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Showing posts with label unemployment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label unemployment. Show all posts
Monday, June 1, 2015
A true job killer
From the art studios of A.F. (Tony) Branco at Comically Incorrect.com
GOP needs a 5 percent growth target
Supply-side, across-the-board tax cuts are the best way there from Larry Kudlow at Kudlow and Company, Inc.
First-quarter real GDP actually declined by 0.7 percent, according to revisions out this week, creating much new talk about recession. But there is no recession. Trouble is, there continues to be virtually no recovery.
The economy has expanded about 1.5 percent over the past two quarters, 2.4 percent at an annual rate over the past two years, and about 2.3 percent during this six-year, so-called recovery. That’s the real problem. Not a one-quarter snowstorm or inaccurate seasonal adjustments.
Following the deepest recession since World War II, a normal recovery should have featured an outsized rebound. The Reagan years exemplified that model. But it hasn’t happened. Why?
On the eve of the Republican primaries, here’s the big question: What must we do to restore America’s long-term economic-growth performance, which is roughly 3.4 percent per year? Answer: 5 percent growth for the next decade.
Today’s economy is about $2 trillion below that long-term trend line. And the absence of normal growth is a big part of 15 million fewer jobs and a 10.8 percent U-6 unemployment rate (marginally attached workers, part-timers who want full-time work, people who have given up).
There are federal-entitlement disincentives at play, but a normal growth path would have produced many more jobs and a higher employment-to-population rate. And while I have written on family breakup as a huge source of poverty, the absence of economic growth is surely part of the problem.
And here’s a point for those who worry about federal debt and deficits. According to the CBO, a 1 percent increase in real economic growth would lower the deficit by about $3 trillion over ten years. In other words, growth solves a lot of problems.
And it’s high time for growth.
A little history: Despite the urban legend of a booming 1950s, there were three recessions under Ike and an average growth rate of only 2.5 percent. Then, in the spring of 1960, Nelson Rockefeller sat down with presidential hopeful Richard Nixon and hammered out the so-called Fifth Avenue compact, headlined by a 5 percent growth target. And almost at the same time, Senator John F. Kennedy entered a 5 percent growth target into his campaign. By the way, with JFK’s supply-side tax cut, the 1960s registered nearly 5 percent growth.
So how about some Republican leadership today, with all the candidates pushing for a 5 percent economic-growth target. It’s exactly what we need to get back to America’s long-term prosperity trend, which had long ensured our world leadership. We don’t have that today. Unfortunately, it’s just as Ronald Reagan warned: Weakness at home creates weakness abroad.
In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, distinguished economist Martin Feldstein made a plea for tax-cut policies that would generate much faster growth. In particular, he argued for more capital investment, which by the way, adjusted for inflation, hasn’t increased in 20 years.
Here’s the Feldstein prescription: Slash the corporate income tax and lower personal income-tax rates. Get rid of taxes on interest and dividends to promote saving. Get rid of deductions that shift capital to less-productive investments. Reform means-tested programs, such as disability insurance and Obamacare, which reduce benefits if people move from welfare to work.
As for my part, I understand that education reform, stable families, job training, reducing regulation, and other non-tax items are crucial for growth. But if we want more risk and innovation, and more take-home pay for the middle class, we must look hard at pro-growth tax reform. And by that I mean across-the-board tax-rate cuts, along with simplification and ending cronyist deductions.
A reformicon recently penned a piece arguing that traditional supply-siders (I guess like myself) only want to cut the top personal tax rate. Nonsense. Kemp-Roth, Reagan’s ’81 and ’86 reforms, and even George W. Bush’s ’03 reform were focused on across-the-board reductions in marginal tax rates. In fact, most of the time, the tax-rate-cut percentage has been greatest for the middle class. And we all borrowed from the JFK tax cuts, which were across-the-board.
That’s the most efficient pro-growth approach: incentive-oriented, economically neutral, tax-rate reduction. Targeted tax credits are inefficient government planning. And they won’t produce growth.
Now, I would prefer a 15 and 28 percent personal tax reform that goes back to Reagan ’86. This would end the 10, 25, 28, and 33 percent brackets that have plagued the middle class. It would increase take-home pay for everyone, providing a bigger bang than child tax credits. I would also like a 20 percent corporate tax rate, along with territorial-based repatriation and cash expensing for investment, all of which would offer the greatest benefit to middle-income earners.
But a 5 percent growth target gets the ball rolling in the right direction. The Democrats won’t do it. But the Republicans can.
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| Visit Larry Kudlow Online |
The economy has expanded about 1.5 percent over the past two quarters, 2.4 percent at an annual rate over the past two years, and about 2.3 percent during this six-year, so-called recovery. That’s the real problem. Not a one-quarter snowstorm or inaccurate seasonal adjustments.
Following the deepest recession since World War II, a normal recovery should have featured an outsized rebound. The Reagan years exemplified that model. But it hasn’t happened. Why?
On the eve of the Republican primaries, here’s the big question: What must we do to restore America’s long-term economic-growth performance, which is roughly 3.4 percent per year? Answer: 5 percent growth for the next decade.
