Right Minded Online

After being out for several days, I’m way behind on my Rush Limbaugh podcasts, and am just now listening to last Friday’s show. During the second hour, the Maha Rushie did a fantastic analysis of the job-killing effects of cap-and-tax, which, oddly, the Democrats are pitching as a job-creation bill. Yeah, the same way the economic stimulus package was supposed to create jobs.

“But on second thought, cap and trade is much more than that. It kills jobs.” The Heritage people have analyzed this. “Over the 2012-2035 timeline, job losses average over 1.1 million. By 2035, a projected 2.5 million jobs are lost below the baseline (without a cap and trade bill). Particularly hard-hit are sectors of the economy that are very energy-intensive: Manufacturers, farmers, construction, machinery, electrical equipment and appliances, transportation, textiles, paper products, chemicals, plastics and rubbers and retail trade would face staggering employment losses as a result of Waxman-Markey,” this bill. “It’s worth noting the job losses come after accounting for the green jobs policymakers are so adamant about creating. But don’t worry, because the architects of the bill built in unemployment insurance,” too.

You want to hear how that works? They know that the bill is going to cream you! Listen to this. Section 432, Energy Refund Program For Low Income Consumers: “(1) The Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, or the agency designated by the Administrator shall formulate and administer the ‘Energy Refund Program’. (2) At the request of the State agency, eligible low-income households within the State shall receive a monthly cash energy refund equal to the estimated loss in purchasing power resulting from this Act.” Now, this is just for the poor. Pay attention. This is a part where the poor get direct deposit transfers of your money. They know your “purchasing power” will be lost resulting from this act! I’m reading from the act.

Waxman-Markey-Madoff Directly Redistributes Wealth to the “Poor”

Despite the stimulus package passed by Democrats earlier this year that was supposed to create millions of new jobs, the unemployment rate is now 9.5% — higher than its has been since 1983. It’s significantly higher than at any time under President Bush, when we supposedly had the worst economy since the Great Depression. If Obama’s job-creating stimulus package has this effect, imagine the effects of cap-and-tax and ObamaCare. Shouldn’t we insist on seeing positive results from Obama and the Democrats before allowing any of their other ideas to be voted into law?

Michelle Malkin » New unemployment numbers: Quick, blame Bush!.

The headline says it all. The press sees hope in the current recession. Trouble is, unemployment is 9.4%, which is a lot higher than it was under George W. Bush. Back then, unemployment ran 5-6%, the economy was growing, and the federal budget deficit was shrinking. Yet the media consistently reported how bad and hopeless the economy was. Now, unemployment is approaching double-digits, the economy is shrinking, and the federal budget deficit is exploding beyond anything we’ve ever seen, and the media find hope. Unbelievably biased.

Employers throttled back on layoffs in May and cut the fewest jobs in any month since the financial crisis erupted last fall — raising the brightest hope yet that an economic recovery will take hold later this year.

But with companies still reluctant to hire, the nation’s jobless rate rose to a quarter-century high of 9.4 percent, and it likely will keep rising into 2010, possibly within striking distance of its post-World War II peak of 10.8 percent.

The economy shed 345,000 jobs in May, the Labor Department said Friday — half what it was losing in a month at the start of the year. But the report also underscored how hard it has been for America’s 14.5 million unemployed to find new jobs.

US loses just 345,000 jobs in May, raising hopes – Yahoo! News.

We were doing so good there for a while, but the price of oil and gasoline have been creeping back up the last few months. Demand is low, supply is high, so that should mean lower prices. But the plentiful supply simply isn’t being shipped to market.

The economic recovery Naimi so optimistically predicts would certainly be vital to oil-producing countries, whose own economies would be imperiled by a drawn-out recession. Oil demand in rich countries has crashed since the onset of the economic crisis last year, and is now at its lowest level since about 1981, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency. U.S. oil inventories – the stored surplus – this month reached their highest level since the 1980s. And about 2.6 billion barrels are currently stored in commercial tankers around the world. “There is some risk we will run out of storage space in the next four to six weeks,” says Simon Wardell, director of global oil at IHS Global Insight, an energy-forecasting company in London. To oil-rich countries that possibility evokes grim memories of 1998, when the Asian economic crisis sent demand plummeting, driving world oil prices down to $10 a barrel. “If we run out of storage it could prompt a collapse in the price,” says Wardell. Oil producers might then choose to dramatically cut output in order to run down the surplus.

Oil Is Plentiful, Demand Weak. Why Are Gas Prices Going Up? – Yahoo! News.

The upside to the housing crisis is that the dream of owning a home is suddenly a lot more attainable.

