Tag Archives: Economy

News

Obama loses 2.19 million jobs, 9.4% unemployment, worst in 25 years

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UPDATE: Welcome readers from 4Simpsons! Thanks for the link Neil!

Gateway Pundit has the story in graphs. (H/T Lonely Conservative)

What was the unemployment rate under Bush?

Despite the recession he inherited, 9-11, stock market scandals, Hurricane Katrina and two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the unemployment rate during the Bush years averaged out to 5.27%. (Misery Index)

How about so far under Obama?

The US economy lost 598,000 jobs in January.
The US economy lost 706,000 jobs in February.
The US economy lost 742,000 jobs in March.
The US economy lost 545,000 jobs in April.
And, in May the US economy lost 345,000 jobs.

Here’s a graph that may help you to understand how bad Obama really is, compared to Bush:

US Unemployment Rate
US Unemployment Rate

Clinton’s rate is good because Newt Gingrich was in charge of the House in 1994 onward, and the House is where all spending bills originate

Hot Air reports (with a graph) that the unemployment rate is worse than the White House predicted it would be if they hadn’t passed the stimulus:

We are heading towards double-digit unemployment and doing that while we incur the massive debt of the unstimulating stimulus package. We could just as easily have kept the money and ridden out the unemployment, much as we’re forced to do now, only being a lot poorer while doing it.

Why is this important?  It demonstrates that the President and his economic advisers have gotten pretty much everything about this economic collapse wrong.  Instead of contracting government spending and shoring up the credibility of the currency, they’re setting records in dissipating it instead.  Instead of focusing on fixing the problem that government explicitly created — mortgage-backed securities — they’ve literally left that for last while they waste money chasing every Democratic constituency but ignoring the actual cancer in the financial system.

Bush was cutting into the deficit until the Democrats Community Reinvestment Act caught up with him in 2008. But Obama has ruined Bush’s effort to balance the budget, with his massive redistributions of wealth.

Obama's projected deficits
Obama's projected deficits

And the Heritage Foundation shows that the national debt is getting much worse under Obama’s tax and spend policies:

debt-deficits_04-580
Debt as % of GDP under Obama

The Heritage Foundation writes:

The national debt is skyrocketing. In 2009 publicly held debt is projected to jump to 54.8 percent of GDP, up from 40.8 percent in 2008. A year to year increase of this size hasn’t occurred since World War II. While the main causes of this massive increase – $787 trillion economic “stimulus” and the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) – are sure to be debated for some time, the truly freighting revelation should be not what has already taken place, but what our elected officials have planned.

President Obama’s budget, if passed, would send debt to levels 26.3 percent of GDP over current law. Although President Obama has publicly stated his desire to both bring down deficits and reform entitlements under his watch, his actions don’t match his words.

Who caused the recession? The democrats caused the recession, Bush tried to stop them in 2003. And Obama’s spending spree is only making things worse. We have a worse economy than Canada now, in every measure that counts. Obama’s planned tax hike is causing companies like Microsoft to ship jobs overseas, and his cap and trade plan will cost us even more jobs.

High tax rates cause the most productive people to stop working, costing us jobs. Obama is to blame. His total ignorance of economics means that he will be playing whack-a-mole with the US economy – always inventing new interventions into the market to fix the problems his last intervention caused.

UPDATE: Muddling Towards Maturity links to a comment by a business owner who explains why he will be hiring in Panama, not in the USA.

News

Obama’s car regulations will kill more Americans than the Iraq war

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The Heritage Foundation reports on Obama’s proposed regulations on fuel economy.

Time for practice. Time to pile into the…Toyota Prius? Maybe the Yaris. Or surely the Smart Car will do. Those are three of eleven cars that meet President Obama’s new emissions standards that include “nothing larger than a midsize sedan, even when you include hybrids.”

Eleven choices of vehicle? The soccer moms will not be liking that.

But it gets worse. It’s going to cost another 50,000 jobs added on to Obama’s massive count.

Keith Henessey writes: (H/T Competitive Enterprise Institute)

NHTSA estimated that a similar option would cost almost 50,000 U.S. auto manufacturing jobs over five years.

See Table VII-1 on page 586 of the NHTSA analysis.  NHTSA estimated that the TC=TB option, which I’m using as a proxy for the Obama plan, would result in the following job losses among U.S. auto workers:

MY 2011

MY 2012

MY 2013

MY 2014

MY 2015

8,232

24,610

30,545

36,106

48,847

Compared to the Bush draft final rule, this is 37,000 more jobs lost.

