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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sandintoes who wrote (33723)	3/6/2009 12:55:47 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

Great article. Thanks.

To: sandintoes who wrote (33723)	3/6/2009 12:57:05 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Obama's Radicalism Is Killing the Dow A financial crisis is the worst time to change the foundations of American capitalism. MARCH 6, 2009 By MICHAEL J. BOSKIN It's hard not to see the continued sell-off on Wall Street and the growing fear on Main Street as a product, at least in part, of the realization that our new president's policies are designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy, not just mitigate the recession and financial crisis. The illusion that Barack Obama will lead from the economic center has quickly come to an end. Instead of combining the best policies of past Democratic presidents -- John Kennedy on taxes, Bill Clinton on welfare reform and a balanced budget, for instance -- President Obama is returning to Jimmy Carter's higher taxes and Mr. Clinton's draconian defense drawdown. Mr. Obama's $3.6 trillion budget blueprint, by his own admission, redefines the role of government in our economy and society. The budget more than doubles the national debt held by the public, adding more to the debt than all previous presidents -- from George Washington to George W. Bush -- combined. It reduces defense spending to a level not sustained since the dangerous days before World War II, while increasing nondefense spending (relative to GDP) to the highest level in U.S. history. And it would raise taxes to historically high levels (again, relative to GDP). And all of this before addressing the impending explosion in Social Security and Medicare costs. To be fair, specific parts of the president's budget are admirable and deserve support: increased means-testing in agriculture and medical payments; permanent indexing of the alternative minimum tax and other tax reductions; recognizing the need for further financial rescue and likely losses thereon; and bringing spending into the budget that was previously in supplemental appropriations, such as funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The specific problems, however, far outweigh the positives. First are the quite optimistic forecasts, despite the higher taxes and government micromanagement that will harm the economy. The budget projects a much shallower recession and stronger recovery than private forecasters or the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office are projecting. It implies a vast amount of additional spending and higher taxes, above and beyond even these record levels. For example, it calls for a down payment on universal health care, with the additional "resources" needed "TBD" (to be determined). Mr. Obama has bravely said he will deal with the projected deficits in Medicare and Social Security. While reform of these programs is vital, the president has shown little interest in reining in the growth of real spending per beneficiary, and he has rejected increasing the retirement age. Instead, he's proposed additional taxes on earnings above the current payroll tax cap of $106,800 -- a bad policy that would raise marginal tax rates still further and barely dent the long-run deficit. Increasing the top tax rates on earnings to 39.6% and on capital gains and dividends to 20% will reduce incentives for our most productive citizens and small businesses to work, save and invest -- with effective rates higher still because of restrictions on itemized deductions and raising the Social Security cap. As every economics student learns, high marginal rates distort economic decisions, the damage from which rises with the square of the rates (doubling the rates quadruples the harm). The president claims he is only hitting 2% of the population, but many more will at some point be in these brackets. As for energy policy, the president's cap-and-trade plan for CO2 would ensnare a vast network of covered sources, opening up countless opportunities for political manipulation, bureaucracy, or worse. It would likely exacerbate volatility in energy prices, as permit prices soar in booms and collapse in busts. The European emissions trading system has been a dismal failure. A direct, transparent carbon tax would be far better. Moreover, the president's energy proposals radically underestimate the time frame for bringing alternatives plausibly to scale. His own Energy Department estimates we will need a lot more oil and gas in the meantime, necessitating $11 trillion in capital investment to avoid permanently higher prices. The president proposes a large defense drawdown to pay for exploding nondefense outlays -- similar to those of Presidents Carter and Clinton -- which were widely perceived by both Republicans and Democrats as having gone too far, leaving large holes in our military. We paid a high price for those mistakes and should not repeat them. The president's proposed limitations on the value of itemized deductions for those in the top tax brackets would clobber itemized charitable contributions, half of which are by those at the top. This change effectively increases the cost to the donor by roughly 20% (to just over 72 cents from 60 cents per dollar donated). Estimates of the responsiveness of giving to after-tax prices range from a bit above to a little below proportionate, so reductions in giving will be large and permanent, even after the recession ends and the financial markets rebound. A similar effect will exacerbate tax flight from