Advocacy Consultant
Some corners of the mainstream media continue to chide Republicans for opposing President Obama’s stimulus/bailout/recovery/handout/train wreck bill. But on the day where the new face of the GOP will be chosen, consider this:
Opposition to the bill was bi-partisan, with 11 Democrats joining the Republicans in voting “Nay.” The same can’t be said for the support.
With stimulus/bailout talk dominating the headlines, President Obama’s Department of Agriculture is doing something smart – reviewing the disbursement of farm subsidies to stop some payments. Currently, the flawed handout program sends cash to some people who have never planted a seed in their lives – and probably couldn’t tell a hole in the ground from… well, you can figure that part out.
It’s over a year old, but this blog post from Merry Olde England has a clever take on the ridiculousness of farm subsidies.
A running theme of the early Obama Administration has been “process.”
When will the President make good on his promise to pull troops out of Iraq? How will the President handle the suspected terrorists at Guantanamo? When will the government pass an economic policy to make everything better? White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has frequently referred to each situation as a process – giving the Administration a chance to delay and diffuse questions.
And as Mama Eltringham pointed out to me today, one Republican is turning that back on the Administration. Faced with a harmful economic stimulus bill, Republicans are looking to delay and diffuse too – delay (or destroy) a harmful bill and diffuse criticism that they are suffering from sour grape syndrome since November. So Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia used the same language:
“The House is set to vote on the legislation as soon as tomorrow… Cantor said the House vote on the legislation ‘is only the first step in the process.'”
Gibbs later credited Cantor with successfully pushing to publish the stimulus package online for public scrutiny – a tactic which not only delays the bill’s passage, but forces the Obama Administration to explain spending $800+ billion in tax dollars during a time when working folks are pinching every penny to get by.
But don’t accuse the Republicans of trying to sink the stimulus. They’re just letting the process play out.
With the mainstream media in full-scale Obama Love mode, it might seem Republican ideas like simplifying the tax code have fallen by the wayside. Luckily, filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney has taken to the streets of Harlem and talked to the constituents of House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangle (who’s had his own problems with the tax code). Maloney shows just how wide an appeal these ideas have.
AOL Political Machine Blogger Matt Lewis was on Fox News today squaring off with former Mondale campaign manager Bob Beckel. The quote that stuck with Lewis coming away from the segment was Beckel’s defense of socialism: “What is wrong with some form of socialism in certain areas?” Here’s the video:
Beckel poses a valid question. And with the Obama administration less than a week from taking the controls, it’s a question that needs to be answered by opponents of a government controlled economy. If people are struggling to make ends meet, a scheme to nationalize industries will sound more appealing – and without a viable answer, could become a reality.
With all the bailout buzz in the air, Mint.com – a free personal finance management website – has its own plan for an economic bailout package (pictured).
I counted five different times where the Mint plan taxes wealth – not income or consumption, but actual saved money (which has probably already been taxed as income). Mint proposes taxing investments and any money made off those investments and advocates seizing corporate bonuses and money that has already been paid out.
Once again: Mint purports to be a financial managment tool. But apparently they don’t believe in people saving money.
Even worse is Mint’s concept of a “Main Street Bailout” – which doesn’t send dollar one to Main Street at all. Their “renewable fuels” funding is nothing more than a subsidy for energy companies’ research and development labs. Their $50 billion mortgage rescue package will be administered by some government entity and doesn’t appear to include a plan for making those endangered mortages affordable to the borrowers who got in over their heads in the first place. And the $20 billion in state funding won’t go any farther than state capitals.
Mint clearly doesn’t care about creating a strong, smart, financial culture. But they do feel the need to advocate policies which sound like they help people solve problems – even if they make the problems worse.
I got my 401k statement the other day. The timing couldn’t have been better – I needed a good scare just before Halloween.
With a good 40 years to go before I’m retirement age, I’m not all that worried. I still have time to continue a long-term retirement plan. Of course, that plan doesn’t include Social Security, which will not be available to me. All of the promises of Obama and others to “protect social security” is a transparent vote grab – and a reasonable one, because seniors tend to vote more often. I’d pander to them too. But here in the real world, I have to figure out how to save for retirement while flushing 7.5% of my paycheck down the crapper for a government-mandated retirement plan that’s about as dependable as an Enron pension.
As Election Day draws near, Republicans across the country will be accused of wanting to dismantle Social Security, Medicare, and other entitlement programs – as if these programs worked.
George Mason Economics Professor Walter Williams has a great line about government entitlements. Professor Williams points out that the facets of American Society that people are most satisfied with – the Internet, the availability of retail goods, etc. – are items in which the free market has been allowed to flourish. But the more regulations and government control exists, the more people tend to be dissatisfied – as they are with education, roads and traffic, fuel supplies.
I know I’d be a lot happier if I could bolster my 401k by saving 7.5% of each paycheck, instead of throwing it away.
I don’t have to make it up: He said it to a plumber from Ohio. To illustrate the courage of his convictions, he even tries to explain marginal rates to make the tax hike sound not so bad.
It plays well in the polls to wage class warfare and say that you’re only taxing “the wealthy” – but the reality is that those taxes hurt the people who are expanding the economy. Government prints money, but businesses create wealth.
(By the way, if all this sounds familiar, it should.)
It looks like the Senate will vote to approve the Wall Street bailout that failed the House earlier this week – despite intense constituent disapproval.
Public disapproval of the proposed bailout was so high, in fact, that the House website crashed under the weight of the public response: those who tried to email their Congressman got an error message about high volume. Their solution was to limit the number of emails constituents could send in.
That’s not a typo – Congress really told America, “Hey! Pipe down!”
It’s easy to blame Capitol Hill’s 1970s-era staffing structure for making Congressional offices amazingly ill-equipped to handle high volumes of electronic constituent communication. But as the internet becomes the easiest and most convenient way for most people to get in touch with their elected representatives, this may just be a scam to drum up business for the post office.
It looks like you, me, and all our fellow taxpayers will not be chipping in more than $5,000 apiece to bail out Wall Street. (They will not be sending it back to us, so don’t get too excited.)
The Wall Street Failout makes me proud to be an American. Across the country, voters’ personal BS meters went off, as constiutuent pressure had a big hand in killing this bill. (Of course, Nancy Pelosi’s campaign speech didn’t help.)
Our elected representatives are now trying to come up with some kind of solution, but this is a good time to trust the wisdom of the people. Much of our current mess was created by government intervention in the first place, as the well-researched video below chronicles (and even though it’s 11 minutes long, it’s worth it). It seems unlikely that the cure for a government-created problem is more government.
Jim Eltringham 
