Economic Info for the Month of July

All is well....

Man...economic news isn't good:

• Yesterday, the news came out that existing home sales dropped 27% for the month of July.  In order to stabilize the residential markets, jobs have to return and prices have to stabilize. The Obama administration has gotten in the way of both processes. Thanks to ill-advised taxpayer-subsidized interventions, prices have remained unrealistically high, and no one wants to buy until they pay the right amount for the value of their investment. And until we quit penalizing capital and introducing massive ambiguities into regulatory regimes and expanding them, jobs won’t get created and new buyers won’t materialize anyway.
• Today, the Commerce Department noted that new home sales dropped 12% for the month of July; down 37% from last year. Expect more deflation in housing markets this year as sales dive to new lows
• Although the Commerce Department predicted a 3% growth, durable goods orders rose, but only slightly thanks to transportation industry by 0.3%.  Meanwhile the rest of the industry dropped 3.8% last month.  In other words, absent artificial stimulation, we had no growth at all in Q2. Depending on the final revision, due on Friday, we could be anywhere from -0.3% to -3.4% excluding Porkulus in Q2. Recovery Summer, my ass.
• Thanks to last year's Cash for Clunkers, used car prices have JUMPED 10% overall due to a lower supply in inventory.  As predicted last year, the people most hurt by the price increases are those who can least afford them. The used-car market usually attracts people who need transportation on a budget, who cannot afford to buy new. By destroying a quarter’s worth of trade-ins in three weeks and permanently taking them off the market, the Obama administration has forced an artificial inflation by supply restriction. Moreover, they did so by subsidizing new-car sales that would have occurred anyway, eating up three billion dollars in taxpayer money. In other words, the White House spent $3 billion to make used cars more expensive for working-class families. Nice work.

Keep in mind that our entire economic recovery has been in the hands of a Democratic Administration and Congress with little to no experience in running a business in the private sector.  In the examples above, each have been directly affected by the laws passed since 2009 under their watch.  Businesses are sitting on 2 Trillion just to collect interest instead of spending to hire and expand because of the policies passed by the current party in power. Nobody knows what's to come of the new legislations that have been passed. I mean this with the utmost respect.....Wake the fuck up people.

Bye Bye Student Health Insurance, another victim in the wake of Healthcare Reform

After the University of North Carolina issues with health insurance, you'd think that colleges would be set with health coverage for their students. Well, due to a surprise in the new Healthcare bill: (via QandO)

Colleges and universities say that some rules in the new health law could keep them from offering low-cost, limited-benefit student insurance policies, and they’re seeking federal authority to continue offering them.

Their request drew immediate fire from critics, however, who say that student health plans should be held to the same standards that other insurance is.
Among other things, the colleges want clarification that they won’t have to offer the policies to non-students.
Without a number of changes, it may be impossible to continue to offer student health plans, says a letter that the American Council on Education sent Aug. 12 to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, signed by 12 other trade associations that represent colleges.
Additionally, the colleges say that some provisions of the law don’t apply to their policies, including those that require insurers to spend at least 80 percent of their revenue on medical care and that bar them from setting annual coverage caps.

Universities usually offer some form of health insurance to students, but those policies fit the needs of young adults, who generally don’t access the health care system nearly as much as older adults. They have smaller networks, as students generally stay within a small geographic area. Premiums are lower because of the low risk, but also because some comprehensive services don’t get fully covered, usually those accessed by people in middle age or older. In short, the policies are tailored to the clientele, which is why pricing can be more efficient.
 
With the new Healthcare Bill, policies can no longer be tailored to clientele, nor can consumers make choices that best fit their lives. All policies must look mainly alike, thanks to the top-down command “reforms” in Healthcare, which mandate coverages regardless of risk or need. So, a comprehensive policy designed to cover Americans in their 50s would be useless for just about anyone who attends college in their youth, and would be more expensive than they are likely to afford.
 
Universities can either offer policies that are so expensive that only a few can afford to buy them, which creates all sorts of problems in managing a risk pool, or they can simply get out of the health-insurance business altogether. Businesses have chosen to opt out thus far, so there's no reason to believe that the Universities wouldn't do the same.

Democrats are running against themselves!?

Let me start off by saying:  I'm glad the first day of school comes once a year.

Let's start today with the Democrats.....or should I say, the ones distancing themselves from the Democratic agenda as of late:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called them her “majority makers” – the moderate to conservative Democrats in right-leaning districts whose election in 2006 made her Speaker.