states like California and New York, which rely on steeply progressive income taxes collecting a large fraction of revenue from a small fraction of their residents. This attack on decentralization permeates the budget -- e.g., killing the private fee-for-service Medicare option -- and will curtail the experimentation, innovation and competition that provide a road map to greater effectiveness. The pervasive government subsidies and mandates -- in health, pharmaceuticals, energy and the like -- will do a poor job of picking winners and losers (ask the Japanese or Europeans) and will be difficult to unwind as recipients lobby for continuation and expansion. Expanding the scale and scope of government largess means that more and more of our best entrepreneurs, managers and workers will spend their time and talent chasing handouts subject to bureaucratic diktats, not the marketplace needs and wants of consumers. Our competitors have lower corporate tax rates and tax only domestic earnings, yet the budget seeks to restrict deferral of taxes on overseas earnings, arguing it drives jobs overseas. But the academic research (most notably by Mihir Desai, C. Fritz Foley and James Hines Jr.) reveals the opposite: American firms' overseas investments strengthen their domestic operations and employee compensation. New and expanded refundable tax credits would raise the fraction of taxpayers paying no income taxes to almost 50% from 38%. This is potentially the most pernicious feature of the president's budget, because it would cement a permanent voting majority with no stake in controlling the cost of general government. From the poorly designed stimulus bill and vague new financial rescue plan, to the enormous expansion of government spending, taxes and debt somehow permanently strengthening economic growth, the assumptions underlying the president's economic program seem bereft of rigorous analysis and a careful reading of history. Unfortunately, our history suggests new government programs, however noble the intent, more often wind up delivering less, more slowly, at far higher cost than projected, with potentially damaging unintended consequences. The most recent case, of course, was the government's meddling in the housing market to bring home ownership to low-income families, which became a prime cause of the current economic and financial disaster. On the growth effects of a large expansion of government, the European social welfare states present a window on our potential future: standards of living permanently 30% lower than ours. Rounding off perceived rough edges of our economic system may well be called for, but a major, perhaps irreversible, step toward a European-style social welfare state with its concomitant long-run economic stagnation is not. Mr. Boskin is a professor of economics at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the non-partisan Hoover Institution. He chaired the Council of Economic Advisers. online.wsj.com

To: sandintoes who wrote (33723)	3/10/2009 9:12:05 AM
From: Peter Dierks	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

When Congress Spends, Worse Is Better Earmarks enable bad bills. By WILLIAM MCGURN MARCH 9, 2009, 11:08 P.M. ET The worse the omnibus spending bill now before Congress gets, the more likely that Congress will pass it -- and that Barack Obama will sign it into law. The reasons confuse most Americans. But the iron logic is well understood by every Beltway politician. We were given a glimpse of it Sunday on CNN, when Peter R. Orszag, President Obama's budget director, called the $410 billion omnibus "uglier than we would like" -- and in the next breath urged Congress to go ahead and pass it anyway. CorbisWhat explains this disconnect? The answer is that politicians and citizens understand earmarks in different ways. Politicians understand that not all earmarks are pork, and not all pork comes in the form of an earmark. They also appreciate the ease of inserting pet projects into large spending bills without any debate or scrutiny. The public understands that this way of handling taxpayer dollars is corrupting even when it doesn't lead to a federal indictment. In fact, since the Jack Abramoff scandals and the now-notorious "bridge to nowhere," earmark has become a dirty word. So when citizens see these earmarks exposed in the press and lampooned on late-night TV, they assume it makes it more difficult for our congresspersons to pass them. What the public does not understand is that the more earmarks there are in a bill, the harder it will be to vote against it. The reason is simple: With every earmark, a congressman or senator gains a personal stake in the passage of a bill he or she might otherwise oppose. Which brings us to the real scandal here -- that 8,500-plus earmarks adding up to $8 billion will end up sticking the American taxpayer with a $410 billion spending bill that is filled with large and significant provisions that have gone largely undebated. Arizona Republican Rep. Jeff Flake understands the logic of earmarks. And he knows how lonely it can be to stand up against them. "Look at the 2005 Highway Bill," he says. "This was a $286 billion bill that we knew we couldn't afford, with a record-setting 6,300 earmarks. But when the time came to vote, there were only eight of us who voted against it -- probably the same eight who had nothing in it." Back then, Republicans were running the show. But in some ways, being in the minority has its own privileges. Taxpayers for Common Sense reports that though Democrats account for about 60% of the earmarks in the omnibus, six of its top 10 Senate earmarkers are Republican -- led by Mississippi's Thad Cochran. With $471 million for his state at stake, how likely is it that Sen. Cochran will hold the line against the earmark-laden omnibus the way he did against the earmark-free stimulus? Then there are those like my own congressman, Rodney Frelinghuysen. Mr. Frelinghuysen, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, voted against the omnibus even though he managed to help fill it with $65 million for New Jersey. It's not as illogical as it first appears. If the Democrats use their majority to get the bill passed, New Jersey still gets the earmarks. Either way, he can present himself as a champion of fiscal rectitude. For a president, the tradeoffs are tougher. When I was in the West Wing, we regularly attacked earmarks. But it was difficult to get specific without sending a member into a fit of pique. As any legislative liaison will tell you, though few senators and congressmen have enough power to get something done for you, almost all have the power to knife you in the back. And they will, as soon as they get the chance. So much as you might love to highlight the speaker's road to nowhere or someone else's six-figure earmark for the Lobster Institute, you have to ask yourself: Is it worth the vote it might cost you later on other, more important items on your agenda -- e.g., a judicial appointment, a vital trade agreement, or a war-funding bill? Right now, some are calling for Mr. Obama to veto the omnibus. It's true that if he did, he would be showing welcome courage in Washington -- not least because saying "No" would mean exposing leaders in his own party to public embarrassment. That may be why instead of talking up a veto, the White House has opted to spin this year's spending as "last year's business" -- and urge Congress to just get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible. "Washington is like 'the Godfather,'" says Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense. "The earmarks are favors from the Don. And once you've asked for his help, you're in it together -- whether you want to be or not." Write to MainStreet@wsj.com online.wsj.com

To: sandintoes who wrote (33723)	3/25/2009 9:46:52 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Obama tries to defend his wastefull spending Obama Defends Budget, Says Spending Will Pay Off In News Conference, President Advocates Making Investments Now to Put Economy on Sounder Footing Later MARCH 25, 2009 By JONATHAN WEISMAN and LAURA MECKLER WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama used a prime-time news conference to defend his $3.6 trillion budget plan, digging in on his ambitious spending and tax proposals one day before the plan begins to move in Congress. Ahead of next week's global economic summit, Mr. Obama also took a subtle swipe at European leaders who have questioned his administration's calls for their countries to offer up more economic stimulus. "We don't want a situation in which some countries are making extraordinary efforts and other countries aren't, with the hope that somehow the countries that are making those important steps lift everybody up," he said. Mr. Obama largely focused on defending his domestic economic proposals. He repeatedly took openings to make the case that the government should spend now on renewable-energy development, education and a health-insurance takeover that would put the economy on a sounder footing once it recovers. He repeated his call for new authority to seize and dismantle nonbank financial institutions like troubled insurance giant American International Group, Inc. Mr. Obama was questioned about a spending plan that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says would run up $9.3 trillion in debt over the next 10 years. He stood by his administration's projections that anticipate $7 trillion in additional debt by 2019. But Mr. Obama acknowledged that more will have to be done to rein in spending over the long term. "The alternative is to stand pat, and to simply say we are just going to not take over health care; we're not going to take on energy, we'll wait until the next time that gas gets to $4 a gallon; we will not build new union schools; we'll allow China or India or other countries to lap our young people in terms of their performance," he said. He said he has yet to detail how he is going bring down record deficits in the long term, but stressed that the key will be controlling health-care costs. He suggested details on how he would control entitlement spending could come in future budgets. Mr. Obama is under pressure, just two months into his term, and it showed. The House Budget Committee on Wednesday is to begin formally drafting his budget proposal into a nonbinding blueprint that will guide legislative action on health care, education, energy and taxes for the rest of the year. Mr. Obama's spending plan is under fire from Republicans and some senior Democrats. Among the administration proposals under attack is a plan to limit charitable and other deductions for upper-income Americans. Mr. Obama stood fast on that proposal. "I'm assuming that [the deduction] shouldn't be the determining factor as to whether you're giving that hundred dollars to the homeless shelter down the street," he said. Meanwhile, Mr. Obama continues to face fallout from the outrage over bonuses paid to executives at AIG, which is 80% owned by the government and has received billions in federal bailout money. Asked why he did not go public with his outrage as soon as he learned of the retention bonuses at AIG, the president snapped, "I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak." (Translation: Teleprompter didn't have a sound bite quality quip.) The president hit on a new theme for his administration: Persistence. He said the election of a conservative government in Israel, with a prime minister skeptical of a Palestinian state made the prospects for peace "not easier than it was." But, he said, as with his domestic efforts, he will soldier on. "That whole philosophy of persistence, by the way, is one that I'm going to be emphasizing again and again in the months and years to come, as long as I am in this office," he concluded. "I'm a big believer in persistence." Write to Jonathan Weisman at jonathan.weisman@wsj.com and Laura Meckler at laura.meckler@wsj.com online.wsj.com

