The following is a guest post from Cesar Zambrano. If you are interested in guest posting at Geek Politics, check out the guidelines here.

The U.S. dollar found few buyers during Q2 and Q3 2010. The reason was simple. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke practically sealed the mid-term fate of the U.S. dollar when he began hinting during the summer that the Fed may move forward with a second round of quantitative easing. During the first week of November 2010, the Fed laid all speculation to rest when it formally announced it would move forward with a second round of quantitative easing, to the tune of $600 billion. In this article, we are going to discuss the effect of QE2 on the U.S. economy, and what factors continue to put pressure on prices.

Currency Values and QE

As a general rule of thumb, currency values get crushed when a central bank engages in quantitative easing. In normal circumstances, if a central bank needs to stimulate economic growth in a country, it simply lowers interest rates, which increases the money supply and infuses cash into the real economy. The ripple effect occurs when people borrow this increased cash, banks lend it, and the economy sputters back to life. That, however, is in normal market conditions. What we have right now in the United States is far from normal.

The Fed lowered the short-term interest rate target to near 0% back in 2008, but the economy has struggled to regain strong traction and growth. Thus, when a central bank has exhausted its options in regards to interest rate movements, it can still engage in what is known as quantitative easing. The goal of quantitative easing is to quantitatively increase the money supply by purchasing Treasury securities. This quantitative increase of the money supply is meant to ease the financial burden on banks. As pressure is alleviated from banks, they will be encouraged to lend money to folks seeking small business loans, car loans, mortgages, etc.

Criticisms of Quantitative Easing

QE is quite a polarizing concept. Many critics view it as a complete manipulation of a country’s currency. This, in fact, is exactly what many critics cried when the Fed announced it would move forward with QE2. Leaders from Germany, France, China, and most emerging market countries publicly attacked the Federal Reserve’s decision, calling it irresponsible. When QE is initiated, it causes a huge excess of liquidity, and opponents of QE2 were concerned this excess liquidity would flood into emerging market economies that were already under inflationary pressure and who were already facing rising exchange rates in foreign exchange trading. Although the complete impact on these emerging market countries is hard to gauge because QE2 was just initiated a few months ago, their argument carries substance.

Core Inflation and QE2

The primary reason the Federal Reserve moved forward with QE2 was because prices were falling well below target levels and it appeared that deflation could begin to settle into the U.S. economy. A deflationary environment is recognized by economists as devastatingly difficult to escape. Currently, 3 months after the initiation of QE2, inflationary data is beginning to show upside movement. This means that deflationary fears are calming. The effect of QE2 on U.S. dollar value can be tracked on a forex demo account.

In February 2011, Core Consumer Price Index (a major gauge of inflation) rose 0.2% above the January figure. This was the largest single month increase in over a year, and it was well ahead of market expectations. This positive figure reinforces the notion that deflationary fears are currently being pushed back, but risk still remains. The labor market is still very weak in the U.S., with unemployment staying around 9%, and this high level of unemployment will continue to put pressure on prices.

Awhile back I wrote that I’d like to see Paul Ryan run for President. I have to say, I still think he would be my favorite candidate on the Republican side. I still don’t think he will run, at least not in 2012, but if he does he’s got my vote.

The following is a guest post from Waylon Fairbanks. Waylon writes on international politics and modern culture. He is a guest blogger for My Dog Ate My Blog and a writer on accredited online universities for Guide to Online Schools. If you are interested in guest posting at Geek Politics, check out the guidelines here.

As President Obama’s sweep to power in 2008 has proven, attracting non-voters to the polls is perhaps just as effective of a strategy as appealing to the active voter. The youth demographic is the statistically least likely major demographic to vote, and yet since the Baby Boomer generation, has become a formidable presence in the electoral process. In either case, the activity or inactivity of the youth vote plays out significantly in presidential elections. So then, how must these cheeky politicians sell themselves for sweet electoral glory? Appealing to the youth vote is not quite as simple as it sounds, and thus they must work through the central institution of the young—popular culture.

Pop culture is largely an apolitical institution that encompasses cultural, artistic and technological trends pervading the youth. How well a politician can enter this superficial world and achieve status, as a cultural “icon” is a large determinant in their political ambitions. For the older class, to which many prominent politicians belong, youth culture is a simplistic and rotten world of immorality and indulgence. However, much nuance exists in this world—and the degree with which this nuance can be grasped and controlled largely dictates appeal within the youth culture.

A fierce election can turn the noblest of men into an indignant and pathetic political prostitute. This phenomenon occurs largely as a result of catering to the youth culture. When John McCain, one of the most preeminent political figures of the twentieth century, dove into the world of “pop culture,” one sees clearly how sad this effort can be. Writing to Snooki, a television personality and notable philistine, Mr. McCain, via twitter feed, wrote “u r right, I would never tax your tanning bed! Pres Obama’s tax/spend policy is quite The Situation. But I do rec wearing sunscreen!” Ah, the depths to which one will swim! You cannot make this stuff up. Regardless of one’s politics, seeing such a man of dignity swoop to these levels is a painful experience.

