With the economy in shambles and his campaign sound bites and early interviews as president coming back to haunt him, President Obama has ramped up the class warfare rhetoric. Let’s put the lie to these strategies.

The Payroll Tax Cut

The issue here is that President Obama wants to help the middle class and he claims the Republicans do not. The famous payroll tax cut puts about $8 a week in the pocket of individuals. But everyone who pays the payroll “tax” expects to get every dollar back, and then some, after they retire. So what is really going on here? The government forces you to participate in the Social Security system. It offers a lousy rate of return compared to alternatives and if you die before you start collecting, everything you paid into it is gone. Your heirs get nothing. If Obama believes in cutting back on payroll taxes, why not convert everything to private accounts and eliminate the tax altogether? Let people save for their own retirement. Let them put more away in the good times, and be able to scale back in the bad times.

The Republicans are not opposed to Obama’s plan, their only requirement is that we cut somewhere else in the budget to make up for the shortfall. This is nothing new. Former Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning raised this very point nearly two years ago, when the Democrats held both houses of Congress. In this enormous government can’t we find anything to cut? Find the cuts and the Republicans will sign on. If not, this is just another case of piling debt on our children and grandchildren, because they will have to make up the difference when we retire.

Taxing the Rich

This week we saw former senator and former New Jersey governor, Jon Corzine testify before Congress to say how sorry he was that he couldn’t find over a billion dollars of his customer’s money. But since he resigned from MF Global he doesn’t have access to any of the records to help in the search. Is the Justice Department beginning a criminal investigation?

Has anyone been charged with a crime for what happened in the fiscal meltdown of 2008? Has anyone collected more campaign cash from Wall Street than Obama? So is it unusual to conclude that President Obama, other than giving speeches, is perfectly fine with Wall Street ripping off the American people, as long as he can rip off the most successful people in America and claim he is looking out for the little guy. Let his pals get boatloads of government money to bail out their companies so they can keep getting richer and then say he wants to tax them more. Is it any surprise that a lot of rich Democrat supporters are coming out and saying they are all for paying more. Who wouldn’t?

President Obama says you can have billions of tax dollars and I just want a kickback in the form of higher taxes so that I can keep spending recklessly. However, ask anyone of these guys to write a check to the Treasury voluntarily, and they all balk. Why? Nobody gets any credit for donating their money to the government. They want the government to take it, not just from them but from every successful business person.

An Economic Winter

If President Obama gets another term, we may face an economic winter from which we may never recover. If the last three years were painful, the next four could be even worse.

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

Jon Corzine, one of those very smart Wall Street guys, the former head of Goldman Sachs, testified before Congress today to answer questions as to what happened to his firm MF Global, which is now one of the largest bankruptcies in US history. There is over $1 billion unaccounted for. He simply doesn’t know where it went. This is the guy that Obama and Biden praised when they took office as the first guy they would turn to in the midst of the economic crisis. It explains a lot about where we are today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm3VMrKqJSA

It seemed that as long as Corzine sat in the cat bird seat of crony capitalism, where if your big bets pay off you rake in the dough and if they go south, you hand the bill to the taxpayers in the form of bailouts because you are too big to fail. Take him out of that role and he acts the same way, but without the safety net you see the results.

What Corzine did, after driving New Jersey into a ditch that Chris Christie is digging out of, he bet heavily on the debt of foreign countries. Oops! It seems like he believed that governments never run out of money, but sadly they do. And we will face the same fate, but who is steering our economic ship? The two guys who think Jon Corzine is brilliant. Jon Corzine is the first guy that Joe Biden and Barack Obama called upon taking office. Is there any wonder that their plan has been a disaster? Is there any wonder that no one on Wall Street has been pursued by the Justice Department? Is there any wonder that they are trying to kill the free market economy by regulating out of existence the things that people actually want to buy and heavily subsidize things that they don’t? Every day we hear a new report of more billions going into green programs that we will never see a return on.

It’s time to drop the curtain and get the hook. These clowns are not the least bit funny.

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

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.

With states’ fiscal situations worsening and the runaway spending in Congress, voters across the country turned to Republicans, or should I say, the Tea Party. Promising to return to Constitutionally limited government and to go to Washington and state capitals, not to start a long new career but to fix the problem, the Tea Party backed candidates wasted no time getting to work.

