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Why do Democrats live far beyond their means?

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Republicans typically enjoy massive support from people who actually know how the world works, namely, small business owners, investors and entrepreneurs. But do Barack Obama and his new Supreme Court nominee know how the world works?

Sonia Sotomayor

Let’s look at Obama’s Supreme Court nominee first.

Here is what she says:

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

So she discriminates against people based on sex and race. There are words for people who discriminate against others based on sex and race.

The American Thinker reports on how she lives within her means: (H/T Commenter ECM)

Sotomayor’s annual earnings come to $196,000 a year ($170,000 a year as an appeals judge and $26,000 for part-time teaching). She has served as an appeals judge for 17 years. This service was preceded by lengthy tenure at a corporate law firm of Pavia and Harcourt, where she was a partner, and presumably was well compensated.

Yet after a career that has spanned 25 years, Ms Sotomayor only has one thousand dollars in net savings. As reported in the New York Post, Sotomayor’s bank account holds $31,985. Her credit cards debts are $15,823, and she has $15,000 in unpaid dental bills. That leaves her with $1,162. Sotomayor’s total assets, revealed as $708,068, consist almost entirely of equity in her Manhattan apartment.

And here is what it means for us:

If confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, Ms Sotomayor will be ruling on numerous cases that involve investors, savers, corporate profits, business regulation, and related free-market issues…. the fact that Ms Sotomayor, after so many years of highly paid professional work, has no savings or investments and no experience or apparent “empathy” with savers or investors, should be highly troubling to the tens of millions of Americans who do have investments, 401Ks, and personal savings.

And here is how this has affected her previous rulings:

In one of her most important rulings (as reported in the New York Times), Sotomayor ruled that corporations must address environmental concerns in the most radical manner without consideration of the cost. If one particle of pollutant remains to be removed, even at the cost of bankrupting all of the companies in the S&P 500 index, that particle must be removed. If a small business has failed to purchase the most advanced equipment available to address environmental concerns, even if the price of that equipment is one hundred times the revenue of the business in question, the equipment must be purchased. That is how much “empathy” we can expect from Judge Sotomayor.

If she is confirmed, she will probably hurt our free market capitalist system, and the liberties grounded by it. The more that the court hurts business and commerce with judicial activism, the more we lose our jobs, our incomes and our liberty itself.

Barack Obama

Now, let’s take a look at how Obama lives. First of all, it’s well known that Obama was raised with a silver spoon in his mouth and went to all the best private schools, where he snorted expensive cocaine. And he awarded massive taxpayer grants to the hospital where his wife worked after her salary was nearly tripled.

The National Review reports:

One of Obama’s Earmark Requests Was for the Hospital That Employs Michelle Obama.

Dan Riehl notes, via Amanda Carpenter, that in the list of earmarks he requested, $1 million was requested for the construction of a new hospital pavilion at the University Of Chicago. The request was put in in 2006.

You know who works for the University of Chicago Hospital?

Michelle Obama. She’s vice president of community affairs.

As Byron noted, “In 2006, the Chicago Tribune reported that Mrs. Obama’s compensation at the University of Chicago Hospital, where she is a vice president for community affairs, jumped from $121,910 in 2004, just before her husband was elected to the Senate, to $316,962 in 2005, just after he took office.”

The NY Daily News reports on how well the Obamas live within their means. (H/T Sweetness and Light)

A close examination of their finances shows that the Obamas were living off lines of credit along with other income for several years until 2005, when Obama’s book royalties came through and Michelle received her 260% pay raise at the University of Chicago. This was also the year Obama started serving in the U.S. Senate.

In April 1999, they purchased a Chicago condo and obtained a mortgage for $159,250. In May 1999, they took out a line of credit for $20,750. Then, in 2002, they refinanced the condo with a $210,000 mortgage, which means they took out about $50,000 in equity. Finally, in 2004, they took out another line of credit for $100,000 on top of the mortgage.

