Obama's government model has failed in state tests

"President Obama has bet the economy on his program to grow the government and finance it with a more progressive tax system. It's hard to miss the irony that he's pitching this change in Washington even as the same governance model is imploding in three of the largest American states where it has been dominant for years -- California, New Jersey and New York.

A decade ago all three states were among America's most prosperous. California was the unrivaled technology center of the globe. New York was its financial capital. New Jersey is the third wealthiest state in the nation after Connecticut and Massachusetts. All three are now suffering from devastating budget deficits as the bills for years of tax-and-spend governance come due.

These states have been models of "progressive" policies that are supposed to create wealth: high tax rates on the rich, lots of government "investments," heavy unionization and a large government role in health care.

Here's a rundown on the results:"

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124597150183556945.html

Quick, pass cap and trade before the fools find out global warming was dreamed up by lunatics

"In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country's new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country's weeks-old cap-and-trade program.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)

The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124597505076157449.html

Cap America's GDP, trade away its economic future

"The reality is that cost estimates for climate legislation are as unreliable as the models predicting climate change. What comes out of the computer is a function of what politicians type in. A better indicator might be what other countries are already experiencing. Britain's Taxpayer Alliance estimates the average family there is paying nearly $1,300 a year in green taxes for carbon-cutting programs in effect only a few years.

Americans should know that those Members who vote for this climate bill are voting for what is likely to be the biggest tax in American history. Even Democrats can't repeal that reality."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124588837560750781.html

For the first time, more disapprove of Obama

For the first time, more Americans strongly disapprove of President Obama's performance than strongly approve. His standing in Rasmussen Reports is minus 2. Thirty-four percent strongly disapprove, while 32 percent strongly approve.

Obama keeps sounding the fire alarm for his policies, but more and more Americans seems to have concluded that some of them, especially cap and trade, are simply absurd.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/
obama_administration/daily_presidential_tracking_poll

Obama's alarmism ignores health insurance reality

"There are 1,300 competing providers of health insurance. And Roll Call's Morton Kondracke notes that the 2003 Medicare prescription drug entitlement, relying on competition among private insurers, enjoys 87 percent approval partly because competition has made premiums less expensive than had been projected. The program's estimated cost from 2007 to 2016 has been reduced 43 percent.

Some advocates of a public option say health coverage is so complex that consumers will be befuddled by choices. But consumers of many complicated products, from auto insurance to computers, have navigated the competition among providers, who have increased quality while lowering prices.

Although 70 percent of insured Americans rate their health care arrangements good or excellent, radical reform of health care is supposedly necessary because there are 45.7 million uninsured. That number is, however, a "snapshot" of a nation in which more than 20 million working Americans change jobs every year. Many of them are briefly uninsured between jobs. If all the uninsured were assembled for a group photograph, and six months later the then-uninsured were assembled for another photograph, about half the people in the photos would be different.

Almost 39 percent of the uninsured are in five states -- Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, all of which are entry points for immigrants. About 21 percent -- 9.7 million -- of the uninsured are not citizens. Up to 14 million are eligible for existing government programs -- Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, veterans' benefits, etc. -- but have not enrolled. And 9.1 million have household incomes of at least $75,000 and could purchase insurance. Those last two cohorts are more than half of the 45.7 million."

http://townhall.com/columnists/GeorgeWill/2009/06/21/taking_a_razor_to_the_presidents_plan?page=2

Failure-prone government grabs more things to run

"The record of government ownership and/or control of companies in the United States and elsewhere has been one long disaster.

Look at the past year alone. The nation's largest man-made environmental disaster (according to the New York Times) was the coal-ash spill in Tennessee on Dec. 28, 2008, caused by negligence at the Tennessee Valley Authority (a federal-government-owned enterprise). By volume, this spill was 48 times bigger than the Exxon Valdez spill. This September, the government formally took over mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose financial holes were many times larger than those of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., WorldCom, Enron Corp. or GM. Fannie and Freddie were both U.S. government-sponsored and -regulated companies that had the implicit guarantee of the U.S. taxpayer.