Today’s economy is about $2 trillion below that long-term trend line. And the absence of normal growth is a big part of 15 million fewer jobs and a 10.8 percent U-6 unemployment rate (marginally attached workers, part-timers who want full-time work, people who have given up).
There are federal-entitlement disincentives at play, but a normal growth path would have produced many more jobs and a higher employment-to-population rate. And while I have written on family breakup
And here’s a point for those who worry about federal debt and deficits. According to the CBO, a 1 percent increase in real economic growth would lower the deficit by about $3 trillion over ten years. In other words, growth solves a lot of problems.
And it’s high time for growth.
A little history: Despite the urban legend of a booming 1950s, there were three recessions under Ike and an average growth rate of only 2.5 percent. Then, in the spring of 1960, Nelson Rockefeller sat down with presidential hopeful Richard Nixon and hammered out the so-called Fifth Avenue compact, headlined by a 5 percent growth target. And almost at the same time, Senator John F. Kennedy entered a 5 percent growth target into his campaign. By the way, with JFK’s supply-side tax cut, the 1960s registered nearly 5 percent growth.
So how about some Republican leadership today, with all the candidates pushing for a 5 percent economic-growth target. It’s exactly what we need to get back to America’s long-term prosperity trend, which had long ensured our world leadership. We don’t have that today. Unfortunately, it’s just as Ronald Reagan warned: Weakness at home creates weakness abroad.
In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, distinguished economist Martin Feldstein made a plea for tax-cut policies that would generate much faster growth. In particular, he argued for more capital investment, which by the way, adjusted for inflation, hasn’t increased in 20 years.
Here’s the Feldstein prescription: Slash the corporate income tax and lower personal income-tax rates. Get rid of taxes on interest and dividends to promote saving. Get rid of deductions that shift capital to less-productive investments. Reform means-tested programs, such as disability insurance and Obamacare, which reduce benefits if people move from welfare to work.
As for my part, I understand that education reform, stable families, job training, reducing regulation, and other non-tax items are crucial for growth. But if we want more risk and innovation, and more take-home pay for the middle class, we must look hard at pro-growth tax reform. And by that I mean across-the-board tax-rate cuts, along with simplification and ending cronyist deductions.
A reformicon recently penned a piece arguing that traditional supply-siders (I guess like myself) only want to cut the top personal tax rate. Nonsense. Kemp-Roth, Reagan’s ’81 and ’86 reforms, and even George W. Bush’s ’03 reform were focused on across-the-board reductions in marginal tax rates. In fact, most of the time, the tax-rate-cut percentage has been greatest for the middle class. And we all borrowed from the JFK tax cuts, which were across-the-board.
That’s the most efficient pro-growth approach: incentive-oriented, economically neutral, tax-rate reduction. Targeted tax credits are inefficient government planning. And they won’t produce growth.
Now, I would prefer a 15 and 28 percent personal tax reform that goes back to Reagan ’86. This would end the 10, 25, 28, and 33 percent brackets that have plagued the middle class. It would increase take-home pay for everyone, providing a bigger bang than child tax credits. I would also like a 20 percent corporate tax rate, along with territorial-based repatriation and cash expensing for investment, all of which would offer the greatest benefit to middle-income earners.
But a 5 percent growth target gets the ball rolling in the right direction. The Democrats won’t do it. But the Republicans can.
_____________________________
Become a Truth Serum Partner Now
Become a Truth Serum Partner Now
Sunday, May 17, 2015
My 2015 commencement address
From the Warning Signs of Alan Caruba at Facts-not-Fantasy
All manner of people are giving commencement speeches to students graduating from colleges and universities these days. It is doubtful that any will be remembered because the prospects of students depend in large part on the economy into which they are entering, the majors they pursued, their individual ambitions, and capacity for hard work. Then, too, there’s dumb luck which often plays a role.
For those graduating this year, my profound sympathy because the economy could not be much worse short of being declared an official Depression. Out of a total of 330 million Americans, there are currently 93,194,000 Americans who are not in the workforce because they can’t find a job or have given up looking.
Even in the field of manufacturing—not something you studied for—the number of jobs have declined by 7,231,000, some 37% since manufacturing peaked in the U.S. in 1979.
U.S. economic growth rate has slowed to 0.2%. In short, it is virtually non-existent. So, with your diploma in hand, unless you majored in the sciences, math or engineering, you are not likely to join the workforce any time soon. Those of you who majored in social work, theatre arts, elementary education, and something called parks and recreation, are going to be at the bottom of the salary scale for the rest of your life.
Of the previous graduates from 2008 to the present who voted for Barack Obama, just 14% have real jobs. You have had the vast misfortune of being born just in time to live through the worst presidency in the history of the nation. If, in fact, you even know the history of the nation.
You are at a further disadvantage because the curriculums of the government schools you attended have been so distorted that you have been led to believe that the Founding Fathers were all slave-owning, white elitists when in fact, many opposed slavery, the labor source of their era, and would have abolished it.
However they knew they could not get the Constitution ratified by the southern states if they did. It’s called compromising for a greater goal, the finest and currently the oldest functioning Constitution on Earth.
