The GM spoof that tells the troof

Job killers in the second stimulus

If you needed any additional evidence that Obama has no intention of rescuing the economy, that it's right where he wants it:

"The Las Vegas Sun reported this weekend that big labor leaders are pushing to include their long-sought "card check" provisions into Obama's Second Stimulus. This legislation would effectively end a worker's right to fight unionization through secret ballot elections, would give the federal government the power to run small businesses and would cost the American economy thousands of jobs.

The other major provisions of Obama's second stimulus are also job killers. The $5,000 new worker tax credit does not create any incentive for already-struggling companies to begin long-term hiring. What's worse, it could even increase unemployment; companies would delay existing plans to create jobs so they could take advantage of the tax credit. And it would add to our national debt. Then there's the TARP-funded government-subsidized loans for small businesses. It's a big-government program destined to fail since the Small Business Administration has a terrible record of effectively allocating capital to the private sector." Morning Bell

It isn't that he's stupid about free markets and what it takes to turn this around--lower taxes and less regulation and interference by the federal government--it's that he knows exactly what works. That's why he won't do it.

There is another sector growing besides the federal government in this economy--lobbyists.

Santa Clauses in the cash for cloture deal

Michelle Malkin in Beltway Christmas peeks inside this Congress' stimulus spending where more money went to higher income areas than low income and then analyzes the costs to the taxpayer for the fatso, flatulent Demcare. She reports Democratic districts have raked in nearly twice as much porkulus money as GOP districts -- without regard to the actual economic suffering and job loss in those districts.

• $54 million no-bid contract was awarded to a firm with little experience to relocate a luxury Bay Area wine train due to flood concerns. [Pelosi]
  
  
• $1 billion for the dubious FutureGen near-zero emissions "clean coal" plant earmark championed by disgraced Democrat and former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin. [Burris]
  
  
• billions in high-speed rail stimulus earmarks to fund a pie-in-the-sky public transportation line from Los Angeles to Las Vegas [Reid]
  
  
• Wall Street regulatory "reform" bill larded with $4 billion in payoffs to minority special interests -- including former failed Air America radio partner Inner City Broadcasting Corp run by Percy Sutton [Rangel and Sharpton and Frank]
  
  
• $12 million in TARP funds for OneUnited, a minority-owned bank that is one of her key campaign donors and a company in which both Maxine Waters and her husband own massive amounts of stock.[Waters]

Then she looks inside Santa's bag for all the goodies we just had to have before the Christmas recess.

• $300 million "Louisiana Purchase" [Landrieu]
  
  
• $45 million "Cornhusker Kickback" [Nelson]
  
  
• cash for cloture votes also included a Hospital Helper of $100 million [Dodd ]
  
  
• bennies for insurance companies and hospitals in Michigan
  
  
• "frontier freebies" for hospitals in Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota and Wyoming
  
  
• New England's Special Syrup for Vermont and Massachusetts -- similar to Nebraska--$1.2 billion over 10 years. $10 billion to Vermont for “community health clinics”. [Sanders]
  
  ACORN/community organizer-friendly provision for minority health bureaucracies in Illinois [Burris]
  
  $10 billion socialized medicine sop to Vermont for "community health clinics" serving in essence as universal health care satellite offices. [Sanders]

HT Bill L.

Subsidyscope to track the bailout

There are many websites to track government money, and although I haven't determined if this one, Subsidyscope is biased, it is by Pew Charitable Trusts, which is usually reliable. I would call your attention to SIGTARP quarterly report, although it does have its own website. It's easier to work back and forth to different programs if you stay at Subsidyscope. Neil Barofsky needs to watch his back. He was an end-of-term Bush appointee to keep an eye on TARP money as the Special Inspector General (SIG) and so far he doesn't like what he sees. He's supposed to go after waste, theft and abuse, and it has become the Democrat's candy shop. Ought to start with Obama, then Geithner, then Frank, toss in Pelosi just to make sure we have diversity of gender, color and religion, but doubt that will happen. I'm just saying. Cute logo, too.

TARP inspector general Neil Barofsky agrees that the mortgage modifications "will yield no direct return" and notes charitably that "full recovery is far from certain" on the money sent to AIG and Detroit. Mr. Barofsky also notes that since Washington runs huge deficits, and interest rates are almost sure to rise in coming years, TARP will be increasingly expensive as the government pays more to borrow. Link to WSJ article

Spreading a big TARP over a sink hole

From Forbes.com: - the $700,000,000,000 bailout will most likely fail according to the government's auditor Neil Barofsky. Some programs, such as $50 billion in mortgage modification subsidies and incentives, were not designed with any reasonable opportunity for a return to taxpayers. . . As of Wednesday, the Treasury said it had received repayments of $73.02 billion and had collected dividends, interest and warrant sale profits totaling $13.03 billion. How did we get here?

Remember how TARP, Troubled Asset Relief Program, had to be RUSHED through with no thought or the world as we know it would come to an end? But never waste a crisis. Obama's thuggery has stolen our freedom and our economy . When the state controls the owners of business you have Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. When it owns the business you have post-1920 USSR. Are these the "progressive" choices you want--national socialism or communism? Didn't we fight this in WWII and even longer in a Cold War in Europe and some hot spots in Asia called Korea and Vietnam? Why did we ask such a sacrifice of generations of our military if we would just give it all away in an election?

