It is as deep as it ever was. The economy isn’t growing fast enough to catch up with population growth. There has been no effective growth at all. Here is a graph from today’s Wall Street Journal.
At the current rate of growth, the economy will never catch up with the long term trend. We stay below it forever. In fact, the economy is actually trending away from the long term growth. Unless it improves dramatically, we will never recover.
Real GDP increased 1.7 percent in 2011 (that is, from the 2010 annual level to the 2011 annual level), compared with an increase of 3.0 percent in 2010.
The increase in real GDP in 2011 primarily reflected positive contributions from personal consumption expenditures (PCE), exports, and nonresidential fixed investment that were partly offset by negative contributions from state and local government spending, private inventory investment, and federal government spending. Imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, increased.
When private equity firms make investments that consistently fail and result in the loss of investor funds, they go belly up and their managers never work in the business again. When venture socialist firms do the same thing, they just go back and get more money.
Just as President Obama toured Solyndra LLC before that taxpayer-funded company declared bankruptcy, so Vice President Joe Biden gave a speech at Ener1, an electric car battery company that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy today despite $118.5 million in stimulus money from the Department of Energy (DOE).
“We know what’s coming — you don’t have to be a fortune-teller to see where the automobile industry has to go,” Biden told Ener1 employees last year. “So why not? Why not have it made in America? That’s why we went out there and came up with $2.4 billion for battery technology.”
House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chair Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., recalled Biden’s visit and the failures of Solyndra and Beacon Power earlier this year. “One bankruptcy may be a fluke, two could be coincidence, but three is a trend,” Stearns said in a statement today. “Our investigation continues, and we are working to ensure taxpayers never are never again stuck paying hundreds of millions of dollars because of the administration’s risky bets.”
On this video, a Wisconsin public school teacher refuses a humanitarian award from Congressman Paul Ryan. He claims that, “Paul Ryan has no business at a MLK event.” What is his justification? He believes that our humanity demands that health care be administered by a massive bureaucratic machine in a far away capital city. He believes that our humanity demands that the central bureaucracy impose dependency on ever increasing numbers of Americans while impoverishing the rest with crushing socialized debt. He believes that humanitarians ignore the iron clad rules of economics and attempt to create wealth from nothing more than wishful legislation.
Paul Ryan believes none of these things. Therefore he rejected the award.
Would you let your kid into his classroom?
I am so tired of leftists who wear willful ignorance like a cloak of righteousness.
Look, I know Romney isn’t a Revoista conservative but his commentary in the video below is important. If we let the Obama, the left and – frankly – Gingrich continue unchecked with this narrative that Americans need be ashamed of being successful, we are screwed. Wealthy people have nothing for which to be ashamed of and much for which to be proud. I resent the crypto-Marxist attacks on wealth going on in this country. It is bullshit.
How many Revoistas remember THIS gem of an interview? I sure do. This is a seminal moment in the relationship between CBS and the Mainstream Media, President George Herbert Walker Bush and the Bush family. From this moment forward CBS made the Bush Family their target. Dan Rather fueled the grudge for as long as he was at CBS. After he was gone the whole feud had become institutionalized and it continues to this day.
It all began two weeks before the Iowa Caucus in 1988.
I have been poor and I have been moderately wealthy. I grew up living, not with my father, but with two separate step-fathers, neither of whom liked me very much. In fact, one of the two pretty much hated me and wasn’t afraid to demonstrate it with a punch. I grew up playing with children who lived in government subsidized housing. Nobody went to college. We didn’t even talk about it. After the Army, I went to college and supported a family of four on a wage that put us in the poverty zone. I never took handouts, however. I worked three jobs to get ahead.
Since my early 30s, however, things have been much better. My business experience has put me elbow-to-elbow with the country club set. I have seen wealth and I have known wealth. I have been fortunate enough to travel and even become a bit of a scotch snob. One thing I learned is that, while money won’t buy happiness, poverty sucks. Here are some other things I have learned by living the range of the American class system.
There are two types of poor people: 1) Those who won’t be poor forever and 2) those who will be. Almost all of the latter group deserve it.
Being poor doesn’t make you have illegitimate kids or do drugs. Having illegitimate kids and doing drugs makes you poor.
Successful and wealthy people are generally more religious than the poor. The more successful you are, the more likely you are to be religious. You figure out the dependent/independent variables.
