This Time, It’s for Real.

By Jerry Bowyer, NRO Financial

"Official" Unemployment Rate

ThoughtRogue: For a real eye-opener, see the real unemployment statistics at ShadowStats.com.  The numbers in the chart above reflect only the amount of applications for Unemployment benefits.  The actual rate of all people out of work is over 20% – and continues to rise!

BuzzCharts spent much of 2003, 2004, and 2005 rebutting the media mantra that the U.S. was experiencing a “jobless recovery.” While unemployment rates bobbed between the upper end of 4 percent and the lower end of 6 percent, the press sang dirges about the “worst job market since Herbert Hoover.” So why is it that nobody seems to mention a “jobless recovery” anymore, especially with the unemployment rate marching toward 10 percent?

The data now confirm that we really are in a jobless recovery. Unemployment just hit 9.5 percent, with few signs of a momentum reversal. And we just passed a historic milestone: Our jobless rate has eclipsed that of France. And why not? American labor policy is rapidly mutating toward the Gallic model of wage floors, heavy unionization, and central planning, while French policy under Sarkozy is inching toward a supply-side formula for growth.

The interesting thing about this jobless recovery is that chainsaw personnel policy isn’t to blame. We’re not firing many people: Terminations have fallen to a fairly moderate level, and monthly layoffs have plunged in the last few months. Initial jobless claims also are falling. The problem is that we’re not hiring many people, either. It’s the Euro-model of non-dynamism — jobs can be neither created nor destroyed.

Meanwhile, we’re starting to hear calls for a second stimulus program. Let’s get the math right first. Under Obama, we just had the second stimulus program, since the first was launched under Bush last year. So we’re now discussing a third stimulus effort, with administration officials sounding the alarm: “The patient’s blood pressure is dropping. We need more leeches, stat!”

Truth is, we’re not mired despite the stimulus plan, but because of it. Entrepreneurs are not mindless beasts who simply expand operations when the government rings the fiscal dinner bell. They know today’s spending explosion will be financed by future tax increases. They know that every government check handed to a social worker, AmeriCorps “volunteer,” or United Auto Worker will be paid for, eventually, by the entrepreneurial and investor class — and they are planning accordingly.

They also know that their unemployment-compensation taxes will rise every time a stimulus plan extends unemployment benefits. Unemployment “comp” is run kind of like an insurance program: Each time one of your ex-employees gets a check, your rates go up. Who other than a community organizer, lobbyist, or solar-panel salesman would hire in an environment like this?

Health care figures in, too. If I’m going to be forced to offer an Obama-designed, gold-plated health-insurance plan to my employees (or face a penalty for each employee not so benefited), every person I hire is a potential long-term health-care liability. This already has begun with the changes to COBRA (a government health-care provision for laid-off employees) in Stimulus II. Wait until Obamacare arrives.

Want Euronomics? Get ready for perpetually high, Euro-style unemployment rates. Want low unemployment rates and robust American-style growth? Bring back the proven model of small government, spending restraint, and low tax rates.

TR:  I tried to warn you that tax-cheat Geithner was milking the money machines 24/7…. just wait until they start buying up our own Treasury Bills with this phony money (not backed by any production of real wealth).  Can anyone say ‘Weimar Republic’?

Forget about Carbon.. Now, There's a Hockeystick!

By John Stossel, ABC

C’mon, just this little mint – it’s wafer-thin… (pronounced:  waffah-theen)

You’d better get a bucket..

by Lynn Stuter

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has gone on record, stating his state will not be taking stimulus money that will force expansion of existing programs or the establishing of new programs. Joined by Governors Mark Sandord of South Carolina, Haley Barbour of Mississippi, Sarah Palin of Alaska, Butch Otter of Idaho, Mitch Daniels of Indiana, and Rick Perry of Texas, these governors are voicing concerns about the stimulus money being offered the states by the federal government under H.R. 1, better known as the Porkulus Package or the Piggy Package of Pork Barrel Spending.

In my last article, I stated that the total cost of the Porkulus Package would be $4.06 trillion broken down as follows: $789 billion for the Porkulus loan itself, money that would have to come from the already depressed economy; approximately $744 billion in debt service on that loan and $2.527 trillion in new programs and expansion of existing programs over the next decade.

It becomes apparent that the states are being offered stimulus money with strings attached; that the cost of getting that money is acceptance of federal regulation.

This phenomenon is nothing new; it has been going on, literally, for decades.

It is called federal discretionary grants.

This is how it works.

Read the rest of this entry »

By -Michael Reagan

It is not true that grown men don’t cry. I’m grown and I’m on the verge of tears. The Republic I have loved all my life is being is being murdered, and the crime is an inside job.

Michael Reagan

If you hear a whirring sound in the background, it is my dad Ronald Reagan, who loved and served this nation, spinning in his grave as his latest successor plunges a carving knife into America’s vital organs.
In his wildest dreams, Ronald Reagan never thought that a president of a United States, now in the throes of a serious economic crisis, would adopt a solution to the problems of our economy that would not only worsen the situation but also set in motion the beginning of a transition of the government of the United States from a constitutional republic into a coercive quasi-Marxist regime where Washington is the master of our people instead of their servant.
Let it be said loud and clear: Barack Obama’s so-called stimulus bill, feverishly embraced by his sticky-fingered Democratic minions in the House and Senate (and three craven Republican senators), will not do a single thing to revive our ailing economy. Nothing.
Instead, it will put Washington’s grasping hands into every nook and cranny of America’s economic and social life, and bankrupt an already penurious nation for generations to come.
Think about it: nearly a trillion dollars to be squandered on a host of pork-laden projects, payoffs to pet leftist groups and causes grasping for their share of the booty, and a few bucks to create jobs, mostly in the public sector.
A trillion dollars we don’t have and will need to borrow from our grandchildren and their offspring. A trillion dollars created out of thin air that will drastically reduce the value of the dollars in our pockets in an orgy of runaway inflation.
It wasn’t all that long ago that spending a billion dollars on government projects and programs was viewed with alarm. As the late Sen. Everett Dirksen once said, “A billion here, and a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”
A trillion dollars is $1,000 billion, a sum that the imagination cannot comprehend.
If you could have spent a million dollars every day since Christ was born, you would not even come close to having spent a trillion dollars, yet Mr. Obama and his wastrel Democratic stooges on Capitol Hill have no qualms about spending that amount – and more – on programs that will do nothing to alleviate the current economic crisis, and in many ways worsen it.

