Fighting to Preserve Liberty in America
For years Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the most thoughtful and erudite public servants we have had, published a document New York and the Federal Fisc that described the flow of dollars from New York and the great imbalance on the return trip. Steve Israel seems to have taken up that mantle but his votes in the House are baffling.
First it was that Bush spent all eight years of his presidency (and was reelected after four of those years) destroying the economy and so we need to give Obama, what, eight years to fix it? Then it was blame Boehner. That didn’t work, because not many people know who John Boehner is. Then it was “the Republicans want to go back to the same old ways that got us into this mess.” Tell that to Arlen Specter, Lisa Murkowski, Mike Castle, Bob Bennett, Charlie Crist, Trey Grayson. Same old, same old? I don’t think so.
Now it is time to go negative. No, I don’t mean campaign ads. That was to be expected as the Democrats do not, repeat, do not want to run on their record, lest it get as ugly on November 2 as a town hall meeting. No, they are going negative on their base. The Democrat heavies are coming out and mocking their base to shame them into coming out and voting for them. Consider some of these gems.
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.
Who would you trust to better invest a million dollars in the economy, Bill Gates or Joe Biden? Do the richest people in America bury their money in a pit in their back yard or do they either spend it or invest it? Are taxes cuts where the American people give less of the wealth they created to the government or is it where the government gives money to the American people?
If you are like the overwhelming majority of Americans you would answer those questions as follows: Bill Gates; spend or invest it; give less to the government. But the Obama administration and their acolytes live in an alternate reality where Joe Biden, who President Obama put in charge of watching carefully how the stimulus money was spent because “nobody messes with Joe,” is in charge of spending $700+ billion; where they think nothing good happens from the most productive people in the economy when they have more resources to work with; where all money belongs to the government and the government gets to decide who and how much we can keep.
By excluding “the rich” from any tax cuts because we “can’t afford to give the rich a $700 billion tax cut”, this administration is saying that by giving Joe Biden $700 billion he will spend it in such a spectacular way that the economy will be humming before Recovery Summer has ended. We are still waiting.
What happens if Bill Gates has an extra million? I could see three things. One, he spends it. Although he is not known to be an extravagant spender like his competitor Larry Ellison, I understand that Mr. Gates lives in a very nice state of the art house. He may choose to upgrade it. That will probably involve architects, engineers, general contractors, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, laborers, and on and on. In other words, jobs. Isn’t that we need now? How many stimulus projects are there that have sucked up money but created no jobs? (If you are struggling with that question go to www.recovery.gov and sample some of the projects) Two, he could invest it. He might fund a start-up which would again create jobs. If the start up was successful, he might buy it outright which would put money back in the hands of the entrepreneurs who started the company and perhaps they would start another. More jobs, more spending, a growing economy. Three, he may put the money in his charity, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. That is a charity that does good things, but with a difference. Because it is a charity not a government program, there will be people watching how the money is spent with the discretion to modify the program if it gets off track. Government programs are built upon rules. If a crook gets a copy of the rulebook, he can rip off the program until someone gets around to re-writing the rules. In the meantime it is ka-ching for the crook.
The incumbents in government believe that tax revenues are their money and tax cuts are gifts from the government to the people. Taxes are what we the people give to the government. We need to starve the beast and put it back in its cage. Government is trying to run every aspect of our lives. This country was founded because a tone deaf government was taxing America to the eyeballs. It is that time again. We should make the Bush tax cuts permanent now and clean house in November.
President Obama went about doing what he does best, giving another speech, and in doing so demonstrated his true colors. He also demonstrated how far he has come from his empty promises to be a uniter and not a divider. As millions across the country gathered to make their voices heard that we are over taxed and over governed, he smugly wondered to a crowd of supporters why the Tea Party members weren’t thanking him for lowering our taxes.
That claim holds about as much water as his continually proclaimed “jobs saved”, a statistic that he and Joe Biden frequently parrot but no one knows how to measure. The Bush tax cuts are about to expire and Obama has no intention of extending them. Thank you, Mr. President. He took $787 billion of our hard earned tax dollars and squandered them on a stimulus program that actually made things worse. How can I make such an outrageous statement? I am relying on the words of the smartest man ever elected to the presidency of the United States. He told us that if we did not implement his stimulus package, the unemployment rate would rise to 9%. Well, it’s at 9.7% so it is not unreasonable to conclude the package that he passed actually made the situation worse. Thank you, Mr. President
He has rammed through his health care program that will add taxes to drugs and medical devices, will tax citizens if they do not buy the insurance he wants us to have. It will cost $1-2 trillion and where does he think that money is going to come from? The Federal government only has one source of revenues, taxes and fees. So how does he suppose he is going to pay for all of this? Why, thank you, Mr. President
Keep mugging it up, Mr. President, keep sneering at the majority of Americans, and soon you can join Jimmy Carter’s elite club of bitter hope and change one term presidents.
For nearly eight years we heard the left scream, “Bush Lied!” over the decision to invade Iraq. One decision and the same refrain repeated over and over again. Where is the scrutiny of the truth police where President Obama is concerned?
