When men who didn’t serve in the armed forces pretend to be decorated war heroes, they’re labeled as “fake veterans” and can even be prosecuted for for what many call “stolen valor.” Recently, one Missouri politician began mailing campaign literature that leads me to believe he’s guilty of stealing the valor of members of the Tea Party Movement (i.e., freedom-loving patriots who sacrifice time, talent and treasure in an effort to save their country from socialism). In short, he’s guilty of “stealing tea.”

The politician at the heart of this matter is Scott Rupp, a RINO Republican running for re-election in Missouri’s 2nd Senatorial District.

This week, I learned from friends in the Tea Party Movement that Rupp had mailed a four-color piece that features a photo of him standing, arms crossed, in front of a bright yellow Gadsden (a.k.a., “Don’t Tread On Me!”) flag. In addition to featuring the flag that’s become a symbol of the Tea Party Movement, the photo features people holding up signs in the background.

The problem I have with Rupp’s brochure is that it gives voters a false impression about a candidate who, according to everyone with whom I’ve spoke, has never been to a single Tea Party event in the district — and I’ve attended dozens of ‘em!

Chuck MacNab, one of the leaders of an anti-socialism group in O’Fallon, Mo., shared feelings about Rupp’s tactics with recipients of his RITEON.org e-newsletter. An excerpt of that e-mail appears below:

As we see it, his flyer attempts to create an illusion. For instance, we have never seen him show up to meet people or to help out at a Saturday rally of K & N Patriots, the largest and primary “tea party” group that has met every Saturday for over a year in his District. Cynthia Davis, his opponent, has shown up to help out, hold a sign and converse with participants at the corner of K & N almost every Saturday, sometimes for the entire duration of the rally.

MacNab had better things to say about Rupp’s opponent, Cynthia Davis, the owner of a Christian book store owner and member of the Missouri House of Representatives since 2003:

Cynthia Davis is definitely the underdog in the 2nd Senatorial District race. Her success may depend, given her limited funds, on how many constituents can be reached with the message that she is the conservative in the race and has the record and the endorsements to substantiate it. One of those endorsements is the Missouri Right to Life (MRL), our state’s oldest and largest grassroots pro-life organization. Davis has worked hard to represent the people who actually live in her District. She has thus far demonstrated through her eight years in the Missouri House that she will not be a carpetbagger for outside, big money interests and indications are that she will not compromise “tea party” values because she is beholden to interests outside of her District.

Because I don’t know Rupp personally and he has never responded to questions I submitted to him via his Facebook page, I must base my political assessments of him on impersonal factors such as the flyer and the manner in which the liberal news media treat him and his opponent.

On Wednesday, the ultra-liberal St. Louis Post-Dispatch seemed to give Rupp a pass while lambasting Davis for her die-hard conservative, small-government, pro-Constitution beliefs.

Big Government

It appears the millions of dollars the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers spent electing President Obama and a Democratic Congress is turning out to be a bad investment, because the Democrats in power failed to deliver the billion “education jobs fund” for the unions.

Even the trimmed amount, originally billion, was more than election-weary Democrats could handle and they removed the pork spending from the Afghanistan appropriations bill.

According to Politico, the Senate-passed version of the bill, minus the education pork, will now head back to the House, where leaders are anticipating quick passage so troops won’t be left stranded in the battlefield.

Thank goodness.

Now the teachers unions will see how the other half lives.  They, and the school districts they strong-arm, will have to made do within their means, just like American families and businesses.

Previous reports indicated that if the Afghanistan bill strategy failed, Big Labor would seek other methods, such as attaching the public school bailout to the unemployment extension.  That bill has been passed and signed, so that idea has failed, too.  The unions’ “vehicle bill” ideas are growing fewer and fewer as the Congress wraps up legislative work to return home and defend its record.

Democrats could use this vote as evidence of their willingness to reign in spending.  But, of course, it comes at the expense of one of their biggest campaign funders.

