What’s the fastest way to riches? No, it’s not real estate, Carton Sheets. All, you have to do is get the government to force society to buy your BS. This is what Al Gore has done, and he is now heading towards becoming the first billionaire environmentalist. How did he do it? False advertising.

Manmade climate change is said to present humankind with some of its greatest challenges in the planet’s history, not the least of which is an alarming increase in frequency and intensity of natural disasters. Massive flooding, super-powered hurricanes, endless tornado seasons and more have all been said to be the direst of consequences of global warming.

In his movie “An Inconvenient Truth”, Al Gore famously proclaimed that, “Temperature changes are taking place all over the world and that is causing stronger storms.” Standing with Hurricane Katrina as a backdrop, the former vice president issued a cautionary tale of disaster in the making, all due to our irresponsible handling of the atmosphere. As recently as February Mr. Gore was giving a presentation showing flooding, drought and wildfires saying, “This is creating weather-related disasters that are completely unprecedented.”

President Barack Obama, in a town hall meeting in April echoed the Nobel laureate’s comments saying, “You’re now looking at huge, cataclysmic hurricanes, complete changes in weather patterns.” He followed that in September when in a speech before the United Nations he claimed, “More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.”

But what if you predicted global natural disaster catastrophes and they didn’t happen? Does that invalidate your entire message? This is the conundrum faced by climate change alarmists as many of their predictions begin to fall flat.

via Predictions of climate change induced natural disasters falling flat.

While most private sector companies would be prosecuted for false advertising, Al Gore just changes his marketing a little and moves forward. I’m sure he’s greasing enough palms in Washington to get away with it. The problem is the people are starting to see through Al Gore’s false stories of man made catastrophe. To believe that man has the power to change the climate is nonsense. We are such tiny factors when you think about the oceans, the sun, cosmic radiation, etc.

Recently, a book, Superfreakonimics, argued that if global warming is real, we don’t have to cut back on our CO2 emmissions. Instead, we could cheaply pump sulfur dioxide into the atomosphere to act as a cooling agent. While thinking about humans minipulating the atomosphere sounds crazy to me, it highlights the lie that Al Gore believes we have to do something. If global warming (now called climate change sinces it’s cooling) is really human created, then the solution posed in the Superfreakonimics book would make sense. Humans could do something to fix it. Al Gore doesn’t buy this though. The authors really don’t either. They are just highlighting that we could fix it cheaper than what Al Gore is proposing if this is the real argument being put out by Gore. Al Gore doesn’t really want a solution as proposed in the book. That doesn’t put money into his pocket. He wants a supposed solution in the form of green technology that doesn’t have to prove itself. That puts money in his pocket, and no one can claim it didn’t work.

Gore himself uses more and more energy everyday with his own private jet, a mansion, and oil to slick his hair back. If he truly believed his own BS, he’d be working out of his house over the internet selling his garbage, but instead he’s travelling the world over wining and dining with the political elite, more than likely on the public dime. So if Al Gore isn’t living up to his own standard, then apparently the standard isn’t worth living up to, and Al Gore has been marketing lies. Anyone have a link to the FTC? I want to submit a false advertising complaint.

While doing some research, I decided to look and see what the S&P 500 was trading at. The average P/E ratio from 1961 through 2008 was 17.79 The height of the dot com bubble reached 35.5. As you can see the current P/E ratio of the S&P 500 is almost 140. You can confirm this on Standard and Poors website. As of this posting, the S&P is trading at 137.98 times earnings. While I’m sure that will come down as companies earnings pick back up, the market appears to be looking for some historical gains in earnings. As I said even in the dot com bubble we were only 25% of where we are currently trading.

While I’m not professional, this sure seems like a lot of people are drinking the economic recovery Kool-aid. I better head over to TradeKing and sell my index fund before the Kool-aid runs out.

The Federal Reserve continues to throw gas on the fire claiming it can pull the gas back out if the fire gets out of control. Good luck.

Rand Paul and Peter Schiff respond to the erroneous claim that inflation is not a problem and that we should really be concerned about deflation. Also, Sean Ryan, a liberty activist from Boston, talks about his confrontations with Barney Frank and the president of the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank.

The Federal Reserve has increased the monetary base to an unprecedented level. If that money works its way through the economy, we will see inflation. Bernanke claims that the Fed can reduce the money supply if necessary, but Rand Paul suspects that if stagflation occurs (high inflation plus a slow economy), the Fed will not be willing to reduce the money supply.

At the root of the problem is the fact that the Federal Reserve claims to control inflation, when it is really the vehicle for inflation.

via Confronting the Myth of Deflation | Wendy Macy’s Blog.

The truth be told.

The typical argument for ObamaCare is that it will offer better medical care for everyone and cost less to do it, but occasionally a supporter lets the mask slip and reveals the real political motivation. So let’s give credit to John Cassidy, part of the left-wing stable at the New Yorker, who wrote last week on its Web site that “it’s important to be clear about what the reform amounts to.”

