Moochelle's Spanish Vacation in 2010 Cost Taxpayers At Least $467K

As reported here:

The five day trip cost at least $467,585, according to Judicial Watch.

The total cost of flying Michelle Obama from Camp Andrews to Malaga and then to Mallorca and back to the United States was $199,323.75.

That tab is based on just 17 hours and 15 minutes of total flying time. ...

The 15-member flight crew stayed at Tryp Guadalmar, a nearby motel where group's lodging cost was $10,290.60 and car rental costs were $2,633.50.

In addition, their food cost was $876.30, which included an American indulgence of $57.68 for four bottles of maple syrup and a package of pancake mix.

Secret Service records, meanwhile, show that the costs to the agency for the vacation were $254,461.20.

This total includes $26,670.61 for a chauffeur tour of Costa del Sol and $50,078.78 for a travel planning company SET P&V, S.L.

Q1 2012 GDP Reported at 2.2 Percent, Q4 2011 at 3.0

I am the chief obstacle to growth.

From the Bureau of Economic Analysis, here:

Real gross domestic product -- the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States -- increased at an annual rate of 2.2 percent in the first quarter of 2012 (that is, from the fourth quarter to the first quarter), according to the "advance" estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the fourth quarter of 2011, real GDP increased 3.0 percent.

Compared to Q1 2011 at 0.4, today's report at 2.2 looks pretty good, until you remember that Q1 2010 roared at 3.9 percent, Obama's best quarter so far but hardly what one would expect from an economy truly in recovery from the depths to which it sank in its little depression of 2008-2009. The post-war period in the United States saw average growth of 3.5 percent, so one lousy imprint of 3.9 does not a recovery make.

America is clearly not growing like it should, nor like it can. And the chief obstacle to that is spelled "Obama".

Here is the most recent statement of historical GDP from the release for the period 1996-2011:

A Little Thursday Night Dog Humor

h/t Sheik Yer Mami

Global Warming Alarmist James Lovelock, Now a Geezer of 92, Backs Off Predictions

Not that he wasn't a geezer already in 2006 when he was still thumping his global warming tub:

In 2006, in an article in the U.K.’s Independent newspaper, he wrote that “before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.” ...

Six years on he's singing a slightly different tune:

“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,” Lovelock said.

“The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” he said.

“The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising -- carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that,” he added.

He pointed to Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and Tim Flannery’s “The Weather Makers” as other examples of “alarmist” forecasts of the future.


More here.

The Depression in Peripheral Europe

In order of severity: Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain, and then even the 17 country Euro area itself, all with four years of sub-standard GDP relative to the 2008 peak.

(source)

Top 10 US States With Low State and Local Debt Burdens

(source)

US States are in a Heap of Debt Trouble: $8 Trillion Worth

In a less than $2 trillion budget world at the state level.

Because of promises to pay for pensions and healthcare for retired public employees out of future tax revenues, the big squeeze is on, according to Steven Malanga, here:

From 2008 through 2010 (the latest year data are available), state spending rose to $1.9 trillion, from $1.7 trillion. ... 

Several years ago, for instance, the treasurer of Cook County, Ill., Maria Pappas, demanded that all of Cook's municipalities report their debt to her. It wasn't easy. They began with bonded debt, then totaled up pension liabilities, then found they had lots more they'd promised to workers for health care. ...

We couldn't get a handle on just how much debt states and their municipalities have accumulated unless every county treasurer does what Pappas did. But just what we can estimate in bonded debt and unfunded pension and health care promises for retirees now totals about $8 trillion. That's a lot of future state and municipal tax revenues already accounted for.

What's that familiar refrain we keep hearing at the federal level, that a present Congress can't bind a future one?

So how can present municipal and county governments bind the taxpayers to pay in future for unfunded promises in the present, huh?

The UK is in a Depression, Not a Double-Dip Recession

The fact is, UK GDP has not recovered since the onset of troubles in 2008, despite the happy talk of "recovery" in Newspeak which must not call things what they really are, for example, here, at CNBC.com:

"Britain's economy contracted by 7.1 percent during its 2008-2009 recession and recovery since has been slow, with headwinds from the euro zone debt crisis, government spending cuts, high inflation and a damaged banking sector.

