Fixing The Economy

[48]

You think USA oil production is going to surpass 10 MBPD???? While USA Demand for crude oil will fall below 13 MBPD? Even if both things happen simultanously, the USA would still be a net importer of oil.

Baker Hughes just released it's weekly drilling rig numbers 8 minutes ago. Take a good look at it. American energy production is about to return to doing what it did while Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II were in office.... drop.

Meanwhile USA NG production is down year-over-year and drilling activity is down 44% year-over-year.

The only way we increase drilling activity (America already drills more than every other country combined) is with higher prices. Much higher. As Dman says, those higher prices kill the economy. This is why a bull move in the stock market creates a bull-market in oil. Thus is the future when the marginal barrel is miles below the surface in tight rock formations.

I can easily say with 100% confidence that American living standards will fall irreversibly. Every generation from here on is going to have it worse than their parents. High paying jobs that create an easy life are a thing of the past, and nothing will change this raw inevitability. Ever.

Believe what you want, but the data doesn't lie.

OBG: I agree with much of what you say. But, ND is booming. Small car/higher mpg IS cutting demand. Crude oil is monopoly cartel...can you say OPEC?...not free enterprise. Nevertheless, WTI is highly correlated to the stock market. As congressional grid lock emerges over spending cuts...ala de ja vue Fiscal Cliff...Dow/500 will go down...it goes down to seasonal summer low anyway...and crude will follow it down.

BTW...when I said "OBG Kool Aid", I was JHF. DF is a t i t t y puller, and they DKJ. lol.

[H. Bell]

IN you make a good case for wall street refoms. Do you think it is necessary to balance the deficit spending in one year or should it phase in?

If you don't eliminate the deficit this year the debt will be larger next year. If you don't fix the deficit next year, the debt will be larger still. How do you ever expect to fix it if it keeps growing? That's why it isn't fixable in my opinion. If they ever make the necessary cuts the economy will tank. That's the pain we're talking about. That's why it's such a joke to hear the Dems say it can be fixed if the rich just pay a little more!! It's a fricking Trillion dollars plus!! Try getting that much tax increases and spending cuts in one year! It ain't gonna happen!!

[82]

Maybe farmers need to pay more federal taxes. If your farming it's easy to use the many tax breaks available to qualify for tax credits designed to help the working poor.

$500,000 of the cost of depreciable assets, including up to $250,000 of the cost of certain real estate assets, and expense the cost under Code Sec. 179. "This provides many businesses with a lucrative opportunity to buy machinery and equipment and to expense eligible qualified real estate purchases in tax year 2012.

How many of you have used the program above to qualify for the program below. If done correctly they tell me you can actually receive a refund even though you never paid anything in.

Earned Income Tax Credit Amounts for Year 2012
The maximum earned income credit for 2012 is: •$5,891 with three or more qualifying children;
•$5,236 with two qualifying children;
•$3,169 with one qualifying child; and
•$475 with no qualifying children.

To be eligible for EIC, both earned income and adjusted gross income (AGI) must each be less than the following amounts for 2012:
•$45,060 ($50,270 married filing jointly) with 3 or more qualifying children
•$41,952 ($47,162 married filing jointly) with 2 qualifying children;
•$36,920 ($42,130 married filing jointly) with 1 qualifying child; or
•$13,980 ($19,190 married filing jointly) with no qualifying children.
•$3,169 with one qualifying child; and
•$475 with no qualifying children.

How many on here, or their working wives make more than $50,270 working a outside job, but qualify for the EIC because your part time farming? Or retired and still part time farm and take the EIC.

The gov't we all love to hate along with farmings ever rising expenses and the fact we are allowed to deduct almost everything we purchase it makes it very easy for farmers not to have to pay hardly any federal tax or at least delay paying the tax almost indefinetly on all those new dollars were creating.

Huge new demand for grain at high prices and perfect weather to meet that demand would do alot to solve the nations problems. It's all about creating NEW dollars and new jobs not rolled dollars.

If you deducted your new smart phone as a farm business expense then technically that makes it an Obama phone.

[rswfarms]

Either way the middle class is forked.

Yes, as usual the middle-class always are the ones to take it in the shorts. Pretty soon the number of middle-class families in our country will drop by 50%. If you want to see what the Big Cities will look like in 20 years, just go to the rural country-side in NC Iowa. Over the last 25 years the number of rural middle-class families has declined by at least 100% or more. In rural Iowa we are fast approaching basically a 2 class society, the "have's" and the "have not's". Most of the high-paid manufacturing jobs which was the base of the middle-class in rural Iowa has disappeared. You have left mainly low-paid service jobs and the wealthy BTO Farmers. And you can see these low-paid service employees give the BTO's dirty looks when they pull-up in there $40,000 Brand-new trucks. Plus these low-paid service employees also think all BTO Farmers get hundreds of thousands of dollars in goverment subsidies. In the future something will have to give, a 2 class society in our country will cause big-time problems. You need a strong middle-class in our society or else things will go downhill quickly. But yes, go to rural Iowa and see how a 2 class society of just the "have's' and the 'have nots" function. It will be coming your way perhaps sooner than you think.

