|
Obama's agenda relies on the tactic of overloading the
system
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| Items on this page are in
chronological order or in order of discovery. Previous year in
left column. |
| Jobs Stimulus |
In his January 5th, 2009, radio address, Obama uses some new
language when discussing what he wants the stimulus package to achieve
in terms of jobs. First off, he has a name for the package -- the
"American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan."
says he wants to
"create three million new jobs" -- this is a change from a few weeks
ago, when he said he wanted the plan to create OR SAVE two million jobs.
He says the "No. 1 goal of my plan ... is to create three million
new jobs, more than 80 percent of them in the private sector."
If
you do the math: 20 percent of three million means 600,000 new
government employees.
Read the transcript
here . . .
600,000 new
government employees = 576,00 Democratic Party jobs |
| Obama Surrendering Internet To Foreign Powers |
Without the ingenuity of America’s brightest minds and the
investment of U.S. Taxpayer dollars, there would be no Internet, as we
now know it today.
Now, the Obama administration has quietly
moved to cede control of the web from the United States to foreign
powers.
Some background: The Internet came into being
thanks to the genius work of American's, Dr.Robert E. Kahn and Dr.
Vinton G. Cerf. These men while employed by the Department of
Defense, in the DARPA office (Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency), in the early 1970’s, went to work conceiving, designing and
implementing the idea of "open-architecture networking." This
breakthrough in connectivity and networking was the birth of the
Internet.
These two gentlemen had the vision and the brainpower
to create a worldwide computer Internet communications network that
forever changed the world and how we communicate in it.
They
discovered that by providing a person with a unique identifier,
(TCP/IP), which was able to be recognized and interact through a network
of servers, all users then could communicate amongst themselves and with
others. The servers would recognize the identifier and connect
networks-to-networks, (utilizing a series of giant servers), that would
pass on information from computer to computer in a seamless real-time
exchange of information. This new process of communication became
know as the "information super highway," the Internet.
Now for
the bad news -- in an effort to show the World how inclusive, sharing,
cooperative and international America can be, the Obama administration
has set off on a plan to surrender control and key management of the
Internet by the U.S. Department of Commerce and their agents.
Continue reading Bradley A. Blakeman
here . . . |
| In America, Barack Obama Is Talking |
Mark Steyn
says he's talking. Talking, talking, talking. He talked
for 90 minutes on the State of the Union. No matter how many
geckos you shoveled down your briefs, you still lost feeling in your
legs. And still he talked. If you had an erogenous zone
before, by the end, it was undetectable even to Frenchmen. But on
he talked. As respected poverty advocate and former Sen. John
Edwards commented, "After the first hour, even my malevolent genie was
back in the bottle."
Like any gifted orator, Obama knows how to
vary the talk with a little light and shade. Sometimes he hectors,
sometimes he whines, sometimes he demands. "We do not quit," he
said. Boy, you can say that again!
So he did: "We don't
quit. I don't quit," he said. But throughout the chamber,
Democrats were quitting. "I quit," says Rep. Marion Berry of
Arkansas, declining to run in November. "I quit," says Sen. Byron
Dorgan of North Dakota, doing likewise. "I quit," says Beau Biden
of Delaware, son of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., choosing not to
run for his father's seat.
But not Barack Obama. On he
went. As National Review Editor Rich Lowry put it after the
Massachusetts vote, the public thinks Obama doesn't get it, and Obama
thinks the public doesn't get it. As he has the microphone, he's
gonna keep talking at you until you do get it. The ever tinnier,
more perfunctory sophomoric uplift at the start and finish can't conceal
the hope-killing, jobs-slaying, soul-sapping message in between, which
has been consistent for two years. As Obama sees it, whatever the
problem, the solution is more Washington.
Simply as a matter of
internal logic, this is somewhat perplexing. After all, when he
isn't blaming George W. Bush, Obama blames "Washington" -- a Washington
mired in "partisanship" and "pettiness" and "the same tired battles" and
"Washington gimmicks" that do nothing but ensure that our "problems have
grown worse." Washington, Obama tells us, is "unable or unwilling
to solve any of our problems."
So let's have more Washington!
That raises the question: Does even Obama listen to his speeches?
The public does -- at least to this extent: They
understand that when he's attacking the tired old Washington games, he's
just playing the game, but when he's proposing the tired old Washington
solutions, he means it. That's the only Barack Obama on offer.
And everything he proposes means more debt, which at the level this guy
is spending means higher taxes.
Functioning societies depend on
agreed rules. If you want to open a business, you do it in
Singapore or Ireland because the rules are known to all parties.
You don't go to Sudan or Zimbabwe, where the rules are whatever the
state's whims happen to be that morning.
That's why Obama is
such a job-killer. Why would a small business take on a new
employee? Obama is proposing a soak-the-banks tax that could
impact access to credit. The House has passed a cap-and-trade bill
that could impose potentially unlimited regulatory costs. The
Senate is in favor of health care reform that would allow the IRS to
seize your assets if you and your employees' health arrangements do not
meet the approval of the federal government. Some of these things
will pass into law; some of them won't. But all of them send a
consistent, cumulative message: There are no rules.
In
such an environment, would you hire anyone? Obama can bury it in
half a ton of leaden telepromptered sludge, but the message is clear:
more Washington, more regulation, more spending and no rules.
Obama and the Democrats have decided, in the current cliche, to "double
down." What's the endgame here? Obama gave it away in his
student loan "reform" proposals: If you choose to go into "public
service," any college loan debts will be forgiven because public service
is more noble than the selfish, money-grubbing private sector.
C'mon, everybody knows that. So we need to encourage more people
to go into public service?
