May 13 2010
The Economic Carnage Of Rampant Liberalism Continues
Two forces in America are heading for a showdown this fall. The first is rampant liberalism that is bankrupting generations of Americans into the future. Through wild and risky schemes, honed from TV-land like thinking about the wonders of Big Brother Government, liberals have put in place a rolling disaster. Just take the April deficit numbers as one data point in this historically massive screw up:
The United States posted an $82.69 billion deficit in April, nearly four times the $20.91 billion shortfall registered in April 2009 and the largest on record for that month, the Treasury Department said on Wednesday.
…
Department officials said that in prior years, there was a surplus during April in 43 out of the past 56 years.
Emphasis mine. First off, April 2009 was dead smack in the middle of the economic storm as it wiped out savings and jobs from 2008 through the fall of 2009. For us to be STILL racking up record financial woes a year later is just staggering. This goes back to my post on the April unemployment and underemployment numbers, which show there has been no relief or progress economically. We are not sinking as fast, but we are sinking in other, less obvious ways.
As the article notes, the normal condition for April in any given year is to be in surplus (due to a massive influx of tax filings and payments). Under President Obama and the DC liberals in Congress, there will never be a surplus April again for the next decade or more. This group of liberal zealots has bankrupt this nation at levels no one ever thought we would see. For a good perspective on this, take a few minutes and watch this video Ed Morrissey discovered on the deficit, debt and economic carnage that is now being inflicted on this nation:
It is mind boggling the damage that has been done in less than two years. Anyone who thinks 2010 is an improvement from 2009, just look at these numbers from the original article:
For the first seven months of fiscal 2010, which ends September 30, the cumulative budget deficit totals $799.68 billion, down slightly from $802.3 billion in the comparable period of fiscal 2009.
The $3 billion difference is round-off error and insignificant. 2010 is going to be just as bad as 2009:
The U.S. full-year deficit this year is projected at $1.5 trillion on top of a $1.4 trillion shortfall last year.
White House budget director Peter Orszag told Reuters Insider in an interview on Wednesday that the United States must tackle its deficits quickly to avoid the kind of debt crisis that hit Greece.
The last line is a pathetic joke, coming from a misleading administration. As the DC liberals rev up for another round of deficit busting spending, the idea the Unites States must tackel deficits is laughable. The United States needs to fire all the liberals in DC and then begin dismantling this runaway, dysfunctional federal behemoth. It must repeal Obamacare, reinstate the Bush tax cuts, dealing with Medicare and Social Security, and cutting away half the bureaucracy that does not directly help this country maintain its economic leadership role. For the latter I am thinking we keep medical research, space exploration, investing in our national security but dumping the bridges to nowhere, studying the sex habits of college students, building dog parks, etc.
We either change the direction of this country 180° and begin shrinking government, or we lose our great country. In the fall the battle for America will be fought, between the rampant liberal zealots and the center of America. I am confident which side will win.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by AJ Strata. AJ Strata said: new: The Economic Carnage Of Rampant Liberalism Continues http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/13326 […]
I wish I had your confidence, AJ. It still seems to be government and liberalism run amok, and the Obama administration is putting in Socialism policies everywhere to intrude on the people’s lives. You mentioned the disastrous economic impact of the laws they have passed, but the hidden regulations and order by fiat, is just as worrisome.
Independent of the EFCA bill we are fighting, the unions are making other inroads, via stealth. Everyday is a new story about the unions and their attempts to unionize all American businesses. Unionization of the public sector is bankrupting cities and states. Just look at Greece. Complete unionization of businesses will destroy free enterprise in this country, IMO.
My question: isn’t there anything illegal or unconstitutional about the moves this administration is making? The Democrats and the Unions and Big Business seem to be in bed with each other, damaging America for short-term profit and long-term disaster.
