As they sit in the warm sun and listen to the celebrity speakers tell them about their bright future a grim reality will set in once the graduation cakes are cut and consumed.

The reality is that, particularly on Long Island, the job outlook is bleak, affordable housing is out of reach, our elected leaders are clueless and whatever opportunity can be found will be found in other parts of the country.

While some of us fight to cut the government leviathan down to size so that is doesn’t suck up the resources that productive people are better suited to employ, those in office are fighting for their own survival and will stop at nothing to hold onto office.

College Loans

As someone paying for their children’s college education, I don’t like paying any more than I have to, but the focus on holding interest rates constant is misguided. College graduates need jobs, not more debt. President Obama and local representatives like Tim Bishop already have piled up enormous debt that our children and grandchildren will have to pay back. Making it more affordable to take on more debt is not a winning strategy. Congressman Bishop used to run a local college, Southampton, that had to be bailed out via a purchase by Stony Brook University. As Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Bishop Touts Highway Bill

On his website Tim Bishop boasts about his support for the two-year transportation bill. While keeping our roads in good repair is important, a closer reading of what Mr. Bishop says is revealing. The highway bill, “would create or sustain 113,300 construction jobs in New York alone: 61,100 in highway construction and 52,200 in mass transit construction, according to the US Department of Transportation.” There it is: “create or sustain.” Well, Congressman, which one is it? How many jobs will be created and how many will be sustained? Any economist, and almost anyone else for that matter, can count a new job. After all, there is a bit of paperwork associated with filling a new job, W-4 forms, I-9 forms, etc. But there isn’t a soul who can count a job sustained.

Created vs. Sustained

Why is that important that we know the difference? Because if you recall with the great stimulus bill, in Tim Bishop’s district, $105 million dollars was spent on school districts to create seven new jobs. In that case the teacher’s union, a big Bishop supporter, got a lot of money and our children and grandchildren got the bill. So how many new jobs will the transportation bill create? We also know that those highway jobs are heavily unionized and the unions back Bishop. Coincidence?

Perhaps another reason Bishop doesn’t want to say how many jobs will be created  is that he could be held accountable. Remember how that pesky promise to keep unemployment below 8% if we gave Obama nearly a trillion dollars blew up in his face?

A Coherent Policy?

On the one hand Bishop is pushing to drive more people into going to college whether they can afford it or not or whether they belong there or not. On the other hand he is pushing spending on construction jobs. How many of our college graduates are going to take those construction jobs? It’s more government spending coming and going. No spending cuts, just more spending, more debt, kick the can down the road.

What we need is less government and more entrepreneurs; less taxes sucking resources out of the economy and more investors putting money where it will generate the most returns; the realization that college isn’t for everyone and we need skilled blue-collar workers who can operate computerized machines in our factories; lower energy costs so that we can afford to actually run factories. We need to unleash the imagination and brainpower of hundreds of millions of Americans in the private sector and not count on bureaucrats picking and choosing winners and losers based on their left-wing ideology.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

President Obama has been on the stump trying to cobble together a coalition that will help keep him in the White House. It matters little what damage his actions might do to America, he has bigger plans and needs more “flexibility” to get them done.

On college campuses he is trying to gin up support by making the interest rate on college loans a campaign issue. The issue is government subsidized Stafford loans. He wants to freeze the current interest rates at 3.4% and he wants the Republicans to fight him on this so that he can create another class warfare wedge issue.

Where have we seen something like this before? Wasn’t the government’s heavy involvement in housing, pushing for everyone to be a homeowner that led to the housing bubble? When that bubble burst, all hell broke loose with it and Obama was able to ride the gush of air into the White House.

Think about the growing debt being accumulated by college students and think about their job prospects in the Obama economy. It is not a pretty picture. What happens if those students upon graduating say, “I can’t find a decent job. I have been duped. I’m not paying back my student loans.” What do you do? Jail them?

Now if interest rates climb, the economic effect will be to curtail borrowing, that is, the old price, supply and demand thing. But if interest rates are kept low, then the demand for more debt will not be curtailed. If the demand for more debt is not curtailed the bubble grows. Four more years of Obama managing the economy will not be a boon to jobs. If we haven’t figured that out yet, we better start studying quickly. There’s a big test coming in November.