From Chris Christie in New Jersey to Scott Walker in Wisconsin, they did not flinch from taking on the public sector unions. They knew that the current trajectory was unsustainable. In Wisconsin, the unions descended on Madison and threw everything they had into the fight. Democrat senators fled the state to prevent a quorum from voting on Governor Walkers measures, union thugs took over the state capital building, inflicting millions in damage to the people’s property, tried to defeat a conservative judge so that the law, if passed, could be struck down by the court, and if that didn’t work they tried to recall six Republican senators at the ballot box. All measures failed, Walker’s policies were implemented and job growth in Wisconsin started chugging along.

In other states like Ohio, Tennessee and Indiana similar setbacks for unions were proceeding more quietly. Meanwhile in the private sector, which has only about 7% union representation, the next major showdown is coming to a head.

The United Auto Workers’ contract with GM, Ford, and Chrysler expires on September 14th. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. As written in a previous post, the unions will be sitting on both sides of the bargaining table, as the Obama administration granted them large chunks of GM and Chrysler stock as part of the bailout package, while stiffing the bond holders, and now the unions as labor will be negotiating with the union as owners. And if they drive GM and Chrysler out of business again, who gets stuck with paying for the cleanup? That’s right, the American taxpayer. Why?

Because the Obama administration couldn’t keep their nose out of the automobile business, thinking if their didn’t bring their collective genius to the limited intellect possessed by the average business owners, how on earth could the auto companies ever function? They should have let the bankruptcy courts handle it, but they decided to drag the rest of us into the mess and now we own a stock that is worth about $31 per share that must climb to $52 for us to break even.

So will the unions commit suicide by making unreasonable demands, drive the auto companies out of business and at the same time kill their own investment in their stock? Or, will they quietly get rid of all of their stock before they trash the auto companies and then demand that the government step in again and bail them out?

Get ready to take it in the neck again, America. The most inexperienced president in US history with his most excellent panel of advisers who never worked in the private sector are about to tell the rest of us how it is supposed to all work. Brace for impact, my friends.

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

Phot by Amanda M Hatfield

Congressional members high tailed it out of Washington after passing a debt limit agreement, but Democrats Steve Israel and Tim Bishop wasted no time in holding a press conference at MacArthur airport on Long Island to blame Republicans for a crisis they created.

“They’re now injecting ideology into our runways,” Rep. Steve Israel, D-Dix Hills, said of Republicans in the House. “They’ve allowed Congress to return home without reauthorizing critical FAA airport safety.”

Wow, that sounds pretty serious. Those Republicans are at it again working hard to make America unsafe.

“Ask yourself if there’s a single company in this country that would solve a $16 million problem at the expense to their corporation of $1.2 billion,” said Bishop, a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. “No, the answer is absolutely not.”

Tim Bishop, a man who has spent his entire career in academia and government is now an expert on what private businesses would do in a given situation. But as we have all learned by now, that when Democrats lips are moving and they are calling people terrorists (which you know are never real terrorists), hostage takers, racists, etc., etc. that they are probably covering up the real issue.

The Two Real  Issues

As you have probably guessed by now the issues are not safety and they are not about foolish fiscal management. The issues are a Democrat union power grab and wasteful spending. First, the union issue.

The House passed an FAA funding bill that the Democrats in the Senate, led by Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, stopped cold, and then, of course, blamed the Republicans. The labor issue was described by the New York Times as follows:

The House also passed a long-term F.A.A. bill that included a measure to repeal a rule of the National Mediation Board, which oversees union and labor issues in the airline and railroad industries. The new rule, which passed after President Obama appointed two of the board’s three members, reversed a 76-year-old rule and made it easier for unions to win a representation election. Under the old rule, workers who did not vote were counted as “no” votes; under the new rule, only those casting ballots were counted.

