Gold Has Soared Over 325% Between 2002 and 2012

Oil Is Up 335% Since The Summer Of 1999

Oil prices have soared over 300% since leaving the $20/barrel range for good in early 2002.

The first time oil hit $19/barrel was in the summer of 1979.

The last time it hit $19/barrel was in January 2002.

Real GDP Per Capita 1980-2000 v. 2000-2012

Up 55% over the earlier twenty year period v. only 6.7% up over the most recent 11 year period.

Consumer Prices Are Up 9.5% In 5 Years

Expensive Oil Since 911 Has Coincided With Slow GDP Growth

Reagan-Bush-Clinton era low energy costs coincided with economic "good times" when real GDP increased 83% over twenty years.

By contrast the last twelve years have witnessed real GDP growth of barely 24% in the face of soaring energy prices.

The country's most urgent need is for lower energy prices, not tax increases. Revenues take care of themselves when the economy is growing well.

Crude Oil Is Priced About Where It Was 5 Years Ago

5yr Gold, NY Spot, Up Over 100% 12/07 to 12/12

From $800 to $1,700 the ounce in five years.

The late 2008 collapse was just a head fake.

5yr GLD Is Up Over 100% 12/2007 to 12/2012

Vanguard Precious Metals and Mining Down 50% 12/07 to 12/12

Your Real Five Year S&P500 Rate Of Return Since October 2007 Is Negative

I've got your real annual rate of return right here. Actually this guy does, but I love showing it. You are down 1.19% every year for the last five years in the S&P500 Index, October 2007 to October 2012.

Buy and hold. Buy and hold. Buy and hold. Buy and hold. Buy and hold. ...

Bye.

"Babes Shall Rule Over Them. And The People Shall Be Oppressed."

"And I will give children [to be] their princes, and babes shall rule over them.

"And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour: the child shall behave himself proudly against the ancient, and the base against the honourable."

-- Isaiah 3:4f.

"Ben Bernanke and other central bankers, like promiscuous parents, compensate and indulge political leaders acting irresponsibly in their stewardship of national economies.

"Sooner or later spoiled children turn out badly, and economies juiced with too much money have their bubbles, inflation and collapse.

"This will all end badly."

-- Peter Morici, Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, here

Crazed Bomber Killed 38 School Children In This Building In 1927

In Bath, Michigan, northeast of Lansing.

Story here.

Human evil is not a recent invention.

Workin' Farmer Style

See it here.

Bank Failure Number 51 In 2012

Bank failure number 51 in 2012 is Community Bank of the Ozarks, Sunrise Beach, Missouri, costing the FDIC $10.4 million.

When asked to show me the money, they didn't have it.

Rare Sighting Of The Equally Rare "Green Whale"

Time Magazine's Unperson Of The Year

Libertarian Louis Woodhill Panders Left And Right

Louis Woodhill, here, who wants to go over the cliff to save the country:


"The electorate, as a whole, understands economics. ... (collectively) the voters know everything . . .."

Which is why they voted for divided government. Democrats were right! Republicans were right!

Uh huh.

Internet Pioneer Comes Out For Gridlock

Marc Andreessen, here:

"The presumption is that we want the government to do things. I'm pro-gridlock," Andreessen said. "It doesn't bother me in the least if government is all ground to a halt." ...

"'Rise above' I completely disagree with it," Andreessen said, speaking of the motto coined by CNBC to resolve Washington's budget woes. "I think it's well-intentioned, but I think it's undesirable and I think it's dangerous."

Growth Of Single Person Households To Blame For Income Inequality

The lesson? Get married and stay married. The tax code is your friend.

As reported here:

Without a corresponding increase in the measured income inequality for U.S. individuals, the increase in the measured income inequality for U.S. households has been almost entirely driven by the increase in the number of single person households over time.

So income inequality among U.S. households isn't increasing because the rich are getting richer. That means that policies intended to right this situation by going after the rich in the name of "fairness" are guaranteed to fail, because the real cause of the increase in income inequality among U.S. households over time is something that cannot be fixed by such actions.

If only the people pushing such policies could see that....

Boosting Minimum Wage 40% Reduces Youth Employment 25%

You talkin' to me?

Way to go, Brownie!

Story here:

In November 2007, teens represented 4.0% of the entire U.S. workforce. In November 2012, teens account for just 3.1% of the reduced U.S. workforce. At this point, jobs that were most likely to have been held by teens are 14 times more likely to have been negatively affected by the employment situation over the past five years than their numbers among the entire U.S. workforce would suggest.

