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News

Trump wants to increase taxpayer subsidies of ethanol, Cruz wants to end them

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Donald Trump should stick to Miss Universe pageants
Donald Trump should stick to Miss Universe pageants

Donald Trump is pandering to ethanol special interests, trying to catch up to Cruz in Iowa.

The Wall Street Journal explains:

Donald Trump, who is battling Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), for the top spot in in corn-rich Iowa, is seeking to draw a contrast between the two candidates by catering to the state’s corn ethanol industry more than any other top GOP candidate.

[…]“I am there with you 100%,” Mr. Trump told a crowd of hundreds of Iowans whose livelihoods depend on the ethanol industry at a summit in Altoona, Iowa, on Tuesday. “You’re going to get a really fair shake from me.”

Corn has long been king in Iowa, the nation’s top corn-producing state, implanting in Iowa voters a sentiment that every candidate must cheer Washington’s backing for ethanol. Since 2011, though, that universal backing has been eroding.

Congress decided at the end of 2011 not to renew a tax credit that cost the government $6 billion a year. Critics of the government’s ethanol policy then set their targets on the ethanol mandate, which requires refineries to blend an increasing amount of biofuels into the U.S. gasoline supply each year.

At the ethanol summit Tuesday, Mr. Trump also read a prepared statement opposing Congress “changing any part of the RFS,” or Renewable Fuel Standard, the mandate’s formal name.

Trump doesn’t just want to keep the subsidies as they are, he wants to raise them, according to this article from The Hill.

It says:

Donald Trump said Tuesday that federal regulators should increase the amount of ethanol blended into the nation’s gasoline supply.

Speaking at an event hosted by the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association, Trump, a real estate mogul and the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, said the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ought to follow the ethanol volumes Congress set in 2007.

“The EPA should ensure that biofuel … blend levels match the statutory level set by Congress under the [renewable fuel standard],” Trump said.

The mandate is popular in Iowa, which hosts the nation’s first caucuses.

He is pandering to the people he speaks to wherever he goes… he has no convictions.

Ethanol doesn’t lower the price of gas, it actually raises the price of food, since some crops are being redirected to an inefficient process. It’s a handout to ehtanol producers, at the expense of gas consumers who must pay more for an inferior product.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz
Texas Senator Ted Cruz

Ted Cruz is different:

In a Des Moines Register op-ed Wednesday, Cruz said he would look to “phase out the Renewable Fuel Standard, end all energy subsidies, and ensure a level playing field for everyone,” a move that would eventually end the mandate that requires oil refiners to mix biofuel into their gasoline supplies.

“My view on energy is simple: We should pursue an ‘all of the above’ policy,” he wrote. “We should embrace all of the energy resources with which God has blessed America: oil and gas, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, and biofuels and ethanol. But Washington shouldn’t be picking winners and losers.”Cruz has previously said he would look to end the mandate by 2022, phasing it out over five years, if elected to the Oval Office.

Cruz leads Republicans in Iowa polls ahead the caucuses there next month, but his ethanol policies could hurt him in the state, which leads in the fuel’s production.

The senator from Texas has previously co-sponsored a bill to end the ethanol mandate immediately. Last spring, he sponsored a phase-out bill, and he says that plan is the best way to support fuel producers.

Going into Iowa and taking on the ethanol subsidy takes balls of steel. And Cruz has them.  He is risking the entire election on doing the right thing for the country as a whole, instead of pandering.

Cruz is trying to shift the public to the right – explaining basic economics to them, and asking them to give up their special interests in order to return to the vision of the Founders for America. Will it work? I think someone ought to try to remind us what America is supposed to be like.

There is a very good explanation of why ethanol subsidies are crony capitalism, by conservative firebrand Mark Levin.

Here’s a summary:

Levin explained what crony capitalism is. That it is the state picking winners at the expense of others.  In the case of ethanol they have made it mandatory in cars, even though it is proven that it does not reduce oil usage, because oil is needed for the production of ethanol.  That it hurts engines.

The most damaging thing that ethanol does, according to Levin is add to famine and poverty in the third world, by limiting the production of food crops, as the land is used to grow ethanol feedstock instead of food.

Levin focused on the fact that Donald Trump is going all in for ethanol to pander to Governor Terry Branstad in Iowa.  He told his audience that Branstad’s son makes a living from the ethanol industry.

There are fundamental economic issues at play here. We are harming our economy and destroying our long-term prosperity the longer we allow socialists to run our economy. Things can be good in this economy. We can get the jobs we want, cheaper prices, higher quality. We can have social programs that work, and greater individual freedom. But we have to go back to our founding principles. That is what made us great, and what can return us to greatness. We did not become the wealthiest nation on the Earth by accident. When all else has failed, why don’t we try doing what worked for the last 200 years?

News

Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio’s intervention in Libya created an ISIS caliphate

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Marco Rubio with his allies: Democrat Churck Schumer and RINO John McCain
Marco Rubio with his allies: Democrat Churck Schumer and RINO John McCain

First, let’s review what happened in Libya, and who owns it. Then, we’ll see where Marco Rubio stood on the issue.