Tax returns for 2004 reveal $14,395 in mortgage deductions. If we assume an effective interest rate of 6%, then they owed about $240,000 on a home they purchased for about $159,250.

This means they spent perhaps $80,000 beyond their income from 1999 to 2004.

The Obama family apparently had little or no savings during this period since there was virtually no taxable interest shown on their tax returns.

These numbers clearly show the Obamas were living beyond their means and they might have suffered financially during the decline in housing prices had they relied on taking ever larger amounts of equity from their home to pay the bills.

And what did the Obamas learn from this?

But in 2005, Obama’s book sales soared and the royalties poured in. Michelle explained, “It was like Jack and his magic beans.”

Without those magic beans, the Obama family would have eventually suffered the consequences of too much debt.

President Obama has never faced consequences in his private life when it comes to managing money. He always had enough money simply by borrowing more and more. And just when things got tight, those magic beans came along to save the day.

I guess this explains Barack Obama’s fiscal policy and his surprise at the consequent surge in unemployment. But he can count on his new judge to back him to the hilt in all of his unconstitutional interventions in the free market – neither of them knows the slightest thing about saving and investing… just borrowing and spending.

News

Who did Obama pick to handle the re-organization of General Motors?

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Look!Obama is appointing the best and the brightest person possible to oversee the bankruptcy re-organization of GM!

First, you need to know about Obama’s take-over of GM, which is pure communism.

Here’s the story from CNSNews:

Without the prior approval of Congress or any legislation authorizing the act, President Obama plans to announce on Monday that the federal government will take a 60-percent ownership stake in General Motors as part of a bankruptcy and reorganization plan for the company.

The White House on Sunday night announced that the plan will require the federal government to provide another $30 billion of taxpayer money to General Motors, on top of the $20 billion in aid the federal government already has given the company.

And guess who Obama’s picked to supervise the bankruptcy and reorganization?

Here’s the left-wing New York Times article: (H/T Hot Air)

It is not every 31-year-old who, in a first government job, finds himself dismantling General Motors and rewriting the rules of American capitalism.

But that, in short, is the job description for Brian Deese, a not-quite graduate of Yale Law School who had never set foot in an automotive assembly plant until he took on his nearly unseen role in remaking the American automotive industry.

Nor, for that matter, had he given much thought to what ailed an industry that had been in decline ever since he was born. A bit laconic and looking every bit the just-out-of-graduate-school student adjusting to life in the West Wing — “he’s got this beard that appears and disappears,” says Steven Rattner, one of the leaders of President Obama’s automotive task force — Mr. Deese was thrown into the auto industry’s maelstrom as soon the election-night parties ended.

“There was a time between Nov. 4 and mid-February when I was the only full-time member of the auto task force,” Mr. Deese, a special assistant to the president for economic policy, acknowledged recently as he hurried between his desk at the White House and the Treasury building next door. “It was a little scary.”

Ed Morrissey comments:

Scary?  Well, yes, and not just for Mr. Deese, whose executive experience actually is less than Obama’s.  He’s never run any business, let alone worked in the auto industry.  He joined the Hillary Clinton campaign by taking a hiatus from law school, which he began after working as an assistant to Gene Sperling, now an advisor to Tim Geithner.  His entire resume consists of campaign work.

Perhaps Deese will do a good job, but I’m not terribly sanguine about the prospects of GM prospering under the guidance of someone who hasn’t ever met a payroll or sold a car.  A President who took his own job seriously would never have appointed a second-tier adviser to this position. A national media who took their jobs seriously wouldn’t let him get away with it, and don’t count this NYT piece in their favor.  They give a glowing report to this political-hackery appointment.

Heck of a job, Deesie!

Nice Deb has reactions from around the blogosphere here. Here’s one from the Heritage Foundation:

Will the new majority owner of General Motors — the United States Government — take an active role in managing the firm as it struggles for viability? In a statement earlier today, President Obama insisted that the government wouldn’t impose it’s own political agenda on GM.

