Of the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do, their chiefs were two hundred; and all their kinsmen were at their command — 1 Chronicles 12:32
I just got through writing an article calling for a compromise on the tax hike Obama is demanding. I already have to eat my words.
It is frankly hard to believe how pathologically Democrats prove themselves to be on a constant basis, even as much as I distrust Democrats and call them liars to their faces.
Realize that Democrats – and particularly Obama – have been saying that we need to hike taxes on the rich. In order to do what? In order to reduce the deficit, they said. A nice, noble-sounding reason. I mean, how can you possibly be against wanting to reduce the deficit???
Here’s a headline of Obama demagoguging tax hikes on the rich under the pretense that it would be to reduce the deficit:
Obama proposes $1.5tn tax hike to cut deficit US president announces a number of measures aimed at reducing deficit in next 10 years, saying rich should pay more tax.
Last Modified: 19 Sep 2011
Here’s Obama over a year later, preaching the same message:
President Obama called on Congress on Friday to reduce the deficit in “a balanced and responsible way” in his first public remarks since winning reelection.
The president said Congress should extend the current tax rates for 98 percent of Americans, but raise taxes on households with annual income of more than $250,000.
Obama did not talk about higher tax rates in his speech, but said he would not accept a deal that cut spending and entitlements but did not ask wealthier households to pay more taxes.
“If we’re serious about reducing the deficit, we have to combine spending cuts with revenue and that means asking the wealthiest Americans to pay a little more in taxes,” Obama said. “That’s how we did it in the 1990s when Bill Clinton was president, that’s how we can reduce the deficit while still making the investments we need to build a strong middle class and a strong economy.”
But Democrats are LIARS and you simply cannot do a deal with these liars because they have no integrity at all in any way, shape or form.
Senate Democrats, feeling confident from their net gain of two seats in last week’s election, say any deficit-reduction package negotiated in the coming weeks must include stimulus measures.
They have yet to decide which prime-the-pump measures to push, but are mulling options such as new infrastructure spending and an extension of the payroll tax holiday.
Some Republicans are likely to balk at the notion that a package to cut the deficit would include new spending. But Democrats argue the No. 1 concern for voters is job creation and that the government needs to take a more aggressive role in spurring the economy.
“We need to do something on stimulus as part of the overall fiscal cliff,” said Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), the Senate Democrats’ chief political strategist. “We have to do something because the economy is not growing fast enough in the first year or two.”
Democrats are liars, and they are particularly liars ANYTIME they say ANYTHING about cutting government spending. Period.
Democrats are now implicitly acknowledging that the “hike taxes so we can pay down the deficit” was a lie and a ruse from the deceitful party of lies and ruses. Now they’re saying, “People who believe what we say are fools, so we have no qualms about lying in every single ‘promise’ we make. We’ll promise one thing and then do another, and if you’re dumb enough to believe us then doom on you!”
Here’s another headline to show you just how damn far Obama is from “compromise” while he demonizes the Republicans for not compromising:
President Obama will begin budget negotiations on Friday morning but moving twice as far away from Republican interests. Instead of the $800 billion in extra federal revenue from tax hikes,Obama will be calling for a whopping $1.6 trillion.
On the other side of the table, House Speaker John Boehner hasn’t specified a revenue target, but he has said he would be willing to accept new tax revenues. He is still unwilling to consider higher tax rates.
As a condition for the possible concession, Boehner continues to insist that Democrats accept structural changes to entitlement programs which are causing long-term budget concerns.
President Obama just attended a meeting with union officials and other activists and will be meeting with CEOs of a dozen companies today. Many executives have already voiced grave concerns about the consequences of the looming standoff over the fiscal cliff.
73% of participants of a Wall Street Journal CEO conference earlier this week said their primary concern was the fiscal cliff.
How the hell do you actually move TWICE as far away to the left from your previous bargaining posture while simultaneously self-congratulating yourself for “compromising” and demonizing the party that HASN’T moved twice as far to the right on their bargaining position? I don’t know, but with the help of the worst media propaganda since Goebbels, Obama has managed to do it.
Statement of fact: “The offer is twice as high as a deal Obama scuttled last year, suggesting he may be prepared to let talks fail again.” That deal – which took Boehner to the breaking point – called for $800 billion in tax hikes. Now Obama is demanding tax hikes that will be TWICE as high as last time. While somehow trying to simultaneously claim that HE is the one willing to compromise!
The idea of curbing tax breaks isn’t new. Tax policy experts have touted it for years and Democrats, including President Obama, have proposed it in one form or another. That’s why it may offer a key to resolving the fiscal cliff.
So this isn’t about raising revenue; this is about targeting one group of people to punish them for daring to try to be successful in America. This is about an out-of-control government demanding more and more control. This is about pure demagoguery, pure and simple.
The fact of the matter is that Obama has DOUBLED DOWN on his demand while the Republicans have offered a surprising concession in being willing to increase government revenues. But because we live in a world that Joseph Goebbels would love, the media STILL portrays Obama as the man who is “compromising” even though he is in fact demanding TWICE as much and the Republicans as “obstructionists” even though they are massively compromising.
I’m not the only human being who can see the massive, galling, astonishing hypocrisy and dishonesty from the Democrat Party, am I?
It doesn’t matter if the Republicans come to the table willing to compromise or not; they are demonized anyway, just the same. So why compromise?
If Democrats want tax hikes, let’s give them to EVERYBODY. If you want somebody else to pay more taxes, dammit, YOU should pay higher taxes.
I was looking for some way forward for Republicans and some way out of this fiscal cliff mess. But let’s just go off that damn cliff. Because there is no possible way to negotiate with people as deceitful and dishonest and disingenuous as Democrats have proven themselves to be. And because “the cliff” can’t be any worse than the direction Obama wants to take America, anyway.
Of course, history now records that Obama didn’t actually make the economy better; he simply changed his bullcrap to a slightly different brand of bullcrap in the hopes you won’t be able to smell the bullcrap.
Okay. So how are we going to be able to EVER hold him responsible? I mean, he’s saying he’s made the economy better now and he’s on the right track to fix everything. Maybe he’s just as wrong as he was back then when he was also wrong, wrong, wrong. Obama by his own lame excuse didn’t know jack squat back then and he still doesn’t know jack squat now. So the world’s squirmiest political weasel says the only thing that a squirmy political weasel can say now that four years of his policies have failed: namely that it wasn’t his policies that failed; it was the rest of the world around him. So how can you hold a liberal president responsible for not understanding the real world???
We just found out that our spending is actually escalating.
It was close. A lot of us didn’t think he could do it. But we should have realized by now that when it comes to spending money we don’t have, Barrack H. Obama is the champion.
According to the U.S. Treasury, the debt of the U.S. government climbed by a total of $1,275,901,078,828.74 in fiscal 2012, which ended yesterday.
That means the federal government borrowed approximately an additional $10,855 for each household in the United States just over the past twelve months.
The total debt of the United States now equals approximately $136,690 per household.
In fiscal 2011, the debt increased by about $10,454 per household–$401 less than the $10,855 per household increase of 2012.
The $1.2758 trillion that the debt increased in fiscal 2012 was about $47.18 billion more than the $1.2287 trillion that the debt increased in fiscal 2011.
The federal fiscal year begins on Oct. 1 and ends on Sept. 30.
At the close of business on Sept. 30, 2011, the total debt of the U.S. government was $14,790,340,328,557.15, according to the Treasury. At the close of business on Sept. 28, the last business day of fiscal 2012, it was $16,066,241,407,385.89
That meant the debt increased in fiscal 2012 by $1,275,901,078,828.74.
At the close of business on Sept. 30, 2010, the debt had stood at $13,561,623,030,891.79. Over the course of fiscal 2011, it increased by $1,228,717,297,665.36 before closing at 14,790,340,328,557.15 on Sept. 30, 2011.
The fiscal 2012 increase of $1,275,901,078,828.74 exceeded the fiscal 2011 increase $1,228,717,297,665.36 by $47,183,781,163.38
Excuse me, math is not one of my strong subjects but shouldn’t the budget deficit be, like, you know, going down every year instead of going up?
Sorry – my bad. For a minute, I thought we were living in an alternate reality where people actually took things like trillion dollar deficits seriously. I will now return to La-La Land and make happy faces because President Obama has the situation well in hand.
Obama – the man who demonized George Bush for adding $4 trillion in debt over eight years – has run up $6 trillion in four. A full third of the entire US debt accumulated over the nation’s entire history has come under Obama’s presidency.
We’re like Europe now for the first time in American history under Obama: our economy is smaller than our debt and while our economy keeps shrinking because of the fool-in-chief’s stupid policies, our debt keeps heading straight up into space like a rocket.
CNN had an interesting article on how Obama has “fundamentally transformed America” into a deadbeat debtor nation way back in late 2009 after Obama’s spending rampage:
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Here’s a new way to think about the U.S. government’s epic borrowing: More than half of the $9 trillion in debt that Uncle Sam is expected to build up over the next decade will be interest.
More than half. In fact, $4.8 trillion.
If that’s hard to grasp, here’s another way to look at why that’s a problem.
In 2015 alone, the estimated interest due – $533 billion – is equal to a third of the federal income taxes expected to be paid that year, said Charles Konigsberg, chief budget counsel of the Concord Coalition, a deficit watchdog group.