The Daily Caller notes:

Clinton is, undoubtedly, the person most responsible for getting America into the international effort that toppled the regime of Muammar Gaddafi. Prior to the Benghazi attack, she was happy to have it known as “Hillary’s War” and touted it as a serious accomplishment.

Libya:

Libya is now a failed state where all types of Islamic extremists find safe haven and illegal migrants are able to pass through on their way to an over-burdened Europe. There are no signs of success at all in the beleaguered country as it has descended into total anarchy.

Egypt:

[Hillary] was a-ok with the toppling of Egyptian president and U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak. But it wasn’t hip liberals who came to power after Mubarak was deposed — it was the Muslim Brotherhood who took over the reins in Egypt before a military coup ousted the Islamists in 2013.

Syria:

Clinton was also the leading force in the Obama administration in backing rebels in Syria and wanted a more active role for America in that conflict. However, hardly any of the rebels seem much better than the current ruler Bashar al-Assad and many of them, such as ISIS, are far worse than the Iranian-backed despot.

So that’s three foreign policy disasters for Hillary: Libya, Egypt and Syria. Sounds pretty bad. But the Daily Caller leans right. Let’s see what the leftist Atlantic says about Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy.

They say:

In August, TheNew Yorker’s John Lee Anderson described the gains made by the Islamists as well as the consequences of ISIS fighters controlling territory in Libya:

Last November, battle-hardened Libyan Islamists, who had returned home from fighting in Iraq and Syria, along with Islamists from other countries, seized the eastern city of Derna and claimed it for ISIS. Emulating their comrades in Raqqa and Mosul, they stoned, shot, beheaded, and crucified people deemed guilty of espionage or ‘un-Islamic’ behavior. Last month, a rival militia loyal to Al Qaeda waged and won a battle for control of the city. The victors are said to have marched the captured ISIS commander through the streets naked before executing him. ISIS lost Derna, but in the past few months they have taken Qaddafi’s home town of Sirte and surrounding areas in Libya’s “Oil Crescent,” and have begun attacks on the outer defenses of the city of Misrata.

Alas, that’s not all:

For months, ISIS has been trumpeting its abduction and execution of African Christians in Libya. In February, a slick, ghoulish video showed twenty-one Egyptian hostages in orange jumpsuits being led along a beach by black-masked executioners, who forced them to kneel and then cut off their heads.

In April, another video appeared, showing the execution of twenty-nine Ethiopians in Libya. Gunmen who trained with ISIS in Libya were involved in the murder of twenty foreign tourists, at a Tunis museum in March, and thirty-eight more tourists, most of them British, at a seaside resort in Tunisia in June. These attacks focused attention on the fact that Libya, a vast, oil-rich, underpopulated country with a long southern-Mediterranean coastline, has become part of the self-proclaimed ISIS caliphate. In a parallel phenomenon, armed trafficking gangs in Libya are driving most of Africa’s illegal immigration to Europe. As many as a hundred and seventy thousand are thought to have made the crossing last year, with thousands dying en route. Unprecedented numbers are continuing to cross this year, taking advantage of the chaos in Libya.

An unnamed Obama Administration official told Anderson, “We think that the threat from ISIL-affiliated groups in Libya is very serious and we’re treating it that way.”

A strong case can be made that the war made Americans less safe.

Libya and Egypt were contained and peaceful before the U.S. Arab Spring interventions. After intervening in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood took over. After intervening in Libya, the Islamic State is rising. And after intervening in Syria, the Islamic State has a base there, too.

Do you know who backed Hillary in her Libya intervention plan?

MARCO RUBIO. 

Here’s an article from the Weekly Standard by Stephen Hayes, who is very favorable to Rubio, explaining how Rubio supported the Hillary-led intervention in Libya.

It says:

Senator Marco Rubio offered his full-throated support Wednesday for the U.S. intervention in Libya and called on President Barack Obama to be clear that regime change is the objective of America’s involvement.

[…]Last night, Rubio sent a letter to Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell, Democratic and Republican leaders in the Senate, calling for Congress to affirm Obama’s policy by authorizing the use of the military force in Libya and to make explicit the goal of regime change. “This resolution should also state that removing Moamar Qadhafi from power is in our national interest and therefore should authorize the President to accomplish this goal. To that end, the resolution should urge the President to immediately recognize the Interim Transitional National Council as the legitimate government in Libya.”

Qadhafi had voluntarily given up his weapons of mass destruction and invited inspectors in, after seeing Bush invade Afghanistan and Iraq. They were no threat to us, and there were no crucifixions of Christians, kidnappings, executions, etc. that we see now.

