Category Archives: Economy

Economy, Politics

Obamanomics Setting Records

According to preliminary numbers from the Congressional Budget Office, the federal government posted its largest monthly deficit in history in February at $223 billion.

Put into perspective, it is the 29th straight month the government has run in the red. A modern record. This one month federal deficit is nearly four times as large as the spending cuts House Republicans have passed in their spending bill, and is more than 30 times the size of Senate Democrats’ opening bid of $6 billion.

And after hundreds of billions, trillions, of dollars of so-called stimulus spending, unemployment continues to worsen. Despite President Obama’s hooting the unemployment rate drop below 9 percent last week, the drop was not a result of more people getting jobs, which is what the community organizer would have you believe. No, the drop was a function of fewer people looking for work, a smaller pool of people looking for jobs that have given up looking for work is what made the unemployment rate drop.

Analysts say an increase in the unemployment rate would indicate that the unemployed, those who have given up looking for work, would share the confidence in the economy that Obama says he has and are actively looking for work again. But that is not whats happening.

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Economy, Organized Labor, Politics

It’s Not A Story About Wisconsin

Often the truth comes out when you think no one  else is listening. Take the Ring of Fire radio show for example. Last week host Mike Papantonio, still high on Koch (rhymes with coke), in a discussion with co-host Sam Seder about the Wisconsin Governor and government labor unions, Papantonio confirmed the symbiosis between Democrat leaders and Big Labor and exactly what the controversy for them is all about.

Contrary to what they say in public, Progressives could care less about ‘the workers,’ or taxpayers for that matter.  ‘The workers’ are the tools for their political and ideological agenda.

Making no distinction between private  and government unions, nor any legal or constitutional justification as to why, Sam Seder asserts ‘Unions do need government support.’

Papantonio’s response . . .

It’s not a story about just Wisconsin. It’s a story, look, here’s the chain.

You take away collective bargaining. Once you take away collective bargaining, the union then, because they have no power, they’re not able to raise money. They’re not able to collect dues. If they’re not able to collect dues, if they don’t collect dues they can’t hire lobbys, they can’t do advertising. They can’t answer the Koch brothers on the television and the newspaper.

Once you have that, you then have people just saying ‘Well just what does the union do? If they don’t do me any good why should I pay anything?’ Even though, if they really really analyze what the union does for them with collective bargaining, it’s huge.

So, when that happens, what’s next thing that happens, the money for progressive ideas dries up. I mean the market of progressive ideas disappears. Because it is drowned out by the FOX News entity.

Economy, Organized Labor, Politics

Jumpstarting A Vibrant & Stable Economy In The United States

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JUMPSTARTING A VIBRANT & STABLE ECONOMY IN THE UNITED STATES
by Farid A. Khavari

The most devastating problem in the United States has been the high unemployment rates that are prevalent, along with the economic problems currently seen. Despite the efforts of pumping hundreds of billions of dollars of stimulus monies and implementation of other economic-political measures, nothing has turned out to be effective, but instead, devastating. The economic system has gone awry. The impression that is given is that the United States is currently in the process of dismantling its own economy, either intentionally or by accident. Americans are noticeably confused or possibly mis-guided by the economic problems that we are currently under. Have Americans given up on our nation, believing that the powers that be will do whatever they feel without hearing our common voices on the economy? Americans should not think in terms of the elite controlling our nation and in turn our economic destiny. We as Americans do have solutions.  The following is an attempt to provide some clarifications to those solutions that are pragmatic, under the motto: What’s good for America, it is good for all Americans!

Continue reading Jumpstarting A Vibrant & Stable Economy In The United States →

Economy, Media, Organized Labor, Politics

Mt. Obama’s Arrogance And Audacity Is In Your Face

In what would otherwise hands-down qualify for the M.R.I.O.T.D. award, what President Obama said today about congress continuing to fund what he deems as his government goes way beyond ridiculous into the absurd.

In a statement Wednesday, the president called for immediate budget negotiations between Congress and the White House, with Vice President Biden, Chief of Staff William Daley and Budget Director Jack Lew playing a role.

