StreetScooby

Ah, so this was a joke? Linear thinking. The economy is nonlinear, as I'm sure you're aware. The issue is better phrased as revenues vs. spending, not taxes vs. spending. Rational people are in agreement that revenues need to be increased, and spending needs to be decreased. Liberals/Democrats seem to view the economy as a fixed pie. They don't seem to understand that we need to grow the pie. The only way to grow the pie is to stop strangling business, which those clueless amateurs in the White House are doing in spades. We are all engines of karma

bill, you're not making sense tonight. Have you been drinking? We are all engines of karma

Too many people are focusing on "taxes" instead of revenues. The Bush tax cuts are not to blame for the mess we're in. That is far too simple of a view to argue. Likewise, the spending increases are by far the dominant factor in the equation at this point in time. We are all engines of karma

The street is an incredibly brutal place to make a living. Folks that make it to the executive suite have alot on the ball, but they're still all too human at times. Not that I'm justifying a $2B mistake. The risk department has alot of explaining to do on this one... We are all engines of karma

Obama needs to stop strangling business in this country. We need to raise revenues, and he's going about it completely wrong. We are all engines of karma

Didn't the higher ups get severe reprimands for not allowing backup fire? We are all engines of karma

Obama is a clueless amateur surrounding by clueless amateurs. The country is finally starting to realize that. Have you done the math? You can't get out of Obama's mess even if you take ALL of the money corporations, billionaires and millionaires are making. REVENUES need to be raised. There is only one solution to this - the government must cut spending, and do so drastically. It must also stop strangling businesses. Obama needs to turn 180 degrees in his approach. He couldn't be doing it more wrong. We are all engines of karma

I agree that Obama doesn't give a fuck about the average Joe. His spending is predominately focused at government workers and union members. If Obama cared about average Joes he'd stopped strangling business in this country. An article in the WSJ today does a good job describing Obama's version of economics: Here's the complete article: ===================================== Obama's Two Economies For Barack Obama, the private economy is an intellectual abstraction. Thus repeated Barack Obama on Monday, promoting his jobs plan: "Should we keep tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires?" So said a news report Monday on the plan's tax details: "The largest chunk of Mr. Obama's tax package comes from limiting itemized deductions for families with more than $250,000 in yearly taxable income and individuals with more than $200,000, including those for home-mortgage interest, state and local property taxes and charitable donations. The White House says that measure would raise roughly $400 billion over 10 years." There was more clarity in a previous presidency about the meaning of "is" than about Barack Obama's elastic definition of a millionaire. Another familiar part of the political background noise in politics is the president's animus toward something called "business." This is taken to mean he dislikes the undeserving fat cats of banking and corporate management. At this level, the president's American Jobs Act is progress: From its details emerges a clear understanding of Mr. Obama's beliefs about what he takes to be the engines of the American economy. How it works. How it grows. For Barack Obama, the private economy is an intellectual abstraction. For Mr. Obama, there is no such thing as the American economy. Instead, there are two Americas with separate economies—one public, the other private. The economy of the public sector—the money it spends and the direct or indirect recipients of its spending—is the real