Category Archives: Barack Obama

Obama Promises Sexed-Up Homes

Barack Obama, Economy, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Political Economy, Technology

How will Big Brother O get you to sex-up your home? Why by skewing production in parts of the economy.

Here is a perfect example of how central planners direct scarce resources into inefficient technologies:

BO is nudging Congress (isn’t that our job?) to provide temporary incentives for Americans to weatherize their homes.

But how—and more importantly why—would cash-strapped Americans spend money they don’t have on retrofitting their abodes with expensive green gimmicks, ASAP?

The first economic order of the day in pushing people to squander scarce resources on fashionable items is for the fool-in-chief to sell the tinsel nation on the sexiness of these consumption goods.

Big Brother Barack says he finds insulation sexy. Sex sells; Obama and sex doubly so.

Is there anything Big Daddy Can’t deliver? Watch:

Update II: Bush & Barack Sitting In A T-R-E-E …

Barack Obama, Bush, Business, Economy, Neoconservatism, Regulation, War

Who Does Barack Obama Remind Me Of? BUSH. The indignant protestations from the Republicans notwithstanding, the two parties and potentates are interchangeable.

Dec 11, 2009: “… leaders say they will try to raise the ceiling to nearly $14 trillion as part of a $626 billion bill next week to pay for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and other military programs in 2010.”

September 11, 2003: Bush increases the ceiling on a whopping $6.8 trillion national debt.

Pleasing neoconservatives: Bush’s preemptive war doctrine never failed to bring a smile to Bill Kristol’s face. Pursuant to last week’s Nobel War Speech address, Obama too is making Bill warm all over.

Read the “Remarks by the President at the Acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize” to see why Bill is glowing.

Update (Dec. 15): The two converge on war and on chasing “fat cats” (bar the likes of Barney Frank):

Bush: “The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, courtesy of the Republican Party, cost American companies upwards of $1.2 trillion. The capital flight it initiated caused the London Stock Exchange to become the new hub for capital markets. Given America’s habit of forcing its habits on others, SOX struck fear into quite a few Liberal Democratic hearts in the House of Lords. Lord Teverson worried about the ‘increasing danger of regulatory creep from American regulators that threatens [Britain’s] own light-touch approach to financial regulation.'”

Barack: “A regulatory tsunami is on its way. ever-increasing regulation, stricter corporate-governance standards and the threat of higher taxes in response to the ballooning deficit. This week the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it considered carbon dioxide to be a dangerous pollutant, raising the spectre of clumsy administrative measures to reduce emissions—a prospect even more terrifying to business than the cap-and-trade scheme currently under consideration in Congress. Meanwhile, hopes of business-friendly reforms to America’s convoluted corporate-tax regime, among other things, have fallen by the wayside. …

‘The concern is pervasive but rather amorphous in the sense that different executives have very different worries,’ says Joe Grundfest, a former member of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) who now runs a ‘boot camp’ at Stanford University for corporate directors. ‘Some fret over tax policy. Others agonise over cap-and-trade, or health-care reform. Many worry about additional corporate-governance regulations. It’s a smorgasbord of corporate neuroses out there.'”

Update II (Dec. 15): Peter Schiff, of course, is hip to the Bush/Barack overlap: “Through aggressive monetary and fiscal stimuli, we are trying to re-inflate a balloon that is full of holes. This was the Bush Administration’s exact response to the 2002 recession. It’s shocking how few observers note the repeating pattern, especially the fact that each crash is worse than the last.”

Update II: Bush & Barack Sitting In A T-R-E-E …

Barack Obama, Bush, Business, Neoconservatism, Regulation, War

Who Does Barack Obama Remind Me Of? BUSH. The indignant protestations from the Republicans notwithstanding, the two parties and potentates are interchangeable.

Dec 11, 2009: “… leaders say they will try to raise the ceiling to nearly $14 trillion as part of a $626 billion bill next week to pay for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and other military programs in 2010.”

September 11, 2003: Bush increases the ceiling on a whopping $6.8 trillion national debt.

Pleasing neoconservatives: Bush’s preemptive war doctrine never failed to bring a smile to Bill Kristol’s face. Pursuant to last week’s Nobel War Speech address, Obama too is making Bill warm all over.

Read the “Remarks by the President at the Acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize” to see why Bill is glowing.