So we have a labor rule that had been in place since 1935, on how union representation elections would be conducted. President Obama appoints two far left members to the National Mediation Board and they reverse the rule. Unions represent only about 7% of workers in the private sector but they are bedrock supporters for the Democratic Party. While Obama tries to refashion America in his own image, the Democrats blocked this bill for that reason and somehow it is the Republicans who are the villains.  The Republicans keep doing what they were elected to do, they keep passing legislation in the House; the Democrats do not seem to pass anything and they block whatever legislation the Republicans pass. Who do you think is the problem?

Wasteful Spending

The other issue concerns funding for a program called Essential Air Service (EAS). EAS, by law, was supposed to expire twenty three years ago, but Congress keeps it alive. It was created after Jimmy Carter deregulated the airlines in 1978 as a way to ease the impact on rural airports by subsidizing them over the ten years after deregulation. The budget for EAS has grown from $50 to $200 million. This program should be eliminated. Those heartless Republicans wanted to cut $16.5 million from the program. The Republicans said that in the overall scheme of things it’s not a lot of money, but we have to start somewhere. Tim “I haven’t found a program I can cut” Bishop naturally jumped in to call the move foolhardy. Well, just what is the EAS?

Essential Air Service

This program subsidizes air service to 140 airports around the country. Here are some examples:

• An airport in Lewiston, Montana. In 2007 it reported that it averages 0.6 passengers per flight. In other words, for every ten flights, six of them had ONE passenger and four of them took off EMPTY! You, my fellow Americans are paying for this.
• Three airports in Kansas in Dodge City, Garden City, and Liberal (no pun) are all within 75 miles of each other and yet we subsidize all three
• Chuck Schumer’s favorites in Messina, Plattsburgh, Ogdenburg, and Saranac Lake are about as close to the large airports in Montreal and Ottawa as Stamford, Connecticut is to JFK airport in New York.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., issued a typical defense of EAS, which supports service to six airports in New York. “There is no question about it,” he said. “Access to air travel is good for businesses, good for jobs, and good for the financial health of the community.”

The politburo has spoken. The central committee of the Democrat party has decided which airports are important and which ones are not, the free market be damned.

Okay but what about places were there are no alternatives such as the 45 subsidized airports in Alaska? In Alaska there are no Interstate highways. The Alaska Railroad only runs from May to September, and air travel is the only transportation available to some remote areas. Surely these places deserve the subsidy. Do they?

In Alaska there is something called the Alaska Permanent Fund, which was created at about the time the North Slope opened up to oil exploration. It collects about 25% of the oil royalties and invests it for Alaska and Alaskans. As of 2008 there was about $28 billion in that fund. There is also the Permanent Fund Dividend which is an annual payment from that fund to Alaskans and in 2010 it paid out $1,281 to every Alaskan who was eligible. If 45 airports, that benefit Alaskans, are in need of a subsidy, why not use this fund to subsidize it instead of using the taxes of someone in New Jersey? The same should go for other states. It’s called the Tenth Amendment. If we eliminate this program, as Congress said it should be eliminated after 1988, we could save $200 million. If we can’t agree to save $200 million, how are we going to save $2 trillion?

Circling back to Mr. Bishop’s remarks, “Ask yourself if there’s a single company in this country that would solve a $16 million problem at the expense to their corporation of $1.2 billion,” it is chutzpah at its highest. The FAA is losing $1.2 billion in tax revenue during this shutdown because Tim Bishop, Steve Israel, Chuck Schumer can’t stand the idea that their union power grab or their automatic pork would be curtailed. As a result jobs are on hold, construction projects stopped, because they won’t even allow a $16.5 million cut, let alone my suggestion to eliminate the whole $200 million. To hold a press conference to blame anyone but themselves is absolutely shameless, but then where is the news in that?

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

It cries out for an intervention. It is almost like a 1950s horror movie where the victim/villain begs for help to stop him before he runs amok and kills again. With a monstrous $14 trillion in debt and Democrats and Republicans about to do battle to increase that amount even more, newly elected Republican governor Rick Scott of Florida turns down white elephant spending on high speed rail, $2 billion worth. But instead of agreeing that Governor Scott’s decision was a prudent one in today’s times, Democrats Chuck Schumer and Frank Lautenberg waddle up to the trough, snorting in glee as they bury their faces in the slop and with the excess dripping off their chins, look into the camera and say, bad for Florida, goooooood for New York and New Jersey.

