Marco Rubio Says It All

Rubio Addresses the Senate - and John Kerry

Government Marco Rubio Rails on Debt Crisis Hypocrisy for 14:02 (And John Kerry Doesn’t Like It)

During by far the most dramatic 24 hours of debt limit negotiations that have had a chokehold on American politics and government since January, Sen.Marco Rubio’s remarks followed by debate with Sen. John Kerry on the Senate floor this afternoon perhaps no better captures the frustration of freshman Republicans, hypocrisy of current political rhetoric, and inability of opposing sides to form real solutions.

Langone Levels Obama

 This is Video "A Must See/Watch"

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/another-home-depot-co-founder-blasts-obama-hes-unpresidential-and-willfully-dividing-us/

US Another Home Depot Co-Founder Blasts Obama: ‘Unpresidential’ & ‘Willfully Dividing Us’

On Thursday, Ken Langone, the former director of the New York Stock Exchange and the co-founder of Home Depot, joined former colleague Bernie Marcus in criticizing President Barack Obama’s job performance. In an interview with CNBC, the successful businessman has some tough words — and warnings — for the nation’s top executive. Watch it, below:
Aside from calling the commander-in-chief “unpresidential” and “petulant,” he accused the president of purposefully pitting Americans against one another during the nation’s ongoing debt debate. In the interview, the successful businessman said:

“He’s not bringing us together. He’s willfully dividing us. He’s petulant. Ronald Reagan would never go into the Oval Office without his jacket on — that’s how much he revered the presidency…
Divide us and we all lose. And this has got to stop. And if [Obama's] listening, or one of his people are listening, and you can quote me exactly for what I say, he is not acting presidential, he is behaving in a way designed, in my opinion, to divide us and make us look at each other with skepticism, with suspicion.
That’s the end of America as we know it when that happens.”

Langone takes specific issue with the president’s “us versus them” mentality. He continues:

“This guy [Obama] worked like hell to be president . . . Behave like a president. Let me look at you as a model to how we should behave. What does he say? Fat cats, jet airplanes. What is the purpose? Us versus them.”

Although Langone didn‘t hold much back in his critique of the president’s debt debate handling, his opposition has little to do with a refusal to accept paying higher taxes. He explained that he does not oppose an elevated tax rate on the wealthiest Americans. Additionally, he says he is open to means-testing Social Security (i.e. reducing benefits to wealthier individuals who may not need or rely upon them), so long as the funds saved are put toward paying down the federal debt. Langone explains:

“People like me have to understand that it isn’t business as usual. I should not get Social Security. I think it’s a travesty for a man of my success and of my means to get anything from the federal government. I think I should pay more taxes . . . but everything they take from me should go to reduce the debt.”

Interestingly, Longone, a wealthy American who may be forced to pay more taxes while receiving fewer Social Security benefits, is more than open to proposed changes — so long as the funds saved or raised help solve America’s debt crisis.
Like many others, he also sounded the debt-ceiling alarm during the interview, warning of the potential ramifications of continuing to spend beyond the nation’s means:

“We need to understand as a nation that you can’t forever expect somebody out there, whether it’s China or somebody in England, to say I will always take America’s debt no matter what.

We are heading into a dose of reality we’ve never seen before . . . Look at the number of states now laying people off because they can’t print paper [money].”

Despite his warning and his negative opinions regarding Obama’s behavior and handling of the debt situation, Langone says he is confident that the federal government will come to a solution before the August 2 deadline.


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Nat. Gas - Shale

A Tale of Two Shale States

Pennsylvania's gain vs. New York's missed opportunity.

 

Politicians wringing their hands over how to create more jobs might study the shale boom along the New York and Pennsylvania border. It's a case study in one state embracing economic opportunity, while the other has let environmental politics trump development.
The Marcellus shale formation—65 million acres running through Ohio, West Virginia, western Pennsylvania and southern New York—offers one of the biggest natural gas opportunities. Former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, a Democrat, recognized that potential and set up a regulatory framework to encourage and monitor natural gas drilling, a strategy continued by Republican Tom Corbett.

More than 2,000 wells have been drilled in the Keystone State since 2008, and gas production surged to 81 billion cubic feet in 2009 from five billion in 2007. A new Manhattan Institute report by University of Wyoming professor Timothy Considine estimates that a typical Marcellus well generates some $2.8 million in direct economic benefits from natural gas company purchases; $1.2 million in indirect benefits from companies engaged along the supply chain; another $1.5 million from workers spending their wages, or landowners spending their royalty payments; plus $2 million in federal, state and local taxes. Oh, and 62 jobs.

Statistics from Pennsylvania bear this out. The state Department of Labor and Industry reports that Marcellus drilling has created 72,000 jobs between the fourth quarter of 2009 and the first quarter of 2011. The average wage for jobs in core Marcellus shale industries is about $73,000, or some $27,000 more than the average for all industries.

The Pennsylvania Department of Revenue says drillers have paid more than $1 billion in state taxes since 2006—and the numbers are swelling. In 2011's first quarter, 857 oil and gas companies and affiliates paid $238 million in capital stock and foreign franchise taxes, corporate income taxes, sales taxes and employer withholding. This exceeds by some $20 million the total payments in 2010.
The revenue department also identified some $214 million in personal income taxes paid since 2006 that can be attributed to Marcellus shale lease payments to individuals, royalty income and asset sales. And all of this with no evidence of significant environmental harm.

***

Then there's New York. The state holds as much as 20% of the estimated Marcellus shale reserves, but green activists have raised fears about the drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing and convinced politicians to enact what is effectively a moratorium.
The Manhattan Institute study shows that a quick end to the moratorium would generate more than $11.4 billion in economic output from 2011 to 2020, 15,000 to 18,000 new jobs, and $1.4 billion in new state and local tax revenue. These are conservative estimates based on a limited area of drilling. If drilling were allowed in the New York City watershed—which Governor Andrew Cuomo is so far rejecting—as well as in the state's Utica shale formation, the economic gains would be five times larger.

Consider New York's Broome County, which borders Pennsylvania and from which you can spot nearby rigs. The county seat of Binghamton ought to be a hub for shale commerce, but instead its population is falling as its young people leave for jobs elsewhere.
A study commissioned by the county in 2009 found that Broome could support up to 4,000 wells, but drilling even half that number would create some $400 million in wages, salaries and benefits; $605 million in property income from rents, royalties and dividends, and some $43 million in state and local tax revenue.

The Broome analysis pointed to Texas, where Chesapeake Energy paid Dallas Fort Worth International Airport $180 million for drilling rights on 18,000 acres of airport property—$10,000 per acre. The airport receives a 25% royalty on the natural gas produced by airport wells—more than $28 million in fiscal 2008. The study also noted the boon that rising oil and gas property values have been to Texas landowners, tax authorities and school districts.

***

Governor Cuomo has said he wants to lift New York's moratorium, and the state's recently released draft rules are a step forward. But they must still undergo legal review and a public comment period that could bar New York drilling for the rest of this year, if not longer. New York will also still ban drilling in about 15% of the state's portion of the Marcellus and impose more onerous rules than other states on private property drilling. Such bows toward the obsessions of rich, big-city greens explain why parts of upstate New York are the new Appalachia.

As they look across their northern border, Pennsylvanians can be forgiven for thinking of New Yorkers the way Abba Eban once described the Palestinians: They never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

BMB YAB Sees Red Ink (Forever)

Our Ten-Trillion-Dollar Man

Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On July 24, 2011 @ 4:58 pm In Uncategorized | 76 Comments

Borrowing Is No Longer Stimulus?
The Congressional Budget Office not long ago forecast that Barack Obama’s $1 trillion-plus annual deficits — scheduled over the next decade — would result in almost another $10 trillion in aggregate debt. Going back to the pre-Bush tax rates this time won’t balance the budget. Slashing discretionary spending will not. So large has the splurge become, and so hooked are the constituencies of federal money, that massive cuts to entitlements necessary to stave off financial implosion may well prompt Greek-like protests.
That staggering sum was apparently conventional wisdom until the November 2010 election. But now there is fear that at some point in the future, Obama will not be known as the first African-American president. Nor will he be cited even as the hope-and-change phenomenon of 2008. Instead, posterity shall know him as the single greatest borrower in American presidential history, a novice who nearly wrecked the U.S. economy by borrowing over $4 billion a day without any feasible proposal how to pay back such a vast sum — taking a post-recession recovery and turning it into a stagflationary mess. In the third year of his tenure, Obama is still left only with

“Bush did it” as an explanation of what went wrong.
Obama has managed the nearly impossible: the greatest peacetime deficits in U.S. history — about $1.5 trillion per year — in his first three years achieved almost no economic expansion. Instead, unemployment is chronic and stays over 9.2%; growth is stagnant; gas is sky-high — and the president seems stunned that none of what he had promised came to pass. All his liberal nostrums have been tried and been found wanting. There is no successful EU model, no winning blue-state statist paradigm for guidance.

