Chutzpah: Treasury Secretary blames GOP for Keystone XL delay

4 thoughts on “Chutzpah: Treasury Secretary blames GOP for Keystone XL delay”

1. If George Bush’s recovery was jobless at 7.5%? Not a recovery.
   If the President has years of data establishing that the pipeline’s route is appropriate and the line is mutually beneficial to our nation and our closest friend on the whole dang planet, but the president withholds the only signature needed to get things going, how do you blame that on anyone except the president?
   As the first comment notes, by lying.

2. THERE IS NO GROWTH!!!

   Good grief the real unemployment figures are 22% and climbing. link

   Of course it matter WHO you are talking about.
   International Monetary Fund Report on the World Economy: Convergence, Interdependence, and Divergence

   …New convergence and strengthened interdependence coincide with a third trend, relating to income distribution. In many countries the distribution of income has become more unequal, and the top earners’ share of income in particular has risen dramatically. In the United States the share of the top 1 percent has close to tripled over the past three decades, now accounting for about 20 percent of total U.S. income (Alvaredo and others, 2012).

   The Real Numbers: Half of America in Poverty — and It’s Creeping Upward

   The Uncomfortable Truth About American Wages

   …When we consider all working-age men, including those who are not working, the real earnings of the median male have actually declined by 19 percent since 1970. This means that the median man in 2010 earned as much as the median man did in 1964 — nearly a half century ago. Men with less education face an even bleaker picture; earnings for the median man with a high school diploma and no further schooling fell by 41 percent from 1970 to 2010….

   New Manufacturing Job Losses Reveal Folly of Obama’s Feel-Good China Summit

   The new U.S. manufacturing job losses revealed in this morning’s Labor Department data once again make painfully clear that President Obama’s China policies are failing domestic industry and the broader American economy….

   …despite President Obama’s claims of a domestic manufacturing renaissance, U.S.-based industry’s share of total nonfarm employment has now sunk to 8.82 percent – below even its level in February, 2010, when manufacturing employment reached its absolute low point during the recession. The reason: Since that time, manufacturing has re-added jobs less than one-third as fast as the total nonfarm economy.

   Given the continually rising, manufacturing-dominated, job-killing U.S. merchandise trade deficit with China, and Beijing’s ongoing trade and broader economic transgressions…

   …the time for talk in U.S.-China economic relations has long since passed. China’s bilateral trade surplus is rebounding from its recessionary lows and as a share of its economy. China’s promises to forsake export-led growth are still coming up empty. And China’s predatory policies of currency manipulation, intellectual property theft, and illegal industry subsidization are either continuing apace of worsening. As a result, Washington must begin rebalancing the dangerously lopsided bilateral economic relationship with tough and smart unilateral actions….

   But that’s OK the US is pursuing secret trade talks…
   The Trans-Pacific Partnership Free Trade Agreement: a massive new international trade pact being pushed by the U.S. government at the behest of transnational corporations.

   Corporate CEOs are in on the secret negotiations but not members of Congress. Comments by our Congress Critters are anything but nice link

   John Williams of ShadowStats has a lot to say about the US economy.
   September 2006 Income Variance Data Signal Economic Troubles Ahead and Household Income Numbers Suggest GDP Fraud (He isn’t shy about calling a spade a spade either)

   Good old Bill Clinton and others mucked up the economic statistics so the government could lie to the people of the USA.

   … the quality of government reporting has deteriorated sharply in the last couple of decades. Reporting problems have included methodological changes to economic reporting that have pushed headline economic and inflation results out of the realm of real-world or common experience.

   For example:
   link – “…Up until the Clinton administration, a discouraged worker was one who was willing, able and ready to work but had given up looking because there were no jobs to be had. The Clinton administration dismissed to the non-reporting netherworld about five million discouraged workers who had been so categorized for more than a year…:

   Revision and Seasonal-Adjustment Games Help Obfuscate Employment Reality

   …With the BLS re-jiggering its seasonal factors each month, the range of potentially gimmicked reporting is great. Nonetheless, year-to-year change in the seasonally-adjusted and unadjusted series should be the same, and based on June’s unadjusted annual growth rate, the jobs increase should have been 107,000 instead of 132,000. Annual growth for June was reported at 1.5% seasonally adjusted, 1.4% unadjusted.

