Back to Basics

I know that they only think of this as the second stimulus bill. After all the recently signed $26 billion spending bill was just a “jobs” bill and this stimulus really is about something different than jobs, right? OK, I am just confused. This is also a jobs bill, but the previous jobs bill was not a stimulus bill.

The Obama administration is mulling a raft of emergency fixes to stimulate the economy before the midterms, including an extension of the research and development tax credit and new infrastructure spending, according to several people familiar with the situation.

Administration officials have been huddling almost continuously during the past week, brainstorming for ideas that would boost employment without hiking the massive federal deficit – with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner rushing to the West Wing for further consultations late Thursday.

The White House press office on Thursday refused to say how much a financial package might be, other than to say it won’t be a “second stimulus.” But the administration will have a tough time selling nearly any package to terrified, Obama-phobic Hill Democrats who increasingly blame the president – and his ambitious, expensive legislative agenda – for their dismal prospects this November.

The meetings, which had Obama huddling with his economic advisers twice in the last seven days, have yielded no specific proposals. But he’s given the team a priority: find ways to pay for as many of the ideas, mostly tax breaks, as possible without a deficit increase, an administration official told POLITICO.

The R-and-D tax cut, which Congressional Democrats have already considered would, for example, be paid for by closing overseas corporate loopholes.

But party leaders were dubious that even a modest, targeted spending bill could pass muster at the height of an anti-tax, anti-deficit, Tea Party-fueled Republican resurgence. . . . .

President Obama thinks that by recently signing a new bill spending $600 million to beef up border enforcement he will look tough on illegal aliens. But decisions such as today’s lawsuit by the Justice Department against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio to stop his policies regarding illegal aliens shows where the administration’s policies are really headed.

The bill Obama signed, which authorizes the hiring 1,500 new border personnel, the deployment of a pair of unmanned reconnaissance drones, and replacing some bases along the border is valuable, but it hardly undoes what the president has done up to this point. With a recent Rasmussen poll showing that 68 percent of U.S. voters support a plan to continue building a fence on the Mexican border, Obama’s change strikes one as a temporary smoke screen.

Up until now the president has worked to cut the number of border agents. 384 border agents were cut last October 1st and in the 2011 fiscal year budget Obama proposed cutting another 180 agents through attrition.

But it isn’t just his record of previously reducing the number of border agents. Obama has strongly opposed the use of fences, whether real ones or virtual ones. In March, he halted funding for the physical fence. Spending on “Total, CBP/Border Security Fencing, Infrastructure, and Technology” (which included the virtual fence) has fallen from $1.05 billion in 2008 at the end of the Bush administration to $800 million in 2010 to $574 million in the coming 2011 budget. That is a $479 million annual cut, something that isn’t going to be made up with a pair of unmanned drones.

Unfortunately, Obama appears to wish for continued illegal immigration as his administration has actively tried to stop states from helping enforce current federal laws. Consider the many actions that Obama has taken so far:

– Just in the last last week two actions by the Obama administration have come to light. A defacto amnesty is being established where deportation cases are being dropped against illegal aliens who have already been arrested. In another case, a non-citizen, who committed several felonies ranging from perjury to voter fraud, was coached by the Department of Homeland Security on how to purge evidence of these actions from his record so that he could still be granted citizenship.

– The Obama administration has brought several lawsuits to try prevent states from discouraging illegal aliens from entering the country. One is well-known and aims to stop Arizona from requiring police to ask for some type of ID — no matter what their accent or looks — of anyone who is “technically ‘arrested’” by police. In May, another lawsuit was brought against Arizona over its law revoking state business licenses for companies that regularly violate immigration laws. The Obama administration’s stance is especially odd since business licenses routinely are conditioned on a crime-free record and such rules have always been determined by the states. The administration hopes to make immigration law the single exception of a law allowed to be broken.

Last night Obama delivered a speech about a war that he exploited for political advantage during the election, and ignored the rest of the time. A war that he tried to sabotage as a Senator, and neglected once in the White House. Where Bush conducted constant conferences with commanders in the field, Obama has let the clashing egos of former Clinton Administration staffers, and a few imported radicals, determine how the war will be conducted. Of all the charges leveled at Bush over the war, he could never be accused of just not giving a damn. Yet that is exactly the case with Obama. He just doesn’t give a damn.

While US soldiers are still dying in Iraq, Obama did his best to take credit for ending combat operations. And used his speech as a opportunity to show off his new Oval Office decor. The level of tone deafness involved in using a wartime speech to show off your new office furnishings, while most Americans are cutting back is completely incomprehensible. It shows a profound contempt for both topic and audience, and a self-involvement that borders on the pathological. It’s as if Obama only managed to interrupt his countless rounds of golf and his vacations, just to put on his best sad face and show off his new rug.