Yet in light of McCain’s cultural gaffs, his vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, proved to be an extremely shrewd character in the realm of popular culture. Mrs. Palin, in spite of no national reputation nor foreign policy experience, quickly developed a dynamic persona that polarized the country. Either you love her or you hate her, and either way, you have an opinion. That’s the point. Mrs. Palin proves to be a rare exception in the political world: she not only exploited political culture for political aspirations, but she in fact left office and formal political life to write books, endorse candidates, give speeches and even host her own television show. Palin has transcended the distinction between a cultural and political figure, to exploit both and thus become a preeminent American icon.

The success of then Senator Obama to harness and exploit both popular culture and the youth vote is a case study in presidential campaigning. Mr. Obama directly engaged the youth vote by utilizing social media and text messaging to compile the greatest following to appear in the modern political sphere. Moreover, Obama used “movement” politics and emotive appeal to enfranchise uneducated and nonpolitical youth voters, who can only be reached through pop culture. President Obama’s recent decline in popularity is likely in part due his inability to appeal using popular culture, as popular culture often is apathetic to a bona fide authority figure. This is the paradox of a promising political and cultural icon attempting to govern.

As popular culture emerges as a stronger force in the political election process due to social networking and mass media, the triumphs and tribulations of the candidates will become both more shrewd and profound, and ironically more laughable and indignant. Let the circus begin.

This is an interview recently from George W. Bush’s recent book tour. I am looking forward to reading Decision Points(aff) and getting some more insight into the life of the President. He is a class act in my opinion. The video is long, but if you have time it’s pretty good.

George W. Bush Interviewed by Matt Lauer from TJ Thompson on Vimeo.

The following is a guest post from Sally C. Pipes. If you are interested in guest posting at Geek Politics, check out the guidelines here.

With the gubernatorial election tomorrow, Jerry Brown appears to have opened up a sizeable lead. Women are emerging as a bulwark of support for Brown, as they favor him by 21 points, according to the latest Los Angeles Times/USC poll.

That’s surprising, as Brown’s stance on mammograms could not be much more anti-woman. “Can we get off of mammograms? [T]here’s no statistical evidence that mammograms help anyone at any age,” he said during a 1995 interview with William F. Buckley at Stanford University.

The millions of women whose lives have been saved by mammograms would beg to differ. With more than 10 percent of all new American breast-cancer diagnoses coming in California, keeping mammograms available and affordable for all women should be an absolute priority for the state’s elected officials.

The most prevalent type of cancer among American women, breast cancer claimed the lives of more than 200,000 between 2002 and 2006.

And yet last year, the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force — a Department of Health and Human Services advisory panel — made a surprising change to its stance on mammograms, recommending against routine mammography for women between the ages of 40 and 49.

The Task Force appealed to the same sort of flawed analysis that Jerry Brown did 15 years ago.

Federal officials concluded that only women 50 to 74 years of age needed mammograms — and that they only needed them once every two years, not annually as had long been the case.

The panel reasoned that 1,900 women in their forties would need to be screened in order to save a single life. But only 1,300 screenings would be required to save a woman in her fifties. And it would take just 377 screenings of women in their sixties to save a life.

Thus, as women grow older, it becomes increasingly cost-effective to screen for breast cancer.

But does that mean that women in their forties shouldn’t get mammograms? Should the government really have the power to consign one in 1,900 women in their forties to death at the hands of breast cancer, just to save a few bucks?

It’s no wonder that Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society, said, “With its new recommendations, the [task force] is essentially telling women that mammography at age 40 to 49 saves lives; just not enough of them.”

Following a public outcry, federal officials softened their proposed guidelines by instructing individual patients and doctors to make the final decision. But they maintain publicly that the guidelines are correct.

Under the new health reform law, this drama is likely to play out again and again.

For instance, the law establishes a new 15-member Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) tasked with recommending to Congress ways to rein in Medicare spending. Its recommendations are not supposed to be used to raise taxes, change benefits, or ration care. But it’s almost certain that the Board’s proposals will lead to these outcomes indirectly.

For example, if IPAB’s recommendations were used to cut payments to doctors and hospitals, Medicare patients would end up waiting longer to receive care — effectively rationing it.

This year, it’s estimated that nearly 210,000 more American women will be diagnosed with breast cancer. If California’s share of new diagnoses is the same as it was four years ago, that’s another 23,000 mothers, grandmothers, daughters, and sisters in the Golden State who deserve access to the best the healthcare system has to offer.

Hopefully, after all these years, Jerry Brown agrees.

