"What's the plan,man? Still no Obama/Dem's formal proposal telling Americans how they'll increase taxes in 4 mos, nor what they'll do w our $"Reminds us of the wildly successful "Where's the beef?" ad campaign for Wendy's 25 years ago.
Obama’s Predictable, Tiring, Ineffective Lecture; Would Someone Call Him on the Hypocrisy, Please?- JP
Congress’ approval rating is at 11% because politicians thwart the will of the people, explode our national debt, and practice reckless deficit spending while hoping we’ll sit down and shut up about their nonsensical agenda. President Obama just made the AFL-CIO suffer through another “Blame Bush” lecture today as he, as usual, put the car in reverse and looked backward to find someone else to blame for problems he helped cause and now aggressively perpetuates.
Okay, Mr. President, you tell us we have to keep looking backward (as we’re steered toward the cliff), so let’s go:
Barack Obama was part of the problem while in Congress. Senator Obama pushed the fiscally irresponsible measures that Democrats, who held the majority, advanced while holding the government’s purse strings. And now, as President, he’s not just one of the pack anymore as a mere contributor to the problem – he now leads the problem. We are sick and tired of President Obama pointing his finger and screeching through his blame game about what he “inherited.” Up until 18 months ago he was fully engaged in that Congressional herd mentality of the Left as he just went with the flow, adding to the debt and deficit, instead of bucking his party’s leadership to stop the recklessness. (Did you ever hear him as an independent voice standing up and speaking out against his Democrat party’s overspending and over reach? Come to think of it, did you ever hear of his congressional record at all? For the life of me I can’t think of any time he used his bully pulpit as a sitting U.S. Senator to lead free market, equality-respecting pro-private sector efforts, nor to change up actions he now conveniently condemns. He could have refudiated them all.)
His lecture today must have been tough for our good union brothers and sisters to sit through, though it may have resonated with some union bosses who desire their members to adopt a herd mentality, too, so as to not dare speak up against what Washington is doing to us.
Surely the good, hard working Americans who happen to be union members know, too, that Obama’s blame game is getting old. It’s obviously ineffective, it’s the antithesis of good leadership, and it reeks of hypocrisy. A complicit media won’t call President Obama out on this, so let’s do it ourselves, friends. It helps put his criticisms and fiscal problems in context.
In contrast to President Obama’s lack of leadership in getting our country on a responsible fiscal path, there are some who have a positive agenda, including Rep. Paul Ryan who has shared ideas that deserve a fair hearing. He knows why we need to rein in the government’s reckless spending and how it can be done. Please read this excerpt of an article by Rep. Ryan and be thankful there are some who remember why they were hired to serve us in Congress – it sure wasn’t to merely vote “present” as the powers-that-be jam the car in reverse while hoping we won’t remember who dug the ditch we’re headed toward.“Reducing deficits should begin with a budget plan to cut spending, yet incredibly Congress abandoned its legal obligation to write a budget this year, which means the leadership has abandoned even the pretense of limiting government’s insatiable spending appetite. I hope the Debt Commission, of which I am a member, will identify potential major spending reductions when we publish our report in December. But waiting for somebody else to suggest cuts was no excuse for Congress to dismiss its mandate to write America’s budget.Rep. Ryan is right about not raising taxes.
There’s no shortage of ideas for cuts we could make immediately. Last year I identified $4.8 trillion we could cut. Right now we could easily reduce spending by $1.3 trillion by: rescinding $266 billion in unused stimulus funds and another $16 billion in leftover TARP money; saving $925 billion by cutting and capping discretionary spending at 2008 levels; imposing a hiring and pay freeze on government employees, saving $65 billion; and reforming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the proximate originators of the home mortgage meltdown, to save $30 billion. I would also give the President line-item veto authority to realize further savings.
The American people and both parties see the need to get federal spending under control. Any time congressional leaders want, we can start by cutting unnecessary expenditures. Let’s not punish business and workers by raising their taxes at a time when the economy is struggling to return to a growth path—that would only make a desperate situation worse.”
Lest we forget, the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Democrats have a special New Years gift in store for American taxpayers. On January 1, 2011, they are going to hit us with the largest tax increase in U.S. history. By allowing the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts to expire on New Years Eve, the Democrats are going to impose a $3.8 trillion tax increase on Americans over the next decade.
