In December 2008, the NBER declared that a recession had begun in December 2007. As I've noted several times in several places, they did this despite several contrary indicators such as positive economic growth in the second quarter of 2008, and at best inconclusive results relating to income, industrial production, and employment.

Nonetheless, the establishment media has consistently run with the NBER's definition of when the recession began. After all, they're the experts. Who are we peons to dare to point out that using the normal person definition, the recession began in the third quarter of 2008, continued for four quarters, and ended when GDP went positive in the third quarter of 2009?

In a move that one would expect is causing an excess of expletives inside the White House, NBER officials have indicated that they can't yet conclude that the recession as they define it has ended. A New York Times story carried at CNBC tells us the following (internal link added by me):

Recession Arbiters, Wary of Certifying an Upturn

A committee of economists, charged with determining the official turning points in the nation’s business cycles, certifies the beginnings and ends of recessions. But this time, the committee members say, the evidence is not so easy to decipher.

The committee announced Monday that it cannot yet declare an end to the recession that began in December 2007. Several members of the body had reported this to The New York Times on Sunday. Such an acknowledgment is rare in the history of setting dates to business cycles and could affect the behavior of investors and consumers.

Despite a recent uptick in employment and income, the decision of the committee at a meeting on Friday reflects a lingering worry that the economy could turn downward again in a so-called double-dip recession.

Several economists on the committee, which has seven active members, said they considered such a turn to be unlikely. But, they said, the duration and severity of the contraction have made it hard to determine with authority that a recovery has begun.

The gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic activity, officially began rising in the second half of 2009, suggesting that a recovery might have quietly started. But the committee takes other factors into consideration, like employment trends and consumer confidence.

Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, and Christina D. Romer, the chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, are former members of the committee, and its position could potentially affect their outlook on monetary and fiscal policy.

Here's the full text of the NBER announcement, which is actually dated Thursday, April 8 (paragraph breaks added by me):

NBER COMMITTEE CONFERS: NO TROUGH ANNOUNCED

CAMBRIDGE, April 8 -- The Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research met at the organization’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 8, 2010.

The committee reviewed the most recent data for all indicators relevant to the determination of a possible date of the trough in economic activity marking the end of the recession that began in December 2007. The trough date would identify the end of contraction and the beginning of expansion. Although most indicators have turned up, the committee decided that the determination of the trough date on the basis of current data would be premature.

Many indicators are quite preliminary at this time and will be revised in coming months. The committee acts only on the basis of actual indicators and does not rely on forecasts in making its determination of the dates of peaks and troughs in economic activity.

The committee did review data relating to the date of the peak, previously determined to have occurred in December 2007, marking the onset of the recent recession. The committee reaffirmed that peak date.

As to the reaffirmation of the December 2007 start date noted at the end of the announcement, employment, one of NBER's "actual indicators" has changed substantially since its announcement in December 2008. Seasonally adjusted job losses during the first quarter of 2008, thought at the time to be 247,000, then adjusted to 338,000, have since had a final downward revision to only 93,000. Also, don't forget that the unemployment rate didn't go above 5.1%, a level that many economists and other consider to be full employment, until May of 2008.

But you really didn't expect a committee of self-anointed academic geniuses to change its mind, did you?

Meanwhile, if the press is going to be consistent, it's going to have to assume that the recession hasn't ended yet until their designated experts tell them it isn't so. Does anyone expect them (or the administration) to tone down their supposedly indisputable claims that we're in the midst of "recovery and "rebound"? Me neither.

It would be a lot easier if we simply used simple, easily understood objective measurements, wouldn't it? As it is, the same crew that has in my opinion unfairly benefited from a seven-month Bush-bashing free ride (December 2007 to June 2008) on the recession's beginning will get no sympathy from yours truly while it twists in the wind waiting for the NBER to make up its mind over nine months after the recession as normal people define it ended.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

Everyone is still looking for a scapegoat for the financial crisis that precipitated the current economic malaise. And one of the popular targets has been former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.

