Part-Time For Economic Reasons Still Over 97 Percent Higher Than in 2007

Part-time employment for economic reasons reached an all-time high of 9.25 million persons as measured on September 1, 2010.

On January 1, 2012 the level still stood at 8.08 million persons, over 97 percent higher than the level measured as recently as February 1, 2007, when the measurement stood at 4.09 million persons.

View the graph and data here.

Part-Time Employment Has Fallen Over 7 Percent From 2007 Peak

Part-time for non-economic reasons reached a peak measurement on March 1, 2007 at 19.75 million persons. On January 1, 2012 the measurement stood at 18.29 million.

View the graph and data here.

Romney in 2009 Openly Favored Tax Penalties To Make People Buy Health Insurance

Romney's op-ed from USA Today is reproduced here.

The relevant portion below is argued in opposition to strong efforts at the time, particularly in the US House under Nancy Pelosi, to pass a healthcare reform bill which included the public option, or government insurance.

Romney's idea, as with RomneyCare in Massachusetts, was to shun the public option in favor of mandated purchase of privately supplied health insurance, under penalty of a tax, which is what we got with the Senate version of healthcare reform now known to us as ObamaCare, under which the tax is called a fine in order for the president to be able to claim that he does not raise taxes on ordinary Americans:

"Our experience also demonstrates that getting every citizen insured doesn’t have to break the bank. First, we established incentives for those who were uninsured to buy insurance. Using tax penalties, as we did, or tax credits, as others have proposed, encourages “free riders” to take responsibility for themselves rather than pass their medical costs on to others. This doesn’t cost the government a single dollar."

As many have been maintaining, Romney's reasoning shows no essential disagreement with ObamaCare. Romney favors government compulsion in healthcare.

Real 2011 GDP Finally Exceeds Real 2007 GDP, But Only By 0.83 Percent

The data were found at the Bureau of Economic Analysis here:

YEAR   REAL GDP (2005 chained dollars)

2007       $13.21 trillion

2008         13.16

2009         12.70

2010         13.09

2011         13.32

And On What Will Santorum Run If The Supremes Find The Mandate Unconstitutional?

Sen. Santorum believes the issue of this election season is authoritarianism in government, as quoted here in The Weekly Standard:

". . . Obamacare. That is the biggest issue in this race. It’s an issue about fundamental freedom. It’s an issue about whether you want the government to take your money, and in exchange, give you a ‘right’….But, of course, when the government gives you a right, they can take that right away. And when the government gives you that right, they can tell you how to exercise that right. And they do — not just what doctors you can see and what insurance policies [you can buy], or how much you’re going to get fined if you don’t do what the government tells you to do, but even go[ing] so far as to tell you how to exercise your faith as part of your health care....If the government can go that far with Obamacare, just think what’s next.”

"The Whole Community Should Mutually Accuse and Come to Blows With Each Other"

Just one of the many ways a tyranny maintains itself in power, according to Aristotle.

In our case, bring up women's rights and "health" and make them an issue when they weren't.

A house thus busy being divided against itself is a house which cannot unite in revolt against its master. And what better way to divide the house than according to nature, the division between the sexes?

Another form of Locke's "crossing nature".

Santorum Bashes Everyone But The Prime Culprit: George W. Bush

Here.

Why bash John McCain, Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush?

I don't recall any of these claiming to redefine the Republican Party like W did. And all three of them served honorably in war, one as a prisoner of war, one maimed by war, and one a practised parachutist under fire. W did none of that. And neither did Santorum. 

OK, maybe Herbert Walker came close to an ideological make-over with that kinder, gentler, shtick, but we all know he didn't really mean it. He was not really into that vision thing. But W was full of hubris and said the conservative movement was OVER and that HE would establish a new meaning for it going forward, which boiled down to nothing more than personal loyalty. He must have learned that from the Democrats.

And I don't recall any of these also-rans abandoning free market principles to save the free market like W did. You can rightly say the objects of Santorum's ire represented tax collection for the welfare state, but at least they made a show of being capitalists. George W. Bush, a failed capitalist before he became president, ended his presidency the same way.

W was a knee-jerk liberal on immigration, welfare for the poor and for seniors, and on exporting the American way. A real conservative ought to say so. Rick Santorum never will.

