My elevator AP news feed

I know how much AP hates to announce anything positive about Trump, his economy, his tariffs, his supporters, his values, his patriotism or his family, so that's why I used the AP article. Our elevators at the Forum use a news feed from AP (left of center) and I just wait for it to switch to volleyball or pick up sticks tournaments. It's all in the verbs. https://apnews.com/article/economy-gdp-spending-trump-federal-reserve-rates-97346d37c4edaa00f519e45941f75264?

"An uptick in consumer spending helped the U.S. economy expand at a surprising 3.8% from April through June, the government reported in a dramatic upgrade of its previous estimate of second-quarter growth.

U.S. gross domestic product — the nation’s output of goods and services — rebounded in the spring from a 0.6% first-quarter drop caused by fallout from President Donald Trump’s trade wars, the Commerce Department said Thursday. The department had previously estimated second-quarter growth at 3.3%, and forecasters had expected a repeat of that figure."

The lies about Trump--NATO

One of the biggest lies the Democrats tell about Trump is that he wants to destroy NATO. So, paying your fair share (2% of GDP) is now being a Nazi? Hmm. Who is it that talks about "fair share" all the time? But what's crazy is Biden is now given credit for what Trump asked for!

 "Just five years ago, there was still less than 10 allies that spent 2% of GDP on defense,” Stoltenberg said during remarks at The Wilson Center in Washington. “I can only now reveal that this year, more than 20 allies will spend at least 2% of GDP on defense.” (CNN, June 17, 2024)

Fourteen Trillion

$14 trillion. That's what Covid + lockdown cost us. "Workplace absences, and sales lost due to the cessation of brick-and-mortar retail shopping, air travel and public gatherings, contributed the most. At the height of the pandemic, in the second quarter of 2020, our survey indicates that international and domestic airline travel fell by nearly 60%, indoor dining by 65% and in-store shopping by 43%. . . . The toll we estimate that it took on the nation’s gross domestic product is twice the size of that of the Great Recession of 2007-2009. It’s 20 times greater than the economic costs of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and 40 times greater than the toll of any other disaster to befall the U.S. in the 21st century to date." 

COVID-19’s Total Cost to the U.S. Economy Will Reach $14 Trillion by End of 2023 – USC Schaeffer 

And how do you put a price tag on stealing our young people's youth and what they might have learned in school?The mental depression. The drug use. They were the least likely to get Covid yet they may have paid the biggest price.

So much of this was unnecessary. Too many ignorant people were given an enormous amount of power. What can we do to prevent it from happening again.

China benefitted from the Pandemic

 Whether you call it the Wuhan Virus, the China Virus, Covid19, or SARS-Cov-2, China is the big winner economically. Our current president has a very chummy relationship with China.

A friend accused Trump of showing tendencies to be a dictator. My response

Can you be specific?

He doesn’t even have control of the Executive Branch, over which he’s supposed to reign!

• Supreme Court appointees who will follow the constitution and not their feelings about social justice? 
• Cutting the red tape of long standing regulations that frees companies from the oversight and boot of Big Gov?
• Attempting to undo Obama’s Executive Orders, which is his legal right, and to have a low court stop him?
• Commending the ICE employees, and all law enforcement?
• Attempts to stop voter fraud (again, he’s been stopped by the courts)? 
• Proposing defunding sanctuary cities who won’t follow federal law?
• Taking away security clearances of employees who’ve gone to work for the media?
• Urging the building the wall that was voted on a decade before he became president? 
• Pulling out of a climate change agreement that was never a treaty and never approved by Congress? 
• Calling out the negative stories about him that appear daily/hourly at WaPo, NYT, LAT, VOX, HuffPo, Politico, Daily Beast, etc.?
• Eliminating the mandate to purchase an insurance product that destroyed the coverage for millions and lined the pockets of insurance companies? 
• Criticizing the millionaire NFL players for their phony protest against the police after sore loser Kaeppernick was radicalized by his girlfriend? 
• Being unfaithful to 3 wives? (which would point to many presidents, CEOs, faculty and administrators of universities, muffler repairmen and mountain climbers).
• Saying mean, uncouth things about McCain, Megan Kelly and Rosy O’Donnell?
• Resetting the clock for NAFTA, treaties or tariffs?
• Expecting loyalty from his friends and people who worked for him? 
• Bringing North and South Korea together for the first time since the end of hostilities in the 50s?
• Bringing home misbehaving basketball players, jailed pastors, and Korean American tourists? 
• For criticizing DACA, an illegal executive order by Obama after he assured the nation immigration was the responsibility of Congress?
• For complaining on Twitter that Obama had spied on him, and being right, and Clintons’ lawyer and Weinstein’s lawyer (now Cohen’s lawyer) Lanny Davis was the source of the leaks to CNN which Davis now had to walk back as inaccurate, aka lies?
• For supporting the military?
• For suggesting a space branch?
• For becoming excited about a military parade?
• For the GDP increase to 4.1% second quarter of 2018?
• Working to bring companies back to the USA after the last president assured us those days were gone?
• Criticizing chain migration?
• Moving the embassy in Israel as all other presidents promised but didn’t do?
• Getting a black woman pardoned from an unfair sentence?
• Medical choices for veterans?

