Be Very Very Afraid of 'The Invisible [Republi-CON] Bond Vigilantes'

UPDATE XII:  What ever happened to those preditions of hyperinflation?

Read the Washington Post, And now let us remember the worst economic prediction ever.

UPDATE XI: "When it comes to views on economics, Republicans have been consistent, clear and wrong."

Read The New York Times, G.O.P. Monetary Madness, which notes "that hard-money doctrine and paranoia about inflation have taken over the party, even as the predicted inflation keeps failing to materialize. For example, in February, Representative Paul Ryan, who is somewhat inexplicably regarded as the party’s deep thinker on matters economic, harangued Mr. Bernanke on how terrible it is to “debase” a currency and pointed to a rise in commodity prices in late 2010 and early 2011 as evidence that inflation was finally coming. Commodity prices have plunged since then, but there is no sign that Mr. Ryan or anyone else is having second thoughts."


UPDATE X: How about those invisible Republi-CON bond vigilantes. Read the Washington Post, Average rate on 30-year fixed mortgage ties low of 3.94 pct.; 15-year also hits record.


UPDATE IX: For all the anti-Keynesian folks out there, please explain:




UPDATE VIII: A told ya so by the 2008 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, in The New York Times, One Point Seven Seven:

"That’s the current interest rate on 10-year US bonds.

Remember, back in 2009 there was a big debate between people like me, who said that we were in a liquidity trap and that interest rates would stay low as long as the economy was depressed, and people like the WSJ editorial page and Niall Ferguson, who said that government borrowing would bring on the bond vigilantes and send rates soaring.

How’s it going?

And just to be clear: this isn’t just about I-told-you-so. We’re talking about different models, different visions of how the economy works. Their vision led to calls for austerity now now now; mine said that the overwhelming danger was that we wouldn’t provide enough stimulus, and that we would pull back too soon. Sure enough, we didn’t and we did. And now catastrophe looms."

Republi-cons continue to sacrifice workers to appease their imaginary inflation gods.


UPDATE VII: It has been several weeks since the so-called downgrade. So how are those bond vigilantes doing? Read The New York Times, Mortgage Rates Hit 50-Year Low.


UPDATE VI: "Fitch Ratings said Tuesday it will keep its rating on U.S. debt at the highest grade, AAA, and issued a 'stable' outlook, meaning it expects the rating to stay there." Read The New York Times, Fitch Ratings Keeps U.S. at Top Credit Rating.


UPDATE V: "Thirty years ago, it became clear that defeating inflation was crucial, even if the means needed to accomplish that would cause a deep recession. . . . [But i]t is time for a new lesson to be learned. Sometimes we need inflation, and now is such a time. " Read The New York Times, Sometimes, Inflation Is Not Evil.


UPDATE IV: "Behold the power of a stupid narrative, which seems impervious to evidence." Read The New York Times, The Downgrade Doom Loop.


UPDATE III: More from that 'liberal' commentator won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics:

"[T]here is no reason to take Friday's downgrade of America seriously. These are the last people whose judgment we should trust.

And yet America does have big problems.

These problems have very little to do with short-term or even medium-term budget arithmetic. The U.S. government is having no trouble borrowing to cover its current deficit. It's true that we're building up debt, on which we'll eventually have to pay interest. But if you actually do the math, instead of intoning big numbers in your best Dr. Evil voice, you discover that even very large deficits over the next few years will have remarkably little impact on U.S. fiscal sustainability.

No, what makes America look unreliable isn't budget math, it's politics. And please, let's not have the usual declarations that both sides are at fault. Our problems are almost entirely one-sided - specifically, they're caused by the rise of an extremist right that is prepared to create repeated crises rather than give an inch on its demands.

The truth is that as far as the straight economics goes, America’s long-run fiscal problems shouldn’t be all that hard to fix. It’s true that an aging population and rising health care costs will, under current policies, push spending up faster than tax receipts. But the United States has far higher health costs than any other advanced country, and very low taxes by international standards. If we could move even part way toward international norms on both these fronts, our budget problems would be solved.

So why can’t we do that? Because we have a powerful political movement in this country that screamed “death panels” in the face of modest efforts to use Medicare funds more effectively, and preferred to risk financial catastrophe rather than agree to even a penny in additional revenues.

The real question facing America, even in purely fiscal terms, isn’t whether we’ll trim a trillion here or a trillion there from deficits. It is whether the extremists now blocking any kind of responsible policy can be defeated and marginalized. "

Read The New York Times, Credibility, Chutzpah And Debt.


UPDATE II: "Virtually unnoticed last week was that [another ratings agency] kept a Triple A rating on the United States." Read The New York Times, Moody’s: Why the U.S. Is Still AAA.


UPDATE: So much for the inflation fear-mongers.

Today the Bank of New York began charging a fee on large deposits. Read the Wall Street Journal, BNY Mellon Deposit Fee: Life in the Liquidity Trap.

BTW, a liquidity trap, "in Keynesian economics, is a situation where monetary policy is unable to stimulate an economy, either through lowering interest rates or increasing the money supply. Liquidity traps typically occur when expectations of adverse events (e.g., deflation, insufficient aggregate demand, or civil or international war) make persons with liquid assets unwilling to invest."

I guess John Maynard Keynes was right after all.

Of course, one 'liberal' commentator has been scoffing at inflation concerns for years.

From more than two years ago, read The New York Times, The Big Inflation Scare, where he speculates that "inflation fear-mongering [was] partly political, coming largely from economists who had no problem with deficits caused by tax cuts but suddenly became fiscal scolds when the government started spending money to rescue the economy. And their goal [seemed] to be to bully the Obama administration into abandoning those rescue efforts."

I guess that's why that 'liberal' commentator won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

I wonder what the Hedgehog News prize winning economist would says now.

(Warning, that is a satirical comment.

Hedgehog News doesn't have any prize winning economist on the payroll.

But Hedgehog News does have many Republi-con candidates on the payroll.)

"S&P has triggered another invisible attack by the invisible bond vigilantes." Read The New York Times, What If They Announced A Downgrade And Nobody Cared?

BTW, a bond vigilante "is a bond market investor who protests monetary or fiscal policies they consider inflationary by selling bonds, thus increasing yields."

If you don't understand this post, you should refrain from debating fiscal policy issues.

Obamney's Economic Plan: Currency Devaluation and Inflation

How does Obamney plan to stimulate the economy? Currency devaluation and inflation.

Read the Washington Post, Does Romney want to be a debaser? and the Los Angeles Times, The idea that inflation might be our friend is gaining traction.

This after years of sacrificing workers to appease their imaginary inflation god.

BTW, I've suggested a little inflation for years.  

