Obama Finally Beats Bush 2004 . . . By 0.03 Points

The final results are still not in, but Obama's re-election totals finally best Bush's 2004 result by 0.03 points.

Bush finished 2004 with 50.73% of the vote. Obama now has 50.76%, after weeks of counting.

Way to go, Brownie! And start the mandate parade.

43% More Housing Destroyed By Hurricane Sandy Than Katrina

Obama Seen Helping Hurricane Sandy Victims

Story here:

305,000 housing units have been destroyed by Sandy compared to 214,000 in Katrina.

Truman Cut Spending Big Time In 1945. The Economy Boomed.

Speaker John Boehner, wake up.

Arnold Kling, here:

When World War II ended in 1945, President Harry Truman faced a problem. Public opinion called for a rapid demobilization that would bring the boys home as soon as possible. But the Keynesians who were gaining prominence in the economics profession warned that a rapid decline in government spending and the size of the public work force would produce, in the late economist Paul Samuelson’s words, “the greatest period of unemployment and dislocation which any economy has ever faced.”

Thankfully, Truman ignored the Keynesians. Government spending plummeted by nearly two-thirds between 1945 and 1947, from $93 billion to $36.3 billion in nominal terms. If we used the “multiplier” of 1.5 for government spending that is favored by Obama administration economists, that $63.7 billion plunge should have caused GDP to fall by $95 billion, a 40 percent economic decline. In reality, GDP increased almost 10 percent during that period, from $223 billion in 1945 to $244.1 billion in 1947. This is a rare precedent of a large drop in government spending, so its economic consequences are important to understand.

Pravda Says Illiterate Americans From Communist Controlled Schools Elected Communist Obama As President Of An America Suffering From A Psychosis Called Liberalism

That about sums it up.

From the Department of It Takes One To Know One, English.Pravda.ru, here:

Obama's Soviet Mistake

19.11.2012 15:23

By Xavier Lerma

Putin in 2009 outlined his strategy for economic success. Alas, poor Obama did the opposite but nevertheless was re-elected. Bye, bye Miss American Pie. The Communists have won in America with Obama but failed miserably in Russia with Zyuganov who only received 17% of the vote. Vladimir Putin was re-elected as President keeping the NWO order out of Russia while America continues to repeat the Soviet mistake. ...

Recently, Obama has been re-elected for a 2nd term by an illiterate society and he is ready to continue his lies of less taxes while he raises them. He gives speeches of peace and love in the world while he promotes wars as he did in Egypt, Libya and Syria. He plans his next war is with Iran as he fires or demotes his generals who get in the way.

Putin said regarding the military,

"...instead of solving the problem, militarization pushes it to a deeper level. It draws away from the economy immense financial and material resources, which could have been used much more efficiently elsewhere."

Well, any normal individual understands that as true but liberalism is a psychosis. O'bomber even keeps the war going along the Mexican border with projects like "fast and furious" and there is still no sign of ending it. He is a Communist without question promoting the Communist Manifesto without calling it so. How shrewd he is in America. His cult of personality mesmerizes those who cannot go beyond their ignorance. They will continue to follow him like those fools who still praise Lenin and Stalin in Russia.  Obama's fools and Stalin's fools share the same drink of illusion.

Reading Putin's speech without knowing the author, one would think it was written by Reagan or another conservative in America. The speech promotes smaller government and less taxes. It comes as no surprise to those who know Putin as a conservative. Vladimir Putin went on to say:

"...we are reducing taxes on production, investing money in the economy. We are optimizing state expenses. The second possible mistake would be excessive interference into the economic life of the country and the absolute faith into the all-mightiness of the state. There are no grounds to suggest that by putting the responsibility over to the state, one can achieve better results. Unreasonable expansion of the budget deficit, accumulation of the national debt - are as destructive as an adventurous stock market game. During the time of the Soviet Union the role of the state in economy was made absolute, which eventually lead to the total non-competitiveness of the economy. That lesson cost us very dearly. I am sure no one would want history to repeat itself."

President Vladimir Putin could never have imagined anyone so ignorant or so willing to destroy their people like Obama much less seeing millions vote for someone like Obama. They read history in America don't they? Alas, the schools in the U.S. were conquered by the Communists long ago and history was revised thus paving the way for their Communist presidents. Obama has bailed out those businesses that voted for him and increased the debt to over 16 trillion with an ever increasing unemployment rate especially among blacks and other minorities. All the while promoting his agenda.

