Freedom Line Blog

Even after recent declines, the level of unemployment claims is higher than one would expect it to be if private nonfarm payrolls were really poised to begin sustained gains.”

That is the observation of Joshua Shapiro, an economist at MFR Inc., speaking about the employment and economic climate more than one year after Barack Obama’s trillion-dollar borrow-and-tax-and-spend “stimulus.”

Mr. Shapiro’s assessment echoes a a survey of economists released by the National Association of Business Economics (NABE) this week.  Almost 75% of surveyed economists reported that Obama’s “stimulus” had no effect on the nation’s natural economic healing cycle or employment:

About 73% of those surveyed said employment at their company is neither higher nor lower as a result of the $787 billion Recovery Act, which the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers says is on track to create or save 3.5 million jobs by the end of the year.  That sentiment is shared for the recently passed $17.7 billion jobs bill that calls for tax breaks for businesses that hire and additional infrastructure spending.  More than two-thirds of those polled believe the measure won’t affect payrolls, while 30% expect it to boost hiring ‘moderately.'”

In other words, Obama pointlessly heaped almost $1 trillion more upon our nation’s unsustainable debt to be repaid via some toxic combination of future borrowing and higher taxes.  In pushing that “stimulus,” he promised that it would keep unemployment under 8%, but unemployment continues to fester at 10% and economists say that the “stimulus” had no effect on employment or the natural cyclical recovery.

An addendum to our Liberty Update commentary piece this week, which highlights the absurdity of Obama advocating greater power for government and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over the American economy.

We noted in our commentary that the latest Pew Research poll shows an American electorate increasingly distrustful of government since Obama entered the White House.  We also noted that the SEC’s recent record of utter incompetence in stopping Ponzi schemes like that of Bernie Madoff, as well as its inability to foresee or prevent the latest economic bubble, suggest that the last thing the struggling American economy needs is even more centralized government control.

We couldn’t have timed our commentary more perfectly, as America wakes up this morning to the news that SEC personnel were wasting thousands upon thousands of hours surfing for pornography rather than actually doing the job that our tax dollars pay them to do.  As one example, an SEC accountant attempted to access a blocked porn site 16,000 times, and many of the SEC staffs’ actions occurred even after the financial bubble burst.

Yet Obama, the man with such paltry private-sector experience or knowledge, sanctimoniously lectures us that he and the SEC should be granted even more authority?

Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has earned high praise from conservatives by making good so far on his promise to clean up the state’s fiscal debacle using established conservative principles.  Christie inherited a $2.2 billion deficit this year and a projected $10.7 billion deficit for next year (over 1/3 of the total budget size), but has managed to cut $13 billion in spending in just eight weeks.  In so doing, he has naturally enraged the usual leftist entitlement class and unionized public employees.

Notably, however, Governor Christie has attracted some support from state Senate President Stephen Sweeney, who is a Democrat and leader of a local private-sector union.  The reason?  Perhaps Mr. Sweeney has recognized that the same public-sector unions whose exorbitant wages and benefits busted New Jersey’s budget also eat into the wages and livelihoods of private-sector union members who pay taxes to subsidize those public sector employees.

Now that the number of public-sector union members exceeds the number of private -sector union members, could we be witnessing the first signs of an intra-labor deathmatch?  This could be interesting…

“So stupid that a caveman might do it.” 

That’s not the slogan of Geico Insurance, but it could be the tagline for its former voiceover spokesman Lance Baxter, a.k.a. “D. C. Douglas.” 

According to reports, Baxter called Tea Party-supporting Freedom Works last month to sarcastically inquire about the number of staffers who were “mentally retarded” and how the organization would react when a Tea Partier “killed someone.”  Geico has dropped Baxter as a spokesman, and in true whining leftist form, he is apparently threatening to sue it.  According to Baxter, he left the voicemail with Freedom Works because of the alleged (but still unsupported) “recent gay and racial slurs slung by Tea Party members at Congressman Barney Frank and Representative John  Lewis during the healthcare reform weekend.” 

