Here’s what the new Republican program is all about:
YouCut – a first-of-its-kind project – is designed to defeat the permissive culture of runaway spending in Congress. It allows you to vote, both online and on your cell phone, on spending cuts that you want to see the House enact. Vote on this page today for your priorities and together we can begin to change Washington’s culture of spending into a culture of savings.
Here is the announcement for the new program:
And they announce what people vote to cut every week, and submit a bill to do it! Then they show the voting results.
Keep in mind that the socialists under Zapatero are running Spain now, and that’s where this green energy policy came from. Is it working out for socialist Spain?
Excerpt:
Pajamas Media has received a leaked internal assessment produced by Spain’s Zapatero administration. The assessment confirms the key charges previously made by non-governmental Spanish experts in a damning report exposing the catastrophic economic failure of Spain’s “green economy” initiatives.
[…]Unsurprisingly for a governmental take on a flagship program, the report takes pains to minimize the extent of the economic harm. Yet despite the soft-pedaling, the document reveals exactly why electricity rates “necessarily skyrocketed” in Spain, as did the public debt needed to underwrite the disaster. This internal assessment preceded the Zapatero administration’s recent acknowledgement that the “green economy” stunt must be abandoned, lest the experiment risk Spain becoming Greece.
The government report does not expressly confirm the highest-profile finding of the non-governmental report: that Spain’s “green economy” program cost the country 2.2 jobs for every job “created” by the state. However, the figures published in the government document indicate they arrived at a job-loss number even worse than the 2.2 figure from the independent study.
Spain is giving up their green energy / green jobs initiative. What does Obama learn from Spain’s failure?
Excerpt:
This document is not a public report. Spanish media has referred to its existence in recent weeks though, while Bloomberg and the Washington Examiner have noted the impact: Spain is now forced to jettison its plans — Obama’s model — for a “green economy.”
Remarkably, these items have received virtually no media attention.
An item which has been covered widely, however, is that President Obama is now pressuring Spain to turn off its spigot of public debt in the name of averting a situation similar to that of Greece.
Also covered widely is Obama’s promotion of the American Power Act — the legislation which would replicate Spain’s current situation in the United States.
Put simply, Obama is currently promoting a policy in the U.S. which is based on a policy that he wishes to see Spain abandon.
Why can’t we learn from Spain’s failure and avoid making the same mistakes they did? Is that too much to ask?
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!
“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.
WINTERY KNIGHT 