A Point Without Partisanship — A Scandal Everyone Should Be Concerned About

A Point Without Partisanship — A Scandal Everyone Should Be Concerned About

Posted by Erick Erickson (Profile)

Wednesday, September 21st at 4:45AM EDT

33 Comments

With the exception of CBS News, few media outlets have paid much attention to Operation Gun Walker a/k/a “Fast and Furious,” which has no relation to Vin Diesel.
The lack of media attention may be about to change. This is a huge and troublesome scandal. The left is, I think, afraid to touch it because of just how far up within the Obama Justice Department the scandal appears to go. The right has been focused more on other fights. The media is focused elsewhere. But the wind is shifting. Without throwing any partisan punches, let me just objectively get in to this business and why the left, the right, and the media should be paying attention.
I wrote about Operation Gun Walker back in March. In short, the ATF allowed Mexican drug lords to buy guns in the United States and walk them across the Mexican border. The too clever by half theory was that the American government would be able to then track the guns via their serial numbers and paint a picture of drug cartel activity by where the guns showed up.
The federal government never advised Mexico nor sought Mexico’s permission. Perversely, the ATF reported decided to then use the gun sales it authorized as evidence that the federal government needed more gun regulations.
As you might expect, the whole operation blew up in the ATF’s face. Using a Gun Walker gun, Mexican drug lords killed an American border patrol agent. Recently another murder on this side of the border turned up tied to a Gun Walker gun.
New evidence in the investigation conservative shows more than 200 murders linked to Operation Gun Walker guns.
Now, even more damning evidence is showing up in the form of secret recordings obtained by CBS News. According to the tapes, made between ATF Agent Hope MacAllister and a gun dealer named Andre Howard, Agent MacAllister admitted she had suggested the ATF hire a private investigator to dig up dirt on U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley to persuade Grassley to stop investigating the ATF.
Now forget all the partisan points for a minute. We have more than 200 deaths attributed to this operation and an ATF agent on tape saying she thought the ATF needed to dig up dirt on a U.S. Senator to stop him from investigating the ATF. At some point we all, left, right, and center, need to recognize when the inmates have taken over the asylum.
This is the federal bureaucracy out of control and it needs a brighter spotlight on it.

The folks who are getting the free stuff, don't like the folks who are paying for the free stuff, because the folks who are paying for the free stuff can no longer afford to pay for both the free stuff and their own stuff.

The folks who are paying for the free stuff want the free stuff to stop, and the folks who are getting the free stuff  want even more free stuff on top of the free stuff they are already getting!

Now... The people who are forcing the people who pay for the free stuff have told the people who are RECEIVING the free stuff, that the people who are PAYING for the free stuff, are being mean, prejudiced, and racist.

So... The people who are GETTING the free stuff have been convinced they need to hate the people who are paying for the free stuff by the people who are forcing some people to pay for their free stuff, and giving them the free stuff in the first place.

We have let the free stuff giving go on for so long that there are now more people getting free stuff than paying for the free stuff.

Now understand this.  All great democracies have committed financial suicide somewhere between 200 and 250 years after being founded.  The reason?  The voters figured out they could vote themselves money from the treasury by electing people who promised to give them money from the treasury in exchange for electing them.

The United States officially became a Republic in 1776, 235 years ago.  The number of people now getting free stuff outnumbers the people paying for the free stuff. We have one chance to change that.  In 2012.  Failure to change that spells the end of the United States as we know it.
ELECTION 2012 IS COMING  

A Nation of Sheep Breeds a Government of Wolves!
I'M 100% for PASSING THIS ON!!!  
Let's take a stand!!!Obama:    Gone!Borders:    Closed!Language:    English onlyCulture:    Constitution,  and the Bill of Rights!Drug Free:  Mandatory Drug Screening before Welfare!NO freebies to:   Non-Citizens!

Free market schools

Share152

Print

Forward

Exciting Schools

by  John Stossel

09/21/2011

17
Comments

School spending has doubled over the past 30 years. Yet what do we get? More buildings and more assistant principals -- but student learning? No improvement. If you graph the numbers, the spending line slopes steeply, while the lines for reading, math and science scores are as flat as a dead man's EKG.
       
Why no improvement? Because K-12 education is a government monopoly, and monopolies don't improve.
       
And yet I'm happy to announce some good news: Cool things are starting to happen in classrooms.
       
