Something to think about concerning the Illegal Immigration debate

• Arizona passes a law saying that Arizona will codify and enforce the federal immigration laws the federal government doesn't wish to enforce. The federal government sues Arizona.

• San Francisco passes a law saying that San Francisco will NOT enforce the federal immigration laws. The federal government has nothing to say to San Francisco on the issue.

Something's wrong with this picture....

Democrats played Politics with Unemployment...but GOP still to blame?

Ok people, you got caught up in your emotions and the Democrats played on that....for over a month now.  If they were serious about the deficit, this would have been paid for and voted on from the beginning but they gambled on the desperation of millions of Americans out of work in the name of Politics.

Another Healthcare Surprise...has nothing to do with your health

You're a business. If you make a payment to someone in the course of conducting your trade or business you are supposed to report that payment to the IRS on a 1099 form, with a copy to the person or business to whom you made the payment. The old law was that you didn't have to report payments to a corporation or payments for such things as merchandise, utilities, shipping or other similar transactions.

Now things are different thanks to a little addition from the Senate Finance Committe into the new Healthcare Bill. Starting in 2012 you'll have to file a 1099 with the IRS for any business, person or entity to whom you make payments in excess of $600 during any taxable year. This, of course, would include anyone you hire to do some minor labor during the year ... but would also include any corporation, no matter how big, to whom you make payments in excess of $600.

The average small business prepares less than 1099 forms a year under the current law. Estimates are that these same businesses will have to prepare more than 100 under the new Healthcare. What's more .. the demand for accuracy, and the punishment for incorrect filings will probably send many of these smaller businesses out there to hire accounting professionals. Just what we need; more tax compliance costs.

There is a move afoot to repeal this hideous 1099 mandate. Rep. Dan Lungren, a Republican from California, has introduced legislation that would repeal the new 1099 requirements.


For those of you who want more details on this. This is a good summary of the changes we are facing.

Obama Blames GOP for upholding Congressional Law (UPDATE: 60 Votes Found)

Showing a lack of knowledge about the concept of governance, the Democrats counter the GOP's call to pay for unemployment by comparing the times when the GOP gave tax credits to businesses.  So let's straighten this out now. 

The government gets funded by two sources:  loans from other nations and taxes (people and Corporations).  Printing money is another way of writing an I.O.U. of which will become some sort of tax in the future.
Banks are funded by the people and backed by the Government (funded by the people and loans)
Corporations are funded by the people when you pay for products or services.  (Refresher course)
Small businesses are funded by the people and banks (funded by the people and Government). 
Getting the picture here?  We, through the private sector, fund the economic engine that feeds the government.
Tax credits/cuts is less money being taken from the businesses or corporations and therefore are not a cost. It's a relief on the businesses that will benefit the consumers (people). This is regardless of budget concerns.

Unemployment benefits are cost regardless of the Federal Budget's status.  In this case, we are in a deficit.  The President signed into law PayGo (Feb 2010), where if any costs had to be added to the budget, Congress MUST find a way to pay for it.  It was to show how responsible the Democrats were and the seriousness about tackling the deficit.  The GOP have been willing to vote for the passage of this bill and have found a way to pay for Unemployment benefits, using part of the $400+Billion of unsed Stimulus to pay for it.  The Democrats are playing politics by selling the idea that the GOP hates the people, etc. while people have been cut off from their benefits in the last month.  They've refused paying for the benefits, using the entitlement program to stir political anger.

This seems like a punk move to me.

Update: Republicans Snow and Collins have signed on to pass the measure, and interim Senator of WV, Goodwin will provide the final vote.  Looks like it's going through (finally!!), but it's tainted with political gaming.

The Failure of the Stimulus Falls on the GOP, and Obama Disagrees

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.

Health Insurance Mandate a Tax after all, who knew?!

Not forgetting that people are not guaranteed to keep their health insurance per the President's foolish promise, the New York Times reports that the Obama administration will defend the ObamaCare mandates as part of its power to tax, despite Barack Obama’s contentious debate with George Stephanopoulos when Obama denied it was a tax at all:

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.

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

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.

Guess who pays in the new Financial Regulation Bill

Barack Obama celebrated the passage of the new financial regulation bill yesterday. So did Chris Dodd and Barney Frank. And why not? It’s not as though they’ll have to pay for the new bureaucracies and regulation imposed on the American financial system. For that matter, it won’t be the bankers, either. Who pays? Three guesses, and the first two don’t count:

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

Thursday, the Associated Press reports that mortgage applications hit a 13-year low last week despite low mortgage rates. Even refinancing applications dropped significantly:

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.

The Feds are Pushing Risky Lending.....again?!

Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal journal posted this article.  Just two years after the implosion of easy credit nearly cratered the entire Western financial structure, the same people who caused it are returning to their old habits. Fannie Mae has embarked on a new program to offer easy credit to people who may not be able to pay it back in a desperate attempt to ignite the economy:

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