Congress, like, totally bummed they will be subjected to their own law

We can't quite ever recall a more delicious lede for a straight news piece.

From Politico earlier this morning:

Dozens of lawmakers and aides are so afraid that their health insurance premiums will skyrocket next year thanks to Obamacare that they are thinking about retiring early or just quitting.

In fact, the whole article is so wondrous we might just reprint the entire piece and provide running commentary. Go ahead and read while we luxuriate in our Schadenfreude...

The fear: Government-subsidized premiums will disappear at the end of the year under a provision in the health care law that nudges aides and lawmakers onto the government health care exchanges, which could make their benefits exorbitantly expensive.

Democratic and Republican leaders are taking the issue seriously, but first they need more specifics from the Office of Personnel Management on how the new rule should take effect - a decision that Capitol Hill sources expect by fall, at the latest. The administration has clammed up in advance of a ruling, sources on both sides of the aisle said.

In what was perhaps the most idiotic line of reasoning ever formulated by a politician, it was Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi that claimed we had to pass ObamaCare so we could find out what's in it. Fully 3+ years after its passage now, Congress kinda-sorta knows what's in it to the extent that they aren't asking if the new federal healthcare law is going to screw them, they are asking how bad it's going to screw them. Good times, gang, good times.


Back to the article:

If the issue isn't resolved, and massive numbers of lawmakers and aides bolt, many on Capitol Hill fear it could lead to a brain drain just as Congress tackles a slew of weighty issues - like fights over the Tax Code and immigration reform.

(italics, ours)

In light of monumentally dubious legislative achievements such as TARP, the American Recovery Act (Porkulus), Dodd-Frank Fin-Reg, Cash for Clunkers and, of course, the subject law away from which the very members that wrote it and passed it are running as fast as they humanly can, we'll let that term percolate for a moment....

And given the legislative trainwrecks mentioned above, someone please explain to us again what is so bad about gridlock.



And back to the article:

The problem is far more acute in the House, where lawmakers and aides are generally younger and less wealthy. Sources said several aides have already given lawmakers notice that they'll be leaving over concerns about Obamacare. Republican and Democratic lawmakers said the chatter about retiring now, to remain on the current health care plan, is constant.

You do recall the President telling all of us that if we liked our current healthcare plan, we could keep it, right? We believe members of Congress sure do.


Continuing:

Rep. John Larson, a Connecticut Democrat in leadership when the law passed, said he thinks the problem will be resolved.

"If not, I think we should begin an immediate amicus brief to say, 'Listen this is simply not fair to these employees,'" Larson told POLITICO. "They are federal employees."

Words that probably should've been aired some 4 years ago, wouldn't you say Representative Larson?


One more time for the Politico piece:

Republicans, never a fan of Democratic health care reform, are more vocal about the potential adverse effects of the provision.

"It's a reality," said Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas). "This is the law. . It's going to hinder our ability with retention of members, it's going to hinder our ability for members to take care of their families." He said his fellow lawmakers are having "quiet conversations" about the threat.

Alabama Rep. Jo Bonner said the threat is already real, especially for veteran lawmakers and staff. If they leave this year, they think they can continue to be covered under the current health care plan.

We've heard ObamaCare called many things and indeed this blog has had its share of pejoratives to associate with ObamaCare but referring to the federal law as a "threat" is a new one.



Woops, we lied... check this out:

The Affordable Care Act - signed into law in 2010 - contained a provision known as the Grassley Amendment, which said the government can only offer members of Congress and their staff plans that are "created" in the bill or "offered through an exchange" - unless the bill is amended.

Wait. What? They had an opportunity to effectively exempt themselves from the apparent horribleness of ObamaCare during the crafting of the legislation and they failed to do even that?

We shouldn't be amazed but we are. It tells you all you need to know about the caliber of people we send to represent us in D.C. that they are now freaking out over that which they will be subjecting the rest of us. Yep, we're in the very best of hands.

It's as if we've run out of good ideas...

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... but make laws we must anyway



Time was in this country when Congress passed legislation and which the President signed into law that gave certain people the right to vote which they had been previously denied or created our national park system to be enjoyed by all future generations of Americans or even declarations that sent our armed forces to war to rid the planet of the scourge of fascism and imperialism. Now days, we pass laws to saddle all future generations of Americans with mountains of debt and to ensure the IRS is all up in our britches more than at any time in our country's history.

"It is unprecedented in recent history, the amount of responsibility the IRS is being given in an area that most people don't think of as an IRS function,"

So saith J. Russell George, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, in his testimony before the House Appropriations Committee on Wednesday regarding the IRS's responsibility for ObamaCare compliance.

George added that Americans , will have more questions about their taxes because of health care penalties or credits, flooding already busy call-in and walk-in tax help centers. "This is going to lead to problems, sir."

Truly... the IRS as the enforcement arm of the new health care law. What could possibly go wrong?

And these resource issues are bound to spill over into tax fraud enforcement, where the IRS will have to do a cost-benefit analysis when determining which tax fraudsters to chase.

"They have to determine what enforcement mechanisms they'll employ . how they go about determining who to audit and who not to," George said.

It would appear that the 16,000 additional IRS agents that were/are to be hired wasn't necessarily the stuff of righty blog fever swamps.

The non-partisan GAO (Government Accounting Office) says there are 47 new taxes and regulations to administer in overseeing of ObamaCare. Go the link for the full list but here are just a few of our faves:

3.Imposes a penalty on health plans identified in an annual Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) penalty fee report, which is to be collected by the Financial Management Service after notice by the Department of the Treasury (Treasury)

.

To our knowledge, no one yet knows what the acceptable/not-acceptable criteria is.

4.Requires state exchanges to send to Treasury a list of the individuals exempt from having minimum essential coverage, those eligible for the premium assistance tax credit, and those who notified the exchange of change in employer or who ceased coverage of a qualified health plan.

These would be the state exchanges that have not yet been set up. Deadline is October of this year. Any takers?

The people being spoken about here are exempt from ObamaCare because they do not make enough money. However, according to the CBO, there will be approx. 6 million Americans who make too much too qualify for the exemption yet not enough to sign up for health insurance. This group of people will be subjected to the ObamaCare penalty tax.

11. Authorizes IRS to disclose certain taxpayer information to HHS for purposes of determining eligibility for premium tax credit, cost-sharing subsidy, or state programs including Medicaid, including (1) taxpayer identity; (2) the filing status of such taxpayer; (3) the modified adjusted gross income of taxpayer, spouse, or dependents; and (4) tax year of information.

Again, the IRS: all up in your business where they have never been before and disseminating said business to another federal bureaucracy.

22. Imposes a 40 percent excise tax on high cost employer-sponsored health insurance coverage on the aggregate value of certain benefits that exceeds the threshold amount.

Companies get wacked for not providing enough healthcare coverage and wacked for providing too much.

44. Imposes a tax of 2.3 percent on the sale price of any taxable medical device on the manufacturer, producer, or importer.

Dem pols in the Boston area who voted for ObamaCare are trying to get this tax thrown out as they are only now figuring out that tax will actually have adverse effects on the medical industry of the Hub City.


Again, go to the link for the entirety of the list.




Exit question: We may try to expand on this later, but can a Republic reach a point where they've got pretty much all their basis covered but since they maintain a full time legislative body that is sent to the nation's capitol to do something, they wind up being far more counter-productive than not?

Medicare Part D, TARP, Porkulus, Dodd-Frank Fin-Reg, Cash for Clunkers and, of course, ObamaCare...


It's worth considering.

Quickies

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A round-up of news items, articles, columns and blog posts that caught our eye this past week.






