Frightening Article About Impending Economic Collapse – The Hoofbeats Of The 4 Horsemen Of The Apopalypse Are Beginning To Echo

It’s not just Europe that is on the brink.  America’s true fiscal gap is a beyond completely insane $222 TRILLION and if Europe doesn’t fall into the fiery pit of hell first, we will.  And things are not going at all well in China, either.

But read this about Europe and try having a good sleep tonight.  Because one thing is for sure: if Europe collapses, the Greatest Depression will start here the same day.

Jacob Rothschild, John Paulson And George Soros Are All Betting That Financial Disaster Is Coming

Are you willing to bet against three of the wealthiest men in the entire world? Jacob Rothschild recently bet approximately 200 million dollars that the euro will go down. Billionaire hedge fund manager John Paulson made somewhere around 20 billion dollars betting against the U.S. housing market during the last financial crisis, and now he has made huge bets that the euro will go down and that the price of gold will go up. And as I wrote about in my last article, George Soros put approximately 130 million more dollars into gold last quarter. So will the euro plummet like a rock? Will the price of gold absolutely soar? Well, if a massive financial disaster does occur both of those two things are likely to happen. The European economy is becoming more unstable with each passing day, and investors all over the globe are looking for safe places to put their money. The mainstream media keeps telling us that everything is going to be okay, but the global elite are sending us a much, much different message by their actions. Certainly Rothschild, Paulson and Soros know about things happening in the financial world that the rest of us don’t. The fact that they are all behaving in a consistent manner right now should be alarming for all of us.

Let’s start with Jacob Rothschild. Apparently he believes that the euro is headed for quite a tumble. The following is from a recent CNBC article….

You know the euro is in deep water when a doyen of the banking industry, Lord Jacob Rothschild takes a £130 million ($200 million) bet against it.

Okay, but the euro has already been falling dramatically. In mid-2011, the EUR/USD was above the 1.40 mark, and right now it is at about 1.23.

Does it really have that much more that it can fall?

If the eurozone ends up breaking apart it sure does.

If there is a Greek default, or if Germany leaves the euro, or if a new currency comes along to replace the euro those currently betting against it will end up looking like geniuses.

Another big name in the financial world that is betting against the euro right now is John Paulson. The following is from a recent Der Spiegel article….

One of these warriors is John Paulson. The hedge fund manager once made billions by betting on a collapse of the American real estate market. Not surprisingly, the financial world sat up and took notice when Paulson, who is now widely despised in America as a crisis profiteer, announced in the spring that he would bet on a collapse of the euro.

And as I noted in my last article, Paulson has also been putting billions of dollars into gold.

So just what are Rothschild and Paulson anticipating?

Could we be on the verge of a massive financial collapse in Europe?

According to the Der Spiegel article mentioned above, a lot of investors seem to be preparing for such a possibility right now….

Banks, companies and investors are preparing themselves for a collapse of the euro. Cross-border bank lending is falling, asset managers are shunning Europe and money is flowing into German real estate and bonds. The euro remains stable against the dollar because America has debt problems too. But unlike the euro, the dollar’s structure isn’t in doubt.

The financial world is starting to wake up to the fact that the globe is absolutely drowning in debt and it is not really good to be holding fiat currencies when a debt crisis erupts.

When men like John Paulson and George Soros start pouring huge amounts of money into gold, it is time to start becoming alarmed about the state of the global financial system.

The amount of money that these men are investing in gold is staggering….

There was also news last week in an SEC filing that both George Soros and John Paulson had increased their investment in SPDR Gold Trust, the world’s largest publicly traded physical gold exchange traded fund (ETF).

Mr Soros upped his stake in the ETF to 884,400 shares from 319,550 and Mr Paulson bought 4.53m shares, bringing his stake to 21.3m.

At the current price of about $156 a share, these are new investments of about $88m of Mr Soros’ cash and more than $700m from Mr Paulson’s funds. These are significant positions.

And the central banks of the world are certainly buying gold at an unprecedented rate as well. According to the World Gold Council, the central banks of the world added 157.5 metric tons of gold last quarter. That was the biggest move into gold by the central banks of the globe that we have seen in modern financial history.

But that might just be the beginning.

According to a recent Marketwatch article, there are persistent rumors that China has plans to buy thousands of metric tons of gold….

Within the gold market, there is unconfirmed speculation that China plans to buy up to at least 5,000 to 6,000 metric tons of gold and that it will start to buy during this year, according to Kevin Kerr, president of Kerr Trading International.

If China buys this much gold, that would exceed annual, global production of gold, he said. “We do not have enough gold for China to buy that much, and it will take China time to purchase this amount of gold.”

So what comes next?

Nobody is quite sure.

Another major financial crisis could erupt in Europe at any moment.

A major war in the Middle East could start literally at any time.

Renowned investor Jim Rogers believes that things are really going to get “bad after the next election“.

Others believe that the action could start even sooner than that.

The truth is that even though we have not seen a “Lehman Brothers moment” yet, things in Europe just continue to get progressively worse. The following is from a recent article by Mark E. Grant….

Whether you turn your attention to Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal or even Ireland; it is getting worse. Nowhere on the Continent are things improving and even in France and Germany the financial strains are beginning to show. It is not a question of Euro-bear or Euro-bull; it is just the numbers as they come rolling out month after month.

There is a growing realization in Europe that the euro simply does not work. Italy is absolutely drowning in debt, the Spanish economy has basically descended into a depression, and Greece has been experiencing depression-like conditions for years at this point.

The euro is doomed. The only question is who is going to blink first.

Nobody wants to be the first to leave the euro. There are rumblings that it could actually be Finland that leaves the euro first, and that would please Germany just fine because they don’t want to look like the bad guys in all of this.

But that doesn’t mean that Germany won’t eventually pull the trigger if nobody else does. The German public is sick and tired of bailing out the weak sisters of southern Europe, and at this point it looks like it would take perpetual bailouts just to keep the euro together.

And recently there have been lots of little signs that Germany is starting to move slowly toward the exit doors.

In fact, I found it quite interesting that a giant euro sculpture was recently removed from the Frankfurt International Airport….

A massive € sculpture (identical to the one in front of the European Central Bank) was dismantled and removed from the Frankfurt International Airport in Germany Thursday.

The official explanation is ‘the plastic parts are getting weak after 11 years and the terminal needed the space‘.

