Hello, everyone – running a garage sale this Saturday, so no time to write for the early AM (well, strictly speaking, there is…but I emptied the attic and then cleared up the garage, and I’m just plain and simple tired…getting old does have its drawbacks, ya know?).

Anyways, still plenty to talk about..including a report I heard that the “over/under” for GOP House seats is 245…Haven’t found the casino running that, but when I do, I’m going to bet the over.

Have at it!

I like it when I come across someone who can put the issue in to just a few paragraphs. Every now and again, I’m able to do that, myself (it is harder than you think) – but I’ve yet to be able to describe our overall condition better than this entry over at Economic Collapse:

…We are like that one couple that almost every neighborhood seems to have that has two shiny new cars in their driveway, that dresses in designer clothes and that seems to have plenty of money to take vacations and yet is in debt up to their eyeballs.

The truth is that the United States keeps getting poorer every single month. The term “trade deficit” is not very sexy, but it is critically important to understand if you want to comprehend what is happening to the U.S. economy. Every month tens of billions of dollars more wealth goes out of the United States than comes into it. We are continually getting poorer.

To cover up our declining national wealth, we have gone into staggering amounts of debt. We have maintained our lavish standard of living by piling up staggering amounts of debt on the national, corporate and consumer levels…

I’m telling you, boys and girls, our only way out of this is to balance our budget and then start making, mining and growing things here in the United States. Balancing the budget will stop the bleeding and prevent national default – while making, mining and growing things will actually create wealth with which we can then pay off the massive debt we’ve already got. If we do anything other than balance the budget and start producing, we’re economically doomed.

The United States is still, by far, the richest nation in the world – we’re just not using our wealth. We have too many people on one form or another of the government dole; we have too many people engaged in non-productive enterprise; we’ve locked away far too much of our natural resources because of environmental and other concerns; we’ve taxed and regulated ourselves to the point where business reasonably feels its just easier to do business in China, of all places – we’ve killed the goose which laid the golden eggs for us.

Decline is not inevitable – people choose to decline. What do we choose? We can get out of this – in 20 years, we could be sitting on top of the economic world once again. All we have to do is show a willingness to face harsh realities, and then get to work.

Will we do it? Time will tell.

Talk about setting the bar impossibly high:

Trying to reshape expectations for the midterm elections, David Plouffe said Thursday that the Republicans should be expected to make a full sweep of Congress – and key gubernatorial races – given the environmental advantages they have. Anything less, he said, should be seen as a disgrace…

So, if the GOP wins the House, wins 7 or 8 Senate seats and, say, 2/3 of the governorships up for election, then we will have failed by Plouffe’s definition. This is a laughable attempt to pre-spin a loss – but also a strong indicator that in Democrat-land, they know they’re in deep trouble.

To me, for the GOP to “win” in 2010 we will have to secure the House – anything less than that would clearly be a rebuke, as well as greatly demoralizing to the GOP base, which scents victory. Indications are pretty solid that we will do so – and we’ll also do quite well in the governorships, with only Colorado looking like a sure-loss for the GOP. In the Senate, even a two or three seat net gain will be quite a stunning victory – and would be preferable for the GOP rather than winning a Senate majority. This would leave us strong enough to block the worst of liberalism, but still in a position to lay full blame on the Democrats for all that will go wrong in 2011.

Things tend to get cast in stone in politics about 30 days out from the vote – only something really out of the ordinary can shake up the race. Democrats – like Plouffe – are going on the theory that they are just now getting busy and thus closing the gap. I doubt it – you don’t close a gap like this, you just try to limit losses (and Democrat actions speak louder – they are pouring money in to what should have been safe seats…trying to build a fire wall around their core base of power). Actions like the maid smear against Whitman in California indicate a growing level of desperation on the part of Democrats. Meanwhile, poll after poll is coming out now on House races showing un-funded, unknown GOP challengers closing in on long term, supposedly safe Democrats.

It could be a blow out on November 2nd, boys and girls – we might even get a victory by Plouffe’s definition. Am I predicting this? No – it can’t be predicted. It all depends on who shows up – I think that the GOP and GOP-leaning Independent turnout will be stupendous while Democrat turnout will be low. But just because I think that may happen doesn’t mean that it will. If it does come out like that, then just watch history being made…if, on the other hand, Democrats can motivate their base, they’ll probably shave some points off the GOP score.

Time will tell – but I look forward to seeing Plouffe on television on November 2nd.

