Monday, November 22, 2010

Barker's Newsbites: Monday, Nov. 22, 2010


Ahh... the '70's...
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7 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://af.reuters.com/article/energyOilNews/idAFLDE6AL0YT20101122?sp=true

Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore said support for corn-based ethanol in the United States was "not a good policy", weeks before tax credits are up for renewal.

(*THROWING MY HANDS UP IN THE AIR*)

* NOW THE IDIOT COMES OUT WITH THIS...?!?! NOW...?!?! WELL... (*SIGH*)... BETTER LATE THAN NEVER.

U.S. blending tax breaks for ethanol make it profitable for refiners to use the fuel even when it is more expensive than gasoline.

* YEP! U.S. TAXPAYERS PLAY THE ROLE OF SUCKERS AGAIN! OH... AND WHILE WE'RE SUBSIDIZING AN ADDITIVE WHICH DECREASES GAS MILEAGE AS IT DAMAGES THE ENVIRONMENT, DON'T FORGET... WE'RE ALSO DISPLACING FOOD PRODUCTION - WHICH MEANS HIGHER GROCERY PRICES FOR YOU AND ME - WHILE "BEST" OF ALL... WE'RE ALSO SUBSIDIZING EXPORT OF ETHANOL AND BLENDS OVERSEAS!

The credits are up for renewal on Dec. 31.

* AND IF REPUBLICANS CAN'T STOP THIS...

(*GRITTING MY TEETH*)

Total U.S. ethanol subsidies reached $7.7 billion last...

* JUST ONE YEAR, FOLKS...!

[Gore] explained his own support for the original programme on his presidential ambitions. "One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president."

(*GASP*) WTF...?!?!

* CONGRATULATIONS, AL FRIGG'N GORE... SINCERELY! YOU'VE ACTUALLY FESSED UP! SINCERELY... THANK YOU. YOU DESERVE CONGRATULATION FOR THAT. (NOW... LIQUIDATE ALL YOUR PRIVATE WEALTH AND DONATE IT TO THE U.S. TREASURY SO AS TO MAKE CONCRETE AMENDS TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE WHO YOU SCREWED VIA YOUR PURSUIT OF PERSONAL POWER.)

November 22, 2010 at 12:57 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-22/rescue-of-ireland-would-dwarf-greece-s-bailout-on-cost-of-shoring-up-banks.html

Ireland will seek emergency international aid totaling as much as 60% of the size of its economy, dwarfing the Greek bailout...

Ireland will ask for about 95 billion euros ($130 billion) from the European Union and International Monetary Fund, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. estimates.

* FOLKS... COMING UP:

The cost of a bailout on the Irish scale for Portugal, seen as the next weakest link among the EU’s high-deficit countries, would cost 100 billion euros...

For Spain, whose banks have also come under strain from the collapse of its real-estate bubble, a bailout of 60% of GDP would cost 632 billion euros.

For Italy, the region’s second-most indebted nation after Greece, the figure would be 912 billion euros.

* FOLKS... WATCH THE EURO. LOGIC WOULD LEAD ONE TO BELIEVE IT'LL SINK LIKE A STONE. I DOUBT IT WILL THOUGH. THE GAME IS RIGGED MY FRIENDS. THE OLIGARCHS WIN... WE LOSE.

November 22, 2010 at 12:58 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704170404575624643400449172.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop

One of the tragi-comic sideshows of passing ObamaCare was the Democratic attempt to buy off the AMA by promising a permanent fix to the Medicare payment formula for doctors. Apparently permanent is four weeks.

That's the upshot of last Thursday night's Senate vote to postpone an automatic 23% cut in Medicare physician payments, but only through New Year's Day. The House plans to approve the same deal next week, and you should think of this as Nancy Pelosi's housewarming gift for Speaker-presumptive John Boehner.

Democrats got their AMA endorsement of ObamaCare from immediate past president James Rohack, who was last seen leaving the Beltway on a turnip truck. But Democrats left a permanent fix out of the final ObamaCare bill in order to keep the official price tag below $1 trillion. Democrats planned to pass the $250 billion "doc fix" later in a separate bill, but somehow they never got around to it. The [still democrat controlled] Senate's latest one-month version costs $1 billion and is paid for by claiming to reduce certain outpatient therapy payments by about $100 million each year for the next decade. (Anyone willing to bet on whether those cuts will ever happen? We'll take the "no" side of that wager.)

