Obama’s Recovery Summer Tour: Fully As Effective as the WIN Button
Obama's Recovery Summer! Have you caught your wave yet?
Everywhere one looks, signs of Obama’s Recover Summer are evident: unemployment and bankruptcies are up, home sales are down, there’s talk of an education bubble bursting. The Recovery Summer 2010 Tour has been as wildly successful as Gerald Ford’s WIN buttons in 1974.
MORE TALES FROM RECOVERY SUMMER!
OBAMA’S RECOVERY SUMMER is 2010′s WIN BUTTON
There once was a president who was completely overwhelmed by the forces of economics. That president turned to sloganeering in an attempt to convince people that they could do what the Federal Government had the power to do. That president was Gerald Ford.
The program? The WIN button.
From Whip Inflation now:
Whip Inflation Now (WIN) was an attempt to spur a grassroots movement to combat inflation, by encouraging personal savings and disciplined spending habits in combination with public measures, urged by U.S. President Gerald Ford. People who supported the mandatory and voluntary measures were encouraged to wear “WIN” buttons, perhaps in hope of evoking in peacetime the kind of solidarity and voluntarism symbolized by the V-campaign during World War II.
The campaign began in earnest with the establishment by the 93rd Congress, of the National Commission on Inflation, which Ford closed with an address to the American people, asking them to send him a list of ten inflation-reducing ideas. Ten days later, Ford declared inflation “public enemy number one” before Congress on October 8, 1974, in a speech entitled “Whip Inflation Now”, announcing a series of proposals for public and private steps intended to directly affect supply and demand, in order to bring inflation under control. “WIN” buttons immediately became objects of ridicule; skeptics wore the buttons upside down, explaining that “NIM” stood for “No Immediate Miracles,” or “Nonstop Inflation Merry-go-round,” or “Need Immediate Money.”
Gerald Ford was turned out of office in 1976, after the WIN button proved to be absolutely powerless against economic forces. One suspects that Recover Summer! will be just as effective as the WIN button was.
“Summer 2010 is actually poised to be the most active Recovery Act season yet.”
–Obama presidential report, June 2010
On we go with more proof that readers need to catch the next wave of Recovery Summer!
Initial jobless claims hit 500,000
While Barack Obama tours the nation claiming that the economy has started heading in the right direction, the data continues to show otherwise. Today, the Department of Labor announced that initial jobless claims hit 500,000 last week, the highest level in 2010 and highest since last November. The four-week rolling average spiked upward again as well:
If Democrats wonder why voters aren’t buying the Recovery Summer public-relations campaign, it’s probably because more of them than ever can’t buy much of anything. Bankruptcy filings rose to their highest quarterly level in five years in 2010 Q2, underscoring the decline in the American economy heading into the summer:
A PREDICTION from Instapundit:
“Watch for panic over the UNEXPECTED collapse in home sales next week.
More proof that the ones in government who got the economy in a mess know how to get us out. Nearly 50 percent leave Obama mortgage-aid program.
Nearly half of the 1.3 million homeowners who enrolled in the Obama administration’s flagship mortgage-relief program have fallen out.
The program is intended to help those at risk of foreclosure by lowering their monthly mortgage payments. Friday’s report from the Treasury Department suggests the $75 billion government effort is failing to slow the tide of foreclosures in the United States, economists say.
Big Government is the only entity that produces more of what’s not needed while it bills the taxpayers for its trouble.
The U.S. Mint keeps making $1 coins when no one is buying because it’s a cash cow–of taxpayer dollars. Why does the Mint keep pumping out $1 coins when few are buying in?
The obvious question is: If there is little transactional demand for the coins and an enormous stockpile already exists, why does the Mint continue to produce the coins in such great quantities?
Meanwhile, the Mint has been generating substantial “profits” from the production and stockpiling of unnecessary $1 coins. Each time a manganese brass disc of metal gets stamped into a legal-tender dollar, the Mint earns seigniorage based on the difference between the costs of production and the face value. In the most recent fiscal year, seigniorage earned through the production of $1 coins was $318.7 million, accounting for 63.5 percent of the Mint’s total seigniorage and net income. It’s a strange overlap of legislative requirements and unintended consequences that created this unnecessary but “profitable” product of the U.S. government.
The Top 10 Highest State Income Taxes: All Obama Blue States. Click the link for the list, which incidentally contains only two of the worst offenders of state insolvency, California and New York (Illinois is missing–for now.) Also notably missing from the list: basket-case Michigan.
Finally, this from the communists loaning the USA enough money to bail out all of those insolvent blue states: China’s Looming Real-Estate Bubble; A massive Keynesian spending program has misallocated capital and set the stage for a crisis.
Despite the global downturn, China’s economic growth rate remains above 10%. But there is mounting evidence that Beijing has misallocated vast amounts of capital, touching off a real-estate crisis that could yet drag the world’s second-largest economy down to earth.
When the global marketplace went into meltdown mode two years ago …
When the crisis hits the Chinese fan, where will the Treasury go to sell its debt?
Depending upon what the Chinese leadership decides to do, the answer to that question may not be available until 2011′s version of Obama’s Recovery Summer!
Finally, why Obama is More a Carter than a Reagan:
To the extent that insufficient aggregate demand is not what ails the economy, the stimulus isn’t important. Obama’s strategies with regard to the banking system, the housing market, and the deficit, on the other hand, matter significantly. And in these areas, he has opted for a strategy of maximum pain-avoidance that has contributed to the sluggishness of the recovery. Instead of forcing the bondholders of TARPed banks to share in the sacrifice, Obama opted for a slow-motion bailout that allowed banks to rebuild their balance sheets gradually by borrowing from the Fed at zero and lending to the government at 4 percent. This strategy kept a lot of capital locked up in zombie institutions rather than flowing to productive enterprises.
There’s more, but that’s all we have time for today. Now, grab your board and keep your eyes peeled for the next sighting of Recovery Summer!
by Mondo Frazier
image: DBKP file
[...] for office buildings, malls, and hotels in three words: “Dead, dead, dead.” ALSO at DBKP: * Obama’s Recovery Summer Tour: Fully As Effective as the WIN Button * Obama Recovery Summer: Residential Construction Down * Obama Wipes Out While Surfing Recovery [...]
[...] Car Sales, US Birthrate Crash, Bunker Supplies UP * The Wreckage of Obama’s Recovery Summer * Obama’s Recovery Summer Tour: Fully As Effective as the WIN Button * Obama Recovery Summer: Residential Construction Down * Obama Wipes Out While Surfing Recovery [...]