“I’m pleased that Democrats and Republicans in Congress came together and passed a plan that will cut spending and keep the government running for the next two weeks,” he said. “But we cannot keep doing business this way. Living with the threat of a shutdown every few weeks is not responsible, and it puts our economic progress in jeopardy.”

Mt. [sic] Obama said a long term agreement “should cut spending and reduce deficits without damaging economic growth or gutting investments in education, research and development that will create jobs and secure our future.”

“This agreement should be bipartisan, it should be free of any party’s social or political agenda, and it should be reached without delay,” he added.

President Obama must be suffering from an early onset of Alzheimer’s or that’s not tobacco in his cigarettes, because this entire issue of pressing for CR’s to avoid a government shutdown was caused by him. His lack of leadership in pressing his Democrat-controlled congress last summer to propose a 2011 budget is why we are where we are today. He is really the one to talk about not being responsible, and of putting ‘economic progress’ in jeopardy. Do you see any economic progress?

Calling for a meeting with Joe BFD Biden, William Chicago Daley, and new Budget Director Jack Lew about his budget mess is his way of making an empty suit look like there’s something in it. Calling meetings and committees to ostensibly solve problems is no substitute for leadership. You can be assured that the media will not notice.

All this, and then some, could have been avoided if congress and the president had done their job last year. But it is no accident that a 2011 budget was not submitted last year. Had he submitted a budget that included doubling the size of government like he has done and increasing the debt like he has done and is planning to do, the mid-term elections would have included a new majority party in the senate as well.

To be fair, there are a couple possibilities for why there was no 2011 budget. One is gross incompetence on the part of the president and the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives under Speaker Pelosi. The other is that it was a political calculation to not have one, which would have shown Obama’s cards for what he had in store in 2011. I’d go with the latter. Unrestrained by a budget, spending like there’s no tomorrow to prop up Big Labor and kill the economy by burdening future generations with debt becomes much easier.

Neither possibility is good. Not for them or America. You might expect it of a community organizer, but not the President of the United States. Which one works for you?

Link: Obama signs bill to head off government shutdown

Economy, Organized Labor, Politics

Differences Between Right to Work and Non-Right to Work States

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Contrary to what the labor union leaders, activists, and fleebaggers say about how good labor unions are for ‘the middle class,’ the statistics tell an entirely different story. You have to excuse them for using class warfare though. They can’t help it. They were born that way.

Right to work states create more private sector jobs, enjoy lower poverty rates, experience more technology development, realize more personal income growth, and increase the number of people covered by employment-based private health insurance.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, right-to-work states added 1.5 million private-sector jobs from 1999 to 2009 for a 3.7% increase; states that are not right-to-work lost 1.8 million jobs over the same decade, a decline of 2.3%.

The numbers really isolate where labor unions and President Obama stand when it comes to the American taxpayer. It’s all about them, and Democrats’ re-election. It’s not about ‘the workers,’ the middle class, jobs, or the economy.

Links: Differences Between Right to Work and Non-Right to Work States |   Right to Work Statistics |  Unions And The Right To Work

Economy, Organized Labor, Politics

How The Wisconsin Education Association Gouges Taxpayers

Digging a little deeper into just one of the reasons that Wisconsin needs to reform their collective bargaining posture with the public labor union, has to do with the labor union’s monopoly as the health insurance provider. Costing the taxpayers thousands more per year per employee than they have to pay.

[T]he big stake that the Wisconsin Education Association has in forcing individual school districts to negotiate benefits — because they can demand that their own WEA Trust have a monopoly on health insurance.

Link: One reason why Wisconsin needed union reform: captive benefits

Economy, Politics

House Votes To Defund ObamaCare

To quote Peter Robinson at Richochet, ‘I have lived to hear the first shots of the revolution.’

