NO MAS, MR. PRESIDENT
The State of the Union could have been written by a computer program. All the now familiar Obama furniture was in the room: the mock outrage at “them,” the psychodramatic first-person boasting (as in, “I will oppose..,” “I will not work with…,” “I will decline…,” “I will not stand by …,” I will not cede…,” “I will not walk away…,” “I will not back down…,” “I will not go back…”); the now customary rear-view-mirror jab at his fading predecessor; the monotonous promising that something is so bad that we must have a new program for it (each year the same threat, the same solution, the same failure); and the silence about the Obama legacy of stimulus, debt, and ObamaCare.
But the people are tired and simply by now shut their ears. Here are five things in the current age that exhaust us.
Go Pay For It Yourself!
What is it about debt that Mr. Obama does not get? Please spare us any new programs or initiatives. We owe now $16 trillion. America is borrowing at the rate of $3 billion-plus a day. So please, Mr. President, no more Solyndras. We did not want or need Cash for Clunkers. There is no money for more expansions of food stamps. Nothing is left for student loan reprieves, high-speed rail, or anything else. To propose any new expenditure would first require some honest disclosure, like the following: “I wish to borrow $10 billion at 3% interest to lower student loan debt and I propose to pay for it by selling off 1000 new oil leases.”
The problem with these Obama initiatives is not just that we do not have the money and must borrow to pay for them, but that we feel most of them only make things worse, whether by subsidizing another mortgage for someone who is by market standards not likely to meet the loan payments and would be better off renting, or by paying some insider crony to make and sell solar panels at a loss. Again, chill on the new programs, and just start paying off what you already borrowed. Outside government, psychiatrists often treat with mind-altering medicines the unstable who compulsively charge things that they cannot pay for and do not need.
Enough Bogeymen, Already
What is it about George Bush that obsesses Obama? It is now January 2012, 40 months after the September 2008 meltdown. So let us finally quit scapegoating “they” (“In the six months before I held office…”; “In 2008…”) who did such terrible things to poor us. Instead, accept the truth about both culpability and responsibility.
Wall Street crooks were only one third of the equation. Another third were equally dishonest and greedy insiders at Freddie and Fannie, such as Clinton hacks like Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelick, or James A. Johnson, who made millions for themselves without much banking expertise, and were egged on by congressionals like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. who hid their own conflicts of interest with high talk about helping the poor. That the three chiefs of staffs in the Obama White House were all Wall Streeters who made millions, in part from the housing bubble, is proof enough of the revolving-door, get-rich schemes. (I don’t remember any particular banking skills that Rahm Emanuel ever displayed that would result in $16 million in profits from two years on Wall Street. Apparently he was a fat cat, a millionaire, and one who did not know that at some point that he already had made enough money.)
The other third party, of course, was “we.” We were not forced to buy homes by “them.” Some of us were greedy and wanted to keep flipping real estate and got caught when the music stopped. Some were stupid and leveraged their homes to pay down credit card debt and write off the interest — or take on even more consumer debt. Some were always better off in an apartment or rental. True, some just bought at the wrong time; but that’s called “bad luck” and not quite the result of a mustached black hat forcing an innocent widow at gunpoint to sign on the dotted line. What are we to think when the president thunders, “We learned that mortgages had been sold to people who couldn’t afford or understand them”? What does “we learned” mean? Did we ever not know? And what does his passive-voice “had been sold” mean? Are we to learn now that it does not mean “bought”? Americans did not “buy” houses, but were pried out of their beds to have too costly homes “sold” to them?
The post World War II economic record is commonly misinterpreted to hide the truth, that lower government spending and greater economic freedom caused the US postwar boom.
Mr Hanson says: “What is the reason [the American economy boomed]? Largely because there was no industry in Japan, Germany, China, South Korea, or Western Europe in 1946.” So, supposedly we boomed because we didn’t have competition. I suggest that Mr. Hansen is merely mistaken in this.
To have a US export boom, other countries must be producing resources or things to pay for our exports. Bombed out foreign economies could not provide those exports to us, and so our postwar recovery could not be based on them. We had no competition, but we also had weak foreign buyers.
A country doesn’t need exports to be growing and prosperous. It only needs to be freed from the dead hand of government taxes and spending.
The U.S. Postwar Miracle
11/04/10 – Economist David R. Henderson
=== ===
[edited] We often hear that big cuts in government spending over a short time are a bad idea. Keynesians argue first that large cuts in government spending, with no offsetting tax cuts, would lead to a large drop in aggregate demand for goods and services, thus causing a recession or even a depression.
Second, with a major shift in demand (fewer government goods and services and more private ones), the economy will experience a wrenching readjustment, during which people will be unemployed and the economy will slow.
Yet, this scenario has already occurred in the United States, and the result was an astonishing boom. In the four years from 1944 to 1948, the U.S. government cut spending by $72 billion, a 75% reduction. It brought federal spending down from a peak of 44 percent of gross national product (GNP) in 1944 to only 8.9 percent in 1948, a drop of over 35 percentage points of GNP.
Why did the U.S. economy do so well in the years following World War II given how badly it had done in the years preceding America’s entry into the war? Dramatically reducing government spending and deregulating an economy can take that economy from sickness to health. In short, one of the main things a government can do to help a weak economy recover is to step aside.
=== ===
“To have a US export boom, other countries must be producing resources or things to pay for our exports. Bombed out foreign economies could not provide those exports to us, and so our postwar recovery could not be based on them. We had no competition, but we also had weak foreign buyers.”
This is just wrong. Did you ever hear of the Marshall plan right after WWII? The US loaned immense amounts of money to bombed out Europe so they could buy from us — from our still working factories — what they needed to rebuild their industrial base. Then they used those re-built factories to produce necessities locally (you can’t import everything, no matter where you live) while paying back the Marshall loans with interest from those new factories’ profits. Basically all those Europeans, who came into the war with a good work ethic and still had it after the war, worked longer each day on average than US workers so they could both rebuild — buying what they needed using money loaned to them — and then pay the interest on those loans. Since only the necessities were produced locally, Europeans getting rich in the re-building economies had to get their luxury goods from places like the North America, Australia, etc., which still had working industrial plants. Soon, however, they caught up and also started producing their luxury goods locally, and at that point the cycle of post-war American riches was over. You can see now why Mr. Hansen is basically correct about the advantages — right after WWII — of having an undamaged industrial base. It’s worth remembering, nowadays when everyone talks as if all debt is automatically bad, that the goodness or badness of a loan depends on how creditworthy the loan recipient is. Europe right after WWII turned out to be very credit-worthy indeed.
That’s not all.
As the Cold War intensified, the U.S. committed to defending Western Europe from Soviet aggression. Western Europe could count on the U.S. military umbrella. We were spending as much as 14% of our GDP on our military at one point; this slowly declined as years went by. So the Western Europeans could devote most of the energies to rebuilding instead of rearming. They never spent anything close to 14% of their own GDP on the military because they could count on the U.S. military instead.
That’s also correct — after WWII the Europeans did not have to pay for their defense (and neither did Japan). That may be why, after the immediate postwar years were over, European workers on average ended up working fewer hours — with their famous month-long summer vacations — than Americans. A decade or so after WWII some cynics were starting to wonder who exactly had won it (see, for example, the plot of “The Mouse that Roared” about a small European country that declares war on the US so it can be defeated and become rich.)
To ZZZ,
Your theory is that the US became prosperous after WWII by loaning money (goods and services under the Marshall Plan) to Europe and collecting interest on the loans.
Your theory is that the Europeans then proceeded to produce only the necessities of life, but then bought huge amounts of luxury goods from the US, fueling the US economic boom. As above, what did they buy those luxury goods with? Money is an intermediary. They would have had to buy luxury goods with their fortunes made from toilet paper and the like.
You also theorize that luxury goods are the basis of prosperity. That’s just wrong.
The Marshall Plan helped to rebuild Europe. Please provide the basis (a link to specific material) that these loans caused a boom in the US.
Gold- they bought the goods with gold. During the years of trade surpluses, America received as payment most of the world’s gold supplies, as Europeans emptied their bank vaults to pay for their imports. This led to the establishment of the Bretton Woods System.
To myth buster,
Your theory is that despite being bombed out, Europe was still fantastically rich with gold, so much gold that the US society experienced an economic boom working for that gold. Could you provide a source to support that?
On the other hand, net US exports in 1946 were 0.3% of GDP, not enough to support our observed economic growth. Net US exports have declined since then.
A Consumption Spending Dilemma
02/01/09 – National Real Estate Investor
=== ===
From 1946 to 1985, personal consumption averaged 62.8% of U.S. real gross domestic product (GDP). It averaged 66.7% from 1986 to 2000, 70.3% from 2001 to 2007, and reached a high of 71.6% in 2007.
In contrast, net U.S. exports of goods and services fell from an average of 0.3% of GDP from 1946 to 1985 to negative 1.8% from 1986 to 2000, and to negative 5.1% from 2001 to 2007. Consequently, more than 90% of the rise in consumption spending from 2001 to 2007 consisted of greater net imports of goods and services.
=== ===
Correction, myth buster! The Bretton Woods system was set up while WW2 was still in progress, in 1944.
Everyone needs to read the book “Stop Renting Now.” It was endorsed by then President Clinton and Hud Secrtary Sisneros. By the time you get to page 30 you see the book is helping people get into homes they can’t even afford. I wonder why I have not heard anyone even bring that book up and the people who endorsed those bad practices. You won’t believe what you will read. And we have Clinton and Sisneros saying this is a good book to follow. Sheesh!
The fact is we were the only western nation left standing that wasn’t bankrupt and physically ruined. Too, we had a huge, unscathed manufacturing base and workforce, a disproportionate number of whom would go on to degrees in higher education and contribute thusly further, in place already.
Our abilities were such that we were able to lift defeated nations out of destitution and set them on their own, fight an incessant war for decades against the USSR and win it, and all the while experience meteoric advances at home.
Dr. Hanson is correct, and Occam’s Razor will suffice in this argument.
True that, Muddy;
The war destroyed most manufacturing in those countries. U.S. manufacturing was only lacking workers that were readily available once the troops came home.
Fortunate for the U.S., its factories didn’t get demolished like the enemies did.
Some 40 years ago I was on a buying trip in Europe. I had in the past bought printed cellophane packaging from England, partly, as a colonial for historical reasons but the price and quality was so out of whack with their German and Dutch competitors that I had to stop. I visited the factory in England, they were very sorry, there was nothing they could do. Their biggest problem was that their factory WAS NOT BOMBED DURING THE WAR. Their plant came from the 30′s, so did a lot of their equipment. Their competitors all had to rebuild, more modern, more efficient. Their second problem was an absolutely intransigent union. They finally went out of business. These two problems are identical to what befell the US industries starting in the 70′s, GM was not going to build a modern robotic plant just because Toyota or Mercedes did nor were their workers going to stand for it.
Yes; Thatcher had to decimate the unions and manufacturing took a hit as a result.
But, are you saying that the Brits would have been better off had their factories been bombed? That may have had an effect on unions for lack of facilities to unionize.
The Germans were funded to rebuild, and they rebuilt and made weapons. Darn good weapons. A sizable portion of the money came from the U.S and the Brits.
The unions in Briton tried to decimate the government, and almost succeeded. Unemployment, strikes, and lack of natural resources, was a daily challenge. Manufacturing can’t survive in that climate.
“Gas has risen over 80% since you took office. The only reason that it has not gone even higher is that your economic policies ensured slow growth (1.7%) and thus curbed fuel demand. Meanwhile some brilliant entrepreneurs discovered how to frack and horizontally drill on mostly private land; so oil and gas production went up despite radical curtailment of federal oil and gas leases by 40%. How strange: after going after the gas and oil industry for three years, the president still could not,as promised, get electricity prices to “skyrocket” or gas to reach “European levels”, and so takes credit for those who resisted his own agenda.”
This is Victor Davis Hanson gold.
The scrappy, inventive private sector finds a work-around to government interference, and Obama takes credit for the wealth they create in spite of his own policies.
my roomate’s step-sister makes $78 an hour on the computer. She has been fired for 7 months but last month her check was $9107 just working on the computer for a few hours. Here’s the site to read more… MakeCash10.comONLLY
I must be doing it wrong. Yesterday I spent all damn day on the computer and didn’t make a dime. Didn’t get my laundry done, either.
I didn’t make any money, either, but I did level up my mage.
Seriously, is there no moderation here any more? How are these damned spammers allowed to post this crap?
Comic relief.
Your roommate’s step-sister probably makes her $78 an hour off an ad on Craigslist under Personals/Casual Encounters . . .
I had a buddy in college who ran an ad in the local newspaper; ” Make money now! Send $5 for details!”
Enough people fell for it that he had gas and lunch money and it paid for his PO box. When they sent the $5 he sent them the details;
“Take out an ad in the local paper saying ‘Make money now! Send $5 for details!’ ”
He also took out another ad that said ” Desperate! Please send money!”
Believe it or not, he got takers on that one too. It was sad, really…..
I suppose he heads a non-profit, now. Or maybe he’s a “community organiser”?
The biggest mistake one can make in business today is to actually do or make anything useful. The government will hound you ’til you drop. But steal money from the government under the rubric of an NGO, and they’ll ive you a medal.
How many museums do we actually need to fund, anyway, especially when the COOs make $300,000 a year. Their job? Getting th3e government to give them more money to waste.
Nice work, if you can get it.
Keep paying those taxes, everyone, because we don’t want the chillruns to starve!
$78 an hour. . . is that all?
Man, I make $100,000 an hour at the computer. . . .and even more when I turn it on!!
Details at:
http://www.theresoneborneveryminute.com
My 2nd cousins step mom’s ex-husbands daughters grand child makes more than that without any computer.
She uses a phone and talks dirty to fools like you.
How do you get fired from being a prostitute?
Mao killed people with eyeglasses? I can hardly imagine it. Did he grind the eyegasses down to a powder and make them drink it? Why didn’t he just shoot them?
I think this reference is not to Mao but rather to Cambodia’s Pol Pot — a radical and extreme communist who decided, once he was in power, that everyone who had been educated was automatically not a member of the proletariat. He reasoned that anyone wearing glasses had done too much reading, or even worse had spent too much time in school. His revolutionary movement was built on the hatred of people living in the Cambodian countryside for all the Cambodian city-dwellers, who were thought to be unfairly exploitative. (A similar city versus countryside political dynamic is now going on in Thailand with so far — fortunately for the Thais — not very much in the way of genocidal violence.) Pol Pot’s minions were notorious for herding city dwellers out to the Cambodian countryside to slave-labor camps where they were worked to death — however those who wore glasses didn’t have to suffer this fate because they were shot right away. This is perhaps the only time in history where an eye-test could have life or death consequences. Historically speaking, his regime was relatively short-lived (for obvious reasons).
