Did you know that since President Obama came into office, the debt limit has been raised seven times?
With those increases, Congress has added $43,000 in debt for every American household in just the last four years.
And now the debt limit deadline is looming again. Treasury will run out of tricks to keep paying the bills on October 17, Secretary Jack Lew announced yesterday.
Instead of pursuing significant spending cuts and entitlement reforms that are desperately needed to get spending under control, House Republicans reportedly are proposing to suspend the debt ceiling for more than a year, which would add $1.1 trillion to the debt.
So, take that $43,000 per household that was added in the last four years and tack on another $8,800 per household.
What happened the last time Congress raised the debt ceiling? Did they accomplish any meaningful spending cuts before increasing the debt limit? In a word, no:
Congress and the President last suspended the debt ceiling from February 4, 2013, through May 18, 2013, adding $300 billion to the national debt in less than four months. Their only request was that the Senate produce a budget for the first time in four years, which it did. No savings were accomplished.
No savings.
This is unacceptable.
As Heritage’s Romina Boccia, the Grover M. Hermann Fellow in Federal Budgetary Affairs, wrote yesterday:
Congress should implement spending cuts and entitlement reforms before—or as part of—an increase in the debt ceiling. Lawmakers still have time to put forth a plan that puts the budget on a path to balance and avoids a debt crisis today and in the future. The clock is ticking.http://blog.heritage.org/2013/09/26/morning-bell-43000-per-household/?utm_source=heritagefoundation&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=&utm_content=&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
Saving the Sequester
While the defund distraction plays on, Congress tries to gut the spending caps.
One cost of the media circus around Ted Cruz is that almost no one is following the classic Washington misdirection play over the automatic sequester spending cuts. While right and left are preoccupied with their hero or bugbear, the politicians are attempting to break the spending caps.The exceptions are Republican Senators Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Jeff Flake of Arizona, a pair of genuine fiscal conservatives who are sounding the alarm on this fiscal jail break. House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had better pay attention or the hard-fought budget victories of 2011 will vanish in this year's fiscal showdown.Readers may have forgotten about the sequester since President Obama predicted hellfire and national damnation when it started to take effect earlier this year.
In 2011, Mr. Obama proposed and Republicans agreed to 10 years of caps on discretionary spending (not including entitlements like Social Security) as part of the debt-ceiling deal, which created the Budget Control Act.
Mr. Obama proposed the automatic cuts only because he thought Republicans would never be able to live with them, and he now regrets it. The horrors the President predicted never did take place as government agencies found ways to save the roughly 5% in 2013 without hitting essential services. But the cuts have been effective at accomplishing one of the GOP's (and the Tea Party's) stated goals: cutting the economic burden of government spending.
Total federal outlays are down from a high of $3.6 trillion in fiscal 2011 to an estimated $3.45 trillion in the 2013 fiscal year that ends on September 30. Assuming no recession and adherence to the caps, federal expenditures will keep shrinking as a share of the economy over the rest of the Obama Presidency. Federal discretionary spending hasn't declined for two consecutive years since the Truman Administration.
The spending cap for 2014 is pegged at $967 billion. Republicans in the House—at the behest of defense hawks—have already made the mistake of raising that number to $986 billion in the continuing resolution budget bill that the House passed last week. The House earmarks all of that extra $19 billion for defense, as it should, but Senate Democrats will shift most of that to domestic spending.
House conservatives were so busy patting themselves on the back for adding the ObamaCare provision that they failed to notice the higher spending level. Or maybe they didn't care. One of the "defund" ringleaders in the House is Georgia's Tom Graves, who is now in favor of the extra $19 billion. It's no accident he's on the Appropriations Committee that decides where the spending goes.
Meanwhile, as the ObamaCare histrionics continue in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid wants to raise the caps for 2014 by as much as another $70 billion to closer to $1.058 trillion in discretionary spending. That was the spending marker that Democrats put down earlier this year in their 2014 budget resolution (which was never reconciled with the House). By focusing so much on the futile effort not to fund ObamaCare, Republicans may let Democrats gut their single biggest fiscal achievement since 2010.
Conservative activists outside of Congress would normally be blowing the whistle on this. But the folks at Heritage Action and the Tea Party Patriots are focusing on the political theater of defunding ObamaCare while downplaying the political reality of what the government actually spends. These are the very folks who are accusing Republicans for being spineless for not joining the defund chorus that has little or no chance of succeeding while President Obama occupies the White House.
***
What they're forgetting is that the sequester is the best political leverage Republicans have to gain a concession from Democrats—on ObamaCare or anything else. The ever-tighter spending caps on domestic discretionary spending are squeezing the liberal constituencies that live off government. As the likes of Planned Parenthood and welfare and other transfer payments get squeezed, the political pressure increases on Democrats to give up something tangible in return for easing the caps.The shrewder Republicans understand this, which is why they've been hoping to use the sequester as part of the negotiation over the federal debt limit that will hit next month. An offer to ease the sequester has a far better chance to win entitlement reforms worth the name, perhaps including a delay in some or all of ObamaCare, than does a government shutdown that Mr. Obama would welcome so he can blame Republicans one more time.
The "defund" drama is Beltway kabuki that is distracting from the real fiscal choices that will be made in the coming weeks. What a shame it would be if by focusing so much on the health-care defunding they can't accomplish in the budget fight, Republicans gave up the sequester spending caps that are their best hope for delaying part or all of ObamaCare.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304526204579097442586704618.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
The Late, Great Middle Class
By Victor Davis HansonThe American middle class, like the American economy in general, is ailing. Labor-force participation has hit a 35-year low.
Median household income is lower than it was five years ago. Only the top 5 percent of households have seen their incomes rise under President Obama.
Commuters are paying more than twice as much for gas as they were in 2008. Federal payouts for food stamps, unemployment insurance and disability insurance have reached unprecedented levels.
Meanwhile, the country is still running near-record budget deficits and is burdened by $17 trillion in aggregate debt. Yet the stock market is soaring.
How can we make sense of all this contradictory nonsense? Irony.
Obama promised to restore the middle class. In truth, he has enacted the very policies that have done it the most damage in years. That paradox may explain why his base of support remains the very rich and the very poor. Goldman Sachs, federal bureaucrats and aid recipients are helped in a way that the strapped hardware store owner, Starbucks barista and part-time welder are not.
For all the talk of infrastructure or stimulus, the latest $6 trillion in federal borrowing seems to have been wasted on bailing out insider banks and green companies, growing the federal workforce, regulating the private sector into stasis, and subsidizing those who are not working.
