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
New York – U.S. consumers’ confidence in the progress of the nation’s economy and of their own financial situation plunged in August to its lowest point since May 1980 over worries about the faltering recovery, according to survey results released Friday.
The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan’s preliminary August reading on overall consumer sentiment stands at 54.9 points, considerably lower than the 63.7 in July and also far from the expectations of analysts, who believed the index would be around 63.
The figures are the lowest in more than three decades, a result of a series of factors including high unemployment rates, a long debate in Congress over raising the debt limit and the downgrading of the U.S. debt by Standard & Poor’s, Reuters/UMich said.
“Never before in the history of the surveys have so many consumers spontaneously mentioned negative aspects of the government’s role,” survey director Richard Curtin said.
By July the index had already retreated significantly, from 71.5 points to 63.7, which at the time was its lowest level since March 2009 and was largely due to the lack of an agreement between Republicans and Democrats to raise the debt ceiling, which was finally approved at the last minute a week ago.
Worries were further heightened this month by the downgrading of the U.S. debt rating, which combined with other structural factors sank consumer confidence to depths unknown in more than 30 years.
And the subindex that measures consumer expectations about how the economy will fare in a year’s time fell in August to 45.7 points compared with 56 points in July and reached its lowest level since May 1980.
For its part, the index that measures consumers’ perception of current economic conditions and their readiness to make large purchases dropped from 75.8 points in July to 69.3 points this month.
Time for another graph to show the sheer devastation that is Barack Obama:
Well, that’s certainly “change.” And I guess we all “hope” Obama doesn’t double down in ruining our lives and our nation even more than he’s already done.
Did I mention the fact that these are CARTER numbers?
Most people simply do not understand how truly BAD things were under Jimmy Carter. Or just how awful Ronald Reagan had it when arrived at the Oval Office for his first day of work in January 1981.
The numbers told the sad story of the Jimmy Carter presidency: interest rates of 21%; inflation at 13.5%, and an unemployment rate of 7%. And a relatively new economic device called “the misery index” – the combination of the unemployment and inflation rates which Carter had himself used to great effect in his 1976 campaign to win election – was at a shocking 20.5%.
And those who went through those dark and difficult times may soon be looking back to that period as “the good old days.”
When Ronald Reagan took office from Jimmy Carter, inflation was at a meteoric 13.3% and the country was in the throes of a fierce recession. There was a real question as to whether workers’ wages would keep up with the costs of living, which made people afraid to either spend or save. And nobody knew how to control inflation – which had risen from 1.4% in 1960 to the aforementioned 13.3% in 1980 – causing a real erosion of confidence in the future. Jimmy Carter answered a reporter’s question as to what he would do about the problem of inflation by answering, “It would be misleading for me to tell any of you that there is a solution to it.”
But Ronald Reagan had a solution. And by the time he left office, he had solved the problem of creeping inflation increases and had actually reversed the trend: he left behind a healthy inflation rate of 4.1%.
Reagan’s policies set the trajectory for growth that would last for 20 years.
America needs another Reagan or it’s doomed. And the LAST thing on earth we need is four more years of Jimmy Carter:
You will NOT get a Reagan from the Democrat Party.
Your only possible hope is to vote Republican, and then get on your knees and pray that both that Republican president and the American people are up to turning around Obama’s disaster.
The Los Angeles Times print edition ran this story on July 2 under the considerably more Marxist headline, “Wealthy benefit from recovery as workers struggle“:
WASHINGTON (AP) — This is one anniversary few feel like celebrating.
Two years after economists say the Great Recession ended, the recovery has been the weakest and most lopsided of any since the 1930s.
After previous recessions, people in all income groups tended to benefit. This time, ordinary Americans are struggling with job insecurity, too much debt and pay raises that haven’t kept up with prices at the grocery store and gas station. The economy’s meager gains are going mostly to the wealthiest.
Workers’ wages and benefits make up 57.5 percent of the economy, an all-time low. Until the mid-2000s, that figure had been remarkably stable — about 64 percent through boom and bust alike.
[…]
But if the Great Recession is long gone from Wall Street and corporate boardrooms, it lingers on Main Street:
— Unemployment has never been so high — 9.1 percent — this long after any recession since World War II. At the same point after the previous three recessions, unemployment averaged just 6.8 percent.
— The average worker’s hourly wages, after accounting for inflation, were 1.6 percent lower in May than a year earlier. Rising gasoline and food prices have devoured any pay raises for most Americans.
