Stumble It!
Not only are all the political prognosticators forecasting that the GOP will take control of the Senate, they're also predicting the Republicans will strengthen their majority in the House, hold the majority of state governorships and win a record number of state legislative chambers across the country.
WASHINGTON -- It's almost a foregone conclusion that President Obama and the Democrats are going to suffer a humiliating defeat in next week's midterm elections.
But what would that mean for the last two years of his deeply unpopular presidency, the outcome of the 2015-16 presidential election cycle and the Republicans' chances of winning back the White House?
Certainly, a huge, game-changing win for Republicans on Nov. 4 will dramatically reorder the political dynamics of the next two years. And this election is shaping up as a very big victory for the GOP across the nation.
Not only are all the political prognosticators forecasting that the GOP will take control of the Senate, they're also predicting the Republicans will strengthen their majority in the House, hold the majority of state governorships and win a record number of state legislative chambers across the country.
When you look at the number of major elective offices across the nation, you discover that the GOP -- whatever the polls say about it in Congress -- now controls a hefty chunk of the nation's political power structure.
The Republicans already have a tight hold on the House, are within six seats of taking the Senate, control 29 of the nation's 50 state governorships and rule 59 of the country's 98 partisan legislative chambers. Democrats hold only 39.
A Washington Post survey of the 6,049 state legislative races in 46 states says a "record number of statehouses could go Republican" in next week's elections.
After looking at these lopsided GOP numbers, all the stories from the liberal news media about how unpopular the Republican brand has become now seem positively laughable. If the GOP is that unpopular, why are the voters putting it in charge of the lion's share of the country?
It should be clear by now that it's the Democrats who are unpopular, or at least the Democrats who have been in lockstep with Obama's agenda to move the country in a sharply leftward direction -- one where more government, more spending and still more regulations are the answers to every problem.
So how will all of this play out over the next two years?
It's certainly going to have a profound impact on the 2015-16 presidential campaign, which will officially begin the day after Tuesday's results.
Hardly a day goes by, it seems, that some news story doesn't appear in one of the nation's major newspapers, usually on the front page, extolling Hillary Clinton as the savior of the Democratic Party, and who is on a fast track to follow Obama into the White House.
That she appears to be the overwhelming choice of her party is unarguable. But she also faces a hornet's nest of political obstacles that no one wants to mention.
First and foremost is that the nation's electorate has grown tired of the Democrats' botched, mismanaged handling of the economy and has turned bitterly against them.
A majority of voters now say the government's ability to address the nation's biggest problems has declined in the last several years. And by an overwhelming 3-to-1 ratio, far more voters blame Obama and the Democrats than the GOP, according to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Clinton is certainly not immune from this deep hostility toward Obama's big-government, anti-business approach to domestic issues, as well as his bungled handling of national security/foreign policy matters, which she oversaw and carried out as the president's secretary of state. She coldly turned a deaf ear to the desperate pleas for added security from the doomed embassy officials who lost their lives in a fiery terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya.
One does not have to be politically clairvoyant to know that the GOP's campaign cry in 2016 will be "it's time for a change," and that means putting the Republicans back in charge of the government.
Meantime, what can we expect from the White House if the Republicans end up in charge of Congress in the last two years of Obama's presidency?
It's hard to see him signing any of the economic reforms the GOP wants enacted to accelerate growth, significantly boost new business formation, job creation and higher middle-class incomes, which have remained flat.
But GOP congressional leaders will want to show the American people the kind of changes that are needed to turn the country around, especially in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.
To do that, they will have to pass pro-growth legislation to reform the tax code by cleansing it of costly corporate tax exemptions and other loopholes, and lowering the tax rates on business, families, individuals and investors.
They will have to tackle a common-sense replacement for Obamacare that lowers health care costs, including the rising cost of medical insurance premiums.
They should dare Obama to veto their pro-growth agenda and, if he does, it will become the virulent issue of the 2016 race for the White House. Then, let's see what Hillary does with that.
It is more than likely that Obama will not give an inch on any of the issues he has steadfastly opposed over his rocky years in office. Not on badly needed budget cuts to slow the growth in spending, tame the deficit and shrink an $18 trillion debt. Certainly not on junking Obamacare, or expanding trade and angering his party's union bosses.
Thus, we're most likely in store for two more years of gridlock in preparation for the presidential election battle to come.
The Republicans better choose their standard-bearer carefully, someone who, unlike Obama or Hillary, as been in charge of running a government and getting an agenda enacted.
The voters are clearly ready for sweeping change, and that's the midterm message they are going to deliver loud and clear on Tuesday.
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Friday, October 31, 2014
Voters Are Ready For Sweeping Change
Saturday, October 18, 2014
The Voters Are Mad as Hell and They Aren't Going to Take it Anymore
...Well it's about time! Our nation is on the verge of defeat across the spectrum dud to this communist clown!
WASHINGTON - Eighteen days before the midterm elections, President Obama and the Democrats face an outraged electorate that is turning into a perfect political storm.
The stock market is in a nose dive, slashing worker 401(k) retirement accounts that further threaten a weak, job-challenged economy. Anemic economic data, including a decline in retail sales -- which accounts for one-third of all consumer spending -- has forced economists to lower their forecasts for economic growth.
If all this weren't bad enough, the Obama administration announced Wednesday
that the government added nearly $700 billion in new deficit spending to a monster national debt that now stands at $17.8 trillion.
This followed growing fears over two new Ebola cases and increasing questions about whether the administration was adequately responding to the disease's outbreak in the U.S., or was asleep at the switch. Federal health care officials were summoned to Capitol Hill to explain how two quarantine nurses could be infected by the disease and why more wasn't being done to protect hospital personnel.