We’ve gone from Freedom to Statism in less than two short years. Will our side undo the damage when (hopefully) they get into office? The economic success for this country is entwined with the freedom of the individual. Unless we are willing to break away from dependency on government, the cost is far greater to America, than the dollar amounts we see exploding.
There is no rhyme or reason for what this President does. This guy, Obama, is an alien with a check book, there is no other explanation.
Something I forgot….has anybody noticed how many people he, Obama, wants to punish? If you “do”, by God, someone has suffered from being “done to” and you will be punished.
Oh yes, Kathie we have noticed…even before the election we knew who this guy was/is.
I am still pursuing this Deepwater oil rig blowout which I think
was an artificially manufactured O-event.
If we are to believe that it wasn’t blown up with military force,
but rather by the stupid decision to order the “mud” to be
removed from the drilling column before setting concrete,
then the question has to be WHY?
This can’t be an accident. It sounds way too fundamental.
I have to defer to WWS and his knowledge of the oil drilling
industry, but I hope there is a trail of forensic evidence
tracing the origin of the fatal set of orders.
Can I really be suggesting that Obama would sacrifice a dozen
oil workers to get his cap and cripple legislation passed?
Of course I am, that is the way he operates.
He would be guilty of murder and treason, but I just know
the trail will not lead back to him, but it will lead back to
someone, and we should start there.
People need to look at only one example to see what Democrat “progressive” policies do to an economy. When the City of Detroit had its last Republican Mayor, it had the highest standard of living of any city in the US. Today it has near the lowest. Over the decades of Democrat “progressive” policies, billions of dollars have been poured into Detroit in “programs” while the conditions of the place continue to deteriorate despite the influx of cash and “programs”.
The same is reflected across the state of Michigan, not just in Detroit. Flint is bulldozing entire neighborhoods.
But people also vote with their feet. Look at the states that are slated to lose Congressional seats and compare that with the list of states that are expected to gain seats. Places like New York, Michigan and Pennsylvania are expected to lose seats in Congress while states like Texas and Utah are looking in increase. For the first time since statehood, California looks to gain NO seats in Congress following an census.
This not only decreases the influence of the liberal states in Congress, it also reduces their electoral votes in Presidential elections. So what we see as a reduction in the political clout of the most “progressive” areas while more conservative areas gain political influence. As Donald Rumsfeld once said, “Nothing succeeds like success” and “progressive” liberal policies have been the exact opposite of success.
And I might add one thing that is telling. There is not one single grocery store from a major supermarket chain anywhere in the city limits of Detroit. Not one. You can not find a Safeway, a Kroger, Giant, IGA, Acme, A&P, nothing. Imagine a place where the business climate is so bad that not even a grocery store chain will locate a store there … and you have the world the Democrats want to create in the rest of the country.
Daniel, I’ve started to get enough info to figure out what happened -and it’s worse than I thought. A lot of this is still rumour and leaks, but more and more it reminds me of Challenger. The engineers knew something was wrong, and management decided it was inconvenient to pay attention to them.
After the cement job was completed, there were integrity tests that were done on the wellbore that did not pass. They were redone, and apparently the results were marginal. Some engineers on the rig and some engineers back in the home office argued that they needed to put a hold on everything, stop, and fix the problem. However, the rig was within 24 hours of leaving the location and going to drill a new well, and it would have been very expensive to have stopped and fixed the faulty cement job. (time and expense seemed to be managements top worry) Also, 7 top execs had traveled out to the rig for a Safety Award cermony (imagine that!!!) and putting a stop on everything would have derailed their schedule. Seriously, that appears to have been one of the top concerns of everyone out there at the time – making sure no one upset the Top Brass’ schedule.
It looks like top BP management looked at the engineering recomendations and said “Eh, it’s probably good enough. Let’s just ignore those bad pressure tests. On with the Awards Ceremony!!!!”
2 hours later – BOOM.
No wonder BP hasn’t been putting up any fuss about paying for all of this.