That’s right, VDH is slightly off here, it was Pol Pot who killed people with glasses. A couple of acute ironies in that fact: first, the training, arms and ideology for Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, even down to the songs that they sung, were borrowed wholesale from the Communist Chinese – the Khmer Rouge were a CCP-sponsored group, sort of like a Southeast Asian franchise of the CCP. Notwithstanding this, most of those killed were ethnic Chinese Cambodians who then, as now, dominated Cambodia’s economy and intellectual class. Of course it didn’t bother Mao in the slightest that he was essentially arming Cambodian peasants and inciting them to murder Cambodian Chinese – after all this was the same guy who murdered 60 million Chinese in his own country and didn’t bat an eyelash. His objective was to spread the Chinese revolutionary “model” elsewhere and by so doing, enhance his prestige vs. other Communist leaders. In other words he was choosing his own ego gratification over the well being of his people – thank goodness that could never happen in the US. (sarc)
I suggest a request for evidence would be in order. I do not find it far fetched that MAO would have people that wore glasses killed.
“Killing people with eyeglasses” is a metaphor and Mao indeed did so. The Chinese cultural revolution ran from 1966-76 and began with Mao and his wife denouncing the presence of “bourgeois” elements in society. Among the bourgeois elements targeted were teachers and professors, especially those who taught foreign languages, such as English and Russian.
In the early 1980s after the Chinese military had put down the cultural revolution, I went to China, invited by an Institute of Foreign Languages, where I retrained professors who had formerly taught the English or Russian language in universities and who had spent the previous two to eight years in the countryside, where they had been exiled because they were considered subversives by those in charge of the cultural revolution. Their crime had been knowing a foreign language and teaching it. In the early 80s, these professors and teachers were brought back from exile in the countryside and were being rehabilitated as professionals again.
Even elementary and middle school teachers were punished during the cultural revolution. For instance, when I was out swimming one day, I encountered a young man whose entire body was covered with horrible scars. He told me that he had been a middle school teacher and that his students had thrown him into a fire during the cultural revolution. During my stay in China, many, many teachers approached me and told me similar stories of the harassment and brutality they experienced during the cultural revolution. Most of the brutality they experienced was at the hands of high school and university-aged students. These teachers and professors told me that they survived when in the countryside because the peasants felt sorry for them and did not force them to work in the fields; they asked them to teach their own children in secret. As a professor myself, I found this last point interesting. I shall remember this when the Occupy Wall Street students attack–I shall find refuge among the hoi polloi.
Gloria, thank you for this very illuminating perspective. As to your final observation, I have no doubt that a VERY large percentage of today’s professoriate would love to join the Occutards in throwing “bourgeois counterrevolutionaries” onto the bonfires.
Gloria, you will be welcome amongst the unwashed I call friend. And you will find teaching, to us and our kids as they appear, a receptive audience.
I note also that Pol Pot’s agrarian paradise also followed Mao’s premises, that eyeglasses were a sign of weakness and knowing, much less teaching, a foreign language obviously subversive on its face.
Evil is…
Fascinating story. The detail about the people in the countryside protecting the professors and having them teach their kids in secret is really heartening–that says something important about the human spirit, I think. That story would make an excellent movie, novel, or short story!
By the way, are you the same Gloria from Shrinkwrapped? Just curious; I think I recognize your voice. In any case, howdy and thanks for sharing that.
Anyone who frequents these discussion boards has seen posts by leftists that state they would like to round up all conservatives and see them put in camps, executed, etc. So, really, nothing has changed with the left, except the name they call themselves.
There is no difference between communists, socialists, liberals or progressives except the degree of severity they are willing to use to impose their ideology upon an unwilling populace. After all, a communist is just a socialist with a gun and you don’t have one. It’s not a coincidence that the left is for gun control. As someone who has had some of my ancestors killed by communists I detest leftists of any stripe.
I’m quite familiar with Mao’s excesses, and I didn’t think twice to interpret it to mean the educated class.
then what?
It all serves to highlight what is factually correct and what is not factually correct regarding history. For example, in Hanson’s previous post, I made mention of “Samson getting another haircut”. It wasn’t Samson who was weakened by a haircut, but classical hero Hercules who was weakened as a result of getting his hair cut. Samson, on the other hand, was weakened as a result of being seduced by the womenisation of his society in the form of one Delilah. But Samson shook off the shackles of femminisation with a mighty tectonic effort, borne of many years of watching his nation beta-male itself into subjugation, and Delilah and her wymynism became a laughing stock for going on three millennia. One wonders if Delilah then beat a path up to Greece to try, try again for more success there by convincing Hercules that getting the haircut (and weakening Greece) would be good for everybody, but without realizing that a weakened Greece would be ripe fruit for the picking and be run over and enslaved by the opportunistic totalitarian Persians. See? Mythology still has much to teach us, if we would but look at how the spoken narrative told the stories of some epic fails in history that had disastrous consequences for our ancestors, the builders of our greatness, and the wisdom to warn us about how not to keep making the same mistakes over and over.
She must have had more success there, as the Greek preeminence of the time was destroyed, but somehow, Judeo-Christian culture survives to this day, and republican government was able to thrive again in Rome, and later in Florence and Siena, and then in the formation of the United States.
The Foucault, Jacques Derridans of our time tell us that history is ever a construct told by the victors. Is that not more true now than ever? What’s particularly irascible is that the conclusion of the Foucault/Derridans has been cleverly substituted as the premise. If the premise is that history is told by the victors, why should we go on to “believe” their implied conclusion, which they substitute as a mystical premise, that now history can now be observed in it’s (official) truth, rather than (what it is in fact) a new narrative told by newish victors to suit themselves, and hold on to, not only their narrative, but more importantly, their power over the masses whose minds they can keep in the dark, in the cave, as slaves of the new totalitarians. The Persians, to cite one example, might have had the military might to dominate for a while, but not the cultural might to sustain their designs, They could have used a Foucault and a Derrida or three in their time to perpetuate a stranglehold on their dominance ad infinitum.
Pol Pot and Mao had it in for those who were educated or wore glasses, perhaps it’s an Asian thing, but I think not, it’s going on here, right now. “History”, “Science”, “Humanities”- it’s all rolled into one mystical “belief system” to graduate us all into Useful Idiots, the playthings and plastic soldiers for Soros fantasies.
Proof? Scientific Method? Pfau! Arcane relics from the past! Of empirical whatevers and blah blah blah! The science is settled! No more History! Pieties and Purity! …that’s the ticket! It’s not even a belief system anymore, but acceptance and submission! To the facts before you. Praise Lysenko!
The Foucault/Derrida crowd maintains a cultural edge in formerly “academic” institutions, hence the “OWS” phenomenon. It’s all a fun house mirrors distortion box needed to keep us from seeing the man or woman behind the curtain, as they’ve lost their grip on the vast majority of us. Theirs is a ship that has sailed- too close to the breakers, to indulge in a extracurricular wave at special friends on the shoreline, and met the rocks instead. Now most of the passengers are free to leave, if they survived, to try and thrive again. Survival is not enough. It is a fight to decide not “outcomes”, but what qualifies as merely a perverse form of entertainment/absurd and hackneyed equally perverse mythology, versus what works best for the individuals who share in the ups and downs of their country. Look out for those on our side who still want to use the perverse mythological route, Like Newt.
Of course, the Foucault/Derrida crowd would know post-modernism as a philosophy if Foucault’s dead of AIDS corpse hit them in the head. To them, including lots of the “academics” that just embrace post-modernism like a Southerner of the ’50s embraced Jim Crow, post-modernism is “just the way it is,” settled understanding, and all that stuff the Left uses to describe their cults and superstitions. The Academy has in less than a century managed to return a majority of America to a medieval level of ignorance and superstition. Today, instead of priests in dazzling silk and moving through clouds of incense, we have professors, politicians, and left-wing pundits and entertainers interceding between the people and reality.
What the heck? I suggest you open a copy of Judges and read the story. Samson lost his strength when Delilah cut his hair. (The idea being that the hair was a symbol of his being a Nazarite; Delilah was his cover to wreck havoc among the Philistines while avoiding retaliation against the rest of the Jews, who weren’t yet strong enough to stand up to them directly.)
Well, he may have meant Pol Pot here, but remember, Pol Pot was in fact heavily subsidized by and directly aligned with Mao.
Why do you find mass-murder humorous? Do you make Holocaust jokes also?
Thanks, I got it wrong twice, and I stand corrected.
Mao’s original revolution, “let a hundred flowers bloom” and “cultural revolution” killed many wearing eyeglasses, professors, educated, etc. Pol Pot likely copied Mao. Mao killed a total of 77 million Chinese and about 38 million of them were starved to death from 1958 to 1962 to sell their food abroad to fund building the atom bomb.
I wish the “We” you refer to as not wanting to hear anymore included more people I know that can’t seem to get enough of Obama’s sermonizing. It’s encouraging though to have someone out there suggesting that maybe even those people are secretly tiring of it also.
I thought that the applause was considerably muted in contrast to earlier SOTU’s. He would pause after a line that was clearly intended for applause and there would be silence, followed by some hesitant and scattered clapping.
I have suspected this and talked about it for some time now. That being his popularity, similar to a flash-in-the-pan celebrity. Given that the people who are addicted fans of the media, who HAVE to be home in time to watch American Idle or the latest episode of Glee and the like.
When you take a person of talent and push them to the front, their time in the spotlight will be short-lived but very bright. When you do the same with someone who has NO talent but the mechanism behind that person can fake it for a time, the light may be just as bright, but the people catch on and the duration is much shorter.
Not to put too fine an edge on it, and don’t take this the wrong way, but the one thing that would make Obama the “greatest president and trouble-solver every on the face of the earth” would be his immediate and unexpected death whereby he’d be canonized and pronounced as ascending to Mount Olympus to run it.
In no way am I saying to do anything to harm the president, that’s not my point. I am saying that his halo has flickered and the people who thought he was some sort of messiah are especially attuned to noticing that he cannot really do anything like they thought he could; That “hope n change” meant something entirely different than what they’re seeing and getting and thus, they are the quickest to jump off the bandwagon.
The diehard sycophants who believed altruistically that this guy was absolutely magical, are more “sophisticated” and think that it’s just a matter of time before his mastery of everything starts to work. But they have limited patience as well in spite of the fact that they will defend him to the end of days. Why? Because they have invested all their personal emotion and in order to lose faith in him, they’d have to admit making a bad or wrong choice.
But when you have an untalented s-and-so and keep getting told that he’s “new and improved” well, all you have to do is look at a laundry soap commercial to learn that it’s the same stuff in a new box. And it’s it’s usually more expensive.
That his SOTU address was a big snoozer is no surprise and expected by at least 50% of the attending members, democrats included. The tepid applause, when compared to the thunder emitted when Gingrich stated flatly his contempt for the media is a polarizing case of difference.
In the military, I heard lots of people say things like, “I’m gonna” and then when the opportunity came to prove out that intent, they did nothing of the kind. I face it now with the management in my company that says, “We’re gonna be number 1″ and the way they think to do that is with more control over the employees and filling out more forms and tracking things more tightly. The similarity to how our government currently runs and how my company does are scary. But the results are the same. We are NOT number one. In fact we come in dead last and our management blames the employees and…get this…our customers. Does that sound familiar?
I have some old Beatles records that I like. Sure, they’re “played” in the sense that they aren’t on the pop charts anymore. But the difference between them and Obama is that they still bring me joy to listen to and even when someone else covers them today, they are fun. Obama started with a one-string banjo and just kept playing it. We’re sick of it. We were sick of it when Carter played it. And, for the record, it’s not just the song so much, it’s the singer.
“Not to put too fine an edge on it, and don’t take this the wrong way, but the one thing that would make Obama the “greatest president and trouble-solver every on the face of the earth” would be his immediate and unexpected death whereby he’d be canonized and pronounced as ascending to Mount Olympus to run it.”
Exactly right. Dittos with Kennedy (all them, in fact). Mt Olympus or Camelot, it’s all the same.
I remember reading several years ago an interview with a man who had grown up in Nazi Germany and who had been a member of the Hitler Youth. Besides describing the Hitler Youth as a case of wholesale child abuse, what impressed was that, in his opinion, if Hitler had died in 1938 he would today likely be remembered as one of Germany’s greatest statesmen.
Well, premature ascension to Olympus certainly did wonders for JFK’s reputation…
You hit many interesting points, one of them a sore point (for me). Management philosophy is the problem, more than any other addition to politics. The reason micromanaging employees (or government programs) doesn’t work is because it’s impossible for one person to really understand what all those below him are doing. It would take years of study to learn all the disciplines that report to a garden-variety middle-manager, yet somehow he’s supposed to tell everyone what to do with their time. It’s intrisically impossible, yet that’s what they teach in many many schools and MBAs believe like ole timey religion. A president of a nation this large cannot understand the millionth part of what all Americans are up to, yet he’s supposed to micromanage the economy? I quote Alicia Silverstone when I say “AS IF!!”
I’ve been troubled by that same point that you make.
I hate to tell you, but that’s not the case. Out here in California, all of the people I know who are Obama supporters were re-energized by the contradictory, pontificating, self-righteous demagoguery in The One’s SOTU speech, and said afterwards that anyone who did not understand the speech in it’s “proper context” was simply too stupid to understand anything of worth.
The madness on the Left is DEEP. And I’m afraid it’s infected everyone, including pretty much all of those who claim to be on the Right – look at the support for Statists like Mitt and Newt.
We “bitter clingers” in flyover country may be the only obstacle between Barack Obama and his goal of a one-party Socialist state. The EU is imploding, and now he wants to emulate them!
One of Dear Leader’s left-wing prophets was Saul Alinsky, an activist who truly confirmed what Shakeapeare proclaimed: “The evil men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”
I’m seeing that too. It’s like we weren’t watching the same thing. Spooky…
And yet I bet you said the opposite 5 years ago, yeah?
5 years ago we had GWB. And, in retrospect, GWB looks like George Washington compared to the likes of an utterly disastrous, Manchurian Candidate – like Obama.
I never thought I’d see it in my lifetime, but Obama is clearly America’s Nero/Commodus/Caligula. It’s astonishing.
Platitudes are great, Stallion, but why not inject some examples behind your comments and name-calling. That tends to work better in discussion. I’ll probably even agree with some of them. Wars, extended tax cuts, and the handout to big insurance that Obamacare as a few. He’s simply doing more of what his predecessor did, sorry.
Boilerplate is right: the first thing I noticed were stock phrases meant to mean everything and offend no one – it amounts to crying out that one will never submit to cute little kitty cats being used for sandwiches.
Obama could use software to write his speeches as others have pointed out in the past. I have to admit it’s very clever if you can get people to cheer such stuff and also very stupid.
But then if you think about it, liberalism and the Democratic Party are also full of generic philosophies more based on faith and supposition than any real world applications. The Dems mean to appeal to those who feel the most disenfranchised which in reality means those perpetually offended and angry since there is not a single thing in the world standing between those with decent work values and success. Complaining and blame is a well known way to get exactly no where and feeling sorry for oneself is not a recommended way to go through life. This is Obama and the Dems, a perpetual excuse factory for both failure and success, which are basically parsed out to mean good and evil in the Left’s comic book view of the world.
