The Great Bank Run

Does anyone remember during Obama's State of the Union Address when Obama announced that he would create a new kind of retirement account, (Lovingly called) the MyRA – which uses your retirement savings to buy U.S. Treasures and pay for U.S. debt?

Obama’s announcement follows a number of startling events which demonstrate how desperate the government is becoming:  with nowhere else to turn, the government is making a last-ditch effort to seize personal savings & retirement to fund the nation’s insurmountable debt.  And there’s only ONE thing you can do to stop it from happening. So I'm going to give you the up & up on what this scam is designed to do.

The U.S. debt, not including unfunded liabilities, is over $17 trillion dollars.  And the U.S. Treasury estimates our debt to go over $28 trillion by 2018!  In order to finance this debt, the Federal Reserve has been buying 90% of the U.S. Treasury market through money-printing stimulus, to the tune of $80 BILLION per month for the last several years.  And we all know that the Fed has begun tapering its stimulus program because they can no longer afford to fund the national debt.

So if the Fed is going insolvent, who do you think the government will lean on to pick up the slack?  The answer is YOU.  10,000 Baby Boomers will turn 65 years-old every day until 2030.  And while the government has a debt problem of $17 trillion, not so coincidentally, our country's IRAs, 401Ks and other retirement accounts amount to right around $19 Trillion.  What a convenient resource for the Federal Government!

Master Plan, Stage 1:  Get YOU to Finance the Debt

Obama suddenly announces in his State of the Union Address that he’s got a great “no risk” idea for Americans saving for their retirement.  His exact words:  “I will direct the Treasury to create a new way for working Americans to start their own retirement savings:  MyRA.  It’s a new savings bond that encourages folks to build a nest egg.  MyRA guarantees a decent return with no risk of losing what you put in.”

In other words, YOU the American taxpayers will start buying U.S. Treasuries because the insolvent Fed can no longer do so.  Whenever anyone tells you an investment is “no risk,” you know you’re being sold another Wallstreet.gov scam.  No risk?  Nonsense.  If you buy a 10-year Treasury bill now, you’re locked in at a low interest rate – a rate that has been kept artificially low by Fed stimulus.  Well, Fed stimulus is ending.  And that means we’re headed into an inflationary environment where interest rates have nowhere to go but up.  So in other words, your bond investments lose significant value EVERY SINGLE YEAR. Hardly no risk.


And how do you feel about investing in a mountain of unsustainable debt?  Most experts (and anyone with common sense) have demonstrated how our national debt levels can NEVER be paid off.  And now, those same experts are predicting the imminent collapse of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency.  So if the market for U.S. Treasuries is drying up and the demand for U.S. dollars implodes, does investment in America’s debt seem like a “no risk” move to you?

Master Plan Stage 2:  Confiscation of Retirement Accounts

So, what happens if you’re not willing to invest in Obama’s MyRa?  How does the government get the funding it needs to continue financing and growing the debt?  The answer:  FORCE you to make your retirement funds accessible to the government.

Lauren Schmitz

If you do some research on US Bill “HB5337,” you will find the plan to nationalize retirement wealth.  On May 6, 2012 Lauren Schmitz, a research analyst at the Bernard L Schwartz Center for Economic Analyst (SCEPA), introduced HB5337.  This 401(k)/IRA de-privatization is the brainchild of Teresa Ghilarducci, whom through funding from the White House and the Ford & Rockefeller Foundations engineered a new “Regulatory & Tax Incentive.” The purpose is to force Americans to convert their Retirement Accounts into Government Managed accounts.

The government will nationalize retirement accounts like IRAs, 401Ks, pensions, 403Bs, etc. so that you will be forced to use a portion of your retirement wealth to purchase U.S. government debt – debt that will ultimately default, as it is not possible to sustain our astronomical debt nor the deficits that create it.


This plan to nationalize private 401K and IRA retirement accounts is being deceptively publicized as the government protecting the public against business failings or state bankruptcies.  But the reality is, your cash, your retirement funds, your bank deposits and your investments are at huge risk of being confiscated by the government through some contrived reason or another.

The Only Way Out

So the government is giving you two options:  fund the debt willingly, or fund the debt by force.

Given those two “options,” it might seem like you have no control over your savings & retirement.  But don’t be fooled – You DO have control. You can REMOVE a portion of your savings & retirement from a financial system on the brink of collapse and store your wealth instead in the ONE asset that lives outside the madness, CAN’T be harmed by the debt disaster or dollar collapse, CAN’T default, and CAN’T be confiscated with the stroke of a key on a computer: REAL PHYSICAL GOLD AND SILVER.

