Author: Mark Noonan

Bachmann Promises $2 a Gallon Gas

Mark Noonan57 Comments

Putting herself in stark contrast to Obama’s “prices will necessarily skyrocket” proposal – from The Hill:

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) vowed Tuesday that, in her presidency, gasoline prices would fall back to less than $2 per gallon.

Bachmann, speaking to a town-hall meeting in South Carolina, said she would pursue energy policies that send pump prices down to levels not seen since early 2009, at the thick of the U.S. recession.

“Under President Bachmann you will see gasoline come down below $2 per gallon again,” she said in Greenville. “That will happen.”…

The thing is, the trick can be done – and done rather easily.  All it takes is “drill, baby, drill” and a bit of extra effort in building refineries.  Just the announcement that we were abandoning Obama’s “permatorium” on offshore drilling would probably drop a barrel of oil by 10 or 20%.  Add to that the knowledge that the EPA would not try to regulate out of existence such promising new technology as “fracking”, and we could see a barrel of oil going for half or less what it is today by the end of a Bachmann first term…and that would go a long way towards lowing the price of gasoline to the $2 a gallon range.

The United States cannot become oil-independent.  We just use too much of it – but given what we know is there and with the existing and developing technology we have, we can certainly reduce our demand for foreign oil by quite a lot.  My guess is by about half (so we’d be importing about a third of our oil needs).  That kind of a slackening of demand on the global market will, in turn, drop oil prices everywhere.  It works out, in the end, to a gigantic tax cut on wealth creation…not only in the direct savings on energy costs, but on the follow-on effects of people having more money to spend on things besides energy.

If we couple such a flat-out development of our oil resources with further development of “clean coal”, nuclear and other alternative energy sources, we can get past the “oil chasm” in our economic history…reaching for a time when our overall demand for oil starts to drop year by year as new energy supplies come on line.  The additional benefit – and it is massive – is that the fewer dollars we’re sending overseas for oil means less wealth for our enemies to use against us.

This is a gigantic and easily understood advantage for the United States and whole world.  Naturally, Obama and his liberals are opposed to it – perversely, because they feel the United States needs to be punished for being so wealthy, powerful and free.  Carrying such a positive, American message is just what we need to do in 2012…as Obama keeps talking about wind and solar, we’ll be talking about what people know, and what can work today.  The rest of the GOP field can do no better than to follow Bachmann’s lead…and if it irks them to have to do so, then the suggestion is to come up with something equally bold to restore American prosperity and greatness.

 

President Obama: Insensitive Man

Mark Noonan30 Comments

Not satisfied with how going to Martha’s Vineyard will look to average Americans struggling to make ends meet, the President went for broke and also got himself a couple of massively expensive campaign buses…made in Canada!

I know, I know – it probably was the Secret Service which insisted upon a particular type of bus, and it may well be that the Canadian company is best to make them.  But a little bit of thought needs to go on here…while Americans are having trouble finding work, it just isn’t sensible for an America President to buy foreign goods.  Period.  End of story.  No, you don’t get to say “but” and come up with an explanation.  It doesn’t matter.  It simply should not have been done.  Either buy an American bus, or don’t buy one at all.

This is a stupid, self-inflicted wound.  And it doesn’t stand alone – the President’s frequent golf dates and the First Lady’s massively lavish vacations have fed in to this “let ’em eat cake” perception.  Over the past three years it has grown upon the American mind that the President doesn’t know and doesn’t care how average Americans live…this trip to the refuge of the super-rich after a short ride around “fly-over America” in a Canadian bus has set the perception in stone:  the President is callously insensitive.

Lots of things can happen between now and the election next year…but it is quite possible that even now the people have just tuned him out.  He was a mistake, not to be repeated.  And the sooner we’re rid of him, the better.

Poll: 26% Approve of Obama on Economy

Mark Noonan37 Comments

From Gallup:

A new low of 26% of Americans approve of President Barack Obama’s handling of the economy, down 11 percentage points since Gallup last measured it in mid-May and well below his previous low of 35% in November 2010.

Fully 71% disapprove.  And I would really like to meet someone who approves of Obama’s economic policies.  I guess that number is proof that some people will never shift away once they decide to back a man.

Just wait until unemployment starts to tick upwards and economic activity goes completely flat, or even negative.

