George Rebane

That the feds are extending and deepening the recession is becoming more visible by the day.  You have to have your head where the sun don’t shine to miss the stream of news recounting this snail-paced recovery.  And I agree with the commentators who predict that we will ‘discover’ after November that the recession has actually deepened.  The causes for this are visible for all who will see.

In ‘the fed’s would screw up a free lunch’ department, we find program after program that the government is messing up.  One of the latest is funding research at the universities.  It turns out that the stimulus money grants require universities to come up with collateral funds to administer, house, monitor, report, … and do a hundred other things so they can spend the granted funds on just research.  In other words, the fed money is incorrectly directed and mandates 10-30% unbudgeted and unavailable indirect costs on top of the grants to the recipient institutions.

White House’s Liz Oxhorn (love that name) tells the schools to just suck it up and “weigh the costs and benefits of the project” before applying.  It is only government that can impose such burdens on their beneficiaries so as make their stimulus unstimulating.  More liberals should learn that eternal truth.

Speaking of liberals – they used to denounce those of us who have for years been pointing out the ongoing rape of the public purse by government employee unions.  Where are they now that the news arrives from all corners of the world with governments reporting that their local versions of the SEIU have ravaged the countries’ finances which call for drastic spending cuts and tax increases?  To put a cherry on this mud pie, our Bureau of Labor Statistics long-running Current Population Survey reports detailed information comparing apples to apples and showing that private industry workers have to toil 13.5 months to earn what federal workers do in 12 months.  And the wealth consuming federal payrolls are growing (let’s hear it for job growth!) while wealth creating private sector employment remains stagnant.  The effect of federal stimulus dollars is no more apparent than in our own Nevada County.

[update]  Where are champions of the public service unions?  The bad news just comes pouring in.  A Stanford Univesity study of Calpers shows that the 2,000% (yes, that’s two thousand percent) increase in California’s unfunded liabilities over the last 20 years has put that state employees’ retirement management institution in the red to the tune of $500 billion.  Well, that’s not altogether accurate.  It’s put the state’s taxpayers in the red for that additional little sum.  A functional idiot at Calpers is claiming that all is well and that all retirement checks will be paid without interruption with the existing assets it is managing.  Even the public employees’ unions don’t believe that bovine scat and are busy renegotiating contract revisions that call for them to take voluntary reductions in their retirement distributions.  Where are all those leftwingers who railed against anyone impugning the integrity of those unions as they raked in contracted benefits from the dolts whom we elected to serve as our representatives to the various jurisdictions throughout California?  Please step forward, Calpers and we taxpayers need your wisdom now.

The net benefits of Obamacare disappeared even before Pelosi’s ‘we have to pass it first before we know what’s in it’.  Now that monster is showing its true colors by the number of jobs it is killing and the number of people being thrown off of the health care our Chief Organizer promised them would remain unchanged.

[7jul2010 update]  The portending disaster of Obamacare grows daily.  Two reports on what is in store for us, one from the WSJ (‘The Massachusetts Health-care Trainwreck’) and the other from the Heritage Foundation (‘The Rationer-in-chief’).   Before reading either piece, please make sure that your seatbelt is fastened and a stout barf-bag is handy.  It is not recommended that you read both on the same day – pace yourself.

No matter, that atrocity is being followed by two others – energy (Kerry/Lieberman), finance reform (Dodd/Frank) – that promise to become “an eerie replay of Obamacare”.  The cap n’ tax energy bill unabashedly promises to permanently hamstring the US economy by demonstrating American ‘leadership’ in following a science-painted myth right off the cliff.  And now we hear that the finance reform bill, on second look, is going to be another premier job killer.  Companies are reporting that investment in new plants and processes are being cut back, postponed, and/or eliminated because the bill’s passage will change the financing landscape necessary to continue this important part of US industry.   True to form, socialism and politics trumped the rush of this ‘midnight to 4AM’ legislation going through Congress.  It now turns out that ‘nobody ever did a cost-benefit analysis of this bill on end users’.

Even if we tried, it’s hard to make this stuff up.  All this is possible because the lame stream media are reporting very little of it, and that in a different light.  Most Americans are not paying attention and don’t believe that any of this is going on.