George Demos kicked off his Hail Mary campaign to win the Republican nomination to challenge Congressman Tim Bishop in New York’s first Congressional District. As he did the last time around he boasts that he is the only true conservative in the race. His claims, though, are devoid of any facts to base them upon other than him saying so. His kickoff ad is either downright dishonest, or just sloppy. Either one hardly qualifies him to represent anyone.

Demos uses campaign material from incumbent Tim Bishop, an odd source for a Republican, to attack Randy Altschuler who was the Republican nominee against Bishop in 2010. Demos also ran in the primary that year and lost to Altschuler by a wide margin. In the general election Altschuler lost by a whisker, in the closest Congressional race in the country that year.

The video that Demos chose to use was selectively edited. The issue that both Demos and Bishop are trying to run on is Mr. Altschuler’s founding of a business, Office Tiger, that provided back office services to other companies. Some of the work was done overseas, some in the U.S. The video shows Mr. Altschuler talking about some overseas locations, but where he speaks of talent in the U.S. that is edited from the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9A8v8RdMgA

Neither Bishop nor Demos mention that when Altschuler started Office Tiger in 1999, the unemployment rate in the U.S. was 4.2%. That is not an environment with a lot of idle workers standing around. Bishop and Demos want to plant the seed in the minds of voters, who are suffering through the longest period of 8%+ unemployment since the Great Depression, that it is not Obama’s and Bishop’s dismal performance ruining the economy but “outsourcers” who are causing the problem. When Altschuler later sold the company in 2005, the unemployment rate was 5.08%, still rather low. Altschuler then went on to found Cloud Blue, creating more jobs in the U.S., by recycling old technology gear.

So what is Demos’ claim to fame as “the only true conservative?” He has worked as a government lawyer at the SEC. The SEC you may recall could not bring down Bernie Madoff although for ten years an individual named Harry Markopolous practically delivered evidence wrapped up with a bow that Madoff was a fraud. The SEC was also noted for staff that was spending their days looking at pornography on government computers. It was also alleged that Demos had outed a whistleblower at JP Morgan, although the third Judicial District  found an “insufficient basis for a finding of professional misconduct.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

So where is all the evidence of Demos’ conservative credentials? Has he created any jobs? Worked for any period of time in the private sector? In these tough economic times what experience does Demos have that indicates he has solutions to our problems? The Republican Party, the Conservative Party, the Independence Party, and many Tea Party groups have endorsed Randy Altschuler.

Demos on the other hand takes a doctored video from a Democrat and uses it to attack a Republican, a direct violation of Ronald Reagan’s eleventh commandment, thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican. He calls himself a winner and Altschuler a loser. Replacing one government employee for another hardly sounds like bold thinking, when most of our issues are government created. However, replacing a government backbencher with someone who grew up in a household headed by a single mother, secured a good education, started a couple of companies, is the kind of breath of fresh air we need in Washington.

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

To many conservatives Mitch McConnell is a sellout. To me, he is a parliamentary master who held off a filibuster-proof majority by his fingernails until reinforcements arrived in the person of Scott Brown. He kicked off his address to the crowd with a little humor.

McConnell said that conservatives are more fun because we are always right. He then quoted what Democrats believe in by quoting from Saul Alinsky. It is all about division and smearing your opponents. But it is going to be a tough task with the president’s record.

The president believes in rewarding his friends and punishing his enemies. Examples include: the Keystone pipeline, Solyndra, Goldman Sachs. He preaches diversity and then attacks Catholics.

This is about Obama’s policies. He asked for and received from his Democrat Congress, nearly $1 trillion so that unemployment could be kept under 8% and since then it hasn’t been below 8%. The average length of unemployment under Obama is forty weeks. The unemployment rate for African-Americans is over 14%, for Hispanics it’s 10.5%, for recent college graduates it’s over 10%. He promised to cut the deficit in half and the deficit has been above $1 trillion for the fourth straight year. He ignored his own deficit commission.

