Barack Obama - Most Effective President Ever !!!

The man says he wants to make something happen, and by golly, it happens. 
Here's The Teleprompter Jesus, in the flesh, talking about how he's going to make you pay more at the pump so you'll stop buying SUV's and become more fuel-efficient. 




Go here to read a summary of the mindset.  Back in the day, someone would come out with a new product, and if it was any good it would catch on, and the old way would slowly die. 

Contrast that approach with the one used in the Year Of Our Lord 2012, where new product-makers lobby Washington for subsidies, Washington mandates their use, Washington punishes their competitors (see LightSquared), and Obama then forces you to use the new product made by people who owe their very existence to Obama.  

It's like watching that wasp on Animal planet, the one that stings and paralyzes a caterpillar and drags it into its nest so the baby wasps can feast until they're grown.  In a way, it's beautiful. 

Well done, sir. Well done.

Mission Accomplished, Team Obama !!!


From The Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Obama plans soon to introduce his energy and environment team, which will include Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu as energy secretary and former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Carol Browner as White House energy adviser.

The team's makeup shows that Mr. Obama plans to put a heavy emphasis on combating climate change and promoting technologies to wean the U.S. off imported oil. He is packaging such priorities as a way to boost employment and help the economy by pouring money into efficiency projects.

.But the next administration will face a range of obstacles on the energy front, from plummeting oil prices and a declining economy to potential rifts among Mr. Obama's own advisers.

In a sign of one major internal difference, Mr. Chu has called for gradually ramping up gasoline taxes over 15 years to coax consumers into buying more-efficient cars and living in neighborhoods closer to work.

"Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe," Mr. Chu, who directs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in September.

Well done, Mr. Chu.  Well done ! 

They should sell it to me for less because we live close to each other !!!

Don Boudreaux teaches economics at George Mason University, the place where I'm going to get a Doctorate in Economics if I ever win the lottery and can afford the tuition.  Boudreaux has written a beautiful letter to Bill O'Reilly of Fox News. 

This letter should be studied by schoolchildren everywhere. 
Boudreaux and Russ Roberts are the proprietors of the Cafe Hayek blog. 
Here goes: 

Mr. Bill O’Reilly
The O’Reilly Factor
Fox News
New York, NY

Dear Mr. O’Reilly:

You’re all lathered up because U.S. oil companies are exporting much of their refined gasoline and heating oil to other countries and thereby putting upward pressure on fuel prices here in America. You conclude that these companies have a moral obligation not to export so much.

Your economics is wrong and your ethics convenient.

First some economics. Selling in the global market encourages firms to build larger factories and refineries that, in turn, enable outputs to be produced at lower costs per unit. So while in the short-run rising exports of oil products can cause fuel prices here to spike, the long-run effect might well be lower prices because of larger, more-efficient scales of operation. Also, more exports of fuel products means more imports of other goods and services. The result is lower prices in America for consumer goods such as clothing and furniture, as well as lower prices of inputs such as steel and industrial machinery used by American factories.

I was amused, by the way, that in your Feb. 17th discussion with Lou Dobbs, Mr. Dobbs shared your anger at rising U.S. oil exports. This is the same Mr. Dobbs who repeatedly complains that the problem with America’s involvement in the global economy is that foreigners stubbornly refuse to buy sufficient amounts of American exports. Go figure.

Now about your ethics. You’re paid so handsomely because there’s a large nation-wide demand for your commentary and bombast. In your career you’ve worked for broadcasters in Boston, Dallas, Denver, Hartford, and elsewhere. And before moving to Fox you were a correspondent for ABC News. You apparently never hesitated to sell your product to the highest bidder; you never hesitated to export yourself from one market to another in search of higher pay; you never resisted the bidding for your services by buyers (i.e., employers) far and wide which put upward pressure on the amounts of money that you are paid, both to appear on television and to deliver lunch and dinnertime speeches.

Get ready!!   Here comes the Don Boudreaux Karate Kid Crane kick !!!!!!!

So I ask: are you guilty of an offense against those many Americans who – as a result of your responding to market signals regarding the value of your services – must now pay higher prices for the privilege of hearing your commentary? Should you return to your long-ago job at a local Scranton television station, at your long-ago lower salary, and apologize to the good people of Lackawanna County for your greedy and evil habit of exporting yourself to wherever and whoever offers to pay you more money?

