Accordion rock

Obama; Job Killer

I wish during the years I was in public office I had this firsthand experience about the difficulties businesspeople face. ... We are choking off business opportunity.

That quote came from Senator George McGovern who tried to start a business after leaving office and ran into a wall of regulations he helped create.  I found the quote today in an article written by John Stossel explaining why job creators are fighting back against the demonizing of business by Obama, another policymaker who has zero business experience.  Please read it but I’ll give you the money quote:

Tom Stemberg, founder of Staples, got involved with the Job Creators Alliance because he's annoyed that the government makes a tough job much tougher.  He complains that government mostly creates jobs — that kill jobs.  "They're creating $300 million worth of jobs in the new consumer financial protection bureau," Stemberg said, "which I don't think is going to do much for productivity in America. We're creating all kinds of jobs trying to live up to Dodd-Frank ... and those jobs don't create much productivity.

I have a school principle that can’t get a loan to buy my late mom’s house because of Dodd-Frank.  He has excellent credit, a good job, but because the house is in a small town and there haven’t been enough home sales in the area to meet the appraiser’s mandated requirements for comps the banks can’t lend.  Small businesses everywhere are running into the same problem, lending to small companies is at a five year low. 

Dodd-Frank is preventing them from getting loans and thereby killing jobs.  Think about that; Congress’ response to a crisis they created is creating another crisis.  This should not be surprising; Dodd and Frank had a big hand in creating the first crises through irresponsible bank regulations.  Ronald Reagan once remarked that “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help'.”   Thomas Sowell recently wrote Gridlock to the Rescue? where he shows how history proves that government intervention into the economy has always resulted in a worse outcome than doing nothing. 

Of course according to leftists if you are against government regulation then you want dirty air and dirty water.  Problem with such simplistic thinking is that regulation has long ago cleaned up most pollution problems.  Nevertheless leftist politicians continue to try and put more and more restrictions on business just to show that they are earning their salaries by eliminating imaginary threats.  Witness how Obama is trying to regulate the newest pollutant, carbon dioxide  (essential to all life and nontoxic at 100 times ambient levels),  as a back door cap and trade move that is predicted to increase energy costs by $129 billion and according to a Commerce Department analysis  would cause job losses of 40,000 to 60,000.  Obama promised to bankrupt coal and openly admitted that “electricity prices would necessarily skyrocket”.  Fewer dollars in everyone's pockets will cripple an already shaky economy causing even more job losses.  Proposed EPA regulations on 200,000 boilers and process heaters will have companies trying to measure trace amounts that are so small it will be difficult if not impossible to achieve, yet Barbra Boxer says if we don't we "will kill 8,100 more people more than would have otherwise been killed from pollution".

Obama was saying pass my jobs bill when he hadn’t even submitted one while at the same time he delayed signing free-trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama.  He finally just signed them but since he was praising them in his 2010 State of the Union address no one can understand the year and a half delay.  Obama’s own trade website reveals that the South Korea agreement alone would create more than 60,000 jobs.  Obama has delayed the Keystone pipeline even though his own State Department has said there is no real issue about the environment that requires further investigation.  He wants to wait till after the election so as to not anger his base at the expense of 20,000 jobs and five billion dollars in property taxes that TransCanada will pay over the lifetime of the project.  He delayed a shale gas project in Ohio to study how hydraulic fracturing might contaminate groundwater despite the fact that there are no confirmed cases of groundwater contamination from fracking ever anywhere.  Groundwater contamination has occurred but not as a direct result of the process, it is the result of waste water evaporation ponds and poorly constructed pipelines taking the waste water and chemicals to processing facilities.  These are normal haz-mat concerns that every industry must monitor and control but is being used as a straw man to vilify a new energy boom that in the Marcellus Shale region alone could create 280,000 new American jobs and add $6 billion in new tax revenues.  The left always bemoans the fact that we are loosing so many jobs to China but never say why.  When a communist country has a lower corporate tax rate than the United States you know we are screwed.  The left's answer, raise those taxes more even though the United States has the fourth highest corporate tax rate in the 30-nation Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.  The Cato Institute reports:

The combined U.S. federal and average state rate of 40 percent is almost 9 percentage points higher than the average OECD top corporate rate of 31.4 percent. Only Belgium, Italy, and Japan have higher rates than that of the United States.

  As one disillusioned Obama donor recently noted:

"Businesses adding jobs" is a headline every elected official loves to read. Sadly, it's one that's getting harder and harder to find because of a policy and regulatory landscape that makes it increasingly difficult for businesses to see why and where creating new jobs makes sense.

Obamacare, the biggest job killer of all needs several posts all by itself.  With all the delayed jobs, lost jobs, and killed jobs Obama and the left have caused one might wonder how unemployment could be dropping.  Easy answer, they are cooking the books.  315,000 people who have given up looking for work and have no job are no longer counted as unemployed.

