Hold Onto Your Wallets

Hold onto your wallets, folks. Here comes stagfalation. Reports today from the government today are giving pause to the inflation and commodity hawks. Monthly unemployment apps increased by 31,000 to 473,000. It was expected to decline by approximately 15,000. Even more disturbing was the 1.4% monthly increase in the PPI (wholesale Producer Price Index). That is an annual PPI inflation rate of 16%. That’s right…16%. As we all know, those wholesale price increases will translate sooner or later into retail prices.

Alright, so retail prices for produced goods will go up…what else is new? Well, commodity prices will start to rise as the investor class look for a hedge against the inflation. That means you will pay more for any commodity based product from gasoline to bread and cereal. In addition, gold prices will begin to rise; great for the gold investor and lousy if you want some jewelry.

The Federal Reserve, whose mandate by law is to control inflation, will have to act. It will raise interest rates and tighten the money supply by either increasing the reserve requirements for banks or simply taking the cash out of circulation. Watch the news. They do that by “selling bonds” and paying interest to people to park their money on the Fed balance sheet.

As interest rates go up, the government will have to pay more just like you and me. You know all that debt we just incurred? Interest rates will go up on that, and the cost of debt service to you and me for government debt will cripple all other government programs. Of course, they could just print money, in which case the dollar would collapse and we would have hyper inflation.

In addition, other countries will not want to buy our debt, forcing interest rates up even further. Taxes will have to rise to pay for basic government services. Folks, this is not a good thing.

Keynesian economics is an economic theory propagated in 1936, and came to prominence as economists concluded that World War II, and the associated massive government spending, pulled us out of the Great Depression. It believes that government is necessary to cure the inefficiencies in the economic system, and looks for private/public partnerships and massive government intervention into the country’s economic system to save us from ourselves.

The 2008 financial collapse is an example of what empowers Keynesians to up the intrusiveness of the central government. Maybe it was needed, but socialists use it as a simple power grab wrapped in intellectual mumbo jumbo.

The cure is often worse than the disease: stagflation. High unemployment, high taxes, high interest rates, high inflation combine to form the misery index. Those of us who lived through the Carter years know what this is.

Are we headed there again? The articles I read today seemed mixed and tempered fears. On the other hand, I am a firm believer that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Even money says this is beginning of something we don’t want to go through!!

The Health Care Summit Trap

With the election of Scott Brown to the Senate, and Obama’s increasingly dismal poll ratings, and the debacle poll ratings for numerous Democrats in the Senate and House in the upcoming fall election, President Obama has indicated that he may be willing to compromise on the proposed health bill stalled in the Congress. He has invited Republicans to a televised “summit” on February 25 at Blair House.

I am for health care reform, just not Obama’s health care reform. That is the message of the American public as evidenced by the Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts special elections. Yet while Americans are screaming for jobs, Obama and his homeys continue to harp on the health care issue largely stalled by his own party. If he couldn’t pass it with his majority in the House and super-majority in the Senate…what’s a Republican to do? But they persist, nonetheless.

There is big part of me that hopes a summit meeting such as this would succeed. Until you have been in the position of losing your health care and not able to buy it, you have no idea how important that pre-existing condition provision is. I have been there and it is scary. But that massive ideologically based 2000 plus page reform bill isn’t the answer, and Obama’s continual focus on it rather than moving to the jobs issue gives me concern.

I suspect this is a setup. This past year, I have witnessed some of the most rotten, base, and slimy political maneuvering and payoffs with this Obama group I have seen in all the years I have been following politics. I have now been conditioned to expect the worse, and I am rarely disappointed. This is a scummy bunch who will stoop to anything to get 100% of what they want 100% of the time. They keep going for broke, and keep coming up empty. Their learning curve is a tad skewed. Maybe it is because they are from Chicago, or maybe it is because they are hard ideologues incapable of viewing the world from any perspective other than their own.

At any rate, the administration seems incapable of understanding that the problem isn’t how the message has been delivered. Americans understand the message as well as the despicable process they used to achieve it. Americans don’t like the process. Americans don’t like the message.

There are those who believe this health care summit is being designed to give Obama cover. The real purpose is to find a way to blame Republicans, who had little to no input on the health care bill, for its failure; then to use that blame to pass large parts of it through the reconciliation process contrary to American wishes.

I think they are on the money. But I think it will fail. Obama has placed himself into a cocoon of progressive advisors and is oblivious to just how unpopular the current health care monstrosity is. I don’t believe sufficient members of the House or Senate would try this given the toxic political landscape it would create for them.

That is a lesson Obama will have to learn; that is if he is capable of learning. Ehhhhh!

