economy

Stories and reports continue to break about the stimulus bill that was rushed through congress earlier this year and the fact that it has not succeeded in creating more jobs for Americans.

Still, there doesn't appear to be any leadership or a unified voice raising the tenor of outrage about this massive failure by the Democratic leaders in Congress and the Administration.  The more people scratch the surface of the stimulus reports, the more they discover a government boondoggle - with non-existent congressional districts, counting jobs that were created without stimulus funding, double-counting of jobs, and unclear entities that have been credited with creating new jobs. 

All the while, unemployment has reached an unbelievable 10.2%

This upcoming election cycle is about jobs and the economy - plain and simple. Every poll since September 2008 has shown that the number one concern of voters is jobs and the economy. 

Voters are watching family members, neighbors and friends cope with layoffs, and many have lost their own jobs.  People are surviving on smaller paychecks.  Many Americans know someone who has lost their home to a foreclosure and ever increasing numbers believe the stimulus is having no effect on the economy.  There is a sweeping sentiment among voters that the government is getting too large and is not responsive to the people.

Without mincing words, the trillion dollar stimulus the Washington Democrats shoved down America's throat is a debacle and is the clearest example of how they are fundamentally failing the American people in regards to jobs and the economy. 

In fact, David Obey, Chairman of the Appropriations Committee and father of the stimulus bill, is now placing blame on the Administration for lack of oversight of his own bill. Even he is running scared from the mess that is the stimulus bill.

This can not be emphasized enough.

Health care reform is important and must debated and a government-run plan should be fought aggressively. However, it appears that while we focus on that, the opposition is getting a free pass on this.  In reality, the healthcare legislation is a distraction to what is most important - the Democratic leadership's big government approach to jobs and the economy has failed...and this is the strongest reason why a big government approach to healthcare is wrong.

Republicans need to begin calling for accountability on this failed stimulus bill that is wrought with inconsistencies and bad numbers...and drumbeat the looming question, "Where are the jobs?"

I point you to a piece by Mike Flynn, editor of BigGovernment.com. Mike wrote a post today, Obama Stimulus Numbers: The Return of Enron-Style Accounting, comparing the reporting of the stimulus bill to Enron's reporting of it's financial reports. He's starting to see where this is heading.

There is nothing here for the ‘enlightened’ progressive class in this, except perhaps poetic justice of a sort. They are about to be ground under the heel of an insatiable government in pursuit of a fanciful and totally unattainable poly-nirvana, along with the rest of us proles…or at least that’s how they see us. They just haven’t figured it out yet. Their heads are still stuck too far in the clouds, but reality is going to come knocking in a big way very soon.

This economic engine of ours is coughing and sputtering like a poorly tuned motor…and getting just about as good mileage out of the fuel which powers it. We’re not talking about the liberals’ other favorite mythical beast, energy, here. We’re talking about the greatest asset this country has. We’re talking about its people. We are talking about jobs. We are talking about an INSANELY obsessed government, totally and completely out of control, hell bent on destroying whatever economic power still resides in the people and the greatest driver in this or any economy, small business, entrepreneurship, and private investment.

The elite leftist is a creature of infinite contravention, espousing an ideology which by its very nature destroys that which produces the means that permits that  intellectual disconnect.

The rest of us see things in a much simpler context. We see our homes, our children, our livelihoods, our savings and our futures threatened by an unresponsive, irresponsible and punitive government in contravention of the very laws that frame its scope of governance. We have only the recourse left to us by the Constitution as a law-abiding people. At least for now. We have the ballot box and the ability to change the direction of the government and the country.

There IS a political sea-change taking place out there now, as an ANGRY and aroused citizenry become aware and educated to the depth and breadth of the betrayal of our trust by a rabidly left-leaning and TYRANNICAL CABAL within the highest reaches of our government.

There will be a huge reckoning in the elections of 2010. I don’t think the DeMarxists could moderate or change course now if they wanted too. They are like a truck on a steep grade which has lost it’s brakes. Fortunately for us, they are about to run into the wall of the American people.