— The jobs that are being created pay less than the ones that vanished in the recession. Higher-paying jobs in the private sector, the ones that pay roughly $19 to $31 an hour, made up 40 percent of the jobs lost from January 2008 to February 2010 but only 27 percent of the jobs created since then.
[…]
Hard times have made Americans more dependent than ever on social programs, which accounted for a record 18 percent of personal income in the last three months of 2010 before coming down a bit this year. Almost 45 million Americans are on food stamps, another record.
[…]
Because the labor market remains so weak, most workers can’t demand bigger raises or look for better jobs.
“In an economic cycle that is turning up, a labor market that is healthy and vibrant, you’d see a large number of people quitting their jobs,” says Gluskin Sheff economist Rosenberg. “They quit because the grass is greener somewhere else.”
Instead, workers are toughing it out, thankful they have jobs at all. Just 1.7 million workers have quit their job each month this year, down from 2.8 million a month in 2007.
The toll of all this shows in consumer confidence, a measure of how good people feel about the economy. According to the Conference Board’s index, it’s at 58.5. Healthy is more like 90. By this point after the past three recessions, it was an average of 87.
How gloomy are Americans? A USA Today/Gallup poll eight weeks ago found that 55 percent think the recession continues, even if the experts say it’s been over for two years. That includes the 29 percent who go even further — they say it feels more like a depression.
Allow me to start with the second paragraph in the story:
“Two years after economists say the Great Recession ended, the recovery has been the weakest and most lopsided of any since the 1930s.”
The weakest and most lopsided of any recovery since the 1930s, you say???
WHO WAS PRESIDENT IN THE 1930s? WHICH PARTY DOMINATED BOTH THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE IN THE 1930s?
And next let me ask you, “Are there any similarities between socialist Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt and socialist Democrat Barack Hussein Obama??? And the answer is, “HELL YES THERE ARE!!!”:
Which is to say, “This is the worst the U.S. economy has ever been since the LAST time we had a socialist just like FDR – and the mainstream media proudly hailed Obama as FDR and Obama’s as a NEW “New Deal.”
Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After scrutinizing Roosevelt’s record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.
”Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump,” said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA’s Department of Economics. ”We found that a relapse isn’t likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies.”
In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.
[…]
”The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes,” Cole said. ”Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened.”
And of course all the “experts” the mainstream media love to trot out have all bought hook, line and sinker the notion that capitalism is something to be loathed and feared. So they demand that America pursue asinine government stimulus policies that fail even by the “experts'” own standards, and then these same “experts” proceed to argue that the economy failing to recover somehow is proof that more of the same thing that already failed is necessary.
These “experts” whom the mainstream media give a loud microphone to to espouse their socialist views are pathologically incapable of seeing this connection between socialist policies and an economy in the doldrums. Every bit of negative economic news is invariably “unexpected” (liberals favorite adjective to wave a hand at bad economic developments whenever a Democrat president is in charge), because these “experts” cannot separate the inevitable results of their ideology from their terribly failed ideology. There has to be a disconnect, or more commonly, a scapegoat.
I think of the Soviet Union, which literally blamed the total failure of their entire political philosophy and the ruinous policies that philosophy entailed by claiming that their agricultural output had been adversely affected due to 72 years of bad weather. And the Soviet Union has gone the way of the Dodo bird for that very reason.
Is America under Obama the next Dodo bird to fall apart while we’re assured that everything is fine while some suitable scapegoat bears the blame for every failure that can’t be ignored???
It couldn’t be the fact that socialism is nothing more than state-planned economic failure. It had to be something else, ANYTHING else.
The Big Brother from the novel 1984 had Emmanuel Goldstein. The Big Brother who is now occupying our White House has George W. Bush.
The next obvious question to ask and answer is, “Why are the wealthy benefitting while the workers struggle?”
The answer is twofold: 1) because when you attack the employers, the first thing to go is the employees and 2) because that’s exactly how crony capitalism works.
