RadioActive with Steve Mitton: August 2011

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

White House’s New Top Economist: Unemployment Benefits Are Not Stimulus

President Obama’s pick as chairman of the White House Council on Economic Advisors co-authored a paper that showed that extending unemployment benefits will likely exacerbate joblessness. The paper’s findings run counter to the president’s economic argument for an unemployment benefit extension, which is expected to be a major part of the jobs plan he will unveil early next month.

Princeton University economist Alan Krueger, who will replace Austan Goolsbee as the White House’s chief economic advisor, “is likely to provide a voice inside the administration for more-aggressive government action to bring down unemployment and, particularly, to address long-term joblessness,” according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

But will Krueger’s recommendations jive with the president’s apparent economic and political agenda? Krueger co-authored a paper for the Handbook of Public Economics in 2002 that seems to undercut the economic argument for extending unemployment benefits. The paper found that those benefits tend to increase the length of unemployment by discouraging the search for a new job, and may actually encourage layoffs. Conversely, the paper also found that unemployed persons who are ineligible for benefits search harder for a job and are therefore unemployed for less time.

Audit: USPS spent $4M on 'nothing'

The U.S. Postal Service, which expects to lose $7 billion this year, spent $4.3 million on employees who did nothing in the first half of the year because of requirements in union agreements, an audit found.

The amount paid for so-called standby time has “significantly decreased,” down tens of millions of dollars from the amount spent just a couple of years ago, says The Washington Post, which obtained a copy of an audit.

Labor agreements mandate that postal employees have a certain amount of guaranteed work hours, which means that they cannot be laid off during periods of low mail volume or unplanned events like the breakdown of equipment. This leads to “standby time,” in which employees spend the day doing nothing — for example, waiting in a cafeteria or breakroom.

Warren Buffett, hypocrite

This one’s truly, uh ... rich: Billionaire Warren Buffett says folks like him should have to pay more taxes -- but it turns out his firm, Berkshire Hathaway, hasn’t paid what it’s already owed for years.

That’s right: As Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson notes, the company openly admits that it owes back taxes since as long ago as 2002.

“We anticipate that we will resolve all adjustments proposed by the US Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) for the 2002 through 2004 tax years ... within the next 12 months,” the firm’s annual report says.

Warren Buffett

It also cites outstanding tax issues for 2005 through 2009.

Obvious question: If Buffett really thinks he and his “mega-rich friends” should pay higher taxes, why doesn’t his firm fork over what it already owes under current rates?

Likely answer: He cares more about shilling for President Obama -- who’s practically made socking “millionaires and billionaires” his re-election theme song -- than about kicking in more himself.

Buffett’s free to back Obama, of course.

And if his firm wants to keep its tax bill low, well, that’s its right, too.

But it would be nice if this “pro-tax-hike” tycoon were a bit more honest about it.

Start, for example, with his grossly disingenuous recent claim that, as he wrote in The New York Times, he paid only 17 percent of his income last year to the government -- even as many working stiffs who make far less than him coughed up higher percentages.

Lawrence Solomon: Science getting settled

The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.

The research, published with little fanfare this week in the prestigious journal Nature, comes from über-prestigious CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centres for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and that has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth’s atmosphere.

In this chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done — demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, the cloudier and thus cooler it will be. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere (the stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth.

Answering Jonathan Alter's Challenge

“Tell me again why Barack Obama has been such a bad president?” Jonathan Alter writes in his column.

Alter tells us he’s not talking here about Obama as a tactician and communicator, and he’s not interested in hearing ad hominem attacks or about people’s generalized “disappointment.” (Neither am I.) He wants to know on a substantive basis why Obama should be judged to have failed so far.

In Alter’s words, “Your mission, Jim [or anyone else for that matter], should you decide to accept it, is to be specific and rational, not vague and visceral.”

Consider the mission accepted.

In one sense, the answer to the Alter challenge is obvious: Obama has failed by his own standards. It’s the Obama administration, not the RNC, that said if his stimulus package was passed unemployment would not exceed 8 percent. It’s Obama who joked there weren’t as many “shovel-ready” jobs as he thought.

Obama’s Enablers

As a rule, the press is the scourge of presidents. They’re expected to endure unending scrutiny, mistrust, and badgering—plus hostility if they’re Republicans—by a hectoring herd of reporters and commentators in the mainstream media. But there’s an exception to the rule: President Obama.

Gary Locke

It’s counterintuitive, but Obama has been hurt by the media’s leniency. Both his presidency and reelection prospects have suffered. He’s grown lazy and complacent. The media have encouraged him to believe his speeches are irresistible political catnip, though they aren’t. His overreliance on words hasn’t helped.

The kind of media pressure that can cause a president to sharpen his game, act with urgency, or take bolder steps—that has never been applied to Obama. If it had, I suspect he’d be a more effective, disciplined, energetic, and popular president today. Ronald Reagan is a good role model in this regard. When the media attacked him over gaffes in the 1980 campaign, “Reagan responded like all competitive men by working to improve himself,” says Reagan historian Craig Shirley. “Experience taught him to be better and try harder.” He took this lesson into the White House.

I don’t want to exaggerate the media’s baneful influence on Obama. It’s hardly the main reason for his decline. It’s a secondary reason, and it continues to have an impact.

