Seeing red in the recovery?

Newsweek compiles their top 10 locales poised for an economic recovery:


1. The Texaplex - Austin, Dallas, San Antonio and Houston


2. The New Silicon Valleys—Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; Salt Lake City; and urban northern Virginia—which offer high-paying high-tech jobs and housing prices well below those in coastal California.


3. The Heartland Honeys — Oklahoma City, Indianapolis, and Des Moines, Iowa—which are enjoying a revival thanks to rising agricultural prices and a shift toward high-end industrial jobs. Remember... people gotta eat.



Not making the cut, of course, is any place in the Lindsay Lohan of the Union, California.

Though not a guaranteer of economic sucess, the article notes a distinctive crimson hew to these recovery zones.

Looking over the horizon.

Cap and trade, Obama care, card check…. Legislation all that has not yet been passed but is the mere specter of these job-killers chilling the economic outlook to the point that small businesses are not hiring and thus continuing to contribute to the rising unemployment rate?

Many business owners I have talked with say they are scaling back and not hiring because of the uncertainty of this political climate. Even if the economy recovers, many small business owners will stay on the sidelines because it may be too expensive for them to do otherwise. It's a capital strike as described in Amity Shlaes' excellent book, The Forgotten Man.

Small businesses because of their flexibility are at the leading edge of job recovery in a recession, a recovery that has yet to materialize. And because of the nature of small businesses they will be more risk-averse to taking on new hires if they feel the business climate is too hostile.

Dr. Helen asks if small businesses "going Galt" will be Obama's downfall, here.

H/T: Instaglen

P.S. Picture (from our recently-concluded roadie) is looking east towards the Henrie Mountains from the Waterpocket Fold region in the Capitol Reef National Park in Utah.

The Surge: Porkulus style

The White House was in full spin mode a couple of days ago as it is becoming more and more apparent that porkulus isn’t working. So, obviously the fix to that problem is… more porkulus.

President Barack Obama announced Monday that he is ramping up stimulus spending exponentially in the next three months, allowing the administration to “save or create” 600,000 jobs — four times as many as during the first 100 days since he signed the bill.

“We’re in a position to really accelerate,” Obama said, unveiling plans to boost spending on national parks, summer youth jobs, veterans medical centers, police and teachers.

But this notion of “save or create” is impossible to gage so it provides the Administration perfect cover for coming up with whatever number they feel like as demonstrating that they are fixing the economy.

The President sounded a defensive note in his remarks, saying his administration inherited a collapsing economy. “Had we done nothing, I think its fair to say that most economists believe that we could have gone into a tailspin,” Obama said.

This, of course, is a bald-faced lie as a)we are unaware of even some economists who said we would've "gone into a tailspin" without porkulus and b) Team Obama predicted unemployment would top out at 8% even with porkulus. Again, the chart below put out by Obama’s own economic team betrays the President’s narrative.



But do you know what part of the porkulus surge has us most excited? This:

The White House is launching WhiteHouse.gov/Recovery, a new webpage “that will allow the public to follow America’s Recovery story and hear from people across the country whose lives are being influenced by the Recovery Act."
“The new site provides snapshots of Recovery Act dollars at work, the latest Recovery news and opportunities for visitors to share their Recovery stories through comments, photos and videos, while Recovery.gov remains the go-to site for tracking Recovery Act spending,” the White House said.

That’s right. America’s going scrap-booking this summer.

Exit quote: "You would think that any self-respecting White House press corps would show some of the same skepticism toward President Obama's jobs claims that they did toward President Bush's tax cuts but I'm still waiting."

- Tony Fratto, senior member of White House communications shop under President George W. Bush

P.S. More budgetary "pay-go" nonsense forthcoming.

You'd have better luck checking between the seat cushions of your sofa

So, where do you go when you want to find out where the federal stimulus money is going? Well, you sure as hell don’t go to recovery.gov, the official website of the stimulus plan which just offers broad brush strokes and splashy graphics but zero in the way of information on specific projects like the John Murtha-Johnstown Cambria County Airport (pop. 20 passengers a day).

Since there is no parent-child relationship between the federal, state and local governments and no hard and fast reporting requirements for who, where and how much with respect to the spending of stimulus dollars, the promised goal transparency is being met with the predictable results.

And since recovery.gov won’t have any details on the whereabouts of your stimulus tax dollars until October, who ya gonna turn to? Enter: the private sector.

An outfit called Onvia has a website of the their own named (cheekily?) recovery.org that, to date, has logged 10,000 specific contracts worth $40 billion and it’s provided completely free of charge.

Check out the Reason.tv video below with Onvia CEO, Mike Pickett talking about his website and accountability and transparency.

If embed no worky, please click here.

Entrance Question

At what point does this cease being Bush’s economy and start becoming Obama’s economy?

No doubt, the Bush administration’s spending in his 2nd term and his fateful decision to pursue Bailout Nation in the fall of last year will continue to have far reaching effects but the fact remains that the Obama recovery plan and recent budget proposal has overwhelmed already the reckless spending of the Bush administration.

Since Obama unveiled his budget last week the stock market has not plunged wildly only to rebound in a similar fashion in a groping attempt to predict the effects of the budget but it has embarked on an steady and uninterrupted downhill grind. This grind indicates the market knows exactly what is in store for the future and remains wholly unenthusiastic about its prospects.

Then again, what would one expect when the “stimulus” plan is devoted to social programs rather than infrastructure upgrades and expansion and when his budgetary vision is centered around income redistribution rather than incentives to expand the economy and improve the economic quality of life for the American worker? Witness the illusory promise of a middle class tax cut that will be given right back to the government and then some because of other fees and taxes such as incoming state and federal carbon taxes and emissions regulations that will be both direct (at the pump or in your car) and indirect (passed-along costs from the energy and auto industry).

We are at the 15 month mark of this current recession (about the average in terms of length and job loss of the last 3 big post-war recessions) and there has been some good news with respect to falling home prices and increased home purchases as well as a steep fall-off of the price of oil and other commodities that has remained fairly stable for a while now. There has been no external bad news for the economy to absorb and process for months now – the reacting the market has done of late has been to internally-generated actions: continued haphazard handling of the financial crisis and an economic vision that is class-warfare driven and top-down and statist in nature.

There are signs that a recovery is imminent. Will this recovery be allowed to blossom? Its up to Obama but we’re not holding our breath.