The Financial Advice of Experts, Then and Now

By Alan Caruba

“I see nothing in the present situation that is either menacing or warrants pessimism…I have every confidence that there will be a revival of activity in the spring, and that during the coming year, the country will make steady progress.” That’s what William Mellon, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, had to say on December 31, 1929. The Great Depression would last until 1941 when the U.S. entered World War Two.

“Could we have a crash a la 1929? The flat answer is no.” So said Dr. Pierre A. Rinfret, a noted economist, writing in Time magazine on October 5, 1987 and, on October 19, 1987—instantly dubbed “Black Monday”—the Dow Jones average plunged 508 points.

Despite the pronouncements of Presidents and pundits, it was the December 30, 1929 edition of Variety, a newspaper for the entertainment industry, that got it right. The day after the crash its headline read, “Wall Street Lays an Egg.”

All through history, the opinions of “experts” have been subject to revision and derision. The Internet has simply multiplied our access to a multitude of opinions. It behooves us all to pick our experts very carefully. A good track record is always a good sign, along with a healthy measure of common sense.

As the economies of the U.S. and several European nations totter on default it is essential to draw on lessons from the past. The most obvious lesson is that the governments of the U.S. and the Europeans have been spending far more than they can tax or borrow.

All have spent decades since the 1980s wasting billions on “alternative” sources of energy in the name of global warming or climate change. All have stayed busy before and since the end of World War Two consolidating power in the U.S. federal government and more recently in the European Union.

Herbert Hoover on whose watch Wall Street crashed in 1929 generally gets the blame, but five years earlier in an address to the annual meeting of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Hoover said, “The test of our whole economic and social system is its capacity to cure its own abuses,” warning that, “If we are to be wholly dependent upon government to cure these abuses, we shall by this very method have created an enlarged and deadening abuse through the extension of bureaucracy and the clumsy and incapable handling of delicate economic forces.”

“The clumsy and incapable handling of delicate economic forces.” Spoken nearly 90 years ago!

What a perfect phrase to describe what the nation has been passing through as Congress during the last days of the Bush administration and the passed two and a half years of the Obama administration has demonstrated.

The financial crisis of late 2008 was the result of government “entities”, Fannie Mae, created in 1938, and Freddie Mac, created in 1970, both intended to stimulate the housing market by securing the loans made by banks for the purpose of giving everyone, including those who could least afford it, the opportunity to own a house. By the time the crisis hit, they jointly owned more than 50% of all U.S. mortgages.

The failure of communism in the former Soviet Union (1922-1991) should be proof enough that government ownership of property and the means of production is one of the all-time bad ideas of the last century. A modified version exists in China with other versions existing from North Korea to Cuba. All depend on oppression and coercion.

The irony, of course, is that the Great Depression was extended by Hoover’s successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who believed that expanding the role of government was the best way to bring the Depression to an end. Instead, the Depression, experienced as well by European nations in the wake of World War One, gave rise to totalitarian governments and World War Two.

There is a reason that President Obama’s approval ratings, along with those of Congress, are at record lows. Most astonishing is the fact that, when Obama took office, the Democrats controlled both houses of the legislature, the Senate and the House. Even more astonishing, Obama pursued the same failed programs of FDR, most famously sponsoring a multi-billion dollar “stimulus” bill, along with taking over General Motors and Chrysler, ginning up a Cash-4-Clunkers program, and discovering belatedly that there were few “shovel ready” infrastructure projects.

By 2010, the voters returned political power in the House of Representatives to the Republican Party, largely on the basis on newly minted “Tea Party” candidates. Obama’s Congress had rejected his proposed budget and the nation has been operating with “continuing resolutions” to fund its activities and a massive battle over raising the debt ceiling for the same purpose. A farcical congressional “super committee” has been told to cut a trillion and a half dollars out of government spending.

The economic advisers that Obama brought into the White House have all departed with the exception of the Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner. The various government departments continue to spend millions authorized by the Congress every week or engage in dubious “loan guarantees” which give every indication of being a series of Solyndra scandals.

Despite the increasingly absurd assertions of the President, it’s not just corporations, large and small, making decisions about the current and near-term future of the economy. It is the vast body of Americans who are deciding what to purchase, whether to expand their business by hiring or not, whether to invest in stocks or gold, and thousands of individual decisions by which the real economy is shaped.

It is their decisions that determine how long the recession lasts, not the official pronouncements about when the last one “ended” or a new one begins. Economists of a conservative point of view know what must be done and should be listened to, but they are not advising this President, nor guiding the government’s decisions.

In the midst of this latest of many financial crisises at home and abroad, the campaign for the next presidential election has begun. Much depends on who John Q. Public elects to the office. Much depends on the long, hard slog to reduce the size and grasp of the federal government.

Will the wisdom of “the crowd” prevail over the present “experts” affecting the economy?

Stay tuned.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → The Financial Advice of Experts, Then and Now

President Cliche

By Alan Caruba

“Peace is more than just the absence of war.”

“So let there be no doubt…”

“We stand at a crossroads of history.”

“There is no excuse for inaction.”

Fewer people at home and around the world are paying any attention when Barack Obama speaks. He has become President Cliché. We were all told what a great speech-maker he was and now nobody wants to listen anymore.

Ironically, in his speech to the United Nations on Wednesday, September 21, he actually said some interesting things. Too bad none of the other leaders of nations care what he has to say. At home, his popularity and approval ratings in the polls continue to plummet to new depths and to set new records for the lack thereof.

In truth, this is not good for the world or the nation. The job of President is all about leadership coupled to effective policies that address problems. In fairness, Obama arrived in the Oval Office with some of the worst problems any president has faced in the modern era. Like his predecessor, on whom he blamed everything, he continued to throw money at the financial crisis, managing to run up the nation’s debt to a historic level. Obama's economic advisors dusted off the failed policies of the New Deal and tried again. They have not worked.

The problems not only did not go away, they got worse.

The Middle East has seen the “Arab spring” in which a number of dictators were overthrown and that seems hopeful except for the fact that radical Islam is the solution that many of those same nations are likely to embrace. It doesn’t help that the U.S. President has famously demonstrated a “tilt” toward Islam as it continues to foment conflict.

The United Nations speech was a long wish list, pasted together with a lot of platitudes about how the UN has played a role in warding off World War Three. That was largely avoided because the U.S. has a couple of warehouses full of nuclear weapons and had maintained the greatest military the world had ever seen. We’re still here. The Soviet Union isn’t. Most U.S. presidents since the end of World War Two wanted to see the world abandon nuclear weapons. It didn’t. The club just kept getting bigger with China, North Korea, Pakistan, and India. Now Iran wants them as well.

The Soviet leaders weren't crazy. The Iranian ayatollahs and mullahs are.

Obama cited the UN founding Charter that called on nations to “unite our strength to maintain international peace and security.” In reality, it has always been the United States who did the heavy lifting. We fought the North Koreans and Chinese to protect South Korea. We sent arms to Israel when it was repeatedly attacked. We detoured into Vietnam and took a shellacking. After 9/11 we drove the Taliban and al Qaeda out of Afghanistan and we organized allies to remove Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein. Most recently, we got NATO to put an end to Gaddaffi’s reign of terror.

The problem Obama has discovered is that the United Nations is composed of many of the worst dictatorships and oppressive regimes on Earth. It is an utterly corrupt institution. It will not prevent World War Three if the U.S. leaves and a large number of Americans want us to leave.

“Peace is hard. Peace is hard. Progress can be reversed. Prosperity comes slowly. Societies can split apart.” Aside from the yawning banality of this pronouncement, the President’s learning curve about the reality of life on planet Earth has been a tough one. Still, he did condemn Syria’s dictator who has been killing that nation’s people, but could not resist showing off his Islamic credentials by saying many of the victims occurred "during the holy time of Ramadan.”

Obama has discovered what presidents since the days of Harry Truman have discovered. That Palestine is not a nation and the Palestinians are a horrid group of people who refuse to live in peace with Israel. “The Palestinian people deserve a state of their own,” said the President. Guess what? The Israelis agree, but cannot get their Mamoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority to actually agree that Israel has a right to exist. Or Hamas to stop lobbing rockets into southern Israel.

In case anyone was actually listening, Obama repeated what every prior President has said, “America’s commitment to Israel’s security is unshakeable. Our friendship with Israel is deep and enduring”. After spending the last two and a half years demonstrating his contempt for Israel, this comes as a real surprise and further proof that Obama will say anything to get reelected.

