This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Economy

  • Your tax dollars at work

    While the economy goes down the drain, while we’re at record unemployment rates, the press corps and the White House staff have a luau;

    Laughing and clapping like morons.

    The Washington Examiner writes;

    Straw huts, hula dancers and kids playing with hula hoops were all on display Thursday evening in the White House’s backyard — not the typical congressional picnic.

    President Barack Obama wanted it this way for the annual picnic for members of Congress and their families.

    “I just want to say to all the members of Congress, you’ve been working hard. I wish I could give you all trips to Hawaii,” Obama said in his brief remarks. “But I figured since, given our budget crunch we can’t do that, that we’d at least bring Hawaii to you.”

    A party for a planned 2500 people – on your tax dollars, on your hard earned money. Talk about fiddling while Rome burns.

    If this had been a Bush party, I’d be able to report how much it cost, but well…apparently that’s not news enough for this administration to make public or for the media to report.

  • Down to the wire on Cap & Tax

    I wrote yesterday that the Democrats were trying to bypass committees and votes to get Cap and Tax passed today. They obviously didn’t think the Gigante Obama Show last night would help them much and according to Newsbusters‘ Warner Todd Huston, they were right;

    ABC’s Barackspactacular Healthcare Extravaganza (I think that was the official name of the show, wasn’t it?) went up against the NBC premiere of “The Philanthropist,” widely panned as disappointing, and a repeat of “CSI: NY” on CBS, widely seen as already once widely seen. Unfortunately for ABC, its prop”O”ganda special got a dismal 1.2 rating to the 2.0 and 1.8 ratings respectively for the entertainment competition.

    Apparently the TV show where he’s president but plays a doctor on TV didn’t go over well.

    So, the Democrats are panicky according to Erick Erickson at Redstate;

    There is only one thing you need to know: the Democrats had an emergency meeting last night and will be meeting again this morning because they have not yet rounded up all the votes to pass their anti-growth Cap and Trade legislation.

    They are very close.

    Erickson links to Democrats and Republicans that haven’t quite made up their minds and need some convincing from you guys – especially if you live in their districts.

  • Dems ram cap and trade to vote

    Congressman Spencer Bachus writes in his blog that the “House leadership bypassing key committees on cap and tax“;

    The Democrat leadership is preventing the public from learning important details about the cap and tax plan by bypassing several key committees. As a Ranking Member on the Financial Services Committee, I called for hearings on the bill’s creation of a massive trading scheme for carbon emissions.

    From Drudge a link to Politico which reports that Al gore isn’t coming to DC today as he had planned (probably so we don’t have record low temperatures);

    Former Vice President Al Gore canceled plans to fly to Washington for a news conference with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday, and instead was working the phones from Tennessee to help push a landmark climate bill to passage.

    Apparently Democrats are getting antsy that the crown jewel of the their plans to rape the economy might go down to defeat if they didn’t circumvent the public. They don’t expect the Obama happy hour to do much for them. Even Democrat and Obama supporter Warren Buffet is opposed to cap and trade;

    Mike Pence pleaded from the floor of the House to call your congressman now if you oppose cap and tax.

    If you oppose the national energy tax, I say call your congressman. If you think the Democrat cap and trade bill will cap growth and trade jobs, call your congressman. If you believe the American people deserve an all-of-the-above energy strategy that will create jobs, achieve energy independence and a cleaner environment then endorse the Republican alternative, call your congressman.

    Back to Bachus;

    I am very disturbed by the repeated pattern of the House leadership in rushing expensive legislation like cap and tax, the so-called stimulus package, and appropriations bills to a vote without adequate review or debate. It’s irresponsible to fast-track legislation that puts taxpayers on the hook for literally trillions of dollars.

  • Reich: Why we need to raise taxes

    Robert Reich, that little-bitty fella from the Clinton Administration, has an editorial in the Wall Street Journal this morning entitled “Why We Need a Public Health-Care Plan“. Unfortunately, Reich doesn’t mention a single reason about why we need a public health-care plan – instead he rambles on about why we need to raise taxes so there can be a public health care plan. But, Reich is a big government guy what should we expect?

    The biggest lie in his piece is this line;

    Critics say the public option is really a Trojan horse for a government takeover of all of health insurance. But nothing could be further from the truth. It’s an option. No one has to choose it.

    He’s right that no one has to choose the government plan for their family, but no one has a choice to opt out of paying for it, do they? Talk about a Trojan Horse. Obama has used the same line continuously. It’s like the folks who pay for social security benefits they’ll never receive. Just like social security, the health care plan will depend on financing from people who’ll never see a return on their money.