Big Government

The New START Treaty is an idea that may harm American national security.  The agreement between the United States and Russia purports to reduce nuclear weapons between two superpowers, yet, in an effort to get the Russians to sign the Treaty, President Obama may accede to a side agreement that will end missile defense.  Missile defense is a means to protect the United States from a rogue nuclear missile and a deterrent to a missile attack from Russia.  Any agreement to dismantle missile defense would a mistake.

The Treaty is officially referred to as the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.  On April 8, 2010, President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed the treaty.  The New START Treaty, 111-5, was signed in Prague on April 8, 2010 then submitted to the Senate on May 13, 2010.  The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has had numerous hearings on the treaty and intends on a vote before the August recess.  For this treaty to pass, 67 Senators need to vote in favor of ratification.  The Democrat Caucus only has 59 members, therefore they need 8 Republicans to support the treaty for it to pass.  Republicans have the power to block this treaty or to stop consideration until the next Congress.

The White House has been very aggressive in efforts to get this treaty passed by the end of the year.  On Friday, Peter Baker of the New York Times reported that “with time running out for major votes before the November election, the White House is trying to reach an understanding with Senate Republicans to approve its new arms control treaty with Russia by committing to modernizing the nuclear arsenal and making additional guarantees about missile defense.”  The only way for this Treaty to pass in the Senate in a manner that would truly protect missile defense would be to add a reservation during Senate consideration of the treaty.  A reservation, offered during the consideration of the treaty much like an amendment to legislation, specifically stating that a diminution or reduction in missile defense is not on the table and not part of any side agreement would have the desired outcome of protecting missile defense.

The core of the treaty is not what is raising the concerns of conservatives in the Senate. According to the New York Times, a central element of the treaty is that it “bars the United States and Russia from deploying more than 1,550 strategic warheads and 700 launchers.”  The problem is the side agreement.  Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC)wrote on his blog in May that “the U.S. should not sign a treaty that weakens our ability to protect Americans and our allies from nuclear weapons. While our missile defense systems are currently engineered to deter threats from rogue nations like Iran and Syria, our goal should be to continue to improve and expand those defenses to protect our people from any nuclear threats.”  DeMint is right on the money.

Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) has been a hero on this issue and pledged that “until I’m satisfied about some of these things, I will not be willing to allow the treaty to come up.”  That is great news, yet Kyl also told the New York Times that he could support if the Administration agrees to “modernize the nuclear force, and the administration has proposed spending more than 0 billion over 10 years to sustain and modernize some strategic systems.”  This may not be enough and a mistake.  Conservative Senators have yet to be given access to the negotiating record containing the side agreement on missile defense.  Also, a promise from President Obama does not hold much weight after his string of broken promises on the Stimulus (Administration promised unemployment to stay below 8%), on the health care individual mandate, and on closing GITMO.

Senator John Kerry said on Bloomberg TV that Republicans may not be given access to the negotiating agreement, but may be tossed a promise for modernization.  Kerry said of the negotiating record “on the negotiating record. And they want assurances with respect to the modernization program on nuclear weapons. They ought to have that and we are willing – you know, I am going to try and get two out of three of those and the third is really up to the administration. The question on the negotiating record is the administration’s decision.”  This seems to indicate that Senate Republicans will not be given the negotiating record.  This is circumstantial evidence that they have something to hide and that President Obama may have negotiated away missile defense in an effort to buy better relations with Russia and to get them to sign the Treaty.

The bottom line is that there is a long way to go before conservatives should give an inch on the Treaty.  A reservation to the effect that missile defense should not be shut down and access to the negotiation record are two simple requests that conservatives may need before allowing any further action on the New START Treaty this year.

Big Government

ACORN whistle-blower Anita Moncrief held a press conference Friday at the Right Online Convention in Las Vegas. She announced today that she will press FEC charges against the Obama Administration for the campaign’s illegal coordination with ACORN during the 2008 election.

Anita also rolled out her new website Emerging Corruption. The website will focus on fraud and corruption in ACORN and affiliated groups.

