Connecticut's Welcome Mat for Small Businesses

So, you own a moving company in Rhode Island and get calls from Connecticut to handle moving people's stuff... except the jobs start and end in Connecticut. You politely tell the potential profit making customer that you can't take their money because you're not licensed to operate in Connecticut. But since you get so many calls you decide to open a branch in Connecticut.

But first, you have to play "Mother, May I" with the State Department of Transportation.
Yes, really:

If Connecticut is open for business, Bob Romano wants to know who turned out the lights.
Romano, owner of Warwick, R.I.-based Coutu Brothers Movers, applied several months ago to expand his current three-truck moving operation into North Stonington. By his estimation, Romano spent more than $6,000 doing everything the state Department of Transportation told him to do: leasing a convenient location on Norwich-Westerly Road, paying his business-entity fee and even making repairs to the office space he intended to occupy.
Then, last week, a DOT hearing officer issued what Romano saw as a stunning denial of his application, saying the business owner had not proved there was a need for his services and noting that two other moving companies in the region had claimed new competition would hurt their businesses.

It would appear that Connecticut state government is in the business of ... raising barriers to entry to business. How did it come to be that a small business has to demonstrate a need before being allowed to open? Why is the government licensing and permitting moving companies in the first place? I mean, other than the making sure their trucks are registered and insured, why does this guy have to beg to compete for business? As is usually the case, when government over regulates government becomes a tool of established businesses to keep upstarts out - or sometimes a weapon for one business to use against another.

But Connecticut is turning a corner. After spending a sweet $27 Million dollars on out of state advertising, we're proclaiming ourselves to be... Still Revolutionary. $27 million. I could have come up with something only half as bad for a quarter of the money. 

Connecticut: Still Revolutionary, unless you run a business. 

Quantitative Easing and The Fed

This explains EVERYTHING.

The Great Recession

Scott Johnson at Powerline has a great post up about unemployment. He's linked to a report in Forbes that features two charts that should scare the shit out of you get your attention. The second graph really scares me. Have we fundamentally changed the economic game? What will economists call "full employment" these days? 6% maybe 7? Just imagine how much better it will be once Crap and Tax is passed.

The Credit Crisis Explained

An excellent video that explains some of the reasons we're in the mess we're in. It sort of skips the government intrusions into the market that set the stage for this, but still educational:


The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

My sentiments exactly

From Kirk Walsh's blog, with a stop over at ExubranLeague, comes the perfect graphic for our curious times:

The lapdog media

Via RedState: Orson Scott Card schools the media in "Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?"

An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

As they say in the blogosphere - RTWT

The New Dollar

By way of Israel Matzav:

Your daily economic update

`Nuff said. Stolen without remorse from Theo Spark