Are WE Feeling Better, Economically Speaking?

             Just in case you weren’t listening to El Presidente or other elected leaders, here are a few of this week’s headlines, Economically speaking.

            First President Obama urges 1/3^rd reduction in oil imports. He is calling for a broad front of initiatives to accomplish this:

1.      “Wider use of natural gas, including incentives (read that as new spending or tax give a-ways which just might add to the deficit) to use it for fuel fleet vehicles such as city buses”. Don’t know about yours, but our city leaders would love to have more money fall from the skies to do this. By the way, if ALL the City Buses in the U.S. were converted to natural gas, what percent of our petroleum usages is that? 1%?

2.      “He backed greater production of biofuels and vowed to establish at least 4 commercial-scale refineries producing cellulosic ethanol or advanced biofuels within the next two years”. Do you think that he will pay for this personally or again spend money he don’t have and add to the deficit? Can you really build a refinery from scratch in just two years?

3.      Now here are the easy ways to reduce oil usage; it is called ‘by the stroke of a pen, good fairy intervention’. “He also pledged to establish higher fuel-efficiency standards for heavy trucks, just as he did for passenger vehicles early in his administration.” Isn’t it great having our best and brightest working on these solutions? If they made the standards REAL high could they overcome our entire oil import problem?

4.      “Obama also urged oil companies to make greater use of the federal leases both onshore and offshore to prop up domestic oil output.” Excuse me, isn’t this the same guy that declared a moratorium last year of indefinite duration on off shore drilling? Was I asleep when he had his epiphany on offshore drilling?

Next poor Portugal has had its credit downgraded to just one notch above ‘junk’ status. No wonder their government quit. But Brazil is thinking of helping to bail them out. One wonders if the Brazilians will buy Portugal bonds, can we ask them to buy some of ours too? Without, or even with, a bailout, a few pundits are forecasting a double dip recession for the poor Portuguese. The good news for the rest of us is that their plight follows Greece and Ireland and since we all know that bad luck comes in threes, the sooner they dive into it, the safer the rest of us will be.

Venezuelan state oil workers pension fund has invested some funds in a Ponzi Scheme and fears to lose millions. It was unclear if those funds were invested in U.S. Social Security Treasury IOUs or not. If not, there may be some recover of funds per the article.

Back to Washington, your Congress and Senate are both stating that they fear a government shutdown will be caused by the other body unless the other body caves soon. Seems that our elected leaders are unable to find 30 to 50 billion dollars of stuff to stop spending money on in a 1.4 trillion dollar budget. That’s about 2.4% or less. Whatever is proposed by one body seems to be shown by the other to take the food right out of the mouths of starving children, most of whom may not be here ‘officially’, but who cares when one is espousing a good cause for spending other peoples’ money.

Oh, and speaking of Washington, you longsuffering Social Security blood suckers (I’m told by Mr. Obama, Ms. Pelosi, and Mr. Reid that you are the major problem our nation faces in the current debt crisis), will not be receiving an income bump for the 3^rd year running. Not quite accurate, you will get a bump, but it will be consumed by an increase in your Medicare premium you double-dipping bloodsuckers, as this is the second biggest problem we face in our debt crisis per my same source. But here is the good news, since the two biggest problems we face to overcome our fiscal problems are centered on a bunch of old bloodsuckers, let’s just wait until they all die, and then we won’t have the problem anymore. At least that seems to be how your Congress and Senate have chosen to view this two issues over the last decade or three. Well, that’s not quite true either, Mr. Obama and his team have passed a new health care bill that will take 500 million dollars away from Medicare to give health care to 30 million new folks who don’t have health insurance, or a green card, which will treat you double bloodsucking old timers as you deserve.

“What Shirley?” “Well, yes I do use both of those programs, but I’m not a bloodsucker, I paid my share all those years I worked!”