Memo to Mr. Baxter:  millions of Americans have joined the Tea Party movement and participated in its gatherings, but no person has produced evidence in support of your allegation.  Further, we don’t recall you expressing the same concerns about violent left-wing protests such as anti-globalization rallies or movies about assassinating George W. Bush. 

That was very stupid of you, Mr. Baxter.  So stupid that a caveman would do it.

In his best Alice in Wonderland attempt to facilitate the Obama Agenda, Ezra Klein of The Washington Post explains the bailout provision of the Senate’s proposed financial regulation bill and determines that “it isn’t a bailout.”

Klein begins with the rationalization that the bill’s $50 bailout provision “isn’t a lot of money” compared to the $700 billion TARP bill and the House’s $150 resolution fund.  Gee, now that you put it that way, we suppose it’s OK?  Rather than characterize Klein’s logic, we’ll simply accept his own description of the bailout process:

The FDIC takes over the banks.  The $50 billion fund is used to keep the lights on while all this happens.”

In other words, Mr. Kelein, the $50 billion fund subsidizes operations and pays the bills during bureaucratic takeover of an enterprise that should have instead faced the stark prospect of certain failure for its own decisions.  In other words, it continues operations while federal regulators take their time in determining their preferred political outcome.  Protecting reckless enterprises against the consequences of immediate and certain failure will only encourage the very moral hazard that incentivized such recklessness in the first place.  That’s precisely the problem with Washington’s bailout culture.

Columnist Mark Steyn points out that Obama may actually be more naive than British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938.  As Steyn notes, at least Chamberlain included the world’s greatest threat to peace at the time, Adolf Hitler, among the list of signatories to his ineffectual Munich treaty.  In contrast, Obama hosted a pointless nuclear summit last week that excluded the world’s most dangerous nuclear aspirant, Iran.

Congratulations, Mr. Obama.

In 1938, naive Western leaders fell for Adolf Hitler’s pretextual “land for peace” ruse.  Is the same delusion afflicting Barack Obama today?

Hitler had used the Sudetenland, an ethnically German region ceded to Czechoslovakia following World War I, as a synthetic grievance to justify his program of expansionism and rearmament.  Credulous leaders like Britain’s Neville Chamberlain believed that satisfying Hitler’s ethnic territorial grievance could resolve simmering European disaccord, so they agreed to allow annexation by Hitler.  In a lasting monument to weakness in the face of tyranny, Chamberlain waved the treaty proclaiming “peace in our time.”

Some things don’t change, despite cautionary pleas of “never again.”

Today, Israel stands in a position similar to Czechoslovakia in 1938, and Western leaders suffer a similar “land for peace” delusion.  Israel’s enemies want nothing less than Israel’s annihilation, but people like Obama somehow believe that the key to Middle East peace is forcing Israel to cede territory to its Palestinian antagonists.  Obama expresses more anger toward Israeli construction of apartments within its own territory than he does toward terrorist rocket attacks against Israeli schoolyards, sadly.  Just last week, Obama claimed that, “when conflict breaks out … that ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure.”

The reality?  America has never once sent troops to shed blood for Israel, which has done quite well defending itself, thank you very much.  Moreover, Israeli surrender of strategic land will only embolden those bent on its destruction.

A tip for President Obama:  spend a little less time preparing your NCAA basketball tournament brackets for ESPN, and a little more time understanding rudimentary history of tyranny’s tactics.

Remember the iconic 1978 movie Animal House?  In it, Kevin Bacon plays a tormented fraternity pledge stripped to his tightie-whitie underwear and forced to respond to each swat of the paddle by screaming, “Thank you, sir!  May I have another?”

In Obama’s new America, life apparently imitates Animal House.  Speaking at a partisan fundraiser, Obama once again descended into his petty trash-talking persona, saying that instead of protesting oversized government and tax burdens on April 15, Tea Party protesters should have been saying “thank you” to him.  That’s not a misprint – we should be thanking Obama for our current federal tax system. Here is the video:

obama-mocks-tea-partiers-you-would-think-theyd-be-saying-thank-you

No, Mr. President.  American taxpayers have already been stripped to their proverbial underwear, just like Kevin Bacon’s pledge.  We’re not going to respond with “thank you, sir, may I have another?”  No, we’re going to swat back come November.