This is just off the top of my head, but nothing sounds like a dictator (Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Chavez, Castro, Maduro, or even powerful crony capitalists like Zuckerberg and Bezos who control their people with threats of firing if they aren’t politically correct). If anything, the media, the courts, the entertainment industry, academe, lifetime employees of the federal government, departments within the Executive branch like CIA, FBI, DoJ, and the Trump haters in both parties have worked overtime to undo the election of 2016.

On the other hand, I’ve seen a published book listing his faults day by day as reported in the media every day since he took office.  I don’t know how many copies have been sold, but I saw it in a book store that did not have a single pro-Trump, pro-conservative, or even middle of the road title on the shelves.

The Recession was over in June 2009—before the stimulus kicked in—in 2013 he says recovery has begun

If Obama hadn't tried to take over 1/6 of the economy throwing all plans for development, invention and expansion into a free fall, the recession he continues to blame on Bush could have been solved quickly. (Technically, it was over in June 2009, so everything he did after that caused the economy to remain sluggish.)

Stimulus evidence one year on

Watching the workers we hired to relandscape the condo grounds (below freezing today, and a Saturday) compared to 2 miles over where ARRA funds are (posted as) being used and nothing is being done, I thought about Barro's article.

The math is a bit over my head, but I can figure out the bottom line. Robert J. Barro says, "Viewed over five years, the fiscal stimulus package is a way to get an extra $600 billion of public spending at the cost of $900 billion in private expenditure."

The stimulus

Kiplinger drinks the Obama Kool-aid

This little item came through today in AIArchitect, the "Kiplinger Connection."

Economic Stimulus
Was the economic stimulus a success? Depends on how you measure.
The answer’s no, if set against Obama’s original goals: Holding joblessness around 8% and limiting the economic contraction this year to about 1.2%. [Yup, he missed that big time.]

But measured against what would have been, it was a rousing success. [You're kidding, right? Have you noticed your grandchildren will pay for this?] Washington added about $90 billion to GDP in the second and third quarters, through direct payments to the states, COBRA subsidies for the unemployed, reduced income tax withholding plus the first round of infrastructure spending. [Notice how little was spent on infrastructure--but isn't that what he promised?] Otherwise, the second quarter contraction would have been worse than the 0.7% it was, and third quarter GDP would have been expected to come in flat. As it is … GDP surely rose in the third quarter, probably by a healthy 3.5% or so. [Gee, maybe he can keep this going 10 years like FDR did?]

One reason for the view that the stimulus isn’t panning out: Obama’s tendency to focus on infrastructure development. Spending on it has been slow to take off…with long lead times for planning and contracting … and slow to pay off in terms of increased business spending and job creation. [Or maybe he was wasting too much political capital on stealing our health care and had no appointments who knew anything about business and capitalism?]

Shoulda coulda woulda--there is no way to measure "what would have been," just as there's no way to know about that job you didn't take, or the one you didn't marry, or that promotion you didn't get, or club you didn't join, or that trip you didn't take. Sure--might have been super, or it could have been a bust. You just don't know. Nor do we know what would have happened if the federal government had just let the recession run its course, let bad companies fail--no cash for clunkers, no take-over of banks and automakers, no petty czars poking their noses into business, no threatening Fox News for pointing out the obvious, no denigration of 95% of American businesses who belong to the Chamber, no take over of the economy in order "not to waste a crisis." But if government stayed out of our business, out of market manipulation, out of mortgages, out of schools--well, wouldn't that mean we don't need them. And what would they do with all that surplus, pent up wind power?

Here’s what the Waxman-Markey energy bill will do for you

“Nothing. Zip. Zero. Zilch. There are no benefits for the American people in the Waxman-Markey energy tax bill. Whenever defenders of the free market point out how much an energy tax will cost the economy, the enviro-left always tries to change the subject to “the cost of inaction.” But here is the dirty little secret about Waxman-Markey: it does nothing to prevent global warming/climate change whatever you want to call it. And that is before House Democrats gutted the bill.” Heritage.org Indeed, in a Congress full of downright scary people, thieves, murderers, adulterers, and brain dead, Henry Waxman reigns supreme.

