I lost my mantra today.

I lost my mantra today.   

 

 

In the zone and engrossed by a lengthy to-do list, oblivious to gloom,  I walked through the front door  at work today and nearly walked past a client who’s been with our company for 5 years.   After an embarrassing double take that betrayed my inattention, I greeted Jim and learned that he lost his job several months ago.  Three managers were let go on the same day.  He was one of three.  This client is my first intimate contact with the recession.   

Ours is an academic economy, we’ve been telling ourselves.  We’ve enjoyed this mantra.  It’s been with us through many good “closes,” some unforgotten “losses” and most importantly, my own personal discovery of the martini and cabernet sauvignon.   

I lost my mantra today.  I still have my religion, such as it is, but I lost my mantra. 

Let’s talk about the grand summer of 2008 when the price of gas broke the buck.    That’s right a 222% change.  Percent change is change divided by base, right?  True, the price of gas only doubled in 2008.  Well, let’s get this right.  Prices hit three dollars then dropped for the 2006 mid-terms.   They hit four dollars then dropped for the 2008 election.  OK, but gas was $1.35 before we invaded Iraq.  It went above $4.35 in the summer of 2008.  That’s  $3 / 1.35 = 222% increase in five years.   222%

 Why has the media let off the hook those responsible for the price-fixing that defined 2008?  Demand more for your money,  America.  Demand the truth.   Who was responsible for the price fixing?  Yes, Wall Street is guilty of mortgage crimes.  Bankers are guilty.  Consumer borrowers are guilty.   There’s plenty of guilt.   You and I share in the guilt, reader and writer.

How did the 222% increase in gas prices affect the economy?   If this increase was the result of anti-trust violations, we have to hold accountable those who were responsible. 

When  you get filthy rich by breaking the law, there is a price to pay.  No exceptions. 

 

 

Old headlines, just in case you forgot about gas prices.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2006-04-27-energy-econ-usat_x.htm

By Barbara Hagenbaugh, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — The U.S. economy has digested surging energy costs in the past few years with little more than a hiccup.

In a USA TODAY survey of economists taken April 20 to 25, 40% said higher energy prices are the No. 1 risk for the economy. While other risks were cited, such as a decline in the housing market and terrorism, energy was the top concern.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/business/09gas.html

Here in the Mississippi Delta, some farm workers are borrowing money from their bosses so they can fill their tanks and get to work. Some are switching jobs for shorter commutes.

People are giving up meat so they can buy fuel. Gasoline theft is rising. And drivers are running out of gas more often, leaving their cars by the side of the road until they can scrape together gas money.

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/08/04/america/Economy.php

Economists believe the $168 billion stimulus program will continue to lift the economy in the current quarter, but many are worried that the economy could slow significantly in the final three months of this year and early next year as the impact from the one-time checks wears off.

Brian Bethune, senior U.S. economist at Global Insight, a private forecasting firm, said the GDP could post back-to-back declines in those two quarters, meeting the traditional definition of a recession.

“The rebates are not translating into anywhere near the spending impulse that Congress and the administration had hoped for,” he said. “Under these circumstances, the economy remains in very fragile condition.”

A little less passive aggressive, A little less spending, Mr. President

A little less passive aggressive

A little less spending, Mr. President

Your Support with Independents is sketchy

Thousands of bloggers intend to hold you accountable

Your Support is Tenuous Mr. President with Independents!

Rush, sit down and shut up.  If you will stop demanding a personal tax cut, the President will be able to hear me say NO NEW SPENDING.   OK, fix health care.  Outside of that, NO NEW SPENDING. Not even on banks unless you’re covering FDIC’s shortfall, nothing.  NO NEW SPENDING.   See Rush, he’s already hearing me.  And he knows that I was a Republican before I was an Independent and that my support is tenuous.  So sit down Rush.  Shut up.

Where was Ayn Rand?

This post has been edited, improved and reposted.  

Click here for the coffee enhanced version.

Toe-curling stupor

The President has demonstrated enormous patience and wisdom in transitioning our behemoth bureaucracy away from the knee-jerk mismanagement of federal policy that has for nearly a decade spoiled wall street into a toe-curling stupor.

Will Tax Cuts Really Help?

On Limbaugh’s Demands for Additional Tax Cuts

• The Bush administration spent trillions of dollars we didn’t have on things we didn’t need as well as things that did us harm like an unprovoked war in Iraq. Sooner or later this debt must be paid down. Later is almost here.

 • During the boom days of the past decade (that were created by wistful real estate buying and obstruction of mortgage regulations by the executive branch of the federal government) the Bush tax cuts (for the old fashioned investor classes) failed to generate sustainable economic growth across class lines as required for trickle-down economics to work effectively. In other words, new jobs, new businesses, new money were not created at levels that could generate the tax revenue required to manage the eight Bush budgets. Bottom line: trickle-down, Reaganomics, tax-cut stimulation failed in the 2000s to keep up with government spending just like it failed to keep up with government spending in the 1980s. These facts pre-date the onset of the banking crisis which became publicly visible in August of 2007. Our government was outspending itself in the good times.

