In an interview with CFIF, Lance Izumi, senior fellow and director of education studies at the Pacific Research Institute, discusses his Encounter Broadside, “Obama’s Education Takeover,” and how President Obama is leading a massive federal power grab that is disempowering local communities and parents by centralizing education policy in Washington.
Listen to the interview here.
Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.
View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.
The Wall Street Journal reports on the reasons French tire company Michelin is expanding its operations in South Carolina while reducing its employment footprint in the Midwest:
Pete Selleck, Michelin’s North America president, said the state has strong technical education resources and ready infrastructure. “South Carolina has a long history with technical colleges dating back to the 1960s,” he said. The state “is also one of the least unionized states in the country, which gives us the flexibility to focus on the customer.”
“There is no significant difference between nonunion and unionized plants other than a rule book in our unionized plants that tell us what we can and can’t do,” Mr. Selleck added.
The emphasis is mine, and it tells you all you need to know about where the growth opportunities are for companies, customers, and employees.
In another part of the article Michelin is credited with paying a starting wage of $20 per hour, about a third more than the $15 per hour required under the average union contract.
Better pay and no union dues? Maybe the iconic bumper sticker saying “Work Union, Live Better” should be changed to read, “Work Union, Earn Less.”
Last month, I posted here on the blog about the U.N. Human Rights Commission’s risible-if-it-wasn’t-so-deplorable failure to deal with the enormous human rights violations occurring in Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. But be not worried — if those fearless defenders of human rights can’t bring justice to Damascus, they’ll be happy to settle for the Orlando suburbs. From Breitbart:
UN Human Rights chief Navi Pillay has called for an “immediate investigation” into the death of Trayvon Martin.
Leaving aside the matter of the despicable record of the UN on human rights, what kind of record does Pillay herself have on human rights, and does she have any moral leg to stand on when interfering in the domestic affaris of the United States? According to Freedom House, between September 2008, when she became the Human Rights Chief, and June 2010, Pillay made no comment whatsoever on the victims in 34 countries rated “Not Free.” Some of the countries not criticized were: Algeria, Angola, Bahrain, Belarus, Cuba, North Korea, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Vietnam.
Your United Nations, ladies and gentleman. Cost to American taxpayers: approximately $3 billion a year.
The Trayvon Martin case remains an ambiguous tragedy. Certainly someone was in the wrong, but the available facts give us no clarity as to who. At the moment, only one thing is certain: justice will be less likely with the UN involved.
So ubiquitous is coverage of presidential candidates in this 24-hour news cycle era — and so pervasive is the numbness that results — that it’s easy to lose sight of some truly bizarre developments in this year’s election cycle; developments that have seen their novelty rusted away by saturation coverage.
Among them: the signature achievement in the political career of Mitt Romney, the almost certain Republican nominee for president (especially with Rick Santorum leaving the race today), is so deeply unpalatable to conservatives that it even divides his advisers. Consider this, from Politico:
Two of the five members of [Mitt] Romney’s recently announced Health Care Policy Advisory Group have a record of opposition to his Massachusetts health care reform plan.
Paul Howard, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a new addition to Romney’s advisory team, wrote in late 2010 that Romney’s plan has resulted in a dramatic increase in insurance costs for small businesses.
He also said it’s “no secret” that the state plan was the “template” for President Barack Obama’s federal health care law.
Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and another new Romney health adviser, was sharply critical of Romney’s health plans in 2007 while Atlas was supporting New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign.
“Mitt Romney’s legacy is the creation of a multibillion dollar government health bureaucracy that punishes employers and insists middle income individuals either purchase health insurance or pay for their own health care,” Atlas told reporters. “The former is a mandate, the latter is a tax and neither one is free market.”
Lest the point be oversold, we should note that past Republican nominees have accessorized their necks with similar albatrosses. John McCain, for instance, was the co-author of a federal campaign finance law loathed by conservatives because it is inimical to political free speech. But there’s still a slight difference: Romney’s policy liability deals with one of the defining issues of the election he’ll be running in — and it also happened to be the intellectual predicate for his opponent’s crowning legislative achievement.
Virtually all the energy that has animated the conservative movement over the last three years — energy best exemplified by the Tea Party — has come in reaction to Obamacare and the government overreach it represents. Now the Republican Party will march into electoral battle behind the progenitor of that intrusion. We live in strange times.
