Stimulus Plan Won't Work

A plan is needed, but not this one.

The essential rational and justification to enact a stimulus plan is rather basic economics, and given the unique situation, justified. Aside from the significant amount of money involved, it’s not that much more complex than the decisions people make about their own family finances, so it speaks to the absolute ignorance of the majority of our citizens that they can’t figure out when their getting rolled!

This stimulus plan is the biggest boondoggle we’ve ever witnessed. Obama proclaimed that he’d stop all earmarks…and that was an easy statement for him, as he know that he wouldn't see any as they’ve all been rolled up into this singular piece of porcine excrement called a stimulus bill. It’s also very telling when the Congressional Budget Office (staffed by Democrats now), says that a mere $26 billion of the House stimulus bill's $355 billion in new spending would actually be spent in the current fiscal year, and just $110 billion would be spent by the end of 2010. This is highly embarrassing given that Congress's justification for passing this bill so urgently is to help the economy right now, if not sooner. The Democrats were so embarassed by the report that the report was pulled from view by the Appropriations Committee.

This administration is not concerned about the stimulus and fixing the economy immediately.  If they did, they would be attempting to assure us that this was a manageable situation.  Instead, they keep sowing gloom and doom in a determined effort to keep raising the general anxiety level, while attempting to frighten people into supporting their supposed stimulus plan. In addition, their refusal to state their commitment to specific tax policies forces most businesses to stay all new activities until they can understand how Obama’s tax policies will impact their plans.  The net result is a stalled economy. 

This situation isn’t accidental, it’s purposeful.  Like many others, Obama and the Democrats know that the American public’s ability to tolerate anxiety and suspense is very limited, so they know that they won’t have to keep stoking the fires of fear for much longer in order to get what they want….cart blanche approval on the largest and loosest appropriation of funding Liberal activities that this country has ever seen, without having to go through the normal discovery and approval process that would expose these items as either pure waste or political payoffs.   

The majority of the plan is basically a payback to the Teacher’s and the Construction Trade Unions, as well as funding for government health care expansion.  Their plan, which includes an expanded SCHIP, will effectively get us to the tipping point where single-payer health care is unavoidable due to the skewed market environment they are createing.  There’s so much funding here that the Democrats don’t even know what else they want to do with it yet…..but they will…..and it won’t be good for the United States.

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) The majority of the funds will not provide any stimulus, and in fact will not even be able to be deployed until well after the recession has ended.

Nina Easton in Fortune magazine states that Obama economic adviser Christina Romer has studied 20th-century recessions and concluded that monetary tools, not fiscal spending, produced recoveries. Even in the Great Depression, monetary expansion, not FDR's public works, opened the way toward recovery beginning in the spring of 1933. Despite that knowledge, Romer and other Obama advisers are expecting that the $825 billion package under consideration in the House will be big enough to change the history that they've all studied.  In addition, they are also betting on the fact that a package divided between $550 billion in spending and $275 billion in tax cuts will be the right mix, even though Romer's research also shows tax cuts to have a larger multiplier effect on the economy than spending.

Even David Brooks in the NY Times presents a negative view of the bill:

There is a strong case to be made for a short, sharp stimulus package to restrain the collapse of the American economy. This would involve big, simple programs with immediate impact — a temporary cut in the payroll tax, big aid to the states, expanded unemployment insurance and food stamps.

There’s also a very strong case to be made for long-term government reform. America could fundamentally rethink its infrastructure policies...

But the stimulus bill emerging in the House of Representatives does neither of these things. The bill marked up Wednesday in the Appropriations Committee is a muddled mixture of short-term stimulus haste and long-term spending commitments. It is an unholy marriage that manages to combine the worst of each approach — rushed short-term planning with expensive long-term fiscal impact.

The bill has three essential failings. First, it lacks any strategic vision. This $825 billion bill has to be passed within weeks. There’s no time for fundamental rethinking or new approaches. Instead, there’s a sloppy profusion of 152 different appropriations — off-the-shelf ideas that mostly create costlier versions of the status quo.

