Obama recession update

[Mornac]

Deficit forecast gloomy for years

By: David Rogers
January 31, 2012
 
For the fourth year in a row, Washington faces a $1 trillion-plus deficit and just servicing the nation’s debt will soon cost as much as paying for Medicaid, the federal-state health care program for the poor and disabled.

Those were two grim predictions in a 147-page report from the Congressional Budget Office, which Tuesday stepped into the 2012 campaign like some stern Aunt Cassandra — coming down from the attic to lecture the protagonists: “It’s not just the economy stupid, it’s also the debt.”

Indeed the $1.079 trillion deficit now projected for the 2012 fiscal year ending Sept. 30 is wider than what the added CBO had predicted in August, and the picture won’t substantially improve unless Congress comes to grip with changes needed in tax and spending policy.

“The CBO’s latest alarm bell couldn’t be more ominous,” said House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). “For years, politicians from both political parties have failed to be honest with the American people about the size and scope of the debt threat. The CBO’s report today confirms that it is past time for serious leaders to put aside politics and start forging solutions.”

To punch home its message, CBO outlines an especially grim scenario in which lawmakers not only extend all the current Bush-era tax cuts at the end of this year but also pull the plug on the $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts set in motion by the Budget Control Act last summer.

In this scenario — which can’t be ruled out politically — deficits would stubbornly hover just under $1 trillion through 2017 adding another $4.7 trillion to the debt over five years.

Under the more prudent — many say unrealistic — scenario of ending all the tax breaks and implementing spending cuts, the cumulative deficits would be $1.72 trillion or $3 trillion less from 2013 to 2017. And it’s that $3 trillion difference that essentially defines the battleground after the November elections if Washington again dithers through this year as it did much of 2011.

As the clock ticks, many costs are already baked into the cake.

For example, even under the more prudent path outlined by CBO, net interest costs will grow dramatically to where they reach $624 billion by 2022 — 2.5 percent of GDP compared with 1.4 percent today.

To put this in some perspective, servicing the debt by 2017 will consume almost as many dollars as paying for Washington’s Medicaid costs — even allowing for the greater health care spending under President Barack Obama’s reforms. And before the end of the decade, debt costs will surpass Medicaid and begin to approach total federal outlays for all nondefense discretionary appropriations.

The same sort of dynamic can be seen in CBO’s predictions for Medicare’s own inexorable growth.

With baby boomers retiring, the caseload for the health care program for the elderly will grow annually at a 3 percent rate over the next decade. But CBO is assuming the growth in costs per patient from 2012 to 2022 will average close to 1 percent above inflation — far less than the 5 percent experienced from 1985 to 2007 and suggesting that it won’t be a simple matter to cut benefits further.

A much smaller illustration — but one that could still be important to writing a farm bill this year — is the rising cost of crop insurance subsidies because of CBO’s predictions of continued high commodity prices. The report indicates an uptick of about $1 billion annually in mandatory spending for agriculture, and much of this appears driven by higher subsidies to support premium payments to insure higher-priced crops.

Not to be forgotten too is the economy, whose continued weakness is a major reason for the higher deficit predicted now by CBO for this year.

Last August, the budget office had predicted a $953 billion shortfall for 2012, breaking the embarrassing string of trillion-plus deficits that began in 2009. And the $1.079 trillion estimate now results from lower-than-expected revenues after CBO downgraded its economic forecast.

In August, for example, the agency predicted 2.7 percent growth in real GDP for 2012, when measured fourth quarter to fourth quarter. Unemployment was expected to fall to 8.5 percent. The new forecast predicts 2 percent growth by comparison, and 8.9 percent unemployment.

CBO admits that’s its alternative budget scenario — allowing for more tax cuts and no sequester next year — will yield higher growth in the short term and lower unemployment. But CBO Director Doug Elmendorf warns too that “over time, the resulting larger deficits would reduce private investment in productive capital and result in real GDP that would fall increasingly below the level in CBO’s baseline projections.”

Comments by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad in reacting to the report captured some of this dilemma.

