After 2 ¾ years in office, President Obama’s policies have failed to revive the U.S. economy, and have actually made things worse. Reckless actual deficit spending for the first 2 ¾ fiscal years plus estimated spending for the final year of 2011 will aggregate to $4.864 trillion.
Note that the immediate prospects for recovery are not good:
The owners of many small businesses say economic uncertainty and inflationary pressures have led them to delay hiring and capital expenditures. Seventy percent have no plans to expand their staffs over the next 12 months, according to a recent U.S. Bancorp survey of 1,004 U.S. companies with annual revenue of $10 million or less.
If you are a loyal blue collar Democrat, you will not be happy that two of the largest declines in jobs are in two sectors with a lot of the best paying jobs. Manufacturing has lost 2,034,000 jobs, or a -14.8% decline. And, construction has lost 1,934,000 jobs, a -26% loss.
And, if like many people, the largest part of you stock of savings in the value of your home, you are not in a very good place:
…home prices fell another 4.2% in the first quarter. Prices have fallen for eight straight months, after the false dawn of 2009-2010, and average home prices are down to levels last seen in 2002….
So, your lifetime of trying to build your savings by paying off your mortgage has been subjected to a big setback.
And no matter how hard they try to obfuscate it, the Democratic Party is at war with America’s desire to use its own energy supplies through penalties, increased costs and less domestic production.
At least 13,000 jobs have been lost since last summer’s moratorium on offshore oil production . . . .
…the national job losses to have increased from 12,000 to 19,000; regional wage losses to be $800 million, up from $500 million; national wage losses to be $1.1 billion, up from $700 million; lost tax revenues on the state and local level to be $155 million, up from $100 million; and lost tax revenues on the national level to be $350 million, up from $200 million.
Canada, our ally and neighbor, has one of the world’s largest volumes of proven oil reserves at 175.2 billion barrels of oil. But, unbelievably:
…Almost all the oil produced ends up in the U.S., where environmentalists and some powerful Democrats have lined up against importing any more of the stuff.
Washington remains ambivalent about a proposed expansion of a pipeline that could nearly double exports from Alberta to the U.S….
Does economic freedom mean anything when regulators in the Executive Branch want to starve our economy of energy? All successful economies are propelled by energy and hindering our use of energy puts a pervasive burden on the whole economy.
And this attack is not just against oil:
The EPA is currently conducting a campaign against coal-fired power…. The 946-page rule mandates that utilities install "maximum achievable control technology" under the Clean Air Act—and even by the EPA's lowball estimates, it is the most expensive rule in the agency's history….
According to the EPA's own numbers, every dollar in direct benefits costs $1,847….
The real goal of the EPA's rule is to shut down fossil fuel electric power in the name of climate change. The consensus estimate in the private sector is that the utility rule and eight others on the EPA docket will force the retirement of 60 out of the country's current 340 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity….
…The International Brotherhood of Electr... Continue
America expended tens of thousands of lives and immeasurable national treasure, including the Marshall Plan, during and after World War II to liberate and rebuild Europe. The United States also defended Europe throughout the Cold War while they pinched their defense budgets and capabilities in favor of massive social expenditures. With the bailouts of Europe just beginning, it looks like we might get entrapped in Europe again:
Greece shook global markets, intensifying fears of a default, as tens of thousands of demonstrators protested a new round of budget-cutting plans and its prime minister offered to step down to try to preserve them.Protests across the capital sometimes turned violent as Prime Minister George Papandreou sought an agreement with opposition parties on austerity measures demanded as the price of a new bailout by euro-zone nations and the International Monetary Fund....
...Mr. Papandreou's Socialist party has a Parliament majority of just four....
The vote is likely to herald a further bout of intense uncertainty in financial markets already rattled by disagreements among the 17 nations that use the euro over terms of a new rescue package. Investors pulled out en masse Wednesday from riskier financial assets. Yields on Greek government bonds leapt to new highs, with two-year paper yielding 29%.
If you look at it in a little more detail, you will see evidence of a failing sovereign nation:
... Greece's debt-to-GDP ratio still tops 150%, and despite touting its efforts at austerity, government expenditures are up 3.6% year-on-year, to 21 billion. Its revenues for the first four months of 2011 were down 9.1% from the previous year....In 2009 Greeks produced $34.2 worth of goods and services per hour worked, according to OECD data—compared to $53.1 in Germany and $56.8 in the United States.
The productivity crisis is linked, in turn, to the huge proportion of Greeks employed by the state—fully a third of the workforce, by some estimates, and civil servants are unionized, often militant and politically influential....
If you are an American taxpayer, which means you are busy working to pay your payroll and income taxes, you may not be paying too much attention to this. On the other hand, the miscreant people of Greece want somebody else to pay for their excessive spending and resulting excessive debt accumulation. And they have a secrete route to your pocket book. It is called the International Monetary Fund:
...The IMF, also known as the “Fund,” was conceived at a United Nations conference convened in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, United States, in July 1944. The 44 governments represented at that conference sought to build a framework for economic cooperation that would avoid a repetition of the vicious circle of competitive devaluations that had contributed to the Great Depression of the 1930s....The IMF's primary purpose is to ensure the stability of the international monetary system—the system of exchange rates and international payments that enables countries (and their citizens) to transact with one other....
Now, your first question is probably, what does Greece’s excessive spending problems have to do with “exchange rates and international payments?” The answer is nothing. Greece is one the European Unions’ 27 member nations and one of 17 EU nations which have adopted the Euro. And, there are other nations in the EU besides Greece that have similarly disastrous fiscal policies, including Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy. These and other EU nations have far too willingly used socialist economic policies that have resulted in massive government spending and debts.
As you can see from this chart, Europe faces a real and substantial debt crisis. The data is sorted by the amount of public debt as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product. As a measuring stick, you should note that for the period ending FY 9/30/08, over 232 years since America’s founding, our debt as percentage of GDP was around 40%. Unfortunately for America, the Obama Administration has outrageously increased our public debt to $9.748 trillion in less than 3 fiscal years. This is a whopping $3.930 trillion increase, or a 68% increase in three years. And so today, our debt to GDP ratio is about 65%.
Since World War II, many of the EU members have a... Continue
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