The committee staff took the kernel of President Obama’s vision — infrastructure programs to create jobs — and surrounded it with an undisciplined sprawl of health, education, entitlement and other spending. There’s money for nurse training, Medicare, Head Start, boatyard support, home weatherization and so on. Eleven of the programs in the bill account for the vast majority of the actual job creation. The rest may be worthy or not, but they have little to do with stimulus. The total package is so diffuse, it costs $223,000 to create a single job.

Second, the bill has relatively modest short-term impact. Many parts don’t even pretend to be stimulus measures, like funding for basic research, or special ed programs. But even the parts of the bill that aim to stimulate will have modest near-term impact. A study by the Congressional Budget Office found that less than half of the money for infrastructure and discretionary programs would be spent by Oct. 1, 2010.

Many of these non-stimulus elements may, or may not be, worthy expenditures.  But, they are not stimulus  programs, and should be decided upon in the normal process, not rushed through for approval because of the heightened state of alarm the Democrats have created.


 Republican Minority Leader John Boehner released the following information on the plan:

1. The House Democrats’ bill will cost each and every household $6,700 additional debt, paid for by our children and grandchildren.

2. The total cost of this one piece of legislation is almost as much as the annual discretionary budget for the entire federal government.

3. President-elect Obama has said that his proposed stimulus legislation will create or save three million jobs. This means that this legislation will spend about $275,000 per job. The average household income in the U.S. is $50,000 a year.

4. The House Democrats’ bill provides enough spending — $825 billion — to give every man, woman, and child in America $2,700.

5. $825 billion is enough to give every person living in poverty in the U.S. $22,000.

6. $825 billion is enough to give every person in Ohio $72,000.

7.  Although the House Democrats’ proposal has been billed as a transportation and infrastructure investment package, in actuality only $30 billion of the bill — or three percent — is for road and highway spending. A recent study from the Congressional Budget Office said that only 25 percent of infrastructure dollars can be spent in the first year, making the one year total less than $7 billion for infrastructure.

8. Much of the funding within the House Democrats’ proposal will go to programs that already have large, unexpended balances. For example, the bill provides $1 billion for Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), which already have $16 billion on hand.  And, this year, Congress has plans to rescind $9 billion in highway funding that the states have not yet used.

9. In 1993, the unemployment rate was virtually the same as the rate today (around seven percent). Yet, then-President Clinton’s proposed stimulus legislation ONLY contained $16 billion in spending.

10. Here are just a few of the programs and projects that have been included in the House Democrats’ proposal:

• $650 million for digital TV coupons.
• $6 billion for colleges/universities — many which have billion dollar endowments.
• $166 billion in direct aid to states — many of which have failed to budget wisely.
• $50 million in funding for the National Endowment of the Arts.
• $44 million for repairs to U.S. Department of Agriculture headquarters.
• $200 million for the National Mall, including grass planting.
• $400 million for “National Treasures.”

11.  Almost one-third of the so called tax relief in the House Democrats’ bill is spending in disguise, meaning that true tax relief makes up only 24 percent of the total package — not the 40 percent that President-elect Obama had requested.

12. $825 billion is just the beginning — many Capitol Hill Democrats want to spend even more taxpayer dollars on their “stimulus” plan.

This is not a Democrat vs Republican issue, it's an American issue.


Contact your Representative and Senator now and tell them to vote no on this Bill.  We have time to create a better plan.  The Democrats rush to push this legislation through is indicative of their desire to prevent understanding of what they are doing.

AP Runs Out Of Kool-Aid

It's  a miracle!


As sure as God made little green apples, miracles do happen. The AP is shocked, shocked, I say, about what it now sees as pure unadulterated fraud in the Carbon Trade business. No sooner did Chief Justice Roberts administer the flubbed swearing-in oath to President Obama, it was as if a veil lifted from their eyes and their ability to comprehend. They finally understood that the Kyoto Treaty and it's CO2 cap-and-trade processes were actually a scam designed to fleece money from industrialized nations (most notably the U.S.)..

Not only a scam, but one that costs industrialized nations a lot of money, does nothing to lower greenhouse gas emissions and supports the forced removal of people, the destruction of the environment and people's homes.

A Stanford University expert is quoted by AP saying that the carbon trading mechanism "is an excessive subsidy that represents a massive waste of developed world resources."