"Wednesday's data showed that output was still 4.3 percent below its peak in the first quarter of 2008, and the economy has only grown by 0.4 percent since the government came to power in the second quarter of 2010."

For the chart, the dark blue line in which shows the current decline in the UK since 2008 still 4 percent down more than three years on, see the UK Guardian here.

It's not a paler shade of gray, dammit. It's a faker form of black . . . on the Firth of effing Forth.

The United States of Moronica

We're even dumber than we look, and our stupid party is the smart one of the two.

From John Carney for NetNet:

"A recent study from the Pew Research Center found that 47 percent of Americans didn’t know which political party supports reducing the size and scope of the federal government. Forty-two percent didn’t know which party usually supports reducing military spending. Thirty-nine percent didn’t know which party generally favors restrictions on abortion. ...

"There’s a substantial ignorant minority on almost every issue. ...

"Forty-four percent of women, for example, did not know Nancy Pelosi is a Democrat (fewer men, 33 percent, got this wrong). Fifty percent of women didn’t know ... John Boehner’s party. ...

"People ages 50 and up are engaged by taxes and partisanship (70 percent correctly identified the party affiliation of Pelosi, 72 percent correctly identified which party is known as the G.O.P.). ..."

Read the rest HERE, if you're smart enough to find the link.

Jeffrey Goldberg Likes One Thing About Newt Gingrich

He wants to go "out there":

All at once, the passengers contorted themselves to get a view out of the starboard windows.

And there it was. The actual shuttle, the space shuttle Discovery, piggybacking a ride atop a Boeing 747, on the way to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, where it would be retired. A ripple of excitement -- boyish, unvarnished excitement -- moved through the cabin.

It was an entrancing sight, and completely improbable, especially to people like me, who still don’t quite understand how a 747 gets into the air, even without a space shuttle as carry-on luggage.

The 747 and the space shuttle made a pass over the Washington Monument and the capital’s other grand marble temples, all consecrated to the American idea. They gleamed in the sun as they received a salute from a spacecraft that represented the physical manifestation of American ingenuity and confidence.

Then the 747 left our view. We settled back into our seats, having been elevated for a moment by a magnificent and elegiac vision -- elegiac, because the end of the shuttle program marks the first time since the dawn of the Space Age that the U.S. government has no immediate plan to launch humans into space.

A few minutes later, while we were still parked on the tarmac, ... the plane’s steering seemed to be malfunctioning. ...

We returned to the terminal, and I watched on CNN as Discovery finished the journey to its nursing home in the Virginia countryside. Only then did the obvious thought cross my mind: Newt is right.

This isn’t a thought that has often crossed my mind, especially over the past several months, but on the matter of space exploration and the role it has played in teaching Americans that they are capable of performing exceptional acts of creativity and bravery, Newt Gingrich is exactly right.

Read the whole thing, here.

KIRK:  Ahead Warp One, Mr. Sulu.

DIFALCO: Heading, sir?

KIRK:    Out there. Thataway.

Domestic Drone Authorizations Are Set To Explode

Locations on this map in red are active.

Get the map here.

Government will soon have total information awareness about YOU.

The decision was bipartisan and sailed through the so-called Tea Party US House of Representatives.

Thanks, Republicans. What good are you?

The New York Times Discusses Bipartisan Culpability For The Imperial Presidency

Here:

Mr. Obama's new approach puts him in the company of his recent predecessors. Mr. Bush, for example, failed to persuade Congress to pass a bill allowing religiously affiliated groups to receive taxpayer grants -- and then issued an executive order making the change.

President Bill Clinton increased White House involvement in agency rule making, using regulations and executive orders to show that he was getting things done despite opposition from a Republican Congress on matters like land conservation, gun control, tobacco advertising and treaties. (He was assisted by a White House lawyer, Elena Kagan, who later won tenure at Harvard based on scholarship analyzing such efforts and who is now on the Supreme Court.)

And both the Reagan and George Bush administrations increased their control over executive agencies to advance a deregulatory agenda, despite opposition from Democratic lawmakers, while also developing legal theories and tactics to increase executive power, like issuing signing statements more frequently.

The bipartisan history of executive aggrandizement in recent decades complicates Republican criticism.