Here's some more of that transparency we've been hearing about:

Former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Sunday that he was told not to "acknowledge" or "discuss" the secret drone program when becoming the government's top spokesman.

Chris Hayes, host of MSNBC's "Up," played a video clip of Gibbs and current press secretary Jay Carney dodging questions about drones in the White House briefing room before asking if the Obama administration has been sufficiently forthcoming about the controversial targeted killing program. Gibbs, who recently became an MSNBC contributor, recalled the instructions he was given upon taking the job.

“When I went through the process of becoming press secretary," Gibbs said, "one of the things, one of the first things they told me was, ‘You’re not even to acknowledge the drone program. You’re not even to discuss that it exists.'”

The national media was slow covering the secret drone war in Pakistan and Yemen during Obama's first term, which has been difficult to track given both the government's secrecy and that strikes often take place in remote areas. But the drone media debate has gained steam early in Obama's second term, alongside questions for top counter-terror official John Brennan upon his nomination to become CIA director.

(italics, ours)

If HuffPo's definition of "slow" is equivalent to "effectively gave no coverage to it whatsoever" then we will concede to their definition of slow.

In fact, the first in-depth coverage of the drone program was in the run-up to the November elections; a lengthy piece by the New York Times that served ostensibly to bolster the President's chops as being tough in prosecuting the war on terror. Not exactly a puff piece but not overly critical of the administration either.

For a newspaper that was apoplectic over some tasteless prisoners-gone-wild photos taken at Abu-Ghraib, the contrast in coverage was emblematic of the state of the 4th estate these days.






We haven't yet had time to read the article but this cartoon in the linked piece from the City Journal is perfect in summing up the unholy relationship between California's state Democrats and the state's unsustainable public pension funds.











Our tweet from earlier this week:

Why gun ownership: Best reason: as a way of telling those who don't want you to own to perform physically impossible acts upon themselves.

Maybe we're missing something but didn't we at some point in this country's history, a nation borne of rebellion, have a little more "Eff-you" in our collective DNA?

Shouldn't always our default position, when told by the government to do something, be: "Why?"

And when told to not do something: "Why, not?"

It's not anarchy, merely critical thinking with an edge and when looking at some of the nonsense, in fact, some of the biggest pieces of legislation that have been signed into law over the past two administrations (we're looking at you Medicare Part D, TARP, the American Recovery Act (Porkulus), Cash for Clunkers, Dodd-Frank Fin-Reg and, of course, the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) and now, pending gun laws) we're stunned by the relative passiveness of the electorate regarding laws that were so carelessly thrown together and which have and will serve to be, at best, preserving of the status quo and, at worst, absolute disasters.


Your thoughts?






Confirmed: Our media doesn't possess a liberal bias, it possesses an idiot bias.

Related: CNN talker, Christiane Amanpour, wishes Zimbabwe tyrant, Robert Mugabe a happy birthday.

They have changed the title of the post to "Robert Mugabe, how many more birthdays in power?"

Original post title did indeed read, "Happy Birthday, President Mugabe"

Nice try, CNN...

San Diego Restaurant-related question:

You wouldn't dare go into a restaurant with a large picture of Adolph Hitler, would you? Hell, no!

Then why would you go into one that had a large floral wall mural of Chairman Mao as is the case with San Diego ramen house, Underbelly?






We actually posed this question to a liberal aquaintance of ours and the shorter version of her response was: Intent.

You see, the statist/collectivist mindset is that that while the purposeful genocide of 6 million Jews, Christians, gypsies and other undesireables was bad, the death of 20-30 million Chinese during the Great Leap Forward, for example, was somewhat excuseable because Mao's heart was in the right place... Oops... he didn't mean to do it.

This is the "Sh$t Happens" logic that excuses the inevitable results of some forms of collectivism over that of others.

Our friend bemoaned the fact that Communism was beset by such bad luck through the centuries, so it could only mean that it was never practiced in its pure(er) form.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the largest body counts in recorded human history as wracked up by the likes of Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot has been sheer coincidence and demonstrable in only that their purer vision of collectivism wasn't implemented.

Just think how many more they could've wracked up had they the opportunity to do so.






Another week and another round of bad news for ObamaCare...

Florida is finding out what California has discovered: there will very soon be a severe doctor shortage:

Brace yourself for longer lines at the doctor's office.

Whether you're employed and insured, elderly and on Medicare, or poor and covered by Medicaid, the Florida Medical Association says there's a growing shortage of doctors — especially specialists — available to provide you with medical care.

And if the Florida Legislature goes along with Gov. Rick Scott's recommendation to offer Medicaid coverage to an additional 1 million Floridians — part of the AffordableCare Act that takes effect next January — the FMA says that shortage will only get worse.

"Florida needs more doctors and it needs more nurses, and it needs them working together in teams," said Rebecca O'Hara, a lobbyist for the FMA.

About 15 million Floridians have health insurance today, and Obamacare, which requires most adults to have coverage by January, could add as many as 2.5 million more. One million would come through a potential expansion of the federal-state Medicaid program that Scott announced this week he was backing. The others would be the result of new mandates requiring employers and individuals to have insurance or be fined.

Governor, Rick Scott, becomes yet another Republican governor to cave in by expanding his state's Medicaid program in response to ObamaCare; Ohio governor, John Kasich, did so two weeks ago.

What is the use of dumping millions more onto the Medicaid rolls if there aren't the doctors to service them? A 2,200 page bill failed to squeeze in a few paragraphs to address this immediate problem.




OK, gang. That's it forr today. We will hopefully catch-up again tomorrow.

A Cash for Clunkers update

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Back in 2009, the Cash for Clunkers program was envisioned as a $3 billion tax-payer funded boost to the economy by offering a $4,500 rebate on used cars to be applied towards a new one. The thought was that this stimulus program would aid a flagging auto industry, bump economic activity and get older less-fuel efficient cars off the street and thus, out of the environment.

Turns out none of this happened as hoped for. As we’ve chronicled in previous posts, Cash for Clunkers has resulted in Clunker’s remorse for people who jumped on the $4,500 rebate and found themselves in a 5-year new car lease that, as it turns out, they could not afford (and the housing/financial crisis was all Wall St.’s fault?) and for a car that a year later they no longer wanted.

Cash for Clunkers also shafted lower/working class families out of perfectly serviceable used cars that they could have employed to get to and from work, school, the market, the doctor, etc. By taking 690,000 used cars out of circulation, it bumped up the price of used cars further putting those cars out of the reach of affordability for those who needed it the most. With transportation mobility comes upward economic mobility and Cash for Clunkers did its part in snuffing out that dream for many lower-income American families.

Cash for Clunkers also shafted charities out of used cars that would’ve been otherwise turned over to them for refurbishment and then turned back over to that charity’s targeted need.

And, as studies have shown, Cash for Clunkers was merely “sugar” as it did temporarily spike auto sales but all it was doing was stealing demand from later on down the road. Overall, net car sales remained flat.



Now, as it turns out, Cash for Clunkers, on top of everything else was/is, horrible for the environment as well.

According to E Magazine, the “Clunkers” program, which is officially known as the Car Allowance Rebates System (CARS), produced tons of unnecessary waste while doing little to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

The program's first mistake seems to have been its focus on car shredding, instead of car recycling. With 690,000 vehicles traded in, that's a pretty big mistake.
According to the Automotive Recyclers Association (ARA), automobiles are almost completely recyclable, down to their engine oil and brake fluid. But many of the “Cash for Clunkers” cars were never sent to recycling facilities. The agency reports that the cars’ engines were instead destroyed by federal mandate, in order to prevent dealers from illicitly reselling the vehicles later.