In retrospect, it seems that the U.S. Congress' action to boost the minimum wage by nearly 41% in three stages from 2007 through 2009 without doing anything to boost the revenues of teen employers by an appropriate percentage to compensate them for their higher costs of doing business during this period of time wasn't such a hot idea.

Now Color Michigan Blue Like Indiana

Forced unionism states are in yellow.

Rules For Radical Republicans: Bush Tax Cuts Edition

Rule 1: Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.

The enemy knows the Congress is a coequal branch of the government. The problem is the Republicans and the Speaker of the House do not. You actually have more power even than that. You have 30 Republican governors. Start using them.

Rule 2: Never go outside the experience of your people.

"New revenues from the rich" is the enemy's idea, not Republicans'.

Rule 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy.

Bush is ancient history. Time to make your own and repudiate the past. Pass something in the House which goes farther than Bush ever dreamed, and send it to the Senate to enrage the enemy.

Rule 4: Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.

The enemy is funding gold-plated union jobs and pensions for federal and state workers at the expense of middle class Americans in the private sector who enjoy neither. It's time you reminded the middle class about that.

Rule 5: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.

Use surrogates saying: Moochelle. Crony capitalist. Ideologue. Bolshevik. Dictator. Muslim sympathizer. Race baiter. Panetta flies cross country too much at taxpayer expense. The vice president thinks FDR talked to a television camera.

Rule 6: A good tactic is one your people enjoy.

Republicans can campaign, too. Go frequently to friendly territory and bring 2016 hopefuls with you.

Rule 7: A tactic that drags on for too long becomes a drag.

The idea of compromise became a drag a long time ago. Stop waiting for it. Go on the offensive instead.

Rule 8: Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period.

The enemy is trying to combine everything into one event, "the fiscal cliff", which tells you they perceive they are at a disadvantage. They are. You need to keep the events separate and do things piecemeal. Raising the debt ceiling should come later, crossing the tax rates fiscal cliff should come first. Fight for spending cuts later with the debt ceiling, not now. Sequestration already gave you some spending cuts, which you should embrace.

Rule 9: The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself.

The greatest fear of the Democrats is a debt ceiling fueled government shutdown over spending cuts, but it wasn't the end of the world under Bill Clinton, and it won't be the end of the world if it happens in 2013. You actually won that in 2011. Do it again, except bigger, to satisfy the ratings agencies. Besides, it's red meat for the base.

Rule 10: Maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

No more appearances with the enemy, especially on the golf course. You are third in line for the presidency. Start acting like it. Visit Afghanistan to encourage the troops.

Rule 11: If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside.

The place you need to get to is the same place you were at two times when the president extended the Bush tax rates, so you should know the way. An uncompromising new insistence on tax reform and much lower tax rates might get you there. It changes the subject and focuses the argument on relieving the taxpayers. The president upped the ante. You need to see him and raise him. Aim for the moon, and you might get into orbit.

Rule 12: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

You might not get the radical tax reform, about which you must be deadly serious, but settling for making the Bush tax cuts permanent is a constructive alternative.

Rule 13: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.

Focus your attention on answering the partisanship of individuals in the pundit class. Don't fire Tea Party men. Enlist them in attacking the enemy. They are good at it, and they will repay you with support later.

The Ignorant Statement Of The Day Comes From Jeff Immelt, Chairman Of GE

The ignorant statement of the day comes from Jeff Immelt, chairman of GE, here:

"The one thing that actually works, state run communism a bit– may not be your cup of tea, but their [Chinese] government works."

Communism is nothing if not "state-run", as in, run by the Communist Party. As it stands, the statement is meaningless.

Actually China's Communist Party practices a form of state capitalism, just like we do, which in the good old days was called fascism. And it only works until it doesn't, at the price of human repression, which goes unreported in the west. You know, like how many abortions were performed this week in Peoria or Shanghai. Still, I don't see a lot of people flocking to China. I see Chinese who have gotten rich trying to get out.

And whereas we build things that actually get used, using fiat currency, China builds things using fiat currency which don't get used, including massive numbers of buildings and highways. Of course, the grandmothers of Bolshevism in our country do the same thing as the Chinese. They build massive numbers of churches which are for the most part vacant all week.

You say socialism, I say national socialism, but let's call the whole thing off.

If You're Unemployed, Just Remember . . .

. . . you're expendable, just like an abortion.

TAC Analysis Of Montana Senate Race Never Mentions Libertarian Spoiler

Michael Tracey for The American Conservative here spends zero time contemplating how the Libertarian Party candidate easily spoiled the race for the Republican by bleeding off his votes, thus electing the Democrat to the US Senate in Montana.

