Archive for the 'Private-Sector Boondoggles' Category
Sunday, March 7th, 2010
More News from the Supply-Side Bailout
They bail themselves out. Then they prepare to repeat what caused the need for a bailout in the first place. Of course. They are a late-imperial overclass that stopped listening to anything but their own cant 30+ years ago.
From the latest Business Week comes a report on how this is happening in the housing(-bubble) sector, in which the big players are now apparently buying up land thinking they’ll get back to 1995:
An additional boost came last year when Congress passed a law allowing companies to get refunds on past years’ tax payments by applying their recent losses to earnings dating back five years. Many sold land at big losses to boost their refunds. The result was a windfall of $2.3 billion for the builders as a group, including $800 million for No. 1 Pulte Homes.
The result of those balance-sheet heroics? Builders have more than $12 billion in cash they can use to replenish their land inventory. Pulte and D.R. Horton each had $1.9 billion in cash and near-term equivalents at the end of December, Toll Brothers had $1.6 billion at the end of January, Lennar had $1.3 billion, and KB Home had $1.2 billion at the end of November.
[These corporate builders'] interest in unfinished land usually comes later in the housing cycle, says Thomas E. Lucas, senior vice-president of operations for DMB in Scottsdale. “We didn’t think we’d sell raw land for three to four years,” Lucas says. That’s a striking vote of confidence considering the threats to housing from high unemployment, rising mortgage rates, and foreclosures.
Can you imagine non-capitalists ever being allowed to rewrite their income tax returns to minimize what they owe?
In any event, it’s clear that, in yet another economic sector, capital has been restored, but has no idea what to do with itself. So, despite their unwillingness or inability to lift a finger to help their own potential customers, they nonetheless presume something, somehow will return them to “normalcy.” Probably their own glorious entrepreneurial spirit, I suppose…
Thanks again, Obama, for all this “change.”
Monday, February 22nd, 2010
Well, Duh
The New York Times today ran this timid little observation:
The president’s new provision seemed to offer Republicans an opening for a new line of criticism — that Obama and Democrats are anticipating the possibility of hefty price increases for health insurance even after their big legislation is adopted.
Gosh, you think so? You think private, for-profit corporate medical insurers might keep raising their prices after it becomes illegal for citizens not to buy their products?
“Seems” rather more than merely “possible,” wouldn’t you think?
Monday, February 8th, 2010
It’s the Capitalists, Stupid
From economist Emmanuel Saez, reporting on the share of personal income going to various percentiles of the U.S. households:
Year 2007 [was] the second highest year on record since 1913 almost equaling 1928, the record year when the top percentile share reached 23.9 percent. Even within the top percentile, the gains from 2006 to 2007 are extremely concentrated. The top .01% (top 14,988 US families, making at least $11.5m in 2007) share increased from 5.46% in 2006 to 6.04% in 2007 leaving well behind the 1928 peak of 5.04 percent.
One wonders whether the year 1928 doesn’t have rather a great deal of relevance as history repeating itself. 2007 looks an awful lot like that former pinnacle, with eerily similar effects seemingly ensuing, with the crucial difference that, behind the marketing facade, Obama is Hoover redux, not FDR II.
Thursday, January 14th, 2010
Rape in Context
From The Daily Howler:
Total spending on health care, per person, 2007:
United States: $7290
Switzerland: $4417
France: $3601
United Kingdom: $2992
Average of OECD developed nations: $2964
Italy: $2686
Japan: $2581
To anyone with an ounce of sense, it’s obvious what those data mean. A real progressive would scream and yell about those remarkable data. But in the career liberal world, all is silent. We’ve been silent for the past fifteen years—since the last time we failed.
(Note: Paul Krugman discussed similar data in a series of columns in 2006. Michael Moore discussed this situation in 2007, in Sicko. But go ahead: Name the liberal journal, or the career liberal journalist, who used the work of Krugman or Moore as a springboard to a long, shrill discussion. Which of our liberals did that?)
People are happy with their current insurance for a fairly obvious reason: They don’t know how badly they’re being looted! In part, they don’t know that basic fact because our career liberals simply won’t tell them. “We’re not Europe,” Serious People write. And that has largely been that.
Nuff said.
Monday, January 11th, 2010
(Deceased) Elephant in the Room
Here, friends, is a photo of the 375-pound battery-pack for the allegedly forthcoming Chevy Volt, which will allegedly boast a driving range of a whopping 40 (yes, 40, four-zero) miles:
20 gallons of gasoline, by the way, weighs about 125 pounds, so this photo confirms that, after decades of intensive research, the best battery our transportation-dictating corporate overclass can come up with still weighs three times more than the onboard fuel it would theoretically replace, and, for all that, will carry you roughly one-tenth as far as an average current motor vehicle.
For those interested in more details, see this post on our new sister blog, Death by Car.
Saturday, January 2nd, 2010
No Arguing Now: “Bono” is a Moron
OMFG! ROFLMFAO!
So, like the like genius like they like call “Bono,” well, like The like New York like Times like totally ran like an editorial by, like, “Bono.” Topic? Ten things “Bono” says need doing to save the world, from the point of view of “Bono,” and of course that’s pretty much the voice of God, isn’t it?
Anyhow, if you think Sarah Palin is dumb and misinformed, you need to pay some attention to her competition here.
Literally, literally every single word of this latest “Bono” sermon that isn’t meaningless poseur claptrap is stark proof of what a corrupt penis “Bono” has become, or maybe always was.
Permit me to cite just one segment of Sir Blowhole’s stunningly stupid and gullible (or worse) Pontiff-ication. Here is His saintly take on our transportation needs in the 21st century. I shit you not: “Bono,” apparently, wrote this, without intending to make a joke:
Return of the Automobile as a Sexual Object
How is it that the country that made us all fall in love with the automobile has failed, with only a few exceptions, to produce a single family sedan with the style and humor and grace of the cars produced in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s? Put aside the question of whether those models were male (as in longer, lower and wider, Dr. Freud) or female (as in fender skirts, curvy belt lines and, of course, headlights). Either way, they all had sex appeal. (In Ireland in the ’70s, it was the E-Type Jag that made sense of puberty.) Today, however, we have the mundanity of our marriage to the minivan and the S.U.V. and long-term relationships with midsize cars that are, forgive me, a little heavy in the rear cargo hold.
Are aerodynamics to blame? Economics? Or that most American of inventions, design by committee? It hurts me to say this about democracy (and I know because my band is one), but rarely does majority rule produce something of beauty.
That’s why the Obama administration — while it still holds the keys to the big automakers — ought to put some style fascists into the mix: the genius of Marc Newson … Steve Jobs and Jonny Ive from Apple … Frank Gehry, the architect, and Jeff Koons, the artist. Put the great industrial designers in the front seat, right along with sound financial stewardship … the greener, the cleaner, the meaner on fossil fuels, the sexier for me. Check out the Tesla or the Fisker Karma car, designed by the same team that gave the world the Aston Martin.
You can’t possibly, imaginably make this stuff up! Nobody would believe you if you did.
“Dr. Freud,” indeed! Paul Hewson is on the couch!
