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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"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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The top 1% of U.S. taxpayers earns 22% of the income and pay nearly 40% of all income taxes. The bottom 50% pays just 3%. We are told that this is unfair, and the "rich" should pay their "fair share". It would probably not overburden the top earners to pay 43% and eliminate all taxes on the bottom 50%. After all, it would only take a 5.5% increase in the amount the top 1% already pays to eliminate the need to collect from the bottom 50%. Can the rich afford it - yes, but can the poor.
Could a house so divided prosper? Given the class-warfare rhetoric from the administration and Congress it appears that this is just the country they wish to create. Use tax credits for the bottom 50%…
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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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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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