Never the responsibility of the purse, only the power

All pretense has been abandoned:

House Democrats will not pass a budget blueprint in 2010, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) will confirm in a speech on Tuesday.

Bend over and think of England.

When in doubt, empty the clip

- Somewhat aged, but as the target flotsam study floats around the confines of the Internet, this should serve to shut down mindless yapping to its affirmative: Eugene Volokh tears into the University of Pennsylvania study claiming that carrying a firearm increases the chances of being shot by 450%.

- Color me unsurprised: the proletariat in the PRK is unhappy with the situation in Sacramento, but is unwilling to remove the persistent source of the problems that plague the state.

- Unpossible; guns are illegal in Chicago! Perhaps if they made them double-plus-ungood-illegal, that would convince those that already disregard the laws to stop disregarding the law.

- Speaking of, guess what has reached a new low?

- It's popular for a reason.

- Wynn is full of win.

- If "recovery" is a new euphemism for "muddled financial cluster-screw", then this does indeed deserve the moniker "Recovery Act".

"Time? What time do you think we have?"

Obama isn't an 'A' student, and he definitely doesn't know much about history...

In one of his first major decisions on trade policy, President Obama opted Friday to impose a tariff on tires from China, a move that fulfills his campaign promise to "crack down" on imports that unfairly undermine American workers but risks angering the nation's second-largest trading partner.

The decision is intended to bolster the ailing U.S. tire industry, in which more than 5,000 jobs have been lost over the past five years as the volume of Chinese tires in the market has tripled.

It comes at a sensitive time, however. Leaders from the world's largest economies are preparing to gather in Pittsburgh in less than two weeks to discuss more cooperation amid tensions over trade.

The tire tariff will amount to 35 percent the first year, 30 percent the second and 25 percent the third.

Although a federal trade panel had recommended higher levies -- of 55, 45 and 35 percent, respectively -- the decision is considered a victory for the United Steelworkers union, which filed the trade complaint.

Hey, here's an idea: how about deliberately angering the largest creditors of the United States with a tariff, then following it up with yet another bond-auction? Obviously, China isn't worried about our ability to repay the staggering amount of debt that the Federal Government has accumulated, so why not?

The spread between AA-investment grade corporates and 10- year Treasuries was 2.07 percent today. The average for this year has been 3.151 percent.

The U.S. government is concerned about overall demand for Treasuries, not appetite from individual countries, said David Dollar, the U.S. Treasury Department’s economic and financial emissary to China.

“The interest rate on long-term Treasury bonds is at a very low level by historical standards,” Dollar said at the World Economic Forum meeting yesterday in Dalian, China. “That says that the market has confidence the U.S. will get the fiscal problem under control.” The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or committed more than $12 trillion in a bid to revive the economy and credit markets.

Very interesting, Mr. Dollar. (I realize that this is beginning to sound akin to a Bond script.) As much as we would like to believe that you are not defrauding the American taxpayers, that isn't what we've heard from our sources in China!

Cheng Siwei, former vice-chairman of the Standing Committee and now head of China's green energy drive, said Beijing was dismayed by the Fed's recourse to "credit easing".

"We hope there will be a change in monetary policy as soon as they have positive growth again," he said at the Ambrosetti Workshop, a policy gathering on Lake Como.

"If they keep printing money to buy bonds it will lead to inflation, and after a year or two the dollar will fall hard. Most of our foreign reserves are in US bonds and this is very difficult to change, so we will diversify incremental reserves into euros, yen, and other currencies," he said.

In all seriousness, I'm having a difficult time imagining a more historically predictable or utterly asinine way of handling a severe market-correction.

Now, I would like to attribute as much of this behavior to either good-natured ignorance or old-fashioned congenital idiocy, but the limit of this behavior is fast approaching deliberate, calculated evil, as I find that the collection of "our best and brightest" on Capitol Hill cannot or will not drop the pitched slap-fight over non-issues to address the debt. Indeed, they seem to be doing everything within their power to not only avoid it, but to exacerbate and accelerate its arrival.

