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

[richard_daily]

You couldn't possibly expend any more effort at being a totally fucked up envious idiot if you tried, you realize that right? You crested long ago, and have been on a downhill run ever since.

Did you want to compare finances and net worth again? I'm flattered that you want me to whip out my penis...

If I remember correctly, you own a couple of hot wheels cars and a house, right?

 

[unregistered]

 

[RightField]

Obama’s Patronage Pigs Can’t Fly
John Steele Gordon | 09.04.2011

As if President Obama didn’t have enough bad news last week, Solyndra, which manufactures solar panels, filed for bankruptcy and laid off almost its entire work force of 1,100. Going down the tubes with it, of course, is a $535 million loan that was guaranteed by the federal government as part of the stimulus program.

And it seems the White House put pressure on the Department of Energy to OK the loan. As the Washington Post reported:

Frank Rusco, a Government Accountability Office director who helped lead a review of the Solyndra loan and the Energy Department’s loan guarantee program, said the GAO remains “greatly concerned” by its 2010 finding that the agency agreed to back five companies with loans without properly assessing their risk of failure. The companies were not identified in the report, but the GAO has since acknowledged that Solyndra was one of them.

And one of the company’s biggest backers, George Kaiser, is also one of Barack Obama​’s biggest backers. That, I’m sure, is another “coincidence,” such as the Republican debate being held at the same time that he chose to address Congress.

As ABC News reported, many solar energy company analysts have long doubted Solyndra’s business plan:


While Energy Department officials steadfastly vouched for Solyndra — even after an earlier round of layoffs raised eyebrows — other federal agencies and industry analysts for months questioned the viability of the company. Peter Lynch, a longtime solar industry analyst, told ABC News the company’s fate should have been obvious from the start.

“Here’s the bottom line,” Lynch said. “It costs them $6 to make a unit. They’re selling it for $3. In order to be competitive today, they have to sell it for between $1.5 and $2. That is not a viable business plan.”

Other flags have been raised about how the Energy Department pushed the deal forward. The Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News and ABC disclosed that Energy Department officials announced the support for Solyndra even before final marketing and legal reviews were in. To government auditors, that move raised questions about just how fully the department vetted the deal — and assessed its risk to taxpayers — before signing off.

Based on the evidence assembled so far, no Wall Street investment officer would have recommended the loan or, if he had, would have kept his job for five minutes. Pouring $535 million into an objectively lousy investment is not how Wall Street makes money.

But it all too often is how politicians get re-elected. “Green jobs” are a big plus for the “environmental movement,” which is a very important liberal special interest. That backing these particular jobs was also a favor for a very important Obama political fundraiser was another plus.

This is a textbook case of capital being allocated for political reasons (it will earn us votes) instead of economic reasons (it will make us rich). It is also further proof that politicians can’t make economic decisions even if they wanted to. And they can’t make them for the exact same reason pigs can’t fly: they aren’t designed to.

Bureaucrats and politicians, many of them in life-long careers, are often wholly ignorant of how markets actually work and how to analyze an investment. Liberal politicians and bureaucrats are also instinctively hostile to the very idea that capital should be allocated according to the economic potential of the investment.

Indeed, this is the fatal flaw in the whole philosophy of the left: that government can be an efficient and wealth-creating steward of a national economy. It can’t work until pigs fly. Far better the philosophy of the right (paraphrasing that great political economist, St. Matthew): Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s; render unto the market that which is the market’s.

 

[mercury14]

The difference between me and you is, I am economically free, you aren't.

Also you sit around on a porn board all day muttering about cocks and assholes, and he doesn't.

 

[richard_daily]

The difference between me and you is, I am economically free, you aren't.

Who am I an economic slave to?

Maybe the marxist Obama government?


I've got more than you, at less than half your age... must hurt, huh?

 

[Ham Murabi]

Who am I an economic slave to?

Section 8 housing.
But you're a "good" slumlord.

