Tom Dougherty is a good guy to talk, drink, and dine with. He can also crunch numbers with the best of them, and he used my Romney column from yesterday as a jumping-off point to try and discern a thing or three about libertarian voters — and how they might impact the election.

This will get you started:

It’s impossible to tell how many libertarians are already committed to Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, but I estimate that there are 1.9% undecided or Gary Johnson supporting libertarians nationally and 2.1% of the same in the eight swing states I track (see Map 2012).

Looking at the national popular vote, using the raw unweighted and my weighted averages, it’s clear that a majority of the undecided libertarians or votes that moved from Gary Johnson to Mitt Romney could have some meaningful impact.

It’s nice to know you count. But go to Tom for the charts and the methodology. He’s not one of these crunchers who cheats by not telling you how he arrived at his conclusions.

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I have a Libertarian friend who’s likely to vote for Gary Johnson, but is open to supporting the GOP — if someone can convince her why Romney should get her vote. With just five weeks left, I suppose it’s time for somebody to make the libertarian case for Mitt Romney.

Before we begin, a few words about the actual Libertarian Party candidate, Gary Johnson. Johnson is almost everything you’d want. He’s a solid libertarian without being weird about it — and you know exactly what I mean. He doesn’t come with the baggage of Ron Paul’s cult of personality. Best of all, Johnson has real executive experience as the governor of New Mexico. And he won’t be elected president of these United States in a millionty-billion years.

In fact, he’ll be lucky to break one-half of one percent of the popular vote.

Look, I like Johnson. I find him endearingly goofy, although that’s probably not a trait most Americans look for in their commander-in-chief. But he’s a good man and a solid libertarian, so if I fail to make the case for Romney — then absolutely please do vote for Johnson. Afterwords, you won’t have to do the Walk of Shame back to your car, like I will.

Since the father of RomneyCare isn’t exactly an easy sell to libertarians, first we have to look at the man already sitting in the Oval Office. And it’s safe to say that unlike 2008, in 2012 there is absolutely zero Libertarian case to be made for Barack Obama.

“Liberaltarians,” remember them? I’m not sure even if their charter member, Will Wilkinson, is still using the word. If you don’t remember, the Liberaltarians were hipper-than-thou libertarians who fell for Obama’s promise to protect civil liberties and cut the deficit in half, and if there are any of these people left after four years, they must be neck-deep in the Kool-Aid. Every policy we hated from George W. Bush, Obama has doubled down on, big-time.

See, those promises were just things Obama said to separate himself from the despised Chimpy McBushHitler. Fact is, Obama is fundamentally opposed to liberty, and he’s fundamentally opposed to the limitations placed on the federal government, and especially to the limitations placed on the executive branch.

I believe this makes Barack Obama a uniquely dangerous figure in American political history.

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Via Jim Pethokoukis.

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China needs close to 10% economic growth each and every year, to generate the 24 million new jobs, each and every year, it needs to accommodate the growth of the labor market and the influx of farmers to the cities. Well:

Standard Chartered late on Monday became the latest bank to downgrade its view on the Chinese economy. Its economists and strategists, led by Stephen Green, now forecast China’s gross domestic product will expand 7.7% in 2012 and 7.8% in 2013, down from their previous growth projections of 8.1% and 8.7%, respectively.

StanChart also expects interest rates on the mainland to be frozen at current levels until the fourth quarter of 2013, compared to an earlier call for one more cut. They see the next rate move to the upside in the October-December period next year, followed by more hikes the year after.

The GDP growth downgrade echoes market sentiment – a number of other banks, including Barclays, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup – have recently done the same.

With a once-in-a-decade leadership transition looming, the difficulties facing the incoming administration are significant. More importantly for those leaders, the game has changed, and is in need of a new set of rules, StanChart suggests.

The problem, of course, is changing the rules when you have only one ruling party and no legal or loyal opposition. Stasis is the desire; eventual collapse is the result.

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President Obama tells Time magazine why his policies are so unloved:

The president says he also wants to do a better job of explaining to the public how his policies will help the economy grow. Obama claims he didn’t do a good enough job selling Americans on the stimulus plan and the auto company bailout because he was so focused on acting to fix the economy.

“[W]e were in the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime crisis, so we had to just do stuff fast. And sometimes it wasn’t popular,” Obama told Time. “And we didn’t have the luxury of six months to explain exactly what we were doing with the Recovery Act, which was basically a jobs act and making-sure-middle-class-families-didn’t-fall-into-poverty act.”

Poor salesmanship, eh? Too busy presidenting to do any speechifying? That’s not what the record says — this President was omnipresent during 2009 and 2010. His polls tended to rise when he cut back on all the speeches and personal appearances.

