Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

When the President, his Vice President, his Secretary of State and others deliberately lie to American citizens about the tragic killing of an American ambassador and three of his staff, the nation has reached a point where decisions need to be made on Election Day. What disturbs me the most is the utter disdain for the truth that has marked the presidency of Barack Obama. It has been nearly four years of repeated lies about the steps that were taken to respond to the financial crisis; the so-called “stimulus” which wasted billions, and the literal explosion of entitlement programs. The administration literally seized control of General Motors and Chrysler, which were then in the normal process of bankruptcy, claiming to save the jobs of auto workers. What they really did was bypass the legitimate creditors and investors. They arbitrarily discontinued GM’s relationship with hundreds of auto dealerships, adding their employees to the unemployment lines. They then insisted that GM inve...

A graph titled 'Private Sector Job Creation' on the Obama-Biden campaign website… announces proudly that 4.4 million private sector jobs have been created over the past 28 months. But at the same point during the Reagan recovery, the economy had created 9.5 million new jobs.     Contrary to the Obama campaign's misleading claim of 4.4 million new jobs created, total jobs today are still half a million less than in January 2009 when Obama entered office.    The unemployment rate, which we were told would not exceed 8% if we enacted Mr. Obama's stimulus package…has never fallen below 8% during his presidency. The rate has averaged 9.2% since February 2009. After Bush's tax rate cuts were all fully implemented in 2003, the economy created 7.8 million new jobs over the next 4 years and the unemployment rate fell from over 6% to 4.4%. President Obama and his chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, Alan Krueger, brag that private sector ...

“Trickle down” is of course a disingenuous misnomer invented by the left to stigmatize conservative supply-side economic policies. It implies favoring the rich—that doing so will “trickle down” to everyone else. Nonsense. Conservatives don’t care any more or less about the rich than do liberals. The point for conservatives is not to help the rich, but to limit the harm done to incentives by tax policy so individuals have greater opportunities to become rich. President Obama misrepresents supply-side economics and then goes on to misinform his audience that it’s never worked. People are entitled to their own opinions, but they’re not entitled to their own facts.    Every time supply-side economic policies have been tried, tax rate reductions were applied to every income group — lower-income, middle-income, and upper-income alike — giving everyone a better shot at success. This is true regarding supply-side policies of the 1920s, 1960s, 1980s and 2000s. Economist Thomas S...

The Danish health care system is the nightmare of any anti-government free market believer -- it's a tax-funded state-run universal health care system. Denmark provides "free" health care to all residents, funded through taxes. There is an optional private health care sector, but it is tiny compared with the vastly larger public system that is used by most of the population. Users pay for a few procedures, such as fertility treatments (from the third attempt onwards) and non-essential cosmetic surgery, as well as most of their own dental care and a portion of prescription medication.    Apothecaries are privately owned, but doctors" visits and hospitalization, including tests, treatment, follow-up care, and some medication, are fully covered. The Danish health care system is not cheap. According to OECD's Health Data 2009, Denmark's health cost per person, public and private, was $3,512. But in the US the cost is more than double at $7,290! In addition,...

This NYT Graphic keeps coming up repeatedly (it's been so widely reproduced, many don't even realize that the Times is the original source!) It's really emblematic of the mindless leftist FUD about economics. Just for starters, this thing represents the "Bush Tax Cuts" as a "cost" . What they fail to understand is that tax rates and tax revenue are two different things. Since the Eisenhower administration in the 1950's federal tax revenue as a percent of GDP has averaged about 18 percent. It didn't matter whether top tax rates were 92 percent (yes, they were that high!), or as low as 30 percent. Tax "rate" differences are not a "cost" item that you can just stick in some chart and say, "See! Bush cost us more money than Obama!". Tax "Cuts" (or in reality "current tax rates", whatever they may be) are not really a cost at all. What we need to measure is revenue to determine if curr...

Unemployment Rate vs Total Employment Yes - the unemployment rate fell to 8.6 percent in November, but it also masks a startling shift in the job market. The Labor Department said Friday that employers added 120,000 jobs last month. With that, the unemployment rate dropped to the lowest level in more than two and a half years. But a key reason for the drop was that hundreds of thousands of people who could work had stopped looking for work . The report showed 487,000 people left the labor force in November -- for the Labor Department's purposes, they are not counted as unemployed. What's important is total employment, which has barely budged. This means we're still facing a NET LOSS of over 2 million jobs since president Obama took office in 2009 - an absolutely abysmal performance, considering all the taxpayer money the government has thrown at the problem. Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics The above chart simply takes the total US employment number b...