Pat Buchanan, who we don’t always agree with, wrote an excellent piece in Human Events that sheds the right kind of light on why the government voted yet more money to “save teachers’ jobs.” Here’s the main point, but please read it all.
Purpose: Vote $26 billion to prevent layoffs of state, municipal and county employees whose own governments had decided they had to be let go if they were to meet their constitutional duty to balance their books.
Workers their own governments thought expendable, Congress decided were so essential, it borrowed another 26 thousand million dollars from China to keep them on state and local payrolls.
And anyone who thinks this Obama party is ever going to cull the armies of tens of millions of government workers or scores of millions of government beneficiaries to put America’s house in order is deluding himself.
There’s more, particularly about the real reasons for this “emergency” legislation, but the article makes it plain why this current bunch in Washington MUST be removed in November.
By the way, the bill in question is HR 1586. One proposed method of covering the $26 billion is to take money from food stamp programs and some scientific research. This might slow the bill up, but it’s likely to pass. We have a hope, irrational though it may be, that Joe Donnelly will vote no this time.
The problem with this bill and others like it is that it carries a requirement that the states maintain their level of spending after the money runs out. Which they may or may not be able to do under their own constitutions — not to mention the fact that the states can’t just print money. They’re set up for failure in the future, when layoffs now would be far less painful. The Federal government is simply prolonging the pain by continuing to prop up both private and public sector institutions that should be allowed to fail, or at least, shrink. The way they’re doing it now, just when we see the light at the end of the tunnel, the federal government makes the tunnel longer.
Stimulus Pushers on WSJ.com. The determination of Democrats to keep pushing economic stimulus has reached such an irrational level it’s hard to understand why they don’t stop. Unless you realize the whole point is stimulus and bailouts for their key constituency, unions.
It seems that Vice-president Gore has not made enough money on his carbon credits, and that’s where the real failure lies.
In our opinion, the congressional lack of progress on this issue is a major success. Man-made global warming fits the template for most hoax-crises: It’s massive, it’s hard to understand, we need leaders to understand it and tell us what to do, the benefits accrue way down the road (for our children, typically) and oh yeah, it’s gonna cost you. The politics ran away with this problem years ago, and the people want no part of it. Gore, fortunately for us, unfortunately for him, has become something of a laughingstock. This may be his surrender speech.
The video here is only a taste of the outside activity. For a really good look inside, check the project’s photo gallery at its website. Some great photos here – only problem is you can’t stop the slide show and the pictures change a little too quickly. But you’ll still get an idea of the scope of this wonderful project for the city of Elkhart.
WSJ commentary points how the IRS’ new role in our health care is likely to cause increased costs and burdens on both small businesses that create jobs, and the agency itself — for no good reason.
. . . starting in 2013 they will also have to report the value ofgoods they buy from a single vendor that total more than $600 annually—including office supplies and the like.
. . . the tracking costs for small businesses will be “disproportionate as compared with any resulting improvement in tax compliance.”
Meanwhile, the IRS will be inundated with useless information, because without a huge upgrade its information systems won’t be able to manage and track the nanodetails.
In a Monday letter, even Democratic Senators Mark Begich (Alaska), Ben Nelson (Nebraska), Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire) and Evan Bayh (Indiana) denounce this new “burden” on small businesses and insist that the IRS use its discretion to find “better ways to structure this reporting requirement.” In other words, they want regulators to fix one problem among many that all four Senators created by voting for ObamaCare.
The law that Republicans opposed amid ridicule is now showing us “what’s in it,” as Nancy Pelosi promised. And the picture isn’t pretty. Those of us in Elkhart County need to remember who foisted this monstrosity on us come November.
Harry Reid’s son, Rory, doesn’t use his last name (same as his weasel-dad’s) anyhere in this campaign had. He obviously realizes old Harry is bad baggage — why doesn’t Harry get it?
Breitbart Reports: Just in case you thought you were under the threshold for a tax increase, Steny Hoyer has a word for you: sucker. See, even though Obama wants to extend the Bush tax decreases a little longer (say, until sometime after the election), Hoyer says we can’t extend them forever because that’s “too costly,” in light of the huge government debt we have.
I am forever sickened by the doublespeak that makes tax cuts costs and wasteful spending “investments.” Hoyer and the gang are oblivious to the concept that the costs are in their own spending, not in citizens wanting to keep their own money.
Here’s the quote from Hoyer:
As the House and Senate debate what to do with the expiring Bush tax cuts in the coming weeks, we need to have a serious discussion about their implications for our fiscal outlook, including whether we can afford to permanently extend them before we have a real plan for long-term deficit reduction,
Of course. There’s NO PLAN for long-term deficit reduction. So taxes increase, and the economy goes further into the tank. For those who voted for Obama on the promise that 95 percent of us would have lower taxes, you’ve just been punked. But you knew that already, didn’t you?
