The economy is in question, healthcare reform is in chaos, the national mood on climate change does not seem to support major legislation to restrict carbon and Afghanistan appears to have the President caught in a loop on reviewing strategy. For all intents and purposes, this administration seems to have very few answers but I am just not convinced that is true.
I believe the President and his inner circle have all the answers but since the truth would frighten most Americans they would rather keep silent and let the battle rage on between those that are asking the questions and the loyal supporters that insist he is doing all he can considering the mess left behind by the previous administration.
Let’s start with the Stimulus plan. $787 billion dollars was earmarked to provide a boost to the economy; or was it? Only a portion was spent and it has had little or no effect on the economy. Never mind the fact that much of what was spent went to cities and states with severe budget problems and there is no doubt that a good portion of that was used to help close some of those gaps. The administration made claims earlier this week that nearly 700,000 jobs were created “or saved”. Hmmm? It wasn’t long ago that Joe Biden was saying that the Stimulus bill was effective beyond his wildest dreams. Now that the employment figures are continuing to fall and the Dow is still fluctuating wildly, it is apparent that his was an overly optimistic view.
Isn’t it curious that the administration’s claims no longer center on jobs created but now include jobs saved, a concept is nearly impossible to verify. Closer examination of the published numbers found that a number of exaggerations were made. A sampling of the figures were put to the test and some recipients of stimulus money used the cash to give existing employees pay raises, but each reported saving dozens of jobs with the money, including one Florida day care that claimed 129 jobs saved when it only issued raises to current employees.
More examples include a Texas contractor whose business kept 22 employees to handle stimulus contracts saw its job count inflated to 88 because the same workers were counted four times. The water department in Palm Beach County, Fla., hired 57 meter readers, customer service representatives and other positions to handle two water projects. But their total job count was incorrectly doubled to 114. A Colorado business claimed that its stimulus contract created more than 4,200 jobs. TeleTech Government Solutions actually hired 4,231 temporary workers for its stimulus project, but most of them worked for five weeks or less and the others no more than five months. The most egregious is a Texas business that received $26,000 for a roof repair. He hired 6 workers and an inspector. When he reported the numbers to the government agency tracking the stimulus money they said “Oh no, you have it all wrong…how many man-hours were involved?” He told them the project lasted a total of 426 hours and POOF! It went on government record as having created 426 jobs.
Add all of this up and one has to wonder what the actual figured really are. Anyone with a modest degree of financial savvy knows that temporary work because someone else is paying the bill is not an actual job. A job is created when there is a sustainable demand for a service or product. Every company at one point or another has experienced a momentary sharp rise in activity. They meet that increased demand through a myriad of possible strategies such as shifting low priority work onto the back burner or by approving the limited use of overtime to meet the contractual demands but never, ever hire additional employees to meet a short term demand
.
The Healthcare bill has only been back in the house an amazingly short amount of time but they still managed to add more than 900 pages and over $100 billion dollars to it. Now it is an amazing 18 inches of stacked paper worth an estimated $2.2 billion dollars per word and according to Nancy Pelosi, it’s ready for a vote. I get very nervous when the government seems to be playing fast and loose with 1/6th of the entire United States economy. Still, the press reports this news as if they were covering the opening of a new doughnut shop when what they should be asking is how a bill of this complexity could have been produced in that period of time without cutting major corners in the legislative process including some healthy and much needed debate?
The fact is, it keeps only a few of the President’s promises to the American people. It does not cover all of the uninsured, it is only budget neutral if you throw out generally accepted accounting principals, it raises taxes on everyone by proxy since it taxes damned near everything but your actual income (provided you make less than $250,000 or your income is taxed then too). It decimates private healthcare and beginning on page 90, actually lays out the transition timeline for driving people with private healthcare plans into the government exchange. The few private plans that remain standing will have their premiums triple. Medicare Advantage will face severe cuts, Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement rates will be slashed, further damaging the doctors that accept those plans and there is a panel that will determine what is covered and how it will be administered.
