Of the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do, their chiefs were two hundred; and all their kinsmen were at their command — 1 Chronicles 12:32
This just in: Democrats are demon-possessed liars who destroyed America during that two-year period when they fascistically OWNED the White House, the Senate and the House (now they merely fascistically own the White House and the Senate, and you’d think they have no power or responsibility at all given the way they blame the House under GOP leadership for basically all the hell that has resulted from Democrat rule).
One of my very favorite Democrat-Obama lies from hell is actually one of the earliest: the lie that it was BUSH who somehow drove up the deficit in the year AFTER he left office and Obama has been reducing it ever since.
It is your assertion that it was President Damn Bush who signed that $410 billion Omnibus bill in March of 2009?
It is your assertion that it was President Damn Bush who left $350 billion in TARP money to President Damn Bush who spent it in early 2009???
It is your assertion that it was President Damn Bush who rammed that damned $2.6 trillion ObamaCare – Ooh, I’m sorry, GorgieCare bill – down our collectivist throats?
It’s really amazing to me what a lousy bunch of Marxists you liars truly ARE. Obama passes all these things, takes credit for them, but when it’s time to be financially responsible for his own damn bills it’s more “Bush did it! Put all the garbage I did and took credit for on Bush’s bill!!!”
Obama cynically and ruthlessly exploited the technical fact that most of a new president’s first year is under the budget of his predecessor to LOAD UP THE DEFICIT in 2009. Obama BLEW UP the deficit, which had been $10 trillion under Bush and is now well over $17.3 trillion. Bush added over $4 trillion to the deficit over eight years, which of course was bad; Obama is on pace to more than TRIPLE that such that he will add over $12 trillion to our unpayable and unsustainable deficit before he leaves office in disgrace.
Of course, our true debt is way north of $225 trillion now. America is doomed. It WILL collapse under the weight of Democrat debt. And please don’t be so stupid and so depraved not to realize that 99.9 percent of all our debt has come from DEMOCRAT programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and now ObamaCare that just exploded federal spending far beyond the realm of sanity. And the night before it all goes to hell, the media talking heads will be assuring you that everything will be fine.
And, of course, we’re only now BEGINNING to see just how truly awful and truly evil ObamaCare truly is.
Please understand that this latest CBO report STILL doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface as to how simply godawful ObamaCare will be to America. Remember when it passed, laden with budget gimmickry designed to lie to the American people so they wouldn’t have any clue how demonic this piece of fascist garbage law truly would be? They reported that ObamaCare would be “deficit neutral.” And then the budget estimates just kept getting worse and worse as time passed. Do you think now, with the ObamaCare monster only one-third out of its hellhole, that they’ve figured out how truly bad it is yet??? Not even CLOSE.
The UPI article reporting on the latest ObamaCare fiasco today implicitly points out how truly bad the CBO has been in estimating the damage of ObamaCare:
WASHINGTON, Feb. 4 (UPI) — The White House Tuesday disputed claims a Congressional Budget Office study concluded the Affordable Care Act would cost millions of U.S. jobs.
The CBO study — which also said the ACA is projected to reduce the federal deficit by more than $1 trillion in 10 years — said the healthcare reform law is expected to reduce employment by about 2.3 million jobs during the same period. The new estimate nearly triples the previous CBO estimate of 800,000 jobs that the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, was to have cost the economy, the Hill newspaper reported.
The law is expected to slow the economy and cause many people to leave the workforce, the impact being felt mostly by low-wage workers, the Washington Post said.
From “this fascist ObamaCare takeover is going to wipe out 800,000 jobs” to “this Nazi ObamaCare law is going to destroy 2.3 MILLION jobs.” You almost get the sense that panicked CBO economists are desperately throwing darts at a board to try to get their hands on some kind of number to relay just how catastrophically horrible this thing is going to be.
The Washington Post piece on the CBO bombshell of the fascist ObamaCare takeover of healthcare also underscores the CBO’s inability to comprehend just how bad this lawless “law” truly is:
The Affordable Care Act will reduce the number of full-time workers by more than 2 million in coming years, congressional budget analysts said Tuesday, a finding that sent the White House scrambling to defend a law that has bedeviled President Obama for years.
After obtaining coverage through the health law, some workers may forgo employment, while others may reduce hours, according to a report by the Congressional Budget Office. Low-wage workers are the most likely to drop out of the workforce as a result of the law, it said. The CBO said the law’s impact on jobs mostly would be felt after 2016.
Republicans quickly pointed to the report’s findings as more evidence of the health law’s flaws, one of their major themes ahead of this year’s mid-term elections. Republicans see the Affordable Care Act as a political boon this year, after the disastrous launch of the law’s Web site last fall.
