GregNews

Beyond the Occupy Wall Street crowd playing the part of the “useful idiots” of organized socialist, national socialist (i.e., Nazi)  and communist parties, you’ve got a massive number of economically-ignorant, naive or at minimum mis-educated youths who seem unaware that they’re protesting the wrong street: Instead of occupying Wall Street they should be occupying K-street, or better yet, the Independence, First, and Constitution streets that surround the Capital building.

[Bloomberg] Federal employees whose compensation averages more than $126,000 and the nation’s greatest concentration of lawyers helped Washington edge out San Jose as the wealthiest U.S. metropolitan area, government data show.

The U.S. capital has swapped top spots with Silicon Valley, according to recent Census Bureau figures, with the typical household in the Washington metro area earning $84,523 last year. The national median income for 2010 was $50,046.

The figures demonstrate how the nation’s political and financial classes are prospering as the economy struggles with unemployment above 9 percent and thousands of Americans protest in the streets against income disparity, said Kevin Zeese, director of Prosperity Agenda, a Baltimore-based advocacy group trying to narrow the divide between rich and poor.

“There’s a gap that’s isolating Washington from the reality of the rest of the country,” Zeese said. “They just get more and more out of touch.”

Total compensation for federal workers, including health care and other benefits, last year averaged $126,369, compared with $122,697 in 2009, according to Bloomberg News calculations of Commerce Department data. There were 170,467 federal employees in the District of Columbia as of June.

That’s right. People working for the federal government make more money than those who actually produce things, be they in Silicon Valley, New York City, Atlanta or B.F. Idaho. And why is that? Well as Tina Korbe points out the Beltway “boasts one lawyer for every 12 city residents” — that’s a lot of “fat cats” to grease the palms of your slimy senator or representative in turn for tax dollars and fabricated “shovel ready” phantom jobs required to sort through phone-book sized regulatory bills.

The Bloomberg report continues:

Lobbyists play a prominent role in the Washington economy. In 2010 there were 12,964 registered lobbyists, with most working in or around the nation’s capital, according to figures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington- based research group that tracks political spending. Spending on lobbying efforts reached a record $3.51 billion last year, up from $3.49 billion in 2009.

Ironically, while President Barack Obama and Democrats have been expressing solidarity with this confused lot of Marxists, they’re well entrenched in the Lobby enterprise.

This week the Washington Post reported that “President Obama has still managed to raise far more money this year from the financial and banking sector than Mitt Romney or any other Republican presidential candidate, according to new fundraising data. … Obama has brought in more money from employees of banks, hedge funds and other financial service companies than all of the GOP candidates combined, according to a Washington Post analysis of contribution data.”

The Democrats are against lobbying and big banking… except when they’re for it.

WSJ:

All of the details weren’t clear in media reports as we went to press, but it seems Mr. Reid’s surtax would raise tax rates on millionaires by five percentage points starting January 1, 2012, or less than four months from now. That’s a year earlier than the tax increases that Mr. Obama is proposing. So much for the President’s promise that “nobody is talking about raising taxes right now.”

How this would stimulate a sluggish economy even under Keynesian economic theory is a mystery, unless you believe like Democrats apparently do that tax rates don’t matter to economic growth.

We doubt that’s how millions of small business owners will feel if they start paying a top marginal rate on their income—which they report through the individual tax code as Subchapter S companies—of 40%. That would rise to nearly 46% in 2013 under Mr. Obama’s other tax proposals (including deduction phaseouts), plus another 3.8% under ObamaCare’s tax increases on investment and payroll income. So Uncle Harry would take nearly 50% of everything they make. Who wouldn’t want to run out and hire more workers with that incentive?

Paraphrasing President Obama, one job of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is to determine if a business is making ‘too much profit.’ Mr. Obama is correct in his assessment that nobody is entitled to “a certain amount of profit,” but where he runs frighteningly amok is taking that assessment to mean that government should be the decider, rather than the American consumer.