Gallup: Perry Now Leads Bachmann, Romney by 21 Points Among Tea Party Supporters

Self-identified Tea Party supporters are more likely to support Texas Gov. Rick Perry for the Republican presidential nomination than they are to support former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney or Rep. Michele Bachmann, according to a Gallup poll released today.

From Aug. 17-21, Gallup surveyed 1,040 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. Fifty-eight percent of these respondents described themselves as Tea Party supporters.

Among these Republican and Republican-leaning Tea Party supporters, 35 percent said they supported Perry for the Republican presidential nomination, 14 percent said they supported Bachmann and 14 percent said they supported Romney.

Elites Try to Crush Tea Party, Raise Taxes

The Politico headline read: “Conservative elites pine for 2012 hero.” They could have shortened that sentence to “Elites pine” or more likely to “Elites freak the heck out.” Because it’s not just the conservative cognoscenti, it’s all of them. The folks in charge miss the good old days when they ran everything and ordinary American voters and taxpayers did as they were told.

Those days are gone and the in-crowd is afraid it is on the way out, too. Congress’s favorability is down to 13 percent and even the lefties at Mother Jones are whining that both parties are cancelling town hall meetings to hide from angry voters.

The era when elite Washington – of all three major parties: Republicans, Democrats and the Media – could just raise our taxes or cut deals behind closed doors has gone bye-bye. And the Powers That Be are determined to turn back the clock.

A Short Primer on the National Debt

With the national debt certain to be a front-and-center issue in the 2012 campaign, it is important to understand the true measure of its size. That size seems to vary considerably in news reports. Some news organizations use the debt held by the public, others use total debt. Still others report total future liabilities of the federal government, without making clear what, exactly, that means.

So, a few definitions. The total national debt of the United States is the sum of all federal bills, notes and bonds that have been issued by the Treasury and not yet redeemed. The publicly held debt is the sum of the Treasury securities held by individuals, financial institutions and foreign governments. (That's not just the Chinese, by the way. Both Great Britain and Japan are also major holders of U.S. debt, as are many other countries in lesser amounts.)

The intra-governmental debt is the sum of Treasury bonds held by agencies of the federal government, principally the so-called Social Security Trust Fund. The liabilities equal the future pensions, health care, Social Security payments, etc., that are promised under current legislation.

Weather cycles cause a drop in global sea level, scientists find

The global sea level this summer is a quarter of an inch lower than last summer, according to NASA scientists, in sharp contrast to the gradual rise the ocean has experienced in recent years.

The change stems from two strong weather cycles over the Pacific Ocean — El Niño and La Niña — which shifted precipitation patterns, according to scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The two cycles brought heavy rains to Brazil and Amazon, along with drought to the southern United States.

Hurricane Relief Politics

The Obama Administration clearly made an all out push in recent days on Hurricane Irene to try to make sure that disaster efforts weren't bungled in a way that might draw paralells to past disaster relief troubles like work in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

After cutting his vacation short by a day on Martha's Vineyard because of the approaching storm, President Obama visited FEMA headquarters on Saturday as his administration bombarded reporters with emails all weekend about U.S. Government disaster efforts.

"FEMA urges East Coast residents to focus on immediate safety," said one of over three dozen press releases churned out in recent days by the Obama Administration, as officials tried to clearly send the message that they weren't just sitting back and waiting to see what happened.

But there was one moment that made me stop dead in my tracks, a quote that came during a visit to FEMA Headquarters on Saturday morning by President Obama.

New Blue Nightmare: Clarence Thomas and the Amendment of Doom

Lord of the Rings aficionados know that the evil lord Sauron paid little attention to the danger posed by two hobbits slowly struggling across the mountains and deserts of Mordor until he suddenly realized that the ring on which all his power depended was about to be hurled into the pits of Mount Doom. All at once the enemy plan became clear; what looked like stupidity was revealed as genius, and Sauron understood everything just when it was too late to act.

Jeffrey Toobin’s gripping, must-read profile of Clarence and Virginia Thomas in the New Yorker gives readers new insight into what Sauron must have felt: Toobin argues that the only Black man in public life that liberals could safely mock and despise may be on the point of bringing the Blue Empire down.

In fact, Toobin suggests, Clarence Thomas may be the Frodo Baggins of the right; his lonely and obscure struggle has led him to the point from which he may be able to overthrow the entire edifice of the modern progressive state.

Flashback: Obama in 2008: Adding $4 Trillion to National Debt ‘Unpatriotic’

Although the national debt under President Barack Obama has increased $4 trillion since he took office in 2009, as a presidential candidate in 2008 Obama criticized then-President George W. Bush for adding $4 trillion to the national debt, saying it was “unpatriotic” and also “irresponsible” to saddle future generations with such a large national debt.

“The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion dollars for the first 42 presidents -- number 43 added $4 trillion dollars by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion dollars of debt that we are going to have to pay back -- $30,000 for every man, woman and child,” Obama said on July 3, 2008, at a campaign event in Fargo, N.D.

New CBO Numbers Confirm – Once Again – that Modest Spending Restraint Can Balance the Budget

The Congressional Budget Office has just released the update to its Economic and Budget Outlook.

There are several things from this new report that probably deserve commentary, including a new estimate that unemployment will “remain above 8 percent until 2014.”

This certainly doesn’t reflect well on the Obama White House, which claimed that flushing $800 billion down the Washington rathole would prevent the joblessness rate from ever climbing above 8 percent.

