“Let me distinguish between professional politicians and the public at large. You know, the public is not paying close attention to the ins and outs of how a Treasury auction goes. They shouldn’t. They’re worrying about their family, they’re worrying about their jobs. They’re worrying about their neighborhood. They have got a lot of other things on their plate. We’re paid to worry about it.”
Turns out he was wrong again…(and by the way seeing the state of the economy I do not think politicians worry enough. I want my money back Mr President!)
Almost 80 percent of lawmakers might need to crack open an economics textbook before the congressional recess ends, a new study on Tuesday suggests.
The vast majority of members lack an academic background in business or economics, according to a study by the Employment Policies Institute, a nonprofit group that takes a conservative stand on fiscal issues. Only 13.7 percent majored in business or accounting, and 8.4 percent have an economics degree.
Richard Clark, the top counter-terrorism czar under both Clinton and George W. Bush, alleges that the CIA covered up masses of evidence that they totally botched their investigation into the 9/11 hijackers. And it’s true that before Homeland Security rounded up the various intelligence agencies, intelligence gathering and analysis that spanned international and national sources was a complete clusterfuck, to use a technical term.
Clarke theorizes that top CIA brass tried to recruit the hijackers and turn them to our side, but were unsuccessful. And – when they realized had failed – they covered up their tracks so that the FBI would not investigate their illegal CIA activities , “malfeasance and misfeasance”, on U.S. soil.
The latest posting by the Treasury Department shows the national debt has now increased $4 trillion on President Obama’s watch.
The debt was $10.626 trillion on the day Mr. Obama took office. The latest calculation from Treasury shows the debt has now hit $14.639 trillion.
It’s the most rapid increase in the debt under any U.S. president.
The national debt increased $4.9 trillion during the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush. The debt now is rising at a pace to surpass that amount during Mr. Obama’s four-year term.
Mr. Obama blames policies inherited from his predecessor’s administration for the soaring debt. He singles out:
“two wars we didn’t pay for”
“a prescription drug program for seniors…we didn’t pay for.”
“tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 that were not paid for.”
Still blaming the others for his mistakes….
Just look at what waste of money was the stimulus plan…. Whoever asked to get free money from the government to “create” jobs was given the money and never accounted for what they did with them….
In a SPIEGEL interview, billionaire investor George Soros criticizes Germany’s lack of leadership in the euro zone, arguing that Berlin must dictate to Europe the solution to the currency crisis. He also argues in favor of the creation of euro bonds as a way out of the turbulence.
Not content with comparing the Tea Party to “terrorists” a couple of weeks ago on Capitol Hill, the vice president has travelled all the way to China to blame the grassroots conservative movement for the humiliating Standard and Poor’s credit downgrade. In response to a question from a medical student at Sichuan University, who asked about “what measures you’re going to implement to reduce those deficits and redeem the financial strength of America”, Biden declared that it was the intransigence of the Tea Party, or “a group within the Republican Party” as he put it, that was to blame for the current deficit-driven financial crisis:
THE VICE PRESIDENT: It’s a very good question. One of the multiple rating agencies reduced our rating from AAA to – plus – come down one notch. And that was very disturbing and bothersome to us, and we have to deal with is.
We do have a deficit that I was asked by the President to head up a commission to try to deal with that deficit. And we made some significant progress, but not the progress we could have made and will make. The bottom line is we have to deal with two elements of our economy. One is what we call entitlement programs — long-term commitments to our people in the area of particularly Medicare. That is the safety net we have for people once they reach the age of 65 to be able to be assured that they have health care.
… It’s easy to make those changes, and we had a tentative agreement to do that between the major political leaders of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party and the administration. But there is a group within the Republican Party that is a very strong voice now that did – wanted different changes, and so that deal fell through at the very end.
Beneath the desperate debt crisis headlines, Jeff Randall finds a country mired in fraud and fiddling – and discovers its authorities are powerless to stop the rot.…Sounds more and more like America…
Americans overwhelmingly believe that the bigger problem with the welfare system in the United States is that there are too many overqualified recipients rather than not enough. Most also think legal immigrants should have to wait at least three years before being eligible for welfare benefits.
