Hope and change.

Only 45.4% of Americans had jobs in 2010, the lowest rate since 1983 and down from a peak of 49.3% in 2000. Last year, just 66.8% of men had jobs, the lowest on record.

The bad economy, an aging population and a plateau in women working are contributing to changes that pose serious challenges for financing the nationÂ’s social programs.

This is bad. Get me a Bipartisan Commission, stat!

“What’s wrong with the economy may be speeding up trends that are already happening,” says Marc Goldwein, policy director of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a non-partisan group favoring smaller deficits.
For example, job troubles appear to have slowed a trend of people working later in life, putting more pressure on Social Security, he says.

Another change: the bulk of those not working has shifted from children to adults.

In 2000, the nation had roughly the same number of children and non-working adults. Since then, the population of non-working adults has grown 27 million while the nation added just 3 million children under 18.

What's surprising is that the media reported this. At least USAToday did.

Posted by: Ace at 01:34 PM | Comments (120)
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Can't wait for their recommendations. $53 trillion on high-speed monorails and another special $40 million for Biden's own real-size toy train set.

Definitely. That's what we needed all along. Grandpa Snoozykins.

This is embarrassing, truly. He just had a commission of approximately the same size and make up (sans Sheriff Joe) and he utterly ignored their findings, choosing instead to demagogue and delay.

And now he's just doing the exact same thing again.

Hey, Jerkoff, every commission is going to say the same thing: We are spending too much money and you have three options:

1) Jack up taxes to unprecedented rates, especially on the middle class, which is going to be surprised at being taxed at a 40% rate (and that's just the feds' take)

2) Begin preparing for the process of default and hyperinflation. We Go Greek, in other words.

3) Reduce spending on entitlements.

That's it. That's your choices. You can convene as many of these Special Commissions as you like, and they're going to keep on saying this, because the math does not change week-by-week. The math has been what it was since the problem was first discovered in the seventies. It has not changed since then, except to grow worse.

I cannot believe he's doing this. Another commission!

At the time, Sperling was discussing the form and mission of a new bipartisan congressional working group the president wants to charge with establishing a deficit-reduction plan. In the presidentÂ’s view, it would consist of 16 members, plus the vice president as chairman, and finish up by the end of June.

Didn't this guy run on the platform that he already had the guts to tackle this, and a fount of brave, wise thinking on the matter?

Three years later and now he needs someone to explain to him the rule of greater than and less than?

The crocodile wants to eat the bigger food, Mr. President.

The crocodile wants to eat the bigger food.

Read it, learn it, live it.

Krugman Loves Obama's Medicare Plan:

As I understand it, it would force the board to come up with ways to put Medicare on what amounts to a budget — growing no faster than GDP + 0.5 — and would force Congress to specifically overrule those proposed savings. That’s what cost-control looks like! You have people who actually know about health care and health costs setting priorities for spending, within a budget; in effect, you have an institutional setup which forces Medicare to find ways to say no.

And when people start screaming about death panels again, remember: you can always buy whatever health care you want; the question is what taxpayers should pay for. And compare this with a voucher system, in which you have insurance company executives, rather than health-care professionals, deciding which care wonÂ’t be paid for.

Wait-- so if the government tells someone they can't have an operation, it's cool, since they can just use their own money to pay for it.

But -- this is the big criticism of Ryan's plan -- if someone has a $15,000 voucher (per year) from the government with which to buy insurance, and that cruel insurer says no... that's "cruel"?

Krugman specifically uses the word "cruelty" to describe Ryan's plan.

It seems that Krugman doesn't mind that seniors might have to pay their own money for health care -- so long as the government is the one doing the deciding, so long as the government is still at the center.

If the exact same thing happens in a private insurance decision (and it would happen less often, as the system would work to impose cost discipline), then all of a sudden it's "cruelty"?

This is their big answer to the Medicare problem -- they insist that the government remain in the center of it, as bloated and wasteful and inefficient and riven by fraud as ever, and to make up for all that lost money -- death panels and rationing!

And liberals are eager to embrace death panels and rationing, as long as it comes from the government!

