Somebody Told Him

President Bush spoke about the economy at the Maryland Heights headquarters of World Wide Technolgies on Friday.

Supposedly, WWT is the largest black-owned company in America.  Strangely, I’ve never heard of it, and neither have most St. Louisans.  Way to go, President Bush and MSM — trying to pump up the accomplishments of black businessmen, and most people in its home city are scratching their heads.  Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if WWT got a lot of business from government contracts.

The President took the time to come to St. Louis just to visit a black company.  I suppose he hasn’t figured out yet that neither he nor any other Republican, even the liberal ones, has virtually no black support.  Why pander to the people that don’t want you?

The President also took the opportunity of his speech to tell us that he knows about the rising price of food and gas.  Really, he does?  This means somebody must have told him.  Because he wouldn’t know on his own accord, as he has never had to worry about having to pay a bill in his life.  But he has a solution to the rising price of food — export more American food to hungry people in Africa.  Good going, slappy.  Reduce the supply here (and increase the demand with his virtual open borders policy), to make food even more expensive.  I hope that wasn’t the idea of the same person who told him that the cost of food and gas was going up.  I mean, one can excuse President Bush for being oblivious.

The President also pumped up the rebate checks, which are beginning to trickle in.  What the President hasn’t told us, and the media hasn’t explained, is that many people won’t get the amount they think they’re going to get.  For instance, an individual will only get $300 instead of the promised $600 if their previous tax return’s total tax liability wasn’t high enough.  Yes, you might get $300 per dependant child, but not if he or she is 16 or older.

A lot of heads are going to roll when people figure out that their tax rebate isn’t what they thought they were promised.

So Much For Reform

This is the Congress that came to power in 2006 promising to reform earmarks.  Yet, the Senate couldn’t find it in its heart to pass the DeMint-McCaskill bill, which was rumored to ban earmarks for one year, but wouldn’t actually have done that — all the act mandated was that, for one year, earmarks needed a two-thirds supermajority to pass.

Claire McCaskill obviously voted for it, as she is a named sponsor.  She was only one of three Senate Democrats not running for President that voted yea.  Hillary and Obama both voted for it for outward appearances, even though they requested 212 and 56 earmarks for a total of $266m and $156m, respectively.  John McCain voted yea, and he is more consistent, because he has requested no earmarks so far this year.

Subprime Distraction

P-D:

Foreclosures up sharply in city, county

When Tina and Edward Aldrich bought their home in Dogtown 22 years ago, Edward was a union steelworker with a steady job.

But the loss of that job and other setbacks prompted the Aldriches to refinance their mortgage four times. Now, they are among the hundreds of St. Louis-area homeowners who are teetering on the brink of foreclosure.

New figures show that foreclosures jumped 52 percent in the city last year, to 2,593. They were up 32 percent in St. Louis County, to 3,760. It was the second consecutive year of double-digit increases in both areas, according to the Public Policy Research Center at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Yet, most of the rest of this article blames subprime.  I think the subprime mania is mostly a distraction, concealing the real truth of the matter:  A good percentage, perhaps a majority, of the foreclosures that have happened during “subprime mania” have happened because the homeonwers have lost their jobs.  And in that case, it doesn’t matter what kind of mortgage one has.

The Democrats are the Evil Party. The Republicans are the Stupid Party. Whenever They Get Together in a Bipartisan Fashion, They Do Something Both Evil and Stupid.

Maybe this isn’t that bad, but when a former Democratic President and any given modern-day California Governor team up on an idea, you just know that there’s an ulterior motive.  The motive?  Bank accounts for illegal aliens.

WSJ:

Beyond Payday Loans

By WILLIAM J. CLINTON and ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER

The American dream is founded on the belief that people who work hard and play by the rules will be able to earn a good living, raise a family in comfort and retire with dignity.

But that dream is harder to achieve for millions of Americans because they spend too much of their hard-earned money on fees to cash their paychecks or pay off high-priced loans meant to carry them over until they get paid at work.

Here is one initiative that can unite progressives and conservatives as well as business leaders and community activists: helping the “unbanked” enter the financial mainstream by opening checking and savings accounts, and working collaboratively with financial institutions and community groups to develop and market products that work for this untapped market. This will put money in the pockets of individuals and grow the economy. And it won’t cost taxpayers a dime.

