Congressman Tim Bishop held an online town hall meeting to hear questions from constituents and give his answers. Perhaps he thought this a safer forum than a live town hall meeting. Last year’s meeting in Setauket did not go well and was soon viral on You Tube.

I will comment on three of the topics from that meeting: the payroll tax cut, regulations, and manufacturing jobs.

Payroll Tax Cut

Congressman Bishop came out heavily pitching the extension of the payroll tax cut, from the normal level of 6.2% to the current level of 4.2% and even to go lower to 3.1%, for at least another year. He made the startling claim, quoting some experts that if the payroll tax cut wasn’t retained it would cost 400,000 jobs. It must be from the loss of all that spending power generated from a 2% cut in the payroll tax. I am sure pizza parlors will be devastated, as the weekly savings to a typical family will be about the cost of a pizza pie. The other statistic was that if the payroll tax was cut further to 3.1%, 750,000 new jobs would be created. Interesting. Raise the tax by 2% and 400,000 jobs would be lost, cut it by an additional 1.1% and nearly twice as many jobs would be created. Like prior predictions of how government intervention would affect jobs, we are supposed to believe that employers will start hiring if the cost of hiring a new employee  is reduced by 3.1% for just one year, before going back up. Only those people who never worked in private industry, like Bishop, Schumer, Obama, would believe that.

Bishop insisted that these cuts would have no impact to the Social Security Trust Fund. Considering that there is nothing in the Social Security Trust Fund other than a bunch of IOUs from Uncle Sam’s other pocket, he may be correct on that front, but he said that the cut would be paid for cutting spending elsewhere. Not surprisingly, he didn’t say where exactly “elsewhere” was.

Throughout the call, Bishop’s press secretary was conducting a dopey poll. To paraphrase, “If you are in favor of the payroll tax cut that will put $1,500 in your pocket, press 1, if not, press 2.” Who wouldn’t press 1? What would the results be if he asked, “If you are in favor of borrowing $600 from China that your children and grandchildren will have to pay back, so that we can give you $1,500 today, press 1, if you think more borrowing and debt is a bad idea, press 2,” I think the poll would turn out quite differently.

Regulations

A caller who owned a small construction company asked about all the regulations and paperwork that businesses had to deal with. Bishop said that President Obama had things well under control forming a commission to “zero base” all regulations and hundreds and hundreds of regulations have been taken off the books. In the Wall Street Journal today there is an editorial titled, “Regulation for Dummies,” that paints a very different picture.

To answer the most basic question—has regulation increased?—we’ll focus on what the government defines as “economically significant” regulations. Those are rules that impose more than $100 million in annual costs on the economy, though there are hundreds if not thousands of new rules every year that fall well short of that.

According to an analysis of the Federal Register by George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, the Cabinet departments and agencies finalized 84 such regulations annually on average in President Obama’s first two years. The annual average under President Bush was 62 and under President Clinton 56

As the graph clearly shows the number of “economically significant” regulations under Obama has skyrocketed. This is what is causing the uncertainty that is hindering employment. How can this be curtailed? A bill just passed in the House of Representatives called the “Regulation from the Executive In Need of Scrutiny Act (REINS)”. This would require any of these economically significant regulations to be sent to Congress for approval before becoming being enacted. What the process is today is that Congress can vote against regulations, but that can be vetoed by the President. If the regulations are coming from the president, wouldn’t you expect him to veto it? This turns it around so that the Congress has to approve the regulations, if they don’t, there is nothing for the president to veto. The Democrats say this is a Congressional encroachment of the Executive.

“The REINS Act would undermine our ability to protect children from harmful toys, prevent asthma and lung ailments resulting from pollution, and ensure that our small businesses can compete fairly in the marketplace,” House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer added. “At the same time, it would force Congress to play a larger role in the regulatory process, leading to even more gridlock in Washington.”

Surely he forgot to mention killing bunnies in there somewhere. But let’s look at the process: Congress passes a law; departments in the Executive branch write regulations to carry out the law Congress passed. So why is it an outrage that Congress reviews economically significant regulations to see if the Executive is actually implementing what they passed? Tim Bishop voted against the REINS Act. This is another case of Democrats focusing on piddling regulations while saying “hands off” the really impactful ones.