Obamunism! Food Inflation Starts to Hurt

Mark Noonan51 Comments

From Zero Hedge:

Somehow even as all that deflation in home prices continues, like perfectly joined communicating vessels, countervailing inflation continues seeping into pretty much every other aspect of society. But don’t take our word for it, (or even gold’s, which is just under all time record notional highs): according to Rasmussen, “Americans nationwide continue to lose faith in the Federal Reserve Board to keep inflation under control, with the number who say they are paying more for groceries now at an all-time high.” Specifically, “93% of adults report paying more for groceries now than they did a year ago, the highest finding to date…

I still tend to agree with those who hold we are in a long-term, deflationary trend…but this doesn’t mean we can’t have short-term, inflationary spikes…like we’re having right now.  While oil prices have tumbled from their highs of the Spring, the fact remains that gasoline prices are still significantly higher than they were a year ago…and I don’t know about the rest of you, but I get sticker shock when I go grocery shopping.

All of this inflation is the result of Bernanke printing up money.  Remember, he did this so that he would have the money necessary to bail out the banksters – and all the money printing works out to picking your pocket.  The dollars you have, you see?, are now worth less…but those with things of actual value to sell simply cannot take less than fair value for their goods.  If they did, then they’d go out of business.  This means that everyone with things of real value to sell (gasoline or food, for instance) must charge more.  This isn’t price-gouging as liberal class-warfare talking points would have it…it is a logical, reasonable response to events.  In this case, the deliberate devaluing of our currency by our central bank in order that very rich people who run very large financial institutions shall not feel pain.

This is the final price of liberalism – our money being stolen by an agency of government so those most closely connected to government can be bailed out.  Bernanke bailed out the banks, Obama/Pelosi/Reid bailed out the unions…they were looking out for their own, and the rest of us got screwed in the process.  The cure is to end the relationship – and the primary means of doing that is to kill off Big Government, so that no corporation or union can, by manipulating government, gain the power to loot the people of their hard-earned wealth.

Poll: Obama Down 6 Points to “Generic” Republican

Mark Noonan9 Comments

From Rasmussen:

…The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely U.S. Voters finds the generic Republican earning 48% of the vote, while the president picks up support from 42%.  Four percent (4%) prefer some other candidate, and another seven percent (7%) are undecided…

Remember, fellow GOPers, I’m mostly linking to these kinds of posts to annoy and depress our liberals…don’t you get cocky:  we’ve got one very hard fight coming up in 2012.

Jerusalem is in Israel

Mark Noonan30 Comments

In spite of what some might want us to believe – from Jewish Journal:

Jerusalem: To be or not to be part of Israel. That’s the question that White House administrations have tiptoed around for decades.

The State Department neither recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s official capital nor views the eastern part of the city—captured from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War and subsequently annexed—as part of Israel. But Congress passed a law in 2002 that effectively recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Presidents have been caught in the middle, cautiously balancing their pro-Israel rhetoric against longstanding U.S. policy.

That’s exactly where the Obama administration found itself last week after news reports revealed that the White House quietly had removed all references to Jerusalem as being part of Israel from a collection of photos on its website…

It is amazingly cowardly of us to not just recognize historic and current reality – Jerusalem is the capitol of Israel.  To all intents and purposes, it always has been and always will be.  Its been 44 years since the Israelis liberated the eastern section of Jerusalem from Moslem misrule and it is high time we just bit the bullet and did the right thing.

But we can’t do that!  It would offend Islam!  Yeah, and our failure to recognize Jerusalem as part of Israel has won us just so many friend in the Moslem world, right?  Get real – there is nothing we can do to make them hate us any more than they already do, while a course of forthright action will at least instruct them that we are people of courage and not to be trifled with.  Recognize the Israeli liberation of Jerusalem..and throw in the Golan for good measure.  Time to end this silliness and start acting like we’ve got a backbone.

Liberal Proposes to Finish Off Los Angeles

Mark Noonan9 Comments

Bankrupt?  Municipal services decaying?  Everyone who can leave moving out as fast as they can?  Then here’s your liberal solution…raise taxes!  From Bloomberg:

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the chief of California’s largest city, called for sweeping changes in Proposition 13, the nucleus of the nation’s anti-tax movement.

The state’s perennial budget crises could be eased by as much as $8 billion a year by removing Proposition 13’s limits on tax assessments for commercial property, Villaraigosa said in a speech to the Sacramento Press Club today. He also urged new taxes on services such as legal representation that he said might yield as much as $28 billion a year…

In the “give credit where it is due” spirit, I have to say I agree with the proposal to tax legal services.  It would be the most effective means of killing of liberalism’s most effective means of gaining power.  They use lawyers to subvert America day in and day out – lay a 90% tax on legal fees, and that will come to a screeching halt.  Of course, given that trial lawyers are a mainstay of Democrat fund raising, you can expect such a proposal to go nowhere…but, it is still a good idea, and we should think about putting it in the GOP platform along with the “wealth tax”.

