Blogs For Victory

James Pethokoukis over at Reuters has the best short description I’ve seen of our economic plight in light of the CBO numbers showing that our debt burden is rapidly becoming unbearable. He also points out that growth is the only way out and suggests a couple ideas (cutting taxes on business and capital flow) which are excellent, but also don’t fully cover our peril, nor provide what is needed to get out of this economic morass.

Our problem is debt – there is too much of it. Too much private debt, too much government debt. The cruel fact of the matter is that even under the best of circumstances and with the best of intentions, we may not be able to pay it all off – at least not in the current time frames for the debt. But if we are to manage this debt of ours then our only hope is to so rapidly grow American wealth that our debt burden becomes first manageable, and then discharged. Even with good luck, its going to be a little while before growth starts to kick in – so, step one is to stop piling up new debt.

That is the hardest thing for almost all liberals and even some conservatives to swallow. Liberals because they are still living in a fantasy world where the government can create economic growth by spending borrowed and/or printed money. It can’t. It is not possible. It never worked – the Great Depression was not cured by New Deal spending, but made longer and deeper because of it. We must balance our budget over the next few years – and, yes, that will be very painful.

The initial economic dislocation of a 25% reduction in government spending (which is the amount we’ll have to cut to even start getting things under control) would be severe. But it would also be relatively short-lived. And the good effects would start almost immediately – first by taking us out of the class of nations at risk of sovereign default (and thus making us a genuine safe haven for foreign capital), secondly by freeing up funds for investment which would have been quite pointlessly expended in buying US government debt.

Those funds so freed up will have to be used wisely. So, we also have to make some sort of action to prohibit State and local government from issuing new debt. No point in freeing up money only to see it wasted on government all the same. We need that freed up money for the initiation and expansion of wealth-creating private enterprise. To encourage this use, we should issue a moratorium on taxes for any new or expanded business which makes things, mines materials or grows food. For such companies already in existence and not able or willing to expand, a significant reduction in business taxes. Remember, we will borrow about $1.5 trillion this year – imagine if even 50% of that were used next year to start up factories, open up mines or create new farms.

Kill the debt. Encourage genuine wealth creation. Eliminate all spending which does not directly provide defense, food, housing and health care – and even in those areas carefully scrub spending to eliminate as much overhead and waste as possible. It will hurt, but it will be over in a couple years.

Or, we can just continue on, spending our way in to complete oblivion and have a complete economic collapse – and this time without any ability to borrow money so instead of a voluntary spending cut of 25%, we’ll have a 50%+ spending cut forced upon us. It’ll also take us years longer to recover, the longer we delay taking the actions necessary for growth.

Its our choice – our window of opportunity is small and getting smaller. We might only have 6 months left to make a good start on this – we might, indeed, already be out of time. But while there still appears to be time, we should take action. This November gives we, the people, are chance to start the ball rolling.

We’ll see how it comes out.

UPDATE: Pending home sales plunge 30%, unemployment claims rise “unexpectedly“, Dow slides.

Chuck Muth of Nevada News and Views sends us a Stuck on Stupid Alert:

From the Department of You’ve Gotta Be Freaking Kidding Me:

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports this afternoon that in the middle of this Great Recession – with bankruptcies and foreclosures through the roof; with unemployment higher in Nevada than anywhere else in the free world; with an Energizer Bunny state budget deficit that seems to just keep growing and growing and growing; with public schools sucking and health care costs skyrocketing – some of our lame-brained legislators, led by our Nanny-Stater-in-Chief, Sen. Mike Schneider (D-Uranus), “agreed Tuesday to draw up a bill to require auto repair shops, smog stations and oil change businesses to check the air pressure in their customers’ tires.”

That’s right. As Rome burns, the Subcommittee on the Production and Use of Energy is contemplating a stupid bill mandating that Nevada businesses check your stinking tire pressure!

Because The One announced, once upon a time, that checking our tire pressure would be a major step in reducing our dependence on foreign oil. And what The One says must be obeyed!