Sorry, Bill and Arnie, but I highly doubt that anyone who is too stupid or too lazy to open a bank account has it in them to partake of the American Dream.  (Yes, I know that there are exceptions, and that not everyone without a bank account is stupid or lazy.)

If they’re so worried about payday loan shops and their high interest rates, bring back the usury laws.

This Is Like Giving a Blood Transfusion to a Corpse

President Bush wants to pump $150 billion of money the Federal government doesn’t have into an economy that’ll spend it all on China-made garbage at Big Box Mart anyway.

Economic stimulus.  Yeah, there’s a good laugh.

It’s As If Doing the Right Thing Isn’t So Right

Wall Street Journal:

Some Cry Foul Over Relief Plan For Borrowers

The Bush administration’s plan to give subprime borrowers a break on their mortgages is already catching flak from an unexpected source: other homeowners.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, at a housing conference yesterday, said he is “aggressively pursuing” an agreement with lenders and investor groups to freeze rates on subprime adjustable-rate mortgages at their original levels. The proposal, aimed at helping homeowners who would fall behind in their payments at higher rates, is designed to prevent a surge in foreclosures next year. About 1.5 million subprime adjustable-rate mortgages are scheduled to reset to higher rates in 2008.

But as outlines of the plan become known, some homeowners are complaining that the effort isn’t fair to borrowers who didn’t overextend themselves. Others argue that the government shouldn’t be involved in perpetuating a housing bubble that needs to deflate. A key question: How far should you go to help borrowers who can’t pay their bills?

“People have to be responsible for their own actions,” says Harry Lancz, a small-business owner in Traverse City, Mich. He holds a pair of fixed-rate mortgages, one for his primary residence, which has been for sale for six months, and one for a second home in Louisiana. “What are you going to do when their credit cards get due and they can’t pay? Are you going to bail them out on that, too?”

Similarly, many legal aliens and American citizens that followed the legal process to become a citizen are indignant over hard or soft amnesty proposals for illegal aliens.  Why follow the law, or why engage in financial common sense, if someone is going to bail you out if you don’t?

Africa Is Only a Disaster Where Democrats Engineered the Downfall

The neo-con blog RedState supplements a recent New York Times story on the impending economic collapse of Zimbabwe with a colorful paragraph of its own.

Question: Neo-cons and “mainstream” conservatives will tend to tell the truth about Zimbabwe, but say nothing about South Africa, which is maybe a decade behind Zimbabwe in its own collapse. What gives?

Answer: Dutcholyatry. The most significant difference between the two African countries is which American president pushed them over the edge, and into the abyss of black rule. It’s fun for neo-cons to pick on Zimbabwe simply because they get to poke fun at Jimmy Carter. Ten years from now, when the krugerrand is at a million percent inflation rate, and the St. Louis CofCC Blog daily monitors the rising exchange rates between it and the U.S. peso, the RedStates, Right Wing Newses, and Power Lines of the world won’t say boo about it, because it was their idol who smashed South Africa to death with the economic boycott he signed in the early 1980s.

Also, Zimbabwe is a slightly less hot potato for the neo-cons to handle than South Africa, because the former never had the hard-and-fast apartheid that the latter did, and apartheid, and its sister systems, segregation and Jim Crow, don’t fit into a “conservative” egalitarian ideology.

They’re Only Here to Do the Jobs That Americans Would Do

CSM today echoes WSJ from about a month ago, about the paltry summer job market for American teenagers. Mass immigration is rightly blamed, and CSM takes it a step further, by telling us that the job market for adults is so bad, (thanks to globalist economic policy), that a lot of people are moving into fields that used to be the exclusive province of teenagers working summer jobs.

Some of this article states that some teenagers, especially those from the middle- and upper-classes, are devoting their summers to education and volunteering. It’s illogical to include them in an article about a bad job market for teens, because they’re not in the job market by choice. If they were, the situation would be worse.

From the CSM:

In Boston, 17-year-old Dedric Due says he’s scanning the newspaper ads for a job, and so far hasn’t found one. With a self-confident bearing, he says he’d like to be an assistant music teacher. But just about anything, from construction to retail, would do. “I’d do whatever job would make me money,” he says.

(snip)

On Washington Street here, Dedric isn’t the only young African-American hoping for a job. Just down the block, Gerald Richardson, 13, has been volunteering after school, mentoring other kids at the Salvation Army. He says he wants to do more of that, for pay, during the summer.

