Thank God For The Canadians (At Least SOMEONE Cares About US Veterans While Obama Destroys Their Country)

This story makes me want to start singing “Oh, Canada.”

Thank God for the VFW, too. 

CANADA WANTS U.S.VETERANS FOR PIPELINE WORK
VFW-backed VetJobs now posting thousands of new vacancies
July 02, 2012

The Veterans of Foreign Wars of the U.S. is proud to announce that its partly owned veterans jobs board has secured an exclusive employment initiative with Alberta, Canada, that could see thousands of U.S. veterans heading north to work on their oil pipeline.

“This is a great opportunity for veterans, transitioning military, National Guard and reservists, and their family members,” said Ted Daywalt, founder and CEO of VetJobs (www.vetjobs.com), a recognized industry leader in helping veterans find work.

“Though America’s Keystone Pipeline is delayed, the Canadians are moving forward on their side of the border and have an immediate need for tens of thousands of workers,” said Daywalt, whose website averages more than 55,000 daily job postings by employers strictly interested in hiring veterans. He said the Edmonton Economic Development Corporation anticipates a shortage of 114,000 workers in the Alberta area, and they want to hire American veterans to fill that shortage.

According to the development corporation, the positions being offered are long term, with many paying as much as 30 percent more than similar industry positions in the United States. Some positions will require a move to Canada, but many others will allow veterans to commute — working several weeks in Canada, then one week back home.

The skilled positions they are currently hiring for include journeymen pressure pipe welders, heavy equipment technicians, steamfitter-pipefitters, structural ironworkers, millwright and carpenter/scaffolders. Professional staff vacancies include construction quality auditors, quality examiners/inspectors, cost estimators, high voltage construction managers, refinery shift supervisors, planners/schedulers, power engineers (operators), project control leads, project managers/coordinators, and health, safety and environment professionals.

“This is a fantastic opportunity and I’m proud of our affiliation with VetJobs,” said VFW National Commander Richard L. DeNoyer, of Middleton, Mass. “Helping thousands of veterans to get well-paying jobs in an important industry just further proves that no one does more for veterans than the VFW.”

To apply for the new positions, go to www.vetjobs.com, click on Search Jobs, then type “opportunity awaits” into the company search field. Additional job postings will be added in the coming months as the Canadian pipeline project progresses.

Barack Obama is a job-killing Marxist.

114,000 jobs on the Canadian side of the border.  We could have had that many damn jobs on OUR side of the border if Obama wasn’t a Marxist posing as an environmentalist.

The very brilliant Charles Krauthammer captured the essence of eco-Marxism the year that Obama was elected to “lower the level of the oceans and heal the planet” among his other promised messianic miracles:

Socialism having failed so spectacularly, the left was adrift until it struck upon a brilliant gambit: metamorphosis from red to green. The cultural elites went straight from the memorial service for socialism to the altar of the environment. The objective is the same: highly centralized power given to the best and the brightest, the new class of experts, managers and technocrats. This time, however, the alleged justification is not abolishing oppression and inequality but saving the planet.

Krauthammer wasn’t the first to notice this “first red, then green” movement from hard-core Marxism to hard-core environmentalism.  From a 1997 article about Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore:

He (Patrick Moore) says the fall of communism brought an influx of anti-corporate extremism to the environmental movement because, “suddenly, the international peace movement had a lot less to do. Pro-Soviet groups in the West were discredited. Many of their members moved into the environmental movement, bringing with them their eco-Marxism and pro-Sandinista sentiments.

“A lot of those in the peace movement were anti-American and, to an extent, pro-Soviet. By virtue of their anti-Americanism, they tended to sometimes favor the communist approach. A lot of those people, a lot of those social activists, moved into the environmental movement once the peace movement was no longer relevant.” Social activists, he suggests, “are now using the rhetoric of environmentalism to promote other collectivist agendas, such as class struggle — which I personally believe is a legitimate area, but I don’t believe it’s legitimate to mix it up with environmentalism.”

Van Jones – Obama’s selection for “Green jobs czar” in addition to being a self-acknowledged communist – is merely one profound example of Barack Obama’s ideology.

The last four years of economic ruin are the profound example of the results of Barack Obama’s ideology.

Obama is killing America hundreds of thousands of jobs at a time.

110,000 jobs from Keystone that Obama destroyed here, 200,000 jobs in Ohio there.  And the consistent plan is to make sure that America will never be strong or energy independent.

Canada is going ahead with the Keystone pipeline on its side of the border because they are not evil unlike our own demon-possessed administration.  If Obama is re-elected, the jobs will go anywhere but America and the oil will go to China.  Not that not having oil will matter to those who vote for Obama; they believe they’ll be riding around on winged unicorns.

I hope 114,000 veterans can escape Obamination and start a new life in Canada.

It’s pretty amazing.  Up until Obama, people from ruined nations fled north TO America.  Now under Obama, Americans from a ruined nation are fleeing north to Canada to get the hell away from what used to be the greatest nation in the history of the world.

Canada Prime Minister In China To Sell Keystone Oil Obama Rejected So America Could Have Highest Gasoline Prices EVER Instead

Fact one: America is just about to lose a huge source of oil because Barack Obama pissed away the hundreds of millions of gallons of Keystone oil and the tens of thousands of jobs it would have provided.  Now the energy America will desperately need to going to go to China.

Canadian PM in China trying to sell Keystone oil, says Sen. Hoeven
By Josiah Ryan – 02/07/12 12:40 PM ET

Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) on Tuesday said that thanks to the Obama administration’s delay of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is, at this moment, hawking his nation’s excess oil to the Chinese administration.

“Right now Prime Minister Harper is talking to Hu Jintao, president of China, and believe me, China wants that oil,” Hoeven said. “[W]e will see what kind of agreement he comes back with from China.”

Harper arrived in China on Tuesday with a delegation of Canadian businessmen, and plans to meet with Chinese officials on the topic of energy.

