Bits Bucket for August 23, 2012
Post off-topic ideas, links, and Craigslist finds here.
The Housing Bubble
Examining the home price boom and its effect on owners, lenders, regulators, realtors and the economy as a whole.
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Name:Ben Jones
Location:Northern Arizona, United States
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Appraisal came in at $525,000. We bought it as a wrecked foreclosure from BofA in Nov. 2010 for $395,000. New loan will be under 80%the LTV issue so dropping .5% MIP + 4.375% FHA for a conventional loan at 3.25%. Sacramento foothills are recovering from the bubble bust!
Droid auto spell…..augh. “..under 80% LTV….
And you couldn’t find a buyer for a small fraction of what you have in it.
So your point is what?
Please define “small fraction.” 10%? 15%? 40%? 75%?
Please define “what you have in it.” Are you referring to the purchase price? The downpayment? The loan?
Some folks here are just so anti-home ownership it’s not funny.
And others here are so pro-debt slavery it’s not funny.
Bad Andy
I agree 100%. Even newly minted homeowners are being a little testy to those of us still looking (excluding cactus, A+ human). I would not judge the market on a snapshot appraisal, since it is my belief some of the froth is seasonal. (I am well aware of the inventory issue. We live it.)
That being said, we have an offer in on a regular sale. OMG, what a money pit. Aluminum wiring isn’t sitting well with EE hubby. Add another $9K going out. We were told to get the drywall done by a dry-waller after the electrician is done. It will cut 25% off the bill. We will know by bedtime. I hate this roller-coaster.
“That being said, we have an offer in on a regular sale. OMG, what a money pit.”
Why buy a money pit when you can rent for much less?
We don’t know that you can rent for so much less. Stability is probably the reason most people buy a home in today’s market. There are still some who see it as an “investment,” but for the most part I’ve seen that mindset fade.
No Andy. We DO know that rental rates are a small fraction of the total carrying costs of buying.
Garbage. PITI on a $100K home here are well under $700 with 20% down. Rent on the same home is more than twice that.
Why rent when we will own outright and we love the house. We will have $425/mo property tax liability, and after the initial money pit outgo, we’ll be secure with a roof over our heads, protected from more medical black swans. Can’t beat that. This home is really in a great neighborhood.
We have always owned until our big home regular sale, having been caught in this bubble. We like the lifestyle and security of owning.
To each his own. I would never nudge a renter’s decision. Everyone likes different “flavors”.
Sorry Andy but you’re pimping now and you know it.
I still want to know what “small fraction” and “what you have in it” mean.
“Some folks here are just so anti-home ownership it’s not funny.”
I suspect some people here are sitting on the sidelines with a big load of cash hoping for a total wipeout so they can become Mr. Potters with their own Pottervilles. They are actively talking down the markets, home ownership, and the very construct of debt itself.
Lack of any attempt to even justify their statements, and just bullying those that provide evidence to the contrary tells me they do not really believe what they are saying, just hope their statements, repeated enough, become “common knowledge”.
Look at the claim that there we built 25 million excess, empty houses since 1993. That is the TOTAL number of houses built, so that can only be the number of excess houses if we did not increase the number of household in 16 years…..
And despite this number being clearly wrong, there had to be 6-8 other people that parroted the 25 million excess empty houses number as if it was verified fact.
Heck, we had one guy trying to argue that every empty house is an excess house, as if no one has a vacation home, a hunting cabin in the woods, and 0% vacancy rate is remotely possible or “normal”.
Excess is amount above normal, so the only way every empty house to be an excess house is for 0% vacancy to be normal.. which is just as moronic as saying that every house built in 16 years is an excess, empty house.
I’m not even advocating buying at 50%. Numbers don’t lie RAL, Realtors might but numbers don’t. If you need the flexibility to move in 5 years you shouldn’t buy under any circumstances.
You’re right. Numbers don’t lie…. Especially with 25 MILLION excess empty houses and Housing Demand at 15 year lows and falling.
I know the area, and Jingle is lying. His numbers are a complete lie. Why are you lying?
Especially with 25 MILLION excess empty houses and Housing Demand at 15 year lows and falling.
In Engineering school it was always “show your work” or you got zero points.
“You’re right. Numbers don’t lie…. Especially with 25 MILLION excess empty houses and Housing Demand at 15 year lows and falling.”
“In Engineering school it was always “show your work” or you got zero points.”
I’ll show you his work.
25 million is the total number of houses constructed between 1993 and 2008, therefore, there are 25 million, empty, excess houses.
http://www.nahb.org/generic.aspx?sectionID=130&genericContentID=554
2008 had the lowest new household formation rate in 15 years, and since it is 2008, we’re still at the lowest demand in 15 years and still falling.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/why-has-household-formation-been-so-slow/2012/01/17/gIQAGad95P_blog.html
Sorry Darryl…. You attribute the 25 MILLION excess empty housing units to two points in time, not me.
And then you further misrepresent the truth by attributing the 15 year low housing demand to housing formation instead of sales.
After being proven a liar and a housing pimp over and over again, why do you continue to lie to HBB readers?
“You attribute the 25 MILLION excess empty housing units to two points in time, not me. ”
So, the tell us what you attribute this totally BS number too.
Or do you just expect us to accept it because you say so?
Someone is a liar, but it isn’t the guy providing links to data sources.
At this point, you’re just proving how full of road apples you are.
We DO know that rental rates are a small fraction of the total carrying costs of buying.
It really depends on where you live. Renting in bumfu(k USA is completely different from renting in Manhattan or San Francisco. Throw in the need to find a rental that accepts large dogs….
Why rent when we will own outright and we love the house.
We like the lifestyle and security of owning.
To each his own. I would never nudge a renter’s decision. Everyone likes different “flavors”.
One more thing to add: if you plan on owning for 10+ years.
Why buy a money pit when you can rent for much less?”
It can’t be that much of a money pit or Awaiting wouldn’t buy it , they seem very careful about home inspections.
All homes require some money to maintain them. I’m down over 3K in repairs in less than 2 months ( balcony and patio cover replacment Bank would not pay for repairs). But if we believe the recent comps I’m up 40K in price. And if this new joker acually sells for 475K I’m up 80K minus realtor 5%. But one should not count Chickens before you sell them.
I’m cool with owning again.
Besides trading worthless RE for valuble Bernakes which appear out of thin air thanks to a truly ingeunius Treasury which buys it’s own debt seems lame to me somehow…
I am sitting on $300k (sold in 2007) cash and still waiting. Especially with the chance of R&R wining the election and removing the mortgage deduction.
Funny thing about renting vs owning, the free time on weekends to go kayaking and fishing vs house maintenance. no one factors that in.
I’ll play the other side of the coin here too. I planned on owning for 10+ years when I bought. Values tanked, the neighborhood went to hell, and my resources dried up. I only wish that I didn’t kill my savings to keep making payments to the bank who had no interest in helping to come up with a mutually beneficial solution.
Again Darryl…. the data has been posted and verified multiple times here.
25 MILLION excess empty houses is something you just don’t like but you don’t have to LIE about it.
Funny thing about renting vs owning, the free time on weekends to go kayaking and fishing vs house maintenance. no one factors that in.
The same is true for owning a disposable house.
Yeah the recent buyers club is out in full force lately. Buying an overpriced home in a questionable economy can be stressful.
Keep it coming, pretty soon we will have a regular support group meeting.
“Especially with the chance of R&R wining the election and removing the mortgage deduction.”
$85 billion in tax deductions mainly for Mitt and his fellow members of the 1% club suggests otherwise.
Mortgage Tax Deduction Remains Touchy Subject For Romney, Ryan and GOP
By Roland Li
August 23, 2012 9:30 PM GMT
The government’s role in the housing market does not generally inspire the same impassioned responses as abortion or health care, but the future of one mortgage tax policy could affect the fate of around $85 billion in annual taxpayer benefits.
The mortgage interest deduction allows homeowners to deduct their mortgage interest payments from their tax returns, limited to up to $1 million of a mortgage’s value. The deduction is considered sacred by many Americans, and the Republican Party and presidential candidate Mitt Romney have grappled with its future as they seek to run on a platform of simplifying the tax code.
Earlier this week, the Republican draft committee reversed its position after lobbying from the real estate industry, voting to continue to press for tax code reforms, but if that failed, to “preserve” the mortgage interest deduction.
…
“Buying an overpriced home in a questionable economy can be stressful.”
Just wait until the next recession, that ‘nobody could see coming’, hits. We will soon be suffering through HBB home owner victim group therapy sessions.
Budget decision delays risk recession
Published 6:36 p.m., Thursday, August 23, 2012
A year ago, Washington strapped on a fiscal suicide vest. It postponed a standoff over spending and taxes by setting drastic spending triggers that would go off in January if nothing was done. It was a drastic step that bought time but little else.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has now weighed in with a powerful warning. A fragile economy, just barely recovering, will fall back in the recessionary ditch if nothing is done. But even if a deal is brokered - such as continued low taxes and only modest spending cuts - the nation’s economy will grow only slightly.
…
RAL, the appraisal uses “comparable sales” which shows three houses nearby and similar to mine have sold for $505,000 to $545,000 in the last few months. So I could sell it for the appraised value.
I did find it curious that the appraisor used the low interest rate environment as a factor in obtaining the value. I know it is a factor, I just found it interesting he used it in the report!
And the sun “could” rise in the west too….. but it won’t.
RAL — are you so dense or are you just trying to make this board more ‘interesting’ - when you can’t convince others with your logic you start name calling - reminds me of elementary school, thanks for putting me in a good mood thinking of those days…
And in rushes the fawing sycophant and housing parasite.
Specify the number that corresponds to “small fraction.” Explain the meaning of “what you have in it.”
You can do math as easily as anyone else.
Why are you asking me to do it for you?
In all this argument the word timing never entered and that was pivotal to both of your accurate cases. It’s only a good time to buy when timing is at stake. When you have a baby, you want stability and homeownership is every human’s dream. Bottom calling is useful but not everyone has to nail it on the head to be right in the end.
“It’s only a good time to buy when timing is at stake. When you have a baby, you want stability and homeownership is every human’s dream.”
lol…. seriously now….. That one is right out of Central Casting.
Assuming you have done a lot of DIY sprucing up, how does your debt restructuring indicate to us that the housing bubble is on again in Sacramento?
What would Paladin have said about the “appraisal will make me rich” viewpoint?
The $395,000 includes about $15,000 in hard costs and I have invested an equivalent amount in labor.
The underlying value does not indicated the housing bubble is “on again” in Sacramento. I believe it is “returing to the mean” after coming of the artificial bottom. The real test will be what happens after the election in November and what happens to the job market in 2013.
We are not looking for the “appraisal makes me rich” strategy. We are looking at the “appraisal improves my cash flow”. Our loan payment on $380,000 drops by $550/mon and the amount of principal reduction in each payment increases from $450 to about $650. This happens because the total interest drops from 4.875% to 3.25%.
I invest in real estate today with the idea that we received cash flow on our investment, the rent also pays down the principal, and if inflation rages, we have a great hedge. As our equity grows and we move into retirement, we can sell a house every few years and buttress our income when needed.
I certainly don’t think everything is all peaches and cream. This strategy is risky and we have to keep reserves for a downturn. However, as I have said many times in the last couple of years, I believe our purchases have been below reproduction cost and the fundamental strategy is sound and likely to work. Buying real estate has not had these type of fundamental and intrinsic values since 1997.
Jinglemail
Thank you for the clarification of your position and opinion.
Awaiting,
I really hope this one works out for you guys. Please let us know?
Will they extend the tax free status on forgiven debt after Jan 1st?
The real test will be what happens after the election in November and what happens to the job market in 2013.
The real test will be what happens after ??
After major tax reform would be my answer….And, thats tax reform thats coming a sure as the sun will rise tomorrow…IMO, its really the only solution to the debt & entitlement issues facing the country…
“Buying real estate has not had these type of fundamental and intrinsic values since 1997.”
This is another lie. In 1997, similar houses sold for much less than $300k.
…and my income was much less in 1997. And the house would have rented for much less in 1997. And the house would have cost much less to build in 1997.
This is what I mean by “fundamental” and “intrinsic”. The numbers work well today, just like they did in 1997.
No one is lying to anyone.
In your case, you’re merely lying to yourself.
“This is what I mean by “fundamental” and “intrinsic”. The numbers work well today, just like they did in 1997.”
So eight to ten times median income is “fundamental” and “intrinsic”? I think you may have let the bubble prices skew you sense of valuation.
Are you renting it out? Is it cash flow positive, after PITI etc.?
This is our home. It would probably rent for $3,000/mon, but we purchased it because it had everything valued, including a view of the downtown skyline and a reasonable price.
We have rentals we purchased in 07, 08, 09, & 10. Just so you all know, my first two purchases are “under water by $95,000 and $45,000. They do cash flow, but late ‘07 and early ‘08 were too early to buy. Patience is not my strongest virtue and my savings were burning a whole in my pocket. Although, I had been waiting for the “right investment conditions” since 1997, you could say I have shown some patience.
“It would probably rent for $3,000/mon,…”
You can rent in nice areas of San Diego for far less. Why would anyone pay that much to rent in Sac?
Because it’s in the hills.
You can rent in nice areas of San Diego for far less.
Really? What’s a typical rent on a 4/2 in a nice area?
Sacramento has hills? Who knew.
“What’s a typical rent on a 4/2 in a nice area?”
$2500
“Sacramento has hills? Who knew.”
The foothills of the Sierra Nevada are within commute distance to the east.
Yes, patience is strained. It will be even more so for many. As much as the drop in interest rate saved you big bucks, prices will be crushed if/when the PTB loses their grip on this nonreality. It could be quite a wait, and for some, put us out of the house to live in business all together.
Didn’t you recently buy a house?
You recall correctly. It is a very modest building. I did not borrow any money to do so and don’t care one bit for my own sake if prices go up or down. I am too old to calculate it as an investment or time the market. Timing for me is before I am too old to do my art.
Others will make the largest financial mistake of their lives buying now, especially with borrowed money, in my humble opinion.
Others will make the largest financial mistake of their lives buying now,
If their PITI is less than renting that house? If so, how and why?
Rio,
For the average young person who uses a mortgage to buy a house many multiples of their yearly income, a loss of magnitude like a year or two income would take a lifetime to recover from. In the meantime, better not have to move. 20% loss, Debt prison. Or bankruptcy.
I am pretty sure you already understand this. I don’t have anything more complex in mind.
“Timing for me is before I am too old to do my art.”
What’s your art, man? Fill us in!
“Others will make the largest financial mistake of their lives buying now, especially with borrowed money, in my humble opinion.”
Yes, and they will be the new “victim” class of 2015.
JM - what kind of system do you have to manage your tenants? do you do it yourself or hire a management company?
thanks in advance.
I do it all myself. I personally screen all my residents and most have been in place for multiple years. When there is a turnover, I dedicate a weekend and a few weeknights to get the house ready for the new resident. I enjoy the whole process. My wife hates it and does not care to manage or clean up after people, so I leave her out of the work.
I have a couple of million in debt and am paying it down by $30,000/year or so, more as each year goes by. It is all cash flow positive. If I had a “bad apple”, it could chew up a year of cash flow, but there is very little a tenant could do which I could not repair in 2-3 weekends.
“I have a couple of million in debt.”
It’s the ‘Taco Bell Jeff’ model, folks!
“This is our home. It would probably rent for $3,000/mon,”
Horsesh!t. More lies from the blogs resident liar.
The house next door rented for $3295 in June. Why all the name calling? I am just telling you my experience. If you don’t like it, relax and take a deep breath.
When one lies, he’s a liar. It’s not name calling. It’s called being truthful which is quite the opposite of what you’re doing.
You know you’re lying. We know you’re lying.
It’s no secret.
I for one believe Jinglemail is being truthful in his reporting.
And I’m certainly no housing shill, not by a long shot.
Whether he is right or not remains to be seen. I look forward to his annual-at-least checkins that we talked about (wasn’t it every Apr 1st, Jingle?).
Glad you could refi. I don’t see your situation that RE has turned in Sac but that you locked in house you like and can afford and benefitted by timing and searching for what you wanted.
I was working with some people in the building trade housed in Sac who said that things have been getting worse there, the worst they have seen. Granted the RFP was on the commercial side but jobs in construction are still jobs and without jobs people cannot afford to by houses.
Commercial is still melting down and getting worse in Sacramento. The reset for commercial may hit bottom in 2013. That end of the business is equivalent to where housing was in 2009, so it is very, very ugly.
To say that commercial in any market “may” hit bottom in 2013 assumes a level of economic growth that we haven’t seen in some time. I don’t see that happening.
I see liars talking up a near-term bottom in order to increase the prospect of convincing greater fools to catch themselves falling-knife real estate investments.
Much commercial that has been built will not recover to anything near its replacement cost…The rents that some of these places will be able to achieve will reduce them to C class investments…Ad to that they are not financeable in any reasonable way and guess what happens to the FMV….
There are tons of empty or stalled commercial developments all over Sac- even in the better areas. kinda makes you wonder about the health of the overall economy and the future of the housing market here…
“In a world of greater fools, the trick is to avoid being the greatest fool.”
Ground level commercial seems to be having problems in my nabe. The high end clothing store that was empty for over a year looks like it may get a tennant by 2013 (there is a little sign) but the jewelry store across the street is still empty and a hair place/salon closed entirely. Looks like another bank branch is going into the hair place (I’m counting at least 6 within a 10 minute walk, maybe 7). There are two empty store fronts in the row with the pizza place and the cupcake place. And one of the stores in the lower level of my building is now empty.
This is a highly walkable, high traffic neighborhood. The residents aren’t the highest income in the area, but the people who come here to shop are. I can’t tell what is going on in the office buildings.
At a time when most people bank online or use ATMs only, why are there so many bank branches?
Middle….there are things you cant do on line or at an atm….like pay your bank credit card with cash…..
“I see liars talking up a near-term bottom in order to increase the prospect of convincing greater fools to catch themselves falling-knife real estate investments.”
Funny, I see the same thing. I think we have a new Las Vegas Landlord on our hands.
“At a time when most people bank online or use ATMs only, why are there so many bank branches?”
Presence and brand recognition.
If I had to guess about the bank branches, in this nabe it might be because of all the older residents. Maybe they don’t like or don’t know how to do stuff on-line? There are a lot of “high” rise apartment and condo buildings here (20 stories or less). But there are also office buildings and very high end retail plus midlevel retail. The retired crowd does a lot of walking here - to the community center, to the post office, to the doctor, etc. I’m guessing they also go to the bank.
Polly you’ve been in forest hills queens, continental or Yellowstone ave. it seems like every high rise has a branch or atm on the ground floor
You’re full of sh!t. I know that area. A friend just bought a 10 acre horse facility with a large ranch house in Pilot Hill for under $500k.
GB, what your friend does has no bearing on my scenario. I am in a gated community on a high end golf course. Much different from a 10-acre property in a hard to access area 30 miles out of town.
“…a high end golf course.”
Brings to mind a story in the local news this week:
Developers Eye Goat Hill Golf Course In Oceanside
Thursday, August 23, 2012
By Alison St John
One of the sites the Chargers rejected for a new stadium in North County has attracted the attention of developers, but proposals to build a world class action sports complex on the Goat Hill Golf Course in Oceanside is proving controversial with residents.
Goat Hill Golf Course sits strategically on Interstate 5 between San Diego and Los Angeles. In spite of its ocean views, the city-owned course is little patronized, and the city doesn’t have the money to keep it green.
The 70-acre course breaks even financially but it is a prime piece of property that is not earning the cash strapped city any revenue. The Chargers studied the site in 2007 but decided it was too small for a football stadium.
Byron Wear, a former San Diego city councilman, spoke for Pacific Coast Village, one of two developers who proposed building a village of commercial and recreational facilities on the golf course.
“If Oceanside decides to change the use of the golf course,” he told the city council, “it should be grand and world class.”
A second developer, Stirling, suggested an action sports facility with zip lines, snow and skate boarding, rock wall climbing and other new, emerging sports. The plan would include community gardens, a central marketplace and classes to teach healthy cooking and digital media. Both plans promised to create jobs, both would involve residential as well as commercial development.
But every Oceanside resident who spoke at the meeting opposed the idea of developing even part of the property commercially. They objected to the plan of expanding the property to 90 acres by relocating the Little League fields, the Girls and Boys Club and a Senior Center.
Janet Bledsoe Lacey protested that the golf course was dedicated for recreational use. Her father led the initiative in 1970 that required a public vote if its use is changed.
“Once you sell it, pave it, it is gone,” she said.
…
conventional loan at 3.25%.
15 year fixed ?