Depending on your race and sex, you have already been taught to blame anything that goes wrong in your life on whether you are white, black or Hispanic, male or female. If you want to know what’s wrong, look in the mirror and ask yourself what you are doing wrong or not doing right—dressing, manners, behavior, addictions, et cetera.
If you have been raised to believe in God and have spiritual values, you are likely to be mocked, though not necessarily to your face. While still the majority faith in America, Christianity is under attack from many directions, not the least of whom are homosexuals that constitute less than 2% of the population.
Their attack on traditional (and biological) male-female marriage that has been part of every civilization going back five thousand years and more will degrade society in many ways.
For many of you, graduation means years of paying off huge loans for the privilege of picking up a degree that, as noted—short of science, math and engineering—will not yield a lot of income. This will impact your lifestyle including possibly having to move back in with your parents.
It may mean putting off marriage and a family of your own for a while and your loans will affect being able to secure a mortgage on a home, but everyone is having problems doing that these days.
So, if all this looks and sound bleak, it is because it is. A real commencement speech should tell you the truth but most of them do not. They are generally filled with inspiring talk about the future.
The future you are looking at along with everyone else is fraught with danger. That, however, can be said of every “future” that every American has faced since the nation was established. It took a shooting war with Great Britain just to have a nation and Americans have been engaged in wars large and small ever since.
The threat of Communism faced Americans after World War Two and generations previous to yours waited out and opposed the Soviet Union for nearly fifty years before it collapsed. Communism is still around however in China, nearby Cuba, Venezuela and other nations who suppress their people in the name of the utopian society they claim to have.
The more recent threat is the rise of Islamism, radical Islam as practiced and supported by a significant percentage of the world’s one billion-plus Muslims. It is a cult about Mohammed based on the total domination of the world. Divided between two sects, Sunnis and Shiites, when they are not killing each other, they are killing “infidels”, anyone who is not a Muslim.
It will fall to you and your fellow graduates to fix the nation’s problems and right now its biggest one is that the federal government is too large and we are collectively facing an $18 trillion debt that must be resolved because just paying interest on it makes doing anything else difficult at best.
All of the states are in debt as well as they struggle to pay the health benefits and pensions of civil service workers, active and retired. That often doesn’t leave much money for fixing potholes and other infrastructure needs.
Whatever problems you will encounter, keep in mind previous generations often encountered much worse, such as those in the 1930s during the Great Depression and in the 1940s who fought World War II, and those from the 1950s and 1970s who were called on to fight the Korean War and the war in Vietnam; more recently those who fought the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Respect their sacrifices and their courage.
If you want to see the government grow even larger along with the debt, vote for Hillary Clinton. She’s still mentally and ideologically stuck in the 1990s, plus she has engaged in behavior that would get anyone else put in jail. You have a large choice among Republican candidates and eventually it will narrow to someone capable of tackling the future.
The best I can do is to wish you good luck. You’re going to need it.
 |
| Know Caruba's Warning Signs |
For those graduating this year, my profound sympathy because the economy could not be much worse short of being declared an official Depression. Out of a total of 330 million Americans, there are currently 93,194,000 Americans who are not in the workforce because they can’t find a job or have given up looking.
Even in the field of manufacturing—not something you studied for—the number of jobs have declined by 7,231,000, some 37% since manufacturing peaked in the U.S. in 1979.
U.S. economic growth rate has slowed to 0.2%. In short, it is virtually non-existent. So, with your diploma in hand, unless you majored in the sciences, math or engineering, you are not likely to join the workforce any time soon. Those of you who majored in social work, theatre arts, elementary education, and something called parks and recreation, are going to be at the bottom of the salary scale for the rest of your life.
Of the previous graduates from 2008 to the present who voted for Barack Obama, just 14% have real jobs. You have had the vast misfortune of being born just in time to live through the worst presidency in the history of the nation. If, in fact, you even know the history of the nation.
You are at a further disadvantage because the curriculums of the government schools you attended have been so distorted that you have been led to believe that the Founding Fathers were all slave-owning, white elitists when in fact, many opposed slavery, the labor source of their era, and would have abolished it.
However they knew they could not get the Constitution ratified by the southern states if they did. It’s called compromising for a greater goal, the finest and currently the oldest functioning Constitution on Earth.
Depending on your race and sex, you have already been taught to blame anything that goes wrong in your life on whether you are white, black or Hispanic, male or female. If you want to know what’s wrong, look in the mirror and ask yourself what you are doing wrong or not doing right—dressing, manners, behavior, addictions, et cetera.
If you have been raised to believe in God and have spiritual values, you are likely to be mocked, though not necessarily to your face. While still the majority faith in America, Christianity is under attack from many directions, not the least of whom are homosexuals that constitute less than 2% of the population.
Their attack on traditional (and biological) male-female marriage that has been part of every civilization going back five thousand years and more will degrade society in many ways.
For many of you, graduation means years of paying off huge loans for the privilege of picking up a degree that, as noted—short of science, math and engineering—will not yield a lot of income. This will impact your lifestyle including possibly having to move back in with your parents.