Messrs. Due and Richardson live in Boston, in Massachusetts, which has sent xenophile Ted Kennedy to the U.S. Senate three days short of forever, and John Kerry there for four terms and maybe more in the future. I’m sure Washington Street in Boston votes almost exclusively for Kennedy and Kerry every time there’s a Senate election, and that, when it’s their turns to pull the lever, so will Due and Richardson. They have nobody to blame but themselves, collectively and (soon) individually.

Confidence Game

CSM:

Since the beginning of the year, the buck has shrunk 5 percent – the equivalent of a 20 percent annual decline – compared with the pound and the euro.

Since nearly all national currencies are simply pieces of paper that rely on public confidence in the country and government that the paper represents, this means that people are having more relative faith in England and Germany (keeping in mind that the Euro and the EU itself is a front for German economic power), than the United States.

I don’t think the fact that the US is more non-white than England and Germany is just a mere coincidence here.

Ballgame Equilibrium

Matt and Andy Blunt would reserve this space for millionaires

P-D Political Fix:

As the Legislature’s adjournment of May 18 nears, dying bills often hitch a ride with bills heading toward passage.

That practice helps explain why ticket scalping would no longer be a crime under a bill the House passed and sent to the governor on Thursday.

Lobbyist Andy Blunt, the governor’s brother, has been seeking to relax the scalping law for his client, Ticketmaster, which wants to resell tickets over the Internet.

It’s time for a basic economics lesson, and please don’t fall asleep on me. It’s relevant to why repealing this law is a bad idea.

The price at which a seller is willing to sell something is the same as one where the buyer is willing to purchase the good or service is called the equilibrium price.

When there are high-profile sporting or concert events, e.g. Cardinals playoff or World Series games, there are a very limited number of seats, but a whole lot of people who want to buy tickets.

Therefore, left to the market, the price for a World Series ticket would be excessively high, so high that hardly anyone, save the 50,000 richest St. Louisans, could afford them.

To give the average person a chance to buy World Series tickets, team owners will price them far below market value. The tradeoff of setting a price below equilibrium is that there has to be a way to ration them, because at that low price, many more people are in the market than tickets available. Usually, the rationing solution involves long lines at the box office, or online availability for about ten minutes, or a ticket lottery.

In order to enforce the spirit of this policy, the state of Missouri prohibits the sale of tickets to any sporting or concert event at a price higher than the face value, anywhere in the state. The purpose of this law is to prevent a secondary black market that would virtually, in economic terms, push the “market” price of tickets back up to the undesirable equilibrium.

For if that happens, the average person is priced back out of the market.

If this bill is passed and signed into law, the secondary market, and all its vicissitudes, is legalized. And Gov. Blunt’s brother’s client stands to make a lot of money.

As an aside, you probably see or hear ads for ticket brokers that are “a short distance” from the stadium, where one can buy hard-to-find tickets for events and concerts. That “short distance” requires crossing a bridge, because those establishments are in Illinois, which does not ban ticket scalping.

No Reason For This Article

Because the article itself has the reason why it shouldn’t exist.

AP:

WASHINGTON - Blacks have been charged higher auto loan rates than other auto buyers, federal research says. But the gap in loan rates could narrow, and possibly disappear, as the result of recently concluded lawsuits.

(snip)

Lenders’ suggested quote rates are based largely on the buyer’s credit history, but auto dealers often raise the rate higher than that risk-related rate without discussing the rate with the customer, consumer advocates said. And they question the causes of those rate differences.

Really, you could have stopped reading this article after the words “credit history.”

Expensive Pad

Apartment construction financed by the Missouri Housing Development Commission for low-income individuals winds up costing taxpayers between $200G and $300G per unit.

Mind you, most of Missouri’s geography is either Ozarks in most of southern Missouri, slightly rolling farmland in most of northern Missouri, or delta in southeast Missouri, and none of those areas are exactly experiencing boom times.

If the apartments built in towns there are costing in the $200G range, then a whole lot of people have their hands in the cookie jar.

Something It Doesn’t Give Them

KSDK-NBC-5:

Volunteer work gives poor teenagers a boost in confidence that can propel them to college, but other teens are more likely volunteers, a federal study finds.

It doesn’t give poor teenagers something that they by definition need and could use: Money.