Remember that his key advisors — Goolsbee, Orszag, Romer, Summers — have now quit and did not last even three years, their policies orphaned by the very parents who spawned them. Even the president joked that “shovel-ready” was a joke. When he evokes “stimulus” and “investment,” in response, we do not even think “borrowing” and “taxes,” but rather “he’s clueless again.” The old argument that we simply did not borrow enough (say, $5, $6, $7 billion a day?) is laughable beyond the point of caricature, given that the administration followed the Bush record of record peacetime debt. The only mystery is whether the massive Obama borrowing was a product of incompetence, a poorly thought out gorge the beast way of increasing taxes and redistributing income, or a more cynical effort at creating a permanent constituency of millions of new food stamp recipients and federal workers. Or more than that still.

Your Debt And None Of Our Own
Obama himself recently proposed a massive deficit budget that not a single Democrat in the Senate could vote for; then suddenly he flipped, and said that red ink of the sort that he ran up was now unsustainable. When did the president of the United States metamorphosize from the greatest Keynesian in presidential history to a fiscal hawk — January? March? April 1?

As he calls for higher taxes, he still has not offered any plan whatsoever that details where the president himself would cut. Remember that he conceded in December that higher taxes were bad; but by July they were then good again. He courts Wall Street one day for campaign money, yet on another calls them “fat cat” bankers and deplores their jets. Food stamps recipients now number 50 million — and we dare not imagine that even one has taken a dime without good cause.
The would-be employer is told to hire, but on what confident supposition, what rationale? That he knows well the tax rate to come, the health care costs to come, the regulations to come, the pro-business, veteran CEO appointee to come, the next presidential slur to come? Apparently Obama believed that capitalists were so greedy, so wealthy, so money-hungry that they would not mind much the redistributive obstacles he erected.

He talks grandly of getting America back to work, as his subordinates try to close down a Boeing aircraft plant, layer more regulations and burdens on energy production, reverse the order of creditors in the Chrysler mess, and take over GM — even as he continues the old “spread the wealth” and “redistributive change” adolescent rants with newer, sillier faculty lounge concoctions, claiming that at some point we have made enough money and that he himself has hundreds of thousands of dollars in income that he does not need and thus should have higher taxes on. (If so, please, help the Treasury out by offering to pay the gas for the Costa del Sol, Vail, and Martha’s Vineyard first-family freebies). One expects such banalities from the college dorm lounge, but not the middle-aged president of the United States.

Carter 2.0
Abroad the misdirection, confusion, and petulance mirror-image the debt mess. In Libya we have no mission aim, no methodology, and no desired outcome — our consolation only that Libya is a tiny country compared to a nearly 30-million person Afghanistan or Iraq. Obama went to the Arab League and the UN, but not the U.S. Congress for authorization — but to do what? Help the rebels? Enforce a no-fly-zone? Kill Gaddafi? Overthrow the government? All, some, or none?

All such mission objectives have come and gone. Now Italy has joined Germany and half of NATO in opposing the effort — apparently on the logic that either Obama will eventually give up on an oil-rich Gaddafi, or that he should, given the bleak replacement prospects. France, which cooked up the campaign, is fence-sitting. Is this the new multilateral “leading from behind”? The only reason I can think why we bombed Gaddafi, and then allowed him to survive, is that we ourselves are terrified of the possible end-game and aftermath, given that we have little idea of who the rebels are, and even less whether they would be better, the same, or worse than the horrific status quo. If and when they storm Tripoli, expect a pogrom against any sub-Saharan African in Gaddafi’s pay, or, rather, any sub-Saharan African in general still in Libya.

The uncertainty in Libya is like that in Afghanistan, which the president once praised as the good war, then failed to meet his commanders for months, then escalated, then suddenly decided to start pulling out in fears of reelection in 2012, even as he appointed his fourth ground commander in less than three years. All that was sort of like pontificating that drilling new oil does not lower gas prices, but pumping previously drilled oil out of the strategic petroleum reserve apparently might in time before November 2012. Or was it similar to praising campaign finance reform, then being the first president to reject it? Or was it analogous to blasting Goldman Sachs and BP after hitting them up for cash and becoming their most favored recipient?

Bush Obama Did It.
Remember the Obama 2007-8 demagoguery on the war on terror? We live now in Lala land where the bad Bush’s Guantanamo, Predators, renditions, tribunals, preventative detention, Iraq, Afghanistan, wiretaps, and intercepts have become the good Obama’s protocols. We, the public, are supposed to nod and in Orwellian fashion get with the new Ministry of Information line, screaming at Bush on the big screen as the bad becomes good, the old good bad.

Remember the Cairo mythological speech, the falsehoods about an Islamic-enhanced Enlightenment and Renaissance, a multicultural Cordoba (with few Muslims in the late 15th century?) being an Islamic beacon of tolerance during the Inquisition? Remember the administration commentary on the underwear bomber, on Maj. Hasan, on the Ground Zero mosque, on trying KSM in New York? The al Arabiya interview, the sermons to Israel, the bowing to Saudi royals?

Juxtapose all that with the Obama’s administration outlawing of “jihadist,” of “terrorism,” of “Islamist.” His team instead gave us “overseas contingency operations” and “man-caused disasters,” seemed to think that the Muslim Brotherhood is secular, and proclaimed that Israel — not Hamas, not Hezbollah, not Iran, not Syria (recall Assad the “reformer”) — is the problem in the Middle East.

Obama Is Obama
So we have what we have always had — the most partisan and the least experienced man in the U.S. Senate as president, elected by a perfect storm of events (e.g., the 2008 meltdown, the media adulation, the anemic McCain candidacy, the furor over Bush and the Iraq war, the orphaned election without a single incumbent, etc.), in which no one was allowed to ask “Who is this stranger?” and “What has he ever done?”, in which the media finally gave up its last shred of impartiality and became a megaphone, as we were assured that Mr. Obama’s most intimate associates were really total strangers, his once praised avid church-going was merely sporadic, his most partisan voting record was in truth bipartisan, and his bad habits of saying disturbing things were simply a symptom of racialist, raise-the-bar nitpicking on behalf of his Neanderthal critics.

In short, Obama came into office with all the Carteresque assumptions on how to take over a private-sector economy and outsource foreign policy to international bodies. He now finds to his utter amazement — as Carter discovered in late 1979 after Teheran, Afghanistan, and Central America — that in the real world none of what worked in word worked in deed. Those who assured Obama that his Harvard lounge fantasies were real have either quit, are now offering new advice, or are criticizing him for once taking them at their word.

So what is he left with? Not much other than hoping that all the ten-trillion-dollar man’s printed money finally starts inflation to coincide with the 2012 election. Otherwise, we get only the same-old, same-old: blame Bush for the deficit each week; or a slur about starving granny with Social Security cuts; or a speech from an African-American congresswoman from the floor of the House attesting to the racism behind doubting Obama can do the job. Nothing much more than that.

The Wages of the 1960s
Obama, you see, is our nemesis. He is a totem, the logical manifestation of a warped media, the reification of some crazy — and arrogant — ideas about redistributive politics, the statist economy, and cultural and social life that permeated American life the last forty years. He is the president with a 1,000 faces that we have all seen at work, on TV, throughout American life, and at some point the odds determined that we had to have a rendezvous with him— perhaps a catharsis to teach us the wages of Keynesian debt, of a social policy contrary to human nature with its equality of result doctrines, of an all-powerful, all-growing unaccountable government, of the now hip ambiguity about past American protocols and history. Obama is the exaggeration of all the dubious ideas that arose since the 1960s — brought to fruition on his watch, delivered by mellifluous cadences by an untouchable persona.

In fact, a Barack Obama was long overdue. Had he not appeared out of nowhere in 2008, we would have surely had to invent him.

