Unemployment By County, Now In Easy-To-View Youtube Format

For those of you who missed it the first time:

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Kim Strassel: 'Wanted By The Democrats: Wildly Optimistic Individual To Oversee National-Jobs-Creation Program. PhD In Imaginary Numbers Required'

Maybe those people who said Obama was Jimmy Carter-lite (or heavy, depending) were right?

Description: The Democratic Party seeks a wildly optimistic individual to oversee a national jobs-creation program. Jobs can be real, or not, so long as the public thinks the party is "doing something." The National Jobs Creator will have at his disposal Congress to pass new "jobs legislation" (aka The It-Is-Not-Another-Stimulus Act of 2009).

The NJC will oversee a dynamic team whose side responsibilities include selling this to the public and saving our behinds in next year's election. This is a potential career status position.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Masters Degree from an accredited program in communications/spin. Candidate must be able to explain to the public why "new jobs legislation" is necessary despite assurances the "old jobs legislation"—a $787 billion "stimulus"—is working. Applicant must demonstrate ability to explain why, despite a global recession, we continued socializing health care, and only just noticed that, wow, Houston, we have a problem. (Candidate might consider researching McDonnell, Bob, Gov.-elect of Virginia, who just kicked us in an election and did it talking about "jobs." That got us wondering.)

Candidate must explain the "new jobs legislation" to a wary public. Candidate must clarify how extending unemployment benefits will create jobs; how extending health insurance for the unemployed will create jobs; how taxing financial transactions to pay for this will create jobs. Candidate is responsible for immediately restoring party credibility on this issue, despite all past failed Keynesian spending and, let's be honest, some (holy moly!) embarrassing stimulus "job counting."

Mostly I'm just embarrassed for all my liberal (they probably prefer progressive), Obama-supporting friends who thought Bush was just so horribly irresponsible when it came to spending and the economy and that Obama would be so much smarter and economically savvy.

Sorry, guys. Hope/change perception ≠ reality.

Related & awesome (h/t Matt L.): The Decline: The Geography of a Recession. Do yourself a favor and check out this excellent graphic showing the recession in geographical terms, county-by-county, across the United States. It's painful.

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Cramer, Obama, Liberals, &c.

Ever since I first noticed the phenomenon, I've looked for the right opportunity to put it into practice. What might it be, you ask? Why, quoting myself, of course.

It was prompted by an email I received from Matt P. Given that I hadn't heard from him in awhile, I jumped at the chance.

Matt wrote:

So low taxes are good in bad economic times so people can get rich, but when the economy is good we can soak the rich and damn the poor? I can't understand how he can't see the fault in his logic. Even when he's right, he's still wrong.

From his post yesterday:

"To be totally out of the closet, I actually embrace every part of Obama's agenda, right down to the increase on personal taxes and the mortgage deduction. I am a fierce environmentalist who has donated multiple acres to the state of New Jersey to keep forever wild. I believe in cap and trade. I favor playing hardball with drug companies that hold up the U.S. government with me-too products.

"... I believe his agenda is crushing nest eggs around the nation in loud ways, like the decline in the averages, and in soft but dangerous ways, like in the annuities that can't be paid and the insurance benefits that will be challenging to deliver on.

"So I will fight the fight against that agenda. I will stand up for what I believe and for what I have always believed: Every person has a right to be rich in this country and I want to help them get there. And when they get there, if times are good, we can have them give back or pay higher taxes. Until they get there, I don't want them shackled or scared or paralyzed. That's what I see now."

I'm all for "giving back," but shouldn't that be my choice?

To which I responded as follows:

Cramer is a liberal Democrat & an idiot [ed. note: but I repeated myself]. I guess, from him, we should be glad when he criticizes Obama at all, as he has done recently.

Obviously, I am in wholehearted agreement with what you say.

To liberals, your money is not really your money. It's the money you got by exploiting people, probably, and you don't deserve it. Plus, they know how to use it better than you do. It's all about power & control--that's the conservative vs. liberal argument at it's core:

Conservatives want everyone to have as much control over their lives as possible. They understand that some people are going to screw up, and that sucks, but that most people will do best whatever makes them happy.

Liberals want to control everyone's lives in every possible way because they think they know how to make everyone equally happy, or, as happens to be the case back in a little place I like to call reality, they know how to make everyone's life suck equally (except, of course, for the American version of the Politburo and their friends who get the green dacha's* in the countryside.)