The Fed’s liquidity lifelines may increase the chances that banks engage in excessive risk-taking with borrowed money, Rogoff said. Such a phenomenon, known as moral hazard, occurs if banks assume the Fed will be there when they need it, he said. The size of bank borrowings “certainly shows the Fed bailout was in many ways much larger than TARP,” Rogoff said.
President Barack Obama signed an executive order Thursday directing federal officials to design a government-wide strategy for making the federal workforce more diverse.
An Office of Personnel Management report says that in fiscal year 2010, the federal workforce was 66.2 percent white, 17.7 percent black, 8 percent Hispanic, 5.6 percent Asian/Pacific Islander and 1.8 percent Native American. It was 56.1 percent male.
We can go two ways here. Either fire 46.2 percent of the whiteys and 6.1 of the males and hire more of the other ethnic groups until we have 20% of each group and 50-50 gender distribution in government. Or probably it will be better just to hire people from the other groups until their number equals the whites number…..problem solved, right? Any way you know you going to pay for the good change the government mandates
The number of people employed by government in Washington, D.C., increased in the month of July even as the overall unemployment rate rose in the District of Columbia itself as well as in 28 of the 50 states, according to a report released today by the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Laid-off workers and aging baby boomers are flooding Social Security’s disability program with benefit claims, pushing the financially strapped system toward the brink of insolvency. Applications are up nearly 50 percent over a decade ago as people with disabilities lose their jobs and can’t find new ones in an economy that has shed nearly 7 million jobs.
“Unfortunately, the Fed doesn’t have any rabbits to pull out of the hat to magically reignite economic growth,” Gault said. “It is doing what it can, and despite the dissent, that will probably mean a QE3 program at some point, but its prime ammunition has already been used.”
Industrial Policy: The fact that President Obama’s “green jobs” campaign has been an enormously expensive failure is now so glaringly obvious even the New York Times can’t ignore it any longer.
In a surprisingly candid article headlined “Number of Green Jobs Fails to Live Up to Promises,” the Times’ Aaron Glantz reports that “federal and state efforts to stimulate creation of green jobs have largely failed, government records show,” and that Obama’s goal of 5 million new green jobs in 10 years is a “pipe dream.”
Before the recession, “squatting” brought to mind Appalachian-style family feuds, wherein the Hatfields camped out for years on end, shotguns cocked, on a remote corner of the McCoy’s acreage., or maybe starving artist types making their homes in neglected former industrial buildings of lower Manhattan.
It’s also a legal concept that has stunned generations of law students: the idea that, in many states, even in 2011, someone with no other legal right to a property could, if a few technical conditions were met, gain title by openly and continually trespassing there without the owners’ permission. As a Berkeley law student first learning of “adverse possession” myself, I was amazed to begin noticing metal plaques in the concrete around campus granting permission to whoever would pass thereon, which was the University’s old school and effective method of avoiding ownership claims by squatters.
When President Obama was inaugurated, he swore an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Article II, Section 3 directs the President to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Unfortunately, in what has become an all too common occurrence in this administration, Obama is once again bending that oath to the breaking point by specifically not taking care that immigration laws passed by Congress are faithfully executed.
THERE’S been a lot of bad economic news lately, yet we may be overlooking the most disturbing development of all: our economic productivity has been weakening. This isn’t just a problem for the United States. Because America remains a leader in technology and innovation, it is also a matter of concern for the entire world.
The U.S. Federal Reserve hasn’t given up supporting the economy by printing money and buying more Treasuries, said Mobius, executive chairman of Templeton Asset’s emerging markets group. The firm is buying commodity stocks, expecting raw material prices to rise, he said.
A troubled nation wonders: How did we get mired in 9.1 percent unemployment, 0.9 percent growth and an economic outlook so bad that the Federal Reserve pledges to keep interest rates at zero through mid-2013 — an admission that it sees little hope on the horizon?
