To keep everybody safe
By Paul Joseph WatsonAfter illustrating their enthusiasm for repealing the Bill of Rights, a video shows Americans happily signing a petition to support a “Nazi-style Orwellian police state,” in what easily represents the most shocking footage of its kind to date.
White House not being honest about ObamaCare problems, says Ezra Klein; Update: Obama blames Republicans, shutdown
....Talk about dishonest — did Obama actually blame the shutdown? Yes, he did:“About three weeks ago, as the federal government shutdown, and the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance marketplaces opened up across the country,” said Obama. “Well, we’ve now gotten the government back open for the American people and today I want to talk about how were going to get the marketplaces running at full steam as well.”Say what? The White House had three and a half years to get this ready, and it rolled out on the same day as the shutdown. The website issues existed long before the shutdown, and the Obama administration was well aware of them before the shutdown and decided to proceed anyway. Talk about spin.
$17,000,000,000,000
President Obama boasted last week that he had signed legislation to lift “the twin threats” to our economy of government shutdown and default. But what was done to fix the problem of growing debt that leads Washington to repeatedly raise the debt ceiling?
Nothing. In fact, by Friday, the U.S. debt had rocketed past $17 trillion.
What does this mean?
- At $17 trillion, this number has passed total U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), the measure of all that is produced in the economy.
- Since Obama took office, the national debt has increased from about $10.6 trillion to more than $17 trillion—a 60 percent increase.
... If interest ever returned to 1997 levels, at say 6.6%, we’d be paying over a trillion dollars a year in debt service. In crude terms, the winners of this Ponzi scheme are the very wealthy connected to Wall Street, which is flooded with foreign and domestic capital. It need not do much of anything more than outperform a pathetic 1% return on savings accounts.
The poor benefit from the vast increase in federal spending and exemption from federal income taxes. In contrast, the middle class still pays high interest on its student loans, credit card, and, to a lesser extent, car debt, receives almost no interest on its meager savings accounts, and is not so ready, after 2008, to dabble in real estate and the stock market.
By Jon Gabriel
The chart is brutally bipartisan. Debt increased under Republican presidents and Democrat presidents. It increased under Democrat congresses and Republican congresses. In war and in peace, in boom times and in busts, after tax hikes and tax cuts, the Potomac filled with red ink.
Washington likes to talk about sustainability. Forget sustainable — how is this sane?
Yet when a conservative hesitates before raising the debt ceiling, he's portrayed as a madman.
A Fifth of Doom
By Stephen Green I've joked that I'm spending everything on liquor and ammo. After writing this column, I don't think I'm joking anymore.
....And still the economy remains on trillion-dollar life support.
Why?
A few possibilities:
● Encouraging Dependency. The Department of Health and Human Services has a budget in 2013 of $941,000,000,000. If HHS were a country, it would be the 16th richest in the world, between South Korea and Indonesia. If HHS were a state, it would be bigger than any of them except for California, Texas, and New York. HHS is bigger than the economies of Vermont, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Alaska, Rhode Island, Maine, Idaho, New Hampshire, Delaware, West Virginia, Hawaii, New Mexico, Nebraska, and Mississippi combined. The District of Columbia is about the same size as HHS — and you can’t imagine that’s a coincidence.
● Debt Overhang. There’s that $17,000,000,000,000 we’ve racked up, plus millions of mortgages still left underwater from the Great Recession.
● ZIRP. The Fed’s Zero Interest Rate Policy is supposed to make borrowing cheaper, but instead it’s made saving more expensive. People — especially people on fixed incomes — have to sock away more and more money to make up for the lost interest on their deposits.
● Concentration of Wealth. D.C. and its environs are now some of the richest in the country. Many of the country’s best go there not to create wealth, but to redistribute it. We’re undergoing a disastrous intranational brain-drain.
● Anemic Productivity Growth. Productivity growth is the real secret to wealth creation, but Bill Clinton’s Community Reinvestment Act, combined with Alan Greenspan’s and Ben Bernanke’s easy money policies, diverted trillions of dollars into housing — and houses are not productive assets. Instead of figuring out inventive new ways to create wealth, our best finance guys were coming up with inventive new ways to create debt.
