government reform

Did You Ever See a Stock Market Crash?

Mark Noonan40 Comments

The Tel Aviv market gives a good indication of what it looks like – and here’s the really bad news:  Israel’s economy is healthy.

Of course, by the time the markets open tomorrow Bernanke and the boys might have figured out some way to finesse around the downgrade and the spreading crisis in the Eurozone.  I honestly don’t know what will happen tomorrow – but things are looking really dicey both in the short and long term.

We’ve got one heck of a mess and it won’t be easy to get out of…and we need a government which recognizes the mess (no more happy talk about how things are moving in the right direction when they’re not) and has the guts to do what is right.  We need to massively reduce spending, reform taxes and entitlements and free up the wealth-creating capacity of the American economy.  This will infuriate all those special interests who are still living off the carcass of Big Government, but it has to be done.

Huckabee: Replace Geithner with Trump

Mark Noonan11 Comments

From CNN:

Amid calls by the GOP for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s resignation, one Republican is offering an unorthodox choice for a potential replacement.

“Ask Donald Trump to be Treasury secretary,” Mike Huckabee said on Fox News Channel.

The former Arkansas governor elaborated: “Have Donald Trump take the job for 90 days. It’s a game changer.”…

Trump certainly wouldn’t be worse than Geithner and may end up a lot better.  Certainly, unless Obama really changes course at this point we’re heading for a really bad time.  Even a major course change won’t completely get us out of the soup…but swift action, now, can prevent “bad” from becoming “hideous”.  If not Trump, then someone who has a bit of guts and a bit of knowledge of business.

But I doubt we’ll see it – Obama may call in Underbus to rid himself of a political liability, but I doubt Obama even sees the need for a real change, let alone what that change might entail.

 

GOP Wants Open Debt Committee Hearings

Mark Noonan4 Comments

From Newsmax:

Much of Washington’s attention is now focused on the bipartisan congressional committee that will soon be formed to recommend how to reduce the budget deficit by $1.5 trillion. And Republicans are working hard to ensure that the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction holds all its meetings in public, The Hill reports.

Six GOP senators sent a letter to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell Wednesday urging that the committee’s business be “done in a transparent manner through advanced public notification, public attendance and live television broadcasts, . . . not behind closed doors.”

The signers include Sens. Dean Heller of Nevada, David Vitter of Louisiana, Mike Lee of Utah, John Boozman of Arkansas, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin…

Good for them and I entirely agree…let us call witnesses who can explain exactly what we’re spending money on and what we can cut without touching a single social security, medicare, medicaid or military pay check.  Hundreds of billions are being spent each year on perfectly worthless activities (including activities hidden within otherwise worthy programs), and the more exposure we can get, the better our chances of a popular demand for cuts.

The people are on our side in the debt battle – we know it must be cut, all we have to do is show where and how much.  Open committee hearings will give us our best chance.

How to Fix the Economy

Mark Noonan37 Comments

I’ve been yammering on about it for years, so maybe you’re tired of reading my views…so, here’s someone else to say it.  Victor Davis Hanson over at NRO’s The Corner:

…If the government were an individual household, the only way out would be to cut spending and find new sources of wealth. Given worldwide demand for food and fuel, and given recent quite astounding new finds of natural gas and oil in the Dakotas, the eastern seaboard, offshore, the American west, Alaska, and Canada, it seems that we should be hell-bent on recovering these high-value fuels through new drilling, refineries, and pipelines, including ways to power our heavy trucks and equipment on natural gas. We should be planting acre to acre and end nonsensical biofuel subsidies and artificial limitations on irrigation deliveries to California’s West Side and elsewhere in the West. We need a national manufacturing policy that prunes regulations and encourages investment here in the U.S., ceases talk of new taxes, repeals the trillion-dollar take-over of the health-care industry, and stops hectoring Boeing about opening a new facility or trying to shut down energy generation plants…

As I’ve been saying – make, mine and grow more of our own stuff.  That is the only way out of this…we have to start creating wealth again.  Of course, this does require hard work, does require getting a little dirty and doesn’t allow for nearly the current number of government bureaucrats, mid-level managers and diversity coordinators, but that is just some of the heavy sacrifices we’ll have to make.