The Republi-CON Continue to Try to Tank the Economy

UPDATE II:  "The aversion to government spending, and government activity generally, which animates many Americans isn’t actually based on economics, or logic: it is an emotionally driven belief system, founded upon a cockeyed view of American history and buttressed by a variety of right-wing shibboleths.

In the real world that rarely intrudes upon conservative economists and voters, both parties (and all Presidents) are Keynesians. Whenever the economy falters and private-sector spending declines, they use the tax-and-spending system to inject more demand into the economy. In 1981, Ronald Reagan did precisely this, slashing taxes and increasing defense spending. Between 2001 and 2003, George W. Bush followed the same script, introducing three sets of tax cuts and starting two wars. In February, 2009, Barack Obama introduced his stimulus. The real policy debate isn’t about Keynesianism versus the free market, it is about magnitudes and techniques: How much stimulus is necessary? And how should it be divided between government spending and tax cuts?

On both questions, Obama took the middle ground. His $800 billion stimulus program was smaller than many Keynesians, such as Christine Romer and Paul Krugman, wanted. (Romer reportedly pushed first for a $1.8 trillion package, then for $1.2 trillion.) Concentrated over a three-year period, it amounted to 1.1 per cent of G.D.P. in 2009, 2.4 per cent of G.D.P. in 2010, and 1.2 per cent of G.D.P. in 2011. So far, some $750 billion in stimulus money has been paid out: about $300 billion went to tax breaks for individuals and firms; roughly $235 billion was dispersed in the form of government contracts, grants, and loans; and another $225 billion was spent on entitlements—unemployment benefits, Medicaid, food stamps, and so on.

And what impact did the stimulus have? Without rehashing the entire debate—we’ve got another five months for that—here are three things to keep in mind.

1. It gave a much-needed boost to spending and growth. . .

2. The rise in federal spending under Obama was pretty modest. . .

3. Paul Krugman is right. To some extent, we already have a Republican economy. With the flow of stimulus money having all but dried up, and with continuing budget cutbacks at the state and local levels, government spending on many goods and services—the government spending that directly impacts G.D.P.—is falling.

You don’t believe it? Take a look at Table 1 in the Commerce Department’s latest report on G.D.P., and focus upon the section labelled “Government consumption expenditures and gross investment.” In 2011, you will notice, these expenditures declined at an annual rate of 2.1 per cent. In the first three months of this year, the rate of decline accelerated—to 3.9 per cent. The cutbacks have extended to all the major areas of government. Federal non-defense spending fell at an annual rate of 0.8 per cent in the first quarter; federal defense spending declined at an annual rate of 8.3 per cent, a shocking figure; state and local spending fell at a rate of 2.5 per cent.

It is a central tenet of Keynesian economics that when the government sector cuts back its expenditures in an economy with slack resources, worried households, and cautious business enterprises, output and growth will stall. That, of course, is precisely what has happened. In a saner world, we would be talking about what should be done right now, rather than after November, to rectify the situation."

Read The New Yorker, Reagan, Bush, and Obama: We Are All Still Keynesians.  

Read also, The Myth of Expansionary Austerity.  

UPDATE:  "[T]he best argument against Republicans’ claims that they can fix the economy. The fact is that we have already seen the Republican economic future — and it doesn’t work."  Read The New York Times, This Republican Economy.  

Republi-cons well know that any good news for the economy is bad news for their election hopes.

Their attacks on the Federal Reserve are "an effort to bully the Fed into doing exactly the wrong thing. The attackers want the Fed to slam on the brakes when it should be stepping on the gas; they want the Fed to choke off recovery when it should be doing much more to accelerate recovery. Fundamentally, the right wants the Fed to obsess over inflation, when the truth is that we’d be better off if the Fed paid less attention to inflation and more attention to unemployment. Indeed, a bit more inflation would be a good thing, not a bad thing."

Read The New York Times, Not Enough Inflation.

Since Obama was elected, Republi-cons have shown their willingness to sacrifice workers to appease their imaginary inflation god.

But there is not need to fear 'the invisible Republi-CON bond vigilantes'.

Obama the Socialist Failure: Lower Unemployment, Deficits, Gas Prices and Inflation (What More Could He Do To Destroy America)

UPDATE XI:  Another graphic representation of Obama's failure to fulfill Republi-con delusions "about inflation, the dollar, and, well, the whole economy the past few years. . .

It was a weird thing to be worrying about. Inflation was just 1.7 percent when Ryan brought up dollar debasement (in early 2011). It's 1.2 percent now. And, as you can see below, rather than being debased, debauched or otherwise devalued, the dollar is actually up 13 percent against a broad index of currencies over this time. Even if you judge the dollar against a basket of commodities, which you shouldn't, since those prices are set in world markets beyond the Fed's control, there hasn't been anything resembling 'debasement': Brent oil has fallen from $100 to $53 and gold from $1,362 to $1,211."

Read the Washington Post, The inflation chicken littles were so wrong: The dollar is on a tear, which included the following graph:

UPDATE X:  "On March 6, 2009, former George W. Bush adviser Michael Boskin offered whatever the opposite of a prophecy is when he said that 'Obama's Radicalism Is Killing the Dow.' Now let's set the scene. Obama had been in office for less than two months at that point, and in that time, stocks had admittedly fallen a lot as markets worried that the big bank bailout known as TARP wouldn't actually be enough to save the banks. It got so bad that Citigroup briefly became a penny stock.

Boskin, though, didn't think that this once-in-three-generations financial crisis was to blame for the market meltdown. Instead, he blamed it on Obama for ... talking about raising taxes? 'It's hard not to see the continued sell-off on Wall Street and the growing fear on Main Street," Boskin philosophized, "as a product, at least in part, of the realization that our new president's policies are designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy.' What followed was the usual conservative jeremiad against higher taxes on the rich, lower taxes on the poor, and deficit spending. Obama's trying to turn us into Europe, and that's why markets are pricing in the possibility of a Great Depression—not the dying economy he inherited."

Read the Washington Post, Now that the Dow has hit 18,000, let us remember the worst op-ed in history, which included the following graph:

UPDATE IX:  After a weekend of price cutting at stations, gas for less than $2 can be found in 13 states across the country. Two weeks ago there was only one gas station in the country selling gas that cheap.

Read CNN, Gas for less than $2 is now widespread.   

UPDATE VIII:   What an unmitigated failure Obama has been trying to destroy the economy and country.

Gas prices continue to tumble. 

Read the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Gas prices could drop to $2 gallon in some parts of country by end of year.

