The Gold To Oil Ratio Is 19.79

Meaning relative to gold, oil is STILL on sale.

They don't think so in California this weekend, but it's true.

Gold would need to fall to $1,350 the ounce to right the ratio at the current price of oil, a 24 percent decline.

Or oil would need to go to $118 the barrel at the current price of gold to right the ratio, a 31 percent increase from the current price near $90. 

Rasmussen Polling Shows Romney Improving, Obama Still Winning

Rasmussen's electoral college map shows Romney now polling slightly ahead in Florida and Virginia, but Obama is still ahead in Nevada, Wisconsin, Ohio and New Hampshire to win it.

Ohio is key in that math, where Romney is narrowing the gap. Everything else remaining equal, Romney capturing Ohio would snatch victory away from Obama.

Romney's strong debate performance already seems to be shifting narrow polling in his direction.

RCP Puts Ohio Back Into "Toss Up" Moving Obama Back To 251 EC Votes

See the map here.

Private Sector Employment Has Fallen 2% In Four Years

Data and graph available here.

In other words, 2,260,000 fewer work in private industry than did four years ago.

Four Years Ago, Total Non-Farm Employment Was Higher By 2.832 Million

Data and graph available here.

The 2% decline in total non-farm employment is the nominal decline which ignores the growing size of the US population, and thus of the workforce, over the period. A healthy economy grows sufficiently to absorb new workers added to the population. Since 2008 US population has grown by over 3%.

The Number Forced Into Part-Time Work Exploded 38% In Last Four Years

View the data and graph here.

In other words, 2.4 million more work part-time today because they must than four years ago.

Four Years Ago, Part-Time BY CHOICE Was 2.7% Higher Than Today

View the graph and data here.

In other words, there are about one half million fewer working part-time by choice compared to four years ago.

Four Years Ago, Full-Time Employment Was 3.7% Higher Than Today

View the data and graph here.

In other words, 4,470,000 full-time jobs existed on September 1, 2008 which do not exist today.

Part-Time Employment Surges Over 7 Percent In One Month

Part-time for economic reasons surged from 8.0 million in August to 8.6 million in September.

Unemployment Drops To 7.8 Percent, Just In Time For The Election

After 43 straight months of unemployment over 8 percent, and an average of monthly reports of 9.0 percent for the entire Obama presidency, the absolute worst record in the post-war period, unemployment has suddenly fallen by 0.3 points in one month from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September.

Just in time for the election!

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics, here:

The unemployment rate decreased to 7.8 percent in September, and total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 114,000, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment increased in health care and in transportation and warehousing but changed little in most other major industries.

The unemployment rate declined by 0.3 percentage point to 7.8 percent in September. For the first 8 months of the year, the rate held within a narrow range of 8.1 and 8.3 percent. The number of unemployed persons, at 12.1 million, decreased by 456,000 in September.

Romney Last Night Actually Embraced Martin Feldstein's Deduction Cap

Here:

"And I'm going to work together with Congress to say, OK, what -- what are the various ways we could bring down deductions, for instance? One way, for instance, would be to have a single number. Make up a number, $25,000, $50,000. Anybody can have deductions up to that amount. And then that number disappears for high-income people. That's one way one could do it. One could follow Bowles-Simpson as a model and take deduction by deduction and make differences that way. There are alternatives to accomplish the objective I have, which is to bring down rates, broaden the base, simplify the code, and create incentives for growth."

You can read Martin Feldstein's argument for capping deductions, here, from which this excerpt:

Limiting the revenue loss from the itemized deductions and the exclusion of employer payments for health insurance to two percent of each individual’s adjusted gross income would raise more than $275 billion at current income levels and more than $3 trillion over the next decade.

Romney Isn't "All-In" With Free Market Capitalism

Romney can talk all he wants about helping small business, but his is the voice of big business:

"Regulation is essential. You can't have a free market work if you don't have regulation."

Economies of scale favor larger corporations over smaller ones with respect to compliance with regulations, which gives them a significant advantage. It's another way of "picking winners and losers", which is what he's accusing Obama of doing.

Sorry Gov. Romney, We're Not Spain

Romney, last night, in another odd coincidence with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"Spain -- Spain spends 42 percent of their total economy on government. We're now spending 42 percent of our economy on government. I don't want to go down the path to Spain. I want to go down the path of growth that puts Americans to work with more money coming in because they're working."

A little dyslexia is going on here, I think. Whatever Spain's expense is as a percentage of GDP, America's is not 42, it's 24.

Here's US News and World Report, in June:

Federal spending was close to 20 percent under the Carter administration, dropped to 18 percent under Clinton, and is currently at an incredible 24 percent of GDP. According to the Congressional Budget Office, federal spending may hover around 22 percent for the next decade.

It's a little disturbing Obama didn't catch this mistake. It's a little disturbing Jim Lehrer didn't catch this mistake. In fact, I've heard the soundbite repeated on the radio this morning without anyone referring to the mistake, and that's pretty disturbing, too.

Does anyone really know what time it is?

Romney Is Half Right: One Tax Proposal Is New, And Alarming

And it is amazing no one has taken this seriously:

"My plan is not like anything that's been tried before. My plan is to bring down rates, but also bring down deductions and exemptions and credits at the same time so the revenue stays in, but that we bring down rates to get more people working."