● Obamacare. We’ll never know how many full-time jobs were lost, how many will never be created, or which small businesses will be induced to stay that way instead of pursuing robust growth. But Obamacare is just getting started, and already it’s turning us into a part-time nation.
That’s not all, of course. There’s higher taxes, the regulatory explosion, the chaos on Capitol Hill, Dodd-Frank, and the administration’s war on cheap energy, to name five more.
The Way Members of Congress Subsidize Their Lifestyles With Political Contributions — And It’s All Legal
Many U.S. lawmakers are using political contributions to subsidize their lifestyles, a new “60 Minutes” report highlights.
...One of the ways lawmakers can get
around the issue is to rely on “leadership PACs,” political action
committees that don’t technically count as being attached to specific
campaigns.
These PACs weren’t in existence when
Congress passed rules in 1989 that made it illegal for lawmakers to use
political contributions for personal use. As a result, members of
Congress have gladly exploited this fact and are using these PACs to
their advantage.
Congresswoman Funneled $294,245 in Campaign Cash to Herself
By Wynton Hall
Rep. Grace Napolitano (D-CA) has bagged at least $294,245 since 1998
by loaning her congressional campaign money at interest rates up to
18%--a scheme that effectively funneled campaign contributor donations
directly into her personal bank account.The self-loan ruse was exposed Sunday night during a joint investigation by 60 Minutes and Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President Peter Schweizer based on Schweizer’s forthcoming book, Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets.
...In 1998, Rep. Grace Napolitano (D-CA) loaned her congressional campaign $150,000 at a staggering 18% interest. Napolitano then let the loan linger unpaid for 20 years. In the first decade of the loan, Napolitano bagged $200,000 in interest payments. Then in 2006, Napolitano lowered the interest rate to 10% and kept drawing interest checks. In the 2008 and 2010 elections, the California Democrat pocketed another $94,245 in interest.
Presently, Schweizer, who appeared Monday morning on CBS Early Show, says the self-loan scheme is legal under congressional rules. The only stipulation is that lawmakers must charge a “commercially reasonable” interest rate on the loans they make to their campaigns—a term of art that is undefined and almost never enforced.
Four Things We Think We Know About Obamacare
By Megan McArdle....The penalty for being uninsured next year is $95. Again, this is partly true. In fact, the penalty for being uninsured next year is $95 or 1 percent of your income, whichever is higher. So if you make $75,000 a year and you decide to go without insurance, the penalty will be $750. There are a number of things you can do to avoid having to pay it, from deliberately getting your utilities shut off to under-withholding taxes from your paycheck so that they don’t have a refund from which to take out the penalty. But that number is what will go on the books at the Internal Revenue Service, not the $95 you’ve probably heard.
Obamacare seeks to segregate patients, doctors by race
By Katie McHughIf you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor under Obamacare — if you both belong to the same race.
Obamacare’s spectacular flop of a rollout distracts from its crude calculus that encourages the allocation of healthcare resources along racial lines and a doctor-patient system splintered into ethnicities.
...Throughout the Obamacare process, administration officials have put a strange emphasis on racial and ethnic factors of dubious relation to health care outcomes. On the day the exchanges opened, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius boasted the national call center employed translators ready to interpret 150 different languages. Her comment was one of many that seemed aimed at separating Americans into units labeled by skin color, ethnicity and other areas that are unrelated to the goal of helping sick people get better.
ObamaCare a Planned Disaster for Political Reasons
By Karin McQuillan...Politics has driven the ObamaCare launch failure from the beginning. Political consideration number one was the 2012 presidential election. The Democrats did not want voters to know there would be a huge jump in the price of insurance for most people not being subsidized. They didn't want us to know about the four- and eight-thousand dollar deductibles, and the limits on what hospitals you would have access to and what doctors you could see. They knew voters would flock to the Republican ticket to stop it.
In order to hide ObamaCare from voters, the administration didn't reveal the details of the law to the companies building the exchanges either, until safely after the election. As a result, the exchange designers weren't able to begin writing software until the spring. Less than six months to create a system this complex made failure inevitable. Obama would not have been re-elected otherwise, so the choice was easy.
