A question for your Congressman at the next town hall

"Mr. Congressman, why are you and your colleagues profiting from insider trading in the stock market at the expense of the rest of us, something that is illegal for all others?"

Indeed, members of Congress and their staff currently do not owe any “duty of confidentiality” to Congress and can’t be held liable for insider trading based on congressional knowledge under the current laws. Nor is there anything at this time that would prohibit Congressional staffers and executive branch employees from sharing inside information obtained from Congress with their friends—potentially allowing the recipients of such information to use it to make huge trading profits or prevent big losses. That means trading on inside knowledge of upcoming Congressional action is today one of the few forms of legal, repeatable insider trading (see my December 2008 column for a list of the others).

An academic study released in 2004, as well as some other more recent developments, indicates that this Congressional loophole to the insider trading laws isn’t just theoretical. Georgia State University professor Alan Ziobrowski released a study showing that during the 1990s, senators’ stock picks (which must be publicly disclosed periodically) beat the market by 12 percentage points a year on average. By comparison, corporate insiders only beat the market by about 6 percentage points a year, and U.S. households underperformed the market by 1.4 percentage points.

Ziobrowski and his colleagues concluded their findings “suggest that senators are trading stock based on information that is unavailable to the public, thereby using their unique position to increase their personal wealth …” Ziobrowski later was quoted as stating that, in his opinion, “there is cheating going on.”

Closing the Congressional Insider Trading Loophole


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ObamaCare: Designed to fail, part 1

The CLASS Act: Provides long-term care at home for the elderly who need help with daily tasks. Enables the elderly and disabled to stay out of nursing homes.

Democrat Senator Kent Conrad calls it a "Ponzi scheme." Fees will be collected from all American workers unless they opt out of the plan. "By the end of the decade, government and private estimates point out, the CLASS Act will take in billions of dollars less than the monthly premiums can cover and could, in fact, be insolvent by 2021." (Washington Times, "Birnbaum: The not-so-Class Act," March 26, 2010)

Premiums (fees) would have to be jacked up to make up the difference, increasing costs, or else deficits would have to increase to cover the difference. The inflow of funds makes Health Care Reform look more fiscally responsible in the short run, but blows a hole in the budget in the long term. (Or will require even more tax increases and mandated fees.)

Obama: master of the game of "kick the can down the road."

Tax receipts drop: real economy has fallen and it can't get up

The US Treasury took in $30.7 billion in individual withholding taxes in February, compared to $38.2 billion a year ago. That's roughly a 20% decline. January 2010 receipts were down about 10% compared to Jan 09.

A graph, if you would like to view it.

State and local personal income taxes are also down about 20% from a year ago.

State and local tax chart, courtesy of the Department of Commerce

If this is what recovery looks like, what does recession look like???

Mish has a long post explaining why retail sales figures are cooked, and not in a good way. Then he provides the actual sales tax receipts from states all around the nation.

Here's Indiana:

December 2009 Sales Tax: 476,111,101.58
December 2008 Sales Tax: 497,628,352.13

November 2009 Sales Tax: 473,363,430.53
November 2008 Sales Tax: 504,327,778.19

October 2009 Sales Tax: 485,658,222.21
October 2008 Sales Tax: 546,284,648.12

Here's Texas:

January 2010: $1,655.3 million
January 2009: $1,928.3 million

December 2009: $1,653.1 million
December 2008: $1,869.4 million

November 2009: $1,696.9 million
November 2008: $1,983.1 million

October 2009: $1,517.9 million
October 2008: $1,739.8 million

State after state -- collections are down from the same month in previous years.

The economic recovery is as phony as the global warmists' tree ring temperature reconstructions. They (the state and their willing accomplices in the MSM) are trying to prevent panic by painting a false picture. Maybe panic is not a good response, but severe fright might motivate our government to start getting the national house in order...

Half the truth from NOVA and National Geographic

Last week I watched the PBS joint NOVA/National Geographic program Extreme Ice. I recorded it in high definition and then crunched it down to DVD-resolution instead of watching online because I was interested mainly in seeing the photography clearly, the beauty and architecture of the glaciers being studied.

Of course it was full of alarmism, implying that glaciers and ice caps were at the tipping point, about to melt and inundate the planet. At the end of the program they estimated a 3 foot rise in sea level by 2100. Part of this is simply due to the expansion of ocean volume from its warming, but that of course assumes the ocean will continue warming, something we cannot actually predict.

The glaciers melting were sure interesting and pretty. But it was all alarmism, talk of "unprecedented change," point of no return, and the implication that warmer air temperatures are to blame. (Well, they are, partly. But globally there is not enough of a change to make the difference. In many cases there are local/regional factors precipitating the "unprecedented" increases in melting in some glaciers.)

When a case is presented with all the evidence on one side and absolutely no voice of moderation, no pieces of evidence on the other side, it is tantamount to a lie. Although many scientists did talk about uncertainty, "we just don't know," "we don't understand this phenomenon," etc., the clear impression was that the scientists were uncertain about how fast calamity would overtake us, not if calamity would overtake us.