Since I know this table is inflammatory, I will anticipate some of the responses:

  • This is an estimate for the job loss from the TC=TB option analyzed by NHTSA in 2007.  This is the closest proxy for the Obama rule, and I’m convinced it’s a good proxy until someone demonstrates otherwise.  But technically, it’s not a job loss estimate for the Obama proposal.
  • This estimate was done in a different economic environment (late 2008), and before the U.S. government owned 1.5 major U.S. auto manufacturers.  My guess, however, is that these changed conditions should push the estimated job loss up from the above estimate, rather than down.
  • There’s a false precision in the above table.  It’s just what NHTSA’s model spits out.  …I don’t put any weight on the precise annual estimates.

And it gets even worse than that.

Steve Milloy writes about the really bad problem on Green Hell blog: (H/T Gateway Pundit)

The Obama administration’s proposed mileage standards that will be announced today may kill more Americans at a faster rate than the Iraq War — his signature issue in the 2008 presidential campaign.

Obama’s standards will require automakers to meet a 35 miles-per-gallon standard by 2016 — four years earlier than the same standard imposed by the Energy Security and Independence Act of 2007.

As discussed in my new book Green Hell, the only way for carmakers to meet these standard is to make smaller, lighter and deadlier cars.

The National Academy of Sciences has linked mileage standards with about 2,000 deaths per year. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that every 100-pound reduction in the weight of small cars increases annual traffic fatalities by as much as 715.

In contrast in the more than six years since the Iraq war began, there have been 4,296 deaths among American military personnel.

The Iraq war cost 550 billion and 4300 lives. And for this we got more liberty and security. Obama is spending trillions and trillions of dollars, and he wants to kill 2,000 Americans per year? I am not even talking about his subsidies to kill more unborn babies at home and abroad. This is on top of that!

News

Who has the better economy? Canada or the USA?

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Hans Bader at the Competitive Enterprise Institute reports:

1.2 million Americans have lost their jobs since the $800 billion stimulus package was signed into law.

The stimulus package has directly destroyed tens of thousands of jobs. A provision in the stimulus package that blocked 97 Mexican truckers from U.S. roads “caused Mexico to retaliate with tariffs on 90 goods affecting $2.4 billion in U.S. trade,” destroying 40,000 American jobs.

It also ignited a trade war with Canada. In response to vague “buy American” provisions in the stimulus package, “A number of Ontario towns, with a collective population of nearly 500,000, retaliated with measures effectively barring U.S. companies from their municipal contracts — the first shot in a larger campaign that could shut U.S. companies out of billions of dollars worth of Canadian projects.”

Yet, Obama had the audacity to claim that only passing the stimulus package would save us from “irreversible decline” and economic ““disaster”.

Obama’s policies echo those of Herbert Hoover, who helped spawn the Great Depression through his protectionism and tax increases.

Remember how Democrats used to complain about Bush and his “tax cuts for the rich”? Yeah, it’s strange how only people who pay taxes (59% of the public) can actually get tax cuts, isn’t it. But Obama has an even better idea: “tax hikes for the poor”.

The Washington Post reports on Obama’s new car tax: (H/T Heritage Foundation, Michelle Malkin, Stop the ACLU, Gateway Pundit)

A senior administration official said the new standards would raise the cost of an average car by $1,300, $600 of which could be attributed to the rules being announced today.

This is not to mention the electricity tax (cap and trade), the cigarette tax, taxing employee health care plans, and the rising cost of living caused by protectionism.

On the other hand, let’s take a look at Canada in relation to the United States, courtesy of the Cato Institute. (H/T Heritage Foundation)

The Cato Institute writes:

Spending: Spending by all levels of the Canadian government peaked at 53 percent of the country’s GDP in the early 1990s, then plunged to 40 percent in 2008. U.S. government spending has risen, reaching 39 percent of GDP in 2008. And with the stimulus package, that number is likely to jump even higher.

Government spending as % of GDP
Government spending as % of GDP

Debt: The Canadian government cut its debt from 71 percent of GDP in 1995 to 32 percent in 2008. Under President Obama’s budget plan, U.S. federal public debt will jump from 41 percent of GDP in 2008 to more than 60 percent next year.

Federal debt as % of GDP
Federal debt as % of GDP

Deficits: Canada has balanced its budget every year since 1998 — not by raising taxes, but by cutting spending. The United States balanced its budget for four years in the late 1990s, but now deficits are so large that it’s difficult to imagine that ever happening again.

Surplus / Deficit as % of GDP
Surplus / Deficit as % of GDP

Corporate Taxes: Canada has cut the corporate tax rate from 28 percent to just 15 percent, and most provinces have trimmed corporate taxes as well. The U.S. federalstate rate stands at about 40 percent, and the Obama administration is planning to increase corporate taxes.

Corporate tax rates
Corporate tax rates

It’s important to note that the Liberal party in Canada is socially progressive, but moderate on fiscal issues. Of course, now that the Conservatives have been running things, it’s gotten even better. It would be great if they could win a majority. The biggest problem in Canada right now is the fascist Human Rights Commissions, but there are candidates from the Conservative Party who intend to abolish the HRCs in BC and Ontario.