If you’re up early in the morning and wonder what’s going to be big news in the United States in the morning, one suggestion is to check out the UK Guardian. This morning, they blamed a hurricane for Citigroups plan to lay off 11,000.
David Stockman a former U.S. Politician and Businessman served as Republican
Representative from the state of Michigan (1977-1981). He then served as the
Director of the Office of Management and Budget during the Ronald Reagan’s First Term
in Office (1971-1985).
As mentioned in Jim’s Show this morning, Mr. Stockman had some dire warning
regarding the Economy.
This from Wikipedia regarding his Financial Legacy
Fiscal legacy
President Jimmy Carter’s last signed and executed fiscal year budget results ended with a $79.0 billion budget deficit, ending during the period of David Stockman’s and Ronald Reagan’s first year in office, on October 1, 1981.[7] The gross federal national debt had just increased to $1.0 trillion during October 1981 ($998 billion on 30 September 1981). By 30 September 1985, four and a half years into the Reagan administration and shortly after Stockman’s resignation from the OMB during August 1985, the gross federal debt was $1.8 trillion.[8] Stockman’s OMB work within the administration during 1981 until August was dedicated to negotiating with the Senate and House about the next fiscal year’s budget, executed later during the autumn of 1985, which resulted in the national debt becoming $2.1 trillion at fiscal year end 30 September 1986 and becoming $2.6 trillion at fiscal year end 30 September 1988.[9]
As mentioned during today’s show here are some video clips that may just send a chill down your spine.
httpv://youtu.be/6HCOcpyHUic
httpv://youtu.be/sYdGvDj4NqE
President Obama held a press conference on friday, speaking of how the economy was doing.
The president had this to say about Job Creation.
“The truth of the matter is we’ve created 4.3 million jobs over the last 27 months, over 800,000 just this year alone. The private sector is doing fine.”
Of course the Romney Campaign responded to the Presidents Statement. Read more
Northrop Grumman announced on Friday that it plans to close its manufacturing facility in Norwalk, Ct.
The plant has been in operation under various owners since 1961. Grumman is in the process of
consolidating its facilities located in Maryland and Illinois. There are currently 315 Workers at the Norwalk Plant,
50 of those employees will be given an option to move to one of their other facilities. Read more
It may seem simplistic, but wouldn’t measuring they buying power of your salary (or what’s left of it) in terms of gallons of fuel per hour make a certain amount of sense?
Think about it: it will make the effects of increasing fuel prices something directly relevant to everyone except the minority of people that don’t own cars (perhaps they can use some measure like Starbucks lattes per hour!), using terms that are more universally understandable than dollars per barrel or consumer price and inflation indices, the ups and downs of the stock market or other even more ethereal measures of the effects of rocketing fuel prices.
It will link the price of oil (which is still the lifeblood of our economy) to stagnating (or worse, decreasing) salaries, the relative ability of people to get around and the general importance of petroleum to our economy and our lives. In other words, it will tell you how much you have to work to get to and from work, as well as do all the other things you need to do involving transportation. It will tell you how many hours you will have to work to buy heating oil if you use it (there should be an equivalency for natural gas, propane and electric). It will also tell you what you will have left after buying fuel. It will tell you just how much you will have left of your fixed income every month. It will help you predict how far your 401K or IRA will go. It will tell you what effects inflation is having on your buying power. Best of all: it will ram home the fact that the economically vacant policies of this administration and Democrats in general are destroying middle income America (which “Slow” Joe Biden is hard at work projecting on the Republican candidates) and obliterating the poor.
Even the “dreaded 1%” will care, as even though they make enough to have it not really affect them on a personal basis, the fact that the businesses etc. that they may own or invest in will have to raise prices or reduce returns on investment based on the number of gallon per hour they spend vs. gallons per hour they take in.
The bottom line is that you will easily be able to judge your current buying power and compare it with previous years, or better, previous administrations, i.e. you got twice as many gallons per hour (or had to work half as much) during the bulk of the Bush years than you do for the bulk of the Øbama years.
The automobile is the means for us to go where we want, do what we want, work where we want and live where we want. Gallons per hour is a measure of the amount of personal freedom left to us, or better, one measure of the personal freedom that is being taken away from us.
I’ve been meaning to reformat this data and post here for some time. It includes data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), a government entity which collects data and produces nothing more than Excel spreadsheets (most likely). Lots of oil production data…
Ed Morrissy at Hot Air always watches federal government statistics and economic reports, providing a good, easy to understand explanation. Today, the U.S. Census Bureau announced orders for manufactured durable goods in January declined 4 percent.