There is a magnificent book entitled, New Deal Or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America, which should be required reading. Burton Folsom Jr. points out that when FDR structured his many policies and regulations that strangled economic growth, he did so in such a way that favored the big crony capitalist corporations at the expense of the smaller businesses that could no longer compete given the costly regulatory requirements. The smaller businesses were forced out of the market while the big businesses protected themselves with insider deals based on access to and influence with the government that only they could afford. And there is no question whatsoever that – even as FDR employed the class warfare of socialism – the rich got richer while the poor got poorer. Income tax revenues plunged as the wealthy sheltered their wealth from the high tax rates and the poor paid an increasingly high overall percentage of tax revenues via excise taxes. Regulations mandating higher pay for workers priced those workers right out of their jobs. Folsom provides the official data to back it up.
In 1929, prior to FDR demonizing the rich, income taxes accounted for 38% of total revenue collected, and corporate income taxes accounted for 43%. Excise taxes which burdened the poor only counted for 19% of revenues. By 1938, the rich and the corporations had protected themselves from FDR’s demagogic tax policies (but the poor couldn’t), such that the only 24% was collected in income taxes (versus 38%) and only 29% from corporate income taxes (versus 43%). Meanwhile the poor-punishing excise taxes (e.g. gasoline tax) soared from 19% to 47% of the total taxes collected. Meanwhile, when income taxes were kept low, the wealthy invariably paid FAR MORE in the total tax revenue as they put their money out to invest in and expand the economy in pursuit of the profits. And they created millions of jobs in doing so.
And the exact same mindset is yielding the exact same results ALL OVER AGAIN. Obama has put the fear of God (actually the fear of the Soviet-style STATE) into the wealthy and the corporations. They keep hearing Obama demagogue them, and they keep sheltering their money. And they will CONTINUE to keep doing that until the threat of Obama is gone. Just like they did with FDR.
That said, there is also a deliberate and fundamental misunderstanding of fascism by the left. If you read leftists, you come away thinking that somehow “fascism” is the takeover of a state by corporations. But stop and think: Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, Hess and all the other key Nazis WEREN’T corporate CEOs who took over the state; THEY WERE SOCIALIST POLITICIANS WHO TOOK OVER THE CORPORATIONS. They usurped the corporations and FORCED them to perform THEIR agenda. They either performed the Nazis’ will or they were simply taken away from their rightful owners and nationalized.
And to the degree that German crony capitalist corporations helped Hitler in his rise to power, THEY WERE JUST MORE USEFUL IDIOTS.
The same sort of takeover of German corporations by socialists is building in America. Take Maxine Waters, a liberal Democrat, as the perfect example. What did she say of the oil companies?
“This liberal will be all about socializing … uh uh … would be about … basically … taking over … and the government running all of your companies.”
THAT’S what Hitler did, too. Hitler got this power through regulations that required corporations to do his bidding, just like Obama has now REPEATEDLY done.
I stand by that sweeping statement. People need to realize that “Nazi” stood for “National SOCIALIST German Workers Party,” and that both Nazi socialism and Soviet socialism were big government socialist tyrannies that failed their people. As to our own experiment with socialism here in the USA, I point out in an article that explains how “Government Sponsored Enterprises” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac policies led us into economic implosion in spite of warnings for YEARS prior to the 2008 economic collapse:
The timeline is clear: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were giant behemoths that began to stagger under their own corrupt weight, as even the New York Timespointed out:
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.
And it was FANNIE and FREDDIE that collapsed FIRST before ANY of the private investment banks, which collapsed as a result of having purchased the very mortgaged backed securities that the Government Sponsored Enterprises SOLD THEM. It wasn’t until Fannie and Freddie collapsed that investors began to look with horror at all the junk that these GSE boondoggles had been pimping.
The man who predicted the collapse in 1999 wrote a follow-up article titled, “Blame Fannie Mae and Congress For the Credit Mess.” It really should have read, “Blame DEMOCRATS.” Because they were crawling all over these GSEs that they had themselves created like the cockroaches they are. But Wallison is nonpartisan
That Chicago corruption extends right into Obama’s home, by way of his wife Michelle. This is a woman who sat on high-paying boards in direct quid-pro-quo consequences of Obama advancing in public office. And in some of those boards, she participated in the worst kind of hospital patient-dumping.
Here’s a video of Michelle Obama you ought to watch – if you can stand the revelations:
Too bad we voted to nationalize the Chicago Way.
I also pointed out that when you attacked employers, the ones who would be hit the most and the hardest would be EMPLOYEES.
Through the 12 months ended in March of last year, 505,473 new businesses started up in the U.S., according to the latest data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s the weakest growth since the bureau started tracking the data in the early 1990s. It’s down sharply from the record 667,341 new businesses added in the 12 months that ended in March 2006.
