President Obama Re-Elected - Page 506

On September 14 2012 23:37 xDaunt wrote:

The two attacks are believed to have been coordinated.

On September 14 2012 23:56 kwizach wrote:

...but that's not what your article says. There's nothing in it about the Egyptian intelligence warning the US about the Bengazi attack. In fact, the two coordinated attacks they were referring to were attacks on the US and Israeli embassies in Cairo.

On September 14 2012 19:32 kmillz wrote:
If a single mother in Wisconsin has 2 children and makes 15,000$ a year, but then gets 3x pay increase or marries a man who makes 30,000$ she will now be making 45,000$ a year. 30,000$ more than what she was making right? Wrong. The benefits she loses by having more household income adds up to 38,036$, therefore actually LOSING money for making more money. It is absolutely insane and it encourages people NOT to work hard. Why would you want to make more money when it really means you get less? But Obama wants to raise taxes across the board, ESPECIALLY on those who make more (WAY more than Bill Clinton did) and increase the handouts.

Not too long ago, the Detroit News ran a story about how landscaping companies in Michigan can't find employees, because job applicants aren't really interested in work.
Keep in mind: This story ran while the state of Michigan had the nation's highest jobless rate.

So what's going on here?

Well, Amy Frankmann, who heads up the Michigan Nursery and Landscape Association, told the paper that members of her organization, "have a lot of people applying but that when they actually talk to them, it turns out they're on unemployment and not looking for work. It's starting to make things difficult."

In other words, the unemployment benefits are so great—it no longer makes sense for many of these folks to work!

It isn't just single mothers who have an incentive to simply not work..

In Michigan, the average landscape worker earns $12 an hour, according to the local Department of Labor. So a full-time landscaping employee makes about $225 more per week then he would get if he chose not to work and simply collected unemployment.

But by the time you factor in federal and state taxes, working full time as a landscaper only nets you about $95 more than an unemployment check. And that doesn't factor in money for gas, lunch, and any other expenses you might incur.

So, in other words...

You have to work 40 hours a week in the heat and the dirt, doing backbreaking work... digging, laying stone on your hands and knees... for an extra measly $95.

Does that sound worth it?

Barack Obama's socialist economics for you folks.

On September 14 2012 19:32 kmillz wrote:
If a single mother in Wisconsin has 2 children and makes 15,000$ a year, but then gets 3x pay increase or marries a man who makes 30,000$ she will now be making 45,000$ a year. 30,000$ more than what she was making right? Wrong. The benefits she loses by having more household income adds up to 38,036$, therefore actually LOSING money for making more money. It is absolutely insane and it encourages people NOT to work hard. Why would you want to make more money when it really means you get less? But Obama wants to raise taxes across the board, ESPECIALLY on those who make more (WAY more than Bill Clinton did) and increase the handouts.

Not too long ago, the Detroit News ran a story about how landscaping companies in Michigan can't find employees, because job applicants aren't really interested in work.
Keep in mind: This story ran while the state of Michigan had the nation's highest jobless rate.

So what's going on here?

Well, Amy Frankmann, who heads up the Michigan Nursery and Landscape Association, told the paper that members of her organization, "have a lot of people applying but that when they actually talk to them, it turns out they're on unemployment and not looking for work. It's starting to make things difficult."

In other words, the unemployment benefits are so great—it no longer makes sense for many of these folks to work!

It isn't just single mothers who have an incentive to simply not work..

In Michigan, the average landscape worker earns $12 an hour, according to the local Department of Labor. So a full-time landscaping employee makes about $225 more per week then he would get if he chose not to work and simply collected unemployment.

But by the time you factor in federal and state taxes, working full time as a landscaper only nets you about $95 more than an unemployment check. And that doesn't factor in money for gas, lunch, and any other expenses you might incur.

So, in other words...

You have to work 40 hours a week in the heat and the dirt, doing backbreaking work... digging, laying stone on your hands and knees... for an extra measly $95.

Does that sound worth it?

Barack Obama's socialist economics for you folks.

On September 15 2012 00:16 xDaunt wrote:

That article doesn't talk about the Cairo and Benghazi attacks being coordinated. Others do.

