Why The Reagan Recovery Was Much More Impressive Than Obama's

James Pethokoukis, The American Enterprise Institute Blog

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-the-reagan-recovery-was-much-more-impressive-than-obamas-2012-1#ixzz2jOpJoXeiMy pal Joe Weisenthal over at Business Insider just wrote a piece – in response to a post I wrote earlier today — with the delightfully provocative and contrarian headline, “Why The Obama Recovery Has Been Much More Impressive Than Reagan’s.”
Nope, I’m not making this up. See for yourself.
Let’s be perfectly clear, the Reagan Recovery (RR) has been far stronger than the Obama Recovery (OR). I think that is beyond dispute, really.
– In the first ten quarters of the OR, GDP is up a total of 6 percent. During the first ten quarters of the RR, GDP rose 15 percent.  Point for Reagan.
– In the first ten quarters of the OR, the economy created 790,00 jobs. During the first ten quarters of the RR, the economy created 7.5 million jobs  Point for Reagan, especially given the U.S. workforce is a third bigger today than it was in the early 1980s.
– In the first ten quarters of the OR, real disposable personal income rose at an annual average pace of 0.8 percent. During the first ten quarters of the RR, real disposable personal income rose at annual average pace of 5.4 percent. Point for Reagan. Game. Set. Match.
But Brother Weisenthal is making a subtler, more subjective point. He is arguing that, for a number of reasons, the Obama Recovery is more impressive than the Reagan Recovery. Not stronger, more impressive because Obama was dealt a worse hand. Among Weisenthal’s points:
1. “There are at least some economists who argue that post-financial crisis economies experience unusually slow growth for years and years.”
Me: Indeed, there are. But there are also some who disagree.  A Federal Reserve study released last November found the following:

Whether a recession is associated with a banking or financial crisis does not have a statistically significant effect on the pace of growth following recession troughs. … Banking and financial crises are associated with more severe recessions – deeper in the case of emerging market economies and longer in the case of the advanced economies – but do not appear to impose additional restraint to recoveries beyond the depth and duration.

2. “The problem is that Pethokoukis is … defining housing bust purely in terms of housing construction, while ignoring the real elephant in the room: The collapse in home prices, and the knock-on effects it has had on the economy.”
Me: I don’t disagree that the “knock on effect” such as loss of wealth may well be a drag on growth. That Fed study makes the same point:  … “recoveries from recessions associated with severe housing downturns are found to be slower.” Well, there is a difference between slow and virtually non-existent, right? Again, the Reagan  Recovery 10-quarter growth rate was 6 percent vs. 4.6 percent for the average post-WWII recovery vs. 2.4 percent for the Obama Recovery. And
And the impact of a deleveraging and a reverse wealth effect are not as clear as Weisenthal contends. Note that personal consumption as increased for 10 straight quarters and the savings rate remains extraordinarily low. But I think this chart, from the NY Times, raises big questions about the deleveraging argument:

Where is the deleveraging? It looks like debt has shifted from private to public. Let me quote a Michael Pento piece from BI, of all places: “Although it is certainly true that after decades of overly speculative borrowing, individuals and corporations are paying down debt, rebuilding their savings, and generally repairing their respective balance sheets. But these activities cannot be faulted for our economic malaise. In fact, as a country, we haven’t deleveraged at ALL. All the moves made by the private sector have been vastly outpaced by the federal government’s efforts to add leverage to the economy.”

3. If you really want an apples-to-apples comparison, it’s hard to fathom why Reagan doesn’t have to answer for a recession happening so soon on his watch, and why he only gets measured on those two years. What’s mor …  the 1984-1988 period was pretty average, so we’re really just talking about two years of really impressive morning-in-America growth.
Me: I think Paul Volcker cranking interest rates through the roof might have had a role in the recession as he attempted to squeeze out the inflation of the 1970s. The 1981-82 recession was the culmination of really 16 years of economic mismanagement. One sign of this: The Dow industrials fell by two-thirds when adjusted for inflation from 1966-1982. (From 1983-1988, the S&P composite notched a real return of 13 percent a year.) The entire previous decade marked by tremendous economic volatility, high unemployment,high inflation. Reagan inherited a mess.
As for GDP growth, it averaged 4.4 percent from 1983-1988 vs. roughly 3.3 percent since WWII. So I am pretty sure growth was markedly above average.  A recent IMF forecast, by the way, predicts sub-3 percent US GDP growth through 2016.

4. “We could of course go on, and point to several other factors in Obama’s favor, such as the fact that tax rates had already been lowered quite a bit heading into his presidency, taking away one easy form of stimulus, or the fact that a major trading partner, Europe, has been in crisis virtually the whole time of Obama’s Presidency, or the fact that Obama faced a Congress who threatened to cause the U.S. to default, or the fact that interest rates were ultra-low already, again taking away one form of stimulus from Obama.”
Me: Gosh, I wonder what U.S. GDP growth would have been in the 1980s had China been the second largest economy in the world growing at 10 percent a year, boosting global growth. Instead, it was the stagnating Soviet Union in the number two spot.  In the 1980s, one-third of the planet lived under communism sapping all that human vitality and creativity (and trade) out of the world economy. And I am not sure about JW’s point about taxes and interest rates. Is he saying that Obama has a much more constructive tax and rate environment and still couldn’t get the economy cooking?
 Bottom line: People were amazingly pessimistic heading into the 1980s after the economically tumultuous 1970s. America seemed to be in decline both economically and militarily. And corporate America was desperately in need of restructuring. (Thanks, Bain!) Obama inherited a much healthier non-financial private sector.
This is what the American people had just gone through, by the way (via MeasuringWorth):

Imagine going back in time and showing these economic statistics from the next 25 years:

Growth up, stocks up, inflation down. Oh, and the Soviet Union gone. Safer, Stronger. Better. Instead of the Soylent Green future of diminished expectations people were predicting in the 1970s, we got something more like the shiny, growthy one shown in Back to the Future II.
Obama has some big shoes to fill.