 

[koalabear]

Also you sit around on a porn board all day muttering about cocks and assholes, and he doesn't.

But you do, MORON.

 

[unregistered]

 

[unregistered]

 

[koalabear]

Sure junior, tell me all about it.

He does have his Chihuahua fantasies. That's why he is always trolling for a date at Lit.

 

[richard_daily]

Both he and you talk about cocks and assholes all day. Again, I'm free to do as I please, whenever I please.

Free to take a trip to the glory hole, whenever you please... That must be very liberating... now if only you'd come out to your family, then you really and truly would be free.

You're "free" to do whatever you please, but you spend hours on here posting about Obama being a marxist and taking $200 million dollar a day trips. One can't help but wonder if maybe you're just a boring old guy who's well past the mid-life crisis stage.

 

[richard_daily]

Section 8 housing.
But you're a "good" slumlord.

I think you're confusing me with kbate.

 

[unregistered]

 

[unregistered]

 

[richard_daily]

Somebody told me he withdrew his family savings to fuck one of our Lit chicks.

This was the same person that told you about Obama's $200 million dollar a day trip to india, wasn't it?

hahaha.

 

[richard_daily]

Really bothers you doesn't it, pup? Must be tough planning a year or so in advance for a weekend at Navy Pier eh?

I got a blowjob on the ferris wheel there a few years ago.. other than that, it's not all that to be honest.

Kind of like your life... not all that.

 

[unregistered]

 

[richard_daily]

You couldn't afford, or keep up with my lifestyle, pup.

rent-boys are expensive, huh?

 

[unregistered]

 

[koalabear]

Somebody told me he withdrew his family savings to fuck one of our Lit chicks.

That would not surprise me a bit. In fact that would explain why he is here trolling, he can't afford real life.

 

[IrezumiKiss]

Somebody told me he withdrew his family savings to fuck one of our Lit chicks.

"our" Lit chicks?

Since when did you own any of the women here, buddy?

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Today could be the day we cross that psychologically important mark of 11K!

Let me give you one example to illustrate this point: in the course of my lecture business I meet a great many owners of small- and medium-sized companies -- precisely the men and women we depend upon to create jobs for all the rest of us. One evening, when my lecture to a group of these entrepreneurs had ended and we were all having a drink in the hotel bar, the CEO of a rock-solid manufacturing company said something that stopped the conversation cold: "I'll be damned before I start hiring people now, just in time to send the unemployment rate plunging so it re-elects the president next year. In a second term, this guy'll kill my business." There was a dead silence, and then every other business owner at the table nodded in agreement.

The point isn't whether these CEOs are right or wrong. The point is that this is what they've come to believe, and their actions will be based upon their perceptions. For all of us who depend on our country's entrepreneurs to create jobs -- which is to say, for all of us without safe government jobs -- this is more than depressing. It's terrifying.

Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan administration as special assistant to the director of Central Intelligence and vice chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council. He is the author of two eBooks, How to Analyze Information and The Cure for Poverty.

The American Thinker

Where you heard it first, who obama is, what he intended to do, and what he did and it's all rw-lies, disinformation and propaganda because we all know Obama "saved" us (as the new messiah) from a Depression...

*nods*
__________________
Barry 2012 Says: Oh No! We Didn't!
http://pajamasmedia.com/tatler/files/2011/04/obama-wide-grin80.jpg

 

[RobDownSouth]

Today could be the day we cross that psychologically important mark of 11K!



The American Thinker

Where you heard it first, who obama is, what he intended to do, and what he did and it's all rw-lies, disinformation and propaganda because we all know Obama "saved" us (as the new messiah) from a Depression...

http://i.imgur.com/BHLWZ.jpg

 

[Wat_Tyler]

11k, for the gazillionth time?

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Repeating the patterns of the Great Depression...