   Adding to the malleability of the reporting, June’s fudge or bias factor (birth/death model) created 156,000 jobs that were added to the unadjusted number for good measure. That number flows through to the seasonally-adjusted data with minimal variation. The bias factors never are adjusted for a recessionary environment, always assuming ongoing growth. For example, 25,000 construction jobs were added to employment last June, and 26,000 construction jobs were fudged this June, despite the obvious deterioration in the 2007 construction environment….

   Consumer Price Index: “GOVERNMENT ECONOMIC REPORTS: THINGS YOU’VE SUSPECTED BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK!”

   …Inflation, as reported by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is understated by roughly 7% per year. This is due to recent redefinitions of the series as well as to flawed methodologies, particularly adjustments to price measures for quality changes….

   The CPI was designed to help businesses, individuals and the government adjust their financial planning and considerations for the impact of inflation. The CPI worked reasonably well for those purposes into the early-1980s. In recent decades, however, the reporting system increasingly succumbed to pressures from miscreant politicians, who were and are intent upon stealing income from social security recipients, without ever taking the issue of reduced entitlement payments before the public or Congress for approval.

   In particular, changes made in CPI methodology during the Clinton Administration understated inflation significantly, and, through a cumulative effect with earlier changes that began in the late-Carter and early Reagan Administrations have reduced current social security payments by roughly half from where they would have been otherwise….

   DEPRESSION SPECIAL REPORT

   Current Economic Downturn Is Worst Since Great Depression

   Recession Started a Year Earlier Than Official Reckoning

   Business Contraction Triggered Systemic Solvency Crisis
   Not the Other Way Around

   Still Heavily Gimmicked, Post-Revision GDP Shows More Realistic Numbers

   Economic Crisis Is Far from Over

   …..As discussed in recent writings, the economy suffers from underlying structural problems tied to consumer income, where households cannot keep up with inflation and no longer can rely on excessive debt expansion for meeting short-falls in maintaining living standards. The structural issues are not being addressed meaningfully and cannot be addressed without a significant shift in government economic and trade policies, which under the best of circumstances still would drag out economic woes for many years.

   The current depression likely will show multiple dips in business activity, as was seen during the Great Depression and in the double-dip recession of the early-1980s. I shall argue that the current downturn started at least a year earlier than the December 2007 onset proclaimed by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), official arbiter of U.S. recessions. The current depression is the second dip in a multiple-dip downturn that started back in 1999, and it preceded and in fact was the proximal trigger for the systemic solvency crisis that rose to public view in August 2007. The ensuing systemic problems did not cause the slowdown in business activity, but they exacerbated it significantly.

   While the current circumstance should become recognized as a “depression,” worse lies ahead as the U.S. government’s long-range insolvency and current efforts at debasing the U.S. dollar trigger a hyperinflation in the next five years. Risks for the onset of a hyperinflation in the United States are particularly high….

   [see article for charts to 2009]

   More recently
   Consumer inflation is running about 10%

   Alternate Inflation Charts

   The CPI chart on the home page reflects our estimate of inflation for today as if it were calculated the same way it was in 1990. The CPI on the Alternate Data Series tab here reflects the CPI as if it were calculated using the methodologies in place in 1980. In general terms, methodological shifts in government reporting have depressed reported inflation, moving the concept of the CPI away from being a measure of the cost of living needed to maintain a constant standard of living….

   Money Supply M2 as a Leading Economic Indicator

   The Federal Reserve will cease reporting Money Supply M3 on March 23rd [2006]. At that time, M2 will become the broadest monetary aggregate published by the Federal Reserve.
   As to M3, we have been looking at ways to estimate or model the components that will cease to be published, so that an M3 estimate could be published on at least a monthly basis. While efforts continue, the prospects for a meaningful M3 replacement do not look promising….

   While it is not as strong an indicator as M3, particularly as to indicating monetary inflation pressures, M2 does generate reasonably good signals of pending recessions, enough so as to be used as one of the traditional leading economic indicators. It is the relationship between M2 and GDP growth that is explored this month….
   The historical relationship between M2 and GDP growth rates can be seen in the following graphs…

   And two years later the economy tanks….

3. The trouble with the so-called growth is that it was first driven by deficit spending to the tune of $4+ TRILLION during the President’s first term and is now being driven by QE. There hasn’t been any real growth which is why 80% of all Americans are on food stamps and out of work.

4. LIAR.