10-year fixed rate with a 30-year amortization. I looked back over my lifetime and realize I have never had a loan in place for more than 10-years (sold or refi’d). My wife did not like this choice, but we agreed in 10-years it is unlikely we will live in this house anyway. We will probably want a condo in SF by then!
10-year fixed rate with a 30-year amortization.”
makes sense
My first loan was a 7 due in 30 which is a 7 year fixed then re-adjust to current rates for the remaining 23 years. Figuring I would not be there in 7 years I went for it , turns out I was there for almost 16 years.
So this time I went for 30 year fixed at 3.625% just to be safe.
Today, I’m fixing for 30 years…do I pay a bit more than a floater? Absolutely, but I don’t need to go floating for affordability, so I don’t want to take the risk.
Romney campaign rolls out energy policy
It focuses on developing domestic fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal - in large part by shifting federal responsibilities to the states, and by expanding exploration and production nationwide.
Romney’s plan calls for reaching North American energy independence by 2020, primarily through expansion of traditional fossil fuels.
Romney’s plan, in contrast, includes continued research support for alternative fuels, but would have wind and solar generation succeed or fail on their own, without government subsidies or loan guarantees.
http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/23/13423039-romney-campaign-rolls-out-energy-policy?lite
There you go. Get the Feds out of the way and let the states manage their own energy policies. Quit subsidizing wind and solar, making them succeed on their own merits.
IMO this is exactly opposite of the Obama Admin’s energy policies and should have a dramatic effect on jobs. Wouldn’t it be nice to quit sending our billions of dollars to OPEC?
Will we stop subsidizing oil and coal, too?
Will campaign promises bear any resemblance to what we actually do?
Fossil fuel profits will soar, because it is a lot cheaper to bribe/buy off State employees/regulators, than it is to buy Federal employees/regulators.
A whole bunch of this newly found energy will be exported. To China. So much for “energy independence”
Exactly. Wealthy energy companies owe NOTHING to the American public. They will skin them if they can.
I’m sure Romney’s post-primary Etch-a-sketch analogy will be equally applicable to campaign promises he is making now, in the unlikely event that he were actually elected.
Will we stop subsidizing oil and coal, too?
The Magic 8 Ball says “No”
Sounds like a good policy to me. Now if we could make some traction on CNG cars and getting more diesels into circulation, I think we’d be making good progress. That and maybe moving some of that Ethanol production quota from corn to sugarcane.
We’re rich in Nat Gas and Coal, might as well utilize those resources instead of relying on OPEC.
Some traction on CNG cars….more diesels…”
Whether it makes sense or not, it sounds like socialist micro managing to me.
it sounds like socialist micro managing to me.
Where exactly in my post did you see “The government should micromange energy policy by tax breaks and incentives on CNG/Diesel”?
I praised Romney’s proposed energy policy and made some generalizations regarding where I think we need to focus our efforts, both private and government.
Nice try with the take-down… better luck next time.
Fracking is destroying our water supplies.
We end up paying for it one way or another. You add environmental regulations limiting the supply of Nat Gas and you drive up the price. Either tax it and clean up the mess or drive prices higher by limiting supply through environmental regulation. Any way, the consumer ends up paying more…
But one way, a lot of people have to get sick or unable to drink their water first.
Then push for more environmental regulation regarding Fracking for Nat Gas… it will limit supply and increase cost, but it is still a better alternative than importing oil from OPEC.
Where have you been dude?
Any push for “more environmental regulation” is considered over regulation and killing small business
Saw a VW TDI on the road the other day with a biodiesel logo on it next to the TDI . I do not know if it was straight from the factory that way but it was a positive reinforcement. Got me to think at least about greenie inroads even if maybe the owner modified the DIESEL logo themselves by adding the BIO part.
Was looking at VW Toureg 4Motion TDI’s recently… I may even come back into the German fold from the Japanese with that vehicle.
And what do we do 100 years from now when the oil and coal are gone? Oh, right… that is someone else’s problem.
Party on while the partying is good.
This policy is, in my opinion, just sucking up to a cash rich industry that is making MASSIVE bribes…. oh, sorry… campaign contributions.
The more we change, the more nothing changes.
And what do we do 100 years from now when the oil and coal are gone?
How many new forms of energy have been harvested in the last 100 years that weren’t feasible prior?
Do you think that maybe continued R&D will pay off with new alternatives in the next 100 years?
To use a battlefield analogy, when you have a sucking chest wound, you don’t worry about risks of heart disease that may kill you 50 years from now. You stop the hemorrhaging and hope the body survives long enough to worry about long-term health risks…
Energy independence would only cut out international trade deficit from $600B to $400B a year. Hardly patching the “sucking chest wound”.
More like diverting the blood gushing from the sucking chest wound to a few special interest groups that have bought and paid for our government.
This plan is just a way to exploit limited resources to the benefit of a few already insanely rich people.
And, answer you own question. How many new sources of energy in the last 100 years? Coal, oil, hydro, nat gas? Oh, right, exactly 1, Nuke.
Or do you think we’ll magically be able to perfect the fusion reactor by then. Do not hold your breath on that one.
I’ve done the numbers and it was closer to $300 Billion, so about half our trade imbalance.
And you forgot Solar, Wind and Geothermal in the last century, in addition to technological improvements in those already mentioned.
Sorry, but wind power is NOT new to the last 100 years.
Solar: “The photovoltaic effect was first observed by Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel in 1839.”
Geothermal? Surely you jest.
“From hot springs, geothermal energy has been used for bathing since Paleolithic times and for space heating since ancient Roman times,”
You were saying?
It is funny the same people that claim that alternative energy sources today are competitive without subsidies seem to be saying that if we use fossil fuels for a hundred years, the alternative energy sources will not be ready in 100 years. I hope we gain some efficiency in 100 years if I thought not I would not spend one more dime on research since it would be a deadend.
As far as a new source it depends how you define it. I guess you could say not even fusion would be a new source since the Sun uses it to make energy. However, to claim that PV is not a new source seems very odd. Unless something is practical it really is not a source. Yes, man knew of and used oil for thousands of years but the petroleum age did not arrive until we drilled the first oil.
Solar is already competitive in many places to centrally generated energy.
You forget the MASSIVE subsidies and external costs tied to oil and gas and coal.
Tax breaks
USGS
leasing land and mineral rights for pennies on the dollar
military support
water and air pollution
using eminent domain to route pipelines and power lines
People who worry about handing debt to our children should really worry about handing a polluted planet with depleted natural resources.
Doesn’t Nostradamus have it pegged at 2148. That fits in with my somewhat knowledgeable analysis of depletion forecasts having studied the Saudi’s best well. Brazil will keep us going for 100 and then it gets ugly.
Romney seems bound and determined to drive the center to Obama, doesn’t he.
All his policy proposals are dead center the Republican base, the people that were always going to vote for him.
The center of the political spectrum is where general elections are won, and I don’t think the center want’s to see an oil rig in every yard, coal stacks as far as the eye can see, and a shift back to polluting, unsustainable, 18th century technology.
You want to stop oil imports? Put the tariff on money leaving the country, jack up the price of imported oil to $200 a barrel. Make gasoline $8 a gallon. Then alternative fuels and sustainable energy will be economically viable on their own.
That is not only sound, long-term sustainable energy policy, it is sound long-term economic policy.
Of course, no one cares about long-term. It is all about exploiting as many resources as possible to make as few people as possible, as rich as possible.
Gawd I hate both political parties. The Republicans suck for being heartless, greedy, short-sighted, rich-get-richer, screw everybody else, lying asshats.
Dems suck every bit as much for being beholden to their own special interests, and unable or unwilling to get the message out that money is debt and the rich can only get richer as long as everyone else is going into debt, and the trade imbalances are funded by unsustainable debt growth that will eventually collapse or force us to inflate it away, and….
Arrrrg. Just arg. So frustrating to see the disaster, and be surrounded by fools that just want to speed the train ever faster toward the cliff, because as long as they get theirs, everything else is someone else’s problem.
“That is not only sound, long-term sustainable energy policy, it is sound long-term economic policy.”
It is also sound security policy. Not caring a rat’s patootie about the Strait of Hormuz (except to the extent that we might care about people anywhere else in the world) would be awsome.
Excellent post!!
“I don’t think the center want’s to see an oil rig in every yard, coal stacks as far as the eye can see, and a shift back to polluting, unsustainable, 18th century technology.”
If gas is hovering around $4/gal, and if they think that this will lower it, then I see the center liking it.
You just want Obama to keep priming the housing pump, that whole self interest thing.
It’s a half-good plan but energy independent in 8 years? No way. There is not enough there. It will take something like combining both Obama’s and Romney’s plan and putting them on steroids plus much more conservation for America to become energy independent. And even then it’s a 20 year project IMO.
I like the expanding oil/gas exploration part of Romney’s plan. I’m not sure about each state having their own environmental impact policy and I would also invest a lot more in alternative energy - solar/wind etc.
Solar and wind etc. are not ready to “succeed or fail on their own” and that type of rigid economic philosophy does not lead to a country being “energy independent”.
“Succeeding on their own” is an economic/capitalistic concept but a country becoming energy independent is more than simply an economic/capitalistic concept and goal. Becoming energy independent is a goal that deals with issues of national security, economics, sovereignty and nationalism, which together is a much more important goal than requiring contributing developing technologies to succeed or fail on their own.
Great national endeavors do not boil down to every facet of that endeavor having to succeed or fail on its own, and the dogma leading to that type of philosophy has led to a decline in America.
“Becoming energy independent is a goal that deals with issues of national security, economics, sovereignty and nationalism, which together is a much more important goal than requiring contributing developing technologies to succeed or fail on their own.”
Bingo.
I’m surprised we haven’t made a full fledged attempt at diesel cars…those smart cars look too dangerous to drive…and diesel is supposed to get 1/3 better mileage then gas…
so Mabye 60-70% of cars can run on diesel year round
Enjoying the monsoon rains here in Tucson. We’ve had almost 2″ of the wet stuff in less than a week.
Hey, Slim. You’re up early.
Orange alert for nasty, scummy air today in DC, but it isn’t going to get above 90, so we’ll take it.
We’ve been enjoying that kind of weather for almost 60 consecutive days. But without the humidity, we just get wildfire smoke to give the Front Range air its flavor.
Has anyone noticed that MarketWatch no longer displays comments on their articles? Its certainly less interesting to read this way.
And IIIIIIIIIIII get to go to Florida next week for a spell of parent-care duty while the sister travels to Michigan. Just in time for Hurricane Isaac to give Florida a good soaking. I’m so excited, I just reserved an SUV that can carry both parents, their wheelchairs & walkers and five cats (my parents’ two and sister’s three) in the event we need to evacuate.
Good times await.
See? Climate change is taking its toll.
Conservative Koch-Funded Global Warming Skeptic Flips Sides
After spending years trying to debunk global warming, scientist Richard Muller has come to the conclusion that the earth really is heating up—and that humans are to blame.
Muller, a UC Berkeley physicist, co-founded the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project three years ago to prove global warming was nonsense. His effort was supported with $150,000 from Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, which backs conservative, business-friendly causes (and is noted for supporting those who deny global warming).
But after gathering and analyzing considerable data, Muller determined the planet’s temperature was rising, and not for natural reasons.
In an opinion piece published by The New York Times, Muller described himself as a “converted skeptic.”
“Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming,” Muller wrote. “Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.”
Studies performed by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project showed the earth’s average temperature had increased by 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, according to Muller. Furthermore, they found temperatures had risen 1.5 degrees over the most recent 50 years.
Muller attributed the changes to “the human emission of greenhouse gases.”
That is the entire text. I’m not positive about the source website, so here is the link:
http://www.allgov.com/news/us-and-the-world/conservative-koch-funded-global-warming-skeptic-flips-sides?news=844860
More importantly, here is a link to the op-ed by the actual scientist:
Op-Ed Contributor
The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic
By RICHARD A. MULLER
Published: July 28, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-change-skeptic.html?_r=3
substantial tease:
CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.
My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.
These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming. In its 2007 report, the I.P.C.C. concluded only that most of the warming of the prior 50 years could be attributed to humans. It was possible, according to the I.P.C.C. consensus statement, that the warming before 1956 could be because of changes in solar activity, and that even a substantial part of the more recent warming could be natural.
Our Berkeley Earth approach used sophisticated statistical methods developed largely by our lead scientist, Robert Rohde, which allowed us to determine earth land temperature much further back in time. We carefully studied issues raised by skeptics: biases from urban heating (we duplicated our results using rural data alone), from data selection (prior groups selected fewer than 20 percent of the available temperature stations; we used virtually 100 percent), from poor station quality (we separately analyzed good stations and poor ones) and from human intervention and data adjustment (our work is completely automated and hands-off). In our papers we demonstrate that none of these potentially troublesome effects unduly biased our conclusions.
The historic temperature pattern we observed has abrupt dips that match the emissions of known explosive volcanic eruptions; the particulates from such events reflect sunlight, make for beautiful sunsets and cool the earth’s surface for a few years. There are small, rapid variations attributable to El Niño and other ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream; because of such oscillations, the “flattening” of the recent temperature rise that some people claim is not, in our view, statistically significant. What has caused the gradual but systematic rise of two and a half degrees? We tried fitting the shape to simple math functions (exponentials, polynomials), to solar activity and even to rising functions like world population. By far the best match was to the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured from atmospheric samples and air trapped in polar ice.
Just as important, our record is long enough that we could search for the fingerprint of solar variability, based on the historical record of sunspots. That fingerprint is absent….
How many times in the same article going to be posted? Probably going after higher funding from the gov. Still does not explain no warming for 15 years. This year is still considerably colder than 1998. Need to have the globe to warm to have global warming.
From theclimatebet.com which has monthly data of the global temperatures back to 2007 when Al Gore continued to make a fool of himself by (maybe) accepting a bet:
The Global Warming Challenge
Evidence-based forecasting for climate change
July: 2012 continues similar to 2011, cooler than 2010
without comments
Despite some excitement about locally high temperatures, in the U.S. in particular, the average global temperature anomaly is, so far this year, much the same as 2011′s at 0.16°C compared to 0.15°C. Compared to 2010, with an annual average anomaly of 0.41°C, most of the world is experiencing a relatively cool year.
You need to inform NASA that they’ve got it all wrong, AGDan.
http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
And there are a bunch more charts and studies and evidence and stuff that they’ve completely misunderstood, too. You need to straighten them out! (Of course, you know those stupid commie scientists just won’t listen to non-peer-reviewed, non-scientific truth.)
Those crazy scientists and engineers that put robots on mars…. Obviously incompeternt.
Warmed since 1880 before Co2 was even important sounds like it is natural. I think NASA can collect data but they cannot explain nor can anyone else why we stopped warming in 1998, nothing you posted disputes that. Not only Nasa can’t explain it, none of the other alarmists could explain it that is why they attempted to hide it and manipulated the data, that is what climategate was all about.
They are so desperate to get the taxes and regulations in place before even the easily conned like you can no longer deny that nature and not man was the primary driver of global warming that did occur between 1977-98 and then stopped making all the alarmists look like fools.
“Warmed since 1880 before Co2 was even important sounds like it is natural.”
Hard to say, no? You can’t rerun the clock with no human greenhouse gas emissions to see how much warming would have occurred without our influence.
Warmed since 1880 before Co2 was even important sounds like it is natural.
They CAN explain it: it was called the Industrial Revolution and it began in the 18th century.
You can’t rerun the clock with no human greenhouse gas emissions to see how much warming would have occurred without our influence.
Bingo,
That would be a controlled experiment and without control we resort to predictive models that have to date been completely wrong and as you point out we cannot even determine what effect our influence has.
All we can do is guess and predict and to date the models have been inexplicably wrong yet the alarmists continue to rely on models alone.
We could follow Einstein’s definition of insanity and continue to rely on wrong models and refuse to question them.
We could also admit there are competing theories and no proof and look more deeply into the science.
And how many parts per million of C02 did the industrial revolution add to the atmosphere? You can’t even figure out the right questions to ask.
If you had studied the issue like I have you would know that man had an insignificant impact on co2 levels prior to 1940 and sense we still are about 1/20 the level of hundreds of millions ago, any end of man stuff shows the same knowledge as the fundies claiming that man and dinoasurs co-existed.We still are not even back to optimum co2 levels for plant growth.
You can’t even figure out the right questions to ask.
OK. How about this: How do you disprove all that evidence I linked to on the NASA Climate Change site? On the word of some crank scientist somewhere? Or a marketing professor?
If you had studied the issue like I have
LOL! You’ve out-studied the scientists at NASA- all on your own! (Well, with a little help from kochtopus misinformation sites.)
“Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.”
The thing that discredits NASA for me in the climate science arena is the lack of unsureness. No discussion of the probable error range in data from long ago. No discussion of self skepticism. Statements of FACT to support conclusion.
First the politics, then the science.
As for the posters here who rely on insult to make an argument………pfffffft! That’s not a discussion.
Polly, then explain if man is causing it andplaceslike China have increased their burning of coal by billions of tons over the last few years, there has been no global warming in 15 years until you can explain that it is becoming increasing clear that man is not the primary factor. James Lovelock the modern father of theory understands that and the alarmists had to find some second rate scientist who had gone the other way to try to refute the impact of his defection. If the man had any credibility he would have been given a lot more than 150,000 from the Koch brothers.
Well Alpha my predictions have been a lot more accurate over the last 6 years, James Hansen who is running the research at NaSA. One degree per decade, yea check the record flat as the Obama recovery.
Would whoever it is who posted the link to the study that debunked Dan’s “last 15 years” nonsense, please repost it. Thanks.
Why don’t you actually look at Muller’s conclusions? He thought that warming didn’t exist at all until he did his own examination of the record, fixed all the problems that he thought existed in the data, and came out deciding that the case for human caused warming was stronger than the previous studies had asserted.
No one has ever posted anything that has shown that we are warmer this year than we were in 1998 because NASA’s own data does not show it. James Hansen tries to muddy the issue by essentially stating that if you take the average of years before 1998 and then look at the average of years after 1998 we are still warming. However, that does not explain why the average global temperature today is cooler than 1998 fifteen years later when co2 emissions have exceeded expectations and we have failed to warm as the models predicted. That is why James Lovelock no longer thinks the science is settled and he is willing to attribute much more of the warming to natural causes.
Issac Newton took a year out of his life to debunk the whole thing. He was convinced that the founder of the Greenhouse Gas/Global Warming “science” was a dangerous crackpot. That’s enough of a review for me.
Yes, Polly look at it he acknowledges that the temperature has flatten but then he just makes the conclusory statement that it was not significant. Fifteen years not significant what BS.
A few days ago a told the board to buy platinum because I saw that the experts had overlooked the short position which meant that even a minor disruption would cause a price spike it did. Years ago this board did not listen to the experts on housing it did its own research and found that home prices were out of line with the metrics.
All I am asking people to look at the hard data and apply logic. The alarmists dismissed that nature was causing virtually any of the warming,a co2 swamped all other causes. Just answer a simple question how can we have a massive increase in co2 emissions, just think China and India growing by about 10% per year, burning coal and no increase in the temps. Defies logic if co2 was indeed the primary cause of the earlier warming. All I get in return is data showing that we have warmed earlier which I do not dispute but it does not explain the key question.
No, he said in an op-ed piece (by definition too short to go into details) that he isn’t convinced it is true (that is what “some people claim” means) and that it isn’t statistically significant. In other words, it is part of some of the short term variables that he had just explained.
“Issac Newton took a year out of his life to debunk the whole thing. “
Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727?
“Just answer a simple question how can we have a massive increase in co2 emissions, just think China and India growing by about 10% per year, burning coal and no increase in the temps. Defies logic if co2 was indeed the primary cause of the earlier warming.”
CO2 is probably the largest emission from industry. Therefore, to tax it properly it must be “identified” a pollutant whether it is responsible for warming or not.
After spending years trying to debunk global warming, (Koch-funded) scientist Richard Muller has come to the conclusion that
the earth really is heating upbeing a wh0re sucks.lol. Or best to stop the service when the money runs out.
Earth isn’t doomed, just its humanoid inhabitants are.
And as a non-breeder, we don’t have any real stake in its future since we’ll be dead within fifty years
Exactly! Humanity will be destroyed by Meteors or Asteroids way before the effects of global warming or global cooling.
Then again why should I give my SUV for my winter driving or AC when it’s 95? I should do it so that Obama can attend another useless campaign trip? I bet his one travel (and logistics to support ) burns as much as fuel I could burn in my lifetime. Or Al gore could take one more cost-to-coast flight on a private plane all by himself? Or should I suffer because the Hedge Fund Managers or their heirs could enjoy their beach front properties? Fook that!
Fight the rich and elite, live your life comfortably. That’s my motto.
Youtube has a killer rant by George Carlin on Global warming. You may like it.
Then again why should I give my SUV for my winter driving or AC when it’s 95?
