The Shiller S and P 500 Price to Earnings Ratio Stands at 19.84

As reported here.

1974 to 1984 was one hell of a buying opportunity by comparison.

Unmanned Drone

h/t Steyn

The New York Times Notices Sarah Palin Now Speaks Their Language

Here, where hope springs eternal:

Ms. Palin’s third point was more striking still: in contrast to the sweeping paeans to capitalism and the free market delivered by the Republican presidential candidates whose ranks she has yet to join, she sought to make a distinction between good capitalists and bad ones. The good ones, in her telling, are those small businesses that take risks and sink and swim in the churning market; the bad ones are well-connected megacorporations that live off bailouts, dodge taxes and profit terrifically while creating no jobs.

Strangely, she was saying things that liberals might like, if not for Ms. Palin’s having said them.

“This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk,” she said of the crony variety. She added: “It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest — to the little guys. It’s a slap in the face to our small business owners — the true entrepreneurs, the job creators accounting for 70 percent of the jobs in America.”

Is there a hint of a political breakthrough hiding in there?

Honey! I Shrank The Workforce!

Employed in January 2009: 142 Million. Employed in July 2011: 139 Million.

So Jim Powell, here, who says the private sector also has shrunk:

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are fewer people employed now than back in January 2009 when Barack Obama was sworn in as President, and there are more people unemployed now than in January 2009.

Back then, a reported 142 million people had jobs. In July 2011, 139.2 million people had jobs.

In terms of employment, the private sector is smaller now than when Obama was sworn in. In January 2009, 110.9 million people were working in the (nonfarm) private sector, but by July 2011 there were only 109.9 million - despite the larger U.S. population in 2011.

Of Course It's Class Warfare!

And of course he's an ideologue, and of course Obamacare is a Bolshevik plot.

And of course whatever he says is not something, is that, and of course whatever he says something is, is not that.

Here's the video.

YOU LIE!

Arizona Power Company Employee at North Gila Substation Causes Massive Outage in San Diego

Oops:

"The outage was triggered after a 500-kilovolt (kV) high-voltage line from Arizona to California tripped out of service. The transmission outage cut the flow of imported power into the most southern portion of California, resulting in wide-spread outages in the region," according to Cal ISO. ...

The Arizona power company APS said the outage appears to be related to a procedure an employee was carrying out in the North Gila substation, located northeast of Yuma, Ariz. Operator error was determined to be the initiating event.

Operating and protection protocols typically would have isolated the resulting outage to the Yuma area. The reason that did not occur in this case will be the focal point of the investigation, which is underway.

More here.

Who needs terrorists when home grown incompetence will do?

'Social Security's Long-Term Shortfall Grows About $1.2 Trillion Annually'

And by "long-term" the meaning is about 18 years.

So said Dennis Cauchon late in the spring for USA Today, here:

Social Security's long-term shortfall grows about $1.2 trillion annually — a sign of an imbalance between the number of young workers and older beneficiaries, according to the Social Security trustees' annual reports. The $21.4 trillion unfunded liability represents the difference between all taxes that will be paid and all benefits received over the lifetimes of everyone in the system now — workers and beneficiaries alike. This is the measure corporations and insurance companies use to assess financial adequacy of their retirement programs.

What this means is that this year and every year for the next two decades or so social security will be in the red annually to the tune of about $1.2 trillion, and government will have to borrow the funds to pay for that annual deficit spending.

Put another way, the social security scheme is a Ponzi scheme writ large. The pool of early fools putting up the dough for the few early, and very lucky, investors has now dried up so much that the program will run in deficit mode annually going forward, just like the rest of government has for years.

This will add significantly to the national debt, driving up interest payments on that debt and severely crimping the government's other spending options without massive injections of new revenues, aka higher taxes on the people.

In the short term, the $2.6 trillion in the social security trust fund (intragovernmental debt) would disappear in relatively short order under this analysis, say roughly in just over two years from now, except that the monies are invested in a mix of shorter and longer US Treasury securities which will reach maturity over a more or less longer period of time and thus force the program into deficit much sooner because redemptions are barred, compounding the pressure on the availability of funds for current year government spending.

You Own Treasuries. So Does The Social Security Trust Fund.

