Thursday, March 5. 2009
An honest accountant dies and St. Peter tells him that he must first spend a day in hell to decide where he wants to be. In hell, he finds beautiful golf courses without greens fees, alluring women who promise to fulfill his fantasies, and a mansion without cost to him. The accountant returns to St. Peter and tells him that hell is his choice. Upon arriving back in hell, it’s a desolated wasteland full of poor wretched souls, the women are decrepit and reject him, and his home is a hovel. The accountant asks the Devil about the change. The Devil replies: Before you were a recruit, now you’re staff.
The former Director of the Congressional Budget Office, respected for honest accounting, Peter Orszag, is now Director of President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Now he’s staff.
His fall from grace was on exhibit several times this past week.
Last Friday, Orszag defended the trimming of itemized deductions by asserting that, “the best way to boost charitable giving is to jumpstart the economy and raise incomes – and the purpose of the Recovery Act enacted earlier this month was to do precisely that.”
The conclusion of the current Congressional Budget Office on the stimulus Recovery Act? As Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiew reports:
“they estimate the long-run effect on GDP may be slightly negative due to crowding out.”
In a Congressional hearing on President Obama’s budget forecast, Orszag was questioned how the budget could count savings based on the “surge” in Iraq continuing for 10 more years when President Obama announced all combat troops would be withdrawn by 2010. The YouTube is here. Orszag counts as “savings” not continuing for 10-years the temporary level of “surge” troops in 2008. Peter Wehner, former Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives, now a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, observes: “This is, even by Washington standards, unusually dishonest. And coming from the administration of Barack Obama, who promised us “honest” accounting and made a big show of how much integrity and candor he would bring to his governing, this is astonishing.”
Democrat Senator Max Baucus, a leader in the Obama administration’s effort to enact sweeping, mostly untested or tested and found wanting, changes to Americans’ health care, pressured the current Director of CBO to cook the books. Senator Baucus: “…it’s not too much of an overstatement to say CBO can make or break health care reform, and I mean that because we got to go by your numbers…I do believe that there are several different intellectually honest pathways to get from here to there. It’s not just one automatic, and so it needs - you got to be ever more creative to find intellectually honest pathways to get the savings we have to have - practically and both politically - to get health care reform.”
A crooked employer asks several applicants for an accounting position the answer to 2 + 2. The winning applicant asks the employer what he wants the answer to be.
That’s the kind of accounting the Obama administration is practicing. It’s not a joke.
 Chart on right via Am. Digest
Via Lucianne:
President Obama's newly named Economic Recovery Advisory Board, the real-world Americans being asked to help solve the nation's financial crisis, includes a union executive who took the Fifth in a federal probe, a billionaire whose failed bank pioneered the subprime mortgage market, and deep-pocket donors who gave or gathered nearly $1.2 million for the president's campaign. In all, 11 of the 16 board members donated or raised money for Democrats in the last election.
8 harsh truths that will improve your life
Boys are "an enormous genetic experiment." AVI
Dr. Bob picks up his guitar again
The Left's romance with terror and tyranny. Radosh at Front Page
Which states are open for business? Not many in New England
Chavez update: Sell food at a loss, or else... And to media: Shut up, or else...
Chris Dodd update: A Kudlow run? Why not? And also via Insty, Bernie Loves Dodd
Geithner is a Warmist.
Cramer's response to the White House attack
Why did the WH snub Brown?
People I talk to are beginning to act a bit scared - even those who voted for Obama. I sense a new fear factor emerging which transcends the banking crisis. People have lost a lot of money, and foresee a business-stifling, high-taxing, low profit future which will burden generations with a bigger government we will never be able to get out from under.
The plan to phase out the mortgage, medical and charitable deductions is just one piece of a series of rule changes in the middle of the game which makes folks uneasy. It's especially uncomfortable for those within ten years of retirement, or with tuitions in their future, who made plans based on existing expectations and stability.
How do you plan for your family when the rules are in flux? How do you invest? How do you invest for retirement? How do you plan to start a business? How do you buy a house? Why would you spend a penny on anything?
Several (non-paranoid) people mentioned to me this week that wealth destruction is a deliberate policy in DC. True or not, Hopey-Changey is slowly turning into plain Scary. We predicted this.
Powerline quotes a reader comment:
If I postpone my retirement as a result of losses to my savings caused in substantial part by President Obama's policies, so that I do not leave the workforce when I had planned, does that mean that my job has been "saved" by Obama?