You could drive an AWD car that has much better fuel economy (and save a lot of money on gas!). Or you could just put good winter tires (say Bridgestone Blizzaks) on your FWD car (that’s what I do).
Your A/C could be partly powered by wind and solar generated electricity.
Fight the rich and elite, live your life comfortably.
You mean by breathing the brown cloud that hangs over just about every metro area in the USA? I also fail to see how you “fight the rich” by turning over your hard earned cash at the fuel pump.
We may not like the brown cloud but we sure do our part to contribute to it. We burn 1-2 tanks of gas every week to climb and bike and ski in the mountains every weekend with all the money we’re not spending at Home Depot or raising humanoid larvae
I also fail to see how you “fight the rich” by turning over your hard earned cash at the fuel pump.
Shows how good the 1% are at propagandizing.
You mean by breathing the brown cloud that hangs over just about every metro area in the USA? I also fail to see how you “fight the rich” by turning over your hard earned cash at the fuel pump.
I will be handing over my money to the “rich” regardless. Whether it’s the oil barrons or the arab sheikhs or the “green entrepreneurs”.
I’ll be handing my money over too. The point is to make it last as long as possible.
Earth isn’t doomed, just its humanoid inhabitants are.
Humans breed like cockroaches… we’re destined to expand into the solar system and eventually, once the FTL barrier is circumvented via Einstein-Rosen Bridges, we’ll expand throughout the galaxy. Once we have a sustainable foothold elsewhere, the risk of extinction goes way down.
Only a matter of time.
Unless we bump into some superior, malevolent aliens.
once the FTL barrier is circumvented
If it was possible, I think there would be pan galactic civilizations like in the Sci Fi shows and aliens visiting us would be commonplace.
Either there are no aliens (think Asimov’s Foundation series) or interstellar travel is impractical.
Or consider this: long before the rise of man, aliens would have colonized Earth. We would never have appeared.
I prefer to think in terms of David Brin’s “Startide Rising” and “Uplift War” universe: Advanced alien civilizations exist, spanning the Galaxy, but we’re too archaic and undeveloped to belong to their club (A Galactic UN if you will). Until we advance technologically as a species, we’ll be shunned.
I also like the idea of some advanced alien race playing God with the genome of Earth… mixes a bit of theology with science and provides for both evolution and creationism.
I liked the Uplift War series. It was interesting, especially how Earth was not uplifted and the pan galactic orthodoxy was that couldn’t have happened.
And who says the aliens wouldn’t come just because we’re “primitive”? I don’t buy the whole “Prime Directive” argument. Even if some aliens were to abide by such a rule, others wouldn’t.
In any case, we’d probably bomb ourselves back into the stone age before inventing an FTL drive.
“we’re destined to expand into the solar system”
We may do it as robots or androids. In any case, I do not expect it will significantly relieve population pressures on earth. A few may get into space and overpopulate there, but the masses will stay here.
Brin is a captivating writer. I have read just about everything he has written, some of it several times.
And as a non-breeder, we don’t have any real stake in its future since we’ll be dead within fifty years
Is there a significant difference in concern about climate change between people who have kids or grandkids and those who do not?
If I didn’t have kids I think I personally might not be as worried.
significant difference in concern
As a non-breeder, we are concerned not with consequences to humanoids but to the pristine, alpine environment and its inhabitants such as pikas, goats, ptarmigans…
The river ( wash whatever its called ) that runs by the Windmill Inn must be full of water now.
Lets see if I can remember the streets Cambell and Orangevale ?
Skyline which I think it turns into River ?
wash was called ? tanque verde ? mesquite.. no I’ll think of it or break down and look at a map..
I had 3.7 inches here, yesterday, more the day before and there is a storm headed this way that is sure to dump a bunch more.
Just 2 weeks ago, we had about 12″ of rain over a 2 day period.
I was hoping it would keep the damn yankees up north for a while.
no such luck. the beaches have been filled with out of state plates for months.
AS-
Got corn?
So, you can’t sell your house and you’ve decided to rent it out until the market improves? Watch out for that property management company. Story from Tucson’s leading daily fishwrap:
Property manager suspects $1M theft
Kind of like giving realtors open access to your house….. and you catch them rifling through everything you own.
http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/Home-Securty-Cam-Catches-Realtor-Behaving-Oddly-160343195.html
SIL is living in a sfr rental that the owner is hoping to unload before pricing resumes its downward journey (owner is a RE). Short story they came home and found $175 missing from a petty cash drawer in the bedroom. Owner made good the loss but will watch buyers in the future. But how do you watch several people at one time?
But how do you watch several people at one time?
You can’t. They need to hide their valuables when their place is being shown. Putting them in a drawer is clearly not adequate.
“Oops! This link appears to be broken.”
Uh-oh. Early morning keyboard fingers. Here is the un-borked link.
Link is borked.
“Reply to this comment” is borked? No, no. That’s just me.
Bork bork bork
“Bork”
Is that a new government program? HAMP SNARP BORK
Tapper, Norah O’Donnell, and Campbell Brown Rebel Against the Media-Collective
The media is supposed to be objective, competitive, and independent. Instead, though, it’s the complete opposite — an organism ruled by conformity, political correctness, and corrupt Narrative leaders like Politico, The Washington Post, The New York Times and (others).
Newsweek takes a single step off the Leftist Narrative-Plantation and hell is rained down on them from more places than just Politico. This is the Media-Collective sending a message that this kind of thing just isn’t allowed – a harsh reminder to everyone else that you will pay a heavy price amongst your own every time this happens.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/08/22/Jake-Tapper-Im-Spartacus-Inspire-Others
And this collective conformity is also present in the HBB. Instead of personal attacks and name calling, IMO it would be best if “all of us” discussed things logically and rationally.
Peace to all,
Lip
Two quips from Mark Twain:
“Those who don’t read have no advantage over those who can’t.”
And …
“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.”
Carl Sagan said something about a person only having enough time during his/her lifespan to read no more than a few thousand books and thus he/she should be a bit selective regarding decisions on what to read and what not to read.
Good advice, IMO.
I met a charming little girl on the subway today. I moved my bag just as she and her mom entered the car, and she saw the open seat and sat next to me. He mother reminded he to say thank you, which she did with enthusiasm. I was reading the free daily paper (the one the Post puts out, not the Times). She leaned over a little and fluently read a Metro card ad including the phrase, “smarter, faster, more convenient.” I asked her what grade she was in. Kindergarden. I asked if she had studied to be able to read so well, or if she had just learned it while other people read to her. She said her mommy taught her. I wish I had thought to give the mother my business card. I want my niece to have a play date with this kid.
ALL of MSM, including the news, is owned by just 6 corporations.
And this collective conformity is also present in the HBB. Instead of personal attacks and name calling, IMO it would be best if “all of us” discussed things logically and rationally before calling someone a commie.
…lefty commie.
Socialism brings out the worst in me, what can I say…
Brought out the worst in Wall St. but that didn’t stop them from profiting from it…. with your tax money.
“before calling someone a commie”
I prefer progressive, same difference.
Bridgeport: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac dodging taxes
Rob Varnon
Updated 6:58 a.m., Thursday, August 23, 2012
The city of Bridgeport is suing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for not paying the state’s real estate property conveyance tax on the foreclosed homes the mortgage giants have sold during the housing crisis.
“Everybody else is paying this conveyance tax, why should Fannie and Freddie be any different?” said Lawyer Anthony Musto, the lead attorney for Bridgeport on the case.
Mayor Bill Finch’s officer referred all questions to Musto, Wednesday.
Musto filed the suit on Monday seeking not only payment of the tax but also class action status on behalf of all Connecticut municipalities.
Spokesmen for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac said they don’t comment on pending litigation. But the lenders have defended themselves in similar cases claiming exemption under federal law. They are government sponsored entities set up to purchase mortgages from banks, thus allowing the banks to lend more money.
Musto said, however, the two entities are publicly traded and their exemption was based on their operation as a mortgage buyer, not as property owner.
“It’s not their job to be buying and selling houses,” Musto said.
Read more: http://www.ctpost.com/news/article/Bridgeport-Fannie-Mae-Freddie-Mac-dodging-taxes-3808647.php#ixzz24N9Vfd55
Voters Are Vegetables®
From the Denver Post - CU analysis: Romney wins presidency because of economy
“A University of Colorado analysis that relies on economic data predicts Republican candidate Mitt Romney will win the presidency, picking up Colorado and all but three of 13 swing states.
The analysis, done by CU political scientists Ken Bickers and Michael Berry, uses unemployment data and changes in personal income in states to conclude that Romney has a 77 percent chance of victory, with the presumptive GOP nominee winning Colorado with 51.8 percent of the vote.
The researchers also assert that their economic based model, which they developed after the 2008 election, would have correctly predicted the outcome of every presidential race since 1980.”
Casino odds tighten!
Obama 2-5
Romney 15-8
I know some posters here claim the Iowa Electronic Markets are rigged (”…just like all other markets…”), but I nonetheless still find the steadily-widening price gap in Obama’s favor quite amazing in the face of myriad MSM reports about polls that suggest a Romney victory.
The gap is currently at its widest point in Obama’s favor going back to the start of the data (July 2011)…
The only poll that counts is the one on election day.
“The only poll that counts is the one on election day.”
It’s not election day, which only leaves prediction as a window into what the future will bring.
Wow. In February during the Republican blood letting you were pointing to polls on how no Republican could possibly win against Obama. Folks we are only about a month away from early voting, the polls do have some meaning at this point. Granted they mean a lot more in October but they certainly are more important than in February.
pointing to polls on how no Republican could possibly win against Obama
Why does everyone look to the polls? I mean what do they know that others don’t know? It’s always what the polls say or don’t say or the way the “polls are trending” or the “polls indicate” whatever.
Why don’t we care what the Czechs say or what the Basques are saying?
Why is it always the Polish?
Funny. And speaking of Poles, er polls, being wrong, didn’t exit polling (as in, the very day of the election) in 2004 show Kerry kicking some tail….until he didn’t?
The MSM polls yes which consistently over estimate the democrats chances. This has been true for as long as I can remember. Carter was suppose to roll over Ford but he just barely won by winning Ohio by a narrow margin.
I wonder how many of the undecideds are really completely fed up with either choice and will go third party or stay home.
Totally had me going there, Rio.
Frank Zappa: Call Any Vegetable - YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhDGiW-qZ2k - 134k - Cached - Similar pages
Jan 20, 2012 … Frank Zappa: Call Any Vegetable. 1hoseeman. S
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Excellent! The squad regularly rocks out to Freak Out! and Absolutely Free.
Goon as a dj and avid record collector i probably have at least 40 zappa lps, ruben and the jets capt beefheart….the artwork is spectacular…( i still buy records just for the artwork and frame it.)… you cant fit that on a 5 inch cd…
But my best score was a lot of zappa cd’s over 60 cds total for $100 on ebay….but the seller was honest they were scratched…and boy were they SCRATCHED….
yet most played fine must have used them as coasters in a bar.
Sheik Yerbouti - Dancing Fool
I had said that the collapse of the debt-driven consumer economy ensured Obama would be elected, Black man or not. It brought him in and might move him out.
A demography based model, however, says Obama wins, since the Republicans are now merely the party of angry white men.
Thus the re-entry of those stupid 1960s culture war “issues” into the election. Lots of our Republican and Democratic “leaders” just can’t help rearguing their youth — while mortgaging our old age.
For Obama, there are several troubling things about this election. The economy is still weak and any black swan event is likely to make it weaker. The effect of Citizens United has given Romney a money advantage that incumbents usually have. The effect of voter suppression laws (ID plus voting hours) favors Republicans and may tip the balance in some swing states.
Republicans also won many state houses in the 2010 elections, giving them control of redistricting in most of those states (some states use independent commissions). This favors them retaining control of the House.
Akin’s misstatements may preserve a slim Democratic lead in the Senate.
In the end, barring a black swan economic crisis, it will come down to which party is able to get out more of their voters. The culture war issues are designed to get the party’s base to the polls.
Nice analysis. It’s probably Ohio and Florida that decide the election and both states have GOP Governors who can make a difference. Politics and sausage should not be observed too closely or it can lead to vomiting.
Voters Are Vegetables®
lmao
Voters Are Vegetables®
A benevolent dictator will set us free!
RAL-
Shame on you for insulting vegetables!
The July housing stats for Austin are disturbing… Prices have NEVER been this high… Not even before the bubble burst a few years back
——-
“The median sales price also was up, rising 9 percent.”
“Central Texas home sales rose 20 percent in July, the 14th straight month of year-over-year increases”
“Austin’s midyear apartment occupancy rate stood at a record 97.8 percent, the highest since at least 1991″
“apartment rents increasing 15 percent in the last two years in the Austin area”
“Central Texas home sales were up more than 15 percent in March, followed by gains of 16 percent in April, 25 percent in May and 23 percent in June.”
“Prices have NEVER been this high…”
Hi Hi Hi Paul McCartney & Wings with chords and lyrics - YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sykD5HR5UUM - 161k - Cached - Similar pages
Apr 15, 2009 … We’re gonna get Hi Hi Hi,The night is young. B E. She’ll be …. views · Paul McCartney & Wings - Band On The Run [Live] [High Quality] 6:13 …
“Wings, the band the Beatles could have been!” - Alan Partridge
I love hearing take it easy when I am driving along I-40. Have to admit when I first heard the song growing up in Vermont, I pictured Winslow AZ to be like Tucson in my mind. Not so much.
SFjack!
Condos are selling now in Fort Worth:
High-dollar dwellings downtown are suddenly selling
FORT WORTH — It took five years, but the last unsold penthouse
perched atop The Tower in downtown Fort Worth is under contract. “It’s out of the blue,” said Tony Landrum, head of TLCurban and the
developer group that redeveloped the 37-story tornado-ravaged former
office tower at Fifth and Throckmorton streets into luxury condo
building.
Not far away, another long-vacant penthouse, in the Neil P. at Burnett Park building, has sold. The interior space is under construction, and the new owners expect to move in in late October.
Are the unexpected penthouse sales indicative of a turnaround in Fort
Worth’s trendy downtown condo market? Real estate agents seem to think so. Condo sales have taken off since the first of the year, they say.
In June, agents with Williams Trew Sotheby’s International Realty sold the last condo in Le Bijou for OmniAmerican Bank, which foreclosed on the property in 2009. Williams Trew was given the listing for
the 14 unsold units, and the bank asked that the units be sold in three years. That was 21/2 years ago, said Joann Royer, vice president of the Williams Trew urban division.
http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/08/17/4189350/fort-worth-real-estate.html
Comment by ahansen
2012-08-22 21:55:24
“…My family was always near the bottom at $2 / week. Not a bad deal when it included an education and school bussing for 3 children….”
How very communist of you! Especially from someone who benefited from the system and derides it so today.
Huh? We paid our taxes and could have used the public schools but paid also for private school. I don’t see your point.
I don’t deride our system but the subversion of it. I have paid millions in taxes and employed hundreds of people, and I get no benifits from the govt in return. I don’t agree with you that I am deriding a system while taking advantage.
I have paid millions in taxes and employed hundreds of people, and I get no benifits from the govt in return.
Clearly you are quite successful. Could you have done the same thing in Somalia? No? Then maybe you did get some benefits from the government.
And if you think you could have done the same thing in Somalia, go do it now. You won’t have to pay taxes, although your local warlords are going to want a cut.
“And if you think you could have done the same thing in Somalia, go do it now. You won’t have to pay taxes,”
If he goes to Somalia who is going to pay for all the SNARP Programs? Not to mention all the public union salaries and benes.
Charlie Tango has derived his benefits from the people (citizens) VIA the government. The government is not the people, only a means to implement what the people need and want. The people used to want individuals like Charlie Tango to provide businesses that in turn would provide them with jobs and all parties concerned contribute in the form of taxes and other fees to provide infrastructure in terms of transportation, communication (postal service), legal system, order (police), etc. It is a mutual agreement.
I derive benefits from my fellow citizens, including such as Charlie Tango. I do not have his level of ability, but I am grateful for his existence and that of others like him. Because of his own investment in a business that provides a needed product or service, as well as jobs, I want him and others like him to survive and do not resent that he profits in the degree to which he made the investment of time, money and aggravation. For what he does, he deserves a better home, better car, nicer clothes, better food, etc.
That used to be the agreement between “the people”. However, it seems that “the government” has decided to elect a “new people”, many from the turd world, who do not have and don’t understand those agreements. This will, in fact, lead to Somalia-like conditions and the very real possibility exists that the US will have no more Charlie Tangos.
And in terms of the “you didn’t build that” argument, I beg to differ. Let’s say I’m travelling a federal highway. My contribution to that highway in terms of taxes and fees might be a half centimeter of concrete, or a portion of a light bulb, whereas Charlie Tango’s contribution might be a yard or so of concrete, or more, considering that he provided jobs so that others could contribute to that highway.
So yeah, he built that. Along with others. The government facilitated it. Or bitched it up, as the case may be.
So yeah, he built that. Along with others. The government facilitated it.
I agree. All three parties- Charlie, the others (aka fellow citizens), and the government- played a part. That was my point. He didn’t do it all on his own.
No.
So his contribution was a yard compared to your centimeter? He is still ONLY ONE of millions who helped pay for it. The people who own the centimeter FAR outnumber him, therefore the public once again, is the provider.
My keyboard seems to have a mind of its own today. Let me try again:
Ah, but the Charlie Tangos of the country make it possible for others to contribute their half a centimeter.
HE did that. I’m not making it possible for others to contribute a half a centimeter. His contribution has more value.
I’ll go even further. The contributions that the Charlie Tangos make, when they form and run a decent business, ripple out even further than direct customers and employees.
A well run business with a good product or service brings prosperity on a number of fronts. They in turn purchase materials, supplies and other services that they need for the business. So other companies win. Maybe they contract with someone like Arizona Slim to put up a website, or do some advertising. The local deli sees an increase in lunchtime business from new employees. Local mechanics get to fix more cars. Local barbers and hairdressers get a little bump from employees who can maybe afford a trim more often.
And so on.
Would he have been able to build that business if he had to deal with chronically ill employees who couldn’t read or get to work?
The people ARE the government here, palmy. “We the People”, “Of the people, by the people, for the people”? Remember?
“The people ARE the government here, palmy.”
Nope, sorry. Nowhere in that of, by and for stuff does it say “are”.
Then that’s your fault, not the Constitution’s.
Would he have been able to build that business if he had to deal with chronically ill employees who couldn’t read or get to work?
The free market handles this by firing the sick or never hiring the illiterate, except for jobs that require only manual labor…
Maybe you just have it AZZ backwards, the dynamic capitalist economy created enough resources so there could be a functioning government, the socialist policies of the old Somalia government destroyed the economy so the government collapsed.
No they didn’t. You appear to know nothing of American history.
The government was SOLELY responsible for the great achievements that helped to create the successful “capitalist”.
You base that on what? Government did not even become a major part of the economy to the 1930s. You can try to rewrite history all you want but this country accepted Adam Smith long before most of the rest of the world and that is why we left China and India in our dust. You and Obama are not different in thinking that Mugabe. If Obama had his way we would soon look like Zimbabwe a few years ago starving because the real food producers were driven out for the sake of equality and his socialist views.
Go back to school. This knowledge is something you shouldn’t be able to graduate high school without knowing.
As for Adam Smith, his words resemble NOTHING of what we accredit to him today. This nation has become the very thing the Founding Fathers fought AGAINST.
Government did not even become a major part of the economy to the 1930s.
Is that not like saying the sun is not a major part of a forest?
Go back to school. This knowledge is something you shouldn’t be able to graduate high school without knowing.
The expansion of government under the New Deal was greater than at any other time in our history prior to the 1930’s. That’s his point.
Capitalism existed in this country long before Socialism. And yes, the Communists have been trying to achieve their dream of a perfect society in the US since 1919.
Communists have been trying to achieve their dream of a perfect society in the US since 1919.
Right. Well if they’re still trying they obviously are not very good at it.
“Go back to school.”
State Universities and public schools are nothing more than progressive indoctrination factories, they stopped teaching real history many years ago.
Then maybe you did get some benefits from the government.
So I either have to accept that I am a communist or move to Somolia and pay taxes to war lords?
Sorry if I have to confirm that I got this all strait, your logic is a bit foreign to me.
Don’t even bother, Charlie. Alpha doesn’t get it, and likely never will.
I’m sure alpha has never had the experience of wondering how the heck he’s going to make payroll.
I’ve worked with smaller businesses almost all my life. At one of my first full time jobs out of college, I watched one Friday as the boss opened the books to write paychecks, let out a huge sigh, shoulders slumped, left his office and went out to the bank to get a short term loan to cover. I’ll never forget it.