Society is increasingly broken into two categories: Poor single people and successful married people.
Ambition is the most important predictor of success.
The more dependent you are, the more dependent you want to become.
Children raised by single mothers almost always wind up poor and struggling.
The worst part of being poor in America is that you are condemned to live among the poor.
Attaining a lower middle class lifestyle in America is easy, almost the default. Those who have not achieved it aren’t even trying.
Class warfare is based on envy and nothing else.
The emergence of class warfare in America is both dangerous and depressing.
November 3rd 1980. It was a lifetime ago. The Jerry Springeresque crowds full of punks who shout down and shut down speakers didn’t quite exist yet. A man of class could use just a few words to shut down a heckler while putting the crowd in the palm of his hands.
I wonder what his thoughts would be regarding the current Republican Primary.
Joint military training exercises will be held evenings in downtown Los Angeles through Thursday, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.
The LAPD will be providing support for the exercises, which will also be held in other portions of the greater Los Angeles area, police said.
Training sites “have been carefully selected to ensure the event does not negatively impact the citizens of Los Angeles and their daily routine,” a department official said.
The training, which a department official said would involve helicopters, has been coordinated with local authorities and owners of the training sites, police said.
Police said safety precautions have been taken to prevent risk to the general public and military personnel involved.
The exercises are closed to the public, police said.”
Warren Buffett, while kissing Obama’s strawberry flavored ass, famously complained that his secretary pays a higher tax rate that he does.
That, of course, ignores several very important aspects of the tax code that Buffett well understands. He understands that capital investment income is very different than regular income. He understands why it is different. He understand that even capital investment income is, actually, taxed more than once so it isn’t an apples to apples comparison. He was simply making a stupid political point that he knows wasn’t accurate.
Even setting all of that aside, we now know that in order to pay a higher rate than Buffett, his secretary would need to be making between $200,000 and $500,000 per year which pretty much puts her in the top 1%. Here is Forbes.
The IRS publishes detailed tax tables by income level. The latest results are for 2009. They show that taxpayers earning an adjusted gross income between $100,000 and $200,000 pay an average rate of twelve percent. This is below Buffet’s rate; so she must earn more than that. Taxpayers earning adjusted gross incomes of $200,000 to $500,000, pay an average tax rate of nineteen percent. Therefore Buffet must pay Debbie Bosanke a salary above two hundred thousand.
We must wait for further details to learn how much more than $200,000 she earns. The tax tables tell us about average ranges. For all we know she earns closer to a half million each year, but that is pure speculation.
The bottom line: She is either a one percenter and part of the class against whom Obama is engaging in class warfare or it is all just another lie of Obama and his sycophants.
President Obama, alighting from the stairs of Air Force One in Phoenix this afternoon, was greeted by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, who handed him an envelope and the two exchanged what appeared to be some heated sentiments. At one point, she pointed her finger at him.
Asked afterward what happened, Brewer said, “He was a little disturbed about my book, Scorpions for Breakfast.
“I said to him that I have all the respect in the world for the office of the president. The book is what the book is. I asked him if he read the book. He said he read the excerpt,” she said, according to a pool report. “He didn’t feel that I had treated him cordially. I said I was sorry he felt that way but I didn’t get my sentence finished. Anyway, we’re glad he’s here. I’ll regroup.”
Ah yes, nothing could be more soothing to the ears of recently laid off and soon to be laid off NASA employees and their community than the words of the Man who will say ANYTHING!
Note to Newt; There’s an Economic Depression on and it’s getting worse by the day. Floridians are having a hard time paying their electric bills and affording fuel to travel to buy ever expensive groceries. How about having a conversation about starting some colonies in the Gulf of Mexico that can produce fuel? It might actually save us some money, generate revenue for the Leviathan and put more people to work doing something that is actually PROFITABLE.
Next stop for the Man who will say ANYTHING and those who dare joust with him will be in my hometown from which I publish, tomorrow evening at the University of North Florida. Who knows what will be said next? Newt knows damn well this is Skynyrd Country. Perhaps he will tell us that by the end of his administration there will also be a Confederate Battle Flag flying high over his Moon Base. Hell yeah, and be sure to paint that rocket black and put a big number 3 on the side of it.
Sturm, Ruger and Company has announced a new bolt-action rifle and they call it the ‘American’. It looks like a good, well-designed gun at a good price. Here it is:
