Time For a Bath

Geez, Mr. Buffett, Quit Whining!

Dear Mr. Buffett:

I've never thought of you as helpless and I am not now enjoying the mental image of you publicly whining about your plight in The New York Times.

Quit complaining that you only paid $6,938,744 in federal taxes last year. After all, it's your own fault. You've spent zillions through the years paying CPAs and tax lawyers to help you and your companies avoid the very taxes you now complain isn't enough. Does your hypocrisy know no shame? Just recently you sheltered billions, literally billions, with the Gates Foundation rather than paying estate and capital gains taxes.

Even with that, all is not lost! Go ahead, pull out your checkbook and write a big one. A really big one. Make it out for all the taxes you've avoided paying the last forty years or so. The easiest way to determine the right amount is to take your total income over the years and multiply that figure by whatever tax rate you believe "the wealthy" ought to be paying today to carry "their fair share" of the burden.

Go ahead, man, for your own dignity, man up!

But please, quit the damn whining.

The View From Planet Hubris

Imagine a scouting team of aliens arriving on Earth from planet Hubris, a team with absolutely no concept of economic freedom and free markets. If all they knew were macroeconomics learned from a book, they would not realize that billions of individual decisions underlay and direct markets every day, 24/7, each of which is made to provide narrow advantage, but in the aggregate provide the best collective choices.

Wouldn't they immediately presume to know better how things should work and set about to make it so?

That's what we have in the Obama White House and spreading through every federal agency like pod people, body snatchers completely alien to free markets and which views individual freedom as a messy obstacle to a better life to all.

The Stupidest Crisis Statement Ever

I've never thought much of Alan Greenspan, whose aura outweighs his judgment by a wide margin, but this is the absolute stupidest approach ever taken to calm financial markets:

"The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default," said Greenspan on NBC's Meet the Press.

Boy, that'll do it. The cat's out of the bag, all you folks to whom the U. S. owes money. I hope the seniors counting on Social Security appreciate his frankness.

We're just going to pay everybody with worthless, inflated dollars.

Yep, calmer markets are just around the corner.

Uh, er, make that just on the other side of the canyon we're about to leap into.

Tim Geithner Plays the Blame Game, Again

During his confirmation process as Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner famously blamed TurboTax for his errors on his personal tax returns.

Now he's blaming the rating agency for his debt mistakes.

The man will never learn.

Barack Obama Makes History!

For the first time in more than two centuries, the American federal government has been awarded a less than top credit rating.

After months of warnings, S&P downgraded the U. S. government to a AA+ rating from the AAA rating that it held for 70 years. It is now in the same league as Spain.

We're awaiting word from the White House of exactly how the downgrade is the fault of President George W. Bush, Mr. Obama's predecessor in office and official blame boy. Mr. Bush has been out of office for 2.5 years. Mr. Obama, his successor, has shown little inclination to accept the responsibilities but no hesitation about enjoying the perks of the office.

UPDATE: I'm reminded that it was just over a year ago that Mr. Obama's whiz-kid extraordinaire, Mr. Tim Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury and the man directly responsible for America's credit rating, said about the possibility of a downgrade,

Absolutely not,” he said. “That will never happen to this country.

Of course, Mr. Geithner is the man that couldn't even do his own taxes correctly, so what should we have expected?

It's Time to Pull Tim Geithner's Over-Limit Credit Card

Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner, the financial genius who admitted he couldn't use TurboTax properly, believes that the solution to a chronic over-limit condition on our national credit card and an admitted inability to pay our debts as they come due is… to raise the limits. I think the Secretary is confusing tactics for winning at blackjack with those needed for spending addiction and political fraud. Mr. Geithner is doubling down, using money borrowed from loan sharks.

Mr. Geithner is playing the old game, now discredited, of mouthing promises that are emptier than the Social Security Trust Fund.

Remember Charles Keating, the man at the center of the Lincoln Savings scandal? He served 4.5 years based on losses of a mere $250 million to 23,000 elderly investors based on shaky securities, and costs to the Resolution Trust and FDIC of only $3 billion.

Pennies. Not even pennies.

How about Bernie Madoff, who built a ponzi scheme of rewarding one generation of investors with the investments of another. To keep the ponzi monster fed ended up costing his victims almost $50 billion spread over a number of years. The losers can draw some comfort, I suppose, that most of the money went to deserving others, people just like themselves. That's the nature of the Ponzi party, rake it from some, give it to others, while the crook(s) at the center rake in the reputational, or political!, benefits of miracle working.