All of this was taking place at a time when the U.S. was caught up in a growing war against a far more dangerous terrorist threat that was on the brink of entering Baghdad in Iraq, and seizing much of Syria, too.
Meanwhile, Russia was showing little or no substantive signs of backing away from its continuing efforts to seize still more territory in Eastern Ukraine whose economy was said to be "choking under Russian pressure."
Europe's economy is in a recession, raising additional fears here of a global economic crisis that will only further weaken an underperforming U.S. economy.
All of this is reaching critical mass as new political data shows the Democrats have fallen to their lowest point in the polls in the last 30 years.
According to a nationwide Washington Post-ABC News poll taken between Oct. 9-12, only 39 percent now have a favorable impression of the Democrats, compared to 51 percent who view them unfavorably.
Obama is at the lowest point of his presidency as well. A 51 percent majority disapprove of the way he's "handling his job as president." Only 40 percent approve.
The Gallup Poll reported similar findings this week: Only 40 percent approved of the job he's been doing, versus 55 percent who disapproved.
And it appears that these voters intend to demonstrate their displeasure by voting for the Republicans. Asked who they planned to vote for on Election Day, just 43 percent said the Democrat, while a 50 percent majority said the GOP candidate.
It is almost impossible to overstate the gloom that now permeates America's electorate and has turned both Wall Street and Main Street into a deeply pessimistic mood.
A "fear gauge" compiled this week by the Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index, which charts investor apprehension, recorded one of its highest fear levels since the summer of 2012.
Despite Obama's assurances that the possibility of a serious Ebola outbreak "are extraordinarily low," the cases of two stricken two nurses in a Dallas hospital have had a rippling across the country and in the economy.
Lawmakers were calling for the resignation of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Tom Freiden and for a travel ban for all nonmilitary passengers and medical personnel flying from the West African countries where the Ebola outbreak occurred.
Airline stocks have been hit hard because of fears that passengers could be exposed to the deadly virus. About 200 airline cabin cleaners at New York's LaGuardia Airport did not report for work last week because they said they hadn't been given adequate protection.
Still, the Ebola threat was serious enough for Obama to suddenly cancel a fundraising campaign trip and meet with his chief health advisers, or else appear that he wasn't on top of the situation.
Whether or not there are new Ebola cases, the crisis has triggered a deeper level of uncertainty in a fragile and uneven economy that is still struggling to climb out of its lethargy in the sixth year of Obama's troubled presidency.
A decline in retail sales, a weak housing market, a still-shrinking labor force, and little or no growth in wages was bad enough. But things could get worse if the Ebola threat causes consumers to stay home more, cancel trips, avoid restaurants, movie theaters, and cut back on shopping. Then the economic angst could turn its full fury in the voting booth against the party of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, expressing their anger in the only way they can.
The Democrats are heading into the final weeks of this election with the political cards stacked against them, and they know it.
The Post-ABCpoll found that two-thirds of the voters now say the country is going in the wrong direction. And six out of 10 Americans say Obama doesn't have a clear plan to govern.
He has similarly dismal polls on dealing with the Islamic State. Several weeks ago, the job he was doing gave him a six point net gain. Now that has dropped by 16 points.
Other polls have found that a majority of the electorate thinks the GOP can do a much better job on the economy, restraining spending and balancing the budget.
Gallup's daily economic surveys this week found that 41 percent of Americans say they're "struggling." Another 5 percent say they're "suffering," and 13 percent say they are under "stress."
A big factor in next month's congressional elections will be voter turnout, and this is where Republicans, who are far more motivated to vote than the Democrats, have a stronger hand to play.
"Seventy-seven percent of Republicans say they are certain to vote, compared with 63 percent of Democrats," the Post reported Thursday.
This could be another "wave" election, a lot like the one in 2010 when the GOP took over the House and stopped Obama's agenda dead in its tracks. Stay tuned.
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Friday, March 21, 2014
Superpower Once Lived Here
A truly spineless worm. To make Jimmy Cater look resolute by comparison...
On February 22, popular protests led to the fall of the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych in Kiev. On February 27, in response to this setback, President Vladimir Putin sent forces into Crimea to seize it from Ukraine. On March 19, President Barack Obama delivered his response. He reassured Putin, “We are not going to be getting into a military excursion in Ukraine.” Obama added, “What we are going to do is mobilize all of our diplomatic resources to make sure that we’ve got a strong international coalition that sends a clear message.”
Carter, whatever his problems, was more hawkish than most in his party. In this he followed in the footsteps of every other Democratic president in the past century. Until Barack Obama.
It’s been a bit bewildering, even disorienting, to watch Obama get mugged by reality and refuse to press charges. But of course he doesn’t want to press charges. He doesn’t believe in an international system in which the American role is to lead. Former Saudi intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal was asked by the Financial Times recently about Putin and Obama. He explained: “While the wolf is eating the sheep, there is no shepherd to come to the rescue of the pack. This is where we find ourselves today.”
Indeed it is. In the New York Times, Sanger comments, “History suggests that such eras [of retrenchment]—akin to what the United States went through after the two world wars and Vietnam—often look like weakness to the rest of the world.” Retrenchment looks like weakness because it is weakness. And the consequences of such eras of weakness aren’t happy.
What is to be done? Congress needs to push the administration in the right direction as much as possible. Foreign policy experts need to propose sound measures—to ensure, for example, that the loss of Crimea isn’t followed by the loss of Ukraine—in the hope that President Obama might be pressured to embrace them.
More broadly, though, the opposition—which one hopes will come to include some liberals and some Democrats—has to articulate a foreign and defense policy of resolve and strength. Allies and enemies around the world will read the American situation differently if they think the American collapse of will is bipartisan than they will if they see that it is not. Pro-Western forces around the world may be able to maneuver and to hang on if they receive a clear message that the cavalry is coming to the rescue on January 20, 2017.
