A Bit of Reality About China

Mark Noonan5 Comments

Kevin Williamson notes Romney’s talk about China and trade and has this to say:

…Mr. Romney, in Ohio, did the usual song-and-dance number about China’s currency manipulation, tariffs, etc. Mr. Romney might want to reflect that he’s running for president of the United States of America, which is at the moment involved in one of history’s remarkable episodes of currency manipulation. Perhaps Mr. Romney could give Ben Bernanke a call and have him run through the details.

Much more sensible than Romney’s speech in Ohio is his short video on the same subject, which features a gentleman named Steve Cohen, who runs a manufacturing business, Screen Machine Industries. Mr. Cohen doesn’t much talk about currency manipulation or tariffs. Instead, he talks mostly about the real, legitimate, actionable beef that American firms have with the Chi-Comms: their rampant, degenerate thievery. China is a nation of pickpockets, a crime-wave with a flag. The hijacking of foreign intellectual property by Chinese thieves, including those running businesses connected to the government, ought to be front-and-center in our trade discussions…

Which is all very true, but doesn’t get at the heart of it – our trade negotiations with China should actually revolve around how we de-couple our economy from theirs.  China is ruled by a corrupt, cruel oligarchy which doesn’t actually care about the Chinese people – and they care even less about us, save in how much then can steal.  While China’s economy is talked up as the new paradigm, it is actually riddled with bad debt and doomed to a spectacular crash – something which will make the end of Japan, Inc. in the late 1980’s look like a walk in the park.  Having our economy tied to China’s means we’re at the economic mercy of people who are robbing their own people blind while conniving at the theft of American wealth by Chinese firms given the go-ahead by the government of China.

The bottom line is even if you hold that we have to import our manufactured goods from low wage nations (an absurd statement, but those who want to ship our jobs overseas never tire of making it), we can do better by ourselves if we imported from nations more friendly to us – India, for instance.  There is no good in the China trade – just an erosion of our wealth, the strengthening of an anti-human dictatorship and world of hurt when the crash comes (which might come with war as the Chinese oligarchs cast about for a means to distract their own people).  Over a period of a few years (no more than five) we should progressively increase tariffs on Chinese goods until they are entirely priced out of the American market.  Meanwhile, we should do all in our power to discharge our debt to China and prohibit, after a date certain, the redemption of American bonds held by Chinese citizens, corporate entities or government bodies (so even if they buy them from third parties, they’ll never get another dime from us).   No more trade with China – not until they institute free, fair elections and develope a government of reliable laws.

It is time we woke up to the realities of the world – and one of the main realities is that the United States cannot afford to have dealings with tyrannical regimes.  Free people should seek to do business with their like – not with the pirate masters of slave labor.

Obamunism! Economy Slows Down

Mark Noonan110 Comments

From the AP:

The economy worsened in much of the country earlier this summer, hampered by high unemployment, weak home sales and signs of a slowdown in manufacturing.

A survey by the Federal Reserve, released Wednesday, found that weak consumer spending, slow job growth and tight credit are restraining growth into the second half of the year.

Growth slowed in eight of the Fed’s 12 bank regions in June and early July, the report found, compared with the spring. That marked the worst showing this year…

Mish has some of the sad details of an economy wobbling towards recession.  The bottom line is that Obama’s program didn’t work.  All that spending, all that printed money – all it brought us was a few quarters of bogus “growth”.  It could be that another round of spending and printing would keep things going for a while – but the cost would be prohibitive.  It would almost guarantee a round of high inflation, while the additional debt could push us in to bankruptcy as early as late 2012.  There are no more things for Big Government to do – its all been done and it has all failed.

Whether or not we tumble in to official recession – as defined by government statistics – remains to be see.  At all events, we won’t get an official word of recession until some time next year, at the earliest (government will guess about what the unemployment rate is, but will not guess when a recession has started…they have to have rock solid facts, and that takes 6 to 9 months to show up).  But the people know full well what is going on – the economy is slumping, jobs are extraordinarily hard to find, prices are causing a pinch to stressed family budgets, and there is no sign of improvement on the horizon.  Unless there is a massive and totally unexpected turn around, Obama will carry this struggling economy in to 2012.

 

 

The Boehner Plan 2.0

Mark Noonan10 Comments

According to the CBO (PDF) it would:

…reduce budget deficits by $915 billion between 2012 and 2021 relative to CBO’s March 2011 baseline adjusted for subsequent appropriations action…

Not much, but it is a genuine reduction in spending and of nearly a trillion dollars.