And it continues unabated. Our elected Congress is being pressured to rush health care bills, rush climate change bills, rush anything called eco- or sustainable or green, rush confirmation of cabinet, czars and judges so only socialists and/or communists get a seat at the table, rush, rush, rush. Or Obama's plans could collapse. So far, he's won all the battles; his plan is working, folks.

You need to be very worried

Those of us who worried about a socialist being elected have seen all our fears met and exceeded. From Heritage.org: In just 4 months President Obama has

Continued to fast-track government control of health care with a $33 billion expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) which isn’t even limited to children and only worsened our nation’s health spending problem.

Pushed through a $787 billion stimulus bill that essentially federalized the construction and renovation of public schools, began subsidizing health insurance for unemployed Americans regardless of income, created more than 30 new federal programs, effectively abolished the hugely successful 1996 welfare reform; and created a trillions dollars of new debt, to be dumped into the laps of our children and grandchildren.

Passed an Omnibus spending bill that raised discretionary spending by 8%, contained 9,287 pork projects costing $13 billion, and spent $123 billion on programs for which government auditors can find no evidence of success.

Used the $700 billion TARP slush fund to effectively nationalize General Motors, turn Chrysler over to the United Auto Workers union, and strong arm the nation’s banks into accepting taxpayer money and government control they did not want.

Actually, I think he just by-passed European, post WWII socialism all together and is going directly into the past to communism (1950s USSR), or national socialism (1930s Germany). You didn't holler when he took over the auto industry, you're not complaining about the health grab, you allowed Congress to have families of business people threatened by Obama supporters, so you probably won't complain when he nationalizes your private pension plan to bail out social security, or says churches can't apply for government grants to feed the hungry if they support traditional marriage, or decides we need only x-number of hours of electricity a day so we can save the planet, or wants you to paint your roof white. If auto dealerships can be closed down because they didn't support the Democrats, your internet business can be unplugged, too. And it is all meaningless folks, he has no intention of "saving" the economy, he only intends to destroy it.

Obama fired the wrong guy

I opened one eye and half an ear to see what I hoped was the ghost of Tim Geithner on Meet the Press. TOTUS says it was a hired actor, but I don't think so. It was the real, flesh and blood lie-baby. The more he lied, the faster he talked, the more my jaw dropped. I don't know who was doing the interviewing, and I can't find the YouTube, nor would it be worth it to look at it again. Here's a guy who was working for FED which helped create the housing bubble and approved the AIG bonuses and when the TARP came down, now working for a former Senator who approved the d-d thing and got the wet snowball of financial disaster rolling down hill. Tim sounded like he was using Obama's teleprompter--not the machine, but the keyboardist/writer. Then they interviewed John McCain, who was very careful not to be disrespectful (which he didn't mind being when Bush was President), but he was truthful. Sarah Palin was his best feature, but oh my, he sounded so good after Tim the Two-Faced.

What has happened to your nest egg?

Here's your tax break

Don't spend it all in one place.

Q: What are some of the tax breaks in the bill?

A: It includes Obama's signature "Making Work Pay" tax credit for 95 percent of workers, though negotiators agreed to trim the credit to $400 a year instead of $500 — or $800 for married couples, cut from Obama's original proposal of $1,000. It would begin showing up in most workers' paychecks in June as an extra $13 a week in take-home pay, falling to about $8 a week next January.

There is also a $70 billion, one-year fix for the alternative minimum tax. The fix would save some 20 million mainly upper-middle-income taxpayers about $2,000 in taxes for 2009. Yahoo News

I think the decrease in the cost of gasoline in the fall added about $2,000 to the average worker's wallet, didn't it? So what will $13 a week, dropping to $8 a week do? What is that, a half pack of cigarettes a day? And their taxes on that pack are the ones paying for the new SCHIP for the middle class. A cup of coffee a day at Panera's? And now we know it's good for us. Where are all those whiners who disparaged the Bush stimulus--like Michelle Obama? Meanwhile, Geithner the tax evader is promising to throw trillions at . . . what? Does anyone know what he's talking about?

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner vowed on Tuesday to jumpstart the nation’s financial system, announcing sweeping new plans to aid struggling banks, spur lending and help beleaguered homeowners.

The program will commit as much as $2 trillion in public and private funds to spur consumer and business lending.

Geithner christened the administration’s revamped bailout program the “Financial Stability Plan,” a not-so-subtle attempt to distance the new Obama administration from the much-maligned management of the “Troubled Asset Relief Program” established in the waning days of the Bush administration. Politico

I'm not too good at math but I saw this at Soda Head: At a million dollars a day, it would take 1,000,000 days or about 2,740 years to spend one trillion. If you want to spend it in your (obviously not mine) life time you would have to spend at least 20 billion per day. Even then it would take you 50 years.

FiSP instead of TARP.

Read The Audacity of Dopes by William K. Black.

How did we get here?

So many people I know have given up. Their attitude is "Oh well, I'm not going to be here to see it." For some reason they think their pension and/or Social Security and annuities will still be here by the end of Obama's first term--perhaps enough to see them to the grave. Scary. While some of you were dancing in the streets and trashing the mall, some of us saw the lights going out all over the country--and not to save electricity. It was the dimming of a dream and hope for the future. Then I read

April 1, 2013 -Unemployment is approaching 25 percent, inflation is close to 40 percent, major portions of the U.S. are having power "brownouts," and Americans are forced to go to foreign countries for timely and quality medical care. How did the world's largest and most prosperous economy fall into such a morass in only a very few years?
Read the rest of Shape of Things to Come?