Archive for the ‘Economy/Financial Markets’ Category

As if Obama and the Democrat takeover of the US Healthcare industry isn’t enough, Obama’s bureaucrats are going after FISHING!!!! He’s got the leftwing enviro groups like World Wildlife Fund(WWF), Greenpeace, Defenders of Wildlife, Pew Environment Group……what’s not to worry about? All that is being considered with this panel of government bureaucrats and leftwing environMENTAL activists is concern for animals. There’s no analysis for economic impact included.

This will affect ALL waterways in the US.

From ESPN: Culled out – Obama administration will accept no more public input for federal fishery strategy

The Obama administration will accept no more public input for a federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing the nation’s oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters.

This announcement comes at the time when the situation supposedly still is “fluid” and the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force still hasn’t issued its final report on zoning uses of these waters.

That’s a disappointment, but not really a surprise for fishing industry insiders who have negotiated for months with officials at the Council on Environmental Quality and bureaucrats on the task force. These angling advocates have come to suspect that public input into the process was a charade from the beginning.

Guess Obama is just ticking off his list of leftwing groups who supported his campaign.

Fishing regulations, Obama, US waterways

This chart is from the Cato Institute and as Instapundit mentioned expect the interest line to sky rocket!

Notice the decline of defense spending. The liberals and anti-war types are always screaming about cutting defense. How much? I suppose zero percent is the only number that would satisfy them!

Federal spending, GDP, CATO Chart

Good old Lamar who has been talking for months about fiscal responsibility has voted to give the Democrats another $85 Billion to stash away for their re-election campaigns. The Dems already have about 2/3rds of the original Stimulus bill left to spend but apparently Lamar Alexander thought the Dems need more cash.

Here’s all the Republicans who voted AYE on the Jobs Stimulus Bill:

Republicans Voting ‘Aye’
Sen. Lamar Alexander [R, TN]
Sen. Robert Bennett [R, UT]
Sen. Christopher Bond [R, MO]
Sen. Samuel Brownback [R, KS]
Sen. Thad Cochran [R, MS]
Sen. Susan Collins [R, ME]
Sen. Judd Gregg [R, NH]
Sen. Kay Hutchison [R, TX]
Sen. George LeMieux [R, FL]
Sen. Lisa Murkowski [R, AK]
Sen. Richard Shelby [R, AL]
Sen. Olympia Snowe [R, ME]
Sen. David Vitter [R, LA]
Sen. George Voinovich [R, OH]
Do these Republicans think we’ll be fooled by the faux name of Jobs? This bill is nothing more than government spending with borrowed taxpayer money. I should say with faux money since the taxpayers have been rung dry at this point. It’s all borrowed or printed faux money.

Lamar did one of those ‘voted against it’ before he ‘voted for it’. He voted against cloture but then turned around and voted for the spending. I guess this is how the Senate Republicans are trying to convince their conservative constituents they’ve learned their lesson and have become more fiscally responsible.

Look for businesses to be laying off employees and then turning around and rehiring them to get the payroll tax exemption. Duh! What else does this bill do?

1) Pay­roll tax ex­emp­tion for new hires —Ex­empts so­cial se­cu­ri­ty pay­roll taxes im­me­di­ate­ly for every work­er hired in 2010 that has been un­em­ployed for at least 60 days.

2) Tax write-offs — Al­lows small busi­ness­es to write off equip­ment pur­chas­es as tax-free busi­ness ex­pens­es rather than de­pre­ci­at­ing them over time.

3) “Build Amer­i­ca Bonds” — Ex­tends a pro­vi­sion from the stim­u­lus that lets state and local gov­ern­ments bor­row from the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment at lower costs to fi­nance in­fras­truc­ture pro­jects and, thus, cre­ate jobs.

4) High­way Trust Fund Ex­ten­sion — Re­plen­ish­es and reau­tho­rizes the high­way trust fund, which uses gas taxes to help state and local gov­ern­ments pay for road re­pair pro­jects.

H.R. 2847 has now gone to the Obama’s desk to be signed!

2010 Jobs Bill, Lamar Alexander votes aye, HR 2847, S.Amdt. 3310, Stimulus Bill

A sheriff in Missouri went to a construction work site on a tip there were illegal aliens working jobs Americans supposedly don’t want. The sheriff thought it was the right thing to do since his county of St. Francis has 11.1% unemployment. There were 14 illegal aliens working and he removed them from the construction site. The sheriff then called ICE and guess what? ICE is only interested if the illegals are terrorism related (remember DHS is more worried about right wingers and recently returned combat soldiers as terrorists than illegals). The sheriff was told to release all the illegals!