On September 14 2012 19:32 kmillz wrote:
If a single mother in Wisconsin has 2 children and makes 15,000$ a year, but then gets 3x pay increase or marries a man who makes 30,000$ she will now be making 45,000$ a year. 30,000$ more than what she was making right? Wrong. The benefits she loses by having more household income adds up to 38,036$, therefore actually LOSING money for making more money. It is absolutely insane and it encourages people NOT to work hard. Why would you want to make more money when it really means you get less? But Obama wants to raise taxes across the board, ESPECIALLY on those who make more (WAY more than Bill Clinton did) and increase the handouts.

Not too long ago, the Detroit News ran a story about how landscaping companies in Michigan can't find employees, because job applicants aren't really interested in work.
Keep in mind: This story ran while the state of Michigan had the nation's highest jobless rate.

So what's going on here?

Well, Amy Frankmann, who heads up the Michigan Nursery and Landscape Association, told the paper that members of her organization, "have a lot of people applying but that when they actually talk to them, it turns out they're on unemployment and not looking for work. It's starting to make things difficult."

In other words, the unemployment benefits are so great—it no longer makes sense for many of these folks to work!

It isn't just single mothers who have an incentive to simply not work..

In Michigan, the average landscape worker earns $12 an hour, according to the local Department of Labor. So a full-time landscaping employee makes about $225 more per week then he would get if he chose not to work and simply collected unemployment.

But by the time you factor in federal and state taxes, working full time as a landscaper only nets you about $95 more than an unemployment check. And that doesn't factor in money for gas, lunch, and any other expenses you might incur.

So, in other words...

You have to work 40 hours a week in the heat and the dirt, doing backbreaking work... digging, laying stone on your hands and knees... for an extra measly $95.

Does that sound worth it?

Barack Obama's socialist economics for you folks.

On September 14 2012 12:47 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

We're not allowed to criticize the Fed now? They hold a fair chunk of the blame for the housing bubble and there are some really smart people out there that think the QE programs aren't helping.

Fed is Harming, not Helping the Economy

On September 14 2012 13:31 aksfjh wrote:

The logic doesn't follow. The problem the Fed has is that their 0% rates aren't low enough. There isn't enough room between the borrowing at 0%, charging interest for the overhead to the debtor, them charging interest to their debtor, and so on. By the time it exchanges all those hands and the risks are accounted for, there are too many hands in the pot. This is the problem, not that Fed rates are "depressing" the spread for investors, but because they can't lower their end of the spectrum any more.

Without the Fed being at 0% rates, the cost of borrowing goes up, and deleveraging is even harder, but the carry remains unchanged, or even becomes a bigger loss. If the Fed goes to 0.5%, or even 1%, we wouldn't see consumer loan or government bond rates go up by a mirrored 0.5-1% because of the huge amounts of capital we have in the system without Fed intervention. All that happens is that refinancing and deleveraging become even harder.

In reality, you have the bond manager pissed that so much money is in the system that it's impossible to make guaranteed returns against the risks, and instead are forced to take guaranteed net loss returns that are less than devaluation of liquid capital from inflation.

On September 08 2012 01:43 paralleluniverse wrote:
http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/07/investing/stocks-markets/

So many news pieces on the weak job report saying that QE3 is just around the corner.

It's so frustrating listening to these pundits, commentators, and investors continually suggesting that QE3 is just around the corner. People, QE3 has been "just around the corner" for months. Where is it? The Fed over the past several months have basically said, "we're monitoring the situation, and if more data comes in showing weakness in the economy, we're ready to act."

People, the Fed have repeated this mantra month-after-month-after-month and have proceeded to do nothing other than to continue to say "we're monitoring the situation, and if more data comes in showing weakness in the economy, we're ready to act." So what's changed? Hell, Bernanke did it again last week at Jackson Hole.

How many more times does one have to be left at the altar before realizing that Bernanke is NOT coming to the rescue?

Bernanke is saying that he's ready to act because that's basically all he's willing to do. He doesn't see the rewards of QE3 outweighing the risk. He's playing poker, when he says the Fed can and will do more if the situation warrants. It's a bluff. Even if the Fed can -- it won't. It's amazing that people have been duped by his poker skills for nearly a year, and still believe that QE3 is coming any day now.