So it’s important to mount a vigorous opposition to Obama’s foreign and defense policies. It’s important to propose serious alternatives. It’s important not just for the sake of intellectual honesty and political clarity. It’s important because what the opposition says now can make a difference in the world over the next three years.
It will still be a rough time. America can’t be strong with a president committed to weakness. But the prospects for a restoration of American strength will be brighter, the challenges of 2017 will be less daunting, if the opposition today stands clearly and unequivocally for American strength and leadership, and—dare one say it?—for American greatness.
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Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Retirements Confound Democratic House Quest
How does that song go, again? Let's see: "Happy Days are Here Agaiinnn!"
Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank’s announcement Monday that he won’t run for re-election marks the 17th Democratic departure from the House this year, compared with only six Republicans. Those numbers don’t bode well for Democrats in their effort to take back control of the House in next year’s elections, Politico and The Hill report.
Democrats and Republicans alike see tough times ahead for House Democrats. “Members of the House don’t focus on their own politics. They focus on whether they are going to be in the majority and can push an agenda,” former Democratic Alabama Rep. Artur Davis told Politico.
“There are very few Democrats who see the prospect of the House shifting. I predict there will be five to 10 other senior Democrats that will announce their retirements in the coming months.”
The Democratic retirements fit a historical pattern. When either party loses a majority, its representatives get discouraged — and some hang it up. After the GOP ceded its House control in 2006, 27 Republicans opted for retirement, compared with six Democrats.
“Members of Congress don’t retire when things are good. They just don’t,” Republican strategist Matt Mackowiak told The Hill. “I think they’re looking at it right now and saying, ‘It’s unlikely we’re going to win the House back. If anything, it’s likely we won’t have the Senate, and the White House is a 50-50 shot, at best.’”
Democrats also may be worried that it will be many years before their party returns to power in the House, especially with the economy looking like it won’t recover anytime soon, Chris Perkins, a GOP pollster in Texas, told The Hill.
“What it does is allow the Republicans to build a narrative,” he said. “It makes the recruiting efforts for the DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee]that much harder, when potential candidates see a lot of senior members bailing.”
Democrats also are fearful of the recent redistricting moves that will make some of their races a lot more difficult. Frank cited changes in his district’s boundaries as a reason for retirement.
California Rep. Dennis Cardoza, whose district was greatly reshaped, put the problem bluntly, telling Politico: “You have to represent people [who] you’ve never represented before. To represent nearly half of new voters . . . well, that’s not my idea of a good time.”
Some of the retirees aren’t too happy with their party leaders. Four of the nine Democrats who are departing and not seeking another office in 2012 voted against Nancy Pelosi as House minority leader.
Cardoza is upset with the White House, saying he is “dismayed by the administration’s failure to understand and effectively address the current housing foreclosure crisis.
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Friday, November 18, 2011
Congressional Supercommittee Is Super Divided - But has Time-Tested Solution at Hand!
So we are apparently to see from this "Super Committee" a package of phony budget cuts and massive real time defence cuts, all because the democrats will agree to cut NOTHING after Osama has increased spending by 4 trillion $ in 3 years, more that all the previous administrations in US history, combined, from Washington through Bush.
The above quote demonstrates 2 things:
- 1: There is a time tested alternative that would work, as it always has, and would raise revenues, as the democrats demand, which also means ...
- 2 The democrats DON'T WANT REVENUE, they want to tear down those who have, in the name of fairness. Whatever happened to the concept of "a rising tide lifts all boats"?
Conclusion: It ain't gonna happen! Our best alternative for now is to let the sequestration occur, and next time, don't cave when time to raise the debt limit comes. When Romney or Newt is president, and we control the Senate, all this can be reversed...T
The freshman Pennsylvania Republican has impeccable conservative credentials. Before he ran for the Senate last year, he ran the Club for Growth, an anti-tax, pro business political action committee that supported GOP House and Senate candidates who fought tax hikes, even knocking off some pro-tax Republican incumbents in party primaries.
Toomey's move was denounced by the Democrats who refused play his game, saying his plan didn't do enough to raise revenues. It also opened up a deeply divisive split in his own party.
Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas, the Republican co-chair of the supercommittee, has sided with Toomey, as have other Republicans, including party leaders. But dozens of members see his plan as a betrayal of the GOP's position against raising taxes at any time, especially in the middle of a weak, high unemployment economy.
Rep. Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina, who calls Hensarling one of his mentors, gathered more than 70 signatures from House Republicans this week on a fire-breathing letter to the panel's leadership that called any tax increases "irresponsible and dangerous to the health of the United States."
But the headlines and the stories about Toomey's tax plan leave out a critical component. While it would cap a number of itemized deductions that taxpayers take, thus raising their taxes, it would also offset those increases by lowering the income tax rates across the board.
Under Toomey's plan, all of the income tax rates would be reduced by as much as 20 percent -- lowering the top rate from 35 percent to 28 percent. The 10 percent bottom tax rate, created under President George W. Bush's 2001 tax cut law, would drop to 8 percent.
The details of these deduction caps are not clear right now and, as a chief analyst of a major business lobbying group told me this week, "the devil is in the details."
Overall, Toomey's plan would reportedly raise $400 billion in additional tax revenue, though an estimated $110 billion of that would be derived from higher economic growth and increased employment.
Supercommittee Democrats argue that his plan would hand huge tax cuts to the wealthy. But GOP aides say that most people in higher income brackets usually take many more deductions to lower their taxable income, so they would on average see their taxes go up.
President Obama and the Democrats are fixated on raising taxes on people who make more than $200,000, as well as small businesses who file as individual taxpayers, major corporations, and investors by raising their capital gains tax rate.