Does € sculpture’s removal from the Frankfurt Airport indicate Germany is preparing for a surprise return to the Deutsche Mark?

Sure that might just be a coincidence, but it also could be a harbinger of things to come.

Sadly, most average people living in North America and Europe have absolutely no idea what is coming. Most of them just want to be able to get up in the morning and go to work and pay the bills and take care of their families.

Unfortunately, millions upon millions of those hard working individuals are in for a very rude awakening.

A lot of people are about to have their current lifestyles totally turned upside down.

But it doesn’t have to be all bad.

In fact, I found it very interesting to read about how some young people are responding to the depression in Greece….

In the spring of 2010, just as the Greek government was embarking on some of its harshest austerity measures, 29-year-old Apostolos Sianos packed in his well-paid job as a website designer, gave up his Athens apartment and walked away from modern civilisation.

In the foothills of Mount Telaithrion on the Greek island of Evia, Mr Sianos and three other like-minded Athenians set up an eco-community.

The idea was to live in an entirely sustainable way, free from the ties of money and cut off from the national electricity grid.

The group sleeps communally in yurts they have built themselves, they grow their own food and exchange the surplus in the nearest village for any necessities they cannot produce.

I think there is a lesson to be learned there.

When the system fails, it is going to be important to be able to live independently of the system.

Governments and big banks all over the world have been rapidly preparing for the coming financial collapse.

Perhaps the rest of us should be too.

If you can believe it, 77 percent of all Americans live paycheck to paycheck at least some of the time.

If another major economic crisis comes along, many of those people are going to be totally wiped out.

And there are already signs that the U.S. economy is basically on life support at this point.

Just look at the velocity of money.

In an economy that is growing and healthy, money tends to circulate very, very quickly.

But when an economy is sick, money tends to circulate very slowly.

And that is exactly what is happening right now. In fact, the velocity of money is currently at the lowest level in modern U.S. history….

For much more discussion on this, please check out this article.

This is exactly what happened back in the 1930s. The velocity of money absolutely plummeted. When people are scared, credit is tight and times are hard, money does not exchange hands as rapidly.

But this is just the beginning.

What we are experiencing right now is rip-roaring prosperity compared to what is coming.

Jacob Rothschild, John Paulson and George Soros are preparing themselves for the tremendous chaos that is coming.

Are you getting prepared?

I found this comment to this article on FreeRepublic rather chilling as well:

Velocity Of Money is the frequency with which a unit of money is spent on new goods and services. It is a far better indicator of economic activity than GDP, consumer prices, the stock market, or sales of men’s underwear (which Greenspan was fond of ogling). In a healthy economy, the same dollar is collected as payment and subsequently spent many times over. In a depression, the velocity of money goes catatonic. Velocity of money is calculated by simply dividing GDP by a given money supply. This VoM chart using monetary base should end any discussion of what ”this” is and whether or not anybody should be using the word “recovery” with a straight face:

I’ve said it over and over and I’ll say it again: the beast is coming.  Revelation chapter six prophesies the world in the last days in total meltdown: economic catastrophe, wars upon wars, famines and grim diseases.  And into that maelstrom comes the beast – the Antichrist, the ultimate false messiah who will make the false messiah Obama look like a fart in a hurricane – riding in on his white horse to save the day.

Why will the world worship the beast and literally take his mark upon their right hands or foreheads in act of economic worship?  Because he will enter the scene during a time of complete catastrophe and chaos and despair and seem to have all the answers.  But it will be not only under but because of his leadership that his promised Utopia degenerates into complete hell on earth in only seven short years.

Worst Hypocrite Who Ever Lived To Ask For Yet ANOTHER Trillion-Plus Dollar Debt Ceiling Hike

Obama then:

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here. Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.”

Obama then:

“The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents – #43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic.”

And then there’s the Obama of now.  There’s the president who demonized his predecessor in a vicious and hateful way who has since demanded the three highest debt ceiling increases in the history of the entire human race.

Obama is demanding yet another debt ceiling hike – this one to the tune of $1.2 trillion.  Because he is determined to spend until our children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children are still paying off his debts.  Because that is liberalism in a nutshell: destroy America and destroy any chance of a future America ever coming back.

Democrats seem to think that if America even has so much as a thousand-to-one longshot chance of having a future, they haven’t done their job.

It’s as if in the Democrat Party the Soviet Union stabbed us in the heart from the grave.  The Communist Party USA sings Obama’s praises as “one of us!” while the former U.S.S.R. mouthpiece Pravda openly mocks Obama’s America as having a fervent desire to commit national suicide.

The true “Da, Comrade!” Party of socialism in America is the Democrat Party.  And that is simply a documented fact.

And, of course, if Republicans try to do the right thing and stand up against the most completely-out-of-control government in human history, they will be demonized into submission by the Democrat-media complex.  You don’t dare do the right thing in God damn America anymore; the American people are too stupid and too evil and too bent on going the way of the Dodo bird.

Which is why the beast is coming.

Barack Obama And Israel: The Coming Antichrist’s Useful Idiot

God damn America just entered a radical and aggressive new phase.  But that should come as absolutely no surprise to those who a) understand the Bible and b) understand that Barack Obama is a truly evil man.

It’s almost as if Obama killed Osama and then decided to balance the scales by killing the entire nation of Israel.

Is Barack Obama the Antichrist?  No.  He is merely the coming Antichrist’s useful idiot.

Ultimately, this coming global dictator known as the Antichrist, the beast (Revelation 13), the man of lawlessness and the son of destruction (2 Thessalonians 2:3) and the little horn (Daniel 7:20-24), will come riding in on his white horse (Revelation 6:1) to “save the world” from impending catastrophe.  There will be total economic implosion, food shortages and famine, and wars – especially in the sense of “race” (ethnos) rising against race (Luke 21:10).

And, of course, the biggest and most dangerous “race against race” of all is the incredibly better war between the Arabs and the Jews.

Antichrist will seem to have an answer for all these problems and more.  This coming dictator will appear to be so effective that the world will literally worship him.

Obama is not the man who will have all the answers; he is merely the fool who leads the world into this state of total chaos and collapse.  He is merely the fool who will usher in the beast and welcome him.

The coming seven-year tribulation – which will be the most terrifying and most dangerous period in the history of the entire human race – will be initiated with the antichrist’s signing of a seven-year treaty “guaranteeing” the peace of Israel (see Daniel 9:27).  And Obama has brought us to the point where we are very nearly at that point.