Anita already posted the Obama Donor List on the website as promised.

Big Government

Andy Stern has just gained yet another job.  Earlier this month, Stern also accepted a position on the Board of Directors for SIGA, a producer of anti-viral and biological warfare defense products.

But this job seems to have some policy teeth, with a think-tank title akin to Media Matters or the Center for American Progress, and it comes with perhaps some welcome company as well.

From The San Francisco Chronicle:

Andy Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union, is joining Georgetown University’s public policy school as a research fellow.

Stern, 59, retired in May after building his union into one of the largest in the labor movement and increasing his own influence with President Barack Obama and Democratic lawmakers.

Stern will coordinate research at Washington-based Georgetown on wage reform, labor policy and retirement security, according to an announcement on the school’s website.

Stern of course maintains his position as an adviser on Obama’s deficit-reduction commission, a post to which Obama appointed him in February of this year.

This announcement comes only weeks after the announcement that Ed Montgomery, who has been serving in the White House as both a member of President Obama’s Task Force on the Auto Industry and as the Director of Recovery for Auto Communities and Workers, will leave the Obama administration to take over as Dean of Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute.  As very active leaders in the labor movement, both Mr. Montgomery and Andy Stern certainly know one another, and have shared visits at the White House for such activities as Obama’s White House Forum on Jobs and Economic Growth.

Coincidentally, another Obama Adviser from the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute may be a familiar face to Stern.  Patricia McGinnis, a Washington Post blogger for their “On Leadership” column, first appeared on Big Journalism during the JournoList fallout when a followup story revealed that the Washington Post failed to disclose her ties to the White House.  As it turned out, McGinnis is not only a WaPo blogger, but she’s also an unpaid Adviser to the Obama White House on Leadership Programs for Presidential Appointees.

Then again, Andy Stern himself, frequent visitor to the White House, and adviser on Obama’s debt commission, also blogs for the Washington Post “On Leadership” column alongside Patricia McGinnis and other panelists.

This should be quite an interesting little gathering of recent and current Obama advisers over there at Georgetown University’s public policy institute – influencing policy from inside the White House, inside Academia, and inside the media, all at once.  So very convenient. That revolving door to and from the White House just keeps on spinning.

Big Government

CNN Newsroom: The Woman behind the controversy: Who is Shirley Sherrod? Don Lemon takes an intimate look into the life of the woman.

Big Government

When they teach American government and the history of the early American republic, political scientists and historians have a puzzle to explain. There is, within the American constitution, no mention of political parties. And yet it is impossible to make sense of American politics in and after the early republic without reference to parties. Moreover, the parties that did emerge in the United States bear only a faint resemblance to the parties that existed in England and on the European continent prior to the American civil war and even less to the parties that exist on the other side of the Atlantic today.

The two puzzles are related. It is true that the Framers of the Constitution had no liking and made no provision for organized political parties, and it is also true that all of the early Presidents made at least a half-hearted attempt to transcend partisanship. It was not until Andrew Jackson that we got our first unequivocally partisan President. It is also true that the partisan divide that emerged in the 1790s was viewed by both sides as something temporary and regrettable. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison formed a party, which in time they called the Republican Party, to counter what they considered a conspiracy on the part of George Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, and in response he formed a party to counter what he considered a conspiracy on their part. Absent the conspiracy, or in the eventuality of its defeat and disappearance, the American republic’s first partisans expected the parties to wither away.

In this presumption, as Martin van Buren came to realize, they were wrong. Given the separation of powers, it was virtually impossible to govern in the absence of partisan alliances. But the very structure of American government – in which Congressmen are elected by particular constituencies located in particular places and look to that locality for re-election, and in which Senators represent particular states and are no less sensitive to local concerns – subverts partisanship and promotes a species of moderation as well. Only the President sees the Union from the perspective of the whole. When Tip O’Neill remarked that all politics is local, he spoke in a fashion perfectly appropriate to his situation as Speaker of the House of Representatives.

We must, then, view political parties from a double perspective.

