An Analysis of the Flaws of Obama

Here's Paul Krugman's take on the wrong-headedness of Obama in his approach to the State of the Union address:

A Tale Of Two SOTUs

In 1982 Ronald Reagan gave his first State of the Union address. His approval rating was about the same as Barack Obama’s now. His economic track record was considerably worse: instead of presiding over the end of a recession, he had presided over the beginning of one, and the economy was in free fall. Nonetheless, Reagan mounted an unapologetic defense of his economic ideology, combined with a harsh critique of his precedecessors.

We haven’t heard Obama’s SOTU yet. But the big news seems to be the spending freeze. What I hear from bat-squeaks is that it’s not a big deal on economic substance, and that admin officials hope it will clear the way for some modest job-creation efforts. We’ll see about that. Rhetorically, however, Obama is clearly, conspicuously endorsing his opponents’ world-view — which will buy him precisely nothing in return.

I don’t think I’m going to watch the SOTU; all indications are that it will be deeply, deeply depressing.

Obama fits the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over-and-over and expecting a different result. This idiotic impulse of Obama's to "find middle ground" means that he paints himself into his opponent's corner while they laugh all the way to the bank. Insane!

Instead of just surmising the Obama will be a one term president, I'm now ardently hoping that he will be unseated by the Democrats in 2012 and a real progressive put in his place. Obama is destructive to the hopes & dreams of ordinary Americans (but a pleasant reassurance for the rich & powerful, not quite the wet dream that George Bush was, but a dream that the rich & powerful find very comforting).

Here's a bit more by Krugman in a posting on his NY Times blog that looks at the bad economics of Obama's SOTU:

A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?

It’s appalling on every level.

It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness”.)

It’s bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.

And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view — and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, “I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.”

Now, I still cling to a fantasy: maybe, just possibly, Obama is going to tie his spending freeze to something that would actually help the economy, like an employment tax credit. (No, trivial tax breaks don’t count). There has, however, been no hint of anything like that in the reports so far. Right now, this looks like pure disaster.

Yep... Obama wants to step back to the 1930s with the same screw-the-ordinary-people approach of Andrew Mellon, Hoover's Secretary of the Treasury. Obama seems only concerned with feathering the nests of Wall Street and the elites. There has been nothing substantive for the little guy beyond the idiocy of "pep rally speeches".

Obama is an Idiot

The experience of the Great Depression was that government had to substitute for missing consumer spending until the economy healed itself. It took nearly 10 years for this to happen. In 1936 when FDR fell prey to the "deficit hawks" and decided to balance the federal budget the US economy fell into a mini-depression inside the Great Depression. From Wikipedia:

In June 1937, the Roosevelt administration cut spending and increased taxation in an attempt to balance the federal budget. The American economy then took a sharp downturn, lasting for 13 months through most of 1938. Industrial production fell almost 30 per cent within a few months and production of durable goods fell even faster. Unemployment jumped from 14.3% in 1937 to 19.0% in 1938, rising from 5 million to more than 12 million in early 1938. Manufacturing output fell by 37% from the 1937 peak and was back to 1934 levels. Producers reduced their expenditures on durable goods, and inventories declined, but personal income was only 15% lower than it had been at the peak in 1937. As unemployment rose, consumers' expenditures declined, leading to further cutbacks in production.

Well... Obama has decided to repeat this experience. Here is a Reuters report:

Obama to seek three-year freeze on domestic spending

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama, under pressure from deficit hawks, will seek a three-year freeze on domestic spending in his 2011 budget that would save $250 billion by 2020, administration officials said on Monday.

Obama will outline the spending hold-down in his State of the Union address on Wednesday and will spell it out in detail on February 1, when he unveils his second budget.

Obama is under fire for a record deficit and has called for a bipartisan congressional commission to consider spending cuts and tax increases to improve the country's fiscal outlook.

Democrats are jittery after the Massachusetts election of a Republican for the Senate seat long held by the late Edward Kennedy, worried that it may be a warning sign for congressional elections in November.

Already stock markets in Asia are down 2-4% on the news (on top of the last weeks 5% slide). I foolishly thought that economists were trained and politicians were educated, but no. The idiots in charge are as stupid as they were in the 1930s.

I just hope it doesn't take a WWIII to get the global economy to recover from this mess.

I thought George Bush was evil and stupid. I now think Obama is stupid but I'm still waiting to decide if he is evil. But to throw more millions out of work so that he can "control the deficit" in the middle of a depression strikes me as evil.

