Obama's Red-Line Presidency

The next president will have to restore the tradition of durable U.S. foreign commitments.

By Daniel Henninger

...This is a troubled moment in the U.S.'s relations with the world. What's missing, astonishingly, is a sustained Republican voice on foreign policy. The Democrats carpet-bombed George Bush because he was so unpopular in places like Sweden. The GOP's major figures look frozen in the headlights of opinion polls that put isolationist sentiment above 50%. This vacuum of ideas will default the commander-in-chief issue in 2016 to the only candidate who was formerly secretary of state.

It's looking to the world outside our borders as if America's red lines can be blurred, moved or erased at whim. The next president will have to restore the idea of a U.S. commitment to its original, more durable meaning.

After Denying They Met, White House Admits Obama Lived with Uncle

By John Nolte

In yet another example of White House dissembling and our subservient media rolling over, the White House admitted Thursday that President Obama not only knows a Kenyan uncle who faced deportation, but that the president lived with this uncle in the eighties. When asked in 2011, the White House said there was no record of the two ever meeting. Apparently, our crackerjack media accepted that false information without ever following up or even asking if the president had been asked.

...This has been all-too typical a problem with our media throughout the Obama administration. Whether it is the IRS scandal, ObamaCare, the ObamaCare enrollment numbers, or Benghazi, our acquiescent media is told something by the White House and simply reports it to the world as fact and without a hint of skepticism.
Since the day Obama stepped on to the presidential stage, the American media have been uniformly terrified at what they might find were they to shift from stenographer to investigative reporter. And as we have seen over the last five years of scandal, lies and incompetence, that fear is not without reason.

Obama’s big inequality speech: short on facts and vision

By James Pethokoukis

Extraordinary claims, it’s been said, require extraordinary evidence. And President Obama made quite an assertion in a speech Thursday at the Center for American Progress: “The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American dream, our way of life and what we stand for around the globe.”
But Obama wasn’t just giving a warning, he was also teaching a partisan, progressive, left-wing history lesson. As he sees it, these toxic trends have been slowly poisoning the US economy and the American Dream for decades. The pro-market or “neoliberal” turn in the nation’s economic policy — tax cuts, deregulation — that started in the late 1970s was, according the president, a big mistake that made rich people even richer and little else.
But much of Obama’s argument is either dubious, deceptive, or demonstrably false...
...Here’s the bottom line: America’s pro-market turn some three decades ago reversed what then seemed like unstoppable national decline. (Nations that didn’t make that choice, such as Japan and France, have not fared well.) Yes the rich got a lot richer, mostly due to technology and globalization. But the middle-class did pretty well, also. Pre-tax incomes at the bottom end suffered, but the safety net has helped a lot. Inequality has likely increased sharply at the very high end, but has been stable elsewhere along the income distribution spectrum. Mobility could be better, but the big problem is really upward mobility from the very bottom. And America remains the world’s innovation leader.
Obama’s revisionist history and one-sided, black-and-white economic analysis may please his dispirited base, but they won’t help America make the right decisions going going forward about how to boost growth and ensure those economic gains are as broadly shared as possible. Obama makes inequality and mobility just seem like convenient excuses to raise taxes and expand government. By placing those issues within a harshly partisan, left-liberal, progressive framework he makes it harder for right-of-center folks who worry about, say, the effect of automation on the US labor force, to engage in a much-needed policy debate.

Quantitative Easing and October Trade Results

By Howard Richman
According to statistics released yesterday by the Commerce Department, U.S. net exports improved slightly in October, though the three month trend is still downward. The best news is that net U.S. goods exports to China increased by $605 million for the year ending in October to a negative $320,419 million from a negative $321,024 million for the year ending in September.
A careful examination of the graph below shows that U.S. net goods exports to China stopped going down in 2013, after declining steadily throughout 2010, 2011 and 2012.

The decline in 2011 and 2012 was a continuation of a longer-term trend line. From about 2000 through 2012, the Chinese government maximized exports to the United States while minimizing its imports from the United States in order to grow the Chinese economy by beggaring the U.S. economy. Its strategy succeeded. China grew by about 10% per year due to increased manufacturing jobs, while median U.S. income declined due to the loss of manufacturing jobs.