Update (Dec. 15): The two converge on war and on chasing “fat cats” (bar the likes of Barney Frank):

Bush: “The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, courtesy of the Republican Party, cost American companies upwards of $1.2 trillion. The capital flight it initiated caused the London Stock Exchange to become the new hub for capital markets. Given America’s habit of forcing its habits on others, SOX struck fear into quite a few Liberal Democratic hearts in the House of Lords. Lord Teverson worried about the ‘increasing danger of regulatory creep from American regulators that threatens [Britain’s] own light-touch approach to financial regulation.'”

Barack: “A regulatory tsunami is on its way. ever-increasing regulation, stricter corporate-governance standards and the threat of higher taxes in response to the ballooning deficit. This week the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it considered carbon dioxide to be a dangerous pollutant, raising the spectre of clumsy administrative measures to reduce emissions—a prospect even more terrifying to business than the cap-and-trade scheme currently under consideration in Congress. Meanwhile, hopes of business-friendly reforms to America’s convoluted corporate-tax regime, among other things, have fallen by the wayside. …

‘The concern is pervasive but rather amorphous in the sense that different executives have very different worries,’ says Joe Grundfest, a former member of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) who now runs a ‘boot camp’ at Stanford University for corporate directors. ‘Some fret over tax policy. Others agonise over cap-and-trade, or health-care reform. Many worry about additional corporate-governance regulations. It’s a smorgasbord of corporate neuroses out there.'”

Update II (Dec. 15): Peter Schiff, of course, is hip to the Bush/Barack overlap: “Through aggressive monetary and fiscal stimuli, we are trying to re-inflate a balloon that is full of holes. This was the Bush Administration’s exact response to the 2002 recession. It’s shocking how few observers note the repeating pattern, especially the fact that each crash is worse than the last.”

Updated: Statist/Stupid Summit On Mount Olympus

Barack Obama, Business, Debt, Economy, Military, Regulation, Republicans

If you are a private-sector sucker plumping for a panoply of new government programs, consider the following: The more of them there are, the fewer of you there will be. Think zero-sum, or parasite vs. host. The first is sucking the lifeblood of the second. The larger the parasite gets, the weaker the host will grow.

[From “Life In The Oink Sector”]

Alas, STATISM AND STUPIDITY ARE INTERCHANGEABLE. Obama can “summit” (forgive this horrid “verbing” of a noun) about jobs all he likes, nothing will come of it. Because he is a dyed-in-the-wool statist, BO cannot conceive—not even with the aid of Lego or some sort of pop-up children’s model—that dolling out unemployment benefits, state aid, and government jobs programs, which all necessitate the seizure of private wealth through taxing, borrowing, and printing paper—cannot create wealth.

Here’s my simple, crude model for Obama the statist. Play with it with the First Girls. Recommend it to your friends:

Put 10 blocks in box A. Take 5 blocks out of box A and place them in box B. The owner of box A is 5 blocks poorer, the owner of box B is 5 blocks richer. Total number of blocks: still 10. Total wealth created: 0.

Come on BO, you can do it.

There is no big secret about “creating” jobs. Government can’t do it. Unless it sucks more capital and credit out of the private economy, it has only the capacity to consume wealth, not create it.

The best BO can do is take a hike; go on a 4-year vacation; walk the plank; just GET OUT OF THE WAY!

Update: Mitt Romney’s 10-point “to lift our economy” gives you an idea of the limits of Republican economic “thinking,” such that it is.

Repair and re-diretc the stimulus is one of Mitt’s recommendations. In other words, keep businesses that should go under or find a new equilibrium artificially inflated.

Individualists, proponents of the Constitution, who understand that individual liberty cannot coincide with the growth of government both at home and abroad cannot categorically accept the Republicans’ perverse notion of limited government.

Mitt also advises the president (who is beyond hope) to limit only non-military discretionary spending, and limit “new spending … to items that are critically needed and that we would have acquired in the future, such as new military equipment to support our troops abroad.”

To Republicans, the warfare state is viable; commensurate with liberty, and without the pitfalls that plague the welfare apparatus:

When Republicans and conservatives cavil about the gargantuan growth of government, they target the state’s welfare apparatus and spare its war machine. Unbeknown to these factions, the military is government. The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports many of the same inherent malignancies of government. Like government, it must be kept small.
Conservative can’t coherently preach against the evils of big government, while excluding the military mammoth.

[From “Your Government’s Jihadi Protection Program.”]