Realize That Obama Has ‘Fundamentally Transformed’ America Into A Failed Marxist State. Just Ask Poor People And Liberals

Quick test.  Who said this:

“The economy is doing poorly. Everything is expensive. With high taxes, we’re not going to be able to pay rent.”

Wrong, Democrat.  It was NOT Karl Rove or some über right wing nutjob who only said this because he hates Obama (and that because he’s “racist”).  Nope.  It was a 34-year-old Hispanic father named Francisco Zuniga at an SEIU-sponsored protest event.  Who would have thought that out of the mouths of leftist whiners could drool wisdom???

This is the fifth year of the Age of Obama.  It is the fifth freaking year of a failed president whose only talent is blaming others for his massive failures.

Let’s break those words from Zuniga down:

“The economy is doing poorly.”

That is something that literally every single person who is not a demon-possessed liar and hypocrite without shame (i.e. a Democrat) knows as a fact.  Obama promised the world; he has delivered economic manure.

What else does Zuniga say?

“Everything is expensive.”

Well, thanks for noticing that little factoid, Francisco.  I’ve written ad nauseum about the Obama Federal Reserve policies that were necessary to “fund” Obama’s reckless and morally and fiscally insane federal spending.  We’ve had Quantitative Easing, we’ve had QE2, we’ve had Operation Twist, we’ve had QE3, and now we’re at “QE Forever.”  And these policies have basically arbitrarily added zeroes to the money supply computers.  As of March of this year, Obama’s chief Fedthug had added over $2 trillion to the money supply – a beyond insane 240 percent increase.

It’s actually probably a lot more than that “mere” 240 percent increase.  CNN Money says that rather than $2 trillion, it’s actually been at least $2.5 trillion.  And as Democrat Bernie Saunders notes, it’s actually an awful lot more than that, given the AT LEAST $16 trillion in “secret loans” that had taken place under Obama’s Federal Reserve.  I mean, holy hell, where did all this cash come from?  From Never-Never Land, that’s where.

Let me put it this way: when Obama took office from George W. Bush, the Federal Reserve balance sheet was $800 billion; it is now $3,601,523 BILLION under Barack Obama.

In an article I wrote three full years ago:

An increase in the money supply is rather like an overdose of drugs. And in this case the effect of the overdose will be hyperinflation. Basically, the moment we have any kind of genuine recovery, our staggering deficit is going to begin to create an ultimately gigantic inflation rate. Why? Because we have massively artificially increased our money supply beyond our ability to actually produce real wealth, and that means that money will ultimately be devalued. There’s simply no way it can’t be. If simply printing money solved financial problems, the government could just mail everyone several million dollars, and we could all retire. The problem is that more money chasing a limited supply of goods simply pushes up prices higher and higher without doing anything to solve the underlying economic problems. If we have a recovery, with increased economic activity, there will be increased demand on the money supply, forcing an upward climb in interest rates as a means of controlling the currency. And then we’ll begin to seriously pay for Obama’s and the Democrat Party’s sins. Paradoxically, the only thing preventing hyperinflation now is the recession, because people aren’t buying anything and therefore aren’t competing for those limited goods.

THAT is why we haven’t yet experienced truly catastrophic hyperinflation YET.  But the moment we ever actually start to get out of the economic hellhole Obama has dug us into, we will see inflation at levels that will shock and dismay you.  You mark my words.  And what we’ve now learned is that having become hooked on the hardcore narcotic known as QE crack, we can’t get off of it – because if we try the stock market will crash and people will start to panic.

Who is actually going to pay for all that money Obama invented?  I pointed out the sad reality a year ago:

Nobody’s talking about what that massive devaluation of our currency is going to ultimately cost us.  Nobody is talking about the fact that the people who are going to pay the highest tax as a result of this action – and it IS a regressive tax – will be retirees who will see the value of their savings drop even as they look at interest rates and pension funds that pay them nothing.  Retirees are not in a position to snort the crack of quantitative easing; they depend mostly on bonds.  And the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve have decided to stab the bond market  that older investors necessarily depend upon in the heart to artificially inflate the stock market.  Until they have to do it again.  And again.  And of course pretty soon again and again after that.

Commodities like oil and food – which conveniently are being ignored as proof positive that we are already seeing MASSIVE inflation – will continue to go up and up and up (see here and here and here for examples).   The fact of the matter is that prices are rising dramatically and HAVE BEEN rising dramatically, and what just happened today will sure that they CONTINUE to rise dramatically.  And everybody but Obama and the Federal Reserve know it.

And everything I predicted in that article and one I wrote back in 2011 turned out to be right.  Except I used the term “QE 4” and Obama’s economic wizards called it “QE Forever” instead.  And all the way back in 2010 I said it would fail, as it HAS failed.  You need to understand: as I pointed out in May 2011, quantitative easing is the economic equivalent of feeding a diabetic lots of sugar.  It is incredibly unhealthy and will ultimately kill the patient, but once you start feeding that sugar you can’t stop or the patient will crash and die for sure, just as Wall Street will crash and die if Obama stops giving them free sugar candy money.

Let me add another group of people to retirees I described above, Francisco: THE POOR.  Because most of the poor are on fixed incomes every bit as much as retirees are.  And their low wages, their welfare and their food stamps just aint going to keep up with the inflation that has resulted from printing money.  When you print money out of thin air, and you’ve got trillions more dollars chasing the same amount of finite resources, the value of those dollars goes down, down, DOWN.

It turns out that “free money” isn’t really so damn free, after all.

Commodities such as food and fuel are skyrocketing – especially gas as Obama’s failed Middle East policy rears its ugly head in Syria (although, mind you, Obama’s gas prices have been shockingly high all along) – and so, yeah, Francisco, “everything is getting more expensive.”

We’re to the point where we will soon be spending more money in interest to service our psychotic debt than we will on anything else.  By the next decade – and keep in mind we’re nearly half way there NOW – we will be spending the equivalent of the 2009 $862 billion Obama stimulus EVERY SINGLE YEAR.  Only those payments will be going to China while they mockingly laugh at our stupidity that made us their debt slaves.

You aint seen nothing yet, Francisco.  Thanks to Obama, your hell is going to get a lot more hellish.

What else did Francisco tell us?  He told us that Obama’s economy was crappy and thanks to Obama’s moral and fiscal idiocy, everything was more expensive now due to inflation.  What else did he say?

“With high taxes, we’re not going to be able to pay rent.”

I don’t need to point out which party and which failed president of which damn party is behind all those taxes, of course.

Let’s try to put this in terms that Francisco will understand if he doesn’t already: who owns your house you’re paying that rent on?  And what do you think happens when liberal demagogues “tax the rich”???  Here’s what will happen: when Obama and Democrats viciously tax “the rich” who own that house you rent, what’s that high-taxed owner going to do?  He’s going to raise your damn rent, THAT’S what he’s going to do.  And if you don’t like paying more in rent, you’d better show up with a huge mob of likeminded enraged sufferers with pitchforks and torches to drive Obama out of Washington before he creates another monster and kills again.

But you won’t, will you?

I want you to consider something about Obama’s “housing recovery” within Obama’s “economic recovery.”  They’re both radically and wildly FAILED.  I want you to consider, Mr. Zuniga, the ramifications of the fact that SIXTY PERCENT OF HOMES SOLD IN 2013 WENT TO CASH BUYERS.  Before I point out what that means, let me first point out how connected it is with the radically failed Obama Fed policies that have kept the money printing presses going night and day and day and night:

USA: 60 percent of homes sold in 2013 went to all cash buyers
Posted on August 16, 2013 by Stacy Herbert

Stacy Summary: This is what interest rate apartheid looks like.

USA:  60 percent of homes sold in 2013 went to all cash buyers

There was an odd sort of myth floating around the market that the cash buyer  crowd was somehow a tiny portion of the market, like a drop of water in the vast  ocean of home buying.  This delusional dream played into the fantasy that this  housing market was naturally rising because of overall household demand when in  reality, it is being driven by investors leveraging the artificial low rates  created by the Fed.  The flood of money from Wall Street has been large.  Even  anecdotally, it was apparent that cash buyers were driving the market given that  housing is a margin driven market.  That is, at any given time only a small  portion of all homes are on the market for sale.  However, an analysis by  non-other than Goldman Sachs shows that 60 percent of all 2013 home sales are  being driven by cash buyers.  That is, the middle class is largely being pushed  out of this game and has become the minority in this real estate market.

You see, Mr. Zuniga, these rich people are taking advantage of the crony capitalism (fascism) of Obama that has helped the elite investor class at the expense of the poor.  They’re snapping up the homes that YOU’RE going to rent.  And then they’re socking you with higher and higher rents.  Meanwhile, you’ve got virtually no change to ever own a home thanks to Obama.  The American dream is dead meat.  And did I mention this is the FIFTH year of the Age of Obama???  But it’s all Bush’s fault, much the way in the Big Brother society of 1984 it was all “Emmanuel Goldstein’s” fault.

Meanwhile, Mr. Zuniga, it’s getting harder and harder for you to even GET a job in Obama’s wildly failed economy.  The jobless rate just went down to 7.4%.  Hip-hip-hooray.  Only it did so as still MORE of the decimated American working class were destroyed into hopelessness at EVER finding a job.

There is an incredibly significant labor measure called the “labor participation rate.”  It is the percentage of working-age Americans who actually have a damn JOB.

There’s an article I wrote a little over a year ago that you ought to consider.  I detailed then the catastrophic plunge in the rate of Americans who actually have a job in the miserably failed Obama economy during and throughout the Obama regime.  At that time, it was the worst it had been in thirty years.  And I noted how each year under Obama’s failed Marxist State, it had just gotten worse and worse.  As an example, I recorded that in November 2010 – and note this AFTER the so-called “recovery” – the labor participation rate was the worst it had been in 25 years.  Which is to say far, FAR worse than anything Bush had ever done, you Democrat ideologues.  The next year, by August 2011, it was the worst in 27 years.  And by May of 2012, it was the worst due to Obama in 31 years.

Here we are, a year or so later, and how have things gone?  Just as I told you they would go under this failed president’s failed leadership and failed ideology: the labor participation rate is now the worst in 35 years.

And the reliably überliberal Los Angeles Times was forced to acknowledge it in these terms:

Although the unemployment rate ticked down to 7.3% last month — the lowest level since December 2008 — it fell largely for the wrong reason. More discouraged Americans gave up looking for work as the percentage of the population in the labor force dropped for the third consecutive month to its worst point in 35 years.

The unemployment rate has been dropping – which has been as good for Obama politically as it has been catastrophic for the rest of America economically.  I predicted a year and a half ago:

At the rate we’re going in Obama’s God damn America, we will have zero percent unemployment and nobody will actually have a damn job.

And, yep, that’s the way we’re headed.

Democrats are demon-possessed bureaucrats.  That’s where they get their name from.  They claim that the labor participation rate is falling as older baby boomers retire.  But that is a LIE FROM HELL.  As an example, it is YOUNG ADULTS who are suffering the most due to Obamanomics.  People cannot find a job who need to work.

And because of ObamaCare, full-time jobs have been “fundamentally transformed” by Obama into part-time jobs with no health benefits.

And if you don’t believe me, again, just ask liberals.  A letter signed by the heads of the Teamsters, the UFCW and UNITE-HERE have this to say about Obama’s impact on workers and the hours they get to work:

When you and the President sought our support for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), you pledged that if we liked the health plans we have now, we could keep them.  Sadly, that promise is under threat. Right now, unless you and the Obama Administration enact an equitable fix, the ACA will shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40 hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class.

The letter from these liberal unions points out the obvious fact that Democrats refuse to acknowledge about their demonic ObamaCare takeover of healthcare:

First, the law creates an incentive for employers to keep employees’ work hours below 30 hours a week. Numerous employers have begun to cut workers’ hours to avoid this obligation, and many of them are doing so openly. The impact is two-fold: fewer hours means less pay while also losing our current health benefits.