Welcome to Landlord Nation, where foreclosure notices are plentiful and for-sale signs offer at least 1,800 homes for under $10,000 that once were worth at least 10 times more.

In extreme cases, homes are on sale for $1 or less, which has enticed investors to Detroit from as far away as the United Kingdom and Australia.

Outside buyers drawn to Detroit’s foreclosed homes.

Michelle Malkin highlights what she calls the letter of the day. It begins:

I have employed about 50 people during the last 20 years, and my family’s taxable income is about $300,000. In order to avoid paying a higher percentage of taxes on all of my income, I will decrease output, lay off some staff and still end up keeping the same amount.

Michelle Malkin » Letter of the day: Disgusted in Diamond Bar.

Unlike liberals, who wanted a sour economy during the Bush presidency so they could blame it on Bush, I actually am not enjoying the recession, nor especially the stock market collapse, since it hurts me personally. Does President Obama care that Americans are losing their jobs and private retirement accounts? Not hardly. Every American who loses his shirt in the current economy is an American who is more inclined to turn to government assistance both in the present and in retirement. Government-dependent Americans are exactly what liberals want, since they live to micro-manage Americans via government control. Liberals are in their element right now. Rush was right. Liberals are funny when they’re out of power. But once they assume power, they are down-right dangerous, at least dangerous to those of us who value individual liberty and the prosperity of an unfettered free market.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled through the 7000 level shortly after the open, then through 6900 and 6800 to finish at 6763.29, down 299.64, or 4.2%. The Dow has fallen 7,401.24 points from the October 2007 record, a 52% drop.

Dow Falls Below 6800 – WSJ.com.

A friend of mine sent me the link to a blog post by Glenn Beck, where he compares a New York City taxi ride to the road to socialism. I don’t read Beck’s blog normally, and haven’t listened to his radio show in quite some time, although he is very good at what he does. I do like this analogy.

It’s official–I may have spent too much time in New York City these past few years, because I’m actually beginning to think about things like a New Yorker. For instance, life with our new President Barack Obama is beginning to feel a lot like being in a taxi, stuck in rush hour traffic: You’re not crazy about the guy behind the wheel, not only do you not like where you’re going you are trapped in Manhattan after all, but you can’t understand the route he’s taking to get you there, and the whole thing is costing you a small fortune. Yes, a cab ride in the big city is like being on The Road to Socialism.

The Road to Socialism « FOX Forum « FOXNews.com.

The Dow Jones today fell to its lowest point since October, 2002. It had subsequently swelled to more than 14,000. Today, it is barely half that. For those of us who have our retirement and college savings tied up in the market, this is not good. This is the result of the Democrats’ mis-named ”economic stimulus” legislation. You can obviously fool Obama voters pretty easily, but you can’t fool the market. I feel like I’m living in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, where the economy is in recession, and so the government has to “do something,” which usually involves massive transfers of wealth and micro-managing the private sector. The more government “does,” the more it hurts the economy, and the worse the economy gets, the more the government feels it has to “do something.” It’s an ugly, downward spiral, and the worst thing is, liberals never accept responsibility for the negative results of “doing something.”

It didn’t have to be this way. President Obama could announce, say, a one-year suspension of the capital gains tax, and the stock market would soar. Instead of all this government spending, had he just cut taxes and gotten out of the way of the private sector, everything would be fine. Markets have an amazing ability to self-correct if simply left alone. But busybody liberals cannot simply leave anything alone. They are constantly tinkering and meddling, and we are seeing the results of that now.

Dow ends at lowest close in more than 6 years.

Shocker: Electronic Money Market Run Nearly Destroyed US Economy.

When you apply conservatism to a recession, you get recovery. When you apply liberalism to a recession, you risk sinking the economy into a depression. Hopefully that’s not where we’re headed, because it has been shown that FDR’s liberal policies extended the Great Depression by a staggering 7 years.

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After scrutinizing Roosevelt’s record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

“Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump,” said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA’s Department of Economics. “We found that a relapse isn’t likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies.”

FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate / UCLA Newsroom.

Last Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed a trillion-dollar pork bill disguised as an economic stimulus package. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with stimulating an economy that is officially in recession for the first time in nearly 17 years.

This is entirely the Democrats’ bill. President Obama and the Democrats dearly wanted this to be a bipartisan piece of legislation. Of course, the Democrats’ idea of bipartisanship is that the GOP acquiesces to whatever the Democrats want. (Really, if bipartisanship is more important than ideology, why don’t we ever see Democrats come over to our side to pass legislation?)

Fortunately, House Republicans would have none of it. Not one, single Republican voted for this behemoth. Not one. The GOP even managed to peel off 11 Democrats to vote against it. But it was not enough. The bill still passed, and is headed over to the Senate.

