Is There Nothing That Obama Can't Do?

He's already got the Nobel Peace Prize.

Does this mean he's in line for the Nobel for Economics?

I guess the love affair between liberals and socialists has been shot..

A La Mesa man who posted racial epithets and a call to "shoot" Barack Obama on an Internet chat site was engaging in constitutionally protected free speech, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday in overturning his criminal conviction.

The observation that Obama "will have a 50 cal in the head soon" and a call to "shoot the [racist slur]" weren't violations of the law under which Bagdasarian was convicted because the statute doesn't criminalize "predictions or exhortations to others to injure or kill the president," said the majority opinion written by Judge Stephen Reinhardt.

liberal pundits are scrambling to create deceptive evidence that Obama is good for the economy. I've seen a slough of graphs this week twisting GDP and unemployment numbers to make it look like Obama is still the messiah.
One number won't lie. The length of the unemployment line.

God I hate it when they put lines through graphs to illustrate trends that are perfectly obvious without the lines.

Looks like a ski graph going down hill.

With apologies to Ceasar, Crassus and Pompey, is it to late to start referring to Obama-Pelosi-Reid as "The First Tri-dumb-virate"?

The up side is more people for government jobs, eh...

Kate read this: "Our benchmark point estimates suggest the Act created/saved 450 thousand government- sector jobs and destroyed/forestalled one million private sector jobs. The large majority of destroyed/forestalled jobs are in a subset of the private service sector comprised of health,(private) education, professional and business services, which we term HELP services."

http://web.econ.ohio-state.edu/dupor/arra10_may11.pdf

Personally I do a bit of time series analysis for work. Be careful making intervention impact assumptions due to legislation, which while passed is rarely implemented immediately and thus one needs to look at the date of implementation to draw intervention correlation.

You would almost think this would make the news here in the US....

Langman is 100% correct. Whenever you split a trend line at an arbitrary spot, it always makes a step in the graph. Particularly when the time series is shorter at one end. Sad to see the Heritage Foundation lying with charts like that, usually we leave that kind of thing to the Liberals.

Obamacare is a disaster, its easy to prove that without damaging one's credibility with cheap sleight of hand graphs.

langmann:

I agree with you so far as physical systems go, but as I noted in another thread, this reduction in job growth is a result of a capital strike.

That's a psychological reaction, and that can occur the moment (if not before!) the legislation passes. In fact, one could argue that, prior to implementation, the psychological effect is even greater due to the uncertainty of the details. After all, it's not like anyone in Congress actually read the 1600+ pages in bill, let alone understood them. The typical businessman wondering whether or not to invest is almost immediately going to shelve any plans he has until the future becomes clear (which, as yet, it has not).

Keynes' A Tract On Monetary Reform, which I have mentioned here recently, describes this perfectly, in an analogous situation. If businessmen expect inflation, where the price of raw materials they use rise during the course of production, they reap windfall profits on sales (esp. if they use LIFO accounting), and the relative costs of servicing their debt falls each year. Keynes described this as a redistribution between the entrepeneur and rentier classes in favour of businessmen. In deflation, the opposite occurs. He describes the effect thusly:

If [entrepeneurs] expect a fall [in prices], it may pay them, as a group, to damp production down, though such enforced idleness impoverishes society as a whole.

He later states that the interest of the "salaried and wage earning classes" (i.e. labour) often coincide with those of the investing (rentier) class. He then goes on to say that just the apprehension of falling prices may be enough to dampen business activity, even if such a fall never comes.

So it is here. Obamacare, once implemented, may actually have minimal effects on business (not likely, but who knows?), but the mere apprehension that it will add substantial costs to each hire is enough to deter businessmen big and small from making it. Forget the big corporations - if each of the 10 million small businesses in the US could hire one more person, the US unemployment crisis would disappear. But when you have no idea what it will cost you to keep your current staff on payroll, are you going to risk adding another?

I don't have a copy of Atlas Shrugged on hand, but I vaguely recall John Galt saying "This is the dollar on strike." America's mighty heart beats slower day by day, with each application of QEx like a slug of adrenaline, providing only a temporary boost. It is death by a thousand taxes, death by ten thousand regulations. Tragic, predictable, and avoidable.

Obamacare is just another iceberg hitting the economic Titanic. The bottom line is simply that you can't outsource thousands of factories, kick millions of workers to the curb and expect life to go on without consequences. Millions who had good paying jobs and were contributers to the economy turn into liabilities that strain the social safety net. Wall street, Fanny May and Freddie Mack put more nails into the coffin. The price of gas, diesel and energy costs in general is a guarantee the there will be no recovery in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile pride dictates we continue to fight wars at great cost we can't win and have little payback even if we were to win. Obama may be a disaster at a time we need real leadership but the writing was on the wall long before he was elected.

If you follow my comments like Oz(just buggin my nigga), you'll know since day 1 I've said that "Obamacare is the problem". The bottom line is, America CANNOT afford Obama care. They cannot have it without paying for it. 10 trillion over the next decade IS THE PROBLEM! Taxes MUST be raised to pay for Obama care. It's obvious; look at the healthcare tax burden in Canada for evidence. And there inlies the paradox. Higher taxes will result in less revenue; therefore, America cannot afford Obamacare! The problem is, Democrats deny this truth, and their useful idiots can't grasp this truth.