    Another joke line from Reich;

    The public plan would merely force profit-making private plans to take whatever steps were necessary to become more competitive. Once again, that’s a plus.

    Yeah, government is great source of competition. Like the Post Office versus UPS and FedEx. When the Post Office loses money, they impose restrictions on UPS and FedEx so the government can be more competitive with the public sector. How does that benefit the consumer? It doesn’t, in fact it usually hurts the consumer.

    As a practical matter, the choice people make between private plans and a public one is likely to function as a check on both. Such competition will encourage private plans to do better — offering more value at less cost. At the same time, it will encourage the public plan to be as flexible as possible.

    Anyone who has ever been under military of veterans care can attest as to how “flexible” the government can be. Here’s an example of the efficiency of military health care. I had an appointment on the fifth floor of Walter Reed to get ready for surgery. A week later, I had another appointment on the sixth floor that they called a “pre-op” appointment. The second appointment was for the sole purpose of me taking my paper work from the fifth floor to the sixth floor in the age of computer networks. That’s efficiency, boy.

    Here’s the part I don’t get – this administration tried to force veterans with service-connected disabilities to get health insurance to reimburse the government for their care. The President was adamant about it and said he needed the $540 billion that would generate, and that was just for the small portion of veterans that have service-connected disabilities. How in hell does he figure he can afford health care for the whole country?

  • Those 600,000 jobs “saved or created”

    You probably watched the media swallow hook line and sinker that idiot line from the President yesterday about the 600,000 jobs he was going to “save or create”. And the 150,000 jobs he’s already “saved”. The Wall Street Journal weighs in today;

    [Bush Administration staffer, Tony] Fratto sees a double standard at play. “We would never have used a formula like ‘save or create,’” he tells me. “To begin with, the number is pure fiction — the administration has no way to measure how many jobs are actually being ‘saved.’ And if we had tried to use something this flimsy, the press would never have let us get away with it.”

    Of course, the inability to measure Mr. Obama’s jobs formula is part of its attraction. Never mind that no one — not the Labor Department, not the Treasury, not the Bureau of Labor Statistics — actually measures “jobs saved.” As the New York Times delicately reports, Mr. Obama’s jobs claims are “based on macroeconomic estimates, not an actual counting of jobs.” Nice work if you can get away with it.

    Yeah, I remember the Left complaining that the only jobs the Bush Administration was creating was at McDonald’s for eight years, but they’re perfectly content to hear ambiguous and imprecise language from their guy.

    “The expression ‘create or save,’ which has been used regularly by the President and his economic team, is an act of political genius,” writes [Harvard economist and former Bush economic adviser Greg] Mankiw. “You can measure how many jobs are created between two points in time. But there is no way to measure how many jobs are saved. Even if things get much, much worse, the President can say that there would have been 4 million fewer jobs without the stimulus.”

    Mr. Obama’s comments yesterday are a perfect illustration of just such a claim. In the months since Congress approved the stimulus, our economy has lost nearly 1.6 million jobs and unemployment has hit 9.4%. Invoke the magic words, however, and — presto! — you have the president claiming he has “saved or created” 150,000 jobs.

    But MSNBC is ready to drink the Koolaid;

    Just how much of an impact Obama’s recovery program had on the pace of job losses is up for debate.

    Obama has claimed as many as 150,000 jobs saved or created by his stimulus plan so far, even as government reports have shown the economy has lost more than 1.6 million jobs since Congress approved funding for the program in February.

    Republicans remain critical of the stimulus spending, slamming it as a big government program that ultimately will do little for recovery.

    With only a fraction of the federal money actually spent thus far, it’s premature to give the stimulus plan credit for economic trends, congressional Republicans said last week.

    Of course, if the media is just going to take everything that Obama says at face value, why do we have a media? Just turn over MSNBC to the White House.

    ADDED: The folks at Newsy read my post and sent this video to accompany it;

  • Carl Webb; the IVAW deserter who didn’t desert

    As most of my regular readers know, there’s turmoil churning around the ranks in the Iraq Veterans Against the War. Although it’s a result of many things, the most contentious point of the turmoil is between the regular patriotic members who merely oppose the war and the members who want the IVAW to become a tool of the International Socialist Organization – just a facade of veterans to lend some legitimacy to the entire socialist movement. The most vile and despicable member of IVAW, Carl Webb, belongs to that second group.