The remaining parts of each car could then be put up for auction, but program guidelines also required that after 180 days, no matter how much of the car was left, the parts woud be sent to a junkyard and shredded.

Shredding vehicles results in its own environmental nightmare. For each ton of metal produced by a shredding facility, roughly 500 pounds of “shredding residue” is also produced, which includes polyurethane foams, metal oxides, glass and dirt. All totaled, about 4.5 million tons of that residue is already produced on average every year. Where does it go? Right into a landfill.

E Magazine states recycling just the plastic and metal alone from the CARS scraps would have saved 24 million barrels of oil. While some of the “Clunkers” were truly old, many of the almost 700,000 cars were still in perfectly good condition. In fact, many that qualified for the program were relatively “young,” with fuel efficiencies that rivaled newer cars.

And though the point was to get less fuel efficient cars off the roads, with only 690,000 traded in, and over 250 million registered in the U.S., the difference in pollutant levels seems pretty negligible.

But all that vehicular destruction did more than create unnecessary waste for the environment. It also had some far-reaching economic effects.

Fully 60% of a car’s recyclable value is in its engine and drivetrain but by federal mandate, the car’s engine was to be filled with a sodium silicate solution and left to rust away in perpetuity in a landfill near you.

Because it was a brief program and because it had a limited scope, Cash for Clunkers, of all the Keynesian gimmickry employed by the federal government, provides perhaps the clearest and best example of the negative consequences that result from the government injecting itself into the marketplace.

Cash for Clunkers: no net positive effect on auto sales, a bain to this country’s charities, sticking it to lower-income families and, now, horrible for the environment. What’s not to love about all that?


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Quickies

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A round-up of news items, articles, columns and blog posts that caught our eye this past week.




B-Daddy admits to being wrong about drilling for oil and natural gas:

I still believe that our own drilling won't have much effect on prices, but it has become clear that I was missing something more important. Jobs. Drilling in North Dakota and the impact of the Keystone XL pipeline, if it were built, means jobs for Americans. It was a mistake on my part not to acknowledge that part of the equation, especially when unemployment really took off in 2009. Further, I might even be wrong about the economic impact. It seems that all of the natural gas we are bringing up out of the ground is having a huge impact on its price.

So I have to give props to Mr. 'Dawg on this, and thank him for pushing me on the issue. Now let's drill baby.

Got diversity?

100% and Vitamin D at Obama campaign headquarters.






Here's Obama's top advisor, David Axelrod on Fox News on Sunday getting Freudian?




Or is the truth of the matter just too difficult to suppress?





Second thoughts on drill, baby, drill?

Qatar, the richest nation on earth, is also the fattest with half of all adults obese and 17 per cent of the population suffering from diabetes.
By comparison America, which is often assumed to be the fattest, looks positively slim with a third of adults obese and eight per cent diabetic.

Out of a population of 1.7million, just 250,000 are native Qataris, who, in the space of just two generations have switched from a tribal existence to living in air conditioned villas being waited on by armies of servants.

More Freude on the Sunday talkies? Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, on what the President had to do to the economy.






0:15 : "...deeply damaging..."

The truth of all manner of Keynesian gimmickry wrapped up in Porkulus, Cash for Clunkers, home-owners assistance mortgage programs which has resulted in 38 straight months of unemployment being over 8%, proves to be an irresistable force for Geithner.

Shoot... the truth doesn't even hurt as Geithner, when he's done, will just rotate back to Citi, Goldman Sachs or a tenured position at Harvard. That's what passes for elite meritocracy in this country, anymore.




Leslie at Temple of Mut on the Hilary Rosen/Ann Romney dust-up:

The set-up: A snarky liberal gadfly Hilary Rosen tweeted that Mitt Romney’s wife Ann had no place commenting on economics because she had never worked (and sounding remarkably like a male chauvanist pig of former decades while doing so — a most remarkable achievement). America’s stay-at-home mom’s everywhere were shocked to discover that their thoughts on gas prices, food costs, consumer inflation, and other economic concerns are not germane to the discussion of any form of domestic economic policy formulation. Interesting, because most of the mom’s I know have a fairly significant role in budget planning. However, given Team Obama’s handling of budget matters, this type of inanity should be unsurprising coming from a 35-time White House cult-woshipper guest.

Good to know that modern feminism has progressed to sounding like Archie Bunker.

And forget about any of this sisterhood nonsense while they are card-checking your political leanings at the clubhouse door.



OK, gang. Gotta get to work. We're out.



Next post: some fun with charts/graphs


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Forget about "the war on women"....

.

... who's paying any attention to the war on the poor?


Alternate headline: Doubling down on stupid


We have previously made note of what a disaster the administration's Cash for Clunkers was as $3 billion dollars to goose demand for new cars took perfectly fine-operating used cars off the market which had the obviously predictable results of raising the price of existing used cars which made them less accessible to lower income folks and charities who would be in the market for the same.

In case anyone wondered, cars are important:

For more than a century, efforts to help the disadvantaged have focused on education, healthcare, nutrition and housing. Almost nothing has been done to help the working poor afford cars, despite research that indicates it would help alleviate poverty.

About 1 in 4 needy U.S. families do not have a car, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation. That's a serious handicap for the millions of Americans who don't have access to robust mass transit.

A nationwide survey of 353 people who bought cars with help from a nonprofit group called Ways to Work found that 72% reported an increase in income. Of those who were on public assistance when they acquired a car, 87% were no longer receiving it a few years later.

Other studies have found that low-income people were more involved in community activities and had better access to healthcare after getting cars, while their children participated more frequently in after-school programs.

"You're more likely to have a job and less likely to be fired," said Evelyn Blumenberg, a professor of urban planning at UCLA who studies transportation and poverty. "It's just a no-brainer that low-income families need cars."

Yet there are almost no state or federal programs to meet the need.

(italics, ours)

Let that sink in for a moment. It's not necessarily that there is no federal program in place to meet the car needs of the poor, there was certainly a program that resulted in worsening this scenario in Cash for Clunkers.


And the situation is not going to be getting any better.

he Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulations that President Obama announced last summer will make it impossible for 7 million lower income consumers to buy a new car according to a National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) study released today.

“While you can mandate what automakers must build, (ed. note: a dubious assumption, at best) you can’t dictate what customers will buy, nor can you dictate if a bank will make a loan,” New Mexico Ford dealer Don Chalmers said today.

Obama's proposed CAFE standards, which will begin taking effect in 2017, raise minimum average vehicle fleet fuel efficiency to 54.5 mpg by 2025. The Environmental Protection Agency and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimate that this regulation will raise the average price of passenger cars and light trucks by $3,000.

“The unintended consequences of the proposed fuel economy increases are clear,” NADA Used Car Guide analyst David Wagner said. “If the price of a vehicle goes up by the government estimate of almost $3,000, millions of people will no longer be able to finance a new vehicle.”

This isn't rocket science, gang. If you are going to start mandating increases in technology outside of market demand, that is necessarily going to have an effect on the price of that technology.

The very class of people statist claim to champion are getting screwed by statist policies. Again, even that, as we have seen over the years isn't rocket science.

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Cash for Clunkers: the gift that keeps on giving

At the height of the Keynesian gimmick known as Cash for Clunkers, we noted that charities weren't too hot on the idea as the program succeeded in taking older, lower gas mileage, but certainly serviceable cars off the market. The very types of cars favored by lower-income folks to get back and forth to work.

It appears now that we are discovering one of the legacies of Cash for Clunkers.