In a remarkable afternoon of floor activity, House Republicans voted to defund ObamaCare on Friday, starving the program of federal funds through the end of 2011. Republican congressman Denny Rehberg of Montana, whose amendment killed the ObamaCare funding, declared that “Today’s vote is the latest victory for the American public and our country in preventing the disastrous ObamaCare law from forever damaging our health care system and hampering job creation,” and hailed Republican efforts as saving “billions of wasted funding while opening the door to true health care reform that reduces costs and improves access.”

In fact today was a veritable two-fer. In helping President Obama live up to his words that the federal government won’t be paying for any abortions, the funding for Planned Parenthood was also dropped.

Oh but wait. There’s pee in the punchbowl. WTF

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Economy, Organized Labor, Politics

Wisconsin Protests, Astroturf

Well it didn’t take very long to find out that President Obama himself, along with his Organizing for America PAC are the driving force behind the protests in Madison, WI. The big picture here is that Obama and his labor union rent-a-mob are the driving force against the voters in Wisconsin.

Dang, this is beginning to look and sound a lot like the ruler is not only ignoring the will of the people but is actively working against them. Shades of Hosni Mubarak, no? Forget that democratic process that Obama was preaching to Mubarak last week. Today, every Democrat legislator in Madison was taken out of town on a bus (probably a short yellow one) in order to avoid the democratic process of representing their constituents and voting Yes or No on the governor’s bill.

What the governor is trying to do is save his state. That’s what he was just elected to do.

The teachers union and union thugs in general are not at their jobs. The kids (gee, it’s not about the kids anymore is it?) are losing lesson time that they’ll have to make up in June and they are complaining.  And while they are complaining, they are also starving. While the schools are closed, the poor children aren’t getting fed. What? And from the ones that supposedly care about ‘the children.’

The governor’s plan is to make the labor union employees pay rates comparable to their private sector counterparts. That, and to take all but their wages out of the realm of collective bargaining. It’s not their wages that present the fiscal calamity for Wisconsin, but the Cadillac benefit and pension plans. The people, aka taxpayers, the ones paying for it, don’t have the money. The party is over. It’s time to get real. It’s time to strip away this mystical perception so long-held by public sector labor unions of being exempt from the real world.

Who is the greedy one here?

The average worker for a state or local government earns $39.83 an hour in wages and benefits. His counterpart in the private sector earns considerably less — $27.49 an hour. Over 80 percent of state and local workers have pensions; just 50 percent of private sector workers do. These differences remain, Sherk notes, even after controlling for education, skills, and demographics. The bottom line: Taxpayers now underwrite unionized government jobs that pay considerably more — over $430 per week more — than comparable jobs in the private sector.

What this all boils down to is this administration and the Democrat party are  and always have been tied at the hip to BIG LABOR. It is BIG LABOR that contributes to their re-election. Democrats know what side their bread is buttered on. That’s why they and President Obama are concerned to the point of making laws (Card Check) to help increase union membership. Fact is, what labor union membership is, is no business of the federal government. They are an industry and business just like any other industry and business, complete with its lobbyists in Washington.

The labor unions have a lot at stake, which is why they’ll bus in protestors, beat up opponents if necessary, demonstrate at private homes,  in order to not lose their grip on the public sector labor market. The kind of labor that taxpayers have to pay for. Or to put it another way. The labor unions don’t want to lose business. If Big Labor’s business cost taxpayers more, then that is a business that the government does not need to be involved in. Let alone trying to expand. Period.

The reason Democrats are so beholden to labor unions is evidenced by the breakdown of organized labor between the public and private sector.

  • In 1980, 23 percent of Americans belonged to labor unions. For 2009, it is down to 12.3 percent.
  • A majority of union members in America (52 percent) now work for the government. This is up sharply from 49 percent in 2008. A function of all those so-called stimulus spending packages which served to grow the size of government and the union’s payroll.
  • A full 37.4 percent of government employees now belong to unions in 2009, up 0.6 percentage points from 2008.
  • Union membership in the productive sector of our economy continued its long-term downward spiral, falling from 20.1 percent in 1980 to a mere 7.2 percent in 2009.

Link: The New Face of Organized Labor |  Wisconsin Democrats Get on Bus, Flee State