You'll find it classified under the debt government owes to itself, so to speak, otherwise called intragovernmental debt, which today totals about $4.6 trillion.

Of that, $2.6 trillion is money borrowed from the social security trust fund, money the government has borrowed to spend for other purposes and thus owes back to the social security program.

Social security takes in roughly what it expends of late, but whenever receipts do not match expenditures, it becomes necessary to cash in a treasury instead of re-investing it in more treasuries as it comes due.

So there really is no pile of cash in safe-keeping for social security. Instead there's a pile of IOU's, backed by the full faith and credit of the United States the printing presses of the US Department of the Treasury.

Governor Perry is correct when he says social security is a Ponzi scheme. 

Ben Bernanke: Clueless on the Consumer Because His Housing Data Are Not Current

From his speech today to the Economic Club of Minnesota:

One striking aspect of the recovery is the unusual weakness in household spending. After contracting very sharply during the recession, consumer spending expanded moderately through 2010, only to decelerate in the first half of 2011. The temporary factors I mentioned earlier--the rise in commodity prices, which has hurt households' purchasing power, and the disruption in manufacturing following the Japanese disaster, which reduced auto availability and hence sales--are partial explanations for this deceleration. But households are struggling with other important headwinds as well, including the persistently high level of unemployment, slow gains in wages for those who remain employed, falling house prices, and debt burdens that remain high for many, notwithstanding that households, in the aggregate, have been saving more and borrowing less. Even taking into account the many financial pressures they face, households seem exceptionally cautious. Indeed, readings on consumer confidence have fallen substantially in recent months as people have become more pessimistic about both economic conditions and their own financial prospects.

Here's the Fed's House Price Index on 8/24/11, which shows prices at late 2004 levels:

The fact is, prices have fallen to 1999 levels and may continue to fall to 1997 levels and perhaps lower than that:

Bernanke doesn't understand the severity of the home equity massacre which the consumer has sustained since 2006. That was the primary source of wealth for the vast majority of Americans, and Bernanke doesn't get that a whole decade of gains has been wiped out. His own data are off by five years.

Everyone hangs on every word of the Fed. "Don't fight the Fed" they say. Too bad the Fed doesn't know what it's talking about.

Obama's Army Kidnaps Guards, Destroys Property at Port of Longview, WA

Hoffa incited unions to violence on Monday here in Michigan, saying “President Obama, this is your army, we are ready to march. Let’s take these sons of bitches out,” and already union thugs are mixing it up before the week is out, in Washington State.

Story here:

Hundreds of Longshoremen stormed the Port of Longview early Thursday . . .

Six guards were held hostage for a couple of hours after 500 or more Longshoremen broke down gates about 4:30 a.m. and smashed windows in the guard shack . . .

Most of the protesters returned to their union hall after cutting brake lines and spilling grain from car at the EGT terminal . . .

One sergeant was threatened with baseball bats and retreated . . .


When is the Department of Homeland Security going to put unions on its list of home grown terrorist threats?

 

Updated link.

'I have abandoned free market principles to save the free market system'

"You know I feel a sense of obligation to my successor to make sure there's not a -- you know, a huge economic crisis.

"Look. I obviously have made a decision to make sure the economy doesn't collapse. I have abandoned free market principles to save the free market system. Having said that, I'm very confident that with time the economy will come out and grow and people's wealth will return."

-- George W. Bush, December 2008, here and here

'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it'

"'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,' a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong."

-- Peter Arnett, The New York Times, February 1968, cited here

'We had to save the banks in order to sue them'

Jonathan Weil gets off a good one here, concluding how ridiculous was bailing out the banks in the first place:

The government has so many conflicting agendas, we may never get satisfactory answers to those questions. All of this is part of the legacy of the unprecedented federal interventions in 2008, as well as a reminder of what a colossal mistake it was in the first place to create Fannie and Freddie with all their privatized profits and socialized losses.

The proper role of government in a free-enterprise system is to police market participants at arm’s length, not join their ranks and choose winners and losers. That’s a line we crossed a long time ago, though. The great outrage isn’t that a federal agency is suing some of these too-big-to-fail banks for damages. It’s that we ever bailed them out at all.

