I Guess He Wanted a More Challenging Job

I was a bit amused to see this in the news. Why exactly would you want to go from holding a job where your biggest concern is "where do I stash this ginormous pile of money?" to a company which is doing so poorly it is majority owned by the US government?

DETROIT — General Motors has hired an outsider to run its troubled finance operations, bringing in the chief financial officer of Microsoft.Chris Liddell will join GM next year, GM Chief Executive Ed Whitacre Jr. said in a statement today.

Liddell, 51, brings depth and experience to the job leading GM's global financial and accounting operations, the statement said.

I Think They Are Being a Bit Too Ambitious

I was amused by this Reuter's headline pointed out by Best of the Web.

Obama administration aims for high school financial literacy

Who knows, maybe they can find someone who can teach Tim Geithner how to use TurboTax?

Greatest Music Video Ever

Scary Economics Stat of the Day

While Paul Krugman may have suddenly developed a desire for gigantic deficits, they are terrifying me. George Melloan points out the true size of the money we are borrowing in the WSJ.

A number more relevant to what the government is actually demanding from the capital markets is the Treasury's financing requirement. At a recent Chartered Financial Analyst Institute conference, Treasury official Karthik Ramanathan proudly described the prodigious fund-raising task he and his colleagues pulled off in the fiscal year, what one might call a borrowing feat unparalleled in human history: "In the course of 291 auctions in 251 business days, Treasury issued nearly $7 trillion in gross Treasury marketable securities to raise approximately $1.7 trillion to finance the government."

Idiotic Democrat Quote of the Day

If I knew this new healthcare bill would guarantee immortality, I would have supported it months ago. From Harry Reid:

Today we vote whether to even discuss one of the greatest issues of our generation - indeed, one of the greatest issues this body has ever face: whether this nation will finally guarantee its people the right to live free from the fear of illness and death, which can be prevented by decent health care for all.

Sarah Palin Comment of the Day

I am hardly the world's biggest Sarah Palin fan, but I am constantly amused by how rabid she makes the left, the very same people who insist she is unimportant while discussing her nonstop. For example the AP dedicated 11 fact-checkers to her new book.

AP writers Matt Apuzzo, Sharon Theimer, Tom Raum, Rita Beamish, Beth Fouhy, H. Josef Hebert, Justin D. Pritchard, Garance Burke, Dan Joling and Lewis Shaine contributed to this report.

So I was wondering, did the AP dedicated 11 people to fact-check, for example, Joe Biden's book? Well, no, the answer occured to me. It is actually rather unlikely that 11 people have ever actually read Joe Biden's book.

First Must See Movie of 2010

Hey, how can you not like a movie whose trailer has the hero introducing himself, "I am a Chief Warrant Officer with the US Army ."? Now that I think of it, Matt Damon does look a lot like me...

UW Medal of Honor Memorial

I donated money to help this get built. I wish I could be there today, but have to work.

Earning a medal, of any sort, was the furthest thing from Bruce Crandall's mind on the morning of Nov. 14, 1965, as he repeatedly flew his Huey helicopter through a hail of enemy fire in Vietnam. Only this mattered: His comrades needed him.

Likewise, John "Bud" Hawk wasn't looking for glory on Aug. 20, 1944, when he stayed exposed in a French orchard, taking a shot in the thigh as he directed fire against German tanks. Fact is, Hawk didn't know if he'd live to see sunset.

On Wednesday, Veterans Day, the University of Washington will dedicate a new memorial to eight UW alumni who have received the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest honor for valor in battle.

Tear Down this Wall

In honor of the 20th anniversary of it happening.

Quote of the Day

I am still amazed by this idiotic Obama campaign against Fox. He won't take on the Taliban or Iran, but Rupert Murdoch is his number one target. Charles Krauthammer weighs in with his usual wisdom.

Defend Fox from whom? Fox’s flagship 6 o’clock evening news out of
Washington (hosted by Bret Baier, formerly by Brit Hume) is, to my mind, the best hour of news on television. (Definitive evidence: My mother watches it even on the odd night when I’m not on.) Defend Fox from the likes of Anita Dunn? She’s been attacked for extolling Mao’s political philosophy in a speech at a high-school graduation. But the critics miss the surpassing stupidity of her larger point: She was invoking Mao as support and authority for her impassioned plea for individuality and trusting one’s own choices. Mao as champion of
individuality? Mao, the greatest imposer of mass uniformity in modern history, creator of a slave society of a near-billion worker bees wearing Mao suits and waving the Little Red Book?