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

Don Boudreaux.  Often imitated, never duplicated. 

The coffee mug shown above was a gift from Dr. Ralph.  His son goes to GMU. 
The picture of Don Boudreaux morphed with Dr. Ralph came from Dr.Ralph.  It's one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen, despite serious competition from some incidents in my Mississippi childhood. 
At 2:00 this afternoon at The Corporate Image 5418 Brentwood Stair in East Fort Worth, I'll be playing guitar and singing with Dr. Ralph. 

8 Steps For Revitalizing The U.S. Economy

Industry Week  has a piece in their online edition by Dr. Ken Mayland, an economist who covers manufacturing and business trends. 
Here are Dr. Mayland's "Eight Steps For Revitalizing The U.S. Economy".  I've been ranting about seven of these for years, and I don't even have a Doctorate in Economics.  Or a Masters.  Or a Bachelors.  I do, however, work in the shipping and logistics industry, and that qualifies me to comment on these things. 

1.  Kill the 2010 health care reform bill.

Well, duh, of course.  Nobody knows who exactly wrote it.  Nobody knows what it is supposed to accomplish.  It's too long for anyone to know what is in it.  A lot of people who lobbied for it have now been exempted from it.  But everyone fears it. 

2.  Do a "reverse course" on developing domestic energy and ease access and permitting for all forms of energy production.

Yeah.  Drill, Baby, Drill.  The Green Energy Scam is slowly being exposed.  Within a year and a half, it'll be dead as a doornail.  Drill, Baby, Drill.  Now.   

3.  Eliminate the minimum wage. Mayland said: "Economists have long know that politicians cannot legislate the productivity of a worker. If you raise the minimum wage above the basic productivity of the worker, the worker will be fired or not hired." Mayland said since the minimum wage was last raised, the biggest increase in unemployment has been among teenagers -- "exactly where you would expect a minimum-wage increase to hurt."

The minimum wage is zero.  The higher you set an artificial price floor for unskilled workers, the more of them you condemn to earning the true minimum wage - zero. 

4.  Repeal the Frank-Dodd financial reform law and Sarbanes-Oxley, which he said put U.S. businesses at a disadvantage compared to businesses in other countries.

I know absolutely nothing about this.  Some might say that this shortcoming has never prevented any of my other rants, but there you have it.  I know nothing about SarbOx.  But this guy does. 

5.  Rein in EPA and the National Labor Relations Board.

Or we could continue to allow the NLRB to tell businesses where they can and can't operate.  Pick one. 

6.  Pass free-trade agreements with Panama, Columbia and South Korea.

This is great as long as it is Free Trade and not Managed Trade.  Any Free Trade Agreement that's 900 pages long is automatically suspect. 

7.  Pare back overly generous unemployment benefits from the current 99 weeks. Mayland cited a scholarly study that if unemployment benefits were 26 weeks, the unemployment rate would be 2% to 2.5% lower.

Yep, and it wouldn't be pretty.  But combine #3 and #7, and you would rapidly approach full employment.  Companies would accomplish more with less.  But it wouldn't be fair !  So we're going to continue to borrow from our fetuses ! 

8.  Trash the tax code and install a flat tax. Mayland said once the appropriate tax rate was determined, taxpayers could fill out their tax return "on a postcard."

Go here for a picture of the Hong Kong tax postcard. 

There you have it.  If Obama and Congress knew that they were going to be propped against a wall and shot if the economy didn't improve within one year, they would implement all of Ken Mayland's Libertarian-ish suggestions tomorrow morning.  Hit the labels below if you want to read earlier rants on any of these topics.

What if the Evil Oil Companies got the same tax breaks as the Wholesome Green Companies?

West Texas is slowly being covered with windmills. 
They're built to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and our own reliance on evil, polluting, non-green, greedy corporations. 

You may have heard that the evil, polluting, non-green, greedy oil companies get a massive subsidy from our government.  This is because our government would give a subsidy to prevent alien invasions from the planet Nekthor in exchange for campaign contributions. 

