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 January 4th, 2011

My Old Kentucky Home – No More!

by @ 21:10. Filed under Immigration, Politics - Kentucky.

As many of you know, after spending my entire life in Minnesota, (except for the year that all Minnesotans are required to spend in Iowa for penance) Mrs. Shoe, the Things and I loaded up the Beverly Hillbillies truck and moved to Kentucky.  As attuned to Minnesota politics as I had become, I am nearly as untuned to the political scene in Kentucky.

Reading a few web news stories I came across this from my own new backyard:

Ky. Republicans file immigration bill as promised

Kentucky Republicans are attempting to pass an immigration enforcement law ala Arizona. The Kentucky version would allow law enforcement to arrest illegal immigrants for trespassing if they are found on
“any public or private land in this state.” As the article notes, that should cover all property in Kentucky. Even though the Democrats here tend to be of the blue dog variety, I’m not placing a lot of money on the final passage of this bill given the Senate (where the bill was introduced) is controlled by the Republicans and the House is controlled by the Democrats.

Regardless of whether the bill passes, I find some of the comments and arguments against the bill illuminating.

The local representative of the Catholic Church, similar to how this issue is handled everywhere by the Catholic Church says this about the bill:

“It’s much broader and much more harmful than the Arizona law,” said the Rev. Patrick Delahanty, head of the Catholic Conference of Kentucky, which is opposing the bill. “This bill does nothing but turn people who are generally hard-working and law-abiding into criminals and drains resources from local governments and police departments that ought to be put into protecting citizens from serious criminals.”

(emphasis mine)

Um, Rev. Patrick, doesn’t the fact that they broke they law to get here and continue to break the law to stay here, fly in the face of your assertion that they are “generally…law-abiding?” Haven’t they turned themselves into criminals but not following our immigration laws?

The good Reverend goes on to display his ignorance of all things not theological with his follow up statement:

Delahanty said Republicans are trying to solve a problem with illegal immigrants that doesn’t exist in Kentucky. The Kentucky Long-Term Policy Research Center estimated last year that Kentucky has about 30,000 illegal immigrants.

I wonder at what level Reverend Delahanty believes the law should be enforced. Should one person speeding be OK but two not? How about drunk drivers? Vandalism; how much should be OK?

More and more I see Catholics at least talking about (I can’t say I’ve actually heard that Pelosi and others have been denied Communion) not conveying Communion to a Communicant who lives in unrepentant sin. I can only assume that Reverend Delahnty follows the Catholic Church in this regard. Isn’t it ironic that when dealing with issues of eternal life the Reverend likely believes that unrepentant sin has consequences but in our momentary, earthly life it shouldn’t?

Budget Chop – Oil and Gas Management

by @ 20:10. Filed under Budget Chop, Energy, Politics - National.

I’ve already highlighted the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management for the need of a budget reduction.  My argument at the time was that if they didn’t want to issue any permits for drilling, there wasn’t need for more than one person to be able to answer the phone and say “NO!”

In one of the first acts of the new year, the Obama administration announced that they would now allow 13 companies to resume their deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.  While this doesn’t mean that they will be issuing new permits, I take this as a sign that the Administration is concerned that my suggestions are sure to be implemented.

It’s becoming clearer and clearer that despite Obama’s rhetoric about job creation, there is no desire to create jobs in the oil and gas industry.  The Energy Information Administration now projects that offshore energy production will be nearly 20% below what they had predicted for the year.  That shortfall translates into thousands of lost jobs and the wages associated with them.  Not only does the Administration’s war on fossil fuels cause lost jobs, it also causes lost revenues.

According to this spreadsheet (I’ve verified them to the reported revenue) in FY 2008, the Federal Treasury received over $22 Billion in revenue from all oil and gas leasing activity.  in FY 2009, that number dropped to to under $9 Billion and in FY 2010 it was about $8 Billion. Now admittedly, there was approximately $10 Billion of “bonuses” received in 2008 which inflates that number a bit. However, even when adjusting for that, revenue to the treasury for oil and gas leasing has dropped by 33% in just two years.

