Liberally Conservative

Thomas J. Pyle: Obama-Reid Oil Tax Huge Jobs Killer

A funny thing happened during the ongoing debate over raising the debt ceiling. President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have drawn a line in the sand, insisting that raising taxes on American oil and gas companies will somehow reduce the deficit and therefore must be part of the final equation. After all, it is only fair, they insist.

The problem with this argument, of course, is that it won’t do a thing to reduce the deficit. In fact, it will make matters worse.

U.S. oil companies take tax credits and deductions that are available to businesses and industries across the board. This includes deducting taxes they pay abroad so they are not double taxed and put at a disadvantage to foreign-owned oil companies. Overall, the industry has an effective income tax rate of 41 percent compared to the average 26 percent tax bracket for industrial companies.

But if our deficit is so large, why should we care if oil companies are hit with a big, new tax increase?

For starters, the government would lose money on the deal. According to a new study by LSU professor Joseph R. Mason, the government would suffer a long-term net revenue loss of $54 billion if the proposal were enacted. The study also projects $341 billion in lost economic output by the energy industry, resulting in 155,000 job losses. It further calculates $68 billion in lost wages that would have strengthened our economy and $83.5 billion in tax revenues that might otherwise have been directed toward reducing the deficit.

Additionally, singling out the American oil industry with a punitive tax hike would both place it at a disadvantage to foreign competitors and discourage domestic production. The United States today imports just over half of its oil and refined petroleum products. This shortsighted proposal would unnecessarily increase our reliance on foreign oil even further. The inherent instability of some of our foreign oil supply already makes the United States vulnerable to disruptions – this proposal would only make matters worse.

The Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently predicted world oil consumption to grow by 1.6 million barrels a day through 2012 and has called for an increase in global supply. At the same time, because of other administration policies, oil production in the Gulf of Mexico is already projected to decline by 150,000 barrels a day in 2011, and by a further 110,000 barrels a day in 2012. This widening gap between domestic supply and demand means that demand for OPEC oil will increase. The last time I checked, many of the OPEC nations weren’t too fond of the United States.

Long-suffering consumers can expect to dedicate an even larger share of their paychecks to filling their gas tanks as a result of rising foreign crude prices. EIA forecasts the annual retail average for regular gasoline price, which increased from $2.78 per gallon in 2010 to $3.56 per gallon in 2011, will rise to $3.64 per gallon in 2012. Keep in mind, those projections do not factor in a potential new tax on energy producers, as envisioned by President Obama and his like-minded colleagues in Congress.

Love them or hate them, oil and gas companies are essential to the U.S. economy, job creation, energy security, and deficit reduction. The industry supports more than 9 million jobs and adds more than $1 trillion to the U.S. economy each year. If congressional leaders are sincere in their desire to reduce the deficit and help the economy recover, they will carefully weigh the unintended consequences of selectively taxing American energy producers before taking action.

Thomas J. Pyle is the President of the American Energy Alliance

Read more on Newsmax.com: Thomas J. Pyle: Obama-Reid Oil Tax Huge Jobs Killer

Funny!!

LOVE IT.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPad]

The GOP's Reality Test - Republicans who oppose Boehner's debt deal are playing into Obama's hands...

The debt-limit debate is heading toward a culmination, with President Obama reduced to pleading for the public to support a tax increase and Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid releasing competing plans that are the next-to-last realistic options. The question now is whether House Republicans are going to help Mr. Boehner achieve significant progress, or, in the name of the unachievable, hand Mr. Obama a victory.

Mr. Obama recognizes these stakes, threatening yesterday to veto the Boehner plan in a tactical move to block any Democratic support. The White House is afraid that it will pass the House and then become the only debt-ceiling vehicle if Mr. Reid can't get 60 votes for his own proposal in the Senate. This would short-circuit Mr. Obama's plan to blame the GOP for a U.S. credit downgrade, any market turmoil, a possible default, and the lousy economy too.

