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February 9, 2010 - Given the myriad of problems facing the United States right now, you can be forgiven for not worrying about what information your water heater is sending to the US government. The fact of the matter is, right now, it is not sending the government any information. But the Obama administration wants to change that. In fact, it wants to know just about everything you are doing with major appliances in your home on a real time basis; an announcement which it made in this morning's Federal Register. More importantly, it wants to control how you use those appliances. If you think about it, the prospect of this is downright frightening and it would mean the end of privacy in your home as you know it.

The Federal Register isn't exactly the publication that most people read every morning. That fact may be exactly what the Obama administration is counting on. It is however the publication in which new government proposals, rules and regulations must be published prior to the time they can be put into effect. In this morning's issue, the Science and Technology Policy Office which reports to the President published a request for public comments that is quite revealing. The request concerns "Consumer Interface With the Smart Grid", which is what the administration is calling the new electric grid for United States.

This morning, President Obama stood before the cameras and announced that the most recent unemployment numbers released show that the economy is improving. According to those numbers, the unemployment rate dipped to 9.7%; down from 10% last month. But at the same time these numbers were released the government also said that there were fewer people employed in January than there were in December. So how is it possible that with fewer people working that the unemployment rate is also down? The answer is that it isn't possible unless the government tinkers with the numbers. And that is exactly what they are doing.

Who says you can't have your cake and eat it too? Someone needs to tell that to the number crunchers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). They have found a way to take people off the rolls of the unemployed, even though they are not working. At least, that is what they want you to think. And it is especially what the President and members of Congress want you to believe.

When the BLS compiles unemployment numbers, it adds new claims for unemployment. At the same time, it subtracts discouraged workers. A discouraged worker is someone who wants to work but who has not been able to find a job and who has given up looking. According to the BLS's own numbers, when you include discouraged workers in the unemployment numbers, current unemployment numbers are above 18%. But even that doesn't tell the entire story.

February 2, 2010 - By virtually any standard, the economic stimulus package passed last year has failed to pay dividends in the form of jobs. Unemployment remains at 10% and while many economists are claiming that the worst is behind us, there is little evidence of this on Main Street. If we are in recovery mode, it is a jobless recovery. Yet the Obama administration continues to push for additional government spending - supposedly to create or maintain jobs even though there is no evidence that the first spending package has created any dividends. At the same time, in the administration's new budget, it is cutting funding for NASA's Constellation program. And the immediate effects of those cuts will be thousands of layoffs.

January 25, 2010 - In just a few days, President Obama will give his second State of the Union speech to a joint session of Congress. While it is widely expected that he will shift the focus to his speech to job creation and the economy, it is highly unlikely that he will paint a true picture of the financial position the country is in. Real unemployment rates are higher than they have been since the Great Depression and Congress and the White House have been printing and spending money so fast that it is almost impossible to keep track of. The end result is that the country is broke and that the only way to dig out of our financial mess is to inflate our way out of it. If you think that sounds farfetched, it is exactly what the government did to pay for all of the big government programs of the 1930's; forcing taxpayers to foot the bill for the government's spending splurges.

Most economists will tell you that inflation is a bad thing because it reduces the spending power of your money. And most economists that have looked at the recent spending habits of the United States Government will tell you that so much money has been spent that it can't be paid back without inflation. Essentially the government needs to reduce the value of the dollar so that the dollars it spends today can be repaid with dollars that will be worth a lot less money.

A lot has been said in the press over the past few months about global government vs. the rights of individual sovereign nations. Much of this has had to do with speculation that Barack Obama would very much like to see a global government, but to date, that has been little more than speculation based on comments he has made. But on Saturday, by order of the President that United States gave up a big a large chunk of its sovereignty by allowing foreign police to operate in the United States without any US government oversight, and virtually nobody noticed. The decision means that foreign police operating under the INTERPOL banner can now conduct their activities without regard to the constitutional protections that all Americans should enjoy within our borders.

In Friday's Federal Register, there was a line item in the Presidential Documents section that read "Amending Executive Order 12425". The title was about as innocuous as they come, and reading the amended executive order didn't help much either. It was very short and read, in part:

The effort to stop global warming came full force to the United States with the election of Barack Obama. Both as a presidential candidate, and later as the new President, Obama has led the charge to pass a bill commonly referred to as Cap and Trade. Simply put, the bill would significantly increase taxes on all forms of energy produced using fossil fuels. In addition, companies would be given strict emissions limits, known as a "cap". And they would be able to sell a portion of those limits on an exchange - known as a "trade". The policy would place significant taxes on individuals and industry and is widely recognized as a job killer. But over the past week, it was revealed that much of the data being used in the scientific community to back up the claims of global warming was actually fabricated. And that could be enough to permanently stop Cap and Trade.

This week, the headlines in Europe have been filled with articles on what is now being referred to as "ClimateGate"; the publication of hacked e-mail messages between some climate scientists.

The mail messages in question resided on computer servers at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at University of East Anglia in England. CRU is widely regarded as the premier repository of climate science data. And that data has been used by the UN and governments around the world to show that the temperature of the Earth is rising.

Barack Obama's "Making Homes Affordable" program was supposed to encourage lenders to modify the mortgages of people who can no longer afford their homes. The program was funded with $75 Billion of stimulus money and it was flawed from the beginning. Lender participation in the program is completely voluntary. To date, there are only 71 companies that have signed up. Once a lender is in the program, there are relatively few requirements placed on them to modify large volumes of loans. Now the President is fed up with the slow progress of lenders, so he has a new "plan". He is going to try to "shame" them into modifying more loans. $75 Billion to fund a program and "shame" is the best solution the government can come up with? Give us a break!

The so-called plan to increase the number of loan modifications being made by lenders is flawed in too many ways to name them all. The new "plan" is to try to publically humiliate lenders who are not modifying enough loans to satisfy the government. The most glaring flaw in this "plan" is that the government is going out of its way to embarrass lenders who agreed to participate, but is doing nothing to embarrass those who didn't join. That alone may be enough to encourage some lenders to abandon the program.