Confessions of a Spendaholic, by Barack Hussein Obama, the Ganef

Opinion 1.0


It's the economy, stupid. In a speech at the Brookings Institute today, President Obama threatened to spend our last bottom dollar. With an estimated $600 Billion still not spent in the stimulus bill, Obama now wants to spend the TARP funds paid back early from financial institutions. Actually, Congress would have to approve this. Is this an admission that the stimulus bill is a failure? Unemployment is at 10% and small businesses are still not hiring. Why not spend the remaining stimulus bill funds, as it was intended for. I can answer that question, President Obama has slated the rest of the stimulus monies in 2010, an election year. There isn't an ulterior motive, just strategic timing. The President spoke of "spending our way out of this recession." That really scares me. Why not use that money to pay back the debt. I posted last week that small business is sitting on the sidelines waiting to see the financial impact they will be burdened with. President Obama is not helping matters with his waffling on any sound decisions that often accompanies fudiciary inexperience. Also, I think the "statute of limitations" has now run out on blaming the Bush administration for everything. Obama criticized the previous administration's mis-management of TARP. He must have forgotten that he voted for it and pressured Bush to sign it. The President spoke of spending money on infrastructure, (highway & bridge construction) small business tax cuts and possibly retrofitting homes for energy efficiency. Why is the federal government paying for our house repairs. I need a new LCD television for the basement?  Obama often talks of being fiscally responsible, if he spends this ill gotten money, he will go down in history as a typical tax and spend liberal democrat. Our government is so out of touch with the people they work for. Maybe that is why his approval is the lowest in history in eleven months as President. Stop spending our Grand kids money.

POTUS speaking at the Brookings Institute:


He never gets it, he was the false choice:


 President Obama, Meet Margaret Thatcher


By Andrew B. Wilson on 12.8.09 @ 6:08AM

Mr. Obama plans to present a list of ideas to Congress on how to "jump-start private sector hiring and get Americans back to work." Here are some suggested ideas for his list.

#1). Begin with the admission that that you, as the leader of our government, are not equipped to solve the problem of joblessness. As Margaret Thatcher said, "The fact is that in a market economy government does not -- and cannot -- know where jobs will come from: If it did know, all those interventionist policies for 'picking winners' and 'backing success' would not have picked losers and compounded failure."

#2). Own up to some fuzzy thinking when you said last week that "I still consider one job lost one job too many." This is the same mistake that Eleanor Roosevelt made when she wrote in a syndicated newspaper column in 1945, "We have reached a point today where labor-saving devices are good only when they do not throw a worker out of his job." Jobs are constantly being both created and destroyed in a dynamic free economy. In a competitive marketplace, every employer strives to become more economical and efficient -- investing in new and better equipment in order to reduce the amount of labor that is required to produce a given output.

#3). This is not -- as commonly supposed by liberals -- a race to the bottom. Rather, it is the real key to lifting living standards and generating stable employment. Through private sector capital investment, workers become more productive, better paid, and therefore better able to trade the fruits of their labor for what workers in other professions or industries have produced. As Thatcher said, "The right way to attack unemployment is to produce more goods more cheaply, so more people can afford to buy them."

#4). Propping up losing companies like General Motors and Chrysler is ultimately counter-productive from the viewpoint of saving jobs. The essence of private enterprise is that businesses go out of business if they fail to satisfy their customers and provide a competitive return on investment to their owners or shareholders. The threat of failure hangs like the sword of Damocles over all business. It is a necessary and powerful incentive for improved performance.

#5). Now would be a good time to announce the cancellation of all future "job summits." These high-level confabs bringing together leaders of industry, organized labor and government only serve to stoke the "fatal conceit" -- as Friedrich Hayek called it -- that it is possible to bring together a group of people who will be able to outperform the marketplace in knowing how best to run the economy. This is a socialist idea, and it has been proven wrong again and again.

#6). Now would be an even better time to announce that you have had a change of heart regarding the misnamed and undemocratic Employee Free Choice Act, which takes away from workers the right to a secret ballot in union elections. Elimination of this legislation would be an extremely positive step in restoring business confidence.

#7). One should dispense with the idea that tinkering at the edges with broad tax credits to businesses that expand their payrolls will do any good. This would have the unintended consequence of rewarding of employers that were planning to hire anyway. More to the point, however, it incentivizes the wrong thinking and behavior. Businesses shouldn't start with the idea of creating jobs; they should start with the idea of creating value for customers.

#8). The best thing that government can do to help create private sector employment is to take less money away from the private sector by reducing both taxes and public spending. Again, as Thatcher said, "Since jobs in a free society do not depend upon government but upon satisfying customers, there (is) no point in setting targets for 'full' employment. Instead, government should create the right framework of sound money, low taxes, light regulation and flexible markets (including labor markets) to allow prosperity and employment to grow."

Jobs or Snow Jobs?


By Thomas Sowell

President Obama keeps talking about the jobs his administration is "creating" but there are more people unemployed now than before he took office. How can there be more unemployment after so many jobs have been "created"?

Let's go back to square one. What does it take to create a job? It takes wealth to pay someone who is hired, not to mention additional wealth to buy the material that person will use.

But government creates no wealth. Ignoring that plain and simple fact enables politicians to claim to be able to do all sorts of miraculous things that they cannot do in fact. Without creating wealth, how can they create jobs? By taking wealth from others, whether by taxation, selling bonds or imposing mandates.