Not that I have any faith in CBO estimates. After all, those bureaucrats still embrace Keynesian economics.

But this post is not about the backwards economics at CBO. Instead, I want to look at the new budget forecast and see what degree of fiscal discipline is necessary to get rid of red ink.

The first thing I did was to look at CBO’s revenue forecast, which can be found in table 1-2. But CBO assumes the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts will expire at the end of 2012, as well as other automatic tax hikes for 2013. So I went to table 1-8 and got the projections for those tax provisions and backed them out of the baseline forecast.

The Obama administration is setting new workplace regulations to assist foreign workers who fill goat herding positions in the U.S. , including employee-paid cell phones and comfy beds.

These new special procedures issued by the Labor Department must be followed by employers who want to hire temporary agricultural foreign workers to perform sheep herding or goat herding activities. It describes strict rules for sleeping quarters, lighting, food storage, bathing, laundry, cooking and new rules for the counters where food is prepared.

“A separate sleeping unit shall be provided for each person, except in a family arrangement,” says the rules signed by Jane Oates, assistant secretary for employment and training administration at the Labor Department.

What's happening to a model healthcare system?

Right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh once vowed to flee to Costa Rica if President Barack Obama's health care reforms took effect.

Limbaugh might have overlooked a couple of critical details: Costa Rica's respected universal healthcare system is highly socialized. It's also on the verge of going broke.

Costa Ricans credit health care with helping boost its life expectancy to 78.7 years -- on par with the richest countries in the world. Costa Rica's broad coverage ranked better than most of the Americas, including the United States, in a 2000 World Health Organization index.

Now, hobbled by mismanagement, the system has become overwhelmed by a burgeoning population that includes an increasing number of elderly and new immigrants who rely on the public system for care.

4200 New Regulations in Obama Pipeline- so far

Way back in January President Obama ordered "a government-wide review of the rules already on the books to remove outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive."

From that statement alone, you might conclude that Obama already knew that finding needless, burdensome regulation in the 81,000 pages of the federal register would be easy pickings.

More than seven months later, the Administration has announced the results of that exhaustive review. By the White House's own undoubtedly inflated estimate, the net benefit will barely be worth one-tenth of one penny of every dollar of expense caused by compliance with federal regulation.

Stock Trader Clutching His Head in Front of a Screen Showing a Stock Market Crash

Insurance on the debt of several major European banks has now hit historic levels, higher even than those recorded during financial crisis caused by the US financial group's implosion nearly three years ago.

Credit default swaps on the bonds of Royal Bank of Scotland, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank and Intesa Sanpaolo, among others, flashed warning signals on Wednesday. Credit default swaps (CDS) on RBS were trading at 343.54 basis points, meaning the annual cost to insure £10m of the state-backed lender's bonds against default is now £343,540.

The cost of insuring RBS bonds is now higher than before the taxpayer was forced to step in and rescue the bank in October 2008, and shows the recent dramatic downturn in sentiment among credit investors towards banks.

My Response To Buffett And Obama

Over the years, I have paid a significant portion of my income to the various federal, state and local jurisdictions in which I have lived, and I deeply resent that President Obama has decided that I don't need all the money I've not paid in taxes over the years, or that I should leave less for my children and grandchildren and give more to him to spend as he thinks fit. I also resent that Warren Buffett and others who have created massive wealth for themselves think I'm "coddled" because they believe they should pay more in taxes. I certainly don't feel "coddled" because these various governments have not imposed a higher income tax. After all, I did earn it.

Now that I'm 72 years old, I can look forward to paying a significant portion of my accumulated wealth in estate taxes to the federal government and, depending on the state I live in at the time, to that state government as well. Of my current income this year, I expect to pay 80%-90% in federal income taxes, state income taxes, Social Security and Medicare taxes, and federal and state estate taxes. Isn't that enough?

Others could pay higher taxes if they choose. They could voluntarily write a check or they could advocate that their gifts to foundations should be made with after-tax dollars and not be deductible. They could also pay higher taxes if they were not allowed to set up foundations to avoid capital gains and estate taxes.

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Bloomberg News

What gets me most upset is two other things about this argument: the unfair way taxes are collected, and the violation of the implicit social contract between me and my government that my taxes will be spent—effectively and efficiently—on purposes that support the general needs of the country. Before you call me greedy, make sure you operate fairly on both fronts.

Today, top earners—the 250,000 people who earn $1 million or more—pay 20% of all income taxes, and the 3% who earn more than $200,000 pay almost half. Almost half of all filers pay no income taxes at all. Clearly they earn less and should pay less. But they should pay something and have a stake in our government spending their money too.

The Entitlement Leviathan in Numbers

Immediately prior to breaking for the August recess, Congress passed a bipartisan agreement to cut spending. Well, sort of.

Leaders in both parties got together to do something evil and stupid; they agreed to the largest increase in the debt ceiling, without solving our debt problem. They cut discretionary spending by $6.67 billion for FY 2012, from $1.0497 trillion to $1.043 trillion. That’s a bit more than half a percentage point. Worse, discretionary spending (budget authority) only accounts for roughly 28% of our projected $3.7 trillion in outlays for FY 2011. So we cut about 0.6% of 28% of our federal budget for next year!