Why? In the past 60 years, the
size of America's government work force has increased five times faster
than the population. Yet Obama says it's still not enough:
We have to divert more of our human capital into the government machine.
He's explicitly telling you: If you start a business, invent
something, provide a service, you're a schmuck. In the America
he's building, you'll be working 24/7 till you drop dead to fund an
ever-swelling bureaucracy. Obama's proposals are bold only insofar
as few men would offer such a transparent guarantee of disaster:
It's the audacity of hopelessness.
The end-game is simple to
progressives. When those working for the government, and for the
unions, and those on the dole outnumber the rest of us, they control the
country. Doesn't matter what the Constitution says. |
| Obama Parts Company With Reality |
John Hinderaker
says
the Obama administration unveiled its budget for FY 2011. The
budget ostensibly covers the next ten years, but its projections for
future years are meaningless. The only year for which it has any
significance is 2011, in which it anticipates $3.8 trillion in spending
and an astonishing $1.6 trillion deficit. In 2006, the last year
in which the Republicans controlled Congress, the deficit was $248
billion -- one-seventh what Obama proposes for next year.
In his
budget announcement today, Obama said: "[O]ur government is deeply in
debt after what can only be described as a decade of profligacy."
So he proposes to put the country far more deeply in debt through
profligacy of a sort that was undreamed of just a few years ago.
Obama said: "[W]e can't simply move beyond this crisis; we have to
address the irresponsibility that led to it, and that includes the
failure to rein in spending...." But his budget doesn't rein in
spending, it increases it over last year's precedent-shattering total by
around $100 billion.
Obama said: "[I]t would be a terrible
mistake to borrow against our children's future to pay our way
today...." His budget, in just the next year, will borrow $1.6
trillion against our children's future to pay our way today.
Either Obama has completely lost touch with reality, or he thinks we
have.
UPDATE: One more thing. The Wall Street Journal
estimates that Obama's proposed repeal of many of the Bush tax cuts will
cost Americans who earn more than $200,000 per year $1 trillion over the
next decade, assuming that Obama's tax increases are not reversed.
Obama won in 2008 with what Michael Barone called a "top and bottom
coalition." He carried lower-income voters and those with incomes
over $250,000, while middle-income voters went for McCain. Now,
Obama can kiss the top part of that coalition goodbye. |
| A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words |
|
"Already, we have made historic strides … to cut wasteful spending."
-- Barack Obama
|
| We Have Made Historic Strides |
In his budget message to Congress, Barack Obama said, "Already, we
have made historic strides … to cut wasteful spending." He made
the comment while presenting a budget proposal that for the second year
in a row would fix federal spending at a percentage of Gross Domestic
Product that is higher than at any time in the past 65 years.
In
both fiscal 2010 and fiscal 2011, Obama’s budgets would have the federal
government spend more than a quarter of the all the wealth produced by
the nation in that year.
No president since Franklin Delano
Roosevelt has consumed such a large a share of the nation’s wealth
through federal spending -- and FDR did it in the midst of World War II.
According to the historical tables that the White House released
with Obama’s budget yesterday, the federal government will spend 25.4
percent of GDP in fiscal 2010, the federal budget year that will end on
September 30. Under the new budget that Obama is proposing for
fiscal year 2011, the federal government will spend 25.1 percent of GDP
in fiscal 2011, which begins on October 1.
Both of these budgets
fall wholly within Obama’s term of office and would be approved by a
Democratic Party that controls both houses of Congress.
By
comparison, in fiscal 2002 and fiscal 2003, the first two years in which
President George W. Bush presented budgets to Congress, federal spending
ended up being 19.1 percent and 19.7 percent of GDP, respectively.
In the first two Obama budgets, spending has averaged 25.25 percent
of GDP. In the first two Bush budgets, spending averaged 19.4
percent of GDP. That means that Obama, so far, is spending
30 percent more of GDP per year than Bush.
In 2008,
Bush’s final full year in office, federal spending was 20.7 percent of
GDP. According to the budget projections released by the White
House on Monday, federal spending will be 23.2 percent of GDP in 2012,
the lowest rate for any of the four years of Obama’s term. As the
White House now calculates it, Obama will easily be the biggest spending
president since World War II.
By comparison, FDR spent only 10.7
percent and 9.2 percent of GDP in 1934 and 1935, his second and third
years of office, during the Great Depression. This year, Obama
will spend almost three times as much of the national wealth as FDR did
in 1935
We have made
historic strides … to cut wasteful spending -- is he kidding? Is
he a con man? -- deluded? -- incompetent? -- purposeful? -- one has to
wonder if Obama believes his own BS? |
| Obama’s Deficit Dishonesty |
Flopping Aces points out that Democrats try to claim it was Bush’s
deficit, yet they want to use recovered TARP funds for another Obama
slush fund.
If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a hundred
times. Despite the fact that Obama signed the most massive
spending bills EVER, he tries to blame the deficit on George Bush.
Dick Morris takes the lie apart piece by piece
here . . .
And,
here's a video
of Sen. Gregg turning the Obama "inherited deficit" lie on it’s head
when he said, "What this administration inherited is not as important as
what our children will inherit." These really are the Obama
deficits and no slick speeches by Obama
can change that!
Is anyone
asking where that money -- a 700% increase in spending in his first year
-- is going? Look at that chart. Does anybody know what that
money is going to be spent on -- other than solidifying the power of
these Obamunists -- what changed in 2009 other than the government being
seized by a motley collection of Marxists and socialists.
In the
next ten years, he's spending 44 times more than the previous ten years.
