The Cynical Economist

Answer – Because the asshole politicians in Washington DC do not do their jobs, but think the solution to all of our problems is to just print more money, but what happens is, that this solution in turn makes oil more expensive not only here but worldwide.

2008:  Candidate for president Barak Obama….

2012: Running on Empty…

While these represent only a fraction of the Obama administration’s efforts to stifle new energy production, here’s a look at some of the key data points from above:

• FEBRUARY 4, 2009 – Just months after President Obama’s Energy Secretary said, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” the Obama administration begins “scrapping leases for oil-shale development” and cancels 77 leases for oil and gas production in Utah. Gas is $1.91 a gallon.

• MARCH 7, 2009 – ABC News says the White House is closely monitoring the expedited Solyndra loan project even as it was delaying new American energy production that would help make us less dependent on foreign energy. Gas is $1.94 a gallon.

• JUNE 27, 2009 - President Obama urges the Senate to adopt House Democrats’ “cap and trade” national energy tax, the same one the president once admitted would cause electricity rates to “necessarily skyrocket.” Then-GOP Leader Boehner later said the bill “would raise electricity prices, increase gasoline prices, and ship American jobs to countries like China and India.” Gas is $2.50 a gallon.

• JANUARY 7, 2010 – The Obama administration announces new bureaucratic hurdles to American energy production that Secretary Salazar admitted “could add delays to the leasing and drilling process.” Gas is $2.67 a gallon.

• MARCH 31, 2010 – Instead of opening new areas to energy exploration and development, President Obamablocks deep-ocean energy production on 60 percent of America’s Outer Continental Shelf. Gas is $2.80 a gallon.

• DECEMBER 1, 2010 – The president re-imposes and expands the moratorium on offshore energy production. Gas is $2.86 a gallon.

• JANUARY 2, 2011 – TIME reported that the Obama administration issued the first in a series of regulations on January 2 designed to unilaterally impose a national energy tax. Gas is $3.05 a gallon.

• MAY 5, 2011 – The White House issues a formal statement opposing House-passed Restarting American Offshore Leasing Now Act (H.R. 1230) and Putting the Gulf of Mexico Back to Work Act (H.R. 1229), legislation designed to jumpstart American energy production, address rising gas prices, and help create new jobs. Gas is $3.96 a gallon.

• JUNE 21, 2011 - The White House opposes the House-passed Jobs & Energy Permitting Act that would unlock an estimated 27 billion barrels of oil and 132 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Gas is $3.65 a gallon.

• NOVEMBER 8, 2011 – The Obama Administration releases a plan for a five-year moratorium on offshore energy production, placing “some of the most promising energy resources in the world off-limits,” according to the House Natural Resources Committee. Gas is $3.42 a gallon.

• JANUARY 18, 2012 – President Obama rejects the bipartisan Keystone XL pipeline and the more than 20,000 jobs that would come with it. Gas is $3.39 a gallon, and rising faster and earlier than ever before.

• And the list goes on….

From CBS News

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….

From American Thinker
By Christopher Chantrill

I know that we are all supposed to love Warren Buffett as the Sage of Omaha, businessman and all-around good guy, but I keep reading stories that make me wonder. Here’s a story about Warren Buffett, the estate tax, and the life insurance industry.

Did you know that the life insurance lobby is actively lobbying to restore the estate tax?

Why would the life insurance industry care about that? It turns out that ten percent of life insurance industry revenue is related to the estate tax. Wealthy people take out life insurance in order to reduce estate taxes because when you die, your life insurance payout doesn’t count as part of your estate.

Did you know that Warren Buffett owns six life insurance companies? Did you know he supports the estate tax? You do now.

Warren Buffett isn’t just noted as an owner of life insurance companies and a supporter of the estate tax. He’s also noted as a buyer of family businesses. As Dick Patten shows, these two business strategies support each other.