And now we have an Islamic State caliphate in Libya, as the UK Telegraph reported earlier this week:

Yet this latest [execution] broadcast was shot not in the Isil strongholds of Raqqa [Syria] or Mosul [Iraq] but the terror group’s new “caliphate” in Libya, where it now controls Colonel Gaddafi’s home city of Sirte, just 350 miles south of Italy.

[…]Formed by a vanguard of just a few dozen fighters a year ago, Isil’s Sirte chapter is now believed to be up to 3,000-strong, imposing a regime of beheadings and crucifixions.

Marco Rubio strongly supported the intervention in Libya, spurning conservatives and embracing Hillary Clinton and the far left. Now we have a caliphate in Islamic State in Libya. I’m a very hawkish person, and supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But Libya and Egypt interventions made no sense, and no Republican should have backed either of them.

News

Under Obama’s socialist policies, youth “Misery Index” reaches record high

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Young people usually only get one side of every issue - because we don't tell them the other side
Young people usually only get one side of every issue – because we don’t tell them the other side

Obama added $10 trillion to the national debt in his 8 years, doubling it from $10 trillion to $20 trillion. That will be placed on the backs of the next generation of younger Americans. But it turns out that they have many other problems as well.

This is from the College Fix.

Excerpt:

In the last two presidential elections, young voters served as a key demographic that helped catapult Barack Obama to the White House. What has he done for millennials in return? According to a new analysis, made them more miserable than ever.

Young America’s Foundation on Wednesday released its annual Youth Misery Index, calculated by adding youth unemployment, student loan debt, and national debt (per capita) numbers.

Today the youth unemployment rate exceeds 16 percent, and the average student in the class of 2015 graduated with a record $35,000 in student loan debt; national debt per capita, “a remarkable burden that will fall squarely on the shoulders of millennials,” is just under $59,000, the foundation reports.

With that, the index has spiked to a record high of 109.9 this year, up from 106.5 last January, and 83.5 in 2009 when President Obama took office, the foundation reports.

What about entitlement programs?

Business Daily reports on a Social Security problem:

The Social Security Trust Fund just suffered its first annual decline since Congress shored up the retirement program in 1983.

The unexpected $3 billion decline is an indication of the precarious state of Social Security’s finances. Since 2010, the program has been paying out more in benefits than it gets in tax revenue, but the trust fund, which earns about $95 billion a year in interest, had kept growing, though a little less each year.

[…]Under current policies, the CBO says the trust fund will be gone by 2029.

If nothing were done before that point, it would take an across-the-board 29% benefit cut — including on the oldest retirees and the disabled — to bring program costs in line with revenues.

Since we aborted the next generation of workers, we can’t afford to keep paying out benefits at the current rate. There are more people retiring than entering the work force. I hope they start to invest early, but what I am seeing is that they want to take out loans and travel the world for fun and thrills.

Obama doubled the national debt in 8 years
Obama doubled the national debt in 8 years

Anyway, on to the next problem, trillion dollar deficits. They’re back!

Investors Business Daily explains:

The federal budget deficit is back on the rise — by an expected $105 billion this year — the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday, the first increase since fiscal 2009. Deficits topping $1 trillion will be back before you know it — three years sooner than expected.

[…]The CBO said the rise was primarily due to the year-end budget deal that extended, and in some cases expanded, corporate and individual tax cuts, as well as busting spending caps. The deficit-to-GDP ratio is expected to grow to 2.9% in fiscal 2016 from 2.5% last year. That would also be the first increase since 2009, with the trend getting worse in the years ahead.

From 2016 to 2025, the CBO expects cumulative deficits of $8.5 trillion — $1.5 trillion more than it predicted in August.

This is the budget deal that establishment Republicans like Paul Ryan supported. Rubio didn’t show up to vote against the Ryan deal. I assume that Rubio was OK with the spending bill passing, and these trillion dollar deficits returning. Cruz showed up to vote against the deal, of course.

And finally, the last problem – Obamacare is making health care more expensive than ever for the middle class.

Investors Business Daily again:

People making just $36,000 a year can easily end up spending 22% of it on health costs, even if they are enrolled in a subsidized ObamaCare insurance plan, according to a report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute.

[…]Individuals earning between 300% and 400% of the poverty level — which works out to roughly between $35,000 and $47,000 — will pay close to a median of 10% of their income on insurance premiums. (This group is eligible for ObamaCare insurance subsidies but at far lower levels than poorer people.)

And because ObamaCare plans typically come with high deductibles and copays, they’ll spend another 5% on out-of-pocket costs. For a worker making $36,000, the combined costs add up to $5,220.

The report found, however, that these costs could easily double. One in 10 people in this income group will end up devoting 22% of their incomes to insurance and out-of-pocket costs.

Even those in the lowest income group could get hit with big bills. One in 10 of those who make less than 200% of the poverty level will face health costs that eat up 18.5% of their income.

Obama likes to paint a rosy picture of the economy in his state of the union, but the real truth is not so rosy. Young people shouldn’t have voted for him, they are not going to live as prosperously as their elders did under Reagan and George W. Bush.