Maybe — just maybe — Americans are sour on the stimulus because of this chart.

Obama’s next B.S. excuse is that “we didn’t know how bad it really was.” Puh-lease. What did he spend his transition doing? What was he reading in the weeks prior to passing the stimulus — Cat Fancy?magazine?

He didn’t have time to make the sale, he didn’t know how bad things really were, he didn’t even write the damn legislation. What did he spend the last four years doing, other than just being his totally awesome self and working up his March Madness picks?

We should also note that the economy had bottomed out in June of 2009, before a single stimulus dollar had been spent. All the stimulus did was dole out hundreds of billions to special interest groups and accelerate the dual bankruptcies of Social Security and Medicare.

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Looks like China’s been cooking the books using an old (but still useful!) trick from General Motors:

Zero Hedge covered the topic of automotive channel stuffing long before it became a conversation piece, particularly as it pertains to Government Motors, a topic which has recently taken precedence after being uncovered at such stalwarts of industry as German BMW and Mercedes, implying the German economic miracle may, too, have been largely fabricated. Another core topic over the years has been the artificial and inventory-stockpiling driven (in other words hollow) “growth” of China’s economy, whose masking has been increasingly more difficult courtesy of such telltale signs of a slowdown as declining electricity consumption and off the charts concrete use. It was only logical that the themes would eventually collide and so they have: the New York Times published “China Besieged by Glut of Unsold Goods” in which, as the title implies, it is revealed that China is now nothing more than one big “stuffed channel.”

One of the reasons people learned to hate GM cars was they had lousy resale value. There were two primary reasons for that. One was GM’s over-reliance on sale to rental companies, which meant there was a steady and large supply of used cars as Hertz, Dollar, etc. rolled over their inventories. So when you went to trade in your five-year-old Chevy, it was worth maybe half of what your neighbor was getting for his Honda. The channel-stuffing hurt, too. GM had to get rid of those cars eventually, and the way to do that was to put cash on the hood — discounts, rebates, subprime loans, whatever it took to move the metal. Downward price pressure on new models did nothing for the resale value of your older model. To say the least.

Helluva way to build brand loyalty, eh? You might be getting screwed on your Chevy trade-in, but at least you’re trading it in for a new Honda. Once bitten, twice shy.

But we’re not supposed to be talking about GM; we’re supposed to be talking about China.

Imagine, if you will, that the world’s smokestack country, the place that manufactures all the cheap stuff, has been stuffing all the channels. From coal and steel to finished products, there’s just a lot of excess inventory built up of everything.

What happens to the price of steel, the price of coal, when Chinese firms have to “move the metal?” That could very well kill demand for our country’s products, as China sells at big losses. Sure, we’ll get even-cheaper Chinese goods to import, but that won’t make much difference for laid-off steelworkers. And our own manufacturers won’t be doing much extra hiring in the middle of a price war.

Next year — maybe sooner — is looking more and more like a hard landing. And we’re still not yet to the point where we’ve been down so long it looks like up. There’s a long way down left to go.

Scary.

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This chart goes a long way towards explaining the nastiness from the Left:

“We have to protect our phoney baloney jobs here, gentlemen!” And they mean it, too.

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From Ars Technica, a history of personal computer marketshare, including smartphones and tablets. This chart showing adaptation rates since the introduction of the Altair in 1975 is telling.

Smartphones began outselling traditional PCs in 2008. But traditional PC sales seem to have nearly plateaued — at the exact moment the iPad was introduced.

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Quite possibly the most bitter, witty, and truthful pop tune ever to make the charts.

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Click to embiggen.

How does your state stack up to Texas?

(Via Willisms.)

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Via Jim Pethokoukis, who writes:

I ran a Google Trends search on “malaise,” the word that came to evoke the dismal 1970s and the economic failures of the Carter administration. As you can see from the above chart, searches on “malaise” are on the rise—and that is probably not counting today’s dismal jobs report.

Damning.

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My GM insider reported back in this morning with some goodies about Warren Buffett, GM’s tanking shares, and the November election.

News broke 10 days ago or so that Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway) bought 10 million shares of GM common stock (~$256 million):

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway built new positions in General Motors and Viacom during the first three months of 2012.

Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A) holds roughly 10 million shares in General Motors (GM, Fortune 500) or roughly $256.5 million worth, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission Tuesday.

GM’s stock price has tanked since the November 2010 IPO, losing over a third of its value, dropping from $33/share to $22.07 currently:

Buffett is usually something of a weather vane for other investors, but he’s not necessarily a very risk averse guy, and has a history of a few big flops (not like $256 million is a lot of money to him).