They are alliances based on principle (this is how they all originated), and they are alliances of convenience designed to enable Congressmen to extract goodies for their constituents back home. In other words, they arise from and nourish deliberation concerning the common good, and they provide occasion for negotiation with an eye to particular goods to be allotted to particular individuals or groups. In consequence, our parties oscillate between two extremes. In some circumstances, they operate as parties of principle; in others, as parties of patronage. Most of the time, they occupy, in an uncomfortable and awkward fashion, the middle ground.

When a party comes to power at a moment of realignment, it tends towards the former extreme and for a time it short-circuits the separation of powers by uniting the legislative, the executive, and, by hook or by crook, even the judicial power in the hands of a single group intent on governing with an eye to specific principles. But once the members of that party have set things right according to their lights, it runs out of gas, and the underlying structure – the separation of powers – reasserts itself; and though a single party may control both houses of the legislature and the presidency, its members are, at least some of the time, at one another’s throats. They cannot afford to ignore their constituents back home, and each is apt to defend the prerogatives accorded the office he holds. When someone referred to the Republicans as the enemy, Tip O’Neill snorted and replied, “No, the Senate is the enemy! The Republicans are the Opposition.”

Party members are reminded that they are men of principle when they think that they are faced with a conspiracy. This is where Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the stalwarts of the first Republican Party stood when they charged Alexander Hamilton and the Federalist with plotting the establishment in the United States of a monarchy. This is where Andrew Jackson and his fellow Democrats stood when they denounced Nicholas Biddle and the Second National Bank. That is where Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans in and after 1860 stood when they railed against the slave-power conspiracy. This is where Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his fellow Democrats stood in 1936 when the former charged that “a small group” of his fellow Americans was intent on concentrating “into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor – other people’s lives.” And this is where we stand today.

Look at what Barack Obama and the Democrats have done – with the so-called “stimulus” bill, with what they call “healthcare reform,” and with their reform of financial regulation. Each initiative involved the passage of a bill more than a thousand pages in length – which virtually no one voting on it could have read, and no one but those who framed it could have understood. Each involved a massive expansion of the federal government and massive pay-offs to favored constituencies. Each is part of a much larger project openly pursued by Progressives in the course of the last century and aimed at concentrating in the hands of “a small group” of putative experts “an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor – other people’s lives.” And we can now say, as FDR said in 1936, that “for too many of us life” is “no longer free” and “liberty no longer real” for we are being deprived by the government of the means by which to “follow the pursuit of happiness.” The only difference is that FDR’s assertions were lies, and when we make the same claim, we are, alas, telling the truth.

This is where we stand today. And there is more. As I have argued repeatedly in the last twelve months – here, here, and here – Barack Obama represents the last gasp of the Progressive impulse, and his ruthlessness and that of his party in both the House and the Senate reflect a species of desperation on their part. The welfare state is no longer sustainable. Thanks to modern medicine, we live longer lives than did our predecessors; and thanks to Social Security, we have fewer children. In consequence, the demographic balance between those expected to pay into the system and those on the receiving end has shifted gradually and unobtrusively but nonetheless dramatically in favor of the latter, and soon the former will no longer have the wherewithal to pay the dues they owe.

This needs to be underlined. The massive increase in taxation required to pay for the as-yet unfunded pensions of civil servants nearing retirement and the increase required to sustain Social Security and Medicare would so radically change the incentives and alter the conduct of those who earn and invest that the tax intake would be far more likely to decline than increase. This may seem counter-intuitive but it is a fact. The trouble with socialism was accurately described by Margaret Thatcher: sooner or later you really do run out of other people’s money, and here is how it happens.

Just as a tax reduction can stimulate economic activity and eventuate in an increase in revenues, so can a tax increase reduce economic activity and eventuate in a decrease in revenues. The more dramatic the change in the tax code, the more dramatic the effect. When human beings know that they can keep the bulk of what they make, they are apt to work like the devil and invest in new technology. When they know that most of what they make will be taken from them and redistributed to others, they are far more apt to take the day off and relegate their savings to treasury bills and municipal bonds.

