Exactly how can you top this? Warren rocks and Grace smokes!!!

From yesterday’s WSJ Opinions, Lawrence Kadish discusses the utter folly of creating more government obligations.

It is the interest on the national debt that makes our future unstable. The exploding size of that burden suggests that, short of devaluing the dollar and taking a large bite out of the middle class through inflation and taxation, there is no way to ever pay down that bill.

As of Sept. 30, 2009, the national debt was almost $12 trillion and interest on that debt was $383 billion for the year, according to the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Public Debt. The Congressional Budget Office on Oct. 7 estimated the 2009 budget deficit to be almost $1.4 trillion (about 10% of GDP). In August, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) estimated total government revenues at about $2 trillion. The revenue estimate included $904 billion from individual income taxes. This means the cost of interest on the debt represented more than 40 cents of every dollar that came in from individual income taxes…

In stark but simple terms, unless Americans are made aware of this financial crisis and demand accountability, the very fabric of our society will be destroyed. Interest rates and interest costs will soar and government revenues will be devoured by interest on the national debt. Eventually, most of what we spend on Social Security, Medicare, education, national defense and much more may have to come from new borrowing, if such funding can be obtained. Left unchecked, this destructive deficit-debt cycle will leave the White House and Congress with either having to default on the national debt or instruct the Treasury to run the printing presses into a policy of hyperinflation.

It is against this background that Washington is now debating whether to create social programs it can’t afford…

Americans need to take notice, stand up, and remind our elected officials that in a democracy the people can change bad leaders.

Dave Burstein at DSL Prime reports that Ivan Seidenberg effectively says the the wireline voice telecom business is dying:

“we have to pivot and make a shift from the voice business to the data business and eventually to the video business. … we must really position ourselves to be an extremely potent video-centric asset.”  He further states, “The issue there is perhaps it is like the dog chasing the bus a little bit. So what I need to do is get ourselves focused around the following idea, that video is going to be the core product in the fixed line business. … I shed myself of the burden of chasing the inflection point in access lines and say I don’t care about that anymore.”

Despite Seidenberg having been one of the few telecom industry visionaries to truly embrace data/video as the future of the industry as long as 10 years ago, it still sounds strange (heretical, in fact) to hear a telecom CEO say “I don’t care about that [access lines] anymore.”  On the other hand, I believe Seidenberg is correct in focusing Verizon’s strategy on the combined communications capabilities of its wired and wireless footprints. (more…)

Newt Gingrich observes the pressure on Chinese leadership to create jobs while discussing his recent trip to China.

The economic pressure the Chinese dictatorship feels to continue creating jobs can be captured by the fact that they need 24 million new jobs this next year just to break even.

Their fear is that without jobs unrest will grow and that historically in China unrest can rapidly become very destabilizing. This focuses their energy on jobs and the economy in a way no American politician can fully appreciate.

So, the Chinese leadership feels intense pressure to create 24 million jobs every single year!  Meanwhile, back in Obama’s USSR, unemployment reached 14.9 million (August – US Bureau of Labor Statistics) and  Obama & Co. appear perfectly content to simply manage expectations for this level of unemployment to persist for years, as indicated last week by Obama’s chief economic advisor, Larry Summers.

More on this later…

In his latest WSJ opinion piece, John Fund documents the damage done to ACORN by the outstanding work of James O’Keefe, Hannah Giles, Andrew Breitbart and Glenn Beck, as well as other less sensational but equally corrupt charges brought against the organization across the country.  In all likelihood, we have only seen the tip of this iceberg.

Newbusters reports that Charlie Gibson declares no knowledge of the ACORN scandal ignited by the investigative reporting and filmmaking of James Okeefe and Hannah Giles.  And this guy is the lead reporter/newscaster for a “major” network?  Duh!  No wonder the “major” networks are either not ranked or at the bottom of the TV news audience rankings.

[Note: This post from Karl Denninger at The Market Ticker so completely captured my state of mind that I felt compelled to re- post it here in its entirety.  I also encourage you to visit his blog for consistently high quality economic analysis and insight.  We do need to jerk these politicians' chains and either force to work for us, or throw them all out and start over.]

From Yahoo News:

On the eve of the August recess, members are reporting meetings that have gone terribly awry, marked by angry, sign-carrying mobs and disruptive behavior. In at least one case, a congressman has stopped holding town hall events because the situation has spiraled so far out of control.

“I had felt they would be pointless,” Rep. Tim Bishop (D-N.Y.) told POLITICO, referring to his recent decision to suspend the events in his Long Island district. “There is no point in meeting with my constituents and [to] listen to them and have them listen to you if what is basically an unruly mob prevents you from having an intelligent conversation.”

Really?

Well Tim, guess what: you work for your constituents, not the other way around.  (more…)