Here’s Canadian-raised comedian Steven Crowder’s latest video. This one made me laugh out loud, and you will too! (H/T IMAO.us)
And here’s the lovely Michele Bachmann staying calm against Barney Frank. Beauty and the Beast! (H/T The Maritime Sentry)
Remember, Democrats caused the recession and Republicans tried to stop it! And Barney Frank was one of the main players in causing this recession, as you can see from the linked New York Times article. Now Michele has to come in and try to clean up their mess.
Fun cartoons
Here is an old-fashioned video on capitalism. I feel so subversive even showing them to you. This is the kind of thing real Americans used to learn about before the public schools were taken over by marxists, feminists and draft-dodging leftists! (H/T IMAO.us)
Harvard economist Martin Feldstein writes in the Wall Street Journal:
Even if the proposed tax increases are not scheduled to take effect until 2011, households will recognize the permanent reduction in their future incomes and will reduce current spending accordingly. Higher future tax rates on capital gains and dividends will depress share prices immediately and the resulting fall in wealth will cut consumer spending further. Lower share prices will also raise the cost of equity capital, depressing business investment in plant and equipment.
Tax hikes for the poor:
Mr. Obama’s biggest proposed tax increase is the cap-and-trade system of requiring businesses to buy carbon dioxide emission permits. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the proposed permit auctions would raise about $80 billion a year and that these extra taxes would be passed along in higher prices to consumers. Anyone who drives a car, uses public transportation, consumes electricity or buys any product that involves creating CO2 in its production would face higher prices…
But while the cap-and-trade tax rises with income, the relative burden is greatest for low-income households. According to the CBO, households in the lowest-income quintile spend more than 20% of their income on energy intensive items (primarily fuels and electricity), while those in the highest-income quintile spend less than 5% on those products.
If you drive a car or flip on a light switch – Democrats have a new national energy tax for you. If you’re a small business owner or if you’re employed by one – Democrats have a new tax for you. If you’re a charity – Democrats have a new tax for your donors. If you’re looking to produce more American energy – Democrats have a new tax for you. If you own stock – Democrats have a new tax for you. And when you’re finally able to relax – after paying all your taxes to Uncle Sam – and you want to kick back, relax, and have a cold beer, you guessed it, Democrats may have a new tax for you too.
When it comes to federal spending, there’s a pattern emerging with President Obama, and it’s not a flattering one. The president says all the right things about the importance of getting the deficit under control, but his actions don’t come close to matching his rhetoric.
An early sign of the disconnect was his heavily publicized demand last month that his Cabinet secretaries shave $100 million from their administrative budgets. Obama said the cuts would “send a signal that we are serious about how government operates” and would help close the “confidence gap” with skeptical Americans. Those cuts amounted to a less-than-confidence-inspiring 0.003% of the 2009 budget, or about 3 cents out of every $1,000.
Then, when he unveiled his 2010 budget last week, Obama made a big deal of his demand for $17 billion in cuts, insisting that the cuts “even by Washington standards … are significant” and that $17 billion is “real money.”
The president got it backward. Out in the rest of the world, $17 billion is a ton of money. But in Washington, where the president is proposing to spend $3.6 trillion next year, $17 billion looks puny – a little less than half a percent of the budget, or the equivalent of cutting a $100 grocery bill by handing back a 50-cent pack of gum.
Anybody who read David Freddoso’s book or looked up Obama’s voting record could have known that his rhetoric was just lies for the gullible.
President Obama’s pledge to work with health care providers and insurers to scale back costs misses the entire point: health care costs are so high because we are not giving patients choice and forcing insurers to compete. We need robust market reforms – not symbolic gestures. The way to lower prices is to put control in the hands of patients. We need to empower Americans by giving them the freedom to either keep their employer plan or purchase the plan of their choice through a tax credit. Choice and competition will drive prices down and quality up.
Shadegg goes on to explain why the Obama plan does none of this. And why should it? We already know that the Democrats want private health care to fail, so they can usher in single-payer health care. (Just they want private industry to fail so they can nationalize more of the free market)
Putting 120 million Americans on government coverage will create a monopoly that sends costs skyrocketing. Choice will be lost because the enormous government-run plan will put the private plans out of business. In other words, if you like what you have, you will lose it. And while health insurance will be provided, health care will not – like every nationalized health plan across the world, as costs escalate, care will be slashed, patients waitlisted, drugs denied.