Many times large corporations will even lobby for more regulations for their own industry because they know that they can handle all of the rules and paperwork far easier than their smaller competitors can. After all, a large corporation with an accounting department can easily handle filling out a few thousand more forms, but for a small business with only a handful of employees that kind of paperwork is a major logistical nightmare.
When it comes to hiring new employees, the federal government has made the process so complicated and so expensive for small businesses that it is hardly worth it anymore. Things have gotten so bad that more small businesses than ever are only hiring part-time workers or independent contractors.
So what we actually have now is a situation where small businesses have lots of incentives not to hire more workers, and if they really do need some extra help the rules make it much more profitable to do whatever you can to keep from bringing people on as full-time employees.
And who do all these rules and regulations hurt the most but the very people Democrats cynically and deceitfully claim they are trying to help? Meanwhile, who does it help the most but the crony capitalist corporations who DON’T do most of the hiring in America who can profit from Obama’s war on business that results in the destruction of their small business competition.
A Slowdown for Small Businesses
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: June 14, 2011
In the latest sign that the economic recovery may have lost whatever modest oomph it had, more small businesses say that they are planning to shrink their payrolls than say they want to expand them.
That is according to a new report released Tuesday by the National Federation of Independent Business, a trade group that regularly surveys its membership of small businesses across America.
The federation’s report for May showed the worst hiring prospects in eight months. The finding provides a glimpse into the pessimism of the nation’s small firms as they put together their budgets for the coming season, and depicts a more gloomy outlook than other recent (if equally lackluster) economic indicators because this one is forward-looking.
While big companies are buoyed by record profits, many small businesses, which employ half of the country’s private sector workers, are still struggling to break even. And if the nation’s small companies plan to further delay hiring — or, worse, return to laying off workers, as they now hint they might — there is little hope that the nation’s 14 million idle workers will find gainful employment soon.
“Never in the 37-year history of our company have we seen anything at all like this,” said Frank W. Goodnight, president of Diversified Graphics, a publishing company in Salisbury, N.C. He says there is “no chance” he will hire more workers in the months ahead.
“We’re being squeezed on all sides,” he says.
So let me ask again the question that the Los Angeles Times phrased: “Why are the wealthy benefitting from the ‘recovery’ as workers struggle?
And the answer is simple: because Barack Obama and the Democrat Party are socialist who have destroyed the engine that creates the jobs that workers depend upon to flourish.
An interesting fact is that businesses are now forced to spend $1.7 TRILLION a year in regulatory compliance costs. That is a massive hidden tax on their viability; it exceeds the overt income taxes businesses have to pay, and it most certainly exceeds their profits. And right now Obama is attacking them via the Dodd-Frank regulatory legislation, via the EPA, via OSHA, via ObamaCare and via the ridiculous actions of the NLRB in addition to their tax burden. Just to name a few. The result is businesses terrified to expand and further place their necks under Obama’s axe blade.
Meanwhile, Obama’s socialist policies have not only devastated the worker by destroying his jobs, but they’ve ruined America on numerous other levels, too. Take the housing crisis – which was THE cause of the economic implosion of 2008. Did Obama make it better? Well, here’s a headline for you from CNBC: “US Housing Crisis Is Now Worse Than Great Depression.” Which is to say that Democrats – who first created the housing crisis by refusing to allow the regulation of their pet socialist wealth redistribution agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – took something awful and turned it into an American Dream-massacring nightmare.
The latest job figures simply further document my point: Obama is destroying America job by job. Not only did the unemployment rate go up to 9.2% (Obama promised the American people that the unemployment rate would be 7.1% by now if he got his massive government-spending stimulus); not only were the previous two month figures adjusted DOWNWARD by some 45,000 jobs; not only have a third of the unemployed been unemployed for at least a YEAR with fully half of the unemployed having been unemployed for over six months (which is unprecedented); not only did the economy create an incredibly dismal 18,000 jobs (versus the 100,000 the economists naively expected); but a quarter million more people simply walked away from the workforce entirely – abandoning any hope that Obama will do anything more than crush their hopes of finding a job.
A cartoonist used the image of the Hindenburg to describe the ideologically-biased mainstream media’s horrified reaction to Obama’s plummeting poll numbers back in July 2009:
But now there is another, far more frightening connection between Barack Obama and the infamous Hindenburg explosion.