China, and other third world countries are being paid to build hydro-electric dams, primarily by European nations who signed the Kyoto Protocols.  China is not know to be sensitive to environmental issues, and as a result, winds up forcibly relocating it's people, and destroying a significant amount of unique habitat in the process. 

The AP has found that hydroelectric projects, whose climate impact is most widely questioned, have quickly become the No. 1 technology in the CDM, and China in particular is rushing in to capitalize.

The Chinese now have at least 763 hydro projects in the CDM approval pipeline and are adding an average of 25 a month. By 2012, those projects alone are expected to generate more than 300 million "certified emission reductions," each supposedly representing reduction of one ton of carbon dioxide. Even at recent depressed market prices, those credits would be worth $4 billion.

If the United States enters the Kyoto system, as proposed by President-elect Barack Obama, it would be the biggest player in a market expected to be worth hundreds of billions a year by 2030.

Environmentalists also point out that hydro power has long been a national priority in China. Since the 1990s — long before the CDM — the Chinese have added an average 7.7 gigawatts a year of hydro power, equivalent to six Hoover Dams annually, International Rivers reports.

In other words, Chinese planners aren't suddenly replacing emissions-heavy coal-fired power plants with emissions-free dams.

The Xiaoxi project design document, in fact, says Chinese regulations would block the building of such a relatively low-output coal plant here. But that's how planners determined the "emissions reductions" from the $183-million, 135-megawatt dam — by calculating how much carbon dioxide a 135-megawatt conventional power plant would produce instead.

That bottom line — some 450,000 tons of global-warming gases each year — would be added to RWE's permitted emissions if it buys the Xiaoxi credits, at a current annual cost of $8 million. And such calculations will be repeated at 37 other Chinese hydro projects where RWE will buy credits.

All told, the 38 are expected to produce more than 16 million CDM credits by 2012, legitimizing 16 million tons of emissions in Germany, equivalent to more than 1 percent of annual German emissions.

At today's low market prices, those credits would be worth some $300 million, paid to Chinese developers and presumably billed to German electricity customers, who by 2007 were already paying more than double the U.S. average rate per kilowatt-hour.

Utilities from Italy's Edison to Tokyo Electric are making similar deals for hydro-project credits in a dozen other countries, from Peru to India to Vietnam.

Rather than reduce their own emissions, "firms in developed countries are buying offsets that don't represent real behavioral change, real reductions in emissions," said Wara, the environmental law professor.

The U.S. GAO investigators said they learned that middlemen sometimes manipulate project paperwork to show a need for CDM financing, and they believe "a substantial number" of projects have undeservedly received credits.

The CDM system "can be 'gamed' fairly easily," said German expert Axel Michaelowa, both a critic and a CDM insider, as a member of the U.N. team that registers CDM projects.

The other amazing part of this miracle is that the AP is actually reporting this story....oh, that's right....Bush is gone.

Full Story....

Bush Years Were Good

Yes, that's correct....


Despite President Obama's continuing statements that we're in a crisis, Steve Landsberg in an article in The Atlantic has taken the position that economic events are not out of the historic norm, and the average citizen's life is better now that when George Bush took office four years ago for the following reasons:

You are better off than you were four years ago.

• After adjusting for inflation, the average American earns about $2500 a year more today than on the day of W's second inaugural.
  

• That same average American now spends a little less time at the office or on the assembly line, and a little more time on vacation or on the couch.
  

• He or she shops online for products that were unimaginable just four years ago. (How many of you read this morning's paper on your Kindle or iPhone?)
  

• The air is cleaner than it was a decade ago, and
  

• life expectancy is up.
  

Not that the last president had much to do with any of this. He didn't. It's the way the modern world works. Things improve. Incomes rise, work hours fall, the quality of goods improves.  Few things in economics are as consistent as the growth of real GDP per capita over the past 200 years:

Today we're in a recession--a moment in time when the march of growth stalls and even gets set back by a couple of years. This happens every now and then. Really. But things pick up again and we move on. Some people get set back a little farther than others; some are unemployed for a while. But the pool of resources is still near an all-time high.

In the long run we have nothing to fear but fear itself--and the rush to poor judgment that is the spawn of fear. Poor judgment makes people say things like "Hey! This new guy in town seems likable and right-minded. Let's give him everything he's asking for so he can take care of us." We've been down that road before. I'm hoping for some change I can believe in.