Since Democrats control the White House and both chambers of Congress, they don’t need any Republican support to pass whatever they want. So why is it important for bills to receive bipartisan support? Because they know their “stimulus” package is nothing more than a monolithic pork bill that does very little to stimulate the economy, and does a great deal to grow government. Democrats therefore want Republicans to sign on so that when it does fail, they can pull the GOP into the circle of blame. But the House GOP was wise enough to oppose the pork bill, also known as the Generational Theft Act of 2009, in lock-step harmony. Good for them.

The national debt currently stands at $10.7 trillion. (That’s $10,700,000,000,000.) It’s difficult to pinpoint an exact figure, because the thing grows at about $6 million per minute. Owing primarily to the bailouts already given away by the Democrat Congress, the current fiscal year deficit stands at more than $1 trillion WITHOUT adding in their latest trillion-dollar shopping spree. Ironically, Democrats railed against deficit spending during the Bush presidency, blaming the War on Terrorism for unnecessarily running up the debt. But Democrats have since re-written the how-to book on deficit spending, dwarfing any deficit that was incurred during the previous administration.

Apparently, it is taboo to incur deficits when defending the nation, but it’s just dandy to incur deficits to grow government.

Every dollar that Congress spends is a dollar that has yet to be collected in taxes. Keep in mind that the government does not create wealth. The private sector does. Government, by its nature, is incapable of creating wealth. Government only taxes wealth that is created by others. Therefore, Congress is spending enormous sums of money that don’t even exist yet, and won’t exist until years from now. Our elected representatives are already spending the tax money of workers who aren’t even working yet. Our kids better start earning a paycheck pronto.

Aside from their fiscal recklessness, the “stimulus” bill does little to actually stimulate the economy. The best way to stimulate an economy is to a) cut taxes, and b) get out of the way of the private sector. The Democrats’ plan does neither. One of the major components to their version of economic stimulus is infrastructure: building bridges and roads. The problem is, a bill passed today doesn’t translate to a bridge tomorrow. These things takes months, even years to plan and build. We need economic stimulus today. That money would be far better used to simply cut taxes immediately, income taxes, capital gains taxes, business and corporate taxes. Heck, you could suspend payroll taxes for a few months, and it would immediately put more money in the pocket of every single American who earns a paycheck, as well as every business, by simply not collecting the FICA tax. Every person, rich, poor, and middle class, would immediately have more money to spend, and President Obama would also be able to make good on his campaign promise of cutting the taxes of 95% of Americans.

But tax cuts simply aren’t part of the Democrats’ plan. They’d rather use the force of the law to transfer wealth and grow government, neither of which will spark economic growth. If government spending stimulated the economy, we’d never have recessions, because government spending increases every year.

On another note, business and corporations that do receive bailout money from the taxpayers leave themselves open to scrutiny, as bailouts create an improper alliance between government and business.

For example, just within the past week, we learned that Merrill Lynch Chief Executive John Thain came under fire for spending $1.2 million to renovate his office a year ago, even before his company received bailout money from the taxpayers. Normally, it’s none of anyone’s business what a private company does with its earnings. But when that company accepts bailout money from the taxpayers, it opens itself up to such scrutiny, and puts itself in a position to have government tell it what it can and cannot spend its money on.

Citigroup, another recipient of bailout money, recently chose not to accept delivery of a corporate jet that it planned to purchase before the credit crisis. President Obama remarked that such jets are not “the best use of money at this point,” calling them “outrageous” spending for a company getting taxpayer dollars.

And when it became known that Wall Street executives received more than $18 billion in bonuses, President Obama remarked, “It is shameful. And part of what we’re going to need is for the folks on Wall Street who are asking for help to show some restraint, and show some discipline, and show some sense of responsibility.”

It’s none of government’s business what private sector executives take home in compensation. None whatsoever. But, once again, when said businesses accept bailout money from the government, then those companies set themselves up for this kind of interference.

At any rate, it’s hard not to laugh when President Obama lectures the private sector on showing restraint, discipline, and a sense of responsibility, when it is he and his fellow Democrats in Congress who have shown no restraint, no discipline, and no sense of responsibility in running up trillions of dollars in deficits with no actual economic stimulus to show for it.

My friend Brad, who is also my personal research assistant, forwarded along the link to Thomas Sowell’s latest and greatest where he discusses, in his clever, brilliant way, the fallacy of the Democrats’ method for stimulating the economy. I’ve said for a long time that if I didn’t have my own brain, I would want Thomas Sowell’s.