And "[s]even years after the credit bubble burst, just two of the 12 countries that went through systemic financial meltdowns in 2007 and 2008 have reclaimed enough ground to reach their previous peaks in per-capita GDP: the United States and Germany. And Germany isn’t looking so hot these days, given that it’s teetering on the edge of deflation.

Many of the other countries that also went through “systemic crises” — as categorized by the work of Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff — still have years to go before fully recovering. The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Ukraine will likely wait until 2018 before reaching their pre-crisis peaks in per capita GDP, according to the International Monetary Fund. Even countries that didn’t technically experience a systemic crisis when we did (such as China and Japan) appear to be in serious trouble. As the Economist recently put it, the United States is looking increasingly like a 'lonely locomotive.'"

Read the Washington Post, How the U.S. economy got its mojo back. 

UPDATE VII:   After predictions of $5-10/gallon for gas, prices are below $3/gallon.

"The gas price tracking app GasBuddy reports that 46% of gas stations around the country are now charging less than $3 per gallon, compared with just 3% one year ago."

Read Time, Last Time Gas Prices Were This Cheap, It Was January 2011.

Another Obama failure! ;-)

UPDATE VI:  Still a socialist/communist failure, Obama can't even destroy the economy.

Read the Washington Post,  Rebounding economy fills state coffers with record tax revenues and The New York Times, Tax Revenue Rockets Up, Helping Lessen the Deficit, Treasury Department Says.

UPDATE V:  Republi-con "predictions about the impact of these policies since they first began in late 2008 have been wrong so far.

Inflation has not spiked, and the value of the dollar has not collapsed. At this point, in fact, there are more worries about deflation than inflation.

But thanks to the tea party influence in the GOP — in particular the Fed-bashing Rand and Ron Paul wing of the party — ripping the Fed and the bigger role it is playing in the economy has become more a litmus test for party loyalty, regardless of whether the dire predictions have come true."

Politico, GOP warnings have not met Fed policy reality.

With respect to David Farragut would say of Republi-cons, damn the facts, full bull ahead!

UPDATE IV:  So much for those invisible [Republi-CON] bond vigilantes'.

"The consumer-price index dropped 0.1 percent, reflecting cheaper energy, clothing and new cars, after a 0.2 percent gain the prior month, a Labor Department report showed today in Washington."

Read Bloomberg, Consumer Prices in U.S. Decline for First Time in Six Months.

Now Obama has fail to create the Republi-con's imaginary hyperinflation.  

UPDATE III:  After predictions of $5-10/gallon for gas, prices are near $3/gallon.

Read The Wall Street Journal, Halloween Treat: U.S. Gasoline May Fall Below $3 a Gallon. 

Another Obama failure! ;-) 

UPDATE II:   Another Obama's failure, and lost opportunity to destroy capitalism:  Read USA Today, S&P says shrinking U.S. deficit boosts debt outlook. 

UPDATE:  More evidence of Obama's failure:  "The S&P 500 has risen more than 25 percent over the last year. It’s risen more than 100 percent since President Obama was inaugurated. 

[Even] wages might pick up soon. After all, most everything else is. Housing prices are rising faster than at any time since 2007. Autos are doing great. Consumer confidence just hit a five-year high. These aren’t just the kinds of numbers that foretell recovery. They’re the kinds of numbers that lead to recovery. A rising stock market doesn’t necessarily mean more jobs anytime soon. Rising housing prices and car sales almost certainly do."

When will they impeach this 'Republi-con failure'? [Note: Obama has completely failed to fulfill Republi-con dreams and fantasies.]

Did you know that "the Dow Jones Industrial Average has soared an astonishing 62% (sixty-two percent!) since the Kenyan Socialist Barack Obama seized the White House in a violent Saul Alinsky coup."


The last president was a much better at destroying capitalism, when he "left office the Dow was 25% lower than it was when he took office eight years earlier", and the economy was losing nearly 800,000/month.

Read Wonkette, Dow Soars 62% Since Obama Took Office; Do Stocks Have Liberal Bias?

For more on Obama's socialist failures, read The Republi-CON 'Obama's a Socialist' Myth.

Our Politically Induced Economic Stagnation, Part of the Republi-CON War on the Middle Class

UPDATE III: The Fed responds to the Repubi-cons:

"We are particularly amused by your reference to Fed actions that 'have likely led to more fluctuations and uncertainty in our already weak economy.' We here at the Fed watched in awe this past summer as you and your congressional allies demonstrated your vast power to create 'fluctuations and uncertainty,' by threatening to default on trillions of dollars' worth of U.S. debt. That triggered the first-ever downgrade of the nation's credit rating. The stock markets tanked. Consumer and business confidence plunged. You guys rock! Fluctuations and uncertainty indeed! So we humbly express our thanks for your insights on how to wreck the economy."

Read U.S. News, What Bernanke Might Say to His GOP Critics.


UPDATE II: "Congressmen have the right to speak out on monetary policy. As long as their advice is not politically motivated. Ask yourself the following question: Would these men be pressuring the Fed to adopt a tighter monetary policy if:

1. Unemployment were over 9%.

2. Inflation had averaged 1% over the past three years.

3. George Bush were president.

Were these men criticizing monetary policy under Bush, when inflation was higher than today? I don’t recall that happening."

Read TheMoneyIllusion, The definition of treason.


UPDATE: Yesterday, a letter was sent to Bernanke, signed by Sen. Mitch McConnell, Rep. John Boehner, Sen. Jon Kyl, and Rep. Eric Cantor, "making clear that the Republican leadership in Congress is strongly opposed to any further attempts to help the economy." Read the Washington Post, Nice central bank you got here. Shame if something should happen to it.

As I said before, Republi-cons want Obama to fail, the American economy is just acceptable collateral damage to achieve that goal.

Why isn't Ben Bernanke 2011 taking the advice of Ben Bernanke 2000?

"Back then, Mr. Bernanke suggested that the Bank of Japan could get Japan’s economy moving with a variety of unconventional policies. These could include: purchases of long-term government debt (to push interest rates, and hence private borrowing costs, down); an announcement that short-term interest rates would stay near zero for an extended period, to further reduce long-term rates; an announcement that the bank was seeking moderate inflation, 'setting a target in the 3-4% range for inflation, to be maintained for a number of years,' which would encourage borrowing and discourage people from hoarding cash; and 'an attempt to achieve substantial depreciation of the yen,' that is, to reduce the yen’s value in terms of other currencies. "

As I said before, Republi-cons want Obama to fail, the American economy is just acceptable collateral damage to achieve that goal.

All part of the Republi-CON war on the middle class!

Those Clueless Republi-CONs

UPDATE:  As noted before, Obama has fail to create the Republi-con's imaginary hyperinflation.