In his State of the Union address he took the unprecedented step of calling out the Supreme Court and encouraging his minions to give that rebuke a standing ovation. Shameful. This is not to say that Obama cannot criticize other branches of government, but there is a time and a place. When Joe Wilson called out “LIAR!” during a previous speech by President Obama he was roundly criticized and rightly so. Not for the criticism, but for the time and the place. Joe Wilson called the president to apologize. Did Obama do the same?
The timing of the act was bad enough, but the accusation he made was not true, as Samuel Alito could be seen saying, if you can read lips. In the midst of his constitutional duty to report to Congress on the State of the Union, he uses a blatant lie to attack his guests. But that wasn’t all. His speech was sprinkled throughout with falsehoods, not least of which was his statement on jobs.
Counting the Uncountable
To try to put a positive spin on his porkulus bill, he had to make up a statistic that no reputable economist can endorse, “jobs saved”. In his State of the Union speech and on the Sunday morning talk show circuit, Obama and his team talked about 2 million jobs created or saved. But they weren’t all on the same page, some said 1.8 million, but regardless it is blatant dishonesty.
Jobs created is a real statistic. As a small business owner I can tell you that when you hire someone there are a number of government agencies that you have to report it to and you have a deadline in which to do so. There is also some paperwork involved when you eliminate a job. But I have never, never had to report to any agency when I thought about eliminating a job and then changed my mind. After all wouldn’t that be the definition of a job saved?
If I never thought about eliminating the position, then the job is not “saved” it just continues to exist. If I thought about eliminating the position and did so, it would not be a job “saved” it would be a job eliminated, no? So it is this two step process of thinking about the action and then not following through that could reasonably be thought of as a “job saved”. How do you measure that thought process? Hiring someone is an observable action. Eliminating a job is an observable action. Saving a job are two related thought processes not externally observable, they can only be “reported” by the decision maker and it cannot be independently verified. Is that the kind of statistic upon which you want your government to base billions of dollars in spending decision? The only added feature of Obamanomics is that some money changes hands. Money that comes from you, dear taxpayer, and goes to the businessman. Can you see why such a statistic is ridiculous?
Which One Is It Mr. President? Mr. Biden? Anyone?
Let’s pretend for a moment that “jobs saved” is a real statistic. If the president has a figure in his head of 2 million jobs created or saved, and for the aforementioned reasons the number of jobs created is a hard number reported to some agency, then the number of jobs saved should be a matter of simple math. 2 million minus the number of jobs actually created equals the number of jobs saved. So why not report it as such? 100,000 jobs created and 1.9 million jobs saved, for example. Why lump them together? Because when you lump them together its harder to tell how big of a lie the president is telling.
Stimulus recipients previously reported that they had directly “created or saved” 640,329 jobs by Sept. 30, but their filings were criticized after it emerged that some people had reported saving jobs when they had actually spent the money on pay raises or paying employees who were not in danger of being laid off.
In December, the White House Office of Management and Budget changed its guidance, telling recipients they should start counting every worker whose salary was funded with stimulus money, rather than guessing whether the jobs would have existed in the absence of the federal plan. Opponents of the program accused the administration of “moving the goal posts” to make the plan appear more successful. — Wall Street Journal, Latest Stimulus Report Fuels Jobs Pressure, Feb. 1 2010
So companies using stimulus money to give people raises was counted as jobs saved! We have 10%-17% of our workforce idled and taxpayers are being fleeced to give people raises and this administration is calling that successful policy. When do we start firing people in this administration? How about Janet Napolitano? How about Eric Holder? or are we saving their jobs too so that the numbers look good? The other reports are just as galling: $1000 purchase of a lawn mower is credited with saving jobs; using stimulus money to purchase boots with each boot (left and right) being counted as a job saved because someone had to make the boots; stimulus money going to create jobs in Congressional districts that do not exist. Does anyone have any confidence that this administration has a clue about how to run a government? This is beyond embarrassing.
The Next Stimulus
But fear not, since the first stimulus was so successful, President Obama is teeing up the next one, but don’t worry this one is only $100 billion. Doesn’t that just make you feel warm all over?
The Joke is on You
Joe Biden just held a press event to reveal how he was going to help the middle class. The man who has a hard time reaching into his own pocket for more than $1 a day in charity to give to his fellow man, has no problem reaching into your pocket and give the fruit of your labor to someone else. It’s a win-win. It doesn’t cost Joe Biden and it helps him keep getting elected and drawing a salary that you pay for.
Here is what he revealed:
Fumbling and Stumbling
The way to create jobs is to let the job creators keep their money to invest in their business and expand. Small business owners are stuck waiting to learn how much all of Obama’s social re-engineering is going to cost them and until they know that, hiring is the last thing they will do. The only thing this administration seems to know how to do is bash business and spend money and the more they spend the longer the recover will take. They are now planning another stimulus plan to follow the last stimulus plan that didn’t work, and the deficit continues to grow and grow and grow.
