Tag Archives: Economic Growth

Republicans block Democrats’ attempt to raise taxes on job creators

From Fox News.

Excerpt:

Senate Republicans on Saturday voted against President Obama’s plan to extend the Bush tax cuts to only the middle class in a pair of votes Democrats are seizing to paint the GOP as guardians of the rich.

The Senate voted 53-36 to extend all expiring tax cuts on individuals with incomes of less than $200,000 a year and married couples making less than $250,000 — seven shy of the required 60 to advance.

Now keep in mind that “the rich” are the very people who own the small businesses that create most of the jobs. That is why constant slamming of the rich with taxes and health care mandates has raised the unemployment rate to 9.8% and kept it above 9% for 19 months – a record never before seen in the history of the country. When Obama says “the wealthiest 2%”, you need to hear “9.8% unemployment”. The wealthy are the ones who create the jobs. Bash the wealthy, and you get fewer jobs.

Obama says:

President Obama said he was “very disappointed” in the Senate’s verdict.

“Those provisions should have passed,” he said.”It makes no sense to to hold tax cuts for the middle class hostage to permanent tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans especially when those high-income tax cuts would cost an additional $700 billion that we don’t have and would add to our deficit.”

“But with so much at stake, today’s votes cannot be the end of the discussion,” he said. “It’s absolutely essential to hardworking middle class families and to the economy to make sure their taxes don’t go up on Jan. 1.”

But the truth is:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell immediately slammed the political maneuvering by Democrats after the votes.

“According to the strange the logic of Democratic leaders in Congress, the best way to show middle class Americans that they care about creating jobs is to slam some of America’s top job creators with a massive tax hike,” he said on the Senate floor.

“Today’s vote was an affront to the millions of Americans who are struggling to find work and a clear signal that Democrats in Congress still haven’t got the message from the November elections,” he said.

Obama is anti-middle class because he is anti-small-business, and small businesses hire the middle class.

Democrats don’t understand how jobs are created

In fact, the unemployment rate has been steadily rising since the Democrats took control of the spending process by winning the House and Senate in January 2007. The left side of this graph begins when Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid took control of the House and Senate in January 2007.

Democrats took control of the economy in 2007
Democrats took control of the economy in 2007

The chart doesn’t lie. When the Democrats control the budget, spending and unemployment rise a lot. When the Republicans controlled the House and Senate, the unemployment rate was 4.5%. These numbers do not lie. When they told you that more spending (the “recovery plan”) to their favored special interest groups will create private sector jobs, they lied. The numbers show that they lied.

People like Michele Bachmann actually OWN SMALL BUSINESSES and they HIRE AMERICAN WORKERS. People like Michele Bachmann should be in charge of the economy. Not people like Obama. Obama had a rich grandmother who paid for all his schooling at expensive private schools. He had his life handed to him on a silver platter. Michele Bachmann grew up poor.

Senate Democrats block pro-small business amendment

From The Hill. (H/T ECM, Marathon Pundit)

Excerpt:

The Senate on Monday night defeated two amendments designed to ease the tax-filing requirements for small businesses.

Senators voted 61-35 — six votes short of the necessary 67 — to reject an amendment by Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) that would strip a provision from the new healthcare law that requires businesses to report supply purchases of $600 or more with a single vendor. Likewise, the chamber voted 44-53 to defeat Sen. Max Baucus’ (D-Mont.) amendment, which would accomplish the same provision but is unpaid-for. That amendment also required 67 votes.

At issue is a section of the new healthcare law that requires businesses, charities and state and local governments to file 1099 reports for all transactions above $600 per year. The votes also represented a noteworthy showdown between Johanns and Baucus, who presented a similar idea but did not fund it through offset spending cuts.

Johanns said his approach was wiser since it was funded through unspent federal monies, directing the federal Office of Management and Budget to cut $39 billion in funds that would have been generated by the 1099 mandate.

The reporting requirement was introduced by the Obama administration.

If you force businesses to waste their time on paperwork, they have less to make money, and that means less money for hiring people.

Colombia’s war on terrorism and Chile’s war on poverty

Map of South America
Map of South America

A magnificent column about Colombia’s war on FARC.

Excerpt:

When Juan Manuel Santos came into office as Colombia’s president and emphasized economic issues over the fight against terrorist guerrillas, he was suspected of going soft on those he had combated as minister of defense under the previous administration. Little did his critics know that he was planning the “coup de grace” against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

The devastating Sept. 22 attack on FARC headquarters in Colombia’s central Meta province all but signifies the end of the five-decade-old conflict. It will take a little while for the official end to be declared, but this war is pretty much over.

[…]For decades, politicians, academics, human rights activists and journalists on both sides of the Atlantic failed to see that there was nothing romantic, “bien-pensant” or Robin Hoodesque about an organization that killed, maimed, kidnapped and extorted for a totalitarian objective.

Colombia’s solitude was such that even the U.S. began to lose faith in its ally a couple of years ago, refusing to approve a free-trade agreement that Bogota had negotiated at a major political cost.

Colombians did not give up and continued to reclaim territory for civilian rule. Much like the defeat of Venezuela’s Cuba-inspired terrorist guerrillas in the 1960s, Colombia’s victory against FARC is the result of civilians awakening to the evil of totalitarian terror.

We get to hear about spectacular military feats, but how many outside Colombia realize that peasants, factory workers, teachers, students and others joined the struggle to defeat FARC, beautifully symbolized by the hundreds of thousands who took to the streets inside Colombia and around the world in 2008 to clamor for the end of terror?

There are still many challenges ahead. The lesson in courage and perseverance that Colombians have given us suggests they are ready to meet them.

I wish that we could sign a free trade deal with them like Canada’s conservative government. Canada is led by a conservative business-friendly economist, and they are very supportive of capitalist democracies like Colombia. Stephen Harper is Canada’s prime minister. He has economics degrees from the University of Calgary. Like Santos, he is very, very tough on terrorism – favoring increased defense spending to protect Canadian interests abroad. And guess what? Canada also has a free trade agreement with another South American country – Chile.

And Chile is also doing very well, even after the massive earthquake.

Excerpt:

Chile’s peso rose to a 27-month high after a report showed the country’s industrial growth accelerated to the fastest since 2006.

The peso appreciated 0.2 percent to 485.23 per U.S. dollar at 11:43 a.m. New York time, from 486.17 yesterday. The currency touched 483.61, the strongest since June 11, 2008. The peso has risen 13 percent during the quarter and 3.6 percent this month.

Chile’s economy is accelerating after the fifth-largest earthquake in a century struck in February, delaying its recovery from a 2009 recession.

“Retail sales grew and industrial production was better than expected,” said Roberto Melzi, a strategist at Barclays Capital in New York.

Retail sales expanded 13 percent in August from a year earlier, and industrial output grew 6.9 percent, the National Statistics Institute said in Santiago. That’s the most since January 2006. Industrial production shrank 17 percent after the 8.8-magnitude Feb. 27 earthquake and its accompanying tsunami, which caused damage worth more than a sixth of Chile’s gross domestic product.

Chile and Colombia are my two favorite South American countries. Both are led by conservative business-friendly economists. Chile’s president Sebastián Piñerahas a Masters and a Ph.D in economics from Harvard, and is successful in the private sector. The Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos specializes in business and economics, with graduate degrees from Harvard and the London School of Economics.