This is an old article, not nearly critical enough, and doesn’t capture the magnitude of his deception, but “How to Write Your Own Obama Speech” is still interesting:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2009/06/04/write-your-own-obama-speech.html
John, I strongly recommend Mark Levin’s “Ameritopia” if you haven’t read it already. It’s a fast read and describes what is happening now to our system and our society. The sad things is that you, me and everyone who reads/posts at these blogs and many others can SEE it but feel helpless because we can’t DO anything about it.
Rather than having a computer write Mr. Obama’s next speech, write the speech yourself.
Amaze your friends when you announce excerpts from the upcoming speech even before the networks get their leaks from the WhiteHouse staff.
Mezermise Audiences, watch people faint, and get the attention of the Nobel committee. That’s right, you too can write Oration just like the pros.
Here it is, the new and improved…
Barak Obama Do It Yourself Speech Kit:
Preamble: this must consist of varying portions or iterations of the following; [Place in any order you choose]
“Folks are hurtin’.” [This must be said with feeling, to show caring.]
“We have to invest in the future.” [Translation; Spend Spend Spend!]
“We need a balanced approach.” [Remember, this means Tax Increases so make it sound reasonalbe.]
“My hope and expectation is that we can put country before party and get something done for the American people.”
[This is the crux of the speech, this is where it is emphasized that any disagreement is tantamount to Treason.]
[At this point it is important to have an agenda list of those things the MSM have placed in Vogue so that you can create a crisis that each of your agenda items will address. Use the following skeleton to introduce each of the current fad agenda items.]
— Obama Introduce the current MSM fad Subject on the Agenda —
“Some would say…” [Insert here a quotation of something No One ever says.]
“let me be perfectly clear…” [This is the place for obfuscation about the subject and any position regarding the subject.]
“We cannot simply just…” [This is where you mention something that would inspire the American People if mentioned by a Republican politician, i.e. "we cannot simply just drill for all the oil we need."]
“make no mistake about…” [Here is where the Exact Opposite of any of the things which are to take place are stated.]
“I reject the false choice that some would…” [Again, reiterate quotations that No One has ever said followed by Him vs. an idiotic extrapolation of any Republican position.]
“I have ordered my team to…” [Doesn't matter what actions you fill in here, they aren't going to do it.]
— Repeat as needed for new subjects —
Then, in closing you must include a reference to the Bush Administration and “The Failed Policies of the Past.” that we cannot go back to.
—————–
This is what happens with a president who continues to reuse phrases that one hears in the halls of mediocre management. I propose we play a game of phrase bingo with the President’s next speech.
Too funny!
Call it “Barry’s Buzzword Bingo.”
Ha!
Ok, for BBB (Barry’s Buzzword Bingo) we’ll need at least 25 words – five across and five down. How about these (nearly all of these were uttered in the SOTU):
Green, Technologies, Union (unionized), Students, Smart
Balanced, Fair Share, Deduction (tax), Millionaires, Rules
Invest, Universities, Overseas, Poverty, Teachers
Bipartisan,Banks, Clean Energy, Predecessor, Wealthiest
Greedy, Hope, False Choice, Environment, Wall Street
Excellent!
jd: that is terrific!
Obama’s problem is it’s not 2007 anymore. Obama is a known Quantity now. Obama was elected based on a manufactured persona, a lie, put forward by the DNC and the fawning media. And who is Barack Hussein Obama?
Obama is the 1st president in the history of the USA who is not a cultural American, and it shows. No other president, except Jimmy Carter, has ever run down his country to the world as Obama has. Obama has denigrated the people of America shamelessly, and he has no idea of who we are because he is not one of us.
Obama was raised far outside of mainstream American culture. His upbringing was by socialists who indoctrinated him from day one to be a hardcore marxist ideologue. Obama was taught to loath the middle class and to use radical rules to attack it. Since before he was elected Obama has been tearing down the USA and the middle class which he fooled into voting for him.
Obama was billed to be all things to all people. A pseudo-mythical messiah-like figure that rose mysteriously with no background yet was a towering intellect who could solve all our problems. Obama is a man of slogans, and was “going to hit the ground running”, and “ready to lead on day one”. He was going to be the post racial president who would unite the USA and lead us into a new era of enlightenment and renewed respect in the world of nations. Only now we know this all to be a farce.
To those of us who took the time to investigate Obama while the fawning media failed to vette him it comes as no surprise that Obama is a failure. Anyone who tried to point out his radicalism, his criminal associates, terrorist friends, his racist church where he sat for 20 years listening to hatred of America and Americans was branded as a racist. It turns out that everything Sean Hannity reported about Obama’s past was true.
And now we know that Obama is a shallow self-serving man of little experience who constantly resorts to demagoguery of those who oppose his radical agenda. He makes denigrating generalizations of broad swathes of the population and makes it clear he is only the president of those who voted for him and support him.
We are much worse off as a nation than we were before Obama and have more than a year of this arrogant fool to endure. The best thing we can do is to vote out every democrat and take away any political power this “president” has. Let’s all watch this impostor vacation and golf and travel the world in Air Force One at our expense while we continue without an inspirational leader and scratch our heads in wonder at the absurd Political Correctness that got us such a ludicrous
Ties it all up with steel cable, VDH. Thanks.
BTW, the Thugocrats’ racewar/classwar of 2012 is underway. It will culminate in the conventions and spread into the streets like Mayday 1968 in Paris. Your commments on the subject need broader promulgation.
Superb essay. One small thought: last month, my wife and I received notification that our 2012 Social Security checks would be increased. It was a surprise, since we had thought inflation reasonably under control and the system itself virtually broke. But there it was. Will be spend it? Yes. Did we ask for it? No. Do we need it? No again. We’ve saved. In miniature, there we have it: our national limousine, with no driver at the wheel, picking up speed as it races down the road of Debt; and there are only green lights. How do we think this will end?
Good comment.
Well, wasn’t the increase a kind of fraud? First, the increase supposedly wasn’t granted because there really has been a great deal of inflation in the country. Krugman says there is no inflation, and even if there were it is not a problem. All you have to do to see inflation with your lying eyes is to go to a grocery store or gas station and look at the prices, e.g., for meat and car water. Second, even if the government is not lying about inflation, the money was granted so you would continue to vote for the big-government swindlers, not because you needed it. And the idea that you are paying more for SS-type medical “insurance” has nothing to do with any of this, does it.
As measured by the BLS and published as the Consumer Price Index, there really isn’t much if any inflation. As measured by real people, particularly those of modest means and/or fixed incomes there is considerable inflation. We went through this in Alaska, as did other oil states, in the oil price crash of the mid-’80s. The precipitous fall from over $30/bbl. to barely $10/bbl. after the North Sea and North Slope began production in the late ’70s caused catastrophic economic dislocations in places that depended on oil revenue and Alaska worse than most because we were so dependent – about 85% of State revenue was (and remains) from oil and in Alaska, the State does everything; there’s little local government or true private economy.
Because of the collapse of oil revenue and State spending many businesses failed and the housing market completely collapsed. Housing is a huge component of the BLS’ “market basket” used to measure the Consumer Price Index, the measure most commonly used for wage adjustments, pension adjustments, etc. Deflation in both housing and fuel costs were causing a flat or even in some quarters deflationary CPI trend. Yet, when you went to the store food and other commodities were still seeing some inflation and unless you bought a new house, your house payments were the same as before the crash. As a government, we made a decision to try to keep as many of our employees on the payroll as possible so as to not further exacerbate the economic problems despite a hue and cry from the private sector for more capital spending. In our economy, capital projects rely largely on material imported from the Lower 48 and even much of the labor is imported, so capital projects are a net outflow to our economy during the construction phase. Of course the price of keeping about the same size workforce was that we could barely pay them and certainly couldn’t pay them more. This is what the socialists never get; even a socialistic economy has to grow or everyone very quickly just becomes equally miserable. There ensued almost a decade of labor strife as the result. We had a Democrat governor and he couldn’t be as confrontational as he should have been with our unionized employees; we should have sought wage concessions but that was a bridge too far for a Democrat. We did hold the line on wages and secured considerable management freedom that had been bargained away in the past, but the unions were at best sullen and often mutinous. The Governor’s position was that he wouldn’t offer any wage increase until he saw an increase in the Anchorage CPI, which was flat or deflationary because of housing deflation. But the unions did have a legitimate complaint in that their members were seeing increased costs of living and the deflation in housing only meant something to you if you were buying a house (or, of course, trying to sell one, and then it had a different meaning altogether – lots of people just put the house keys in the night deposit box and left the State) Ironically, the Exxon Valdez spill cleanup poured so much money into the State that we did get a significant improvement in the economy by late ’89 and the first significant increase in the ANC CPI in several years, so we bought a little peace with modest wage increases in 90 – 93. It didn’t do the Democrats any good though; their guy, a union made-man, finished third in what should have been a two man race. Walter Hickel, former Republican governor and US Interior Secretary, wouldn’t accept the very liberal Republican nominee produced by the then-open primary and ran a largely self-financed campaign for Governor on the Alaska Independence Party ticket. That’s where all the “secessionist” crap that got slung at the Palins came from; lots of people registered AIP in ’90 to back Governor Hickel.
My war stories aside, that’s what’s going on Nationally today; housing deflation is pulling down the CPI measurement and disguising the actual inflation in the things people have to buy in order to live. So, Comrade Obama and his band of the smartest people to run a government evah are going to have to find some way to get some economic growth strong enough for people to actually feel or it isn’t going to be long before before he’s feeling the wrath of a private sector not insulated from economic circumstances they way the public sector, especially the unionized public sector, is, facing civil strife from the growing numbers of unemployed young people, many with huge debt, and civil strife from the social welfare program dependent as both the states and the federal government become less and less able to maintain benefits and certainly unable to increase them. This is what spelled the end of Wiemar Republic. The government had chosen to inflate its way our of its war and reparations debt and Germany’s highly unionized – they had stuff under the Kaiser and Wiemar that US unions only dream of even today – workforce could inflate its wages and social welfare benefits along with the inflating Mark. The economic downturn of the late ’20s, early ’30s stifled all growth in the German economy and made the government and business unable to keep wages and benefits on par with the inflated Mark. The Wiemar Republic fell to the NSDAP, but it could as easily have fallen to the Communists. German business made what we’d now call a crony capitalist deal with the Nazis – they called it business coordination – that the Nazis would rein in the communists and the communist controlled unions in exchange for business support of the Nazis. Sound familiar? One thing I always admired about the actual communists I dealt with was that they were very rational and they learned from their mistakes. Being outmaneuvered by the Nazis almost cost them the Soviet Union and they learned how to “coordinate” with business. If you’re in business in America today, you will either “cooperate” with the government or they will regulate and litigate you right out of business. It’s an old story.
Another elephant in the room is the artificial suppression of interest rates. Many retirees depend on CD interest to supplement retirement. With 1% return they are having to gradually diminish the principle to maintain living standards. The purpose of lower interest is to stimulate business, purchasing capital goods buying houses etc., however we see the effect as quite different. This administration is hell bent to destroy the middle class, and doing a pretty good job. Maybe four more years and the job will be complete.
Yes. The expression, “you can take that to the bank” has no meaning any longer.
Well, you can take it to the bank, but if KIng Barack steals the election this year, you’ll probably find the bank Occupied.
Add to that the inflation they intend to reduce the debt in the longer term and low income and fixed income households are both harmed. Anyone over 50 remembers the damage done to those groups in the late 70′s-80′s and yet the current economic “experts” can’t see past their spreadsheets. What is manageable inflation to them is dire to some households. One of my main complaints about Obama is that he can’t see past his grand vision to the unintended consequences.
One always talks about what one knows. Obama knows nothing, thus he talks about nothing… endlessly. He truly is a testament to the value of an Ivy League education. Without those degrees he wouldn’t be qualified for a minimum wage job, without the connections of the 1% Club he’s unhireable. It’s all on display at the SOTU – a man with no job skills, no work history, no personal accomplishments talking about what he knows, which is nothing. Well, that’s not exactly true, he does know he’s unhireable without his college connections, hence his rage at the “private sector”. And I’m sure if we looked close enough we’d find that he didn’t leave his first job at the law firm to become a community organizer, rather he was unceremoniously booted out. It’s magic really, don’t perform in the private sector and you get fired, don’t perform in the public sector and you become President. No wonder he expounds on “green technology”, he’s had first-hand experience with magic!
“magic” = “affirmative action”
I’m thinking it’s worse than that.
He has no redeemable skills whatsoever. And in that vein, “Those who can’t do-criticize.”
I can’t remember the movie but the line went something like this: “I’m at a crossroads here, Mr___. I have listened to you at length and tried tirelessly to find that function, that position for you where your alleged assets will triumph and produce something of great value to me. In that I have failed, sir. At first I thought I had done something incorrectly or had misjudged you but as it turns out, you have no redeemable skills whatsoever.”
the simplest answer to all of the questions raised is -”this is what marxists do…”
the real question is “why are we unable to convince more, seemingly/possibly reasonable, americans to get off the path to inevitable destruction and change course?”
do we need more of it (statism) so as to be like smelling salts eventually snapping the people out of their stupor?
In large part 0′s supporters are there because they have been indoctrinated since elementary school to believe that the government is always beneficent. The ideas from the left are always for “one’s own good and the good of the people”. Of course, they don’t realize that this is the propaganda meme of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, et al.
Americans are rarely taught that Communism failed economically before the political collapse came in Russia. Most do not believe that Communist China will fail, likely within their lifetimes. Europe, although virtually no one in the left wing economic intelligentsia will acknowledge the fact, has failed and is tottering on the brink of political Armageddon.
Yesterday I listened to the finance minister of Sweden, a U.S. assistant secretary of the Treasury, and several others discuss why we need more “fairness” in the economic system and why free capitalism must be restrained. They were all smiling and nodding to one another – the real message was yeah, let’s do this because it will be more power for thee and me. Power = money; money = prestige; prestige = power; and round and round the circle goes. That is the brass ring the left is trying to take, and then take out of play for the rest of us.
And the homerun king has just knocked another one out of the park…
What really makes me sick is the unforgiveable asininity of my fellow Americans, who have incredibly found a way to squander the inheritance of the greatest nation ever built by man and have destroyed it in two generations. The proof of this collapse is the very fact that we have to endure the bulls**t of such a monster as Hussein and his gaggle of crooks prancing around our national stage as the freely elected representatives of a people rotten to the core.
There’s an old adage (and I’m paraphrasing): The first generation makes the fortune, the second generation grows it, and the third generation ruins it utterly. We may be there.
It doesn’t matter if we keep voting for people who will give us other people’s money. The economy will adjust itself.
Small potatoes and loose change…
SOTU Flop
Poor Victor! One would expect some reasonable understanding of some historical perspective when one talks about debt and deficits. But alas when one covers oneself with shilling for the ignorant conservatives one has to understand their audience who love to remain ignorant and uniformed and you certainly help keep them in that state. Job well done!