The CBO report said those rocky beginnings of the federal online marketplace would suppress enrollment this year, though not in the future. The agency predicted that the number of Americans who buy private health plans through the new insurance exchanges before a March 31 deadline for coverage in 2014 will be 6 million, while the number of low-income people who join Medicaid this year will be 8 million.
Both figures are one million fewer people than the CBO had forecast the last time it issued such a prediction, nine months ago.
Off by a million people in only nine months. Because after all, what’s a million people between friends? It’s kind of like Obama’s totalitarian big-government socialist buddy Joseph Stalin put it: one death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic. Under messiah Obama, we’re all just “statistics” now. And, of course, as the next Democrat president would have you believe, “What difference does it make?”
But you see how the estimates just keep getting worse and worse???
Notice the description of the moral hazard of people who will simply abandon TRYING to get a low-wage job and simply skate on the dole with their free Medicaid. This was a job-destroying act in every possible way you can slice it.
Barack Obama is the worst liar and the most amply DOCUMENTED liar in the history of the United States. If he says good morning, the man is lying. President “If you like your health plan you can keep your health plan. Period. End of story” has proven that. A pit viper has more credibility than Obama and is far less dangerous to your health.
Take a trip down memory lane. Conservatives have been ACCURATELY PREDICTING exactly what has happened under ObamaCare. And Democrats viciously and rabidly demonized us in every way imaginable for telling the thing they hate the most – the TRUTH. Because if you are a Democrat you hate the truth and call people who tell the truth “racist.”
People like me tried to warn America. But the American people overall have become ignorant and depraved and frankly pathetic. I think of Nazi Germany and a man who tried to warn that nation:
I am writing this from cell 24. Outside a new Germany is being created. Many millions are rejoicing. Hitler is promising everyone precisely what they want. I think when they wake to their sobering senses, they will find they have been led by the nose and duped by lies.”
That’s YOU, America. YOUR country has been “fundamentally transformed” by the very worst kind of liar. By the time most of you people finally wake up to your sobering senses, your country will have imploded under the weight of its own debt and moral stupidity and you will have nothing. And of course what will you do? Being wicked, you will keep rejecting the God whom you have already rejected with your love of abortion and sodomy and you will instead put your trust in total socialism. And that’s when the beast prophesied in Revelation will come to finish the job Obama started.
The Los Angeles Times print edition ran this story on July 2 under the considerably more Marxist headline, “Wealthy benefit from recovery as workers struggle“:
WASHINGTON (AP) — This is one anniversary few feel like celebrating.
Two years after economists say the Great Recession ended, the recovery has been the weakest and most lopsided of any since the 1930s.
After previous recessions, people in all income groups tended to benefit. This time, ordinary Americans are struggling with job insecurity, too much debt and pay raises that haven’t kept up with prices at the grocery store and gas station. The economy’s meager gains are going mostly to the wealthiest.
Workers’ wages and benefits make up 57.5 percent of the economy, an all-time low. Until the mid-2000s, that figure had been remarkably stable — about 64 percent through boom and bust alike.
[…]
But if the Great Recession is long gone from Wall Street and corporate boardrooms, it lingers on Main Street:
— Unemployment has never been so high — 9.1 percent — this long after any recession since World War II. At the same point after the previous three recessions, unemployment averaged just 6.8 percent.
— The average worker’s hourly wages, after accounting for inflation, were 1.6 percent lower in May than a year earlier. Rising gasoline and food prices have devoured any pay raises for most Americans.
— The jobs that are being created pay less than the ones that vanished in the recession. Higher-paying jobs in the private sector, the ones that pay roughly $19 to $31 an hour, made up 40 percent of the jobs lost from January 2008 to February 2010 but only 27 percent of the jobs created since then.
[…]
Hard times have made Americans more dependent than ever on social programs, which accounted for a record 18 percent of personal income in the last three months of 2010 before coming down a bit this year. Almost 45 million Americans are on food stamps, another record.
[…]
Because the labor market remains so weak, most workers can’t demand bigger raises or look for better jobs.
“In an economic cycle that is turning up, a labor market that is healthy and vibrant, you’d see a large number of people quitting their jobs,” says Gluskin Sheff economist Rosenberg. “They quit because the grass is greener somewhere else.”
Instead, workers are toughing it out, thankful they have jobs at all. Just 1.7 million workers have quit their job each month this year, down from 2.8 million a month in 2007.
The toll of all this shows in consumer confidence, a measure of how good people feel about the economy. According to the Conference Board’s index, it’s at 58.5. Healthy is more like 90. By this point after the past three recessions, it was an average of 87.
How gloomy are Americans? A USA Today/Gallup poll eight weeks ago found that 55 percent think the recession continues, even if the experts say it’s been over for two years. That includes the 29 percent who go even further — they say it feels more like a depression.