The hour is later than you think.

How very apropos

The Final Exam of Voxiversity III: Liberal Fascism was posted today, and the timing could not be more perfect:

“At the moment, except for the people without insurance, we’re not in a health-care crisis,” said Stephen Wayne, a professor of government at Georgetown University in Washington. “You do need a crisis to generate movement in Congress and to help build a consensus.”

I am sure that Rahm and the Council of Doom are arranging something to bolster the flagging support for ever-increasing Federal control of the economy in the face of a manifesting depression that ought to offer up something truly worthy of the title "crisis".

Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said the administration made unprecedented health-care progress in eight months.

“We gave Congress a charge, we gave them broad outlines, which is the reason we are farther along than any of the five presidents that have tried,” Emanuel said in an interview yesterday. “We’re not there yet, and this speech is intended to finish the job.”

Stay the course, Rahm. I'm sure the marginal increases in speeches, outlines and hope-change will sufficiently stimulate the Congress into recovery...

Tackling the Medicare debt-horizon

The predictability of powermongers and the idiots that follow them

A succinct and scathing examination of the utter idiocy behind HR 2454:

Before the last few years, scholars used to say that we couldn't get a depression today because policymakers wouldn't make mistakes as bad as the ones they made in the 1930s. Though we've made some great moves in the last year — increasing the money supply and guaranteeing money markets funds — we're also repeating many of the same mistakes as Hoover and FDR (propping up failing industries; raising taxes; wasting money on unneeded public works projects; corruption; expensive new anti-business government programs).

Certainly, the Smoot-Hawley bill of 1930 was dumb; it imposed huge tariffs on foreign goods imported into this country, which backfired when those countries raised their tariffs too. In a sense, cap-and-trade looked like it would be even dumber; it seemed that it might impose a tariff on our own US manufactured goods, but not on foreign goods. But the House realized this and decided to require the administration to impose tariffs on goods imported from countries that don't restrict their own emissions to the same extent as the US (tip to Maguire and OandO. This 21st century version of Smoot-Hawley will probably take years before the tariffs will be imposed.

The cap-and-trade bill, if passed by the Senate and actually implemented over the next few decades, would do more damage to the country than any economic legislation passed in at least 100 years. It would eventually send most American manufacturing jobs overseas, reduce American competitiveness, and make Americans much poorer than they would have been without it.

In other news, America still has manufacturing jobs.

The commentary regarding the smug, self-satisfied masturbatory group-think regarding carbon-footprints, offsets, credits, et al from Matt and Trey in the South Park episode "Smug Alert" is both devastatingly funny (although, as one might expect, not safe for work) and tragically accurate; much to the misfortune of the nation, the Bay Area has already demonstrated that not only does it produce power-hungry fascists with questionable mental stability, it can bring the rest of its party to heel with its lunacy.

We are long overdue for a second discussion regarding the voluntary association of "these United States".

He's come to save the day!

When a problem comes along, you must empty the clip

Hindsight is twenty-twenty, and all it took was a couple of comments for me to realize that something without comment-space would be unwieldy. So, we're back to "round-up" posts until I get this figured out. Here are the links, preserved for posterity:

- US Customs poised to ban one-handed assisted-open knives.

- "Isn't it time we started rounding up promoters of hate before they kill?"

- Use a camera, go to jail. (Via Lew Rockwell Blog)

It's not sexism, it's "differently empowered"

Giving new teeth to the phrase "electric leash":

Sheriff's spokeswoman Elise Schaffer said Cody J. Redenius, 20, is under a domestic abuse restraining order that prohibits him from possessing a firearm.

His ex--girlfriend told investigators she found a picture of Redenius holding the shotgun on his Facebook account. The picture was posted Wednesday. It's unclear who posted it.

What's the real story here? Is it that one can be busted over a social-networking site for alleged wrong-doing, or that a restraining order (not, mind you, a conviction by a jury of peers) invalidates numerous Constitutionally-protected rights?