Remember back in 2010, during a Democrat(ic) Congressional Campaign committee fundraising dinner during an ill-fated attempt to keep Pelosi’s death grip on the House, he said:
After they drove the car into the ditch, made it as difficult as possible for us to pull it back, now they want to keys back. No! You can’t drive. We don’t want to have to go back into the ditch. We just got the car out.
Flash forward almost two years to 2012. How has Øbama’s “driving” been? Unemployment is high, the debt has soared, deficit spending is on an rocketing upward, Øbama’s proposed budgets have been ludicrous, the Senate’s mandatory budgets have been nonexistent, two years of budgets from the Republican led House languish in the Senate, never brought to the floor, the Sword of Damocles in the form of Øbamacare hangs over our heads (conveniently poised to take effect after the 2012 elections), Øbama’s budget directors and economic advisers can’t give a firm figure on the results of any of his so called economic “fixes” or even a date when they are projected to actually fix something, etc., etc.
To use Øbama’s own example, he took the keys, pulled the car out of the ditch, drove the car over a cliff, hired a taxpayer funded crane (no doubt built in China) to haul the wreck back up, and pushed it over again.
No, Mr. Øbama, you do not deserve the keys to the car. You need remedial driving lessons and an alcohol blood test before we even consider letting you look at the keys again. Or economy isn’t your bumper car. Or is it “demolition derby”?
Back in 2010, the young president followed up with:
After a stormy time, people may be a little sea sick. But right now the waters are calm. There on the horizon we can see our destination. Now is not the time to lose heart. Now is not the time to get complacent. Now is the time to remind ourselves of what America is all about and return Democrats to the House of Representatives.
Maybe we should listen to him (with a little corrective editing):
After a building hurricane, people may be sea sick to the point of vomiting overboard. But right now the waters are swirling down a whirlpool. There on the horizon we can see our destination. Now is not the time to lose heart. Now is not the time to get complacent. Now is the time to remind ourselves of what America is all about and return Republicans to the House of Representatives AND the Senate AND the White House for that matter!
An earlier post on this blog noted that Øbama made this prediction:
I will be held accountable. I have four years. If I don’t have this done in three years, this is going to be a one term proposition.
Let’s make Mr. Øbama’s prediction come true. He’s earned it.
A recent link by a contributor to the blog was made to the far left site, American Progress, about the cost that enforcing immigration laws, i.e. detaining and deporting illegals, is detrimental (“a disaster”) to local, state and national economies.
To wit: American Progress makes ten arguments, each of which either references another left wing blog or a dead link. Go figure. In the newspapers that are referenced (and aren’t dead links), terms like “He had no firsthand knowledge, but….”, followed by outright and unsourced assumptions and opinion, such as “I’d already received emails and messages on Facebook that the state’s immigration law had caused BBVA Compass, which is owned by the Spanish megabank BBVA Group, to cancel plans for an $80 million tower in Birmingham for the bank’s U.S. headquarters”, then in the next paragraph states that “the bank is going to stay in the Daniel Building headquarters and renovate the Harry B. Brock Administrative Center near Highland Golf Course. That was reported in Saturday’s paper. But the reason for the tower cancellation wasn’t made clear.”
So American Progress just makes up a reason, specious as it is? Seriously, why would this bank not only stay in Alabama, and continue to expand, if the immigration law was seen as an affront or impediment? This is what American Progress calls a reputable source. The rest of us call it rumor mongering and yellow journalism. What they don’t mention is that any path to citizenship will be a one way path to the Democrats, hence the liberal support for “motor voter” registration as well as the clearly crooked “same day registration”, topped off by their rabid and nonsensical opposition to positive ID for all voters.
This is not to say that alleged right-of-center newspapers don’t participate in this. The WSJ recently had an article, titled “A CEO’s demand: Fix immigration” on the Chipotle Mexican restaurant chain that was raided by the government and lost a significant number of their workers to scrutiny of their hiring records by ICE. The company claims that they “unintentionally hired some illegal immigrants” due to rapid upscaling in the number of their outlets. Apparently, this “overenthusiastic hiring” caused them to lose half of their 900 employees to ICE raids in Minnesota alone!