He could have told us all to stuff it, that we weren’t going to get paid that particular Friday.
let out a huge sigh, shoulders slumped, left his office and went out to the bank to get a short term loan to cover.
Idiot! He should have had Bain show him how to offshore his labor and make real $. Like a patriotic successful capitalist would.
I’m sure your former boss didn’t build that.
“Idiot! He should have had Bain show him how to offshore his labor and make real $. Like a patriotic successful capitalist would.”
alpha, you do make a good point here. THAT is the problem, the parasitic financial services industry. That is what breaks people’s hearts and makes them give up. There is no real product or service here, and those who have businesses that do provide something useful, and yet must endure all sorts of hassles and regulation, etc., they take a look at the Romneys and Dimons and Blankfeins of the world and figure “why bother?”.
Every time I’ve been screwed on a deal, it’s been by a “small local businessman”
Sorry if I assume they are all a bunch of crooks/weasels until proven otherwise.
“Every time I’ve been screwed on a deal, it’s been by a “small local businessman”
Sorry if I assume they are all a bunch of crooks/weasels until proven otherwise.”
LOL, I’ve had my issues with “small business” as well, but I have to say, it’s been more in recent years than back in the day. And perhaps the example is set from the top.
I’ve been treated well, and I’ve been treated like crap over the years. Being treated well is better.
alpha-sloth wrote: “Idiot! He should have had Bain show him how to offshore his labor and make real $. Like a patriotic successful capitalist would.”
palmetto wrote: alpha, you do make a good point here. THAT is the problem, the parasitic financial services industry
The ruling paradigm nowadays seems to be “Screw the muppets as hard as you can and take absolutely everything you can and to heck with the consequences.”
Society allows this. It’s been snookered to think that this approach is the best way to improve the society’s standard of living. The trickle-down / ‘greed-is-good’ model.
Society should demand that its institutions try to build lasting, generational wealth, and add to society. Today’s institutions are derelict in that. From religious institutions we get pedophilia and pseudo-science; from political institutions we get corruption and narcissism; from too many businesses we get wealth concentration and destruction.
There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear.
Same here X. Big corps play their games of employment destruction but they do at least pay regularly (until they don’t), but my experience with SBs has been one of borderline criminality, corner cutting and theft on their part.
I hate retail and I now hate mom and pop shops. As the saying goes, they are small for a reason.
Which begs the question….
Then maybe you did get some benefits from the government.
So I either have to accept that I am a communist
No, you need to realize that as a successful member of this society, you have indeed derived benefit from the government.
And aren’t you in the REIC? So don’t even attempt to deny that you’ve been on the receiving end of lots of government beneficence. Your whole industry has, as is pointed out here daily- often by you!
I agree, alpha. I suspect that much of Charlie’s business has been paid for by those HELOC’s that we all hate.
Charlie those aren’t taxes that’s the free unregulated market with no rules at work. Taxes go to support the people and the infrastructure and the security of the state.
Inversely, can the Government create a sustainable system of infrastructure, order and welfare without industry? Would Government even exist in it’s current form without the support of private industry?
Government couldn’t exist in its current, bloated, overbearing form without industry.
Without the 1% the government would have to find another way to bring in 36.73% of their income.
http://ntu.org/tax-basics/who-pays-income-taxes.html
Yep if we could just concentrate all the wealth down to 100 people the gov would be flush with cash.
Romney reported effective tax rate 13% likely given tax loopholes and overseas accounts it’s less than 10%.
My rate is closer to 24%.
So spreading the wealth would really have a negative effect on the country.
Remember he made 20% of his wealth with one likely insider deal where he turned a 250% profit after less than 2 years on a gov phone directory he purchased. Tell me there wasn’t a payoff or insider deal on this.
And Romney did this under a higher tax rate in the 80’s and 90’s.
Sorry measton, when 25% of people pay 87.3% of taxes there is already something fundamentally unfair about the system. Making the burden even higher for that 25% will do nothing for the remaining 75%.
25% DO NOT pay 87% of the taxes.
Do. Not.
I think ecofeco proved that here a week or 2 ago.
IIRC, there was only a $3 billion difference between what the wealthy paid and what everyone paid on totals of around $400 billion for each of the 2 groups.
This was report direct from the IRS. A spreadsheet. From 2010, I think. (latest date available)
That the rich pay substantially more taxes than everyone else a bald faced lie.
Where’s your link to back it up? I gave mine.
And what percentage of the money do the 25% make?
The top 0.1% love to blend into the top 1-25% which is exactly what your statistic does. I’m in the top 1% I pay 24% effective tax rate which I’m fine paying as long as a guy who makes 10x what I make pays atleast the same rate, instead of less than 10%. The rules and tax policy and trade policy and control of gov already favor the elite wealth strippers on wall street.
Seriously explain to me how an investment in a mundane directory business returned 250% in 2 years. Explain to me how Enron World com and all the price fixers market manipulators and outsourcers and wealth strippers have improved our economy and why they need to pay 50% less on every dollar they earn compared to me.
I’m pretty sure I said “the IRS”. As in, their website.
“Note: AGI is Adjusted Gross Income
Source: Internal Revenue Service”
Try again Turkey.
Yep and that is the formula used BY the IRS to arrive at the final payments.
Only $3 billion difference between the rich and EVERYONE else.
Do try and keep up.
Still waiting to see your numbers Turkey. 87.3% of personal income tax was paid by the top 25% in this country in 2009. You said, “25% DO NOT pay 87% of the taxes.” and I asked for a link.
“Where’s your link to back it up? I gave mine.”
Call me lazy, but I always like to see a link to the data source. If I do a search, I might not find the same link. And even if you posted it previously, I may have had a busy day and missed it.
No this again.
Bookmark it.
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/09in11si.xls
Col 16.
0-200K = 431668300
201K - 10 million = 434280399
OMG — I hope my math is wrong this time, but I think that IRS file shows the top 0.1% are now making 10% of all income?
Stunning…
On closer inspection, it’s 0.17% that make 10% of all income — not so bad, after all.
No, but here’s the thing: it’s all about AGREEMENTS, keeping them and breaking them. And these agreements, ultimately, are with the CITIZENS, the people.
Both government and industry break down when they abrogate basic agreements with the people.
Would Government even exist in it’s current form without the support of private industry?
Ask the Communists of the former Soviet Union, North Korea, and China how that has worked out for them…
I have paid millions in taxes and employed hundreds of people, and I get no benifits from the govt in return.
This statement defies logic. Not only does it defy logic but it grabs logic by the neck, takes it behind the woodshed and starts puttin’ a serious butt whippin’ on the poor thing.
1. A business pays taxes on profits and profit is a main benefit of owning a business.
2. That business could not exist without the benefitss the government provides. (Roads, Laws, Law enforcement, regulated insurance/finance, education, national security etc.) The business man did not build those things. How could he build all of those things by himself? But the business man’s taxes help maintain those things necessary for the business’s existence.
3. The taxes paid to maintain the infrastructure crucial to the business give the business owner the great benefit of the ability to make profit.
Therefore the businessman IS receiving real and substantial benefits in return for the substantial taxes he pays and has paid.
Rio, using your argument, you *benefit* from all the gas I burn because I release CO2 into the air and that CO2 enables plants to grow which produce food, and you eat food, so you benefit from my exhaust.
and you eat food, so you benefit from my exhaust.
Thank you!
Deriving benefits from a system of restricted government where democracy, free markets, capitalism, and a strong judeo christian moral system coupled with a strong protestant work ethic have all combined in one of the most unique bastions of socio economic freedom in the history of the planet hardly lends credibility to the recent “big government” involvement. The somalia argument is one of the biggest, stupidest strawman arguments out there.
In fact, if you are so ready to string up the one percent, you might as well wrap an electrical cord around your own neck now, since by living in this country you are almost automatically guaranteed to be in the top 1% of income earners in the world.
The somalia argument is one of the biggest, stupidest strawman arguments out there.
In fact, if you are so ready to string up the one percent…..
Those two sentences back to back are funny.
Uhh, it’s another strawman highlighting the stupidity of the somalia strawman… I’m glad you find it amusing as that was the intent.
I’m glad you find it amusing as that was the intent.
Really?
“The somalia argument is one of the biggest, stupidest strawman arguments out there.”
It may be a poor example, but it is one of the few places in the world where government has completely broken down. I suppose it could be argued that the warlords are a form of government. They don’t do much for infrastructure or property rights or contracts. The only defense they provide is self defense.
From your original remark I understood that you attended Parochial Schools while your parents only dropped $2 a week in the collection plate. Is that correct?
I went to a show at the theater complex at Catholic University last night. Beautiful campus. I bet it costs a heck of a lot more than $104 a year to attend.
Buddy of mine (well, his wife actually) is sending the kid to the local Catholic High School (St Louis Metro/Chesterfield area).
$14K/year tuition. Plus transportation for the 12 mile drive each way.
Comment by In Colorado
2012-08-23 08:32:44
From your original remark I understood that you attended Parochial Schools while your parents only dropped $2 a week in the collection plate. Is that correct?
That was in the 50s and 60s, my dad was making $140 / week but he had know knowledge of a 10% tithe requirement.
I a couple years where my class was taught by the choirmaster who did not have a teach credential yet overall we got a better education than in the public school system.
You obviously think we were taking advantage by paying so little but remember 1st we paid taxes that funded the public schools that we did not attend. The amount paid caused no complaints from the church, why do you care 1/2 century later?
sorry for the typos
You obviously think we were taking advantage by paying so little but remember 1st we paid taxes that funded the public schools that we did not attend
So this justifies your father not paying his share of your education and dumping this on other church members?? It justifies his not paying that which the church asked for and required? Obviously that 2 dollars a week also had to cover a lot of other functions of the church not just your education so your father was really paying almost nothing and sticking it to the other church members.
I think the picture is clear now.
It justifies his not paying that which the church asked for and required?
You don’t know what your talking about.
Yeah how wrong of his dad to pay what he thought he could afford! The ingrate! Churches should have taxing authority to throw people in jail like the gov’t does as well!!
I know your father made 140 dollars a week of which he spent 2 dollars a week to support the church he attended and to school his children.
Seriously he is abusing the other church members who donated more. He is donating less than 2% of his income to the church and expecting them to school and likely feed his children during the week.
He was a very bad man.
“I don’t deride our system but the subversion of it. I have paid millions in taxes and employed hundreds of people, and I get no benefits from the govt in return.”
You can not possible believe this!
The money you earned is given value and kept relatively stable by government banking policies. Without FDIC insurance and Fed Reserve guaranteed liquidity, there is no way that we’d have $38+ Trillion dollars in existence for you to have made (and paid taxes ) millions of.
All those people you’ve employed? How many were educated in public schools or with higher education grants or guaranteed student loans?
Law enforcement to keep people from just coming and taking your stuff without paying?
Fire departments? Building code enforcements to prevent great fires that consume entire cities?
Transportation network including air, rail, roads, ports…
Come on. How can you say you have received no benefit? None? No one can be that ignorant!
Oh, but they DO believe it.
Talk about the Free $hit Army!
Sewer, trash collection, jails to lock up criminals, basic scientific research… We can mock Al Gore’s comments about sponsoring the laws that created the internet, but without ARPA Net and the high tech initiative that built the backbone, or the changes that opened it to commercial use, the internet would not be what it is today.
Power grids, water supply, traffic laws, safety standards that keep you food safe, water clean and hospital sanitary…
Really? No benefit for government… none at all?
Slate has an article up about a bunch of silicon valley billionaires starting businesses to eventually mine asteroids. Every employee mentioned in the article used to work for NASA.
Nope, no benefit from government there. Just risking their own capital. No benefit at all.
As I mentioned to Rio, my exhaust fuels the plants that you eat. So you should directly send me money so I can burn more gas to provide the plants that nourish you with more CO2. I promise you if I run out of things to do buring gas I will burn the money directly which will also produce CO2 for your food source. Since plants really need Co2 to live, you should in fact send me 35% of your income.
As I mentioned to Rio, my exhaust fuels the plants that you eat.
It was funny!
(But try not to tell the same joke twice in one day)
CO2 in excess may be decreasing our food supply not increasing it. In case you haven’t noticed the heat wave and lack of rain have decimated our corn crop.
I think there is a symbiotic relationship between citizens, industry and government. Without one, the others can not survive. The all or nothing arguments are foolish, we just need to have all progressives deprogrammed and the country will flourish for many years to come.
Apparently the irony escaped you, CT.
I was referring to the communistic nature of your church and your willingness to make use of it when it suited your purposes. (And crow about it in retrospect.) “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”, and all that.
I was referring to the communistic nature of your church and your willingness to make use of it when it suited your purposes.
We are talking about the late 1950s thru the mid 1960s. This choice was made by my parents when I was 6 years old.
I got a drivers license when I was 16 and never went to a Catholic school or church again.
Churches taking care of their own and the poor is a way to avoid a socialistic govt sliding towards communism but I understand we are all commies we just don’t know it yet?
Wall St certainly is.
“…we are all commies we just don’t know it yet….”
Bingo. At issue is to what degree.
See also:
common, communicate, community, commune, communion, and (oops) communist.
The difference between socialism/communism and simple community is no one in a community is threatening your imprisonment if you don’t pay up. Yet somehow the money still existed for the kid to get an education from the church… Strange isn’t it?
Yet somehow the money still existed for the kid to get an education from the church… Strange isn’t it?
Your points today are a bit.
Yet somehow the money still existed…
…by being taken from one (much larger) tither and effectively given to another (much smaller) tither, no?
Most of my teachers were volunteers. I had some years with teachers without teaching credentials.
Dollars in the 1950s/60s went a lot farther. Our new 3 bedroom house cost $13,000.
Catholics without children supported those that had children much like in the public system.
And crow about it in retrospect.
I wasn’t crowing just giving some perspective on the subject of the cost of a private catholic education.
If I had children I probably would not subject them to catholic schools but I did learn that an education isn’t about spending a lot of money or even graduating high school.
You claim I know nothing of science, perhaps all you sense is my lack of education? It does you a disservice to jump to these conclusions plus it offends me.
I didn’t say you “know nothing of science”, Charles, I said you apparently don’t know what actual science entails because you ascribe to it a political bias that legitimate scientific pursuit does not countenance. And then continue to argue that it does.
My comment about the communistic nature of churches was both good-natured and tongue in cheek, but the larger truth still seems to elude you. Instead of being offended, why not take that as advisory? Didn’t those nuns teach you nothin’?
Pax.
Report: Middle class will take years to reverse losses of last decade
By Phillip Reese
America’s middle-class earners lost significant ground during the last decade as their incomes dropped for the first extended period since World War II, according to a report released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center. - Read More
This is what “the future belongs to Lucky Ducky” means.
And in Eddietard’s universe, this is a lie.
A lot of that wealth was in their home.
“a lot of that wealth was in their home”. BS, it wasn’t wealth until cashed out; it was a pipe dream. Any number of natural disasters could wipe out your house but the land will always be there. Any area over an extended period of time can become blighted, gang infested, etc and values plummet. That is why I have never bought a house as an “investment”.
“Any number of natural disasters could wipe out your house but the land will always be there.”
A man made disaster came through and Mr. and Mrs. Wannabe`s equity and now Mr. and Mrs. Cashed out are crying foul. Most of them (like my ex- DBLL) didn`t buy their houses as an “investment” either. But when those houses started shi##ing Golden Eggs they were more than happy to take it and proclaim there financial brilliance for having bought a house in 1997.
That is why I have never bought a house as an “investment”.
The fact that some people may choose to buy a house for reasons other than investing seems to be lost on a few posters here.
I bought 3 as investments, did very well! Timing is everything.
“The fact that some people may choose to buy a house for reasons other than investing seems to be lost on a few posters here.”
No, the newly minted home debtors with rare exception are turning to the HBB for moral support and validation. It’s actually fortunate that we have posters who are skeptical.
A rising share of Americans have been becoming worse off since the early 1970s. This is nothing new.
Falling real pay was covered over first by more workers per household (as women entered the labor force), then by cuts in future retirement income (which is only biting now), then by rising debts.
High school dropouts and minorities started losing out first, then high school graduates in the 1980s industrial recession, then college graduates in the early 1990s, the first white collar recession. By then it was the 80 percent against the 20 percent.
Then it was the 99 percent against the one percent. Next stop — only the 0.1% will be better off.
By then it was the 80 percent against the 20 percent.
Then it was the 99 percent against the one percent. Next stop — only the 0.1% will be better off.
When fully 50% of U.S. “Taxpayers” don’t pay any Federal Income Tax, it isn’t just about the top 1% vs. the 99%, it’s about the 75%-5% paying a very large share of the tax burden while the bottom 50% get handouts and the top 5% get tax breaks.
Raise taxes on the top 5% and stop with the handouts to the bottom 50%. I’m tired of my hard won money being used so slackers at the bottom can leach off of society and crooks at the top can lobby, steal, and cheat there way to riches.
I have no problem killing the “handouts” (i.e. food stamps) to the bottom 50%, provided there are jobs available to them that pay a living wage. Unfortunately, the reality is that most Lucky Duckies can’t even fund a full time minimum wage job, and instead have to work 2-3 part time jobs (where they have no guarantee of minimum hours) and even then need food stamps to survive.
In other words, the real problem isn’t that half pay no incomes. The problem is that half the country is living at or near poverty. And we can thank “free trade” for this. Meanwhile, our trading partners “pick their winners” and are systematically cleaning our clocks.
One person’s hand out is a Busines lobby’s profit.
I have no problem killing the “handouts” (i.e. food stamps) to the bottom 50%, provided there are jobs available to them that pay a living wage.
The Republicans and Clinton did this in the 90’s with welfare reform. And yes, a lot of people got off their butts and went out and got jobs. But it only worked because there were the jobs for people to go out and get.
Now, after another decade of outsourcing, this time of white collar as well as blue, the R’s want to do this again, only without the jobs for people to go out and get. Logic fail.
You should try living on those “handouts”.
Every time I hear this I know I’m seeing someone who has had a VERY sheltered life.
so slackers at the bottom can leach off
And I’d like to see numbers to support comments like this. Sure, with any form of “assistance,” you are going to have people that game the system. But this idea that the majority receiving assistance are slackers is repeated time and again, with no evidence to back it up.
Like from a HS friend on his FB page. He claims that his mom (who raised 3 kids after their dad left them - that part’s true) couldn’t wait to get off assistance and did ASAP (also true). And yet there he is, just about every day, posting something about whether it is fair to take money from him to give to the slackers. So, his mom was a humble, noble woman in temporary need and everyone else is a slacker. I don’t buy it.
I’m wondering what a guy, back in the day, who thinks like this guy, would think as he walked past a welfare office and saw a single mom with 3 kids in tow, and government check in hand. (OK, I’m not wondering at all…)
Every time I hear this I know I’m seeing someone who has had a VERY sheltered life.
I live in a former middle-class, post-industrial city, in a neighborhood that was wealthy 50 years ago and is now mostly middle-class, surrounded by neighborhoods that have gone from middle-class to working-poor, to Projects/Section 8. I see it every day as I go off to work:
Section 8/Welfare/Disability types hanging out on the street corners or outside Liqueur stores or Dunkin Donuts while I’m heading off to work. Overweight mothers with five kids in tow walking around the city, or waiting for the bus.
I’m not talking about the factory worker collecting UI while looking for a similar paying job. I’m talking about those abusing the system because they were unlucky, ignorant, or just plain lazy. And yes, there are lots of them.
BTW, where you say “sheltered”, I say “luck favors the prepared”. We all make choices in life, about time people started living with them…
Section 8/Welfare/Disability types hanging out on the street corners or outside Liqueur stores or Dunkin Donuts while I’m heading off to work.
But how do you know that’s who those “types” are? Could be third shifters getting their after-work beers. Could be part timers who don’t have to be anywhere until afternoon. Or, they could be drug pushers. Or, they could be mooching off their parents who work, not your tax dollar.
Point is, how do you know? Do they flash their Section 8 badges or drug/gang signs? How do you know?
Point is, how do you know? Do they flash their Section 8 badges or drug/gang signs? How do you know?
You can easily tell the difference between a 20-something unemployed drifter in a stained wife-beater and dirty pants hanging out next to the local 7-11 and the middle-aged factory worker still in his blue dockers hanging out after a shift with buddies.
Also, I own a rental property. Whenever I advertise an available apartment, I get numerous requests from Section 8 renters. By law, I have to take an application, so I get to see a snapshot of their “finances”, “employment”, etc.
Thanks for proving my point.
a 20-something in a stained wife-beater
That describes a lot of the guys that work in the mills that I call on.
Which highlights my point…that it is pointless to say “while the bottom 50% gets handouts” because there is no way to back it up other than to turn the attention to 20-somethings in stained wife-beaters, as if that is what the bottom 50% is. Too strawman for my taste.