Criticizing libertarianism at TAC evidently conflicts with the program.

Obama's Popular Vote Total Reaches 50.93%

They keep working on that tax increase mandate!

Memo To Jim DeMint And Heritage Foundation: Limited Government, Conservative v. Libertarian

Memo To Senator Jim DeMint and The Heritage Foundation:

Conservatives and libertarians DO NOT share the same understanding of limited government.

Libertarians believe in limited government in order to be free to do anything they want, as long as it doesn't hurt anybody.

Conservatives believe in limited government as the larger, necessary and inevitable political expression of the moral limitations they place on themselves as individuals who respect the laws of Nature and of Nature's God, transgressions against which hurt others and especially the individual whether he recognizes it or not.

Limited government can only exist where there is self-limitation pre-existing. It cannot be voted into existence.

It begins with the personal moral experience of a conversion taught variously in human experience, but well-expressed by the ancient Greek maxim "Nothing too much". We know it more vaguely in our time, for example, as conservation and good stewardship of resources as opposed to relentless consumption and production, or as savings and thrift in economics as opposed to repeatedly rehypothicated credit and debt, or as abstinence outside of marriage and fidelity within it, or in law as a scale of punishment of infractions against these appropriate to their severity.

Libertarians can know these things only because conservatives have told them, otherwise they do not have it in them, deluded as they are that the possibilities in life are infinite. Libertarianism is thus an infantile idea from which one should grow up. 

How To Distinguish Between A Libertarian And A Conservative

The libertarian is the pot-smoking fudge-packer and the conservative would be the guy running away from him as fast as he can.

I Don't Call Sen. Jim DeMint "Demented" For Nothing

Here he is in all his confused glory:

"I think the new debate in the Republican Party needs to be between conservatives and libertarians. We have a common foundation of individual liberty and constitutionally limited government, and we can rationally debate some of the things we disagree on. I don’t think the government should impose my morals or anyone else’s on someone else, but at the same time I don’t want the government purging morals and religious values from our society. We can find a balance there. It really gets back to decentralization. The tolerance is going to come from decentralization and letting people make their own decisions, but we have to be able to put up with societal stigma of things we don’t like."

No, we don't have a common foundation.

Libertarians believe in freedom as license. Conservatives believe in ordered liberty, that there cannot be true freedom unless we respect the transcendent moral order. In recent times libertarians were easily allied with Democrats on social issues, and finally gave up on that and moved rightward on economic concerns. In doing so they demonstrated their unprincipled shape-shifting for what it is, and that Republicans have been too stupid to reject them. For example, I can't recall a single prominent Republican or so-called conservative descrying the many Republican victories spoiled by libertarians in either of the recent elections in 2010 and 2012. What is more we have idiot conservatives like Sarah Palin telling us we must make room for libertarians in the Republican Party while the Libertarian Party itself is encouraged by the races it has spoiled for Republicans by electing Democrats. This from the woman who vigorously supported John McCain and TARP.

Libertarians are not natural allies of conservatives, but they are of Republicans just as they are of Democrats, because the Republican Party has been liberalized beyond recognition. That a so-called conservative like Jim DeMint is friendly toward libertarianism tells you all you need to know about the state of conservatism in America. Conservatism in America is really and truly dead.

One of the favorite ideas of libertarians illustrates my point. The idea comes by analogy from Adam Smith's invisible hand at work in economics, namely, that the electorate always gets it right (Jude Wanniski). Is there a Republican who voted for Romney saying any such thing anywhere in the country now that Obama is re-elected? I doubt it. But that is the position of John Tamny and his ilk at Forbes Magazine. John Tamny, by the way, would like you to be a completely rootless person, with no house, no wife, no children, paying no property taxes for good schools and contributing no commitment to church and community but owning just two bags and a passport so that his beloved capitalist boss can send you wherever and whenever he needs you.

Good government, as the Scriptures teach, is a terror to bad behavior, not to good. That means there are moral absolutes, against which all libertarians do chafe, now more, now less, starting with "It is not good that the man should be alone."

To Demented Jim there are no such absolutes. He's a moral relativist who doesn't have the courage of his own moral convictions. "My morals" he says, as if they belong only to him and didn't come from the Author of Life. St. Paul, I remind you, ridiculed the Corinthian Christians for such an attitude, saying "What do you have that you did not receive?" Our faults are as ancient as the way of escape.