***

Under the two-phase Boehner plan, Congress would authorize $1 trillion in new debt in return for $1.2 trillion in budget cuts over the next decade. Most of that will come from caps on domestic discretionary spending over 10 years—the Pentagon and homeland security are exempt—with automatic spending cuts if the caps are breached. While one Congress cannot bind another, the proposal would at least guarantee real reductions in fiscal years 2012 and 2013.

Related Video

Freedom Works President Matt Kibbe discusses the prospects for Speaker Boehner's debt ceiling plan and the Tea Party opposition.

In the second stage, the House and Senate would convene a 12-member joint select committee with a deficit reduction goal of $1.8 trillion by November. The majority and minority of both chambers would each make three assignments, and any plan that secured seven votes or more would get an up-or-down vote in both chambers with no amendments.

The danger for the GOP is that the committee could end up proposing tax increases, since the committee's only remit is the deficit, not the larger fiscal landscape or the size of government. A poorly chosen Republican nominee could defect, and any structural change to entitlements almost certainly can't pass the Senate.

Then again, unless the plan passed, Mr. Obama couldn't request the additional $1.6 trillion debt ceiling increase that he would soon need. The political incentive is for a reasonable package, and many Senate Democrats also don't want to vote for tax increases before 2012.

Strangely, some Republicans and conservative activists are condemning this as a fiscal sellout. Senator Jim DeMint put out a statement raking the Speaker for seeking "a better political debt deal, instead of a debt solution" (emphasis, needless to say, his). The usually sensible Club for Growth and Heritage Action, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation, are scoring a vote for the Boehner plan as negative on similar grounds.

If the Boehner plan fails in the House, the advantage shifts to Harry Reid's Senate plan.  But what none of these critics have is an alternative strategy for achieving anything nearly as fiscally or politically beneficial as Mr. Boehner's plan. The idea seems to be that if the House GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a default crisis or gradual government shutdown will ensue, and the public will turn en masse against . . . Barack Obama. The Republican House that failed to raise the debt ceiling would somehow escape all blame. Then Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced-budget amendment and reform entitlements, and the tea-party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor.

This is the kind of crack political thinking that turned Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell into GOP Senate nominees. The reality is that the debt limit will be raised one way or another, and the only issue now is with how much fiscal reform and what political fallout.

If the Boehner plan fails in the House, the advantage shifts to Mr. Reid's Senate plan, which would raise the debt ceiling by $2.4 trillion in one swoop through 2012. That would come without a tax increase but also $2.7 trillion in mostly fake spending cuts like less government "waste, fraud and abuse" and a $1 trillion savings from troop drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan that are already built into the baseline. As fiscal reform, this is worse than Mr. Boehner's plan.

If the Reid plan passes the Senate after Mr. Boehner's plan failed in the House, Mr. Boehner would be forced to beseech Nancy Pelosi and the White House to deliver Democratic votes to raise the debt limit. Mr. Obama's price could be the tax increases that the GOP has so far rejected. But who knows what else Mr. Obama would demand, and Congress might rush through, amid a political panic and financial market turmoil as the Treasury closed down government services to meet its debt obligations.

It's true that the Boehner plan doesn't solve the long-term debt problem, but Mr. Obama won't agree to anything that does. The GOP plan also may not prevent a U.S. national credit downgrade, but it has a better chance of doing so than Mr. Reid's. The Boehner plan is the most credible proposal with a chance of becoming law before the 2012 election.

***

The Speaker has made mistakes in his debt negotiations, not least in trusting that Mr. Obama wants serious fiscal reforms. But thanks to the President's overreaching on taxes, Mr. Boehner now has the GOP positioned in sight of a political and policy victory. If his plan or something close to it becomes law, Democrats will have conceded more spending cuts than they thought possible, and without getting the GOP to raise taxes and without being able to blame Republicans for a debt-limit crackup or economic damage.

