Stimulus jobs are $160,000 each?!?

That's what Jake Tapper at ABC News has reckoned. Figuring that the Obama administration is boating of anywhere between 640,000 and 1 million jobs saved or created because of the "stimulus" package, and that $159 billion was allocated by Congress and President Obama for such purpose, then the most conservative estimate has each rescued job worth $160,000.

The White House economists are calling these figures "calculator abuse". Wish I'd have thought of that one during those many times that I struggled with algebra in eighth grade!

Pssst... hey, President Obama. Wanna really use the government to create jobs and bolster the economy? It's very very simple:

CUT TAXES
AND
CUT SPENDING!!!

NO country in history has ever spent itself into prosperity. America can not possibly be any different.

Read More

When there's no more room in Hell, the dead shall shop the Earth!

Leave it to the federal government to re-define the old saying about "death and taxes".

THOUSANDS of the dearly departed are receiving "stimulus" checks. It's been estimated that "between 8,000 and 10,000 checks for millions of dollars" worth of publicly-financed "economic recovery" is being written out to those who are long beyond such temporal concepts as money and spending.

And some of these people, it turns out, never received a Social Security number! Meaning that to the government they weren't officially alive to begin with.

Sorta brings a whole new meaning to "the undead" when you think about it...

Read More

United States poised for Zimbabwe-style economic collapse, sez governor

If the United States keeps "spending a bunch of money we don't have", it faces a collapse of its economy much like what has happened in Zimbabwe, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford predicts.

In case you haven't heard, the financial hyper-inflation which has rocked Zimbabwe has led that country to issue a one trillion dollar bill as part of its currency. For one of those legal tender notes, you can currently buy a hamburger or two.

Sanford gets what's really going on. Too bad there doesn't seem to be many other elected officials who are likewise calling for fiscal sobriety right now.

Read More

President Obama signs "stimulus" into law

The $787 BILLION package is now enacted legislation, as President Barack Obama signed the bill at a ceremony in Denver.

There might be another "stimulus" coming soon, believe it or not.

And on the day of this esteemed occasion, the Dow dropped 297.81 points, -3.79%, to close at 7,552.60.

And on a somewhat related note, I've been hearing some curious rumblings about stuff going down in the Eastern Europe markets, that might bear watching for the time being.

Read More

Federal government's fiscal obligations calculated to be more than WORLD's gross product

Jerome Corsi has published a wallopin' eye-opener of an essay. According to his figures, the United States federal government's runaway spending (like the "stimulus") combined with its already existing financial obligations, is more than the gross domestic product of the entire world.

There is no way we are going to be able to pay for all of this in our lifetime, the lifetime of our children, and quite possibly the lifetime of their grandchildren. Not if our politicians keep adhering to this insanity.

Read More

"Stimulus" file size: Is Congress TRYING to keep us from examining it?

ReadTheStimulus.org is reporting that the final language of the "stimulus" bill has been posted on the U.S. House website. But if you think you're going to get to exercise your right to easily pore over the legislation, think again. From ReadTheStimulus.org...

Final Language Posted
Posted at 11:00 pm on Thursday, February 12, 2009

The final language has been posted; you can find links to the various docs at the Speaker's website. Update: The speaker's website is apparently down. Imagine that. Docs are also available here.

The total size of the four major files is over 100MB, and consists of 1419 pages. Three of the four files are huge "scanned" PDFs, meaning they were created by printing the original document and then scanning it in again --- and therefore contain no real "text" that can be easily searched. This will make our parsing process difficult and more time consuming, so we most likely won't have our versions ready until midday tomorrow. But we'll see...

There is no reason at all why this bill, as bloated as it is, should not be in standard rich-text Acrobat format. 1,419 pages? In a document containing all text and no images, that would be extremely quick and easy to download, not to mention convenient to search and scan.

But instead, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has published the "stimulus" as unwieldy scanned images.

In my mind, either the House website staff is inept and incapable of fully grasping available technology, or this is a deliberate attempt to prevent the legislation from easily being scrutinized by the public.

I'm inclined to believe the latter.

Read More

Insanity: "Stimulus" ultimate cost could be $9.7 TRILLION

At this point, I am only left to seriously wonder if the people who are supposed to be running the country, have any functional grasp at all of the value of numbers.

According to a story on Bloomberg.com, the total cost of all the bailouts that the U.S. House and Senate are pursuing with this "stimulus" package, is going to come out to, at least, $9.7 trillion.

Here it is for people who like to look at lots of zeroes...

$9,700,000,000,000

It's said to be enough to pay off 90% of all the homeowner mortgages in this country.

I'm going to paraphrase a line that I heard from a movie several years ago...

"The country is headed for trouble. The country is headed for grief."

Read More

Where's the hope?! Obama evokes fear if "stimulus" isn't passed

Remember all that talk of "hope and change" during the past election cycle? What happened to it? Because now President Barack Obama is sounding like the dire opposite of Franklin Roosevelt, warning that if the "stimulus" bill isn't passed...

"This recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse."

Not even three weeks into the job and the man's already done did a "malaise speech".

Dear President Obama: if you seriously want to stimulate the economy across the board, you cannot do it with more spending! That might seem to buy some time in the short term, but what is really needed is to cut taxes and CUT SPENDING!

That may not win Obama any early accolades, but posterity would ultimately judge him to be a wise president if he were to adopt such a sober-minded fiscal policy.

Read More

"National car crushing" sought for inclusion in stimulus plan

You see, this is part of what's screwy with the United States right now. We've got too many politicians like Diane Feinstein and Henry Waxman, sitting on their publicly-funded derrieres all day and doing nothing but coming up with crap like this. As part of the "economic stimulus" now being debated, some in Congress are looking at it as an opportunity to completely gut the domestic industry manufacturing trucks and SUVs. Part of the scheme involves giving cash vouchers - out of the federal treasury - to people in order to help them buy "more fuel-efficient" vehicles.

So as if this country's economy wasn't in shambles enough, Feinstein and Waxman not only want to waste even more of our money, they want to destroy much of what little industrial infrastructure we have left to us.

It's almost enough to make one wonder if some elected officials are not actually the proverbial "Manchurian candidates", if ya know what I mean. They certainly seem hellbent enough on wrecking havoc to this country.

Thanks to John Seilback for the heads-up.

Read More

Some random musings on things...

A few months ago George W. Bush proposed wasting hundreds of billions of dollars of our money and it was called "bailout" and some politicians approved it. Today Barack Obama is proposing wasting hundreds of billions of dollars of our money and it's being called "stimulus" and those same politicians deride it as unacceptable.

I would like to quote "Oceania is at war with Eurasia, Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia" to the Powers That Be, but sad to say, they most likely wouldn't get it.

And now that he's President, doesn't Obama have better things to do than to get into the proverbial "pissing contest" with a radio commentator who is nothing more than a shameless shill for the "other side"?

Don't we have better things to do than to even care about such a non-story involving two men with apparently arrested development?

Pat Buchanan is right: we have become an unserious people in a serious time.

Read More