Amazing video on Israel:
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Sad commentary on America. (See 1 below.)
Even sadder on America's press and media dolts! (See 1a below.)
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How Israel seeks to survive. (See 2 and 2a below.)
How Israel seeks to survive. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Idyllic spring in DC did not provide a springboard. (See 3 below.)
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Obama retreats on Iran and China folds vis a vis Assad leaving Russia his lone supporter? Will the trade off work? (See 4 below.)
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Will Obama's failed and incoherent economic policy do him in , do America in, both nor either? Time and voters will decide. (See 5 below.)
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Idyllic spring in DC did not provide a springboard. (See 3 below.)
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Obama retreats on Iran and China folds vis a vis Assad leaving Russia his lone supporter? Will the trade off work? (See 4 below.)
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Will Obama's failed and incoherent economic policy do him in , do America in, both nor either? Time and voters will decide. (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1)This is too accurate to be amusing.
You know you live in an Upside-down Land if...
- A Muslim officer crying "Allah Akbar" while shooting up an army base is considered to have committed "Workplace Violence" while an American citizen boasting a Ron Paul bumper sticker is classified as a "Domestic Terrorist".
You know you live in an Upside-down Land if...
- You can get arrested for expired tags on your car but not for being in the country illegally.
You know you live in an Upside-down Land if...
- Your government believes that the best way to eradicate trillions of dollars of debt is to spend trillions more of our money.
You know you live in an Upside-down Land if...
- A seven year old boy can be thrown out of school for calling his teacher "cute" but hosting a sexual exploration or diversity class in grade school is perfectly acceptable.
You know you live in an Upside-down Land if...
- The Supreme Court of the United States can rule that lower courts cannot display the 10 Commandments in their courtroom, while sitting in front of a display of the 10 Commandments.
You know you live in an Upside-down Land if...
- Children are forcibly removed from parents who appropriately discipline them while children of "underprivileged" drug addicts are left to rot in filth infested cesspools.
- You know you live in an Upside-down Land if...
- Working class Americans pay for their own health care (and the health care of everyone else) while unmarried women are free to have child after child on the "State's" dime while never being held responsible for their own choices.
- You know you live in an Upside-down Land if...
- Hard work and success are rewarded with higher taxes and government intrusion, while slothful, lazy behavior is rewarded with EBT cards, WIC checks, Medicaid and subsidized housing.
You know you live in an Upside-down Land if...
- Being self-sufficient is considered a threat to the government.
- You know you live in an Upside-down Land if...
- Politicians think that stripping away the amendments to the constitution is really protecting the rights of the people.
You know you live in an Upside-down Land if...
- The rights of the Government come before the rights of the individual.
You know you live in an Upside-down Land if...
- Parents believe the State is responsible for providing for their children.
You know you live in an Upside-down Land if...
- You can write a post like this just by reading the news headlines.
You know you live in an Upside-down Land if...
- You pay your mortgage faithfully, denying yourself the newest big screen TV while your neighbor defaults on his mortgage (while buying iphones, TV's and new cars) and the government forgives his debt and reduces his mortgage (with your tax dollars).
You know you live in an Upside-down Land if...
- Your government can add anything they want to your kid's water (fluoride, chlorine, etc.) but you are not allowed to give them raw milk.
You know you live in an Upside-down Land if...
- Being stripped of the ability to defend yourself makes you "safe".
You know you live in an Upside-down Land if...
- You have to have your parents signature to go on a school field trip but not to get an abortion.
You know you live in an Upside-down Land if...
- An 80 year old woman can be stripped searched by the TSA but a Muslim woman in a burqa is only subject to having her neck and head searched.
You know you live in an Upside-down Land if...
- Using the "N" word is considered "hate speech" but writing and signing songs about raping women and killing cops is considered "art".
Unfortunately, this list could go on and on.
Our world has been turned upside-down.
We are in distress. Where do we go from here?"COWARDICE asks the question - is it Safe?""EXPEDIENCY asks the question - is it Politically Correct?""VANITY asks the question - is it Popular?""But the CONSCIENCE asks the question - is it Right?""And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither, Safe, nor Politically Correct, nor Popular, but one must take it, because its RIGHT!
1a)Isn't it amazing that, within only one week of Tiger Woods crashing his Escalade,
The press found every woman with whom Tiger has had an affair during the last few years?
And, they even uncovered photos, text messages, recorded phone calls, etc.!
Furthermore, they not only know the cause of the family fight, but they even know it was a
9 iron from his golf bag that his wife used to break out the windows in the Escalade.