Allow me to start with the second paragraph in the story:
“Two years after economists say the Great Recession ended, the recovery has been the weakest and most lopsided of any since the 1930s.”
The weakest and most lopsided of any recovery since the 1930s, you say???
WHO WAS PRESIDENT IN THE 1930s? WHICH PARTY DOMINATED BOTH THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE IN THE 1930s?
And next let me ask you, “Are there any similarities between socialist Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt and socialist Democrat Barack Hussein Obama??? And the answer is, “HELL YES THERE ARE!!!”:
Which is to say, “This is the worst the U.S. economy has ever been since the LAST time we had a socialist just like FDR – and the mainstream media proudly hailed Obama as FDR and Obama’s as a NEW “New Deal.”
Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After scrutinizing Roosevelt’s record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.
”Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump,” said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA’s Department of Economics. ”We found that a relapse isn’t likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies.”
In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.
[…]
”The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes,” Cole said. ”Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened.”
And of course all the “experts” the mainstream media love to trot out have all bought hook, line and sinker the notion that capitalism is something to be loathed and feared. So they demand that America pursue asinine government stimulus policies that fail even by the “experts'” own standards, and then these same “experts” proceed to argue that the economy failing to recover somehow is proof that more of the same thing that already failed is necessary.
These “experts” whom the mainstream media give a loud microphone to to espouse their socialist views are pathologically incapable of seeing this connection between socialist policies and an economy in the doldrums. Every bit of negative economic news is invariably “unexpected” (liberals favorite adjective to wave a hand at bad economic developments whenever a Democrat president is in charge), because these “experts” cannot separate the inevitable results of their ideology from their terribly failed ideology. There has to be a disconnect, or more commonly, a scapegoat.
I think of the Soviet Union, which literally blamed the total failure of their entire political philosophy and the ruinous policies that philosophy entailed by claiming that their agricultural output had been adversely affected due to 72 years of bad weather. And the Soviet Union has gone the way of the Dodo bird for that very reason.
Is America under Obama the next Dodo bird to fall apart while we’re assured that everything is fine while some suitable scapegoat bears the blame for every failure that can’t be ignored???
It couldn’t be the fact that socialism is nothing more than state-planned economic failure. It had to be something else, ANYTHING else.
The Big Brother from the novel 1984 had Emmanuel Goldstein. The Big Brother who is now occupying our White House has George W. Bush.
The next obvious question to ask and answer is, “Why are the wealthy benefitting while the workers struggle?”
The answer is twofold: 1) because when you attack the employers, the first thing to go is the employees and 2) because that’s exactly how crony capitalism works.
There is a magnificent book entitled, New Deal Or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America, which should be required reading. Burton Folsom Jr. points out that when FDR structured his many policies and regulations that strangled economic growth, he did so in such a way that favored the big crony capitalist corporations at the expense of the smaller businesses that could no longer compete given the costly regulatory requirements. The smaller businesses were forced out of the market while the big businesses protected themselves with insider deals based on access to and influence with the government that only they could afford. And there is no question whatsoever that – even as FDR employed the class warfare of socialism – the rich got richer while the poor got poorer. Income tax revenues plunged as the wealthy sheltered their wealth from the high tax rates and the poor paid an increasingly high overall percentage of tax revenues via excise taxes. Regulations mandating higher pay for workers priced those workers right out of their jobs. Folsom provides the official data to back it up.
In 1929, prior to FDR demonizing the rich, income taxes accounted for 38% of total revenue collected, and corporate income taxes accounted for 43%. Excise taxes which burdened the poor only counted for 19% of revenues. By 1938, the rich and the corporations had protected themselves from FDR’s demagogic tax policies (but the poor couldn’t), such that the only 24% was collected in income taxes (versus 38%) and only 29% from corporate income taxes (versus 43%). Meanwhile the poor-punishing excise taxes (e.g. gasoline tax) soared from 19% to 47% of the total taxes collected. Meanwhile, when income taxes were kept low, the wealthy invariably paid FAR MORE in the total tax revenue as they put their money out to invest in and expand the economy in pursuit of the profits. And they created millions of jobs in doing so.
And the exact same mindset is yielding the exact same results ALL OVER AGAIN. Obama has put the fear of God (actually the fear of the Soviet-style STATE) into the wealthy and the corporations. They keep hearing Obama demagogue them, and they keep sheltering their money. And they will CONTINUE to keep doing that until the threat of Obama is gone. Just like they did with FDR.
That said, there is also a deliberate and fundamental misunderstanding of fascism by the left. If you read leftists, you come away thinking that somehow “fascism” is the takeover of a state by corporations. But stop and think: Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, Hess and all the other key Nazis WEREN’T corporate CEOs who took over the state; THEY WERE SOCIALIST POLITICIANS WHO TOOK OVER THE CORPORATIONS. They usurped the corporations and FORCED them to perform THEIR agenda. They either performed the Nazis’ will or they were simply taken away from their rightful owners and nationalized.