But these taxpayers pay the lion's share of all income taxes. Raise taxes on capital gains and you will get less venture capital investment and a weaker economy. Fewer Americans will sell assets they hold to plow their gains into higher performing, growth investments if the capgains tax rates take a bigger bite out of their profits.
Without knowing the full details of Toomey's plan, he is following a tried and true fiscal path to economic growth. We've had many recessions and downturns in the last five decades, and lowering the tax rates have always helped our economy recover and made it stronger than before.
The Kennedy across-the-board tax rates in the 1960s. The Reagan tax cuts in the 1980s, followed by the broader and bipartisan tax reforms of 1986 that got rid of a number of tax breaks, exemptions and other loopholes in order to lower the rates, cutting the top marginal rate to 28 percent as Toomey would do now.
And let's not forget the Republicans' pro-growth capital gains tax cut President Clinton signed in his second term that unleashed a wave of high tech capital investment that led to full employment and a budget surplus.
Even the Bush tax cuts in in 2001 and 2003 helped us get through several financial catastrophes, cut the deficit in half and produced a 4.7 percent unemployment rate in 2007 just before the subprime, home foreclosure scandal drove us into severe recession.
Still, it is hard to see this bitterly divided supercommittee producing a well thought out growth incentive plan under such a tight deadline, before Thanksgiving.
The driving force behind its creation in the federal debt limit battle was a series of annual budget deficits under Barack Obama's presidency that climbed to $1.5 trillion in his first year and hit $1.3 trillion this year. The total federal debt now stands at a whopping $15 trillion.
But the members of the supercommittee say they are no nearer to a deal now than when they began. They have agreed on a large number of spending cuts, but clearly the stumbling block remains the issue of taxes. Maybe the best course would be to set that issue aside for the time being, turning it over to the tax-writing panels of Congress, and concentrate on a plan to cut spending.
The supercommittee's mission is to cut at least $1.2 trillion over 10 years. That comes out to a little over $100 billion a year out of a nearly $4 trillion annual budget that wastes more than that sum each and every year.
If they can't agree on even that amount in savings, then I say, let the automatic budget cuts -- triggered under the debt limit deal -- begin.
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Wednesday, November 16, 2011
ObamaCare Goes to Court: A historic showdown on the constitutional limits of federal power
This was so clearly the intent of the founders that it cannot be disputed. Only ignored.
Well, not this time. Obama care is such a monstrous expansion of federal power, that were it to be upheld, there would no longer be ANY limitation on what the federal government could command the individual to do, as this article makes clear.
For these reasons, the US Supreme Court will overturn Obama care this spring, and that outcome is not seriously in doubt...T
The "constitutionality" of the Obama health care law, Harvard Law School's
Laurence Tribe wrote in the New York Times earlier this year, "is open and
shut," adding that the challenge against it is "a political objection in legal
garb."
In announcing yesterday that it will consider the law's constitutionality,
the Supreme Court said it would give an historic five-and-a-half hours to oral
arguments. Perhaps by his Cambridge standard, Mr. Tribe thinks the nine Justices
are a little slow. We prefer to think this shows the Court recognizes the
seriousness of the constitutional issues involved. It makes those who cavalierly
dismissed the very idea of a challenge two years ago look, well,
constitutionally challenged.
Other critics of the constitutional case have suggested that its outcome
before the High Court will be a wholly "political" decision, a repeat of
Bush v. Gore. We trust the justices won't fall for this slur against
their reputation.
The issue at the heart of the ObamaCare challenge brought by 26 states and the National Federation of Independent Business is whether the federal government has the constitutional authority, under the Commerce Clause, to order everyone in the United States to purchase health insurance—the so-called "individual mandate." If that is so, critics argue, then there is no limit to what commercial activity the government can command. And make no mistake: Future governments would order specific "commercial" activity under this authority.
The latest spin to be directed at the constitutional challenges is that conservative judges on the lower courts are divided. In fact, it isn't just conservatives who are divided over the law's constitutionality. One of the appellate judges on the 11th Circuit in Atlanta who overturned the law in the case the High Court accepted is a Democrat. Open and shut? Not quite.
Among the conservative opinions on behalf of ObamaCare in the lower courts, the two that we'd call the most idiosyncratic and misguided were issued separately by Judges Laurence Silberman and Jeffrey Sutton.
Judge Silberman, in an opinion joined by Judge Harry Edwards, acknowledges that Justice's lawyers defending the ObamaCare individual mandate couldn't cite "any doctrinal limiting principles" to this new, expansive reading of the Commerce Clause. But somehow Judge Silberman found a justification anyway in a 1942 Court precedent involving limits on wheat-growing for personal consumption, because these personal decisions ultimately might affect interstate commerce.
As a member of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Silberman may have felt he was bound by that precedent as he interprets it. But the Supreme Court can revisit such precedents, or their misapplication, especially in light of its own more recent attempts to put some limits on federal government power under the Commerce Clause.
Judge Silberman also explicitly notes that an affirmation of such a broad Commerce Clause interpretation could become a "federal police power" to the disadvantage of the states—though he seems surprisingly unconcerned about it.
In a pro-ObamaCare decision in July, Judge Sutton abstracted the law's mandate in a way that allowed him to find it constitutional, rather than address the mandate's provisions as they are written into the law. But Judge Sutton did address the stakes in the case with unmistakable clarity: The High Court, he wrote, "either should stop saying that a meaningful limit on Congress's commerce powers exists or prove that it is so."
The Obama Administration's answer to the law's multiple discrepancies, contradictions and nuances has been to go all-in on the argument that overturning the mandate will overturn the entire law. It's true that without the mandate the law is unlikely to work, but the law is such a Rube Goldberg contraption that it won't work with the mandate.