Boys and girls, fellow conservatives and allied libertarians, this is the best we’re going to get while Reid runs the Senate and Obama wields the veto pen.  We’ve won – we’ve forced the GOP to stand firm against tax hikes and hold out for genuine reductions in spending.  If Boehner can get this through the House, then our duty will be to put as much pressure as we can on the Senate to pass it.  That done, it doesn’t matter what Obama does – sign or veto, it still works out to a victory for us.

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  Sure, I’d like to lop off a trillion from the 2012 budget, but that just isn’t going to happen. No matter how annoying it is, we still have to abide by the results of the 2008 election in the White House and the Senate.  So, accept this deal – and then let’s get in to 2012 where we’ll fight to get a White House and a Senate which will cut a trillion out of the 2013 budget.

Wasserman Schultz: GOP Seeks a “Dictatorship”

Mark Noonan17 Comments

More of that good, old “new tone”.  From Politico:

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), chair of the Democratic National Committee, said Wednesday that House Republicans are trying to impose “dictatorship” through their tactics in the debt-ceiling negotiations. She said the GOP rhetoric could “spark panic and chaos,” which she called “potentially devastating” to the economy…

‘Cause Obamunism has been so good for the economy, I guess…and, about that dictatorship thing:

After being squeezed out of the debt talks, Barack Obama told Latinos today, “I’d Like to Bypass Congress and Change the Rules on My Own.”

I bet you would like that, Barry – could really have a “living Constitution” then, couldn’t we?  Deep in the heart of every liberal, there is a tyrant struggling to break out.

Youth Vote Abandons Obama

Mark Noonan6 Comments

From Michael Barone over at the Washington Examiner:

…there has been big movement among whites. In 2008 they were 51 to 40 percent Republican. In the first half of 2011 they were 56 to 35 percent Republican — more Republican than Southern whites were three years ago.

The most noteworthy movement among whites has been among voters under 30, the so-called Millennial generation. Millennials voted 66 to 32 percent for Barack Obama in 2008 and identified as Democrats rather than Republicans by a 60 to 32 percent margin.

But white Millennials have been moving away from the Democrats. The Democratic edge in party identification among white Millennials dropped from 7 points in 2008 to 3 points in 2009 to a 1-point Republican edge in 2010 and an 11-point Republican lead in 2011…

The Obama kool aid just isn’t cutting it, any longer.  The kids were wowed in 2008, but now they’ve got years of experience with Obama’s reality…and being stuck in mom’s basement with a stack of unpaid student loans isn’t helping matters.

No, 2012 will not go like 2008.  Obama can still win if the GOP nominates a weak candidate, but the glory days of Obama are over.  He’s damaged goods – just another hack politician trying to sell people a line.

Blogging for Bucks?

Mark Noonan6 Comments

The Other McCain urged people to help out Zilla  – who apparently needed a few bucks to avert the end of her blog.  Generous people helped out and all is well.  But it got me thinking – do people really blog for money?

Looking around the new version of B4V, I don’t see the “tip jar” that I recall seeing on the old version.  My presumption is that Matt hasn’t found the time to install it, but I don’t know if the old one was ever hit.  I do have one over at Noonan for Nevada, but I’ve never received anything from it.  I don’t even know why I had my cracker-jack tech support team (my stepson) install one on N4N…I guess it is just the convention to have one.

My point here is that I do this for love – I love to write, love to spout off, love to have some give and take of debate.  Love to see all of you here.  Love the notes I get every now and again when someone tells me that what I’ve written had special meaning for them.  Love the fact that for each of you who comment there are hundreds more who come here every day just to read.  When I can’t think of something interesting to write I feel like I’m letting people down.  When I make a mistake I feel like I’ve betrayed a trust.  When I see someone powerful using my exact words to describe a situation I delight in the evidence that they – or, at least, their aides – are checking the blog.  I do this for no money and whether or not I ever make any money at writing, you can count on me doing this until the day I die.  Rely on it, if there isn’t a post by me for a couple days and there wasn’t an announcement that I’m on vacation or some such, then I’m dead.

Don’t get me wrong – if any of you out there are secretly billionaires and want to write a $100,000.00 check to me, I’m going to cash it.  That is Mark Noonan, by the way.  But it wouldn’t change why I blog, or what I blog about, or my opinions.  They say you should do what you love, regardless of whether it is profitable – and when I’m blogging, that is precisely what I’m doing.