In order to substantiate their alarmism and political agenda, global warming activists must explain why current warming or cooling is any different than other warming or cooling periods throughout Earth’s history. The Ice Age, after all, receded long before moms began carting their kids to soccer practice in SUVs.  Similarly, today’s frozen areas were once swampy jungles.  The only constant throughout the world’s climate history has been change, illustrating the absurdity of the very term “climate change.”  After all, that’s what the climate does continually – it changes.

So what do global warming alarmists do?  They exaggerate historical temperature data to suggest that current trends are somehow more pronounced than previous periods of climate change.  Specifically, they concocted the “hockey stick” graph, which graphs climate data to show a sudden temperature jolt in the shape of a hockey stick.  Without it, they cannot distinguish one period of climate change from any other.

Unfortunately for them, Britain’s leading statistician has concluded that the “hockey stick” was “exaggerated” and was compiled using “inappropriate methods.”  Professor David Hand of the Royal Statistical Society issued his conclusion as part of a larger report on the “Climategate” scandal, which stated that, “it is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians.”  Predictably, Professor Hand apologetically attempted to avoid hysterical blowback from the global warming crowd by adding that the data “show a clear warming signal.”  But climate realists don’t deny that the globe doesn’t periodically warm and cool.  Without the debunked “hockey stick,” though, environmental extremists’ claims are no different than their discredited “global cooling” claims of the 1970s.

More “inconvenient truths” for Al Gore and the synthetic global warming industry.

Recall the flimsy, grand promises that candidate Barack Obama used to get himself elected in 2008:

We’ve been living beyond our means, and we’re going to have to make some adjustments.  Now, what I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut.”

Obama made that promise during the third presidential debate in October 2008, well after the onset of the financial crisis that he now uses as an all-purpose alibi.  Accordingly, Obama’s apologists cannot claim that current realities were unforeseen when he made that statement.  Indeed, Obama himself pronounced during that same debate, “I think everybody understands at this point that we are experiencing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.”  One wonders whether Obama thought for even a moment about what would happen if he ultimately won and was forced to make good on his “hope and change” promises.

Regardless, the collision between Obama’s frivolous promises and reality continued this week.  The Treasury Department has announced that March 2010 marked a record 18th consecutive month in which the federal government posted a budget deficit.  This despite the fact that federal “bailout” spending has declined, meaning not even that can be scapegoated by the Obama Administration.  March’s $65 billion deficit also exceeded the Congressional Budget Office’s projected $62 billion deficit, and the first half 2010 fiscal year deficit now stands at $717 billion, only slightly below last year’s $781 billion first half deficit.

We’re witnessing “change,” but certainly not of the “hopeful” variety.

Activists who favor so-called “Net Neutrality,” which would actually make the federal government suddenly non-neutral in overregulating the Internet, possess a natural advantage in the battle for public opinion simply because the term “Net Neutrality” sounds so innocuous.  After all, people unfamiliar with the issue might think to themselves, “what could be so bad about ‘neutrality?'”  Consequently, it became very important for Americans to realize the true nature of this toxic agenda currently being advanced by the Obama Administration, his Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the political left.

For this reason, the results of a new Rasmussen poll are extremely encouraging.  By a two-to-one margin (53% to 27%), Americans oppose governmental “Net Neutrality” efforts to regulate the Internet in the same way the government seeks to regulate the airwaves via the “Fairness Doctrine.”  Most impressively, this means that public support for “Net Neutrality” has plummeted some 22% since June 2008.  Notably, among those who use the Internet either every day or nearly every day, opposition to “Net Neutrality” rises to 63%.  In other words, those who are most familiar with the Internet and use it most often oppose “Net Neutrality” even more strongly.  They know that “Net Neutrality” advocates’ constant doomsday predictions have been proven nonsense.  Opposition also increases among investors, who realize that “Net Neutrality” would undermine the incentives to continue investment and network expansion, which will be necessary for future Internet growth in America.  That speaks volumes.

