News

Fiscally conservative Canada campaigns against global bank tax

Leave a comment
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper

Story from Breitbart.

Excerpt:

Canada will “resist” a bank tax, Industry Minister Tony Clement said Tuesday as ministers fanned out across the world to raise opposition to the proposal for avoiding another financial crisis.

“Canada is, and will remain, opposed to a tax that would penalize financial institutions that remained strong and prosperous while many of the world’s banks failed,” Clement told a press conference with Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon.

“We will resist the bank tax here at home and we seek to convince other heads of government of the virtue of our position,” he said as senior ministers echoed his message in Mumbai, Beijing and Washington.

Attempts to reach international agreement on coordinated bank taxes at last month’s G20 and IMF meetings ran aground.

Nations including Canada and Brazil, whose banking sectors emerged largely unscathed from the financial crisis, objected to the plan, favoring higher capital reserve requirements instead.

[…]Clement said the bank tax would “encourage risky behavior” if it is used to create a bank bailout fund and “reward bad behavior” of those institutions responsible for the recent financial crisis in the first place.

As well, it would “unduly burden” Canadian banks and put them at a “competitive disadvantage” to other financial institutions.

“This tax would reach into consumers’ pockets and punish our financial institutions which have taken precautions to avoid the very turmoil that is afflicting other parts of the globe,” Clement lamented.

Stephen Harper is a fiscal conservative. He knows that low interest rates are bad, so he created tax-free savings accounts to get people to work and save their money. And he knows that people who buy houses need to be able to pay for them, and his banking policies reflect that. There is no Democrat-sponsored “Community Reinvestment Act” in Canada to allow the socialist mafia (ACORN) to pressure private banks into making risky loans. And there are no Democrats taking political contributions while blocking attempts to investigate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And there are no bank bailouts!

The Conservative Party of Canada keeps its banking sector squeaky clean. They even plan to cut spending! And the Canadian people support fiscal conservatism. That’s why they aren’t facing the mess we are facing. And they have lower unemployment, too – 8.1% compared to our 9.9%. Canada is kicking our tails! How can this be? How did they manage to elect an economist, while we are stuck with this perpetually-bowing flibbertigibbet and his legions of bloviating boffins, each more corrupt and incompetent than the last? Democrats have no real-life experience! They just had rich parents!

Look at this article from the Financial Post.

Excerpt:

“In Canada, there were no taxpayer bailouts of financial institutions, so we believe there is no justification for levies on banks and financial institutions,” Harper said at a news conference following meetings with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and European Council President Herman Van Rompuy.

[…]Canada and the EU are in the midst of negotiating an ambitious trade deal. The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) was launched at the 2009 Canada-EU summit and to date, three rounds of negotiations have taken place. There are at least two more to go over the next year.

The deal will give Canada greater access to the markets of the EU’s member countries and will strengthen an economic relationship that is already worth $75-billion in trade. The EU is Canada’s second-largest trading partner after the United States and is also Canada’s second-largest source of direct foreign investment, putting $162-billion into Canada in 2009.

This is grown-up fiscal policy. Government should stay out of the mortgage-lending industry, and sign as many free-trade deals as possible. The exact opposite of what the Obama administration is doing.

News

Obama administration complains about Arizona immigration law to China

3 Comments

From CNS News.

Excerpt:

In a “candid and constructive” human rights dialogue with officials from the People’s Republic of China last week, Obama administration officials brought up Arizona’s new immigration-enforcement law, telling the Chinese Communists it was an example of a “troubling trend” in the United States and an indication of “discrimination or potential discrimination” in American society.

Ironically, the State Department’s most recent report on human rights in China indicates that the government there restricts the internal travel of its own citizens.

[…]On Fox News Tuesday morning, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley–trying to defend Posner’s comments – was asked if he had read the ten-page Arizona law. He said he has not read it, although he did criticize it.

Attorney General Eric Holder, who is weighing a constitutional challenge to the law, admitted last week that he has not read it; and Homeland Secretary Janet Napolitano on Monday told a Senate panel that she had not read the law, either.

The People’s Republic of China is “an authoritarian state in which the Chinese Communist Party constitutionally is the paramount source of power,” according to the State Department’s 2009 Human Rights report on China.

The report also states, “Individuals and groups, especially those deemed politically sensitive by the government, continued to face tight restrictions on their freedom to assemble, practice religion, and travel.”

China is one of the biggest violators of basic human rights on the planet. So what do the Democrats do? They go to the major human rights violators and tell them that the United States is just as evil. We’re evil because we protect our borders and enforce our immigration laws. China murders people for their religion and sells their organs, and we’re equal to China – at least according to Democrats.

UPDATE: Republican senators are demanding that the Obama administration publicly retract their outrageous comments.

News

Texas rolls back liberal anti-American bias from textbooks

3 Comments

Story here on Eagle Forum.

Excerpt:

By a 10-to-5 margin, the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) just told liberals to stop “messing” with social studies textbooks.

For years, liberals have imposed their revisionist history on our nation’s public school students, expunging important facts and historic figures while loading the textbooks with liberal propaganda, distortions and cliches. It’s easy to get a quick lesson in the virulent leftwing bias by checking the index and noting how textbooks treat President Ronald Reagan and Senator Joseph McCarthy.

When parents object to leftwing inclusions and omissions, claiming they should have something to say about what their own children are being taught and how their taxpayers’ money is spent, they are usually vilified as “book burners” and belittled as uneducated primitives who should allow the “experts” to decide. The self-identified “experts” are alumni of liberal teachers colleges and/or members of a leftwing teachers union.

In most states, the liberal education establishment enjoys total control over the state’s board of education, department of education, and curriculum committees. Texas is different; the Texas State Board of Education is elected, and the people (even including parents!) have a voice.

Texas is uniquely important in textbook content because the state of Texas is the largest single purchaser of textbooks. Publishers can hardly afford to print different versions for other states, so Texas curriculum standards have nationwide influence.

So what are some of the changes? Are they positive?

The review of social studies curriculum (covering U.S. Government, American History, World History and Economics) comes up every ten years, and 2010 is one of those years. The unelected education “experts” proposed their history revisions such as eliminating Independence Day, Christopher Columbus, Thomas Edison, Daniel Boone and Neil Armstrong, and replacing Christmas with Diwali.

After a public outcry, the SBOE responded with common-sense improvements. Thomas Edison, the world’s greatest inventor, will be again included in the narrative of American History.

[…]The SBOE specified that teaching about the Bill of Rights should include a reference to the right to keep and bear arms. Some school curricula pretend the Second Amendment doesn’t exist.

[…]Texas curriculum standards will henceforth accurately describe the U.S. government as a “constitutional republic” rather than as a democracy. The secularists tried to remove reference to the religious basis for the founding of America, but that was voted down.

[…]Discussions of economics will not be limited to the theories of Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and Adam Smith. Textbooks must also include Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market theory.

History textbooks will now be required to cover the “unintended consequences” of Great Society legislation, affirmative action, and Title IX legislation.

This is the only article I found that had actual details of the changes. The rest were just left-wing posturing and vague accusations. But that’s the left-wing media, I guess.

I still haven’t given up on my dream of living in Texas, and this is just one more reason why. I could actually send my (future) kids to public schools in Texas!