Freedom Line Blog

Take a look at Table 2.1, “Receipts by Source: 1934-2015” here on the White House Office of Management and Budget website.  For the year 2009, the federal government took in $915 billion in income tax receipts.  Then take a look at this Congressional Budget Office report that the Obama “stimulus,” which was originally estimated to cost $787 billion, in fact cost $862 billion.

And to what effect?  The Obama White House promised that his “stimulus” would keep unemployment below 8%, but we’ve instead suffered months of approximately 10% unemployment.  Gross domestic product reports are tepid and often revised downward, and the Labor Department reported this week that unemployment claims increased just as Obama and Biden embarked on their “Recovery Summer” tour.

Obama’s “stimulus” has only succeeded in adding almost $1 trillion to our nation’s unsustainable debt, while failing in its stated goals.  For the same cost, we could have completely eliminated the income tax for an entire year.  That’s right – no income tax at all for 2009.  Imagine the real-world stimulative effect that would have had.  Unfortunately, Obama and liberals prefer more government spending and control of taxpayer dollars to the true stimulative effect that the income tax elimination would have instead provided.  They know that once Americans suddenly saw those dollars in their pockets, it would be nearly impossible to corral them back into Washington’s usual tax-and-borrow-and-spend ranch.

Last week, CFIF highlighted the rise of female conservatives as a political force.  Last night, voters had their say.  Republican primary voters in Mississippi’s first congressional district deflected Fox News analyst Angela McGlowan’s overtures, handing her a distant third place finish.  McGlowan’s political future will depend on whether she steps up her local presence in Oxford, MS, to build towards another race.

For Susana Martinez, though, the future is now.  After handily beating her male opponent in the GOP primary yesterday, Martinez is poised to be a “game changing” candidate if elected governor of New Mexico later this year.

If you haven’t heard of Martinez, you will.  She’s served thirteen years as the Las Cruces-based District Attorney where she secured reelection twice despite Democrats outnumbering Republicans 3-to1 in her county.  Most impressively for the governor’s race, she has a detailed plan to fix New Mexico’s sputtering economy.  Hmm…tough career prosecutor with a detailed fiscally conservative vision.  Sound familiar?  Thankfully, she’s a lot prettier than New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

If she’s half as forceful, in a few years New Mexico might join New Jersey as two of the friendliest states to business and consumers.

The last few days offered a study in contrasts.  Charles Djou won a plurality special election becoming just the third Republican to represent Hawaii in Congress.  He did so by sticking relentlessly to a pro-growth, low tax message that resonated in a heavily Democratic district.  While Djou won’t vote with the GOP on every issue, his commitment to fiscal conservatism will be a huge factor in whether he gets reelected to a full term in November.

Contrast Djou’s steady drum beat approach to Rand Paul’s improvisational jazz.  The Kentucky GOP senate nominee erased the euphoria of a double digit beat down of the establishment candidate last Tuesday by questioning the constitutionality of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a federal law mandating racial equality.  His points aside, Paul took his eye off the ball by engaging the issue.  The 2010 midterm election results – and Rand Paul’s popularity – are not the product of a national rethink on the scope of Congress’s power to enforce the 14^th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

It’s about the economy, Rand.  The safest ground for limited government types this cycle is to stay on message that tax-and-spend must end.  Just Djou it.

It looks like there will be more jobs next year as the American economy struggles free of the recession; it’s just that half of them won’t be full-time.  Or come with a retirement plan.  Or offer health coverage.  Or even sick days.  But hey; it’s work!

In a sobering report, Eve Tahmincioglu – herself an independent contractor – writes about the emergence of the “contingent workforce,” an umbrella term for freelancers, temps, and pay-for-project workers.  According to a study released by Littler Mendelson, a leading employment law firm, up to 50% of the new jobs in the next economy will be contract work.  The benefit to the company is payroll flexibility.  The benefit to the worker is a job, or more likely, multiple jobs for less pay than a full-time equivalent position.