Mr. Obama’s statement is quite telling, and scary too: Recall the former Soviet Union leaders used to brag that they suffered no bankruptcies in the USSR — the reason being that one can never have a bankruptcy if there is no private property, or private ownership of business. The president told us in 2008 that his wish was to “fundamentally transform America.” Judging by his words below, he wasn’t kidding. And he wonders why so many Americans fear him, and think he’s a socialist or communist?

President Obama joined fellow Democrats in blasting a new fee on debit card users announced by Bank of America, arguing that banks do not have an “inherent right” to a certain amount of profits.

The bank has come under a hail of criticism after it announced it would begin charging debit card users $5 a month, blaming the move on policymakers who curbed the amount of fees they could collect from retailers.

“You don’t have some inherent right just to get a certain amount of profit if your customers are being mistreated,” he said in an interview with ABC News. “My hope is that you’re going to see a bunch of the banks saying to themselves, ‘You know what, this is not good business practices.’”

“This is exactly why we need this [CFPB - Treasury Deparment's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau],” the president said. “We need somebody whose sole job it is to prevent stuff like this.”

Prevent stuff like what? Making a profit? Wouldn’t merchants (the banks’ customers) best determine if they’re being gouged or not rather than an unelected and unaccountable group of bureaucrats in the U.S. Treasury department? Wouldn’t consumers best decide, rather than some government bureau, if they would prefer credit cards or prepaid cards?

As Jonah Goldberg pointed out recently, here’s how government grows: It (1) either creates a real problem or invents a mythical one, then (2) proposes and enacts a “solution” to that problem. (3) Repeat steps 1 & 2.

So in this case the Democrat Congress, under the Durbin Amendment, invented the problem — that the economy was harmed by debit card fees that were too high for merchants — then enacted the solution, the Durbin Amendment, which by government fiat cut in half banks’ debit profitability, telling them that they could only charge 24 cents per debit transaction (from 44 cents).

This “solution” to an imaginary “problem” was typical liberally-activist government arrogance stemming from a belief that its “experts” could devise better economic engineering than that of 300 million consumers acting collectively.

It also smacks of hypocrisy in the form of propping up one kind of crony corporatism (bowing to the retail lobby) even as they demonize another (banking).

Here’s how the Democrat’s “solution” will affect you: less consumer choices — not just Bank of America, but the rest, like Wells Fargo, CitiGroup, Regions, and Morgan Chase, for starters, are now eliminating free checking and charging annual fees for debit-card holders, as well as eliminating many points programs.

According to CNN, “Your debit card may soon be denied for purchases greater than $100 — or even as little as $50.”

Hey, but thank heavens the government is “protecting us.”

Even worse, Mr. Obama must hate poor people. Without free checking, many poor Americans will be forced into costly high-percentage paycheck-cashers and money lenders. (Hello Amscot!)

Worst of all, the Durbin Amendment is a jobs killer: According to Portfolio.com, “the majority of startups and entrepreneurs often use their personal accounts as the initial run of funding. They count on the perks they can collect as ways to reward their staffs, especially when they can’t always afford the high-flying salaries of the past.”

Sorry, small business!

This is especially true for the smaller banks and credit unions that cannot absorb the financial loss:

The most noticeable change will likely be the closure of bank branches, reversing a decade-long growth. Branches today serve as customer-recruitment centers, as customers, once enrolled, do much of their banking electronically, by ATM or online. By making many new customers unprofitable, however, the Durbin amendment eliminates the incentive to compete by offering more branches.

Citing the negative impact of the Durbin amendment and other regulations on customer profitability, Texas-based IBC bank recently announced its decision to close 55 supermarket-based branches, eliminating 500 jobs, rather than increasing banking fees. Other banks will inevitably follow suit.

Conceived of as a narrow special-interest giveaway to large retailers, the Durbin amendment will have long-term consequences for the consumer banking system. Wealthier consumers will be able to avoid the pinch of higher banking fees by increasing their use of credit cards. Many low-income consumers will not. Banking will become less innovative and consumer-friendly.