Gold isn’t a debt instrument and isn’t made of paper,

Gold rises in value as the national debt increases.

Gold rises in value as the dollar falls.

Gold rises in value as inflation kicks in.

Gold is out of the government’s view and private.

Gold has outlasted every paper currency the world has ever known.


Gold triumphs when nation’s fail.

Conservatism Unplugged: Where did all the money go?

Politics brings out the worst in us. One is more vile the more there is at stake.

Leveraging a little animus, It turns mere opposition into hate.

The lava bubbling underneath each heart, Inhibited by guilt or love or fear, Comes bursting forth, by scribes with subtle art Stoked vigorously as new elections near.

If ever there has been a president who has failed to give the middle class of America a fair shot, it is Barack Obama. Voters acknowledge that President Obama has mishandled the economic recovery, failed to confront our fiscal problems, embraced unpopular legislation, contravened the law through executive orders, broken numerous pledges on taxes, taking public monies, hiring lobbyists and publishing bills before they are signed, managed to blame his problems on anyone handy and cynically chosen to severely divide the country. And yet, in spite of these monumental shortcomings, Mr. Obama is deemed “likeable” and is running even with Romney.   

With the billions in stimulus dollars that was given to foreign companies, mostly to subsidize their own green energy projects. AFP President Tim Phillips said “The Obama Administration continues to waste our tax dollars trying to pick winners and losers. This leads to overspending, no new job creation, and inevitably creates government cronyism. The President wasted some $530 million on Solyndra, but now we’re finding billions more given to ‘green energy’ companies overseas. The American people deserve to know the disturbing details of how their tax dollars are being wasted in pursuit of an ideological agenda.”

The purpose of this posts is to review what I call "random wasteful spending" that exists throughout most, if not all, of the Federal bureaucracy. This is different from what I call "systemic wasteful spending" that is anything but random. Systemic wasteful spending occurs everyday, every month, every year, in the same manner, almost like clockwork. 

After following various reports of jailed convicts and illegal immigrants receiving unemployment checks from U.S. taxpayers, the Obama Administration has admitted that in fiscal year 2011 the government “overpaid” around $14 billion in benefits.

Wishing For A Bonner

Obama's $840 billion stimulus contained more than a million dollars to study erectile dysfunction, and yes, I know, any complaint will be identified as a war on men.

That would be in addition to a Republican war on women as alleged by zanies not liking perfectly sound criticisms of Obama's health insurance mindlessness.

That’s a chunk of change for a nation suffering through a painful debt crisis that’s topped $15 trillion. Like most bloated government programs, the Department of Labor’s (DOL) unemployment benefits— paid by state treasuries and the federal government—is rife with fraud and corruption. 



Estimates of stimulus benefits cannot possibly calculate the pluses of leaving more money in the private economy, and the Congressional Budget Office is among those worrying about long-term harm offsetting current advantages.
Thanks not just to the stimulus, but to fervor for more spending generally when revenues are down, the debt has grown by $5 trillion under Obama. That renders us vulnerable to immediate danger on top of saddling our grandchildren with impoverishing repayments.

The president has ignored corrective recommendations of his own debt commission, and this year offered a $3.8 trillion budget defeated 99-0 in a Senate vote that left Democrats making flimsy excuses for what was really a rejection of ruin.

Ours is a president of spectacular negligence. A prime example has been his refusal to propose changes in Social Security, Medicare (beyond cuts that were not overall budget deductions) and Medicaid, even though those three entitlements and debt interest will consume all federal tax revenues as soon as 2025 if not restructured.

Obama himself has even acknowledged that something has to be done, but instead of doing it, created a new health care entitlement worsening the jam we are in by more than a trillion dollars over the next decade. If you want an idea of how absurd Obama's $3.8 trillion budget request for 2013 is, consider the fact that he actually wants to increase funding for the U.S. Department of Energy.

CBS News reported this year that it found 12 "green" companies that got billions from Washington "then declared bankruptcy or are suffering other serious financial issues."

Beacon Power, one such company, was deemed by Standard & Poor's credit rating agency to have a 70 percent chance of failing. Yet that didn't stop the administration from giving Beacon tens of millions of dollars -- after which the company went under.

Harry Reid

It was also via the Energy Department that the Obama administration halted the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada. Taxpayers had pumped billions of dollars into Yucca Mountain so that it could accommodate spent nuclear fuel from around the country. But to please Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and environmentalists, the administration ended the project, and another huge investment by the Energy Department was lost.

Does that seem like an agency on which the president should want to spend more money for "clean-energy development"?

Not surprisingly, the $4 trillion in deficit reduction supposedly sought in the budget proposal would come "over 10 years." So even if Congress approves the president's plan, a future Congress could readily restore the money, and more.

At any rate, the "reductions" are dubious. The president claims huge savings from winding down the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but those "savings" largely represent money that was not going to be spent anyway. It's an accounting gimmick.

And private economists are challenging the president's reliance in his budget figures on rosy projections of 3 percent economic growth this year and next, when actual growth is struggling to maintain 1 percent. They say that is far higher than growth is actually likely to be.

Meanwhile, a series of destructive tax increases would be imposed on "the rich," on banks, and on the oil, gas and coal companies that meet most of our nation's energy needs. Do you want to pay more to heat your home and fill your gas tank?

And the president's plan gives scant attention to reforming Medicare and other programs that are the key drivers of rising debt.

Finally, the president wants well over $100 billion in new "stimulus" spending, a big part of it to hire more government workers despite the 2009 stimulus' failure to produce the projected jobs.

The president's chief of staff, Jacob Lew, openly rejected talk of real spending cuts.

"The time for austerity is not today," he said on a Sunday talk show.

Bob Corker

We disagree, and so does U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn.

"An honest analysis of the president's budget virtually eliminates the White House's claims of deficit reduction when you remove the spending cuts previously enacted in law, alleged savings from money for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that was never going to be spent, and nearly $2 trillion in new taxes," Corker stated in a news release.

Noting that our national debt -- $15.3 trillion -- is now as big as our entire economy, he added: "This budget makes a mockery of the American people. If a Republican or Democratic governor of Tennessee proposed a budget like this one, they would be run out of the state."

The president should start anew and offer a budget that relies on slashing wasteful and unconstitutional spending, not on growth-destroying tax increases and "stimulus."

Sound Work For Americans On The Keystone Pipeline? WAIT

Keystone Oil Pipeline

A controversial pipeline from Canada that the White House delayed last month would bring jobs and increase energy security in the United States.

Alexander J. Pourbaix

Time is absolutely of the essence to obtain the approvals needed so Americans can begin to experience the benefits of Keystone,” Alexander J. Pourbaix, president of energy and oil pipelines for TransCanada TRP -0.02% – the company that proposed the pipeline.

Brent Booker (L)

Brent Booker head of the construction arm of Laborers International Union of North America said that because of the jobs it would bring “this project is not just a pipeline, it is in fact a lifeline,” for his members.

Construction industry unemployment reached 27% in 2010 and hovered around 20% for much of last two years, he said. The pipeline would create 20,000 immediate jobs, and an additional 2.5 million jobs in the not-so-distant future Pourbaix and union members said.

“They would have started a couple months from now” without the delay, Pourbaix said. “Americans were hired and are "Very" ready to go to work.”

The pipeline would dramatically increase TransCanada’s capacity to bring tar sand oil from Canada to Texas and would ease crude oil gluts in Cushing, Okla. and North Dakota.

Opponents have protested the pipeline’s potential environmental impact to wetlands and higher levels of greenhouse gas produced by burning tar sands. A State Department report estimated an increase of between “3 and 21 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually” from burning fuel from tar sand instead of crude oil.

Last month President Barack Obama backed the decision by his State Department to delay a ruling on a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline until 2013 to study alternatives to the environmentally sensitive Sand Hills area in Nebraska.

Gov. Dave Heineman

Last week Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman signed a law ordering the state pay for a new environmental assessment to consider alternatives to the Sand Hills.

Wednesday a House Republican introduced a bill that would force the Obama administration approve the project.

committee chairman Ed Whitfield

“Since the president did not, Congress in my view must act,” said committee chairman Ed Whitfield, Republican from Kentucky. Obama’s decision to review the project “appears to be blatantly political,” he said. “This is the most technologically advanced and safest pipeline ever proposed.”

The State Department had already reviewed the project, Pourbaix said. With 27,000 monitoring points and the ability to remotely shut values, “Keystone will be safe,” he said.

