Housing collapse

The two links below are to slide shows that tell the story better than anything I've seen.

It's pretty incredible, and what it says about the vast inventory of foreclosed houses is almost surreal:

A Frightening Satellite Tour Of America's Foreclosure Wastelands

Case Shiller: Here Are The 15 Housing Markets That Will Fall The Most By 2012

Fooling nobody

Smoke, mirrors, and cheap deceptive blather.

Obama is completely hopeless. He suffers from the same mental disease that's been common to socialists all the way back, from Babeuf to Robert Owen to Marx/Engels and on forward. It's the twin delusions that people are malleable to any degree in their motivations, and that capitalism is a magical, eternal fount of money that can be confiscated and redistributed to establish the New Order. The result is always the same, a vastly powerful central government overseeing a ruined economy and an impoverished people. They simply cannot learn the clear lessons of history, seem to be emotionally unable to accept them.

Socialism is the most anti-humanist system ever developed, because it consistently sacrifices people to a theoretical system with a utopian vision of what people ought to be like, but are not, never were, and never will be. Economic failure, political repression, and mounds of corpses follow like night follows day.

Byron

Cantor: We need entitlements on the table, Mr. President

Obama proposed a five-year freeze on non-security discretionary spending. That accounts for around $450 billion in a $3.8 trillion budget, which has a deficit of $1.5 trillion. Obama claimed in his speech last night that a freeze in this spending would save $400 billion over the next decade, but that comes from simply eliminating the discretionary spending increases Obama himself projected over that period. It doesn’t “save” money in any sense except the Beltway definition of savings through decreases in projected spending increases.

Besides, $40 billion of savings a year against projected deficits of over a trillion dollars each of the next ten years (on average) leaves 96% of the deficits in place. That’s not even a good start; it’s barely even symbolic.

The only ways to end the deficits are through massive reforms of mandatory spending to get to the $2.4 trillion in spending it represents, as well as the discretionary spending on security that accounts for almost another trillion dollars. Until those are on the table, deficit reduction talk is not just cheap, but transparent.

Ridiculous CBS poll

CBS did an online poll during Obama's speech, where 500 people representing viewers nationally (self-identified 44% Dem, 25% GOP):

The results are being touted all over the place this morning: 91% approve of the proposals the president made in his speech, only 9% disapprove.

This is obviously a completely ridiculous poll, and a suitably ridiculous outcome. As William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection points out, you couldn't get this kind of opinion number in North Korea. 91% of Americans don't agree about anything, let alone anything politically serious.

What's going on here is also obvious. Obama's speech was a list of goodies, period. Naming goodies isn't making a proposal -- proposals contain cost estimates, risk assessments, specify what has to be sacrificed to actually bring about whatever thing or service is being proposed. A goody list is just a description of attractive stuff, with no mention of their cost, what would have to be given up in exchange, or the likelihood that they could actually ever be achieved.

Obama says Higher economic growth. Viewer says, "Yeah, I'm for that!" Better health care that also saves money -- "Yeah, I'm for that, too!" Job creation? "Yeah!" High-speed rail. "Yes!" More technical training in schools. "My man!" And so on and on through the whole silly speech.

It's like standing in front of an audience of seals, holding up one fish after the other to see if they clap their flippers. Of course they would like to have every fish you hold up, wish they could have it, are in favor of it being thrown their way. Clap, clap, clap. So what?

Junk poll, junk result, sponsored by CBS, a junk network, then touted and pumped by the rest of them. Business as usual for the liberal media.

Byron

Fail

A truly dreary, disconnected SOTU speech. He even dragged out that debunked CBO estimate that ObamaCare would save money -- the CBO itself disclaimed it as a product of bad numbers. This president has nothing left.

Even AP (!) isn't buying whatever it was that Obama thought he was selling.

FACT CHECK: Obama and his imbalanced ledger

Gosnell trial

Is this (below) what Dr. Gosnell's defense will be build around? That he was performing a perfectly legal form of abortion? "I spoke with three labor and delivery nurses who are familiar with the procedures, two of them had also read the grand jury's indictment. All remarked at how similar the procedures were." So his practice was guilty of nothing more than, perhaps, criminal negligence in the case of the women who died or were injured, that and some failures of hygiene? Are we going to find out things we'd rather not know about partial-birth abortions, how they're done, how many of them are being performed, and justified how, exactly?

