Saturday, November 07, 2009

Weekend Links: The Economy

It was quite a week for developments on the economic front.  I wish I could report it was good news.
First off, official unemployment hit 10.2% after October’s figures came in.  This indicates things are getting worse for the American worker – not better. Ed Morrisey at Hot Air has an excellent post on it including an updated Romer graph of what the stimulus promised to do versus what actually happened.  We are off the chart now.  Also from Ed is a post with links of what jobs were really saved by the stimulus, starting with California.  Hint: the state & federal governments aren’t honest.
Doesn’t get much more pointed than what India’s finance minister said when their central bank bought 200 tons of gold in order to reduce dollar holdings.  What did he say about the economies of Europe and the US?  That they had “collapsed.”  Asian countries are running from the US dollar now.
Makes the wrangling over how much to increase health care look silly if there won’t be any money at all.  Still, the Republican health care plan was rolled out Wednesday after having the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) go over the figures.  It would actually reduce the deficit by $68 million over a ten year span.  Sounds good compared to the trillion dollar increase in debt from ObamaCare.  Still, how will any of it be paid for? There is no answer on that, because there is no way to!

UPDATE:  I was wrong, the Democrats plan isn't a trillion dollar outlay, but $3,000,000,000,000 plus over 10 years according to the CBO! The Heritage foundation estimate comes in at $2.4 to 2.6 trillion.  This is insane.

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