Ms. Pelosi - It's All Yours

Politico reported this morning that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged Democrats in the House to dismiss the call for bipartisanship stating, " ..it is a process extraneous to passing a stimulus bill."

Yeah, we totally understand your arrogance Ms. Pelosi, you feel your party is running the show and if you exclude the minority voice who would care enough to stop you. That's why you ordered most house committee meetings to deny any motion by Republicans to move forward. I realized that long before yesterday that you had no intention for bipartisanship in your house. The only thing is Ms. Pelosi, the person calling for bipartisanship is the President of the United States. You should talk to him.

Every Republican out there understands that you have all the votes you need to pass any legislation that you want. No need for you to compromise, just do it. But understand that Republicans, like myself and over 58 million others, would we ever vote for an inexperienced senator as President of the United States, nor would we ever vote for someone with your values. So you better be sure you don't screw it up. If you do not have bipartisan support then this is your spending bill, your recession and your issue to be accountable for in the next election.

God speed Ms. Pelosi, 2010 is right around the corner.

Create or Save?

The great debate of the day is the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aka - The Economic Stimulus Bill. The catch phrase from the left is that this bill with create or save 3 to 4 million jobs in the next 2 years, though President Obama has, on occasion, lowered his rhetoric to 2.5 million jobs.

It's not just President Obama that is saying create or save phrase. Every democrat on Capitol Hill is saying the same thing and not surprising the media is repeating the democratic talking points. Not one person is actually looking at the words being used and providing any type of analysis on what they are really saying. Just me.

The analysis that the media provides always talk about job creation. Their assumption is that the ARRA is going create 3 million jobs, but this is not what Obama and his friends are saying. Look if Obama believed that his spending programs would create 3 million jobs he would simply say this bill creates 3 million jobs. Instead Obama adds these words "or save" to every one of his speeches. If we are going to spend $900 billion I want something qualifiable to measure against its success. How do you measure jobs saved? At the end of the day are we going to say that we spent over 2 trillion dollars to keep our unemployment rate at 7.6%? That's moronic.

Government spending does not buy us out of a recession. Sweden would be a world power if this was the case. If Government spending creates jobs then why has France’s unemployment rate been a steady 9% for thirty years?

Even if the $900 billion dollar spending bill is signed into law and it really does create 3 million jobs that means we spent $300,000 per new job. How does that make sense to anyone?

When Cats and Dogs Love Each Other

No one has ever excused me of being left of center however in the past couple of days I have supported a Kennedy (see post on Caroline Kennedy) and now the Washington Post editors are echoing the same sentiment I posted yesterday on the economic stimulus. Here is the link their editoral and a brief snippet of their comments.

"...some in Congress and the new administration apparently see the country's present recession as an opportunity to change the federal government's spending priorities more generally or simply to reward loyal political constituencies. This is understandable, given that the voters endorsed the Democratic Party and its priorities in November. But it's risky to make new, multiyear commitments in the middle of a crisis without debate over competing priorities -- and without paying for them through some means other than borrowing.

Helping hire, equip and pay police, a $4 billion item under the bill, might be a good idea, but writing checks to individual households for the same amount would do more to stimulate the economy. Ditto for $16 billion in Pell Grants for college students, $2.1 billion for Head Start and $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts. All of those ideas may have merit, but why do they belong in an emergency measure aimed to kick-start the economy?"

Washington Post, January 25, 2009

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/24/AR2009012401616.html

Back to Parsing Words and what the Economic Stimulus Really Means

I think the day has come to define the difference between and emergency economic stimulus bill and pork barrel spending. During President Obama's weekly radio address he highlighted several key points to his plan:

• Double within three years the amount of energy obtained from renewable resources.
• Upgrade 10,000 schools and improve learning for about 5 million students
• Save 2 billion dollars by making federal buildings more energy efficient
• Triple the number of undergraduate and graduate fellowships in science
• Tighten security at 90 major ports.

All of these plans have merits on their own but none of these will stimulate our economy. Let me make my point clearer, tightening security at our ports might be a good thing, increasing science fellowships might be a good thing, investing in renewal energy might be a good thing, but none will provide an economic stimulus that is needed immediately.

Maybe we could use a little transparency on President Obama's intentions. These are projects that President Obama has wanted since the day he has started campaigning, but he is putting an "economic stimulus" cloak on them in the hopes that people would support this because we are in such serious economic trouble and no one would notice.

The Presidents claims that his infrastucture programs will alone create 600,000 new jobs. That should be comforting to the 5,000 employees Microsoft laid off yesterday. They may be able to get jobs paving streets.

Mr. President let me give you some ideas on what would have an immediate impact on our economy:

• Reduce taxes on corporations by a third. That would still be nearly twice as much as corporations in Ireland pay.
• Do a two year furlough on capital gains taxes. With the huge losses we have seen in the past few months no one is going to have capital gains anyhow.
• Since the unemployment roles have nearly doubled in the past year do you think that maybe a time for an aggressive job training program? Duh.
• Allow people to dip into to their 401k savings without penalty taxes to get caught up on their bills.
• Repeal many of the SOX compliancy regulations that prevent companies from upgrading information systems.

President Obama ends his address by telling the American people "It's a plan that will save or create 3 to 4 million jobs over the next few years." Are we back to a time when we are going to parse every word that a President says? Save or create? What does that mean? We may have 10% unemployment but he can take credit for saving 4 million jobs that would have been lost had he not been there to help us?

Mr. President your plan is an $800 billion pork barrel!

President Obama and His Childish First Week

On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics. We remain a young nation. But in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.