Stress of Busy Scedules

FAITH AND YOU
More than a few Plain Dealer readers tell me, "Looks like you've been busy."
"Sure beats the alternative," I always respond, very aware of friends who need jobs.
But aren't all of us too busy, at least some of the time? Haven't most of us wondered, "Where did today go? The day is shot, and what did I really get done?"
I have a friend who hates any gap in his schedule. So he packs in the jobs, appointments and phone calls. Then, when something happens to disrupt that plan, he feels frustrated.
But he's not the only one whose schedule seems designed to produce stress. We all do it.
"That's especially true if your job has no boundaries," said Sister Mary Ann Flannery, director of the Jesuit Retreat House in Parma. "Sometimes, I feel like a gerbil in a wheel. I go around and around, and I don't feel like I'm getting anywhere."
When that happens, it's impossible to follow Psalm 46:10: "Be still and know that I am God."
Hey, it's hard to even think straight.
"A while ago, I came home from a long trip and immediately hit the ground running," said Jonathan Schaeffer, pastor of Grace Church in Middleburg Heights. "I was sitting at this event, wondering why I agreed to go. There was no reason that I had to be there."
Sometimes, I do a lot more than wonder. I get resentful.
"Why am I wasting time with this?" I ask myself.
Then the answer comes: "Terry, you're the idiot who made the commitment."
Schaeffer mentioned a concept that I first heard from writer Stephen Covey: "Whenever we say yes to something, we say no to something else."
The idea is that we have a limited amount of time each day. If we get up at 6 a.m. for an early breakfast meeting, we say no to sleep. If we go out with friends after work, we may be saying no to spending the night with our family.
"Sometimes, an emergency happens and we have to drop everything and go," said Schaeffer. "But sometimes I'm asked to do something, I know it's not urgent, but I go. I think about how Jesus often interrupted what he was doing to spend time with people who were hurting."
It's also true that Jesus went to weddings and parties. He disappeared into the mountains to pray. He didn't seem to be in a hurry.

Ephesians 5:15-17 reads: "Be very careful, then, how you live -- not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord's will is."

It's not always easy to know the Lord's will, especially when it comes to our daily schedule. We need to work to pay bills. We need to be with family and friends in need. We need to rest. We can't do it all.
"Some of us do things because we like to feel needed," said Flannery. "Others think we are doing what is best for our kids when we drive them to every lesson and camp and event -- and we don't really spend any time talking to them. It's so easy not to really think and pray about our schedule."

Or to ask the question: "If I say yes to this, then what am I saying no to?"

I once heard someone say, "Every need is not a call."
The point is that while the cause is good, it may not be good for you.
"We can't do everything," said Schaeffer. "We need to give ourselves permission to say no.
"We need to pray about our schedules. What is it that God wants us to do?"

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


schedules seems designed to produce stress

especially true if your job has no boundaries  -  Psalm 46:10: "Be still and know that I am God."   

Stephen Covey: "Whenever we say yes to something, we say no to something else."       

"Every need is not a call." 



We need to give ourselves permission to say no

"We need to pray about our schedules. What is it that God wants us to do?" 

Ephesians 5:15-17 reads: 

"Be very careful, then, how you live -- not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord's will is." 

Noonan on Gang of Six

Out of the Way, Please, Mr. President

The Gang of Six puts forward some ideas worth pursuing.

• By PEGGY NOONAN 

It's good, it represents progress, build from it. That would be a helpful approach to the Gang of Six proposal on the debt. Don't deep-six it because it's flawed. Flawless isn't going to happen. There will be a big election in 2012. A lot can be settled then, and after.

The Gang of Six—three Democrats and three Republicans in the Senate—this week put forward a plan aimed at reducing the national debt by almost $4 trillion over the next 10 years. It includes $500 billion in immediate cuts, and it repeals a costly provision of ObamaCare. It would lower the top individual tax rate to 29%, push corporate tax rates down to 29% from 35%, and abolish the Alternative Minimum tax. On long-term spending, the plan includes a legislative supermajority and sequester feature. In the words of a senator involved in the bargaining, "For the first time, we have some real teeth" in spending controls.

This is all pretty good. It moves the ball forward in the right ways.

As for the flaws:
A lot is left up to committees and future action. A lot is left vague. But a critic of the plan, the Cato Institute's Dan Mitchell, highlighted with justice one of its central advantages: It "is not fueled by class-warfare resentment." These days that always comes as a surprise and a relief. And it might have come at a cost to the Democrats in the bargaining sessions.

The primary good of the plan is that it represents the work of three serious liberals and three serious conservatives who together are moving in the right direction, not the wrong one. They admit the spending crisis is a crisis; they appear to admit that we cannot, at least now, tax our way out of it. This seems small but isn't. Agreement on these essentials is an antidote to feelings of widespread public hopelessness: "Washington can't do anything." That hopelessness damages us more than we know, both at home and in the world. We have to look competent. We have to look like we can reform ourselves. The other day there was an apparently incorrect report that the Republicans and the president had neared a debt-ceiling deal. The markets immediately jumped. Everyone wants Washington to work.

People hunger for it.

For the longest time he wouldn't engage, and now he's engaged. For the longest time he didn't care about spending, and now he cares about spending. Good, both in terms of policy and for him. But his decision to become engaged has become a decision to dominate, to have his face in front of the television cameras with his news conferences, pronouncements, and what his communications people are probably calling his "ownership" of any final agreement.
He's trying to come across as the boss, the indispensable man, the leader. And, of course, the reasonable one.

That's all very nice and part of Political Positioning 101, but at this point it's not helping. He's becoming box-office poison. His numbers are falling. The RealClearPolitics composite job approval poll rating has him down six points since June 2, when the debt-ceiling crisis began. That fall, from 52% to 46%, exactly tracks his heightened media presence and his increased attempts to be seen as dominant. Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm, said that if he ran for president today he'd lose, that his job-approval numbers are "worse than they appear," and that he continues to have real trouble with undecided voters.

And if you've watched him lately, you know why. When he speaks on the debt negotiations, he is not only extremely boring, with airy and bromidic language—really they are soul-killing, his talking points—but he never seems to be playing it straight. He always seems to be finagling, playing the angles in some higher game that only he gets. In two and a half years he has reached the point that took George W. Bush five years to reach: People aren't listening anymore.

The other day he announced the Gang of Six agreement with words that enveloped the plan in his poisonous embrace: "I wanted to give folks a quick update on the progress that we're making." We're. He has "continued to urge both Democrats and Republicans to come together." What would those little devils do without Papa? "The good news is that today a group of senators . . . put forward a proposal that is broadly consistent with the approach that I've urged." I've urged. Me, me, me.

That approach includes "shared sacrifice, and everybody is giving up something." He was like a mother coming in and cheerily announcing: "Dinner's served! Less for everybody!"

We're trying to begin a comeback, not a famine. We're trying to take actions that will allow us to grow.
He's like a walking headache. He's probably triggering Michele Bachmann's migraines.

The Gang of Six members themselves should have been given the stage to make their own announcement, and their own best case.
The president, if he is seriously trying to avert a debt crisis, should stay in his office, meet with members, and work the phones, all with a new humility, which would be well received. It is odd how he patronizes those with more experience and depth in national affairs.
He should keep his face off TV. He should encourage, cajole, work things through, be serious, get a responsible deal, and then re-emerge with joy and the look of a winner as he jointly announces it to the nation. Then his people should leak that he got what he wanted, the best possible deal, and the left has no idea the ruin he averted and the thanks they owe him.

For now, for his sake and the sake of an ultimate plan, he should choose Strategic Silence. Really,
recent presidents forget to shut up.

They lose sight of how grating they are.

The Left gets Ugly - Bill Maher

Andrew Klavan

 

Reality Time

 

Why the country’s Bill Mahers say what they say

 

       21 July 2011

Coulter said on FOX News’s late-night show, Red Eye. “All they are saying is, ‘I hate Michele Bachmann,’ ‘I hate Sarah Palin.’ Except they’re saying, ‘I [expletive] hate Michele Bachmann,’ ‘I [expletive] hate Sarah Palin.’ And then conservative blogs and this show say, ‘Oh, they use the f-word,’ and then they get 8 billion times more viewers.”

As so often, Coulter makes a good point. Maher, who is only just so funny and only just so bright and only just so popular, seems rather desperately to be turning himself into a moral Elephant Man in an attempt to draw the gawkers. The dignified reaction would be to walk on by, warning the children not to stare at the poor fellow because he has an affliction, God bless him.