Obama should be able to cure cancer and buy world peace with that kind
of money. What's Obama planning to do with that money? What
just changed? |
| Obama's Deficit Projection |
|
| Obama Borrows $2,000,000,000,000 |
Jake Tapper is
reporting that behind closed doors and with no cameras present,
Obama signed into law Friday afternoon the bill raising the public debt
limit from $12.394 trillion to $14.294 trillion.
The current
national debt is $12.3 trillion. Check out the
National Debt Clock, which
tells you your share of that -- roughly $40,000 per citizen, $113,000
per taxpayer.
The bill also establishes a statutory Pay-As-You-Go
procedure requiring that new non-emergency legislation affecting tax
revenue or mandatory spending not increase the Federal deficit -- in
other words, any new spending or tax cuts must be paid for with new
taxes or spending cuts. |
| Down With Small Business! |
|
John Hinderaker
notes
that the "Miss me yet?" billboard of President Bush that garnered
national publicity was paid for by a group of small business owners who
consider the Obama administration's policies to be hostile to them.
No surprise there -- pretty much every small business owner I know feels
that way. Still, it was a bit of a shock to see these numbers in
USA Today, based on a survey of 884 small businesspeople:
How has the Obama administration affected
small-business success?
It has had a positive effect: 11%
It has
hurt me: 77%
No effect: 13%
If anything like 77% of small businessmen think the Obama
administration has hurt them, it's no wonder Democratic Senators and
Congressmen are fleeing for the exits.
Small businessmen in Wisconsin
paid for this sign. Seems like a trend.
|
| Planning To Fail |
Pedro Primavera
says the economy seems to have settled in somewhat from the disaster
of 2008. Every indication is the economy is poised for a rebound
-- provided the right trigger is in place.
In the past, the
trigger that has always got the economy back on track has been tax cuts,
by Ronald Reagan, George Bush and John Kennedy -- presidents from both
sides of the aisle. And just when the economy is primed for that
trigger, Obama is going in the exact opposite direction: it is as if he
is sabotaging the efforts of the American people.
It would be
one thing if he were just plain incompetent, like Jimmy Carter, but the
evidence says otherwise. In the same week he lectures the American
people and -- presumably -- the American Congress, he signs into effect
a $1.9 trillion increase in the national debt. This is at the same
time when the budget deficit is already at crisis proportions according
to World Bank standards. In effect, he is using the credit card --
even our kids' credit card -- just to pay the minimum balances on the
other credit cards.
If Obama is not incompetent, then surely
somebody is trying to ruin the economy while Obama is unaware, as former
Virginia Governor Wilder laments. However, somebody needs to
explain Plausible Deniability to Obama. It means having underlings
doing things while you were unaware. Sometimes it is true,
sometimes a lie. But no, Obama does the lying by himself.
And then there is his signature on all the bills.
Maybe there is
something wrong with the economic models professed by most Democrats.
This much is true. Keynesianism somehow lives on as faulty
economic theory. For instance, Keynes asserted government is
flexible and business is not. Evidence in the last 50 years shows
government is a living and breathing entity that seemingly must either
grow larger or die. It should be no wonder that the best years of
the post-WWII era were the Reagan years, as he openly declared war on
big government. Keynes also said full employment was gained
through fiscal policy served up by -- you guessed it -- big government.
The only problem with Obama as a Keynesian is he never professed
to be one. His mentors at an early age were Marxists, he claimed
to hang around Marxists in college, and he has surrounded himself with
czars who at best are laughable kooks of the highest order (otherwise
known as academics) who have espoused many Marxist ideals.
Obama
did not lie when he said just before the election that his election
could bring fundamental change within government and society. The
only problem is that nothing he is trying is new. It is all old
and demonstrably failed attempts at power struggle. It lives only
in the hallowed but hair-brained halls of academia and among the
socially bitter.
If anything, Obama needs to be called to task
over his economic policies. Why is he not supporting a tax cut
that could instantly call out the American consumer and spur business
into action? Why is he not supporting business that could provide
millions of jobs? However, the American media seems to fawn over
the enlightened dictator as they did with Fidel Castro and others.
Instead of calling Obama to task over failed policies, they act as his
propaganda machine. They want to use their influence to support
some misguided higher ideal of humanity seemingly derived from JD
Salinger's A Catcher in the Rye.
It is becoming fairly obvious
now to the casual observer: Obama is destroying the infrastructure of
this nation purposefully. The hard part is making it to 2012
before the damage is done.
Just watch Obama's
Executive Orders. |
| USS Obama Is Sinking |
J.C. Arenas
says the Obama Administration continues to proclaim the strength of
the nation's economy, and foreign governments are responding with a
collective "yeah, right".
ABC News reports:
Foreign owners of US government debt reduced
their holdings by the largest monthly amount ever in December, with
China offloading so many Treasury securities that it is no longer
the largest foreign holder.
According to new data released
Tuesday morning by the Treasury Department, foreign holdings of
Treasury securities plunged by $53 billion in December, a record
drop. China led the sell-off, reducing its holdings by $34 billion.
The administration has continued to increase the
government's expenditures even while it takes in less revenue -- one
consequence of the Great Recession. To shore up the hole between
the revenue and expenditures, the government has to borrow money, and
foreign nations serve as its lenders through purchases of U.S.
Treasuries. The administration has defended the nation's ability
to service these debts, but it's becoming ever more difficult to believe
its claims. The fact that foreign governments are reducing their
holdings of U.S. debt is a sign that they are paying more attention to
the administration's actions than its words.
Barack Obama's
inability to do anything to stem the tide of the nation's unemployment
problem has forestalled any potential recovery from the recession, and
the government will continue to collect less revenue.
Additionally, his $3.8 trillion budget for fiscal year 2011 has provided
the latest indication that the administration has no plans to curtail
spending on any meaningful level.
