Government Spending. Does It Really Work as a “Stimulator”?

tiredoflibbs88 Comments

Listening to obAMATEUR, his fellow looters, the moochers and the mindless drones, you would think that the Stimulus and the rest of the over $5 TRILLION in spending by our so-called “leader” would have had a huge effect on the economy.  They would be touting this into the next term.

Sadly, for the looters, this is not the case.  Private spending is needed for the economy to produce the fruit we have seen from successful administrations like Reagan’s.

We have a study now published in the National Journal of Economic Research from University of California at San Diego economist Valerie Ramey.  Ramey puts the proggies lies about the success of their spending schemes to rest.

According to Ramey: “An increase in government spending never leads to a significant rise in private spending.  In fact, in most cases it leads to a significant fall.”

“A significant fall”…… say it again…..  “A significant fall……”  One true measure of the proggy belief have been the headlines concerning the economy and job growth – “an UNEXPECTED FALL in economic grown” or “an UNEXPECTED RISE in unemployment claims”, etc etc.

We already know that obAMATEUR believes that the United States is great and successful because of “government investment” code for “spending”.  Ramey also finds that government spending increases government employment .. but not private employment.

That’s it liberals keep charging on your “Bank of China” credit card and kick the can down the road to our children and grand-children.  ObAMATEUR used those words as senator when criticizing President Bush.  But those words are no longer part of his rhetoric (or any other proggy’s for that matter) while he is the one in charge.  Come November, those words will make another appearance when the proggies no longer control the White House.

UPDATE:

The budget proposed by the obAMATEUR 2012 will result in a DEFICIT of $26 trillion dollars by 2022.   If you were to spend $1,000 per minute, it would take you about 49,000 YEARS to spend $26 trillion dollars.  The obAMATEUR will do it in ONLY 10 years! What an accomplishment! – any you proggy drones whine I cannot compliment your pResident.

That’s the debt your children and grandchildren are going to have to pay.  Here is another compliment – He sure spends other people’s money very rapidly.

We can’t afford another four years of this bozo and his fellow looters.  BTW,  I am sure this budget will be UNANIMOUSLY defeated like his others.  But he will blame only the non-proggies and his loyal drones will regurgitate the dumbed down talking point.

The Survey Says: GOP Voters Are Better Informed, More Open Minded

Matt Margolis119 Comments

File this under: Duhhh!

Yet another new survey shows that Republican supporters know more about politics and political history than Democrats.

On eight of 13 questions about politics, Republicans outscored Democrats by an average of 18 percentage points, according to a new Pew survey titled “Partisan Differences in Knowledge.”

The Pew survey adds to a wave of surveys and studies showing that GOP-sympathizers are better informed, more intellectually consistent, more open-minded, more empathetic and more receptive to criticism than their fellow Americans who support the Democratic Party.

“Republicans fare substantially better than Democrats on several questions in the survey, as is typically the case in surveys about political knowledge,” said the study, which noted that Democrats outscored Republicans on five questions by an average of 4.6 percent.

This latest survey from Pew gives even more credence to an earlier survey showing liberals being much more close-minded.

A March 12 Pew study showed that Democrats are far more likely that conservatives to disconnect from people who disagree with them.

“In all, 28% of liberals have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone on SNS [social networking sites] because of one of these reasons, compared with 16% of conservatives and 14% of moderates,” said the report, tiled “Social networking sites and politics.”

The report also noted that 11 percent of liberals, but only 4 percent of conservatives, deleted friends from their social networks after disagreeing with their politics.

A March Washington Post poll showed that Democrats were more willing to change their views about a subject to make their team look good. For example, in 2006, 73 percent of Democrats said the GOP-controlled White House could lower gas prices, but that number fell by more than half to 33 percent in 2012 once a Democrat was in the White House.

Anecdotally, I have to say I see proof of this plenty. In my life I’ve lost friendships with people who couldn’t tolerate my political views. And I’ve known plenty of liberals whose views of conservatives could only be described as bigoted. I’m not saying it doesn’t go both ways at times, but it seems to me, as these surveys support, liberals are far more guilty of it.