All that aside, what if the oil companies got a subsidy similar to that received by the windmill producers?  (Windmills, ironically, are now called an "industry of the future".)  Here's The Foundry:

With the current debate over ending oil producers’ subsidies the question arises as to what subsidies do the producers actually get. It is a surprisingly complicated question. Wind producers also get subsidies that take complex forms—investment tax credits, production tax credits, mandates, property tax exemptions, etc. But the major federal subsidy for wind producers is the option to take a 30 percent investment tax credit or to receive a 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour production tax credit.


“2.2 cents” doesn’t seem like much, but, depending on the time of year, it falls somewhere between 25 percent and 100 percent of the wholesale price of electricity. Forty percent if frequently used as the average.

So, what would an oil-production subsidy look like if it were the same magnitude?

Deepwater drilling rigs can cost over $400,000 per day. With other costs, a rough per-well figure would be $100,000,000 per well. If an oil company could get the same 30 percent investment tax credit as wind producers, the government would write the company a $30,000,000 check for each well completed. For the lower cost, shallow-water wells, the government would write a check closer to $3,000,000 for every well drilled.

If on the other hand, the oil company opted for a production tax credit (and it was set at 40 percent of the 2010 average price of about $75 per barrel) then the government would write the oil company a check for $30 for each barrel produced (onshore as well as offshore).

If a subsidy like that was the deal oil companies had, then cut away. But the $4 billion per year that oil’s detractors keep repeating works out to $0.60 per barrel, and upon closer examination they do not even qualify as oil-industry subsidies.

Heritage’s Nick Loris and Curtis Dubay have sorted it all out. Of course, there are subsidies for the oil and gas industry, but they come from the Department of Energy, not from unfair tax benefits, and they work out to about a nickel per barrel. So, leave it to Washington to misidentify and exaggerate the problem.

Yeah, you can paint a windmill green, but you can't make it as efficient as oil. 

 

The solution to high gas prices? Let's put in a 62 mpg mandate !!!

Derrick Z. Jackson is a typist for the Boston Globe.  He is deeply and profoundly wrong so often that I've "liked" him on Facebook just to keep in touch. 

Here's an excerpt from his latest, called "United States Must Break The Addiction To Foreign Oil". 

Unrest continues to spread, from the Middle East to the Middle West to . . . the gas pump.


The democracy uprisings against repressive regimes, many of which America propped up, has also fanned fears for the flow of oil. In response, Big Oil has jacked up its prices and gasoline is back up to $3.20 a gallon for unleaded in Massachusetts and is reportedly headed to $3.50 nationally. As the Obama administration tiptoes between popular protests and potentates who turn on our oil spigot, Americans are concerned about prices at the gas pump.

As well they should be.  What should we do?  OMG, what can we do? 

If only we had oil of our own, oil of our very own somewhere off the coasts of California, Oregon, Washington, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, D.C., Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and all those other little Yankee states in the middle where my geography is fuzzy? 

If only, if only.  

Seriously.  That part of Jackson's rant is so profoundly screwed up that it doesn't even rise to the level of being wrong.  The Middle East is in the middle of a huge upheaval, and that's going to jack with fuel prices for a while.  Everyone, and I mean everyone, has huge reserves.  Gasoline costs what it does at any given moment because that's what people are willing to pay at that moment, all other factors taken into account.

 

Competitors, especially small ones, have huge barriers to entry, all put in place by the people who stand in front of each other once a year for the SOTU speech, and rant about our addiction to foreign oil   Otherwise people would be out there drilling near the states listed above. 

One other thing....trade is a funny thing.  Both sides need each other.  Whose economy do you think can last longer without the other?  U.S. Consumers or Evil Foreign People?  That's the question our politicians never ask.  Citizens of other countries now rely on American Dollars.  They can't eat, build houses, or educate their children without them.  Have you ever had a 25% drop in sales?  It's tough, isn't it? 

And when we give our dollars to those foreigners with funny names who worship funny gods, do you know what they have to do with them?  There's only one place where they accept green pieces of paper with pictures of dead presidents on 'em. 

Back to Derrick Z. 

