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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (80648)	7/14/2010 11:49:31 AM
From: Sully-	1 Recommendation Respond to of 90947

Government Spending Can’t Fix the Economy Obama sends Americans to their mattresses. By: Michael Barone National Review Online Home-mortgage interest rates are the lowest in history, but house sales are plunging. Banks can make money easily because of the Federal Reserve’s low interest rates, but they’re not making many loans. Major corporations are sitting on something like $2 trillion in cash, but they’re not investing. Unemployment is running at 10 percent, rounded off, for the eleventh straight month, but few employers are hiring, and a million people have stopped looking for work in the last year. Small-business hiring is at a nine-month low, and retail sales are tailing off. Government policies designed to stimulate the economy seem to be having the opposite effect. Consumers aren’t buying, businesses aren’t hiring, and those fortunate enough to have some cash on hand don’t seem to be investing. I call it the mattress economy. People seem to be following this investment strategy. Step one: Go to Mattress Discounters and buy the biggest mattress you can find. Step two: Take it home, and stuff all your money in it. Step three: Lie down, and get some rest. This hurts the economy, but it’s a rational response to the Obama Democrats’ public policies. And that’s not just the view of their political opponents. Consider the plaint of Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg, head of the Business Roundtable, which has been playing footsie with the Obama administration for most of the last 18 months. “By reaching into virtually every sector of economic life,” Seidenberg recently wrote, “government is injecting uncertainty into the marketplace and making it harder to raise new capital and create new businesses.” Or take a look at Obama backer Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com website. “Why aren’t businesses hiring?” asks tax lawyer Hale “Bonddad” Stewart. “Uncertainty: There has been a tremendous amount of change over the last 12 months. Businesses are still trying to figure out what this means for their bottom line. Until there are firm answers, they will freeze hiring.” In other words, the Obama Democrats’ vast expansion of the size and scope of government — and the threat that they may pass even more such legislation in a lame-duck session of Congress after the November election — has chilled the animal spirits that John Maynard Keynes said were the driving force for economic growth. Instead of stimulating the economy, the Obama Democrats’ policies have shocked it into immobility. People are lying on their mattresses, waiting for the next shock. At least one is definitely coming: The Bush tax cuts expire at the end of the year, which means that high earners can be sure they will very soon keep less of what they make. Politicians up for reelection are taking notice. Congressional Democratic leaders can’t round up the votes for another stimulus package and have not dared to ask their members to vote for a budget resolution. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman keeps beating the drum for even more increases in federal spending. But congressional Democrats are refusing to dance. Democrats can plausibly claim that their 2009 stimulus package, passed less than a month after Barack Obama was sworn in, prevented a 1932-style downward spiral. But it didn’t hold unemployment below 8 percent, as they promised it would. They can argue that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s stress tests prevented a meltdown of the big banks. The problem is that it didn’t get them back into the lending business. And Democrats can claim that the General Motors and Chrysler bailouts are working out better than some of us doomsayers predicted. Unfortunately, the transfer of assets from secured creditors to the United Auto Workers — which I dubbed “gangster government” last year — has undoubtedly deterred investment in similar enterprises. But the brute fact remains that even enormous government spending can’t revive an economy when government threatens to take away anything you earn. America has seen this kind of thing before. In the late 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt raised taxes on high earners, encouraged lawless sit-in strikes by labor unions, and took over utility businesses, the response was a “capital strike.” Instead of creating jobs, businesses and investors put their money in mattresses. The result was a stagnant economy and double-digit unemployment — and a 75-seat Republican gain in the 1938 off-year elections. Back then, the economy eventually perked up thanks to mobilization for World War II. No such mobilization appears on the horizon today. You may need to get a bigger mattress. — Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner. © 2010 the Washington Examiner. Distributed by Creators.com. .

