, 8 million new jobs were created. But in the aftermath of the financial meltdown those jobs have disappeared. The so-called Obama recovery over the past two years has made no dent in this gloomy picture.

And through this whole period our economy has barely grown at a subpar 1.6 percent yearly rate for real GDP.

Meanwhile, the stock market — perhaps the best measure of our wealth and well-being — has essentially been flat for the past decade. And while the free-enterprise private sector has barely muddled along, the government has grown fat.

During the Bush years, the federal government increased from 18 percent of GDP to 21 percent. The debt went up $2.5 trillion, from roughly 32 percent of GDP to 40 percent. And now, during the Obama period, spending has moved even higher to at least 24 percent of the economy, while total federal debt has ballooned near 100 percent of GDP.

It’s almost a mirror image: The expansion of the public sector and the decline of the private sector. This is completely inimical to the American peacetime experience. And it forces us to think seriously about whether we are losing our world economic leadership. Are we? And if so, does this loss of economic leadership threaten our national security and foreign-policy stature?

And all while jobs, the economy, and stocks slumped over the past ten years, the dollar dropped 37 percent and gold increased by nearly 500 percent, from $250 to nearly $1,900 an ounce.

We don’t have the kind of inflation today that we experienced in the 1970s. But it is certainly worth noting that a collapsing currency and a skyrocketing gold price are key barometers of a loss of confidence in the American economic story.

And because most foreign currencies and gold denominated in those currencies have shown the same problems — paper money going down and the yellow metal going up — it’s not farfetched to suggest that America’s funk is leading the rest of the world in the wrong direction.

My key thought is that the U.S. in the last decade has adopted a wrongheaded policy of government expansion — primarily spending and regulating — financed by ultra-easy monetary policy and rock-bottom interest rates.

Tax rates haven’t moved much. But the whole tax system is badly in need of pro-growth flat-tax reform and simplification. However, the expansion of spending and regulating is robbing the private sector of its entrepreneurial vitality. Here’s the new fear: More big-government spending stimulus from Obama’s jobs plan. More EPA. More NLRB. More Dodd-Frank. More Obamacare.

And as the policy mantle for growth has swung to Federal Reserve stimulus, we are learning once again what Milton Friedman taught us 40 years ago: The central bank can produce new money, but there is no permanent production of jobs and growth from that pump-priming.

Big government financed by easy money is a lethal economic combination. It must be reversed. We should be reducing the regulatory and spending state while keeping money predictably stable (and even re-linked to gold). The supply-side nostrum that worked so well for 20 years, beginning with Ronald Reagan, was low tax rates, light regulation, limited government, and a hard dollar. Gold collapsed between 1980 and 2000 as stocks, jobs, and the economy roared. The last ten years? We’ve gotten the policy mix completely backwards. The results show it.

This is a Reagan moment. We need a new leader who can get the economics right and reverse our decline. Literally, for the whole world, nothing is more important.

Larry Kudlow, NRO

 

[MeeMie]

Both excellent reads. Thanks for posting.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

di nada






__________________
"Ceterum autem censeo, Liberalem esse delendam"

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Is this a great country or what? Washington Post:

The Internal Revenue Service allowed undocumented workers to collect $4.2 billion in refundable tax credits last year, a new audit says, almost quadruple the sum five years ago.

Although undocumented workers are not eligible for federal benefits, the report released Thursday by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration concludes that federal law is ambiguous on whether these workers qualify for a tax break based on earned income called the additional child tax credit.

Taxpayers can claim this credit to reduce what they owe in taxes, often getting refunds from the government. The vagueness of federal law may have contributed to the $4.2 billion in credits, the report said.

The IRS said it lacks the authority to disallow the claims.

The IRS a helpless giant? You believe that?

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, On Friday announced plans to examine the refunds.

"The disconcerting findings in this report demand immediate attention and action from Congress and the Obama Administration," Hatch said in a statement.. "With our debt standing at over $14.5 trillion and counting, it's outrageous that the IRS is handing out refundable tax credits...to those who aren't even eligible to work in this country."

Wage earners who do not have Social Security numbers and are not authorized to work in the United States can use what the IRS calls individual taxpayer identification numbers. Often these result in fraudulent claims on tax returns, auditors found.