To: sandintoes who wrote (33723)	4/5/2009 2:14:39 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Carl Schramm Giving Capitalism Its Due The head of the Kauffman Foundation on the importance of entrepreneurship. APRIL 4, 2009 By NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY Carl Schramm doesn't buy the idea that some businesses are "too big to fail." That notion, says the president of the Kansas City-based Kauffman Foundation, only creates obstacles for entrepreneurs. Instead, he sees the failure of big companies as the "moment when 1,000 flowers can bloom." The Kauffman Foundation, known to National Public Radio listeners and a few others as "the foundation for entrepreneurship," is difficult to categorize, but its president seems to like it that way. Last Sunday afternoon at the largely deserted Harvard Club in New York, I sat down to talk with Mr. Schramm, an unassuming man with distinctive round spectacles who oversees an almost $2 billion endowment. Kauffman was founded in 1966 by pharmaceutical magnate Ewing Marion Kauffman. In 1950, he launched a drug company in the basement of his Kansas City home. Forty years later, when he sold the business to Merrell Dow, it had become a diversified health-care company with nearly $1 billion in annual sales and more than 3,000 employees. Kauffman gave a lot of thought to his journey from poverty to wealth, according to Mr. Schramm. "He saw this as the central theme of his life." So what exactly is a foundation for entrepreneurship? Aren't foundations supposed to give money to charity? And aren't entrepreneurs supposed to get money from investors, not philanthropists? On the theoretical level, Mr. Schramm, who started his own health-care company and merchant bank, believes that the foundation has a duty to foster an environment hospitable to entrepreneurship. And so, for instance, Mr. Schramm brags that Kauffman has "dragged economists into considering the importance of firm formation to the overall growth of the economy." The foundation has commissioned some 6,000 papers on this and related topics in the past several years. Then there is the question of the public perception of entrepreneurship. In the most recent survey that the foundation sponsored, pollsters found that 63% of respondents "prefer giving individuals the incentives they need to start their own businesses as opposed to allowing the government to create new jobs directly." Conducted last month, the survey also showed that instead of the government's stimulus package, two-thirds of respondents would prefer "reducing legal barriers and red tape for new business development" as a way to jump-start the economy. Finally, 89% of respondents said that "capitalism is still the best economic system for our country." Despite this popular attitude, Mr. Schramm worries that there is a tendency on the part of some citizens to want the government to prevent market chaos. Prior to the financial meltdown this fall, "I think we were in full tide of entrepreneurial capitalism and now there's an introspection, where the vocabulary is all about regulation and the importance of the government to restart the economy," he says. While Mr. Schramm believes that the government has a role to play, he argues that "historically through the last seven recessions it's been entrepreneurs who essentially restarted the economy." Kauffman is dedicated to cultivating such innovators. Mr. Schramm is intent on dispelling the common misperception that "If you don't have it done by the time you're 19 or 21, it ain't gonna happen," and according to Inc. magazine, he says, "the fastest growing firms in the United States are started by people who are 39 years old" on average. In order to educate young people about the history of entrepreneurship in America, the foundation has partnered with 18 college campuses. "When I was in high school, the word entrepreneur was in zero use, it was not part of the American vocabulary. If you were to ask about inventors, they were pretty much dead people, you know, George Westinghouse and George Eastman." Today, Mr. Schramm thinks that kids do see more entrepreneurship around them with Internet startups and the like, but schools still don't encourage it. Even business schools, Mr. Schramm says, seem to offer only a "very rigid formalistic perspective about writing business plans." Kauffman has tried to provide more direct and practical aid to those trying to start their own businesses. Through a program called FastTrac, for instance, Kauffman will help 1,000 current and new small-business owners in New York City over the course of the next year learn the skills they need to succeed. FastTrac helps budding entrepreneurs with the important decision of picking a lawyer, for instance. "The bad choice of a lawyer at the start of a business or the bad choice of an accountant can screw the business up in a way that is fatal," says Mr. Schramm. The program also advises