The stimulus that was sold on the promise of “shovel-ready jobs” ended up, even in Obama’s own words, being “not as shovel-ready as we thought” as it completely and utterly failed to do anything but bankrupt America and transform this nation into debt-slaves.
Obama has been wrong about absolutely everything he ever said. Now he’s implicitly arguing, “I was wrong about the lies I told you back then, but why don’t you trust my current lies now?”
The economy is going to hell under Obama far faster than anybody short of Cloward and Piven ever dared think.
If at first QEI doesn’t succeed and then QE2 doesn’t succeed to make up for the worst and most wicked president in American history, why try, try, try again.
Bernanke and the rest of the Federal Reserve Board keep trying to magically create enough money to keep up with Obama’s deranged socialist spending and no matter how determined they are to get the job done it just won’t go their way. I have a feeling the Federal Reserve, in trying to deal with Obama, can relate to this scene of Cameron Diaz trying to deal with her bong:
They keep trying to add zeros to the Federal Reserve computers but they can’t seem to add the damn numbers fast enough to keep up with their psychotic president. And they keep saying, “SERIOUSLY?!?!”
Policy makers at the US Federal Reserve are leaning toward more stimulus action “fairly soon” unless economic data turns around, minutes from their meeting three weeks ago showed Wednesday.
The minutes revealed most members of the Federal Open Market Committee were concerned about slowing growth and the vulnerability of the economy to external threats, particularly economic instability in Europe.
“Many members judged that additional monetary accommodation would likely be warranted fairly soon unless incoming information pointed to a substantial and sustainable strengthening in the pace of the economic recovery,” the record of the July 31-August 1 FOMC meeting said.
“A number of members noted that if the recent modest rate of economic growth were to persist, the economy would be less able to weather a material adverse shock without slipping back into recession,” it added.
Fed members discussed the merits of different approaches to sparking more drive in the economy, from signalling that they would keep their benchmark interest rate at the current all-time low longer than currently understood, to undertaking more bond purchases aimed at pulling long-term interest rates down further.
Some said that a new Fed program to purchase Treasury and other bonds, pressing down their yields, “might boost business and consumer confidence”, while demonstrating that the committee remains focused on lowering unemployment while keeping inflation under control.
In the end, the FOMC put off any new action, but the minutes show the policy makers closer to moving on a new stimulus plan at their next meeting on September 12-13.
Yes, it’s pretty crazy to keep trying quantitative easing over and over and over again – the definition of insanity being what it is and all – but you’ve got to see things from the Fed’s perspective: all Obama can do is fail, and fail, and then fail some more while blaming absolutely everything but his failed leadership and his failed policies for said failure. So no matter how totally nuts QE3 is at this point, that’s pretty much all we got until we get ourselves a new president who isn’t a Marxist.
But, you know, if it makes you feel any better, Obama is spending all that money to keep losing more jobs for America:
(RTTNews) – First-time claims for U.S. unemployment benefits unexpectedly showed a modest increase in the week ended August 18th, according to a report released by the Labor Department on Thursday.
The report showed that initial jobless claims edged up to 372,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 368,000. The modest increase came as a surprise to economists, who had expected jobless claims to slip to 365,000 from the 366,000 originally reported for the previous week.
Additionally, the Labor Department said the less volatile four-week moving average crept up to 368,000 from the previous week’s revised average of 364,250.
by RTT Staff Writer
Unexpected! Drink, ye few dying-of-cirrhosis-of-the-liver-zombies who are still left alive in this the fourth year of the mainstream media trying to cover for Obama almost as desperately as the Federal Reserve is.
One of the factoids that Obama doesn’t want you to think about is the fact that, given our population growth, ten million Americans have actually entered the work force during Obama’s presidency. And Obama is so far behind in creating jobs for them that it is beyond unreal. Which is why our labor participation rate is getting to the point that you just want to crawl into your own toilet and flush yourself before Obama does it for you.
Compare Obama’s abject failure and his abjectly failing “solutions” to Ronald Reagan. And then vote like you AREN’T stupid.
Just to make sure you understand what’s going on, liberals will do whatever they’ve got to do to somehow gin up the markets before the election. Democrats will do whatever it takes to create the illusion that the country isn’t going to hell prior to election day. They’ll bankrupt the country and make our children and their children ad infinitum debt slaves to the Chinese if that’s what it takes.
In the market itself, two things are happening: one is that banks are able to borrow money at nearly a zero percent interest rate and then reinvest it in bonds for a safe and easy profit without those risky and pesky loans to small businesses. The other thing is that there are virtually zero bankruptcies of major business and financial sector entities because they can borrow money at the aforementioned artificially low interest to keep themselves alive no matter “artificial” that life is. The moment we start to see interest rates go to their natural levels, you are going to see a giant swath of reorganizations (which is a fancy word for bankruptcies). It’s coming.
I’ve also watched as QE2 (that’s Quantitative Easing, the Obama Fed plan to manipulate interest rates by creating bogus money based on the government essentially borrowing from itself) has fed this big player stock market gluttony with artificial money creating artificially low interest rates. The last time quantitative easing ended, the market lost about 16% of its total value in about two weeks. QE2 is scheduled to end in June. You do the predictive math about what’s going to happen in June/July.
I am reminded of a rather chilling 7 minute video about a fictional scenario which is starting to look more and more like a prophecy:
The plot of the highly realistic video is that Obama’s announcment of QE4 is met with the world market finally realizing that Obama is a clueless idiot. And it proceeds to detail the unravelling of the entire financial system.
We are almost certainly going to see QE3. The only way we WON’T see QE3 is if the “experts” rename what will be virtually exactly the same thing. The liberal/progressive/socialist powers that be simply don’t have any other plan. And whether it’s QE4 or QE5, at some point the world markets will come to the same conclusion that they arrive at in the fictional video above.
As he campaigns for re-election, President Obama is ruminating over the biggest mistake of his first term — and it might surprise supporters and critics alike.
In the president’s view, he has not been a good enough storyteller, putting policy goals ahead of laying out a clear narrative for the American public.
“The mistake of my first term. . .was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right. And that’s important,” Obama told “CBS This Morning” anchor Charlie Rose in a White House interview that will be broadcast Sunday and Monday.
“But the nature of this office,” the president added, “is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times.”
Mitt Romney made sure Obama’s chin was at precisely the correct angle when he responded:
“President Obama believes that millions of Americans have lost their homes, their jobs and their livelihood because he failed to tell a good story. Being president is not about telling stories. Being president is about leading, and President Obama has failed to lead. No wonder Americans are losing faith in his presidency.”
Even to cast Obama’s latest “storytelling” in its very best possible light, what Obama is really saying is that his policies are wonderful, but the American people are simply too damn stupid to understand it.
Give me a little time to warm up as I provide my own response to Obama, because I’ve got a lot to say on my way to past-the-boiling-point.
Republicans are keen to tie any new jobs efforts to a stimulus bill that has become unpopular. A New York Times/CBS poll found that just 6 percent of Americans believe that it created jobs, even though independent economists estimate that it has saved or created more than 1 million jobs.
Cato has just published a full-page ad in the New York Times with the names of some 200 economists, including some Nobel laureates and other highly respected scholars, who “do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance” — contrary to widespread claims that “Economists from across the political spectrum agree” on a massive fiscal stimulus package.
But let’s get back to the fact that only 6% of Americans believed the $3.27 trillion Stimulus actually created any jobs. Understand, that comes from a CBS/New York Times Poll that featured the following:
Obama was a “storyteller,” all right. But the thing was his stories were lies. Obama’s economic plan has wildly failed. According to Obama’s “storytelling,” unemployment ought to be 5.6 percent now because that’s what he said it would be by this time if we passed his stimulus. That was his “story.”
Obama, of course, once started on the “storytelling” that the Republicans were “obstructionists” never quit telling that story. It didn’t matter that Democrats COMPLETELY OWNED ALL THREE BRANCHES OF GOVERNMENT FOR THE ENTIRE FIRST TWO YEARS OF THE OBAMA REGIME. It didn’t matter that in fact Democrats had owned two of the three branches – both the House and the Senate – since November 2006 when Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid took over Congress. It didn’t matter that since Democrats took over Congress food stamp dependency has soared 70 percent and under Obama crippling poverty and food stamp dependency has skyrocketed 53 percent (3o million in 2008 to 46 million now). If the Republican Party didn’t go along with the Democrat Party’s and messiah Obama’s radical failure and misery they were “obstructionists” even when their “obstructionism” clearly did not prevent the Obama agenda from being implemented.
That solemn promise that Obama made to the American people that he would rise above the negativity and bitterness and partisanship and hate was itself nothing but the most hateful “story” ever told by the most cynical demagogue ever to hold office.
Obama had PLENTY of “storytelling” with his ObamaCare takeover of the American health care system.
STEPHANOPOULOS: I wanted to check for myself. But your critics say it is a tax increase.
OBAMA: My critics say everything is a tax increase. My critics say that I’m taking over every sector of the economy. You know that. Look, we can have a legitimate debate about whether or not we’re going to have an individual mandate or not, but…
STEPHANOPOULOS: But you reject that it’s a tax increase?
STEPHANOPOULOS: “Under this mandate, the government is forcing people to spend money, fining you if you don’t. How is that not a tax?”
