GM CEO, NHTSA Administrator Testify to Congress on Chevrolet Volt Safety – Rumor Central

What did you know and when did you know it?

Even a few in congress have questions about the administration’s involvement.

They are probably against apple pie, mom, baseball and the Marine Corps as well, Bill.

GM CEO, NHTSA Administrator Testify to Congress on Chevrolet Volt Safety – Rumor Central.

What the Dover Sun Park Will Really Cost You: Caesar Rodney Institute

More information about a previously reported boondoggle.

Dave Stevenson writes this:

It is astonishing you are not allowed to know what the Dover Sun Park is costing you. The total added cost of the Sun Park compared to using conventional power over the twenty year contract will be $93 million or almost $5 million a year! The total generation cost for power will average about three and a half times the cost of conventional power or thirty six and a half cents a kilowatt-hour. But, you say, won’t the savings in greenhouse gas generation be worth it? Using the current value of carbon dioxide emission permits in the regional cap and trade market the Dover Sun Park carbon offsets are worth less than $25 thousand a year. Calpine switched from coal to natural gas at the Edge Moor electric generating plant saving money and a years’ worth of sun park carbon emissions every five days.

Below is a link to a post I did about the Dover Sun Park in 2009 and the CRI article.

Caesar Rodney Institute.

So Much for Transparency.

Safety Group Clears Chevrolet Volt – WSJ.com

Good news!  The NHTSA has looked into it and found that there is no defect as regards the battery of the Volt catching fire and that the repairs that GM has instituted will resolve the problem; the one that does not exist.

“The agency’s investigation has concluded that no discernible defect trend exists and that the vehicle modifications recently developed by General Motors reduce the potential for battery intrusion resulting from side impacts,” NHTSA said in a statement.

I guess this is the type of gibberish that one might expects when the regulator of an industry is a 25% shareholder.

 

Safety Group Clears Chevrolet Volt – WSJ.com.

Wouldn’t This work on the National Debt?

The Obama administration has various programs listed on the “Making Home Affordable” website that are supposed to get mortgage lenders to reduce interest rates, extend terms and/or reduce mortgage balances so that people can afford their mortgages.   They use taxpayer money to induce lenders to participate.  The rules exclude many of the homeowners that the programs were supposed to help. More than half of those who managed to get the modifications re-defaulted in a short time.  The programs are failures, of course; but I digress.

Since the President thinks that rate reductions below market and writing down principal balances are such a good thing for the banks to do, I wonder if he has contacted the owners of the US debt and made the same suggestion to them. “What is good for the goose is good for the gander.”  The nations creditors have lent us money that they know or should or should know that we can’t afford to pay back.   I am sure the Red Chinese, Arab oil states and individual investors would quickly succumb to Obama’s power of persuasion and happily agree to forgive 50% or so.

Maybe he should send Senator Kerry around as his special debt forgiveness envoy.  I remember when he was running for President, he said he could “jawbone” the OPEC nations to reduce oil prices.  If he already has this “jawboning” ability with the Arabs, I am sure it would work on the Chinese as well.

Obama himself could use his campaign stops to exhort retirees to donate some of their bonds, bills and notes to the national debt.  After all, he wants the banks to force their stockholders (which would include retirees and pensioners) to take a hit.  I am sure they would be grateful to him for being asked and make a big contribution to his campaign.  He could get AARP to sell the idea.  After all, they got their membership to swallow a $500 Billion in Medicare cuts to fund Obamacare without a peep.

Delaware Academy Of Public Safety And Security — A Delaware First In CPR Training

Last night, the Delaware Academy of Public Safety & Security (DAPSS) celebrated a first for Delaware public schools. 98% of the current 9th grade class of 117 students were presented awards for being CPR certified — over 50 of the class were certified to the Health Professional level. Jonathan Kirch of the American Heart Association addressed the group and thanked these young leaders for stepping up to save lives.