Romney is threatening to reduce the value of exemptions and credits which exist under the existing tax code.

This amounts to major fiddling which the preoccupation with "deductions" obscures.

Deductions we have lost before, as in the 1986 tax reform. That he wants to reduce the value of more deductions is bad enough. But the truly alarming thing is the proposal to do the same to exemptions, and to a lesser extent to credits. That is new, and alarming.

That can only mean the whole set of assumptions involving the system of personal exemptions, and perhaps also the time-honored "married filing jointly" status itself, and credits such as the Earned Income Credit and the Child Tax Credit and the like. I can well imagine a President Mitt Romney eliminating the favoritism of the tax code toward married people, and toward their housing and their children, to make gay and unmarried people equal to them in the tax code. Remember, in Massachusetts Gov. Romney had a reputation, deserved, for being a tax equalizer.

I also expect he will propose capping the value of deductions and credits by using something like Martin Feldstein's plan, in order to preserve the deductions and credits for lower income individuals but phasing them out as one climbs the income ladder. In other words, the progressive tax code stays, but progressivity of tax deductibility goes out the window. That may be fair to a liberal like Romney, but it isn't maintaining progressivity, it is steepening it.

Mitt Romney is not a social conservative. And if he gets his way with the tax code, I suspect he's going to prove it, unless conservatives in the US House stop him.

Good luck, America. You're going to need it.

Romney Should Know Better: The Rich Will Suffer Under More Of Obama

Mitt should know better than to say the rich will do just fine whether he's president or Obama:

"But I'm not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people. High-income people are doing just fine in this economy. They'll do fine whether you're president or I am."

Taxes on the rich will rise under ObamaCare alone, not to mention in other ways if Obama gets his way.

It's politically incorrect to defend equality of treatment under the law for the rich today, and Romney is wrong to concede this ground. Obama's belief that the rich don't presently pay their fair share is unjust when they pay not only the largest sums but at higher rates.

The robbery continues only because there are more Obamas in the country than there are rich people. Mitt shouldn't join them.

Rep. Paul Ryan's So-Called Conservatism Won't Roll Back Anything

He's about preserving Medicare, not ending it.

He's for abortion in certain circumstances.

And now he's about preserving the status quo on DADT, too.

Conservative in name only.

Story here:

One year after the repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy that barred openly gay and lesbian service members from serving in the military, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) said in an interview with WPTV NewsChannel 5 that the controversial policy should not be reinstated.

"Now that it's done, we should not reverse it," Ryan told WPTV NewsChannel 5 during a visit to Miami. "I think that would be a step in the wrong direction because people have already disclosed themselves."

Rasmussen Moves North Carolina Into "Toss Up", Leaving Romney With 181 EC Votes

See Rasmussen's map, here.

He had shown North Carolina leaning Romney for quite some time.

RCP Moves Missouri Back Into "Toss Up", Putting Romney At 181 EC Votes

See the history of map changes, here.

Missouri has been changeable since summer, either leaning Romney or a toss up.

On 4th Anniversary Of TARP, 12% Of Banks Are Still In Trouble

nonperforming bank loans as percentage of total

The FDIC reports as of June that it has 7,246 member banks with $14 trillion in assets. Four years ago there were 8,384 member banks with assets of $13.6 trillion. Bank failures and consolidation in the industry have reduced the total membership by over 13 percent in the interim.

Bank failures have cost the Deposit Insurance Fund, funded by member premiums, in excess of $80 billion, costs which are inevitably passed on to bank customers. TARP was deliberately morphed into a fascist capital injection scheme when it became clear that identifying and buying toxic mortgages was an unworkable solution, cooked up as it was in a panic. The capital injections effectively made taxpayers unwilling stockholders in troubled "financial" institutions, some of which were not commercial banks to begin with but were allowed to become so to obtain protection.

Meanwhile bank nonperforming loans in the US continue at a high level, over three times higher than prior to the financial crisis in 2008, despite TARP's measly billions, and despite the real action trying to circumvent free-market capitalism involving trillions of dollars of Federal Reserve liquidity interventions.

An unofficial list of problem banks tracked here currently shows 874 institutions still under some form of FDIC supervision for irregularities of one kind or another, four years after the passage of the Troubled Asset Relief Program signed by President Bush on October 3, 2008.

Sen. Barack Obama voted for the TARP program in the US Senate, as did Sen. John McCain, his opponent for the presidency, joining the rest in the US Congress who wanted to make it appear they were doing something about the crisis. In the wake of TARP the stock market crashed anyway in the succeeding month, preparing the way for the debacle of March 2009 five months later. The mortgage market remains effectively dead, along with housing, net worth, and employment, zombies all. 

How much better off we would be today if we had simply embraced the failure prescribed by capitalism instead of denying it. Bankruptcy courts would have been busy selling off assets to responsible actors, debts would have been adjudicated, and a few high profile bad players may have actually gone to trial, and jail, by now.

Instead it's just more of the same: government of the bankers, by the bankers, and for the bankers.

Real Clear Politics Gives New Hampshire To Obama, And 269 Electoral College Votes

One vote away from a fait accompli.

Here.