It may mean putting off marriage and a family of your own for a while and your loans will affect being able to secure a mortgage on a home, but everyone is having problems doing that these days.
So, if all this looks and sound bleak, it is because it is. A real commencement speech should tell you the truth but most of them do not. They are generally filled with inspiring talk about the future.
The future you are looking at along with everyone else is fraught with danger. That, however, can be said of every “future” that every American has faced since the nation was established. It took a shooting war with Great Britain just to have a nation and Americans have been engaged in wars large and small ever since.
The threat of Communism faced Americans after World War Two and generations previous to yours waited out and opposed the Soviet Union for nearly fifty years before it collapsed. Communism is still around however in China, nearby Cuba, Venezuela and other nations who suppress their people in the name of the utopian society they claim to have.
The more recent threat is the rise of Islamism, radical Islam as practiced and supported by a significant percentage of the world’s one billion-plus Muslims. It is a cult about Mohammed based on the total domination of the world. Divided between two sects, Sunnis and Shiites, when they are not killing each other, they are killing “infidels”, anyone who is not a Muslim.
It will fall to you and your fellow graduates to fix the nation’s problems and right now its biggest one is that the federal government is too large and we are collectively facing an $18 trillion debt that must be resolved because just paying interest on it makes doing anything else difficult at best.
All of the states are in debt as well as they struggle to pay the health benefits and pensions of civil service workers, active and retired. That often doesn’t leave much money for fixing potholes and other infrastructure needs.
Whatever problems you will encounter, keep in mind previous generations often encountered much worse, such as those in the 1930s during the Great Depression and in the 1940s who fought World War II, and those from the 1950s and 1970s who were called on to fight the Korean War and the war in Vietnam; more recently those who fought the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Respect their sacrifices and their courage.
If you want to see the government grow even larger along with the debt, vote for Hillary Clinton. She’s still mentally and ideologically stuck in the 1990s, plus she has engaged in behavior that would get anyone else put in jail. You have a large choice among Republican candidates and eventually it will narrow to someone capable of tackling the future.
The best I can do is to wish you good luck. You’re going to need it.
_____________________________
Become a Truth Serum Partner Now
Become a Truth Serum Partner Now
Thursday, May 7, 2015
New economic policies from the private sector
From the art studios of A.F. (Tony) Branco at Comically Incorrect.com
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| Get Your Daily Dose of Humor and Reality from A.F. (Tony) Branco |
_____________________________
Become a Truth Serum Partner Now
Become a Truth Serum Partner Now
An Obama economic disaster
From the Warning Signs of Alan Caruba at Facts-not-Fantasy
Commenting on the rioting in Baltimore, the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henniger was almost to the end of his April 30 text when he said “On Wednesday morning, the year’s first-quarter GDP growth rate came in—0.02%.
Next to nothing. For the length of the Obama presidency, with growth significantly below norm, unemployment for blacks aged 24 and younger has hovered between 30% and 40%. That’s the real powder key, not the police.”
Most Americans do not put the state of the economy at the heart of everything else is occurring. Instead they listen to politicians apply the blame to everything other than themselves.
President Obama spent his entire first term blaming George W. Bush for the bad state of the economy he inherited, but instead of addressing it, he increased it by imposing ObamaCare, radically altering how many would be hired while others were cut to a part-time status. The bill added a number of taxes as well.
When 2015 arrived in January CNS News reported that “A record 92,898,000 Americans 16 and older did not participate in the labor force in December, as the labor force participation rate dropped once again to 62.7 percent, a level it has not seen in 36 years,” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Remember those unemployed young blacks? In March the BLS noted that a record of 12,202,000 black people were not in the labor force. The unemployment rate for black people in March was 10.1 percent, which is nearly double the overall unemployment rate of 5.5 percent.
For black teens, age 16 to 19, the unemployment rate was even higher at 25.0 percent, meaning that one in four black teens who were actively seeking a job did not have one.
By the beginning of April, the BLS reported that “a record 93,175,000 Americans 16 and older did not participate in the labor force in March, as the labor force participation rate dropped to 62.7 percent, the lowest level seen in 37 years.”
Also in April, the BLS reported that “a record 56,131,000 women, age 16 years and over, were not in the labor force the previous month, as the participation rate for this group dropped to 56.6 percent—a 27 year low.
It was no surprise that the Department of Agriculture reported that “The number of beneficiaries who receive compensation from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), otherwise known as food stamps, has topped 46,000,000 for 37 straight months.”
The U.S. Census Bureau started 2015 with news that one out of five young adults—white, black, Hispanic—and ages 18 to 34, currently live in poverty! That’s 13.5 million people, “up from one in seven (8.4 million people) in 1980.”
If all this strikes you as very bad news, it gets worse. In February, the Daily Caller’s White House Correspondence, Neil Monro, reported that “President Barack Obama has quietly handed out an extra 5.46 million work permits for non-immigrant foreigners who arrived as tourists, students, illegal immigrants or other types of migrants since 2009.”
“’The executive branch is operating a high parallel work-authorization system outside the bounds of the (immigration) laws and limits written by Congress (and which) inevitably reduces job opportunities for Americans,’ said Jessica Vaughan, the policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies” which filed the FOIA request the revealed this travesty.