And then he ruined it all by saying, “To preserve our planet, we must not put off action that climate change demands. We have to tap the power of science to save those resources that are scarce. And together we must continue our work to build on the progress made in Copenhagen and Cancun.”

The major fuels of the modern world are not scarce. We live above an ocean of oil. There is enough coal in America alone to keep the lights on here for centuries. Tapping the sun and wind has proved to be a huge waste of money for two of the least productive ways to provide energy. Copenhagen and Cancun, the site of two UN climate change conferences were total failures.

President Cliché closed out saying—again—“Peace is hard, but we know it is possible. So, together, let us be resolved to see that it is defined by our hopes and not our fears.”

Our fears are what sustain peace. It is why every nation is armed to the teeth.

Obama is a national embarrassment. And he wants four more years in office.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → President Cliche

A Week of Horrid Headlines

By Alan Caruba

Journalism is often called “History written in a hurry.” If so, last week’s headlines from the front page of The Wall Street Journal reflected a period of our current history that will likely have future historians wondering how we made it through these times without completely losing our minds.

If fear sells newspapers, drives television news ratings, gets bad laws passed, and is useful for selling all manner of other goods and services, than last week must have been very good for business.

The weekend edition, Saturday/Sunday, September 3-4, began with “Job Growth Grinds to a Halt.” The sub-headline was “Lack of Hiring in August Roils Financial Markets; Gloom Ratchets Up Pressure on Obama.” The President would have to wait until the following Thursday to roll out his “Jobs” bill and to tell a joint session of Congress, “Pass this bill now!”

Reluctant to admit its role in the housing mortgage crisis that broke in late 2008 during the political campaign and largely due to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—both of whom own 50% of U.S. mortgages—the next article on page one was “U.S. Sues Big Banks Over Home Mortgages.”

Monday was Labor Day so there was no WSJ edition, but on Tuesday, September 6, the lead headline was “Europe Signals Global Gloom” with a sub-headline, “World Markets Fall as Continent’s Debt Crisis Fuels Worries of Lengthy Slowdown.” It reminded me of the cliché that, when the U.S. sneezes, the rest of the world gets pneumonia.” Under the lead story was a headline, “Voter Discontent Deepens Ahead of Obama Jobs Plan.”

By Wednesday, September 7, the headline was “Euro Woes Stir Currency Fears” with a sub-headline, “Older Americans Held Hostage by Mortgages.”

On Thursday, September 8, the headline was “Fed Prepares to Act” with a sub-headline, “Officials Consider Unusual Steps to Avert an Economic Stall.” The nation has been stalled since 2008 when gobs of taxpayer money was used to bailout banks, an insurance company, and two major auto manufacturers. Meanwhile, an accompanying headline said, “U.S. Hits Builders with Pay Probe” about a Labor Department investigation “of the top companies in home building, hitting them with a broad demand for records that has led to complaints of regulatory overreach.” You think?

By Friday, following Obama’s speech, the lead headline was “Obama’s Bid to Spur Growth." The sub-headline was “President Asks Congress for $447 Billion in Cuts, Spending; Tepid GOP Response.” With a $14 trillion national debt, I’d be tepid, too.

The proposed bill would be paid for with tax increases that would kick in after the next election in 2012. They are the same increases a Democrat-controlled Congress refused to authorize!

The Saturday weekend edition, led off with “Banker’s Exit Rattles Markets” and a sub-headline, “In Europe, Top ECB Economist Resigns, Seen as Policy Protest; Dow Industrials Fall 303.68 points.”

Obama speaks. The Dow tanks. Coincidence? I think not.

The other lead article headline was “Treasury Weighs New Tax Scheme.” It began “Treasury floats the notion of eliminating some, but not all taxes on overseas profits of U.S. multinational companies…”

Thus, the week’s WSJ headlines were a microcosm of the fears defining the economies of the U.S. and European nations whose socialist programs and massive over-spending had landed all of them in hot water.

We expect and we want government to exercise prudence in the management of public funds, but successive administrations and congresses did not, electing always to expand government. Let's hope the Fed does not want to print more money. It will cause a collapse of confidence.

It’s September 2011. Welcome to the 1930s.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → A Week of Horrid Headlines

The More Obama Speaks...

By Alan Caruba

The most interesting thing happening in the world of politics and finance today is the way Barack Hussein Obama continues to lose traction every time he gives a speech.

After the “jobs” speech, Wall Street dropped three hundred points when the market opened the following morning.

When longtime, staunch supporters of Obama such as MSNBC’s Chris Matthews look and sound betrayed, it is clear that even Obama’s liberal base is in disarray. Matthews, presumably a seasoned political observer, had poured all his faith into Obama, believed in hope and change, and Obama only delivered a huge national debt, the first downgrade of the nation’s triple-A credit rating, massive unemployment, and the sad repetition of failed solutions.

Conservative commentators were openly disdainful of Obama’s use of a joint session of Congress as a stage for a purely political speech, but it was the public as always that had the last word.

Obama’s first speech to a joint session of Congress in February 2009 garnered 52.4 million viewers. By January 2010, the State of the Union speech drew 48 million and the 2011 SOTU attracted only 42.8 million.

His “jobs” speech was watched by 31.5 million. On the East Coast it was 7 PM, but in California it was 4 PM. Maybe it was just the time difference? Or maybe people have decided that listening to Barack Hussein Obama is just a great waste of time, no matter what the hour may be.

I know that the conventional political wisdom is that Obama has 14 months to go and that he’s a great campaigner, but to my eye his audiences following the “jobs” speech were composed mostly of union members or the very young.

Among the military, whenever he addresses them, the silence is palpable. Recall the sullen response he got at West Point when he announced his Afghanistan strategy, if one can even call it that.

There is a hard core of perhaps 20% who love Obama to the exclusion of his record of failure to focus on the economy. Others, though, from the black and Hispanic base are beginning to look for the exit. The Black Caucus is unhappy. Hispanics are unimpressed.

The race card is being played. Class warfare is being encouraged. These are the tools of a demagogue.

Obama, though, is convinced that if he just talks enough he can change opinion; thinks he is the master salesman, the ultimate campaigner. What he does not see, nor sense, is the derision with which his message is being received.

The public has had two and a half years to take his measure and while he cannot be fired until November 2012 and will not leave until January 2013, he is pure poison to any hope of economic recovery. He has the reverse Midis touch; whatever he touches turns to poop.

It was almost comical that the solar panel company he touted as the green jobs wave the future, Solyndra, received millions from the government, filed bankruptcy, and got a visit from the FBI that seized its records and computers. When it comes to picking winners and losers, Obama always manages pick a loser and stick the public with the bill.

Meanwhile his administration seeks to block Boeing from creating new jobs and raids Gibson guitars for using the same wood as every other guitar-maker in the nation. His administration shipped guns to the drug cartels in Mexico for reasons beyond comprehension. His Attorney General pleads ignorance.

His rhythmic phrase, “Pass this bill”, repeated seventeen times in the course of his speech to Congress ignored the fact that there literally is no bill. Out on the campaign trail a day or so later he was still saying it.

Obama is intoxicated with the sound of his voice, his staccato delivery, his hand gestures, and all the other elements of oratory upon which he has depended for his rise to the top. He just hasn’t figured out that it is not what you say, nor how you say it, that matters. What matters is the result of his policies. They don’t work.

Obama matters less and less in national affairs except for the destruction he and his minions continue to wreak upon a nation struggling to come back from a major financial crisis, fearful of his flawed judgment, not hiring, not spending, and waiting impatiently for November 2012 to arrive.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → The More Obama Speaks...

The Green Jobs, Clean Energy Scam

By Alan Caruba

There will probably never be a definitive calculation of how much money the United States (and other nations) has wasted on Green programs, litigation, grants, research, and projects such as those involving “renewable” or "clean" energy. It will surely add up to several trillion because it has been going on for a very long time through administrations reaching back to Jimmy Carter’s and Richard Nixon’s.

A recent article in Washington Examiner.com revealed the amount of money taxpayers pay out to Green organizations that sue the EPA and other government agencies. In point of fact the EPA encourages such law suits in order to use the court system to affirm regulatory efforts that might otherwise by stopped by Congress.

As this is being written, there are several pieces of proposed legislation in Congress to keep the EPA from utterly and completely destroying the economy and the ability to provide Americans with electricity.