Obama’s Stimulus: Nothing but a Democrat Slush Fund

Mark Noonan6 Comments

Just in case any of you out there ever thought that Obama and his Democrats actually cared about America – from Breitbart:

In their explosive new book Debacle: Obama’s War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future, Grover Norquist and John Lott, Jr. uncover a startling fact: heavily Democratic states with lower poverty rates, lower unemployment rates, lower bankruptcy rates, and lower foreclosure rates received most of President Barack Obama’s $825 billion Stimulus.

Put another way, Stimulus money went to precisely the states that needed it the least but were more politically connected to the Democratic Party….

You think that any Democrat leader out there believes that the money of the American people should be fairly distributed among those who need it most?  Oh, come on – if that were the case, the local Catholic Charities here in Las Vegas would have plenty of food to feed the homeless.  But, where is the upside in that for our Democrat wheeler-dealers?  Who gets paid when a bum gets fed?  For crying out loud, next you’ll be wanting to spend some “shovel ready” money to actually fix up distressed neighborhoods rather than having it spent on some more Solyndras!

There is a vile odor about the United States these days – something has gone horribly wrong.  Not just with Obama, of course – he’s just the tail-end-Charlie of a long, hideous string of events.  The capstone of a oozing pile of lies, swindles, hatreds and fears which have been used to extract power and wealth from the American people and transfer it to leeches and tin-plated tyrants.  And don’t get me wrong, here – there are plenty who claim to be Republican who are very much part of the problem.  But it is the left and its captive Democrat party which had led the way to degradation and which has nearly wrecked this nation.

We’ve really got to work hard for the rest of the year, folks – if you think things have been bad since 2009, just wait until a re-elected Obama gets to be flexible about things in 2013.

The TEA Party Lives!

Mark Noonan121 Comments

Reports of the death of the TEA Party are greatly exaggerated – from Slate:

The Tea Party movement is alive in Utah. With representatives from FreedomWorks in the audience, delegates at the Utah Republican Convention managed to force Sen. Orrin Hatch into a June 26 primary. He got 59.2 percent of their votes against Dan Liljenquist, a 38-year-old state senator. Hatch needed 60 percent to avoid the primary. He couldn’t do it. In two rounds of voting, he went from 2,243 votes to 2,313 votes. If he’d gotten 32 more votes, he would have wrapped this up…

Nothing against Hatch – in fact, I’ve met him and he’s intelligent, well informed and a complete gentleman…but he’s also been in DC for a loooong time and he has, at times, “worked across the aisle” which means, really, nothing more than helping liberal Democrats destroy our nation, piece by piece.  Hatch saw what happened to Bennett in 2010 and so has both shifted right as well as worked his GOP base in anticipation of this – but the fact that he couldn’t wrap it up shows (a) that he’s still mistrusted as a DC insider and (b) that he’ll have to fight hard to retain his seat.

The bottom line is that the Second American Revolution continues – we, the people, are not just going sit there and take it.  Hatch is likely to win the GOP primary – but what happened to him will both make a better Senator out of him, as well as show all GOPers in DC that they’d better darn well do the work of the people, not the work of the Ruling Class.

The Food Stamp President

Mark Noonan218 Comments

From the Wall Street Journal:

The Congressional Budget Office said Thursday that 45 million people in 2011 received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, a 70% increase from 2007. It  said the number of people receiving the benefits, commonly known as food stamps, would continue growing until 2014.

It’ll grow until 2017, at least, unless we rid ourselves of Obama this November.  Though some people are starting to sound rather hopeful in that regard.

