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.

Vinegar & Honey

My grandpa said you attract more flies with honey than vinegar.

Always listen to grandpa.

NEW YORK/LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Technology outsourcing and consulting firm Accenture Ltd plans to change its place of incorporation to Ireland from Bermuda, following an exodus of large multinational companies to Europe as the U.S. government plans to tighten tax rules.

Accenture said on Tuesday it does not expect any material change in its financial results or tax treatment, but said Ireland will provide economic benefits. Its board unanimously approved the move.

"A member of the European Union, Ireland offers a sophisticated, well-developed corporate, legal and regulatory environment," Accenture Chief Executive William Green said in a statement.

A company spokesman said Accenture is also moving because of continued criticism of companies incorporated in Bermuda.

I don't know why Tiny Tax Cheat Tim and President Obama thought they could get former American companies to "come home to papa" by threatening to raise their taxes, but it's not going to work.

And when Accenture's Mr. Green says that Ireland offers "a sophisticated ... regulatory environment," what he really means is stable, predictable. It isn't likely to change the rules on the whim of some socialist bureaucrat.

Political Hard Ball Threatens Your Freedom

You don't tug on Superman's cape. You don't spit into the wind. You don't pull the mask off the ol' Lone Ranger.

And you can't repeal the laws of economics.

Okay, it doesn't rhyme, but it's true, and that's just as important.

There are some headlines today that all have a common theme.

U.S. Threatens to Rescind Stimulus Money Over Wage Cuts (California)

Obama Budget Nixes Aid for Jailing Illegal Immigrants

U.S. Political Risk Grows in Financial Crisis

You can read the details for yourselves, but here's a quick synopsis of each story.

1) The State of California is bumping against the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a powerful and increasingly suspect organization that has strong ties to President Obama. In trying to get control of its budget, California's legislature tried to lower the hourly wage of home health-care workers from $12.10 to $10.10. California may be out of money by July if it doesn't do several things to cut costs. The Obamatons are threatening to pull $6.8 billion.

This is hard-ball politics, pure and simple. Union protectionism versus budget responsibility. Compassion is not an issue here, but the laws of economics are. So is the issue of disenfranchisement, as the judgment of the people's elected legislature is being superceded by unions and federal bureaucrats.

2) Obama proposes to kill the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, which spends about $400 million to reimburse states for jailing illegal border crossers, most of whom have committed crimes. As a senator, Obama supported this program. Now he sees it as a way to further other aims, including the attempt to bamboozle us as to his budget cutting credentials.

Border security is supposed to be a federal responsibility. We know it's a joke. Under Obama, the joke is totally on each state. Here the Obama administrations appears to want to use the laws of economics to reduce border enforcement by state and local governments.

3) Let's actually review some of what the UK Guardian writes:

Political risk is becoming a growing concern for investors in the United States as the government plays a larger and more controversial role in private enterprise because of the financial crisis.

State intervention in economic affairs is always closely watched by investors for what it means for their decisions on where to allocate money, although this is usually more of a worry in emerging markets than in developed economies.

Political risk is becoming more of a U.S. issue as some investors howl over what they see as arbitrary intrusion by the government in business affairs.

They view President Obama's restructuring plan for bankrupt automaker Chrysler as an attempt to subvert the legal rights of lenders and say lenders will also be unfairly targeted if the U.S. Congress passes a bill to rewrite bankruptcy law to reduce home mortgage payments.

The Chrysler situation was an attempt to put the union workers ahead of the legal rights of lenders who were guaranteed BY LAW first claim on the company's assets. This is hard-ball politics, and the American people are beginning to realize it.

You cannot do this and expect to pay no price, economically or politically. What happens when investors no longer play ball in America? Our economy completely tanks. There are enough risks right now with bloated federal budgets crowded out private lending capital and threatening to gut the dollar, without adding the political risk that at any given moment the federal government can decide to take over the firm in which you invested your life's savings.

This isn't just risky, it is wrong. In America we have enshrined the rights to acquire and develop property in our legal system. Our last two presidents -- Bush and Obama -- have shown us they do not believe in property rights. That's where the political price comes into play.

You'd better ask yourself pretty soon whether getting revenge on "the rich" and "big business" is worth trashing the lifestyle you enjoy and the freedoms you cherish.

You cannot have social freedom, the right of association, free speech, religion (or no religion) if you do not have property rights. They are all interlinked. Allow the government to usurp one, even if you think it's for the greater good, and you will find that the others crumble away.