Who knew that you needed luggage for your wine bottles?

Yeah, the USA is flat broke with no reprieve in sight, but the citizens are making do as they have always have. Around here farming in the recent past had been devoted to tobacco, cotton, and soy beans with a few other odds and ends thrown in, but the 2004 Tobacco Buyout has changed that into a very limited and specialized business, cotton has always been tough, and soybeans seem to be grown everywhere. As a result, a lot of the family farmers have been trying new things. Southern grape varieties grow here like weeds, so a number of the old family farms have converted some acreage to vineyards and little wineries are popping up.

I was reminded of this by a crony who dropped by recently and recounted how his son had built a winery business on the family farm complete with wine tasting, tours, and a gift shop for the city folks. Needless to say we were chafing him a bit about the fancy visitors and he was giving back as good as he got. One of the things he mentioned was that a popular item in the gift shop was wine bags like these:

Now to me a wine bag is brown paper with an open top sticking out, but there seems to be a market for leather cases for folks to carry their fancy wines to parties and picnics and BYOB restaurants. While that wouldn't go over too well down the road at Ma's Diner, there are apparently high class city eateries that welcome this sort of thing. Of course, I had to suggest that if you were really worried about your wine bottle breaking you could just get Wine-in-a-Box.

The good news is that I guess the Obama regime hasn't entirely stamped out simple pleasures and luxuries or basic American ingenuity. I just hope that continues because the current mess is going to require a massive clean-up when it all falls down.

Don't think of it as welfare. Think of it as a career.

From the always interesting Zero Hedge - When Work Is Punished: The Tragedy Of America's Welfare State:

for increasingly more it is now more lucrative - in the form of actual disposable income - to sit, do nothing, and collect various welfare entitlements, than to work. This is graphically, and very painfully confirmed, in the below chart from Gary Alexander, Secretary of Public Welfare, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (a state best known for its broke capital Harrisburg). As quantified, and explained by Alexander, "the single mom is better off earnings gross income of $29,000 with $57,327 in net income & benefits than to earn gross income of $69,000 with net income and benefits of $57,045."

I have to observe from the chart that there doesn't seem much point to even working at all since $0 income plus welfare works out to about the same as earning $55,000 without any government benefits.

That point hasn't been lost on the citizenry either:

But perhaps the scariest chart in the entire presentation is the following summarizing the unsustainable welfare burden on current taxpayers:

• For every 1.65 employed persons in the private sector, 1 person receives welfare assistance
• For every 1.25 employed persons in the private sector, 1 person receives welfare assistance or works for the government.

I like to think of it as uninvited guests at the nation's dinner tables. If you have a job and your spouse has a part time job, when you sit down to dinner you have a welfare moocher or a government bureaucrat sitting down with you. Pass the potatoes Barack, and don't scarf all the chicken!

The "fiscal cliff" is more like a mole hill

There's lots of consternation in Washington and among the chattering class over the "fiscal cliff" and while the hype will whipsaw markets and keep the politicians busy, it really is a drop in the bucket:

I see the future: The politicians will meet and fret and hold press conferences and predict disaster. Then they'll reach a deal.

It will just postpone the reckoning, but they'll congratulate themselves, and the media will move on.

America, however, continues to go broke.

"They're not going to admit that we're bankrupt, and they won't admit that we're on the verge of a major, major change in our society," says Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas. "So they'll keep putting it aside, but then we'll eventually probably destroy the dollar."

The across-the-board cut, or "sequestration," was designed to be so distasteful that Congress would be moved to cut more deliberately. If it doesn't act, $110 billion in projected spending will be automatically cut -- half from domestic spending, half from the Pentagon.

"They assume that they made it so bad that they wouldn't accept it, but I don't think they did," said Paul. "They're not even ... talking about real cuts. They're talking about cuts in baseline budgeting."

Right, the old baseline budgeting trick.

"If they propose, let's say, a $10 billion increase for next year and cut it down to $9 billion, they say they're cutting 10 percent. But they're not cutting anything, they're only increasing it $9 billion instead of $10 billion. It's done on purpose so that people get confused."

Even better, the amounts under discussion are miniscule compared to the across-the-board cuts that are needed:

"When government spending is about $3.8 trillion, you're going to cut $100 billion? That's a deck chair on the Titanic," said Russ Roberts of the Hoover Institution.

And the US budget is looking more like the Titanic every day.

US household income lowest since 1995

US median income lowest since 1995 - thanks, Obama!

Obama job creation worst since World War II

Obama on track to have worst job record since World War II

Obama Spends More Time On Golf Than On The Economy

And Obama spent just 8 minutes more per week on the economy than the average dog owner spends walking their dog.

Not to worry - rampant inflation is only affecting the stuff you buy frequently

Citi: Don't Worry Consumers, Inflation Is Only Affecting Things You Buy Every Day.

I guess if you could eat a house, you wouldn't notice.

It's the uncertainty, stupid

James Carville's famous line from the 1992 Presidential campaign, "It's the economy, stupid," is applicable again this year and the reason why is the economic uncertainty created by Barack Obama and his gang of leftist radical tinkerers:

Why isn't the economy recovering? After previous recessions, unemployment didn't get stuck at close to 10 percent. If left alone, the economy can and does heal itself, as the mistakes of the previous inflationary boom are corrected.

