Negative Railroad A Collection of Breaks in the Line

President Tokyo Rose Obama has been lying. Economic conditions require no urgent action to “avoid catastrophe”:

For the second consecutive month, the index of leading economic indicators rose, gaining 0.4% in January, following a downwardly revised 0.2% in December.
 

"The second half of 2009 may see a period of anemic growth," said Ken Goldstein, economist at the Conference Board. "In fact, a return to robust growth may not occur until well into 2010, even if the long climb starts a few months from now."

If there was any urgency, it was political.

The Barrister posts:

Another bit of evidence contrary to the current sky-is-falling headlines:

Apparel sales picking up at some stores

Sales have likely picked up at Urban Outfitter Inc.'s Anthropologie stores, Limited Brands Inc.'s Victoria's Secret and American Apparel Stores Inc., said Todd Slater, an analyst with Lazard Capital markets.

Businesses are required to track their income, expenses and obligations according to a standard set of rules. The rules are called Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or GAAP. Although there are complexities and abuses, following GAAP allows businesses to be reliably compared against competitors. GAAP helps the Securities and Exchange Commission deter management from manipulating the books to overstate profits or hide liabilities.

$900,000,000,000 (porkulus plus 1st-year interest cost)
÷    300,000,000 (estimate of US legal population)
=        300,000 (cost of bill per person)


Congress is borrowing an additional $300K per American.

THREE. HUNDRED. THOUSAND. DOLLARS. PER. PERSON.

Truth is not the halfway point between two untruths.

Quoted from: Ludwig von Mises

The current President has shown poor judgment in his cabinet picks. He’s taken a hostile tone with Republicans, contrary to his promised bipartisan “change”. He’s taken a series of steps to make the United States appear weaker in the eyes of terrorists. And he’s put his name on an $800 billion addition to the deficit which he didn’t write.

I expect Obama’s supporters are happy with this. Conservatives, and even most Republicans, are irate. There’s a third group, not getting mention in the media or the blogs I follow, who are likely the real victims of voter remorse: Hillary supporters.

Coyote posts evidence that Tokyo Rose Obama’s anti-hope message isn’t change, either:

The porkulus bill is such an amazing over-reach of Federal power, I conclude that with its passage, the US Government will no longer be a legitimate authority. Adherence to US law will descend from being morally proper to being merely pragmatic or convenient. This need not be chaos; our conduct can still be guided by personal honor, social mores, and common-law tradition.

My conclusion has led me to wonder, exactly where is the line between legitimate and illegitimate government? When was, or when will be, that line crossed?

Banking problems are not currently a headline issue. When raised, the tone is almost invariably anti-bank. Barney Frank, Barry, and the chorus of talking heads are upset that banks aren’t making loans. As though these evil, greedy people are padding their fortunes by stuffing cash in their mattresses and somehow vicitmizing the hard-working middle class.

Balderdash.

Barney Frank needs to get one piece of information firmly lodged in his brain - to a bank, deposits are liabilities and loans are assets. It's not that banks don't need and want to lend the money they have. It's that they don't want to lose the money they have, because then they will have to pay it back from their assets that are still good, thus suppressing lending further to good credit risks.

It is essential to recognize a distinction between merely working and working to create wealth. A policy goal to create jobs, to put people to work, is a formalization of the old joke about hiring half the people to dig holes and then hiring the other half to fill the holes. Everyone is working a job, but nobody is better off. No wealth was created through shifting dirt.

Today’s headline: Economy Shed 598,000 Jobs in January

President Tokyo Rose using the data as justification to feed his pet pig spending bill: “And if we drag our feet and fail to act, this crisis will turn into a catastrophe.”

The prophets of Peak Oil have fallen silent. A price collapse and drop in global demand have allowed other paranoids to push to the headlines. But their voices will rise again. When that happens, remember this:

North Dakota and Montana have an estimated 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil in an area known as the Bakken Formation.
…

Tom Blumer does a better job making a couple of my recent points:

Before its release, experts predicted that the economy’s gross domestic product (GDP) had contracted by an annualized 5%-6% during that period. The actual annualized -3.8% from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) was not nearly that bad.

If the porkulus bill hasn’t snorted away all your oxygen this week, you might remember last weekend’s top catastrophe, “GDP contracts 3.8% as inventories limit downturn; Fourth quarter marks worst performance for U.S. economy in nearly 27 years.” I heard different version of the “worst since when” comparison, ranging from the 1980s to the ominous Great Depression.

I don’t have time to develop my thoughts fury about Barry’s persistent anti-hope message about the American people’s economy. Coyote fills the breach:

Barrack Obama, in the Washington Post:

By now, it’s clear to everyone that we have inherited an economic crisis as deep and dire as any since the days of the Great Depression

Sorry, maybe I am just cynical from having politicians call 8 of the last 3 recessions the worst economy since the Great Depression**, but I don’t think this is the worst crisis since the 1930’s.  It’s not even the worst since I was born.  The late 70’s were worse, the early 80’s were worse, and from a financial/banking crisis point of view, the late 80’s were worse.

Obama has turned his righteous huffing about executive pay into a proposed law. As CEO of a taxpayer-funded organization that’s running a projected trillion-dollar annual deficit, Barry looks like a hypocritical fool:

Presidential Compensation

Cash Compensation:
Salary: $400,000
Cash Subtotal: $400,000

Room and Board:
55,000 sq ft mansion, in historic D.C.: @ $100/sqft: $5,500,000/yr
Personal Chef / Kitchen Staff: $300,000 / year
Other Servants / Attendants: $500,000 / year
R&B Subtotal: $6,300,000

The war we are fighting until victory or the bitter end is in its deepest sense a war between Christ and Marx.

Quoted from: Jospeh Goebbels

Velociman unleashes a fabulous rant against deserving targets:

This selfsame deceit manifests itself time and again in the Leftist philosophy. Those who cry "Peace!" the loudest are not for peace per se, they are merely the enemies of their own civilization. They cried Peace! when Reagan ousted communist thugs in Grenada, they shouted Peace! against the contras, they shouted Peace! against the Israelis in a stomach-curdling example of relativism.

Rep. Alcee L. Hastings, D-Fla., has introduced to the House of Representatives a new bill, H.R. 645, calling for the secretary of homeland security to establish no fewer than six national emergency centers for corralling civilians on military installations.

The proposed bill, which has received little mainstream media attention, appears designed to create the type of detention center that those concerned about use of the military in domestic affairs fear could be used as concentration camps for political dissidents, such as occurred in Nazi Germany.