Who benefits from the Keystone stoning

Well if you were to guess George Soros, you'd be wrong but how about another spokesperson for the administration, Warren Buffett............

Warren Buffett’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe LLC is among U.S. and Canadian railroads that stand to benefit from the Obama administration’s decision to reject TransCanada Corp. (TRP)’s Keystone XL oil pipeline permit.

With modest expansion, railroads can handle all new oil produced in western Canada through 2030, according to an analysis of the Keystone proposal by the U.S. State Department.

“Whatever people bring to us, we’re ready to haul,” Krista York-Wooley, a spokeswoman for Burlington Northern, a unit of Buffett’s Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/A), said in an interview. If Keystone XL “doesn’t happen, we’re here to haul.”

The State Department denied TransCanada a permit on Jan. 18, saying there was not enough time to study the proposal by Feb. 21, a deadline Congress imposed on President Barack Obama. Calgary-based TransCanada has said it intends to re-apply with a route that avoids an environmentally sensitive region of Nebraska, something the Obama administration encouraged.

It pays to know low people in high places........



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When green isn't so green

It cracks me up that your average Branch Gorevidian believes that stopping the Keystone pipeline construction is somehow better for the environment than filling a tanker half way across the world and delivering the oil to an American refinery.

Or, as it pertains, to haul Canadian oil south on rail cars............

On any given week, three to seven CP Rail trains laden with crude oil from the North Dakota Bakken field whisk across North America, bypassing the pipeline bottlenecks in mid-continent that are depressing oil prices and unaffected by the noise in Washington, D.C., that is holding back the Keystone XL pipeline.

It’s a roaring business. In 2009, when Calgary-based Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. started dabbling in crude oil transportation, it moved 500 of its black barrel-shaped cars out of the basin. Last year, its oil trains carried 13,000 cars and soon CP could be moving 70,000 cars or more a year out of the North Dakota Bakken tight-oil field alone.

With each tank car containing 650 barrels of oil, that’s 126,000 barrels a day — a significant pipeline on rail.

“We think that’s foreseeable in the not-too-distant future, and we think based on what we are doing now there is potential above that,” Tracy Robinson, CP’s energy and merchandise vice-president, said in an interview.

It’s not the pipeline on rail that some were envisioning some years ago, when Canada’s major railway companies, Montreal-based Canadian National Railway Co. and CP, started looking for ways to get a piece of the growing Alberta oil sands by offering alternative transportation.

Because, afterall, we all know that there has never been a railroad accident.

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Forget John Galt, where's his 60 billion

Overseas. Where it will stay until the US revises it's corporate income tax code..............

Apple made an aggressive pitch for a corporate tax holiday Monday, stressing that it plans to keep more than $60 billion parked offshore until Congress makes it easier for companies to bring those profits home.

The warning from the nation’s most valuable company came as Apple announced it would pay a dividend to shareholders and buy back stock, moves that will cost about $45 billion over three years.

Who needs any of that cash?

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Why gas is $4/gal

Might have something to with this graph.............

Subsidize, then regulate....... the life blood of government.

Apparently, some tax preparers are upset that the feds are requiring licenses as a way to regulate the industry.

Congress never gave the IRS the authority to license tax preparers, and the IRS can’t give itself that power.

But last year the IRS imposed a sweeping new licensing scheme that forces tax preparers to get IRS permission before they can work. This is an unlawful power grab that exceeds the authority granted to the IRS by Congress.

The burden of compliance will fall most heavily on independent tax return preparers and small businesses. Unsurprisingly, big firms such as H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt support the licensing scheme. As The Wall Street Journal explained: “Cheering the new regulations are big tax preparers like H&R Block, who are only too happy to see the feds swoop in to put their mom-and-pop seasonal competitors out of business.”

These regulations are typical government protectionism. They benefit powerful industry insiders and at the expense of entrepreneurs and consumers, who will likely have fewer options and face higher prices. But tax preparers have a right to earn an honest living without getting permission from the IRS. And taxpayers—not the IRS—should be the ones who decide who prepares their taxes.

Now most of you know that I am generally against regulation but how about one that work's for Old Gordon by creating barriers to entry into the market? With my CPA designation, I'm usually grandfathered into all these regulations.