I believe it was Reagan who once said there are no easy solutions, but there are simple ones.  Getting our nation back on track will not be easy, but it is quite simple.  Ditch the idiot liberalism of the past few decades, insist everyone pull their weight and just get to work.  It’ll all be ok, if we do that…no easily; not with out a lot of tears and sweat, but it’ll all be ok.

Capitalism or Socialism?

Mark Noonan23 Comments

Donald Byrne over at Catholic Journal has an excellent look at both our horrid fiscal situation (yes, we really are going bankrupt) and points out that that in our most-desired goals (prosperity and equity), free market capitalism does much better than State socialism.  Essentially, the imposition of socialistic policies in the United States have exacerbated wealth disparities – if Obama’s goal was really to “spread the wealth around”, he’d be reading Hayek and changing course.  Byrne concludes:

…The goals that competitive free market capitalism brings society toward are efficiency and equity on the microeconomic level and high employment and a reasonable degree of price level stability as well as a consensus driven rate of economic growth.  The decisions of the many, NOT the few, dictate what an economy will produce in the way of goods and services, in what manner those goods will be produced and in distribution of income (the reward of the goods and services produced) with maximum freedom to the people as consumers and productive resources.  It is an economic system that is based on the principle of subsidiarity, again, where the decision-making is driven down to the lowest level possible…after all, who knows/understands better than the individual (in most cases) what is best for them?

And there’s that word I keep using – “subsidiarity”.  Remember, in the end all our fights are to secure for us “subsidiarity” – the right of individuals and localities to decide for themselves the best means of living their lives.  It is at the core of American political morality – it is why our Declaration asserts that government’s must rule by consent, and why the 9th and 10th amendments were added to the Constitution.  It is doubtful that many of the Founders had read deeply in to Catholic social teaching, but in this case they didn’t have to….anyone with a bit of wisdom will swiftly understand his inability to dictate to others, and others far away from his own community.

Obama’s crime against Americanism (because that is what is amounts to) is to suppose that he and those in power with him can determine what is best for everyone.  That they can justly “spread the wealth around” and come to a superior outcome than the individuals, themselves, could achieve.  Not only is this wrong philosophically, it is also wrong in strictly practical terms.  The erosion of the middle class, the destruction of America’s ability to make, mine and grow things, the bankrupting of our nation and the moral decline of the populace are directly traceable to socialistic attempts to decree an outcome, rather than allow things two work themselves out through the interplay of free people.

The only quibble I have with Byrne is over the use of the word “capitalism”.  We should more emphasize the term “free market” than the word “capitalism” because capitalism has come to mean in the public mind a collection of Ivy League educated board room trolls, and the government-subsidized crony-capitalist.  Our fight is not to make the world safe for GE; not to make smooth the path of Government Motors…but to free up the market so that average men and women can enter it, using their own means of production, to create wealth for themselves, their families and their communities.

In practical, political terms I think we’d do much better this way.  What we have growing in the United States is a populist revolt against the Ruling Class.  Sickened by the corruption of politics and the economy, the people are demanding that those who have ruined things be tossed out, while those who are willing to work obtain the greatest reward.  We’ll go further – obtain more power to reform, that is – if we hitch ourselves to this popular revolt, and we can best do that by clearly identifying ourselves in complete opposition to what is currently wrong.

As we enter the Great Debate of 2012, we’ll have Obama telling everyone that a victory for free markets means granny being thrown over the cliff.  Allied with Obama will be those crony capitalists who will warn that failure to support “too big to fail” corporations will be a disaster.  We must expose these lies – we must present a vision of America free and prosperous, and explain that all socialist plans (regardless of what label they are given) will lead to poverty, dependence and a divided, dysfunctional America sliding towards tyranny.  Our question must be – who do you trust:  Obama or yourself?  Make that the issue of 2012 and we’ll win so big a victory that liberalism will not trouble us again for 20 years.