"We must seek support in the moral values that have ensured the progress of our civilization. Honesty and hard work, responsibility and faith in our strength are bound to bring us success."- Vladimir Putin

The red, white and blue still flies happily but only in Russia. Russia still has St George defeating the Dragon with the symbol of the cross on its flag. The ACLU and other atheist groups in America would never allow the US flag with such religious symbols. Lawsuits a plenty against religious freedom and expression in the land of the free. Christianity in the U.S. is under attack as it was during the early period of the Soviet Union when religious symbols were against the law.   

Let's give American voters the benefit of the doubt and say it was all voter fraud and not ignorance or stupidity in electing a man who does not even know what to do and refuses help from Russia when there was an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Instead we'll say it's true that the Communists usage of electronic voting was just a plan to manipulate the vote. Soros and his ownership of the company that counts the US votes in Spain helped put their puppet in power in the White House. According to the Huffington Post, residents in all 50 states have filed petitions to secede from the Unites States. We'll say that these Americans are hostages to the Communists in power. How long will their government reign tyranny upon them?

Russia lost its civil war with the Reds and millions suffered torture and death for almost 75 years under the tyranny of the United Soviet Socialist Republic. Russians survived with a new and stronger faith in God and ever growing Christian Church. The question is how long will the once "Land of the Free" remain the United Socialist States of America? Their suffering has only begun. Bye bye Miss American Pie! You know the song you hippies. Sing it! Don't you remember? The 1971 hit song by American song writer Don McLean. ...

Joel Kotkin Urges Republicans To Join The Class War

"It’s time for Republicans to break with the traditions of Goldwater, Reagan, and, particularly, Bush and shift to something more akin to the party’s roots in the mid-19th century. This party needs less preaching and libertarian manifestos that essentially defend plutocracy. Instead it’s time to embrace class warfare on today’s gentry, and embrace the aspirations of today’s middle-class. Honest Abe in 2016?"

Egging on the Republicans to embrace Marxist class categories and methods and pretending that's not an appeal to ideology, Joel Kotkin here thinks Republicans could win again if only they gave stuff to the yeoman class and took away stuff from the clerisy. You know, like his hero Pres. Abraham Lincoln did when he signed the Homestead Act in 1862, which gave away 160 acres out west to anyone who would improve the land, and when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which took away the property of slaveholders without compensation. Like all good dictators, Lincoln made notions of property and its value even more arbitrary than they had been before.

It is little appreciated how the Homestead Act basically destroyed the flexibility of the federal revenue system, causing the federal government to rely increasingly on tariffs and also excises which up until The War Between The States had fluctuated up and down as revenues from federal land sales did the same.

So Anderson and Martin, here, who emphasize the substitutability of tariff and land sales revenues:


"Coinciding with the rapid increase in land grants to homesteaders, railroads, and the states after 1862, the federal revenue derived from land sales fell rapidly as a proportion of total receipts. Further, the general decline in tariff rates that had occurred until the Civil War was reversed, and tariff rates began to rise rapidly. Import duty rates, which had reached their lowest level in the century in 1857, increased sharply during the Civil War and remained high for the remainder of the century (Baack and Ray 1983, p. 73). Tariffs continued to be the single most important source of federal revenue after the war ended."

So in an important sense, Lincoln and the Republicans are to blame not just for the development of Our Enemy, The State, they are also to blame for setting the untenable conditions to fund it as it henceforth and inevitably grew large. In the end, the price of Union and black emancipation would be universal bondage to Leviathan with the coming of the Income Tax in 1913.

Kotkin completely misses the significance of what's going on on the right. Conservatives in America are rediscovering the meaning of the constitution, and how people like Lincoln ruined it. Mitt Romney with his incessant talk of American supremacy in the world simply reminded them too much of him.

Kotkin's correct about one thing, though, that the socialism of Obama is misunderstood. But Kotkin doesn't call it the fascism that it is, because Kotkin himself actually advocates it himself, only that it's the good kind which helps grow the middle class.