For those who don’t know, I co-founded this school and currently serve as the Board Chair. 40% of our kids are from low-income families. The student population is split almost evenly between minority & white students as well as male/female. We are currently enrolling students for the 2012-2013 school year for 9th and 10th grade. Every cadet in addition to the standard State curriculum, is required to take spanish and chinese. We have had presentations with over 30 first responder groups and served as “patients” in a surprise emergency drill at St. Francis Hospital.

 

Gov. Romney’s Tax Rate

Romney and Bain Capital

So, given the characterizations by Newt, Perry and the Democrats, I am to understand that the companies that Bain invested in were healthy thriving companies full of well paid employees. If not for Bain buying these companies, they would be prospering today with their employees earning a fine living.
That is not my understanding. I thought that Bain invested in existing companies that were in trouble and new companies. Would not most of the ones that were failing have gone bankrupt on their own with or without Bain? Would the employees not have lost their jobs? Did any companies and jobs survive because of them or did they fail every time?
Am I missing something here? I must be. If I were not, some Romney supporter would be making this argument. Aren’t here any?

Twenty Years Of Federal Gov’t Mismanagement

The information provided in the enclosed chart comes from John Mauldin. He sends out a weekly email in which he weighs on the global economy. He meets with many global leaders of all kinds. You can subscribe for his email by clicking on his name above, going to his site, and registering. It is good stuff.

In his most recent email, he basically spells out, in a simplified model, how we got to our current predicament of having a bankrupt government. The underlying theme is that, eventually, this will turn out badly — very badly.

Readers of this site know that I believe that the policies that our government has followed over the last few years (equivalent to years 25 & 26 above) have been wrong-headed and make the problems we face even worse. The clock is ticking.

The following text steps through Year 1 and Year 24 above. Year 25 & Year 26 are my interpretation of the end of his analysis. Note, I do not include a sample modeling the eventual large increase in interest rates that will come just like it has now started in France.

Let’s assume a country that has a gross domestic product (GDP) of $1,000. In the beginning it taxes its citizens about 25% of GDP and spends the money for the public’s benefit. But alas, it spends about 30% of GDP, so it must borrow the overage (about $50) from its citizens or from the citizens of other countries. Because the country starts out with relatively little debt, interest rates on this loan are low, because those who buy the debt can easily see that the the country can pay them back. If the debt of the country is only 5% of GDP ($50) and the interest rate is 4%, then the amount that must be paid as interest is only about $2 per year. Not a whole lot, about 0.2% of GDP.

But this goes on year after year. Sometimes the deficits get smaller and sometimes they get larger, depending on the economy; but government expenditures grow at the same rate as the country grows, and the debt keeps growing at an average of 5% of GDP per year. Now, if the country is growing at 3% a year, after 24 years the economy will have doubled to $2,000 GDP. That means the debt has grown (roughly) to a total of $1,800, which is now a debt-to-GDP ratio of 90%. Debt has grown faster than the country’s economy. Note that if the country had held its budget down to where it grew slower than GDP, thus reducing its need for debt, that ratio would be lower, even if the debt had grown. You can indeed grow your way out of a debt problem if the growth of government spending is less than the growth of the economy.

But what if the size of government grows to about 50% of GDP, rather than 25% or 30%, over the 24 years, as politicians decide to spend more money and voters decide they want more benefits? (Think France.) Then the private sector must pay about 50% of its production to the state – plus, the debt is now growing unwieldly. The private sector has less to invest in new businesses and tools, and the growth of the economy slows.

And then along comes a very nasty recession. The revenues of the government fall as the economy shrinks. If the economy shrinks by 3% and total taxes are 50%, then tax revenue falls to $970. But the government does not cut back; and indeed, because it must pay unemployment benefits and welfare (because unemployment rises in a recession), its expenses actually rise by 5%! So it now needs $1,050 to pay all its budgeted expenses. And it must now borrow $80 to pay everyone it has promised to pay, in addition to the $100 it was already borrowing every year to cover its deficit, or a total of $180 a year, which is 9% of GDP.