Semper Vigilans, Semper Fidelis

© Skip MacLure 2009

This is hard to believe, but hey, it's the federal government's own statistics.

Guess how many new jobs the much ballyhooed "stimulus" program has created across the state of Connecticut, a place with a workforce of about 2 million?

20. That's right. TWENTY. Two-Zero.

You know, that's a total of 2.8 additional new jobs for each Democratic vote in the CT congressional delegation that favored the $800 billion boondoggle.

I really do hope this program picks up some more steam. Because based on the fact that CT's taxpayers are responsible for about 2.2% of the total federal tax base; right now we are running a cost to the CT taxpayer of about $900 million per additional job. This even makes Alex Rodriguez look like cheap labor.   

Then again, Joe Biden was in Fairfield last month  touting some big paving and tree cutting program  on the Merritt Parkway.  And we know " no one messes with Joe"

Right?

Hundreds of thousands of taxpayers swarmed the nation's capital Saturday to deliver a message to their elected officials: Don't turn our American Dream into a nightmare. A nightmare is exactly what America will be living if "cap and trade" legislation to reduce carbon dioxide emissions becomes law. That global warming tax would kill millions of jobs, bring an end to cheap energy and cripple the economy.

Even the Obama administration knows that taxpayers will feel the pain in their wallets -- though it admitted so only grudgingly last week after a Freedom of Information Act request by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. By the Treasury Department's estimate, Americans would pay up to $1,761 a year because of cap-and-trade.

The economically depressing facts calculated by the Heritage Foundation include more than 2 million lost jobs, $9.4 trillion in economic losses, and a jump of $829 per family for utility costs.  Cap-and-trade is nothing more than a stimulus bill for high-pollution China, which will get American jobs and keep emitting carbon regardless of what America does.

 The worst part of it is that the legislation is completely unnecessary. The push for cap-and-trade is driven by factually flawed fantasies of manmade global warming.  Environmentalists love to tell lies about an ice-free Arctic, and senators like John Kerry, D-Mass., repeat the lies even after they have been exposed.

Al Gore mastered the scare tactics in his documentary An Inconvenient Truth -- a film so riddled with flawed science and political spin that the British High Court won't let schoolchildren watch without a warning. Unfortunately, American students are still being force fed nonsense about global warming all the time.

We expose the devastating costs of global warming hysteria in our film Not Evil Just Wrong, but Gore and Hollywood don't want America to see it. That's why we're organizing a cinematic tea party, a natural outgrowth of rallies like the one in Washington last weekend.

Our movie will premiere in homes and on campuses across the country on Oct. 18. We hope it will be the start of a long-needed resistance movement against radical environmentalism.

 At 9:18 Friday night, I got an alert from the Washington Post. Barack Obama had slapped tariffs on imports of Chinese tires. Barack Obama's handling of this issue shows several things. First, it shows a real contempt for China, trade policy, and his international relationships more broadly. As one of my liberal friends likes to point out, this action demonstrates how the Democrats really cannot be taken seriously as the internationalist party.  And it shows the implicit contradictions in much of Obama's economic policy.

Let's start with the time of its announcement: 9:18pm. Really? Saturday morning in China? This tells us who the audience for this policy was: the United States. It tells us that Obama is willing to subordinate trade policy -- just before the G-20 meeting no less -- to domestic politics that he is embarassed about. Why else release this late on a Friday night?  (note that by statute, he didn't have to release a response to International Trade Commission recommendations until the 17th. He picked this timing)

By Saturday afternoon, China issues scathing remarks. By Sunday, they announce counter-tariffs against US chickens and auto-parts. We have a full scale trade war.  And Asian and European markets open the week down. Thanks Barack...

So Barack Obama started a trade war for entirely domestic reasons, jeopardizing the recovery, and is afraid of the headlines here, why he doesn't care about international opinion. How does that sound?

Now, why chickens and auto parts? I don't immediately understand the chickens, although I suspect it is a pretty good business for us, but I understand auto parts. 