The North Dakota Democrat warned “we will not solve this [deficit] problem unless both sides, Democrats and Republicans, are willing to move off their fixed positions and find common ground.” But mindful of the slow recovery, Conrad argued that the CBO numbers should also spur more immediate action on extending jobless benefits and a payroll tax holiday, due to expire at the end of February.

“Although the economic recovery is strengthening, it is clear the economy remains fragile,” Conrad said. “Failing to extend these critical measures would add further drag to the economy and jeopardize the gains we have already made.”

Tuesday’s release of the CBO forecast sets the stage for President Barack Obama’s own 2013 budget to be rolled out on Feb. 13. But much as Ryan spoke of both parties needing to work together, there’s little evidence the GOP is prepared to move from its anti-tax posture that so frustrated Obama last year.

Even among House Republicans, there is a reluctance to fully commit to corporate tax reform before the November elections, because of the painful economic choices that will be required. And much as Democrats have enjoyed all the focus on Republican Mitt Romney’s wealth and low 15 percent tax rate, the discussion has also highlighted how much lower the relative tax rates have become for many middle-income families as well.

The Tax Institute at H&R Block illustrates this in a mockup tax return for a family of four — comparing filings after tax reform in the mid-1980s vs. 2011 after a decade of tax cuts and added child and education tax credits that have made the code more complicated.

In the first case, a family with adjusted gross income of $40,100 in 1987 ends up paying $4,297, or an effective rate close to Romney’s 15 percent. In the second, the 2011 household with an income of $80,000 — about the same as $40,000 in real dollars — pays just $3,690 in income taxes — thanks to the credits — and enjoys an effective rate of 6.9 percent.

If real reform is coming, it will also have to address these tax expenditures — many of which are far more expensive. And all told, CBO estimates that through the 10-year budget window, major tax expenditures in the individual income Tax Code will total nearly $12 trillion over the 2013 to 2022 period, or 5.8 percent of GDP.
 
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/72205.html

[Mornac]

Feb 10, 2012
Obama budget to miss deficit goal


By Richard Wolf, USA TODAY

President Obama's proposed 2013 budget will forecast a $901 billion deficit for next year, falling far short of his goal to halve the deficit in four years.

The budget, an outline of which was released by the White House Friday night, will show a higher deficit this year than in 2011, up from $1.3 trillion to $1.33 trillion.

In addition, the projected decline to $901 billion in 2013 is dependent on enactment of the president's policies, including spending reductions agreed to last summer and ending George W. Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy at the end of this year.

For weeks, White House officials have said the budget would make little news because many of its elements were well known:

•About $1 trillion in spending cuts agreed to with Congress and signed into law in August

•Obama's goal of slashing another $3 trillion from annual deficits over 10 years, including about $1.2 trillion mandated by the August agreement

•Obama's key priorities, outlined in his State of the Union address last month and in the American Jobs Act he proposed in September. Those include initiatives in manufacturing, energy production, education and training, and infrastructure repair.

•His desire to add $1.5 trillion in new revenue, much of it by ending Bush's tax cuts for families with income above $250,000. Republicans who control the House have previously blocked that proposal.

But the outline released Friday includes a few details sure to draw attention on Monday, when Obama releases the full 2013 spending plan:

•The deficit would decline as a percentage of the economy from 8.5% this year to 5.5% in 2013 and 2.7% by 2018. Most economists say deficits should be below 3% of the economy.

•Tax breaks for the wealthy would be reduced so that they are no better than those for the middle class. No household making more than $1 million a year would pay less than 30% in income taxes.

•More than $360 billion would be cut from Medicare, Medicaid and other health programs over 10 years -- an amount that's sure to be seen as too much by seniors and liberal groups, and paltry by Republicans in Congress pushing more robust cuts in entitlement programs.

•Defense spending would be reduced by nearly $500 billion from what was planned in the budget Obama proposed a year ago.
 
•Savings from winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would be put toward deficit reduction and investments sought by Obama, including new infrastructure spending.

•About $350 billion in new investments, most of them remaining from Obama's American Jobs Act that was derailed in Congress, would be rejuvenated.