Democrat Bias Finally Noticed

Finally!

At last!  At least two national media pundits (Hannity and Dobbs) have finally weighed in on Robert Reich's (Clinton's former Secretary of labor) recommendation that the stimulus package being developed specificaly exclude white males.  That fact that his comments were made in front of Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi, and yet they did not raise even an eyebrow over his words, speaks volumes about the Democrat party agenda.

Dobb's commentary supports my earlier post regarding this travesty.

 



If you can't view video, click here .

LOU DOBBS, HOST: Well it's clear that there is a remarkable need for a high order of specificity irrespective of the partisan interests here it would seem. Thank you, Ed Henry, as always, for keeping us on top of these issues.Astonishing remarks today on the stimulus package, the remarks coming from one of the president's more influential advisers outside government, Robert Reich. Reich saying in a committee meeting earlier this month that race would play a large role in determining who would benefit from the economic stimulus package.

His comments came in remarks to a top-level committee of congressional Democrats, comments ignored by the national mainstream media. Let's hear what he said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROBERT REICH, FORMER LABOR SECRETARY: I am concerned, as I'm sure many of you are, that these jobs not simply go to high school people who are already professionals or to white male construction workers. I have nothing against white male construction workers. I'm just saying that there are a lot of other people who have needs as well.

And therefore, in my remarks, I have suggested to you, and I'm certainly happy to talk about it more, ways in which the money can be -- criteria can be set so that the money does go to others. The long- term unemployed, minorities, women, people who are not necessarily construction workers or high skilled professionals.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

DOBBS: Extraordinary set of possible criteria to be applied to an infrastructure and economic stimulus plan. Reich apparently doesn't believe government money should be allocated on the basis of need or skills, but by something else entirely. And that leaves open the question, I think it's a question that it is shouting is, what in the world is he thinking. Reich is a former labor secretary in the Clinton administration. A well documented liberal who obviously is not resisting the temptation to inject group and identity economics into group and identity

Pictures Of US Airways 1549 Recovery From Hudson River

Pictures of lifting the aircraft out of the water.

Obama Channeling Bush?

Deep down are they the same?

John Stewart seems to think so....

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Changefest '09 - Obama's Inaugural Speech

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Only time will tell....

Republican Anxiety

 On This Day In 1368:

In a coronation ceremony, Zhu Yuanzhang ascends to the throne of China as the Hongwu Emperor, initiating Ming Dynasty rule over China that would last for three centuries

Republicans frantically searched Barack Obama's genealogy to determine if he was also related to Zhu, then relieved to find that he's just Polish......

Boleslas Ier le Vaillant Piast, roi de Pologne 967-1025 & Emmilda des Wendes +1017     |     Mieszko II Lambert Piast, roi de Pologne 990-1034     |     Casimir Ier le Rénovateur Piast, duc de Pologne 1016-1058     |     Ladislas Ier Hermann Piast, duc de Pologne 1043-1102     |     Boleslas III Bouche-Torse Piast, duc de Pologne 1085-1138     |     Ladislas II Piast, duc de Cracovie 1105-1159     |     Richilde Piast 1135-1198     |     Sancha de Castille 1154-1208     |     Alphonse II, comte de Provence ca 1180-1209     |     Raimond-Bérenger V de Provence, comte de Provence et de Forcalquier ca 1205-1245     |     Eléonore de Provence 1223-1291     |         |     |     Edward I Longshanks Plantagenêt, King of England 1239-1307     Edmund Crouchback Plantagenêt, earl of Lancaster 1245-1296     |     |     Elizabeth Plantagenêt 1282-1316     Henry Plantagenêt, Earl of Lancaster 1281-1345     |     |     William de Bohun, Earl of Northampton ca 1311-1360     Eleanor Plantagenêt 1318-1372     |     |     Elisabeth de Bohun ca 1350-1385     Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel 1346-1397     |     |         |     Elizabeth Fitzalan 1366-1425     |     Joan Goushill     |     Catherine Stanley     |     Dulcia Savage     |     Maud Bold     |     Jennet Gerard     |     William Eltonhead     |     Richard Eltonhead     |     Martha Eltonhead     |     Eltonhead Conway     |     Martha Thacker     |     Edwin Hickman     |     James Hickman 1723-1816     |     Susannah Hickman     |     Annie Browning     |     George Washington Overall 1820-1871     |     Susan C Overall 1849     |     Gabriella Clark 1877     |     Ruth Lucille Armour 1900-1926     |     Stanley Armour Dunham 1918-1992     |     Ann Dunham 1942-1995     |     Barack Obama 1961-

Democrats: No Stimulus Money To White Males!