Gee, that's certainly less cruel than offering someone a policy with a high deductible whereby they pay for all routine costs up to some fixed level (like $5000 per year) and the insurer pays every dime after that, and doesn't ration.

The only thing they care about is keeping the government in this. Cutting care, stealing a half-trillion from Medicare, death panels, rationing -- all of these are acceptable (required, really, in their plan), and it's all defensible so long as government is kept in the center of everything.

Posted by: Ace at 12:51 PM | Comments (169)
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You pay $25 less if you agree that your screen-saver will be an advertisement, targeted, I'm guessing, to you, based upon your buying history.

It's an interesting idea. I think this is going to become more common -- TVs might actually be sold at discounts if you don't mind banner ads popping up on your screens every half hour for a half minute or something like that.

Because technology is increasing our ability to avoid advertisements altogether, if we wish, and we do, the future of advertising is going to consist partly of advertisers paying you, in the form of discounts and other inducements, to allow yourself to be advertised at.

The other part of it, as far as TV, is going to be back-to-the-future, as stars are going to be required to do ads that run on the show (like they used to have actors read a pitch for Chesterfields cigarettes or whatnot). Product placement isn't enough.

Everyone fast-forwards through commercials now; the only way to actually catch their attention is to do something that looks like the show, with the show's actor, and maybe in the show's set, doing a sketch aimed at selling a product.

Subliminal Advertising? It occurs to me that the only time I "watch" commercials is when I have the TV on in background, and am not really watching it, so I can't fast-forward through the commercials.

That's really the main time I actually hear a commercial.

I think a lot of people are like that, and so maybe advertising has to be tailored increasingly to that demographic -- the guy too inattentive to fast-forward or mute -- and make advertisements with cloying or haunting melodies and constantly repeated catchphrases to get into the non-watching person's mind subliminally.

I know that's what they used to do, and still do a little. But they decided about fifteen years ago they had to give someone a reason to watch commercials, and so for a lot of advertisers, the way to go is with well-produced ads with funny jokes or whatnot.

But if people are paying less and less attention to the ads, and you only get your message through to the inattentive minds more and more, maybe they just have to go back to that constantly-repeated-catchphrases and annoying jingles model.

I'm not saying that's a good thing. I'm just saying that's the only way they're going to get much advertising messaging in on me, by sneaking it in.

Actually... They're already doing this without any discount for DVD's and of course when you go to the theater. They won't pay you to be advertised at or give you an opt-out if they can get people to just accept this is the way it is.

DVD's really annoy me, because they often try to make it difficult for you to skip past the ads.

So: On the other hand, they might just start selling TVs with built-in ad modes. And you'd either have to pay them extra to remove that, or hack your system.

Posted by: Ace at 11:40 AM | Comments (212)
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It passed 260-167, with 59 Republicans voting against it, but 81 Democrats voting for it. 108 Democrats voted no.

Boehner isn't celebrating the not-very-good deal:

"Is it perfect? No. I'd be the first one to admit that it's flawed," Boehner said. "Well, welcome to divided government."

Boehner said he wishes more cuts could have been achieved, and hinted that more would be coming. "Does it cut enough? No. Do I wish it cut more? Absolutely. And do we need to cut more? Absolutely."

He'd better internalize that message and not just feed us soup.

Democrats spun it as a partial victory and/or sign the Republicans aren't very serious about budget cutting -- which is, of course, not really spin so much as a plausible read of the situation.

...

Only a handful of Democrats spoke out against the deal, and many more welcomed the ability of Republicans to back away from steeper cuts in H.R. 1, the House-passed spending bill that would have cut $61 billion from FY 2010 instead of the nearly $40 billion agreed to last week.

"It also shows that they're not wedded to H.R. 1," said Rep. Sam Farr (D-Calif.). "The message goes out that they make adjustments."

The message needs to go out they need to make adjustments the other way.

Posted by: Ace at 11:18 AM | Comments (149)
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The most eagerly anticipated disaster of the season will at least have Wonder Woman wear her classic tighty-brighties.

Unfortunately she'll still be wearing the rest of her outfit, which, in an attempt to appear hip, cool, modern, and "classy," winds up looking cheap and stupid. Everyone says Wonder Woman's real costume is "stupid," which I guess it is, but it's a stupid we've come to know for 70+ years, so even though it's stupid, we don't think of it that way. Like Joe Biden, who is a moron, but no one seems to notice (except us).

