American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture
John Hinderaker takes a grim look at what’s to come when the national debt in the US (on a gross basis) will climb to above 100pc of GDP by 2015:
This graphic tells the story. Note what happened after the Democrats took control of Congress in 2007
By the way, this doesn’t include the effects of Cap and Trade if that passes.
More than 100% of Gross National Product. A banana republic scenario at best; Possibly, a collapse of democracy, too.
John Hinderaker takes a grim look at what’s to come when the national debt in the US (on a gross basis) will climb to above 100pc of GDP by 2015:
This graphic tells the story. Note what happened after the Democrats took control of Congress in 2007
By the way, this doesn’t include the effects of Cap and Trade if that passes.
More than 100% of Gross National Product. A banana republic scenario at best; Possibly, a collapse of democracy, too.
I was just saying in the prior post that taxes are going to rise so much, we’ll be thinking back to now as “the good old days.” Here’s one reason why:
CBO says ObamaCare will cost $115 billion more than thought
Of all the slime dripping from ObamaCare, from the de facto bribes to the procedural shenanigans to the Democrats’ insane demagoguery of townhall protesters, the gaming of the CBO numbers is what bothers me most. Which, in a way, is silly. When you’re talking about sums as fantastically astronomical as $940 billion, who cares what the actual pricetag is? But that’s just it: Obama pretended to care, touting the bending o’ the cost curve and demanding that the Democrats bring in a bill below the arbitrary yet politically toxic threshold of $1 trillion. And in order to make that happen, they were willing to tell any lie and pull any accounting trick that they had to, from rigging the cost window to obscure the actual $2.5 trillion pricetag to pouring the enormous costs of “doctor fix” into a separate bill so that it wouldn’t show up in the CBO data on O-Care to pushing the bill through the House before CBO was finished running the numbers. At a moment when Americans desperately need leaders to be frank with them about the cost of entitlements and what it’ll take to restore fiscal stability, Obama gave them a new entitlement built on lie after lie after lie. That’s the legacy of his signature domestic “achievement.”
If that doesn’t fill your heart with joy, Cap-and-Trade is back.
You really have to laugh to keep from crying.
I was just saying in the prior post that taxes are going to rise so much, we’ll be thinking back to now as “the good old days.” Here’s one reason why:
CBO says ObamaCare will cost $115 billion more than thought
Of all the slime dripping from ObamaCare, from the de facto bribes to the procedural shenanigans to the Democrats’ insane demagoguery of townhall protesters, the gaming of the CBO numbers is what bothers me most. Which, in a way, is silly. When you’re talking about sums as fantastically astronomical as $940 billion, who cares what the actual pricetag is? But that’s just it: Obama pretended to care, touting the bending o’ the cost curve and demanding that the Democrats bring in a bill below the arbitrary yet politically toxic threshold of $1 trillion. And in order to make that happen, they were willing to tell any lie and pull any accounting trick that they had to, from rigging the cost window to obscure the actual $2.5 trillion pricetag to pouring the enormous costs of “doctor fix” into a separate bill so that it wouldn’t show up in the CBO data on O-Care to pushing the bill through the House before CBO was finished running the numbers. At a moment when Americans desperately need leaders to be frank with them about the cost of entitlements and what it’ll take to restore fiscal stability, Obama gave them a new entitlement built on lie after lie after lie. That’s the legacy of his signature domestic “achievement.”
If that doesn’t fill your heart with joy, Cap-and-Trade is back.
You really have to laugh to keep from crying.
In today’s podcast at 11AM Eastern,
Special guest Rick Moran talks about Obama’s latest scheme, and other items in the news.
Prior post:
Drill for cap and trade?
Obama to Open Offshore Areas to Oil Drilling for First Time (emphasis added)
The Obama administration is proposing to open vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling, much of it for the first time, officials said Tuesday.
The proposal — a compromise that will please oil companies and domestic drilling advocates but anger some residents of affected states and many environmental organizations — would end a longstanding moratorium on oil exploration along the East Coast from the northern tip of Delaware to the central coast of Florida, covering 167 million acres of ocean.
Under the plan, the coastline from New Jersey northward would remain closed to all oil and gas activity. So would the Pacific Coast, from Mexico to the Canadian border.