The fight isn’t over, despite public opposition and a Court of Appeals decision last week rejecting the FCC’s alleged authority to impose “Net Neutrality.”  Obama’s FCC responded to the Court’s decision in Nancy Pelosi-like fashion, indicating that it will attempt to impose “Net Neutrality” by any means necessary.  Nevertheless, these are encouraging signs in this important battle.

Many Americans unfortunately view elections in too limited a perspective, assuming that mistakes can simply be reversed at the next election cycle.  Today’s announcement by United States Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens that he will retire reminds us that elections can be far more consequential and long-lasting than many voters assume.

Less than halfway into his tenure, Barack Obama will already have nominated almost one-quarter of the Supreme Court.  That is an enormous impact for the most radical President in American history.  Last year, his “empathetic” nominee Sonya Sotomayor saw her most notable ruling, the New Haven firefighter “affirmative action” decision, embarrassingly reversed by the Supreme Court in the midst of her confirmation process.  Yet she was nevertheless confirmed.  The fact that these are lifetime appointments makes this fact all the more alarming.

Our collective task in the upcoming months is to ensure that:  (1) the dangerous judicial philosophy of Obama’s nominee is fairly and thoroughly illuminated, (2) that we stand up for the principles of individual freedom and Constitutional fidelity just as strongly as we stood against ObamaCare in nearly stopping it despite overwhelming Democrat majorities, and (3) that Americans’ eyes are opened to the way in which Obama seeks to alter America for decades into the future.  This important battle now begins.

Congressman Bart Stupak (D – Michigan), whose “I voted against the bill before I voted for it” sellout proved pivotal in foisting ObamaCare upon America, now announces he will not run for reelection this November.

So tell us, Congressman – was it all worth it?  You initially took a principled stand against ObamaCare, but then sold out your own cause on the basis of a promise from Barack Obama to issue an executive order, which doesn’t carry the force of Congressional law.  This is the same Barack Obama who promised during his campaign to abide by public campaign finance limitations, then changed his mind when that became politically inconvenient.  The same Barack Obama who opposed Hillary Clinton’s healthcare proposal because it imposed an individual mandate, but whose ultimate bill included that same individual mandate.

Now, even Politico comments that “without Stupak on the ballot, the seat becomes an immediate pickup opportunity for Republicans.”  In other words, even Nancy Pelosi now knows how it feels to be blindsided by Bart Stupak.

How will we halt the growth of big government when a majority of citizens contribute less than they receive in benefits from the state?

As Congressman Paul Ryan (R – Wisconsin) and others note, when that “tipping point” is reached, it will incentivize voters to perpetually increase government spending and taxes, since “the rich” are the only ones paying for the largess.  Unfortunately, we continue to approach that dangerous point in America.  According to the Tax Policy Center, an astonishing 47% of Americans owed the federal government no income taxes in 2009.  In other words, almost half of Americans are immune from actually paying income tax for the benefits everyone enjoys, such as national defense, education, police, fire and highways.  Moreover, despite absurd claims that “the rich don’t pay their fair share,” the top 10% of income earners pay almost 75% of the nation’s income taxes.  In contrast, the bottom 40% of income earners actually profit from the federal income tax, because they receive more dollars in tax credits than they otherwise owe.

Those on the left welcome this phenomenon, because it encourages voters to further enlarge the nanny state (as in, Nanny Pelosi state?).  And why not?  The suckers who actually work hard and increase their incomes will have to pay for it all, anyway.

Marking a very welcome victory for individual liberty and the free market, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has ruled that the Federal Communications Commission does not possess the authority to impose bureaucratic “Net Neutrality” rules upon the Internet sector. 