Obama aint going down quietly: he’s taking the entire American economy with him:
After tumbling below 10,000 yet again Wednesday morning, the Dow rebounded to close above that psychologically important level and was slightly higher early Thursday. Still, fear in the market is being expressed by the continued rally in Treasuries and widespread chatter about an ominous sounding technical indicator: The Hindenburg Omen.
The Hindenburg Omen has a roughly 25% accuracy rate in predicting big market upheaval since 1987, meaning it’s far from infallible but isn’t inconsequential either. The indicator’s creator, mathematician Jim Miekka, compares the Hindenburg Omen to a funnel cloud that precedes a tornado in a recent interview with The WSJ. “It doesn’t mean [the market’s] going to crash, but it’s a high probability,” he said.
Complex and esoteric even in the world of technical indicators, the Hindenburg Omen is triggered when the following occurs, Zero Hedge reports:
— The daily number of NYSE new 52-week highs and the daily number of new 52-week lows must both be greater than 2.2% of total NYSE issues traded that day.
— The NYSE’s 10-week moving average is rising.
— The McClellan Oscillator (a technical measure of “overbought” vs. “oversold” conditions) is negative on that same day.
— New 52-week highs cannot be more than twice the new 52-week lows. This condition is absolutely mandatory.
These criteria have been hit twice since Aug. 12, prompting Miekka to get out of the market entirely, The WSJ reports. Judging by the recent market action, many others are following suit — or at least moving in the same direction.
Worry List Lengthens
As Henry and I discuss in the accompanying clip, there are a lot of reasons to be worried right now that having nothing to with The Hindenburg Omen, the “Death Cross”, Mercury being in retrograde or myriad other indicators cited by market pundits of various stripes.
More fundamental reasons to be concerned include:
It’s the Economy, Stupid: This week’s weak durable goods and home sales reports are just the latest in a string of desultory data. In sum, the macroeconomic data strongly suggest the job market isn’t going to improve anytime soon. And if the job market doesn’t improve, there’s really not much hope for a turnaround in housing, consumer sales or anything else really. Oh, and the stock market is still expensive on a cyclically adjusted P/E basis, making it more vulnerable to an economic slowdown.
Unusual Uncertainty: On July 21, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke testified on Capitol Hill that the Fed’s forecast called for real GDP growth of 3%-3.5% for 2010 and 3.5%-4.5% in 2011 and 2012. Less than a month later, the Fed announced plans to buy Treasuries again (a.k.a. “QE2”) and, as The WSJ reported this week, there’s a tremendous amount of dissention within the Fed about the ‘right’ policy prescription.
Financial Follies: Whether it’s renewed concerns about Europe’s sovereign debt crisis, more U.S. bank closures or reports of commercial developers walking away from properties, it’s clear the problems in the financial system were not resolved by various and sundry bailouts and government stimulus … not by a long shot.
Good Politics vs. Good Economics: S&P’s downgrade of Ireland’s debt and Greece’s revenue shortfall show the short-term perils of the austerity measures that have swept Europe. But promising to cut government spending and slash deficits appears to be a winning political strategy in America right now. Certainly, it’s a key message of Republican and Tea Party candidates, who appear to have the momentum heading into the November mid-term elections. But if Europe’s ‘PIIGS’ are any example, gridlock might not be so “good” for the economy this time around, much less the financial markets.
Of course, the “good” news here is that there’s so much to worry about and the markets typically are darkest just before dawn.
This week, Intel CEO Paul Otellini and Jim Tisch, CEO of Loews Corp. both blamed the President’s policies for creating an environment of “uncertainty” that is crippling America’s economy.
The Obama administration is “flummoxed by their experiment in Keynesian economics not working,” Otellini said Monday in a speech in Aspen.
Higher taxes and more regulation add an additional $1 billion to building a semiconductor manufacturing plant in the U.S. vs. overseas, the CEO said.
As a result, “the next big thing will not be invented here. Jobs will not be created here,” Otellini said, warning of “an inevitable erosion and shift of wealth, much like we’re seeing today in Europe…this is the bitter truth.”
Loews’ Tisch made similarly themed comments in a Bloomberg interview on Wednesday. “Part of the problem is that business has very little confidence in what’s been going on and very little visibility,” he said.
But is it just CEOs? Is it just big business? Surely Obama’s anti-business policies are making things easier for the little guy, right?