PRESIDENT OBAMA: “No. That’s not true, George. The — for us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase.
“The Federal Government does not have the power to order people to buy health insurance. Section 5000A would therefore be unconstitutional if read as a command. The Federal Government does have the power to impose a tax on those without health insurance. Section 5000A is therefore constitutional, because it can reasonably be read as a tax.”
Obama has – after “storytelling” that ObamaCare was NOT a tax and then demanding his lawyers argue before the Supreme Court that it WAS a tax – now returned to his “storytelling” that it isn’t a tax no matter what the hell the Supreme Court said. I mean, after all, they’re not “constitutional scholars” the way messiah Obama is. And the Supreme Court Justices certainly aren’t “storytellers” the way Obama is. Few people can ever become that rabidly personally dishonest.
But let me perfectly clear, because I know you’ll hear the same old claims that rolling back these tax breaks means a massive tax increase on the American people: if your family earns less than $250,000 a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime.
“no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what. My view is that health care reform should be guided by a simple principle: fix what’s broken and build on what works.”
Eighty-three percent of American physicians have considered leaving their practices over President Barack Obama’s health care reform law, according to a survey released by the Doctor Patient Medical Association.
The DPMA, a non-partisan association of doctors and patients, surveyed a random selection of 699 doctors nationwide. The survey found that the majority have thought about bailing out of their careers over the legislation, which was upheld last month by the Supreme Court.
Now, even the Administration admits that this isn’t the case, stating that “as a practical matter, a majority of group health plans will lose their grandfather status by 2013.”
Another “story,” another damn lie. I guess Obama’s “storytelling” didn’t include things as silly as “practical matters.”
Because storytelling = lying to this dishonorable weasel.
And for Obama to tell you the damn STORY that he hasn’t told you enough “stories” amounts to his saying that he failed to understand how pathologically stupid you people were. BECAUSE HE SHOULD HAVE LIED TO YOU MORE THAN HE ALREADY HAS.
We are going on four years into God damn America now. And God will surely continue to damn this nation that was once “under God” more and more and more until Obama is either driven out of office or until we simply collapse under the weight of our failed and demonic policies.
In an Ohio campaign event, President Barack Obama described the kind of ads he foresees the GOP running against him during the election cycle.
“From now until then, both sides will spend tons of money on TV commercials. The other side will spend over a billion dollars on ads that tell you the economy is bad, that it’s all my fault; that I can’t fix it because I think government is always the answer, or because I didn’t make a lot of money in the private sector and don’t understand it, or because I’m in over my head, or because I think everything and everybody is doing just fine,” Obama said at Cuyahoga Community College Metropolitan Campus in Ohio on Thursday.
Notably, Obama did not refute the hypothetical accusations.
“That’s what the scary voice in the ads will say; that’s what Mr. Romney will say; that’s what the Republicans in Congress will say. Well, you know, that may be their plan to win the election. But it’s not a plan to create jobs. It’s not a plan to grow the economy. It’s not a plan to pay down the debt. And it’s sure not a plan to revive the middle class and secure our future.”
It’s interesting. Obama first says, “The other side will spend over a billion dollars…” Do you know which side first brought up the real possibility that it would be able to raise over a billion dollars?
Obama says they’re going to tell you ”that tell you the economy is bad, that it’s all my fault.” Well, that’s a shocker. We thought Obama knew that he’d been the president for the last four years and that the president was responsible for his economy. That’s been true in the past, but not in this case, because Obama is a pathological weasel and a malignant narcissist to boot. So Obama has never once accepted so much as a scintilla of blame for ANY of his four years of failure. Rather, he’s literally still blaming Bush – and if you want four more years of failure along with four more years of excuses and four more years of blaming Bush, you know who to vote for. Rather, he’s blaming the Republican Party for “obstructionism” – as if the two years of utter Democrat obstructionism in which Democrats controlled both the House ANDthe Senate during the period between 2006 and 2008 when the economy went to crap, during which a Senator named Barack Obama and a Senator named Joe Biden participated in obstructing absolutely everything George Bush tried to do while personally demonizing him on a constant basis, and the first two years of the Obama administration when he had total control of the White House, the House and the Senate but got NOTHING done to help the economy, mattered.
But that’s exactly what Obama is doing: demanding more of what he has already done and which has already failed. Obama demands that America bash its head against a reinforced brick wall until it is a brainless collectivist socialist state like Europe. Nothing will stop him from turning America into a failed state except an election.
Few things are more difficult in politics than confronting failure and learning from it. It is especially difficult when a leader you have championed, and in whom you have placed your highest hopes, turns out to be less than he seemed.
Such is the dilemma facing liberals in the age of Obama. Barack Obama entered the presidency with his sights and standards very high, and many liberals believed he could be the transformative figure they had been awaiting for generations. But by now it is clear that, by any reasonable measure (including those set out by Obama himself at the beginning of his term), his presidency has been a failure.
Consider the economy. President Obama has overseen the weakest recovery on record. He is on track to have the worst jobs record of any president in the modern era.The standard of living for Americans has fallen more dramatically during his presidency than during any since the government began recording it five decades ago. As of this writing, unemployment has been above 8 percent for 38 consecutive months, the longest such stretch since the Great Depression. Home values are nearly 35 percent lower than they were five years ago. A record 46 million Americans are now living in poverty.
The economist Michael Boskin has listed some of the post–World War II records set during the Obama years: among them, federal spending as a percentage of GDP at 25 percent, the federal debt as a percentage of GDP at 67 percent, and the budget deficit as a percentage of GDP at 10 percent. The United States has amassed more than $5 trillion in debt since January 2009, with the president having submitted four budgets with trillion-dollar-plus deficits. (Prior to Obama, no president had submitted even a single budget with deficits in excess of a trillion dollars.) In addition, government dependency, defined as the percentage of persons receiving one or more federal benefit payments, is the highest in American history.
Add to this the fact that the president’s signature domestic achievement, the Affordable Care Act, is among the most unpopular major domestic policies passed in the last century; and that the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, widely known as Obama’s stimulus package, is so unpopular that his aides have virtually expelled the word stimulus from their lexicon.
And yeah, add to that the fact that Obama keeps trying to same trick under different names – it’s no longer a “stimulus,” it’s an investment The “S” word is a dirty word, so Obama has to use another dirty word to sucker the American people into doing the same fool thing all over again. It’s no longer “shovel-ready jobs,” it’s “construction workers ready to get dirty”. And, you see, the fact that Obama is not talking about construction workers ready to get dirty “right now” means we can’t consider his infamous confession that “Shovel-ready was not as … uh .. shovel-ready as we expected.”
Barack Obama campaigned four years ago assailing President George W. Bush for wage losses suffered by the middle class. More than three years into Obama’s own presidency, those declines have only deepened.
The rebound from the worst recession since the 1930s has generated relatively few of the moderately skilled jobs that once supported the middle class, tightening the financial squeeze on many Americans, even those who are employed.
[...]
As a candidate in 2008, Obama blamed the reversals largely on the policies of Bush and other Republicans. He cited census figures showing that median income for working-age households — those headed by someone younger than 65 — had dropped more than $2,000 after inflation during the first seven years of Bush’s time in office.
Yet real median household income in March was down $4,300 since Obama took office in January 2009 and down $2,900 since the June 2009 start of the economic recovery, according to an analysis of census data by Sentier Research, an economic- consulting firm in Annapolis, Maryland.
One of the interesting things that comes from these facts is that Americans have actually lost more in household income SINCE “the recession officially ended” ($2,900) than they had during the recession ($4,300 – $2,900 = $1,400). Obama’s “recovery” is a “wreckovery” – which is the term conservatives like Michelle Malkin coined in predicting that Obamanomics would be a colossal and wildly expensive failure. It is literally true to state that Obama’s “recovery” has been harder on American families economically than the recession that he keeps claiming he inherited was for those families.
Pardon us for telling the world about what a profound failure you are, Barry Hussein. Sorry it bothers you. Truly sorry you are a pathetic and inadequate man in a job that is clearly way over your abilities to perform.
Obama says the Republicans are going to say “that it’s all my fault; that I can’t fix it.”
Obama in 2009: If I can’t fix the economy in three years, you can call me former President Obama
by editor on June 16, 2011
Don’t you hate it when your own words come back to bite you in the butt? Back in February 2009 President Obama told Today Show host Matt Lauer that he’d be a one-term president if he didn’t fix the economy in three years.
“I will be held accountable,” Obama said. “I’ve got four years and … A year form now, I think people are going to see that we’re starting to make some progress, but there’s still going to be some pain out there … If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition.”
Obama at the time he made that remark clearly believed that his Obamanomics held the answer, and that he could turn the economy around with his Obamanomics. His was the administration that predicted that if his stimulus was passed – by which I mean the first $862 billion one, not the second $447 billion dollar one that he demanded follow it – unemployment would not go above 8% and that in fact unemployment would be less than 6% by now. And he was saying if I’m wrong I’ve got no business holding this job and I should be voted out of office.
Question: DID OBAMA FIX THE ECONOMY? Please consider the above section on the economy before you provide an asinine answer, liberal.
Obama predicts we’ll going to say that “the economy is bad, that it’s all my fault; that I can’t fix it because I think government is always the answer.”
Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history. Thanks to him the era of big government is back. Obama runs up taxpayer debt not in the billions but in the trillions. He has expanded the federal government’s control over home mortgages, investment banking, health care, autos and energy. The Weekly Standard summarizes Obama’s approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.
The typical American household would have paid nearly all of its income in taxes last year to balance the budget if the government used standard accounting rules to compute the deficit, a USA TODAY analysis finds.
Under those accounting practices, the government ran red ink last year equal to $42,054 per household — nearly four times the official number reported under unique rules set by Congress.
A U.S. household’s median income is $49,445, the Census reports.
The big difference between the official deficit and standard accounting: Congress exempts itself from including the cost of promised retirement benefits. Yet companies, states and local governments must include retirement commitments in financial statements, as required by federal law and private boards that set accounting rules.
The deficit was $5 trillion last year under those rules. The official number was $1.3 trillion. Liabilities for Social Security, Medicare and other retirement programs rose by $3.7 trillion in 2011, according to government actuaries, but the amount was not registered on the government’s books.
Yeah, Barry Hussein, you believe that government is God, and you are as determined as any true believer to force all Americans to bow down before you as the god of your Government and render you sacrifices and offerings otherwise known as “taxes.” You DO believe “government is always the answer.”
And as was pointed out, in your demagogic attack that masqueraded as a “major policy speech” and yet offered nothing, NOTHING, you “did not refute the hypothetical accusations” that you literally levied against yourself.
Rather, you state them as a rhetorical device to suggest that they now somehow can’t be used against you – no matter how true they are and no matter what a failure you are. And when we do in fact say the facts that you predicted we’d say – and why wouldn’t we? – you want your worshipers to disconnect the logical side of their brains and instead say, “Obama was right! Scary voice man said exactly what Obama predicted!”
Obama says that the GOP will go after him “because I didn’t make a lot of money in the private sector.” That isn’t true, and if you claim it is, find me a major conservative source that argues that Obama didn’t make enough money to be deemed a fit candidate for president. It’s a straw man demagogic argument like most all of his other arguments that doesn’t have a scintilla of truth to it.
Our argument isn’t that Obama isn’t “rich” and so he shouldn’t be president (Obama ISrich, by the way: his books made him so); our argument is that Obama has basically NEVER had a real job in the private sector and has absolutely no idea whatsoever how the private sector works. In fact, when Obama came the closest he ever would in his career to having such a job, he was so radical and so anti-business that he wrote, “I felt like a spy behind enemy lines.” Obama’s real love was for socialist community agitating and undermining the private sector. Our argument is also the fact that Obama has an administration that is almost as clueless in actual world business experience as he is:
The Obama administration is truly one of the blind leading the blind.
“The private sector is doing fine. Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government,” President Obama claimed on Friday. His solution to fix the public sector was more government spending.
Nobody is arguing that Obama says “everybody and everything is doing just fine.” That is simply typical lying demagoguery from a lying demagogue weasel. Obama wants to slander and demonize the truth so that when his followers hear it, they will be inoculated against it and turn their brains off. The fact is that Obama said that the private sector is doing just fine, and that ought to be quite a surprise to the vast majority of Americans. According to US News and World Report, about 22 million people work in the American public sector. The OTHER 291 million Americans are in the private sector. And let me assure you that things aren’t nearly so rosy for those 291 million Americans as Barack Obama claims they are.
“The private sector’s doing fine” is a lie from a genuinely evil man.
Many people have admired Obama’s speaking ability. Allow me to point something out: the gift of great public speaking can be a blessing or a curse. In the case of Winston Churchill, it was a blessing, as his courage and clarity of speech rallied the free world to fight and to keep fighting. In the case of Adolf Hitler, it was a curse as an demon-possessed man used the power of lies to ignite the unholy passions of a nation that had succumbed to a spirit of deception. I’m not trying to claim that Barack Obama is Adolf Hitler; I’m merely pointing out the fact that the gift of speech can be used not to illuminate the truth, but to deceive, not to reveal reality, but to distort it, not to untangle the truth, but to tangle it up into knots. Barack Obama does the latter on a constant basis.
When the revelations came out about Rev. Jeremiah Wright – Obama’s self-acknowledged spiritual leader and mentor for over 20 years – I realized that this man was an order of magnitude more evil than any president who had ever sat in the Oval Office, and that America would suffer terribly under him. History documents that I have not been wrong.
So when Obama says, “They’re going to say this about me,” what he’s really saying is, “They’re going to tell you the truth about me. Don’t believe it. Believe my lies instead.”
I heard Obama’s top campaign guru TWICE directly quote Mitt Romney as saying, “We don’t need more teachers. We don’t need more firefighters.” Here’s one of those:
AXELROD: Governor Romney chose to jump on the word, but what was most interesting is how he reacted to the spirit of the thing, because his statement was we don’t need any more teachers, we don’t need any more firefighters or police. The president is out of touch. Out of touch? We have lost 250,000 teachers in the last 27 — couple of years. Every community in the country is feeling it. It’s bad in the short term for our economy, because those are good middle-class jobs, and it’s bad in the long term for our economy because we’re not going to win and our kids aren’t going to win unless we invest in education.
So I would suggest he’s living on a different planet if he thinks that’s a prescription for a stronger economy.
As soon as Axelrod said that, I knew it was a pure lie from a pure liar. I knew that there was no way Mitt Romney said, “We don’t need any more teachers. We don’t need any more firefighters or police.”
For the record, when Axelrod said “Governor Romney chose to jump on the word,” “the word” he was referring to was Barack Obama’s incredibly stupid and incredibly wrong statement that “the private sector’s doing fine.” And because Barack Obama said an incredibly stupid thing, David Axelrod decided to deceitfully and falsely attribute a bogus remark to Romney so that he could demonize him for the lie that Axelrod fabricated.
Romney said in Iowa that Obama “wants another stimulus, he wants to hire more government workers. He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.”
Two very different statements. There is a rather huge difference between saying “We can’t afford what Obama has already TWICE tried and which the American people have now clearly flatly rejected” and “We don’t need more teachers.” Romney accurately points out the fact that Barack Obama says we need to do the son of the son of stimulus – yet anothermassive government spending program that has already twice failed America – and pointed out that Obama justifies expanding government and expanding the (liberal union) government workforce by citing firemen, policemen and teachers. It’s basically that scam that cities use when they have bloated budgets: you never hear them say, “If you don’t pay more taxes we’ll fire all our bureaucrats!” Rather they say we’re keeping every single bureaucrat but we’ll fire all the policemen and firemen and teachers and then you’ll be sorry. And Romney also points out that if you look at Wisconsin, if you look at San Diego, if you look at San Jose - uberliberal places ALL – you will see that the American people are now OVERWHELMINGLYrejecting what Obama is demanding.
In San Jose, fully 70% of the residents voted to cut back pensions that allowed firefighters to retire at the age of 48 with 90% of their salary – which is consistent with California public sector workers. These benefits DWARF what private sector workers have any chance of ever receiving.
Wisconsin “public workers” get on average $14,500 more than their private sector counterparts with similar qualifications; they receive more than twice the health care benefits than their private sector counterparts, and they get 4.5 times more in pension.
It is frankly immoral. If the left actually wanted more policemen, firefighters and teachers THEY WOULD CUT THESE UNSUSTAINABLE BENEFITS AND FREE UP FUNDS TO ALLOW GOVERNMENTS TO HIRE MORE POLICEMEN, TEACHERS AND FIREFIGHTERS.
As it is, take a look at the unfunded liability of California according to the Los Angeles Times:
The staggering amount of unfunded debt stands to crowd out funding for many popular programs. Reform will take something sadly lacking in the Legislature: political courage.
The state of California’s real unfunded pension debt clocks in at more than $500 billion, nearly eight times greater than officially reported.
That’s the finding from a study released Monday by Stanford University’s public policy program, confirming a recent report with similar, stunning findings from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.
Note to anyone who has a functioning brain cell: we’re bankrupt. We don’t have the money. We can’t keep allowing Democrats to give public unions fat contracts in exchange for those public unions giving back the Democrats a kickback in the form of campaign contributions. Our children will starve and die in the burning streets if we keep doing that. And I mean that very literally. The United States of America is going to collapse. And first there will be riots and then we will descend into complete anarchy. And our children will very much starve and die in the burning streets.
America’s actual debt is no trivial $16 billion (it was $10 trillion when Obama took office, with George Bush having grown it by $4 trillion over eight years); it is now way, WAY over $200 TRILLION. And Democrats have saddled us with 99.9 percent of that unpayable debt bomb that is waiting to explode.
I keep trying to warn people. It’s right out of the Bible. There is a spirit of delusion on us that is going to kill us just as it has killed other nations before us. We think we’re fine, that everything is fine, and that we can go on doing what we’ve done before. One day soon we’re going to collapse – and when that collapse comes it’s going to happen with staggering, stunning speed and it’s going to catch nearly all Americans completely off guard. Your money will be virtually worthless literally overnight. And your family is going to suffer horribly in the ensuing chaos.
There’s a line from a song: “You can’t always have what you want.” That idea is completely foreign to liberals, who believe with Obama that he can slash the size of government and massively expand the size of government at the exact same time. But under Obama, people are buying the lie that we can have mutually exclusive things that fundamentally contradict one another. Mitt Romney isn’t saying, “We don’t need any more teachers.” Mitt Romney is saying, “We can’t afford any more Obamanomics.”
