No Runny Eggs

The repository of one hard-boiled egg from the south suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (and the occassional guest-blogger). The ramblings within may or may not offend, shock and awe you, but they are what I (or my guest-bloggers) think.

Archive for February 27th, 2009

Home Work Assignment

by @ 20:29. Filed under Miscellaneous.

As you watch the Obama Administration:

  • Spend money they don’t care how they’ll ever pay back
  • Nationalize entire industries
  • Force other industries into permanent national servitude by virtue of providing financial advantage to a few of the large competitors
  • Promulgate policies that rewards inefficiency and punishes accomplishment all in the name of “fairness”

Are you feeling like you’re living in the middle of a made for TV movie?   Do you wonder how this can possibly be happening and why didn’t someone see this coming?   Someone did.

If you haven’t, or even if you have but it’s been awhile, go out this weekend and plunk down $8.95 for the paperback version of Atlas Shrugged.   Yes, it’s a long book but you don’t need to read it all this weekend.   Find time to read the first 200 pages.   We will be testing on your assignment next week!

Real Man Of Genius!

by @ 20:28. Filed under Miscellaneous.

Reason.tv salutes you, Mr. Plagiarizing, Gaffe-Prone, Hair-Plug-Wearing Vice President.

You’ve got to love the Reason TV folks…equal opportunity skewerers!

TARP Repaid

by @ 16:27. Filed under Business, Economy.

A ray of hope on a Friday afternoon.   This article just breaking from Reuters:

Iberiabank shares rally, to repay TARP loans

This is the first bank to fully repay loans it received under the TARP.

Most interesting is the reason they are paying their TARP loan back:

“Recent actions, interpretations, and commentary regarding various aspects of the program places our company at an unacceptable competitive disadvantage,” the bank said in a statement, adding that continued participation “is no longer in the best interest of our company and its shareholders.”

Translation:   We’re tired of having the government looking over our shoulder and having to be worried about stupid people seconding guessing every action we take to run our bank!

I also just heard but haven’t been able to confirm, that Northern Trust Corp., the bank that just got all the negative PR over the party they recently threw, is also soon to pay its loan back.

Brief CPAC Friday AM/Chicago Tea Party, DC edition update

by @ 13:09. Tags: ,
Filed under Conservatism.

– Listened to a number of Congresscritters in the early morning session before catching up with Kevin Binversie. He may have less blogs in his reader than I do, but he makes the most of them.

– Bailed out for the DC Tea Party at Lafayette Park with Doug Welch, Skye, and a few others, and because I’m the guy with the most Metro experience, I got to be tour guide. We had a few hundred people in, Skye got interviewed by Joe the Plumber, and I hit a trifecta in run-ins: Uncle Jimbo, concretebob (both sporting Don’t Be A Dou’Che shirts) and Michelle Malkin. When I get back to the room and if I am not too hammered, I will have cell-“quality” pics up. The good news is I likely won’t have to do another 26-minute walk; the Metro runs later Fridays and Saturdays.

Back to the fun.

Call Me Carnac

by @ 10:42. Filed under Call me Carnac, Economy, Politics - National.

So you thought I was just pulling numbers out of my rectum with my earlier post?   How about this:

Economy shrinks at fastest pace in 26 years

Specifically, look at this statistic:

With Friday’s figures, Mayland lowered his forecast for this year to show a deeper contraction of just over 2 percent.

Hmmmm, President Obama said it was only going to be -1.2% when most private economists were already saying -2.2%.   Seems like President Obama is “ofer” in his attempt to prognosticate economic statistics.   It’s going to take a lot of hope to think his forecasting prowess will improve anytime soon.

An extra entrant in the Deep Tunnel Awards

by @ 9:23. Filed under Envirowhackos.

(H/T – Jon Ham)

The New York Times reports on the next target of the envirowhackos – comfortable toilet paper. The story hits all the hot-button envirowhacko issues, from how many trees are cut down to how much water is used to bleach to (yes, you guessed it) Gorebal “Warming”.

For those of you not from Milwaukee, there’s a reason why I invoked Charlie Sykes’ Deep Tunnel Awards (which are aired on 620WTMJ every Friday at about 11:35 am Central). The local sewer utility, MMSD (The Clean Crappy Water People), has a somewhat/almost/not quite deep enough tunnel, and MMSD tends to dump sewage (be it “blended” or “raw”) when the “100-year rains” hit on the average 3-4 times a year. That also sort of wipes out the landfill argument, because those dumps tend to send toilet paper into Lake Michigan.

Revisions/extensions (1:16 pm 2/27/2009) – Speaking of Charlie, he’s all over this.

Obamanomics 101

by @ 5:19. Filed under Economy, Politics - National.

Between,  his Tuesday night address to Congress and a speech today, President Obama has revealed his budget proposals not only for the coming fiscal year but in large part, for the length of his Presidency.

First, let’s deal with the issue that is budget proposals are somehow different than those provided by previous administrations.   They aren’t.   While there have been different methods of presenting the budget such as continuing operations versus special appropriations for Iraq, there has been one constant comparable in all of them; the increase in debt required to service them.   Put in other words, each of the fiscal years, regardless of how the budget was compiled, can be compared based upon the year end debt that they created.

When President Bush took office, the US debt was approximately $5.7 Trillion.   At the end of Bush’s first term, total debt was $7.4 T, an average increase of $350 Billion per year.   During Bush’s second term debt ended around $10.6 T with $1.6 T of that coming in the last year alone.   If you take out the last year the average increase was $500 billion per year and that was while paying for the Iraq war.

Enter President Obama.