Hoeven, whose state would host part of the proposed Keystone pipeline, which would carry oil from Canada to the American Gulf Coast, argued forcefully from the Senate floor on Tuesday that Canada wishes to sell its oil to its “best friend” the United States, but that the administration’s delay of a decision on the project had caused them to shop overseas for a buyer.

“The only thing we can figure is that the administration has decided that they don’t want oil produced in the Canadian sands,” Hoeven said. “While we continue to put Canada on hold, China is working very hard to make sure that oil comes to them.”

After a quiet morning on the floor, the Senate recessed for a break until 2:15 p.m. to accommodate party luncheons. The Senate will also be recessed Wednesday to accommodate a Democratic retreat.

Fact two: Americans spent more on gasoline over the course of 2011 than in ANY YEAR IN AMERICAN HISTORY.

U.S. drivers spend record amount on gasoline in 2011
Despite lower demand, more than $448 billion has been paid so far for fuel — $100 billion more than in 2010. Consistently high oil prices are blamed.
December 09, 2011|By Ronald D. White, Los Angeles Times

American drivers this week broke a record that will bring them no joy.

They collectively spent more than $448 billion on gasoline since the beginning of the year, according to the Oil Price Information Service, putting the previous record for gas expenditures — set in 2008 — in the rearview mirror with weeks of driving still to go.

It’s also a huge jump over last year, when U.S. drivers spent more than $100 billion less on gas.

The major reason for the record-setting gas spending in 2011 was that oil prices were consistently high all year. And that probably brought joy at the other end of the pipeline. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is on pace to top $1 trillion in net oil exports for the first time, or 29% more than last year.

Fact three:

Gas prices to spike 60 cents or more by May
By Gary Strauss, USA TODAY

Get ready for another round of pain at the pump: $4 (or higher) gasoline.

After rising 19 cents a gallon in the past four weeks, regular unleaded gasoline now averages $3.48 a gallon, vs. $3.12 a year ago and $2.67 in February 2010.

Prices could spike another 60 cents or more by May. “I think it’s going to be a chaotic spring, with huge price increases in some places,” says Tom Kloza of the Oil Price Information Service. Kloza expects average prices to peak at $4.05, although he and other industry trackers say prices could be sharply higher in some markets.

Rising prices are an annual spring ritual, largely because of seasonal demand.

Refiners also switch from winter formulations to more expensive seasonal formulations to meet stringent environmental standards, which can tack on 15 cents a gallon, says Brian Milne of energy tracker Televent DTN.

This year’s earlier-than-usual run-up is more about anticipation than current supply and demand. Last week, the Energy Department reported anemic U.S. consumption — the lowest levels since September 2001. Domestic crude oil prices, now about $98 a barrel, are near six-week lows.

Renewed tensions in the Middle East are bolstering crude prices, while speculators are boosting futures contracts, betting on global supply disruptions and tighter refining capacity. Kloza notes that several U.S. and overseas refiners have experienced temporary or permanent closures.

So far, $4 a gallon has proven to be the upper limit consumers will pay. Last April, national prices peaked at about $3.98 a gallon. In 2008, a sharp run-up ended when prices hit an all-time average of $4.11 a gallon that summer.

“Higher demand, Iran, lost refining capacity are all potential problems,” Milne says. “We’ll get over $4 a gallon, but it’s going to be tough to sustain that level. People will drive less.”

Energy analyst Patrick DeHaan of price tracker Gasbuddy.com expects prices to rise to about $3.55 a gallon by the end of February and peak around $4 by Memorial Day weekend.

“You could see prices in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Washington and other major metropolitan areas at $4.60 or higher,” DeHaan says.

Lisa Margonelli, author of Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank, says consumers will be vulnerable to rising prices until the U.S. develops alternative fuels such as natural gas.

Fact four: Barack Obama is the worst and most failed president in American history.

Our Former Socialist Neighbor Canada Is Doing Great. Why? Because It Went The OPPOSITE Way Obama Imposed On America.

Omigosh.  That stuff that Republicans keep talking about?  Yeah, it actually works.

It sure as hell works a lot better than Obama’s strategy to blame Bush for Obama’s entire failed presidency.

Too bad Americans would rather follow Obama and Democrats in the direction that the Dodo bird took:

Tax Cuts, Less-Intrusive Gov’t Help Canada Soar
Posted December 29, 2011 06:27 PM ET

Success: Away from the low growth and high regulation of an America under Washington’s thumb, our northern neighbor is economically strong. As 2011 ends, Canada has announced yet another tax cut — and will soar even more.

The Obama administration and its economic czars have flailed about for years, baffled about how to get the U.S. economy growing.

In reality, the president need look no further than our neighbor, Canada, whose solid growth is the product of tax cuts, fiscal discipline, free trade, and energy development. That’s made Canada a roaring puma nation, while its supposedly more powerful southern neighbor stands on the outside looking in.

On Thursday, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that he will slash corporate taxes again on Jan. 1 in the final stage of his Economic Action Plan, dropping the federal business tax burden to just 15%.

Along with fresh tax cuts in provinces such as Alberta, total taxes for businesses in Canada will drop to 25%, one of the lowest in the G7, and below the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development average.

“Creating jobs and growth is our top priority,” said Minister Jim Flaherty. “Through our government low-tax plan … we are continuing to send the message that Canada is open for business and the best place to invest.”

It’s not just that Canada’s conservative government favors makers over takers. Harper’s also wildly popular for shrinking government. “The Harper government has pursued a strategic objective to disembed the federal state from the lives of citizens,” wrote University of Calgary Professor Barry Cooper, in the Calgary Herald.

Harper also has made signing free trade treaties his priority. Canada now has 11 free trade pacts in force, and 14 under active negotiation — including pacts with the European Union and India, among others.

“We believe in free trade in Canada, we’re a free-trading nation. That’s the source of our strength, our quality of life, our economic strength,” Flaherty said last month.

Lastly, Canada has pursued its competitive advantage — oil. And it did so not through top-down “industrial policy,” but by getting government out of the way.