The Heritage Foundation had become reprehensible enough for having embraced Reagan liberalism, which contributed materially to what became the tyranny of the ObamaCare mandates. Now Heritage is to be headed up by the confused conservative DeMint, if he really isn't just a stealth libertarian. Doesn't that tell you everything you need to know about Heritage, that it remains to this day so intellectually confused about the meaning of conservatism that it welcomes a libertarian sleeper?

Conservatives should revolt against Heritage's choice of Sen. Jim DeMint, but don't count on it. I reckon there are only 500,000 of us in the whole country, and that's being generous. In the end, Sen. DeMint and Heritage will come to nothing, and the Republicans too if they are not careful.

"SAVE YOURSELVES FROM THIS CROOKED GENERATION!"

Food Stamps In September Hit New Record 47.7 Million Americans

Hm. There's that number "47" again.

Data here.

Libertarian Republican Sen. Rand Paul Recommends Going Galt On Fiscal Cliff

Gee, what a shock, a libertarian recommending "strategic withdrawal" on new taxes. Does anyone think libertarians really believe in any principles at all?

It's the one principle they do believe in which is at work here: freedom, a license to do anything.

They are no less culpable, and no less liberal, than the liberal Republicans they attack for raising taxes.

Senator Rand Paul, here:

"Why don't we let the Democrats pass whatever they want? If they are the party of higher taxes, all the Republicans vote present and let the Democrats raise taxes as high as they want to raise them, let Democrats in the Senate raise taxes, let the president sign it and then make them own the tax increase. And when the economy stalls, when the economy sputters, when people lose their jobs, they know which party to blame, the party of high taxes. Let's don't be the party of just almost as high taxes."

It's a kind of paraprosdokian like "We had to destroy the village in order to save it": We have to raise taxes in order to cut taxes.

Do House Republicans, who would have to surrender their majority and vote "present" on a Democrat tax bill, really want to be remembered for crashing the economy even more to make a political point? Haven't enough of us lost our jobs already? Hasn't the economy already sputtered for too many years?

If libertarians had their way, we'd all be smoking the dope that makes Senator Paul think this way.

How about just doing the right thing for its own sake and continuing to be the party of no new taxes in the face of economic stagnation, and let the chips fall where they may?

The Enemy Of My Enemy Is My Friend, Illustrated

Everything Hitler, including Mein Kampf, is big in India:

Hitler’s popularity in India is not the result of anti-Semitism, says Navras Jaat Aafreedi, a professor of social sciences at Gautam Buddha University in New Delhi. He says it stems from a dearth of European history classes in schools. To the extent that German history is taught, he says, it’s in the context of “the view that had Hitler not weakened the British Empire by the Second World War, the British would have never voluntarily left India.” 

Read all about it, here.

The Sign Read: "Pants 50% Off!"

But it was more like 75% off.

Why Did We Get Obama In 2008? Because A Republican Bailed.

Why did we get Obama in 2008?

Because a good conservative bailed in 2006.

Namely, conservative Republican Senator Peter Fitzgerald from Illinois, who chose not to run for re-election in order to spend more time with his needy son in his formative years, according to statements he made on Tom Roeser's "Political Shoot-Out" radio program at the time on WLS, Chicago. I know. I was there. I listened in front of my fire.

One wonders, then, why he ran for the Senate in the first place.

In addition to that, Peter Fitzgerald was a real conservative in a state full of Republicans who were not. He famously rubbed them the wrong way. But I honestly don't know what he expected.

At any rate his voluntary departure after one term helped open the way for another Illinois State Senator like he had been, one Barack Obama, to run for the Senate seat in 2006, a seat by the way which Senator Carol Mostly Wrong had once held.

And the rest is history.

Now, Senator Jim DeMint from South Carolina is bailing out to head up the Heritage Foundation, having brought a few so-called conservative people into the Senate.

South Carolina was the state which quoted a Tea Party member as saying during the Republican primary election that she loathed Mitt Romney to the core of her being. The state ended up going big for Speaker Newt Gingrich. So I rather doubt we'll get a similarly dramatic turn in Senate representation, but it still is upsetting that conservatives bail just when we need them the most.

Since DeMint seems happy with the idea that a Republican governor will appoint his successor, isn't that an argument for doing it all the time?

Repeal the 17th Amendment.

Gasoline Prices Up 129% After Four Years Of Obama

You deserve it!

The Gold To Oil Ratio Moves Much Higher To 19.85

Oil is on sale relative to gold. The latter has recovered its legs a little bit recently.

ObamaCare Will Separate The Wheat From The Chaff

If this story in the Washington Post is correct and big successful firms in large numbers continue to provide insurance under ObamaCare as before, despite the costs, expect the less competitive, smaller firms who are at comparative disadvantage to suffer the most and possibly disappear as they drop coverage because they must to survive.