Second, millions of Americans are covered by non-profit health insurance plans like the ones in which most of our members participate. These non-profit plans are governed jointly by unions and companies under
the Taft-Hartley Act. Our health plans have been built over decades by working men and women. Under the ACA as interpreted by the Administration, our employees will treated differently and not be eligible for subsidies afforded other citizens. As such, many employees will be relegated to second-class status and shut out of the help the law offers to for-profit insurance plans.

And finally, even though non-profit plans like ours won’t receive the same subsidies as for-profit plans, they’ll be taxed to pay for those subsidies. Taken together, these restrictions will make non-profit plans like ours
unsustainable, and will undermine the health-care market of viable alternatives to the big health insurance companies.

You want to know who is killing your dreams, Mr. Zuniga?  Democrats.

But you keep voting for them anyway, because you prefer lies and more socialism and more welfare and then more lies and still more socialism and still more welfare, to the truth that would set you free if you were willing to finally act like a man and be determined to stand up on your own two feet and demand an economic system that enables you to do that.

You’re siding with the wrong people, the wrong party, the wrong political philosophy.  You’re siding with the people who keep HURTING you.  As you’d understand if you stopped and thought about your own words.

You’re one of those people who still idiotically believes that when Obama “gives” you “free stuff,” it’s actually FREE.  Let me pop your bubble, Francisco: when ObamaCare taxes insurance companies, taxes drugs, taxes medical devices, and mandates (that means forces) the health industry to pay for all of these “free” benefits such as free birth control and 26-year-olds staying on mom and dad’s health plan, the cost of medical care rises FOR EVERYBODY.  And at the same time the quality of health care goes up for EVERYBODY.

And that has had the result that people are getting kicked off health plans rather than all the lies Obama promised.

You don’t understand that everything you and your Democrats want to do – such as force businesses to raise the minimum wage whether they can afford to do so or not, whether they will cut their work forces or not, whether they will be forced to raise prices (which will reduce demand and thus reduce jobs) on poor people who buy from them or not – undermines the economy and hurts the very poor people Democrats dishonestly claim to be trying to help.  Back in 2009, I predicted that Obamanomics with its totalitarian dictate on employers to pay higher wages would be a holocaust for minimum wage workers.  And I was right.  And I just keep being more and more right as Obama’s devastating and disastrous impact on the economy spreads like the cancer that it is.

In order for the economy to create jobs, and create enough jobs to get America out of the hellhole Obama put it in, the government needs to step off employers’ throats.  Quit forcing them to do stuff they can’t afford to do and cover stuff they can’t afford to cover.  Cut their taxes so they have an actual INCENTIVE to create jobs.  And for that matter cut the damn welfare incentive so that working-age adults who ought to be ashamed of themselves if they were capable of that virtue have an actual incentive to start working.

With QE3 Federal Reserve And Obama Administration Fully Qualify For Definition Of Insanity (Doing SAME Thing Over And Over And Expecting Different Results)

Things aren’t getting better.  Obama told you a lie.  Democrats have been telling you lies.  I (and other conservatives) have accurately and reliably told AND PREDICTED the truth from the get-go.  As I will document in this article.

First of all, the QE3 that was launched today is an open recognition of the failure of the Obama administration by the Federal Reserve.

The initial title of this article – as you can see by examining the link itself – was “GOLDMAN: Bad Jobs Report Puts Odds Of QE Next Week Above 50%.”

GOLDMAN: It Looks Like QE Is Coming Next Week
Joe Weisenthal|Sep. 7, 2012, 8:47 AM

Quick blast outta Goldman.

BOTTOM LINE: With today’s August employment report showing a nonfarm payroll gain of 96,000 and an unemployment rate of 8.1% because of a drop in the participation rate, we expect a return to unsterilized and probably open-ended asset purchases at the September 12-13 FOMC meeting.

MAIN POINTS:

1. We now anticipate that the FOMC will announce a return to unsterilized asset purchases (QE3), mainly agency mortgage-backed securities but potentially including Treasury securities, at its September 12-13 FOMC meeting. We previously forecasted QE3 in December or early 2013. We continue to expect a lengthening of the FOMC’s forward guidance for the first hike in the funds rate from “late 2014” to mid-2015 or beyond.

So this isn’t a “good thing.”  This is a bad thing.  The 200 point increase in the stock market is a temporary blip and ultimately only the institutional investors who can move money around in microseconds will be able to benefit from it.

Here’s another article I wrote back in August that cites proof that the QE3 that we just saw Friday is the result of the Obamanomics disaster.  The Fed simply didn’t launch QE3 because Obama’s economic policies are working; they did it because Obamanomics has utterly failed.

Second, let’s look at the “success” of quantitative easing:

Here’s more on that from an article I wrote back in August 2011.  Notice that I predicted with complete accuracy that QE2 would fail and that we would be at precisely the point where we are now trying a THIRD round of quantitative easing.

And this isn’t really even “QE3”; it’s really “QE4.”  Because Operation Twist basically WAS QE3.  It was certainly at the very least a “primer” for QE3.  I’m hardly the only one to say that, as it’s rather easy to show.  Just how many times do we have to keep trying this???

As long as Wall Street keeps getting its massive doses of sugar (really more like crack cocaine) from the government, it keeps feeding and feeding from the massively-government-subisidized feeding trough.

Look at the chart above and answer this question: if I were a drug addict pursuing doses of crack, how would a graph of my behavior look different?  I’d have my hit (QE1) and then crash; then I’d take another hit (QE2) and then crash; so I’d need another hit (QE3).  And then another one, ad infinitum.  That is the nature of destructive addictive behavior; and the addict either changes or he dies.  We’ll see in November if we’re ready to change or if we want to keep pursuing economic crack until we collapse and die as a nation.

How many times do you keep doing the same thing?  Now that we are at “QE3,” how is this not the classic definition of insanity???

What do you think the odds are that the market is going to tank again just like it did the first two times in anticipation of a QE4????  And you need to realize that a vote for Obama IS a vote for QE4.  And QE5.  And we’ll be a banana republic before Obama’s Fed would have a chance to do a QE6.

Not counting QE3 today, the Federal Reserve has pumped (or dumped) more than $2.3 trillion in money that it invented by adding zeros to their computer under Obama.

Let me ask you a question?  Where did that $2.3 trillion go?  Are you richer???

You sure aren’t.  In fact, even if you blame the ENTIRE recession on Bush (as liberals invariably do), Obama has still been very nearly TWICE as disastrous for household incomes in his “recovery” than you can blame Bush for during “his” recession.  You’re being lied to every single day.

When George Bush left office, a senior citizen with $300,000 in bonds – basically a fairly average retirement nestegg – could collect $1,500 a month in interest.  Which was enough for them to live on and be able to have the principal for emergencies and hopefully be able to leave that principal to their children.  But Obama and Bernanke have obliterated that; now that same $300,000 is producing only $200 a month in interest.  Which is very obviously nowhere NEAR enough to live on.  And so senior citizens are eating away at that nestegg that they counted on at a very alarming rate.  Obama and his failed policies have screwed these people – and the mainstream media will NOT talk about it.

Now the Fed balance sheet is going to be over $3 trillion.  And you can add to that shocking tally another $40 billion every single month for the foreseeable future.  Before Obama took office, it was $800 billion.  Nobody’s talking about what that massive devaluation of our currency is going to ultimately cost us.  Nobody is talking about the fact that the people who are going to pay the highest tax as a result of this action – and it IS a regressive tax – will be retirees who will see the value of their savings drop even as they look at interest rates and pension funds that pay them nothing.  Retirees are not in a position to snort the crack of quantitative easing; they depend mostly on bonds.  And the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve have decided to stab the bond market  that older investors necessarily depend upon in the heart to artificially inflate the stock market.  Until they have to do it again.  And again.  And of course pretty soon again and again after that.

Commodities like oil and food – which conveniently are being ignored as proof positive that we are already seeing MASSIVE inflation – will continue to go up and up and up (see here and here and here for examples).   The fact of the matter is that prices are rising dramatically and HAVE BEEN rising dramatically, and what just happened today will sure that they CONTINUE to rise dramatically.  And everybody but Obama and the Federal Reserve know it.

I put it in biblical terms here.  And I pointed out:

The only thing propping up the economy under Obama’s morally and fiscally idiotic policies is QE2. Banks and major businesses are not being allowed to fail (it’s all too big too fail in an increasingly fascist system in which the government dominates the banking and corporate spheres). Right now, the system Obama has only made more broken is being kept afloat in cash being created out of thin air. The last time quantitative easing ended, the DOW immediately lost 16% of its value in two weeks. And QE2 is set to end in June.

This means QE3, and then of course QE4. Because “QE” means “Quack Economics” far more than it should mean anything else.

I also pointed out that this would fail way back in 2010.  And I pointed out that all the Federal Reserve is doing is monetizing Obama’s damn insane deficits.

But the real inflation monster is still yet to come.

Back in May of last year I wrote this:

QE2 is the economic equivalent of sugar in nutrition. Will it provide quick energy? Sure it will. Will that quick energy come at the expense of future health? You bet it will.

Right now, as a result of the Obama Federal Reserve’s policy of increasing the monetary supply by buying debt from itself (literally creating money out of thin air), there is more economic activity. Right now, as a result of this policy, credit rates are lower. Fewer banks and corporations are going under because of the ready access to cheap money. Investors see the stability and invest.

We should all feed our children tons of sugar, so we can enjoy the short term bonanza of frenetic activity.

Unless you worry about all the cavities, the weight gains, the diabetes, and of course that huge depressing crash with all of those catastrophic health consequences that necessarily come later.

The first time we ended QE1, the stock market lost 16% of its value in two weeks. Which is to say it didn’t work the first time for the same reason it won’t work this second time. Or a necessary third time, etcetera.

One of the more sinister effects of quantitative easing is that it essentially becomes a tax on saving. You were busy at work putting away as much as you could during a period when your money was worth more. But now, as a result of artificially increasing the money supply, all that money you accumulated in saving is worth less. Why is this? Because you can increase the money supply all you want, but you’ve still got the same finite amount of goods and services. And when you’ve got twice as many dollars in the money supply as you had before, over time those same goods and services will cost twice as much as before, and so on.

Right now, prices are going up dramatically on virtually everything that matters. And yet the only ones who refuse to admit it are the federal government and its staunchest mainstream media propagandists who think and report what the Obama regime wants them to think and report.

In another article I wrote over two full years ago:

An increase in the money supply is rather like an overdose of drugs. And in this case the effect of the overdose will be hyperinflation. Basically, the moment we have any kind of genuine recovery, our staggering deficit is going to begin to create an ultimately gigantic inflation rate. Why? Because we have massively artificially increased our money supply beyond our ability to actually produce real wealth, and that means that money will ultimately be devalued. There’s simply no way it can’t be. If simply printing money solved financial problems, the government could just mail everyone several million dollars, and we could all retire. The problem is that more money chasing a limited supply of goods simply pushes up prices higher and higher without doing anything to solve the underlying economic problems. If we have a recovery, with increased economic activity, there will be increased demand on the money supply, forcing an upward climb in interest rates as a means of controlling the currency. And then we’ll begin to seriously pay for Obama’s and the Democrat Party’s sins. Paradoxically, the only thing preventing hyperinflation now is the recession, because people aren’t buying anything and therefore aren’t competing for those limited goods.

THAT is why we haven’t yet experienced truly catastrophic inflation YET.  But the moment we ever actually start to get out of the economic hellhole Obama has dug us into, we will see inflation at levels that will shock and dismay you.  You mark my words.