Obama has never had much patience for doing the hard work of governing the country. Instead he shuttled from country to country, golf course to golf course, and resort to resort– while shifting the real work onto congress and his aides, who shifted it onto their aides. What America got was the unlimited power fantasies of immature radicals with no responsibility given flesh in legislation that hardly anyone in the majority party seemed to even bother to read. Meanwhile, having confused his job with that of a King or a Pope, Barry dispensed his wisdom on every random topic from police procedures in Massachusetts to sports picks in the NBA and the NFL. It was as if Obama did not understand that he had won the right to do a very difficult and unpopular job. Instead like the contestant who is picked out of the audience at a game show, he only seemed to understand that he was suddenly very rich and famous.

The Obama Administration hopelessly blurred the lines between Reality television and politics, giving us a self-indulgent child in the Oval Office, who is always eager to pose for photos and be fawned upon, but does not understand that he has responsibilities, rather than unchecked powers. The difference between Barack Obama and Levi Johnston, is not in intelligence or ethics, it’s in marketability. Obama was the ultimate marketable candidate. And the equivalent of the economies of some small countries were spent marketing the hell out of him. But how do you market failure? And what do you tell customers when the product they bought turns out to have nothing inside?

When Obama ran for office, his theme was that he had “New Ideas” to offer. Even more than the ubiquitous Hope and Change was the promise of new ideas. These new ideas weren’t communicated as such, instead the campaign focused on its social media strategy, its posters and all the other accouterments of its “cool” image. And now toward the beginning of the end of a new year, it is impossible for even Obama supporters to find any actual “New Ideas”.

Yet Obama and his media lackeys have decided to again adopt “New Ideas” as their talking point. At the beginning of the month, Obama warned that Republicans “have no new ideas”. Always a day late and a trillion bucks short, Biden chimed in last week on message, echoing his boss by warning that the Republicans have no new ideas. This would be a more potent talking point if the public weren’t sick and tired of new ideas that put their grandchildren deep into debt while taking away their jobs. And if Obama actually had any new ideas.

For all the glamor of the new, Obama began his term with an expanded program of bailouts and frenzied spending. This was not a new idea. It was an existing unpopular policy that his administration decided to practice with no fiscal discipline, or even the pretense of actually trying to help the economy. On Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama carried on variations of the Bush Administration’s existing approach, but with little to no oversight or interest. Obama’s big nationalized healthcare showpiece is a revival of a Clinton Administration policy priority, that is short on new ideas, but long on pork and sweetheart deals for his backers.

There are no new ideas here, just a powergrab as all the rats and cockroaches from previous administrations and NGO’s  have scuttled under Obama’s skirts to romp in the pantry. Their feeding frenzy has pushed the national debt to unprecedented heights. The economy has been squashed and countless jobs have been lost as possessed by a sense of invulnerability, the left was allowed to wage a ruthless war against the private sector, even while Obama’s friends in the business community were allowed to profit from bailouts and stimulus plans that did a lot for Democratic donors, but nothing for the economy.

The hoary corruption of congress met the fresh stench of the administration radicals whose shoulders Obama had ridden on to victory. And together they ravaged and pillaged the country from coast to coast. They took over some companies and spent fortunes on others. They imposed illegal taxes on the public, while turning them into debt slaves for generations to come. They stood up for Muslim terrorists and kicked American patriots in the face. And now at the beginning of the end of the year, they wonder why judgment day has finally come calling. Why the conservative opposition can bring out people in force, while Obama can only trot out his minions in cushy bureaucratic positions and assorted union thugs to try to silence political dissent. But trying to silence political dissent, only gives it more volume.

Taxpayer-supported mortgage behemoth Freddie Mac — yes, the same government-sponsored entity that is sucking $64 billion of your money to stay afloat — is proud to announce that it is squandering more of your bucks on a “diversity officer:”

Freddie Mac, the government-controlled mortgage buyer, on Monday named Subha V. Barry to head its newly formed office of diversity and inclusion.

As chief diversity officer, Barry will work with the company’s business units to ensure they’re maximizing opportunities in diverse markets. She will also ensure the company is utilizing diverse talent among its employee and suppliers, and developing strategies focused on the needs of a diverse work force.

Barry will also design the new executive diversity council.

You can thank diversity-mongering Maxine Waters for stuffing the race preference mandates into the financial “reform” law.

Expect more cronyism of color on the public dime.

So much for MLK’s dream, eh?