Today at The American Spectator I blogged at length about how Eric Holder’s Justice Department uses flagrant racial double-standards in enforcing the law.
The same habit infects the news media, and apparently some police departments as well: If the perpetrators are black, it is A) not news, and B) sometimes not investigated, much less prosecuted. J. Christian Adams has a new example here. In this case, a motorist was targeted by a black biker gang. Result: Nada. Adams writes:
Boyd tells me he contacted the crime beat reporter at the Birmingham News and told her about his story. “Not newsworthy,” was her response. Boyd also tells me that law enforcement officials told Boyd they “don’t mess with the Outcasts of Alabama.” Comforting.
Had the attackers been the Confederate Hammerskins, and the victim been different, we all know (at a minimum) the Birmingham News would have covered the story. DOJ lawyers would be checking on the contract air carrier from Washington to Birmingham. I’ll wager even Soledad O’Brien would have spent at least one show on the attack.
It is precarious when the law, and attention from the media, are so out of balance. When state law enforcement officials flinch from prosecutions of the black Outcasts of Alabama, and national media organizations ignore some violence while elevating other incidents to month-long stories, the rule of law suffers.
Shame on the Birmingham News. Shame on any police who don’t follow up on such cases. Shame on all of us for letting race affect how we deal with important issues and events, in any direction.
The Heritage Foundation breaks down the numbers of what ObamaCare was promised to save, and what it actually costs:
Combine this spending monstrosity with the $787 billion stimulus bill and you’ve got nearly $1.5 trillion added to the federal deficit before any other Obama Era policy has been discussed. Lard on the costs of EPA regulations, the uncertainty of Dodd-Frank’s implementation, and the specter of all the Bush tax cuts vanishing next January and it’s no wonder the American economy is stagnant. The liberals in Washington, D.C. are spending and regulating us into oblivion.
Attorney General Eric Holder, dismissing the idea that voter fraud is a serious problem in an interview with NBC News last month:
I think there is a misperception that there is a vast amount of vote fraud out there. You do not see huge amounts of vote fraud and the type of vote fraud that we see is not typically the kind that is in-person vote fraud at the polls which voter ID laws are designed to impact.
Now witness the latest from James O’Keefe’s team at Project Veritas, wherein a young white man walks into a Washington D.C. polling place and the poll workers are only too happy to hand him Holder’s ballot:
It’s been said by some supporters of President Barack Obama’s $787 billion stimulus spending spree that we can’t really know if it failed because we can’t ‘re-run’ the last three years to see if something else might have worked.
But according to economist John Lott, we don’t have to.
In a wide-ranging interview with The Daily Caller about his new book, , Lott compares the different approaches by the liberals in Debacle: Obama’s War on Jobs and Growth and What We can Do Now to Regain Our Future the Obama White House and the conservatives running Canada’s government. The results aren’t pretty.
How do we know the stimulus package made the economic situation worse?
Compare the U.S. and Canada. Their unemployment rates increased in lock step from August 2008 until six months later, in February 2009, when the stimulus was passed in the United States. During those six months, the U.S. unemployment rate rose by 2.1 percentage points, from 6.1 percent to 8.2 percent, and the Canadian rate grew by 1.9 percentage points, from 5.1 percent to 7 percent (using the BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] measure to make the Canadian measure of unemployment comparable to the U.S. rate). The graph that we have showing this is actually stunning.
Canada adopted a much smaller and quite different “stimulus” program that emphasized cutting tax rates and regulations and that produced dramatically smaller deficits. On a per-capita basis, Canada’s stimulus was about a third that of America’s, costing $979 per person compared to our $2,730. The conservative Canadian government chose not to introduce any big programs.
Obama, meanwhile, adopted big-ticket Keynesian programs, believing that government spending for its own sake creates wealth. But Democratic emphasis on “green” energy, government-approved investments and technology and higher salaries for public-school teachers merely moved money away from where Americans and companies would have otherwise spent it.
Obama’s stimulus also raised the effective marginal tax rates that some individuals face, discouraging work; Canada, by contrast, cut some marginal rates. Obama kept the corporate tax rate stuck at 35 percent, while Canadians cut their corresponding rate from 21 percent in 2007 to 16.5 percent this year — with a further cut to 15 percent planned for next year. By last year, Canada had the lowest overall tax rate on business investment of any major industrialized country.
