Being Poor Ain't What It Used To Be

So the Census Bureau recently released US poverty rate numbers and hands are being wrung over how horrible it is that 15% of people in the US are currently in poverty. But looking at this chart you can see that it's more or less bounced around between 10 and 15% since the mid 1960's.

And Tim Forstall of Forbes points out that the way the poverty level is calculated - income below "three times the food bill of a family in the early 1960s, upgraded over time for inflation" - only counts cash income and not benefits. Which means that Medicaid, Food Stamps, Section 8 housing vouchers, and all the various tax credits available do not count towards this calculation.

So when the government computes the poverty level it's really counting the number of people who were poor before we helped them.

And how bad off are the poor? Well this bad:

That's right 78% of the poor have air conditioning, over 2/3's of them have cable TV and DVD players, and over half have cell phones (note that this is from 2005 so I expect these percentages to have only gone up since then). Damn - as a kid back in 1980 I would have given anything to be impoverished 2011-style. more...

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:13 PM | Comments (568)
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OT Alert: Always Sunny in Philadelpha starting on FX. Then Archer. Both funny. Both profane/sleazy/mean.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves, but yeah, I repeat, I have been semi-seriously floating this sort of idea for a while.

Starting at 3:05, Fund entertains this idea. No, Obama can't be primaried out, not really, because if you win, you lose, because no way do the 1/3rd of the blacks that make up the Democratic primary voting community welcome that. (In this scenario, Obama would be such a sure loser (only way it could happen in the first place) that many blacks would support the switch, but too many more would view it as the Democrats betraying the first black president, rather than sticking by him.)

The only way it happens if it's voluntary; Obama declines to seek reelection.

Maybe after it was strongly suggested he do so.

Kind of silly, but not really so silly: We are probably in a recession now, and the scary thing is, a recession might be the best case scenario.

Is this all Obama's fault? No. Europe is coming apart at the seams; Obama didn't do that. But he's been pushing us towards a European model. He just wouldn't be viable after that. Especially because it's pretty clear he's married to his One Big Idea (European social-democratic welfare statism) and this Rara Avis will not reinvent himself under any circumstances.

This is now a nontrivial possibility. Tiny chance. But we do sort of have to rouse ourselves into preparing for the possibility that as much fun as we're having at Obama's expense lately -- he may not actually be our opponent in 2012.

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Posted by: Ace at 05:58 PM | Comments (184)
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Hey, Jews? You either stay on Team Democrat or we give you the treatment we give to our enemies.

You don't want us reviving centuries-old tropes about Jewish wealth, do you?

Then do the right thing. You understand?

California Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman, a prominent Jewish congressman, explained that some Jews are selecting not to vote for Democrats because “they want to protect their wealth, which is why a lot of well-off voters vote for Republicans.”

Waxman is himself Jewish, so I suppose he's "allowed" to say this. Still, he's putting people on notice what the acceptable sort of commentary may become if Jews aren't sufficiently supportive of the Democratic cause.

Jews, meanwhile, are starting to have their doubts about Obama's commitment to protecting their wealth (as Waxman might put it).

Obama’s approval rating among Jewish Americans is also down to 55 percent – a five point drop from his approval rating in June, which stood at 60 percent.

Together, the rise in disapproval and dip in approval ratings are a net negative 11 point downturn for Obama among JewsÂ…

At that link, Hot Air discusses whether or not the US will veto Palestine's formal demand of statehood at the UN. Based on Obama's hosin' from The Chosen, he figures we will in fact veto it.

But who knows with this guy.

Posted by: Ace at 02:44 PM | Comments (505)
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I am sick to death of King Barry the Green trotting out Warren Buffett as his go-to CEO. "Tax me more" begs Buffett, when he could just write a check.

Oh, wait, that would blunt the effectiveness of his charitable giving estate tax avoidance plan. My bad.

Notice, though, that Obama only has a handful of people to use as examples. When you get past the ultra-wealthy like Buffett and Bill Gates, Sr. and rent-seekers like GE's Jeffrey Immelt, there's not much left.

So how many jobs has Buffett created, anyway? He invests in established businesses after others have done the heavy lifting and is famously hands-off when it comes to management of his portfolio companies. I guess he's good at saving jobs or something, but creating ... not so much.

On the other hand, there are people like Bernie Marcus that anybody but a SCOAMF would love to have on his team. Marcus was one of the founders of Home Depot, which employs about 320,000 people in over 2,200 retail locations and sucks dollars out of my wallet on a weekly basis.