Following an request from Republican Sens. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma and David Vitter of Louisiana, the Government Accountability Office undertook an investigation regarding the cost of environmental litigation and while it proved daunting, the GAO reported that “the Department of Justice spent at least $43 million from 1998 to 2010 defending the Environmental Protection Agency in court, while the Department of Treasury paid about $14.2 million from 2003 through 2010 to successful plaintiffs for attorney’s’ fees and associated costs. The EPA paid about $1.4 million from 2006 and 2010 to plaintiffs”

Earlier, in a special report, the Washington Examiner noted that “the major players in the environmental movement are lavishly funded by private contributions from individuals and foundations. And many of them also receive hundreds of millions more dollars in government grants and contracts, so it’s not as if these groups are unable to pay their legal legions out of their own coffers.”

But no, the taxpayers are stuck with the bill.

The cost of Green “solutions” to non-existant environmental problems is proving particularly evident as reports reveal that “renewable energy” companies rapidly fail when federal subsidies are ended or spent. A case in point was the Senate vote in June to end billions of dollars in subsidites for the U.S. ethanol industry.

Ethanol, also known as “moonshine” had been ordered by the government to be added to every gallon of gasoline consumers use despite the fact that it produces less energy, reducing mileage, and adds to the cost at the pump. It was, of course, another Green lie about reducing “greenhouse gas emissions” said to be the source of a “global warming” that was not occurring. Ethanol producers have been closing their doors in droves now that the tap has been shut off. In a world afloat on billions of barrels of oil, the need for ethanol never existed.

In a similar fashion U.S. manufacturers of solar panels are also closing their doors, sustained initially by U.S. subsidies and loan guarantees. The latest is Solyndra, a California firm that just declared bankruptcy.

President Obama had touted Solyndra as a shining example of Green jobs and technology, offering $535 million in loan guarantees. China, however, has captured much of the market for solar panels. Touted as a way to help reduce electricity costs, left unsaid is that they are expansive to purchase and install. The average homeowner would have to wait ten or twenty years to amortise their investment.

Without similar subsidies and mandates, the wind power industry would rapidly collapse as well.

The impact of Green initiatives and mandates has been particularly onerous at the state level. As I noted in an earlier commentary, “In July, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie pulled out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a consortium that would have required renewable energy use for the provision of electricity.

In Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Corbett has been aggressively de-emphasizing renewable energy use and energy conservation. He has shut down the state department of environmental protection’s office of energy and technology development.

The President has been touting Green jobs since he took office and, if he does so in the course of his speech to a joint session of Congress, you will know that this Big Green Lie is still part of his continuing failure to address the real causes of unemployment in America, taxation, regulation, and a general assault on the energy industry and others..

Word is that Obama still hasn’t installed solar panels on the roof of the White House despite promises to do so. The last President to do that was Jimmy Carter and they were removed by President Reagan.

Green Lies have cost Americans trillions of dollars since the environmental movement began in earnest in the 1970s.

This is written prior to President Obama’s address, but if you hear him speak of “Green jobs” or “clean energy” or “renewable energy”, feel free to turn the channel to anything else because this is the most duplicitous and incompetent President to ever hold the office.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → The Green Jobs, Clean Energy Scam

McConnell Takes Obama to the Woodshed

By Alan Caruba

On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell (R-KY) gave a response, in advance, to President Obama’s Thursday speech regarding the state of the economy.

“We’ve tried the President’s approach. It’s failed.”

I doubt that Sen. McConnell’s speech received much notice by the mainstream media, but it was as succinct an analysis of why everything the President has done regarding the economy has failed. Reportedly, Obama wants to throw more billions at “recovery.”

Much like the man caught in bed by his wife with someone else, Obama’s approach is “Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?”

Obama has a very big problem now. Even those who voted for him have removed their rose-colored glasses and concluded that they have mortgaged the present and their future to someone who has no idea how to fix that future. He will do what he has always done. He will blame someone or something else. The Bush administration. A Japanese earthquake. Hurricanes. Bad luck. And this time around, Congress.

Sen. McConnell is no silver-tongued orator. He’s not flashy or charismatic. He is, however, the quintessential conservative politician. In his address on the Senate floor he said, “I don’t think any one of us is under any illusion that the American people were particularly eager to see us come back.” That is refreshing candor.

“After two and a half years of being told that Washington had the answer to everything from the high costs of health care to high unemployment, people have every reason to be skeptical.” If Americans are skeptical of a sharply divided, highly partisan Congress, they are even more skeptical of the President.

“For more than two and a half years, under this administration, Americans have been hearing about the wonders that government spending would do for our economy, and about the dangerous consequences of failing to apply ‘bold’ solutions to big problems.”

Sen. McConnell paused and asked, “And what’s it gotten them?”

One thing Americans know about the Obama “Stimulus” is that there are 1.7 million fewer jobs in America since he signed it. “That’s not the kind of change people voted for three years ago,” said Sen. McConnell.

What, indeed, did people think they were voting for three years ago? Change? Hope? Those aren’t policies, they’re slogans.

What Americans don’t know about the Stimulus, Sen. McConnell noted, was that it is “the one of the single most expensive pieces of legislation Congress has ever approved. The interest payments alone are projected to cost an average of $100 million a day.”

“And here’s what the President told us...the Stimulus would save or create 3.5 million jobs.” As we now know, Obama’s answer to everything is more government. When his programs are criticized his answer is that it’s just politics. No, it is the failure of those programs that is obvious to anyone and everyone.

Sen. McConnell noted the ways, rather than admit failure, Obama has taken, such as agreeing to keep taxes from going up last December, but then he identified the source of our present problems. “The President is forever eager to embrace big proposals whenever government’s at the helm, but when it comes to doing the kind of things job creators really want, he’s suddenly timid. He’ll agree to a tax cut as long as it’s temporary.”

It was a long speech, but Sen. McConnell rounded it out by identifying what can and should be done. He called on the President to send Congress the three trade treaties that have been sitting on his desk for nearly three years. He called for a reform of the budget process and for a balanced budget amendment. He warned against a series of huge and costly regulatory proposals by the Environmental Protection Agency.

“We’ve tried the President’s approach. It’s failed.”

“Millions of Americans are looking for Washington not so much to do more, but for the first time in a long time, to do less—so that they can finally do what it takes to get this economy moving again.”

In the wake of the President’s speech, who are you going to believe? Him? We’ve tried that and it hasn’t worked.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → McConnell Takes Obama to the Woodshed

500 Days Until Obama Leaves Office

More about → 500 Days Until Obama Leaves Office

Obama's Jobs Speech is D.O.A.

By Alan Caruba

Not only is President Obama’s forthcoming “jobs” speech a self-inflicted embarrassment when he was told he could not deliver it to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday—the first time any President was refused the day and time of his choosing—but it is essentially D.O.A.; dead on arrival.

Every one who has had to endure the last two and a half years of Barack Hussein Obama knows he has no idea how to “create” any jobs other than government jobs or how to cut through the Gordian knot of Washington’s regulatory and taxation bureaucracy. For starters, since taking office his administration has accelerated regulations more than the entire two terms of the man he blames for his problems.

Obamacare has stalled hiring as businesses large and small wait for its repeal. Already repealed by a vote in the House of Representatives, if the November 2012 elections give the nation a Republican Senate and President, this huge burden will be removed. On September 1, Wayne Crews, a vice president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and nationally recognized authority on federal regulations, wrote a commentary in The Washington Times in which he said, “Mr. Obama’s slate of yet more regulations is beyond merely alarming in this tense environment. The Federal Register already stands at more than 54,000 pages so far this year.”

Crews especially cited the cesspool of over-regulation, the Environmental Protection Agency, for its proposed “Maximum Achievable Control Technology” pollutant control mandate for fossil-fuel utilities, for cement plants and boilers widely in hospital and factor use, for “dust” that is stirred up during normal farming, and for power-plant coal ash.

Obama just asked the insane EPA to withdrawal its proposed ozone rules that Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com says “would provide no health benefits, but cost $1 trillion per year in compliance, and kill 7.4 million jobs by 2020.”

“Far from a jobs agenda,” said Crews, “Mr. Obama advances an explicit anti-jobs program, one totaling hundreds of billions of dollars in costs and hundreds of thousands in jobs lost and jobs that can never appear. On top of an orgy of rule-making, our government, as deliberate public policy, prohibits access to safe and efficient extraction of fossil fuels on land and offshore.”