Hatch nailed it. The irony is depressing. The IRS will use all of its powers to go after some poor guy who owes a few thousand bucks but won't lift a finger to stop illegals from cheating the government.

Something is wrong with that picture.

Rick Moran
The American Thinker

But, of course, we all realize $4billion is not much of a percentage of the overall tax and budget picture, a mere rounding error and, of course, saying anything at all about it is racism, not a hunt for waste and fraud, you look for waste and fraud in the military budget...

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

In the last 30 months, the Obama administration has created a psychological landscape that finally just seemed, whether fairly or not, too hostile to most employers to risk new hiring and buying. Each act, in and of itself, was irrelevant. Together they are proving catastrophic and doing the near impossible of turning a brief recovery into another recession.

Here is the lament I heard: the near $5 trillion in borrowing in just three years, the radical growth in the size of the federal government and its regulatory zeal, ObamaCare, the Boeing plant closure threat, the green jobs sweet-heart deals and Van Jones-like “Millions of Green Jobs” nonsense, the vast expansion in food stamps and unemployment pay-outs, the reversal of the Chrysler creditors, politically driven interference in the car industry, the failed efforts to get card check and cap and trade, the moratoria on new drilling in the Gulf, the general antipathy to new fossil fuel exploitation coupled with new finds of vast new reserves, the new financial regulations, an aggressive EPA oblivious to the effects of its advocacy on jobs, the threatened close-down of energy plants, the support for idling thousands of acres of irrigated farmland due to environmental regulations, the constant talk of higher taxes, the needlessly provocative rhetoric of “fat cat”, “millionaires and billionaires,” “corporate jet owners,” etc. juxtaposed, in hypocritical fashion, to Martha’s Vineyard, Costa del Sol, and Vail First Family getaways — all of these isolated strains finally are becoming a harrowing opera to business people.

Despite enormous opportunity for many cash-rich firms to take advantage of the down cycles (low interest, plentiful potential employees, discounted prices, etc.), they are taking a pass, almost as if to collectively sigh, “This bunch doesn’t like me much and I’m going to hunker down, hoard my cash, and sit out the next year and a half until they are gone.” And the administration’s efforts to counteract these symbols and impressions by courting a high-profile, hyper-capitalist Warren Buffett, or a GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt have proven even more ironic: the former calls for higher taxes that his firms seek to avoid, or targets his post-mortem wealth to (more efficient?) private foundations that rob the Treasury of billions in lost inheritance taxes, or knows higher taxes won’t much matter to his tens of billions in net worth; the latter’s firm paid no 2010 U.S. income taxes on many of its profits and outsourced jobs overseas. And when Obama is told by his base to “get tough,” “get angry,” and “double-down” on the EU-like statist policies and Chicago-organizing, get-in-their-face rhetoric that got him into this jobs stagnation mess, should we laugh or cry? Get furious and demand — what? Snarl and scream about the right to go “big” from $1.6 trillion to $2 trillion in annual borrowing?

Highly publicized visits to bankrupt subsidized green plants, blaming George Bush, new racially-driven invective from some congresspeople against the Tea Party, sermons about the sensitivities of illegal aliens, politically-correct tutorials about Islam — all that might rally the base or in isolation be understandable, but again fairly or not, such liberal rhetoric simply adds to the problem from yet another dimension: confirming perceptions that employers are about the last people in the world that this administration is worried about.

Victor Davis Hanson
Pajamas Media

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

No, the question wasn't answered...

Let me try again; What policies has the government implemented; through the EPA, OSHA, or any other government agency that have caused business to fail within the last 4 years?

You're all in a tizzy about how the EPA is destroying business, so surely you must have some evidence to back up your claim...


Or, perhaps you're just repeating the mantra that you've been conditioned to believe?

Again, some proof to support your viewpoints would be helpful.

Did I hear somebody recently say something about dropping job-killing smog regulations until 2013 (after the election)?

Musta been some rw-Tea Party loon who wants dirty air like Christine O'Donnell or that wacko Keynesian Denier in the White House who extended the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, Sarah Palin, or maybe it was that Islamic-hating Michelle Bachmann...,

I just know I heard something about it on the neocon talk radio where every day they bash Bush's war policy, Gitmo and his huge deficits...,

Who said that? Maybe I should email answers.gov...

