VP Joe Biden blamed the GOP today for the democrat’s stimulus failure telling ABC’s Jake Tapper that the record spending bill was not big enough.
Politico reported:
Vice President Joe Biden said that the Recovery Act was undersized because the White House shrunk the economic stimulus package to win Republican votes in Congress to pass it.
"I think it would have been bigger,” he told ABC’s Jake Tapper in an interview airing Sunday. “In fact, what we offered was slightly bigger than that.”
In the end, the administration found three Republican votes to pass the Recovery Act. And, while “a lot” of administration officials believe the emergency spending was too small, Biden said that more than 3 million people are now working because of the federal programs.
And here's the President, Feburary 2009:
There are provisions in the package that need to be left out… But, broadly speaking the package is the right size. It is the right scope. It has the right priorities to create 3-4 million jobs and to do it in a way that lays the groundwork for long term growth.”
Listen for the 4:20 mark:
Definitely a case of "not taking responsibility", "passing the buck" and other terms that were used to fire up voters in 2008. Joe Biden offered a flat-out, horse-crap lie to Tapper in this interview. The Obama White House got exactly the amount of stimulus they wanted, and more. The stimulus didn’t fail because Congress didn’t spend enough money. It failed because Barack Obama and Joe Biden have no idea what they’re doing, and they’re proving that much every day they’re in office.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Health Insurance Mandate a Tax after all, who knew?!
When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s “power to lay and collect taxes.”
And that power, they say, is even more sweeping than the federal power to regulate interstate commerce.
Administration officials say the tax argument is a linchpin of their legal case in defense of the health care overhaul and its individual mandate, now being challenged in court by more than 20 states and several private organizations.
Remember when asked about the mandate, President Obama's response:
That is exactly what the mandates do — regulate individual behavior in an area where the federal government has no jurisdiction and punish those who don’t exhibit favored choices, in this case buying comprehensive health insurance regardless of whether it makes sense for anyone. This court will almost certainly take a dim view of the same attempt that the 1922 court struck down as a gross overreach by the government.
Paul Ryan: A Time for Choosing
Young Gun Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is extremely bright and informed. He is also and an excellent communicator.Recently he appeared on CNBC to discuss his Roadmap For America’s Future.
Via GatewayPundit :
Are we going to reclaim the American idea?
An entrepreneurial economy where you make the most of your life, you can maximize your potential; reinvigorate the principles of liberty, freedom, free enterprise – and defend its morality – or – are we going to abandon the American idea, and become a stagnant European-style cradle-to-grave welfare state, where we drain people of their incentive and will to make the most of their lives, and become more dependent on the government? The President and the people that run Congress are dedicated progressives. They believe that we ought to have the government so much more involved in our lives, with the government – not ourselves – as the determining factor of our destiny. The country must answer the question: do we want an entrepreneurial society that gets the prosperity turned back on in the 21st century, where individual merit and entrepreneurial activity defines the American economy – or – are we going to have more and more people dependent on the government for their livelihoods? That is the fork in the road – and the urgency of the time for choosing is being precipitated by the current direction of our government and the looming debt crisis, driven by the explosion in entitlement spending. We must decide what kind of a country we are going to be in the 21st century.
Via GatewayPundit :
Are we going to reclaim the American idea?
An entrepreneurial economy where you make the most of your life, you can maximize your potential; reinvigorate the principles of liberty, freedom, free enterprise – and defend its morality – or – are we going to abandon the American idea, and become a stagnant European-style cradle-to-grave welfare state, where we drain people of their incentive and will to make the most of their lives, and become more dependent on the government? The President and the people that run Congress are dedicated progressives. They believe that we ought to have the government so much more involved in our lives, with the government – not ourselves – as the determining factor of our destiny. The country must answer the question: do we want an entrepreneurial society that gets the prosperity turned back on in the 21st century, where individual merit and entrepreneurial activity defines the American economy – or – are we going to have more and more people dependent on the government for their livelihoods? That is the fork in the road – and the urgency of the time for choosing is being precipitated by the current direction of our government and the looming debt crisis, driven by the explosion in entitlement spending. We must decide what kind of a country we are going to be in the 21st century.
Keeping Up with the Unemployment Rate
Here we go..
The light blue line represents what unemployment would be had nothing been done to stimulate the economy. Notice, we stay around 9%.
The dark blue line represents what unemployment would be after the stimulus passed. You know the promise that unemployment would be under 8%, yada, yada....
We went past that percentage. The maroon dots represent the ACTUAL unemployment data, peaking above 10%. A lot of factors led to this happening. Geithner's prediction (March 2010) to Congress is that unemployment will not drop to 8% until the 4th quarter of 2012.