Mr. Cassidy is more honest than the politicians whose dishonesty he supports. “The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment,” he writes. “Let’s not pretend that it isn’t a big deal, or that it will be self-financing, or that it will work out exactly as planned. It won’t. What is really unfolding, I suspect, is the scenario that many conservatives feared. The Obama Administration . . . is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind.”

Why are they doing it? Because, according to Mr. Cassidy, ObamaCare serves the twin goals of “making the United States a more equitable country” and furthering the Democrats’ “political calculus.” In other words, the purpose is to further redistribute income by putting health care further under government control, and in the process making the middle class more dependent on government. As the party of government, Democrats will benefit over the long run.

This explains why Nancy Pelosi is willing to risk the seats of so many Blue Dog Democrats by forcing such an unpopular bill through Congress on a narrow, partisan vote: You have to break a few eggs to make a permanent welfare state. As Mr. Cassidy concludes, “Putting on my amateur historian’s cap, I might even claim that some subterfuge is historically necessary to get great reforms enacted.”

No wonder many Americans are upset. They know they are being lied to about ObamaCare, and they know they are going to be stuck with the bill.

via John Cassidy on ObamaCare – WSJ.com.

The writing is already on the wall. Government is poised to take over health care. The next logical step in controlling the cost of this “public service” will be controlling your eating habits. While I believe that people should pay for their eating habits via increased insurance premiums, I do not believe the government should be telling people what to eat, trying to change the way people eat, or getting involved in people’s eating habits what-so-ever.

Instead of hoping that individuals can muster the self-discipline on their own to avoid processed foods, fast food and days without physical exercise, the idea is that governments must actively work to change environments and reduce the menu of harmful options available in everyday life.

As a result, hundreds of towns in Europe and elsewhere have adopted a version of this strategy, aimed particularly at preventing children from becoming overweight and obese. They hired dietitians to counsel children and their families in schools, organized walk-to-school days, hired sports educators and built new sporting facilities. The U.S. government, meanwhile, is increasing its funding for cities and towns to pursue so-called community-based obesity prevention, in an effort to gather data about which kinds of tactics work best.

“People are finally acknowledging that the obesity problem is so pervasive that it isn’t just because people are making bad choices,” says Laura Kettel Khan, an obesity expert at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which makes grants to states for community obesity-prevention programs.

via New Obesity-Fighting Programs Enlist Entire Towns – WSJ.com.

The free market has a way of dealing with obesity via health insurance premiums. It also would deal with it, if the government would stay out of the free market. The government encourages bad eating habits. It does this by promoting the idea that no one should pay increased insurance costs because of pre-existing conditions, obesity or any other higher risk factor. Once government controls health care, there will be no penalty what-so-ever for bad habits.

Also, the government subsidizes corn more than any other crop which is used in most fattening foods to the tune of almost $10 billion a year. Because corn is so cheap, things like high fructose corn sryup have been developed to make food cheaper. Corn is also used to feed most live stock, which makes live stock cheaper as well. This is why fast food is so cheap. If you remove the government subsidies, corn prices will go up. With corn prices, the cost of some of the worst foods will also increase, which would result in less consumption of those foods.

We are watching the same old sitcom. Government side effects cause or contribute to our societal ills, and the government inserts itself to be our saviors willing to take our freedoms in order to fix our problems. Unfortunately, the people are all too willing to take the government solution.

Government’s role in society is to create criminals out of ordinary people.

Shout out to Hotair for the video

Bob Murphy had a great post,  Free Advice: “The Money That Is Sold Abroad Is You!”, that reiterates my post on selling our kids into slavery. This video is a lot more dramatic though. I’m jealous.

As usual, our government finds it wise to punish good behavior. If you are a small growing business, you better not hire anyone once payroll reaches $499,999. Once you cross over that line, you are in the cross hairs of government regulators who decide how you must treat your employees. If you don’t do what they say, you will pay more taxes.

The House bill mandates that employers with payrolls above $500,000 must contribute — for each full-time employee — 72.5% of the premium cost for single coverage and 65% of the premium cost for family coverage. The penalty for failing to do so is a 2%-to-6% tax on employers with payrolls between $500,000 and $750,000 and an 8% tax for employers with payrolls above $750,000.

via Small Business Crunches Numbers – WSJ.com.

So how does this promote job growth? Business aren’t in the business of charity. If they must spend more on health care or even worse send money to Washington, they are not going to have that money to grow and to create jobs. Those employees will get less pay, because businesses figure out the overall cost of employees. If they budget X for a certain position, the person will get X minus health care, minus taxes, minus social security, minus unemployment insurance, minus workers comp, minus other benefits, and minus any other business cost associated with that employee.

If an employee takes care of themselves and their employer didn’t pay for their health insurance, they would have more money in their pocket. The employer would be able to pay more for the position without the extra costs.  Shopping for themselves, the employee would get better rates and maybe buy a low premium, high deductible insurance plan. This would increase their income substantially. Because businesses are forced into buying health insurance for all regardless to health conditions of each individual, their plans are more expensive and eats more money out of the healthy worker’s pocket. This lowers the standard of living for all workers, and is more punishment for doing the right things.

