A great read on the parallels between the systematic bailout responses to the financial crises in the US and Europe. Where Europe has Greece, etc., we have AIG, the auto companies, and Fannie/Freddie - all unaffordable to taxpayers who are footing the bill under the false pretense that their/our government will somehow be able to tax and spend their way back to solvency.
Simply put - this course is unsustainable and work against the essential goal to restore confidence to private sector investors and employers. Uncle Sam should not be in the business of creating jobs - that’s the role of the free market and private sector.
Our job in Washington needs to be to create real reform that improves incentives and inspires confidence, and to get government out of the way of the private sector’s ability to create jobs and work towards a real economic recovery. | Having overdrawn its own credit to save the global private sector, Western governments now are losing the confidence of their own lenders. It started with the Greeks, but the Spanish and Portuguese are considered bets for default, etc. |
This is a misleading narrative in one respect. Whatever the private sector’s role in helping to trigger the timing of the government credit crisis, it was coming anyway, thanks to the developed world’s unaffordable welfare states. |
So far, though, we aren’t getting a good bailout from Europe, as in a realistic sharing of the pain of their common mistake between the Greeks (and perhaps others) and their lenders. Instead, European taxpayer money is being thrown on the fire in a pretense that insolvent governments will somehow be willing to raise taxes and cut spending enough to pay back every dime. |
| Nobody believes this: Nobody doubts some kind of debt restructuring (read: default) is ahead. |
But now we come to the binary debate between the pain caucus and the free-lunchism of those who believe governments have great scope left to borrow and borrow, stimulate and stimulate. Both are lousy alternatives. Neither is sustainable; both work against the essential goal here, to restore confidence to private sector investors and employers. |
All this applies to the U.S. too, fig-leafed by the ease with which Washington currently can finance its deficits in a world where investors are seeking the relative safety of the dollar. That won’t last. Right now, America seems poised somewhere along the transition from debt deflation to stagflation, which historians may one day collectively call the “Obama Depression.” |
To change our fate, the best possible solution is real reform that improves incentives and inspires confidence—worlds different from today’s sterile debate about whether a conspicuous short-term deficit encourages or inhibits recovery. Fed Governor Kevin Warsh put it nicely in a speech in Atlanta this week, when he cited veteran Washington economist Charles Schulze to the effect that “it is not the wolf at the door but the termites in the walls that require attention.” |
On the 3 month anniversary of the passage of Obamacare, the reality of its broken promises are setting in, and it’s no coincidence that Obama’s big business allies are now coming out echoing what we’ve been stressing all along: Obama’s policies are bad for business and bad for job creation.
Throwing money at every problem is not a new solution, and certainly isn’t the “change” Americans were promised.
The chairman of the Business Roundtable, an association of top corporate executives that has been President Obama’s closest ally in the business community, accused the president and Democratic lawmakers Tuesday of creating an “increasingly hostile environment for investment and job creation.”
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Ivan G. Seidenberg, chief executive of Verizon Communications, said that Democrats in Washington are pursuing tax increases, policy changes and regulatory actions that together threaten to dampen economic growth and “harm our ability . . . to grow private-sector jobs in the U.S.”
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“In our judgment, we have reached a point where the negative effects of these policies are simply too significant to ignore,” Seidenberg said in a lunchtime speech to the Economic Club of Washington. “By reaching into virtually every sector of economic life, government is injecting uncertainty into the marketplace and making it harder to raise capital and create new businesses.”
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The final straw, said Roundtable president John Castellani, was the introduction of two pieces of legislation, now pending in Congress, that the group views as particularly bad for business. One, a provision of the administration’s financial regulation overhaul, would make it easier for shareholders to nominate corporate board members. The other would raise taxes on multinational corporations. The rhetoric accompanying the tax proposals has been particularly harsh, Castellani said, with Democrats vowing to campaign in this fall’s midterm elections on a platform of punishing companies that move jobs overseas.
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“We believe the cumulative effect of these proposals will help defeat the objectives we all share — reducing unemployment, improving the competitiveness of U.S. companies and creating an environment that fosters long-term economic growth,” Seidenberg wrote in a cover letter for the document, titled “Policy Burdens Inhibiting Economic Growth.”
Read more at www.washingtonpost.com |
Government take over of health care.
Check.