I’m starting to think that the hoopla about and the overemphasis of volunteering is originating from corporate mouthpieces, and is meant to grease the skids to get young people used to working for peanuts or for nothing.

For the Greater Good

Recently, I have seen a spate of TV ads for TIAA-CREF Financial Services. All of the ads play a light instrumental version of “Somewhere” by Bernstein/Sondheim in the background, and the visuals involve scenes from the education or health care fields.

TIAA-CREF, which stands for Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association - College Retirement Equities Fund, was inspired by Andrew Carnegie and founded by one of his top lieutenants and with Carnegie Foundation money in 1918 as TIAA.

The goal of the ads, and the goal of TIAA-CREF’s services, is to extol the virtues of financial planning for those in the education, health care, and non-profit sectors. As you can see from their logo, they provide services “for the greater good.”

Does anyone else other than me feel a little insulted?

The implication is that only the education, health care and non-profit sectors are altruistic enough to do things “for the greater good.”

I suppose UPS or FedEx, which makes many deliveries to educational, health care and non-profit institutions, doesn’t help the “greater good.”

It would also seem that construction contractors, who build the edifices where health care and education take place, don’t help the “greater good.”

All of this also ignores the fact that most education and health care firms and institutions are just as interested in the bottom line as the greedy non-altruists at the delivery company and the construction firm. Go to any big-city hospital complex, and one of two things or both are forever happening there: Construction and major renovation. The only difference is that the profits earned in health care and education aren’t subject to Federal corporate income taxes.

Affirmative Action Mortgages

The next time you hear President Bush or any race-pandering neocons talking about the gains that black Americans have made in home ownership, drop this little piece of bad news from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in their laps:

Vardiman is African-American, a fact that could be significant. One large national study — which has been replicated in other smaller studies — concludes that African-Americans and nonwhite Latinos are more likely than whites to be victims of predatory lending. And they’re more likely to be steered into high-risk, high-interest-rate subprime mortgages.

The Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit homeownership research group based in Washington, projects that 16 to 20 percent of all subprime loans made last year in Missouri and Illinois will end up in foreclosure.

Such findings are raising concerns that discriminatory lending practices could derail recent gains made in black homeownership. In 2006, 51 percent of black households were owner-occupied, up from 48.4 percent in 2004. By comparison, 75 percent of white households are owner-occupied.

This means that the increasing home ownership rate among blacks has come due to blacks either taking out low-rate ARMs during a time of record low mortgage rates, (a very risky thing to do), and/or affirmative action lending by banks, in that banks will be more likely to approve loans for marginally credit unworthy non-whites than they would for whites, ceteris paribus.

Reagan White House Gnat Going Up The River

The Blotter by ABC:

The Blotter on ABCNews.com reported last year that Stockman, famed for his role in developing what is known as Reaganomics, was under criminal investigation for alleged illegal accounting and disclosure practices at a now bankrupt Michigan auto parts company, Collins and Aikman, where he served as chairman and CEO from 2002 to 2005.

You will read in this article that David Stockman was an architect of Reaganomics, a pejorative for Lafferian supply side economics. The truth of the matter is that he was an opponent of Reaganomics, especially the tax cuts, all along. His opposition was trumpeted by anti-Lafferian Democrats.

White Professionals Are Making Too Much Money

So thinks Alan Greenspan, and this is why he thinks we need more open borders and H-1-B visas. His rationale is income inequality, though with more non-white immigration, there will only be more income inequality and less of a working middle class in between rich and poor.

It should be obvious now that the “income inequality” issue is nothing more than a plutocratic hammer to dilute the working middle class and working upper middle class.

If he’s serious, then why not just outsource the Chairmanship of the Federal Reserve System?

Andrew Cuomo Is a Hypocrite

New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo (R), standing next to his Connecticut counterpart, Richard “Smith and Wesson” Blumenthal

Cuomo is exposing the student loan industry, and highlighting how it is intertwined with higher education in almost a Siamese sense. But Cuomo is a Democrat, and votes for Democrats, and voted to put Nancy Pelosi in power, whose actions will only increase college tuition, and the need for college students to take out student loans.

It’s Worse Than That

KSDK:

St. Louis police and firefighters won a multimillion-dollar victory against the City of St. Louis this week, but thousands of local officers, firefighters, widows, and retirees may not realize just how much their pensions are owed.