Everything that Barack Obama has attempted to accomplish in the last eighteen months flies in the face of economic reality, and the American people are not as economically illiterate today as they were in 1932 and 1936. They look at the deficits run up in the last two years; they contemplate his healthcare reform; and they know that they will be called upon to pay and pay and pay. They are rightly afraid of the consequences, and a great many of them are also furious. What was sold as hope and change is likely to leave them hopeless and in possession of little but small change – and, as the polling data confirms, to an ever-increasing degree, they recognize this fact.

We as a people have come to a crossroads. We can acquiesce in what the Democrats have forced down our throats; we can meekly accept Obamacare, the confiscatory taxes that will come with it, and the rationing of medical care that Obama and his minions intend to impose on us. Or we can fight – but this can only be done through a political party, and the party we have to work with – the Republican Party – is at the moment a party of patronage frustrated at being driven from the heights of power and more apt to mouth slogans designed to mollify our zeal than to act in concert as a party of principle intent on setting things right.

To get a sense of the obstacles we face, I suggest that those who have gotten this far in perusing this post take a close look at the last four chapters of my book Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, where I chart and attempt to explain the growth of the administrative state both in the United States and abroad; sample the blogposts linked here and found here, where I discuss more recent developments; and then read and re-read the brilliant and disturbing analysis of our present discontents that Angelo M. Codevilla has published in the current issue of The American Spectator (which is available online here).

As Codevilla and I have argued in different but complementary ways, what is required is a return to first principles carried out at the ballot box and enforced on the hapless hacks in the Republican Party by a public sentiment fierce, fully aroused, and no longer willing to tolerate half measures. What is needed is a peaceful revolution that restores civil equality, that does away with “affirmative action” and protected legal categories, that eliminates the redistributionist apparatus imposed upon us gradually over the last century, that eventuates in a principled rejection of government subsidies of every kind, and that restores to the states and the localities the prerogatives that are rightly theirs. Anything short of this will merely slow down our gradual descent into servitude.

Big Government

Listen to the whole thing:

“I’ve watched the full tape. It gets worse; it doesn’t get better! It’s not that Andrew Breitbart took out something that what was going to somehow get her off the hook. She hangs herself later on with footage that Andrew Breitbart I believe did not have on his.”

Hat tip Media Matters for America.

Big Government

CNN Anchor to Shirley Sherrod: Would you like to see [Andrew Breitbart's] site to be shut down?

Shirley Sherrod: “That would be a great thing. Because I don’t see how that advances us in this country.”

—-

Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor at UCLA on JournoList: “I hate to open this can of worms,” he wrote, “but is there any reason why the FCC couldn’t simply pull [Fox's'] broadcasting permit once it expires?”

Why so fascist?

As a proud dues-paying member of The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, here’s a little peek behind the curtain to take home with you over the weekend…

Never once, not even in private — not even as the entire corrupted media was savaging Sarah Palin’s family and reporting on the status of a private citizen’s plumber’s license — not even as the whole of the MSM was spreading lies told by the Congressional Black Caucus about the Tea Party hurling racial slurs — not even after reading what we already knew to be true on JournoList — and not even now as we watch all the hypocritical sanctimony surrounding Sharon Sherrod drip from the same MSM lips that refused to broadcast videos proving the Tea Party had been defamed by members of Congress — never once have I heard a fellow Vast Right-Wing Conspirator even hint at the idea of silencing, quieting, or shutting down the other side.

As a former Leftist I do, however, understand the knee-jerk leap to fascism. Being a Leftist sucks when it comes to political debate. You really only have two choices to try and convince others that your progressive ideas and values aren’t toxic, and that’s emotionalism, lies, or both. I remember how frustrating that was and so it only makes sense that Leftists would find appealing everything from a literal “shut up” straight through to wishing that America wasn’t a democracy but instead the kind of country with a government willing and able to permanently silence those opinion and broadcast outlets a chosen few don’t agree with or don’t think “advances us in this country.”