This post originally appeared at The American Enterprise Institute Blog. Copyright 2013.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-the-reagan-recovery-was-much-more-impressive-than-obamas-2012-1#ixzz2jOp2ldK2

Comments on Trayvon

I found this post and wanted to comment on it, but found the Comments closed (Don't you HATE when that happens...), so I decided to re-post it on MY blog, so I could comment on it....

From "The Audacity of Despair, collected prose, links and occasional venting from David Simon"

The article titled simply, "Trayvon" posted on July 13th, 2013

You can stand your ground if you’re white, and you can use a gun to do it. But if you stand your ground with your fists and you’re black, you’re dead.
In the state of Florida, the season on African-Americans now runs year round. Come one, come all.  And bring a handgun. The legislators are fine with this blood on their hands. The governor, too. One man accosted another and when it became a fist fight, one man — and one man only — had a firearm. The rest is racial rationalization and dishonorable commentary.
If I were a person of color in Florida, I would pick up a brick and start walking toward that courthouse in Sanford. Those that do not, those that hold the pain and betrayal inside and somehow manage to resist violence — these citizens are testament to a stoic tolerance that is more than the rest of us deserve.  I confess, their patience and patriotism is well beyond my own.
Behold, the lewd, pornographic embrace of two great American pathologies:  Race and guns, both of which have conspired not only to take the life of a teenager, but to make that killing entirely permissible.  I can’t look an African-American parent in the eye for thinking about what they must tell their sons about what can happen to them on the streets of their country.  Tonight, anyone who truly understands what justice is and what it requires of a society is ashamed to call himself an American.

What gets me about this article is the fact that it's nothing but raw emotion.  The Author doesn't care about justice, who is right, who is wrong or the facts about anything.  The verdict didn't go the way he wanted so let's destroy the system.

First let's look at the "Stand Your Ground Law".  About 1/3rd of all the claims on Stand Your Ground were filed by African Americans in Florida, even though they make up only about 1/6th of Florida's Population.

Second, let's look at the "Race Issue".  George Zimmerman isn't "White", he's half Peruvian and Half Jewish, hell he went to Prom with a black girl that he had dated in High School.  From the time he was 6 to 11 he lived in a Black household, his Business partner is black and so is his grand father.  To top it off, he tutored black kids for free in an after school program, after it was officially cancelled by the State.  Does this sound like the kind of guy that "hated" black people?

Finally, let's talk about Trayvon, he wasn't some little, tiny, innocent 12 year old as he was portrayed by the big media outlets.  He was a towering over 6' tall, fully developed teenager constantly getting into trouble.  He lived in Miami with his mother, but his mother sent him nearly 4 hours north to stay with his Father in Sanford, after he got suspended from School (AGAIN), for writing Graffiti on a wall in school and because they found a bag with traces of Marijuana in it.  At the time, they also found a bunch of jewelry in his backpack with a screwdriver, which Martin had said was given to him by a "friend" which he wouldn't name.

Draw your own conclusions, but from what I see, the African American community enjoys protection from "Stand Your Ground" at a disproportionate rate to the rest of the population, Zimmerman was anything BUT racist and Trayvon was anything BUT an innocent bystander.  People want to make this about race, but it's not.  It's simply a tragedy of circumstances and no amount of Bricks, Race Baiting or Punditry will ever change that fact.

Obama Administration Set to Deport Christian Family Fleeing Persecution

In 2010 a U.S. Immigration Judge granted the Romeike family political asylum, based upon the fact that the German Government was attempting to remove their kids from them.  What was their hideous crime that would cause the German Government to take the draconian measures of removing the Romeike Children from their home?  Why they were Home Schooling their children, and even worse teaching them Christian Values.  These are things that are currently illegal in Germany and will no longer be tolerated.

Fast forward to 2013, and if you listen to the Obama Administration while making the following proclamation on Religious Freedom Day, you would think they would be on the Romeike families side right?:

“Today, we also remember that religious liberty is not just an American right; it is a universal human right to be protected here at home and across the globe. This freedom is an essential part of human dignity, and without it our world cannot know lasting peace.”

“As we observe Religious Freedom Day, let us remember the legacy of faith and independence we have inherited, and let us honor it by forever upholding our right to exercise our beliefs free from prejudice or persecution…”

Yet at the same time U.S. Attorney, Eric Holder is moving to have them deported!  The Administration claims that the families fundamental rights have not been violated by the German Government's law forbidding families from homeschooling, so they've asked the courts to withdraw the families political asylum and have them deported back to Germany!

The Home School legal Defense Association (HSLDA) is representing the Romeikes family and are doing what they can to have them stay in the US.  The HSLDA issued the following statement:

“The U.S. law of asylum allows a refugee to stay in the United States permanently if he can show that he is being persecuted for one of several specific reasons. Among these are persecution for religious reasons and persecution of a ‘particular social group.’”

“In most asylum cases, there is some guesswork necessary to figure out the government’s true motive—but not in this case. The Supreme Court of Germany declared that the purpose of the German ban on homeschooling was to ‘counteract the development of religious and philosophically motivated parallel societies.’”

“This sounds elegant, perhaps, but at its core it is a frightening concept. This means that the German government wants to prohibit people who think differently from the government (on religious or philosophical grounds) from growing and developing into a force in society.”

“The Romeikes’ case is before the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. The case for the government is officially in the name of the Attorney General of the United States. The case is called Romeike v. Holder. Thus, the brief filed by the U.S. Department of Justice is filed on behalf of the attorney general himself—although we can be reasonably certain he has not personally read it. Nonetheless, it is a statement of the position of our government at a very high level.”

