The “Compassionate” Conservatism of Our President Handed Us The Mortgage Crisis.

It wasn’t that long ago that our president unknowingly yet, intentionally set the stage for this failure. I believe his effort was genuinely out of the goodness of his heart, however, socialism is a failure no matter who initiates it or what their intentions are. Had he taken a different tact in a less dramatic lowering of standards, predicted declining prices and weighed the ramifications with more scrutiny we wouldn’t need to be bailing out anyone nor looking at tremors from the initial shock of circumstances. ( Yeah, I know hindsight is 20/20 but, when the buck stops at your desk you have to be right everytime….Just for the record; our president has done many good things for the right reasons although the sneak of the amnesty bill with the added name calling of ‘xenophobes’ and even ‘vigilantes’ to volunteers protecting what he was supposed to be protecting still has me frosted beyond thaw.  )

In appreciating that 99.928% of home owners are paying their mortgage and of those most have sufficient equity in their homes for having options if any of them were to fall on hard times but, this is certainly not the case for first time home buyers who received the presidential hand-out of a down payment and the further twisting of lender’s arms to approve them for loans when it was obvious to the lenders this inevitable outcome was merely a matter of time.

Now, the same president acts to “save” the mortgage crisis with even more of our taxes from and through his own “compassionate” wrongheadedness but, not even the liberals are calling him on it as doing so would directly reveal their political goal of socialism ( in a large, “caring” parent of government ) is predictably and incontrovertibly a dismal failure.

Further, the same day Senator Murtha was compelled to publicly confess our troop surge had indeed won us victory was also the same day the MSM and elected official spin machines cranked up their old standby of loudly crying that our confidence-based-economy sky was falling. Simply stated, if they can’t lose the war to win the White House, they’ll destroy our economy to win it…they simply don’t possess any principles or values to know right from wrong.

Here is a mere sampling of the record of our president’s intentions and actions…cause and effect folks, it’s not rocket science;

President Hosts Conference on Minority Homeownership October 15, 2002
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021015-7.html

President Focuses on Home-Ownership in Radio Address  June 15, 2002
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020615.html

President Bush Signs American Dream Downpayment Act of 2003  December 16, 2003
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/12/20031216-9.html

Remarks by the President in a Conversation on Homeownership March 26, 2004
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/03/20040326-15.html

It’s time to send OPEC a message

Now for a while I have railed against the loony left in this country because they have made us more dependent on foreign oil and more dependent on foreign refined gasoline.  We don’t have the refining capacity in this country to meet the demand we have and our economy is paying for it.

I think that it is time to send a message to OPEC; it is time that we start telling OPEC countries to either increase their output to help us meet our demand and lower the price or we’ll stop importing.  I know it sounds like a hollow threat but if we actually followed through with it the move would insure adequate supply for many years to come and here’s how.

We import roughly 5.5 million barrels of oil per day from OPEC countries, 1.4 million barrels from Venezuela.  First we stop importing anything from Venezuela, and we tell the remaining OPEC countries that they will be increasing production to make up the difference of what we don’t import from Venezuela.  If they refuse then we will cease all oil imports from Algeria, Angola, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, and Qatar.  They will view this as a move to break up OPEC, which it is, and refuse.  This leaves us importing oil from Iraq and Saudi Arabia, Iraq needs to finance their country’s future so they will not be able to do much except increase their production to as high a level as they can.  Saudi Arabia is in the difficult position.  They are the largest OPEC exporter to the US, but they will be fighting the remaining OPEC countries who want to make the deal so they can get back into the good graces of the world’s largest oil customer.  These are smaller countries and they can’t afford a standoff like this.

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The Real Examples of Torture

There has been much discussion about interrogation techniques, water boarding, etc.  These are mild compared to what is in store for the American people between January 2009 and January 2013.  We are down to three presidential candidates and one of them will be in the White House for the next four years and this boils down to trying to decide between one of the three stooges to run the country for four years.

We have Hillary, everyone knows she is a socialist.  Most on the right know her to be nearly as dangerous as Stalin.  Yet she runs around trying to make the left think she is kook enough to get their support, many feminazis go along just because they’re obligated to, I think its part of bylaws of N.O.W. or something.

