Quote of the Day Part II
Filed under: economy, Obama Economy, Our Dear Leader, Politics
The tv talking heads are all aflutter about Obama “cutting his vacation short” to “address the fiscal cliff”.
Give me a break. They had 2 years to deal with this. They might as well say “Obama heroically crams for test”.
Quote of the Day
Jeremy Clarkson, host of the BBC program “Top Gear” tweeted the following:
“Americans. It took us 40 years to get rid of Piers Morgan. Pleasse don’t send him back.”
Another Math Post
Filed under: economy, Obama Economy, Our Dear Leader, Politics, Taxes
Yes, math is required, you should have paid more attention in school.
First, a spot on quick review of the so-called “Fiscal Cliff” negotiations.
Here is the bottom line kids, our Dear Leader has no issues with going over that cliff. Really, Barry doesn’t see any downside to it. He knows that tax hikes, even limited ones, are going to have a negative effect on the economy. The across the board tax hikes on top of new Obamacare taxes are going to be even worse. This way he can blame the Republicans, and the democrats with press credentials will back him on this, and then take credit for the budget cuts.
On to the math part, courtesy of johngalt at Flopping Aces.
One of the persistent myths that left repeats is that tax cuts don’t pay for themselves. This is one of those talking points that sounds simple, but is clearly false when you do the math.
As JG points out:
Given the period from 1994 to 1999, the growth period under Clinton, federal revenues increased by 1.3% for every 1% increase in GDP.
Given the period from 2003-2007, the growth period under Bush, with the lower tax rates, federal revenues increased by 1.7% for every 1% increase in GDP.
Pretty simple. Lower taxes results in an increase in GDP, which results in an increase in federal tax revenues. Note that most leftists will deny this and attack you personally for daring to bring actual math into the argument.
Let’s run with these numbers:
Applying those percentages in a comparison model, then, we can see that if given a starting point of $2.5 Trillion in revenues, and a growth of 3%(real GDP growth) in GDP, that under the Clinton tax rates, the following year’s revenues would equal roughly $2.598 Trillion. Under the Bush tax rates, that figure goes up to $2.628 Trillion. For a ten year period, the difference in revenue, assuming constant growth in GDP, becomes roughly $2.2 Trillion dollars difference in revenue
Now 2.2 Trillion dollars is about half of what our Dear Leader added to the federal debt in his first term. If Barry really was worried about the increasing federal debt and the stagnant economy, he would be working really, really hard to avoid across the board tax hikes. What is interesting, and not surprising to anyone who has been paying attention, is that Barry clearly isn’t interested in reducing the Federal debt, or improving the economy.
Some people out there in the MSM/DNC actually do the math and understand the problem. It is a very small subset of the MSM, which includes the nice folks over at CNBC. CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo interviewed democrat Senator Ben Cardin recently, and called him out on the democrat’s political posturing.
“That’s all you want to do. That’s it. It’s your way or the highway. Raise the rates on the rich. No other way. Your way or the highway. That’s it. That’s where we are. Thank you, Senator.”
“So how come you’re not moving forward? What’s the problem? Because the American people are so tired of this, and they are really tired of the lawmakers thinking that the American people are stupid. You can’t keep coming on the show every week saying the same thing: ‘It’s not a balanced approach.’”
“You’re talking about $1.2 trillion in revenue, but you’re not prepared to put anything on the table. People are not stupid!”
The best part was that after she committed this act of actual journalism, traders on the floor watching erupted in cheers and applause. They do the math and know what is going on.
Friday B-Movie Pick: Genesis of the Daleks
Doctor Who: Genesis of the Daleks
Reaching back to 1975, we find this classic from the Tom Baker, the 4th Doctor, era. The Time Lords send the Doctor, Sarah and Harry back to the creation of the Doctor’s greatest enemy, the Daleks! It has that low budget mid 70s BBC look, but carries it off well. If you only know the new Doctor series (Numbers 9, 10 and 11), check this out.
SEIU taking lessons from ACORN
You remember ACORN, the vote fraud experts. With confessions and convictions of vote fraud in at least 24 states.
Well, it seems that another arm of the democrat party, the SEIU (the major public service union) has been taking lessons from ACORN.
SEIU members have been caught committing vote fraud.
An investigation by the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office has led to a subpoena of SEIU’s Washington, D.C. headquarters and has implicated the prominent labor union in a voter fraud case that threatens to lead to criminal prosecution.