They don’t make a lot of money, and they don’t collect Social Security. So when they retire, officers and firefighters rely heavily on their pensions — something the City of St. Louis has shortened by an estimated $90 million.

James Owen, a St. Louis Police retirement system attorney, said that for 50 years the City of St. Louis fully funded officer’s pensions. But in 2003, he said the city arbitrarily decided to contribute only six percent of payroll.

Back in the days when that local radio station whose mascot is a wildebeest was worth listening to, they had a host named Gary Wiegert, who was at one time the President of the St. Louis Police Officers Association (SLPOA), the dominant union of city cops.

He informed his listeners that not only did the city quit paying all the monies they should have to the cops’ pension fund (he did not say anything about firefighters), the cops’ pension fund was so well managed that they didn’t need all the city’s lawfully required contribution, that their fund would be self-sustaining for years, although it only allowed for at most 75% of payscale-at-retirement pension levels, and that the city’s non-contribution was the reason why it couldn’t be 100%.

But it’s worse than that, Wiegert made the contention that the city was trying to borrow money from the cops’ pension to finance public housing projects, essentially meaning that those “loans” would be grants. So the city didn’t put in the money it should have, and tried to sneak money out of the fund.

The Other Side of the Housing Bubble

The main reason for the spike in real estate prices since the beginning of this decade has to do with simple algebra. Lower interest rates means that, for a given payment per month, people can afford larger mortgages. And people got pre-approved for increasingly larger amounts, and bid against each other with these pre-approved numbers, and thus real estate prices were bid upward.

For instance, if you can afford a $1,000 monthly payment, and the interest rate is 8%, and the life is 30 years, then you can afford up to $136,283. If the interest rate goes down to 4%, then you can afford up to $209,461 with that same monthly payment. This is only counting principal and interest, not monies that go into escrow for property taxes and insurance.

What many people have done is opt for insanely low adjustable rate mortgages at a point when all interest rates were at historic lows, thereby increasing pre-approval amounts even higher, and bidding up housing values even higher.

The trouble is, interest rates are going up, and this means ARM rates are going up, and monthly payments of ARM mortgages are going up. So naturally, many people can’t afford their new higher payments, and going into default, and their houses are being foreclosed upon.

And so we have today’s news that foreclosures are at an all-time high. This is to be expected in the wake of interest rates going up after an all-time low.

Oh It Isn’t?

Headline on the neocon blog American Thinker today:

NASCAR Ain’t PC

The rest of the story, by one Earl Wright, follows suit.

Mr. Wright, talk with a NASCAR fan in the South. He might disagree with your assessment.

Of course, this is the same blog that also has this headline today:

Is Pat Buchanan Economically Illiterate?

The reason for the question is that its author questions Buchanan’s protectionist trade policies. The answer is no, he is not economically illiterate. If you look at the world in terms of pure economics, then free trade is the ne plus ultra of economic reason and literacy. But Buchanan, like a lot of sane people, and unlike economic determinists like Mr. Warshawsky here, realizes that there are other, more worthy concerns than economic prosperity.

Milton Friedman Warned Us

If any of you are aghast at the story about certain Seattle area elementary schools banning Legos because they don’t like the evil connotations of private property that lego structures imply, don’t forget that the late Milton Friedman once said that public schools will inevitably teach economic socialism as a fundamental tenet, because public schools are a result of economic socialism, and they, like any other institution that expects to survive, are true to their principles.

A Trillion Here, A Trillion There, Pretty Soon It Starts Adding Up To Real Money

President Bush’s proposed budget for FY 2008?

$2.9 trillion.

His first budget submission, for FY 2002, was $1.9 trillion.  That’s a 53% increase over seven fiscal years.

By contrast, President Clinton’s first budget submission, for FY 1994, was $1.5 trillion, which means that 2002 compared to 1994 was only a 27% increase.

No Loans For Them

Latino and Latin-American college students are less likely to utilize student loans as a means to finance their higher education.  The LA Times gets it partially right:

“The majority of Mexican clients we had, I noticed, liked to pay in cash,” said Coronel, 22. “They were insecure about credit or borrowing, as they thought fraud would be a possibility. I think we learned that from our parents.”

Coronel hasn’t taken out any loans either.

Students, professors, researchers and loan providers cited three common reasons for the aversion to loans: lack of knowledge about financial aid, fear of debt and distrust of lenders.