However it is done, transferring wealth is not creating wealth. When government uses transferred wealth to hire people, it is essentially transferring jobs from the private sector, not adding to the net number of jobs in the economy.

If that was all that was involved, it would be a simple verbal fraud, with no gain of jobs and no net loss. In reality, many other things that politicians do reduce the number of jobs.

Politicians who mandate various benefits that employers must provide for workers gain politically by seeming to give people something for nothing. But making workers more expensive means that fewer are likely to be hired.

During an economic recovery, employers can respond to an increased demand for their companies' products by hiring more workers-- creating more jobs-- or they can work their existing employees overtime. Since workers have to be paid time-and-a-half for overtime, it might seem as if it would always be cheaper to hire more workers. But that was before politicians began mandating more benefits per worker.

When you get more hours of work from the existing employees, you don't need to pay for additional mandates, as you would have to when you get more hours of work by hiring new people. For many employers, that makes it cheaper to pay for overtime. The data show that overtime hours have been increasing in the economy while more people have been laid off.

There is another way of reducing the cost of government-imposed mandates. That is by hiring temporary workers, to whom the mandates do not apply.

The number of temporary workers hired has increased for the fourth consecutive month, even though there are millions of unemployed people who could be hired for regular jobs, if it were not for the mandates that politicians have imposed.

Economists have long been saying that there is no free lunch, but politicians get elected by seeming to give free lunches, in one form or another. Yet there are no magic wands in Washington to make costs disappear, whether with workers or with medical care. We just pay in a different way, often a more costly way.

Nor can these costs all be simply dumped on "the rich," because there are just not enough of them. Often people who are far from rich pay the biggest price in lost opportunities. A classic example is the minimum wage law.

Minimum wage laws appear to give low-income workers something for nothing-- and appearances are what count in politics. Realities can be left to others, so long as appearances get votes.

People with low skills or little experience usually get paid low wages. Passing a minimum wage law does not make them any more valuable. At a higher wage, it can just make them expendable. Raising the minimum wage in the midst of a recession was guaranteed to increase unemployment among the young-- and it has.

None of this is peculiar to the current administration. The Roosevelt administration created huge numbers of government jobs during the 1930s-- and yet unemployment remained in double digits throughout FDR's first two terms.

Constant government experiments with new bright ideas is another common feature of Obama's "change" and FDR's New Deal. The uncertainty that this unpredictable experimentation generates makes employers reluctant to hire. Destroying some jobs while creating other jobs does not get you very far, except politically. But politically is what matters to politicians, even if their policies needlessly prolong a recession or depression.

Daft Statement of the Day:
 "spend our way out of this recession."
Barack Hussein Obama, December 8, 2009 Mr. Obama, we are out of money. CP

Hypocrisy of the week:
140 private jets + 1200 limos = Copenhagen Carbon Party. I guess it's easy to promote pulbic transit when your "public transit" has wings and burns 700 gallons of taxper funded fuel per hour.

Kill Bill Vol. III:


Opposition to Senate Healthcare Bill: Call your Senators!

"We the people" must stop the Obamacare Proposals: I am formally asking (pleading) with you to muster up the initiative and enthusiasm to fight the healthcare bill that will emerge in the end of the year. First, there are 2 bills (proposals) that will somehow be merged into one bill. Liberals are adamant about some form of "Public Option." (Government Run Option) I think the democrats believe they can push this bill through while we are sleeping. The democrats have blocked many bills that would allow the final bill to be posted on the internet 72 hours prior to a vote. Why? you know why. We must oppose this more than we did over the summer. Let them know, we are not against healthcare reform, just not a total makeover. Call and email your representatives. I have emailed and called mine so many times, they are referring to me by my first name. Write an old fashioned letter, it has a lot of importance. Attend your local tea parties and townhalls to voice your opinions and make a overwhelming presence. Below, is a little list how you can get involved. It is our civic duty. "It is our Country."

http://www.congress.org/
http://www.joinpatientsfirst.com/
http://www.freedomworks.org/
http://www.resistnet.com/
http://www.teapartypatriots.com/
http://www.teaparty.org/
http://www.taxpayer.org/
http://www.taxpayer.net/
info@cmpi.org
http://www.fairtax.org/
http://www.conservativeamericansunited.org/

CALL YOUR SENATORS! EMAIL YOUR SENATORS! CALL YOUR SENATORS! EMAIL YOUR SENATORS!

Polls you can live by:

27% Strongly approve of President Obama's job performance.
38% Strongly disapprove.
Presidential Approval Rating Index: -11
47% Somewhat approve of President's job performance.
52% Somewhat disapprove
41% Approve of healthcare reform.
51% Disapprove of healthcare reform
-10 difference.
79% believe we should audit the Fed.

Quote du jour:
 "Never spend your money before you have it." (Mr. Obama)

Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826)

Contact: conservative09@gmail.com

References:
http://www.hotair.com/
http://www.weeklystandard.com/
http://www.americanspectator.com/
http://www.realcleapolitics.com/
http://www.newsmax.com/
http://www.newsbusters.com/
http://www.thehill.com/
http://www.drudge.com/
http://www.biggovernment.com/
Andrew B. Wilson
http://www.rasmussen.com/
Thomas Sowell
http://www.youtube.com/
http://www.msnbc.com/
http://www.quotationspage.com/