And to the degree that German crony capitalist corporations helped Hitler in his rise to power, THEY WERE JUST MORE USEFUL IDIOTS.
The same sort of takeover of German corporations by socialists is building in America. Take Maxine Waters, a liberal Democrat, as the perfect example. What did she say of the oil companies?
“This liberal will be all about socializing … uh uh … would be about … basically … taking over … and the government running all of your companies.”
THAT’S what Hitler did, too. Hitler got this power through regulations that required corporations to do his bidding, just like Obama has now REPEATEDLY done.
I stand by that sweeping statement. People need to realize that “Nazi” stood for “National SOCIALIST German Workers Party,” and that both Nazi socialism and Soviet socialism were big government socialist tyrannies that failed their people. As to our own experiment with socialism here in the USA, I point out in an article that explains how “Government Sponsored Enterprises” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac policies led us into economic implosion in spite of warnings for YEARS prior to the 2008 economic collapse:
The timeline is clear: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were giant behemoths that began to stagger under their own corrupt weight, as even the New York Timespointed out:
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are so big — they own or guarantee roughly half of the nation’s $12 trillion mortgage market — that the thought that they might falter once seemed unimaginable. But now a trickle of worries about the companies, which has been slowly building for years, has suddenly become a torrent.
And it was FANNIE and FREDDIE that collapsed FIRST before ANY of the private investment banks, which collapsed as a result of having purchased the very mortgaged backed securities that the Government Sponsored Enterprises SOLD THEM. It wasn’t until Fannie and Freddie collapsed that investors began to look with horror at all the junk that these GSE boondoggles had been pimping.
The man who predicted the collapse in 1999 wrote a follow-up article titled, “Blame Fannie Mae and Congress For the Credit Mess.” It really should have read, “Blame DEMOCRATS.” Because they were crawling all over these GSEs that they had themselves created like the cockroaches they are. But Wallison is nonpartisan
That Chicago corruption extends right into Obama’s home, by way of his wife Michelle. This is a woman who sat on high-paying boards in direct quid-pro-quo consequences of Obama advancing in public office. And in some of those boards, she participated in the worst kind of hospital patient-dumping.
Here’s a video of Michelle Obama you ought to watch – if you can stand the revelations:
Too bad we voted to nationalize the Chicago Way.
I also pointed out that when you attacked employers, the ones who would be hit the most and the hardest would be EMPLOYEES.
Through the 12 months ended in March of last year, 505,473 new businesses started up in the U.S., according to the latest data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s the weakest growth since the bureau started tracking the data in the early 1990s. It’s down sharply from the record 667,341 new businesses added in the 12 months that ended in March 2006.
Many times large corporations will even lobby for more regulations for their own industry because they know that they can handle all of the rules and paperwork far easier than their smaller competitors can. After all, a large corporation with an accounting department can easily handle filling out a few thousand more forms, but for a small business with only a handful of employees that kind of paperwork is a major logistical nightmare.
When it comes to hiring new employees, the federal government has made the process so complicated and so expensive for small businesses that it is hardly worth it anymore. Things have gotten so bad that more small businesses than ever are only hiring part-time workers or independent contractors.
So what we actually have now is a situation where small businesses have lots of incentives not to hire more workers, and if they really do need some extra help the rules make it much more profitable to do whatever you can to keep from bringing people on as full-time employees.
And who do all these rules and regulations hurt the most but the very people Democrats cynically and deceitfully claim they are trying to help? Meanwhile, who does it help the most but the crony capitalist corporations who DON’T do most of the hiring in America who can profit from Obama’s war on business that results in the destruction of their small business competition.
A Slowdown for Small Businesses
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: June 14, 2011
In the latest sign that the economic recovery may have lost whatever modest oomph it had, more small businesses say that they are planning to shrink their payrolls than say they want to expand them.
That is according to a new report released Tuesday by the National Federation of Independent Business, a trade group that regularly surveys its membership of small businesses across America.
The federation’s report for May showed the worst hiring prospects in eight months. The finding provides a glimpse into the pessimism of the nation’s small firms as they put together their budgets for the coming season, and depicts a more gloomy outlook than other recent (if equally lackluster) economic indicators because this one is forward-looking.
While big companies are buoyed by record profits, many small businesses, which employ half of the country’s private sector workers, are still struggling to break even. And if the nation’s small companies plan to further delay hiring — or, worse, return to laying off workers, as they now hint they might — there is little hope that the nation’s 14 million idle workers will find gainful employment soon.
“Never in the 37-year history of our company have we seen anything at all like this,” said Frank W. Goodnight, president of Diversified Graphics, a publishing company in Salisbury, N.C. He says there is “no chance” he will hire more workers in the months ahead.
