.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
American Political Orphan
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!" Patrick Henry
he first seven months of the Obama administration seemingly make no sense. Why squander public approval by running up astronomical deficits in a time of pre-existing staggering national debt?
Why polarize opponents after promising bipartisan transcendence?
Why create vast new programs when the efficacy of big government is already seen as dubious?
But that is exactly the wrong way to look at these first seven months of Obamist policy-making.
Take increased federal spending and the growing government absorption of GDP. Given the resiliency of the U.S. economy, it would have been easy to ride out the recession. In that case we would still have had to deal with a burgeoning and unsustainable annual federal deficit that would have approached $1 trillion.
Instead, Obama may nearly double that amount of annual indebtedness with more federal stimuli and bailouts, newly envisioned cap-and-trade legislation, and a variety of fresh entitlements. Was that fiscally irresponsible? Yes, of course.
But I think the key was not so much the spending excess or new entitlements. The point instead was the consequence of the resulting deficits, which will require radically new taxation for generations. If on April 15 the federal and state governments, local entities, the Social Security system, and the new health-care programs can claim 70 percent of the income of the top 5 percent of taxpayers, then that is considered a public good — every bit as valuable as funding new programs, and one worth risking insolvency.
A high income is now rationalized as having less to do with market-driven needs, acquired skills, a higher level of education, innate intelligence, inheritance, hard work, or accepting risk. Rather income is seen more as luck-driven, cruelly capricious, unfair — even immoral, in that some are rewarded arbitrarily on the basis of race, class, and gender advantages, others for their overweening greed and ambition, and still more for their quasi-criminality.
Read the rest here, Victor Davis Hanson has the best explanation of the Obama agenda so far.
‘When times are tough, you tighten your belts,’ the president said. ‘You don’t go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage. You don’t blow a bunch of cash on Vegas when you’re trying to save for college.’
President Obama
Likewise, Mr. President, you can’t keep running up trillion dollar deficits when you can barely service the interest on the debt we already owe.
Where’s the belt tightening at the Federal Government Level?
Organized labor may be putting their dollars behind an online effort to take down Tea Party groups and their “radical ideas.”
A new Web site, TheTeaPartyIsOver.org, has connections to unions, including the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
The American Public Policy Committee pays for the site, whose self-declared mission is to “prevent the Tea Party’s dangerous ideas from gaining legislative traction.”
The Tea Party Movement’s idea of lower taxes and smaller government doesn’t sit well with unions. Especially the unions that represents government employees.
Somehow the principles of our Founding Fathers have become ‘radical ideas.’
It’s amazing how the ‘statists’ want to portray our country’s founding principals as radical.
The idea of secret banking cabals that control the country and global economy are a given among conspiracy theorists who stockpile ammo, bottled water and peanut butter. After this week’s congressional hearing into the bailout of American International Group Inc., you have to wonder if those folks are crazy after all.
Wednesday’s hearing described a secretive group deploying billions of dollars to favored banks, operating with little oversight by the public or elected officials.
We’re talking about the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose role as the most influential part of the federal-reserve system—apart from the matter of AIG’s bailout—deserves further congressional scrutiny.
Yet when unelected and unaccountable agencies pick banking winners while trying to end-run Congress, even as taxpayers are forced to lend, spend and guarantee about $8 trillion to prop up the financial system, our collective blood should boil.
Heck of a business model. AIG takes huge risks and when thing are good they take their profit. When things go bad they are ‘too big to fail’ and get bailed out by the American taxpayer.
As Reilly says ‘our collective blood should boil.’
NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the moon are dead. So are the rockets being designed to take them there — that is, if President Barack Obama gets his way.
When the White House releases his budget proposal Monday, there will be no money for the Constellation program that was supposed to return humans to the moon by 2020. The troubled and expensive Ares I rocket that was to replace the space shuttle to ferry humans to space will be gone, along with money for its bigger brother, the Ares V cargo rocket that was to launch the fuel and supplies needed to take humans back to the moon.
There will be no lunar landers, no moon bases, no Constellation program at all.
There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.
The U.S. Treasury and Labor Departments will ask for public comment as soon as next week on ways to promote the conversion of 401(k) savings and Individual Retirement Accounts into annuities or other steady payment streams, according to Assistant Labor Secretary Phyllis C. Borzi and Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary Mark Iwry, who are leading the effort.
According to the article, as of mid 2009 there was 3.6 trillion dollars in IRAs and 401(k)s. Thats a tempting sum to the Obama Administration and the Democrats when they are pilling up an unsustanable level of debt. They want to sieze it and convert it to annuities so that retires will receive “steady payment streams.”
