Mr Obama, You're No Reagan!

Deroy Murdoch, a most astute man, does us a favor by assembling a concise catalog of Obama's economic blunders...

"Under Obama, federal spending has risen from 20.7 percent of gross domestic product to 25.3 percent, Washington’s largest slice of apple pie since 1945."

"Obama’s spend-o-rama includes federally funded green jobs that Boskin dismisses as “the leprechaun economy.” The apotheosis of this blarney was last month’s $1.2 billion Energy Department loan guarantee to SunPower Corporation of Richmond, California. Its solar-equipment project promises 15 permanent positions. Cost per job-created: a staggering $80 million." (NRO-Deroy Murdock)

Reagan's Recovery vs. Obama's Sagging Non-Recovery

Boskin compared snapshots of Obama’s and Pres. Ronald Reagan’s post-recession recoveries, 27 months after each downturn hit bottom.

In September 2011, on Obama’s watch, non-farm payrolls had grown 0.6 percent, yielding 841,000 jobs since June 2009.

Under the tax-cutting, business-boosting Reagan, non-agricultural employment swelled 8.7 percent, generating 7.7 million new jobs. (NRO-Deroy Murdock)

How Mr. Volker Would Fix It

Reading that comparison reminded me how Obama, to much fanfare, brought the venerable Paul Volker on-board as a convenient counter-weight to his socialist advisers who were discomfiting those serious people not in a hopium-induced daze those first heady days of the Obama Presidency.

It calmed people down, and then Obama proceeded to completely ignore the former Fed Chair who tamed Carter's dreaded stagflation and ushered in the historically-unprecedented Reagan economic boom. Volker has offered his advice on how to fix this mess. It's too wonky to go into here, but it involved breaking up anyone too big to fail, no more government underwriting Wall Street gamblers, putting the different financial functions into their own boxes and jailing those who stray, among other things. You can read the whole thing here: Volker's Advice.

Free Market Ideas for Increasing Employment

For the libertarians among us, taking advice from a former Fed Chairman just won't do, so Reason Magazine has an article entitled Get a Job! that is chock full of free-market remedies sure to get people back to work.

The ideas are too simple-minded and timeless for the progressive eggheads powering Obama's economic failure: Less regulations, less government intervention in the marketplace, no more government bureaucrats picking winners and losers...

Free marketeers know that government cannot power the recovery.  The path to economic success begins with economic freedom. Bill Frezza explains:

Do you sometimes wonder why economists are accorded such respect and influence given the fact that they claim knowledge over the unknowable, promote theories that are untestable, and make forecasts for which they are never held accountable? Isn’t that the definition of a witch doctor?

If engineers were held to the same standards, bridges would collapse as often as banks, planes would fall from the sky (if they ever got off the ground), and cyclical blackouts would be a permanent feature of our electrical grid. But at least they would get to visit the White House.

This gets to the heart of why we should take all macro economic advice with a grain of salt.  It is a soft science, useful for gaining insight, but incapable of predicting market behavior.  Government-planned economies fail, free markets succeed. 

Have you ever watched engineers from different schools argue on Sunday morning talk shows about the validity of Bernoulli’s Principle or Ohm’s Law? No? Yet economists, like rival witch doctors, get red in the face promoting diametrically opposed economic remedies, sometimes sharing Nobel Prizes in the same year for theories that directly contradict each other. Take $2 trillion and call me in the morning. (Bill Frezza - Fundamental Fallacies of Macro Economics)

Obama's Scorched Earth Campaign

President Obama took his classless act on the road, making political hay out of the catastrophic wildfires in Texas...

Without mentioning him by name Obama mocked Perry as "a governor whose state is on fire, denying climate change." (AP News)

A US president mocking a governor whose state is a disaster area because of wildfires (which also occurred before the “global warming” era) is unprecedented. President Obama is a low-class, disgusting Chicago machine pol.

