GayPatriot

The Internet home for American gay conservatives.

Which is the stronger majority?

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On Monday, the president said this about the Supreme Court review of Obamacare, “Ultimately, I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”  Emphasis added.

On March 21, 2010, the U.S. House  passed the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” by a vote of 219-212, with 34 Democrats joining 178 Republicans in opposition.  No Republicans vote for the bill.  (That’s a 7-vote margin.)

Fewer than ten months later, on January 19, 2011, the chamber, under new leadership, in large part because of opposition to said Act, acted to repeal the legislation by vote of 245-189, with three Democrats joined the sizable Republican majority.  (That’s a 56-vote margin.)

Would you agree with me that a 56-vote margin is a stronger majority than a 7-vote margin in a legislative body which hadn’t grown any larger between the two votes?

FROM THE COMMENTS: JP offers, “Also for great true ‘Strong Majorities’ see 0bama’s budgets. He got total agreement with no votes at all from BOTH parties. That’s a strong majority.”

UPDATE:  Seems I wasn’t the only one to make this observation.

If taxing the rich is so important to President Obama . . .

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. . . why didn’t he submit legislation to the 111th Congress when the Democrats had a majority in the House and a super-duper majority in the Senate (filibuster-proof for six months)?

And why aren’t our friends in the legacy media asking him about this oversight?

Question came to mind as I was reading Rush’s response to Obama using Warren Buffet’s secretary as a prop:  “There’s something inherently unfair about the Republican tax code, as though Warren Buffett’s secretary is eating pork and beans while sitting in the sewer grate, while her boss is flying around on his NetJets planes. And, lo and behold, she was up there!”  Read the whole thing.

Republican tax code?  Democrats had full power for two full years and didn’t try to reform it.  So, shouldn’t we be calling it a Democratic tax code?

FROM THE COMMENTS: chad writes:

Republicans need to do a better job explaining double-taxation with dividends and capital gains. The way it is now, people hear about how so-and-so made all this money and only paid 15% while some much poorer person paid 20% or more, never getting the explanation as to how this is an apples-to-oranges comparison so long as we have high corporate income taxes that take a huge cut of profits before they become dividends or capital gains.

Indeed.

So, tell me again, why did young people vote for Obama?

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Maybe it’s that they don’t want to grow up. From Yahoo!’s homepage today:

The real story though is that although they helped elect the incumbent, delivering two-thirds of their votes to Barack Obama, they’re the group suffering the most from his economic polices. Although that Democrat saw his American Recovery and Reinvestment Act sail through a Democratic Congress in 2009, that supposedly stimulative legislation has failed to generate the jobs he promised.

And now only “only 55 percent of young Americans have jobs, [the] lowest [figure] since WWII“:

Unemployment among young adults is at its highest point since World War II, new data show. And it’s having a disconcerting impact on the trajectory of their careers and lives.

“We have a monster jobs problem, and young people are the biggest losers,” Andrew Sum, an economist with the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University told the Associated Press.

Just 55.3 percent of people between 16 and 29 were employed in 2010 on average, the according to new figures released by the Census Bureau. That represents an enormous drop from 67.3 percent in 2000. Among teens the figure was less than 30 percent.

Emphasis added.

Misdiagnosing cause of financial crisis, our elected officials gave more power to regulators who helped cause crisis

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Nobel-prize winning economist Gary S. Becker had a piece in the Wall Street Journal on Friday which is perhaps the best short comprehensive piece on the ongoing economic malaise, from the causes of the financial crisis of 2008 to the failure of the immediate past Congress and current administration to remedy the situation.

The University of Chicago economics professor reminds his readers that “government behavior also contributed to and prolonged” the financial crisis: “Regulators who could have reined in banks instead became cheerleaders for the banks.”

Given that markets melted down in a Republican administration, Democrats cleaned up at all levels in the 2008 elections. Once in power, they turned to their party’s tried and true response to economic crises: more government spending. Congressional Democrats put together a near-trillion dollar “stimulus plan”, and “Leading government economists, backed up by essentially no evidence, argued that this spending would stimulate the economy by enough to reduce unemployment rates to under 8%.”

Although a lot of economic theory supports the notion that higher spending stimulates the economy, the historical record tells a different story.

Instead of economic expansion on par with previous economic recoveries with accelerating job creation and declining unemployment, the Democratic stimulus instead produced . . .

. . . a sizable expansion of the federal deficit and debt.

The misdiagnosis of widespread market failure led congressional leaders, after the 2008 election, to propose radical changes in financial institutions and, more generally, much wider regulation and government control of companies and consumer behavior. . . .

Although regulatory discretion failed leading up to the crisis, Congress nevertheless added to the number and diversity of federal regulations as well as to the discretion of regulators. [Read more…]

Cleaning up Obama’s Messes

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In today’s WSJ.com’s Political Diary (available by subscription), Stephen Moore quips “The Laffer report on the two presidents”, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama “is aptly entitled ‘The Odd Couple.’ In this case Reagan would be Felix, because he cleaned up the mess; and Mr. Obama is more like Oscar, who leaves a bigger mess behind.”