From the comments section, Kotkin says as much:

"i am an old-style democrat who favors using government when necessary to create an ever-larger property owning class. neither party today has this as its main focus. instead both are neo-feudalist as I will explain in the coming months."

Old style democrat? You know, the FDR kind, which admired and imitated the strong men of Europe, who eventually plunged the world into a war far bloodier than, but no less reminiscent of, Lincoln's.

Conservatives want to get rid of the imperial presidency, not just get one friendly to its interests.

Joel Kotkin's "New Geography" isn't old enough.

Obama's New Favorite Beer

Gold to oil ratio finishes the week at 19.84

Another week, another deformed metric. Oil remains on sale relative to gold because the money is moving to gold, a broader vote of "No confidence" in the global economy.

Gang Of Sixer, Sen. Chambliss, Proves His Liberalism

Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia always seemed a weak sister.

Now he's proved it once and for all, here, and here, by repudiating his pledge to vote against tax rate increases.

That's an alarming development for Republicans because it indicates that Chambliss is not just threatening to vote for more revenues from deduction limitations, but for more revenues from tax rate increases.

Look at it this way: a vote for tax increases is a vote to maintain the status quo, which can only mean more of the same, including further increased prices for commodities, which is at the center of Sen. Chambliss' unholy alliances.

Follow the money people! This guy doesn't care about the country. He only cares about himself!

"And A Fatherless Child Shall Lead Them"

A fatherless president for a fatherless nation

Americans narrowly re-elected a fatherless child to lead them as "broken families" begin to outnumber intact ones in the voter rolls.

Rebecca Hagelin for USNews.com, here, identifies the broken family trend creating today's voter:

Noted social science researcher Patrick Fagan points out that in 1950, for every 100 babies born in America, 12 were born to a broken family—that is, they were either born out of wedlock or to a family that would suffer divorce. Fast forward to today, and for every 100 babies born in America, over 60 are born to broken families.

The results of the latest census reported by Liz Peek for TheFiscalTimes.com, here, starkly depict the consequent disappearance of traditional America and its replacement by a broken one:

The 2010 Census reported that for the first time in our history, married couples make up less than half of all households. The traditional family with a mom, dad and children now constitute less than 20 percent of American households, down from 43 percent in 1950.

Whatever else may be said about Barack Obama, Americans have re-elected him to a large extent because he resembles them in the most elemental way which people like Mitt Romney and John McCain do not.

Let's Face It, Republicans Helped Create "The Takers"

It's time for a reality check. Republicans bear heavy responsibility for creating "the takers", the infamous 47% of households who pay no taxes.

The real reason Mitt Romney lost the election is because he couldn't get Reagan Democrats to turn out for him enthusiastically, people for whom dissing the whole idea behind the tax credit programs expanded by Reagan and Bush 43 to subsidize working families just like them sounded foreign coming from the mouth of a Republican candidate for president. I refer to the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit.

Reagan had made the former his answer to welfare dependency, and George W. Bush further expanded it and also doubled the latter, to the point that now, as the Tax Policy Center says here:

[T]he Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit . . . are the major reason many low-income working families avoid the income tax. About one-third of those who don’t pay are families with kids.

This New York Times graphic, using Tax Foundation data, shows how the percentage of non-taxpaying filers had grown by over 50% since 1986 through the end of the Bush presidency, and now under Obama has really ramped up another 50% so that since the time of the 1986 tax reform twice as many filers have no federal tax liability as did twenty-five years ago. If Obama has doubled down on anything, they were Republican ideas to begin with. To paraphrase an old saw, We sold them the rope they're hanging us with. 

What once seemed like benign Reagan era social props have grown into major federal welfare transfer payment programs for the lower and middle classes in America, which is why liberals like Tim Noah here deliberately don't focus on them in analyzing the takers, "the 47%". To do so mutes their point that these people still pay the regressive payroll tax, which the EITC offsets. But practiced long enough, these lower wage workers getting EITC payments every year until retirement will collect Social Security without having really contributed to it themselves, transforming it, for them, from a contribution based pension into pure welfare.

Democrats are more than happy to have Republicans do this dirty work for them in expanding the federal welfare state instead of just acting as they do in more somnolent times as mere tax collectors for it. During the next five years, these direct subsidies to families are projected to cost the Treasury over $90 billion each year. In 2011 alone there were over 26 million EITC claims costing the taxpayers nearly $59 billion. 

