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.

Fear: The First, Second And Third Reason NOT To Invest

Once again, the purveyors of fear make an appearance, trying to scare you into investing in stocks when stocks are again near historic highs and Shiller p/e multiples are near the top of the historical range, this time at Reuters, here.

Patience is a rule of investing, too, which requires you to stick to your reasons for investing, or not investing, in the first, second, and third place. It makes no sense to purchase investments which for good reasons seem to be overvalued, especially when based upon historically novel forms of valuation which remain in vogue despite the lessons of the great debt bull since Ronald Reagan.

Appeals to "fear" from people who are already "all-in" are therefore suspect, and should be. Nothing continues to feed a fake bull like ever more greater fools.

And don't forget that permabulls need you, too, like Larry Kudlow, who confessed on his radio show last Saturday:

"God knows I'm long. I'm long . . . I have no choice."

If it's a free country and a free market, why is there so much compulsion?

The Greedy Bastards' Big Lie About Your Mortgage Interest Deduction

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Read the data for yourself, here, from the Joint Committee on Taxation's own estimate of the "cost" to the government of your mortgage interest deduction.

The JCT estimated that the government's biggest loss of revenue between 2007 and 2011 came from the exclusion of dividends and long term capital gains from higher tax rates. This does NOT include gains from selling real estate.

Tax losses from deductions for health insurance expenditures ranked second, tax losses from deductions for retirement plans third, all three of which range between $632 billion and $607 billion over 5 years.

The tax loss from deducting mortgage interest was a distant fourth, at $430 billion, yet the drumbeat from so-called conservatives to eliminate the deduction gets louder everyday.

Can you say, "Middle Class Tax Increase"?

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Blown Prediction Of Doomsday Award Goes To Republican TARP Author Sen. Judd Gregg

The blown prediction of doomsday award for 2012 goes to former Senator Judd Gregg, Republican author of TARP, who opined in July (here) that September was likely to be a month where we might again come close to total economic collapse.

Oh well. There's always Octember. After which comes Novonder.

As we all know:

MINISTER OF PROPAGANDA to DICTATOR HAILSTONE:

"Yah, you were gonna Blitz-Kreeg Great Mitten by the middle of August!"

FIELD MARSHAL HERRING to DICTATOR HAILSTONE:

"Then you said, Septober, then Octember, it's now in the middle of Novonder, and we ain't there yet!" -- The Three Stooges, "I'll Never Heil Again" (1941, here)

TARP averted nothing. And now nothing has averted nothing.

Aren't you glad he was in charge?

"I'll Turn Public Schools Into Food Deserts, You Take Care Of The Rest"

Two Years From Now Unemployment Will Still Be About 9.1 Percent

So the calculator here.

That must mean 2 years from now Obama will be the president.

Romney Isn't A Flipflopper On Taxes, He's A Snake

During the primaries Romney ran as a conservative tax cutter who would cut taxes across the board by 20 percent.

Now that he's the candidate, in Ohio he has said not to expect much of a tax cut because he would be eliminating deductions and exemptions at the same time, evidently in continuity with his pledge to maintain revenue neutrality and the progressivity of the tax code. You'll be paying the same . . . for now.

The problem with this is that the deductions and exemptions are bullwarks against the effects of rising tax rates in the future, and once removed expose taxpayers to the full force of those higher tax rates. This happened to us once before between 1986 and 1993 when deductions were eliminated by Reagan in exchange for lower tax rates, only to be raised again by Clinton. (Sorry, folks).

Conservatives should be running away from Romney. He's not just a mere flipflopper. He's a snake, and a liberal one at that whom the Democrats will be quite happy to have succeed with his tax program because it will make it easy for them to milk the middle class the next time they come to power.

Americans Are Pretty Much OK With The Fascist Police State

Poll here.

Do The Mussolini With Cabaret Voltaire

Video here.

UN Ambassador Susan Rice Does The Mussolini For Politico

Story here.

US Embassy Cairo Decides Religious Feelings Trump Free Speech

I'm sure the Supremes are amused by the attempt to assert the priority of one clause of the First Amendment over another clause of the First Amendment.

I saved the screen shot from 9/12/12.

Speaking of not abusing the right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others, the news reports that The Piss Christ is back on display.

So let me get this straight. Muslims do not believe in the deity of Christ, nor of Muhammad for that matter, but if you insult Muhammad you must die.  But Christians in America worship Christ as a god but its government does nothing to protect them from hurt religious feelings when he is insulted.

So therefore the government of the United States thinks Islam is deserving of superior treatment, for some reason.

Gee, I wonder what that would be?

Democrats Embrace "ObamaCare" Moniker On Bumper Sticker

Seen on a car in Grand Rapids this morning.

Tea Party Support Has Dropped 20 Percent Since Summer 2010

Gallup has the numbers, here.

30 percent of respondents supported the Tea Party in August 2010.

In August 2012 support is just 24 percent.

In the interim Republican operatives have worked to co-opt local chapters, assisted by Rush Limbaugh and Freedom Works in particular.

You know Rush Limbaugh, the guy who thinks President George W. Bush used the tax code to pander to the middle class.

Would Republicans have retaken the House in 2010 with 2012's level of support?

Just sayin'.