Obamacare Power Grab

 “For the power given to Congress by the Constitution does not extend to the internal regulation of the commerce of a State, (that is to say of the commerce between citizen and citizen,) which remain exclusively with its own legislature; but to its external commerce only, that is to say, its commerce with another State, or with foreign nations, or with the Indian tribes.”

"I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That 'all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people.' To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition." 

Thomas Jefferson

The idea that the commerce clause can be used as a catch all that will allow Congress total control over our lives will be challenged next year in what is arguably the most important Supreme Court decision since the founding of the Republic.  Is this hyperbole?  I don’t think so and apparently at least one congressman doesn’t either. 

Here you see Rep. Fortney “Pete” Stark (D-Calif.) at a now infamous town hall meeting being asked about slavery and constitutional limits to congress.

“I think that there are very few constitutional limits that would prevent the federal government from rules that could affect your private life.”

The questioner then outlined those very parts of the Constitution that were meant to place limits on the federal government.  She then asks:

“So my question is, how can this law be constitutional? But more importantly than that, if they can do this, what can’t they?”

His answer to we the people?

“The federal government, yes, can do most anything in this country.”

 Hopefully everyone saw that clip but I replay it here because it is the foundation of Obama's and most leftists beliefs.  The government is all powerful and the people need to just let our betters tell us how to live.  For our own good, for the children.  The idea that if the government can mandate we buy health care then they can tell us to buy anything, a Chevy Volt or broccoli or whatever, was recently admitted in court.  In writing for the majority confirming the constitutionality of the Obamacare mandate Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the D.C. Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals flatly stated that he can’t find any limit to congressional power:   (emphasis mine)

“We acknowledge some discomfort with the government’s failure to advance any clear doctrinal principles limiting congressional mandates that any American purchase any product or service in interstate commerce. But to tell the truth, those limits are not apparent to us, either because the power to require the entry into commerce is symmetrical with the power to prohibit or condition commercial behavior, or because we have not yet perceived a qualitative limitation.”

 This is no dumb congress critter saying this.  Hope you all like broccoli.

 

Obama's Gift to Iran

Iranian Military Examine Obama's Holiday Gift

I found it hard to believe that Obama chose not to destroy the drone that Iran has captured.  Surely we couldn’t locate the drone or some other impediment to protecting a highly classified strategic asset was in play.  However it seems that Obama made a deliberate decision not to target the drone for fear that Iran would consider this a hostile act.  

Iran certainly has no such qualms; they have cost the lives of countless American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan with support to the insurgents including providing the deadliest of Improvised Explosive Devises, IEDs, to the terrorists.  Recently they themselves tried to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador by attempting to blow up a D.C. restaurant.  But Obama doesn’t want to piss them off?  The only reason I can think of, aside from conspiracy theories regarding Obama’s loyalties, is that he still holds out the hope that he can negotiate Iran into giving up its nuclear ambitions.  The man is so assured of his silver tongued oratory that he even thinks that politely asking Iran to give us the drone back a day after they said they wouldn’t might actually work. “We’ll see how the Iranians respond,” Obama says. 

 

Rick Santorum recently commented on Obama's appeasement in the Middle East to which Obama responded, “Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 out of 30 top al-Qaeda leaders who’ve been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement,”.   Of course we can’t ask Osama anything because he’s dead, but Obama’s newest dumb statement highlights another of Obama’s decisions that, aside from conspiracy theories regarding Obama’s loyalties, is hard to figure out.  Osama had barely reached room temperature, or sea temperature, before the President started crowing about how he had killed him.  No thought to how that compromised the tons of intelligence the mission had captured just as no thought to how releasing the fact that we had obtained tons of intelligence compromised that very intelligence.

The man is in over his head and apparently no one around him is willing to let him know how badly.  By a vote of 100-0 the Senate passed its most stringent Iran sanctions bill to date. Obama opposed it.  Why?  Aside from conspiracy theories regarding Obama’s loyalties I just can't say.

Obama helping Al Qaeda?

Al Qaeda flag flown above Benghazi courthouse

Gaddafi certainly was no friend of America, Ronald Reagan called him the “Mad Dog of the Middle East” before dropping a bomb on his tent, but recently he was behaving himself.  Since he wasn’t an actual ally it wasn’t quite the betrayal that throwing Mubarak under the bus was when Obama decided to go to war with Libya.  Still Gaddafi did call Obama a friend and said “He is a man whose policy should be supported, and he should be assisted in implementing it in any way possible, since he is now leaning towards peace.”  Now that we have killed Gaddafi and replaced him with a Sharia government that embraces Al Qaeda what is Obama’s next move concerning Libya?  Why help them build up their military of course.