Here’s another insider nugget of information you can take home with you. The warning I most frequently repeat at our thrice-weekly VRWC meetings (a Denny’s on Sunset) is: Take them at their word.

When the Left threatens the 1st Amendment, it’s not hyperbole and it’s not a joke. If they had the power to do it, they would do it. And they’re driving to obtain the power and already have the bill written — the Orwellian named Fairness Doctrine.

Big Government

The Hill reports today:

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) is suggesting a climate change bill could have better prospects in a lame-duck session.

Kerry made the comments to Bloomberg as the Senate abandoned plans to move on climate change legislation before the August break. The decision is expected to prevent a vote on the matter this year, though Kerry is still offering hope.

“I have to tell you, this is not dead. We are going to continue to work. It may well be that after the election — if that is what happens — I mean, we will continue to try over the next weeks, but if it is after the election, it may well be that some members are free and liberated and feeling that they can take a risk or do something. Or, you know, the whole political landscape may have changed in some way,” Kerry said Thursday in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital With Al Hunt” that will be broadcast this weekend.

Kerry told the Bloomberg news service that he would continue seeking votes, and said the climate bill’s prospects could improve after the midterm elections.

Continue reading here. Even if, as expected, the Democrats suffer mind-numbing losses in November, Congress will reconvene before the new Congress is sworn in. After losing their once-in-generation political power, how much mischief can they do? The question answers itself, sadly.

Big Government

The Hill reports today:

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) is suggesting a climate change bill could have better prospects in a lame-duck session.

Kerry made the comments to Bloomberg as the Senate abandoned plans to move on climate change legislation before the August break. The decision is expected to prevent a vote on the matter this year, though Kerry is still offering hope.

“I have to tell you, this is not dead. We are going to continue to work. It may well be that after the election — if that is what happens — I mean, we will continue to try over the next weeks, but if it is after the election, it may well be that some members are free and liberated and feeling that they can take a risk or do something. Or, you know, the whole political landscape may have changed in some way,” Kerry said Thursday in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital With Al Hunt” that will be broadcast this weekend.

Kerry told the Bloomberg news service that he would continue seeking votes, and said the climate bill’s prospects could improve after the midterm elections.

Continue reading here. Even if, as expected, the Democrats suffer mind-numbing losses in November, Congress will reconvene before the new Congress is sworn in. After losing their once-in-generation political power, how much mischief can they do? The question answers itself, sadly.

Big Government

The near collapse of our financial institutions and the overall economy and the misguided notion that a few trillion dollars of additional federal spending would return us to prosperity moved us in early 2009 to suggest an alternate approach.  We proposed in an essay published in The American, the on-line journal of the American Enterprise Institute, a fifty percent tax credit up to a fixed limit for every taxpayer who purchased any consumer goods anywhere in the United States.

Our theory was that a robust economic recovery would be fueled by increased retail purchases, and that every dollar of cost to the treasury represented a prior retail purchase within the American economy. This, by definition, would have produced an immediate increase in revenues to our struggling business and manufacturing sectors.  That essay and the positive feedback it engendered provided the impetus for the establishment of the Of Thee I Sing 1776 website, the goal of which has been to produce weekly, timely, and hopefully, thought provoking essays.

This week we return to the subject of economic stimulus as more and more politicians from both sides of the aisle and columnists from left to right have pronounced the stimulus a disappointment, at best, and a disaster at worst.  More likely, given the nation’s accumulated debt, the latter may be the more apt description.

So is there a Plan B, so to speak, in the works?  The answer so far, based on bills recently considered and rejected by members of both parties in Congress, is that Mr. Obama would prefer to double down on the discredited Keynesian approach which didn’t work during the great depression and which failed miserably through the recently “ended” (at least by common definition) great recession.  Tell the 9.5% of the workforce who are still unemployed that the recession is over.  Tell that to those who have watched the average time the unemployed are out-of-work grow from six weeks to 12 weeks, to 25 weeks to 35 weeks.