We'd like to see the entire law overturned, but the mandate deserves its own constitutional judgment. It shouldn't be found constitutional merely because Justice's lawyers say its excision would ruin the entire law. Congress can't drop unconstitutional provisions into laws hoping that the Court will bless them simply because not doing so would invalidate the larger law.
Perhaps the most intriguing nugget in the Supreme Court's announcement is that it will take arguments on the law's Medicaid provisions. Intriguing because the Court was under no obligation to touch the law's Medicaid piece, which none of the lower courts invalidated. ObamaCare vastly expands Medicaid to the middle class and hammers hard any state that refuses to comply. It appears some of the Justices want to hear someone justify this federal aggrandizement as well.
The Court itself deserves credit for deciding to take this case this year, even though it probably means issuing a decision in an election year.
The law is already speeding the ruin of U.S. health care, increasing costs and reducing competition. It is easily the most unpopular major reform in decades and the most unpopular entitlement expansion ever. More broadly, it is impossible to duck the matter of whether this law's powers would stop at health care, as its backers insist, or whether it will be merely the first wave of other such mandated enforcements, if the federal government is given the power to compel individuals to participate in commerce, rather than merely regulate it.
These are issues involving the nation's core understanding of the citizenry's relationship to its government. Voters should have the chance to include the Court's verdict on the law when they go to the polls in 2012.
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Monday, October 31, 2011
Obama: Campaigning Like It's 1936
Don't take just the author's word: Read "Liberal Fascism" by Jonah Goldberg" and/or "New Deal Or Raw Deal? How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America" By Burton Folsom Jr. Both of which document in devastating fashion that it was FDR who prolonged and deepened the great depression, and is was his death, not the end of WWII, that finally ended it...T
While Republican presidential candidates are looking forward by proposing
variations of a flat income tax, President Barack
Obama’s tax-the-rich campaign strategy is looking backward—to
Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 reelection campaign. FDR won his reelection, but the
American people lost: Roosevelt’s new taxes on business and the “economic
royalists” gave us the “Roosevelt recession” of 1937-38.
By August of 1935, Roosevelt had achieved some of his signature pieces of
legislation: a new entitlement program known as Social Security, banking reform,
pro-union reform, infrastructure expansion and massive transfers of wealth to
the poor and middle classes. Sound familiar?
FDR also ran up federal spending significantly: from 6 percent to 9 percent
of the economy.
However, FDR needed more revenue to support his big-government schemes. More
importantly, he needed a villain to explain why, given the passage of his New
Deal legislation, government spending and regulations, the economy was still
struggling.
So he proposed raising taxes on the rich, which he dubbed a “Wealth Tax.” As
he explained to Congress in June 1935, “Our revenue laws have operated in many
ways to the unfair advantage of the few, and they have done little to prevent
the unjust concentration of wealth and economic power. … Social unrest and a
deepening sense of unfairness are dangers to our national life which we must
minimize by rigorous methods.” President Obama couldn’t have said it better
himself.
There were several components to FDR’s plan. First he wanted very high taxes
on the rich—up to 79 percent—and to lower the thresholds so that more
high-income earners paid more taxes. He also wanted to increase the estate
tax. As for business, he wanted to close the “loopholes,” a graduated corporate
income tax and a tax on intercorporate dividends.
But the bill that actually passed the Democratically controlled Congress in
1935 would not raise much money—estimated at about $250 million, which initially
seemed like enough to cover budgetary shortfalls. FDR’s associates acknowledged
at the time that the Wealth Tax was more about politics than policy, or as
Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau put it, “it was more or less a campaign
document.”
However, by 1936 Roosevelt needed yet more revenue and had apparently grown
to relish his new class warfare and railing against “organized money.” So he
proposed another business tax: an undistributed profits tax.
Like Obama, FDR faced what he saw as a big problem: Businesses had a lot of
cash on hand but weren’t spending it. “Regime uncertainty,” the reluctance of
business to hire and invest when faced with a growing onslaught of new taxes and
regulations, suppressed capital spending. No one knew what the future held so
businesses held on to their cash hoping to survive. Again, sound familiar?
Roosevelt believed that forcing businesses to spend that money would create
jobs. So he proposed, and got, his undistributed profits tax. If the
government were going to tax idle money anyway, maybe businesses would put it to
work.
The irony, of course, is that the more FDR dreamed up new taxes and
regulations to get the economy moving, the more regime uncertainty he created.
And those efforts had a predictable effect: the economy began to turn south in
1937, resulting in the Roosevelt recession. Unemployment had fallen from a high
of 24.9 percent in 1933 to 16.9 percent in 1936, the year of FDR’s first
reelection—still significantly higher than the post-war high of 7.5 percent
during Reagan’s 1984 reelection and the current, and likely to remain, 9.1
percent unemployment rate under Obama.
However, unemployment under Reagan and Roosevelt were dropping quickly in
their reelection years, which boosted voter confidence. Not so with Obama. And
Obama’s embracing of FDR’s “soak the rich” tax policies—as FDR’s critics called
it—will do just as much economic harm now as they did then. While the
unemployment rate fell to 14.3 percent in 1937, it rose to 19 percent in 1938
and only declined to 17.2 percent in 1939.*
If President Obama is trying to draw lessons from FDR’s 1936 reelection, he
is learning the wrong ones. FDR had a huge majority in both houses of Congress,
so he was able to get his class-warfare agenda passed—though his efforts
expanded the growing divide between conservative and liberal Democrats. Obama
may complain about the need to tax the rich; Republicans won’t let him do
it.
In addition, the country leaned more to the left then, with several national
demagogues—including Louisiana Senator Huey Long, Francis Townsend and Father
Charles Coughlin—constantly pulling FDR leftward (whether FDR really resisted
that leftward tug is a matter of opinion). There really is no strong national
voice to the left of Obama, except for MSNBC and perhaps Occupy Wall Street.