On September 15 2012 01:34 Rassy wrote:



Thats a verry interesting read, thx for link.
Nvm i misunderstood it, he means the spread between short and long term yield, and the carry trade around it.
Spread between long term and short term interest is expected to decline due to the latest anouncement of the fed buying mbs up to 40b/month, so banks will make less profit from this?
(short term staying equall at 0% and long term coming down)
It will have big effects, need to think about it lol. It can be a brilliant idea though it might also point at the fed running out of options to play with the short term yield (it beeing at next to zero already)

Does Quantitative Easing Mainly Help the Rich?

Last month, the Bank of England issued a report that must have made Fed chairman Ben Bernanke squirm.

It said that the Bank of England’s policies of quantitative easing – similar to the Fed’s – had benefited mainly the wealthy.

Specifically, it said that its QE program had boosted the value of stocks and bonds by 26 percent, or about $970 billion. It said that about 40 percent of those gains went to the richest 5 percent of British households.

Many said the BOE's easing added to social anger and unrest. Dhaval Joshi, of BCA Research wrote that “QE cash ends up overwhelmingly in profits, thereby exacerbating already extreme income inequality and the consequent social tensions that arise from it."

The BOE countered that the benefits of easing may have trickled down, and that “without the Bank's asset purchases, most people in the U.K. would have been worse off."

Still, the paper is instructive for the United States. The latest round of QE announced by Bernanke yesterday has sparked growing controversy about how Fed policy has mainly helped the wealthiest Americans.

On September 15 2012 03:18 JonnyBNoHo wrote:
Interesting article from CNBC

Link to full article.

On September 15 2012 00:39 aksfjh wrote:

I'm not going to touch the first part since you're just throwing numbers out of your ass.

As for the part about Michigan, the maximum benefits one can make on unemployment total $362 a week (equivalent to $9.05/hr), but that isn't the default benefits one gets. Without kids, your pre-benefit income would have to have been closer to $17.65 an hour for 3 months, at 40 hours a week. With 5 kids, it would have been around $16.20 an hour.

PDF Michigan Unemployment Benefits

What does this mean? People already on maximum unemployment regularly have jobs that have considerably higher wages than service jobs being offered, such as waiting tables or landscaping. For somebody that made similar wages to the job in the first place, like a waitress or landscaper being laid off, the jump from unemployment to the same work would be much larger. Somebody only taking a $1 paycut ($13 to $12) would see their wages go up 1.5-2x from unemployment benefits (about $260 per week to $480 per week). It only becomes a "measly" amount when your regular income is 1.5x or more than the job being offered to you.

On September 15 2012 03:18 JonnyBNoHo wrote:
Interesting article from CNBC

Link to full article.

On September 15 2012 04:13 ziggurat wrote:

So a person who used to make $17.65 and who has now been off work for over a year is getting high enough benefits that he has no incentive to take a job that pays $12 per hour. So taxpayers are paying him not to work, while in the meantime businesses can't find people willing to work for $12 per hour. Does this not seem like a problem to you?

On September 15 2012 04:22 aksfjh wrote:

Benefits last no longer than 20 weeks. There were exceptions up until 2010, iirc.

Chances are, if they can't find other work before their unemployment is up, they'll take what they can get. Otherwise, they'll put their time and effort into finding a job that can sustain them (and their family) with as little shock as possible to their lifestyle. If they just outright take the first offer and put 40 hours a week into it, they won't have the ability to look for a job they are suited for. We can't have police officers, nurses, and teachers becoming landscapers every time a layoff occurs...

But if you happen to be president just now, what you are faced with, mainly, is not a public-relations problem but an endless string of decisions. Putting it the way George W. Bush did sounded silly but he was right: the president is a decider. Many if not most of his decisions are thrust upon the president, out of the blue, by events beyond his control: oil spills, financial panics, pandemics, earthquakes, fires, coups, invasions, underwear bombers, movie-theater shooters, and on and on and on. They don’t order themselves neatly for his consideration but come in waves, jumbled on top of each other. “Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable,” Obama said at one point. “Otherwise, someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. Any given decision you make you’ll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn’t going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision. You can’t be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out.” On top of all of this, after you have made your decision, you need to feign total certainty about it. People being led do not want to think probabilistically.