Next we have Obama, can you believe this guy?  And they accused Reagan of acting?  This guy has done nothing, managed nothing, governed nothing, and he runs around talking in circles making people faint and he says absolutely nothing.  I have started watching Obama recently, debates, speeches, etc, and this guy says nothing in a way that makes the left drool all over themselves.  My what a gullible breed…

Last we have McCain.  This has the makings of 1996 only some actually think McCain could win because democrats will field either a candidate who is hated by the majority of Americans or a weak candidate who won’t tell anyone where he stands on any given issue.  This is dangerous because McCain doesn’t have any core principles at all.  He bends over for any liberal that tells him to.

So we can look forward to a weaker economy, tax increases, weaker defense, etc.  It will probably give our enemies an opportunity to rebuild and rearm.  This will probably result in more terrorist attacks, and more American lives lost unfortunately.

My how I wish we could just fast forward to the end of this chapter to see how it ends and look forward to the next.

The dirty little secret about oil

It has taken $100 per barrel oil but now the government can no longer hold back the new technologies that will someday replace oil.  Yes for at least 50 years the government has had a vested interest in keeping oil prices low.  It all comes down to the almighty buck, but not the bucks that Exxon or Shell are raking in, no it comes down to taxes.

So long as oil was priced low there is no interest in trying to figure out a less expensive, or cleaner, way to power our nation and the world for that matter.  Why would car companies work on developing vehicles that operate on different sources of power when a gallon of gas was $1.00?  That development costs money and consumers in the early nineties wouldn’t have paid for it.  So in the nineties liberals, mostly democrats but a few republicans along the way, began to monkey around with air quality standards.  The thinking was to make it so expensive for car makers to meet these standards that they would begin pouring money into cleaner technologies.  This didn’t happen on the scale that environmental movement wanted.  The standards did have an impact, we got vehicles that got fewer miles per gallon with less power, but less polluting.  The benefit of that was that people unwittingly fell for this hook line and sinker.  Gas was still relatively cheap so it wasn’t as big a deal to consumers that they were buying more gas.

Big deal right, well I believe it is.  You now have cleaner cars and that’s makes people feel better.  Great, but if we have to look at the fact that those cars get less mileage than their counterparts from a decade prior.  This results in the need to pump more oil, so our vehicles actually use more fuel but they burn it cleaner however we have to buy more gas.  Now at the same time liberals make it impossible to drill for oil in many regions of our country that have oil thus forcing us to continue to deal with third world thugs like Hugo Chavez, and that Nazi loving pinhead in Iran.

Now on to the almighty buck.  The liberals in this country love to rail against “Big Oil” and how mean they are for gouging us for fuel.  What you may not know is that oil profits are less than $0.10 per gallon.  Yet these oil companies invest all the money to find oil, extract it from the ground, refine it, formulate it with other things that the liberals tell them they have use to make it burn cleaner, ship it to gas stations where you get to go and pump it into your cars.  They do all that to make a lousy $0.10 per gallon and still have to listen to uneducated idiots complain about the price of gas and how they are to blame for it.  Yet between $0.45 and $0.70 per gallon, depending on where you live, is federal and state gas taxes.  Government does nothing to find sources of oil, does nothing to get it out of the ground, does nothing to get it to market.  They assume no risk in the venture but there they are with their hand out for their cut.  So yes with demand for oil up due to government regulation government also gets to profit on the back end as well.  When the price of gas goes out of sight then who’s there bad mouthing the profits of oil companies and complaining about how much money they’re making?  Those same liberals and they tell us they want to take more oil profits but do they ever tell us how much the government profits from the oil business, no.

So with the price of oil up a lot of investment has gone into clean technologies, electric vehicles, bio-diesel, hydrogen fuel cells, etc.  This is fine, I have no problem with these technologies in fact the biggest impediment now to getting these technologies to market is that government hasn’t yet figured out how to tax these things.  But never fear, they will, and whatever source of fuel we use in the future doesn’t matter.  Liberals will create the same circumstances with the next fuel, be it hydrogen or ethanol, makes no difference because to liberals it is all about raising taxes and gaining power.