Unemployment In November Said To Decline To 7.7%

Down from 7.9% in October.

The report is here:

"Hurricane Sandy made landfall on the Northeast coast on October 29th, causing severe damage in some states. Nevertheless, our survey response rates in the affected states were within normal ranges. Our analysis suggests that Hurricane Sandy did not substantively impact the national employment and unemployment estimates for November. BLS will release the regional and state estimates on December 21st. For additional information on how severe weather affects employment and unemployment data, see Question 8 in the Frequently Asked Questions section of this release."

The reported employment growth average for 2012 fell from 157,000 per month in last month's report to 151,000 in this month's report, putting 2012 through November behind 2011's average of 153,000 new jobs created per month.

The participation rate in the labor force declined 0.3 in the raw data, 0.2 in the seasonally adjusted data, probably the biggest reason for the headline number to decline.

Translation: as more people aren't looking for work, they don't count! Meanwhile job creation looks like it declined quite significantly in just one month if the average for the year dropped 6,000 per month in just 30 days, which means November must have been pretty bad to have had that large of an effect.

There's somethin' funny goin' on here, Lucy.

The Rats Are Jumping Ship

"Tea Party favorite" Senator Demented Jim is resigning his Senate seat early to head up the Heritage Foundation, whose spawn was RomneyCare, and, you know, ObamaCare, and which has otherwise utterly failed to stop the leftward drift of the country.

The reason, of course, is that Heritage is the standard bearer of Reaganism, which is really a form of liberalism. As such it has furthered the leftward drift of the country as it made Republicanism home for Reagan Democrats who fled the radicalism of the Democrat Party and in their turn liberalized the Republican Party, driving out the conservatives in the process and making the Republican Party safe for the Bush family.

Meanwhile at FreedomWorks Dick Armey has controversially bailed out with a boat load of cash donated to help elect conservatives, which didn't go so well in November. After co-opting the Tea Party, the Republicans have now raped it.

It's interesting how the public face of both organizations has been the Rush Limbaugh Radio Program from noon to 3 daily, where Rush runs paid ads for them. Today, in fact, Rush had Sen. DeMint and Ed Feulner on the show to interview them about the move, no doubt to help preempt the narrative that DeMint is bailing out because of the increasingly hostile environment for conservatism in the Senate, led by squishes like Sen. Mitch McConnell. And right afterwards we got a nice little plug for FreedomWorks.

The glaring problem for the so-called conservatism of the Republican Party is that it is still trying to preserve the excrescences of the progressivism of the early 20th century when what it should be doing is challenging the originalist credentials of figures like Reagan, Teddy Roosevelt and Lincoln. The latter did more to ruin the original constitution than any president before or since, which is why no thinking conservative can call himself a Republican.

The only people in the country who used to have the habit of mind necessary for overthrowing foreign accretions to the original faith were Protestants, but any examination of them today demonstrates few instances of the virtues which characterized their forebears, unless the followers of Westboro Baptist Church be accepted. The capitulation of Christianity in America generally to the gay mafia tells you all you need to know about the intimate (can I say that?) connection between contemporary theology and liberalism.

Just ask yourself when was the last time the Heritage Foundation or FreedomWorks got upset that Obama has presided over the sweeping away of the Hyde Amendment, the single bulwark in law erected by conservatism against the radical advances of a dictatorial, blood-thirsty, liberalism? Communion, anyone?

Or did they ever object? None of us can remember.

Glenn Beck Is Bat-Shit Crazy

I never listen to the guy, but I just happened to turn on the radio and there he is, right now, saying

"The constitution is divinely inspired."

Unlike certain lines of the New Testament which claim divine inspiration for "Scripture", the constitution notably doesn't for itself, and provides for its own amendment.

The founders were too wise to claim infallibility for what they did. Too bad Glenn Beck is in thrall to a fanaticism which keeps him from seeing that.

His microphone deceives the simple, who are many.

CNBC Shills For Obama, Ignores Big Spike In Jobless Claims

CNBC obviously wants nothing to stand in the way of Obama and the Democrats solving the fiscal cliff by raising taxes on everybody.

It's amazing how the commie sympathizers blatantly rewrite the headlines in denial of reality.

Initial claims for unemployment spiked up to nearly 500,000 in the latest report, and CNBC says claims fall, focusing only on "seasonally adjusted" numbers from the Dept. of Labor.

Claims in the "not seasonally adjusted" category spiked up nearly 140,000 in the last week, and over the last four weeks have averaged 435,000, far in excess of a number in the low 300,000s consistent with an environment of job creation.