Net Neutrality’s looming regulatory encroachment into the Internet, which has thrived like no other sector of the American economy precisely because regulators have generally maintained a “hands-off” approach, threatened to stifle broadband investment and expansion.  Fortunately, a unanimous Court ruled that, “the commission has failed to tie its assertion of ancillary authority over Comcast’s Internet service to any statutorily mandated responsibility.”

For months, Barack Obama has promised to turn his focus toward job creation, but instead obsessed over destructive agenda items like ObamaCare and alienating our international allies like Israel and Britain.  Meanwhile, unemployment festers at approximately 10% despite Obama’s promises over a year ago that it would not exceed 7.8% under his borrow-and-spend “stimulus” program.

So what is the Obama Administration doing now to address American jobs?

Encourage more legal action against employers.

Obama’s Labor Department Secretary Hilda Solis announced last week its “We Can Help!” program, which encourages employees to pursue legal claims against their employers.  This program promises “the use of Spanish/English bilingual public service announcements — featuring activist Dolores Huerta and actors Jimmy Smits and Esai Morales” in order to “address such topics as rights in the workplace and how to file a complaint with the Wage and Hour Division.”

Yes, just the thing to reduce burdens on strapped employers and encourage job creation – more litigation and bureaucratic persecution of private businesses.  Never mind that swarms of ambulance-chasing litigators stand ready to wrench nuisance dollars from employers via litigation – the Obama Administration seems to believe that the pressing issue in our employment picture is not enough employer prosecution.  This program will merely divert employers’ resources toward litigating these cases, taking even more money away from the job creation that our economy needs so desperately.

After a bloody Civil War that split the nation and killed 620,000, America sought to settle the divisive issue of race once and for all by amending the Constitution to explicitly guarantee “equal protection of the laws.”  Despite that straightforward text, liberals during the past four decades have fomented the Orwellian idea that race-based unequal protection under the law somehow constitutes equal protection under the law.

In a brief filed this month with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Fisher v. University of Texas, the Obama Administration has unsurprisingly opted for the latter, supporting continuation of a racist admission system instead of equal rights.  Currently, the university literally flags each applicant’s file based upon his or her race, in order to undertake what it deceptively labels a “holistic” evaluation process.  In other words, admissions officers assess candidates’ skin color in order to reach whatever racial result they sanctimoniously deem appropriate.

A closely-divided United States Supreme Court sanctioned this discriminatory procedure in one of its more curious decisions of the past decade.  In the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision, the Court ruled that universities could consider race as a “plus” factor to achieve what it called a “critical mass” of racial diversity.  Preposterously, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that “we expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”  Well, that statement was made approximately 25 years after the Supreme Court condoned the same “holistic” race-based process in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, but somehow 25 more years were necessary.  Moreover, seven years have passed since O’Connor made that statement, yet the issue remains just as divisive despite the election of an African-American President, of all things.

What has changed since that date, however, is that Justice O’Connor has been replaced by Justice Samuel Alito.  Accordingly, a majority may now exist to declare that “equal protection of the laws” means what it says, and fulfill Justice John Roberts’s wise declaration that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Within days of ObamaCare’s passage, AT&T, Caterpillar and other American employers announced hundreds of millions of dollars in earnings writedowns pursuant to U.S. accounting laws.  Although Democrats falsely claim that these restatements are mere political attacks aimed at Barack Obama, the simple fact is that they are legally required to report the corporate costs of ObamaCare’s tax increase on the retiree drug benefits that they pay each year. Specifically, the Financial Standard Accounting Board’s 1990 Statement Number 106 mandates earnings restatements due to anticipated future retiree liabilities.  If these employers did not report the writedowns, they’d be prosecuted.

The most despicable reaction of all, however, may be that of two Congressmen who played a critical role in imposing ObamaCare in the first place.  Henry Waxman (D – California) and Bart Stupak (D – Michigan), those two profiles in cowardice and malevolence, have now demanded the CEOs of AT&T, John Deere, Caterpillar and Prudential appear to justify themselves before their committee.   According to their letter, “the new law is designed to expand coverage and bring down costs, so your assertions are a matter of concern.”