But, fear not; the best is yet to come. The mandatory entitlement spending reforms will be tackled by the super committee. The only problem is that a committee with such luminaries as John Kerry, Patty Murray, and James Clyburn – will never cut a dime from mandatory spending.

Where does this leave us?

Spending Cuts, Not Tax Hikes, Best for Deficit: NABE

The majority of economists surveyed by the National Association for Business Economics believe that the federal deficit should be reduced only or primarily through spending cuts.

The survey out Monday found that 56 percent of the NABE members surveyed felt that way, while 37 percent said they favor equal parts spending cuts and tax increases. The remaining 7 percent believe it should be done only or mostly through tax increases.

As for how to reduce the deficit, nearly 40 percent said the best way would be to contain Medicare and Medicaid costs. Nearly a quarter recommended overhauling the tax system and simplifying tax rates and exemptions. About 15 percent said the government should enact tough spending caps and cut discretionary spending.

The latest survey by the NABE was conducted in the two weeks ending Aug. 2, the day that the Senate passed and President Obama signed legislation to cut spending by more than $2 trillion and raise the nation's debt ceiling.

Power Play Video: FCC Commissioner Warns of Back Door to Fairness Doctrine

Though much of the discussion about a possible fairness doctrine for broadcasters went away when Republicans took over the House of Representatives in 2010, one Federal Communications Commissioner says there still could be an effort at finding a back door to the rules. Commissioner Robert McDowell told Chris Stirewalt on Monday's Power Play Live that localism, a proposal that gives the federal government the ability to make sure broadcasters serve their communities, could also be used to wedge in principles of the fairness doctrine.

"The government would be compiling data as to what kind of content you were airing and whether the government thought that was appropriate content," McDowell said. "It could be political speech, it could be shows on baking or gardening. But we don't know where the government is headed."

See the full discussion below and click http://live.foxnews.com each weekday at 11:30 a.m. eastern for Power Play Live.

Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis

America waits with bated breath while Washington struggles to bring the U.S. economy back from the brink of disaster. But many of those same politicians caused the crisis, and if left to their own devices will do so again.

Despite the mass media news blackout, a series of books, talk radio and the blogosphere have managed to expose Barack Obama's connections to his radical mentors -- Weather Underground bombers William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis and others. David Horowitz and his Discover the Networks.org have also contributed a wealth of information and have noted Obama's radical connections since the beginning.

Yet, no one to my knowledge has yet connected all the dots between Barack Obama and the Radical Left. When seen together, the influences on Obama's life comprise a who's who of the radical leftist movement, and it becomes painfully apparent that not only is Obama a willing participant in that movement, he has spent most of his adult life deeply immersed in it.

But even this doesn't fully describe the extreme nature of this candidate. He can be tied directly to a malevolent overarching strategy that has motivated many, if not all, of the most destructive radical leftist organizations in the United States since the 1960s.

Most Voters Oppose Public Schooling, Tuition Breaks, Driver’s Licenses For Illegal Immigrants

The Obama administration announced last week that it was slowing the deportation process for "low priority" immigration cases to focus on illegal immigrants with criminal records. Critics complain the move is intended to get around Congress' refusal to pass the so-called Dream Act aimed at providing a path to citizenship for those who came to the country illegally before age 16. But a majority of voters remain opposed to giving the children of illegal immigrants the same educational opportunities as those who are here legally.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that only 32% of Likely U.S. Voters believe children of parents in this country illegally should be allowed to attend public school here. Fifty-three percent (53%) do not believe those young illegal immigrants should be allowed to attend public school. Fifteen percent (15%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Last September, just 20% said local government should be required to provide a public school education for a child brought into the United States illegally by his or her parents. Sixty-four percent (64%) disagreed and said local governments should not be required to educate them.

Our Gay-Marriage Experiment

One of the few issues on which opinion has moved left over the last few years is same-sex marriage. In 1996, Gallup found that Americans opposed it by a 68 percent to 27 percent margin. Last May, Gallup found Americans in favor by 53 percent to 45 percent. That’s a huge change in 15 years.

Other polls have shown similar movement. Pew Research reported last week that 45 percent favored same-sex marriage and 46 percent were opposed — a dead heat. Pew polls in 2008 and 2009 found only 35 percent to 40 percent in favor.

This is an issue on which the differences between age groups are as large as any I can remember. In the May Gallup poll, 70 percent of those under age 35 favored same-sex marriage. Only 39 percent of those over 55 agreed.

So while opinion on one controversial cultural issue, abortion, has not changed much, opinion on same-sex marriage has changed vastly.

Why? One reason is probably that as people learn that friends and relatives are gay, they become more sympathetic to gay rights. We see a similar change in voters’ willingness to elect openly gay candidates to Congress and other offices.

But increasing support for same-sex marriage causes problems for politicians. When two-thirds of voters were opposed, it didn’t: Almost everyone opposed it. Possible exception: Barack Obama, running for state senate in a university-dominated district in 1996.

As a candidate for U.S. senator and president, Obama said he opposed same-sex marriage. As president, he says he still does, but his opinion is “evolving.”

This may reflect a split between Democratic core constituencies. Affluent liberals overwhelmingly favor same-sex marriage. But most black voters are opposed.

