Tag Archives: Obama

News

Democrat Majority Leader Steny Hoyer says we may need another massive stimulus

1 Comment
Budget Deficit
Budget Deficit

The first two spending bills didn’t work, so we just need to keep trying harder to spend our way out of debt!

Check out this story from Reuters. (H/T Gateway Pundit)

Excerpt:

U.S. leaders should be open to the possibility of a second stimulus package to jolt the economy out of a recession still causing job losses, House of Representatives Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said on Tuesday.

…President Barack Obama led the charge for a two-year $787 billion stimulus package that his fellow Democrats who control Congress pushed through the House and Senate in February and he has argued it would help create or save up to 4 million jobs.

Create 4 million jobs? He’s lost 2.5 million jobs so far. Maybe he doesn’t know what the word create means?

foundry_recovery_plan_full

Michelle Malkin lists a few more of the Democrats in favor of more government spending.

Excerpt:

As you all have heard, Laura D’Andrea Tyson, the Clinton economic adviser now on Team Obama, has floated a second stimulus plan. Democrat Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island has echoed the call. Other Democrats are open to it.

Only 10 percent of Porkulus One has been spent, misspent, or gone untracked, but who’s counting?

I’ve uploaded two documents for your perusal this morning: The first is a GAO report on stimulus spending by states and localities, which will be released this morning at a House oversight hearing.

You can read the whole thing here.

Bottom line: The funds are not being spent on what they’re supposed to be spent on. States made up their own criteria for spending. School and transportation bureaucrats preserved their own jobs instead of “stimulating” others.

The second document is a GOP memo dissecting the failures of Porkulus One.

You can read the whole thing here.

Michelle lists a few of the key findings from the second document.

National Debt
National Debt

Why didn’t the massive Democrat spending spree work?

This is lesson one of Economics 101. When government spends money, the money comes out of the private sector. Government is not even close to allocating capital and producing wealth as efficiently as the free market system.

Ed Morrissey explains:

Here’s where we get into the “saved or created” dodge of the Obama administration.  The Porkulus money may have “saved” jobs, but they were government jobs, not the private sector.  Most government employees have union representation, primarily by the SEIU.  The only jobs Porkulus may have saved were those of bureaucrats in state government, and mostly to make sure the unions stay on the side of the Democrats.

None of that money went into promoting growth in the private sector, which is why unemployment skyrocketed.  Capital stayed out of the market, in part because of fears of confiscatory tax increases and in part because of the amount of regulation threatened by the Obama administration, and what capital was left will get eaten up by the cost of Porkulus eventually.  And the GAO says it will take months just to get effective reporting on how that money gets spent, regardless of where it goes.

Obama’s support is now virtually 50-50 according to Rasmussen Reports.But he won’t care, because he’s the Obamessiah! As long as the left-wing fascists and terrorists love him, who cares what economically-literate peons like us think?

News

John McCain tells Obama that Honduras was right to kick Zelaya out

2 Comments

The Hill has a post up about McCain’s response to the Honduras crisis. (H/T Gateway Pundit)

They quote McCain’s Twitter feed:

Violence and unrest in Honduras & China – we need to continue to stand up for human rights and democracy around the world!

I regret the military takeover in Honduras, but it’s clear President Zelaya was in violation of his country’s constitution.

The Hill writes:

McCain’s statement runs in direct conflict with the Obama administration’s position on the coup. Last week, the president said that the coup was “not legal” and that Zelaya is still the president of the Latin American nation.

Members of Congress have generally been mum on the situation, but some tensions are beginning to show, especially amongst Republicans. Rep. Connie Mack (R-Fla.) said that Zelaya “trampled on the Honduran constitution” and called the Honduran president’s effort to extend his term a “blatant power grab.”

Zelaya proposed a constitutional referendum that would allow him to seek reelection, superceding term limits layed out in the country’s constitution. Members of the Honduran military arrested him and forced him into exile on June 29.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with the ousted president today.

More at Gateway Pundit.

Commentary

Who caused the recession? How did the housing bubble happen?

Leave a comment

Republicans on the House Oversight have released a report that explains what caused the subprime crisis.

I can’t read the whole thing! But Hot Air has the key facts so you don’t have to read it either!

* Political pressure led to the erosion of responsible lending practices:

In the early 1990s, Fannie and Freddie began to come under considerable political pressure to lower their underwriting standards, particularly on the size of down payments and the credit quality of borrowers. (p.6)

* Lower down payments led to housing prices that outpaced income growth: Once government-sponsored efforts to decrease down payments spread to the wider market, home prices became increasingly untethered from any kind of demand limited by borrowers’ ability to pay. Instead, borrowers could just make smaller down payments and take on higher debt, allowing home prices to continue their unrestrained rise. Some statistics help illustrate how this occurred. Between 2001 and 2006, median home prices increased by an inflation-adjusted 50 percent, yet at the same time Americans’ income failed to keep up. (p. 11)

* Members of an “affordable housing” coalition shared profits with political allies to help legitimize their business practices: Fannie Mae created and used The Fannie Mae Foundation to spread millions of dollars around to politically-connected organizations like the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. It also hired well-known academics to give an aura of academic rigor to policy positions favorable to Fannie Mae. One paper coauthored by now-Director of the Office of Management and Budget Peter Orszag, concluded that the chance was minimal that the GSEs were not holding sufficient capital to cover their losses in the event of a severe economic shock. The authors suggested that “the risk to the government from a potential default on GSE debt is effectively zero,” and that “the expected cost to the government of providing an explicit government guarantee on $1 trillion in GSE debt is just $2 million.” (p.7)

* The Government Sponsored Enterprises led the way into the housing crisis: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were leaders in risky mortgage lending. According to an analysis presented to the Committee, between 2002 and 2007, Fannie and Freddie purchased $1.9 trillion of mortgages made to borrowers with credit scores below 660, one of the definitions of “subprime” used by federal banking regulators. This represents over 54% of all such mortgages purchased during those years. (p.24)

My comprehensive post on this issue is here. In that post, I collected videos of Democrats admitting that their plan was to force banks to make loans to unqualified borrowers, as well as news articles by the New York Times and Los Angeles Times on the topic.