Harper has enacted market-friendly regulations to accomplish big things like the Keystone Pipeline — and urged President Obama to move forward on it or else Canada would sell its oil to China.

These policies have been well-known since the Reagan era. But in a country that’s been institutionally socialist since the 1950s, Harper’s moves represent a dramatic affirmation for free market economics.

For Canada, they’ve had big benefits.

Canada’s incomes are rising, its unemployment is two percentage points below the U.S. rate, its currency is strengthening and it boasts Triple-A or equivalent sovereign ratings across the board from the five top international ratings agencies, lowering its cost of credit.

Is it too much to ask Washington to start paying attention to the Canadian success story?

These sound principles work every time they are tried, and they have led to a transformation in Canada.

Imagine what they could do in the U.S.

Or stay socialist and perish.

I pointed out in an article nearly two years ago that Canada was on a far better path than the USA BECAUSE it didn’t go the way to Obama’s “stimulus hell.”  In particular, I cited an article by John Lott that documented Canada was doing far better BECAUSE it didn’t pursue a giant government stimulus.

And this is the same John Lott who wrote an article on February 3, 2009 boldy predicting what in FACT HAPPENED: that Obama’s stimulus would RAISE unemployment (which it did: unemployment went from 7.6% when Obama took office to 10.2% by October 2009).  Versus the Obama prediction that if his stimulus was passed unemployment wouldn’t go above 8%.

Conservatives have been right over and over again.  But it doesn’t matter when there is a party of genuine evil running things and when there is a media propaganda machine that fanatically supports that party of genuine evil.

The God damn America that Obama “fundamentally transformed” the United States into is a suicide machine.

Obama’s Labor Secretary Hilda Solis Proudly Supports American Workers With Her New Canadian-Built Car

I just got through writing about how literally out-of-touch-with-reality STUPID Obama and his key advisers are.

And then, as if on cue, enter Labor Secretary Hilda Solis:

Solis supports U.S. workers by driving Canadian-made car 18 
QMI Agency
First posted: Thursday, September 01, 2011 10:38 AM EDT | Updated: Thursday, September 01, 2011 10:52 AM EDT

U.S. President Barack Obama’s labour secretary says she’s proud to drive a Chevrolet Equinox and support American workers.

Only problem is, the Equinox is built in Canada.

Hilda Solis told a breakfast meeting of the Christian Science Monitor in Washington on Wednesday that she has visited vehicle assembly lines in Michigan and Ohio and met “some very proud workers.”

“I’ve always been an advocate for small, efficient vehicles and I thought, what better example could I set if I encouraged my staff to go purchase and seek how we could acquire a vehicle that would, for me, send a signal that we’re for supporting our American workers, American-made products,” she said in a YouTube video posted by Fora.tv. “I’m just delighted, it’s a good product.”

She’s even nicknamed her new car “The Bullet.”

But the Equinox is actually built in two Ontario plants, in Ingersoll and Oshawa. General Motors noted earlier this year that both plants are running at full capacity.

Critics immediately pointed out Solis’s error in believing her car came from the hard work of Americans.

But a labour department spokesman said the modern automobile industry is “global.”

“Cars assembled here in the U.S. are made from globally sourced parts, just as cars assembled in other countries utilize parts made in America,” Carl Fillichio told the Washington Post. “Not only is the Equinox the second fastest selling SUV in America – a good sign for the overall health of the U.S. auto industry – 66% of its parts were made in the United States. That’s up from about 50% just a few years ago.”

Three things:

1) It took a reporter like 20 seconds on his smartphone to know something that the idiot Obama appointed to run the Labor Department should have known before she picked her car (or at least started blabbing about why she picked it).  There’s something called “due diligence” that these Obama “geniuses” clearly do not comprehend.

2) This episode of a top-level Obama economic official literally being involved with sending jobs to foreign countries follows immediately on the heels of another top-level Obama economic official sending jobs to foreign countries.  Think of Jeffrey Immelt, Obama’s head of his council on jobs and competitiveness, who just fired a bunch of American workers and sent their jobs to China. You’ve heard that expression that begins, “With friends like these…”?

3) What is wrong with Obama and all his minions that they can’t just admit they were idiots and try to move on?  I mean, yes, we live in an age where at least some part of anything halfway complicated was probably made somewhere else.  But beyond that mindboggling triviality, Hilda Solis obviously screwed up in a very major way.

I remember when Obama mispronounced “corpsman” three times (repeatedly calling Corpsman Brossard “corpse man”).  I’m actually surprised that Obama didn’t proceed to issue a presidential directive that from now on all Navy Corpsmen would henceforth be referred to as “corpse men.”

Obama Stimulus Is Reason Why Our Unemployment So Much Higher Than Others

The Obama stimulus was one of the greatest political disasters in American history.  It’s not enough to say it did nothing; it did WORSE than nothing.  And it is going to be like an anvil weighing down our economy for years and years to come as we struggle to pay back what will ultimately be $3.27 TRILLION.

Updated April 28, 2010
Why Our Unemployment Rate Is So Much Higher Than Others
By John Lott
FOXNews.com

Compared to Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and Brazil, Americans have real reasons to be dissatisfied with President Obama’s policies.

As President Obama travels today to Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri, he will try to convince voters that his economic policies are creating jobs. But a year after Obama claimed that the stimulus had started creating jobs, it is not just the general public that believes that the stimulus was a waste of money, so do the experts. This week a new survey from the National Association for Business Economics found that 73 percent of business economists believe that the stimulus “has had no impact on employment.”

Many will point out that the unemployment rate has soared well above what the Obama administration predicted would occur if the stimulus were enacted. On Feb. 28, 2009, Eleven days after the stimulus bill signed into law, the White House predicted that the national unemployment rate would average 8.1 percent in 2009 and then decline to an average of 7.9 percent in 2010. Clearly things got much worse than the administration predicted. While the unemployment rate stood at 8.1 percent in February, 2009, by the end of last year it had risen to 10 percent. It still remains very high at 9.7 percent.