Never Yet Melted, with a quote from Obama's book:
Who could possibly have predicted that a red diaper baby community organizer with a life-long record of radical associations would adopt an ultra-left program of taxing and spending? Messrs. Buckley and Brooks obviously weren’t paying attention when they read Dreams from My Father. Obama explains that he learned as an adolescent that he could get away with doing drugs and raising Cain, simply by mollifying the adults in his life by speaking softly and politely.
DFMF, 94-95:
It was the start of my senior year in high school… and one day she [his mother] marched into my room, wanting to know the details of [his friend’s] arrest. I had given her a reassuring smile and patted her hand and told her not to worry. I wouldn’t do anything stupid. It was usually an effective tactic, one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied as long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied; they were relieved—such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.
Dick Morris:
...he is determined to pass his agenda of bigger government, nationalized healthcare and vastly greater spending even at the price of inflation and subsequent recession. He puts ideology first and the economy a distant second.
The stock market has figured out his priorities and is responding accordingly. One can only hope that voters also eventually realize what is going on.
Mankiw:
Rahm Emanuel, the incoming White House chief of staff, has said, “You don’t ever want to let a crisis go to waste: it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid.”
What he has in mind is not entirely clear. One possibility is that he wants to use a temporary crisis as a pretense for engineering a permanent increase in the size and scope of the government. Believers in limited government have reason to be wary.
Why so tentative about that, Professor?
From Krauthammer's The Obamaist Manifesto:
In the European Union, government spending has declined slightly, from 48 percent to 47 percent of GDP during the past 10 years. In the United States, it has shot up from 34 percent to 40 percent. Part of this explosive growth in U.S. government spending reflects the emergency private-sector interventions of a Republican administration. But the clear intent was to make the massive intrusion into the private sector temporary and to retreat as quickly as possible. Obama has radically different ambitions.
Ed. note: To top it all off, and to add insult to injury, Congress has now given itself a pay raise, along with an extra gift of $93,000 for petty cash. If $93 grand is "petty," I am in the wrong business. With their pensions (not 401-Ks - real old-fashioned pensions) and remarkable medical plans and perks, they are entirely insulated from the consequences of their own actions. I see no collectivist "sacrifice for the common good" on the part of Congress.
h/t, S,C&A
Wednesday, March 4. 2009
Politico reports that these tricks have been in the works for months. We need to get used to this new ball game. Can anybody imagine the Bush admin. doing stuff like this?
I do not believe that Conservatives, or Repubs, are up for these kinds of games and tactics. We have often observed here that the Left prefers to reserve their live ammo for their fellow Americans rather than for foreign threats or dangerous criminals.
One considered opinion, from Moderate Voice:
Let's put all of this in proper perspective: Rush Limbaugh and George Stephanopoulos are private citizens who are media celebrities. They do not run the RNC of the DNC, write any bills or pass any laws. Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama are part of the White House. The President can veto bills and apply political pressure but the Presidency does not appropriate any money or is authorized to spend one dime without the legislative branch. Michael Steele hasn’t figured out his responsibilities at the RNC, and if he did, his role is to win elections not shape fiscal policy.
Barack Obama has got less than a year before the 2010 primary season begins. He has only got that window of opportunity to turn around the economic mess that he has inherited from Republican Administration and a Democratic Congress. If Republicans want to recover their political mojo, it is the Congress that has got to be the focus of any message. Stop playing their game - Obama is not important and you are not going to beat him… plus he not running for re-election for three years - last time I checked, you can’t beat someone who is not even running.
 US companies pay the highest taxes in the world. I have never understood why businesses are taxed at all. All it does is to make prices of things more expensive for consumers because a tax is just another expense to be passed along. In other words, biz taxes are just a covert tax on consumers and investors.
Equity Analyst in Chief. Embarassing
Has anybody read A Canticle for Liebowitz? (h/t, Grow A Brain)
Did you know that To Kill a Mockingbird was a racist book?
Map of the EU economic crisis
Cooler heads at NOAA changing their tune on climate
Dr. Clouthier is fed up with unmanly men and other PC baloney
How Obama ambushed and used the head of Caterpillar
Whites told to "go home" in Detroit.
Centrist Dems feeling uncomfortable. Christopher Buckley has second thoughts. So does David Brooks.
Budget rant by Ace
Isn't the WH getting a bit petty and vindictive? They attack Rush for a week. Now it's Jim Cramer. Must be a deliberate diversionary tactic.