Everyone agrees that small business and entrepreneurship is the engine that actually creates new jobs. Crews noted that “Back in the early 1990s, the proportion of all regulations impacting small business stood at 14 percent of the total number of regulations. Today, 21 percent of rules impact small businesses—up three percent from 2009.”

Obama has also become well known for his advocacy of “green jobs” and, one day after Wayne Crews was lamenting the regulation explosion, Stephen Moore was writing in The Wall Street Journal that “President Obama is expected to seek another $250 billion or so in new stimulus funds next week, with plenty of money for clean energy and the creation of so-called green jobs.”

Future economists will calculate how much money the Obama administration has wasted on the fantasies of wind and solar energy, but what we know for sure is he has utilized all the powers of government to ensure that access to the fossil fuels on which ours and every other economy worldwide is based is thwarted, slowed or punished.

Moore wrote of an Obama-appointed U.S. attorney who brought criminal charges against seven oil companies for “causing the deaths of 28 migratory birds found in oil waste pits.” No such charges have ever been levied against the owners of wind farms that routinely slice and dice hundreds, if not thousands, of birds and bats.

Virtually every program the Obama administration has launched to turn around the economy has been a failure

The Center for Postsecondary and Economic Success recently pulled together data on the state of unemployment today, two years after Obamacare, two years after the “stimulus” act, two years after the bailouts of GM and Chrysler, et cetera. There are, according to the Center, 14 million Americans unemployed and still actively looking for work. There are five unemployed workers for every job-opening and, in August, NO NEW JOBS were created.

In terms of long-term unemployment, about 6.2 million workers have been unemployed for six months or more. Among them, 4.5 million have been jobless for a year or more. Unsurprisingly, the least educated are the hardest hits. Since January 2010, the Center says there has been a net loss of 500,000 jobs for people with high school diplomas or less, but a net gain of 1.2 million jobs for college graduates. Unemployment among blacks and Hispanics is significantly higher than for whites.

His brain clogged with Marxist and Keynesian nonsense that puts government at the center of the economy, Obama’s Thursday speech will be a hodge-podge of failed programs, proposals to spend billions we don’t have, and a tinker-toy constructed of various tax credits and other efforts, none of which have worked since the day he took the oath of office.

Watch what the stock market does when it opens Friday morning. Then watch as businesses sit on what money they have, hire sparingly, and wait until Obama is gone as of January 20, 2013.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Obama's Jobs Speech is D.O.A.

Political Pinball, One Day Later

By Alan Caruba

In the primaries, politics is a lot like pinball as it moves in unexpected ways, lifting one candidate’s chances of getting the nomination, bypassing others. In the national election, it’s more like a bowling bowl, rolling down a straight and narrow stretch headed either to the gutter or a strike.

For Republicans, we’re in the pinball phase of the blood sport of politics. For Democrats, they have but one choice and that’s Barack Obama. Watch now as many Democrats re-register as either independents or Republicans.

How can you tell who the White House fears more as an opposing candidate? Just watch how many times David Axelrod, the public relations guy behind Obama’s win in 2008 gets on television to attack Mitt Romney and Texas Gov. Rick Perry who announced his candidacy on Saturday, the day of the Iowa straw vote. Then try to keep count of the number of lies he will tell about either.

In 2008, Axelrod had a totally unknown, charismatic Obama to sell who ran more against George W. Bush than John McCain. In 2011-2012, he has the most unpopular President since Jimmy Carter.

Axelrod honed his skills in Chicago politics. On August 9, Politico revealed that “Barack Obama’s aides and advisors are preparing to center the president’s re-election campaign on a ferocious personal assault on Mitt Romney’s character and business background, a strategy grounded in the early stage expectation that the former Massachusetts governor is the likely GOP nominee.” (Emphasis added)

Five days later Obama’s advisors had Gov. Rick Perry in the crosshairs. Romney had skipped the Iowa straw vote, but none of them believe the straw poll winner, Rep. Michelle Bachmann, has any chance of securing the GOP nomination. And they are right.

Like some pit bull chained up in the basement of the White House, Axelrod came charging out on Friday to attack Gov. Perry even before the straw vote made news. As Jeffrey Folks said in an August 14 commentary posted on AmericanThinker.com, Perry is “the most successful American governor in living memory.”

The political pinball has bounced away from Romney, Bachmann, and other GOP candidates and found its home in the Perry campaign. The longer it stays there, the more it will transform into a great, big bowling bowl headed straight down the lane and into the White House.

On one hand it will be fun to watch Axelrod and other Obama lapdogs foam at the mouth and spout all manner of lies about Perry, but it’s 2011, the economy is in the tank, the nation’s credit rating was downgraded for the first time in its history on Obama’s watch, the unemployment rate is officially at 9.1, and the dreaded “double dip” recession is in full bloom.

Moreover, Obama has lost his mojo. He is in the worst of all political positions; he is an object of ridicule.

Folks compared the Texas economy to California’s. Given that California is one of the most liberal States and Texas is comfortably conservative when it comes to policy, Folks noted that “What California lacks in the kind of political leadership that will attract new business. Economic growth in California—one can hardly call it ‘growth’—has been stagnant or worse over the past decade.”

“In April 2011, California ranked last among the 50 states in job creation” said Folks, noting it had an unemployment rate of 11.8% while in the same month, the unemployment rate in Texas was 8.2%.

“As Governor of Texas,” Folks pointed out, “Rick Perry helped to create a tax and regulatory environment that would attract new business to the state and allow businesses already there to flourish.” And Texas has a zero income tax!

Within twelve hours, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty had dropped out of the GOP race and we can expect the others to follow suit with the likely exception of Mitt Romney, but Perry will demolish him in the primaries to come.

Republicans can already smell a winner and with good reason. Perry is the longest serving Texas governor and he has never lost an election. The Reagan Democrats of the 1980s put him in the White House and it will be the turn of the Perry Democrats this time around.

There’s a reason Obama is franticly trying to raise as much money as he can at this point, 14 months out from Election Day. In the months and weeks ahead, the smart money will no longer be there.

Only one thing is predictable, Axelrod and the Chicago political thugs that form the inner circle of Obama’s team will engage in every dirty trick, every slander, and every lie possible in a desperate effort to stave off the juggernaut of Gov. Rick Perry.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Political Pinball, One Day Later

President Bobblehead

By Alan Caruba

As President Obama’s head moved robotically from left to right and back again while his eyes followed the scroll of text on the teleprompters, I began to think about this ever-present factor for all his speeches and why this man is president at all.

It’s not that he isn’t in a world of trouble two-and-a-half years into his first and mercifully last term in office. All presidents “inherit” a variety of problems from their predecessor, but not all presidents—none in fact—spend all their time blaming their predecessor. If there are problems, the presumption is that they were elected on their promises to solve them.

Ronald Reagan asked “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” The voters said no and he served two memorable terms. The nation is now immeasurably worse off than just two-and-a-half years after Obama’s election.

Obama has exacerbated the problems he encountered that first day in the Oval Office and added several horrors, not the least of which is called Obamacare.

Behind the avalanche of words regarding Barack Obama is the central issue of whether he should be president. Anyone else would have been impeached by now. The news media of the 1970s that revealed the corruption of the Watergate scandal, with notable exceptions, now remain silent on this issue.

On July 22, Jeffrey T. Kuhner, writing in The Washington Times, bluntly said “President Obama has engaged in numerous high crimes and misdemeanors…Mr. Obama should be impeached” and was met by wall-to-wall indifference. It wasn’t even a topic for the cable news 24/7 chattering class.

Earlier this year, after reading Dr. Jerome R. Corsi’s book, “Where’s the Birth Certificate?”, I opined that Obama would likely be forced to resign based on the weight of evidence that he was not only ineligible to hold the office under the terms set forth in the U.S. Constitution, but that there was ample evidence that even the Social Security number he was using was fraudulent.

That’s how naïve I am, but I should have realized that the U.S. court system has systematically dismissed cases brought to expose his ineligibility, mostly on the basis that the complainant had no “standing” to do so. If a citizen, operating under the same Constitution as the President has no standing, who does?

Most certainly the Obama administration’s Department of Justice would not take any action. If it prefers to sue the State of Arizona for trying to defend its own border with Mexico, and wouldn’t prosecute members of the New Black Panther Party who were videotaped trying to intimidate white voters, the likelihood of the DOJ doing anything involving a constitutionally ineligible President is slim to none.