Michelle Bachman is exactly correct about this. The repeal of Obamacare must be the top priority of American if they want their jobs back. Period!

@ KevinB : I do not dispute effects based on expectation. The thing is that one tends to see those happen before the intervention, and one would also possibly see gradual effects prior to the intervention.

The problem with time series analysis is that there is no control. Which means that there could be confounders that cause the effect rather than your intervention. For example some other event could have happened that stopped the job growth during that time. The best one can do is include as many of those confounders as independent variables in the time series analysis along with your intervention and perform the interrupted time series regression or ARIMA and see if the effect is still explained by the intervention. It may well no longer be.

Oz
hopefully this isn't deleted.

I responded to your "calling me out" and was deleted; therefore, I look like an arse with my comment on this thread. No offence intended(it was a friendly dig). I agreed with your assertion, said "sorry" and asked to squash any beef you might have with me.

Indy:

It's obvious; look at the healthcare tax burden in Canada for evidence.

Hold on there, hoss. In 2009, the US spent almost 18% of GDP on health care. 35% of that amount was Medicare and Medicaid - that's 6% of GDP that's totally government funded. At the same time, private health insurance cost 32% of the total, or not quite 6%. Call it 11% of GDP total. Now, you can call employer provided health insurance voluntary if you wish, but the fact is most companies feel it's incumbent to provide it, so it's pretty much the same as a tax.

Now, Canada spent roughly 10% of GDP on health care at the same time. So the total amount of Canadian government spending on health care is less, on a proportional basis, than the combination of US federally funded health care and "voluntary" private insurance.

Perhaps the an*l probing at the border has temporarily deranged you, but the the costs to a business in terms of tax and benefits in Canada is, if not lower, certainly not substantially higher than it is the US as you alleged.

perhaps ur right kb, but I was discussing payroll tax and such with someone and we pay much more in payroll deductions. i'd always thought this was because of the extra hc burden.

RU saying per person we're paying less for hc? i had always thought that it would be cheaper to pay an insurance company directly verses regular deductions towards the big hc pie, not to mention the superior packages including dental and perscriptions.

anyways, it seems that if I could have half my taxes back, and pay the monthly priemium for my family, I'd be waaaayyyyy ahead. furthermore, if it's a home with two working parents, then the cost of the same canadian hc service is double. no?And if American employers cover a large % of the cost, then doesn't it make it that much cheaper for the individual?

anyways, i'm not certain that %gdp is the correct measure in this case, but i'll take your word for it as you've clearly done more looking into this than me.

btw, the "probe" was free, if you don't count the cost of my dignity.

cheers

Like a teenager in an overpowered rear wheel drive car with summer tires in February, speeding toward a an icy curve with an deep chasm inches off the road, the time to make the right decisions is long since passed. We made all the wrong ones. Now it is hunker down and hope to still be alive when the car comes to a stop.

aaaaaanddd there's a GOTCHA !!!

the moonbats really need to have their own words thrown back at them much more often...they need the reminder.

from www.ihatethemedia.com

Sean Hannity sucker punches Juan Williams

July 20, 2011 · 44 comments

Oh, sure, it was a figurative sucker punch, but it left poor Juan’s head spnning nonetheless.

Hannity reeled off a list of Eric Cantor’s outrageous comments about raising the debt ceiling and asked for William’s response. When Juan finished ripping Cantor, Hannity unleashed the sucker punch and told him that the comments all came from Senator Barack Obama back in 2006, not Eric Cantor in 2011.

The best part is the stunned look on Williams’ face at the very end of the clip.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMyQJjL9QcQ

KevinB, you're missing one important point re US vs Canada healthcare. The Canadian healthcare system as a whole is massively inefficient and teetering on the edge of colapse. As any doc, they'll tell you for hours.

Conversley, (and I've worked in it) the US health system is not nearly as inefficient and currently is not near colapse. That will change as Obamacare starts to take hold and the system begins to corrode.

Its not an apples to apples comparison.

@ The Phanthom

Not sure where you get your information but the Canadian health care system is much more efficient than the US system. 33% cheaper. About 10 % of CDN gdp.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_and_American_health_care_systems_compared

peterj, I get my information from real life experience and study dude, where do you get yours? Try to arrange a hip replacement for a close friend or relative, then we'll talk ok?

Like I said, I've worked in -both- systems. If the Canadian system is cheaper per capita, (which I doubt) that's because its RATIONED.

As in waiting lists. As in people dying in transit because they don't do procedure X at -this- hospital you have to go downtown for that. As in Grandma gets forgot in the ambulance out in the parking lot and they find her dead ten hours later when the next shift checks in. As in your emergency room "housing" is a marked off spot in the main hallway with the number "86" in front of it written in scuffed duct tape. As in the burned out nurse gives Grandma the wrong sh1t and she dies of it, and nobody even tries to cover it up or fires the nurse. Business as usual.

Any hospital doing that in the USA would be sued out of existence in a week. ALL large metropolitan hospitals do that in Canada. And worse.