Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Because Bernanke has been flooding them with funny money, the accounting makes it appear that the profits of top US banks are up. If Bernanke dropped a bunch of funny money out of a helicopter into my bank account, it would look like I was making money too, but it's just funny money. I would be producing no more afterward than I am now. The same with our economy and those banks. Nothing has changed in the economy other than it has contracted more, and we know that because businesses are still cutting workers.

Government regulation does not work for a very simple reason:

"Nobel Prize winning economist George Stigler, who garnered fame for developing the "Economic Theory of Regulation," better known as the "Theory of Regulatory Capture," postulated 50 years ago that interest groups and political representatives will use the regulatory powers of government to shape laws and regulations to their advantage. It's no coincidence that Treasury Department heads originate from Wall Street."

Hello, Mr. Goldman.

"Kolko was one of the first academics to criticize the Progressive Era — the period of reform that lasted from the 1890s to the 1920s. Kolko's research discovered that free enterprise and competition were vibrant and expanding during the first two decades of the 20th century, until businesses began petitioning government for regulation in order to stem competition. Indeed, the 1913 Federal Reserve Act was the product of a banking reform movement initiated by big banks seeking to insulate themselves from small-bank competition."

This is the inevitable consequence of big government, of a government that interferes in our economy. There's no such thing as good government, only less bad government, and the only way to make government less bad is to make it smaller. The only way to make government significantly less bad is to make it significantly smaller.

Government's protection of big banks, which have a now explicit guarantee against failure, is harming small banks and wrecking our credit system. If our economy lasts that long, all banking and credit will end up in the few banks government declares are too big to fail, and government will control those banks. This is complete fascism (as opposed to the soft fascism we have now). All others will collapse. We'll have central planning of all banks done on Wall Street and in Washington. Imagine what this will do to business on main street that depends on local banks understanding the community.

"Small businesses, defined as employing anywhere from one to 49 people, account for 48 million jobs in the U.S., and medium-sized businesses, between 50 and 499 employees, account for 42 million jobs. Large businesses account for just 17 million. Without access to capital, these small and medium-sized businesses will continue to lay off their employees, creating a vicious cycle of shrinking consumer credit and demand."

We elected the two parties who have done this to us. We have nobody to blame but ourselves. Uh-oh. I didn't see this one coming, but I bet Obama did:

"If banks are being supported by taxpayer dollars as a public good, wouldn't it be logical to make Citigroup and Goldman part of the government so that they can serve the public like the Department of Motor Vehicles? The powerful banking lobby will likely prevent the nationalization of the entire banking system. But expect new challenges to our assumptions about the status quo if this recovery and the proposed regulatory reforms fail."

Those reforms are designed to fail. All this is designed to collapse our credit industry further, and it will. Then Obama will seize the financial firms he declares too big to fail. He's got it all worked out. He'll blame George Bush and claim he never wanted to do this when he took office.

TAX AND SPEND:

The tremendous danger of adopting a VAT tax in the US.

The fiscal insanity in Washington.

The Senate wants to suck $20 billion more out of the economy and pass it out as welfare to Democrat constituents in the name of economic stimulus that won't be called economic stimulus. If that makes any sense to you, I'd like to thank you for reading my blog, Senator.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

You would think that the story of the collapsing US dollar, the biggest economic story in the world outside the US, would be the biggest economic story in the US. Needless to say, it's not. All we keep hearing is that we're in recovery. What a load of crap.

"The biggest story in the world economy is the continuing fall of the U.S. dollar, or at least it is everywhere outside of Washington, D.C., the place most responsible for its declining value. For good reason, the world is wondering if America has cast the dollar adrift.
...
The Fed has been flooding the world with dollars in the name of preventing a U.S. deflation after last year's panic, and it shows no sign of tightening any time soon. Last week's awful September jobs report convinced markets that the Fed will keep the money spigot wide open well into 2010.
...
The world's investors can also see the arc of overall U.S. economic policy, which is becoming less inviting to global capital. Higher taxes on capital gains and income; new entitlements that will require trillions of dollars in new U.S. borrowing; a wave of new antitrust enforcement, more telecom regulation ("net neutrality") and trade protection, new restrictions on energy production, easier rules for union organizing, and so much more. All of these are signals that U.S. growth is likely to be slower than it otherwise would be, and that the returns on investing in America will be lower than they should be. This too is a reason to sell greenbacks.
...
Washington may not care to notice, but the sell-off in the dollar is a daily global vote on U.S. economic policy. It is not a vote of confidence."