I fully appreciate the college financing issue. But the education model is broken. Colleges seem to raise tuition in lock step with increases in government aid, so no progress is made. Colleges also seem to be afraid of not attracting enough students so they fill their course catalogs with nonsense courses that will interest no employer. The amount of debt piling up is frightening, but hey, we have a president to reelect. We’ll fix that later; just like Social Security, Medicare, budget deficits…

The Republicans are right to at least demand cuts in spending elsewhere to pay for this. They know the problem won’t get fixed or even addressed with Obama at the helm. We have to hang on for another six or seven months to cancel Obama’s contract and then prepare to roll up our sleeves and undo the damage he has done.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

I just got my latest e-mail update from Congressman Tim Bishop and one cannot help but just shake his head. He leads off by mentioning his bogus survey, and tells the reader how (surprise!) people are concerned about taxes. Of course that is when Tim Bishop loses his way again.

You see Tim Bishop is a big supporter of the payroll tax cut. He is also a big supporter of big spending and big government. So let’s examine this closely. What is the purpose of the payroll tax? In the structure of the great Ponzi scheme that it is, the payroll tax goes to fund Social Security checks and Medicare. So a payroll tax takes away revenue from these programs. To put it another way, Tim Bishop is saying, “Let’s raid the piggy bank of today’s retirees and hand the bill to our children and grand children.” They will have to pay more than they did before because not only must they support the baby boomers who are now retiring they will have to make up the shortfall from this cut in funding. Tim Bishop is actually bragging about this.

Class Warfare

He then goes into the class warfare riff, about how nobody likes to pay taxes, that Republicans want to balance the budget on the backs of middle class taxpayers, etc. Okay, let’s talk about fairness. How fair is it that 47% of income earners pay no income tax? How politically dangerous would it be if that number increases to greater than 50%, such that the majority of voters pay no taxes, but the minority is demanded to pay more? Is that fair? Is that America?

“That is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest.” – James Madison, March 29, 1792, Essay on Property

But who do you want to believe? James Madison, the father of the Constitution, or Tim Bishop? It is income taxes, not payroll taxes, that go to the funding of the federal government. Tim Bishop attacks any curtailment of income taxes but makes not a peep about curtailment of runaway spending. No, we need to spend more on Solyndra, on bailouts, on Fannie and Freddie, on the Department of Education! We need to tax, tax, tax, he says.

He then attacks the Ryan budget. This is from a man whose party has not passed a budget, as required by law, in the Senate in nearly three years. This is from a man whose party leader, the president, has seen his budget go down in  a Democrat controlled senate 97-0, and he attacks Paul Ryan’s plan? What’s Tim Bishop’s plan? Oh, that’s right, stop the outsourcing of call centers overseas. That will get the economy humming.

He specifically attacks broadening the tax base.

“Base-broadening” is a Washington term for eliminating some of the credits and deductions that help middle-class families own a home, send their children to college, and afford healthcare.

No, Tim, broadening the tax base means getting more people into the workforce as taxpayers. Get it? Broadening the base, not squeezing more out of it. After squandering nearly a trillion dollars on the stimulus that promised us unemployment would not rise above 8%, it has not been below 8% since then. That is the worst record since the Great Depression, but of course that was all Bush’s fault.

It’s time to realize the hope and change experiment is over. It is time to get back to the principles of the founders which make this country great for over two centuries. It’s time to get rid of the politicians who keep throwing sand in the gears in the form of mountains of regulations. It is time to shrink government back to where it protected our rights and liberties rather than took them away to substitute them with the collective wisdom of politicians like Tim Bishop.

Tim Bishop says we need more spending, more stimulus, more debt, no solutions. I say, no more. 2012, the end of an error.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

We know that Tim Bishop hates outsourcing. He has gone so far as to introduce new legislation to prevent outsourcing of call center jobs. Tim Bishop may be a very big oursourcer himself.

Tim Bishop supported the auto bailout of GM and Chrysler with tax dollars. Chrysler is now owned by Fiat, an Italian automaker. That means that all Chrysler employees who are not employed in Italy, are by Tim Bishop’s definition, outsourced. If he is consistent with his beliefs he should demand that all Chrysler jobs be relocated to Italy, so that this invidious outsourcing is stopped.

GM, the other half of the auto bailout Bishop voted for, although still an American company took taxpayer dollars and then increased the amount of automobile production overseas by 35%. More outsourcing.