Former bad-boy novelist turned bad novelist Bret Easton Ellis snarked at Glee's expense, on Twitter, that while he liked the basic concept of the show, every time he watched it he felt like he was "stepping into a puddle of HIV."

He previously angered gays by undermining the point of a don't-commit-suicide-if-you're-gay campaign by responding that, contra the campaign's message, it doesn't get better, "It gets worse."

Complicating this is the fact that Bret Easton Ellis, if the subject matter of his books has any basis in reality, should probably know: Almost all of his main characters are either bisexual or "straight" but dabbling in bisexuality, and Ellis himself...

...has said in the past that he doesn't identify as gay or straight.

And usually when someone says his sexuality is "complicated," I just clear matters up and say "No, it's not really very complicated at all, you're just gay."

Anyway, while rude, anyone familiar with the show knows it has moved from a heavy subtext of homosexuality to a heavy text of homosexuality. A lot of people seemed to like that, and I wouldn't demand that gays can't have an hour of tv a week, but I do question the 8:00 run-time for a show that's not just about gay sex, but also about straight underage sex, plus drinking and, I'm sure, eventually donkey-punching.

And, I mean, look: Gays and gay supporters need to chill. Anyone can criticize a show for being too much about any one thing, and people usually do. "Too much of this character." "Too much of this plot."

I don't believe that it should be forbidden to say that "Glee is just too gay for me." It's a gay show; before it was gay friendly, now it's just gay. That's what it is, and that's fine (except-- 8:00?), but gayness can't be the one thing in the world a show can never have too much of.

The last bit of silly stuff is the Harry Blodget, the guy behind the BusinessInsider website family, has apparently gone full birther, and I don't mean about Obama, I mean about Sarah Palin's son Trig, breathlessly pimping a "Professor's" claims that it's all a gigantic hoax and conspiracy that the media won't dig into, despite the huge amount of evidence.

These people always make a big deal of Palin's flight back from Texas to Alaska when her water broke. No one would do that, they all claim, despite the testimony of women who actually were pregnant saying, "Yes, I did stuff like that, you have up to a day before you actually give birth" or whatnot. They just blow that off.

But their theory doesn't make sense besides. If Palin was faking a pregnancy, then we know the hospital was in on it, since the hospital claimed Palin gave birth rather than one of her daughters (as the conspiracy theory goes). So the conspiracy was already in the works.

But so if Palin was actually not pregnant, why the hell would she even tell someone that her water had broke? Why not just fly home and say she gave birth the next day? Or the day after that? Or -- just when she got back, immediately?

If the hospital is already on-board with hiding Trig's actual mother they can adjust the time of birth, if needed. Since Palin is not actually pregnant and the hospital is in on the conspiracy (in this delusion), she doesn't actually have to rush back home to "cover" for her daughter; she can spend a frickin' week more in Texas, if she likes, then fly home and say "I just gave birth" and who can tell a week-old baby from a day-old one?

Again: The whole hospital is in on it so there's no real race-against-the-clock thriller/chase drama here.

Anyway, absurd, and I'm glad I never bothered to read this Business Insider site in the first place.

Posted by: Ace at 10:50 AM | Comments (148)
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Perhaps a break from the aneurysm-inducing budget nonsense, eh?

I appreciate great works of art. Be it Picasso's Guernica, Goya's Saturn Eating His Children, or Duchamp's toilets.

I am also a bacon afficiando, embarking on my own bacon experiment combining espresso (my fourth greatest love) and bacon which was documented here.

So, when I saw this Denny's ad:

I had to indulge in a potential American post-minimalist masterpiece.
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Posted by: CAC at 10:42 AM | Comments (69)
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Since I'm ignorant, I will refrain from making a big statement about this. It doesn't sound right to me, but then, little does lately, and Coburn is a smart guy.

Still this sounds too easy and too good to be true.

But-- let's go for it, whatever this is.

Senator Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) holds the treasure map. He and his team cite an Office of Management and Budget document with the riveting title “Balances of Budget Authority — Budget of the U.S. Government — Fiscal Year 2011.”