I was watching Neil Cavuto’s program, and a liberal was arguing that not only should the public sector and the unions that give 95% of their campaign contributions to Democrats continue to receive these out-of-control and unsustainable benefits, but private sector workers ought to have them too. And instead of cutting public sector employee benefits to be more in line with private sector workers, we should instead force every business in America into bankruptcy by forcing them to pay the kind of insane benefits that we’re paying Obama’s government class of elites. And Cavuto kept repeating versions of “you are completely insane.”
The liberal was basically saying that if you can’t get that square peg to fit into that round hole, you use a bigger government-powered hammer until you force your peg to fit wherever the hell you want it. Government is God, and our God can do anything He wants.
Cavuto kept asking, “Where are you going to get the money?” And that dose of reality simply didn’t matter: because liberals are as immune from reality as you can get. Liberalism is ultimately the incoherent intolerance of reality. They live in their little world of “isms” and talking points.
David Axelrod is a liar without shame. And so is the evil president he is pimping for.
Normally, when a president calls a press conference he has something major to announce; he’s actually accomplished something. In this case, Obama calls a press conference to do nothing more than grandstand and continue his “the one and only person who must be above blame is the president – unless that president happens to be a Republican in which case he is the only person who must be blamed.”
I remember coming across a statement from the Soviet Union not long before its collapse in which Soviet big government totalitarians actually blamed seventy-two years of bad weather after their policies resulted in perpetual famine - having executed all their other viable scapegoats. That’s the true audacity of hope: hope that the benighted people will continue to believe the utterly asinine lies of the left even after it is beyond obvious that they have failed.
While blaming Bush is a fountain that will never run out as long as Obama has one last breath of air in his lungs, apparently it is worn out enough that Obama had to find new scapegoats, such as Europe (but all Spain and France and Greece are saying is that they want to be like Obama and make other people pay for their reckless government spending) and the Republican House for refusing to pass everything Obama wants. Never mind that explorers had actually discovered the continent of Europe even previous to the Bush years and never mind that when the U.S. economy went from wonderful to terrible during Bush’s final two years in office the Democrats not only controlled the House but also controlled the Senate as well. And never mind that Obama had complete control of the government for his first two years given that he had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate to go with a massive majority in the House – and wasted it passing his soon-to-be-found unconstitutional ObamaCare mandate over an angry nation that overwhelmingly knew it was unconstitutional.
The unemployment rate was 4.4% when the Democrat Party swept the Congress with Nancy Pelosi ruling over the House and Harry Reid running the Senate. What about Democrat Party obstructionism? Regarding bipartisan compromise, Nancy Pelosi, the physical embodiment of fingernails raking across a chalkboard, had this to say when she was asked when the Democrats would produce their own plan while demonizing Bush’s plan: “Never. Is that soon enough for you?” For the official record, Pelosi was right: Democrats never DIDproduce any kind of plan while successfully filibustering Bush. The Democrats governed entirely by demagoguing Bush over everything under the sun and blocking him in everything he tried to do.
By the way, Barack Obama was one of those obstructionist Democrats. On the debt ceiling, Obama took a hard-core position and not only voted against it, but demonized Bush as a failed leader for needing one. And this is the same cynical lying weasel who has since demanded the three largest debt ceiling increases in the history of the entire human race.
The Democrats actually blockaded Bush time and time again. Do you know why our economy collapsed in 2008? You can answer the question in three words: “Fannie and Freddie.” As much as Democrats want to demonize the private sector and George Bush, the fact of the matter is that Fannie and Freddie – which controlled over half of the mortgages in America – were the VERY FIRST entities to collapse and triggered the collapse of firms such as Lehman Brothers for the primary reason that Lehman suddenly found itself holding Fannie Mae-bundled mortgage backed securities that were suddenly known to be toxic. Barney Frank in 2005 brushed off a question of whether the government’s push to increase home-ownership rates might result in people buying more home than they could afford and inflating the housing market by barking, ”We’ll deal with that problem if it happens.” But we find that not only would Democrats NOT deal with it, but they wouldn’t let Bush or Republicans deal with it either.
“Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.”
In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980′s.
”From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ”If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.”
George Bush began trying to seriously deal with the looming housing bubble which was guaranteed to create a mortgage meltdown as early as 2003:
WASHINGTON, Sept. 10— The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago. (New York Times, September 11, 2003)
You can read how Barney Frank responded in that same article:
WASHINGTON, Sept. 10— The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago. (New York Times, September 11, 2003)
Congress chartered Fannie and Freddie to provide access to home financing by maintaining liquidity in the secondary mortgage market. Today, almost half of all mortgages in the U.S. are owned or guaranteed by these GSEs. They are mammoth financial institutions with almost $1.5 Trillion of debt outstanding between them. With the fiscal challenges facing us today (deficits, entitlements, pensions and flood insurance), Congress must ask itself who would actually pay this debt if Fannie or Freddie could not?
And it came to pass exactly as John McCain warned. And now we KNOWwho would actually pay for it: YOU.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are so big — they own or guarantee roughly half of the nation’s $12 trillion mortgage market — that the thought that they might falter once seemed unimaginable. But now a trickle of worries about the companies, which has been slowly building for years, has suddenly become a torrent.
REP. BARNEY FRANK, D-MASS.: I think this is a case where Fannie and Freddie are fundamentally sound, that they are not in danger of going under. They’re not the best investments these days from the long-term standpoint going back. I think they are in good shape going forward.
Lenders also have opened the door wider to minorities because of new initiatives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–the giant federally chartered corporations that play critical, if obscure, roles in the home finance system. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy mortgages from lenders and bundle them into securities; that provides lenders the funds to lend more. . . .
In a nutshell, Fannie and Freddie, in their role as Government Sponsored Enterprises, bought tens of millions of mortgages, and then repackaged them into huge mortgage-backed securities that giant private entities such as Bear Stearns, AIG and Lehman Brothers purchased. What made these securities particularly attractive to the private banking entities was that these securities were essentially being sold – and had the backing – of the United States government. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, again, are Government Sponsored Enterprises.
The Role of the GSEs is to provide liquidity and stability to the U.S. housing and mortgage markets. Step 1 Banks lend money to Households to purchase and refinance home mortgages Step 2 The GSEs purchase these mortgage from the banks Step 3 GSEs bundle the mortgages into mortgage-backed securities Step 4 GSEs sell mortgage-backed and debt securities to domestic and international capital investors Step 5 Investors pay GSEs for purchase of debt and securities Step 6 GSEs return funds to banks to lend out again for the issuance of new mortgage loans.
Now, an intelligent observer would note a primary conflict: the GSE’s role was to “provide stability,” and yet at the same time they were taking on “significantly more risk” in the final year of the Clinton presidency. What’s wrong with this picture?
The GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were designed to bundle up the mortgages into mortgage backed securities and then sell them to the private market.
Fannie Mae is exempt from SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] regulation. Which screams why Bush wanted to regulate them. This allowed Fannie Mae to bundle up mortgages, which were then rated AAA with no requirement to make clear what is in the bundle. Which screams why Bush wanted to regulate them.
This is what allowed the toxic instruments that have been sold across the world to proliferate. And then to explode. It also created a situation where money institutions did not know and could not find out whether potential inter-bank business partners were holding these “boiled babies on their books, complete with a golden stamp on the wrapping,” rather than safe instruments. This then inclined banks to a natural caution, to be wary of lending good money to other banks against these ‘assets’. And thus banks refused to lend to one another.
And it was Democrats, not Bush, and not Republicans, who were all over this disaster that destroyed our economy in 2008.
We were led by a pathologically dishonest media to believe that Republicans had created this mess, when it fact it had been Democrats. And so we gave the very fools who destroyed our economy total power.
I added the last link to point out that we’re looking at a $600 TRILLION problem and Barack Obama’s supporters are COMPLETELY BEHIND that $600 trillion problem.
If you believe the Democrat Party, the fact that Fannie and Freddie controlled over half of all the mortgages in the United States, and the fact that Fannie and Freddie went completely bankrupt and precipitated the financial crash of 2008, and the fact that economic experts predicted Fannie and Freddie would cause an economic collapse, and the fact that even the New York Times admitted concern over a “torrent of worries” caused by Fannie and Freddie’s massive exposure shortly prior to the economic collapse, all somehow go to prove that Fannie and Freddie were in no way responsible for the 2008 economic collapse. As insane as that is, that is what they have to say.
Let me put it bluntly: if you don’t understand that Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s 2008 collapse created the financial crisis, you are a fool. If you don’t acknowledge that the Democrat Party engineered that collapse and then refused to allow George Bush or anyone else to reform these massive GSEs to prevent that collapse from happening, you are a liar. Which is why I routinely label Democrats as lying fools.