But with a bow to Coulter’s wisdom, there does seem to me to be one thing worth saying about Maher and the others. Their ugliness seems to be escalating day by day, and with it the dishonesty, distortions, and bullying anger of their mainstream-media fellow travelers. There’s a reason for this, I think. It’s the increasingly apparent failure of Barack Obama. With the notable exception of Osama bin Laden’s execution, the Obama presidency has resembled nothing so much as an episode of Mr. Bean, one slapstick misadventure after another. The stagnant economy, the rising unemployment, the staggering, soon-to-be-crippling debt—hiked more under Obama than under every president from Washington to Reagan combined—these can no longer be blamed on his predecessor but are his to own.

This has to be fantastically humiliating for our left-wing media. If you’ve forgotten what they were like during Obama’s 2008 candidacy—the weirdly sexual thrills up their legs, the unreasoning comparison of Obama with America’s greatest men, the pseudo-religious idolatry—you have only to turn to August’s edition of Esquire to find a representative reminder that has to be read to be believed. It’s a column from Canadian writer Stephen Marche hilariously titled “How Can We Not Love Obama?” and subtitled “Because like it or not, he is all of us.” At one point, Marche writes: “‘I am large, I contain multitudes,’ Walt Whitman wrote, and Obama lives that lyrical prophecy.” And later—and I swear I’m not making this up: “Barack Obama is developing into what Hegel called a ‘world-historical soul,’ an embodiment of the spirit of the times. He is what we hope we can be.”

What might once have been dismissed as an embarrassing lapse into bobby-soxer squealery now has to be recognized as a desperate attempt to keep a dying euphoria alive. Likewise the increasingly low and vulgar meanness of Maher and all his cronies. It may, on the one hand, be the tactic of second-rung celebrities desperate for more attention, but it may at the same time represent the dismay of yet another generation of leftists waking from yet another utopian daydream to find themselves in a disaster of their own making.

McConnell and the Tea Party - BMB YAB

Tea Party would defeat Obama by supporting McConnell plan on debt
By George Will

  
The Tea Party, the most welcome political development since the Goldwater insurgency in 1964, lacks only the patience necessary when America lacks the consensus required to propel fundamental change through our constitutional system of checks and balances. If Washington's trajectory could be turned as quickly as Tea Partyers wish — while conservatives control only one-half of one of the two political branches — their movement would not be as necessary as it is. Fortunately, not much patience is required.
 
The Goldwater impulse took 16 years to reach fruition in the election of Ronald Reagan. The Tea Party can succeed in 16 months by helping elect a president who will not veto necessary reforms. 
To achieve that, however, Tea Partyers must not help the incumbent achieve his objectives in the debt-ceiling dispute.
 
One of those is to strike a splashy bargain involving big — but hypothetical and nonbinding — numbers. This would enable President Obama to run away from his record and run as a debt-reducing centrist.
Two Obama objective is tax increases that shatter Republican unity and dampen the Tea Party's election-turning intensity. 

Because he probably can achieve neither, he might want market chaos in coming days so Republicans henceforth can be cast as complicit in the wretched recovery that is his administration's ugly signature.

 

Mitch McConnell's proposal would require Obama to make three requests for additional debt-ceiling increases. Each time he would be required to recommend commensurate spending reductions. Concerning them, Congress would, of course, retain its constitutional power to do what it wishes.


Obama could muster sufficient Democratic votes (one-third plus one, in one house) to sustain his veto of Congress's disapproval of his requests. But this would not enhance presidential power. Rather, McConnell's proposal would put a harness on the president, tightly confining him within a one-time process.

Congressional primacy would be further enhanced by McConnell's proposed special congressional committee. It would not be another commission; it would have no administration members or other outsiders. Its proposals would be unamendable, and would be voted on this year.
 
Thanks largely to the Tea Party, today, more than at any time since Reagan's arrival 30 years ago, Washington debate is conducted in conservatism's vocabulary of government retrenchment. The debt-ceiling vote, an action-forcing mechanism of limited utility, has at least demonstrated that Obama is, strictly speaking, unbelievable.
 
Five months ago he submitted a budget that would have accelerated indebtedness, and that the Democratic-controlled Senate rejected in May, 97 to 0. Just three months ago he was demanding a "clean" increase in the debt ceiling, containing nothing to slow the spending carousel. Now he calls for "the largest possible" debt-reduction deal. Today, he says, "If you look at the numbers, then Medicare in particular will run out of money and we will not be able to sustain that program no matter how much taxes go up." Last year he advertised Obamacare as a sufficient reform of health care. He denounces Republicans as uncompromising regarding tax increases but vows "I will not accept" a deal that does not increase taxes.
 
Obama vaguely promises to "look at" savings from entitlements because "we need to find trillions in savings over the next decade." But when McConnell learned that negotiations chaired by Vice President Biden had identified a risible $2 billion in 2012 discretionary spending cuts — a sum equal to a rounding error on the GM bailout — McConnell concluded that Obama's frugality pantomime required a response that will define the 2012 election choice.
 
Obama's rhetorical floundering is the sound of a bewildered politician trying to be heard over the long, withdrawing roar of ebbing faith in a failing model of governance. From Greece to California, with manifestations in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Illinois and elsewhere, this model is collapsing. Entangled economic and demographic forces are refuting the practice of ever-bigger government financed by an ever-smaller tax base and by imposing huge costs on voiceless future generations.
Richard Miniter, a Forbes columnist, is right: "Obama is not the new FDR, but the new Gorbachev." Beneath the tattered, fading banner of reactionary liberalism, Obama struggles to sustain a doomed system. 

Democrats' dependency agenda — swelling the ranks of government employees, multiplying government-subsidized industries, enveloping ever-more individuals in the entitlement culture — is buckling under an intractable contradiction: 
It is incompatible with economic growth sufficient to create enough wealth to feed the multiplying tax eaters.
 

Events are validating the Tea Partyers' arguments. Time is on their side — but not on America's, 

unless the impediment to reform (Obama) is removed in 16 months.

Ben Stein on "Arab Spring"

Ben put's Egypt Rebellion and "Arab Spring" into perspective, that we ignore at our own peril.



http://jewishworldreview.com/video/ben_stein.php3

Why We Can't -VDH

We should remember the lesson of Henry Huntington's Big Creek Project, started 100 years ago this year, as we let rich irrigated farm acreage lay idle and pass on exploiting new oil and gas fields -- preferring to argue endlessly over how to redistribute our inherited but ever-shrinking national pie.

The Big Creek project, like the Panama Canal, the Hoover Dam, the San Francisco Bay and Golden Gate bridges, and the interstate highway project were the work of confident but less wealthy bygone generations. They understood man's ceaseless elemental struggle against nature to survive one more day, and did not have the luxury to second- and third-guess the work of others before them.

Industrialist and entrepreneur Henry Huntington conceived the gargantuan effort, begun in 1911. In just 157 days, a supply railroad up the mountains was built with picks, shovels and horse-drawn scrapers by thousands of workers struggling at over 6,000 feet in elevation. In just two years, electricity was flowing southward from a new powerhouse generating unit at Big Creek that harnessed San Joaquin River water released from the new Huntington Lake reservoir.

Huntington's dream project -- eventually expanded, and today managed by the Southern California Edison power company -- would eventually encompass six major lakes, 27 dams, and 24 powerhouse generating units that repeatedly capture the descending High Sierra water to generate over 1,000 megawatts of clean electricity.

The interconnected lakes store precious water for 1 million acres of irrigated California farmland thousands of feet below. The thriving High Sierra sailing, sports and tourist industry grew up around the new lakes and roads. Far from destroying the environment, the Big Creek project created beautiful alpine reservoirs and gave millions of middle-class Californians access for the first time to the beauty of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Few appreciate that the entire project was built with private funds.

How did our ancestors -- poor and with limited technology -- so quickly create such a vast project, which today probably would pose insurmountable challenges to their far richer high-tech descendants?

They were far more in need and far more self-confident than we are today -- acting when they were 80 percent sure of success rather than endlessly talking and delaying in expectation of an always-elusive 100 percent certainty. In 1911 there was a desire for the new wonders of electricity, but no prior generation to have supplied it. Today, we take the power for our iPads and video games for granted, and are more likely to nitpick the environmental and social sensibilities of past generations who gave us what we so nonchalantly use in the present.

Quite simply, Big Creek could not be built today in the United States. 