This is the new reality: In a country where market forces aren't left to themselves to pick winners and losers; in a country where trillion dollar budgets and spenduli are used to shower billions of dollars on campaign supporters (read: ACORN, Unions, etc.); in a country where government picks the winners and the losers, you better hope that, at the very least, you aren't on Obama's naughty list.


*In Soviet Russia, supposedly everyone had access to homes in the countryside surrounding Moscow & other Russian cities. In reality, the only ones who stayed there, ate black market food, owned cars that ran, took hot showers, etc., etc. were the leading Communist party members & their friends.


If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Reject Obama-conomics

In Thursday's Journal, Daniel Henninger recommended we all "reread the apostles and evangelists of private economic growth -- Ronald Reagan's "A Life in Letters," Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose," Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson."

By happy coincidence, I received via mass email, one of Milton Friedman's great TV moments.

It's short; please watch.



As one of my economic heroes was fond of repeating, government is at its best (historically AND its best is not saying much) when its efforts are both simple & targeted.

There is nothing about TARP, Obama's stimulus, Obama's budget, Obama's cap-and-trade, or Obama's proposed TARP-2 that fits either of those criteria. These are all proposals from men (& a few women) who think they can manage the economy from above better than individuals can on their own.

We've been down that road before. A bunch of times. Let's not go there again.


If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Absent Bush, Dems Make Straw Man Of Rush (UPDATED)

I should have said, "Democrats & the media (but I repeat myself) make a straw man out of Rush Limbaugh."

That joke doesn't get old.

My man at NewsBusters, Noel Sheppard, wrote up a good piece about recent revelations from the left that they want to make Limbaugh the new Republican bogeyman--used to scare the public into submitting to their nefarious plans.

Well, new revelations suggest that Democrats began a smear campaign against the conservative talk radio host last October, and now it's really caught steam.

Apparently, the Left feared its message would be muted without having George W. Bush to blame for all the world's problems, and Limbaugh made a nice substitute as the object of their disaffection to distract the public from real issues.

Given White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's connections to key media figures such as ABC's George Stephanopoulos as well as CNN's Paul Begala and James Carville, disseminating the hate was a piece of cake.

It almost goes w/o saying that I think their plan will fail--most importantly, because Rush is a far better communicator than George W. Bush. And because Rush already has 20 million regular listeners.

I don't want to say Emanuel & Begala & Carville & Co. are dumb, but this strategy strikes me as pretty stupid. Seriously, folks, when you are the establishment, it doesn't help you to elevate the competition.

I don't think there is a smarter, more persuasive communicator of conservative ideals that Rush Limbaugh. If these people are persuadable, they will be persuaded by Rush.

Note that I'm not talking about the leftist progressives who already hate all things conservative. These people are dead to reason until they realize how much their feel-good policy preferences suck in the real world.

Independents--the same ones who were persuaded about offshore drilling. The same ones who have begun to turn against the spendulus. The same ones who are skeptical about bigger government & higher taxes--these people will turn to Rush and large numbers of them will be persuaded by him.

UPDATE 6:17pm BST: Jonah Goldberg weighs in on El Rushbo's controversial statement that he hopes Obama "fails":

Here we go again. Rush Limbaugh is public enemy No. 1. Liberal bloggers and media chin-strokers are aghast at Limbaugh's statement that he hopes Barack Obama fails. Well, given what Obama wants to do, I hope he fails too. Of course I want the financial crisis to end -- who doesn't? But Obama's agenda is much more audacious. Pretty much every major news outlet in the country has said as a matter of objective analysis that Obama wants to repeal the legacy of Ronald Reagan and remake the country as a European welfare state. And yet people are shocked that conservatives, Limbaugh included, want Obama to fail in this effort? What movie have they been watching? Because I could swear that conservatives opposing the expansion of big government is what conservatives do.

European elites and visiting liberal American backpackers love Europe. All they ever see are the tourist traps. They don't see the vast numbers of welfare state lower class--many immigrants--who live, for instance, in the banlieues of Paris.

These people--and their equivalents in Germany, et al--firebomb the cars of the wealthy every night. And the liberal elites of these countries just don't get it. They think, 'we gave these people welfare and universal healthcare and public housing, what the hell more do they want!?!!'

I don't want to go off on a rant here, because what I have to say on the subject could occupy at least a fortnight's worth of my intermittent posts, but is this what you all want America to look like?

In Europe, the lib elites keep throwing more money at the masses because unlike America, there is no chance in hell of the elites ever allowing the hoi polloi to move up to the next income bracket.

