I’m not sure how I missed this one, but it seems that my favorite Senator the dishonorable Tom Harkin has endorsed Howard Dean to become the next secretary of the Health and Human Services. Who else could it be? As the Godfather of pork Harkin knows when he sees a good swine. Oh, not so long ago Senator Harkin endorsed Howard Dean for president of the United States. We all know how that turned out…
Sheer unadulterated brilliance. It’s difficult to believe that it’s been five years already. Senator Harkin is hard at work in the Congress coming up with new ways to bankrupt the nation. One idea he has is “Cash for Clunkers.” If you’re low-to-middle income Harkin wants to give you $10,000 cash for your car so you’ll buy an American fuel efficient car.
Actually, what Harkin wants to do is have the American taxpayer help pay for a badly made American car that’s supposedly fuel efficient. This plan is just another ponzi scheme that really just wealth redistribution and a bailout for failing automakers. It’s more of the coffee economics that dominated his short campaign for president in 1992.
President Obama’s war on the American taxpayer continued by repealing Executive Order 13202. Unions aren’t just content with bankrupting the big American car companies. Greg Mankiw has more.
This is good news for union workers, bad news for non-union workers, and bad news for taxpayers, who will pay more for what the government buys on their behalf. In my judgment, it is bad news from a macroeconomic perspective. As I learned from Professor Larry Summers, one “cause of long-term unemployment is unionization.”
Charles Platt is a former Senior writer for Wired magazine, computer programmer and author of over 40 fiction and nonfiction books. He decided to leave writing for awhile and take on a bit of a social experiment. After reading the book “Nickel and Dimed,” which discusses the exploitation of the American work, Platt went and a got a job at Wal-Mart. Platt has now written about his experience at the New York Post.
Some people, usually community activists, loath Wal-Mart. Others, like the family of four struggling to make ends meet, are in love with the chain. I, meanwhile, am in awe of it.
With more than 7,000 facilities worldwide, coordinating more than 2 million employees in its fanatical mission to maintain an inventory from more than 60,000 American suppliers, it has become a system containing more components than the Space Shuttle – yet it runs as reliably as a Timex watch.
There’s definitely a twinge of elitism in anyone who says they’re concernered about the working conditions at Wal-Mart. Just because their customers are poor doesn’t mean the employees are treated bad.
I’ve always wondered why Home Depot and Lowes get a pass. The work is far more strenuous at those box chains than it is for most Wal-Mart employees. Also it’s not like Target is some kind of worker’s paradise. I don’t expect this will change the Wal-Mart haters. How do you stop something that’s completely irrational?
I’ve been updating the website this weekend. It’s bee a few years since I upgraded the blogging software. There are a lot of features I’d like to add, but I’m basically having to learn from scratch again. It took all day just to figure out how to add links to the sidebar.
In other news some Senators caved and it looks like the Government Stimulus bill will indeed pass. This just means it’s more likely that our generation will witness our government going bankrupt. Ron Paul has more…
This bill isn’t so much an indictment of the Democrats as it is on the Republicans. The Democrats have always been known as the big government spenders. It’s the principle of their party. The Republicans squandered an amazing opportunity after decades of Democrat rule in Congress. The Republicans just took after the Democrats. Unfortunately the Republicans never enjoyed a large enough majority to get away from moderate rule. Americans who are tired of wasteful spending and corruptions now have no alternative. The nations heads inevitably towards bankruptcy. When the economy bounces back in six months or two years the Democrats will claim they did it. When the country goes bankrupt 5 years or 20 years from now those greedy bureaucrats will be nowhere to be found.
The unemployment numbers aren’t really at record levels. First of all the number of workers in the United States is much higher than it was in the 70′s. Here’s a graph that puts it in perspective. It’s annoying the press can’t do a better of job of keeping this slowdown in perspective.
One of the main problems with the election of Barack Obama was the fact that one party would have control of the country. The Democrat advantage is larger than anything during the Bush administration and with the economy in turmoil one party rule is a disaster. The stimulus package that Obama has rammed down the country’s throat is nearly unforgivable. The economy will likely bounce back, but it won’t be because of this bill that will help bankrupt the nation. This President said he’d be different, but this is one of the most partisan pieces of legislation in recent memory.
Republicans were left out and all Obama could say is that “he won.” Does this sound familiar? Yeah, because Bush said that in 2004 when he took the ambitious task of reforming Social Security. That social program is going bankrupt, and will go bankrupt even faster now that Obama is running the country into the ground. It’s sad that Obama was given a free pass. The press never challenged this unqualified person and now the country is stuck with someone who’s playbook was defeated decades ago. In Bush the nation had a leader that coundn’t communicate, in Obama the nation has man who can give a good speech, but has no clue what he’s doing. Take your pick America. We’ll be paying for this bill for a long time.
It looks like I was wrong. It doesn’t appear Obama has any intention in changing this monstrosity being passed off as a stimulus package. Why would the President decide to push through a partisan bill that Americans don’t support and that the Congressional Budget Office suggests will hurt the economy? It doesn’t make much sense. The President has already broken his ethics pledge. I have to admit I’m not exactly sure what’s going on in the White House.
Today the Washington Post published an op-ed by the President defending the stimulus bill.
And if nothing is done, this recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.
So much for hope. Nothing in this bill is going to help. It’s basically a fulfillment to a Democrat pork wishlist. It’s amazing that Obama pledged to end business as usual and now has embraced a larger version of the status-quo. I guess the Obama administration is will to take the political hit for the next two years and pass this bill for the Democrat party. The economy always bounces back and if it does this will be forgotten in four years. However, if the economy sinks for the next four years Obama won’t be able to blame Bush and this bill will define this term. Maybe Obama isn’t that smart. Maybe he’s not that good of a leader. That’s the risk the nation took when it elected someone with basically no experience.
There’s no doubt about it, the stimulus bill passed by the House last week is a monument to bad government. It basically represents everything Americans are fed up about when it comes to Congress. It’s for those reasons that I don’t think it’ll pass in its current form. Eventually Obama is going to intervene. I cannot imagine that the President would let two years of “change” rhetoric get flushed down the toilet in his first 100 days in office.
The President fights off hardball questions like “do you think the final play of the Super Bowl should have been reviewed?”
Ultimately the fastest way to encourage job creation and investment is lower corporate taxes. For whatever illogical reason many Democrats are opposed to this measure despite the fact cooperate taxes in the United States aren’t competitive with other countries. To make Democrats happy Obama could insist that the United States end corporate subsidies. For many companies a decrease in taxes would make up for the elimination in subsidies. Many of these subsides are in place because of the high tax rate.
Companies are currently cutting costs to stay in business. If the government reduces taxes it means less jobs will be lost. Why do members of Congress and the President care if a corporation spent bailout dollars on remodeling? Did that corporation create jobs? Doesn’t that make more sense than spending money on a trillion dollar stimulus package that includes funding for contraceptives? This is an economic stimulus bill, not a sexual stimulation package. Perhaps the Congress is confused. It wouldn’t be the first time.
If the bill passes without being changed Obama will become the parable of the “Politician Who Cried ‘Change.”
Recent Comments