In a 2008 referendum in California, 70 percent of blacks voted against same-sex marriage. A same-sex-marriage bill was defeated this year in Maryland after black Democratic legislators opposed it. Same-sex marriage would be legal in California and Maryland were it not for opposition by black voters.

Has Progressivism Ruined Environmental Science?

In my thirty years of work in the science arena, as a government scientist, an industry consultant, and an academician, I have witnessed an increasingly adverse influence of progressivism on the practice of science. This influence has been especially visible in my specialty, environmental science (with a focus on air-pollution meteorology).

From the start of the modern environmental movement with the publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson in 1962 followed by The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich in 1968, the science of the environment became overly contentious. Certainly, diversity of opinion and positions in the scientific community is desirable and largely advantageous to the advancement of the discipline. But, what quickly developed was a progressive environmentalism that elevated nature back to the Gaian status of the ancients and established one viewpoint as dogma. Soon, conformance to this one holy vision (as opposed to the usual ad nauseam progressive mantra to "celebrate diversity") became the mandate. Anyone opposed the lofty goal imposed by progressive theology of protecting the Earth, at nearly any cost, was increasingly targeted in very unscientific ways with ad hominem attacks, public ridicule, eventual limitation of government funding, and even eco-terrorism.

In addition, regardless of the extreme actions taken by progressives to defend their sacred environmental tenets, media outlets and the scientific community were rather tolerant.

Climate-science practice is surely a good example of the current progressive-influenced "consensus" toward challengers of the humans-are-heating-the-planet storyline. And, the "Climategate" tempest is a specific instance.

Normally, much ado would have been made by the mainstream media and mainstream science with the release of the Climategate e-mails. Instead, both seemed to work overtime to minimize the damage from those exposed files. The mainstream media often seemed to downplay the importance of the e-mail content and referred to the files as "stolen," implying that the leaker was a criminal. Indeed, the act may have been criminal; however, such indictment is typically not the tack taken by the same news organizations when damaging information is similarly aired which targets business or industry concerns or conservative leaders. In those cases, these "whistleblowers" are portrayed in a somewhat more heroic fashion -- even applauded for doing society a favor.

Keeping Michele Bachmann Honest on Gas Prices

Like many of you, I am often unhappy with our political leaders. One thing that annoys me the most is that many will say or do just about anything to get elected. By now, you have surely heard the news that Republican presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann has promised a return to $2/gallon gasoline if she is elected president:

GOP candidate Michele Bachmann: I'll bring back $2 gas

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- President Michele Bachmann has a promise: $2 gas.

"Under President Bachmann you will see gasoline come down below $2 a gallon again," Bachmann told a crowd Tuesday in South Carolina. "That will happen."

"The day that the president became president gasoline was $1.79 a gallon," Bachmann said. "Look what it is today."

My immediate reaction to that was to wonder whether she is really that naive, or simply making dishonest campaign promises that she knows she can't keep. Perhaps she truly believes deep down that she could achieve this. In that case, she has to be one of the most naive presidential candidates to come along in quite some time. (And for the record, I think cheap gasoline is a terrible idea in any case. We should not encourage consumption of depleting resources. I laid out my reasoning and a fair plan for raising gas taxes in How Much Are You Willing to Pay to be Nuke-Free?).

Let's first take a look at the basic claim. I have seen many people repeat her claim that gasoline was $1.79 a gallon when Obama took office, but I haven't seen anyone fact check that. So I went to the EIA statistics, and found that the week before Obama took office (his inauguration was on Tuesday, January 20, 2009), overall retail gasoline averaged $1.90 a gallon. The week of his inauguration retail gasoline averaged $1.89 a gallon. So, there was some slight context possibly needed to qualify the $1.79 a gallon remark (probably somewhere gasoline averaged that price) but the general claim is basically correct: Prices were much lower when Obama took office, and now the price of gasoline is $3.66 a gallon.

FDR's policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After scrutinizing Roosevelt's record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

"Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump," said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA's Department of Economics. "We found that a relapse isn't likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies."

In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.

Rep. Maxine Waters, the liberal lawmaker from southern California, continued to press for Democrats and President Obama to adopt a more combative style with Republicans ahead of next year's elections.

"This is a tough game. You can't be intimidated. You can't be frightened. And as far as I'm concerned -- the Tea Party can go straight to hell," Waters told an Inglewood, California audience at a "Kitchen Table Summit" Saturday night, according to Los Angeles television station KABC.

Waters made waves last week when she openly criticized Mr. Obama's style and called on him to get tough with Republicans in order to help disadvantaged Americans, including African Americans.

"The president is going to have to fight and he is going to have to fight hard," she said at a job fair in Atlanta on Thursday.

Nina Totenberg: Obama Can Save Economy With 'A Lot of Very Populist Rhetoric'

Stock markets around the world are once again imploding in fear of a global double-dip recession.

Appearing on PBS's "Inside Washington" Friday, NPR's Nina Totenberg said Barack Obama can cure what ails us with "a lot of very populist rhetoric" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

NINA TOTENBERG, NPR: The fact is that the economy does not get better from its illness unless there are in fact more jobs, because nobody is spending, there aren't, people don't have jobs to, who don't have jobs don't have income to spend. And, I mean, I, I think really the only choice Obama has right now is to, to, is a lot of very populist rhetoric to try and get a real budget that has real tax increases and real cuts and real job creation possibilities.

Yeah.