Not only that, they know which wedge!
And, each & every day, they were able to continue to provide America with updates
On Tiger's sex rehab stay, his wife's divorce settlement figures, as well as the dates & Tournaments in which he will play.
Now, Barack Hussein Obama has been in office for almost three years, yet this very same press:
Cannot find any of his childhood friends or neighbors;
Or find any of Obama's high school or college classmates;
Or locate any of his college papers or grades
Or determine how he paid for both a Columbia & a Harvard education;
Or discover which country issued his visa to travel to Pakistan in the 1980's;
Or even find Michelle Obama's Princeton thesis on racism.
They just can't seem to uncover any of this.
Yet, the public still trusts that same press to give them the whole truth!
Don't you find that totally amazing ?
NOW TELL ME THERE IS NO CORRUPTION IN THE AMERICAN PRESS
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------2) Israel’s gas diplomacy
Israel: ‘Gas is our strategic interest for new partnerships’
How do you survive when you’re surrounded by enemies, as is Israel? You win allies among the nations that surround your enemies.This increasingly successful Israeli approach — dubbed the periphery strategy — exploits an arsenal of Israeli assets that its new-found allies need: Israel’s military, its counterterrorism skills, its technology, and especially of late, its surprising wealth of hydrocarbons.Israel’s periphery strategy is nothing new. After Israel survived its war of independence in the late 1940s, when it was invaded by six neighbouring Arab armies, Israel set about winning friends in the Middle East among non-Arabs. In this it succeeded wildly — Israel won friends among black African states, to which it transferred water-conserving agricultural technologies; among small non-Arab Muslim countries and ethnic groups that were at odds with the Arab states, and with Iran and Turkey, two non-Arab regional powers that became full-blown military allies.Then the strategy all but collapsed with the OPEC oil boycott of 1973. “Stay friends with Israel and we’ll cut you off from oil,” the Arab states told the many poor oil-dependent countries that had relations with Israel. Poor countries felt they had no choice but to comply. Israel was from that point mostly abandoned, its former friends suddenly harsh critics at the United Nations, where they voted en masse to condemn Israel in one Arab-sponsored resolution after another.Now Israel’s periphery strategy is back big time, thanks largely to hydrocarbon diplomacy. Apart from a major oil find in its interior, Israel has known gas reserves of some $130-billion in the Mediterranean, with some estimating that twice as much will materialize as exploration continues. Israel’s Mediterranean neighbour, the island nation of Cyprus, is also discovering immense amounts of gas in the sea bed adjacent to Israel’s. The two are now developing their gas jointly, with plans to export it to Europe or Asia or both. Greece, which may have more oil and gas in its extensive Mediterranean waters than either, is now talking of joining Cyprus and Israel in joint ventures.The sea change in the attitude of Greece and Cyprus is breathtaking. Until recently, these two ethnically Greek nations were frigidly cold toward Israel, partly because they believed their economic interests lay in the more populous Arab world, partly because they feared for the safety of the 250,000-member Greek community in Egypt if they were to establish good relations with Israel.Today the Greek calculus has changed. Not only did Greek trade with Arab states fail to blossom, the Greek presence in Egypt has all but vanished. Egypt’s Greek-owned industries were nationalized; Egypt’s Greeks were persecuted for their Christian faith. The official remaining count for Egyptian Greeks, once the most affluent and influential minority in Egypt, is but 3,000.In contrast, Greeks now have common cause with Israel in exploiting their hydrocarbon riches and in defending them — Turkey, an enemy of the two Greek nations as well as Israel, has vowed to stop both Cyprus and Greece from developing their hydrocarbons on the basis of long-standing territorial claims. The Israeli-Greek-Cypriot alliance is likely strong enough to stand up to Turkey and allow these new-found friends to profit together.But for Israel, profit is only the half of it, as a senior advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu told the press in an interview last week, when the two were in Cyprus to further the nations’ hydrocarbon co-operation. “Gas is our strategic interest. It is … a diplomatic tool for creating new partnerships, first in our region, as well as with the great powers of India and China.”Israel views Cyprus and Greece as part of the “Western arc” of its periphery strategy, along with other European countries such as Christian Romania and Bulgaria, and Muslim Albania, which has been a standout defender of Israel in the United Nations. Israel now also has allies to the east, such as Georgia and Azerbaijan in Central Asia. And as part of its southern diplomacy, Israel recently established an East African alliance with predominantly Christian Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia and South Sudan designed to fend off Iran and Islamist terrorism. Israel’s stock in East Africa is particularly high because of its role in gaining independence for South Sudan, the world’s newest state.Over much of South Sudan’s half-century struggle for independence, Israel almost single-handedly armed and supported the black African rebels against what was widely recognized as genocide and enslavement perpetrated by the Arabic rulers based in northern Sudan. In recognition of Israel’s role in its liberation, the leader of South Sudan made Israel his first foreign stop following independence and promised to establish his country’s embassy in Israel’s capital of Jerusalem, the only country in the world to do so.Israel’s military help will continue to be needed in East Africa. The oil-rich South Sudan may well find itself at war again with the north and East African countries may find themselves subject to terrorist attack, particularly since South Sudan plans to pipe its oil eastward to ports in Kenya and Ethiopia instead of north through Sudan, which relies on South Sudan’s oil.Focus on Israel and it appears to be a tiny isolated country surrounded by a sea of hostile Arab nations. Zoom out, though, and it is the Arab nations that are revealed to be isolated, increasingly surrounded by age-old adversaries, most of which have growing ties to Israel. With Israel’s hydrocarbon assets continuing to grow, and with Israel’s military and intelligence assets remaining dominant in the region, Israel’s periphery diplomacy has emerged as one of the country’s remarkable achievements.
