Six months of railing against business rather than finding ways to encourage entrepreneurs to expand and hire has left the Obama administration with egg on its face. "Pass my $800 billion Stimulus Plan and unemployment will not exceed 8%" was the Obama administration mantra. Well we passed it, and unemployment will soon exceed 10%. President Obama said his Stimulus Plan would save or create 3.5 million jobs in the next two years. This cornucopia of 1960's "Great Society" style social programs misbranded, as a Stimulus Plan has not produced jobs and worse still is unlikely to produce any permanent private sector jobs. Maybe a few hundred thousand temporary infrastructure jobs will be created over the next year or two but that is the best we can hope for from the…
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The first lesson every President learns is that in trying to please all his constituents he pleases no one, including himself.
President Obama sold the $800 billion Stimulus Plan to the American people as a strategy to create untold
infrastructure jobs. If fact, President Obama said the stimulus plan would save or create 3.5 million jobs in the next two years and that he hoped to limit the unemployment rate to a peak of 8% this summer. In typical political bait and switch fashion his democratic Congress allocated 8% of the stimulus money to infrastructure projects. Instead of infrasturture jobs Congress gave us cornucopia of social programs that have been on their wish list for decades, leaving the President with egg on his face.
The
unemployment rate has already reached…
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The Obama 10 year budget includes trillions in new spending programs at a time when tax revenues are declining at a precipitous rate.
The projected deficit in the
Obama Budget is $7.0 trillion for the decade 2010 to 2019. That's the good news!
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has concluded that, if the Obama budget were approved, the federal government would actually run even larger
deficits averaging nearly $1 trillion a year over the next decade. The cumulative deficit from 2010-19 would be $9.3 trillion, according to the report - $2.3 trillion more than the Obama administration's forecast. The main reason for the difference in budget estimates is a difference in economic growth, with congressional views of long-term growth less optimistic than those of the White House. …
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Now that Standard and Poor's has cut its outlook on the U.K.'s AAA
credit rating, can the U.S. be far behind. We're headed down the same primrose path, according to Bill Gross co-chief investment officer of PIMCO, who predicts that the U.S. "will eventually loose its top rating". How did we get to this sorry state of affairs?
Unbridled spending and borrowing - The U.S. is boosting its debt sales to $3.25 trillion for the fiscal years ending Sept 30th pushing the nation's "marketable debt" to an unprecedented $6.36 trillion. The Federal Reserve's custodial holdings of Treasuries for foreign accounts have already risen to $1.9 trillion.
But the past is only prelude to the Obama fiscal future. Further deterioration of the dollar and our credit rating is a virtual certainty as…
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Tax havens! Greedy Wall Street bankers! Hedge fund money lenders! Speculators! Shameful profiteers! President Obama's populist demagogic outcries against America's 200-year history of free market capitalism seem limitless. My immigrant grandparents are undoubtedly turning over in their graves to hear such blasphemy from the mouth of the President of the United States.
Obama's most recent target - those evil Caribbean tax havens. The current tax-deferral system is merely a ban-aid on a tax system that is openly hostile to American multinational companies. No other major industrial country treats its international business interests with such disdain and puts its companies at such a competitive disadvantage in the global economy. Then we wonder why we have such a large trade deficit.
A German firm doing
business in Ireland, say, pays no German income…
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"A man younger than 30 who's not a liberal has no heart and a man older than 30 who's not a conservative has no brain" - Winston Churchill.
Spending his formative years in Paris and then returning to complete college and graduate school at the American University of Paris, my son became deeply steeped in French cradle-to -grave socialism, never failing to extol its virtues. A self proclaimed "caviar socialist", my caviar - his socialism, lamented how hardened we fiscally conservative "old people" had become to the wishes of the "people". The mean spirited American ideal of education, hard work and opportunity for all was just a bromide invented by the American bourgeoisie in a nefarious plot to stifle the true wishes of the "people".
"Ah, for those carefree days, when my…
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Obamanomics - a "Bush" league plan for job creation. Job creation was tepid during the Bush years and it is likely to be even less robust in the Obama years.
The respected
Blue Chip economic forecasters, expect the unemployment rate, which surged to 8.5% last month, to peak at 9.6% in first quarter 2010. For the unemployment rate to fall, we must not only increase the number of
jobs, but that increase must exceed the expected increase in the size of the
labor force. In other words, merely increasing the number of Americans working will not necessarily decrease the unemployment rate. Today there are
154 million Americans in the labor force and just to maintain the
status quo, 2.0 million new jobs must be created annually…
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"Rather go to bed with out dinner than rise in debt" - Benjamin Franklin.
President Obama is attempting not merely to expand the role of the federal government but to put it in such a dominant position that its power can never be rolled back. Obamanomics is the means to that end. Obamanomics represents change with unconscionable trillion dollar annual deficits leading us to the brink of national insolvency. And to what end - to remake the United States into a mirror image of a European social democracy?
The prospect of Treasury flooding the world with dollars to support trillion dollar annual deficits for the next decade is alarming, and the world is rightly getting nervous. If China and other foreign creditors lose their appetite for U.S. debt, the result will…
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The road to insolvency is paved with
red ink. How can the United States become
insolvent? Easy, just add the Obamanomics deficits, as laid out in the President's ten-year plan, to the existing $11 trillion
national debt and it will not be long before the US is unable to meet its financial obligations. Presently, debt held by the Social Security Trust Fund and other governmental agencies is $4.4 trillion, plus the remainder of the debt (owed to citizens or "foreign" owners) is $6.6 trillion. Approximately 50% of US debt is owed to
foreigners, up from 31% in 2000, and this debt will undoubtedly continue to climb. If China and other foreign creditors lose their appetite for US debt, the result will be catastrophic for the dollar…
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During the Bush years, the national outlays rose from $1.9 trillion in 2001 to $3.0 trillion in 2008, and the country went from enjoying a surplus of $128 million in 2001 to suffering a deficit of $459 million in 2008. We called Bush irresponsible. Perhaps the fiscal 2009 deficit of $1.75 billion should be viewed as an anomaly since it's the direct result of the $700 billion Bush TARP plan and the $800 billion Obama Stimulus Plan, both implemented to ameliorate the effects of the financial crisis and recession. But how do we justify an average deficit of
$700 billion annually from 2010 to 20019, which according to the
Obama budget, will be boom times? GDP will be likely rise to an eye-popping $23 trillion in 2019…
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