Reince Priebus Is An Electoral College Fiddler. Get Rid Of Him.

We already have fiddling going on with the National Popular Vote campaign. Now it turns out Reince Preibus, RNC chairman, favors a form of fiddling with the Electoral College of his own, here.

That's three strikes against Reince for me. He did a lousy job in 2012. We did nothing but keep the House, in the worst economy since WWII. He attacked the duly elected candidate for Senate in Missouri. I won't mention Indiana. And now this.

Dump Reince Preibus.

What Was Josh Brown, The Reformed Broker, REALLY Thinking About?

about bullets with one 't'?

or about bulletts with two?

The Left Refuses To Spell Properly. The Right Can't.

People Who Won't Spell Are The Enemy

"We are perfectly in the right to abandon conventions if we can afford to."

Seen here (what a shock, right?).

There is nothing too low which will not be lifted up by this sort.

ObamaCare Is Fascism? So Is The Federal Reserve.

And TARP. And Dodd-Frank.

So says Robert Romano for Investors.com here:

[ObamaCare] guarantees customers to large companies, in this case insurance providers that supported passage of the legislation, and in the process cartelizes the system.

In other words, private profits are being embedded into the law, and enforced by the bureaucracy, which will levy fines on individuals and employers that fail to comply with the mandates. ...

[T]he level of state control in this new system, and insurance industry participation in implementing it to its own benefit, is undeniable. It is corporatism defined.

One could compare it to the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 that implemented the National Recovery Administration, which may have been patterned after Mussolini's labor laws, as summarized in a 1991 Yale Law School study by James Whitman, before it was subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court.

Or the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which gave privately owned banks the power to appoint regional Fed chairmen and outsourced creation of the public currency to a banking cartel.

Or more recently, one might examine the Troubled Asset Relief Fund (TARP), Dodd-Frank's "orderly liquidation fund" and the Fed's continued mortgage-backed securities purchase program — all bailout programs that privatize profits and socialize losses in the financial sector. More corporatism.

This country has been a veritable cornucopia of fascism since the days of Woodrow Wilson and FDR.

Has free market capitalism failed in the United States? It's hardly been tried.

Annual Percentage Increases To Federal Spending Since Fiscal 1999

Fiscal Year / Percentage increase to outlays over prior year

1999 /  3.0%

2000 /  5.1

2001 /  4.1

2002 /  7.9

2003 /  7.4

2004 /  6.2

2005 /  7.8

2006 /  7.4

2007 /  2.8

2008 /  9.3

2009 / 17.9

2010 / (1.8)

2011 /  4.3

2012 /  5.3

Average annual increase over the last 14 fiscal years: 6.2%.

At that rate, the rule of 72 says outlays will double in fewer than 12 years. Outlays for 2012 are estimated to finish at $3.8 trillion. Half of that is $1.9 trillion. Actual outlays in 2001, eleven years prior, were $1.9 trillion.

So in 2023, eleven years from 2012, expect outlays to reach $7.6 trillion.

What Is The Cost Of 5 Million Homes Repossessed By The Banks?

In 2009, it is estimated the average mortgage was $172,000. If 5 million homes have been repossessed by banks in the current 7 year housing catastrophe, using that average amount as a proxy for the cost would mean a hit to the banks of about $860 billion, far less than the $7.7 trillion in emergency lending extended by the Federal Reserve which we have learned about.

The government could have stepped in, if it had had the resolve, and paid off each mortgage at that cost to save the banks in question who were on the hook, and renegotiated ownership with each homeowner. An additional 10 million plus mortgages today are underwater, and could have been incorporated also into the payoff deal.

For its part, the government could have prevented moral hazard in the arrangement by enforcing foreclosure and assuming ownership where applicable, and expanded its public housing role by radically expanding its owned housing stock and becoming the landlord to the former owners, now transformed into renters.

Why that is not preferable to the current arrangement where we continue to bail out the banks and extend and pretend on housing I do not know. It would be bad, but it couldn't be worse.

Yes, it is a formidable logistical task, not without considerable cost in itself, but we'd have this behind us by now if there had only been resolve and decisive action had been taken.

It takes imagination, and our leaders don't have it, in either party.

Latest Real Case Shiller Home Price Index Shows Prices Top Of Range Pre-Bubble

If you take out the obvious housing bubble, the graph shows how prices for housing today are at the upper range of historical experience when adjusted for inflation. These are prices in December 2012 dollars going back to 1890, over 120 years. It doesn't get more current than that. Housing assets are still expensive on this showing, about 12% too expensive, imho. Price discovery is being impeded by Federal Reserve zero interest rate policy. See the graph here.