Yet, I'm against these regulations. Why? because the industry doesn't need them.

I've been a CPA for 23 years. There was never an outcry for regulating the industry until the past few years. Anyone want to guess why?

With the expansion of the earned income credit, lot's of unscrupulous people got into the industry to extract large fees from lots of poor dumb asses. For instance, cruise into any bad neighborhood and you'll usually see a tax preparation business right next to the local pawn shop and/or check cashing business.

These people are willing to charge upwards of $500 for a tax return I would charge $95 for. Now you might be asking why customer would be willing to pay that. But if you are due a $7,000 refund for money that was never yours to begin with what do you care what the fee is?

And like all other types of "free" government money, the earned income credit invites all kinds of fraud into the process.

Hence the government now needs to regulate the people who are ripping off the system.

If the feds really wants to get rid of the riff raff in the tax preparation business, simply take the money out of it. The guys in the business will move to greener pastures like Medicare fraud.

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Stupidity on display

Apparently, the feds are worried about teen smoking.....

More work needs to be done to keep young Americans from using tobacco, including creating smoking bans and increasing taxes on tobacco products, the U.S. Surgeon General’s office said in a report released Thursday.

Almost one in five high school-aged teens smokes, down from earlier decades, but the rate of decline has slowed, the report said.

It says it’s particularly important to stop young people from using tobacco because those who start smoking as teenagers can increase their chances of long-term addiction. They also quickly can experience reduced lung function, impaired lung growth, early heart disease and other health problems like asthma.

Here's an idea.

Let's make it illegal for teens to buy cigarettes! Oh, you mean it already is?

OK let's increase the prices of cigarettes through increased taxes! Oh a pack of cigarettes costs costs over $5 a pack, which is comprised of taxes in excess of $3 a pack?

But hey, it's government and like the definition of insanity, let's do more of the same and expect a different result

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Why I'm a libertarian?

Because for years, I've proclaimed that most agencies designed to regulate businesses actually end up becoming lobbying agencies for the industries they oversee.

Think about it, if I have a job overseeing the trucking industry, do I move up the government scrotum pole faster if the trucking industry is kicking ass or failing?

Here's a real life example..............

Federal inspectors knew of serious food safety violations at a Washington state fruit processing plant. It seemed like the kind of thing that the United States Department of Agriculture would jump on. But that’s not what happened.

Government whistleblowers tell the KING 5 Investigators that the agency was more concerned about the money Snokist was generating for the USDA than the safety of the citizens it serves.

“I think it’s pretty poor,” said Wendy Alguard, the USDA’s former inspector assigned to Snokist. “All (the USDA) is out to do is try and make money, instead of doing what their original job is, being concerned about the product and the safety of people,” said Alguard.

“Money, it’s money,” agreed Jerry Pierce, the USDA inspector who as Alguard’s predecessor at Snokist.

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From the "if you have to say, it's probably not true" file

If someone tells you they want to be a millionaire but the only thing they do is buy lottery tickets how serious are they?

"On Tuesday at the State of the Union, I laid out my vision for how we move forward," President Obama said at a campaign event in Las Vegas, Nevada. "I laid out a blueprint for an economy that's built to last, that has a firm foundation. Where we're making stuff and selling stuff and moving it around and UPS drivers are dropping things off everywhere."

"That's the economy we want. An economy built on American manufacturing, with more good jobs and more products made here in the United States of America," he also said.

Clue phone to the Obamunists, incorporating job killing regulation is like making the lottery your retirement plan.

There goes John Galt

Rather than deal with the complexities of U.S. tax law, Americans living overseas are increasingly renouncing their citizenship in order to avoid paying their income taxes.

According to National Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson, approximately 4,000 people gave up their citizenship from fiscal year 2005 to FY 2010. Renunciations increased sharply within the past three years, from 146 in FY 2008 to 1,534 in FY 2010. And during the first two quarters of FY 2011 alone, 1,024 Americans ditched their citizenship.

We don't need no stinkin' rich people.

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But other than that it's a great idea

Someone should tell the Obamunists that the Keystone pipeline is hauling oil from Canada to the gulf, not beer..............