This may be a very troubling trial, wrenching maybe, and not primarily for Gosnell. What kind of slippery slope did we end up on here? I am not a religious believer, but I do believe that the weakening of religious belief in the West carries some costs. How else can any notion of the sanctity of human life be maintained? The word itself means sacred or holy. We replace that with what, exactly, that will protect innocent life? The legal system doesn't seem an adequate answer, as the type of abortions he was performing apparently are legal. We should not have ended up at this place, but it's unclear to me how to avoid it, what resources a secular society has to draw moral lines and maintain them. We'll know decadence has been achieved when the only standards that can be appealed to are aesthetic ones.

Byron

The Eerie Timing of An Abortion Anniversary and Charges Against Philadelphia's Dr. Gosnell

Yet the procedure that Gosnell is alleged to have preferred to implement in his practice is one that bears a strong resemblance to something several public officials have voted in support of as U.S. Senators of "late term abortions." These procedures are more commonly referred to as "partial-birth abortions."

Both procedures begin by inducing early labor. Depending on how early, this alone will claim the life of roughly 76% of the pre-born children involved. Therefore in both cases roughly 25% of the pre-born children survive and a dilemma exists.

For parents who went seeking an abortion, a living child is exactly the opposite of what they wished.

In Gosnell's case he carried the delivery through to completion, it is alleged that he would then end the child's life by using a pair of scissors to snip the spinal cord.

With the majority of "partial-birth abortions" the medical practitioner would deliver the child to within two inches of being completely out of the birth canal, then using a pair of scissors, or a scalpel, would puncture the base of the head, and snip the spinal cord.

What would follow in both procedures would normally be a suctioning of the skull, disposal of the medical and human waste, and the surgical repair of the patient, if any was needed -- both procedures regularly required some repair.

I spoke with three labor and delivery nurses who are familiar with the procedures, two of them had also read the grand jury's indictment. All remarked at how similar the procedures were.

Where did stimulus money go?

How a Trillion dollars went down the drain. Families used the money to pay down credit card debt and hunker down. Grants to states were used to temporarily shore up state finances, -- without requiring them to cut spending -- and to expand Medicare. Federal and state purchases of goods and services, which could have been stimulative, were negligible. The state finances are in ruin, the Federal deficit has exploded, the money's gone, and there was no stimulus.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

Byron

Where Did the Stimulus Go?

During the recent recession, the U.S. Congress passed two large economic stimulus programs. President Bush’s February 2008 program totaled $152 billion. President Obama’s bill, enacted a year later, was considerably larger at $862 billion. Neither worked. After more than three years since the crisis flared up, unemployment is still very high and economic growth is weak. Why have such large sums of money failed to stimulate the economy? To answer this question, we must look at where the billions of stimulus dollars went and how they were used.

Nearly half of all stimulus-program grants to states have been funds for Medicaid, the primary state-government health-care program for low-income families. These grants were designed to achieve the Obama administration’s goal of increasing health-care coverage by expanding government health-care programs.
But that goal is a far different one from stimulating aggregate economic activity. Medicaid grants were unlikely to provide much if any stimulus to aggregate economic activity, and they haven’t. Moreover, these grants appear to have caused state governments to shift funds away from purchases of goods and services and into their Medicaid programs.

To sum up: the federal government borrowed funds that it mainly sent to households and to state and local governments. Only an immaterial amount was used for federal purchases of goods and services. The borrowed funds were mainly used by households and state and local governments to reduce their own borrowing. In effect, the increased net borrowing at the federal level was matched by reduced net borrowing by households and state and local governments.

So there was little if any net stimulus. The irony is that basic economic theory and practical experience predicted this would happen. If policymakers had only remembered what Milton Friedman, Franco Modigliani, and Ned Gramlich had said, we might have avoided these two extremely costly policy failures.

Incredible

Corbett demands probe of failure to regulate abortion clinics in Pennsylvania

The argument by both departments that they didn’t think their jurisdiction extended to abortion clinics is a bald-faced lie. They knew full well that they had the authority to conduct investigations and to prosecute violations. They just didn’t want to do it. As the grand jury concluded, the neglect by both DoH and DoS for “abortion patients’ safety and of Pennsylvania laws is clearly not inadvertent: It is by design.”

Gosnell and his staff of ghouls face criminal prosecution for their crimes. Corbett and his team should pursue charges against public officials for gross dereliction of duty — and start checking to see how many more Gosnells are operating charnel houses in the Keystone State with impunity because of it.

I'm pro-choice (safe, legal, and rare), but nobody in the world could be pro- what went on in this place. To say that Pennsylvania public officials were derelict hardly suffices; they were virtually complicit. You can bet that other states are already scrambling to perform overdue inspections, hoping not to uncover anything like this.

