Bloodthirsty Liberal

He’s losing his popularity or they wouldn’t be reporting this

As experts debate the potential speed of the US recovery, one figure looms large but is often overlooked: nearly 1 in 5 Americans is either out of work or under-employed.

According to the government’s broadest measure of unemployment, some 17.5 percent are either without a job entirely or underemployed. The so-called U-6 number is at the highest rate since becoming an official labor statistic in 1994.

The number dwarfs the statistic most people pay attention to-the U-3 rate-which most recently showed unemployment at 10.2 percent for March, the highest it has been since June 1983.

The difference is that what is traditionally referred to as the “unemployment rate” only measures those out of work who are still looking for jobs. Discouraged workers who have quit trying to find a job, as well as those working part-time but looking for full-time work or who are otherwise underemployed, count in the U-6 rate.

With such a large portion of Americans experiencing employment struggles, economists worry that an extended period of slow or flat growth lies ahead.

“To me there’s no easy solution here,” says Michael Pento, chief economist at Delta Global Advisors. “Unless you create another bubble in which the economy can create jobs, then you’re not going to have growth. That’s the sad truth.”

Pento warns that forecasts of a double-dip (”W”) or a straight up (”V”) recovery both could be too optimistic given the jobs situation.

Instead, he believes the economy could flatline (or “L”) for an extended period as small businesses struggle to grow and consequently rehire the workers that have been furloughed as the U-3 unemployment rate has doubled since March 2008.

Hey! I know what we can do! Let’s raise taxes on businesses! Let’s particularly go after small businesses. I’m sure that will help.

Elections have consequences kidz. When you all lined up to vote for the Messiah, you were voting to make your future career, whatever it is you dreamt about as you slogged through college, a non-starter. Unless you dreamt of working for ACORN, that is.

- Aggie

How come global warming went away?

There’s a general rule of life, the KISS rule: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Liberals never follow it. So, to them the fact that the earth is refusing to comply with their demented notion of global-warming-climate-change! means that the earth is wrong. Because the default position is that they are right. Always. If you disagree, you’re stupid, Stupid.

Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.

At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average.

Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth’s average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.

Ironically, climate change appears to have stalled in the run-up to the upcoming world summit in the Danish capital, where thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, business leaders and environmental activists plan to negotiate a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Billions of euros are at stake in the negotiations.

Reached a Plateau

The planet’s temperature curve rose sharply for almost 30 years, as global temperatures increased by an average of 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.25 degrees Fahrenheit) from the 1970s to the late 1990s. “At present, however, the warming is taking a break,” confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany’s best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. “There can be no argument about that,” he says. “We have to face that fact.”

Bummer. I love a good catastrophe. I love pouring money down the toilet to avert a most excellent catastrophe. What will happen if the public decides that global warming is nonsense?

- Aggie

Now, that’s doing land-office business:

[A]s we have seen here, phony “saved or created” numbers are the norm, not the exception, and most of the jobs data are insupportable.

And even Earl Devaney, the man in charge at Recovery.org, can’t deny it. In a response to Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Devaney says that he cannot certify any of the jobs data published by the government:

…

“Your letter specifically asks if I am able to certify that the number of jobs reported as created/saved on Recovery.gov is accurate and auditable. No, I am not able to make this certification,” Devaney wrote, in a letter provided to ABC News.

Devaney rejected Issa’s suggestion that the site include a more prominent disclaimer, such as an asterisk or a footnote. He said the site already does mention in a note to users that “errors and omissions” are likely.

They’re not bugs, they’re features.

With this complete fiasco of an economic stimulus, is it any wonder this headline appeared this morning?

Obama warns of a ‘double dip’ recession

He’s about the last to come to the realization.

And speaking of headlines we love:

Oct. home construction, permits fall unexpectedly

“Unexpected” by whom?

Construction of new homes unexpectedly plunged last month, as builders waited to see whether lawmakers would extend a tax credit for homebuyers.

The results show how much the housing market has been relying on government support for its fledgling recovery.

In other words, there is no recovery, nor any expectation of one, just government bailing.

Yesterday, I was sarcastically referred to as Pollyanna or Little Mary Sunshine for reporting similar news. I prefer Snidely of Sunnybrook Farm.

Good news first: we’re still in recession and stimulus smoke and mirrors have produced nothing.

What’s that, you say? Shouldn’t that be the bad news?

You tell me:

Factory production declined in October, signaling that consumers and businesses remain cautious in their spending and suggesting a sluggish economic recovery.

At the same time, the weak economy is keeping inflation in check. Wholesale prices rose less than expected last month.

…

A rebound in auto production, driven by the government’s now-defunct Cash for Clunkers program, has boosted industrial production in recent months. Car production sagged in October.

Barack Obama promised us cake and ice cream and hot dogs and chocolate bars. Now, we have the inevitable tummy ache. But the good news is that after we hurl it all up in a foul-smelling splatter, we won’t have gained any weight. That’s the lesson I’ve learned.