The Federal Reserve still keeps interest rates at near zero. That mostly helps Wall Street, where money flows madly in search of any sort of return.
Most real interest rates for consumer purchases somehow remain exorbitant. Banks obtain their money cheaply and lend it out expensively. No wonder that so many Wall Street and banking executives -- Timothy Geithner, Jack Lew, Peter Orszag, Gene Sperling, Larry Summers -- revolve in and out of the highest levels of this "no revolving door" administration.
Middle-class workers see little chance of retiring when their meager savings earn almost no interest, so they are apt to stay on the job longer. In circular fashion, their continuance only makes unemployment rates for young entry-level workers even worse.
Obama always threatened higher taxes on the well-off. He achieved that goal with a new 39.6 percent federal rate on upper incomes -- well apart from state and payroll taxes. Yet such steep taxes do not much affect the super-rich. Their income is often exempted through sophisticated tax-avoidance or, more often, earned through less taxed capital gains.
Small employers in many states have no such recourse and now pay more than half their incomes in assorted federal, state and local taxes. Naturally, they are hiring fewer people and making fewer capital investments.
That greater tax hit might have been worth it had the new rates been part of a balanced-budget agreement like the Bill Clinton-Newt Gingrich deal of 1997 that froze spending levels and for a time stopped our ruinous borrowing.
Not this time. We end up with the worst of all worlds: once again a 39 percent top tax rate, but now with out-of-control federal spending and more multibillion-dollar budget deficits.
By virtually shutting down gas and oil leases on federal lands, the administration has declined the chance to create millions of new energy jobs and to lower fuel prices. For now, cheaper power bills and gasoline prices, and the creation of more jobs in energy, depend entirely on those who drill on private lands -- despite, not because, of federal efforts.
Even the many sires of Obamacare now deny their past parentage. Unions want out of it. Congress demands exclusion from it. Well-connected businesses won exemption from it.
The poor who mostly do not pay federal income taxes will get a largely free, bureaucratized federal health-care system. Many of the rich praise Obamacare but will quietly use their own money to avoid it. The middle class will see their premiums soar and the quality of their coverage erode.
These are surreal times. Wealthy elites who help to shut down jobs in energy, timber and mining are deemed liberal -- but not always so the middle classes, who suffer the consequences in lost jobs and higher prices.
Universities voice progressive bromides, but they care mostly for the tenured and the technocrat, not the part-timer and the indebted student. Despite soaring tuition, campus is now the haunt of the very wealthy who can afford exorbitant tuition and the very poor who are often exempted from it. The less romantic middle class goes $1 trillion into debt for their high-interest student loans.
Never has it been so good to be invested in a vastly expanding federal government -- either to distribute or receive federal subsidies. Never has it been so lucrative to work in banking or on Wall Street. And never has it been so bad to try to find a decent job making something real.
To paraphrase the Roman historian Tacitus, where we have made a desert of the middle class, we call it a recovery.
http://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2013/09/26/the-late-great-middle-class-n1709455/page/full
Obama Has Dismantled America
Does the extinguished candle care about the darkness? Ask the huddled masses who are yearning to be free. America was once thought of as a light unto nations. Obama has single-handedly extinguished that light.I saw it all coming. In my 2010 book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America, I noted that one student who was interviewed after an Obama town hall meeting during his first presidential trip to Europe in 2009 said happily: "He sounds just like a European." That is, not like an American president who loves his country. And he doesn't: asked during that visit to Europe about American exceptionalism, Obama answered: "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."
In other words, he didn't believe in American exceptionalism at all. In a seminal moment for modern historians and active political observers like myself, a snapshot came across the newswires in May 2008, showing candidate Obama crossing an airplane tarmac, mid-gait, and holding Fareed Zakaria's American epitaph, The Post-American World. In the photo, Obama is holding his place in the book with his finger, as if he didn't dare put it down and wanted to dive back into it as soon as he could.
The vicious Zakaria describes his book this way: "This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else." In it, he details the era he hopes we are entering now -- a world in which the United States would "no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures." He asserts that the "rise of the rest" is the "great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world. The tallest buildings, biggest dams, largest-selling movies, and most advanced cell phones are all being built outside the United States. This economic growth is producing political confidence, national pride, and potentially international problems."
Obama seems bound and determined to drive America over a cliff and make Zakaria's vision of the future a self-fulfilling prophecy. Obama went to work from his first day in office to make Zakaria's wishful thinking about America's decline a reality. As the most powerful man in the world, he would level the playing field, even if it meant cutting America off at the knees. Good and evil would be made equivalent, with evil sanctioned by the world's only remaining superpower. He turned against our allies (particularly Israel) and showed them that America could not be relied on. He taxed us into poverty and stirred up racial strife to make us all less safe. He has enabled Russia to re-emerge as a world power, and the Islamic jihadists are bolder than ever.
Obama vowed to make America just another nation -- unexceptional -- and he has. It's not that other nations have risen. They haven't. It's that Obama has dismantled American hegemony and diminished our standing in the world.
And so, during the Muslim massacre at a Nairobi mall, whom did Kenyan officials call for help? They called Israel. Obama is Kenyan, with close relatives in the country. It is his native land, the country where his father was born. So you might think he would have sent help, but his father (and stepfather) were Muslim; perhaps that is why he always comes down on the side of the jihad.
Where is the media coverage? This is Obama's native land -- where is his condemnation of the vicious sharia? His silence is sanction and support.
And in general, the U.S. is glaringly absent in this worldwide fight for freedom against Islamic jihad killers. Here is where America should be leading from the front, or the side, but at least from somewhere. I am ashamed for my country.
Kenya has been a beacon for democracy in Africa. But Africa has come under the boot of Islam under a post-American U.S. president who is aiding and abetting the global jihad. Obama aided Islamic supremacists in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria. And Islamic supremacists have been waging a vicious jihad in Mali, Nigeria, Sudan, Ethiopia, Tanzania...the whole continent. This is the horror of Islamic supremacism.
Egypt, in a fierce rebuke of Obama and his patronage of the Muslim Brotherhood, on Monday banned the Brotherhood. Here in America the Muslim Brotherhood should be designated a terrorist organization like Hamas (an MB group), along with its proxies in the U.S. such as CAIR, ISNA, MSA, and MAS. Despite Egypt's massive rejection of Islamic supremacism, and despite the recent rash of Muslim on non-Muslim attacks, the jihad-aligned media is digging in and whitewashing Islam and jihad, while doing everything they can to make Obama look good.
But despite their best efforts, that task is getting harder and harder. And the absence of America acting in the defense of freedom across the world is proof that Ayn Rand was right when she said that "the spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles."