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My auto industry insider has gotten back to me with another report. Here it is.

Seton [Motley]‘s piece looks at Chevy’s decision to kill the Avalanche for poor sales performance (but not the Volt), correctly pointing out how insane this is:

A Volt which the American people don’t want to own. Made by General Motors, of which the American people are still forced to own 33%. As the result of the $83 billion auto bailout–on which we’re poised to lose more than $30 billion.

But he’s only on the tip of the iceberg, both in how bad the Volt sales reality is and in the company’s reasoning for propping up the Volt.

In his recent book, Car Guys vs. Bean Counters”, former GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz claimed: “There were rumblings from prominent Democrats that “if they get our money, they’re going to produce the kind of vehicles we want them to produce.”" This is the same Bob Lutz, by the way, who has taken to the pages of Forbes in recent months to bash right-of-center criticisms of the Volt (see: “Chevy Volt and the Wrong-headed Right,” “The Chevy Volt, Bill O’Reilly, and the Postman’s Butt,” and “I Give Up on Correcting the Wrong-headed Right about the Volt“). Lutz is also currently a paid consultant for GM, but I digress. [I'll add that the Volt was Lutz's baby with GM. -Steve.]

It’s no secret that the Obama administration (including Obama himself, who reassured the UAW that he’d personally buy a Volt when his presidency ended) has been flacking for the Volt for a long time — but that’s kind of unfortunate for them (and for GM) because it helps set the stage for what an abysmal failure the car has been.

Volt sales were actually up in March. They “soared” up to about 2,000 that month, and lefty environmentalists, GM, and the administration are trying to call it a success. GM CEO Dan Akerson (the White House’s handpicked guy) said all the criticism would fade away if they sold about 3,000 Volts a month.

Basically, they’re trying to play the expectations game, hoping we forget that GM had expected to sell about 5,000 Volts per month — and the administration (according to a DOE report) was counting on them selling 10,000 Volts per month this year. It’s worth noting, too, that Akerson testified before a House Oversight panel that they “didn’t engineer the Volt to become a political punching bag.” Funny — I didn’t hear any outcry when the Obama administration hyped the Volt in official government documents….

Anyway, now GM is trying to pretend that 2-3k/month is “success,” so I drew up this handy chart — attached as a PNG as well — think you can use it? [Absolutely! -Steve.]

Click to embiggen — that’s one scary-ass chart.

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You’ve seen the headlines already, but let’s look a little deeper:

U.S. economic growth cooled in the first quarter as businesses cut back on investment and restocked shelves at a moderate pace, but stronger demand for automobiles softened the blow.

Gross domestic product expanded at a 2.2 percent annual rate, the Commerce Department said on Friday in its advance estimate, moderating from the fourth quarter’s 3 percent rate.

2.2% is not a disaster. It’s about what you’d expect a hot economy to do as it cooled off. It’s been the same with jobs growth. 120,000, 140,000 — not bad, if we’d just enjoyed a year or two of 200,000+ growth each month. Of course, we never got that hot economy. We never got the jobs growth. We never got the big GDP numbers.

As Zero Hedge reminded everyone this morning, “It now takes $2.52 in new debt to raise GDP by $1.00.” That’s unsustainable. And everyone knows it. It’s just that in Washington, they can pretend not to know it, so long as Bernanke keeps doing the ZIRP and the Twist.

Want to hear the really scary part? You probably don’t, but I’m going to tell you anyway. Last quarter’s anemic growth might have been borrowed from the current quarter, thanks to the unseasonably warm weather. I’d look for sub-2% growth perhaps as early as this quarter, but certainly in the second half of the year. That stinks.

Which brings us to the argument Mitt Romney needs to start making. Romney has taken some heat from the right, for talking up the economy, for seeing the silver lining. But he really had no business going negative while the jobs numbers looked OK — you don’t win by talking down a growing economy. Those days are probably over, although we won’t know for sure until next Friday’s jobs report. If it’s another lame one, then Romney needs to switch gears again, and explain to people why Obamanomics has failed. And it’s a simple case to make.

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I already have a Scary-Ass Chart picked out for The Week in Blogs, but this one deserves a mention, too. Federal Spending as a percentage of GDP since 1929.

Please note that in 1945, spending peaked at 35.3%, as we ground Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan into rubble. That paved the way for 50 years of prosperity, and set the stage for the fall of Communism in 1989.

Also note that spending was even higher in 2010 — 36.2% of GDP.

And what did we get for the money? Bunches of cheesy roadsigns and Solyndras.

That’s the Obama legacy right there.