No word yet from President Obama if large chain retailers will next be investigated by the CFPB for earning “a certain amount of profit.”

When the going gets tough on President Obama you can count on him to revise decades of economic history.

[WSJ] President Barack Obama on Thursday said the U.S. has lost some of its competitive edge and gotten a “little soft.”

Mr. Obama, in an interview with WESH-TV in Orlando, said his administration has been tough on the country’s trading partners and tried to strengthen U.S. manufacturing.

“This is a great great country that had gotten a little soft and we didn’t have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades,” Mr. Obama said in response to a question about the country’s economic future. “We need to get back on track.”

Mr. Obama has faced heavy criticism for his handling of the economy, and the high unemployment rate –9.1%– is threatening his re-election bid.

As a wise man once said, you’re entitled to your own opinions but not to your own facts. Obama’s context may have regarded the strength of trade and manufacturing, but don’t think for a second that he’s not attempting to portray our current economic plight as something that has been building for decades. It’s just not true. Every economic indicator of relevance shows increasing and steady improvement over the last 2-3 decades. Those who pine for the days of assembly-line factories also miss the point: Those losses were often due to technological advances or simply cheaper wages overseas (benefiting consumers with cheaper costs). It’s like crying a river for all of those railroad and telegraph jobs we no longer provide. It makes no sense. We’re an IT and service economy, and we’re better off for that transition.

Jim Geraghty sums it up nicely:

Er, rewind the tape. We didn’t have the competitive edge we needed over the last couple of decades? Which ones? The 1980s, when the free world outlasted the socialist model and triumphed over the Soviet Union without firing a shot? The 1990s, when our economy integrated the technological breakthroughs of the Internet age and our economy grew to new dazzling heights? Or the last decade, where we responded to the most devastating attack in our nation’s history, where our enemies unleashed mass death in our biggest cities, by toppling two brutal regimes, and we did it all with the unemployment rate between 4 and 6 percent?

The facts are easy to find. Let’s take a gander over at the federal government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA, Department of Commerce) and Department of Labor (DOL) web pages, for instance.

In the 1980s, gross domestic product (GDP) grew at an average of a whopping 7.8% per quarter (Thanks Reagan!); in the 1990s it grew at an average of 5.6% (another great average); and in  the 2000s (and let’s stop at Bush’s exit, 4th QTR 2008) it grew at an average of 4.4%. Obama’s GDP quarterly growth from 1st QTR 2009 until now? 2.7%

Um, who’s been less competitive?

You can do the same for unemployment too - and it’s truly where the rubber meets the road. The umemployment rate in the 1980s averaged 7.3%, and that’s coming off the late-70s energy crisis and President Carter’s ineptitude. By the time Reagan left office he had it down to 5.3%. In the 1990s, the unemployment rate averaged just 5.8%, and it dropped to 5.1% in the 2000s (again, I’m stopping at Bush’s exit). Indeed, even if you want it averaged by president (which is somewhat a misnomer since the Congress has massive control over an economy), it would read Reagan (7.5%), Bush Sr. (6.3%), Clinton (5.2%), Bush (5.3%) and Obama (9.3%).

SARASOTA — Following an apparent shark attack in the Bay area this weekend, the animal rights organization PETA has announced plans to run an outdoor advertising campaign attacking a recent Bay area shark attack victim.

The organization plans to promote an ad that shows a human “drumstick” hanging out of a shark’s mouth, next to the words “Payback Is Hell. Go Vegan.”

The organization will put the ad on benches and billboards near Anna Maria Island, they said will promote their claim that “the deadliest killers in the water aren’t sharks — they’re humans.”

You see, if we just stopped eating fish and all became Vegans then sharks wouldn’t attack people in the wat… oh, wait… I guess we’d have to give up recreational swimming in the ocean too…

Some people are outraged when they see things like this but I think it’s great because it truly shows PETA for the half-baked, illogical, and extreme organization they are. Such PETA ideological campaigns might be great back-slapping material for their monthly meetings, but it hardly wins over more moderate and reasonably-minded people to their organization.