However one small nit about debt – under Republican Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Bush II the national debt increased from under $1 trillion in 1980 to close to $13 trillion (subtract the $1 trillion increase from Clinton’s 8 years). Now what programs of President Obama added to the debt– was it the prescription drug program – that was passed under Bush II by republicans. Was it the two wars – that was the feckless Bush II as well. Was it the financial meltdown in 2008 that ripped out billions in tax revenue from state and local governments as well as the federal government? Was it having no regulation on banks while trillions were ripped out from people’s net worth?
Now I know you like to ignore reality as you’re a conservative but on occasion you should at least try to be honest with yourself shouldn’t you?
So please tell us what policies from President Obama contributed to our national debt.
Total national debt has increased 1/3 during Obama’s 3 year tenure alone.
Some $900 Billion in “stimulus” literally down the drain.
At least 3 known “green energy” flops, the largest we know of $535 Million to Solyndra. Energy Sec’y Steven Chu was working on another $400 Million for Solyndra even as that company was going belly up.
Obama preached self-righteously as a Senator (2007) against raising the debt ceiling, called it “irresponsible” and “unpatriotic” and has just asked for another $1.3 Trillion.
Total national debt has increased 1/3 during Obama’s 3 year tenure. alone.
Some $900 Billion in “stimulus” literally down the drain.
At least 3 known “green energy” flops, the largest we know of $535 Million to Solyndra.
Energy Sec’y Steven Chu was working on another $400 Million for Solyndra even as that company was going belly up.
“We’ll keep chasing green with taxpayer money until hell freezes over!”
Obama preached self-righteously as a Senator (2007) against raising the debt ceiling, called it “irresponsible” and “unpatriotic” and has just asked for another $1.3 Trillion.
Interest on the national debt alone was over $4.5 Billion in 2011.
All Obama knows to do to keep power is monetary dispensations to special interests, such as public unions & exclusions from Obamacare & his favorite group of employees, government workers.
………”All Obama knows to do to keep power is monetary dispensations to special interests, such as public unions & exclusions from Obamacare & his favorite group of employees, government workers.” ……..
it is all he has to do. most people have never had any up close experience with a community organiser. this is standard fair, if they can they will bring violence.
I think the occupy groups are their opening salvo on the point of violence. this is just starting and precious few are aware of where it will end. think Egypt.
Federal spending 2008, $2.983 trillion. Federal spending 2011, $3.834 trillion. Increase: 29%.
Deficit 2008, $458 billion. Deficit 2011, $1,266 billion. Increase: 176%. (Source: US Government Printing Office)
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the prescription drug benefit, were already in place in 2008. So even you, Flaming Liberal, can see that the one-third increase in federal spending between 2008 and 2011 were not due to the expenses you cited.
Wow. In the words of Dr. Evil: “You just don’t get it, Scott…”
Let’s, for the sake of argument, cede all the evil of the Bush administration.
So what? What does that possibly have to do with any of the points raised? Is it some sort of “our turn” to run up debt? Some sort of “well, YOU got to!” mentality?
So if it helps, imagine a whole series of mea culpas… NOW how do you explain your boy’s actions? Is Solyndra suddenly a great idea? Cash for Clunkers wasn’t a waste? There WERE shovel-ready, non-union jobs in the Stimulus (enough to justify it)? What? How does sufficient rejection of Bush’s activities make the President’s actions okay? How does that work? Had there been enough apologies, Holder would resign over Fast and Furious? High Speed Rail would fade away? Are all the blatant errors of the last three years solely because VDH didn’t mention Bush’s failings enough (which, if you read his stuff during the Bush years, I think you’ll find he did).
Spare me.
MDC you talk about piss holes in the snow when you bring up those programs and I bet you along with all your ignorant comrades also think lowering taxes to their lowest level in years while we conducted two wars and passed Medicare part D while also increasing tax subsidies to oil and not negotiating lowest prices for big pharma were godsends to the middle class. Obama wanted to lower the deficit by increasing taxes and raising revenue on the wealthy. Of course that is a no go for the people who love to step their boot on the backs of the poor and middle class.
True Americans do want the middle class to be strong and the piss of them from on high hoping it will trickle down has never worked. I can’t wait for Romney
You are an offensive flaming idiot, a Talking-point-O- Matic for mind-numbed leftist crap. You’ve never had an original thought in your worthless parasitic life; you just repeat the crap that some professor, lefty pundit, or celebrity idiot stuffed in your useless head. And, yes, I know this is 100% ad hominem but I long ago learned that there is absolutely no point in arguing facts and logic with a lefty; they’re immune. Their professors told them they were the smart people for believing the crap they believe and everyone who doesn’t believe as they do is ignorant, mouth-breathing, uni-browed, or whatever insult you useless consumers of valuable oxygen are throwing around this week. Why are you here? Nobody here with a brain is going to argue with you because we all know it is a waste of electrons to even try to educate some lefty useful idiot. Hopefully the communist SOB you all worship will get the Helter-Skelter he’s trying to provoke. Then you’ll find out what both sides think of useful idiots.
Sooooo… you DON’T really have anything useful to say.
Bush was bad, and therefore anything that follows is okay, and there is no reason to examine any given action by the President for efficacy, because, after all, Bush didn’t veto that Big Pharma bill five years ago.
Is this some sort of clever twist on “the ends justify the means?” Now is it “Bush justifies any action whatsoever?”
Good luck with that.
Bush wasn’t just bad he was horrendous and put our country into a big hole. The programs mentioned that were Obama’s are a piss hole in the snow regarding our debt. The right is all aflutter regarding our debt yet where were they under the incompetent one that you ignorantly voted for twice along with all the other fruit cakes here? Yet when one actually does look at what caused the high deficits it’s the rights being scared xhitless of anything that moves in the dark and it must be terminated with extreme prejudice. Heck the right should walk around wearing adult depends just for safety sake. We got two ignorantly stupid wars that we will be paying for long after they are over. 2/3 of the cost hasn’t been absorbed yet and the wackjob republicans which many here seem to be on their knees swallowing anything bad said about Obama and giving high fives when more war talk spews forth from Romney, Gingrich, and the nutcase Santorum.
Have you listened to the rabble that attends the Republican debates – cheering for a person without insurance to die and booing a soldier in Iraq just because he’s gay and a whole host of other openly ignorant displays. Yet the candidates stay silent like the population of Germany during WWII.
I can’t wait until you nominate your wackjob and I’m hoping it’s Romney. He’s the perfect guy to represent your party. A man who made his living piling on debt in LBO’s. Just like the Republican Presidents.
In any here was honest and that might be hard to find they would realize that when one is dumped into a cesspool of crap it takes time to get out. Yet the republicans have been crying from day 1.
Hopefully this election will show the Republican for what they are – a concoction of jesus freaks, HS dropouts, racists and bigots, homophobes, and sadists.
Oh have we said we want Romney?
Maybe you can explain to us with a straight face how the banks ripped us off out of trillions. And maybe you can explain to us why deficits are bad when republicans in charge but perfectly acceptable when democrats are in charge. You want to repeal Medicare Part D? Fine by me.
Poor CubanBob – I suppose pass the trash derivatives that banks knowingly sold did not help the financial crash. I suppose that just helped the value of housing increase. And of course having the vast bulk of no doc mortgages issued by private bankers only strengthened the value of housing when the crash started in 2007. Naturally in your mind the banks did nothing and it was happenstance that the wealth of the middle class was reduced by trillions. Poor CubanBob it must be nice living in your dream world.
I can already see that many posters here have replied to your query specifying which policies or programs Obama initiated in office that have blown out the budget so I won’t repeat them. What is hard to quantify but no less significant in now OBama has added to our deficit is how he has from the outset of his presidency done everything he can in his “offical” speeches, offhand remarks, and demonstrated temperament to scare the bejeezus out of just about any company in the private sector; giving them every incentive to stop investing, hold off adding employees or scale back operations in the U.S.
He’s done a fantastic job of-
- vilifying corporations and the private sector at every opportunity.
- Continually casting doubt about tax rates both personal and corporate (always droning on about paying more)
- Incessant prattling on about his undefined concept of “fairness.”
- Touting further schemes to stimulate development of green energy investments despite the continued fallout from the first batch of costly initiatives.
- Dreaming up new ways to further regulate huge sectors of the economy and place unelected bureaucrats in positions that give them wide latitude for making rules that ultimately cost businesses piles of money and make goods and services more expensive for consumers. This last point includes him giving vast new rulemaking powers to the EPA.
All these add up to anemic or nonexistent growth in GDP, persistently high unemployment, and accelerated off-shoring of manufacturing.
I also find it perversely amusing when you trot out the “Republican predecessors (starting with Reagan) were the ones who were the real scofflaws when it comes to deficit spending – kind of like that stupid chart that’s making the rounds on Facebook showing that Obama increased the debt a much smaller percentage than his predecessors (showed Reagan increasing nat’l debt 118% vs Obama’s 16%.) I have this to ask of any of the dimwits who produce such intellectually dishonest arguments: Which economic environment would you rather live under today: Obama’s or ANY of his Republican predecessor’s?
Flaming, anyone that has dealt with government, particularly the Federal government, knows that it will consume this country at some point the way the European Union is consuming Europe.
Try to deflect attention away from Obama as much as you can; it will not change the fact that he is incompetent for the office he holds. We should be thankful he isn’t any better at wrecking this country. The economy won’t come back until he’s out of office because no one in business trusts him based on the decisions he has made so far. Perhaps he has made a decision that is actually good for business, good for the economy. If he has defend them, but don’t come on this website with your shilling for Obama and the dems’ nonsense.
You forgot to mention “Obama’s War”. Obama is “awesome”. He is #1.
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2011/05/04/libya-vs-iraq-obama-is-awesome/
Flaming, did you actually read the article?
Among other things, he mentions Solyndra, “Cash for Clunkers”, the student loan program, expanding the food stamp program.
You do prove Hansen’s point, however, about Obama’s—and liberals’—obsession with George Bush.
The The Strafe of the Union address does not resonate with us, my dear cyberfriend, VDH, because we were never its intended audience.
Clearly, by now we see the evidence that Obama has absolutely no interest in representing the will of the people he was elected to serve. He has only an interest in ruling the people, he disdains, by favoring the people who genuflect before him and render him abject fealty….and cover.
The reason his words clang off our ears is precisely because they were not intended for our ears. We are eavesdroppers on an internal conversation with left wing social engineers in the process of burning bridges instead of building them, blowing up the free market instead shoring up its foundations, and assembling class/racial warfare garrisons through ACORN/SEIU thugs, Blank Panter voting booth Red Guard, gun running to Mexican drug cartels and manipulation of the Treasury for the best green thieves this side of Nottingham.
It makes no sense to our ears, VDH, because it is intended to teach Polly to earn a cracker. Parrots and lemmings…Journolist types, Soros lackeys, the useful idiots and Marxists of every stripe, took out their decoder rings and learned to hide the decline, cover up the disasters, blameshift and shirk responsibility, and build the “narrative”.
Of course it was incoherent. Of course it was disingenuous. Of course it was irresponsible. Of course it was divisive. Those are features, not bugs, in the tutorial that passes for our Strafe of the Union these days.
The Fabian in the White House delivered a speech that was not aimed at us, VDH. Except for the strafing. That is always aimed at us. And, our circular firing squad seems a bit too preoccupied at the moment to fire back.
Well said, CFB. I realize that among the several reasons I cannot stand to listen to Obama (or watch him) is the fact that I know he is not talking to me or others like me. He does not represent us at all; he does not care about us. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that we could all drop dead & that would be just fine & dandy with him.
There’s is hardly anyone on the scene today who can say it better than VDH. Just want to stand up and cheer. Just did.
Dr Hanson’s excellently terse dissection of this administration’s (low case “c” deliberate) Orwellian bull***t leaves nothing else needing more clarification.
Now, We the Electorate have a real problem: we must professionally and promptly translate the likes of Dr Hanson’s writings and the absolutely sound ideas behind them into votes against the current administration, and we only have so many months in which to do this.
This urgency to unseat our current president and his ilk in offices in Washington is such that we need a Opposition Unified behind a Republican candidate, which in turn requires a mammoth effort to disrupt the lethargy of those voters who’ll stay home on election day if the weather is bad.
It’s almost to say that we need to change the way we vet our candidates in order to prevent our future electoral duping and and prevent future Obama’s from being filtered up through our existing procedures right smartly into the Oval Office.
Maybe we need a “Shadow Government”, a “Loyal Opposition” standing by, in the British manner.
In any event, we must somehow absolutely insure that the likes of this Obama and his ilk are never permitted to be leveraged into power again, ever.
Nice idea, but it appears a little late for vetting a candidate this time around. We appear to have let the MSM and the establishment pick our candidate, again.
Maybe we can do a little better with our Congressional nominations?
“No one quite knows why a dark-skinned Pakistani-American does not qualify for preferences, and a light-skinned Brazilian American with a trilled last name sort of can.”
Actually, Brazilians are not “Hispanic” because they speak Portuguese, not Spanish. So even a dark-skinned poor Brazilian does not qualify for preferences, while a light-skinned rich Spaniard does.
Actually, in Calfornia several years back, a state assemblyman of Portuguese background tacked on Portuguese-American to the list of Hispanic state set-asides in education and state hiring (sorry, I can’t recall his name right now). Also, immigrants and children of immigrants from Brazil indeed do place a checkmark in the minority category on forms, with many claiming African ancestry, or simply the claim that they are immigrants and therefore a victim.
I have lived my entire life in Newark, Fremont, Livermore and Tracy, ie, the East Bay, here in California, and have watched the interesting transformation of the “Portagees” who have owned most of the farmland for a century, and who now sell it off for development dollars, now claim to be minority victims.
Interestingly, the victim status somehow rubs off for merely being Latin and Catholic (good) as opposed to WASP (bad). Don’t ask me, I don’t get it, but that’s how it falls. Ie., immigrant, Latin, Catholic (except for Italians) equals minority victim.
Thanks again, Dr. Hanson, for another precise, factually based biopsy of the Obama epidemic.
I think “No Mas, El Hefe” is more appropriate.
Delivering a speech to the richest, most powerful governing body on an 8th grade level is commensurate with Obama’s intellect and education magnitude.
And the 8th grade rank is consistent with the Democrat economic theory.
They shut down lemonade stands because lemons are detrimental to the environment, unsanitary, and people are using too much lemonade.
Their kool-aid is better for the environment, because it can remain in the bag and on your shelf for centuries before it deteriorates, it smells better, and biodegrades faster once mixed with water. It’s also union made!
(Pardon the mixture of prose; I know there are many Left sycophants that read here, and I wanted to make it simple enough for them.)
Simply a-s kicking. Great summary, and hopefully Romney uses this tack to take Obama and the rest of them down.
Anymore? I didn’t want to hear this bull excrement to begin with.
Obama’s SOTU speech reminded me of the Italian cruise ship’s captains handling of affairs recently. He failed to inform the Coast Guard but the passengers with smart phones did.
Obama has spent much time at the Captain’s Table entertaining himself and others while our ‘ship’ has been taking on much debt. Perhaps what were once navigable passages are now made dangerous by our reduced draft as we sit much lower in the water. Who knows, maybe a rock like California might tear a hole in the hull and begin the process that puts America on it’s side like that beautiful cruise ship.