economy, the one that matters for the health of the country. Mr. Obama's second economy, the one most people think of as the private sector, is an intellectual abstraction. It's like the distant planets that astronomers regard as real but have discovered using mathematical calculations. It is believed that life forms exist in the private economy, but they do so as datapoints inside the White House Office of Management and Budget. The plan's biggest outlays are the payroll tax cut and tax credit for new hires. Few owners in the private economy would have identified a 12-month break from payroll taxes or the credit as the best incentive for elevating long-term employment. The payroll tax cut's primary purpose is to enable an Obama mathematical abstraction known as the Keynesian multiplier. By the way, the plan's third-to-last paragraph—call it the Rick Perry Footnote—says the $175 billion payroll tax holiday won't impact Social Security payments: "Social Security will still receive every dollar it would have gotten otherwise, through a transfer from the General Fund into the Social Security Trust Fund." This sounds like a Ponzi scheme. Once past the tax-cuts-for-temps, the jobs plan drops anchor in the public economy. The "targets" of the plan's $447 billion of spending are industries and people who are or always will be dependent on payments from public budgets. The plan's parts operate almost entirely inside the public-sector ecosystem. Enlarge Image WL0915 WL0915 Corbis A 1930s construction project by the Works Progress Administration. The primary categories of workers identified helped by the plan are teachers, police, firefighters, construction workers, "boiler repairmen." The plan would put people to work modernizing 35,000 public schools, repairing transit systems and airports, and developing "high-speed rail corridors." The $10 billion National Infrastructure Bank is a "government-owned entity," with the government guaranteeing loans due to "market gaps" for infrastructure financing. The American Jobs Act sounds like a jobs plan more for developing China than for the 21st century U.S. economy. The plan asserts it will put people back to work "in key areas that are central to America's future competitiveness." Then it says it will allow the rehiring of teachers, police and firefighters "who have been laid off because of budget cuts." But people have been laid off in the other economy, too. This week Bank of America said it would lay off 30,000 people. Last month, HSBC bank announced massive layoffs. Stories abound of new college graduates living at home, unemployed. A study out this week from the Institute for Financial Literacy says college graduates have become the fastest-growing group of bankruptcy filers. The Obama $0.5 trillion jobs plan reflects no recognition of the unemployed people connected to the U.S.'s most competitive and dynamic industries. Notwithstanding all that Democratic intellectuals such as Richard Florida have written about the party's future lying with sophisticated knowledge workers, these people fall outside the president's field of vision. Barack Obama (and his activist base) has talked nonstop about helping "the middle class," but it's clear this is a static, backward-looking notion of what makes up the American middle class. Because Mr. Obama and his circle divide the economy into two parts, with the private economy merely a satellite orbiting the public sun, he has proven incapable of offering policies for the whole nation. A Whole America plan to lift both blue-collar and white-collar workers would have included some gesture toward a broad-based Bowles-Simpson tax reform, rather than wait for the debt panel to act. The plan's mention of reforming Sarbanes-Oxley (for small and new business only) merely promises to "work with" the SEC to "explore ways." A pipedream. The American Jobs Act is a jobs plan for Barack Obama's America. The United States is a bigger country than that. We are all engines of karma