Just prepare. Starting next year, a range of tax cuts expire, new taxes begin and government spending increases. The IRS reported that they do not have the manpower or resources to enforce the mandate for the new Healthcare bill, new tax to pay for that (via Hotair). The President has now changed his stance on the mandate and is admitting that it's a tax. A very hostile environment for economic growth and the unemployment situation. Numbers are my thing, and I'm tired of being right
The light blue line represents what unemployment would be had nothing been done to stimulate the economy. Notice, we stay around 9%.
The dark blue line represents what unemployment would be after the stimulus passed. You know the promise that unemployment would be under 8%, yada, yada....
We went past that percentage. The maroon dots represent the ACTUAL unemployment data, peaking above 10%. A lot of factors led to this happening. Geithner's prediction (March 2010) to Congress is that unemployment will not drop to 8% until the 4th quarter of 2012.
Just prepare. Starting next year, a range of tax cuts expire, new taxes begin and government spending increases. The IRS reported that they do not have the manpower or resources to enforce the mandate for the new Healthcare bill, new tax to pay for that (via Hotair). The President has now changed his stance on the mandate and is admitting that it's a tax. A very hostile environment for economic growth and the unemployment situation. Numbers are my thing, and I'm tired of being right
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Wake Up Call of the Day
Via (Ed Morrissey; Hotair)
Ezra Klein calls this “the scariest jobs graph you’ve seen yet,” and for good reason. The center-left Brookings Institute calculated what kind of job growth it would take to reach pre-recession employment levels, and how long it would take. Brookings takes into account population growth and therefore calculates that in this month, the total employment gap has expanded to 11.2 million jobs. According to their analysis, adding jobs at a rate equal to the best average monthly rate for any one year in the past decade will mean we won’t catch up to pre-recession employment until 2022 (via Newsalert):
Looking ahead, there are several challenges to sustained job growth. The boost to economic activity from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is winding down and job losses related to temporary Census workers will continue in July. Further, the four-week moving average of initial claims for unemployment insurance have hit their highest level since March and have remained above 450,000 all year.
The “job gap” underlying these numbers is daunting. In recent months, on this blog, we described the job gap — the number of jobs it would take to return to employment levels from before the Great Recession, while also accounting for the 125,000 people who enter the labor force in a typical month. After today’s employment numbers, the job gap stands at almost 11.3 million jobs.
How long will it take to erase this gap? If future job growth continues at a rate of roughly 208,000 jobs per month, the average monthly job creation for the best year for job creation in the 2000s, it would take 136 months (more than 11 years). In a more optimistic scenario, with 321,000 jobs created per month, the average monthly job creation for the best year in the 1990s, it would take over 57 months (almost 5 years).
If we start in 2009Q4, when Obama argued that Porkulus and his other economic policies started taking effect, the rate of job creation under his policies has been … +39,000. Bear in mind that this includes the massive Census Bureau hires made by the Obama administration in 2010.
How about just the private sector? The Brookings calculation isn’t limited to the private sector, so it’s a bit like comparing apples and oranges, but few people doubt that private sector jobs have to return in force to close the jobs gap. The average monthly growth in the private sector during the entire Obama term has been -192,000, and the average growth since the beginning of 2009Q4 has been +14,000. In other words, two-thirds of the growth numbers from Porkulus come from government hiring, not private-sector growth.
How long will it take to close the employment gap with a growth rate of +14K in the private sector? It’s flat-out impossible, because we’re digging the hole deeper each month at that rate. Under the failed Keynesian policies of the Democrats in Congress and the Obama administration, 2022 looks like a pipe dream instead of a nightmare.
Ezra Klein calls this “the scariest jobs graph you’ve seen yet,” and for good reason. The center-left Brookings Institute calculated what kind of job growth it would take to reach pre-recession employment levels, and how long it would take. Brookings takes into account population growth and therefore calculates that in this month, the total employment gap has expanded to 11.2 million jobs. According to their analysis, adding jobs at a rate equal to the best average monthly rate for any one year in the past decade will mean we won’t catch up to pre-recession employment until 2022 (via Newsalert):
Looking ahead, there are several challenges to sustained job growth. The boost to economic activity from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is winding down and job losses related to temporary Census workers will continue in July. Further, the four-week moving average of initial claims for unemployment insurance have hit their highest level since March and have remained above 450,000 all year.
The “job gap” underlying these numbers is daunting. In recent months, on this blog, we described the job gap — the number of jobs it would take to return to employment levels from before the Great Recession, while also accounting for the 125,000 people who enter the labor force in a typical month. After today’s employment numbers, the job gap stands at almost 11.3 million jobs.