The sheer insanity of this does boggle the mind – but it also is another perfect example of the liberal mindset. The mindless interference in personal lives. The onerous regulation of business. The action designed to make it seem like something is being done when nothing gets solved. Once again, we can’t get these clowns – local, State and federal – out of office soon enough

From Fox News:

It seems abundantly clear to me that the Panthers were let off simply because they were the Panthers. Remember, in the liberal world view, black people can never be racist because only people with “power” can be racist…no matter who obviously racist a non-white group is, a liberal will still never call them that.

We won’t be able to obtain justice in the United States while the Obama Administration is in office – they are incapable of providing it because they don’t know what it is.

Is Google taking things too far? Their expansion is getting disturbing.

Google has been using its dominant position in online search to muscle its way into other Internet businesses, ultimately limiting consumer choice, Consumer Watchdog said today in a report written for its new Inside Google Website.

The nonprofit, nonpartisan consumer group is sending the report to U.S. and European antitrust regulators.

[…]

The Inside Google study found that since adopting “Universal Search,” which favors Google’s properties with prominent listings in its results, traffic to Google’s sites has soared at the expense of competitors. The controversial search practice was launched in 2007.

“Google claims that its search is neutral,” said John M. Simpson, consumer advocate with the group. “This study shows that it’s not and demonstrates the damaging impact Google’s unfair practices have had on competitors.”

Consumer Watchdog will give the Inside Google study, “Traffic Report: How Google is Squeezing out Competitors and Muscling Into New Markets,” to U.S. Justice Department and European Commission antitrust officials.

The study of Internet traffic data for more than 100 popular websites since 2007 revealed Google’s dramatic gains. In the most comprehensive study of its kind to date, Inside Google obtained three years of Internet traffic data from the respected web metrics firm Experian Hitwise. The data allowed an analysis of Google’s business practices and performance that is unprecedented in scope.

What do you think?

Just love it:

I’m noticing an increasing willingness to not just be conservative, but to be in-your-face conservative.

And their latest tactic is to just shove so many things in to the bill that it might find a majority for passage:

…The plan is to create one bill that combines the unemployment benefits with an extension of a popular tax credit for people who buy new homes…

…The measure, which is the same as the one in the Senate bill, would provide up to 99 weekly unemployment checks averaging $335 to people whose 26 weeks of state-paid benefits have run out. The benefits would be available through the end of November, at a cost of $33.9 billion. There are no offsets in the bill, so the cost would add to the budget deficit…

Just pile it on, Democrats – there is a bottomless well of money and we’ll never have to pay back our national debt. Its not like there’s a cent which can be cut elsewhere, you know. Every bit of federal spending is crucial – cut a penny of it, and we’ll all died. What’s more important: our long term economic health, or getting you re-elected in November?

Just insane. And it will all have to be paid for – and it will be the poor and middle class footing the bill for this idiocy.

From Byron York’s article on the Gore sex scandal:

…Finally she got away. Later, she talked to friends, liberals like herself, who advised against telling police. One asked her “to just suck it up; otherwise, the world’s going to be destroyed from global warming.”…

For liberals, advancing the agenda is all that matters – and if part of the price to be paid is that a person must be sexually violated by a liberal leader, then its ok. A bit of a grope is to be set against the possibility that Gore will save us all from global warming…

The thing to draw out of this is that everything is political with them. The only time it ceases to be so is when one of them comes to his or her senses and ceases to be a liberal. Take nothing they say at face value unless it is confirmed elsewhere by impeccable sources – you’ll never know when they are trying to snow you in the name of the Cause.

This exchange at the hearings is pretty much all we need to know about her:

Senator Coburn asks if Congress passes a law mandating we all eat our vegetables, would that go beyond the scope of the “commerce clause” – Kagan essentially declines to answer. We can only presume this is because she can’t think of anything which would not be covered by the “commerce clause” – that she can’t think of a power Congress doesn’t have, as long as they can dress it up as affecting inter-State commerce.

Kagan may be lots of things, but she has no business on America’s highest court.