Imagine President Bush mocking New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco after Hurricane Katrina:

"… a governor and a mayor who still believe in nanny-state liberalism, when it’s bred generations of people so benumbed by government assistance they no longer have the good sense to get out of the way of a hurricane! he he heh...”

This is not a man who is president of all Americans and unites us. This is a cornered, cracked-out street punk fearful of going down, wildly swinging iron bars at his enemies and dividing us so he and his gang can continue to dominate the government special interest trade.

It’s all about rescuing the progressive agenda

ATHERTON, Calif. (AP) — President Barack Obama charged Sunday that the GOP vision of government would "fundamentally cripple America," as he tried out his newly combative message on the liberal West Coast.

No, Mr. President, you’re confused...

 The “GOP vision” if guided by the tea parties, would fundamentally cripple the progressive feral beast that has wiped its ass with the constitution, suborned the federal government, and is now engorging itself on more and more of our tax dollars and our freedoms. That is what we set out to “fundamentally cripple,” and America will be much the better once we get it done.

Progressives make an arrogant mistake: Equating Government with America

Their doctrinaire religion inextricably entwines the two, conflating them into one pseudo-patriotic package. It's a neat trick that allows them to slap an American flag on their horrible statist creature and then damn to hell anyone who speaks heresy against it.

It's not working anymore. Americans are turning againt the soulless progressive beast.

The Lyin' King, Starring Barack Obama

Anyone who believes a plumber pays more in taxes than a billionaire is probably also dumb enough to vote for Barack Obama. 






It's going to get worse before it gets better...

Even Obama's people are saying unemployment will not go down before the 2012 election, and I believe them. Removing $1.5 trillion from the economy is not the way to grow jobs.  That's according to Reaganomics as well as John Maynard Keynes.  The president is economically illiterate and his policies are an incoherent clash of careening desperation and overheated class warfare populism, all fueled by crony crapitalism.

Obama Will Run in 2012

Don't believe the speculation that Obama may go quietly into that good night and make way for another Dem candidate.  He's young and America is not yet completely broken.

President Obama is an effete liberal metrosexual who's "down with the struggle" community organizer persona is just a pose.  He's never been in a fight in his entire life, other than the time he and  his gay Muslim "porn 'stash" roomate both discovered a roach under the sofa cushion, and the room broke out into a cocaine-frenzied pillow fight.

Regardless, he ain't giving up his current gig without a global-billionaire-funded fight (where others do the dirty work.)

But anyway...  Greece will default, and who's in and who's out of the Eurozone won't really matter; Germany will end up on top...  It's gonna be ugly.

We here in the US will continue sliding sideways, but I think we'll come out OK, even after the ten years or so of misery and chaos we are facing.  For the most part, we still know how to take care of ourselves, our kinfolk and our neighbors; Those who do not should probably partner up with that Spanish-speaking family down the street.  Where they came from, you had to have some basic survival skills or you'd end up dead.

Our fundamentals are better than Europe's, and I really do remain optimistic that no matter how bad it gets, riots and all the rest, we will make it through, if only because North America (thanks in no small part to Canada) will remain fertile ground for capital, especially when compared to the rest of the world.  

China?

Are you kidding?  Their one-child policy has made China a dead man walking.  And the men not dying will not be able to find a woman, because the poor little commies aborted way more little girls than little boys.

Their environment is a nightmarish catastrophe bubbling just below the surface.  Hundreds of millions are still mired in poverty.  Smaller countries chafe at their role as The Middle Kingdom's slave state, while other nations find ways to undercut them with cheaper labor, just as China did to the developed world.  China will get old before it gets rich.

The Collapse Won't be Pretty
 
The Chinese Communist Politburo still nurtures the illusion that they can ride the beast, doling out freedom with an eyedropper.  Good luck with that.  Gorbachev thought he could just crack the door open, and next thing he knew, freedom's hordes were storming the breach.  His Eastern European clients were hanging from lamp posts while Boris Yeltsen was blasting the walls of Parliament with hijacked tanks.  It's folly.  Once human beings get a whiff of liberty, it's all over.