Instead of admitting that this massive tax hike is just an attempt to get hardworking taxpayers to continue to fund their reckless spending, the Democrats are selling it is as a tax on “the rich” to increase revenues to pay down the debt. However, history shows that raising the top tax rate doesn’t lead to increased revenues. It’s what Arthur Laffer describes as a tax-the-rich Catch-22: the highest earners, who are expected to bear most of the tax burden, generally also have the best tax advisers to help them get around it.
Regardless of what the Democrats want you to believe, this is a tax increase on every American who pays taxes. Families will suffer because the Democrats’ tax hike will reinstate the marriage penalty, cut the child tax credit in half, abolish various personal exemptions, and impose limits on itemized deductions like home mortgage interest and charitable contributions. Investors and savers would suffer through increases in the top rates in long-term capital gains and qualified dividends. And the Alternative Minimum Tax would end up hitting 15 million taxpayers – up from 4 million in 2009.
We’ll all be feeling the pinch, but the ones who will be hit hardest by this massive tax hike will be America’s small business owners – the businesses that create up to 70% of all jobs in this country. According to a recent report by the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, small business owners will pay over half the taxes raised when the Democrats increase the top two tax brackets. In an already anemic jobless recovery, the last thing government should do is to impose even higher tax burdens on job creators. Instead of hurting “the rich,” such measures would end up hurting the unemployed.
To burden American families and small businesses with the largest tax hike in history while the economy is teetering on the brink of a potential double-dip recession is madness. It’s another reason why we must elect commonsense fiscal conservatives in the upcoming midterm elections this November. We simply cannot afford the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Democrats. We need people in Congress who know that the best way to get our economy moving again is to cut taxes, not raise them by unprecedented amounts.
You might have noticed that the Democrats have been throwing around the phrase “common sense” more often these days, but actions speak louder than words. We need real leadership in Washington across the board. We need common sense solutions, not finger-pointing, buck-passing, and lecturing.
- Sarah Palin
Midnight Votes, Backroom Deals, and a Death Panel- JP
Last weekend while you were preparing for the holidays with your family, Harry Reid’s Senate was making shady backroom deals to ram through the Democrat health care take-over. The Senate ended debate on this bill without even reading it. That and midnight weekend votes seem to be standard operating procedures in D.C. No one is certain of what’s in the bill, but Senator Jim DeMint spotted one shocking revelation regarding the section in the bill describing the Independent Medicare Advisory Board (now called the Independent Payment Advisory Board), which is a panel of bureaucrats charged with cutting health care costs on the backs of patients – also known as rationing. Apparently Reid and friends have changed the rules of the Senate so that the section of the bill dealing with this board can’t be repealed or amended without a 2/3 supermajority vote. Senator DeMint said:“This is a rule change. It’s a pretty big deal. We will be passing a new law and at the same time creating a senate rule that makes it out of order to amend or even repeal the law. I’m not even sure that it’s constitutional, but if it is, it most certainly is a senate rule. I don’t see why the majority party wouldn’t put this in every bill. If you like your law, you most certainly would want it to have force for future senates. I mean, we want to bind future congresses. This goes to the fundamental purpose of senate rules: to prevent a tyrannical majority from trampling the rights of the minority or of future congresses.”In other words, Democrats are protecting this rationing “death panel” from future change with a procedural hurdle. You have to ask why they’re so concerned about protecting this particular provision. Could it be because bureaucratic rationing is one important way Democrats want to “bend the cost curve” and keep health care spending down?
The Congressional Budget Office seems to think that such rationing has something to do with cost. In a letter to Harry Reid last week, CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf noted (with a number of caveats) that the bill’s calculations call for a reduction in Medicare’s spending rate by about 2 percent in the next two decades, but then he writes the kicker:“It is unclear whether such a reduction in the growth rate could be achieved, and if so, whether it would be accomplished through greater efficiencies in the delivery of health care or would reduce access to care or diminish the quality of care.”Though Nancy Pelosi and friends have tried to call “death panels” the “lie of the year,” this type of rationing – what the CBO calls “reduc[ed] access to care” and “diminish[ed] quality of care” – is precisely what I meant when I used that metaphor.