Sally C. Pipes is President and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute. Her latest book, The Truth About Obamacare (Regnery 2010), was just published.

Note from Derek:
This is the kind of problem Obamacare will create. We have to save money, so things will get cut. You simply can’t give more people better coverage for less money, no matter what the administration says. One or two of those can’t happen. Since we are covering more people, it will either be worse coverage or more money, and probably both.

Normally I hate political ads, but this one was pretty funny.

So this one is completely off topic, but I just thought I’d share what I’ve been up to lately. Just released what I think is a pretty cool app for the iPhone. It is a skiing app that shows trail maps for around 200 different resorts and records your data as you ski. It saves your speed, distance, time, and vertical drop in addition to saving the run and showing it color coded by speed on the map. I think it is pretty cool, but I could be biased from all the time I spent working on it. Anyways, if you happen to like skiing watch the video and check it out in the iTunes Store.

The following is a guest post from Robert Goldberg. He is Vice President of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest. If you are interested in guest posting at Geek Politics, check out the guidelines here.

Nearly a billion people watched as the 33 Chilean miners were rescued from their accidental prison below the earth. And millions more made their safe escape possible through innovations in medicine, telecommunications and engineering.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger observed, “If those miners had been trapped a half-mile down like this 25 years ago anywhere on earth, they would be dead. What happened over the past 25 years that meant the difference between life and death for those men?”

His answer: market-driven innovation.

Henninger continued: “The Center Rock drill, heretofore not featured on websites like Engadget or Gizmodo, is in fact a piece of tough technology developed by a small company in it for the money, for profit. That’s why they innovated down-the-hole hammer drilling. If they make money, they can do more innovation.

“This profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at that Chilean mine. The high-strength cable winding around the big wheel atop that simple rig is from Germany. Japan supplied the super-flexible, fiber-optic communications cable that linked the miners to the world above.

“Samsung of South Korea supplied a cellphone that has its own projector. Jeffrey Gabbay, the founder of Cupron Inc. in Richmond, Va., supplied socks made with copper fiber that consumed foot bacteria, and minimized odor and infection.

“Chile’s health minister, Jaime Manalich, said, ‘I never realized that kind of thing actually existed.’”

As Henninger notes: “[W]ithout the year-over-year progress embedded in these capitalist innovations, those trapped miners would be dead.”

But there is another lesson to be learned that is woven in the fabric of this fundamental insight: Both the technologies used to save the miners and the rapid development of a rescue plan were made possible because millions of people around the world exchanged time, money, ideas and inventions to create a solution.

As Matt Ridley writes in his wonderful book The Rational Optimist, the exchange of ideas and things is essential to generating the prosperity and technology that made the rescue possible along with the tax revenues that allow governments to function. Because finding more efficient ways to improve the creation of products and delivery of services in response to human wants and needs has always been the path to improving well-being.

Ultimately, societies thrive when innovation occurs without much interference and where governments are not seeking to centralize and manage the exchange of ideas and resources according to some master plan. The $20 million spent to rescue the miners will generate greater wealth and longer life for thousands and millions of people in the years ahead. The rescue is a model of how people around the planet can solve problems and improve life if left to their own devices.

Absent government interference, the rescue was not only flawless — it took less time than expected. Compare the speed and efficiency of the Chilean operation to, say, the government’s response to the BP oil spill. The administration, abiding regulations and chain of command inured to one way of doing things, requiring a test before introducing a new technology, made matters worse before they got better. Ultimately the Gulf response was organized around the belief that resources are finite and that government must regulate human activities to protect the commons.

The belief that government must control the pace and use of innovation to avoid financial Armageddon explains why Obamacare is organized to redistribute health care spending and limit it according to government-produced rules. An article in the New England Journal of Medicine observed: “The antagonism toward cost-per-QALY comparisons also suggests a bit of magical thinking — the notion that the country can avoid the difficult trade-offs that cost-utility analysis helps to illuminate…. It represents another example of our country’s avoidance of unpleasant truths about our resource constraints.”

In fact, advances in surgical procedure, the introduction of medicines that reduce the need for hospitalization, including drugs for a host of diseases that were once fatal, have made medicine more efficient and valuable. Greater gains in efficiency and value are on the way. We will be able to predict which of us could eventually have disease, preventing them or treating them before they cascade. But such innovations are the disease, according to those in charge of Obamacare: They will drain limited resources and must be regulated.

Isaiah Berlin wrote: “Disregard for the preferences and interests of individuals today in order to pursue some distant social goal that their rules have claimed is their duty to promote has been a common cause of misery for people throughout the ages.”

The rescue of the Chilean miners was the product of leadership encouraging collective intelligence and innovation on a global scale. In America, an elite is using government to consolidate its ability to impose its grand vision about healthcare on the nation. Who will rescue us from this fate?