I won’t pick apart what he’s done to the deficit this year, except to say that while Obama is quick to talk about what he “inherited,” he’s not so ready to discuss that he is just as responsible for the $1.75 T projected deficit of this year as Bush is.   After all, wasn’t it than   Senator Barack Obama who assured us that he was “just a phone call away” working to persuade Congress to pass the $700 B TARP.   And wasn’t PEBO who was consulted on the auto bailout?   Wasn’t it also PEBO who made the ultimate decision on requesting the second tranche for Tarp?   Finally, as President Obama wasn’t it he who led the way to the stimulus package, the largest single expenditure ever in the US?   The only people who believe that this deficit was “inherited” are those who worship at the altar of Obama or simply chose to be ignorant.

Moving past ’09, President Obama’s budget plan will optimistically, increase the US debt by a minimum of $1T in the first two years and $500 B in the second two years of his administration, a total of a $3 T increase in debt in only 4 years!   Enormous deficits especially when you consider that  Obama will no longer have a war to finance, he will not have to spend to “reclaim the economy” after this year and the previous CBO budget had projected that the deficits during this same time frame would be “merely” $1.7 T!

I noted that the deficits that Obama is projecting are optimistic.   In fact, the deficits are likely not even nearly achievable.   Why do I say that?   After all, isn’t part of Obama’s plan to increase taxes on “the rich,” close loopholes and find other ways to raise tax revenue?   Yes he is.   However, Obama has overlooked one very basic economic fundamental.

Back in June of last year I introduced you to Hauser’s Law.   Hauser’s Law, simply put, says that no matter what you do to tax rates, how you open or close tax loopholes, whether you increase one type of rate and decrease another, tax income tends to equalize around 19.5% of GDP.   Nobody can explain for certain why this happens but, when you see a trend that holds over nearly 60 years, across numerous administrations, spending and taxing philosophies, if it isn’t a law, it should be made one.  

What’s Hauser’s Law got to do with Obama’s deficits?   Simple.

Obama is banking on a rapid return of income that he can tax.   Obama’s budget assumes that growth will be negative 1.2% this year returning to a robust 3.2% next year.   The CBO which is in line with many private economists, believes growth will be negative 2.2% this year and positive 1.5% next year.   Doesn’t sound like much until you realize that Hauser’s Law says that each percentage point equates to about $28 B of missed tax revenue and that it compounds over the time frame.   If Obama is off by just 1% in each of the years that translates to a deficit understatement of over $130 B (remember when a Billion used to be a big number?).   If the CBO is right and Obama wrong, the first two years alone will translate to over $130 B with additional shortages in the last two years because of a lower GDP run rate.  

As an aside, isn’t it ironic that Obama’s budget is highly optimistic in projecting revenue when he’s been telling us for months that this is the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression?   If you look at what happened to GDP the years following the depression Obama is not just optimistic, he’s delusional!

On top of the overly optimistic growth rates is another problem for Obama’s tax revenue.   Obama has committed to significantly increasing a number of taxes to increase the revenue.   He has even proposed a new tax, a carbon tax to generate significant amounts of new revenue.   Economists of all persuasions will tell you that increasing taxes will reduce overall GDP.   Increasing taxes on something will always cause less of that something to be consumed or created.   Don’t believe me?   Just take one look at what is happening to cigarette consumption as taxes continue to be increased on them…it’s not going up!   Now we can discuss what the elasticity of that change is i.e. do you have to double the taxes before GDP is impacted or will a 1% increase in taxes impact GDP.   However, Hauser’s law says that the elasticity discussion is moot.   Hauser’s Law will say that the very fact that less GDP is generated will result in less tax revenue being generated regardless of what the actual rates are.

Everything Obama does is for the optics or in how the action supports his ideology.   It’s too bad that he doesn’t approach issues from an actual intelectual honesty and curiousity.   If he had in the case of his budget, he may have learned the core fact from Hauser’s Law:

Putting it a different way, capital migrates away from regimes in which it is treated harshly, and toward regimes in which it is free to be invested profitably and safely. In this regard, the capital controlled by our richest citizens is especially tax-intolerant.

Contrary to Obama and Gibb’s protestations that this is the first budget with “full disclosure,” this is a budget that is built on more optimism than all the “Hope” in Obamaland.   The budget will fail on any measure of fiscal integrity and responsibility.   My hope is that the country doesn’t fail economically along with it.

Brief CPAC very-early Friday morning update

by @ 1:33. Tags:
Filed under Conservatism.

– I attended a very interesting session on Al Franken and ACORN, which I recorded for a couple people who had other engagements on and around Bloggers’ Row (which makes up for the piss-poor performance on TEMS).

– I was “intercepted” by a few friends while on my way to the official CPAC dinner (note to self: save $550 if you show up next year by not buying the diamond package). It turned into a bloggers’ dinner with Kevin Binversie, Stephen Green, Sean Hackbarth, Melissa Clouthier, Katie Favazza, Fausta Wertz, Rick Moran, and a few others my alcohol-addled brain (more on that in a bit) can’t quite remember. Random question; should I be disturbed that Kevin called me instead of Sean to find out where everybody was?

– Afterwards, most of us ended up back at the Omni’s bar, where I split time between that group and Doug Welch. Eventually, Mary Katharine Ham and then Ace rolled in. No, you’re not going to get what was said from me; I have been bound to silence, and before I tell you, I would have to kill you. However, it was worth missing the last Metro train back to the Carlyle and taking a 26-minute walk back.

Given it’s somewhere around 2:30 Eastern, the first speaker is up at 8 local, and the DC Tea Party in Lafayette Park is at noon, I am calling it a night.

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