Earlier this week, the White House announced that its unemployment projections included in the budget -- 8.9% in 2012 and 8.6% in 2013 -- already are outdated. If the actual jobless rates are a full percentage point lower, that could mean a $95 billion reduction in the deficit, according to a previous estimate from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

Obama will unveil the budget at 11 a.m. Monday at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, Va. -- just beyond Washington's Beltway. On Wednesday, he'll go further, embarking on a three-day trip to Wisconsin, California and Washington.

Administration officials said a more complete proposal for corporate tax reform will be forthcoming later in February.

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2012/02/obama-budget-to-miss-deficit-goal/1

[Case_Closed]

Why the urgency for a budget now?  It's already been over 1,000 days without one.

[Mornac]

Jobless disability claims soar to record $200B as of January

By JANET WHITMAN

February 19, 2012

Standing too many months on the unemployment line is driving Americans crazy — literally — and it’s costing taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.

With their unemployment-insurance checks running out, some of the country’s long-term jobless are scrambling to fill the gap by filing claims for mental illness and other disabilities with Social Security — a surge that hobbles taxpayers and making the employment rate look healthier than it should as these people drop out of the job statistics.

“It could be because their health really is getting worse from the stress of being out of work,” says Matthew Rutledge, a research economist at Boston College. “Or it could just be desperation — people trying to make ends meet when other safety nets just aren’t there.”

As of January, the federal government was mailing out disability checks to more than 10.5 million individuals, including 2 million to spouses and children of disabled workers, at a cost of record $200 billion a year, recent research from JPMorgan Chase shows.

The sputtering economy has fueled those ranks. Around 5.3 percent of the population between the ages of 25 and 64 is currently collecting federal disability payments, a jump from 4.5 percent since the economy slid into a recession.

Mental-illness claims, in particular, are surging.

During the recent economic boom, only 33 percent of applicants were claiming mental illness, but that figure has jumped to 43 percent, says Rutledge, citing preliminary results from his latest research.

His research also shows a growing number of men, particularly older, former white-collar workers, instead of the typical blue-collar ones, are applying.

The big concern about the swelling ranks is that once people get on disability, they’re unlikely to give it up and go back to work.

“It’s not like other support programs, such as unemployment insurance, which you lose after a year or two,” says Michael Feroli, chief US economist with JPMorgan.

Social Security’s disability fund, which has been operating short of cash since 2005, is forecast to run out of reserves by 2018.

The jump in successful disability claims also is making the unemployment picture look extra rosy because those folks are falling off the jobless rolls.

“If they’re on disability they’re generally not counted,” says Feroli, who estimates that a quarter of those dropping out of the job market are getting disability. “It’s no trivial number.”

 http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/pain_brings_gain_taZkGOAUhXALmhEEyMpmqJ#ixzz1mzNyzWGh

[Mornac]

April 19, 2012
Food Stamp Rolls to Grow Through 2014, CBO Says

The Congressional Budget Office said Thursday that 45 million people in 2011 received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, a 70% increase from 2007. It  said the number of people receiving the benefits, commonly known as food stamps, would continue growing until 2014.
 
Spending for the program, not including administrative costs, rose to $72 billion in 2011, up from $30 billion four years earlier. The CBO projected that one in seven U.S. residents received food stamps last year.
 
In a report, the CBO said roughly two-thirds of jump in spending was tied to an increase in the number of people participating in the program, which provides access to food for the poor, elderly, and disabled. It said another 20% “of the growth in spending can be attributed to temporarily higher benefit amounts enacted in the” 2009 stimulus law.
 
CBO said the number of people receiving benefits is expected to fall after 2014 because the economy will be improving.
 
“Nevertheless, the number of people receiving SNAP benefits will remain high by historical standards,” the agency said.
 
It estimated that 34 million people, or 1 in 10 U.S. residents, would receive SNAP benefits in 2022 “and SNAP expenditures, at about $73 billion, will be among the highest of all non-health-related federal support programs for low-income households.”


 http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2012/04/19/food-stamp-rolls-to-grow-through-2014-cbo-says/?mod=e2tw

[Mornac]

Food Stamp Spending Has More Than Doubled Since 2008



In 2008, taxpayers spent $38 billion on food stamps.  In 2013, that figure will be $82 billion.

