Is Huckabee a "Progressive"?

Last night, during Mike Huckabee's program, he responded to a letter sent to him regarding his position on health care reform. He indicated that he favored an expansion of Medicaid to cover the uninsured, but that he differed with Democrats in that he wanted the insured to have to pay premiums. His position is that they should have a "vested interest" in keeping costs down and that helping to cover the premiums of a "government sponsored" program would do that.

I'm sorry, but isn't that a "progressive" position? By that, I mean, doesn't this move us one step closer to a government-run one-payor health care system?

Doesn't it also (in light of my two previous posts) violate the constitution?

Huckabee calls himself a conservative, and I'm sure in the current political environment, most others would brand him conservative, as well. However, the more I study government and how it is supposed to function (according to the framers of the constitution), the more I'm convinced that there is little difference between those who label themselves conservatives and those who label themselves liberals or progressives. They are all trying to increase the size and scope of government to suit their own ends ... not ours.

(While it's true that Huckabee is no longer holding political office), it is time to recall the whole lot of them, and find people who truly UNDERSTAND what the constitution says and are willing to take an oath to defend it.

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The Earthquake and the Constitution

Natural disasters are great opportunities for politicians to gain political points and to look good. That, of course, is one reason the left went after Bush so voraciously after Hurricane Katrina. Bush did nothing wrong, of course, during the storm or the aftermath of one of the worst Hurricanes to strike that area, but the left COULD NOT allow Bush to look good in the aftermath of a natural disaster. Particularly one that they wanted to blame on him.

Today (Saturday), Chile was hit by an earthquake of 8.8 magnitude, one of the strongest ever recorded. Obama couldn't wait to get out on the White House lawn and offer his support to Chile. Of course, we haven't actually DONE anything, yet, but we can't waste the opportunity for Obama to LOOK GOOD doing it.

THe point this brings up is one that I feel particularly strong about, and that is the limited powers of government. I just re-read the constitution (again). I have always felt that the federal government has never been given the constitutional authority to take money from the citizens of the US (in the form of taxes) in order to send that money to foreign governments (many of which are run by dictators and warlords, and are full of citizens who dislike us).

Of course, every president since World War II has done that, and I'm not sure how you challenge the constitutionality of that action. Once the precedent has been established, the Supreme Court seems to simply ignore the constitution and just go with the flow.

While it's very "nice" for the US to help out nations like Haiti and Chile and other nations who are in need. But I don't see that the constitution gives the President or Congress the authority to send our troops and our dollars to those nations, even for humanitarian reasons.

If private citizens want to give money to programs and organizations (such as the Red Cross) to assist these nations in time of need, I think that's entirely proper and appropriate. However, my tax dollars should NOT be used to help or build other nations. Our nation is BROKE. We don't have the money to be sending elsewhere.

Am I wrong? Am I heartless?

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Quote of the Day

"Somehow I feel like Michael Moore just told me to eat more salads."

-- Robert Stacy McCain on Barack Obama lecturing America on federal spending and fiscal responsibility.

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Spending America Into Oblivion

From American Spectator (Spectator.org)

By Peter Ferrara on 2.3.10 @ 6:08AM

At the invitation of the Republicans, President Obama spoke at the Republican retreat last Friday. During the following Q & A, Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas rose to ask the final question: "You are soon to submit a new budget, Mr. President. Will that new budget, like your old budget, triple the national debt and continue to take us down the path of increasing the cost of government to almost 25 percent of our economy."

Rep. Hensarling's statements regarding President Obama's budget last year, supported by almost every Democrat, including those supposedly fiscal conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats, were completely accurate, taken directly from the analysis of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). That 25% of our economy refers only to the cost of the federal government. State and local government adds over 50% more, increasing the total cost of government in America to almost 40% of GDP already.

But President Obama responded as if the question were completely illegitimate, saying, "I've just got to take this last question as an example of how it's very hard to have the kind of bipartisan work that we're going to do, because the whole question was structured as a talking point for running a campaign."

On Monday, President Obama publicly submitted his new budget. That budget forthrightly answers Rep. Hensarling's question, even though President Obama would not in the light of a national TV broadcast. President Obama's own budget confesses that it would more than triple the national debt from $5.8 trillion at the end of 2008 to $18.6 trillion by 2020.

Indeed, it would almost double the national debt in just four years from 2008, to $11.5 trillion in 2012. The budget also confesses that under President Obama's first three years, 2009-2011, the federal government will borrow over $4.2 trillion. As the Wall Street Journalreported last week, "That is more than the entire accumulated national debt for the first 225 years of U.S. history."

During the glorious 2008 campaign for hope and change, then candidate Obama harshly criticized George Bush for running $3.3 trillion in deficits over his eight years in office. But President Obama's new budget confesses that he will run up that much in deficits in just two years and three months. Moreover, as Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation reported on Monday, "President Obama would run up more debt over his eight years than all other Presidents in American history -- from George Washington to George Bush -- combined."