“We’re being squeezed on all sides,” he says.
So let me ask again the question that the Los Angeles Times phrased: “Why are the wealthy benefitting from the ‘recovery’ as workers struggle?
And the answer is simple: because Barack Obama and the Democrat Party are socialist who have destroyed the engine that creates the jobs that workers depend upon to flourish.
An interesting fact is that businesses are now forced to spend $1.7 TRILLION a year in regulatory compliance costs. That is a massive hidden tax on their viability; it exceeds the overt income taxes businesses have to pay, and it most certainly exceeds their profits. And right now Obama is attacking them via the Dodd-Frank regulatory legislation, via the EPA, via OSHA, via ObamaCare and via the ridiculous actions of the NLRB in addition to their tax burden. Just to name a few. The result is businesses terrified to expand and further place their necks under Obama’s axe blade.
Meanwhile, Obama’s socialist policies have not only devastated the worker by destroying his jobs, but they’ve ruined America on numerous other levels, too. Take the housing crisis – which was THE cause of the economic implosion of 2008. Did Obama make it better? Well, here’s a headline for you from CNBC: “US Housing Crisis Is Now Worse Than Great Depression.” Which is to say that Democrats – who first created the housing crisis by refusing to allow the regulation of their pet socialist wealth redistribution agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – took something awful and turned it into an American Dream-massacring nightmare.
The latest job figures simply further document my point: Obama is destroying America job by job. Not only did the unemployment rate go up to 9.2% (Obama promised the American people that the unemployment rate would be 7.1% by now if he got his massive government-spending stimulus); not only were the previous two month figures adjusted DOWNWARD by some 45,000 jobs; not only have a third of the unemployed been unemployed for at least a YEAR with fully half of the unemployed having been unemployed for over six months (which is unprecedented); not only did the economy create an incredibly dismal 18,000 jobs (versus the 100,000 the economists naively expected); but a quarter million more people simply walked away from the workforce entirely – abandoning any hope that Obama will do anything more than crush their hopes of finding a job.
At the CNBC town-hall-style meeting, President Obama offered a little advice for members of the Tea Party movement who argue that the federal government has grown too big and powerful.
The president said that sentiment was rooted in history, and called it a “noble tradition of being healthily skeptical of government. That’s in our DNA. … That’s a good thing.”
But he critiqued the Tea Party candidates, saying they were failing to identify actual cuts in government services that they were willing to accept to force such changes in spending.
Their message is, he said: “We’re going to control government spending. We’re going to propose $4 trillion in additional tax cuts and somehow magically this is all going to work.”
Mr. Obama said he had the following question for Tea Party candidates: Would you cut veterans benefits? Would you cut resources for Social Security and Medicare? What taxes are you willing to see go up?
“The challenge for the Tea Party movement is to identify what exactly would you do,” he said.
Two things wrong with Obama’s “challenge”:
1) I thought we had a president. I guess we don’t, which is why Democrats have to keep blaming Bush for everything. I mean, isn’t Obama sort of responsible for his massive deficits? Shouldn’t maybe Obama take a look at his spending, rather than demanding that his critics fix all the problems he’s supposed to be fixing?
Maybe Obama should just resign from office, so someone else can deal with the disaster, since he clearly has no ideas as to what to do.
2) Obama asks, “Would you cut veterans benefits? Would you cut resources for Social Security and Medicare? What taxes are you willing to see go up?” As if people are blaming him for enacting veterans benefits, Social Security, and Medicare. That’s just the kind of empty, sounds-smart-if-you’re-really-stupid rhetoric I’ve come to expect from my demagogue-in-chief.
And, of course, the answer, in terms of the Tea Party movement “identifying what exactly would you do,” would be to say:
“WE’D START OUT BY UNDOING EVERYTHING YOU DID, AND THEN CONTINUE BY DOING EVERYTHING THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF YOU!!!”
If Obama were halfway honest, rather than the disingenuous liar he has proven himself to be, he’d ask about what we would do about HIS socialist welfare spending, rather than FDR’s and LBJ’s.
In the first 19 months of the Obama administration, the federal debt held by the public increased by $2.5260 trillion, which is more than the cumulative total of the national debt held by the public that was amassed by all U.S. presidents from George Washington through Ronald Reagan.
[F]rom the day Mr. Obama took office last year to the end of the current fiscal year, according to the Office of Management and Budget, the debt held by the public will grow by $3.3 trillion. In 20 months, Mr. Obama will add as much debt as Mr. Bush ran up in eight years.
Mr. Obama’s spending plan approved by Congress last February calls for doubling the national debt in five years and nearly tripling it in 10.
President Barack Obama is poised to increase the U.S. debt to a level that exceeds the value of the nation’s annual economic output, a step toward what Bill Gross called a “debt super cycle.”