 
Since 2007, the number of Americans on food stamps has skyrocketed 70 percent to 45 million people--or one out of every seven people living in America.
 
According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. is experiencing a "food stamp crime wave," as the program is now rife with fraud, abuse, and waste.
 
As Rev. Jesse Jackson has stated, President Barack Obama should consider it "an honor to be a food stamp president."

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/04/21/food-stamp-spending-has-more-than-doubled-since-2008

[Mornac]

1 in 2 new graduates are jobless or underemployed
By HOPE YEN | Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The college class of 2012 is in for a rude welcome to the world of work.

A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don't fully use their skills and knowledge.

Young adults with bachelor's degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that's confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.

An analysis of government data conducted for The Associated Press lays bare the highly uneven prospects for holders of bachelor's degrees.

Opportunities for college graduates vary widely.

While there's strong demand in science, education and health fields, arts and humanities flounder. Median wages for those with bachelor's degrees are down from 2000, hit by technological changes that are eliminating midlevel jobs such as bank tellers. Most future job openings are projected to be in lower-skilled positions such as home health aides, who can provide personalized attention as the U.S. population ages.

Taking underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor's degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade.

"I don't even know what I'm looking for," says Michael Bledsoe, who described months of fruitless job searches as he served customers at a Seattle coffeehouse. The 23-year-old graduated in 2010 with a creative writing degree.

Initially hopeful that his college education would create opportunities, Bledsoe languished for three months before finally taking a job as a barista, a position he has held for the last two years. In the beginning he sent three or four resumes day. But, Bledsoe said, employers questioned his lack of experience or the practical worth of his major. Now he sends a resume once every two weeks or so.

Bledsoe, currently making just above minimum wage, says he got financial help from his parents to help pay off student loans. He is now mulling whether to go to graduate school, seeing few other options to advance his career. "There is not much out there, it seems," he said.

His situation highlights a widening but little-discussed labor problem. Perhaps more than ever, the choices that young adults make earlier in life — level of schooling, academic field and training, where to attend college, how to pay for it — are having long-lasting financial impact.

"You can make more money on average if you go to college, but it's not true for everybody," says Harvard economist Richard Freeman, noting the growing risk of a debt bubble with total U.S. student loan debt surpassing $1 trillion. "If you're not sure what you're going to be doing, it probably bodes well to take some job, if you can get one, and get a sense first of what you want from college."

Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University who analyzed the numbers, said many people with a bachelor's degree face a double whammy of rising tuition and poor job outcomes. "Simply put, we're failing kids coming out of college," he said, emphasizing that when it comes to jobs, a college major can make all the difference. "We're going to need a lot better job growth and connections to the labor market, otherwise college debt will grow."

By region, the Mountain West was most likely to have young college graduates jobless or underemployed — roughly 3 in 5. It was followed by the more rural southeastern U.S., including Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee. The Pacific region, including Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington, also was high on the list.

On the other end of the scale, the southern U.S., anchored by Texas, was most likely to have young college graduates in higher-skill jobs.

The figures are based on an analysis of 2011 Current Population Survey data by Northeastern University researchers and supplemented with material from Paul Harrington, an economist at Drexel University, and the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. They rely on Labor Department assessments of the level of education required to do the job in 900-plus U.S. occupations, which were used to calculate the shares of young adults with bachelor's degrees who were "underemployed."

About 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of bachelor's degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed, the highest share in at least 11 years. In 2000, the share was at a low of 41 percent, before the dot-com bust erased job gains for college graduates in the telecommunications and IT fields.

Out of the 1.5 million who languished in the job market, about half were underemployed, an increase from the previous year.

Broken down by occupation, young college graduates were heavily represented in jobs that require a high school diploma or less.

In the last year, they were more likely to be employed as waiters, waitresses, bartenders and food-service helpers than as engineers, physicists, chemists and mathematicians combined (100,000 versus 90,000). There were more working in office-related jobs such as receptionist or payroll clerk than in all computer professional jobs (163,000 versus 100,000). More also were employed as cashiers, retail clerks and customer representatives than engineers (125,000 versus 80,000).