A bit surprising is the projection that managers and professionals like engineers, scientists, and attorneys are joining the ranks of the temporarily employed.  So, what does all this mean for public policy?  Plenty.  With millions of workers on the hook for their own health care, retirement, and payroll taxes don’t be surprised if many of them default into “public options” like ObamaCare; especially if the government offers it at a lower price than the private sector.  Just what The One wants: more jobs, more dependency on government!

Pardon our John Kerry-accented French, but who the hell does Barack Obama think he is?

This was Obama, once again saturated in his own false sense of economic prowess, speaking yesterday to an ever-dwindling audience of true believers in Illinois:

I do think, at a certain point, you’ve made too much money.”

Really?  Does the $5,505,409 that Obama earned last year happen to conveniently fall just below that “too much money” threshold?  What about his multimillionaire supporters Oprah Winfrey and George Soros?  And more importantly, who does this man think he is to instruct the most dynamic and prosperous society in human history that “you’ve made too much money?”

Somewhere, Joe the Plumber must be shaking his head over a cold beer and sighing, “I tried to warn you.”  It’s too bad that more people didn’t heed his warning after Obama suggested that we “spread the wealth around” during the 2008 campaign, but there’s always the opportunity for a “do over” in November 2010 and 2012.

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.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

The numbers don’t lie: Californians are voting with their feet when it comes to protecting their pocketbooks…all the way to Texas.

Though it’s hard to believe that more taxes don’t create more jobs, it’s down right shocking to realize that taxpayer financed commercials like this one are failing to draw people to the Golden State.

To answer the Governator’s question: as soon as Sacramento adopts a tax and regulatory regime WAY more friendly to businesses.

H/T: Reason.tv

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.

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.

American liberals love to praise supposedly superior European governance and culture, oblivious to the irony that they nevertheless continue to live in the United States.  This phenomenon became particularly visible during the ObamaCare ordeal, as liberals claimed that we must somehow join the rest of the “industrialized world” in providing unsustainable government-controlled healthcare.

Well, here’s a dose of sobering reality.  As noted on a front page story in today’s Wall Street Journal entitled “Europe’s Choice:  Growth or Safety Net,” Europe has stagnated economically for the past two decades compared to the United States.  Worse, this has occurred even as Europe continued its failure to carry their own weight with respectable defense expenditures.  From 1990 to 1999, Europe’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew 2.0%, compared to 3.3% for the U.S.  From 2000 to 2008, Europe only grew 1.7%, whereas the U.S. grew 2.2%.

Yet we’re supposed to emulate their example?  Can’t liberals just move there instead?

According to a recently released Fox News poll, nearly four out of every five voters (79%) feel the U.S. economy could collapse and that Washington has no credible plan to fix it.

That pessimism is not held by voters identifying with just one political party either.  72% of Democrats, 84% of Republicans and 80% of Independents share the pessimism about the economy, while just 18% of all voters surveyed think it’s “so big and strong it could never collapse.”

Before you go blaming those greedy Wall Street suits for the nation’s gloom, read this little nugget from FoxNews.com’s report on the poll:

78 percent of voters believe the federal government is ‘larger and more costly’ than it has ever been before, and by nearly three-to-one more voters think the national debt (65 percent) is a greater potential threat to the country’s future than terrorism (23 percent). …

“Three in 10 American voters (30 percent) say they are comfortable with the size and role of the federal government right now, while 65 percent say the government has become too big and ‘is restricting American freedoms.’”

In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses why another taxpayer-funded stimulus package and government “investments” in so-called green jobs are not the answers to the nation’s future prosperity.

As the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter memorably put it, the free market is about “creative destruction” —  rank, privilege, and status mean nothing if you can’t compete in the marketplace. Bad companies and products wilt under competition from more capable rivals.

Applying these kinds of first principles to policy debates can be unwieldy at times, however, if they don’t exactly square with your political coalition. Republicans have been wed to the business establishment for decades on the notion that those who philosophically support the free market and those who actually grind the gears of commerce on a daily basis are natural allies. Not necessarily, says Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan in an interview with RealClearPolitics. When asked about the current state of the economy:

Republicans messed this up too. We have to remember that we’re also to blame for having practiced crony capitalism. But where we are right now — it’s a systematic expansion of this doctrine. For us, it’s easier to fix because we just have to rededicate ourselves to our principles. For Democrats, they would have to repudiate theirs, because crony capitalism sits nicely with their philosophy. You can sort of see an alignment here where big business and big government find a common agreement and that is a very big danger to our free market system. So we need to go back to being pro-market, instead of just pro-business. And there is a difference.

