Posts with the tag 'government spending'
Once again showing why all conservatives should rally ’round McCain:
At its core, the economy isn’t the sum of an array of bewildering statistics. It’s about where Americans work, how they live, how they pay their bills today and save for tomorrow. It’s about small businesses opening their doors, hiring employees and growing. It’s about giving workers the education and training to find a good job and prosper in it. It’s about the aspirations of the American people to build a better life for their families; dreams that begin with a job.
So how are we going to create good jobs? Let’s start with small businesses, which create the majority of all jobs. A recent report says small businesses have created 233,000 jobs so far this year while other sectors are losing jobs. Small businesses are the job engine of America, and I will make it easier for them to grow and create more jobs. My opponent wants to make it harder by imposing a “pay or play” health mandate on small business. This adds $12,000 to the cost of employing anyone with a family. That means new jobs will not be created. It means existing employees will have their wages cut to pay for this mandate. My plan attacks the real problems of healthcare — cost, availability and portability.
Some economists don’t think much of my gas tax holiday. But the American people like it, and so do small business owners. Just ask Andrew Emmett who runs Air-Tite insulation in Michigan. He has had to stop hiring new workers because of the cost of fuel for his trucks.
We need to keep the IRS from taking more of your income and making life harder for small business. If you believe you should pay more taxes, I am the wrong candidate for you. Senator Obama is your man. The choice in this election is stark and simple. Senator Obama will raise your taxes. I won’t. I will cut them where I can. Jobs are the most important thing our economy creates. When you raise taxes in a bad economy you eliminate jobs. I’m not going to let that happen.
Senator Obama’s tax increases will hurt the economy even more, and destroy jobs across this country. If you are one of the 23 million small business owners in America who files as an individual rate payer, Senator Obama is going to raise your tax rates. If you have an investment for your child’s education or own a mutual fund or a stock in a retirement plan, he is going to raise your taxes. He will raise estate taxes to 45 percent. I propose to cut them to 15 percent. His plan will hurt the American worker and family. It will hurt the economy and cost us jobs. For those of you with children, I will double the child deduction from $3,500 to $7,000 for every dependent, in every family in America. At a time of increasing gas and food prices, American families need tax relief and I, not my opponent, will deliver it.
Obama’s entire economic plan is just warmed-over Carterism…as was said of the Bourbons of old, the liberal Democrats have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. Obama’s blast-from-the-past concepts like a “windfall profits” tax shows that he hasn’t thought about economics, but has swallowed whole the liberal concept that the government knows best. McCain, however, is a longstanding Reaganite on the economy - the man who understands that as far as economic growth is concerned, the best thing the government can do is get the heck out of the way. You can’t manage an economy from the center because you can’t know what people want, nor what people are willing to do. Only the free interplay of the market can make such determinations - still imperfectly, but far more effectively than even the wisest and most knoweldgable government bureaucrat.
But McCain is also no booster of mere business for the sake of business - he seems to instinctively understand that the very large corporations can be just as ineffective as the very large government bureaucracies and this is why McCain’s emphasis is on the smaller corporations and family businesses. It is the man or woman who is building up something of their own who is doing the real work of America - not the man working on becoming CEO of a Fortune 500 company, no more than the empire-building bureaucrat is. Large corporations and large bureaucracies will remain, at least for a while; but the less said about them, the better - and lets certainly not go about encouraging them. Unleash the average American, and you’ll get prosperity. McCain is for such unleashing, while Obama is for fastening yet more chains about us…nice chains, to be sure; chains which are intended to help us, it goes without saying…but chains nonetheless, and chains which will ruin us and, for the 1,000th time, dash liberal hopes and dreams.
We’ve hit a rocky patch at the junction of stupid loans (made, it must be noted, mostly by larger corporations with the connivance of Big Government) and high oil prices. The economy is in fundamentally good shape, but in order to weather this storm and emerge stronger on the other side of it we’ll need a free marketing Reaganite like McCain, not a quasi-socialist Carterite like Obama.