As President Obama and other Democrats have correctly pointed out many times, this has been a worldwide recession. Why not compare the changes in unemployment rates in other countries to the unemployment rate in the U.S. Figure 1 shows (click here) the percentage change in the U.S.’s unemployment rate since January 2009 when Obama became president compared to Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and Brazil. While several of the countries experienced similar increases during the beginning of 2009, by October of last year the United States had clearly “won” the race to have the largest percentage increase in unemployment of any of these countries.

Looking at the unemployment changes in terms of just the level of unemployment produces a similar picture (click here). The U.S. and many of these other countries had fairly similar unemployment rates in January last year, but by March the U.S.’s unemployment rate had increased.

Take Canada, whose economy is closely tied to ours and who is our largest trading partner. The Canadian stimulus package was nowhere as extensive as ours. Their stimulus spending of $22.7 billion last year and $17.2 billion, this year, amounts to about 7.5 percent of their federal spending for their 2009 and 2010 budgets — about a third of the per-capita stimulus spending in the United States.

Has Canadian unemployment climbed higher than ours because of their relative inaction? Hardly. Figure 3 shows (click here) the percentage change in unemployment rates in the U.S. and Canada since January 2009 when Barack Obama became president. While the percent increase in unemployment was the same for the first couple of months, Canada’s unemployment rate had peaked by August last year and fallen since then. By contrast, the U.S. rate only really began to decline the beginning of this year.

But it is not just Canada where the unemployment rate is faring better. Other countries, too, decided against a massive stimulus plan. In March, 2009, German Chancellor Angela Merkel pointedly refused to spend more money to “stimulate” the German economy. Yet, Figure 4 (click here) shows that Germany never really saw the unemployment experienced by other countries.

Japan clearly had an initial percentage increase in unemployment that was at least as bad as what we saw in the United States, though the country started from a much lower unemployment rate to begin with. Its stimulus as a percentage of GDP was also relatively large — about half as large as ours. Yet, Japan’s unemployment rate peaked in July 2009 and began to decline after that (see Figure 5 here).

The unemployment data shows that compared to these major countries, Americans have real reasons to be dissatisfied with Obama’s policies. It is also understandable why the vast majority of economists feel that Obama’s stimulus policies have spent a lot of money but produced no benefit. These same economists now expect the U.S. job market to improve, but that improvement won’t be due in any part thanks to Obama’s policies. It will just be due to the normal end of the recession.

As Obama travels the country today telling us what he is doing for us, Americans might do well to remember not just the huge bill that he has left our children and grandchildren, but how poorly he has done compared to other countries.

John R. Lott, Jr. is a FoxNews.com contributor. He is an economist and author of “More Guns, Less Crime” (University of Chicago Press, 2010), the book’s third edition will be published in May.

According to a New York Times/CBS poll, a whopping 94% of the American people agree with Bayh. Only 6% of Americans believe Obama’s massive porkulus has created jobs a full year after going into effect.

Only SIX PERCENT of Americans believe that Obama’s porkulus has created any jobs at all.  That means more Americans believe that space aliens have anally probed them than believe in the stimulus.  It also means that 94% think Obama and his entire administration and the entire Democrat congressional leadership are completely full of crap.

And 48% of Americans polled don’t think porkulus will EVER create jobs.

And now we find out that the people were right.

We have to hold Democrats responsible for this travesty.  We have to vote them out, before they destroy the country more than they already have.

Obama’s ‘Unprecedented’ Nuclear Summit Completely Fatuous

Washington Post syndicated columnist and Fox News correspondent Charles Krauthammer had the following to say regarding Obama’s self-ballyhooed Nuclear Summit:

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: What was unprecedented this week was the unprecedented use of the word “unprecedented” by the president to describe a conference which was completely fatuous. What were the accomplishments?

Yesterday we talked about the Ukrainian uranium. Today, as Steve indicated, our big advantage is that Chile, Mexico, and Canada will now sequester highly enriched uranium. I don’t know about you but I’ve been asleep nights worrying about Canadian uranium. I grew up in Canada. These people you don’t know what their capable of doing, and some of them remember the war of 1812.

(LAUGHTER)

Look, this was all a conference about changing the subject. The subject when it comes to proliferating nukes is Iran. If it acquires nukes, it’s the end of the NPT, it’s the end of all effort to prevent a weapon from falling in the hands of terrorism. It’s the biggest supporter of terrorism in the world. It will change the world. It will change the Middle East. Everybody is going to arm as a result.

To not talk about it, as what happened in the conference, it came up in the press, afterwards, because it was left out, is to show how useless this whole thing was. I’m sure half of the leaders of these countries are going home, shaking their heads, and saying what was this all about? Is this a president who believes he’s actually achieved anything here?

You kind of get the sense that Obama accomplished nothing given what a body of 47 world leaders SHOULD HAVE been talking about – but didn’t even bother to mention.

Which is probably why Obama so totally shut out the press; so that fewer people would have the facts to know what a completely empty and meaningless political show truly was.

We saved the planet from Canadian uranium.  Yay.  I can finally stop worrying about that worrisome and vexing threat.

Meanwhile, Iran is about to become a nuclear weaponized state and change the world in terrifying ways.  And nobody’s going to do anything about it.

The Dirty Secret About Our Unemployment Rate

First of all, did Obama’s stimulus create jobs and help the economy?  I put it this way the other day, while writing an article about how ObamaCare amounts to a profoundly dishonest and secretive scheme to hijack one-sixth of the economy:

It’s rather like the stimulus.  Obama fearmongered the economy to get his $3.27 trillion stimulus-porkulus through Congress.  Obama falsely promised that unemployment wouldn’t go above 8% if it passed.  The legislation was raced through so quickly that no one could have even possibly read it.  Obama has said it was a success, citing the never-before-in-history-seen category of “created or saved jobs.”  But even then, he had to resort to a series of galling lies to sell his giant failed stimulus.  Not only were jobs created out of thin air (Obama claimed that a single lawnmower created 50 jobs through his website!!!) to fraudulently make a failed stimulus appear successful, but phantom congressional districts and even zip codes that don’t exist began to collect huge sums of stimulus money.  Meanwhile, the thoroughly dishonest Obama administration transformed their stimulus into a gigantic Democrat slush fund, with double the money going to Democrat districts and with no regard to unemployment.