“We argued that Germany is a party to many human rights treaties that contain specific provisions that protect the right of parents to provide an education that is different from the government schools. Parents have the explicit right to give their children an education according to their own philosophy.”

“While the United States government argued many things in their brief, there are three specific arguments that you should know about.”

“First, they argued that there was no violation of anyone’s protected rights in a law that entirely bans homeschooling. There would only be a problem if Germany banned homeschooling for some but permitted it for others.”

“A second argument is revealing. The U.S. government contended that the Romeikes’ case failed to show that there was any discrimination based on religion because, among other reasons, the Romeikes did not prove that all homeschoolers were religious, and that not all Christians believed they had to homeschool.”

“This argument demonstrates another form of dangerous “group think” by our own government. The central problem here is that the U.S. government does not understand that religious freedom is an individual right. One need not be a part of any church or other religious group to be able to make a religious freedom claim. Specifically, one doesn’t have to follow the dictates of a church to claim religious freedom—one should be able to follow the dictates of God Himself.”

“One final argument from Romeikes deserves our attention. One of the grounds for asylum is if persecution is aimed at a “particular social group.” The definition of a “particular social group” requires a showing of an “immutable” characteristic that cannot change or should not be required to be changed. We contend that German homeschoolers are a particular social group who are being persecuted by their government.”

If returned to Germany, the Romeike family will be torn apart by the German Government, facing fines, Jail time and the removal of the children. 

To Many Hands Out, How Will We Pay?

When we look at what's going on with our economy, one has to wonder.  How will the United States pay for so many people on the Federal Dole?
Let's consider for a moment that we have about 10,000 people per day that are signing up for Food Stamps, or roughly 300,000 per month.
On top of that we have thousands on a daily basis signing up for Welfare.
On top of that we have around 10,000 people per day retiring and collecting Social Security (which is a pay as you go program, there is no trust fund)
On top of all these handouts to non producers, we also have the Federal Government adding about 100 new employees per day.
So you might be sitting there saying, Yeah, we're a big country, what's the big deal.  Here's the big deal.  We're only adding around 150,000 jobs a month to the economy.  Yes, you heard that right.  We have around 300,000 new retirees per month collecting Social Security and over 300,000 NEW people collecting Food Stamps plus who knows how many collecting Welfare EVERY month and yet only 150,000 new jobs a month to support all of this.  How will we pay for it all?  I just don't see it happening.

Sanchez and Others Further Goals of Political Elites

Yesterday I was driving along to a Job site when I heard Rick Sanchez on the Radio talking about how Millionaires get away with only paying 10 and 15% in income taxes.  So I promptly called up WIOD and explained to him that he was mistaken, when people invest.... oops, he cut me off and hung up on me and proceeded to say "... In the Cayman Islands and other places to hide their money and keep from paying taxes".

Wow, I thought to myself.  Is this guy REALLY this misinformed or is he just trying to gain a Populist position to increase his ratings.  After all, he did just recently take up the 3PM to 6PM slot on WIOD.  I was heartened to hear that many of those calling tried to set him straight on how income earned ANYWHERE in the world, had to be paid by U.S. Citizens.  Even if that income was earned outside of this country and we are one of a very few countries that actually does this.  As an example, a French or British citizen living and earning money in the U.S. isn't subject to French or British taxes, but the reverse is not true!  We REALLY have one of the worst taxing structures in the country.  Back to the story though, next thing you know there was a guy that called and agreed with Rick.  He proclaimed that he worked for a Private Equity Fund, where the Millionaires did nothing but try to avoid taxation by "hiding" funds in other countries.

I tried calling back but of course they wouldn't take my calls anymore so I guess I'll have to rage against the machine here on MY format.

So here's what I would have said, if I had actually had a chance to talk.

First of all Rick, getting a paycheck is not the same as investing in a Private Equity Fund, Mutual Fund or any other kind of investment.  Why?  Because just as you didn't walk into WIOD and hand them over a Million dollars to invest in their operation, the average working stiff doesn't INVEST in his employer.  He's just there with his hand out at the end of the week asking to get paid for the time he put in.  You see Rick, once you get your paycheck and AFTER you've already paid your taxes on that paycheck (which for you probably averages around 30+ Percent) you can now choose to invest that leftover money in some sort of Mutual Fund or other investment that will hopefully create jobs somewhere.  Rick, are you telling me that we should tax that money which you are essentially GAMBLING in some sort of investment, at the same levels of taxation as regular income?  

Of course not, this is why we have preferential treatment for investments, because otherwise what's the point in taking a gamble, if when you win the Government is going to take half?  As for "Hiding" investments in other countries, I think that people are making business decisions based upon the confiscatory nature of our Federal Government.  If Norway is charging their companies HALF the taxes that we do, doesn't it make business sense to move some of your manufacturing there?  Ask the guys that made the two biggest cruise ships in the world, and they would probably tell you that they wouldn't be able to compete if they made those ships in the U.S. because of the tax and regulatory hurdles.  The same goes for almost any manufacturing operation.  Just look at what Canada is doing.  Even though their dollar has risen by almost 40% in the past 10 years, manufacturing in Canada is up.  Why?  They've lowered Corporate Rates to around 25% (15% Federal and around 10% Provincial).  Here's the kicker.  Even with the lowered rates, revenue is up from all the additional economic activity.  To top it off, even though we, their biggest trading partner have been mired in a deep recession, they've managed to maintain an unemployment rate of around 2% lower than we have, despite the fact that historically Canada has had an unemployment rate of around 3% HIGHER than we have!