And the Obama presidency is an epic moral failure.
The White House just issued a statement stating that there will be no negotiations on the upcoming debt ceiling hike. But by a 2-to-1 margin, the American people disagree. A new Bloomberg poll shows that 61% of voters say “right to require spending cuts when the debt ceiling is raised even if it risks default.” This sentiment is shared by a plurality of Democrats.
In worse news for the president, the poll shows that despite the best of efforts of his administration and the media, only 40% blame congressional Republicans for what the poll calls Washington dysfunction. By comparison, though, 38% blame Obama. Statistically, that is a tie. In February, Obama held a 43% to 34% advantage on the same issue.
For those of you with a life, the debt ceiling debate is different from the debate we are currently having, which is over funding the government through a continuing resolution. The debt ceiling is about allowing the Treasury to borrow more money than we already have borrowed.
Overall, though, this poll shows the GOP going into the debt ceiling with the will of the people firmly behind them. It also shows that like the gun control, George Zimmerman, and immigration reform, the media appears to be losing its power to sway public opinion. The media have spent years attacking the GOP as obstructionists and as a result the polls have only moved against Obama.
When 61% want spending cuts and the president disagrees, he is the extremist out-of-touch with the American people.
It just wasn't supposed to happen this way.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/09/26/poll-61-percent-want-spending-cuts-attached-to-debt-ceiling
Let ObamaCare Collapse
Congress can't kill the entitlement state. Only the American people can.
What the GOP's Defund-ObamaCare Caucus is failing to see is that ObamaCare is no longer just ObamaCare. It is about something that is beyond the reach of a congressional vote.As its Oct. 1 implementation date arrives, ObamaCare is the biggest bet that American liberalism has made in 80 years on its foundational beliefs. This thing called "ObamaCare" carries on its back all the justifications, hopes and dreams of the entitlement state. The chance is at hand to let its political underpinnings collapse, perhaps permanently.
If ObamaCare fails, or seriously falters, the entitlement state will suffer a historic loss of credibility with the American people. It will finally be vulnerable to challenge and fundamental change. But no mere congressional vote can achieve that. Only the American people can kill ObamaCare.
No matter what Sen. Ted Cruz and his allies do, ObamaCare won't die. It would return another day in some other incarnation. The Democrats would argue, rightly, that the ideas inside ObamaCare weren't defeated. What the Democrats would lose is a vote in Congress, nothing more.
A political idea, once it becomes a national program, achieves legitimacy with the public. Over time, that legitimacy deepens. So it has been with the idea of national social insurance.
German Chancellor Otto von Bismark's creation of a social insurance system in the 19th century spread through Europe. After the devastation of World War I, few questioned its need. In the U.S., Franklin Roosevelt's Social Security system was seen as an antidote to the Depression. The public's three-decade support for the idea allowed Lyndon Johnson to pass the Medicare and Medicaid entitlements even in the absence of an economic crisis.
Going back at least to the Breaux-Thomas Medicare Commission in 1999, endless learned bodies have warned that the U.S. entitlement scheme of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is financially unsupportable. Of Medicare, Rep. Bill Thomas said at the time, "One of the biggest problems is that the government tries to administer 10,000 prices in 3,000 counties, and it gets it wrong most of the time." But change never comes.
Medicaid is the worst medicine in the United States. It grinds on. Doctors in droves are withdrawing from Medicare. No matter. It all lives on.
An established political idea is like a vampire. Facts, opinions, votes, garlic: Nothing can make it die.
But there is one thing that can kill an established political idea. It will die if the public that embraced it abandons it.
Six months ago, that didn't seem likely. Now it does.
The public's dislike of ObamaCare isn't growing with every new poll for reasons of philosophical attachment to notions of liberty and choice. Fear of ObamaCare is growing because a cascade of news suggests that ObamaCare is an impending catastrophe.
Big labor unions and smaller franchise restaurant owners want out. UPS dropped coverage for employed spouses. Corporations such as Walgreens and IBM IBM +0.52% are transferring employees or retirees into private insurance exchanges. Because of ObamaCare, the Cleveland Clinic has announced early retirements for staff and possible layoffs. The federal government this week made public its estimate of premium costs for the federal health-care exchanges. It is a morass, revealing the law's underappreciated operational complexity.
But ObamaCare's Achilles' heel is technology. The software glitches are going to drive people insane.
Creating really large software for institutions is hard. Creating big software that can communicate across unrelated institutions is unimaginably hard. ObamaCare's software has to communicate—accurately—across a mind-boggling array of institutions: HHS, the IRS, Medicare, the state-run exchanges, and a whole galaxy of private insurers' and employers' software systems.
Recalling Rep. Thomas's 1999 remark about Medicare setting prices for 3,000 counties, there is already mispricing of ObamaCare's insurance policies inside the exchanges set up in the states.
The odds of ObamaCare's eventual self-collapse look stronger every day. After that happens, then what? Try truly universal health insurance? Not bloody likely if the aghast U.S. public has any say.
Enacted with zero Republican votes, ObamaCare is the solely owned creation of the Democrats' belief in their own limitless powers to fashion goodness out of legislated entitlements. Sometimes social experiments go wrong. In the end, the only one who supported Frankenstein was Dr. Frankenstein. The Democrats in 2014 should by all means be asked relentlessly to defend their monster.
Republicans and conservatives, instead of tilting at the defunding windmill, should be working now to present the American people with the policy ideas that will emerge inevitably when ObamaCare's declines. The system of private insurance exchanges being adopted by the likes of Walgreens suggests a parallel alternative to ObamaCare may be happening already.
If Republicans feel they must "do something" now, they could get behind Sen. David Vitter's measure to force Congress to enter the burning ObamaCare castle along with the rest of the American people. Come 2017, they can repeal the ruins.
The discrediting of the entitlement state begins next Tuesday. Let it happen.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304526204579097443230322758.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Cruz Control Should Be Standard on GOP Models
By Ann CoulterIf I could briefly interrupt the Republican firing squad aiming at Ted Cruz, let's talk about something we all agree on. And by "we all," I mean a majority of the American people, the Teamsters, many Democrats and every single last Republican.
Obamacare is an unmitigated disaster.
It was passed illegally without the House ever voting on the Senate bill and became law absent a single Republican vote -- even "the girls from Maine" and "the girl from Arizona" -- the only major legislation ever enacted on a strict party-line vote. The Supreme Court had to violate the Constitution's separation of powers to uphold Obamacare as a "tax" -- despite the fact that no elected body could ever have enacted such a massive tax hike even with the sleazy parliamentary tricks used to pass this bill.