For more than a century, efforts to help the disadvantaged have focused on education, healthcare, nutrition and housing. Almost nothing has been done to help the working poor afford cars, despite research that indicates it would help alleviate poverty.

About 1 in 4 needy U.S. families do not have a car, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation. That's a serious handicap for the millions of Americans who don't have access to robust mass transit.

A nationwide survey of 353 people who bought cars with help from a nonprofit group called Ways to Work found that 72% reported an increase in income. Of those who were on public assistance when they acquired a car, 87% were no longer receiving it a few years later.

Other studies have found that low-income people were more involved in community activities and had better access to healthcare after getting cars, while their children participated more frequently in after-school programs.

"You're more likely to have a job and less likely to be fired," said Evelyn Blumenberg, a professor of urban planning at UCLA who studies transportation and poverty. "It's just a no-brainer that low-income families need cars."

Yet there are almost no state or federal programs to meet the need.

(italics, ours)

Let that last sentence sink in. Cash for Clunkers destroyed 700,000 cars. You don't think that a good chunk of that 700,000 cars, were they still around, could be meeting the needs of the poor and low income families in this country?

There was a federal program, alright. But it was a federal program that absolutely shafted people who need wheels to get to work, to go shopping, to take their children to the doctor, etc.

"Those cars could have been used for very needy working-class families," said Carolyn Hayden, a Glendarden, Md., transportation consultant. "It will go down in the annals as a missed opportunity."

More like a fantastically horrible idea. Think about it: $3 billion to essentially keep people unemployed. What's not to like about that?

The Keynesian gimmickry employed by the Obama administration to get us out of the recession were intended to be quick-hitters to boost the economy. What were finding, however, is that as short-lived as these programs were they have a legacy and a human cost that will be felt for years.

News item of the day

News ledes that make you wonder upon which planet the New York Times and/or the Obama administration are currently residing.

As the economy worsens, President Obama and his senior aides are considering whether to adopt a more combative approach on economic issues, seeking to highlight substantive differences with Republicans in Congress and on the campaign trail rather than continuing to pursue elusive compromises, advisers to the president say.

Elusive compromises like Porkulus, Cash for Clunkers, Cash for Caulkers, car company takeovers and ObamaCare all which enjoyed zero bi-partisan support and which did nothing for, and can be argued, did further harm to the economy. Those elusive compormises?

Mr. Obama plans to spend time this weekend considering his options, advisers said. The White House expects to unveil new job-creation proposals in early September

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Can't wait to see how the same old Keynesian gimmickry is going to be re-packaged and re-spun in just a few weeks.

So far, most signs point to a continuation of the nonconfrontational approach — better to do something than nothing — that has defined this administration. Mr. Obama and his aides are skeptical that voters will reward bold proposals if those ideas do not pass Congress. It is their judgment that moderate voters want tangible results rather than speeches.

“If you’re talking about a stunt, I don’t think a stunt is what the American people are looking for,” the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, told reporters on Wednesday. “They’re looking for leadership, and they’re looking for a focus on economic growth and job creation.”

Actually, give "nothing" a try. Seriously. Give it a whack because nothing they have tried so far has done any good. And stunts? Mr. Carney, kind sir, stunts and demand-side gimmicks are all this administration has offered up.


And as for our wondering about re-packaging failed Keynesian policies, it doesn't look like Team O is going to even worry about any slick re-branding because it's mainstream economic theory, dontcha know?

A wide range of economists say the administration should call for a new round of stimulus spending, as prescribed by mainstream economic theory, to create jobs and promote growth. It is clear that the House would never pass such a plan.

The campaign meme of the Obama adminstration which will be dutifully parroted by their water-carriers in the media has been set and you won't be surprised to know the crappy state of the economy has nothing to do with them but rather the fellow that preceded Obama and those damn pesky Republicans that keep getting in the way of allowing the administration from further ruining the economy.

Your high-speed choo-choo update (UPDATED)

(please scroll down for update)


Like the Sun rising in the East...

Building tracks for the first section of California's proposed high-speed rail line will cost $2.9 billion to $6.8 billion more than originally estimated, raising questions about the affordability of the nation's most ambitious rail project at a time when its planning and finances are under fire.

A 2009 business plan developed for the California High-Speed Authority, the entity overseeing the project, estimated costs at about $7.1 billion for the equivalent stretch of tracks. Officials say those estimates were made before detailed engineering work and feedback from communities along the proposed route.

The latest estimates are contained in two environmental impact studies that were shared with The Associated Press before their public release on Tuesday.

The truly scary part of this continuing sad saga of high speed trains here in California is that the "first section" that has been under-estimated, on the conservative side, to the tune of the entire federal Cash for Clunkers program ($3 billion), is that they underestimated the easy part of the track-laying.

If the powers-that-be are underestimating what it's going to cost to lay tracks between the sprawling metroplises of Borden and Corcoran out in the middle of the Central Valley, just wait for the budget-busting fun to begin when it comes time to sharpening the pencil up over mountain passes into Los Angeles and right-of-ways in and around San Francisco. What could possibly go wrong?

We've had ourselves quite a few completely senseless boondoggles over the past few years, but if California's high-speed choo-choo endeavor stays on its current trajectory (and it's early, gang) then it may prove to be the queen-mother of all boondoggle debacles. And we're looking at you, ethanol.



(UPDATE #1) We are gladly liberating what B-Daddy shared in the comments section.

Matt Groenig: pork buster?

Quickies: the new civility edition

A round-up up news items, columns, articles and blog posts that caught our eye this past week. And here's your language warning as we are not feeling all that civil, unfortunately.






Froma Harrop is a syndicated columnist and head of the National Conference of Editorial Writers, a group that has a project called Restoring Civility as part of their website. It should come as no surprise then that the Wall St. Journal's James Taranto got wind of what Ms. Harrop considers civil editorializing:

"Make no mistake: The tea party Republicans have engaged in economic terrorism against the United States--threatening to blow up the economy if they don't get what they want. And like the al-Qaida bombers, what they want is delusional: the dream of restoring some fantasy caliphate. . . . Americans are not supposed to negotiate with terrorists, but that's what Obama has been doing. . . . That the Republican leadership couldn't control a small group of ignoramuses in its ranks has brought disgrace on their party. But oddly, Obama's passivity made it hard for responsible Republicans to control their destructive children. The GOP extremists would ask Obama for his firstborn, and he'd say, 'OK.' So they think, why not ask for his second-born, to which he responds, 'Let's talk.' "

Again, the complete lack of originality ought to shame these people but it's painfully obvious now that shame is not a trait they possess.

And which Harrop lamely rationalizes when she noted she was being called out:

I see incivility as not letting other people speak their piece. It’s not about offering strong opinions. If someone’s opinion is fact-based, then it is permissible in civil discourse. Of course, there are matters of delicacy, and I dispensed with all sweet talk in this particular column. And I did stoop to some ad hominem remarks, I’ll admit.

However, it was a Wall Street Journal editorial that first called the tea-partiers “hobbits.” After John McCain picked up the hobbits theme in a much-quoted remark, a subsequent editorial expanded on it, ending with:

Yes, I was angry, but I’m engaging in the defense of my country. I know the tea partiers say the same, but their behavior is that of a national wrecking crew. Most may be nice people who don’t know what they’re doing, but many a country has foundered on the passions of nice people.

First of all, we don't even know what the hobbit metaphor was supposed to mean. It made no sense in any way, shape or form in the context of the debt debate. But more importantly, Harrop excuses her behavior because she is the sane and rational one in the debate as determined by... her. All others who don't agree with her are just a bunch of stark raving lunatics and should just shut up. The moral superiority of the liberal-Left on full display here, folks.