I wrote an article titled, "It's spending, stupid." There I noted that the federal government, from 1965 to 2009, never cut spending one single year. That's right, not one time -- nope, nada, nothing. To repeat: from 1965 to 2009, the federal government never decreased annual spending. To see the figures on a chart is eye-opening. The annual rise in spending has been a steady, nonstop, unbroken, upward climb for over 40 years. To the contrary, revenues to the federal government have gone up and down, the result not of tax rates on "the rich," but of the status of the economy from year to year, especially during recessions. It's both amazing and depressing to see that the federal government, unlike you and your family and your household and your business and your anything and everything else, is apparently incapable of adjusting (i.e., decreasing) its spending based on available revenues. It used to do so, but that changed in 1965, when the federal government, starting with the Great Society, began an outright spending addiction.

As I noted in the article, seeing this for yourself is as easy as Googling "historical tables deficit," where one can view two sources: CBO historical tables (Congressional Budget Office) and OMB historical tables (Office of Management and Budget). These are the official sources for data on federal budgets. In the OMB link, look at Table 1.1, titled, "Summary of Receipts, Outlays, and Surpluses or Deficits: 1789-2016."

In my commentaries and emails, I even included hyperlinks (as I have here) to these tables, imploring people to look for themselves rather than accept my word. I arrogantly and mistakenly thought I was providing a service to people who otherwise didn't know these things. Once they saw the data for themselves, I figured, they would reconsider their view. How naïve I was.

I can't begin to try to recount the angry emails I got from liberals insisting that the reasons for our deficits/debt problem is not over-spending by the federal government, but greed by wealthy people who don't pay "their fair share" of income taxes and by dastardly "racist" "terrorists" in the Tea Party. And, yes, I actually got emails (many of them) from people insisting that Tea Party members are "terrorists." It is astonishing to see, but it's absolutely true that when Democratic Party officials mouth charges like this, they are immediately accepted and repeated by their followers. It's very dispiriting. And to observe an American public, only 10 years removed from September 11, somehow equating Tea Party members with "terrorists" leaves me almost speechless and hopeless.

I won't bother here responding to that particular smear, but I would like to address the charge that the rich are not paying "their fair share." Again, I will stick to data, and I again fear that it will make no difference among the liberal faithful.

If you Google the words "Who pays income tax?" you will find a chart (click here) from the National Taxpayers Union. It includes these telling statistics:

The top 1% of income earners pay 38% of all federal tax revenue. The top 5% pay 59%. The top 10% pay 70%. The top 25% pay 86%. The top 50% pay 97.3%. Conversely, the bottom 50% pay merely 2.7% of all federal tax revenue.

As the data shows, the rich are certainly paying their fair share. In fact, they pay the vast share. The poorest Americans, conversely, pay literally nothing in income taxes.
If anything, the system is disproportionately titled against the wealthy. Our "rich" are paying for the reckless behavior of politicians addicted to spending; they are subsidizing spending addicts. And to watch those addicts blame the mess on the rich for not paying enough? It's obscene.

But the folks who have emailed me have the complete opposite opinion -- and it is that: an opinion. It is an incorrect opinion. And lately, it has been aided and abetted not merely by the usual class-warfare demagogues in the Democratic Party, but by the likes of Warren Buffet and even some liberal Republican writers, who are dupes for this line of propaganda. Warren Buffet is the Democrats' dupe.

Let me repeat: America's deficit/debt problem is a spending problem. It is not the fault of rich people who pay too little income tax or Tea Party members guilty of "terrorism." Don't take my word for it. Look at the data.

My fear, however, is that the data just doesn't matter to a huge number of blind followers. And that's a very serious problem for this country, a giant propaganda hurdle that may be insurmountable.

Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College.
The (hated and smeared) American Thinker
__________________
Sideshow Barry Barker 2012 Says: "It's NOT the economy, Stupid!" It's the Birthers! The Tea Party! SARAH PALIN!
RACISM!!!
http://pajamasmedia.com/tatler/files/2011/04/obama-wide-grin80.jpg