Just as Washington does today, Mr. Madoff  took steps every year to skim off a few dollars to keep himself going, to pay the bills. He fiddled a few more dollars out as necessary to reward particular friends and allies, his supporters, again just like Washington.

Still, $50 billion measured on Mr. Geithner's scale isn't even up to nickels and dimes. Not even a rounding error. Before Mr. Geithner is through, before his boss has completed even a single term, they will have run up more than $6 trillion of new debt.

$6 trillion is 6000 billions of dollars. 120 times larger than Madoff's crime, 2000 times larger than the total cost of the Keating Five.

$6 trillion is a lot of money. It is more than we can repay. It has all been borrowed based on phony numbers and false promises. It has been borrowed from nearly every corner of the world, from billions of people who will never see their investments returned.

Any executive who does the same should end up in jail, serving a sentence in proportion to the size of the fraud and the number of victims. On that scale, Mr. Geithner and his boss, should serve an eternity at hard labor in a hot climate.

It is a crime.

"I'm From the Federal Government. We're Ordering You To Move"

Imagine a land where the rulers could arbitrarily order you to pick up your family, all your possessions and move to a distant location.

It happened in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. It happened in Red China in the 1960s.

Lafe Solomon

And in 2011 it happened in the United States as the Obama administration once again invented a brand new power not found in law or authorized by the Constitution under which we've all agreed to live. Mr. Obama's team of petit despots has ordered The Boeing Company to abandon its newest factory in South Carolina, built at a cost of $1 billion, turn its back on the thousand workers already hired and the two thousand new recruits identified to fill future jobs, and instead build or expand its assembly lines and workforce in only and specifically in Washington.

The civil complaint by the National Labor Relations Board accuses Boeing of "interfering with, restraining, and coercing employees" by opening an expansion plant to manufacture increased numbers of new aircraft in right-to-work South Carolina rather than in the heavily unionized Puget Sound region. The NLRB has requested an order requiring Boeing to build and operate its expansion line for the manufacture of 787 aircraft in Washington State using unionized labor from the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.

THE NLRB official behind this tyrannical move is its acting general counsel, Lafe Solomon, appointed by Mr. Obama last year on a temporary basis in order to avoid for as long as possible the need for Senate approval.

Interestingly, no Boeing employees lost their jobs because of the decision; Boeing's unionized employment in the Puget Sound is 2,000 jobs greater today than it was prior to the expansion.

Earlier, the same Lafe Solomon threatened to sue four states for passing laws guaranteeing workers a right to a secret ballot for union elections. According to Mr. Solomon, since a right to a secret ballot does not exist in federal law it should not, cannot exist at the state level.

Given his radical agenda, there is no possibility that Mr. Solomon's nomination will ever be confirmed by the Senate. His continued presence in the office of General Counsel might very well threaten the NLRB's future funding. It will be interesting to see how long Mr. Obama hugs organized labor's coin purse before he throws Mr. Solomon under the bus.

Granted that this is the way it's done in Chicago, but it ought not to be the way the system operates nationally.

UPDATE:  Here is the complete text of Boeing EVP Michael Luttig's letter to the NLRB calling that agency's acting general counsel out for a number of "misrepresentations." It makes for incredible reading.

UPDATE: A special welcome to Doug Ross' readers. Please feel free to nose around!

Oil Price Reduction: Obama Reverses Bush Success

Under the theory that magic is only the working of that which we don't understand, the leftists in the White House must be absolutely awestruck and skeptical to the point of active disbelief by free markets. They have a much easier time with the old command/control model, where even when things don't work out quite the way they were supposed to, easy explanations came to mind. Oil prices increase without a rest for two years? No problem, just wait for a mideast crisis to break out and blame the rise on it.

This week oil and its derivatives, including gasoline, are touching record levels. Within the next few days we'll be hearing and seeing dozens of stories in the legacy media reporting the highest prices "since 2008" and we'll all know they'r referencing the days of the Bush administration and we'll get the message, "This isn't so very bad, these prices are only matching what happened under Bush."

It's true, during the final year of the Bush presidency oil prices rose inexorably, finally peaking in July 2008 at an all-time high of $145 per barrel of crude. Mr. Bush was presented a selection of possible moves that included price controls, special taxes on the oil companies, increased mileage requirements for cars, insistent calls for more "green energy." Those who suggested additional drilling for American oil were derided: Then, as now, leftists pooh-poohed any possibility of constructive market reaction to a "largely symbolic move."