Here is the story:

Obama Orders Israel to ‘End the Occupation’
by Maayana Miskin

United States President Barack Obama issued a stinging condemnation of the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria on Wednesday in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly. The U.S. “does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements,” Obama announced.

Using unusually harsh terminology, Obama called to “end the occupation that began in 1967” – referring to Israel’s control of Judea and Samaria.

Obama also stated that the U.S. must put more pressure on Israel to accept Arab demands. “The United States does Israel no favors when we fail to couple an unwavering commitment to its security with an insistence that Israel respect the legitimate claims and rights of the Palestinians,” he said.

The U.S. president had demands for Israel’s opponents as well, and called on UN member states to avoid “vitriolic” attacks on Israel and recognize Israel’s legitimacy. In addition, he called on the Palestinian Authority to “end incitement against Israel.”

In his speech, Obama reported that progress had been made in a meeting the day before with  Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

Obama has pressured Israel to completely freeze building for Jews in Judea and Samaria, a plan Netanyahu has rejected. Israeli leaders have stated that many Judea and Samaria communities are within the “national consensus” regarding towns that are expected to remain in Israeli hands permanently, and that building should continue in those areas. The Obama administration’s most recent statements on the subject made clear, however, that a freeze on settlements could not be a precondition for peace talks between Israel and the PA.

Regarding Iran, Obama expressed support for both diplomacy and consequences. Iran and North Korea should be offered “greater prosperity and a more secure peace” if they agree to abide by international guidelines, but “must be held accountable” if they insist on pursuing nuclear weapons, he said.

Bolton: Israel on the Chopping Block
Former United States ambassador to the UN John Bolton said the president’s message had strong significance, particularly given the venue. Obama has put Israel “on the chopping block,” Bolton warned.

‘World Must Work Together’
Obama called for the nations of the world to work together, saying, “Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility.”

“Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world’s problems alone,” he added pointedly.

Obama said UN member states had fallen short in addressing the world’s problems. Among the issues he called to address were genocide, “protracted conflicts,” nuclear proliferation, and global warming.
(IsraelNationalNews.com

With “friends” like Obama, Israel really doesn’t need any enemies.  But of course it has them anyway – numbering in the scores.  Obama has proven that he is the most anti-Israel and anti-Jewish president in American history.  We can now readily see why the United States of America is not mentioned in Bible prophecy.  Our fate is very nearly sealed.  The writing on the wall is nearly complete: America has been weighed on the scales and found wanting.  Our way is the way of Obama, the way of the Dodo bird and the way of hell.

Obama has every intention of exposing the underbelly of Israel, leaving her with completely indefensible borders, including an 8 mile-wide country that cannot possibly resist the next invasion.  Obama is literally seeking to give the Arabs the high ground so that they can murder every single Jew in Israel with near impunity.  Obama’s new borders would come at the price of Israel’s existence.  Israel will resist this, of course, but with the United States – formerly Israel’s greatest political ally – now becoming her chief political enemy, she will become increasingly isolated and desperate.

At the very moment that the Syrians have shown how truly evil they are, we have a president who actually wants to give them the strategically vital Golan Heights.  That is beyond the limit of lunacy.  It doesn’t matter how desperately wrong the Obama administration is or how many times that proof is documented for all to see.  We continue to blithely march like the proverbial lemmings to our fools’ end.

And not only is Obama demanding this of Israel, but it is demanding that the Arabs give no concessions whatsoever.  Barack Obama – whether stupidly or wickedly – has dedicated himself to the destruction of the state of Israel.  Obama has literally torn-up Bush-era agreements that were overwhelmingly ratified by both Republicans and Democrats in both the House and the Senate.  Israel now knows for certain that the United States is no trustworthy partner, and that America’s word means exactly nothing.

At one particularly asinine moment in Obama’s speech we had this:

“How can one negotiate with a party that has shown unwillingness to recognize your right to exist?” Obama asked.

And – bizarrely – Obama didn’t even bother to try to answer it as he essentially demand that Israel trust said “party” anyway.  It was as though merely raising the intractable issue was good enough.

When the Antichrist comes offering an apparent way out of this fools’ dilemma Obama has imposed, Israel will take it.  And the death sentence of the present world will be inaugurated.

Liberals in America and around the world have been dreaming of a one-world Utopia for decades.  The Bible told us 2,000 years ago that such a global dictatorship that the left is seeking would come to pass – in the last days.  What the left passionately believes will be the salvation of the human race will actually be the guarantee of the destruction of the human race (Revelation 13:1-18).  One of the greatest ironies in human history is that the left – which openly mocks the Bible – have become the primary instruments of its fulfillment.  To their certain doom.

You Democrats will one day be forced to account for the horror that you will have unleashed in voting for and supporting Barack Hussein Obama.

Take a look at a map of the Middle East:

Try to find Israel on that map.  It is so small it is hard to see.  And then look around at the Arab/Muslim states that surround her.

With all this land, it isn’t enough.  The Arabs want it all.  They want Israel destroyed.  They want her driven into the sea and annihilated.  They want to finish what Hitler started.

I can’t make it any more plain than this.  It is past time for you to choose your side.  If you side with Barack Obama and the Muslims who yearn – and rabidly froth at the mouth – for holocaust, you will pay for your wickedness with eternity in hell.  These policies are the result of a depraved moral stupidity that will find no place in God’s heaven.

At the same time, if you seek to stand with Israel, then STAND with them.  Call your congressman.  Write your congressman.  Attend meetings and publicly demand that Barack Obama be forced to abandon his policies that will result in the certain death of America as God truly does damn a nation that has become great by standing with Israel more than any other nation in history.

The Bible says that all these things will inevitably come to pass.  But woe be to you if you let the consequences fall upon your head and the heads of your children.

The beast is coming; his fool is already here to prepare his path to domination for him.  Will he take you to hell with him?

Why Western Civilization Is On The Verge Of Self-Destuction. In A Nutshell.

