http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/how-many-jobs-depend-on-the-big-three/

1 in 10 jobs won't evaporate if the "big" 3 go under.

Because I just couldn't be in a party with someone like Maxine Waters.

http://www.truthonthemarket.com/2008/11/13/this-liberal-will-be-all-about-socializing-uhhh-basically-taking-over-and-the-government-running-all-of-your-companies/

thanks: Truth on the Market.

Called Chicago boys: check out their article on Obama http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/6380.html  Basically it shows his policies in action via examples of past failures.  I'm sure you investors know this but for y'all not familiar with this concept: the investing technology out there lets you check retroactively test your strategy.  Consider this blog a retroactive test of Obama's policies.  He fails.  The economist endorsed Obama - I think most economists are making a mistake.  Yes McCain's economic plans are way too deficit heavy but socialism-lite is not the answer.  Plus think of it this way: McCain isn't going to get to enact his policies - he is the check and balance.  I think he will keep the dems honest which will keep us more efficient than a submissive Obama.

From the WSJ: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122541609109386729.html 

 

In this fall's first presidential debate, Barack Obama analyzed the causes of the credit meltdown. "Now, we also have to recognize that this is a final verdict on eight years of failed economic policies promoted by George Bush, supported by Senator McCain, a theory that basically says that we can shred regulations and consumer protections and give more and more to the most, and somehow prosperity will trickle down."

In the second debate, Mr. Obama offered a similarly vague diagnosis: "I believe this is a final verdict on the failed economic policies of the last eight years . . . that essentially said that we should strip away regulations, consumer protections, let the market run wild, and prosperity would rain down on all of us."

Could Mr. Obama really believe that the era of Sarbanes-Oxley was about letting "the market run wild"?

One had to look far and wide in the spring of 2002 to find anyone who thought the Sarbanes-Oxley law was an experiment in cowboy capitalism. For example, on its front page of April 25, 2002, the New York Times reported: "House and Senate negotiators agreed . . . on a broad overhaul of corporate fraud, accounting and securities laws aimed at curbing the rampant abuses that have shaken Wall Street . . . Some lawmakers called it the most sweeping securities legislation since the 1930s." The Times added that "business and accounting industry lobbyists had tried in recent days to soften the measure, but they got nowhere."

Of course, in the years since this sweeping securities legislation was enacted, its costs -- borne by public companies, and therefore by investors -- have been many times official estimates. And with the benefit of time, even liberal Democrats such as New York Sen. Charles Schumer came to realize that the regulatory monster created by Sarbanes-Oxley had to be tamed.

Mr. Schumer was so concerned about the migration of business from Wall Street to London, Hong Kong and even Dubai that he joined New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in commissioning a study of the problem and potential solutions. When the study was released in January 2007, Messrs. Schumer and Bloomberg wrote in an accompanying note that "our regulatory framework is a thicket of complicated rules." They warned that without reform, "we will no longer be the financial capital of the world."

As heavy as was Washington's hand upon the financial markets beginning in year two of the Bush era, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer may have imposed even greater costs on Wall Street. Dusting off the 1921 Martin Act -- an antifraud statute so broad that it does not even require prosecutors to demonstrate criminal intent -- Mr. Spitzer forced a series of costly settlements that made Wall Street's traditional business of underwriting stock offerings much less profitable.

The excesses Mr. Spitzer sought to prevent were clear at the time; only later did the collateral damage to America's markets become manifest, as New York lost business to London and elsewhere.

In a 2004 Slate column, Daniel Gross described the initial impact when Mr. Spitzer targeted the insurance industry. "In response, the stocks of the biggest players implicated, Marsh & McLennan and AIG, have tanked, losing a combined $38 billion in market capitalization. More alarming for the insurers, Spitzer signaled this was just the beginning of an industry-wide investigation. For when he finds a few bad eggs, Eliot Spitzer cleans out the entire coop and changes the way it is run, as Wall Street's investment banks and mutual funds have learned to their dismay."

Mr. Spitzer would ultimately drive the CEOs of both Marsh and McLennan and AIG from office, with disastrous consequences for shareholders. In the case of AIG, the staggering extent of the disaster has lately been revealed.