Will Someone “Primary” Obama?

Mark Noonan6 Comments

Certainly the Hillary supporters can say that – though if Hillary had won, then Obama supporters would be all “I told you so”, because Hillary is just as much a liberal as Obama and would have pursued the same economic policies…though she might have done better on the whole health care issue, given her past lessons-learned.

But can it happen?  Can there be a serious, Democrat challenger to President Obama?  Andrew Malcolm over at the Los Angeles Times points out some salient facts:

…Strong support among liberal Democrats for Obama’s jobs record has plummeted 22 points from 53% down below a third. African Americans who believe the president’s measures helped the economy have plunged from 77% to barely half.

Obama’s overall job approval on the economy has slid below 40% for the first time, with 57% disapproving. And strong disapprovers outnumber approvers by better than two-to-one.

Those are the sort of numbers which indicate a primary challenger is coming – and as Malcolm points out, Vermont’s socialist Senator, Bernie Sanders, has called for just that.  Trouble is, it just can’t happen.  Even if you are a super-liberal Democrat who is upset that Obama hasn’t been sufficiently leftist (given how socialist he’s been, we conservatives now wonder just how commie a Democrat would have to be to please the Democrat base), you just have to know that (a) you can’t take the nomination away from Obama (the Democrat party is firmly under Obama’s control and even if someone started to do well with the voters, the Democrat leadership would ensure that Obama got the nomination, no matter what) and (b) even if you did by some miracle beat Obama for the nomination you’d go down to crushing defeat in November as Obama supporters (especially among African-Americans) took revenge for you knocking off their guy.  And not only would you not win the Presidency, but the fact that you divided the party would mean a crushing GOP victory all the way down the ballot.

So, no, there won’t be a Democrat primary challenger for Obama – not unless it is entirely a fringe candidate who won’t even get to 10% of the vote.  There will be no replay of Ted Kennedy’s 1980 challenge to Jimmy Carter.  The Democrats are stuck with Obama – they know that in the end it is better to lose with him at the top, if it comes to that, than to divide the party in a quixotic attempt to oust him…they’ll still lose, but lose even worse.

This is the wages of foisting a lie upon the American people.  As I pointed out on September 22nd,  2008:

…Obama is the “Un-Named Democrat” – the stealth candidate who can be all things to all men without being anything concrete to anyone. You want someone who will heal racial divisions? Obama. Re-unite the people of the United States? Obama. End the campaign in Iraq? Obama. Reverse global warming? Obama. Make foreigners love us? Obama. If there’s something about the past 8 years which has gotten on your nerves, Obama is the guy to fix it…not that he’s told you how he’ll fix it…

And he never did tell us how he’d fix it.  He just kept speaking in broad, uplifting generalities while a host of minions (including the MSM) went forth to tell the people that Obama was The One…that his “narrative” was so good, that he was so good looking, that he was so well-spoken…and he’ll fix it all.  Don’t vote for tired, old, white McCain…vote for energetic, young, black Obama.  Come one, just do it – it’ll be great.

But it was all a lie.  Obama wasn’t a post-racial healer; he belonged for 20 years to a racist “church” headed up by a mountebank of the worst order.  Obama didn’t want to re-unite us; he was pledged to “spreading the wealth around” which implies setting one group against another.  Obama couldn’t make foreigners love us; they didn’t hate us because of who was in charge, but because of what the United States is.  On and on – each bit of the Obama narrative false from start to finish.  And now Obama has been in office for two and a half years and people can see that it was a false narrative…but now Democrats can’t get rid of him.  They are lashed to the mast of the SS Obama and if he goes down, they go down with them.

And it serves them right – nothing better in the world than the operation of justice.  Lies brought the Democrats victory in 2008, and those lies will bring them defeat in 2012.

How Would You Balance the Budget?

Mark Noonan19 Comments

Instapundit has an excellent tool where you can fiddle around with spending and taxes and figure out how to balance our budget.  I came up with my plan:

A 20% reduction in military spending.

A 20% reduction in Medicaid spending.

A 74% reduction in non-defense, discretionary spending.

A 10% increase in payroll taxes.

Income and corporate taxes remain as they are, as do Social Security and Medicare spending.

Under this plan, the budget goes in to surplus in 2014 – but has the drawback of going back in to deficit in 2018.  But not nearly as much as we are now – in the $200 billion range.

