Less than 10 minutes after President Obama blamed everyone he could for our economic problems, the DJIA fell below the 11,000 mark.
I’m guessing by the middle of this month the DJIA will be south of 10,000.
Monthly Archives: August 2011
Phony Unemployment Numbers
On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced a drop in the unemployment rate from 9.2 percent to 9.1 percent. And that 117,000 jobs were added.
The BLS also noted that there were 38,000 fewer people working in July than in the previous month. So how can it be that the unemployment rate ‘dropped?’
It dropped because the bean counters in Washington have reduced the pool of workers enough to cause the percentage change go in one direction when what is measured is actually going in the opposite direction. The BLS calls this “seasonally adjusted” as modified by the “civilian labor force participation rate.”
[scribd id=61861912 key=key-2inwl0ufhv0awdanz1ti mode=list]
Look what the rate is if Washington used the same method of tracking unemployment that you and I use. Beginning with the active labor force as big as it was when Obama was inaugurated, the unemployment rate would be 11.7%.
If the unemployment rate goes up but is not reported, did it really happen?
Link: Jobs report shows some ugly truths | Bureau of Labor Statistics
Geithner Still Pointing Fingers
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Standard & Poor showed “terrible judgment” in lowering the U.S. government’s credit rating.
“They’ve handled themselves very poorly. And they’ve shown a stunning lack of knowledge about the basic U.S. fiscal budget math,” Geithner said in his first public comments about the credit rating decision.
“Terrible judgement?” This from a guy who earned the nickname ‘tax cheat Geithner’ for not paying his income taxes. Just like he blamed ‘TurboTax’ for his tax cheating problems, Geithner is blaming Standard & Poor’s poor judgement for lowering the United States’ credit rating for the first time ever to AA+, down from AAA where it has been for nearly a hundred years.
According to Geithner, it’s just because the credit rating company does not understand “U.S. fiscal budget math.” No doubt they don’t understand the concept of spending your way to prosperity and borrowing your way out of debt. They don’t understand that increasing the national debt by 7 trillion dollars in ten years is a decrease. What they do see is U.S. doing nothing to attack the public debt or the willingness to stop the deficit spending in the budgets that they have failed to produce. That is what Geithner means by U.S. fiscal budget math.
Some people are calling for Geithner to step down for his mangling of the economy. Even if he did, it would not solve the problem. His boss believes in the same fuzzy math and points fingers at everyone but himself too!
Obamanomics Is Expanding
Updated 8/7/2011. Now that all the stimulus money has played its course, look around for signs of success. And also look for President Obama to ask for either another “stimulus” package or a QE3, or both. But that’s beside the point.
The point is the economic genius of our president, media malpractice, and how well the two go together.
Obamanomics began from a “social justice” footing. Simply put, social justice is a statist belief that the government must manage society in a way that guarantees outcome under the pretense of fairness. I don’t believe that is in the Constitution, but Obama doesn’t preserve, protect, or defend it anyway. He really wants to be America’s new founding father.
He manages society through taxation, taking money from those who have it (regardless of whether they have been born) and give it to those who want it. The fact that the recipients might want to keep the checks coming by voting to keep them in office is just an unintended? consequence.
While Americans that have lost their jobs are in the unemployment line, President Obama is working hard to keep his own. Having been to 37 fundraisers up to this point in time, it is clear where his focus is. Bush and Clinton had 10 and 7 respectively for the same length of time in their first term.
But now, Obamanomics has a new twist. The fact that there is no job creation going on is not because of the president’s policies or his class warfare, wealth envy, or anti-business tendencies. PBS and Obama blame it on businesses for not hiring people. Here is a quote from a short PBS article that took two people to write.
However, it’s been clear for months that President Obama’s ability to enact job-creating policies has been significantly restricted by politics and the business community’s refusal to hire in the face of depressed consumer demand.