Byron

Philadelphia case

Here is the report of the grand jury. I haven't read it all, but clearly the biggest question it raises is why the medical/legal authorities did not take action long, long before they did. If you consider where this butcher shop was located, and who the women were that made up its clientele, it's hard not to come to a very ugly conclusion about that.

Byron

How depressing is this?

Very:

Student tracking finds limited learning in college

The study, an unusually large-scale effort to track student learning over time, comes as the federal government, reformers and others argue that the U.S. must produce more college graduates to remain competitive globally. But if students aren't learning much, that calls into question whether boosting graduation rates will provide that edge.

"It's not the case that giving out more credentials is going to make the U.S. more economically competitive," Arum said in an interview. "It requires academic rigor ... You can't just get it through osmosis at these institutions."

---
The whole college thing is suddenly starting to look like what it is, a house of cards. "More college graduates"? The focus on boosting the number of graduates is completely wrong -- it needs to be on raising the quality of graduates instead. We have plenty of people graduating, the problem is that too many graduate with majors of little value to anybody. What earthly point is there in adding another million graduates with junk majors who end up unemployed, in debt from student loans, and living in Mom's basement? It's a waste of everybody's time and money. Far better to learn plumbing or welding or something else where there are careers that pay good money because they actually accomplish something useful. Truth be known, there are large numbers of people sitting in college classrooms who could not pass the courses necessary to learn how to repair the modern automobile.

Colleges are focused primarily on maximizing their FTE count (Full Time Equivalent students -- two half-time students equal one FTE), which means maximizing asses in seats, Electrical Engineering or Resentment Studies, one's as good as the other. That's what the funding formulas are based on, so it's how they make their money, not by producing quality graduates in economically valuable majors.

Byron

Boondoggle

Labor Department awards millions of dollars in college grants for scarce ‘green jobs’

The Department of Labor has issued several million dollars in grants to community colleges and specialized universities around the country to train students for “green jobs” in renewable energy fields. While the grants are supposed to fund the future “rank and file” workers of the renewable energy industry, there’s a glaring problem the DOL seemingly overlooked — those jobs are either non-existent or scarce.

How ridiculous. If there was any real demand for these workers, their training would be happening where it should happen, which is on-the-job.

This is just Government finding another way to burn taxpayer money.

Byron

The Secret

Few foreclosures, no bank failures: Canada offers lessons

Not a single Canadian bank failed during the Great Depression, and not a single one failed during the recent U.S. crisis now dubbed the Great Recession. Fewer than 1 percent of all Canadian mortgages are in arrears.

That's notable given that the recent U.S. economic turmoil was triggered by a meltdown in mortgage finance, forcing an unprecedented government rescue of Wall Street investment banks and the collapse of more than 300 smaller banks as the housing sector went bust.

How'd Canada avoid all that?

"This sounds very simple, but one of our CEOs has said we are in the business of making loans to people who will pay them back," said Terry Campbell, vice president of policy for the Canadian Bankers Association in Ottawa.

Sounds fairly fundamental, but it isn't so simple when you add into the mix a delusional Democrat social agenda, fronted by the likes of Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, an agenda that said societal fairness requires that every family should own a home regardless of ability to afford it. So the Community Reinvestment Act was used to put US lenders under Government threat to make those bad loans or else face regulatory reprisals. Shazam! People were put into houses they couldn't afford, the doomed loans were guaranteed by Freddie, securitized and marketed as AAA investment quality.

Then the completely unsustainable housing bubble this created began to weaken, the underlying loans slid into default as under-qualified homeowners couldn't make their payments, and the whole rotten mess collapsed, taking the rest of the economy with it. So here we are. Like King Canute, who thought he could command the tides, maybe the Democrats have a plan to fix it all by passing some new laws of economics...

Byron

Depression territory

Government policies driven by a SOCIAL goal of "fairness" created a system of false ECONOMIC incentives that wrecked the housing market and caused this catastrophe. Then, rather than let the market clear the mess, Government foolishly continues to try to prop it up by throwing money down a rat hole of futile stop-gaps to try to keep people in houses they can't afford, and never could afford. The money being thrown away is borrowed, adds to the monstrous deficit, and is not available for productive uses. A perfect storm of stupidity.

Government directed social-economic planning is the core idea, the Holy Writ, of left liberalism, always has been, always will be. They will learn nothing from this. Less than nothing, because the lesson they will see is that Government did not go far enough, did not do something to sufficient extent, to make it all work. The best anyone can do is try to keep these people out of public office, far away from the levers of Government power.

Byron


CNBC:

Things were bad but the broader economy never reached Depression territory. The housing market, on the other hand, just crossed that threshold.

