Wake Up Little Stupid Head!

You are being played like a chump in many ways. Here are just 2:

foreign outsourcing of component manufacturing has led to consistent overstatement of U.S. GDP and productivity. The connection goes a long way to explain why we keep losing jobs even as GDP is apparently expanding.

As our economy becomes less competitive due to higher taxes, burdensome and uncertain regulations, and capital flight, more manufacturing and services will be outsourced to foreign firms. However, the flaw in GDP calculation allows the output of those foreign workers to be included in our domestic tally. Since we count the output but not the worker responsible for it, government statisticians attribute the gains to rising labor productivity. To them, it looks like companies are producing more goods with fewer workers.

The reality is that we are producing less with fewer workers. The added “productivity” comes from higher unemployment and larger trade deficits. This is a toxic formula that will have lethal economic consequences. _PeterSchiff

And # 2, look at the taxes!

I keep reading about surveys that show that retail sales are up. But as noted above, no one pays extra sales taxes, or decides they need to pay more income taxes. The surest way to measure retail sales is sales taxes. Want to know how incomes are doing? Look at income tax receipts. Let's look at sales taxes first.

First off, I can find no single source of recent sales tax information. It is all one-off, but it is consistent. Sales taxes in my home state of Texas are down 12.8% year-over-year, and we're in the fifth straight month of decreases of 11% or more. Projections are for sales taxes to continue to decline into 2010.

There is a very revealing study by the Pew Center on state taxes, called "Beyond California". Everyone knows how badly off California is. The Pew Center looks at how the rest of the states are doing, and focuses on 10 states that also have severe problems. Sales tax receipts are down 14% in Arizona, and state income taxes are down 32%.

On average, revenues are down almost 12%. Oregon has seen their revenues collapse a stunning 19%. New York is down 17%, with a deficit of 32%. Illinois has a projected deficit of 47% of its budget, second only to California with 49%. You can see how your state fares here.

The Liscio Report notes that all states had negative year-over-year sales tax collections in October, and the weighted average decrease was 10.2%, down from a negative 7.2% in September. _SeekingAlpha

One more thing: do you really believe those unemployment numbers they try to feed you?

As I noted last week, the number of unemployed actually soared by 558,000, to 15.7 million, as measured by the household survey, not the 190,000 you read about in the mainstream media. Unemployment is sadly continuing to rise by significant amounts.

In August, I did an interview with CNBC from Leen's Fishing Lodge in Maine. The unemployment numbers had just come out. I did a back-of-the-napkin estimate that we would need about 15 million new jobs over the next five years just to get back to where we were when the recession started. _SA

President Obama thinks he can speak the country out of the recession with his teleprompter and 1960s era speechwriters.

He thinks that by paying off his supporters in the big unions, big Wall Street firms, big trial lawyer partnerships, and big overseas illegal campaign contributor scams, that somehow everything will magically get better.

How, Mr. Obama? By taxing small and medium business into oblivion? By destroying the coal industry, hamstringing the oil industry, and paralyzing the nuclear industry? By giving the auto industry to your union chums to destroy, and regulating the energy industry out of existence? By creating a monster of a government health care bureaucracy that drives the economy into the mud even more quickly than all previous entitlements put together?

Hey little stupid head! Wake up and decide if you are going to put up with this green rookie incompetent clown president you stumbled into electing. Because despite what you may have been told, the world really did need a prosperous, strong US -- for a lot of reasons.