President Barack Obama vigorously defended his $787 billion stimulus on Wednesday, insisting it rescued Americans from the worst of the economic calamity and ripping Republican critics who called it a waste.
Obama and Vice President Joe Biden launched a sweeping effort to convince skeptical Americans that the stimulus has been beneficial on the one-year anniversary of a plan that was pushed through the U.S. Congress by Democratic majorities.
Obama, in a White House speech, said he believed the stimulus will save or create 1.5 million jobs in 2010 after saving or creating as many as 2 million jobs thus far.
Just to put things in perspective Mr. President, if we took your salary and applied it to pay the $787 $862 billion stimulus price tag. It would take two million one hundred fifty five thousand years to pay it off. That’s without even considering the interest that would have accrued.
America no longer believes you Mr. President. Check out the 337+ comments to the above article and see for yourself.
Americans are catching on real fast. They recognize Bovine Splatitude when they hear it, even without the help of Talk Radio.
Members of Congress give all sorts of reasons for retiring, but the reason that Democrat Evan Bayh gave is starting to sound awfully familiar. The two-term Senator from Indiana said he just couldn’t stand the partisan bickering in Washington any more.
“I’ve had a growing conviction that Congress is not operating as it should. There is much too much partisanship and not enough progress,” he said yesterday, announcing he would not seek reelection this Fall.
Let me see Senator Bayh, “Congress is not operating as it should?” Running up a 1.4 Trillion dollar deficit, Federal Debt over 12 Trillion dollars, Earmarks (AKA wasteful spending), waste, fraud and abuse at the hand of the United States Congress, is this the partisanship you are talking about? The Democrat majority is in charge and the American People are holding them to account. Get over it!
he first seven months of the Obama administration seemingly make no sense. Why squander public approval by running up astronomical deficits in a time of pre-existing staggering national debt?
Why polarize opponents after promising bipartisan transcendence?
Why create vast new programs when the efficacy of big government is already seen as dubious?
But that is exactly the wrong way to look at these first seven months of Obamist policy-making.
Take increased federal spending and the growing government absorption of GDP. Given the resiliency of the U.S. economy, it would have been easy to ride out the recession. In that case we would still have had to deal with a burgeoning and unsustainable annual federal deficit that would have approached $1 trillion.
Instead, Obama may nearly double that amount of annual indebtedness with more federal stimuli and bailouts, newly envisioned cap-and-trade legislation, and a variety of fresh entitlements. Was that fiscally irresponsible? Yes, of course.
But I think the key was not so much the spending excess or new entitlements. The point instead was the consequence of the resulting deficits, which will require radically new taxation for generations. If on April 15 the federal and state governments, local entities, the Social Security system, and the new health-care programs can claim 70 percent of the income of the top 5 percent of taxpayers, then that is considered a public good — every bit as valuable as funding new programs, and one worth risking insolvency.
A high income is now rationalized as having less to do with market-driven needs, acquired skills, a higher level of education, innate intelligence, inheritance, hard work, or accepting risk. Rather income is seen more as luck-driven, cruelly capricious, unfair — even immoral, in that some are rewarded arbitrarily on the basis of race, class, and gender advantages, others for their overweening greed and ambition, and still more for their quasi-criminality.
Read the rest here, Victor Davis Hanson has the best explanation of the Obama agenda so far.
‘When times are tough, you tighten your belts,’ the president said. ‘You don’t go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage. You don’t blow a bunch of cash on Vegas when you’re trying to save for college.’
President Obama
Likewise, Mr. President, you can’t keep running up trillion dollar deficits when you can barely service the interest on the debt we already owe.
Where’s the belt tightening at the Federal Government Level?
Organized labor may be putting their dollars behind an online effort to take down Tea Party groups and their “radical ideas.”
A new Web site, TheTeaPartyIsOver.org, has connections to unions, including the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
The American Public Policy Committee pays for the site, whose self-declared mission is to “prevent the Tea Party’s dangerous ideas from gaining legislative traction.”
The Tea Party Movement’s idea of lower taxes and smaller government doesn’t sit well with unions. Especially the unions that represents government employees.
Somehow the principles of our Founding Fathers have become ‘radical ideas.’
It’s amazing how the ‘statists’ want to portray our country’s founding principals as radical.
The idea of secret banking cabals that control the country and global economy are a given among conspiracy theorists who stockpile ammo, bottled water and peanut butter. After this week’s congressional hearing into the bailout of American International Group Inc., you have to wonder if those folks are crazy after all.
Wednesday’s hearing described a secretive group deploying billions of dollars to favored banks, operating with little oversight by the public or elected officials.
We’re talking about the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose role as the most influential part of the federal-reserve system—apart from the matter of AIG’s bailout—deserves further congressional scrutiny.
Yet when unelected and unaccountable agencies pick banking winners while trying to end-run Congress, even as taxpayers are forced to lend, spend and guarantee about $8 trillion to prop up the financial system, our collective blood should boil.
Heck of a business model. AIG takes huge risks and when thing are good they take their profit. When things go bad they are ‘too big to fail’ and get bailed out by the American taxpayer.
As Reilly says ‘our collective blood should boil.’
NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the moon are dead. So are the rockets being designed to take them there — that is, if President Barack Obama gets his way.
When the White House releases his budget proposal Monday, there will be no money for the Constellation program that was supposed to return humans to the moon by 2020. The troubled and expensive Ares I rocket that was to replace the space shuttle to ferry humans to space will be gone, along with money for its bigger brother, the Ares V cargo rocket that was to launch the fuel and supplies needed to take humans back to the moon.
There will be no lunar landers, no moon bases, no Constellation program at all.
There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.
The U.S. Treasury and Labor Departments will ask for public comment as soon as next week on ways to promote the conversion of 401(k) savings and Individual Retirement Accounts into annuities or other steady payment streams, according to Assistant Labor Secretary Phyllis C. Borzi and Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary Mark Iwry, who are leading the effort.
According to the article, as of mid 2009 there was 3.6 trillion dollars in IRAs and 401(k)s. Thats a tempting sum to the Obama Administration and the Democrats when they are pilling up an unsustanable level of debt. They want to sieze it and convert it to annuities so that retires will receive “steady payment streams.”
Let me tell you what this is - it is an attempt to prevent the collapse of the Treasury market!
Forcing people into Treasuries as an “annuity” is exactly what Social Security allegedly is. Except that Treasury stole the money that was collected in FICA taxes and spent it!
Guess what? They’ll do that here too - you’re going to “invest” in Treasuries which of course are effectively a CALL option on the future taxing ability of the government.
Let’s see if I understand this. The government takes your IRA / 401(k) and gives you an IOU. Then they pay you back in inflated dollars in equal monthly payments until you die. Haven’t they done this already with the generational ponzi scheme called Social Security? I wonder if they have hired Bernie Madoff as a consultant?
The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be filled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome be bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.
The Democrat and Republicans In Name Only, (RINO)s, have lost touch with the American People. They have become the political elite and We the People have become "fly-over country." I am not a Nazi, a terrorist, a member of the KKK, a racist, or a member of an angry mob. I'm not a birther, teabagger, truther or astroturfer. I do, however believe in the original intent of the Founding Fathers, the United States Constituton and the rule of law. I believe that Government should serve the People, not the other way around. I’m an American and conservative to my very core.