Now cometh the Obama administration. They've chased American deep-water drilling rigs to Brazil and Africa. They've offered billions of dollars of taxpayer assistance to firms drilling off the South American coasts. After Shell Oil spent $6 billion preparing to drill in the Arctic, the administration pulled the carpet out from under the effort by refusing to approve permits.

A simple graphic tells the devastating story:

As a matter of real fact, the Obama administration has done nearly everything possible to raise the international price of oil and the cost for gas in this country. 

I wonder why?

I wrote about this a couple of years ago in How President Bush's Few Words Saved Us $800 Billion Annually. It's worth reading even now.

Should Securities Fraud Be An Impeachable Offense?

In 2008 the Securities and Exchange Commission for the first time filed a complaint for securities fraud against public officials, citing five employees of the city of San Diego with misleading purchasers of the city's bonds. I was struck by the language in the SEC's announcement

The SEC charged the former officials for failing to disclose to the investing public buying the city’s municipal bonds that there were funding problems with its pension and retiree health care obligations and those liabilities had placed the city in serious financial jeopardy.

According the Linda Chatman Thomsen, Director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement

Municipal officials responsible for municipal bond disclosure play a key gatekeeper role in protecting investors. It is therefore imperative that they honor the public’s trust by ensuring that investors are provided with accurate, material information about the issuer’s fiscal health.

A SEC Regional Director piled on with

Despite knowing of the city’s substantial pension and retiree health care liabilities, these five former San Diego officials failed to disclose what they knew to municipal securities investors. Their actions not only jeopardized the investors, but also compromised the interests of the city’s citizens and its current and future retirees.

But it is the next paragraph in the SEC announcement that really resonates

According to the SEC’s complaint, the five former officials knew that the city had been intentionally under-funding its pension obligations so that it could increase pension benefits but defer the costs. They were aware that the city would face severe difficulty funding its future pension and retiree health care obligations unless new revenues were obtained, pension and health care benefits were reduced, or city services were cut. They specifically knew that the city’s unfunded liability to its pension plan was projected to dramatically increase, growing from $284 million at the beginning of fiscal year 2002 to an estimated $2 billion by 2009, and that the city’s liability for retiree health care was another estimated $1.1 billion. But the officials failed to disclose these and other material facts to rating agencies or to investors in bond offering documents and continuing disclosures.

In the end, four of the defendants settled the SEC charge by formally acknowledging that they misled the investing public and paying pretty hefty fines. As part of the settlement, they agreed not to seek reimbursement of the fines from others, so the dollars had to come out of their own pockets. The City of San Diego was also sanctioned, the first time ever, and paid big bucks as well as agreeing to sin no more, in order to settle.


Now, what happens if just for the fun of it we substitute federal government for city or San Diego?

The question is, how is this different from what Messrs. Geithner, Bernancke  and Obama have been doing in order to keep U. S. Treasuries afloat? Haven't they been intentionally under-funding pension obligations in order to increase benefits but defer costs? Is there anything substantially different from the SEC charge and Obama administration practices?

Obama, Turning the Rule of Law Upside Down

The Obama administration has a real affinity for Alice in Wonderland interpretations of the law. According to both Mr. Obama and Humpty Dumpty,  the law means what they say it means, the writings be damned.

We've seen this with their defense of Obamacare. Seeking a constitutional grounding for taking over the medical payments industry, Obama's lawyers are claiming authority under a power to regulate interstate commerce. Fair enough, but it stretches language to its limits, and turns it completely upside down to define my decision not to participate in the program, perhaps instead napping in the afternoon, doing nothing at all, as commerce.

Under this theory, Mr. Obama can order a seemingly endless number of improvements to our lives. A decision not to buy a car this year can be reversed by regulation. Presumably the Department of Commerce could decide that auto sales are a national priority and that we must purchase a car to support the country. Further, since the Obama administration retains a multi-billion dollar investment in General Motors, a person could be specifically ordered to buy a Chevy or a GMC. We could be required to buy broccoli and asparagus weekly, and be ordered to prove we actually ate them. Think the observation is extreme, not so. Obamacare would require of each of us similar actions in an area that has never before been subject to federal oversight. Under Mr. Obama's vision, there's no corner of our lives that would be immune from federal oversight.