It is not surprising that Presidents Clinton and Obama let China run trade surpluses with the United States. Progressives have long favored an internationalist trade policy. The real surprise is that President George W. Bush permitted these Chinese depredations. (PK'S NOTE: Why the surprise? Bush was a Progressive)

History Casts Doubt Upon Non-Aggression Pact With Iran

By Victor Davis Hansen
....Because Iran is not a consensual society, our nuclear deal will last only as long as Iran finds it strategically useful. After restoring their fiscal health, expect that the Iranians will abruptly reboot all their centrifuges and finish making a bomb. The theocracy will also use the present non-aggression arrangement with the United States to double down in Syria, energize Hezbollah and strengthen Hamas.
Just as the German-Russian deal ensured the start of World War II in Europe, and the Russian-Japanese accord led to Pearl Harbor and a Pacific theater of conflict, so too a now heady Iran will use its diplomatic exemption to fund more terrorism and offer more provocation to Israel and the Sunni Gulf states.
The United States has already learned after its Syrian backdown that dictator Bashar Assad was emboldened and is now clearly winning the war against the insurgents. He certainly seems more legitimate and confident ever since we begged Syria not to use any more weapons of mass destruction and asked the United Nations to help dismantle what they could find.
Americans are $17 trillion in debt and tired of intervention in the Middle East. Anything that might preclude the need to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities to prevent a nuclear theocracy is understandably attractive. But the problem with such appeasement is that it only delays a reckoning and usually ensures war.
The tough sanctions against Iran were finally beginning to work. The regime was getting desperate and running out of money to fund its bomb program and terrorist appendages.
Then, suddenly, we caved -- allowing Iran both a nuclear program and normal commerce. The deal has terrified our Arab friends, bewildered some of our allies and isolated Israel.

Audit: IRS Could Issue Up to $2.3 Billion in Fraudulent Tax Refunds Each Year

Fraud Could Cost $11.4 Billion Over Next 5 Years

The IRS could issue nearly $2.3 billion in fraudulent tax returns to individuals who forge tax identification numbers each year, according to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).
An audit released on Thursday found that the tax agency routinely issues refunds to business accounts with fabricated Employer Identification Numbers (EINs).
...The audit identified 285,670 stolen or falsely obtained EINs that were used for 767,071 tax returns in 2011. As a result, a total of $2,273,177,371 in potentially fraudulent refunds were dispensed that year.

IRS Has No Strategy for Fraudulent Obamacare Tax Credits

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has no system in place to prevent fraud when individuals apply for tax credits under Obamacare, according to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).
The IG said in an audit released Tuesday that the IRS has no plan to manage, monitor, or mitigate fraud risk when processing premium tax credits available under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
“The ACA Program has not yet completed a fraud mitigation strategy,” the audit found. “It is important for the IRS to thoroughly consider fraud threats and risks that could impact new ACA systems.”

Issa: FBI impeding inquiry into IRS targeting of conservative groups

By Stephan Dinan
The House’s chief investigator says the FBI is stonewalling his inquiry into whether the agency and the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative group True the Vote for special scrutiny, and Rep. Darrell E. Issa is now threatening subpoenas to pry loose the information from FBI Director James B. Comey Jr.
Mr. Issa, California Republican, and Rep. Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican, are leading the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s IRS inquiry. They also said the FBI is refusing to turn over any documents related to its own investigation into the IRS, which began in the days after an auditor’s report revealed the tax agency had improperly targeted tea party groups for special scrutiny.

House subcommittee: Obamacare’s $300 billion Medicare Advantage raid will hurt seniors next year

Obamacare “raided” $300 billion for Medicare Advantage and seniors will begin feeling the cuts next year, according to an analysis Tuesday by the House Energy and Commerce Health

Subcommittee.
Obamacare took $700 billion from Medicare and $300 billion from Medicare Advantage alone for its own funding

, according to the subcommittee. The cuts to Medicare Advantage beneficiaries will “begin to be fully realized in the next year,” according to the subcommittee.
“There was a promise made to seniors as well. The promise was that we’re going to use your Medicare dollars as a piggy bank to fund

the Affordable Care Act, and in doing that we’ll improve Medicare and allow seniors to keep their doctors if they liked. So, do you have an opinion as to whether or not this is another broken promise?” subcommittee vice chairman Rep. Michael Burgess said in a statement.

...Twenty-eight percent of Medicare beneficiaries were enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans in 2013.

Obama's Plan to Snatch Your Savings

By Jeffrey Folks
In his first term, Obama managed to get his paws on health care, banking, energy, student loans, the auto business, and more.  Now he has his sights set on your 401(k).