The lesson Obama should be learning from the 1936 election is that FDR’s
Wealth Tax and class warfare set the economic recovery back years. Obama’s
effort to channel FDR’s policies and reelection success would have exactly the
same impact.
Merrill Matthews is a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy
Innovation in Dallas, Texas. Follow at http://twitter.com/MerrillMatthews
* For a discussion of the best figures for pre-war unemployment rates see
Robert A. Margo, “Employment and Unemployment in the 1930s,” Journal of Economic
Perspectives, Spring 1993.
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Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Obama's Behavior Is Getting Worse
"I've never seen an adult in an important leadership position -- especially not the president of the United States -- show such frightening immaturity and self-absorption."
That encompasses Obama to the tee. Clinton was a liar, but this guy is a sociopath!...T
Obama's Thursday news conference was a sober reminder of the nature of the man in the Oval Office. I infer that even many of his supporters in the liberal media are finally catching on to the magnitude of his personality disorders.
How could a man in his important position continue to act so childishly, accepting no responsibility for his policies and behavior and demonizing everyone who dares to disagree with or oppose him? It's worse than embarrassing; it's unsettling.
From the conference we are reminded that Obama believes that:
--Only "big and bold" intervention by the government can get an economy moving; so long as he cites a few "expert economists" who agree with him, there can be no other legitimate opinion.
--Anyone who disagrees with or opposes him is engaging in partisan politics rather than acting in good faith, on principle and in the best interests of the country. Republicans have blocked him for partisan reasons for not just the past six months, but the past 2 1/2 years. He has "gone out of (his) way in every instance to find common ground" with Republicans. You know, as with "I won, John" and "I don't want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talkin'" and "stay in the back seat."
--If Republicans continue to oppose his jobs bill, it will be because they don't want laid-off policemen, firefighters and teachers working again.
--The failure, waste and corruption in his $868 billion stimulus package are irrelevant when considering whether to embark on another such reckless venture. He doesn't need to explain away the damning empirical data on his stimulus bill, because economists told him it would work and therefore it did work. If he hadn't spent all that borrowed money, we would have experienced another great depression. Anyone who disputes this is either a rube or improperly motivated.
--It doesn't matter that he famously breached his promise that unemployment would not exceed 8 percent if Congress passed his stimulus bill or that studies show that only 7 percent of the stimulus money went toward infrastructure despite his commitments to the contrary. Nor does it matter that he cavalierly joked about having lied about the existence of a plethora of "shovel-ready jobs." He is a well-meaning liberal, after all.
--His good intentions also exempt him from accountability on the Solyndra scandal, because his ideology inclines him toward a blind faith in the existence of cataclysmic man-made global warming, which in turn requires him to mandate government subsidization of "green technologies." Those allegedly noble intentions further entitle him to a pass for ignoring those who warned the government not to proceed with the project. His intentions relieve him from responsibility for Solyndra's abject failure to meet the projections of the same kind of geniuses he is berating us for not following on his jobs bill.
--He still isn't the slightest bit concerned about our national path toward bankruptcy, addressing it only with a few throwaway lines about how this bill would pay for itself, even though no bill of his has paid for itself.
--He is going to stick to his lies that a) his bill is a "jobs bill," b) it would implement the "Buffett Rule" when Warren Buffett himself said he is only for raising taxes on the super-rich, c) the "rich" aren't paying their fair share of taxes, and d) Republicans have not put forward an economic plan.
--He is going to continue to pretend or fool himself into believing that the American people still back his socialist approach to economic problems, his class warfare approach to influencing public opinion, his demagogic approach to entitlement reform and his hyper-partisan approach to problem-solving.
--He has complete confidence in Eric Holder, so he doesn't need to worry about the facts on "Fast and Furious," either; Holder's dubious testimony is of no concern to Obama, and he doesn't have to answer for it, because he trusts Holder, and therefore, so should we. Besides, even if it should turn out that Holder did something wrong, Holder is the attorney general and Obama's not responsible for him.
--He is never going to stop blaming everyone and everything but himself for the problems he has caused. Thursday, he told us yet again that our economic mess was created by George W. Bush, the Japanese tsunami, the two wars, the Republicans' gamesmanship over the debt ceiling, and Europe's financial instability. Oh, yes, and many of our problems even "predate the financial crisis."
Our chief executive either is a mastermind at Machiavellian manipulation or has deep psychological and emotional problems. I've never seen an adult in an important leadership position -- especially not the president of the United States -- show such frightening immaturity and self-absorption
David Limbaugh
Monday, October 10, 2011
Aimless Obama walks alone
The reports are not good, disturbing even. I have heard basically the same story four times in the last 10 days, and the people doing the talking are in New York and Washington and are spread across the political spectrum.
The gist is this: President Obama has become a lone wolf, a stranger to his own government. He talks mostly, and sometimes only, to friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett and to David Axelrod, his political strategist.
Everybody else, including members of his Cabinet, have little face time with him except for brief meetings that serve as photo ops. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner both have complained, according to people who have talked to them, that they are shut out of important decisions.
The president’s workdays are said to end early, often at 4 p.m. He usually has dinner in the family residence with his wife and daughters, then retreats to a private office. One person said he takes a stack of briefing books. Others aren’t sure what he does.
If the reports are accurate, and I believe they are, they paint a picture of an isolated man trapped in a collapsing presidency. While there is no indication Obama is walking the halls of the White House late at night, talking to the portraits of former presidents, as Richard Nixon did during Watergate, the reports help explain his odd public remarks.
Obama conceded in one television interview recently that Americans are not “better off than they were four years ago” and said in another that the nation had “gotten a little soft.” Both smacked of a man who feels discouraged and alienated and sparked comparisons to Jimmy Carter, never a good sign.