But at the Republican retreat, when he was on national television, President Obama refused to take responsibility for any of this. Further responding to Rep. Hensarling, who had said, "what were the old annual deficits under Republicans became the monthly deficits under Democrats," President Obama said that "had nothing to do with anything we had done." He went on to repeat basically what he had said during his State of the Union Address earlier in the week, "By the time I took office, we had a one year deficit of over $1 trillion and projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade. Most of this was the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program."

Heritage's Riedl corrected President Obama on Monday, saying, "This is simply not true. The policies mentioned by President Obama were implemented in the early 2000s. Yet even with all those policies in place, the 2007 budget deficit stood at only $162 billion."

President Obama's budget admits a federal deficit for 2010 of $1.6 trillion, ten times as much as that 2007 deficit of $162 billion, which was the deficit for the last budget adopted by Republican Congressional majorities. This was where Hensarling got his statement that the annual deficits under the Republicans had become the monthly deficits under the Democrats, to which President Obama wrongly responded, "that's factually just not true, and you know it's not true."

But the truth is that President Obama's $1.6 trillion deficit for 2010 is the largest in world history, rising still more from last year's record $1.4 trillion deficit. And this record 2010 deficit assumes continued record low interest rates this year on our gargantuan national debt. If interest rates rise, then federal spending and deficits will explode still further due to interest costs on that debt. The Obama budget already projects that net interest spending will soar to $840 billion by 2020, more than four times current levels.

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Spending Bill Passes

By now, you already know that congress has passed a trillion-dollar-plus spending package that will raise the national debt so high that our grandchildren's grandchildren will be working three jobs o pay for it. What you may not have heard, and what the media has not been reporting, may startle you...

The omnibus spending bill would lift the 13-year-long ban on directly paying for abortions in the nation's capital. The legislation, which President Barack Obama is expected to sign, also contains funding for Planned Parenthood and the UNFPA.

The Senate passed the bill, which funds several federal government departments, by a 57-35 vote, with Democrats backing the measure and most Republicans opposing it.

Passage of the measure today was no surprise given that Democrats won a filibuster battle on a narrow 60-34 vote that saw Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Thad Cochran of Mississippi and Richard Shelby of Alabama side with Democrats to move ahead to a vote on the bill.

Those same three Republicans voted for the bill and three Democrats, pro-abortion Sens. Evan Bayh of Indiana, Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, all voted against it for other reasons.

Shelby voted for the bill even though he signed a letter along with 35 other Republicans saying they would filibuster it because of the abortion funding. Collins and Cochran did not sign the letter.

Democrats held open the vote to allow ailing pro-abortion Sen. Robert Byrd to come to the Senate to vote and for pro-abortion Sen. Joseph Lieberman to walk from synagogue to support it.

Several pro-life organizations called on members of the Senate to oppose the bill because it overturned the Dornan Amendment that has prohibited taxpayer funding of abortions in the District of Columbia.

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council called the bill "a Christmas gift to Planned Parenthood" and "supporters of coercive abortion."

“This appropriations bill guts a longstanding prohibition on using public funds to pay for abortions in the District of Columbia," Charmaine Yoest of Americans United for Life complained in a statement to LifeNews.com.

"The bill also provides millions of dollars for international 'family planning' that could be directed to organizations that pay for and promote abortions. A majority of Americans do not support the use of their tax dollars to pay for abortions," she said.

The bill also appropriates $648.5 million for international family planning funding, an increase of $103 million from Fiscal Year 2009, without the constraints of the Mexico City Policy to prevent these dollars from being provided to organizations that promote and perform abortions.

The bill also increases funding for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which has an admittedly pro-abortion agenda and has been criticized for working hand-in-hand with Chinese population control officials, to $55 million, a $5 million increase from FY09.

Perkins' group also said that the bill cuts abstinence education funding.

The Senate, today, passed a $1.1 trillion spending bill which doesn't include money for the military, the money for which will be subject to another vote and is expected to be $626 billion.

The bill also:

--permits detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to be transferred to the United States to stand trial but not to be released.

-- voids a long-standing ban on the funding of abortion by the District of Columbia

-- phases out a D.C. school voucher program and opens the door for the city to permit medical marijuana.

-- lifts a nationwide ban on the use of federal funds for needle-exchange programs which allows addicts to exchange needles used for injecting drugs.

-- gives federal workers pay increases averaging 2 percent, with those in high costs areas getting slightly higher increases.

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Bankers Need to "Give Back"

Over the weekend, our teleprompter-in-chief made a big deal about the financial community, and in particular, institutions that were part of the big-government liberal bailouts*, needing to "give back" to America.