Is it Dawn, or Sunset?

Have we forgotten what Thomas Jefferson warned us when in 1791? He said, “To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. If we run into such debts, we (will then) be taxed in our meat and our drink, in our necessities and in our comforts, in our labor and in our amusements. If we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people under the pretense of caring for them, they (will) be happy.”
Jefferson would have refused to believe that a free people would allow their government to saddle them and their children and grandchildren with a debt so enormous they could not even begin to comprehend.
Nor would he have even dreamed of the government’s wasting money on projects noted by former Georgia Rep. Bob Barr, such as a billion dollars to subsidize money-losing Amtrak, $20 billion to expand the already-bloated food stamp program, about $2 billion diverted from the wallets of hard-working Americans to subsidize child care, and $2.8 billion to fund advocacy programs studying the global-warming hoax.
There’s another $600 million for newer cars for government bureaucrats, $44 million to refurbish the Department of Agriculture, $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts, $150 million to spruce up the Smithsonian buildings, and more than $400 million to promote anti-smoking programs and programs to fight sexually transmitted diseases.
That’s what future generations of Americans will be paying for. I’m sure they’ll thank us.

By -Deroy Murdock, National Review Online

Exhibit A: Excrement, Gilded

President Barack Obama would lose his quiet struggle against nicotine addiction if he dispatched the Secret Service to score him a carton of Camels. So why is Obama fighting Washington’s addiction to debt by . . . sinking Washington deeper into debt?

On Monday, Obama correctly criticized Republicans as the “folks who presided over a doubling of the national debt. . . .” Former President George W. Bush, largely in cahoots with GOP lawmakers, amassed $3.35 trillion in deficits between 2002 and 2009. This disgraceful legacy has crippled Republicans from coast to coast and relegated the party to fiscal therapy for the foreseeable future.

A Really Inconvenient Bailout-Debt Fed "Hockey Stick"

But rather than correct the GOP’s recent debt-swelling ways, Obama is exacerbating this mess.

“Obama pledged to fix what he considers Republican governing errors, not double down on them,” Heritage Foundation fiscal analyst Brian Riedl wrote Wednesday. “Adding the ‘stimulus’ bill to a realistic budget baseline yields a projected 2010-17 cumulative budget deficit of $8.4 trillion-2.5 times the size of President Bush’s deficits over the equivalent eight-year time period.”

The $789 billion Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Collins-Snowe-Specter spending blitz is a bargain compared to the $2.25 trillion in fresh bailout funds that Secretary Timothy Geithner unveiled in the Treasury’s Cash Room Tuesday. This will buy America “new programs and extraordinary action,” Geithner promised.

Congress must pass an omnibus appropriations bill before March 6. Cost: $400 billion.

And don’t forget the regular federal budget, which funds FBI, FDA, FTC, and hundreds of other beloved acronyms. It likely will weigh in at more than $3 trillion.

If all this stimulus worked-from 2008’s $168 billion in tax-rebate checks to the $13.35 trillion bailout-and-nationalization orgy that turned Bush’s final days pornographic-the economy would be hot and bothered. Instead, this constant stimulation functions like Viagra in reverse.

Whether you applaud this spending or consider it the latest shambles erected by America’s reckless political class, the question remains: From where will all this money come?

“There is no tooth fairy,” economist and author Stephen Moore told the Manhattan Institute Wednesday. “That’s the fundamental fallacy of the Keynesian model. The money has to come from somewhere.”

“The government cannot put into the economy what it first did not take out,” said Americans for Tax Reform’s John Kartch. “That would be like scooping up water from one side of a lake, dumping the water into the other side of the lake, and announcing that you’ve just filled the lake.”

Try this Washington accounting right now: Take your house keys from one pocket and transfer them to the other. Congratulations! You now own two homes.

To fund his continuation of Bush’s breathless spending, Obama probably will shake the tin cup and pray that lenders come running.

“Over two years, Washington is set to borrow a staggering $3.5 trillion from a shrinking global savings pool,” Riedl explained. But who has $3.5 trillion these days? U.S. and foreign banks are gasping. Europe’s governments are wheezing. What will happen when China is too winded to attend Treasury’s bond auctions? Either the Fed will buy those bonds, re-enacting the aforementioned house-key trick, or the Treasury will decorate its increasingly dreary bonds by offering investors higher interest rates. Steeper interest, of course, will slam the economic brakes just as Uncle Sam floors the accelerator.

Read the rest of this entry »

Pork-Zilla Hunt

-TR

:  Hey, I have an idea – How about members of Congress actually read and debate the bill in its entirety BEFORE VOTING on it for a Change.  We can only Hope.

Write to your Rep. here  and write your Senator here.  I also suggest you fax them as a good many of these Congress Critters are round-filing the emails. For cheap faxing go here.

NC SEZ:  JOHN KERRY:  YOU ARE AN ARROGANT BASTARD, AND I FOR ONE,  CAN’T WAIT TO SEE YOUR LAST DAY ON PLANET EARTH!

-TR:  How are we ever going to reconcile  these two colliding world views?  Secession.