So it didn’t matter to Barack Obama that millions of Americans were out of work while the White House masterminded a secretive program to provide non-Americans access to the jobs that were available.
We are living in the midst of an economic disaster and despite the often rosy headlines the reality is one that Stephen Moore, the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, took note of in January in The Washington Times. He identified “hidden indicators” of the true state of the economy as 2015 began:
“The $1 trillion growth gap. This economic recovery is the lowest in 50 years”
“The restless recovery. It’s been 10 years since Americans in the middle class got a pay raise that kept pace with inflation.”
“Inequality is worse. The Gini coefficient (as measured by the Census Bureau), the left’s favorite measure of income inequality, rose each of Mr. Obama’s first four years in office, breaking all-time highs in both 2011 and 2012, and it remains high.”
“The debt has grown by $7.3 trillion. When Mr. Obama entered office the national debt was under $11 trillion. Now it’s more than $18 trillion…it will be $19 trillion when he leaves office.”
The record speaks for itself. Americans are worse off today than when Obama took office in 2009. In the years since then he has totally failed to take the best understood steps to push back against a recession and unemployment.
He has expanded the federal government. He has failed to initiate a reform of the nation’s tax code to stimulate investment and expansion.
The nation’s first black President has so poorly served the interests of the African-American population that they are worse off today. He has practiced “equal inequality” by afflicting our other demographic groups, younger workers, woman, and everyone else who has been left unable to afford college and unable to purchase a home and start a family.
These years will be seen in retrospect as a desert of opportunity.
 |
| Know a Warning Sign When You See It |
Next to nothing. For the length of the Obama presidency, with growth significantly below norm, unemployment for blacks aged 24 and younger has hovered between 30% and 40%. That’s the real powder key, not the police.”
Most Americans do not put the state of the economy at the heart of everything else is occurring. Instead they listen to politicians apply the blame to everything other than themselves.
President Obama spent his entire first term blaming George W. Bush for the bad state of the economy he inherited, but instead of addressing it, he increased it by imposing ObamaCare, radically altering how many would be hired while others were cut to a part-time status. The bill added a number of taxes as well.
When 2015 arrived in January CNS News reported that “A record 92,898,000 Americans 16 and older did not participate in the labor force in December, as the labor force participation rate dropped once again to 62.7 percent, a level it has not seen in 36 years,” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Remember those unemployed young blacks? In March the BLS noted that a record of 12,202,000 black people were not in the labor force. The unemployment rate for black people in March was 10.1 percent, which is nearly double the overall unemployment rate of 5.5 percent.
For black teens, age 16 to 19, the unemployment rate was even higher at 25.0 percent, meaning that one in four black teens who were actively seeking a job did not have one.
By the beginning of April, the BLS reported that “a record 93,175,000 Americans 16 and older did not participate in the labor force in March, as the labor force participation rate dropped to 62.7 percent, the lowest level seen in 37 years.”
Also in April, the BLS reported that “a record 56,131,000 women, age 16 years and over, were not in the labor force the previous month, as the participation rate for this group dropped to 56.6 percent—a 27 year low.
It was no surprise that the Department of Agriculture reported that “The number of beneficiaries who receive compensation from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), otherwise known as food stamps, has topped 46,000,000 for 37 straight months.”
The U.S. Census Bureau started 2015 with news that one out of five young adults—white, black, Hispanic—and ages 18 to 34, currently live in poverty! That’s 13.5 million people, “up from one in seven (8.4 million people) in 1980.”
If all this strikes you as very bad news, it gets worse. In February, the Daily Caller’s White House Correspondence, Neil Monro, reported that “President Barack Obama has quietly handed out an extra 5.46 million work permits for non-immigrant foreigners who arrived as tourists, students, illegal immigrants or other types of migrants since 2009.”
“’The executive branch is operating a high parallel work-authorization system outside the bounds of the (immigration) laws and limits written by Congress (and which) inevitably reduces job opportunities for Americans,’ said Jessica Vaughan, the policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies” which filed the FOIA request the revealed this travesty.
So it didn’t matter to Barack Obama that millions of Americans were out of work while the White House masterminded a secretive program to provide non-Americans access to the jobs that were available.
We are living in the midst of an economic disaster and despite the often rosy headlines the reality is one that Stephen Moore, the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, took note of in January in The Washington Times. He identified “hidden indicators” of the true state of the economy as 2015 began:
“The $1 trillion growth gap. This economic recovery is the lowest in 50 years”
“The restless recovery. It’s been 10 years since Americans in the middle class got a pay raise that kept pace with inflation.”
“Inequality is worse. The Gini coefficient (as measured by the Census Bureau), the left’s favorite measure of income inequality, rose each of Mr. Obama’s first four years in office, breaking all-time highs in both 2011 and 2012, and it remains high.”
“The debt has grown by $7.3 trillion. When Mr. Obama entered office the national debt was under $11 trillion. Now it’s more than $18 trillion…it will be $19 trillion when he leaves office.”