Blaming the country is political heresy, of course, yet Obama is running out of scapegoats. His allies rarely make affirmative arguments on his behalf anymore, limiting themselves to making excuses for his failure. He and they attack Republicans, George W. Bush, European leaders and Chinese currency manipulation -- and that was just last week.
The blame game isn’t much of a defense for Solyndra and “Fast and Furious,” the emerging twin scandals that paint a picture of incompetence at best.
Obama himself is spending his public time pushing a $450 billion “jobs” bill -- really another stimulus in disguise -- that even Senate Democrats won’t support. He grimly flogged it repeatedly at his Thursday press conference, even though snowballs in hell have a better chance of survival.
If he cracked a single smile at the hour-plus event, I missed it. He seems happy only on the campaign trail, where the adoration of the crowd lifts his spirits.
When it comes to getting America back on track to economic growth, he is running on vapors. Yet he shows no inclination to adopt any ideas other than his own Big Government grab. His itch for higher taxes verges on a fetish.
Harvey Golub, former chairman of American Express, called the “jobs” bill an incoherent mess. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, he said that among other flaws, the bill includes an unheard of retroactive tax hike on the holders of municipal bonds.
“Many of us have suspected that economic illiterates were setting the economic policy of this administration,” Golub wrote, adding that the bill “reveals a depth of cluelessness that boggles the mind.”
The public increasingly shares the sentiment. A new Quinnipiac polls finds that 55 percent now disapprove of Obama’s job performance, with only 41 percent approving. A mere 29 percent say the economy will improve if the president gets four more years.
The election, unfortunately, is nearly 13 months away.
The way Obama’s behaving, by then we’ll all be talking to portraits of past presidents, asking why this one turned out to be such a flop.
Full article in new window
Monday, September 12, 2011
Obama's Pathetic, Pedestrian Speech
What is there to say about Barack Obama's speech to Congress Thursday night and the so-called American Jobs Act he said Congress must pass? Several thoughts occur, all starting with P.
Projection. That's psychologist-speak term for projecting your own faults on others. "This isn't political grandstanding," Obama told members of Congress, as Republicans snickered (but thankfully resisted the temptation to shout, "You lie!"). "This isn't class warfare."
These sentences came four paragraphs after Obama insisted that "the most affluent citizens and corporations" should pay more taxes (which spurs job creation how?) and not long before he promised to "take that message to every corner of the country."
Lest there be an doubt about Obama's real intentions, consider that his speech was obviously modeled on Harry Truman's call for a special session of the Republican Congress in the summer of 1948 so he could campaign against it. And consider that Obama pointedly refused to rebuke Jim Hoffa's "let's take these sons of bitches out" -- meaning Republicans -- when he introduced him last Monday in Detroit.
Pragmatism. Perceptive writers like David Brooks of The New York Times told us in 2008 that Obama was basically a pragmatist, a slave to no ideology but simply a student of what works. Brooks was apparently impressed by Obama's mention of Edmund Burke and the sharp crease in his pants.
But a pragmatist would probably not choose to call for more of the policies that plainly haven't worked. Infrastructure spending (shovel ready, anyone?), subsidies of teachers' salaries, fixing roofs and windows on schools -- these were all in the 2009 stimulus package, which has led to the stagnant economy we have today.
A pragmatist doesn't keep pressing the same garage door button when the garage door doesn't open. He gets out of the car and tries to identify what's wrong.
Paid for. "Everything in this bill," Obama said in his eighth paragraph, "will be paid for. Everything."
By whom? Well, in the 24th paragraph he tells us that he is asking the 12-member super-committee Congress set up under the debt ceiling bill to add another $450,000,000,000 or so to the $1,500,000,000,000 in savings it is charged to come up with. The roving camera showed the ordinarily hardy super-committee member Sen. Jon Kyl looking queasy.
Obama is like the guy in the bar who says, "I'll stand drinks for everyone in the house," and then adds, "Those guys over there are going to pay for them."
What's fascinating here is that once again the supposedly pragmatic and sometimes professorial president is not making use of the first class professionals in the Office of Management and Budget to come up with specifics, but is leaving that to members of Congress, maybe in a midnight marathon session with deadlines pending. Same as on the stimulus package and Obamacare.
Pathetic promises. Perhaps he hoped people wouldn't notice, but Obama did put in two words -- "faster trains" -- as a plug for his pet project of high-speed rail. Liberal blogger Kevin Drum calls California's HSR project, the largest in the nation, "a fantastic boondoggle," likely to cost three or four times estimates and with ridership estimates that are "fantasies." "We have way better uses for this dough," Drum concludes.
Political payoffs. Nearly one-quarter of this latest stimulus package -- sorry, American Jobs Act -- is aid to state and local government, to keep teachers and other public employee union members on the job and paying dues to the unions. Altogether unions gave Democrats some $400 million in the 2008 election cycle. Pretty good return on their "investment," eh?
Pettifoggery. Obama impressed many conservative writers in 2008 with his ability to state their positions in fair terms -- which led some to think that surely he must agree with them. But he seems to have lost this knack.
Conservatives, according to this speech, want to "wipe out the basic protections that Americans have counted on for decades" and "simply cut most government spending and eliminate most government regulations."
"Most" means more than 50 percent. Does the White House have documentation for the claim that Republicans want to cut government spending by more than 50 percent? And what "basic protections" do they want to "wipe out"?
Barack Obama seemed like an unhappy warrior Thursday night, still unreconciled to the results of the 2010 elections, "seeming desperate and condescending at the same time," in the words of maverick liberal blogger Mickey Kaus. That darn garage door just won't open!