Manufacturing Jobs

Another caller asked the Congressman about manufacturing jobs. He patted himself on the back for helping to bail out the auto industry. He said if he and others hadn’t done that that hundreds of thousands of jobs would be lost. I addressed the implausibility of this in an earlier post. In that post I argued that if GM and Chrysler went bankrupt and even if they didn’t come out of it leaner and meaner, people still needed transportation. They would buy Fords, Toyotas, Nissans, Hondas, etc., that are currently built here in the U.S. Those car companies would need to increase their purchases from suppliers and those who formerly supplied GM and Chrysler would be well situated to supply the remaining car companies. The argument that we don’t manufacture here anymore is a myth. On a dollar volume basis, we still manufacture more than any country on earth. A few miles from where I am writing this, in Georgetown, Kentucky, is the largest Toyota factory outside of Japan. Due to a free trade agreement with South Korea that the Democrats blocked for years, that Toyota plant will begin exporting about 6,000 Camrys a year from Kentucky to South Korea.

One of the reasons we don’t build more here is our lousy tax code. Fix it. A reason there is not more manufacturing in Mr. Bishop’s district on Long Island is high electric rates. Factories run on power and power on Long Island is expensive. One of the reasons for that is that government approved the building of a $5 billion nuclear power plant on Long Island, and then when it was ready to throw the switch, they changed direction and said it couldn’t open. So Long Island rate payers had to find and buy electric from other sources and pay for the mothballed plant that produced nothing. Once again, the government helping us out.

But Tim Bishop has a solution. He wrote a bill to ban offshore call centers from federal contracts or loan guarantees for five-year. Nothing like micromanaging a corner of the economy while the rest of it burns. Why not look to the root cause? Tax structure, too much regulations, ObamaCare, out of control government spending. If Congress would fix those problems maybe companies wouldn’t look offshore to set up call centers.

The Budget

Tim Bishop also touched on the deficit and debt. He said we need to cut spending, but he never said what he would cut; he said we needed to control entitlement spending, but he didn’t say how he would do that; and he said we needed to add revenue, but he knew exactly how to do that, tax the rich. Here’s how I see it. The government got us into this mess by spending too much money, they should get us out of it by spending less money. Asking for any more tax revenue is just shirking their responsibility for which they are paid handsomely, and passing the problem on to us. Who couldn’t solve the problem with enough money?

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

photo by Kevin Dooley

One of the main reasons the current economic problem is so hard to solve and the battle lines are so starkly drawn is that there is strong disagreement on what the problem is and likewise the solutions. The mantra from the left is that the problem is Bush’s fault, there was too much deregulation under Bush, although no one points to any particular regulation repealed under Bush that caused the crisis, and that we don’t tax enough. Those on the right have a different view.

Conservatives believe that President Obama is hell bent on changing America from a world leader to just one part, co-equal with many others in a world government. Think of the European Union with America added. In addition, we believe, that Obama wants to remake America as another socialist state on the European model instead of fertile ground for creative entrepreneurs to plant the seeds of their dreams and watch them grow. Instead he wants to redistribute the wealth by taking from those who produce to those who do not.

At first blush this may seem compassionate even fitting within the Judeo-Christian philosophy of helping the least of our brothers. However, I don’t recall learning anywhere in my Catholic upbringing those passages in the Bible or among the church scholars where we should all defer to the government and shirk our individual responsibilities. In other words if the story of the Good Samaritan was played out today, the Samaritan would see the man beaten and lying on the side of the road, dial 911, and then go about his business without soiling his hands to help the poor man himself. No worry, there must be plenty of government programs to help the poor guy and better yet, we can tax the rich to pay for it. He would not be so crazy as to put the man in his car, take him to a private hospital, leave some money for expenses and promise to pay any shortfall on his return. That would be viewed as nutty. However, when Obama’s philosophy is in place for a long enough time it changes from that of helping those truly in need, to one of entitlement. If you doubt this you need only look and listen to the recent rioting in Britain. They can rob and loot from business owners, because they say they’re the rich and they deserve to get taken down a couple of pegs. But who is paying for their handouts?

But aside from our view of the role of government what about what has worked in the past and what has not? What about the lies that pack political punch but do not stand up to scrutiny. Let’s take a look at the “we have to tax more” lie.