I came across the following article on Yahoo:

Prince Speaks for Kardashian-Weary Nation: ‘Get Off the Stage!’
Posted Tue Feb 8, 2011 8:18am PST by Caryn Ganz

Last night at Madison Square Garden, Prince did what so many of us want to do, but simply cannot do: make Kim Kardashian go away. At the end of each of the singer’s Welcome 2 America concerts in New York, he’s invited VIPs onstage to dance — and in Cyndi Lauper’s case, belt a few notes. Yesterday one of his stellar backup singers took Kim by the hand and led her onstage, saying, “Look who I got.” Prince busted a move; Kim stood and laughed. So he dismissed her with a neck-snapping, “Get off the stage!” as the crowd roared. “Welcome 2 America,” he added, scanning the audience for another girl who “can get busy.”

Stars who have successfully boogied with Prince at MSG include Sherri Sheppard, Naomi Campbell, Alicia Keys, Whoopi Goldberg, Jamie Foxx, Tavis Smiley, Cornel West, and Spike Lee. Yes, Sherri Sheppard, the same woman who horrified Prince on national TV by proclaiming on “The View,” “I have wanted to make love to you for my whole life.” He’s even serenaded Leighton Meester with “I Love You But I Don’t Trust You Anymore.”

Kim’s defense, mounted on Twitter (of course): “I was so nervous I froze when Prince touched me!” She added that the Purple One gave her another chance, and she did, indeed, get funky. “This time I redeemed myself! We all danced while Prince played the piano! Wow! What a night!”

In truth, she should feel honored — because of Prince’s staunch anti-Internet stance, no fresh footage of him has managed to hit the web in years. In 2007, the singer even got into a fight with his fans when he pulled down images of everything from Prince-inspired tattoos to photos of his album covers — and when his devotees got angry, he wrote a diss track called “PFUnk” that includes the line, “I love all y’all, don’t you ever mess with me no more.” Thanks to the Kardashian smackdown, we got another glimpse of our favorite funkateer in action!

Well, there’s nothing about this article that is remotely important or meaningful.

What IS a testament to the rapidly approaching extinction of the late great USA and the Western Civilization it epitomizes is at the bottom:

The word “vacuous” comes to mind.  Can you not understand why radical Islam is exploding, given such a completely airheaded altnernative?

And yet this story came out just today, and 2,841 people believed it was so significant that they felt the need to comment about it.  And, good Lord, I came back three minutes later just to recheck, and the number had risen to 2,918 comments.

Now, I don’t waste my time with this kind of mind-sucking drivel.  But I can’t remember reading an important article about anything even remotely important that fired up this level of hype and attention.

It’s like the Animal Farm society is already here, living and breathing, in our midst.  And its zeitgeist has taken over our feeble little atrophied minds.  And every day, there is less and less and less about this civilization that is worth fighting for.  It has become a hollow facade, with everything that truly made it great carved out by political correctness, the postmodernist purge of truth and meaning and the progressive social-engineering doctrine of mutliculturalism.

The spine that made everything great in our democracy possible has been ripped out of our civilization.  The document that made our Constitution possible said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  Now nothing remains to provide a foundation for anything.

Except, of course, whether Kim Kardashian should have been kicked off the stage or not.

We are in a great sucking vortex of moral idiocy – trapped in a depraved culture that has tragically become like a giant reciprocating engine that just drives us downward and ever downward dumber and dumber with every stroke of its constantly pumping cylinders.

The Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible sums it up marvelously in its second verse: “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities!  All is vanity.”

The beast is coming, the Antichrist warned about by that same Bible for some 2,600 years.  Everything is amazingly in place, including the technology for the mysterious “mark of the beast.”  Our rotted world system will soon collapse.  And when it implodes, it will do so with stunning speed in a matter of days.  Chaos will follow.  Economic collapse, wars and fighting, disease and death, just as Revelation 6 describes.  And this political beast, this Antichrist, this big government visionary will emerge onto the scene claiming to have all the answers.  Everything he does will appear to have the magic touch.  And the whole world will literally worship him in place of God.

We have already had a taste of this frenzied idolatry in the person of Barack Hussein Obama.  But what is coming will dwarf the empty “hope and change” of Obama.

And does anyone seriously believe that this present generation of vacuous amoral fools won’t worship him just as the Book of Revelation says?

What the Bible prophesies is no longer a collection of fanciful fable; it has become the most reasonable description of where are world is truly headed.

Barney Frank And Democrat Party Most Responsible For 2008 Economic Collapse

I don’t want to ridicule Barney Frank on account of his weight.  Suffice it to say he is easily able to pull off the two faces he routinely wears, and the two sides he routinely takes.

Here’s the recent side of Barney Frank:

Frank: “well one of my biggest differences with the Bush administration, even with the Clinton administration, was that they overdid that. I have always been critical of this effort to equate a decent home with home ownership. I think we should have been doing more to provide rental housing, my efforts have been to try and get affordable rental housing I was very much in disagreement with this push into home ownership and I think the federal government should not be artificially doing that. The goal is for people to have decent housing and I think beginning in the Clinton administration, exacerbated by Bush, we pushed people too much into home ownership…”
– Barney Frank, May 20, ‘2010 on CNBC.

And here’s Frank from 2005 documenting the fact that Barney Frank in 2010 is a rank liar:

“This is a very important resolution, particularly at this time, because we have, I think, an excessive degree of concern right now about home ownership and its role in the economy.
Obviously, speculation is never a good thing. But those who argue that housing prices are now at the point of a bubble seem to be missing a very important point. Unlike previous examples, where substantial excessive inflation of prices later caused some problems, we are talking here about an entity, home ownership, homes, where there is not the degree of leverage that we have seen elsewhere.

This is not the dot-com situation. We had problems with people having invested in business plans for which there was no reality and people building fiber-optic cable for which there was no need. Homes that are occupied may see an ebb and flow in the price at a certain percentage level, but you will not see the collapse that you see when people talk about a bubble.

So those of us on our committee in particular will continue to push for home ownership.
– Barney Frank, 2005

link
Video Link

[I found these quotes at US Politics Online].

You’re right, Barney.  It wasn’t the Dot-com situation.  It was a hundred times WORSE than the Dot-com situation, even given as bad as the Dot-com bubble was.  And yeah, you sure were right when you said there wouldn’t be a collapse, weren’t you?

So first of all, we have Barney Frank – liberal Democrat par excellence – acknowledging that the bad policy that led to the mortgage market meltdown was actually a CLINTON policy that Bush merely continued (most likely because he knew he’d be called a “racist” the moment he ended a program that gave billions of dollars to minorities to buy homes they couldn’t afford).