Brought to you by Joe "Foot-in-Mouth" Biden via the VAWA of 1994: remember, this man is one heart-beat away from the Football...

Timothy Geithner, Rocket Surgeon

The Chinese may be buying our assets*, but even they have their limits:

"Chinese assets are very safe," Geithner said in response to a question after a speech at Peking University, where he studied Chinese as a student in the 1980s.

His answer drew loud laughter from his student audience, reflecting scepticism in China about the wisdom of a developing country accumulating a vast stockpile of foreign reserves instead of spending the money to raise living standards at home.

"Mr. Krugman, our esteemed thaumaturgist, has promised that the ancestral animal spirits will smile upon our money harvests once again," Geithner continued, "But only so long as we maintain our confidence that they will do so. To doubt the animal spirits would be folly!"

I suspect Geithner is fearing for his job (I am hesitant to call it a career, as it is unskilled labor), as he may yet need to exchange his suit for motley:

In his speech, Geithner renewed pledges that the Obama administration would cut its huge fiscal deficits and promised "very disciplined" future spending, possibly including reintroduction of pay-as-you-go budget rules instead of nonstop borrowing.

"We believe in a strong dollar ... and we're going to make sure that we repair and reform the financial system so that we sustain confidence," he said.

"Initial phases of balancing the spending increases include the sales of various government properties, including former Navy shipyards in Arizona and New Mexico, and necessity-based taxation of excess assets in the private sector," Geithner added, "The Obama administration is determined to fix our economy, good and hard."

* In the least-valuable sense of the term.

Naiveté, intractability, and the aftermath

One must spend money to make money, nes pa?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama proposed on Thursday nearly doubling funds to enforce U.S. tax laws next year, with an aim of more than quadrupling funding for tax compliance to $2.1 billion within five years.

The budget plan seeks $12.1 billion for the Internal Revenue Service, responsible for collecting and enforcing individual and corporate tax laws, for fiscal 2010, which begins October 1. That amounts to a roughly 5.2 percent increase over the IRS budget for 2009, which was $11.5 billion.

The budget proposal, which must be approved by Congress, includes a $890 million request to boost tax enforcement, including in the international arena, an increase of $400 million from 2009.

Brilliant; I suppose that we should start referring to the agents as "revenuers" for time-period parity.

However, according to the President of the Dallas Federal Reserve, this is all irritatingly pointless:

No combination of tax hikes and spending cuts, though, will change the total burden borne by current and future generations. For the existing unfunded liabilities to be covered in the end, someone must pay $99.2 trillion more or receive $99.2 trillion less than they have been currently promised. This is a cold, hard fact. The decision we must make is whether to shoulder a substantial portion of that burden today or compel future generations to bear its full weight.

Now that you are all thoroughly depressed, let me come back to monetary policy and the Fed.

It is only natural to cast about for a solution—any solution—to avoid the fiscal pain we know is necessary because we succumbed to complacency and put off dealing with this looming fiscal disaster. Throughout history, many nations, when confronted by sizable debts they were unable or unwilling to repay, have seized upon an apparently painless solution to this dilemma: monetization. Just have the monetary authority run cash off the printing presses until the debt is repaid, the story goes, then promise to be responsible from that point on and hope your sins will be forgiven by God and Milton Friedman and everyone else.

And the Obama administration is worried about recouping $21 billion a year from corporate-tax loop-holes?

Mogambo Guru is right: we're freakin' doomed.

A public-private joke, no doubt

If ever a picture was worth a thousand words, this was it.

"There was no comment from the White House."

Yet another of minion of Caesar balks at rendering unto the State:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Health and Human Services nominee Kathleen Sebelius recently corrected three years of tax returns and paid more than $7,000 in back taxes after finding "unintentional errors"—the latest tax troubles for an Obama administration nominee.

The Kansas governor explained the changes to senators in a letter dated Tuesday that the administration released. She said they involved charitable contributions, the sale of a home and business expenses.