Blow the deficit up by $1.5 trillion (FY2011).
Check.
Burden our children with a $13 trillion national debt.
Check.
Cover your Democrat rear by proposing ‘cuts’ now?? House Democrats are scrambling to jumpstart a long-stalled effort to
trim the federal budget, spurred by deficit worries that have left them
unable to push much of their agenda. |
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said during a Wednesday morning meeting with committee chairmen that he and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) intended to hold them to a Friday deadline to submit detailed lists of duplicative and wasteful programs that can be eliminated from the $3 trillion budget.
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| “You need to produce something on this,” Hoyer said, according to a person in the room. “You all need to find some programs to cut.”Read more at thehill.com |
This is a must read article that debunks each liberal argument for the need to pass Obamacare, and goes to show that attaining the supposed “success” of a giant healthcare overhaul trumps good governance - which is possible through smaller, more reasonable, bipartisan measures that have widespread support.
The kicker here is that Democrats are under the misguided impression that passing Obamacare is the politically expedient move, however, as this article explains, it spells bad news for Dems, and bad news for the American people. Contrary to all the theories, Democrats will not benefit from ObamaCare. |
What has been driving the machine these past few painful months is the fantastical (at this point) Democratic belief that somewhere at the end of “comprehensive” health care rests good politics. The left in particular is pushing these Democrats-must-pass-health-care-for-their-own-political-good arguments, and clearly some of President Obama’s advisers buy it. In the interest of sanity, let’s go through the theories. |
Put another way, Democrats will prove to voters how capable they are by passing a bill that most voters—including 62% of independents—hate. Curious. This theory also assumes Americans will confuse Cornhusker kickbacks, Christmas Eve votes, and a desperate reconciliation process with “governance.” Curiouser. Most curious is that this theory does not allow for Democrats to prove their leadership by dropping ObamaCare and instead passing measures that are popular with the public and have bipartisan support. Read more at online.wsj.com |
Since Democrats took control of Congress in January 2007, they have raised the debt limit five times and the national debt has increased by $3.69 trillion (42.5%).
As my constituents are forced to tighten their belts financially, Democrats today look to loosen our government’s again to the tune of $6,000 per person. The debt is projected to reach 69% of our GDP in FY11, a level the U.S. hasn’t seen since the end of World War II. Even countries in the EU are required to keep their debt levels below 60% of GDP. This spells higher interest rates and inflation, weakening of the dollar, and the U.S. risking its AAA sovereign credit rating. | Facing a politically excruciating vote, House Democratic leaders are counting on new budget deficit curbs to help smooth the way for a bill allowing the government to go $1.9 trillion deeper into debt over the next year - or about $6,000 more for every U.S. resident.
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| Already, the accumulated debt amounts to $40,000 per person. And the debt is increasingly held by foreign nations such as China.
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| To ease its passage, Democrats attached tougher budget rules designed to curb a spiraling upward annual deficit - projected by Mr. Obama to hit a record $1.56 trillion for the budget year ending Sept. 30. |
| If the rules are broken, the White House budget office would force automatic cuts to programs like Medicare, farm subsidies and veterans’ pensions. |
| Mr. Obama’s budget projects the government’s debt doubling to $26 trillion over the next decade. It offers few solutions for seriously closing the gap other than promising to appoint a bipartisan commission to come up with a plan to address the problem. Read more at www.cbsnews.com |
If you’d told me a month ago that a Republican running against
President Obama’s health care plan would win Ted Kennedy’s former
Senate seat, I’d have said you were crazy.
If the Obama health care bill has sparked such a massive backlash in
Massachusetts, I can’t imagine what Democrats in red and purple
districts are hearing back home. Democrats should take the hint and stop
pushing their unpopular plan on the American people. Massachusetts voters tell Democrats to shelve ObamaCare. |
The resounding five-point victory in one of America’s most liberal states is an upset heard ’round Washington—and one that ought to force Democrats to rethink their entire agenda, national health care in particular. Despite an 11th-hour intervention by President Obama in a state he carried with ease only 14 months ago, state Attorney General Martha Coakley was routed even in such unlikely tea-party outposts as Andover (58%) and amid a large turnout for a midwinter special election. |
Yesterday’s vote wasn’t a repudiation of Mr. Obama’s Presidency, or at least it needn’t be. The President remains more popular than his policies, and voters want him to succeed. But they are also telling him he needs to steer a more moderate, less partisan course, returning to the pragmatism and comity that shaped his political rise but have vanished in his first, squandered year. Read more at online.wsj.com |
Yesterday, after scrambling to close up shop in the House for the year to catch her flight to Copenhagen, Speaker Pelosi looked toward 2010 as the time to finally address our soaring deficit and job creation. However, given the Obama/Pelosi/Reid track record thus far, we can only imagine this to mean more taxes and more spending.