The underlying and repeated claim was that increased melting of ice would cause sea level rise, inundating low-elevation islands, Vietnam, and other coastal areas. Yet no evidence was presented of an actual acceleration of sea level increases. (The sea levels have been rising for 15,000 years, long before any burning of fossil fuels oo man-made creation of greenhouse gases.)

Here's the latest record of global sea levels, going back almost 20 years. The average rise is about 3mm per year, or about 1/8 of an inch, and it has been remarkably steady. Far from accelerating, it appears to me that the sea level increase has moderated (i.e. the average slope of the increase has slightly decreased) since 2004, which would be expected since Phil Jones, the embattled head of East Anglia's Hadley Climate Research Unit, admits now there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1998.

A paper last year attempting to back up the IPCC's claim of a three foot sea level rise in the next 90 years has now been withdrawn, due to errors. Basically, they cite uncertainty. At least that is a start. To claim to know something when one does not know it is offensive to the notion of pure science, which is supposed to be getting at the truth. If you don't know, then the truth is to say you don't know.

NOVA tried to have it both ways, claiming there are many things about melting glaciers we don't understand, yet seeming certain that sea levels would be rising dramatically because of it. If you did not listen closely, you might have felt frightened to go to bed for fear you would wake up underwater!

If anyone is interested in articles offering sound alternative explanations for Arctic, Antarctic, and Greenland ice melting -- i.e. local or regional factors -- you'll find plenty searching through the archives at http://wattsupwiththat.com.

Climate consensus not so solid now

Phil Jones, head of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of East Anglia now makes several key admissions to the BBC:

"He said he stood by the view that recent climate warming was most likely predominantly man-made. But he agreed that two periods in recent times had experienced similar warming. And he agreed that the debate had not been settled over whether the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the current period."

This is what skeptics have been saying for years. Other periods of history show similar warming trends, and it is unlikely those were CO2-related. In addition, is it probable that temperatures were warmer 1000 years ago than they are today. Phil Jones finally admits that the "debate" is not "settled." All right, then.

"His colleagues said that keeping a paper trail was not one of Professor Jones’ strong points. Professor Jones told BBC News: 'There is some truth in that.'

“'We do have a trail of where the (weather) stations have come from but it’s probably not as good as it should be,' he admitted."

One would think that if a person is promoting programs that will cost the nations of the world trillions of dollars, one ought to have a cast-metal air-tight record of stations where the data is coming from, and a full record of the data!

The CRU produced sloppy science at great cost. Now finally, they admit it. It is unlikely they will ever admit the full extent of their bias and data manipulation. But facts are facts.

Snotty questions for "Too Big To Fail" banksters

The New York Times invited financial experts to submit questions that should be asked in the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission hearings, beginning today. Officials from Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America will be grilled.

James Grant suggests the following question: Bankers are dealers in money. The Federal Reserve is a creator of money — since the crisis began in August 2007, it has conjured up $1.1 trillion. Given the ease with which these dollars are materialized on a computer screen, how can they be worth anything?

Financial blogger and former IMF official Simon Johnson asks some of the meanest questions:

1. Describe in detail the three worst investments your bank made in 2007 and 2008 — that is, those transactions on which you lost the most money. How much did the bank lose in each case?

2. What was the total compensation of each manager or executive supervising those three transactions — including yourself — in 2007 and 2008?

3. Are those executives still with your bank?

Yes, I think these are questions we would like to know the answers to. More here.

How bad is unemployment, really?

A little investigative work by Zero Hedge, using Treasury Department figures, reveals some interesting anomalies.

In December, the amount of Unemployment Insurance payments disbursed by the US Treasury totalled $14.7 billion, a 24% increase over the $11.8 billion paid out in November. (For purposes of comparison, the government paid out $14 billion to federal employees last month, meaning that Uncle Sam is paying more in unemployment benefits than it is paying in salaries to its own workers.)

But what is really odd -- click the link above to look at the charts and graphs -- is that the amount of unemployment benefits paid by the Treasury used to very closely track with the official number of "total insured unemployed." Yet in the last year there has been a huge divergence. Unemployment payments outgoing are far above what one would expect from the number of unemployed officiall reported. This indicates that the total number of unemployed may be as much as 32% higher than officially reported.

Look at the charts. Draw your own conclusion. It looks like the goverment has found a way to hide a large part of the unemployed from the official statistics. What they can't hide is the amount of money flowing out to those insured unemployed former workers.

[UPDATE: Zero Hedge has subsequently raised the possibility that instead of an increase in unemployment that is not reflected in the Bureau of Labor statistics, perhaps the Treasury is now helping out state governments burdened with their own share of unemployment outlays. The truth is, they don't know. Further investigation will be necessary to reveal the jump in the Treasury's outlays for unemployment insurance, and why it is so out-of-whack with the BLS official unemployment numbers.]