I was surprised to meet kids who said they like school. What? I found school boring. How can it be that these fourth-graders tell me that they look forward to going to school and that math is "rockin' awesome"?
       
Those kids attend one of those new charter schools. Charters let them escape the bureaucracy of regular schools, including, often, teachers union rules. These schools compete for kids because parents can always choose another school. That makes them better.
       
Not every charter school is good, but the beauty of competition is that bad ones go out of business, while good ones expand. Then good schools teach more kids. Choice and competition produce quality. Anyone surprised?
       
Government schools rarely improve because no matter how bad they are, they still have captive customers.
       
The Harlem charter schools admit kids that bureaucrats label "at risk of failure." But these kids learn. And they do it at lower cost.
       
I visited another charter chain, American Indian Public Charter Schools in Oakland, Calif., that gets similar top results, also at lower cost.
       
"Kids in American Indian Public Charter Schools score so far above the average for the state for public school children that there isn't even a word for it," says Andrew Coulson, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom.
       
Those schools use methods different from the charters in Harlem. For example, they pay some kids to tutor other kids.
       
Both charters do something that regular public schools rarely do: fire teachers. One charter principal calls it "freeing up a person's future."
       
You cannot maintain quality unless you can fire people, said Deborah Kenny, founder of Harlem Village Academies.
       
While bad teachers might get fired, (SET ITAL) good (END ITAL) teachers are given freedom.
       
"They can choose their textbooks, teaching methods -- as long as they, every quarter and every year, make sure that the students are learning what they need to learn," Kenny said.
       
In Harlem, 43 percent of eighth-graders pass state math tests. In Kenny's schools, 100 percent pass. So if charters work, why aren't there more of them? Because teachers unions hate them. The president of the Newark Teachers Union, Joseph Del Grosso, doesn't want charters in what he calls "his schools."
       
"Over my dead body, they're going to come there," he told me.
       
Because of that attitude, people who try to start charter schools often find that bureaucrats make it hard. But in one city, most kids now attend charters. How did that happen?
       
It happened because when Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans, it also destroyed the school system. Some school reformers thought that might be a blessing.
       
"It was probably one of the worst school districts in the country," said Paul Pastorek, former Louisiana state superintendent of education. The state faced a choice: Rebuild the old system or build something new. It built something new. Opening charters became easy. Today, most kids in New Orleans attend charter schools, and test scores are better.
       
Ben Marcovitz started a charter school called Sci Academy.
       
"We have complete control over the quality of our instruction."
       
At first, only a third of his students were proficient on state tests. Now, Sci Academy's test results are among the best in the city.
       
Competition drives schools to try different things in order to succeed. It's similar to what happens with consumer goods -- computers, refrigerators, cars -- that get better every year.
       
If charter schools do this well, imagine what a really free and competitive system -- one without compulsory tax financing and bureaucratic chartering procedures -- could do.
       
Our kids deserve a free market in education.

Share308

Print

Forward

The CEO Who Got Fined For Hiring Too Many People

How the government kills jobs.

by  John Hayward

09/21/2011

182
Comments

Peter Schiff, the CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, testified before the House Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs, Stimulus Oversight, and Government Spending on September 13.  He was there to speak on the subject of job creation, but Schiff also knows a few things about how the government can destroy jobs.  In his remarks before the subcommittee, which he also published in full at Forbes, he explained how he was fined for hiring too many people:

Regulations have substantially increased the costs and risks associated with job creation.  Employers are subjected to all sorts of onerous regulations, taxes, and legal liability. The act of becoming an employer should be made as easy as possible. Instead we have made it more difficult. In fact, among small business owners, limiting the number of employees is generally a goal. This is not a consequence of the market, but of a rational desire on the part of business owners to limit their cost and legal liabilities. They would prefer to hire workers, but these added burdens make it preferable to seek out alternatives.

In my own business, securities regulations have prohibited me from hiring brokers for more than three years. I was even fined fifteen thousand dollar expressly for hiring too many brokers in 2008. In the process I incurred more than $500,000 in legal bills to mitigate a more severe regulatory outcome as a result of hiring too many workers. I have also been prohibited from opening up additional offices. I had a major expansion plan that would have resulted in my creating hundreds of additional jobs. Regulations have forced me to put those jobs on hold.

