Tag Archives: Jobs

Podcasts

FL senator Marco Rubio: “We need more taxpayers, not more taxes”

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Florida Senator Marco Rubio
Florida Senator Marco Rubio

If there is anyone I like almost as much as Michele Bachmann, it’s Marco Rubio. And boy, can this guy do an interview.

On the Sean Hannity show: (7 minutes)

And on the Rush Limbaugh radio show: (11 minutes)

He’s William Lane Craig-esque. He just talks about the issues without one hem or haw. Not an uh or an ah to be heard. It’s uncanny. Hmmn. Look at that picture up there. He looks very intense. Do you think he might be some sort of conservative super-android designed by the U.S. Military in a secret base under a mountain in Colorado? I’m not sure.

I actually heard him interviewed on the Hugh Hewitt show on Tuesday night. Hugh played the interview back-to-back in two consecutive hours, and then his producer Duane Patterson posted the full transcript. This one was the best interview of all. Hugh does a great interview, and he was blown away by Marco Rubio.

Excerpt:

HH: Now the President is betting, obviously, that he can turn a conservative message into a toxic one for 2012. Your old colleague from the Florida House, Adam Hasner, is running for Senate down there, a lot like Josh Mandel in Ohio, and Ted Cruz in Texas, they’re running as real conservatives with very much a Rubio-like message from 2010. Will that work in this environment of demagoguery from the White House?

MR: Yeah, it will work, because the common sense of the American people is powerful, and I think that too many people here in Washington walk around thinking well, we can spin it this way, or we can use our allies in the media to confuse people and make them not believe their own eyes. But the truth is that we’re way past that today. The ability of people to get information from multiple sources in real time, the ability of us to communicate directly to our constituents, to go on programs such as yours and talk about the reality of what we’re facing, is something that wasn’t around not that long ago, and it’s incumbent upon us who feel passionate about this to go out there and make clear to the people what our choices are. And this is not a complicated issue. It’s very, very simple. The United States spends more money than it takes in, and it’s not generating enough revenue for its government to pay down the debt. So we have to figure out how do we stop spending more money than we take in? We need a balanced budget amendment. We need a spending cap. And we need real reductions in spending starting right now. And what do we do to get more revenue in the hands of government so it can pay down its debt and not grow its government? Well, you’re not going to do that through tax increases. You’re going to do that through new taxpayers, that is getting people back to work, getting people hired and working, so these people will pay taxes, and then we can use that revenue to pay down the debt. That’s what we need. And you’re not going to create new taxpayers, you’re not going to create economic growth and jobs in America if you’re running around threatening to raise taxes.

HH: Do you think the President understands the underlying economics, Senator Rubio, and is just demagoguing it? Or is he fundamentally misinformed about how capitalism works?

MR: I think there are three things going on here. Number one, I think he’s a prisoner to extremist elements in his own base who not only, they don’t care that the taxes don’t solve any problems. They want their pound of flesh. They want to punish somebody, they want class warfare. That’s what they believe in. And this is their chance to do it, and they’re putting pressure on him to do that. So I think that’s his first problem. His second problem is that I think he’s surrounded by a bunch of people who philosophically do not believe fully in the free enterprise system, and in fact, they’d like to see government play a greater role. And they see this downturn in the economy, and crisis such as this, as an opportunity to exert more government involvement in our economy. And that’s the second problem. And his third problem is a level of incompetence. I think the President, quite frankly, is not up to the job. And if you look at every measure of quality of life in America today, unemployment is higher. The debt is higher. The only thing lower is the value of your home. If you look at every measurable economic thing in America today, they are all worse than they were the day he took over. Two and a half years into his presidency, things continue to get worse, not better, and it’s because the President is incompetent in his job as president. He is not, he doesn’t know what he’s doing.

I think he’s going to be President one day. And I agree with him on Obama’s competence. The man is not qualified in any way, shape or form to run a lemonade stand, much less to be the President of the most powerful country on the planet. I would like to see a Marco Rubio/Allen West ticket in 2020, after the two Michele Bachmann terms are done.

 

News

John Boehner says no to Obama’s plan to raise taxes by 2 trillion

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Republican Speaker John Boehner
Republican House Speaker John Boehner

From the leftist Washington Post.

Excerpt:

Senate Democrats have drafted a sweeping debt-reduction plan that would slice $4 trillion from projected borrowing over the next decade without touching the expensive health and retirement programs targeted by President Obama.

Instead, Senate Democrats are proposing to stabilize borrowing through sharp cuts at the Pentagon and other government agencies, as well as $2 trillion in new taxes…

[…]Republicans dismissed the Democratic blueprint, saying higher taxes would be devastating to an economy already weighed down by a 9.2 percent unemployment rate. In their spending plan, House Republicans proposed to save $4 trillion entirely through spending cuts; they would also eliminate Medicare as an open-ended entitlement after 2021.

“If they’re calling for $2 trillion in tax hikes in the middle of a jobs crisis, it’s little wonder that it’s been 800 days since Senate Democrats passed a budget,” said McConnell spokesman Don Stewart.

Since early this year, Senate Democrats have struggled to draft a spending plan. Moderates refused to endorse any blueprint that included big annual budget deficits or big tax hikes. Liberals, meanwhile, opposed sharp cuts to social programs. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the senior Budget Committee Republican, has relentlessly hammered Democrats for their failure to adopt a budget.