Ryan is one of the brightest members of Congress around (his comprehensive plan for restoring America’s economic health is referenced extensively in the interview and can be found here) and it’s nice to see an elected official finally making this too-oft ignored distinction.

I may not win any points for originality for calling attention to the imbecility of Time Magazine’s Joe Klein, but his latest rhetorical moonshot has to be read to be believed.

Harnessing the liberal tendency to blame their failures on the stupidity of the country, Klein reacts to a new CNN/Opinion Research poll that shows nearly three quarters of the country considers the stimulus package wasteful by indicting the cognitive capacities of the nation (in a post titled “Too Dumb to Thrive”, no less). To wit:

Two thoughts:

1. The Obama Administration has done a terrible job explaining the stimulus package to the American people…especially since there have been very few documented cases of waste so far.

2. This is yet further evidence that Americans are flagrantly ill-informed…and, for those watching Fox News, misinformed.

It is very difficult to have a democracy without citizens. It is impossible to be a citizen if you don’t make an effort to understand the most basic activities of your government. It is very difficult to thrive in an increasingly competitive world if you’re a nation of dodos.

Strip away the ad hominem and here’s what you have:

1. We’re not communicating well enough (the oldest — and most impotent — political excuse in the book)

2. There’s been no waste (Klein seems to be missing that Americans aren’t reacting to abuse in the program … they think the above-the-board spending is pointless)

3. This is the American people’s fault for being thick-browed knuckle-draggers (someone might want to point out to the intellectual vanguard over at Time that the health of the economy and the intelligence of the electorate are what are called independent variables. The economy isn’t still faltering because Americans think the stimulus is pointless. Americans think the stimulus is pointless because the economy is still faltering).

Oregon, whose 11% unemployment rate exceeds the national rate by a full percentage point, sits just to the north of California, whose suicidal economic policies have provided a close-up lesson that reducing economic freedom reduces prosperity. As a result, Oregonians have seen first-hand the mass exodus of jobs and residents stemming from those policies.

So as Oregonians head to the polls tomorrow to consider two tax-raising ballot measures, we’ll see whether they’ve internalized California’s straightforward lessons.

Proposition 66 would increase Oregon’s personal income tax on “the rich” by fully 2%, and Proposition 67 would foolishly increase the corporate income tax. You know…  those corporations that actually create jobs and add to the economy.

Just as California’s reckless tax-and-spend policies have driven residents and jobs to surrounding states, Oregon may astonishingly slit its own wrists in the same manner by passing these measures.  Residents and community leaders in Washington, Idaho, Utah, Montana, Nevada and Arizona may welcome the resulting influx, but it will mean doom for Oregon. Nike, Inc. founder and chairman Phil Knight, hardly a starched-collar conservative, has labeled Propositions 66 and 67 “Oregon’s Assisted Suicide Law II,” and some economists predict 70,000 lost jobs if the measures pass.

So which way, Oregon?  Freedom and prosperity, or suicidal tax increases?  Massachusetts, Virginia and New Jersey voters have learned the lessons of Obamanomics, and now we’ll see if the news has traveled out to the West Coast…

Are you wondering how all that stimulus money is being spent to create jobs in this country? 

No, not those “stimulus jobs” in nonexistent congressional districts.  Real wage-paying jobs.

CNSNews.com reports:

The Social Security Administration (SSA) spent $30 million in stimulus money in 2009 to hire 585 new bureaucrats who will be responsible for certifying whether people are eligible for disability so they can be paid by the taxpayers not to work.

A report from the SSA’s Office of the Inspector General says that the SSA’s Office of Disability Adjudication and Review (ODAR) hired 35 new administrative law judges and 550 staffers to determine whether people are eligible to receive federal disability payments for not working.