And regarding the BOP stack, I do have to give credit to whoever asked the best question of the Congressional hearings a couple days ago: “How can a fail-safe device have 244 documented failure modes????”
Turns out that Transocean knew several key systems on that BOP stack were non-functional before they put it in place. It’s hell when your own engineers document everything.
And here is why everyone is pointing fingers at everyone else:
Halliburton – did a crap cement job.
Transocean – used a crap set of BOP’s and followed bad procedures.
BP – made the disastrous decision to blow off their own engineer’s warnings and ignore all the red flags that were flashing.
This was a good old fashioned clusterfark, no doubt about it.
Jeezus H. Christ, what a mess.
“This was a good old fashioned clusterfark, no doubt about it. ”
And that is generally how things like this happen. It most often takes a chain of mistakes at several different places to cause a disaster like this. The thing is … if you are going to disregard the warnings from the engineers, what is the sense of having them in the first place?
I see that sort of behavior all the time in my own occupation as a network engineer. Management can be informed that there is a problem looming, the the current architecture won’t support their growth plan or that demand is rapidly meeting capacity and the network is going to fail, but there is a sense of “it isn’t a problem until it is a problem”. And the result is that things finally break and it becomes an emergency. So you have some operation that is loosing tens of thousands of dollars a minute now because they didn’t want to spend a couple of hundred grand (20 minutes worth of lost traffic) six months ago. I have seen this happen more than once, too.
This notion of “it isn’t a problem until it is a problem” needs to be addressed in business schools. They are too focused on “this quarter” or “this month” and not focused enough on “if this fails, is it going to blow our profit for the next several years” sort of thing.
An individual in corporate America is too often rated on their performance in the current time period. Why worry about next year? I might be dead next year (that is basically what the business notion of “The long run is nothing more than a series of short runs placed end to end. In the long run, we are all dead” business models get you). They are not willing to sacrifice their profit for this time period in order to ensure profit over the following time periods because that directly impacts their performance reviews and bonus payments.
If Charlie sacrifices his profit for this quarter but Bob cuts corners, Bob gets a promotion and a raise while Charlie might be fired. Whoever takes over Charlie’s position ends up making cash hand over fist while Bob’s well blows up and Bob has explaining to do in Congress. But the last 99 of Bob’s wells didn’t blow up and in the meantime, he made serious bucks by cutting corners.
Basically, corporate America rewards that sort of behavior and penalizes forward thinking. That is why we get what we get.
If anyone here is thinking that any of these policies will ever change or the American people will wake up are sadly mistaken.
The Greeks in the face of debt crisis are rioting to protect their socalist handouts and programs. Once you get people addicted to these programs they will never give them up.
The answer to this socalist mess will be more what? yes, more socialism, that is global socalism, thats the next step!! for you see they Obama/eruo socalists see the problem as an unfair global distribution of wealth. So the USA will have to give up more wealth to pay for sick euro countries.
This stuff is not goiing to stop, it will progress with failure after failure, and crisis after crisis, untill the is a global socalist/communist government emerges. That is the end game!! Make no mistake about it.
The experiment in freedom and democracy was an exception in the history of human relations. Humans have been ruled by Kings, dictators and tribal strong men. Its what humans really want.
Those of us who clamor for freedom are the exception. The reconstruction of the Tower of Babel continues. God help us all.
WWS, yeah, Morton Thiokol’s advice was ignored by NASA and the Challenger was lost as a result. I understand that Morton Thiokol has been absorbed by another company or went into oblivion.
The sad part is that in spite of the tiger team to change the management demographics to prevent another Challenger accident, we saw no change.
Columbia accident? Uhm…no change either.
Today, the FDOC contract that I work on is designed to design and implement efficiencies that would lead to cost savings for NASA, which means more profits for our company. The problem is how the management handled the efficiencies. Most were mismanaged from the beginning with no mandate to ensure a seamless integrated system. Most efficiencies to date have lead to inefficiencies with negative costs.
crosspatch, I call it “management by crisis” and it’s really bad where I work these days. Because of Obama’s plan to “shutdown” NASA (his end goal), morale is very low and many people are very unhappy and very reactive.