In addition, the added cost of security regulations have forced me to create an offshore brokerage firm to handle foreign accounts that are now too expensive to handle from the United States.  Revenue and jobs that would have been created in the U.S. are now being created abroad instead. In addition, I am moving several asset management jobs from Newport Beach, California to Singapore.

(Emphasis mine.)  Noting that an increasingly hostile business environment in the United States will naturally lead him to move capital, jobs, and tax revenue abroad, Schiff offered suggestions for an alternative approach:

To encourage real and lasting job growth the best thing the government can do is to make it as easy as possible for business to hire and employ people. This means cutting down on workplace regulations. It also means eliminating the punitive aspects of employment law that cause employers to think twice about hiring. To be blunt, the easier employees are to fire, the higher the likelihood they will be hired.

Schiff’s detailed proposals for promoting job growth are not timid: he suggested replacing all corporate and personal taxes with a national sales tax, abolishing the federal minimum wage, repealing mandated employment benefits like overtime pay and leave time, and shutting down extended unemployment benefits.  He also thinks interest rates are too low, and should be “raised to bring on a badly needed restructuring of our economy,” which he admits would be painful at first, but would “lay the foundation upon which a real recovery can be built.”

That’s some pretty strong medicine, but it’s worth pondering in the context of endless political promises to “pivot to job creation.”  If we really value job creation as a top priority, we should be willing to consider doing away with factors that impede job creation, no matter how traditionally accepted they might be.  For example, here’s how Schiff addresses the federal minimum wage:

Minimum wages have never raised the wages of anyone and simply draw an arbitrary line that separates the employable from the unemployable. Just like prices, wages are determined by supply and demand. The demand for workers is a function of how much productivity a worker can produce. Setting the wage at $7.25 simply means that only those workers who can produce goods and services that create more than $7.25 (plus all additional payroll associated costs) per hour are eligible for jobs. Those who can’t, become permanently unemployable. The artificial limits encourage employers to look to minimize hires and to automate wherever possible.

In other words, as with every other form of price control, decreeing that labor must be purchased for at least $7.25 does not make all labor suddenly become worth $7.25.  Why is it considered “normal” to force taxpayers to pay almost five million dollars per job to create 3500 “green” jobs, but relaxing the minimum wage law is unthinkable?

In a similar vein, Schiff offers tough and provocative talk about mandatory workplace benefits:

Employment is a voluntary relationship between two parties. The more room the parties have to negotiate and agree on their own terms, the more likely a job will be created. Rules imposed from the top create inefficiencies that limit employment opportunities. Employee benefits are a cost of employment, and high value employees have all the bargaining power they need to extract benefits from employers. They are free to search for the best benefits they can get just as they search for the best wages.

Companies that do not offer benefits will lose employees to companies that do. Just as employees are free to leave companies at will, so too should employers be free to terminate an employee without fear of costly repercussions. Individuals should not gain rights because they are employees, and individuals should not lose rights because they become employers.

What do Americans value more: job creation, or all the social “benefits” built into the federally-mandated cost of labor?  Schiff’s overall point is that people respond to incentives.  When labor is artificially transformed into an expensive and risky resource, employers purchase less of it.  Politicians who talk about jobs as their “highest” priority really mean that jobs are somewhere in their top 20 priorities, and might crack the top 10, if their poll numbers drop low enough.

No amount of political grandstanding or short-term “stimulus” spending can re-program large numbers of human beings away from rational economic behavior.  The high-minded intentions behind government regulation are often quite at variance from the behavior it actually encourages, or discourages, among those who don’t make business decisions based on the moral postures struck by politicians.

It’s also a cold truth, often forgotten during heated moments of class warfare, that job creators have a variety of options for responding to perverse incentives.  Americans too often discuss employment from within a very narrow box… but escaping that box is not impossible.  Just ask the CEO who started sending jobs overseas, when the U.S. government fined him for hiring too many people.

Warren “forgets” taxes

http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/144319/elizabeth-warren-disputes-gops-class-warfare-claims/

While railing about all of the benefits American taxpayers give to business, warren conveniently forgot that business and business owners both pay taxes, and pay much more in percentage and overall contribution than workers. It could fairly be said the workers should be thanking businesses for their jobs, roads, and security.

Are we conservatives, or are we RHINOs?