Sebelius said she filed the amended returns as soon as the errors were discovered by an accountant she hired to scrub her taxes in preparation for her confirmation hearings. She and her husband, Gary, a federal magistrate judge in Kansas, paid a total of $7,040 in back taxes and $878 in interest to amend returns from 2005-2007.

Best quip thus far:

"We know now that Obama really isn't Jesus... Jesus could build a cabinet."

Crows, Gold and Three-Card Monte

The Mogambo Guru offers up yet another keen insight:

Although Mr, Zuckerman does not mention me directly, he says, “For years, big gold fans were fast-moving traders and so-called gold bugs, a crowd of bears ever-convinced that the underpinnings of global economies and markets were set to crumble” which not only describes me to a freaking T, but is exactly what happened!

He also describes me pretty well, too, when he says, “Gold has disappointed some investors because it hasn’t been a home-run investment despite continuing financial ills” which is also the fault of the Federal Reserve, which is on record as saying that “the Fed stands ready” to dump as much gold onto the market as is needed to keep its price from rising.

And the reason they are openly manipulating the price of gold, which is the advice of former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, is because they are concerned about the price of gold rising, which is a clear signal that inflation is raging because the Fed is a bunch of money-maddened morons and the economy is in Big Freaking Inflationary Trouble (BFIT) because of them and their mismanagement of monetary policy with their ridiculous neo-Keynesian econometric stupidities! Hahahaha!

Following news today that the Federal Reserve is going to print promissory-notes until the presses glow red-hot, gold has jumped almost thirty-dollars an ounce.

Jim Cramer, who has evidently never read the story of "Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby" and suffered for it, sang the praises of Bernanke this morning on CNBC regarding the $1.2 trillion inflation of the money supply and expects to see long-term growth in the near-future as a result of the purchase of the worthless Treasury bonds.

I feel sorry for the guy, but then again, I don't have my own show on CNBC (nor do I want one), and I suspect before long he will have developed a keen appetite for corvus a l'Orange with thinly-sliced chapeau, served with nothing but the economic establishment's finest whine.

Something is rotten in the state of Beltway

Double-speak, or infighting? Pelosi contravenes Holder's assertions:

Q: "Madam Speaker, Attorney General Holder yesterday said that the Administration wants to reinstitute the assault weapons ban. Have you talked with Administration officials about that, and how quickly can you bring it to the floor?"

Speaker Pelosi: No, but I think on that score, one good place to start would be to enforce the laws that are on the books right now. And I think the evidence points this out, that the Bush Administration was not enforcing law. So let's start with enforcing the law that we have now."

Does Holder have "foot-in-mouth" disease, or did he let the cat out of the bag?

How was the Bush Administration not enforcing the law regarding those nasty "assault weapons"? If anything, the BATFE seems to enforce laws not on the books right now, and encourages interpretations that favor arbitrary enforcement of said "laws".

I can't bring myself to believe that Pelosi has suddenly developed a new-found respect for the Second Amendment, as we poor proletariat in the Peoples' Republik of Kalifornia have steaming heaps of evidence to the contrary; hence, I must surmise that either there is a measure of infighting between the Princess Pelosi Power-Puff Party and the Hope-Change Kool-Aid Korps, or Pelosi believes that their political position is not yet sufficiently entrenched to weather the political backlash from such a ban.

Either way, I predict that firearms sales will continue on a strong upward trend.

Update:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will join Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in opposing any effort to revive the 1994 assault weapons ban, putting them on the opposite side of the Obama administration...

It was not immediately clear whether Reid would block the bill from the Senate, but his opposition casts serious doubt on its chances. Also, Manley noted that Reid voted against the ban in 1994 and again when it expired in 2004.

This doesn't surprise me, as Pelosi seems to have Reid's tackle firmly in her skeletal grip. I suspect that Pelosi is adopting a realistic view regarding the maintenance of a Democratic majority in the House, and that the lofty throne of the Speaker of the House soothes the voices too sweetly for her to give it up without a grotesque level of carnage.