That’s just what we need when we are broke, more spending on projects that will be losing money for as long as they remain in existence. But who can turn down an opportunity to put their faces in front of the cameras and gleefully spend other people’s money? Some Republicans can, many Democrats cannot. Amtrak has lost billions of dollars since it came into existence. If the predictions are true, and they probably are not, the Acela high speed train time from New York to Washington will be reduced by 31 minutes from two hours and fifty-five minutes to two hours and twenty-three minutes. This is great for people who live in Manhattan and are traveling to a meeting in DC or vice versa, but anyone outside of Manhattan is probably going to go to one of the areas three airports and fly down.

The eagerness not to let money go unspent is more proof that the debt limit should not be raised without some concrete spending reductions as part of the deal. Senators like Schumer and Lautenberg simply cannot be trusted to do anyting other than spend you and your children into oblivion. They can’t help themselves. We’ll have to do it for them.

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

The order in the Middle East has been crumbling, but it seems that the only place President Barack Obama knows where to lead is on the dance floor or when ramming through his socialist programs. When it comes to real solutions to fix the economy or on foreign policy he is utterly lost.

When students rose up against the mullahs in Iran, the Obama administration was strangely silent while demonstrators were murdered in the streets.  But Israel is condemned at the drop of a hat. When the Mubarak regime started to wobble so did the president’s position, for Mubarak, against Mubarak, for Mubarak, against Mubarak. In capitals across the Middle East and around the world our enemies rubbed their hands in glee, while our friends started looking for new friends.

When Khadafy rattled his saber at Ronald Reagan and bombed a discothèque in Berlin that killed two American servicemen, Reagan responded with a raid on Libya that landed 277 hits with 5 misses. Khadafy went back in his cage. When violence broke out from this terrorist slaughtering his own people, President Obama remained silent for days due to a “scheduling conflict.” The scheduling conflict concerned getting Americans out of the country. Between Reagan’s action and Bush’s taking out of Hussein in Iraq followed by Khadafy’s throwing in the towel on his nuclear program, it seems clear that Khadafy does not want a military conflict with the U.S. So a clear message to him that the fastest way to get into a military conflict with the U.S. would be to impede the evacuation of any U.S. citizens will give him pause. To back that up the Sixth Fleet should have been put on station in the Gulf of Sidra and Obama could then be a leader and speak out forcefully against this terrorist.

Instead our leader made it clear he was ready to follow the United Nations. So look out, Khadafy, we’re going to let you have it in Switzerland and kick you off the Human Rights panel. Take that! You can almost see Khadafy’s wrist getting red and starting to swell. I’ll bet that any American left in Libya is bursting with pride over that step. Now we are going to start applying sanctions. Am I the only one who thinks Libya will deteriorate to chaos, if it is not already there, before any sanctions can have an effect? How many people think, Khadafy is going to pull up short because we have frozen his assets like his mansion in New Jersey? With all due respect to the Garden State, I don’t think that is top of mind for Khadafy.

Budget Matters

On budget matters we are now kicking around $4 billion in cuts to prevent a government shutdown for two weeks. How about Harry Reid getting back to Washington and putting the Senate in session to consider the bill already passed by the House that cut $61 billion from the budget? We are running a $1.6 trillion single year deficit. A cut of $61 billion may change that number to $1.5 trillion after rounding. Let’s get serious! Where is the leadership from the White House. His budget was a joke, boasting of saving $1.1 trillion over TEN YEARS. We will be that much deeper in the hole by NEXT YEAR.

Meanwhile my congressman is out fighting the spending cuts that were included in the House bill that passed that chamber. Doesn’t anyone understand the urgency of the problem? We are hemorrhaging red ink and it is time to stop blaming Bush and start looking at the people who are doing the spending.

All the Democrats want to talk about is that the Republicans want to shut down the government, the Republicans want to shut down the government, while they pick up their fiddles and play a tune. If President Obama was a leader, the leader of the Democratic party, he would be on the phone to Harry Reid and tell him to get back to work. Put together the best deal you can, but this is a crisis. But President Obama doesn’t see any crisis. He is more focused on preventing  a solution in Wisconsin than in doing his duty.