 

[koalabear]

Did I hear somebody recently say something about dropping job-killing smog regulations until 2013 (after the election)?

Musta been some rw-Tea Party loon who wants dirty air like Christine O'Donnell or that wacko Keynesian Denier in the White House who extended the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, Sarah Palin, or maybe it was that Islamic-hating Michelle Bachmann...,

I just know I heard something about it on the neocon talk radio where every day they bash Bush's war policy, Gitmo and his huge deficits...,

Who said that? Maybe I should email answers.gov...

It may have been Perry, I heard he said all cars must get 54MPG too.

 

[richard_daily]

Did I hear somebody recently say something about dropping job-killing smog regulations until 2013 (after the election)?

Musta been some rw-Tea Party loon who wants dirty air like Christine O'Donnell or that wacko Keynesian Denier in the White House who extended the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, Sarah Palin, or maybe it was that Islamic-hating Michelle Bachmann...,

I just know I heard something about it on the neocon talk radio where every day they bash Bush's war policy, Gitmo and his huge deficits...,

Who said that? Maybe I should email answers.gov...

Were they regulations put in place in the last 4 years?


And what jobs have been lost due to them? Surely you have some answers... stop pretending like you're clueless...

Oh wait. Never mind.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Go back up four posts Dick.




Yeah kb, I think it was Perry, the Great Job Destroyer of Texas!
__________________
The want of confidence in the public councils damps every useful undertaking, the success and profit of which may depend on a continuance of existing arrangements. What prudent merchant will hazard his fortunes in any new branch of commerce when he knows not but that his plans may be rendered unlawful before they can be executed? What farmer or manufacturer will lay himself out for the encouragement given to any particular cultivation or establishment, when he can have no assurance that his preparatory labors and advances will not render him a victim to an inconstant government?
Madison, Federalist 62.

 

[koalabear]

The stock market is stable today.

 

[richard_daily]

Go back up four posts Dick.

Yeah, that didn't answer the question either.

I'll leave you to wallow in your own shit, you enjoy it, like most pigs.

 

[busybody..]

UNEMPLOYMENT AND THE WORKFORCE: Workers Giving Up Hope Keep Obama’s Re-Election Hopes Alive. “Workers giving up hope, thereby keeping the unemployment rate artificially low, is keeping Obama’s reelection hopes alive. If the headlines screamed that unemployment was 11.4%, even I might begin to believe.”

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

*chuckle*




One can even feel the sputtering frustration from the Democrats with "saved" jobs...

 

[Byron In Exile]

*chuckle*

One can even feel the sputtering frustration from the Democrats with "saved" jobs...

I believe the proper meaningless phrase is "jobs saved or created."

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

I believe the proper meaningless phrase is "jobs saved or created."

I used shorthand...



__________________
"The request of Industry to the Government is as modest as that of Diogenes to Alexander: Stand out of my sunshine."
Frédéric Bastiat

 

[busybody..]

*chuckle*




One can even feel the sputtering frustration from the Democrats with "saved" jobs...

Clearly, it isow in Obama's BEST INTEREST to make things as bad as possible

So more will drop out of workforce

The more that DROP out

The lower the rate goes

WATCH! MAGIC! Before the election a few million will "drop out"

 

[busybody..]

UNEMPLOYMENT AND THE WORKFORCE: Workers Giving Up Hope Keep Obama’s Re-Election Hopes Alive. “Workers giving up hope, thereby keeping the unemployment rate artificially low, is keeping Obama’s reelection hopes alive. If the headlines screamed that unemployment was 11.4%, even I might begin to believe.”

http://legalinsurrection.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Twitter-@jamesPethokoukis-real-unemployment.jpg

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Clearly, it isow in Obama's BEST INTEREST to make things as bad as possible

So more will drop out of workforce

The more that DROP out

The lower the rate goes

WATCH! MAGIC! Before the election a few million will "drop out"

Dropping like flies - Lord of the Flies

 

[Wat_Tyler]

Let's beat Piggy, him and his damned glasses.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Let's beat TIMMAH!