Canada also didn’t run the huge stimulative deficits that we ran here in the U.S. They didn’t saddle their kids with a huge debt that they were going to have to pay off.
But if Obama’s program — including a massive 21 percent hike in spending from 2008 to 2011 and corresponding massive deficits — worked so well, why has our unemployment rate risen more since those policies were adopted than have the rates of the European Union, South America, Japan, Australia or New Zealand?
Along with reformist former state official Bradley Byrne, I explained yesterday at the Mobile Press-Register how Medicaid is taking over the entire Alabama General Fund budget, and how ObamaCare makes it worse. This might have some bearing, tangentially, to the Supreme Court case on ObamaCare (the part argued last, about states being commandeered into ObamaCare Medicaid expansions).
Federal and state governments share Medicaid costs, but Obamacare by design will add millions nationwide to state Medicaid rolls while picking up the added costs only in the short term….
Before the $81 million error was discovered and before Gov. Bentley was forced to prorate the state’s budget (making across-the-board cuts due to revenue shortfalls), and even without full implementation of Obamacare, the state General Fund’s budget for Medicaid had doubled in just two years. To put this into perspective: During this two-year period, our court system was cut by a third, our criminal prosecutors’ offices by 14 percent, our Forestry Commission by 17 percent and our economic development by 5 percent. Medicaid went from consuming 20 percent of our General Fund budget two years ago to 36.5 percent this year. It is on track to consume the entire General Fund by decade’s end.
This is a big deal. And Alabama is hardly unique. It adds practical weight to the states’ arguments that they are being coerced into something they can’t afford.
Ironically, the Obama Administration projected when he entered office that unemployment wouldn’t exceed 8% after his massive spending “stimulus.” Instead, the rate has exceeded 8% for 38 consecutive months, the most since the federal government began keeping records. Over three long years. Of course, Obama can at least claim something on which he has proved reliable.
Today, the Labor Department announced that only 120,000 new jobs were created last month, well below expectations of over 200,000. That number is insufficient to reduce unemployment by even a single percentage point over a year, and the only reason the rate fell from 8.3% in February to a still-miserable 8.2% in March was that more people gave up and abandoned the workforce altogether. Under Obama, we have witnessed record spending, record deficits, record regulation and record hostility toward private employers. So what does he have to show for that? As detailed this week by The Wall Street Journal, the worst economic recovery in history. Those straightforward facts speak for themselves.
Clean energy is the dream that refuses to die. From the Obama Administration on down, liberal politicians throughout the nation are constantly promising “green jobs” boomlets, acting as though the only thing standing between a better future where energy is both cleaner and more affordable is political will and obstructionist special interests. In reality, the real hurdle to achieving their dream is substantially higher: the economics just don’t work out. A recent initiative in Nevada shows the complete fiscal folly underpinning clean tech. From the Las Vegas Sun:
The electricity produced by NV Energy’s $46 million wind rebate program has fallen far short of expectations.
In a startling example, the city of Reno’s wind turbines — for which the city received more than $150,000 in rate-payer funded rebates — produced dramatically less electricity than the manufacturers of its turbines promised.
…
As first reported by the Reno Gazette-Journal, one turbine that cost the city $21,000 to install saved the city $4 on its energy bill. Overall, $416,000 worth of turbines have netted the city $2,800 in energy savings.
That means that the savings from the Nevada program have equaled only about 2/3 of 1% of the cost of installing the turbines. Remind me again, isn’t the oft-cited goal for this new era of technological progress to promote science and math?
Politico reports that an Inspector General’s investigation concluded the Department of Energy’s loan to Solyndra corrupted a process to serve a political agenda.
The Treasury Department’s review of Solyndra’s $535 million federal loan guarantee was “rushed” through in about one day in March 2009, “based on an expedited review request from DOE so that a press release could be issued,” according to a Treasury inspector general report that gives further evidence of the early Obama administration’s eagerness to announce progress in funding clean energy.
…
The report also found that DOE didn’t consult with Treasury on the terms and conditions of the loan deal before or during the Energy Department’s own review process, including the review of Solyndra’s credit worthiness.
Nor did DOE include Treasury in negotiations that later allowed private investors to skip past taxpayers in the repayment line in the event – which turned into a certainty – that Solyndra went bankrupt.
The corruption in the Solyndra loan process is unique in that – so far – no one inside the government has been accused of being bribed for making so many financially ruinous decisions with taxpayer money.
The only explanation is the triumph of ideology over process.