Environmentalists would claim that the pristine nature of the San Joaquin River would be unnecessarily altered, citing a newly discovered colony of spotted newts or dappled dragonflies in the way of the proposed penstocks. Unions would demand blanket representation without elections -- and every imaginable compensation for such hazardous duty. Workers would apply for stress-related disability benefits given the dizzying heights and the dank subterranean mining. Government regulators and inspectors would outnumber project engineers. Private entrepreneurs world never risk such a chancy investment without ironclad government guarantees of profits despite enormous cost overruns. And the public would be as skeptical of the risk as they would be eager to enjoy its dividends when completed.

HUNTINGTON LAKE, Calif. -- Our politicians love soaring platitudes followed by little, if any, follow-up. The more Americans are promised shovel-ready stimulus projects, new sources of power and other fantasies, 

the more we accept that bureaucracy, regulations, lawsuits and impact statements will prevent much from ever being done.

Debt Cieling Plans

The Half-Trillion Plan

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: July 21

The debt ceiling looms. Confusion reigns. Schemes abound. We are deep in a hole with only three ways out: the McConnell Plan, the G6 Plan and the Half-Trillion Plan.

— The McConnell essentially punts the issue till after Election Day 2012. A good last resort if nothing else works.

— The G6, proposed by the bipartisan Gang of Six senators, reduces 10-year debt by roughly $4 trillion. It has some advantages, even larger flaws.

— The Half-Trillion raises the debt ceiling by that amount in return for an equal amount of spending cuts. At the current obscene rate of deficit spending — about $100 billion a month — it yields about five months’ respite before the debt ceiling is reached again.
In my view, the Half-Trillion is best: It is clean, straightforward, yields real cuts, averts the current crisis and provides until year-end to negotiate a bigger deal. At the same time, it punctures President Obama’s thus far politically successful strategy of proposing nothing in public, nothing in writing, nothing with numbers, while leaking through a pliant press supposed offers of surpassing scope and reasonableness.

As part of this pose, Obama had threatened to veto any short-term debt-ceiling hike. Which has become Obama’s most vulnerable point. Is the catastrophe of default preferable to a deal that gives us, say, five months to negotiate something more significant — because it doesn’t get Obama through Election Day?

Which is why Obama is already in retreat. On Wednesday, press secretary Jay Carney showed the first crack by saying the president would accept an extension of a few days if needed to complete an already agreed long-term deal.
Meaning that he would exercise his veto if that larger deal required several months rather than several days? Call his bluff. Let the House pass the Half-Trillion. Dare him to put America into default because he deems a short-term deal insufficiently grand. After all, it dovetails perfectly with parts of the G6, for which the president has expressed support and which explicitly allocates roughly the same amount of time — six months — to work out the grander $3 trillion to $4 trillion deal.

The G6 conveniently comes in two parts.
 
Part One puts immediately into effect, yes, a half-trillion dollars in cuts, including a more accurate inflation measure (that over time greatly reduces Social Security costs) and repeal of the CLASS Act (the lesser-known of the two new Obamacare entitlements, a fiscally ruinous, long-term-care Ponzi scheme).

Part Two of the G6 is far more problematic. It mandates six months of committee negotiations over the big ones — Medicare, Social Security, discretionary spending caps and tax reform. Unfortunately, the Medicare and Social Security parts are exceptionally weak — no mention of any structural change, such as raising the eligibility age to match longevity. As for the spending caps, I wouldn’t bet my dog’s food bowl on their durability.

On tax reform, the G6 calls for eliminating deductions, credits, exclusions and exemptions to reduce rates across the board. The new tax rates — top individual rate between 23 percent and 29 percent — would bring us back to Reagan levels (28 percent). This would be a good outcome, but the numbers thus far are fuzzy and some are contradictory. Moreover, those negotiations have yet to begin.
In principle, however, if the vast majority of the revenue raised by closing loopholes goes to rate reduction, and if the vast majority of the net revenue raised comes from the increased economic activity spurred by lowering rates and eliminating inefficiency-inducing loopholes, the trade-off would be justified. We shall see.

What to do now? The House should immediately pass the Half-Trillion Plan, thereby putting something eminently reasonable on the table that the president will have to address with a serious counterproposal using actual numbers. If the counterproposal is the G6, Republicans should accept Part One with its half-trillion dollars in cuts, consumer price index change and repeal of the CLASS Act, i.e., the part of the G6 that is enacted immediately and that is real. Accompany this with a dollar-for-dollar hike in the debt ceiling, yielding almost exactly the time envisioned in the G6 to work out grander spending and revenue changes — and defer any action on Part Two until precisely that time.

The Half-Trillion with or without the G6 Part One: ceiling raised, crisis deferred, cuts enacted and time granted to work out any Grand Compromise. You can’t get more reasonable than that.

Do it. And dare the president to veto it.

VDH - Obama's About Face on Debt Cieling (NOT)

July 17, 2011
St. Obama and the Debt Dragon
by Victor Davis Hanson
Pajamas Media

“Reckless Fiscal Policies”

Why did Obama only enumerate George W. Bush’s big spending as responsible for the out-of-control $14 trillion-plus debt, while not mentioning his own contribution of $5 trillion? Why is there a debt limit standoff now, rather than, say, in 2009 or 2010? Why did this latest $1.6 trillion Obama budget prompt the current crisis? Why did Obama not start debt limit talks the moment that his own hand-picked Simpson-Bowles commission presented their findings? Why did Obama just recently submit, and have rejected, a budget that would have scheduled even larger deficits of the sort he is now warning against (“Armageddon”)?

Why is voting against the debt limit reckless now, but in 2006 Obama lectured us thusly:

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure.

It is a sign that the US government can’t pay its own bills.

It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally.

Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.

(He then failed even to vote on the issue in 2007 and 2008 when the limit was raised again. So Obama has an even weaker case than the weak case of the congressional Republicans who approved the Bush deficits, given that if Obama was right at the time to vote “no,” then $6 trillion later, with a ruined, rather than robust, economy, he could now be really right to vote again “no,” when he has the political power not to raise the debt ceiling.)

Why is Obama talking of new tax increases when he ruled that out in December 2010: taxes then bad, now seven months later good? Why does the president claim 80% of the people want taxes when polls prove no such thing?

Failure, Failure Everywhere

In 2009, newly arrived Obama was convinced of redistributive Keynesian postmodern economics, a sort of updated fable that borrowed money would spawn more money, or at least would not have to be paid back, or could be excused along the lines: “If a Republican Bush borrowed nearly $5 trillion in eight years, then, dammit, why cannot a liberal Democrat be allowed to borrow more than $5 trillion in three?” And if Reagan gave us “starve the beast” (cutting taxes would cut revenue that would force smaller government), Obama could console himself with “gorge the beast” (growing government in extraordinary fashion would force higher taxes that in turn would redistribute income from those who “didn’t need it” to those who work for or receive from the government and who most certainly did need it).

The architects of his economic policies — Austan Goolsbee, Peter Orszag, Christina Romer, Larry Summers — did not even last three years. All now are either back in tenured academia, making millions in the revolving door that Obama once blasted, or writing op-eds why following their former advice is leading to insolvency, or all three combined.

None are making the argument any more that we need more of their stimuli or ObamaCare will save us billions and create “400,000 new jobs.”

Their borrowing did not stop unemployment from plateauing at 9.1% or prevent the housing market from getting worse, or growth from stalling, or gas from soaring, or the beginnings of a new inflation. In the meantime, the model of Obamism (e.g., Greece [1], Portugal, Italy [2], Spain, Ireland) in Europe of high taxes, redistributive government, astronomical debt, and unsustainable pensions has crashed.

So Obamism did not work, and now is the politically opportune time, before the 2012 election, to follow the famed Obama reinvention stratagem: Cite straw men and extremists on both sides, and put St. Obama plop in the middle as the sober, great dragon slayer, who blames both his contemporaries and his predecessor. Hard to do, I know, when you wasted $5 trillion, but do it nonetheless he has. In the word of Obama, wasted borrowed money is “stimulus,” not-so-shovel ready jobs are “investments,” and hiking taxes on someone else is “revenue enhancement.”
2012 on the Brain

The Tea Party won the largest midterm election victory since 1938 on the theme that Obama’s rate of borrowing and debt-creation were unsustainable and made worse, not better, by massive new Obama healthcare and green initiatives. So Obama, now well below 50% in the polls, is to be reinvented as a reasoned budget cutter. Note the logic that suddenly after ObamaCare and green fiascos we pause in midstream, and talk of fiscal restraint and again more taxes.