If conservatives defeat the Boehner plan, they'll not only undermine their House majority. They'll go far to re-electing Mr. Obama and making the entitlement state that much harder to reform.

Courtesy of The Wall Street Journal.

 

Pelosi On GOP Budget Vote: “We’re Trying To Save Life On This Planet As We Know It Today”…

Speechless.

Via Weekly Standard:

Nancy Pelosi on today’s vote: “What we’re trying to do is save the world from the Republican budget. We’re trying to save life on this planet as we know it today.”

Why? What’s so great about life on this planet as we know it today? Let liberals defend the status quo. We conservatives seek to improve life on this planet. If I could paraphrase Bobby Kennedy: There are those, like Nancy Pelosi, who look at things the way they are, and ask why. We dream of things that never were — like reducing domestic discretionary spending, year over year — and ask why not!

Or, to paraphrase another of Pelosi’s predecessors: The liberals only interpret the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

President Obama Is No Longer Tethered To Reality

President Barack Obama’s speech to the nation Monday night was highly disturbing.  Because read carefully, it reveals a president wildly divorced from the fundamental realities of the nation he is supposed to be leading.

President Obama actually told America on national television that it is a nation “with a system in which the deck seems stacked against middle class Americans in favor of the wealthiest few.”  It is incomprehensible how a man serving as president of these United States could make such a fundamentally false assertion about his own country.

As I explain in my new book, America’s Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb, before Obama was even elected, official IRS data showed that for 2007 the top 1% of income earners paid more in federal income taxes than the bottom 95% combined.  The top 1% paid 40.4% of all federal income taxes that year, almost twice their share of income.  The middle fifth of income earners, the actual middle class, paid 4.7% of federal income taxes.  Deck stacked against the middle class in favor of the wealthiest few?

 

Moreover, the bottom 40% of income earners as a group paid no federal income taxes that year.  They instead received net payments from the IRS equal to 4% of total federal tax revenues.  As my book explains, this was actually the result of nearly 30 years of Reaganomics.  Today close to 50% of Americans pay no federal income tax.

We see the same in some states.  In California, the top 1% pay 48% of all state income taxes.  In New York, the top 1% pay 41% of all state income taxes.  In New Jersey, until recently the top 1% paid 46% of state income taxes.

Moreover, America’s corporate income tax rate is virtually the highest in the industrialized world at nearly 40% on average, counting state corporate rates.  Even Communist China has a 25% corporate rate, with the average in the mostly socialist European Union below that.  In formerly socialist Canada, the corporate rate today is 16.5%, scheduled to fall under current law to 15% next year.  Doesn’t sound like America suffers a deck stacked against the middle class in favor of the wealthiest few.

And already scheduled under current law for 2013 are increases in the top tax rates of every major federal tax, apart from the already too high corporate tax rate.  That is because the ObamaCare taxes become effective that year, and the Bush tax cuts expire.  So the top two income tax rates would go up nearly 20%, the capital gains tax rate would go up nearly 60%, the tax on corporate dividends would nearly triple, and the Medicare payroll tax would go up 62% for the nation’s small businesses, job creators and investors.

Obama’s wildly erroneous statement Monday night indicates he is not living in the real world, which is dangerous for America.  These tax policies so heavily skewed against the nation’s small businesses, job creators and investors are central reasons why there has been no recovery from the last recession, why working people can’t get jobs, why their wages are falling in real terms, why unemployment is still rising 3.5 years after the last recession started, why a record number of Americans are in poverty.  As a consequence, in reality, it is Obama’s anti-market economic policies that are actually in effect stacked heavily against the middle class, working people and the poor.

Obama also told the nation Monday night he wants to “ask hedge fund managers to stop paying taxes at a lower rate than their secretaries.”  This is another false truism that is widely circulated throughout the liberal/left.  The allegation arises because capital gains income is taxed at 15%, while individual income tax rates range higher than that.  But as I explain in my book, the fundamental mistake is the failure to recognize that capital income is taxed multiple times, not just by the capital gains tax.  It is taxed at least four times, by the individual income tax, the corporate income tax, and the death tax, besides the capital gains tax.  That is why the most fair as well as most economically productive rate for the capital gains tax would be zero, as is the case in much of the industrialized world.