The left has had its eye on retirement savings for years, but so far takeover attempts have been rebuffed.
...Despite its 2010 failure to take over retirement savings, the left has not given up.  As reported in WND, officials at the U.S. Treasury and Labor Departments continue discussions aimed at channeling private savings into Treasury obligations via a so-called "Automatic IRA."  Once it has forced workers and employers to contribute to Automatic IRAs, and eventually forced existing savings into government obligations as well, government would control much of the investment capital in America.  The free market will cease to exist.
Perhaps in support of that goal, Dodd-Frank legislation of 2010 established the Office of Financial Research (OFR), which recently issued a report suggesting that mutual funds may pose a risk to financial stability. At several points in the report, the authors suggest that many aspects of the financial system are not at present highly regulated and that the risks of these unregulated private transactions are unknown.  The implication seems to be that greater government scrutiny is called for.

Once it is established that mutual funds pose a risk to financial stability, government will likely proceed on its merry way, with thousands of pages of regulations bringing those funds, and the savings they manage, under the thumb of government.  It is only a short step from regulation to appropriation, whether by seizure via regulation or by mandating an investment in "safe" government obligations.

Fail: US Has Wasted $154 Billion on 'Renewable Energy'

By Julian Morris and Victor Nava
On Thursday, the Associated Press reports, “President Barack Obama is ordering the federal government to nearly triple its use of renewable sources for electricity by 2020.”
In October, the Department of Energy announced $60 million in subsidies for solar energy research and development programs as part of the SunShot Initiative. ....Why is the federal government funneling good taxpayer money to bad companies and failing technologies?
The answer may be that cronyism and influence often decide where these loans and subsidies go. In a new study published this week by Reason Foundation, we examined the loan guarantees made by the Department of Energy (DOE) under its “Section 1705” program from 2009 to 2011, which were part of the America Recovery and Reinvestment Act. We looked at lobbying expenditures by recipient companies and correlated them with the size of loan guarantees received. We found a correlation suggesting that the DOE made choices on the basis of the information that was most cognitively available – information provided by lobbyists – rather than on the basis of the viability of the technology and the soundness of the company applying for the subsidies.
...The worst part is that these crony subsidies and loan guarantees aren’t even going to particularly sound companies or innovative forms of technology. Twenty-two out of the 26 projects funded through the Section 1705 program were rated “junk” level investments. Yet, they were given millions in taxpayer dollars. To date, only four of the projects have been completed and three of the companies receiving Section 1705 loan guarantees have already gone bankrupt. Several other recipients, including SoloPower and the Spanish company Abengoa Solar, are in the process of laying off workers, selling off equipment, and are not paying contractors for services provided.
...Since 1973, U.S. government agencies have spent $154.7 billion on “renewable energy” with very little to show for it. Proponents of solar technology claim that their favored technology is on the verge of being competitive with traditional forms of energy, but they have made the same claim since at least the mid-1990s. Billions of dollars in subsidies later, solar still only comprises at most 0.2 percent of U.S. electricity production according to the Energy Information Administration.
“Green” energy subsidies benefit the politically connected while harming future generations as hundreds of millions of dollars are added to the country’s debt burden with each green failure. It’s time to end all subsidies—for all energy companies, not just green ones—and let the best technologies win.

....Jonathan Turley, a law professor at the George Washington University, testified that there has been a radical expansion of presidential powers in recent years, beginning with President George W. Bush, and continuing under Obama.
“If a president can unilaterally change the meaning of laws in substantial ways, or refuse to enforce them, it takes offline that very thing that stabilizes our system,” he said.
He told members of the committee that more federal agencies growing increasingly independent could lead to the rise of a “fourth branch” of government, where federal agencies can determine their own jurisdictions.
Turley warned that if a president unilaterally enforces laws, then it will lead others to claim the same authority in the future. This, combined with the rise of more independent federal agencies, could destabilize the delicate balance between the branches of government.
If executive power should continue to expand, then Congress will become “a sad relic of what was once a tripartite system of equal branches,” he said.
“This body is becoming less and less relevant,” he added.

Princeton University Orchestra Debuts ‘Ballad for Trayvon Martin’

Trayvon Martin continues to be a subject of intense interest for the academic elite. The Princeton University Orchestra and the University Concert Jazz Ensemble is set to debut “The Ballad for Trayvon Martin” today, NJ.com reports.
The goal of the music, according to its composer, noted jazz artist Anthony D.J. Branker, is to pay homage to victims of racial violence.
“I simply want to make a connection,” Branker said, “whether it’s on a level of social consciousness, or music and expression.”
Branker said his composition “speaks to all of us to continue to work together so that children of any race, ethnicity or religious affiliation never have to meet such a tragic end.”