A Lovely Question: Why Is Interest Income, Perhaps 10 Percent of GDP in the Past, Trivial to Savers but Ever So Important to Banks?

Jeffrey Snider wants to know, here:

I think everyone understands that credit is vital to businesses, but they also intuitively understand that customers are probably more vital (and the largest problem for businesses of all sizes since 2008). I don't think Chairman Bernanke can claim that interest income is trivial and therefore not really a consideration, both in an empirical sense (the numbers don't bear that out, especially at the margins) or, perhaps more importantly, in the perceptions of the voting public. If he does, then why is such a trivial amount to savers so important to banks? It cannot be the money multiplier effect since bank net income (the pivot in this trade-off) plays no role in that presumed multiplier - ZIRP is a technique of expanding bank balance sheet capacity. It is the method of circulation that is at issue here, and the Fed and its global central bank cousins are placing all their chips on circulating money indirectly through credit creation. If that is a superior option, then they should be able to demonstrate it.

Obama's New Campaign Slogan

A Volt in every garage and a condom in every pocket.

ObamaCare Inspires Fear For The Sake Of Making A Contract, Violating The Law

This is what ObamaCare does: It threatens with a fine the person who fails to make a contract with an insurance company.

"[I]n the freedom of choice there ought to be a kind of equality between the contracting parties. ...[N]o fear should be unjustly inspired for the sake of making the contract, or, if such fear has been inspired, that it should be removed."

-- Hugo Grotius, On Contracts, The Law of War and Peace, Book 2, 12, X (1625)

ObamaCare Violates Centuries of Contract Law: The Mandate is Equal to Duress

It's so simple a child could tell you that, but to date no legal wizard from Harvard, Yale, Chicago, or Stanford has been able to put his finger on it quite so well as this wonderful stroke of genius distilled in a newspaper from the American heartland of genius, Virginia:

From Hugo Grotius in the 17th century through William Story in the 19th and up to the present, legal doctrine has held that contracts are not valid unless they are entered into by mutual assent. If one party signs a contract as the result of fraud or under duress, it cannot be valid. But if Congress compels people to buy insurance policies — not as a precondition of exercising a privilege such as driving, but as a consequence of having been born — then, the [I]nstitute [for Justice] argues, this would undermine centuries of contract law.

All those law degrees, wasted.

If they were smart they would ask for their money back.

Now why didn't The Heritage Foundation realize this back in 1989 and save us from all this trouble from HillaryCare through RomneyCare and ObamaCare?

After all this time America is still little more than a backwater in the intellectual history of the West. Progressivism. Bah! Humbug!

This is an Unpaid Ad for The True Born Sons of Liberty

GO TO HELL, BARACK.

Oil Price To Crash By Fourth of July?

Chris Cook thinks so, maybe even to $60, here:

In my analysis, absent a massive, and sustained, shortfall in oil supplies – which I cannot see occurring, since all involved have every interest in ensuring it does not occur – the oil price will, as I have already forecast, fall dramatically by the end of this year’s second quarter at the latest. It’s not a matter of if, but when it will happen.

That implies gold at $900 the ounce.

I can wait four months.

Q4 2011 GDP, Second Estimate, Up .2 to 3.0 Percent, Q3 at 1.8 Percent

So reports the Bureau of Economic Analysis, here.

The revision up does not move the needle up on overall 2011 GDP, which was a pathetic 1.7 percent.

Occupy Portland Vandalizes Two Banks and a Starbucks

Anti-capitalists, they call themselves:

Police said they received an e-mail that said it was from "Some Of Those Responsible" and read in part, "about an hour and a half ago (around ten pm, Tuesday night) a group of anticapitalists rolled up on the US Bank at SE 39th and Main and smashed out its windows and ATMs." ...

Police said a second e-mail was received after the Key Bank branch and Starbucks locations were vandalized, which read in part, "wherever capital chooses for its bunker, we will be there to attack it in the night." It was signed "For freedom, for equality, for anarchy".

Story, here.

A Chase branch and a Wells Fargo branch were vandalized last November (story here).

Santorum Voters in Michigan Heavily Self-Identified as Democrats

By a margin over Romney voters of 35 points, according to FoxNews exit polling here:

Santorum voters were also union members by 15 points over Romney voters.