According to government projections released last month, only three of the 30 occupations with the largest projected number of job openings by 2020 will require a bachelor's degree or higher to fill the position — teachers, college professors and accountants. Most job openings are in professions such as retail sales, fast food and truck driving, jobs which aren't easily replaced by computers.

College graduates who majored in zoology, anthropology, philosophy, art history and humanities were among the least likely to find jobs appropriate to their education level; those with nursing, teaching, accounting or computer science degrees were among the most likely.

In Nevada, where unemployment is the highest in the nation, Class of 2012 college seniors recently expressed feelings ranging from anxiety and fear to cautious optimism about what lies ahead.

With the state's economy languishing in an extended housing bust, a lot of young graduates have shown up at job placement centers in tears. Many have been squeezed out of jobs by more experienced workers, job counselors said, and are now having to explain to prospective employers the time gaps in their resumes.

"It's kind of scary," said Cameron Bawden, 22, who is graduating from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas in December with a business degree. His family has warned him for years about the job market, so he has been building his resume by working part time on the Las Vegas Strip as a food runner and doing a marketing internship with a local airline.

Bawden said his friends who have graduated are either unemployed or working along the Vegas Strip in service jobs that don't require degrees. "There are so few jobs and it's a small city," he said. "It's all about who you know."

Any job gains are going mostly to workers at the top and bottom of the wage scale, at the expense of middle-income jobs commonly held by bachelor's degree holders. By some studies, up to 95 percent of positions lost during the economic recovery occurred in middle-income occupations such as bank tellers, the type of job not expected to return in a more high-tech age.

David Neumark, an economist at the University of California-Irvine, said a bachelor's degree can have benefits that aren't fully reflected in the government's labor data. He said even for lower-skilled jobs such as waitress or cashier, employers tend to value bachelor's degree-holders more highly than high-school graduates, paying them more for the same work and offering promotions.

In addition, U.S. workers increasingly may need to consider their position in a global economy, where they must compete with educated foreign-born residents for jobs. Longer-term government projections also may fail to consider "degree inflation," a growing ubiquity of bachelor's degrees that could make them more commonplace in lower-wage jobs but inadequate for higher-wage ones.

That future may be now for Kelman Edwards Jr., 24, of Murfreesboro, Tenn., who is waiting to see the returns on his college education.

After earning a biology degree last May, the only job he could find was as a construction worker for five months before he quit to focus on finding a job in his academic field. He applied for positions in laboratories but was told they were looking for people with specialized certifications.

"I thought that me having a biology degree was a gold ticket for me getting into places, but every other job wants you to have previous history in the field," he said. Edwards, who has about $5,500 in student debt, recently met with a career counselor at Middle Tennessee State University. The counselor's main advice: Pursue further education.

"Everyone is always telling you, 'Go to college,'" Edwards said. "But when you graduate, it's kind of an empty cliff."

http://news.yahoo.com/1-2-graduates-jobless-underemployed-140300522.html

[dustup]

..... President George Herbert Walker Bush started the ball rolling down hill.........

From left to right: (standing) President Carlos Salinas, President Bush, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney; (seated)
Jaime Serra Puche, Carla Hills, and Michael Wilson at the NAFTA Initialing Ceremony,
October 1992


.....1993 was a dramatic down turning point for the US.......

"Senate Rallies Bipartisan Vote to Pass NAFTA, 73-26"
"House votes to pass NAFTA 234-200"

President Clinton's speech on NAFTA

......Our political process failed America and that started the economic decline and job losses in America.....

[foodserver]

...and in keeping with a trend established the economic indicators when updated continue to be worse than originally reported.

"Gross domestic product [cnbc explains] expanded at a 2.2 percent annual rate, the Commerce Department said on Friday in its advance estimate, moderating from the fourth quarter's 3 percent rate.

While that was below economists' expectations for a 2.5 percent pace"

more at..    http://www.cnbc.com/id/47202822

[foodserver]

April’s payroll job creation news was even worse than expected, as hiring slowed to only 115,000 jobs, well below the consensus expectation. This marks the third consecutive year in which hiring has collapsed in the spring after showing some signs of life in the winter. Interestingly, not all news outlets are willing to continue covering for the Obama administration. The AP didnt try to sugarcoat the bad news:

    WASHINGTON – U.S. employers pulled back on hiring in April for the second straight month, a sobering reminder that the economy remains weak. The unemployment rate fell to 8.1 percent, but only because more people gave up looking for work.