Obama has been an utter catastrophe for the United States – you take Johnson, Nixon and Carter, roll them in to one huge, nauseating political ball and you won’t get the disaster which is President Obama.  I honestly don’t think that Obama cares for America – not for the America that we Americans live in.  He has this vision of an entirely different America; something alien to our experience and against our finest ideals.  An America of socialist “rights” is what Obama wants – a right to government support, a right to not work, a right to be in school for decades, a right to retire early, a right to an abortion, a right to all the sex we can stand; and, of course, since he’s from Chicago, a right to political payoffs if you are properly connected to the elite…but no right to free speech, no right to worship God, no right to bear arms…

I am in good spirits, though – disgusted with things as they are, but still feeling confident.  I do believe we are awake.  Underneath the relentless MSM propaganda for Obama the real fight is going on…with patriots working hard to defeat Obama and these patriots will not be denied.  We’ll see how things come out – but on November 7th, I suspect we who love America will be highly pleased with the election results.

 

 

Obama Ate His Dog — Open Thread

Retired Spook95 Comments

This actually started as an off-topic comment in the previous thread, but there is so much humorous material involved in the “man eats dog” story that it deserves its own thread.

UPDATE, by Matt Margolis: a couple of my own tweets on the subject:

Obama: Can’t Even Do Stupid Right

Mark Noonan76 Comments

Geesh – from the Telegraph:

President Obama erred during a speech at the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, when attempting to call the disputed archipelago by its Spanish name.

Instead of saying Malvinas, however, Mr Obama referred to the islands as the Maldives, a group of 26 atolls off that lie off the South coast of India…

Even calling them the “Malvinas” is dumb – that is what Argentine leaders attempting to distract their people call them; doing so in order to pretend that Argentina ever had a legitimate claim to the Falkland Islands.  But if you’re going to kowtow to hack politicians on the make, then at least use the right word, Mr. President.

Just to set the record straight – the Brits have been continuously settled in the Falklands since 1833 – or, to put it in to perspective, about 15 years longer than Americans have been continuously in Nevada.  If Argentina owns the Falklands, then Mexico owns Nevada.  The population of the islands is a bit more than 3,000.  These people mind their own business, make a fairly decent life in their harsh land and express absolutely zero desire to come under Argentine rule.  You have to be one of two things to hold that Argentina should be in control:  an idiot, or a hack politician.  Given Obama’s blunder on the name of the islands, I’d have to plunk down for “idiot”.

This is especially true now that the hacks in Argentina have been sabre-rattling over the islands – threatening a repeat of  Argentina’s 1982 invasion.  For Obama to go along with Argentine pretensions  – which signal that if they attack, we won’t do anything – only helps bring forward a blood letting.  Which, in turn, puts “idiot” more and more indelibly in the mind.

 

How Much Nonsense Do You Believe?

Mark Noonan95 Comments

Just a little test here, folks – a challenge, if you will.  It is my contention that most of us believe a series of falsehoods which distort our ability to make rational decisions.  This is far more prevalent on the left than on the right, but all of us are immersed in a sea of lies and thus even when we’re trying to get it right, we can often get it wrong because some facet of our action is motivated by a lie.  So, here’s something to think about – how many times have you heard the phrase, “believe in yourself”?  Ten thousand times?  A million?  I’ll bet that 100% of us have heard it and that 99% of us believe it.  If you just believe in yourself, you can get on.  Just this past Saturday morning I was watching the TV for a few minutes and there was Donald Trump saying “I believe in myself”.  But, is there anything to it?  A quote:

Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true. Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world.  Yet I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it.  The publisher said of somebody, “That man will get on; he believes in himself.” And I remember that as I lifted my head to listen, my eye caught an omnibus on which was written “Hanwell.”(the name of a lunatic asylum – ed.)  I said to him, “Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves?  For I can tell you.  I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar.  I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success.  I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.”  He said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. “Yes, there are,” I retorted, “and you of all men ought to know them.  That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself.  That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself.  If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can’t act believe in themselves; and debtors who won’t pay.  It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself.  Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. Believing utterly in one’s self is a hysterical and superstitious belief like believing in Joanna Southcote:  the man who has it has  ‘Hanwell’ written on his face as plain as it is written on that omnibus.”  And to all this my friend the publisher made this very deep and effective reply, “Well, if a man is not to believe in himself, in what is he to believe?”  After a long pause I replied, “I will go home and write a book in answer to that question.” This is the book that I have written in answer to it. – G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Chapter II, The Maniac