Yet the companies not only failed, but between them have also left the U.S. taxpayer liable for more than $1 trillion. All too many in the mainstream media choose to ignore or underreport government failures while hyping private- company failures. Just look at the press coverage of the Exxon Valdez versus the TVA Tennessee spill, or the coverage given Enron versus Fannie and Freddie."

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun
/18/government-grinds-the-gears/

Rural Dems not buying what Obama is selling

"Angered by White House decisions on everything from greenhouse gases to car dealerships, congressional Democrats from rural districts are threatening to revolt against parts of President Barack Obama’s ambitious first-year agenda.

“They don’t get rural America,” said Rep. Dennis Cardoza, a Democrat who represents California’s agriculture-rich Central Valley. “They form their views of the world in large cities.”

(snip)

“I wouldn’t say it’s a complete strikeout, but they’ve just got a few more bases to it when it comes to the rural community,” said Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu.

A rural revolt could hamper the administration’s ability to pass climate change and health care legislation before the August recess."

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/23828.html

Obama's financial oversight reofrms would enable him to pick the winners before the game starts

"Designating particular financial firms for this kind of special regulatory treatment clearly signals to the markets that these institutions are too big to fail. It will reduce the perceived risk of lending to them, enabling them to raise funds at lower cost than their smaller competitors.

In other words, the administration's plan would create what are essentially government-sponsored enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in every sector of the financial economy -- insurers, securities firms, finance companies, bank holding companies, and hedge funds -- where these specially regulated firms are to be designated. The result will be devastating for competition. Larger firms will squeeze out smaller ones and aggressive small companies will have less opportunity to overcome the government-backed winners."

(snip)

"In AIG, GM, Chrysler, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac we can see the future that the administration envisions for our economy -- a sclerotic and unchanging structure of big companies working with, protected by, and relying on big government."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124528373595925623.html

Obama's hand is on GM's steering wheel

"The administration is determined to prop up GM as a jobs program for the UAW and Midwestern states rich in electoral votes. This frenzy will intensify as the administration's decisions deepen the debacle."

http://townhall.com/columnists/GeorgeWill/2009/06/
07/have_we_got_a_deal_for_you?page=2

White House blundered in GM bankruptcy

"...the Obama administration overtly played favourites to get the United Auto Workers protection it would not have received under Section 1113, probably elevating costs in a way that will damage prospects for a successful reorganisation. It made and imposed business judgments on GM about what cars to make and what plants to close (and perhaps about suppliers and distribution) that no one in the government or on the task force had the experience to make and for which no one would be financially accountable. Worst of all, despite Sunday’s desperate attempt to distance itself from GM’s future decisions, it left its fingerprints all over the new plan. Inevitably the White House will take political and hence financial responsibility for its success, relieving pressure on management and labour to succeed. Ultimately it elected to adopt an industrial policy toward the industry that failed utterly in the UK, and has worked out badly and expensively in France and Italy.

Finally, in the process, it disturbed the security of expectation that has made lenders willing to provide capital as secured credit, thus handicapping all US industry and undermining what has been, for all its flaws, one of the best financial reorganisation processes in the world, now emulated elsewhere.

The administration took a tragic situation and turned it into an expensive mess to pay a political debt. It wasted billions of dollars over many months delaying GM’s filing and then implicitly put itself on the hook for many billions more. The financial, political and social echoes of that decision will be with us for a long time. In short, they blew it."

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cd00d2c6-4ee2-11de
-8c10-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1

Since when does racial preference equal empathy?

"You would need a heart of stone not to be inspired by Sotomayor's story. But does her superior knowledge of "ordinary" people arise from being Hispanic? Sotomayor thinks so, if we believe the snippet from a 2001 speech at the University of California, Berkeley, law school that rippled across the Internet this week. She believes judges cannot help being affected by gender and ethnic identity. "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences," she said, "would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." This doesn't make Sotomayor a bad person or a racist, even if Rush Limbaugh has called her one. But it is not what most Americans would define as empathy."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1901478,00.html

The U.S. experiments with "gangster government"

"Something bad and dangerous is happening in Barack Obama's America.