In other words, who are you going to believe – Henry Waxman, Bart Stupak, Barack Obama and their doctored Congressional Budget Office predictions, or your own actual bottom line and real-world numbers? Every person with a grain of sense anticipated the negative consequences of ObamaCare, but such effects seem to have blindsided ObamaCare’s advocates.

More generally, who are Henry Waxman and Bart Stupak to be hauling the CEOs of some of America’s most valuable and successful companies to Capitol Hill to explain themselves?  Shouldn’t it be the other way around?  How many jobs have Waxman and Stupak created in their lives compared to AT&T, Caterpillar, John Deere and others?  How many successful products have Waxman and Stupak contributed to the world economy and human progress?  Why aren’t the CEOs the ones hauling Waxman and Stupak to explain their retrograde economic views and the destruction that they are wreaking on America, rather than vice-versa?  Why aren’t Waxman and Stupak explaining their toxic behavior to a nationwide audience?

We live in an increasingly Orwellian era, and the sheer weight of absurdity may soon cause a snap.

Imagine a new federal regulatory commission including lifetime appointees to investigate officials for alleged violation of “international human rights treaties,” including those  “related to the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina or to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.”

It’s not merely farce.  It’s proposed federal legislation supported by approximately 50 activist organizations to remake the United States Commission on Civil Rights, which was established in 1957 to combat illegal and unconstitutional discrimination within the U.S.  This proposed new commission, the brainchild of former Civil Rights Commission chair Mary Frances Berry and organizations calling themselves the “Campaign for a New Domestic Human Rights Agenda,” would also be empowered to “monitor U.S. compliance with international treaty obligations.”  Most ominously, though, this leftist boondoggle would “recommend new legislation and ‘encourage adoption’ of conventions to which the U.S. is not currently a party.”

It’s not bad enough that Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency is attempting a backdoor implementation of the Kyoto Protocol and global warming agenda?  It’s not enough that so-called gun “control” activists seek to impose United Nations-style infringements upon our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms?  It’s not bad enough that the Obama Administration and its leftist cheerleaders advocated prosecution of Bush Administration officials who assisted our war against terrorism?

Not according to the left, apparently, in its continuing onslaught to control every minute aspect of our lives and eliminate whatever degree of American sovereignty and exceptionalism remains after Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid exhaust themselves.

Welcome to the ObamaCare hangover, America.

In his weekly Main Street column entitled “The Tax Police and the Health Care Mandate,” Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn points out a malignant paradox within ObamaCare.  Namely, that ObmaCare’s infamous individual mandate (which compels uninsured Americans to suddenly purchase insurance under penalty of prosecution) will have one of two consequences.  It will either (1) penalize poorer Americans who fail – or find themselves unable – to purchase insurance by unleashing a horde of IRS enforcers upon them;  or, alternatively, (2) remain lightly enforced in order to avoid punishing the poor, thereby escalating our collective taxpayer cost into the stratosphere.

The rationale behind the individual mandate, of course, is that many of ObamaCare’s provisions, such as forcing insurers to cover people with preexisting conditions, would make its total cost unaffordable unless healthier and younger uninsured Americans were required to buy coverage.  McGurn notes that Obama was against this individual mandate before he was for it, opposing it during the 2008 Democrat primaries against Hillary Clinton, but unsurprisingly inserting it into ObamaCare’s provisions later on.  Nevertheless, enforcing the individual mandate will require new legions of IRS agents to target Americans who refuse to either purchase insurance or pay the federal tax penalty.

Which creates the paradox.  Those who consider themselves too poor to buy insurance today may still feel that way even when ObamaCare’s mandate is imposed, in which case they’ll find themselves the targets of the IRS.  If, however, federal bureaucrats in their famed mercy refrain from enforcing ObamaCare’s individual mandate in order to avoid persecuting poorer Americans (just as they do not penalize failure to return census forms), the total cost of ObamaCare will far exceed what its proponents promised us while they shoved it up our…  noses.

Nancy Pelosi was right about one thing, though.  We’re sure finding out a lot about ObamaCare now that it’s passed.