Arkady's Thoughts

Kentucky's Republican Senator Jim Bunning has dominated headlines in the past few days due to his seemingly incomprehensible and flat out evil "filibuster" of a 10 billion dollar unemployment package.  As reported by CNN just two days ago, Bunning is being blamed for filibustering H.R. 4691 and has in the process drawn ire from not only Democrats, but fellow Republicans.  Most puzzling is the reporting of the story as if Bunning performed some horrendous act for which he now must be crucified for.  CNN is not the only culprit as virtually every major news media spun this story as Jim 'the Scrooge' Bunning blocking unemployment benefits from being paid out.   Not true, he has nothing against unemployment benefits, he simply refused to provide unanimous consent for a bill that has absolutely no financing mechanism.  That is all.  From a geeky political perspective this is hardly a filibuster as the bill was never brought up for debate, but was s...

Perhaps discussing is the wrong term, perhaps skewers or shreds is more appropriate.  In five or six minutes Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) runs through the costs of Obama's proposal and brings to light the many painful aspects that we have been talking about for the past several months.  First and foremost, the entire plan is way too expensive and while Obama's proposal is not yet scored by the CBO the Senate's version was indeed scored and the scoring was based on misleading information.  Ryan delves into specific tricks and gimmicks that he believes were injected into the bill on purpose to offset the cost deficit.  The true cost over ten years of this new government health care proposal will result in over 400 billion in losses, but that number is useless.  Because as you remember, the bill is front loaded which means that taxes and cuts to Medicare will go on for ten years, but spending will only go on for six.  If you were to look out in twenty years the d...

Below is a fascinating video on a subject rarely discussed.  Dan Mitchell is on point as always presenting another government paradigm that we have so frequently examined.  This paradigm suggests that most of the time our government responds to a so-called crisis, implements benevolent and far reaching regulations and end up hurting people unintentionally while failing to solve the crisis.  In lessons from Shays' Rebellion we saw how radically and quickly a government can jump to a conclusion based on perceived threats or failing to understand the source of the problem.   Stopping criminals from laundering money and using far reaching regulations is just such an example.  However there is a great cost to pay for such benevolence. On top of the tens of billions extracted from the banks by the FDIC, the banks are also burdened with filing millions of reports on "suspicious" activities that some have estimated cost the banking industry up to 10 billion...

Throw this one into the rapidly mounting "duh" pile.  FDIC is reporting of a rapid increase in distressed banks, highest in 16 years to be exact.  On top of that and you can throw this one into "government manipulated statistic" pile, FDIC claims their account dipped further into negative territory.  Looks like our ruling elite are following a directive of extend and pretend, because a negative account does not exist.  There is a much more apt and straightforward term for negative account and that would be the term bankrupt.  As this little blurb suggests, the situation is dire and getting worse.  The FDIC reported that its Deposit Insurance Fund dropped further into negative territory, reporting a $20.9 billion loss in the fourth quarter, worse than its $8.2 billion loss in the third quarter. The agency hopes to make up that loss through advance payments by banks of $45 billion in fees In fact, as reported here some time ago , FDIC has been br...

Reading the news has replaced for me the need to watch late night comedy, I get all the humor one could handle plus a dash of fright and terror.  In today's NYT piece , we learn of our dear leader's new brilliant idea; price fixing!  That is right folks, where the brilliant minds of the Soviet Politburo and the crack team of the Nixonian administration have failed, our Harvard Law School graduate (where are those pesky transcripts?) decided he has figured it out all out.  The president’s bill would grant the federal health and human services secretary new authority to review, and to block, premium increases by private insurers , potentially superseding state insurance regulators. The bill would create a new Health Insurance Rate Authority, made up of health industry experts that would issue an annual report setting the parameters for reasonable rate increases based on conditions in the market. Nice.  Let's pretend that America is just stupid enough to forget th...

In a surprising and underhanded way , yesterday after the market closed the Federal Reserve raised the discount rate from .50% to .75%!  Before we get into what this means, the fact that a major policy change was announced just before the third Friday of the month leaves much to be desired.  This is because all third Fridays are option expiration days and the market always reacts violently to any unexpected decision from the Fed.  Although today's market open looks rather timid overnight futures were showing significant losses and I bet some people who were positioned long were thinking of creative ways to water board Bernanke and set fire to the Federal Reserve building. So what is the discount rate?  This is the rate that the central banks charge for doing business with the member banks if the member banks need cash.  If you were to imagine the entire Federal Reserve structure it is a giant pyramid.  On top sits the main Federal Reserve and under h...

It looks like the CRU email hacking set off a chain of events that are proving to be cataclysmic for the Global Warming alarmists.  Two back to back reports have not only confirmed what many skeptics have been thinking, but threaten to unravel long held beliefs that have been accepted by some as gospel.  Still, even to this day many cling on to the idea that human caused Global Warming is rooted firmly in science and some politicians like Howard Dean/Al Gore go far as to disparage and insult those individuals who believe that global warming is nothing more than a political ploy to garner more power and influence.  So for those people who still insist that humans are the cause of global warming due to science, for you consideration is the following:  Phil Jones admits that there has been no global warming since 1995 .  This is rather critical not only because Phil Jones played a crucial role as part of the scientific team to research GW, but because the IPCC ...