On page 8, Table 1 indicates in black and white that this fiscal year’s federal budget contains $703,128,000,000 in “unobligated balances.” Thus, more than $703 billion languishes on department, agency, and program ledgers. This includes $12.2 billion unspent at the Agriculture Department, $16.4 billion at Labor, $25.2 billion at Housing and Urban Development, $71.4 billion at Defense, and $309.1 billion at Treasury.

While unspent obligated money must be stewarded for specific purposes for up to five years, these unobligated funds “have not yet been committed by contract or other legally binding action by the government,” OMB explains.

...

In fact, Senator CoburnÂ’s office estimates that $82.4 billion of these funds are between six and 20 years old! You read correctly: At this very second, the federal budget contains $82.4 billion that has hibernated in numerous accounts between FY 1991 and FY 2005. While agency chiefs and lobbyists might scream that these funds are sacred, such arguments become hilarious when applied to taxpayer dollars that have remained untouched for at least half a dozen years.

Team Coburn reckons that at least $100 billion of these unobligated funds safely could be applied to budget reduction.

$71 billion of such funds are at Defense, and given all the wars we're fighting, that is probably best left alone; but as to the rest, I'm not sure why on earth Coburn (and the writer Deroy Murdock) would set the figure that could be "safely" cut at $100 billion or $140 billion.

This article is actually from February 11th -- did no one read it? Did Coburn not press for it?

This is why I think it's not right. This seems so easy. Too easy. If it could be done, why is it not being done?

I can only think that Coburn is missing some nuance to what "unobligated funds" mean.

If it's true, why didn't we just cut $300 billion right away?

Certainly I want to push on this, and I want answers. I'm just skeptical this could be true, given that it seems to me this would be just about the easiest way to trim a half-trillion imaginable. Hell, I don't even think Democrats could put up a huge fight about it.

What I really think is that "unobligated funds" means "money we actually lost or wasted so we're putting it in this special category called 'unobligated funds' so that it appears like we still have it but in fact it was spent on bumper pool and hookers." (David Letterman joke, from back when he was funny -- actually I think it was his head writer's joke, back when his head writer was funny.)

Thanks to Warden.

Posted by: Ace at 09:50 AM | Comments (165)
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Well, now I don't know what to think. I have to confess the obvious -- I have no expertise at all in government/legislative budgeting or what is or what is not a cut. I have to rely on the opinions of others -- if the CBO says only $352 million of real, right-now cuts are happening, I have to believe that.

On the other hand, if people who sound like they know what they're talking about tell me this is how it works, I sort of believe that.

I don't know. I feel like I'm being spun but I'm not sure who's doing the spinning or in which direction.

The updated version of the AP story that sent me bonkers-bananas now contains a big bit of context:

At issue is a concept in budgeting that is often difficult to grasp. Appropriations bills like the pending measure give agencies the authority to spend taxpayersÂ’ money. But such authority typically takes months or years to actually leave the federal Treasury, so cuts made in the middle of the budget year often have little immediate impact.

Well, I guess that makes sense to me.

A.J. Strata calls me ignorant (by implication; he calls everyone who bit on the story ignorant), which is a flaw I have to confess to. I am ignorant on this, alas. I guess I shouldn't even be posting about it but damn, it's news.

Like the ‘shovel ready’ nonsense squawked by the liberal media around the Democrats failed Stimulus Bill in 2009, every action by Congress takes months and years to filter its way through the bloated federal bureaucracy and its ocean of paperwork. That applies to spending increases and cuts. The ship of state is a ponderous and slow thing, making snails look like formula 1 race cars.

What you get in these CRs is nothing more than a commitment to follow through and cut spending, stop programs, close down activities in following budgets. You do not get a $38 billion dollar rebate. That is why you don’t want government by CR – the entire plan in the CR is vaporized once the period of the CR is over. All these cuts disappear on October 1, 2010 if they are not forwarded into the more binding and long term GFY budget for 2012. There you have more resilience (though any Congress can change direction at any time – thus the idea to enact 2 year budgets).

Like I said, I think I'm being spun. When I first started to read Captain Ed's post, I have to admit I thought "Oh gee, the establishment got its talking points to him."