The White House communications director cannot be trusted to address high schoolers without uttering inanities. She and her cohorts are now to instruct the country on truth and objectivity?

Obamaegomaniac

Could this guy be more full of himself?

President Obama said during his speech today: ‘For those who question the character and cause of my nation, I ask you to look at the concrete actions we have taken in just nine months.’

Remember When Dissent Was Patriotic?

I was listening to Nancy Pelosi get hysterical today. How that women ever got into a position of authority in this country is beyond me. Anyway, before we get on to that, a look back at the first (and hopefully last) inaugural address by President Obama:

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake.

Now, apparently Nancy Pelosi disagrees:

"We are a free country, and this balance between freedom and safety is one that we have to carefully balance," Pelosi began. She then became emotional as she recalled the events, startling the reporters gathered for the weekly news conference.

Well apparently while dealing with foreign terrorists who like to fly planes into buildings, balancing security and rights is not a dilemma, but when dealing with those evil Republicans on the other hand, then you really have to be careful...

Hoover and the Depression

It has become part of modern Democratic dogma that Hoover just fiddled while the economy collapsed, necessitating a rescue by FDR. Not at all true.

Pro-labor policies pushed by President Herbert Hoover after the stock market crash of 1929 accounted for close to two-thirds of the drop in the nation's gross domestic product over the two years that followed, causing what might otherwise have been a bad recession to slip into the Great Depression, a UCLA economist concludes in a new study.

"These findings suggest that the recession was three times worse — at a minimum — than it would otherwise have been, because of Hoover," said Lee E. Ohanian, a UCLA professor of economics.

The policies, which included both propping up wages and encouraging job-sharing, also accounted for more than two-thirds of the precipitous decline in hours worked in the manufacturing sector, which was much harder hit initially than the agricultural sector, according to Ohanian.

"By keeping industrial wages too high, Hoover sharply depressed employment beyond where it otherwise would have been, and that act drove down the overall gross national product," Ohanian said. "His policy was the single most important event in precipitating the Great Depression."

The findings are slated to appear in the December issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Economic Theory and were posted today on the website of the National Bureau of Economic Reasearch (www.nber.org) as a working paper.

The Opinion Journal Imitates Me

This sounds familiar:

Two Columnists in One!
"Basically we have a world-class budget deficit not just as in absolute terms of course--it's the biggest budget deficit in the history of the world--but it's a budget deficit that as a share of GDP is right up there....

Krugman on Deficits

Paul Krugman on his blog yesterday shows once again how he has stopped becoming a serious economics. First Kruggie from 2004, when the budget deficit was a mere $413 billion:

PROFESSOR PAUL KRUGMAN, PRINCETON ECONOMIST: Well, basically we have a world-class budget deficit not just as in absolute terms of course - it's the biggest budget deficit in the history of the world - but it's a budget deficit that as a share of GDP is right up there.It's comparable to the worst we've ever seen in this country.

It's biggest than Argentina in 2001.

Which is not cyclical, there's only a little bit that's because the economy is depressed.

Mostly it's because, fundamentally, the Government isn't taking in enough money to pay for the programs and we have no strategy of dealing with it.

So, if you take a look, the only thing that sustains the US right now is the fact that people say, "Well America's a mature, advanced country and mature, advanced countries always, you know, get their financial house in order," but there's not a hint that that's on the political horizon, so I think we're looking for a collapse of confidence some time in the not-too-distant future.

Now from his blog, when it was announced that the deficit will total over $9 trillion, over the next decade, more than double the worst deficit under Bush, for 10 straight years!

It turns out that I was a little over-pessimistic in my assessment, mainly because the $9 trillion includes this year’s deficit, so we start from debt at 40% of GDP, not 50%. Overall, the OMB puts debt in 2019 at 76.5% of GDP; that figure is slightly exaggerated, however, because various financial rescues get counted as additions to the deficit even though taxpayers end up with additional assets. Net of these assets, the debt in 2019 is 68.9% of GDP.