...Federal agencies are sitting on a pile of major health, environmental, and financial regulations that lobbyists, congressional staffers, and former administration officials say are being held back to avoid providing ammunition to Mitt Romney and other Republican critics.
Despite looming legislative deadlines in the Affordable Care Act, court deadlines requiring environmental-protection rules, and a financial industry awaiting clarification on key reform details, the pace of regulatory release has slowed by almost half.
The explosion of federal regulations under the Democrat Big-Government Nanny was crushing our economy and disgusting citizens who care about freedom. So before the election, Nanny did a slow-mo partial shutdown, if you will, throwing every ObamaCare deadline years behind schedule...
...Obama will go down in history as America's most unaccountable president. He has skated over one calamity after another, with none of the blame attached to his party -- our economic stagnation, the suffering of our neediest citizens, the destabilization of the Middle East, a looming nuclear Iran, Benghazi, the IRS, the spying on ordinary citizens and the press. None of these significant failures have mattered one whit to loyal Democrat voters.
Why would ObamaCare be different? When you are never blamed for failure, failure is acceptable. All that matters is political advantage. The worse your performance, the more important politics becomes. Obama's politics is all about defaming voters who disagree with him, so his own followers would be ashamed to listen to their valid criticism.
The Morgan Shakedown
A landmark that shows how much politicians now control U.S. finance.
The tentative $13 billion settlement that the Justice Department appears to be extracting from J.P. Morgan Chase needs to be understood as a watershed moment in American capitalism. Federal law enforcers are confiscating roughly half of a company's annual earnings for no other reason than because they can and because they want to appease their left-wing populist allies.The settlement isn't final and many details weren't available on the weekend, but we know enough for Americans to be dismayed. The bulk of the settlement is related to mortgage-backed securities issued before the 2008 financial panic. But those securities weren't simply a Morgan product. They were largely issued by Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, both of which the federal government asked J.P. Morgan to take over to help ease the crisis.
So first the feds asked the bank to do the country a favor without giving it a chance for proper due diligence. The Treasury needed quick decisions, and Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon made them in good faith. But five years later the feds are punishing the bank for having done them the favor. As Richard Parsons notes nearby, this is not going to make another CEO eager to help the Treasury in the next crisis. But more pointedly, where is the justice in such ex post facto punishment?
Then there's the fact that $4 billion of the settlement is earmarked to settle charges against the bank by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We are supposed to believe that the bank misled the two mortgage giants about the quality of the mortgage securities they were issuing. But everyone knows that Fan and Fred had as their explicit policy the purchase of securities for liar loans and subprime mortgages to further their affordable-housing goals. Those goals went far to create the crisis, but now these wards of the state are portraying themselves as victims.
...To make the victims whole, the government would have to distribute the settlement proceeds to those buyers, who aren't mom and pop. If instead the feds pass out the money to consumers or their favorite advocacy groups, the fact that this is a political shakedown and wealth-redistribution scheme becomes even clearer. Perhaps the Administration will have the checks arrive in swing Congressional districts right before the 2014 election.
...The real lesson of the Morgan settlement isn't that justice has finally been done to the perpetrators of the crisis. That would require arresting Barney Frank and those in Congress who blocked the reform of Fannie and Freddie, plus the Federal Reserve governors who created so much easy credit.
The lesson is how government has used the crisis to exert political control over even the most powerful private financial companies. The real lords of American finance are Attorney General Eric Holder, Treasury chief Jack Lew and their boss in the White House.
Obama wins and young Americans lose
The future promises little but bankruptcy
By Charlie Kirk...As the politicians and their supporters (who are the parents and grandparents of my generation) continue to kick the can down the road, my generation needs to speak up and declare, “Stop! It’s not fair that these cans are piling up in our front yard.”
Republicans don’t want to raise taxes, and Democrats don’t want to cut spending, so in order to pay the nation’s bills, the only option left is for Uncle Sam to print money, raise the debt limit and continue to borrow money abroad.
What’s another trillion to a generation that is already drowning in debt?