And speaking of which, John Kerry was on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" Friday morning giving his views on freedom of the press. Shut Up! , he explained:

“And I have to tell you, I say this to you politely. The media in America has a bigger responsibility than it’s exercising today. The media has got to begin to not give equal time or equal balance to an absolutely absurd notion just because somebody asserts it or simply because somebody says something which everybody knows is not factual.

“It doesn’t deserve the same credit as a legitimate idea about what you do. And the problem is everything is put into this tit-for-tat equal battle and America is losing any sense of what’s real, of who’s accountable, of who is not accountable, of who’s real, who isn’t, who’s serious, who isn’t?”

Terrorist, Al-Queda, anti-1st amendment talk from a person that could've been our President... we must really be getting under their skin.

So, in keeping with all the civility we've been seeing of late and also in keeping with a tea party pejorative, we have a question for the Senator: Hey, Kerry... how do our balls taste?






Walter Russell Mead, one of the great thinkers of our time expounds on how it is the liberal-Left disaffects voters.

The promise:

The progressive, administrative regulatory state and more broadly the technocratic and professional intelligentsia who operate it sold themselves to the public as an honest umpire in charge of American life. . . . Instead, we would have government by philosopher kings, or at least by incorruptible credentialed bureaucrats. Alabaster towers of objectivity such as the FCC, the FDA, the EPA, the FEC and so many more would take politics out of government and replace it with disinterested administration. Honest professionals would administer fair laws without fear or favor, putting the general interest first, and keeping the special interests at arm’s length. The government would serve the middle class, and the middle class would thrive.

And the reality:

For large numbers of voters the professional classes who staff the bureaucracies, foundations and policy institutes in and around government are themselves a special interest. It is not that evil plutocrats control innocent bureaucrats; many voters believe that the progressive administrative class is a social order that has its own special interests. Bureaucrats, think these voters, are like oil companies and Enron executives: they act only to protect their turf and fatten their purses. . . . The professionals and administrators who make up the progressive state are seen as a hostile power with an agenda of their own that they seek to impose on the nation.

We forgot where we first heard the term but "technocratic authoritarianism" sums up quite well the widening gap and increased resentment felt by the country class towards the ruling class. Check out more of both Mead and B-Daddy's breakdown at The Liberator Today.





How are those higher taxes in New York working out?

Taxed-out New Yorkers are voting with their feet, with a staggering 1.6 million residents fleeing the state over the last decade.

For the second consecutive decade, New York led the nation in the percentage of residents leaving for other states, according to the report by the Empire Center for State Policy.

The population loss is "the ultimate barometer of New York's attractiveness as a place to work, live and do business," the report's co-author, E.J. McMahon, said. "It's the ultimate indication that we've been doing things wrong."

Most analysts blamed New York's high taxes and skyrocketing cost of living for the mass exodus.

The Tax Foundation ranked New York highest in the nation in the combined state and local tax burden in 2008. And as small-business lobbyist Mike Durant noted, New York has also "consistently ranked worst or in the top three worst in business climate. You can't suck every penny out of people and expect them to remain in New York."

Put another nail in the coffin of the static tax model whereby extra revenue is not generated by a simple geometric rise in the tax rate. What is happening in New York is living proof of a lesson statist just never learn: people will alter their behavior in the face of higher taxes. And businesses will alter their behavior in the face of higher taxes and an increased regulatory burden. Remember this the next time you hear someone tell you that the deficit can be shored up if only we had higher taxes on the rich.





Jonah Goldberg to the hypocrites in the legacy media: Go to Hell! , he explained.





Sir Charles of Doo Doo Economics on an overlooked feature of the debt deal:

The founders of the American Republic envisioned a world of laws and not of men. Unfortunately men often envision a world founded under their law. To rise above the constraints of our Republic a new threat has emerged and it is named "Super Congress!"

Read more here.





Shane Atwell's completely indespensible Regulation Watch.





Your hi-speed choo-choo update:

China’s debt-burdened Railways Ministry, under fire after last month’s deadly train crash, might need a central government bailout and will have difficulty raising new funds, some analysts predict, adding to concerns around the country’s high-speed rail system.

Construction of the fast-train network was a linchpin of China’s economic stimulus plan to counter the global financial crisis. Led by lending from commercial banks, the Railways Ministry’s debt burden increased to hundreds of billions of dollars, largely used for accelerating the construction of the high-speed network, which Beijing heralded as world class.

The railways’ debt woes are part of the larger stimulus tab now starting to weigh on China’s government and could also call into question the economics—and not just the safety standards—of an industry China had hoped would become a significant global export.

Unapologetic, Chi-comm chearleaders like the NY Times' Thomas Friedman are comforted by the fact that our head-long plunge into high-speed choo-choos will not be deterred let alone informed by the disaster it is becoming to the Chinese.



And now for something a little different:

An Indiana couple is facing public indecency charges after they allegedly had sex for 30 minutes Sunday afternoon in a community pool while dozens of witnesses, including children, watched the illicit aquatic action.

Connersville Police Department officers were summoned to the Roberts Park Family Aquatic Center after pool patrons complained to the facility’s manager.

Cops initially issued no trespass orders to Myron Helms, 33, and Victoria Cross, 40, but prosecutors yesterday decided to charge the pair with the misdemeanor indecency count.

Pool manager Cindy Schwab told cops that she walked up behind Helms and Cross “when she realized what they were doing,” according to a Connersville Police Department report. After telling the pair to stop, Schwab said that Cross moved away from Helms, which was when “she could see the male’s penis.”

And then she couldn't. And then she could. And then she couldn't....



Leslie, local tea party lioness on the debt ceiling dealKICKING the Can DOWN the ROAD, OVER the CLIFF

No one here in San Diego, across the country, or elsewhere in the world, who has been closely following the news, is surprised that S&P downgraded this nation’s credit rating from AAA to AA+. The simple, bitter truth is that the United States of America spends money it doesn’t have. And S&P formally stated what the taxpayers of this nation have been saying loudly these past three years — .you can’t spend us back to solvency.

The Tea Party was started in 2009 out of the growing frustration that our representatives in Washington DC were more interested in reelection instead of representation. The Republican Party had abandoned it’s fiscally conservative roots, approving more entitlement programs and agreeing to continue baseline budgeting that automatically increases spending levels. The Democrats, especially when they gained control of both Houses in 2007, dramatically escalated spending while rewarding their base constituencies. President Obama has seen fit to promote his vision of wealth distribution as he demonizes this country’s wealth producers and uses his regulatory agencies to harm our businesses. All of them stopped representing the average tax paying American. TARP, Stimulus, Cash-for-Clunkers, and Obamacare are prime examples of bi-partisan betrayal that set America firmly on the road to fiscal disaster.

None of it worked. None of the Keynesian gimmickry worked as we had predicted all along. We're out of money and out of gimmicks and the credit rating agencies know it.

Looking on the bright side of things, no single person has done more to put a stake through the heart of the Keynesian economics than that of Barack H. Obama. Indeed, he should get the "credit" for it don't you think?


OK. That's it, gang. Lord willin' and the river don't rise, we'll see you all tomorrow.

Quickies: the completely manufactured debt ceiling deadline panic edition

A round-up of what some people have been saying about the debt ceiling deal.