Obama believes in bigger and bigger government. Today, the earnings of federal workers is 60% higher than those in the private sector who pay those salaries. Layoffs of federal employees is running at less than 300 per year, meaning there is a higher probability of a federal worker dying of natural causes than getting laid off. Meanwhile Obama has added 150,000 to the federal payroll. We are supposed to believe that there is no possible way to shrink the federal payroll because of how important government is to life in America.

In just nine months we will have a chance to let Obama know what we think of his vision of big government.

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

Tim Bishop likes manufacturing. The manufacturing of campaign issues, that is. In his effort to manufacture a campaign issue around overseas outsourcing, he got a lifeline from the White House yesterday when President Obama held an “insourcing” forum yesterday to encourage companies to “bring jobs back to America.” An editorial in the Wall Street Journal titled, “Insourcing for Dummies” describes the effort.

Having spent his entire adult working life at either Southampton College, which went out of business and was acquired by the State University of New York, and the House of Representatives, Mr. Bishop should be forgiven if his grasp of economics is lacking. So let’s try to help get him up to speed.

Coming from academia, I am sure Mr. Bishop will give due deference to a study on outsourcing from an Ivy League University. Matthew J. Slaughter, an economist at Dartmouth’s Amos Tuck School of Business, conducted a study where he found that for every job outsourced overseas, two jobs were created in the U.S. How could that possibly be? It works something like this.

Let’s say a company has an opportunity to outsource its call center overseas and takes advantage of doing so. It utilizes a well-educated work force in India, and let’s say it cuts its cost allocated to that call center in half. It now has additional capital to invest in growing the business. To do so, it hires more sales people, who in turn need sales engineers to explain their widgets to their perspective customers, and when the customers buy more widgets, more people are needed to process the orders and build the widgets. This boost of growth results in a boost in jobs.

Slaughter studied Bureau of Economic Analysis data, reported annually between 1991 and 2001 for 2,500 multinational companies. This was a time when India and China were ramping up their operations to take on outsourcing roles. What Slaughter found was that while employment in their foreign affiliates grew by 2.8 million jobs, U.S. based employment in the parent firms grew by 5.5 million jobs. Taking it a step further, when that job growth is compared to total job growth, those multinational created more jobs faster than the economy as a whole.

Tim Bishop’s Plan

So what is Tim Bishop’s big idea? He wants companies to shut foreign outsourcing or have two call centers that callers can choose between. That means there is no savings from the call centers, which translates into fewer profits to use to grow the business and hire fewer people. Also lower profits, means less tax revenues because what are companies taxed on? Correct! Profits!

So in the midst of a dastardly economy with high unemployment, and staggering deficits, Tim Bishop wants to curtail corporate growth, reverse conditions for job growth, and reduce tax revenues. What a trifecta! This is all so that Tim Bishop can have something, anything, to build a reelection campaign around. There no major call centers in his district, so this is a bald-faced effort to cling to office. If he was serious about the economy, he would be advocating for slashing the corporate tax rate or even backing the Fair Tax, so that money held overseas could flow back to the U.S. and perhaps other countries would build factories here and create even more jobs. But that would require a grasp of economics, instead of an iron grasp on his House seat.

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

In his recent telephone town hall meeting, Tim Bishop expressed his support for the continued payroll tax holiday but making it clear that it would have no impact on the Social Security Trust Fund. Money for Social Security would continue to go into the trust fund from other sources. What other sources you might ask? I may have an answer for you.

In an article in HousingWire magazine, the author points out that:

The Federal Housing Finance Agency will increase guarantee fees on single-family mortgage-backed securities charged by the government-sponsored enterprises by 10 basis points effective April 1, 2012, in response to the new funding mechanism for the payroll tax cut extension passed by Congress.

So it seems that the Social Security Trust fund will get its money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or more accurately, from new home buyers. So for a two month extension of the payroll tax holiday that will prevent taxpayers from paying an additional $130 into the Social Security Trust Fund, that everyone expects to get back anyway, new home buyers will have to pay thousands in new fees.