In sum, Democrats deceived the AMA about the doc fix and are now deceiving voters about how they'll pay for even this four-week reprieve. And they're dumping the $250 billion bill on Republicans.

* AND SOMEHOW I DOUBT THAT NETWORK NEWS VIEWERS OR LOCAL NEWSPAPER READERS WILL HAVE THIS EXPLAINED TO THEM BY OUR FRIENDS IN THE LIBERAL PRESS/MEDIA. (*SMIRK*)

This doctor-payment charade has served both parties since it was created in 1997 as a palm-greaser for campaign contributions and to disguise the real costs of Medicare as part of the Bill Clinton-Newt Gingrich balanced budget deal. But these Democratic abuses are something else. Three of the four stopgaps this year have passed after the deadline set by the previous stopgap, so for a time Medicare simply stopped paying doctors, causing back-office disruptions nationwide. (Imagine if a private insurer pulled these stunts.)

November 22, 2010 at 7:51 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704658204575610924168519824.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop

President Obama is now retrenching after his midterm rebuke, and one of the main ways he'll try to press his agenda is through the alphabet soup of the federal regulators.

[S]pecial oversight priority for the new Congress ought to be the Environmental Protection Agency... The scale of the EPA's current assault is unprecedented, yet it has received almost no public scrutiny. Since Mr. Obama took office, the agency has proposed or finalized 29 major regulations and 172 major policy rules. This surge already outpaces the Clinton Administration's entire first term...

At least 56 Senators in next year's Congress are on record supporting bills that would freeze the EPA's carbon regulation for a time or strip the agency of its self-delegated powers. But the EPA is still pursuing the same agenda through other means, harming business expansion, job creation and economic growth.

A key task for the next Congress will be to start pushing back. Liquidating the EPA budget would yield better returns.

* FOLKS... READ THE ARTICLE IN ITS ENTIRETY IF YOU WANT EXAMPLES OF EXACTLY HOW OBAMA'S EPA IS SETTING THE STAGE FOR EXPLODING ENERGY COSTS EVEN AS GOVERNMENT ENFORCED SCARCITY REARS ITS UGLY HEAD.

November 22, 2010 at 7:52 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704648604575620502560925156.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

The draft recommendations of the president's commission on deficit reduction call for closing popular tax deductions...

* GOOD!

...higher gas taxes...

* BAD!

...and other revenue raisers to drive tax collections up to 21% of GDP from the historical norm of about 18.5%.

* VERY BAD!

Another plan, proposed last week by commission member and former Congressional Budget Office director Alice Rivlin, would impose a 6.5% national sales tax on consumers.

* WORST OF ALL...!!! (PRAY THAT MS. RIVLIN FALLS INTO A RIP VAN WINKLE "NAP" AND DOESN'T WAKE UP TILL WE, OUR CHILDREN, AND GRANDCHILDREN ARE ALL SAFELY DEAD. (*SMIRK*)

The claim here, echoed by endless purveyors of conventional wisdom in Washington, is that these added revenues - potentially a half-trillion dollars a year - will be used to reduce the $8 trillion to $10 trillion deficits in the coming decade. If history is any guide, however, that won't happen. Instead, Congress will simply spend the money.

* EXACTLY! FOLKS... WE'VE GOT TO STARVE THE BEAST OF GOVERNMENT - NOT FEED IT!

Using standard statistical analyses that introduce variables to control for business-cycle fluctuations, wars and inflation, we [article authors Stephen Moore and Richard Vedder] found that over the entire post World War II era through 2009 each dollar of new tax revenue was associated with $1.17 of new spending. Politicians spend the money as fast as it comes in - and a little bit more. [A]lternative [data] models produce different estimates of the tax-spend relationship - between $1.05 and $1.81 - but no matter how we configured the data and no matter what variables we examined, higher tax collections never resulted in less spending.

This is exactly the opposite of what the tax-increase lobby in Washington is preaching today. For example, Erskine Bowles, co-chairman of the president's deficit reduction commission, suggested at a briefing several months ago that there will be $3 of spending cuts for every $1 of tax increases. Sound familiar? Reagan used to complain that he waited his entire presidency for the $3 of spending cuts that Congress promised for every dollar of new taxes he agreed to in 1982. The cuts never came.

The grand bargain so many in Washington yearn for - tax increases coupled with spending cuts - is a fool's errand. Our research confirms what the late economist Milton Friedman said of Congress many years ago: "Politicians will always spend every penny of tax raised and whatever else they can get away with."