Is it because "[i]nflation is just a scare story [Republi-cons and] people old enough to remember the 1970s tell."

Read the Washington Post, Inflation is dead: It’s below 1 percent in the U.S., U.K., Europe, China, and Japan.

Rand Paul and the Republi-cons "have, for years, brayed about high inflation that didn't exist and currency depreciation that wasn't happening, even taking the unprecedented step of publicly warning the Fed off its stimulus efforts, all while the real problems were too-low inflation, and, more recently, a stronger dollar that's put a crimp on the recovery. But despite this, Paul wants these people who have been, to put it charitably, wrong about everything to have more of a say against the ones who haven't. And it's all in the name of 'transparency' that the Fed is already providing plenty of, which Paul would know if he actually read something about it anywhere other than the usual Austrian suspects. The worst part, though, is that we know what an economy with the kind of tight money that Republicans prefer looks like right now. It's called 'Europe,' and it has twice as much unemployment as we do. But hey, empirical evidence doesn't matter, right? Let them eat first principles!

That's the kind of crazy that would make charlatans and cranks both say Rand Paul is giving them a bad name."

Read the Washington Post, Clueless in Kentucky: Rand Paul’s ideas about the Fed make absolutely no sense.  

The Republi-CON 'Gold Will Save Us' Myth

"In 1981, President Ronald Reagan created the Gold Commission. The purpose of the commission was to appease conservatives who wanted to see the country return to the gold standard. The conclusion of the Commission? That’s a clown idea, bro.

'Restoring a gold standard does not appear to be a fruitful method for dealing with the continuing problem of inflation,' the Commission reported. They even rejected the halfway measure of issuing a limited number of bonds backed by gold as a way of 'introducing gold into our monetary system.'

So, to recap, in 1981, amidst a serious inflation problem, Reagan created a commission to study a gold standard. You couldn’t have picked a more sympathetic president, or a more sympathetic moment, to the gold standard. And they still rejected it.

Now fast forward 30 years. There’s no inflation problem. The head of the Federal Reserve was originally appointed by George W. Bush and is credited by most observers as having headed off a potential Great Depression through creative monetary policy. And so what does the Republican Party want to do? Well, according to a draft of the party’s platform, they want another Gold Commission."

Read the Washington Post, The GOP has picked the wrong time to rediscover gold. 

Watch What You Wish For, You Might Lose Your Job, The Sequester Edition

UPDATE IV:  The March jobs reports shouldn't surprise anyone, it's Republi-con déjà vu, 1930s edition, all over again.  Read The New York Times, The Urge to Purge, which begins:

When the Great Depression struck, many influential people argued that the government shouldn’t even try to limit the damage. According to Herbert Hoover, Andrew Mellon, his Treasury secretary, urged him to 'Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers. ... It will purge the rottenness out of the system.' Don’t try to hasten recovery, warned the famous economist Joseph Schumpeter, because “artificial stimulus leaves part of the work of depressions undone.”

Like many economists, I used to quote these past luminaries with a certain smugness. After all, modern macroeconomics had shown how wrong they were, and we wouldn’t repeat the mistakes of the 1930s, would we?

How naïve we were. It turns out that the urge to purge — the urge to see depression as a necessary and somehow even desirable punishment for past sins, while inveighing against any attempt to mitigate suffering — is as strong as ever. Indeed, Mellonism is everywhere these days. Turn on CNBC or read an op-ed page, and the odds are that you won’t see someone arguing that the federal government and the Federal Reserve are doing too little to fight mass unemployment. Instead, you’re much more likely to encounter an alleged expert ranting about the evils of budget deficits and money creation, and denouncing Keynesian economics as the root of all evil.

Now, the fact is that these ranters have been wrong about everything, at every stage of the crisis, while the Keynesians have been mostly right. Remember how federal deficits were supposed to cause soaring interest rates? Never mind: After four years of such warnings, rates remain near historic lows — just as Keynesians predicted. Remember how running the printing presses was going to cause runaway inflation? Since the recession began, the Fed has more than tripled the size of its balance sheet, but inflation has averaged less than 2 percent.

But the Mellonites just keep coming . . . [demanding] liquidationism, with a strong goldbug streak. . .

But that prescription is, of course, anathema to Mellonites, who wrongly see it as more of the same policies that got us into this trap. And that, in turn, tells you why liquidationism is such a destructive doctrine: by turning our problems into a morality play of sin and retribution, it helps condemn us to a deeper and longer slump.

The bad news is that sin sells. Although the Mellonites have, as I said, been wrong about everything, the notion of macroeconomics as morality play has a visceral appeal that’s hard to fight. Disguise it with a bit of political cross-dressing, and even liberals can fall for it.

But they shouldn’t. Mellon was dead wrong in the 1930s, and his avatars are dead wrong today. Unemployment, not excessive money printing, is what ails us now — and policy should be doing more, not less. "

If ya forgot, Hoover was a Republican.  

UPDATE III:  The March jobs report was "is a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad jobs report." Read the Washington Post, Today’s jobs report is a disaster. But why?

As first predicted two months ago, 'sequester will sock a vulnerable economy.'

Too late for the election, but all part of the Republi-con effort to tank the economy. 

UPDATE II:  "Partisan gridlock is the law of the land for the foreseeable future. . .

In short, if you think this is as bad as things can get, just wait awhile."

Read the Washington Post, After the sequestration stalemate, things will only get worse.

UPDATE: "It may be hard to believe, given the intense partisan strafing already ignited by the automatic government spending cuts that begin on Friday, but this year’s budget wars have yet to get fully under way.

In the next month, Democrats and Republicans, so at odds with one another that they are not even negotiating to avert the across-the-board cuts set to kick in at the end of the week, will have to find a way to agree on spending levels for the remainder of this year. If they fail, they could risk a government shutdown starting March 27, when the current authorization for spending runs out."

Read The New York Times, Fight Over Spending Cuts a Prelude to Budget Battles Ahead.

As I said at first back in October 2010, there is an old proverb, author unknown: "Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it."

"The federal government, the nation’s largest consumer and investor, is cutting back at a pace exceeded in the last half-century only by the military demobilizations after the Vietnam War and the cold war.

And the turn toward austerity is set to accelerate on Friday if the mandatory federal spending cuts known as sequestration start to take effect as scheduled. Those cuts would join an earlier round of deficit reduction measures passed in 2011 and the wind-down of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that already have reduced the federal government’s contribution to the nation’s gross domestic product by almost 7 percent in the last two years."

Read The New York Times, Austerity Kills Government Jobs as Cuts to Budgets Loom.

Also read the Washington Post, Sequester will sock a vulnerable economy.

