Re: A broken promise: Neither stimulus nor change


"SordoT" <sordoT@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:6v3g8bFi5sk0U1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Passing this bill is essential to the status of his presidency, not so
much to the future of our country. That's what all the hurry is, he
doesn't want people to find out what all is in there.


A broken promise: Neither stimulus nor change

http://www.theunionleader.com

Only three weeks into President Barack Obama's administration was all
the time it took for many Americans to see through the fog of rhetoric
to the ugly details hidden behind.

President Obama promised to end politics as usual in Washington and give
us an earmark-free recovery plan that would jolt the economy by saving
the housing sector and rebuilding national infrastructure. That is not
even close to what we actually got.

Of the $819 billion in "stimulus" spending, no more than 5 percent is
dedicated to infrastructure improvements, The Boston Globe reported last
week. It took a Republican amendment in the Senate this week to get
home-buyer tax credits to encourage Americans to stop the slide in the
housing market.

Where does the rest of the money go? Wherever House Democrats wanted to
put it.

"Not less than" $6 billion is dedicated to "construction, repair and
alteration of federal buildings." That is $1.4 billion more than the
bill dedicates to employment and training programs.

The bill spends another $6 billion to make federal buildings more energy
efficient, $1.5 billion for research at universities, $150 million for
rural law enforcement, $25 million for tribal alcohol and substance
abuse programs, $50 million to fight Internet child predators, $500
million to NASA for "science," $1.2 billion for "research and related
activities" at the National Science Foundation, $1.2 billion for
"operation and maintenance, Army," $800 million for Superfund cleanup
sites, $6.4 billion for "state and tribal assistance grants" for
environmental and clean water initiatives, $79 billion for the
Department of Education State Fiscal Stabilization Fund, of which the
secretary of education is permitted to reserve $25 million for
"administration and oversight."

Those examples represent a tiny fraction of the billions in wasteful,
non-stimulative spending in the "stimulus" bill. As Karl Rove noted in
yesterday's Wall Street Journal, the bill increases non-security
discretionary spending by 81 percent, from $393 billion to $712 billion.
And even though Congress classifies this bill as "emergency" spending,
thereby avoiding its own rule requiring that all new spending be paid
for, most of the spending does not sunset.

That is, vast increases in funding for federal programs will become the
new baseline for those programs. With this bill, we are permanently
raising federal spending.

As the American people have learned these details, their support for the
stimulus bill has shrunk. A Rasmussen Reports poll this week found that
only 37 percent of the public now supports this legislation.

On the opposite page, President Obama states his case for the bill. As
usual, he is long on rhetoric and short on specifics. He believes he can
persuade the people into supporting this plan by simply asserting that
a) we are in a national economic emergency, and b) the bill will create
jobs. The American people aren't buying it.

The President let liberal House Democratic leaders write his stimulus
bill. They gave us exactly the kind of bill he campaigned against -- one
larded with pork and waste.

The President would be wise to work with senators to remove wasteful and
unnecessary spending from the bill. That is what the people want, and it
is what he promised.

Alas, he is intent on putting his good name on this bad bill and selling
it as if it represents the kind of change he promised us.

It isn't, and the American people see that already.

I believe Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton had some of the finest financial minds in their administrations. Neither Reagan nor Clinton would allow themselves to be manipulated by them though and put our financial house in order and kept it there. But Clinton screwed up by letting China bribe him, and others in his administration, into extending MFN status to China. Back then many of us wrote letters of protest, made phone calls and generally made pests of ourselves in opposing that ill conceived idea. Well, now I ask you to read what the person responsible for that new China policy has to say.

After you read this, stop and think. We now have 90% of the Reagan/Clinton financial team back in power. But the difference this time around is this. Obama is not a smart person. He has no executive experience and he is very easily manipulated. And that my friends just might be the final nail in the good ole' USA coffin. Now that China and Japan have stopped buying US debt, where do you think the money will come from to keep this balloon in the air? We are headed for a monumental disaster and congress is stoking the engine with everything they can come up with.

Update U.S.-China policy
By HAROLD MEYERSON

A few months ago, Robert Cassidy found himself pondering whether trade
actually benefited the American economy. "I couldn't prove it," he
says. "Did it benefit U.S. multinational corporations? Yes. But I
cannot prove that it benefits the economy."

Such doubts would hardly be news if they came from an established
critic of free trade. But Robert Cassidy was the chief U.S. negotiator
on China's 1999 market access agreement with the United States the
document that was the basis for Congress' extension of permanent
normalized trade relations to China, which in turn enabled China to
join the World Trade Organization. During the 1990s, Cassidy was the
assistant U.S. trade representative for the Asia-Pacific region, and
before that he worked in the Treasury Department's international
affairs office.