November 22, 2010 at 7:53 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704648604575621062239887650.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

[T]he lame-duck [still democrat controlled] Congress might extend one of the key elements of [the Obama] "stimulus": Build America Bonds (BABs).

The [original] federal subsidy allowed states and cities to offer...investors an attractive return. The catch: Congress authorized the program only through 2010, to allay concerns that BABs would become a permanent bailout.

States and municipalities have used these bonds to rack up some $160 billion in new debt over the last 19 months.

[Build America Bonds were] a new kind of taxable bond that offered a 35% federal subsidy on the interest rate. Washington designed the subsidy to appeal to investors such as pension funds and overseas buyers who don't buy traditional municipal bonds because they can't take advantage of their tax-free status.

* YEP... THAT'S RIGHT, FOLKS... WHAT'S NOW DEBT TO STATE TAXPAYERS IS SUBSIDIZED PURCHASE/RETURN TO FOREIGN INVESTORS - ALL COURTESY OF THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION AND THE DEMOCRATIC CONGRESS.

* OH... AND DON'T FORGET... THE 35% FEDERAL SUBSIDY DOESN'T COME OUT OF THIN AIR. IT GETS ADDED TO THE NATIONAL DEBT - WITH INTEREST!

California alone has issued some $21 billion in BABs...

New Jersey has used up to $500 million to recapitalize its depleted transportation trust fund. Columbus, Ohio, issued $131 million in BABs to start construction of a downtown convention hotel. And in Dallas, Texas, when no private operator would finance a new convention hotel, the city went ahead with a government-subsidized hotel, courtesy of $388 million in BABs.

(*SARCASTIC CLAP-CLAP-CLAP*)

Now dozens of governments and other municipal issuers (like New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the University of California) have hired lobbyists to push Congress to extend BABs beyond this year. And in its 2011 budget, the Obama administration proposed making Build America Bonds permanent, with an interest-rate subsidy of 28%.

(*HEAD THEATENING TO EXPLODE*)

The governments that have made the most use of BABs have been those with the greatest fiscal problems.

* NOT SURPRISINGLY, OBAMA'S HOME STATE - THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF ILLINOIS - AND CALIFORNIA - WHERE JERRY BROWN HAS JUST BEEN ELECTED ONCE AND FUTURE GOVERNOR - ARE TWO OF THE WORST CULPRITS.

November 22, 2010 at 7:53 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1194156c-f66a-11df-846a-00144feab49a.html#axzz164oNgKXv

Black market networks based in Pakistan and China played a leading role in equipping North Korea’s newly declared nuclear facility, according to western intelligence officials and analysts.

* HMM... LET'S SEE... ONE IS OUR "ALLY" IN THE... er... "WAR ON TERROR," WHILE WE RELY UPON THE OTHER FOR MANUFACTURED PRODUCTS AND... er... "INVESTMENTS."

The revelation on Saturday that North Korea is operating more than 1,000 centrifuges to enrich uranium at its site in Yongbyon caused consternation in Washington, Seoul and Tokyo.

Siegfried Hecker, the scientist who inspected the facility, largely discounts North Korean claims that it was home-built, citing instead Pyongyang’s “clear pattern of co-operation and exchange with Pakistan” and “troubling procurement ... with commercial entities in China.” He also cites his “concern about potential co-operation and exchanges in uranium technologies between North Korea and Iran.” European intelligence sources strike a similar note, pointing to co-operation with Pakistan.

The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) suggests that North Korea may have already built a secret enrichment facility elsewhere, using equipment or knowledge procured from Pakistan, and “either transferred it to Yongbyon or simply built another one based on its experience of bringing the first, perhaps smaller, one into operation”.

ISIS said in an October report: “North Korea frequently procures for its uranium enrichment programme either directly in China or by using it as a transshipment point.” ISIS added that, according to a European intelligence official, from 2007 to 2009 North Korean entities obtained state-of-the-art machines needed to make centrifuge parts via China. ISIS...also draws attention to companies involved in the nuclear black market located in countries such as Germany and Switzerland. But it points to China’s alleged role as a crucial entrepôt, where many North Korean front companies are based.

Mark Fitzpatrick, an expert in proliferation at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, [notes,] “There are many who continue to supply Pakistan, North Korea and Iran. It’s a global supply network, with suppliers primarily in western Europe, South Africa, Malaysia, Sing­apore, Japan and South Korea. Some European intelligence officials signal that Russian traders may have also helped North Korea.

November 22, 2010 at 11:46 PM

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