To me, though, it shows that it can be done – and done by the crucial 2014-15 time frame when we are currently at risk of real default.  Of real national bankruptcy.

The drawback of the tool is that it isn’t finely tuned enough – I’m sure I could find things to significantly cut the Social Security/Medicare budget without lowering benefits.  Essentially, that is why I had to cut non-defense, discretionary spending so much.  I cut defense on the rock-solid theory that there is a lot which can be cut there without affecting readiness.  As for my cuts to Medicaid, I am certain that if we block granted out funds to charitable hospitals and medical facilities, we can provide superior care to the poor at lower cost – the huge bureaucracy we use now to do it is likely eating up a huge amount of money, mis-allocating resources and generally screwing things up.  People who actually do health care can likely do it better than the bureaucrats in charge.  I don’t think we’d actually go back in to deficit under a plan really crafted by me, down to the penny (and what we really need for this discussion is a line by line list of budget items…give us the dollars and cents spent on each department and bureau along with the subsidiary organizations, all grants, all scheduled payments to contractors as well as how much we pay each employee and a description of what they do…then we can really figure out what to cut).

In reality, I think we can get to a surplus by 2015 – and keep up a $500 billion a year surplus for as long as we need to pay off our debts for good (and, remember, even if we’re even – no surplus, no deficit – we’re paying off debt…the big surplus devoted to debt repayment means we’d be out of debt by 2015 or so; and then we can slash taxes like no tomorrow). And that must be the goal – followed by a constitutional amendment prohibiting the government from issuing bonds except during a declared state of war.

Anyways, play around with it, yourselves – see what you can come up with.

For a Change of Pace and Ironic Justice: Kerry Spokesman Stripped of Silver Star

tiredoflibbs9 Comments

John F. Kerry almost became president running on the basis of his alleged heroism in Vietnam. Thanks to the efforts of a group of truth-tellers, the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, the serious holes in the fantasy narrative propounded by the Kerry campaign came to the attention of enough Americans that John Kerry was not the first faux-Irish President of the United States.

One of Kerry’s enablers in propounding his imaginary heroism was a man named Wade Sanders, who himself held a Silver Star, and who introduced Kerry to the Democratic Convention. Scott Swett, who was central to the unraveling of the Kerry storyline, tells us that the Kerry enabler has been exposed for what he is. His Winter Soldier site has the details:

John Kerry was introduced at the 2004 Democratic National Convention by Wade Sanders, a retired Navy Captain and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy who served as a Swift Boat officer in Vietnam. Like Kerry, Sanders was the recipient of a Silver Star for gallantry in action. During the 2004 campaign, Sanders functioned as Kerry lead attack dog against the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, repeatedly denouncing the veterans on the air as liars and comparing them to Nazi propagandists.

Wade Sanders is now in Federal prison, serving a 37-month sentence for possessing child pornography. Now the Navy Times reports that Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus has revoked Sanders’ Silver Star. The highly unusual decision appears unrelated to Sanders’ felony conviction. A Navy spokesman cited “subsequently determined facts and evidence surrounding both the incident for which the award was made and the processing of the award itself.” John Kerry has to be hoping this doesn’t become a trend.

As one might imagine, the media has ignored this story. Even the Navy Times declined to post its own article online.

HAT TIP: The American Thinker and Thomas Lifson

UPDATE: Here is the Sanders sentencing memorandum. Horrific.

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I have a prediction….. let’s wait to see if it comes true.


Wu Resigns

Mark Noonan28 Comments

From CBS:

Rep. David Wu, D-Ore., announced his resignation today following allegations he engaged in “aggressive and unwanted sexual behavior” with a young woman.

“The time has come to hand on the privilege of high office,” Wu said in a statement. “I cannot care for my family the way I wish while serving in Congress and fighting these very serious allegations.”

Wu said that his resignation would be effective upon the resolution of the debt ceiling crisis…

The man should never have been re-elected last year – had his staff cared more about the people  of Washington, and even cared about Wu, they would have revealed before the election that Wu was not fit to be a Congressman.  This whole incident might not have happened had someone done the right thing.

Hopefully Wu will now get the mental and spiritual counseling he needs – and, of course, deal with the sexual allegations.  Meanwhile, we need to find out some way to hammer Congressional staffers who essentially conspire to cover-up their boss’ problems.  The staffers ultimately work for us, not for the Representative and they have no right, in my view, to remain silent when serious problems become noticeable about an office holder.