The answer is readily obvious.  No, the stimulus didn’t help the economy.  As a solid plurality of Americans now rightly believe, the stimulus HURT the economy.

And they are right.  What we find out when we look at the economies of countries that either had or did not have stimulus packages is that the countries with huge stimulus packages (like the U.S.) had much more unemployment than the countries that didn’t:

As President Obama and other Democrats have correctly pointed out many times, this has been a worldwide recession. But if Summers and Biden are right in their assessment of the stimulus measures, one would think that the U.S. economy should be recovering better the many other countries, countries not wise enough to follow Obama’s lead of an extraordinary $787 billion increase in government spending.  It is also particularly timely to evaluate the spending since Christina Romer, the chairwoman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, told Congress today that the stimulus had already had most of its impact on the economy. […]

But it is not just Canada where the unemployed are faring better. Other countries, too, decided against a massive stimulus plan. In March, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel nodding in agreement at his side, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared: “the problem is not about spending more.” Later that month, the president of the European Union, Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek of the Czech Republic, castigated the Obama administration’s deficit spending and bank bailouts as “a road to hell.” The Washington Post wrote that there was a “fundamental divide that persists between the United States and many European countries over the best way to respond to the global financial crisis.”

The unemployment rate in the European Union was higher than in the United States to begin with even before the Obama administration’s spending. By January, the EU unemployment rate stood at 8.5 percent — almost a whole percentage point higher than ours.  So what has happened since the big U.S. stimulus spending spree was passed? We more than caught up with the EU’s high unemployment rate.  By August, the last month data is available for the EU, the U.S.’s unemployment rate slightly exceeded the EU’s — 9.7 versus 9.6 percent.

Germany has particularly been out front resisting the call for more public spending.  Yet, from January through September, the German unemployment rate only rose slightly, from 7.9 to 8.2 percent.

Data on unemployment rates from 27 countries from Japan and South Korea to Brazil and other South American countries to Europe shows that from January to August display the same consistent pattern.  Even in the EU it isn’t just a few countries that are driving the relatively small increase they have experienced.  The U.S. had a larger increase in unemployment than 22 countries — that is, 81 percent of the countries had a smaller increase in unemployment this year than the United States. Unemployment in some major countries such as Brazil and Russia has actually fallen since January (see Table here).  Other countries, from France to Mexico to Australia to Switzerland, have seen unemployment increase by only about half the amount of the U.S. rate. Indeed, the average increase in unemployment for the 27 countries is slightly less than half the US increase.

The article should be read in its entirety to see just how powerful the evidence is that the stimulus failed.

In other words, to the extent that there has been any improvement in the economy, it has been in spite of – and VERY CLEARLY NOT because of – the stimulus.

And one of the most frightening things we have in the wake of the failed Obama stimulus is shockingly high unemployment levels.  The Obama White House said that if Obama’s stimulus wasn’t passed unemployment would rise to 9% (it was 7.6% when Obama took office; and the Obama White house said it would remain under 8% if the stimulus was passed).  But it didn’t, did it?

Thus we come to Obama’s dirty little secret of unemployment:

Unemployment: The Dirty Little Secret Everyone’s Ignoring

By John Lott – FOXNews.com

The problem of people getting discouraged and giving up looking for work is ballooning.

The unemployment rate might be stuck at 10 percent, but the more detailed numbers in the Department of Labor’s Household survey data paint a more dire picture. The number of people with a job fell by 589,000 in December. Even worse, the number of people not in the labor force grew by an astounding 843,000 during just the last month. The Household survey data is what is used to measure the unemployment rate.

To get an idea of the size of this increase in the number of people not in the labor force, since February, when the stimulus package was passed, I repeat, the number of people not in the labor force has grown by 3.2 million. But the number for December represents 26 percent of the entire increase over that period of time. The problem of people getting discouraged and giving up looking for work is ballooning. Of course, they have had good reasons to be discouraged. Similarly since February, the total number of people employed has fallen by 4 million.

In September, Larry Summers, President Obama’s top economic adviser, claimed: “We have walked a substantial distance back from the economic abyss and are on the path toward economic recovery. Most importantly, we have seen a substantial change in the trend of job loss.” Christina Romer, the chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, made a similar statement today. While conceding that the December numbers were a “slight setback,” she argued: “In a broad sense the trend toward moderating job loss is continuing, consistent with the gradual labor market stabilization we have been seeing over the last several months.”

The growth in the U.S. unemployment rate has continued to outpace the rest of the world. Since February, the average unemployment rate for the European Union has grown by 1.2 percentage points. By contrast, the US unemployment rate has grown by 1.9 percentage points — a 58 percent greater increase. Nor does the rate look particularly strong compared to what economists were predicting at the beginning of the year. Back in mid-January, business economists and forecasters surveyed by The Wall Street Journal expected the December unemployment rate to be at 8.6 percent.

Unemployment should start to improve, but the numbers indicate that the improvement in unemployment that economists and forecasters were predicting has occurred much more slowly than was expected at the beginning of 2009. By moving huge amounts of money from one industry to another, the stimulus as well as all the regulatory changes have caused a lot of churning in the labor market — movement of people from one job to another than has caused temporary unemployment. Unfortunately, the huge number of people who have withdrawn from the labor force represent a big hangover that will make reducing unemployment a slow process.

The “unexpected” (the lamestream media always naively expects good news when Democrats are in charge) and disappointing December job numbers released yesterday have more economists worrying about a double-dip recession.  We lost jobs even during the Christmas temp hiring frenzy, which will force the federal reserve to keep interest rates artificially low, which will have a negative impact on our economy down the road.