First, B-Daddy of The Liberator Today encourages us to take the long war view of this:

It's warm at my house, (I was going to say hot, but we live in San Diego, CA not San Diego, TX). My son's room seemed especially warm, so I turned on his overhead fan. A while later, I went back in his room and it was still uncomfortable. The fan was spinning fast, but in the wrong direction, sucking air up from the floor and blowing it towards the ceiling. This fan has a remote control, with way to many buttons; but I managed to hit the button to reverse the flow. (I know I am probably not supposed to do that, but quit interrupting.) As soon as I hit the button, nothing seemed to happen, the fan was still sucking air from the floor. But after a while, I noticed that it had started to slow. Sure enough, it continued to slow and slow, eventually coming to a complete stop and reversing direction.

So here is the deal with this execrable debt ceiling deal; we've got a fan spinning at high speed in the wrong direction and threatening to fly apart. But the only reasonable thing to do is apply a countervailing torque that will eventually reverse the flow. Sticking a pitchfork between the blades to get it stop instantly isn't going to be good for the fan or the pitchfork. But that means that we have to keep the torque constantly applied, because this fan has a lot of mass and momentum built up over decades.

A lot of tea partyers are incensed by this deal. That may not be such a horrible thing. Let's harness that anger toward taking back the Senate and the Oval Office in 2012 where we might possibly be able to do something about the real budget busters: entitlements (Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid which is not getting nearly the attention it should considering the horrible fiscal condition of many of our states).





Over at our blog buddy, Harrison's place, we made the following comment on his take on Biden's tea party = terrorist outburst and the liberal-Left echo chamber:

So, when the liberal-Left finally gets around to “pedophile” will that be the end of the line or do we just start the whole “racist-extremist-terrorist-pedophile” cycle all over again?

Oh-no. Looks like we're in a bit of an echo chamber of our own as Jim Treacher turns the tables in his tweet:

So we're terrorists for "holding the country hostage"? Okay, then: For what you're doing to future generations, you are pedophiles. Own it.

Then again, maybe pedophile just doesn't make the cut in the liberal-Left pejorative handboook.





Crime, smog, traffic and graffiti and all they have to show for it is their crappy newspaper.

Yep. Leave it to the L.A. Times to politicize Gabby Giffords' return to the floor of the House a couple of days ago to cast her debt-ceiling vote.

Steve McCann at The American Thinker is shoveling dirt:

The Obama Presidency is over. He has abdicated all responsibility to the Congress, in particular the House of Representatives, which has little choice but to assume a role they are not structured to do: lead the country as best they can until November 2012. The American people, suffering under the burden of high joblessness, eroding housing values, inflation and dramatically declining economic growth with no prospect of any immediate relief, are increasingly resigned to the fact that they must focus on surviving as best they can until the election.

To paraphrase a famous quote: rumors of the President's demise are greatly exaggerated.

McCann, however, is correct in his assertion that in kicking the can down the road with respect to dealing with the debt ceiling issue, the Democrats and the President were spoiling for a fight with the Republicans, to the exclusion of all else that is ailing this country right now. They gambled on this and they got worked. And for all that, the President came out looking ineffectual and incompetent. Hope he likes apples.




Stephen Green at Pajamas Media may not believe Obama's Presidency is over but the gravy train has definitely been derailed.

President Obama has had a good two-plus years, handing out deficit-busting goodies to all the favorite Democrat constituencies. The EPA has become the monster it always threatened to be, the unions are stuffed full of automakers and have the mighty Boeing trembling at their power. The insurance companies are wards of the state, the medical profession has been saddled and broken. The symbiosis of Washington and Wall Street is complete, each too big to fail and utterly, sickeningly and dangerously co-dependent.

But yesterday’s debt deal showed that Obama’s goodie bag is empty. There’s nothing more to hand out. Santa Claus has left the building, and the Grinch has taken his place.

“Honestly,” the Democrats must be wondering, “what good is he to us now?”

(italics, ours)

That would be the Keynesian gimmickry goodie bag, Mr. Green.

Porkulus fail. Cash for Clunkers fail. Cash for Caulkers fail. HAMP fail.

All these wonderful and well-meaining programs that were designed to lift us out of the recession and propel us into economic prosperity only served to forestall a real recovery and now it looks as though the stall has been overcome by gravity and we are once again heading back into recessionary territory.


And, of course, Charles Krauthammer chimes in on... patent reform?:

More bridges

And speaking of Keynesian gimmickry and "dead"... Rich Lowry shovels some of his own dirt.

Sen. Dick Durbin, the liberal lion from Illinois, pronounces the debt deal “the final interment of John Maynard Keynes.”

The burial ceremony should be a nice, simple one after the violence done to the aged economist by the failure of the broad Obama stimulus program. The administration’s serial overpromising in his name did more to discredit Keynes than a century’s worth of broadsides by his intellectual enemies.

Nearly three years into the Obama administration, the unemployment rate is more than 9 percent, a grassroots movement devoted to cutting government has the upper hand in the House of Representatives, and the debt of the United States could well be downgraded by Standard and Poor’s. If Durbin thought that in these circumstances Keynes was heading anywhere other than a pine box, he hasn’t been paying attention.

It must be an alliterative thing because we never hear or read the term "conservative lion". But considering that Durbin ascended to that title after Teddy Kennedy's passing, maybe what qualifies one for "liberal lion" status is trashing our troops over in Iraq.


OK, gang, that's it. Hope you enjoyed this special mid-week edition of Quickies.

Lessons (not) Learned

If some of the things you read here by us in this post sound a tad repititious, don't blame us but rather those who wish to keep repeating the same mistakes.

President Obama made a rare admission of a policy misstep Wednesday, acknowledging that his administration failed to provide enough support to struggling homeowners and recognize the scope of the nation’s housing crisis.

Despite predictions by Obama’s advisers that the housing market would rebound by now, real estate prices are falling once again. And the administration’s efforts to push banks to modify the mortgages of families who missed their monthly payments have been widely criticized as lacking.

Obama first raised the issue Wednesday when a questioner during a town hall event asked what mistakes the president had made in handling the economy.

“The continuing decline in the housing market is something that hasn’t bottomed out as quickly as we expected,” Obama responded.

Later, he added, that his administration’s efforts to help struggling homeowners were “not enough.”

“And so we’re going back to the drawing board,” he said.

Step away from the drawing board, please!


The administration's series of tax credits and home-owners' assistance programs is reminding us, in a sense, of Cash for Clunkers in that one of its "accomplishments" was that it merely stole demand from the future, propping up housing prices in the short term only to see them fall again once those programs expired.

Instead of allowing the market to take its course and wring the bad actors out of the system, they insist on employing one round of Keynesian gimmickry after another, prolonging the agony, promoting market uncertainty and forestalling what would be any real and natural housing recovery.

As it stands, however, the President shows his colors as a true believer in that the statist solution for failed statist policies is simply more statism.

We need new economists

Employers added 39,000 jobs in November, far fewer than expected, as budget-strapped local governments continued to lay off workers, and retailers and manufacturers cut payrolls despite recent signals that both sectors have been growing.

The nation's unemployment rate, which is calculated from a different survey, rose to a seven-month high 9.8% from 9.6% in October as the labor pool grew by 103,000, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported Friday. Among their ranks were many discouraged Americans who re-entered the workforce after giving up their job searches in the recession.

The report disappointed economists, many of whom believed the 172,000 increase in jobs last month signaled that the job market would finally shift into a higher gear. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg expected payrolls to grow by 150,000 in November.

It has been noted both here and other places how consistently economists and the media at large are caught off guard by "unexpected" bad economic news. It's getting to be that you can set your first Friday of the month (when the jobs reports come out) clock by any and all bad economic news to be "unexpected".

But why is that? Precisely what actions has the government taken that would be of benefit to the economy and where economists would not express shock, shock, of "unepected" bad news?