Corsi’s book, 392 pages of fact-piled-on-fact, begins by asserting that “no legal authority has ever verified Barack Obama’s legal eligibility to be president, that glaring inconsistencies and blackouts in his life narrative has caused widespread doubts among the American populace, and that, in fact, a compelling body of evidence exists that Obama is not a natural-born citizen as is required of all presidents by Article 2, Section 1, of the Constitution.”

“No usurper of the office of the president of the United States can be tolerated if the Constitution is to have enduring authority,” said Corsi.

“The test in the upcoming presidential election of 2012,” said Corsi, “is whether or not President Obama will get a second pass on having to present his eligibility credentials to the American public.” Most certainly the birth certificates he has offered thus far either do not meet that test or are complete forgeries.

There is no greater peril to the nation than to have its guiding legal instrument casually ignored. This is written prior to the Republic candidate’s Iowa debate on Fox News Channel, but I would bet the subject of Obama’s ineligibility and usurpation of the office of the presidency will not be mentioned.

© Alan Caruba 2011

More about → President Bobblehead

President Blah, Blah, Blah

By Alan Caruba

President Blah, Blah, Blah got in front of the television cameras midday on Monday to say the usual meaningless things he has been saying since he was elected, none of which are true and none of which have been able to hide the fact that he has driven the nation into the ditch with a lot of help from Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

Over the weekend he unleashed the White House attack dogs to blame the nation’s problems on the Tea Party when, of course, it was his administration that added three trillion to our debt.

After a while we just stop listening to what a president says; especially if we have concluded he is either clueless or has a hidden agenda.

“If his lips are moving, he’s lying” is an old cliché, but it fits President Barack Hussein Obama because it is quite likely that no one believes him any more with the exception of the usual brain-dead liberals who still think he is a genius. So far he has shown a genius for increasing the debt and the unemployment numbers.

This is a man who was still talking about electric cars, high speed trains, and renewable energy while the price of gas continued to increase along with everything else.

On Monday he was still talking about the nation's infrastructure as a source of jobs even after recently admitting there were few "shovel ready" projects. Tired ideas, ideas that don't work, repeated over and over again.

President Obama has been boring people from the day he took office. “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” The oceans have been rising a few centimeters every century and the planet is just fine. His election did not transform either the laws of nature or physics.

Instead, all that transformational gibberish turned out to be about a nation already in financial trouble as the result of the September 2008 bursting of the housing bubble. His response was to waste a great deal of time forcing Obamacare on everyone. Americans want to feel that they have a say in what the government is doing and, when they don’t, they organize.

The emergence of the Tea Party was the legacy of Obamacare. A movement without leaders, but one that made itself felt in the 2010 elections that transferred the power of the nation’s purse from Democrats to Republicans in the House and reduced their majority in the Senate.

It may just be my imagination, but President Obama seems to believe he can just stand at the podium, read from the Tele-Prompters, and convince Americans that all our problems have to do with “millionaires and billionaires”, “corporate jets”, and the folks who provide the sources of all real energy; coal, oil, and natural gas.

Nobody is buying those idiotic electric cars (except government agencies) and nobody believes the Green grifters who have been living off federal largesse with their pathetic wind and solar farms, and ghastly ethanol. If it were not for government mandates they would all have been out of business long ago.

Politico recently reported that “people and households earning more than $1 million annually made up just 0.1 percent, or just over 235,000, of the 140 million tax returns filed in 2009.” Meanwhile, there are now a record 45.8 million Americans using food stamps, nearly 15% percent of the population. You do the math.

As for those awful oil companies, the top three paid $42.8 billion in income taxes in 2010. Moreover, according to the American Petroleum Institute, oil and natural gas companies employ 9.2 million Americans and account for 7.5 percent of GDP.

If the Obama administration had not set out to thwart any new oil exploration and a US-Canada oil pipeline, and to shut down active coal mines while punishing coal-burning utilities, the economy would be looking a lot better.

In a recent column, former Reagan speechwriter, Peggy Noonan, said, “But the president is supposed to be great at speeches. Why isn’t it working? One answer is that it never ‘worked.’ The power of the president’s oratory was always exaggerated.”

“The debt-ceiling crisis revealed Mr. Obama’s speeches as rhetorical kryptonite. It is the substance that repels the listener.”

In an effort to look as if he was truly engaged in finding room for compromise during the debt ceiling debate, Obama seemed to be on television with either a prepared or impromptu speech every other day. He does not do “impromptu” well. The casual “eat your peas” remark was received as it should have been, as someone pretending to be the only adult in the room, lecturing the rest of us as children.

I am beginning to sense that even in Congress, a lot of Democrat Senators and Representatives are beginning to do the calculus of getting reelected if they continue to vote the straight party line or are even seen on the same stage as Obama.

None of Congress’s solutions to our economic doldrums are working because of the sharp partisan divide that ignores the problems millions of Americans are encountering. They were all tried in the 1930s and they all failed.

Now that Obama has hit the campaign trail, it would be nice if the mainstream media began to report on how many or how few people turn out to listen to President Blah, Blah, Blah. How many of them are union members? How many are minorities?

How many will have been out of work for so long that by November 2012 they will vote for Bugs Bunny if he is on the Republican ticket?

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → President Blah, Blah, Blah

Flirting with the Great Depression 2.0

By Alan Caruba

POLITICO Breaking News:
August 5, 2011

“Credit rating agency S&P has downgraded U.S. debt from AAA, the first debt downgrade in U.S. history, the Associated Press reported.”

When a nation’s debt equals its entire annual gross domestic product, it is bankrupt. It can still produce goods and services, but it will likely encounter fewer customers worldwide as they too are drawn deeper into their own debt crises.

When it must borrow billions daily just to meet its obligations to other nations and individuals who have purchased its treasury notes, it is has reached a point of “moral hazard” that threatens the wealth of every single citizen.

When it raises its “debt ceiling” to $14.58 trillion, the amount its Congress permits, and one day later its Treasury Department announces that its debt reached 100% of its GDP, it is in serious financial difficulty. Not since 1947 when the U.S. was recovering from the cost of World War II have we reached this point.

The nasty “debate” in Washington over the debt ceiling included the Republican demands that we reduce our spending and Democrat demands that we raise taxes. Those advocating sanity were called “terrorists” and “extremists.” The shallow reductions agreed to were stretched over ten years and barely begin to address the immediate financial crisis. Harder decisions were pushed off on a "super committee" that no one expects to agree on anything.

This news is bad enough for the United States of America, but it affects many other nations around the world in exactly the same way the Crash of 1929 did, leading to the Great Depression of the 1930s and putting in motion the events that led to World War II.

Does history repeat itself? Apparently so.

What is happening in America is happening around the world. Greece, a nation of 11 million people, had by 2009 managed to run up its debt to more than $500 billion. Its fellow members of the European Union took notice even though Greece accounted for only two percent of the EU’s economy. A year earlier, the tiny nation of Iceland, population 300,000, had literally bankrupted itself when its debt went from $8 billion in 2001 to more than $48 billion in 2007.

On September 29, 2008, the Irish cabinet held an emergency session by phone because the implosion of its housing market threatened to bring down its financial system. To avoid a bank run, it guaranteed all deposits and, not long after, England did the same thing.

Many people find history boring, but it does provide lessons and what America and its lenders all face is the potential for The Great Depression 2.0. The gyrations on Wall Street and worldwide are evidence of global fears.

In America, the Congress merely applied a band-aid to a gaping wound, the result of the “solutions” instituted during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the entitlement program of Social Security and, in the 1960s, the addition of Medicare. In the 1930s, the federal government guaranteed mortgages by creating Fannie Mae and later Freddie Mac.

When the financial crisis arrived in 2008, they owned half of all the mortgages issued by the nation’s banks. The government was forced to step in and seize both “government sponsored entities” to avoid bringing down the nation’s financial system. At the same time, it agreed to buy up the “toxic assets” owned by a number of banking firms and by the insurance giant, AIG. Billions in public funds were allocated to this.

There probably was no alternative.

In the same way the government in the 1930s initiated all manner of programs to put Americans back to work, the Obama administration created a “stimulus” program while, at the same time, taking ownership of Chrysler and General Motors. The Federal Reserve reduced interest rates close to zero, lending banks and nations billions. By contrast, during the Great Depression the government had allowed hundreds of banks to fail which, in hindsight, contributed the nation's ills.

Franklin D. Roosevelt had been elected to end the Depression, but after nearly eight years of the New Deal has passed, FDR’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., addressed the House Ways and Means Committee on May 9, 1939, to say, “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.” Unemployment remained high and would remain high until World War II intervened in 1941.