How long will it take to erase this gap? If future job growth continues at a rate of roughly 208,000 jobs per month, the average monthly job creation for the best year for job creation in the 2000s, it would take 136 months (more than 11 years). In a more optimistic scenario, with 321,000 jobs created per month, the average monthly job creation for the best year in the 1990s, it would take over 57 months (almost 5 years).
If we start in 2009Q4, when Obama argued that Porkulus and his other economic policies started taking effect, the rate of job creation under his policies has been … +39,000. Bear in mind that this includes the massive Census Bureau hires made by the Obama administration in 2010.
How about just the private sector? The Brookings calculation isn’t limited to the private sector, so it’s a bit like comparing apples and oranges, but few people doubt that private sector jobs have to return in force to close the jobs gap. The average monthly growth in the private sector during the entire Obama term has been -192,000, and the average growth since the beginning of 2009Q4 has been +14,000. In other words, two-thirds of the growth numbers from Porkulus come from government hiring, not private-sector growth.
How long will it take to close the employment gap with a growth rate of +14K in the private sector? It’s flat-out impossible, because we’re digging the hole deeper each month at that rate. Under the failed Keynesian policies of the Democrats in Congress and the Obama administration, 2022 looks like a pipe dream instead of a nightmare.
Guess who pays in the new Financial Regulation Bill
Big banks facing big drops in revenue are looking to Main Street to make up the difference.
Checking accounts, bank statements, even popping into your local bank branch could carry a hefty cost as the nation’s mega-banks scramble to offset expected damage from the sweeping financial overhaul. The uncertain future has overshadowed otherwise strong second-quarter earnings at JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp.
All three companies beat expectations this week with profitable results. Yet their stocks tumbled, helping send the wider market sharply lower Friday.
This is so basic that people inside the Beltway never learn it. Costs imposed on businesses get passed to consumers. It doesn’t matter where those costs originate, whether they come from materials, labor, rent, taxes, or regulation. All of those figure into the price paid by consumers for the product or service provided.
How will consumers get hit with these new regulations? Expect more fees on more transactions, including paying premium prices for doing business face to face with bank tellers and other employees. Banks will start demanding higher minimum balances and start charging higher fees on accounts that don’t make the cut. Bank of America will lose between $7 and $10 billion just on charges for debit and credit cards alone, money that will get made up by its customers somewhere.
That's the big secret that most of the public fails to realize when Democrats continually issue the battle cry calling for raising taxes and fees on big business. Consumers may not pay the entire price, however, at least not directly. If you like your local branch, better get used to the idea that it may disappear. With billions of dollars in new costs landing with a thud on their balance sheets, we can expect to see branches close up entirely — and the jobs that exist disappear along with them.
In short, the bill will erode consumer buying power, harm retirement accounts that rely on the performance of financial institutions, and create more unemployment. What exactly did we get in return for all of this?
If you want a refresher course on business, I've done the legwork. Pay attention!
More from "Recovery Summer".....13 year low in Mortage applications
Demand for loans to purchase U.S. homes sank to a 13-year low last week, and refinancing demand also slid despite near record-low mortgage rates, the Mortgage Bankers Association said on Wednesday.
Requests for loans to buy homes dropped 3.1 percent in the week ended July 9, after adjusting for the Independence Day holiday, to the lowest level since December 1996, the industry group said.
Refinancing applications fell 2.9 percent, and the mortgage market index that reflects total loan demand also fell 2.9 percent.
Average 30-year mortgage rates edged up 0.01 percentage point to 4.69 percent, but were near the record low of 4.61 percent set in March 2009, based on MBA records dating back to 1990.
Now that the artificial stimuli have ended, most of those who intended to buy have already done so in order to take advantage of a useless taxpayer subsidy of the sales. There remains only a historically small demand among those who either didn’t qualify for the tax break or didn’t need it, or perhaps a cadre of buyers who think that Congress will create yet another subsidy for sales and are waiting them out.
Remember when the Obama administration announced its plan to spend billions of dollars to prevent foreclosures? Again, it’s the Associated Press informing people today that there will be more foreclosures in 2010 than there were in 2009, breaking records again:
More than 1 million American households are likely to lose their homes to foreclosure this year, as lenders work their way through a huge backlog of borrowers who have fallen behind on their loans.
Nearly 528,000 homes were taken over by lenders in the first six months of the year, a rate that is on track to eclipse the more than 900,000 homes repossessed in 2009, according to data released Thursday by RealtyTrac Inc., a foreclosure listing service.