The powers that the Obama administration claimed in order to arrest the financial crisis and mitigate the recession are being used and abused in ways that are underming the legal and financial stability of the United States. Investors: You are warned."

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/
05/10/david-fum-quick-fix-today-crisis-tomorrow-in-obama-s-white-house.aspx

Obama's auto bailouts subsidize foreign economies at the expense of U.S. workers and manufacturers

"The U.S. government is pouring billions into General Motors in hopes of reviving the domestic economy, but when the automaker completes its restructuring plan, many of the company's new jobs will be filled by workers overseas.

According to an outline the company has been sharing privately with Washington legislators, the number of cars that GM sells in the United States and builds in Mexico, China and South Korea will roughly double.

The proportion of GM cars sold domestically and manufactured in those low-wage countries will rise from 15 percent to 23 percent over the next five years, according to the figures contained in a 12-page presentation offered to lawmakers in response to their questions about overseas production.

As a result, the long-simmering argument over U.S. manufacturers expanding production overseas -- normally arising between unions and private companies -- is about to engage the Obama administration."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/
2009/05/07/AR2009050704336.html

A preening fascist sets out to destroy capitalism, finds willing allies among failed MI politicians

"Our story begins with the slow downfall of Chrysler, which succumbed to bankruptcy after experiencing a steep sales decline of 48 percent in one year. During its slide, Chrysler borrowed money from lenders and in return signed a contract promising that as so-called senior creditors, they'd get paid before anyone else if the company went under.

These creditors, by the way, represent something of a cross-section of America: the University of Kentucky, Kraft Foods' retirement fund, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, pension funds, teachers' credit unions, and so on.

A normal bankruptcy filing would be straightforward. Senior creditors get paid 100 cents on the dollar. Everyone else gets in line.

But President Obama and his allies don't want that to happen. So they interfered on behalf of unions (the junior creditors) and publicly upbraided the senior creditors who were asserting their contractual rights and threatening to head to bankruptcy court.

Last week Mr. Obama lambasted them as "a small group of speculators" who "endanger Chrysler's future by refusing to sacrifice like everyone else."

Rep. John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, sent reporters a statement calling the creditors "vultures" and "rouge hedge funds." Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm piled on, taking aim during her radio address at a 'few greedy hedge funds that didn't care how much pain the company's failure would have inflicted on families and communities everywhere.'"

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/05/07/politics/
otherpeoplesmoney/main4997900.shtml

Dems never waste time on favorable facts when there's a good doomsday crisis to exploit

"Contrary to popular perception, even though America is at the epicenter of the financial crisis, it has suffered less than its industrialized peers in terms of economic growth. According to the latest International Monetary Fund figures two weeks ago, the U.S. economy actually grew 1.1 percent last year even as Japan's shrank by 0.6 percent. France and England's both grew 0.7 percent, and Canada's only 0.5 percent—or less than half of America's. Only Germany did slightly better at 1.3 percent.

What's more, despite all the gloom and doom about the American economy, IMF expects its gross domestic product to shrink 2.8 percent this year compared to anywhere between 3 percent (France) to 6.2 percent (Japan) for these other economies. (Figures from the U.S. since the IMF projections suggest that the U.S. economy contracted more than expected in the first quarter of this year but it is not yet clear how the other countries performed.)

Not only is America hurting relatively less now, its economic performance in the prior 18 years—from 1990 to 2007—has also been visibly better than everybody else's. Calculations based on Department of Agriculture data show that America's GDP grew at an average annual rate of 3 percent during this period. By contrast, Canada's grew 2.88 percent; England's 2.3 percent; France's 1.92 percent; Japan's 1.74 percent and Germany's 1.59 percent."

http://www.reason.com/news/show/133344.html

Obama pursues "banana republic capitalism"

"The Chrysler reorganization is shaping up as another milestone in the decline of the rule of law under Barack Obama. We've said for quite a while that bankruptcy is the only viable option for Chrysler and General Motors, not--as Obama claims--because they don't know how to make the right kinds of vehicles, but because their unsustainable union contracts make it impossible for them to be profitable. That reality has now been turned on its head, as the administration has tried to bully Chrysler's secured creditors into going away, while the United Auto Workers Union, solely on the basis of political clout, would be paid at an implied rate of 50 percent and would emerge owning 55 percent of the company, with the government also holding a stake.