Here are the numbers. My detractors always want the facts, not the unintended consequences, not the run up to the War on the Economy by smart investors and CEOs who were ducking for cover hiding their assets in foreign countries as soon as an Obama presidency was on the horizon, while contributing to his campaign. Not an historical survey of the Kulaks loss of property and life by Stalinists. OK, here they are. Here’s what higher prices on everything for the sake of a global warming myth looks like. Waxman's energy bill will mean the loss of your job (especially if you are paid on local tax money such as a teacher, librarian, policeman, street sweeper, dog catcher, etc.)

By the year 2050, the “clean” version reduces projected global temperatures by 0.044ºC (or ~3% less than the rise without the legislation), the “dirty” version gets you about half of that, or 0.022ºC (~1.5% less), and the “dirtier” version saves half of that again, or 0.011ºC (<1% less). By century’s end, you don’t do much better–the temperature reduction amounts to, respectively, 0.112ºC (0.20ºF), 0.046ºC (0.08ºF), and 0.013ºC (0.02ºF).

They only crunched the job loss numbers on the clean version and found it would reduce aggregate gross domestic product (GDP) by $7.4 trillion by 2035 and destroy 844,000 jobs annually. Maybe on your planet that sounds like a worthwhile trade, but not on mine!

Every profession wants a piece of the bailout and stimulus plan

The building industry is just one of them, but never you mind, peek under the covers of your own profession and you'll find a group thrusting and sweating with a calculator trying to figure out how they can rape the tax payer.

"To revitalize the building sector, which accounts for about one in every 10 dollars of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product, the AIA has developed the Rebuild and Renew Plan, which details its recommendations for the allocation of funds in President Obama’s economic recovery plan. The AIA is calling on the new administration and Congress to create policies that ensure these monies are spent on the planning, design, and construction of energy-efficient, sustainable buildings and healthy communities that are advantageous for both the environment and economy." AIArchitect This Week, 1-26-09

Hellooo out there! Did no one study American History? FDR lead us through a full decade of the Great Depression (yes, it began under Hoover, who like Bush also tried tinkling on the economy to get it to bloom). The poor and low income suffered the most under FDR's plans because the percentage of tax burden on the creators of wealth falls most heavily on the poor. Under FDR Americans began a slide into government nannyism that continues to this day, in thought, word and deed. Boomers have never known anything else than Uncle Sam as a cruel step-father and/or sugar daddy. Forgive us, Lord, may we not be lead into the temptation of hand-outs, bail-outs, and more welfare for business, banks, and farmers than we already have.

Maybe the economy is tanking in anticipation of Obama?

"The message blasted at us day after day by the Obama campaign and its public relations machine, otherwise known as mainstream media, is that we are in a recession, we have been for essentially the last eight years, and the US is unique in this because of the failed policies of George W. Bush.

We are not in recession. The economy of the last eight years has been fine. And we are doing better than our European know-it-alls who favor an Obama victory. At least that's what the most recent economic data show." Read the rest of the story, Exactly wrong again, especially the numbers.

The real story is exactly the opposite of that being told by the Obama campaign and mainstream media. The problem is lack of free markets.

• The federal register in 2004 held 78,851 pages of regulations, or the equivalent of 30 New Deals. The equivalent of almost two New Deals was added between 1999 and 2004.
  
• Sarbanes-Oxley, adding onerous new regulations on corporations designed to hopefully prevent future Enrons, was enacted in mid-2002. It didn't quite work with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac or investment banks, did it?
  
• The first increase in the minimum wage in 10 years came in 2007; a second increase came in the summer of 2008. In May of 2007 (before the increase), the unemployment rate stood at 4.5%. The latest rate (after two minimum wage increases in two years) stands at 6.1%.
  
• The housing and financial crisis can be attributed directly to federal regulations and mismanagement at the Government Sponsored Entities of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

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Defense spending

A chart in the WSJ today showed that defense spending is at 4% of the GDP. It was above 5% in 1990 according to OMB, then went down to 3% 1999-2001, then rose to 4% 2004-2007 (I'm reading the chart; didn't see the numbers in the article). In Bush's budget predictions it should go up--I'm not sure if that is in spending, or because revenues will be down when the Democrats increase taxes. During the Korean War defense spending was 14% of GDP, and 9.5% during the VietNam War, and 6% during the Reagan years as noted in Bret Stephens article on Declinism. He notes that within a few years of the Reagan military build-up the Soviet Union collapsed. Europe and Japan with virtually no military costs during the same time period entered a period of economic stagnation.

Hand wringing over how Europeans and Asians see us is a politicians' hunt for fools gold, he says. Watch for a new book by Fred Kaplan, another author getting paid for predicting America's decline. They've been quite popular during the Bush administration and will probably drop off if a Democrat is elected, even if nothing changes globally. These declinism books are a bit like the anti-war movies these days. Do they sell--I mean to anyone but public libraries, who love this stuff.