China's Totalitarian-Capitalism chemistry set will blow up.  And it won't be a little ka-boom, it will be a roaring fireball seen and heard around the world.

Forget investing in the stock market.  Put your faith in God and your money in gold and lead.

Banker Bailout

Europeans are irked, miffed and rankled at Tiny Tim Geithner's stern warnings against the eventuality of a Euro-Crash.

"I found it peculiar that even though the Americans have significantly worse fundamental data than the euro zone that they tell us what we should do and when we make a suggestion ... that they say no straight away,"

They say they don't need his lectures, and they're probably right.  They seem to be doing a hell of a job on their own, although they will gladly accept our money to keep the scheme afloat awhile longer.

The latest round of American financial assistance came Thursday with a promise by the Federal Reserve to swap as many dollars for euros as European bankers need.

Make no mistake.  This is a Banker Bailout, at US Taxpayer Expense

We The Taxpayer will pay for this by paying more for everything as the value of the dollar continues to erode:

But over the long term, consumers could feel the impact of central bankers flooding the financial system with cash, according to John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics.

If Greece and other unstable economies collapse, Goldman Sachs and their international partners in crime would suffer catastrophic losses, and we can't have that!  So you and I watch our savings continue to be eaten away by these rats and cockroaches, while prices climb, all so Tiny Tim can send Europe all the dollars it needs.

They are propping up a rotting edifice.  The foundation has been eroded by rent-seeking rats and moral relativists.  The walls are shot through and the roof is sagging, threatening to fall in at any moment.

Collapse is inevitable.  Maybe all at once, or maybe piece by piece.  A credible argument can be made that it has already started.  Does anyone in their right mind really think Greece, Greece! can pay all that money back? Really?

The Economist explains The Cost of Break-Up.  Experts conclude that more borrowing is the only answer.

It is a bad sign when the only remedy the wizards can come up with is more of what got you in trouble in the first place.

Bloomberg - End The Fed's Dual Mandate

USA: An Economic Obamanation

I love it when lefty columnists write headlines like this:

GOP Out to Sabotage Economy!

It gives me a chance to say,

"Too Late, Obama Beat Them To It!"

You can always count on lefty loon Michael Tomasky to give us a good hearty laugh at his expense.  His naked psychological projection is stunning:

It’s about time the Democrats started saying openly what has been clear for months or even years now—that as long as economic recovery would work to the political benefit of Barack Obama, the Republicans have been, are, and will be in favor of sabotaging the economy.

Tomasky must have been on the moon during the Bush years, when democrats and their toadies in the press spent 6 whole years talking down the economy until finally they got their wish and it crashed.

What's Obama's economic plan?  Mine involves hoarding ammo, water and MREs...  It could get ugly out there.

It's not getting a lot of press here in the US, but the European streets are simmering with anger, and this time it's not the Muslims, but the natives who are violently restless.  Could anger spill over to violence in this country against those running the joint?  Hell yea, concludes eternal skeptic and unabashed liberal Paul Farrell.

He calls Reaganomics evil, but is silent at the progressive evil that has racked up northwards of $60 trillion in unfunded liabilities, all in the name of “progress” and prosperity, while actually driving us to retrograde penury.

That street violence, in Athens, Madrid, and someday here, was brought to us by the bankrupt promises of progressivism.

The European Union, like the 19th-century Congress of Vienna, can point to one achievement: a general absence of war in Western Europe for more than 60 years. Otherwise, almost all the socialist promises of an equality of result are imploding before Europeans’ eyes. (VDH - Europe is Warning Us)

Income inequality is at an all time high, unemployment is rampant and we are trapped in an Obamanomics stagflation death spiral.  People have a right to be angry.