Our computers and the internet are the cell phones which eventually sent the Italian Coast Guard into action. The passengers helped each other more than they might have been prepared as the infrastructure failed during the emergency. Injuries and deaths were kept surprisingly low, given the numbers of people involved and the magnitude of the event.
Fortunately, most got off the ship safely though not as quickly as the captain. Should we suffer a similar fate, my guess is the Obamas will ‘touch down’ in Chicago in a New York minute. I really don’t want to see America laying on its side, ever. But then, I doubt those who built a powerful, high-tech ship– the culmination of years of ship building experience with the latest in navigating systems- thought it would end up on it’s side either. November 2012 we get a new captain who takes the job seriously and understands the seas or we may sink too.
VDH Excellent as always.
…you do realise you are talking about a marxist! you can not reason with one and reason means nothing to them. They consider themselves above others and reason and in the end they will kill you.
Around 25% of the audience dropped out of watching the SOTU Address after five minutes. My guess, they tuned in to what they thought was going to be their regularly scheduled program and were confronted with Obama when they came back in from the kitchen or bathroom. Many of the other 75% probably just walked out without turning off their tvs or fell asleep in their chairs. I must admit I did have it on but I was over here on my computer after about five minutes of his bull.
Average federal pay matches Microsoft By Andrew Biggs January 27, 2012, 10:56 am
http://blog.american.com/2012/01/average-federal-pay-matches-microsoft/
But be sure to read the comments as well. There are a lot of questions about apples to apples here.
I know how much people like to do this and these days how much conservatives/Republicans love to make unflattering comparisons between public and private sector workforces. Unlike most who blather about this stuff, I’ve actually done it for real. I’ve commissioned salary studies, helped design them, and tried to use the findings to fashion pay practices and collective bargaining objectives.
First, it is impossible to compare a government workforce to a private sector workforce. Government typically employs all sorts of job classifications that simply do not exist in the private sector. It is very difficult to compare a government’s workforce to another government’s workforce. Governments do different things, serve different populations, and have different competitive positions based on geography, cost of living, social/cultural amenities, etc.
What you can compare is wage/salary plus benefits cost for reasonably matched job classifications and even that comparison is meaningless unless you can accurately adjust for cost of living differences. There is also a somewhat more subjective differential for standard of living expectations that is very hard to measure but which definitely impacts a government’s ability to recruit and retain employees.
In the example of the US v. Microsoft, the bulk of Microsoft’s employees are in Seattle, one of the highest cost of living areas in the Country, but that said, within reasonable commuting distances, the cost of living varies wildly between the stratospheric costs of Queen Anne Hill to much lower costs relatively close by near the old railroad yards and the station and stadiums and suburban costs vary wildly based on the age and demographic of the neighborhood and, especially, whether there is waterfront property in the neighborhood. MS competes for talent with other computer industry firms in Silicon Valley, some of which is even more expensive than Downtown Seattle but which also has wildly varying costs within commuting distance, or at least what people in CA seem to believe is reasonable commuting distance. Alaska’s collective bargaining law says that labor agreements WILL have a cost of living differential based on the COL in Seattle, WA. OK, and just what part of Seattle, WA do I base it on. The US also has cost of living differentials based on what part of the Country the employee is based in, but like all such things, including those in my State, those differentials are as much political as statistical.
There are very few private sector social workers, grant administrators, public sector labor relations specialists, correctional officers, police officers, etc. Government is the predominant employer of all sorts of scientists and other professionals. In Alaska the only people who employ Petroleum Geologists are the State of Alaska and the Oil Industry. Guess who pays them better! And guess is what you’ll have to do, because they won’t tell you what they pay theirs. That was always are real gripe for me on the political side of paying our employees; the private sector was always happy to bitch about what we paid but absolutely refused to share what they paid.
One legitimate complaint from the private sector is that it is almost impossible to adjust public employee wages downward when equivalent jobs in the private sector go down or when there are changes in relative cost of living. If the employees are union and you try to cut wages for a job classification or reduce a COLA, they just go buy a mayor or governor who promises not to make the cut. In the mid-to late ’90s governments computerized in a mad rush and they did so at the same time they were trying to adjust to Garcia v. San Antonio’s placing public employers under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act and changing the overtime entitlements for many government employees while at the same time dealing with the Y2K scam. Computer types could pretty much name their price. By the mid-’00s, computer weenies were a dime a dozen but governments had all sorts of cable pullers and pluggers making $100K/yr. Most couldn’t cut their pay because of union contracts, pay policies, or politics, so they had to either keep them and pay them exorbitantly or just do away with the function altogether and contract out, also not easily done politically, especially in a union state.
The complaint we heard most from the private sector after the oil price crash of the mid-’80s was that government employees had ridden Pipeline Era inflation up, but, unlike the private sector, had not ridden it down with the Bust. That was only somewhat true, but definitely true in the job classes where we competed directly with Pipeline construction companies: labor, trades, and crafts, security/law enforcement, some natural resource scientists, etc. We never got wage takebacks but we basically deflated the relative wages of our workforce by refusing to let it inflate for most of two decades. From ’86 until ’03 wages only matched CPI in ’90 – ’93, though by then we were far behind the West Coast states in nominal dollar wages in some classifications and well behind the US in jobs where we competed directly with them. This time our answer to CA pays better was, “Go to CA” and to the US pays better was, “have a nice life as a fed.” We just decided we were not going to compete with the US government or the wildly inflated wages of CA and WA.
A general rule of government compensation is that you should never be the leader or the least-paid follower and you have to give value to ALL of your benefits that can be quantified, which by the way doesn’t include “job security” because you can give it economic value with any precision and security varies widely from job to job.
Anyway, before this becomes a book; suffice it to say that published direct comparisons are rarely accurate and often have an agenda, so take them as being worth what you paid for them. And just as an example, I survey I commissioned in ’02 or ’03 for a couple dozen or so benchmark labor, trades, and crafts, clerical/technical, and law enforcement classifications cost me nearly a quarter million bucks and wasn’t nearly as good as I would have liked because of the difficulty of getting good comparables and the reluctance of many private employers to disclose their pay.
Blah blah blah.
I’ve worked in the private sector, and the public sector. You are right. They are tough to compare. In my private sector job I did same amount of work as my entire department does. Folks, you are being stolen from.
The USA borrows over $46,000.00 dollars a second to keep the government going. This is not going to end well.
http://nation.foxnews.com/president-obama/2012/01/02/every-day-obama-regime-takes-6-billion-and-spends-10-billion
Attending an Obama predictable speech is an act of “praise” for the messenger regardless of content. Sort of like people sitting in church week after week. The followers would stop attending or fire the preacher if he didnt provide the message they wanted. Who is to be despised – the preacher or the followers ?
“Eric Holder once called us collective cowards for not wishing another conversation on race on his terms…”
That particular one always gets me royally pissed off.
Who is it that’s improved race relations in the US, say since 1968? Well, that would have been you, me, him, her – not some frigging smarmy suit in Washington, droning on and on about, “well I sponsored a bill that this and that and yadda yadda yadda.” People such as Holder and Obama have done literally nothing to improve racial tensions in the US, except to try to claim credit for it having occurred.
As usual, simply fantastic. Victor Davis Hanson for President.
Art Chance for Secretary of State!
Best, most informed comments ever.
Art Chance for State!
Best, most informed comments, ever. Invaluable.
(You had me at “search and destroy missions”)
The content of our character alone matters; those who are not so confident in their own, usually demand that their tribal affiliations be essential and not incidental to their personas.
Eric Hoffer…
“The uncompromising attitude is more indicative of an inner uncertainty than of deep conviction. The implacable stand is directed more against the doubt within than the assailant without.”
“Every extreme attitude is a flight from the self.”
Fine essay; maybe Obama will accidentally read it while he’s surfing for his next vacation spot.
As he makes a few extra bucks out of his current gig Obama may actually believe that the world as we have known it is unsustainable. The great joke of his presidency is that he has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the world according to Him and the left doesn’t work at all. One suspects that quite a lot about Obamaworld was never about real world results, but about “controlling the people,” as that inestimable dem Congressman put it. Obama got the dems a lot closer to their goal.
Obama READ this?
The first time he came across a word he couldn’t pronounce or understand, it would be condemned as racist.
And being intimidated by the label racist is motivation to vote for him.
Maintaining the ignorance of his herd is critical for his survival.
I have a new slogan for Obama for the 2012 campaign: Rope a Dope & Chains. See I’ll lie to you for a whole year about all the “stuff” I’ll deliver to you if you elect me. Then I’ll put your children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren in chains to pay for it.
http://evilbloggerlady.blogspot.com/2012/01/lack-of-solar-activity-and-mini-ice-age.html Great article VDH, I am linking to it.
Dumped ‘Fast Furious’ Docs Contradict Sworn Holder Testimony
http://dailycaller.com/2012/01/28/latest-friday-night-document-dump-shows-holder-was-informed-of-fast-and-furious-connection-to-brian-terry’s-murder-on-day-border-agent-died/
“So please tell us what policies from President Obama contributed to our national debt.”
———–
I love how that is supposed to be a serious question.
The Democrats increased spending for the war in Iraq every year they controlled Congress.
The Democrats supported the prescription drug benefit. I love how you leftists keep bringing this program up. You want it repealed, right?
Obama, supported by Democrats, extended the Bush tax cuts.
“Was it having no regulation on banks while trillions were ripped out from people’s net worth?
Really?
There was no SEC, Sarbanes-Oxley, IRS, DOJ anti-trust division, etc?
Who knew!??
“So please tell us what policies from President Obama contributed to our national debt.””
Here you go:
Under Obama, federal government spending has exploded by more than $600 billion per year. In President George W. Bush’s last full year in office, federal spending was just under $3 trillion; under Obama, it increased to approximately $3.6 trillion. That’s an increase of more than 20 percent
…
On Obama’s watch so far, the size of the cumulative federal debt has increased from $10.6 trillion to $14.8 trillion — about 40 percent — and it continues to climb.
…
For example, the State Department and other international assistance went from $47 billion in 2008 to $58 billion in 2010. The Labor’s Department’s budget authority went from $57 billion in 2008 to $179 billion in 2010.
Most of the new spending was the result of policy choices by the president and congressional allies. During 2009 and 2010, federal agencies and programs saw extraordinary increases in their budgets.
Poor Jay – anyone can post and subtract one item from another and say look how much government spending increased and then blame it on Obama. Anyone who is patently dishonest that is.
I know you are ignorant to what happened when Obama first got into office but the GDP dropped significantly in Bush’s last year and Obama’s first year. That tends to depress tax revenues at all levels of government. Unemployment was falling off the cliff with 4 million jobs lost in Bush’s last year and Obama’s first month in office 800K lost their jobs. The first six months in office under Obama another 4 million lost their jobs. Naturally to the truly ignorant it had to be Obama’s fault. Then we start getting job growth in the private sector at the evil stimulus kicks in (you know the one where the CBO says close to 2.5 million jobs were created by it) even though the Republicans were against it. So when people say hey how long are you going to blame Bush and Republicans I say look at the hole they dug for us.
Now of course when you state the labor department authority went from $57 – $179 Billion in 2010 you are very deceitful in what that represents – do you know what unemployment does to a budget and what unemployment compensations does when masses suddenly get unemployed? Naturally those 8 million unemployed in about a year are Obama’s fault right? RIGHT?
So the Republicans starting attacking state and local government employment and significant drops in employment have happened at the state level. However, the private sector has had 23 straight months of growth and unemployment has started to drop to the dismay of the Republicans who have done everything in their power to have this country stay down.
Obama recently put forth a jobs act in which close to 600K would be put back to work (in the PRIVATE SECTOR) on rebuilding bridges and Roads and schools – another words infrastructure that needs funding anyway. It was fully paid for by eliminating the tax cuts for the wealthy. Republicans went berserk saying it’s class warfare. Of course the rich have been doing extremely well while the middle class has been shrinking while the poor have been increasing. The class warfare has been going on for 30 years yet only recently has the middleclass found out about it.
Please please bring on Romney – he’ll be our perfect foil as we take back the house in big numbers and keep the Senate and then we’ll see what real change is all about.
Speaking of the robotic rhetoric of Obama, it’s interesting to read similar robotic explanations of the soaring debt under Obama from the ‘progressives’, eg, as in Flaming Liberal’s post.
The debt was $10.626 trillion on the day Obama took office. The latest calculation from Treasury shows the debt has now hit $14.639 trillion.
It’s the most rapid increase in the debt under any U.S. president.
The national debt increased $4.9 trillion during the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush. The debt now is rising at a pace to surpass that amount during Mr. Obama’s four-year term.
The left blames:
“two wars we didn’t pay for”
“a prescription drug program for seniors…we didn’t pay for.”
“tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 that were not paid for”
But wars are never ‘prepaid’! And these wars were approved by both the UN and Congress. The left, whose rhetoric constantly refers to them as ‘Bush’s wars’ conveniently ignores this vital FACT. [Unlike Obama's Libyan war].
The drug program – chosen by Congress. And you don’t prepay tax cuts – what a ridiculous notion.
The housing fiasco was due to Clinton and the Democratic Congress – and such as Frank and Dodds.
None of these funding requirements explain Obama’s increase in the debt – his near trillion dollar ‘stimulus’ program which didn’t go to develop infrastructure for jobs but to pay for his unionized public services jobs already in existence; his disastrous public funding of Solyndra and other bankrupt ‘green’ energy, his refusal to enable domestic oil production, his funding of 1 billion to Soros’s oil holdings in Brazil, his strangling of domestic small businesses with the EPA regulations and his health care…
That is – Obama hasn’t developed any methods to deal with the debt – and certainly, taxing those Rich People who make money in Magic Cauldrons won’t deal with the debt. Has he reformed the tax code? Reformed entitlements? Enabled the devt of small and medium businesses? Reformed the public service and its unionized greed? Nope. Nothing. Nothing.
Mr. Hanson,
You are awesome beyond expression. Thank you, thank you for this post. It expresses all my thoughts and feelings about Barry Soetoro and his puppet masters. As far as the Racism Industry is concerned, all of the modern day peddlers of racism victimhood need to go back to where the whole mess started in Africa. Their grievances needed to be laid at the feet of the descendents of slave traders of fellow Africans. One never hears about that in our MSM do they? Oh Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Eric Holder, The Black Congressional Caucus why have you not brought the fight to the very ones who started the slave trade in Africa? Why have you not illustrated that deplorable history? Is it because it is not profitable for you to go there? Hypocrites and fools and shysters are they.
“Flaming Liberal” = “Longtime overpaid unionized civil servant”
–there’s no other explanation. Really. Think about it.