The problem today is that the economy is not being left alone. Instead, it is haunted by uncertainty on a hundred fronts. When rules are unintelligible and unpredictable, when new workers are potential threats because of Labor Department regulations, businesses have little confidence to hire. President Obama's vaunted legislative record not only left entrepreneurs with the burden of bigger government, it also makes it impossible for them to accurately estimate the new burden.

...

Nothing more effectively freezes business in place than what economist and historian Robert Higgs calls "regime uncertainty."

"(A)ll of these unsettling possibilities and others of substantial significance must give pause to anyone considering a long-term investment, because any one of them has the potential to turn what seems to be a profitable investment into a big loser. In short, investors now face regime uncertainty to an extent that few have experienced in this country -- to find anything comparable, one must go back to the 1930s and 1940s, when the menacing clouds of the New Deal and World War II darkened the economic horizon."

Uncertainty created by Obama's legislative "successes" are comparable to the Depression and World War II? This does not bode well for job growth.

No manure, Sherlock. And the way to end the uncertainty is coming up on Election Day in November when we can give the Obama buffoons the spanking they so richly deserve.

(h/t Instapundit)

Democrats stimulated by shopping frenzy

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you tossed a credit card into a meeting of Shopaholics Anonymous? You know - those poor sad people whose only stimulation comes from spending a whole lot of money they don't have on a whole of stuff they don't need? Well, watching the current shopping frenzy enveloping the Democrats in Washington is the closest I am likely to ever get to such a sight. As the Wall Street Journal observes, the Donks have been on the wagon for 40 years and have just fallen off with a bang:

"Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before."

So said White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in November, and Democrats in Congress are certainly taking his advice to heart. The 647-page, $825 billion House legislation is being sold as an economic "stimulus," but now that Democrats have finally released the details we understand Rahm's point much better. This is a political wonder that manages to spend money on just about every pent-up Democratic proposal of the last 40 years.

We've looked it over, and even we can't quite believe it.

Hit the link, for some of the details of the Democrat shopping list, but I'm sure you won't be surprised. Every ridiculous purchase that you can think of has made it onto the list.  What about the stimulus excuse? (Economic stimulus that is, not the the Donks creaming their jeans.)

Some $30 billion, or less than 5% of the spending in the bill, is for fixing bridges or other highway projects. There's another $40 billion for broadband and electric grid development, airports and clean water projects that are arguably worthwhile priorities.

Add the roughly $20 billion for business tax cuts, and by our estimate only $90 billion out of $825 billion, or about 12 cents of every $1, is for something that can plausibly be considered a growth stimulus. And even many of these projects aren't likely to help the economy immediately. As Peter Orszag, the President's new budget director, told Congress a year ago, "even those [public works] that are 'on the shelf' generally cannot be undertaken quickly enough to provide timely stimulus to the economy."

The rest goes to the usual laundry list of buffonery and waste plus some juicy payoffs to Donk political supporters like government workers and ACORN. Here are some I like:

Here's another lu-lu: Congress wants to spend $600 million more for the federal government to buy new cars. Uncle Sam already spends $3 billion a year on its fleet of 600,000 vehicles.
...
As for the promise of accountability, some $54 billion will go to federal programs that the Office of Management and Budget or the Government Accountability Office have already criticized as "ineffective" or unable to pass basic financial audits. These include the Economic Development Administration, the Small Business Administration, the 10 federal job training programs, and many more.

Of course, once the hogs get their noses in the trough, you can also be sure that they are going to demand the same funding plus more in future years.

So where does that leave the taxpayers whose credit cards have been stolen for this shopping spree? Well, aside from not fixing the banking crisis caused by the Democrats insisting that banks make loans to illegal aliens and deadbeats and the Democrats insisting that their pets, Fannie and Freddie, "package" up those loans and sell them far and wide; what we are most likely to get is runaway inflation. Some factoids:

The U.S. National Debt was $930 billion in 1980, or 33% of GDP. Today it is $10.7 trillion, or 76% of GDP. The National Debt has grown by 1,150% in 28 years. With the planned fiscal stimulus (taxing future generations), the National Debt will reach 100% of GDP during the Obama administration. When Argentina's economy collapsed in 1998, their National Debt as a percentage of GDP was 65%. The Great Deniers say we are not Argentina. They say we are safe because the U.S. dollar is the reserve currency of the world. This is like jumping off a 20 story building and as you pass the 10th floor someone yells out the window asking how you are doing. You answer, “Good, so far”.
...
Every single dime of the $1 trillion will be borrowed. The government will borrow $1 trillion from foreign countries, hand it out to their constituents, while encouraging them to resume borrowing and spending. Barney Frank and Charlie Rangel will force insolvent banks to lend money to companies, consumers, and deadbeats in foreclosure proceedings. The change we can believe in is - we will borrow and spend our way out of the largest debt bubble in history. Consumers and companies are acting rationally and trying to purge themselves of debt. The government will not allow that to happen. A massive additional dose of leverage will revive the patient. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. Are the politicians running this country insane, unintelligent, or just so corrupt that special interests outweigh the interests of the American people? The current pork laden stimulus package will lead to a rerun of Japan's lost decade, with one vast difference. Our lost decade will terminate in a hyperinflationary collapse.

Can you say Weimar Germany? I knew you could. And if you like to read the stats, it looks like the money supply is already growing out of bounds even before the shopaholics get to the store.

Well, you do what you can. By all means write to your "representatives" in Congress and tell them to get back with the Shopaholics Anonymous program. However, this is going to need a "tough love" intervention which hopefully won't be too long delayed - for all our sakes.