Spending money for infrastructure is another time-consuming way of dealing with what is called an immediate crisis. Infrastructure takes forever to plan, debate, and go through all sorts of hearings and adjudications, before getting approval to build from all the regulatory agencies involved.

Out of $355 billion newly appropriated, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that only $26 billion will be spent this fiscal year and only $110 billion by the end of 2010.

Using long, drawn-out processes to put money into circulation to meet an emergency is like mailing a letter to the fire department to tell them that your house is on fire.

If you cut taxes tomorrow, people would have more money in their next paycheck, and it would probably be spent by the time they got that paycheck, through increased credit card purchases beforehand.

Thomas Sowell : What Are They Buying? – Townhall.com.

During pretty much the entire Bush presidency, the media and Democrats consistently claimed that the economy was in recession, or at least on the brink of one. But the official definition of an economic recession is two or more consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, and we finally have that, as the GDP has shrunk for both the third and fourth quarters of 2008. This is the first U.S. recession since the last quarter of 1991 and the first quarter of 1992. This time, we have the Democrat-induced housing and mortgage crisis to thank, because that’s what got the whole thing started.

Economic forecasters see more job cuts ahead – Yahoo! News.

Even though he writes from Scotland, Gerald Warner has some incredible insight into the recession-driven economic policies of our new president. He’s one western foreigner who hasn’t drunk the Obama kool-aid.

Obama is mega-Blair. It is understandable some Americans should be deceived; but after the Blair experience there is no excuse for any Britons buying the Brooklyn Bridge. The one reservation that slightly dampens the euphoria of Obama groupies is the thought that now, with a massive recession under way, is a most inopportune time to come into office. Nothing could be further from the truth. From Obamas viewpoint, this is a preternaturally opportune moment, an unhoped-for conjunction of circumstances that uniquely enables him to implement a programme that would otherwise have been unthinkable.

In normal times, the aggressive expansion of big government and state intervention into every area of the economy and of citizens lives would be a non-starter in America. Today, however, a recession that threatens to deepen into a depression has left frightened citizens vulnerable to the blandishments of the Keynesian snake-oil salesman. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan – Obamas so-called stimulus package – is the vehicle for transforming America into a Stetson-wearing European Union.

Gerald Warner: New president, same old snake-oil economics – Scotland on Sunday.

I feel like I’m living in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged these days. In that novel, government looters began to interfere in the private sector, which slowed the economy. When the economy slowed, the looters looted even more, which caused the economy to crash. And when the economy crashed, the looters really clamped down in an effort to “fix” things.

Still, Obama said “an economic situation that is dire” requires immediate and bold action with unprecedented tax cuts and federal programs. More bad news is expected Thursday and Friday on U.S. layoffs, and stocks plummeted anew on Wednesday, wiping out gains from the first week of the new year.

Make no mistake, government provided the impetus for what may turn out to be a recession by giving us the housing crisis. The worse the economy performs, the more the Democrats interfere. The more they interfere, the worse the economy gets. Yet they never take responsibility for their failed policies. They only blame the private sector, when the private sector has been pushed out of the way.

Obama taps spending watchdog, eyes Social Security – Yahoo! News.

Any comparison of the economic conditions in the U.S. at the present and those that existed during the Great Depression are disingenuous, require some measure of ignorance in order to believe, and simply do not reflect the depravity that existed during that era.

In the Great Depression, many Americans lined up for food and soup. In the current economic crisis, many Americans line up to shop for bargains.

Although political and economic leaders have told us the current recession is America’s greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, the two events are not comparable. And the differences are particularly acute at Christmas time.

Lloyd Mitchell, 90, of Oklahoma City said he felt fortunate to get some fruit in his stocking when he was growing up as the son of a tenant farmer in far southwest Oklahoma. Mitchell’s father grew cotton on hardscrabble land in an era of drought and record low prices.

Economists, survivors say Depression can’t compare | NewsOK.com.

I am currently reading Ayn Rand’s monolith Atlas Shrugged, and am nearly 600 pages into the novel, or about halfway done. I feel like I’m reading about the current government-induced economic crisis, just at a different time with difference characters. Atlas Shrugged is a very good (and very scary) depiction of what happens to a free market when liberals and bureaucrats start tinkering with the private sector in an effort to force “fairness” onto their subjects.

It is a scenario where the producers and inventors are attacked and brought down because of their profits, where wealth is pillaged, sloth and incompetence are rewarded, liberal intellectuals with stupid ideas who don’t provide jobs are considered enlightened, and profit-seeking entrepeneurs who create wealth and do provide jobs are considered enemies of the people.

In other words, Atlas Shrugged, published 51 years ago, is still a relevant model on how not to run an economy, because free markets still work and liberal policies are still detrimental to wealth and job creation.