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We talked a couple months ago about GM channel-stuffing Chevy Volts. Channel stuffing is when a company makes far more widgets than it can sell, then hopes eventual deep retailer discounts will clear the shelves. But in the meantime, they get to boast how many widgets they’ve shipped.

The stuffing got completely out of hand in 2007-08, when GM and Chrysler were stacking up unwanted cars in lots all over Michigan.

Anyway, it looks like GM is back to its bad old ways. Net of stuffed channels, GM might have have suffered “a sequential decline” in sales — in a new-car market that’s picking up.

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Comparing jobs gains, 51 months after pre-recession peak, which is where we are now.

Click the link for more scary-ass charts. Or, better yet — don’t.

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Meet the parrot pants smuggler, hear the President tell reporters how to do their jobs, and feel the terror of real-life snakes on a plane — all on another exciting episode of…

…The Week in Blogs!

BONUS: Weep at the scariest-ass chart ever.

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Wow — what a stinker of a jobs report. First, let me show you why it’s worse than it looks. Then I’ll show you why it’s even worse than that.

The big number, 8.2% unemployment, is down one-tenth of one percent from last month, on 120,000 net new jobs. But 120,000 is only just barely enough to keep up with population growth, because that’s about how many people should enter the labor force each month, every month, the whole year round. But even more people — 164,000 — simply gave up, stopped looking for work, and are no longer any concern of the BLS. The experts had predicted jobs growth of anywhere from 200,000 to 250,000.

ASIDE: We need to net about 1.5 million jobs a year just to stay even with our growing population. We’ve netted about 2.5 million in the almost three years since the Great Recession ended. So we’re almost two million jobs short of nothing more than treading water. Yeah, that’s bad.

Tyler Durden said it best: “The unemployment rate drops to 8.2% for one simple reason: the number of people not in the labor force is back to all time highs: 87,897,000.” Jim Pethokoukis noted that if the LFPR were the same as when Obama took office, the unemployment rate would be 10.9%. But “discounting for cyclical, aging issues, the unemployment rate would be 9.4%.” Either number is unacceptable near the end of the third year of “recovery.”

But now we get to the really bad part.

If I’m reading BLS correctly, 90,000 of those jobs — 75% of the net — are attributed to the “birth/death” model for new business. And that model has been broken for several years, as ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank have made it increasingly difficult for entrepreneurs. We don’t just have discouraged workers; we also have discouraged employers.

So nobody really knows how many jobs were created last month. As previously noted, “The numbers, they are awful.”

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Zero Hedge has “3 Charts On The ‘Real’ Deteriorating State Of Corporate Balance Sheets,” but it was the third one that really caught my eye.

The caption reads:

Margin Improvement is no longer broad-based (as we noted recently, costs are increasing faster than revenues which compresses margins rapidly and in the worst case chews through [sic] that stickpile of cash – hence the other two charts).

As previously noted, throwing money around won’t help at all in a poisonous business climate.

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Richard Branson plays the White House Edition of “Let’s Make a Dope Deal,” Jonah Goldberg scores the Understatement of the Week, and I’m absolutely drowning in scary-ass charts — all on another exciting episode of…

…The Week in Blogs!

BONUS: Scientifical proof that eating red meat makes you happy.

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It only took three years, but President Obama has wracked up more debt than President Bush did in eight, despite the war ending in Iraq and the surge coming to an end in Afghanistan. Here’s the chart, courtesy of CBS.

But whatever you do, don’t call the President unpatriotic. We’ll let him do that for us.

Hey, GOP — run this one non-stop, why don’t you?

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Chris Rock throws a tantrum (and a camcorder), Randi Rhodes wants your ovaries, and a shot of Wild Turkey just ain’t what it used to be — all on another exciting episode of…

…The Week in Blogs!

BONUS: Some weeks, just one Scary Ass Chart won’t do.

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Android developers have a problem — Android. Here’s why one popular developer has given up:

We could re-engineer how Battleheart accesses its data to work with this new system. This isn’t an impossible task, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to dedicate resources to it. For one, we’re in the middle of production on another game, and can’t simply drop everything to implement this because Google finally delivered on a year-old promise. And secondly, as I mentioned on Twitter, our Android apps aren’t making money. A few people took offense to the bluntness of this statement, so I’ll clarify in more delicate terms. There’s a big difference between generating revenue, and “making money” – It’s not that they haven’t generated income, but that income is offset by the additional support costs the platform has demanded. Where did your dollar go? We spent about 20% of our total man-hours last year dealing with Android in one way or another – porting, platform specific bug fixes, customer service, etc. I would have preferred spending that time on more content for you, but instead I was thanklessly modifying shaders and texture formats to work on different GPUs, or pushing out patches to support new devices without crashing, or walking someone through how to fix an installation that wouldn’t go through. We spent thousands on various test hardware. These are the unsung necessities of offering our apps on Android. Meanwhile, Android sales amounted to around 5% of our revenue for the year, and continues to shrink. Needless to say, this ratio is unsustainable.