I’m an optimist on human potential and freeing the private sector to grow jobs, wages and the economy. I’m a pessimist about our government, because they haven’t looked at the very simple spreadsheet that I put together based on Mr. Mauldin’s simple model of our economy. We are in for a long, long, long slog.

Where Does That Transportation-related Energy Come From?

Private Equity And The 2012 Presidential Election

I know that the President is expecting the mainstream media to give him a pass on vetting his re-election campaign and his Presidential record, so I guess it should come as no surprise that he would appoint Jack Lew to replace Bill Daley as his Chief of Staff. But I think that this appointment will make slamming Mitt Romney much more difficult?

As most readers to this site know, Newt Gingrich, Governor Rick Perry, and Governor Huntsman did not help their respective causes by trying to vilify capitalism in a Republican Primary. Not sure who their campaign people are, but what an idiotic ploy.

The three fading candidates efforts probably helped Romney, however, not only because it makes him more attractive to the pro-American capitalism vote, but because it brings up the issue of creative destruction that has been part and parcel of America and capitalism since the beginning. In order to grow an economy, inefficient and outdated businesses and/or business practices must be shut down. Freeing up resources to invest in new, growth industries. This includes eliminating jobs in some industries so that employment can begin in others.

It has largely been assumed that President Obama, who spares no opportunity to vilify those that provide economic opportunity, will run a nasty “class warfare” campaign because he can’t run on his record. (Simple strategy: If your record stinks, make people believe that your opponent’s record stinks even worse. That is negative campaigning in a nutshell.). But, can he?? He just appointed Jack Lew to be his Chief of Staff. Who is Jack Lew? According to Mother Jones magazine:

As White House budget director Jack Lew prepares to take over for departing chief of staff Bill Daley, it’s worth revisiting Shahien Nasiripour’s blow-by-blow of Lew’s brief, less-than-illustrious stint at a unit of Citigroup that made money by betting against the housing market as it prepared to implode:

Multi-Adviser Hedge Fund Portfolios LLC was a unit of Alternative Investments’ Hedge Fund Management Group, the 36th-largest such “fund of hedge funds” in the world when Lew came aboard, according to a ranking by Alpha magazine, a publication that covers the hedge fund industry.

That Multi-Adviser fund in particular had $407 million by the end of 2007, a week before Lew was named as Alternative Investments’ chief operating officer…At that time, it had $18 million invested in Paulson Advantage Plus LP, worth $26.4 million, comprising about 6.5 percent of the Multi-Adviser fund’s total capital.

The Paulson fund was run by hedge fund king John Paulson, the man who made billions off the deterioration of the housing industry by making bearish bets on securities tied to home mortgages—particularly subprime home mortgages.

Under Lew, the Multi-Adviser fund doubled its investment in Paulson’s fund to nearly $42 million by March 2008; by the next quarter, it’d cranked that investment up to just over $60 million, making it the biggest piece of the Multi-Adviser fund, Nasiripour reported. So how’d it go for Lew and Citi?:

Citi paid Lew $1.1 million for his year at Alternative Investments, according to an ethics disclosure report filed in January 2009. He was also eligible for an undisclosed bonus….His unit, though, lost as much as billions of dollars in 2008 as its bets turned sour. In the first quarter of 2008 alone the unit lost $509 million; the company stopped publicly disclosing the unit’s individual numbers soon thereafter, but the part of the company that absorbed Alternative Investments lost $20.1 billion in 2008, according to the bank’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Citigroup, as you might recall, also received $45 billion in TARP money.

So, President Obama’s Chief of Staff is a Private Equity guy, just like Mitt Romney. Only Jack Lew’s investments failed and required a government bailout while Mitt Romney made money and created jobs.

Gee, I wonder who will win the “Private Equity Slamfest”…