In the Teapot Dome scandal members of the Harding administration got kickbacks for no-bid contracts on oil drilling. The HUD scandals of the late 1980’s made some officials, lobbyists, and construction companies rich at the expense of the poor. But with Solyndra and other failed alternative energy busts, Obama’s DOE blew billions of dollars on nothing more than a bankrupt ideology; namely, the fantasy that green technology can be subsidized into sustainability.
At least with bribes you can follow the money. The Obama administration’s version of corruption is something arguably new. The only way to ensure its eradication is to fire the people who hire the ideologically-driven bureaucrats.
President Barack Obama’s controversial warning to the Supreme Court that a vote to overturn ObamaCare would be “unprecedented” is getting push-back from the federal judiciary.
During oral arguments on a different ObamaCare provision than those argued before the Supreme Court last week, Fifth Circuit Judge Jerry Smith asked a Department of Justice lawyer for clarification. “Does the Department of Justice recognize that federal courts have the authority in appropriate circumstances to strike federal statutes because of one or more constitutional infirmities?”
To drive home the point, Judge Smith ordered DOJ to provide a written explanation of its views “no less than three pages, single spaced.”
The only problem with the homework assignment is that it wasn’t directed to the right person. President Obama, that one-time constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago, should be the one sitting at the keyboard relearning first year law.
At least then he’d be aware that what’s truly unprecedented is his belief that federal courts are rubber stamps for his liberal agenda.
Every week or so it seems there’s another story out of Washington about the federal government spending an eye-popping amount of money on something that’s either dramatically overpriced or outright unnecessary: $115,000 a year for someone to update the Interior Department’s Facebook page, for instance, or the Maryland town where more than $800,000 of stimulus money was spent in order to publicize how well stimulus money was being spent.
Perhaps, in a fit of rage at one of these stories, you’ve wondered why there isn’t a government watchdog tasked with reining in these expenditures. Though it’s little know outside of Washington, there actually is such an organization, the colorlessly named General Services Administration (GSA), which describes its mission as “to use expertise to provide innovative solutions for our customers in support of their missions, and by so doing, foster an effective, sustainable, and transparent government for the American people.” And now the head of the organization, Martha Johnson, is stepping down after the GSA went on a taxpayer-funded spending binge.
GSA’s Public Buildings Service spent $822,000 on the biennial Western Regions Conference in Las Vegas for only 300 employees, according to an inspector general’s report.
The expenses included $147,000 for airfare and hotel lodging for six planning trips by conference organizers. That figure included $100,000 on two “scouting trips” and five off-site meetings and an additional $30,000 on catering costs for those trips, according to the report.
Among the other expenses were $3,200 for a mind reader; $6,300 on a commemorative coin set displayed in velvet boxes; and $75,000 on a training exercise to build a bicycle, according to the IG report, which was obtained by Federal Times.
GSA also promised the hotel an additional $41,480 in catering charges in exchange for the “concession” of the hotel honoring the government’s lodging limit.
The agency also spent $44 a person per breakfast and $95 per person for its closing reception dinner.
The agency also spent money on mementos for attendees, clothing for GSA employees and tuxedo rentals, according to the report.
The GSA: Looking out for the taxpayers since 1949. But who will watch the watchmen?
h/t — Mollie Hemingway at Ricochet.
Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.
View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.
The Daily Caller makes hilarious use of Karl Rove’s analysis comparing the spending rates for the Bush and Obama reelection campaigns.
But there’s plenty of evidence that the campaign isn’t bringing in as much money as it wants.
For example, data from the campaign’s earlier quarterly reports to the Federal Election Commission show that Obama’s spending is growing faster than revenues.
“The Obama campaign’s high burn rate doesn’t come from large television buys, phone banks or mail programs that could be immediately stopped … [but] from huge fixed costs for a big staff and higher-than-expected fund-raising outlays,” according to a March 14 article by Karl Rove, chief political strategist for George W. Bush.
In the second quarter of 2011, Obama’s “campaign spent 25% of what it raised… while Mr. Bush’s campaign spent only 9% in the second quarter of 2003,” Rove said. Since then, the spending pace has accelerated, he said, pointing out that in January “the Obama campaign spent 158% of what it raised, while the Bush campaign spent 60% in January 2004.”
Also, his supporters initially predicted a $1 billion reelection fund, but campaign staffers are quick to deny that is a goal.