“But, but — open is better!”

Maybe not. As it turns out, developers aren’t the only ones giving up:

Eric Chu has stepped down as manager of Google’s troubled software market for Android, and is being replaced by Jamie Rosenberg from Google Music as the company aligns all of its digital content under the Google Play umbrella.

[SNIP]

Last January, Chu admitted to “anxious app developers” that Google was “not happy” about the limited number of apps actually being purchased in Android Market, and outlined plans for turning the beleaguered software store around in 2011.

[SNIP]

However, Android app sales have not dramatically turned around since, despite the fact that the majority of smartphones not running Apple’s iOS incorporate some version of Google’s Android platform software, providing the search giant with a large installed base to sell apps.

The question not being asked is, which installed base? Android 4.x is quite good — but fewer than 2% of Android phones are running it. Because of the multitude of hardware platforms Android sits on (not to mention the jiggering phone vendors do to the OS), handset makers have to jump through all kinds of tech hoops before they can roll out new versions to existing users. Incremental iOS uptakes, on the other hand, are nearly universal — and as instant as an iPhone or iPad user wants it to be.

As a result, most Android users are running older versions of the OS. How old? The dominant Android for 2012 is expected to be… 2.3 “Gingerbread,” which was first released in December of 2010. On the iOS side, a majority of users were already using the latest-and-greatest version by Christmastime, just two months after its release.

What’s a developer to do, when the newest APIs can work for only a tiny sliver of a fraction of potential customers?

When it comes to tablets, the situation is even more dire. There’s only one serious Android tablet, and that’s Amazon’s Kindle Fire — which doesn’t even count as an Android tablet. Amazon uses a heavily-altered version of Gingerbread, which can run apps only from Amazon’s own store. (“But open is better!”)

So if you’re a developer, you have a couple choices:

1. Make one version of your app for the latest version of Apple’s iOS, which is running on almost every in-use iPhone. And then make a slightly-altered version for 60 million iPad users, too.

2. Try and figure out what the hell to do with Android, which has almost no additional tablet customers for you to exploit.

If that’s not daunting enough, check out this chart:

To a developer, Android users suck, because they won’t pay for anything. Apparently, they’re plenty happy playing “Angree Bürds” they downloaded for free off some skanky server in Russia or wherever — so why pay five bucks for the real deal?

And ad revenue? There might be pushback against the ad model, as more stories like this start coming out:

MWR Infosecurity found that a significant number of the top 50 “free” apps which generate money for the developer and advertisers by connecting to an American advertising network pass on details about the phone’s user to the network – a move that may breach European data protection laws. With roughly a quarter of the UK’s phone users using Android phones, and with millions of apps downloaded every month – often for free, supported by advertising, rather than paid-for – the gap in security is a source of concern.

Uncertain ad revenue from a fractured user base, versus a near-monolithic user base of people happy to pay a few bucks for a quality app — that’s not much of a choice, is it?

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That’s what some of the pundits were claiming last week, anyway. Customers, not so much:

If you are hoping to score a new iPad from Apple, you might have to wait. Apple’s website shows March 19 as the earliest ship date for online orders of its popular tablet computer. And there is a limit of two per customer on the number of tablets that can preordered.

The shipping delays affect all models and price levels on preorders, according to the website.
“Customer response to the new iPad has been off the charts and the quantity available for pre-order has been purchased,” Apple said in a statement. “Customers can continue to order online and receive an estimated delivery date.”

Last year, Apple “disappointed” investors by selling not many more than four million iPad 2s in the first quarter of its availability, even though sales were constrained only by supply, and not by demand.

Apple CEO Tim Cook’s particular genius is managing the supply chain. So you can imagine, that when he announced a record-wide rollout of the new iPad, it’s because Apple had plenty of units stockpiled. And it’s a sure thing Apple’s manufacturing partners have their assembly lines expanded and working to max capacity.

Even so, it seems to have taken only a few days to blow through the stockpiles and two or three weeks worth of new ones coming off the lines. That doesn’t include the units Apple will have available at their retail stores — to long lines, undoubtedly. Then, to empty shelves.

This is a monster product launch.

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Via Tyler Durden… well, I’ll just let the chart speak for itself.

The safety net is becoming a barcalounger. Who’s got the remote?

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