Yesterday, the Medicare and Social Security Trustees issued a new report that laid out unequivocally that our current Medicare and Social Security programs are on a path for financial implosion and are in need of serious reform.
In fact, the Medicare insolvency date has moved up to 2017. And, that doesn’t include the impact of the so-called “stimulus” bill, which could accelerate insolvency by about 6 months.
And, we’re facing a strain on Social Security like never before, with nearly 80 million retiring Baby Boomers tapping into the funds soon we’ll be spending more to pay benefits than what the system receives in payroll taxes. Yet, we continue to carry on with the status quo, every now and then saying that we need to reform it, but not actually doing anything about it.
Michele is trying to do something about it, but the House is filled with Democrats who never ran a business in their entire lives.
I’ve introduced the Truth In Accounting Act to make government finances truly transparent and open. Not only would financial commitments be crystal clear to Congress, but also to the taxpayers.
Currently, when Congress and the President prepare budget proposals and pass spending bills, they have the luxury of ignoring shortfalls year after year. They prepare, present, and approve budgets which project these estimates over the short-term – usually five or ten years. And, there are a lot of things that can be done on paper to paper over the long-term shortfalls.
My Truth in Accounting Act would require the President to consider these long-term shortfalls when he proposes his budget. And, it would require both the GAO (Government Accountability Office) and the U.S. Treasury to report this information to the Congress so that the numbers can be used when we’re finalizing the annual budget.
Furthermore, my legislation would require that the report be translated into easily comprehensible terms so that nothing could be hidden by complex jargon. The government’s fiscal imbalance would be presented in the whole, and as distributed per person, per worker, and per household.
The Heritage Foundation is my favorite think tank, just like the Investors Business Daily podcast is my favorite podcast. These two news sources are heads and shoulders over anything else. Except for Commenter ECM, but that goes without saying.
Let’s see what they have for us today!
First, let’s get an answer to the question of who cut spending more, Bush (in his last year budget) or Obama (in his first budget)?
Oh, that reminds me of a video I saw on the Maritime Sentry of the lovely Michele Bachmann trying desperately to persuade the silly people in Congress not to give more money to organizations like ACORN who are facing charges of voter fraud. But there’s only one Michele and so many other unqualified people.
I don’t know why they won’t listen to her and do what she wants. When I see Michele speaking, I just want to give her whatever she wants. She seems so passionate, moral and competent, much more so than the other people who haven’t actually run a business or home-schooled 5 children and 23 foster children.
Representative Michele Bachmann
She had a post on her blog about her amendment to block giving money to ACORN, too.
Excerpt:
On Monday of this week, charges were brought in Nevada against ACORN and two of its former employees for voter registration violations, and today, the Allegheny County District Attorney in Pennsylvania charged seven employees of ACORN with forgery and election law violations, saying they filed hundreds of fraudulent voter registrations during last year’s general election.
It really could not be more timely as Chairman Barney Frank was just on the House floor trying to justify his amendment to the Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act that will allow groups such as ACORN that have been indicted, or have employees who have been indicted, of voter fraud to receive millions in taxpayer funding.
Last week, the House Financial Services Committee unanimously passed my amendment to prohibit the flow of your money to such groups, but Chairman Frank feels it necessary to take back his support for that commonsense language and raise the bar so that organizations would have to be convicted before their access to tax dollars would be cut off.
While I realize that we are all innocent until proven guilty, ACORN has established a pattern of voter registration violations that seems to pop up election after election and in state after state. The courts are the appropriate place to try guilt and innocence. Congress has a fiduciary obligation to spend tax dollars wisely.
Your taxpayer money must be held to the highest standard, and not used to engage in a proven pattern of voter registration violations.
Here’s another story from the Heritage Foundation about Obama’s interventions into the free market. The more he meddles, the fewer people will want to run businesses in the USA, and the more unemployment there will be. You’ll remember that Obama tried to force the banks to stiff creditors for pennies on the dollar, while giving his union supporters a much better bankruptcy deal than they deserved.