How to Cut – Really Cut – Government Spending

Mark Noonan45 Comments

It isn’t hard – from Zero Hedge:

…In a nutshell: do to the government, what the privates sector has done to itself in the past 3 years, and fire 15% of the federal government workforce…

…slimming the US government ever so modestly, by just 15%, would generate savings of $117.4 billion a year, or $1.4 trillion over the next 10 years. And no, these are not reductions in future spendings: these are real actionable cuts from the day they are enacted, with fungible cash able to be used for any other, much more needed purposes, up to and including economically stimulative projects, which actually generate jobs for the private sector…

Ah, but that would mean less government employees, and thus less government union members…and so less donations to Democrats seeking power.  It is a nauseating circle of corruption…demands for big government in order to pay for politicians backing big government who will then make government even bigger.

Now, why didn’t the GOP go this rout?  For two reasons:

1.  The TEA Party element is strong, but it is not dominant in the GOP.  It can stop some things from happening, but it cannot yet force through genuinely conservative/libertarian policies.

2.  Even as the TEA Party element rises from strength to strength, we have to deal with the reality that the American people installed an ultra-leftist President in 2008.  Obama simply will not – cannot, in fact – make genuine cuts in spending.  Liberal Democrats had been slavering for years in anticipation of just that day…the day they managed to hoodwink the American people in to voting an ultra-leftist President in to office while ultra-leftists controlled the Congress.  They essentially upped government spending by a trillion dollars annually and this is to be the “new normal”; no liberal is ever going to be allowed to cut in to it.

But what this proposal shows is that without even for a moment altering the basic structure of our government, massive spending cuts are possible.  The government is so impossibly over-bloated that you can make cuts of $100 billion a year and you’ll still have an overwhelming behemoth of government.  All the talk of throwing granny over the cliff is just so much liberal lies…and they simply must know it; no one is actually that stupid.

Get ready for the political fight of your life – 2012 will be the final battle between liberty and Big Government.  One of the two will prevail, and probably prevail for good.

Boehner: “The Best We Could Get”

Mark Noonan40 Comments

From NRO’s The Corner:

House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) told GOP members on a conference call Sunday evening that he had reached a deal with congressional leaders and the White House, but that it wouldn’t happen “unless we have membership on board.” It remains to be seen how many House Republicans will end up supporting the final package, but members on the call told National Review Online they thought it would ultimately pass with bipartisan support. “I’m not sure I’m going to support it but I think it will probably pass,” said freshman Rep. Dennis Ross (R., Fla.). Members described the tone of the call as overwhelmingly positive, with many praising Boehner’s efforts in the negotiations. Despite his concerns about the final deal, Ross said “leadership has done a very good job of getting it to this point,” and described a sense of relief among members, many of whom may not love the deal, but are nonetheless happy to be moving on to the next fight.

According to sources, Boehner said the deal was “the best that we could get.” In particular, he thanked the 87 freshmen members for their input, without which “we wouldn’t have gotten this far.” Ross concurred. “I think the freshman class has been very valuable to this process,” he said…

That last bit is really best translated as, “goodness, we didn’t fully realize until now that these TEA Party people are serious!”.  But, all in all, it is a good thing – this is the first time since the glory days of 1995 that a GOP House Speaker can count on a solid, conservative GOP caucus…one which won’t go all soft on him in return for campaign cash and other DC blandishments.  But it is not the best we could get – it is the best that the GOP could get using this strategy.

We need to think carefully not just about what we want, but how we want to get there.  We did not do a good enough job of forcing the Democrats to defend their disgusting Big Government liberalism – they were defensive, to be sure, but they were still defending the concept of using government money to be nice to people…we need tactics which will expose the fact that they really want to use government to reward liberal cronies.