Sheriff Forced to Release Illegal Immigrants

“Our unemployment rate right now is 11.1%,” said Bob Meynell, Carpenters’ District Council of Greater St. Louis and Vicinity. He believed the work site had been using illegal workers for some time.

“When the local police would drive by you would hear all the whistles on the job site and you’d turn around to look and 6 or 7 of them were hiding,” he said.

The Sheriff promises he will continue to investigate any calls concerning undocumented workers but fears this problem will continue.

Don’t worry Bob from the Carpenters Union, Obama will get you a job with the government. That’s where Obama is adding jobs. Obama isn’t really interested in curtailing illegals from taking jobs from Americans. He’s looking for new voters for the next election.

ilegal aliens, St. Francis MO, jobs Americans won’t do, DHS, ICE, Obama

Instead of having adults running regulatory agencies we’ve got environMENTAL activists making decisions based on junk data modeling. You don’t have to like herring or lobster to be alarmed by more radicalism coming from governmental agencies. Fish are more important than people. Activists don’t care about American jobs.

From Slublog at Hot Air – The Ripple Effects of Federal Action: A Case Study

Herring is not overfished, or subject to overfishing, but the New England Fishery Management Council’s Science and Statistical Committee has identified a troubling “retrospective pattern” in runs of a computer model used to profile the stock.

Erring on the side of caution, the committee has decided to advise reducing the maximum catch next year from 145,000 metric tons to 90,000 metric tons.

The degree of unreliability in the retrospective pattern was considered to range between 17 and 37 percent. But the committee rounded up to a 40 percent cut in the “acceptable biological catch,” a scientific calculation of the sustainable harvest level used to set the upper level of the total allowable catch.

Continue reading…..

Maine fishery, regulatory agencies, overregulation, activists

You didn’t? Too bad cause this is what they’re planning on doing. Course, initially, this will be voluntary but don’t count on it staying that way.

In mid January I wrote about Obama and the Democrat’s latest scheme:

Well, this is one of the schemes Obama is planning. Forcing you to convert your 401k investment into annuities having the government as the annuity salesman. It’s bad enough that the likes of Rep. Barney Frank forced banks into the CRA using Janet Reno holding a sledgehammer over lending institutions heads. Then protecting Fannie and Freddie into insolvency so the US Taxpayers have to give unlimited funds to cover the CRA mess Barney and his Democrat cronies created. It was so great that Barney was able to blame the banks and Bush for the housing bubble collapse, can’t wait to see how Barney manages this conversion.

From IBD Editorials: Class Warfare’s Next Target: 401(k) Savings

In plain English, the idea is for the government to take your retirement savings in return for a promise to pay you some monthly benefit in your retirement years.

They will tell you that you are “investing” your money in U.S. Treasury bonds. But they will use your money immediately to pay for their unprecedented trillion-dollar budget deficits, leaving nothing to back up their political promises, just as they have raided the Social Security trust funds.

This “conversion” may start out as an optional choice, though you are already free to buy Treasury bonds whenever you want. But as Karl Denninger of the Market Ticker Web site reports: “‘Choices’ have a funny way of turning into mandates, and this looks to me like a raw admission that Treasury knows it will not be able to sell its debt in the open market — so they will effectively tax you by forcing your ‘retirement’ money to buy them.”

Moreover, benefits based on Treasury bond interest rates may be woefully inadequate compensation for your years of savings. As Denninger adds, “What’s even worse is that the government has intentionally suppressed Treasury yields during this crisis (and will keep doing so by various means, including manipulating the CPI inflation index) so as to guarantee that you lose over time compared to actual purchasing power.”

Considering that the Chinese are selling off their US bonds and not buying anymore US bonds these Democrat robber barons are looking for their next shill to rob and that is once again YOU, the American citizen!

Obama 401k scheme, 401k ponzi scheme, Jeff Bingaman D-NM, Herb Kohl D-WI, Jim McDermott D-WA, George Miller D-CA

This is good from FoxieNews.

Pants on the ground, cartoon, debt

Not so good? Well, this is one of the schemes Obama is planning. Forcing you to convert your 401k investment into annuities having the government as the annuity salesman. It’s bad enough that the likes of Rep. Barney Frank forced banks into the CRA using Janet Reno holding a sledgehammer over lending institutions heads. Then protecting Fannie and Freddie into insolvency so the US Taxpayers have to give unlimited funds to cover the CRA mess Barney and his Democrat cronies created. It was so great that Barney was able to blame the banks and Bush for the housing bubble collapse, can’t wait to see how Barney manages this conversion.

