There is an increasingly nasty battle brewing in the Republican race for the nomination to run against Democrat incumbent Tim Bishop in the First Congressional District in New York.  With jobs and the economy the number one issue across the nation, the petty personal attacks may result in potential Republican voters staying home in disgust.

In an excellent article in the Wall Street Journal titled, “New York’s GOP Never Learns,” Kim Strassel concludes her article by saying, “The effect has been to enrage and divide a New York party that should have bigger things on its mind. Say, winning this fall.” 

Chris Cox is trying to play catch-up to the front runner Randy Altschuler who has been actively campaigning for more than a year.  The difficulty for Mr. Cox is that his positions are not that different than those of Mr. Altschuler.  So, while Mr. Altschuler has been taking on the Democratic incumbent Tim Bishop and Bishop’s lockstep voting with Nancy Pelosi, Mr. Cox has resorted to attacking Mr. Altschuler.  Not to leave his flank unprotected, Mr. Altschuler has been forced to respond and now the race, with two weeks to go before the primary on September 14^th, has degenerated into a mudslinging contest.  There is a third candidate, George Demos, who is lobbing attacks from the rear with little effect.

Each candidate is calling themselves the “true conservative,” and Mr. Cox has garnered the support of the Suffolk County 9-12 Project the self-proclaimed “Largest Tea Party organization in Suffolk County.”  Mr. Cox’s father, Ed Cox, is the head of the New York State GOP.  Ms. Strassel reports that the senior Mr. Cox, backed Steve Levy over Rick Lazio for governor to curry favor with the Suffolk County GOP chairman to back his son.  It is all the kind of backroom political dealing that have attracted a rush of newcomer candidates and put incumbents of both parties on the endangered species list.

The Tea Party Endorsement

What caught my eye was the endorsement of the Suffolk County 9-12 Project and the announcement by Bob Meyer, co-founder.  He gave as one of his primary reasons that, Randy Altschuler was one of those people, “getting rich off the backs of hardworking Americans by outsourcing their jobs.”  That sounds more like Jimmy Hoffa, Andy Stern, or Barack Obama’s class warfare than any Tea Partier I know.  A commenter on the 9-12 Project’s site, Judyann Joyner added, “Randy is credited with the creation of ‘white collar sweatshops in India.’”  Pretty strong stuff.  I don’t know if Ms. Joyner or Mr. Meyer visited the company that Mr. Altschuler co-founded in India, but Business Week magazine did.

“The lights burn day and night in the gleaming glass-and-chrome building that towers over a leafy street in the southern Indian city of Madras. Here at OfficeTiger, 1,500 young men and women peer into computers 24 hours a day, analyzing and processing U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission reports and other documents drawn up by lawyers and bankers on Wall Street. Walking the floor, sometimes even at 3 a.m., is 34-year-old co-founder and co-Chief Executive Joseph Sigelman.”

Just because the office operates 24 hours per day, don’t been conned into thinking the same people are at their desks 24 hours a day.  “Gleaming glass-and-chrome building that towers over a leafy street,” yup, sounds like a hellhole to me.  Business Week added, “Indeed, OfficeTiger is the only successful startup in India’s $5 billion outsourcing industry that is owned and managed by a U.S. entrepreneur.”  So we have an American company making money in India, in what seems to be a rather large and competitive field, and this is a bad thing?  Since when did conservatives turn into protectionists?  But what about the jobs they replaced?  Okay, let’s examine that. 

You have some Wall Street firms that are in a competitive business.  A young entrepreneur comes up with an idea to reduce operating expenses by having an external company handle routine clerical tasks that are not one of the firm’s key competencies, that is, people don’t buy that firm’s services because of their typing skills.  The company outsources and reduces costs.  By reducing costs, they prosper and grow; by growing they create more high skill jobs like lawyers, accountants, financial analysts, IT people, etc.  Perhaps even some of the former typists, because of their computer skills can move of the ladder to spreadsheets, and databases.  Do some people lose their jobs, yes, just as buggy whip makers lost their jobs when the automobile came on the scene.  Okay, let’s shift to India.