Proving that everyone hates it, Congress has now exempted itself from Obamacare's provisions, having asked for, and received, a waiver from President Obama.
Yes, these are the exact same politicians who lecture us that Obamacare is "the law of the land!" (So are our immigration laws.) The same ones who huffily announce that the Supreme Court upheld it! (The court also upheld the First Amendment in Citizens United, but that doesn't stop Obama from demanding Congress overturn the First Amendment.) They are the same sanctimonious frauds who tell us that Obamacare is "the right thing to do!"
Those guys waived Obamacare for themselves. If national health care is so great, why don't they want it?
In every single category of Crap Forced On the Country by the Left, liberals always have a work-around for themselves.
They love the public schools and denounce school choice -- but their kids go to St. Albans or Sidwell Friends. As Al Gore responded to a question from a black journalist for Time magazine who asked him why he opposed school vouchers while sending his own kids to private schools, "My children -- you can leave them out of this!"
Oh, now I see.
Liberals are always eager to release criminals and block crucial crime-fighting strategies such as stop-and-frisk -- which they announce from the safety of their antiseptic, crime-free neighborhoods. They love the homeless, but try putting a homeless shelter in their doorman buildings.
They tell us guns won't protect us -- and then we find out the loudest of them all have armed guards. Staunch gun-control advocate Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago had three armed guards with him at all times, as well as an armored car. Mayor Rahm Emanuel also has armed guards and an armored car. Chicago aldermen are allowed to carry any guns they like. But until very recently (we hope!) the people of Chicago were virtually prohibited from being armed.
Are you beginning to see the pattern?
Liberals love affirmative action -- provided their offspring still get into Harvard, Yale or Princeton. How about they give up their kids' seats to disadvantaged minorities?
Class warriors Warren Buffett and the Nation magazine's Katrina vanden Heuvel hired phalanxes of lawyers to fight the IRS when informed they weren't paying the government what they owed. George Soros and the Kennedy family stash their money in offshore accounts, safe from U.S. taxation.
Liberals also strongly support every manner of environmental regulation -- unless it blocks the view from the Kennedy compound. In deference to Teddy Kennedy's ferocious opposition to wind farms off the coast of Cape Cod, the federal government reduced the number of turbines, moved them farther off the coast and ordered them painted white to blend in with the view.
And now these government do-gooders shoving Obamacare down our throats have managed to exempt themselves from its wonderful provisions. Supreme Court justices won't have to suffer under Obamacare, but will continue to have their health care subsidized by us, the hapless taxpayers forced into this rotten system.
Unfortunately, most Republicans are too stupid to notice that Democrats are walking around with a gigantic glass jaw. Democrats must not be able to believe their dumb luck. Instead of hitting our glass jaw, Republicans have decided to attack Ted Cruz!
Cruz, and his Senate colleague Mike Lee (who, for some reason, is being held harmless by both Democrats and Republicans), have demanded that the Senate vote on the House bill fully funding the entire government -- except Obamacare. Most important, they want Democrats to allow more than one amendment to that bill.
The Democrats are refusing either of those options in the Senate.
Among the amendments Republicans might want to introduce is one requiring members of Congress and their staffs to live under Obamacare. Or an amendment delaying the law's implementation for the whole country -- and not just the big employers favored by Obama. And also an amendment taking the administration of Obamacare out of the hands of the utterly corrupt IRS.
Can we at least get Senate Democrats to vote on these urgent reforms? I'd especially like to see the votes of red state Democrats, such as Mary Landrieu, Mark Begich and Mark Pryor. I bet their Republican opponents in the midterm elections next year would, too.
Of course, for Cruz's threat to work, it has to be credible. Too bad Republicans have been blanketing the airwaves proclaiming that: (1) They don't have the votes to defund Obamacare; and (2) Republicans will get blamed in the event of any government shutdown.
Republicans: You never had to shut the government down! (And thanks for making it blindingly clear that you never intended to.) You could have waited to see how the public opinion was going and cried uncle at the last minute.
But instead of attacking Obamacare and the breathtaking hypocrisy of the Democrats over this massively unpopular law, far too many Republicans have been spending their time attacking Ted Cruz. (Why didn't we see one-tenth as much venom directed at Sen. Marco Rubio for trying to give the Democrats 30 million new voters with amnesty as we have toward Cruz for trying to defund Obamacare?)
For every minute you spend attacking Cruz on TV, Republicans, could you consider spending two minutes attacking Obamacare?
Barry Goldwater didn't "have the votes" when Ronald Reagan launched the conservative movement with his "A Time for Choosing" speech in 1964. But he galvanized conservatives and gave them the hope of future victories. Does Rep. Peter King think Reagan was a fraud who lost influence in the Republican Party with that speech? We don't have the votes, Ron!
Whether or not Cruz succeeds, we wouldn't be talking about Obamacare this week without his efforts to defund it -- at least those of us who are talking about this disastrous law, rather than attacking Cruz.
http://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2013/09/25/cruz-control-should-be-standard-on-gop-models-n1709843
Republicans and the Kobayashi Maru test
Those familiar with the Sacred Texts of Western Civilization (the original 69 episodes of Star Trek
for those of you from Rio Linda) know about the Kobayashi Maru. It is a
test at Starfleet Academy designed to be unwinnable, as a challenge to
officer candidates. Captain Kirk was famously the only cadet to win it,
but he did so only by reprogramming the problem.
Republican
attacks on Ted Cruz for standing up to the disaster that Obamacare will
be for the country reflect the corner that the Democrats and the MSM
have crowded Republicans into. Not the least of Rush's many blazing
insights is that "we cannot expect to be praised by our enemies,"
meaning the MSM. But Republicans are trying to achieve
exactly that. If the MSM is against something, then it is wrong. Cruz
is taking the role of Winston Churchill, pointing out the danger to the
Republic and by implication denouncing the appeasers, and the
Republicans are denouncing him.
Republicans
are going to have to follow Captain Kirk's strategy in the Kobayashi
Maru test - they are going to have to reprogram the problem. What does
that mean? They have to reach out to their constituency with arguments
based on the first principles. Consultants tell them not to do this.
They tell candidates the makeup of the population in this county and
that town and this state and what to tell them based on focus groups.
Nevah gonna work for Republicans. If that strategy could ever work, it
would be for a dominant party that controls the high ground of the
argument and only has to tune the message for each group.
Republicans
are not in that position. That is the victory of the MSM. It has
delegitimized the basic arguments for the country in the public forum.
But, as Rush has observed, 80% of the country, including most liberals, live their lives
as conservatives. Republicans have to believe that there are 51%+ of
voters out there that believe in the conservative view of the country,
well summarized by the Tea Party as Fiscal Responsibility, Limited Government, Free Markets.