The number of unemployed is essentially the same percentage of people who were unemployed before the Administration and the huge Democratic majority in Congress, in the name of “job creation”, started shoveling our tax money out the door (or as some might say burning it in a bonfire).  And just why won’t President Obama, Majority Leader Reid and Speaker Pelosi wake up and smell the fire that continues to burn?  The answer can be found in two very telling and, now, very familiar utterances of the president and his senior staff in the early days of the new Administration.  The president said he wanted to “fundamentally change America” and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, when economic disaster was around the corner, famously said, “Never waste a crisis.”

Because not enough people dug below the surface to question what it means, “to fundamentally change America,” President Obama and his acolytes in the Congress set about “not wasting a crisis.”  To be sure we were in the midst of a major crisis calling for meaningful governmental action.  To prevent a complete meltdown of the world’s financial system and a seizing up of all interbank credit, Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, during the last weeks of the Bush Administration, pumped liquidity into the financial markets using tools the Fed had never before utilized.  In that effort they, joined later by Timothy Geithner following President Obama’s assuming office, did do a remarkable job and stabilized the banks and the financial markets. Fortunately, Geithner, as President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank under Bush and a key member of the TARP One planning process, was able to “hit the ground running” when he was tapped by Obama to become Secretary of the Treasury.

The stimulus package(s), however, is another story.  While strong action was needed to jump-start an economic recovery, having Congress appropriate an unprecedented amount of money essentially to be spent without guidelines was the opportunity of a lifetime for the political left.  Claiming they would produce or save millions of jobs, they swiftly assumed control of vast swaths of the private economy, something they had long coveted.  So where are those jobs?  Why hasn’t the private sector recalled millions of employees now that trillions of stimulus dollars have been pumped into the economy?  They don’t exist because the various, highly inefficient stimulus plans have stimulated no consumer spending.

The unprecedented federal spending didn’t work and, in fact, simply burdened the nation with increased debt.  Even the Business Roundtable, which supported Mr. Obama’s initiatives, (we believe more out of a patriotic instinct during a crisis than out of common sense) has issued a fifty-four-page report to Peter Orszag, the outgoing director of OMB detailing the Administration’s job creating initiatives.

Roundtable President John Castellani stated:  We stuck with that [Congressional] majority “through trying circumstances,” even “alienating many of our traditional colleagues,” and what did we get?  They keep “vilifying” the private sector!  And taxing it, and empowering unions, and ignoring trade.  “The time has come for a new course,” declared Mr. Castellani, a mere 18 months after Democrats announced plans to tax companies, empower unions and ignore trade.

All of this, together with near government ownership of the auto industry, the student loan business, health care legislation that, despite promises that everyone can keep their own insurance if they so desire, (how kind of them to permit us to keep our own insurance) is inevitably on a track toward the single payer system long preferred by President Obama and the left wing of the Democratic Party.

The government takeover or control of so much of industry creates an atmosphere of uncertainty, which, in turn, inhibits companies and individuals from returning to the risk-taking investments and new initiatives, which really do create jobs.

Why not try another approach?  The left is ever scornful of, and resolutely opposed to, Republican tax-cutting proposals, notwithstanding compelling evidence that such tax policy invariably results in explosive economic growth (think the Reagan tax cuts of 1981 and the Bush tax reductions in 2001).  The “rich” must “pay their fair share” they cry even though the upper five percent of taxpayers pay approximately sixty-one percent of the federal income taxes collected, and the bottom 50% contribute only three percent of all income tax collected, and 43%  pay no income tax at all.  The answer lies in what Mr. Obama really means about fundamentally changing America.  His vision is nearer to the socialist dream of transferring wealth from the most productive members of society to those less fortunate on the wealth scale … and the tax system is the left’s best weapon to achieve that result.