The thinking is analogous to this: the adolescent takes the chronically indebted family Master Charge card, maxes it out, has no more credit, and then asks his father and mother to take on additional jobs to find the money to pay off the debt, but while insisting that he keep all his previously charged junk — and the card as well. At some point in July 2011, all the money borrowed since 2009 was deemed absolutely essential. Nothing was wasted. There was no fraud. Instead, all that $5 trillion saved lives and the planet as well. Borrowing a trillion dollars for ObamaCare cannot be renegotiated.

Obama 2.0 is talking, then, of some cuts to projected added expenditures, not going back and cutting a $1 trillion ObamaCare initiative or the tens of billions in green subsidies, much less just balancing the budget by adopting the 2007 budget levels. Any argument that government expenditures have reached a record percentage of GDP, or that combined state, federal, and payroll taxes can gobble over 50% of one’s income, or new figures that the US is the most progressively taxed of the Western democracies, or that almost 50% of the population pays no income taxes, or that 5% now pay almost 60% of the aggregate income tax obligation — all that is rendered meaningless.

Sacred Borrowing

Again, today everything borrowed since 2009 is considered wise “investment,” and thus pruning back any of the unnecessarily added spending is deemed heartless. Remember the logic of the debtor (I knew it well during the dark years of farming in the early 1980s when I saw the indebted everywhere): the debtor always asks himself why he should have to pay anything back, since his lenders still have more money than he. A Greece shrugs that even without their $180 billion paid back, Germans are still wealthier than Greeks; an Obama shrugs that even with higher taxes, the “wealthy” still have more than the recipients of federal largess.

If anyone thought that past Obama lamentations about the Supreme Court’s failure to force “redistributive change,” about the need to spread the wealth, about the notion that at some point we have made enough money were aberrant, then examine the most recent Obama toss off that he has hundreds of thousands in income “he doesn’t need” and thus doesn’t mind paying higher taxes on it (so should we all if we just had a government-paid-for house, car, plane, food, and expenses).

There Is a Pattern Here

Note well this pattern of suddenly turning to the neglected debt: Obama lectured for most of 2008 that “drill, baby, drill” was silly, given his belief that increased supply would only marginally affect then climbing prices, and his religion that high gas prices are good in that they make wind/solar subsidized energy more attractive, encourage less energy use and thus cool the planet, while favoring government mass transit rather than the mindless individual’s use of a private car. Then as reelection neared, he tapped the strategic petroleum reserve on the logic that while drilling more new oil does not lower prices, pumping previously drilled oil most surely does.

Note well that suddenly Obama called for withdrawal in Afghanistan, on the logic that, while a few months ago a surge, a new commander, and a sustainable commitment were vital to winning the “good war,” now, with reelection looming, it is time to start packing it in.

Aspirin for Cancer?

So what is the status of the debt limit crisis now?

The annual deficit and the aggregate debts are so massive that all the talk of a few billion cuts here and there, or even a trillion or so, means little. To save us, we would have to slash two or three entire departments (e.g., perhaps energy, education, agriculture, etc.), end all agriculture subsidies, raise the retirement age, freeze cost of living raises for Social Security, clamp down on food stamp and entitlement abuses (almost 50 million now receive them), and do far, far more — while encouraging the private sector to drill, mine, grow food at unprecedented rates, as government trimmed regulations and revised the tax code to encourage wealth creation.

But it is far easier to create monsters and joust over the slices of a shrinking pie.

So the current economic paralysis will persist as we continue demonizing the mythical “them” — until we stop acting like Greeks cursing better off Americans as if they were German bankers who are to be damned for their success.

---

URLs in this post:
[1] Greece: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/greeces-deal-with-the-devil/
[2] Italy: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/europe’s-debt-crisis-arrives-in-italy/

Higher Education - Next Bubble

Will Higher Ed Be Next Bubble To Burst Open?

By MICHAEL BARONE
Posted 07/20/2011 06:42 PM ET

 

 

 

 

When governments want to encourage what they believe is beneficial behavior, they subsidize it.

Sounds like good public policy. But there can be problems. Behavior that is beneficial for most people may not be so for everybody. And government subsidies can go too far.
Subsidies create incentives for what economists call rent-seeking behavior. Providers of supposedly beneficial goods or services try to sop up as much of the subsidy money as they can by raising prices. After all, their customers pay with money supplied by the government. Bubble money, as it turns out. Sooner or later, bubbles burst.

We are still suffering from the bursting of the housing bubble created by low interest rates, lowered mortgage standards and subsidies to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Those policies encouraged the granting of mortgages to people who should never have gotten them — and when they defaulted, the whole financial sector collapsed.

Now some people see signs that another bubble is bursting.

They call it the higher-education bubble.

For years, government has assumed it's a good thing to go to college. College graduates tend to earn more money than non-college graduates. Politicians of both parties have called for giving everybody a chance to go to college, just as they called for giving everybody a chance to buy a home. So government has been subsidizing higher education with low-interest college loans, Pell grants and cheap tuitions at state colleges and universities  The predictable result is that higher education costs have risen much faster than inflation, much faster than personal incomes, much faster than the economy over the past 40 years.

Moreover, you can't get out of paying off those college loans, even by going through bankruptcy. At least with a home mortgage, you can walk away and let the bank foreclose and not owe any more money.

Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, is adept at spotting bubbles.

He sold out for $500 million in March 2000, at the peak of the tech bubble, when his partners wanted to hold out for more. He refused to buy a house until the housing bubble burst.

"A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed," he has said. "Education may still be the only thing people still believe in in the United States." But the combination of rising costs and dubious quality may be undermining that belief.

For what have institutions of higher learning done with their vast increases in revenues? The answer in all too many cases is administrative bloat.

Take the California State University system, the second tier in that state's public higher education. Between 1975 and 2008, the number of faculty rose by 3%, to 12,019 positions. During those same years, the number of administrators rose 221%, to 12,183. That's right: There are more administrators than teachers at Cal State now.

These people get paid to "liaise" and "facilitate" and produce reports on diversity. How that benefits Cal State students or taxpayers is unclear.

It is often said that American colleges and universities are the best in the world. That's undoubtedly true in the hard sciences. But in the humanities and to a lesser extent in the social sciences, there's a lot of garbage. Is a degree in religious and women's studies worth $100,000 in student loan debt?

As economist Richard Vedder points out, 45% of those who enter four-year colleges don't get a degree within six years. Based on the low achievement level of most high school grads, many of them shouldn't have bothered in the first place.

Now consumers seem to be reading the cues in the marketplace. More students spend their first two years after high school in low-cost community colleges and then transfer to four-year schools. Out-of-staters are reportedly flocking to low-tuition North Dakota State in frigid Fargo.

Politicians, including Barack Obama, still give lip service to the notion that everyone should go to college and can profit from it. And many college and university administrators may assume that the gravy train will go on forever.

But that's what Las Vegas real estate developers thought in 2006.

My sense is once again well intentioned public policy and greedy providers have produced a bubble that is about to burst.

Dem's Want TAXES - FOREVER

Explaining Obama’s tax-hike obsession

Jul 18, 2011 22:41 EDT

It’s the great mystery of the debt ceiling debate: Why is President Barack Obama so darn adamant about raising taxes? 

Doesn’t Obama know that even his former chief economist, Christina Romer, says tax increases “will tend to slow the recovery in the near term.” Not that things look much better a few years out. The International Monetary Funds sees economic growth below 3 percent through 2016. And Democrat-friendly Goldman Sachs now thinks a double-dip recession is possible even as it lowers its growth forecast and raises its prediction for unemployment.
But Obama’s tax obsession becomes understandable when you realize the long game he’s playing:

Big Taxes to fund Big Government. Decade after decade.

See, it’s an almost universal belief among left-of-center journalists, economists, policymakers and politicians that Americans must pay higher taxes in coming years to cover the medical expenses of its aging population – not to mention all sorts of brand new social spending and green “investment.” Dramatically higher taxes. On everybody. And if we have a debt crisis, maybe those tax increases come sooner rather than later.

And it’s not even a secret, really. Here’s liberal economics columnist Ezra Klein of The Washington Post:

The reality is that we’re going to have higher taxes in the coming years, and beyond that, we’re going to have higher taxes than we’ve traditionally had during periods in which taxes were relatively high.