A relentless drumbeat of just who among the rich and powerful are getting government money and just who they donate to (and speak and write in favor of) should be used in the next battle.  Show the American people that “food for the starving” really works out to “Cadillac for Nancy Pelosi’s crony-capitalist”.  These people on the left have been looting the Treasury for decades.  Sweat heart deals for government contracts, special tax and regulatory breaks:  things like that and the pols get, in return, campaign cash, investment tips and well paid corporate sinecures once out of office.  Show this to the American people…force the liberals away from defending charity and in to defending their greed for wealth and power.

We also need to win the class war – and my idea of a “wealth tax” is the best way to end that battle once and for all.  Democrats are endlessly harping on how we GOPers want to steal food out of granny’s mouth so we can give tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires.  Do them one better – propose a tax which will won’t hit anyone except a millionaire or billionaire and watch the Democrats try to stop it…force them to reveal that their “tax the rich” rhetoric is really “tax the middle class, leave our rich donors alone”.

Still and all a good effort.  Big Government liberalism is firmly on the defensive – and Obama and his Democrats will have to defend their worthless, wasteful, immoral and un-American welfare State all through 2012.  We have them on the run – now, let’s push them over the edge, and take back our country.

NAACP Executive Convicted of Voter Fraud

Mark Noonan10 Comments

From the DC Caller:

…In a story ignored by the national media, in April a Tunica County, Miss., jury convicted NAACP official Lessadolla Sowers on 10 counts of fraudulently casting absentee ballots. Sowers is identified on an NAACP website as a member of the Tunica County NAACP Executive Committee…

…Sowers was found guilty of voting in the names of Carrie Collins, Walter Howard, Sheena Shelton, Alberta Pickett, Draper Cotton and Eddie Davis. She was also convicted of voting in the names of four dead persons: James L. Young, Dora Price, Dorothy Harris, and David Ross.

In the trial, forensic scientist Bo Scales testified that Sowers’s DNA was found on the inner seals of five envelopes containing absentee ballots…

This is why we on the right want people to show ID when voting and why we want voter rolls purged of dead, moved or invalid voters.  Doing so would make it exceptionally more difficult for a criminal like Sowers to operate.  Naturally, our liberals are opposed to this for that very reason – if we make voter fraud difficult, it will impinge upon liberals’ ability to cheat.

It is my contention – backed up by the amount of research Matt and I did in writing Caucus of Corruption – that voter fraud is endemic to the Democrat party.  It is not a bizarre event; it is not something which some times occurs in the heat of political battle…it is carefully organized and done in such a way that whenever a vote comes close, Democrats can count upon a pool of bogus votes to put them over the top.  I believe that in all voting districts where Democrats have any sort of control, the cheating is systemic…even in areas where they are sure to win as a sort of “just in case” assurance.

This first came to my attention in 2000 when I got down and dirty in to Florida precinct returns and noted a bunch of precincts which had 90% or better turn out with 90% or more of their votes going for Al Gore.  In the normal course of events, this just doesn’t happen…90% of any group more than a 20 simply cannot make it to any event (you’ll note this each time you set up a dinner party at your house) and you don’t get 90% of the votes going one way except when you’re cheating; there simply isn’t that level of unanimity in politics.  You might get 90% voting in favor of motherhood (and that is a “might”), but outside of that sort of thing, people tend to disagree.  This told me that a certain percentage of the votes being cast were bogus…and then I just paid attention since then, and noted it more and more often.

Dead voters, multiple registrations, illegal voters, ballots being “discovered” by Democrats in just sufficient numbers to put their guy over the top.  Absentee ballots have become an especially strong tool for fraud (in my view, only active duty military, police, firefighters and emergency responders should be allowed absentee ballots…everyone can just get to the polls, or don’t vote).  This conviction is just the very tip of a gigantic iceberg – quite honestly, we should investigate every race where the margin of victory was less than 1%…doesn’t matter who won, just investigate it…place the balloting under the microscope.  I bet you’ll find questionable votes throughout the system, and I’ll bet almost all of them will eventually be traced to liberal persons and groups.