Dial Back Spending to 2005 Levels and it will match our Revenues

So here's the thing, STOP empowering Politicians by repeating their claims as facts.  Corporate tax rates in the U.S. are higher than all G7 Nations, tax collection in the U.S. is projected to be 2.7 Trillion, a record, yet as usual they're spending a Trillion over that amount!  The real problem isn't tax collection, it's the insane levels of spending.  Does anyone even realize that since his first year in Office, Obama has spent nearly a Trillion dollars each and every year MORE than what Bush spent for 7 out of 8 years?  We RARELY see reporters talk about how cuts are NEVER cuts, the politicians create a baseline budget of 3 to 10% above the previous year and if the number is less than that it's called a cut, even though it's actually an increase.  The ONLY reason they're able to get away with this lie over and over again is because of people like Rick Sanchez and other media types that REPEAT the lie.

The King is Dead, Long Live the King

Hugo Chavez was a hero to the poor in Venezuela, and many here in the U.S.  What most fail to realize however is that the progress that he made in helping the poor will be short lived.  Why?  Plain and simple, he got lucky.  He took over just at the time that Oil started to skyrocket.  He used those petro dollars to improve the lives of those in Venezuela, but did nothing for the rest of the economy.  Compared to the rest of the region, the Venezuelan economy is in shambles.  To top it off, Venezuela today is even more dependent on Oil dollars than it was before, just as the world is starting to move away from oil.  Ford, GM and Chrysler are all making trucks that run on Natural Gas, cheap and plentiful here in the States and long before it runs out, the move will be to solar and Fuel Cell technology.

Instead of investing in the future, Chavez used oil as his cash cow to finance his socialist dreams.  Even worse, Chavez lavished over 100 Billion dollars on his buddies, while putting at least 1 to 2 Billion in his own pocket of the estimated Trillion Dollars in oil wealth generated since he took over.  What will happen to Venezuela in 10 years when more and more cars, buses, trucks and Power Plants are converted to run on Natural Gas and as Solar continues doubling in efficiency every few years.  Even worse, what would happen to Venezuela if a Conservative takes over the White House in 4 years, and removes most restrictions on drilling, and increases permits on Federal lands, thereby flooding the market with cheap oil?  The U.S. has  the largest untapped reserves in the world.  Just look at what happened during the Reagan era when he conspired with the Saudi's to make oil super cheap, bankrupting the Soviet Union.

Unfortunately, history will look upon Chavez as a short sighted opportunist who beat the populist drum of vilifying the U.S. and Capitalism.  He spread the disease of Socialism in Venezuela and set them up for a major fall.  The King is Dead, Long Live the King.

Climate Reconstruction Shows Long Term Cooling Trend

Climate in northern Europe reconstructed for the past 2,000 years: Cooling trend calculated precisely for the first time

Calculations prepared by Mainz scientists will also influence the way current climate change is perceived / Publication of results in Nature Climate Change

An international team including scientists from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has published a reconstruction of the climate in northern Europe over the last 2,000 years based on the information provided by tree-rings. Professor Dr. Jan Esper's group at the Institute of Geography at JGU used tree-ring density measurements from sub-fossil pine trees originating from Finnish Lapland to produce a reconstruction reaching back to 138 BC. In so doing, the researchers have been able for the first time to precisely demonstrate that the long-term trend over the past two millennia has been towards climatic cooling. "We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low," says Esper. "Such findings are also significant with regard to climate policy, as they will influence the way today's climate changes are seen in context of historical warm periods." The new study has been published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Was the climate during Roman and Medieval times warmer than today? And why are these earlier warm periods important when assessing the global climate changes we are experiencing today? The discipline of paleoclimatology attempts to answer such questions. Scientists analyze indirect evidence of climate variability, such as ice cores and ocean sediments, and so reconstruct the climate of the past. The annual growth rings in trees are the most important witnesses over the past 1,000 to 2,000 years as they indicate how warm and cool past climate conditions were.

Researchers from Germany, Finland, Scotland, and Switzerland examined tree-ring density profiles in trees from Finnish Lapland. In this cold environment, trees often collapse into one of the numerous lakes, where they remain well preserved for thousands of years.

The international research team used these density measurements from sub-fossil pine trees in northern Scandinavia to create a sequence reaching back to 138 BC. The density measurements correlate closely with the summer temperatures in this area on the edge of the Nordic taiga. The researchers were thus able to create a temperature reconstruction of unprecedented quality. The reconstruction provides a high-resolution representation of temperature patterns in the Roman and Medieval Warm periods, but also shows the cold phases that occurred during the Migration Period and the later Little Ice Age.

In addition to the cold and warm phases, the new climate curve also exhibits a phenomenon that was not expected in this form. For the first time, researchers have now been able to use the data derived from tree-rings to precisely calculate a much longer-term cooling trend that has been playing out over the past 2,000 years. Their findings demonstrate that this trend involves a cooling of -0.3°C per millennium due to gradual changes to the position of the sun and an increase in the distance between the Earth and the sun.

"This figure we calculated may not seem particularly significant," says Esper. "However, it is also not negligible when compared to global warming, which up to now has been less than 1°C. Our results suggest that the large-scale climate reconstruction shown by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) likely underestimate this long-term cooling trend over the past few millennia."

No Deal Pending on Sequestration, Because of the Opportunity it Presents

Joe Scarborough got it got it right, when he said that America won't remember the Sequester of 2013 "as some cataclysmic fiscal event", but when he goes on to say about the Republicans that "you would think its leadership would have taken to heart Mr. Obama’s warnings and struck a deal before their abysmal approval ratings sank even lower", he fails to see the point.  Obama had absolutely no intention of striking a deal.  These cuts after all, amount to a paltry 2% of PROJECTED spending (which is always a MINIMUM of 3% higher than the previous year).  As the former White House Chief of Staff to the President, Rahm Emanuel used to always say, "You never let a serious crisis go to waste".  This issue literally presents the President with yet another opportunity to slam the Republicans and get more public support for his programs, his methods, his tax increases and so on.  So what was Obama's end game?  Blow this up to an issue, even though he knew it's a non issue, then blame the Republicans!