US auto parts are made by the United Autoworkers, the same union that Obama bailed out when he bailed out GM and Chrysler, two companies that had becoming wards of their union pension funds. In addition to hurting the unions, this could hurt the auto manufacturers themselves, which Obama owns and which opposed the tire tariffs because it will raise their costs. First he screwed the car companies for the UAW, now USW. Perhaps this is a lesson for when he takes over the health care sector. 

So where was the logic in this? He helps his allies, with one hand, but hurts them with the other. He hurts the economy. He hurts the government run companies. And he opens a trade war just in time for the G-20 to create real structural damage to the US economy.

Furthermore, this is how he is celebrating the anniversary of the death of Lehman Brothers. By sticking the knife in the economy.

That's change I can believe in.

Democrats have excelled at creating the impression that wages have been stagnant or even declining in recent decades (which is inaccurate), so this sort of thing is important to emphasize. We really are getting richer. (bullet points added for clarity)

While looking for something else, I stumbled across this Census report on household income from 2006.  What's really interesting is to look at the percentage of households in each income category and how that's changed over time.  If the prophets of doom and decline and rising inequality are right, we would expect to see, I'd think, lots more rich households and lots more poor ones as the supposed gap widens.  Some prophets of doom might expect to see fewer households in the upper brackets as the highest income categories are dominated by a few people getting very, very rich.

The reality, as it turns out, is different. 

• From 1980 to 2006, the percentage of US households earning $100,000 or more (in constant 2006 dollars) grew from 8.6% to 19.1%.
• The percentage between $75k and $100K grew from 10.3 to 11.3 percent. 
• At the other end, the percentage under $15K fell from 16.6% to 13.4% and
• [T]he percentage between $15K and $34K fell from 26.2% to 23.3%.
• Thus all three categories below $35K fell a total of 6.1 percentage points. 

The middle classes fell too, though by less.   The sum total across the $35K to $75K categories fell by 5.4 percentage points.  In other words:  the net movement of households was an 11.5 percentage point gain in households above $75K and a net reduction of 11.5 percentage points in houses below $75K.  So the percentage above $75K rose from 18.9% to 30.4%.  That is, it increased by over 50%. Let me repeat that:  over 30% of US households in 2006 earned above $75K compared to under 20% in 1980.  Over the same period, the percentage of US households earning under $35K fell from 42.8% to 36.7%.  Fewer households are poor, fewer are middle class, and a hunk more are above $75K.

WSJ: "Economists ... Say Recession Is Over"

Pro Publica: "Just 12 Percent of Stimulus Money Has Been Spent"

Big Government has saved us!  Can it please stop now?

One of the toughest things in business is to truly cut costs without hurting the business when you do it. There are two parts to that. First is finding a way to cut costs in one area without causing costs to increase ‘downstream'. A lot of times a cost decrease in one area merely pops up somewhere else.

It is very difficult to get cost cuts to show up on the bottom line. The second part of the problem is to cut costs without hurting the operation or delivering a worse product to your customers. This is really hard! To cut costs without hurting the business or the customer requires a great deal of experience and talent. All good business people know this.

Which brings me to my concern with what Washington now wants to do with Health care. They claim they want to cut costs, add customers and not hurt the product. And the politicians and the bureaucrats will figure out how to do this. No one in Las Vegas would take that bet, but the politicians want the American people to make that bet - and the stakes are the lives of our citizens and the economic future of our children. And by the way, it is a bet that they won't make for themselves or for their families. Let's not let them do this to us!

 Also posted at Tom Ganley For Senate.

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For the first time in the history of our great nation, the deficit has reached $1 trillion.  Experts predict that federal spending could very well exceed revenues by almost $2 trillion by this fall.

There is no question that the deficit has increased dramatically, in large part because of the so-called stimulus package of almost $800 billion.  Congress hastily enacted the bill in February without any thought or strategic planning. I opposed the bill because it exploded our national debt without providing any meaningful economic growth. Since the bill was signed into law, we have lost two million jobs and unemployment has reached a 26 year high of 9.5 percent.

