The Con is On -- Are You Gullible?

The President went before the cameras of Bloomberg TV yesterday and told some whoppers. At least, I hope he was knowingly telling lies, cause if he wasn't, then he's the biggest fool we've ever had in the Oval Office.

And I'd hate to think that of any president.

At any rate, what he had to say included some real "howlers" -- stuff that would be funny if it weren't so painful. Let's start with the half-truthful stuff first.

President Barack Obama said the U.S. unemployment rate will reach 10 percent this year, even as the economy begins to emerge from the recession.

“You’re starting to see the engines of the economy turn,” Obama said today in an interview with Bloomberg Television at the White House. “It’s going to take a long time -- we had a huge de-leveraging that took place.”

Obama acknowledged that unemployment lines may keep growing despite government efforts to boost economic growth, saying he’s confident an expansion will begin “shortly.”

Yes, the unemployment rate will reach 10 percent this year. It already has! And it will go much higher still because the real nasty stuff hasn't hit yet. The engines of the economy are turning, yes indeed. They never stopped turning, and they usually go into higher rotation in the summer months thanks to seasonal construction and farm employment. Heaven forbid they stop turning.

Obama's nod to growing unemployment lines is just his way of covering his posterior, and attempting to keep all of us little mushrooms in the dark just a bit longer.

Now The One abandons veracity and goes straight to mendacity, as he talks of rising bond rates.

Obama said Treasury yields are rising because investors have grown “more confident that we may have avoided the very worst scenarios” for the economy and financial markets.

The 10-year Treasury note yield has increased 0.57 percentage point since May 14, and Treasury bears say yields will keep increasing as the government sells record amounts of debt to fund recovery programs.

“People have a greater appetite for risk, which means that there’s going to be money flowing out of Treasuries and people are going to start putting money in other investments that provide higher yields,” he said. “That also means that yields on Treasuries are going to go up.”

Obama said it’s important for the U.S. to maintain fiscal discipline to ensure investors around the world keep buying U.S. government debt.

Treasury bond yields are rising because investors are less confident, not more. Anyone who ever studied for their securities license knows this. And who are they less confident in? Uncle Sam. There is good reason for this: the federal government is having to borrow 50 cents for every dollar it spends this year, an unprecedented amount of new debt. The yield must go up as a carrot to get people to purchase this debt. It will go up more.

What does this mean to the Average Schlub? Higher prices in the short term as inflation begins. We are already seeing it with the price of gasoline, or hadn't you noticed? The value of the dollar is dropping, and so the owners of OIL -- mostly people who don't like us much anyway -- are demanding more dollars to part with each barrel. It gets worse: some people won't invest in corporate stocks and bonds now because of Obama's meddling, so instead they are purchasing commodities like, yes, OIL! This is also driving the price upward. It isn't based on usage, but savvy investing as OIL actually has some intrinsic value, unlike the paper dollar.

Obama might not like this, but there isn't a damn thing he can do about it, except tell tall tales about how confident investors have become. Confident in OIL, yes.

Then our presidential Messiah says something that is so outlandish, so incredibly, galactically stupid, that one can only wonder if he thinks this is true. I requote:

“People have a greater appetite for risk, which means that there’s going to be money flowing out of Treasuries and people are going to start putting money in other investments that provide higher yields,” he said. “That also means that yields on Treasuries are going to go up.”

People don't have an appetite for risk! They hate risk. They will TOLERATE risk, to a greater or lesser degree depending upon the investor and the circumstance, but only thrill-seeking idiots have an appetite for risk, and these are people who climb Mount Everest, go skinny dipping with sharks, or appear as guests on The View.

The vast majority of sane people want safe investments. As they develop confidence in the rate of return, they will up their risk tolerance somewhat, but nothing that has happened in the markets in the last couple of years has done anything to increase the confidence level.

But why should I expect a man who studied Saul Alinsky's organizing principles and who thinks Socialist economic policies work, to know anything about free market economics?

Then Obama uncorks another laugher: It's important for the U.S. to "maintain fiscal discipline" so the world will keep buying our debt!

The U.S. hasn't "maintained" fiscal discipline in decades. We were like the guy down the street who gets his oil changed once every 100,000 miles, whether he needs it or not, and who doesn't buy replacement tires until they blow out. Fortunately we had this one thing going for us that the rest of the world counted on and respected: we were free. We enjoyed liberty, personal and economic -- and I would argue that the economic is essential to the personal. The world counted on our productive, free economy to either make stuff or to produce wealth that could be spent on their stuff.

We are losing that now. You cannot have free markets with direct government intervention in ownership of companies, subsidies, salary caps, etc. You cannot regulate major sectors of an economy without direct and indirect effects on every other part. The world is watching us devolve into just another government-mandated, bureaucratized society, and it is not amused. We were the engine that pulled the world's economic train, and we've decided that we'd rather take it easy than do the heavy pulling. Let someone else, like China, do it?

The U.S. is showing no signs of learning fiscal discipline ESPECIALLY under President Obama. How can you declare, as he did yesterday, that it's okay to drive deficits to an all-time high of $1.8 trillion -- look at all the zeros in the written out number $1,800,000,000,000 -- as long as we "cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term." Half of $1.8 trillion is still $600 billion, which is higher than any deficit of any other president in history.

That's fiscal discipline? In what alternate universe or nearest parallel dimension?

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says deficits will average $600 billion for the next 10 years, which according to my mental calculator is $6 trillion. That's if we don't pass ObamaCare, which will add, conservatively, another $1 trillion per year in deficits. And yet that is exactly where Mr. Obama intends to lead us, by trying to "con"vince us that we can spend our way into "savings":

“I’m confident that if we take the steps that are necessary on health care, on energy, on education, if we get a strong financial regulatory system in place so that people have confidence in the markets again, that we will end up seeing recovery shortly,” Obama said.

You cannot spend and borrow your way into prosperity. In all the history of the human race, it has never been done.

You earn and save to be prosperous. You invest in productive enterprises.

Government is not a productive enterprise. It is the most wasteful way to accomplish anything, except warfare which, by definition, is a wasting enterprise. War breaks things. No wonder governments are so good at it.

President Obama is good with the con job, perhaps in part because he is a true believer in the end result: Socialism.

But you deserve the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth: this road leads to loss of liberty and economic slavery.