From the New York Times, September 30, 1999:

Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

It’s beyond asinine that Democrats blame Bush for ruining the economy, and praise Clinton as having the mostest wonderfulest economy ever, when it was a Clinton program that ruined the Bush economy.  But that’s the mainstream media narrative for you.

It’s ironic that Frank in hindsight so laughably compared the housing mortgage bubble that brought down the economy in 2008 to the Dot-com bubble that brought down the economy just as Clinton was leaving office.  Because that’s TWO giant economy-killers that “Mister Wonderful Clinton” inflicted on George Bush.  The Clinton-era Dot-com crash ultimately destroyed 78% of the Nasdaq composite.  Clinton benefited with a huge market surge, and Bush paid with a huge market collapse that began taking place while the handprint on the Bible from Bush’s oath of office was still warm.

So Barney Frank reminds us that the destruction of the Bush economy was bookended by massive Clinton failures – the Dot-com bubble collapse in 2001 and the housing market bubble collapse in 2008.  And Clinton was never blamed for either of them by the propagandist mainstream media.

The second thing you can notice is that Democrats like Barney Frank – who were so quick to pounce all over the mortgage meltdown and blame Bush for it – were not only the ones who created the problem, but were the ones who defended the problem.

What’s the Democrat-mainstream media-created narrative for why we had the 2008 collapse?  Republicans refusing to regulate?  Read what the New York Times said back in September 11, 2003:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 10— The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.

Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.

The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.

So Bush WANTED to regulate, in contradiction to all the lies that you heard.

And who blocked those regulations?  Omigosh, it was Barney Frank and his Democrats.

”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

Representative Melvin L. Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, agreed.

”I don’t see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing,” Mr. Watt said.

You would find if you bothered to look at the facts that Bush demanded reform and regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac SEVENTEEN TIMES during his presidency.  And that Democrats refused to regulate the GSEs and even threatened filibusters against regulation.  Not that the mainstream media is honest enough to report the truth.

You would find if you bothered to look at the facts that financial experts literally predicted that the Clinton-birthed Fannie and Freddie expansion would ultimately explode.

Again from the New York Times, September 30, 1999:

In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980’s.

”From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ”If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.”

What do we have, even in the pages of the New York Slimes?  A prediction that as soon as the economy cooled off, the mortgage market wold explode like a depth charge and the government would have to step in to prevent a catastrophe?  From a Clinton program?

The same man – Peter Wallison – who had predicted the disaster from 1999 wrote a September 23, 2008 article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Blame Fannie Mae and Congress For the Credit Mess.”

The New York Times acknowledged that Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “buy mortgages from lenders and repackage them as securities or hold them in their own portfolios.”

And the Los Angeles Times on May 31, 1999 describes how this process turned into a bubble, as more begat more, and then more and more begat more and more and more:

Lenders also have opened the door wider to minorities because of new initiatives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–the giant federally chartered corporations that play critical, if obscure, roles in the home finance system. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy mortgages from lenders and bundle them into securities; that provides lenders the funds to lend more. . . .

In a nutshell, Fannie and Freddie, acting as Government sponsored enterprises, bought tens of millions of mortgages, and then repackaged them into huge mortgage-backed securities that giant private entities such as Bear Stearns, AIG and Lehman Brothers purchased.  What made these securities particularly attractive to the private banking entities was that these securities were essentially being sold – and had the backing – of the United States government.

Here’s the process:

The Role of the GSEs is to provide liquidity and stability to the U.S. housing and mortgage markets. Step 1 Banks lend money to Households to purchase and refinance home mortgages Step 2 The GSEs purchase these mortgage from the banks Step 3 GSEs bundle the mortgages into mortgage-backed securities Step 4 GSEs sell mortgage-backed and debt securities to domestic and international capital investors Step 5 Investors pay GSEs for purchase of debt and securities Step 6 GSEs return funds to banks to lend out again for the issuance of new mortgage loans.

Now, an intelligent observer would note a conflict: the GSE’s role was to “provide stability,” and yet they were taking on “significantly more risk” in the final year of the Clinton presidency.  What’s wrong with this picture?

The GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were designed to bundle up the mortgages into mortgage backed securities and then sell them to the private market.

Fannie Mae is exempt from SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] regulation. Which screams why Bush wanted to regulate them.  This allowed Fannie Mae to bundle up mortgages, which were then rated AAA with no requirement to make clear what is in the bundle.  Which screams why Bush wanted to regulate them.

This is what has allowed toxic instruments that have been sold across the world.  It also created a situation where money institutions did not know and could not find out whether potential inter-bank business partners were holding these “boiled babies on their books, complete with a golden stamp on the wrapping,” rather than safe instruments.  This then inclined banks to a natural caution, to be wary of lending good money to other banks against these ‘assets’.  And thus banks refused to lend to one another.

John McCain wrote a letter in 2006 urging reform and regulation of the GSEs.  He said:

Congress chartered Fannie and Freddie to provide access to home financing by maintaining liquidity in the secondary mortgage market. Today, almost half of all mortgages in the U.S. are owned or guaranteed by these GSEs. They are mammoth financial institutions with almost $1.5 Trillion of debt outstanding between them. With the fiscal challenges facing us today (deficits, entitlements, pensions and flood insurance), Congress must ask itself who would actually pay this debt if Fannie or Freddie could not?

An of course, they could not pay their debts.  Fannie and Freddie basically went bankrupt and were taken over.  And they took a whopping share of the biggest financial institutions down with them.  Fannie is in the process of devouring nearly 400 billion dollars of bailout money from the American taxpayer.  And now – GREAT GOOGLEY MOOGLEY – Obama is planning to funnel yet another $800 BILLION through the same Fannie and Freddie who already destroyed us once.

And thus you had a financial disaster created by one William Jefferson Clinton and one Democrat Party.  And now a second act of economic destruction is being planned by Barack Obama.

The 2008 economic collapse that Democrats were elected to fix was itself created by Democrats who will now continue the very policies that created the disaster in the first place.

Democrats then demonized Bush for merely being there when the disaster happened.  When they had created the mess, and when they had refused to allow Bush to do anything to prevent a Democrat-created disaster that he and other Republicans saw coming, but ultimately lacked the courage to stop.

CBO Totally Off Projecting Social Security Meltdown

The Congressional Budget Office has a 100% track record: they always underestimate how much government programs cost; and they always fail to project how soon they will go to hell.

It is ironically fitting that we have the news that Social Security is going into the red way ahead of schedule the same week that we pass a law based on a massively erroneous CBO projection.

