Obama and The Debt: A Love Story

courtesy IBDLast night in his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama claimed

Over the last few years, both parties have worked together to reduce the deficit by more than $2.5 trillion... As a result, we are more than halfway towards the goal of $4 trillion in deficit reduction that economists say we need to stabilize our finances.

The folks at Investors Business Daily suggest that the president's fudge factor on that claim should induce the political equivalent of a diabetic coma:

When the [president's debt] commission filed its report in 2010, the national debt was $9 trillion, or about 63% of the nation's GDP. The national debt today is over $12 trillion, and has already surpassed 76% of GDP.

Had the debt commission's plan been adopted, the deficit this year would be $646 billion, and on its way down to $279 billion by 2020. And the debt would be holding steady at about 65% of GDP.

Instead, this year's deficit will be $845 billion ? even after the alleged $2.5 trillion in savings that Obama touts ? and will start climbing again in three years, reaching back up to $1 trillion by 2023, according to the latest forecast from the Congressional Budget Office.

The national debt, meanwhile, never drops below 73% of GDP, according to the CBO, and starts climbing after 2018, reaching 77% of GDP by 2023.

More here.

As a technical note, the figures above represent debt held by the public, which is a subset of total federal debt. When you factor in the debt that government agencies owes to each other (the gross debt), the current figure is actually $16.4 trillion, or more than 100 percent of GDP. That's important because when gross debt is greater than 90 percent of the economy for five years, economic growth tends to slow by 1 percentage point a year for periods that can last for 20 or more years. As awful as it is to have public debt levels climbing toward 80 percent of GDP, the fact that we've had gross debt higher than 90 percent of GDP since 2008 means we're in a "debt overhang" situation that may well retard growth for the next quarter-century.

Source: http://reason.com/blog/2013/02/13/obama-and-the-debt-a-love-story

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Xbox '720' Release Coming: Microsoft Opens Entertainment Studio To Prepare For Xbox 360 Successor

The company announced its plans during an interview on Monday night between Peter Kafka of AllThingsD and Microsoft?s senior VP of its game division, Yusuf Mehdi, and Nancy Tellem, the company?s entertainment and digital media president as part of the website?s Dive into Media conference.

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Microsoft?first hired Nancy Tellem, a former executive at CBS (NYSE:CBS) and Hollywood veteran, last September as part of its drive to expand the content and services its flagship Xbox 360 video game console offers beyond strictly video games.

With Tellem helming the Los Angeles office, the newly minted ?Xbox Entertainment Studios? already has over 150 employees dedicated to producing first-party ?interactive? video content for the Xbox 360 and presumably its next-generation successor -- a first for the company?s dedicated gaming devices. While Mehdi and Tellem were tight-lipped on any details about what, exactly, this new content or Microsoft?s next Xbox might look like, they said that the first examples of the new ?interactive content? will ?hopefully? be introduced to available consoles later this year.

This was partly a strategic move as the company no doubt saw the looming competition from prospective hardware developers like Apple (NASDAQ:?AAPL) introducing its own comprehensive home entertainment devices (for lack of a better term), an anxiety to which other game industry leaders like Valve?s Gabe Newell have admitted. But changing the nature of the Xbox console also reflects a strategic reframing of the console itself based on users? own habits. The majority of the Xbox 360?s 76 million users, Mehdi said, spend far more time watching stuff on the console than playing with it -- the purpose for which the device was originally designed.

And the changes don?t just stop at the usage. While Xbox users, like all gamers, have traditionally been overwhelmingly white male teenagers, Mehdi said 38 percent of Xbox users are currently female, and 51 percent have children of their own. On an aggregate scale, the Xbox 360 offered 18 billion hours of entertainment worldwide in 2012, with users spending an average of 87 hours a month with the device. And the company already has some 46 million users subscribing to its premium Xbox Live subscribers, which will most likely be the online platform through which it distributes any of its new video content.

In some ways, then, Microsoft is facing a similar challenge to the one that Internet companies like Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) or Amazon (NASDAQ:?AMZN) are beginning to tackle as they strive to produce first-party content or nab exclusive access to the type of video content that cable networks have historically claimed as their own. And Tellem did say that her goal is to produce ?hit? programming for the company. But Microsoft is trying to meet this challenge in a unique way by integrating ?interactivity? into its new content.