Tick, tick, tick.

I noted in an earlier post that President Obama’s economic address in the Rose Garden had been scheduled for 12:30pm Eastern. It is now past 1:00pm Eastern. Wonder what kind of tension there must have been on his economic team phone conference this morning?

Reader @nicklaus on Twitter quips that the recovery is “delayed,” so it’s entirely fitting that the laggard president’s address today is late, too.

Meanwhile, in case you missed, here are the depressing details of the next massive expansion of government aid to home borrowers:

The Obama administration plans to set up an emergency loan program for the unemployed and a government mortgage refinancing effort in the next few weeks to help homeowners after home sales dropped in July, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan said.

“The July numbers were worse than we expected, worse than the general market expected, and we are concerned,” Donovan said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program yesterday. “That’s why we are taking additional steps to move forward.”

The administration will begin a Federal Housing Authority refinancing effort to help borrowers who are struggling to pay their mortgages, and will start an emergency homeowners’ loan program for unemployed borrowers so they can stay in their homes, Donovan said.

Responsible renters, there’s nothing for you.

Flashback 2009: Washington’s recipe for more mortgage defaults

As the nation’s children return to elementary and secondary schools, it is increasingly essential that their parents and communities coast to coast realize how poorly served they are and how their learning environment is increasingly tainted by a socialist agenda.

Our nation’s schools have long been factories of boredom, centers of academic incompetence. High school graduation rates have been in a fairly steady decline. At its peak in 1969, the rate was 77 percent. By 2007 it was 68.8 percent.

In mid-August, The Wall Street Journal reported that “New data show that fewer than 25% of 2010 graduates who took the ACT college-entrance exam possessed the academic skills necessary to pass entry-level courses, despite modest gains in college-readiness among U.S. high school students in the last few years.”

What caught my eye was a quote from Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington, who said that “if our kids aren’t dropping out physically, they are dropping out mentally.”

The subject of education is important because they are the generation to which the future of the nation must be entrusted and “A recent study found the U.S. ranks only 12th in the percentage of adults aged 25 to 34 who hold college degrees.”

The failure of our nation’s schools, to my mind, coincides with the creation of the U.S. Department of Education in 1979, signed into law by President Jimmy Carter, and which began operating on May 16, 1980.

The word “education” does not appear in the U.S. Constitution and, until the Department of Education came along, it was the responsibility of States and local communities. A government that has managed Conrail since 1976 without once making a profit should not have been trusted with the nation’s educational system.

So this is the economic growth that by far the largest Keynesian stimulus in American history produces? President Obama’s $814 billion in stimulus, a more than $1.3 trillion annual deficit for the second year in a row, has produced what the administration has declared is the long awaited “Summer of Recovery.”

Last fall the economy grew at a reasonable 5 percent annual rate, though even that was not particularly fast for a “recovery.” Yet, it has dropped since then: during January through March, the growth rate dropped to 3.7 percent and April through June, 1.6 percent.

But Americans didn’t need the new incredibly slow GDP growth numbers that came out on Friday to tell them that the economy was growing slowly or see through the Obama administration’s constant cheerleading. An Angus Reid survey released on July 31 found that only 11 percent of Americans rated their economic conditions as Very Good / Good, down from 15 percent in April. In July, as incredible 86 percent of Americans felt that their economic condition is Poor/Very Poor, up from 83 percent. A just released CBS News/New York Times poll finds that 83 % now say that the economy is bad, with an incredible 37 percent saying that they believe the economy is in permanent decline.

Since April, the Bureau of Labor Statistics Household Survey has shown that 1.7 million Americans have left the labor force and simply given up looking for work. The total number of people employed has dropped by nearly half a million.

Depressingly, next year’s huge scheduled tax increases mean that growth will be slow in 2011. If you know that your tax rate is going to rise in the coming year, you will work harder this year while you are able to keep a larger share of your income.

But President Obama does not understand incentives. To him it is just greed. As he famously told “Joe the Plumber” during the 2008 campaign, “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” He keeps on talking about how the wealthy can afford to pay more. Yet he doesn’t talk about what needs to be done to make the economy, the economic pie, bigger for everyone. What tax cuts the administration has put forward have lowered average tax rates and raised marginal rates. Obama proposed and got Congress to sign off on a lump sum deduction in 2009, but it still discouraged people from working more because as they earned more, the size of their deduction shrank.

Talking about the “Recovery Act” in a new interview with Time magazine, Biden waxed on about how “Now the fun stuff starts! . . . This is a chance to do something big, man!” What excited him was all the social engineering the government was going to do with the stimulus, creating “green energy” and “green transportation.”  Now THAT’S telling. So, the stimulus wasn’t really about growth, it was about changing America. It was about subsidizing projects that no one would have invested in without the subsidies.

