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

To: Hope Praytochange who wrote (49546)	3/1/2012 9:57:22 AM
From: Peter Dierks	2 Recommendations Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71588

No There There By Ben Stein on 2.29.12 @ 7:16AM Obama's fake accent on a big night. Tuesday It's the night of the big primaries in Michigan and Arizona. The news networks are going nuts over Romney squeaking by in Michigan after he outspent Santorum five to one. I guess I am crazy (I know I am) but it seems to me as if the man who spent 20 cents to every Romney dollar and got within three percentage points of Romney is the star. However, that's not my point right now. I just finished watching C-SPAN. It was fascinating. A very smart GOP Freshman Senator from Wisconsin was grilling Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. The Senator asked a simple question: why are members of the armed forces being required to up their health insurance payments when civilian federal employees who have unions are not? Secretary Panetta had no answer at all. He just sort of squirmed. But the Freshman Senator from Wisconsin is totally right. This is an outrage: asking the warriors and their families to pay more for health care while the statistical clerks at Commerce get away free? That's disgraceful. But then came the comic relief: Barack Obama talking to the United Auto Workers convention in DC. Now, understand, I am a union man -- Screen Actors' Guild, American Federation of TV and Radio Artists, Writers Guild. And I like private sector unions a lot. Plus, Mr. Obama's speech was completely fine and sensible except when he was simply making up criticism of the GOP for imaginary stands they never took. But his voice! His accent! He has completely reprogrammed his Punahou School, Columbia undergrad, Harvard Law School accent to try to make it sound like what he imagines a workingman's accent is. It borrows a pitifully little amount from Dr. King. There's a touch of storefront preacher. He -- of course -- drops his "g's" at the end of "ing." That's how educated people think working people talk. But it's more than that. He also has a southern cracker imitation tossed in there to appeal to what he imagines are southern men who work in auto plants -- so he sounds like a strange mixture of Joe Hill, Martin Luther King, Jr., and George Corley Wallace of Alabama. It's a whole new accent never seen on earth before created by this master chameleon to disguise his ultra-privileged background. It's his mouth that's moving, but it's not Barack Obama that's speaking. It's a robot speaking machine in Mr. Obama's brain. He has set the machine to "please the workingman" accent and also "please the African-Americans" at the same time and the result is that weird, sad King/Wallace voice. It's sad actually. For Mr. Obama, there's no there there. spectator.org

To: Hope Praytochange who wrote (49546)	3/3/2012 11:17:48 PM
From: greatplains_guy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

France's Class Warrior François Hollande says his proposed 75% tax rate is 'patriotic.' Updated March 2, 2012, 6:56 p.m. ET. François Hollande, France's Socialist Party candidate for President, made a campaign stop this week in London, hoping to win over the 300,000 or so of his fellow citizens who now make their home on the other side of the Chunnel. If Mr. Hollande's proposal to impose a 75% tax rate on incomes over €1 million ($1.3 million) ever becomes law, he'll have to get used to many more such visits to Perfidious Albion. Mr. Hollande calls his 75% rate a matter of "patriotism," and in one sense he's right—it would take a very patriotic Frenchman to stay put and pay the levy. French footballers are said to be especially distressed by Mr. Hollande's proposal, which could be good news—for the English Premier League. When he emerged at St. Pancras station in London, Mr. Hollande was asked whether he had a message for London's financial district. His reply: "I am not dangerous, but we need more regulation everywhere." To be specific, Mr. Hollande has consistently hit out against the "obscenely rich" and declared himself the "enemy" of the "world of finance." In December he announced he would renegotiate the pending treaty on fiscal discipline to give France more flexibility in funding its welfare state. He has also suggested he wouldn't be averse to seeing the European Central Bank print more money if that's what it takes to keep France's welfare state gasping along. We've often admired France's willingness to go its own way on all kinds of political, economic and social questions: It shows an enduring independence of spirit. But French voters, whether in Paris or London, can also see that neighbors like Spain and Italy are desperate to make their labor markets more flexible and their welfare systems less burdensome. Give Mr. Hollande points for forthrightness. But his agenda identifies him as a socialist of the very old school: a high-taxing, rich-bashing, inflation-tolerating class warrior. The polls currently give Mr. Hollande a hefty lead over incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy, but Mr. Hollande's socialist opus may be the one thing that could give the French President another term. online.wsj.com

To: Hope Praytochange who wrote (49546)	3/26/2012 2:28:47 AM
From: greatplains_guy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