In the movie “The Last Boy Scout”, Bruce Willis would ask people that he was about to punch, “Head or Gut?”. If you were an unlucky person who didn’t understand the question, you got both. This is similar to how the government treats industries that they want to get involved in. Apparently, the utilities are asking for the gut, thinking it will be less painful.

The executives’ desire for prompt action is colliding with Washington’s focus on other issues and growing reluctance to tamper with power-industry costs during a weak economy.

An American Electric Power coal plant, with a new carbon-capture unit, in New Haven, W.Va. Most power companies don’t think any effective, affordable technology exists to capture and store their carbon-dioxide emissions.

Some executives said last week they think intervention by the Environmental Protection Agency would be doomed because, for the most part, all the agency can do is order firms to install “best available control technology.” Most power companies don’t think any effective, affordable technology exists to capture and store carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants.

Most power companies prefer so-called cap-and-trade legislation to EPA regulation because the former is expected to give them greater flexibility on how to comply and thus cost them less than EPA regulation, they say.

Still, plenty in the utility sector continue to oppose legislation to cap carbon emissions.

Under cap-and-trade legislation — which the House has passed but the Senate hasn’t vote on yet — the government would require companies to hold permits to emit greenhouse gases. Over time, the government would issue fewer permits, bringing emissions down gradually while allowing companies to trade the permits among themselves. Companies that find it too expensive to reduce their own emissions could pay other firms to reduce theirs. They could also invest in activities that offset carbon-dioxide emissions, such as planting trees.

The EPA would be “forced to pursue a technology road map that doesn’t exist,” warned Jim Rogers, chief executive of Duke Energy Corp., Charlotte, N.C., who also has lobbied the Hill repeatedly to pass a bill.

John Rowe, head of Exelon Corp., Chicago, said that EPA regulation would be “more arbitrary, more expensive, and more uncertain for investors and the industry than a reasonable, market-based legislative solution like cap and trade.”

The executives said they want legislation — and soon — because utilities need to make billions of dollars of investments in coming years and risk bad choices in a legislative void.

via Some Utilities Push Congress to Act on Carbon Emissions – WSJ.com.

Guess who the people are who don’t understand the question? That would be the you and me. We are about to get both in the form of a huge increases in the cost of living. This will come in our utility and health care costs. Not only that, each one of these touches every other part of our lives. Every business is going to be affected by these increased costs, which means they will have to raise prices of their products.

Instead of picking either head or gut, utilities should throw the first punch. They should be telling the public/customers what this means to them. Then again, the government could tell them they can’t do that. Look at Humana during the health care debate. But hey, luckily we still have freedom of speech right?

This weekend the house moved the nanny state a little further down it’s evolutionary track toward tyranny. The statists, such as Nancy Pelosi, are acting like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. “Come on Charlie Brown. I swear I’ll let you kick the ball.” Falling for the same old trick, pro-lifers, so-called Blue Dogs and various health companies bought into the trick.

Mrs. Pelosi’s craftiest political turn was a last-minute compromise to strip federal funds from insurance plans that cover abortions. The deal—negotiated by Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak and supported by the National Right to Life Committee—gave cover to 40-some Democrats to support the larger bill.

However, as subsidized costs soar, government will have no choice but to ration medical care, starting with the aged and grievously ill. Is pre-natal life more valuable than the elderly? We’re reminded of the way pro-lifers supported Anthony Kennedy over Laurence Silberman for the Supreme Court in 1987 merely because Mr. Kennedy was a Catholic who claimed to personally oppose abortion. Mr. Stupak played the right-to-lifers like a Stradavarius.

The real importance of the abortion uproar is as preview of the politics that will dominate every medical coverage issue if ObamaCare becomes law. Every decision of what to insure or not—when an MRI can be used, or whether a stage-four breast cancer patient can get Avastin or some future expensive drug—will become subject to political intervention over moral disputes or budget constraints. Heretofore, these decisions have largely been made between a doctor and patient. This is the real “right to life” issue.

Perhaps the most unsurprising news in this drama was the collapse of the Blue Dog “deficit hawks.” Enough of them always cave in the end to give Mrs. Pelosi her way. It’s nonetheless worth noting the surrender of that most vocal scourge of deficits, Tennessee’s Jim Cooper, who voted aye on grounds that the bill can be improved in the Senate.

via Pelosi’s Health Care Means Rationing Politics – WSJ.com.

If the pro-lifers think for one second that ObamaCare won’t cover abortions shortly after it’s passed, they apparently don’t follow politics much. The same goes for so-called Blue Dogs. The government never stands at a steady state. Like the universe, it’s always expanding. Once it gets its hooks into health care, it will act like a parasite devouring its host.

Anytime the government is involved in the economy, it claims to have the “right” to tell companies, people, etc what to do. Just ask all those on Wall Street who’s pay is not regulated. They didn’t agree to bailouts with that as a stipulation. They signed on, and that was sprung on them after the fact. When the government is involved, contracts and agreements don’t count. You fell for it again, and Pelosi is about to move the ball.