Santa Cruz Trek in Peru's Huascaran National Park

As always, click any image to enlarge.

Best Quote of the Day

A timely quote for our day from Greg Gutfeld from Breitbart:

Here is a simple fact: a liberal president operating with a liberal media leads us to a really unpleasant place--populated with programs, policies, and principles that are woefully inept and corrupt. Obamacare, Benghazi, the IRS scandal, Pigford, and weird euphemisms for terror like "workplace violence" and "self-radicalization"--this isn't a comedy of errors, it's a tragedy of horrors. There is no guard rail anymore when you’ve got the left monitoring the left.

Well said.

ObamaCare Kills Jobs; Obama Doesn't Get It

One of the many problems with the Left is that they are incapable of letting facts get in the way of their ideology.  For years now, Democrats have pooh-poohed the notion that ¨uncertainty¨has caused the anemic economic recovery blaming it other factors.  Yes, there are other factors at work for sure.  But it is undeniable that ObamaCare is hurting job creation.

In my blog Small Business Creates the Most Jobs and ObamaCare is Killing Them,  I make the point that small businesses create more than 70% of the new jobs in this country.  When small businesses are under duress from the increased requirements of bureaucrats (local, state and federal), including the requirements of ObamaCare, it will stunt new job creation.

Already, businesses are cutting back on hours to escape the burden of ObamaCare. No one knows the cost of this law.  I don´t know.  You don´t know.  No one knows.  Numbers are leaking out and they big and rising.  The whole thing is going to fall apart when people discover it´s true cost.

From Investor´s Business Daily

Nearly 22 million Americans can't find a job or the full-time work they want. Millions more have quit looking altogether. Now, even more working Americans are seeing their hours cut because of the unreasonable burdens of the president's health care law.

The culprit is a requirement in the law that companies with more than 50 full-time workers provide expensive one-size-fits-all health insurance.Some small businesses have stopped hiring in order to stay below that number of employees. Others are cutting full-time workers back to part-time status — less than 30 hours a week.

The cuts are happening across industries and across the county. 

The Federal Reserve reported in March that the health care law is a major concern for businesses.Employers in the Fed's Richmond district blamed the law for layoffs and a reluctance to hire. Businesses around Dallas reported hiring the bare minimum to get by, due to uncertainty about the health care law. This uncertainty remained a drag on growth in the April Fed report. The drop in hours and the reluctance to hire are having a ripple effect throughout our economy.

Wages are stagnant. Economic growth is anemic.Just a few days ago, we learned that first quarter GDP increased at an annual rate of just 2.5%. This dismal number is nowhere near what we should be seeing nearly four years after the recession ended.The economy can't grow until we get Americans back to work. People can't get back to work if there aren't more jobs.

Employers aren't hiring because of the health care law

I've Warned You of Government Tyranny

This blog has warned many times that the biggest problem with big and bigger government is loss of freedom and inevitable government tyranny.

Obama recently warned graduating students at Ohio State to ignore those voices that warn of government "tyranny"

..you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They'll warn that tyranny always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. 

News of Tyranny and Cover-ups 

Really, we should reject those voices?  Now we hear that the IRS is persecuting "dissidents" by hammering them in audits and in applications for tax-free status.  Targets weren't just Tea Party groups, but anyone who even questioned out-of-control government spending .  From the Wall Street Journal:

The Internal Revenue Service's scrutiny of conservative groups went beyond those with "tea party" or "patriot" in their names—as the agency admitted Friday—to also include ones worried about government spending, debt or taxes, and even ones that lobbied to "make America a better place to live," according to new details of a government probe.

Now we've witnessing a belated burst dam of reporting now about how the Federal government, with the "tone" set by chief executve Obama, is comitting the very malfeasance and tyranny that I've warned.

We hear of IRS persecutions of citizens who happen to disagree with the administration,  the dozen revisions of the Benghazi lies and "talking points" to protect the incompetent or worse,  and the monitoring of journalist's phones and emails in an unprecedented affront to freedom of the press.

It gets worse and keeps piling up.  This is the tip of the iceberg.   Expect more "persecution" news from the highly ideological EPA, "Justice" Department, and HHS.

News of Medicare Fraud

In the news today is a story of 89 persons, including 14 doctors and nurses, who are charged with Medicare fraud to the tune of $100s of million in 8 cities. You can bet that it's just the tip of the iceberg. All of these programs are rife with fraud---as inevitably happens with big government programs.  I'm including this headline to underscore the evils of big government.

HHS Coercive "Donations"

Last Friday, from the Washington Post, reporting that HHS Sibellious has probably broke the law with her "request" for donations from health care companies.   From the Washington Post reported by Townhall:

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has gone, hat in hand, to health industry officials, asking them to make large financial donations to help with the effort to implement President Obama’s landmark health-care law, two people familiar with the outreach said. Her unusual fundraising push comes after Congress repeatedly rejected the Obama administration’s requests for additional funds to set up the Affordable Care Act, leaving HHS to implement the president’s signature legislative accomplishment on what officials have described as a shoestring budget. 

Of course, blame those bad and evil Republicans for "gumming up the works."  Never mind that Obama has almost single-handedly, completely and utterly, poisoned his relationship with the opposition, so much so that he couldn't even get an expanded gun background check bill through the Senate.  He's so stupid that he somehow forgot that he has to work with those people to have any success.

Wait until the bureaucrats, under ObamaCare, deny you care because of your political views!!   You now know that I'm not kidding or exaggerating!!  The IRS is a major administrator of ObamaCare.