Only 24 percent of Santorum voters thought abortion should be legal, and 77 percent of Santorum voters thought of themselves primarily as abortion issue voters, with only 13 percent of Romney voters seeing themselves that way.

Deficits and the economy mattered more to Romney voters than Santorum voters by 16 and 17 points.

Despite Santorum's view that mainline Protestants aren't really Christians, Romney and Santorum pretty much split that vote with Santorum winning Protestants by two points. But Santorum lost the Catholic vote by a 7 point margin.

Romney excelled among females, the over 65 demographic, those making over $200,000 a year, college graduates and post-grads, the somewhat conservative, those somewhat opposed to the Tea Party and those favoring legalized abortion.

Self-identifying moderates went for Romney 45 percent to Santorum's 31 percent. The somewhat conservative went for Romney by an even larger spread, 50 to 32.

The Washington Post here reported that 1 in 10 Republican voters yesterday self-identified as Democrats:

Early exit polls in Michigan seemed to show that the negative campaigning had weighed on the state’s Republicans. Less than half of voters there said they backed their candidate “strongly.” About one in seven said they made their choice because they dislike the other options — four times the proportion that said so in this political season’s first votes, at the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses.

The polls also showed that a large number of Democrats had, in fact, crossed party lines in Michigan. About one in 10 of Tuesday’s voters identified themselves as Democrats in exit surveys. That was a higher figure than in any of the other early GOP contests.


About 978,000 votes were cast in Michigan's primary yesterday.

Wins in Michigan and Arizona Give Romney 2 to 1 Lead in Delegates over Santorum

The Wall Street Journal here provides a handy delegate tracker:

Hey Romney! Is Obama's An Extreme Left-Wing Crusade To Bankrupt Us Or Not?

Sen. John McCain couldn't bring himself to talk this way in 2008, but he had to in 2010 to get re-elected to the US Senate:

"President Obama is leading an extreme left-wing crusade to bankrupt America,'' McCain says in one of the radio ads his campaign is airing.

Romney Views Republican Base As Angry Mob With A Beef Against Obama

Except he's not going there.

Remarks quoted here:

“It’s very easy to excite the base with incendiary comments,” he told reporters. “We’ve seen throughout the campaign that if you’re willing to say really outrageous things that are accusatory and attacking President Obama, that you’re going to jump up in the polls. You know, I’m not willing to light my hair on fire to try and get support.”

But you already knew that:

O’Reilly: Is he a socialist?
Romney: You know, I prefer to use the term that he’s just over his head.
O’Reilly: Yeah, but you got to look at his economic plan. An economic plan that’s top down, federal leadership, getting us out of the recession--- he spent trillions of dollars on that. And people say, Listen, the guy’s a socialist — it’s class warfare that’s what he’s gonna wage against you if you get the nomination: You’re a rich guy, you’re out of touch. Is he a socialist?
Romney: Uh, you know, I consider him a big-government liberal Democrat. I think as you look at his policies, you conclude that he thinks Europe got it right and we got it wrong. I think Europe got it wrong. I think Europe is not working in Europe. And I’ll battle him on that day in and day out. But I’m probably not going to be calling him names so much as calling him a failure.


Like John McCain before him, who refused to criticize Obama or even question his political beliefs, Romney is out of step with the American people, the majority of whom believe "socialist" is a fitting moniker for President Obama:

Rick The Chameleon Santorum: Slams Cross-Overs in January, Courts Them in February

What a difference a few weeks can make, as reported here:

In stark contrast to his campaign's more recent courtship of Democrats, in January Santorum told Democrats that if they wanted to vote for a Republican, they should switch their party affiliation.

"It's the Republican nomination, not the independent nomination or the Democratic nomination," he said on the call. "If you're a Democrat and you want to be a Democrat, then vote in the Democratic primary, not the Republican. If you want to vote in the Republican Party then become one."

At the time, Santorum's main criticism was of Romney's success in the New Hampshire primary, where 53% of Republican primary participants did not identify themselves as Republicans. In the weeks following Romney's win in the Granite State, Santorum repeatedly cited that statistic in arguing that his rival's supporters was [sic] out of step with the mainstream GOP electorate. Now Santorum is hoping non-Republicans will help give him the edge in Romney's home state [of Michigan].