The Answer Is: Zero, No One, LOL

UPDATE IV:  AIG "was made a political scapegoat by Fed and Treasury officials and a backdoor vehicle for bailing out the world’s biggest banks, whose bailout came with much sweeter terms."

Read the Washington Post, Court tells government it was wrong to seize AIG, but awards no money to billionaire ex-CEO.

You may remember, the bank's were paid 100 cents on the dollar for worthless CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), resulting in a $14 billion payment to the Treasury Secretary's former company. 

The worthless CDOs were then dumped in a special fund named Maiden Lane III, an inside joke on the American people.  ("The name Maiden Lane was taken from a street which runs beside New York Federal Reserve in Manhattan.")  (The NY Federal reserve keeps a backdoor that opens on the street, "through which it can sneak people" into and out of the fed building.) 

UPDATE III:  "Instead of embracing the orthodoxy of bank bailouts, austerity, and low inflation, Iceland did just the opposite. And even though its economy was hammered by the banking crisis perhaps harder than any other in the world, its labor didn't deteriorate all that much, and it had a great recovery. . .

[C]ompare it with the United States:



How did Iceland pull it off?

Let the banks go bust . . .

Executives of the country's most important bank were prosecuted as criminals. . .

Reject austerity . . .

Devalue and accept inflation . . .

Impose temporary capital controls . . ."

Read Vox, Iceland put bankers in jail rather than bailing them out — and it worked.

While in the U.S., we bailed out the Banksters, and now they are suing us.

"Americans were angry when Wall Street’s greedy and risky behavior triggered a global financial crisis in 2008. They were angrier still when the government had to borrow and spend hundreds of billions of dollars to rescue mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the largest banks and the insurance company AIG. They were outraged when they found out that executives at those enterprises were continuing to receive big salaries and bonuses.

So just imagine how outrageous it would be if some Wall Street sharpies went to court to argue that they didn’t benefit enough from the bailouts and that taxpayers should pay them tens of billions of dollars more.

In fact, they did. And, according to legal observers, they just might prevail."

Read the Washington Post, We bailed you out, and now you want what!?!

UPDATE II:  In 2006, securities lawyer warned JPMorgan Chase of "'massive criminal securities fraud' in the bank's mortgage operations. . .

[Since then, the bank and the U.S. government have tried to silence her.  She has been prevented from talking] "by asleep-on-the-job regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission, by a court system that allowed Chase to use its billions to bury her evidence, and, finally, by officials like outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, the chief architect of the crazily elaborate government policy of surrender, secrecy and cover-up."

Read Rolling Stone, The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase's Worst Nightmare.

UPDATE:  "Have you heard the latest about how bad the richest of the rich have it these days? It is reason to fear the wrath of the .01 percent!"

Read The New York Times, Plutocrats Feeling Persecuted, which discusses "the rise of a small but powerful group of what can only be called sociopaths."  

The question:  How many Banksters were prosecuted?

Read the Washington Post, This is a complete list of Wall Street CEOs prosecuted for their role in the financial crisis. 

Trump's Big CON: He is a Jackass, The Farmers Edition

"Rick Hammond said he wasn’t worried. In more than 30 years of working his wife’s fifth-generation farm in York County, Neb., and steadily acquiring more acres to leave to their kids, he had seen it all: the high inflation and rapid land devaluation of 1980s, the consolidation of farms that followed those bankruptcies, the steady depopulation of rural populations ever since. But he wasn’t worried about a repeat of history. Despite falling grain prices, stalled land values and mounting farm debt, his family was more than equipped to weather a bad year. 'Now, if we see sub-four-dollar corn for two more years,' Hammond continued, 'yeah, you’ll see some people going broke.'

That was the fall of 2014. Today, corn prices remain perilously low. At just $3.50 per bushel, it now costs more to grow corn than a farmer can sell it for. Soybeans, which surged in planted acres when corn prices went into free fall, are only marginally better. Now below $10 per bushel, beans are trading at less than two-thirds of their price of just a few years ago. To get through these lean times, farmers have been taking out more and more loans. U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics indicate that while farm income has been cut nearly in half in the past four years, farm debt has increased by more than a quarter — with projections that it could surpass $390 billion in 2017, the highest level since the farm crisis in the 1980s.

And yet, President Trump — whom many farmers voted for specifically because of plunging income — may be about to make things far worse.

With those unsustainable debts and dwindling profit margins in mind, more than 75 percent of rural voters in the Farm Belt cast their ballots for Trump in the last presidential election. They cheered Trump’s promise to support the Renewable Fuel Standard (which props up the ethanol industry), his pledge to eliminate estate taxes on inherited farmland and roll back regulations on farm runoff, and, most of all, they liked his tough talk on trade policy. Roughly one-third of their combined corn and soybean harvest is shipped overseas, so farmers said they were heartened by Trump’s reputation as a hard-nosed negotiator, a businessman renowned for his skill at the art of the deal, who could strong-arm trading partners into paying higher prices for American commodity grains. Instead, Trump is threatening to withdraw entirely from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) — a move that farm lobbying organizations, market analysts and trade experts universally agree would be disastrous for farmers."

Read the Washington Post, Farmers voted heavily for Trump. But his trade policies are terrible for them.

It's the RepubliCONs and Wall Street vs. Main Street

UPDATE II:  "Huzzah! Hang the celebratory banners! Unleash the confetti! Happy days are here again. The Dow Jones industrial average closed yesterday [March 5, 2013] at 14,253.77! . .

But since the initial Obama stimulus has tapered off, and the banks strengthened, the throw-it-all-at-the-wall strategy has given way to a world where Congress sits on its hands and avoids anything that gives off a whiff of being 'stimulus' (even Democrats avoid the term). And the Fed has been the only game in town, trying to spur growth through a series of unconventional steps."

Read the Washington Post, The stock market is back, but the economy isn’t. Blame Congress. 

UPDATE:  It's been "a golden age for corporate profits, especially among multinational giants that are also benefiting from faster growth in emerging economies like China and India. . .

Corporate earnings have risen at an annualized rate of 20.1 percent since the end of 2008, he said, but disposable income inched ahead by 1.4 percent annually over the same period, after adjusting for inflation."

Read The New York Times, Recovery in U.S. Is Lifting Profits, but Not Adding Jobs.

"Here are two things that are true about the economy today.

(1) The Dow Jones industrial average is poised to set a new record as corporate profits stretch to all-time highs.

(2) There are still fewer working Americans today than there were before the start of the Great Recession.