In India white collar jobs are created; their standard of living improves; they buy consumer goods like iPods and iPhones and their offices need sophisticated IT equipment from companies like Cisco Systems which grow companies like Apple and Cisco creating jobs in the U.S. We live in a global economy and if we want prosperity and peace, the best way to get there is through free markets.  Even Mr. Cox in the policy section of his website blames government policies for companies outsourcing jobs overseas.  If it is the government’s policies that make these jobs uncompetitive here and Mr. Cox knows it, why is Mr. Altschuler wrong for reacting to it and helping American companies that use these services remain competitive?

After selling Office Tiger to RR Donnelly, Mr. Altschuler started another company in the U.S., CloudBlue, that recycles old IT equipment.  So we have an entrepreneur that has started a couple of companies that have created jobs around the world and that makes him a villain?  Perhaps Mr. Meyer should go back and read some of the quotes on his own website:

“You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom.” – Dr. Adrian Rogers

“I have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” – Thomas Jefferson

Mr. Meyer’s key criticism of Mr. Altschuler smacks of the government picking winners and losers.  This business is okay, but not that one.  If your business creates jobs overseas that is bad, but if it creates jobs here it is okay.  Well, Mr. Altschuler has done both and he has firsthand experience doing so, which is what we sorely lack in Washington.  If the strategy of Mr. Cox continues, including creating another party, the TaxPayer party, to run on and split the vote further, Mr. Cox might as well mail his strategy over to the Bishop campaign as I am sure they will find it very useful in the general election.  Not my cup of tea.

The focus should be on defeating the out of control spenders in Congress who got us into this mess, not fighting each other to the death and let the incumbent waltz back into office.  The time is now.  Mr. Cox should focus on what he would do as a Congressman that is better than Tim Bishop and Mr. Altschuler.  If he can’t articulate that, he should drop out.  He is not going to win a lot of support by throwing mud at his fellow Republicans.

Note: In the spirit of full disclosure I have done some volunteer work for the Altschuler campaign

President Obama wants to have it both ways.  He wants to appear to be fiscally responsible and he knows that to do so, that something has to include Social Security.  However, to try to keep as many Democrats in office that he can he has to play that other favorite card of the Democrats, that Republicans want to push grandma in her wheelchair down the stairs by privatizing Social Security.

In a campaign stop in Racine, Wisconsin the president had this to say, “”I’ll fight with everything I’ve got to stop those who would gamble your Social Security on Wall Street. Because you shouldn’t be worried that a sudden downturn in the stock market will put all you’ve worked so hard for—all you’ve earned—at risk.”  Oh, really, Mr. President?  Then perhaps you can show us where all the Social Security money is that you don’t want to put at risk.  The problem is that the government spent it all.  That’s right, there’s no lock box, no account, no bank vault, no hole in the ground were the money is buried, earning nothing.  I only wish I was able to put “at risk” all the money that the government took out of my paycheck along with my employer’s contributions. 

Based on my last annual statement from the Social Security administration, the government collected about $170,000 from me and my employers on my behalf.  Had I the opportunity to put that “at risk” in the stock market, the Dow Jones 30 industrials to be precise, including all the ups and downs, that $170,000 would be worth about $800,000 today.  Thank you Democrats for keeping me safe from accumulating that amount of wealth and instead “investing” it in ethanol, turtle crossings in Florida, bridges to nowhere, airports in John Murtha’s district that no one flies to, etc.  By Social Security estimates, that money they took from me and my employers, will be paid back to me and run out about ten to twelve years before I expire.  So instead of having a real nest egg that I can live off of and pass the rest on to my heirs, my getting Social Security will depend on the next generation getting taxed to the eyeballs to pay me and they can hope the next generation does not rise up in arms when they get the bill.