The g-fee increase will remain in effect through Oct. 1, 2021. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the g-fees would offset about $35.7 billion in the costs of the tax cut. Mortgage Bankers Association CEO David Stevens said the increase could mean an extra $4,000 in fees on a $200,000 mortgage.

One of the problems facing Long Island is affordable housing. Our young people are leaving Long Island for areas were there is a larger rental stock that they can start out in, rather than living in mom and dad’s basement, and where they can afford to buy a house after saving a down payment for a couple of years. Apparently for the benefit of a political talking point Tim Bishop votes to slam an already weak housing marking with additional fees. After all who can really call a two month anything sound fiscal policy? Notice there is no spending cut mentioned here, it is an increase in taxes and fees. This is what Tim Bishop was telling his constituents not to worry about in his town hall meeting? What will become of his district, if nobody lives here but retirees? Is that his plan to solve the unemployment problem? Drive enough young people away until the number of jobs fits the remaining population?

The problem is spending. It was only last week that Joe Biden was attacking Mitt Romney’s policies by saying:

“His proposal would actually double down on the policies that caused the greatest economic calamity since the Great Depression and accelerated a decades-long assault on the middle class,” Biden added.

Decades long assault on the middle class? I guess he means you too, Bill Clinton. The greatest economic calamity since the Great Depression has been the Obama administration and if he were to get reelected it would finish America off. We have had the worst consistent unemployment since the Great Depression for the entire Obama administration. We have had the worst record of job creation, loss actually, since Herbert Hoover. The National Bureau of Economic Research says the recession ended in June of 2009. Does it feel like it to you? Most recoveries from economic downturns are mirror images of the slump. A gradual recession is followed by a gradual recovery; a sharp downturn is followed by a sharp upswing. Not this time. Just look at the job creation record of Team Obama.

This chart goes all the way back to Harry Truman and Obama’s performance stands alone.  Let’s put to rest the “eight years of failed Bush policy, yada, yada, yada” and face the fact that Obama and his spending, heavy-handed regulations, and insatiable appetite to fix everything by taxing more has put us into an economic winter. Tim Bishop has happily ignored the needs of his constituents to buy favor from the Democratic leadership and their special interest pals. They have done an awful job and we need to turn them out, before they turn us into Greece.

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

Tim Bishop has submitted legislation to punish firms that use overseas call centers. He is desperate. He needs an issue that he hopes will sneak him past the electorate into office for another two years. Outsourcing worked for him last time, so he is trying to put lipstick on that pig and pass it off as bold, new thinking. What I am thinking is when is Tim Bishop ever going to represent the people who actually live in his district?

How many call centers are in his district that are threatening to move overseas? How may call centers are trying to decide between locating in his district or locating in India? If the answer to either of the above questions is none, why is he spending time on this?

Over twenty years ago, while working at Citibank, they had a customer service center for credit cards in Melville. For cost reasons they were looking at shutting it down and moving it. I was asked to provide an analysis of the telecommunication costs in an effort to keep it in place. Based on the customer distribution, I showed that its current location was the best choice from a telecommunications basis, but it was not enough to offset the people cost. The alternatives considered were Maryland, South Dakota and Nevada. India was not on the list. But if you were a customer service rep on Long Island who didn’t want to move, was the fact that the job was staying in America, give you consolation? Your job went away

So what is Tim Bishop doing starting a trade war with India? How does that help his constituents?

 ”Outsourcing is one of the scourges of our economy and why we are struggling so to knock down the unemployment rate,” said Bishop.

In a previous post on Mr. Bishop’s insightfulness I pointed out that the largest Toyota factory outside of Japan is in Georgetown, Kentucky. Through a new free trade agreement that plant will now begin exporting Toyotas from the U.S. to South Korea. If Toyota didn’t outsource those jobs to the U.S. but kept them in Japan, there would be 7,400 fewer Americans employed in Kentucky than there are today. So how does Bishop square this with his statement that outsourcing is a scourge and contributes to unemployment when this is proof of the opposite? Perhaps if our tax structure wasn’t so abysmal, other companies would locate their factories here? But we have one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world, so why build here? But when was the last time you heard Tim Bishop pounding the podium for lower tax rates?