So Obama and the Democrats continually demonize Republican obstructionism and the mainstream media refuses to put that story into any kind of context of DEMOCRAT obstructionism. Why is it a valid charge that the Republican House should be blamed as “obstructionist” given that DEMOCRATS had both the House AND the Senate when the economy went bad under Bush? When have you heard about such a challenge in the media? Democrats have blamed Republicans and Bush for four years now about destroying the economy. Where has the media ever even so much as questioned that premise, let alone provide the facts I document for you here? Further, Obama and the Democrats – in trying to demonize Republicans for their “obstructionism” – are demanding that Republicans vote for what is essentially the son of the son of Obama’s first massive and massively failed stimulus. Remember that first massive stimulus that was officially $862 billion but which the CBO said would actually cost $3.27 TRILLION when it was all said and done? Remember that second stimulus program for $447 billion that will likewise cost far more than that? How many more stimulus programs should Obama get? How many trillions of dollars in government spending is enough? Have you heard these questions from ABC, NBC or CBS???
Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate Minority leader, made an interesting observation. He basically said, “The president keeps accusing the Republicans of wanting America to fail. That’s not true. If Republicans wanted America to fail, they would SUPPORT the president and his failed policies.”
And what is the Democrats response to that? A fantasy story based on counterfactual claims: if we hadn’t passed the stimulus things would have been worse. Don’t remember what he said back then because they turned out to be a sack of lies; remember our new lies now. And if George Bush hadn’t been president, space aliens would have destroyed the entire human race. Prove that one wrong. Obama’s own projections prove that to be false; but the lies they keep a changin’ because that’s what hope and change means – keep telling changing lies and hope the people buy them.
If you want to know what is “obstructing” jobs in America, look no further than Barack Obama and the Democrat Part and their anti-business, anti-growth policies.
The biggest “obstruction” of all facing America is the one shoved up Democrats’ rear ends. Sorry to end on such a crass note, but the truth is invariably an unpleasant thing where Democrats are concerned.
All of the major news outlets are reporting that the stimulus bill voted out of conference committee last night has a meager $789 billion price tag. This number is pure fantasy. No one believes that the increased funding for programs the left loves like Head Start, Medicaid, COBRA, and the Earned Income Tax Credit is in any way temporary. No Congress under control of the left will ever cut funding for these programs. So what is the true cost of the stimulus if these spending increases are made permanent?
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) asked the Congressional Budget Office to estimate the impact of permanently extending the 20 most popular provisions of the stimulus bill. What did the CBO find? As you can see from the table below [visit link], the true 10 year cost of the stimulus bill $2.527 trillion in in spending with another $744 billion cost in debt servicing. Total bill for the Generational Theft Act: $3.27 trillion.
The actual cost of the Obama stimulus was simply completely unreported by the mainstream media which is now merely the propaganda wing of the Democrat Party. The numbers reported were pure lies.
So, as I’ve said over and over and over again, the “real” cost of the Obama stimulus was actually 308.75% higher than it was deceitfully sold to the American people as costing.
And now we see that that was a common theme of the Obama deception: because we find that the real Obama deficit wasn’t $1.3 trillion; no, it was actually $5.6 trillion. Which is, for the record, 330.77% higher than what we were told.
A picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s a picture of the the contrast between Obama’s bullcrap and actual reality:
The typical American household would have paid nearly all of its income in taxes last year to balance the budget if the government used standard accounting rules to compute the deficit, a USA TODAY analysis finds.
Under those accounting practices, the government ran red ink last year equal to $42,054 per household — nearly four times the official number reported under unique rules set by Congress.
A U.S. household’s median income is $49,445, the Census reports.
The big difference between the official deficit and standard accounting: Congress exempts itself from including the cost of promised retirement benefits. Yet companies, states and local governments must include retirement commitments in financial statements, as required by federal law and private boards that set accounting rules.
The deficit was $5 trillion last year under those rules. The official number was $1.3 trillion. Liabilities for Social Security, Medicare and other retirement programs rose by $3.7 trillion in 2011, according to government actuaries, but the amount was not registered on the government’s books.
Deficits are a major issue in this year’s presidential campaign, but USA TODAY has calculated federal finances under accounting rules since 2004 and found no correlation between fluctuations in the deficit and which party ran Congress or the White House.
Key findings:
•Social Security had the biggest financial slide. The government would need $22.2 trillion today, set aside and earning interest, to cover benefits promised to current workers and retirees beyond what taxes will cover. That’s $9.5 trillion more than was needed in 2004.
•Deficits from 2004 to 2011 would be six times the official total of $5.6 trillion reported.
•Federal debt and retiree commitments equal $561,254 per household. By contrast, an average household owes a combined $116,057 for mortgages, car loans and other debts.
“By law, the federal government can’t tell the truth,” says accountant Sheila Weinberg of the Chicago-based Institute for Truth in Accounting.
Jim Horney, a former Senate budget staff expert now at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, says retirement programs should not count as part of the deficit because, unlike a business, Congress can change what it owes by cutting benefits or lifting taxes.
“It’s not easy, but it can be done. Retirement programs are not legal obligations,” he says.
In California, Democrat Governor Jerry Brown is talking about the “crisis” of the official state deficit of billion. That’s not even CLOSE to the truth; the actual deficit of just the Democrat-passed unfunded pension liabilities for their union allies is $500 billion ALL BY ITSELF.
The state of California’s real unfunded pension debt clocks in at more than $500 billion, nearly eight times greater than officially reported.
That’s the finding from a study released Monday by Stanford University’s public policy program, confirming a recent report with similar, stunning findings from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.
It’s great if you’re in a government employee union and give all your campaign contributions to Democrats to keep the pork coming. It sucks if you’re the vast majority of Californians. Meanwhile, these same California voters keep falling for the same trick, namely, Democrats keep promising that they’ll redistribute the wealth of others and give it to people who vote Democrat.
Until California collapses under the weight of Democrat lies and burns in hell.
There’s only one term to describe this sheer lunatic deception: demon possessed. The Democrat Party today is the party of hell. One day soon Democrats will worship the Antichrist who will promise the big government Utopia of their dreams and take his mark and ultimately end up in the eternal fire that they truly deserve.
As bad as California looks, the actual debt picture of the United States as a country makes that $500 billion in uncounted unfunded liabilities to pro-Democrat labor unions look like nothin’.
Understand, this article was written in August 2011 when the national debt was “only” $14 trillion. It’s going to be $16 trillion by the end of the year.
Look at the actual debt faced by the United States. You’re on the hook for this:
When Standard & Poor’s reduced the nation’s credit rating from AAA to AA-plus, the United States suffered the first downgrade to its credit rating ever. S&P took this action despite the plan Congress passed this past week to raise the debt limit.
The downgrade, S&P said, “reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics.”
It’s those medium- and long-term debt problems that also worry economics professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff, who served as a senior economist on President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. He says the national debt, which the U.S. Treasury has accounted at about $14 trillion, is just the tip of the iceberg.
“We have all these unofficial debts that are massive compared to the official debt,” Kotlikoff tells David Greene, guest host of weekends on All Things Considered. “We’re focused just on the official debt, so we’re trying to balance the wrong books.”
Kotlikoff explains that America’s “unofficial” payment obligations — like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits — jack up the debt figure substantially.
“If you add up all the promises that have been made for spending obligations, including defense expenditures, and you subtract all the taxes that we expect to collect, the difference is $211 trillion. That’s the fiscal gap,” he says. “That’s our true indebtedness.” [...]
Quantitative easing is a hidden tax; the government inflates the currency which deflates the value of the existing dollars. The dollars systematically become worth less and we get inflation – which is actually running out of control (see here, here, here, here and – for the antidote – here).
Democrats love to blame Republicans for our debt. They are, as I have said before, demon-possessed liars. The programs that the Democrat Party rammed down our forcibly collectivist throats such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are responsible for 99-plus percent of our massive unsustainable unpayable debt that will necessarily implode America.
If you want to put it in honest terms, the agreement the Democrats – the party of baby genocide – was this: “You vote for us, and we’ll give you benefits that we’ll sell the next generation into slavery to pay for.” And Democrats said, “Good! That’s what we want!”
Republicans can’t end Social Security or Medicare now; millions of Americans (including my own parents) count on these programs - even as bad as they are – for survival. Democrats made sure that there were no rivals and no possible alternatives. But we were right all along that it was a terrible program for America and we were right all along pointing out that there were FAR better alternatives.
If that isn’t bad enough, Democrats as we speak are trying to ensure that these programs – beginning with Medicare – go bankrupt. Because the Republicans who said these programs were a mistake to begin with are doing their best to try to sustain them, while Democrats are refusing to allow ANY of the fixes that will prevent them from GOING BANKRUPT NO LATER THAN 2017. Democrats are demanding that we keep these programs exactly as they are: and “exactly as they are” equals CATASTROPHIC BANKRUPTCY and collapse.
And fot further go on with the sheer deceit of the Democrat Party, we now know that ObamaCare was sold on such a whopping load of lies it is beyond unreal – such as a SEVENTEEN TRILLION DOLLAR FUNDING GAP between the ocean of lies and the actual reality.
As sick and as frankly terrifying the implications of all the above are, can I end on a hilarious note?
