Time for Thorns

Remember the tax  His Oneness put on tanning salons?   The one which was supposed to raise $200 million this year?   Yeah,  that’s the one,  and it brought in a whopping $36.6 million in the first six months.   Dear me,  another economic forecast the Obama crew screwed up.

Yeah,  the Bush tax cuts contributed,  but it’s the overspending that  did it.   Scott Hodge  offers 2 charts  which put it all in perspective.   Jim Lacey runs the numbers  on entitlement  overspending.

Michael Tanner explains  why tax increases  won’t solve our budget problems.   This chart provides  a breakdown  of income tax deductions.

Go  here for a  wonderful cartoon on the economic headwinds His Oneness has mentioned.

If you want to know why it’s so damned difficult to talk economics to progressives or liberals,  Andrew Stiles has a  marvelous post detailing Sen. Pat Toomey’s current dealings with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.  It’s tangible proof that they are so caught up in their ideology they are simply incapable of rational thought.

I adore Thomas Sowell’s random thoughts  –  reading them is like paging through miniature books on different subjects.   In this selection,  he sums up Washington thinking on jobs and tells you why it’s so wrong  — all in a single paragraph consisting of two sentences.

Compare this to His Oneness without a teleprompter and remember that concise words flow from an orderly,  disciplined mind.   What Obama gives us is undisciplined,  disorderly froth spilling over lofty-sounding,  but essentially meaningless,  New Age babble  mixed with Orwellian doublespeak.

Stimulus spending  by the government doesn’t work.  You don’t have to be an economics professor to  understand de Rugy’s post,  or the column she links to.

Australia  learned its lesson years ago.   Will we?

Michael Ramirez scores a touchdown with  this one.

And here’s one  that’s related.

So says Enron economist Paul Krugman,  having previously pined for a MUCH larger stimulus,  sung the praises of China’s all-powerful government,  and is now sighing that instead of following Japan’s model,  “…we will take a hard right turn into economic disaster.”

But yes,  things could still be worse for Japan.  It could still be taking economic advice from Tim Geithner,  who gave them the Lost Decade which is now stretching into two lost decades.   As Treasury Secretary,  Timmy is now in the process of giving America a lost half-century,  being,  like the rest of the Obama Administration,  unable to distinguish between a ditch and a cliff.

The departing adviser of His Oneness  wishes she hadn’t used the 8% unemployment figure in her January report.   I’m with Joseph Lawler on this one.

Confirmation of the failure of the economic policies is  here.