Together, with the help of New York investment banker Ken Langone who assembled a group of investors and business partner Arthur Blank, they launched the highly successful home-improvement retailer The Home Depot in 1979. The store revolutionized the home improvement business with its warehouse concept and the three became billionaires as a result. He was the company's first CEO for 19 years and served as chairman of the board until his retirement in 2002.

Also, if you've ever been to the outstanding Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, thank Bernie Marcus - he's almost singlehandedly responsible for its existence.

This is a guy that knows a thing or two about what it takes to create a business and hire people. Here's his assessment of the administration (from CNBC's Squawk Box):

About a year ago I was on this program, and we had this great conversation. If you remember, I said something like Geithner does to small business what Debbie did to Dallas.

...

Look, a year ago I predicted what was going to happen. Things were looking good, Obama was out there saying we're turning things around, the money was out there, we're putting money in, we're spending money, we're creating jobs. And after speaking about this, and I did a lot of work beforehand ... I visited a lot of small business people beforehand to see what the real world was like which is what the people in Washington don't have a clue about.

I mean they really don't know. You know, when you go into Washington, it's never, never land. Unemployment is low as hell. You can't find people for jobs. People are making tons of money. They're spending money in restaurants. I mean there's no problem in Washington. It's like a state unto itself. It's like a country unto itself. (emphasis added)

Bingo! I hear DC metro has some nice golf courses too.

The government doesn't need to Pass This Bill™! It just needs to get the hell out of the way.

(Video below the fold) more...

Posted by: andy at 01:22 PM | Comments (193)
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I said this.

But okay, here's some other people saying this.

I think the best one can say about Perry’s two debate performances is that they’ve been good enough — he is, after all, still the frontrunner in most polls. I think the worst you can say is that, so far, Perry is deeply disappointing to any Republican who wanted a presidential nominee who could naturally and easily articulate a powerful argument for conservative principles and think on his feet.

I'd put it like this: When people buy a car, they like the reassurance that this is the car for them. That there really is no close competitor. That there are no nagging doubts they'll have as they drive away, wondering about the other models. Maybe those were better?

You can close a deal with nagging consumer doubts, but it'll take a long time, and the client will never really be satisfied with his choice.

Although Perry is making a case for himself as a car that's okay, and will get you where you want to go, he's not doing the real job of making would-be buyers think, "Man, why would even look at another car?"

Very meh, okay. Not closing the sale.

On the Gardasil thing, Perry's friends come to his defense.

Video at the link, but here's the print story:

Until you've seen a special photograph, Craig Wilson says you don't know the whole story of Rick Perry's HPV vaccine decision.

"She's happy as hell. I mean, she is just unbelievably ecstatic," Wilson said. "Here she is on a beautiful ranch somewhere, riding on a motorcycle, which she's never really done, with the governor of the state of Texas."

The guy driving the motorcycle is Governor Rick Perry. The young woman on the back is Houstonian Heather Burcham, who was at that moment just 31 years old and a few months away from dying of cervical cancer.

Heather said in an interview prior to her death, "I feel like I'm not going in vain, because I can tell others about it."

When Heather was diagnosed, she set out to tell the world about her illness and the vaccine that would've prevented it. Her fear was that her pain and her death would mean nothing.

She said, "I kept thinking, 'What good can come from this?'"

After Governor Perry got in Texas trouble for signing an executive order in 2007 mandating the HPV vaccine, Heather tried to convince lawmakers to let it stand, and in the process met Governor Perry. But more than a meeting, it sparked a friendship.

Long after the order was rescinded and Perry lost the political fight, they kept talking. Heather had Perry's personal cell phone number and he invited her for a day at a friend's ranch.

Wilson, a friend of Heather's, recalled, "It was a great day, one of the great days of her life. She loved the whole thing."

Months later, when the end was near for Heather, Perry quietly snuck into Houston and sat by her bedside. No press, no statement -- just the governor and one of his 21 million constituents.

"I think he truly had a heart for this young woman," said Mary Lee, one of Heather's friends.

Sob stories don't make Perry's position right, but this does tend to demonstrate that Perry might have been motivated by more than that sweet, sweet $22,000 in Merck retardation money.

Posted by: Ace at 12:41 PM | Comments (420)
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I've been following the Global Warming controversy for years and it's easy to forget that not everybody has seen the same info I have. For example, the long term temperature records extrapolated from Greenland and Antarctic ice cores. It was mentioned in the Planet Gore blog the other day and I thought, "oh yeah - lots of people haven't seen this!".

Here's a animated graph of temps covering the last 420,000 years. When people say the Earth's warming is getting out of control keep this graph in mind.