Thus, it should come as no
surprise that Obama is losing the confidence of other nations who
justifiably don't believe that the nation's financial house of cards
will be in order anytime soon. China is leading the way.
Premier Wen Jiabao first voiced his concerns over the U.S.'s debt last
March, and the Chinese have been dumping their Treasury securities for
the last five months.
If foreign nations continue to decrease
the amount of money they loan to the government, it will find itself
between a rock and a hard place. It will either be forced to pay a
higher interest rate to borrow money from other nations or it will have
to print the money it needs. If printing money becomes the only
course of action, inflation will ensue, and foreign governments will
find the investments they have made into the U.S. devalued.
It's
difficult to see how Obama continues to tout what a great job he's doing
while he watches his Democratic colleagues in the legislative branch and
foreign governments invested heavily in the U.S. economy, both jump from
his sinking ship. |
| Obama's Recovery Is A Manipulation Of The Facts |
David Limbaugh says when you're president of the United States and
your primary claim to fame is your economic prowess, but your economic
record fails by all objective measures, what do you do? You call
on your skills as a virtuoso propagandist.
With the perceived
catastrophic economic crisis of 2008-09, Barack Obama captured the
presidency at the perfect time in America's modern history for him to
unleash his grandiose socialist policies -- policies so ambitious that
the American people would never have tolerated them under any other
circumstances.
With the nation in near panic over the impending
doom of the economy, Obama presented his now-infamous "stimulus plan" to
artificially create government demand by spending more than $800 billion
of borrowed money to "jump-start the economy."
Being a die-hard
Keynesian, Obama probably believed his program would create jobs.
But given his attitude about the wealthy being undeserving of their good
fortune, he probably wasn't risking too much in the event it didn't
work. The funds would redistribute wealth to those less fortunate
and whom society, in Obama's view, has cheated.
It would also
force allocations of money to "green" enterprises that would never be
pursued if left to the sanity of private-sector consumer demand, further
expand the public sector in general and provide ample slush money to
reward unions and other supporters to shore up his re-election efforts.
According to Keynesian theory, as I understand it, it doesn't matter
much where the government spends other people's money -- just as long as
it spends it.
Continue reading
here |
| Total Devastation |
Jim Hoft
says Obama and the Democrats tripled the national deficit in one
year. They will likely top that this year.
But, it’s even worse then we thought. Barack
Obama’s budget will force the US debt to soar to 90% of the Gross
Domestic Product.
The Washington Times
reports:
Obama’s fiscal 2011 budget will generate nearly
$10 trillion in cumulative budget deficits over the next 10 years,
$1.2 trillion more than the administration projected, and raise the
federal debt to 90 percent of the nation’s economic output by 2020,
the Congressional Budget Office reported Thursday.
In its
2011 budget, which the White House Office of Management and Budget
(OMB) released Feb. 1, the administration projected a 10-year
deficit total of $8.53 trillion. After looking it over, CBO
said in its final analysis, released Thursday, that the president’s
budget would generate a combined $9.75 trillion in deficits over the
next decade.
"An additional $1.2 trillion in debt dumped on
[GDP] to our children makes a huge difference," said Brian Riedl, a
budget analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "That
represents an additional debt of $10,000 per household above and
beyond the federal debt they are already carrying."
|
| Obama Signs Student Gift Program |
Gateway Pundit blog
contends that Obama just made the Student Loan Program a Student
Gift Program (with your money, of course).
Barack Obama tripled
the national deficit his first year in office. It will be larger
this year. But, that won’t stop him from handing out more "free"
money.
Under the Obama’s new plan to bankrupt America, students
will only have to pay 10% of their discretionary income on their student
loan and after 20 years the government will pay the rest off.
Starting July 1st, when the government
issues student loans, it will bypass the banks who have
traditionally provided them, and directly target borrowers.
A
White House press release spells it out this way, "[A]ll new federal
student loans will be direct loans, delivered and collected by
private companies under performance-based contracts with the
Department of Education. According to the non-partisan
Congressional Budget Office, ending these wasteful subsidies will
free up nearly $68 billion for college affordability and deficit
reduction over the next 11 years."
But some in Obama’s own
party say eliminating the middle man also equals eliminating jobs.
But Obama’s focus today will be more about what the bill does
than what it does not.
He will also talk about the
provision’s less controversial expansion of Pell Grants, as well as
supporting historically black and minority institutions and caps on
student loan repayments.
According to the White House, "New
borrowers who assume loans after July 1, 2014, will be able to cap
their student loan repayments at 10 percent of their discretionary
income and, if they keep up with their payments over time, will have
the balance forgiven after 20 years."
From the comments section:
Obama does not read history. The
reason that private companies were managing student loans for the
government was the FRAUD of the 70’s. At that time, with the
government running the loan program, it was actually the
Universities that systematically STOLE, through bureaucratic
methods, billions of dollars.
And, Just an issue of
definitions here. When they say 10% of "Discretionary" income,
are they saying that after I have paid for my housing, food, clothes
to work, car to get to work and my insurance, that I only have to
pay 10% of THAT amount?
Related:
Obama’s student loan takeover adds $52 billion to deficit according to
"Fair Value" accounting, says Congressional Budget Office. |
| The Looming Obama Debt Disaster |
John Hinderaker
asks
is the United States Greece? The short answer is: not yet, but it will
be if the Democrats remain in control in Washington for two more
election cycles.
In the Telegraph, Edmund Conway summarizes a
lengthy report by the International Monetary Fund on sovereign debt that
came out today:
[T]he really interesting stuff is the
detail, and what leaps out again and again is how much of a hill the
US has to climb. Exhibit a is the fact that under the Obama
administration's current fiscal plans, the national debt in the US
(on a gross basis) will climb to above 100pc of GDP by 2015 - a far
steeper increase than almost any other country.