For immigrants, that distrust is rooted in bad experiences with government-backed financial institutions in their home countries. Also, some students and parents might be reluctant to seek aid because they are undocumented immigrants.

Researchers said the loan phobia isn’t limited to the Latino community but is a common apprehension among students from low-income, immigrant, or first-generation college backgrounds.

“It’s not an us-versus-them mentality,” said Deborah Santiago, vice president for policy and research for Excelencia in Education, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., that aspires to help Latinos get through college. “But the reluctance to take out loans, specifically federal ones, is definitely an issue for Latinos.”

Another taboo reason is that Latinos benefit from various race-based grant and scholarship programs, and therefore tend not to need to borrow for the purpose.

The Carnahan Effect

Here’s another example of making unintended but insulting implications.  Here’s the headline of a Reuters story:

Minimum wage hike would help blacks:  study

The implication here is blacks are only worth a wage so low that it’s unlawful to pay them any less.

When Jean Carnahan was running for re-election for her appointed Senate seat against Jim Talent in the November 2002 special election in Missouri, she made minimum wage hike a centerpiece issue in her campaign to motivate the black vote.  Lizz Brown was insulted by this, for the same reason I stated above.

State of the Union 2007

The only reason I watched the SOTU tonight is to see what Bush would say on immigration, and to hear Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) give the Democrats’ response. Interestingly, this is the second year in a row when a Virginian has given the Democratic response; last year that duty went to Gov. Tim Kaine, who was then, like Sen. Webb now, in the first month of his term. NBC’s Bio of Webb shows that he and rapper Eminem have something in common: They are both natives of St. Joseph, Missouri.

Pick Your Poison

Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) on PBS’s Bush Iraq speech afterparty (pph):

I’m not going to vote for spending bills for Iraq reconstruction, when we still have devastated areas in our own country like New Orleans.

Oh great.  Either it’ll be spent on an Arab rathole, or a Negro/Hispanic rathole.  I suppose spending the money on white people, or not collecting that tax revenue at all, aren’t options?

Webb’s joining McCaskill in the disappointment aisle.

Feeding the Educracy

CNS News:

Incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has promised to make it easier for low- and moderate-income students to afford college tuition, but some political experts predict the cost of such promises could hurt the Democratic agenda and the very students the party says it wants to help.

The Democratic plan for college tuition, formulated by California Rep. George Miller, would lower interest rates on federally subsidized college loans to 3.4 percent from 6.8 percent.

Lois Rice, a scholar at the liberal Brookings Institution, said in a discussion Wednesday the proposal “is clearly designed to try to ease the burden of paying for college, and that’s laudable, but there could be some very severe and probably unintended consequences.”

Rice, a former vice president of the College Board — a non-profit organization that administers college admissions tests and helps students to find financial aid — said the change would cut the monthly payments on $20,000 debt by more than half, and could save a student more than $4,000 over the life of the loan.

But, Rice said, “lowering the interest rate for students could in many ways encourage greater borrowing.” With a lower interest rate, borrowers might be more likely to feel empowered to borrow more money from private lenders, she said, putting them into deeper debt.

It’ll just give colleges and universities another loophole to raise tuition.  That’s what the Pelosi plan here is all about; stroking the liberal higher education system.

It’s Too Late, Georgey

Reuters:

President George W. Bush said on Wednesday the budget he presents to Congress next month will aim to balance the budget by 2012 and make lower tax rates permanent.

“Next month I will submit a five-year budget proposal that will balance the federal budget by 2012,” Bush said after a meeting at the White House with top administration officials.

Notwithstanding anything weird happening, the last budget Bush will sign before leaving the White House will cover FY 2009, October 1, 2008 through September 30, 2009.  How he thinks he can plan for or receive credit for the Federal budget in 2012 is beyond me.

Doubting The $50 Billion Thomas

On the heels of last night’s post in reaction to the Brokaw special on immigration, where I said that the $50 billion paid into the Social Security system by illegal aliens working legit jobs was still underfunding the S.S. system, I just assumed that the $50 billion was true, because I assumed the “study” Brokaw cited encompassed several fiscal years.

The study, as it turns out, was done and released by New York University, and its contention is that the $50bn figure is yearly.

Now I’m starting to have my doubts.  Let’s get out the calculator.