Dictatorship of the Whack Jobs

We live in a day and age when anyone with a crackpot idea can get the infamous 15 minutes of fame and we are supposed to shake in our politically correct shoes. What’s scary is that people actually give serious consideration to some of this garbage. Much of the muck in which we find ourselves today can be directly traced to some of these nutty ideas, and like trained politically correct dogs, we subject ourselves to a Dictatorship of the Whack Jobs. If you say something long enough and loud enough, people will begin to believe it. Before you know it, the craziest person in the room is running the asylum. Three examples have surfaced over the last 24 hours.

1) Mother Theresa deserves to be on a stamp. Our beloved post office has decided to honor this marvelous woman by issuing a postage stamp in her honor; and here come the whacked atheist groups complaining that this is an endorsement of religion. Here is a “saint” in both the sacred and secular sense that devoted her entire life to the poorest of the poor. Yes, she was a nun. And Martin Luther King was a minister. So what!! Now we will hear a prolonged discussion about the separation of church and state. Let’s all sing a verse of Silent Night and forget the whole thing.

2) Johnny Weir is an American ice skater currently going through the 2010 Olympic trials. In one of his performances, he wore a costume trimmed in fox. Here comes some whack job animal rights group, the Friends of Animals, requesting that he change his costume and respect the rights of animals. You know what? Go away. You mind your business and I will mind mine. But poor Johnny, afraid he would be harassed at the Olympic qualifying events, acquiesced and changed to “faux”. If you don’t think the harassment of those who wear fur coats is real, I have personally witnessed, right in downtown Youngstown, red paint thrown on fur coats by these idiots. Here is the deal. My wife wears fur, and lots of it. And she will continue to wear fur. The former wife of a friend of mine said it best when confronted by one of these misguided animal rights fools. She said: “This mink was born for me to wear on my back!” And that’s the fact, jack.

3) Speaking of which, Ground Hogs Day was this past Tuesday. Here come our friends at PETA complaining that Punxutawney Phil should be replaced with an animal robot because the groundhog is being subjected to extreme cruelty while looking for his shadow. I should have the life this animal has, pampered to the max the other 364 days of the year. Of course this was a cheap publicity stunt for this group which crossed the line from legitimate concerns into complete insanity a long time ago. But you know what? Some idiot will be sitting watching his television set going “Ya, man. They’re right. We ought to stop that stuff. Save the groundhog.”

Are all of the above funny? Of course they are. And for the most part, we take them for what they are worth. The point is that just because someone complains about something doesn’t mean we should act on it. The biggest nuts are the ones with the biggest mouths. If it starts to sink into our societal norms, we all end up paying the price…and sacrificing our freedom.

Just ask the restaurant owners in New York City who are being told by Mayor Bloomberg to take salt shakers off the tables and limit salt content in their food. Limited salt intake is a good idea if some of us need to do that. On the other hand, it’s none of Mayor Bloomberg’s business. Maybe he will try to ban people wearing furs in New York next…and take my word for it…you will see that coming in the next few years in some city, some place.

2009 - America at the Abyss

Once again, the American system has won. When history writes about this period of time, it will talk about a fiscal calamity that opened the door to radical reformation of the American system of governance, and the subsequent failure of that reformation. It will talk about how the world financial system nearly collapsed. It will talk about a small cadre of extreme left wing activists with a charismatic front man following a basic leftist tenet: never let a crisis go to waste. It will talk about how close to the abyss the United States came to socialism and collectivism.

Seizing on the financial calamity of September, 2008, these folks lied to the American public, posing as political centrists. The press, enamored by a black presidential candidate who reinforced the press’s fundamental political belief, abdicated its responsibility of vetting, researching, and reporting. Instead, it deified the candidate. The press embraced a man with a political history of voting present on issues of consequence, with little national experience, no business experience, and who came from a background of affirmative action coupled with quota based scholarships and community organizing.

It was a brilliant move by the left wing plotters. Here was a man who was charismatic. Here was a man who was a brilliant orator. Here was a man who promised to transcend the divides of this country. His good looks and charm made it easy to overlook radical associations. He wanted to bring us together in a time of crisis....he said.

They didn’t pay attention when he said he was going to “spread the wealth around.” He meant what he said. When elected to office, he promptly turned economic policy over to those who were most likely responsible for the problem in the first place. Do whatever you want and spend whatever you want was the rule. Meanwhile, he and his left wing cabal moved to push through the takeover of 1/6th of the American economy…a government takeover of the American health care system. They almost succeeded.