2a) Netanyahu downplays Egyptian natural gas cutoff
04/23/2012 15:10
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, in his first comments about the cutoff of Egyptian gas to Israel, played it down Monday, saying it was the result of a commercial dispute.
"We don't see this gas cutoff as something that is born out of political developments," he told a group of Israel Bonds leaders on Monday. "This is actually a business dispute between the Israeli company and the Egyptian company."
Earlier on Monday, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman said that he hoped the dispute could be solved like any business dispute, Israel Radio reported.With that, Netanyahu said, "I must say that we have gas reserves that will make Israel totally energy independent, not only from Egypt, but from any other source, and which will turn Israel into one of the world's largest exporters of natural gas. So we are quite confident on that score."
Israel has every desire to uphold the peace accords with Egypt, the foreign minister said. Egyptians share that interest, he added.
"We're following what's happening in Egypt and hope that everything will work out for the best," Liberman told Israel Radio.
Labor MK Isaac Herzog echoed Liberman's sentiments on Monday, saying "There is no interest in a deterioration from either side."
"This is not a positive development, but I think we should not make more of this than it is... On a policy level, it is clear to all of us, both to Israel and to Egypt, to continue to maintain the peace treaty," he said.
On Sunday Egypt announced that it was terminating the gas deal inked in June, 2005. Egyptian officials said Cairo's decision to halt the flow of gas through the pipeline was not rooted in political disagreements. Rather, the issue was part of a commercial dispute between the companies and Egyptian government corporations that is presently being adjudicated abroad.
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3) Obama's Springtime of Discontent
By Steve McCann
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------4)China steps back from supporting Assad, parts ways with Russia
3) Obama's Springtime of Discontent
By Steve McCann
Spring is the most idyllic time in Washington, D.C. It is marked by not only the blossoming of the cherry trees along the Tidal Basin, but also the greening of the grass and trees along the Mall as an influx of awestruck high school students and tourists circulate amid the museums, memorials and monuments that dominate the landscape. However, this year an unusual scent has permeated the atmosphere; it is the air of desperation emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
This has not been a spring of promise and renewal for the Obama administration; rather, it has been one of threadbare political tactics and demagoguery dying on the vine and the reality of three years of Barack Obama taking root in the American consciousness.
A centerpiece of Obama's re-election strategy is class warfare personified by the promotion of the Buffett Rule -- legislation to compel Americans earning $1 million or more annually to pay a minimum 30% in income taxes regardless of the income source.
Last September the president claimed that this tax was needed to "stabilize our debt and deficits for the next decade." However, it turned out that the total amount of revenue raised by this tax over the next ten years was a mere $46 billion, while the projected deficits in the Obama ten year budget would amount to more than $9,600 billion.
Undeterred, Obama next claimed the Buffett Rule necessary, as it is "about growth...about being able to make investments we need to strengthen the economy and create jobs." As the stimulus -- which passed in February of 2009, amounting to nearly $900 billion -- did absolutely nothing except enrich Democratic Party allies, what are the odds that $46 billion over ten years will accomplish anything?
Finally, the Obama administration was forced to admit that the proposed tax was simply a campaign ploy under the guise of "fairness" even though the less than two tenths of one percent of all tax filers this proposal would affect pay nearly 21% of all income tax revenues. The proposal was eventually shot down in the Senate, as the transparency of Obama's cynicism was there for all to see.
Every week brings forth a new story about another government-funded "alternative energy" company going into bankruptcy. The loss to the American taxpayers is now into multi-billions of dollars. Further, nearly all these companies and their investors have a direct or indirect connection to either the Democratic Party or the Obama White House and re-election team.
The scandal at the General Services Administration (GSA) revolving around lavish and unconscionable spending on parties reveals more than just the greed and ineptitude of various government bureaucrats.
During the financial crisis of 2008, a phrase often bandied about was "too big to fail" when describing the need to rescue various banks and financial institutions. The GSA debacle and the irresponsible funding of now-bankrupt "green companies" have brought to the fore the undeniable truth that the federal government itself has become not only too big to fail, but a leviathan impossible to control.
In fiscal 2012, the federal government is slated to spend in excess of $3.8 trillion. Only two nations on the face of the earth (China and Japan) have a national Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in excess of that amount. Further, all the nations of South America combined have a GDP of $4.1 trillion with a total population of 386 million, as compared to 310 million in the United Sates.
The bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. administer a budget which amounts to $12,258.00 per American, whereas the total economic activity in the entire continent of South America is the equivalent of $10,621.00 per person. There is no possible way to stop fraud and abuse with this unfathomable amount of spending combined with a convoluted, unanswerable, and bloated bureaucracy.
So what is the president's solution? Propose a budget that accelerates spending to $5.8 trillion within ten years and seizes more control over the economy through regulations, mandates, and a further expansion of the bureaucracy. The result: the national debt will be $26 trillion by 2022, as compared to $10.6 trillion when Obama took office in January of 2009, and waste, fraud, and abuse will be more rampant than ever.
The shenanigans of the Secret Service in Colombia and those of the GSA are not directly traceable to the White House, and they reflect poorly on the individuals involved. However, what Barack Obama fails or does not care to understand is that he and his administration set the tone for those who work in the government. It has become painfully obvious to the average citizen that Barack and Michelle Obama view the presidency as their personal fiefdom and are thus entitled to all the perquisites that go with royalty.
Be it the 94 rounds of golf since becoming president or the innumerable lavish vacations and White House parties or the general air of entitlement, one thing is clear: there is little regard for the taxpayers' money or how hard they work to earn it. This mindset has permeated the bureaucracy, and what has happened at the GSA is in all likelihood being repeated throughout the government. A government that has hired over 174,000 since Obama assumed office. And a government whose total compensation package for its employees averages $119,982.00 per year, as compared to $59,909.00 in the private sector.
The backdrop for all this is the ongoing economic malaise and intractable unemployment situation. The published unemployment rate of 8.2% in March does not include those who have dropped out of the job market. If the labor force participation rate (that part of the overall civilian population in the labor force) were the same as when Barack Obama became president, the actual unemployment rate would be 10.6% -- as those not in the labor force have increased by nearly seven million.
The American people, regardless of the statistics reported by the government or the propaganda put out by the Obama White House, know, through their own day-to-day experience, that the economy is not improving, nor will it anytime soon.
Hanging over this landscape is a trifecta of potential economic crises: the never-ending European debt debacle, an ongoing housing depression, and skyrocketing energy costs. Meanwhile, a global disaster resulting from Obama's mishandling of the Middle East could be ignited at any time.
These myriad factors are why Barack Obama has focused all his attention since Labor Day on campaigning for re-election (he has attended nearly twice as many fundraisers as George W. Bush in a comparable period of time). And why he has reverted to the now-threadbare tactic of pitting American against American using race, ethnicity, religion, or income as a catalyst. Additionally, as he is devoid of a sense of decency or honor, Obama is willing to portray his opponents as the worst of mankind, out to subjugate the people and pillage the nation.
However, this attempted demonization and societal upheaval are happening much too soon. The election is almost 200 days away, and the Obama re-election cabal will not be able to maintain this level of vitriol for that long a period of time, as the citizenry will soon tire of the rhetoric and falsehoods. Particularly when the opposition, which will raise as much or more money than the Obama machine, begins its counter-offensive together with the somnambulant but about to re-awaken Tea Party movement.
Similar to 2008, the Obama re-election campaign is being built on a flimsy foundation of image and propaganda. It will not succeed, as the record and inevitable campaign faux pas (which have already begun) of a no longer unknown candidate will be their Achilles heel.