    Earlier this month, TSO wrote about Webb when Casey Porter resigned from IVAW and brought our attention to Webb. Since then, Kris Goldsmith resigned and this stirred Webb up again. He bragged on his own Facebook page that he forced another resignation of a “conservative” from IVAW;
    (more…)

  • Making up threats

    Last week, it was credit cards, this week it’s cyber security – it seems like we have a new crisis pop up almost everyday that President Obama feels a need to protect us from. I don’t have any crisis in my life – I pay my credit cards, if I ever use them – when the credit card companies try to raise my rates, I threaten to close the accounts and they magically change their minds. My computers work just fine with the software I bought myself. But somehow, the Obama Administration thinks I need to let their camel’s nose under my tent corner. (NY Post link)

    “We’re not as prepared as we should be, as a government or as a country,” he said, calling cyber threats one of the most serious economic and military dangers the nation faces.

    He said he will soon pick the person he wants to head up a new White House office of cyber security, and that person will report to the National Security Council as well as to the National Economic Council, in a nod to the importance of computers to the economy.

    While the newly interconnected world offers great promise, Obama said it also presents significant peril as well. The president declared: “Cyberspace is real, and so is the risk that comes with it.”

    We don’t seem to be prepared for anything these days. The solution is always more government. With more government comes more taxes, more regulation and more intrusion. Remember Jimmy Carter’s Energy czar, who became part of the new (then) Energy Department that was going to make us energy independent? Of course, they’ve had thirty years to make us energy independent, so…any minute now.

    The internet, on the other hand, is working just fine – that probably won’t be the case after the government gets it’s crap-smeared fingers in it. Of course, Obama says that corporations aren’t taking care of us. Why wouldn’t they? They have a financial stake in the internet – if something breaks, they lose money. I’ve been conned on the internet – Amazon made me whole when some fraud sold me something that didn’t exist. Another person who sold me a fake signed first edition of a Frederick Forsythe book is being prosecuted by Ebay – sentencing is in September.

    When a previous bank I had found that my bank card number was stolen during a computer-looting of Western Union a few years back, they had a new card in my hands before I knew what had happened. The only reason I’m not with that bank is because they were seized by the FDIC when banks first started collapsing in 2007 because they’d made a bunch of bad mortgage loans in Atlanta.

    I pay money for fraud protection that also includes insurance if I do get burned. Yet, twice in the last few years, government employees have had their laptops stolen from their homes and those laptops had my Social Security number in them – that’s why I purchased fraud protection – to protect myself from government buffoonery.

    Yet everyone is ready to support this latest brainchild from the Obama Administration. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t trust the Bush Administration either – the anti-Federalists taught me to be wary of government.

  • That proposed $17 billion savings in the budget

    So that President Obama guy announced that he had hacked $17 billion off of his record-setting spending spree of a budget for next year – less than 1/2 of 1% of the budget. He points out that he’s saving us from ourselves; (Reuters quote)

    “We can no longer afford to spend as if deficits don’t matter and waste is not our problem,” Obama told reporters. “We can no longer afford to leave the hard choices for the next budget, the next administration or the next generation.”

    Yeah, the “hard choices” like half of the budget cuts coming from the Department of Defense according both Reuters and Associated Press;

    About half the budget savings would come from an effort by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to curb defense programs, including ending production of the F-22 fighter and killing a much-maligned replacement helicopter fleet for the president that’s way over budget.

    Oh, so he’s going to sacrifice his own proposal to buy a slew of new helicopters to ferry him back and forth to Andrews Air Force Base and Camp David. That almost compares to cutting tankers and fighters, doesn’t it? I mean stuff that we need to defend ourselves with. Stuff the Constitution says that government is supposed to do.

    But, the budget knife is aimed at critical social stuff, too;

    On the domestic side of the ledger, an early childhood education program known as “Even Start” and a long-range radio navigation system that has been made obsolete by GPS technology were on the chopping block.

    Other cuts included halting payments to states for abandoned mines that already have been cleaned up and cutting a Department of Education attache position in Paris.

    So some DOE weinie is going to leave his cushy posting in Paris – big whoop. That’s almost like cutting fighters and tankers, isn’t it? Most of the cuts in domestic spending were dusted off from the Bush Administration;

    Many of the cuts mirror those proposed previously by Bush but largely rejected by Congresses controlled by both Republicans and Democrats. In fact, Democrats already have pared about $10 billion from Obama’s appropriations requests in passing the $3.4 trillion congressional budget plan last month.

    Oh, and the President’s promise to not raise taxes on people making less than $250,000 fell by the way side, too – he’s raising airport fees to cover the costs of posting those federal irritants known as TSA agents so they can continue to put my toothpaste in a baggie for me.

    Like I’ve ben saying for months, when the Democrats threaten budget cuts, defense has to put their collective hand over their collective balls. Well, and that one Ed Department weinie in Paris.