Heck with putting forth an actual plan on paper that legislators, the Congressional Budget Office, and the American people can fully examine and analyze.

What we need right now is more populist rhetoric from the Populist Rhetorician-in-Chief.

This has worked so well for the nation and the economy the past 30-plus months.

Backdoor Amnesty – Abusing the Constitution and Presidential Authority

When President Obama was inaugurated, he swore an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Article II, Section 3 directs the President to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Unfortunately, in what has become an all too common occurrence in this administration, Obama is once again bending that oath to the breaking point by specifically not taking care that immigration laws passed by Congress are faithfully executed.

The Department of Homeland Security announced on Thursday that it would halt all deportation proceedings against illegal immigrants who are attending school, have family in the military or are primarily responsible for other family members’ care, and allow them to apply for work permits. Apparently, the only illegal aliens that the Obama administration will detain and deport are those who have committed additional serious criminal offenses in the United States – the fact that they committed a crime under federal law by entering the United States illegally (8 U.S.C. § 1325) is apparently of no concern to this administration.

It is no coincidence that the factors that DHS says it will now consider are the very same provisions that were in the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors or DREAM Act that was proposed by Senator Dick Durbin. This bill failed to pass Congress because of principled opposition from senators like Jeff Sessions, who pointed out that this bill was so filled with loopholes that it would send illegal immigrants the message that the U.S. has “given up on enforcement of our immigration laws.” The DREAM Act really stood for “Deviously Replacing Enforcement with Amnesty” and that is the policy that has now been implemented by President Obama and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano.

Outsourcing Jobs, Union-Style

These days, what would a firm that outsourced 400,000 U.S. jobs be called? The answer: labor union. Monday's Canada-Colombia free-trade pact is its masterpiece.

Leo Gerard, the proudly Canadian president of the United Steelworkers Union, is one of many who ought to stand up and take a bow.

He and his fellow Big Labor union bosses loudly opposed the U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement, using their political muscle to keep the already-negotiated deal on ice in Congress and the White House for nearly five years.

It's come at a massive cost to American workers' jobs.

Wall Street targeted for Britain-style riots

In the wake of Britain's riots, a group of American radicals are planning a "Day of Rage" targeting Wall Street and U.S. capitalism.

The upcoming protests, replete with a planned tent city in downtown Manhattan, is closely tied to the founders of ACORN and leaders of major U.S. unions, including the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU.

There are indications the protesters are training to incite violence, resist arrest and disrupt the legal system.

The protest aims to take root nationwide.

Activists are advertising on social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter for a "Day of Rage" on Sept. 17 to begin with the "occupation" of Wall Street and continue with protests across the nation.

The Authoritarian Temptation

In the weeks during and since the debt-ceiling debate, the media, pushed by the Democratic Party, has peddled the propaganda that our government is broken -- because the Republicans in the House of Representatives negotiated a better deal than the liberals wanted.

While it was President Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner who, during the debate, said they couldn't assure payments of Social Security or interest on the federal debt payments (while Republican leaders guaranteed there would be no lapse in such payments) it was the GOP that the media accused of irresponsible threats.

It is par for the course for the losing side in a congressional fight to bewail the end of democracy in America. But it is rare for the major media to push and the broader public to bite on, such a line.

“We had reversed the recession, avoided a depression, gotten the economy moving again,” President Obama fantasized on the campaign stump in Iowa. “But over the last six months, we’ve had a run of bad luck.”

Bad luck?

Mr. Obama, meet the late Robert A. Heinlein, a Naval Academy midshipman-turned-influential-author, who decades before you entered the Oval Office presciently described your administration. It was Heinlein who penned one of the most insightful observations ever of human nature:

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded - here and there, now and then - are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as ‘bad luck.’ “

A disastrous summer for the White House. Is Barack Obama now the most unpopular US president since Jimmy Carter?

Jimmy Carter, the 39th US president, and Barack Obama (Photo: Rex/Getty)

Gallup’s latest numbers are a real eye-opener. The polling company now has Barack Obama’s approval rating at just 39 percent, the lowest level of his presidency, and down 13 percentage points since the start of June. Gallup finds that 54 percent of Americans now disapprove of the president’s job performance. And according to the RealClear Politics average of several major polls, a staggering 73.8 percent of Americans now believe the country is moving down the wrong track. .

Obama’s low personal ratings are coupled with widespread disillusionment with the condition of the US economy in Gallup’s surveys. 53 percent of Americans now rate the economy as poor (as opposed to just eight percent who believe it is good/excellent) and 79 percent say the economic outlook is getting worse.

Strikingly, Barack Obama has achieved the lowest ratings for any US president at this stage of his first term in office for 32 years, since 1979, according to polling data provided by the Gallup Presidential Job Approval Center. To place Obama’s ratings in historical context, at the same stage of their first term (or only term in the case of Bush Snr.), George W. Bush had a 60 percent approval rating (August 2003), Bill Clinton had 46 percent approval (August 1995), George H.W. Bush 71 percent (August 1991), and Ronald Reagan 43 percent (August 1983).

How ironic that as America debated its debt ceiling all summer and faced a stunning credit downgrade, the nation approached a most timely anniversary: It was Aug. 13, 1981, that President Reagan signed the Economic Recovery Act. Understanding Reagan's thinking 30 years ago is critical to discerning where we are now.