Kind of puts a new perspective on it, doesn’t it?  The phrase “believe in yourself” has been entirely ingrained in your existence (I speak here to the 99% who currently believe in the notion – if you are of the 1% who saw through it all along, then you may skip this).  It is just part of your mental make-up…it is a dogma you not only don’t question, but don’t even see a reason to question.   If you bother to read the rest  of the book, you’ll find the answer to what you should believe in instead of yourself:  God.   If you believe in God then you’ve taken that first step to wisdom (and if you maintain a genuine belief in God while you believed that you should “believe in yourself” then you avoided the worst errors attendant upon believing in yourself).  To believe in yourself is a form of idolatry – it is part of the first lie of hell (“you shall be as gods”).  And it leads to all sorts of errors – like, just for one in ten thousand examples, the man who will leave his wife and children so that he can pursue some dream or other…breaking his word and destroying a family because he “believes in himself”.

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Are You a Racist?

Retired Spook115 Comments

Back when I was growing up in the 50’s and early 60’s, the term “racist” actually meant something. Today we throw the word around so casually that it’s virtually lost its meaning for most people. So just exactly what is a “racist”?

Webster defines racism as follows:

1
: a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race

2
: racial prejudice or discrimination

I’ve NEVER thought of myself as a racist, and yet I’ve been accused of being one on this blog when I’ve written that I believed blacks in America have been duped and suckered into voting in virtual lockstep for Democrats in exchange for affirmative action programs and free “stuff”.  I don’t know how any casual observer could perceive it any other way.  If that makes me a racist, well then I wear that as a badge of honor.  It hasn’t changed the way I look at blacks as individuals.  I’ve been hoping for nearly half a century that MLK’s dream would come true, and we would get to a point where everyone would judge others by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.  I’m still waiting for that to happen, and, in fact, it appears we’re drifting farther away from that ideal rather than toward it.  Much of our current problems, IMO, can be laid at the feet of the current administration.  Never in my lifetime has there been a president who has been more divisive, particularly along racial lines, than this president.  What a poor record for one who was touted as being the first “post racial president.

As I said in a comment in a previous thread, my overall experience with other races, particular blacks, has been pretty good.  I graduated from high school in 1963, a year before the Civil Rights Act was passed.  Democrats held substantial majorities in Congress back then, and it wouldn’t have passed had not a substantial majority of Republicans voted for it.  All that was eclipsed a year or two later with LBJ’s Great Society and War on Poverty, two of the most massive government wealth transfer mechanisms every seen at that time.  Those two programs were the lynch pins in the Left’s effort to destroy the black family.  OK, let me rephrase that and give Progressives the benefit of the doubt that their initial goal was not to destroy the black family.  The destruction of the black family was simply an unintended consequence of the Left’s effort to create a solid block of reliable votes.  Regardless of the initial motivation, the destruction of the black family is the root of many of our current societal problems.

Prior to high school graduation, I’ll have to admit, my exposure to interaction with blacks was pretty limited.  I didn’t dislike them or not get along with them; I just didn’t interact with them much.  Most of the blacks in Fort Wayne, Indiana where I grew up went to one inner-city high school – Central High (since converted into a vocational center for the Fort Wayne Community Schools) We played them in basketball — they beat us — we shook their hands, end of story.  As I got out into world, I began to interact more with other races, but still I don’t recall ever encountering any of the types of problems we see today.  It just never dawned on me to treat someone differently because of the color of his or her skin.

So just exactly what is racism in modern terms?  Is it something that can eventually be overcome.  Will our kids do a better job than we’ve done, or is it going to take a race war before we finally move on?  It’s pretty obvious, from discussions about the recent Trayvon Martin incident, that our resident Progressives see it through a completely different lens than do our Conservatives and Libertarians.  Let’s see if we can have a civilized discussion about it.