Although the new document is unlikely to be officially adopted, it was embraced by a majority of Senate Democrats when Conrad presented it at a closed-door luncheon earlier this week, aides said.

Under the blueprint, the top income tax rate would rise to 39.6 percent for individuals earning more than $500,000 a year and families earning more than $1 million. That group, which constitutes the nation’s richest 1 percent of households, would also pay a 20 percent rate on capital gains and dividends, rather than the 15 percent rate now in effect.

John Boehner says no way.

Excerpt:

Speaker John A. Boehner told President Obama on Saturday night he will not agree to the president’s most ambitious plan for deficit reduction, citing the administration’s pursuit of tax increases as one of the main hurdles.

The Democrats want to tax investors and job creators. Is it any wonder that this administration has been unable to create jobs? They keep taxing and regulating the small businesses and investors who enable the creation of the majority of new private sector jobs, then are shocked to find that no new jobs are being created. When will they learn that “taxing the rich” just means “taxing the job creators”?

Why are companies not hiring?

Companies are not hiring because the Democrats spent too much, and now they want to raise taxes. Higher taxes makes companies not hire workers.

Look at this diagram:

Republican control of House = low unemployment

Compare the unemployment rates when Republican Newt Gingrich was in charge of the House, to when Nancy Pelosi was in charge:

Gingrich versus Pelosi unemployment graph
Unemployment: Gingrich ('95-'99) vs Pelosi ('07-'10)

Nancy Pelosi added 5.34 trillion to the national debt in 4 years! If you are running a business, then you STOP hiring when you see that the government is spending so much that new taxes are inevitable. You cannot argue with these facts – more spending means higher unemployment, BECAUSE more spending raises fears of higher taxes on job creators. And that’s exactly what Obama is now threatening, and why the unemployment rate is going UP not DOWN. Newt Gingrich added only ONE TRILLION to the national debt between 1994 and 1999. ONE TRILLION. That’s bad, but it’s not FIVE TRILLION as under Pelosi.

Prior to January 2007, George W. Bush’s unemployment rate was down below 5%. Job creators knew that he wasn’t going to come after them with tax hikes and burdensome regulations. You can’t create jobs by punishing job creators. The trade-off of low tax rates for the wealthy is a low unemployment rate. Those are the facts, and we have to live with reality as it is.

News

How the Obama administration opposes the creation of 100,000 jobs

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Comparison of unemployment rates - Bush vs Obama
Comparison of unemployment rates - Bush vs Obama

The Wall Street Journal reports on how Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency is trying to block a pipeline from Alberta that would create 100,000 jobs and lower oil prices at the pump.

Excerpt:

With 9.1% unemployment and gasoline prices in the stratosphere, President Obama must sometimes wish that some big corporation would suddenly show up and offer a shovel-ready, multibillion-dollar project to create 100,000 jobs and reduce U.S. reliance on oil from dictatorships.

Oh, wait. His Secretary of State has had that offer sitting on her desk since she was sworn in. The trouble is that the Administration can’t approve it without upsetting its anti-fossil fuel constituency. And so the proposal sits.

In September 2008 TransCanada applied to build a new pipeline—the Keystone XL—to bring diluted bitumen from the oil-rich tar sands of Alberta to thirsty American refineries on the Gulf Coast. It is hardly a radical proposal. Canadian crude has been flowing to the U.S. for decades. Another Canadian company—Enbridge—operates the Clipper pipeline across the Canadian border to Chicago. In July 2010 TransCanada began operating its Keystone pipeline from Alberta to Cushing, Oklahoma, which is a major storage and pricing depot.

The Keystone XL would cut a slightly different path, through the American heartland to Port Arthur, Texas. Judging from its past experience and that of Enbridge, TransCanada expected that permitting would take roughly 23 months. Thirty-three months, two State Department studies and 208,000 public comments later, TransCanada is still waiting. On current trend, the company will be lucky to get its permit by January, or after 40 months. But even that is far from certain.

If Mr. Obama were drawing up a plan from scratch to boost union employment and deflate Iranian-ally Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, it might look like the Keystone XL. TransCanada estimates that building the pipeline will mean more than $20 billion—$13 billion from TransCanada itself—in investment and 13,000 new American jobs in construction and related manufacturing. The company also expects more than 118,000 “spin-off” jobs during the two years of construction.

TransCanada says it has signed building contracts with four major U.S. unions. It projects that construction will generate $600 million in new state and local tax revenue and that over its life the pipeline will generate another $5.2 billion in property taxes. The Energy Policy Research Foundation in Washington estimates that by linking to the XL, oil producers in North Dakota’s Bakken region will enjoy efficiency gains of between $36.5 million and $146 million annually. Lower transport costs will mean savings for Gulf Coast refiners of $473 million annually if the pipeline meets conservative expectations of shipping 400,000 barrels per day.

Today those refineries are highly dependent on imports from Mexico and Venezuela, which have decreased output in recent years. TransCanada would help to provide Gulf Coast refiners with a more reliable source of supply from a U.S. ally.

Obama wants to create jobs – he just wants to create jobs in Mexico, Venezuela and the Middle East.