Jane Fleming Kleeb

Jane Fleming Kleeb, head of nonprofit group Bold Nebraska that opposes the project as it stands, argued that tar sands had not been fully studied and cited problems cleaning up 800,000 gallons of tar sands oil that spilled into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan last year.

Kleeb said she stood with Obama in wanting to study the project further.

Look At The Bright Side



Signs of the recession; Falling oil prices 



Oil futures fell as the impasse over the U.S. debt ceiling hardened, while a surprise drop in U.S. durable-goods orders also weighed.

Later today, market participants should shift their attention to the U.S. Department of Energy's weekly report on U.S. oil and fuel inventories.

Light, sweet crude for September delivery was down 97 cents, or 1%, to $98.63 a barrel in early trade on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent crude on the ICE Futures Europe exchange fell seven cents, or 0.1%, to $118.21 a barrel.

U.S. Congress and Senate are still far from an agreement to raise the U.S. debt ceiling before Aug. 2, a date when the U.S. Treasury Department has said the government will run out of cash to pay its bills. Republican leaders have put forth a plan in the House of Representatives to raise the country's borrowing limit, but they delayed a vote on the bill until Thursday. 

AAA Credit Rating



If the government fails to reach an agreement, the three major ratings agencies have said they will downgrade the U.S.'s triple-A credit rating. That could raise the cost of borrowing and possibly slow the economic recovery in the world's biggest crude consumer. An actual default on U.S. obligations could be even more disastrous, some analysts warn.

"Ratings agencies can already easily make the case for a downgrade of the U.S. credit rating from AAA to AA," analysts at JBC Energy, a consultancy based in Vienna, said in a research report. "We think this is going to happen, reflecting not only the relatively dire state of the U.S. economy, but also the inability of the political system to cope with the current situation in a responsible manner."

Crude futures extended their losses following a surprise drop in U.S. durable-goods orders last month. The decline signals the sluggish economy is weighing on the country's manufacturing sector, a major user of energy.

Manufacturer's orders for goods like transportation, computers and machinery fell 2.1% to a seasonally adjusted $191.8 billion, the Commerce Department said. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires had expected orders would rise 0.4%.

Attention is likely to shift to the Energy Department's weekly report at 10:30 a.m. EDT. A similar report from the American Petroleum Institute late Tuesday showed a surprise increase in inventories, sending crude futures lower in after-hours trading.

The industry group said oil stockpiles rose four million barrels last week. A rise in stockpiles can signal weaker demand from refiners and can weigh on oil futures. 

I'm not playing fair but more people are using public transportation



Analysts are expecting the DOE to report a 1.4 million-barrel drop in U.S. oil inventories, according to a survey by Dow Jones Newswires. Gasoline stocks are seen rising 400,000 barrels, while inventories of distillates, including heating oil and diesel, are seen rising 1.7 million barrels.

Global Markets Everywhere



Will this Greek drama go out on a global tour?



That’s the fear as officials in Athens scramble to work out an austerity plan to avoid defaulting on the nation’s sovereign debt while some Greek voters riot in the streets.

Greek voters riot in the streets


Some market watchers worry Greece 2011 could be a replay of Lehman 2008 when it comes to market performance and economic growth. Greece defaults, markets tank, and the global economy spins into severe recession.

In the “Greece as Lehman redux” scenario, a default would force lenders, especially European banks, to write down billions in Greek loans. The losses would reduce bank capital and trigger a global credit crunch. That’s why rating agencies have put European banks under review for possible downgrade.

Certainly, there are reasons to worry that Greece’s problems could be the last straw for the recovery, especially because a default could bring the unanticipated. And recent data show the U.S. economy has throttled back significantly in the second quarter.

The biggest risk, however, isn’t Greece per se. It is the prospect of other peripheral euro members — Ireland, Spain, and Portugal — following Greece down the default path. That cascade effect has to be avoided.

The U.S. and global economies aren't in better shape than they were in 2008. If time heals all wounds, three years has done nothing in the way of healing economic excesses and the world banking system.

To be sure, sentiment can change on a dime, but, I doubt it, and the banking system seems to be taking it up the ..., well, you know.

Interbank rates remain extremely low. The three-month London interbank lending rate is creeping along below 0.25%. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, it soared above 4%.

Back then, almost all U.S. banks tightened standards on commercial loans — basically shutting off bank lending. At the same time, the commercial paper market froze, leaving businesses no access to cash to meet payrolls or maintain inventories.