Overweight mothers with five kids in tow walking around…
Is she single?
Overweight mothers with five kids in tow walking around…
See also my story about my friend’s mom above. Not knowing her back story, it is worth ZERO to judge her situation. Strawmen (strawwomen?) such as this are a dead-end argument.
When fully 50% of U.S. “Taxpayers” don’t pay any Federal Income Tax,
That’s propaganda 1/2 truth by omission. The poor pay more in total taxes (stateLocalPayrollPropertyUtilitySales) as a percentage of their income than do the rich such as Romney. What do you want to do? Make them pay even more taxes on a poor man’s wage?
The poor pay more in total taxes (stateLocalPayrollPropertyUtilitySales) as a percentage of their income than do the rich such as Romney. What do you want to do? Make them pay even more taxes on a poor man’s wage?
I was very clear about my statement: “Federal Income Tax”. I also didn’t say “percentage of income paid in taxes”.
There is plenty of work that can be done for the money paid from welfare/section 8/disability/UE. One of the biggest problems in our society is that everyone seems to think you can get something for nothing…
I was very clear about my statement: “Federal Income Tax”.
But the poor pay more in total taxes as a percentage of their income than do the rich such as Romney. So what they don’t pay federal taxes. They pay their fair share of total tax-they pay more than Romney as a percentage of their income.
Lets say A and B need to be funded by taxes. The rich pays 5% of his income into A and 5% into B. The poor pays 15% into A and nothing into B. But the poor guy is paying 15% and the rich guy is paying 10% of their income. So now you rag on the poor guy for not paying into B?? Even though he’s paying a higher share if his very low income in taxes? Tax the poor more? I don’t know what you are complaining about.
One of the biggest problems in our society is that everyone seems to think you can get something for nothing…
Only 5% of the federal budget goes out to pay something for the non-working poor. 20% Goes to the military. I don’t know what you are complaining about.
“There is plenty of work that can be done for the money paid from welfare/section 8/disability/UE.”
Whose job will they be taking?
The middle class will never reverse the losses. We will become INdia China and Russia with the oligarchs controlling all via the gov and the press. They will doll out just enough to keep people from rioting and giving up hope which takes away the fear of death and loss of property that keeps most from rioting.
Most likely scenario, IMO.
“They will doll out just enough to keep people from rioting…”
If this is the type of government you fear, why is this the type of government you support?
I don’t support this type of gov. I support a progressive tax system right now we have the elite paying a much lower percentage of their income than the upper, upper middle, middle class and lower middle class. We have a system that bails out the elite and doesn’t create jobs. We have trade rules that favor outsourcing and the destruction of labor.
Where in my statement did you see I support this. The difference between you and I is that I believe the problem is the elite and you believe the problem is the gov. As I’ve stated just follow the money. When our president is worth billions like Putin, Mubarek, Sadam, and wins every election by 100% etc then you’ll know the problem is the gov. Our problem is the elite that have rigged the system to their benefit and at the expense of everyone else.
I again point to Romney who likely pays less than 10 cents on every dollar he earns while I pay 24 cents. He has an IRA worth close to 100 million dollars despite caps on how much people can put in these retirement accounts.
He made his money in a rigged system and produced absolutely nothing, he stripped wealth from American workers, likely bribed his way to sweet heart deals on the italian telephone directory and shafted his fellow American using tax loopholes and scams.
Fed conundrum:
QE3 at the September meeting would be a vote for Obama; no QE3 would be a vote for Romney.
Likely compromise: A “Great Pumpkin” hint that a future QE3 is coming in case of worse economic conditions ahead.
World stocks ease as Fed stimulus seen less certain
A worker on the IG Group’s trading floor looks away from his screens in the City of London, October 4, 2011. REUTERS/Olivia Harris
By Herbert Lash
NEW YORK | Thu Aug 23, 2012 1:48pm EDT
(Reuters) - Global stocks retreated on Thursday on dimmed expectations for new stimulus from the Federal Reserve and data showing slower economic growth, while the euro rose after sources said Spain is in talks over conditions for aid to reduce its borrowing costs.
The favored option is that an existing rescue fund, known as EFSF, would purchase Spanish debt at primary auctions while the European Central Bank would intervene in the secondary market to lower yields, three sources with knowledge of the matter said.
However, Spain has not made a final decision to request a bailout, the sources said, and no specific figure for aid has been discussed, one of the sources told Reuters.
The euro rallied to a fresh seven-week high against the dollar, up 0.3 percent at $1.2564, while the U.S. dollar index was down 0.2 percent at 81.362.
Concern over the outlook for the global economy sapped investor sentiment as did comments from James Bullard, president of the St. Louis Federal Reserve.
Minutes from the latest Federal Reserve meeting released on Wednesday indicated the U.S. central bank might be ready for another round of stimulus.
But Bullard, a non-voting member of the policy-making Federal Open Market Committee, said on CNBC television on Thursday that U.S. data has been somewhat better since the July 31-August 1 meeting and the minutes were “a bit stale.
“There could be a tiny bit of steam coming out of the QE3 balloon,” said Jack de Gan, chief investment officer at Harbor Advisory Corp in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. De Gan referred to a third round of monetary stimulus known a quantitative easing.
…
Global stocks retreated on Thursday on dimmed expectations for new stimulus from the Federal Reserve
But gold is way up today and up $90 in the past month. I wouldn’t usually expect that combo.
Aug. 23, 2012, 3:25 p.m. EDT
Romney says he won’t renominate Bernanke
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Get ready for QE3
U.S. stocks shift to neutral after Fed minutes
U.S. 2012 budget deficit $1.1 trillion: CBO
By Steve Goldstein
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney pushed back on an interview given by one of his advisers earlier in the week that suggested he would be willing to renominate Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. Speaking to Fox Business Network, Romney said: “I always listen to people who have counsel and advice but my view has been that I would want to select someone who is a new member, excuse me, a new person to that chairman position, someone who shared my economic views, was sympathetic to the needs of our nation and I want to make sure the Federal Reserve focuses on maintaining the monetary stability that leads to a strong dollar and confidence that America is not going to go down the road that other nations have gone down to their peril.” While Romney says he hasn’t considered a single person, he added that Glenn Hubbard, who had given that interview earlier in the week, is “a wonderful economic adviser,” and that Greg Mankiw is “likewise an excellent economic adviser.”
Why oh why does he have to keep talking up Glenn Hubbard?
I suspect with his busy schedule, Mitt has not yet had time to see a screening of Inside Job.
ECONOMY
Updated August 23, 2012, 5:22 a.m. ET
Fed Moving Closer to Action
Minutes Show Clear Consensus for Taking Steps Unless Economy Picks Up Steam
By JON HILSENRATH And KRISTINA PETERSON
The Federal Reserve sent its strongest signal yet that it is preparing new steps to bolster the economic recovery, saying measures would be needed fairly soon unless growth substantially and convincingly picks up.
Minutes released Wednesday from the Fed’s July 31-Aug. 1 policy meeting suggested that a new round of bond buying, known as quantitative easing, was high on its list of options.
Some sectors of the economy—including business hiring and retail sales—have shown gains since the Fed meeting, which had stirred doubt in financial markets about whether the central bank would proceed. But the Fed minutes left little doubt that a clear consensus was building at the meeting for a move that is bound to be controversial, coming in the midst of the presidential campaign.
…
Fortune 1000 companies are showing record profits and have for almost 2 years.
Just exactly what IS this “bolstering” for?
The Federal Reserve sent its strongest signal yet that it is preparing new steps to bolster the economic recovery,
and from the same day:
Global stocks retreated on Thursday on dimmed expectations for new stimulus from the Federal Reserve
Funny
Considering how the gold bug brigade insists that paper money is “worthless,” it’s amazing how strong the (worthless dollar) price response is to hints that QE3 is going to happen next month.
Even more interesting: Gold is now rallying against the backdrop of a stock market selloff. I thought QE3 would help both gold and stocks?
Aug. 23, 2012, 10:38 a.m. EDT
Gold soars after Fed, China data spur easing hope
Metal futures hover at highest in four months
By Claudia Assis and Polya Lesova, MarketWatch
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Gold futures surged Thursday, bid solidly higher as poor manufacturing data from China and minutes from the Federal Reserve’s most recent rate-setting meeting spurred expectations for more monetary easing.
Gold for December delivery gained $27.10, or 1.7%, to $1,667.70 an ounce on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
A close around these levels would be gold’s highest since mid-April. The gold contract ended lower in the previous session, off 0.2%, but on Tuesday had settled at its highest since early May.
The Congressional Budget Office again warns about the legislative and executive branches failing to act on maintaining current tax rates.
Fears of inflation have boosted gold in recent sessions. Inflation expectations were given a fresh nudge as minutes of the the Federal Open Market Committee, the U.S. central bank’s policy panel, showed participants actively discussed taking more measures to boost economic growth, including potentially initiating a third round of quantitative easing, or large-scale bond purchases. Read more on gold.
Investors are interpreting the minutes “as an indication that the Fed may be willing in the near future to launch QE3 if the pace of economic recovery fails to pick up,” Commerzbank analysts wrote in a note.
Weak manufacturing data from China released overnight added impetus to calls for global stimulus efforts, with a poor reading on shipments suggesting that global demand had not improved much. Read more on China data.
…
I don’t think that anyone here has seriously said that fiats are worthless, but they do have a history of depreciating, spectacularly in some cases.
The goldbug trolls who used to post here about “worthless paper currency” are long gone.
No we don’t say money is worthless, we say the dollar is becoming worthless so it makes sense to convert the paper until something that will hold value.
At least the U.S. housing recovery is gaining strength, even as the rest of the world economy stares into the maw of a global depression.
Something about this doesn’t quite smell right.
Aug. 23, 2012, 10:26 a.m. EDT
Sales of new homes climb 3.6% in July
Housing market still on uptick despite broad economic slowdown
By Jeffry Bartash, MarketWatch
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Sales of new homes rebounded in July as the housing industry remained one of the few areas of steady growth in the U.S. economy.
The sale of single-family homes climbed 3.6% to an annual rate of 372,000 last month from 359,000 in June and matching the increase in May. The level of sales in May and July were the highest in more than two years.
Sales in June were also revised up from an original reading of 350,000, based on the latest government figures.
Economists polled by MarketWatch had forecast new home sales to rise to a seasonally adjusted 365,000.
Although the U.S. economy has slowed, the housing sector is still an oasis of growth. New home sales are 25.3% compared to one year ago.
Cheap prices and rock-bottom interest rates have helped boost demand, especially among younger couples who put off home ownership in the aftermath of the 2007-2009 recession. The median price of new homes, for example, dropped 2.1% to $224,200 last month from $229,100 in June.
If the current sales pace remains constant over the next five months, economists say the industry could add to the nation’s growth in 2012 for the first time in several years.
Yet the housing market is still weak by historical standards despite gathering momentum. If the U.S. were growing at a healthy pace, economist say, new home sales would likely average more than 1 million a year. Sales typically surge after a recession ends, but that didn’t happen after the last downturn.
The biggest increase in demand took place in the Northeast, where sales rose nearly 77% after falling 55% in June. The sharp swing likely reflects the difficulty in making seasonal adjustments based on the small number of actual sales rather than any underlying changes in consumer demand.
Sales also rose 7.7% in the Midwest.
In the South, sales declined by 1.6% and purchases fell 0.9% in the West.
The supply of new homes available for purchase on the U.S. market fell to 4.6 months at the current sales pace from 4.8 months in the prior month. The faster rate of sales and a slow pace of construction also resulted in the number of homes on the market falling to a record low 142,000 in July.
Yet builders appear to be trying to catch up — permits for new construction have jumped sharply in 2012 and show no sign of abating.
“We are no longer battling the headwinds of the housing recession,” Chief Executive Allen Anderson of AV Homes said after the building company released its quarterly results earlier this month.
…
When I lived in Mexico in the 70’s they ran the printing presses around the clock and things seemed to hum along for a while. Those who objected to this referred to the status quo as “La economia ficcion” (The fiction economy).
What’s happening right now across the globe and here in our own country, is eerily familiar.
The key here is “across the globe”
They are all doing it.
July 27, 2012, 3:38 p.m. EDT
Why the Fed will look past rising food prices
By Greg Robb, MarketWatch
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The most far-reaching drought in 50 years in the United States is pushing corn prices to new records, signaling higher food price inflation by the end of the year.
But the prospect is not expected to stop the Federal Reserve from easing to help the struggling economy, analysts said.
“Corn prices won’t factor in the Fed’s thinking,” said Michelle Meyer, senior U.S. economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Meyer expects the Fed to launch a new round of bond buying, or QE3, in September.
…
Waiting for the excuses of “it is all Bush’s fault” in 3…2…1…
—————————————–
Obama’s Epic Deficit Failure
Investor’s Business Daily | 08/22/2012 | IBD Staff
Spending: Remember when President Obama promised he’d cut the deficit in half in his first term? Well, the results are in, and red ink will once again top $1 trillion. Calling this an epic failure isn’t enough.
In his first budget message to the country, Obama promised to make the “tough choices necessary to restore fiscal discipline, cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term in office, and put our nation on sound fiscal footing.” His plan projected a deficit of $557 billion this year, and $512 billion next year.
On Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Office showed how far Obama has missed that target. It reported that the deficit will top $1.1 trillion this year, and assuming Congress keeps most of the Bush tax cuts in place (which Obama wants), the deficit will be close to, if not more than, $1 trillion next year.
It gets even worse when you look at the deficit as a share of the economy. Obama’s first budget promised the deficit would account for just 3.4% of GDP by 2012. Actual result: 7.3%. He said the deficit next year would be just 2.9% of GDP. Now the CBO figures it will be more like 6%.
2banana strawman modus operandi:
1. Post something to suggest that “It’s all Obama’s fault.”
2. Preemptively accuse nonexistent HBB readers of claiming “It’s all Bush’s fault.”
P.S. IT’S ALL BUSH’S FAULT.
IT’S ALL BUSH’S FAULT.
IT’S ALL BUSH’S FAULT that Obama promised $557B, declining deficits and not only failed to meet his promised target but failed to even try?
I say I say, that’s a joke, son!
That was a joke, I say, that’s a joke, son.
And by exactly how much is Romney promising to cut the deficit in his first term?
If Romney fails to cut the deficit in half in his first term, are we justified in switching back to Dems?
I’ll bet 10 to 1 that within a year of his taking office the GOP montra of deficits don’t matter will play daily on Fox. Of course this time deficit spending will all be funnelled to the elite via tax cuts and no bid contracts and privitization (ie privitize industries that can be used to funnel gov money directly to the well connected instead of the majority of Americans). We will see a voucher system for medicare that won’t kick in for 10-20 years.
The number of government contractor employees will increase regardless of who wins the election. You’ll see…
I disagree as the elite solidify their hold on gov they will just hand out money to each other with no strings attatched. ie now they actually have to build a road, but in the future the gov will spend the same amount and only half a road or no road will be built and thus there will be fewer workers or in other case contractors.
There can be only one. Many who think they are elite will find themselves marginalized and robbed just like the rest.
I’ll bet 10 to 1 that within a year of his taking office the GOP montra of deficits don’t matter will play daily on Fox
And they will continue to bail out banks and other big biz. And will start another war. Oh well, at least some HS grads will have rewarding “careers” as cannon fodder in the middle east.
At this point I’ve stopped caring about who wins, because either way were gonna be hosed.
Democrats/liberals are funny.
When republicans are in power they are all “we need hope and change and we have to get rid of the evil person in office RIGHT NOW…”
When democrats are in power they are all “they are all the same so who cares anyways and we might as well keep the devil we know because a new guy might do EVEN WORSE…”
At this point I’ve stopped caring about who wins, because either way were gonna be hosed.
When we voted for Obama, we didn’t know we were voting for Republican-Lite.
Yeah, I bought into the “Change” meme. Silly me.
He’s still better than any Republican. They are a certified pack of liars, who occasionally slip and tell people what they really think. (see Todd Akin).
Republicans/conservatives are morons.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
According to NeoCons, anyone that is not a NeoCon is a Democrat/Liberal.
Doesn’t matter that I’m a registered Republican desperately trying to pull my party back from the elite special interest, lying sacks of toad stools, and money mongers… If I’m not with you, then I’m a Liberal Democrat.
Again we see the Republicans trying to drive the centrists to the Democratic party.
I’ve voted for a Democratic nominee for president a grand total of 1 times in my life, but you extreme Right wingers sure are working hard to make sure this November makes it 2.
“When we voted for Obama, we didn’t know we were voting for Republican-Lite.”
Really? I did.
I’m out in BFE. I don’t get as good a view of the sewer as you have.
“Democrats/liberals are funny.”
Even funnier since I’m neither.
“According to NeoCons, anyone that is not a NeoCon is a Democrat/Liberal.”
Correct. Being that I’m an old paleocon, banana boy just reminded me of that. There’s nothing like failing a purity test to remind you that the inmates are running the asylum.
Democrats/liberals are funny.
Thank you! You are very complimentary today.
“At this point I’ve stopped caring about who wins, because either way were gonna be hosed.”
It’s good to see some are catching on.
It is not all Bush’s fault.
It goes back 50 years to the 1960s when we embraced free trade, the 1970s were our free trade policies made us a net importer for the first time in out history combined with ever falling top marginal tax rate that encouraged more money to flow into fewer hands, the 1980s when we embraced cheap money, unsustainable debt growth and bubble economics as a means of generating the vast sums of new debt/money needed to fund our vast and growing trade imbalances, the 1990s when the queen of all bubbles ended in the tech wreck, and then the 2k0s when the king, gawd, lord emperor of all global bubbles gave us the housing bubble….
It is not all Obama’s fault, it is not all Bush’s fault (either of them), it is not even all Regan’s fault. It is the fault of every voter and every politician that was too ignorant or greedy to realize that we were trading short-term gain for long-term pain.
Trade imbalances will not allow themselves to be persisted indefinitely. They result in excess debt build up, the interest on the debt just widens the gap, until eventually the debt grows so large that it can’t grow any larger, then it collapses under its own weight into cascade default into depression.
Iver the last 30 years, we’ve increased each household’s share of total debt from 2.8x median household income, to 6.5x median household income. Government is no being relied upon to be the borrower of last resort. How long before the collapse? 5 more years? 10?
Can we say it was all Jack Welch’s fault?
Waiting for the excuses of “it is all Bush’s fault” in 3…2…1…
Of course it’s not all Bush’s fault. But Obama inherited an economy that is structurally damaged.
Most the holes Obama digs are because the industrial and other parts of our economic base were offshored for the rich and the taxbase was gutted for the rich. Romney won’t change any of that. Why would he? It’s his class of super-rich who have reaped all the benefits the past 30 years. More tax cuts for the rich/corporations? Been there/done that. It doesn’t work.
Look. Let’s put the politics aside and face the facts. USA’s economy is structurally flawed and the middle-class has been gutted. Middle-class wealth has been redistributed to the rich. This is fact. The trends started well before Obama took office.
I think Obama understands 20% of the problem and Romney about 5%.
Aug. 23, 2012, 7:20 a.m. EDT
Germany’s Schaeuble: More time won’t help Greece
By MarketWatch
FRANKFURT (MarketWatch) — German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told a German radio broadcaster Thursday that granting Greece more money or time to implement austerity measures wouldn’t help the country overcome its problems, news reports said. “More time is not a solution for the problems,” Schaeuble told radio station SWR, reports said. Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, who is scheduled to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel Friday in Berlin, has argued that Greece needs additional time to implement austerity measures and reforms in order to leave room for the recession-wracked economy to recover in the near term.
EUROPE NEWS
Updated August 22, 2012, 7:15 p.m. ET
Greece Faces New Pressure on Cuts
European Official Says Decision on Extending Deadlines for Overhauls Will Come After Creditors Visit
By ALKMAN GRANITSAS and COSTAS PARIS
Greek Premier Antonis Samaras, facing camera, embraces Eurogroup President Jean-Claude Juncker before their meeting in Athens on Wednesday.
ATHENS—A top European official on Wednesday warned that Greece faced a “last chance” in proving its credibility to international creditors, and said a decision on Athens’s proposal to extend deadlines on overhauls wouldn’t come until after inspectors visit next month.
Speaking after a meeting with Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, Eurogroup chief Jean-Claude Juncker said Greece must step up its efforts to cut its budget deficit and enact economic overhauls.
“As far as the immediate future is concerned, the ball is in the Greek court,” he said. “In fact this is the last chance and Greek citizens have to know this.”
But he reiterated his hopes that Greece would remain in the euro.
“I am totally opposed to the exit of Greece from the euro area,” he said, adding that Greece’s departure would pose a “major risk” for the currency bloc.
…
No. More time will not help Greece.
They are a lifted up coral reef with neither fossil fuels nor significant mineral deposits. They lack damnable rivers for hydro power.