Tags: Barack Obama, economic policy, government spending, John McCain, taxes
July 8th, 2008
You’d think that with Obama’s success at obtaining a low-cost mansion for himself that he’d have been more effective on housing for the poor:
The squat brick buildings of Grove Parc Plaza, in a dense neighborhood that Barack Obama represented for eight years as a state senator, hold 504 apartments subsidized by the federal government for people who can’t afford to live anywhere else.
But it’s not safe to live here.
About 99 of the units are vacant, many rendered uninhabitable by unfixed problems, such as collapsed roofs and fire damage. Mice scamper through the halls. Battered mailboxes hang open. Sewage backs up into kitchen sinks. In 2006, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale - a score so bad the buildings now face demolition.
Grove Parc has become a symbol for some in Chicago of the broader failures of giving public subsidies to private companies to build and manage affordable housing - an approach strongly backed by Obama as the best replacement for public housing.
As a state senator, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee coauthored an Illinois law creating a new pool of tax credits for developers. As a US senator, he pressed for increased federal subsidies. And as a presidential candidate, he has campaigned on a promise to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that could give developers an estimated $500 million a year.
But a Globe review found that thousands of apartments across Chicago that had been built with local, state, and federal subsidies - including several hundred in Obama’s former district - deteriorated so completely that they were no longer habitable.
Grove Parc and several other prominent failures were developed and managed by Obama’s close friends and political supporters. Those people profited from the subsidies even as many of Obama’s constituents suffered. Tenants lost their homes; surrounding neighborhoods were blighted.
When we first started building public housing it became a complete disaster - the government ponied up the money to have them built and then managed the housing with a maze of bureaucratic rules which made it impossible to get rid of bad elements and dead certain that the housing would become blighted in short order. The phrase “public housing” by the early 1980’s immediately brought to mind images of crime and filth. And so reforms were proposed - the crowning effort to actually fix the problem was initiated by “bleeding heart” conservative Jack Kemp who initiated the Homeownership and Opportunity for People Everywhere (HOPE) program while he was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the Elder Bush Administration…unfortunately, budget battles in cabinet and unwillingness of the Democratic Congress to spend money on a GOP-inspired anti-poverty scheme which would disempower Democratic-donating bureaucrats essentially killed the very promising program - it does linger on to this day, but it never was able to accomplish its primary purpose of making poor people into home owners so that they would be empowered and have the incentive to keep their neighborhoods up to snuff.
What has happened since then has mostly been a boondoggle, as we can see from the quoted article - favored contractors getting government swag to build low-cost housing and as these contractors are protected by their bought-and-paid-for political patrons, there isn’t much incentive for the contractors to actually build something useful. The problem isn’t just in Chicago, to be completely fair to Obama here - we have a low cost housing development here in Las Vegas which was built on toxic soil and was useless from the get-go. But the problem for Obama is that with a rather thin resume’, he can’t afford to have any of this corrupt business-as-usual political backscratching going on - and it appears that he was very happy to be hip deep in it. Now the connections to the corrupt Rezko and his shady mansion deal become more stark…coupled with the revelations that Obama’s supporters profited off Obama-backed slum construction, it shows that Obama is deeply involved - indeed, owes his rise to - the hopelessly corrupt Chicago-area Democratic politics.
So, good people, if you want a President who will ensure that well-connected contractors make money by building unlivable slums for the poor, Obama is your man…if you want something different that warmed-over liberal politics of the past, then McCain would have to by your choice.
Tags: Barack Obama, government reform, government spending, housing, John McCain, liberal lies
June 28th, 2008
From the Wall Street Journal:
As every reformed addict knows, the road to recovery is long and hard. So it is for Republicans who became addicted to spending “earmarks” while running Congress, lost their majority in large part because of it, and are now struggling with mixed results to dry out.
