A true thing of beauty.

Just watch (HT The Right Scoop):

Transcript of relevant portions (roughly the first two minutes, after Santelli is asked, “What do you make of what’s happened since Friday):

Santelli: You guys ever play sports, y’ever been on an organized team?

Answer: Yes.

Santelli: Okay, y’know, sometimes you get a couple of bad calls, or the game didn’t go your way and it should’ve. A good coach isn’t going to come up to you and say, “Gee, y’know, the other team really stinks. Y’know, I’m mad. We’re gonna fight, we’re gonna appeal. We’re gonna go to every league and every lawyer.”

No, y’know what a good coach says? “It doesn’t matter, okay? We’re a better team than this.” Just take this to motivate the team to go on to greater things.

Y’know, the Treasury Secretary, the 8% excuses, y’know, the blame Bush, blame the sun, blame this. Y’know what leadership means? It means it doesn’t really matter what S&P says. We all know deep inside that no country’s the same as it was five years ago. And the market seems to be okay with it.

And as for stocks goin’ down, we’re already Ralph Cramden on thin ice. Now an infant jumped on our shoulders. It’s even more weight.

In the end, in the end, we need to address problems we know exist. A Treasury Secretary or a President should be out here not fighting S&P, not grabbin’ the other coach and slappin’ ‘em around, takin’ the umpire behind the barn. He should be getting the team psyched to overcome. See, I remember I had a professor in college. I wrote a great paper, could never please this guy. But it made me better, okay?

We nee-, we’re better than this. Don’t get caught up in the minutiae, all this BS. We’re better than this. We need to prove it. We’re off the track. Whether we’re better than some other country or not, the real issue is we’re on the wrong path.

Blame the Tea Party? Geez, no wonder Kerry did so well in an election! If it wasn’t for the Tea Party, they’d have passed the debt ceiling thumbs-up, we’d have been rated Triple -B.

By the way, what is the full name of that complete jerk “Steve” who thinks it’s his moral duty to interrupt Santelli, believes that tax increases are the answer to everything (never mind that we’re either in a recession or darned near it), and actually said with a straight face that we’re every bit as creditworthy as a country now as we were five years ago? He’s about as insufferable as anyone I’ve seen on a business program.

You want “revenue,” Steve-O? Here’s how you get it:

• Selectively sell federal lands.
• Drill baby drill.
• Frack baby frack.
• Selectively sell more federal lands.
• Call off the EPA attack dogs.
• Expedite permitting processes across the board.
• Overall, cancel the current fear-based economy by repealing Obamacare and its $400-plus billion in tax increases and telling the statist-in-chief to sit on the sidelines for the next 17-1/2 months. Watch the economy respond and generate all kinds of corporate and individual tax collections.
• Restore the 2% Social Security cut next year; it didn’t “stimulate” anything, and Social Security is too broke.

That’s just a warm-up. You don’t need across-the-board, recession-inducing tax increases to take in more money (and they won’t produce as much as you think they will anyway) — unless your goal is power and control, and not economic growth and prosperity.

The “must have charts” crowd will have to take a rain check, but the tables below make telling points about the “Rebound? What Rebound?” Economy (HT to BizzyBlog commenter Greg and Geoff at Ace’s Place for the nudge, and to Karen at the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the guidance):

Specifically:

• On a seasonally adjusted basis, July’s full-time employment was down over 800,000 compared to June 2009, the month the recession as normal people define it ended. Part-time employment was up slightly. Unfortunately, each of the data sources involved has its own independent seasonal adjustments, which is why the annoying differences on the third line are there.
• Given the quirks of seasonality, it’s important to look at the raw (i.e., not seasonally adjusted) numbers. Comparing July 2011 to July 2009 (to negate seasonality), we see that full-time employment this past month was 425,000 lower than it was two years ago. Part-time employment was also lower, by almost a quarter-million.

Two years into an alleged recovery we have fewer total workers. I know the Establishment Survey says differently, but given that it’s based on calls to companies, it’s not going to pick up a lot of employees who are out there at smaller entities or who are individually self-employed.

Let’s look at the differences there:

So:

• Comparing seasonally adjusted July 2011 to June 2009, we see that the gap between the two surveys has narrowed by almost 1.4 million, a 15% drop in the difference.
• Comparing not seasonally adjusted July 2011 to July 2009, we see that the gap between the two surveys has narrowed by over 1.7 million, another 15% drop.

What does it mean? To me, it indicates number of things, though the mix can’t be determined, and readers may have additional ideas:

• People who are looking for a way to make a living through work are looking to hook up with established employers instead of venturing forth on their own. This pattern of the past two years is yet more evidence that the Birth/Death Model the BLS uses to estimate net unfound jobs created or lost is highly suspect in a fear-based economy. Fewer people are starting up businesses, and when they do, they don’t hire many other people (if any).
• Given that total employment per the Household Survey has declined (even though the civilian 16-and-over population is up by about 4 million in the past two years), more people have given up seeking work or gainful employment and/or are working “off the books.” More than a few of them have decided to retire and start taking Social Security benefits to get by, but that doesn’t get you anywhere near a 4 million person decline.
• It may be that the explosion in payments to individuals, the ritual extensions of unemployment benefits, and the deliberate easing of benefit requirements in many government entitlement programs (e.g., food stamps, traditional welfare, even up to and including free cell phones) is leading many to conclude that they can get by on what they’re receiving indefinitely.

It gets tiresome repeating what should be obvious, but this is unsustainable.

The Journal is not a big fan of the ratings agencies, and says so in an editorial this morning.