Now, the latest Federal Reserve senior loan officer survey shows more bank are easing lending standards than are tightening them. And commercial paper outstanding is expanding so far this year.

Going Down in DEBT



Perhaps another key reason to expect the recovery to go belly up is the long build-up to a possible default. The global credit authorities and financial markets have been digesting this problem for more than a year, and are still where they were a year ago. Some participants think a default is inevitable; Greece should just do it.

Then the world can move on to an even bigger worry: whether the U.S. government will soon default on its debt.

How did the US economy get in such BAD shape

In life there is a tipping point for everything where what had seemed impossible has inched its way forward against the odds and is now about to pick up a lot of speed.



Unfortunately, a great example of that right now happens to be the unbridled of the U.S. economy. 

Example of Imbalenced


We appeared in the past to have enough checks and balances that things could get bad but not come undone to the point that the safeguards stopped working. It’s what allowed us the freedom to spend time arguing over the choice between big government or allowing the free market system to correct on its own. That last one is another way of saying let things unfold as they will, it can’t get but so bad and along the way all of the scams will get peeled away. And, it is the idea that will inevitably come into play if the imbalance, the tipping point becomes too weighted on either side.

In other words, when tinkering no longer works for whatever reasons a government has to either go to martial law or for a little while into an economic freefall till we hit the natural resting point. We appear to be sliding ever more quickly into that latter category. However, and this is really ironic, it’s the illusion of that idea that helped get us here in the first place.

The recent approach that was taken toward the housing market was supposed to be an easement of so much regulation but was more look the other way than step back. That helps to explain why the older policies from the New Deal, a time of big intervention, were also kept in place.

The intention wasn’t really to create a healthy free market system but to allow certain groups to take advantage of a situation. Therefore, no one was really analyzing what the effect would inevitably be toward having the federal government backing up mortgages for low-income families through the institutions Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and giving people with no money the opportunity to buy more than they could ever hope to pay back.

You see, we appeared to be choosing a free market system but we were practicing a rigged system.



Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were born out of an era when we were trying to fix the last time we got into this mess, the Great Depression after people were allowed to speculate in the stock market without having the money to back up their purchases. Once enough people decided to sell and expected to get paid with real money the illusion evaporated. There was never any money.

This time big government decided to remove regulations about lending practices and it became possible for people to get adjustable rate mortgages with balloon payments without having to show that the reality was they were pitifully undercapitalized.

Step two of our predicament happened the moment a shrewd employee of an investment firm noticed it was possible to take the sub-prime mortgages, or bad loans and sell them to everyone else. This was the equivalent of a gold rush but as usual, fool’s gold.

The third step came about when the ratings systems used by brokers, Moody’s, Fitch and Standard and Poor’s started helping the investment firms who were getting the ratings with some advice. The illusion was that there was a wall that separated the two sides but it’s now coming out that, well, that wasn’t true.

Step four occurred when the end-user, the guy-on-the-street started investing in mutual funds that were heavily invested in sub-prime mortgages. It tied all of us together in one giant knot so that when the entire thing unraveled it would hit us all.

One of the biggest moments that signaled things have definitely changed is when the Federal Reserve even in the shadow of inflation gave in and lowered the prime lending rate just a smidge yet again and Wall Street ignored the entire event.

It appears that investors of every size see the problem as bigger than any single event and therefore have concluded that no single fix is going to get us out of it. Perhaps if oil was not already pushing us to a financial breaking point with a lot of new realities we would already be looking at the worst of it but the truth is we don’t actually know what the bottom is just yet.

And, by the time we do, just like after the Great Depression, a lot of our cultural landscape may look very different, Like the ingrained American culture.

Why aren't blacks up-set over Obamas economy?



Get a job or get out



The Republican National Committee routinely fielded questions from black journalists about what the Bush White House and Republicans were going to do about the “alarmingly high” 11% unemployment rate for African-Americans. People were outraged when I had the audacity to point out that unemployment was still pretty low (the overall rate was 5%) and that there had been record-breaking continuous and consecutive job growth month-over-month. No matter, the black community was still in a “crisis.” And it was all the Republicans’ fault.

Apparently it still is. After all, who else can be blamed? Some folks get downright indignant at the mere thought that Obama would be challenged on this issue. Others dare not question his administration, perhaps for fear of being labeled racists. Others find themselves, as I recently did, engaged in a heated discussion with a brother who insisted (to the point of calling me a liar) that unemployment was far higher under Bush than it is under Obama. I also recall (during the Bush years) one angry young sister in a long line outside a Washington, D.C.-area gas pump when prices were $4 a gallon screaming how it was “all Bush’s fault.”

