Like The Promo Said: Coming This Fall

…hopefully.

Nice to Have an Imperial President

…who oozes respect for the other branches of the government.

Obama Takes Aim at Supreme Court, Calls Them ‘Unelected Group of People’

…Obama remains ‘confident’ that the law will be upheld and felt he had to remind ‘conservative commentators’ that for four years they complained of ‘judicial activism’ and that an ‘unelected group of people’ would overturn a ‘duly constituted and passed law’, a scenario he compared his healthcare fight to.

Ah, separation of powers. What a quaint, droll concept.

Numerology

Kicking the can down the road really does work.

Until you run out of road

1) 2.2 percent is the average interest rate on the U.S. Treasury’s marketable and non-marketable debt (February data).

2) 62.8 months is the average maturity of the Treasury’s marketable debt (fourth quarter 2011).

3) $454 billion is the interest expense on publicly held debt in fiscal 2011, which ended Sept. 30.

4) $5.9 trillion is the amount of debt coming due in the next five years.

For the moment, Nos. 1 and 2 are helping No. 3 and creating a big problem for No. 4. Unless Treasury does something about No. 2, Nos. 1 and 3 will become liabilities while No. 4 has the potential to provoke a crisis.

In plain English, the Treasury’s reliance on short-term financing serves a dual purpose, neither of which is beneficial in the long run. First, it helps conceal the depth of the nation’s structural imbalances: the difference between what it spends and what it collects in taxes. Second, it puts the U.S. in the precarious position of having to roll over 71 percent of its privately held marketable debt in the next five years — probably at higher interest rates.

And remember this is just the current debt; it doesn’t take into account the amount that the Greatest Economic Savior Evuh is piling on.

While he lives within our means, of course.

The Lies He’ll Tell

…to shore up his little green buddies could use a correction-injection.

Got some facts right here, ma’am!

…What seems to have Obama especially steamed is the fact that the conventional-energy companies are profitable. Especially the five largest. So he wants to tax them. He then wants to redistribute their income to his favorite green-energy firms. Sound familiar? I don’t know which is more important to the president — the fact that he hates fossil fuel, or the fact that he hates success. Or that he wants an energy-entitlement state.

But here’s what I do know, factually.

Oil companies have an effective corporate tax rate well above 40 percent. And they operate within one of the highest-taxed industries in America. According to the Tax Foundation, for more than 25 years, oil and gas companies have sent more tax dollars to Washington and state capitals than they earned in profits. That’s a fact.

Single-handedly, oil and gas companies finance over 10 percent of non-defense discretionary spending within the U.S. budget. According to the Wall Street Journal, ExxonMobil [XOM 87.06 0.33 (+0.38%) ], the world’s largest energy firm, paid out $59 billion in total U.S. taxes over the five years prior to 2010 while earning only $40.5 billion in domestic profits.

And Obama wants to raise taxes on conventional-energy firms by somewhere between $40 billion and $80 billion? Whatever happened to the supply-side principle that if you tax something more, you get less of it?

But with gasoline prices headed towards $5 a gallon, and with oil prices over $100 a barrel, virtually the whole country outside of the White House wants more oil, more retail gas for the pump, and more energy supplies everywhere in order to bring prices down. Raising taxes won’t do it.

NOT April Fools

David Brooks.

“…But Sotomayor and Kagan I think really showed on that public, or the newest justices, how smart they are.”

Eh…what?

Kagan: “The exact same argument so, so that really reduces to the question of: why is a big gift from the federal government a matter of coercion?

“In other words, the federal government is here saying: we’re giving you a boatload of money. There are no, is no matching funds requirement. There are no extraneous conditions attached to it.

“It’s just a boatload of federal money for you to take and spend on poor people’s healthcare. It doesn’t sound coercive to me, I have to tell you.”

Wow. Just wow.

Oh, wait. I think she said that from the bench, too.

Okay. My bad. Brooks/April Fool. They are practically indistiguishable, regardless.

Possible New World Record

Daughter and I went to Costco yesterday.

I spent $2.75

I Think the Phrase Is

…”Bazinga!”

And just one more:

When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ball-point pens would not work in zero gravity.

To combat this problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion developing a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300° C.

The Russians use a pencil.

SPAM of the Day

Dropped, for whatever reason, into the Earl Scruggs post…

TK Wetherell would not be entitled to be a pimple on Bobby’s ass. He is one of those Tallahassee red necks who believed that FSU enjoyed the same exalted position in the college football world as an Alabama, a Notre Dame, or an USC. Without Bobby, FSU would be competing with UAB and USM for relevancy in the South. Bobby was entitled to stay as long as he wanted, which was just one more year.

Now that he’s gone, Tallahasse is revealed as the cousin-marrying, possum-eating, “Bug Tussle” that it has always been.

And even though we despise Bobby Bowden with every fiber of our being?

Oh, agreed. It’s sheer poetry.