Which is why his rejection of U.S. trade policy is worth more than
passing notice. Speaking this week at the Economic Policy Institute, a
liberal think tank, Cassidy noted how the promises made when the
Clinton administration was promoting China's accession to the WTO have
been turned on their head. "Claims were made that U.S. exports of goods
to China would increase substantially," he recalled, "creating jobs in
the higher-paying export sector." Instead, American manufacturers
shuttered factories here and opened them in China, while China's
undervaluation of its currency guaranteed that U.S. products would not
be sold there. Indeed, Cassidy added, U.S. exports to China "consist
primarily of raw materials" hardly the product of superior U.S.
technology and production.

What Cassidy offered this week was a more full-throated version of a
critique that has begun, tentatively, to emerge from the Obama
administration: that the U.S.-China economic relationship is flawed, in
part, as Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has said, because China
manipulates its currency to make its exports cheaper and ours
unsustainably pricey. That's a clear shift in policy, since currency
manipulation, which generally has a far greater effect on the price of
internationally traded goods than tariffs do, was a wrong that the Bush
administration was loath to right. As Thea Lee, the AFL-CIO's chief
international economist, has pointed out, the U.S. trade
representative's office has for years routinely referred complaints
about currency manipulation to the Treasury, which has referred them to
the International Monetary Fund, which, according to a report in
Monday's Financial Times, has not discussed China's currency policy
since 2006.

Such a discussion would be of more than academic interest, since the
economic relationship between the United States and China is the
linchpin of the global economy that is, a central cause of the global
economic crisis. China produces and we consume; China takes the
proceeds from our consumption and lends it back to us, not so we can
produce more American multinationals would prefer the Chinese do that
but so we can take on more debt and continue to consume.

The next time we turn our attention to crafting a new linchpin for the
global economy, Cassidy says, we need to do better. He contends that
the new administration and Congress can invoke anti-dumping laws to
mitigate the unfair competition that results from China's currency
policy. More elementally, he argues, U.S. trade policy should be based
on America's economic self-interest. It speaks volumes about the last
couple of decades of U.S. trade policy that the man who negotiated many
key points of that policy now thinks that they were calculated not to
enhance our national interest but, rather, those of U.S. financial and
corporate interests.

The debate about the stimulus package before Congress has helped expose
the huge rift between our national interest and that of our globalized
business sector. Last week, the House Appropriations Committee voted
almost unanimously to require the use of U.S.-made steel in the
infrastructure projects included in the stimulus, unless the U.S.
industry which is running at 43 percent of capacity was unable to
supply it.

You might think that American business, beyond the steel industry,
would welcome such language, but, in fact, using Americans' tax dollars
to stimulate American production looks like the last thing globalized
American business wants. A letter opposing "Buy American" provisions in
the stimulus has been signed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the
Business Roundtable and several other such groups.

It was bad enough when our banks and corporations decided to take their
funds out of American manufacturing to promote low-wage production in
China. Now they want to direct the tax dollars behind the stimulus
program to the same end.

The only mystery here is why the Chamber and the Roundtable aren't
compelled to register as foreign lobbyists. Of all the terms we could
use to describe them, "American" certainly does not spring to mind.


--
Benjamin Franklin famously remarked that the
Founding Fathers had given us "a republic,
if you can keep it."

There's more than just 3 co-equal branches
of government. There is a 4th branch that
overides all the other 3 combined. That
branch is the citizens themselves. They hold
the power to defeat any law, remove any law-
maker and/or any judge in the land, including
a Supreme Court Justice. The trouble is, the
people just roll over and play dead when a
right is usurped. No one TAKES your rights
away. YOU GIVE THEM AWAY by not
reacting to government's overstepping their
limits.

JC, your friendly neighborhood educator
http://www.hillsdale.edu/

.

Relevant Pages

  • The Guns of August: Lowering the flag on the American century
    ... Lowering the Flag on the American Century ... start of World War I and called it The Guns of August. ... Meanwhile, whether we dismantle our empire or not, China will become ... However, it has a booming economy, a favorable balance of payments ...
    (alt.politics)
  • Re: The Guns of August: Lowering the flag on the American century
    ... Lowering the Flag on the American Century ... start of World War I and called it The Guns of August. ... Meanwhile, whether we dismantle our empire or not, China will become ... However, it has a booming economy, a favorable balance of payments ...
    (alt.politics)
  • Re: The WTO is useless.......it is doomed
    ... so I don't think WTO membership is a bad ... The impact of WTO membership to China is neutral. ... the essential myths of American civilization, ... declining economy that cannot carry the heavy ...
    (soc.culture.china)
  • Re: Reagan and Clinton. Then theres Obama.
    ... But Clinton screwed up by letting China bribe him, and others in his administration, into extending MFN status to China. ... now I ask you to read what the person responsible for that new China policy has to say. ... actually benefited the American economy. ...
    (soc.veterans)
  • Reagan and Clinton. Then theres Obama.
    ... But Clinton screwed up by letting China bribe him, and others in his administration, into extending MFN status to China. ... now I ask you to read what the person responsible for that new China policy has to say. ... actually benefited the American economy. ...
    (soc.veterans)