That, my friends, is your hard-earned taxpayer dollars at work.

For a man of such supposed intellectual prowess, Barack Obama certainly seems oblivious to any sense of irony.

Attempting to stanch his hemhorraging public aproval numbers, Obama yesterday retreated to phony populism by proposing $90 billion in new taxes upon American banks. It must be noted that many of these banks have already repaid the questionable bailout funds that they received, and are now staring at a form of double jeopardy.

Obama’s misguided proposal contradicts his own stated goal of encouraging bank lending in this choppy economy, because the new tax will undercut banks’ ability to create new loans.  Further, the tax will merely be passed on to strapped American consumers, as all corporate taxes ultimately are.  It’s such a terrible idea that even Democrat Senator Kristen Gillibrand voiced opposition, saying it “could disproportionately affect New York City’s economic recovery, which relies on a growing financial services industry.”

Disregarding this reality, Obama was undeterred, sanctimoniously thundering, “we want our money back, and we’re going to get it.”

We feel the same way, Mr. President.  In just the first year of your administration, we have seen you squander our hard-earned dollars on failed “stimulus” behemoths and bureaucratic boondoggles on behalf of labor unions and other favored special interests.  We have seen you triple the budget deficit after telling us duirng your campaign that you were going to reduce it by scouring the budget “line by line.”

Yes, Mr. President, we also want our money back.

The Labor Department this morning reported that nonfarm payrolls fell by a seasonally adjusted 85,000 in December, bringing the total number of jobs lost in 2009 to a whopping 4.2 million.

As Center for Individual Freedom (CFIF) Vice President of Legal and Public Affairs Timothy Lee wrote this week in a commentary posted on CFIF’s website, “the latest economic data continue to suggest that our recovery is weaker than it otherwise should be, due to malignant federal policies.”

Lee points to a recently released survey  by the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB), which makes his point:

According to the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB), a tiny 7% of small businesses (which account for approximately 2/3 of new jobs) expect near-term expansion and the type of risk-taking necessary for sustained prosperity.  Further, only 8% of NFIB respondents expect near-term employment opportunities.  The same NFIB report also states that capital investment and expenditures have dropped to a 35-year low.”

The reason?  Lee writes:

According to the NFIB survey, businesses report that the current political climate stands high among the reasons for tepid recovery, even ahead of the ability to secure loans.  The survey goes on to cite ‘the level of uncertainty being created by government, the usual source of uncertainty for the economy.  The ‘turbulence’ created when Congress is in session is often debilitating, this year being one of the worst.’ …

“…The continuing onslaught of more government spending, borrowing and regulation will not bring the type of recovery that we should expect, but rather perpetuate an inhospitable economic climate.  When we return to time-tested policies that encourage private investment, risk-taking and hiring – less confiscation of wealth, greater protection of property rights and fewer oxygen-depleting regulations – is when sustainable, long-term growth will return.”

In other words, when it comes to job losses and the slow economic recovery, It’s Washington, Stupid!

Read Lee’s full commentary piece here.

The Obma White House has long followed the idea that there’s no problem that the federal government shouldn’t fix.

Now, it’s telling us that there’s no improvement that the federal government shouldn’t fix, either.

That appeared to be the message from White House Council of Economic Advisors Chairman Christina Romer and National Economic Council Chairman Lawrence Summers, both of whom made the rounds on yesterday’s Sunday talk shows.  In his comments to George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week, Mr. Summers said that, “most professional forecasters are now looking for a return to job growth by spring.”  And appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, Ms. Romer predicted “positive job growth sometime in the first quarter.”

But as noted by The Wall Street Journal today, we must ignore federal deficits in favor of more “stimulus” spending.  According to both Summers and Romer, shifting focus to the deficit instead of spending even more during a period of record deficits would be “suicide.”

So let’s get this straight:  Obama’s first “stimulus” was supposed to cap unemployment at 8%.  It’s now at 10%.  But despite the fact that the White House expects job growth to return in the next quarter, it wants to spend even more to “stimulate?”

One is left to wonder whether the Obama Era more closely resembles a work of Orwell or merely an issue of The Onion.