Mr. Hanson’s comments suffer from a number of serious errors. The most important error concerns the debt. The debt never has to be “repaid” as such. Instead, we just need to reach agreement on how the “burden” associated with the debt will be distributed. Government debt is different from private debt in one key way: the government always retains the power to levy taxes on those people who hold government debt. The US national debt could be paid off tomorrow if Congress passed a tax levy on “certain financial assets” or “government bonds.” Congress could set the levy at 100%. What would that mean? It would mean that we could pay off all of the debt merely by taxing bondholders in the precise amount that we owe them. No more debt. Further, no effect on anyone else in the economy. What is the government debt debate actually about? It is deciding which poor and middle class Americans should be taxed (or have their programs cut) so that the government can pay repay rich people who hold government bonds. Suggestions that we need to repay the government debt are about making the top 1% even richer. The reason that folks are becoming agitated by increases in government debt is because the top 1% are fearful they may be asked to shoulder the burden. Recall at bottom this key fact: a government bond is merely a promise to levy a tax in the future on someone to repay the bond. It is always possible that the person taxed (in the future) could be the bond holder. Economically, the most efficient and fairest solution to a government debt “problem” is always simply to tax the bondholders for the full amount of the bonds.
Mr. Hanson’s second major error concerns the long term sources for the decline of the American economy. The primary source of decline is that we allow “free trade.” That is we allow goods to be imported from nations where workers are paid slave wages, where business is allowed to pollute, where there is no concern about work place conditions like sexual harassment or work place safety, and where bribery and corruption are rampant. The American economy boomed in the 1950s and 1960s when Unions were strong and insured that workers took home a fair wage. In those days, a middle class worker could save for retirement, buy a home, send kids to college. Today, the middle class is vanishing because we have exported manufacturing to slave wage nations. We would do much to restore American manufacturing by imposing high tariffs on imported goods, and by eliminating state right to work laws. We need more private sector unions, and we need to insure that you cannot undercut union wages by making goods in slave labor countries like China.
So the government will place a tax on the Fed and all the foreign governments that are buying US debt? And the People’s Republic will continue to buy US bonds? And everything will work out OK.
And things boomed in the 50s and 60s when unions were strong and there was no competition for the heavy metal cars and other stuff they made.
It’s easy to be stupid when your rich. Not so much when you’re not.
we need to insure that you cannot undercut union wages by making goods in slave labor countries like China
What undercuts USA union wages is almost everything made not only in China but almost everywhere on the planet. Granted that lower end-user prices are not an unalloyed benefit but are indeed a benefit (and the more so the further down the income scale) –else the transactions would have never come into being in the first place.
The world had been catching up ever since the mid 20th century pause of the city-busting wars. What were we to do?
In any case, your quoted sentence is fairly chilling (“insure”?), and begs the question, if domestic free consumption supporting foreign slave labor is our problem, then musn’t our solution be domestic slave consumption?
Your idea that to tax federal bonds at 100% of principal, in effect confiscation, would affect only the rich is utterly misconceived. Default on federal bonds would ruin many institutions on whom hundreds of millions of Americans rely, including local governments, pension plans, insurance companies, mutual funds, banks, and credit unions. Do you not know that among the biggest holders of federal bonds are the Federal Reserve and the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds? The result of your proposal would be immediate economic ruin.
An excellent exposition of Keynesian theory. Sadly, it doesn’t work.
You fit right in with Comrade Obama’s crony capitalists! US unionized labor cannot compete with non-union labor here or abroad so it wants the government to do away with the competition.
You can find some agreement from all but the most ardent “free traders” and economic libertarians on the unfairness of much of the US’ trade relationships, especially our relationships with the so-called developing countries. We really shouldn’t force the American worker to compete with workers in countries that essentially have slave labor and which have no environmental or safety protections, at least none that are enforced so long as you stay on the government’s good side. But the answer isn’t to make the American worker insulated from economic competition as you and the unions seem to want. In many industries the unionized US worker can’t even compete with the even more unionized European or Japanese worker. The reason is that US unions basically run on a crony system and so long as you’re one of the cronies, you’re untouchable no matter what you do or don’t do. It isn’t that you can’t fire an unproductive employee under a union contract, it’s that nobody wants to fire anybody so long as the employee remains one of the boys. In the private sector unionization only exists where it is propped up by the government either in the form of government funding, government regulation and barriers to entry, or both, e.g., aerospace and defense, shipbuilding and maritime trades, healthcare, regulated monopoly utilities, publicly funded construction, any government subsidized work, etc.
The reason the US workforce became highly unionized because the Roosevelt Administration forced most war production under union contracts through what we would now call project labor agreements. Facially the union contracts and the use of arbitration and no-strike or lockout provisions was to assure uninterruped production of war materiel. It did largely do that, though the unions often failed to honor the no-strike provisions, and prodigious feats of production ocurred under War Labor Board auspices. However, union misbehavior and communist leanings both during and especially just after WWII provoked a tremendous and justified backlash against them that took the form first of the Taft-Hartley Amendments to the National Labor Relations Act which reined in some of the abuses and open communism from 1948 and then the Landrum-Griffin amendments that helped to rein in union corruption from, IIRC, 1957. Private sector unionization has been in freefall ever since except in those places where the union and management can collaborate to screw the shareholders and taxpayers.
In those states that allow full unionization of public employees the unions have become nothing more than a European-style socialist labor party usually allied with and providing the muscle for the Democrats. There are only two or three states with unionized public employees that aren’t deeply and irredeemably Democrat, hopelessly corrupt, and at or near bankruptcy. My state is the only one that has fully unionized public employees and which has consistently had Republicans in charge of either the legislative or executive branches and frequently both, and that is only because the oil companies have the muscle to take on the unions. Of course that means the Republicans are just as much in thrall to the oil industry as the Democrats are to the unions.
In any event, private sector unionization has been in freefall since union abuses and communist sympathy were somewhat reined in in the late ’40s, early ’50s. For whatever good unionization can accomplish, and I don’t deny that it has accomplished some good things, though I think most of them would have ocurred anyway, American unionization has always become either communist controlled, hopelessly corrupt, or both. Right now it is both in both the private and public sectors and has a “made man” in the White House, but just like the ’40s, the backlash is going to be terrible. Then maybe we can start to have a meaningful discussion of how to make American labor more competitive and American trade more fair, but right now, I’m not willing to bring corrupt and communist unions to the table for that discussion.
State Dept., what was I thinking?
Art Chance for Earth Czar!!
fantastic satire
Paul Krugman has joined PJM.
What an honor.
“Suggestions that we need to repay the government debt are about making the top 1% even richer.”
Right. Because only the rich own Treasury Bills. Ordinary people do not buy them, ever.
Over 100 million Americans own stocks, bonds and securities. They have their portfolios. Most are for retirement, via 401(k), etc…. Some are college funds for their kids. Not many are about living off the investment income during their working years.
But go ahead. Just levy the 100% tax on these items. In other words, just confiscate the wealth. I’m sure that won’t violate the Constitutional requirement that taxes be levied evenly, if one can evenly legitimately call it a tax, nor will it violate the 4th Amendment.
I’m sure the people who get burned by this won’t hang the politicians for the outright theft. Just renege on the money borrowed. I’m sure folks will be lining up to lend in the future. I’m sure there will be no consequences whatsoever. That’s just a swell plan. What a nice, SIMPLE solution you offer.
Really, really stupid post.
not the combined sum of uninformed and just plain stupid voters alone, though their number is large, but those who make up the so-called intelligentsia in our colleges and universities who are the problem. Brain dead, they worship a little middle-finger-flicking snot nose toady who bows down to potentates and cuddles up with every two-bit lowlife tyrant he can to win their favor. Not only an intellectual idol, he shares a sycophantic yellow streak that runs down all their spines toward authority, and kiss his ass to express their fealty and undying devotion.
Please forgive this long quote of the opening paragraphs of
How I Woke Up to the Untruths of Barack Obama
by Christopher Booker @ The Telegraph:
When I happened to wake up in the middle of the night last Wednesday and caught the BBC World Service’s live relay of President Obama’s State of the Union address to Congress, two passages had me rubbing my eyes in disbelief.
The first came when, to applause, the President spoke about the banking crash which coincided with his barnstorming 2008 election campaign. “The house of cards collapsed,” he recalled. “We learned that mortgages had been sold to people who couldn’t afford or understand them.” He excoriated the banks which had “made huge bets and bonuses with other people’s money”, while “regulators looked the other way and didn’t have the authority to stop the bad behaviour”. This, said Obama, “was wrong. It was irresponsible. And it plunged our economy into a crisis that put millions out of work.”
I recalled a piece I wrote in this column on January 29, 2009, just after Obama took office. It was headlined: “This is the sub-prime house that Barack Obama built”. As a rising young Chicago politician in 1995, no one campaigned more actively than Mr Obama for an amendment to the US Community Reinvestment Act, legally requiring banks to lend huge sums to millions of poor, mainly black Americans, guaranteed by the two giant mortgage associations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
It was this Act, above all, which let the US housing bubble blow up, far beyond the point where it was obvious that hundreds of thousands of homeowners would be likely to default. Yet, in 2005, no one more actively opposed moves to halt these reckless guarantees than Senator Obama, who received more donations from Fannie Mae than any other US politician (although Senator Hillary Clinton ran him close).
***
He goes on. Energy is next. Read more at the link.
Thanks for mentioning that.
Few know that a young and ambitious Obama used newly developed software in 1991 to track lending patterns in Boston to “underserved communities”, providing the pretext to Clinton’s CRA enhancement.
He also took 30 aging hippies of the original ACORN- Arkansas Community Organizers for Reform Now- and rebranded it as American CORN, presently an army 300,000 strong.
Guy’s a deep technician, cultivated by the Clinton mafia machine- who’s New Party radicals paved the way for Hillary’s Chicago DSA takeover of Congress and the White House.
A radical faction takes first the largest party, then the Congress, then the White House, then the economy.
Meanwhile, they’ve been bribing or importing voters loyal to the Party, not the country.
It’s a takeover.
Barry is the Weather Underground Party candidate.
The Obama administration reminds me of the Saddam administration: While our Army was at the airport in Baghdad, old Baghdad Bob was on TV denying the truth of what was obvious to everyone else. But that was on the surface, what was really happening during those years after the first Gulf War was grand larceny, as in packing whole houses full of billions of dollars. It turns out Saddam was working with a corrupt United Nations in the Oil for Food Program siphoning off billions in the process. Somehow they thought they could escape and indeed some (UN) have still not paid the price. In the end, justice will be done no matter how long it takes.
Back to Obama who as Victor points out keeps spouting the same old sh*t. But what is really going on? Well billions and even trillions of dollars are leaving the building and going where? They are going into to other people’s pockets; let’s call them the friends of Obama or the friends of Obama’s friends. Do billions and even trillions of dollars just disappear into thin air? Hell no. So the main point of this administration has been to steal as much as possible. With the secondary goals of enslaving the entire world in some kind of global sharia where the thieves can keep on stealing. Meanwhile the commander in chief keeps inventing straw men and using Bush to blame for his crimes.
These thieves are people who do not believe in truth or justice; they think it is a construct. The reality of the universe is that truth and justice are principals, like gravity that cannot be broken, despite the fact that birds can fly and rockets can go into space, at the end of the day gravity still rules. So God created Truth and Justice to rule over mankind. Those who deny this always suffer the consequences; ask any honest historian, ask any criminal, he knows its coming, the sword of Truth to make him pay. Obama must feel it but is also denying it.
Obama and his friends must think they have found an anti gravity machine but I am here to tell you they have not and they will, at the end of the day be held accountable for every penny, every debt, every lie and every injustice. Truth and Justice are patient but they will not wait forever. Obama’s chickens will come home to roost and the Soros’s and the Buffett’s of the world will not be immune.
The first two points Dr. Hansen raises are easily explained. Why doesn’t Obama understand debt? Easy. Liberals only understand spending; they ignore debt. Mitch McConnell said recently that he asked Harry Reid if there was a single spending item he would cut without raising taxes; Reid said there wasn’t. Europe is full of liberals who find cutting spending almost impossible. Note that Sarkozy is proposing higher taxes for France. Note how Greece balked at cutting expenses even when they risked going over the cliff.
On bogeymen, the answer is also easy. Saul Alinsky tactics require an enemy to vilify. This fits in well with the structure of the Democratic party, which is made up of a collection of permanently aggrieved victim groups. Democrats in general rarely talk about the American people – it is always some subset of the population; “the middle class”, “working families”, “returning veterans”, and the like. Having an enemy makes it look less like pandering, and Alinsky provides the tools to find and oppose an enemy.
“Most accept that culture, not race matters…”
That depends on what “most” you are talking about: on the Left and among black Americans, it is assumed that race matters and that the plight of black people in America is wholly engineered by white racism. If you don’t believe that, go to The Root and read only one days worth of articles to get a stomach full of hate speech against whites.
This view is shared by Bill Cosby and Spike Lee, pretty much every black celebrity and the entirety of the black elite.
But look at a satellite photo of the island of Hispaniola which Haiti and the Dominican Republic share. The Haitian side shows the difference in value systems and if you could do the same thing in the U.S. the obvious would be shown. The difference is that in Haiti they can’t blame white folks since there are none.
This view of white racism is the core principle of the Democratic Party and includes “homophobia,” “Islamophobia” and feminism. It’s a blame game and excuse factory all rolled into one.
Obama is buying off the mob with pretty words and entitlements. What is happening in Oakland is the harbinger of the future if the mob doesn’t get it’s handouts.
In fact some of the mob’s more articulate members have stated specifically that it will be cheaper to pay them off than to repair the damage they will cause or the turmoil they will create.
There is an even more basic way to understand all the madness going on, even on the conservative side.
Dogmatism is running amok!
Most people are ignorant about the insuperable contradictions inherent in their programmed world view, whether it’s hard core religionists like the mad mullahs, “devout” Christians, leftists, rightists, etc—and, they go to their grave thinking they were ALWAYS right.
Not a whole lot of reflective awareness happening!
I remember, as a kid learning about the “real world”, when fighting the USSR commies was dominating our reality, reading about the “dialectic”, re Karl Marx—dialectical materialism: that was it. And, the gist of the message was that it was way too hard to understand for us “average” guys.
Well, what a surprise to find out, later, about the “negative dialectic”, as wickedly employed by Nagarjuna, around 100 A.D., who extolled Madhyamika Buddhism.
Granted, he was on a higher mission, that transcended the “mere empirical” realm of, say, politics. However, the essence of his insight pertains to our human situation, as dire as it is.
There is a more fundamental opposition than thesis-antithesis, or right-left, etc—“that between dogmatism and criticism, which is the analytic or reflective awareness of them AS dogmatic theories. Criticism is deliverance of the human mind from all entanglements and passions. It is freedom itself.” “The Central Philosophy of Buddhism”, by T.R.V. Murti, 1955, page 41
Just ask yourself, how much reflective awareness is present, these days. Newt Gingrich is a perfectly brilliant example of the problem! And, on the left, what else can one say about Obama, except such things as VDH does today?
Yes—dogmatism RULES, in our mostly unevolved human condition, these dark days.
Expect more of the same—the trend is your friend.
Yea; Thats how you think after you smoke the cheap stuff. Save up and buy the good stuff before you post the next time, to save us some vacant space. And give some to the “academic” indoctrinating you.
Quoth the dogmatist, Christian flavor, I’d wager.
The student loan reprieve could be called. “cash for flunkers”!