To: Sully- who wrote (80648)	7/14/2010 12:36:35 PM
From: Sully-	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

The National Association for the Advancement of Coddled People The NAACP is no longer a proud and respectable civil-rights organization. Michelle Malkin National Review Online Before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People decided to ride the anti-tea-party wave back to political relevancy, its most recent activist crusade involved a silly space-themed Hallmark graduation card. Yes, the NAACP has been lost in space for quite some time now. And blaming whitey will no longer cut it. In June, the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP demanded that the greeting card be pulled. The card used the term “black holes,” which the bionically equipped ears of the PC police insisted sounded like “black whores.” “It sounds like a group of children laughing and joking about blackness,” one NAACP official complained. It was a group of hipster cartoon characters chattering about the universe and galaxies and wide-open possibilities to new high-school and college grads. Alas, this is what has become of the once-inspired drive against racial discrimination. In just a few short decades, the stalwart strivers for equality have turned into coddled whiners for hypersensitivity. The NAACP is a laughingstock. The group no longer represents the best interests of oppressed minorities, but the thin-skinned whims of the black elite and the ravenous appetite of the Nanny State. Establishment civil-rights leaders now use their once-compelling moral authority to hector, bully, and shake down corporate and political targets. As Ward Connerly, the truly maverick opponent of government racial preferences, who is black, wrote recently, “The NAACP is not so much a civil-rights organization as it is a trade association with clear links to the Democratic Party, despite the claim of its chairman that ‘the NAACP has always been non-partisan.’ Such a statement doesn’t pass the giggle test. The NAACP uses the plight of poor black people as a fig leaf to hide its true agenda of promoting policies that benefit their dues-paying members, not black people in general or poor black people in particular.” To compensate for squandering the proud history of the civil-rights organization on innocent greeting cards, NAACP leaders introduced a much-hyped resolution at their annual convention this week attacking the nation’s biggest racial bogeyman: the tea-party movement. It’s a tried-and-true tactic of worn-out grievance-mongers: When you can’t find evil enough enemies to blame for your problems, manufacture them. (Just ask hate-crimes huckster Al Sharpton.) This is why one of the most popular signs spotted at tea-party protests across the country remains the one that reads: “It doesn’t matter what this sign says. You’ll call it racism, anyway!” The NAACP resolution calls on its chapters across the country to “repudiate the racism of the Tea Parties” and stand against the movement’s attempt to “push our country back to the pre–civil rights era.” Yet, it’s the NAACP that lobbied the Obama White House to dismiss voter-intimidation charges against the thugs of the New Black Panther Party, according to Justice Department whistleblower J. Christian Adams. It’s the NAACP that opposes the 21st-century school-choice movement to free poor minority students from rotten government schools, as black parents in Washington, D.C., have suffered firsthand. It’s the NAACP that elevates “diversity” above academic rigor as its primary education goal. And it’s the NAACP that backs retrograde, race-based set-asides and classifications that encourage cronyism of color championed by their water-carriers at the Congressional Black Caucus. And it’s the NAACP that tolerates racist sneers and smears like those leveled by the St. Louis NAACP chapter against black limited-government activist Kenneth Gladney, who was derided by civil-rights leaders as an “Uncle Tom” after he was beaten bloody by Service Employees International Union henchmen last summer. Addressing the convention on Monday, first lady Michelle Obama urged NAACP mau-mau-ers to “increase” their “intensity.” She’s a pro at employing intense accusations of racial oppression as a defense against criticism and milking the victim-ocracy for all it’s worth. At Princeton, she complained about “further integration and/or assimilation into a white cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant.” But rather than remaining “on the periphery,” Mrs. Obama climbed the crooked Chicago ladder on a rapid ascent to the top. She hopped from Princeton to Harvard to prestigious law firms, cushy nonprofit gigs, and an exclusive Hyde Park manse, before landing in the East Wing with the greatest of ease. Question the timing of the tea-party-demonizing resolution? You bet. The NAACP’s man at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. finds himself radically out of step with the American mainstream in the lead-up to the 2010 midterms. He sent his wife to the convention to reestablish White House racial authenticity at a time when increasing numbers of minorities are now as fed up with massive debt, usurpation of individual liberties, corruption in Washington, and chaos on the border as everyone else. It’s a black-hole bonanza. Cue the distraction: RAAAACIST! — Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2010). © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc. .