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Posted by: Open Blogger at 11:35 AM | Comments (125)
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Saved 13 fellow soldiers and Marines, plus 23 more Afghan allies.

Killed at least 8 Taliban while doing so.

[S]uddenly, the lights in the village went dark, and gunfire erupted. About 50 Taliban insurgents perched on mountainsides and taking cover in the village had ambushed the patrol.

As the forward team took fire and called for air support that wasn't coming, Meyer, just a corporal at the time, begged his command to let him venture into combat to help extricate the team. Four times he was denied his request before Meyer and another Marine, Staff Sgt. Juan Rodriguez-Chavez, jumped into an armored Humvee and headed into battle. For his valor, Rodriguez-Chavez, a 34-year-old who hailed originally from Acuna, Mexico, would be awarded the Navy Cross.

"They told him he couldn't go in," said Dwight Meyer, Dakota Meyer's 81-year-old grandfather, a former Marine who served in the 1950s. "He told them, 'The hell I'm not,' and he went in. It's a one-in-a-million thing" that he survived.

That's all I'll quote. The piece is worth reading; at this point, Meyer made five trips into the "kill zone," manning the turret to provide some semblance of cover to himself, as he and Rodriguez-Chavez evacuated soldiers. Getting shot up as they did.

On their own authority, of course. Defied orders -- "It's too dangerous, you don't have permission, we can't afford further casualties. You're not going."

"The hell I'm not."

Nice.

Video interview with Meyer here.

Update: Obama's ARRA is trying to figure out if there's some way to add the 13 saved soldiers and Marines into the "saved or created" jobs list.

Corrected: While a corporal during the Medal of Honor-worthy engagement, Meyer is now a sergeant.

Also corrected -- he's the first living Marine recipient in 38 years.

Posted by: Ace at 11:13 AM | Comments (100)
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Thanks to conspirator JohnE., via Enemy of the People Adam S. Baldwin, Soyndra's own CEO praised Obama specifically and personally for pushing through a half-billion deadweight loss.

From Solyndra's own website, which I hereby report to AttackWatch for spreading lies.

SOLYNDRA OFFERED $535 MILLION LOAN GUARANTEE BY THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

Fremont, CA, March 20, 2009 – Solyndra, Inc. announced today that it is the first company to receive an offer for a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) loan guarantee under Title XVII of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Solyndra, a Fremont, California-based manufacturer of innovative cylindrical photovoltaic systems, will use the proceeds of a $535 million loan from the U.S. Treasury’s Federal Financing Bank to expand its solar panel manufacturing capacity in California.

“The leadership and actions of President Barack Obama, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and the U.S. Congress were instrumental in concluding this offer for a loan guarantee,” said Solyndra CEO and founder, Dr. Chris Gronet. “The DOE Loan Guarantee Program funding will enable Solyndra to achieve the economies of scale needed to deliver solar electricity at prices that are competitive with utility rates. This expansion is really about creating new jobs while meaningfully impacting global warming.”

New theory of combating the deadly scourge of global warming: If we just destroy wealth, it will necessarily help reduce man-made global warming, because less economic activity means less carbon dioxide -- less travel, less production, less manufacture, less food, less everything. Probably fewer people, too.

Win-win-win.

So... hooray, I guess?

Solydra Did Produce a Lot of Economic Activity, On the Part of Lobbyists, PR Firms, and Spin Doctors: What was it producing? Chiefly spin.

Now if we could just attach magnets to that spin and place that spin inside a magnetized pipe....

Now, Politico reports the lede, but they do not highlight it. Let me do that for you.

Solyndra officials kept obsessive watch over their press coverage while still sending glowing progress reports to the Obama administration — even as the solar manufacturer edged closer to going belly-up.

The media-massaging — revealed in emails released Wednesday — was especially frenzied before and after President Barack Obama’s May 23, 2010, trip to Solyndra’s California headquarters as the company sought to tamp down questions about its troubled finances, the U.S. solar industry's ability to compete with China, and unionized workers who had to take a day off without pay during the visit.

Solyndra spokesman David Miller also did his share of glad-handing with the White House aides handling Obama's trip.

"If you tire of the White House life and ever decide you want to move out with your best friends in [California] let me know,” Miller emailed to White House special assistant Johanna Maska the day after the visit. He added that “we could find you a great corporate gig very quickly."

Maska, promoted this April to director of White House press advance, didn't take Miller up on the offer.

But wink wink on that, huh? You're such a trooper... if you just keep helping us, we can help you, savvy?

Via Hot Air.