“That would be unprecedented,” said Rick Sharga, a senior vice president at RealtyTrac.
By comparison, lenders have historically taken over about 100,000 homes a year, Sharga said.
None of the stimuli and the rescue plans worked, because none of them addressed the core problem: joblessness. Without jobs, people lose their homes no matter how much the government intervenes to stop it. Until we get people back to work, these programs are simply futile. A homebuyer tax break doesn’t help someone without a job qualify as a buyer, and restructuring plans for existing mortgages can’t help an unemployed person make a mortgage payment. We need to shift gears quickly to reduce the massive uncertainties created by the radical Democratic agenda, reduce taxes and the regulatory burden, and get capital working in the US again so that we have employment at a level where foreclosures return to their normal level. Only then will housing markets stabilize.
Friday, July 16, 2010
The Feds are Pushing Risky Lending.....again?!
Fannie Mae, seized by the U.S. government in 2008 to avert the mortgage company’s failure, launched an initiative in January that allows some first-time home buyers to get a loan with a down payment of as little as $1,000. Securities firm Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, a brokerage operation jointly owned by Morgan Stanley and Citigroup Inc., is offering some clients home-equity credit lines of as much as $2.5 million.
Credit-card issuers mailed 84.8 million offers of plastic to U.S. subprime borrowers in the first six months of this year, up from 43.7 million a year earlier, estimates research firm Synovate. Nearly 8% of loans for new cars in the latest quarter went to borrowers with the lowest range of credit scores, up from 6.2% in 2009’s fourth quarter, according to J.D. Power & Associates and Fair Isaac Corp. …
Shirley Davis, a 66-year-old retired phone-company administrator who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., is more than $33,000 in debt, earns just $2,414 a month and filed for bankruptcy in June. Shortly before that, she ripped open an envelope from Capital One Financial Corp., which pitched her a credit card even though it sued her in 2006 to recover $4,470 she owed on a different card from the bank.
“At some point we lost you as a customer and we’d like to have you back,” the letter said. Ms. Davis said she was stunned. “Even I wouldn’t give me a credit card at this point,” she said.
Did we not learn anything the first time? Take into account that the Financial Regulation Bill passed yesterday has no restrictions.....NO REGULATION (I mean not to the extent that private lenders will get)....on the entities that played essential roles in the financial collapse in 2007. Of course, I mean Federally run, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under the FHA.
Making high risk loans to unqualified borrowers is part of the reason why we got us into this mess. Lenders aren't lending because we want them to be more responsible (and they have no idea what's going to happen next year when taxes jump), so the fix is to promote high risk lending? Why make the same mistakes again?
Surely that doesn't sound responsible
Thursday, July 15, 2010
We're In Good Hands....
Debt Commissioner Bowles, of our official Deficit Commission, comes to the great conclusion of cutting spending and increasing revenues to save the economy. We needed a commisson for that?!
Seriously, any economist could tell you that! Every Republican was saying that! How about you cut spending by disbanding this group of idiots and save us taxpayers from paying your salaries!
Seriously, any economist could tell you that! Every Republican was saying that! How about you cut spending by disbanding this group of idiots and save us taxpayers from paying your salaries!
Obama falls back to the same conclusion as Bush when it comes to Iran
In late 2006, George W. Bush met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon and asked if military action against Iran’s nuclear program was feasible. The unanimous answer was no. Air strikes could take out some of Iran’s nuclear facilities, but there was no way to eliminate all of them. Some of the nuclear labs were located in heavily populated areas; others were deep underground. And Iran’s ability to strike back by unconventional means, especially through its Hizballah terrorist network, was formidable. The military option was never officially taken off the table. At least, that’s what U.S. officials always said. But the emphasis was on the implausibility of a military strike. “Another war in the Middle East is the last thing we need,” Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote in 2008. It would be “disastrous on a number of levels.”
Gates is sounding more belligerent these days. “I don’t think we’re prepared to even talk about containing a nuclear Iran,” he told Fox News on June 20. “We do not accept the idea of Iran having nuclear weapons.” In fact, Gates was reflecting a new reality in the military and intelligence communities. Diplomacy and economic pressure remain the preferred means to force Iran to negotiate a nuclear deal, but there isn’t much hope that’s going to happen. “Will [sanctions] deter them from their ambitions with regards to nuclear capability?” CIA Director Leon Panetta told ABC News on June 27. “Probably not.” So the military option is very much back on the table.