Global Response To Debt Was To Triple Down On It

From Reuters, here:

The amount of money thrown at rescuing the world economy since the Great Recession began is truly staggering, probably more than $14 trillion, and the financial spigots are still open. ...

In 2009, the IMF calculated that official rescue efforts totaled nearly $12 trillion, and since then the Fed and the ECB have pumped more cash into the economies they oversee.

Poverty Thresholds 2011

As shown here.

Poverty Guidelines 2012

As shown here.

Partners in TARP Crime

The Most Important Thing About The Norway Terrorist

From Barry Rubin in The Jerusalem Post, here:

IF TERRORIST murders by Hamas and Islamists did not stop well-intentioned future leaders of Norway from considering them heroic underdogs, an evil local man could think his act of terrorism would gain sympathy and change Europe’s politics.

After all, it has already changed the Middle East, and even been sanctified by Western media, intellectuals and governments.

When Norway’s ambassador to Israel tries to distinguish between “bad” terrorism in Norway and “understandable” terrorism against Israelis, that opens the door to a man who thinks his country is “occupied” by leftists and Muslims.

In this sense, the most important thing about the Norway terrorist is not that he is right-wing or anti-Islam. The most important thing is that he believed terrorism would work on behalf of his cause.

Had he held all of the same beliefs but didn’t think murder was a good tactic, nobody would be dead from his actions.

Of course, he was mentally unbalanced, but had a material basis for his imaginings.

What he didn’t understand is that many Europeans will accept terrorism against Israelis or even Americans; very few will applaud terrorism against fellow Europeans.

Nevertheless, many people gave him the idea that terrorism would change minds, and bring victory. They weren’t those whose blogs he quoted a few times in a 1,500-page manifesto, and who explicitly rejected violence. It was the successful terrorists and their Western enablers who gave him the tactic he implemented.

The Atlantic's Lies About Tax Loss Expenditures

The latest lazy lies attacking the so-called privileges of the so-called middle class come from one Linda Killian at The Atlantic here:

"The three largest expenditures in the tax code are all things many middle-class Americans take advantage of -- tax-free employer-provided health insurance, the home mortgage interest deduction and tax-free 401(k) retirement accounts. ... The tax exemptions for home mortgage interest cost the government more than the entire budget of the Department of Housing and Urban Development according to Steuerle [an Urban Institute economist]."

These are NOT the three largest. They rank 1, 3 and 6, not 1, 2 and 3.

If Linda Killian had bothered to read the Joint Committee on Taxation's latest report on the subject, she would have known that.

Here are the top ten tax loss expenditures for 2011, according to this committee of the US Congress:

$109.3 billion  Employer provided health insurance and related

$ 90.5 billion  Reduced tax rates on dividends and capital gains

$ 77.6 billion  Owner-occupied mortgage interest deduction

$ 59.5 billion  Earned income credit

$ 56.4 billion  Credit for children under 17 aka Child Tax Credit

$ 48.4 billion  401K-type plans

$ 42.7 billion  Pension plans aka union retirement plans

$ 42.4 billion  State/local income, sales and property tax deduct.

$ 38.0 billion  Exclusion of capital gains at death

$ 31.0 billion  Exclusion of benefits under cafeteria plans

$ 31.0 billion  Exclusion of untaxed Social Security and RR benes.

Who benefits from the top three? It's hardly a middle class phenomenon . . . today.

Rich and poor and everyone in between gets health insurance when they are employed by an employer, not just the middle class. And they don't pay tax on that "income." But the size of this break is bound to decline dramatically in coming years, if ObamaCare is not struck down or repealed. Fewer employers will be providing coverage, choosing to pay lower fines instead. Other companies will deliberately downsize in order to escape the requirements under the law, making employer-provided insurance less common than it is today. The net effect may very well be that employer-provided health insurance becomes more and more an upper class phenomenon.

Reduced rates of taxation on dividends and capital gains primarily benefit the rich in America. Could that be why Killian overlooked it entirely? It certainly doesn't fit her narrative against the middle class, does it? But this category is the real number 2 in the list of tax loss expenditures.

Working class and middle class people who are lucky enough to have joined the investor class are investing primarily through tax-deferring vehicles like union pension plans and 401K plans, which rank number 7 and 6 in Congress' accounting of tax loss expenditures. It is questionable, however, for pensions and 401Ks to appear in this list of tax loss expenditures at all. Eventually the deferred money will become income, and it will be taxed.