....Instead of whining about gas prices, Americans should be demanding that the Democrats and the Republicans make oil independence a top priority. Less than a year after the BP oil spill, energy has disappeared as a top issue of the day in current polling of Americans. This is even though energy affects everything from jobs to the environment to what wars we wage to how many blind eyes we offer to dictators who sit on fossil-fuel resources.

Like almost all other Statists, Derrick Z. can throw down an eloquent rant about how many billions of dollars we idiotically pay dictators, all in the name of "stability".  Derrick slams The Teleprompter Jesus for his response to the BP spill.  And after griping about our government's ineffectiveness, what does he want? 
What does he want? 
Derrick Z. wants more government involvement. 

Last month, the new Republican House majority, which has declared war on the Environmental Protection Agency, inspired infantile behavior from the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. The organization wrote Darrell Issa, the new House oversight chairman, to protest the potential cost of fuel-efficiency standards as high as 62 miles per gallon being considered by the Obama administration.

Yeah, 62 miles per gallon.  Declare it, make it so, get pro-active. That's all it takes.  Ask King Canute.   

Derrick, mandates and Congressional Performance Art won't get us anywhere. 
Building a "Fortress America", taking us back to a trading system like Feudal China's, won't get us anywhere.   We need the Evil Foreigners and they need us. 
We need for our government to leave everyone the hell alone.  Build some roads.  Referee in some disputes.  Defend the borders.  That's all. 

On our addiction to foreign oil

I was flipping channels a couple of days ago and heard someone blathering about ending our dependence on foreign oil.  I don't remember who it was, but it might as well have been John McCain....



Or Jimmy Carter....



Or anyone else who is trying to scare voters into supporting oil company subsidies or throwing money to Green Energy scams.  (Yes, oil company subsidies and Green Energy scams.  The players all wear different uniforms, but they're playing in the same game.)



These guys always speak of our "addiction to foreign oil", but never say a word about our addiction to foreign computers, wine, cheese, electrical components, iPhones, televisions, fabrics, jeans, suits, or that inexpensive mouse you're using to make my words move up and down on that foreign screen in front of you.  They try to give the impression that the lines of latitude and longitude of factories and warehouses should be your most important shopping criteria.   

They never acknowledge that those of us living in Fort Worth, Texas, have a higher quality of life because we trade our goods and services (the things we're best at doing) with people who live in Waco, Texas (for the things that they're best at doing). 

Texans often trade with people from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana.  Some of the people in Arkansas have funny accents.  Some of the Oklahomans look like Indians.  And despite Texas being an overwhelmingly Protestant state, we can hold our noses and swap our stuff with the Catholic natives of south Lousiana. 

I'm considering trading with Memphis Tennessee for BarBQue, since Texas BarBQue sucks.  The Texas stuff is made from cows, not pigs. 
Should that be anyone's decision other than mine? 

We trade with Canada.  We swap lots of our stuff for their timber. 
We trade with Mexico.  We swap lots of our stuff for their clothing and auto parts. 

Yes, we rely on people from those other strange cities, states and nations.  But guess what?  They rely on us for our goods and services, and they also rely on us as.....customers.


If Fort Worthians and Texans and Americans were to stop purchasing things made by those other cities, states, and nations, it would harm us and it would harm them.
The only groups to profit from the shutdown would be the government enforcers and guards at the arbitrary borders of our cages.  (And, of course, the businesses that would then have a monopoly in the goods and services that were prohibited from crossing our city, state, or national borders.)


If other countries ever stop swapping their stuff for our stuff, they're in a world of hurt.  Imagine what it does to a retailer to lose 20% of its customers.  The retailer has to lay off employees. 

Does anyone believe that any of the oil producing nations of the world can now afford to withhold oil from the United States?  They are all addicted to foreign dollars. 

They have to sell the stuff to somebody.  They can no more stop selling oil to us than Target, Wal-Mart, and Kroger can arbitrarily stop selling groceries to people whose names begin with a vowel.  It would kill them. 

I repeat....We aren't addicted to foreign oil.  The oil producing nations are addicted to foreign dollars.  Think of it that way for fifteen minutes, and you'll start laughing the next time a politician tries to play the race card (or the geography card). 

The Dilbert cartoon came from here.  The videos came from YouTube.  The source of the gasoline that got me to Starbucks this morning doesn't really matter. 