And establishment = not to be trusted.

And on the other hand, we have the AP, which... well, let's say I trust them about as far as I can spit a minivan.

The AP itself has just about only liberals on its give-me-the-narrative-storyline rolodex, and it's not as if Obama and Reid don't have a vested interest in pushing the meme (for their base) that these concessions are trivial.

I guess I'm saying I don't know, but I'm inclined to think this is legit -- or legit by Washington standards, anyway. Even if the CR does cut $38.5 billion of what I'd call real cuts, it's still disappointingly trivial, but then, it was disappointingly trivial the day it was announced, too.

Miss80sBaby and a commenter named "Jim," I think, as well as a few others urged caution in taking AP's claims of what should or should not count as "real" cuts with a massive dose of salt, and they were right -- at the very least, they were definitely right that we shouldn't take that AP report as dispositive about the arguable semantics of a complex (and not well understood) budgeting process.

I am still guessing this mostly smoke and mirrors. But how much I don't know.

Sorry if I misled, or if I'm misleading right this very moment. I can't say "I don't really know" enough times.

Thinking About It: It does make sense that money appropriated but not yet spent would in fact be the first stuff cut, right? That would be the easy stuff, and it's not really surprising that in a negotiation the other side mostly conceded the easy stuff.

But the fact that it's easy doesn't mean it's not real.

One can say "If they're only going after easy stuff, that means they haven't committed to fighting for the hard stuff," and that's true, but then, it's not really new information. We sort of already knew this -- ObamaCare, for example, is not being defunded, and that was already known, and I have to think that that is only a moderately-hard thing.

Of course, the Democrats would shut the government down over that, but I guess that's what it has always come down to -- many/most of us here actually want a shutdown to demonstrate we're serious and to force the negotiations further to our side. And our leadership in Congress is scared like little babies over that prospect -- but again, we already knew this. We didn't just learn this yesterday from this AP report.

Posted by: Ace at 08:16 AM | Comments (362)
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(All hail the mighty Slublog for the graphic.)

While I labor on part 3 of my "basics of economics" series (Savings, Credit, Debt, and Banking), I thought it wise to remind you that DOOM! still lurks close by. You know, in case your mood had improved or you were thinking of being happy today.

President Obama's speech didn't exactly thrill Congressman Paul Ryan, who'd been specifically invited to attend. You might say that Obama's partisan, hectoring, mean-spirited speech pissed him right off, in fact. It's kind of like being invited to a party only to find that the point of the whole party was to insult you.

The WSJ wasn't feeling the love either. Our very own Ace shat on it from a great height yesterday. The Hammer thought it was "a disgrace". So to whatever juiceboxer Obama detailed to write that abomination of a speech, congratulations! You certainly had an impact!

Many rank-and-file Republicans have become rather dispirited at how little "there" is there in the hard-fought Continuing Resolution spending bill that House Speaker Boehner proudly announced early in the week. Mark Steyn captures some of the ennui:

At some point, you have to close a cabinet department just to show youÂ’re serious. Instead, the governing class is sending the message that the political institutions of the United States are so diseased they do not permit meaningful course correction.

To the looming public-sector pension "bomb", the housing "bomb", the Medicare "bomb", the Social Security "bomb", and the real actual Iranian "bomb", we can now add the "tax and debt bomb". We've got so many bombs up in here we oughta open up a bomb store. Complete destruction, now 10% off! Every bomb must go!

This just in from rdbrewer: Jobless claims jump by 27,000 to 412,000. All together now -- unexpectedly!

And yes...California and Illinois are still boned.

[UPDATE 1]: Here's a good policy-level discussion of what Obama's budget alternative really means in fiscal terms. (I can summarize it: much higher taxes, not much in terms of reduced spending. And it doesn't touch entitlement spending at all.)

[UPDATE 2]: A reminder -- Atlas Shrugged opens tomorrow. I've never been a huge fan of the book -- I think The Fountainhead is a far better work -- but I'm going to see the movie. It feels almost like a duty to go see it at this point.
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Posted by: Monty at 04:34 AM | Comments (333)
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[silent rage]

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:58 AM | Comments (180)
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