Being in the common currency prevents them from using exchange rates to fight global trade imbalances. They have adopted the pro-wealth-gap tax policy that allows ever more money to flow into ever fewer hands.
The have MASSIVE trade imbalances. Those trade imbalances can only be funded via new money creation, and that creates offsetting debt. They are maxxed out on debt, lack control of their currency to wipe away the existing debt via inflation and start over.
Greece is between a rock and a hard place, and it isn’t going away as long as they remain in the common currency and with their pro-wealth-gap tax policies.
They lack damnable rivers for hydro power.
I bet they damn their rivers every day for not being dammable.
obamamotors is a failure and will go bankrupt again.
The government fails when it picks winners and losers with massive taxpayer funds.
How many liberals/socialists even drive a GM vehicle? None that I know.
————————————-
GM Goes From Bad to Worse Despite Obama Bailout
Townhall.com | August 23, 2012 | Michael Barone
“When the American auto industry was on the brink of collapse,” Obama told a campaign event audience in Colorado earlier this month, “I said, let’s bet on America’s workers. And we got management and workers to come together, making cars better than ever, and now GM is No. 1 again and the American auto industry has come roaring back.”
His conclusion: “So now I want to say that what we did with the auto industry, we can do in manufacturing across America. Let’s make sure advanced, high-tech manufacturing jobs take root here, not in China. Let’s have them here in Colorado. And that means supporting investment here.”
Was he calling for a federal bailout of other American manufacturing companies? And what does he mean by “supporting investment”? White House reporters have not asked these obvious questions, for the good reason that the president, who has been attending fundraisers on an average of one every 60 hours, has not held a press conference in something like two months.
Obama talks about the auto bailout frequently, since it’s one of the few things in his record that gets positive responses in the polls. But he’s probably wise to avoid probing questions, since the GM bailout is not at all the success he claims.
GM has been selling cars in the U.S. at deep discount and, while it’s making money in China — and is outsourcing operations there and elsewhere — it’s bleeding losses in Europe. It’s spending billions to ditch its Opel brand there in favor of Chevrolet, including $559 million to put the Chevy logo on Manchester United soccer team uniforms — and just fired the marketing exec who cut that deal.
It botched the launch of its new Chevrolet Malibu by starting with the green-friendly Eco version, which pleased its government shareholders, but which got lousy reviews. And it’s selling only about 10,000 electric-powered Chevy Volts a year, a puny contribution toward Obama’s goal of 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.
“GM is going from bad to worse,” reads the headline on Automotive News Editor in Chief Keith Crain’s analysis. That’s certainly true of its stock price.
The government still owns 500 million shares of GM, 26 percent of the total. It needs to sell them for $53 a share to recover its $49.5 billion bailout. But the stock price is around $20 a share, and the Treasury now estimates that the government will lose more than $25 billion if and when it sells.
That’s in addition to the revenue lost when the Obama administration permitted GM to continue to deduct previous losses from current profits, even though such deductions are ordinarily wiped out in bankruptcy proceedings.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that GM is bleeding money because of decisions made by a management eager to please its political masters — and by the terms of the bankruptcy arranged by Obama car czars Ron Bloom and Steven Rattner.
Rattner himself admitted late last year, in a speech to the Detroit Economic Club: “We should have asked the UAW (the United Auto Workers union) to do a bit more. We did not ask any UAW member to take a cut in their pay.” Non-union employees of GM spinoff Delphi lost their pensions. UAW members didn’t.
The UAW got their political payoff. And GM, according to Forbes writer Louis Woodhill, is headed to bankruptcy again.
“It’s bleeding losses in Europe.”
That’s the problem, and it has nothing to do with the U.S. Of course Europe had been a GM success for a long time.
I seem to recall that GM almost shut down Opel during the BK days.
The first cash infusion was made by Bush. Why not call it Bush Motors instead?
Cause obama keeps harping on it?
————————–
The Obama General Motors Duplicity
Flopping Aces | 08-22-12 | James Raider
For three years our consciousness has been bombarded with assertions from Obama, his handlers, and his justifiers, that he is pro-business, understands the private sector, and is a leader — after all did he not singlehandedly “save” General Motors and America’s auto industry? Enough with the lies already!
Now that there is an actual businessman running against him for the Oval Office rather than a pol, the President’s machine has been turning up the volume on Obama’s GM escapade. We too easily recall his preening three years ago as the media declared him the new CEO of General Motors. Today Obama claims that without him, there would be no auto industry in America and he further claims that GM is a roaring success.
With admiration from the vast majority of the media, Obama is spiking the football on his prime example of crony-capitalism. This is not just any version of capitalism. This three year saga of GM has been a White House mandated, directed, orchestrated, manipulated, sleaze filled, top-down, “I-know-better,” abuse of laws and industry with taxpayer money to achieve egoistic and self-serving purposes.
This Administration persevered in abusing its power to ignore laws and common sense, in order to pull-off the biggest heist in US government history. And it did so in broad daylight.
The fourth estate’s fear, adulation, and mostly uncomplicated ignorance, allowed this larceny to occur. Law makers allowed it to materialize without backlash. Taxpayers watched, confused. Some, not so confused, but unable to act.
Geithner orchestrated the redirection of TARP funds for the bailout – yes, that very same slush fund specifically established to bailout financial institutions, NOT corporations. While we may never fully know the total cost to taxpayers, and we will never know the full extent of the damage done to individuals harmed by the process, we can accept as a base amount the initial $80+ billion dollars from TARP and the government stock purchase of 60% ownership.
Why is this a “base” amount? On behalf of the Nation’s taxpayers, and circumventing the country’s bankruptcy/tax laws, the orchestrators of the GM scheme ALSO sacrificed taxpayer treasure in the form of a $45 billion gift of business-loss tax credit.
Section 382 of the tax code, limits net operating loss carry-forwards in ‘loss corporations.’ Did this restrict Obama, Jarrett, Axelrod and Geithner in any way? Not when they were buying the permanent financial backing of a powerful union. The same union which this year committed one half billion dollars to Obama’s re-election campaign.
Do you want GM to go BK? What about Wall St? AIG?
Or are you just anti-GM? Now that O is in the whitehouse?
DO you like that O is cutting back gov jobs?? Anything? Killing OBL? Ending one war?
Fortune 1000 companies are showing record profits and have for almost 2 years.
in order to be a good neo-con, you must never mention the 8 yrs of Bush.
But what happened with the “we’ve paid back every dime” and “we saved a million jobs” mantras that we’ve heard from Government Motors and Team Obama?
That article it total bullcrap with political spin on top.
http://www.gm.com/content/gmcom/home/company/investors/earning-releases.content_pages_news_emergency_news_0802_q2_earnings.~content~gmcom~home~company~investors~earning-releases.html
obamamotors is a failure……The government fails when it picks winners and losers with massive taxpayer funds.
I would say most of the time this is true. But is it always true? Seriously, always? What if national security is involved? National security experts have said America’s industrial decline has put our national security at risk and the automotive industry is a huge portion of our dwindling industrial base.
So we allow our industrial base to take a potentially fatal blow because we need to adhere to a rule of capitalism? When adhering to that rule of capitalism will weaken American capitalism? I think not.
Meanwhile, other countries have industrial policies where they “pick the winners”, and they are cleaning our clocks.
God is out to get the Republicans. I guess they missed the passage in the Bible that says a love of money is the root of all eeeeeeeevil?
Perhaps they could hire Pat Robertson to pray for a weather reprieve?
Tampa mayor ‘prepared’ to order evacuation if convention city threatened by hurricane
Published August 23, 2012
Aug. 22, 2012: An official with the National Hurricane Center shows some of the possible trajectories tropical storm Isaac could develop in the coming days at the National Hurricane Center in Miami. (AP)
Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn told FoxNews.com just days before the start of the Republican National Convention that he’s prepared to order an evacuation of the host city if Tropical Storm Isaac strengthens to hurricane force and looks like it could make a “direct hit.”
“The safety of my residents and our guests and visitors is my No. 1 concern,” Buckhorn said.
Both Tampa and the Republican National Committee are taking precautions in case the storm threatens to rain on the GOP gala set to kick off Monday. For the time being, nobody really knows where the storm will hit or how strong it will be. The current forecast has Isaac strengthening into a hurricane Thursday night and heading toward South Florida, arriving around Monday.
“We don’t know,” Buckhorn told FoxNews.com. He said the city is monitoring the storm, but noted they have a few days to figure out what to do, if anything.
Buckhorn, for his part, can decide whether to order an evacuation.
“I’m always prepared to do so, and I’m obligated to do so if there is the likelihood of a direct hit,” he said, adding that by that point the RNC would probably have already made a decision on whether to go forward.
For now, he said, “We are full throttle heading for the opening gavel.” Buckhorn played down the possibility that “Hurricane” Isaac would wash out the GOP festivities.
TBO.com reported that Florida Governor Rick Scott said he would be in daily contact with the RNC and other officials for storm updates to determine whether to halt or shorten the convention, the report said.
“This state is prepared,” Scott reportedly said. “We’ve been through hurricanes. If we have a hurricane, we will deal with it.”
RNC convention planners also said in a statement Wednesday, without going into specifics, that they have plans in place in case of severe weather.
“We are working closely with our partners at the federal, state and local levels to monitor the weather — and we have contingency plans in place to ensure the health and safety of convention delegates, guests and visitors, and the Tampa Bay community. We are looking forward to a great convention,” the statement said.
…
If it’s a “legitimate” hurricane won’t the convention just repel it naturally LOL?
Everybody knows hurricanes are just free-loaders stealing all that damn heat energy and not paying for it!
Don’t. Get Me. Started.
But you did, so here goes: Need I point out to any halfway sane person that having ANY sort of major event ANYWHERE in Florida during hurricane season is a REALLY. BAD. IDEA.??????????????????
For starters, it’s nasty hot and humid even without the threat of a storm. It’s STUPID. STUPID. STUPID! Not like we don’t have freakin’ DECADES of history to show what can happen in Florida during the months of August, September and even October.
If anyone with the RNC planning committee had even half a brain cell, they would have kindly but firmly told officials from ANY Florida city that “Uh, no, we’d love to have the convention there, but it’s just not feasible, given the historically proven risk”.
This is beyond stupid, it’s sheer panty-sniffing insanity.
Call the dang thing off, or move it to San Diego.
I’m serious, too. That would be the smart thing to do. Yeah, maybe the storm will drift in some direction nowhere near Tampa. It’s possible. But the sane and safe thing to do would be to immediately call the event off and let the RNC shift to another venue. NOW!
But no, they’re gonna play a game of chicken with a hurricane.
move it to San Diego.
Then god would send an earthquake.
Not only is our weather better than Tampa’s, but one of the candidates lives here!
San Diego Named Among ‘Safest Weather’ Cities
The Weather Channel has dubbed San Diego one of the two safest weather cities in the West
By Monica Garske
Saturday, Aug 11, 2012 | Updated 10:15 AM PDT
San Diego is known for its highly desirable weather and now America’s Finest City is being touted for having some of the “safest” weather in the country.
According to a list compiled by The Weather Channel, San Diego made the cut as one of the two “safest weather cities” in the West, followed by West Honolulu, Hawaii.
…
I’ve been to the San Diego area. Along the water, most awesome weather in the country, IMO. A few miles inland, not so much. A blast furnace at certain times of the year.
San Diego is like New York: all the disasters are man made, and most are financial.
“… all the disasters are man made, and most are financial.”
Do you get out to the West much, WT?
Evacuations in San Diego, Riverside county fires
The Associated Press
Posted: 08/14/2012 09:16:45 AM PDT
Updated: 08/14/2012 09:32:33 PM PDT
AGUANGA, Calif.—Residents in sparsely populated parts of Riverside and San Diego counties were told to evacuate their homes Tuesday as several wildfires burned in Southern California’s desert heat.
Riverside County fire officials said a blaze near the community of Aguanga, east of Temecula, started shortly before 1 p.m. and quickly surged to nearly 3 square miles. Firefighters aided by six air tankers, including a DC-10, had it 5 percent contained.
Nine homes were evacuated and at least one was destroyed. News helicopters showed the two-story house enveloped in flames.
Some 40 miles away, in northeastern San Diego County, residents in Ranchita were told to evacuate as one of four lightning-sparked fires came dangerously close to rural ranch houses. Those fires have burned about 3 square miles.
The four fires that make up the so-called Vallecito Lightning complex now total more than 9 square miles, and the fire is 10 percent contained. CalFire spokeswoman Roxanne Provaznik said firefighters have nearly 23 miles of containment line to construct, and two firefighters have been injured.
Elsewhere in Southern California, a wildfire in Joshua Tree National Park burned 273 acres and was 60 percent contained. Firefighters said they expect to have that fire under control by Friday night.
They want to swing that Florida vote so bad, they couldn’t help themselves.
I’m guessing that was it. I bet the cities didn’t have to pitch it, or at least the state didn’t. They picked Florida to send a message.
Bwahahahaha! It’s gonna be one helluva message.
The Dems are going to make hay out of the symbolism. That’s for sure.
Jeebus, they coulda gone to Cleveland. Or Green Bay.
This country isn’t big on portents. When the Space Shuttle blew up over Palestine (TX) the day before Bush announced he would be invading Iraq, we didn’t blink an eye.
Could there have been a more classic “sign from above”?
Ain’t it da trute, Montana.
Now, let’s look at the situation we are faced with. The correct thing to do would be to just call it off right now and shift to another venue (any planning committee in its right mind would do that, would have a back up. As my dad used to say, safety first.)
But OH, NO! We’re talking politics and money here, better to double down and risk a total clusterfark than do the right thing and head off potential disaster.
You are now going to see some political inaction AT ITS VERY FINEST, so sit back and enjoy the show. Because here’s the deal: the logical person to shut down this pop stand would be Bob Buckhorn, the ball-less feel-good Democratic mayor of Tampa. Because he’s a Democrat, what he’s looking at is, “what if it doesn’t hit? What if it shifts away as so many storms have in the past? If I shut it down now, and it fizzles out, I risk the ire of the Republicans who will say that a nervous nellie Democrat peed on our parade, not to mention the loss of all that (imaginary) revenue to local businesses and the city of Tampa”. And the Dems will be REALLY pissed at me because I handed the Repubs a whip to flog the party with. I’ll just monitor everything”.
The RNC isn’t going to do anything, either. Neither is the Governor of Florida. They’re just going to sit back and watch a Democratic mayor go crazy. Until it’s too late.
What Happens if Isaac Hits Tampa During the GOP Convention?
By Abby Ohlheiser
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 22, 2012, at 2:25 PM ET
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2012/08/22/isaac_rnc_convention_what_happens_if_the_storm_hits_during_the_gop_convention_.html
With Isaac threatening to wash out the Republican National Convention next week, organizers have been quick to assure the public that there are backup plans in place. What exactly those are, however, they’re not saying. Which is only making us wonder even more about how they would deploy a Plan B for an event, months in the making, that’s supposed to attract an estimated 50,000 travelers to Tampa?
In May, Florida officials held a mock hurricane drill for an imaginary storm they nicknamed “Gispert.” Gispert was scheduled to hit on the second day of the convention, and was powerful enough to flood large areas of Tampa. In that scenario, state officials said that they likely would have postponed the event, a decision that would ultimately rest with Florida Gov. Rick Scott. “Public safety. That’s going to be the number one priority,” Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carrol said then. “We can have the convention again.”
It’s unclear if the GOP would be willing to weather the delay or not. The most convention organizers will say, according to Tampa Bay Online, is that their emergency backup plan involves moving the event to another, unspecified, location, or possibly holding some convention business online.
Ultimately, however, it appears as though organizers will be at the mercy of the weather and the state’s desire to play things safe. The extra visitors to the area, many of whom will be staying at beachside hotels in Pinellas County (a peninsula with limited access in and out), may cause officials to evacuate vulnerable areas early, WTSP reports.
Although a direct hit by Isaac would be the first in 90 years for Tampa, planners got something of a mini-preview of a logistical nightmare on Monday night when a quarter-mile air-conditioned tent designed to coolly shuffle convention-goers from one temperature-controlled building to the other was damaged by a storm, according to TBO.
Because national conventions typically happen during a time of year ripe for hurricanes and other storms, this isn’t the first time one would be affected by the weather. In 2008, Hurricane Gustav made landfall in Louisiana just as Republicans were kicking off their convention in St. Paul, Minn. That led GOP organizers to cancel a host of opening-day events and scale down other parts of the planned festivities.
Brings to mind the Florida condo flippers who were snapping up deals back in 2005. At least they had the good judgment to wait until the hurricane had passed before going condo shopping in the tailwinds…
But hookers are cheaper, right?
As if on cue:
Tampa Bay Gay Prostitutes Gearing Up For Flood Of Closeted Republicans
Glad to know the Log Cabin Republicans will not feel left out.
Little known fact: Tampa is one of the “swingers” capitals of the south.
Apparently they have no shortage of homosexuals there, either. Back in the mid-1990s, I had a gig there playing for a national convention of gay mens choruses. To say it was interesting would be a severe understatement.
LOL, Tampa has one of the most seedy underbellies in the country.
The Bay area is also the lightning capital of the US.
“Apparently they have no shortage of homosexuals there, either.”
Mostly over in St. Pete. The more “upscale” crowd, anyway. The rough trade does tend to gravitate more toward Tampa.
‘The more “upscale” crowd, anyway.’
Log Cabin Republicans?
This? Is one excellent rant.
I recently wrote something similar to the Mayo Clinic, which is holding an educational course on Amelia Island next August. But you said it better.
If anyone with the RNC planning committee had even half a brain cell
That’s the problem right there
Perhaps they could hire Pat Robertson to pray for a weather reprieve?
They’d better not try to hire Billy Graham … he’s a Democrat.
Not sure whether Graham has a track record of stopping hurricanes in their tracks, either…
I don’t think he’s ever claimed to have such powers.
Few humans are sufficiently foolish or audacious to make such claims.
I hope the local government isnt planing on helping out any bootstrappers. The theme is ‘we built this’.
I’m lovin’ it!
Is there any way to bet on a direct hit of a hurricane during the Republican convention?
Easy money. Those computer models are pretty damn accruate these days.
With every weather update the hurricane track moves futher off the coast from Tampa, so I guess God loves the Republicans. It appears now that all it will do is disrupt oil production raising the price of gasoline hurting Obama. Of course, I getting the track from a government website so its accuracy is suspect.
At the very least, it will be a humid, fetid, sloppy mess complete with torrential downpours, lightning strikes and inconvenient flooding. Not to mention the fungus amongus.
Boo-YAH!
So a typical Tampa day in August?
Latest one backs that up. Tampa will get rain and little more if the goverment models are right. We will be seeing offshore drilling platforms shutdown soon in the Gulf. Fill your car up because it is going to cost more for gasoline soon.
“Tampa will get rain and little more if the goverment models are right.”
Don’t basic principles of karmic justice which control the universe dictate the government scientists will miss their forecast this time, and the hurricane will make a direct at the height of the opulent GOP conclave?
P.S. Gubnmint has two “n”s.
Posted at 02:46 PM ET, 08/20/2012
Could hurricane wreak havoc at Republican convention? Will it be Isaac?
By Jason Samenow
GFS model simulations showing a tropical system over Florida August 27-28 during the beginning of the Republican National Convention (StormVistaWxModels.com) For three straight simulations, NOAA’s Global Forecast System (GFS) model has tracked a tropical system right over the Florida peninsula through or close to Tampa just as the Republican National Convention is ramping up. Assuming this system - presently a little swirl in the open Atlantic - strengthens some, it will be named Isaac.
…
Karma demands that the RNC be “Ground Zero” for any hurricane landfall.
Strand all of those bootstrappers in a convention center for a couple of weeks, and show all of us how it’s done. Maybe they can wave goodbye to Romney, as he flies away in his private helicopter.
Too bad they will do what Republicans/suburbanites typically do. Load up the F-150s and leave the problem behind them, and leaving behind anyone who doesn’t have transportation.
That would be a Kodak moment. A bunch of the wretched refuse outside the convention center with “I need a ride out of town” signs, being passed by the convention goers in their half-empty Suburbans and Limos.
Too bad they will do what Republicans/suburbanites typically do. Load up the F-150s and leave the problem behind them, and leaving behind anyone who doesn’t have transportation.
Is it typical for the left to cry “sour grapes” over other’s successes in life?
“Those damn middle-class families with jobs and F150’s. The government should do something about them. I deserve an F150 too.”
Ron White said it best: “You can’t fix stupid.”
NE. It really does come down to that.
Success? Of course not? Getting rich through fraud and crime?
That’s not sour grapes, that’s righteous anger.
http://www.republicanoffenders.com
Really? From how many days ago? My post was using data from a few hours ago which was the latest information.