The fact that these two things can be true at the same time might outrage you. But it shouldn't surprise you. In the last 30 years, there has been a great divergence between growth and workers' incomes, as the New York Times reminds us today. Corporate profits have soared, in the last decade especially, particularly because of three things: Globalization has pushed down the cost of labor available to multinational corporations; technology has allowed companies to make more with fewer workers, in general; and Big Finance has gobbled up the economy, as the banks' share of total corporate profits has tripled to about one-third since the middle of the last century."

Read The Atlantic, Corporate Profits Are Eating the Economy, which includes these graphs:

(Remember that bailout, Wall Street say thanks suckers!)

Now do you understand the unholy alliance of the Republi-cons and their corporate overlords
in their war on the middle class?

The Republi-CON Reagan Myth (and What Obama Can Learn From It)

UPDATE III: Reagan once said: "Someday it might be worthwhile to find out how images are created — and even more worthwhile to learn how false images come into being."

And just in time for President's Day Weekend, a new film examines the myth of Reagan, who according to The New York Times, Reagan and Reality:

"[Presented} himself — and has since been presented by his admirers — as someone committed to the best interests of ordinary, hard-working Americans. Yet his economic policies, Reaganomics, dealt a body blow to that very constituency.

Mark Hertsgaard, the author of 'On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency,' says in the film, 'You cannot be fair in your historical evaluation of Ronald Reagan if you don’t look at the terrible damage his economic policies did to this country.' . .

What we get with Reagan are a series of disconnects and contradictions that have led us to a situation in which a president widely hailed as a hero of the working class set in motion policies that have been mind-bogglingly beneficial to the wealthy and devastating to working people and the poor. . .

[T]he economic revolution that gained steam during the Reagan years and is still squeezing the life out of the middle class and the poor that is Reagan’s most significant legacy. A phony version of that legacy is relentlessly promoted by right-wingers who shamelessly pursue the interests of the very rich while invoking the Reagan brand to give the impression that they are in fact the champions of ordinary people."

Shall we have a WEBY meet-up to watch the film?


UPDATE II: "Some Republicans, I suppose, might be so enraptured by the Reagan legend that they are unaware of his actual record. I hate to break it to Sarah Palin, but Reagan raised taxes. Often. Sometimes by a lot.

When he took office as governor of California in 1967, the state faced a huge budget deficit. Reagan promptly raised taxes by $1 billion - at a time when the entire state budget amounted to just $6 billion. It was then the biggest state tax increase in history. During Reagan's eight years in Sacramento, the top state income tax rate increased from 7 percent to 11 percent. Business and sales taxes also soared. . .

[As president, Reagan] raised taxes 11 times, beginning with the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982. . .

Reagan had promised to eliminate the departments of Energy and Education, but he didn't. Instead, he signed legislation that added to the Cabinet a new Department of Veterans Affairs. . .

[Now,] the Republican Party has lost its mind. The GOP argues for deep across-the-board budget cuts of a kind that Reagan ultimately rejected. Party leaders denounce the belief that government can do any good for anybody as "socialism." "

Read the Washington Post, The GOP's selective memory on Ronald Reagan.


UPDATE: Did you know that "[f]ederal spending grew by an average of 2.5 percent a year, adjusted for inflation, while Reagan was president. The national debt exploded, increasing from about $700 billion to nearly $3 trillion." This despite the fact that "Reagan raised taxes six of the eight years he was in office."

And I bet you didn't know that "Reagan was in favor of amnesty for illegal immigrants, [and] he signed a bill to give amnesty to 2.6 million illegal immigrants in the United States."

To better understand Republi-con mythology, read the Washington Post, Five myths about Ronald Reagan's legacyand HBO documentary explores Reagan's myths, mysteries, which shows that "Reagan-the-man refuses to conform to Reagan-the-myth, a figure [the documentary shows that ] has been created by political opportunists to brand policies and agendas Reagan himself would likely oppose."

"The present-day radicals donning Reagan drag, led by Sarah Palin, seem not to know, as Cannon writes, that their hero lurched “from excessive tax cuts to corrective tax increases disguised as tax reform” and “submitted eight unbalanced budgets to Congress in succession.” Reagan made no promise whatsoever of a balanced budget in the document that codified Reaganomics, his White House’s 281-page message to Congress in February 1981. The historian Gil Troy has calculated that spending on entitlement programs more than doubled on Reagan’s watch. America slid into debtor-nation status, and Americans “went from owing 16 cents for every dollar in national income in 1981” to owing 44 cents per dollar in 1988. . .

What Reagan did know was how to deliver a message, even if that message belied his policies or actions or the facts."

Read The New York Times, Let Obama’s Reagan Revolution Begin.

A Slump Worse Than the Depression?

Former Goldman Sachs chairman John Whitehead foresees a slump deeper than the Great Depression and a growing deficit threatens the credit of the United States itself. Read Reuters, Whitehead sees slump worse than Depression. His solution, higher taxes to pay for the "trillion dollar problems" facing the United States, including social security, expanding health insurance, rebuilding infrastructure and increased spending on green energy.

Otherwise the nation's credit rating could be downgraded, which could lead to inflation, or even hyperinflation. (Think Zimbabwe.)

No one wants to admit "the painful truth that their country is hurtling toward a debt-induced economic disaster."

Who Cares About the Economy, the 'Single Most Important thing is for President Obama to be a One-Term President'

For years now the Republi-cons have been sacrificing workers to appease their imaginary inflation god.  They want to crucify the middle class 'upon a cross of gold'. It's all part of the Republi-cons war on the middle class. 

So, of course, the Republi-cons have been trying to tank the economy, because good news for the economy is bad news for their election hopes.

Now others have started to notice that the Republi-cons have "blocked pro-growth policy and backed job-killing austerity – all while blaming Obama."  Read The Guardian, Did Republicans deliberately crash the US economy?

Fear, Anger, and Hatred: It's the Republi-CON Condition

UPDATE:  "Political conservatism and serious policy analysis can coexist, and there was a time when they did. Back in the 1980s, after all, health experts at Heritage made a good-faith effort to devise a plan for universal health coverage — and what they came up with was the system now known as Obamacare.

But that was then. Modern conservatism has become a sort of cult, very much given to conspiracy theorizing when confronted with inconvenient facts. Liberal policies were supposed to cause hyperinflation, so low measured inflation must reflect statistical fraud; the threat of climate change implies the need for public action, so global warming must be a gigantic scientific hoax. Oh, and Mitt Romney would have won if only he had been a real conservative."

Read The New York Times, The Wonk Gap.  

"Hate on, haters. It was what you were meant to do."

Read the Washington Post, Researchers take on crucial question: Are haters gonna hate?