How Stimulus Fails A case study of federal waste in Silver Spring, Maryland Jim Epstein from the April 2012 issue It’s not hard to make the case that President Barack Obama’s $840 billion stimulus was a failure. The economy, which was supposed to recover as a result of the massive spending, has largely remained in the doldrums. The administration’s prediction in the event that the stimulus didn’t pass—an unemployment rate of 8.8 percent—was exceeded within two months of February 2009, when the bill was signed into law. (At the time, the total cost was said to be $787 billion; that figure was later adjusted upward by more than $50 billion to align with the president’s budget.) Democratic dead-enders claim this laughably inaccurate employment projection was based on a lack of knowledge about how lousy the economy really was. They tend to overlook another broken stimulus promise: that 90 percent of the jobs “created or saved” would be in the private sector. In fact, the biggest beneficiaries of stimulus funds have been public school teachers. These big-picture truths paint a picture damning enough. But to better understand the fallacies of stimulus economics, it helps to take a close-up look at how the money was spent. To capture such a cross-section of stimulus reality, reason.tv went to Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., that is home to many government contractors and other recipients of money earmarked for the “shovel-ready” projects that were supposed to bring the economy back to life. The ground rules for stimulus dollars, as laid out by Obama’s top economic adviser at the time, Larry Summers, were based on the insights of legendary 20th-century economist John Maynard Keynes. The funds were to be “targeted” at resources idled by the recession, and the interventions were to be “temporary” and “timely,” injected quickly into the economy. None of that turned out to be true. “Even if you were to believe that government spending can trigger economic growth,” says reason columnist Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, “the money is never spent in a way that’s consistent with the conditions laid out by the Keynesians for it to be efficient.” Infrastructure The first stimulus project in the nation to get shovels into the ground was the resurfacing of Maryland’s Route 650. One reason for the quick turnaround: The job consisted of routine road repairs. That would prove typical of stimulus expenditures. Obama said the stimulus would put nearly 400,000 people back to work rebuilding America. But in the year after the stimulus was passed, the U.S. construction industry shed about 900,000 jobs, or 14 percent of its work force. The industry still hadn’t recovered two-and-a-half years later. In Maryland, the “specialty trades,” a subset of the construction industry that handles big infrastructure projects, have lost an estimated 8 percent of their work force since the stimulus was passed, amounting to 8,000 jobs. Against that backdrop, the state’s Department of Transportation says stimulus money for transit projects has paid for the full-time salaries of about 600 construction workers since the middle of 2009. (Article continues below video.) Why didn’t Maryland’s $771 million in stimulus outlays for transit infrastructure have a bigger impact on the local economy? Partly because Gov. Martin O’Malley cut his own infrastructure budget more than enough to offset gains from the stimulus. Maryland’s Transportation Trust Fund generally pays for highway repairs by collecting a special gas tax and other user fees. After the stimulus money was made available, O’Malley raided the trust fund, diverting $861 million during the next three years to help balance the state budget, according to information provided by Maryland’s Department of Legislative Services. Even with the stimulus, state spending on transit infrastructure has seen a net decrease of $90 million since 2009. That sort of scenario played out all across the country. Stimulus dollars were used to cover general expenses rather than activating idle resources. Government Contracts A particularly ineffective way to put idle resources back to work is to give money to big government contractors to do more of what they’re already doing. Yet that’s what happened in downtown Silver Spring. Just three firms—Synergy Enterprises, Senior Service America, and Social & Scientific Systems—pulled down more than half of the $138 million in stimulus grants paid to 46 organizations in Silver Spring. While they were receiving a combined $71 million in stimulus, these companies were raking in another $702 million in other government contracts, according to USASpending.gov, a government website that comprehensively tracks federal spending. The stimulus money was simply a bit more of the same, not exactly a recipe for jolting the economy into action. Or consider Palladian Partners, a communications firm in Silver Spring that has received $98 million in government contracts during the last 12 years. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), Palladian’s biggest client, tacked $363,760 in stimulus dollars onto an existing contract, then followed that up with two more awards totaling $431,333. Palladian was to spend the money collecting and disseminating information about…how the NIH was spending stimulus money. With the nearly $800,000 project now 80 percent complete, Palladian has built a website and published 29 original articles on it. The stimulus grant went to hire two new employees, neither of whom was unemployed before coming to Palladian. That’s no way to jump-start the economy. Green Jobs The stimulus bill set aside $500 million for a program to train and recruit people for the new green economy. The program promised to place 80,000 people in so-called green jobs. The grant period is more than half over, and the program has placed only 8,000 people in jobs, according to a report by the Department of Labor’s inspector general. In downtown Silver Spring, a union-backed organization called the International Transportation Learning Center received $5 million in stimulus dollars, partly to recruit thousands of new workers and train them in “green job” skills. But because transit workers already enjoy low unemployment and the new green jobs weren’t materializing, the group instead received permission to use the entire grant to teach new skills to workers who already have jobs. “The spirit of the stimulus shouldn’t be to get people who already have jobs to get more money to do the same thing, just bigger,” says De Rugy. Under stimulus theory, she says, “government spending should be going to places where unemployment is very high, going to people who are poached from unemployment lines.” Weatherizing Homes “We’re going to weatherize homes,” Obama said in an interview with CBS on February 4, 2009. “That immediately puts people back to work.…What would be a more effective stimulus package than that?” According to Keynesian theory, stimulus funds must be spent quickly to be effective. By the president’s own account, one of the most “shovel-ready” programs in the package was supposed to be a $5 billion initiative to weatherize 590,000 homes around the country. But according to a February 2010 report by the Department of Energy’s inspector general, only 8 percent of the weatherization money was tapped in the program’s first year. In Silver Spring, Gov. O’Malley held a press conference at the house of Sonja and Richard Lowery in June 2009. Theirs was the first home in Maryland to be weatherized with stimulus money. The program then nearly ground to a halt. In the first year, Maryland weatherized just 279 homes, 4 percent of its goal. The main holdup was a concession to organized labor that “prevailing wage” rules apply to programs funded by stimulus dollars. That meant weatherization workers had to earn at least the average wage in their area for the work they were hired to do. Before workers could be paid, Maryland (and every other state) spent months conducting surveys to determine the average wages and benefits for workers weatherizing homes in every county. Today Maryland is racing to spend the remainder of its weatherization money before it has to forfeit what’s left in early 2012. “The main lesson of the stimulus is that creating jobs is a very complex process,” says De Rugy. “And certainly it can’t be directed by a top-down institution that pretty much fails at everything it does.” Jim Epstein is a producer at reason.tv. reason.com