Get a tax break—get your legs broke:

A report published by the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration yesterday concluded that over 15 million Americans may owe the IRS for the tax credit they received as part of the recovery (that wasn’t) plan. According to Yahoo News:

More than 15 million taxpayers may owe the government $250 or more because of how the IRS last spring set up President Barack Obama’s tax break that was designed to help consumers spend the U.S. economy out of recession. Individuals with more than one job and married couples in which both spouses work may have to repay the government $400, either through a smaller tax refund or a larger tax bill.

On top of that, roughly “65,000 taxpayers could technically face penalties for underpaying their taxes in 2009.”

Don’t forget Cash for Clunkers. You’ll owe taxes on the $3,500 or $4,500 dollars you got there. too.

Obanomics means that if the recession doesn’t bankrupt you, the recovery will.

Looks like President Obama bowed to the wrong Asian:

Federal Reserve officials sometimes sound as if their only worry is the domestic U.S. economy, but their gusher of dollars is starting to have serious consequences for the rest of the world. Nowhere is this more evident than in Asia, where President Obama is getting an earful from leaders this week about what all those greenbacks are doing to their economies.

…

At a conference in Singapore, Hong Kong chief executive Donald Tsang—a former finance minister—said Friday he’s “scared” about loose U.S. monetary policy. “Where is the money going—it’s where the problem’s going to be: Asia,” Mr. Tsang said. “You can see asset prices going up, not only in Korea, in Taiwan, in Singapore and in Hong Kong, going up to levels that are incompatible or inconsistent with the economic fundamentals.”

On Saturday, China’s top banking regulator, Liu Mingkang, chimed in that the Fed’s binge is the main cause of “massive speculation.”

…

The larger mistake is to believe that any nation can devalue its way to prosperity. As other currencies rise in value and force productivity gains, the U.S. economy will become relatively less efficient. American living standards will decline, as those in Asia rise. This is the real lesson of the Connally-Nixon devaluations of the 1970s and the inflation that followed.

We’ll all be bowing soon enough.

Hasn’t been this much hunger since the Clinton years

WASHINGTON — The number of Americans who lacked reliable access to sufficient food shot up last year to its highest point since the government began surveying in 1995, the Agriculture Department reported on Monday.

In its annual report on hunger, the department said that 17 million American households, or 14.6 percent of the total, “had difficulty putting enough food on the table at times during the year.” That was an increase from 13 million households, or 11.1 percent, the previous year.

The results provided a more human sense of the costs of a recession that has officially ended but continues to take a daily toll on households; it describes the plight not of a faceless General Motors or A.I.G. but of families with too little food on their children’s plates.

Indeed, while children are usually shielded from the worst effects of deprivation, many more were affected last year than the year before. The number of households in which both adults and children experienced “very low food security” rose by more than half, to 506,000 in 2008 from 323,000 in 2007, according to the report.

Overall, one-third of all the families that are affected by hunger, or 6.7 million households, were classified as having very low food security, meaning that members of the household had too little to eat or saw their eating habits disrupted during 2008. That was 2 million households more than in 2007.

In a statement, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack emphasized the administration’s efforts to combat hunger by creating jobs, providing job training, extending unemployment benefits and taking other measures. He called hunger “a problem that the American sense of fairness should not tolerate and American ingenuity can overcome.”

Elections have consequences, but it is sad to see them play out on little kids. I hope the parents notice that they voted for Hope ‘N Change and ended up with hunger. Maybe they’ll try something else next round.

And have you noticed that the media is running story after miserable story about the family that can’t afford to buy milk? Remember those stories when Bush was president and unemployment was about 30% lower - or more? Gee, I seem to remember a whole bunch of Obama ads… why even a prime time one hour special… focusing on families having a tough time making it. I wonder if they are doing any better today? Mmm. Mmm. Mmm. Barack Hussein Obama. Yeah.

- Aggie

Thinking back to the Bush administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein hid WMD’s, and the response across the political spectrum when those WMD’s failed to appear, I have to call it like it is: President Obama is a Liar.

“But, Aggie, who could have predicted the depth and breadth of the downturn?” you query.

To which I succinctly reply, “Doesn’t matter. He lied.” Turnabout is fair play.

A couple posts back there is a video showing him lying about Khaled Sheik Mohammed and his future plans for trying him at GITMO, not in Manhattan. I just love it when Obama convicts himself, posing for camera and lying. Now that’s review his lies about the economy:

Ten months ago, at the beginning of the great stimulus debate, President-elect Barack Obama’s economic advisers produced an unfortunate chart.

The chart plotted out two lines. One projected the unemployment rate through 2014 with a stimulus package; the other projected unemployment across the same period without it.

The first line — the hopeful line, the one that was used to sell $800 billion worth of stimulus — showed the rate of joblessness peaking this fall at 8 percent, and dropping swiftly thereafter. The second line — the no-stimulus scenario — showed unemployment peaking at 9 percent, holding there across 2010, and then declining in 2011 and 2012.