Class Today at NoBullU on WEBY

Listen to the voice of wisdom and reason in a wilderness of partisan rhetoric -- No political insanity, no conservative hypocrisy, no liberal foolishness -- Just straight talk, straight at you, and that’s no bull!!

NoBullU will broadcast today from 4:05 to 6:00 p.m. at 1330 AM WEBY and on line, courtesy of Cyber Smart Computers.

Topics:

Local and regional: any comments on the local elections?, will Crist win?, and where are the hurricanes;

Nation and international: Republi-CONs are the new binLadi-cans, just part of the Republi-CON election-time religious fear-mongering -- Republi-CON bicycle fear-mongering, Republi-CON baby fear-mongering, and Republi-CON McCarthy-like fear-mongering; yet another example of how fear, anger, hatred = violence; all part of the Republi-CON created reality; is it all for the common good, or everyman for himself?, are Republi-CONs sacrificing workers to appease their imaginary inflation God?

Oil Spill Fallout to Date: finally, the well is capped, now what to do about 205.8 million gallons of oil in 643 quadrillion gallons of water (a quadrillion is one thousand million million or 10¹⁵, imagine 0.8934545... drops of oil in a 22,000 gallon pool, assuming 90,840 drops/gallon and the oil evenly dispersed), maybe we should just leave it to Alcanivorax, who was suggesting that the government push aside BP and take over?, what did more harm, the oil spill or media hype and political grandstanding?; fraud, waste and abuse, in Fl the 3 counties farthest from the spill received over 1/2 of the money, one of them, Franklin, received over 1/3 of the $40 million; well meaning stupidity is still stupidity, lost compensation, should you get extra money after lying to the IRS?, did ya hear bout Big Oil's Big Daddy, Dick 'Chickenhawk' Cheney's secret energy task force, discounts for deepwater drilling, tell me -- the oil deposit now leaking would have provided how many days' worth of oil to Americans?, Obama's energy pipe dreams, is it time for N2N, was it God's wrath for destroying his planet?, shocking realization that bottom-line influences corporate policy, political grandstanding, and Republi-CON 'less government' hypocrisy;

and

Trivia and Humor: Happy 60th Birthday Bikini!

But I'll discuss anything. Disclaimer: the host reserves the right to end any discussion and hang up on you.)

So tune-in, call-in, but only if you can handle some ass kickin' discussion of politics and current events.

And remember: I'm still God's favorite Gulf Coast talk show host, just ask the capped well!

To Balance the Budget, Do Nothing

UPDATE II: "[T]here’s an uncomplicated way to fix America’s medium-term debt woes. All Congress has to do is … nothing. At the end of 2012, the Bush tax cuts would automatically lapse. As inflation rose, the alternative minimum tax would hit more and more Americans. A whole slew of business tax breaks would expire. And the Sustainable Growth Rate formula in Medicare would trigger large automatic cuts to payments to doctors." Read the Washington Post, Doing nothing is still an option, which includes this graph:




UPDATE: Another way to balance the budget, end tax expenditures, better known as tax deductions. Tax expenditures amounted to about $1 trillion in 2009. Read Random Observations for Students of Economics, Spending Hidden in the Tax Code.

One difference, "non-defense discretionary spending tends to be skewed quite progressively while tax expenditures are often quite regressive." In other words, the tax deductions like that for corporate jets disproportionally benefit the rich.

As I've said before, the NoBullU solution for the federal deficit and debt is: restructure the federal government (to end Congressional free lunchism), reform the federal tax code (so that revenues pay for ALL government spending), and amend the Constitution to require a balanced federal budget (because Congress can't control its spending).

"The single most important fact about our projected deficits is that if Congress does nothing, they go away. You might not like how they go away — it’s mostly higher taxes and sharp cuts to Medicare — but they go away." Read the Washington Post, We have a Congress problem, not a deficit problem, in one graph:

Republi-Con Treason

Why would a Republi-con Congressman tell Chinese officials "the budget numbers that the U.S. Government has put forward should not be believed."



Don't forget that the executive director of the Beijing Private Equity Association and a director of the China National Association of International Studies, has already demanded "inflation-protection measures for China’s existing investments in America, and [requested] additional security or collateral for its continued investments. America should also provide its largest creditor with greater transparency and information."

Because he wants to bankrupt the country for the benefit of his political party.

So who is the real un-American?

How Radical Can They Be?

UPDATE VII:  Republi-con "elders, many of whom have been in denial about their party’s radicalization, seem especially startled. But all of this was predictable.

It has been obvious for years that the modern Republican Party is no longer capable of thinking seriously about policy. Whether the issue is climate change or inflation, party members believe what they want to believe, and any contrary evidence is dismissed as a hoax, the product of vast liberal conspiracies. . .

Unfortunately for all of us, even the shock of electoral defeat wasn’t enough to burst the G.O.P. bubble; it’s still a party dominated by wishful thinking, and all but impervious to inconvenient facts. And now that party’s leaders have bungled themselves into a corner."

Read The New York Times, The Boehner Bunglers. 

UPDATE VI:   How did the Republi-cons become so radical?

"It was Mr. Gingrich who pioneered the political dysfunction we still live with. His inflammatory rhetoric provided a model for the grandstanding guerrilla warfare of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. And his actions — particularly his move to shut down the government in 1995 and 1996 — undermined popular trust and ushered in the present political era of confrontation and obstruction.

But here’s the catch: Mr. Gingrich, of Georgia, rose to party leadership because he was the preferred candidate of the moderates themselves. They even sided with him against Robert H. Michel of Illinois, the House minority leader from 1981 until 1995, who, in his civility and willingness to cooperate with Democrats, embodied the moderate’s political sensibility.

Mr. Michel once reminded his fellow House Republicans that “we also have an obligation to the American people” to be “responsible participants in the process.” Talk of obligation and responsibility to the greater public good would quickly become obsolete in the Gingrich era of hyperbolic partisanship.

The problem for Republicans was that playing a “responsible” role appeared to consign them to permanent minority status. For a 40-year span beginning in 1955, Republicans were in a minority in the House and were in the majority for only six years in the Senate. By the early 1990s, even moderate House Republicans felt that the ruling Democrats had grown arrogant and corrupt.

As moderates came to believe that nothing was to be gained from cooperating with Democrats, they became more receptive to Mr. Gingrich’s argument that the way to dislodge the entrenched majority was to polarize the electorate while attacking Congress as an irredeemable and illegitimate institution. . .

The Republican Party won’t change course until the Gingrich strategy for winning House elections stops working."

Read The New York Times, The Moderates Who Lighted the Fuse. 

UPDATE V:  Republi-cons are "barking-mad pack of ideologues," with an approach that "places great value on zeal and combativeness and isn’t very concerned with success" and an idée fixe "that some sort of cataclysmic confrontation is inevitable."

