How many times are we going to hear asinine comments like the following from Zack Burgess at the Philadelphia Tribune?
unemployment
Minimal to non-existent; Unlikely; No serious reforms were on the way; Needs to take a close look; Hardly the inspiring rhetoric of Knute Rockne or Winston Churchill. Tim Bishop’s back in his congressional seat starting his fifth term in office and already the group he was meeting with, the Long Island Farm Bureau, was expressing buyer’s remorse.
We all know by now Tim Bishop’s position on outsourcing. Rather than being a response to conditions of full employment and poor quality work, it can only be described as despicable. One problem with his view is that he voted to bail out GM who turned around and outsourced good manufacturing jobs to their overseas plants increasing production there by 50%, once the bailout was approved. You don’t hear Mr. Bishop talking about that vote very much. He also doesn’t like to talk about his vote on TARP that sent billions of dollars to French and German banks. He only wants to talk about outsourcing. Not the outsourcing that he has done but only about his opponent.
Over the past few days we have learned of a new tack by Al Qaeda on how to strike at America. It is not by commandeering planes and crashing them into buildings, it is not by putting homicide bombers into passenger seats, it is now by sending packages with bombs inside from overseas to targets in the U.S. It is very disturbing to know that Al Qaeda is not giving up, despite the piles of olive branches Barack Obama has laid at the feet of these despots.
Equally disturbing, for those of us in the First Congressional District in New York, is the scorecard just issued by national security organization Keep America Safe, which just gave Congressman Tim Bishop its lowest possible score, an “F”. It explained:
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.
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.
Tim Bishop has one reason that he consistently gives for sending him back to Congress and that is that his opponent, Randy Altschuler, started a company and Bishop claims it outsourced jobs overseas.
In a New York Post article yesterday, Raymond J. Keating informs us that the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council, where he serves as chief economist, just released their Small Business Scorecard for the 111thCongress. The scorecard rates members of Congress on a wide range of votes (27 in the Senate and 22 in the House) that cover such things as workplace regulation, ObamaCare, government spending, tax policies, energy legislation, and bailouts. Overall, he tells us the New York delegation scored just 11 percent on the scorecard, the sixth worst of the fifty states. The two members of the delegation that scored well are Peter King, and John Lee. On the other hand Tim Bishop failed to vote even once with small business on big issues. A big fat zero.
With just over three weeks to the election, we know one thing about Tim Bishop. He has a problem with outsourcing. He doesn’t want to talk about his record, about TARP, the GM and Crysler bailout, the stimulus, Cap and Trade, or ObamaCare. His entire campaign is about a company his opponent Randy Altschuler founded in 1999 and sold in 2005 that provided business services. Mr. Bishop, like a magician, feels that if he can keep the voters distracted long enough on outsourcing, he can pull a reelection out of his, er, hat.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdDOiUzxIXU&hd=1
Transcript:
With unemployment stuck north of 9% and today’s figures, although better than expected were nowhere near the level needed to bring down the unemployment rate, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi adjourned Congress without taking up the issue of the massive tax increase looming over the horizon. With things being about as bad as they could possibly be, why stir up more American’s ire with a failed vote on taxes. If they continued the existing tax rates, they would face the wrath of their base for letting those pesky, productive, high performers (aka the rich), keep their money in the private economy rather than give it to Congress and President Obama to squander.
But if they tried to keep the rates where they are for those making less than $250,000 they faced the prospect of not getting it done and incurring the anger of everyone else. Perhaps they thought that if they slipped out of town, no one would notice.
So the key element standing in the way of a strong recovery, uncertainty, continues. Small businesses still don’t know if their taxes are going up, on top of all the other burdens this administration and Congress are placing on them. So don’t expect them to take any steps that might help solve the problem. You can be pretty sure that for at least a month, the unemployment picture will continue to be dismal. Perhaps when the Democrats are swept out on November 2, they will graciously bow out with an extension of the current rates, or they can try the scorched earth approach. The betting could go either way. So let the Republicans prepare a bill to extend the rates as the first order of business, retroactive to January 1, 2011, once they take over the new Congress. But for now, Pelosi and Reid should hang their heads in shame for the damage they have done.
