Tag Archives: China

John Campbell takes a shot at Obama’s budget

This is Representative John Campbell letting the Democrats have it with both barrels.

I found the video linked on his blog, where he has some advice for how to explain to your neighbors what this budget will really cost taxpayers.

Excerpt:

If you want to see what a 30% tax increase looks like, take your paycheck and multiply the total taxes deducted by 1.3.  Then, subtract that from your gross income and that will be close to your new net income. So, if you made $3,000 gross and $2,000 net, you will now only net $1,700. Oh, and that won’t include the cuts your employer has to make in order to pay for their tax increases. By the way, this budget includes all kinds of things that are minor in the grand scheme of things, but big to certain people. For instance, it would repeal the use of the ‘Last In, First Out’ (LIFO) inventory accounting method.  This will dramatically raise taxes on all retail businesses who carry inventory.

Gateway Pundit has a list of the top 10 facts about the budget here. On economist Robert P. Murphy’s blog, I found a link to this story in Bloomberg.

Excerpt:

The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or committed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year, to stem the longest recession since the 1930s.

New pledges from the Fed, the Treasury Department and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. include $1 trillion for the Public-Private Investment Program, designed to help investors buy distressed loans and other assets from U.S. banks. The money works out to $42,105 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. and 14 times the $899.8 billion of currency in circulation. The nation’s gross domestic product was $14.2 trillion in 2008.

Representative John Shadegg has a list of the taxing/spending records that Obama’s budget is breaking in a post on Red County. And remember, the Democrats caused this mess and the Republicans tried to stop them. More details from John Boehner and Mike Pence about what’s in Obama’s budget here. The Republican alternative budget is here.

CBO: Budget adds 4.8 trillion to national debt, China worried

Hot Air has this:

In a new report that provides the first independent analysis of President Obama’s budget request, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted that the administration’s agenda would generate deficits averaging nearly $1 trillion a year over the next decade$2.3 trillion more than the president predicted when he unveiled his spending plan just one month ago.

Tax hikes are mentioned here at the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Open Market blog:

Obama’s budget would explode the national debt while increasing taxes. That’s the conclusion of the Congressional Budget Office, controlled by lawmakers who support Obama. “The President’s proposals would add $4.8 trillion to the national debt,” increasing “the cumulative deficit from 2010 to 2019 to $9.3 trillion.” The budget also adds $1.9 trillion in tax increases.

And the stimulus bill Obama claimed was needed to avert “disaster” and “irreversible decline“? It will shrink the economy over the long run, since its “increase in government debt is expected to displace or ‘crowd out’ . . . private capital.”

…The CBO’s conclusion confirms its earlier findings that the stimulus package will cut wages and the size of the economy in the long run, despite costing $800 billion. The stimulus package also gutted welfare reform.

The Heritage Foundation blog The Foundry has more. Here are just a few of their bullet points:

• He raises taxes not just on upper-income taxpayers as he promised, but on all Americans through his misnamed “climate revenues”, and as his budget indicates, this is just a starter program.

• The President calls for enormous increases in government spending on health care and climate change, but on a great many other programs.

• The CBO saw through perhaps the greatest chicanery ever in federal budgeting when President Obama first assumed the full costs of the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in perpetuity, and then claimed he is cutting spending when he asserts a change in policy and those spending amounts disappear.

The more he spends, the more it looks like he’s going to have to print money to get out of this, or raise taxes on producers and destroy the economy completely. And all that makes China very, very worried. Here is an article from the leftist New York Times, headlined “China’s Leader Says He Is ‘Worried’ Over U.S. Treasuries”.

Excerpt:

The Chinese premier Wen Jiabao expressed concern on Friday about the safety of China’s $1 trillion investment in American government debt, the world’s largest such holding, and urged the Obama administration to provide assurances that its investment would keep its value in the face of a global financial crisis.

…Mr. Wen said he was “worried” about China’s holdings of Treasury bonds and other debt, and that China was watching United States economic developments closely.

If Obama prints more money, this would raise inflation and devalue the US currency, including the Treasury Bonds held by China.

But economists have cited several possible threats, led by the prospect that the dollar’s value will depreciate over time, lowering the value of China’s holdings.

“In the short run, the dollar is appreciating” because global investors see the American currency as a safe haven at a time of crisis, Bai Chong-En, who heads the economics department at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said in a telephone interview. “But we don’t know what’s going to happen in the long run. If the American stimulus package is financed mainly by borrowing, then that may affect the future value of Treasury securities.”

Some specialists also say that high inflation could erode the dollar’s value. Finally, some believe that China’s investment in American debt is now so vast that, should it need foreign exchange in some emergency, it would be unable to sell its Treasury securities without flooding the market and driving down their price.

“The only possibility, really, is that China will have to hold these bonds until maturity,” said Shen Minggao, the chief economist at Caijing, a Beijing-based business magazine. “If you start to sell those bonds, the market may collapse.

And Heritage Foundation is reporting that they are even talking about switching out of the US dollar as their reserve currency.

Sigh. I found an article by Victor Davis Hanson (H/T Stop the ACLU) where he explores why Obama is destroying the economy. He has three possible solutions, and he analyzes each of them.

  1. Clueless
  2. Not so clueless
  3. A mean streak

Personally, I vote for 1). And that goes for anyone voted for him. And I’ve read David Freddoso’s book, so that’s where I am coming from. But you can read the VDH article and make up your own mind.

France, Germany and Italy warn G20 nations against Obammunism

I was browsing over at the Anchoress and I found some very interesting links in her link-filled post here. She runs a blog that features a mix of Catholic-oriented reflections and a conservative perspective on the news of the day.

Here’s the part of her post that caught my attention:

Not good: First Putin told him not to, now France and Germany. Boy, didn’t the left HATE when Bush was this stubborn and set on his own way? And he didn’t listen to other countries? I seem to remember the left really, really hating that. About Bush. They hated these things too. When Bush did them.

Here is the warning from France and Germany from the Financial Times, via American Thinker:

Disagreements between the European Union and the US over how to combat the global recession widened on Tuesday as EU governments made clear they had little appetite for piling up more debt to fight the collapse in output and jobs.

Finance ministers from the 27-nation bloc insisted in Brussels that it was doing enough to support world demand and did not need at present to adopt another fiscal stimulus plan, as Washington is urging.

The US-European differences are casting a shadow over next month’s summit in London of leaders from the G20 group of advanced and emerging economies, an event to be attended by Barack Obama on his first visit to Europe as US president.

It’s true that France, Germany and Italy have all elected conservative leaders recently, (along with Japan, Canada, the Czech Republic and Mexico). I thought that these European socialist countries were to the left of the USA. Are we now to the left of France, Germany and Italy?

You might remember that I posted recently about former-communist Russia warning Obama about the dangers of socialism. Former-communist China also warned Obama to stimulate the economy with tax cuts, not spending. Instead, Obama raised taxes and spent trillions.

Canada, Japan and Mexico also elected conservatives governments. Why can’t we be more like them? Why do we have to embrace Obama’s unilateral, cowboy-communism? Why must Obama anger the world with unpopular economic policies that fail the “global test”? Why does Obama make the world hate us?