The War on Drugs, Terrorism, Poverty, Assault Weapons, Hate Speech, et al.

It's for the children! Wave hands! Talk louder! Shoulder things!

At a press conference announcing the arrests, Holder also suggested that re-instituting a U.S. ban on the sale of assault weapons would help reduce the bloodshed in Mexico, where last year 6,000 people were killed in drug-related violence.

U.S. officials have a responsibility to make sure Mexican police "are not fighting substantial numbers of weapons, or fighting against AK-47's or other similar kinds of weapons that have been flowing to Mexico," Holder said.

Maybe it's a double-secret underhand twin-spoiler extra-cheese economic stimulus, designed to promote consumer confidence through firearms sales!

And maybe I'll be the first one on my block with a sleigh hitched to eight flying pigs.

When in doubt, empty the clip

- Just a few posts down, I had spun myself a perfectly fine snarky rant... Then I find that someone explored the general problem earlier, more eloquently, and with the benefit of seniority. Fortunately, everyone wins, except NPR, which will remain a colony of invertebrate inveterate sycophantic parasites.

- When I was a wee lad, I loved Garfield. It does not come as a surprise that I now enjoy this, in all of its perverse glory.

- Why has it taken so long for this to be developed?



- Fun with Keynesians.

Honesty in advertising

National Politburo Radio: Damn the logic, full speed ahead!

Evidently, we failed to understand the sheer genius of John Maynard Keynes the first time 'round, and the rescue plan will now be repeated louder, slower, and with additional gesticulation:

Keynes became this season's go-to solution because of his masterpiece prescription for how to get out of a global depression — The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.

"I've read the general theory five times," says Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University. "The first time I read it, I was maybe 18." Cowen has been reading Keynes' book again, this time writing notes and conducting a discussion on his blog, Marginal Revolution.

Cowen says Keynes corrected what he saw as a fundamental error in the economics that had come before. Classical economics teaches that if there's a downturn, the economy will eventually sort itself out. If people aren't buying enough, prices will drop to a point where people start spending.

Keynes' radical insight was to look out the window in the 1930s and see that sometimes things don't right themselves. The economy goes into a downward spiral. The usual dynamic of supply and demand breaks down.

Further analysis shows that economic systems without central-banking occasionally undergo periods of suspended gravity, portals to the netherworld, and hang-nails.

In between smarmy fluffing-fits of fascist economic planning and its more notorious advocates, NPR erected a straw-man to prove the validity of the bailout schema:

The discipline of economics includes many different groups — the monetarists, the Chicago school and supply-side economics. The Keynesians used taxes and government deficits as their main tools for steering the economy. The anti-Keynesians thought you could have the same effect just by using the central bank — the Federal Reserve — to carefully control interest rates. If the economy overheats, raise rates. If it starts to sputter, lower them.

The Keynesians and anti-Keynesians fought some bitter battles through the 1980s. But by the time of the Clinton administration, most economists agreed on the basics: Some of Keynes' ideas are useful, but in a post-Keynesian world, the interest rate is the most effective tool.

The silence is deafening regarding Austrian economics; in a post-Keynesian world economic implosion, the most effective tool is the axe. Axe fractional-reserve banking, axe the Federal Reserve, axe the ability of the State to further its authoritarian designs. The faulty premise that prosperity can continue without interruption assumes perfect judgement on by every economic actor involved, particularly the government. Stop and think about this: when has this ever been true, even in their wildest fantasies? Not only is it ludicrous in theory, it's demonstrably impossible. (For a more eloquent explanation of the magnitude of failure involved here, particularly at this point in history, read Part I: BUSINESS CYCLE THEORY.)

Out of morbid curiosity, let us examine a plan that would make Rube Goldberg flush with envy:

"So, here's the way Keynes would have done it," Blinder says, sketching points on a blackboard in his office.

The Keynesian formula is straightforward. First, you estimate how much the economy should be producing — given all the people and factories and offices. Blinder's guess is $15 trillion. Then you look at what the economy is actually producing. He puts that at $14 trillion.