Rick Lowry quoted at Betsy:
Obama exaggerated the downside of the economy two weeks ago so he could get more spending, and now he’s exaggerating its upside so he can get more spending. The fixed goal is more spending. The means — the rhetoric, the arguments, the assumptions — are flexible so long as they serve that ultimate goal.
The past few weeks should have cleared away the debate over Obama’s intentions — is he a pragmatist or an ideologue? Obama is a pragmatist in pursuit of an ideological prize, willing to zig and zag so long as his lodestar of expanded government is ahead of him.
Tuesday, March 3. 2009
 The Obama stock market. Is the Left rejoicing in this loss of wealth?
Obama's war on the middle class
Not gonna work on Maggie's Farm no more. Staying under O's tax limit. Dr. Helen has more. Our Barrister already promised his wife that he would.
Today's economy is a response to Obama policies
4.9 billion for ACORN?
Family farms are the big losers in Obama's budget
Riehl explains why he thinks TigerHawk's video (posted here earlier today) is off base. He says O doesn't give a damn about TigerHawk. O is an orator, but you have to watch what he does, not what he says. He will say almost anything, being a politician.
Obama lied; the economy died
The filibuster, then and now. Powerline
O's plans for medical care rationing. NY Post
From Dick Morris' Obama's War on Prosperity:
President Lyndon Johnson’s administration was known for his War on Poverty. President Obama’s will become notable for his War on Prosperity.
We’re speaking, of course, of Obama’s plans to hike income taxes on the most wealthy 2 or 3 percent of the nation. He’s not just raising the top rate to 39.6 percent; he’s also disallowing about one-third of top earner’s deductions, whether for state and local taxes, charitable contributions or mortgage interest. This is an effective hike in their taxes by an average of about 20 percent.
And soon the next shoe will drop - he’ll announce that he’s keeping yet another of his campaign promises: to apply the full payroll tax to all income over $250,000 a year. (Right now, the 15.3 percent Social Security tax only applies to the first $106,800 of income - you neither pay the tax on income above that, nor accumulate added benefit.) For many taxpayers in this bracket, this hike will raise their total taxes by about half.
Finally, he’s declaring war on investors by raising the capital-gains-tax rate to 20 percent.
These increases are politically insignificant: The top 2 percent of the nation casts only about 4 percent of the votes, barely enough to attract the notice of even the most meticulous pollsters.
But they have enormous economic significance. Those who earn more than $200,000 pay almost 60 percent of America’s income taxes and account for a third of its total disposable income. If these spenders and investors are hunkering down, waiting for the revenuers to beat down their doors, their confidence will be anything but robust. Their spending will drop; they’ll be unlikely to invest (except in new tax shelters).
Photo: Eyeball Soup. I will spare you the recipe for that bummer of a dinner.
A personal testimony at Wizbang. Many, many people in that same category.
Related, Rush vs. Doofus. Am Digest
Tigerhawk. Good vid by him about the "working affluent".
Related, from Kimball's The President's Shock and Awe:
The crucial thing to understand about that attack on achievement is that it is a histrionic, not an economic, gesture. Raising taxes on (while simultaneously cutting deductions for) top earners will not do much to improve the Treasury’s balance sheet. But it will cause pain among the affluent. It will also cause delight among the more than 43 percent of tax filers who pay no income tax. (Is that fair?) So the President scores two points: he punishes those whom he resents, and he panders to the crowd whose approbation he craves.
 It's 13 degrees F in NYC this morning. The Park is a winter wonderland.
Church membership decline
I hope these protesters do not return home tonight to a heated house. Related: The Farce of Global Warming at Am Thinker
Do Congress' kids go to public schools?
Control of the Census and one-party rule
America's worst traffic bottlenecks. h/t, Marginal Rev
Party like it's 1928
Brits fighting Brit jihadists in Afghanistan
For once, I kinda agree with Krugman. Revenge of the Glut
Tax increases for the middle class are inevitable
Obama's Doublespeak. Villainous. Leftist pols rarely say what they mean directly.
The big reward for mortgage fraud. WSJ
And yet another tax cheat for the Administration. What is it about Dems and tax fraud?
Affordable housing. Guess what the median home price is, in Detroit
John Bolton on Iran
Tax hikes "demotivating and demoralizing"
Rahm: Obama agrees to 9000 earmarks
Nobody ever accused blogger Pam Geller of being shy. A revival meeting for Geert Wilders. If he stands for free speech, then I am on board. I am not sure that he isn't a jerk, though.