Expect failure and more revelations from this supposedly "most transparent" and "post partisan" administration.

Government Scrubs-Away True Inflation Rate

Using alternate measures of inflation other than the CPI guage, inflation is suddenly hotter than advertised.  The CPI index measures housing inflation using what's called Owner"s Equivalent Rent instead of using more volatile housing price indices.

Chairman Greenspan was widely criticized for maintaining excessively low interest rates in the early 2000s and ignoring the incipient housing price bubble (which he was causing)!  The burst housing  and mortgage debt bubbles have caused the current and prolonged economic downturn.

This could have been avoided if alternative inflation measures were reported and used by policy makers.  If a Housing Price Index (HPI) were substituted for Owner's Equivalent Rent (OER), our current inflation rate is 3.3% rather than the reported CPI inflation rate of 1.5%.

Using this alternative inflation guage in the early 2000s would have also signaled markedly  higher price inflation and would have correctly indicated that the Fed Funds interest rates were dramatically too low.  When the Fed Funds interest rate is below the rate of inflation, it is said that we have negative real interest rates. We had that in the 2000s.  And right now, according to ANY guage of inflation, real interests are again strongly negative.

So, Fed Funds interest rates are dramatically low now and again we have negative real interest rates!  So, expect more bubbles and bursting bubbles!   Do we ever learn??

Have a look at a great article from D.S. Hort at Advisor Perspectives discussing these alternative inflation measures with great graphs comparing CPI with alternatives over the past 30 years.

Obama COULD Learn Much From Texas

Obama could learn something about economics from Texas---but won't.   He reminds me of the saying "there is none so blind as he who cannot see."

From his inability to learn from the cop in Cambridge to his stubborn and ineffective efforts to create so-called green jobs, which are a complete bust--even fraudulent, this President, time and time again, proves incapable of learning or adjusting.  He's not smart.  He just appears smart since he's a good "performance artist."

To be honest, if I had to choose an actor for the job as president, I might have preferred Morgan Freeman. He played a great role as President in "Deep Impact."  What the heck, he'd be just as qualified as Obama.  You can't be any more unqualified!

Back to learning from Texas and economic policies that actually work,  Have a look at the article from John Merline at Investor's Business Daily,

President Obama went to Texas on Thursday. Since taking office, Obama has pushed more government as the way to get the economy moving. He dramatically boosted spending, imposed massive amounts of new regulations, ran enormous deficits, and has imposed more than $1 trillion in tax hikes.  At the same time, Obama has berated those who advocate tax cuts and deregulation as key ingredients for economic growth and prosperity, saying such policies have "never worked." [It's Obama's brain that doesn't work ]

But Obama's policies have produced the most sluggish economic recovery since the Great Depression. GDP growth has topped 2.5% in just four of the 15 quarters since the recovery started. The country is still 2.6 million jobs shy of the previous employment peak set back in January 2008. Poverty rates are up; real household incomes are down.

Texas, meanwhile, has pursued a far different path from the one Obama advocates.

The Lone Star state has the 6th lowest tax burden in the country, according to the Tax Foundation, and has the third smallest government per-capita in the country, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

It also consistently ranks as one of the most business-friendly states in the country. Chief Executive magazine, for example, has ranked Texas No. 1 for eight years in a row, citing "its business-friendly tax and regulatory environment."And since the recovery started in June 2009,

Texas has outperformed Obama on every important economic measure:

Jobs: Private sector jobs have shot up 10% in Texas since June 2009, which is twice the national growth rate. And while U.S. employment is still 2% below its pre-recession peak, in Texas it's 5% above the state's previous high.

Labor Force:  Nationwide, the labor force — the number of people who have jobs or are actively looking — has remained virtually flat since the recovery started, climbing just 0.3% over the past 45 months. Texas, in contrast, has seen its labor force climb 6.2%, as workers flood the state.

Wages: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average annual wages in the U.S. rose 5.4% from May 2009 to May 2012. In Texas, they rose 6.1%.

Per Capita Income: Texans have also seen their per capita personal income grow faster than the nation as a whole, increasing 13.3% compared with 10.5% nationwide, Bureau of Economic Analysis data show.

GDP: And Texas' economy has grown faster than the overall economy since Obama took office. Between 2009 and 2011, real GDP in Texas expanded 8.7%, while the nation's overall GDP managed just 4.6% growth, according to the BEA.

And while Obama and his backers complain that austerity is now standing in the way of economic growth, Texas proves that more government spending and government jobs aren't needed to grow the economy. Overall state spending has been flat since 2010, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers, and BLS data show that state and local government jobs dropped 16,500 since the recovery started.

Rick Perry has, in fact, presided over a terrific economy and Texas has a significant budget surplus.  Liberals love to paint Perry as being "stupid."  If he's stupid, I want to be stupid! That's alright, they got it wrong about Ronald Reagan too.  Liberals, when it comes to economics, are idiots.  This is proven time and time again, and Obama is the prime example.

Who's the stupid one? Has Obama suceeded in anything?

Phony European Austerity

In my blog, European austerity is all about taxation, I argued that tax increases are the thing causing the current recession in Europe, not supposed decreases in public spending.  There are, in Europe as in the USA, idiot politicians and idiot media talking-heads that call the reductions of planned increases (but still an increase) a "cut."   But in an absolute sense there are few actual reductions of spending in the government sector in Europe . 

Have a look at the following graphs:

Change in Government Expenditures since 2007 in %

All of this spending leads to too much debt everywhere. Have a look at the graphs below:

Change in Government Debt from 2007 to 2012 in %