But the more important point is that everyone in this bottom 66 percent of wage earners by definition makes less than $100,000 per year and by and large very few of them are playing around in the stock market, where fat cats like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and Mitt Romney derive their unearned income, taxed at the non-permanent lower rates under the Bush tax legislation of 2001-2003. Were these rates permanent, however, this tax loss expenditure wouldn't even make the list.

Contrast that with something which is more or less permanent: the exclusion of income from Social Security taxation. The current income ceiling after which income is not so taxed is almost $107,000 per year. In 2010 just under $2 trillion in ordinary wages and salaries made by the rich escaped the Social Security tax. The tax loss expenditure of that? $125 billion, higher than anything in the Joint Commission's report. And it all went to the rich.

Third is the ever popular whipping boy of the tax reform crowd, the mortgage interest deduction. It should worry average Americans who struggle on the crumbs which fall from their masters' tables that our betters want to make it harder for us to own four walls and a little garden and a tree. 100 million out of 150 million wage earners in 2010 made less than $40,000 per year. Try buying a house on that.

Democrats and Republicans have successfully conspired to attack Social Security for the first time by de-funding it temporarily and haven't yet been electrocuted by the once-feared third rail of politics, so I fully expect them to keep trying on mortgage interest.

Four years ago the mortgage interest deduction was more like $88 billion, so with the collapse of housing we have witnessed a decline in the amount of mortgage interest being paid, and so deducted. $10 billion less. The reason for this is two-fold. One, fewer homeowners. Two, refinanced mortgages at lower rates. With home ownership already under severe stress, it is astonishing that liberals of both parties continue to attack it under the guise of tax fairness. What it really is, is statists greedily looking for more revenue.

I say they can all go to hell.

The Banker Inmates Are Running The Central Bank Asylum

"[W]hat we see unfolding is the latest chapter in the tug of war between inflationary and deflationary forces. During the “goldilocks” economy of the last decade, investors levered themselves up. Homeowners treated their homes as if they were ATMs; banks set up off-balance sheet Special Investment Vehicles (SIVs); governments engaging in arrangements to get cheap loans that may cost future generations dearly. Cumulatively, it was an amazing money generation process; yet, central banks remained on the sidelines, as inflation – according to the metrics focused on - appeared contained. Indeed, we have argued in the past that central banks lost control of the money creation process, as they could not keep up with the plethora of “financial innovation” that justified greater leverage. It was only a matter of time before the world no longer appeared quite so risk-free. Rational investors thus reduced their exposure: de-levered. When de-leveraging spreads, however, massive deflationary forces may be put in motion. The financial system itself was at risk, as institutions did not hold sufficiently liquid assets to de-lever in an orderly way. Without intervention, deflationary forces might have thrown the global economy into a depression.

"The trouble occurs when the money creation process takes on a life of its own, because the money destruction process is rather difficult to stop. However, it hasn’t stopped policy makers from trying: in an effort to fight what may have been a disorderly collapse of the financial system, unprecedented monetary and fiscal initiatives were undertaken to stem against market forces. Trillion dollar deficits, trillions in securities purchased by the Fed with money created out of thin air (when the Fed buys securities, it merely credits the account of the bank with an accounting entry – while no physical dollar bills are printed, many – including us – refer to this process as the printing of money)."

-- Axel Merk (for the rest, go here)

See Eskil Pedersen Demand Norway Boycott Israel One Day Before Breivik Came To Kill

Everything about Norway's AUF and its leader Eskil Pedersen has to do with a fanatical program of political action against the State of Israel, as shown in this photograph taken the day before Breivik's massacre, and in this story. The AUF's program is so extreme that even the already extreme position of the Norwegian Labour government against Israel isn't good enough for it.

An insane preoccupation with a country eleven days distant from Norway by sea by the children of the ruling political party doesn't come out of nowhere. It is a symptom of a wider mental disorder at work in Norway, indeed, it is the prevailing mindset.

Why should anyone be surprised that such a disease of the mind should also produce a deranged maniac like Anders Breivik?

Breivik's trial will not examine that, nor will much of the world ever examine it, because those who share in this irrational hatred of the Jews will not let it happen.