From the New York Times:

This year, the system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes, an important threshold it was not expected to cross until at least 2016, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Okay.  The CBO was off by a whopping six years.

And we’re supposed to trust the accuracy of their bogus politicized “score” of ObamaCare why?

The New York Times goes on to say:

Mr. Goss said Social Security’s annual report last year projected revenue would more than cover payouts until at least 2016 because economists expected a quicker, stronger recovery from the crisis. Officials foresaw an average unemployment rate of 8.2 percent in 2009 and 8.8 percent this year, though unemployment is hovering at nearly 10 percent.

The trustees did foresee, in late 2008, that the recession would be severe enough to deplete Social Security’s funds more quickly than previously projected. They moved the year of reckoning forward, to 2037 from 2041. Mr. Goss declined to reveal the contents of the forthcoming annual report, but said people should not expect the date to lurch forward again.

Do you get that?  The report that said everything would be just peachy dandy until 2016 was just written LAST YEAR.

These people don’t have a freaking clue.  And that is simply a fact.

You were sold a bill of lies packaged under the rhetoric, “Ten years from now, ObamaCare will only cost X, Y, and Z.”

These people don’t know what the hell will happen next week, let alone next decade.

The math necessary to justify the proposition that ObamaCare would cover 30 million more people and run in a deficit neutral fashion rather reminds me of a Sidney Harris cartoon:

All I can tell you is the Democrats’ math wasn’t even explicit in step one.

There were so many gimmicks, shenanigans, and outright lies in the legislation they sent to the CBO for scoring that it isn’t even funny.

This bill will boomerang back at us in the coming years and it will bankrupt the country.  We’ve had wildly wrong budget projections in the form of analysis justifying Social Security and Medicare.  And now we’ve got $100 trillion debt in unfunded liabilities to show for those totally bogus projections.  We’ve managed to weather the massive red ink deficits in those programs until now, but there’s a fundamental difference with ObamaCare.  That difference is A) that we’re stacking ObamaCare on top of those massive liabilities and compounding trillions on top of trillions; and B) that the economy is in FAR worse shape than it was than when these massive programs went off the rails.

79% of Americans see a complete economic collapse coming.  They’re right.  Get ready for it.  Because the beast is coming.

Update, March 26: Today we have this news as reported in the Washington Times:

CBO report: Debt will rise to 90% of GDP
Friday, March 26, 2010
By David M. Dickson

President Obama’s fiscal 2011 budget will generate nearly $10 trillion in cumulative budget deficits over the next 10 years, $1.2 trillion more than the administration projected, and raise the federal debt to 90 percent of the nation’s economic output by 2020, the Congressional Budget Office reported Thursday.

In its 2011 budget, which the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released Feb. 1, the administration projected a 10-year deficit total of $8.53 trillion. After looking it over, CBO said in its final analysis, released Thursday, that the president’s budget would generate a combined $9.75 trillion in deficits over the next decade.

Only a total fool would trust the government’s ability to do anything other than massively underestimate its debts.

The problem is that fools from the party of fools are in power.

ObamaCare Is Cloward-Piven Strategy In Microcosm

First of all, what is the Cloward-Piven strategy:

From Discover The Networks:

First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse. […]

The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven’s early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1972 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one.

Newsmax offers a further description of Clowar-Piven, and raises the very real possibility that Obama not only studied the strategy, but in fact even studied under Richard Cloward:

Their strategy to create political, financial, and social chaos that would result in revolution blended Alinsky concepts with their more aggressive efforts at bringing about a change in U.S. government. To achieve their revolutionary change, Cloward and Piven sought to use a cadre of aggressive organizers assisted by friendly newsmedia to force a re-distribution of the nation’s wealth. It would be telling to know if Obama, during his years at Columbia, had occasion to meet Cloward and study the Cloward-Piven Strategy.

On my own view, Obama has a “win we win, lose we win” strategy.  To wit, the Obama administration and the Democrat Party are pursuing incredibly risky policies across the board.  If the country and the economy somehow manages to survive these measures (which I would compare to a man surviving a poisoning), Obama and the Democrats will claim victory.  If, on the other hand, the entire national system collapses due to these shockingly terrible policies, the liberals believe that a terrified, hungry public will turn to the government for help – and allow the statists to restructure the nation into a completely socialist system.

The Obama administration, on my view, consists of a collective of fiscal sociopaths.  They don’t even care about the harm that they are doing, as long as they accomplish their self-serving objective of statism, in which they ultimately wield the levers of totalitarian power.

Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said that you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.  The very real question is how far these people are willing to go to milk a crisis to impose their agenda; and how willing they would be to create a crisis to finish the job.

Now armed with the above information about Cloward-Piven, and the above thesis that Obama and the Democrats are actually employing it, let us consider the Democrats’ and Obama’s attempt to take over the health care system.

Far too many Democrats want a socialist single-payer system, and liberals like Democrat Representative Anthony Weiner think the current Senate Democrat proposal is just the ticket to take us there:

New York Rep. Anthony Weiner, an outspoken backer of the public option, hailed the expansion of Medicare as an “unvarnished” triumph for Democrats, like himself, who have been pushing for a single-payer government-run health care system. “Never mind the camel’s nose; we’ve got his head and his neck in the tent.”

The generally left-leaning Washington Post agrees with Rep. Weiner, saying that the

last-minute introduction of this idea within the broader context of health reform raises numerous questions — not least of which is whether this proposal is a far more dramatic step toward a single-payer system than lawmakers on either side realize. […]

The irony of this late-breaking Medicare proposal is that it could be a bigger step toward a single-payer system than the milquetoast public option plans rejected by Senate moderates as too disruptive of the private market.

It is amazing that when the people overwhelmingly rejected the public option, Democrats responded by giving them the public option on steroids.

But let us take a look at who have aligned against this monstrosity, and see just how bad it truly is.

The Mayo Clinic:

“Expanding this system to persons 55 to 64 years old would ultimately hurt patients by accelerating the financial ruin of hospitals and doctors across the country. A majority of Medicare providers currently suffer great financial loss under the program. Mayo Clinic alone lost $840 million last year under Medicare. As a result of these types of losses, a growing number of providers have begun to limit the number of Medicare patients in their practices.  Despite these provider losses, Medicare has not curbed overall spending, especially after adjusting for benefits covered and the cost shift from Medicare to private insurance.  This is clearly an unsustainable model, and one that would be disastrous for our nation’s hospitals, doctors and eventually our patients if expanded to even more beneficiaries.”