The record speaks for itself. Americans are worse off today than when Obama took office in 2009. In the years since then he has totally failed to take the best understood steps to push back against a recession and unemployment.
He has expanded the federal government. He has failed to initiate a reform of the nation’s tax code to stimulate investment and expansion.
The nation’s first black President has so poorly served the interests of the African-American population that they are worse off today. He has practiced “equal inequality” by afflicting our other demographic groups, younger workers, woman, and everyone else who has been left unable to afford college and unable to purchase a home and start a family.
These years will be seen in retrospect as a desert of opportunity.
_____________________________
Become a Truth Serum Partner Now
Become a Truth Serum Partner Now
Friday, April 10, 2015
Liberals go crazy over the Obama depression
From the files of Judson Phillips, Founder of The Tea Party Nation
Liberals go crazy when real Americans start talking about the Great Obama Depression. While it is true the economic downturn began before Obama was in the White House, his policies have helped continue it and make it worse.
Many Americans just blithely go about their lives. They know things are worse but wait, there is a new Iphone out they can go get. The Romans understood this concept so they had bread and circuses.
The drive by media, still in the tank for Obama will not talk about how bad things are. Just how bad is our economy now?
The Economic Collapse Blog just released some staggering statistics.
Among other shockers are these:
America is in a complete economic collapse. This is the total and complete destruction of America as an economic superpower.
As bad as that is, the government is stuck on stupid. Both Democrats and Republicans want Amnesty. Amnesty will break the back of our economy. Millions of new illegal aliens will be on welfare, skyrocketing the costs of welfare and public services.
Both Democrats and Republicans want to pass the Trans Pacific Partnership, a super free trade agreement. Under this agreement, which Congress will basically have to pass to find out what is in it, American jobs will be lost. American businesses will be put at a competitive disadvantage with foreign businesses.
2016 truly is America’s last chance. If a Democrat is elected President or if Jeb Bush is elected, it really is game over for America. The Great Obama Depression will become the Great Bush Depression (or the Great Warren Depression) and America will go the way of other fallen superpowers.
America has a choice. Elect someone like Ted Cruz who will change things or we can live the words of Ronald Reagan who warned us one day we would be telling our children and grandchildren what it was like to grow up in America, when it was a free and great nation.
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| Meet Judson Phillips |
Many Americans just blithely go about their lives. They know things are worse but wait, there is a new Iphone out they can go get. The Romans understood this concept so they had bread and circuses.
The drive by media, still in the tank for Obama will not talk about how bad things are. Just how bad is our economy now?
The Economic Collapse Blog just released some staggering statistics.
Among other shockers are these:
- Incomes fell for the bottom 80 percent of all income earners in the United States during the 12 months leading up to June 2014.
- According to one recent report, 43 million Americans currently have unpaid medical debt on their credit reports. (Didn’t Obamacare work out so well for everone?)
- For each of the past six years, more businesses have closed in the United States than have opened. Prior to 2008, this had never happened before in all of U.S. history.
- If you have no debt at all, and you also have 10 dollars in your wallet, that you are wealthier than 25 percent of all Americans.
- The average American must work from January 1st to April 24th just to pay all federal, state and local taxes.
America is in a complete economic collapse. This is the total and complete destruction of America as an economic superpower.
As bad as that is, the government is stuck on stupid. Both Democrats and Republicans want Amnesty. Amnesty will break the back of our economy. Millions of new illegal aliens will be on welfare, skyrocketing the costs of welfare and public services.
Both Democrats and Republicans want to pass the Trans Pacific Partnership, a super free trade agreement. Under this agreement, which Congress will basically have to pass to find out what is in it, American jobs will be lost. American businesses will be put at a competitive disadvantage with foreign businesses.
2016 truly is America’s last chance. If a Democrat is elected President or if Jeb Bush is elected, it really is game over for America. The Great Obama Depression will become the Great Bush Depression (or the Great Warren Depression) and America will go the way of other fallen superpowers.
America has a choice. Elect someone like Ted Cruz who will change things or we can live the words of Ronald Reagan who warned us one day we would be telling our children and grandchildren what it was like to grow up in America, when it was a free and great nation.
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Friday, April 3, 2015
Just how quick is the job market declining?
From the art studios of A.F. (Tony) Branco at Comically Incorrect.com
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Tuesday, October 14, 2014
We need some regulatory patriotism
We need some regulatory patriotism ~ from the files of Paul Driessen at CFACT.org
President Obama condemns tax inversions, but pillages America with his regulatory agenda
“My policies are on the ballot, every single one of them,” he reminded voters on October 2nd.
It’s no mystery why American companies have stockpiled over $2 trillion of overseas earnings in foreign bank accounts. If they bring it to the United States, the IRS would grab 35% of it. That’s the US corporate tax rate – the highest in the developed world, double the average in EU nations.
Medtronic found a creative way to repatriate its cash, allowing it to bring money to the USA subject to just a 12.5% tax. The company acquired Covidien, another, smaller medical device firm in Ireland and will establish its formal headquarters in Dublin, thereby slashing its tax rate by two-thirds, and leaving it with far more cash for plants and equipment, innovation, hiring and keeping workers, and tapping new markets.