A family business owner or farmer takes out a large life insurance policy which he sinks tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into each year. When he finally passes away, the life insurance pays out his policy to his family–tax free…

Even as Mr. Buffett’s insurance companies are “protecting” family businesses from the IRS, he is buying companies that are forced to sell themselves to pay the death tax. Mr. Buffett’s ability to buy family businesses at bargain basement prices depends on families being desperate to sell-and nothing produces family businesses desperate to sell quickly like a 55% bill from the IRS on all of the businesses’ assets.

Estate taxes must be paid to the U.S. Treasury within a year of the testator’s death. In cash.

Back in 1931, the liberal son of an immigrant banker knew what to call this kind of business. Matthew Josephson wrote The Robber Barons to argue that the industrial giants of the 19th century had not created wealth in the right way. They had acted like the feudal barons who for centuries had dominated the mountain passes through the Alps. The great corporations of the Gilded Age “monopolized strategic valley roads or mountain passes through which commerce flowed” just like the old barons-of-the-crags.

Hello, Warren? Isn’t your business model exactly the one that so offended young Matthew back in the Great Depression after he got back from a decade living la vie bohème as an ex-pat in Paris? Aren’t your businesses sitting at an economic choke-point, exploiting the unintended consequences of bad government economic policy, gouging successful family businesses both coming and going, and exploiting grieving widows?

Matthew Josephson inaugurated the arch, knowing style that liberal John Kenneth Galbraith picked up in the 1950s and that Noam Chomsky does so well today. These writers all appeal to the liberal reader who wants to believe that America is unjust and crude but who doesn’t want to be enlightened much by actual knowledge about business and the economy

That’s OK. Let our liberal friends spin their fantasies of conspiratorial robber barons and corporate greed. We have Hernando De Soto with The Other Path and The Mystery of Capital. He shows us how the real robber barons are the leaders of “redistributive combines” of special interests competing for privileges from favor-dispensing politicians and bureaucrats.

And now we have Deirdre McCloskey and her bubbly, one-of-the-girls style. In The Bourgeois Virtues, she argues that whether you like capitalism or not, there are now six times as many humans living today as in 1800, and the average living human consumes eight and a half times as much as people consumed two hundred years ago. Plus capitalism has made us “ethically better people,” whereas socialism does the opposite

It’s hard to think of Warren Buffett as a robber baron. He’s a jolly chap who just seems to be along for the ride. But the ugly truth is that his businesses benefit from one of the major big-government redistributive programs by which the ruling class makes government big and families small. He’s a leader of a “redistributive combine” that wants to keep what it got from the government favor factory. He’s one of the chaps sitting by the side of the road taking their cut, courtesy of Uncle Sam.

It would be nice if our liberal friends would be as hard on their green-energy crony capitalists and their high-speed rail robber barons as they would like to be on the white working-class striver trying to buy a small construction business.

But at least Warren Buffett is a nice robber baron. We all like life insurance companies. They are different from health insurance companies.

Christopher Chantrill is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. See his usgovernmentspending.com and also usgovernmentdebt.us. At americanmanifesto.org he is blogging and writing An American Manifesto: Life After Liberalism.

By the way guess who owned some of the companies bailed out with your tax dollars  - Mr Buffet….

and

guess who will potentially profit from the high speed railroads system that Obama loves so much…

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From GoogleNews

BEIJING — China — home to the biggest counterfeit and piracy market in the world — has said it will launch a nationwide crackdown on fake goods in a bid to improve the country’s image abroad.

The State Council, or cabinet, said Tuesday it would “launch a special campaign to fight intellectual property rights infringement and the manufacture and sale of counterfeit goods” at a meeting chaired by Premier Wen Jiabao.

The six-month campaign, which includes making sure government organisations use genuine software, will begin at the end of October, the State Council said in a statement.

IPR infringement and counterfeit goods “upset the market’s normal order, impair the competitive strength and innovation of businesses, and hurt China’s image abroad,” it said.