This is banana republic capitalism at its worst. Political influence, rather than the law, dictates the rights of the parties. When some of the secured creditors refused to be intimidated, Obama libeled them in the press, saying, outrageously, "I don't stand with those who held out when everyone else is making sacrifices." Actually, under Obama's plan the politically favored parties, principally the UAW, will benefit--will steal money, to put it crudely--from the parties who held out. Those parties call themselves the 'non-TARP lenders.'"

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/04/023460.php

Carbon tax won't pay for Obama's ubergovernment

"In the service of his ultimate mission -- the leveling of social inequalities -- President Obama offers a tripartite social democratic agenda: nationalized health care, federalized education (ultimately guaranteed through college) and a cash-cow carbon tax (or its equivalent) to subsidize the other two.

Problem is, the math doesn't add up. Not even a carbon tax would pay for Obama's vastly expanded welfare state. Nor will Midwest Democrats stand for a tax that would devastate their already crumbling region.

What is obviously required is entitlement reform, meaning Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid. That's where the real money is -- trillions saved that could not only fund hugely expensive health and education programs but also restore budgetary balance.

Except that Obama has offered no real entitlement reform."

http://townhall.com/columnists/CharlesKrauthammer/2009/04/24/obama_the_grand_strategy

Government may soon own bailed out banks

Call it "creeping fascism."

By transforming carbon dioxide from a harmless gas essential to plant life into a dangerous gas that must be controlled to avoid widespread disaster, the Environmental Protection Agency is inviting the Obama administration to exercise unprecedented power over the natural resource and industrial sectors of the American economy.

Next up: lasting control of banks and other financial institutions.

The New York Times reported Monday that the White House is considering a conversion of hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout money to common stock in the banks that received it. By doing so, the Times reported, the administration "can shore up the nation’s banking system without having to ask Congress for more money any time soon," according to officials.

"In a significant shift, White House and Treasury Department officials now say they can stretch what is left of the $700 billion financial bailout fund further than they had expected a few months ago, simply by converting the government’s existing loans to the nation’s 19 biggest banks into common stock.

Converting those loans to common shares would turn the federal aid into available capital for a bank — and give the government a large ownership stake in return."

The proposed move raises again a question that first came up when the Bush administration proposed the bank bailouts last year. Why doesn't the government take preferred stock in the recipient banks in exchange for the bailouts?

This would have kept the government out of direct management of the banks.

By proposing a payback in common stock, the Obama administration is demonstrating that it wants power over the banks commensurate with its stock holdings.

"...some critics would consider it a back door to nationalization, since the government could become the largest shareholder in several banks," the Times acknowledges.

"The Treasury has already negotiated this kind of conversion with Citigroup and has said it would consider doing the same with other banks, as needed. But now the administration seems convinced that this maneuver can be used to make up for any shortfall in capital that the big banks confront in the near term."

Treasury has about $135 billion left from the $700 billion commited to bank bailouts, but the Times reports that "the nation’s banks are believed to need far more than that to maintain enough capital to absorb all their losses from soured mortgages and other loan defaults."

EPA takes charge of the weather, plans to deprive plants and trees of carbon dioxide, other gases

My tribe paid a high price for venturing into the distant wilderness without first consulting the Environmental Protection Agency.

Some reached the coast of what would become Newfoundland, where their settlement was unearthed decades ago. Others settled in what became Iceland, where they set up a primitive democracy that still endures a thousand years later.

Another group of Norwegian Vikings hauled up on the shores of Greenland, which appeared to them a land of milk and honey. They established farms, and appear to have prospered for more than three centuries.

As things turned out, they had happened upon Greenland during a period of warming. Then the ice came back and all of them died. The Little Ice Age, which ranged from approximately 1350 to 1850, had arrived.