Obama could care less about the millions of workers who have despaired of finding a job to the point where they don’t even bother to look for work any more, because those people fall off out of the measurement categories.  If you consider them, unemployment is now at 17.3%.

Let me introduce you to an economist who – unlike so many others – was correct in her prediction of the economic meltdown: Meredith Whitney.

Unemployment is likely to rise to 13 percent or higher and will weigh on the economy for several years, countering government efforts to stabilize the banking industry, analyst Meredith Whitney told CNBC. […]

“We underestimate how much the whole economy is dependent on the mortgage industry, and that has to change,” Whitney said. “This is what happens when you delay the inevitable. We’re buying time here, but we’re not restructuring the economy.”

Not only has Obama failed to improve the mortgage industry, but what he has done has actually made the system WORSE, even according to the left.  I mean, even the New York Times has said Obama’s solutions are adding to the housing woes.  The first paragraph of their article said:

The Obama administration’s $75 billion program to protect homeowners from foreclosure has been widely pronounced a disappointment, and some economists and real estate experts now contend it has done more harm than good.

To serve as an ironic reminder of Obama’s message of “hope and change,” here’s a recent Business Insider article entitled, “How Obama’s Mortgage Modifications Are Making Things Worse By Giving Desperate Homeowners A False Sense Of Hope.”

Well, Obama promised hope.  If you were dumb enough to believe his promises had any reality, then doom on you.

And it isn’t any better for residential mortgages:

(June 9) – Commercial real estate mortgage defaults are at a 15-year high and will more than double by the end of 2010, according to a new report from research firm Real Estate Econometrics (REE).

And again:

NEW YORK, Jan 7 (Reuters) – U.S. commercial mortgage-backed bond defaults may more than double this year as the economic recession hurts office building, retail store and multifamily housing assets, Fitch Ratings said on Wednesday.

It was the mortgage industry – imploded by Democrats – that caused the economic implosion of 2008.  And our failure-in-chief hasn’t done a damned thing to make that industry better.  All he’s given, characteristic of his entire presidency, is false hope.

And now we’re looking at a double dip for the housing and mortgage industries, as well.

One day, years from now, an honest Obama administration official (if there is one) will be saying something similar to FDR’s Treasury Secretary:

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong… somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises… I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started… And an enormous debt to boot!” – Henry Morganthau, FDR’s Treasury Secretary, May 1939

In April 1939, six years after FDR rolled out his failed New Deal, unemployment was still at 20.7%.

We are now only 3.4 percentage points away from Treasury Secretary Henry Morganthau’s moment of clarity.

Breast Cancer Screening: Government Fires First Volley Of Rationing, Death By Medical Neglect

Let me begin by saying that the current versions of ObamaCare don’t have a single death panel.

It’s more like 111 separate death panels.

Some of the names  and acronyms of the dozens and dozens of bureaucracies are undoubtedly different under the new iteration of socialized medicine, but here’s a snapshot of your new health care system if Democrats get their way:

The Senate version is 2,075 pages of fun, I hear.  Nobody understands it.  And nobody is going to end up getting a chance to read it by the time it gets voted on.

If you thought that there was going to be any kind of transparency or accountability – or even honesty – from the Obama administration – you need to stop smoking your crack pipe.

This latest event in the march toward socialized medicine reminds me of the case of Barbara Wagner.  In Oregon, which has “universal coverage” through the state, she was abandoned to die by a system that would not pay for her cancer treatment, but offered to pay for her euthanasia.

Only this time, the government wants to deny treatment on the other side of the cancer diagnosis.

IBD Editorials

Rationing’s First Step

Health Care: A government task force has decided that women need fewer mammograms and later in life. Shouldn’t that be between patient and physician? We have seen the future of health care, and it doesn’t work.

We have warned repeatedly that the net results of health care bills before Congress will be higher demand, fewer doctors, more cost control, all leading to rationing.  New recommendations issued by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) regarding breast cancer and the necessity for early and frequent mammograms do not convince us otherwise.

Just six months ago, the panel, which works under the Health and Human Services Department as a “best practices” study group, was shouting its concern about a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study showing a 1% drop in the number of women regularly undergoing such screening and prevention.

The task force was saying that women older than 40 should get a mammogram every one to two years. It found that frequent screening lowered death rates from breast cancer mostly for women ages 50 to 69. But that was then, and this is now.

“We’re not saying women shouldn’t get screened. Screening does save lives,” Diana Petiti, task force vice chairman, said of the recommendations published Tuesday in Annals of Internal Medicine. “But we are recommending against routine screening.”

Now the panel recommends that women in their 40s stop having routine annual mammograms and that older women should cut back to every two years. The concern allegedly is that too frequent testing can result in increased anxiety, false positives, unneeded follow-up tests and possibly disfiguring biopsies.  Preventing breast cancer and saving lives almost get lost in the new analysis.

“I have a particular concern in this case about who was involved in this task force,” says Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La., who was a heart surgeon in private life. “There are no surgeons or oncologists who deal directly with breast cancer or even radiologists. … I’ve seen far too many young women develop late-stage breast cancer because they didn’t have adequate screening.”

Little, if anything, has happened medically in the last six months to cause such a shift. A lot, however, has happened politically as a health care overhaul has limped forward on life support. The Congressional Budget Office has been busy pricing these various bills, a process that includes screening and prevention.

As we have warned, the growing emphasis seems to be on cost containment rather than quality of care. About 39 million women undergo mammograms each year in America, costing the health care system more than $5 billion.

“The American Cancer Society continues to recommend annual screening using mammography and clinical breast examination for all women beginning at age 40,” says Otis Brawley, its chief medical officer. “Our experts make this recommendation having reviewed virtually all the same data reviewed by the USPSTF, but also additional data that the USPSTF did not consider.”

Daniel Kopans, a radiology professor at Harvard Medical School, says: “Tens of thousands of lives are being saved by mammography screening, and those idiots want to do away with it. It’s crazy — unethical, really.”