If the people at the top got there by the sweat of their brow battling it out in the free market arena, good for them.  I begrudge them nothing.  But that’s not always the case in the United States of Crony Crapitalists.

The Big Banks are still to big to fail, despite what Chris Dodd and Barney Frank told us.  The sweaty pornographic embrace (with the taxpayer as the pivot man) between DC and Wall Street is simply too lucrative to abandon.

Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup, and other giant U.S. banks have been profiting at your expense through an implicit taxpayer guarantee of their debt above and beyond the bailout funds they have already received, a recent report from credit agency Moody's shows.

We are in for a painful deleveraging.  Walter Russell Mead writes that we will pass through a profound societal change as well.  There’s no way around it.  We are out of easy answers.  We bought our prosperity with borrowed money, and it must be paid back, but the Obama administration is blissfully ignorant of this reality.

Victor Davis Hanson asks...

If dispirited Europeans are conceding that something is terribly wrong with their half-century-long experiment with socialism, unassimilated immigrants, cultural apologies, defense cuts, and post-nationalism, why in the world is the Obama administration intent on adopting what Europeans are rejecting?

Liberals love to preach about environmental sustainability, but they ignore the fact that the social model they have built is financially unsustainable.

Coercion is the Cornerstone of Progressivism

Obama Orders Regulatory Reform

When I saw this news item, my immediate question was, "what are they up to?"  The President can't be serious.  He and his statist minions love regulations!  The bigger and more complex, the better!

Leftists love regulating the lives of others.  They get a perverse pleasure from it.  Go try to comment on your average lefty blog.  You will quickly meet up with a giddy little potentate who has her twitchy finger on the delete button, ready to scold you for your offensive rightwing hatred.

Statism and Coercion Go Hand in Hand

Progressivism is not statism, but statism is the vehicle progressives have chosen to advance their agenda.  Friedrich Hayek rightly observed that governmental grand schemes logically lead the government to become increasingly dictatorial.  It must if it is to enforce the order.   The people have got to cooperate for the schemes to work.  The grander and more numerous the government projects, the more dictatorial coercion is required...

• Obama bars Boeing barred from expanding manufacturing to North Carolina
• The Federal Government forces you to buy into their healthcare scheme
• Taxpayer money is handed to Ethanol millionaires
• Congress bans the incandescent bulb
• In times of austerity in states, cities and private homes, a tentacular federal government stubbornly refuses to rein in programs, and instead recklessly increases spending and regulation
• The federal government responds to acts of terrorism by treating its own citizens as criminals 

Meanwhile, the clanking, soulless federal monster has set about destroying the value of our currency and now talks of government-private sector partnerships to "get the economy working."   It didn't work in the Soviet Union and it wont work here.

Here is what will work, for indeed it has always worked since time immemorial:

Remove the roadblocks to economic activity which are taxes, regulation, barriers to trade, and cheap, unstable money.  (John Tamney - An Entirely Predictable Economic Dip)

Our Economic Emperors Have No Clothes

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke admits he doesn't "have a precise read on why this slower pace of growth is persisting." He is only our latest economic emperor revealed as having no clothes.

It apparently takes a tenured Princeton economics department chairman not to understand what the average Joe knows only too well - that an $800 billion-plus stimulus that didn't stimulate on top of Washington turning the mortgage industry into a welfare program isn't something the jobs market can easily recover from.  (IBD - Fall of Economic High Priests)

So, What Would Fix It?

As economic historian Thomas Woods points out in his book on the financial crisis, "Meltdown," a few bankruptcies of too-big-to-fail firms would do more to jolt the financial sector "into being sensible and cautious instead of reckless and irresponsible than all the regulatory tinkering in the world."

A free economy doesn't need an elite of government high priests named Bernanke or Greenspan or Rubin or Summers to reach and maintain the greatness that has marked most of U.S. economic history. It needs protection from such arrogant figures.  (IBD - Fall of Economic High Priests)