Thus, the so-called stimulus approach of flooding the economy with federal spending, the creation of tens of thousands of pages of new regulations which will stifle growth, the continued failure to legislate meaningful tort reform (frivolous litigation being a method to force major corporations to make what amounts to extortion payments to avoid the costs of litigation), all combine to accomplish the twin results of wealth transfers and the inhibition of economic growth.

At a time when the country desperately needs the purchasing power of its people to energize a hesitant and insecure economy, the Obama Administration is swiftly moving to vacuum from that economy trillions of dollars to redistribute according to its transformative priorities.

Prominent economist Arthur Laffer, whose writings inspired the Reagan tax cuts, in an op-ed piece in the July 8, 2009 edition of the Wall Street Journal, posited the following:

“Since late 2007 the federal government has spent somewhere around .6 trillion to stimulate the economy.  That is a lot of money.  My suggestion would have been to take all .6 trillion and declare a federal tax holiday for 18 months.  No income tax, no corporate profits tax, no capital gains tax, no estate tax, no payroll tax (FICA) either employee or employer, no Medicare or Medicaid taxes, no federal excise taxes, no tariffs, no federal taxes at all, which would have reduced federal revenues by .4 trillion annually.  Can you imagine where employment would be today?  How does 2.5% sound”?

To the contrary, in 2011, taxes are scheduled to increase with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts.  The top income tax rate will increase to 39.5 percent from 35 percent, with a 43 percent top rate, a product of the healthcare legislation, due in 2013.  The top rate on capital gains and dividends are scheduled to grow from 15 percent to 39.5 percent.  And the estate tax is scheduled to kick back from zero in 2010 to 55 percent, with a million exclusion in 2011 unless Congress acts as they had been expected to do starting last year.  Their failure to do so, leaving many Americans, particularly the elderly, in a complete state of confusion about how they or their estates will be taxed is nothing less than a dereliction of duty by Congress.

With fall elections looming, we had better keep our eyes open until Congress adjourns in July.  And although Will Rogers said “no man’s property is safe when Congress is in session,” concerned Americans better hold on to their wallets and pay attention even after the Congress adjourns later this month. The real danger may come following the fall elections. Many Democrats, whether they win or lose in November, envision a lame-duck session as the potential final opportunity, for many years, to finish Mr. Obama’s transformation of America from an engine of economic growth to a statist nation where the government has its finger in every pot and its thumb on every scale.

By Hal Gershowitz and Stephen Porter

Big Government

In this week’s edition of Coffee and Markets, featuring The New Ledger’s Francis Cianfrocca, we’re talking about GM’s purchase of Americredit, changes in FHA policy, deflation, Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, and more. We’re brought to you as always by Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com and LibertyPundits.com.

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Related Links:

Geithner Squashes Tax Cut Extension Talk
NYT: GM’s Free Ride on the Taxpayer Dime
Everything Happens Faster Under State Run Capitalism
The Coming Crisis for Social Security
When is a Tax Not a Tax? When the White House Says So

Big Government

From The Plum Line at The Washington Post:

Now this is going to drive the right bananas.

Check out this nugget in an interview that Shirley Sherrod did with Joe Strupp, in which she comes right out and claims Fox News is using her as a “pawn” in a racist plot to undo the gains African Americans have made:

She said Fox showed no professionalism in continuing to bother her for an interview, but failing to correct their coverage.

“I think they should but they won’t. They intended exactly what they did. “They were looking for the result they got yesterday,” she said of Fox. “I am just a pawn. I was just here. They are after a bigger thing, they would love to take us back to where we were many years ago. Back to where black people were looking down, not looking white folks in the face, not being able to compete for a job out there and not be a whole person.”

This is pretty incendiary stuff. Sherrod is clearly not going away, and now she appears determined to force a larger conversation about the Breitbart-Fox News axis’s broader efforts to stoke white resentment towards the nation’s first African American president.

Of course, if the White House’s goal is to avoid racial controversies, this blast from Sherrod isn’t going to make it any easier for them to take a stand and resolve this.

But let’s have that conversation about what Breitbart and Fox are really up to, say I! Looking forward to Fox’s coverage of this.

Big Government