Much has changed since the 1930s, but much has not.

In 2010, power in the House of Representatives was returned to the Republican Party, but the debate over the debt ceiling revealed the difficulty it had marshalling support for raising it. Many new Tea Party caucus Representatives opposed it. Others argued that only massive spending cuts could remedy the growth of the nation’s debt. In the Senate, controlled by the Democrat Party, any deal that did not include raising taxes was dead on arrival.

Other than the so-called “stimulus” programs, the President devoted all of 2009 to legislation dubbed Obamacare that would have created a government takeover of twenty percent of the nation’s economy. By May 2010, a million people marched in Washington, D.C. to protest it. It has since been repealed in the House and has 26 States allied against it in the courts.

In the 1930s, efforts to keep the world’s economy from imploding found little political support for the measures needed to sustain an integrated world economy. In the modern era of globalization, the same problems have been encountered and, sadly, the United States has shown little taste for reducing its spending as it continues to borrow until, at some point, other nations decide to put their money elsewhere. So far that has not happened.

The United States’ financial future is in peril without a significant downsizing of the federal government and the international economy faces similar challenges as nations share similar debt levels that exceed their ability to meet their obligations.

It will take a minimum of a decade to meet the USA’s present need to reduce spending and reduce the burden of its borrowed debt. Let us hope the voters in 2012 take the first steps toward the political resolve needed by returning power to the Republican Party in the Senate and the White House. Then let us hope they show real political courage.

Let us hope it doesn’t take another world war to focus our attention on survival of a different kind.

Editor’s Note: This commentary was greatly aided by data in the “Lost Decades” by Menzie D. Chinn and Jeffry A. Frieden, recently published by W.W. Norton & Company.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Flirting with the Great Depression 2.0

Unleashing Americans

By Alan Caruba

“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.” -- Thomas Jefferson

My father was a certified public accountant, as is my older brother. I not only lacked any arithmetical skills, I spent much of my early years ignoring the ups and downs of the economy, thinking that these matters were beyond my comprehension. What I failed to understand was that the economy was as much a creature of meddling politicians as economic theories.

I was born in the midst of the Great Depression and have now lived long enough to be caught in a new one. I know that economists and others say we are in a Recession, but it feels like a Depression to me and to the millions of other Americans who are out of work and being laid off weekly. It feels like one to those who suffered foreclosure on their homes. It feels like one every time we go to the supermarket and gasp in disbelief at the cost of groceries.

The unimaginable debt that Americans have incurred by borrowing far too much as a nation and as individuals with credit cards, and the ease with which one could borrow against home equity, has now forced us to deal with the reality of a financial crisis that began in late 2008 when the housing bubble burst.

Historically, it started far earlier when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, elements of the 1930s New Deal, were created to bring “social justice” to the housing market. By the time of the 2008 implosion, they owned more than half of all mortgages issued in the nation.

While the politicians seek to position themselves to blame the other party, the saving grace is that in 2010 voters returned power in the House to Republicans; doing so by electing a large number of “Tea Party” candidates pledged to reduce the debt and reverse what have been the disastrous policies of the Obama administration.

Despite the breathless reporting of the 24/7 news channels, the parade of politicians on both sides explaining their positions, the real news is that Americans are finally engaged in a real debate over the debt and the nation’s future. In 2012 they will vote to change course and, just as European nations that also borrowed too much, they will have to accept austerity measures.

A lot of government programs and, indeed, whole agencies and departments should be ended.

It’s not the death of socialism in America, but it is the recognition that a government that seizes and redistributes the wealth of working Americans must be reversed, revised, and reduced in size and scope.

Too much taxation, too much regulation, too much borrowing, and too much wasteful spending is what the national debate is all about and it is a long overdue debate.

In the land of the brave and the home of the free, Americans want to be free to decide what kind of light bulbs they can purchase, what kind of cars they can drive, and end all the other restrictions that make doing business in America an expensive, unrealistic nightmare.

In a way, the infatuation with a completely unknown, untested, and inexperienced president has been a wake-up call. Barack Obama was packaged to be a celebrity, a “messiah”, when all he really was, was an ill-prepared, standard issue Marxist. He surrounded himself with economic advisors and unvetted “czars” who shared his belief that one last, big push could “transform” a nation that was more in need of a sensible budget than grandiose and failed socialist solutions.

The result was the appalling Obamacare law that attempted to seize twenty percent of the nation’s economy. The House has voted to repeal it. Twenty-six States have gone to court to have it nullified. A Republican president and Senate in 2012 will end it.

Obama and the “green economy” advocates around him have dumped billions into wind and solar energy companies that could not exist without government subsidies coupled with government mandates for their use. Combined, wind and solar provide less than three percent of the nation’s electricity and will never meet its needs.

The nation’s auto industry, once the envy of the world, is almost entirely controlled by the government that, even in the midst of the debt ceiling debate, was being told it must produce lighter, more dangerous automobiles to meet unrealistic demands that they provide more mileage per gallon. You cannot get more energy from a gallon of gasoline than you can from any other source of energy that is ruled by the laws of physics.

Openly scornful of fossil fuels, the Obama administration has rendered the nation more dependent on foreign oil and waged war on coal and now natural gas.

The Obama moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico has wreaked havoc on the oil industry, pursuing the same policies of earlier administrations that have thwarted exploration and extraction of the billions of barrels of U.S. oil that go untapped and unused. Oil rigs have been departing the Gulf to other nations, along with thousands of jobs and millions in the revenue they contributed to the economy. The vast resources of the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge remain off-limits even though only the tiniest part of the refuge would be affected.

We suffered a socialist “stimulus” that stimulated nothing but an increased multi-trillion dollar debt.

I think America has turned an invisible corner and that as soon as we rid the nation of President Obama and his tax-and-spend Democrat supporters in Congress, the nation will begin to correct its borrow-and-borrow-some-more profligate ways. A smaller, less intrusive government may emerge in the years, the decades ahead.

The entrepreneurial energies of Americans will be unleashed if that occurs. The present Recession/Depression will join all the previous ones we have been through. We have all been chastened and we will conclude it wasn’t just Barack Obama’s policies, but decades of socialist policies dating back to the earliest days of the last century.

If that occurs, our children and grandchildren will have the excessive burden of debt lifted from them and American’s energy, innovation, and optimism will prevail.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Unleashing Americans

The Tea Party is Making Obama Look Good

By Alan Caruba

"There are plenty of ways out of this mess, but we are almost out of time," said President Obama on Friday morning. It only took from his Monday address to Friday’s to make Obama look good and, for that, we can thank the intransigent Tea Party element of the Republican Party.

When presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) says she will never vote to raise the debt ceiling, she is being unrealistic because the “ceiling” simply allows the nation to continue borrowing to meet its massive financial obligations. The time for cutting spending lies ahead and the Tea Party can play a role in that, but right now the United States of America is looking default in the eye and risking a downgrade of our historic AAA credit rating.

It is ironic that the author of much of the nation’s $14.3 trillion debt, achieved over three short years in office, can talk about the Republicans resisting Speaker John Boehner’s proposed legislation and correctly say they are risking “taking down the nation.”

A nation this sharply divided between Republicans and Democrats has gone to the mat at the eleventh hour far too many times whether it was TARP or Obamacare. The 2010 elections that gave power to the GOP in the House was a good step in the right direction insofar as it curbed Obama’s efforts to spend the nation out of the deep financial hole created over decades. It gave, however, majority power to only one element of Congress, the House, leaving the Senate in the hands of Democrats. There can be no change in the White House until 2012.

You don’t, however, cure the spending built into the nation’s budget, but putting its credit rating in jeopardy or giving President Obama the opportunity to scare senior citizens, veterans, contractors and everyone else with threats their checks are not going to be in the mail. That’s a recipe for anarchy.

Up to now the Republicans have made a succession of very good moves—all of which have been rejected by President Obama. The plan put forth by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) provided for $6.3 trillion in spending cuts in the first ten years. It will take ten years to winnow a debt that has been building since the introduction of “entitlement” programs in the 1930s and 1960s.

As Peter Ferrara who has conservative credentials as long as your arm wrote in The American Spectator, the Ryan plan would “drive federal spending to 15% of GDP, well below the postwar historical average of 20%. Ryan’s budget included tax reform to get the economy booming again, with a 25% top income-tax rate for incomes over $100.000 a year, and a 10% rate for incomes below that.”