Since CNBC says the "temporary spike caused by Superstorm Sandy has faded" that can only mean the spike up which they ignore had a different cause.

Elections have consequences, and higher taxes and ObamaCare are going to cause more joblessness, as the last four weeks suggest. 

Democrats Like Howard Dean Want Taxes To Go Up On Everyone

Video here.

Dean views tax increases as a necessity to avoid having to cut spending.

Democrats see no need to keep taxes or spending low.

Democrat Senate Wants Your Taxes To Go Up, Won't Vote On Obama's Plan

Story and video here, quoting Mitch McConnell on what the Senate refused to vote on:

"[W]e didn’t just put together a bill that included [Obama's] $2 trillion tax increase – we also added the almost $400 billion in new tax stimulus measures he wanted as well. This bill contained a continuation of the payroll tax holiday, a 10 percent credit for new wages that will go to businesses big and small, and it included a fix to one of the many flawed provisions of Obamacare – an expansion of a tax credit for businesses that no one uses. This proposal reflected exactly what was in the President’s budget and his various submissions to Congress."

Flashback July 2011: Obama Didn't Need Tax Rates To Rise Then

Oh, but now he does. As he was a liar then, so is he now, and ever shall be. Amen.

Video here.

One Month Later, Obama Still Has Less Than 51% Of Popular Vote

One month after the election, Obama still can't crack the 51% level in the popular vote.

With 127.6 million votes counted, he's still at 50.88%, only just slightly better than George W. Bush's 2004 win with 50.73% when 122.3 million voted.

W didn't have a mandate then, and Obama doesn't now.

The truly remarkable thing about the presidential election remains the voters' giant shoulder shrug in the worst economy since WWII. We'll never know how things might have turned out had the Republicans not picked a me-too liberal and run a real conservative instead of Mitt Romney, whose first act after his nomination was formalized was to trot out his wife to assure us all how conservative was her husband. Liberal Democrats aren't the only ones suffering from projection syndrome.

As it was the voters shrugged in comparison to 2008 and 2004 when 43% and 42% of the population voted. This year just 40% did.

As FDR bought election after election during the Great Depression of the 1930s with direct federal assistance programs and interventions in the New Deal and culminating in the Social Security Act of 1935 in the Second New Deal, Obama has similarly blunted the pain of our economic straits with massive expansions of unemployment insurance, food stamps, welfare and disability, cell phones, heating assistance, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, culminating in the Supreme Court's validation this summer of ObamaCare.

Whatever else may be said, doling out the goodies worked then, and it has worked again, which speaks volumes about the ineffectual nature of the kind of conservative revolution worked by Ronald Reagan, which was no revolution because it was at heart a compromise with the liberal welfare state, not an overturning of it.

Half of America may still hunger for a real meal of conservatism, but so far, all they've been fed are Twinkies.

This 47% Explains Why Democrats Want To Go Over The Fiscal Cliff

It's funny how 47% keeps coming up.

That's supposed to be the number of people who wouldn't vote for Romney because they were "the takers". 47% also turned out to be the percentage which actually ended up voting for Romney. And now it turns out that 47% is also the percentage of all the wages earned in this country by the middle class last year, which now stands to lose the most when Democrats shove them over the fiscal cliff because Obama won. They didn't show that ad of Paul Ryan shoving that lady in the wheelchair over the cliff for nothing. When you suffer from liberal projection syndrome, every time you accuse someone else you're just telegraphing what you intend to do yourself.

Nearly $3 trillion of the $6.2 trillion of wages in America in 2011, 46.8%, was made by people making between only $20,000 and $75,000 per year, and the only thing standing in the way of their taxes going up is President Obama's insistence that his victory means everything and the Republicans' victory in the House means nothing.

Democrats and liberal Republicans both cast their greedy eyes on those eleven compensation intervals piled up all together starting near the bottom of the income ladder in blue in the chart because not coincidentally those eleven together just happen to represent all the income aggregates which are also the largest of all, each in excess of $200 billion in 2011. We're talking about 71 million wage earners in this country out of 151 million who make all that money, which, oh my gosh, is also 47% of the workers.

Hm.

You'll look in vain for any aggregates among the very rich coming anywhere close to that kind of money, quite simply because there just aren't enough rich people in America to pile up tranches of $200 billion. Oh, there's  830,000 people accounting for, say $184 billion, who make between $200,000 and $250,000. Your dentist, probably. And then there's 275,000 Americans who make between $500,000 and $1 million. They account for just $183 billion. Some of these people probably own your favorite restaurants.