From from the horse’s as..errmm, I mean from the horse’s mouth:

…We contracted with Research 2000 to conduct polling and to provide us with the results of their surveys. Based on the report of the statisticians, it’s clear that we did not get what we paid for. We were defrauded by Research 2000, and while we don’t know if some or all of the data was fabricated or manipulated beyond recognition, we know we can’t trust it…(Ed. Note: we normally do not link to hate sites, such as Daily Kos, but as the left believes Kos’ polls, this is an important bit of news worthy of an exception.)

I’m willing to give Kos the benefit of the doubt on this – the polls consistently came out the way he would have liked them to come out, and in the true fashion of the left, little or no effort will ever be made questioning the pro-left data (global warming was built up just like this). Kos is the victim here – but the victim of that leftist worldview which builds up barriers to free inquiry.

Research 2000 may have just seen an easy mark – I long ago figured out how I could become quite wealthy: just start feeding the left whatever it wants to hear. And if I did it as a conservative who saw the light and was trying to make amends for my previous wickedness, it would have been that much fatter a paycheck. The left doesn’t think, doesn’t question – lacks real world knowledge and is ill equipped to figure out a scam (thus Frank and Dodd, who largely created the financial crisis, are charged by the left with fixing it).

Given the level of suckerness (as it were) on the left, I could have carried off such a scam quite easily – but while I’m no saint, I’m not someone who can run a con like that. Kos was taken in – and will be, again. As sure as night follows day, the next person or entity who will tell Kos what he wants to hear will be believed by him without question…if it ever winds up differently, it will only be because Kos figures it out, and becomes a conservative.

UPDATE: Research 2000 is counter-suing Daily Kos?

…Ali’s attorney, Richard Beckler of Howrey LLP in Washington, told TPMmuckraker in an interview, “This guy is completely all wet. This allegation of fraud is absurd.” He added, “These guys are basically ruining Mr. Ali’s business.”

Beckler promised to take “some kind of action soon against all of them” — referring to Kos and the three authors of the analysis calling R2K’s data into question. He declined to elaborate…

I love it when lefties start ripping in to each other.

Alex Daley over at Casey Research lays out the very depressing case:

…For the first time in a long time, developed governments in Europe and the U.S. face the specter of sub-AAA credit ratings and rapidly rising costs of borrowing more (ratings that, frankly, had they been put in place by the inept agencies years ago when they were initially deserved may have had repercussions that would have helped us avoid many of today’s problems). Between rising borrowing costs, the already hefty budgetary burden of paying prior debt interest, and the ever-expanding rolls of government employees, legislators can hardly keep up on the bills these days, let alone inject any more into the economy.

The irony, of course, is that by unloading a full clip from the assault rifle when trying to “save” the economy, the governments of the OECD nations have actually created a catch-22 situation. One wherein they not only have no tools left to manipulate the markets against a further slowdown, but also where they have created monetary policy so extreme that undoing it would be more disastrous than the fallout would have been had they not stepped in in the first place….

As I’ve said before, there isn’t any way to avoid the next part of the crash. I don’t think there ever was, as Keynesian pump-priming has never worked. Oh, I know it is a matter of liberal religious faith that such policies cured the Great Depression, but that is just utter nonsense, as can be seen with a cursory glance at the relevant data. Be that as it may, even if such things do work, there’s no way to do it any longer – we’re simply out of money. Even if you whistle up a couple trillion more dollars at the Federal Reserve, all you’ll do is move the crisis from one set of bankrupt entities to another – you might buy yourself a few weeks, if you do that…and just make matters worse, in the long run.

We are going to be forced to balance our budget by simple fact of not being able to borrow any more money. Initially upon the crash, no one will have any to lend – later, anyone who has rebuilt a bit of wealth will stay away from government issued debt as too risky. It will be very, very painful – but, bankruptcy always is. The good news is that once we’re out of it, we’re done – we can start rebuilding again…and, hopefully, learn our lesson and pass relevant laws forbidding both the issuance of government debt as well as government backing for any private, financial transaction. Government debt, in the sense we know it, was invented almost by accident in the 18th century (and was created largely to bail out idiots who got themselves wrapped up in a stock market bubble…sound familiar?) – taking the long view of things (as I like to do), we can see that the three century experiment in this has failed. We should not try it, again.

HAT TIP: Mish’s