The government shouldn't have to spend the entire trillion-dollar shortfall. That's because of something called the "Keynesian multiplier." Every dollar the government spends produces more than a dollar in spending throughout the economy. If the government pays you to build a bridge, you spend your paycheck on rent and food and so on, and then your landlord and grocer have money. Using Keynesian math, you can figure out exactly how much the Obama administration should spend.

Blinder taps his chalk, winding up his calculations. "That would lead you to conclude that you needed about $650 billion as a stimulus," Blinder says. "Voila! That's the kind of number they're talking about right now. You see it in the newspapers every day, a number in that range."

Ah, devaluing the currency while shouldering a massive spending deficit, increasing military agitation abroad and increasing spending on public works* is truly the path to prosperity! In fact, this "Keynesian multiplier" is nothing of the sort: rather than a wholesome remedy for an illness, it has all the therapeutic effect of scarfing an entire bag of candy and half a case of energy-drinks before heading to the gym.

So, will the Obama "Magic Stimulus" fix the economy?

If you believe that, I have a public-works project for sale.



* This has been tried, and was admittedly a failure:

"In the meanwhile, however, President Hoover himself was beginning to have doubts about one of his favorite policies: public works. In a conference at the end of February, Hoover admitted that his public works program, which had nearly doubled Federal construction since the start of the depression, had failed. It was very expensive, costing over $1200 per family aided, it was unavailable to the needy in remote regions and to those who were unable to perform such labor, which was, after all, unskilled make-work. Hoover now was coming to favor more Federal grants-in-aid to states in lieu of more Federal public works. By May, Hoover had openly reversed his earlier position, and now opposed any further extension of non-self-liquidating public works."

America's Great Depression, The Hoover New Deal of 1932: Public Works Agitation

The Heresy of Survivalism

Evidently, SurvivalBlog was the focus of a Yahoo! News story on the troubled times we live in and the corresponding interest in survivalism. A link to a MetaFilter thread followed the article, from which I gathered the following opinions about the vocal majority:

- The State, all-powerful and all-knowing, will rescue everyone without fail in a crisis situation.

- Having more than a few weeks of food on-hand is selfish and paranoid, and the amount in excess is directly proportional to one's paranoia and antisocial sentiments.

- Firearm ownership signifies sexual dysfunction/deviancy, and anyone that would use a firearm to protect themselves, their liberty or property is "already dead inside".

- If the future has any sort of apocalyptic events that will precipitate hardship, it would be preferable to die than try to survive. Should survival be unavoidable, kill and loot from those that are prepared.

- I (my room-mate/siblings/parents/dog/friend/lover/ancestor) experienced a three-day blackout, and (I/we/they) made s'mores and told stories, which by induction, proves that all preparation beyond three days is unnecessary if one has candles and s'mores.

- Lowering myself to preparing for a disaster would cheapen my morals, poke quarter-sized holes in my faith and pride in my society, and cause the milk to sour.

- Any impending collapse is the fault of the Bush administration for failure to subsidize low-income hope/change.

I imagine that the vocal majority is college-educated, registered with the bipartisan juggernaut and unaware of the nature of fractional-reserve banking. Which is to say, blissfully ignorant of history and unwilling to be bothered while worshipping at the altar of the State. Furthermore, I doubt that the average snarky pedant has walked more than ten miles at a stretch, fired a rifle, or eaten something that they had to kill. Prosperity, in their eyes, is a matter of belief.

And so, following the weekend of the final exam for America's Great Depression, echoes from the past attempts to stabilize an inflationary economic model continue to build amidst the increasingly fervent attempts to avert disaster. No amount of belief in the fundamental goodness of human nature will mitigate the cascading economic failures that are inherent to the international banking systems that were modeled on central-banking theory. Not only has it ruined the economies of multiple nations, but it has left virtually no safe haven from the following holocaust. And yet, the vocal majority welcome it with open arms, and expect salvation within the year at the hands of the State.

So it goes.