President Bush was not a fiscal conservative. For example, he added the prescription drug benefit to Medicare without providing funding for it. But in an article in the Wall Street Journal giving a primer on the debt situation, John Steele Gordon says this:

That decline {of debt relative to GDP] ended in 2001 following the collapse of the dot-com bubble and rising unemployment in the resulting recession. By 2003 the debt-to-GDP ratio had risen to 61.7%. Many blame the Bush tax cuts for adversely impacting federal revenues, causing the debt to spiral upwards. But that is just not true. Federal revenues declined by almost 12% in the early years of the decade, but when the tax cuts fully kicked in in 2003, the economy began to grow strongly again and federal revenues increased 44% in the next four years, while unemployment fell to 4.2% from 6.2%. Federal outlays in those four years increased by only 26.4%, and while the debt-to-GDP ratio increased to 64.8% by 2007, that was still well below what it had been in 1994.

First, the Democrats love to hark back to the Clinton years, the last time we had budget surpluses, as proof of the genius of Democratic leadership. But when Bush became president and was hit with a recession and the bursting of the dot com bubble, why was that not Clinton’s fault? Answer: President Bush had more class than to point fingers. He took the hand he was dealt and played it. Likewise, when he left office he made no comments about his successor, unlike the equally classless former Presidents Carter and Clinton who can’t bring themselves to get off the political stage.

Bush cut taxes and brought the unemployment rate down to 4.2% from 6.2%, while Obama jacked up spending and the unemployment climbed from 7.7% and is stuck at over 9%, two years after the recession officially ended.

Second, the argument from the left is that we have to repeal the Bush Tax cuts because we cannot afford them. As Mr. Gordon points out we had a revenue boom. In 2007 the Treasury took in more revenue than at anytime in history. This is plainly a spending problem and we have to unwind the reckless spending. The spending under President Bush was out of control and under President Obama he has kicked into overdrive.

The “solutions” being floated talk about it taking 10, 20, 30, 40 years to get things under control. It didn’t take that long to get into this mess, why should it take that long to get out? Granted, we are facing the Baby Boomers going from paying into Social Security and Medicare to drawing out and addressing that has to be front and center. The ponzi schemes that are Social Security and Medicare, like all ponzi schemes, have reached the point where we don’t have enough new people paying in to keep the con going. It is collapsing and we need our representatives to come up with a workable solution. We need to return to Constitutionally limited government, and let the states handle those things that are not specifically delegated to the federal government by the Constitution as is clearly spelled out in the tenth amendment.

But first we need our representatives to act like grown ups and stop trying to score political points to get themselves reelected, and face up the what the problem really is, spending, and fix it. The golden goose is dead. It’s time to live within our means.

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

Mommy! Johnny Boehner didn’t return my phone call! Waaaah! Seriously? Is this what a president says in a press briefing? Good Grief!

Peggy Noonan wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, that captures the character of this president quite nicely.

For the longest time he wouldn’t engage, and now he’s engaged. For the longest time he didn’t care about spending, and now he cares about spending. Good, both in terms of policy and for him. But his decision to become engaged has become a decision to dominate, to have his face in front of the television cameras with his news conferences, pronouncements, and what his communications people are probably calling his “ownership” of any final agreement. He’s trying to come across as the boss, the indispensable man, the leader. And, of course, the reasonable one.

That’s all very nice and part of Political Positioning 101, but at this point it’s not helping. He’s becoming box-office poison. His numbers are falling. The RealClearPolitics composite job approval poll rating has him down six points since June 2, when the debt-ceiling crisis began. That fall, from 52% to 46%, exactly tracks his heightened media presence and his increased attempts to be seen as dominant. Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm, said that if he ran for president today he’d lose, that his job-approval numbers are “worse than they appear,” and that he continues to have real trouble with undecided voters.

And if you’ve watched him lately, you know why. When he speaks on the debt negotiations, he is not only extremely boring, with airy and bromidic language—really they are soul-killing, his talking points—but he never seems to be playing it straight. He always seems to be finagling, playing the angles in some higher game that only he gets. In two and a half years he has reached the point that took George W. Bush five years to reach: People aren’t listening anymore.

The other day he announced the Gang of Six agreement with words that enveloped the plan in his poisonous embrace: “I wanted to give folks a quick update on the progress that we’re making.” We’re. He has “continued to urge both Democrats and Republicans to come together.” What would those little devils do without Papa? “The good news is that today a group of senators . . . put forward a proposal that is broadly consistent with the approach that I’ve urged.” I’ve urged. Me, me, me.