Their latest halting effort in what appears to be at least a 12-step recovery plan will come tonight, when President Bush uses his State of the Union address to lay down his toughest anti-earmarking pledge to date. We’re told he will tell Congress that he will veto any fiscal 2009 spending bill that doesn’t cut earmarks in half from 2008 levels. He will also report that he is issuing a Presidential order informing executive departments that from now on they should refuse to fund earmarks that aren’t explicitly mentioned in statutory language.
Excellent - good government, excellent reform…and it jams Democrats up against a wall on this issue they pretended to care about in 2006 and 2007. They either have to go along with President Bush - and anger their narrow special interests - or oppose him, and anger everyone else. This is the sort of thing we’ll have to do all through 2008 - keep forcing Democrats to choose between the high-sounding rhetoric and their disgraceful reality.
Tags: Earmarks, government reform, government spending, State of the Union
January 28th, 2008
Its a word we use here in Nevada - the process whereby Californians flee the high taxes, onerous regulations and intrusions into private life of the State of California, and then try to implement those very things here in Nevada. They are trying to “californicate” us. It’d be nice if they’d at least let us have a smoke afterwards, but they are trying to ban smoking here. Anyways, California is pretty messed up right now - they’ve “californicated” themselves pretty well, as Victor Davis Hanson notes:
But lost in the furor is any self-reflection, such as why would UC Davis recently pay John Edwards, multimillionaire trial lawyer, $50,000 plus to give a brief lecture on poverty? Such questions are never answered, much less raised, since the problem is always framed as a matter of a shortage of income, never a surfeit of unnecessary expenditure.
We in California, given the past budget implosions, know the script to follow. We expect that police, fire, prisons, parks, etc. will be threatened with cut-backs and closure, while the state-funded “Center for this” and the “Department of that” will remain untouched, since cutting the essential while protecting the politically-correct superfluous is the only way to scare the voter and achieve higher taxes.
At some point we Californians should ask ourselves how we inherited a state with near perfect weather, the world’s richest agriculture, plentiful timber, minerals, and oil, two great ports at Los Angeles and Oakland, a natural tourist industry from Carmel to Yosemite, industries such as Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and aerospace — and serially managed to turn all of that into the nation’s largest penal system, periodic near bankruptcy, and sky-high taxes.
Hanson has a point - heck, it is the point: whenever there’s a budget crunch in any government, the government simply will not make the necessary cuts to bring expenditure in line with revenues. We had the same thing out here in Nevada a couple years back and, as you might have guessed, we were saddled with the largest tax increase in State history…rammed through because the MSM kept trumpting the government line that if we didn’t increase taxes, kids would die, or some such. I decided to take a look at the California government directory, and here is a sample of places rational people would seek budget cuts:
California Alternative Energy and Advanced Transportation Financing Authority; Center for Analytical Chemistry; California Constitution Revision Commission; California Council for the Humanities; California Indoor Air Quality Program; Acupuncture Board; Board of Barbering and Cosmetology; Cemetary and Funeral Bureau; Bureau of Electronic and Appliance Repair; Bureau of Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation; Bureau of Naturopathic Medicine; Film Commission; Horse Racing Board; California State Railroad Museum; Commission on Status of Women
And that doesn’t even begin to cover wasteful spending in more vital departments, nor departments which seem important, but also seem to have several redundant agencies looking after the same issues. All of those in my list could probably be shut down tomorrow, and not a single Californian would die as a result…or even be slightly injured. I’ll bet that a complete audit of California government and an elimination of anything which didn’t deliver police, fire, education or health services (even most broadly defined) would result in at least a 25% reduction in State spending. But that won’t happen - because government will never cooperate in eliminating part of itself.
As Hanson points out, as some point Californians will simply have to take charge of this and conduct a political revolution - overturning decades of liberal/left flapdoodle in one fell swoop of constitutional change. And, one day, we the people of the United States of American might just have to do that with our federal government, just to bring it back into line.
Tags: government reform, government spending
January 19th, 2008
