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.
Ohio
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.
As the Tea Parties celebrate their second anniversary, some of the volunteers have become battle weary, particularly those who live in blue states and don’t see some of the progress that that have been achieved in red states. To rally the troops the following speech was prepared for one of the Tax Day rallies.
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 21st century and to leave trains to the movies.
Comments submitted in response to a previous post, “The Progressive War on Federalism,” focused on the Electoral College and a movement called the National Popular Vote (http://www.nationalpopularvote.com) bill. Rather than argue against my point it only seemed to reinforce it. The objective of this movement, which before this commenter’s contribution I was unaware of, is to abolish, or should I say neuter, the Electoral College and replace it with the direct election of the president. This movement looks to further weaken the states and move us away from federalism and toward a strong monolithic central government. Here is my analysis.
As we approach the mid-point of his term we, once again, hear President Obama with another scheme to create jobs. This time he really, really means it. For a mere $50 billion we can build roads, rails and runways and we can create an “infrastructure bank” to boot. I guess the government wants to get into the banking business now that they have swallowed up two thirds of the domestic auto companies and passed a law to take over health care. But, hey, who are you calling a socialist?
The infrastructure bank has supporters: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ed Rendell the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania and Michal Bloomberg the Democratic, Republican, Independent mayor of New York, but they want it to support more projects such as water and clean energy projects. But here’s the really good news, according to the New York Times “They say such a bank would spur innovation by allowing a panel of experts to approve projects on merit, rather than having lawmakers simply steer transportation money back home.” We get a brand new panel of experts to tell us morons what is good for us!
How about this idea, get the Federal government out of the roads, rails and runways business. Unless the road is part of the Interstate highway system, and that means interstate, the feds should stay away from it. If a road within a city needs maintenance, that city and its citizens should pay for it, not taxpayers elsewhere in the country. That’s how the whole process got screwed up. You build my road, I’ll build your road and nobody will know who pays for what, until we find out we are $13 trillion in debt.
One of the good ideas Jimmy Carter had was to deregulate the airlines. Airlines became competitive and prices came down. The problem is that air travel consists of three components: the airlines, the airports and air traffic control. Complete the process, deregulate the airports and air traffic control. If you do that, airports can charge different prices for takeoff and landing slots. No more will we see thirty-two flights all scheduled to take off at 7:30 AM from one airport. Private investors would also have an incentive to build a state of the art air traffic control system.
By the way, what happened to all those “shovel ready” projects from the first stimulus plan? Did we actually finish building all the turtle crossings that this country needs?
On another front, Obama continues to tinker with the mortgage market rather than getting out of the way, letting housing prices find their bottom and then going from there. George Mason economist Anthony B. Sanders said in the New York Times, ““Housing needs to go back to reasonable levels. If we keep trying to stimulate the market, that’s the definition of insanity.” Even Democrats are piling on:
“The administration made a bet that a rising economy would solve the housing problem and now they are out of chips,” said Howard Glaser, a former Clinton administration housing official with close ties to policy makers in the administration. “They are deeply worried and don’t really know what to do.”
Who would have thought that a president and vice president with no executive experience prior to taking office would not know what to do once they got there? After all everyone knew that Obama was a really nice guy with an even temperament, what went wrong? Now we hear that Fannie Mae wants to back mortgages with nothing down. But not to worry, this time they are actually going to require the lenders to check to make sure the borrower has income. I feel better already.
Since this administration seems to like experts how about listening to these experts:
“We have had enough artificial support and need to let the free market do its thing,” said the housing analyst Ivy Zelman.
Michael L. Moskowitz, president of Equity Now, a direct mortgage lender that operates in New York and seven other states, also advocates letting the market fall. “Prices are still artificially high,” he said. “The government is discriminating against the renters who are able to buy at $200,000 but can’t at $250,000.”
It’s time for President Obama and his administration to get his boot off of the neck of the economy. Ours is the strongest most resilient economy in the world, if you set it free. All of the tinkering and the anti-business threats have pushed employers to the sidelines. The uncertainty over the economy has led businesses to take a wait and see attitude.
The rhetoric the Democrats have been trying to muster to save their skins is that “eight years of failed policies,” yada, yada, yada. The reality is that this recession started one year after Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid took over Congress. This recession started in the last year of the Bush administration, not the first seven. This recession has lasted nearly twice as long and counting under Obama than it did under Bush, and it shows no sign of changing anytime soon. A recent poll in Ohio by Public Policy Polling asked respondents who they would prefer to see in the White House right now and the results were George W. Bush 50%, Barack Obama 42%; what does that tell you?