In retrospect, it seems so simple that even a cave man could figure it out. Weather changes, sometimes remarkably fast and furiously, sometimes slowly but ferociously. Those who are in the wrong place often die.

Now, however, the weather is about to play a new, unprecedented political role, and the EPA is becoming the point of the spear in a neo-fascist scheme devised by the Obama administration to take unprecedented control of the American economy.

The EPA has ruled that current higher concentrations of carbon dioxide and related gases are the "unambiguous result of human emissions."

Scientific research shows that the more greenhouse gases there are in the atmosphere the more heat is trapped, raising the earth's temperature.

The EPA has endorsed that research and determined that "natural variations" in climatic conditions, such as solar activity, couldn't explain rising temperatures.

Okay. How, then, does the EPA explain the warming that transformed Greenland from a big block of ice into fertile land that my fellow Norwegian tribesmen farmed for about 350 years?

No one was there when they arrived. What, if not solar activity, had turned up the temperature in Greenland? The EPA has to answer that question or I, for one, will deliver the derisive laughter that propaganda organization so richly deserves.

To reach its desired conclusion, long in the making, the EPA draws two arguable conclusions:

1. Higher temperatures are undesirable and must be prevented.

2. Higher temperatures can be stopped by government regulation of carbon dioxide, a ubiquitous gas that humans exhale and plants inhale, and other greenhouse gases.

Never mind that the evidence for global warming - a less-than-one-degree rise in average temperature over 100 years - is worthy of derisive laughter.

Never mind that the average temperature has actually been falling for the last seven years.

By happenstance, Energy Secretary Steven Chu addressed some of these questions at the just-concluded Obama-Chavez festival in Trinidad and Tobago, where he warned that the Caribbean region faces "very, very scary" rises in sea levels and intensifying hurricanes, while Florida, Louisiana and even northern California could be flooded.

But skeptics promptly pounced on Chu's claims.

"Secretary Chu still seems to believe that computer model predictions decades or 100 years from now are some sort of 'evidence' of a looming climate catastrophe," said Marc Morano, executive editor of ClimateDepot.com and former top aide to global warming critic Sen. Jim Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma.

"Secretary Chu's assertions on sea level rise and hurricanes are quite simply being proven wrong by the latest climate data. As the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute reported in December 12, 2008: There is 'no evidence for accelerated sea-level rise.'"

Hurricane activity in both hemispheres is at 30-year lows, Morano said, and experts such as MIT's Kerry Emanuel and Tom Knutson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration "are now backing off their previous dire predictions."

Trouble is, neither skepticism nor contrary evidence will deter the neo-fascists, who are determined to take control of the economy because free enterprise and consumer preferences haven't delivered the result they want: a nanny government that determines which cars we drive across a landscape dotted with windmills and "Obama Saves" signs.

Obama's remedies don't fit the problem

"...I had made my train journey to Washington from Princeton University. There I had been lecturing, 30 years on, about how Margaret Thatcher confronted economic crisis when she first came to power in 1979. The point that strikes one is that it was the crisis which, above all, galvanised her, captured her intellect, harnessed her energy. Like Churchill in relation to the Second World War, she felt that all her life had been a preparation for that hour. Her vision of what was wrong with her country, and how to put it right, was seen entirely through the prism of the crisis.

The same cannot be said of Barack Obama. This is not merely because he has no previous experience of governing. It is because his idea of what he wants to do is really something quite different from what is actually happening to his country. In his inauguration address, he spoke of the need to get on with the business of "remaking America". For him, that economic stuff is not really part of the remaking, but a distraction from it. His vision of a more social-democratic country was conceived almost without reference to the greatest economic catastrophe to hit America for 80 years. He barely had to argue, or even think about it before or during the campaign. It shows. He says that his education, energy and health reforms must happen so that "such a crisis [the financial one] never happens again", but he merely asserts the link: he does not prove it.

Through his astonishing personal qualities, allied with his ethnicity, Mr Obama feels like the right man to be President. But perhaps he has come at the wrong time."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/charlesmoore/
5173804/Obamas-house-of-prosperity-may-yet-be-a-castle-in-the-air.html
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