Friday, February 5, 2010

Barker's Newsbites: Friday, 2/5/10


Another day... more news...
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7 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704259304575043600254910186.html

It's worth noting that when Democrats took over Congress in 2007, the debt ratio was 36.2%, but within a year it had climbed to 40.2% and was heading north. Now the public debt ratio is climbing even faster...

February 5, 2010 at 10:28 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=520216

[By George F. Will]

On Day One of his vow to take "meaningful steps to rein in our debt," Barack Obama asked Congress to freeze portions of discretionary domestic spending. This would follow an astonishing permanent expansion:

Republicans on the House Budget Committee say appropriations bills Obama has signed, along with his stimulus spending, have increased discretionary domestic spending by 84%. He almost certainly will not keep his promise to veto spending bills when Congress, as it almost certainly will, largely disregards his request.

On Day Two, taking a break from the rigors of austerity, he was in Tampa, Fla., promising $8 billion for high-speed rail projects there and in a dozen other places. Four days later, he released a $3.8 trillion fiscal year 2011 budget that would add another $1.3 trillion to the national debt.

February 5, 2010 at 12:00 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=520230

Too many of those pain-in-the-neck productive people living in your state, making everyone else look bad? Want to get rid of them? Let [New Jersey] the Garden State show you how it's done through the tax code.

At one time in the not-too-distant past, New Jersey was by some measures the wealthiest state in the country. No more. Wealth is fleeing at an alarming rate. Between 2004 and 2008, more than $70 billion in wealth headed for the exit according to a new study by Boston College's Center on Wealth and Philanthropy.

Worse, it's not being replaced. Though more people moved into the state than moved out during the period of the study, the net worth of the people who fled was, at 70% higher. Those who left also tended to be better educated, more entrepreneurial and more professional.

February 5, 2010 at 12:01 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=520226

Congress stands ready to lift the debt ceiling an additional $1.9 trillion and is eager to waste hundreds of billions more.

Once approved by Congress, which is inevitable, the new debt ceiling will be $14.3 trillion — roughly equal in size to our entire economy. But why raise the ceiling now, even though the U.S. has only $12.3 trillion in total debt?

As the Associated Press notes, the $14.3 trillion is "enough to keep Congress from having to vote again (to raise the debt ceiling) before the November elections on an issue that is feeding a sense among voters that the government is spending too much and putting future generations under a mountain of debt to do it."

In short, naked politics: Congress can spend like sailors on shore leave while pretending to be "concerned" about deficits and the debt.

February 5, 2010 at 12:01 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704259304575043624084138794.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

[By Philip K. Howard, author of "Life Without Lawyers" (Norton, 2010) and chairman of Common Good]

'Let's try common sense," President Obama said in the State of the Union address, provoking a spontaneous burst of laughter in the House of Representatives chamber.

The unintended humor exposes an important truth about Washington: Everyone knows that won't happen.

[EXAMPLES:]

[T]eachers aren't trying to fail. They're frustrated all day long by the types of bureaucratic programs and incentives that Mr. Obama wants to pile even higher on them; the solution is not to tweak the bureaucracy, but to abandon it. Charter schools succeed because the people in them are free to use their common sense all day long...

America can't build new infrastructure because no one has the authority to say "go." Nearly endless environmental review, followed by years of litigation by anyone who doesn't want the project, [often makes] it impossible to put a shovel in the ground for a new project for years.

Mr. Obama is still stumping for a health-care bill that was substantially written by lobbyists. That's why the legislation is so convoluted. It's an agglomeration of special-interest deals far removed from what's needed to bring health-care costs under control. Lobbyists didn't kill the health-care bill. According to Katharine Seelye of the New York Times, they spent about half a billion dollars promoting it. The American people killed the bill.

Washington is broken. So are most state governments. The reason is the same. Government is out of control, schools are out of control, health-care costs are out of control, lawsuits are out of control ... Fixing modern government, Peter Drucker once observed, requires returning to first principles. What's missing in government is the activating principle of all human accomplishment - individual responsibility.

February 5, 2010 at 12:01 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.vote.com/mmp_printerfriendly.php?id=1848

[By Dick Morris]

President Obama brings to mind the hapless engineers at Toyota who find that their vehicles accelerate whether or not the driver wants them to. It appears that no matter how hard Obama jams on the brakes with his newfound commitment to deficit reduction (after almost doubling the deficit in one year), the level of red ink just seems inexorably to rise. The House voted yesterday to raise the federal debt limit another $1.9 trillion.

[I]f the president really wanted to get serious about reducing the deficit, he's got two easy steps to take: 1) Stop the remaining $500 billion of last year's $800 billion stimulus package; 2) Refund to the Treasury the $500 billion in TARP funds repaid by the banks.

Instead, he's merrily spending the remaining stimulus cash -- even though the first round failed to curb the recession, doing little more than protecting the jobs and pay of state and local government employees. The remaining money would do more of the same - while also funding pork-barrel projects all over America. But only $300 billion of the stimulus has been spent. Why not call back the remaining $500 billion?

Because Obama is still committed to the expansion of government spending! His promise of a (minor) freeze NEXT year brings to mind an overweight friend's talk of the diet he'll go on... as he starts upon another banana split.

Then there's the TARP funds. Most of the money laid out under President George W. Bush is being repaid by the banks that borrowed it, but Obama is intent on intercepting the cash before it lands in the Treasury and sending it out the door again. He wants these funds for his second stimulus, relabeled as a "jobs bill." Some $30 billion is to go to small businesses [supposedly] for job creation, $30 billion for consumer credit and yet another $100 billion for more state and local aid - that is... more protection for government workers.

February 5, 2010 at 8:36 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7157590/India-forms-new-climate-change-body.html

The Indian government has established its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it “cannot rely” on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group headed by its own leading scientist Dr R.K Pachauri.

[T]he Indian government will established a separate National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor the effects of climate change on the world’s ‘third ice cap’, and an ‘Indian IPCC’ to use ‘climate science’ to assess the impact of global warming throughout the country.

“There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report, [the] IPCC doesn’t do the original research which is one of the weaknesses… they just take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks.

February 5, 2010 at 8:37 PM

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