And now many of them – and other Democrats in competitive districts -- are fighting for their political lives in a harsh environment and have found it necessary to distance themselves from their leaders and Democratic policies.
After Democrats won a special election in Pennsylvania earlier this year in which the GOP nominee tried to tie the Democrat, Mark Critz, to Pelosi and Obama, the Speaker said, “What we learn from this election and I think hopefully Republicans saw clearly, is nationalizing the election, talking about Speaker Pelosi and President Obama was not as appealing to the public there than Mark Critz talking to them about their jobs.”
Will that also hold true for Democrats talking about Pelosi and Obama in a negative way?

In case you are in disbelief, here are the campaign ads. First, Bobby Bright, D-Ala:



Next, Jason Altmire, D-Penn:



Mike McIntyre, D-NC:



Glenn Nye, D-Va:



Joe Donnelley, D-Ind with 2 ads.:





This is a just a mess.

Whew....LONG WEEK!!!

Too bad it's going to be much longer.  Summer's almost over and school will begin for the little one, so I'm in parent mode until next wednesday.  I have no special guest posters on my site just yet, but feel free to check out some of the links to the left of blogs I regularly visit.  Hotair.com is the absolute best.  Enjoy until I return!

Andrew Klavan: A Young Person's Guide to the United States Constitution

It's the little things they don't emphasize...this video lays out the basics of the Constitution so anyone can understand it

DEMOCRATS AND GOP BATTLE OVER BUSH TAX CUTS

Neil Boortz on Fox News explaining the effects of tax cuts in an economy in his subtle way:



In case you're wondering: 70% of economist favor extending Bush Tax Cuts.  Link to Wall Street Journal article here as the source. Go figure.

Video: “I’m willing to take a chance on something different”

Change?

Very Positive step towards Housing Reform by the Obama Team: Cut Out the Community Organizers

The Washington Post reports today that community organizers find themselves on the outside without a seat at the table where the new policies will develop for housing reform — and that they’re not keeping quiet about the betrayal:

Affordable-housing advocates raised concerns Thursday that the Obama administration is excluding consumer and community groups from playing prominent roles in a government-sponsored conference next week that will kick off efforts to overhaul national housing policy.

After the administration announced the 12 panelists for Tuesday’s conference, the nonprofit National Community Reinvestment Coalition said consumer and community groups had been “muscled out” by financial companies, economists and academics without a sense of how housing policy plays out in communities.
“Apparently being a community organizer qualifies you to be president, but it’s not good enough to be part of HUD and Treasury’s think tank on housing,” said NCRC chief executive John Taylor, whose group works with hundreds of community organizations to promote access to financial services for low- and middle-income people.

Inflating housing bubbles by forcing or incentivizing overreliance on subprime loans clearly hasn’t worked out well for most communities; we now have a foreclosure crisis, thanks to people overextending themselves on overvalued homes. The government interventions of the past twelve years have created crisis and instability, and it doesn’t take a community organizer to see that.

Cutting out the community organizers could mean one of two outcomes. Either Obama is serious about recalibrating HUD’s mission towards low-income rentals and away from distorting lending markets to push ownership where the economics simply don’t support it, or this process is just a beard to continue the status quo by claiming that the White House did its due diligence in checking out all of the possibilities.

A Little on the Economy and Jobless Claims

Great video about the number of jobs lost under the Pelosi-Reid Congress since 2007:



By the way:

• Initial jobless claims today jumped to their highest level in almost 6 months.
• The Department of Housing and Urban Development have begun issuing emergency $50,000 loans at zero interest to unemployed homeowners in an attempt to stall foreclosures, using $1 billion of Porkulus funds for the effort and $2 billion from the same source for indirect aid through state governments.
• foreclosure seizures have increased by 6% over last year
• Home foreclosures are spreading in areas that didn't have problems before, like in the Northwest and Midwest
• The US bailout of financial institutions, and in particular AIG, wound up rescuing foreign firms, according to a new report from the Congressional Oversight Panel.
• That $26.1 Billion Jobs package for public servants?  There's already waste and abuse, reported a day after its passage.  States that don't need the money are recieving it.

But this is the "Recovery Summer"!!

Hispanics Fire Back at Harry Reid

Yesterday Harry Reid said this:
“I don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican,” said Reid. “Do I need to say more?”
Seriously, this has been the issue for African Americans for how long? Nice to see the Democrats play the race card (i.e. if you are minority, you must vote Democrat). We have got to get past these political stereotypes and learn about the issues.
Dr. Manny Alvarez speaks out against Harry Reid’s prejudiced (NOT RACIST) comments about voters of Hispanic descent:

Milton Friedman on Libertarianism

More from Milton Friedman about the principles of Libertarianism. Just felt like I had to share this four part series.

Milton Friedman - Socialism vs. Capitalism

This guy pretty much said it. I've found a new hero.



I just realized that I'm a pure capitalist and not the current definition as defined by the progressives of today.  If it exists, I'm a Constitutional Libertarian Capitalist.  I'll define this later.