Now that we are officially at QE3, I want you to watch this video to see what necessarily awaits you:

Get ready, because the American economy WILL be going on a scary ride:

On The June/August Market ‘Correction’, Obama And QE2

There was all kinds of questions and all kinds of answers regarding why the market has been crashing since July 21:

Dow falls 512 in steepest decline since 2008 crisis

NEW YORK (AP) — Gripped by fear of another recession, the financial markets suffered their worst day Thursday since the crisis of 2008. The Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 500 points, its ninth-steepest decline ever.

The sell-off wiped out the Dow’s gains for 2011. It put the Dow and broader stock indexes into what investors call a correction — down 10 percent from the highs of this spring.

The day was reminiscent of the wild swings that defined the markets during the crisis three years ago. Gold prices briefly hit a record high, oil fell an extraordinary $5 a barrel, and frightened investors were so desperate to get into some government bonds that they were willing to accept almost no return on their money.

It was the most alarming day yet in the almost uninterrupted selling that has swept Wall Street for two weeks. Since July 21, the Dow has lost more than 1,300 points, or 10.5 percent of its value. It has closed lower nine of the 10 trading days since then.

For the day, the Dow closed down 512.76 points, at 11,383.68. It was the steepest point decline since Dec. 1, 2008.

The “10% decline” is the tipping point that defines a “market correction.”

But what is being “corrected”?  The term “correction” implies that something was wrong that needed to be corrected.

Most of what I heard yesterday had to do with the ongoing fiscal crisis in the European Union, with the P.I.I.G.S. – Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain –  just getting uglier and uglier.

Greece was bad enough.  But now Italy is going into the crapper, and Italy is just “too big to bail,” to play off the phrase “too big to fail” that “justified” so many of the recent unprecedented bailouts.

I don’t doubt that the deteriorating situation in Europe is part of the crisis that is causing the gigantic selloff in the United States that is imploding all of our market indexes.  And of course I could now get up on my soapbox and point out that, given that this failed socialist model is crashing down in Europe, WHY THE HELL IS OBAMA AND THE DEMOCRAT PARTY DOING THE SAME CRAP HERE?!?!?

And of course, that is still a valid question.

But I have a different theory as to what is going on.

I think this major market reversal is merely a delayed result of the completely artificial levels created by QE2.  And QE2, of course, was the result of our own Obama Federal Reserve machinations.

Take a look at this (and notice it was written in May prior to the end of QE2 in June):

* The QE2 Counter-Play:

The end of Quantitative Easing Two (QE2) will occur at the end of June 2011. This article is designed to provide an area for focused discussions about the design of counter-plays for a potential sharp reduction in equity valuations.

* Why would the end of QE2 cause a sharp reduction in equity valuation? In other words, how does QE2 work?

Quantitative easing is a monetary policy used by the Fed to stimulate the US economy. The Fed buys government bonds and other financial assets with new money that the Fed creates (out of thin air), thus increasing the money supply and reserves of the banking system. This action raises the prices of the financial assets bought, which lowers their yield.

As the Fed systematically purchases a substantial volume of long-term Treasury bonds and other financial assets (i.e., equities), large financial institutions (i.e., bondholders) shift their wealth into equities to achieve a higher return. In other words, the Fed’s actions reduce risk in the equities market which makes equities a more sensible investment than bonds. So, simply put, the Fed puts large quantities of money into the markets, inflating the price of equities. Money follows money, and up the market goes.

The resulting rise in equity prices increases household wealth, providing a boost to consumer spending. Figure One clearly demonstrates the effect of quantitative easing.

Figure One

click to enlarge

Of course, a few data points do not constitute absolute proof that quantitative easing is causal to a stock-market rise, or that stock-market increases cause increases in consumer spending.

However, the timing of the stock-market rise, and the lack of any other reason for a sharp rise in consumer spending, makes that chain of events look very plausible. Figure One shows us that shortly after QE1 was announced, the market free fall began to stabilize. After the QE1 program was expanded from 600b to 1.725 trillion, the market sharply reversed. When QE1 ended, the market once again reversed with about a 20% drop. That’s 200 S&P points (2,000 Dow points) over a two month time period.

QE2 was then suggested, and the market reversed. At the moment of decision, the market hesitated, then QE2 was announced, and once again, the market sharply increased. The time line of these events is perhaps more clearly demonstrated in Figure Two.

Figure Two

Note that as the Fed buys Treasures, the yield stabilizes at about 3.5%. Figure Three demonstrates a clear association between the Fed purchases and commodity prices.

Figure Three

* Consumer Spending and Increases in Share Prices:

Note – the source for this section is based on a published interview with Martin Feldstein, Professor at Harvard.

The magnitude of the relationship between the stock-market rise and increases in consumer spending also fit the data. Share ownership (including mutual funds) of American households totals approximately $17 trillion. So a 15% rise in share prices increased household wealth by about $2.5 trillion.

Relationship Between Wealth and Consumer Spending:
Historically, the association between wealth and consumer spending implies that each $100 of incremental wealth raises consumer spending by about four dollars, so $2.5 trillion of additional wealth would be expected to raise consumer spending by roughly $100 billion. That figure matches closely with a drop in household saving and the resulting increase in consumer spending.

Since US households’ after-tax income totals $11.4 trillion, an one-percentage-point fall in the saving rate means a decline of saving and a corresponding rise in consumer spending of $114 billion – very close to the rise in consumer spending implied by the increased wealth that resulted from the gain in share prices.

None of this appears to augur well for 2011. There is no reason to expect the stock market to keep rising at the rapid pace of 2010. Quantitative easing is scheduled to end in June 2011, and the Fed is not expected to continue its massive purchases of Treasury bonds after that.

Without increases in stock-market wealth, will the savings rate continue to decline and the pace of consumer spending continue to rise more rapidly than GDP?

Will the strong economic growth at the end of 2010 be enough to propel more spending by households and businesses in 2011, even though house prices continue to fall and the labor market remains weak? And does artificial support for the bond market and equities mean that we are looking at asset-price bubbles that may come to an end before the year is over?

* The Hedge Shack:

So what does the investor do? Based on what happened at the end of QE1, it appears we can anticipate a 15% to 20% drop in the overall market. Are their any market sectors that would provide safety?

I’ve discussed quantitative easing.  As an example, I said on May 9:

QE2 is the economic equivalent of sugar in nutrition. Will it provide quick energy? Sure it will. Will that quick energy come at the expense of future health? You bet it will.

Right now, as a result of the Obama Federal Reserve’s policy of increasing the monetary supply by buying debt from itself (literally creating money out of thin air), there is more economic activity. Right now, as a result of this policy, credit rates are lower. Fewer banks and corporations are going under because of the ready access to cheap money. Investors see the stability and invest.

We should all feed our children tons of sugar, so we can enjoy the short term bonanza of frenetic activity.

Unless you worry about all the cavities, the weight gains, the diabetes, and of course that huge depressing crash with all of those catastrophic health consequences that necessarily come later.

The first time we ended QE1, the stock market lost 16% of its value in two weeks. Which is to say it didn’t work the first time for the same reason it won’t work this second time. Or a necessary third time, etcetera.

Talking about this new Keynesian tactic of quantitative easing with a financial whiz is kind of like the opposite side of talking to a financial whiz about gold.  Gold is routinely pooh-poohed by financial whizzes because if people bought gold, they wouldn’t need all of the damned financial whizzes, now would they?

Now, let’s just say for the sake of argument that you were watching the Democratic National Convention in August of 2008 and came to the belief that the mainstream media coverage was so blatantly biased and dishonest that Barack Obama was going to win the election.  And you had a vision of the sheer smackdown that would happen in this “God damn America.”

So you made an appointment with your portfolio manager and told her you wanted to cash out all of your stock holdings so you could put your investment nest egg into silver and gold.

What do you expect your portfolio manager would say?  Do the words, “This is a big mistake.  Trust me, the stock market is not going to collapse.  The average gains of the stock market invariably outperform gold indices.  Blah blah blah.”  The bottom line is that if you pull your money out of the fund she manages, she’s not going to get any more of your money.

Well, the fool who did that would have bought all kinds of silver at about $13 an ounce and gold at about $825 an ounce.  And that fool would have more than doubled his money while everybody else lost their shirt, then got part of their shirt back if they played the game right, then lost their shirt again.

And, of course, if that fool happened to be watching CNBC yesterday, he would have listened and laughed as the same sort of experts pooh-poohed gold because it went up in value to an all-time high before taking something like a $30/ounce hit.  And the smart guys said, “See what happens when you put your money in gold and silver?”

And the fool was thinking, “Yeah.  I more than double my money and laugh like a drunk monkey while everybody else runs around screaming like a bunch of Chicken Littles.”

It’s pretty much the same sort of thing with quantitative easing.  Only it’s a lot more technical, and you’ve got to be a whole lot smarter and a whole lot more informed to make any money before the whole economy comes crashing down.  And in the age of quantitative easing, boy do you ever need your financial whiz kid to help you plot your course

QE1 and QE2 were abject disasters.  And I don’t doubt for a second that the “correction” that we saw yesterday – and from all accounts will see again today given the Asian market bloodbath – was in large part a delayed reaction to the end of the sugar high of QE2.  Particularly given that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said, “There will be no QE3 for the moment, but QE2 won’t come to an abrupt halt at the end of June either.”  Which is to say that nobody really knew when to start the selloff after the end of the last sugar high.

But what do I know (or the above fool, for that matter?)?

But here we are – all promises aside – at the door to QE3:

ROUBINI: QE3 Has Begun
Joe Weisenthal|Aug. 4, 2011, 7:05 AM

With markets tanking, and the economy weakening, buzz about the Fed doing QE3 has really heated up.

The FOMC meets next week, and the Jackson Hole conference (where QE2 was announce) happens soon thereafter.

But arguably, the next round of general easing has begun.

Yesterday at 3:00 AM the Swiss lowered interest rates to stem the rise of the Franc, and last night Japan intervened to make its currency weaker.

And then today, the ECB confirmed more bond buying, so however you slice it, the central banks are back into easing mode.

On Twitter, Nouriel Roubini declares that the latest currency interventions from Switzerland and Japan represent the start of QE3, ultimately ending in more Fed easing

Here’s a video that is just looking more and more likely to be history before the event:

Obama Cooking Up A Nasty Batch Of Poison Stew For Democrats With Shocking Inflation

If you listen to the mainstream media, Obama is unbeatable.  Which is really quite bizarre, given the state of the “it’s the economy, stupid.”

Inflation: Poison for Obama in 2012
By Nina Easton, senior editor-at-large @CNNMoney May 9, 2011: 7:22 AM ET

FORTUNE — One of my most vivid memories from 1974 was the gas station at the foot of the hill below my Southern California high school — car lines snaking out into the street, heralding the failure of the government’s price controls and lame ideas such as odd-even rationing. That also was the year President Gerald Ford cooked up an equally goofy plan: Whip Inflation Now, or WIN.

As Ford unveiled WIN to a joint session of Congress on Oct. 8, his bulbous forehead gleaming with sweat, he truly believed he was giving voice to a momentous occasion — on a par with F.D.R.’s call to action at the depth of the Great Depression. How could he know that, four decades later, people would still ridicule his pleas to farmers to grow more food, to citizens to “drive less, heat less,” and — the worst — to supporters to wear those ridiculous WIN buttons that the smart set turned upside down to declare “Need Immediate Money”?

That government leaders would embrace such silliness — it was Nixon who instituted the Stalinesque wage and price controls that set the stage for Ford’s call to citizen action — stands as a powerful testament to how much inflation unnerves the body politic. We haven’t experienced real inflation in more than a generation, so this economic blight is mostly an uncertain stranger to pollsters and political strategists — as well as to voters under 50. But if inflation warnings are right, this stranger could become the dark horse of the 2012 election and beyond.

We know that inflation distorts economic behavior. In the 1970s a combination of high tax rates and inflation prompted investors to flee production in favor of protection. “Give me shelter,” recalls Michael Barone, principal co-author of the annual Almanac of American Politics, referring to not only tax behavior but also investments in assets like real estate to beat inflation rates. But inflation also affects voting behavior — and could exacerbate already widespread anxiety and uncertainty about a struggling economy and President Obama’s reaction to it. With rising prices on everything from big-ticket items like college tuition to food and gas, consumers “feel they don’t have any safe ground to stand on,” Barone notes.