Home values have fallen 26 percent since their peak in June 2006, worse than the 25.9-percent decline seen during the Depression years between 1928 and 1933, Zillow reported.

November marked the 53rd consecutive month (4 ½ years) that home values have fallen.

What’s worse, it’s not over yet: Home values are expected to continue to slide as inventories pile up, and likely won't recover until the job market improves.

Backfire

Instapundit:

The biggest worry after the November elections was that a lot of people on the right would declare victory and go home. The shameless attempt to politicize the Tucson shootings and scapegoat people on the right has generated a huge amount of anger. Tea Party folks being who they are, I suspect this will mostly manifest itself as grunt-level political work in preparation for 2012 — precisely the opposite of what the scapegoaters were hoping for: Don’t get mad, get even, by making 2012 an even bigger shellacking than 2010.

This is what happens when you get beat and, rather than sitting down and calmly figuring out what you did wrong, you panic instead and start grabbing at straws, looking for a cheap fix. There is no cheap fix for where the Dems have landed themselves.

Just like the GOP after it lost its majority in 2006/2008, the Dems will have to earn their way back. That means either convincing people that their approach to things is the correct one or changing their approach to things so it more closely resembles what voters want. So far, they don't have a clue how to do that and are just digging themselves into a deeper hole. It's all about recapturing credibility, and attacking the other side with false accusations and name-calling contributes nothing to that, merely makes you a sore loser having a tantrum and it fires up the opposition.

Dems have two serious problems. One is that they rammed legislation through with their control of the WH and both houses of Congress, which means blaming the GOP won't work -- Dems did not need a single GOP vote to carry out their agenda. The second is that they did so much long-lasting damage (e.g., outrageous spending and deficits), that it will follow them for years like tin cans tied to their tails. They fully own the entire mess for as long as it lasts. Since the Dems that survived the last election were mostly the more leftward leaning, their strong inclination will likely be to double down on their legislative and regulatory record. Good luck with that.

We about to see how smart Obama really is.

Byron

Dupnik, free speech

(1) Why has Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik become an instant media whore, thrusting himself in front of every camera he can find to try to spread the blame for Loughner's shooting spree? He's making a fool of himself, and you don't do that without good reason. He acts like a man on a frantic mission to cover his own behind. There were warnings and red flags all over the place about this shooter, yet Dupnik's office sat on its hand and took no action. How did Loughner stay on the OK list to buy a gun in the first place? Sheriff Dubnik has a whole bunch of explaining to do, and the media fog machine is not going to protect him for long.

See this: http://moelane.com/2011/01/10/did-dupnik-dismiss-loughner-threat/


(2) On the demands for "toning down the political rhetoric," Comedian Penn Jillette tweeted thus:

F*ck Civility. Hyperbole, passion, and metaphor are beautiful parts of rhetoric. Marketplace of ideas can not be toned down for the insane.

Exactly right.

Said another way by an anonymous commenter: "Anyone else find it creepy that the new standard of what we may say or not say is: How will it affect the behavior of an obviously crazy person who may or may not hear it?"

Much worse than creepy. The left would repeal the 2nd Amendment, now they'd gut the 1st Amendment, too? No wonder they didn't want the Constitution read. Always some government imposed restriction for our own good, of course. This is the same nanny pack of worshippers at the altar of political correctness that has created Orwellian speech codes on university campuses, places above all where debate should be, needs to be, free and untrammeled.

(If you think that's important, send a few bucks to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education at www.thefire.org. They've been dragging university administrations into court for free speech violations and winning every case. On their website you can see recent cases, and also look up any college to see how it stands with respect to free speech policies on its campus. Some of the worst offenders will surprise you. FIRE's only politics are the politics of the Enlightenment; one of its founders, Prof. Alan Korz, literally wrote the book on the ascendency of reason -- represented by a flame -- in Western civilization. Good people and a good cause, tax deductible.)


Byron

Fantasies

CBO NOW SAYS Repealing Obamacare Will Save US $540 Billion

Anybody who could possibly believe that a massive new medical care entitlement would save money needs put down the crack pipe and try to re-enter the real world. CBO says repealing ObamaCare would reduce spending by $540 billion over ten years. Good. But I don't for one moment believe that number, either. The true amount saved by killing this monstrosity would be far more than that.

Just consider the actual cost of Medicare vs. the projected costs -- House Ways and Means predicted in 1967 that Medicare (introduced the previous year) would cost about $12 billion by 1990. In fact, by 1990, the Medicare tab was... $110 billion! The CBO estimates 2010 Medicare spending at $528 billion, $735 billion in 2015, $1,038 billion in 2020. Those will be underestimates, too, even without ObamaCare.

Byron