The Ultimate Organizer

The president is organized, if nothing else. In this realm he shows his strength. He manages to play a round of golf about every other week. He has top union leaders to the White House about every other week and his White House is on the phone with them several times per week. He has hosted swell parties at the White House and today the New York Times introduces us to his personal trainer. But to show his community spirits, he shares his personal trainer with other White House staffers.

Instead of a President Obama with nice six pack abs, I would much prefer the leadership and waistline of Chris Christie.

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

Ah, the romance of rail travel.  From Murder on the Orient Express to From Russia with Love to White Christmas to Some Like It Hot there is something alluring about a train.  But for all those warm feelings it’s time to recognize that we are in the 21^st century and to leave trains to the movies. 

There have been calls for the great idea of high speed rail that is, in effect, a solution in search of a problem.  It may work well in Europe and Japan, but the United States is not Europe or Japan.  Two things needed to make high speed rail viable are population density and distances between such population densities that are not too close and not too far. We have a whole lot of neither.

Building a high speed rail system is capital intensive.  Between the track bed, carefully engineered to keep high speed trains on the tracks and the passengers comfortable, the rolling stock, and the signaling and safety equipment, it takes a lot of money to build it.  If that investment is to be recovered you need many passengers paying ticket prices high enough to make a profit and low enough to attract those passengers.  Those population centers have to be far enough apart so that the inconvenience of public transportation offsets driving by car and close enough so that the travel time is not too much longer than air travel.  How many of these routes are there in this country that satisfy those criteria?  Precious few.

Consider that part of the country where the population is densest, the Northeast Corridor, extending from Boston to Washington, D.C.  This happens to be one place in the country where rail service works.  Amtrak runs a fast train service along this corner that in 2008 actually made a profit of $41 per passenger on this service, called Acela. 

Let’s compare that to what is being planned for California.  The concept is a high speed rail link running from San Francisco in the north to San Diego in the south, a run of about 800 miles.  The initial segment of the project is estimated to cost $5.5 billion, take five years to build, and will connect Bakersfield to Madera mainly through agricultural regions.  From a construction perspective that should be an easy build with long stretches of open spaces.  Anyone care to wager what how much the estimate will grow?  The total cost is estimated at $40 billion.  If you could achieve the same profit as the Acela ($41 per passenger) and carry as many passengers as the Northeast Corridor in a year (10.8 million), it would take over 90 years just to recover the capital costs, not including any interest charges.  Is that remotely feasible?

Here’s where the problems mount, you could travel the 800 miles by air in about an hour and a forty minutes, whereas a high speed train would probably take around four hours.  One of the towns mentioned in a recent article in the New York Times as being along the route is Corcoran, population 26,000 including 12,000 “guests of the state” at nearby prisons.  Don’t count on them using the rails much.  The distance is too great and the population density is lacking.  But once again, the federal government is in the middle of something where it doesn’t belong providing funding.  Why should the overtaxed citizens of New York and New Jersey pay for a high speed rail system entirely within the state of California?  This about sums it up:

On Dec. 9, California’s rail authority received a windfall of additional federal stimulus money — some $600 million — when Republican governors in Ohio and Wisconsin passed on money intended for their states. California voters approved high-speed rail in 2008, and deadlines are already passing, including a Dec. 31 cutoff for the state to finalize a plan to spend federal money in the Central Valley. Initial spending will span a raft of projects, including designing stations, redirecting nearby roads and acquiring land.

So responsible governors in Ohio and Wisconsin passed on federal stimulus money; rather than return the money to the Treasury, damn it, it was going to be spent by someone!  Send it to California.  In case you hadn’t noticed lately, California is broke.  So tell me again, why hasn’t this project been cancelled?

If the people of California want to build this themselves, fine.  If a private company sees the opportunity to make a profit and wants to build this, go ahead.  But to take tax dollars from one state and give it to another to build another white elephant, is insane.  It is time to get our heads screwed on straight and live within our means.  Between cars and air travel, there are few places you cannot reach in this country.  There is no value in spending billions of dollars to hit a very small niche between the two.