Pharmaceutical, biotechnology, healthcare and other companies have concluded or are pursuing similar “tax inversion” strategies. The actions have outraged the White House, “progressive” activists and many Democrats in Congress – except when President Obama’s BFF Warren Buffett engineered Burger King’s acquisition of Canada’s Tim Horton café and bakery chain.
The President says the practice is “unpatriotic” and “immoral,” calls the companies “corporate deserters,” and says businesses must start acting like “good corporate citizens.” Congressional Democrats have issued similar denunciations and want inversions prohibited or punished. They’re barking up the wrong tree.
The proper solution is comprehensive tax reform. However, Republicans want to address both corporate and individual tax issues, Democrats insist that only corporate taxes on the table, and Mr. Obama is typically not inclined to do the hard work of forging bipartisan compromises. Instead, he wants his IRS and Treasury Department to review “a broad range of authorities for possible administrative actions” and ways to “meaningfully reduce the tax benefits after inversions take place,” as one Treasury official put it.
Companies, workers and investors are bracing for the coming executive fiats. The diktats epitomize a huge problem that neither Congress nor the courts have been willing to address, but which continues to drag our nation’s economy and employment into the abyss: an out-of-control federal bureaucracy that is determined to control virtually every aspect of our business and personal lives – at great cost, for few benefits, and with little or no accountability for mistakes or even deliberate harm.
Of course we need taxes, laws and regulations, to set norms and guidelines, safeguard society, punish miscreants and pay for essential government programs. No one contests that. The question is, How much?
What we need right now is regulatory patriotism – and Executive Branch morality, citizenship, and fealty to our Constitution and laws. The federal behemoth today is destructive, and unpatriotic.
Even worse, these criminal complexities and costs are being imposed by increasingly ideological, left-of-center, anti-business “public servants” who target conservatives and are intent on advancing President Obama’s agenda of “fundamentally transforming” the United States. They are determined to redistribute wealth, pit economic and ethnic groups against each other, close down coal-fired power plants, ensure that electricity prices “necessarily skyrocketing,” and stop drilling, mining, ranching, fracking and pipelines.
Poll after poll finds Americans focused on jobs and the economy, and on ISIL, terrorism and Ebola. Not so our federal government. Secretary of State John Kerry says climate change is “the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction,” posing “greater long-term consequences” than terrorism or Ebola. For EPA the biggest issues are global warming, “environmental justice” and “sustainable development.”
How is the US economy responding to these policies? Median household income is down $2,000 since Obama took office, while costs of living continue to rise. Despite the subsidies, electricity prices have soared 14-33% in states with the most wind power. Some 45 million Americans now live below the poverty line – a 50% increase over the 30 million in poverty on inauguration day 2009.
While the official unemployment rate is now under 6% for the first time in six years, University of Maryland economist Peter Morici puts the real jobless rate at closer to 20% – which includes the millions who have given up looking for work, those who want to work full-time but must settle for part-time, and students enrolled in graduate school because their employment prospects are so bleak.
The labor force participation rate now stands at 62.7 percent, the lowest level in 36 years, with over 92 million adults not working. Over the past six years, one million more Americans have dropped out of the labor force than have found a job.
Indeed, a hallmark of the Obama recovery is its unique ability to convert three full-time jobs with benefits into four part-time positions with no benefits – and then say unemployment is declining.
It’s hardly surprising that dozens of senators and congressmen who voted with Mr. Obama 90-99% of the time now want to be seen as “moderate independents” – and do not want to be seen with the President.
But as President Obama told Northwestern University students October 2, “Make no mistake, [my] policies are on the ballot, every single one of them.”
He’s absolutely right. So are his economic and employment records. Time will tell how many people remember that when they vote November 4.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.
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| Click Here to Visit the CFACT Website |
President Obama condemns tax inversions, but pillages America with his regulatory agenda
“My policies are on the ballot, every single one of them,” he reminded voters on October 2nd.
 |
| Make No Mistake ~ My Policies Are on the Ballot |
Medtronic found a creative way to repatriate its cash, allowing it to bring money to the USA subject to just a 12.5% tax. The company acquired Covidien, another, smaller medical device firm in Ireland and will establish its formal headquarters in Dublin, thereby slashing its tax rate by two-thirds, and leaving it with far more cash for plants and equipment, innovation, hiring and keeping workers, and tapping new markets.
Pharmaceutical, biotechnology, healthcare and other companies have concluded or are pursuing similar “tax inversion” strategies. The actions have outraged the White House, “progressive” activists and many Democrats in Congress – except when President Obama’s BFF Warren Buffett engineered Burger King’s acquisition of Canada’s Tim Horton café and bakery chain.
The President says the practice is “unpatriotic” and “immoral,” calls the companies “corporate deserters,” and says businesses must start acting like “good corporate citizens.” Congressional Democrats have issued similar denunciations and want inversions prohibited or punished. They’re barking up the wrong tree.