President Obama's rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico is an act of national insanity. It isn't often that a president makes a decision that has no redeeming virtues and -- beyond the symbolism -- won't even advance the goals of the groups that demanded it. All it tells us is that Obama is so obsessed with his re-election that, through some sort of political calculus, he believes that placating his environmental supporters will improve his chances.

Aside from the political and public relations victory, environmentalists won't get much. Stopping the pipeline won't halt the development of tar sands, to which the Canadian government is committed; therefore, there will be little effect on global warming emissions. Indeed, Obama's decision might add to them. If Canada builds a pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific for export to Asia, moving all that oil across the ocean by tanker will create extra emissions. There will also be the risk of added spills.

Now consider how Obama's decision hurts the United States. For starters, it insults and antagonizes a strong ally; getting future Canadian cooperation on other issues will be harder. Next, it threatens a large source of relatively secure oil that, combined with new discoveries in the United States, could reduce (though not eliminate) our dependence on insecure foreign oil.

Finally, Obama's decision forgoes all the project's jobs. There's some dispute over the magnitude. Project sponsor TransCanada claims 20,000, split between construction (13,000) and manufacturing (7,000) of everything from pumps to control equipment. Apparently, this refers to "job years," meaning one job for one year. If so, the actual number of jobs would be about half that spread over two years. Whatever the figure, it's in the thousands and important in a country hungering for work. And Keystone XL is precisely the sort of infrastructure project that Obama claims to favor.

The big winners are the Chinese. They must be celebrating their good fortune and wondering how the crazy Americans could repudiate such a huge supply of nearby energy. There's no guarantee that tar-sands oil will go to China; pipelines to the Pacific would have to be built. But it creates the possibility when the oil's natural market is the United States.

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Life in Obamaworld

When the companies that supply motor fuel close the books on 2011, they will pay about $6.8 million in penalties to the Treasury because they failed to mix a special type of biofuel into their gasoline and diesel as required by law.

But there was none to be had. Outside a handful of laboratories and workshops, the ingredient, cellulosic biofuel, does not exist.

In 2012, the oil companies expect to pay even higher penalties for failing to blend in the fuel, which is made from wood chips or the inedible parts of plants like corncobs. Refiners were required to blend 6.6 million gallons into gasoline and diesel in 2011 and face a quota of 8.65 million gallons this year.

“It belies logic,” Charles T. Drevna, the president of the National Petrochemicals and Refiners Association, said of the 2011 quota. And raising the quota for 2012 when there is no production makes even less sense, he said.

Penalizing the fuel suppliers demonstrates what happens when the federal government really, really wants something that technology is not ready to provide. In fact, while it may seem harsh that the Environmental Protection Agency is penalizing them for failing to do the impossible, the agency is being lenient by the standards of the law, the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act.

Now ask yourself the question. Who ultimately pays these fines? Hint. It's not the owners. It's not going to be the suppliers.

It will be the consumer. Once again Obama gives you that payroll tax holiday so you can pay it back in oil company fines.

Thanks reader Jeremy for the link.

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Must read

This is dated but if you haven't read the whole thing, you need to read this article by Kevin Williamson.

For a few measly millions, Wall Street not only bought itself a president, but got the start-up firm of B. H. Obama & Co. LLC to throw a cabinet into the deal, too — on remarkably generous terms. President Obama, for a guy prone to delivering prim and smug little homilies denouncing greed, greed, greed — the only of the seven deadly sins that truly offends Democrats (though Mrs. Obama has done some desultory work on gluttony) — is strangely comfortable among the Gordon Gekkos of this world. Shall we have a partial roll call? Beat the drum slowly and call out the names: With unemployment still topping 9 percent, the catastatic world economy teetering on the brink of another, even larger financial catastrophe, and trillion-dollar U.S. deficits as far as the green-shaded eye can see, let’s hear it for Obama’s first National Economic Council director, Lawrence Summers (of hedge-fund giant D. E. Shaw and venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz), who has had some nice paydays courtesy of Lehman Bros., JPMorgan Chase, and Citigroup. Let’s hear it for Citigroup’s Michael Froman, deputy assistant to the president and deputy national-security adviser for international economic affairs, for Hartford Financial’s Neal Wolin, deputy Treasury secretary, for JPMorgan’s William Daley, Obama’s chief of staff, and for his predecessor, Rahm Emanuel of Wasserstein Perella. Let’s hear it for Fannie Mae’s Tom Donilon, national-security adviser. (No, seriously: One of the luminous interstellar geniuses who brought Fannie Mae to its current aphotic state of affairs, upside down to the tune of trillions of dollars, is running national security, and the former director of the White House Military Office, Louis Caldera, was on the board of IndyMac when it finally went toes up — sleep tight, America!) And, lest we forget, let’s have three big, sloppy cheers for economic-transition team leaders Robert Rubin (Goldman Sachs, Citigroup) and folksy tax enthusiast/ghoulish billionaire vulture Warren Buffett.