?Our value-add is not being just another distributor,? Medhi said. ?It?s adding another level of interactivity.?

It?s tempting to see a buzzword like ?interactivity? as a mere gimmick. But Tellem said: "I really don't believe in just adding interactivity for interactivity's sake," instead insisting that there are "some natural things that evolve out of it that enhance the experience."

She added that viewers will still have options for how they choose to consume the content, saying, "You can have your choice, you can either watch linear content or really interact with it.?

If nothing else, adding interactivity to television-style programming could increase both the level of user engagement and the content provider?s understanding of that same engagement -- which is promising news for a company no doubt interested in securing advertising revenue.

"Advertisers are very excited about that opportunity," Tellem said.

Microsoft shares dropped slightly in Tuesday morning trading, falling to $27.78 per share.

Source: http://www.ibtimes.com/xbox-720-release-coming-microsoft-opens-entertainment-studio-prepare-xbox-360-successor-1078992

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Video: USPS: Why Stop Saturday Service?

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Source: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/cnbc/50719074/

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Alabama hostage standoff: Negotiators talking through a pipe

A PVC tube has become the conduit for food, medication, and ongoing negotiations between law enforcement and the Alabama man who shot a bus driver and took a child hostage on Tuesday.

By Phillip Rawls,?Associated Press / January 31, 2013

Law enforcement personnel work at check point Wednesday, Jan. 30, in Midland City, Alabama, near the home where the suspect in Tuesday's school bus shooting is barricaded in a bunker with a young child as hostage.

Jay Hare / The Dothan Eagle / AP

Enlarge

Speaking into a 4-inch-wide ventilation pipe, hostage negotiators tried Thursday to talk a man into releasing a kindergartener and ending a standoff in an underground bunker that stretched into its third day.

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The man identified by multiple neighbors and witnesses as 65-year-old retired truck driver Jimmy Lee Dykes was accused of pulling the boy from a school bus on Tuesday and fatally shooting the driver. The pair was holed up in a small room on his property that authorities compared to tornado shelters common in the area.

James Arrington, police chief of the neighboring town of Pinckard, said the shelter was about 4 feet underground, with about 6-by-8 feet of floor space and a PVC pipe that negotiators were speaking through.

There were signs that the standoff could continue for some time: A state legislator said the shelter has electricity, food and TV. The police chief said the captor has been sleeping and told negotiators that he has spent long periods in the shelter before.

"He will have to give up sooner or later because (authorities) are not leaving," Arrington said. "It's pretty small, but he's been known to stay in there eight days."

Midland City Mayor Virgil Skipper said he has been briefed by law enforcement and visited with the boy's parents.

"He's crying for his parents," he said. "They are holding up good. They are praying and asking all of us to pray with them."

Republican Rep. Steve Clouse, who represents the Midland City area, said he visited the boy's mother Thursday and that she is "hanging on by a thread."

"Everybody is praying with her for the boy," he said.

Clouse said the mother told him that the boy has Asperger's syndrome, an autism-like disorder, as well as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. Police have been delivering medication to him through the pipe, he said.

The normally quiet red clay road leading to the bunker was teeming Thursday with more than a dozen police cars and trucks, a fire truck, a helicopter, officers from multiple agencies, news media and at least one ambulance near Midland City, population 2,300.

As night fell and temperatures dipped into the low 40s, police and other emergency workers wore heavy coats outside a small church being used as a command post. Neighbors said Dykes had a small heater in the bunker.

Overhead, a small aircraft with blinking lights flew wide circles high above the man's property. An ambulance remained parked on the side of the dirt road leading to Dykes' home.

Dykes was known around the neighborhood as a menacing figure who neighbors said once beat a dog to death with a lead pipe, threatened to shoot children for setting foot on his property and patrolled his yard at night with a flashlight and a firearm.

The chief confirmed that Dykes held anti-government views, as described by multiple neighbors: "He's against the government ? starting with Obama on down."

"He doesn't like law enforcement or the government telling him what to do," he said. "He's just a loner."

Authorities say the gunman boarded a stopped school bus Tuesday afternoon and demanded two boys between 6 and 8 years old. When the driver tried to block his way, the gunman shot him several times and took a 5-year-old boy off the bus.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/k6-_O11VbFQ/Alabama-hostage-standoff-Negotiators-talking-through-a-pipe

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