Restricted by politics? Not hardly. Obama got all the stimulus and major policies he asked for. Neither PBS nor President Obama and his advisers understand free-market economics. Businesses don’t hire people so that someone will have a job. They hire people when they believe they would lose business if they did not hire. They hire people so that they can make money. Or to put it another way, businesses don’t hire people when business is down and there is no prospect of business getting better any time soon. But in Obamanomics, businesses should hire people so they will have a job.
So this is why taxpayers have to continue to fund PBS?
But wait, there’s more. Remember the first stimulus package? All that shovel ready stuff, rebuilding the nation’s roads and infrastructure. He sold it to the American people on the pretense that that’s what it was going to be used for. And they bought it. Now we know it was nothing more than a slush fund to give to state governments to support the public-sector union wages and pension plans. Knowing full well that that money would come back to the Democratic party in 2010 like it did.
Well guess what? Pretend all that infrastructure rebuilding never happened. Because in reality, it didn’t. That’s why President Obama will be hitting up the American people for more money to ostensibly do the same thing that he asked Americans to pay for a couple years ago. You know, back when unemployment was in the 6-7 percent range.
We also need to give more opportunities to all those construction workers out there who lost their jobs when the housing boom went bust. We could put them to work right now, by giving loans to private companies that want to repair our roads and our bridges and our airports, rebuilding our infrastructure. We have workers who need jobs and a country that needs rebuilding; an infrastructure bank would help us put them together.
The administration is counting on the short memory of the dumb masses and outlets like PBS to dutifully carry their water. Short of admitting they have it all wrong, they are left with no other choice.
Link: With Debt Deal Done, Obama Turns to Re-election Campaign | With debt deal done, Obama sees need now for new spending on bridges, roads, unemployment | Huffington: Nobody Believes Obama’s Top Priority Is Jobs; It’s Getting Re-Elected | I Will Not Rest
No Deal On Debt Deal
If anyone thinks that this deal fixes anything, they need to think again.
At best, in ten years, Congress plans on increasing the debt by $7 trillion instead of $10 trillion. The ‘baseline budgeting’ scam employed by our lawmakers has got to be scrapped. That’s nothing but fantasy economics. Time to get down to the same ‘real economics’ that exists in the real world outside Washington D.C..
That bill and the PR surrounding it is another way to kick the can down the road while making it look like something good was accomplished. It is unlikely to prevent a downgrade in the credit rating, which was what all the crisis-talk was about. The only good that came out of it is that at the very least, the conversation has shifted from expanding government to reducing it.
But this bill does nothing to reduce it. Because of that, the credit rating is still going to suffer. And the so-called cuts don’t even start until after the election in 2013.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) characterized it this way, ‘instead of running to bankruptcy, we’re walking to it.’
If the bill called for spending to be held at last year’s level, with no automatic annual increases as exist in this bill, then that would be worth signing into law.
To illustrate how ridiculous the smoke and mirrors on the budget gets under baseline budgeting, if this bill called for a spending freeze, that is to say with no increase whatsoever, the CBO would rate that as a 9 trillion-dollar cut. And that makes sense to who? Apparently it makes sense to too many people on capital hill.
UPDATE 8/6/2011: U.S. Loses AAA Credit Rating From S&P
Iraq Down, Iran Up
Guess whats been happening in Iraq and Iran? Haven’t you heard?
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta says Iran is increasingly being involved in supporting attacks on the U.S. military in Iraq.
During a surprise visit to Baghdad on July 11, Panetta blamed Iran for the spike in Shi’ite militia attacks on the U.S. military. Panetta said the U.S. military would act without Iraq Army approval to stop what he termed the Iranian campaign against American troops, Middle East Newsline reported.
In June, 14 American soldiers were killed in the deadliest month for the U.S. military since 2008 amid what officials said marked intensified Iranian training of Shi’ite proxies.
And Iraq is facing the prospect of secession by its minority Sunni community. The Iraq government “has lost control over much of the Sunni community,” particularly in the western province of Anbar.
Looks like the ‘debt ceiling’ and ‘default’ hysteria has succeeded in keeping the new trouble in the Middle East from being reported. And there is no one in the Obama administration, including the Commander-in-Chief himself, talking about it.