Then-SEIU Senior Organizer-in-Training Clarence S. Haynes, who is no longer affiliated with the union and whose whereabouts are currently unknown, voted in the hotly contested April 2011 election for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat despite not being a resident of Wisconsin and leaving the state shortly after voting, according to an October 19, 2012 affidavit prepared by Bruce J. Landgraf, the assistant district attorney for Milwaukee County.
It is not surprising that left fights sensible and common sense voter ID laws.
Update: democrat party officials in Maryland, NJ, NY and Massachusetts Face Prison Time for Voter Fraud
Color me completely and utterly unsurprised. Don’t expect to read this in the NY Times or hear about it on the hard far left MS-NBC propaganda arm of the DNC though.
Friday B-Movie Pick: Casino Royale
Not the recent Bond franchise reboot, but the 1967 comedy version. A great cast including David Niven as the original James Bond, Woody Allen as his nephew Jimmy Bond, Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, Orsen Wells, and a few other cameo shots by actors you should recognize. I’m a fan of the Austin Powers movies, but Casino Royale proves that you could squeeze every last drop of Mojo out of Austin, and the whole batch would not be as cool as David Niven’s mustache alone!
Roundup
Filed under: Congress, Culture of Corruption, Our Dear Leader, Politics, When democrats attack
Today’s roundup post is by Jonah Goldberg:
A Democratic senator hired an unpaid intern who was an undocumented immigrant but a documented sex offender. Apparently Senator Menendez needed an immigrant to do sex offending that Americans won’t do.
Meanwhile, Representative Jim Moran is “embarrassed” by the revelation that his voter-fraud-orchestrating son smashed his girlfriend’s face into a garbage can and pleaded guilty to assault. The girlfriend appears to be doing what she can to make the story go away. But don’t worry, the phrase “war on women” may still only be used to describe people who don’t want to pay for someone else’s birth control. No word if anyone on the left will be expressing their gratitude for the Violence Against Women Act for this.
Over in Michigan, defenders of the union protestors who tore down an Americans for Prosperity tent are heading toward trutherism, suggesting that it was all a set up, the canvas-and-rope equivalent of the Reichstag fire. No word yet if anyone is claiming the Jews inside the tent got advance notice.
Oh, and after months — nay years — of rhetoric from the president and his proxies about how taxes are simply a sign of neighborliness and the dues we pay to live in this great country, we learn that Obama’s staff owe nearly a million dollars in back taxes.
And the Republicans are losing to these guys.
HT to Mr Reynolds, who is correct in his assessment. Just another example of how you would rarely loose money betting on Congressional Republicans to screw the pooch.
The Cult of Obama
I refer to hardcore extremist Obama supporters as cultists. I prefer this term to “O-Bots” or “Moonbats”, because it is more descriptive of the behavior exhibited. You can observe them dropping their supposedly “core beliefs” as soon as they become in conflict with their devoted worship of our Dear Leader. The so-called “Peace movement” for example. Our Dear Leader followed the Bush timetable in Iraq, doubled down in Afghanistan, and started the unprecedented Drone War. Yet to the Obama cultists, Bush & Cheney are still “War Criminals” while Barry is making America “more loved” throughout the world. This is despite the growing military threat of Communist China, the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs, Islamofascists taking over in the Middle East after the so called “Arab Spring, Russia walking away from missile defense treaties, and Al Qaeda murdering an US Ambassador.
I had one Obama cultists flat out deny that the US Congress has failed to produce a budget in over three years. That is an undisputable fact! No budget has made it through both houses of Congress in over three years. The House has passed several, but no budget has made it out of the democrat controlled Senate, including several submitted by President Obama! Not only did this cultist deny the reality of the lack of an actual federal budget, he went on to claim that the debt was growing at the same rate under Obama as it was under GW Bush. Let’s review that one. In the eight years of the GW Bush administration, the debt grew by $4 Trillion. There are even clips of Obama calling that level of debt growth “unpatriotic.” At the point I was having the “discussion” with Obama cultist, the federal debt had grown another $4 Trillion in less than four years since Obama took office. Even skimming a half Trillion that he “inherited” from the previous budget (i.e. the last federal budget passed and signed by the President, which was GW Bush at the time), that is still $3.5 Trillion in new debt in under four years! That is almost double the rate that our Dear Leader called “unpatriotic!” The reality of actual math wouldn’t sway this cultist from his belief in the Lightbringer. At that point I just stopped trying to have an actual intelligent discussion with cultist, who in other aspects of his life, is actually quite bright. There is an old saying about wrestling with pigs in the mud that applies here.