Greenspan recently testified on Capitol Hill and was pressed about how he may have contributed to the financial crisis. According to Suze Orman, host of CNBC's "The Suze Orman Show," some of the blame should go to Greenspan for a 2004 speech he made to the Credit Union National Association.

Greenspan had said some might have "saved tens of thousands of dollars had they held adjustable-rate mortgages rather than fixed-rate mortgages during the past decade," but he did preface it by saying that wouldn't have been the case if rates adjusted upwards as they did. But Orman, appearing on MSNBC's April 8 "Morning Joe" contended he shouldn't have commented on those mortgages at all.

"Well, some blame should be placed on him," Orman said. "I was telling one of your producers, and I'm not sure I have this date exactly right, but I'll never forget around the year 2004, I think it was Feb. 23, to be exact, something like that. I was watching television and he goes on TV and he says, ‘Everybody, if you had gotten an adjustable rate mortgage 10 years ago, which would have made it 1994, you would have made so much more money on your mortgage and your home than if you had gotten a fixed rate mortgage.' And I'm sitting there, going, ‘No! No! Don't do that! Don't do that! Everybody's going to start getting an adjustable rate mortgage at the exact time they shouldn't.'"

Orman told viewers those remarks were what inspired all the exotic debt instruments traded on Wall Street - which aren't necessarily the same as an adjustable-rate mortgage.

"And sure enough, that's right around when you started to see mortgage companies come out with these negative amortization loans, no money down loans, opt-in, opt-out - all these different things that the Fed chairman said," Orman continued. "Loans like that, even though he didn't say ‘like that,' but when he said adjustable rate - what do people know? So, it was right around then that things started to turn around. And I'll never forget coming on television and saying to everybody, ‘What was he thinking? Why did he do that?' And to this day, I'll never understand it."

Ultimately she said the banks were at fault for the financial crisis, but Greenspan had to share the blame. However, she still didn't place any blame on the irresponsibility of the borrowers, which curiously is a theme of Orman's CNBC show.

"However, bottom line is, he's not the one to blame for this," Orman continued. "Maybe he had some responsibility, but, oh, give me a break. You had Lehman Brothers that had very sketchy accounting methods. You had Goldman Sachs that was betting against both sides of the market. They were betting on real estate going down, by insuring everything with AIG, at the same time, they were selling these instruments. They had a fortune to make. Believe me, it was far more than what Alan Greenspan did. You can blame Wall Street and the bankers for this one."

Well, most readers here don't think like writers at the Associated Press. Heck, in his report last Friday, the AP's Ken Thomas didn't even mention the fact that the EPA's regs represented a four-year move-up, and to a slightly higher standard -- apparently because doing so would have required him to mention the B-word (Bush) in connection with something seen as environmentally positive. Thomas also allowed "global warming" advocacy support to go unchallenged, as if the ClimateGate scandal that has wrecked the alarmists' entire case didn't exist.

Here are selected paragraphs from the AP report:

New mileage rules: Pay more for cars, less at pump

Drivers will have to pay more for cars and trucks, but they'll save at the pump under tough new federal rules aimed at boosting mileage, cutting emissions and hastening the next generation of fuel-stingy hybrids and electric cars.

The new standards, announced Thursday, call for a 35.5 miles-per-gallon average within six years, up nearly 10 mpg from now.

By setting national standards for fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions from tailpipes, the government hopes to squeeze out more miles per gallon whether you buy a tiny Smart fortwo micro car, a rugged Dodge Ram pickup truck or something in between.

The rules will cost consumers an estimated $434 extra per vehicle in the 2012 model year and $926 per vehicle by 2016, the government said. But the heads of the Transportation Department and Environmental Protection Agency said car owners would save more than $3,000 over the lives of their vehicles through better gas mileage.

... "Because of these standards, Americans will drive vehicles that save them money at the pump, cut the country's oil dependence and produce a lot less global warming pollution," said Jim Kliesch, a senior engineer in the Union of Concerned Scientists' Clean Vehicles Program.

... The changes will cost the auto industry about $52 billion, but the government says the program will provide $240 billion in savings to consumers, mostly through lower fuel consumption. The changes also could help U.S. manufacturers who produce advanced vehicles, batteries and engines, the government said.