The president further proclaimed Monday night that “most Americans don’t understand how we can ask a senior citizen to pay more for her Medicare benefits before we ask corporate jet owners and oil companies to give up tax breaks that other companies don’t get.”  But his ObamaCare law already more than asks seniors to pay more for their Medicare benefits.  It requires them to pay 40% to 200% more if they, in the President’s infinite wisdom, earn too much, defined as over $85,000 a year this time.

Note also the tax break for corporate jet owners was adopted in the Obama stimulus to create jobs in corporate jet manufacturing.  Yet, such tax breaks for corporate jets or oil companies that other companies do not get are special interest, central economic planning loopholes that undermine the economy rather than advance it.  The only truly pro-growth tax policy is the lowest possible tax rates for all, with no special interest loopholes.  But the amount of revenue lost on Obama’s corporate jet scam is so trivial it is not even worth talking about as possibly even contributing to solving the deficit and debt crisis.

Finally on Monday night, Obama threatened America’s seniors with more, saying that if House Republicans don’t agree to his tax increase to increase the debt limit, “we would not have enough money to pay the bills — bills that include monthly Social Security checks.”  This can only be described as calculated deception.

The Social Security trust funds include $2.7 trillion in government bonds, which are due and payable when needed to pay Social Security benefits.  As I also show in my book, those bonds do not represent any real savings and investment.  They involve only a statement of the legal authority Social Security has to draw from general revenues, on top of payroll tax revenues.  But in dealing with a crisis over the debt limit, that legal authority can be the critical factor.

While those bonds are explicitly not transferable, and so cannot be sold to the public to raise money, under prior practice they would be cashed out by selling new government bonds to the public.  Since the Social Security trust fund bonds are included in the national debt subject to the debt limit, they can be replaced by such new public bonds without the total debt going over the limit.

Moreover, those Social Security trust fund bonds are explicitly backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S.  That means Obama is constitutionally required to pay them when needed to pay Social Security benefits.  In addition, there is more than enough general revenue coming in to just cash out the trust fund bonds as necessary in any event, even without issuing any new public bonds.

As a result, Obama is constitutionally required to pay Social Security benefits, under his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.  That means failing to pay those benefits would be an impeachable offense.

Courtesy of Forbes.

Perry May Participate in the Iowa Debate

|| Is Texas Governor Rick Perry trying to get himself included in the Iowa debate? ||

Feelers.

While it has been expected that he would enter the presidential race by September,

Overtures from the Rick Perry camp suggest he may jump in sooner.

The Texas Governor has been inquiring about getting into the August 11 debate in Iowa.

Texas Governor Rick Perry has put out feelers on the possibility of participating in the August 11 Fox News Debate in Ames.

Two sources in Perry’s camp said the governor hasn’t indicated to debate sponsor Fox News that he will participate, and said it was very unlikely that he’d enter the race by then: Even as he ramps up an apparent campaign-in-waiting, he’s indicated that his final decision will come in mid-to-late August.

But the conversations between Perry’s camp and debate organizers suggest that Perry at least considered jumping in earlier, and that his strategy and timing have been very much in flux.

Although the exact timing of his announcement remains undecided,

The “if” part of the question is no longer in doubt;

Texas Governor Rick perry will run for president in 2012.

Courtesy of Red Dog Report.

Obama may veto anti-Pak aid bill

US secretary of state Hillary Clinton has warned the lawmakers that she would recommend President Barack Obama to veto a bill, which imposes aid restrictions on several countries including Pakistan. Clinton said this in a letter to leadership of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, which last week passed the foreign authorisation bill, which among other things requires a certification from the secretary of state that Pakistan is not supporting terrorist activities.  