What has changed? “I started to rethink this last November,” a recently retired U.S. official with extensive knowledge of the issue told me. “We offered the Iranians a really generous deal, which their negotiators accepted,” he went on, referring to the offer to exchange Iran’s 1.2 tons of low-enriched uranium (3.5% pure) for higher-enriched (20%) uranium for medical research and use. “When the leadership shot that down, I began to think, Well, we made the good-faith effort to engage. What do we do now?”
Now that the Obama administration has wasted more than a year on the same kind of fruitless diplomacy that had already been tried over and over, they have suddenly reached the conclusion that Iran doesn’t want peace; it wants nukes. And if it wants nukes more than it wants peace, they’re likely to want the nukes for a specific target. All of this was blindingly apparent in 2007, but Obama somehow figured that starting over from scratch would work, since he was the change that the world wanted and needed.
A military strike will be an act of desperation, which the Bush Administration surmised, but the only option worse is an Iran armed with nuclear weapons. We’ve wasted three years getting back to that same realization, but you can bet that the Iranians haven’t wasted a day of it.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Examining Black Loyalty to Democrats
I've got to hand it to Zo, he hits most of the points. I would go even further and say that the socio-economic policies of the Democratic Party, in it's current form, results in economic slavery by creating a class of dependent citizens. These citizens will support the hands that feed them, while never noticing that their other freedoms were given away in exchange for relief from the burden of personal responsibility and comfort. Quite similar to the physical slavery by the Democrats of the past. Only this time, blacks aren't the only ones enlaved. It's the middle and lower classes of all races and genders.
Watch...
Watch...
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
"Al Qaeda is a racist organization" says......President Obama?!
No worries about being politically correct any longer. It's on.
Speaking about the Uganda bombings, the president said, “What you’ve seen in some of the statements that have been made by these terrorist organizations is that they do not regard African life as valuable in and of itself. They see it as a potential place where you can carry out ideological battles that kill innocents without regard to long-term consequences for their short-term tactical gains.”…
Explaining the president’s comment, an administration official said Mr. Obama “references the fact that both U.S. intelligence and past al Qaeda actions make clear that al Qaeda — and the groups like al Shabaab that they inspire — do not value African life. The actions of al Qaeda and the groups that it has inspired show a willingness to sacrifice innocent African life to reach their targets.”…
“Additionally, U.S. intelligence has indicated that al Qaeda leadership specifically targets and recruits black Africans to become suicide bombers because they believe that poor economic and social conditions make them more susceptible to recruitment than Arabs,” the official said. “Al Qaeda recruits have said that al Qaeda is racist against black members from West Africa because they are only used in lower level operations.”
“In short,” the official said, “al Qaeda is a racist organization that treats black Africans like cannon fodder and does not value human life.”
I question the timing, given today's low support numbers from CBS and WaPo on the President. It seems like a ploy to cater to the center-right who were tired of the refusals to label terrorist organizations from the Middle East as "radical muslim" factions. Easiest way to demonize them (as it has been for any opposition)? Play the race card. It stirs emotion and support pretty quickly.
At the same time, it seems uneccessary, given that Al Qaeda has been seen as a terrorist group (bad guys) by the American public as a whole.....so why go there?
Speaking about the Uganda bombings, the president said, “What you’ve seen in some of the statements that have been made by these terrorist organizations is that they do not regard African life as valuable in and of itself. They see it as a potential place where you can carry out ideological battles that kill innocents without regard to long-term consequences for their short-term tactical gains.”…
Explaining the president’s comment, an administration official said Mr. Obama “references the fact that both U.S. intelligence and past al Qaeda actions make clear that al Qaeda — and the groups like al Shabaab that they inspire — do not value African life. The actions of al Qaeda and the groups that it has inspired show a willingness to sacrifice innocent African life to reach their targets.”…
“Additionally, U.S. intelligence has indicated that al Qaeda leadership specifically targets and recruits black Africans to become suicide bombers because they believe that poor economic and social conditions make them more susceptible to recruitment than Arabs,” the official said. “Al Qaeda recruits have said that al Qaeda is racist against black members from West Africa because they are only used in lower level operations.”
“In short,” the official said, “al Qaeda is a racist organization that treats black Africans like cannon fodder and does not value human life.”
I question the timing, given today's low support numbers from CBS and WaPo on the President. It seems like a ploy to cater to the center-right who were tired of the refusals to label terrorist organizations from the Middle East as "radical muslim" factions. Easiest way to demonize them (as it has been for any opposition)? Play the race card. It stirs emotion and support pretty quickly.
At the same time, it seems uneccessary, given that Al Qaeda has been seen as a terrorist group (bad guys) by the American public as a whole.....so why go there?
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