Did economists actually think gimmickry like Cash for Clunkers was going to going to provide any sort of long-term growth for the economy instead of merely the illusion of stable growth? And it's been obvious to anyone with a pulse that Porkulus has come nowhere close to delivering on its promise to keep unemployment under 8 percent.

People and businesses don't know what they are going to be paying in taxes next year and a looming regulatory regime which includes ObamaCare have contributed to a chilling of the business environment where these businesses are unwilling to hire new employees.

We'd hate to think that the economists are in the tank for statist government actions but given the fact that this administration has consistently pursued actions that have done harm to this nation's economy with the full knowledge of economists who are supposed to know these things, what else are we to believe?

Enough with the "unexpected". We need new economists.

Mass. pol provides unsolicited clinical assessment of America

It's come to this: After being told that the reason for the impending mid-term ass-kicking was because the Democrats did not advertise their "accomplishments" adequately and that we, the electorate, were not sufficiently appreciative, the senior Senator from the Bay State offers up one last gasp: America has gone bat-crap crazy.

“It’s absurd. We’ve lost our minds,” Kerry said. “We’re in a period of know-nothingism in the country, where truth and science and facts don’t weigh in. It’s all short-order, lowest common denominator, cheap-seat politics.”

Well, not completely nothing, Senator.

There are a few things we do know: We know that unemployment is at 9.6% after being promised it would not rise above 8% if we passed $800 billion worth of porkulus. We know that health insurance premiums are going up instead of down with the advent of ObamaCare after being promised that ObamaCare would bend the health care cost curve downward. And we know that the passage of ObamaCare was done in a horrendously partisan, crass, shameful and corrupt manner that was the very antithesis of HopenChange.

We know that Fannie and Freddie are still holding a mountain of toxic assets and that we will continue to pour tens of billions of tax-payer dollars into these black holes with no hope of unwinding the poisons in the greater housing market. Indeed, we know that there are no incentives in place to prevent yet another housing bubble in the near future.

We know that Keynesian economics does not work. After reading about it in books, we saw first-hand how demand-side gimmickry like Cash for Clunkers was merely a $3 billion exercise in bumping the demand curve to the left with the inevitable flattening out of that curve after the program ended resulting in zero net sales.

We also know that the government/General Motors lied about how GM was paying down its TARP loan.

We know that the administration's team of economic advisers are making like rats leaving a sinking ship such was their collective "success" in handling the economy. They will repair to universities to spread their lunacies to impressionable 20 yr. olds or to Wall St. boards to perpetuate our current system of crony capitalism.

We know that the President has alienated our friends abroad and has abased himself and our country in the face of those nations hostile to us.

We know that Congress has demonstrated cowardice by not addressing the budget or the impending expiration of the Bush tax cuts before the mid-terms.

We know we have a corrupt hack that is running the Department of Justice of which there is credible evidence that top-level DoJ political appointees worked to cover-up the malfeasance in the shuttering of a highly visible voter intimidation case.

We know we are piling up record deficits and debt with an administration that shows no inclination to reverse course.

And we know that we have a President and administration that are economic illiterates who are hostile to free-market principles to the degree they have introduced a regulatory regime that has stalled a recovery and has kept private capital on the sidelines as companies wait to see what broadsides they will be forced to absorb next.


For John Kerry, possessing the giant intellect that he does, this may not seem a comprehensive list of grievances confirming that we don't know much, so us simple folk out here in fly-over country will try to send a more complete message next Tuesday.

Remorse

$3 billion in tax-payer money to simply dislocate demand to the left, raise prices in the used car market and screw over charities that depend on the tax write-off incentives for those donating used cars...

Now, who wouldn't be down for all that Cash for Clunkers would provide?

Well, you, apparently.

Thousands of people who leased cars last year as part of the Cash for Clunkers program are having second thoughts and are trying to get out of their leases, reports LeaseTrader.com.

The program provided up to a $4,500 rebate if a person signed at least a five-year lease for their car.

A year later, that money has long been spent and people realize they are stuck with the car for four more years, says John Sternal, LeaseTrader.com spokesman.

"I think it's Cash for Clunkers remorse," Sternal says, whose company helps hook up people who want to trade out of their leases with those looking for a lease.

Some drivers want out of the lease for financial reasons but for others it's just not wanting the car.

Sternal notes that a five-year car lease is a really bad deal for most people who usually lease a car because they want to drive the latest model.

He says it will be very difficult for Cash for Clunkers lessees to trade a lease with four or more years left on it because most traders want a shorter lease, he says.

The only other choice is to break the lease, but then the lessee must immediately pay the remaining payments, which often amounts to more than $10,000.

He says the issue in status-conscious Southern Californians is not so much about the money, but the car.

"They woke up last year and saw the Cash for Clunkers program and thought they they could help the environment and the bunnies and the trees and got smaller, environmentally-friendly cars," Sternal says. "Now they look at that car and think about the really nice car they used to have and think 'I want something roomier, more luxurious. This contract is bad and I'm not in love.'"

Priceless... Unfortunately, however, as the first paragraph above stated it is not.

This is so very reminiscent of the home-buyer credit and the HAMP programs concocted by Team O that enticed potential buyers and mortgage-holders into deals they could not possibly sustain given the economy.

Instead of staying out of the market for a while and/or accepting foreclosure terms, then renting in order to build up capital to get back into the housing market when personal fiances were in better shape, the feds dangled cheap money and the implicit promise of pain-free home-ownership to millions of Americans.

And, similarly, instead of staying in their perfectly good-operating "clunker", the American public was lured into unsustainable lease deals by the feds who dangled the double-whammy of cheap money and doing something good for the environment.

Frivolous spending of tax payer money for hopelessly distorted housing and auto markets with landfills full of used cars to show for it: is there anything else you would like accomplished with social engineering-minded Keynesian gimmickry?

What this also should represent is a toxic combination of people unwilling to make rational decisions in difficult economic times and a government all too willing to subsidize those poor decisions. Got moral hazard?

Exit question: a bailout for Cash for Clunker remorsers?


H/T: Hot Air

They get it... they really get it.

The Associated Press and Reuters are probably two of the guiltiest parties in seemingly being shocked, shocked by continual bad economic news by their continual use of "unexpectedly" when reporting out on higher unemployment, lower GDP figures and rising home foreclosure rates.

It begs one to ask: "Have not these guys been paying attention?" and "Just what is it about porkaholic Keynesian gimmickry that would lead them to believe it is going to turn the economy around?"

So we must give credit where credit is due to the multi-colored fishwrap USA TODAY for their headline:

As expected, August auto sales crater

Comparison with last year skewed by cash for clunkers

We were so overcome with emotion upon seeing that headline and sub-headline we almost broke down in tears. Tears of joy, friends, tears of joy.

Car and truck sales dropped sharply in August from a year ago, the result of a massive hangover from last August's cash-for-clunkers federal rebate fiesta that made it the best car sales month of 2009.

Industrywide sales were down 21% from last August, to 997,468, the worst August total since 1983, according to Ward's AutoInfoBank. The month's seasonally adjusted annualized sales rate of 11.47 million, however, put it about on par with the sales rate through most of this year.

Toyota was one of the biggest losers, with sales cratering 34%. It had been one of the biggest beneficiaries of last year's stimulus program, with many consumers opting to use their $4,500 rebate on Toyota and Lexus vehicles. Sales of Corolla, one of its top cash-for-clunkers cars, fell by more than half.

Federal rebate fiesta? Somebody at USA TODAY is having too good of a time.