The environmentally sensitive Bristol Bay in southwestern Alaska would be protected and no drilling would be allowed under the plan, officials said. But large tracts in the Chukchi Sea and Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska — nearly 130 million acres — would be eligible for exploration and drilling after extensive studies.
The proposal is to be announced by President Obama and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland on Wednesday, but administration officials agreed to preview the details on the condition that they not be identified.
The proposal is intended to reduce dependence on oil imports, generate revenue from the sale of offshore leases and help win political support for comprehensive energy and climate legislation.
I translate that to mean “promise to drill, maybe, sometime, if you suckers pass cap and trade.”
How about the coal industry? Dan Riehl says,
It reminds me of Stupak’s executive order, more than anything else. Obama wants disastrous cap and trade policy, to shut down the coal industry – and one day, maybe, we get to drill for oil off our own coast, eventually, perhaps.
Yup. That’s the ticket.
James Pethokoukis explains 12 reasons unemployment is going to (at least) 12 percent.
Read the whole list, but pay particular attention to items 6-9:
6. The number of permanent job losses this cycle (unemployed but not for temporary purposes) increased by a record 6.2 million. In fact, well over half of the total unemployment pool of 15.7 million was generated just in this past recession alone. A record 5.6 million people have been unemployed for at least six months (this number rarely gets above two million in a normal downturn) which is nearly a 36% share of the jobless ranks (again, this rarely gets above 20%). Both the median (18.7 weeks) and average (26.9 weeks) duration of unemployment have risen to all-time highs.
7. The longer it takes for these folks to find employment (and now they can go on the government benefit list for up to two years) the more difficult it is going to be to retrain them in the future when labour demand does begin to pick up.
8. Not only that, but we have a youth unemployment rate now approaching a record 20%. Again, this is going to prove to be very problematic for employers in the future who are going to be looking for skills and experience when the boomers finally do begin to retire.
9. The gap between the U6 and the official U3 rate is at a record 7.3 percentage points. Normally this spread is between 3-4 percentage points and ultimately we will see a reversion to the mean, to some unhappy middle where the U6 may be closer to 15.0-16.0% and the posted jobless rate closer to 12%. This will undoubtedly be a major political issue, especially in the context of a mid-term elections and the GOP starting to gain some electoral ground.
Those are depression-era numbers. Dale Franks points out that
if we currently reported the unemployment rate as they did in the 1930’s, our current rate of unemployment would be around 17.2%
Of course, these numbers don’t account for the effect a job-killer bill like Cap and Trade, or the costs of the healthcare bill would have on the economy.
How’s all that hope and change working for you now?
Link also at Instapundit
Climate chief Lord Stern: give up meat to save the planet
People will need to turn vegetarian if the world is to conquer climate change, according to a leading authority on global warming.
In an interview with The Times, Lord Stern of Brentford said: “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”
Direct emissions of methane from cows and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gases. Methane is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas.
Especially if you’re downwind from the cows. But,
Hold on. If we eat less beef, pork and poultry, we’ll be eating a lot more beans, broccoli and cabbage, and producing a heck of a lot more methane ourselves.
Which would make taking public transportation even more unpleasant for Lord Stern (and everybody else) – if he takes public transportation, that is.
Stern wants to raise the price of meat to a point where we all turn vegetarians:
Lord Stern, the author of the influential 2006 Stern Review on the cost of tackling global warming, said that a successful deal at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December would lead to soaring costs for meat and other foods that generate large quantities of greenhouse gases.
Here in the US the Cap and Trade legislation will kill jobs.
And then there’s the redistribution of wealth from rich countries to poor ones: Lord Stern
warned that British taxpayers would need to contribute about £3 billion a year by 2015 to help poor countries to cope with the inevitable impact of climate change.
If you think your soy diet will save you from Stern’s scheme, think again:
UN figures suggest that meat production is responsible for about 18 per cent of global carbon emissions, including the destruction of forest land for cattle ranching and the production of animal feeds such as soy.
The basic idea is that people and animals are “bad for the planet.” Malthus is back in fashion, after all.
But things are not bad enough for Stern to give up his meat: He said
said that he was not a strict vegetarian himself
UPDATE, Thursday 29 Oct.
Don’t miss Hoi Pollutants?