Flunkers? Haven’t you heard there is no such thing ever since they invented the “No child left behind” Foolishness? Little Billy and Suzie in danger of failing? Quick, lower the standards!!!! Mustn’t have our little snowflakes feelings hurt by thinking they aren’t as good as the rest of the class. /sarc
Lowering the standards happened long before NCLB, which was, in fact, conceived as a way to stop schools from giving diplomas that the recipient couldn’t read. Whether such federal intervention was Constitutional or warranted is another issue, but it isn’t NCLB that caused the standards to tank.
“diplomas they couldn’t read”! Priceless!
Obama has one of those in gold leaf.
Good one, Keaton.
Regarding No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the strongest criticisms are leveled by educators who claim the fatal flaw was … wait for it … “the program was underfunded.”
Yep, sure. In other words, asking educators to ensure Joan and Johnny can read and do basic math is unfair and irrational. Unless, of course, we give them more money and make it worth their while. To do their jobs.
As always, follow the money.
Obama constantly says his failures are because of an obstructionist republican congress. Does not that make him look weak and ineffectual, when compared with Bill Clinton, who had to deal with the devil incarnate Newt Gingrich?
Isn’t it interesting that anti-pollution legislation is so frequently anti-poor people legislation. When I was a kid I bout a car for $600. Even kin inflation adjusted dollars that is hardly possible today and the cost of keeping something like on the road is horrible. I believe that the main reason for the inability of many poor people to own transportation to get to work is the imposition of cost raising environmental regulation. There are myriad examples of Democratic damn the poor attitudes.
aloysiusmiller;
It’s not that the legislation is “anti-poor”. The increased cost is passed onto the “poor” from the manufacturer and middle man, in the base prices. It always works that way, and government never learns, because they don’t think that far ahead.
The legislators (law makers) get their money before anyone else. They really don’t care about anybody else. If it becomes a big enough issue, they’ll pass more legislation “correcting” the prior laws that are outdated and not providing enough new revenue.
The “poor” are easy marks. Always have been, and are also easy prey for vultures like the Obama regime.
“Cash for Clunkers” is the perfect example of that—perfectly useful cars and trucks had their engines ruined and what was the end result for the working poor? The price of used cars and trucks went up—thanks to all of the ones destroyed by the Obamessiah in his Infinite Wisdom, there were fewer vehicles for people to buy. And all of us who know a thimbleful of economics theory know if the supply goes down and the demand doesn’t, the price goes up. Apparently that’s something The One never learned at Columbia, Harvard Law, or through life itself.
Poor? Bite your tongue. Had you read more articles here you would know that there really aren’t any poor people. The fact that they could even think about having a car, or, I suppose, even an electric light (which an Emperor could not have had 150 years ago), proves that they are not poor. Plus, they don’t have to pay any taxes, probably are better off than the poor fools making $200,000. Based on the logic often heard here, the fact that they have to pay more for their cars would be a good thing; otherwise being poor ceases to mean anything.
Stuff it, Dwight; you’re insufferable with this crap. If you have a brain you know that we’re now nigh on to three generations of parasites who have no concept of work or self-sufficiency. I figure sometime next summer Comrade Obama figures out how to provoke the EBT cards not recharging on the expected date and we have the Helter-Skelter that the Left has been wanting for so long.
Goodness gracious, if you are offended, I had better try a different piece of truth. ;-) I, myself, would drive a clunker until it fell apart or simply required so much repair that it was no longer cost-effective. My number 2 car, the 93 Buick Roadmaster Wagon chugs on, and I’m sure that it would have been high on the clunker list. Predators attacking VDH’s pump-wiring, are apparently driving newer vehicles, but maybe they should reconsider. The Roadmaster would carry a lot of people and copper, but they would have to steal more gas to drive it.
The “poor” are a Dem constituency, therefore suspect, borderline despised. The class of people you growl about bother me as well, but the solution is what? Yes, there should be more personal responsibility, more incentives or iron fists at the right time to push people into employment, but it is not exactly a rosy job market out there.
Sorry, that I can’t come up with more growls and slashes, which is what you seem to entertain yourself with while brooding in sub-zero St. Helena.
Even when we had full employment through the middle of the Bush years they were still sitting on their sorry butts collecting welfare and making babies – and voting Democrat, or being voted for by the friendly people in the vans that ride around voting for people who can’t be bothered, probably didn’t even realize they were registering to vote when they signed up for welfare. The professional welfare recipients don’t even show up as unemployed because they never even make the attempt to find work.
Back in the early days of welfare reform we had a Democrat Administration that really didn’t want to do anything associated with the Republican reforms, but had no choice but to at least go through the motions. So, we did all sorts of scenarios on a welfare to work program. In those days, our entry-level clerical jobs that required only a diploma or a GED and no experience paid in the low $20s. We figured out that a single mother with one child who availed herself of all the benefits to which she was entitled was making the equivalent of $37K. They didn’t exactly beat down our doors when we started recruiting for the Welfare to Work positions.
aloysiusmiller;
Here’s a video on taking money from the “rich” to pay our national debt. A little different perspective with a great conclusion.
Enjoy:
http://www.4yourcountry.org/2011/04/if-you-take-all-the-money-from-the-rich-it-still-ldoes-not-settle-the-deficit.html
Blame Bush ? What about the Democrat Party that controlled both chambers of Congress in 2007/8. And of which Obama was a member. Perhaps our media will point this out but I won’t hold my breath.
Dang straight … in particular, take a look at what happened to employment growth in the years previous to Mr. Obama’s inauguration:
http://www.agoyandhisblog.com/2010/03/26/every-picture-tells-a-story-dont-it/
Looks to me like businesses responded to the statements of Pelosi, Reid, et. al. and scaled back their activities in anticipation of their potential new status as cash cows and social-services surrogates.
Surprising Government BLS Employment Numbers http://bit.ly/s7fWeU
“No one quite knows why the ancestors of those who were interned in camps, or of those blown up while working for the 19th-century railroad, often outscore the majority on math tests and therefore must have an unspoken quota placed on their numbers admitted into universities, while those who recently immigrated from the Caribbean on average perhaps do not outscore the majority, and therefore must receive federal preferences as if their ancestors were discriminated against.”
There seems to be something wrong with the sentence. The ancestors referred to are not currently taking math tests; presumably they died some time ago. I’d think logically we’re talking about living people. Somehow the living and the dead are all mixed up together here. What a strange picture.
If you replace “ancestors” with “descendants” it makes sense.
– about the homes he was selling to farmworkers. He merely said, “There are ways.”
“We learned that mortgages had been sold to people who couldn’t afford or understand them”?
– “We don’t care whether someone makes over the dreaded $200,000…”
Even if you earn just under that figure, it will still be tight paying both college tuition for your children and your estimated taxes because Obama wants to spend your earnings in advance. You earn too much for financial aid. Meanwhile, Obama will mandate tuition remission to those who vote for him while also giving them our taxed earnings because it seems fair to him and them.
Outstanding article! I’ll make it a point to read more Mr Hansons’ work.
And he’s right, the people have had enough of worn letfist rhetoric from this sitting president. Time for change, as in Obama and his ilk vacating the office
Yes, it’s a shame the WH doesn’t give one whit what The American People want
I just want to use this well perused comment section to say that I am a new person for Mitt Romney.
Dr. Hanson, your brilliance is bringing out a ton of jealousy in here.
Regardless, I have three points and I’ll shut up.
One, O’Drama’s hope and change was designed not to give any specifics; and the line benefited by having a press that sucked from his water bottle nonstop. Now we have some specifics. Like looting the national treasury to the tune of 5 trillion dollars; a job killer all by itself.
Two, O’Drama’s “hope and change” the new phrase is an equivalent one to “hope and change.” “Fairness”, the word, was bought out of old Saul Alinsky campaign lines suggestions; it’s depending on the press not to ask for any specific definitions.
Third, the leftists constantly suggest tea partiers and Republicans in Congress don’t believe in “compromise.” Our brainchildren in Congress have failed to realize that the comeback is,”sir, there’s good compromise and bad compromise.” We believe in the former, not the latter.
Sorry, here’s a fourth point.
If you’re for Romney, you’re for socialized medicine, you’re pro abortion; you’re generally left of center. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Different people have different views. Just know what Romney believes in, and stands for when push comes to shove.
I don’t care about 5 things, I don’t want to see him on my tv ever. I can’t stand his cadence, his chin always up above everyone else and his constantly reading his teleprompters.
This is one Green Nazi scam which has had its day except in the minds of moronic moonbats George Soros, Obambi, the Democrats and Al Gore.
Forget global warming – it’s Cycle 25 we need to worry about (and if NASA scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over again)
• Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years
By David Rose Daily Mail UK 29th January 2012
The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.
The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.
Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.
Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.
Solar output goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak.
We are now at what should be the peak of what scientists call ‘Cycle 24’ – which is why last week’s solar storm resulted in sightings of the aurora borealis further south than usual. But sunspot numbers are running at less than half those seen during cycle peaks in the 20th Century.
Analysis by experts at NASA and the University of Arizona – derived from magnetic-field measurements 120,000 miles beneath the sun’s surface – suggest that Cycle 25, whose peak is due in 2022, will be a great deal weaker still.
According to a paper issued last week by the Met Office, there is a 92 per cent chance that both Cycle 25 and those taking place in the following decades will be as weak as, or weaker than, the ‘Dalton minimum’ of 1790 to 1830. In this period, named after the meteorologist John Dalton, average temperatures in parts of Europe fell by 2C.
However, it is also possible that the new solar energy slump could be as deep as the ‘Maunder minimum’ (after astronomer Edward Maunder), between 1645 and 1715 in the coldest part of the ‘Little Ice Age’ when, as well as the Thames frost fairs, the canals of Holland froze solid.
Yet, in its paper, the Met Office claimed that the consequences now would be negligible – because the impact of the sun on climate is far less than man-made carbon dioxide. Although the sun’s output is likely to decrease until 2100, ‘This would only cause a reduction in global temperatures of 0.08C.’ Peter Stott, one of the authors, said: ‘Our findings suggest a reduction of solar activity to levels not seen in hundreds of years would be insufficient to offset the dominant influence of greenhouse gases.’
These findings are fiercely disputed by other solar experts.
‘World temperatures may end up a lot cooler than now for 50 years or more,’ said Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at Denmark’s National Space Institute. ‘It will take a long battle to convince some climate scientists that the sun is important. It may well be that the sun is going to demonstrate this on its own, without the need for their help.’
He pointed out that, in claiming the effect of the solar minimum would be small, the Met Office was relying on the same computer models that are being undermined by the current pause in global-warming.
CO2 levels have continued to rise without interruption and, in 2007, the Met Office claimed that global warming was about to ‘come roaring back’. It said that between 2004 and 2014 there would be an overall increase of 0.3C. In 2009, it predicted that at least three of the years 2009 to 2014 would break the previous temperature record set in 1998.
So far there is no sign of any of this happening. But yesterday a Met Office spokesman insisted its models were still valid.
‘The ten-year projection remains groundbreaking science. The period for the original projection is not over yet,’ he said.
Dr Nicola Scafetta, of Duke University in North Carolina, is the author of several papers that argue the Met Office climate models show there should have been ‘steady warming from 2000 until now’.
‘If temperatures continue to stay flat or start to cool again, the divergence between the models and recorded data will eventually become so great that the whole scientific community will question the current theories,’ he said.
He believes that as the Met Office model attaches much greater significance to CO2 than to the sun, it was bound to conclude that there would not be cooling. ‘The real issue is whether the model itself is accurate,’ Dr Scafetta said. Meanwhile, one of America’s most eminent climate experts, Professor Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology, said she found the Met Office’s confident prediction of a ‘negligible’ impact difficult to understand.
‘The responsible thing to do would be to accept the fact that the models may have severe shortcomings when it comes to the influence of the sun,’ said Professor Curry. As for the warming pause, she said that many scientists ‘are not surprised’.
She argued it is becoming evident that factors other than CO2 play an important role in rising or falling warmth, such as the 60-year water temperature cycles in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
‘They have insufficiently been appreciated in terms of global climate,’ said Prof Curry. When both oceans were cold in the past, such as from 1940 to 1970, the climate cooled. The Pacific cycle ‘flipped’ back from warm to cold mode in 2008 and the Atlantic is also thought likely to flip in the next few years .
Pal Brekke, senior adviser at the Norwegian Space Centre, said some scientists found the importance of water cycles difficult to accept, because doing so means admitting that the oceans – not CO2 – caused much of the global warming between 1970 and 1997.
The same goes for the impact of the sun – which was highly active for much of the 20th Century.
‘Nature is about to carry out a very interesting experiment,’ he said. ‘Ten or 15 years from now, we will be able to determine much better whether the warming of the late 20th Century really was caused by man-made CO2, or by natural variability.’
Meanwhile, since the end of last year, world temperatures have fallen by more than half a degree, as the cold ‘La Nina’ effect has re-emerged in the South Pacific.
‘We’re now well into the second decade of the pause,’ said Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. ‘If we don’t see convincing evidence of global warming by 2015, it will start to become clear whether the models are bunk. And, if they are, the implications for some scientists could be very serious.’
Oh, thank you “Pragmatist”;
I was up all night pacing the vacant streets of Detroit worrying that nobody would post this. I am so relieved.
I have some good points for a conversation on Race for the Racist DOJ.
1) Why did the DOJ ignore the Racist actions of the Black Panthers during the last Presidential election and on whose instructions?
2) Why did President Obama call the Harvard Policeman ‘Stupid’ and accuse him of ‘Racism’ without knowing all the facts.
3) Why have members of YOUR Justice department admitted that they dont pursue Black Racists and on whose instructions?
4) Why is your department stonewalling and refusing to co-operate with the Mexican Gun Running inquiry?
5) How could you oppose Arizona’s Policing Bill when you, on your own admission, had never even read it.
etc. etc. etc. almost ad infinitum.
“What is it about debt that Mr. Obama does not get?”
“What is it about George Bush that obsesses Obama?”
Personally, I’m glad you brought these up, since they are not mutually exclusive constructs. Those of us who happen think there is but one party at this point would point out that many people on this very board complaining about spending and debt sat on their hands for years as GWB did exactly the same thing. So, what obsesses ME about GWB are the hypocrites who are now complaining about the same exact policies being enacted.
Today’s policies are simply more of the same egregious mistakes, folks. If you complained then, great. I applaud those who hold their own accountable. My only wish is that people do so now because they did so then. If you just happen to be waking up to the problem now that his supposed opposition holds office you’re too late, you’ve been asleep far too long, and frankly your opinion is something I don’t want to hear either.
are in and of themselves a puzzle, because they reveal a naivete one would not expect on his part.
Obama understands that our debt will ruin us. How can Dr. Hanson not understand this about Obama?
Why is Obama obsessed about Bush? Because, obviously, his blaming Bush is effective, that’s why.
Dave is so correct. There is only one political party. If you think either one of them care about you personally then you have to be an idiot. They want your money and they want you to shut up while they spend your money trying to get re elected. VDH is a great talker who exploits passions as much as Obama and for his own personal gain. WAKE UP.
so he makes a living, but what personal gain do you think he gets out of what he actually says?