The Journal also takes a shot at the ratings agencies’ indifference towards how a nation in trouble most effectively gets its house in order. There is a big difference in net result if you let the government spend like mad by spreading money out to more and more people, as seen in the spike at the far end of the graph at the right, compared to employing strategies designed to grow the economy

But it’s even less of a fan of the unprofessional whining coming out of the White House over S&P’s debt downgrade decision (bolds are mine):

… is there anything that S&P said on Friday that everyone else doesn’t already know? S&P essentially declared that on present trend the U.S. debt burden is unsustainable, and that the American political system seems unable to reverse that trend.

In that context, the Obama Administration’s attempt to discredit S&P only makes the U.S. look worse—like the Europeans who also want to blame the raters for noticing the obvious. Treasury officials and chief White House economic adviser Gene Sperling denounced S&P for relying on a Congressional Budget Office scenario that overestimated the U.S. discretionary spending baseline by $300 billion through 2015 and $2 trillion through 2021.

But even adjusting for that $2 trillion would only reduce U.S. publicly held debt to 85% or so of GDP—still dangerously high. And that assumes that recently agreed upon spending caps are sustained over a decade, something which rarely happens.

We think the larger problem with S&P, Moody’s and Fitch is that they make no distinction over how a nation balances its books—whether through tax increases or spending reductions. Like the International Monetary Fund, the raters care only about balance.

This takes too little account of the need for faster economic growth, which is the only real path out of a debt crisis. Britain’s government has earned rater approval for its fiscal consolidation, but its increases in VAT and income tax rates are hurting its tepid recovery. Letting the credit raters dictate tax increases is the road to an austerity trap.

The real reason for White House fury at S&P is that it realizes how symbolically damaging this downgrade is to President Obama’s economic record. Democrats can rail all they want about the tea party, but Republicans have controlled the House for a mere seven months. The entire GOP emphasis in those seven months—backed by the tea party—has been on reversing the historic spending damage of Mr. Obama’s first two years.

… But as recently as 2008 spending was still only 20.7%, and debt held by the public was only 40.3%, of GDP.

In the name of saving the economy from panic, the White House and the Pelosi Congress then blew out the American government balance sheet.

… The better answer—the only road back to fiscal sanity and AAA status—is to reverse the economic policies of the late Bush and Obama years. The financial crisis followed by the Keynesian and statist revival of the last four years have brought the U.S. to this downgrade and will lead to inevitable decline. The only solution is to return to the classical, pro-growth economic ideas that have revived America at other moments of crisis.

The graph at the top right is also interesting in what it reveals about the 1990s Clinton economy.

Although I’m not certain of what specifically caused the percentage of individuals receiving government money to go from 47% in 1992 to almost 60% in 1998 (my nominees would be SCHIP, expanded educational entitlements, and the expanded Earned Income Credit), in retrospect I don’t see how one could say it was needed, or healthy. It’s also interesting that a slight (too slight, to be clear) turndown in the percentage during the next couple of years coincides with the budget-balancing actions taken by then-Congressman and now Ohio Governor John Kasich and Republicans in Congress.

From Denver:

Aug 6, 2011 / 05:45 pm

Team Zaryen, a group of amputee soccer players who lost limbs in the devastating Haiti earthquake last year, demonstrated their impressive skills at the Knights of Columbus’ convention in Denver, Colorado this week.

Supreme Knight Carl Anderson, who visited Haiti in the earthquake’s aftermath, praised the players for their determination on Aug. 1 and noted the “greatness of the people of Haiti” and their “faithfulness and generosity of spirit.”

Port-au-Prince’s Team Zaryen is made up of players who received prosthetic devices through a partnership between the Knights of Columbus and Project Medishare.

At a press conference on Aug. 1 at the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Denver, the players moved around on crutches kicking a soccer ball with a strength and swiftness that surpasses most average players.

Coach Cedieu Fortilis told CNA that the team formed in September of 2010 and since then, has attracted about 40 members.

He said the community in Haiti, as well as everyone they encounter in their travels, are fascinated watching them play since “no one expects amputees to be able to do this.”

“There are no words,” he added, “to describe the blessing that the Knights of Columbus have been for us.”

Fortilis noted that the players chose the word “Zaryen” as their team name since it is the Creole word for Tarantula – a spider known to keep thriving even after the loss of a leg.

The team also announced that they will tour the U.S. this fall to run soccer clinics for wounded members of the U.S. Military.

“Following the earthquake there was a tremendous outpouring of support from the people of the United States, much of it coordinated by America’s armed forces,” said Dr. Robert Gailey, director of rehabilitation services for Project Medishare.

“Team Zaryen is now looking to return the favor by running clinics for wounded American services members this fall in the United States,” Gailey said, “and we are honored to be working together with the Knights of Columbus to assist these young people in Haiti and to be providing these clinics for the U.S. Military.”

Go here for the rest of the story.

We’ve just spent the past month or so having politicians and the press tell us that if there was no debt-ceiling deal by August 2, the government might default on its debts (of course, Tim Geithner and Barack Obama could indeed have strategically defaulted if they had wished, but work with me here).

But Sunday on Meet the Press, in a remark I expect will not be relayed much if at all by the rest of the establishment press, Alan Greenspan said that default is impossible — which puts him directly at odds with the rest of Washington’s elites and Ben Bernanke, his successor as Federal Reserve chairman. On July 14, Bernanke said: “A default on … (U.S. Treasury) securities would throw the financial system … potentially into chaos.”

Wait until you see the reason why Greenspan says default is impossible, as carried at CNBC’s web site in an item by Patrick Allen:
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