This health care bill is one of the most far-reaching and expensive expansions of the role of government into our lives. We’re talking about putting one-seventh of our economy under the government’s thumb. We’re also talking about something as intimate to our personal well-being as medical care.
This bill is so unpopular that people on the right and the left hate it. So why go through with it? The Senate is planning to vote on this on Christmas Eve. Why the rush? Though we will begin paying for this bill immediately, we will see no benefits for years. (That’s the trick that allowed the CBO to state that the bill won’t grow the deficit for the next ten years.)
The administration’s promises of transparency and bipartisanship have been broken one by one. This entire process has been defined by midnight votes on weekends, closed-door meetings with industry lobbyists, and payoffs to politicians willing to sell their principles for sweetheart deals. Is it any wonder that Americans are so disillusioned with their leaders in Washington?
This is about politics, not health care. Americans don’t want this bill. Americans don’t like this bill. Washington has stopped listening to us. But we’re paying attention, and 2010 is coming.
- Sarah Palin
Congress Never Ceases to Amaze- JP
Really? A tax on national defense? I hear liberal Congressional proposals and I, like most Americans, wonder if they’re serious. We’re going to put a price tag on security?
With Congress and President Obama spending money on everything at breakneck speed, it’s interesting that they are only now getting nervous about spending – but only when it comes to providing the necessary funds to complete our mission in Afghanistan. They don’t need a new “war tax” to fund a strategy for victory in the war zone. They simply need to prioritize our money appropriately.
I find it telling that the Pelosi-Reid Congress is only cost-conscious when it comes to our national defense. Scary. Nonsensical. Unacceptable.
- Sarah Palin
The Pelosi Bill Was Rammed Through on Saturday, But Sunday’s Coming- JP
We’ve got to hold on to hope, and we’ve got to fight hard because Congressional action tonight just put America on a path toward an unrecognizable country.
The same government leaders that got us into the mortgage business and the car business are now getting us into the health care business.
Despite Americans’ decisive message last Tuesday that they reject the troubling path this country has been taking, Speaker Pelosi has broken her own promises of transparency to ram a health “care” bill through the House of Representatives just before midnight. Why did she push the 2,000 page bill this weekend? Was she perhaps afraid to give her peers and the constituents for whom she works the chance to actually read this monstrous bill carefully, if at all? Was she concerned that Americans might really digest the details of a bill that the Wall Street Journal has called “the worst piece of post-New Deal legislation ever introduced”?
This out-of-control bureaucratic mess will be disastrous for our economy, our small businesses, and our personal liberty. It will slam businesses at a time when we are at double-digit unemployment rates – the highest we’ve seen in a quarter of a century. This massive new bureaucracy will cost us and our children money we don’t have. It will rob Americans of more of our freedom and further hamper the free market.
Make no mistake: we’re on course to have government commandeer one-sixth of our economy. The people who gave us Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac now want to run our health care. Think about that.
All of us who value the sanctity of life are grateful for the success of the pro-life majority in the House this evening in its battle against federal funding of abortion in this bill, but it’s ironic because we were promised that abortion wasn’t covered in the bill to begin with. Our healthy distrust of these government leaders made us look deeper into the bill because unfortunately we knew better than to trust what they were saying. The victory tonight to amend the bill and eliminate that federal funding for abortion was great – because abortion is not health care. Now we can only hope that Rep. Stupak’s amendment will hold in the final bill, though the Democratic leadership has already refused to promise that it won’t be scrapped later.
We had been told there were no “death panels” in the bill either. But look closely at the provision mandating bureaucratic panels that will be calling the shots regarding who will receive government health care.
Look closely at provisions addressing illegal aliens’ health care coverage too.
Those of us who love freedom and believe in open and transparent government can only be dismayed by midnight action on a Saturday. Speaker Pelosi’s promise that Americans would have 72 hours to read the final bill before the vote was just another one of the D.C. establishment’s too-common political ploys. It’s broken promises like this that turn people off to politics and leave them disillusioned about the future of their country.
But despite this late-night maneuvering, many of us were paying close attention tonight. We’ll keep paying close attention. We need to let our legislators in Washington know that they still represent us, and that the majority of Americans are not in favor of the “reform” they are pushing. After all, this is still a country “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” We will make our voices heard. It’s on to the Senate now. Our legislators can listen now, or they can hear us in 2010. It’s their choice.
- Sarah Palin