“For Pakistan, the bill toughens the certification criteria for assistance under Kerry-Lugar-Berman Pakistan legislation and removes altogether that law’s waiver authorities,” Clinton told the Congressional leadership expressing her strong opposition to the Foreign Relations Authorisation Act.

The bill includes onerous restrictions and State operations, international organizations and foreign assistance, Clinton said in her letter dated July 26.

“The Secretary did send a letter to the House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen as well as Ranking Member Howard Berman objecting to the authorisation bill that the House Foreign Affairs panel approved last week on a party-line vote,” state department spokesman Mark Toner said.

Courtesy of Hindustan Times.

The Democrats' Big Tax Lie

You’ve probably heard this line dozens of times in the seemingly endless debate over deficits and taxation, and chances are you’ll hear it many times more during the campaign of 2012, regardless of the final resolution of the debt ceiling crisis.

Don’t be fooled.

Neither of the dueling plans currently on the table (one from Speaker of the House John Boehner, the other from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid) contain tax increases of any sort but President Obama remains firmly committed to raising the rates on top earners when the latest extension of the Bush tax cuts expires at the end of next year.

The Democratic line about “the lowest rate in 50 years” effectively reinforces two important liberal themes: first, that the rich don’t pay their fair share to support the operations of government, and second, that hiking rates on under-taxed wealthy people offers a painless, eminently fair way to increase revenue and reduce the deficit.

The trouble with this rhetorical approach is that it relies on an obvious and embarrassing falsehood: far from paying the “lowest rate in 50 years,” top earners actually paid at the current rate or significantly lower for most of the time in the last quarter century.

Today, the most economically productive American couples pay a top rate of 35 percent on every dollar they earn above $379,150. In 1988-90, following Ronald Reagan’s triumphal second term tax reform, big incomes paid at the highest rate of 28 percent—a big difference from today’s burden. In 1991-92, following the politically costly tax increases of President George H. W. Bush, taxes on the highest incomes went up to 31 percent—still considerably lower than today. In 1993, Bill Clinton pushed tax hikes through a heavily Democratic Congress (with a margin of just one vote in the House) and for the next nine years the top marginal rate soared to 39.6 percent. The second president Bush, welcomed to office with a significant budget surplus, sought to lower rates across the board, and since 2003 Americans in the most fortunate tax bracket have paid at the 35 percent level—slightly lower than under President Clinton, but notably higher than Reagan’s preferred rate.

“

“Why should the rich object to paying more in taxes when they’re right now paying taxes at the lowest rate in fifty years?”

On what possible basis, then, do Democrats repeatedly refer to “the lowest rates in 50 years”?

They cite figures showing the federal government taking in less revenue today as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product than the long-standing postwar average. In the first two years of Barack Obama’s presidency, Washington drew total funds amounting to just 14.9 percent of the economy, compared to a remarkably consistent 17 to 18 percent during the preceding 50 years.

But this reduction in revenue stemmed directly from the economic collapse of September, 2008, and not from the controversial Bush tax cuts. As a matter of fact, during the Bush years with the lower top tax rate (35 percent), Uncle Sam collected an average of 17.1 percent from the economy in federal taxes—very much in line with historical figures going all the way back to 1951. The last year of the Bush presidency (2008) produced a healthy 17.48 percent in revenue, before the suffering of the Great Recession pushed much of the middle class into lower tax rates and drove millions of hard hit Americans off the tax rolls altogether. Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s own figures project that revenue for the federal government will be almost back to normal in 2012 (16.62 percent of GDP)—even without the tax rate increase the president wants to impose the following year.

Even a cursory glance at the historical records make it clear the amount of revenue flowing to the federal government bears little connection to the tax rates applied to the wealthiest Americans. In 1951, for instance, top earning families (those who earned more than $400,000) paid a confiscatory top marginal rate of 91 percent, but the government collected just 16.2 percent of the GDP in revenue. More than 30 years later, during the brief three year interlude when taxpayers enjoyed the low Reagan top rate of 28 percent , the feds took in vastly more total revenue—an average of 17.9 percent.