That last sentence is a super understatement. President Obama knows about this and he knows the consequences. Ben Bernanke knows about this and he knows the consequences. Tim Geithner knows about this and he knows the consequences. They're doing it to us on purpose. This isn't a mistake. It's evil.

HEALTH CARE:

Boortz is reporting that the non-legislative version of the Baucus bill says Americans can go to the DMV to get our health insurance. I don't know what to make of this.

Boortz highlights how the next step toward socialized medicine is going to shape up - after this bill passes, and something will pass, it's guaranteed to drive up prices and lower quality of care. In a few years, somebody is going to advocate returning to a voluntary system, a free system, a private system. And Democrats will claim that Republicans are going to take health care away from Americans. He's right. That's what they do with Medicare and Social Security every election. So the march to socialized medicine and serfdom continues.

The Baucus bill would set the health insurance industry on a death spiral.

"Insurance death spirals occur when regulators force insurers to offer coverage (“guaranteed issue”) at premiums below the known risk of those they are insuring, without any assurance that the shortfall can be made up elsewhere. When insurers comply with these rules and offer relatively low cost health insurance policies to all comers, quite predictably, many sick people step forward to sign up. When the insurers then try to turn around and charge higher premiums to the relatively healthy to cover their costs, the healthy, also quite predictably, are more reluctant to enroll because they can see the premiums they would have to pay would very likely exceed their health-care costs. So they often say "no thanks" to the insurance and decide to take their chances by going without coverage instead. As more and more healthy people exit the marketplace, insurers are then forced to raise premiums for everyone who remains, which only further encourages the lower risks to opt out. This vicious cycle of rising premiums and an increasingly unhealthy risk pool is called a ‘death spiral’ because it eventually forces the insurer to terminate the plan."

That's always been the goal of Democrats.

"As matters stand now, if the Baucus bill were to become law, in a couple of years Congress would be forced to take up the issue again to clean up the mess the bill will have created."

That's also part of the plan. Once again government has crafted a bill to do exactly what it wants. This bill is another huge step toward the end of the decades long march toward socialized medicine.

Here's a specific example of that death spiral: insurance company pulls insurance line out of New York because it can't make money given the mandates. I don't see how this insurer can not pay though. These people paid all their premiums to have this benefit. This article would have me believe that the government just let this company violate its contract. I find that hard to believe, but this is the Washington Times, not the New York Times. I can understand stopping selling those policy lines so they don't have to pay future high claims, but I don't see how they can stop paying on an existing policy. If this article has presented all the salient facts, then government allowed this company to break it's contract. We have to restore the sanctity of contracts otherwise the rule of law will continue to collapse in America.

WAR:

Pakistan suffers wave of terrorist attacks. Do you remember, before we invaded Afghanistan, when Pakistan was pretty stable country? Musharraf had had his bloodless coup, which is a recurring theme in Pakistan because of corrupt politicians, and the people of Pakistan seemed pretty satisfied. Even after we had ousted al Qaeda from Afghanistan in early 2002, Pakistan was still very stable. Our attempt to nation-build in Afghanistan as made Pakistan violent and unstable.

POLITICS:

Obama nominates SEIU attorney to labor board. Nothing like letting the foxes in the henhouse.

MISC:

Michael Dell says that if you buy a brand new microprocessor, totally new tools (Microsoft Office 2010) and Windows 7, you'll love your PC again. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement. That sounds more like Windows 7 is a dog that requires you to move to the latest, greatest hardware and software for it to run well. This sounds like a harbinger of Windows 7 problems.

Why would people be mad that Pepsi is trying, most likely tongue in cheek, to help men pick up women? Maybe these people need a lesson in the birds and the bees. Lots of people seem to need that lesson. Lighten up.

Redskins fans who dress up in women's clothes and wear hognoses claim they have copyrighted this and trademarked the name Hogettes.