Everyone who supports the Social Security system as it is today, acknowledging that we have to fulfill our commitment to those who have retired or are very near to retiring, should join Bernie Madoff in cell block C, for the Ponzi scheme the government created.  President Obama, it is time to stop lying to the American people.  We don’t want government to run our lives.  You have crammed your left wing agenda down our throats and we will give you our rebuttal on November 3.  Then your one term will be up two years hence.

To say today’s “Restoring Honor” event in Washington will be historic is an understatement.  Gauging by the biased reporting on the news pages of the New York Times and the seething, sputtering outrage from Bob Herbert and Charles Blow on the Op-Ed pages should give you a pretty good indication of the focus this event will garner.

Kate Zernike opens her report, titled “Where Dr. King Stood, Tea Party Claims His Mantle”, saying it is the ultimate “thumb in the eye” to stand on the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” in the place he stood and talk about restoring honor.  How dare he?  Isn’t that what racists said of Dr. King when he stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial with these words?

“Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.”

Ms. Zernike reminds us of the case of Shirley Sherrod, who was fired by the Obama administration when a videotape of her redemptive speech about how she first discriminated against a white farmer but later helped him was shown across the Internet.  She writes about video tape being heavily edited by failing to show how she mended her ways and helped that farmer.  But Ms. Zernike doesn’t finish the story where later in her speech Ms. Sherrod says that those who opposed Obama’s health care plan had racist motives because President Obama is black.  Ms. Sherrod’s redemption is far from complete.

She then says that the Tea Party’s talk of states’ rights raises the specter of Jim Crow and George Wallace.  But it was the federal government that passed and enforced the Fugitive Slave laws and it was independent states of the north, exercising their states’ rights, who supported the Underground Railroad and refused to actively assist returning slaves to the South.  So states’ rights cut both ways.

She concludes that, “Even if Tea Party members are right that any racist signs are those of mischief-makers, even if Glenn Beck had chosen any other Saturday to hold his rally, it would be hard to quiet the argument about the Tea Party and race.”  It’s hard to quiet the argument because those on the left keep falsely making it.  They cannot prove racism so they feel that by repeating often enough, they can make it stick.

I was at a street fair manning a booth for a Tea Party organization this spring.  An African-American teacher approached us tentatively to ask what we were about.  I asked her if she wanted the rumors or the truth and she opted for the truth.  I told her that we were a policy based organization focusing on accountable government, fiscal responsibility, limited federal government and following the Constitution.  She said she didn’t know any of that, she got e-mails from Moveon.org all the time and before leaving she signed our e-mail list.  When the truth reaches the ears of people over the screeching of the New York Times and the main stream media, it is generally well received.  The racial of mix of the Tea Party rallies will change over time when we can speak to the folks one on one without the lies of the left.

The Opionators

Bob Herbert begins his Op-Ed piece in a very open minded fashion, “America is better than Glenn Beck. For all of his celebrity, Mr. Beck is an ignorant, divisive, pathetic figure.”  Thank you for sharing that, Bob, but there’s no need to pull punches here.

“There is a great deal of hatred and bigotry in this country, but it does not define the country. The daily experience of most Americans is not a bitter experience and for all of our problems we are in a much better place on these matters than we were a half century ago.”

So why to you and your fellow travelers throw down the race card every time someone disagrees with a policy, if they are not of the same race?  Object to ObamaCare, that’s racism.  Object to the stimulus, racism.  Wanting Obama to fail to turn America into a socialist states, racism straight up.  Yes there is hatred and bigotry in this country, but it is primarily coming from the left.

Not to be outdone in the outrage department, Charles Blow titled his Op-Ed piece, “I Had a Nightmare.”  Mr. Blow said the following, “I find it curious that many of the same people who object so strenuously to the Islamic cultural center proposed for Lower Manhattan, many on the grounds that it is inappropriate and disrespectful, are virtually silent on the impropriety and disrespect inherent in Beck’s giving a speech on the anniversary of King’s address.”  This would be an excellent point, if he could point to 3,000 blacks that Glenn Beck has murdered in the name of restoring honor.  But Mr. Blow can make no such connection, so his analogy to the Ground Zero mosque falls flat.  Curious indeed.