Books upon books will be written about 2009. But not since the Vietnam War, where the right wing of the American political spectrum controlled American foreign policy, have I seen an American government completely ignore, and treat with disdain, the voice of the people. Obama, Pelosi and Reid head faked the public into voting for them promising moderation. What the public got was a radicalization of the political system backed by Chicago muscle.

While the members of Congress plotted behind closed doors, the public took to the streets; ignored by the press and demeaned by the political leadership. I won't forget the disdain for the American public exhibited by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. I won't forget how the Democratic congress followed these nut cases like cows with a cattle prod. Pelosi called the American public astro-turf. The protestors in the streets were called Nazis, and racists, bigots, and the obscene reference “tea-baggers.” Congressmen stopped meeting with constituents. Those that did ridiculed those who questioned them.

Legislation enacting these Draconian measures were passed at midnight on Saturday nights out of the public scrutiny. And in the worst piece of legislative chicanery I have ever seen, the Senate passed its version of health care on Christmas Eve, then quietly slinked out of Washington leaving only the echoes of their bribes and back door dealings between our political leaders and their friends.

But a Christmas Day near terrorist tragedy woke America up. The bloom was off the rose when a man with explosives strapped to his underwear nearly blew up a plane. Couple that with a down and dirty union tax deal hatched by Obama himself, in the White House, Americans finally began to ask in large numbers what is going on.

In a stunning reversal of fortune, Massachusetts halted the march toward socialism by sending a Republican to Washington to fill the Senate seat of Ted Kennedy. Scott Brown was elected to office on a platform built on defeating the legislation for which Ted Kennedy dedicated his entire political career. The disdain of the public for Obama’s double dealing health care strategy could not have been clearer.

So now we move to the future. Republicans shouldn’t be dancing in the streets. The problems facing our health care system are still there, and poised to get substantially worse as aging baby boomers enter into the Medicare system. Hopefully, moderate solutions can now be discussed in a civil manner and crafted true to our American values and our Constitution.

But 2009 will go down in history as the year almost lost our freedom to a bunch of far left whackos who honored their own ideology rather than the people. And for that, I am grateful.

Sleaze and Massachusetts

No matter how you slice or dice it, the election of Scott Brown to fill Ted Kennedy’s vacant Senate seat marks a turning point in the political history of the United States. America is the big winner, and in many ways a big loser, in this landmark political event.

Why it happened is no big mystery. While Americans were grappling with the effects of the Great Recession, the political party and its leader elected in 2008 chose to promote an ideological agenda instead of a pragmatic economic agenda. Instead of dealing with an economy in shambles, Obama, Pelosi and Reid chose to go on an ideological spending spree (“we don’t need any more jobs for white construction workers”) and attempted to nationalize the health care industry. With a filibuster proof majority in both houses, it was time for fulfill the long time Democratic dream of nationalized health care. The rest of the country could wait.

The country would have survived, but what it couldn’t tolerate was the sleaze factor which grew geometrically over the past 4 months as the Democrats cut deal after deal with one special interest group after another, mostly those who were party supporters, at the expense of seniors and small business owners and their employees. We looked the other way with the payoff to Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu. We bitched but tolerated the unprecedented bribe to Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson, pushing Nebraska’s Medicaid costs off on to the rest of the nation. We moaned when Florida was granted exemptions to allow it to maintain its Medicare Advantage program while eliminating it everywhere else.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was the bribe to the unions, giving a tax exemption to union Cadillac health plans, while small business and the rest of us would have to pick up the slack. Let’s face it. The bulk of those exemptions were to go to government employees who were already making substantially more than the rest of us on the taxpayer dime, and the UAW who magnanimously gave up raises for 2 years, and the job bank, as part of an engineered bailout of the US auto industry. How many times do the rest of us have to pay for these people? At a cost of $60 billion, the sleaze even smelled in Boston.

If you look at the polls, the tide began to turn towards Scott Brown in December with the Louisiana and Nebraska deals…and completely turned with the union exemption deal. Sleaze is like pornography. You can’t define it, but you know it when you see it.

America is the loser specifically because health care needs to be reformed. Democratic uber liberal Congressman Anthony Weiner said it best when he commented that Congress needs to listen to the people, and devise a simpler plan that is easily understandable, and fair to everyone, not just Democratic special interest groups. Democrats AND Republicans should heed his words and look at health care reform anew.

America also loses because we elected Barack Obama who promised a centrist platform, a post partisan administration, transparency and accountability. Instead, he ran to his ultra liberal base, shut out all Republicans, closed the door to the press, and made some of the sleaziest deals I have seen in all my years of following politics. He should be ashamed of himself.