The second week in March of last year offered a nice illustration of a president’s curious predicament. On March 11 a tsunami rolled over the Japanese village of Fukushima, triggering the meltdown of reactors inside a nuclear power plant in the town—and raising the alarming possibility that a cloud of radiation would waft over the United States. If you happened to be president of the United States, you were woken up and given the news. (In fact, the president seldom is awakened with news of some crisis, but his aides routinely are, to determine if the president’s sleep needs to be disrupted for whatever has just happened. As one nighttime crisis vetter put it, “They’ll say, ‘This just happened in Afghanistan,’ and I’m like, ‘O.K., and what am I supposed to do about it?’”) In the case of Fukushima, if you were able to go back to sleep you did so knowing that radiation clouds were not your most difficult problem. Not even close. At that very moment, you were deciding on whether to approve a ridiculously audacious plan to assassinate Osama bin Laden in his house in Pakistan. You were arguing, as ever, with Republican leaders in Congress about the budget. And you were receiving daily briefings on various revolutions in various Arab countries. In early February, following the lead of the Egyptians and the Tunisians, the Libyan people had revolted against their dictator, who was now bent on crushing them. Muammar Qaddafi and his army of 27,000 men were marching across the Libyan desert toward a city called Ben­gha­zi and were promising to exterminate some large number of the 1.2 million people inside.

On March 15 the president had a typically full schedule. Already he’d met with his national-security advisers, given a series of TV interviews on the No Child Left Behind law, lunched with his vice president, celebrated the winners of an Intel high-school science competition, and spent a good chunk of time alone in the Oval Office with a child suffering from an incurable disease, whose final wish had been to meet the president. His last event, before convening a meeting with 18 advisers (which his official schedule listed simply as “The President and the Vice-President Meet With Secretary of Defense Gates”), was to sit down with ESPN. Twenty-five minutes after he’d given the world his March Madness tournament picks Obama walked down to the Situation Room. He’d been there just the day before, to hold his first meeting to discuss how to kill Osama bin Laden.

In White House jargon this was a meeting of “the principals,” which is to say the big shots. In addition to Biden and Gates, it included Secretary of State Hil­lary Clinton (on the phone from Cairo), chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, White House chief of staff William Daley, head of the National Security Council Tom Doni­lon (who had organized the meeting), and U.N. ambassador Susan Rice (on a video screen from New York). The senior people, at least those in the Situation Room, sat around the table. Their subordinates sat around the perimeter of the room. “Obama structures meetings so that they’re not debates,” says one participant. “They’re mini-speeches. He likes to make decisions by having his mind occupying the various positions. He likes to imagine holding the view.” Says another person at the meeting, “He seems very much to want to hear from people. Even when he’s made up his mind he wants to cherry-pick the best arguments to justify what he wants to do.”

Before big meetings the president is given a kind of road map, a list of who will be at the meeting and what they might be called on to contribute. The point of this particular meeting was for the people who knew something about Libya to describe what they thought Qad­da­fi might do, and then for the Pentagon to give the president his military options. “The intelligence was very abstract,” says one witness. “Obama started asking questions about it. ‘What happens to the people in these cities when the cities fall? When you say Qaddafi takes a town, what happens?’” It didn’t take long to get the picture: if they did nothing they’d be looking at a horrific scenario, with tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered. (Qaddafi himself had given a speech on February 22, saying he planned to “cleanse Libya, house by house.”) The Pentagon then presented the president with two options: establish a no-fly zone or do nothing at all. The idea was that the people in the meeting would debate the merits of each, but Obama surprised the room by rejecting the premise of the meeting. “He instantly went off the road map,” recalls one eyewitness. “He asked, ‘Would a no-fly zone do anything to stop the scenario we just heard?’” After it became clear that it would not, Obama said, “I want to hear from some of the other folks in the room.”
[...]