If
there is not a majority out there for that message, then the
Republicans are finished anyway. A few can hang on as vestigials and
get the perks and the pension, but that is too cynical a view. A better
view is Edwards Deming's adage that "everybody is already doing their
best" (Deming was the quality control guru that put Japanese industry on
its feet after World War II and became embraced in the U.S. in the
1980's when he was in his 80's)..
The point is that with
everybody doing their best, we are losing. That means that we are not
doing the right things. For instance, we as Republicans cannot let
ourselves be lectured on morality by the party of slavery, segregation,
lynching, and the Klan.
And
the welfare plantation. The liberal project of the last 50 years -
putting people on welfare and destroying their families - is a failure.
We have to say so. Welfare is a war on black men, a real war,
as distinct from the phony Republican war on women. Welfare warehouses
people, particularly men, by encouraging them not to participate in the
enterprise economy. The result? Chicago. Detroit.
We
know why the Democrats warehouse people. To survive, Democrats need
clients. Their worst nightmare is a country of independent,
self-reliant families. Obamacare is an effort to turn the entire
country into clients, whose access to health care is decided by Lois Lerner, who, with her nasty leftism and disdain for conservatism, is going to be the staff of Obamacare.
Republicans
are worried about what "others," meaning the MSM, are going to say.
Republicans cannot win by running between the raindrops of the
conventional wisdom, which is Leftism. They have to reprogram the
problem.
Ted Cruz is showing how to do it.
What We Just Saw
In the aftermath of Senator Ted Cruz’s epic performance on the Senate floor, a few observations:
After
his disgraceful attacks on Cruz, including his reach-across-the-aisle,
dog-in-the-manger response today, this should be the end of Senator John
McCain as a voice of influence in the Republican party. Ditto his
mini-me, Senator Lindsey Graham. Indeed, the entire Old Guard of
business-as-usual “comity” fans passeth. When you care more about what
the other side thinks, it’s probably time either to switch teams or step
down. There
is new leadership in the GOP, whether the party wants to admit it or
not: Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Jeff Sessions, and the others who
stepped into the breach to spell the senator from Texas.The
popular reaction to Cruz will be immediate and noticeable; the more the
old bulls carp, the more the public will rally to Cruz’s side. The
country has been spoiling for a real fight since the election of 2008,
and now it has one.Conservatives
have finally realized that, as it’s currently constituted, they have no
home in the Republican party, which is the Washington Generals to the
Democrats’ Harlem Globetrotters, the designated losers who nevertheless
are rewarded handsomely for their sham opposition.To
that end, conservatives understand that rather than form a third party,
their only hope is to seize control of the corrupt, rotting hulk of the
GOP, which they now can do with the help of a reinvigorated Tea Party —
especially with Lois Lerner’s IRS off its back.The
Cruz faction in the Senate, and its allies in the House (whose
leadership is now up for grabs) must now press their advantage. The
louder the Democrats squawk, the more they are wounded; the one thing
they’ve long feared is a direct assault on their core beliefs as translated into actions,
and the deleterious effects of Obamacare, just now being felt by the
population, are the most vivid proof of the failure of Progressivism
that conservatives could wish for.Win or
lose, the battle is now joined: First the struggle for the GOP and then
the battle for control of Congress and the presidency. Cruz just struck
at the kings he could reach — the Republican “leadership” — and has
most likely dealt them a fatal blow. Now the Tea Party hordes must back
him up by eliminating his opponents (who tend to be geriatrics, and thus
“leaders” by longevity rather than talent or commitment) through the
primary process wherever possible. If he can carry off this coup, he and
Senator Paul will very quickly find themselves elevated from
back-benchers to commanders.Nevertheless,
control of the Congress by the current GOP “leadership” would only
serve to increase frustration on the right. The citizenry does not want
“deals” or more legislation — it wants action.There
is no reason to think the Tea Party, if properly organized and
harnessed, cannot be even more potent next year than it was in 2010,
especially now that its members know the government really was out to
get them.Make Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin into the faces of the Democratic party and watch the votes peel away from the Left. Any
party that cannot successfully sell freedom and personal liberty
doesn’t deserve power. The trick will be to explain — by word and deed —
that the Democrats’ Manichaean choice (Big Brother or the orphanage) is
a false one, that less can be more, and that the restoration of a
Republic of self-reliant citizens will benefit all Americans — not
simply the government class and its clients. http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/359508/what-we-just-saw-michael-walsh
People Will Remember
Watching Ted Cruz's majestic, twenty-one hour speech in defense of defunding ObamaCare was thrilling.
Observing all the small-minded critics on both sides of the aisle go after him as though he were a serial killer was so distressing. I am reminded of a fine film, made in 1941, titled People Will Talk. In the film, a horrible little man, played by Hume Cronyn (looking eerily like Harry Reid), strives to bring down a fine man, a doctor (Cary Grant). The man tries every dirty trick in the book and fails. But just before the end, the doctor's friend, Shunderson, played by Finlay Currie, says the following (written by Joseph Mankiewicz):
Know this all you Republicans who have spent the last few weeks trashing Sen. Cruz, especially you John McCain: Each of you has revealed for all to see what you are made of and the voters will not forget.
Observing all the small-minded critics on both sides of the aisle go after him as though he were a serial killer was so distressing. I am reminded of a fine film, made in 1941, titled People Will Talk. In the film, a horrible little man, played by Hume Cronyn (looking eerily like Harry Reid), strives to bring down a fine man, a doctor (Cary Grant). The man tries every dirty trick in the book and fails. But just before the end, the doctor's friend, Shunderson, played by Finlay Currie, says the following (written by Joseph Mankiewicz):
"You're a little man. It's not that you're short, you're little in the mind and in the heart. Tonight you tried to make a man little whose boots you couldn't touch if you stood on the highest mountain in the world. And as it turned out, you're even littler than you were before."Reading and listening to all the vicious personal attacks directed at Sen. Cruz by Democrats and Republicans, it becomes depressingly clear that Congress is largely made up of very small men and women; small in their minds and small in their hearts. And Senator Ted Cruz? He possesses the splendid grace and class of Cary Grant's fictional Dr. Praetorius.
Know this all you Republicans who have spent the last few weeks trashing Sen. Cruz, especially you John McCain: Each of you has revealed for all to see what you are made of and the voters will not forget.
Ted Cruz Might Just Have Won the Future for the GOP
Make no mistake about it: the on-going “extended speech” by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has absolutely nothing to do with defunding the Affordable Care Act—or even delaying it for one goddamn day.