    The Labor Department says employers added 115,000 jobs in April. That’s below March’s upwardly revised 154,000 jobs and far fewer than the pace from earlier this year.

    The unemployment rate has fallen a full percentage point since August to a three-year low. But last month’s decline was not due to job growth. The government only counts people as unemployed if they are actively looking for work.

This is the most brutal statistic of all: In April, the percentage of adults working or looking for work fell to the lowest level in more than 30 years.




http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/05/the-obama-jobs-disaster-worsens.php

[JC3.0]

The Republicans' purposeful prevention of progress, i.e., unwillingness to work with this President, oe Democrats on anything is certainly not helping anything along in a positive manner.

 Need anyone be reminded of Senator McConnell saying that the main mission of his party is to make Obama a one term president-basically by not working with him on anything. And Rush Limbaugh "hopes he(Obama) fails". You people(Repukes, Conservatards,"libertarians" "independants", whatever you call yourselves) are willing to keep America from succeeding, or holding back it's progress as long as it means Obama failing. That's how twisted you are.

[foodserver]

JC3

Do you think Democrats in the Senate are or should be considering re-electing a Republican president while he or she is in office?

[JC3.0]

JC3

Do you think Democrats in the Senate are or should be considering re-electing a Republican president while he or she is in office?

To be completely honest I think everyone needs to vote their conscience and convictions of their own beliefs on a case by case basis and not lockstep with party. When I lived in Illinois, although I've been a lifelong Democrat I voted for Jim Edgar for Governor. I don't always vote straight party. I do vote for what I believe is the best choice available.

  I was ready to vote for Bob Dole-still like the guy. But all he had on his plate was the fact the "he served", and his mantra on Capital Gains Tax, in other words serving his rich friends. Otherwise, he had no "vision" to steer the country.He, much like McCain believed they had put in enough time in government to deserve the office, but could not convince not only me, but enough others to become POTUS. Similarly, I don't think, when given a choice between the man who IS POTUS currently and Mitt Romney-I don't think Romney has the best interests of the entire country in his crosshairs,but rather people in his socioeconomic strata. He has said as much,making mention that he could care less about the poor.

  I know it's popular among republicans like yourself to think you are well enough off and that those not like you are simply lazy mooches. Well,those people you call mooches have a vote that counts every bit as much as yours does-at least still. However, Republicans try several measures to eliminate,block,disenfranchise,discourage, or disallow these "undesireables" as they know that these blocks of "mooches" never-or rarely vote Republican. Since Republicans lack a majority of votes or message to win a majority of votes these days, they work hard to "block" or eliminate whole groups of votes or voters to attempt to win. At the same time, their older aging base dies off and does not replenish w/ new recruits, and their messages are basically anti women,anti ethnic, anti gay,anti melting pot of any kind and you all have become a party of crabby old white men, and there simply arent enough of you in numbers to win, so you try throwing money around to buy, block-whatever to win. Good luck with that, and we'll see you on election night. Pack your bags to leave newsrake and start writing your goodbye speech now.

[foodserver]

Can you identify some Senate Democrats that you think voted for Bob Dole or any other Republican Presidential candidates?

[JC3.0]

Can you identify some Senate Democrats that you think voted for Bob Dole or any other Republican Presidential candidates?

I'm not seeing why I need to do this for you. Add to that-I'm not a political historian who tracks voting records,nor am I interested in doing so. It's not who I am, nor am I obligated. Further, you are not my teacher, nor am I your student, and you have no right to play these homework games or expect fols to play along with you.

 A simple fact remains that you-in all of your infinite wisdom,predictions and judgement-hastily and rather stupidly accepted a foolish bet that you have tried unsuccessfully to backpedal out of, while trying to sugarcoat and whitewash that attempt with a bullshit olive branch. I'm not buying it foodie-not for one second. See you on election night.

Obama 2012, bitches...