[ses]

Now why do you suppose they think farmers get hundreds of thousands of dollars in government assistance. Do you think it's because idiots like you spew that kind of crap all over the Des Moines newspaper's website? Maybe a few even read these farm websites and read your bulljitt about being worth $37 million dollars and you're making $812.50 an acre profit and still getting FSA payments. You frikkin' retread.

[thorbossler]

I wish I had my digital camera this morning at the Casey's Convenience store where I assisted a woman load up 4 - 30 Packs of beer on her lap for the ride home. Paid cash for the suds, all the other party food was charged to her Illinois Link Card.

db51, is this a part time job to help make ends meet where you had no choice, or WTH are you doing assisting this bullsheiss?


Thor

[villageidiot]

maybe she offered him a little sumthin for his services????

[iadave]

He had to help her out as he was headed to her party! LOL

[rswfarms]

Now why do you suppose they think farmers get hundreds of thousands of dollars in government assistance. Do you think it's because idiots like you spew that kind of crap all over the Des Moines newspaper's website? Maybe a few even read these farm websites and read your bulljitt about being worth $37 million dollars and you're making $812.50 an acre profit and still getting FSA payments. You frikkin' retread.

Any idiot knows at a $7+ Corn Price and a 185bu yield your profit level is over $800/acre if your land is paid-off. And yes, these non-farmers in rural Iowa are well informed that we recieve $62/acre in Welfare Payments. This is not new information for them.

[BinswOH]

Jabber nice work, some solid ideas there.

George Will has finally come out in favor of breaking up banks too big to fail in today's WSJ editorial.

Time to break up the big banks

By George F. Will, Published: February 8

With his chronically gravelly voice and relentlessly liberal agenda, Sherrod Brown seems to have stepped out of “Les Miserables,” hoarse from singing revolutionary anthems at the barricades. Today, Ohio’s senior senator has a project worthy of Victor Hugo — and of conservatives’ support. He wants to break up the biggest banks.

He would advocate this even if he thought such banks would never have a crisis sufficient to threaten the financial system. He believes they are unhealthy for the financial system even when they are healthy. This is because there is a silent subsidy — an unfair competitive advantage relative to community banks — inherent in being deemed by the government, implicitly but clearly, too big to fail.

The Senate has unanimously passed a bill offered by Brown and Sen. David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, directing the Government Accountability Office to study whether banks with more than $500 billion in assets acquire an “economic benefit” because of their dangerous scale. Is their debt priced favorably because, being TBTF, they are considered especially creditworthy? Brown believes the 20 largest banks pay less when borrowing — 50 to 80 basis points less — than community banks must pay.

In a sense, TBTF began under Ronald Reagan with the 1984 rescue of Continental Illinois, then the seventh-largest bank. In 2011, the four biggest U.S. banks (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo) had 40 percent of all federally insured deposits. Today, the 5,500 community banks have 12 percent of the banking industry’s assets. The 12 banks with $250 billion to $2.3 trillion in assets total 69 percent. The 20 largest banks’ assets total 84.5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.

Such banks have become bigger, relative to the economy, since the financial crisis began, and they are not the only economic entities to do so. Last year, the Economist reported that in the past 15 years the combined assets of the 50 largest U.S. companies had risen from around 70 percent of GDP to around 130 percent. And banks are not the only entities designated TBTF because they are “systemically important.” General Motors supposedly required a bailout because a chain of parts suppliers might have failed with it.

But this just means that the pernicious practice of socializing losses while keeping profits private is not quarantined in the financial sector.

To see why TBTF also can mean TBTM — too big to manage — read “What’s Inside America’s Banks?” in the January/February issue of the Atlantic. Frank Partnoy and Jesse Eisinger argue that banks are not only bigger but also “more opaque than ever.” And regulations partake of the opacity: The landmark Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, separating commercial banking from investment banking, was 37 pages long; the 848 pages of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law may eventually be supplemented by 30 times that many pages of rules. The “Volcker rule” banning banks from speculating with federally insured deposits is 298 pages long.

There is no convincing consensus about a correlation between a bank’s size and supposed efficiencies of scale, and any efficiencies must be weighed against management inefficiencies associated with complexity and opacity. Thirty or so years ago, Brown says, seven of the world’s 10 largest banks were Japanese, which was not an advantage sufficient to prevent Japan’s descent into prolonged stagnation. And he says that when Standard Oil was broken up in 1911, the parts of it became, cumulatively, more valuable than the unified corporation had been.

Brown is fond of the maxim that “banking should be boring.” He suspects that within the organizational sprawl of the biggest banks, there is too much excitement. Clever people with the high spirits and adrenaline addictions of fighter pilots continue to develop exotic financial instruments and transactions unknown even in other parts of the sprawl. He is undecided about whether the proper metric for identifying a bank as “too big” should be if its assets are a certain percentage of GDP — he suggests 2 percent to 4 percent — or simply the size of its assets (Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, has suggested $100 billion).

By breaking up the biggest banks, conservatives will not be putting asunder what the free market has joined together. Government nurtured these behemoths by weaving an improvident safety net and by practicing crony capitalism. Dismantling them would be a blow against government that has become too big not to fail. Aux barricades!