The Market is Shorting Obama’s ‘Stimulus’

clipped from www.realclearmarkets.com President Barack Obama’s “stimulus” plan invokes the 1930s fiscal strategy put forward by British economist John Maynard Keynes, who saw capitalism as pretty much spent. Having exhausted their store of innovative ideas, investors curled up. Workers lost jobs, spent less, and sent still other workers walking. Budget deficits – government spending without taxes to “pay as you go” – would pull unemployed workers off the street and arrest the downward spiral. Investors’ “animal spirits” would be calmed, new capital risked, and economic vitality restored. So the Obama theory – government spending is stimulus. If so, financial markets should feel the love. The U.S. budget is awash in red ink, and $800 billion more of it should easily move the needle on our economic prospects. Indeed it has – in the wrong direction. Financial markets don’t want more government debt or a scramble for “shovel-ready” spending projects. They want the skeletons in the banking sector’s closet exposed and expunged.

Why would anyone think that the problems that led us here are suddenly the solution to get us out? Bush spent like a drunken sailor on social programs and war. Bush passed and signed a $750 billion stimulus package. Now Obama is spending like an even more drunken sailor with a new $800 billion stimulus package and spending on wars.

Obama’s campaign promise to “spread the wealth” has become “destroy the wealth.”

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CNBC’s Rick Santelli’s Chicago Tea Party

clipped from www.youtube.com Watch Video

How does CNBC’s Rick Santelli feel? Seems like he could be the little boy who saw that the Emperor had no clothes, and wasn’t afraid to speak up.

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Upside Down Economics

clipped from townhall.com Upside Down Economics From television specials to newspaper editorials, the media are pushing the idea that current economic problems were caused by the market and that only the government can rescue us. What was lacking in the housing market, they say, was government regulation of the market’s “greed.” That makes great moral melodrama, but it turns the facts upside down. It was precisely government intervention which turned a thriving industry into a basket case. An economist specializing in financial markets gave a glimpse of the history of housing markets when he said: “Lending money to American homebuyers had been one of the least risky and most profitable businesses a bank could engage in for nearly a century.”

The economy is on TV 24×7, and there is a big effort to sweep away the popcorn trail of how we got where we are today. This is a good column that looks at the roots of how government intervention is what led to the problems, and how the government is unlikely to solve it.

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Will Government Make Your Health Care Decisions?

clipped from townhall.com McCaughey discovered buried in the bill a new bureaucracy called the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology. Among other things, it means that a Washington official will “monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective.” Some of that occurs now, but this would take it to a whole new level. The idea comes straight from former HHS nominee Tom Daschle’s 2008 book “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis” in which he says that doctors are going to have to give up their autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.” Inevitably, this means the government will decide who gets life-saving treatment and who doesn’t. It is survival of the fittest in practice. Thank you, and belated happy birthday, Charles Darwin.

I think we all knew this was coming, but maybe not so soon. Now we know what’s all inclusive in the stimulus bill, and that includes establishing a government agency to oversee health care choices.

Great. The government can’t even manage the conversion from analog to digital TV. Now they’ll be taking a look at you (er, us), and determining what’s cost effective and appropriate. Who cares what you want? The government will have to be responsible rationing out health care dollars, so they get to make the call on your treatment.

Fantastic. Yikes.

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Will Stimulus Dollars Flow to OPEC?

Has anyone noticed the price of gasoline inching up the past few weeks? Without a serious plan to increase domestic energy supply, I fear that much of Obama’s stimulus dollars will flow straight from the government to consumers pockets to the gas pump and ultimately to OPEC.

President Obama has been touting “green energy” but neglecting the reality of what works.  The United States needs to expand domestic energy production.  This means nuclear power for electricity, and oil and natural gas for vehicles.

In the short term, there is something President Obama can do to prevent his stimulus package from going to OPEC.  He can mandate that all new Federal vehicles run on natural gas.  Natural gas is already in our homes and can easily be used to fill up these cars in the garage overnight.  Natural gas burns cleaner than gasoline, and this would also help clean up the air.  Including natural gas vehicles in our vehicle fleet would diversify our energy needs and reduce reliance on foreign oil.

Obama can begin to construct a new generation of nuclear power plants that will power the coming generations of electric cars.   Everyone talks about hybrids and electric vehicles, withour realizing that it will take a significant expansion in our ability to produce electricity to provide power for the batteries.  These new nuclear power plants can replace the polluting coal powered plants that we use today.

While everyone hopes that the stimulus package will jump-start the economy and help consumers cope with expenses, it’d be a shame to see this money end up in the pockets of OPEC.