After venting his spleen, Mr. Blow suggests we re-read Dr. King’s speech “and to recommit ourselves to the nobility of righteous pursuits.”  Let’s do that.

“But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.” –“I Have a Dream Speech”

How do the actions of the left, throwing down the race card at every turn, accusing everyone who disagrees with Barack Obama to have racism at the core of that disagreement comport with not “drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred”?  It arrogantly assumes that it is impossible not to see the glorious benefit of the government running every last aspect of our lives, therefore the only reason to disagree has to be racism.  With regard to violence, where do we see the violent demonstrations on the left or the right?  Breaking windows, looting, SEIU members beating down street vendors for selling anti-Obama buttons, etc. are all on the left.  When the police show up at rallies organized by the left they show up in riot gear, at Tea Party rallies the mounted police have to decide whether to let people pet their horses or not.

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’” –“I Have a Dream Speech”

Didn’t America elect an African American President of the United States with 53% of the vote?  More than voted for Clinton either time, or Jimmy Carter?  Barack Obama wasn’t elected by minority votes alone.

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” –“I Have a Dream Speech”

Who more closely shares that dream, Glenn Beck, or those on the left who insist that forty years after Dr. Martin Luther King gave his speech that blacks can’t get into college or get a job without affirmative action; that black families have not been destroyed by government programs like welfare that drove fathers away; that government run schools that can’t graduate its students are far better for blacks than school vouchers that will let them escape those hellholes?  Dr. King’s speech says nothing about racial preferences.  Dr. King’s speech talks about color blindness.  Dr. King’s speech says give us an equal chance.  Glenn Beck believes that.  Those on the left do not.  It is those on the left who believe African Americans cannot compete without more government programs to help them.  Glenn Beck believe they can succeed if government gets out of their way and if the left stops the lies of dependency that hold them back.  It is the New York Times, Charles Blow, Bob Herbert who wrap themselves in racial division and then say, “Why can’t we come together?”  If you want us to come together, stop standing in the way.

The talking points have been established that it was eight years, eight, of failed Bush and/or Republican policies that got us into this mess and President Obama and the Democrats are working hard to get us out of it.  Let’s take a closer look.

What blew up in 2008?  It was the housing market.  The underlying cause of the problem has Democrat/liberal/progressive fingerprints all over it going back to Franklin Roosevelt who created Fannie Mae.  Add into that mix Lyndon Johnson privatizing Fannie Mae to hide it from the budget and creating HUD; Jimmy Carter creating the Community Reinvestment Act; Bill Clinton pushing for more home ownership among those who could least afford it, Andrew Cuomo as HUD Secretary pushing Fannie and Freddie to take on riskier mortgages; Barney Frank and Chris Dodd fighting against regulation before they were fighting for it (and where have we heard that formulation before?); and when housing prices run out of gas and the house of cards that the Democrats built collapses, it’s all Bush’s fault.

Let’s look at the timeline.  When he took office, President Bush was handed a recession from Bill Clinton resulting from the dot.com bubble.  In less than a year we had 9/11.  In spite of that, Bush pushed through tax cuts and got the economy to grow through most of his presidency.  The Democrats took control of Congress in January 2007 and in December 2007 the economy went into recession.  One year later Barack Obama is elected President of the United States.  Now, more than a year and a half after Obama is in office the economy looks like it is slipping into a double dip recession, and this is the Republican’s fault?  Who has been spending like a drunken sailor?  Who wasted almost $1 trillion on a stimulus plan that was so ineffective the Obama administration had to invent a new statistic, “jobs saved”, to hide its dismal performance.  They add on ObamaCare, which no one in Congress read before voting on it and no one knows what is in it and so no small business is going to hire anyone until they know what it costs.  How is that the Republican’s fault or Bush’s?