Sales will continue to putter along at an anemic pace for the foreseeable future, several auto executives said on conference calls to discuss August sales. There is little on the horizon to persuade customers to come back to showrooms, they say.

Emily Kolinski Morris, Ford senior U.S. economist, noted there's little to support optimism in economic data on consumer confidence, jobless claims and other indicators: The data show "lower momentum for auto sales the next three to six months."

Recession-battered consumers are saving more, she said, which will hurt sales in the near future.

Don Esmond, Toyota's senior vice president for sales, said the company is continuing its relatively generous incentives program through September to keep customers in showrooms. But Toyota senses customers are more interested these days in saving than buying a new car, he said.

"It's understandable why consumers keep putting off major purchases," he said.

But he doesn't think the government should bring back another major car-buying stimulus program. "I think the best thing for the industry is consistent growth brought from real demand, not stimulus brought into the marketplace," he said.

Unlike the broader main stream media, it would appear that auto execs and the writers at USA TODAY expected Cash for Clunkers to distort the market just as it has.

And perhaps when the rest of the media takes off its "O"-colored glasses, they'll realize that there is nothing unexpected happening to the economy whatsoever.

It matters

A couple weeks back, we gave some free campaign strategy to Republicans running for House and Senate seats. There were four things that we thought needed to be hammered on relentlessly and they were:

1) The economy/jobs
2) ObamaCare
3) Federal spending/unsustainable debt
4) Process

The first 3 are pretty obvious and the 4th may be as well, but as the Republican ads we've see thus far are doing the job on the first three (shoot, even some Democratic candidates are following this advise), we're not seeing the process of governance hit up nearly as much as it should.

Right now, the Republicans are the proverbial dude walking around the whorehouse with hundred dollar bills hanging out of his pocket. We like the dude's chances also but why leave the voters wondering - the issue of process needs to be a campaign theme as well and Jay Cost writing in Politico's Horse Race blog agrees with us:

Partisans on both sides tell themselves stories about why they're up, why they're down, and why the other side is where it is. These stories usually contain at least a grain of truth, but they also help encourage ideologues in the face of an impending rejection by the electorate. Democrats ignored the political problem of health care in the fall and winter - arguing that Martha Coakley and Creigh Deeds were bad candidates, that voters had been turned off by the health care bill because of the process, and that they would come around once the many benefits kicked in. Now, they're pointing to the economy as the only significant reason why the party is in trouble.

It would be difficult for any strong partisan to admit that such an accomplishment was so deeply unpopular. Yet the polling is pretty unequivocal on the relationship between the Democrats' fortunes and the health care bill. It was during the health care debate that the essential building block of the Democratic majority - Independent voters - began to crumble. It was evident in the generic ballot. It was evident in the President's job approval numbers. It was evident in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.

Reconstructing the Democrats' meme, we can fairly say that the economy is a huge problem for the party. Of this, there can be no doubt. We can also say that the stalled recovery denied the Democrats a chance to win back the voters they lost over health care. But the process and passage of health care reform were crucial elements in the story. That's when the party started losing the voters it needs to retain control of the government.

(itlalics, his)

Cost alludes to the narrative attempting to be established by the liberal-Left that if the economy wasn't in the tank as it is currently, the President's approval numbers would not be upside down as they are now.

Because that premise is not entirely without merit, it then behooves Republicans to remind Independents that whatever state the economy would've been in right now, the reason why they fell out of love with the Obama and the Democrats: the process of the passage of ObamaCare was a spit in the face at them.

Remind Indies that the HopenChange narrative was all about changing the way business was done and how Obama was going to achieve transparent and ethical governance in D.C. And then remind them of the Cornhusker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, the union carve outs, the Stupak sell-outs and all the rest of the backroom wheeling and dealing that ultimately resulted in a monstrous entitlement program that we cannot pay for and will limit our medical decision freedoms. Process matters.

Process played a big part in 2006 when the Democrats won back the House and Senate by hammering the Republicans on their ethics problems.

It's too late in the election cycle for the economy to be of aid to the Democrats even if it did miraculously spring back to life, but drive a stake through this thing by emphasizing that it wasn't just that Cash for Clunkers and Porkulus did nothing for jobless numbers and the economy as a whole but that Hope and Change are an entirely fraudulent brand.

Process matters.

Cash for Clunkers: revisited

Say you're out of work, your spouse is out of work or you're under-employed but in dire need of some vehicular transportation. Obviously, in this economy and being in the financial circumstance that you are, you are leaning heavily towards the used car market.

But before we get to cruising down to the used car lot, let's go back to a previous post where we whined that Cash for Clunkers was $3 billion poured down the drain "for absolutely nothing".

Ah, how wrong we were.

Car buyers on average paid $1,800 more for a used vehicle in July than they paid a year ago at this time, according to Edmunds.com data. That's a 10.3 percent increase, bringing the average cost of a 3-year-old vehicle to $19,248. The price of a Cadillac Escalade spiked nearly 36 percent. "A lack of confidence in the economy is driving more people to used cars, putting upward pricing pressure on a limited supply of vehicles," said Joe Spina, a senior analyst for Edmunds.

There's a tricky aspect to this analysis, because last summer was marked by a used-car buying frenzy spawned by the Cash for Clunkers program. Spina said the effects of that program are hard to isolate precisely. "So many economic factors affect automobile sales and prices. It's believed that the program delayed purchases prior to the program and also pulled sales forward while in place," he said. "The program also eliminated inventory of older vehicles that were traded and then scrapped."

Of course, you shouldn't be buying an Escalade anyway so the social engineering benefits of CfC are obvious.

So we were off on our assessment of Cash for Clunkers. Way off. That $3 billion of tax-payer scratch accomplished quite a bit, most importantly, by distorting the market by artificially reducing the supply of used cars and as a result, hosing over working families that would be in the market for used cars.

H/T: Instaglen

Not so random thought of the day

Who really is the Party, or more accurately perhaps, the culture of "No"?

Consider:

All the hundreds of billions (trillions?) we've dumped into various stimulus packages thus far don't seem to have helped employment in the private sector one bit. In fact, one could make the argument that the government spending has crowded out activity on the private side. Do you think we can cut back on that a bit, if not shut off the porkulus spigot entirely?

Answer: No


About the myriad of demand-side Keynesian programs and gimmicks? Yeah, those housing credits, Cash for Clunkers, Cash for Caulkers, etc., etc. Hasn't helped. Is it possible we can re-think how better to spur demand and get the economy on track?

Answer: No


OK, then. What about our national sovereignty? Instead of the usual prattle about "comprehensive immigration reform" (which, come to think of it, really is the most transparent aspect of the political class, these days), can we get serious about border enforcement? Is it possible that we acknowledge that narco-violence and environmental destruction in the desert southwest is a huge problem and our laxity in addressing it in a clear and sober manner is part of that problem?

Answer: No


Incompetency is one thing but corrupt incompetency is entirely another. Would it be too much to ask of the political class for some transparency and a whiff of ethicalness in behavior and how they craft legislation? Transparency and ethics are the things they said they would return to D.C., after all. So, how about it?

Answer: No


Health care reform? No one read this thing. The political class that championed it has all but admitted that they haven't read it. And it was written by lobbyists from both the pharmaceutical and insurance industries - the very people demonized by the political class in order to get this filthy, rotten piece of crap rammed through sideways. Pelosi had a point: we are indeed finding out what's in this thing after the fact. And the more we find out about it, the bigger a complete disaster this thing is proving to be. The American people don't want it as recent election results are bearing-out. But it's still going to be inflicted upon us, right?







Answer: Yes!

Oh. We stand corrected. Sorry for wasting everybody's time.