These Aren’t the Hispanics You are Looking For
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Tag Archives: idiocy
You Were Warned
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Fathom It
Do Democrats Understand Economics?
The latest from His Holiness The Bringer of Healthcare:
President Obama unveiled plans Thursday to double U.S. exports over the next five years in hopes of spurring job growth, an ambitious goal that may rekindle the battle over free-trade policy.
The president acknowledged the formidable barriers to his goal: doubts in Congress over new free-trade agreements, misaligned currencies that make Chinese products cheaper on global markets, and continued weakness in global demand, all problems that could dwarf efforts to promote U.S. products and services abroad.
But, Obama said in a speech, “in a time when millions of Americans are out of work, boosting our exports is a short-term imperative.”
Just a couple of things – don’t American’s have to be working in order to produce exports? It’s not like 10% of the labor force is out of work and not producing anything. And don’t other countries have to buy the stuff we export? And doesn’t your party contain the biggest bunch of anti-free traders in the world?
So how is this wondrous and magical export increase to be created? Glad you asked:
Designed to deliver on a pledge he made in his State of the Union speech, Obama’s plan includes $2 billion in new export financing through the Export-Import Bank, which helps U.S. companies finance overseas sales; establishment of a Cabinet group to promote U.S. goods and services abroad; and an expanded role for the Nixon-era President’s Export Council, to be chaired by W. James McNerney, Boeing’s president and chief executive. Restrictions on the overseas sale of some high-end technology goods may also be eased.
So $2 billion more that we don’t have and will have to borrow from the rest of the world, two new bureaucratic idiocies, and allowing China to buy more of our technology to improve their weapons. I’m sure the money will get spent, that’s the one thing that Democrats are good at doing. But do you think any of this will produce more than a handful of jobs? Well, His Highness thinks he will get:
If successful, the president said, the program would create 2 million jobs. Experts said the viability of that figure would depend on the type of exports that are expanded.
2 million new jobs? Even the Washington Post has to immediately undercut the idiocy of that statement. This is supposed to be the smartest guy in the room. The Harvard Professor. But aside from drooling idiots, could you find anyone in America who thinks that this mess of new spending is going to come anywhere close to producing 2 million jobs?
I realize that we have now had a couple of years of Obama and his flunkies lying to us, but this still hits a level of DUUUUH that I find astonishing.
The Tao of The Clunker
Just a wonderful article on the cash for clunkers debacle over at Hot Air by Chairman Zero:
Originally slated to last through October, Cash for Clunkers blew through its billion-dollar funding in a week, and has received an injection of two billion additional dollars from Congress. Those are your dollars, by the way, assuming you are one of the 57% of Americans who pay federal income tax.
If it makes you feel any better, remember that all of this is being done in the name of a religion you probably don’t believe in. Oh, wait, that’s going to make you feel worse. Good. It should. The sight of Obama’s apparatchiks squealing with glee like little girls, and declaring Cash for Clunkers to be a phenomenal success, should fill you with blind rage. Maybe we could get a little value for our money by having the federal government assign the brainwashed schoolchildren trapped in its rotting educational system to fashion bits of metal from the destroyed clunkers into decorative keepsakes, and mail one to everyone who paid taxes last year. We could call them Planetary Savior Trophies, and each could come with a little prayer you recite each morning, to reduce global warming. It would be as effective as anything else Big Government forces us to do in the name of global warming.
I urge you to read the whole thing.
Thought Crimes Bill Advances
The inability of lawmakers to understand the constitution, equal treatment before the law, double jeopardy, and individual liberty is stunning. In some ways it prevents me from believing that American as currently constituted can endure.
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Random Thoughts
1. We all know that the state governors coming to the Federal government for bailouts is simply a buck-passing process. They are looking at reduced revenues and instead of being straightforward and saying “We love government and are raising your taxes to pay for it”, they get to hide behind the cover of having the Feds print money and send it to them by the back door. They know this is a fraud, the feds know it is a fraud, I know its a fraud. What’s still shocking to me is that there apparently are a whole host of Americans who don’t understand that this isn’t something they can get for “free”. Perhaps is a failing of my imagination. But I would love for somebody who thinks that this is a good thing to attempt some explanation about how this isn’t just a honking pile of horse feces.
2. See this picture of the guns that the terrorists in India used to slaughter hundreds?
These are not the standard third-world AK-47’s which can be put together with tinfoil and toothpicks and still kill people. These are HK MP5s, and as Anatreptic notes:
This isn’t a black market gun. While people living in caves in Afghanistan can and do manufacture Kalashnikovs by hand, the MP5 is a sophisticated weapon requiring high tech metallurgy and other technologies for their production.