We are just a few months away from the tax cuts put in place by President Bush expiring.  President Obama wants them to expire.  This will place an additional massive burden on small businesses and just about everyone else and he wonders why aren’t companies hiring?  The man came into office with no executive experience and the year and a half he has been in office he hasn’t seemed to pick up any.  Could it be because he is surrounded by advisors who have little to no executive experience themselves?

To my fellow Americans I say, hang in there it is less than 100 days to vote the bums out.  Perhaps not all of them, but at least we can bring in some adult supervision.  It’s time to stop steamrolling the American people with the socialist programs and to let “We the People” take back our government.

We have come to expect a fight whenever a seat opens up on the Supreme Court as there are distinct battle lines between conservatives who believe the Constitution should be interpreted how it was written and liberal/progressives view it in light of what they feel it should be today.  In other words, conservatives approach the Constitution with a magnifying glass while liberal/progressives approach it with an eraser and pencil.

I happen to believe that elections have consequences and that for the most part the president should be allowed to nominate who he chooses to fill a Supreme Court vacancy and have them approved.  However, as Democrats like to point out when a Republican sits in the White House, the Senate has a Constitutional role to give advice and consent on such nominees, not just rubber stamp them, which is true enough.  Unfortunately, today the advice and consent process is almost a sham, because the nominees have learned how to keep their mouths shut and defer from answering all but the blandest questions under the cover that it may come up before them in a case on the court.  We can thank Ted Kennedy for this as he turned the advice and consent role into an opportunity to smear a nominee, Judge Robert Bork, in the most vile and mendacious way to pander to the base of the Democratic Party.  Since then, it’s been lights out on any serious probing of the thought process of nominees to our highest court.

But what about Elena Kagan?  After the Senate Judiciary panel approved her nomination along nearly party lines (Lindsey Graham – R voted in favor) most Americans (87%) believe she will be confirmed, according to Rasmussen.  However, in the same poll Americans oppose her nomination 42% to 36%.  Is she qualified to a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court?

One of the arguments against her is that she has never been a judge before.  That is true, but it is also true for about one-third of past Supreme Court justices.  However, among those past Supreme Court justices who were not judges, they had on average 20 years experience in the private practice of law.  Ms. Kagan has two years experience in private practice, two years.  The rest of her experience in academia or government service. 

Before her current position of Solicitor General, she had never argued a case at a trial.  She has no judicial experience, next to no private practice experience, and thanks to Ted Kennedy, she revealed as little as possible about her judicial philosophy to get confirmed.  Her key strength, according to Barack Obama, is her ability to build consensus.  I’ll give you a translation of what that really means.  Her job will be to vote with the liberal bloc of the Supreme Court and use her persuasive powers on Anthony Kennedy to peel him off and generate as many 5-4 wins as possible.  President Obama does little without a purpose and his purpose is to pull the Supreme Court in the same direction as the laws he has jammed through against the will of the American people.

Despite the approval of the Judiciary committee, an effort must be mounted to reject or filibuster her approval.  How can we accept someone with so little in the way of qualifications to a lifetime appointment?  We know next to nothing about her judicial philosophy.  There are no cases on which she has written opinions that can be examined.  With regard to what she has written in the government service she simply says I was acting as an advocate for my client, and those are not necessarily my views.  Who could argue with that?  So what are her views?  We don’t know and like Nancy Pelosi claimed with the health care monstrosity, “we’ll just have to pass it to find out what’s in it.”  With a lifetime appointment, you can’t take it back later if you disagree with her eventual positions.  The track record of the “Trust me” presidency is downright frightening.

With all due respect to Elena Kagan, I don’t see how we can idly sit by and silently accept another Obama abomination of ramming through his agenda without regard for the people who elected him.  He is essentially asking us to grant a lifetime appointment that could profoundly affect our liberties, to someone who is a blank slate that we know little about. He should withdraw the nominee and submit another candidate.