The EPA is setting a tailpipe emissions standard of 250 grams (8.75 ounces) of carbon dioxide per mile for vehicles sold in 2016, equal to what would be emitted by vehicles meeting the mileage standard. This represents the EPA's first rules ever on vehicle greenhouse gas emissions, following a 2007 Supreme Court decision.

Each auto company will have a different fuel-efficiency target, based on its mix of vehicles. Automakers that build more small cars will have a higher target than car companies that manufacture a broad range of cars and trucks. For example, passenger cars built by General Motors Co. will need to hit a target of 32.7 mpg in 2012 and increase to 36.9 mpg by 2016. Honda Motor Co., meanwhile, will need to reach passenger car targets of 33.8 mpg in 2012 and ramp up to 38.3 mpg in 2016.

An interesting item found after digging into the numbers a bit is that the two car companies controlled by the government are so far the ones who are on balance doing the least about their gas-hungry mix of vehicles, based on this look at the top five best-selling brands in the US (data is from the Wall Street Journal's March Auto Sales report):

Governent/General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler have the three highest mixes of "light trucks" (SUVs, pickup trucks, etc.). But GM's mix is tilting a bit towards light trucks, not away from them. It would appear that Ford's light vehicles sales percentage will drop below GM's in the near future. Chrysler wouldn't even exist without light trucks, and its mix is so high that it will take years (assuming it hangs on) for its mix to come down to even Ford's or GM's current levels. I should also not that since its the smallest of the five U.S. sellers listed above, it will likely be the least able to afford whatever fixed costs are associated with EPA compliance.

If the company-defined targets identified in Thomas's report are fixed, as he implies by not qualifying the specific numbers with an "about," GM will have to reverse its product-mix trend and move from higher-profit light trucks at a time when it's still losing money even after going through a government-orchestrated bankruptcy.

As to the Bush-related news, it comes from this item carried at the New Mexico Independent:

A renewed focus on increasing fuel efficiency standards came in 2007, when President George W. Bush signed the federal Energy Independence and Security Act which required automakers to increase fuel efficiency to 35 miles per gallon fleetwide by 2020.

Of course, many sensible people believe that the government has no business dictating fleet mileages, especially since the entire global warming enterprise has been exposed as the fraud that it has always been. There seems to be no reasonable basis for the requirements, other than to give the EPA a reason to feel self-important while driving up the cost of vehicles and compromising driver safety -- another factor Ken Thomas chose to ignore.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

In fact, Devaney's defense for the ‘phantom' congressional districts (clerical errors), the claims that he reports to the Obama administration (they simply listen and adjust their thinking), and the complaint that Recovery.gov itself cost $18 million to overhaul (it might cost up to $18 million), make the operation look amateurish at best.

Couple all of this with stories of overly complicated systems involved in the stimulus application process, and inaccuracies in the reporting of supposed ‘two-time losers' - an error that prompted a statement of apology from the board -, and one can only envision those CareerBuilder monkey commercials from years past.

More troubling is Recovery.gov's insistence on using the phrase ‘jobs created' when tracking stimulus funds - as can be seen here on a report designed to show the viewer the ‘Most Jobs Created by State'.  This comes nearly three months after Ed Pound, Spokesman for the Recovery Board, told ABC News that, "...since OMB is not going to use ‘jobs created or jobs saved' anymore, we're not going to use it either."

The reason the Office of Management and Budget was distancing itself from the phrase?

Because it is impossible to track. 

The AP reported how the administration had to respond to its previous - um, embellishments - on the number of jobs affected by the stimulus package.  They also point out how the new method would actually inflate previous erroneous numbers, and subsequently explains why said method would make accuracy an impossibility.

In January, CNN ran a piece about the nation's first stimulus project.  The article points out that federal officials had estimated that the project would create 220 indirect jobs.  This, despite a statement from agricultural economist, Michael Sykuta, who surmises "that a single construction job normally spins off two or perhaps three indirect jobs at most."

An expert claims that 3 jobs are created indirectly at most, and the feds somehow estimate 220 - a mere increase of over 7,000%. 