The CHART OF THE DAY tracks U.S. gross domestic product and the government’s total debt, which rose past $13 trillion for the first time this month. The amount owed will surpass GDP in 2012, based on forecasts by the International Monetary Fund. […]
Gross, who runs the world’s largest mutual fund at Pacific Investment Management Co. in Newport Beach, California, said in his June outlook report that “the debt super cycle trend” suggests U.S. economic growth won’t be enough to support the borrowings “if real interest rates were ever to go up instead of down.”
Serious consequences associated with deficit spending have long seemed like far-off problems, but they are now likely to hit the country with considerable force within the next several years.
One is servicing the debt itself. Most people don’t pay much attention to the interest payments the federal government makes every year. They haven’t had to. Debt service has been manageable, thanks to low interest rates and consistent economic growth.
But, according to the Congressional Budget Office, annual debt payments — currently about $200 billion — are set to skyrocket. CBO estimates that interest payments on the federal debt will total $916 billion by the year 2020.
“Interest rates are going to rise and at the same time, we’re going to have a substantial increase in the size of the debt,” says Roberton Williams, a senior fellow with the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. “We’ll be paying five times as much in dollar terms by 2020 than we did last year.”
Think of what our lives will be like as we have to pay off the equivalent of Obama’s massive 2009 stimulus plans every single year.
And Obama weasels out of his overwhelming role of imploding our country by pointing to policies that were enacted generations ago? He tacitly argues that any support for Social Security and Medicare means that people somehow MUST therefore support his asinine stimulus and his ObamaCare boondoggle?
3) When Obama says, “What taxes are you willing to see go up?” he is relying on a fundamental fallacy of liberal progressivism, namely that ever higher tax rates collect ever higher tax revenue. I debunked this error of thinking in an article entitled, “Tax Cuts INCREASE Revenues; They Have ALWAYS Increased Revenues.”
At the ultimate level, the progressive myth clearly breaks down: just make the income tax rate 100% on everyone, and see how long it takes for everybody in the country to quit their jobs. To put it in a nutshell, when the income and capital tax rate is kept low (certainly not at zero, but low), there is more incentive for people to work, and invest, and risk their time and their capital, with the result that the economy grows. And then the tax revenues actually increase, because taxes are collected from a much larger base.
And more people have jobs, too.
Fortunately, one gets the point that the American people are either not even bothering to listen to Obama anymore, or else they’ve finally seen through his nonsense. Even DEMOCRATS are tuning Obama out in droves now.
If you’re the President of the United States or one of his political appointees and you’re ideologically opposed to new oil and natural gas development offshore, what do you do when the public registers its overwhelming support for new drilling in public opinion polls?
You dance, delay, and deceive. You speak melodious words about seeking the wisdom of the public in making these decisions and then ignore evidence of the public will when you get it, or worse, you hide it.
First came the dance. In August 2008, after soaring gas prices and a dramatic shift in public opinion caused President Bush, Florida Governor Charlie Crist, and Republican presidential candidate John McCain to reverse their positions on offshore drilling, then-Senator Obama also changed. The Democratic presidential nominee reversed his own position and that of his party, saying he was open to offshore drilling as part of an overall energy plan. The Democratic Congress followed a month later by quietly dropping the 25-year Congressional ban on offshore drilling.
Then came the delay. In January 2009, President Obama inherited a draft five year offshore drilling plan prepared by the outgoing Bush administration. The plan was already receiving public comment as part of the elaborate rule making process followed by federal agencies. Ken Salazar, Obama’s new Secretary of Interior, determined the decision about new offshore drilling was so important that he ordered a six-month extension to the comment period.
Third comes the dishonesty.
In April of 2009, during a discussion about offshore exploration in San Francisco, Salazar said that President Obama directed him to “to make sure that we have an open and transparent government” and that “these are not decisions that are going to be made behind closed doors.” Salazar went on to say that President Obama wanted to make sure that DOI was “maximizing the opportunity for the public to give us guidance on what it is that they want to do.”
Yet, more than four months after the comment period ended, the Department of the Interior has failed to make any public announcement about the results, even though sources have told American Solutions for months the comments show a 2-1 advantage in support of offshore drilling.
It took American Solutions almost four months and the power of the Freedom of Information Act to finally uncover indirect confirmation that, out of over 530,000 comments submitted, pro-drilling comments outnumbered anti-drilling comments by a 2-1 margin.
In an email dated October 27, 2009, Liz Birnbaum, director of the Minerals Management Service, informs other Interior officials that a preliminary tabulation of the results of the comment period had not yet gone to Secretary Salazar, adding “[s]o the Secretary can honestly say in response to any questions that he’s [SIC] has not yet seen the analysis of the comments – staff is still working on it. I did, however, confirm to him the 2-1 split that these guys [at American Solutions] are emphasizing.”