“And by the way, we’re going to pay down our debt in a way that is balanced and responsible. I inherited a trillion dollar deficit; I signed $2 trillion in spending cuts. My opponents won’t admit it because it runs contrary to, I guess, the only argument they have — but since I’ve been President, federal spending has actually risen at the lowest pace in nearly 60 years. (Applause.) It usually takes a Democrat to fix these problems after they have run up the tab.” (Applause.) — Barack Obama, May 24, 2012
In order to justify this demonic lie, Obama assumes a baseline that simply blames George Bush for all 2009 debt – INCLUDING OBAMA’S MASSIVE $3.27 TRILLION STIMULUSTHAT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH GEORGE BUSH AND WHICH NOT ONE SINGLE REPUBLICAN VOTED FOR. Obama’s “baseline” further assumed that emergency programs such as the TARP – which Obama himself approved of and voted for – was now something that America had to repeat every single year in perpetuity as opposed to being what it was (a one-time emergency event). And so the following year when Obama didn’t spend another $700 billion in TARP, he was actually SAVING money. Oh, and to complete the point about how ridiculous this is, OBAMA ASKED FOR AND RECEIVED HALF THE $700 billion TARP funds. So Obama voted for it, Obama asked for it, and Obama spent it. But it’s Bush’s fault and so blame Bush.
Obama is artificially and demonically jacking up the “baseline” and then pointing to a lie to say “I’m only increasing spending by a little tiny bit.” He uses a bogus contrived statistic to claim he’s the lowest-spending president in sixty years when the actual reality is that he’s the highest-spending president in the history of the entire human race.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” – Karl Marx
I have frequently on this very blog demanded liberals to explain in detail just how exactly Barack Obama isn’t for the same thing (i.e., the major economic element of communism). But let’s start with the French and get to Obama later.
Planet France is a place where fools have pretty much run things ever since 1789. Two words that define France today are “socialism” and “surrender.”
Who did Planet France just elect? And just what is this particular cheese-eating socialist surrender-monkey saying he’s going to do?
PARIS (AP) — Socialist Francois Hollande defeated conservative incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy on Sunday to become France’s next president, heralding a change in how Europe tackles its debt crisis and how France flexes its military and diplomatic muscle around the world.
Exuberant, diverse crowds filled the Place de la Bastille, the iconic plaza of the French Revolution, to fete Hollande’s victory, waving French, European and labor union flags and climbing the column that rises at its center. Leftists are overjoyed to have one of their own in power for the first time since Socialist Francois Mitterrand was president from 1981 to 1995.
“Austerity can no longer be inevitable!” Hollande declared in his victory speech Sunday night after a surprising campaign that saw him transform from an unremarkable, mild figure to an increasingly statesmanlike one.
Sarkozy is the latest victim of a wave of voter anger at government spending cuts around Europe that have tossed out governments and leaders over the past couple of years.
In Greece, a parliamentary vote Sunday is seen as critical to the country’s prospects for pulling out of a deep financial crisis felt in world markets. A state election in Germany and local elections in Italy were seen as tests of support for the national government’s policies.
Hollande promised help for France’s downtrodden after years under the Sarkozy, a man many voters saw as too friendly with the rich and blamed for economic troubles.
Hollande said European partners should be relieved and not frightened by his presidency.
“I am proud to have been capable of giving people hope again,” Hollande told huge crowds of supporters in his electoral fiefdom of Tulle in central France. “We will succeed!”
Hollande inherits an economy that’s a driver of the European Union but is deep in debt. He wants more government stimulus, and more government spending in general, despite concerns in the markets that France needs to urgently trim its huge debt.
Sarkozy conceded defeat minutes after the polls closed, saying he had called Hollande to wish him “good luck” as the country’s new leader.
Sarkozy, widely disliked for budget cuts and his handling of the economy during recent crises, said he did his best to win a second term, despite widespread anger at his handling of the economy.
“I bear responsibility … for the defeat,” he said. “I committed myself totally, fully, but I didn’t succeed in convincing a majority of French. … I didn’t succeed in making the values we share win.”
With 75 percent of the vote counted, official results showed Hollande with 51.1 percent of the vote compared with Sarkozy’s 48.9 percent, the Interior Ministry said. The CSA, TNS-Sofres and Ipsos polling agencies all predicted a Hollande win as well.
Hollande has virtually no foreign policy experience but he will face his first tests right after his inauguration, which must happen no later than May 16.
Among his first trips will be to the United States later this month for summits of NATO — where he will announce he is pulling French troops out of Afghanistan by the end of the year — and the Group of Eight leading world economies.
Hollande’s first challenge will be dealing with Germany: He wants to re-negotiate a hard-won European treaty on budget cuts that Germany’s Angela Merkel and Sarkozy had championed. He promises to make his first foreign trip to Berlin to work on a relationship that has been at the heart of Europe’s postwar unity.
Germany’s foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, congratulated Hollande on Sunday night and said both countries will keep on cooperating closely in driving the European Union’s policies and be “a stabilizing factor and a motor for the European Union.”
At home, Hollande intends to modify one of Sarkozy’s key reforms, over the retirement age, to allow some people to retire at 60 instead of 62. He also plans to increase spending in a range of sectors and wants to ease France off its dependence on nuclear energy. He favors legalizing euthanasia and gay marriage.
Sarkozy supporters call those proposals misguided.
“We’re going to call France the new Greece,” said Laetitia Barone, 19. “Hollande is now very dangerous.”
Sarkozy had said he would quit politics if he lost, but was vague about his plans Sunday night.
“You can count on me to defend these ideas, convictions,” he said, “but my place cannot be the same.”
His political allies turned their attention to parliamentary elections next month.
People of all ages and different ethnicities celebrated Hollande’s victory at the Bastille. Ghylaine Lambrecht, 60, who celebrated the 1981 victory of Mitterrand at the Bastille, was among them.
“I’m so happy. We had to put up with Sarko for 10 years,” she said referring to Sarkozy’s time as interior and finance minister and five years as president. “In the last few years the rich have been getting richer. Now long live France, an open democratic France.”
“It’s magic!” said Violaine Chenais, 19. “I think Francois Hollande is not perfect, but it’s clear France thinks its time to give the left a chance. This means real hope for France. We’re going to celebrate with drink and hopefully some dancing.”
Planet France is a place where liberalism lives forever. Planet France is a place where foolishness is wisdom, where night is day and where evil is good.
Euro falls to three and a half year low amid market jitters at French and Greek elections The Euro hit a three and a half year low against the pound as financial markets reacted to the election of Francois Hollande as France’s first Socialist president for 17 years and the new threat to a eurozone break-up posed by the post-election turmoil in Greece.
By Roland Gribben, Henry Samuel and Bruno Waterfield
11:24AM BST 07 May 2012
The Paris stock exchange CAC 40 index dropped 1.52pc in early trading with investors nervous about the growing pressure for a eurozone economic policy switch from austerity to growth, reflected in the French and Greek election results and President Hollande’s priorities.
The euro fell heavily across the board on Monday. Traders said the euro’s losses, which saw it hit a three-month low against the dollar, its lowest in 3 and a half years against the British pound and a 2 and half month trough versus the yen, were likely to be extended in coming days.
Stocks in Italy fell 2.2pc, the main Madrid index slipped 1.76pc while a 2.02pc drop in the DAX index of leading German shares was blamed on a local election setback for Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Political stalemate in Greece after the failure of any party to gain a majority saw shares on the Athens market slump 7.6pc.
The strength of the opposition to the Greek bail-out programme has raised fresh questions about continued eurozone membership.
Alexis Tsipras leader of the Syriza party, a coalition of the radical left which emerged as the second biggest after winning 16pc of the Greek vote, immediately drew the battle lines declaring: “The people of Europe can no longer be reconciled with the bailouts of barbarism.”
The euro fell its lowest level for almost four months to $1.2954 before showing signs of a rally to $1.301 while the interest rate on France’s benchmark ten year bonds rose.
Traders said there was no panic but the rising yield is increasing concerns about a run on French debt and a threat to the French deficit reduction programme. A widening in the spread between French and German bonds was seen as a ‘flight to safety.’
Germany’s 10-year yield fell to as low as 1.552pc, the second record in consecutive trading days.
Ratings agency Standard and Poor’s said President Hollande’s victory would have no immediate effect on its French rating.
The agency infuriated former President Sarkozy when it stripped France of its top triple-A rating in January.
A number of analysts felt markets had already taken account of a Hollande victory while others argued that a combination of the French and Greek results would increase pressure on eurozone debt.
World stock markets hit as France votes for first Socialist president in 20 years and Greece chooses a parliament with a majority of MPs from anti-bailout parties.
Some say that the market has already taken a Hollande win – i.e. a win for socialism, a win for liberalism, into account. These are pretty much saying that Hollande will govern far more pragmatically than his liberal rhetoric suggests. They’re saying that the world financial markets will prevent true socialism from emerging in France, and that Hollande will have to face reality given that he’s simply boxed-in by simple reality. But even those people are saying, “We are quite pessimistic about the euro area in the short-term. We think that the GDP contraction will amplify in the second quarter. So, things will get worse in the coming weeks.”
I think that’s hogwash. I think that Hollande will now believe he’s got a mandate to export his brand of socialist-liberal belief in unicorns and fairy dust to Germany and to the world financial markets. His win was by about the same margin that Obama won by, interestingly, and both Obama and Democrats sure as hell thought THEY had a mandate which they foolishly exploited until the voters gave them a historic ass-kicking in 2010. I also think that Hollande’s “Our way out of our massive debt is for our government to pretend we’re not in debt and quadruple down on our reckless, insane spending” mantra is the way to ruin. And that ruin will surely ensue. And, lastly, I think that the Eurozone’s complete and utter collapse is all but guaranteed now.