Shocker Democrat Post-Racial Policy....

"If you're Brown Stick around.....If you're White, take a flight"

Clinton's Secretary of Labor, and the inestimable and Honorable Charles Rangel (D-NY), finally let the rest of us in on the secret plan for the Stimulus....No Whites need apply!.....

After you get over the shock of how blatant the Democrats are in their efforts to discriminate against White males, the more significant question to ask is why hasn't this been trumpeted throughout the news media?

"I am concerned, as I’m sure many of you are, that these jobs not simply go to high-skilled people who are already professionals or to white male construction workers.  … I have nothing against white male construction workers.  I’m just saying that there are a lot of other people who have needs as well. … Criteria can be set so that the money does go to others, the long term unemployed minorities, women, people who are not necessarily construction workers or high-skilled professionals." -  R. Reich

Reich doesn't want to explicitly keep funds from white males, but just set it up that there's no way that they can be part of the plan.  This is outrageous!  But unfortunately expected, especially when Rangel is involved.  But come to think about it, it's been going on for quite some time with mandated set-asides for women and minority owned businesses in Government Contracts....no big deal.....suck it up, Chuck....


The next two years are going to create enough work for the Supreme Court that we'll need two Courts to handle the  appeals....


Hat tip to ED MORRISSEY

Palin 100 % Greener than Obama!

 She's back! She's hot! And she's kickin' butt.....

Brace yourself.

There's almost nothing in here about President Barack Obama's inauguration or his speech or the parade.

This one is about Alaska's Republican Gov. Sarah Palin, the unsuccessful GOP candidate for vice president, what, two years ago, it seems.

Anyway,  Margot Roosevelt, over at the Greenspace blog, reports that Palin has just unveiled a statewide green energy plan. It would do even more than California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's 33% renewable electricity plan by 2020.

Palin's new plan would get the utilities in oil-rich Alaska to produce 50% of their power through renewable sources. She'll introduce the legislation during the current legislative session, she says. (Obama, btw, has suggested 25% by 2025.) Margot's got the new Alaskan details.

-- Thanks to Andrew Malcolm for this info.

How Should Obama Be Judged?

What Standards apply to judging Obama's performance?

Juan Williams has an excellent column on this subject in today's Wall Street Journal, and I’ll append it after my comments.

After listening to many on-air reporters and pundits claim repeatedly about how proud they were of the U.S. as a result of President Obama's inauguration,  it started to strike me as a left-handed complement (my apologies to any lefties).  It came across as if the only time that they can be proud of this country is when something that they approve of occurs, as opposed to being proud of the great arc of our history and the continuing positive role that this nation plays in the world.

I have always been proud of being an American citizen – every day of my life.  There have been some days when I’ve been disappointed in events that have occurred, but those events have always been engendered by individuals – not our country. 

I have been outraged over quite a number of events: racial prejudice witnessed in the South when I first went into the Army in 1967; Lt. Calley and My Lai;  Nixon and Watergate; Clinton & Monica, the FALN and Mark Rich pardons; Abu Ghraib; but each one of these and other events were the result of individual actions, not the nation's.

I am proud that in the U.S., as opposed to many other nations, we have the opportunity to change the leadership of our Government every four years, and that unlike many other nations, we normally don’t invest in a cult of personality around our leaders (although that is something that I’m not pleased about currently regarding many of our fellow citizen's view of President Obama). Yesterday’s event was really the continuation of normalcy for us, and for that I’m continuously proud.

I was pleased in witnessing yesterday’s event because it was a result of White America voting for Obama.  That’s is a very positive indicator of how far our culture has moved forward, and an affirmation of what many of us have known to be true for quite some time, but that has been purposely denied by many who are invested in maintaining the issue of racial prejudice in the US.