"This is the reality that finally brought Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein, two of DC’s most arbiters of political standards and practices, fastidiously sober, even-handed and high-minded, to finally just throw up their hands mid-last-year and say 'Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.'"

The party is "committed to a reckless, pointless budget brinkmanship, which creates a perpetual cycle of outrage and disillusionment among conservatives and leaves Washington lurching from one manufactured crisis to the next."

"[D]ivided government now looks like dysfunctional government.  And despite the political security created by the rigged system of redistricting, Republicans may suddenly find the congressional midterms a referendum on their ability to get things done.  The scorecard is ugly on that front, providing yet another reason for Democrats to accept a government shutdown, however painful.

There is the sense that maybe the stark stupidity of this conflict will break the hyper-partisan fever consuming our nation’s capital.  Republicans are realizing that the angry conservative populist forces they empowered to achieve power have turned on them and are now actively restricting their ability to be taken seriously as a governing force."

Read The American Conservative, Republicans, Over the Cliff.

The article quotes other conservatives, and concludes that the "Republicans cannot govern. These people aren’t conservatives. They are radicals."

UPDATE IV:  "What is at stake in this government shutdown forced by a radical Tea Party minority is nothing less than the principle upon which our democracy is based: majority rule."

Read The New York Times, Our Democracy Is at Stake,.

The article notes that the "contempt for the democratic process" by a "superempower[ed] small political movements to act in extreme ways without consequences and thereby stymie majority rule" is the result, of among other things, "the rise of a separate G.O.P. (and a liberal) media universe — from talk-radio hosts, to Web sites to Fox News — [which] has created another gravity-free zone, where there is no punishment for extreme behavior, but there’s 1,000 lashes on Twitter if you deviate from the hard-line and great coverage to those who are most extreme. When politicians only operate inside these bubbles, they lose the habit of persuasion and opt only for coercion. After all, they must be right. Rush Limbaugh told them so." 

UPDATE III:  What are the Republi-cons risking by shutting-down the government to attack Obamacare?

"Right now, then, a kind of sour spot seems like a pretty plausible outcome for Republicans: A shutdown that lasts just long enough to convince swing voters that the G.O.P. can’t be trusted with the reins of government, but also ends with the party’s grassroots convinced that they’ve been sold out by their leaders once again."

Read The New York Times, Is Republican Intransigence Reasonable?   

UPDATE II:  "It is almost impossible to find an establishment Republican in town who’s not downright morose about the 2013 that has been and is about to be. . .

The blown opportunities and self-inflected wounds are adding up."

Read Politico, Eve of Destruction, which notes that the problem is that "pressure from conservative media only encourages their public voices to say things that offend."

UPDATE:  Republi-cons may soon "suffer a third straight crushing defeat at the Presidential level. Based on history and common sense, that will probably be enough to give the reformers the upper hand. With today’s G.O.P., though, you never can be sure. . .

A party that loses once can put it down to bad luck or the political cycle. A party that loses twice can blame a bad candidate. (That’s you, Mitt!) A party that loses three times can hardly avoid some navel inspection. . .

For now, the G.O.P. and many of its tribunes on Capitol Hill appear content to ignore this elemental fact of political life. Maybe things will change during the next few months, but I wouldn’t wager on it. More and more, it’s looking like it will take Hillary Clinton, or another Democrat, succeeding Barack Obama in the White House to bring about real changes in the G.O.P.

To put it another way, the great G.O.P. freak show still has a ways to run. From the point of view of the cynical heckler in the cheap seats, that’s just dandy: extremism and nuttiness makes good copy, and it keeps the Republicans out of the White House. The problem is that, diverting as it is, the show is paralyzing the government and doing great damage to the country."

Read The New Yorker, Why the G.O.P. Needs to Lose For a Third Time.

"When Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) was picked as Mitt Romney’s running mate last August, conservatives rejoiced.

Ryan, after all, is known as a conservative’s conservative, having authored the GOP budget that contained trillions in spending cuts and major entitlement reform. By picking Ryan, the logic went, Romney was making a bold choice in the name of shoring up the GOP base.

But in today’s Republican Party, Ryan’s recent voting record is hardly one of the most conservative. And in fact, his votes over the past two years paint the picture of a middle-of-the-road conservative Republican rather than a rabble-rousing tea party crusader.

Whether that says more about the Republican Party or Paul Ryan is up for debate."

Read the Washington Post, In today’s GOP, Paul Ryan is middle-of-the-road. 

This is interesting because Ryan was (and I do mean was) a expected contender in 2016. Read the Washington Post, Rubio vs. Rand vs. Ryan, The race for conservative mantle in 2016. 

Even more interesting, "CPAC will have a hole in the line-up: Chris Christie, the outspoken governor of New Jersey, has not been invited to speak at CPAC, despite his massive popularity."  Read the Washington Post, Chris Christie’s CPAC snub.

Republi-cons just don't understand or accept that political extremism is a problem in the general election, even Romney, who was a relative liberal before the campaign, lost in 2012 to Obama and a bad economy.

The "Republi-CONs Are Better for the Economy" Myth

UPDATE:  "Since the Second World War, the economy has done better when Democrats are in the White House . . .

Read the Washington Post, Hillary Clinton was right: The economy has done better under Democrats.

The chart below shows that the economy under Carter did better than under any Republi-con president since WWII, even better than under Reagan.

Trump is right when he says that "the economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans. . .

Here's a chart showing the average rate of economic growth under each president since the Second World War, taken from a recent paper by Princeton University economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson. They note that when a Democrat was in the Oval Office, the average rate of growth was 4.4 percent. Under Republicans, the average rate was just 2.5 percent.

It's not just broad measures of economic growth, either, Blinder and Watson observe. Industrial production increased at an average rate of 5.6 percent under Democrats, compared to 1.8 percent under Republicans. The unemployment rate under Republicans averaged 6 percent, compared to just 5.6 percent under Democrats. The average return on the stock market has been 8.1 percent under Democrats, and 2.7 percent under Republicans.

Inflation is only measure by which the economy's performance under Democratic and Republican presidents is more or less equal. Prices have increased an average rate of 3 percent under Democrats, compared to 3.3 percent under Republicans — not a significant difference.

You might be thinking that even if the economy as a whole does worse under Republican presidents, the wealthy do better, since Republicans tend to favor low-tax policies on the wealthy. That's not true either, though.  As the political scientist Larry Bartels shows in this chart, things have been better for Americans under Democrats, now matter how much money you make.

"

Read the Washington Post, Rand Paul is attacking Donald Trump for making a 100% true statement about the economy.