This, sadly, appears to be the future of medicine under government-run health care. Aside from taxes on insurers, providers and device manufacturers, we’ll be up to our eyeballs in cost-effectiveness boards that will decide who gets what tests and treatments, when and if. These are only recommendations for now, but they are the shape of things to come.

An IBD/TIPP poll found that 45% of medical doctors would consider retiring if the Congressional health care “reform” passes.  Given the fact that an increasing shortage of doctors is already one of the chief burdens in providing health care, this exodus would amount to a catastrophe that our health system would never recover from.

In Canada, the chronic doctor shortage has been bad enough that patients literally have to sign up for a lottery in order to have a chance to “win” a primary care physician.  But now we are learning that overwhelmed Canadian doctors are using a lottery of their own to dump patients.

Why on earth would anyone want this for America?

The Obama administration is preparing the health delivery system to implement the philosophy of Obama advisers such as Robert Reich, Ezekiel Emanuel, and Cass Sunstein, which can be easily summarized with the quote:

“It’s too expensive…so we’re going to let you die.”

Robert Reich’s words in context only make the hateful idea sound even more hateful:

And by the way, we’re going to have to, if you’re very old, we’re not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It’s too expensive…so we’re going to let you die.”

Then there are the words of Obama’s Regulatory Czar, Cass Sunstein, who wrote:

“I urge that the government should indeed focus on life-years rather than lives. A program that saves young people produces more welfare than one that saves old people.”

And Rahm Emanuel’s brother Ezekiel, whom Obama appointed as his OMB health policy adviser in addition to selecting him to serve on the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research wrote:

“When implemented, the Complete Lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated… The Complete Lives system justifies preference to younger people because of priority to the worst-off rather than instrumental value.”

“Attenuated” means, “to make thin; to weaken or reduce in force, intensity, effect, quantity, or value.”  Attenuated care would be reduced or lessened care.  Dare I say it, in this context it clearly means, “rationed care.”

And Obama himself told a woman who wanted to keep her aging mother alive:

“At least we can let doctors know — and your mom know — that you know what, maybe this isn’t going to help. Maybe you’re better off, uhh, not having the surgery, but, uhh, taking the painkiller.”

YOU take the painkiller rather than have that lifesaving surgery, Barry Hussein.  And why don’t you insist that Michelle and your two daughters take the pill rather than have that lifesaving surgery, too?  Just to be like all the “little people” out there.

But of course that’s not going to happen.  Rather, Democrats have now exempted themselves from 11 separate amendments that would have required them to have the same ObamaCare that they want to force everyone else to have.

You can understand why they would do so, given the promises that the system will be worse than terrible, and due to the fact that even a complete idiot who looks around and sees how horribly the administration has managed the H1N1 vaccine situation can recognize that taking on 1/6th of the economy would be beyond catastrophic.  I mean, heck, if I were a Democrat, I’d be sure to exempt myself from this monstrosity too, lest MY family members fall under the coming steamroller.

This “recommendation” of reducing mammographies isn’t mandatory now, but that’s because the government hasn’t usurped the health care system yet.  You just wait a decade from now, when the government runs everything, and soaring deficits force them to start cutting costs.

John Stossil Takes ObamaCare Apart, Shows Why We Need Profit-Driven System

Video:

Stossil has this to say about “better” health care from the government:

President Obama says government will make health care cheaper and better. But there’s no free lunch.

In England, health care is “free” — as long as you don’t mind waiting. People wait so long for dentist appointments that some pull their own teeth. At any one time, half a million people are waiting to get into a British hospital. A British paper reports that one hospital tried to save money by not changing bedsheets. Instead of washing sheets, the staff was encouraged to just turn them over.

Obama insists he is not “trying to bring about government-run healthcare“.

“But government management does the same thing,” says Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute. “To reduce costs they’ll have to ration — deny — care.”

“People line up for care, some of them die. That’s what happens,” says Canadian doctor David Gratzer, author of “The Cure“. He liked Canada’s government health care until he started treating patients.

“The more time I spent in the Canadian system, the more I came across people waiting for radiation therapy, waiting for the knee replacement so they could finally walk up to the second floor of their house.” “You want to see your neurologist because of your stress headache? No problem! Just wait six months. You want an MRI? No problem! Free as the air! Just wait six months.”

Polls show most Canadians like their free health care, but most people aren’t sick when the poll-taker calls. Canadian doctors told us the system is cracking. One complained that he can’t get heart-attack victims into the ICU.

In America, people wait in emergency rooms, too, but it’s much worse in Canada. If you’re sick enough to be admitted, the average wait is 23 hours.

“We can’t send these patients to other hospitals. Dr. Eric Letovsky told us. “Every other emergency department in the country is just as packed as we are.”

More than a million and a half Canadians say they can’t find a family doctor. Some towns hold lotteries to determine who gets a doctor. In Norwood, Ontario, “20/20” videotaped a town clerk pulling the names of the lucky winners out of a lottery box. The losers must wait to see a doctor.

Shirley Healy, like many sick Canadians, came to America for surgery. Her doctor in British Columbia told her she had only a few weeks to live because a blocked artery kept her from digesting food. Yet Canadian officials called her surgery “elective.”

“The only thing elective about this surgery was I elected to live,” she said.

It’s true that America’s partly profit-driven, partly bureaucratic system is expensive, and sometimes wasteful, but the pursuit of profit reduces waste and costs and gives the world the improvements in medicine that ease pain and save lives.

“[America] is the country of medical innovation. This is where people come when they need treatment,” Dr. Gratzer says.

“Literally we’re surrounded by medical miracles. Death by cardiovascular disease has dropped by two-thirds in the last 50 years. You’ve got to pay a price for that type of advancement.”

Canada and England don’t pay the price because they freeload off American innovation. If America adopted their systems, we could worry less about paying for health care, but we’d get 2009-level care — forever. Government monopolies don’t innovate. Profit seekers do.