The Republicans have put forward plan after plan, the Democrats acting alone, none. Yes there is that gang of six or seven or whatever, but you will notice that the Democrats will not take a step into that minefield without a Republican at their side. But what have the Democrats done by themselves? President Obama puts forth a budget and when that is laughed off the air, he comes back a couple of weeks later with a new one. It’s unheard of for a president to do that, and then his budget is put up for a vote and it goes down 97-0. He couldn’t even find a single Democrat to vote for it? Do the Democrats in the Senate under Harry Reid vote for anything other than to block it?

Let’s recap the plans on the table:

While Obama, who shunned press conferences and briefings for months, now seems to hold one like Grace before meals, is all posturing all the time. He is also trying to paint the Tea Party patriots as unreasonably stubborn. Well, let’s revisit that one.

Do you remember a negotiation a few short months ago, after the 2010 election. The Republicans ran on a platform of fiscal responsibility and were rewarded with the overwhelming support of the American people. So they set about to work cutting $100 billion from the current fiscal year. Through intense negotiations with the president, the $100 billion became $30 billion (it’s okay, because it’s less than a full year). Then when that onion got peeled back there were only about $300 million in real immediate spending cuts. Snookered?

It is a time honored Democrat tradition to negotiate a deal and then welsh on it if they can. Ronald Reagan negotiated with Tip O’Neill to raise $1 in taxes for every $3 in spending cuts. The tax increase was immediate, the spending cuts never came. George H. W. Bush, negotiated spending cuts and the Democrats insisted on tax increases. Bush went along and then the Democrats ran on a platform that Bush broke his “Read my lips…” pledge. Let’s see, you get what you want and then you beat up the other guy for giving it to you?

So does anyone wonder why the Republicans might be digging in their heels. I have a suggestion for Speaker Boehner. Go play golf. Start the August recess early. Send everyone home. When the Democrats and the president find enough of a spine to put their plan on paper and present it to the Republicans to accept or reject, then perhaps we can consider this a negotiation among adults. But for right now it is the Democrats who are blocking every effort to put our fiscal house in order.

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

(This is the second of a series of articles focusing on topics presented at the Cato Policy Perspectives 2011 conference held at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel on Friday, April 8, 2011)

Kicking off the conference, Ed Crane, president of the Cato Institute, talked about American exceptionalism and how President Obama doesn’t believe in that. To illustrate, he gave the example where while in Europe the president was asked if he believed in American exceptionalism, and he hedged by saying he supposed so, just at the Germans believe in German exceptionalism, the British believe in British exceptionalism, and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. President Obama doesn’t think that America is exceptional and to the extent that he might, he is doing everything in his power to root it out.

The other key point that Mr. Crane made concerned people talking about national goals and aspirations. Nations shouldn’t have goals. People should have goals and nations should protect their right to pursue them. Who wants Washington to set some goals and then have individuals reorder their lives to fit into the grand plan? To me that is the essence of the battle between libertarianism and statism. This is also a nice segue into the Cato presentation on education provided by Charles Murray.

Education

One of the key contributors to American exceptionalism is a well educated work force, and we may be losing that edge. However, Mr. Murray found reasons for optimism. Another point of view I wish to consider was in an article in the Wall Street Journal today by Vint Cerf, one of the real forces behind the Internet.

At a time when we see the tragedy of K-12 education played out in the documentary Waiting for Superman and the pitched battle over public sector unions and teacher tenure in Wisconsin, Mr. Murray’s talk titled. “The Coming Good News About Market Forces and Education,” might seem a bit out of place. He didn’t delve too deeply into K-12 education, other than to say there are a lot more options today than there were in the past, among them: home schooling, charter schools, and vouchers. Mr. Murray’s focus was on post secondary education.

First the bad news:

• The BA degree is no longer a classic liberal education. There are precious few institutions (Murray could name four) that actually provide one.
• He called it a saccharin education with almost anything qualifying as a course. Some of my favorites are: The Stupidity Course at Occidental College (one of Obama’s Alma maters); The science of Harry Potter at Frostburg State University; The Simpsons and Philosophy at UC Berkeley; and Tree Climbing at Cornell University
• It used to be you spent four years getting a BA to mature and grow. In the old days you had a more distant relationship with your professor, more like a supervisor at work. He didn’t care how many other courses you had, he gave you an assignment and he expected you to finish it on time, if you didn’t you failed. Which brought to mind a professor I had at Manhattan College who taught math. His famous saying was, “Engineer build bridge, bridge fall down, no partial credit.” Today that’s not the case. If you miss an exam, you take the makeup test. If you don’t like your grade, you whine to the professor.
• There is now a residence staff at most colleges to do the things parents used to do, so that now four years living at school is just a way of prolonging adolescence.
• He called it a con game
  • You need a degree to get an interview
  • A degree will get you a wage premium over those who don’t have one
  • There is no relationship between a degree and what you actually learned
  • An employer sees a degree and knows two things: one, you have some level of intelligence; two, you have some level of perseverance.
  • A Yale graduate is important not because of what they learned at Yale, but the fact that they got into Yale when they were eighteen speaks to some amount of raw material to work with.

