Vast Write Wing - June 2010

[lwoolley]

I got in on the tale end of your discussing Jeff McClure's letter. As Mr. McClure's apparent intent is to publicize his proudly held liberal political convictions, I'm sure he would not object to the text of his letter being made available for reference by those like myself who unfortunately missed that part of your show this morning. Would you consider posting the letter on your website?

I feel the community is well served by broadening its awareness of community and business leaders' core beliefs which, after all, drive the way in which those individuals seek to influence our daily lives.

I very much enjoy your show and I try to catch as much as possible while still managing to get some work done. Keep up the good work.


Randy Lucas

[lwoolley]

Hey Lynn, I just got the tail end of that caller David about Israel. He sounded foolish. Everyone wants Israel's land because of Jerusalem, only because of religious purposes. Muslim, Jew, and Christian beliefs all center around Jerusalem.

I've gone back to work now, so I only get to listen to the back end of Hour 3 now.

Thanks Lynn.

S. C. B.

Steven Chad Burrow
Mathematics Professor
Central Texas College

[lwoolley]

Arthur Laffer is wary of the increased taxes and regulation as a stifler of innovation and commerce. The increased taxes are made necessary by the spending orgy and the resultant debt.

There is a difference in managed debt and unsustainable debt. Yes, I actually owe money on two houses. One of them is paid for by rent income. The other house is managed debt that I can afford based on my financial situation. But one way I was prepared for a "rainy day" was not to be in excessive debt where such debt was not a component of necessity.

I have no credit card debt, no automobile debt (although that is coming soon because my vehicles are wearing out) and I have not yet seen the necessity of a big-screen TV set. HOWEVER and this is a big however, if I decide to incur debt, I will do it with my own money since I lack the ability to tax others. Taxing authority is a profound power and responsibility which Obama holds dear.

The Clearwater Board is a case in point. It has a single and narrow mission, yet energy is now expended on how to spend tax money it has which it does not need. Schools, which cannot and will never educate our children as they did in the past, focus on bilingual education because of an invasion of students from another country. They cannot educate these children and yet we are told that if they just had more teachers, higher pay, better and bigger building, all would be well. COGs are the biggest money-suck in state history. We have lots of ways to stop spending, but those who benefit are not going to let it go.

Government at all levels will never stop spending not should it. But at the local level, we should decide as communities what we want to spend money on. At the federal level, we have a different situation. The debt is sinking this country whether Jeff McClure thinks so or not. The example of Greece is my proof. Britain is right on Greece's tail and we' not not all that far behind.

Lynn

[lwoolley]

Hans Hartung <hhartung@hot.rr.com>

Received this from a friend of mine. How much more can we desecrate Jesus? What is our society doing? This is not a good thing.

The movie " Corpus Christi " is due to be released this June to August. This disgusting film, set to appear in America later this year, depicts Jesus and his disciples as homosexuals! As a play, this has already been in theaters for a while. It's called " Corpus Christi " which means "The Body of Christ". It's revolting mockery of our Lord. But we can make a difference. That's why I am sending this e-mail to you.

If you do send this around, we just might be able to prevent this film from showing in America . Let's stand for what we believe in and stop the mockery of Jesus Christ our Savior. Where do we stand as Christians? At the risk of a bit of inconvenience, I'm forwarding this to all I think would appreciate it. Please help us prevent such offenses against our Lord.

There is no petition to sign, no time limit, or minimum number of people to send this to.. It will take you less than 2 minutes! If you are not interested and do not have the 2 minutes it will take to do this, please don't complain when God does not have time for you because He is far busier than we are. Hey, it's worth a shot!

Apparently, some regions in Europe have already banned the film. All we need is a lot of prayer and a lot of e-mails.

GET THE WORD OUT

[lwoolley]

Bill Garner <Coachrwg@sbcglobal.net>

Went to Odessa, Tx. last night(Mon.7th) to hear the Rabbi talk. He is Chairman of the Temple Institute in Jerusalem. He will be in Waco on June 16th at Holiday Inn 1801 Development Blvd. He is very informative. If you can go hear him or have heard him speak, he will be in your neck of the woods. His website which, I haven't looked at, is www.templeinstitute.org. He was critical of the Obama admin. on their response to the flotilla. Says a large number of the people had strangely the exact same amount of Euros. (Sounds like a terroists pay.)