I applaud Obama’s successful run to the Presidency.  His campaign will be studied for years not only because of its excellence in execution, but also because of the biased role that the media played.

I took pride and pleasure yesterday in witnessing the continuation of our heritage of democratic processes, saluted President Obama in a waging a successful campaign, and applauded the reasonable and measured actions that he has taken up to this point.  However, I took no pleasure in seeing a man and a party that I disagree with receive the reins of government.  Hopefully our differences of opinion will be few, but when they arise, I will respectfully argue my position.

          

·         JANUARY 20, 2009, 11:31 P.M. ET

Judge Obama on Performance 

Let's not celebrate more ordinary speeches.

By JUAN WILLIAMS

.......It is neither overweening emotion nor partisanship to see King's moral universe bending toward justice in the act of the first non-white man taking the oath of the presidency. But now that this moment has arrived, there is a question: How shall we judge our new leader?

If his presidency is to represent the full power of the idea that black Americans are just like everyone else -- fully human and fully capable of intellect, courage and patriotism -- then Barack Obama has to be subject to the same rough and tumble of political criticism experienced by his predecessors. To treat the first black president as if he is a fragile flower is certain to hobble him. It is also to waste a tremendous opportunity for improving race relations by doing away with stereotypes and seeing the potential in all Americans.

Yet there is fear, especially among black people, that criticism of him or any of his failures might be twisted into evidence that people of color cannot effectively lead. That amounts to wasting time and energy reacting to hateful stereotypes. It also leads to treating all criticism of Mr. Obama, whether legitimate, wrong-headed or even mean-spirited, as racist.

This is patronizing. Worse, it carries an implicit presumption of inferiority. Every American president must be held to the highest standard. No president of any color should be given a free pass for screw-ups, lies or failure to keep a promise.

During the Democrats' primaries and caucuses, candidate Obama often got affectionate if not fawning treatment from the American media. Editors, news anchors, columnists and commentators, both white and black but especially those on the political left, too often acted as if they were in a hurry to claim their role in history as supporters of the first black president.

For example, Mr. Obama was forced to give a speech on race as a result of revelations that he'd long attended a church led by a demagogue. It was an ordinary speech. At best it was successful at minimizing a political problem. Yet some in the media equated it to the Gettysburg Address.

The importance of a proud, adversarial press speaking truth about a powerful politician and offering impartial accounts of his actions was frequently and embarrassingly lost. When Mr. Obama's opponents, such as the Clintons, challenged his lack of experience, or pointed out that he was not in the U.S. Senate when he expressed early opposition to the war in Iraq, they were depicted as petty.

Bill Clinton got hit hard when he called Mr. Obama's claims to be a long-standing opponent of the Iraq war "the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen." The former president accurately said that there was no difference in actual Senate votes on the war between his wife and Mr. Obama. But his comments were not treated by the press as legitimate, hard-ball political fighting. They were cast as possibly racist.

This led to Saturday Night Live's mocking skit -- where the debate moderator was busy hammering the other Democratic nominees with tough questions while inquiring if Mr. Obama was comfortable and needed more water.

When fellow Democrats contending for the nomination rightly pointed to Mr. Obama's thin proposals for dealing with terrorism and extricating the U.S. from Iraq, they were drowned out by loud if often vacuous shouts for change. Yet in the general election campaign and during the transition period, Mr. Obama steadily moved to his former opponents' positions. In fact, he approached Bush-Cheney stands on immunity for telecommunications companies that cooperate in warrantless surveillance.

There is a dangerous trap being set here. The same media people invested in boosting a black man to the White House as a matter of history have set very high expectations for him. When he disappoints, as presidents and other human beings inevitably do, the backlash may be extreme.

Several seasons ago, when Philadelphia Eagle's black quarterback Donovan McNabb was struggling, radio commentator Rush Limbaugh said the media wanted a black quarterback to do well and gave Mr. McNabb "a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn't deserve." Mr. Limbaugh's sin was saying out loud what others had said privately.

There is a lot more at stake now, and to allow criticism of Mr. Obama only behind closed doors does no honor to the dreams and prayers of generations past: that race be put aside, and all people be judged honestly, openly, and on the basis of their performance.

President Obama deserves no less.

Read complete column ....