The Sherrod incident is the latest in a long line of shoot from the lip misfires from the Obama administration, from the president on down.  Here is a review of some of the more egregious of them:

• President Obama, without waiting for the facts says the Cambridge, Massachusetts police department “acted stupidly,” in an incident involving African American  professor Henry Louis Gates.  A picture from the “beer summit” shows the president confidently striding toward the cameras while in the background Sergeant Crowley takes Professor Gates arm to help him negotiate the stairs, as Professor Gates walks with a cane.  Racist?
• With 13 dead Americans at the hands of terrorist Nidal Hasan, Janet Napolitano comes out and claims, “The system has worked really very, very smoothly over the course of the past several days.”  A few days later she would eat those ridiculous words.
• Not to be outdone by herself, after another terrorist attempt on our soil in Times Square, Secretary Napolitano quickly came out to label the attempt a “one-off” and the suspect a lone wolf.  As the investigation picked up steam there were all sorts links to terror groups in the Middle East.
• When the president of Honduras tried to override term limits and become the next Hugo Chavez, the Honduran government enforced its laws against the changes that its president was trying to illegally implement.  The Obama administration immediately labeled the legitimate actions of the democratically elected Honduran government a coup.  Hillary Clinton’s State department cancelled the visas of all members of the Honduran Supreme Court.  Not to be intimidated by Chavez, Castro, or Obama, Honduras stood its ground.  The Congressional Research Service looked at the Honduran Constitution and the actions of its government and found that the government acted properly and within the law.
• When Arizona reached the end of its rope and could not get the Obama administration to enforce the law on the border, they passed a law to give their police greater flexibility to determine the legal status of people stopped for another police matter.  The Obama administration immediately called the law unconstitutional.  When asked if they read the massive 10 page law, that’s right 10 pages, both Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary Janet Napolitano (yes, her again) both said they hadn’t read it before declaring it unconstitutional.  This administration pushes through legislation running thousands of pages each and they can’t find time to read a ten page law before condemning it.
• Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod gave a speech to the NAACP where she spoke about her transformation from having a racial bias in a decision she made 24 years ago, to today where she tries to treat all individuals regardless of race.  Only the first part of the story was headed toward the airwaves, the part about her past discrimination, and before the news hit the air she was fired by the Obama administration.  Had they watched the whole tape before acting, they wouldn’t be swimming in apologies right now.

Is this just the lack of experience or does the Obama administration need adult supervision?  They jump to these wild conclusions and then end up backtracking days later.  After eighteen months in office you would think they would have learned by now how to govern.

Another case without as quick a trigger is the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill.  After taking office President Obama appointed a commission, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission to investigate the root causes of the crisis.  A prudent person might say, let’s hear what the commission finds out and then write legislation to address those root causes.  With months more to go before that commission’s work will be done, we have another 2,000+ page bill coming out of Congress and signed by the president to put new regulations in place on the financial services industry.  Why the rush?  Wouldn’t it be better to fix the real problems rather than what Chris Dodd and Barney Frank think are the problems and let them paper over their own culpability in the creating the crisis?  Why were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac excluded?  In one of the hearings before the commission an argument was made that AIG did not have to be bailed out, that there were measures in place to ride out the crisis and that in the long run their policies would be fine.  Whether that is true or not, will have to wait for the final report, but the “just don’t stand there, do something,” mentality is disconcerting.  I certainly hope we are never faced with another Cuban Missile Crisis with this team in place.

This week we saw President Obama come out swinging to that old class warfare tune.  Lashing out at Republicans in Congress for not adding to the deficit by extending unemployment benefits, he implied they were heartless and cruel.  The president used the same tired prop of the straw man, that is, accusing “the same people” without naming any of those people.  He uses this tactic because if he actually named the people he was accusing he would have to produce facts to back up the charges and Obama, as usual, doesn’t have any.