The economy has been far weaker under President Obama than it was under President Bush, which is why Obama’s disapproval rating on the economy is at 60%. Even after all of the bailing-out and “stimulating” that was supposed to create jobs and bring us back from the brink, we’re at over 9% unemployment nationwide. The unemployment rate for African-Americans stands at 16.2%.

Conservatives aren’t surprised by the economic consequences of Obama’s failed policies. What is surprising is the deafening silence among my counterparts in the press corps. No outrage. No outcry. Not a peep. People aren’t asking the same questions of this president that they asked of Bush. Where are the critical, “non-partisan” voices who spoke out against Bush? Are they calling the DNC and demanding action? Are civil rights leaders blaming “racist” Obama administration policies for not getting black folks out of these dire straits? Where is the equal-opportunity reporting?

It’s no coincidence that the Obama administration has begun to ramp up its so-called “outreach” to black Americans by touting a new African-American White House webpage. It’s not because President Obama has been successful at closing the achievement gap between white and black students, delivering on substantive health parity issues that plague minorities or creating incentives to help jumpstart minority businesses and create jobs. It’s because that’s what Democrats do when it comes time to court minority voters. They pull out the spit and polish to ensure the shoe looks shiny and new. It would behoove black media and GOP hopefuls to pay more attention to the worn-out sole rather than the shine.

 

Capsizing The US Economy





Much Like The Us Economy

  

Our economy supposedly has been in “recovery” for quite a few months now. But that is of little comfort to tens of millions of Americans who remain either involuntarily jobless or able to find only part-time work when they need full-time jobs.

Distressingly, our nation’s unemployment rate is rising once again. It increased from 9 percent in April to 9.1 percent in May, according to figures recently released by the U.S. Labor Department. About 14 million Americans are unemployed — a figure that doesn’t include millions who have given up trying to find jobs, and millions who need more work hours than they are able to get in the current economy. When those numbers are added in, the so-called “underemployment” rate is nearly 16 percent.

In May, about 54,000 jobs were created, the Labor Department reported. But that number — the lowest level of job creation in eight months — is hardly good news. With the natural growth of the size of the labor force from high school and college graduates, new immigrants and others entering the job market, the number of jobs created in May was only half what is needed even to keep up with the growth of the workforce. And it’s only about one-fourth of what is needed to actually reduce the rate of joblessness.

The persistent lack of jobs isn’t the only bad news about the economy, though.

The “recovery” that our country purportedly is experiencing is also painfully elusive to drivers every time they pay sky-high prices to fill their gas tanks. Even those who are fortunate enough to have jobs are seeing their purchasing power drop because of excessive fuel costs.

Homeowners are feeling the pinch, too. Home values have now dropped to their lowest level in more than nine years. Just since 2006, home prices have dropped more than they did during the Great Depression! Foreclosures, meanwhile, are continuing at a rapid pace, further depressing home values.

Upside Down Home Morgage


It’s hard to imagine that President Barack Obama will come up with reasonable suggestions for turning around these troubling economic trends. His previous ideas — most of which involve heavier federal spending — have generally met with failure.

On job creation, the Obama administration claimed that unemployment would not exceed 8 percent if only Congress passed the $862 billion “stimulus” in early 2009. Almost immediately after the stimulus passed, joblessness rose past the 8 percent mark, and not once since then has it gotten back down even to that painfully high level — much less below it. At the same time, the stimulus ballooned the already alarmingly high national debt and expanded the size and reach of government.

Shoval Ready Jobs



On gas prices, the president remains reluctant to allow thorough development of domestic oil supplies, which would reduce our reliance on oil from unstable foreign nations and would lower fuel costs. Instead, he continues to promote subsidies for costly ethanol, as well as for alternative energy such as solar and wind power.

As for housing prices, both Obama and the former Bush administration backed expensive tax credits for home buyers — credits that were supposed to boost the collapsing housing market. With that effort obviously having failed to achieve the desired results — while increasing our national debt — we can only hope that the federal government won’t intervene yet again to “help” the housing market.

Despite all these unhappy economic tidings, the Obama administration continues to insist that our nation is in “recovery” — and that still-higher taxes and greater spending are the path to prosperity.

We’re not sure how much more of that kind of “recovery” we can stand.