Now comes news that according to the Obama mandarins running the National Labor Relations Board, to move a company from a heavily unionized state to a right to work state is illegal. In an amazing display of arrogance, Lafe Solomon, the NLRB's chief lawyer, has adopted the position pushed by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers that Boeing should be required to abandon its efforts to build its new 787 in North Carolina and instead manufacture the plane in Washington State. Boeing has already hired 2,500 North Carolinians to build the plane.

According to Mr. Solomon, a corporate decision to not manufacture in a location because of a history or work stoppages and delivery delays, high costs or unfriendly labor environment is against the law. Only if the purpose is political payback from Mr. Obama to his organized labor supporters, by far his largest contributors, can this decision be other than insane.

As unions have become ever more thuggish over the decades, employers and their employees have voted with their feet, fleeing the inhospitable for the welcoming. Here, with a h/t to Forbes, is a graphic illustration of the thousands of people who fled union-controlled Detroit for friendlier climates:

Each red line represents 200 residents leaving Detroit in 2008. In-migration, to the extent there is any, is shown by the black lines.

Notice the correlation with right-to-work states, as shown here:

The majority of population movement from the nation's most notorious union headquarters city outside of Washington, DC., is to states that offer a better labor environment.

Now, according to the Obama's NLRB, the employers of everyone of those migrants could face prosecution for actions that might be construed as "retaliation" against unions.

Last, but probably not the final example, Mr. Obama's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has been actively arranging to supply illegally purchased firearms to Mexico's drug cartels. This effort, aptly codenamed Gunrunner, allowed thousands of illegally-purchased guns to walk across the southern border with the knowledge and specific approval of the federal agency charged with keeping guns out of the hands of criminals. Two of the rifles the BATFE arranged to deliver to the crime cartels were later used to kill a federal agent.

As Humpty Dumpty recognized long ago, "The questions is, 'Which is to be master, that's all.'"

That question is with us still.

Obama: We Are The Budget Cutters We've Been Waiting For!

Two years is forever in the land of politics. Heck, two weeks can cover a multitude of conversions.

Proving the point, Mr. Obama, exhausted by his need to scoop up after the elephants on a march, is now racing to get ahead of the parade.

He's apparently ready to abandon his 2012 budget, on which the ink is barely dry, in an attempt to recapture budget leadership from Paul Ryan.

I don't think the new tagline will play as well with his base as the old one.

"If It Saves Just One Child"

With his 2012 budget proposal, Mr. Obama will consign 100 million American children to lives of perpetual servitude, selling them into slavery with his debt.

He's requesting the authority to spend $45,000 from our three children's pockets, just this year. Over the course of his remaining presidency, he will charge more on their good credit than we have spent on them their entire lives to date. Worse, he's spent and borrowed that much already and now want's to double down.

Truly, has he no honor?

We owe it to our children and their children to stop his insanity.

Now.

The Bank of The United States

Imagine for a moment that you're a proud and pleased investor in a bank, a major bank. As an investor, it's treated you and other shareholders well. Dividends have been paid to investors every year since inception and and the Board of Directors have increased them in most years. Over time, you've reinvested those dividends and your stake has increased to the point where it is now substantial. In fact, it has grown so large that you've incorporated it into your plans for retirement, a happy state to which aspire in just a few years, buoyed with confidence in your nest egg.

Recently, though, your excitement has been tempered by whispers between your neighbors. Some of them were concerned. They've started gently questioning Board members, first in informal settings when they happen to meet socially. But there has been a growing chorus among your neighbors, many of whom are also investors in the bank. They share quiet complaints about a lack of information, an inability to get complete answers about the business.

In annual meetings, management and Board members talk glowingly and endlessly about the bank's ever-rosier performance and projections. Assets are always up and earnings always increasing.

And then you hear from a fellow investor that management and Board members have moved their own holdings into other investments. Worse, there are soft rumblings about the auditors, that they are conferring about "inappropriate concentrations of assets," and "an unstable borrower."

The truth starts leaking. The bank has only a single borrower, to whom the bank has lent more than 100% of its capital, in fact with which it's invested 100% of its assets. You learn that once upon a time borrowings were used to expand its business, buying productive assets, building transportation projects, launching lines of business. But sometime in the past without news or notice the borrower passed a tipping point, using more and more of its borrowing not for investment but for consumption, to pay bonuses to its management and payrolls to its workers.

And now, truly bad news. You learn that the borrower, your bank's only customer, has never paid down its principal, at best, for years it made only monthly interest payments. Recently, not even that. It has renewed notes for the principal amount month after month, adding each month to the balance an amount equal to the interest due.