With the stimulus plan, Congressman Bishop voted to spend a trillion dollars across the country to be paid for by whom? Well, consistent with the Democratic message of “tax the rich”, when compared to other states, New York is relatively rich, so we get a bigger share of the bill and a smaller cut of the benefits. How did Congressman Bishop’s vote help his district? Most of the money that did come here went to people who already had a job, and a union card, the teachers. Who is backing Mr. Bishop on his phone center folly? The Communication Workers of America. Bishop knows he needs union muscle if he has a prayer of getting reelected.

He also likes the idea of the payroll tax holiday and tells people at his town hall meeting, not to worry about the Social Security Trust Fund losing important funding, that money will come from elsewhere. Where exactly? Does Mr. Bishop have some magic beans or a goose laying golden eggs like a gatling gun? We’re broke thanks to Mr. Bishop and his pals spending, spending, and spending.

So Tim Bishop looks out for Tim Bishop first, Nancy Pelosi second, and if he can help his constituents cut through some bureaucratic red tape, cut through it but not eliminate it, he will do so. But he needs something, anything, to take the voters eyes off his dismal record in Congress, so let’s try another new twist on outsourcing, whether it is germane to his constituents or not. After all, where else is Tim Bishop going to land a job that pays $174,000 a year with his resume?

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

Photo by boss tweed

Ah, 1922, the Yankees won their second American League pennant and finished up their final season at the Polo Grounds before moving across the river to their new stadium in the Bronx. In the summer, hyperinflation in Germany meant it took 493 marks to equal one dollar. Feature length film Nanook of the North  is released. In the fall the conversion rate in Germany is 1,000 marks to the dollar. Stalin comes to power in Russia, and Mussolini in Italy. By November it takes 3,000 marks to equal one U.S. dollar in Germany. Alexander Graham Bell dies. By year-end it takes 7,000 German marks to equal one U.S. dollar. It was also the last time the 9th Congressional District in New York was held by a Republican.

Printing money was not working in Germany. In 1921, there was a deep recession in the U.S. Unemployment hit 11.7 percent, but the Republican administration did not launch any massive bailout programs nor plaster the economy with new regulations. Business owners had the freedom to react to their circumstances. They could adjust wages and prices as the market demanded. They did and as steep as the recession had been the snap back to full recovery was just as sharp. By 1922 the unemployment rate was down to 6.7% and a year later in 1923, it was down to an incredible 2.4%.

We are now in an economy under this administration where the unemployment rate started at 7.4% and has climbed and is now stuck at around 9%. It has been this way for nearly three years and the projections are that it will stay this way for years in the future, just like it was under FDR. And why not? President Obama is following many of plans of FDR that didn’t work in the 1930s and are not working now.

If a trillion in stimulus spending didn’t work, let’s spend another $500 billion, right? If passing enormous regulations such as ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, EPA, kills any business desire to hire people, blame the Republicans for saying STOP!

A message went out from New York to Washington last night. In a district with 3:1 Democrat advantage. The people voted for a Republican. A Republican who said stop the spending, support our allies, don’t destroy our social institutions and remember that all Obama’s horses and all Obama’s men and women, are not smarter than the rest of us. Get out of our way. Let us make decisions for our own lives and stand back. We, the American people, not the bureaucrats in Washington who never set foot in the private economy, like Chuck Schumer and Anthony Weiner, will turn this economy around. Give us our lives, our liberty and stop impeding our pursuit of happiness. It is our pursuit and our responsibility to catch up with our happiness. You bureaucrats cannot deliver it to us. Give not, Take not.

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.