President Barak Obama – January 20, 2009

The first week President Obama has held office isn’t over and one is left with wondering how much conviction Obama has in the very words that he wrote and spoke. In separate events today President Obama was at the least extremely arrogant and at worst downright insulting.

Early in the day Obama warned the Republicans in Congress they need to quit listening to Rush Limbaugh if they want to get along with Democrats and his administration. First off, if Republicans had listened to Rush Limbaugh, they wouldn’t have supported the government bailout in October and John McCain would not have won the party’s nomination. Second, Democrats control the House, the Senate and the White House, but you, Mr. President, are insisting that the new emergency stimulus has to have bi-partisan support. President Obama this is your spending bill, and with the strangle hold the Democrats have on Washington you can pass your spending bill without a single Republican supporting it. So if you want this bi-partisan support then it’s the Democrats responsibility to go out of their way to get along with Republicans.

Now if the new administration was concerned about transparency they would publish the White House Press Briefings transcripts on their web site, much like President Bush and President Clinton did. But President Obama has no plans on doing that. So please accept my apology if I don’t get the quote correct from today’s press briefing. Several reporters asked about Republican concerns about the so-call emergency stimulus bill. All the White House could say is that they heard the Republican leadership concerns but that there was not going to be any movement on the spending spree planed by the House Democrats.

Adding insult to injury the New York Post reports, “While discussing the stimulus package with top lawmakers in the White House's Roosevelt Room, President Obama shot down a critic with a simple message.

"I won," he said, according to aides who were briefed on the meeting. "I will trump you on that."
The response was to the objection by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Arizona) to the president's proposal to increase benefits for low-income workers who don't owe federal income taxes.

Not that Obama was gloating. He was just explaining that he aims to get his way on the stimulus package and all other legislation, sources said, noting his unrivaled one-party control of both congressional chambers. “

Mr. Obama you are the one that wants bi-partisan support, but you don’t have to be genius to see that you only want that so you can have political backup. I can hear it right now, well the Republicans supported the bill too. Mr. Obama if you want Republican support then you are going to have to make concessions, if you choose not to then not one Republican should support this bill. Pass it yourself!

Obama's Choice to run IRS did not pay taxes

Timothy Geithner has paid over $48,000 in back taxes and interest, including $26,000 just last November, right before his nomination papers went to the Senate. As secretary of the Treasury, his job includes oversight of the Internal Revenue Service.

Geithner reportedly has no explanation for his failure to pay the self-employment taxes even though he was notified by the International Monetary Fund where he worked at the time that he was responsible for them and had signed documents to that effect. Obama continues to back Geithner, who was head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York at the time of his nomination and has been heavily involved in high-level government discussions about economic rescue measures in recent months.

My Thoughts: This man didn't pay taxes for three years! This was not a simple oversight, it is an example of habitual criminal behaviour. Lets ask Wesley Snipes where Giethner should begin his term as Secretary of the Treasury!

Frailty: Thy Name is Addict

Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. And here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world. The best way to break this addiction is through technology. - Pres. Bush, State of the Union -2006

Yes, America is addicted to oil, and now is the time to take seriously President Bush's call to "move beyond a petroleum-based economy and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past." Unless the American people demand that their government officials, power companies and auto industry join the President in this agenda, then we, as a society, are nothing more than 300 hundred million enablers! If we fail to act we can consider ourselves to be no better than the corner thug pushing drugs at the neighborhood crack house.

Are Americans ready for a serious energy policy? You bet. Today we import 10 million barrels of oil per day. Of this, 2.2 million barrels day of this comes directly from the Middle East. At today's prices that's more than 140 million dollars every day leaving our economy. Over the course of the year that's nearly $5 billion. Imagine the effects of taking $140 million a day and putting it back into American's pockets. Mind you, this is just Middle East oil and not including monies going into the Venezuelan, Mexican and Canadian economies.

How to get started. The Democrats were quick to criticize President Bush because he failed to include conservationism as a means to lower our dependence on foreign fuels. Well, this country has been obsessed with conservation for over 30 years now. In fact, the use of reusable fuels have increase more than 10% each year since 1999 and has had no effect on reducing the amount of foreign fuel we consume on a daily basis. Conservation efforts, though they mean well, has not work, nor will they ever work. The only way to get the public to reduce foriegn fuel consumption is to get it to accept alternative fuels. To help in this effort Gov. George Pataki of New York has proposed the elimination of state taxes on homegrown alternative fuels such as ethanol and biomast. In addition, he wants to initiate a grant program to make it easier for owners of gas stations to install ethanol pumps. Great steps! Make alternative energies cheaper and make it available. Trust me this will play well in Iowa, how does President Pataki sound to you?

If there is a positive in the failing of the American automobile industry is the fact that Ford, General Motors and Dalhmer-Chrysler all admit radical changes are needed to be more competitive. Now is the time that to convince the car makers to change their focus from being competitive to changing the entire industry. Trying to be competitive results in $5 billion in loses per year! Look what happens in the Information Technology industry, sure Asians can make the silicon chip cheaper, but who cares? "We'll make a better chip that will make that one obsolete." The lesson - Don't compete with them, make them have to change to meet your new standards. Detroit needs to adopt this philosophy. What better standard would there be than creating alternative powered vehicles.

Perhaps the most important factor is for President Bush to get the heart and soul of the American people to follow his lead. The economic value of new policies are obvious and the "Buy American" slogan always has high mpg, but think what could happen if the President links the new policies as another tool to win the War on Terror. You may call it a shameless use of propaganda, but what would be a better way to put pressure on the Arab run OPEC cartel. The longer these countries protect terrorists, like Bin-Laden and Al-Zawahari, the more we will be resolved to develop alternative fuels. The Mullahs in Iran wants the western world to leave them alone, lets create an environment where we can help them out.