Money Available For Spending Is Up Over 70% Since 2008, But Total Debt Is Up 7%

M1 money supply has gone up about $1 trillion between mid-2008 and now, almost 5 years. This is basically spending money which is not being spent.

Total credit market debt fell an equivalent amount, but all of it in 2009, so one cannot say the one "offset" the other. (The extra M1 was saved over the nearly five year period. The debt was discharged somehow, through pay-downs or defaults, and relatively quickly during the year of the biggest GDP decline in post-war memory). And since early 2010, total debt is back up over $2.5 trillion. And since 2008 TCMDO is up over $3.6 trillion overall.

Somebody is ramping up debt just like before the crisis, but it's not the consumer.

The Anti-Rush Morning Update

Don't blame the Republican base, or the American people, or the 47 percent for that matter . . . lead them!

Zillow Recognizes 2012 Housing Value Increase Is Double The Norm

The final three months of 2012 marked five consecutive quarters of U.S. home value appreciation, and the near 6% annual jump is roughly double the historical average that has home values climbing about 3% a year, Zillow said.

“Good news for homeowners after years of poor performance,” Stan Humphries, Zillow’s chief economist, said in a statement. But Humphries cautioned consumers against expecting 2012-like gains in the future, saying we expect this recovery to continue into 2013, but at a more sustainable pace.”

The rest is here.

Without a driver for jobs, I see no reason for housing to appreciate at even 3% per year. In fact, prices today are within that percentage of the historical top of their range prior to the bubble. In other words, prices are still too high, historically, but Zillow isn't going to tell you that, at least not that way.

Buyer beware, imho.

America's Holocaust

 54,559,615

Rush Limbaugh Continues To Blame The Republican Base

Since the end of the first half of the second hour of the broadcast today, Rush Limbaugh again repeatedly blamed the Republican base for Romney's loss, instead of blaming the Republican Party for nominating the wrong candidate, and Romney for being the wrong candidate.

So not only did Romney blame the 47 percent who wouldn't vote for him, Rush Limbaugh continues to blame Republican conservatives for not voting for Romney. If you want to know what's wrong with the Republican Party, that's it. 

Romney was the wrong candidate, because he wasn't a conservative, and had no fire in the belly for anything, including holding Obama's feet to the fire. 

So what do Rush and Republican liberals like Colin Powell have in common? Criticism of conservatives. And Rush starts the show bemoaning the growing isolation of conservatives, and then proceeds to contribute to that isolation.

Gee whiz. Rush had a nice long weekend to rest up, and this is the best he can do? I swear he got more than a cortisone shot from that doctor he just met.

The time has long since passed that Rush should have retired.

205 Million To Be Unemployed Worldwide By 2014

So says the ILO, the International Labour Organization, noting that 205 million unemployed worldwide will break the 2009 record of 198 million. Unfortunately on the way to that, we'll exceed the record already in 2013 with 202 million unemployed worldwide.

Call it trickle down unemployment:

"Unemployment remains as dire as it was during the crisis in 2009," Ekkehard Ernst, chief of the employment trends unit at the ILO, which wrote the report, told CNBC.

While the crisis may have originated in the developed world, the report noted that 75 percent of 2012's newly unemployed came from outside it, with East Asia, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa being the worst affected.

Ernst attributed this to the "spillover effect" of weak growth in advanced economies, and in particular, the recession in Europe.

Read the rest here at CNBC.com.

A Busted Inaugural JumboTron For A Busted ObamaNation

Video here. People simply gave up and left.

The rest of us have been  experiencing broken down conditions like we're suddenly living in a third world country, so why not at the inauguration, too?

I guess The Washington Post has decided it's safe to do journalism again.

5 Years Of Uncommon Snows Give London Mayor Boris Johnson An Open Mind

Lord I wish Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, England, were my mayor, my governor, hell, my president for crying out loud.

This guy, trained in the study of classical antiquity, utters more civilization and common sense in one brief column than I've heard in four years from Barack Obama on any subject, let alone from nearly anyone else in this increasingly barbarous republic of ours, if it can still be called a republic. And that's saying a lot because President Obama has been talking non-stop now for four years and hasn't said one damn thing yet, even when the teleprompter is working properly. Where else can you learn about the Maunder minimum, Martinis, the Dalton minimum, William Shakespeare and solar science all wrapped up in a delightful bow about winter snow? I know not where.

Notably, the mayor ends his column with the humility characteristic of a man who one day will doubtless be the leader of many more in England than just the happy inhabitants of London, or at least it can be hoped:

I am speaking only as a layman who observes that there is plenty of snow in our winters these days, and who wonders whether it might be time for government to start taking seriously the possibility — however remote — that [astrophysicist Piers] Corbyn is right. If he is, that will have big implications for agriculture, tourism, transport, aviation policy and the economy as a whole. Of course it still seems a bit nuts to talk of the encroachment of a mini ice age.