And liberal economics columnist David Leonhardt of The New York Times outlines a completely implausible scenario — at least to himself — to avoid massively higher taxes:

For taxes to remain where they are, Washington would need to end Medicare as we know it, end Social Security as we know it, severely shrink the military – or do some combination of the above.

How high?
Three liberal think tanks recently devised budgets to put the U.S. government on a sustainable fiscal path through 2035. Their plans, collectively, called for Washington to collect an average of 23.6 percent of GDP vs. the post-World War II average of 18.5 percent. To put that in further perspective, the highest level of tax revenue that Uncle Sam has ever taken is 20.9 percent in 1944.
And to reach such a stratospheric level of taxation, these groups are calling for unprecedented tax hikes via millionaire surtaxes, higher taxes on alcohol and tobacco, securities transaction taxes, higher taxes on capital gains, higher taxes on corporations, higher death taxes, carbon taxes, and gasoline taxes. None of which, supposedly, would hurt economic growth. Even worse, all those tax hikes would still fail to balance the budget. And when you move past 2035, taxes would almost certainly need to go even higher.

That is the high-tax future the liberal establishment has in store for America. No wonder Obama rejected his own debt commission last December. It would limit the tax and spending burden to 21 percent of GDP. Neither is nearly enough for the Obamacrats and their successors. Just look at Obama’s budget from last February. Over a decade, it never reduces spending to less than 23 percent of GDP and spending is actually higher at the end of the ten-year span than in the middle. And eventually all that spending would need to be paid for via higher taxes. Recall that back in 2009, the White House floated a trial balloon about a instituting a value-added tax to pay for healthcare reform or general debt reduction.

Underlying all this longing for higher taxes is a belief government can’t and shouldn’t be cut. 

Nonsense.
Both the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation have devised workable fiscal plans that would keep taxes below 20 percent of GDP.

And Rep. Paul Ryan’s Path to Prosperity shows how to reduce spending to below 19 percent of GDP by 2040. And rather than managed decline toward a slow-growth, EU-style social welfare state  (that even the EU can’t afford anymore,) these plans would help keep America growing and living standards rising as they have for decades. Those are high stakes in the debt ceiling debate —  and in the battles over taxes and spending in the years to come.

Debt Default - US Reaction

James Pethokoukis

Politics and policy from inside Washington

How would U.S. react to a debt crisis?

Jul 20, 2011 13:20 EDT

If the U.S. doesn’t get a handle on federal debt, there will be a financial and economic crisis. By 2035, debt as a share of GDP could be 250 percent, though a panic would surely happen long before that point was reached. But if a crisis came, how would Washington react? What drastic measures would be taken? I think there would be a huge push for a massive tax increase, probably via a value-added tax. Here is some of what the Comeback America Initiative sees happening:

Social Security
• The higher retirement eligibility ages for Social Security would be increased to 70 for normal retirement and 65 for early retirement, and fully implemented by 2030 and 2020, respectively.
Most of the proposed reforms under the Preemptive (Prudent) Framework would be retained with the following significant differences:
• Repeal the Affordable Care Act of 2010.
• Repeal the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003.

Defense:

Most of the illustrative reforms under the Preemptive (Prudent) Framework would be retained with the following significant differences:

• Accelerate the planned draw down of U.S. troops from Southwest Asia from the end of 2014 to the end of 2012.
• Accelerate the reduction of U.S. overseas military and civilian presence.
Taxes and Revenues:
• Impose temporary deficit reduction revenue increases in fiscal 2013-2014 to accelerate deficit reduction and debt/GDP stabilization efforts.
• Phase-in the special income and payroll tax exclusion on employer provided and paid health care by 2018.
• Take any other actions needed to comply with annual revenue targets.

And the result:

The result is a balancing of the total budget by 2015, and reduction of debt/GDP to about 51 percent of GDP in 2021 and declining rapidly, versus about 76 percent of GDP and increasing rapidly under CBO’s current law baseline, and to about 28 percent and declining in 2035 versus about 91 percent and rising under the baseline.  … Overall spending under the framework would be reduced to 20.1 percent of GDP in 2021, from 23.9 percent under the current law baseline, and to 21.8 percent of GDP and leveling in 2035 from 28.3 percent and rising under the baseline. Nominal public debt would be less in 2023 than 2015 and essentially stable.The Reactive (Crisis Management) Framework also involves having to impose a temporary deficit reduction revenue increases to accelerate deficit reduction and debt/GDP stabilization, while maintaining an overall cap on federal revenues at 21.5 percent of GDP

Rubio w/Hugh Hewett

    Do you think the President understands the underlying economics, Senator Rubio,
    and is just demagoguing it?
     
Or is he fundamentally misinformed about how capitalism works?

  I think there are three things going on here.

Number one,
        I think he’s a prisoner to extremist elements in his own base who don’t care that the taxes don’t solve any problems. They want their pound of flesh. They want to punish somebody, they want class warfare. That’s what they believe in. And this is their chance to do it, and they’re putting pressure on him to do that. So I think that’s his first problem.

Number two,
        I think he’s surrounded by a bunch of people who philosophically do not believe fully in the free enterprise system, and in fact, they’d like to see government play a greater role. They see this downturn in the economy, and crisis such as this, as an opportunity to exert more government involvement in our economy. 

Number three
        I think the President, quite frankly, is not up to the job. HE'S INCOMPETENT! If you look at every measure of quality of life in America today, unemployment is higher. The debt is higher. The only thing lower is the value of your home. If you look at every measurable economic thing in America today, they are all worse than they were the day he took over.

Two and a half years into his presidency, things continue to get worse, not better, and it’s because the President is incompetent in his job as president. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.

TS - Tax Cuts "For the RICH" BMB

Dissecting The Demagoguery About 'Tax Cuts For The Rich'

By THOMAS SOWELL
Posted 07/18/2011 06:20 PM ET

Democrats' insistence that the "rich" pay more in taxes is rivaled only by Republicans' apparent inability or unwillingness to engage them on this specific issue. In the following excerpt from testimony submitted to the Senate Finance Committee, economist Thomas Sowell attempts to fill that void.

At various time and places, particular individuals have argued that existing tax rates are so high that the government could collect more tax revenues if it lowered those tax rates, because the changed incentives would lead to more economic activity, resulting in more tax revenues out of rising incomes, even though the tax rate was lowered.
This is clearly a testable hypothesis that people might argue for or against on either empirical or analytical grounds. But that is seldom what happens.

Even when the particular tax-cut proposal is to cut tax rates in all income brackets, including reducing tax rates by a higher percentage in the lower-income brackets than in the upper-income brackets, such proposals have nevertheless often been characterized by their opponents as "tax cuts for the rich" because the total amount of money saved by someone in the upper-income brackets is often larger than the total amount of money saved by someone in the lower brackets.
Moreover, the reasons for proposing such tax cuts are verbally transformed from those of the advocates — namely, changing economic behavior in ways that generate more output, income and resulting higher tax revenues — to a very different theory attributed to the advocates by the opponents, namely "the trickle-down theory."

"Trickle down" is not an economic theory.

No such theory has been found in even the most voluminous and learned histories of economic theories, including J.A. Schumpeter's monumental 1,260-page "History of Economic Analysis." Yet this nonexistent theory has become the object of denunciations from the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post to the political arena, and has been repeated as far away as India.

It is a classic example of arguing against a caricature instead of confronting the argument actually made.

While arguments for cuts in high tax rates have often been made by free-market economists or conservatives in the American sense, such arguments have also sometimes been made by people who were neither, including John Maynard Keynes and President John F. Kennedy, who in fact got tax rates cut during his administration.

But the claim that these are "tax cuts for the rich," based on "trickle-down theory," also has a long pedigree.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt's speech writer, Samuel Rosenman, referred to "the philosophy that had prevailed in Washington since 1921, that the object of government was to provide prosperity for those who lived and worked at the top of the economic pyramid, in the belief that prosperity would trickle down to the bottom of the heap and benefit all."
The same theme was repeated in the election campaign of 2008, when presidential candidate Barack Obama attacked what he called "the economic philosophy" which "says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else."

