Washington's Wake

Posts Tagged ‘Economy’

So, Peter Orszag, HRH The Sun Kings economics guesser in chief tells us we must rein in the spending.

President Barack Obama’s top budget adviser, Peter Orszag, said on Tuesday that the U.S. government must significantly alter its policies in order to tackle a growing mountain of debt.

Dear Peter,

I know where you can cut at least a trillion dollars in new spending over the next 10 years.

Love,
The American People

PS, If you need some more ideas where to cut spending, I’ve got a lot of them. Not that you’d listen to me…

As if we weren’t all waiting for this other shoe to drop. The trial balloon has official been raised.

The United States should consider raising taxes to help bring deficits under control and may need to consider a European-style value-added tax, White House adviser Paul Volcker said on Tuesday.

Volcker, answering a question from the audience at a New York Historical Society event, said the value-added tax “was not as toxic an idea” as it has been in the past and also said a carbon or other energy-related tax may become necessary.

Though he acknowledged that both were still unpopular ideas, he said getting entitlement costs and the U.S. budget deficit under control may require such moves. “If at the end of the day we need to raise taxes, we should raise taxes,” he said.

I hate to quote the entirety of a news article but that was it. Which is why I am certain this is a trial balloon. Time to see how far we can radically remake America in the leftist manner.

The thing that I feel the worst is that Paul Volcker doesn’t even know that’s he’s being used. And he’ll be discarded like a used, well, you know, if they need to do so. He did such a great job at the end of the Carter era, it’s so sad to see him repeat history.

If you folks thought the health care bill was bad, wait till the drunken sailors masquerading as congress will do with real extra billions in cash. These reprehensible solons can’t be responsible with the deficit spending they’ve already done. Now we want to give them even more money?

You want to get entitlement spending under control, cut the spending. There’s two ways for everyone who is not a government, to deal with their spending. They can either increase income or reduce expenses. The pathetic excuse for the political weenies in Washington haven’t even thought about reducing expenses.

As it’s obvious they won’t reduce expenses. We the people will have to do it for them. The first way to cut the expenses in Washington is to vote out of office those bums and put new ones in with a really tight leash. And yes, I do mean leash. If they won’t heal to the voters, vote the new guys out too.

Yes, maybe it is time to remake America. And we’ll first start with the political class. I think it’s time they get to see the exercise of political power by those in flyover country by losing their jobs.

So, who do we believe?

We have ADP who actually processes payroll for private companies. ADP says we lost(pdf) 23,000 jobs between February and March.

According to today’s ADP National Employment Report®, private sector employment decreased by 23,000 from February to March on a seasonally adjusted basis.

Then there’s the “official” employment statistics.

Payrolls rose by 162,000 workers, the third gain in the past five months and the most since March 2007

But, there’s a lot of adjusting of numbers and other noise going on. Depending on who you read, 48,000 of those people that became employed became employed as government works as part of the 2011 census. Ok. So private employers then theoretically hired 114,000 employees.

Zero Hedge has a wonderful article talking about all the adjusting going on. They show from the governments own statistics that there were 81,000 jobs “created” due to the birth/death adjustment. In reality, those are literally numbers made up. Those 81,000 “jobs” are completely made up wholesale. If we remove those we are left with 33,000 actual real jobs that private employers created.

But the number that gets trumpeted is the 162,000 even though most of that number is comprised of government jobs and fake jobs. And yet we’re going to make policy based upon those fake numbers. Doesn’t make me feel good that anyone in positions of power has a clue about what’s going on in the real world where the taxpayer lives.

I’m sure there’s no coincidence that this is the first bond sale since Obamacare passed but it is an interesting data point.

WEAK DEMAND: Interest rates climbed in the bond market Thursday after a government debt auction drew tepid demand. Auctions Tuesday and Wednesday also saw lower demand.

NOT THAT INTERESTED: The auction of $32 billion in seven-year notes saw demand fall from the past two months. That means the government could have to start offering higher interest rates to attract buyers.

The thing to remember is that this has happened before. And demand picked up.

But..

If the only way demand picks up is by raising the rates paid, here comes stagflation.

Since the federal government has a monopoly on the mail delivery service. Let’s see how well they’re doing and what’s new and upcoming. Maybe we can learn something about how government run health care is going to work out for everyone.

