George Rebane
The new budget compromise – Dems 1; Repubs 0. Let’s see if I got this one right. The sequester is out, new taxes, er fees, are in. Obamacare has unlimited drawing rights on the federal fisc and the liberal agenda is again in full force. The deficit will continue to increase for the first two years, and then over the next eight years we are promised about $27B of TOTAL reduction of deficits that will run around $1T annually. That’s less than 0.3% per year, a fraction so small, … never mind. And that budget agreement is what we are now supposed celebrate?! BTW, does anyone want to bet the ranch, or even the south 40, that we will ever get the average $2.7B/yr deficit reductions over the next ten years?
Remember the scandal of IRS targeting the tea parties. You’d think that they would have pulled back after the embarrassing exposes in front of congressional committees. Not a chance. They have redoubled their efforts to get tea parties off their 501c4 tax code designations. And all this while agreeing that the poster child of liberal propaganda organizations, the League of Women Voters, gets to maintain its 501c3 designation. For those who forgot, a c4 organization is a non-profit that doesn’t have to pay taxes on its income, but contributions to it are NOT tax free. A c3 non-profit also doesn’t have to pay taxes, but its contributors get to deduct contributions from their taxable income. (more here)
The securities markets have broached bubble heights again, and the economy is stuck in low gear with no up shift in sight. The SP500 is trading at a P/E of 25 when its norm is down around 16. Banks are lending paltry amounts to small businesses, and instead are banking their excess reserves with the Fed and preventing all that multiplication of cash in the economy. But some pundits are still having a hard time figuring out why. It doesn’t take rocket science to understand that people are bidding up established companies as productive repositories into which to put their cash, and banks don’t want to take risks on start-ups and smaller businesses that are having a hell of time weathering the uncertainties and fiscal fiascoes that Team Obama has prominently cooking up on the front burner.
But many in Washington are still singing Keynsian Christmas carols of more “public investment”, in short, more monetary loosening to get us out of the “secular stagnation” that we arguably are suffering from. This is the method that Japan has tried for 20 some years to kick-start the economy, and now continue stagnating as they lead the low growth world in debt that is over 200% of GDP (ours is just over 100%), and from which there is no soft landing.
FDA concludes that French fries cause cancer. While they haven’t yet banned fries and fried foods in general, don’t put it past them to try. The newly discovered culprit is acrylamide, a chemical that forms when you brown plant foods while cooking. Given Obamacare’s increased healthcare costs, you’d think that the FDA would co-operate and encourage everyone to supersize their fries and fat burgers. The cumulative effect would increase the incidence of cancers that will hit the above 50 folks the hardest. But that’s why Obamacare has a death panel that would further cut medical services and thereby increase earlier age death rates to avoid longer lives with higher annual medical bills. What’s not to like about more fried foods? (more here)
But to really avoid having too many people in the world, let’s once and for all outlaw genetically modified foods as the more wacko elements of the Left’s environmentalist movement want. GM foods suffered a recent setback from an erroneous piece of published research that was quickly withdrawn after being identified as bogus. But that made no never mind to the Agenda21 crowd who really want to reduce Man’s footprint on earth. And massive starvation is the socially just and politically correct way to go forward. Today it is the GM foods grown worldwide that are feeding our growing population expected to max out somewhere between 9-10B around 2050. This number will not be fed with pre-GM foods even if every arable acre on earth is cultivated. But that is all for the good, because hungry people also riot and cause all kinds of civil unrest that requires more government guns to control. And we all know that comprehensive government is the real solution for the good life of those who do make it to the post-GM world. (more here)
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