As the long list of Senate Republicans who declined to back a full-blown, fill-your-hands-you-son-of-a-bitch filibuster over Obamacare could tell you, it’s a done deal that the president’s consistently unpopular
health-care law is going forward even if the government shuts down.
Come next week, the enrollment period is going to start, and come
January 1, 2014, the plan will kick into gear despite every reason to
believe it will be a clusterfudge of epic proportions.
So
what exactly was Cruz doing up there, hogging the limelight on C-SPAN’s
low-wattage webstream for a couple of hours, if he wasn’t serious about
stopping Obamacare? He was playing his part in a pretty goddamned
brilliant strategy to win the future not for himself but for the Republican Party.
Cruz
and his fellow Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) are the best-known of the gaggle
of legislators that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) denounced as “wacko birds”
earlier this year. “It’s always the wacko birds on right and left that
get the media megaphone,” sputtered McCain in the wake of Paul’s immensely popular and influential filibuster,
which called much-needed attention to the Obama administration’s glib
attitude toward civil liberties and executive branch overreach.
The wacko bird caucus overlaps
pretty well with the Tea Party. Besides Cruz and Paul, it includes such
characters as Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Reps.
Justin Amash (R-MI) and Thomas Massie (R-KY). Despite meaningful
differences among them, they all support cutting federal spending and
taxes, and reducing regulations on business and other economic
activities. Unlike many members of the GOP, they are critical of the
national surveillance state and, at least in the cases of Paul and
Amash, are principled non-interventionists who are quick to question the Pentagon budget.
At a time when a record high 60 percent of all Americans agree the federal government has “too much power,” the wacko birds are flying pretty high, especially when they attack their own party for its utter malfeasance
during the Bush years. There’s every reason to believe that the future
belongs to the wacko birds and their general, transpartisan message that
government is too big and too powerful. The trend throughout the 21st
century, reports Gallup,
is increasing skepticism toward Washington, D.C. The trend is
particularly pronounced among all-important independent voters, who make
up a plurality of the electorate. In 2003, 45 percent of them thought
the government was too powerful. Now it’s 65 percent. They will vote for
candidates—and a party—pushing limiting government.
But
Cruz and Paul are speaking to significantly different audiences,
despite being wacko birds of a feather. As befits the son of former Rep.
Ron Paul (R-TX), who ran for president as a libertarian in 1988, Rand
Paul is a consciously unconventional Republican who gained his Senate
seat after beating Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s handpicked
candidate in the 2012 Kentucky primary.
Paul
is consciously going wide in looking for the sorts of newer, younger
voters his septuagenarian father cultivated during the 2008 and 2012
presidential campaigns. At the Conservative Political Action Convention
(CPAC) in March, he rapped
the GOP hard for having grown “stale and moss-covered” and demanded the
party “embrace liberty in both the economic and the personal sphere.”
Almost alone among national Republican figures, he’s making serious
attempts to win over black voters and woo millennials.
One of his stump-speech lines stresses that Republicans “need to be
white, we need to be brown, we need to be black, we need to be with
tattoos, without tattoos, with ponytails, without ponytails, with
beards, without.”
In contrast to Paul—and despite his suspiciously ethnic surname and scandalously Canadian birth—Cruz
is the favorite son of an older, whiter America. As Paul brings in
fresh new blood to a broad, limited-government coalition, Cruz is
locking down the tired old blood that realizes the John Boehners, Mitch
McConnells, John McCains, and Lindsey Grahams of the world really don’t
give a rat’s ass about them. Almost without exception, Cruz’s positions,
including his “Potemkin battle” to stop Obamacare, mesh perfectly with
what Slate’s David Weigel calls “Republican seats that are largely whiter and more rural than the rest of the country.”
Where
Paul wears turtlenecks, sports weird hair, and talks about letting
states decide their own laws on drugs and marriage, Cruz is rocking a
retrograde, wet-look haircut and is unambiguously and unambivalently
conservative on any social issue, including the phantom menace of Sharia
law (“an enormous problem”
in America, according to Cruz). You’d think Cruz’s Ivy League bona
fides—undergrad at Princeton, law school at Harvard—would hurt his
street cred with disgruntled flyover-country independents and
Republicans, but he’s playing it perfectly. His diplomas certify that’s
he’s just as “whip-smart” as President Obama even as he can testify from
personal experience that Harvard Law is housing a dozen “Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.”
Indeed,
Cruz’s greatest political asset is the disgust he inspires in
mainstream liberals. Every jab by Beltway Draco Malfoys such as The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank (who sniffs
that Cruz is “an opportunist driven more by ambition than ideology”)
and get-a-load-of-this eye-rolling by coastal elitists (Cruz was “creepy” as an undergrad and strolled around Princeton in a “paisley bathrobe”) make him more effective with his core audience. GQ readers may think Jason Zengerle’s well-wrought hatchet job has shown all the world what a pompous, humble-bragging
jackass Cruz really is: he can’t stop namedropping! He’s got a
self-aggrandizing portrait of himself in his Senate office! He insulted
the venerable Sen. Dianne Feinstein! The “maverick” John McCain “fucking
hates” him! But the GQ piece, like all liberal criticism of
Cruz, and even vaguely contentious interviews with semi-conservative
types such as Chris Wallace of Fox News, makes him a bigger hero to his
fans.
The
odds are that neither Paul nor Cruz will be president. It’s nothing
against them; it’s just that the odds are stacked against any
individual. But commentators who think these guys are in politics only
for themselves are missing the energy that’s driving the wacko birds.
Maybe, just maybe, they really do believe in shrinking the size, scope,
and spending of the federal government. And maybe they realize that
their vehicle of choice, the Republican Party, really does need to reach
out to new swaths of the electorate while holding on to conservatives.
If
that’s true, then between Paul and Cruz, they’re covering a lot of
territory. For my money, the most interesting moment in Cruz’s
interminable speech came when Paul, who refused to back a filibuster on
defunding Obamacare, popped in to ask a question. It was like an old
Chip and Dale routine from Looney Tunes, where the two excruciating
chipmunks couldn’t stop complimenting each other. Would Cruz, Paul
asked, ever compromise and vote for a budget that included funding for
the Affordable Care Act?
Before getting to a long-winded, circuitous, and utterly predictable no,
Cruz took a few minutes to talk about how Paul’s filibuster in March of
CIA Director John Brennan’s nomination was historic and momentous. Cruz
noted that the filibuster was the first time he ever spoke on the
Senate floor and that it was among “the proudest moments of my life.”