• Rush Limbaugh presently spends his days demanding more tax cuts based on his presumption that we have not yet figured out that the Bush tax cuts didn’t work. The boom of the 2000s was a speculative housing bubble. Period. Nothing more. The Bush tax cuts did not generate sustainable economic growth. The tax cuts Limbaugh now so crudely demands will perform the task of righting the economy no more effectively than they performed under Bush.

• I am challenging loyal Rush listeners to call the show this week and start asking the hard questions that Rush doesn’t want to hear. Mr. Limbaugh, isn’t “insanity doing the same things over and over and expecting to get different results? If so, why should I support the policies of the Bush administration that created the budget deficits that plague our country today? It didn’t work during the Bush boom, why will it work during the Bush crash?”

• I’ve read Limbaugh’s holy-grail, by the way, Atlas Shrugged.  I probably read it before Rush read it.  It is the reason I am a fiscal conservative and not a liberal. It is an exceptional book with truly prescient insights into the chaos that surrounds us today. The author understood that it is the captains of industry who make opportunity and that they must be rewarded with a fair and reasonable tax code. I am not in favor of Obama deficits any more than I was in favor of Bush deficits. All this said, there are elements of the Obama budget that we must accept as necessary medicine. This is the subject of a future post. For now we have to stay on task. Limbaugh is demanding more of the bad medicine that created the economic collapse keeping Americans awake at night.

• Post disagreements, agreements, questions and challenges of any kind on this blog.  Get a dialogue going. It’s time for all of us to roll up our sleeves and get into the heart of the questions at hand like:  more tax or less tax for those earning over $250,000 per year?

President Elect Obama is the only elected official who responded publicly to my concerns more than two years ago. Thank you, Sir.

Shortly after Bush’s reelection, I began to sense America’s decline.  By late 2005 I had begun writing letters to every Senator and Representative who had ever represented me.  President Elect Obama was the only elected official to respond publicly and positively to my concerns. 

God bless you, Sir.  Congratulations.

Conservative response to Obama’s Election

The 20 -25 or so people I care for the most have tonight cried at and sworn over the outcome of this election.  I can only pray tonight that they each will soon begin to sense the passion and authenticity of a man who is not afraid to speak truth and define reality – who genuinely cares about their future – cares, especially, in comparison to the power brokers he has replaced. 

Let this be a holy place for the human spirit consecrated to the forces which magnify the soul.

Obama the Socialist

I don’t know how anyone can hear the latest audio from the great Obama and not be scared to death if that man becomes the next president of the United States.  If you like to have your taxes raised so you can share your money with everyone .  If you don’t like the constitution, or think that it is flawed.  If you think that it is OK to kill a baby that is half way out of his/her mothers womb or that a baby that survives an abortion does not deserve to be saved.  If you want the next generation of kids to be taughtsocialism as a way of life.  If you don’t think that we need to explore and drill for the resources that we have in our own country.  If you want Obama to be the one responsible to appoint the next several Supreme Court Justices.  If you want us to leave Iraq and concede defeat.  If you want this country to be tested with a great crisis that will not be responded to in a way we think is appropriate.  If you don’t like your country or are not proud of your country and want change.  If Obama gets elected as the next president of the greatest, most powerful country in the world then GOD HELP US ALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lincoln’s Prayer Proclomation – second posting

After months of isolation, I nearly lost my desire for occasional solitude.  After years of corruption, I nearly lost my conservative balance.  While the election cycle recovers from the full-tilt we experienced over the past two weeks, I find I’m left with prayer and deciding between the Prayer of St. Francis and the Prayer of Lincoln.

Lincoln’s Prayer Proclamation

In 1863 Abraham Lincoln called the nation to repentance, confession of our national sins and turning back to God. We believe America, more than ever, needs to do this again. Seven months prior to his Proclamation for a National Day of Thanksgiving, Abraham Lincoln issued the following:

A Proclamation for a National Day of Prayer

Whereas, the Senate of the United States, devoutly recognizing the supreme authority and just government of the Almighty God in all the affairs of men and of nations has by a resolution requested the president to designate and set apart a day for national prayer and humiliation.

And whereas, it is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God: to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon: and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord:

And insomuch as we know that by His divine law nations, like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land may be but a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people?

We have been the recipients of the choices bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown; but we have forgotten God.

We have forgotten the gracious land which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God who made us:

It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.

All this being done in sincerity and truth, let us then rest humbly in the hope authorized by the divine teachings, that the united cry of the nation will be heard on high, and answered with blessings no less than the pardon of our national sins, and the restoration of our now divided and suffering country to its former happy condition of unity and peace.

Abraham Lincoln

 

Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury,pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen

 

Alas, my favorite:

Let this be a holy place for the human spirit consecrated to the forces which magnify the soul.