Its business has softened. Revenues are down. Earnings have become losses and the borrower no longer has the ability to pay interest due, let alone repay any principal.

Your bank is facing failure. It will collapse in just a couple of months, unable to raise more cash on the open market, now unable to pay its own bills.

Unable to pay for your retirement.

Senator Bernie Sanders, one of a dozen true socialists in the U. S. Senate just finished an impassioned defense of the Social Security system, swearing that it is solvent and able to fund all of its obligations in coming decades. Senator Sanders said that Social Security has more than $2.6 trillion in assets and that those who are concerned should stop raising questions.

Bernie Sanders didn't mention that every single one of those $2.6 trillion, your total investment in the bank and that of your neighbors, every cent, have been loaned to the government of the United States, of which Bernie Sanders is what is known in business as "a controlling person."

The only asset held by the system is not cash parked safely away in a valut but notes signed by a nearly-bankrupt federal government.

The biggest difference between Bernie Sanders, self-avowed socialist Senator from Vermont,  and Bernie Madoff, currently a resident of federal prison after his conviction of fraud, is the size of their scams.

The Abortion of a Generation of Entrepreneurs

From a comment at Transterrestrial Musings by Jody Green,

To the private sector a half a billion dollars is enough to start a whole new industry. To the federal government it is a rounding error. How many new industries will be lost due to a wasteful spending of a totally dysfunctional federal government?

Truer words were never spoke.

The Obama administration has sucked the market dry for startups. Investment capital has all but disappeared as angel investors have fled the market and VCs died by the hundreds, perhaps thousands.

A million companies have not been started, they died before their birth. A million more have sprung too weakly into life, suffering life-long defects caused by the business equivalent of oxygen starvation, a lack of sufficient capital.

Obama has presided over—nay, he has performed!—the abortion of an entire generation of entrepreneurs.

Just as in human death before life, we will never hear the screams of the victims, the unborn businesses and industries that might have been.

They are dead, there bodies sucked dry so that government may live more grandly.

It's Time to Shrink the Presidency

Michelle wants to downsize the Big Mac. I say McDonalds should keep the supersize meal but we should downsize the presidency to a more digestible portion.

There was a time when an imperial office was justified—the cold war years come to mind—when actual leadership of the western world was exercised by the American president. The whole world was in a constant state of near-war then, a state of alert that might have required nearly instantaneous response at any moment. It was a time when a response that only the President could decide upon would be in time for it to be effective. With that role—the president as constantly alert guardian in a very real way standing for world peace—it made sense to load up on the accoutrements of office in order to keep the occupant safe and in constant communication with others.

Nearly every event over those decades seemed to argue "more." Assassination attempts, against Truman, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II and the murder of Kennedy, justified an ever-tightening ring of steel and agents to surround the president and separate him from ordinary life and ordinary people.

Nixon added his own special magic to accelerate the process, not only fanning flames of ceremonial pomp and circumstance, but hardening the walls of staff against intrusion by outsiders. Reagan made efforts to live his own way, retreating frequently to the tonic of hard labor required to maintain both Rancho del Cielo and his own sense of grounding. While security tightened during the first Bush's term, largely due to a shooting war, Clinton led the presidency into an enormous leap into personal hedonism, treating the White House and the Executive generally as ornaments on his personal flight from polyester. Even though Bush II tended more toward the Reagan model than Reagan himself, the war or terror drove the security bureaucracy that had grown nearly non-stop since 1948 to new levels of presidential constriction. President Obama, marketed as the "post-imperial President," has turned the entire structure to a celebration of his own existence, an aggregation of outings, travel and parties as if there is no tomorrow, a magnifying mirror of personal aggrandizement.

Today, nearly 6,000 people work full time to support the president and his family, at a total cost of $1.5 billion annually. By a spectacular margin, President Obama's lifestyle is the most expensive in all history, easily more than any other living person, exceeding by more than $1 billion the costs of any runners-up. Even the Sultan of Brunei, a despot not known for his material moderation, can only dream of the regalia at Mr. Obama's beck and call, all of it tax-free.

As an old joke has it, "No need to pay me, I'll work for expenses."

We'd be better off paying the man a celebrity-level salary if he'd just agree to pick up the tab for his own expenses. Of course, that presents an issue: if presidential pay was more extravagant, say $100 million a year, voters might be more careful about the applicant they hire.