The Wall Street Journal rightly calls this fiasco “The Worst Bill Ever.”  Why?

As Congress’s balance sheet drowns in trillions of dollars in new obligations, the political system will have no choice but to start making cost-minded decisions about which treatments patients are allowed to receive. Democrats can’t regulate their way out of the reality that we live in a world of finite resources and infinite wants. Once health care is nationalized, or mostly nationalized, medical rationing is inevitable—especially for the innovative high-cost technologies and drugs that are the future of medicine.

The Dean of the Harvard Medical School gave it a “failing grade.”  Dr. Jeffrey Flier argued that:

In effect, while the legislation would enhance access to insurance, the trade-off would be an accelerated crisis of health-care costs and perpetuation of the current dysfunctional system—now with many more participants. This will make an eventual solution even more difficult. Ultimately, our capacity to innovate and develop new therapies would suffer most of all.

The California Medical Association came out strongly against the Democrat plan:

The state’s largest doctors group is opposing healthcare legislation being debated in the Senate this week, saying it would increase local healthcare costs and restrict access to care for elderly and low-income patients.

The California Medical Assn. represents more than 35,000 physicians statewide, making it the second-largest state medical association in the country after Texas. […]

“The Senate bill came so short that we could not support it, even though we solidly support healthcare reform,” said Dr. Dev GnanaDev, medical director at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center in San Bernardino, who also serves on the association’s executive committee.

Doctors who oppose the Senate bill are concerned that it would would shift Medicare funding from urban to rural areas, move responsibility for Medicare oversight away from Congress by creating an Independent Medicare Commission and, ultimately, decrease Medicare reimbursement rates.

That “Independent Medicare Commission” is just one of the many “death panels” this bill would create.  One hundred and eleven death panels, to be precise.

This is “It’s-Friday-the-13th-and-Jason-Voorhees-is-a-real-monster-and-he’s-actually-in-your-house” terrifying.  The Democrats will collapse our health care system.  People will die.

And I submit to you that the Democrats want to crash the health care system – which is the best in the world after adjusting for murders, suicides, and accident deaths – and replace it with a socialized system that would dramatically expand the power and scope of government.

On top of the disastrous impact on patient care would be the disastrous impact on the national economy.  The health care system that the Senate Democrats would impose on Americans would cost at least $2.5 trillion every ten years following its initial roll-out.  How much more can we afford?  How many more cards can we add to our house before the whole thing comes crashing down?

Why would anybody want to impose a system that is so terribly bad, and which will cost so terribly much?

When you think of the trillions in spending that this administration has already accumulated, and then add the additional $200 billion a year (and $1,761 per family) cost of Obama’s cap-and-trade energy fiasco, you can’t help but begin to wonder if there is an intentional determination to overwhelm our system and “push society into crisis and economic collapse.”

Even Liberals Realizing Obama Has Been Total Bust At Creating Jobs

This article is in many ways typical New York Times.  It comes from a distinctly liberal perspective, and views solutions to the problems that America faces through a liberal prism.

The big difference in this case is that it really takes a critical look at a Democrat.  It slams Barack Obama as being basically disinterested and uninvolved in – and even uncomprehending of – the biggest crisis facing the country.

Does Obama Get It?

By BOB HERBERT
Published: October 5, 2009

The big question on the domestic front right now is whether President Obama understands the gravity of the employment crisis facing the country.  Does he get it? The signals coming out of the White House have not been encouraging.

The Beltway crowd and the Einsteins of high finance who never saw this economic collapse coming are now telling us with their usual breezy arrogance that the Great Recession is probably over.  Their focus, of course, is on data, abstractions like the gross domestic product, not the continued suffering of living, breathing human beings struggling with the nightmare of joblessness.

Even Mr. Obama, in an interview with The Times, gave short shrift to the idea of an additional economic stimulus package, telling John Harwood a few weeks ago that the economy had likely turned a corner. “As you know,” the president said, “jobs tend to be a lagging indicator; they come last.”

The view of most American families is somewhat less blasé. Faced with the relentless monthly costs of housing, transportation, food, clothing, education and so forth, they have precious little time to wait for this lagging indicator to come creeping across the finish line.

Americans need jobs now, and if the economy on its own is incapable of putting people back to work — which appears to be the case — then the government needs to step in with aggressive job-creation efforts.

Nearly one in four American families has suffered a job loss over the past year, according to a survey released by the Economic Policy Institute. Nearly 1 in 10 Americans is officially unemployed, and the real-world jobless rate is worse.

We’re running on a treadmill that is carrying us backward. Something approaching 10 million new jobs would have to be created just to get back to where we were when the recession began in December 2007. There is nothing currently in the works to jump-start job creation on that scale.

A massive long-term campaign to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure — which would put large numbers of people to work establishing the essential industrial platform for a truly 21st-century American economy — has not seriously been considered. Large-scale public-works programs that would reach deep into the inner cities and out to hard-pressed suburban and rural areas have been dismissed as the residue of an ancient, unsophisticated era.

We seem to be waiting for some mythical rebound to come rolling in, magically equipped with robust job creation, a long-term bull market and paradise regained for consumers.

It ain’t happening.

While the data mavens were talking about green shoots in September, employers in the real world were letting another 263,000 of their workers go, bringing the jobless rate to 9.8 percent, the highest in more than a quarter of a century. It would have been higher still but 571,000 people dropped out of the labor market. They’re jobless but not counted as unemployed. The number of people officially unemployed — 15.1 million — is, as The Wall Street Journal noted, greater than the population of 46 of the 50 states.

The Obama administration seems hamstrung by the unemployment crisis. No big ideas have emerged. No dramatically creative initiatives. While devoting enormous amounts of energy to health care, and trying now to decide what to do about Afghanistan, the president has not even conveyed the sense of urgency that the crisis in employment warrants.

If that does not change, these staggering levels of joblessness have the potential to cripple not just the well-being of millions of American families, but any real prospects for sustained economic recovery and the political prospects of the president as well. An unemployed electorate is an unhappy electorate.

The survey for the Economic Policy Institute was conducted in September by Hart Research Associates. Respondents said that they had more faith in President Obama’s ability to handle the economy than Congressional Republicans. The tally was 43 percent to 32 percent. But when asked who had been helped most by government stimulus efforts, substantial majorities said “large banks” and “Wall Street investment companies.”