budding entrepreneurs never to let their lawyers or accountants invest in the company. "You have to develop your own sense of the value of the advice you're getting. And the minute people say well I want to own 25% of the company, all the alarm bells ought to go off." Finally, the foundation goes out of its way to support minority entrepreneurship. Mr. Schramm doesn't use any social-justice lingo to explain the program, but reverts to a kind of charming nerd-speak. He says that after a lot of analysis, Kauffman has found that there is "the greatest delta among black males." In other words, for a given amount of entrepreneurial investment, that group will see the greatest improvement in its economic status. While there are many activists out there saying that foundations should give more to minorities, you won't find many who offer the Kauffman philosophy: "We should have a proportionate number of black billionaire owners of businesses as exists in the majority community," says Mr. Schramm. In addition to encouraging entrepreneurship of all sorts, Mr. Schramm says the foundation itself is supposed to act entrepreneurially. In the past couple of decades, a veritable army of professional nonprofit workers has grown up. But Mr. Schramm was not among them. Before arriving at Kauffman, he taught at Johns Hopkins (he has a law degree and a doctorate in economics). When he applied to foundations for funding during his time as a professor, he recalls, "You had to be very good at using language to sound like you were out on the frontier, but in fact you couldn't go too far because . . . foundations are very cautious." For a while, he wondered what was behind that tendency. He concluded that "the foundation culture had developed a sort of consensus": Foundation money is "quasi-public." In a prescient article that Mr. Schramm wrote for the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy in 2006, he notes that "the foundation appears to lack any coherent theory of its own role in society and the economy." The result, he warned, is that "government can impose expectations that may destroy the foundation's ability to achieve the purposes for which it was conceived." Lately, some in the government have been trying to do exactly that. A few members of Congress, including Rep. Xavier Becerra (D., Calif.), have recently suggested that foundations need to be giving a greater percentage of their dollars to minority groups and other "marginalized communities." And various activist groups, including the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and Greenlining, have made the case that philanthropic dollars really belong to the public since they are tax exempt. Mr. Schramm responds: "I don't think as a legal matter that it holds because under that theory my 401(k) is public money." So who are the real stakeholders in foundations? Mr. Schramm can think of only one: the donor. "At Kauffman I think the trustees and I are very, very clear: We work for Mr. Kauffman," says Mr. Schramm, acknowledging that his boss passed away in 1993. Kauffman not only left extensive writings but also videotape of himself describing how he wanted the foundation to operate. Mr. Schramm says that one board member told him he was hired because he was the only candidate who had read Kauffman's book. Despite, or perhaps because of, his familiarity with Kauffman's thought, Mr. Schramm did not have an easy time taking over the foundation in 2002. Over time Kauffman had grown unwieldy, with one of the highest overhead costs of any foundation in the country. And its mission had become diluted. For example, Mr. Schramm notes, Kauffman said he was interested in education. "What was read into it was he was really more interested in general youth development. So we found ourselves supporting sports programs." Kauffman owned the Kansas City Royals for a time and Mr. Schramm notes that "he loved sports, but when it came to his foundation, he was crystal clear about what he wanted to have done and the word 'sports' never shows up in hundreds of pages of discussion." And so within a year of taking over, Mr. Schramm began a serious overhaul of the foundation. He laid off about half of its 150-person staff and cut off funding to some of its biggest grantees, many in Kansas City. There was a public outcry from local nonprofits and from some former members of the board. One told the New York Times that "Carl doesn't seem to understand that there isn't an 'I' in team." It reached the point where Missouri's then attorney general, Jeremiah Nixon, launched an extensive investigation. He determined that Mr. Schramm had not led the foundation astray. What ultimately saved his job, says Mr. Schramm, were the detailed writings that Kauffman left before his death. "What happened was not atypical in foundations. Often around 10 years after the death of the donor there's a moment of truth." People who were close to the donor will say, "Yes, he said that but he didn't mean that." Mr. Schramm concludes: "If there was one piece of advice I'd give to someone who was starting a foundation it is this: Think very, very hard of the long term and write down what you want your foundation to look like in 30 years or 40 years." Despite the fact that the foundation's endowment has fallen by $722 million since the end of 2007, Mr. Schramm sees this as Kauffman's "moment." While "no one hopes for a recession," it's during economic crises that entrepreneurs "challenge companies that have gotten big and lazy." The downturn, he says, will even challenge Kauffman to "think about how we can do our work better, like every business." In fact, Mr. Schramm adds, "The only people immune from thinking hard in moments like this are in government." Ms. Riley is the Journal's deputy Taste editor. online.wsj.com