Lisa Murkowski - "Baby, You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now"

Senator Lisa Murkowski (Exxon - R), having failed to get the Republican nomination or the Libertarian nomination, is making one last appeal to her base:

Less than an hour before Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski planned to announce a write-in campaign to retain her seat, her top aide e-mailed scores of the most prominent lobbyists in Washington to ask them to join a Saturday conference call with the senator.

The emails went to another segment of her supporters that couldn't be ignored:

Karen Knutson, Murkowski’s chief of staff, emailed scores of top lobbyists in town and employees at some of the largest oil companies – including Chevron, Conoco Phillips and Marathon Oil – to ask them to join the senator on a conference call Saturday, according to a copy of the e-mail and a recipient list obtained by POLITICO.

Here's B.B. King doing "Baby, You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now"



The magazine cover came from here. 

Bail Out Studebaker ! Bail Out T. Boone Pickens !

I saw this bumpersticker in Fort Worth today, and started thinking....

....would bailing out Studebaker be any sillier than bailing out Chrysler?  What could be sillier than the current rounds of bailout mania? 

Well, I found out when I went to Bally's fitness to put in some mandatory treadmill time. 

The Bally's TV's were tuned to CNN, which featured Larry King interviewing T. Boone Pickens, mostly about the BP oil spill, but partly about AMERICA'S DEPENDENCE ON FOREIGN OIL and the Pickens plan to replace oil with gentle gusts of wind from unseen fairy flatulence which would be enough to power Pickens Inc. windmills paid for by your taxes. 

T. Boone Pickens wants your money, just like Chrysler wants your money.  They both go through government to force the wealth transfer.  In the case of T. Boone, he just wants his bailout up front.  Just like Chrysler, he can't make it without you.  Nobody in his right mind would voluntarily a dime of their own funds for the windmill scheme unless he knew up front that Boone was going to get some pork.     

One thing about AMERICA'S DEPENDENCE ON FOREIGN OIL....think of an individual that you do business with, preferably a little guy.  Think of somebody with an oil change franchise, or a seamstress, or a Mom'n'Pop restaurant.  Do you depend on them, or do they depend on you? 

It's mutual, isn't it?  You're trading stuff with each other.  If you didn't buy the oil changes, the clothing, or the meals from them, they would have to find someone else to sell the stuff to.  Finding new customers is a hassle. 

Political hacks like to talk about AMERICA'S DEPENDENCE ON FOREIGN OIL.  Well, that street runs both ways, but you never hear them talk about FOREIGN OIL'S DEPENDENCE ON AMERICAN DOLLARS.  If the dreaded foreigners couldn't sell their oil to us, they would have to sell it to someone else.  Their overhead is high, just like ours is.  They have to keep the money rolling in.. If they want to cut us off, they still have to sell it to somebody who is not yet purchasing very much oil.  Somebody like....well, I can't think of anybody else.  But whoever bought it would wind up selling most of it to us. 

Frederic Bastiat figured it out 150 years ago.  He wrote:

The sort of dependence that results from exchange, i.e., from commercial transactions, is a reciprocal dependence. We cannot be dependent upon a foreigner without his being dependent on us. Now, this is what constitutes the very essence of society. To sever natural interrelations is not to make oneself independent, but to isolate oneself completely.

Giving T. Boone Pickens his bailout money ahead of time would be like reviving Studebaker to end our dependence on Toyotas. 

The Obama Tire Pressure Gauge

The Republicans and John McCain are hammering Obama's suggestion that Americans keep their tires properly inflated, and are passing out Obama air pressure gauges like the one shown above. Obama claims that this would save more oil than would be produced by additional wells.
Perhaps that's true. Perhaps it isn't.
But I already keep my tires properly inflated.
Granted, if everyone else did so, it would decrease the demand for oil.

I continue to be amazed at the groups who are anti-globalization except when it comes to oil.
I get a kick out of the politicians who slam the oil industry for excess profits (which are less than those of the finance or technology industries), but continue to give tax breaks and subsidies to oil companies.
Why not eliminate all this posturing, stop grandstanding, cease the bribing and lobbying, end the Sale Of Indulgences, and let people drill if they think they can make some money drilling?