As both President Carter and the late President Ford could attest, that’s not a good place for an incumbent to be. John Huizinga, an economist at the University of Chicago, rightly notes that while unemployment affects some people — and rattles many more — “inflation affects everyone.” Huizinga co-authored a 1982 study that opened with the conventional wisdom of that era: “It is well known … that the public regards inflation as a more serious problem than unemployment.” Looking back, that seems astonishing. While the double-digit inflation of the 1970s had inched down to 8%, unemployment at that time was still a whopping 9.7%.

By historical standards, the latest consumer price index showing a 1.2% annual rise remains super low. But consumers are being hit with hikes to two key components that aren’t included in that number — gas and food. Consumer Growth Partners recently called the rise in grocery prices (6.5% in the first quarter) “the sharpest in a generation.” And gas prices are pushing toward $4 a gallon. Including gas and food, the annual inflation rate is more than double the rise in the CPI.

Even if systemwide inflation doesn’t return in this election cycle, rising gas and food prices will be on the minds of voters. President Obama already faces an unemployment rate that has only recently slipped below 9%, worsened by long-term jobless rates unprecedented since World War II. The Congressional Budget Office now predicts an unemployment rate of 8.2% on Election Day 2012; no President since F.D.R. has been reelected with unemployment over 8%. (President Reagan, facing a similarly painful recession, was elected with a 7.2% jobless rate.)

Add inflation to that mix and it could become a poisonous stew for Democrats. And we’ll know the President is in real trouble if his staff starts handing out buttons.

There’s a video (apparently unrelated to the above article) at the site with the title, “Fed has more to worry about.”  At just before the 2:30 mark, the expert guest says (and this is not a completely accurate transcript, but it’s pretty close):

“A lot of people think that what they’re going to do is raise interest rates and it’s going to turn into a replay of the Hooverism of the 1930s in this country where they raised rates just as the economy was beginning to creep forward.  And then you just end up with another big recession.”

And, of course, in this case, “another big recession” was otherwise known as THE GREAT FREAKING DEPRESSION!!!

Thanks to Obama and his Fed’s incredibly risky and immoral policies, shockingly high interest rates are a fait accompli.  You don’t spend (“throw away” on political patronate pork is more accurate) the trillions of dollars that these fools have spent; and you don’t simply create money out of thin air the way these clowns have done with their QE1 and their QE2 and very shortly QE3 and just get away with it.

The Fed is going to be forced to raise interest rates.  That is simply a fact.  The Obama Federal Reserve is about the only entity on planet earth that refuses to recognize that inflation is becoming a huge problem.  And the moment they ARE forced to ultimately raise rates, you’re going to start to see really ugly get really really really ugly.  Because there’s almost no possible way now that we’re going to be out of our economic woes before the Fed is forced to deal with inflation.

And yes, oh yes, inflation is most definitely here.

This was the Jimmy Carter problem.  And as people like me have been pointing out all along:

It took Ronald Reagan to get America out of a death spiral last time.  Sadly, this time there may not BE another Ronald Reagan.  And this time it may well just be too late.

The beast is coming.

‘Unexpected’ Increase In Tax Revenues: More Confirmation That Lower Taxes Increases Growth/Revenue

I just finished responding to a pair of enjoyable comments from Robbie (here and here).  And Robbie posts an excellent 5:46 minute video of the great economist Thomas Sowell:

As Robbie points out, I say much the same things as Sowell.  What he says about tax rate cuts and increased investment and growth having been proven by four presidents over nearly a century (Calvin Coolidge, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and George Bush) is exactly what I pointed out in my article “Tax Cuts Increase Revenues; They Have ALWAYS Increased Revenues.”

We just had more confirmation of the effectiveness of tax cuts in INCREASING tax revenues (which means that when the government has lower tax rates, it actually collects MORE in tax revenue than it would were it to have higher tax rates):

WASHINGTON – Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner now is saying that, contrary to his recent dire warnings of “catastrophic economic consequences” should Congress fail to increase the nation’ debt limit, there has been an apparent unexpected increase in projected tax revenue, and the deadline for possible default has been benched until mid-spring.

Allow me to define “unexpected” for you: it is an adjective in Democratese for, ‘We’re too stupid to understand why, and too dishonest to admit it, but conservative economic policies are working.'”

A little more information as to why we had this “unexpected” increase in tax revenue comes out of an interview:

CHIOTAKIS: So how did the Treasury Secretary do this? I mean, I thought the old deadline of July 8th was pretty firm.

GENZER: Yeah, that’s what everybody thought. But Geithner actually got a little help from you and me, Steve — the taxpayers. It seems the IRS actually took in more tax revenue than expected last month.

There was an expectation that was building for the entire second half of 2010 that Republicans would win big in November, which greatly stimulated the stock market:

“More than 85 percent of institutional investors see the GOP taking the House next month. While political polls suggest that changes are likely in Washington, a staggering number of professional investors think that the Republicans will win back the House of Representatives in November and that may be adding to their sense of a better business environment going forward. Since government policy error remains the biggest fear of investors, according to the poll, the view of DC trends matters.”

The unemployment rate – which had been steadily going UP, has gone down every month since Republicans were overwhelmingly elected and took over the House.  As I have pointed out in the past:

Here’s an interesting factoid that doesn’t seem to get any mention in the mainstream media: Unless I’m seriously mistaken, the unemployment rate has gone down every month since Republicans took control of The House in January:

Unemployment was if anything going UP.  And then Republicans took over, and whammo.  It started going down.  But Republicans didn’t receive so much as a scintilla of credit from the mainstream media.  It’s just amazing.

One of the things that investors and businesses were looking for from Republicans was their central promise that they would not budge in demanding that the Bush tax cuts be extended.  And as confidence grew that the Republicans would win in November and force Obama to reverse his repeatedly stated intention of pursuing Marxist class warfare and punishing investment, production and growth, people who actually produce in this nation began to act accordingly.

Hence the “unexpected” increase in tax revenue.

Democrats invariably point to the Clinton years as “proof” that the century proving that tax rate cuts increase revenues was just a ninety year fluke.

But the Clinton years actually prove the opposite: conservative policies were right during the Clinton years, too.

First, Clinton and Democrats increased taxes on the top marginal income rates in 1993.  Did wonderful things happen after that?  Well, if you’re a Republican, yes, they most certainly did: as a result of the complete failure of Clinton’s economic policy, 1994 marked the biggest takeover by Republicans in history, with Republicans slaughtering Democrats and taking over both the House and the Senate.

It wasn’t until Clinton reduced the capital gains rates that we really saw the kind of growth that Democrats love to point to.  It wasn’t until AFTER Clinton announced “the era of big government is over.”  And yet the actual reasons for that growth prove that their policies are totally wrong.

With the help of mainstream media propaganda, the American people have largely forgotten that Bill Clinton was forced to say, “The era of big government is over.”  With the help of mainstream media propaganda, the American people have largely forgotten that the “good” Clinton years came as a direct result of Republicans dominating both the House of Represenatives and the United States Senate.  With the help of mainstream media propaganda, the American people have largely forgotten that the “Clinton surplus” was the direct result of the Contract with America and its pledge for a balanced budget – literally over Clinton’s constant attempts to prevent it.

The mainstream media – like the Democrat Party whose propaganda whores they are – WILL NOT tell the truth about such matters.

But here we are again.  Republicans pass tax cuts, and then there’s an “unexpected” increase in revenue.  Just like every single other time.

After George W. Bush passed his tax cuts, we had dishonest and confused liberals reacting as the New York Times did:

“For the first time since President Bush took office, an unexpected leap in tax revenue is about to shrink the federal budget deficit this year, by nearly $100 billion.”

And for the record, President George Bush’s 2003 tax cuts:

raised federal tax receipts by $785 billion, the largest four-year revenue increase in U.S. history. In fiscal 2007, which ended last month, the government took in 6.7% more tax revenues than in 2006.

These increases in tax revenue have substantially reduced the federal budget deficits. In 2004 the deficit was $413 billion, or 3.5% of gross domestic product. It narrowed to $318 billion in 2005, $248 billion in 2006 and $163 billion in 2007. That last figure is just 1.2% of GDP, which is half of the average of the past 50 years.

Lower tax rates have be so successful in spurring growth that the percentage of federal income taxes paid by the very wealthy has increased. According to the Treasury Department, the top 1% of income tax filers paid just 19% of income taxes in 1980 (when the top tax rate was 70%), and 36% in 2003, the year the Bush tax cuts took effect (when the top rate became 35%). The top 5% of income taxpayers went from 37% of taxes paid to 56%, and the top 10% from 49% to 68% of taxes paid. And the amount of taxes paid by those earning more than $1 million a year rose to $236 billion in 2005 from $132 billion in 2003, a 78% increase.

It boils down to this: the more you hate America; the more you hate American economic power; the more you want to see the American people suffer; the more you should vote Democrat.

Now, I mentioned two comments to Robbie.  The other comment was about QE2 and its impact.

QE2 is the economic equivalent of sugar in nutrition.  Will it provide quick energy?  Sure it will.  Will that quick energy come at the expense of future health?  You bet it will.

Right now, as a result of the Obam Federal Reserve’s policy of increasing the monetary supply by buying debt from itself (literally creating money out of thin air), there is more economic activity.  Right now, as a result of this policy, credit rates are lower.  Fewer banks and corporations are going under because of the ready access to cheap money.  Investors see the stability and invest.

We should all feed our children tons of sugar, so we can enjoy the short term bonanza of frenetic activity.

Unless you worry about all the cavities, the weight gains, the diabetes, and of course that huge depressing crash with all of those catastrophic health consequences that necessarily come later..

The first time we ended QE1, the stock market lost 16% of its value in two weeks.  Which is to say it didn’t work the first time for the same reason it won’t work this second time.  Or a necessary third time, etcetera.

One of the more sinister effects of quantitative easing is that it essentially becomes a tax on saving.  You were busy at work putting away as much as you could during a period when your money was worth more.  But now, as a result of artificially increasing the money supply, all that money you accumulated in saving is worth less.  Why is this?  Because you can increase the money supply all you want, but you’ve still got the same finite amount of goods and services.  And when you’ve got twice as many dollars in the money supply as you had before, over time those same goods and services will cost twice as much as before, and so on.

Right now, prices are going up dramatically on virtually everything that matters.  And yet the only ones who refuse to admit it are the federal government and its stauchest mainstream media propagandists who think and report what the Obama regime wants them to think and report.

Meanwhile, the key factor that led to the economic crash in 2008 – the housing market – just had its worst quarter since the darkest depths of that crash.  And as bad as that is, the experts are saying that we are STILL  a ways off from hitting bottom.  Obama hasn’t solved anything.  And economists are described as being in the fetal position over this “unexpected” – (there’s that word again) – development.

It’s just like feeding that little kid sugar: frenetic activity that actually accomplishes nothing, followed shortly afterward by a nasty crash.

US Dollar, Housing, Oil And Food Markets Point To Dodo Bird Ending For America: The Beast Is Coming

This is your dollar.

This is your dollar on Obama:

APRIL 23, 2011
Dollar’s Decline Speeds Up, With Risks for U.S.
BY TOM LAURICELLA

The U.S. dollar’s downward slide is accelerating as low interest rates, inflation concerns and the massive federal budget deficit undermine the currency.

With no relief in sight for the dollar on any of those fronts, the downward pressure on the dollar is widely expected to continue.
The dollar fell nearly 1% against a broad basket of currencies this week, following a drop of similar size last week. The ICE U.S. Dollar Index closed at its lowest level since August 2008, before the financial crisis intensified.