Photo by wstera2

Obama has a jobs plan, or so we are told. He will unveil it after he returns from Martha’s Vineyard. I hope it is a little more detailed than his budget plan to cut $4 trillion that no one can find by meticulously searching the Oval Office. I don’t even know what is in the plan and I have a better one. Stay in Martha’s Vineyard, Mr. President. Set a goal to play eighteen on every PGA sanctioned golf course in the country. Don’t you have some friends and family in Hawaii that miss you?

If we can just keep you out of Washington, so we’re not grappling with your non-leadership, leadership, things may not get a whole lot better until November 2012, but at least they might not get worse. Anyway, isn’t that your new campaign theme, “Just Imagine How Bad It Could Have Been! Vote Obama”?

Take North Carolina for example. Boeing opens a factory there to build its 787 Dreamliner. It hired 5,000 workers and they are ready to go. Then along comes our helpful friends in Washington from the National Labor Relations Board. They say, “Oh, no, this is retaliation. Boeing asked the unionized workers in Washington state for a moratorium on strikes and the union reasonably said they wanted Boeing to promise to never manufacture anywhere but Washington state and Boeing refused. How DARE they?!” So not only did Boeing add 3,000 jobs in Washington state, somehow opening up another factory in South Carolina, a Right to Work state, is retaliation. In an economy crawling along with unemployment stuck at north of 9% Washington is killing 5,000 jobs. When our intrepid leader, President Obama was asked about this he boldly proclaimed that the NLRB was an independent agency and his hands were tied. The President of the United States meekly says he is powerless against a panel of five bureaucrats.

If you asked some of those pesky evil Tea Party freshmen over in the House of Representatives who haven’t spent their entire lives in government service, they would probably say, give us a shot at it. First, we will drain their budget to $1; second tell Boeing to go ahead and make the NLRB’s day; and then sit back and see what action the NLRB will take with $1 in the petty cash drawer. Next step would be to legislate the Department of Labor out of existence, and the NLRB along with it. There are plenty of agencies in the individual states to take up any slack.

Other Award Winning Jobs Moves by the President

As we watch oil rig after oil rig sail out of the Gulf of Mexico to friendlier climes, the Obama administration’s mismanagement of the BP oil spill fiasco adds to the misery. Thousands of jobs were lost or put on hold. Trouble in the Middle East, disruption of oil production in Libya, we should increase domestic oil production but roadblocks to that keep getting thrown in the way. No, green energy is the answer as we watch another heavily subsidized solar energy company file for bankruptcy sending more workers to the unemployment line.

The American people are still waiting for GM stock to his $53 per share so we can break even on this wonderful investment. So how does Washington help? Let’s start by punching a bigger hole in the deficit by subsidizing the Chevy Volt to the tune of $7,500 per car in tax credits. Oh, that’s bad. No, that’s good. Chevy can’t sell them, so there won’t be much in the way of tax credit damage to the budget! Instead, the Obama administration comes out with new CAFE standards to require car companies to produce cars that get 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. If that doesn’t drive a stake through the heart of GM and Chrysler and saddle the American people with more debt, nothing will. With a $2,000 per car disadvantage over their foreign rivals GM and Chrysler are not going to be able to make small, light cars capable of this standard competitively. Well at least we’ll put those workers on unemployment slowly over the next 14 years.

How much more punishment can this economy take until we put President Obama on permanent retirement? So, please, Mr. President, I would rather you work on your golf handicap than give our economy more handicaps than it can handle.

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

It’s no mystery that President Barack Obama believes in social justice. What is social justice? It is basically taking from those who are the most productive and giving to those who are the least productive. This is done through the coercive power of government, not by appeals to our compassion to give to those we believe need a helping hand. That is called charity. Charity is voluntary. Social justice is compulsory.

President Obama also makes no secret that he believe in the European model of socialism. That consists of bigger government, government run healthcare, government run retirement, rich unemployment benefits, higher taxes, more vacation, but it also comes with something that he doesn’t realize.