In other words, contrary to the simplistic assumption that raising tax rates always increases revenues, a rate of 91 percent brought in less to the Treasury by every standard than a 28 percent rate. Alan Reynolds, a veteran economist with the Cato Institute (and a frequent guest on my radio show) isolates the figures for individual income tax collections (excluding corporate levies, capital gains tax, estate tax and other sources of revenue) and shows that higher top rates historically bring somewhat lower–not higher -tax collections.

Between 1952 and 1979, the top tax rate ranged from 70 percent all the way to 92 percent, but revenues from personal income tax amounted to only 7.8 percent. From 1988 through 1990, with the highest individual rate 28 percent, taxpayers actually provided more funds, not less—8.1 percent of GDP. Reynolds concludes: “The trendy talking point of blaming projected deficits on ‘tax cuts for the rich’ is flatly absurd. Both individual incomes taxes and overall federal taxes have long been a surprisingly constant percentage of GDP—8 percent and 18 percent, respectively—regardless of top tax rates on salaries, small business and investors. It follows that the only reliable way to raise real federal revenues over time is to raise real GDP.”

The hard facts (readily available from the Internal Revenue Service) not only expose the false Democratic claims about “the lowest tax rates in 50 years” but also give the lie to any suggestion that wealthy taxpayers contribute less than their fair share. The most recent numbers (updated in October, 2010) show that the top 1 percent of tax returns covered an amazing 38 percent of all income taxes—nearly doubling the share of the total income they earned (20 percent). The top 5 percent of taxpayers (earning above $159,000) earned 35 percent of all income, but paid the big majority of all income taxes—59 percent.

On the other side of the economic divide, the bottom 50 percent of all taxpayers (who filed nearly 70 million returns) covered only 2.7 percent of the taxes, though they earned 12.8 percent of the nation’s total adjusted gross income. The bottom 50 percent of filers paid taxes at an average rate of just 2.59 percent, but the top 5 percent paid at a rate more than seven times higher: 20.7 percent.

No wonder that the OECD (the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, representing the world’s 34 most prosperous western and Asian nations) reported that the United States tax system counted among the most progressive in the world—relying more heavily on the wealthiest taxpayers and applying lighter obligations on the poor and middle class.

President Obama hopes to gain political traction by regularly attacking “millionaires and billionaires” who “contribute nothing” to solving our debt crisis, but his rhetoric ignores the fact that prosperous taxpayers generally kick in more than their share of federal revenue. Democratic propagandists may score cheap points by deriding “hedge fund managers who ride around in their private jets” but it’s simply not true that those people pay “the lowest tax rates in 50 years” (or even in 20 years), or that raising their rates would play a meaningful role in solving our fiscal crisis.

Courtesy of The Daily Beast.

The morphing of Obama

WASHINGTON — Michael Gerson, who knows a thing or two about presidential speeches, says that President Barack Obama’s Monday night address to the nation about the debt ceiling really wasn’t about anything at all. The president was merely getting a jump on the blame game rather than advancing a new argument or reframing the debate.

Gerson, chief speechwriter for George W. Bush, may know of what he speaks, but I respectfully beg to differ. Obama wasn’t just blaming, though he did plenty of that. He was also clearly auditioning for his post-presidential Act II as a Fox News commentator. How else to explain the sudden injection into his lexicon of the words “fair” and “balanced?”

Savvy.

As we enter the whirlwind of the 2012 presidential election cycle, Obama is distancing himself from hope and change, a campaign slogan that requires exhausting emotion and radical movement, and shifting to a homey, market-tested message that, if cable news is your guide, resonates better in the American parlor.

Forget the polls. Show me the ratings!

