Spending Trendlines: Obama Goes Vertical

Let's play "Find the Conservative Spending Trendline."

Is it the postwar trendline of the 1940s? Can you imagine such a small government today, spending just barely $400 billion by 2015?

Or how about The Great Society trendline of the 1960s, spending $800 billion by 2015? Unfortunately its little Vietnam-guns and Medicare-butter time bombs had time delay detonators.

They went off and set the trendline established in the wake of the mid-1970s recession, oil embargoes and Iranian hostage crisis which took us all the way through Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, and Clinton. Does $2.5 trillion by 2015 sound conservative to you? All assisted by a dollar finally unglued from gold in 1971.

It certainly couldn't be George W. Bush's trendline, could it? It was an even more radical departure from the past because of added spending on drugs for seniors and two more wars. And don't even think of calling that policy "tax and spend." It was all spend. 

For an encore to that sorry enterprise, Obama has taken it practically vertical, but it can't reach escape velocity and looks doomed to crash. Which is why the man who eight months ago signed the extension of the Bush tax rate regime now suddenly wants to raise taxes as part of a debt ceiling deal this summer.

Some people define conservatism as maintaining the status quo. Some as measured, gradual change. Cutting current spending back toward the 1970s trendline, which is where Rep. Paul Ryan is trying to go, is viewed as radical by the likes of Newt Gingrich and the left. In reality, though, it's just a return to a status quo ante which for its time was anything but conservative. What this means is that so-called conservatives today find themselves reduced to defending the liberalism of the still recent past.  

  

Federal Spending and Federal Receipts 1901-2010

Tax receipts have fallen dramatically during the Panic of 2008, but spending has not. It should.

If you don't have the dough, you don't go to the show.

Unemployed? To Megan McArdle You're Just A Depreciating Asset

Here:

"Human capital is like almost any other form of capital: it is a depreciating asset."

In other words, your worth as a human being is purely economic.

Megan may have a job, but it masks a poverty of soul which lies at the heart of America's problems, where everything is fungible, including your house, and now you.

Want a vacation? Write a check on your HELOC account. Pregnancy inconvenient for your career? End it. Old people cost too much to take care of? Withhold food and water. 14 million unemployed?

"[W]hat are we going to do with all these people?"

Why, liquidate them, of course, like any other asset.

Anyone who will do anything for a job will do . . . anything.

Save your self. 

Repatriating Overseas Corporate Cash Primarily Benefits Shareholders

Claims it will boost the dollar, job growth, new investment and the stock market are exaggerated, according to Marc Chandler, here.

He points out that overseas cash may be as high as $2 trillion but that perhaps 40 percent of it is already parked in low tax havens abroad. Why move it?

Based on the last repatriation in 2004 and 2005, when about $300 billion came home, only on the most generous reading about 250,000 new jobs were created compared to a predicted 500,000, if 2003's anemic 100,000 new private sector jobs per month is the baseline. And dollar gains could just as easily be attributed to incremental 25 basis point upticks in interest rates by the Federal Reserve.

For the full argument, follow the link above.

To Hell With Clive Crook and The Financial Times

For phrases, here, such as:

"if there were any such thing as a moderate Republican;"

and

"a pathologically intransigent Republican party."

Why don't you bugger off to The Guardian or something, Clive? You'd be more happy there, fantasizing about how immune from the dark side of human nature you think you are, and how inferior you imagine the Colonies remain.

We beat you, and we'll beat you again, and again and again and again.

Landslide Vote For Israel in Congress, Except for Rep. Justin Amash and 5 Others

The vote was a non-binding resolution, a shot across the bow of the Palestinian Authority, which Justin Amash, among others, could not bring himself to support:

The U.S. House of Representatives threatened to cut off funding to the Palestinian Authority if it pursues recognition of statehood outside of negotiations with Israel.

A resolution passed Thursday night by a vote of  406 to 6 "affirms that Palestinian efforts to circumvent direct negotiations and pursue recognition of statehood prior to agreement with Israel will harm United States-Palestinian relations and will have serious implications for the United States assistance programs for the Palestinians and the Palestinian Authority."

The non-binding resolution is similar to one passed last month by the Senate. ...

Among those voting against was a freshman, Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI), who is aligned with the Tea Party and who is of Palestinian descent.

Tea Party candidates were an unknown quan[t]ity to pro-Israel groups last year and since then, the Republican leadership has endeavored to secure assurances of support for Israel from lawmakers aligned with the Tea Party.

Most have done so, although there are holdouts like Amash. The five other members who voted against the resolution were Reps. Ron Paul (R-TX), Walter Jones (R-NC), Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Nick Rahall (D-WV) and Earl Blumenauer (D-OR).

Read more here.

Krauthammer Attempts to Define the Political Spectrum

He says, here, that a person open to both liberal and conservative views is a moderate, which would be David Brooks of The New York Times, in his opinion.