Now the good news.

• Universities were built to support a large library, bring together great minds for scholarship, and enable a large number of students to listen to lectures. Things have changed
• We no longer need a physical library — with the Internet and resources such as Google books you can access a tremendous amount of research material from home.
• Scholarship is now done through collaboration across the world, not across a campus.
• Distance learning works. Why listen to some adjunct give a lecture when you can sit in one room while a Nobel laureate a thousand miles away conducts the lecture?

With the expense of college seeming to be without end the status quo cannot continue. Employers know they are not being served. But there is an enthusiastic group of suppliers ready to provide solutions.

The real course work to learn a skill in college could probably be completed in one and a half to two year, Murray estimates. If a set of certifications could be developed, and Murray cites the CPA exam as an example, that would demonstrate to employers that the applicant before him has actually acquired a set of skills, what more would they need? If similar certifications for marketing, teaching, social work, etc. could be developed a new form of post secondary education might be born. Then the goal of a good education could be about learning how to find what you love and how to pursue it.

Innovation

Vint Cerf has a slightly different take;

Despite our well-developed college and post-college system, America simply is not producing enough of our own innovators, and the cause is twofold—a deteriorating K-12 education system and a national culture that does not emphasize the importance of education and the value of engineering and science.

Perhaps there is a solution in the melding of the two. Our K-12 system produces 1 million dropouts a year and 70% of eighth graders cannot read proficiently. It is broken. We need to put students ahead of job security for teachers and allow talented teachers to receive the economic rewards worthy of their talent. Unions are for just the opposite, protect the inadequate teacher and don’t reward the good teacher as they make the “rest of us” look bad.

But we do need more engineers and scientists. How do we encourage that? First we need to get education out of the hands of Washington. Washington will make sure the solution is bland and ineffective. One of the biggest backers of the creation of the Department of Education was the National Education Association the big education union, so that should tell you something. Let the fifty states come up with competing ideas on how to accomplish this.

Perhaps state schools could offer loans to engineering and science students that would cover whatever financial aid didn’t, in other words a free education. The trade off would be that they had to work in that field in that state. If they did 1/10 of the loan would be forgiven in the first year, 1/9 of the remaining principle and interest would be forgiven in the second year, 1/8 in the third year, such that after ten years, the loan would be fully forgiven. Employers would be attracted to locate near the schools to pick up the talent that graduated. The additional revenue generated from high tech businesses in the state, the income tax revenue from highly paid engineers and scientists coupled with the lower cost of dropouts who end up in prison should make this a cost effective program. All of the capabilities that Charles Murray talked about could be used to form a K-12 to post secondary bond to interest younger students to go into the engineering and science disciplines.

Charles Murray thought this would happen over the next ten to fifteen years. It should a priority to set up sooner. If we fail to act, the replacement for the iPhone won’t just be made in China, it will come from a Chinese company.

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

“I always use the word extreme, that’s what the caucus instructed me to do the other week, extreme cuts and all these riders, and Boehner’s in a box but if he supports the Tea Party, there’s inevitably [be] a shutdown.  – Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY)

In an article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Senator Marco Rubio said:

Every generation has had to confront and solve serious challenges and, because they did, each has left the next better off. Until now.

It brought to mind the movie Generation Zero, that chronicles the origins of the great financial meltdown that we have experienced. In that movie they point to one of the contributing factors the transition in power from those who lived through the Great Depression and World War II to the Baby Boomers, who knew little deprivation in their lives. Now as these boomers, of which I am one, took the reins of power, caution was thrown to the wind.

We are in the midst of a grave situation of out of control spending. Getting it back under control will be hard and it will be painful, but not as hard and painful as it will be if we do nothing. So the Republicans have been battling between cutting a modest amount and a seriously large amount.

The Democrats have been battling to cut nothing. They have no plan. In the last Congress they didn’t even bother to pass a budget. Their plan now is to play partisan politics, and try to demonize the Republicans who are playing the adults in the room. The Democrats are trying to find the right word they can use to extract the most ire from the public against the Republicans. New York Senator and the Democratic Caucus think they have found the word: extreme.