So normally Democratic Massachusetts, the bluest of blue states, once again strikes a chord for freedom from tyrannical government as it did in 1776. In the best of worlds, Obama would learn from his mistakes and move to the center. He would re-open the health care debate, this time being honest about costs and solutions instead of trying to fool both the people and special interests. In his drive for his vision of health care reform, he has managed to screw everyone but his basic core constituent groups. But don’t bet the rent. Ideologues rarely know when to fold them. America should not blink in this cold hearted game of ideological poker. Now we know what they are capable of.

The New Bank Tax

President Obama’s bio shows that he taught Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago. That’s nice. And that would be the constitution of what country? Did you say the United States?

There is no doubt in my mind that large portions of the proposed Health Care Reform bill, notwithstanding whatever form comes out of Congress, will be declared unconstitutional. The Federal Government can do many things, but forcing people to buy a health care policy just because they were born doesn’t cut muster.

Likewise, forcing insurance companies to sell pre-approved government plans, and only those plans, smacks of National Socialism…that’s what Germany did. And let's not even talk about the preferential classes and states built into this thing. I can go on and on, but it is scary…and you should be afraid. If this monstrosity ever passes, it will tie up the courts for years, and go the way of the McCain/Feingold Campaign Reform Act...death by a thousand cuts.

Now Obama wants to tax the banks on outstanding liabilities to “punish” the banks for bad behavior. On its face, this type of legislation is unconstitutional. In normal capitalist societies, punishment is meted out by letting the bad-behaved entity fail, and go into bankruptcy. Both Bush and Obama didn’t let that happen. I disagree, but I understand why they did what they did, and how TARP was SUPPOSED to act. But as in all things government, it got perverted.

Politically, both parties will use this proposed $90 billion mea culpa to the public to satisfy the populist strain currently running through our society, and demanding revenge from the evil doers. Barney Frank gleefully said the money will go into the general fund to pay for the war in Afghanistan, and to increase social security disability. Just what we need, another increased entitlement. The Republicans, even though it’s against every fiber of their being to pass this sort of thing, will do it claiming it will reduce the deficit. Of course it will.

The banks aren’t saying a whole lot, but I am sure their lawyers are already at work challenging this “punishment tax” for participating in the TARP program whether they wanted to or not, and any first year law student will tell you the banks have nothing to worry about. Ex post facto punishment legislation is prohibited.

But it does make for good political theater. Unfortunately, the public will once again pay the price for political grandstanding in higher fees, higher interest rates, and abysmally tight lending standards. That translates into a stagnant economy, and permanently high unemployment, and staggering deficits.

I hope the members of Congress on both sides of the aisle believe the show is worth the price of admission that we will pay to watch.

We Are At War...Really?

Finally, after two weeks and several false starts with questionable speeches re: the Christmas Day crotch bomber, President Obama’s widely anticipated, promoted to be shocking, and continually delayed speech was given from the White House in front of a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Here is the shocking news….President Obama says we are war!!!!! Really??? Where the hell has he been for the past year? We are in deep doo-doo if he is just now figuring that out.

Watching his metamorphosis from “isolated” extremist to war warrior has almost been funny. It reminds of that television show from a few years back Boy Meets World. Yes, there is evil in the world. But it also makes me wonder whether or not he is actually learning the lesson, or if this is just another act where he chokes over the words saying one thing, but does something completely different. Yes Mr. President! You lie!

Why are we surprised that terrorist activity is on the upswing?

1) He continues to harp about Gitmo. He is obsessive about it to the point of being dangerous.

2) He unleashed Attorney General Holder on CIA agents already cleared of wrong doing by an independent panel of investigators on that torture thing. You are surprised the “dots weren’t connected”? Hello!!!! CIA agents are afraid if they cross Obama’s Maginot sensibility line, they will go to jail.

3) Obama went around the world kissing everybody’s ass. Oh…if we could only just get along….what a wonderful world it would be. Surprise!!!

4) If he can’t even bring himself to say radical Islam…then there is a problem in defining the enemy. We are at war with whom, Mr. President.

5) One of his security chiefs was criticized for going skiing after the bombing attempt on Christmas. Of course, Obama stayed in Hawaii and played golf. It’s always good to lead by example.

6) He is going to try those bad Gitmo dudes in New York for the 9/11 massacre. Is he serious? Can you spell “car bomb?”

7) Rather than question the crotch bomber under perfectly legitimate means when the jerk was taken off the plane, Obama’s Justice Department reads this dude his Miranda rights and gets him a lawyer. I think that says it all.

I heard a commentator once say that when liberals are in charge of national security…people die. We had ten dead in Texas with the jihadist psychiatrist dude, and almost 300 on Christmas Day.

You know what the government response to this will ultimately be? Taking naked pictures of granny at the airport.

When will America wake up? How many people will have to die?