Dave –if the revelations of 2008 (see the Freeman Report for a thumbnail), the secret trillions of CDS built up in AIG accounts beginning –on cue with the Dem sweep of congress –a tremendous surge in 2006-2007 (like the drug wars on the border), the September 2008 Bank Panic where naked short-selling (still unpunished, though the govt knows who was doing it) drove down the big banks’ stock by 70% in a little over a week’s worth of trading days, all bringing in Obama in November with the perfect storm of a crisis (about half attributable to citizen reaction to his election, and half attributable to actions of his supporters ‘doing well by doing good’) opportunity to crash the system WHILE blaming his predecessor for everything painful and/or frightening, and if the instant Obama doubling (merely doubling, if you believe the reports!) of Bush overspending deficits of about 4 or 5% of GDP with unemployment of 4 or 5%, to 8 or 10% of GDP with 8 or 10% unemployment, are so trivial a set of changes in your eyes that anyone who only in 2008 woke up to incipient tyranny must be a hypocrite and as such ought to shut up, then my friend i can only conclude that you are having some sort of fit and are (hopefully only temporarily) deranged.
A ‘doubling’ is a whole lot!
If you dine at a new restaurant and next morning you weigh twice as much as the day before and overnight half your teeth have fallen out, will you be so sanguine about that restaurant, and just shrug it off, because, since you didn’t complain before your meal, you have no right to complain now?
***
Prepared at the request of the Dept of Defense, released some two years after submittal to same –would you say the perps were or were not aware that they were ‘fundamentally changing America’ –and while making vast fortunes too, of course, were also deliberately staging the best possible conditions for the incoming presidential administration of Comrade Obama, Community Organizer?
Or not?
Buddy, I’d be happy to believe such one-sided rhetoric if not for the veto power that could have reined in such a free-wheeling Democratic Congress, no? Interestingly, it really didn’t. As but one example, memory serves that TARP went through both legislative and executive branches quite swimmingly (well, okay, the second time around).
The other reason I don’t like such one-sided discussion is that you conveniently miss an opportunity to highlight when and how that total came to be. To say it was doubled is easy to do when you look at yearly numbers and use subtraction. How about being objective as to WHEN some of those numbers actually came into existence?
Here’s how some others might see it:
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/07/24/opinion/sunday/24editorial_graph2.html?ref=sunday
I know, I know. It’s not credible. It’s the NYTimes, right?
As of right now our borrowing costs are low. Imagine what will happen if/when interest rates increase?
Dave, i hear ya –yes, the Bushies were whipped and watching the clock their last year or so. There’s really no civil defense against the Lavrenti Beria doctrine, where a party need only make a country ungovernable then wait for a demoralized population to come around to it, as the only power that can control the societal breakdown that it itself is deliberately creating for that very effect.
IMHO that’s where you equivocate –in the notion ‘they’re all the same’. Granted, the pro-Constitutionalists have been feckless and forlorn coping with the mocking mutation (‘make them live up to their book’ –Alinsky, Cloward, Piven, DNC, KGB, NYT, etc) but still they are a world apart from the people behind the Obama administration. It’s all in the mens rea.
“the secret trillions of CDS built up in AIG accounts beginning –on cue with the Dem sweep of congress –a tremendous surge in 2006-2007″
I’ve always wondered who shorted the ABX derivatives index (where derivatives are priced) by $2 Trillion dollars in one day, causing a reset in asset prices:
no bank knew what any other bank’s assets or bets were worth, they couldn’t loan to each overnite, credit froze up globally
“the September 2008 Bank Panic where naked short-selling…”
the result. economic war.
and a fortune made by those in the know who had already shorted or bought puts ahead of time
they (the communist cabal) aren’t ever planning on paying any of it back.
it’s a consolidation move- it’s about seizing power, not about money.
just knock everything down and give yourself a big enough credit card to buy all the depressed assets cheap.
Ask Democrat Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson about his Abacus play- he made 1.5 billion dollars off the TARP
Ask the communist government unions where all their pension funds went- blown on ‘elections’ and graft
the junk mortgage bonds forced on banks by Frank/Dodd/Fanny Mae and laundered by a servile Wall St were meant to refill those depleted union coffers
it’s economic war for permanent power
broke peasants can’t do diddly-squat- ask George Orwell
Pragmatist – Climate modelling today is where physics was before Newton or chemistry before the renaissance. It shows a very small part of the picture and it’s accuracy and utility is marginal.
It will take at least 20 more years, and possibly a great many more, before it can produce results that are “accurate” enough to be usable or at least give the correct rough trends.
Dr Hanson is on fire with this excellent essay – one of his most pointed and best. The last paragraph has several quotes worth framing.
“Human nature and the laws of physics, not technocratic liberalism, are still the best guides to the madness around us.”
“The content of our character alone matters; those who are not so confident in their own, usually demand that their tribal affiliations be essential and not incidental to their personas.”
Thank you so much, Dr Hanson, for your talents and willingness to share them.
I have one more that I don’t think he even mentioned. How about we do NOT interfere in more Muslim nations? How about “NO MORE LIBYAS,” where the president of the United States decides to go to war without the consent of Congress, let alone the American people? And why is it that whenever we DO intervene in the Muslim world, whether it’s Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Syria, we usually make things worse? Please, Mr. President, let the Muslim world start working out it’s own problems. The way you and Clinton are going right now, it certainly can’t get any worse.
Oh yeah, Libya is definitely the budget-buster here. Hell, it was more of a Reagan war. Fast in, although not really IN at all, and over relatively fast, even if Arab spring is just beginning. Libya seems insignificant to me compared to Iraq and Afghanistan.
You’re right, except for that li’l ‘separation of powers’ thingie that constitutes the ‘rule of law’ –or did, once upon a time in America.
The multi-million pensions of EACH federal worker alone when added up is what will bankrupt you – you must get rid of the federal fatsos – and there is only one language they understand i’m afraid…
Unfortunately Americans are too nicey-nice to do the job…
And so America must inevitably go down the pooper of history…
Too bad, but you have only yourselves to blame – allowing the mulatto monster in office without anyone being willing to stop him, it’s a national shame on all Americans.
Please call or email Newt and Mitt’s camps and tell them to quote some of VDH’s words.
We would kick Obama’s #@)* if they would listen.
I send VDH articles to my California Rep. Jerry Hill for him to throw away, but I tried.
Also, read Steve Sailer’s Isteve blog. Buchanon, Sailer and Hanson are three of America’s most accurate thinkers and writer, even though VDH supports wars and intervention. Reading all three, one will eventually turn against meddling and intervention with other countries, despite Hanson’s fine arguments. Unfortunately, uday and kusay would still be raping, but this happens daily along with other crimes against women in Muslim countries. They won’t give it up, no matter what we do, so why spend billions and Lives to try and stop it, when they just hate us more.
There was a state of the union address?
Wonderfully accurate and well written Sir!
Lot’s of ammo for my sociailist friends and family.
Thanks
Today’s WSJ notes that the 104-story World Trade Center tower is woefully over budget at $3.8 billion. Political infighting, security issues and the difficulty of construction in a constrained space are cited as partial causes for the cost overrun.
Meanwhile the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 authorized an expenditure of $787 billion to help stimulate the national economy. Remember?
Even at today’s ballooned cost, the ARRA could have built one of these 1,776-foot skyscrapers in every American city over the size of 122,000. That means Miramar, FL; Mesquite, TX; Bellevue, WA; Eugene, OR; Sterling Heights, MI and 202 other cities could have had a similar building — 207 World Trade Center skyscrapers in all — each one of them taller than any office tower now standing on US soil.
Now, that would have been something!
Does anyone have a firm idea of what the $787 billion actually bought?
I know what it bought; a gigantic financial fortress for the global crime syndicate.
misery.
Isotherm – Does anyone have a firm idea of what the $787 billion actually bought?
Yes, worthless financial waste at 100c on the dollar (TARP). More importantly it bought record bonuses for the puppet masters on Wall Street and valuable campain contributions for our ruling class masters in Congress (on BOTH sides of the isle).
Oh you forgot to add in TALF, ZIRP and direct swap lines into the Federal Reserve, when you add those parts of the Wall Street bailouts in we are currently in the red to the tune of ~ $1.8 trillion.
Argentina on the Potomac – At least we still have the bananas (EPA decision pending). Change…
While I agree with a lot of the analysis on debt and spending, if we truly to understand the principles of physics then we really have to consider the laws of thermodynamics in the context of economic growth.
Fossil fuels are essential to our economy now but they are rising in cost. Even oil companies have admitted that conventional oil production peaked in the late 2000′s. So we can keep on plodding along, thing we can consume more natural resources with a growing population, keep emitting greenhouse gases and not pay for it on the agricultural end, and believe that a constant growth economy is possible. But no matter how efficient technology becomes we cannot assume that the assumptions of neoclassical economics are right. Consider: there are no substitutes for fresh water, the waste absorption capacity of the atmosphere, and you cannot consume more biotic resources than they can be reproduced without depleting the stock. It’s that simple.
So, in some ways, the Greens are speaking partial truths. Though I think the sustainable economists are the real people to listen to (eg Herman Daly). They understand markets and ecology. You can’t have the former without the latter.
–the problem is not that people do not believe that these are legit issues –the problem is the sheer weight of the criminal hucksters that on the strength of such issues have leaped onto our aching backs waving the bloody shirt as permiso for every ‘end justifies’ scheme ever dreamed up in every fever swamp anywhere.
The choice between them and simply accepting the inevitable for any species that avoids suicide, that is, letting mother nature’s signs and portents and invisible hand sort these things, is no choice at all.
The latter promises uncertainty and requires faith and may deliver anything from nothing more than the time journey of life routine, all the way to disasters and miracles on the way to solution and even salvation.
The former however promises little uncertainty, as it has already delivered the taste of sharp black uniforms with silver skulls on hat and cuff, the worship of the tongues of mad dictators, the extreme ghastliness of final solutions, and the collaborators who cannot abide the human reflection.
is the sound of his voice as our president
FYI – Another anti-corporation guy:
“We may congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its end.
It has cost a vast amount of treasure and blood. . . .
It has indeed been a trying hour for the Republic; but
I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes
me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war,
corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places
will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong
its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth
is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.
I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety
of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war.
God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless.”
Abraham Lincoln – from a letter to Col. William F. Elkins, Nov. 21, 1864.”
–i wrote you a nice reply, Dwight, but it went to moderation heaven (or hell). PJM is great –but only to read as far as i’m concerned –trying to comment is a crabshute, i usually just give up for a few months only to try again and fail again. So anyhoo i’ll cut it short and just offer you a heads-up on the Lincoln quote:
http://americanmissive.com/2009/03/20/did-abraham-lincoln-say-that/
(here’s hoping!)
…er…it reappeared when i posted the blue note. gak…wish i unnerstood softwear
Interesting stuff, including the comments at the end. The quote is apparently questionable, having appeared in only ONE of the many collections of Lincoln writings. I have some collected Lincoln writings, which I will now check.
By the way, sometimes when I post a link, along with my comments, it takes much longer to go up. There may be a filter which picks up links and they have to be checked before the post is permitted to go up.
Thanks –that’s probably what it is –hyperlinks.
Re the one author who used the quote, note that many prior works purporting to be ‘complete’ did not reference the quote –and too that that one book was published in 1931 –two years after the Crash of ’29 and a time when the left was definitely on the march in the USA, chafing under Hoover and trying hard to delegitimize him as rightful heir to the party of Lincoln –to the benefit of candidate FDR in the election of 1932. The intellectuals were waxing rhapsodic over Mussolini and Stalin (‘we have seen the future and it works’), and had by then fully absorbed that in Utopia, the great end can justify any means. So wot woulda been a little fibarooskie about Honest Abe, with the Future of Mankind at stake?
Also, the text is not Lincolnesque –among other atonal groupings, the pejorative remark about the prejudices of the people has no equivalent anywhere i’ve ever read in Lincoln’s words.
The sentiment, however, somewhat abridged and narrowed here and broadened there but similar, may be seen explicitly in the postwar correspondence of British Peer Lord Acton (of the famed ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’ quote) and former major general of the defeated Army of Northern Virginia, Robert E. Lee.
http://www.bing.com/search?q=robert+e+lee+correspondence+with+lord+acton&src=IE-SearchBox&oma=toggle_off
It was said of Lincoln’s Sec. of War, Simon Cameron, that he would steal a hot stove if he could figure out how to get his arms around it. The word “shoddy” comes from the inferior wool made of sweepings from the loom floor that was used to make contract union uniforms that fell apart with any use or upon getting wet. Shoes made of lacquered paper showed up from time to time. Union burial contracts were fraught with fraud; many of the graves in the hollowed grounds are filled with the bones of draught animals or parts of the bodies of several men, or with nothing at all. The union army and its contractors were the original military industrial complex.
I always enjoy and agree with Dr. Hanson’s essays, but this time, I wonder…
On the one hand, he pins much of the blame for the housing crash on, “equally dishonest and greedy insiders at Freddie and Fannie, such as Clinton hacks like Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelick, or James A. Johnson, who made millions for themselves without much banking expertise, and were egged on by congressionals like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd who hid their own conflicts of interest with high talk about helping the poor.”
But on the other hand, he writes, “some just bought at the wrong time; but that’s called ‘bad luck’ and not quite the result of a mustached black hat forcing an innocent widow at gunpoint to sign on the dotted line.”
Yes Dr. Hanson, many of us lost our down payments, the result of sweat and frugality, because we had the “bad luck” to buy a modest home at the same time “equally dishonest and greedy insiders” were busy destroying the market. Bad luck indeed, Dr. Hanson. They are, in fact, “mustached black hat(s).”
“Some were stupid and leveraged their homes to pay down credit card debt and write off the interest — or take on even more consumer debt.”
Hey! We did that! Most financial “experts” were spreading this around in the early 00′s and it seemed to us conventional wisdom.
Now we’re in Ch. 13 — and never happier!
Re: “The war destroyed most manufacturing in those countries. U.S. manufacturing was only lacking workers that were readily available once the troops came home. Fortunate for the U.S., its factories didn’t get demolished like the enemies did.” Cybergeezer, the operative word above is “fortunately”… our manufacturing base remained intact, but Japan, Germany et al. rebuilt using Marshall Plan money much of the time, and erected new plant and equipment, a generation or more ahead of what we had. Rebuilding allowed them to leapfrog us in terms of manufacturing. Uncle Sam’s defense umbrella, provided more or less gratis by the U.S. taxpayer, only widened the gap as we pumped huge amounts of dollars into national – and world defense – while Europe and the rest of the western alliance put their savings into building up their economies and/or welfare safety net.
Who was the “fortunate” one in this scenario? The answer isn’t as clear-cut as one might think.
A Frightening thought. If Obama wins a second term, maybe we’ll find out who he really is. I’m as concerned as most people of what will happen if this imposter gets re-elected. It seems like he’s got a plan and it’s a sinister one. Please watch this video. http://youtu.be/8qHmXMMCrlI
Cybercorrespondent