Lest we forget, noted Ferrara, “the first act of the new GOP House majority was to vote to repeal Obamacare. That means $1 trillion in spending cuts, and $500 billion in tax cuts, during the first ten years alone, as scored by the CBO.”

The Tea Partiers in the House do not want to take yes for an answer when it comes to the gains that can be secured if the debt ceiling is raised and the 2012 elections promise to put a GOP candidate into the Oval Office and capture power in the Senate. They can have it all if they support Speaker Boehner.

As Wall Street Journal columnist, Kimberly A. Strassel noted Friday morning, referring to Speaker Boehner’s prolonged negotiations with President Obama, “Instead he realized that this White House had no intention of agreeing to serious debt reduction and that it cared primarily about tax hikes. His decision to call off the talks earned him some catcalls, but it reset the political dynamic.”

That was evident in President Obama’s Monday primetime address to the nation that was universally seen as offering no plan and no leadership. By Friday morning the dynamic had changed as Speaker Boehner became the man unable to achieve a resolution to the current crisis; all because Tea Party dead-enders could not see their way clear to a compromise.

This is precisely why the President is effectively beating up the Republicans in Congress.

As Strossel correctly noted of Speaker Boehner and the House Tea Partiers, “What he did do this week is position his party to take credit for a bill that averts a crisis, cuts more spending than any Democrat thought possible, and exposes the White House’s insincerity on the deficit and economic prosperity. The Republicans who yesterday undermined (the) bill now bear sole responsibility for whatever political fallout comes next.”

If that is four more years of President Obama, it will be because Tea Partiers refused to compromise, to be realistic, and to understand that you don’t turn around decades of bad social legislation in a day.

They now have a weekend left to see the light or take down the Republican Party and the nation.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → The Tea Party is Making Obama Look Good

The Turning Point for "Entitlement" Programs

By Alan Caruba

The result of all the drama emanating from Capitol Hill and the White House has been to get a lot of people wondering about the sustainability of Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid.

Both Democrats and Republicans agree that the “debt ceiling”, the limit on how much the federal government is permitted to borrow, must be raised. It is essentially an accounting fiction because, since 1960, it has been raised 78 times; 49 times by Republican presidents and 29 times by Democrat presidents.

What makes it an issue now? $14.3 trillion dollars worth of U.S. debt.

It is not just the size of this debt, probably the greatest that any nation has ever owed in history, it is that it was initially due to a financial rescue program in 2008 when President Bush and Congress sought to avoid a collapse of Wall Street and banks. The TARP funds were eventually repaid.

Part of the current debt is due to massive spending programs by the Obama administration, allegedly to “create or save” jobs and “stimulate” the economy. They did neither.

The Obama spending programs were, in essense, Democrat slush funds parceled out to the party’s faithful to ensure that teachers and other public service workers would be retained, that General Motors and Chrysler could avoid the normal bankruptcy procedures that would have restructured both companies—and likely reduce union power, and that favored contractors could receive funding for “shovel ready projects.”

A long term, on-going problem has been the current and future debt is attributed to meeting the obligations of Social Security, introduced in 1935 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and to the high costs of Medicare and Medicaid. The latter became law on July 30, 1965 as an amendment to the existing Social Security legislation.

In sum, both programs reflect the Democratic Party’s commitment to “social justice” (wealth redistribution) that began in the early part of the last century. Republicans were not immune to this. President George W. Bush added to the costs of Medicare with prescription coverage.

The battle on Capital Hill is between the Democrats, led by President Obama, who wants to raise taxes in the midst of what is called a recession but is truly a Depression 2.0. Raising taxes is what President Roosevelt did and it simply prolonged the Great Depression by sucking money out of the free market economy.

On the other side of the non-negotiating table are the Republicans who, thanks to the Tea Party members of the House, have been forced to reclaim their reputation as a party devoted to limited government and prudent fiscal policies.

It is assumed by all that the debt ceiling with be lifted. It is unknown whether the nation’s credit rating of AAA will be reduced as the result of a failure to substantially cut spending and, far more importantly, meet its obligation to repay its debt. Indeed, the central issue is all about credit.

A nation that must borrow billions every day to meet its obligations cannot afford to lose a rating that is rooted in the very beginning of its history when Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, insisted that all Revolutionary War debts be paid in full.

Social Security is the largest government benefit program in the world. It represents more than 20% of the federal budget and, together with Medicare/Medicaid, they accounted for 53% of total federal outlays in Fiscal Year 2008, with net interest payments accounting for an additional 8.5%.

Here’s the rub. At the time that Social Security was created, somewhere between 10 and 14 workers were paying into the system for every recipient receiving a check. By 2010, the ratio was about 3 workers paying in for 1 taking out.

Social Security is unsustainable.

When President Roosevelt was pitching Social Security, he promised that no worker would ever pay more than 1% of their income into the system. By 2010, self-employed persons like myself were paying 15.3% of their income into Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid.

President Roosevelt promised that Social Security would be self-sustaining and that its benefits “should not come from the proceeds of general taxation.” In practice, although a “trust fund” was set up, every dollar contributed to Social Security has gone into the general revenue fund and has been spent by Congress in any manner it saw fit.

In 1935 no one expected that Americans would routinely be living into their seventies, eighties, and nineties. The age at which recipients could begin to draw benefits was 65 and that coincided with the average lifespan nearly 80 years ago. Today, men on average live to age 78 and woman outlive them by a wide margin.

In the same fashion that the House has voted to repeal Obamacare and 26 States have joined together to argue in court that it is unconstitutional, Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid have arrived at a moment in time, a turning point, when both must be dismantled—assuming of course that the Congress and White House manage to avoid a financial catastrophe for all Americans.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → The Turning Point for "Entitlement" Programs

Identifying a Psychopath

By Alan Caruba

One hardly needs an advanced degree in psychology or be a full-fledged psychiatrist to conclude that Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian mass-murderer, is very likely a psychopath. Anyone who would blow up a government building and gun down children, thinking that he was going to ignite a revolution against Muslims in Europe is not dealing with a full deck.

The event initiated a torrent of news coverage and comment. Much of the initial coverage was wrong. Breivik was not a “fundamentalist Christian” and he was not linked to any particular group. He was the classic lone wolf. Like the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski, Breivik had his own “manifesto.”

Breivik, Kaczynski, and other psychopaths share characteristics which had been identified by Robert D. Hare, a noted researcher in the field of psychopathy. In 1995 he published his Psychopathy Checklist. It is still in use today for the purpose of diagnosis.

In the forthcoming August/September issue of Free Inquiry, a magazine favored by humanists and atheists, David N. Stamos, a philosopher who teaches at York University in Toronto, Canada, has a meditation on “The Philosophical Significance of Psychopaths.” His timing is fortuetous to say the least.

Stamos informs us Hare calculated that “roughly one in every one hundred humans is a full-fledged psychopath.”

Let us dispense with the notion that that they are all mass-murderers. They are not. Many rise to positions of considerable power and influence precisely because their traits are prized in pursuits that range from politics to the management of corporations.

Here then, out of the twenty characteristics that Hare identified, are those I will cite for the purpose of this commentary:

Glib and superficial charm
Grandiose (exaggeratedly high) estimation of self
Need for stimulation
Pathological Lying
Cunning and manipulativeness
Lack of remorse or guilt
Callousness and lack of empathy
Parasitic lifestyle
Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

By now I suspect you are saying, “Wait a minute! That fits Barack Hussein Obama!” and you would be right.

So, is he a psychopath? That is not for you nor I to say. We lack the training and experience to make such judgments, but it shouldn’t keep us from drawing some general conclusions.

Stamos poses and answers his own question, “What distinguishes psychopaths from normal people? Principally, it is a total absence of what we typically take to be moral qualities; sympathy, empathy, compassion, guilt, remorse, conscience, loyalty, truth telling, and a sense of fairness.”

“Psychopaths are highly narcissistic. Not only are they extremely self-centered, but they also think of themselves as being of a higher nature than the rest of us,” writes Stamos. “To them, normal individuals are made weak by sympathy and emphathy and refrain from getting the most that they can from life because of conscience, guilt, and remorse.”

“To psychopaths, we are like sheep. They, on the other hand, are like wolves—animals of prey. The sheep exist for the sake of the wolves. The sheep are to be manipulated, used, and even killed if the situation is right. All that matters is that the wolf be gratified.”