David Rosenberg, market guru, has officially declared that the US economy is in a state of depression, and he sees the economic superpowers woes worsening.

On the heels of that bleak forecast, the statistics for existing home sales for July were released and the numbers were ugly. The weak housing market collapsed. Reflecting the worst slump in American history, existing housing sales had plummeted a stunning 27 percent and there’s no sign on the horizon that sales will stabilize any time soon.

The bottom line, argues Rosenberg and others: the US economy has collapsed into another Great Depression.

Citing the period from 1929 to 1932 and the eerie similarities, Rosenberg said, “We may well be reliving history here. If you’re keeping score, we have recorded four quarterly advances in real GDP, and the average is only 3 percent.” The same happened during the early 1930s stock market rebound of 50 percent after the 1929 crash.

The Great Depression followed the brief economic upswing.

As long as two years ago, one of Britain’s top economists predicted a decade-long depression, $45 trillion in debt defaults and unemployment in the US and UK approaching 25% or higher.

During October 2008, economist Fred Harrison told the Foreign Press Association in London,”"The massive contraction in demand caused by this ‘wealth effect’ will condemn the western economy to a decade-long depression.”

Building on my continuing War on the West/War on Jobs series, today’s column initiates an Obama jobs death toll. The social justice Left has always used Alinskyite story-telling to get its way. Time for the Right to better tell the stories of the forgotten victims of the Obama job-killing machine.

Regarding the new CBO report on the stimulus (coincidentally — or maybe not coincidentally — released on the same days as GOP leader John Boehner’s jobs speech), McQ says pointedly: “Of course it boosted the GDP by a sizeable amount. When you pour almost a trillion dollars out of the government bucket and that is part of the calculation of GDP, then naturally the GDP is going to be ‘boosted’. The question is, what good did it do. Claims of ‘increasing the number of people employed’ is, as is obvious, a guess cranked out by an economic model. But look around you. When what the bucket has dumped out drains away, what do we have? 9.5% unemployment – at least at an official level – 1.5% higher than what was promised if the “stimulus” wasn’t passed. A stagnant economy. Businesses neither expanding nor hiring. Car sales – down. Housing sales – way down. Consumer confidence – in the tank. Expanded regulation, increased taxation and a war on business…So let the left and the media try their best to make this more than it is – the effect on GDP calculation that absurd levels of governmental deficit spending will have. Take that out and there isn’t much to shout about, is there?”

***

The White House War on Jobs
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2010

The “Summer of Recovery” is looking more and more like the Beltway Chainsaw Massacre for America’s workers. As President Obama lolls on Martha’s Vineyard with his well-heeled Chicago pals, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll shows that 72 percent of people are very worried about joblessness and 67 percent are very concerned about massive government spending. After a nearly $1 trillion fiscal stimulus and several multi-billion-dollar corporate and union bailouts, unemployment remains stuck near 10 percent nationwide; jobless claims rose again last week. One shudders to think how many more jobs will be on the chopping block after the vacationing president finishes “recharging his batteries.”

The blame avoidance industry, of course, never takes a break. Capitol Hill Democrats blame George W. Bush. President Obama blames inaction by the, er, Democrat-controlled Congress. On Tuesday, Vice President Joe Biden derided GOP Leader John Boehner’s speech on the Obama job-killing machine as a return to the past. Biden sneered about the
“good old days” when Republicans held the majority in Washington. But laid-off, unemployed, and endangered Americans in the health care sector, auto industry, oil, mining, gas, and fishing industries are no doubt wondering: What’s wrong with returning to the days when they had jobs and steady paychecks?

Elites, whether elected or unelected, will not do anything for the good of the country. Examples abound in the national debt, immigration predicament, trade deficits, unending wars, educational failures, drug war and environmental degradation.

Back in the early years of the Continental Congress, Thomas Jefferson asked George Washington, “Why the need for a senate?”

Washington replied, “Why do you pour your coffee into a cup?”

“To cool it,” Jefferson replied.

“That’s why we need the senate to cool the passions of the peoples’ chamber—the House of Representatives,” said Washington.

Two hundred and thirty four years later, the Senate and House evolved into “Empty Chambers.” Senate majority leader Harry Reid cannot tie his shoes from his enfeebled mind. House leader Nancy Pelosi fails American citizens on every level. Congressional members on both sides of the aisle fail to pull their thumbs out of their eyes. They either cannot see or refuse to look at conditions across America.

Let’s touch on a few: