Story Of Obama

While I'm waiting for the market to reach my target this might be a good time to comment on the above Romney Ad. Which could have been just as well an Obama Ad. Both use this meaningless feel good slick advertising produced by highly competent, very professional, and very expensive film makers.

I can hardly think of a better example to illustrate what is wrong with the American political process and why it now leads to such dismal results. Here is an Ad that says absolutely nothing about policy and about how the candidate would go about solving America's problems, one of which, ironically, is too much money in politics.

Are we supposed to vote based on who hired the best film maker, best musical score, best slogan, or what exactly?

 

Obama Fudges Clinton Tax Record

http://www.dickmorris.com/obama-fud...s&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports

 

Obama Encouraging Americans to Get on Welfare
by Michael D. Tanner

The Obama administration clearly doesn't believe that enough Americans are receiving welfare.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius last week issued an order giving the Obama administration greater authority to waive work requirements included in the 1998 welfare reform law. This comes on top of a new ad campaign, using Spanish-language soap operas, to encourage more Latinos to sign up for food stamps.

The administration even gave a special award to an Agriculture Department worker who found ways to combat the "mountain pride" discouraging Appalachian residents from taking full advantage of food stamps and other welfare programs.

One message was loud and clear: More Americans should be getting welfare.

One wonders how that is possible. The federal government runs 126 separate anti-poverty programs. That may surprise most Americans, who think of welfare as the cash benefits provided under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program — formerly Aid to Families with Dependent Children. But the U.S. welfare system is far larger than that.

There are 33 housing programs, for example, run by four different Cabinet departments, including, bizarrely, the Department of Energy. There are 21 programs providing food or food-purchasing assistance. They're administered by three different federal departments and one independent agency. There are eight different health care programs administered by five separate agencies in HHS. Six Cabinet departments and five independent agencies oversee 27 cash or general assistance programs. Altogether, seven different Cabinet departments and six independent agencies each administer at least one anti-poverty program.

All those programs cost taxpayers more than $668 billion last year. That's an increase of more than $193 billion since Barack Obama became president. It's roughly 2½ times greater than any previous increase over a similar time frame in U.S. history and will increase means-tested welfare spending by about 2.4 percent of gross domestic product.

Moreover, if one includes state and local welfare spending, government at all levels will spend more than $952 billion this year to fight poverty.

The Obama administration obviously believes that one measures compassion by inputs. The more money we spend on welfare programs, it argues, the more people receive benefits from those programs, the better job we do fighting poverty. By those measures, we are indeed doing a better job.

Since President Lyndon B. Johnson first declared a "war on poverty" in 1964, federal, state and local governments have spent roughly $15 trillion fighting poverty. In constant dollars, federal spending on welfare and anti-poverty programs has jumped from $178 billion to $668 billion — a 375 percent increase in constant 2011 dollars. Total welfare spending — including state and local funds — has increased from $256 billion to $908 billion, a 355 percent increase.

Or look at it a different way: As a percentage of GDP, federal spending on welfare programs has increased more than fourfold, from just 0.83 percent of GDP to 4.4 percent. Total welfare spending at both the federal and state levels nearly tripled, from 2.19 percent of GDP to 6 percent. On a per capita basis — or rather per poor person — federal welfare spending has risen by more than 900 percent, from $1,625 to $14,848, while combined federal and state welfare spending increased by a smaller but still substantial 651 percent, from $3,032 to $19,743.

Indeed, federal welfare spending actually totals more than $14,848 for every poor man, woman and child in this country. For a typical poor family of three, that amounts to more than $44,500. Combined with state and local spending, government spends $20,610 for every poor person in America — or $61,830 per poor family of three.

Given that the poverty line for that family is just $18,530, we should have theoretically wiped out poverty in America many times over.

But we have not only failed to end poverty, it's getting worse. In fact, the poverty rate has recently increased to 15.1 percent of Americans, the highest level in nearly a decade and nearly the level it was soon after the "war on poverty" began.