Write your representatives.  Write the President.   Be loud.   We can’t ignore energy, or it will come back and bite us in the rear end yet again.

Notes:

• Monica notes that there WAS bipartisanship in the stimulus package.  7 democrats joined republicans in the House voting against it!
• Michelle Malkin notes that there are protests planned over the “porkulus.”
• From Noel Sheppard, an Obama stimulus love fest on Meet the Press.
• The Corner notes that this isn’t socialism, it’s fascism.
• The above is actually a link to a link, at Pajama’s Media.  A very nice entry on the differences between socialism and fascism, and what’s happening now.  Read it!
• A great cartoon at Red Planet Cartoons that shows, better than words, the energy picture.  Check it out!

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Global Warming Propaganda (Again)

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com Global Warming Propaganda Worse than Predicted Today’s alarmist headline from Reuters: “Global warming seen worse than predicted.” Here is the story behind the headline: The climate is heating up far faster than scientists had predicted, spurred by sharp increases in greenhouse gas emissions from developing countries like China and India, a top climate scientist said on Saturday. But wait! The earth has cooled since 1998, so the statement that it is “heating up faster” is plainly false. What’s going on here? Field said “the actual trajectory of climate change is more serious” than any of the climate predictions in the IPCC’s fourth assessment report called “Climate Change 2007.” Huh? Those (notoriously unreliable) climate predictions were made just over a year ago. And how can the “actual trajectory” be “more serious,” since 2008 was cooler than 2007? This is the solution to the mystery:

The global warming hysteria is brought to you by folks who are a little scared of looking at the data. Instead, they’ve bought into a political movement. The true victims of this will be all of us, should any global warming legislation be implemented.

The winners? China. They seem far enough removed from these idiots to continue on.

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Iranians put Obama on an Ass

clipped from gatewaypundit.blogspot.com

Hate is still a four-letter word, no matter who is President.

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-6 Degrees at Global Warming Conference

clipped from www.buffalonews.com Frigid temperatures take WNY by surprise Talk about great timing. Buffalo State College hosts the national teach-in on Global Warming Situations today — a day the local temperature bottomed out at minus 6 degrees. No evidence of global warming here, at least not this morning, when unofficial reports to the National Weather Service listed temperatures as low as 9 degrees below zero elsewhere in Erie County. “We didn’t have temperatures forecast to be quite that cold,” weather service meteorologist David Zaff said this morning. “When you have snowpack on the ground and clear skies, temperatures can plummet. It’s called radiational cooling.”

It’s as if God is mocking these fools. Does it seem like these conferences on global warming are frequently met with ice storms, blizzards, and otherwise bone-chilling weather?

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Tax Cheatin’ Palooza

clipped from voices.washingtonpost.com Solis Senate Session Postponed in Wake of Husband’s Tax Lien Revelations A Senate committee today abruptly canceled a session to consider President Obama’s nomination of Rep. Hilda Solis to be labor secretary in the wake of a report saying that her husband yesterday paid about $6,400 to settle tax liens against his business — including liens that had been outstanding for as long as 16 years. The report, by USA Today, came just before the Senate’s Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee was slated to meet to consider Solis’s nomination, which had been delayed by questions over her role on the board of the pro-labor organization American Rights at Work. A source said that committee members did not learn about the tax issue until today.

Now, if you or I were to “make an honest mistake” on our taxes, how would we be dealt with by the IRS? You know the answer. Here are the folks who want to raise your taxes, yet they seem to have difficulty paying their own taxes.

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Talk Radio Hearings on the Way?

clipped from www.radioink.com Senator: Talk Radio Hearings Could Be On The Way WASHINGTON — February 5, 2009: Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) told nationally syndicated talk host Bill Press this morning that the recent flips of liberal Talk stations in several markets were a “disservice to the public.” Stabenow said that, in the day of the Fairness Doctrine, “you had to have balance,” and continued, “I think something that requires that in a market with owners that have multiple stations that they have got to have balance — there has to be some community interest — balance, you know, standard that says both sides have to be heard.” Stabenow told Press that the airwaves are “dominated by one view” that “overwhelms people’s opinions — and, unfortunately, incorrectly,” and said that “right-wing conservative talk hosts” are “trying to make people angry and saying all kinds of things that aren’t true and so on.”

The liberals can’t seem to keep a listening audience, so they need the help of the government to mandate that you tune in. If liberal talk radio was something that people wanted to listen to, it would survive in the free market. It hasn’t done very well.

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