So, Mr. Obama, keeps your hands were we can see them and slowly step away from the economy.
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal, newly elected Republican Congressman from Hawaii Charles Djou called Birthright Citizenship a GOP Achievement. And to think I was happy to hear Mr. Djou was elected in an unusual special election where he ran against two Democrats simultaneously. They split the vote and he won. Birthright Citizenship is not a GOP achievement it is an accomplishment of judicial activism, pure and simple. Mr. Djou says, “The Citizenship Clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment provides that a person born in the United States is automatically a citizen, regardless of the race, ethnicity or citizenship of his parents.” Where the hell does it say that?
The Amendment actually reads, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” These, so called conservatives, like the first part of the clause but seem to go ignorant or blind at the second part. If you are a Constitutional Originalist, you look to the meaning of the Constitution first in the actual text, then to any information that you can glean from what was discussed at the time of its passing. This is a case where that information could not be any clearer.
Senator Jacob Howard of Ohio was the author of the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment. He said:
“[E]very person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States. This will not [emphasis added] , of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons. It settles the great question of citizenship and removes all doubt as to what persons are not citizens of the United States. “
How much clearer could “not include aliens” be? Aliens are outside the jurisdiction of the United States and are subject to their home country.
Linda Chavez, who presents as her conservative credentials that she served in the Reagan and Bush administrations, points to English Common Law as the basis of the Birthright Citizenship. Since under Common Law you are immediately and forever a citizen of the place of your birth. However, with the Declaration of Independence we did away with that custom of English Common Law. Under Common Law, you could not renounce your citizenship, and if we are still under that law, we are still all Englishmen. It was also one of the causes of the War of 1812. The British did not recognize our process of Naturalization. They were stopping our merchant ships and taking off sailors they deemed to still be English citizens and pressed them into service in the Royal Navy. The concept that Ms. Chavez is arguing supports Birthright Citizenship is from feudalism, where the serfs belonged to the land. They received the lord’s protection and in return gave their lord a lifetime of service.
At the time of passage of the 14th Amendment, whose purpose was to grant citizenship to the freed slaves, the debate was whether it would also confer citizenship on the American Indians. Under Mr. Djou’s logic and Ms. Chavez’s they were born here, it was automatic. But it wasn’t. Not because of discrimination but because they were members of their tribes which were considered sovereign nations. The United States signed treaties with them. In the Supreme Court case Elk v Wilkins the court ruled:
“Indians, born within the territorial limits of the United States, members of and owing immediate allegiance to one of the Indian Tribes, an alien though dependent power, although in a geographical sense born in the United States, are no more born in the United States and ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ …than the children of subjects of any foreign government born within the domain of that government, or the children, born within the United States, of ambassadors or other public ministers of foreign Nations.”
That was the law until 1898 in the Supreme Court case United States v Wong Kim Ark, where the majority used the Common Law argument to ignore what was written in the text of the Amendment, what was discussed at the time of the Amendment by the author of the Amendment and its supporters and the prior Supreme Court case. This is judicial activism at its baldest. In the dissenting opinion by Chief Justice Fuller he made it clear:
“when the sovereignty of the Crown was thrown off and independent government established, every rule of the common law and every statute of England obtaining in the colonies, in derogation of the principles on which the new government was founded, was abrogated.”
The American Revolution did away with that definition of Birthright Citizenship under the Common Law.
So along comes Lindsey Graham, who can’t decide if he is for open borders or against them, so his suggestion to amend the Constitution to end Birthright Citizenship sounds somewhat hollow. It is also irrelevant. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution clearly grants the Congress the power “To establish an (sic) uniform Rule of Naturalization..” This does not require an amendment, just a simple clarifying law that Birthright Citizenship does not exist in the United States.
The irony is that the 14th Amendment was created to make it more difficult for future Congresses to repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which said pretty much the same thing as the 14th Amendment and it was changed with the stroke of the pen of an activist Supreme Court. Perhaps we need to consider the idea of Mark Levin in that perhaps we need to have a legislative veto of Supreme Court decisions. If the role of the Supreme Court is to interpret laws written by Congress, why not let Congress with a two-thirds vote, explain what the Supreme Court misinterpreted?
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:
- U.S. Chamber of Commerce — they have butted heads with Obama over health care and climate change policies
- National Federation of Independent Businesses
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:
- Service Employees International Union (SEIU) officer
- President of the American Federation of Teachers — a union of workers in a government run monopoly
- United Food & Commercial Workers International Union
- CEOs of some Fortune 500 companies
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.