President Obama wants to create a bipartisan panel to recommend how to reduce the deficit. He gives the back of his hand to bipartisanship when it comes to workable solutions to real problems, but he loves bipartisanship when it gives him political cover to make unpopular decisions. All of his supporters love to say that experience doesn’t matter and that President Obama is the smartest guy in the room. If that is true, he should not be afraid to propose bold spending cuts and shrinking government and be smart enough to explain it to Congress on his own. If he does so, I am sure many Republicans would support him and vote for it (and almost all Democrats vote against it). But he wants it both ways, he wants Republicans to yield to tie spending cuts to tax increases and put the package to an up or down vote. He will then take that on the campaign trail to tell the world how Republicans voted for tax increases. If you don’t believe me, look to history. George Herbert Walker Bush, of the “no new taxes” pledge, got Congress to agree with spending cuts in return for a tax increase. Bill Clinton clubbed him to death, like a baby seal, with that pledge and then enjoyed Bush’s restraint upon Congress on the spending side to generate budget surpluses. Let President Obama take the lead. Wasn’t that why he was elected? Because he was a different kind of leader? So, lead away.
There was a commercial not too long ago where a young man looked out his window to the village green where a bundle of money had just fallen. He calls his wife/girlfriend over to show her. She suggests running down and getting it, but he says, no, let’s wait. Next you see a frizzy headed guy down on the green who screams, “MONEY!!!!” In seconds, people came out of the woodwork and scoffed up all the money while the young couple looked on.
The image of that commercial popped into my head as I considered the job summit being led by President Obama. To me, the young couple represented the government pondering how to direct the economy to achieve this specific goal or that. The mob on the green was the free market. While the government dithers over what kind of legislation to write, which special interest groups to pay off to pass it, how to develop incentives to get private industry to do this or that, if they would just cut taxes and get out of the way, the free market would get to work creating jobs where they are needed, not where some bureaucrat thinks they should go.
Uncertainty
The biggest cloud overhanging this economy is uncertainty. The Obama administration is slamming through enormous changes: a $787 billion Porkulus package, cap and trade, health care. Businesses look at this combined with the accumulation of massive government debt, tax increases rather than cuts (yes letting the Bush tax cuts expire is a tax increase, not just the expiration of tax cuts as Speaker Pelosi tries to spin it) and they don’t know what hiring that extra employee is going to cost, let alone what it will cost to keep the employees they already have. So they don’t hire until the dust settles and they can calculate the impact.
“Tax incentives for job creation are “worthy of further consideration,” he said, while adding that the administration is also set on making a big push in the area of green jobs.” – President Obama at Jobs Summit
“Worthy of further consideration”? Since conservatives have been calling for tax cuts for a year now, this kind of statement in Obama-ese translates thusly, “I have to make a nod to the right, to acknowledge that I heard them, but it ain’t happening.” Couple that with the “big push in the area of green jobs.” We are in the midst of the scientific scandal that the “settled science” of man-made global warming could be the greatest hoax since Bernie Madoff, and Obama wants a big push in the area of green jobs. What if that area collapses because the urgency that Al Gore has been screaming about is no longer urgent? It’s government planning on the order of Soviet five-year plans or Mao’s Great Leap Forward programs. It harkens back to Jimmy Carter’s giant Synfuels project that was going to convert coal into oil, until oil prices fell and the project imploded, but not before billions of tax dollars were poured into that rat hole.
How Simulating!
If you listen to Joe Biden, the stimulus plan is working better than expected. But let’s take a closer look. As of about three weeks ago only $120 billion of the stimulus money had been spent. (So why is Congress looking at another stimulus with over $600 billion left to spend in the first one?) Of that money, 80% went to the Department of Education, Health and Human Services, and the Department of Labor. What about all the “shovel ready” projects? Only about $4 billion has gone to the Department of Transportation. Feel better?
Jobs Summit Attendees
So who is meeting with President Obama at the jobs summit? Well first let’s look at who was not invited:
I don’t know about you, but I think they might have an idea or two about how to create conditions that let the free market create jobs. As for the attendees:
How many jobs do unions create, not occupy, create? Think of the auto industry, steel industry, public K-12 education, the Postal Service, and government in general. Do they bring images of thriving, vibrant, engines of job creation? Or is the image more of the basket cases of the U.S. economy? This is not a slight against the union workers themselves, but rather of their leadership who create so many restrictions on job rules to artificially create the need for more jobs. There motto is: why have three people do the work, when you have five do it?
As far as big business is concerned, let me dispel the thought that conservatives and big business go hand in hand. In many cases big business looks to cut deals with the government to protect their industries and markets from upstart companies. They have gotten big and lethargic, rather than nimble and vibrant. Small businesses create about 80% of the jobs in the U.S. and they didn’t have a seat at the table.
So was the jobs summit about creating jobs or just jive talk? If you want a real jobs summit see what American Solutions was hosting in Cincinnati, Ohio and Jackson, Mississippi. They actually discussed ideas that would work.