Who is Chuck Schumer

Chuck Schumer is a career politician. He had a very successful high school academic career, he scored a perfect 1600 on the SATs, went to Harvard and then on to Harvard Law School. He has never practiced law. He has never worked in private industry since graduating college.

After graduation, he ran and was elected to the New York State Assembly at the age of 23, becoming the youngest member of that body since Theodore Roosevelt. He served three terms and then ran for the vacated Congressional seat of Elizabeth Holtzman in 1980. He remained a Congressman for eighteen years until deciding to run for the Senate in 1998. He won that election in 1998 and was reelected twice, most recently this past November.

So Chuck Schumer knows how you should live your life, right? He has been living off the tax dollars of his constituents for thirty-seven years and writing the rules for how to live their lives during that time. What happens if Congress does not stop spending? Does Chuck Shumer’s business go bankrupt? No, but yours might. Does Chuck Shumer, get laid off? No, but you might. Does Chuck Schumer feel an impact to his lifestyle? No, but you will. He has made sure that all of the special interests who have helped reelect him are well taken care of and they will surely be there again in 2016.

But you, my fellow Americans, are extreme because we want a government to live within its means, just like the rest of us do. What we need are extreme spending cuts, and if that means Chuck Schumer has to live in the private sector rather than just pander to it, so be it.

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

By now you are probably getting pretty tired of the comparisons of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and how Obama is/would/should apply the lessons learned by Bill Clinton and coast to a second term. I, however, have always seen Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as two very different politicians with different goals.

In my view, Bill Clinton’s goal in life was to be President of the United States and to do whatever was necessary to get there and serve two full terms.  Barack Obama I see as a man with an agenda and the presidency is the best means to implement that agenda. Unlike many former presidents, Jimmy Carter excepted, Bill Clinton still loves being on the stage, getting called to rally the troops, being consulted, in short, being the center of attention.

Barack Obama matured within a philosophy of wealth distribution, social justice, big government and has demonstrated his zeal to implement as much change as possible, before the opposition knows what hit them. He advanced those ambitious programs that fit that agenda (Stimulus, Health care, cap and trade) while letting favorites of the left but not fundamental to his vision (Guantanamo, withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan)  wait.

Bill Clinton had no problem moving to the center if that helped him get reelected. Clinton was and is a brilliant politician who knows how to follow the script to deliver a convincing performance to the crowd. Obama has a trickier and riskier task.

With all he has put on hold that his far left base wanted if he moves dramatically to the center, they will abandon him to a primary challenge and his reelection chances will collapse. If he doesn’t appear to move to the center, the independents who have been leaving him in droves will continue to do so and his reelection chances will collapse. He has to fake a move to the center long enough to slow the defections of the independents and then circle back to the left to hold them long enough to get reelected. So how does he do that?

Time may not be on his side, as two years is a long time to fool two diverse groups. He is off to a good start though. He gave a strong speech in Tucson. There has been little activity in Washington other than the ObamaCare repeal that was newsworthy, allowing Obama’s ratings to climb by about ten points. He wrote an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal announcing a change in the way regulations are written such that they will require a cost/benefit analysis, a sign he is moving toward the middle. Since most of the electorate loses focus during the “off-season”, similar sleights of hand may help him achieve his goal.  Sleight of hand?

I call it a sleight of hand because in the same document that he called for cost/benefit requirement on every new regulation he also included this:

 When the agencies weigh costs and benefits, the order says, they should always consider “values that are difficult or impossible to quantify, including equity, human dignity, fairness, and distributive impacts.”

The left hand giveth, the right hand taketh away. Is it just cynicism on my part? The EPA is “confident that that it won’t need to alter a single current or pending rule.” So, in effect, the “new” ruling on regulations is all smoke and mirrors.

If Mr. Obama makes sure he knows where his teleprompter is at all times, he might be able to pull it off. He is a very good rehearsed speaker. Let 2008 be your guide.

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

When President Obama and his team stood before their supporters and introduced ObamaCare you could almost hear them sing in unison the Carly Simon song, “Nobody does it better…”.  They were going to bring us the health care we had been waiting for.  Magically covering every soul in America whether they wanted it or not.  If they did not, the government would be just like granny used to be, “Open wide, this won’t hurt a bit.”  Come to think of it, was that granny or… never mind.