During the election cycle, there were Obama cultists, who “didn’t care” (their exact words) about the 300 plus dead Mexicans, and at least one US Federal agent, killed by Obama’s Fast and Furious program, or the fact that all of Obama’s records, college, medical, etc. were sealed, but were livid over Governor Romney only releasing one years of worth of tax return. They were on their high hobby horses claiming criminal fraud. They also viciously attacked anyone who dared disagree with them over the slightest point of their claims, which, of course, had absolutely no evidence behind them what so ever. When the details of Governor Romney’s tax returns came out, showing that not only was there no evidence of criminal fraud what so ever (in fact, he deliberately over paid his federal taxes because of his own personal concepts of “fairness”), there was not one word of apology or even admission of “over stating” the issue from the cultists in question. They just moved their hatred of anyone who dared to question their deity to the next DNC sanctioned talking point.
This post requires basic math and reading comprehension skills
Filed under: economy, Obama Economy, Our Dear Leader, Politics
The November 2012 unemployment numbers are out and, of course, the followers of the Cult of our Dear Leader are saying how wonderful those numbers are and those with basic math and reading comprehension skills are not so quick to jump in and join the cheering.
As in most cases, the truth lies between the two camps, but it’s closer to those with the basic math and reading comprehension skills.
According the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U3 unemployment rate (the so-called “official” rate) dropped from 7.9% in October to 7.7% in November. That is the official government number. No books were cooked to get there. It was calculated the same way the federal BLS calculated the U3 number for the past couple of administrations. Just how the feds calculate that number is important to know. I’ll get to that later.
For a more accurate look at the health of the US labor force, you need to look at the BLS’ U6 rate, which includes the underemployed. People who can’t find full time jobs and are working part time for example. That number has been in the low to mid teens for most of the Obama regime. That fell from 14.6% in October to 14.4% in November. Moving in the right direction, but still crazy high considering the U6 rate averaged 9.2% during the GW Bush administration. That was with the declining economy he inherited, the economic recession caused by the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks, and the sub-prime housing bubble bursting! It’s even worse when you compare the Obama Economy to the Reagan Recovery, which at this point in President Reagan’s first term, the economy was producing over 800,000 new jobs a month.
The question the media should be asking is how those unemployment numbers are dropping. Yes, the economy is adding new jobs, but at a rate barely above the 125,000 new jobs a month needed to meet population growth. The numbers for October and September were revised downwards, so we should take the November number of 146,000 new jobs with more than just a few grains of salt. Even adjusting for the level of error seen in October and September, the number new jobs number is still probably over 125,000, but certainly not enough to lower the U3 and U6 numbers by two tenths of a percent in a single months time.
Now it is time to address how the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates the various unemployment rates, including the U3 and U6 numbers. The key thing to know here is that this rate is based on the official federal workforce count. If you are collecting unemployment, and thus are officially looking for work, you are part of the official workforce that the federal government counts. If your benefits run out, you are no longer counted as part of that workforce, so you are not part of those BLS calculations. If you were on unemployment but start receiving other benefits, such as food stamps or welfare, you are removed from the official workforce count as well. So as the number of Americans on food stamps (which aren’t actual stamps anymore, but EBT cards) rises to record levels under the Food Stamp President, the size of the American workforce, as calculated by the federal BLS, shrinks in a corresponding fashion.
So while approximately 146,000 new jobs were added to the economy in November 2012, the size of workforce dropped by over a half million. To put it another way, the reduction in the workforce was well over three times the size of the increase in the workforce. Combine those two numbers and now that 0.2% drop in both the federal U3 and U6 rates make sense.
If the U3 rate was calculated using the same size workforce as existed when Barry Obama took office, the U3 rate would be 10.7%. Clearly, the primary goal of our Dear Leader and congressional democrats has not been job creation, but the illusion of job creation.
So what the November 2012 unemployment numbers really tell anyone willing to look past the smiling faces of the democrat operatives with press credentials, is that there are more people receiving money from the government (i.e. money obtained from tax revenues), than are people paying taxes than there were last month. That is the legacy of the Obama Economy.
Update: Since I posted this, the BLS “adjusted” the November 2012 unemployment rate upwards from 7.7% to 7.8%. Given the economic stewardship of the Obama regime, don’t expect that to get any better. The initial BLS U3 rate for December 2012 was 7.8%. I wouldn’t be surprised if that gets “adjusted” upwards as well.
Correct in every detail
Filed under: Culture of Corruption, Our Dear Leader, Politics