When a public employee is on record condoning purposeful deception of the American people, the taxpayer should no longer have to fund his or her job. Secretary Salazar should immediately fire Liz Birnbaum for purposefully deceiving him, and in turn, the American people. It’s not possible for the Secretary to honor pledges of openness, honestly, and transparency in government if his staff is going to deliberately undermine such pledges.
Public opinion polls already measure near 70% support for offshore drilling, so the results from a public comment period that reflect the same public sentiment should not be surprising. But after all this talk of wanting the public’s input, Secretary Salazar and his team must find it a real stumbling block to have to explain all their anti-energy development actions in light of the comment period results to which they previously attached such great importance.
This newly gained insight into the anti-energy exploration mindset within the Department of the Interior allows a new perspective of President Obama’s mention of offshore development in his recent State of the Union address. Here is the one paragraph in which the President described offshore development:
But to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country. It means making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development. It means continued investment in advanced biofuels and clean coal technologies. And, yes, it means passing a comprehensive energy and climate bill with incentives that will finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in America.
To the passive listener, it sounded like President Obama expressed at least rhetorical support for offshore drilling.
But the President only says we must make “tough decisions” on offshore drilling, deliberately refusing to apply that standard to other decisions on energy.
But tough for whom? Certainly not for the public that overwhelmingly supports more offshore drilling.
Indeed, the only person facing a tough decision is the President since an important part of his political base is opposed to new American energy development.
Bucking public opinion would indeed be a tough decision for this President, but he has shown himself quite comfortable with bucking public opinionto pursue stunningly unpopular policies on health care and cap and trade.
In short, it’s a fair conclusion that the tough decisions the President identified in his State of the Union was his intended decision not to pursue any new offshore oil and gas development. The actions by Salazar and his team are entirely consistent with that conclusion.
What makes all of this dispiriting, especially this month, is that with 15 million Americans out of work and with the President’s recently submitted budget projecting trillion dollar annual deficits for the next ten years and a near tripling of the national debt by 2020, the President is throwing away a golden opportunity over the next three decades to create millions of new jobs and generate more than $270 billion in annual economic growth from new oil and gas development, including $54 billion annually in federal tax receipts that could help lower the federal deficit and the national debt.
These extraordinary benefits of job creation and economic growth – all without requiring any federal spending – are, sadly, not on President Obama’s agenda, notwithstanding all the phony rhetoric to the contrary.
Indeed, we can look forward to the President’s continued strategy of dance, delay, and deceive.
In contrast to opening up our vital oil fields, which would have a huge positive impact in terms of both jobs, the economy, and our national security, it is interesting to compare Obama’s energy policy.
“You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, uh, you know — Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad. Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it — whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, uh, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.”
You had a chance to decide which policy you wanted 16 months ago – and you chose national bankruptcy.
We voted for this foolish clown. I guess we deserve to suffer until he’s finally, mercifully gone.
On April 17, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an endangerment finding, saying that global warming poses a serious threat to public health and safety. Thus, almost anything that emits carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases could be regulated under the Clean Air Act. This is the first official action taken by the federal government to regulate carbon dioxide.
The endangerment finding is the initial step in a long regulatory process that could lead to the EPA requiring regulations for almost anything that emits carbon dioxide. Automobiles would likely be the first target, but subsequent regulations could extend to a million or more buildings and small businesses, including hospitals, schools, restaurants, churches, farms, and apartments. The following five reasons explain why this would be a big, costly mistake.
1. It’s an Economy Killer
Above anything else, any attempt to reduce carbon dioxide would be poison to an already sick economy. Even when the economy does recover, the EPA’s proposed global warming policy would severely limit economic growth.
Since 85 percent of the U.S. economy runs on fossil fuels that emit carbon dioxide, imposing a cost on CO2 is equivalent to placing an economy-wide tax on energy use. The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis study of the economic effects of carbon dioxide cuts found cumulative gross domestic product (GDP) losses of $7 trillion by 2029 (in inflation-adjusted 2008 dollars), single-year GDP losses exceeding $600 billion in some years (in inflation-adjusted 2008 dollars), energy cost increases of 30 percent or more, and annual job losses exceeding 800,000 for several years. Hit particularly hard is manufacturing, which will see job losses in some industries that exceed 50 percent.[1]
High energy costs result in production cuts, reduced consumer spending, increased unemployment, and ultimately a much slower economy. But importantly, higher energy prices fall disproportionately on the poor, since low-income households spend a larger percentage of their income on energy.