“The dollar just hasn’t had anything positive going for it,” said Alessio de Longis, who oversees the Oppenheimer Currency Opportunities Fund.

The main driver for the dollar’s decline is low interest rates in the U.S. compared with higher and rising rates abroad. Lower rates mean a lower return on cash—and the pressure from that factor could intensify next week when the Federal Reserve’s rate-setting committee is expected to signal that U.S. short-term rates will likely remain near zero for many months to come. On Wednesday, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is scheduled to give the central bank’s first-ever press conference following a policy-setting meeting.

But it is worry about the U.S. budget deficit that is intensifying the selloff. On Monday, investors were spooked by a warning from Standard & Poor’s that it might take away the U.S. government’s coveted AAA rating status amid concerns the Obama administration and Republicans in Congress might not be able to agree to significant reductions in the deficit.

In addition, Chinese government officials have stepped up rhetoric hinting they might diversify their $3 trillion of currency reserves away from U.S. dollars. Such a shift would chip away at what has been a substantial source of dollar-buying in recent years.

I dare say that the Wall Street Journal got it wrong this time.   While it certainly might be technically true that the immediate driver of the dollar’s decline is ” is low interest rates in the U.S. compared with higher and rising rates abroad,” that is only a symptom of the ultimate cause of the dollar’s decline.  The bigger picture can be summed up in two words: quantitative easing.  Obama’s Federal Reserve is creating money out of thin air.  And with more dollars chasing the same amount (and actually fewer) finite goods and services, the value of each dollar devalues. 

A week is a long time in Obama’s God damn America.  A fool-in-chief can do a lot of damage in a week:

APRIL 29, 2011
Dollar Skids to New Three-Year Lows
By JAVIER DAVID

NEW YORK—Investors wasted no time in sending the dollar to new three-year lows after the Federal Reserve gave them little reason to support it.

Weak U.S. growth and unemployment data quickened the dollar’s fall. Initial employment claims jumped back above the 400,000 level in the latest week. Meanwhile, gross domestic product data showed that economic growth slowed sharply in the first quarter, led by surging food and energy costs that sent a key gauge of inflation, the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index, soaring to its highest level in nearly three years.

Late Thursday, the euro was at $1.4821 from $1.4794 late Wednesday. The dollar traded at ¥81.54 from ¥82.04, while the euro was at ¥120.85 from ¥121.37. The U.K. pound bought $1.6640 from $1.6636. The dollar fetched 0.8733 Swiss franc from 0.8738 franc, plunging to a new record low.

The ICE Dollar Index, which tracks the U.S. dollar against a trade-weighted basket of currencies, was at 73.12 from 73.519, its lowest level since July 2008.

Has Obama made our economy better?  Really?  You’ve been watching and reading mainstream media propagandist lies, haven’t you?  Here’s the reality: our dollar situation is every bit as bad now as it was when the terrible economic implosion of 2008 hit us.  That giant sucking sound you hear all around you is the value and purchasing power of your dollar sinking into the abyss.

Here’s another major economic indicator going right down the toilet:

Home price gains since spring 2009 vanish
The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index for 20 major U.S. cities in February comes close to its previous bottom reached in April 2009.
By Alejandro Lazo, Los Angeles Times
 April 26, 2011, 5:06 p.m.

The home price gains made after the housing market bottomed in spring 2009 have vanished, with 10 cities posting fresh lows in February, according to a closely watched index that tracks home prices in America’s biggest metropolitan areas.

The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index for 20 major U.S. cities, released Tuesday, came within a hair of its previous bottom hit in April 2009. The renewed drop in home prices indicates the nation’s housing woes continue despite a recovery in the broader economy.

“There is very little, if any, good news about housing. Prices continue to weaken, while trends in sales and construction are disappointing,” said David M. Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at Standard & Poor’s.

[…]

Foreclosures remain a significant part of the market and probably will remain so for the foreseeable future as borrowers continue to fall behind on their mortgage payments.

Patrick Newport, U.S. economist for consultancy IHS Global Insight, wrote in a note Tuesday that the decline in the index and drops in other home price measures — specifically a monthly index produced by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which has seen steady declines in recent months — indicate that the housing slump is once again widespread.

The federal agency’s index’s “recent decline indicates that the vicious cycle in which falling prices lead to more foreclosures which lead to even lower housing prices, continues to play a role in keeping housing on the mat,” Newport wrote.

The Case-Shiller index has fallen to nearly the same level it was in April 2009, the last time it bottomed, evaporating the gains made last year after a popular tax credit for buyers fueled sales nationally. Experts predict prices will continue to fall this year, pushing past their previous lows into a much-feared double dip.

The only thing propping up the economy under Obama’s morally and fiscally idiotic policies is QE2.  Banks and major businesses are not being allowed to fail (it’s all too big too fail in an increasingly fascist system in which the government dominates the banking and corporate spheres).  Right now, the system Obama has only made more broken is being kept afloat in cash being created out of thin air.  The last time quantitative easing ended, the DOW immediately lost 16% of its value in two weeks.  And QE2 is set to end in June.

This means QE3, and then of course QE4.  Because “QE” means “Quack Economics” far more than it should mean anything else.

The following video WAS a fictional account warning us of what could happen.  But it is about to become news before history confirms it:

And do I really have to say anything about gas prices?  Gas was $1.79 a gallon when Obama took office; it is now $3.91 and going up every single day.  That is an increase of more than 118%.  How’s that hope n’ change workin’  out for ya?

Should I mention corn?  Field corn has increased 300% (from $2 a bushel in 2009 to $6 a bushel now) under Obama’s dreadful godawful policies. 

Wheat prices have more than doubled.  These are basic staples used in everything. 

Food costs more than at any time since 1974.  And it’s going to get much, much worse.  Prices for food and meat are going to soar in the coming days.

Liberals say they care about the poor.  But they don’t give a damn about the poor.  All Democrats want is to “fundamentally transform” America into a socialistic system where they can maintain power forever.

The other thing to say about the above is that Gerald Celente predicted in 2008 that food riots and revolution would overtake America by 2012.  I pointed out in a recent article that what he said is exactly coming to pass both here and around the most flammable region on earth.

And all the unrest you’re seeing around you is simply the Cloward and Piven strategy for bringing about the downfall of the United States of America finally coming to pass exactly like the left wants, and exactly like people like me were talking about for the last two years.

Nobody’s really telling you about what’s happening or about what’s coming.  And that’s mostly because nobody wants to hear about it.

When Adolf Hitler seized power (he never took more than 37% of the vote, but that doesn’t stop a big government tyrant from seizing total power), he began to ruthlessly suppress dissent.  Today, the Democrat Party has pushed on attempt to impose one euphamistically-named “Fairness Doctrone” after another to shut down competing voices, even as Nancy Pelosi now demands a system in which “elections shouldn’t matter so much” in the aftermath of the one that drove her from power).

I think of one journalist named Stephen Laurent who was impriosoned for trying to tell the truth about Hitler.  He wrote:

“I am writing this from cell 24. Outside a new Germany is being created. Many millions are rejoicing. Hitler is promising everyone precisely what they want. I think when they wake to their sobering senses, they will find they have been led by the nose and duped by lies.”

And that is where America is heading.  Only there will be no America to rebuild America the way the United States of America rebuilt Germany in the aftermath of Germany reaping its whirlwind after sowing the wind.  Obama himself will have seen to that.

The funniest thing about this – if anything about America turning into a socialist banana republic is “funny” – is that it will be the left who so rabidly despise the Word of God (otherwise known as the Holy Bible) who will bring about it’s ultimate fulfillment.

The beast is coming.  He will be a one-world global leader who will take over in the catastrophic aftermath of false messiahs like Barack Hussein Obama.  He will be the personification of the United Nations and globalism and a world without borders and all the other total idiocy the left has been jabbering about for decades.  He will represent the sum total of everything the liberals have ever yearned for.

The secular humanist left has said that if they could just take over, they would create a humanist Utopia.  God is going to give them their chance in the Tribulation with the big government Utopia of the Antichrist.

And in just seven years he will have brought a literal hell on earth.

It will be the left – it will be the people who most hate and despise and mock the Bible – that brings about all of the end times prophecies of the very Bible they so ridicule.

Barack Obama is an example of the sneering tone of the left toward the Word of God:

Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount – a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let’s read our Bibles. Folks haven’t been reading their Bibles.

But I have been reading my Bible, President Obama.  And I’m seeing more and more reasons to believe it and accept it as God’s Word about a time which is now at hand.

I see the dollar devaluing to nothing; I see the cost of food skyrocketing.  And I consider the words of the book of Revelation:

“He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name” (Revelation 13:16-17)

.

Obama’s ‘Hope And Change’ At Work: Most Americans (Correctly) Believe Our Best Days Are Now Behind Us

History reminds us of a time – not all that long ago – when a charismatic leader promised a fundamental transformation that brought hope to a nation.

The leaders’s name was Adolf Hitler.  It didn’t end well.  Seriously.

The kind of fascistic irrationally euphoric Utopian rhetoric of Obama –

“I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal… This was the moment — this was the time — when we came together to remake this great nation …”

– hasn’t seemed to work out very well in the real world.  I mean who talks like that but a fascist demagogue promising a false Utopia, anyway?  Not that most liberals have any clue whatsoever about the real world, mind you.

The evidence is crystal clear that Obama is a fascist and a demagogue.  But the mainstream media is every bit as unlikely to tell the truth about Obama as Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda was likely to tell the truth about their Fuhrer.

The New York Times once said – as part of the irrational fascistic hype surrounding Obama – that:

WASHINGTON — At the core of Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is a promise that he can transcend the starkly red-and-blue politics of the last 15 years, end the partisan and ideological wars and build a new governing majority.

Did Obama ever once come close to actually fulfilling that “core presidential promise”???

How about this: within 24 days of Obama assuming the presidency, The Wall Street Journal was rightly able to say this about our “transcending” figure:

President Barack Obama has turned fearmongering into an art form. He has repeatedly raised the specter of another Great Depression. First, he did so to win votes in the November election. He has done so again recently to sway congressional votes for his stimulus package

It wasn’t even a month after assuming the presidency that Obama began to dismiss the Republicans he had promised to reach out to:

“Don’t come to the table with the same tired arguments and worn ideas that helped to create this crisis,” he admonished in a speech.

It was barely only a month after assuming the presidency that Obama began to thumb his nose at the Republicans he had promised to reach out to:

 When [Republican Rep. Eric] Cantor tried to justify his own position, Obama responded: “Elections have consequences, and at the end of the day, I won.”

Were those really the words that would “transcend the starkly red-and-blue politics of the last 15 years”???  In taking that stand, was there actually any chance whatsoever that Obama would “end the partisan and ideological wars”???  Is anyone frankly so morally and intellectually stupid to see these tactics as they way to “build a new governing majority”???

And of course, shortly after the American people rejected Obama in the largest shallacking in modern American history and voted against the Democrat Party in droves, Nancy Pelosi began to further degenerate into fascism (where elections shouldn’t matter unless the fascists win them), saying: “elections shouldn’t matter as much as they do.”

And then we proceeded to see Democrats and liberals behave far more like fascists than people who gave a damn about elections or the consequences of elections in Wisconsin.

I think of the fact that Hitler never won more than 37% of the vote.  But the moment he seized power, “elections didn’t matter as much as they should have.”

Barack Obama is a man who has personally repeatedly demonized George W. Bush, Republicans, entire industries, businesses, and even medical doctors (remember how they amputate people’s feet and yank out their tonsils just to illegitimately profit?).  As a Senator, he personally attacked George Bush for his failure of leadership for having to raise the debt ceiling; now he’s personally attacking anyone who acts as cynically and despicably as he acted.  Obama personally demonized George Bush for trampling on the Constitution for Iraq even though Congress had directly authorized his actions; but this same cynical demagogue would attack Libya without any congressional authorization whatsoever.  Obama lectured Republicans that it hurt the country and the essential political debate to demagogue the other side with health care, only to viciously attack the Republicans the first time he thought it would politically help him to do so.  Rep Ryan – whom he invited to his speech just to single him out for attack – said, “What we got yesterday was the opposite of what [Obama] said is necessary to fix this problem.”  And Obama doesn’t just demonize his opponents; he falsely demonizes his opponents by telling demonstrable lies.