This is why these types of socialist policies should never translate to America: Here, the poor don't stay poor forever. There is a lot of movement from one bracket to the next. That just doesn't happen anywhere else.

If Obama gets his way, it might not happen in America either.


If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Obama's Stimulus: 'Triumph Of Hope Over Experience' (UPDATED)

The title is not an endorsement, by the way.

Click here to see a long list of economists who think that Obama's plan to stimulate the economy is a very, very bad one.

(thanks to Fernando M.)

The WSJ's arguments against it are also pretty darn persuasive.

This is a political wonder that manages to spend money on just about every pent-up Democratic proposal of the last 40 years.

We've looked it over, and even we can't quite believe it. There's $1 billion for Amtrak, the federal railroad that hasn't turned a profit in 40 years; $2 billion for child-care subsidies; $50 million for that great engine of job creation, the National Endowment for the Arts; $400 million for global-warming research and another $2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects. There's even $650 million on top of the billions already doled out to pay for digital TV conversion coupons.

[...]

Another "stimulus" secret is that some $252 billion is for income-transfer payments -- that is, not investments that arguably help everyone, but cash or benefits to individuals for doing nothing at all. There's $81 billion for Medicaid, $36 billion for expanded unemployment benefits, $20 billion for food stamps, and $83 billion for the earned income credit for people who don't pay income tax. While some of that may be justified to help poorer Americans ride out the recession, they aren't job creators.

As for the promise of accountability, some $54 billion will go to federal programs that the Office of Management and Budget or the Government Accountability Office have already criticized as "ineffective" or unable to pass basic financial audits. These include the Economic Development Administration, the Small Business Administration, the 10 federal job training programs, and many more.

[...]

Any Blue Dog Democrat who votes for this ought to turn in his "deficit hawk" credentials.

This is supposed to be a new era of bipartisanship, but this bill was written based on the wish list of every living -- or dead -- Democratic interest group. As Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it, "We won the election. We wrote the bill." So they did. Republicans should let them take all of the credit.

Asking for someone, anyone, among the few remaining Obama supporters who read this blog to defend this bill is unfair. I would be asking them to defend the indefensible.

Obama is exactly what we thought he was--a traditional tax and spend liberal--a true nanny-stater. Give Obama and the Democrats your money, they know how to spend it better than you do.

There is no bi-partisanship or post-partisanship in this bill. There is no fiscal discipline. There is no tax cutting. None of what Obama promised during his campaign is in this bill. None of what the kool-aid drinking Obamabots projected into his airy rhetorical speeches is in this bill.

All that's in this bill is the patronizing spending 'wish list of every liberal Democrat for the last 40 years.'

$50 million for National Endowment for the Arts? Are you kidding me?

I got a stimulus plan for you: Collect fewer taxes and allow Americans to do what they will with their own damn money.

(thanks to Morgan H.)

UPDATE 12:43pm BST: I gave you Obama's stimulus plan. I gave you my stimulus plan. Now try on Rush Limbaugh's stimulus plan. Wear it around the store. See how it feels. More importantly, see how it makes you feel about yourself.

Do you feel that tingly feeling going down both legs? Yeah. That's the power of El Rushbo.

Fifty-three percent of American voters voted for Barack Obama; 46% voted for John McCain, and 1% voted for wackos. Give that 1% to President Obama. Let's say the vote was 54% to 46%. As a way to bring the country together and at the same time determine the most effective way to deal with recessions, under the Obama-Limbaugh Stimulus Plan of 2009: 54% of the $900 billion -- $486 billion -- will be spent on infrastructure and pork as defined by Mr. Obama and the Democrats; 46% -- $414 billion -- will be directed toward tax cuts, as determined by me.

Then we compare. We see which stimulus actually works. This is bipartisanship! It would satisfy the American people's wishes, as polls currently note; and it would also serve as a measurable test as to which approach best stimulates job growth.

I say, cut the U.S. corporate tax rate -- at 35%, among the highest of all industrialized nations -- in half. Suspend the capital gains tax for a year to incentivize new investment, after which it would be reimposed at 10%. Then get out of the way! Once Wall Street starts ticking up 500 points a day, the rest of the private sector will follow. There's no reason to tell the American people their future is bleak. There's no reason, as the administration is doing, to depress their hopes. There's no reason to insist that recovery can't happen quickly, because it can.

Let the great stimulation competition of 2009 begin.


If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.