Judged by outputs — how few people are poor and therefore how few people need welfare — we are not doing nearly so well.

This is all the more tragic because we actually have a pretty good idea of what the keys are to getting out of or staying out of poverty: (1) finish school; (2) do not get pregnant outside marriage; and (3) get a job, any job, and stick with it.

None of this has anything to do with getting more people to sign up for welfare benefits.

This means that instead of trying to expand welfare, we should end those government policies — high taxes and regulatory excess — that inhibit growth and job creation. We should protect capital investment and give people the opportunity to start new businesses. We should reform our failed public school system to encourage competition and choice. We should encourage the poor to save and invest.

Unfortunately, on policy after policy — from health care reform to the stimulus — Obama has been content to simply throw money at a problem with little regard for results.

In this case, sadly, it's the poor who suffer the most.

 

2012 Elections: Bill of Rights Missing
by Nat Hentoff

If President Barack Obama is re-elected, more of us will continue to lose our constitutional rights to the presumption of innocence, basic to due process, along with other hard-won definitions of being American.

So far, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has omitted any reference to how the Obama administration has gone beyond George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in ignoring the Constitution's separation of powers — and, thus, our separation from our history.

Deeply aware of the importance of this election for the future of our nation, John Hanrahan — former executive director of the Fund for Investigative Journalism and a past reporter for The Washington Post — agrees with the assessment of my congressman, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., and quotes from a speech the congressman gave on the floor of the House last year:

"In the last 10 years, we have begun to let go of our freedoms, bit by bit, with each new executive order, court decision and, yes, act of Congress. We have begun giving away our rights to privacy, our right to our day in court when the government harms us, and, with this legislation (the National Defense Authorization Act), we are continuing down the path of destroying the right to be free from imprisonment without due process of law."

In a post titled "The press needs to expose the siege of democracy, not abet it" (niemanwatchdog.org, July 6), Hanrahan is speaking for the most influential organization among journalists, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, whose Nieman Fellows — having been awarded a year's residence — have won in their careers 99 Pulitzer Prizes.

Hanrahan is currently on special assignment for NiemanWatchdog.org — a separate program there that is intended to encourage reporters to be more aggressive in questioning the powerful.
In his column, Hanrahan points out what's vitally missing from too many sources' coverage of the 2012 presidential election by citing this reminder:

"As for the broadcast media, where is the network documentary about this rollback of civil liberties, a la the Edward R. Murrow expose of Senator Joseph McCarthy's assault on democracy back in the 1950s?"

I experienced the chilling effect of Joe McCarthy's "Red Scare" dragnet hunt for suspected communists. So dramatic were his Senate hearings that some individual states instituted their own McCarthy-like unAmerican Activities committees. So many Americans — against whom there was no actual evidence of communism — were losing their jobs, that people I knew buying books or records that could have caught Sen. McCarthy's attention insisted their purchases be wrapped so carefully as to hide their titles and authors.

But then came CBS' Edward R. Murrow and his equally fearless producer, Fred Friendly, who exposed Sen. McCarthy on "See it Now," where the senator was chief spokesman for himself. The program's revelation of how contemptuous McCarthy was of basic American values of fairness and justice had a lot to do with the U.S. Senate censuring McCarthy, following which he began to fade away.

Also underlining this kind of patriotic courage, which is not to be found now among most members of Congress who fear confronting Obama's rampant unAmericanism, Hanrahan recalls the Senate hearings by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, that exposed the databasing of innocent Americans by the National Security Agency. Today, these shocking, warrantless invasions into all sorts of Americans' communications target those alleged to be "associated" with terrorists.

And dig this scary insight by Hanrahan into how we will still be targeted by ever more advanced surveillance technology under Obama or Mitt Romney:

"In a further sign of our nation's downhill trajectory, most of what Church and other civil libertarians of the time denounced as dangers to our democracy are today praised or taken for granted by our national leaders and many mainstream media commentators as the normal state of affairs, necessary to protect against every person everywhere who might harbor an intent to do the United States and its people wrong."