Actions and events have shown this to be the springtime of discontent and the beginning of the end of the Obama regime.
Assad scrambles for cash to fund his war
This change of face surfaced at the UN Security Council on Saturday, April 21, when after voting for another 300 observers for Syria, the Chinese delegate Li Baodong made an unusual speech:
“We also call upon the international community to continue its firm support for Mr. Annan’s good offices’ efforts and consolidate the results achieved, and we strongly oppose any word and act aimed at creating difficulties for Mr. Annan’s good offices.”
Li went on to say: “China always maintained that the independence, sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity of Syria as well as the choice and the will of the Syrian people should be respected.”
Western sources stress that, with this speech, the Chinese ambassador stepped aside from Russia’s uncompromising backing for the Syrian ruler. Moscow remained the only world power acting to limit the UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan’s powers and the effectiveness of the UN monitors by denying them proper equipment and authority for overseeing an end to the violence in Syria.
The shift in Chinese policy was noted by Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan on April 10 when, after visiting Beijing, he remarked: “China is not in the same position as it was before. It is shifting away from full support for Assad’s regime.”
Washington sources believe that the Obama administration can count this change of face as a return on its policy of nuclear appeasement of - and rapprochement with - Tehran.
A senior US official said that what concerns Beijing most is the US oil embargo on Iran and its effect on the Chinese economy. Now that the Chinese see signs of a possible loosening up of sanctions especially in relation to Iranian oil exports in the wake of evolving US-Iranian deals, they are breathing a deep sigh of relief and prepared to be more accommodating to the US in its policy on Syria.
The approaching easing of sanctions against Iranian oil was signaled Saturday, April 21, by an announcement in Tehran that new purchasing contracts for the whole of 2012 had come in from the Asian refineries which were in trade relations with Iran.
Beijing is reported by our sources as having turned down an appeal from the Assad regime to purchase tens of billons of dollars worth of Syrian government bonds to tide it over its economic distress for the duration of the war. Last week, Assad was revealed to be so cash-strapped as to start dipping into the national gold reserves held in the Syrian state bank and selling the precious metal on financial markets in Dubai.
China’s defection will not immediately bring Bashar Assad crashing down, but it is a vote of no-confidence by a key world power in his survivability. It leaves Tehran and Moscow as the only props of his regime and may well inspire second thoughts in either or both of his champions.
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5)
Once upon a time, President Obama was a traditional Keynesian. When he came into office, he favored a massive injection of new government spending into the economy in the name of “stimulus” — counter-cyclical federal activity aimed at offsetting depressed consumer demand emanating from a recession-battered private sector. Unfortunately for the president, that approach to economic revival has now been thoroughly discredited in the public’s mind. The problem with Keynesianism isn’t the theory; it’s the practice. What happens in the real world — that is, the world in which Congress drafts and passes legislation — isn’t a series of tidy, one-time, highly valuable public investments that would not have occurred were it not for the legislation.No, when Congress writes stimulus spending bills, what we get are narrow-purpose pet projects, large federal bureaucracies, ideological hobbyhorses, and spending that simply displaces what otherwise would have occurred anyway, especially at the state level. The net result provides little if any boost to aggregate demand because the states — and to some extent private citizens — simply pocket the federal money and reduce their deficits and debts. Meanwhile, what federal taxpayers get is a permanent increase in the size of government — because almost nothing in politics is ever “one-time” — as well as a massive increase in the national debt. Of course, it didn’t help that the president and his advisers claimed that the $800 billion stimulus bill that Congress passed in early 2009 would keep the unemployment rate below 8 percent. Because unemployment soared passed 8 percent in early 2009, and even now, more than three years after passage of the stimulus bill, it still has not fallen back below that level even once. So the president has abandoned any pretense of defending the signature economic initiative of his term in office. Indeed, like his health-care plan, the stimulus is something he pretty much never mentions. That has put him in a difficult position, because the economy continues to be the top concern of voters, with just six months to go to the November election. To fill the void, the president has taken to articulating a different kind of economic “philosophy” in a series of high-profile speeches over the last year. It began with hisdenunciation of House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan’s 2011 budget plan last April, and continued with his address to a joint session of Congress last September, hisspeech in Osawatomie, Kan., in December, and the sequel to his Ryan-denouncing tirade delivered earlier this month, now known with special fondness as the “social Darwinism” speech. From these speeches, we learn that the president believes that the way to confront the central challenge of our time and restore an era of robust economic growth in the United States in the years ahead is . . . what exactly? It isn’t clear. For one thing, the president has chosen to define his “plan” (if it can be called that) mainly by saying what it isn’t: He wants it known that his approach to the economy most