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-government-shutdown-20110922,0,1889149.story

Ignoring the faulty conclusion the left leaning LAtimes draws (the only choice it to lean farther left, mwah ha ha!) the republican establishment are left with a choice to side with conservatives or liberals. Time to show your stripes ladies and gentlemen. You can prove yourselves RHINOs, and suffer the consequences in the next election, or act like actual conservatives and earn the support of the voters.

 

Double dip anyone?

Double dip anyone?

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-09-22/treasuries-rise-for-fifth-day-gain-on-slowing-economy-fed-twist.html

It’s time to eschew Peters and Eshoo, two more liberals we can’t afford to fund.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/story/2011-09-21/disaster-aid-government-shutdown/50487302/1

"While the government has a responsibility to fund disaster response in places that were devastated by Hurricane Irene or other natural disasters, it is unconscionable to use funds designed to create jobs in manufacturing states to pay for it," Reps. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and Anna Eshoo, D-Calif.

Why are taxpayers on the hook for people who decide to live in hurricane or earthquake zones? Those people should be paying the insurance premium based on their risky lifestyle, not stealing from taxpayers in what amounts to risk subsidies.

Why are taxpayers gouged for “green jobs” that it is abundantly clear are not sustainable, and as demonstrated by our job loss, not even real jobs? The market should make these decisions, and in fact has done so, while the bureaucracy throws money away fighting reality.

It’s time to eschew Peters and Eshoo, two more liberals driving jobs out of America with excessive taxes, driving up our cost of living with subsidies to their voter base, driving up our debt with their tax and spend lunacy.

Obama is running on the 1928 communist platform

http://www.redstate.com/erick/2011/09/21/class-warfare-american-communists-of-1928-compared-to-barack-obama/

Share201

Print

Forward

Obama Losing It: George Washington's Cool With His Tax Hikes

by  Jason Mattera

09/20/2011

70
Comments

Methinks that Michelle Obama​ must be lacing the organic vegetables at the White House with some illegal narcotic.  Either that or Obama’s smoking addiction goes way beyond cigarettes.

How else to explain his attempt to persuade us that he and our first President are like brothers?  He’s just a habitual liar, you say?  Well, I guess there’s that.

During his televised address in the Rose Garden yesterday, Obama actually justified his blowout government spending palooza by quoting none other than George Washington.

Said the Messiah, “It’s always more popular to promise the moon and leave the bill for after the next election or the election after that.  That’s been true since our founding.  George Washington grappled with this problem.  He said, ‘Towards the payment of debts, there must be revenue, that to have revenue there must be taxes, [and] no taxes can be devised which are not more or less inconvenient and unpleasant.’  He understood that dealing with the debt is—these are his words—‘always a choice of difficulties.’ ”

For Obama to pull the “Hey, George Washington loved taxes too” card is almost comical.  Almost, because there’s really nothing funny about the nation’s President being this unlearned about American history.  Clearly Washington and his compatriots understood that taxation was needed to fund programs, but to justify the level of taxation that Obama and his minions advocate today to feed the ever-growing beast that is our federal government falls squarely outside of the structural limits of what was intended.

Don’t believe me?  Just read a little something—something called the U.S. Constitution—to see exactly what the government was designed to do.  A scandalous loan to Solyndra isn’t an enumerated power, FYI.

While the fact remains that while Americans are growing weary of BHO’s infatuation with green jobs and shovel-ready projects, do they have the stomach for the large-scale cuts that are needed in order to mitigate a national debt exploding past $14 trillion, and actually restore constitutional fidelity to Washington, D.C?

A lot of departments and agencies would have to get axed or severely restructured. 

That depends, says freshman Sen. Mike Lee.  “I don’t think the public necessarily has an appetite for saying let's slash this department and that one,” he told HUMAN EVENTS.  “The American people understand that there are good people in every department of government.”

He went on to say that Americans do understand that the government can’t support every area of life.  Something’s gotta give.

“So the question isn’t, ‘Do we want to slash entire departments just for the sake of doing it?’ It’s, ‘What do we need to cut in order protect those things that only the federal government can do?’ ”

Here’s the last installment of our exclusive interview with the Utah senator, where he also gives the skinny on what you can expect in the Senate these next few months.

Gird your loins, people!

In other news, Obama says that his huge tax hike on job producers is basic arithmetic.  'Do the math,' he implored Congress.  But can he?  How about releasing those college transcripts, champ.