How long can we survive as even minimally free Americans unless we teach the next president of whichever party that, ultimately, this elected leader is responsible to us? We the People are not responsible to him.

Imagine Washington, Jefferson and Madison becoming aware of the current president of this constitutional republic going through a "kill list" to decide, on his own, which American citizen is to be assassinated! That's already happening as, to its great credit, has been revealed by The New York Times.

Hanrahan says we need "the kind of persistent and disruptive street agitation that is vital to any campaign to restore the Bill of Rights."

That's what Thomas Jefferson insisted not long after the American Revolution, when he said we are the basic guarantor of our liberties. But, he added, that requires an informed, organized people. Who is ready to start our march back to the 1787 Constitution and the 1791 Bill of Rights? How soon can we ring the Liberty Bell again?

If we don't restore the Bill of Rights, who will we be then?

There are much faster ways now to send the Committees of Correspondence around this land. And if force is used against us, that's what we faced before. And that's how we became free the first time.

 

Don't Forget: ABO

 

The Real Change

 

State Of The Democratic Party

 

Response to Obama’s Attack on Small Business Owners

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Study shows Obama tax plan bad news for the economy —especially in blue states
by Ed Morrissey

Two months ago, the Congressional Budget Office issued a stark warning to Congress over the fiscal impact of “Taxmageddon,” the upcoming expiration of the Bush-era tax rates at the end of this year. Allowing all of the tax rates to rise would push the US into recession:

Tax hikes and spending cuts set to take effect in January would suck $607 billion out of the economy next year, plunging the nation at least briefly back into recession, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday.

Unless lawmakers act, the economy is likely to contract in the first half of 2013 at an annualized rate of 1.3 percent, the CBO said, before returning to 2.3 percent growth later in the year.

Canceling those tax and spending policies would protect the recovery in the short run and encourage more vibrant growth, around 4.4 percent, in 2013, the CBO said. However, unless lawmakers adopt policies that would reduce budget deficits by a comparable amount down the road, the CBO said, the national debt would continue to climb, imperiling future economic growth.

Republicans want to follow the CBO’s advice and cancel the tax hikes, while looking for other ways to reduce spending rather than the sequestration policies set to take effect in January. Democrats want to hold both hostage to force the GOP to agree to Obama’s proposal to raise taxes on earners over $250,000 — or $1 million, depending on which Democrats one asks, and when. Will the economic impact of those tax hikes be much different than that of the full fiscal cliff? According to a new study by Ernst and Young … no:

With the combination of these tax changes at the beginning of 2013 the top tax rate on ordinary income will rise from 35% in 2012 to 40.9%, the top tax rate on dividends will rise from 15% to 44.7% and the top tax rate on capital gains will rise from 15% to 24.7%.

These higher tax rates result in a significant increase in the average marginal tax rates (AMTR) on business, wage, and investment income, as well as the marginal effective tax rate (METR) on new business investment. This report finds that the AMTR increases significantly for wages (5.0%), flow-through business income (6.4%), interest (16.5%), dividends (157.1%) and capital gains (39.3%). The METR on new business investment increases by 15.8% for the corporate sector and 15.6% for flow-through businesses.

This report finds that these higher marginal tax rates result in a smaller economy, fewer jobs, less investment, and lower wages. Specifically, this report finds that the higher tax rates will have significant adverse economic effects in the long-run: lowering output, employment, investment, the capital stock, and real after-tax wages when the resulting revenue is used to finance additional government spending.

Through lower after-tax rewards to work, the higher tax rates on wages reduce work effort and labor force participation. The higher tax rates on capital gains and dividend increase the cost of equity capital, which discourages savings and reduces investment. Capital investment falls, which reduces labor productivity and means lower output and living standards in the long-run.
•Output in the long-run would fall by 1.3%, or $200 billion, in today&#8223;s economy.
•Employment in the long-run would fall by 0.5% or, roughly 710,000 fewer jobs, in today&#8223;s economy.
•Capital stock and investment in the long-run would fall by 1.4% and 2.4%, respectively.
•Real after-tax wages would fall by 1.8%, reflecting a decline in workers&#8223; living standards relative to what would have occurred otherwise.