definitely bears no resemblance to the plan he claims his GOP adversaries favor. Indeed, the primary purpose of these speeches has quite clearly been to tear down the straw man of a plan the president says the GOP supports in the hopes that the public will look more favorably on the president’s miserable economic record. And so we hear from the president that the GOP favors creating a “you’re-on-your-own economy,” wants to “end Medicare as we know it,” seeks to revert to “social Darwinism,” and plans to eviscerate the social safety net to pay for a tax cut for the rich. None of this is true. No matter. The president has decided that the only path to electoral victory is to become attack-dog-in-chief. But what about the actual substance? Is there anything at all to what the president is saying? When you strip out all of the excessive and grandiose rhetoric, what the president is attempting to argue in these speeches is that the keys to higher economic growth in the United States are higher marginal tax rates on the successful, no reforms to entitlement programs, and more government spending on selected “investments.” To say that this is a pathetic plan for growth would be to give it too much credit. It is important to note here that the president is not arguing at this point that we need more government spending for stimulus reasons. His budget plan is to raise taxes sufficiently to cover additional spending, with only a modest increase in the deficit in 2013 compared to current law. No, his argument at this point is that the government spending he has in mind is so essential that the American economy simply can’t live without it. This is absurd. In a telling exchange, the president recently argued that, by gosh, even behemoths Google and Facebook wouldn’t exist today if it weren’t for “investments” that “we” made in basic science. Presumably, the president is referring to the early research the Defense Department conducted on an information network that morphed into the Internet. But there’s a little problem with this argument. The president’s budget cuts defense spending — drastically — and far below the levels called for in the GOP plan. If any budget plan is harming this kind of innovation, it’s the president’s plan, not the GOP’s. Further, the president’s budget freezes funding for the National Institutes of Health. This is by far the largest source of resources that the federal government provides for basic scientific research. This freeze on NIH simply doesn’t square with the president’s contention that somehow his plan is far superior to the GOP budget with respect to research and development. And it gets worse. The president in these speeches has argued over and over that a key ingredient to growth is more federal spending on education and workforce training. This argument runs counter to five decades of experience. The federal government has steadily become more and more involved in elementary and secondary education since 1965. There’s not a shred of evidence that it has helped raise educational performance by students. On the contrary, the steady encroachment of federal regulations and spending in education has coincided with an erosion of the nation’s standing relative to that of our peers around the world. And, with respect to workforce training, the federal government has conducted countless studies on the effectiveness of the many existing workforce-training programs going back at least 30 years. These programs — run mainly by the Department of Labor — have been shown time and again to produce mediocre results, at best, in terms of gains in future earnings for workers. The idea that somehow the Obama administration has a formula for doing this better in the future than it has been done in the past is simply not credible, to put it mildly. Finally, on taxes, there’s no dispute among economists that, other things being equal, higher marginal rates are worse than lower marginal rates for economic growth. Indeed, every bipartisan budget plan offered over the past three years has had as a central pillar tax reform with lower marginal rates and a broader base. The only one calling for raising marginal rates is President Obama. He is the outlier. The formula for long-term growth in the United States is not a secret or a mystery. It’s the same formula that economists preach to countries that have very little track record of economic progress. The key is to embrace a strong free-market economy with stable monetary policy, free trade, low marginal tax rates, a tight rein on government entitlement promises and regulations, and narrow deficits. The president’s plan touches on none of this. He has proposed no serious tax reform or deficit-reduction package. He is, at best, reluctant to promote free trade, for fear of offending his union base. And, on entitlements, he has taken the largest expansion in a generation and piled that on top of the unaffordable programs already on the books. Meanwhile, the GOP plan, put together by House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, takes on all of the serious challenges holding back the American economy. It removes trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities from the U.S. balance sheet, puts the government on a path to balanced budgets, and reforms both the individual and the corporate income-tax systems to lower rates and broaden the bases — without any reduction in revenue. And there’s still plenty of funding in the Ryan budget for worthwhile federal spending on infrastructure and other programs, including reformed education and workforce-training efforts. The president would have been better off sticking to a Keynesian defense of his original stimulus plan. It would have been a more plausible story. Because now that he has abandoned defending that, he basically has nothing left to say. Which is why he is resorting to pumping up trivialities and calling them a plan. — James C. Capretta is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He was an associate director of the Office of Management and Budget from 2001 to 2004. |
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