That’s a pretty fantastic lineup, from Wall Street’s point of view, but the real bonus turned out to be Treasury secretary Tim Geithner, who came up through the ranks as part of the bipartisan Robert Rubin–Hank Paulson–Citigroup–Goldman Sachs cabal. Geithner, a government-and-academe man from way back, never really worked on Wall Street, though he once was offered a gig as CEO of Citigroup, which apparently thought he did an outstanding job as chairman of the New York Fed, where one of his main tasks was regulating Citigroup — until it collapsed into the yawning suckhole of its own cavernous ineptitude, at which point Geithner’s main job became shoveling tens of billions of federal dollars into Citigroup, in an ingeniously structured investment that allowed the government to buy a 27 percent share in the bank, for which it paid more than the entire market value of the bank. If you can’t figure out why you’d pay 100-plus percent of a bank’s value for 27 percent of it, then you just don’t understand high finance or high politics.

Are your national news media types so ingrained with liberal orthodoxy that they just can't even conceive of the notion that it's really the democrats who are the party of Wall Street and big dollar interests who love a government who will protect their turf from intruders?

It baffles the imagination.

Moving jobs to Mexico Act of 2012

As if you needed another reason to move your production facility overseas...........

Employers are facing more uncertainty in the wake of a letter from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission warning them that requiring a high school diploma from a job applicant might violate the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The development also has some wondering whether the agency’s advice will result in an educational backlash by creating less of an incentive for some high school students to graduate.

The “informal discussion letter” from the EEOC said an employer’s requirement of a high school diploma, long a standard criterion for screening potential employees, must be “job-related for the position in question and consistent with business necessity.” The letter was posted on the commission’s website on Dec. 2.

Employers could run afoul of the ADA if their requirement of a high school diploma “‘screens out’ an individual who is unable to graduate because of a learning disability that meets the ADA’s definition of ‘disability,’” the EEOC explained.

Who needs the aggravation?

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Some of us are more equal than others

Full disclosure, I have a relative who worked for MF Global. Hopefully, I'll get to share some of his information one day.

By the way, in case you did not know this, Jon Corzine operated a securities firm without the proper licensing (his expired without a renewal). DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS YOURSELF. Unless you are connected.

Regulations create jobs

just think of all the bureaucrats employed for this mess............

Next up was Randy Truckenbrodt of Randall Industries. Randy told us of a facility he purchased in the 1980s that had two small gasoline tanks buried on the property by previous owners. He wanted to dig up the old ones and replace them with one that would better serve his needs for his fleet of trucks.

Truckenbrodt contacted the government, secured permits, hired a contractor and dug up the two aging gasoline tanks. Then the nightmare began. The IEPA and other agencies began a long, drawn out game of questioning, demanding, and stalling Truckenbrodt’s work resulting in almost two decades of obstruction. A 50-some-foot hole was left open in the ground in the middle of his property for 17 years as government officials dallied on giving him permission to complete his construction. 17 years!

All during this time, Truckenbrodt’s property was in a purgatory unable to be sold, improved, or used easily by his company. Worse, all financial avenues were closed to him for the property. He could not refinance or get loans as the IEPA had the property on its trouble list.