A lot of ink and pixels have been spilled this week over the ICI’s report that equity mutual funds suffered net withdrawals totaling over $33 billion in the first seven months of 2010. Myriad reasons were cited for the trend, including a mistrust of stocks, the flash crash and an aging population. (See: The Next Bubble? Investors Flee Stocks in Droves In Favor of Bonds.)
Perhaps the biggest reason of all hasn’t gotten enough attention: Americans are making due with less and don’t have the money to put into stock funds, and many are taking money out of their investments to pay for basic necessities like food, clothing and shelter.
With wages stagnant for those who still have a job “a lot of people are having to tap into their nest egg to keep their living standards going,” says Damien Hoffman, co-founder of WallStCheatSheet. “A lot of people are living out of principal. There’s no other way to get around that.”
Fidelity’s recent report of a sharp increase in the number of 401(k) participants seeking loans or hardship withdrawals in the second quarter is further evidence of the disappearing middle class. “These are basically emergency ways to fund yourself. We think it’s a scary statistic,” Hoffman says. “Where is the middle class going to be if they draw down their 401(k)s drastically over course of next few years?”
Obama’s anti-business and profoundly socialist policies seek to punish business in every way he can.
A lot of Americans were probably happy with that in November of ’08.
But that was before they began to realize the truth that either all boats rise, or all boats sink. Nancy Pelosi never drained the political swamp, as she falsely promised, but Barack Obama has certainly drained the ocean of economic opportunity (and very likely poisoned the bluebird of happiness, but that’s a crime for another day). We need the rich, and the big businesses, in order to have jobs. When they profit, the rest of us do. And when they are demonized and attacked and regulated to death, the rest of us suffer, too.
Because name the last time a poor person hired you and gave you a good paying position. If you’re a liberal, let me add, “It was never, wasn’t it, dumbass?”
A glance at Obama’s appointments and their actual world business experience should suffice to reveal how important business was to Obama.
Obama filled his administration with radicals out to “fundamentally transform America.” And being the kind of man or woman who was oriented toward meeting payrolls and expanding businesses really didn’t need to apply.
And these eggheaded Marxists are seizing money from the private sector – and even from the future – and making terrible decisions about how to invest it. We get turtle tunnels and monkey cocaine studies rather than infrastructure investment. Had it been up to businesses as to how to invest the trillions of dollars that Obama pissed away, things would have been a lot better now.
On November 4, 2008, the voters of the United States of America voted for national extinction. And yet many are surprised that we’re now following in the footsteps of the Dodo bird.
There seems to be a genius to Obama’s incompetence. He is failing on so many levels, in so many ways, all at the same time, that nobody can possibly keep track of them all.
Which means, paradoxically, that the more failures Obama accumulates, the better he looks, as coverage of all the failure is dissipated such that nothing receives the focus it needs to penetrate the American culture of distraction.
Obama is turning to Bush’s general and Bush’s Secretary of Defense in order to overcome the failure created by utterly failed Democrat Party ideas.
Chief among those utterly failed Democrat ideas is the timetable for cut-and-run. Democrats wanted to impose this guaranteed-to-fail strategy for Iraq, but Bush prevailed and won the war. Now they want to make sure we lose in Afghanistan, as Afghans who want to stay alive realize who will still be there a year from now (i.e., the Taliban), and who won’t (i.e., the United States), and that they’d better not ally themselves with their “timetable for withdrawal” all-too-temporary American allies.
Of course, the failure in Afghanistan comes as a welcome relief to day 72 of the even bigger failure in the Gulf of Mexico.
The leftwing media is essentially shouting, “Hey, take your eye off that total failure over there on the Gulf Coast. Look over here!!! Obama fired a guy that pricked his thin-skin and appointed Bush’s general to save his liberal ass. And he gave a speech!!! Don’t waste your time thinking about the fact that BP took the cap off the leaking hole so that 104,000 gallons of oil per hour could pour out of the sea floor. Don’t look at the possibility that as much as 4.2 million gallons of oil are pouring out of that damn hole Obama can’t plug every single day!!!
The Obama-failure in Afghanistan is a distraction for the Obama-failure in the Gulf of Mexico. And the Obama-failure in the Gulf of Mexico is a distraction for the Obama-failure in the economy.
Where are we supposed to look to see an area in which Obama HASN’T failed?