This issue goes to the heart of Mitt Romney's problem with the Republican Party: He had the temerity to point out the dependency practiced by too many Republicans. Unfortunately for Mitt Romney and the country, he had no constituency for this message, or at least not enough of one to get him over the top.

More than ever I suspect that this way of thinking is what was behind Mitt Romney's interest in "rectitude" in "equalizing" taxes when he was governor of Massachusetts, but also accounts for his statements distancing himself from the Reagan record in the 1990s when he ran against Sen. Ted Kennedy, just when Rep. Newt Gingrich was about to unleash The Contract With America. Reagan might have been an anti-communist conservative, but a fiscal conservative he was not, at least not in practice. That's what was really important to Romney at the time and obviously still animates him. But not his party which has made zero progress toward fiscal conservatism and has gone the other way.

Say what you will about Romney's social liberalism, it was his fiscal conservatism which alienated him not just from Democrats, but also from anyone receiving a big tax refund every spring.

A famous Democrat once said, "I didn't leave the Democrat Party, the Democrat Party left me." But a fiscal conservative can't say the same of the Republican Party . . . in living memory it's never been there.

(graphic here)

Obama 2012 Now Ties Bush 2004 With 50.73% Of Popular Vote

As all votes get tallied since the election two weeks ago on November 6, total votes cast in the presidential are now up to 125.53 million and Barack Obama achieves the dubious distinction of matching George W. Bush exactly in the percentage of the popular vote received.

Way to go, Brownie! 

Reed Galen And His Ilk Confuse Television With Reality

Well why not? His parents probably used television as a baby sitter. The video here shows Reed Galen sporting a ginormous wristwatch and more neurotic hand gestures per second than I can count.

Here are his recent remarks about television:

The ABC sitcom “Modern Family” is an excellent reference point for the problems of today’s Republican Party. One of the most popular shows on television, it features, among other things, a Latina immigrant and her son and a gay couple with an adopted daughter.

Those characters are not merely a paean to political correctness: They are the glue of the show. And for Americans under 45, they are not seen as objects of scorn or derision but a reflection -- albeit through Hollywood’s funhouse mirror -- of what the country looks like today.

Someday someone is going to kick Reed Galen's ass but good, or his kids' ass if he actually has any, or something worse, which they'll deserve but won't assimilate because it's already too late for them.

Obviously his baby boomer parents never taught him anything, which is why the country looks like it does today, and deserves everything it's going to get.

Reed Galen formerly served in the losing John McCain for president campaign.

63% Of Congress Voted For Bailouts, 75% Of Democrats

Here.

I hate to quote myself, but someone's got to do it.

Paul Krugman Really Wants To Increase Taxes On The Middle Class

Fair taxation looks like the rates of the 1950s, says Paul Krugman, here:

"America in the 1950s made the rich pay their fair share."

What he's not telling you, however, is that America made the poor pay their "fair share" too in the 1950s, which today they are not doing. Even liberals agree 47% of the American people today don't pay any income taxes whatsoever. But at the 1950s rates, nearly 60% of today's workers, almost 90 million out of 151 million total American workers, would actually be paying income taxes, and paying income taxes big time, at a marginal rate of 20% instead of the low Bush rates of 10% and 15%, if they pay any income taxes at all.

Can you say, "Big middle class tax increase if Krugman got his way"?

The tax rates Krugman refers to come from the Internal Revenue Code of 1954. If those rates were in effect today, the rich at Obama's beloved $200,000 a year level would be in the 59% bracket instead of in his 39.5% bracket, which makes Obama look like not simply a conservative by comparison with Krugman, but a reactionary by comparison with Bill Clinton.

More to the point, under Truman's rates in 1952 applied to today "the rich" would be in the 66% bracket. So high marginal tax rates on "the rich" actually came down from 66% under Truman to 59% under Eisenhower. Krugman is disingenous in portraying 1950s rates as some draconian trend to punish the rich when in fact Eisenhower was practicing the art of the possible in his time, trying to lower taxation while still trying to pay off the massive debt accumulated during World War II. Compare that to today when the chief liberal sticking point on taxes is the difference between the top marginal rate under Bush of 35% and the top marginal rate under Clinton of 39.5%.

