Fighting to Preserve Liberty in America
Progressives are a funny group when it comes to investing, and I mean real investing, not the phony code word for spending. If they’re the ones controlling the money and especially if the money is not theirs, then investing is fine. If it will compete with one of their sacred social programs and you will directly benefit from it, then bar the door it’s an out of control casino.
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.
As I check the current price of GM stock this morning, $31 per share, and I contemplate how in the world it is going to reach the $53 per share price Americans need to fully recover their “investment” in the automaker, a recent news story lays it on the line. It’s not going to happen. The Obama administration has announced that it is demanding that auto companies double the mileage that their fleets get, to 56.2 miles per gallon, by 2025.
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.
Tim Bishop continually bashes his opponent on the topic of outsourcing jobs. One of Mr. Bishop’s brilliant solutions, brilliant because it was conceived of in the halls of academia and Congress rather than at the helm of a company, is to raise taxes on companies foreign operations.
At the same time Mr. Bishop and his fellow travelers rail against businesses that are sitting on piles of cash rather than hiring and investing. Since he probably doesn’t know how to read a balance sheet, I will enlist the aid of John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems and Safra Catz, President of Oracle who spell it out in the Wall Street Journal.
I don’t know who Linda McGibney is, so when a friend tweeted a video she was in rebutting Ben Stein on the fast approaching massive tax increase, I first watched the video and then went about Googling her to find out more about her.
The video begins with a clip of Ben Stein saying basically that if you want to consider raising taxes in the future that may be fine, but right now is not the time to do it, it is just punishment. The video then cuts to Ms. McGibney, who like Barack Obama, begins to lecture us about what she knows so little.
“Ben Stein is wrong,” she intones. She continues to describe herself as an American, in the highest tax bracket, and working in the entertainment business, just like Mr. Stein. Wait a minute. From what I could gather, Ms. McGibney is a screenwriter, which hardly makes her an authority on tax matters. Mr. Stein on the other hand is an economist and a lawyer, besides being in the entertainment field. His father was Herbert Stein who served as an economist in the Nixon administration and Ben Stein was a speechwriter for both Nixon and Ford. So when it comes to speaking on matters, economic, I would tend to defer to Mr. Stein.
There is panic in the ranks of the left this Halloween. In today’s Times, Frank Rich, does his level best to whistle past the graveyard, but the fear is clear. He astonishingly titles his piece, “The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York.” I guess they feel the Hitler moniker has lost its zest, so the leftists resort to calling those on the right, Stalinists. Their disorientation could not be more palpable.
What has them in such a tizzy? It centers around the special election in New York’s 23rd Congressional District. The local Republican party bosses chose a candidate, Dede Scozzafava, who would never be mistaken as a conservative, although Mr. Rich actually called her, “a mainstream conservative by New York standards.” That’s like saying David Letterman is chaste by liberal standards, as if these things are measured on a relative scale. But that’s the way liberals and statists think. If your neighbor is more promiscuous than you, then you must be celebate. If you want to make Nancy Pelosi a moderate, move her to Cuba.
Ground Shift
What has Mr. Rich and his cohorts nervously clearing their throats, is that the uprising against the entrenched statists, led by the Tea Parties, actually delivered results. Ms. Scozzafava is pro-abortion, pro-same-sex marriage, pro-Obama stimulus package, pro-card check to make it easier to form a union without a secret ballot election, and supported by ACORN. This is what Mr. Rich calls a conservative, “by New York standards.” What sticks in his craw is that the election was a win-win, for him and his friends. Elect the Republican or the Democrat and it doesn’t matter much, they both hold the same basic views. Then along came Doug Hoffman.
Doug Hoffman threw his hat in the ring on the Conservative Party line. By this Saturday, with support pouring in all across the country from true conservatives, Hoffman was in a dead heat with the conservative and the Republican Scozzafava was fading fast. So she decided to suspend her campaign, and Mr. Rich and company hit the panic button.
So how does Mr. Rich frame his argument? Well he starts by saying Hoffman has no grasp of local issues. Uh, the position is United States Congressman, not city alderman. He well understands the issues at the national level and how the policies of the Obama Administration are bankrupting the country. Those policies will negatively affect the people in his district. But leave it to Mr. Rich to scoff at Hoffman, because he doesn’t know how much pork barrel spending the district needs. A true patriotic Congressman, like John Murtha, finds a way to build an airport in the district that nobody uses and hands the bill to people in other districts like, well, New York’s 23rd. He’s going to Washington to fight those who are bleeding the Treasury dry. So Mr. Rich fights that by calling Fort Drum, home to the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division, a “pork-dependent military base.” Hmmm…the last time I read my copy of the Constitution, it specifically required providing for the national defense. I couldn’t find in my copy where it required building airports no one needed so that John Murtha could get re-elected in perpetuity. I understand it is a fine distinction, but I would have thought someone employed by the New York Times would be able to make it.
Frank Rich’s Happy Talk
Mr. Rich oddly calls the developments in New York as good news. With a recent Gallup Poll, showing that for every self-described liberal there are two self-described conservatives, Mr. Rich says the ideologues that brought about the events in New York’s 23rd, may then start picking off other conservatives and destroy the party. Does he mean conservatives like Arlen Specter, Lincoln Chaffee, Olympia Snow, Susan Collins, Charlie Crist, oh my! With 73% of GOP voters saying that Congressional Republicans have lost touch with their base, this is not good news for Mr. Rich and company. What he believes is that a small cabal of conservatives will put unelectable candidates on the ballot that voters will reject and the Democrats will gleefully reap the rewards. In reality, the GOP leadership has for too long put weak candidates on the ballot that Democrats easily beat because the Republican base cannot get excited about them. McCain is a war hero and worthy of our admiration, but just look at his signature legislation: McCain-Feingold, McCain-Kennedy. He was not a conservative on many fronts.
Nixon was a conservative, Ford was not. Reagan was a conservative, Bush 41 was not and Dole was not. George W. started more conservative than not, but then drifted to become a big spender. McCain was not a conservative. Do you see a pattern here? Conservative Republicans win.
With Obama’s approval rating going down in a virtual straight line, Mr. Rich confidently proclaims that the only politician Obama has to fear is Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan. By all means, Mr. Rich, you keep telling your pals that.
Stock Market Leads the Way
As I write this the stock market is up nearly 200 points, and it has risen in each of the last three months. Commodity prices are rising based on encouraging manufacturing data from abroad. Personal incomes rose 0.5% in April. Chrysler could exit bankruptcy as soon as Monday. Citigroup and GM are removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, replaced by powerhouse Cisco and Travelers. Ford motor’s shares rose 4.9% on news that it plans to expand production in the third quarter to try to gain market share from its rivals, and without government money.
The Stimulus Flop
Less than 10% of the $780 billion stimulus package has been spent. President Obama told us we desperately needed or we may be mired in this recession/depression for years . The free marketers said that this economy is strong enough to recover on its own, which the statists sneered at. Government created this mess by their meddling in the housing market and how they mishandled interest rates and the money supply but we were told that “only government” can get us out of it. More recently President Obama, who has been trying to spend every dime Congress will let him get his hands on has said we are out of money. Here’s a thought: repeal the rest of the stimulus and get out of the way of the strongest economy on earth.
Things to Ponder
If the Obama administration is not careful and doesn’t reverse course before he bankrupts us, we may be faced with accelerating inflation and sky high interest rates. Shall we get nostalgic for the days of Jimmy Carter?