This graphic tells the story. Note what
happened after the Democrats took control of Congress in 2007:
The United Kingdom, despite its rather weak
economy, is in much better shape:
Conway writes:
[T]he US, according to the IMF's
projections, has more to do than any other country in the developed
world (apart from Japan) when it comes to bringing its debt back
towards sustainable levels. Here's the killer table. The
column to look at is on the far right: note how the US needs a 12pc
of GDP chunk chopped out of its structural deficit (ie adjusted for
the economic cycle). That's $1.7 trillion.
The Democrats in Washington are both too stupid and
too ideologically committed to read the writing on the wall. They
are leading the United States over a financial cliff, and they have no
intention of turning back. On the contrary: if they can, they will
hobble our economy further by enacting a carbon tax. There is only
one way to stop them, and to save our children -- from whom greedy,
selfish Washington liberals are borrowing trillions of dollars -- from a
lifetime of debt. The Democrats must be voted out in 2010, and
Barack Obama must be denied a second opportunity to deconstruct the
country that he doesn't much like. |
| Private Pay Shrinks To Historic Lows |
Dennis Cauchon
says paychecks from private business shrank to their smallest share
of personal income in U.S. history during the first quarter of this
year, a USA TODAY analysis of government data finds.
At the same
time, government-provided benefits -- from Social Security, unemployment
insurance, food stamps and other programs -- rose to a record high
during the first three months of 2010.
Those records reflect a
long-term trend accelerated by the recession and the federal stimulus
program to counteract the downturn. The result is a major shift in
the source of personal income from private wages to government programs.
The trend is not sustainable, says University of Michigan economist
Donald Grimes. Reason: The federal government depends on private
wages to generate income taxes to pay for its ever-more-expensive
programs. Government-generated income is taxed at lower rates or
not at all, he says. "This is really important," Grimes says.
The recession has erased 8 million private jobs.
Even before the downturn, private wages were eroding because of the
substitution of health and pension benefits for taxable salaries.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that individuals received
income from all sources -- wages, investments, food stamps, etc. -- at a
$12.2 trillion annual rate in the first quarter.
Key shifts in
income this year:
• Private wages. A record-low
41.9% of the nation's personal income came from private wages and
salaries in the first quarter, down from 44.6% when the recession
began in December 2007.
• Government benefits.
Individuals got 17.9% of their income from government programs in
the first quarter, up from 14.2% when the recession started.
Programs for the elderly, the poor and the unemployed all grew in
cost and importance. An additional 9.8% of personal income was
paid as wages to government employees.
Economist Veronique de Rugy of the free-market
Mercatus Center at George Mason University says the riots in Greece over
cutting benefits to close a huge budget deficit are a warning about
unsustainable income programs.
Economist David Henderson of the
conservative Hoover Institution says a shift from private wages to
government benefits saps the economy of dynamism. "People are paid
for being rather than for producing," he says. |
| Obama Pushes New $80 Billion Stimulus |
NewsMax.com is
reporting that Obama is pushing a new $80 Billion Stimulus, adding
to $1.6 trillion deficit -- that Barack Obama and his aides are stepping
up a push for further government spending to boost the economy as signs
grow of the recovery's fragility.
The White House is calling for
Congress to urgently pass measures to extend jobless benefits, aid
cash-strapped states and provide targeted tax breaks to encourage
research and development by businesses.
Obama's Democratic
allies, facing congressional elections in November, have grown cautious
about additional spending. Seizing on voter anxiety about
deficits, Republicans have cast the administration's policies as
fiscally reckless as they seek to challenge Democratic majorities in
both houses of Congress.
"People are suffering out there.
We want to keep this economy growing faster. We want to see an
acceleration of job creation. And we have to take some steps to
continue in that direction," top White House adviser David Axelrod told
NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday.
His comments came a day after
Obama wrote to congressional leaders, urging them to move swiftly to
approve new measures to "spur job creation and build momentum toward
recovery."
Senate Democrats have introduced legislation that
would renew expiring unemployment benefits, and extend business and
individual tax breaks. They would offset some of the bill's costs
by raising taxes on hedge fund managers and other steps.
The bill
complements one passed in the House of Representatives last month, which
would authorize about $80 billion in new spending and add $31 billion to
the deficit. The cost of the Senate version has not been estimated
yet.
Obama also backs a separate measure that would provide cash
to states to prevent teacher layoffs but a $23 billion version of that
legislation recently failed in the Senate.
"What the president is
saying is, we need to expend additional dollars to make sure that we
don't have significant layoffs," House of Representatives Majority
Leader Steny Hoyer, a Democrat, told ABC's "This Week."
According to
this report,
the money would go to Obama's union and public sector allies to prop up
the Democrats who are nervous about the fall elections. |
| Alfred E. Obama |
David Limbaugh says that Observing Obama's
relentlessly reckless approach to our nation's fiscal integrity is
reminiscent of the signature phrase of Mad magazine's Alfred E. Neuman,
"What, me worry?" Obama struck again last week at the G-20
conference in Toronto, urging other nations to follow his Pied Piper
lead into deficit spending hell.
Unlike recent U.S. presidents
who recognized and touted this nation as the world's exemplar for
economic growth and prosperity, Obama is turning us into a poster nation
for financial irresponsibility. While other nations at the meeting
were focusing on deficit reduction, Obama was haplessly urging them to
join us in Keynesian spending oblivion.
He told the conference
that global economic recovery remains "fragile" and implored the
nations' leaders to continue deficit spending to sustain the "recovery."