But here’s what he does have.  He has a record of focusing his energy on passing ObamaCare instead of focusing on growing the economy.  He is layering on more uncertainty of huge government programs and impending taxes that are scaring most small businesses from any hiring until the dust settles and they can tally up the bill.  He has Republicans who are ready to go along with the extension in benefits, if and only if, they are paid for.  With only about half of the $787 billion stimulus bill money spent, which is working fabulously by the way, taking the needed $30 billion from that kitty should be obvious. 

President Obama also has a chief economic advisor named Larry Summers.  Mr. Summers wrote an article on unemployment for the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics while at Harvard and in it he raised the following points:

• Government assistance programs contribute to long-term unemployment is by providing an incentive, and the means, not to work.
• Unemployment insurance also extends the time a person stays off the job. [Colleague Kim] Clark and I estimated that the existence of unemployment insurance almost doubles the number of unemployment spells lasting more than three months.
• If unemployment insurance were eliminated, the unemployment rate would drop by more than half a percentage point, which means that the number of unemployed people would fall by about 750,000.
• Another cause of long-term unemployment is unionization. High union wages that exceed the competitive market rate are likely to cause job losses in the unionized sector of the economy. Also, those who lose high-wage union jobs are often reluctant to accept alternative low-wage employment.

It seems as if President Obama has painted himself into a corner.  The stubbornly high unemployment numbers are poised to ravage the Democrats in the mid-term elections.  But if his advisor, Mr. Summers, is to be believed, the unemployment benefits he is trying to use as a campaign issue against the Republicans is probably propping up the unemployment numbers.

The American people have reached their limit on deficit spending and want it reined in.  The Democrats put in place something called Paygo, which means pay as you go.  If you want something, you have to pay for it.  However, the Democrats are bypassing their own rule at every turn.  You can’t have it both ways, ceremoniously pass a Paygo rule for the purpose of the photo op and to look responsible, and then spend recklessly once the klieg lights go dark.

What prompted this president to conduct his Rose Garden show with three unemployed Americans used as props?  Could it be that Nancy Pelosi is hopping mad that this president has not been helping Democrats to get reelected in the fall?  If so, perhaps that was the point of the Rose Garden performance, nothing but election year politics.  And you wonder why the American people are becoming increasingly cynical about their government?

President Obama’s new tack on the campaign trail is to get people to forget the last year and a half and try to scare the voters by saying, “Remember who got us into this mess and who is getting us out of it.”  Is that supposed to rally the voters to the Democrats jamming budget busting program after budget busting program down their throats?  Let me make two points to any voter to whom that strategy may give pause.

1. George W. Bush isn’t running for office
2. According to the Bureau of Economic Statistics, the recession started in December of 2007.  Who was in control of Congress for a full year by December of 2007?  That’s right, the Democrats.

So if you want to punish those who were in charge when the recession hit, with Bush gone, that leaves the Democrats.  Fire away.

Back on the campaign trail where he feels comfortable that he knows what he is doing, Barack Obama traveled to Las Vegas to stump for Harry Reid.  Harry Reid used to be a boxer and when he told Barack Obama this he said, “Barack, I wasn’t the fastest.  I wasn’t the hardest-hitting, but I knew how to take a punch.”  Based on all the legislation that has been passed since 2008 that an  overwhelming majority of the American people have opposed, makes one wonder if Harry Reid took a few punches too many.

Shortly after taking office and settling into his “bash business” mode Obama blasted businesses for their extravagant meetings held in places like Las Vegas.  Someone then whispered in the president’s ear that extravagant business meetings in Las Vegas were good for Las Vegas and Harry Reid. Oops.  And there you have the crux of the problem.

What, exactly, is government’s role to tell private companies how to spend their money?  What is the role of governments to say to a BP, “Give us the $20 billion, or we’ll take it from you,” as was attributed to Joe Biden, without first going to court?  What is the role of government to say to its citizens, you must buy this health care product or pay a fine?  Well in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, it is probably all fine and dandy, but in America?