“…I am indeed fearful writing this. It’s really a bad idea to speak out. Angering the President is a mistake…” What country would you expect to hear a citizen make this statement? Venezuela? Cuba? Russia? Nope, those are the words of prominent hedge fund manager Clifford Asness, who wrote a now-famous and widely circulated open letter this week describing the intimidation techniques used by President Obama and his administration.
Why did the President have to resort to such enhanced techniques of intimidation? Mainly because he was asking financial lenders to engage in the same unscrupulous acts his administration has been engaging in since January, i.e. picking winners and losers without concern for free market principles. The President wanted hedge funds to force a loss on investment onto their unknowing clients, so he could reward supportive union bosses in a “controlled” (i.e. Obama controlled) bankruptcy.
The rest of the post documents the ways in which government intervention and intimidation of private business hurts the economy. And they summarize Tom Lauria’s testimony that I blogged about before:
Tom Lauria, a prominent bankruptcy judge, and Democratic Party contributor, recently told WJR in Detroit: “One of my clients was directly threatened by the White House and in essence compelled to withdraw its opposition to the deal under threat that the full force of the White House press corps would destroy its reputation if it continued to fight.” Certainly the White House press corps considers themselves independent of any revenge scheme the President may cook up, but then why has their silence on these issues been so loud?
And here is the big picture lesson:
While the left and the right can agree to disagree on certain matters of this bailout, every American should be on one side of this intimidation debate, against what Michael Barone labeled “Gangster Government“. Whether trying to strong arm the dissolution of a company to benefit its union bosses, or trying to use selective declassification of national security memos to prove a policy point, the White House needs to be held to the highest (not higher) standard. The best way to end this cycle of government intimidation is to get government out of these businesses to begin with. Without an end, there shall be no means.
Attack the free market and you attack all of our liberties, especially our precious freedom of religious expression. If I cannot earn an income and make purchases without government approval, then I am not free. We have to keep talking about this story until Obama understands.
My next story is from Victor Davis Hanson, writing in Investor’s Business Daily. He makes the case that America is strong, secure and prosperous for specific reasons. Mess with the design of the country and we will lose our liberty, security and prosperity.
His first example is environmental regulation in California:
Now in California — the nation’s richest farm state — the population is skyrocketing toward 40 million. Yet hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland this year are going out of production, and with them thousands of jobs.
Why? In times of chronic water shortages, environmentalists have sued to stop irrigation deliveries in order to save threatened two-inch-long delta fish that need infusions of fresh water diverted from agricultural use. And for environmental and financial reasons, we long ago stopped building canals and dams in the Sierra Nevada to find sources of replacement irrigation water.
And what about domestic energy production?
Developing such traditional sources of energy responsibly would save us trillions of dollars in imported fuels, keep jobs at home and allow the nation a precious window of energy autonomy as we steadily transfer to more wind, solar and renewable energy.
If we exploit our own energy carefully offshore and in Alaska, it will mean less sloppy foreign drilling off places like Nigeria or in the fragile Russian tundra to feed American cars and trucks.
And what about being able to project military power abroad?
Democrats and Republicans have also taken for granted having enough military power to intervene overseas to remove tyrants like Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Manuel Noriega and the Taliban — and to stop atrocities whenever we can. But such power takes hundreds of billions of dollars in expensive hardware and military personnel.
He also wants to keep the defense budget static, or even cut it in some places.
In our have-it-both-ways generation, we want to keep our involvements abroad while not worrying as much about the practical means to meet them.
And his last example, massive deficits… and expanded entitlement programs?
Then there is the question of national debt. We are projected to run a record $1.7 trillion deficit — and may add $9 trillion to our existing $11 trillion in aggregate debt over the next eight years.
Meanwhile, the president has outlined vast new entitlement programs in health care, education, environmental programs and infrastructure.
It’s like we think that the USA is a magic place that will somehow keep running smoothly if we stop believing everything that got us the top spot in the first place. Shouldn’t we send Obama to North Korea or something where his policies might actually be welcomed? Democrats can’t handle any of these issues. Let’s put Michele Bachmann in charge in 2012.
WINTERY KNIGHT 