 

Think about it, Joe himself reported on how the Republicans wanted to give the President control over exactly what would be cut, yet he refused?  Not only did he refuse, he actually threatened to VETO any bill that gave him that kind of authority and responsibility!  Why would he do this?  Simple, the President doesn't want ANY cuts whatsoever, no matter how small and no matter how much waste is pointed out, but more importantly he wants to have another issue to beat up the Republicans over.  The plan is to hype up the damage to the economy over the next year so the Republicans lose in the Midterm elections.  Obama ends up with Nancy Pelosi in charge of Congress again and he can go back to pushing things like his Climate Change agenda and other tax increases.

DEBT LIMIT - A GUIDE TO AMERICAN FEDERAL DEBT MADE EASY.

For those with short attention spans:
Total Household Debt:                          $140,000.00
Household Income:                                 $21,000.00
Household Spending:                              $38,200.00
New Debt:                                             $16,500.00
Amount Cut:                                                $385.00

Translated to the Federal Government:

Total Federal Debt:             $14,000,000,000,000.00
Federal Income:                    $2,100,000,000,000.00
Federal Spending:                 $3,820,000,000,000.00
New Debt:                            $1,650,000,000,000.00
Amount Cut:                              $38,500,000,000.00

Either way you look at it, it's only about 1% of the budget.  Let's keep in mind this video was made about a year ago with the original budget deal.  The new budget deal calls for "800 Billion" in cuts... [over 10 years], or about 80 Billion a year.  Pretty much all the other numbers are about the same, except the income has increased to around 2.3 Trillion a year.  The new "cuts" will amount to only around 2% or about double the original budget deal a year ago.

If the new numbers were put into the video the amount the guy had "cut" from his budget would be around $800.00 a year, instead of $385.00 a year.  Either way we're talking about tiny, insignificant "cuts" that only perpetuate the incredible levels of spending.

Obama Close to Shutting Down Alaskan Pipeline

The entire NPRA area joins ANWR in now been deemed "Off Limits' by the Obama Administration

President Obama is campaigning as a champion of the oil and gas boom he's had nothing to do with, and even as his regulators try to stifle it. The latest example is the Interior Department's little-noticed August decision to close off from drilling nearly half of the 23.5 million acre National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska.

The area is called the National Petroleum Reserve because in 1976 Congress designated it as a strategic oil and natural gas stockpile to meet the "energy needs of the nation." Alaska favors exploration in nearly the entire reserve. The feds had been reviewing four potential development plans, and the state of Alaska had strongly objected to the most restrictive of the four. Sure enough, that was the plan Interior chose.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar says his plan "will help the industry bring energy safely to market from this remote location, while also protecting wildlife and subsistence rights of Alaska Natives." He added that the proposal will expand "safe and responsible oil and gas development, and builds on our efforts to help companies develop the infrastructure that's needed to bring supplies online. The problem is almost no one in the energy industry and few in Alaska agree with him. In an August 22 letter to Mr. Salazar, the entire Alaska delegation in Congress: 

The Areas we WERE drilling were relatively tiny, in comparison to the size of Alaska or even the U.S.A.

Senators Mark Begich and Lisa Murkowski and Representative Don Young—call it "the largest wholesale land withdrawal and blocking of access to an energy resource by the federal government in decades." This decision, they add, "will cause serious harm to the economy and energy security of the United States, as well as to the state of Alaska." Mr. Begich is a Democrat.

The letter also says the ruling "will significantly limit options for a pipeline" through the reserve. This pipeline has long been sought to transport oil and gas from the Chukchi Sea, the North Slope and future Arctic drilling. Mr. Salazar insists that a pipeline could still be built, but given the Obama Administration's decision to block the Keystone XL pipeline, Alaskans are right to be skeptical.

Alaskans also worry that the National Petroleum Reserve will become the same political football as the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, or ANWR, which Washington has barred from drilling because of dubious environmental objections. The greens now want Congress to rename the energy reserve the "Western Arctic Reserve" to give the false impression that it is a fragile wildlife area. Some parts of the area are environmentally sensitive, but those 1.5 million acres (around Teshekpuk Lake) had already been set aside. Most of the other 11.5 million acres are almost indistinguishable from acreage owned by the state that is being drilled safely nearby.

The feds and Alaskan officials disagree about how much oil and natural gas is in the petroleum reserve. Some early federal estimates put the range between six and 15 billion barrels of oil, but in its latest survey the Bureau of Land Management projects closer to one billion. State officials and industry experts put the figure much higher based on the earlier surveys and improved drilling techniques.

The truth is no one knows. Prudhoe Bay turned out to be much more productive than originally believed, but surely the best strategy is to allow private drillers to risk their own money to find out. The oil and gas industry isn't in the business of drilling dry holes on purpose.

The Interior power play couldn't come at a worse time for Alaska, whose economy and government are heavily reliant on oil jobs and revenues. As recently as the 1980s, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline carried some 2.2 million barrels of oil a day from the North Slope to the port of Valdez. Yet as the once-rich fields of Prudhoe Bay and the Kuparuk River have declined, oil flow has dropped to one-third of that volume. North Dakota recently passed Alaska as the second highest oil-producing state behind Texas.

The problem isn't that Alaska is running out of oil but that federal rules are preventing the state from developing those resources. No matter what Mr. Obama says now, in a second term his great Alaska energy shutout will continue.