Breivik has forced the world to ask what it is that makes a man a psychopath. Hare believes that psychopathy shows up early in life and likely has a genetic component. It does not matter what one’s formative experiences are. The psychopath is going to make his way in the world based as much on his deficiencies as his abilities.

Not only does the psychopath lack a conscience and other chracteristics we prize in our fellow human beings, “they don’t want them” writes Stamos, “because they see nothing wrong with themselves. They look at the moral virtues and values of normal humans as the very features that make those humans weaklings and suckers, ready to be exploited by people like them.”

As President, a psychopath might blame all present ills on his predecessor and earlier administrations.

As President, a psychopath might not accept any responsibility for failed programs.

As President, a psychopath might prove to be an unreliable person with whom to negotiate.

As President, a psychopath might regard bringing the greatest nation on earth to ruin as proof of his own grandiose view of himself.

This is, of course, pure conjecture. Call it food for thought.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Identifying a Psychopath

Obama is Boring Us to Death

By Alan Caruba

About halfway into his fifteen minute televised address on Monday evening, it occurred to me that Obama is literally boring Americans to death. He was elected to a great degree based on his eloquence and he delivers a speech well, but last night’s speech is the one we have been hearing since January and earlier.

I really don’t give a hoot about “millionaires and billionaires.” Heck, I want to be a millionaire!

“Corporate jets”? What’s that all about? Even Playboy’s Hugh Hefner once had a corporate jet. I would love to have a private jet if only to avoid having to go through airport security these days.

“Corporate taxes”? US corporations pay the highest tax rates of virtually every other nation. Yes, they look for loopholes. You would, too!

“Hedge fund managers”? I don’t know any. Are they doing something criminal? No. They are making bets on the economy. Better that than blowing the money in a casino.

Peggy Noonan, a former speech writer for Ronald Reagan, bestselling author, and now a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, last Saturday wrote “The president, if he is seriously trying to avert a debt crisis, should stay in his office, meet with members, and work the phones, all with a new humility, which would be well received. It is odd how he patronizes those with more experience and depth in national affairs.”

And then she said, “He should keep his face off TV. He should encourage, cajole, work things through, be serious, get a responsible deal, and then re-emerge with joy and the look of a winner...” Noonan concluded saying, “he should choose Strategic Silence. Really, recent presidents forget to shut up. They lose sight of how grating they are.”

Obama’s first year in office was distinguished by his being on television all the time, from The View to late night comedy shows. He loves the camera, loves the attention, and loves himself to the point of an unseemly, off-putting narcissism.

Instead of taking Noonan’s advice, he has become the National Mosquito, always buzzing around somewhere in the room.

Why was the Monday night speech necessary? Both Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, a Democrat, and John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, a Republican, have concluded that Obama had to be cut out of the discussions regarding the necessity to raise the debt ceiling because he was a hindrance to achieving any deal. To put it more bluntly, both concluded that Obama could not be trusted.

Reid and Boehner have essentially cut Obama out of the process. They have asserted the independence and the role of the legislative branch. Together they will send Obama a debt ceiling bill and tell him to take it or leave it. If he finds a reason to veto it, they will over-ride his veto and the rest of us will know that Obama’s agenda has always been the destruction of the nation.

Obama’s polling numbers reflect the growing realization of his arrogance and his incompetence. The advisors he chose and the programs he initiated have all proved to be failures and very costly ones at that. Unemployment rates today equal those of the Great Depression. Millions are on food stamps. Economic growth is an anemic one percent or so. Even people who don’t listen to presidential speeches or follow the news that closely know he is a loser.

There will always be at least 20% of voters who will support Obama no matter what happens. They are the true believers, the core that Democrats have always depended upon, unions, minorities, and federal employees.

The political pundits all said that the speech was aimed at the independents, always the most critical factor in recent national elections. The problem for Obama is that the next election isn’t until November 2012 and people tend to have very short memories. A lot of voters don’t make up their minds until they are in the booth. A year and a half from now is an eternity for these “undecideds.”

The speech was a bore, a repeat of all the poll-tested words and phrases he will repeat between now and November 2012. He’s become a windup doll, the White House Chatty Cathy.

It would be nice if we could ignore him and millions of American wish they could. The bad news is that he’s not going away for at least a year and a half. The good news is that he’s about to be neutered by both the Republicans and Democrats in Congress.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Obama is Boring Us to Death

Washington's Magical Thinking

By Alan Caruba

The term, “magical thinking”, has been around a while to describe what individuals do to cope with the vicissitudes of life. I, for example, regularly buy a Mega Millions lottery ticket in the hope of winning when, logically, rationally, I know the odds are millions to one of that ever happening.

Magical thinking can be found in all aspects of life and it is surely magical thinking that caused America’s politicians, starting back around the turn of the last century, to believe that a really big government could take care of everyone when, prior to that, self reliance, support from the family structure, and hard work were the early guiding principles.

Indeed, the U.S. Constitution is testimony to the Founding Father’s intense distrust of a centralized government—hence checks and balances—and the fallibility of individuals entrusted with power over others. It turns out they were right because now there is no aspect of our lives into which government does not intrude.

A lot of this can be traced to the rise of Communism, the handiwork of Karl Marx, and its adaptation into Socialism, a modified form. In 1917 Russia had Communism imposed on it during the Bolshevik Revolution as the antidote to the rule of the czars. In time it utterly failed, but few have taken a lesson from that. It wreaked havoc and death on Russians for over seventy years.

Indeed, throughout the last century, wars were required to defeat various forms of totalitarian rule. Even the Peoples Republic of China eventually embraced its own form of Capitalism while retaining power in the hands of a centralized government.

Communism is a kind of magical thinking based on collectivism that always seems to come back to a handful of men ruling by coercion.

In 1908, the Socialist Party nominated Eugene V. Debs to run for president. A dedicated unionist, Debs had studied Marxism while in jail. What he believed then is still prevalent today. “When I joined the Socialist Party,” said Debs in accepting the nomination, “I was taught that the wish of the individual was subordinate to the party will, and that when the party commanded it was my duty to obey.”

“I am not satisfied with things as they are,” said Debs, “and I know that no matter what administration is in power, even were it a Socialist administration, there will be no material change in the condition of the people until we have a new social system based upon the mutual economic interests of the people; until you and I and all of us collectively own those things that we collectively need and use.” Debs was soundly defeated.

The election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, however, brought socialism to its zenith of power in America. He remained in office from 1933 until his death in 1945. Social Security is collectivism. Medicare and Medicaid is collectivism. Government “make work” programs are collectivism.

A government that owns an auto company is collectivism. A government that can shut down oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is collectivism. A government that decides how much mileage the car you buy must achieve is collectivism. A government that thwarts the building of new utilities to meet the needs of a growing population and then instructs people to reduce their use of electricity is collectivism.

And a government that believes it can continue to borrow and borrow and borrow from the rest of the world to maintain sixty percent of its annual budget for “entitlement programs” is engaged in magical thinking.

It is magical thinking to believe that the same ratings organizations, Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s, should be trusted. They both granted top grades to the “government entities”, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which plunged the nation into a huge financial crisis. Indeed, the rating organizations never saw the implosion of Wall Street institutions coming until billions in public funds were needed to keep a complete collapse from occurring.

Spending more to get out of debt is magical thinking and yet that is the only “plan” the Democrats and the President offer the public. A July 25 Wall Street Journal editorial, “Toying with Default”, provided an insight to this saying, “Here’s a number for the debt history books: Mr. Obama’s final offer in the Biden talks was a $2 billion cut in 2012 discretionary spending. The federal government spends more than $10 billion a day.”

At a time when European nations are imposing major austerity programs, the Republican Party is charged with having to save the nation from a Democrat Party that has reluctantly concluded that a reduction in spending is necessary and increase in taxes is not achievable..

As a nation, if we are to survive, we must disengage ourselves from a century of “progressive” programs that are not based in reality. Debts must be paid. Entitlement programs must be revised and eventually abandoned. Government must be reduced in size and scope. Private enterprise must be set free to function and thrive.

Earlier generations fought a Revolution to free ourselves from the British monarchy and parliament. Earlier generations fought a Civil War to preserve the Union. A present-day older generation of Americans fought two major wars against totalitarian governments and lesser ones in Korea, Vietnam, and most recently in Iraq.

The present generation of Americans must empower Republicans in Congress to save the nation from the errors of the past, the wild spending, and the confiscatory effort to “transform” the nation into a collectivist society that mirrors failed “progressive”, Communist and Socialist thinking and programs.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Washington's Magical Thinking