Reagan's initiative was the antithesis of President Obama's $800 billion "stimulus" that didn't stimulate. The 2009 version was the single greatest contributor to our record $1.5 trillion deficit. It was, plain and simple, what Reagan didn't do.

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We also publish weekly columns by Al Neuharth, USA TODAY's founder, and DeWayne Wickham, who writes primarily on matters of race but on other subjects as well. That leaves plenty of room for other views from across the nation by well-known and lesser-known names alike.

When Reagan signed the Economic Recovery Act at his ranch near Santa Barbara, it was the largest tax cut in American history. He also revealed leadership that Democrats and Republicans alike agree we are not seeing currently from the White House. Even TheWashington Post called Reagan's action "one of the most remarkable demonstrations of presidential leadership in modern history."

Tax the rich while we still can

Democrats better hurry and soak the rich while there are still enough of them left to make it worth the effort.

At the rate President Barack Obama's policies are destroying wealth, the pool of millionaire taxpayers may be too shallow to provide the windfall the redistributors hope for.

Plunging stock markets over the past two weeks have ravaged portfolios and caused lots of people to slip a few rungs down the economic ladder. Last Monday alone, investors lost $1.2 trillion.

Imagine.

Had Democrats got to tax those assets before they disappeared, it would have delivered a windfall that could have been used to plump up the entitlement infrastructure. You snooze, you lose.

But that's the problem with so-called millionaire's taxes. They only work if the rich stay rich, and high tax and spend policies that slow growth, rock financial markets and take the reward out of risk-taking produce a lot of ex-millionaires.

Obama plan: Destroy Romney

Barack Obama’s aides and advisers are preparing to center the president’s reelection campaign on a ferocious personal assault on Mitt Romney’s character and business background, a strategy grounded in the early-stage expectation that the former Massachusetts governor is the likely GOP nominee.

The dramatic and unabashedly negative turn is the product of political reality. Obama remains personally popular, but pluralities in recent polling disapprove of his handling of his job, and Americans fear the country is on the wrong track. His aides are increasingly resigned to running for reelection in a glum nation. And so the candidate who ran on “hope” in 2008 has little choice four years later but to run a slashing, personal campaign aimed at disqualifying his likeliest opponent.

Job participation

The White House and much of the chattering class cooed on Friday when unemployment dropped to 9.1 percent and 117,000 jobs were reportedly created in July. But these numbers, upon closer inspection, show no progress on the jobs front.

Buried in the job stats was a number — 193,000 — that dwarfed all the rest. That is the number of workers who left the job market. If 193,000 left and only 117,000 jobs were added, we lost 76,000 jobs. Moreover, this is not an aberration.

When President Obama took office in January of 2009, the labor participation rate was 65.7 percent. Now, “The labor force participation rate is currently 63.9 percent. That is the lowest level since 1984,” says Matt McDonald, a communications and business strategist who previously worked in the Bush administration. “If the labor force participation rate today were 65.7 percent, there would be an additional 4.2 million people in the workforce.” In that case, the unemployment rate would be 11.5 percent not 9.1 percent.

Unemployed men in Iowa line up for food during the Great Depression, circa 1935.

A week of bad economic news has led some economists to worry: Is it 1937 all over again?

But here's a second worry. Even if we avoid a repeat of 1937, we still have to worry about another 1936.

Here's the background to the worries:

As everyone knows, the global economy plunged into a great depression at the end of the 1920s. In the United States, the Great Depression hit bottom in early 1933. The years from 1933 through 1936 were years of economic recovery.

Then -- slam -- the U.S. economy hit the wall again. In 1937, the U.S. economy tumbled back into a depression almost as severe as in 1929-33.

Released lobsters retaken, group says

Talk about bad karma.

On Thursday, a group of Buddhists traveled to Gloucester and purchased 534 lobsters, about 600 pounds worth, from a wholesaler and dumped them back into the sea in a prayer ceremony in which the crustaceans’ bands were cut and blessed water was sprayed on them.

Freedom. But it may have been short-lived.

Yesterday, lobstermen from the fishing vessel Degelyse said they had traveled to the site of the ceremony, laid their traps, and hauled up exactly 534 lobsters, according to a local blog, Goodmorninggloucester.org.

Second Recession in U.S. Could Be Worse Than First

If the economy falls back into recession, as many economists are now warning, the bloodletting could be a lot more painful than the last time around.

Given the tumult of the Great Recession, this may be hard to believe. But the economy is much weaker than it was at the outset of the last recession in December 2007, with most major measures of economic health — including jobs, incomes, output and industrial production — worse today than they were back then. And growth has been so weak that almost no ground has been recouped, even though a recovery technically started in June 2009.

“It would be disastrous if we entered into a recession at this stage, given that we haven’t yet made up for the last recession,” said Conrad DeQuadros, senior economist at RDQ Economics.

American Tinderbox

For some time now, residents of some US cities have noted occasional incidents of seemingly random, racially motivated violence in which young Black males are involved. The hot weather and bad economy seem to be combining to generate a small but possibly significant uptick this year. The national media are doing their best to avoid looking too closely at this disturbing phenomenon, and perhaps for good reason. What the United States doesn’t need is a media firestorm that triggers copycat violence.

Nevertheless some attention should be paid. Journalist Eugene Kane has the bare bones in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Philadelphia – While out of town last week, I suddenly started receiving urgent long-distance messages about young black people in Milwaukee acting crazy.