To: sandintoes who wrote (33723)	9/17/2009 10:42:20 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

The ACORN Obama knows by Michelle Malkin Creators Syndicate Copyright 2008 If you don’t know what ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is all about, you better bone up. This left-wing group takes in 40 percent of its revenues from American taxpayers — you and me — and has leveraged nearly four decades of government subsidies to fund affiliates that promote the welfare state and undermine capitalism and self-reliance, some of which have been implicated in perpetuating illegal immigration and encouraging voter fraud. A new whistleblower report from the Consumer Rights League documents how Chicago-based ACORN has commingled public tax dollars with political projects. Who in Washington will fight to ensure that your money isn’t being spent on these radical activities? Don’t bother asking Barack Obama. He cut his ideological teeth working with ACORN as a “community organizer” and legal representative. Naturally, ACORN’s political action committee has warmly endorsed his presidential candidacy. According to ACORN, Obama trained its Chicago members in leadership seminars; in turn, ACORN volunteers worked on his campaigns. Obama also sat on the boards of the Woods Fund and Joyce Foundation, both of which poured money into ACORN’s coffers. ACORN head Maude Hurd gushes that Obama is the candidate who “best understands and can affect change on the issues ACORN cares about” — like ensuring their massive pipeline to your hard-earned money. Let’s take a closer look at the ACORN Obama knows. Last July, ACORN settled the largest case of voter fraud in the history of Washington State. Seven ACORN workers had submitted nearly 2,000 bogus voter registration forms. According to case records, they flipped through phone books for names to use on the forms, including “Leon Spinks,” “Frekkie Magoal” and “Fruto Boy Crispila.” Three ACORN election hoaxers pleaded guilty in October. A King County prosecutor called ACORN’s criminal sabotage “an act of vandalism upon the voter rolls.” The group’s vandalism on electoral integrity is systemic. ACORN has been implicated in similar voter fraud schemes in Missouri, Ohio and at least 12 other states. The Wall Street Journal noted: “In Ohio in 2004, a worker for one affiliate was given crack cocaine in exchange for fraudulent registrations that included underage voters, dead voters and pillars of the community named Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy and Jive Turkey. During a congressional hearing in Ohio in the aftermath of the 2004 election, officials from several counties in the state explained ACORN’s practice of dumping thousands of registration forms in their lap on the submission deadline, even though the forms had been collected months earlier.” In March, Philadelphia elections officials accused the nonprofit advocacy group of filing fraudulent voter registrations in advance of the April 22nd Pennsylvania primary. The charges have been forwarded to the city district attorney’s office. Under the guise of “consumer advocacy,” ACORN has lined its pockets. The Department of Housing and Urban Development funds hundreds, if not thousands, of left-wing “anti-poverty” groups across the country led by ACORN. Last October, HUD announced more than $44 million in new housing counseling grants to over 400 state and local efforts. The White House has increased funding for housing counseling by 150 percent since taking office in 2001, despite the role most of these recipients play as activist satellites of the Democratic Party. The AARP scored nearly $400,000 for training; the National Council of La Raza (”The Race”) scooped up more than $1.3 million; the National Urban League raked in nearly $1 million; and the ACORN Housing Corporation received more than $1.6 million. As the Consumer Rights League points out in its new expose, the ACORN Housing Corporation has worked to obtain mortgages for illegal aliens in partnership with Citibank. It relies on undocumented income, “under the table” money, which may not be reported to the Internal Revenue Service. Moreover, the group’s “financial justice” operations attack lenders for “exotic” loans, while recommending 10-year interest-only loans (which deny equity to the buyer) and risky reverse mortgages. Whistleblower documents reveal internal discussions among the group that blur the lines between its tax-exempt housing work and its aggressive electioneering activities. The group appears to shake down corporate interests with relentless PR attacks, and then enters “no lobby” agreements with targeted corporations after receiving payment. Republicans have largely looked the other way as ACORN has expanded its government-funded empire. But finally, a few conservative voices in Congress have called for investigation of the group’s apparent extortion schemes. This week, GOP Reps. Tom Feeney, Jeb Hensarling and Ed Royce called on Democrat Barney Frank, chair of the House Financial Services Committee, to convene a hearing to probe potential illegalities and abuse of taxpayer funds by ACORN’s management and minions alike. Where does the candidate of Hope and Change — the candidate of Reform and New Politics — stand on the issue? Barack Obama, ACORN’s senator, is for more of the same old, same old subsidizing of far-left politics in the name of fighting for the poor while enriching ideological cronies. It’s the Chicago way. michellemalkin.com