Barack, the standup comic, used the analogy that he and Harry Reid had mud on their shoes, were pushing hard to get the car back on the road, and were making progress little-by-little and when they finally got one wheel on the pavement the Republicans want to throw the car into reverse.  Really?  I would compare it more to conservatives telling everyone to get out of the car and help push, instead of waiting for Nancy Pelosi to come back from Dunkin Donuts with free food for all the overweight union bosses jammed in the car squawking that they didn’t do manual labor.  Their contract didn’t call for pushing cars out of ditches. 

So, while this car should have been out of this ditch and well down the road by now, Harry and Barry will try to convince us that what they’re doing is absolutely brilliant; it’s just that we are too stupid to see it.  After all, it took the greatest president in history, FDR, over eight years and a World War to get us out of the Great Depression, so relax we have another 6 ½ years to go.

Imagine what would have happened if the ever resilient American economy was allowed to work on its own without all the government intervention in the 1930s.  Perhaps the Depression would have been shorter like the recession of 1920-1921, and perhaps we would not have had World War II, and Fannie Mae, and a bankrupt Social Security, and a couple of generations later all of us swimming in debt.  It’s time the tow truck of the most powerful economy on the face of the earth to come along and be allowed to do its job.  Tell Harry and Barry to go sit down on that stump over there, and watch how it is really done.  “You’re making a mess of yourselves and embarrassing the rest us.”

Well the cat’s finally out of the bag and it’s been loosed by none other than President Obama himself.  Once again out on the stump where he is most comfortable and away from the Oval Office where decision making is required, the president is now taking a new tack, or it is an old one?  He is now saying how much worse things could have been if not for his stimulus program.  This is the standard progressive/statist line that we didn’t do enough… if only we spent more money our program would have worked.

But here’s the problem.  To get the $787 billion stimulus package passed the president said that if we did nothing, unemployment would rise to 9%, but if we passed his stimulus package it would go no higher than 8%.  Where is the unemployment rate?  It is at 9.7%.  So if things could have been worse if they did nothing, his economic team is totally clueless because they were the ones who put forth the 8% vs. 9% argument.  Now Obama is trying to tell us that if we did nothing, the unemployment rate could have been in the double digits.  Who says so?  Is this his own projection or is his economic team back at the Ouija board?  Is anyone from the economic team being fired?

Here is an alternate theory.  If the stimulus plan was not implemented and the president cut taxes by $787 billion instead and promised not to introduce any new government programs for two years, that the unemployment rate would be much lower.  How can I make such an outrageous claim?  Let’s look to history.  In 1920-1921 there was a steep recession where the unemployment rate hit 11.7%.  Back then, government didn’t saddle businesses with regulations and businesses were free to cut wages and make other adjustments without government meddling.  Within one year the unemployment rate fell to 6.7% and the following year it was down to 2.4%  Contrast that to the Great Depression where we had massive government intervention and massive government spending and the unemployment rate never fell below 14.7%.

Bringing Jobs Back to America

Another brilliant example of your government killing the economy comes from the company Bucyrus Erie.  They were bidding on a job in India to provide heavy equipment to help them mine coal for a power plant the Indians were building.  Bucyrus Erie went to the Export/Import bank, a government agency, to try to get a loan guarantee to finance the deal.  Because a coal plant would increase the carbon footprint of India, the Ex/Im bank turned down the request.  This didn’t stop the plant being built, it just meant that the heavy equipment was going to be provided by China or Russia instead of the USA.  There would be no effect on the carbon footprint, a big effect on jobs in the US.  At the same time, President Obama is on the stump talking about how hard he is working to bring jobs back to the US.  Really?  They must have read his speech over at the Ex/Im bank, because they are reconsidering Bucyrus Erie’s request.

More government is killing our economy.  Our economy is very tough and it is extremely hard to bring down, but the current administration is trying its best to do so.