His point was that since the government bailed them out to the tune of several billions of dollars, they needed to loosen up credit so that individuals and businesses that are not now able to borrow money, may borrow money and put that money back into the economy.

Sounds good, doesn't it?

This is, of course, a prelude to more government regulation. Obama will complain that the financial community isn't doing what he wants them to do, proving that the Big Bad Evil Corporations need more regulation. That regulation will require them to be more "fair" about lending and will require them to lend money to more minorities and disadvantaged people and businesses that employ or might employ a lot of people, but don't have the financial stability to get a loan right now.

Once those regulations pass, these financial institutions, instead of doing business that is in their best interest, will be required to change their policies and procedures to suit the government's interests. In a few short years, when those borrowers are unable to pay back the loans, these financial institutions will become insolvent and require government funds to . . . .

. . . hey wait a minute. Isn't that how we got here in the first place?

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Yesterday, Fox; Today, Associated Press

Showing no shame, the Obama administration today slammed a report from The Associated Press alleging the government had overstated by thousands the number of jobs it has created or saved with federal contracts under President Obama's $787 billion recovery program.

The White House seized on an initial report from a government oversight board weeks ago that claimed federal contracts awarded to businesses under the recovery plan already had helped pay for more than 30,000 jobs. The administration said the number was evidence that the stimulus program had exceeded early expectations toward reaching the president's promise of creating or saving 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year.

But the 30,000 figure is overstated by thousands -- at the very least by nearly 5,000, or one in six, based on AP's limited review of some of the contracts -- because some federal agencies and recipients of the money provided incorrect job counts. The review found some counts were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of jobs; some jobs were credited to stimulus spending when, in fact, none were produced.

Within minutes of the publication of AP's story, the White House released a statement at 12:15 a.m. Thursday that it said was the "real facts" about how jobs were counted in the stimulus data distributed two weeks ago.

"This story draws misleading conclusions from a handful of examples," Ed DeSeve, an Obama adviser helping to oversee the stimulus program, said.

"Tomorrow, more than 100,000 recipient reports will be posted on Recovery.gov," DeSeve said. "Unlike the small number of reports reviewed by AP, these reports have been reviewed for weeks, errors have been spotted and corrected, and additional layers of review by state and local governments have further improved the data quality."

Nevertheless, the White House said it is aware there are problems. In an interview, the advisor said agencies have been working with businesses that received the money to correct mistakes. It asserted that had been a test run of a small subset of data that had been subjected only to three days of reviews, that it had already corrected "virtually all" the mistakes identified by the AP and that the discovery of mistakes "does not provide a statistically significant indication of the quality of the full reporting that will come on Friday."

"If there's an error that was made, let's get it fixed," DeSeve said.

There's no evidence the White House sought to inflate job numbers in the report, but the administration embraced the flawed figures the moment they were released.

The data partially reviewed by the AP for errors included all the data presently available, representing all known federal contracts awarded to businesses under the stimulus program. The figures being released Friday include different categories of stimulus spending by state governments, housing authorities, nonprofit groups and other organizations.

As of early Thursday, on its recovery.org Web site, the government was still citing 30,383 as the actual number of jobs linked so far to stimulus spending, despite the mistakes the White House has now acknowledged and said were being corrected.

A Colorado company said it created 4,231 jobs with the help of Obama's economic recovery plan. The real number: fewer than 1,000.

A child care center in Florida said it saved 129 jobs with the help of stimulus money. Instead, it gave pay raises to its existing employees.

Elsewhere in the U.S., some jobs credited to the stimulus program were counted two, three, four or even more times.

The discrepancy raises questions about the reliability of a key benchmark the administration uses to gauge the success of the stimulus. The errors could be magnified Friday when a much larger round of reports is released. It is expected to show hundreds of thousands of jobs repairing public housing, building schools, repaving highways and keeping teachers on local payrolls.

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Cash For Clunkers Has Clunker Website

Auto dealers the nation over are praising the cash-for-clunkers program for filling their showrooms with folks ready to buy. According to most estimates, somewhere between 700,000 and 800,000 units moved in connection to the program. How many of them would have moved anyway absent government incentives which allowed dealers to make more money per car? Er, not clear. What will the effect of the $3 billion in tax dollars being sucked out of one end of the economy and thrown into the backseat of a new Prius? Also not clear (though shouldn't all cash for clunk receipients be forced to give rides to anyone who asks for as long as they own the car?). Exactly when and how the trade-ins will be destroyed? Also not clear (though would make great video, for sure, especially if Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood personally destroys all vehicles).

This much, however, is clear: The government's website that was supposed to handle all dealer claims sucks worse than your grandpa's Pinto:

"We continue to address technical problems with the CARS Web site, and have determined that the Web site will not be fully functional before [this] morning," the Transportation Department said in a statement sent to dealers late Monday evening. "Dealers should be assured that they will be provided time to submit pending deals equivalent to the time that was lost this afternoon while the system was down."