The climate bill is supposed to address the global concern of carbon dioxide but only western industrial nations are being driven to adopt these measures. The largest producers of carbon will not participate and pretty much the entire third world is exempt in the U.N. equivalent of “burn ‘em if you got ‘em”. Many member nations of the European Union had been suckered into this during the Kyoto conferences of 1997 and have suffered disastrous effects. England has gone as far as installing weight meters on trash cans in urban areas so that their citizens can be assessed an additional tax based on the amount of non-recyclable trash they produce.
Now that Kyoto 2, otherwise known as the Copenhagen conference is just weeks away, England and Germany are urging the United States to follow their lead in reducing carbon output. But is it really about the saving the planet or are they simply trying to level the economic playing field because of the devastation the Kyoto accords have wreaked on their ability to compete in a world market place? Isn’t it curious that a Germany company has recently rented part of an old GM manufacturing plant to make air conditioning compressors in the United States far from the carbon limits in their own country? If we pass this here will our few remaining manufacturing businesses be forced to leave our country as well, just to remain in business?
All of this is supposedly being done to reduce carbon which we are now finding is not the problem we thought it was. The idea was created by environmental extremists that shouted loud enough and long enough to catch the ear of some equally extremist legislators. Nasa’s James Hanson produced a report supporting the theory of global warming that the environmental movement and Al Gore have waved as a banner of proof positive since it was released. Independent scientists have recently come forward saying their data shows that the 1930’s were far warmer than recent years and that arctic ice is no longer receding, bringing the Hanson report under scrutiny. When other scientists could not reproduce Hanson’s conclusions they asked to see the data sets that Hanson used to construct his report. To this day, Hanson refuses to release the data and will not discuss the issue further.
Tree ring data accumulated by the IPCC (The International Panel on Climate Control) also issued findings that reinforced global warming theories but once again, peer studies cannot reproduce the famed “hockey stick” graph that would illustrate a recent spike in global temperatures. Many things affect tree ring growth aside from temperature including annual rainfall and soil composition. It was disclosed that the IPCC had hand selected tree ring samples that would only produce the results they wanted. When an honest scientist in the IPCC program accused them of picking cherries he was told “You have to pick cherries if you want to bake a cherry pie.”
This is not the sort of behavior you would expect to find in a serious scientific community; but the IPCC is not a serious scientific community. It is a conglomeration of environmental activists and a few scientists that support environmental causes. In fact, few of their scientists are climatologists but are rather, associated with other totally unrelated fields of science.
Worse yet, while the terms of the Copenhagen accords are nebulous and still being constructed, it is clear that if America enters into this agreement that many of the decisions we make as a nation regarding energy and ecological policies will be subservient to the policies issued by an international climate panel and that spells the end of American sovereignty. Don’t forget, that the only advantage that America still has in this global economy is abundant and affordable energy. Without that, we cannot compete against nations that allow businesses to pay their people ten dollars a week.
All of these things can only lead us into one school of thought. Why? Why would we authorize an $800 billion dollar stimulus plan that will not create anything more than a momentary increase in temporary labor? Why would we seek to pass a healthcare bill that does nothing to solve the major problems of cost and availability of healthcare? Why would we seek to pass climate legislation and enter into international accords that will place American sovereignty under the control of the U.N., damage our economy, send our few remaining manufacturing industries to foreign lands and yet yield no measurable benefit to the climate?
The combined effect of these plans and programs spell doom for the United States and yet despite massive and vocal opposition from the citizens of this nation, the President and his circle of advisors seem to be hell bent of pursuing these very interests. We already know that many of his closest advisors are radical Marxists that have a distain for free market capitalism and an open and professed admiration of Mao Zedong. Is that the answer? Is that the missing piece of the puzzle? We already learned through Cloward and Pivens that radical Marxists generally believe that the US will accept only Socialism after Capitalism has been destroyed. Since that is the obvious sum of these programs I can only believe that this is the intent.
I heard a Democratic strategist say that this is absurd. “Why would Obama do that? Neither he or any Democrat that voted with him would ever be elected again!” That may be true in a true Republic but will the electoral process still be in force in a Socialist America that is subservient to UN policy? Will the Constitution even exist in the form we know today or will it fall victim to other international accords? And that is a very interesting question.