So, Tim Bishop is outraged by the amount of outsourcing going on by private companies, but he doesn’t seem to have a problem taking your money through taxes and outsourcing jobs as long as a big union, such as the United Auto Workers, is in favor of it. If a union like the Communications Workers of America complains about call center jobs being outsourced it’s an outrage, and Tim Bishop takes umbrage with that and introduces legislation to stop it. If another union, the United Auto Workers, begs the Obama administration to bail them out even if it means outsourcing more jobs, Tim Bishop blithely goes along.

So, which is it Tim? Is outsourcing good or is outsourcing bad? Or do you just not have a clue? Don’t answer that until you hear from Nancy Pelosi, President Obama, the CWA, the UAW, United Federation of Teachers or whomever else does your economic thinking for you.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

President Barack Obama has a new budget. So it’s time to suspend reality and listen and nod your head and pine for four more years.

President Obama promised in 2009 to halve the deficit by the end of his first term. The last fiscal year budget deficit under Bush was $482 billion. In the four years of Obama’s first term it has yet to be less than $1 trillion. As former New York City Mayor Ed Koch used to asks his constituents, “How’m I doing?”

So while Obama’s new budget promises another trillion plus deficit, but don’t worry he will cut $4 trillion in spending over the next ten years. Never mind that even if he is reelected 60% of that timeline is beyond his control. It should also be pointed out that $4 trillion over ten years is only $400 billion a year, which leaves another $600 billion to be added to the national debt each year.

If that is not smoke and mirrors enough, that $4 trillion includes $1.5 trillion in tax increases. Why does this president and his backers insist that we have to take more money from the production of America’s citizens to cover his spending, rather than cutting his spending to fit within the available revenues?

For his first two years in office he worked with a Democrat controlled Congress. He got everything he asked for and everything is worse. We have staggering debt despite his promises to cut the deficit in half, unemployment worse than when he took office despite his promises to that his stimulus would cap unemployment at 8%, we have ObamaCare striking right at the heart of the First Amendment and he basically says, “get over it.”

Enough is enough. The experiment failed. It is time to cut this man loose and start working to repair the enormous damage he has done.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

Rick Perry at CPAC 2012

At CPAC this week, Rick Perry visited the Blogger Lounge and while there spoke briefly about the Keystone Pipeline.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOJmJklM_po

While President Obama is planning on raising taxes and spending another trillion dollars more than the government takes in for yet another feeble attempt at a government led job recovery, private industry jobs are ready to go, but he has killed it and China stands to benefit. Sure he will tell us that he is only delaying the decision until after the election to give time to study the issue in greater detail.

Similarly, he is bragging now about opening more acreage to oil drilling after he put a moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, waiting until the oil rigs sailed into the sunset in search of more favorable countries, so now he can blame the oil companies for not drilling.

But getting back to the Keystone Pipeline, the argument of the environmentalists is that this pipeline will jeopardize a large drinking water aquifer in the mid-west. But this map proves otherwise.

Ogallala Aquifer Map

If you click on the link to enlarge the map you will see that the Ogallala Aquifer is already criss-crossed with many pipelines today and that the proposed Keystone Pipeline passes over the upper corner of the aquifer but otherwise goes around it.

This is purely Obama desperately trying to hold some kind of coalition together. But as in the recent battle with the Catholic Church over ObamaCare and contraception, he has supporters on both sides of the issue, a no-win situation. In this case it is the environmentalists on one side and union construction workers on the other. He continues to build upon his record and that record is a disaster for America.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

At CPAC Marco Rubio showed some of the traits that make him a leading candidate for Vice President no matter who the Republican nominee happens to be. He mixed humor and personal narrative.

Rubio spoke with a degree of awe about arriving in the Senate. He wondered to himself, “How did I get here?” But after spending time in Harry Reid’s do-nothing Senate he looked around and wondered, “How did they get here?”

Getting more serious he talked about President Obama’s State of the Union address and how the president scrupulously avoided talking about his record. Why? Well, Rubio explained, for two years President Obama had a Democrat controlled House and a Democrat controlled Senate, which until the passing of Senator Edward Kennedy and the election of Republican Scott Brown to replace him, they had a filibuster-proof majority. So for two years he got everything he wanted and since then, everything has gotten worse.

So what did Obama say in the State of the Union address? He chose to pit Americans against each other. He is trying to sell the American people on a bill of goods that says we are a zero-sum society. That is, for someone to get ahead, someone has to get pulled down. But that is not true, but Obama needs us to believe it so that he can get people to vote for him.