Pakistan Ordinance Factories manufactures these weapons under license from HK, and they are under the control of the Pakistani Ministry of Defense.
The implications of Pakistani involvement seem rather hard to miss. Of course the Pakistanis are calling it an attack by Jews. Again, my jaw drops but knowing third-world countries and the absolute media control they have it seems rather more possible that they can force-feed this kind of crap to their population.
3. Following along in the jaw-dropping stupidity we have the latest propaganda drop from the psychiatrists that 1 in 5 of the population between 19 and 25 is crazy. And that goes up to half if you include alcohol and drug abuse. What we really have is a whole generation that needed to have been smacked on their bottoms at age 5 and taught some manners. These completely self-involved dimwits have a lot of surprises ahead. Their grandparents (the baby boomers) are racking up huge debts and expect these little honkers to pony up the cash when they can no longer control their bowels. And any suggestion that the boomers will not get their social security will generate a firestorm that will make the protests about the Iraq war feel like a kindergarten nap session.
Wonderful Recommendation For Destroying The Economy
From some twittet working for McKinsey (and heading up a non-profit corporation) in London:
If Barack Obama gets his way we could see the unleashing of a green revolution which will lift the economy.
Mr Obama and his team are strong supporters of a cap-and-trade scheme, similar to that operating in Europe, to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The Obama version would auction permits to pollute, among companies which burn fossil fuels. Over time the number of permits would fall, ratcheting down the “cap” on total pollution. It’s a simple idea, invented in the US in the 1980s, to combat acid rain.
This is the wonderful idea that even the High and Self-Important one admitted would “cause electricity costs to skyrocket”. But that’s not a concern to somebody who’s energy costs are completely paid for by the government:
Old economy pundits fear that a cap-and-trade scheme will hit the economy when it is down, by raising electricity prices and slashing energy company profits. Mr Obama doesn’t seem to buy that line. Asked by Time magazine a few weeks ago whether he wouldn’t need to go slow on introducing cap-and-trade, he said that part of the revenue raised by auctioning permits should go straight back to the consumer, maybe through a rebate on payroll tax. John Podesta, the head of Mr Obama’s transition team, has suggested that the revenues could be used to build new clean-energy transmission lines, and to insulate homes, thus giving a short-term stimulus.
Why do I believe that the government will simply keep all the money to spend on things it thinks are important – rather than actually sending any of it back to the peasants. Because its all right there for everybody to take:
A cap-and-trade scheme could raise around $150 billion a year. The American pipe-fitters union supports carbon caps because they are likely to mean non-exportable jobs in laying a new energy infrastructure. “Weatherisation” (insulating homes) could be the centrepiece of a green new deal that creates “green collar” jobs and simultaneously saves people money on their energy bills. This is FDR in triplicate: creating jobs, cutting energy bills, and boosting hundreds of small companies which are already manufacturing everything from solar components to LED lighting to high-tech coatings for wind turbines (some of which are incidentally, being made from old car parts). Far from being a one-way drain on the economy, green regulation could boost the economy in straitened times.
Your future awaits. Union thugs stuffing insulation into houses no one can afford because electricity and a mortgage are too expensive, hunched over your latest tax bill reading by the light of your teeny tiny LED and simply hoping the wind blows for another 10 minutes before you go completely dark.
The next generation will really be happy about that. They won’t even be able to play their iPods since the green taxes on any electronics will be 1000%.
Are you stocking up on candles people?
They are Both Economic Nincompoops
Basic economics people – trade is a win/win – now if only somebody would tell the two major party Presidential candidates:
McCain and Obama talk constantly about how much they will “invest” — with money taken from the taxpayers, of course — to achieve energy independence. “[W]e can provide loan guarantees and venture capital to those with the best plans to develop and sell biofuels on a commercial market,” Obama said.
What makes Obama think he’s qualified to pick the “best plans”? It’s the robust competition of the free market that reveals what’s best. Obama’s program would preempt the only good method we have for learning which form of energy is best.
And John McCain seems to be no better:
McCain promises a $300-million prize to whoever develops a battery for an electric car. But the free market already provides plenty of incentive to invent a better battery. As George Mason University economist Donald Boudreaux writes, “Anyone who develops such a device will earn profits dwarfing $300 million simply by selling it on the market. There’s absolutely no need for any such taxpayer-funded prize“.
Central energy planning and government-funded prizes are economic idiocy.
Truth
From American Digest (the article is rather disheartening in a way, but a really good read):
Colorado Right 