Update: I gave that Politico story short-shrift. While I've excerpted the beginning, and highlighted that job offer bit, do yourselves a favor and read the whole thing.

Which is about "intercepting" stories from getting into the NYT, and "mitigating" them if they do... and Solyndra and White House officials are discussing this together.

It's all about media messaging -- which 90% worked, until the bankruptcy.

So, apologies for the suggestion that Politico was napping on the job. Good article, read the whole thing.

Yet Another Update: JohnE., who has been reported to AttackWatch, tells me I stopped reading Solyndra's press release (the first link) too quickly, and missed the end:

Goldman, Sachs & Co. acted as exclusive financial advisor to Solyndra in connection with this loan guarantee application.

Wow. So many Administration cronies, deep-pocket donors, gettin' PAID, son!

Everyone got to dip their beaks.

Except you. You don't count. You exist in order to provide labor for your lords.

Posted by: Ace at 10:34 AM | Comments (154)
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Fast.

And furious.

People are wondering why Solyndra is getting attention, while the media continues to basically ignore Gunwalker, except for these obligatory "here's what happened, but we're also signalling by our lack of interest that it's no big deal" minor, middle-of-the-newspaper stories.

I don't know, of course. But here's my guess.

Solyndra looks like the sort of scandal they're used to calling a scandal. You have here money flowing to corporations and political allies and donors, and political pressure to push this money through, and then the money being completely lost.

They have a template in their minds for that sort of thing.

The problem with Gunwalker, from a media point of view, is that they don't know what pre-existing box it should be neatly packed into.

I have talked about Gunwalker and the theory of the crime. I've said that I don't think the "Turned Up To 11" theory is very helpful. This is the theory, popular on the right and especially with Second Amendment watchers, that the program was created deliberately to cause a spate of gun murders in Mexico and along the US border, which could subsequently be used, Reichstag Fire like, as a pretext for cracking down on the gun rights of American citizens.

To me, this seems a bit unlikely. Not completely unlikely, but a bit unlikely, and a bit too big and conspiratorial to buy without a lot of evidence.

The more likely theory, to me (and the one the media would buy, if it bothers to buy any theory at all), is that this is a crime of incompetence and gross negligence.

However, if that's what it is, the media is obviously pre-disposed to letting off Obama. After all, it's just a case of "mistakes being made." They meant well, didn't they? Okay, so Obama and his senior people apparently graduated with their Masters of SCOAMF degrees (with honors), but all this is (in this view) is an intelligence operation gone badly wrong.

For the media, I guess they'd say: Well, the CIA has goofed up on a lot of covert operations we don't like, that is, operations we never wanted them to try in the first place (Iran-Contra); so here at least the goof was on an operation we could at least all support.

So I think that is part of the issue here. The theory I think is more likely to be true, and also more likely to be considered by the media at all, is a story of gross incompetence and negligent homicide in a badly conceived and completely mismanaged intelligence sting. The media might buy into that, a little, but that also gives them an excuse to say "Mistakes were made, no big deal."

On the other hand, a theory which does have actual malice and corrupt motive attached to it -- the Deliberate Gun Murder As Pretext For Gun Law theory -- is so big that it's very hard to bite into. You can't sort of nibble around it -- you have to take the whole thing in in one bite, and even for someone like me, who's on the right and very opposed to Obama, it's a lot to cram in your mouth all at once.

So I think that's the difference. Solyndra is big, but not too big; they can wrap their heads around it. Money, politics, favors, boondoggles -- they get that.

Gunwalker is either some kind of gross incompetence -- which they'll just excuse Obama for -- or a very large, very serious conspiracy against the American people, which is certainly inexcusable but also difficult to prove (and even hard to conceive).

None of this is really meant to be prescriptive. I'm not offering any advice as to what to do about this. It's just descriptive.

For Gunwalker to be something the press can actually digest, it has to involve more deliberate malice than the "criminal negligence" theory, as they're currentl pretty chill about that level of deadly incompetence, but not so much malice as in the Reichstag theory, which they won't even consider as a possibility.

I don't know what that theory would be.

Problems With the Theories: The "gross incompetence" theory is unsatisfactory because it simply makes no sense.

You cannot have a covert law enforcement sting if you simply let the guns walk and do not track them. What, do you have psychics remotely viewing the weapons? Psychics who will later testify in court as to their psychometric visions of guns changing hands and then being used in murder?

This plainly makes no sense. Once the guns walk, as they did, that's it as far as law enforcement.