This story originated on WSJ

The Five Trillion Dollar Lie

Romney is planning on cutting taxes by 20% across the board, in conjunction with eliminating some tax deductions.  The plan is to broaden the number of people who the Government collects taxes from while at the same time lowering the overall rate.

Obama counters by asserting that this amounts to a Five Trillion Dollar give-away to the rich over the next 10 years.  

The problem with Liberals is that they see taxation as a zero sum game.  They fail to realize that cuts in taxes produces more economic activity that produces more taxes

The whole thing reminds me of the Reagan era.  Let's face it, Reagan had a plan to cut taxes from 75% to 50%, then subsequently to 28%.  So overall, he cut the rates by 67%!  Or more than THREE TIMES what Romney's proposing. If Obama was running against then "Candidate" Reagan, he would have claimed that Reagan's plan would cut taxes by 15 Trillion in today's dollars.  However, the truth is, that Reagan's plan DOUBLED total revenue for the Federal Government over the 8 years that he was President.

In fact, if you look throughout history, every time that tax rates have been cut, Federal Revenue's end up increasing.  Why?  Simple.  When Job Creators get to keep more of their money, they create MORE JOBS.  With more jobs, the government needs to support less people and instead collect taxes from more people   Not just Income taxes, but sales, gas, Import, ... everything.

If we look to history as our guide, when Harding cut taxes from 75% to 25%, unemployment went from near 14% to less than 2% over the next 4 years AND paid down all the debt the Government had racked up from WWI!

When Hoover increased taxes from 25% to 63% in reaction to the Market Crash, instead of the anticipated boom in Revenue, revenue PLUMMETED with new company creation coming to a halt, and unemployment hitting 15%

When FDR increased the rate to 90%, revenue fell even more and unemployment hit nearly 1 in every 4 workers!  A stat that stuck for nearly an ENTIRE DECADE!  Only the War ended up pulling us out of that malaise.

Tax cuts passed after FDR eventually got the economy going again, but since they kept going up and down over the next several decades, not until Reagan was elected did we see another "Harding Style" revival of the economy.

Let's also not forget that the last time the budget was balanced was when Clinton cut the capital gains rate from 28% to 20%.  Sure he increased the "INCOME" tax from 28% top rate to 39%, but that happened during his first term and DID NOT close the budget gap, instead it widened on his first term!

The problem with Liberals is that they see taxation as a zero sum game.  They fail to realize that cuts in taxes produces more economic activity that produces more taxes, more jobs and removes people off government doles.  Increased taxes have the opposite effects, Job creators move to other countries or change operations to get out of paying the increased taxes.  Apple is a perfect example.  Apple used to manufacture most of their components here in the U.S.  With the tax and regulatory environment here in the U.S. becoming increasingly unfavorable, they moved their operations to the Asian rim, where the top rate is 25%, Capital investments are fully tax deductible and Capital Gains taxes are half what they are here and also tax deductible.  What good does it do California and the Federal Government to have an effective rate of nearly DOUBLE, when they've moved their operations offshore?  They now can't collect it.

There is one thing though that's undoubtedly true about that Five Trillion Dollar Number, while Bush added 4 Trillion in debt in his two terms as president, Obama has added 5 Trillion in new debt in just his first term.

Blacks: ‘SLAVISH DEVOTION TO THE DEMOCRAT PARTY’

The Bishop E.W. Jackson, founder of Chesapeake, Virginia-based Exodus Faith Ministries, recently released a controversial video calling for African Americans to make a mass exodus from the Democratic Party. Throughout the clip, Jackson delivers stinging blows to both liberals and the African Americans who continue to support them, while decrying what he sees as a “slavish devotion to the Democrat Party.”

They have insulted us, used us, and manipulated us. They have saturated the black community with ridiculous lies,” he said, speaking directly to the black community. ”They think we are stupid and that these lies will hold us captive while they violate everything we believe as Christians.
”Jackson went into detail in the video, taking aim at the “unholy alliance” that he sees between Democrats, faux-civil rights leaders and Planned Parenthood.
“The Democratic Party has created an unholy alliance between certain so-called civil rights leaders and Planned Parenthood, which has killed unborn black babies by the tens of millions,” he proclaimed. On the morality front, Jackson took issue with the party’s internal debate over “God” being dropped from its platform and derided the notion that homosexuality should be equated “with being black.“ He called the later tenet of the Democratic Party an ”outrageous lie.”

“We as Christians ought to know better. Shame on us for allowing ourselves to be sold to the highest bidder,” Jackson continued, telling his fellow black pastors that they, too, would need to make a decision between supporting Democrats and embracing Jesus.

Blacks should be OUTRAGED by the fact that "Margaret Sanger" is an AWARD that the Democrat Party still gives out, and yet she was one of the BIGGEST racist in the country.  She STARTED Planned Parent hood to "exterminate" the Negro population and would often speak at the women's branch of the KKK!

We're Supposed to Believe a JUNK YouTube Video Did this?

Think about this for a moment.  In countries where the majority of the people don't even have computers, supposedly they're all sitting around watching YouTube Videos disrespecting Mohammed?  Anyone who's seen this video can see that it's CLEARLY an amateur job that could have been put together by kids, yet this is the video that's causing mass rioting all over the world?

In the meantime, when Bill Maher put together a professional FULL FEATURE FILM absolutely SLAMMING Islam, nope, nothing nada!  How does this make any sense folks?    No it seems to me that these people are being purposely riled up to protest on this garbage video while the majority have not even seen it.  In the mean time, instead of our leaders condemning the Riots, the Killing and the all out chaos, INSTEAD .... they're out there "apoligizing" for this video, as if "WE THE PEOPLE" put this dammed thing together! The truth is that this is something that is being used to manipulate people.  To what end, I have no idea but even the Libyan President is saying that all of this was planned!