Rove argues that one reason the re-election campaign might be running lighter-than-expected on cash is that many of Obama’s 2008 supporters are not opening their checkbooks this time around.
Spending growing faster than revenues (158%!). Huge fixed costs triggering obscene debt. An unsustainable burn rate. Grandiose predictions cratering on fiscal reality. Contributors unwilling or unable to pony up more cash.
Whether it’s managing the federal government or his own campaign, Barack Obama is as unbalanced with money as he is with policy.
Over at the Wall Street Journal, James Grant, editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer has a perceptive review of the new book, “White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, our National Debt, and Why it Matters to You,” by former IMF Chief Economist Simon Johnson and University of Connecticut law professor James Kwak. Two passages deserve special attention.
On the banking system, Grant writes:
Here’s an idea: Let’s try capitalism for a change.
Rather than the bureaucratic monstrosity called the Dodd-Frank Act, for instance, why not hold the bankers personally accountable for the solvency of the institutions that employ them? Until 1935, bank stockholders would get a capital call if the company in which they had invested became impaired or insolvent. It was their problem, not the government’s. In the same spirit, suggests the New York investor Paul J. Isaac, let the bankers forfeit a portion of their past compensation—say, that in excess of 10 times the average manufacturing wage—if they steer their employer on the rocks. And let them surrender not just one year’s worth but rather seven year’s worth—after all, big banks don’t go broke all at once. Proceeds would be distributed to the creditors, as in days of yore. Bankers should not only take risks. They should also bear them.
And on the endless invocation of the Great Depression as the sole object lesson in how to respond to a severe economic downturn:
Messrs. Johnson and Kwak, who draw the usual conclusions from 1929-33, fail to mention the depression of 1920-21. Yet this cyclical downturn was as instructively brief as it was ugly. Peak to trough, nominal GDP plunged by 23.9%, wholesale prices by 40.8% and the CPI by 8.3%. Unemployment, as it was then inexactly measured, soared to 14% from a boomtime low of 2%. And how did the successive administrations of Woodrow Wilson and Warren G. Harding, along with the Federal Reserve, meet this national disaster? Why, they balanced the budget and raised interest rates. Yet for reasons never examined in the pages of this book, that depression promptly ended and the 1920s roared.
Grant’s theme? Responsibility, both personal and collective. That has the great virtue of being the right thing to do. It also has one even greater virtue: it works.
It’s been a rough re-launch into the public consciousness for former Senator Arlen Specter (R/D-PA) since switching parties and losing the Democratic primary in 2010.
While hocking his memoirs during media appearances Specter has made off-color comments about Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin, and Rick Santorum, insulted at least one radio host, and drawn attention to his book’s portrayals of former fellow senators Ted Kennedy (D-MA) as a “walrus” and John Thune (R-SD) as looking like a movie star “in or out of clothes.”
The Blaze website has a helpful compilation of Specter’s lowlights during his media blitz, including Glenn Beck’s radio show co-host reading excerpts from Specter’s book; such as the nugget about the time another senator cut in front of Specter to get a ‘free’ (i.e. taxpayer-funded) massage in the Senate gym. Arlen’s take-away from the experience: collegiality is dying in the upper chamber.
Ronald Reagan once said, “Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.” In Specter’s case, Reagan’s observation still holds true.
Joe Mathews blogs at NBC Bay Area on the people and institutions most at fault for California’s budget fiasco.
The system makes the decisions, not lawmakers. And that system — the formulas and court decisions and constitutional spending mandates and tax restrictions — does not exist in any particular place that can be protested.
That’s the strange genius of this system, which is really a set of complex formulas. You can’t picket a formula’s house.
Indeed, protesting at the Capitol may be counterproductive — because it advances a false public narrative that the legislature is the problem here. The problem is the people of California, especially voters of the present and of the past.
…
Two years ago, in this piece for Fox & Hounds Daily, I suggested five alternative locations for protests: highways, gas stations, the prison guards’ union, retirement communities, and unsold homes.
Since then, I have one additional idea: California cemeteries.
Many of the spending mandates and tax restrictions that are strangling the budget, and higher education in particular, were put in place long ago by voters.
So long ago that many of those voters are dead. What better way to represent this problem of the dead governing the living than by taking the protest to those voters?
And what better way to show the crisis of California’s politics than to act as if politically-imposed spending formulas can’t be politically reformed?
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