Let’s recap:  No new leasing, more drilling area restrictions, lost jobs and wages….Oh, that’s not so bad…..

Former executive predicts gas to hit $5 by 2012

NRE 2010 Awards – News Story of the Year

by @ 5:00. Filed under NRE 2010 Awards.

Welcome to Day 4 of the NRE 2010 Awards. Today, we focus on the biggest news story of the past year. As a review/preview, here’s the rest of the schedule:

– Jackass of the Year, 1/1
– Thank You for Existing, 1/2
– Dumbest Thing Said, yesterday
– Person of the Year, tomorrow

And the nominees are…

The November election (from realdebate) – Never in my lifetime have I seen such a dramatic shift. The country saw real liberalism in action and rejected it soundly. Major kudos to Wisconsin which had the biggest turn around of any state in the nation: 2 Congresscritters, The Governor’s Office, the State Assembly & Senate and of course a US Senate seat. The left still doesn’t understand it, they just think people who don’t agree with their world view are stoopid.

Passage of Placebocare (Shoebox) – I don’t think there’s any question that the passage of this bill crystalized the anti Obama, anti Democrat, anti incumbent and anti Rino movement that culminated in the elections of 2010.  Sure, people were upset about the stimulus bill, sure, people were upset about the finance bill and numerous other efforts by Democrats to make us less free and more beholden to our D.C. masters.  However, passage of Placebocare, in spite of overwhelming public sentiment against it, showed even those in the electorate middle that we could no longer tolerate the arrogance of the D.C. meritocrisy mentality.  I hope the sleeping giant of the silent majority has finally been awakened….we’ll find out as 2011 plays out.

Chilean mine rescue (from Kevin Fischer) – Trapped in a Chilean mine for 69 days, how did Edison Pena and the other 33 workers survive? With help from the King. Appearing on the David Letterman Show, Pena said the miners found comfort in listening to Elvis on a specially-delivered MP3 player sent into the mine. Without publicity, Elvis Presley Enterprises sent whatever material could fit into a tube: DVDs, CDs, Elvis sunglasses. The men entertained themselves in sing-a-longs to lift their spirits while they waited for help. The Memphis Commercial Appeal wrote this headline: “Elvis to the rescue-The King’s music soothed Chilean miners.”

President Barack Obama becomes President George W. Bush. (From Phineas) This is really more of a theme over several stories, but it also is a story in itself. Riding a wave of Bush-bashing into office and promising to be anything but Bush, Obama found himself time and again mugged by reality and force to continue Bush’s policies: tax rates, military commissions for terrorists, Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan… One can almost hear Obama speak with a Texas twang. The irony is laughable.

The national debt tops $14 trillion (from steveegg) – Up until very late last night, I was going to pretty much repeat last year’s choice of the Tea Party Movement getting vocal (and this time, power), while those in government doubled (this time tripled with both halves of the bipartisan Party-In-Government taking part) down on stupid. However, I’ll get ahead of the fiscal curve and explain why a specific element of that, the debt hitting 95% of the Gross Domestic Product, is going to be THE STORY. Yes, we’ve been in that territory before. However, there are three big differences between 1946 and 2011:

  1. There isn’t 16 years of pent-up demand just beginning to be met to drive the GDP up to a point where the debt load becomes manageable.
  2. On a related note, we’re not the sole source of goods like we were after World War II.
  3. The nature of the debt is far different – rather than the debt being almost exclusively past obligations that, once met, don’t recur, a significant portion is on future obligations that are only increasing.

Sooner or later, the house of cards is going to get a “major makeover”, and another 2-year delay in a serious attempt at a crash diet means it’s more likely that “major makeover” will be a collapse.

Number of the day – $14,025,215,218,708.52

by @ 0:34. Filed under Economy Held Hostage, Politics - National.

That number is the total amount of federal government debt outstanding as of 12/31/2010. Of that, $9,390,476,088,043.35 (plus about $10 million, or if you prefer, $0.00001 trillion in what is termed “guaranteed debt of government agencies” that is somehow not part of the public debt but is part of the “debt subject to limit”), and $4,585,749,068,174.55 in “intragovernmental debt” (that would be, for the most part, the various “Trust Funds”). To put it in a bit of text perspective, the Gross Domestic Product was $14.119 trillion in 2009, and if projections can be believed, will come in at just over $14.7 trillion in 2010. That makes the public debt just under 64% of GDP and total debt over 95% of GDP.