The "Science" Behind Global Warming

Since the revelation of the Hadley CRU's e-mails leaked to the public a growing number of "errors" and "inconsistencies" have been discovered in the IPCC reports and the supposed "scientific" consensus for global warming.

Here is a blog posting by the blog EU Referendum out of the UK that points out how the horror story of destruction of the Amazon rain forest in the IPCC reports is backed up by the "science" of a policy hack and a green activist's "investigative" journalism. In theory the IPCC's reports and policy recommendations for world leaders was supposed to be based on sound science and reflect the consensus of science. But in reality it reflects the picking and choosing of fanatics desperate to find whatever flimflam they could to sell their viewpoint:

The IPCC also made false predictions on the Amazon rain forests, referenced to a non peer-reviewed paper produced by an advocacy group working with the WWF. This time though, the claim made is not even supported by the report and seems to be a complete fabrication

Thus, following on from "Glaciergate", where the IPCC grossly exaggerated the effects of global warming on Himalayan glaciers – backed by a reference to a WWF report - we now have "Amazongate", where the IPCC has grossly exaggerated the effects of global warming on the Amazon rain forest.

This is to be found in Chapter 13 of the Working Group II report, the same part of the IPCC fourth assessment report in which the "Glaciergate" claims are made.

...

In all, then, the IPCC claim is a fabrication, unsupported even by the reference it gives, which it should not in any event have used as it is not a primary source.

The significance of this cannot be understated. Together with polar bears and melting ice-caps, and melting glaciers, the Amazon rain forests are iconic symbols for the climate change industry, and their potential loss was fully exploited at December's Copenhagen summit.

There, the dire predictions from the IPCC were treated as a baseline, and then expanded upon by others and reported widely, adding to the sense of doom and crisis.

Well sourced reports, however, put logging and farm expansion as the major threat to the rain forests, climate change being just another factor which exacerbates the damage. But this was not good enough for the IPCC, which wanted to hype up crisis. And, as with melting glaciers, it did so using exactly the same technique of making an assertion unsupported by the "science" it holds as so important.

Read the posting to get the details of how a "policy advocate" and a "green activist" wrote a WWF pamphlet that became a referenced "scientific" source for the IPCC reports, a reference which is supposed to be a peer-reviewed scientific publication, which the WWF pamphlet certainly is not.

Here is a related video:

Workers of the World Unite... to have your picture taken

Here's a wonderful photo gallery by the Boston Globe of the many different "faces" of work in today's world. And another photo gallery here.

So much of what we see and hear is negative, destructive, and discouraging. Wars, disasters, death are depressing. It is nice to celebrate this world, the work done by people to make things to make a better world, and to see the glorious diversity and beauty of the real world around us. Take a moment and enjoy the above photo galleries.

Some Details on GM's Volt

I found the following discussion of battery use and MPG measurement very interesting in Geoffrey Styles' Energy Outlook blog:

I was particularly interested in the battery's recharging requirements, in relation to the energy density concerns I discussed in last Tuesday's posting. The Volt recharges in two modes: At 240 V and drawing between 15-30 amps, it takes up to 3 hours to restore the roughly 50% of the battery pack's 16 kWh maximum charge used in "charge-depleting" operation--that first 40 miles or so of battery-only driving that provides the car's main selling point. Recharging on 120 V household current takes more like 8 hours. I was somewhat surprised that Tony seemed to share my view that Volt drivers are unlikely to wait until the middle of the night to recharge their cars, unless their highest priority is minimizing their electricity costs (and possibly emissions.) He has apparently been using a Volt on weekends and cited the benefits of daytime recharging at home or office to keep the battery ready for use, consistent with the main purpose of owning such a car.

The switchover from battery-only operation to driving with the onboard generator running was one of the key features I was anticipating, based on my concern that the Volt would ultimately be handicapped in low-battery, "charge-sustaining" operation by its reliance on a fairly small 4-cylinder engine. After all, the performance expectations in the category the Volt aspires to are set by powerful engines similar to the V-6 in my Acura TL, which delivers 270 peak horsepower. Well, you could have fooled me. The Volt I drove yesterday was intentionally given just enough battery charge to last about 3 miles, and when I passed that point and the little engine fired up, there was no discernible change in performance. That's apparently because the car is never really driven by the engine alone, since the battery is never completely drained. The accelerator controls only the flow of current from the battery to the electric motor; meanwhile the car's software runs the engine as needed to keep the battery charged to acceptable levels, but not to recharge it fully. That's a subtle distinction, because when I pushed the car hard in this mode, I heard the engine rev up noticeably with that characteristic 4-banger tone that provided the one discordant note in an otherwise near-luxury experience. But the trade-off was evident when I pulled the car into its tent shelter and switched it off. The cumulative fuel economy display on the dash read a whopping 910 mpg.