[lwoolley]

Lynn,
Your statement that Israel was founded after the "world got together" to find a homeland for the Jews after WWII is not entirely accurate. Britain took Palestine away from the Turks in WWI as depicted in the movie "Lawrence of Arabia". Britain wanted to establish an imperial link between Egypt and the Suez Canal to Mother India. Lord Rothschild, a Jew, was the primary financier of Britain's war and imperial efforts at the time. Rothschild leaned heavily upon the British government to consider establishing a Jewish homeland again in Palestine. The British, including Churchill who was Foreign Secretary at the time and T.E.Lawrence, agreed to allow controlled Jewish immigration. By the '30's Britain was engaged in a counter-insurgency against both Jews and Arabs who were committing atrocities against each other. By the 40's Jewish terrorists were carrying out a full scale guerrilla war against Britain and Arabs in Palestine even while Britain was in a death struggle with Nazi Germany. After the war, Jewish propaganda [as depicted in the movie, "Exodus"] portrayed Britain as anti-Semitic and Nazi-like for simply trying to control Jewish immigration and maintain peace between Jew and Arab. Under severe pressure from the Truman administration and American public opinion, shaped by Jewish propaganda, Britain relinquished control of Palestine and Israel was instantly recognized by us.

unsigned Waco

[lwoolley]

Lynn, that was a factually accurate, but historically incompleat and somewhat sanitized analysis. Your piece ignores the violence or terrorism Jews brought to bear against the Arabs and the British and the fact the land was conquered by the British Army opening the opportunity for real Jewish settlement. The Turks were never going to let many Jews in. It was the Balfour letter to Baron Rothschild that got the ball rolling; not a League of Nations mandate.
Did you read and agreewith the recent Stratfor analyses I sent you?
You were 100% right about our loud-mouth President's remarks about BP. Would he rather us buy oil from the Arabs, Russians, Chinese or Venezuelans? One-third of BP's shareholders and employees are American----many of them Texan and UT and A&M grads. BP's U.S. operations came about by buying the old AMOCO or American oil company of Cleveland. BP may be guilty of not having sufficient controls in place to monitor the work of it's American subsidiary and sub-contractors.
Under it's former boss, Lord Browne, BP concentrated on marketing and "Green" PR while farming out much of it's engineering functions. Hayward is an enginneer and was made CEO in attempt by BP to get back to it's core mission.

unsigned, Waco

[lwoolley]

SOL,
So, you wanna shoot John Maynard Keynes do you? Take a number and we'll call you when it's your turn. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth I earned a degree in Economics in a philosophical environment that was mostly Keynesian and in which I had just a little exposure to the Austrian School of Economic Thought (the antithesis of the Keynesian School). I emerged from that environment as an adherent to the Austrian School and I have thought from then to now that I'd like to shoot the bastard myself. But let's get real in the area of blame-allocation. The living adherents to the Keynesian School should at least be consigned to rigorous Austrian re-education camps. Said camps should be located at Gitmo.
USL

[lwoolley]

U.S debt to rise to $19.6 trillion by 2015

WASHINGTON
Tue Jun 8, 2010 6:19pm EDT
WASHINGTON June 8 (Reuters) - The U.S. debt will top $13.6 trillion this year and climb to an estimated $19.6 trillion by 2015, according to a Treasury Department report to Congress.

Bonds | Global Markets

The report that was sent to lawmakers Friday night with no fanfare said the ratio of debt to the gross domestic product would rise to 102 percent by 2015 from 93 percent this year.

"The president's economic experts say a 1 percent increase in GDP can create almost 1 million jobs, and that 1 percent is what experts think we are losing because of the debt's massive drag on our economy," said Republican Representative Dave Camp, who publicized the report.

He was referring to recent testimony by University of Maryland Professor Carmen Reinhart to the bipartisan fiscal commission, which was created by President Barack Obama to recommend ways to reduce the deficit, which said debt topping 90 percent of GDP could slow economic growth.

The U.S. debt has grown rapidly with the economic downturn and government spending for the Wall Street bailout, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the economic stimulus. The rising debt is contributing to voter unrest ahead of the November congressional elections in which Republicans hope to regain control of Congress.

The total U.S. debt includes obligations to the Social Security retirement program and other government trust funds. The amount of debt held by investors, which include China and other countries as well as individuals and pension funds, will rise to an estimated $9.1 trillion this year from $7.5 trillion last year.

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Lynn,

Indeed bad news sells papers and that is what Reuters is all about. If you read to the end of the article you will find a hint of the real truth.