Romney Can't Help Himself, He Sees a Problem He Fixes It.

On the night of July 6, 1996, 14-year-old Melissa Gay, daughter of Bain Capital executive Robert Gay, went missing in New York City, after going out without permission. Gay went to Mitt Romney, his business partner, and explained the situation.  Mitt Romney, immediately took charge and paid for his 50 employees to fly to NYC and put them all up in a Hotel to assist in the search.

"And so I said," Romney recalled when asked about the incident during a town hall meeting in March 2012, "‘Let’s close the firm, let’s close the company. Let’s all of us fly down to New York and try to find her.’ And so we closed the business, we went home and packed our things, we got a hotel near the airport where we all went to, we set up a headquarters, we met with the detectives with the New York City Police Department, we hired a private investigative firm to help guide us through this process."

Gay, Romney, and team literally fanned out on the streets of Manhattan in suits and ties, distributing 300,000 fliers and asking passersby point-blank if they had seen the missing girl. Their efforts quickly paid off in the form of a phone call from a private residence in Montville, New Jersey, where it turned out Melissa was staying, after going to an all night Rave Party without her parent's permission. She was retrieved by police and reunited with her parents in the early morning hours of July 12.

"She's OK," Robert Gay said in a statement to the Associated Press. "How can you ask for anything more than that?"

Yet people say that "Romney can't relate to people with problems"?  Just watch the video and judge for yourself.

Here Comes Inflation, AGAIN!

Here we go again guys, the Fed is up to no good, and on a Rampage printing money as fast as it can run the presses.  I guess we learned nothing from the 70's and how Inflation got out of control with excessive Government spending.  With all this money flooding the system, Food, Gas and Energy prices, which are already at an all time high are going even higher!  This action will undoubtedly Further push down American's disposable income, which in turn will cause even more job losses!  I mean let's face it, if you're having to spend $100.00 in gas just to go to the restaurant, you probably can't afford to go to that restaurant anymore right?  As Investors business Daily says, 

The government's addition of $1 trillion a year to our nation's debt hangs over this economy like a dark cloud, keeping entrepreneurs and big businesses alike on the sideline. The "fiscal cliff" we're about to go over will sock Americans — especially entrepreneurs — with a tax hike of almost $1 trillion. That's why the economy's dead — not insufficient Fed money printing."

 But don't worry there's a bright side to all this money printing, I'm sure that within just a few years of the coming inflation, we could do like the Germans did in the 1920's and use all that extra cash as a heating source for our homes. Hey at least no one will freeze to death in the Winter of 2016!

Government Motors Losing Almost 50K on Every Volt

Nearly two years after the introduction of the path-breaking plug-in hybrid, GM is still losing as much as $49,000 on each Volt it builds, according to estimates provided to Reuters by industry analysts and manufacturing experts.

Cheap Volt lease offers meant to drive more customers to Chevy showrooms this summer may have pushed that loss even higher. There are some Americans paying just $5,050 to drive around for two years in a vehicle that cost as much as $89,000 to produce.

At this price as little as $199 a month for the lease, it represents an absolute bargain for the Driver, but an absolute Boondogle for the Taxpayers who funded not only the development of the car, but also Government rebates handed back by the Government! ~ Added by NoSocialism.com

And while the loss per vehicle will shrink as more are built and sold, GM is still years away from making money on the Volt, which will soon face new competitors from Ford, Honda and others.

GM's basic problem is that "the Volt is over-engineered and over-priced," said Dennis Virag, president of the Michigan-based Automotive Consulting Group.
And in a sign that there may be a wider market problem, Nissan, Honda and Mitsubishi have been struggling to sell their electric and hybrid vehicles, though Toyota's Prius range has been in increasing demand.

GM's quandary is how to increase sales volume so that it can spread its estimated $1.2-billion investment in the Volt over more vehicles while reducing manufacturing and component costs - which will be difficult to bring down until sales increase.

But the Volt's steep $39,995 base price and its complex technology — the car uses expensive lithium-polymer batteries, sophisticated electronics and an electric motor combined with a gasoline engine — have kept many prospective buyers away from Chevy showrooms.

Some are put off by the technical challenges of ownership, mainly related to charging the battery. Plug-in hybrids such as the Volt still take hours to fully charge the batteries - a process that can been speeded up a bit with the installation of a $2,000 commercial-grade charger in the garage.

PLANT SHUTDOWN

The lack of interest in the car has prevented GM from coming close to its early, optimistic sales projections. Discounted leases as low as $199 a month helped propel Volt sales in August to 2,831, pushing year-to-date sales to 13,500, well below the 40,000 cars that GM originally had hoped to sell in 2012.

Out in the trenches, even the cheap leases haven't always been effective.

A Chevrolet dealership that is part of an auto dealer group in Toms River, New Jersey, has sold only one Volt in the last year, said its president Adam Kraushaar. The dealership sells 90 to 100 Chevrolets a month.

The weak sales are forcing GM to idle the Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant that makes the Chevrolet Volt for four weeks from September 17, according to plant suppliers and union sources. It is the second time GM has had to call a Volt production halt this year.

GM acknowledges the Volt continues to lose money, and suggests it might not reach break even until the next-generation model is launched in about three years.

"It's true, we're not making money yet" on the Volt, said Doug Parks, GM's vice president of global product programs and the former Volt development chief, in an interview. The car "eventually will make money. As the volume comes up and we get into the Gen 2 car, we're going to turn (the losses) around," Parks said.

"I don't see how General Motors will ever get its money back on that vehicle," countered Sandy Munro, president of Michigan-based Munro & Associates, which performs detailed tear-down analyses of vehicles and components for global manufacturers and the U.S. government.