None dare call it fascism, though, not even Jonathan Weil.

Angela Merkel Believes in Magic, Which is a Very Bad Sign For Us All

As reported here, by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard:

Chancellor Angela Merkel said the ruling validated her rescue policies, and once again vowed to do whatever it takes to ensure the survival of monetary union.

"History has shown that countries with a common currency never wage war against one another, and that is why the euro is far more than just a currency. If the euro fails, Europe fails. It must not fail, and will not fail," she said in an emotional speech.

This faith in a mere currency construct is the same sort of faith neo-conservatives in America have in the political-economic construct known as democracy, the chief article of which faith is that democracies don't make war on democracies. Nevermind that Washington, DC, has been at war with the fifty united States since the American War Between The States. And make no mistake about it . . . that war has not been won even yet, otherwise there would be no such thing as a Tea Party.

If and when that war is won and the Tea Party disappears, the rest of the world should be afraid. Very afraid. For that is when you will discover that democracies have always gone to war to survive.

Long live The Republic.

Democracy? Not so much.

Liberals Love Progressive Taxation. Progressive Tax Deductions? Not So Much.

Peter Orszag for Bloomberg here likes the idea of flat tax deductions for some reason, but not flat taxes.

Maybe it's because such equality in deductions would increase the taxes paid by the top 25 percent of taxpayers, who already contribute the vast majority of the government's revenue. Orszag sees no reason why a person in the top marginal tax bracket should have his taxes reduced at that marginal rate by a deduction for a 401K contribution, or a mortgage interest payment, or a donation to charity. He wants the deduction to be a flat deduction for everyone, regardless of income, which sounds to me like an admission that there's something actually immoral about progressivity in the tax code.

Sounds like progress to me, the logical implication of which is that the tax rate also should be one flat rate for all.

In the meantime it remains that "tax reform" is to "progressive" as "tax increase" is to "liberal." The name has been changed to disguise the guilty.

Citigroup VP Pleads Guilty to Embezzling Millions Between '03 and '10

And he's only 35 NOW, according to this story:

A former vice president for Citigroup pleaded guilty Tuesday to embezzling more than $22 million from the company and funneling the money to his personal bank account.

Gary Foster, 35, pleaded guilty to bank fraud, admitting that he took the money between 2003 and 2010. He appeared in U.S. district court in Brooklyn before Judge Eric Vitaliano.

Obama Doesn't Give a Damn About Your Right to Privacy

Obama has allowed a privacy oversight board within his own appointment power to languish. Clearly he prefers a culture of unchecked surveillance of American citizens.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, established in the wake of The Patriot Act to help protect Americans from Executive Branch abuses of their Fourth Amendment protections, has been the last thing on President Obama's mind since he got elected.

While Obama did name a privacy officer for the Department of Homeland Security, the president has so far failed to nominate a quorum for a Congressionally-mandated oversight board to track civil liberties issues government-wide.

So says Politico here today, but just as an aside in a story about the invasive procedures of the TSA as sensationalized by Drudge.

OMB Watch here a few months ago stated the issue of Obama's utter indifference much more accurately:

All five seats on the board are now vacant. President Obama nominated two members in December 2010, but even if confirmed they would not have a quorum to conduct business. The board has been inactive since 2008 due to vacancies.

We called attention to the issue of Obama's circumvention of this board over a year and a half ago here, based on reporting from Eli Lake for The Washington Times.

Obama may be a doctrinaire leftist ideologue, but more of the Leninist and Stalinist variety, in which the personal advantage for Der Fuehrer of spying on American citizens trumps the principles of the revolution.

And you dopes believed in the guy. 

Under Obama 15 Percent Unemployment or Greater for 31 Months Straight

(source)

Obama Decides It's Time To Imitate Failure and Put 'Country First'

In Cannon Falls, Minnesota, in August, as quoted here:

"You've got to send a message to Washington that it's time for the games to stop, it's time to put country first."

Gee, I wonder where he got that idea?

Let's see now, he stole "Yes We Can" from Bob the Builder.

And then there was this: "The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office."


Hm. Interesting pattern.

Maybe that's why the lid remains slammed down tight on his academic record.