For example, the “debt” created by the stimulus bill passed last year is included in the “estimate”, however the high number also counts the money theoretically owed by Congress to the Highway Trust Fund. Since a fairly large portion of the stimulus bill was to fund highway and bridge construction and repairs that were supposed to be funded by the Highway Trust Fund it is merely the shuffling of debt from the Fund to the stimulus bill. Still, in the higher estimates because of the way the bill was written, the debt is now in two places. More, the larger debt number includes the commitment by Congress to the TARP program. Factually, the TARP is pretty much fully paid for with collateral and or repayments and interest. It looks like it will be a net gain for the federal government, however in the larger $19.6 trillion one underlying assumption is that all of the money committed to TARP is gone. Back when we had the Resolution Trust Corporation, all the funding for that was counted as debt too. When RTC shut down and returned more money to the Treasury than was appropriated by Congress that debt vanished and was replaced with a gain. That was part of why we ran a surplus in the late 1990s.

That “90%” number is an opinion. In fact during our history we have seen employment and GDP surge as our debt shot past 100% of GDP. Many economists, and perhaps a majority of them disagree with the assumption that there is some magic number for the assumed debt beyond which we will have difficulties. Some nations in Europe are experiencing excellent economic growth with a debt to GDP ratio that is double that of Greece. Greece, on the other hand, will have to find some way to write down its debt or it is going to experience a social disaster. The difference is the ability to grow the economy. Our debt service load is about 10% of federal revenues. That equates to about 2.5% of GDP. There is the critical number.

The real danger is that we decide to cut back on federal spending right now. If that were to happen we would immediately see a surge in unemployment and a wave of companies closing their doors. Those events would lead to a very significant decline in tax revenues and an equally impressive increase in government expenditures as the banks failing across the country were taken over by the FDIC, pension funds were taken over and replenished by the PBGC, and a host of people started drawing Social Security and became eligible for Medicaid. At the same time we would see the housing market grow even worse as the people who no longer had jobs were unable to make the house payments on their houses which are now worth a lot less than they owe. Since a lot of those houses are VA and FHA insured, that too would increase the federal expenditures.

If the federal government then reduced other expenditures even further because of the tsunami of bank, pension, and other liabilities it had to cover, that would lead to an even greater wave of unemployment, bank failures, and foreclosures. Taken together it would then create a deflationary spiral. When stability was reached we would probably have around 40% unemployment (or more) and be in a prolonged depression that would make the 1930s look tame. Worse, we would effectively plunge the rest of the world into the same pit.

We would emerge, but we would do so only as we expended the federal debt to levels that make today’s numbers look like chump change. Why would we do that? Because we would find ourselves facing a world war. History has been repeating that pattern for about a thousand years. Each depression was created by just the event and reaction set that I described above. In each case the world emerged from the depression by borrowing to the hilt to finance a major war. The likely opponent would be Russia and the war would be mostly fought over Europe and the Middle East. If that sounds like WWII, it is because it is. The propensity to fight a worldwide war has not gone away. All that is needed is a sufficiently severe economic crisis that people give up hope, as the Germans did in the 1930s. There is commonly a dictator in the wings who truly believes that he can solve the problems of his people by conquering a few nations around him. Putin is frothing at the bit for just such an opportunity.

There is another consistency in history and that is that the number of people killed in the world war that brings us back to prosperity has been rising exponentially. Actually there were a large number of good papers and books published on this subject following WWII. The next war was predicted to be capable of causing such a huge devastation and mortality rate that civilization would collapse. That is why the United Nations was formed.

Jorge Santayana famously wrote, “Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it.”

In short the subject, “We need to shoot John Maynard Keynes.” is appropriate to the content and assumptions. John Maynard Keynes is dead and has been for a very long time. Shooting his bones seems to me to be an absurdity. I have read some of his work and factually it beats the heck out of many of the alternatives. He focused on a theory of how to break the cycle of depression and war that has plagued humanity for over a thousand years. Ronald Regan adopted Keynes’ theory in 1982 and headed off a depression. He increased the deficit massively and expanded the number of people directly and indirectly employed by the federal government by a factor of about three. In doing so he set us up for a huge economic boom instead of the depression that was looming in front of him. His prime adviser was Paul Volker. Dr. Volker is once again the prime adviser to the President and is once again giving the same advice. It worked before and appears to be working again.