Full article in new window
Related articles
- President "Pass This Bill" To Lecture Congress To "Pass This Bill" (minx.cc)
- Obama's Stimulus Plan, Dead on Arrival (jhaines6.wordpress.com)
- Obama jobs speech calls for end to 'political circus' in Washington (guardian.co.uk)
Saturday, September 10, 2011
The unhappy warrior- Obama's Campaign 2012
Barack Obama looked and sounded angry in his speech to the joint session of Congress. He bitterly assailed one straw man after another and made reference to a grab bag of proposals which would cost something on the order of $450 billion—assuring us on the one hand that they all had been supported by Republicans as well as Democrats in the past and suggesting that somehow they are going to turn the economy around. He called for further cuts in the payroll tax (which if continued indefinitely would undermine the case of Social Security as something people have earned rather than a form of welfare) and for a further extension of unemployment insurance (perhaps justifiable on humanitarian grounds, but sure to at least marginally raise the unemployment rate over what it would otherwise be). He called for a tax credit for hiring the long-term unemployed (unfortunately, these things can be gamed). He gave a veiled plug for his pet project of high-speed rail (a real dud) and for infrastructure spending generally (but didn’t he learn that there aren’t really any shovel-ready projects?). He called for a school modernization program (will it result in more jobs than the Seattle weatherization program that cost $22 million and produced 14 jobs?) and for funding more teacher jobs (a political payoff to the teacher unions which together with other unions gave Democrats $400 million in the 2008 campaign cycle). “We’ll set up an independent fund to attract private dollars and issue loans based on two criteria: how badly a construction project is needed and how much good it would do for the country.” Yeah, sure. Like the screening process that produced that $535,000,000 loan guarantee to now-bankrupt Solyndra. And Congress should pass the free trade agreements with Panama, Colombia and South Korea. Except that Congress can’t, because Obama hasn’t sent them up there yet in his 961 days as president.
Obama assured us that this would all be paid for. But as far as I could gather, he punted that part of it to the supercommittee of 12 members set up under the debt ceiling bill. He now blithely charges it with coming up with more than its current goal of $1.5 trillion in savings by Christmas. Oh, and he’s going to announce “a more ambitious deficit plan” that will “stabilize our debt in the long run”--11 days from now.
In the meantime, he called for higher taxes on “a few of the most affluent citizens”—as if this could pay for all the spending he’s been backing. What’s interesting here is that he seems to have left the way open for a 1986-style tax reform, cutting tax rates and eliminating tax preferences, or at least that’s how I read these words: “While most people in this country struggle to make ends meet, a few of the most affluent citizens and corporations enjoy tax breaks and loopholes that nobody else gets [did he look up at his guest Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE, which paid no corporate tax on $14 billion in profits last year?]. Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary—an outrage he has asked us to fix [actually, Buffett could volunteer to pay more if he wants to]. We need a tax code where everyone gets a fair shake, and everybody pays their fair share. And I believe the vast majority of wealthy Americans and CEOs are willing to do just that, if it helps the economy grow and gets our fiscal house in order.” As I read it, he’s not insisting on higher tax rates, though he apparently is not ready to agree to a tax reform that is scored as revenue-neutral, as the 1986 act was. Also, if Obama wanted a 1986-type reform, he could have used the Bowles-Simpson fiscal commission’s recommendations last December as a springboard; instead, he brushed them aside without a murmur. So on balance I don’t think he’s serious on this, but there is a glimmer of a possibility that he is.
Straw men took a terrible beating from the president. He assailed “tax loopholes” for oil companies, the chief one of which is that they are treated like other companies classified as manufacturers. The administration proposal is that the five largest oil companies shouldn’t be, because—well, because we want to get our hands on more of their money. Today’s Republicans, he gave us to understand, want to “eliminate most government regulations” and “wipe out the basic protections that Americans have counted on for decades.” And, he suggested, they would never have created public health schools or the G.I. Bill or research universities.
When Barack Obama says, “This isn’t political grandstanding,” you have a pretty good clue that that is exactly what it is. Lest anyone doubt that, consider this from the third-to-last paragraph. “You should pass it. And I intend to take that message to every corner of the country.”
In other words, this was a campaign speech. It might result in passage of some of Obama’s proposals, and some of them might even do some good. But of course we didn’t see the kind of change of direction on policy that Bill Clinton made in 1995 and 1996, which enabled him to rise above his party’s 45% level of support in the 1994 elections (that’s the Democratic percentage of the House popular vote) and with 49% of the vote win reelection in 1996. (Ross Perot won 6% that year; polls suggest two points of it would have gone to Clinton had Perot not run.) I don’t think these proposals have the potential to turn around the careening economy, I don’t think many of them will become law and I don’t think this campaign initiative is likely to prove successful. From the demeanor and affect of the unhappy warrior at the podium last night, I suspect he may feel the same way.
Since I commented on Michele Bachmann’s makeup after the Republican presidential debate last night, let me make a comment on male neckware today. What is it with pastel ties? Barack Obama, Joe Biden and John Boehner were all wearing them tonight, and so was Fox News’s Ed Henry, reporting from the White House.
Full article in new window
Friday, September 02, 2011
Rush Limbaugh: Obama Has “Shot His Wad” And Should Resign
I wholeheartedly agree. Comrade Osama, sir, resign, and take your entire Politburo with you, sir! Begone, and may there be and end to the fallacy or "progressivism", which is now shown to be liberal fascism...T
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Detroit in Ruins:How it got there
There are of course more causes: The 67 Riots, racial tensions etc...but the root cause, as the progressives love to say, is, well, progressive policies that have destroyed this once great city...T
Related articles
- Economy Collapse Detroit Destroyed in Ruins (livingstrongandhappy.blogspot.com)
- Longform.org's Guide to Detroit: From the World War II boom to "ruin porn," five odes to the Motor City. (slate.com)
- Trouble in Detroit as car powerhouse becomes capital of scrap (rt.com)
- Capturing the Idling of the Motor City (nytimes.com)
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