China’s counterfeit and piracy market employs millions of factory workers, distributors and shop assistants across the nation.

You got that? Crackdown on industries that employs millions. LOL. China will never do that. Why would the Communist leaders risk destabilizing their positions by starving the people who keep them in power?

Authorities have launched crackdowns before, and Beijing says it has managed to stamp out some of the existing Internet piracy and copyright infringement.

But of course, when you censure the whole incoming and outgoing information stream in China,  it is easy to stop the internet piracy and copyright infringement. You just shut down everything.

But analysts say graft and weak policing mean factories still continue to churn out fake goods, costing foreign and domestic firms billions of dollars in lost revenue.

The crackdown will focus on the publishing, culture and entertainment, high-tech and agricultural industries, the statement said.

It will target production of fake goods at the source, strengthen market regulation, and increase protection of intellectual property rights in the import and export sectors and on the Internet, it added.

Authorities have also been asked to strengthen awareness of copyright infringement issues.

The whole thing is just a propaganda piece to soften the critics of the undervalued Yuan and to show action and strength in part of the Chinese.

I think the crackdown is unlikely to crack on anything. Remember the stories from 2007?

Fake goods and unsafe food threaten Chinese exports. Chinese government executed few guys, but nothing else changed. The production of fake and unsafe goods continued….

Even as recently as last month the EU pressed China over the fake goods, because the whole world is pissed off

China will rise the value of the Yuan, but will flood us with fake ipads and GPS and nikes and will use whatever technology and know how they have stolen….

They can have their currency devalued a little bit, but will not have the people rioting on the streets because of lost jobs

Last week Michelle Obama encouraged the citizens of USA to go on vacation on the Mexican Gulf  and spend some money to help rebuild the gulf economy. Few days later she and her family went on vacation, but not on the gulf beaches as she encouraged the rest of us to do, but in Maine.

If you ask yourselves the question, why did she do that, here is a possible answer – Gulf coast waters are contaminated and toxic

From Canada free press
By Fred Dardick

The same hypocrite who says our energy costs must “necessarily skyrocket” to fund his political ambition, is giving Marie Antoinette a run for her money when it comes to spending national treasure on personal luxuries.

While much of the country is struggling to pay their bills, the President and First Lady are partying like rock royalty. The collection of talent that has made the pilgrimage to the White House to entertain Obama and friends is nothing less than amazing: Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Tony Bennet, Paul Simon, Marc Anthony, Herbie Hancock, Martina McBride, Queen Latifah, The Foo Fighters, Faith Hill, and recently foot-in-mouth Paul McCartney to name a few.

This has the makings to be the greatest ongoing concert series ever to be seen on this Earth just to entertain one man … all paid for by the American taxpayer.

Let Them Eat Cake

How much does this world-class entertainment cost? Assuming the artists themselves forgo appearance fees, I highly doubt Paul Simon would perform with just a karaoke machine as backup.
Professional equipment needs to be brought in – sound engineers, stages, lights, etc… Even small scale performances by these artists can be very expensive.

Add booze, food, security, invitations, social secretaries, wait staff, and hangers on to the tab and the price for one of these events could easily top $75K. With over 27 concerts hosted thus far, the total cost to taxpayers is in the millions of dollars.

The executive branch does not provide detailed information regarding entertainment expenses, however, it has been estimated the Obamas spent at least $10 million on “drunken White House parties” in 2009 alone.

The Audacity of Food Stamps

Considering the country is at war and a record 40 million Americans rely on food stamps to eat, Obama should show some class and skip the expensive partying.

Whether it’s the world’s greatest concert series, multi-million dollar date night in New York or taxpayer funded shopping in Europe for the First Lady, the Obamas are exposing themselves as nothing more than greedy, self-serving politicians.

While the President and First Lady insist the rest of us endure economic hardship for the greater good, they are living like a king and queen on our dime.