Technorati Tags: Oil,Iran,Hugo Chavez,Democrats,Republicans,Gas Prices,Taxes

Track The Other White Meat, Federal PORK!

Townhall reports via their February ‘08 magazine that we can now track all government contracts, grants, insurance, federal assistance and loans through the Office of Management and Budget’s website at www.USAspending.gov

We can search from the government agency down or from the recipients up, by city, county and state all the way to the specific transaction. They can no longer hide funding of The Bridges To Nowhere or other Pork like the Museum for Woodstock.

This website was provided by Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) who mandated it with the “bipartisan” Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 which opened the website in December 2007. Coburn said in a news conference the day it opened that Bloggers were the “key group in getting this done” and told us to “get out there and start using this….I think it’s going to be wildfire.”

I think Tom was trying to tell us in no uncertain terms there’s a ton of Pork to reveal to the American people…what do you think he meant?

Lets get busy guys and gals, through this source we can whittle down big government very quickly when they realize we’re watching them like a hawk…but, we have to actually use this rightful tool and I know for some of you, you’re already at the website.

For those of you who would like a guide to know where to start digging and why, I highly recommend Fred Dalton Thompson’s Government at the Brink: The Root Causes of Government Waste and Mismanagement. ( Townhall Press August 2007 ) 

More FairTax slight of hand

Because of the length of Ian’s comment on the FairTax I felt it deserved a post to fully refute it’s misconceptions.

• Point 1) The FairTax rate of 23 percent on a total taxable consumption base of $11.244 trillion will generate $2.586 trillion dollars – $358 billion more than the taxes it replaces.

The goal is not to allow the government to confiscate more money.  We need reduce the amount of money that government gets not make it easier to get it.

• Point 2) The FairTax has the broadest base and the lowest rate of any single-rate tax reform plan.

This doesn’t make it right.  A rate of 23% is still much too high and it’s taxation of everything is wrong.

• Point 3) Disposable personal income is higher than if the current tax system remains in place: 1.7 percent in year 1, 8.7 percent in year 5, and 11.8 percent in year 10.

This is not accurate, you make assumptions about the costs of goods going down that will not happen in year  1 and may only begin to happen in year 5.

• Point 4) Consumption increases by 2.4 percent more in the first year, which grows to 11.7 percent more by the tenth year than it would be if the current system were to remain in place.

The assumption that consumption will grow in year 1 is ludicrous. You are looking at this from the perspective of theory and mathematics but you apply no logic to it.  When you start taxing everything at 23% people are going to stop spending.

• Point 5) On average, states could cut their sales tax rates by more than half, or 3.2 percentage points from 5.4 to 2.2 percent, if they conformed their state sales tax bases to the FairTax base.

This is not going to happen, states that have sales tax will never change there systems.

The bottom line is that this plan puts out theory and attempts to support it with mathematics that aren’t real and it makes assumptions that are not going to happen.  The cost of goods isn’t going to drop overnight, people aren’t going to wake up one morning with 1.7% more disposable income.  However if this plan goes through people will wake up one morning and have less money to spend because they are paying 23% on top of the original cost of goods.

There will be less spending, which will be followed by job cuts, to be followed by businesses closing, followed by increased inflation.  This will have a horrible effect on the economy for the first 3-5 years.  Yes we may actually get to the numbers you suggest by year 10 but we will have gone through a depression to get there where we will be facing 15-20% unemployment.

This plan doesn’t repeal the 16th amendment so in all likelihood this will be a 23% in addition to all the state sales, and income taxes that we pay today.

This plan does nothing to reduce government spending.  95% of the problem with taxation is that the government keeps spending money like drunken sailors. 

I am not opposed to a complete change to a consumption based tax system but only under certain conditions:

1. Repeal the 16th amendment
2. Mandatory defense spending of 50% of the federal budget.
3. Reduce entitlement spending to 15% or less of the federal budget.
4. Tax rate of 15%
5. Exempts food and medicine as most state sales taxes do today.
6. Includes no prebate where the government continues to confiscate large amounts of income and then decides to dole out small amounts of it back to the people.

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