The Washington Post reports that Obama's remarks "tempered the Group of
20's headline achievement at the summit, a deficit-reduction target that
had been pushed by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the host of
the meeting and a fiscal conservative."
Obama is wholly
impervious to the historical record documenting the failure of FDR's
pump priming during the Depression, which exacerbated rather than
ameliorated the economic problems. He is similarly detached from
reality concerning the failure of his own policies to stimulate growth
of any kind to save his beloved public sector and thus recommends more
of the same.
In speech after speech, he takes credit for having
launched an economic recovery in the United States and for achieving job
growth. Notwithstanding his economic models that stubbornly
predict such results, he can point to no empirical evidence to verify
his delusional boasts.
It would be bad enough if his economic
policies were simply retarding our economic recovery, but they are also
accelerating our trip to national bankruptcy. Yet Obama continues
to press forward with his foot smashed down on the gas pedal.
Continue reading
here . . . |
| Another Crisis To Not Waste |
Paul Mirengoff
says
there is rising fear that our economy is headed for a "double-dip"
recession due to a slowdown in China, concern over the strength of the
European banking system, and diminishing consumer confidence here in the
U.S. The drop in consumer confidence is quite remarkable.
The Conference Board's index showed a decline from 62.7 percent in May
to 52.9 percent in June. Experts had expected no change.
Confidence could fall even more when the June jobs report is issued on
Friday. Forecasters expect the jobless rate to remain at 9.7
percent.
To understand how devastating a double dip recession
would be, we need only consider the consequences of the original dip,
which destroyed 20 percent of Americans' wealth. A Pew Research
Center survey shows that four in ten Americans have had to tap savings
and retirement accounts to make ends meet. Almost a quarter of
Americans had to borrow money from someone. One in ten, including
24 percent of those between the ages of 18 to 29 years old, moved back
in with their parents.
As for parents, 35 percent of those 62 and
older who are still working say they have postponed retirement.
Six in 10 working adults between ages 50 and 61 say they may be forced
to do the same.
But at least in the event of a second dip, we
won't have to listen to Europeans and their admirers among the American
left tell us how reckless the U.S. is compared to its betters abroad.
And perhaps Thomas Friedman will keep his admiration for the Red Chinese
to himself for a while.
As for the domestic political
consequences of a double-dip recession, they hardly require elaboration.
I haven't wanted to look ahead to the 2012 election; the one this fall
consumes all the energy I'm able to devote to horse race politics.
But another economic hit might well leave the Obama presidency on life
support.
This would be true of any modern presidency, I think.
But it seems to me that Obama has left himself particularly vulnerable.
The Pew study mentioned above shows that more than half of American
adults responded to the recession by whittling down their mortgages,
credit card balances, car loans and other borrowing. Nearly half
say they plan to save more and third say they plan to spend less.
But the Obama administration, in its quest to not let the crisis go
to waste, responded in precisely the opposite way. Rather than
sacrificing by keeping spending under control, Obama has splurged, first
through the wasteful stimulus bill and then though an unpopular health
care bill that few believe is fiscally sound.
Obama, in sum, is
completely out-of-step with America on the matter most important to
Americans. Many will likely forgive and forget if the economic
outlook brightens substantially. But right now that looks like a
big" if." |
| No One's Capital Is Safe In Obama's America |
Claude Sandroff says Obama's poorly coded
message to investors is to take your money out of America and keep it
out. Whether through excessive taxation, suffocating
over-regulation, or thuggish confiscation, the lesson to be drawn by
anyone with excess capital is to look for friendlier places to put it to
work.
The list of friendlier places excludes North Korea,
Venezuela, and Iran for the time being, but almost everywhere else
qualifies. Russia's president spent several days in Silicon Valley
recently looking for adventurous investors and came away with a $1B
commitment from Cisco Systems. For Cisco, sitting on a cash hoard
of $30B, with years of experience partnering with the burgeoning Russian
venture capital industry, the decision was probably not a very tortured
one. And what a perfect opportunity for Cisco's CEO John Chambers
to keep his cash as far from Obama's collection agencies as possible.
President Medvedev promises Cisco a capital gains tax rate of
zero; Obama promises to retire the evil George Bush capital gains rate
of 15% and increase it to 20% in 2011. Cisco is merely telecasting
to anyone who wants to tune in that Russia is taking advantage of
Obama's lurch towards socialism (or worse). While Russia is
portraying itself as a stable bastion for capitalists, America is
increasingly seen as the land that mauled Chrysler and GM bondholders.
While erstwhile command economies are liberalizing, America under Obama
is nationalizing. The lesson is clear: Don't leave cash within the
American financial system, earning minimal returns, with the fear that
at any moment your assets can be confiscated or redistributed by a
lawless and capricious federal government.
When will Obama
decide that Cisco (or Wal-Mart, or Apple, or Google, or any other
successful enterprise) is not paying its "fair share"? Aren't the
profit margins earned by Cisco on its routers -- sometimes approaching
70% -- too rich, or even obscene? Aren't these gains, in essence,
nothing but windfall profits resulting in the eventual gouging of the
average American internet subscriber? Cisco might not drill in the
Gulf of Mexico for its profits, but man-made disasters could await it
too, in the form of arbitrary, BP-like shakedowns of its hard-earned
wealth. Why risk shakedowns in gangland Obama when a much more
competent criminal like Putin will guarantee your investments?
Cisco is not the only company sitting on a gigantic cash cushion.
All told, the balance sheet cash for the non-financial segment of the
S&P 500 totals around $1 trillion. Businesses sit on these huge
asset cushions and accept earning virtually nothing in real terms
because risks are too high to consider anything else.
In 2011,
one of the largest tax increases in American history goes into effect.