Truckenbrodt noted that the environmental testing game is a major scam more often than not because the state encourages testing, and testing, and testing ’til the cows come home racking up costs the whole time. It’s so bad, Truckenbrodt said, that many contractors have told him they quietly urge clients to just go ahead and build their buildings, lay their driveways, or do other things without notifying the IEPA at all and cross fingers that the government will never find out about the work being done. The system, Truckenbrodt says, is so bad that it encourages people to break the law and cheat in order to avoid the jobs-killing regulatory nightmare that can sometimes take decades to get through.

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But hey, you can move your business to Indonesia.....problem solved.

They won't have those corporate jet owners to kick around anymore

Or the employees who build them..........

Piper Aircraft Inc. on Monday announced it will lay off 150 employees and release 55 contract personnel as a result of a decision to indefinitely suspend its Piper Altaire light business jet program.

Layoffs will begin this week and progress through the end of the year as the program winds down. Employees will receive individual separation packages depending on factors such as the length of time they were employed, said Piper spokeswoman Jackie Carlon.

Contract personnel were let go today. The contract personnel were largely engineers working as independent contractors or through an agency. They were primarily based at the Vero Beach facility. according to the company.

While the Altaire program was on schedule and budget, Carlon said "the market for light business jets is not recovering sufficiently enough or quickly enough for us to continue developing the program under the economic conditions we currently face,"

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Bundler in Chief

With the approval of the Obama administration, an electric car company that received a $529 million federal government loan guarantee is assembling its first line of cars in Finland, saying it could not find a facility in the United States capable of doing the work.

Vice President Joseph Biden heralded the Energy Department's $529 million loan to the start-up electric car company called Fisker as a bright new path to thousands of American manufacturing jobs. But two years after the loan was announced, the job of assembling the flashy electric Fisker Karma sports car has been outsourced to Finland.

"There was no contract manufacturer in the U.S. that could actually produce our vehicle," the car company's founder and namesake told ABC News. "They don't exist here."

Henrik Fisker said the U.S. money so far has been spent on engineering and design work that stayed in the U.S., not on the 500 manufacturing jobs that went to a rural Finnish firm, Valmet Automotive.

"We're not in the business of failing; we're in the business of winning. So we make the right decision for the business," Fisker said. "That's why we went to Finland."

Hey, part of the winning formula is to bilk the US out of millions in free money.

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Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

Often, you have wonder about people's opinions when the say things in front of a camera.

But what about those things said in candor?

Apparently, Steve Jobs gave the president and earful...........

Steve Jobs told President Barack Obama he was “headed for a one-term presidency,” citing the U.S.’s competitive disadvantages with China and a “crippled” education system, a new biography of former Apple CEO indicates.

“You’re headed for a one-term presidency,” Jobs told Obama in a meeting last year where he asserted that the White House needed to be more friendly toward business, according to the Huffington Post, which obtained a copy of the Walter Isaacson’s forthcoming book, “Steve Jobs.”

Jobs also told Obama that “regulations and unnecessary costs” put the United States at a competitive disadvantage with China, where companies can build factories more cheaply.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1011/66537.html#ixzz1bQIimYOF

Your average liberal

Yesterday, I was listening to one of local talk shows when Nick, a gay man from out here in "Redville" called in from the occupy Cincinnati rally.

I keep thinking this guy is a made up character who calls in because no one can be this stupid. For instance, who does he think supplies batteries and Starbucks?

Listen in starting at the 15:45 mark.

What was his grade in Econ 101?

Dissembling about the capital destruction debacle that was his Administration's loan guarantee to bankrupt green-energy firm Solyndra, President Obama told ABC News last week that "if we want to compete with China, which is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into this space...we've got to make sure that our guys here in the United States of America at least have a shot."

Of course if the president were better schooled in basic economics, he would well understand that "our guys" do have a shot to compete in this space thanks to U.S. capital markets being the deepest in the world. Thanks to angel financing, venture capital, PIPEs, convertible bonds, bonds themselves, and stock issuance, those with a good idea have myriad options when it comes to marrying their innovation with capital.

And there lies the obvious problem with Solyndra. Unable to raise needed operating funds in the private markets, it was forced to go to the federal government to get what our markets would not provide.

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