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

Many states have a constitutional requirement to balance their budgets while the federal government has no such limitation.  As such, a number of stately are longingly looking toward Washington to throw some cash their way so they don’t go bankrupt.  It is not going to get better.

If you think Washington awash in debt, is a problem, it is chump change compared to what is brewing at the state level.  Trillions in unfunded pension liabilities are looming and those who are benefiting from those generous plans or who are going to, don’t care about the rest of us who have to pay for them and then go provide for ourselves.

Lawsuits are starting to be filed to stop states from altering the terms of these plans.  The time to act is sooner rather than later, but that is lost on one teacher in Colorado who says, “Why is the state so quick to break its promises.”  Perhaps we should explore how these promises were made, in both directions. 

Unions backed Democrats almost exclusively.  Democrats riding union support into office had a debt to repay.  They repaid it by supporting the kinds of contracts that the unions wanted and the unions returned the favor with their loyalty.  Who paid the bill?  The rest of us.  How much say did we have in the process, next to none.  In private industry, unions negotiate with management.  Unions have almost no say in who gets hired into management and will sit across from them at the bargaining table.  So the adversarial relationship has management supporting the shareholders and unions backing the workers.  As management became more enlightened and took better care of their employees, the need for a union middleman faded away.  That is why in private industry union representation is down to about 7% and falling while in the public sector is around 37% and growing.

The public employees argue that their generous pension plans is merely deferred compensation to make up for their salaries during the time they worked.  The only problem is that the unions did a good job not only on the pensions but on the salaries as well, so that the average public sector employee makes about 34% more than his private sector counterpart.  Fair being fair, our public sector friends would probably recognize their good fortune and agree to help fix the problem, right?  No chance.  As one put it, “I shouldn’t be responsible for past pension underfunding and foolish risks managers made with my money long after I retired,”  Okay, let’s give that a closer look.

Why do you think the pension is underfunded?  Could it be that the government entity could not afford to make the extravagant  payments the union contract required and still balance the budget?  If they tried to raise taxes to cover the shortfall then even the unions with all their political muscle couldn’t get those responsible re-elected.  So it was better to sweep it under the rug for a future administration to deal with.  What about those risky investments?  Well, with risk goes reward.  If you need bigger payoffs on your pension assets to make up for the shortfalls in funding that you didn’t want to make, you may take bigger chances to make a bigger payoff.  But if you are wrong, instead of fixing the problem, you make it worse.  So the real problem is that the unions and the politicians they fought to elect negotiated contracts that were unrealistic and unsustainable.  What does the union member say. “I’ve got mine, you go get yours.”

What are some of the onerous changes that states are asking for?  In New Jersey, Chris Christie asked for a one-year freeze on public employees pay and for them to contribute 1.5% of their salary toward their retirement.  Outrageous!  How about in Colorado where they asked for a 2% cap in the Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) for retirees instead of 3.5%, in an environment with 0% inflation.  Dastardly!  One individual’s justification was that he does not and cannot pay into Social Security so the pension is all retirees have to live on.  He fails to point out that being prohibited from contributing to Social Security puts 6.2% more of his salary in his pocket, since he pays no Social Security taxes, and if he had the self discipline to take that and invest it in the Dow Jones Industrial Average he would have far more money of his own than he would ever get from Social Security.

This problem is not going away.  Once upon a time, public sector employees did earn less in salary than those in the private sector, but those days are long gone.  They earn more, can retire earlier, can retire with more money for longer periods of time and put the burden on all taxpayers who have to cover their pension while providing for their own.  Their “too bad” attitude is shameful.

Democrats think they have a winner.  They want to lather on some more financial regulations because regulators dropped the ball on enforcing what already exists.  So as conservatives point out that what they are proposing is unnecessary or won’t work, they can gleefully say, “Republicans are for the fat cats, while we’re for the little guy.”

Broken Regulations

Harry Markopolos recognized within “minutes” that Bernie Madoff was a fraud.  He took his case to the SEC and was promptly ignored.  He took it to Forbes magazine…not interested.  Bernie Madoff himself was surprised how long it took to be found out. 