The Postal Service took the first formal step Wednesday toward cutting mail delivery to five days a week.

The postal governing board agreed to ask the independent Postal Regulatory Commission for an opinion on dropping Saturday delivery. That request goes to the commission next week.

Under the proposal, mail delivery to homes and businesses and mail collection from blue mailboxes would be limited to Monday through Friday.

Well, that’s not good. They’ve got a monopoly on delivering letters and now they’re going to cut their service levels. I wonder why they’re going to do that?

The Postal Service says the delivery change would save more than $3 billion annually. It is a major part of a decade-long plan to eliminate losses and restore the agency to stability in the face of shrinking business.

Well I can certainly understand that. I wonder how many postal workers were laid off? Hey… what’s with the crickets all of a sudden. I know when my employer lost a lot of business, it started cutting costs. The largest costs of any businesses are its employees. So unfortunately we laid off a lot of people.

Oh wait I see now. Instead of really cutting costs, it’s now cutting service because it doesn’t have the nuts to layoff their employees. Instead, we’ll cut service because well that only affects our customers and that way we don’t have to layoff anyone. Of course that’s not going to really help you.

After all, when in business, you want to make it EASIER for your customers to do business with you, not harder. Cutting the hours you are available to your customers is not going to make it easier for your customers. And, if you don’t have that Saturday service, you really are overstaffed as your current staffing is based upon 6 days of service not 5 days so I’m sure we’ll see some layoffs. Hey, whats with the crickets again?

And these bastards want to run health care? I can’t see how that will turn out badly…

This is a great speech. It’s a barn burner. They should be like this more often. It would really show some life and what they really stand for as a party.

Both parties should be doing this all the time. They all should have to defend their pieces of silver that I am paying for. Not just on this vote. After reading Instapundit talk about some congressional hack getting a NASA Administrators job for his yes vote on health care, it’s nice to see someone will hopefully put them to the fire for selling their vote.

The following graph comes to us courtesy of Financial Armageddon.

The top graph shows the percentage of income to the average American that comes from the federal government. You can see that it’s been on its way up for a long time. That means more and more people are getting money from the federal government and that’s becoming the basis for their “income”.

It’s a sad commentary because for every dollar that a person gets from the federales, it’s a dollar less that they are actually working for in a product job. I would like to think that when we finally come out of this downturn that the chart will start back on a downward turn, but I really know that’s just wishful thinking.

The tough part is that the more people get used to being on the government dole, the harder it will be for the government to stop paying them and the harder it becomes on those actual taxpaying people to continue to finance the unworking. At some point, which I hope isn’t too soon, there will be way too few people working for the amount of benefits that are being paid out. That way lies madness and I don’t want to see what happens.

I think all the patriotic hackers and computer geniuses in the US should make a concerted effort to bring down the Chinese internet. They put a lot of energy and time into cracking and hacking and spamming and all that. Why not do it for a cause that might actually help us all?

Well if you haven’t seen the bad news, the House has passed its version, whichever one they pretend they actually have in written form, of health care reform.

Hours after President Obama exhorted Democratic lawmakers to “answer the call of history,” the House hit an unprecedented milestone on the path to health-care reform, approving a trillion-dollar package late Saturday that seeks to overhaul private insurance practices and guarantee comprehensive and affordable coverage to almost every American.

After months of acrimonious partisanship, Democrats closed ranks on a 220-215 vote that included 39 defections, mostly from the party’s conservative ranks. But the bill attracted a surprise Republican convert: Rep. Anh “Joseph” Cao of Louisiana, who represents the Democratic-leaning district of New Orleans and had been the target of a last-minute White House lobbying campaign. GOP House leaders had predicted their members would unanimously oppose the bill.

Sweet.

The dems have a 75 seat majority but were only able to get a 5 seat majority for this bill.

Anyone that voted for this bill should be voted out of office.

I’m truly not one for a lot of hyperbole, but I am really scared that this will change the country in ways we do not know. And no, I don’t think they will be good ways.

I am at a loss for words and am feeling very negative about the future of this country.

Hopefully the clowns that make up the senate will do the right thing and kill this.

I don’t have high hopes though.