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

To: Hope Praytochange who wrote (55363)	9/21/2012 11:48:51 PM
From: greatplains_guy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Why Voters Are Angry at Corrupt Bailout Culture Why Romney Needs to Talk about Bailouts - It could solve several of his problems with voters at once. By Nicole Gelinas September 20, 2012 4:00 A.M. The most interesting thing about the video of Mitt Romney speaking at a May fundraiser has nothing to do with “the 47 percent.” Rather, it’s his answer to a guest at the event who had a suggestion about what the GOP presidential nominee should say on the campaign trail about bailouts and crony capitalism. The unnamed speaker pleaded with the candidate: At least bring the issue up. “It doesn’t matter whether you are in the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street,” he said. People are upset that the government is “permeated by cronyism.” Romney’s guest continued: “Regulatory agencies aren’t protecting the people they’re supposed to be regulating. . . . People see that the government is working for the powerful interests” and not for average people. The perception that the playing field isn’t level, he noted, “threatens the whole idea that they have this great opportunity” to become successful. He suggested that Romney promise to clean house at the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has remained reluctant to come down hard on Wall Street malfeasance. Romney’s answer was to display complete disinterest in an issue that has engaged more potential voters than any other over the past two years. Romney began with a non sequitur: “I wish they weren’t unionized, so we could go a lot deeper than you’re actually allowed to go,” apparently referring to SEC employees. But public-sector unions have little to do with the tone at the top of government. Specifically, President Obama has allowed people whose worldview is based in bubble-era Wall Street — such as Larry Summers and Tim Geithner — to make decisions about Wall Street and even the broader economy. Wall Street knows, then, that all the White House wants is for them to continue business as usual. Failure to let creative destruction do the work of cleaning up the financial industry is a major reason why the economy can’t recover. Free-market capitalism can’t operate as it should when the firms that control the capital depend on permanent government connections. Romney went on to argue that voters just don’t care about this complicated stuff: “The things that animate us are not the things that animate them,” comparing his donors to the relatively small slice of the American electorate that, he says, represents swing voters. Voters on the fence are mostly just thinking about themselves, Romney concluded. They must be wondering, “Who can get jobs for my kids and get rising incomes?” (It was, indeed, an early preview of his August convention speech, in which Romney pledged “to help you and your family.”) But Romney needs to understand that voters are not just mercenary beasts looking for whichever candidate will help get them a better pay packet. Voters care about the world around them; they care about what corporate-bailout culture — a culture that predates Obama — has done to their country. And they’re angry about it. They are angry because they don’t want to live in a country that privileges the well connected, not because they’re necessarily lacking in that regard but because it hurts their country. To address those worries, Romney needs to start talking about what happened on Wall Street four years ago and what has happened since. Embracing the topic would also help him with voters wary of his history as a Wall Street type himself, who, yes, laid people off. Americans would accept layoffs if they knew they could find better jobs than the ones they lost. They know, further, that they’re less likely to find them in a world where connections matter more than merit. If Romney doesn’t start telling people what he’ll do to ensure that Americans succeed on merit rather than on connections, people will write him off as one of the clueless well connected, confirming for good that he is stuck in a bubble. Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. Reach her @nicolegelinas on Twitter. nationalreview.com

To: Hope Praytochange who wrote (55363)	10/1/2012 10:02:08 PM
From: greatplains_guy	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

How Obama’s green energy policies are bad for the poor Philip Klein October 1, 2012 \| 3:18 pm President Obama has made so-called “green energy” policies a key part of his economic agenda, but as a new book argues, they actually disproportionately hurt the poor by boosting the cost of energy. Last week, Examiner columnist and Manhattan Institute fellow Diana Furchtgott-Roth, author of the new book “Regulating to Disaster: How Green Jobs Policies Are Damaging America’s Economy,” explained that: Most people think green is good but pay little attention to associated increases in costs. In 2015, it will cost between $49 and $79 to generate one megawatt hour of electricity from natural gas. A megawatt hour from onshore wind will cost between $75 and $138, and from solar photovoltaic will cost between $242 and $455. As her book demonstrates in this chart, rising costs of energy hit lower income Americans the hardest, because they spend a higher proportion of their incomes on energy: Energy Costs as a Percentage of Income by Quintile, 2011 washingtonexaminer.com