No, all the big piles of dough the Democrats "need" are "down low" because that's where all the people are, and the Democrats are comin' for you!  

So get ready all you people out there who voted for Obama, your taxes are going up big time, from this:

2013 Bush tax brackets

to this:

2013 Obama tax brackets

Have fun stormin' the castle!

Peter Schiff Reminds Us That The Debt Ceiling Isn't Original To The Country

For RealClearMarkets, here:

The debt ceiling itself is both an ill-conceived compromise and a relic of past governmental integrity. For its first 128 years as a republic, the United States was able to function without a debt ceiling. This was possible for the simple reason that U.S. government had no central bank and could not borrow beyond its ability to repay through taxation. And since the ability to tax is always limited by taxpayers' assets (and their extreme hostility to those who want to take them), legal gimmicks were not needed to prevent Congress from spending too freely. But the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 gave the Federal Government a potential means to borrow indefinitely by having the new bank buy its debt. Sensing this danger, the original Federal Reserve Act of 1913 prohibited the Fed from buying or holding government debt.

But just four years later the United States needed a means to raise money quickly to pay for its efforts in the First World War. The government passed an amendment to the charter to allow the Fed to purchase Treasury Bonds. Fearing (correctly) that this would create a mechanism for perpetual debt expansion, conservative lawmakers insisted that the amendment include a "debt ceiling" provision that would cap the amount that the government could borrow.

Stalin's Crimes Are Untold In Oliver Stone's Untold History Of The US

If anything is untold in Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States, it's the history of Stalin's crimes while the US under FDR was still friendly with him.

Under Obama apologists for socialism from Milos Forman to Oliver Stone are crawling out from underneath their rocks.

And if they get what they want, we will all be swept away.

"According to evidence released from secret archives since the dissolution of the Soviet Union . . . [just] during 1937 and 1938, when the Great Terror was at its height, the security organs detained for alleged 'anti-Soviet activities' 1,548,366 persons, of whom 681,692 were shot -- an average of 1,000 executions a day. The majority of the survivors ended up in hard-labor camps. (For comparison, the tsarist regime between 1825 and 1910 executed for political crimes 3,932 persons.) In 1941, when Germany invaded the USSR, camps run by the Gulag, their main administrative body, held 2,350,000 inmates, or 1.4 percent of the country's population. The slave laborers performed important economic functions, being employed on large construction projects and forced to cut timber in the far north. No one responsible for these crimes against innocent people was tried after the Soviet Union had collapsed; indeed, they did not even suffer exposure or moral opprobrium but continued to lead normal lives.

"Censuses revealed that between 1932 and 1939 -- that is, after collectivization but before World War II -- the population of the Soviet Union decreased by 9 to 10 million people.

". . . existing humanity was debris, the refuse of a doomed world, and killing it off was a matter of no consequence."

-- Richard Pipes, Communism: A History (New York, 2001), 67ff.

Obama Milks Air Force One and Marine One To Toy Shop

Obama went to Pennsylvania to talk up his tax hike, slam Republicans, and then do a little toy shopping. Keith Koffler's bullshit detector went off, here, when he found out Marvin Nicholson, the caddy, was carrying packages on their return to the White House marked K'nex, where Obama spoke.

US vs. EuroArea17 GDP Growth Rates Since 2007

Latest EA17 (and EU27) performance discussed here.

After 4.7 Years, UK GDP Remains In Depression

The top chart, discussed here, shows the failure to recover to zero after 56 months compared to the same point in previous recessions. The lower chart shows GDP rates of growth from October 2006 to the latest available figures.

How To Know We've Lost The Country

When the likes of a Larry Kudlow, who plays the part of a spokesman for one of our important values and should know better than to descend to vulgarianism in public, gets so upset about raising taxes in the teeth of economic stagnation that he lets loose with "effing".

Today, at the end of the second hour of the program, right after which he complains about the loss of spirituality in America!

Really Larry, someone's got to have some class. If not you, who?

Why Obama And Dems Will Let Bush Tax Cuts Expire

Because in order to transform the taxpayer, first you have to destroy the taxpayer.

Real Retail Sales Still Have Not Bested The 2006 Peak

Data through September 2012, here.

Q3 2012 GDP Revised Up To 2.7% From 2.0% In Second Estimate

The full Bureau of Economic Analysis pdf may be found here.

Only two quarters have come in higher under Obama, the fourth quarters of 2009 and 2011 at 4.0% and 4.1% respectively.

All other quarterly reports of GDP have been lower than today's 2.7% report. It's appalling that there have been no reports in the 3.0s since Obama took the helm, especially after the depths to which we sank.