From All American Blogger we read about the plan detailed in Business Week.

But what you won’t read in the Business Week article is this from Will Collier of Pajamas Media:

As noted later in the article, “Seven in 10 U.S. households would object to a requirement that retirees convert part of their savings into annuities,” and the “why” of that opinion isn’t that hard to figure out: they’re a bad deal for everybody except the guys selling them. Consumer gurus like Clark Howard have been warning people away from high-commission “guaranteed” annuities for years. I bet everyone reading this knows of somebody who’s been ripped off by an annuity salesman.

But now … now the government would be the annuity salesman – except that if the administration gets its wish, there won’t be any “selling,” you’ll just be forced to take the money you’ve earned and “convert” it to a construct that they’ll allow you to “invest” in. No more of this willy-nilly mutual fund nonsense for you plebeians; we’ll tell you how you’re going to pay for things, so hand over the cash – it’s your patriotic duty!

It would be plenty bad enough if the “guaranteed” government annuities were limited to bailed-out insurers like AIG. But Karl Denninger of The Market Ticker took a deeper look and found an even scarier outcome. Denninger believes this is really a scheme to prop up the market for Treasury bonds by forcing citizens to “invest” in them.

As Denninger points out, “Forcing people into Treasuries as an ‘annuity’ is exactly what Social Security allegedly is. Except that Treasury stole the money that was collected in FICA taxes and spent it!”

Another Ponzi Scheme from the Democrats to rape and pillage the US Taxpayer.

Obama 401k scheme, 401k Ponzi Scheme, Jeff Bingaman D-NM, Johnny Isakson R-GA, Herb Kohl D-WI

Back in May of this year this massive tax hike was broached by Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) and now Pelousi is talking about it. For those who don’t understand what a VAT would mean, think of it as a widget that is going to be produced for the market. At every point in the making of that widget a tax is added to it’s cost. Each hand that touches that widget adds taxes. If you want to add 20% to the cost of anything you buy then you’d love the Euro style VAT.  By the way, this doesn’t mean that ANY other taxes will be going away, it means the VAT will be in ADDITION to all the other taxes we pay.

Back in May I had posted on the new drive by the Democrats to shove a VAT down our throats:

There is nothing these Democrats controlling Congress and Obama will not do to kill the capitalist engine and destroy the US economy. To pay for all their wild spending and socialist mandates they finally have gone where they never dared to go in the past. A National Sales Tax or Value Added Tax (VAT).

Sen. Conrad broaching the VAT was just the opening salvo, now Pelousi is upping the ante.

From The Foundry:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi joined a growing liberal chorus calling for a massive tax hike through the implementation of a value added tax (VAT). A VAT is similar to a national sales tax. Businesses would pay it at each stage of the production process and consumers at the cash register. European countries have had VATs for years.

Francis Cianfrocca wrote about “Get Ready for the VAT” last May in Redstate:

My expectation was that Obama would wait till after the midterm election in November 2010, and then start sending out surrogates to float the idea of a VAT. After he himself was safely re-elected in 2012, he would come out and champion the idea himself and get it done.

It looks like we won’t have to wait that long. Already, the PR push has started. Eighteen months ahead of what I thought the schedule would be.

The push he’s referring to comes from a Washington Post story which I referenced in my May posting:

latest move by Democrats and Obama to push this new hobbling and crippling of the economy.
At a White House conference earlier this year on the government’s budget problems, a roomful of tax experts pleaded with Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner to consider a VAT. A recent flurry of books and papers on the subject is attracting genuine, if furtive, interest in Congress. And last month, after wrestling with the White House over the massive deficits projected under Obama’s policies, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee declared that a VAT should be part of the debate.

“There is a growing awareness of the need for fundamental tax reform,” Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) said in an interview. “I think a VAT and a high-end income tax have got to be on the table.”

This is the plan folks, this will be what HAS to be done to save the country and it will need to be IMMEDIATELY. At least IMMEDIATELY after the Dems and Obama pass takeover of healthcare and the energy industry.

VAT, Obama, Pelosi, Democrats, push for tax expansion

This story is being reported in the UK Independent which Ralph Bristol mentioned on his radio show this morning.

The demise of the dollar

In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading

By Robert Fisk
Tuesday, 6 October 2009

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years.

Read the rest of the story.

Oil, trading oil in dollars,