BTW, WWS, one of my co-workers’ wife works in the oil industry. He says that almost everyone in the oil industry is working with BP to stop the oil flow and clean up the mess. Anything outside this oil spill are on hold. He also says that his wife is very tired of hearing the media hype over this oil spill.
When the history of this period is written, Obama will likely be known as this era’s James Buchanan.
No he won’t. Obama won’t rate that high.
And as for shortsighted management, allow me to point to the source.
Harvard Business School.
Which is notorious for producing graduates focused on maximizing this quarter’s profits…and running the company into bankruptcy five years down the road.
oneal:
I am not so sure. I think they may just run out of money.
Eric Holder, in front of congress today, admitted that he had not read the new Arizona law. I find it totally irresponsible and hysterical that the Attorney General of the country would comment on a law he had not read. I would also say that Obama had not read the law before he commented on it either. If he had he would never have made the statement that he did (walking down the street with your children, getting an ice cream, getting stopped for the way you looked). We have elected fools!
The one bright spot about the spill is that the chemical dispersants are actually doing a very good job at breaking this up, which (combined with favorable winds) is why very little of this oil has made it to shore yet. (of course if the wind changes…)
It makes me suspect that this was the real disaster plan all along. You’ve heard a lot of talk about containing the oil with floating booms; not only was that a joke, everyone knew that it was a joke. They only work in seas with less than 3′ swells, but this is open ocean – who makes a plan for the ocean in which step one is “Okay, assume there are no waves…..”
It was a pathetic plan, which is why no one bothered to store up much in the way of any booms – why bother when you know they won’t work anyways?
The problem with the chemical dispersants/emulsifiers is that they’re generally pretty poisonous to all marine life, and you have to pump a lot of it to break up the oil. So it looks like the plan was “Let’s say we’ll use booms because they look harmless even though we all know they won’t work, but really we’ll use chemical dispersants, but we won’t say that now because no one would ever approve that ahead of time, they’ll only approve in the middle of a disaster when there’s no other choices.”
And I’d say the Government and everyone operating in the Gulf was in on that one together.
Today they’ve scrapped top hat and are going with tubing stabbed into the liner/leaking pipe, sealed off with what’s usually called a packer. No guarantee this will work, but this approach would have been my first choice and I don’t know why they waited so long to try it – I think it’s far better than the stupid Big Box which clogged up with hydrates as soon as they put it in place. Now this approach could still have a hydrate problem, but it’s much more sealed from seawater which should lesson the possibility.
While I’m ranting I might as well point out that they should *never* have pumped so much water trying to fight a fire that they couldn’t possibly put out – they should have let that rig burn, at least the oil wouldn’t be in the ocean. It could have stayed there floating and burning for who knows how long, and at least that would have gotten rid of the oil.
There were no leaks underwater – it was the fireboats pumping water onto the top which sunk the rig as the water they were pumping ran down into the flotation pylons. Yep, you guys did a lot of good by sending that rig to the bottom of the ocean.
Another stupid, stupid move.
The incompetence of this administration is apparently boundless.
“Eric Holder, in front of congress today, admitted that he had not read the new Arizona law.”
And neither have most of the people who have an opinion on it.
Basically, Arizona simply took the federal laws that the federal government was not enforcing and made them state laws and *is* enforcing them. All Arizona did was make the federal code a state law. There is, as far as I am aware, nothing in the Arizona law that was not already in the federal law including the requirement to show that someone is here legally.
WWW
If I understand what you are saying then in effect, Halliburton and Transocean recommended that more work be done on this well but were overridden by BP.
If that is case then BP and Eastern Airlines are probably going to have something in common because the legal and punitive damages of this could be simply immense