That dry text doesn’t, however, do it justice. I decided to go through 40 years’s worth (or, give or take a few shakes of a lamb’s tail, about the length of time I’ve been walking the Earth) of calendar-year-ending Monthly Statements of the Public Debt, grab the GDP for each of those years (estimated for 2010), and whip up a “little” frightening chart for you:


Click for the full-size chart

The short version of that chart:

  • Between 1970 and 1981, total debt remained right around the 37% of GDP, and publicly-held/guaranteed debt remained right around 27% of GDP.
  • Publicly-held debt plateaued right about 40% of GDP between 1986 and 1989, but because of changes to Social Security, the increasing intragovernmental debt, which crossed the 10% of GDP threshhold in 1988, caused total debt to continue to increase at an unchanged rate.
  • Sticking with intragovernmental debt briefly, it steadily increased to a high of nearly 32% of GDP in 2009 before multiple “trust funds” began running deficits, both primary (cash) and gross, helping to increase the publicly-held debt as said “trust funds” get monetized through borrowing while there is exactly $0.00 set aside or otherwise available for the purpose.
  • Back to the publicly-held debt, it again plateaued at 50% of GDP between 1992 and 1996, with total debt plateauing around 68% of GDP, before “unified budget surpluses” and a gangbusters economy allowed them to go down as a function of GDP.
  • By 2000, total debt dropped to about 57% of GDP, with publicly-held debt hitting its post-1981 low of 33% of GDP in 2001. While publicly-held debt remained about 37% of GDP through 2007, the increasing reliance on “trust fund” surpluses caused total debt to increase to about 66% of GDP in 2007.
  • The muzzle came off the debt monster in 2008, with publicly-held debt increasing to about 64% of GDP and total debt increasing to about 95% of GDP by the end of 2010.

Several of those in my bloated feed reader, like Dad29, Zip, Allahpundit Stephan Tawney, and ultimately NRO’s Corner crew, found yet another utterance from Barack Obama that has reached its expiration date – one from a 2006 debate in which he opposed raising the debt limit as Senator, an act which his economic advisor now calls “insanity”:

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here. Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.

The publicly-held debt was 37.3% of GDP at the end of 2005 and 36.6% of GDP at the end of 2006, while total debt was 64.6% of GDP at the end of 2006 and 64.4% of GDP at the end of 2006.

Revisions/extensions (7:02 am 1/4/2011) – The Emperor links, and provides a further link to Aaron Worthing at Patterico’s Pontifications and the full Obama remarks that were walked back. The relevant extension:

Over the past 5 years, our federal debt has increased by $3.5 trillion to $8.6 trillion. That is “trillion” with a “T.” That is money that we have borrowed from the Social Security trust fund, borrowed from China and Japan, borrowed from American taxpayers. And over the next 5 years, between now and 2011, the President’s budget will increase the debt by almost another $3.5 trillion.

For those who can’t do the math, Obama was complaining about a potential $12.1 trillion total debt by the end of 2011. Well, we’re at just over $14 trillion before we got to the beginning of Calendar Year 2011 (or if you prefer, a quarter of the way through Fiscal Year 2011). The kicker – had Pelosi taken up Obama’s proposed budget, the total debt would be $15.1 trillion at the end of FY2011.

R&E part 2 (7:45 am 1/4/2011) – Dan Spencer points out just how much the debt has gone up under Nancy Pelosi’s now-expired Speakership – $44,662 for every man, woman and child who make up the 310,574,015 U.S. populace.

A minor point of order – the first 9 months of 2008 were largely budgeted by the prior Congress, while the last 3 were budgeted solely by Pelosi and Senate Democrat leader Harry Reid. That explains why the deficit, at least as a percentage of GDP, didn’t increase all that much in 2007.

I might redo the chart to reflect fiscal years instead of calendar ones, but it is a bear to get the numbers.

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