John Merline at Investors Business Daily also points out that the effects will be felt more in the very states that support Obama the most:

Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and California — all blue states — would suffer the most, according to a Tax Foundation report.

The reason, the study notes, is that these states have higher shares of wealthy taxpayers than the rest of the country. In each of them, those making more than $200,000 — the taxpayers targeted by Obama’s hikes — account for more than 56% of all federal income taxes paid in those states. The U.S. average, the report notes, is 50%.

“As a result, a higher proportion of new tax dollars will come from these states,” noted the Tax Foundation’s Ed Gerrish, “likely impacting local economies.”

IBD also notes in a separate editorial that the Obama proposal fails Fed chair Ben Bernanke’s test on policy:

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke warned Congress Tuesday to “do no harm” to our fragile economy. …

“Economic activity appears to have decelerated” from the tepid first quarter, he said, and “available indicators point to a still smaller gain in the second quarter.”

Bernanke talked about a “loss of momentum in job creation” and slower household spending growth for Q2.

Manufacturing, he said, “has slowed in recent months.” The rise in spending on equipment and software “appears to have decelerated.” Indicators of future investment “suggest further weakness ahead.”

In this context, Bernanke encouraged lawmakers to adopt the Hippocratic Oath and “do no harm.”

“Fiscal decisions,” he said, “should take into account the fragility of the economy.”

Clearly, Obama has prioritized re-election over the fragile economy. Why else would he talk about raising taxes as the economy slides toward recession, and the fiscal cliff guarantees one? In my column for The Fiscal Times, I write that the “you didn’t build it” comment relates directly to Obama’s view of the role of government in dictating economic outcomes, but mostly he just needs to fight Mitt Romney with good, old-fashioned class warfare more than he needs to position the US for recovery in 2013:

Once again, Obama wants to make this an issue of “fairness.” By arguing that it takes a village for anyone to succeed in a market, the President can argue for greater confiscation in tax policy, claiming that it will fuel a new level of success. …How bad will it be? In the long run, Ernst & Young concludes, the tax hikes will cost more than 700,000 jobs and reduce economic output by 1.3 percent if the cuts go to fuel more government spending, using today’s economy as a measure. Wages would fall by 1.8 percent, and investment would decline by 2.4 percent. If the proceeds of the confiscatory policies get used to fund a broader reduction in tax rates below current levels – which is not part of Obama’s proposal – output still falls by 0.4 percent.

This demonstrates the problem with excessive government interventions in markets, which always suppress growth to some degree. That is a rational trade-off, however, for a smoothly operating economy. However, we do not have a smoothly operating economy nor have we had one for the last several years, thanks to a crash created by government manipulation of the lending and securities markets to achieve favored social-policy outcomes, and an economic plan afterward that consisted of short-term gimmicks and escalating ambiguity in tax, regulatory, and monetary policy.

We need to find ways to stimulate growth, not suppress it. Obama’s argument that the village needs to confiscate more from those who invest and take risks to provide that growth is exactly the worst prescription possible for our ailing economy – and yet another demonstration that the President has learned nothing about small business or the economy after four years in office.

I wrote this earlier today, but it’s worth repeating: Small businesses and markets fund the government, not the other way around. The reason why we have the capital to seize for building roads, bridges, and other infrastructure is because of the wealth created by free markets. Without that wealth, the government could not sustain that infrastructure, and without the economic expansion and employment provided by risk-taking entrepreneurs, we wouldn’t need them at all. Obamanomics is completely backwards, which is why it’s not terribly surprising to see the economy heading in that direction, too.

 

Winston Churchill once said, that “redistributing wealth is like standing in a bucket trying to lift oneself up by the handle.”