When Rosenman referred to what had been happening "since 1921," he was referring to the series of tax-rate reductions advocated by Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon and enacted into law by Congress during the decade of the 1920s. But the actual arguments advocated by Secretary Mellon had nothing to do with a "trickle-down theory."
High rates drive taxpayers into shelters.
Mellon pointed out that, under the high income-tax rates at the end of the Woodrow Wilson administration in 1921, vast sums of money had been put into tax shelters such as tax-exempt municipal bonds instead of being invested in the private economy, where this money would create more output, incomes and jobs — thereby producing higher tax revenues for the federal government.
It was an argument that would be made at various times over the years by others — and repeatedly evaded by attacks on a "trickle-down theory" found only in the rhetoric of opponents.

The actual results of the cuts in tax rates in the 1920s were very similar to the results of later tax-rate cuts during the Kennedy, Reagan and George. W. Bush administrations — namely, rising output, rising employment to produce that output, rising incomes as a result and rising tax revenues for the government because of the rising incomes, though the tax rates had been lowered.
Another consequence was that people in higher-income brackets paid not only a larger total amount of taxes, but a higher percentage of all taxes, after what were called "tax cuts for the rich." It was not simply that their incomes rose, but that this was not taxable income, since the lower tax rates made it profitable to get higher returns outside of tax shelters.

The facts are unmistakably plain, for those who bother to check the facts. In 1921, when the tax rate on people making over $100,000 a year was 73%, the federal government collected a little over $700 million in income taxes, of which 30% was paid by those making over $100,000.

Revenue spiked as tax rates were slashed.

By 1929, after a series of tax-rate reductions had cut the tax rate to 24% on those making over $100,000, the federal government collected more than a billion dollars in income taxes, of which 65% was collected from those making over $100,000.
There is nothing mysterious about this. Under the sharply rising tax rates during the Wilson administration, fewer and fewer people reported high taxable incomes, whether by putting their money into tax-exempt securities or by any of the other ways of rearranging their financial affairs to minimize their tax liability.

Under Wilson's escalating income-tax rates to pay for the high costs of the First World War, the number of people reporting taxable incomes of more than $300,000 — a huge sum in the money of that era — declined from well over a thousand in 1916 to fewer than three hundred in 1921. The total amount of taxable income earned by people making over $300,000 declined by more than four-fifths in those years.

Secretary Mellon estimated in 1923 that the money invested in tax-exempt securities had tripled in a decade, and was now almost three times the size of the federal government's annual budget and nearly half as large as the national debt. "The man of large income has tended more and more to invest his capital in such a way that the tax collector cannot touch it," he pointed out.
Getting that money moved out of tax shelters was the whole point of Mellon's tax-cutting proposals. He also said: "It is incredible that a system of taxation which permits a man with an income of $1,000,000 a year to pay not one cent to the support of his government should remain unaltered."

Capital won't work for inferior returns.

He added: "Just as labor cannot be forced to work against its will, so it can be taken for granted that capital will not work unless the return is worthwhile. It will continue to retire into the shelter of tax-exempt bonds, which offer both security and immunity from the tax collector."

In other words, high tax rates that many people avoid paying do not necessarily bring in as much revenue to the government as lower tax rates that more people are in fact paying, when these lower rates make it safe to invest their money where they can get a higher rate of return in the economy than where they can get a higher rate of return in the economy than they get from tax-exempt securities.

The facts are plain: There were 206 people who reported annual taxable incomes of one million dollars or more in 1916. But as tax rates rose, that number fell to 21 by 1921. After a series of tax-rate cuts in the 1920s, the number of individuals reporting taxable incomes of a million dollars or more rose again, to 207 by 1925.

As output surged, joblessness plunged.

It should not be surprising that the government collected more tax revenue under these conditions. Nor is it surprising that, with increased economic activity resulting from more investment in the private economy, the annual unemployment rate from 1925 through 1928 ranged from a high of 4.2% to a low of 1.8%.

The point here is  that:
there was no serious engagement with the arguments actually advanced but instead an evasion of those arguments by depicting them as simply a way of transferring tax burdens from the rich to other taxpayers.

Dems Will Never Stop Spending - Ann Coulter

ONE PRESIDENT LEFT BEHIND: McCONNELL SCHOOLS OBAMA ON DEBT

July 13, 2011

Democrats don't want to cut any government spending programs, not now, not ever. The country is on a high-speed bullet train to bankruptcy (the only kind of bullets liberals approve of), and the Democrats' motto is: Spend! Spend! Spend!

Democrats are at an advantage in the "should the U.S. go bankrupt or not?" debate because, based on their economic policies so far, 
        they obviously favor bankruptcy.

This allows them to sit back and demand that Republicans propose all the spending cuts and then turn around and scream that Republicans have declared war on the poor and disadvantaged.

It's a nice trick, especially considering Republicans control only the House.

Meanwhile, the Democrats control all other branches of our government: the Senate, the White House, and The New York Times op/ed page.

What's their plan?

Their plan is to keep spending, while blaming tax breaks for corporate jets for the entire $14.3 trillion deficit. The Democrats will never suggest any cuts to a budget that has put the country another $4 trillion in debt only since Obama became president.

So Republicans keep proposing cuts and Democrats keep riling up the increasingly large number of people who get checks from the government.

Nothing ever gets cut, but more people hate Republicans for having proposed any cuts at all. If you've never worked for the government, you have no idea of the vicious campaigns of vilification that will be brought by the recipients of government largesse against the smallest reduction in that largesse.

Ask Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose governorship was finished when he put a series of initiatives on the ballot to make the tiniest reductions in government workers' benefits.

Ask Scott Walker and all elected Republicans in Wisconsin who brought on Greek-style riots by suggesting that government employees start paying 6 percent of their own pension contributions and 12 percent of their health care insurance.

Ask Rep. Paul Ryan, whose modest proposal to reduce Social Security payments -- starting 15 years from now -- has turned him into a national pariah.

Ask the next president of the United States, New Jersey's Gov. Chris Christie. (And ask him nicely -- I hear the guy's got a temper!)

The problem isn't with elected Republicans; the problem is that the people want their treats. According to a Gallup poll in January, more than 60 percent of Americans want no cuts to Social Security and Medicare, which currently consume more than one-third of the entire federal budget.

Obama and the rest of his party are determined to keep increasing the size of our massively bloated government, on and on, year after year, without end in sight, until everyone with a job works exclusively to pay taxes to the government. Plan B is for everyone to move to Greece.

Republicans can't cut anything as long as they control only one-half of one branch of government. If purist conservatives on the outside want serious spending cuts, they'd better give the GOP a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress first.

Meanwhile the nation sinks deeper into debt.

Republicans tried using the expiring debt ceiling to force the Democrats to agree to budget cuts. But the Democrats still refused to propose any.

Obama's big idea for taming a government with a $3.83 trillion budget and a $14.3 trillion debt is to collect -- in the best-case scenario -- another $300 million a year from corporate jet owners. That would cover .007 percent of the federal budget or .002 percent of the national debt. Is it happy hour yet?

Instead, Democrats demagogued the issue, with Obama flying around the country on Air Force One, claiming that if the debt ceiling is not raised, America will default on its debts and the entire economy will collapse.

If Republicans cut government spending, recipients of government checks come after them with pitchforks. If the Republicans refuse to raise the debt ceiling to force spending cuts, the economy collapses.

In general, the trend seems to be in the direction of higher spending and endless debt.

The government will just keep spending and spending until we're all on bread lines. But there won't be any bread because within 10 years, nearly the entire federal budget will go to pay Social Security and Medicare recipients. (On the plus side, a lot of us will be speaking Greek by then.)

But now, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has checkmated the Democrats. He has proposed a bill that will allow Obama to raise the debt ceiling three times, up to $2.4 trillion, over the next 18 months, but only provided Obama proposes equivalent cuts in spending each time.

Finally, the Democrats will be forced to pony up spending cuts -- or default on the debt and crash the economy.

Contrary to some hysterical Republicans, McConnell's bill does not forfeit any of Congress' authority: The House and Senate will still have to decide whether to accept Obama's proposed cuts when they write their appropriations bills.

But we will finally get some proposed cuts to federal programs from Obama, and not more nonsense about theoretical savings from "investing" in our children's future with additional spending on Pell grants and prenatal counseling.

McConnell's deal cleanly takes the debt ceiling issue off the Republicans' back and puts it on the president's back. Either the Democrats tell us what they'll cut or they'll have to admit: "We will never cut anything. Everything Ann Coulter says about us is true!"

COPYRIGHT 2011 ANN COULTER