Obama mentioned the word “balanced” seven times, including thrice in one paragraph about his “balanced approach.” He’s just a compromising, Henry Clay sort of fellow, while those Richie Riches on the other side of the aisle are obstruction-loving, average-American haters. (I’m translating here.)

The word “fair” made four appearances. Obama is just trying to be fair by asking the richest Americans (who already pay all the taxes) to pay “their fair share.” This may, indeed, be necessary in the final analysis, but demonizing “the wealthy,” putting the family of four that earns $250,000 in the same category as billionaires is disingenuous and hardly the way to cooperative, compassionate hearts.

He also mentioned Ronald Reagan and Thomas Jefferson. Obama long ago recognized the power of dropping Reagan’s name, and Reagan did say many reasonable things that hard-righters wouldn’t love today. For that matter, hard-righters wouldn’t even nominate Reagan today, but why mess with a good myth as long as it’s still working on the stump?

As Gerson pointed out, a presidential address to the nation is “a chosen and deliberate political act.” Obama may have failed to bestir hearts by focusing mostly on the other team’s unwillingness to play on his terms, but he was assuredly acting deliberately.

It was a political maneuver, pure and simple.

The notion that only the White House has been trying to make this sucker float and the Republicans have only been trying to rip off poor people is of course nonsense. But Obama effectively delivered this message in his usual calm, unruffled, patient, Obi-Wan way. A casual news consumer might have wondered what the heck is wrong with those selfish Republicans.

Alas, House Speaker John Boehner, who followed Obama with a speech of his own (and did sound like the dental hygienist needed to give him a quick rinse), didn’t help matters. Whatever else he may have said, the words that stuck just eight days before the U.S. defaults on its loans, were: “That is just not going to happen.” Boehner was referring to the “sad truth” that the president “wants a blank check.”

What happened to all that bonhomie? The golf summit? The bipartisanship and cooperation? Monday night’s dueling speeches were purposeful, all right. They were a stakeout and Obama’s was for 2012. Fair and balanced?

You decide.

Courtesy of Bowling Green Daily News.

Obama appointee at Labor resigns after ethics probe

A high-ranking Department of Labor official appointed by President Obama to oversee a jobs training program for veterans has resigned after an inspector general’s investigation found that he had violated federal procurement rules and ethics principles.

Raymond Jefferson (DEPARTMENT OF LABOR)

Raymond M. Jefferson, assistant secretary of the Labor Department’s Veterans’ Employment and Training Service, submitted his resignation Tuesday.

Jefferson engaged in “a pattern of conduct ... which reflects a consistent disregard of federal procurement regulations, federal ethics rules and the proper stewardship of appropriated dollars,” according to the report from the Department of Labor inspector general.

The charismatic Jefferson, a West Point graduate and former Army Ranger who lost a finger on his left hand in a training accident, was considered a rising star in veterans’ circles. Jefferson, a Fulbright fellow with an MBA from Harvard Business School,was nominated by Obama in April 2009 to head the Veterans’ Employment and Training Service program, which is meant to help veterans prepare for the civilian job market.

The report says that Jefferson and his deputy, John McWilliam, “abused their authority” by “coercing” VETS employees into awarding contracts to management consultant Stewart Liff, a former colleague of Jefferson’s.

Liff, who was paid as much as $275 an hour, received approximately $700,000 over a 16-month period for services that could have been secured at a much lower cost through open competition, according to the report. The services included advice on the proper color scheme for offices.

“This is the kind of boondoggle that taxpayers have every right to expect would come to a screeching halt,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), who requested that the inspector general investigate allegations of misconduct from whistleblowers within the VETS program.

“They shouldn’t be hiring management consultants at seven hundred grand, and hiring friends, when there are thousands of veterans out there on modest incomes,” McCaskill added. “It’s just wildly inappropriate.”

Liff could not be reached immediately for comment.

The report also says that Jefferson circumvented procurement rules to hire a former Army lieutenant colonel who was a West Point classmate.