If Boehner is an unrealistic fool, what does that make Obama? We are all engines of karma

Alot of people don't realize that if cap and trade goes through, Goldman Sachs is going to make a FORTUNE, even by their own terms. Prophet-Gore will be a valued client, no doubt. We are all engines of karma

And, there's a genuine happy ending involved in this transaction! We are all engines of karma

There's much more going on here than that. The Senate's Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission's report (http://fcic-static.law.stanford.edu/cdn_media/fcic-reports/fcic_final_report_full.pdf) does a good job describing how we got into this mess. The dissents do a good job analyzing the reason why. Couple the irrational phase most of the country went through with the housing bust with the govt's incredibly irresponsible spending, and here we are... We are all engines of karma

Nobel prize winner for physics in 1973 Dr. Ivar Giaever resigned as a Fellow from the American Physical Society (APS). http://www.climatedepot.com/a/12797/Exclusive-Nobel-PrizeWinning-Physicist-Who-Endorsed-Obama-Dissents-Resigns-from-American-Physical-Society-Over-Groups-Promotion-of-ManMade-Global-Warming We are all engines of karma

Yet another good article today: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904060604576570821884273638.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond ====================================== Obama's Two Economies For Barack Obama, the private economy is an intellectual abstraction. Thus repeated Barack Obama on Monday, promoting his jobs plan: "Should we keep tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires?" So said a news report Monday on the plan's tax details: "The largest chunk of Mr. Obama's tax package comes from limiting itemized deductions for families with more than $250,000 in yearly taxable income and individuals with more than $200,000, including those for home-mortgage interest, state and local property taxes and charitable donations. The White House says that measure would raise roughly $400 billion over 10 years." There was more clarity in a previous presidency about the meaning of "is" than about Barack Obama's elastic definition of a millionaire. Another familiar part of the political background noise in politics is the president's animus toward something called "business." This is taken to mean he dislikes the undeserving fat cats of banking and corporate management. At this level, the president's American Jobs Act is progress: From its details emerges a clear understanding of Mr. Obama's beliefs about what he takes to be the engines of the American economy. How it works. How it grows. For Barack Obama, the private economy is an intellectual abstraction. For Mr. Obama, there is no such thing as the American economy. Instead, there are two Americas with separate economies—one public, the other private. The economy of the public sector—the money it spends and the direct or indirect recipients of its spending—is the real economy, the one that matters for the health of the country. Mr. Obama's second economy, the one most people think of as the private sector, is an intellectual abstraction. It's like the distant planets that astronomers regard as real but have discovered using mathematical calculations. It is believed that life forms exist in the private economy, but they do so as datapoints inside the White House Office of Management and Budget. The plan's biggest outlays are the payroll tax cut and tax credit for new hires. Few owners in the private economy would have identified a 12-month break from payroll taxes or the credit as the best incentive for elevating long-term employment. The payroll tax cut's primary purpose is to enable an Obama mathematical abstraction known as the Keynesian multiplier. By the way, the plan's third-to-last paragraph—call it the Rick Perry Footnote—says the $175 billion payroll tax holiday won't impact Social Security payments: "Social Security will still receive every dollar it would have gotten otherwise, through a transfer from the General Fund into the Social Security Trust Fund." This sounds like a Ponzi scheme. Once past the tax-cuts-for-temps, the jobs plan drops anchor in the public economy. The "targets" of the plan's $447 billion of spending are industries and people who are or always will be dependent on payments from public budgets. The plan's parts operate almost entirely inside the public-sector ecosystem. The primary categories of workers identified helped by the plan are teachers, police, firefighters, construction workers, "boiler repairmen." The plan would put people to work modernizing 35,000 public schools, repairing transit systems and airports, and developing "high-speed rail corridors." The $10 billion National Infrastructure Bank is a "government-owned entity," with the government guaranteeing loans due to "market gaps" for infrastructure financing. The American Jobs Act sounds like a jobs plan more for developing China than for the 21st century U.S. economy. The plan asserts it will put people back to work "in key areas that are central to America's future competitiveness." Then it says it will allow the rehiring of teachers, police and firefighters "who have been laid off because of budget cuts." But people have been laid off in the other economy, too. This week Bank of America said it would lay off 30,000 people. Last month, HSBC bank announced massive layoffs. Stories abound of new college graduates living at home, unemployed. A study out this week from the Institute for Financial Literacy says college graduates have become the fastest-growing group of bankruptcy filers. The Obama $0.5 trillion jobs plan reflects no recognition of the unemployed people connected to the U.S.'s most competitive and dynamic industries. Notwithstanding all that Democratic intellectuals such as Richard Florida have written about the party's future lying with sophisticated knowledge workers, these people fall outside the president's field of vision. Barack Obama (and his activist base) has talked nonstop about helping "the middle class," but it's clear this is a static, backward-looking notion of what makes up the American middle class. Because Mr. Obama and his circle divide the economy into two parts, with the private economy merely a satellite orbiting the public sun, he has proven incapable of offering policies for the whole nation. A Whole America plan to lift both blue-collar and white-collar workers would have included some gesture toward a broad-based Bowles-Simpson tax reform, rather than wait for the debt panel to act. The plan's mention of reforming Sarbanes-Oxley (for small and new business only) merely promises to "work with" the SEC to "explore ways." A pipedream. The American Jobs Act is a jobs plan for Barack Obama's America. The United States is a bigger country than that. We are all engines of karma

Yet another article of interest... A Blue-State Bailout in Disguise http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904353504576568352231645730.html California comes to mind here... "Leading the way", as Pelosi put it, ....to economic ruin... We are all engines of karma

Through October of this year, the US government has spent $434,131,324,866.27 ($434B) servicing debt. This is completely out of control. http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/ir/ir_expense.htm We are all engines of karma