The feds have made various noises about not reimbursing dealers who are either late with paperwork or can't access the broken site in a timely enough fashion. Expect the followup on this "successful" stimulus program to be about as dogged and high-profile as news from the war in Afghanistan. Here's a Dallas dealer's lament from yesterday, the last day of the program:

"Any deal you do today, there's certainly a high risk of not getting paid," he said. "Unfortunately, there will be some dealers who will be hurt financially by this program. There are probably some nervous lending institutions, too."

Dallas-area sales are down 37.5 percent from last year, btw.

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More: Your Tax Dollars At Work Stimulating The Economy

Perhaps you've noticed the unemployment rate rising as stimulus dollars continue to go out the government door. How can this be? Weren't those stimulus dollars all supposed to be going to "shovel-ready" projects? No, wait. They were supposed to be going to local and state governments to keep them from laying off teachers and law enforcement personnel.

Where else is it going?

The Social Security Administration admitted today that 1,700 check were mistakenly sent to inmates who were ineligible to receive benefits. While this glitch is only hitting the media today, apparently the error was discovered some time ago.

The Boston Herald reported that the administration is asking for the Massachusetts money back (among other states). But Diane Wiffin, a spokeswoman with the Massachusetts Dept. of Corrections said that her department tried to alert the Social Security staff months ago when it first discovered the checks had been sent to 23 inmates who were ineligible for any benefits. "It was the DOC's opinion that the inmates were not eligible for the payments ...., and we withheld the checks from the inmates at that time and immediately contacted the federal Social Security Administration," she said.

But the administration failed to provide a directive despite several requests, so the department could no longer withhold the checks from the inmates.

No doubt, that stimulus money has been spent on drugs, payments for "hits," cigarettes, bribes, and who knows what else.

While the amounts and the number of checks in this specific instance are relatively small in the large scheme of things, these sorts of SNAFUs seem to be repeated over and over. The more people investigate where are taxpayer dollars are going, the more it is clear that much of the money is being spent unwisely, and in many cases being diverted to people and causes it was never intended for, often going to recipients who have no legal right to any of the funds.

If those same stimulus dollars had been simply divided evenly and sent to every taxpaying American citizen, the effect probably would have been more pronounced and more positive.

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"Risk" is a Four Letter Word

Just when the economy needs risk-taking the most, risk-takers are under the most threat. The Treasury now wants venture-capital firms declared as systemic risks and put under tight restrictions as part of the broader re-regulation of financial firms. Venture capitalists argue that since they don’t use debt and their firms are comparatively small, they shouldn’t come under rules designed for highly leveraged, too-big-to-fail banks.

How this debate turns out matters, because some 20% of U.S. gross national product is created by companies that were formed through venture backing. They include Intel, Apple and Google. How policy makers treat venture capital is a measure of the amount of innovation and enterprise that happens in an economy, with more regulation leading to less innovation.

This is a tough time for venture capital, with investments by firms falling more than 50% in the second quarter. The 700 or so venture-capital firms in the U.S. are mostly small partnerships, with a modest voice in Washington. They say the industry as we know it can’t survive if firms are regulated as investment advisers, which would mean complying with rules for disclosure, compliance, record keeping and privacy designed for huge firms.

This is a good time to recall that the venture-capital industry was born as a reaction to New Deal regulations that stifled capital and prolonged the Depression. The country’s first venture-capital firm (other than family-run funds) was American Research and Development, planned in the 1930s and launched after World War II in Boston.

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Cash For Clunkers On the Rocks

The Obama administration will suspend the "cash for clunkers" program unless the Senate provides $2 billion more for the popular car incentive plan, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said Sunday.

He said he expects the current $1 billion pool to be exhausted by the end of this weekend. The House approved an additional $2 billion on Friday and the administration is pressing the Senate to go along before its summer vacation begins at week's end.

"If we don't get the $2 billion from the Senate ... we would have to suspend the program next week," LaHood said in an interview with C-SPAN's "Newsmakers" show. He said the administration "will continue the program until we see what the Senate does and I believe the Senate will pass this."

At least one GOP senator questioned the need to speed the money.

"This is crazy to try to rush this thing through again while they're trying to rush through health care, and they want to get on to cap and trade electricity tax," said Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C. "We've got to slow this thing down."

I find it disturbing when I watch the car commercials on TV. Both local and nationwide ads are promoting this program. The administration intended the program not just to stimulate car sales, but to get gas guzzling, polluting vehicles off the streets and put more efficient vehicles on the streets. That apparently isn't happening. Many vehicles being offered are trucks, SUV's, and larger cars. Cars being traded in are often less than five year old, are no less fuel efficient that the ones being bought and no less polluting.

At least those taking advantage of the program are getting back some of their tax dollars.

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