Gee, we didn't know David Brooks was open to conservative views.

Government Spent About $113K PER SECOND in 2010

Federal Spending 1901-2010

As calculated here.

Treating Radioactive Water at Fukushima is Not Going Well

Components made in the US and France have been able to treat only 2,000 tons of approximately 110,000 tons of radioactive water.

More water storage tanks are being installed while efforts continue to improve removal of radioactive cesium.

As presently configured, the systems work for about five hours instead of for weeks at a time, and remove only 10 percent of the radiation.

Story here.

New Taxpayers, Not New Taxes

"Let's stop talking about new taxes and start talking about creating new taxpayers, which basically means jobs."

-- Senator Marco Rubio, here

June Unemployment Up 0.1 to 9.2 Percent!

Love that laser-like focus on jobs, you incompetent flake!

Story here.

Down With The Establishment!

"The Establishment is in a panic. It has been jolted awake to the realization that the GOP House, if it can summon the courage to use it, is holding a weapon that could enable it to bridle forever the federal monster that consumes 25 percent of gross domestic product."

-- Patrick J. Buchanan, here

Cheap Oil Fuels The Booms

Mexican on Death Row Since 1994 Brutal Murder Finally Executed, Despite Obama

The AP has the story here:

A Mexican national was executed Thursday for the rape-slaying of a San Antonio teenager after the U.S. Supreme Court turned down a White House-supported appeal to spare him in a death penalty case where Texas justice triumphed over international treaty concerns.

Humberto Leal, 38, received lethal injection for the 1994 murder of Adria Sauceda. She was fatally bludgeoned with a piece of asphalt.

In Saudi Arabia he would have been bludgeoned with a piece of asphalt, in 1994.

TSA Agent Stole From Your Luggage, Fenced The Stuff Online

$50K worth at FLL.

Story here.

Republican Governor of Tennessee Wants To Spearhead Internet Tax Initiative

The RINO's name is Bill Haslam. Rhymes with Has-Been.

Story here.

Conservatism Has Always Been Counter-Revolutionary

A frequent MO of the left is to substitute its own definition of something for the real thing, and then argue against it. Otherwise called setting up a straw man. Words mean whatever they say they mean.

That's what Michael Lind has done to Russell Kirk over at Salon.com.

A commenter on his "The three fundamentalisms of the American right: How conservatism went from orthodox and traditional to radical and counter-revolutionary" here gets it exactly right:

The stupidity is also amusing for the way Lind telegraphs his punch in the title, since Russell Kirk, channeler of Burke, consistently advocated for the counter-revolutionary interpretation of the American Revolution throughout his career. More than that, he thought that his own interpretation of the American Revolution as a revolution not made but prevented was entirely consistent with E.J. Payne's interpretation of the Burke who famously loathed what became of France's revolution. Kirk lays out his interpretation in this famous essay, stating from the start his indebtedness to Payne for the idea:

The most learned editor of Burke’s works, E. J. Payne, summarizes Burke’s account of the events of 1688-89 as “a revolution not made but prevented.” Let us see how that theory may be applicable to North American events nine decades later.

On this interpretation, the King of England was the revolutionary, against whose red-coated infringers on the chartered rights of Englishmen the American colonists reluctantly and at length opened fire with more than just words.

Lind would like things to be as they once were, when conservatism was still inchoate, unsure of itself, and above all, politically ineffectual:

Back when conservatism was orthodox and traditional, rather than fundamentalist and counter-revolutionary, conservatives could engage in friendly debates with liberals, and minds on both sides could now and then be changed.

But now that conservatism is a genuine threat to the revolutionary left which has taken control of America, it's time to sound the alarms:

Sooner or later, dogmatism and reality will collide, and it is not reality that will crumple like tinfoil. The only question is how much damage will be done to the American polity before the revolution of the saints fizzles out.

"Collide." "Crumple." "Damage." Sounds more like an invitation to a train wreck than to a battle, but I could be wrong.

Round one to the right last November. More skirmishes to follow. 

The Liberal Attack on Bill Clinton Continues, This Time From Joe Stiglitz

As picked up by Slate, here, which especially savors a straw man when mixed with a delusion:

[A] powerful ideology—the belief in free and unfettered markets—brought the world to the brink of ruin. Even in its heyday, from the early 1980s until 2007, American-style deregulated capitalism brought greater material well-being only to the very richest of the richest country of the world. ...

A decade ago, in the midst of an economic boom, the United States faced a surplus so large that it threatened to eliminate the national debt. 

Here Come The Mexican Trucks

Unless Congress stops them by not ratifying the agreement.

Story here.

Defining a Depression

"Some point to the success of Latvia in managing its so-called internal devaluation. But its GDP is 23 percent below its pre-crisis peak. That is a depression."

-- Martin Wolf, here