We saw this in Canada, where we did find one area of medicine that offers easy access to cutting-edge technology — CT scan, endoscopy, thoracoscopy, laparoscopy, etc. It was open 24/7. Patients didn’t have to wait.

But you have to bark or meow to get that kind of treatment. Animal care is the one area of medicine that hasn’t been taken over by the government. Dogs can get a CT scan in one day. For people, the waiting list is a month.

When your health care system is better at treating cats and dogs than it is at treating humans, something is terribly wrong.

Swine Flu Pandemic And Why We DON’T Want Socialized Medicine

Let’s see. Obama unveils his socialized medicine plan just as the swine flu hits the headlines. The Teleprompter of the United States of America told Americans that the swine flu proved that $12.8 trillion of government spending isn’t enough. You’d almost think there was a hand on a switch somewhere.

The left – being the ideological partisan demagogues they are – immediately engaged in a “YES WE CAN . . . . blame the Republicans” campaign.

If they didn’t demonize, they wouldn’t be Democrats. And when I talk about “the Dems,” you know I’m referring to “the Demagogues.”

As a matter of practical reality, the administration may be right in not wanting to take the economy-harming step of closing the border with one of our top trading partners (although there are LEVELS of closing the border – and we NEED to do a MUCH better job of protecting our borders). But their argument for not closing the border is absolutely pathetic. They claim that since the flu is now here, closing the border would be tantamount to closing the barn after the horse has left. The problem with the logic of their argument is that there are clearly way too many infected horses in Mexico who are infecting still healthy American horses.

Mexico is a country of over one hundred million people – and it is a country in crisis. The first “American” causality of swine flu was a Mexican child who died in an American hospital. And infected Mexicans are continuing to flow across the border and infect Americans.

The difference in how the swine flue has hit Mexico versus the United States raises a very simple question:

Swine flu worse in Mexico than US, but why?
By MIKE STOBBE
AP Medical Writer

ATLANTA — Why has the swine flu engulfing Mexico been deadly there, but not in the United States?

Nearly all those who died in Mexico were between 20 and 40 years old, and they died of severe pneumonia from a flu-like illness believed caused by a unique swine flu virus.

The 11 U.S. victims cover a wider age range, as young as 9 to over 50. All those people either recovered or are recovering; at least two were hospitalized.

“So far we have been quite fortunate,” said Dr. Anne Schuchat of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Saturday, just hours before three new U.S. cases were confirmed.

Health experts worry about a flu that kills healthy young adults — a hallmark of the worst global flu epidemics. Deaths from most ordinary flu outbreaks occur among the very young and very old.

Why the two countries are experiencing the illness differently is puzzling public health experts, who say they frankly just don’t know.

Conservatives know.

But . . . but . . . Mexico has socialized medicine!

By JAMES TARANTO APRIL 27, 2009

This is a Bicentennial Minute. Eleven Americans, ranging in age from 9 to 50, have come down with swine flu, the Associated Press reports: “All those people either recovered or are recovering; at least two were hospitalized.”

In Mexico, however, the toll has been much worse. “About 70 deaths out of roughly 1,000 cases represents a fatality rate of about 7 percent,” the AP notes. This is far higher than the 2.5% fatality rate from the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19, although the latter was many orders of magnitude more widespread, killing 40 million people world-wide.

“The Mexican rate sounds terrifying,” the AP writes. “But it’s possible that far more than 1,000 people have been infected with the virus and that many had few if any symptoms.” Which is somewhat, though not entirely, reassuring.

The AP dispatch is titled “Swine Flu Worse in Mexico Than US, but Why?” There’s no definitive answer, but here’s one of the possibilities:

Access to medical care has been an issue in Asia, where a rare bird flu–which does not spread easily from person-to-person–has killed more than 200 over the last several years. Maybe Mexican patients have also had trouble getting medical care or antiviral drugs, some have speculated–even though the government provides health care.

Wouldn’t this paragraph make more sense if it ended “. . . BECAUSE the government provides health care”?

You see, we have a successful health care system because we haven’t allowed the government to ruin it yet.

When Obama DOES ruin it by having the government take it over, we’ll be rationing our medical resources, too.

Obama inserted medical rationing into his porkulus package.

It was always such a no-brainer (so you’d think even our no-brain-no-pain liberals would understand): socialized medicine invariably leads to the rationing of health care resources. There were hard facts supporting this over a decade ago.

While Obama is saying, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” on socialized medicine, the very countries we are wanting to be like such as Canada have been saying, “This utopia isn’t working out so well.”

Do you recall the very recent death of actress Natasha Richardson on a Canadian ski resort? She very likely died as a result of socialized medicine, medical rationing, and poor diagnoses as a result of “the very finest care the government can provide.”

As long as there is private competition, you can always take your business elsewhere. That has always – up until Barack Obama and his fondness for nationalizing – led to be tendency of the free market to provide the best services at the lowest prices.

California – yes, liberal, Kool-Aid-drinking California – recently rejected socialized health care.

Allow me to quote myself as to Obama’s plan:

One thing is extremely important to understand: Obama’s health care plan is modeled on the Massachusetts plan. How are things going there? Well, in the three years of the program’s existence, the tiny state is now already facing cost overruns of over $400 million. Does that sound like a rousing success? Massachusetts is facing a projected 85% increase in its costs by 2009 – which should set up a serious red flag that such programs are MASSIVELY underfunded.

And Obama would take those massive cost overruns and multiply them like Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes.

Government run health care is based on a fool’s premise: that the government can save money by employing the economies of scale. The simple fact of the matter is that government bureaucracies, government boondoggles, government hyper-regulation, government susceptibility to massive systemic fraud, and government mismanagement will always kill the golden goose of scale. One hundred percent of the time.

Which was why the Senate couldn’t even run a damn cafeteria without going millions of dollars into the red.

The promise is that they will be able to cover millions more people for the same or less money by efficiency. But government is inherently inefficient. Which means they not only don’t SAVE money, they LOSE money. And then they’ve now got millions more people to cover.

Hence rationing. Hence more people die.