We must bring an end to this – and here’s how we do it:

1.  Require all voter registration be done in person.  No mail in registration, no people sent out in to the streets to collect registrations.  If you want to register to vote, get yourself to a voter registration office, present your ID and some sort of proof of address, and register.  Yes, this is a bit difficult…but voting is a responsibility as much as a right, and if you wish to exercise the right you’ll have to take the responsibility to get your registration done.  All voters must register at least 6 months in front of election day in order to ensure that there is time for random registration checks to be done by election officials.  All persons registering to vote must swear to their legal ability to vote and the correctness of the information provided on penalty of one year in jail for lying.

2.  Require all voters to present their picture ID before voting.  Once a person has voted, have them dip their right index finger in blue ink.

3.  Voter rolls must be purged every other year.  The voter registration bureaucrats must send out letter requiring a response from all registered voters.  All letters returned or un-answered will result in that person being purged from the voter rolls.  All voter rolls must be bounced against lists of convicted criminals and anyone convicted of a felony must be purged.  All voter rolls must be bounced against a registrar of deaths since the last election and all deceased persons must be purged.

That would do it – we would ensure that almost all votes cast in any election would be legitimate.  Do not tax me with whines about how this would be unfair to this or that voting group…first off, I don’t buy the liberal-racist view that ethnic minorities aren’t smart enough to register to vote and present a picture ID.  Secondly, we must ensure that only those allowed to vote participate in our elections and that no illegal votes are counted.  If we are to be a democratically governed republic, the security of our vote is an absolute requirement…and the need for integrity in voting trumps every other consideration.

Enough of this liberal voter fraud.

Debt Deal Done, Fake Crisis Averted

Mark Noonan11 Comments

Hot Air has the details – it mostly works out to a defeat for the left as it looks like they didn’t get tax hikes, didn’t get as much new debt ceiling as they wanted and were prevented from gutting defense.  The deal was done because, in the end, Obama saw his approval rating cratering and wanted to stop the bleeding – some times you do have to let a crisis go to waste.  Especially when you made one up out of whole cloth.

The real budget crisis comes in 2015 or so if we don’t significantly cut spending by then.  While Obama is President, we won’t be able to do that – so the whole solution to our real budget crisis is to get Obama out of the White House in 2012.

Budget Deal in the Works

Mark Noonan61 Comments

From the AP:

Officials say the White House and Republican leaders in Congress are making significant progress toward a last-minute agreement to avoid a default threatened for next week.

These officials say the two sides are discussing a plan to raise the debt limit by about $2.4 trillion and enact spending cuts of a slightly larger amount in two stages.

The deal under discussion would also require Congress to vote on a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, but not require its approval.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the discussions.

Ed Morrissey over at Hot Air surmises that, finally, Obama is actually willing to state what he wants – what he will sign.  In other words, we’re finally getting a White House plan for the debt.  All this time we’ve been pretty much working in a void because Obama never indicated what was actually acceptable to him…and it seems that Reid had actually  signed on to the GOP plan, at Obama’s behest, only to be told at the last minute by Obama that he wouldn’t sign it.

My feeling is that Obama was hoping that the looming crisis (which is entirely fake, by the way) would force the GOP to cave and they’d go ahead and either give him a “clean” debt ceiling increase through 2013 or, at least, go along with some tax hikes.  As it became clear that GOP would give him neither of these things – and as Obama’s approval rating has cratered through this mess – I think that someone finally got Obama to realize that he had to defuse this manufactured crisis…make it go away before the worst of all things happened:  Tuesday arrived and the world didn’t end.

For our side, we’ve done well – we’ve laid down the marker for future budget negotiations and demonstrated conclusively that the GOP – at least in its TEA Party element – will not back down from a fight.

“Never let a crisis go to waste” was Obama’s watchword from day one…even if he had to make up a crisis.  But now Obama has learned that dishonesty can only carry you so far.