Almost never was so much made of so little.

One critical difference between Obama's stated position and Paul Krugman's, however, is that while the president's marginal rate of 39.5% would remain the last rate on the ladder, Krugman would expand the ladder with additional marginal rates all the way up to 91% as was done in the Revenue Code of 1954.

Only a fanatic would think that that's part of what's possible today. Not even Obama thinks that.

Yet.

That Light At The End Of The Tunnel?

Better run. Here comes the ObamaCare train.

Was Socialist France The Model For ObamaCare's 50 Worker Rule?

Mike Tanner for The New York Post, here:

Under ObamaCare, employers with 50 or more full-time workers must provide health insurance for all their workers, paying at least 65% of the cost of a family policy or 85% of the cost of an individual plan. Moreover, the insurance must meet the federal government’s requirements in terms of what benefits are included, meaning that many businesses that offer insurance to their workers today will have to change to new, more expensive plans. ...

Under the circumstances, how likely is the company to hire that 50th worker? Or, if a company already has 50 workers, isn’t the company likely to lay off one employee? Or cut hours and make some employees part time, thus getting under the 50 employee cap? Indeed, a study by Mercer found that 18% of companies were likely to do exactly that. It’s worth noting that in France, another country where numerous government regulations kick in at 50 workers, there are 1,500 companies with 48 employees and 1,600 with 49 employees, but just 660 with 50 and only 500 with 51.

Tanner might have emphasized that as companies become 49ers because of ObamaCare, the workers will increasingly become 29ers, part-timers who are exempted from coverage under ObamaCare because they are deliberately kept to 29 hours per week.

After being 99ers for so long, that's about as good as it's going to get.

To The Associated Press, Sadomasochism Is Just A "Subculture"

Crown Roast of Wiener

Seen here:

[Castro District] Supervisor Scott Wiener's proposal would make it illegal for a person over the age of 5 to "expose his or her genitals, perineum or anal region on any public street, sidewalk, street median, parklet or plaza" or while using public transit.

A first offense would carry a maximum penalty of a $100 fine, but prosecutors would have authority to charge a third violation as a misdemeanor punishable by up to a $500 fine and a year in jail. Exemptions would be made for participants at permitted street fairs and parades, such as the city's annual gay pride event and the Folsom Street Fair, which celebrates sadomasochism and other sexual subcultures.

Since about 1994 sadomasochism et cetera have not been considered mental illnesses by medical authorities when such deviancies are "consensual". Evidently the public in San Francisco no longer consents to the regular assaults against their eyes from assorted naked exhibitionists of deviancy, which should on that logic make such malefactors henceforth technically mentally ill once again.

Wow, wasn't that easy?

Accordingly we should now be able to say that, since libertarians advocate freedom for such deviancies but habitually fail at the polls, libertarians also are mentally ill because they do not enjoy the consent of the governed. 

The followers of libertarian Jude Wanniski continue to assert that the electorate always gets it right, so since the electorate repudiates libertarianism time and time again libertarians must be mentally ill.

It remains unknown if libertarianism ever was considered a mental disorder by authorities, however.

Needless to say, the date from which civilization may be said to have ended now has been postponed thanks to San Francisco Castro District Supervisor Scott Wiener.

Great name.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Wittiest Line Of The Week Past

"The generals are being led by their privates."

-- Rush Limbaugh

Thousands Of French Protest Genitally Modified Marriage

Story here:

Marc, a 60-year-old Parisian who said he was a fervent Catholic, called the government hypocritical. “They all have wives and children. So they understand perfectly well what kind of deviations would result from the approval of gay marriages.”

He was holding a sign that read “No to genitally modified marriage”.

Austin, MN, Hires Part-Timer To Save $18K On "Benefits"

"Benefits", as in health insurance.

The guy will work 30 hours per week and make $60K a year, but will get no benefits.

Story here:

He will not receive fringe benefits of pension, health insurance, life insurance or disability insurance. ... With the hiring of Erichson as a flex-time employee, the HRA [Housing and Redevelopment Authority] will save about a total of $38,000 ($20,000 in salary and $18,000 in benefits). The arrangement is planned to be revisited after one year of employment.

Yeah, at which time he'll be cut to 29 hours per week.

Capisce?