Asked if he was surprised that the Pentagon had not presented him with the option to prevent Qaddafi from destroying a city twice the size of New Orleans and killing everyone inside the place, Obama says simply, “No.” Asked why he was not surprised—if I were president I would have been—he adds, “Because it’s a hard problem. What the process is going to do is try to lead you to a binary decision. Here are the pros and cons of going in. Here are the pros and cons of not going in. The process pushes towards black or white answers; it’s less good with shades of gray. Partly because the instinct among the participants was that … ” Here he pauses and decides he doesn’t want to criticize anyone personally. “We were engaged in Afghanistan. We still had equity in Iraq. Our assets are strained. The participants are asking a question: Is there a core national-security issue at stake? As opposed to calibrating our national-­security interests in some new way.”

The people who operate the machinery have their own ideas of what the president should decide, and their advice is pitched accordingly. Gates and Mullen didn’t see how core American security interests were at stake; Biden and Daley thought that getting involved in Libya was, politically, nothing but downside. “The funny thing is the system worked,” says one person who witnessed the meeting. “Everyone was doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing. Gates was right to insist that we had no core national-security issue. Biden was right to say it was politically stupid. He’d be putting his presidency on the line.”

[...]
Public opinion at the fringes of the room, as it turned out, was different. Several people sitting there had been deeply affected by the genocide in Rwanda. (“The ghosts of 800,000 Tutsis were in that room,” as one puts it.) Several of these people had been with Obama since before he was president—people who, had it not been for him, would have been unlikely ever to have found themselves in such a meeting. [... ] An N.S.C. staffer named Denis McDonough came out for intervention, as did Antony Blinken, who had been on Bill Clinton’s National Security Council during the Rwandan genocide, but now, awkwardly, worked for Joe Biden. “I have to disagree with my boss on this one,” said Blinken. As a group, the junior staff made the case for saving the Ben­gha­zis. But how?

The president may not have been surprised that the Pentagon hadn’t sought to answer that question. He was nevertheless visibly annoyed. “I don’t know why we are even having this meeting,” he said, or words to that effect. “You’re telling me a no-fly zone doesn’t solve the problem, but the only option you’re giving me is a no-fly zone.” He gave his generals two hours to come up with another solution for him to consider, then left to attend the next event on his schedule, a ceremonial White House dinner.

[...]

Obama insists that he still had not made up his mind what to do when he returned to the Situation Room—that he was still considering doing nothing at all. A million people in Ben­gha­zi were waiting to find out whether they would live or die, and he honestly did not know. There were things the Pentagon might have said to deter him, for instance. “If somebody had said to me that we could not take out their air defense without putting our fliers at risk in a significant way; if the level of risk for our military personnel had been ratcheted up—that might have changed my decision,” says Obama. “Or if I did not feel Sarkozy or Cameron were far enough out there to follow through. Or if I did not think we could get a U.N resolution passed.”

Once again he polled the people in the room for their views. Of the principals only Susan Rice (enthusiastically) and Hil­lary Clinton (who would have settled for a no-fly zone) had the view that any sort of intervention made sense. “How are we going to explain to the American people why we’re in Libya,” asked William Daley, according to one of those pres­ent. “And Daley had a point: who gives a shit about Libya?”

[...]

Obama made his decision: push for the U.N resolution and effectively invade another Arab country. Of the choice not to intervene he says, “That’s not who we are,” by which he means that’s not who I am. The decision was extraordinarily personal. “No one in the Cabinet was for it,” says one witness. “There was no constituency for doing what he did.” Then Obama went upstairs to the Oval Office to call European heads of state and, as he puts it, “call their bluff.” Cameron first, then Sarkozy. It was three a.m. in Paris when he reached the French president, but Sarkozy insisted he was still awake. (“I’m a young man!”) In formal and stilted tones the European leaders committed to taking over after the initial bombing. The next morning Obama called Medvedev to make sure that the Russians would not block his U.N. resolution. There was no obvious reason why Russia should want to see Qad­da­fi murder a city of Libyans, but in the president’s foreign dealings the Russians play the role that Republicans currently more or less play in his domestic affairs. The Russians’ view of the world tends to be zero-sum: if an American president is for it, they are, by definition, against it. Obama thought that he had made more prog­ress with the Russians than he had with the Republicans; Medvedev had come to trust him, he felt, and believed him when he said the United States had no intention of moving into Libya for the long term. A senior American official at the United Nations thought that perhaps the Russians let Obama have his resolution only because they thought it would end in disaster for the United States.