Look at everything, if you have time to contemplate all the failure that Obama has brought. But don’t be distracted from taking time to watch the spill cam footage every day, or following the latest tracking of Obama’s oil spill and its contamination of the Gulf Coast, or following the Obama-regime-caused inability to clean up the mess.
As you watch the daily disaster unfolding, don’t forget to remember that Obama is the guy running the show. Or that the show looks like a chicken running around after its head has been cut off
It would be nice if the Obama administration got its narrative straight. Christine Romer, the chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, says that the stimulus pretty much had all the effect it’s going to have. And while she’s saying that, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is proclaiming that the stimulus was designed with a two-year horizon and that “half that effect is still ahead of us.” Maybe they could get together and cook their story.
It wouldn’t hurt if the White House got its basic facts straight, while they were at it.
WASHINGTON – The White House is promising that new figures being released Friday will be a more accurate showing of progress in President Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan. It aggressively defended an earlier, faulty count that overstated by thousands the jobs created or saved so far.
Ed DeSeve, serving as Obama’s stimulus overseer, said the administration has been working for weeks to correct mistakes in early counts that identified more than 30,000 jobs paid for with stimulus money. He said a new stimulus report Friday should correct many mistakes an Associated Press review found that showed the earlier report overstated thousands of stimulus jobs.
“I think you’ll see a pretty good degree of accuracy,” DeSeve said in an interview.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs downplayed errors in job counts identified by the AP’s review, telling reporters, “We’re talking about 4,000, or a 5,000 error.”
The AP reviewed a sample of federal contracts, not all 9,000 reported to date, and discovered errors in one in six jobs credited to the $787 billion stimulus program — or 5,000 of the 30,000 jobs claimed so far.
Even in its limited review, the AP found job counts that were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of paid positions; jobs credited to the stimulus program that were counted two and sometimes more than four times; and other jobs that were credited to stimulus spending when none was produced.
For example:
• Some recipients of stimulus money used the cash to give existing employees pay raises, but each reported saving dozens of jobs with the money, including one Florida day care that claimed 129 jobs saved.
• A Texas contractor whose business kept 22 employees to handle stimulus contracts saw its job count inflated to 88 because the same workers were counted four times.
• The water department in Palm Beach County, Fla., hired 57 meter readers, customer service representatives and other positions to handle two water projects. But their total job count was incorrectly doubled to 114.
Those errors were included in an early progress report on the stimulus released two weeks ago that featured numerous mistakes, including a Colorado business’ claim that its stimulus contract created more than 4,200 jobs. TeleTech Government Solutions actually hired 4,231 temporary workers for its stimulus project, but most of them worked for five weeks or less and the others no more than five months, company president Mariano Tan said.
The short-term positions should have been reported as 635 full-time, 40-hour-a-week jobs under the government’s method of calculating stimulus work, Tan said.
Now, first of all, stop and contemplate the farce that is going on here. We have lost 3 million jobs since Obama bluffed and pandered his generational theft act through Congress. And they are touting 30,000 jobs as a success? I mean, 30,000 jobs created or saved is a massive failure on its face. And then it turns out that even many of those 30,000 jobs are bogus.
Obama promised his Wreckovery Act would create 3 million new jobs. The fact that he now has to play games to create the illusion that he “saved” or created a minuscule 30 thousand jobs is a screaming testimony to what a failure Obama has truly been.
The White House, according to media reports, is blasting the Associated Press for exposing this new Obama administration fabrication. I guess they’re not a “legitimate news agency,” either.
Economists forecast the nation’s total output grew at an annual rate of 3.3 percent between July and September, after contracting for a record four straight quarters. That growth has been fueled by a huge influx of government cash, including a temporary tax credit for first-time homeowners and a $1.25 trillion Federal Reserve program to keep mortgage rates low.
In other words, the GDP grew, my hind end. Rather, the government spent a ton of money, the result of which was to artificially pump up the economy. It’s the equivalent of borrowing a ton of money you don’t have to buy a car you can’t afford in order to impress your neighbors. Only it’s Obama instead of you, and it’s trillions of dollars rather than thousands.
As a result of this fraud, the administration can pump up a number. But the reality is very different. Consumer confidence “unexpectedly” dropped in October just as we’re entering the critical Holiday shopping season, meaning the American people aren’t falling for the ruse. And new home sales took an “unexpected” dump into the toilet to throw a bucketful of cold water into the face of anyone naive enough to buy the myth that we’re going to rise above our housing market woes.
Start Thinking Right 