Paul
I believe the President and his inner circle have all the answers but since the truth would frighten most Americans they would rather keep silent and let the battle rage on between those that are asking the questions and the loyal supporters that insist he is doing all he can considering the mess left behind by the previous administration.
Let’s start with the Stimulus plan. $787 billion dollars was earmarked to provide a boost to the economy; or was it? Only a portion was spent and it has had little or no effect on the economy. Never mind the fact that much of what was spent went to cities and states with severe budget problems and there is no doubt that a good portion of that was used to help close some of those gaps. The administration made claims earlier this week that nearly 700,000 jobs were created “or saved”. Hmmm? It wasn’t long ago that Joe Biden was saying that the Stimulus bill was effective beyond his wildest dreams. Now that the employment figures are continuing to fall and the Dow is still fluctuating wildly, it is apparent that his was an overly optimistic view.
Isn’t it curious that the administration’s claims no longer center on jobs created but now include jobs saved, a concept is nearly impossible to verify. Closer examination of the published numbers found that a number of exaggerations were made. A sampling of the figures were put to the test and some recipients of stimulus money used the cash to give existing employees pay raises, but each reported saving dozens of jobs with the money, including one Florida day care that claimed 129 jobs saved when it only issued raises to current employees.
More examples include a Texas contractor whose business kept 22 employees to handle stimulus contracts saw its job count inflated to 88 because the same workers were counted four times. The water department in Palm Beach County, Fla., hired 57 meter readers, customer service representatives and other positions to handle two water projects. But their total job count was incorrectly doubled to 114. A Colorado business claimed that its stimulus contract created more than 4,200 jobs. TeleTech Government Solutions actually hired 4,231 temporary workers for its stimulus project, but most of them worked for five weeks or less and the others no more than five months. The most egregious is a Texas business that received $26,000 for a roof repair. He hired 6 workers and an inspector. When he reported the numbers to the government agency tracking the stimulus money they said “Oh no, you have it all wrong…how many man-hours were involved?” He told them the project lasted a total of 426 hours and POOF! It went on government record as having created 426 jobs.
Add all of this up and one has to wonder what the actual figured really are. Anyone with a modest degree of financial savvy knows that temporary work because someone else is paying the bill is not an actual job. A job is created when there is a sustainable demand for a service or product. Every company at one point or another has experienced a momentary sharp rise in activity. They meet that increased demand through a myriad of possible strategies such as shifting low priority work onto the back burner or by approving the limited use of overtime to meet the contractual demands but never, ever hire additional employees to meet a short term demand
.
The Healthcare bill has only been back in the house an amazingly short amount of time but they still managed to add more than 900 pages and over $100 billion dollars to it. Now it is an amazing 18 inches of stacked paper worth an estimated $2.2 billion dollars per word and according to Nancy Pelosi, it’s ready for a vote. I get very nervous when the government seems to be playing fast and loose with 1/6th of the entire United States economy. Still, the press reports this news as if they were covering the opening of a new doughnut shop when what they should be asking is how a bill of this complexity could have been produced in that period of time without cutting major corners in the legislative process including some healthy and much needed debate?
The fact is, it keeps only a few of the President’s promises to the American people. It does not cover all of the uninsured, it is only budget neutral if you throw out generally accepted accounting principals, it raises taxes on everyone by proxy since it taxes damned near everything but your actual income (provided you make less than $250,000 or your income is taxed then too). It decimates private healthcare and beginning on page 90, actually lays out the transition timeline for driving people with private healthcare plans into the government exchange. The few private plans that remain standing will have their premiums triple. Medicare Advantage will face severe cuts, Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement rates will be slashed, further damaging the doctors that accept those plans and there is a panel that will determine what is covered and how it will be administered.