The combination of Mr. Bush's enactment of Sarbanes-Oxley and Mr. Spitzer's Wall Street prosecutions contributed to America's significant market-share loss of initial public offerings -- and the U.S. is yet to return to pre-Bush levels. While government reduced the profit-making potential in Wall Street's traditional bread-and-butter business, it was simultaneously encouraging investment in the housing sector. Neither activity constituted deregulation.

Perhaps Mr. Obama is looking beyond the financial markets and taking a broad view of the economy in concluding that Mr. Bush was a deregulator. If so, it's hard to find evidence to support this conclusion.

Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute tracks regulation across the entire federal government. He reports that the Bush administration set an all-time record in 2004, when it published more than 75,000 pages of proposed and enacted rules in the Federal Register.

Leftists might assume that many of these rules were actually watering down earlier standards -- but where's the evidence of declining compliance costs? Lafayette College economist Mark Crain estimates more than $1.1 trillion in federal regulatory costs for 2004, up an inflation-adjusted 16% from 2000. Overall agency enforcement budgets have increased each year since 2004.

A recent report, "Regulatory Agency Spending Reaches New Height," from Washington University's Weidenbaum Center puts Mr. Bush's regulatory activity in historical context. Co-authors Veronique de Rugy and Melinda Warren say that when it comes to spending on regulatory agencies, our current president is almost in a class by himself, with an increase of almost 68% during his two terms. In constant dollars the Bush regulatory budget increases vastly exceed those of predecessors Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Nixon and, yes, Lyndon Johnson.

Looking at regulatory spending in percentage terms, Mr. Bush's staggering 2003 increase of more than 24% was the largest in the last 50 years. If Mr. Obama considers this a record of deregulation -- and if current polls hold -- America's economy could be in for a very long four years.

Mr. Freeman is assistant editor of the Journal's editorial page.

Let me address two of Obama's claims that are just plain false.

1) Obama alleges that independent organizations have claimed that he would provide three times more  middle class tax relief than McCain.  The report - which I blogged on earlier from the Tax Policy Center - said that without counting McCain's tax exemption for health-care Obama would provide three times more tax relief to the middle class.  However this isn't true for middle class families with children (remember McCain wants to double the child exemptions).  The statement is completely false if you count McCain's health-care tax credit which the Tax Policy Center didn't do and admitted that if you counted those credits that the results would be drastically different.
             The other deceptive problem with his statement is that Obama is ignoring his unintended consequences of raising taxes on small businesses, capital gains, wealthy individuals and entrepreneurs.  First of all, yes, taxes might go down for many people - but how many people would face an income loss as a result of his policies?  Economics 101 - all people pay all taxes.  You can't tax one group without hurting another in some way.  Think about it this way: two people are in a town.  One guy sells stuff on ebay the other guy runs a grocery store.  The guy who sells stuff on ebay makes 100 dollars, the one who runs the grocery store makes only 50 dollars.  The government decides to tax the "rich" guy and redistribute to the "poor guy".  So the government takes 25 of the rich guys dollars and spends 20 dollars on stuff for the poor guy.  Wait you might say - they taxed the rich guy 25 dollars.  The government is inefficient - they need 5 dollars to run themselves.  Now the grocery store guy gets 70 dollars and the ebay guy has 75 dollars.  Problem is now that the ebay guy is down 25 dollars and so he decides to cut back on his grocery store bill so he only spends 25 dollars instead of fifty... so what happens?  The grocery store owner is down to 45 dollars.  5 dollars less than what he started with before the redistributive process began.  Now this isn't always going to happen - but don't think this is uncommon.  When you take away income people spend in the economy and give it to the government you have a dead-weight loss.  Instead of the government people working and producing goods and services they only drain money from the pool.  Do they spend it too?  Yes, but they don't add their own production to the economy.  They redistribute money and take a commission, they don't actually do anything else. 

Real quick side note: As for the small business claim (Obama says he will lower taxes on 98% of small businesses or if he doesn’t lower their taxes he won’t raise ‘em.  98% of small businesses is a misleading number.  See 98% of small businesses generate only 50% of all small business income!  So the other 2% of small businesses that Obama will raise taxes on generate the other 50% of the small business income!  Think you are going to get a raise if your boss has to fork over more money to Uncle Sam?  I didn’t think so.