This ad says it all:

From Reuters:

U.S. lawmakers pushed for the country’s largest mortgage lenders to suspend foreclosures in all 50 states after Bank of America Corp announced on Friday it would temporarily halt evictions nationwide.

BofA, the largest U.S. mortgage servicer, is the first U.S. bank to institute a nationwide moratorium on foreclosures, expanding on a 23-state suspension announced last week while it conducts a review of its procedures…

While those immediately facing foreclosure will get a bit of relief because of this, the actual effect will be bad – this will put an even larger question mark over our entire housing market and, by extension, our already insolvent financial system. This, to me, is just a symptom of the break down of our financial system.

One thing to keep in mind is that the people running the financial show are not necessarily people who have a clue about finance. Oh, to be sure, they know the game we’ve got right now – or, at least, the game we had until 2008’s crash – but they don’t really know how money is made and how it is invested. I work for an absolutely gigantic, multi-national banking firm and from what I can gather, senior management was blithely going forward even as recently as a month ago thinking things were going swell (there have been some indicators of late that this is changing…a few moves in senior management which make me think they realize, at long last, that fake money and huge debt do not make for prosperity).

Its not better on the government side as our government finance people are drawn from the same pool as private sector financial firms…business school graduates who are instructed in Keynesian economics as if it were revealed truth. Given all this, it does not surprise me at all that even in something as straightforward as foreclosure (which, remember, means that a person borrowed money and didn’t keep paying), they still screwed it up. And now, I’ll bet, all major banks will have to halt foreclosures as everyone tries to figure out what to do – complicated by the fact that Democrats scent a chance to scare up some votes by taking a populist stance against the banks (to be sure, we GOPers should, too…but not in the manner of the Democrats…they just want to whip up anger, we should be demanding reforms which make banks rational).

This mess will be a long time being cleaned up – and until we do, housing won’t even stabilize, let alone recover.

UPDATE: California gets in to the act – asking Wells Fargo to halt foreclosures (which is a spreading demand…and likely wrapped up in election year politics; the CA AG is Jerry Brown, currently running for governor).

From the AP:

A wave of government layoffs in September outpaced weak hiring in the private sector, pushing down the nation’s payrolls by a net total of 95,000 jobs.

The unemployment rate held at 9.6 percent last month, the Labor Department said Friday. The jobless rate has now topped 9.5 percent for 14 straight months, the longest stretch since the 1930s…

I seem to recall something from my history books about the Great Depression…something bad. What was it? Let’s think now…oh, yeah, that’s it!…there was a Great Depression back then. And now Obama has matched that wonderful time – we’ve got high, long term unemployment just like back then. Woohoo!

Oh, wait…that isn’t a good thing…

We can’t borrow and spend our way out of this – we can only work our way out of it. We need to make things, mine things and grow things – if we’re not doing that, then we’re just wasting our time and, very probably, making things worse.

UPDATE: In October of 2006, just prior to the Democrat takeover of Congress, unemployment was 4.4%. Ask yourself, are you better off than you were four years ago?

UPDATE II: The “U-6” unemployment rate (which counts unemployed, discouraged and working part-time when wanting full time) rate is up to 17.1%…just shy of the 2009 peak of 17.4%. This indicates two things:

1. We’re back in recession.

2. Someone is fudging the official number as it shows 9.6%. My guess is that it is actually closer to that 10.1% in the Gallup survey…and I’ll bet dollars to donuts the post November 2nd numbers reflect this.

It is possible – Victor Davis Hanson notes:

… if the Republicans regain the House, the entire Obama redistributive agenda will stall. That stasis will give far more certainty to the business cycle — and probably provide the necessary psychological lift for businesses to start hiring and buying again.

In a weird way, by losing the Congress, Obama may well see the economy rebound — a turnabout for which he’ll take credit, despite the failure of his earlier massive borrowing schemes, which will seem like ancient history by 2012…

The key, for Obama’s economic recovery hopes, is if American business is really sitting on trillions of dollars, waiting for a better business climate to get going like gang busters. I’m not so sure – it seems to me that our banks, for instance, are sitting on their money because they know they’ll have to write down at least a trillion dollars in loans in 2011 and 2012. Meanwhile, other businesses may be sitting on cash because they don’t expect any fundamental recovery and thus just want cash reserves to survive for a year or two of low or non-existent profits.