But it doesn’t seem as nuts as it did five years ago. I look at the snowy waste outside, and I have an open mind.

And on this quotation, "Sometime too bright the eye of heaven shines", which he makes from Shakespeare's sonnett, in the bleak mid-winter I can live for days as I remind myself that not everything dies forever, least of all the good, the true, and the beautiful:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest;
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Moochelle Shovels It In At Inaugural Lunch Like She Hasn't Eaten In Days

Mabel, Mabel, strong and able, get your elbows off the table. This is not a horse's stable, but a first class dining table.

And shouldn't the First Lady finish chewing and swallowing before shoveling in the next fork full?

Meanwhile everybody else is talking about the eye-rolling, while the president seems genuinely affable toward his nemesis.

Video here.

Obama Promises To Faithfully Execute The Constitution . . .

. . . it'll be a drive-by shooting.

Bush And Obama Piss Down The Backs Of Older Workers And Tell Them It's Raining

In the post-war period, the unemployment level for workers 55 and over first reached the 400,000 mark in 1948, and rattled up and down around that for five decades, briefly doubling during the recessions after 1980 and 1990. The weakness was already apparent however by July 1974, when the level last got effectively to 400,000, at 402,000. The superlative growth of GDP under Truman, Eisenhower and JFK/Johnson had propelled the country strongly forward but ran out of gas, quite literally, the summer after I graduated from high school. It was the immediate aftermath of the Arab oil embargo, and also the summer when Richard Nixon's presidency went tits up. The Vietnam denouement occurred the following year, Jimmy Carter got elected a year after that, and within four years interest rates and inflation rose to crippling levels. America had lost her way. The reforms during the Reagan/Bush years would take until the presidency of Bill Clinton in the 1990s to make GDP look once again like it did during the immediate post-war years. Things got so good by the late 1990s that people routinely quit their jobs, looking for greener pastures elsewhere. Finding and keeping qualified workers became very difficult for employers. But it was not to last.

It was in May 2001 that the unemployment level for America's oldest workers last saw that old normal territory, at 493,000, and it hasn't looked back since.

Since that date there has been a sustained problem of unemployment for older workers, for whom the new normal level quickly became 800,000 during the Bush administration. Now it has ramped up much higher than that under Obama, the new normal since 2008 rising five times the old normal to 2 million. The unemployment level for workers 55 and over has gone from 493,000 in 2001 to a peak of 2.233 million in 2010, an increase of nearly five fold. Today the level remains stuck just under 2 million.

Under George Bush the unemployment level for older workers never really came down, and under Obama it has hardly moved after ramping up so high. It is hard to believe that it isn't by design, since older workers tend to be the highest earners. You can save a lot of money as an employer by firing them. 2 million workers no longer making $50,000 a year comes to a savings of $100 billion annually.

Older workers no longer working aren't depreciating assets. They're expenses, written-off.

Who will be next?

Depression Of 2008-09 Doubles Move From Employees To Independent Contractors

I know the truth of this story first hand.

Obama's laser-like focus vaporizes jobs.

The income in this household shifted to income from contract work almost immediately after Barack Obama's election in 2008, just six weeks after which a long career as an employee involuntarily came to an end. For two years every nickel of such income was reported as 99ers, which reduced and/or eliminated any income received from extended unemployment insurance benefits, as is only right. When that ran out in 2010, it was strictly catch as catch can from then on. From month to month you don't know if the phone will ring with a job, or an email will arrive asking for a bid. The new reality is living on 50% of what we used to, and paying for our own benefits, and double to Social Security.

That was over four years ago, and with ObamaCare set to be implemented one year from now, the war on American jobs will only get worse as employers keep full-time employees under 50 in number if they can, make as many employees part-time as they can, and hire independent contractors as they can, all to avoid having to provide health insurance under ObamaCare.

This is what the government mandate means: compulsion, tyranny and poverty. In order to provide coverage for a few, it first has to be destroyed for the many.

The story in The Wall Street Journal, here, deserves your full attention:

Typically, independent contractors are less expensive for employers, who don't have to pay taxes on wages or supply benefits, as they would for their employees. Reliance on independent contractors has increased over the years, particularly in the recession, when employers sought less expensive labor.

In December 2012, 6.7% of payroll checks written by small employers went to 1099 workers, or those not considered employees of a company, according to SurePayroll, a Chicago-based payroll firm that caters to 40,000 small employers with an average of seven employees. That's roughly double the 3.5% of payroll checks that went to 1099 workers in December 2007.

The trend is expected to accelerate this year given the framework of the looming health-care law, employment analysts predict.