With unemployment north of 9%, economic growth crawling along when it should have come out of the recession like a rocket, it prompted Robert Lucas, the 1995 Nobel Prize winner in economics to say:

“Is it possible that by imitating European policies on labor markets, welfare and taxes, the U.S. has chosen a new, lower GDP trend? If so, it may be that the weak recovery we have had so far is all the recovery we will get.”

The slower GDP numbers do not only affect presidential polls. It is estimated that due to the recession and slow recovery we are taking in about $400 billion less in tax revenues than we would under a more robust recovery. As I have said many times here and in my book, Liberty’s Lifeline, Obama is repeating just what didn’t work in the 1930s. Lucas explains:

What discomfits him is the similarities in the policy choices that accompanied both delayed recoveries. By 1934, the Depression’s banking crisis had been resolved, “yet full recovery was still seven years away,” he said in the Milliman lecture. GDP stayed more than 10% below trend. “Why?” The answer, he says, was growth-suppressing policies, such as the Smoot-Hawley tariff, cartelization, unionization and, “most important but hardest to measure, FDR’s demonization of business.”

Sound familiar? The financial panic of 2008 was essentially under control before Obama was sworn in. The recession officially ended over two years ago, but in the mean time we spent nearly a trillion dollars on a pork laden “stimulus” bill, lined up another trillion in spending with ObamaCare, we have free trade treaties being held hostage by Obama’s union supporters, and Obama’s anti-business attitude is clear. After Roosevelt’s massive government spending programs at least we had results like the Hoover Dam, new parkways, new parks, etc. Where is our new Hoover Dam that was built by the Obama stimulus? There is none. In my congressional district, the lion’s share of the stimulus went to school districts and the teachers’ unions. Poof, gone. Gone except, that is, for the bill that has to be paid by the rest of us.

Professor Lucus leaves us with this observation:

“If we’re going to move to a European welfare state,” says Prof. Lucas, “we’re going to have to pay a European price.” And that price could be a permanently lower level of GDP per person. The U.S.’s amazing 100-year ride would slow.

Among the many things any such drop in GDP will siphon away is America’s relentless productive vitality. “So much new happens in the United States,” Prof. Lucas says. But will it still?

The American Dream sprang from the freedom of our economy where an idea, hard work, and dedication could pay off big and benefit not just the individual with the idea but all those who use the product or service. In Obama’s world of regulatory and government oppressiveness, most new ideas will be crushed in the crib under the burden of goverment requirements to surrender their wealth to the laggards.

The beacon of hope is to limit Obama to one term before he can make his changes irreversable.

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

He can’t seem to say it enough, the economy is in the tank because of those tax breaks on corporate jets. Well, he didn’t exactly say that, but instead of the trillions of dollars in spending that he demanded and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid delivered, somehow a tax break that amounts to $3 billion over ten years is center stage in the budget battle.

Believing, as they always do, that the sheeple will stand and be shorn whenever Washington wants more revenue. Class warfare is wonderful because standing up for the rich guy is so indefensible. But I would like to call to mind the last time this was tried. In the early 1990s the Democrats had the bright idea that a 10% tax surcharge on sales of new yachts that cost more than $100,000 was a grand idea. Afterall, if you could afford to buy a $100,000 yacht you could afford to pay your “fair share.” It was poetry. Or was it?

Sales of new yachts that cost over $100,000 cratered. Regular blue collar folks who worked in these boat yards along the coast, were laid off left and right. Those nasty, stupid, rich guys didn’t stand still and get clipped like they were supposed to. Instead, if they wanted a boat that cost more than $100,000 they bought a used one. Or they took a short flight to the Bahamas and gave that country their business. Nothing flowed into the Treasury, and unemployment in the boat building industry skyrocketed.

So what do you suppose will happen this time around as Obama tries to make the sale of new corporate jets more expensive? That’s right, the deficit will not be affected but unemployment will be and not in a way that Obama expects. Will this man ever pick up a history book or newspaper and see if his hairbrained ideas have been tried before and how they turned out? I don’t think so either.

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