This is like a referendum on whether God is with the Republicans or against them. It’s a perfect storm!
Politics
EYE OF THE STORM: Republican spokesman says convention will go on as Isaac stays on track toward Florida
No cancelation policy firm, says GOP convention CEO William Harris, despite Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn’s Weds. warning that closing down convention maybe be necessary.
By Kristen A. Lee / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Thursday, August 23, 2012, 2:15 PM
Tropical Storm Isaac’s state is seen in this NOAA satellite infrared image taken August 23.
HANDOUT/Reuters
Canceling next week’s Republican National Convention in Tampa is not an option, a GOP spokesman said Thursday morning as a potential hurricane continued on a path toward Florida.
“There is no such thing as canceling,” the Republican National Committee’s Sean Spicer told CNN as Tropical Storm Isaac moved west through the Caribbean Sea.
Alex Sosnowski, expert senior meteorologist for AccuWeather.com, wrote that the current storm track suggests Florida may begin to see thunderstorms, strong wind gusts and heavy rain on the eve of the RNC’s Monday kick off.
“We do have contingency plans to deal with weather-related and other circumstances that may occur to ensure that the business can go on at the RNC and that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan will become our nominees, and that the safety of the folks here attending it and in the Tampa Bay community are taken care of,” Spicer said.
…
The trick is to link bank deposits to these gambles. That way, if the bets pay off, you keep the winnings. If they don’t, the public eats the loss. Fortunately, the mechanism which allows this - TBTF and the lack of ring-fenced consumer deposits - is still in full force and rising.
Risk Builds as Junk Bonds Boom
By PETER LATTMAN
August 15, 2012
NYT
Money market funds pay next to nothing. Interest rates on United States Treasuries are dismal. The volatile stock market has been dead money for more than a decade.
But on Wall Street — as the old saying goes — somewhere, someone is making money. And these days, that somewhere is junk bonds.
The market for junk bonds, risky corporate debt that pays high interest rates, is red hot. Such debt, also known as high-yield bonds, has returned 10.2 percent year-to-date, according to a JPMorgan high-yield index. Junk bond funds are on a pace to take in a record amount of money this year. Companies with less than stellar credit are issuing hundreds of billions of dollars of bonds.
“In a yield-starved world, high-yield bonds are right now the only game in town,” said Les Levi, a managing director at the investment bank North Sea Partners. “The market is giddy.”
Sounds like a sales pitch.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/08/15/risk-builds-as-junk-bonds-boom/
Hold on to your wallets!
Buffett’s Exit From Muni-Bonds Signals Trouble Ahead for Local Govts
By Morgan Korn | Daily Ticker – Tue, Aug 21, 2012 12:58 PM EDT
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway ended its five-year bullish bet on the municipal bond market, The Wall Street Journal reports. The Omaha, Neb., company noted in a recent quarterly filing that it had canceled credit-default swaps insuring its $8.25 billion muni-bond market wager. The Journal said it was unclear whether Buffett’s decision resulted in a profit or a loss and the 81-year-old Buffett declined to comment about the early termination of the contracts.
Does Warren Buffett’s exit from the municipal bond market portend more financial hardships for struggling U.S. states and cities?
The Daily Ticker’s Aaron Task and Henry Blodget say Buffett’s move may very well signal his fear that more cash-strapped cities, states and municipalities will default on their debt. Local authorities have been making severe budget cuts (affecting both personnel and services) over the past two years to stave off bankruptcy but many are still short on funds.
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/buffett-exit-muni-bonds-signals-trouble-ahead-local-165817581.html
Coworker had bought a condo in 2002. Couple years ago he moved into his girlfriend’s house (they are now married) and he rented out the condo for $850 to a family that had just lost their house to foreclosure.
Well, couple months ago, that family moved out, because 2 years post foreclosure, their credit scores are back up to where they can buy again.
After 2 years as a rental, he had to do some fixing up of the condo, like new carpets and paint.
Just rented it out again last week for $950 a month.
“Just rented it out again last week for $950 a month.”
And Darryl just pimped another lie.
Well, since property records are public record, let’s see if he was lying to me….
OOpps, I was wrong. He bought it in late 2001, not 2002. My bad.
http://recorder.maricopa.gov/recdocdata/GetRecDataDetail.aspx?Rec=20010804967
And $850 a month and now $950 a month? Yep, seems not to far off the market rate.
http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/170-E-Guadalupe-Rd-UNIT-15-Gilbert-AZ-85234/8247398_zpid/
Ouch. He paid $90K and is only renting it for $850 or $950 a month? I’m paying $49K and rents in the area are $600-700.
You call me a liar, I provide a link to the data. Thanks for giving me the opportunity be be all up in your face.
Thanks for proving yourself to be a charlatan and a liar once again.
A perfect case study that makes the case for buying.
Or a perfect case for a next foreclosure.
“A perfect case study that makes the case for buying.”
Wager on a liars lie. What are you waiting for?
The point was not that everyone should buy, regardless of where they live.
Phoenix is a special case where house prices in many areas of town are off 60-75% or more. The condo I am buying last sold in 2006 for 132K. I’m getting it for under $50K. If housing is not back below fundamental value as determined by price/rent and price/income where you live, then I’d still recommend not buying.
Also, the point was that a lot of people that lost their houses to foreclosure a couple years ago, are back in the market buying, throwing cols water in the face of the theory that the crash will be made worse by everyone that lost a house coming to the conclusion that housing is a horrid investment.
Housing is a horrid investment when you are buying for way above fundamental value.
At some point it is worth buying. It appears that 2002 was once such point. But there are still excess supply issues, and possible vacancy. Being a landlord is hard.
Being a landlord is past hard. It needs to be your worst case scenario. I’ve never understood people speculating on property to rent it to others. Yuck.
Heard a screed from a bunch of local “Investment Counselors” this morning on the radio.
Saying “we’ll be thrown back into recession” in 2013, if the Bush tax cuts aren’t extended. (As if we ever got out of the last recession….)
Then they turn around and say “taxes are too low, and government expenditures are too high”.
(Yeah, people being out of work, no decent paying jobs being generated, downward wage pressures on most everybody else, and unemployment and food stamps have nothing to do with it.)
Not to worry though. If you have at least $50K to invest, they can help guide you thru it…….
Lying rat bastards, the lot.
Progressives?
ft dot com
Last updated: August 23, 2012 11:10 am
Eurozone recession looms, surveys show
By James Fontanella-Khan in Brussels and James Wilson in Frankfurt
The eurozone will almost certainly slip back into recession, according to surveys of business activity that highlighted how Germany’s economy is being dragged into the region’s crisis.
An index of purchasing managers in the eurozone showed a seventh consecutive private sector contraction. The “flash”, or preliminary, August figure for the bloc was broadly unchanged at 46.6 from 46.5 a month earlier but the decline in German output accelerated.
Markit Economics, the compiler of the index, said the readings, on top of gloomy data in July, would be consistent with a fall of 0.5 per cent or 0.6 per cent in eurozone gross domestic product in the third quarter. Eurozone GDP shrank 0.2 per cent in the three months to June: a recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth.
“It would take a substantial bounce in September to change this outlook,” said Rob Dobson, a senior economist at Markit.
…
Got unsustainable “housing recovery”?
ft dot com
August 23, 2012 4:08 pm
New home sales match two-year high
By Anjli Raval in New York
New home sales rebounded in July to match a two-year high last seen in May, pointing to a recovery in the US housing market.
Sales of new single-family homes increased 3.6 per cent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 372,000, according to Department of Commerce statistics.
Analysts had expected a figure of 362,000 for July after an upwardly revised 359,000 level for June. Sales rose back up to the May level, which was the highest reading since April 2010.
Sales were up more than 25 per cent from the July 2011 level.
The US housing market, which was at the root of the financial crisis in 2008, has struggled to recover over the past six years amid low prices and high foreclosure rates. However, recent data has showed a stabilisation in sales and prices as more Americans have moved ahead with purchases against a backdrop of record low mortgage rates.
“Levels of housing activity remain extremely depressed relative to previous peaks, but growth rates across most of the housing data are clearly moving in the right direction,” said Jill Brown, vice-president of economics at Credit Suisse.
However, the median sales price of new houses sold in July decreased 2.5 per cent from a year ago to $224,200.
The supply of homes at the current sales rate dropped to 4.6 months from 4.8 months in June. There were 142,000 new houses on the market at the end of July.
…
Report: U.S. middle class has ‘worst decade in modern history’
Since 2001, median household income has fallen from $72,956 to $69,487 in 2010.
August 22, 2012|Reuters
Middle-income earners, long seen as the solid center of the country, are pessimistic and place the blame squarely on U.S. lawmakers, banks and big business, Pew Research Center found.
The U.S. middle class has shrunk drastically over the last 10 years as Americans’ net worth has plunged, wages declined and standards of living slipped away, according to a report released on Wednesday.
Middle-income earners, long seen as the solid center of the country, are pessimistic and place the blame squarely on U.S. lawmakers, banks and big business, the findings by the Pew Research Center showed.
“America’s middle class has endured its worst decade in modern history,” researchers wrote.
Since 2001, median household income has fallen from $72,956 to $69,487 in 2010, the report said.
The median household net worth, which is the value of assets minus debt, dropped from $129,582 to $93,150 over the same 10-year period, according to Pew, which analyzed U.S. data along with its own survey of nearly 1,300 adults who consider themselves middle class.
The nonpartisan research group’s snapshot comes in the midst of a close presidential campaign that has become in part a referendum on whether President Barack Obama’s policies over the last few years have helped Americans as the nation struggles to recover from deep economic woes.
His Republican rival Mitt Romney, a multi-millionaire former private equity executive who is one of the richest men ever to run for president, has based his campaign on his pledge to build jobs and boost the economy.
Pew’s survey found more of the middle class support Obama’s policies than Romney’s.
More than half (52 percent) of those polled said Obama’s policies would help the middle class in a second term, while 39 percent say they would not. Forty-two percent said Romney would benefit middle income Americans if elected, while 40 percent say his policies would not help, the survey showed.
OBAMA IN BETTER POSITION
Researchers said they found that “neither candidate has sealed the deal with them, but that President Obama is in somewhat better shape than his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney.”
Polls have shown Obama with a growing lead over Romney.
…
Time and time again over the past 3 years, it’s been repeatedly proven that until the wretched refuse start seeing some of the profit that is being hoarded by business, banksters and the 1%ers, the economy will continue to suck.
It isn’t a “free market” when the Robber Barons can bribe Congress/lawmakers to stack the financial deck in their favor (via bailouts, tax law, transfer of tax burden to the middle and lower classes, etc, etc.).
It isn’t a free market when you build factories in countries where there is no free market. (Back in the day, we used to call these people “Collaborators”…..didn’t turn out to well for most of them, after the Germans were kicked out of Western Europe).
What we need to do to fix this problem is cut taxes for the elite do away with social security and medicare and all infrastructure spending and start a war. That’s the ticket.
Didn’t W already take care of most of those items?
So median income has fallen 5% in the past decade. What has the median house price done? I’ll be ready to call the bubble over when we see a 5% discount from 2001 house prices to match the 5% dip in median household income.
Looking at census data, the only way you get median incomes down that much is in inflation adjusted.
So, they are taking the 2001 number that in 2001 dollars was $56,500ish, then inflating it to 2012 and getting the $73K. The are then saying that now the median is $70K, so we’re off 5%, but leaving off the “ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION” caveat.
So, median income is not keeping up with inflation. Duh.
That does not mean that today’s houses should be below 2001 price, unless you are first taking that 2001 price and adjusting it up 25-30% for 11 years of 2-3% average inflation.
It’ll be worse than that, because while wages have fallen the price of food, energy, healthcare and education have been going up, up and away.
Nominal median income has fallen 5%, but the picture worsens when you factor in inflation, including higher housing prices and costs.
The other glaring omission in those median income comparisons is data for unemployed households. Using all households in the comparison, including those which experienced income loss, would uglify the picture considerably.
That’s what liars like Darryl do. Omit, obfuscate and misdirect.
“place the blame squarely on U.S. lawmakers, banks and big business”
As always, I blame progressives.
262 bedrooms, 75 baths…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2192331/Now-thats-sell-block-Former-prison-262-small-bedrooms-75-bathrooms-gyms-goes-sale–steal-390-000.html#comments
Continuing a subject from yesterday.
Hire a Union Stripper…Look for the Union Label…….
http://tinyurl.com/8pngyh5
BTW, 2fruit. Don’t knock “old strippers”. Unlike 18 year old, pedophile-bait strippers, a nice 30-35 year old stripper “knows what she’s doing”
Link didn’t work. Might be my network however.
Google “union strippers”
One of the most important stories in the U.S. economy these days is the rise of extreme inequality.
Over the past 30 years, a larger and larger portion of America’s income growth has gone to those in the top 10% and even more to the top 1% and even more to the top 0.1%. This is a major change from the prior 60 years, in which the top 10% and the bottom 90% shared in the income gains.
A stark and startling example of this trend is the fact that, adjusted for inflation, “average hourly earnings” in this country have not increased in 50 yrs.
A recent Pew study confirms that America’s middle class has experienced a lost decade
Since 2000, the Pew says, “the middle class has shrunk in size, fallen backward in income and wealth, and shed some—but by no means all—of its characteristic faith in the future.” Pew cites statistics showing that middle class earnings and net worth have plummeted since the mid-2000s and that about 85% of the middle class say it is harder to maintain their standard of living than it was 10 years ago.
The reason the decline of the middle class is important is not just about fairness. It’s about the health of the economy as a whole.
Collectively, the middle class represents enormous buying and spending power, and in the past 60 years this spending power has helped the U.S. economy become the envy of the world.
But now, however, the middle class is increasingly strapped. And the resulting impact on spending is constraining the growth of companies that sell products and services to American consumers.
The causes of this middle-class decline are many, from globalization (jobs being shipped overseas), to the decline of private-sector unions, to the wholesale embrace of a “shareholder value” religion that values profit over everything else that companies produce. But the result of the trend can be seen vividly in two charts.
First, wages are now at an all time low as a percentage of the economy.
Second, corporate profits are at ana ll time high
finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/middle-class-broke-pew-study-reveals-real-problem-155018682.html?l=1
One of the other VERY important things revealed by this is the destruction of the “rising wages creates inflation” myth.
Rising wages do not create inflation as much as creating money out of thin air creates inflation.
But the result of the trend can be seen vividly in two charts.
First, wages are now at an all time low as a percentage of the economy.
Second, corporate profits are at an all time high
Isn’t that the GOP strategy for “prosperity”?
Yep. We can’t all be rich until we’re all poor first.
Why are the American people putting up with this transfer of the wealth to these BS crybaby power hungry sociopaths that could care less about what they do to people . They want slaves ,thats what they want ,workers with no power .
We didn’t have a population problem in America ,there should of been no reason for us losing our jobs to Nations that do have population problems .
Because them union commie gay minorities might get rich and then get uppity.
to the wholesale embrace of a “shareholder value” religion that values profit over everything else that companies produce.
“The religion”. The dogma.
Shareholder value is only one part of capitalism - not all of capitalism. But this one part newly dominating capitalism is a threat to the entire system of capitalism.
Some of you think you are defending capitalism by disparaging those who point things like this out. But you are wrong. You would protect capitalism much better by joining those who point out that the wholesale embrace of shareholder value above all else is actually destroying American capitalism and the American middle-class.
“85% of the middle class say it is harder to maintain their standard of living than it was 10 years ago.”
Hmmm…who to blame? Yeah, got to go with progressives.
U.S. housing isn’t the only part of the global economy moving at a crawl.
Got shadow inventory?
China Besieged by Glut of Unsold Goods
Forbes Conrad for The New York Times
Bags of toys stored at a shop in a wholesale market in Guangzhou, China, this week. A glut of unsold goods is hampering China’s efforts to emerge from a slowdown.
By KEITH BRADSHER
Published: August 23, 2012
GUANGZHOU, China — After three decades of torrid growth, China is encountering an unfamiliar problem with its newly struggling economy: a huge buildup of unsold goods that is cluttering shop floors, clogging car dealerships and filling factory warehouses.
The glut of everything from steel and household appliances to cars and apartments is hampering China’s efforts to emerge from a sharp economic slowdown. It has also produced a series of price wars and has led manufacturers to redouble efforts to export what they cannot sell at home.
The severity of China’s inventory overhang has been carefully masked by the blocking or adjusting of economic data by the Chinese government — all part of an effort to prop up confidence in the economy among business managers and investors.
But the main nongovernment survey of manufacturers in China showed on Thursday that inventories of finished goods rose much faster in August than in any month since the survey began in April 2004. The previous record for rising inventories, according to the HSBC/Markit survey, had been set in June. May and July also showed increases.
“Across the manufacturing industries we look at, people were expecting more sales over the summer and it just didn’t happen,” said Anne Stevenson-Yang, the research director for J Capital Research, an economic analysis firm in Hong Kong. With inventories extremely high and factories now cutting production, she added, “Things are kind of crawling to a halt.”
…
What? Super low paid Chinese workers aren’t buying houses, cars, and other “consumer” crap?
Say it ain’t so, Joe!
I’m glad that China has a surplus of goods . Now maybe they can sell that crap for 75% cheaper than they did before and they might get down to the price that crap deserves . Maybe China’s low wage workers can buy the crap at a 90% discount .
There is something wrong with a Country mass producing products that the bulk of their citizens couldn’t afford to buy .
Americans on the other hand aren’t producing ,yet they have been buying China goods based on debt or using up prior wealth when USA was productive ,or they are forced into it because of the monopoly of it .China pollution goes all around the world also ,don’t kid yourself that it doesn’t .The crap ends up in the landfills a lot sooner also .
I saw a clip on some of the slave labor in this World yesterday ,and it’s true that these people die at a young age and they work children 16 hours a day . These workers are actual slaves and this sort of thing is taking place ( some of it was in India and other places they couldn’t disclose the locations ).
Can’t post above for some reason. Polly, what do you mean he does not believe it is true about the 15 years? This is not opinion it is fact using NASA’s own numbers . One kind of idiot is he that can’t look at a data chart and not see it. This year is not as warm as 1998 and last year is not as warm as 1998. The data is there and I posted links to the data and I am not going to waste my time re-posting. During el nino years we can match 1998 but no significant warming over the years. I posted an article a few days ago stating that many peer reviewed studies have confirmed this. The fact that NASA goes out of its way to hide this simple data from people shows how far James Hansen is from science and how close he is to the religion of AGM.
Maybe you missed my post from late last night, so I’ll repost in answer to the above.
“..explain why for 15 years we have been on a downward sloping mesa of temperatures…”
Because we haven’t. Climate change is a diverse syndrome of oceanographic and atmospheric fluctuations; some warming, SOME COOLING, all interrelated and on an overall upward trend.
Your apparent source, (based on googling the rhetoric you keep repeating along with your erroneous “facts” ) is the widely discredited “creation scientist” Roy Spencer, whose work was based on erroneous satellite readings that have been universally disavowed since they were discovered in the late 1990’s. Since then Spencer (who bills himself as “THE OFFICIAL CLIMATOLOGIST OF THE RUSH LIMBAUGH SHOW”) has been furiously back-pedaling and pandering to paid partisan interests. (Spencer’s own later work, btw, corroborates an overall warming trend in the troposphere.)
Here he is fessing up to screwing up the most critical observations of his career.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLnJttkhDTM&feature=player_embedded
For the “scientific” record, Spencer is an advisor to and serves on the board of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and is a signatory to Cornwall’s “An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming” which states:
“We believe Earth and its ecosystems — created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence — are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception.”
The average temperature of the earth is established by NASA every year. It use to be easy to find on the NASA site when global temperatures were indeed rising. What you are posting is just double talk. There is nothing complex about looking at the global temperature for 1998 and then comparing that temperature for 2011. A third grade student should be able to do it. It reminds me very much of the complex models the banks were using to say that houses were going to rise every year. When people on this board cut through the bs and said how can wages go up 1% a year and houses 7%?
I am cutting through the bs, how can you have significant AGW when despite all the Co2 added to the air over the almost 15 years the global temperature for 2011 is less than the global temperature for 1998. The models are wrong, the father of modern AGW theory understands it but you just refuse to accept it because it is contrary to your religion.
Finally, he is just flat out wrong about the oceans all moving in the same direction as my post below explains.
Because we haven’t. Climate change is a diverse syndrome of oceanographic and atmospheric fluctuations; some warming, SOME COOLING, all interrelated and on an overall upward trend.
We were at a tipping point, cooling was not on the menu.
The alarmist rely 1st on historical data, detect trends and reasons for them and then project these trends forward in time based on the reasons continuing and accelerating and being augmented by feedback loops.