Part
of that is surely just the sort of flattery for which the Senate is
nauseatingly well-known. But there’s no question that these two wacko
birds, and the others in that small and growing nest, are pulling in the
same direction even as they are courting different audiences. They’ve
shown that they can work together, and they’ve shown that they’re not
standard-issue Republicans but true believers in limited government. In a
country where six of 10 voters already think the government is too big,
the wacko bird caucus has got a lot of room to fly.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/25/ted-cruz-might-just-have-won-the-future-for-the-gop.html
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/25/ted-cruz-might-just-have-won-the-future-for-the-gop.html
$1B to Be Spent to Promote Obamacare in 'Normandy Invasion' of Health System
Obamacare proponents are reportedly expected to spend $1 billion on a six-month campaign to get Americans to sign up for coverage under "Obamacare" when the healthcare exchanges open on October 1.The Obama administration intends to use social media promotions to target "young adults in urban areas that are home to many of the nation's estimated 47 million uninsured people."
Reuters reports that proponents of Obamacare, including "health insurers, hospitals, and health systems," and groups like AARP and "charities to Walgreen and CVS pharmacy chains," are also expected to pour in $1 billion in marketing initiatives.
"This is a Normandy invasion of the health system," Uwe Reinhardt, a healthcare economist at Princeton University, told Reuters.
On Tuesday, the White House "kicked off a six-month campaign to encourage" Americans to sign up for Obamacare. They have also employed celebrities and even some sports teams to help in the efforts.
Reuters notes that "the massive public education campaign faces a long, difficult slog to persuade nearly 3 million healthy young people with low to moderate incomes to purchase private insurance."
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/25/Proponents-to-Spend-1B-to-Promote-Obamcare-in-Normandy-Invasion-of-Health-System
The IRS is unable to account for $67 million spent from a slush fund
established for Obamacare implementation, according to a Treasury
Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) report released today.
The “Health Insurance Reform Implementation Fund” (HIRIF) was tucked into Obamacare in order to give the IRS money to enforce the tax provisions of the healthcare law. The fund, totaling some $1 billion of taxpayer money, was used to roll out enforcement mechanisms for the approximately 50 tax provisions of Obamacare.
According to the report: “Specifically, the IRS did not account for or attempt to quantify approximately $67 million [from the slush fund] of indirect ACA costs incurred for Fiscal Years 2010 through 2012.”
The report also found several other abuses of taxpayer funds, including:
Travel abuse: The report states, “Specifically, we identified 38 IRS employees in two judgmentally selected business units whose travel was charged to the HIRIF in FY 2012, but no portion of their salary and related benefits was charged to the HIRIF.” In short, the IRS was not making sure that employee travel reimbursements had anything to do with the purpose of the fund. This is not the first time that IRS employee travel has created a scandal for the agency.
1,272 IRS Obamacare enforcement agents: The report estimates that total slush fund spending cost taxpayers the equivalent of 1,272 new full time IRS agents.
The IRS requested an additional 859 IRS Obamacare enforcement agents for Fiscal Year 2013: According to the report, “The IRS informed us that it requested $360 million and 859 FTEs for FY 2013 to continue implementation of the ACA. However, the IRS did not receive this requested amount for FY 2013.”
To add insult to injury, the IRS has told the Inspector General that it will comply with the recommendations made in the report; unfortunately, the slush fund has been fully spent, making that promise meaningless.
http://atr.org/irs-watchdog-million-missing-obamacare-slush-a7886#ixzz2g0f10XBx
IRS Watchdog: $67 Million Missing from Obamacare Slush Fund
The IRS is unable to account for $67 million spent from a slush fund established for Obamacare implementation, according to a TIGTA report released today
The “Health Insurance Reform Implementation Fund” (HIRIF) was tucked into Obamacare in order to give the IRS money to enforce the tax provisions of the healthcare law. The fund, totaling some $1 billion of taxpayer money, was used to roll out enforcement mechanisms for the approximately 50 tax provisions of Obamacare.
According to the report: “Specifically, the IRS did not account for or attempt to quantify approximately $67 million [from the slush fund] of indirect ACA costs incurred for Fiscal Years 2010 through 2012.”
The report also found several other abuses of taxpayer funds, including:
Travel abuse: The report states, “Specifically, we identified 38 IRS employees in two judgmentally selected business units whose travel was charged to the HIRIF in FY 2012, but no portion of their salary and related benefits was charged to the HIRIF.” In short, the IRS was not making sure that employee travel reimbursements had anything to do with the purpose of the fund. This is not the first time that IRS employee travel has created a scandal for the agency.
1,272 IRS Obamacare enforcement agents: The report estimates that total slush fund spending cost taxpayers the equivalent of 1,272 new full time IRS agents.
The IRS requested an additional 859 IRS Obamacare enforcement agents for Fiscal Year 2013: According to the report, “The IRS informed us that it requested $360 million and 859 FTEs for FY 2013 to continue implementation of the ACA. However, the IRS did not receive this requested amount for FY 2013.”
To add insult to injury, the IRS has told the Inspector General that it will comply with the recommendations made in the report; unfortunately, the slush fund has been fully spent, making that promise meaningless.
http://atr.org/irs-watchdog-million-missing-obamacare-slush-a7886#ixzz2g0f10XBx
Export-Import Bank Awards Millions to Spanish Green Energy Company
Former NM Gov Sec Bill Richardson sits on both boards
The Ex-Im Bank recently authorized a pair of loans totaling $33.6 million to Abengoa—a Spain-based energy company—that will fund the export of American-made products for use in solar projects in Spain and South Africa.
Former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D.) sits on the Abengoa International Advisory Board and is currently listed on the Ex-Im bank’s website as a member of the 2013 advisory committee that helps guide bank policy.
The Ex-Im Bank did not immediately respond to request for comment on Richardson’s involvement in the loan.
The Ex-Im Bank said its financing will support approximately 200 U.S. jobs.
“Ex-Im Bank’s consistent support of renewable-energy projects demonstrates our commitment to supporting high-skilled jobs in an important homegrown industry and improving the environment,” said Ex-Im Bank chairman and president Fred P. Hochberg in a statement. “In addition to contributing to cleaner sources of energy and supporting U.S. jobs, these two transactions will support President Obama’s goal of doubling access to power in sub-Saharan Africa.”
The Ex-Im Bank offers foreign companies lines of taxpayer-backed credit to purchase American products.
However, critics say Richardson’s holding a seat on both Abengoa and the Export-Import Bank’s advisory boards is just another example of cronyism at the bank.
“The Export Import Bank is just a slush fund for corporate welfare and it should be eliminated,” said Barney Keller, spokesman for the conservative Club For Growth. “It’s no surprise that the well-connected and powerful are the ones benefitting from this taxpayer-backed monstrosity.”