Rubio then related to his own family saying that he felt his father and grandfather were better men than he, but Rubio has advanced as far as he has because he was born in the greatest country in the world.

He then made a telling point. He said that Republicans try to attract followers by arguing who is more like Ronald Reagan. Do you ever hear Democrats argue about who is more like Jimmy Carter?

What is government’s role, he asked? We should have an understandable tax code so that individuals and businesses can make decisions for business reasons not tax reasons. We need regulatory reform. Yes, we all want clean air and clean water but with sanity. We don’t have an energy policy, we have energy politics. While in office for three years President Obama had no plan for Medicare, but as soon as Republican Paul Ryan came up with a plan, he attacked it.

Summing up, Rubio said that President Obama seems to be a really good father; he seems to be a really good husband; but he is a terrible president. I couldn’t agree more.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

Congressman Tim Bishop continues to push his manufactured campaign issue, with the full union backing of the Communication Workers of America, to fight against outsourced call centers. He calls it a “surgical strike”. I think there are more appropriate names for it.

It’s always fun to listen to someone who hasn’t spent a day outside of academia or government tell the rest of us, a) what the problem is; and b) what the solution is. The first question that I would ask Congressman Bishop is “why is this such an important issue for your constituents?” Answer: It isn’t. There are no major call centers in his district and there are none that I know of that are weighing a move to his district. So why is this his major legislative focus?

He is desperately looking for an issue, any issue, that he can campaign on. He cannot campaign on his record. He cannot campaign on a record of supporting the Obama economic disaster. He cannot campaign on how much the debt ballooned on his watch. So Doctor Bishop wants to do a little surgery and penalize companies who outsource call centers. Since Bishop never held a job that produced anything for a profit he can be excused for not grasping the impacts of his proposed bill.

One of his provisions is to make companies that have outsourced call center jobs overseas ineligible for government contracts. Two of the largest US PC manufactures HP and Dell and they both have call centers overseas. So does Congressman Bishop want the stop the federal government from buying PCs from HP and Dell? Who should they buy them from? Chinese Lenovo, Taiwan based Acer? Japan’s Toshiba? Speaking like a general he says it is a surgical strike. Well surgical strikes are designed to limit collateral damage, and Bishop’s plan is chock full of collateral damage.

Here is how Bishop could really help the situation. First, take a basic economics course. Study how the global economy works and how free global trade helps everyone. Perhaps he should ask his backers at the Communications Workers of America, what they can do to make call centers in the US more cost-effective. Do they have too many work rules in their contracts? Do they force their members to pay union dues to pay for the union to back Bishop and Obama? If their dues were limited to collective bargaining, perhaps employers could afford more call center jobs in the US. Tell Obama we need to slash the corporate tax rate so that companies do not save billions of dollars by locating operations in overseas countries with lower tax rates and then trap those profits overseas so they can’t be brought back to create jobs here.

But that may be too much to ask of Mr. Bishop before November. So here’s a better idea. Step down, and let someone who has actually created jobs take your place.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

President Obama, always on the campaign trail, is now on the road trying to explain why his class warfare strategy is not class warfare. In his State of the Union address, he once again invoked the “Buffett Rule”, which is little more than a fig leaf to allow Obama to raise taxes. But what about some other “Buffett Rules”?

Spending

What is the Buffett Rule on spending? Does Warren Buffett agree with President Obama that we should spend 150% of what we take in? Did Warren Buffett become one of the richest men on the planet by spending 150% of what he takes in and borrowing the shortfall? I think Buffett’s counsel would be to live within our means; don’t spend more than you take in, but I didn’t hear President Obama invoke the “Oracle of Omaha” when he submitted his budget to the Senate that was voted down 97-0. I didn’t hear Obama mention spending at all other than to say some nonsense about cutting spending by $2 trillion over ten years. At the rate we are going that level of spending “cuts” will mean we are $8 trillion deeper in debt ten years from now rather than $10 trillion. We need to cut $1 trillion in spending next year. So let’s hear what Buffett has to tell Obama about spending.

Investing

Warren Buffett is regarded as a masterful investor. What’s the Buffett Rule on investing? President Obama took credit for saving the auto industry. Really? If that is his idea of a good investment why does the price of GM stock have to rise to $52 before the American people’s investment to break even? GM stock is currently trading around $25. How many people are expecting GM’s stock to double in the near future? Or is it more likely that union contracts will once again, drag GM beneath the waves? My research indicates that Warren Buffett does not hold any GM stock. I wonder why? I do know that Warren Buffett made a very tidy profit by investing in Goldman Sachs. Meanwhile American taxpayers, you know, the ones who are under taxed, bailed out that company and many others. How much did Buffett invest in Solyndra? How much money is Warren Buffett investing in high-speed rail in California? Why should the American people believe that someone who has never held a job in private industry (Obama) is suddenly the smartest venture capitalist in America? How big of a portfolio do the real venture capital firms put in the hands of new hire fresh out of college? But this president takes billions of our tax dollars and squanders them on his pet projects and then lectures us how we need to invest in our future when they go belly up. When is Warren Buffett going to tell him to stop?

The Buffett Rule on Taxes

At the State of the Union address we were introduced to the famous secretary of Warren Buffett. She’s the poor woman who pays a higher tax rate than Mr. Buffett on her income. It is estimated that the poor dear makes between $200,000 and $500,000, otherwise she would not be paying double the tax rate of Buffett. That could put her solidly in the top 1% of earners in the country, if she is at the high-end of that range (the top 1% is earnings above $343,000). So Barack Obama actually lamenting that the top 1% is over taxed? Of course not. It is not about who is paying too much, it is about who is not paying enough.

The problem is spending, plain and simple. There are not enough rich people in America, even if taxed at 100% to close the budget gap. What Obama is doing is class warfare. Let’s get people angry enough at the wealthy so that Obama can then link the wealthy to the Republicans and sneak back into a second term.

If Obama thinks he is playing by the rules, Buffett’s rules, then he should at least play by all of them.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

Tim Bishop likes manufacturing. The manufacturing of campaign issues, that is. In his effort to manufacture a campaign issue around overseas outsourcing, he got a lifeline from the White House yesterday when President Obama held an “insourcing” forum yesterday to encourage companies to “bring jobs back to America.” An editorial in the Wall Street Journal titled, “Insourcing for Dummies” describes the effort.

Having spent his entire adult working life at either Southampton College, which went out of business and was acquired by the State University of New York, and the House of Representatives, Mr. Bishop should be forgiven if his grasp of economics is lacking. So let’s try to help get him up to speed.

Coming from academia, I am sure Mr. Bishop will give due deference to a study on outsourcing from an Ivy League University. Matthew J. Slaughter, an economist at Dartmouth’s Amos Tuck School of Business, conducted a study where he found that for every job outsourced overseas, two jobs were created in the U.S. How could that possibly be? It works something like this.

Let’s say a company has an opportunity to outsource its call center overseas and takes advantage of doing so. It utilizes a well-educated work force in India, and let’s say it cuts its cost allocated to that call center in half. It now has additional capital to invest in growing the business. To do so, it hires more sales people, who in turn need sales engineers to explain their widgets to their perspective customers, and when the customers buy more widgets, more people are needed to process the orders and build the widgets. This boost of growth results in a boost in jobs.

Slaughter studied Bureau of Economic Analysis data, reported annually between 1991 and 2001 for 2,500 multinational companies. This was a time when India and China were ramping up their operations to take on outsourcing roles. What Slaughter found was that while employment in their foreign affiliates grew by 2.8 million jobs, U.S. based employment in the parent firms grew by 5.5 million jobs. Taking it a step further, when that job growth is compared to total job growth, those multinational created more jobs faster than the economy as a whole.

Tim Bishop’s Plan

So what is Tim Bishop’s big idea? He wants companies to shut foreign outsourcing or have two call centers that callers can choose between. That means there is no savings from the call centers, which translates into fewer profits to use to grow the business and hire fewer people. Also lower profits, means less tax revenues because what are companies taxed on? Correct! Profits!

So in the midst of a dastardly economy with high unemployment, and staggering deficits, Tim Bishop wants to curtail corporate growth, reverse conditions for job growth, and reduce tax revenues. What a trifecta! This is all so that Tim Bishop can have something, anything, to build a reelection campaign around. There no major call centers in his district, so this is a bald-faced effort to cling to office. If he was serious about the economy, he would be advocating for slashing the corporate tax rate or even backing the Fair Tax, so that money held overseas could flow back to the U.S. and perhaps other countries would build factories here and create even more jobs. But that would require a grasp of economics, instead of an iron grasp on his House seat.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.