This is idle speed. The car is running in the driveway, warming up, but that's about it.

Democrat Senate Majority Leader Dirty Harry Changes His Tune

"The only way you can change the rule in this body is through a rule that now says, to change a rule in the Senate rules to break a filibuster still requires 67 votes. You can't do it with 60. You certainly cannot do it with 51."

-- 2005 

Hillary's Indentured Servitude To Obama: After 4 Years $25 Million Debt Is $73K

If there were really such a groundswell for Hillary, if there were really such a division in the Democrat Party between her partisans and Obama's, the one clamoring for her liberalism vs. the other urging Obama's radicalism, why has it taken this long to retire a measly $25 million campaign debt in a world of billion dollar campaigns?

Hillary isn't going away. She's been gone a long time, and the Democrat Party is a completely radicalized party.

Story here.

Oswald Spengler Warned Us About "Revenge" Communists Like Obama

"But there are two sorts of Communist. The one, the credulous type, obsessed by doctrine or feminine sentimentality, remote from and hostile to the world, condemns the wealth of the wicked who prosper and also, at times, the poverty of the good who do not prosper. This lands him either in vague Utopias or throws him back upon asceticism, the monastic life, Bohemia, or vagabondism, which proclaims the futility of all economic effort. But the other, the "worldly" type with the realist political outlook, hopes through its followers to destroy society, either from envy or revenge, because of the low place assigned in it to their personality and talents, or, alternatively, to carry away the masses by some program or other for the satisfaction of his own will-to-power. But this, too, likes to hide itself under the cloak of some religion."

-- Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, 1933

"Voting's the best revenge."

-- Barack Obama, November 2, 2012 (here)

Destruction is the predicate of transformation.

ObamaCare Part-Times 59 Cedar Falls, Iowa, Public Employees

Because ObamaCare has a look-back period of one year for determining who must be offered health insurance, employers all across America are cutting back the hours of every employee they can to 29 per week right now in order to be exempt from the provisions starting in 2014.

The latest employer in the news is Cedar Falls, Iowa, which hopes to save about $850,000 by cutting its 32 hour workers to 29 hours, as reported here:

City attorney Tom Meyer said if every one of those 59 workers were to remain at 30 hours per week and get health insurance, it could cost the city as much as $850,000 per year.

Marijuana Makes At Least 2% Of Its Consumers Insane

So says a story for The UK Independent, here:

The long-suspected link between consuming cannabis and developing schizophrenia has been repeatedly confirmed by recent studies. Observers say that for cannabis the present moment is similar to that half a century ago when scientific proof of a connection between smoking tobacco and cancer became so strong that no serious doctor or scientist could deny it. ...

Sir Robin Murray, Professor of psychiatric research at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, says that studies show that "if the risk of schizophrenia for the general population is about one per cent, the evidence is that, if you take ordinary cannabis, it is two per cent; if you smoke regularly you might push it up to four per cent; and if you smoke 'skunk' every day you push it up to eight per cent".

If you were wondering why America is the way it is under Obama, you now know why.

Romney Was A Terrible Candidate Because He Is A Liberal

So says Steve Baldwin, here, who unaccountably fails to mention that team Obama wanted Romney to be the Republican candidate for that very reason:

"[A]s any conservative from Massachusetts knew, Romney was a liberal at heart who, as Governor, led the nation in passing three of the left’s most sacred issues: Same sex marriage, Cap and Trade, and government control of health care. ...

Romney’s liberal record on taxes (yes, he taxed the corporate world in Massachusetts), Cap and Trade (first in the nation!), gay marriage, gay rights, quotas, gun control, immigration, etc, etc. was little known outside of Massachusetts because many of America’s leading conservatives decided to portray him as someone he wasn’t. Even a number of prominent right to life and national pro-family groups and leaders made a decision to remake Romney as a conservative even though they knew he was not. I should know; I briefed many of them about Romney’s record. Had the conservative leadership told the truth about Romney’s record as Governor, it’s likely he wouldn’t have won the GOP nomination."

That tells you all you need to know about the Republican Party, which doesn't just settle for liberalism. It settles for liberalism of the worst kind. And the so-called conservatives cooperated.

To hell with all of them.

Rich Guy Prick Warren Buffett Votes For Suppressing The Middle Class

Warren Buffett, here, says raising taxes on the rich would lift the morale of the middle class.

On the contrary, it would help keep the middle class in its place by making it more expensive to get where he is, and more importantly help keep the rich in their place because they can afford it.

Just the way the rich like it.

What a prick.