From Insty:
DEMONIZER-IN-CHIEF?
What is it with this President? Obama has an obsessive need to find enemies against whom to campaign. . . . Attacking lobbyists is not the point of Obama’s latest ploy. Rather, painting anyone who opposes him as a “lobbyist” is the point. In attacking the “lobbyists” Obama is doing what he did on the issue of race during the campaign: Anyone who opposes me doesn’t just have a different opinion, they are evil and dangerous to the rest of you. This tactic simultaneously generates support among the majority and silences the minority. Other presidents have been accused of using “enemies” as a political rallying point. Almost invariably, however, these enemies have been foreign (the “evil empire” and “axis of evil”). Obama is the first president “in my adult life” to set American against American, to create enemies at home as a political rallying point, to create a climate in which law-abiding American citizens are singled out as being worthy of attack.
Yep, Barack has met the enemy, and he is us.
Ouch.
Wilkinson on the Dem-union attack on the DC charter school experiement:
If you believe, as I do, that the returns to further government spending on education, given its present structure, is zero or negative, and that the best hope for increasing the quality of education for the least well-off, and for increasing economic and social mobility generally, is to legalize competitive markets in education, then you will tend to believe, as I do, that this attempt to destroy voucher programs before than can show themselves effective is nothing less than a powerful political interest group screwing over poor people by bending the democratic process to their advantage.
From Steyn on Statezilla:
Is the new all-powerful Statezilla vulnerable to anything? Unfortunately, yes. He loses all his superpowers when he comes into contact with something called Reality. But happily, Reality is nowhere in sight. There are believed to be some small surviving shards somewhere on the planet — maybe on an uninhabited atoll somewhere in the Pacific — but that’s just a rumor, and Barack Obama isn’t planning on running into Reality any time soon.
Monday, March 2. 2009
 Man, did Rush's CPAC speech (which we linked here) kick up a lot of dust in all quarters. He loves that: it gets him listeners, and he loves being provocative. Truth is, I have never heard Rush say a single hateful thing to anybody, although he can be tough on seminar callers. Plenty of humorous mockery, of course. As far as I can tell, the guy loves people, and respects them and their potential enough to not want them to be serfs of the State. Anyway, a few links:
Rush to Chairman Steele: Where are your guts?
Where Rush went astray at CPAC. Hawkins at Pajamas
Rush to the Kultursmog. Driscoll
Rush has been demonized ever since he hit the airwaves. As an interesting and articulate spokesman and evangelist for the Conservative cause, the Left just had to do that. They demonize anyone Conservative who attracts a following, and have done so, with the MSM's assistance, for 40 years. Rush is Everyman's Bill Buckley (except Buckley got a pass because "he was one of us" - a "sophisticated" Yalie - plus he never had a large, populist following and thus was viewed as harmless). Whether I agree with him or not about things, I see him as a national treasure and as a stimulant for debate about important subjects and principles. That is his role.
From VDH, in The Triumph of Banality, one quote:
If we wish to get health-care costs under control, then we should at least be honest with the American people and admit that we are all paying a collective fortune largely for three reasons: (1) to keep functioning into their 60s those who drank, smoked, and ate too much and in a past era would have passed on at 60; (2) to give us all an extra three to five years of mobility and functionality after we reach 75; (3) to fit us up with IVs, feeding tubes, and respirators so that in our last six months of life we can die in a rest home or among machines and specialists in a hospital rather than in our own home with a few morphine tablets for pain and a bowl of soup with a straw on the nightstand.
He is wrong about the medicine: your longevity is in your genes more than in your behavior. However, the only solution to the costs of medical care is rationing and I, for one, do not want the government in charge of that.
 Nice snowfall overnight here, and today too. Beautiful.
1.5 million year-old human footprints. Video
The Gun Control Genocide Chart
George Lakoff explains The Obama Code
Re-usable toilet wipes? Gimme a break
How Iran got the plans for Obama's new helicopter. It's about file-sharing.
Why Socialists in Vermont? AVI
Centrifugal forces in the EU
New Jersey's War on Business
Why Obama went big. Politico
Why some non-profits can't use their endowment money now
Dick Morris:
The draconian tax increases on the segment of the population that pays most of the taxes, generates most of the jobs, employs most of the workforce, and accounts for much of the consumer spending will chill whatever small warmth the stimulus package can generate. How can Obama pretend that he wants to encourage confidence among bankers and consumers while he regulates them, taxes them, and vilifies them? His tax increases make it clear that he is less interested in solving the recession and the financial crisis than he is in vindicating his political agenda of redistribution of wealth and income. The price of this policy will be lost growth and lost jobs.