Again.

Last time it happened, I was on vacation during the Fourth of July weekend when a bunch of misbehaving young black people ransacked a gas station convenience store and attacked residents in a park.

This time, I was in my hometown of Philadelphia attending the National Association of Black Journalists convention when my BlackBerry started blowing up with news about what happened Thursday night at the Wisconsin State Fair.

According to reports, it was similar to what happened in Riverwest last month, but on a much more brutal – and scarier – scale.

When people start reporting they were being beaten by black people for no other reason than being white people at the State Fair, that’s pretty disturbing.

We face recession without shock absorbers as Berlin loses patience

This time we face the risk of double-dip recession without shock absorbers. Interest rates are already at or near zero in much of the OECD club. Fiscal deficits are stretched to the limits of safety.

Far from loosening, the US is on track to tighten by 2pc of GDP next year, and Europe by 1pc to 2pc, into the slowdown.

China has already pushed credit to 200pc of GDP. It cannot repeat the trick.

News Corp's 'The Daily' Has Its Own News-Gathering Aerial Drone, Which Is Drawing FAA Inquiries

The U.S. military has drones, lots of them if the daily reports coming in from Afghanistan and Pakistan are any indication. And a handful of law enforcement groups--though less than would like--have a drone or two at their disposal. But on the domestic, non-security front, drones live a in a regulatory gray area. Hobbyists can use them, but commercial entities are not supposed to employ drones for any kind of monetary gain, says the FAA.

Nonetheless News Corp’s The Daily has a news gathering drone aircraft that it’s been flying around, and the FAA is investigating that use to ensure that it complies with all of the nebulous FAA regulations that kind of exist regarding private drone usage.

The Daily has used its drone to capture aerial footage of storm-struck Alabama earlier this year as well as the flooding in South Dakota, Forbes tells us. Their hardware: a MicroDrone md4-1000, a micro aerial vehicle that can be fitted with various imagery or sensor payloads (Google has one like it, purportedly to augment its aerial map data).

What Expansion?

Obamanomics: In case you thought the economy was doing better, Friday's report on gross domestic product likely disabused you of that notion. It shows the last two years of economic policymaking have been an utter failure.

New data show that the economy has been expanding far less robustly over the past two and a half years than initially claimed.

According to the Commerce Department, first-quarter GDP growth was 0.4%, not 1.9% as first reported. In the second quarter, it grew at a tepid 1.3% pace.

And Federal Spending Keeps on Rising...

The debt ceiling fight has been long and exhausting, but it will have a big payoff. After it's finally resolved -- with the Boehner plan or the Reid plan or something else -- we will have confronted our budget crisis, made tough choices and forced the federal government to live within its means.

That's right. And I'm Katy Perry.

We have heard a lot lately about plans to slash spending by trillions of dollars. Though these sound like deep cuts, they are not even shallow cuts. Under the plans being discussed in Washington, federal spending would rise, and so would the federal debt -- not by a little, but by a lot.

Consider Speaker John Boehner's blueprint, which envisions savings of some $3 trillion over 10 years. The biggest chunk of savings comes from a cap on discretionary outlays, letting them grow as fast as inflation -- meaning they would gobble up more dollars every year.

Behind the D.C. Slugfest

About 50 percent of taxpayers don’t pay federal income taxes. Almost half of American adults receive either the majority of or all of their income in some form from government. They are naturally desirous of even more entitlements, in the sense that even higher taxes on the top 5 percent might ensure at least some of the needed revenue to pay for them. And if that echelon must pay 70 percent or 80 percent rather than the present 60 percent of all collected income taxes, it would still not be such a bad thing, inasmuch as the circumstances surrounding their earned income must be somewhat suspicious. In the words of the president, the so-called affluent surely at some point must realize that they have made enough money and have hundreds of thousands in unneeded income that could easily be assessed with higher taxes.

The agenda of the poorer and lower-middle classes is championed mostly by an affluent elite located on the two coasts, who find power and influence in representing “the people,” and are themselves either affluent enough, or enjoy enough top government salaries and subsidies, to be largely exempt from any hardship that would result from their own advocacy of much higher taxes and larger government expenditures.

For debt-ceiling deal to become law, what needs to happen by Tuesday

In a rare moment of relief, Senate leaders rushed together to the floor Sunday night to announce a historic debt agreement, and Asian financial markets, just opening, rallied.

But selling the deal to a critical mass of rank-and-file lawmakers is as formidable a political reach as breaking the bitter, partisan impasse among top leaders – and it all must be wrapped up by Tuesday, when the United States loses its borrowing capacity.

Many conservatives say the deal doesn’t go far enough to ensure that the US will shift to a more sustainable fiscal course, including a balanced-budget amendment. Some liberals say that the richest Americans have not been required to share the sacrifice by paying more taxes.

Specialist Michael Pistillo, left, works at his post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange Monday, Aug. 1, 2011. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The deal reached by Congress to raise the debt ceiling and cut more than $2 trillion in public spending will probably have only a minor impact on the economy for the next two years.

Almost all the cuts would be made in 2014 or beyond. The approach heeds a warning by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and many private economists: Cutting too much too soon could harm the weak economic recovery.

Yet the deal won't do much to help the economy either, economists said, at least in the short term.