Thus, reporting the addition of indirect jobs created or saved is equally as futile an effort as calculating those directly created or saved. 

Case in point, the numbers being touted by that first stimulus project.  In it, the administration provides an educated guess of 30 jobs created.  Then, the Recovery.gov site utilizes a mathematical formula to determine that the project may have created or saved 24.69 jobs.  But the contractor involved in the project estimates that the number of jobs saved was 10.

Review that last paragraph for a moment.  Not only are the numbers trending downward, but the terminology involved is designed to drive the numbers upward.  Here is the transformation simplified:  30 created → 24.69 created or saved → 10 saved.

Created, saved, funded.  Double-counting directly or indirectly created jobs. 

And still, the Recovery.gov Web site continues the dishonest theme by continuing to list these fuzzy numbers as jobs 'created'.

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Wondering how much faith the left has in your ability to run your own life? Chris Matthews was brutally honest today when he criticized that "idealistic notion" of self-reliance that ignorant conservatives insist on pushing.

Matthews apparently believes that without massive social welfare programs like Medicare and Social Security, there would be "poor people all over the place, old people lying in the streets," and the nation would look like "Calcutta."

He made these absurd claims -- and they are absurd -- on yesterday's Hardball, and went on to call for a more robust "social state," complaining that lefty bloggers had not done enough to make it seem more desirable to the American people (h/t Gateway Pundit).

Steve, that's part of the propaganda problem here. The problem is we don't think of what the country would be like if we didn't have medicare for our parents as they get very old, in their 80s for example, and they're still alive. They need health care, a lot of it, and have don't have any source of income. They're not working every morning. They're not making a paycheck.

We don't think -- What would it be like in this country, Calcutta? Poor people all over the place, old people lying in the streets. I mean we don't think about what it would be if we didn't have health care, if we didn't have Social Security for people at the age of 65. If we didn't have unemployment compensation. If we didn't have a progressive income tax.

There's a lot of things we don't think about and the right wing just pounds and pounds away at this idealistic notion of a cowboy country, where everybody's self-reliant. Well, part of self reliance is -- …

I think progressives for all their power in the blogosphere have not done a positive case for the advantages of some kind of social state.

What stood out even further for me about the announcement was GM's top line, i.e., global revenues. That figure came in at $57.5 billion.

Ford's revenues during the final two quarters of 2009 were $66.3 billion, or roughly 15% higher. GM's ten missing days in July would only explain about one-third of that difference.

It may be out there, but I haven't seen a lot of establishment media recognition that Ford is a bigger company worldwide than General Motors, and has been since the first quarter of last year. Given that GM was larger than Ford for about the previous 80 years, Ford's ascension to the top spot among US-based companies in worldwide revenues would ordinarily be what is known as "news."

In fact, though it is true that Ford's domestic unit sales still trail GM, the Associated Press's Dee-Ann Durbin still treated the overall smaller company as the kingpin in her coverage of GM's brief announcement today. Durbin also wrote as if the idea that the government-controlled company will be able to go public is a certainty, and threw in a laugher of a paragraph about how things are supposedly getting better at Chrysler, where year-over-year sales are still in decline (bolds are mine):

GM owes an additional $45.3 billion to the government. That will be repaid when GM makes a public stock offering, which Liddell says will happen "when the markets and the company are ready."

Liddell, who came to GM at the beginning of the year from Microsoft Corp., wouldn't say whether GM will make money in the first quarter, but said there's a good chance the company will make a profit in 2010 based on encouraging first-quarter sales and production. GM plans to release first-quarter results next month.

"I think there is a danger of overpromising and underdelivering," he said. "When we put the numbers on the board, we will come out and tell you about them."

GM, which remains the largest car company by sales in the U.S., saw a slight gain in U.S. market share in the first three months of this year compared to a year ago.

... Things are also on the mend at Chrysler Group LLC, which also went into bankruptcy protection last year and is now managed by Fiat SpA. Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne said last week that the automaker has $5 billion in cash on hand and expects to break even this year. Chrysler plans to provide more detailed financial results later this month.