Seems Democrats believe the incumbent can repeat the feat of the most successful domestic policy president of the 20th century and win reelection despite middling polls during his third year in office. Problem is is that the Gipper’s poll numbers steadily increased in 1983 while in the corresponding year of his term, Obama’s have drifted downward.

Moore is onto something when he talks about Obama having left a bigger mess behind [than the one he “inherited”]. One reason House Republicans haven’t been able to devote more time on conservative reforms is that they have had to clean up messes the previous Congress left behind, such as its failure to pass a budget and to increase the debt ceiling high enough to accommodate the spending increases it did pass.

In addition to the messes the last Democratic House left the current Republican one, there are the messes Obama will leave to his successor, including notably two of the “big” pieces of legislation he signed, the health care overhaul and the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, each increasing federal control over our economy. Not to mention all the new regulations administration appointees have foisted on the private sector, particularly those imposed by the EPA.

The next president is going to have to devote the better part of his first year in office just cleaning up the messes the incumbent is making today.

Obama wants GOP to hike taxes to pay for his party’s profligacy

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President Obama, I believe, made two crucial decisions, deciding perhaps (at least in the first case) by choosing not to decide that make his grandstanding on the tax issue little more than political demagoguery.  In the first case, he chose not to stand up to congressional Democrats when they presented him with their $800-billion dollar “stimulus.”   The second was when he agreed to extend the tax Bush tax cuts.

Now, wherever he goes, whatever he does, he talks about shared sacrifice and people paying their fair share, by which he means that he wants Congress to tax “millionaires and billionaires.”   Yet, if he thought we needed to raise more revenue from taxpayers, why then did he sign off on extending the tax cuts?  WIthout doing anything, they would have just lapsed and, presto chango, millionaires and billionaires (not to mention small business owners) would be sacrificing a little more to Uncle Sam.

And today the president and the various left-of-center pundits are lecturing Republicans for rejecting tax increases altogether.  Yeah, but Republicans didn’t support the Democrats’ supposedly stimulative spending spree which the president pushed without providing a means to pay for it.  And now the president’s supporters are demanding Republicans support tax increases to pay for that ill-advised piece of profligacy.  And pay the political price for it as well.

The primary reason Republicans are focusing on spending cuts is because the Democrats have ratcheted spending up to levels so high that George W. Bush looks stingy by contrast.  Many of us who would be happy just getting spending down to Clinton-era levels.

President Obama: The Man Without a Plan

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On Tuesday, I linked the closing question of Stephen Green’s insightful post on the Obama administration, but the beginning of that post also merits your attention (as does the middle).  He used Steve McCann’ thoughtful piece at American Thinker, linking the president’s behavior in the debt ceiling debate to his overall failure of leadership, as his jumping-off point.

McCann contends that

Barack Obama’s only interest in the debt ceiling debate was to raise the borrowing limit sufficiently to get by the next election, and as a cudgel to denigrate the Republicans. His concern was not for the American people and the impact of overwhelming national debt, nor an impending and inevitable credit downgrade. Rather, he was determined that raising the debt ceiling would not become an issue during the presidential campaign. . . .

The destruction wrought by the nearly $5.5 Trillion (more than a third of the total debt of a nation 222 years old) he will have added to the nation’s balance sheet by the end of his term was immaterial, thus no detailed plan was forthcoming from the White House, and no lie or accusation aimed at the opposition was too absurd to tell.

The Democrat has, McCann observes, “abdicated all responsibility to the Congress, in particular the House of Representatives, which has little choice but to assume a role they are not structured to do: lead the country as best they can until November 2012.”  Indeed, Obama been doing that since the dawn of his administration where he let congressional Democrats draft the “stimulus” as they would later write the health care overhaul.

Seems the election of a Republican House threw a wrench into his plans of governance.   [Read more…]

The day the president lost the tax issue

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December the 7th may be the day that lives infamy, but December the 6th marks the day President Obama lost the debate on taxation.  On that day last year, as Washington Post writers Lori Montgomery and Shailagh Murray put it, the Democrat “and congressional Republicans . . . reached a tentative accord on a far-reaching economic package that would preserve George W. Bush administration tax breaks for families at all income levels for two years”.

To return tax rates to their level before the Texas Republican took office, all Obama had to do was, well, nothing.  The tax rates set early in Mr. Bush’s term would have expired on their own.

In working out this compromise, then signing the bill, the president essentially conceded the argument on taxes.  And yet now it appears the agreement he had worked out with congressional leaders fell apart because Speaker Boehner wouldn’t accede to his demand for “additional revenues” (AKA more taxes).

If the president so wanted additional revenue, why then didn’t he just sit back last December and let the Bush tax rates lapse?

Why couldn’t it have been settled before 2010 Elections?

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Glenn Reynolds notes how convenient it is that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner [says the] Debt-Ceiling Must Be Settled Until After 2012 Election. He wants Congress to “take default off the table for the next 18 months … through the election.”

Might have been more convenient for Democrats to settle it before the 2010 elections when they had the votes to do so, considering, that is, how they used those votes to increase the debt as an astronomical pace.