Fighting to Preserve Liberty in America
Photo by cursedthing
We saw the beginnings with the Battle of Wisconsin. The one place were unions were growing robustly was in the public sector, surpassing the private sector for the first time in 2009. But then 2010 happened.
Photo by Dave Makes
Two news items yesterday, when put together, start to tell an interesting story. Warren Buffett invested $5 billion in Bank of America in a private sweetheart deal that will guarantee him a 6% return (that’s $300 million per year) and he is hosting a fund raiser for Barack Obama in New York where the tickets start at $10,000. What’s going on?
Photo by wstera2
Obama has a jobs plan, or so we are told. He will unveil it after he returns from Martha’s Vineyard. I hope it is a little more detailed than his budget plan to cut $4 trillion that no one can find by meticulously searching the Oval Office. I don’t even know what is in the plan and I have a better one. Stay in Martha’s Vineyard, Mr. President. Set a goal to play eighteen on every PGA sanctioned golf course in the country. Don’t you have some friends and family in Hawaii that miss you?
In the July 4 issue of National Review we have this follow-up on the stimulus.
“In a speech at Chrysler’s Toledo plant celebrating his administration’s ‘successful’ bailout of the company, the president invoked the multiplier effect by pointing out that saving the plant had helped Chet’s Restaurant, a Toledo institution since the 1920s, to stay open. A few days later, Chet’s announced that it was closing; the owner laid equal blame on the current hard times and Ohio’s 2006 enactment of a smoking ban.”
More than two years after the official end of the recession our economy limps along. We are overtaxed, overregulated by busybody governments at all levels, that believe their superior intellect and beliefs should be impressed on the drone populace for their own good. What was that phrase? “Give me liberty…”
That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.
Actual Unemployment vs. Stimulus Sales Pitch
It was a very close race, one of the last decided in the country. Out of 180,000 plus votes the final margin of victory was just under 600 votes. In that election Tim Bishop successfully managed to hide from his record and instead he took advantage of a late Republican primary that was hotly contested and pounced with a campaign of personal attacks on his opponent that was just enough to carry the eight weeks until Election Day. His opponent, Randy Altschuler, wants a rematch and it appears the race will be decidedly different.
On a report that his challenger from last fall, Randy Altschuler, may be looking at a rematch, Tim Bishop’s team wasted no time throwing away all pretense of what they preach to get back in the gutter to revel in the politics of personal attack.
What Bishop Says
In a speech on the floor of the House during consideration of a vote to repeal ObamaCare, Congressman Bishop had this to say:
“Mr. Speaker, I believe it is time this Congress does what President Obama called on Americans to do last week: approach our debates and our differences with civility and honesty. We appear to be doing reasonably well with regard to civility, but less so with honesty.”
What Bishop Does
Jon Schneider, Tim Bishop’s spokesman responded to the report of a rematch with juvenile name calling:
“Randy Outsourcer couldn’t win in a once-in-a-generation year for Republicans,” writes Jon Schneider, the spokesman, using the campaign’s negative nickname for Altschuler. “While Tim Bishop will be able to run in 2012 on his record of fighting House Republican efforts to cut 1,000 jobs at Brookhaven National Lab, Randy will remain a fatally flawed outsourcer with a track record of getting rich by shipping American jobs overseas.”
“Randy Outsourcer”? That is hardly civil nor honest. It is the kind of discourse you would expect in a grammar school lunchroom or schoolyard.
The Facts
Congressman Bishop’s main argument for reelecting him was that his opponent created a successful company that provided services to businesses and some of those services were provided from offshore locations. We live in a global economy, but don’t let facts get in the way. Will Mr. Bishop tell Canon, USA, to close their North and South American headquarters in Melville, which employs 1,200 Long Islanders, because everyone knows outsourcing is bad? Let’s send those jobs back to Japan where they belong! How about SRI, a German manufacturing and engineering giant looking at Long Island; or WiseCon and Surikat, two Chilean companies? Let us not forget all the foreign based auto companies that employ tens of thousands of Americans here in America. Go home foreigners!
But don’t look too closely at Bishop’s record. After all, he voted for the bailout with taxpayer money of GM and Chrysler. After getting our money Chrysler announced the construction of a $570 million engine plant in Mexico. GM for their part quickly announced that they were increasing their offshore production by 53%. These are high paying manufacturing jobs. So what does Congressman Bishop have to say about his proclivity to outsource using not his own money and taking risks on his own, but with our money? I’m still waiting on a response to the letter I sent to him nearly two months ago asking that very question.
Perhaps it is just a lack of understanding of economics. A study by Dartmouth’s Amos Tuck school of business found that for every job outsourced overseas, two new jobs were create here. In a global economy it is foolhardy to try pick and choose among products based on their country of origin. In 1989, I bought a Ford Probe GT. It was built by Mazda, in Canada, but Ford owned 25% of Mazda. So what was it? Who cares? Pursuing this line of thinking will take us back to the days of Smoot-Hawley tariffs that plunged us deeper into the Great Depression, but that shouldn’t be surprising. The progressives, like Tim Bishop, are doing everything else to mimic the Great Depression.
Time for a New Strategy
It is interesting that Mr. Schneider picked Tim Bishop’s current efforts to save the jobs of 1000 workers at the Brookhaven National Labs. He doesn’t mention his votes for ObamaCare, the Stimulus, the auto bailouts. While saving 1000 jobs is admirable, what about the rest of the 700,000 citizens in his district. He just wants to hand them the bill. Since government has no money except that which it gets from its citizens through taxes, every big government program has an invoice that has to be paid. Take, for example, the stimulus. His constituents share of that bill is about $3 billion. He “successfully” brought home $679 million according to www.recovery.gov. That would be like getting a $679,000 house for “free” with a $3 million mortgage attached to it. Are there any takers out there for that deal?
Next time around Mr. Bishop may actually have to run on his record, but let’s leave the taunts and childish names behind and have an adult debate on the issues. The people of the district deserve as much.
That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.
I received an e-mail from my congressman touting his efforts to fight outsourcing. In a global economy, it escapes my why this is a good thing and why we need more businessmen in Congress and fewer professional politicians and academics. So I penned the following response.
The latest news on the economy is not encouraging: a mere 39,000 jobs added and the unemployment creeps ever closer to 10% at 9.8%. In spite of this, or apparently ignorant of it, the lame duck House voted yesterday for another whopping tax increase on the most productive among us. Yes, yes, they will beat the class warfare drums about tax “cuts” for the rich, when what they are voting on is not a cut at all, but either leaving things the way they are or raising taxes. With the recovery barely showing a pulse, it is not the time to take money out of the hands of free market capitalists and put it in the hands of the government. Who do you think can pull the economy out of the doldrums, entrepreneurs or government bureaucrats?
There’s good news and bad news coming out of the Tim Bishop campaign. The good news is that he has a new ad out so we don’t have to keep watching the same ad he has been running incessantly for the past five weeks. The bad news it’s about the one subject that Tim Bishop wants to talk about, outsourcing. It’s the same old stuff, wrapped in a new package. Why can’t Tim Bishop talk about his record? Is he embarrassed by it or afraid of it.