As I’ve pointed out, that’s bad, but it’s not horrific either by historical or international standards. On a comparable basis, federal debt hit
109 percent of GDP at the end of World War II, and hit a second peak of 49 percent at the end of the Reagan-Bush years. And a number of European countries have hit substantially higher debt levels without crisis.

The Postalization of Health Care

I went to the post office this morning, there is a major one only a couple of blocks from work. I simply needed to pick up some stamps. I searched around for a vending machine, as I destest having to deal with postal employees, but alas, there were none. Finally I asked a couple of employees standing behind a counter chatting with each other accomplishing nothing, if I could buy some stamps.

They informed me that I could not, because it was only 8:25, and the people who sold the stamps do not come on duty until 8:30. With a scowl I replied, "Thanks for the great service." and one of them replied sarcastically, and with no apparent sense of shame "you are welcome".

Now continuing what is possibly the world's most clueless argument for getting government involved in our healthcare, is Jesse Jackson Jr. I swear this guy is setting new records for bad economics.

Stimulus Success?

Several months ago I argued that Keynesian stimulus was not a proven concept. It might be a bit early to say definitively, but the early evidence showed that I was unfortunately right.

White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee promised on "Fox News Sunday": "It's going to take more than a few months to turn it around." That contradicts White House economic adviser Lawrence H. Summers' promise in January that the economy would start improving "within weeks" so long as the president's $787 billion stimulus was passed.

The stimulus actually has dampened economic projections. In January, before the stimulus was passed, 53 business economists and forecasters surveyed by the Wall Street Journal expected gross domestic product (GDP) for the third quarter (July through September) to rise by 1.2 percent at an annual rate. Predictions became gloomier after the stimulus passed in March. In May, these experts forecast only a 0.6 growth rate for the third quarter.

Great Moments in UW Class of 93 History

I was interested to find out the woman who broke the expense account scandal in the UK was a classmate of mine. Unfortunately, I didn't know her. Big school and all.

If the British tabloids knew about the sex-advice column Heather Brooke wrote for the University of Washington Daily nearly two decades ago they might run with it as a salacious news item.

Something like "sex writer rocks Parliament."

But that information hasn't reached them, it seems, and Brooke has proven to an entire nation she is a journalist of another ilk. In doing so, the former Seattleite has shaken up the British parliamentary leadership and perhaps changed forever the relationship between the British press and the House of Commons.

No Kidding

In the bizarre beyond belief category, President Obama proposes the largest deficits, by far, in US history through massive spending increases, and then notes that they are a bad idea.

May 14 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama, calling current deficit spending
“unsustainable,” warned of skyrocketing interest rates for consumers if the U.S. continues to finance government by borrowing from other countries.

“We can’t keep on just borrowing from China,” Obama said at a town-hall meeting in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, outside Albuquerque. “We have to pay interest on that debt, and that means we are mortgaging our children’s future with more and more debt.”

Holders of U.S. debt will eventually “get tired” of buying it, causing interest rates on everything from auto loans to home mortgages to increase, Obama said. “It will have a dampening effect on our economy.”

You Are Joking, Right?

Jake Tapper is about the only serious journalist left. Robert Gibbs continues to be the clown of the White House.

JENNIFER LOVEN, AP: The $100 million target figure that the president talked about today with the Cabinet, can you explain why so small? I know he talked about -- you know, you add up 100 million and 100 million, and eventually, you get somewhere, but it would take an awfully long time to add up hundred million (inaudible) in the deficit. Why not target a bigger number?

GIBBS: (Smiling) Well, I think only in Washington, D.C. is a hundred million dollars...

LOVEN: The deficit's very large. It's not a joke.

GIBBS: No, I'm...

LOVEN: The deficit's giant. $100 million really is only a step.

GIBBS: But no joke.

LOVEN: You sound like you're joking about it, but it's not funny

.GIBBS: I'm not making jokes about it. I'm being completely sincere that only in Washington, D.C. is $100 million not a lot of money. It is where I'm from. It is where I grew up. And I think it is for hundreds of millions of Americans.

LOVEN: The point is it's not a very big portion of the deficit.

TAPPER: You were talking about an appropriations bill a few weeks ago about $8 billion being minuscule -- $8 billion in earmarks. We were talking about that and you said that that...

GIBBS: Well, in terms of -- in...(CROSSTALK)

TAPPER: ...$100 million is a lot but $8 billion is small?