George Will has a column titled Our floundering ‘federal family’ here today: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/our-floundering-federal-family/2011/09/13/gIQA9oaxSK_story.html I've copied it below. Obama and the liberals have to get out of the way. ========================================= Our floundering ‘federal family’ By George F. Will, Published: September 14 In societies governed by persuasion, politics is mostly talk, so liberals’ impoverishment of their vocabulary matters. Having damaged liberalism’s reputation, they call themselves progressives. Having made the federal government’s pretensions absurd, they have resurrected a supposed synonym for the government, the “federal family.” Having made federal spending suspect, they advocate “investments” — for “job creation,” a euphemism for stimulus, another word they have made toxic. Barack Obama, a pitilessly rhetorical president, continues to grab the nation by its lapels, demanding its attention, and is paying the price: The nation is no longer listening. This matters because ominous portents are multiplying. Bank of America, which reported an $8.8 billion loss last quarter, plans to lay off 30,000 out of a workforce of nearly 300,000. The Postal Service hopes to shed 120,000 of its 653,000 jobs (down from almost 900,000 a decade ago). Such churning of the labor market would free people for new, more productive jobs — except that to reduce unemployment, the economy needs an approximately 3 percent growth rate, triple today’s rate. Consumers of modest means are so strapped that Wal-Mart is reviving layaway purchases for the Christmas season. The Wall Street Journal reports that Procter & Gamble, which claims to have at least one product in 98 percent of American households, expects hard times for a long time: It is putting new emphasis on lower-priced products for low-income shoppers. Just as Obama administration policies have delayed the housing market reaching a salutary bottom, Europe’s policies designed to delay Greece’s default on its debt are probably making that inevitability worse. If the contagion reaches Italy or Spain (“Too big to fail and too big to bail”), we shall learn how hollow Europe’s banks are, and how much U.S. banks are entangled with them. During the debt-ceiling debate, the New York Times, liberalism’s bulletin board, was aghast that Republicans risked causing the nation to default on its debt. Now two Times columnists endorse slow-motion default through inflation: The Federal Reserve should have “the deliberate goal of generating higher inflation to help alleviate debt problems” (Paul Krugman) and “sometimes we need inflation, and now is such a time” (Floyd Norris). Ken Rogoff, a Harvard economist, suggests “trying to achieve some modest deleveraging through moderate inflation of, say, 4 to 6 percent for several years.” This is an antiseptic way of saying we should reduce the weight of our indebtedness by reducing the value of the dollars in which it is denominated. But does the nation need more uncertainty? And note Rogoff’s serene confidence in government’s ability to control such things — inflation will be fine-tuned within a narrow band, switched on for just a few years, then off, like a government-approved light bulb. It is a wonder, this faith-based (and often campus-based) conviction that the government that brought us the ethanol program can be trusted to precisely execute wise policies that will render the world predictable and progressive. For two years, there has been one constant: As events have refuted the Obama administration’s certitudes, the administration has retained its insufferable knowingness. It knew that the stimulus would hold unemployment below 8 percent. Oops. Unemployment has been at least 9 percent in 26 of the 30 months since the stimulus was passed. Michael Boskin of Stanford says that, even if one charitably accepts the administration’s self-serving estimate of jobs “created or saved” by the stimulus, each job cost $280,000 — five times America’s median pay. And research by Garett Jones and Daniel M. Rothschild of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center indicates that just 42.1 percent of workers hired by entities receiving stimulus funds were unemployed at the time. More (47.3 percent) were poached from other organizations, and 10.6 percent came directly from school or outside the labor force. Obama’s administration, which is largely innocent of business experience, knew its experts would be wizards at investing taxpayers’ dollars. Oops. After receiving more than half a billion stimulus dollars in loan guarantees, bankrupt solar-panel maker Solyndra has shed nearly all of its more than 1,100 workers. The economic policy the “federal family” should adopt can be expressed in five one-syllable words: Get. Out. Of. The. Way. Instead, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, whose department has become a venture capital firm for crony capitalism and costly flops at creating “green jobs,” praises the policy of essentially banishing the incandescent light bulb as “taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.” Better to let the experts in his department and the rest of the federal family waste other people’s money. We are all engines of karma

I fear we are reaching that point. Our public education system is falling apart, and the more I think about it, the more I find myself blaming that on liberal policies. We are all engines of karma

Thanks for posting the article. We are all engines of karma

One of the "mistakes" I noticed in the paper came at the end. The author attempted to show how incomplete the modelling was in AGW by proposing another 1st order effects model, in the interest of demonstrating that modelling itself was incomplete. I figured this was going to be latched onto by AGW people. The paper should have only addressed the data, and nothing else. We are all engines of karma

From the BBC today: Having read the original paper, it's focus is on the raw data showing the earth is losing plenty of heat, much more than AGW models predict. Any discussion of math modeling is deliberately secondary in the paper, as the authors point out the modeling is still too complex. Interesting to note that the actual data is NOT being refuted. The editor is resigning because "the process" wasn't followed. We are all engines of karma

There is no need to for the government to take this action. As soon as a Congress comes into power that feels guns are bad, they would use the database to confiscate peoples guns. Look what Bernie Sanders just did. He released data on futures positions held by every company in America, even though that data was confidential. People who are pro-2nd amendment do not trust the government with confidential information. And they have a valid concern, IMO. We are all engines of karma

Anyone else? Looking to get a steady crew going, making 100+ jumps/year, and some tunnel time. Nationals would be fine, but not required. Anywhere between Sky's The Limit, Ranch, and Cross Keys. Feel free to PM me. We are all engines of karma

ROFLMAO... Thank you, I needed to laugh today. We are all engines of karma

The main storyline is actually quite interesting, and thorough. The conclusions drawn by the Democratic majority reflect a pretty shallow analysis of what happened, IMO. The dissenting opinions did a very good job on their analysis. We are all engines of karma