As I said, Obama is a fascist bully and a cynical demagogue.  And yet the mainstream media has the unmitigated chutzpah to continue to insanely depict this cynical, lying, hypocrite demagogue as an inspirational figure.

The American people and the mushroom have something in common: both are kept in the dark and fed manure.

So you can understand why the American people – for all the information available to them – are so terribly ignorant about just what the hell is going on in our political system.

But as misinformed and lied-to as Americans are when it comes to the sea of lies they are presented with as “news,” they are still aware that fewer of them have jobs, fewer of them have homes, their food cost more, their fuel cost more and that the quality of their lives are rapidly slipping away under the policies of a failed president and his failed party.

America’s Best Days
Those Confident That America’s Best Days Lie Ahead Down to 31%
Monday, April 25, 2011

Voter confidence that the nation’s best days are still to come has fallen to its lowest level ever.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely Voters shows that just 31% believe America’s best days are in the future. That’s down three points from last month and is the lowest result found in polling since late 2006.

Fifty-three percent (53%) believe America’s best days are in the past, also the highest measurement in over four years. Sixteen percent (16%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Separate polling finds that only 22% of Likely Voters believe the United States is now heading in the right direction. That ties the lowest level found during Barack Obama’s presidency.

While majorities of Republicans (68%) and voters not affiliated with either major political party (52%) believe America’s best days are in the past, a plurality of Democrats (45%) thinks its best days still lie ahead.

Fifty-eight percent (58%) of white voters believe America’s best days have come and gone, but the same number of black voters (58%) feel the opposite is true.

[…]

And of course, it is true: America’s days truly ARE behind us as long as Barack Hussein Obama and as long as Democrats are able to continue to lead.  Either Democrats will go down, or America will go down.

But, liberals say, it was BUSH who made the economy fail.  Two things: 1) how many years should that line of garbage continue to succeed?  And 2) it was never true to begin with (also see here).

Do you know that Democrats had total control of both the House and the Senate from 2006 until 2010???

George Bush tried SEVENTEEN TIMES to warn Congress that unless we got control of the out-of-control Democrat-controlled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the out-of-control housing and housing mortgage market that it was poisoning with piles of bad debt, our economy would go under.  The problem had festered because Bush had reappointed the first black Fannie Mae CEO because of political correctness.  Franklin Raines was a failure and a corrupt fraud who disguised massive debt.  Further, fearing the same political correctness, Republicans had allowed themselves to be repeatedly stymied in their attempts to reform the Government Sponsored Enterprises Fannie and Freddie as Democrats screamd “racism.”  John McCain was if anything even more clear in 2006 when there was still time to fix the developing crisis.  McCain wrote (in 2006):

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?

McCain asked, “Who would actually pay this massive debt for these incredibly risky liberal policies if Fannie or Freddie could not?’  And we now have the answer to that question, don’t we???

Even the liberal New York Times recognized the threat posed by Fannie and Freddie.  And Peter Wallison all but predicted the collapse as early as 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.”

 The same 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.”

Wallison was 100% correct, and had the FACT that he had accurately predicted the collapse to give him further credibility.  Democrats were 100% wrong.  Barney Frank was one of the unanimous Nazi-goosetepping Democrats who said stuff like this:

”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.”

Basically a MONTH before Fannie and Freddie went bankrupt and started the entire housing mortgage market collapse in 2008, Barney Frank was still singing the same idiotic tune:

REP. BARNEY FRANK, D-MASS.: “I think this is a case where Fannie and Freddie are fundamentally sound, that they are not in danger of going under. They’re not the best investments these days from the long-term standpoint going back. I think they are in good shape going forward.

They’re in a housing market. I do think their prospects going forward are very solid.”

John McCain correctly predicted a disaster.  Barney Frank was still spouting outrageous lies just one month before the bottom fell out of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and then caused the bottom to fall out of the entire economy.  Republicans were right and Democrats were disasterously wrong.  And the American people responded by electing Democrats and purging Republicans.  Because we were lied to, and because we have become a bad people who believe lies.

Democrats blocked every single move by both the Republicans and by George Bush.  They actually threatened filibusters to prevent Bush from fixing the broken system that failed and it was DEMOCRATS who took our economy down the drain.

And Senator Barack Obama had more campaign money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in a shorter time than anyone in Congress.  And he also had more campaign money from Lehman Brothers – a dirty Wall Street player that went belly up – in a shorter time than anyone else in Congress.  Obama was bought and owned by the people who blew up our economy.

Only a nation of fools would have voted for this inexperienced Marxist fool to run our nation.  But a nation of fools believed the worst media propaganda campaign since Joseph Goebbels plied his trade.

Even fools feel pain when they keep getting burned, though.  And Obama is burning America alive.

We are slipping.  Even fools can feel it:

26 Apr, 2011, 11.27AM IST,IANS
China’s economy to surpass that of US by 2016: IMF

BEIJING: The Chinese economy will surpass that of the US by 2016, the International Monetary Fund ( IMF )) has predicted.According to the IMF’s forecast, based on “purchasing power parities”, China’s gross domestic product (GDP) will rise from $11.2 trillion in 2011 to $19 trillion in 2016, while the American economy will increase from $15.2 trillion to $18.8 trillion.

China’s share of the global economy will ascend from 14 percent to 18 percent, while the US’ share will descend to 17.7 percent, China Daily reported.

The Economist had predicted in December 2010 that China would overtake the US in terms of nominal GDP in 2019.

 At the same time all of the other growing disasters is taking place, we have a crisis in the price of oil.  And Obama has done nothing but exacerbate that crisis with energy policies that are even more destructive than Jimmy Carter’s.

Do you feel your nation growing smaller and smaller and weaker and weaker?  That is the hope and change you voted for.

In the time that Obama has been president, we’ve gone from predicting China would overtake us by 2030, to 2019, to just five years away.  And mark my words, it will be moved up yet again, before they overtake Obama’s ignorant stupidity even faster than that.

Under Obama, and due to his immoral and criminally reckless policies, we are spending like fools and at the same time insanely inflating our money supply (under the euphamism of “qantitative easing” or QE2.  And here are the results:

APRIL 23, 2011
Dollar’s Decline Speeds Up, With Risks for U.S.
BY TOM LAURICELLA

The U.S. dollar’s downward slide is accelerating as low interest rates, inflation concerns and the massive federal budget deficit undermine the currency.

With no relief in sight for the dollar on any of those fronts, the downward pressure on the dollar is widely expected to continue.
The dollar fell nearly 1% against a broad basket of currencies this week, following a drop of similar size last week. The ICE U.S. Dollar Index closed at its lowest level since August 2008, before the financial crisis intensified.

“The dollar just hasn’t had anything positive going for it,” said Alessio de Longis, who oversees the Oppenheimer Currency Opportunities Fund.

Thanks to your fool-in-chief president, your dollar is worth less and less.  And your gas and your food cost more and more.  Food now costs more than at any time since 1974, thanks to the Democrat messiah.

Or maybe he’s not such a fool.  Because maybe this is what he wanted all along.  Read this article on “the Cloward and Piven Strategy” created by liberals/progressives to implode America written in 2008 (you could also read my own article written in 2009).  And then see what top SEIU official Steven Lerner – who left the “workers of the world unite; it’s not just a slogan anymore” radical union at the same time #1 White House visitor Andy Stern did – had to say about deliberately trying to cause a financial crisis that will implode America.

The United States of America is dangerously close to complete collapse.  One wrong move, one piece of bad news, just one thing, could send us into a collapse that will be impossible to stop.

And we are either being led by a total fool, or even worse, we are being led by a man who is actively plotting to collapse America to impose a radical leftwing ideology, and who doesn’t care one iota more about the American people than Adolf Hitler cared about the German people.

I’m sure you have probably picked up on my angry tone.  I am angry; I’m beyond angry.  Why?  Because I see the beast foretold by the book of Daniel and the book of Revelation coming.  I see the collapse coming, and the Antichrist riding in on his white horse to save the day.  And I see that the same liberals, the same progressives, the same Democrats who caused this collapse will be the ones to welcome this coming world dictator.  And it will be these same Democrats who call for the American people to take his mark on their hands or on their foreheads so that they can join the rest of the world and buy and sell.

Rest assured, Obama’s reckless fiscal policies are not just undermining America; they are undermining the entire world.  The unrest in the Middle East (which again says “Last days as foretold by the Bible” all over it) is directly attributed to Obama’s monetary policies, according to the G-2o and the central banks.

Barack Obama is a false messiah.  The Democrat Partyis the party of hell.  And they are leading us to hell on earth right now.  Today.

And we are voting for hell.

You mark my words.  It won’t be long now.  The beast is coming.  And if you vote Democrat, you have already voted for him by paving the way for his soon-arrival.

Get ready for hell.

The Pathological Stupidity Of Obama’s ‘Fairness’ Meme Of Taxing The Rich

We need to balance our insane budget deficit, Democrats say.  And it’s time the rich paid their fair share.

All the top 10% of earners paid is 73 percent of the income taxes collected by the federal government.  That’s nothing.  It’s those poor poor who suffer the most.  The bottom 50% have to pay a whole bunch of nothing.  It’s just brutal for them every April.  They want to write a check to the government, but only the rich get to do stuff like that.  And the bottom 40% are so screwed by our federal income tax system that they actually are forced to accept free money in addition to paying a whole bunch of nothing.  Unless the Associated Press is lying about it.

Nothing makes me more annoyed than the phrase “give the rich tax cuts.”  Because it presumes that the government owns us and graciously allows us to keep some of what we earn.  The way liberals understand things, they own all the means of production.  They own my labor and whatever I earn from my labor.  And I am lucky if the commissars allow me to keep enough to feed myself.  It derives from a tenant of Marxism: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”  At the core is central planning; government stands above us, it stands above God (which is why consistent Marxists deny God exists and religion is merely an opiate of the masses), and government should redistribute everything according to its divine power.

That is the intrinsic logic of their view that allowing the rich or anyone else to keep more of their own money is considered a cost to the government.  But it ISN’T a cost to the government to allow me to keep more of my own money; anymore than it is a cost to me to allow my next door neighbor to keep more of his own tools.

Obama gave an address in which he paid lip service to reducing spending – even though his budget that he released only TWO MONTHS AGO didn’t reduce any spending at all – and in fact stated that it would be dangerous to do so.  Obama has no plans to cut spending; in fact, the deficit in just the first six months of this year shot up another 15.7%.  Obama is going to do what he’s been doing since he started running for president; he’s going to offer meaningless rhetorical platitudes about cutting spending and reducing costs, while demonizing the rich and demanding that the ONLY people who pay REALLY START TO PAY.

Obama is going to talk about “fairness.”

The ‘fairness’ meme
April 12, 2011 – 4:47 am – by Roger Kimball

We don’t know exactly what Barack Obama is going to say when he fires up his teleprompters at George Washington University tomorrow. The color, we do know, however: it’s red, as in “red ink,” what Mitch Daniels at his speech at CPAC earlier this year called “the new red menace.” (I like to think that the invocation of the old “red menace,” the Communist, socialist one, was deliberate: it is, I would argue, apt.)

The substance of the speech, as ABC notes, is “closely held.” Everybody thinks that there will be at least pro forma acknowledgement that spending on such programs as Medicare and Social Security needs to be reined in. But the big O will also return to one of his favorite themes, a by-word from his 2008 campaign: “increased taxes on the wealthy” (that’s according to “White House officials”).