Now reality has produced numbers of its own. In every month since May, the unemployment rate has been roughly a percentage point higher than the chart’s grimmer, stimulus-free scenario. This October, when Obama’s advisers predicted that unemployment would stand at 8 percent with the stimulus and just under 9 percent without it, the actual jobless rate leaped to 10.4 percent.

Interestingly, although the UN, the CIA, and European intelligence sources all believed that Saddam had WMDs, the fact that Bush told us that Saddam had WMDs, based on the best intelligence available at the time, was a LIE. Do you remember, gentle reader? So how is it that the NY Times columnist gives Obama a pass?

This dire figure isn’t Barack Obama’s fault. Even in an age of near-trillion-dollar spending sprees, the president of the United States has only limited influence over the unemployment numbers.

Not a total pass, and we’ll take what we can get:

But the White House spent the winter pretending otherwise. The stimulus bill was framed and sold primarily as a jobs bill, and the Obama administration placed a substantial bet on the promise that the unemployment rate would start dropping before 2010 arrived.

When the stimulus passed with almost no Republican support, Rahm Emanuel, the president’s chief of staff, declared that “the most important number … is how many jobs it produces, not how many votes it gets.”

He was right. But with unemployment near a 25-year high, that “most important number” isn’t looking very good. The White House is stuck arguing counterfactuals — how much worse the economy would be without the stimulus — and trumpeting obviously inflated estimates of how many jobs have been “created or saved” by federal dollars.

Bozos on Parade.

- Aggie

The soft, squishy, flaccid, limp hold summits:

President Obama took time Thursday — before jetting off to Asia for a 10-day tour — to announce a December jobs summit aimed at synching job growth with the massive government spending meant to “break the back” of the recession.

The announcement came as the Labor Department reported another 502,000 new jobless claims, two high-tech mainstays announced big layoffs and the unemployment rate reached 10.2 percent.

Obama said the White House forum will gather CEOs, small business owners, economists, financial experts and representatives from labor unions and nonprofit groups “to talk about how we can work together to create jobs and get this economy moving again.”

You just have to admire the kind of mind that would think of asking nonprofit groups how to create jobs and make money. That’s brilliant.

Unless by nonprofit group he means General Motors and Chrysler.

“The economic growth that we’ve seen has not yet led to the job growth that we desperately need,” Obama said.

I know, it’s just so unfair. You bankrupted this country and paid off every special interest group that supported you (thanks, teachers!), and how many jobs do you have to show for it? Negative-190,000 last month alone.

Summits. This guy loves summits so much he should have a constant nose-bleed.

The beer summit, remember?

And who could forget the Fiscal Responsibility Summit (ummit-ummit-ummit), without which we’d be in a whole lotta trouble.

Oh, come on, you remember:

That is why today, I am pledging to cut the deficit we inherited in half by the end of my first term in office.

…

To start reducing these deficits, I have committed to going through our budget line-by-line to root out waste and inefficiency…. We will replicate these efforts throughout the federal government, eliminating programs that don’t work tomake room for ones that do…. We’ll end thetax breaks for companies shipping jobs overseas and stop the fraud and abuse in our Medicare program….

But that money is now promised to pay for health insurance—it can’t reduce the deficit if it’s paying off a new entitlement.

And why have you been promising to do this since March? What’s stopping you?

That is why I have called this summit today, and why I have invited leaders from both sides of the aisle:because we all have a role to play in this work. Because I believe it is time for a frank conversation about thefiscal challenges we face—challenges that concern every single one of us, no matter where on the politicalspectrum we fall.

So today, I want all of you to start talking with each other and exchanging ideas. I want you to question eachother, and challenge each other, and work together not just to identify problems, but to identify solutions.

That is the purpose of the breakout sessions that are starting right now. I know that each of you brings a wealth of expertise and experience on a broad range of topics, and I appreciate your willingness to participate inthese sessions. I expect that this process will be engaging and productive, and I look forward to hearing the results when you report back later this affernoon.

Did anybody mention tax cuts, Mr. President? Or do you have an F-chip to bleep out such unpleasant words?

This is who he is and what he does. We thought we elected a president, but we got a kindergarten teacher.

No, not Pakistan. Illinois, Oregon, Wisconsin, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, Rhode Island

California’s ongoing fiscal crisis has attracted national attention, but a study warns that nine other states are barreling toward similar economic disaster.

A report released Wednesday by the Pew Center on the States says Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island and Wisconsin also are at risk of fiscal calamity.

That could mean higher taxes, more layoffs of government employees, increasingly crowded classrooms and fewer services in states that account for more than one-third of America’s population and economic output.

Most of the states face rising unemployment and high home foreclosure rates, and their revenues have dropped by double-digit percentages.

It would be interesting to know what they have in common, as distinct from other states that are doing well. It isn’t a Left/Right thing, because Arizona is there. It isn’t rapid growth because Michigan is in the line-up. Is it simply high taxes? If so, why isn’t NY showing up? It would be good to know so that we don’t repeat the same mistakes moving forward.

Also, I wonder if these states are too big to fail?

- Aggie