The climate bill is supposed to address the global concern of carbon dioxide but only western industrial nations are being driven to adopt these measures. The largest producers of carbon will not participate and pretty much the entire third world is exempt in the U.N. equivalent of “burn ‘em if you got ‘em”. Many member nations of the European Union had been suckered into this during the Kyoto conferences of 1997 and have suffered disastrous effects. England has gone as far as installing weight meters on trash cans in urban areas so that their citizens can be assessed an additional tax based on the amount of non-recyclable trash they produce.
Now that Kyoto 2, otherwise known as the Copenhagen conference is just weeks away, England and Germany are urging the United States to follow their lead in reducing carbon output. But is it really about the saving the planet or are they simply trying to level the economic playing field because of the devastation the Kyoto accords have wreaked on their ability to compete in a world market place? Isn’t it curious that a Germany company has recently rented part of an old GM manufacturing plant to make air conditioning compressors in the United States far from the carbon limits in their own country? If we pass this here will our few remaining manufacturing businesses be forced to leave our country as well, just to remain in business?
All of this is supposedly being done to reduce carbon which we are now finding is not the problem we thought it was. The idea was created by environmental extremists that shouted loud enough and long enough to catch the ear of some equally extremist legislators. Nasa’s James Hanson produced a report supporting the theory of global warming that the environmental movement and Al Gore have waved as a banner of proof positive since it was released. Independent scientists have recently come forward saying their data shows that the 1930’s were far warmer than recent years and that arctic ice is no longer receding, bringing the Hanson report under scrutiny. When other scientists could not reproduce Hanson’s conclusions they asked to see the data sets that Hanson used to construct his report. To this day, Hanson refuses to release the data and will not discuss the issue further.
Tree ring data accumulated by the IPCC (The International Panel on Climate Control) also issued findings that reinforced global warming theories but once again, peer studies cannot reproduce the famed “hockey stick” graph that would illustrate a recent spike in global temperatures. Many things affect tree ring growth aside from temperature including annual rainfall and soil composition. It was disclosed that the IPCC had hand selected tree ring samples that would only produce the results they wanted. When an honest scientist in the IPCC program accused them of picking cherries he was told “You have to pick cherries if you want to bake a cherry pie.”
This is not the sort of behavior you would expect to find in a serious scientific community; but the IPCC is not a serious scientific community. It is a conglomeration of environmental activists and a few scientists that support environmental causes. In fact, few of their scientists are climatologists but are rather, associated with other totally unrelated fields of science.
Worse yet, while the terms of the Copenhagen accords are nebulous and still being constructed, it is clear that if America enters into this agreement that many of the decisions we make as a nation regarding energy and ecological policies will be subservient to the policies issued by an international climate panel and that spells the end of American sovereignty. Don’t forget, that the only advantage that America still has in this global economy is abundant and affordable energy. Without that, we cannot compete against nations that allow businesses to pay their people ten dollars a week.
All of these things can only lead us into one school of thought. Why? Why would we authorize an $800 billion dollar stimulus plan that will not create anything more than a momentary increase in temporary labor? Why would we seek to pass a healthcare bill that does nothing to solve the major problems of cost and availability of healthcare? Why would we seek to pass climate legislation and enter into international accords that will place American sovereignty under the control of the U.N., damage our economy, send our few remaining manufacturing industries to foreign lands and yet yield no measurable benefit to the climate?
The combined effect of these plans and programs spell doom for the United States and yet despite massive and vocal opposition from the citizens of this nation, the President and his circle of advisors seem to be hell bent of pursuing these very interests. We already know that many of his closest advisors are radical Marxists that have a distain for free market capitalism and an open and professed admiration of Mao Zedong. Is that the answer? Is that the missing piece of the puzzle? We already learned through Cloward and Pivens that radical Marxists generally believe that the US will accept only Socialism after Capitalism has been destroyed. Since that is the obvious sum of these programs I can only believe that this is the intent.
I heard a Democratic strategist say that this is absurd. “Why would Obama do that? Neither he or any Democrat that voted with him would ever be elected again!” That may be true in a true Republic but will the electoral process still be in force in a Socialist America that is subservient to UN policy? Will the Constitution even exist in the form we know today or will it fall victim to other international accords? And that is a very interesting question.
Paul
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