That result prompted an interesting discussion about what fuel economy really means in a car like this, which dutifully calculated mpg based on the tiny amount of gasoline consumed in the last lap of several miles of mostly battery-powered driving. I got a sense that GM recognizes the shortcomings of mpg in measuring such a vehicle's energy usage, though they are clearly quite focused on it as the primary metric of both consumers and the existing and proposed federal fuel economy standards. But even knowing intellectually that the car's electric efficiency, which Tony confirmed is in the range of 200-250 Watt-hours per mile, or 4-5 miles per kWh, equates to roughly 58-72 miles per gasoline-gallon-equivalent of natural gas going into a gas turbine power plant somewhere, that 910 mpg still got my attention with its implication of very rare visits to the gas station.

Moving the US fleet of vehicles from their current 25 mpg to something like 75 mpg would reduce the importation of oil and the amount of CO2 dumped into the atmosphere. I'm not saying this will do it, but obviously technology can move us a long way toward whatever goal we have in mind.

I'm so tired of the simple-minded political protestors whose only response to any perceived problem is to ban it or tax it. The option of technology as a tool to fix the future is completely overlooked. It deserves to be the first option not the last option for most of the problems society faces. To my mind, a carrot is a far better tool of social persuasion than a stick.

Joke

Here's a bit of humour from a Paul Krugman posting:

Back in the 1980s there was a joke about Democrats laying out their new platform. The principles of the platform were tax cuts for the rich, big spending on the military, and cuts in programs that help the poor and workers. One Democrat asked, “How does this make us different from the Republicans.” The answer was, “Compassion: we care about the victims of our policies.”

In my opinion, what makes a good joke is the fact that, beneath the surface of the joke, there is a solid grain of truth that people need to be forced to confront.

Krugmans Indictment of Bernanke

Here is the short list of failures in Bernanke's performance put forward by Paul Krugman in his NY Times op-ed:

Consider two issues: financial reform and unemployment.

Back in July, Mr. Bernanke spoke out against a key reform proposal: the creation of a new consumer financial protection agency. He urged Congress to maintain the current situation, in which protection of consumers from unfair financial practices is the Fed’s responsibility.

But here’s the thing: During the run-up to the crisis, as financial abuses proliferated, the Fed did nothing. In particular, it ignored warnings about subprime lending. So it was striking that in his testimony Mr. Bernanke didn’t acknowledge that failure, didn’t explain why it happened, and gave no reason to believe that the Fed would behave differently in the future. His message boiled down to “We know what we’re doing — trust us.”

As I said, the Fed has returned to a dangerous complacency.

And then there’s unemployment. The economy may not have collapsed, but it’s in terrible shape, with job-seekers outnumbering job openings six to one. Nor does Mr. Bernanke expect any quick improvement: last month, while predicting that unemployment will fall, he conceded that the rate of decline will be “slower than we would like.” So what does he propose doing to create jobs?

Nothing. Mr. Bernanke has offered no hint that he feels the need to adopt policies that might bring unemployment down faster. Instead, he has responded to suggestions for further Fed action with boilerplate about “the anchoring of inflation expectations.” It’s harsh but true to say that he’s acting as if it’s Mission Accomplished now that the big banks have been rescued.

What happened here? My sense is that Mr. Bernanke, like so many people who work closely with the financial sector, has ended up seeing the world through bankers’ eyes. The same can be said about Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary, and Larry Summers, the Obama administration’s top economist.

Krugman ends up saying Bernanke must be re-appointed to avoid an even worse appointment. That is faint praise indeed. I would rather see some backbone on the part of politicians. They need to push back against the heavy thumb of the Wall Street banks that has tilted the scales in their favour. The mandate of the Federal Reserve was two-fold: one was to support a sound banking system and underlying currency (the joy of Wall Street bankers) and the other was a growing economy and full employment (which has long been lost by the worshippers of Mammon on Wall Street).

So, while Krugman gives a tepid endorsement of Bernanke, he lashes him with this accusation:

If Mr. Bernanke is reappointed, he and his colleagues need to realize that what they consider a policy success is actually a policy failure. We have avoided a second Great Depression, but we are facing mass unemployment — unemployment that will blight the lives of millions of Americans — for years to come. And it’s the Fed’s responsibility to do all it can to end that blight.