The Club for Growth is one of several small-government groups that opposed the reauthorization of the Ex-Im Bank last year. The reauthorization bill raised the limit on the total financing the bank can guarantee borrowers from $100 billion to $140 billion.
The groups, along with several conservative members of Congress, oppose the bank on the grounds that it favors large, politically connected companies and distorts markets.
Supporters of the bank say it encourages U.S. exports and supports American jobs.
As previously reported by the Free Beacon, The Ex-Im Bank approved $152.2 million in loans to Abengoa in December 2012.
“Mr. Richardson had no role or communication with anyone in the Bank regarding that transaction,” a spokesman for the Ex-Im Bank told the Free Beacon at the time. “His appointment to the Advisory Board was made public only after he had been fully vetted by the bank, which occurred after the initial press release was issued.”
“As stated previously, Richardson had no communication or role with anyone at the bank regarding this transaction,” an Ex-Im Bank spokesman said in a follow-up statement. “The bank has financed several Abengoa projects over the last few years and the details of this transaction were finalized prior to Richardson joining the advisory board.”
Richardson has other ties to the Ex-Im Bank. He headlined a fundraiser for Diane Farrell’s 2004 congressional campaign that was expected to bring in $300,000. Farrell is a former Ex-Im Bank director. She voted to approve a final commitment on an $83 million loan to Abengoa for a plant in Mexico while still a director in 2011.
The Inter-American Development Bank also awarded the green energy company a $41 million loan in December for a wind project in Uruguay. Richardson also serves on a selection committee for an annual award given out by the bank.
Abengoa has garnered a wealth of federal subsidies and preferential treatment from the Obama administration, including fast-tracked leasing from the Interior Department for solar farms, and loan awards worth $2.78 billion from the Energy and Treasury Department.
Abengoa’s American green energy projects—Solana, Mojave Solar, and Abengoa Bioenergy Biomass of Kansas LLC—had low credit ratings but were approved for significant DOE loans.
Solana’s Fitch credit rating was BB+ in 2010 when the company received $1.45 billion from the Energy Department. Mojave Solar’s rating was BB when the company received $1.2 billion in September 2011. Bioenergy Biomass was rated CCC when it received a $132.4 million loan in August 2010.
Allegations of cronyism dogged Richardson’s tenure as New Mexico governor. Some of Richardson’s largest campaign contributors received lucrative regulatory exemptions and preferences that aided their companies.
“State regulatory changes helped transform a small company owned by a pair of Richardson administration insiders into the biggest ‘cradle to grave’ oil field waste disposal company in the Oil Patch of southeast New Mexico,” the Albuquerque Journal reported
Critics accused Richardson of being involved in another pay-to-play scandal involving a New Mexico state grant to CDR Financial Products. A Justice Department investigation into the pay-to-play allegations against Richardson was dropped in 2009.
Richardson served as secretary of the Department of Energy prior to his election as governor.
http://freebeacon.com/export-import-bank-awards-millions-to-spanish-green-energy-company/
Report: Coca-Cola, NEA, Others Fail to Disclose Obama Inaugural Donations
Two-thirds of the 62 groups that donated to President Barack Obama’s inauguration and were required to disclose those donations failed to do so, according to a new report.
Unlike the president’s first inauguration, corporate donations were sought this year. But major companies and major unions, like the National Education Association, failed to disclose their contributions according to a new report by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Politico reports:
Organizations who also spend money on lobbying must file disclosure reports to the Senate and the House, detailing their political contributions over $200. But 42 of the 62 organizations that are both registered to lobby and donated to the inauguration failed to disclosure their contributions on those forms, the report found.
Microsoft, for example, failed to list contributions totaling more than $2 million on their most recent disclosure, including more than $500,000 in in-kind contributions for equipment and technical services. Another major donor to the festivities, Chevron, did not list their $1 million donation on their report.
Other corporations that failed to list their contributions to the inauguration include Coca-Cola, Visa, TracFone Wireless, and Aflac. Unions like the National Education Association, the International Association of Fire Fighters, United Food and Commercial Workers and the American Postal Workers Union. Trade associations on the list include the American Hospital Association, the Biotechnology Industry Organization and the Community Financial Services Association. Law firms with lobbying shops like Capitol Counsel, Greenberg Traurig, and others also did not disclose their contributions, according to CREW.http://freebeacon.com/report-coca-cola-nea-others-fail-to-disclose-obama-inaugural-donations/
Bank lobbyists want to raise taxes on 96 million Americans
As Congress debates an overhaul of the tax code, it is considering implementing new taxes that will have a dramatic impact on the middle class and effectively raise taxes on about 96 million people. This blanket-style review of the tax code would end the tax-exempt status for nonprofit credit unions, which would jeopardize tens of thousands of jobs and stifle economic growth.New taxes on credit unions will also eliminate needed competition between banks and credit unions. The result: higher fees and higher loan and mortgage rates for many in the middle class, and for small businesses.
The proposal to place new taxes on credit unions is being pushed on Capitol Hill by the banking industry’s K Street lobbyists, who tell politicians that credit unions’ nonprofit tax status gives them an unfair advantage, while at the same time letting credit unions off the hook in the effort to balance the budget.
But banks have private investors and stockholders, and are taxed on their profits. Credit unions make no profits and return their surplus back to their members through lower interest rates on loans and higher rates on deposits – so taxes are paid at the individual member level. According to an Americans for Tax Reform review of current tax policy, “the net effect for federal coffers is pretty close to a wash.”
The Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the tax exemption for credit unions amounted to $0.5 billion last year. But $0.5 billion is only a tiny fraction of the annual deficit. And worse, Steve Pociask of the American Consumer Institute writes, “…eliminating the nonprofit status of credit unions would cost consumers $16 for every $1 of taxes saved. That would be a really bad deal for consumers.”
As for the supposed unfair advantage claimed by Big Banking’s lobbyists, a look at the market share of credit unions does not bear their argument out: Banks hold 93 percent of financial assets in the United States, while credit unions hold roughly six percent.
The Credit Union National Association (CUNA) is working to prevent new taxes from being foisted upon credit unions. CUNA partners with state leagues and credit unions to track and have an impact on laws affecting operations and members. CUNA engages credit unions at the grassroots level, facilitates discussion and provides credit union input to regulators to build knowledge for compliance staff. CUNA is helping credit union members voice their opposition to new taxes on these member-directed and member-owned institutions in an effort to preserve an essential piece of our financial system and a vital tool for the middle class and our communities.
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