It currently costs GM "at least" $75,000 to build the Volt, including development costs, Munro said. That's nearly twice the base price of the Volt before a $7,500 federal tax credit provided as part of President Barack Obama's green energy policy.

Other estimates range from $76,000 to $88,000, according to four industry consultants contacted by Reuters. The consultants' companies all have performed work for GM and are familiar with the Volt's development and production. They requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of their auto industry ties.

Parks declined to comment on specific costs related to the Volt.

The independent cost estimates obtained by Reuters factor in GM's initial investment in development of the Volt and its key components, as well as new tooling for battery, stamping, assembly and supplier plants — a price tag that totals "a little over" $1 billion, Parks said. Independent estimates put it at $1.2 billion, a figure that does not include sales, marketing and related corporate costs.

Spread out over the 21,500 Volts that GM has sold since the car's introduction in December 2010, the development and tooling costs average just under $56,000 per car. That figure will, of course, come down as more Volts are sold.

The actual cost to build the Volt is estimated to be an additional $20,000 to $32,000 per vehicle, according to Munro and the other industry consultants.

The production cost estimates are considerably higher than those for the Chevrolet Cruze, the Volt's conventional gasoline-engine sister car, which Munro estimates at $12,000 to $15,000 per vehicle.

Production costs typically include such items as parts, material, labor and the cost to run the factory, according to manufacturing expert Ron Harbour, who heads the North American Automotive Practice at Michigan-based consultant Oliver Wyman.

COST PENALTIES

The Volt costs more to build for several reasons, mostly related to the car's richer content, complex technology and still-low sales and production volumes.

The basic model has a higher level of equipment and features than the Cruze, which is assembled in Lordstown, Ohio, and has a starting sales price of $17,925. The Volt also has a number of unique parts, including the battery pack, the electric motor and the power electronics.

Some of GM's suppliers also impose cost penalties on the automaker because the Volt's production volume remains well below projections.

Still, as the company wrestles with how to drive down costs and increase showroom traffic, Parks said the Volt is an important car for GM in other respects.

"It wasn't conceived as a way to make tons of money," he said. "It was a big dip in the technology pool for GM. We've learned a boatload of stuff that we're deploying on other models," Parks said. Those include the Cruze and such future cars as the 2014 Cadillac ELR hybrid.

The same risky strategy — gambling on relatively untested technology — drove massive investments by Toyota Motor Corp in the Prius hybrid and Nissan Motor Co in the Leaf electric car.

Toyota said it now makes a profit on the Prius, which was introduced in the United States in 2000 and is now in its third generation. Sales of the Prius hybrid, which comes in four different versions priced as low as $19,745, have almost doubled so far this year to 164,408.

Other such vehicles haven't done nearly as well. Nissan's pure-electric Leaf, which debuted at the same time as the Volt and retails for $36,050, has sold just 4,228 this year, while the Honda Insight, which has the lowest starting price of any hybrid in the U.S. at $19,290, has sales this year of only 4,801. The Mitsubishi i, an even smaller electric car priced from $29,975, is in even worse shape, with only 403 sales.

Toyota's unveiling of the original Prius caught U.S. automakers off guard. GM, then under the leadership of Rick Wagoner and Bob Lutz, decided it needed a "leapfrog" product to tackle Toyota and unveiled the Volt concept to considerable fanfare at the 2007 Detroit auto show.

The car entered production in the fall of 2010 as the first U.S. gasoline-electric hybrid that could be recharged by plugging the car into any electrical outlet. The Obama administration, which engineered a $50-billion taxpayer rescue of GM from bankruptcy in 2009 and has provided more than $5 billion in subsidies for green-car development, praised the Volt as an example of the country's commitment to building more fuel-efficient cars.

NEXT-GENERATION CAR

GM's investment in the Volt has so far been a fraction of the $5 billion that Nissan said it is spending to develop and tool global production of the Leaf and its associated technologies and the reported $10 billion or more that Toyota has plowed into the Prius and various derivatives over the past decade.

But there will inevitably be more development costs for future generations of GM plug-ins and it could still could be years before GM sells enough Volts to bring the cost down to break even.

The average per-car costs for development and tooling will drop as sales volume rises. But GM will need to sell 120,000 Volts before the per-vehicle cost reaches $10,000 — and that may not occur during the projected five-year life cycle of the first-generation Volt.

Parks said the company also is continuously reducing production costs on the current Volt and its successor. "There is a strong push on the cost of the Gen 2 to get the car to make money and to be more affordable . . . Virtually every component in the next-gen car is going to be cheaper," he said.

One obvious way to pull down costs is to push up volume — but GM is paying a hefty price to do so.

The automaker just ended a special Volt lease program that offered customers a low monthly payment of $279 a month for two years, with some high-volume dealers dropping the payment to $199 a month after receiving incentive money from GM, with down payments as low as $250. The company said about two-thirds of Volt customers in July and August leased their vehicles, compared with about 40 percent earlier this year.

Before GM resorted to discounting Volt leases, sales were averaging just over 1,500 cars a month. A huge part of that reason was consumer push back over the price, according to Virag of Automotive Consulting.

Volt's nearest competitor, the Prius, is priced at $24,795, with a newer version, the Prius Plug-In, starting at $32,795.

Parks said the sales pitch for the Volt was "difficult" because of the sticker price and the car's technical complexity. But the discounted leases have helped lure more non-GM buyers into Chevy showrooms. Their number-one trade-in: Toyota Prius.

Raymond Chevrolet, in suburban Chicago, sells an average 1,000 Chevys a month, including three to seven Volts. Dealership president Mark Scarpelli said that "some people who like the concept of an electric vehicle find it cost-prohibitive."

(Reporting by Paul Lienert, Bernie Woodall and Ben Klayman in Detroit; Editing by Martin Howell & Theodore d'Afflisio)