2) Obama claims that in regards to Health Care, "By the way, the average policy costs about $12,000. So if you've got $5,000 and it's going to cost you $12,000, that's a loss for you."  What a crock.  He's too smart to be this dumb.  This is just a misleading statement that he knows McCain won't be able to parry.  It might be 12,000 - though that figure is debated... but the 5,000 is nonsense.  It is 5,000 plus 12,000-taxes on the 12,000... let's think about it this way:  The median working family income makes $61,500 (rounding).  If we pretend that this family has no more income exemptions and won't receive anymore under McCain then if you add 12,000 to that number it becomes 73,500.  Now the first 3,601 of that money is taxed a rate of 15% so one would get to keep 3,060.85 of that money.  The next 8,399 dollars are taxed at a rate of 25%, so you get to keep 6,299.25 of that.  Now you add them together and get $9360.10.  On top of that 9,360 dollars you get a 5,000 tax credit so you get a total of $14,360.10...  What is more $14,360.10 or $12,000 dollars?  Obama is also assuming that the average cost of healthcare is going to stay at $12,000 dollars.  If you deregulate healthcare over state lines that cost could be considerably less...  Now the problem with McCain's plan is how he is going to deal with sick people who need care?  I have a few ideas about how to do this BUT... they are my ideas not his. Regardless though the 5,000 vrs 12,000 is total bull and yall need to know the real numbers.  McCain's plan has some serious problems but Obama's claim is too inaccurate and misleading for me to let it go... 

 

http://news.yahoo.com/s/bloomberg/20080916/pl_bloomberg/ambsgo09sxvo

Obama and McCain, they'll fight for us right?  Smart regulations?  Yeah... w/e.  They have been bribed to the tune of 9.9 and 6.9 million dollars of donations (respectively). 

Change change in a pot, the more you believe it the more we rot!  Hmm my song writing skills are somewhat limited.  I texted Tupac for some advice.  He sent me back some hot lines:

Come on come on
That's just the way it is
Things'll always be the same
That's just the way it is
aww yeah

Is the public financing system broken Barack?  Or are you as greedy as the CEO's you criticize?  As for you McCain - Phil Gramm as an economic advisor in this day and age is like letting the inmates run the asylum! (Yes I know he is no longer affiliated with the campaign and he slated for the Belarus embassy).

Edit: Poor AIG... looks like the feds won't bail them out either.  I guess they should have investigated what they insured in the financial sector.  Nah, no one does that anymore... :)

Edit: That's what?  The fifth time I have used the inmates run the asylum expression during the last couple weeks.  Seems like it always applies. 

We need two things right now to help Wall Street out. 

1) Transparency - the books of these major investment firms are black boxes, no one knows what’s inside except the inmates...

2) And this goes with #1... Credit agencies who rate, aka Credit rating agencies, are not working... See it works like this.  Investment Bank A asks Credit Rating Agency B to evaluate them and give them a rating.  CRA B gives them a mediocre rating.  IB A says, "we don't like your rating we're not going to pay you."  CRA B either reevaluates, or goes away.  Now let's say you are the CEO of CRA B.  You know that someone is going to give IB A a good credit rating.  Why?  Because people are greedy, and there is a demand for a rating - the truth doesn't pay here necessarily.  The market is unfortunately going to give IB A a rating it doesn't deserve.  So we need to get rid of this system.  We need to have someone understand the books and rate them.  Either IB's provide open books for everyone, which would not necessarily be such a great idea, to put it lightly, or CRA's need to be able to evaluate IB's fairly.

Unless we fix something to do with the transparency of IBs we're letting the inmates run the asylum.

 

Yeah, Screw-Job.

http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2008/07/top-senate-recipients-of-fanni.html  Hmm Barney Frank, Chrissss Dodd, Hill and Obama... wonder why they bribed them the most?  The best evaluation of who is responsible for this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/11/AR2008091102841.html.  As usual Clinton and Bush got it right.  Congressional Dems got it wrong.  I think Congressional Democrats are probably the worst thing to happen to America in the past twenty years... their record is just a travesty of competency.