American families have always known a basic economic fact that politicians in Washington, DC just can't seem to understand - you can't spend more money than you have!! Not a difficult concept, is it? I certainly learned the concept as a businessman and in raising my family. Most Americans live by that very basic rule. But they just don't get it. Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget recently said, "Most anybody who's being honest knows we've reached a point where we've got a very dangerous fiscal situation, and it won't fix itself." Too bad Washington hasn't been listening.

I will continue to oppose the reckless spending of official Washington at every opportunity. I have said many times, I am a businessman, not a politician. I have created jobs, met payrolls and balanced budgets. I know what makes a strong economy and just as importantly I know what will harm our economy -higher taxes, more overly burdensome regulations, and ballooning deficits are not the answer. You and I know that the last thing we need in these difficult economic times is an out of touch Congress and President who increase taxes and spend your hard-earned dollars in a reckless manner.

Federal revenues are down 17.9 percent from a year ago. And yet government spending is at an historic high. The American people understand the need to cut personal spending and live within their means. What will it take for Washington to follow the lead of the people who put them all in office?

 Also posted at Vern Buchanan for Congress.

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Original Source: Shake and Bake Meth Leaves Financial Ruin in its Wake

Check for shake and bake residue

A couple of current trends are combining forces to create a new trend. Home foreclosure and “shake and bake meth” are coming together to create a growing group of families who face severe health problems and financial catastrophe.

If you’re looking for how to make shake and bake meth, you are on the wrong web site. I’m not in the business of instructing people on how to make drugs. However, if you want to hear stories about why you should have a house tested for shake and bake meth residue before you sign your mortgage papers, please continue.

The Holts’ $30,000 problem

The New York Times tells the story of a family whose financial emergency could not be solved with a same day payday loan. Here’s the story of the Holts:

The spacious home where the newly wed Rhonda and Jason Holt began their family in 2005 was plagued by mysterious illnesses. The Holts’ three babies were ghostlike and listless, with breathing problems that called for respirators and repeated trips to the emergency room. …

More than five years after they moved in, that the couple discovered the root of their troubles: their house … was contaminated with high levels of methamphetamine left by the previous occupant. …

The Holts’ next realization was almost as devastating: it was up to them to spend the $30,000 or more that cleanup would require.

Connection to shake and bake method

It’s true that homes have been contaminated with methamphetamine residue since long before shake and bake meth became a national trend. However, the New York Times reports:

Federal statistics show that the number of clandestine meth labs discovered in the United States rose by 14 percent last year, to 6,783, and has continued to increase, in part because of a crackdown on meth manufacturers in Mexico and in part because of the spread of a new, easier meth-making method known as “shake and bake.”

Get your home tested

Some people wouldn’t even think to have a home tested for meth residue before moving in. However, regardless of the neighborhood, it is definitely worth it to have a house tested for before you agree to buy it.

Just in case you are not convinced, here’s a NYT story about another family:

Meth contamination can bring financial ruin to families like that of Francisca Rodriguez. The family dog began having seizures nine days after the Rodriguezes moved into their home in Grapevine, Tex., near Dallas, and their 6-year-old son developed a breathing problem similar to asthma, said Ms. Rodriguez, 35, a stay-at-home mother of three.

After learning from neighbors that the three-bedroom ranch-style home had been a known “drug house,” the family had it tested. The air ducts had meth levels more than 100 times higher than the most commonly cited limit beyond which cleanup is typically required.

The former owner had marked “no” on a disclosure form asking whether the house had ever been a meth lab, Ms. Rodriguez said. But because he is now in prison for meth possession, among other things, the Rodriguezes decided there was nothing to gain by suing him. They moved out, throwing away most of their possessions because they could not be cleaned, and are letting the house go into foreclosure.

“It makes you crazy,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “Our credit is ruined, we won’t be able to buy another house, somebody exposed my kids to meth, and my dog died.”

More threads on: http://www.thenextright.com