One of the miracles of ObamaCare was to be health care for those with pre-existing conditions.  That such people could live in our country without health care was a blight that had to be corrected.  Despite the fact that many parts of ObamaCare don’t kick in until 2014, after all we have to get a running start on the tax revenues to get this beast off the ground, this was an issue that could not wait.

So the Health and Human Services Department was blessed with the ability to create their own insurance and get it out to the masses desperately waiting with hope, for change.  The temporary program, which runs until 2014 when the rest of ObamaCare kicks in, is only projected to cost a mere $5 billion.  Imagine that, the word “billion” preceded by a single digit number.  How frugal! How thrifty!  In return it would rescue 375,000 poor souls the first year and 400,000 per year afterward.  And woe be to any insurance company that dropped someone so they would be forced to go with the government program, they would get the bill!

With all of the glorious pieces in place Team Obama was ready to prove what they had said all along.  As soon as the American public sees ObamaCare in action they will not believe how they lived without it all these years.

So they travelled to North Dakota and signed up one person.  Yes, folks, one.  That is not a typo and it is not followed by the word “billion”, “million”, “thousand”, or “hundred”.  A solitary, single person in all of North Dakota.

Well that must just be an anomaly, there aren’t that many people in North Dakota anyway.  So the team moved on to West Virginia where they did better by a factor of four.  Four people, that is, bringing the program’s total to five.

Undaunted, they pressed on to a more populous state;  Minnesota, a state with 5.2 million residents.  Surely, they would find plenty of people to sign up for this great new program, and they did, relatively speaking.  They found fifteen people in Minnesota, which meant after quadrupling the program in West Virginia, they tripled it again in Minnesota.  I can hear Robert Gibbs extolling these numbers now, the multiples that is, not the raw numbers. Indiana was the next fertile ground to till.  And, as amazing as this may sound they found three times as many more people, sixty-three, in Indiana as they had in the other three states combined;  an overwhelming success.  Now they were ready for the big time, Texas.

In Texas, they would be fishing in a pool of 24.7 million people and lo and behold, they caught 393 of them.  Hot diggity!  By November 1, across the country they had signed up 8,011 people.  Okay, okay, it’s not 375,000 but it is not zero either.  Sheesh!  What a bunch of complainers. 

Not to let any failed program die a natural death, the Obama administration is prepared to tweak the program to attract more people.  It is going to cut premiums 20% and expand benefits.  When you are broke and you can’t get more broke fast enough, just remember you can always provide more costly benefits for less offsetting revenue to pay for it, to encourage more people to help you break the bank.

On a more serious note, here is how the Wall Street Journal sums it up.

Pre-existing conditions sometimes do lead to genuine hardships, and polls show that voters are worried about the relatively rare horror stories. More modest fixes could bring more stability to the individual market, while Republicans support a boost in funding for the high-risk pools that 35 states offer as a safety net. The government didn’t need to annex a sixth of the economy and create a multitrillion-dollar entitlement to help 8,011 people.

Well, Nancy, now that we know what’s in it.  Can we repeal the damn thing?

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.  – Unknown (often attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville)

An article in The Hill newspaper titled “Teachers union expands playing field for midterms” describes how the teachers’ union is getting out supporting certain candidates.

In the face of a difficult election climate for Democrats, the teachers union added 25 congressional districts to its get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort last week. It’s running radio and television ads in the Pennsylvania and Washington Senate races, as well as in Rep. Tim Bishop’s (D-N.Y.) district.

It’s payback time.  As part of the stimulus package that Tim Bishop voted for, over $105 million went to public schools in his Congressional District and, according to www.recovery.gov the web site tracking all things stimulus-wise, it added a total of seven jobs.  That’s not a misprint folks, seven new jobs.  That comes out to about $15 million per new job.  In the midst of unemployment close to 10% we spend $105 million to create seven jobs?  But wait a minute, it’s not just jobs created, it’s also jobs saved.  Right, right, I keep forgetting that.  The mysterious “jobs saved” metric that no one knows how to measure.  Okay, I’ll play along.

We are talking about teachers jobs here.  In New York State, according to the Empire Center for New York State policy, we spend $17,173 per pupil per year.  The year over year growth in that spending was 7.5%.  What was inflation during that time? It was 1.6%.  What is the compelling reason that we need to increase spending on education 4.7 times the rate of inflation that includes a 6.3% growth in teacher’s salaries and a 9.1% growth in their benefits?  Well, we need to save these teachers or who will teach our kids, right?