Pelosi attests to this, “We did it then; and we will do it again.” | Sounding a more centrist note, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday there is a “fierce determination” to reduce the deficit |
Pelosi’s comments Wednesday came as the House rushed through a final stretch of back-to-back year-end bills in hopes of going home for Christmas. |
Most striking were the increased tensions over deficit reduction that seemed to trip up the speaker herself. Democrats only narrowly won approval of an estimated $290 billion increase in the Treasury’s borrowing authority to avoid the threat of default in January. And then hours later, there was a backlash from some of her own freshmen against an estimated $150 billion jobs creation bill that Pelosi had championed but that barely survived on a 217-212 vote. |
“We’ve been here before,” Pelosi said. “We had to make very difficult decisions — and, as you know, we paid a political price for it — but we had to do it. … We did it then; and we will do it again.” Read more at dyn.politico.com |
With two-thirds of the House cosponsoring Dr. Paul’s H.R. 1207, my Senate colleagues have a great opportunity here to gain some traction for the movement to audit the Fed. The Senate Banking Committee is poised to clear Mr. Bernanke’s nomination on Thursday, sending it to the full Senate for a vote. Several lawmakers plan to use the proceedings to gain momentum for a bill that aims to subject the Fed’s monetary-policy making to congressional audits. |
The measure, crafted by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), mirrors one written by Rep. Ron Paul (R., Texas) that was included in the House’s overhaul of financial-industry regulations passed last week. |
“It would surprise me if very many people would be willing, in public, to vote against the audit,” Mr. DeMint said. “Americans don’t trust the Federal Reserve,” he said. It has expanded its “mission well beyond anything that was ever discussed.” |
But the audit legislation has drawn backers from across the political spectrum, including Mr. Sanders — among the most liberal lawmakers in Washington — and conservatives such as Messrs. Paul and DeMint. Read more at online.wsj.com |
There is nothing in the healthcare bills thus far that reward consumers for staying healthy or consuming less healthcare. People taking financial ownership of their well-being means more efficient spending by both consumers and healthcare providers. The health-care bills moving through Congress contain little to reward consumers for lowering their health costs, an omission prompting some lawmakers to press for more such incentives. |
There are virtually no provisions in the Senate or House health bills that directly reward consumers for choosing cost-efficient care or lowering their medical costs through healthy behavior. Instead, the White House and top Democrats who drafted the health bills focused on giving doctors, hospitals and other health-care providers incentives for reducing unnecessary treatments. |
The idea of giving consumers more “skin in the game” when it comes to health costs has long been popular in some academic circles, especially among those who believe market forces can help solve the U.S. health-spending problem. |
“Most Americans don’t get a chance to benefit when they shop wisely,” he said. “That’s something that we ought to change, and it’s certainly not partisan.” Read more at online.wsj.com |
We have consistently stood strong against irresponsible, expensive Democratic bills this year, and will continue to do so if they try to piggyback more pieces of their political agenda onto this important defense appropriations bill. Using defense funding as a means to force through unpopular legislation is politics at its worst. Emboldened House Republicans who refrained from criticizing President
Barack Obama earlier this year have unanimously rejected Democratic
bills on spending, taxes and financial regulatory reform in December. |
On Friday, the House passed a regulatory reform bill, 223-202, with 27 Democrats voting no. The House also passed an omnibus measure, 221-202, with 28 Democrats rejecting it. And earlier this month, an estate tax cut extender cleared 225-200, with 26 Democrats defecting. Not one Republican backed any of the measures, which are all supported by the White House.
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The House GOP’s unity has complicated a possible Democratic strategy to attach language on increasing the national debt limit to the politically popular defense-spending bill.
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On Monday, 174 House Republicans sent a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) vowing to oppose the spending measure if the debt increase were attached to it.
Read more at thehill.com |
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