Meanwhile, our debt hangs over us like a sword of Damocles, ready to cut off our head at any moment. It cannot be emphasized enough that if we don’t get our budget balanced in a few years, we’re going to be facing a complete collapse. And this leaves off the prospect that Europe and China may collapse under their mountains of bad debts – even if we balance our budget, if Europe and China tank it will be hard for us to gain economic traction (though we’ll do better than them, if we’ve balanced our budget).

Can Republicans really tackle the debt while Obama is firing off the class warfare rhetoric about evil Republicans forcing granny to starve? That remains to be seen – it may prove impossible.

But we must try. We must, that is, rescue America even if it means rescuing Obama. And, of course, it may not help Obama – I think a lot of people have already tuned him out and he may have difficulty convincing people that any recovery by 2012 is really due to Obama’s efforts. It is also different, now, because of the New Media…Clinton could triangulate his way in to a second term on the back of GOP policies, but I don’t know if Obama will be able to do that trick, even with a slavishly devoted MSM running cover for him.

Read it and weep, liberals:

Low-income workers stand to lose the most if lawmakers fail to reach a consensus on the Bush-era tax cuts, according to a new report from the Tax Foundation.

The report states that on Jan. 1 the doubling of the child tax credit, increased standard deductions and income credits and the creation of the 10 percent tax bracket — all of which primarily aimed at non-wealthy taxpayers — will vanish if gridlock persists in Washington.

While wealthier taxpayers pay more in taxes and stand to lose more money if the tax cuts expire, the impact on low-income taxpayers will be far greater because they live on slimmer margins…

This is because the tax cuts were designed to give a lot of help to poor and middle income wage earners. While you liberals were out there screaming “tax cuts for the rich”, the reality has been quite different…it is the poor who benefited. And not just in direct tax cuts, but in the increased prosperity because job creation wasn’t hampered by high taxes on “rich” people who make 250,000 a year (meanwhile, the super rich – your George Soros, etc – never seemed to get taxed when you liberals “tax the rich”).

Just because you wanted to play class war politics, these poor people will now suffer. Because you wanted a talking point rather than a policy, poor people will now have less money to spend and save.

So, is this hope, or is it change?

Didn’t we just have a whole summer of recovery?

Unemployment, as measured by Gallup without seasonal adjustment, increased to 10.1% in September — up sharply from 9.3% in August and 8.9% in July. Much of this increase came during the second half of the month — the unemployment rate was 9.4% in mid-September — and therefore is unlikely to be picked up in the government’s unemployment report on Friday…

The consensus for the report tomorrow seems to be for a figure of 9.7 to 9.9%…I figure it won’t, under any circumstances, go to 10% simply because Obama and Co won’t let unemployment be officially in double-digit territory a few weeks in front of the vote. Someone will fudge the numbers sufficient to keep it below 10…even if its 9.96%, or some such.

The bottom line is that we are heading back in to full blown recession. The stimulus failed – now we’ll have to become a bit more responsible and realize that balancing the budget and cutting taxes is the only way out.

Bailouts weren’t enough – now the banks have to be protected against their illegal actions regarding foreclosures. From Business Insider:

The hottest story right now in the banking industry is foreclosure-gate, as various firms like Bank of America, JPMorgan, and GMAC have halted foreclosures upon realizing that the paperwork behind them has been shoddy at best.

The fallout — which has already invited investigations from state AGs — could throw a major wrench into what’s already been a costly, tedious, and economically damaging process.

Seemingly out of nowhere, the Senate passed a bill that could get the banks out of this mess…

It looks as though the banks, faced with massive numbers of foreclosures, played fast and loose with State and federal regulations on foreclosure processing. This has thrown in to question the legality of all foreclosures. The banks face risks of lawsuits forcing them to return foreclosed homes to previous borrowers, as well as possible criminal sanctions under various State laws – and this doesn’t get in to the fact of what to do for the people who bought foreclosed homes but may not have full legal title to the property. Its a huge mess and it is the direct result of financial industry incompetence.

And, liberals, your Democrats have slipped through a bill to get the banks off the hook. How do you feel about that? Where is your grand progressivism, now? I mean, we conservatives don’t like this – we know that foreclosures must happen, but we are also insistent that the relevant laws and regulations be observed. Why is your side working to provide what amounts to unfair advantage to one of the two sides?

Because it does work out like that – if Obama signs this bill, then it will essentially mean that a bank can do as it pleases regarding foreclosure. The people will have little recourse, because they won’t have the money to take the banks to court, while the banks will feel that they are protected against sanction by law enforcement. This law is a direct assertion of the power of big corporations over the lives of regular folks.

Is this hope, or is this change?