When asked how “average working people” or “you and your family” had benefited, very small percentages, in a range of 10 percent to 13 percent, said they had fared well.

The word now, in the wake of last week’s demoralizing jobless numbers, is that the administration is looking more closely at its job creation options. Whether anything dramatic emerges remains to be seen.

The master in this area, of course, was Franklin Roosevelt. His first Inaugural Address was famous for the phrase: “The only thing we have to fear. …” But he also said in that speech: “Our greatest primary task is to put people to work.” And he said the country should treat that task “as we would treat the emergency of a war.”

Now that’s the sense of urgency we need.

More Articles in Opinion » A version of this article appeared in print on October 6, 2009, on page A31 of the New York edition.

Not to dive into the genetic fallacy, as so many liberals so often do, but it is nevertheless significant that the Economic Policy Institute is a distinctly liberal think tank.  And Hart Research Associates aint exactly Rasmussen.  So while I don’t know that they aren’t right in their survey about Obama vs. Congressional Republicans, I would point out: 1) that I wouldn’t regard it as gospel; and 2) don’t forget that as LOW as Bush got in the polls, he STILL outperformed the Democrat-controlled Congress throughout his entire presidency.

In fact, Bush had more than DOUBLE the ratings of the Democrat Congress:

Bush’s job approval rating fell to 24 percent from last month’s record low for a Zogby poll of 29 percent. A paltry 11 percent gave Congress a positive grade, tying last month’s record low.

So in terms of net differences, Bush actually fared quite a bit better when pitted against a Democrat Congress than Obama is faring when pitted against Congressional Republicans.  And I would submit that the public thinks a lot more highly of Republican ideas than this smoke-and-mirror statistic would otherwise indicate.  Just sayin’.

I made that point just to demonstrate the statistical sleight of hand going on.

Now, Bob Herbert is a big government, rah-rah FDR guy, who sees the big public projects of the WPA as the model for our country’s salvation.

For what it’s worth, I – and Congressional Republicans – agree(d) that that would have been FAR better than Obama’s $3.27 trillion pork-laden employment bust known as the stimulus.

A New York Times story points out why Republicans opposed the porkulus so fiercely:

But the committee’s ranking Republican, Jerry Lewis of California, asserted that the program would do far too little to finance road construction, flood control projects and other works for the public good.

“Facts are stubborn things,” Lewis said, describing the package as a recipe for bloated government programs that would saddle taxpayers with a debt burden “well, well into the future.”

And now even the New York Times is essentially acknowledging that the Republicans were right and Obama was wrong.

I would also point out that the Hoover Dam is named the Hoover Dam because Herbert Hoover was doing public works projects before FDR.  And Herbert Hoover was the guy that every Democrat loves to blame for the Great Depression.

And while we’re on the subject of what happened in the 1930s, I might as well point out that things didn’t go so good under the leadership of FDR.

In fact, FDR’s Treasury Secretary had this to say as he looked back over the decade:

“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

A look at the graph of unemployment should help you understand what Henry Morganthau understood:

It shouldn’t surprise you when you take the time to learn about what FDR attempted that he actually prolonged the Great Depression by seven years.

Having mentioned the massive yet mysteriously ignored failure of FDR to solve unemployment or get the economy going, allow me to return to Obama’s current failure.

Still another liberal publication, Time Magazine, ran an article back in July entitled, “Obama’s Stimulus Plan: Failing by Its Own Measure.”  It begins:

Back in early January, when Barack Obama was still President-elect, two of his chief economic advisers — leading proponents of a stimulus bill — predicted that the passage of a large economic-aid package would boost the economy and keep the unemployment rate below 8%. It hasn’t quite worked out that way. Last month, the jobless rate in the U.S. hit 9.5%, the highest level it has reached since 1983.

And of course, it’s currently 9.8% – and almost certain to keep rising.

Now contrast what the Obama team predicted – a ceiling no higher than 8% unemployment – and then see what the administration is trying to pass off now:

Vice President Joe Biden delivered a rousing review of the government’s economic stimulus plan in a conversation with the nation’s governors. “In my wildest dreams, I never thought it would work this well,” he said. “Thank you, thank you.”

I mean, is this a statement that when team Obama said that they believed their stimulus plan would keep unemployment under 8% that they were being fundamentally dishonest with the American people?  And that 9.8% unemployment is better than their wildest dreams?

And don’t just say Vice President Joe Biden is an idiot and dismiss him.  He IS an idiot, of course.  But he is the official spokesidiot of the Obama Administration.

Having affirmed that significant public works-style projects would have been a massive improvement over the failed Obama stimulus, allow me to briefly point out a few other things that would have helped the nation restore confidence in the U.S. economy and the jobs that would have gone with it.

For one thing, tax breaks would have helped, but we didn’t get them.

Contrary to Democrat fluffery, there really weren’t “tax breaks” in the stimulus.  Rather, the people who got the “breaks” didn’t actually pay federal income taxes.  The “tax breaks” were really welfare breaks.  Lowering taxes stimulates more investment and more productivity by allowing investors to keep more of what they earn, rather than incentivizing them to shelter their money, which raising taxes invariably does.  Transferring money from the pockets of tax payers and giving it to those who didn’t pay federal income taxes – even if you euphemistically call it a “tax break” – simply doesn’t accomplish that goal.

Another thing that would have helped was targeting stimulus toward the businesses that actually do most of the hiring.

Small businesses which employ 20 or fewer workers are responsible for 50% of the jobs in this country.  And businesses defined as “small businesses” are responsible for nearly 3/4ths of the total jobs in the USA.

And what did small businesses get from the stimulus? Butkus.  The porn-loving National Endowment for the Arts actually got more stimulus funds than all the small businesses in the country combined.

If Democrats wanted to create jobs, they might have considered giving the money to businesses that actually created jobs, rather than to their politically connected liberal special interest groups.  Again, just sayin’.

It also would have helped if the stimulus had been something that actually helped more than it hurt.  The Congressional Budget Office, hardly a conservative bastion, reported that the stimulus bill would lead to a lower GDP 5 to 10 years out than if Congress had done absolutely NOTHING.  The enormous government spending will ultimately crowd out private investment which would have had a much higher chance of increasing GDP than the spending in the stimulus bill.