Between 2000 and 2009, in New York State, according to the Wall Street Journal (April 12, 2010) we added 15,000 teachers to the public school system, while at the same time the student population fell by 121,000.  Fewer and fewer students but more and more teachers.  It seems like there are plenty of teachers to go around, no?  But what about classroom size?  We have to make classes smaller so that our kids can learn better!  Sadly, no.

But while state legislatures for decades have passed laws — and provided millions of dollars — to cap the size of classes, some academic researchers and education leaders say that small reductions in the number of students in a room often have little effect on their performance.  — New York Times, Feb. 22, 2009

So tell me again, why it was necessary to pass a stimulus package and give $105 million to schools in Mr. Bishop’s district?  Well, that seems to bring the story full circle.  Mr. Bishop votes to take the public’s money, to bribe the public (the teachers) so that the teachers will come out in force to support the caring Mr. Bishop and help him keep his job.  One hand washes the other.

The only problem is that the stimulus money, at some point has to be paid back.  For the amount of stimulus money that came into Mr. Bishop’s district, $300-$400 million, his constituents will shoulder around $3 billion of the $825 billion in the stimulus package. The average household in his district now owes around $12,600 in debt to pay for the stimulus.  It is against the law for individuals to make a campaign contribution that large to a candidate, so it’s a pretty slick way to get around it, don’t you think?  And besides, you have to ask people to make a campaign contribution and they have to agree to hand it over.  This way…

The recession officially ended before the first stimulus dollar hit the streets.  Now, over a year later, the unemployment rate is 9.6% and our GDP growth is limping along at 1%-2%.  But, hey, those teachers are doing swell.  When you see them on the campaign trail for Mr. Bishop over the next four days, be sure to thank them for all they have done.

Election Day is Tuesday, November 2, 2010.  Be there.

After an anemic GDP report for the second quarter of 2010 of 1.7% growth, the third quarter barely topped it at 2.0%.  With only four days left before the election and the mood against Obamanomics already at a boil, this is not good news for the Democrats.  The Wall Street Journal reports:

With the holiday season just around the corner, the outlook for spending by Americans doesn’t look great either. A gauge of consumer confidence has been falling since June as Americans worry about weak home prices and jobs.

So much for the stimulus.  The recession ended before dollar one of the stimulus hit the streets and over a year later the economy is still crawling.  So don’t look for the unemployment numbers to be changing anytime soon under this administration’s plan. 

Tuesday, November 2, will be interesting.

New York state government is a basket case.  Earlier this week we were treated to the theater of the governor’s debate featuring such luminaries as Jimmy McMillan of the Rent is 2 Damn High party, and former madam Kristin Davis who seemed smarter on fiscal policy than half of her opponents on the stage.  But let us not forget it was a stage and this is New York.  Instead of being held at Hofstra University, it should have been held on Broadway, but I digress.

The government itself is one problem, the state pensions are quite another.  A problem on the order of $30 billion to $80 billion.  Harry Wilson is running for state comptroller.  Mr. Wilson made his money on Wall Street, investing and turning around troubled companies.  His opponent, Tom DiNapoli was appointed to the comptroller position after his predecessor, Alan Hevesi, was charged misconduct for trading access to the pension in return for favors.

Mr. DiNapoli has been in politics since he was 18 years old.  An entire career in politics and he is supposed to be able to cope with this massive problem created by career politicians?  As Albert Einstein said, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”  But Mr. DiNapoli attacks Wilson because Wilson comes from Wall Street.  From what planet are these New York politicians coming from?  New York’s motto is the Empire State.  We call ourselves the financial capital of the world.  New York City and New York state would collapse if not for the tax revenue from Wall Street and the income taxes of those who work there and we are to believe that Wall Street is evil?  Those are the ramblings of an imbecile.

In one of the bluest of blue states Mr. Wilson has not only been endorsed by the New York Post and the Daily News, but the New York Times as well.  He has also been endorsed by Michael Blumberg, who knows a thing or two about finance.  Dan Henninger of the Wall Street Journal suggests that Andrew Cuomo should endorse him and seal the deal for both Wilson and himself.  If this pension bomb is not diffused, Cuomo, if he wins as he appears likely to do, will be doomed before he begins.  Wilson has the tools to turn this around.  Or we can leave this in the hands of a political hack.

I’d like to know what you think.  Share your thoughts below.