Now would be a great time to deconstruct the imperial presidency, to shrink the office to human scale. Given that the United States is retreating from world leadership, that there is no need now or in the foreseeable future for an instantaneous decision to vaporize 200 million people in MAD retaliation, let's cut back. The thousands of federal agencies, commissions, and bureaucracy have proven themselves terribly resilient. They will easily withstand loss of communication with the President for short periods, an hour or two, a day or two. Heck, they're nearly certain to keep doing tomorrow what they did yesterday even if they were out of touch with the boss for a month or two… or three.

Consider for a moment: What presidential task of the last several years has justified 600 factotums, let alone 6,000? Does the job really require a minimum of 41 vehicles in every presidential motorcade, flown in for foreign visits? Are we better served with a fleet of White House aircraft than Great Britain, where the prime minister flies commercial, as he did just a few weeks ago on his way to visit the president?

Although the story was likely apocryphal, how many readers believed at first reading it was true, that a presidential visit to the Taj Mahal might actually cost $200 million a day? It probably didn't, but who can say what it did cost? Probably more than $2 million, quite possibly more than $20 million, even, conceivably the $200 million figure. Who knows?

The American nuclear arsenal will soon be just ten percent of its size four decades ago. Isn't it time we did the same for the imperial presidency? Given a shrinking American footprint, it's time to shrink the foot to fit.

I suggest we consolidate presidential spending from its current 20-plus agencies into a single budget for all White House activities, then shrink it to a smaller huge number, say $150 million a year.

I suspect many of our presidents could do just fine on such a purse, but wonder if Mr. Obama could manage to squeak by.

Washington Democrats to American Voters: "DROP DEAD!"

Only six weeks after the election destined to change modern American history, an election which saw hundreds of public offices at all levels across the land change—from left to right, blue to red, liberal to conservative, Democrat to Republican—Harry Reid and his henchmen in the Democratic leadership in Washington responded to voters with a resounding, "DROP DEAD!"

The Senate Majority Leader has just scheduled for a floor vote a $1.1 trillion dollar ($1,100,000,000,000), 1,900 page spending bill larded up with 20,000 separate earmarks. These earmarks, nearly ten per page, will cost future American generations, our children and their children and their children's children, hundreds of billions of dollars. By themselves they are commit more spending than did the entire federal government just a few years ago.

One can make credible arguments over the meaning encapsulated in the recent election: whether or not it demanded an end to Obamacare, the future of nuclear storage at Yucca Mountain, the path of the war in Afghanistan. It is impossible, however, absolutely totally impossible, to credibly claim that November's voters were voicing their support for continuing—for expanding!—legislators' cowardly addiction to stealth spending.

Many of these people were fired in November, given notice to clean out their offices in January.

They've taken license for liberty to loot the place on their way out the door.

Party Like There's No Tomorrow

Mr. Obama is killing the economy slowly, practicing a spooky form of medieval medicine that slowly bleeds producers dry. Every week he applies more leeches, more regulators who latch onto the economic body and suck out it's life.

Early warnings of our coming trials can be seen in the indicators of inflation, a potentially fatal form of economic fever.

The Price of Gasoline Under President Obama

Gold Prices Since Obama Inauguration

As the effects of the devalued American dollar spread, American families and companies will become poorer, less competitive, less able to provide for their own futures.

The most important promise in the Republicans' election-winning Pledge to America was not about taxes, nor Obamacare, not spending. Though all those are critically important, they pale in comparison of the game-changer, their promise that all regulations affecting $100 million or more of the economy will require specific congressional approval.

…(W)e  will require congressional approval of any new federal regulation that has an annual cost to the economy of $100 million or more. This is the threshold at which the government deems a regulation "economically significant." If a regulation is so "significant" and costly that it may harm job creation, Congress should vote on it first."

This change has the potential to cure the ills that Obama has wrought. It can be the aspirin that reduces our high temperature and threatens our economic lives. Capital markets and business leaders, from the local bodega on the corner to the largest firms across the nation, will reassert themselves into their proper roles as captains of industry, masters of their destinies, while the government shrinks to its rightful role.

Until we have the opportunity to treat the infection in the White House in 2012, it is critically important to support conservatives' efforts to reign in the bureaucracy by holding Republicans accountable for their most important promise.

If President Bush Continues To Be The Problem...

If, as Mr. Obama continues to complain, President Bush is the problem, perhaps we should elect a president who can replace him?

Mr. Obama obviously doesn't have the solution.

Obama's Hope

H/T Lucianne

Change in November