“What we are not doing, what I have no interest in doing, is running GM,” he declared. Calling the government a “reluctant shareholder”, he declared that “GM will be run by a private board of directors and management team with a track record in American manufacturing that reflects a commitment to innovation and quality…They and not the government will call the shots and make the decisions about how to turn this company around… When a difficult decision has to be made like where to open a new plant or what type of new car to make, the new GM, not the US government will make that decision”.

This sounds reassuring, but in fact this non-interference pledge was broken even before he started speaking, as the White House was already trumpeting a pledge extracted from GM to “build a new small car in an idled UAW factory”, furthering the President’s environmental goals as well as pleasing his labor allies.

I think a law student/Hillary campaign lackey is the best candidate available. He’s a Democrat, at least, so you know you’re getting superior economic reasoning power. And GM just asked for another 30 billion, presumably to pay for their union member pensions and benefits. What do you expect when the President and Democrat Congress are running trillion-dollar deficits?

His Supreme Court nominee has similar qualifications. She’s Hispanic and female – female and Hispanic. And she thinks her sex and race will make her a better judge than white male candidates. The best and brightest!

News

CRISIS! British politicians caught abusing expense accounts

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I remember when Stephen Harper took over from the corrupt left-wing Liberal party in Canada, the first thing he did was to pass the Federal Accountability Act, which requires all expense claims to posted on government web sites for the public to see. Conservative MPs could be seen having business meetings at Subway, while Liberals bilked the public for thousands for various junkets. I was so happy for the Canadians.

But the Conservative Party isn’t running things in secular socialist Britain…

Muddling Towards Maturity posted on the whole sordid story, which appeared in the National Review.

David Pryce-Jones writes:

It turns out that the Blair-Brown Labour government could not bring itself to raise salaries for MPs, but instead set up “the system” of allowances that were privileged and kept secret. An MP could claim thousands of pounds more or less on his own say-so, with shaky receipts for dubious expenditure, and the result is that some have built property portfolios worth a million pounds or more.

…Supervising this milking of “the system” was Michael Martin, the Speaker. In the early days of Tony Blair, this man was press-ganged into a job for which he was unfit. An old hardline socialist and trade-union man, he saw himself as defender of entitlements rather than liberty and proper government. He put in outrageous claims for himself and his wife. He did his very best to suppress information about the embezzling and spivery going on under him, in the classic manner of a trade unionist getting whatever he could for his comrades.

READ. THE. WHOLE. THING.

And Muddling also linked to this updated story in the New York Post, entitled “The Mother of All British Scandals”.

…A government minister, one of the richest men in the House of Commons, claimed $150,000 from the taxpayer to finance the mortgage on a “second home.” (He already had seven.) A leading Tory repaired the moat around his stately home on expenses.

Sometimes, the claims were trivial and comically embarrassing: tampons, diapers, the repair of leaky pipes, ice-cube trays ($2.50), hair straighteners ($150) and Scotch eggs ($1.25). Taxpayers unknowingly rented two pornographic movies for the husband of another Cabinet minister. A Tory spokesman on “skills and education” hired an electrician to change his light bulbs. (Cost to the taxpayer? About $225.)

The worst claims bordered on the fraudulent — and some stepped over that border. One MP claimed mortgage-interest payments of about $17,000 on a house that had no mortgage. Another took $55,000 in expenses on a necessary “second home” near Parliament, when his primary home was only a few hundred yards away.

Many MPs “flipped” — i.e., changed their homes from primary to secondary in order to receive second-home allowances. One MP flipped three times and got more than $150,000 of public money.

…Prime Minister Gordon Brown claimed $8,000 to pay for his brother to clean his London apartment. My favorite example, though, is the case of Sinn Fein MPs from Northern Ireland who claimed about $750,000 in expenses to attend a Parliament that they refuse to attend on principle.

This is absolutely amazing. Read the whole thing!

Ed West has more on this story. First of all, the British government hands out taxpayer money to lobbying firms, in order to be lobbied for policies they really want to enact anyway. And here, he talks more about solutions to the problem of government entitlements.