Our socialist fools in the Democrat Party in America are as determined to ignore reality as the sociliast fools on Planet France.
Compare and contrast openly socialist Hollande’s major policies to Obama’s: both want huge government stimulus programs; both oppose any constraints on government spending; both demand that we tax the rich; and both want a special tax on banks. That’s because Barack Obama is a damn SOCIALIST!!!
The French election previews the U.S. November election contest between incumbent Barack Obama and challenger Mitt Romney in the following four ways:
1). Both Obama and Hollande offer almost identical leftist platforms (details on this below).
2) The bland challengers (Hollande and Romney) ignite electoral passions less than their more colorful opponents (playboy Sarkozy with his celebrity wife and Obama, the first black president).
3) The sorry state of the economy gives both challengers a hefty leg-up.
4) The French and American elections are foreshadowed by electoral disasters for the incumbent party in off-year races in 2010 and 2011. In both, the incumbent party lost long-held majorities in one house of Congress or parliament.
It’s no secret that President Obama wants America to look more like Europe. He desires expanded powers for labor unions, higher gas prices for commuters and a diminished role on the world stage. So far, he’s been effective in fostering the conditions for European-style unemployment on these shores. [...]
As we speak the unemployment rate just went down. Why? Because 115,000 jobs were created – nowhere near enough to even keep pace with population growth, mind you - and 342,000 gave up trying to find a job in complete despair. We live in our own version of planet France when nobody could have a job and our president could boast of a 0% unemployment rate.
George Will pointed out a couple of facts as to just how terrible Obama is managing our economy this week on ABC’s “This Week”:
JAKE TAPPER: George, the president kicked off his campaign yesterday. Thoughts?
WILL: He kicked it off a day after we saw the emblematic achievement of the Obama administration, which is to make a decline in the unemployment rate bad news. It ticked down from 8.2 percent to 8.1 percent because 342,000 of Americans succumbed to discouragement with the Obama economy and left the economy.
Male participation rate in the economy today is lower than it has been at any time since we began keeping this statistic in 1948. Indeed, if the workforce participation rate were the same today as it was when Mr. Obama was inaugurated, the real unemployment rate would be measured at about 11 percent. That’s no record to run on.
People who are graduating from college, 53 percent, do not get jobs when they graduate. We are going to lose that whole generation because, you know, when the jobs do come back, they’re going to hire college graduates just coming out.
Those idiot socialist fools deserve to suffer; it’s too dang bad the rest of the nation has to suffer along with them because of their vote for Obama four years ago.
I point out how simply godawful Obama has been for America. Two years ago, due to Obama’s wildly failed policies, the labor participation rate measuring how many working-age Americans are actually WORKING was at a 25-year low. Last year that participation rate had decreased to a 27-year low. This year it decreased to a 31-year low. Millions and millions of jobs have simply been vaporized under Obama and there is no sign that they will be coming back.
If you vote for Obama’s version of planet France, I can guarantee you that that rate measuring how many working-age Americans have any chance whatsoever of getting a job will continue to plunge.
Tell me that Democrats care about the poor while Republicans only care about the rich and I’ll say, “Jon Corzine.” And that’s all I really need to say, given what Corzine did (where’s that $1.6 billion you “lost,” Jon?) and given this picture of a pair of genuine weasels:
• “You’ve had an honorable man, a decent man, an honest man, at the helm of this state. … He’s fought for what matters to ordinary folks.”
• “People…say, ‘You know, I was saving up all my life. …. Suddenly, because of this financial crisis, I may have to go back to work.’ “
• “Jon knows these are challenging times. This is why he got into public service. He didn’t do it for the paycheck.”
• “This crisis…came about because of the same theories, the same lax regulation, the same trickle-down economics that the other guy’s party has been peddling for years.”
• “Jon’s got the mop and he’s cleaning up after somebody else’s mess.”
• “One of the things you’ve got in Jon Corzine is somebody who tells it to you straight,” Mr Obama said.
Do you notice how Obama – that vile weasel – used Jon Corzine to demonize Republicans? Obama was actually dishonestly saying that Republicans created a mess, and that this quivering piece of slime Jon Corzine was the guy cleaning up that mess.
Let me just digress for a moment and state that Barack Obama is the most divisive, most dishonest, most hateful, most demonizing, fearmongering LIAR in American history.
“Jon’s a leader who’s been called to govern in some extraordinary times,” Obama said while campaigning for Corzine in 2009. “Jon Corzine wasn’t just the first governor to pass an economic recovery plan for his state. He was an ally with the Obama administration in helping us develop a national recovery plan.”
“I literally picked up the phone and called Jon Corzine and said Jon, what do you think we should do,” Biden said. “The reason we called Jon is that we knew that he knew about the economy, about world markets, how we had to respond, unlike almost anyone we knew. It was because he had been in the pit — because he had been in the furnace. And we trusted his judgment.”
“Way back in the transition period, before we were sworn in, when Barack Obama and I were literally sitting at a desk in a high rise in Chicago, beginning the plan on how we would try to get this economy out of a ditch, literally, the first guy I called was Jon Corzine. It’s not a joke. It’s not a joke. First of all, he’s the smartest guy I know in terms of the economy and on finance, and I really mean that.”
That’s right, Jon Corzine was a trusted adviser to Obama and Biden. That’s why our economy is in such great shape now. And the guy who helped Obama put together the massively failed stimulus also just put together the fourth largest bankruptcy in American history as he put his liberalism to work at MF (which stands for “Managed Futures”) Global and helped himself to other people’s money.
Now the smartest guy Obama and Biden know is saying, “I don’t know where the money went.” You know, even though that was pretty much his whole JOB to know.
”Companies like Solyndra are leading the way toward a brighter and more prosperous future.”
And of course Obama was right: a more “prosperous future” for China because we’re going to keep paying the interest on that $535 million Obama gave to his crony capitalist buddy who raised funds for him. And I’ll bet that Obama crony George Kaiser will be giving Obama something-something from that $535 billion stash in the form of campaign contributions. After all, that’s what “fairness” is all about, isn’t it?
Here’s the latest story in the saga of the poster boy for the fact that everything that liberals say about caring about the little people while Republicans only care about the rich load of crap:
Then only thing that could top today’s epic market insanity and hilarity, would be that Corzine is himself about to be Corzined. And just released from Bloomberg:
MF GLOBAL’S CORZINE ORDERED FUNDS MOVED TO JPMORGAN, MEMO SAYS
CORZINE’S `DIRECT INSTRUCTIONS’ CITED BY CONGRESSIONAL PANEL
MF GLOBAL TRANSFER WAS USED TO COVER OVERDRAFT, PANEL SAYS
MF GLOBAL FINDINGS CITED IN MEMO OBTAINED BY BLOOMBERG NEWS
And so we can now add perjury to felony embezzlement. Which means we now have to wait to find just which MF’er (and JPM’er) will be given a promise of untold millions if they only get Fab Tourre’d for a few years, and spend 5-7 in minimum security state prison instead of brave Jonny.
Jon S. Corzine, MF Global Holding Ltd.’s chief executive officer, gave “direct instructions” to transfer $200 million from a customer fund account to meet an overdraft in one of the brokerage’s JPMorgan Chase & Co. accounts in London, according to an e-mail sent by a firm executive.
Edith O’Brien, a treasurer for the firm, said in an e-mail sent the afternoon of Oct. 28, three days before the company collapsed, that the transfer of the funds was “Per JC’s direct instructions,” according to a copy of a memo drafted by congressional investigators and obtained by Bloomberg News.
O’Brien’s internal e-mail came as the New York-based broker found intraday credit lines limited by JPMorgan, the firm’s clearing bank as well as one of its custodian banks for segregated customer funds, according to the memo, which was prepared for a March 28 House Financial Services subcommittee hearing on the firm’s collapse. O’Brien is scheduled to testify after being subpoenaed this week.
“Over the course of that week, MF Global’s financial position deteriorated, but the firm represented to its regulators and self-regulatory organizations that its customers’segregated funds were safe,” said the memo, written by Financial Services Committee staff and sent to lawmakers.
Vinay Mahajan, global treasurer of MF Global Holdings, wrote an e-mail on Oct. 28 that said JPMorgan was “holding up vital business in the U.S. as a result” of the overdrawn account, which had to be “fully funded ASAP,” according to the memo.
O’Brien Letter
Barry Zubrow, JPMorgan’s chief risk officer, called Corzine to seek assurances that the funds belonged to MF Global and not customers. JPMorgan drafted a letter to be signed by O’Brien to ensure that MF Global was complying with rules requiring customers’ collateral to be segregated. The letter was never returned to JPMorgan, the memo said.
The money transferred came from a segregated customer account, according to congressional investigators. Segregated accounts can include customer money and excess company funds.
Corzine testified that he never intended a misuse of customer funds at MF Global, and that he doesn’t know where client funds went.
“I did not instruct anyone to lend customer funds to anyone,” Corzine told lawmakers in December.
Steven Goldberg, a spokesman for Corzine, declined immediate comment.
Oops. Of course, in Jonny’s defense there was no perjury here. The truth was merely rehypothecated.
Just remember these truths every time a Democrat repeats their tired class warfare lies. It’s every bit as much of a lie when a Democrat says them as it was when a Stalinist said pretty much the same damn things.