Aside from that, Villaraigosa’s proposals are just economic suicide.  Los Angeles and California are suffering from the inability of Californian’s to create wealth.  The block to such creation is California’s insanely burdensome tax and regulatory environment…Villaraigosa proposes to increase the burden.  And he wants to do it in lieu of cutting back the worthless, wealth-destroying California bureaucracy.

I guess they just don’t learn – from Obama right on down to mayors like Villaraigosa:  all liberals can ever think to do in a crisis is raise taxes and keep spending.  We have the answer for that – and we’ll give it November next year.

Warren Buffett Wants His Taxes Raised

Mark Noonan114 Comments

From the New York Times:

…Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.

If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot…

First off, Warren, if you really want to kick in a bit extra, then why did you have your team of lawyers and accountants (I’m sure you’ve got them) work the system so that you only paid an effective tax rate of 17.4%?  It is no problem for you to pay more – just take fewer deductions.  Or, if you want, just cut a billion dollar check to Uncle Sam.

Of course you won’t do that – not for you to just step up to the plate.  That wouldn’t advance your true cause here…keeping Big Government going through a round of tax hikes which might, indeed, take a little more from your annual income, but which will mostly hit people of far less wealth than you.  Because, dear Warren, you know better than most the truth…for all the billions you have, your wealth is chump change compared to the hundreds of billions held in smaller amounts by the people who make 200k or more per year.

Liberal financial sharks, like Buffett, thrive in a system of fiat money, government-subsidized debt and Big Government graft.  If that system comes to an end – via bankruptcy – then the Buffett’s of the world might have to get a real job.  You know, produce actual wealth  in order to make money.  The thought is too horrifying to contemplate.  So, rather than see their milch cow go down, they write Op-Eds in the New York Times which will then be cited by liberals as justification for higher taxes:  “see, even someone as rich as Warren Buffett wants a tax hike!”.   Sorry, Warren – too bad, liberals:  we’re on to the scam.

I propose a way to test this willingness of Buffett and other bazillionaire liberals to pay taxes.  Rather than hiking income taxes, why don’t we tax wealth?  I propose a 5% tax on all wealth in excess of $5 million.  Total it up for us, Warren – how rich are you?  Forbes says you’re worth $45 billion.  This means we want $2.25 billion from you next year.  And the year after.  You’d better hope your investments hold up, huh?  I know you were hoping for a “soak the middle class” tax hike which also might have cost you a measly million or two more per year (easily made up, of course, by some bit of sharp financial practice elsewhere), but I want to really tax the rich…I want a couple billion dollars from you.  Every year.  You do that, and I’ll agree to a general income tax hike.

Cross Posted:  Noonan for Nevada

Obama Feels the Heat

Mark Noonan9 Comments

From Obama’s Magical Misery Tour:

 

Yesterday, at work, I took a call from a customer and after relatively quickly disposing of the issue at hand, I was treated to a 30 minute lecture on how Obama is ruining our nation.  I, naturally, could not comment on this – as an official representative of my employer, it was not for me to engage in partisan politics, regardless of my personal views.  So, I just kind of let it wash over me and after the customer had got it off the chest, I ended the call.  This wasn’t the first such unsolicited anti-Obama rhetoric I had received.

I don’t think in all my life I’ve ever come across a President who has so greatly angered so many.  While there are those who still worship at the shopworn altar of The One, the bulk of the people can be classed two ways – those who have tuned Obama out, and those who are going to crawl across broken glass on their knees to eject him from office next year.

In this, the massive build up of Obama during the 2008 campaign – which Obama gleefully joined in (remember, the seas were going to start to recede?) – has boomeranged on the President.  He was sold to the public as the answer to all our hopes and dreams – the cure for all that ailed us.  It was an impossible standard to measure up to…and Obama’s problem is not just that he didn’t measure up to the hype (really, the lies…everyone who pumped him up in 2008 knew darn well he wasn’t what they claimed), but that he didn’t even come close.  In addition to this broken dream there is also the growing public perception that Obama has nothing but contempt for the American people (in this I think the majority is mistaken…he doesn’t know enough about us to have contempt for us; he appears just plain and simple ignorant of how life in America outside the government/academic bubble is lived).  It makes for a poisonous stew…and it is reflected in Obama’s cratering approval rating.

In sum, Obama is in deep political trouble, and I don’t know how he gets out of it.  We’ll see what he does – and what the GOP does.