“Poor stewardship of appropriated dollars is unacceptable at the U.S. Department of Labor and will not be tolerated,” the Labor Department said in a statement.

The department has placed all contracting activity by VETS under special oversight and made other management changes, according to officials. “We are reviewing the report to determine appropriate fixes and necessary corrective actions to ensure that a situation like this does not happen again,” the department said in its statement.

Courtesy of The Washington Post.

Obama Battles Increasing Odds for Reelection

The latest poll by the Washington Post-ABC News, published last week, provided one more indication of President Obama’s increasing difficulties in generating support for his reelection campaign. When 1,001 people were asked, “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Barack Obama is handling his job as president?” almost half responded negatively, with one-third strongly disapproving, up from 24 percent just two months earlier.

And when they were asked, “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Obama is handling the economy?” nearly six in 10 disapproved, with more than four in 10 strongly disapproving. When asked how he was handling the federal budget deficit, 60 percent disapproved, an increase of eight percentage points since January.

Further indication of dissatisfaction was revealed by answers to “how you feel about the way the federal government works,” with an astonishing 80 percent dissatisfied, and 25 percent “angry,” up from just nine percent last November. Views on the economy were even worse: 90 percent were negative, with just 10 percent giving a positive response.

The job approval numbers from RealClearPolitics.com were equally dismal, with the average of all polls taken since early July showing an approval rating of just 45.5 percent while 49.3 percent disapproved of Obama’s job performance, close to an all-time high.

Jay Cost, writing for the Weekly Standard, went several steps further in analyzing Obama’s chances for reelection based upon a recent Gallup poll. Cost noted that in the upcoming election, both the Republican and Democrat parties will have the same objective: obtain a high turnout among the party faithful, and woo and win as many independents as possible. The independents were key to Obama’s victory in 2008, with job approval ratings for the President in January 2009 in the high 60s. By July of that year, his approval ratings dropped below 50 percent, and have continued to fall, with current ratings among independents barely above 40 percent. As Cost noted, “It is worth pointing out that in the last forty years, no president has ever been elected ... with less than 48 percent of the independent vote.”

Cost’s analysis is straightforward: Assuming that the election in 2012 is based upon the same electoral demographics as in 2010 (36 percent Democratic, 36 percent Republican and 28 percent independent) and further assuming that the President wins the same share of the independent vote as their current ratings indicate (42 percent), then the President has no chance. Cost concluded, “Without a noticeable change in the trends on partisan identification, it is hard to envision such a pro-Democratic electorate emerging next year.”

The President’s inability to turn the economy around despite ringing declarations that his policies would do so is also going to cost him dearly in the 2012 election. This Mitt Romney TV ad showing Obama making one such promise to college students and failing to deliver makes clear the difficulties the President will have.

 

There is another public-perception battle that the President is losing: The public is increasingly negative toward his methods, viewing him as an emperor, giving orders from on high. Although there are no polls to measure hubris, or lack thereof, columnist George Will put it succinctly:

At his Friday news conference-cum-tantrum, Barack Obama imperiously summoned congressional leaders to his presence: "I've told" them "I want them here at 11 a.m." By Saturday, his administration seemed to be cultivating chaos by suddenly postulating a new deadline: The debt-ceiling impasse must end before Asian markets opened Sunday evening Eastern time, lest the heavens fall. Those markets opened; the heavens held.... Obama has marginalized himself. Inordinate self-regard is an occupational hazard of politics and part of the job description of the rhetorical presidency, this incessant tutor. Still, upon what meat doth this our current Caesar feed that he has grown so great that he presumes to command leaders of a coequal branch of government? He once boasted (June 3, 2008) that he could influence the oceans' rise; he must be disabused of comparable delusions about controlling Congress.

If these polls are any indication of how the election might turn out in 15 months, the President will in fact be heartily “disabused” of any such beliefs in his grandeur.

Courtesy of The New American.