...In this political climate, where it’s all about “winners and losers,” the most important scoreboard to look at is the national debt clock. The debt clock shows exactly how much debt the United States is accumulating in real time as we now approach $17 trillion. Every time the clock ticks upward, how can any reasonable politician consider himself a victor? The nation has added more than $6 trillion in new debt during the past five years. With each dollar we borrow, we sacrifice a little bit more of the next generation’s liberty.
Democrats and Republicans like to point to elections, polls and public opinion to define victory. I only look at the debt clock. Until it stops ticking upward, we are all losers, especially the youth of this great nation. They are the ones left with multitrillion-dollar deficits that will be mathematically impossible to pay back. As we look to the future, we see only bankruptcy.
The Maligned Tea Party
The Left’s characterizations just aren’t true.
By Charles C W Cooke....Broadly speaking, tea-party hysteria seems to be originated and peddled by three factions. The first, and most cynical, is made up of perfidious progressives who, because they oppose the Tea Party’s economic agenda and fear its electoral and political clout, have set out with malice aforethought to destroy the group’s reputation. Into this bloc we can reliably throw almost everybody at MSNBC, the Democratic National Committee, the Obama administration, and the parade of political operatives who work around the clock to make politics intolerable for everyone. Given that these people are more committed than they are creative, you will notice that their preferred epithets for the Tea Party are the ones that they throw at everybody. Hence “racist,” “greedy,” and “stupid.”
The second faction consists of the genuinely dangerous Americans who do not grasp the nature, legitimacy, and vital role of vehement political opposition in a free republic. These are the people who, willfully or not, orchestrated and cheered on the IRS’s disgusting singling out of tea-party groups. Evidently, a number of people in America have managed to convince themselves that citizens who rail against taxes and debt and wish to see a reduction in regulation are more likely than most to break the laws they disdain — even though there is precisely no evidence for this. To propose that members of the Tea Party should be more closely monitored by the IRS because they advance an anti-tax message is akin to proposing that the advocates of drug legalization should be singled out for visits by the DEA or that opponents of wiretapping should be targeted for NSA surveillance. In other words, it is to say that there should be tangible consequences for speaking up against the status quo.
The third group is perhaps the most interesting, for it is full of people who have become precisely what they fear. When the history of this period in American life comes to be written, historians will almost certainly come to see the hysteria prompted by the rise of the Tea Party as akin to the “Red Scare” of the 1950s — except, that is, that there were actual Communist traitors in America. The New York Times’s Ross Douthat has observed that the more genuinely vexed among the movement’s detractors believe the group to be “an expression of crypto-fascist, crypto-racist rage, part Timothy McVeigh and part Bull Connor, potentially carrying a wave of terrorist violence in its wings.” Douthat correctly explains that “the historical term for this kind of anxiety is ‘Brown Scare’ — an inordinate fear of a vast far-right conspiracy, which resembles the anti-Communist panics of our past.”
George Will Bails Out
By Sally ZelikovskyJust when you thought the blowback from the defund-shutdown effort couldn't get worse, along comes conservative columnist George Will, claiming that the Tea Party and Obama "have something important in common -- disdain for the practice of politics within the Framers' institutional architecture."
To suggest that the Tea Party has common ground with the one person and administration that stands diametrically opposed to everything they hold dear -- limited government, fiscal responsibility, lower taxes, individual liberty, and free markets -- is a reductio ad absurdum. One wonders if the author is completely out of touch with the people who make up the Tea Party or is just filled with his own disdain for it? I hope the former.
Then, to describe this supposedly shared disdain with the qualification "within the Framer's institutional architecture" makes me further wonder where George Will has been for the last five years? The Tea Party reveres the Constitution, the Framers, and their infrastructure for constitutional governance. The Tea Party actually promotes the "practice of politics" as long as it takes place "within the Framer's institutional architecture." It's... what we live for! And, it's what we've been ridiculed for as well.
Will There Be Blood?
Heckuva job, Obama: President excuses long list of scandals and blunders
By Dave BoyerThe list of scandals and blunders in the Obama administration is long, but the roster of people who have been fired by President Obama
for screwing up is strikingly short.From Benghazi to the Internal Revenue Service to the Fast and Furious gun-running furor in the Justice Department, the president
has been loathe to hold high-level aides accountable for major bungling.
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