So what the hell was the plan here? No one will say. Oh that's not true; they'll say, but they're obviously lying. They claim, vaguely, it was a sting, but as I just explained, you can't have a sting without actually recording the evidence. Surveilling, videotaping, watching, following, tracking. None of that was done, so their claim as to the end-goal here is simply false.

On the other hand, I can't buy the Reichstag scenario, either, at least not as it's been explained to me.

Here's the problem. A small group of people may conspire in secret. That's possible. But bear in mind the actual operation was conducted by dozens (maybe in the low hundreds?) of ATF agents (and other agents, of the DEA and FBI too, it seems) who were not part of the conspiracy, but were integral parts of it; that is, they're not conspirators, but they are witnesses.

So: If the goal was to have a series of gun murders and then pass gun laws to crack down on the murders the Administration actually caused, how did anyone think they could possibly get away with it?

What actually happened was that ATF agents began screaming about this -- early and often. They thought this was bizarre and dangerous and would lead to deaths. (Maybe they were psychic, too, huh?)

The this-was-all-planned scenario relies upon the premise that these agents could have been controlled. The plan only works if you keep the non-conspirator participants in line. You keep them quiet. You threaten to fire them if they squawk.

Well that didn't work. But that's okay from a conspiracy point of view, because sometimes conspiracies are undone when someone squawks.

My problem is How could any reasonably intelligent person have imagined this would work? That is, I could buy a big plan like this if I could imagine, at the start of it, those involved had a reasonable expectation they could get away with it.

But the way this is explained to me -- the Big Theory -- I can't see how the malefactors could ever imagined, in the earliest planning stages, how they could have kept ATF agents from dropping dime on them.

I need some other theory, personally. I don't buy the Small Theory, and can't quite buy the Big Theory, either.

Posted by: Ace at 09:42 AM | Comments (297)
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They don't say boondoggle. But the numbers the report do say it.

A $38.6 billion loan guarantee program that the Obama administration promised would create or save 65,000 jobs has created just a few thousand jobs two years after it began, government records show.

The program — designed to jump-start the nation’s clean technology industry by giving energy companies access to low-cost, government-backed loans — has directly created 3,545 new, permanent jobs after giving out almost half the allocated amount, according to Energy Department tallies.

This is more than a half million dollars per job. Actually, it's more than that, because the WaPo calls these jobs "permanent." I think they are what is more accurately called "Solyndra permanent," by which I mean "temporary, until the loans have to be repaid, which they can't be."

Actually... Well, I was right, when I said "more than half a million dollars per job," because it is more than that. I lost a decimal place. It's five and a half million per job -- $5,444,000.

Obama’s efforts to create green jobs are lagging behind expectations at a time of persistently high unemployment. Many economists say that because alternative-­energy projects are so expensive and slow to ramp up, they are not the most efficient way to stimulate the economy.

“There are good reasons to create green jobs, but they have more to do with green than with jobs,” Princeton University economics professor and former Federal Reserve vice chairman Alan Blinder has said.

Now they tell us.

Obama is contending that the numbers should be padded with an additional 30,000 jobs at Ford -- apparently money went to retraining them to build hybrid fuel vehicles.

But those jobs aren't saved. Just some federal money went to retraining -- which the company usually does. The only reason federal money was even involved here was yet another subsidy for hybrid vehicles.

Where's the evidence they would have lost their jobs but for this? They probably just would have gone about their business, making cars people actually want, rather than the ones the Administration wants them to want.

Mark Muro, a Brookings Institution fellow who researches the clean-tech industry, said the agency appears to be counting every employee working in upgraded plants, when the more relevant question is how many workers would have been laid off without the loans.

Right, exactly, well here's the thing: Obama initially wanted to be the first president ever to get credit for jobs saved or created.

Later, he discovered that even by that measure, he was still failing. So when the ARRA asked businesses it had subsidized to report back to it about jobs, it did not ask such businesses to tell them how many jobs the subsidy had saved or created.

It specifically told them to report back which jobs had been funded, even by a dollar, with federal money, regardless of whether the job in question was ever in danger of being terminated. Just tell us if anyone's being paid, even by a few dollars, with our money; we want to count that as a job we funded.

Hence a number which really should be about jobs created, period, turned into jobs saved or created, and, in a final step of absurdity, then into jobs saved, created, or merely funded.

“I always take these job estimates with a big grain of salt,” Josh Lerner, a Harvard Business School professor who has written about failed government efforts to stimulate targeted industries, said in an e-mail. “There tends to be a lot of fuzzy math when it comes to calculating these benefits (regardless of the party taking credit for the program).”

Now they tell us.

Posted by: Ace at 09:04 AM | Comments (177)
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