2. Negligible Environmental Benefit
The extraordinary perils of CO2 regulation for the American economy come with little, if any, environmental benefit. In fact, analysis by the architects of the endangerment finding, the EPA, strongly suggests that a 60 percent reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions by 2050 will reduce global temperature by 0.1 to 0.2 degrees Celsius by 2095.[2]
Some environmental alarmists believe saving the environment should come at any cost, but when the benefit is barely noticeable, such an extreme viewpoint still cannot be justified.
3. Lack of Scientific Consensus
The decision to regulate carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases was supported by supposed compelling scientific evidence. For example, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson “relied heavily upon the major findings and conclusions from recent assessments of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPPC].”[3] Additionally, the EPA cited harmful impacts including increased droughts, floods, wildfires, heat waves, and sea level rises as a result of climate change. But the reality is that natural disasters are just that–they occur with or without global warming.
The scientific consensus behind global warming, especially the seriousness of the impacts, is anything but strong. Last December, the U.S. Senate Minority released a report that included 650 dissenting scientists refuting claims made in the IPCC report.[4] That number has grown to over 700, more than 13 times the number of scientists (52) who had a direct role in the IPCC report.
4. Backdoor Policy
The United States Congress has been reluctant to pass any global warming legislation or engage in international climate reduction treaties. Last year’s most noted global warming legislative proposals was S. 2191, the America’s Climate Security Act of 2007, originally sponsored by Senators Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and John Warner (R-VA).
This cap-and-trade bill would have set a limit on the emissions of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide from the combustion of coal, oil, and natural gas. A number of concerns existed, chief among them the impact on already-soaring gasoline prices, and consequently the bill was withdrawn by its Senate supporters after only three days of debate.
While some Members of Congress undoubtedly support the EPA’s attempt to curb global warming, the fact that unelected and unaccountable EPA bureaucrats are trying to bypass legislative efforts makes it all the more objectionable.
Equally indefensible is any attempt to use the threat of EPA regulations to induce Congress into enacting a cap-and-trade bill it would not support otherwise. Members should not be forced to prematurely pass a bill without fully understanding its effects and consequences.
5. Expanded Bureaucracy
Having EPA bureaucrats micromanage the economy, all in the name of combating global warming, would be a chilling shift to a command-and-control system in which EPA officials regulate just about every aspect of the market.
Beyond the costs of such actions, the red tape and permitting delays are almost unfathomable. Though the Administration recently enacted a stimulus bill and touted “shovel ready” construction projects to boost the economy, EPA regulations would essentially assure that a great deal of such economic activity would be held up for months, if not years.
For instance, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires federal agencies to file environmental impact statements for EPA review before moving forward with projects. According to the Government Accountability Office, normally it takes a federal construction project an average of 4.4 years to complete a NEPA review. Along with the Clean Water Act’s Section 404 requirements, before a shovel can break ground, it could take 5.6 years for a project to jump through all the normal environmental hoops.[5] Granting the authority for one of the largest and unprecedented regulatory undertakings in U.S. history would greatly expand the EPA’s power.
The kind of industrial-strength EPA red tape that routinely imposes hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in compliance costs could now be imposed for the first time on many commercial buildings, farms, and all but the smallest of businesses. Not only would these costs and delays hamper the private sector, but the paperwork could paralyze federal and state environmental regulators, drawing resources away from more useful endeavors.
A Dangerous Step
The EPA’s official announcement commences a 60-day public comment[6] period before the agency issues a final ruling. Using the Clean Air Act to regulate CO2 would likely be the most expensive and expansive environmental regulation in history and will bypass the legislative process completely. In essence, the decisions of few will drastically alter the lives of many–all for a change in the Earth’s temperature too small to ever notice.
Ben Lieberman is Senior Policy Analyst in Energy and the Environment and Nicolas D. Loris is a Research Assistant in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
[5]U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, “Evaluating the Performance of Environmental Streamlining: Development of a NEPA baseline for Measuring Continuous Performance,” at http://www.environment.fhwa.dot.gov/strmlng/baseline/section2.asp (April 23, 2009).
Start Thinking Right 
Dishonest Obama Administration Lies Re: People’s Demand To Harness America’s Oil Resources
February 9, 2010From Big Government.com
In contrast to opening up our vital oil fields, which would have a huge positive impact in terms of both jobs, the economy, and our national security, it is interesting to compare Obama’s energy policy.
In Obama’s own words:
You had a chance to decide which policy you wanted 16 months ago – and you chose national bankruptcy.
We voted for this foolish clown. I guess we deserve to suffer until he’s finally, mercifully gone.
Tags:$270 billion, 2-1 margin, anti-energy, Bush, cap-and-trade, comment period, deceive, dishonesty, drill, economic growth, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket, energy plan, five year offshore drilling plan, Ken Salazar, millions of new jobs, natural gas, Obama, offshore drilling, oil, polls, public opinion, purposeful deception, six-month extension, tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil
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