Not only do capital gains rise, but so too does the payroll tax, the
income tax, and the estate tax. And even then, businesses large
and small, while in their final financial death throes, will have
nothing to look forward to other than the doom of ObamaCare and the
unknown costs that Obama will attempt to afflict via cap-and-trade and a
European-style value-added tax.
Continue reading
here . . . |
| The Humbling Of Obama |
Peter Wehner says, my, how the mighty have
fallen.
In a speech in Wisconsin yesterday, Obama, promoting the
"merits" of his stimulus bill, said this:
Now, every economist
who’s looked at it said that the Recovery [Act] did its job. … The
problem is, number one, it’s hard to argue sometimes, "Things would have
been a lot worse." Right? So people kind of say, "Yeah, but
unemployment’s still at 9.6 percent." Yes, but it’s not 12 or 13
or 15. People say, "Well, you know, the stock market didn’t fully
recover." Yeah, but it’s recovered more than people expected last
year. So part of the challenge in delivering this message about
all the Recovery Act accomplished is that things are still tough, they
just aren’t as bad as they could have been. They could have been a
catastrophe. In that sense [the stimulus] worked.
There is
a lot to say in response, starting with the fact that some of these
statements are flatly untrue. It is simply not correct that "every
economist" who has looked at the stimulus bill says it did its job.
In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, for example -- on the very day Obama
claimed universal support among economists for his stimulus package --
Allan Meltzer, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University,
began his op-ed this way: "The administration’ s stimulus program has
failed." There are even Keynesian economists, like Harvard’s
Jeffrey Sachs, who are critical of the Recovery Act.
But the
problem for Obama goes deeper than simply this false claim. The
Obama administration itself said that if the Recovery Act passed,
unemployment would not exceed 8 percent. In fact, unemployment has
exceeded what the Obama administration said would happen were the
stimulus bill not passed. Obama is the one who set the standard --
and he’s now rightfully being held to it.
Beyond even that,
though, it is interesting to see how much reality has humbled Obama.
He came into office not only promising to create jobs, restore
prosperity, open doors of opportunity, cut health-care costs, and reduce
our "mounting debt" but also to end divisions in our politics, transcend
partisanship, put an end to the blame game, provide unprecedented
transparency, stop the rise of the oceans, and heal the planet.
Those were his words, his claims, his commitments. And now he has
been reduced to saying: "Things are still tough; they just aren’t as bad
as they could have been." His strongest case in his defense is
that unemployment is almost 10 percent -- but it’s not 12 or 13 or 15
percent.
Talk about defining success down.
Continue
reading
here . . . |
| Obama Administration Oozes Arrogance |
NewsMax.com says the Obama administration grows
more arrogant, cavalier, and fundamentally dishonest every day. In
just the past few days, we've seen a number of troubling examples.
Frankly, sometimes it's hard to keep up.
During a speech in
Racine, Wis., Obama bragged about how wonderful the terrible economy is.
You'll recall that during both of President George W. Bush's terms,
Democrats, including Obama, castigated him for destroying the economy,
despite the existence of empirically verifiable robust growth during
seven of those eight years.
Now that Obama has been in office for
a year and a half and his economy is failing by all objective measures,
he and his Democrats demand, once again, that we ignore the empirical
evidence in front of our faces and bow down to them in reverent
gratitude for ensuring that things are not worse than they are.
Everyone knows Obama promised -- he was hardly tentative about his
prediction -- that if the nation followed him over the cliff with his
harebrained "stimulus" scheme, unemployment would not exceed 8 percent.
When unemployment soared above 10 percent, he insisted that we be
patient to allow his plan to work. Now that it stubbornly remains
in the high 9s, he tells us that if he hadn't implemented his stimulus
bill, the economy would be much worse (12 percent or 13 percent or 15
percent), so we not only are forbidden from criticizing him for this
disaster but also must genuflect because only three of the four wheels
of the economy are teetering over the edge of the cliff.
He said,
"There may be some roads that not only were repaired but also were . . .
linked up to create a new industrial park that would facilitate
long-term economic development beyond this immediate crisis."
Can
you imagine the reaction of the liberal media had a Republican president
uttered such gibberish? There "may be some roads"? How's
that for a non-statement? That were linked up to a new industrial
park to facilitate long-term growth? How about some facts here,
Mr. Intellectual? Then again, how can you blame him for citing
nebulous "facts" and failed economic theory when neither the real facts
nor the economic evidence substantiates his claims.
Continue
reading
here . . . |
| Obama Announces Billions For Bogus Jobs |
The Daily Caller is
reporting that Obama
announced that -- in the name of bringing "jobs back to the country" --
the Department of Energy has awarded $2 billion dollars to two energy
companies.
Abengoa Solar and Abound Solar Manufacturing will use
the money to create some of the world’s most advanced and largest solar
panels and plants, Obama said.
In all, though, the billions are
expected to buy just 5,000 jobs, meaning that each position will likely
end up costing the federal government upwards of $392,000 per job.
Of those 5,000 jobs, the majority are expected to be temporary positions
in fields like construction -- only
1500 of them will be permanent..
Observers -- including blogger Ed
Morrissey -- have
pointed out that, even if the employees were taxed
heavily and their jobs generated significant tax revenue, Obama’s
initiative would likely not pay for itself for over fifty years.
During his address to the nation weeks after the explosion at the
Deepwater Horizon oil rig, Obama made a push for clean energy and
discussed its importance in the wake of the disaster. |
| The Obama Economy Is Purposeful Disaster |
Rush Limbaugh: At Andrews Air
Force Base today, President Obama cast his state of the economy in
upbeat terms and we're working right now on an audio sound bite from
last November of me reacting to Obama, basically saying identically
word-for-word what he said today about the economy. It's pretty
illustrative. "To every American who's looking for work, I promise
you we're going to keep on doing everything we can. I'll do
everything in my power to help our economy create jobs and opportunities
for all people."