The proper solution is comprehensive tax reform. However, Republicans want to address both corporate and individual tax issues, Democrats insist that only corporate taxes on the table, and Mr. Obama is typically not inclined to do the hard work of forging bipartisan compromises. Instead, he wants his IRS and Treasury Department to review “a broad range of authorities for possible administrative actions” and ways to “meaningfully reduce the tax benefits after inversions take place,” as one Treasury official put it.
Companies, workers and investors are bracing for the coming executive fiats. The diktats epitomize a huge problem that neither Congress nor the courts have been willing to address, but which continues to drag our nation’s economy and employment into the abyss: an out-of-control federal bureaucracy that is determined to control virtually every aspect of our business and personal lives – at great cost, for few benefits, and with little or no accountability for mistakes or even deliberate harm.
Of course we need taxes, laws and regulations, to set norms and guidelines, safeguard society, punish miscreants and pay for essential government programs. No one contests that. The question is, How much?
What we need right now is regulatory patriotism – and Executive Branch morality, citizenship, and fealty to our Constitution and laws. The federal behemoth today is destructive, and unpatriotic.
- The confiscatory 35% corporate tax rate is embedded in a Tax Code that’s 74,000 pages long, counting important cases and interpretations. It totals some 33 million words (compared to 788,280 in the King James Bible) and is loaded with crony corporatist provisions and complex, indecipherable language.
- A 906-page, 418,779-word (un)Affordable Care Act that has already metastasized into more than 10,000 pages of complex, often contradictory regulations, with more interpretations and clarifications to come.
- The 2,300-page Dodd-Frank law has already spawned over 14,000 pages of banking and financial rules.
- Over 175,000 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations are coupled with more than 1.4 million pages of tiny-type Federal Register proposed and final rules published just since 1993, at the rate of over 71,000 pages per year. Doctors, patients, insurers, businesses large and small – much less average citizens – cannot possibly read, comprehend or follow this onslaught.
- At least 4,450 federal crimes are embedded in those laws and regulations (with some 500 new crimes added per decade) – often for minor infractions like failing to complete or file precisely correct paperwork for selling orchids or importing wood for guitars. Neither inability to understand complex edicts, lack of knowledge that they could possibly exist, nor absence of intent to violate them is a defense, and the “crime” can bring military swat teams through doors, and land “violators” in prison for months or years.
- Production Tax Credits and other sweetheart “green” energy subsidies and grants total some $40 billion a year – for ethanol producers and folks like Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Mr. Tom Kiernan, who is both CEO of the American Wind Energy Association and treasurer of the League of Conservation Voters, which gives millions to mostly Democratic candidates to perpetuate the arrangements.
- American businesses and families must pay $1.9 trillion per year to comply with these mountains of regulations. That’s one-eighth of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product; it’s almost all the corporate money now held overseas: $5,937 a year for every American citizen – and far more than the $1.6 trillion in direct economic losses that re-insurer Munich Re blames on weather-related disasters between 1980 and 2011.
- $353 billion of these regulatory costs are inflicted by the Environmental Protection Agency alone, say Competitive Enterprise Institute experts who prepared the $1.9 trillion regulatory costs analysis for 2013.
Even worse, these criminal complexities and costs are being imposed by increasingly ideological, left-of-center, anti-business “public servants” who target conservatives and are intent on advancing President Obama’s agenda of “fundamentally transforming” the United States. They are determined to redistribute wealth, pit economic and ethnic groups against each other, close down coal-fired power plants, ensure that electricity prices “necessarily skyrocketing,” and stop drilling, mining, ranching, fracking and pipelines.
Poll after poll finds Americans focused on jobs and the economy, and on ISIL, terrorism and Ebola. Not so our federal government. Secretary of State John Kerry says climate change is “the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction,” posing “greater long-term consequences” than terrorism or Ebola. For EPA the biggest issues are global warming, “environmental justice” and “sustainable development.”
How is the US economy responding to these policies? Median household income is down $2,000 since Obama took office, while costs of living continue to rise. Despite the subsidies, electricity prices have soared 14-33% in states with the most wind power. Some 45 million Americans now live below the poverty line – a 50% increase over the 30 million in poverty on inauguration day 2009.
While the official unemployment rate is now under 6% for the first time in six years, University of Maryland economist Peter Morici puts the real jobless rate at closer to 20% – which includes the millions who have given up looking for work, those who want to work full-time but must settle for part-time, and students enrolled in graduate school because their employment prospects are so bleak.
The labor force participation rate now stands at 62.7 percent, the lowest level in 36 years, with over 92 million adults not working. Over the past six years, one million more Americans have dropped out of the labor force than have found a job.
Indeed, a hallmark of the Obama recovery is its unique ability to convert three full-time jobs with benefits into four part-time positions with no benefits – and then say unemployment is declining.
It’s hardly surprising that dozens of senators and congressmen who voted with Mr. Obama 90-99% of the time now want to be seen as “moderate independents” – and do not want to be seen with the President.
But as President Obama told Northwestern University students October 2, “Make no mistake, [my] policies are on the ballot, every single one of them.”
He’s absolutely right. So are his economic and employment records. Time will tell how many people remember that when they vote November 4.
__________________________________________________
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.
__________________________________________________
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