According to the Wall Street Journal's monthly vehicle sales report, Durbin's final excerpted statement is so barely true that it wasn't even worth citing. GM's first quarter 2009 market share was 18.5%, while the first quarter of 2010 came in at 18.7%. Subtract out the effects of what was from all appearances a government- and media-orchestrated campaign against Toyota that had its worst effects during January and February, and GM's model lineup is in no way better than it was a year ago.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

"The Tower commission did not find Reagan a lousy orator; they found him a lousy president," Rep. Barney Frank said of Reagan to Time magazine in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra Affair in 1987.

And more recently, those on the left, and also some on the right, have declared the era of Reagan over for the Republican Party - a point more rational voices on the right aren't willing to concede.

So why are some supporters of liberal causes attempting to co-opt Reagan to promote their own ideals?

Asking "WWRD?" ("What would Reagan do?") is becoming a trend on myriad issues, including global warming alarmism, health care legislation, attacks on the Tea Party movement and, surprisingly, liberal pundits seeking to put the best face on President Barack Obama's leadership.

Videos Embedded Below Fold

Reagan a ‘Climate Champion'?

Imagine a scenario where former Vice President Al Gore and Reagan would team up for a common cause. Doesn't sound at all plausible, unless you're buying into a campaign that a group called Republicans for Environmental Protection is trying to promote.

On their Web site, ClimateConservative.com, visitors can find a number of radio spots the group is airing during the Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck programs on stations in New Hampshire. These ads suggest Reagan would have been all about combating the so-called threat of manmade global warming.

"Reagan knew that good stewardship is a conservative value," the announcer says in one ad after a Reagan speech. "Scientists found chemicals were depleting the earth's ozone layer. Reagan pushed through the treaty that fixed the problem. He ignored radio pundits who claimed ozone depletion wasn't real. Today, scientists warn that heat-trapping pollution is dangerously altering our climate. Once again, some want us to ignore the problem, but that would endanger our children's future - contrary to the conservative values Reagan stood for. It's time to ask, what would Reagan do?"

The other two ads convey the same message to suggest Reagan would have been on board reacting to climate change alarmism with domestic policies that wouldn't necessarily translate into solving this supposed problem and would cripple the U.S. economy. However, according to John D. Heubusch, executive director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, that's speculation, and it's hard to imagine a scenario Reagan would be on board an economy-challenging obstacle like cap and trade.

"I know that, particularly in this economic climate, he would want to promote policies that protect our environment in a way that doesn't cost us jobs or place an unfair burden on the U.S. taxpayer," Heubusch said to the April 3 Los Angeles Times, reacting to the ad.

The Gipper Against the Tea Parties? 

Ron Reagan, one of the sons of the former president, is a liberal whose political views that are very different from his father's. For whatever reason, the younger Reagan didn't seem to think his father would have been on board with a movement that advocates for smaller government, one of the fundamental tenets of Reagan-style conservatism.

Back on HLN's Jan. 26 "The Joy Behar Show," host Joy Behar asked Ron Reagan what his father would have thought about the modern tea party movement. Ron said that his father, the conservative icon wouldn't have looked upon the Tea Party movement favorably.

"Oh, I think he would be unamused by the tea partiers with their Hitler signs and all the rest of it. No, I don't think he'd be cottoning to that much at all," Reagan replied.

That curious claim is counter to what the elder Reagan wrote in the Dec. 7, 1973 issue of National Review. In that article, Reagan clearly laid out the stakes as he saw them in the battle against bloated government and massive taxation, writing, "[the idea of limited government] must prevail because if it does not, the free society we have known for two hundred years, the ideal of a government by consent of the governed, will simply cease to exist."

As Reagan's other son, Michael Reagan recently explained to the Business & Media Institute, the 40th president would have been a staunch advocate of the Tea Party movement.

"I think that my father would have been supportive of a grassroots movement, as he was always supportive of grassroots movements, you know, in this country," Michael Reagan said. "I mean, people need to remember without the grassroots, Ronald Reagan probably doesn't become president of the United States of America and he worked the grassroots on a regular basis during his political career, and especially between the years of 1976 and 1980 after the loss in Kansas City."