Chipotle’s claims that only “about half its workers are hispanics, including many in management roles.” A check of current national unemployment rates for hispanic CITIZENS at the government’s (optimistic) Bureau of Labor Statistics gives you a rate of about 11%. Are these people unwilling to work in such an upstanding, upwardly mobile job? Could it be that they don’t “look hispanic” enough? Or maybe the jobs are not as great as they say? Honestly, with just over 13 million people desperate for work in this country, how logical or reasonable is their claim that they can’t come up with enough legal job candidates, even with their claimed highly selective hiring standards, to fill their job openings without resorting to hiring illegals?
Let’s face it: businesses like the cheap labor, and the Democrats like the cheap votes. In both cases, the welfare of the American citizen is being compromised. Both sides claim that the U.S./state economies can’t survive without this pool of cheap, illegal labor.
I believe the same arguments were once made by former slave states.
Illegals coming here may fill a low end employment niche, particularly ones created with racist/elitist, “I’m too good for that job” attitudes (see Juan Williams to Gingrich a few debates ago). New illegals may be thankful for both being here and having work, but will the naturalized-through-birth children of this generation of illegals settle for working in the fields? I suspect not, particularly if they are conscripted into unions. You can’t keep them down on the farm once they’ve been to Paris! If this is the case, then a new wave of illegals will be required to fill the gap left by the children of the current workers. Ad infinitum.
A continuing boon or another bust? I think you know the answer to that.
As SOS noted in an earlier post, Øbama has seen fit to unilaterally implement the so called “DREAM” Act through an executive order. It is glaringly obvious – dare I say transparent – that a very desperate Øbama, with poll numbers in the toilet and an administration full of so called “experts” ineffectively flailing at the economy, is trying everything he can to bolster his voting base. The Motor Voter Act and the Democrat’s constant resistance to any positive identification to vote will help guarantee that.
We are constantly told that illegal aliens “do the jobs that Americans don’t want to do”. Okay, let’s accept that premise for a minute. If true, then we are importing an effective slave class of workers to “do menial tasks that (we presumably) can’t get Americans to do” even with Øbama’s horrendous unemployment figures (even though that was shown not to be true when ICE did raids on Smithfield meat packing plants in Alabama in 2008). Liberals also tell us how important it is to keep the families of illegals together, educate them as we do citizens, give them free welfare, medical care etc., and that we can’t possibly deport them as fast as they are flowing in.
Naturally, most of these people are grateful to be here, given the places and conditions they left. My question is this: once the current crop (pardon the pun) of workers retires or whatever, who will replace them?
The liberals never seem to address this (yet another example of what Jim describes as liberal’s inability or lack of desire to figure out things to their logical conclusion). Once we create, and are dependent on, these low wage workers, we will have to find more to replace those now working.
Will it be the people that have waited patiently to come in the front door? Not likely. They are usually well qualified individuals that have aspirations to set up businesses, teach whatever.
Will it be the children of the current illegals? Very unlikely. Once they go through our current school system, get exposed to our way of life, television, etc., they will likely develop the same aversion to fieldwork and other menial labor as the children of citizens. As the old song goes, “How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they’ve seen Paris?”.
Will it be a new wave of illegals? Undoubtedly. It would have to be. Given the liberal’s aversion to preserving/defending the borders, and middle America’s aversion to liberals, they need waves of new potential voters. They are trying to buy into the rapid growth of “hispanic” community with entitlements and open borders. They will recycle the arguments of today down the road, and we will be faced with the same problem in another 20 years or less. Using the gratefulness of illegals to pad their voter rolls is both illegal and immoral.
Care for a vicious cycle, anyone?
Another thing to consider is whether this constant influx of illegals will actually prolong or maintain the high unemployment we see now. It seems unavoidable, as there are only so many jobs available in the country, and illegals will continue to supplant citizen workers as they do now, working for minimal wages and requiring no benefits (for the moment), leaving the citizens to go on unemployment. When you hire an illegal to do your roof to save a buck, it means that the American roofing company down the road gets no business, pays no wages or taxes. Similarly, the children of illegals will supplant the children of citizens in college, as there will be seats set aside for them based on their illegal status or some “affirmative action” setup. And don’t forget competition for limited student loans.
The point is, the constant, virtually unimpeded flow of illegals as a class of government dependent proles into the country benefits nobody except the politicians that believe they can milk votes out of them, and the system is set up to keep the flow going out of a contrived necessity.
Front door immigration is a great and good thing; backdoor illegal invasions are not, and half the battle will require the repeal of the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The path to citizenship starts at the end of the line in their home countries, behind honest applicants waiting patiently to get in. We must not reward squatters.