Those historical data were problematic but addressed through various means that led to climate gate and the ongoing need to silence and demean any opposition. Now current data are problematic and you explain it away with the above gibberish.
The models did not predict a probability of either warming or cooling for the current 15 year period ending now. In fact “[o]ver the last 15 years, we’ve been told that human CO2 emissions would cause global warming to accelerate to new dangerous levels, and this “unequivocal” warming would generate fantastic, catastrophic climate change disasters - the IPCC’s climate models told us this, and truth be told, they were absolutely and spectacularly wrong”
HadCRUT global temperature data show that the large growth in atmospheric CO2 levels continues, ad nauseam. Yet the 15-year trend of stable to a slight global cooling remains.
This extended 180-month period of non-warming was not predicted by a single global climate model - nada, zilch, zero.
The IPCC’s climate models obviously have very serious, fundamental issues that can’t just be ‘tweaked’ away. The most serious issue is their being CO2-centric. Prior periods of global warming came with elevated CO2 but the CO2 never drove the warming it always trailed the warming. Similarly when periods of warm temperatures ceased the high levels of CO2 declined after temperatures reduced.
“THE OFFICIAL CLIMATOLOGIST OF THE RUSH LIMBAUGH SHOW”
Thank you!
This is one of the funniest days on the HBB in a long time!
Is this climatologist “legitimate”?
It gets even better. I decided to do a bit more digging and came up with this little gem:
“…Spencer is the author of three books critical of mainstream climate science:… All of those works were published by Encounter Books.. the group’s major funder is the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation…The Kochs have played acritical role in funding climate-denial efforts, contributing $24.9 million to organizations that have worked to cast doubt on mainstream climate science.
A further discussion of “THE OFFICIAL CLIMATOLOGIST OF THE TUSH LIMBAUGH SHOW can be found here:
http://www.southernstudies.org/2011/09/climate-science-contrarian-roy-spencers-oil-industry-ties.html
Hah. Typo of the month! “RUSH” Limbaugh, not “TUSH”.
“TUSH LIMBAUGH SHOW”
That clearly wasn’t a typo, but rather a Freudian slip. Brings to mind one my favorite Shakespeare characters, Nick Bottom.
Many years ago, I heard Rush Limbaugh say that God wouldn’t allow anything bad to happen to the earth. I was a very surprised. Being someone who relies on science to bolster my understanding of how the physical world works, it took only a cursory search of my memory to realize that gargantuan disasters do befall the human race. Pompeii, Ice Ages, World War II, The Black Death, post WWI Spanish Flu outbreak.
I suppose Limbaugh or someone like-minded might respond that disasters do occur, but it won’t cause global human extinction, because it’s not part of God’s plan per the Bible.
Okay, but what if the result is massive social disruption and human die-offs not leading to extinction? Isn’t that worth trying to avoid?
One=what
Here are some of the natural factors that can cause warming:
1. sunspot activity, last 70 years averaged the highest in 8000 years.However, we are about to go into a very quiet period according to scientists. This year and the beginning of next is the peak in a 11 year cycle
2. PDO, which is a warming of the Pacific occurs in a 60 year cycle 30 years warming and thirty years cooling. During the cooling cycle good runs of salmon off the Northwest during the warming not so much. It was at is peak warmth in 1998.
3. Similar cycle occurs in the Atlantic but since the ocean is smaller has less of an impact. It is actually still in warming phase but should go cool within a few years.
4. El Nino which is about a one year warming of the pacific, they tend to be stronger during a warming PDO and weaker during the cooling phase.
From around 1977 to 1998, the natural horses were pulling in one direction at least the two big ones the PDO and Sunspots. No surprise we had rapid warming. Now, we have a split verdict PDO has gone cool, but we have peak sunspot activity, warm Atlantic and a weak el nino leading to higher global temperatures. This is why when people just look at one natural factor and say for instance solar activity was weak this year and we had a warm year,so can’t be sunspots, I know they did not know what they are talking about. Similarly, I cannot believe any scientist that claims most of the warming was co2 cause when I know of these facts
But soon, very soon we are going to be in a cooling pdo combined with a low sunspot environment and that is when the fun begins. Got popcorn?
Just to make it easy for folks since the AGW crowd cannot seem to look up a simple data chart.
In 1998 the combined ocean and land temperature on a global basis for the year was .58C above the base period of 1951-1980.
For 2011, it was .51C.
For the first 7 months of this year it is 50.7C.
All figures are from NASA. “Lucy you have some splaining to do”. or James Hansen does. See why James Lovelock has admitted the models do not work?
.507C
Just had my Al Gore moment just like him saying the ocean was going to rise 15 feet in a few decades. But at least I did not say that the earth was millions of degrees just a few miles down.
I always thought it was a good idea to move over to clean
and cheap renewable energy because pollution sucks and
depending on oil from Countries that hate us is a stupid thing to do . The fact that we have clean renewable energy ,like the Sun for instance ,is just a good idea to develope aside from any arguement that the Globe is
heating up or cooling down .All these wars in which protecting oil is behind it all is getting a little old .It’s just a intelligent thing to move away from dependance on oil, or nuclear for that matter . So if it happens to be true that global warming or cooling is taking place at least we get the secondary benefit of helping to stop that . I happen to not like toxins in the air and that’s a good reason to want to develope cleaner sources of energy as well as pest control . Big Business wants to pollute at will ,and that’s not acceptable .
Thanks for throwing that trump card, Wiz. I completely agree.
(This also doubles as the reason I avoid the whole argument over warming/climate change)
There is no argument, only the last frantic bleetings of the oil industry confronting the inevitable.
“There is no argument, only the last frantic bleetings of the oil industry confronting the inevitable.”
Then what? Living in huts on collective farms with no electricity and no transportation? Will you be vacating your remote enclave to join the rest of us?
‘Big Business wants to pollute at will ,and that’s not acceptable’
Look at the people driving around you. Are they ‘willing’ to change?
‘the reason I avoid the whole argument over warming/climate change’
How many climate summits have we had that turned out nothing? I’ve come to the conclusion that no matter what the facts are, nothing will be changed. So, how do we deal with that?
NASA?
Found this is 5 seconds.
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2008/earth_temp_prt.htm
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2011-temps.html
Bain Closes U.S. Plant, Forces Workers to Train Chinese Replacements
By Eamon Murphy
Posted 3:38PM 08/17/12 Posted under: Money and Politics, Jobs
Throughout this presidential election cycle, we’ve heard attacks on the business practices of Bain Capital, the private equity firm co-founded by Mitt Romney in 1984. Most recently, a political action committee that supports the re-election of President Obama released an ad featuring Joe Soptic, a former steelworker who lost his job, and hence health insurance for himself and his family, after the closing of the Bain-owned plant where he worked. Soptic’s wife subsequently died of cancer; in the ad, he blames Bain and Romney for the fact that she didn’t get care in time to detect and treat her disease.
“I don’t know how long she was sick,” Soptic says, “and I think maybe she didn’t say anything because she knew that we couldn’t afford the insurance.”
The ad’s veracity has been questioned (and defended), but evidence of Bain’s deleterious impact on workers continues to surface.
In the most recent news in that vein, The Guardian reports that Bain has for months been dismantling and shipping to China, “piece by piece,” a car parts plant, of which it is majority owner, in Freeport, Ill. — even as it requires the workers to train personally their Chinese replacements, who have been flown in by management.
…
That is called “improving efficiency”.
There is only one way to stop this. Lower the wage of the American worker to $1.50 an hour.
And to whom are the corporations going to sell the goods they produce, when all the world is working for $1.50 an hour?
Off shoring works great as long as your customers can buy on credit, right?
“I don’t know how long she was sick,” Soptic says, “and I think maybe she didn’t say anything because she knew that we couldn’t afford the insurance.”
“Uniquely American”
This does not happen in in other 1st world nations. Seriously it doesn’t. This uniquely American. We are unique. We are exceptional. And we have the “best healthcare in the world”.
This isn’t a new story. Happens all the time.
Usually they hold your severance package like a gun to your head. Train your replacement, and draw a paycheck for a few more months, and get a little better severance package.
One of the joys of avoiding being up to your eyeballs in debt……telling these jackazzes to go pound sand.
One of my favorite simple pleasures in life happened back in 2010. Company kicked us out the door, no severance, no nothing…..the suits stole all of the cash (about 1.5 billion), then filed Chapter 11.
Then, the new managers call back nine months later needing my help. Seems as though nobody could figure out what was going on with the aircraft maintenance logs after I left. They were looking at a $200K bill, if they didn’t get it straightened out.
Told them they were confusing me with someone who gave a $hit about their airplane. Said I might think about being co-operative, if my $20K magically reappeared.
“You didn’t build that! YOU TORE IT DOWN AND SENT THE JOBS TO CHINA!!”
Come on people now, smile on your brother everybody get together gotta love one another right Now
Right Now
Right Now!
Oh baby,
Vale (the Olympian) is about ready to pop upward.
I can’t wait for a bottom to form
This is getting interesting.
Go housing bust. Raw Raw.
History Says a Roaring Stock Market Makes Obama Win Likely
August 23, 2012
Barack Obama gestures as he arrives to deliver remarks during a campaign event at Canyon Springs High School in Las Vegas, Nev.
If the stock market continues its surprising rally, Mitt Romney may be nothing more than a rich investor after the November elections, while President Obama gets started on a second term.
That’s the implication of an updated study on the effect of the stock market on presidential elections, which found a strong correlation between positive stock-market returns and the re-election of the incumbent when a sitting president is running for a second term. “Large stock market advances during the final three years of incumbent candidates’ terms tend to be strongly associated with subsequent landslide victories,” says the report from the Socionomics Institute, a research firm in Gainesville, Ga.
It’s hardly a revelation to suggest that a rising stock market boosts the re-election odds of an incumbent president. But the Socionomics research goes a step further by comparing the stock market to other factors such as unemployment, economic growth, and inflation—which, it found, have surprisingly little influence on presidential re-election bids. “The importance of these other variables remains relatively weak or insignificant when examined in combination with the stock market,” according to the study.
The Socionomics Institute is run by Robert Prechter, a controversial forecaster and social theorist who has been predicting a stock-market crash for several years. Prechter is also the lead author of the paper, which examined the stock market’s effect on U.S. presidential elections all the way back to 1824, when the necessary data was first available. Some modern examples that validate the theory are Ronald Reagan’s 49-state win in 1984 (preceded by a 42 percent stock-market gain over the previous three years) and Bill Clinton’s 1996 landslide victory (preceded by a 64 percent gain).
The stock market is a potent indicator not because most voters own stocks, but because it reflects the public mood and the overall direction of the economy. A rising stock market may even contribute to confidence and the sort of positive feedback loop that makes consumers and business feel more upbeat, while a falling market does the opposite. That feeling of optimism or pessimism ultimately redounds to the nation’s political leader, whether deservedly or not.
If the pattern holds, Obama ought to replicate the Reagan and Clinton victories, since the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen by 40 percent over the last three years. “Mr. Obama would have a strong probability of winning a second term if the election were held today,” Prechter says. “But a lot can happen in the stock market from August through October, as we experienced in 1987.” That’s the year stocks fell by 23 percent in one day—for reasons that still aren’t fully understood–and took more than a year to recover.
…
If the pattern holds, Obama ought to replicate the Reagan and Clinton victories, since the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen by 40 percent over the last three years.
I don’t think in 1984 and 1996 the recent stock market rise was still below the peak set years before. Seems like a much different psychology to me. If we were setting new records, yes, I would agree that Obama was a shoo-in.
Particularly since if you look at the first two examples the investor class was giving credit to the President. Now every one knows it is just due to the funny money we have been printing.
“If the pattern holds,…”
Hmmmmmm….
“Comment by Bad Andy
2012-08-23 06:51:18
Some folks here are just so anti-home ownership it’s not funny.”
…says the guy who let his house go into foreclosure.
did he for realz?
“did he for realz?”
Bootstraps and all.
…says the guy who let his house go into foreclosure.
Maybe he’s thinking with his head and not just with emotion. Things, situations and times change. Do we all (including me) change with them?
Actually, Keynes Didn’t Say “When The Facts Change, I Change My Mind”
Henry Blodget | September 30, 2011
I love John Maynard Keynes! Wait, did I just say that? (AP)
Yesterday, GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney made a fool of himself by affectionately quoting Republican bete-noire John Maynard Keynes—and then attributing the quote to Republican hero Winston Churchill.
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?…” Romney proudly told a cheering crowd of supporters, to explain why he has flip-flopped on so many positions over the years.
(We’re not sure what “facts have changed” about abortion, gay marriage, and other issues that Romney has flip-flopped on, other than that Romney was then governor of a liberal state and is now trying to suck up to the right-wing of his conservative party, but that’s a different issue).
…
Hmm, I seem to remember that not being a good enough response when it came from one candidate for certain voters in 2004. Wonder how that will go down this election with those same voters now that the guy on their side is using it…
Probably better than in 2004. He may not be far enough right for them, but he is farther right than Obama.
http://www.thehousingbubbleblog.com/?p=6357#comment-1886805
No way!
BTW, long-time readers will recall that Andy has been around for a while. I was very complimentary of him back in the day.; he was one of the first to freely discuss that he was underwater and I always appreciated his honesty.
whoops saw it as I hit the send key 2012 is .507
Gold and number of HBB posts are suddenly skyrocketing.
What gives?
Animal Spirits!
NOM NOM NOM
The housing pimps, NARscum PR and media consultants are in high gear boys.
I’m thinking gold will get majorly hammered if the Fed doesn’t come through with QE3?
BTW, I’m happy that we are getting the “liar” and “pimp” counts way up today despite my absence.
Nice work people.
Sorry but you’re not the only pimp and liar here.
I’m glad I could get you to add 2 to the total.
Rental Watch and I are members of the Housing Liars Club.
At least post under you own name fool.
Serious ,any current Politician that isn’t shouting the need for a mass transfer of the wealth back to the Majority ,especially the worker bees ,by any means possible ,isn’t being serious . Any serious Politician that isn’t bought off should be shouting from the roof tops that the USA majority population will fall off a clift should the current policies of catering to the Monopolies and 1 % is a recipe for disaster ,
I’m telling you the rest of the World thinks we are stupid ,which we are because it’s stupid to destroy a Country for the benefit
of self interest groups that could care less these days about anything but profit and greed and power and Globalism .
This was a form of hijacking of the USA where no shots were fired ,just betrayal from our Politicians and Citizens being in LA LA LAND . I wasn’t paying attention either and I regret that .
Serious ,how can anybody take serious these Politicians that most should of been fired in 2007 when we found out most were this stupid and bribed .
Hopefully one of the Republican scientists who posts here will help me out, but to my reading, this map of Isaac’s projected path suggests it will hit Tampa with 75 mph winds just in time for the start of the GOP convention next week.
McBride is a liar…. and so am I.
I’m thinking global stock market rout from now through Ben’s QE3 announcement speech in Jackson Hole on August 31. Does that seem about right?
Asia stocks march south
Asian stocks fall sharply as investors grow gloomy about the health of the global economy and odds for more monetary easing.
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
August 22, 2012, 7:20 p.m. ET
The Cliff the Keynesians Built
Temporary tax cuts created the fiscal threat to growth.
‘A stimulus program should be timely, targeted and temporary.”
—Lawrence Summers, January 29, 2008
Well, well. So the folks who have run U.S. economic policy since 2008 are alarmed about the peril of the 2013 “fiscal cliff.” Too bad they didn’t worry about that when they were creating the very ledge they now lament.
The latest warning comes from the Congressional Budget Office, which estimated in its mid-year budget outlook Wednesday that the economy will return to recession in 2013 if taxes rise and spending falls on schedule in January. “Such fiscal tightening will lead to economic conditions in 2013 that will probably be considered a recession,” say the CBO sachems, “with real GDP declining by 0.5 percent” from this year’s fourth quarter to the final quarter of next year and unemployment rising to about 9% from 8.3%.
Yes, a year of falling output would “probably be considered” a recession, especially if you are one of the 9% jobless.
One point to keep in mind is that CBO’s economists are as true-blue Keynesians as exist on the planet. Like the Obama White House and Treasury, they believe in the “multiplier” that $1 of federal spending somehow creates $1.50 in greater GDP. Thus they plug large spending cuts into their economic models, and, presto, they find a recession.
One remarkable (and highly dubious) note in the CBO report is that the budget gnomes predict a big surge in tax revenues in 2013—to 18.4% from 15.7% of GDP—despite the recession they also predict. CBO simply doesn’t think taxes matter much to taxpayer behavior, so it applies the higher rates to its current predictions of income and pretends revenues will roll in like the tides. But this will be a fantasy if enough Americans find ways to hide their income or work less, or if they simply earn that much less thanks to the recession.
The larger policy point is that this is the fiscal cliff the Keynesians built. The 2008 quote above from Larry Summers, the Harvard economist who later became President Obama’s chief economic adviser, sums up the mindset that has dominated policy for most of the last decade and especially since 2008.
Rather than provide predictable, consistent policy for the long term, the Summers-Obama-Geithner-Krugman theory goes that government should jolt the economy with spending and tax cuts that are targeted and temporary. The jolt will drive the economy out of recession, rapid growth will resume, and the wizards of Harvard Yard can then tell us the precise moment when the stimulus can be withdrawn and taxes should rise again.
Or, if the jolt doesn’t work, then order up another jolt, which makes the tax cliff even steeper.
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It seems like visions of liquidity dancing through their heads have blocked out all thoughts of economic reality from traders’ minds — until just now, that is…
Asian shares retreat dimming outlook for growth
A man passes an electronic board displaying market indices from around the world outside a brokerage in Tokyo August 23, 2012. REUTERS-Yuriko Nakao
A worker on the IG Group’s trading floor looks away from his screens in the City of London, October 4, 2011. REUTERS-Olivia Harris
By Chikako Mogi
TOKYO | Fri Aug 24, 2012 1:53am EDT
(Reuters) - Asian shares retreated from a two-week high on Friday as investors scaled back their expectations of strong stimulus from the U.S. Federal Reserve and fretted about economic growth after manufacturing surveys from the euro zone and China depicted a bleak outlook.
Senior Fed official James Bullard said U.S. data had been somewhat better since early August and the Fed’s July 31-August 1 minutes, which had indicated a third round of monetary stimulus, or quantitative easing (QE3), might be in store, were “a bit stale”.
Bullard’s comments, and business surveys in China and the euro zone showing the world economy was dwindling, put a brake on a global market rally that had been spurred by the release of the minutes on Wednesday.
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I guess the hurricane isn’t the only anticipated source of rain at next weeks’ GOP convention?
Strippers look to GOP to ‘make it rain’
By Ann O’Neill, CNN
updated 10:32 PM EDT, Thu August 23, 2012
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
* Tampa’s strip clubs are preparing for the Republican National Convention
* More than 50,000 visitors are expected to converge on the Florida city
* Tampa is known as “lap dance capital of the world,” but other cities have more nude clubs
* A strip club trade group says Republicans spend three times more than Democrats
Tampa, Florida (CNN) — Go-Go and Ezili are dancing cheek to cheek on a Friday night. That is to say they’re spinning, glute to glute, on a polished chrome pole at a strip club.
A thunderstorm leaves puddles in the parking lot under a sign that boasts “OMG! These girls are hot!” The strippers try to “make it rain” inside, too: When patrons approve of their gyrations by slipping credit cards into machines that look like ATMs, the sound of recorded thunder rolls across the stage. Sure enough, $1 bills flutter from the ceiling onto the twirling twosome.
The joint is all mirrors, throbbing music, flashing neon and spotlights. Voluptuous young women wearing G-strings, stiletto heels and not much else teeter over the spanking new, Day-Glo acid trip of a carpet. But there’s no liquor served here, because in Tampa they can’t offer both booze and totally naked women under the same roof.
Speaking of the roof, there’s a spaceship up there that features $80 semiprivate “quick launch” lap dances.
After the 10-minute show, which includes a gravity-defying “death lay” against the mirrored ceiling, Go-Go retires to another mirrored room, where she boots up a laptop and chats with fans online via a program called “Club Cam.”
Ezili, who is studying to be a dental assistant, strolls in clutching two fat stacks of dollar bills — $85 for her and $85 for Go-Go after the house takes its cut. Not bad, but they’re hoping for a whole lot more when the Republicans come to town Monday. They’re counting on the GOP convention to make it rain for a whole week.
Go-Go’s boss says she’s “the best pole girl in Tampa.” She says it’s hard work and should be an Olympic sport. She’s in it for the money, and she swears it’s only temporary. Pole dancing is not, as she puts it, “my career path.”
A big plus, she says, is the friendship forged with other dancers. “We see each other naked every day,” she explains, “so we kind of open up to each other.”
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“A strip club trade group says Republicans spend three times more than Democrats”
Family Values?