As I wrote you earlier, our public federal debt is about 58% of GDP. Based on the growth we have seen this year so far in GDP even if the debt rises to $9 trillion the percentage of GDP will only move up to about 60%. That will put us very nearly at the bottom of developed nations in term of percentage of GDP as national public debt.

As a closing note, I have had several people approach me about investing who are eligible to be drawing Social Security but are not. They have accepted employment in various positions relating to the upcoming expansion of I-35. That expansion through Central Texas came from the stimulus bill. More, the proposals I have seen for reducing the federal debt have a powerful consensus to them. All of them demand a massive reduction in defense spending. After all that is currently the biggest part of the budget not mandated by law.

In the specifics of the proposals there is another consistency. They advocate moving all Army installations nearer to the coasts and cutting the size of the Army in half. Fort Hood would then become a place that units came to train once a year rather than the largest military installation in the world. Do you want that?

There are some hard choices that must be made, and we will need to slow down the growth of our debt and perhaps even stop it for a while, but we absolutely need to reject the hype and absurd numbers and proposals that are being thrown about. We need to dig deep and think carefully about the ripple effect of any move we make. The logic behind the “bailout” of General Motors was simple. Allowing GM to go into regular bankruptcy would have cost the federal government about four times what they loaned to GM to keep it alive. The failure of banks, companies, and large scale unemployment and house foreclosures combined with the loss of tax revenue would have been astonishing. GM is now back to profitability and the federal government is probably going to turn a profit on the “bailout” rather than face a combination of outflows and absence of taxes that would cost it about a trillion dollars!

Jeff

[lwoolley]

Bill Garner <Coachrwg@sbcglobal.net>

Went to Odessa, Tx. last night(Mon.7th) to hear the Rabbi talk. He is Chairman of the Temple Institute in Jerusalem. He will be in Waco on June 16th at Holiday Inn 1801 Development Blvd. He is very informative. If you can go hear him or have heard him speak, he will be in your neck of the woods. His website which, I haven't looked at, is www.templeinstitute.org. He was critical of the Obama admin. on their response to the flotilla. Says a large number of the people had strangely the exact same amount of Euros. (Sounds like a terroists pay.)

[lwoolley]

SOL,
Opinion section of today's WSJ, "The Alien In The White House" says all about Obama. You gotta read it.

A personal note: The USL feels deep rage against those who voted for this alien 16 months ago. Informed electorate my ass! I'm very much confirmed in my Devolutionary/Enclave belief that certain demographics and geographics in this country should go their seperate ways. The nation's capital can be moved to Omaha for starters......
USL

[lwoolley]

BP's not much different than many of the business leaders here in Waco who have supported and continue to support "Honeybee" Edwards.
Unsigned, Waco

[lwoolley]

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0610/s ... 61010.php3

Hope I am not boring you with the Israel info. I think it is about the most important event happening out there!

This article suggests that though world opinion is against Israel the actual balance of power between middle eastern
states is about where Israel needs it to be. Israel is kind of in the middle of a circular firing squad and they are willing
to duck!

Belinda

[lwoolley]

Lynn, have you noticed all the callers panting to talk about this big 10 BS? Most of us care less for the big 10 or Astro baseball. The sports for most of adults now is.. Politics!

Mike Licavoli
Harker Hts, TX

[lwoolley]

SOL,
There is an interesting column in the Dallas Morning News today by Kevin Sherrington about Nebraska's animosity toward Texas (The University of) and much of this animosity results from the Big 12 Championship game last season. I don't remember much about the game except that Nebraska played a great game, that I pulled for Nebraska (surprise!), and that the burnt orange bullies won the game. Why does Nebraska have the red-ass about this game? What am I missing?

There is some interesting reading in the Lubbock Avalanche Journal (lubbockonline.com) today. Looks like Baylor ain't gonna make the cut this time. I did not know that USC is a private school, did you?

I had thought for years that a Baylor departure from the Big 12 replaced by Arkansas would be a good thing, but Arkansas is conspicuous by its absence in any scenario to replace Nebraska. If you elect to give this thing any of your airwaves time, you should read Sherrington's column. I suspect that the bones of the departed J. T. King are moving right about now. He verbally predicted to me the demise of the Southwest Conference in 1975 and I suspect that he would not be surprised at today's happenings. Advertising revenues are the lifeblood of big-time college football and schools that are deficient in filling stadia for both home and away games will not long survive in said environment. Sorry Baylor.
GD