Obama: The Next Reagan?

Since his death in 2004 - and despite all the hostile coverage he has got from the media during his presidency - Reagan is often compared to his ideologically opposite successor President Barack Obama, who has been shown to be a media darling.

Newsweek senior Washington correspondent and MSNBC regular Howard Fineman spoke glowingly of the similarities between Reagan and Obama in the Nov. 30, 2009, issue of Newsweek:

There are some remarkable affinities, personal and historical. Like Reagan, Obama shares a celebrity's sense of comfort on the (public) stage, a belief in sticking to the script, and a faith in the power of the written word spoken from an imposing rostrum. He also shares Reagan's reverence for the power of a narrative in politics - Reagan, because he was an actor; Obama, because he is a writer. Obama came of age politically when he arrived on the mainland in the Reagan years.

He watched Reagan attack with bold ideas the Carter era's sense of hopelessness and ‘malaise'; saw him and his party get hammered in the first midterm election in 1982; saw him, during a severe economic downturn, rebound to a sweeping second-term ‘morning in America' victory in 1984.Around the White House right now - beset by a weak economy and dire midterm election prospects - the story of the Gipper is uplifting, at least to the man in the center chair at the cabinet table.

And Fineman isn't alone. Ed Schultz, a liberal radio talker and host of MSNBC's "Ed Show" made a similar comparison on his April 5 program. However, Schultz's evaluation was done in an effort to attack the GOP for opposing the extension of unemployment benefits.

"Ronald Reagan was called the great communicator," Schultz said. "There's simply no question that Barack Obama is also a great communicator. He needs to be speaking up aggressively and making it clear that in this moment, what Tom Coburn is doing is not making a point about the deficit. What Tom Coburn is doing is slowing down the economic recovery, because when you stop these unemployment benefits, you squeeze money out of the towns that are hardest hit across this country."

And some have taken it a step further - that Obama is better at being Reagan than Reagan. According to CNN's Soledad O'Brien, the comparison was not only valid but Obama had exceeded Reagan's abilities as a communicator.

"The good news for this president, of course, is that he, like Reagan, is the great communicator, gets very high marks on that," O'Brien said on CNN's Jan. 27 "The Situation Room. "And in fact when we asked in the polls how do you rate him as a communicator, Obama - now 90 percent say he's a great communicator, a good speaker and communicator. Reagan 84 - 84 percent said that President Reagan was a great speaker and great communicator. So he's beating Reagan, who was known as ‘The Great Communicator.'"

But even where Obama has failed, particularly the economy, pundits have managed to trot out the Reagan comparison to prop up the current command-in-chief.

"If we can just - I've been wanting to share this on ‘Meet the Press' for some time," former "NBC Nightly News" anchor Tom Brokaw said on NBC's March 14 "Meet the Press." "Looking forward beyond the elections this fall about the political future of President Obama, here are some numbers that people may want to keep in mind. These are the unemployment rates in key states in 1982, well into President Reagan's first term. Look at the screen. Michigan, 16.8 percent; Alabama, 14.3; Ohio, 13.9; down through 12 and above. That went on into 1983. Did it spell the end of the Reagan presidency? Not exactly."

And although it's convenient for the left to draw these comparisons for the sake of political expediency, Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, says Barack Obama is hardly cast in the mold of Ronald Reagan.

"One can quarrel about the efficacy and justice of the Reagan tax cuts and the Obama health care expansion, but one thing is plain from the political styles that these presidents have brought to the passage of their signature domestic legislation," Berkowitz wrote for The Weekly Standard on Aug. 10, 2009. "Reagan's forthright approach is more consistent with democratic norms and the presuppositions of a free society than Obama's hide-the-ball tactics."

Doing her best to channel Obama's inspiring Notre Dame address about shunning immoral endeavors in the private sector for virtuous and selfless community endeavors, Stephanie Elam sounded more like a Public Works Czar than a CNN correspondent on April 6.