Welcome to the egalite cafe: Neoneo
NBC pulled this SNL skit from its website in October, and had it removed from Youtube. Too much truth.
Dino:
We wrote very little that was critical of the incoming administration as it assembled its team and raised the prospect that President Obama might try to govern from the center. In little more than a month, Obama’s counterproductive economic policy choices have clarified matters considerably. Decisions will likely come from the left, and pretty far left for that matter; talk about consensus building appears to be just for the cameras. We’ll just have to see what happens to this latest expensive boondoggle. (Oops — it seems that we may already know.)
Sunday, March 1. 2009
At American Thinker. The Repubs still haven't had their morning coffee yet.
It's amusing to see the the Gore Effect afflicting James Hansen. Will his big climate-scare protest in DC tomorrow be snowed out by a late season blizzard?
If so, one might consider it to be Gaia's justice.
 Japanese scientists refute AGW
A nationwide ammo shortage hits US. Besides ammo, there's one more thing that is selling very well these days
Here comes the God particle
Did Obama cross the line? Coyote
Paul Harvey began broadcasting news in 1944. Didn't I hear him on the radio last week?
Jesus the reformed racist? Anchoress
Obama lies. Riehl:
More mindless demagogy. Obama has his own special interests as do most all politician's. And his budget has little to do with economics and much to do with Leftist political reform. His rhetoric is simply meant to distract and divide the public so he can pull the wool over their eyes before they realize what they are going to get in the end. We'll be getting what everyone always gets from government, way too little for way too much.
The era of even bigger government. Reason.
Betsy: Obama admin oblivious to incentives, tradeoffs, and unintended consequences.
How will Dems let cap & trade die? Megan
Andrew Bolt via Insty:
GOOD thing for Barack Obama that he isn’t George Bush. He’d have been slaughtered for starting so badly that he’s picking a Cabinet of tax cheats. . . .
how loudly would the people who cheer Obama have screamed if Bush had, for instance, surrounded himself with this extraordinarily long list of spivs and chiselers?
On arrogance, a quote from Cafe Hayek:
Today's cackling by politicians and pundits about how the auto industry should be restructured, the health-care industry overhauled, and the banking industry reorganized is deafening. Surely I'm not alone in being horrified that so many people with no experience in these industries - and with no skin in any of these games - fancy themselves qualified to pontificate about matters on which their knowledge can't possibly be more than superficial.
What if Obama turns America into Europe? Pajamas. Or into California?
I know that we have many readers who have never listened to Rush. They are missing out on some fun entertainment and a good dose of common sense. His entire speech to CPAC is here - all the YouTube clips of his speech - but here's YouTube clip # 3 for a taste (yes, he is looking as big as a house):
Saturday, February 28. 2009
 What I am reading: A few of Michael Novak's books
Mike Pence at CPAC: Video. This guy is good.
Romney is looking better too.
How did the Left come into power? Hawkins
Thought crime at Central Conn
Cruel and funny, but apt
John Silber on university Presidency coups (with references to the Larry Summers debacle)
The Dyl sends in this piece on slums via a fascinating site, Emergent Urbanism. I blame Jacob Riis for our misunderstanding of "slums." Also via that site, half of Americans want to move. That is sad.
 Question re Cap & Trade: why would corporations mind paying a carbon surcharge? They will simply pass it on to consumers as a price increase and have a net cost of zero.
Answer: Passing the cost to consumers, which they must do, will make domestic American products more expensive in comparison to imports and will result in reduced sales.
Unintended consequences: 1. To the extent that production can be shifted to foreign companies or foreign plants of US companies, jobs will move overseas. 2. With respect to domestic production, the result will be wildly inflationary. 3. Because cap & trade fees allow pollution to continue, the environment will not benefit (but it is becoming clear that global warming climate change is not human-caused in any case so the only effect will be that production will shift to China and the world will see a net increase on pollution). 4. Cap & Trade is designed to motivate companies to spend money to reduce their pollution, but that will further increase their costs and further reduce their competitiveness – a lose-lose situation.
Photo: That's our Kondratiev
Ultra ETFs are double leveraged. Bullish? Ultra Long ETFs. Bearish? Ultra Short ETFs. They are trading tools: volatile and fun to play with.
Short-term winning strategy? Short the Dow before every Obama or admin. speech.
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