So he's talking to you personally, whatever you
are, wherever you are. Then Pelosi's out there saying the best job
creation job we've got is unemployment benefits. It doesn't make
sense. It doesn't make sense in any way, shape, manner, or form,
but that's what she's out there saying. You know, we got the jobs
number today. Unemployment fell from 9.7% to 9.5%, but the reason
is that 652,000 people dropped out of the workforce. So there's a
smaller universe of people who are counted; 652,000 people dropped out.
They're not even looking for work anymore. It is a disaster.
It is an unmitigated disaster, the employment circumstances and the
economy overall. The numbers are all bent. They're rigged
and spun.
The keystone, I think, is to look at this year to
year, from last June to this June. U3 is the official unemployment
rate. U6 is where they count those 652,000 (heh, heh) who have
given up work as unemployed. That's what takes the real
unemployment rate up to around 18%. But the reported unemployment
rate June of 2010 is 9.5%. The official unemployment rate in June
of 2009 was 9.5%. U6, the real unemployment rate, in June 2010 is
16.5%. In June 2009 it was 16.5%. You will hear more
spinners telling you how good or bad the figures are but the essential
reality is that from last June to this June, a one-year arc of the
almost trillion-dollar spending, there hasn't been any change. The
bottom line is zero change. Probably it's gotten worse because of
all the people who have dropped out no longer working are even looking
for work.
You know, I think we need to change the terms. They
call this "U3" and "U6" for unemployment three, unemployment six.
The government needs to change the titles. "FU3" and "FU6" because this
is essentially what they have done to us. The FU3 unemployment
rate. And the worst unemployment news is not even in the report.
You know what the worst unemployment news is? Obama is still
employed! Geithner is still employed. Bite Me is still
employed. That's what's wrong with the unemployment numbers.
Obama is not among them. Vice President Bite Me is not among them.
Pelosi is not among them. Dingy Harry is not among the unemployed
(but that will happen soon). Geithner is not among them.
Everybody's talking about what a surprise it was to see these numbers go
down like this. No. In fact, the Drive-Bys are not even
trying to spin this in a positive way. They know they can't.
They're not trying to say, "This is a fizzling recovery. We're
putting a little dent in it here." The fastest way to create jobs,
as I just said, is to get rid of Democrats in November. It's to
add their names to the unemployment rolls.
Continue reading
here . . . |
| Barack Obama: The Great Jobs Killer |
Wayne Allen Root says, to paraphrase former
President Ronald Reagan, "Obama, there you go again."
The current
occupant of the White House claims to know how to create jobs. He
claims jobs have been created. But so far the score is Great Obama
Depression 2.2 million lost jobs, Obama 0 -- a blowout.
Obama is
as hopeless, helpless, clueless and bankrupt of good ideas as the
manager of the Chicago Cubs in late September. This "community
organizer" knows as much about private-sector jobs as Pamela Anderson
knows about nuclear physics.
It's time to call Obama what he is:
The Great Jobs Killer. With his massive spending and tax hikes --
rewarding big government and big unions, while punishing taxpayers and
business owners -- Obama has killed jobs, he has killed motivation to
create new jobs, he has killed the motivation to invest in new
businesses, or expand old ones. With all this killing, Obama
should be given the top spot on the FBI's Most Wanted List.
Meanwhile, he has kept the union workers of GM and Chrysler employed
(with taxpayer money). He has made sure that most government
employee union members got their annual raises for sleeping on the job
(with taxpayer money). He made sure that his voters got handouts
mislabeled as "tax cuts" even though they never paid taxes (with
taxpayer money). And he made sure that major campaign contributors
collected billions off government stimulus (with taxpayer money).
As far as the taxpayers -- the people who actually take risks with
our own money to create small businesses and jobs and pay most of the
taxes -- we require protection under the Endangered Species Act.
So who is going to pay Obama's taxes? Not his voters. They
want government to pay them. Who is going to create Obama's jobs?
Not his voters -- they've never created a job in their lives.
Continue reading
here . . . |
| Like A Cancer From Within |
NewsMax.com is reporting that the leaders of
Obama’s own debt commission say that his administration cannot tax and
spend their way out of our economic problems. At present,
available federal revenues are fully consumed by just three programs:
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The rest of the federal
government is being financed by China and other nations.
The
heads of Obama's national debt commission painted a gloomy picture
Sunday as the United States struggles to get its spending under control.
Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles told a meeting
of the National Governors Association that everything needs to be
considered -- including curtailing popular tax breaks, such as the home
mortgage deduction, and instituting a financial trigger mechanism for
gaining Medicare coverage.
The nation's total federal debt next
year is expected to exceed $14 trillion -- about $47,000 for every U.S.
resident.
"This debt is like a cancer," Bowles said in a sober
presentation nonetheless lightened by humorous asides between him and
Simpson. "It is truly going to destroy the country from within."
Simpson said the entirety of the nation's current discretionary
spending is consumed by the Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security
programs.
"The rest of the federal government, including fighting
two wars, homeland security, education, art, culture, you name it,
veterans, the whole rest of the discretionary budget, is being financed
by China and other countries," said Simpson. China alone currently
holds $920 billion in U.S. IOUs.
Bowles said if the U.S. makes no
changes it will be spending $2 trillion by 2020 just for interest on the
national debt.
"Just think about that: All that money, going
somewhere else, to create jobs and opportunity somewhere else," he said.
Continue reading
here . . . |
| |
©
Copyright Beckwith 2010
All right reserved
|