Here’s my bet: the operative word in Obama’s speech tomorrow night, the mantra that will be repeated endlessly not only by O but also by the left-wing commentariat, is “fairness.” You remember his campaign shtick: the Saddleback Church event, for example, when Rick Warren asked candidates John McCain and B.O. about taxes. “Define rich,” he asked. McCain tossed out an income of $5 million, which elicited derision. But the gravamen of his response came in the elaboration: “I don’t want to take any money from the rich. I want everybody to get rich.”

How different was B.O.’s response: What he was looking for, he said, was “a sense of balance, and fairness in our tax code. It is time for folks like me who make more than $250,000 to pay our fair share.”

“Our fair share.” That, as I noted at the time, is B.O.’s refrain. “[W]e will save Social Security for future generations by asking the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share.” It’s a small step from the invocation of “our fair share” to Obama’s call for a tax on “the windfall profits of oil companies,” a tax increase on capitals gains, elimination of the tax on Social Security tax, etc., etc.

The crucial point here is that what Obama is interested in is not increasing revenue but in promulgating redistributionist policies that make it harder for people to prosper economically. William McGurn, writing in The Wall Street Journal back then, recalled Obama’s response to ABC’s Charlie Gibson when Gibson observed that raising taxes led to decreased revenues: “Well, Charlie,” Obama replied, “what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.”

“For purposes of fairness”: that means, “for purposes of economic egalitarianism.”

McGurn observed:

[I]t doesn’t really matter whether a tax increase actually brings in more revenue. It’s not about robbing from the rich to give to the poor. Robbing from the rich will do, especially if it’s done in the name of fairness.

Now there are good reasons Mr. Obama is not likely to pursue the revenue side of the fairness question. As this newspaper noted in a recent editorial, the latest data from the Internal Revenue Service does not show to Mr. Obama’s advantage. As we come to the end of the Bush administration, the top 1% of American taxpayers already pay 40% of all income taxes — the highest level in 40 years. The top 10% of income earners pay 71% of the taxes.

The bottom line is that when Obama invokes “fairness,” he wants us to feel guilty about economic success. This is the secret of his appeal to the socialistically inclined.

It worked in 2008. Let’s see how it goes down tomorrow. Over the last two years, Barack Obama has presided over an economic Armageddon. Everyone knows about that $14 trillion that is the federal debt. Few people, I suspect, really appreciate what that unimaginable figure represents. And the kicker is, $14 trillion is only a tithe of the trouble. As Kevin Williamson and others have pointed out, the country’s real debt, when you facotr in state indebtedness and unfunded so-called “entitlement” liabilities, is closer to $130 trillion. That horror-movie figure is just too awful to contemplate, so I will draw a veil.

[…]

For the record, I wrote an article entitled, “Tax Cuts Increase Revenues; They Have ALWAYS Increased Revenues,” in which I documented that every single time the United States has reduced the income tax rate, federal revenues have gone up.  I go back to Warren Harding to document that.  I include John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush – who increased federal revenues by lowering tax rates.

But this recurring documented fact of U.S. history is tantamount to rocket science to liberals.  Because they adhere to the entirely unrealistic premise that if I were to double your taxes, I would collect double the revenue, because people wouldn’t react to the tax increase by altering their behavior.

Recent developments give me a crystal clear example of why liberals couldn’t be more wrong:

Gas Price Rise, Americans Drive Less
By Rachel Smith
Posted: Apr 12, 2011 10:30 a.m.

Americans are taking rising gas prices seriously. They’re already driving less, “reversing what had been a steady increase in demand for fuel,” the Associated Press writes. “For five weeks in a row, they have bought less gas than they did a year ago.”

The average price of gas is an obvious indicator of why national fuel consumption is dropping. At the end of March, AAA reported that gas reached an average of $3.60 nationally. Today, AAA says the national average is $3.79 for regular grade, a 29 cent jump in about two weeks. Business Week reports that many analysts forecast that these numbers will worsen, and expect that consumers could pay as much as $5 a gallon this year due to political unrest in North Africa and the Middle East, which supply much of the United States’ oil. The $5 per gallon speculation has been floating around the industry for some time, but last year, CNN stated that former president of Shell Oil, John Hofmeister predicted that Americans could pay $5 a gallon by 2012. Analysts have bumped that date up.

“Drivers are already reacting to the change,” writes Kicking Tires. “In the first week of April, consumption was down 3.6%, or 2.4 million gallons of gasoline,” based on data from MasterCard Spending Pulse.

One of the best ways to combat rising gas prices is to drive less, but there are other simple things you can do. […]

Even uneducated, ignorant and frankly stupid people understand this incredibly basic concept: cost goes up, activity goes down.  And yet you have liberals with PhDs staffing agencies such as the Congressional Budget Office utterly fail to understand that if they make taxes go up, they will end up with reactions that will invariably produce less revenue for the government.

If even high-school dropouts understand that if the price of gasoline goes up, they need to drive less, how is it that brilliant businessmen won’t realize that if their tax rates go up, they need to protect their money?

Here’s another analogy that might be spot on the money.  Suppose your going to work and a mugger jumps you and takes all your money.  As he’s walking off, counting your (well, his now) cash, he says, “I hope you’ve got as much dough tomorrow, because I’m going to mug you again.”  Now, if you’re smart, you won’t be happening by that way at all the next day.  But if you’ve absolutely got to go that way to get to work, will you have as much money that next day?  Not if you’ve got a single functioning brain cell.  On my analogy, if you figure out some other way to get to work, that’s tax avoidance.  If you stash your cash somewhere so you don’t have it for the robber to take, that’s tax sheltering.  And if you’re too stupid to understand that this is what people do when their taxes go up, that’s liberalism.

The more taxes increase, the more activities that were previously not worth doing – such as sheltering assets, moving assets overseas, investing in collectibles, purchasing tax-exempt investment vehicles, or just dodging taxes – become worth doing.

And so,what happens every single time happens yet again.  Raise taxes expecting more revenue, get less revenue, and hurt the economy in the process by penalizing productivity and investment risk and thereby restricting growth.  And when you encourage growth by reducing the tax burden and allowing people to keep what they earn, lo and behold, cetaris parabis, there is a surge in activity, an increase in economic growth and a corresponding increase in federal tax revenue.

I say “cetaris parabis” because if you throw in a socialist Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that undermine something as vital as our housing mortgage market by imposing morally and fiscally insane policies until the system comes crashing down, such as what occurred leading up the crash in 2008, the best tax rates in the world can’t save the system.

Here are just a few articles I wrote on that subject, in order of date written with the earliest listed first:

Biden: ‘We Misread The Economy, And It’s All Republicans’ Fault

AEI Article: How Fannie And Freddie Blew Up The Economy

Barney Frank And Democrat Party Most Responsible For 2008 Economic Collapse

More Proof Democrats Destroyed The Economy In 2008: The Ongoing Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac Disaster

We need to have intelligent economic policies.  If we don’t have such policies, we’re going to struggle regardless of our tax rates.

Quickly, another liberal policy that will not even possibly work is the Federal Reserve QE2 (that’s the second shot at quantitative easing) that artificially reduces interest rates by artificially increasing the money supply in order to increase lending.

Here’s the problem with that.  Short term, it might seem to work.  The stock market looks at the apparent backstopping of our economy and follows the leader (Uncle Sam) up until the ship starts to sink.  After which they will sell, sell, sell.  But the ship ALWAYS sinks.  Why?  Because you have a lot more dollars chasing after the same supply of finite goods and services (if anything, in the last few years, we have a LOWER supply of finite goods and services).  So what happens?  More dollars chasing less stuff.  That’s inflation.  It will INVARIABLY require more devalued dollars to buy the same things.  The more you inflate the money supply, the worse that inflation gets.  And we have massively increased our money supply.

Let me go back to what I wrote going on a year ago now:

An increase in the money supply is rather like an overdose of drugs.  And in this case the effect of the overdose will be hyperinflation.  Basically, the moment we have any kind of genuine recovery, our staggering deficit is going to begin to create an ultimately gigantic inflation rate.  Why?  Because we have massively artificially increased our money supply beyond our ability to actually produce real wealth, and that means that money will ultimately be devalued.  There’s simply no way it can’t be.  If simply printing money solved financial problems, the government could just mail everyone several million dollars, and we could all retire.  The problem is that more money chasing a limited supply of goods simply pushes up prices higher and higher without doing anything to solve the underlying economic problems.  If we have a recovery, with increased economic activity, there will be increased demand on the money supply, forcing an upward climb in interest rates as a means of controlling the currency.  And then we’ll begin to seriously pay for Obama’s and the Democrat Party’s sins.  Paradoxically, the only thing preventing hyperinflation now is the recession, because people aren’t buying anything and therefore aren’t competing for those limited goods.

And let me point out that we’re looking at huge inflation now – even as Obama declares victory over the recession – in insanely rising gas prices, food prices, clothes prices, all prices:

Hope ‘n Change Coming To Fruition: Cost Of EVERYTHING About To Go Up

Instability, Food Riots And A Heaping Dose Of ‘I Told You So’

Just like I said would happen.  And just like the long list of economists said would happen when they begged Obama not to do the $3.27 trillion stimulus.

This phenomenon is going on all over the world because most of the world is tied to the U.S. dollar – the currency that Obama has been poisoning hoping for short-term political gains.

And, again, a temporary extension of the Bush tax cuts (which doesn’t help businesses and individuals who are desperately searching for consistency so they can predict their costs) is not going to help us out of this kind of moral and fiscal insanity.

But what we are going to see is Obama now demagoguing all the massive economic failure that his own policies are responsible for creating in the first place to demand that the rich “pay their fair share.”

Actual U.S. Debt Exceeds GDP Of Entire Planet

Here’s one for you to put in your pipe to smoke on.  Even if the U.S. were to seize the wealth of the entire planet, and even if we taxed all the wealth of not only the rich but the miserably poor as well, we STILL couldn’t pay off the debts that Democrats demand that we keep adding to until after we’ve reached that “straw that broke the camel’s back” point:

True U.S. debt exceeds world GDP by $14 trillion
Obama 2010 budget deficit now 5 times larger than nation’s output
Posted: March 21, 2011
By Jerome R. Corsi

As the Obama administration prepares to finance a Fiscal Year 2011 budget  deficit expected to top $1.6 trillion, the American public is largely unaware that the true negative net worth of the federal government reached $76.3 trillion last year.

That figure was five times the 2010 gross domestic product of the United States and exceeded the estimated gross domestic product for the world by approximately $14.4 trillion.

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. GDP for 2010 was $14.861 trillion. World GDP in 2010, according to the International Monetary Fund, was $61.936 trillion.

“As government obligations continue to spiral out of control and the U.S. government shows no willingness to make the magnitude of spending cuts required to return to fiscal responsible, the U.S. economy is headed to a great collapse coming in the form of a hyper-inflationary great depression,” says economist John Williams, author of the website Government Shadow Statistics.

Statistics generated in Williams’ most recent newsletter demonstrate the real 2010 federal budget deficit was $5.3 trillion, not the $1.3 trillion previously reported by the Congressional Budget Office, according to the 2010 Financial Report of the United States Government as released by the U.S. Department of Treasury Feb. 26, 2010.

The difference between the $1.3 trillion “official” 2010 federal budget  deficit numbers and the $5.3 trillion budget deficit based on data reported in  the 2010 Financial Report of the United States Government is that the official  budget deficit is calculated on a cash basis, where all tax receipts, including  Social Security tax receipts, are used to pay government liabilities as they  occur.

The calculations in the 2010 Financial Report are calculated on a GAAP basis  (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) that includes year-for-year changes  in the net present value of unfunded liabilities in social insurance programs  such as Social Security and Medicare.

Under cash accounting, the government makes no provision for future Social  Security and Medicare benefits in the year in which those benefits accrue.