So what does the SEC do now?  It initiates a case against Goldman Sachs where professionals on both sides of a transaction knew what they were getting into.  One side bet on housing prices continuing to rise, the other betting the bubble would burst.  The decision on pursuing this was voted 3-2, with three Democrats voting in favor of pursuing the case, and two Republicans voting against.  It must be the Democrats looking out for the little guys and the Republicans looking out for evil Wall Street, right?

John Paulson is the investor who allegedly played unfairly by being able to choose the securities that went into the investment that Goldman Sachs allegedly didn’t disclose to the other party.  Mr. Paulson hasn’t been charged with anything.  Mr. Paulson also contributed $30,400 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee last June.  If you recall Jon Corzine, former Democratic Senator and Governor of New Jersey, used to be the chairman of Goldman Sachs.  The new head of the SEC enforcement division in the Obama Administration, Adam Storch, is a former Goldman Sachs Vice President.  So who’s in bed with Wall Street? 

Democrats Need a Diversion

With almost every measure of public opinion on government appointment sinking to all time lows, the Democrats need to ramp up the class warfare machine to find anything that will gain traction with the public.  They know they can’t fight on the facts so they have to start the fog machine.  Typical Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals stuff.

Conservatives must focus the debate on the issues and not shrink from the fight.  It is far too easy to show that Big Government (Obama) and Big Business (GE, et al) are really partners in dividing up the spoils amongst themselves and telling the rest of us how to live our lives.

Remembering Reagan

Ronald Reagan famously said that the statists believe:

“If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

There is currently no more telling example of this than Senator Chuck Schumer bloviating about Spirit Air Lines charging passengers for carry on baggage.  He wants to introduce legislation prohibiting this.  Hey, Chuck, if you don’t like Spirit charging you for your carryon bags, pick another airline!  That’s how markets work.  But the genius that is Washington is, NO we have to regulate that!  So the idiots would pass a law prohibiting charging for carryon bags and the airlines will respond by raising ALL ticket prices to compensate.  So instead of my having a choice of carrying a bag on board or saving the money, or choosing another airline altogether, the government will make everything equal and more expensive.

So, Chuck, how are you and your pals doing as far as growing the economy and getting the unemployment rate down?   Maybe you should spend some time on that, no?

President Obama has just created a panel to figure out how to get our debt under control.  Even when he makes a decision, such as this one, it is to pass the buck to someone else to do the heavy lifting.  His attempt to overhaul health care turned into the Harry and Nancy Show.  Obama campaigned and gave speeches while Pelosi and Reid shut out the Republicans and created the bill that could not be passed.  Obama is now trying to put lipstick on that pig, by calling for a bipartisan meeting.  But instead of starting over and getting ideas from everyone, they are basically going to pick over the stinking corpse of the bill that the Democrats could not get passed.  It is obvious that the real objective is to either get some Republicans to sign on or to use the meeting as a club to beat the Republicans as the “party of No.”

Stop Me Before I Spend

This president can’t seem to control himself and he finds that he painted himself into a corner.  If he tries to raise taxes on those who make less than $250,000 per year he will be breaking a major campaign promise.  If he stops spending on his own, he will lose the left which is about the only support he has remaining.  So he calls in Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles to co-chair a committee charged with making the president a tailor made fig leaf, to allow him to cut spending and raise taxes, while shrugging his shoulders and saying, “I can’t go against the excellent advice of this august commission.”

If he wants to cut spending, he can just cut spending.  He doesn’t need a commission to do so.  How about an across the board spending freeze, except for national defense, until the economy grows enough to balance the budget and not with gimmicks like increasing discretionary spending now 24% and then saying you will freeze that same spending for the next three years?  How about freezing government hiring?  How about returning $500 billion in unspent stimulus money and $400 billion in repaid TARP money, plus interest, to the Treasury?  Don’t hold your breath.  That would require someone with executive experience who knows how to make a decision, rather than deliberating, like a legislator.  Sarah Palin comes to mind, as does George Bush (I & II), Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan.  These experienced executives knew how to put together a budget and make decisions.  Chris Christie in New Jersey was just sworn in last month as governor and he immediately identified the problem as too much spending and got to work cutting it back.  All that President Obama seems to know how to do is talk. 

If we start advertising now, we may get enough resumes to review to find a replacement by 2012.