"This is really about helping those people out, getting them ready as far as the choice for best course of study for the financial future," Elam said on CNN "Newsroom." "So you may consider the possibility of enlisting in public service. Demand is really high right now for government jobs ... and any remaining debt on federal student loans will be forgiven after you work full-time in public service for ten years."

In order to take advantage of this, however, students must make sure they're closely bound to the government. "But to get this benefit, you need to take out your loan from a federal lender as opposed to a private one like Sallie Mae," she continued (although the Obama administration has already taken over student loans - along with the banks, housing, and automakers, and...). "But you can get around this little restriction here if you consolidate your loans into the Direct Loan Program."

Elam's point was that the Obama administration is picking winners and losers. Join the "service" bureaucracy and you win - you won't have to repay your education debts. Join the shrinking private sector (the part of the economy that actually creates wealth) and you're on your own.

"If you enter a profession such as teaching, health services, social work - also if you take a look at clinical research - you could qualify for loan forgiveness through one of many programs," Elam stated. "But before you make of course a huge multi-year commitment, make sure the program has a way to make good on its promises."

When anchor Tony Harris asked, "if you're still looking for ways to ease that burden a bit, what about loan forgiveness? Is that available, say, through volunteer work?" Elam took the opportunity to champion AmeriCorps - another corrupt and inefficient government program that is unjustifiably bleeding taxpayers and adding to America's budget crisis.

"They're not going to forgive your loan, but if you do have service that you provide to AmeriCorps, you will enjoy loan forbearance, and what that really means is you won't be have to make any payments while you're serving, and AmeriCorps volunteers are also eligible for an education reward for $5,350," Elam said, before touting the beauties of Peace Corp service.

"In addition, volunteers with Perkins loans are eligible for a partial cancellation benefit. 15 percent of a Perkins loan can be canceled upon the completion of each full year of service of your first two years in the Peace Corps and 20 percent can be canceled upon completion of the third and fourth year. So what this really means is four full years of Peace Corps service will equal a 70 percent cancellation of an existing Perkins loan. So that's really not a bad deal Tony."

With summer driving season upon us, it's important to note that there's a traditional jump in gas prices. But will this seasonal adjustment benefit commodities, specifically oil and make the price of gasoline even higher? That could happen if those forms of energy lure investment from what seems to be an over-valued equities market, brought on by what some claim is cheap money. 

On her April 5 program, "Closing Bell" host Maria Bartiromo asked CNBC's CME Group floor reporter Rick Santelli if a move higher in commodities was due to inflation. However, according to Santelli, it's not inflation but a move by investors out of a potentially over-valued equities market that will cause a rise in commodities.

"Well, you know, I don't like to link the two together," Santelli said. "I mean, many times you know, it is core [minus] food and energy. So I think throw all that away. I think the better question is, is that when people are afraid to put their money to work in treasuries, because rates may be going higher, maybe afraid that we are a little long in the tooth in the sugar-buzz rally of equities - boy, commodities is the place to be. Most of the good dollar trades probably already out there."

And with this flight from equities to commodities, Santelli explained it could and will cause an upward adjustment in energy prices.

"We have the cyclical side - we're going to have $4 gas this summer probably anyway," Santelli explained. "It's a great trade. Maria. You know, we've been to $150 before and I don't see why it couldn't happen again."

"Closing Bell" co-host Scott Wapner agreed with Santelli and explained it won't just hurt the consumer, but it would have a ripple effect across the economy into corporate profits. He explained that Alcoa (NYSE:AA), a commodity stock that one might think would benefit by this shift in investing behavior would benefit, actually would be hurt by higher energy costs.
"You know Rick, you look at what's happening with commodity prices today, and Maria was talking about how energy stocks as one of the leadership groups," "If you have a continued rise in say the price of crude oil, the impact is not only on the consumer at the pump with rising gas prices, but certainly the crimp on corporate profits, because margins get squeezed because of rising input costs. For example, Alcoa today got downgraded because of the issue of maybe having a disappointing first quarter even though commodity prices like aluminum have been higher and energy costs are higher as well, so it becomes more costly to produce some of these products. So, it could have a real impact on corporate profits."