Let me tell you what this is - it is an attempt to prevent the collapse of the Treasury market!
Forcing people into Treasuries as an “annuity” is exactly what Social Security allegedly is. Except that Treasury stole the money that was collected in FICA taxes and spent it!
Guess what? They’ll do that here too - you’re going to “invest” in Treasuries which of course are effectively a CALL option on the future taxing ability of the government.
Let’s see if I understand this. The government takes your IRA / 401(k) and gives you an IOU. Then they pay you back in inflated dollars in equal monthly payments until you die. Haven’t they done this already with the generational ponzi scheme called Social Security? I wonder if they have hired Bernie Madoff as a consultant?
The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be filled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome be bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.
The United States Supreme Courts upholds the intent of the Founding Fathers and rules against the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance law. The Cato Institute explains it well.
The Democrats are railing against the decision as ‘Judicial Activism.’ Barack Obama, who seems to hold the Constitution of the United States in contempt said, he would ‘work immediately’ to develop a ‘forceful response.’
This is a major victory for free speech and the lefties hate it.
The Republican victory in Massachusetts has sent a wave of fear through the halls of the Senate, with moderate and liberal Democrats second-guessing their party’s agenda — and worrying that they’ll be the next victims of voters’ anger.
When you force your will on the American people and rule against their wishes you will pay the price.
Be cautious America, the Democrats will change and make you think they have reformed. Don’t be fooled. They will do anything to get re-elected. My guess is they under-estimated the reaction of the American people. Now they will find out what it is like to receive their wrath.
Sarah Palin will announce today that she’s hitting the campaign trail for Republicans—including her former running mate John McCain.
John McCain calls himself a maverick but I have another word for him - RINO (Republican in name only). As much as I like Sarah Palin, Sarah should remember how McCain’s staff treated her and tell McSame to take a hike.
Come on Sarah, what are you thinking? John McCain represents everything that is wrong with Washington DC. He needs to go!
But Obama’s problems are more than a question of style. There is doubt aroused on substance. He sets deadlines and then lets too many pass. He announces a strategic review of Afghanistan, describing it as “a war of necessity,” only to become less sure to the point that he didn’t even seem committed to the policy that he finally announced. As for changing politics in Washington, he assigned the drafting of central legislative programs not to cabinet departments or White House staff but to the Democratic congressional leadership of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the very people so mistrusted by the public. Who could be surprised that the critical bills—the stimulus program and healthcare—degenerated under a welter of pork and earmarks that had so outraged the American public in the past?
U.S. investors overwhelmingly see President Barack Obama as anti-business and question his ability to manage a financial crisis, according to a Bloomberg survey.
The global quarterly poll of investors and analysts who are Bloomberg subscribers finds that 77 percent of U.S. respondents believe Obama is too anti-business and four-out-of-five are only somewhat confident or not confident of his ability to handle a financial emergency.
The poll also finds a decline in Obama’s overall favorability rating one year after taking office. He is viewed favorably by 27 percent of U.S. investors. In an October poll, 32 percent in the U.S. held a positive impression.
As the Obama administration marks its first birthday, there is no reason to shop around for the perfect present. What President Barack Obama needs most is obvious: a new political strategy
How’s that hope and change thing working out for ya?
Democrat leaders are now talking about actually bringing legislation that will raise our debt limit by $1.9 trillion. But we are told by the same Democratic leadership that they are going to get serious in 2010 about fiscal discipline. I guess along those lines, President Obama is expected to announce a bipartisan commission that will look for ways to reduce deficits in the future. Sounds like an appealing idea, but the devil’s always in the details in Washington, D.C.
The president’s commission, on close examination, actually looks like a guard dog with no bite. Looks like fiscal discipline but it could easily be ignored by Congress. Remarkably, the president’s proposal, as I have heard about it, is prohibited from recommending cuts in any discretionary spending. That will be about $1.4 trillion, and the ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ that’s completely off limits. And as many of us know, with the partisan bias and the structure of it, as reported, it’s likely this commission would just be an excuse to raise taxes.
Rep. Mike Pence R-Indiana
Typical of the Obama Administration, a presidential commission to reduce future deficits but prohibited from recommending cuts in discretionary spending.
Obama, all talk and nothing to show for it. Typical! Just typical!
The Democrat and Republican Party have lost touch with the American People. They have become the political elite and We the People have become "fly-over country." I am not a Nazi, a terrorist, a member of the KKK, a racist, or a member of an angry mob. I'm not a birther, teabagger, truther or astroturfer. I do, however believe in the original intent of the Founding Fathers, the United States Constituton and the rule of law. I believe that Government should serve the People, not the other way around. I’m an American and conservative to my very core.