“The broad GAAP-based federal deficits, including the Social Security and  Medicare unfunded liabilities, have been in the $4 trillion to $5 trillion range  in 2008 and 2009, and 2010’s deficit again likely was near $5 trillion,  remaining both uncontrollable and unsustainable,” Williams wrote.

“The federal government cannot cover such an annual shortfall by raising  taxes, as there are not enough untaxed wages and salaries or corporate profits  to do so,” he warned.

In his analysis of the 2010 Financial Report of the United States, Williams  listed both an official accounting and an alternative.

“The estimate of a broad 2010 GAAP-based deficit at $5 trillion is mine,” he  noted. “At issue with the published report, consistent year-to-year accounting  was not shown, with a large, one time reduction in reported 2010 Medicare  liabilities, based on overly optimistic assumptions of the impact from recently  enacted health care legislation.”

U.S. Government GAAP Accounting  Federal Budget Deficits U.S. Treasury, Financial Report of the United States,  2002-2010 (John Williams, Shadow Government Statistics, ShadowStats.com)

Williams argues the total U.S. obligations, including Social Security and  Medicare benefits to be paid in the future, have effectively placed the U.S.  government in bankruptcy, even before we take  into consideration any future and continuing social welfare obligations that may  be embedded within the Obama administration’s planned massive overhaul of health  care.

“The government cannot raise taxes high enough to bring the budget into  balance,” Williams said. “You could tax 100 percent of everyone’s income and 100  percent of corporate profits and the U.S. government would still be showing a  federal budget deficit on a GAAP accounting basis.”

Williams argues the U.S. government has condemned the U.S. dollar to “a  hyperinflationary grave” by taking on debt  obligations that will never be covered by raising taxes and/or by severely  slashing government spending that has become politically untouchable.

“Bankrupt sovereign states most commonly use the currency printing press as a  solution to not having enough money to cover  obligations,” he cautioned. “The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have  committed the system to its ultimate insolvency, through the easy politics of a  bottomless pocketbook, the servicing of big-moneyed special interests, gross  mismanagement, and a deliberate and ongoing effort to debase the U.S. currency.”

He is concerned that the Federal Reserve will supplement its current policy  of Quantitative Easing 2, or QE2, under which the Fed intends to purchase by  mid-year 2010 another $600 billion of Treasury debt with “QE3.”

“These actions (QE2 and QE3) should pummel heavily the U.S. dollar’s exchange  rate against other major currencies,” he concludes. “Looming with uncertain  timing is a panicked dollar dumping and dumping of dollar-denominated paper  assets, which remains the most likely event as a proximal trigger for the onset  of hyperinflation in the near-term.”

Williams predicts that the early stages of hyperinflation will be marked by  an accelerating upturn in consumer prices, a pattern that has already begun to  unfold in response to QE2.

“For those living in the United States, long-range strategies should look to  assure safety and survival, which from a financial standpoint means preserving  wealth and assets,” he advises.

Williams suggests that physical gold in the form of sovereign coins priced  near bullion prices remains the primary hedge in terms of preserving the  purchasing power of the dollar, as well as stronger major currencies such as the  Swiss franc, the Canadian dollar and the Australian dollar.

And as totally insane as that is, it might well even be worse than that.

$61.936 trillion sounds like a lot.  And that’s the official figure for the International Monetary Fund’s estimate for U.S. indebtedness.  But the IMF is giving credibility to a figure that makes that $62 trillion seem almost manageable:

I Can Give You 200 Trillion Reasons Why We Need To Cut Government Spending NOW
By Michael Eden     March 7, 2011

Republicans are trying to get our spending under control, and Democrats are demonizing them every single step of the way.  Because Democrats are demons, and demonizing is the only thing they know how to do.

For the record, Republicans are trying to cut an amount which is basically 1/30th of Obama’s budget deficit.

News from globeandmail.com
The scary real U.S. government debt
Wednesday, October 27, 2010

NEIL REYNOLDS

Ottawa — reynolds.globe@gmail.com

Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff says U.S. government debt is not $13.5-trillion (U.S.), which is 60 per cent of current gross domestic product, as global investors and American taxpayers think, but rather 14-fold higher: $200-trillion – 840 per cent of current GDP. “Let’s get real,” Prof. Kotlikoff says. “The U.S. is bankrupt.”

Writing in the September issue of Finance and Development, a journal of the International Monetary Fund, Prof. Kotlikoff says the IMF itself has quietly confirmed that the U.S. is in terrible fiscal trouble – far worse than the Washington-based lender of last resort has previously acknowledged. “The U.S. fiscal gap is huge,” the IMF asserted in a June report. “Closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 per cent of U.S. GDP.”

This sum is equal to all current U.S. federal taxes combined. The consequences of the IMF’s fiscal fix, a doubling of federal taxes in perpetuity, would be appalling – and possibly worse than appalling.

Prof. Kotlikoff says: “The IMF is saying that, to close this fiscal gap [by taxation], would require an immediate and permanent doubling of our personal income taxes, our corporate taxes and all other federal taxes.

“America’s fiscal gap is enormous – so massive that closing it appears impossible without immediate and radical reforms to its health care, tax and Social Security systems – as well as military and other discretionary spending cuts.”

He cites earlier calculations by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that concluded that the United States would need to increase tax revenue by 12 percentage points of GDP to bring revenue into line with spending commitments. But the CBO calculations assumed that the growth of government programs (including Medicare) would be cut by one-third in the short term and by two-thirds in the long term. This assumption, Prof. Kotlikoff notes, is politically implausible – if not politically impossible.

One way or another, the fiscal gap must be closed. If not, the country’s spending will forever exceed its revenue growth, and no one’s real debt can increase faster than his real income forever.

Prof. Kotlikoff uses “fiscal gap,” not the accumulation of deficits, to define public debt. The fiscal gap is the difference between a government’s projected revenue (expressed in today’s dollar value) and its projected spending (also expressed in today’s dollar value). By this measure, the United States is in worse shape than Greece.

Prof. Kotlikoff is a noted economist. He is a research associate at the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a former senior economist with then-president Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. He has served as a consultant with governments around the world. He is the author (or co-author) of 14 books: Jimmy Stewart Is Dead (2010), his most recent book, explains his recommendations for reform.

He says the U.S. cannot end its fiscal crisis by increasing taxes. He opposes further stimulus spending because it will simply increase the debt. But he does suggest reforms that would help – most of which would require a significant withering away of the state. He proposes that the government give every person an annual voucher for health care, provided that the total cost not exceed 10 per cent of GDP. (U.S. health care now consumes 16 per cent of GDP.) He suggests the replacement of all current federal taxes with a single consumption tax of 18 per cent. He calls for government-sponsored personal retirement accounts, with the government making contributions only for the poor, the unemployed and people with disabilities.

Without drastic reform, Prof. Kotlikoff says, the only alternative would be a massive printing of money by the U.S. Treasury – and hyperinflation.

As former president Bill Clinton once prematurely said, the era of big government is over. In the coming years, the U.S. will almost certainly be compelled to deconstruct its welfare state.

Prof. Kotlikoff doesn’t trust government accounting, or government regulation. The official vocabulary (deficit, debt, transfer payment, tax, borrowing), he says, is vulnerable to official manipulation and off-the-books deceit. He calls it “Enron accounting.” He also calls it a lie. Here is an economist who speaks plainly, as the legendary straight-shooting film star Jimmy Stewart did for an earlier generation.

But Prof. Kotlikoff’s economic genre isn’t the Western. It’s the horror story – “and scarier,” one reviewer of his book suggests, than Stephen King.

Enron-style accounting?  From our government?  Say it aint so!!!

It’s isn’t a matter of IF America will financially collapse; it is only a matter of WHEN.  And “WHEN” is SOON.

And it will necessarily happen because Democrats are genuinely depraved.

Recklessly spending money on fools’ projects that your grandchildren will become debt slaves just trying to pay the interest on is immoral.

I can only keep begging Republicans to turn the Democrats’ demonization game back at them.  Democrats are running around on their talking points denouncing Republicans as “extremists” who want to kill poor people.

Bullcrap.

It is DEMOCRATS (I call them “Demoncrats,” for “Demonic Bureaucrats”) who want to implode America and kill tens of millions of American people by plunging this country into a great depression that will make the last one in the 1930s seem like a fun-filled day at the beach.

It’s not going to be the richest people who starve to death and die miserably in the cold.  It’s going to be all the people liberals love to say they care about – when in reality all they do is cynically manipulate them toward their own increasingly certain doom.

Don’t you dare forget that it has been LIBERALS who have been dreaming of undermining and imploding America financially since Cloward and Piven back in the 1960s.  And now we’ve got a JUST-ex SEIU official on tape plotting to send America into a financial crisis that will dwarf anything ever seen.

If you have a true death wish, and you vote Democrat, then by all means keep doing so, because they will give you the destruction and nihilism that you seek.  That’s the real meaning of Obama’s “hope and change.”

‘How Do You Create A Job?’ Don’t Ask Democrats Unless You Enjoy Gibberish

The transcript may not do the embarrassment to Richard Blumenthal (and by extension the entire Democrat Party) justice, but it’s still worth reading:

LINDA McMAHON: A follow-up, Mr. Blumenthal. You’ve talked about you want to incentivize small businesses. Tell me something, how do you create a job?

RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: A job is created, and it can be in a variety of ways, by… a variety of people, but principally by people and businesses in response to demand for products and services. And the main point about jobs in Connecticut is we can and we should create more of them by creative policies. And that’s the kind of approach that I want to bring to Washington.

I have stood up for jobs when they’ve been at stake. I stood up for jobs at Alderman Motors when GM wanted to shut down that automobile dealership. I stood up for jobs at Pratt & Whitney when that company wanted to ship them out of state and overseas. I stood up for jobs at Stanley Works when it was threatened with a hostile takeover.

I know about how government can help preserve jobs. And I want programs that provide more capital for small businesses, better tax policies that will promote creation of jobs, stronger intervention by government to make sure that we use the ‘Made in America’ policies and ‘Buy America’ policies to keep jobs here rather than buying products that are manufactured overseas, as WWE has done.

McMAHON: Government, government government.

Government does not create jobs. It’s very simple how you create jobs. An entrepreneur takes a risk. He or she believes that he creates goods or service that is sold for more than it costs to make it. If an entrepreneur believes he can do that, he creates a job.

The video is even better yet, because you can almost see the scarecrow actually twisting in the wind:

It was almost as though Richard Blumenthal was having a flashback to his Vietnam days, you know, when he wasn’t there, and could see only empty, deceitful vacuity.

Linda McMahon has made millions of dollars doing something that Richard Blumenthal has never done and will never understand.  She has created jobs.

Blumenthal sees only government, because he is a pompous bureaucrat.  He doesn’t see risk; he can’t possibly see risk.  Because his government is the kind of entity that can piss away nearly a trillion dollars, and continue on as though nothing had happened.  And if the government gets in a real bind, as it already is now, it can engage in abstract games such as “quantitative easing” – which is government euphemism for basically printing more money and reducing the value of every American’s savings so that it can pay its obligations and keep humming merrily along.

Linda McMahon sees risk.  And she sees government as something that gets in the way, and then gets even more in the way the more “helpful” it tries to be.

Linda McMahon understands that the essence of job creation is someone taking a risk.  If a potential business owner or investor believes that he or she can make a reasonable profit by creating a product or funding its creation, that person has to take a risk.  They could be wrong, and lose everything.

Will the government come to the rescue and print money for the business owner or investor if he or she turns out to be wrong, or fails to deliver on his or her vision?  Only in a Democrat like Blumenthal’s world.

For the rest of us, the prospect of huge tax hikes, extreme regulations, huge health care cost increases due to ObamaCare, energy-depleting radical environmentalist policies, politically correct garbage, and the like, can and do make the difference between deciding to take the risk inherent in job creation, and deciding to put your money somewhere else instead.

Conservatives understand the bottom-line behind job creation; liberals understand governmental gibberish.