On Saturday, Michael Barone linked a Weekly Standard piece by Yuval Levin which he described as a “must read”, adding that “the Romney campaign should definitely read the whole thing, and act on it.” Having read the lengthy essay, I agree.

Yuval offers a sound means for Romney to approach the issues facing the country in the current campaign and to advocate for real reform (some might call it to put forward his hopes for change).

And Levin offers a sharp critique of the incumbent’s sustained support for Washington’s sclerotic status quo:

His express objectives are to protect our existing entitlement system from structural reforms, to increase the tax burden on investment and employment, to further empower and liberate regulators, and to bring more of our economy into the public sector. His economic policy is unimaginative in the extreme—combining early-20th-century social democratic theory with mid-20th-century pork barrel politics. His answer to the government’s fiscal woes is to squeeze the military and the taxpayer to buy a few more years of denial. In every respect, he stands for stagnation and stasis, for defensive consolidation rather than aggressive growth. He thinks the best we can do is to manage decline.

Simply put, President Obama has no interest in a new way of thinking about America’s prospects, and therefore essentially nothing to offer to assuage the public’s growing anxiety. All he can do is try to direct that anxiety away from himself. He is at best irrelevant, at worst a great impediment, to the effort to keep America growing in the new economic order we are entering.

Like Barone, I urge you to read the whole thing.

“You might think”, reports Oliver Knox  on Yahoo! News

. . .  that Barack Obama’s crazy presidential schedule makes it difficult for him to stay on top of popular culture. You’d be half-right. Quizzed on ABC’s “The View” on Monday, Obama slam-dunked a question about Kim Kardashian . . . .

“Which Kardashian was married for only 72 days?” co-host Joy Behar asked the president.

“That would be Kim,” Obama replied.

Via Jim Geraghty.  Meanwhile, at PJMedia, Tom Blumer reports:

An indicator of just how seriously the federal government’s financial situation has deteriorated (combined of course with the establishment press’s clear desire to emphasize “news” which might assist Dear Leader’s reelection effort) is that the dismal 2012 report released by the Social Security system’s trustees on April 23 received little attention. Viewed through that perverse prism, cash deficits which “will average about $66 billion between 2012 and 2018 before rising steeply,” even before considering the $110 billion or so taken from “general (non-existent) revenues” during 2011 and 2012 to make up for the payroll tax cut, pale in comparison to the importance of higher priorities — like working up a 5,400-word report riddled with errors and distortions on what Mitt Romney was doing when he was a teenager.

The sad, under-reported truth is that three years into an alleged “recovery,” the long-term outlook for Social Security continues to crumble at an accelerating rate.

Via Glenn Reynolds.  Could find online any reports about the president’s plan to fix Social Security.  Or address the coming insolvency of Medicare.  Or a plan to put a dent in the national debt.

Just shy of a year ago, I posted some pictures I took of empty storefronts on Melrose between Fairfax and La Brea.  Today, I chose just one block, this time west of Fairfax and found on the north side of the street (Melrose) between Edinburgh and Highland exactly as many empty storefronts as occupied ones:

If entrepreneurs weren’t vacating these stores, they could be paying taxes to the state of California, helping reduce it’s deficit while providing jobs for aspiring actors — and other Hollywood wannabes.

The very state policies which cause these enterprises to go belly-up account to a large degree for the state’s slumping revenues.  California has become one of the nation’s least-friendly states for small business.

As Jennifer Rubin puts it:

. . . unless you understand that California has the worst business climate in the country and its revenue projections turned out to be wildly over-optimistic. Reuters explains: “The deeper deficit forecast reflects the state’s uneven economic recovery: tax collections this year have fallen about $4 billion below projections, though many state legislators and economists had warned that the January revenue estimates were far too optimistic.”

And tax collections will continue to fall unless state legislators act to reduce the regulatory burden and adopt a more business-friendly tax structure. That alas does not seem to be on Governor Brown’s agenda.

Oh, and the south side of that block also has its share of vacant storefronts: (more…)

California deficit has soared to $16 billion, Gov. Jerry Brown says:

Gov. Jerry Brown announced on Saturday that the state’s deficit has ballooned to $16 billion, a huge increase over his $9.2-billion estimate in January.

The bigger deficit is a significant setback for California, which has struggled to turn the page on a devastating budget crisis. Brown, who announced the deficit on YouTube, is expected to outline his full budget proposal on Monday in Sacramento.

“This means we will have to go much further, and make cuts far greater, than I asked for at the beginning of the year,” Brown said in the video.

Good.  Jerry, you also might want to consider repealing the Dills Act. That could go a long way to cutting the costs of state government.

Saw this last night on Yahoo! — where the news tends to skew left:

Smoke and mirrors?

Perhaps:

President Obama today raised the ante on his efforts to limit the rise in oil prices. The president, joined by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Attorney General Eric Holder, called on Congress to adopt tougher rules on speculators in the oil market.

. . . .

The Daily Ticker’s Henry Blodget says the proposal is “embarrassing” because speculators have little to do with the rising price of oil and gasoline. Prices are moving higher, Henry says, because “three billion new capitalists” in India and China are consuming oil and gasoline. It’s the balance between supply and demand that determines whether oil prices rise or fall, not speculators, Henry argues.

And then, of course, there are the Obama administration’s own policies which, by limiting exploration, have made it difficult to increase supply to match increasing demand.  If the president were serious about reducing oil prices, he would eliminate federal regulations preventing exploration and expedite the approval process for drilling on federal lands.

Seems that for this president, the solution to every problem is tougher federal oversight when, in many case, it’s federal meddling which created (or exacerbated) the problem in the first place.

And this time for a change, some in the media are catching on.

Take a gander at Yahoo!’s headlines in this screenshot I took at 10:24 PST (1:24 GayPatriot blog time):

Note the last one. By clicking on that headline, we don’t get a news story, but an opinion piece by a former official in the Carter administration. Just took one google search to determine Mr. Shapiro’s politics. Yeah, his USA Today bio claims that “Since 1979, his only partisan activity has been voting”, but the tone of his column suggests otherwise.

Perhaps, Yahoo!’s editors includes that column in their headlines because they wanted to balance out yet another poll (and this one which tends to lean left) showing that American prefer budget cuts to spending hikes as a means to reduce the deficit: “Cutting government programs is favored as the way to reduce the budget deficit by more than twice as many Americans as those who favor raising taxes, said a Reuters/Ipsos poll.”

As per the last headline, expect more such coverage of Romney, with various media outlets styling opinion pieces critical of the presumptive Republican nominee and praising the Democrat as news.  But, the Reuters/Ipsos poll shows us just how out of touch is the incumbent, a Democrat who, since his election, has favored increasing government programs — even after voters repudiated this approach in the 2010 elections.

Seems that the incumbent President of the United States thinks he can win reelection only by attacking his likely adversary:

When President Barack Obama criticized Mitt Romney by name this week for embracing a controversial Republican budget proposal, he worded his attack carefully and with bite.

“(Romney) said that he’s ‘very supportive’ of this new budget, and he even called it ‘marvelous’ — which is a word you don’t often hear when it comes to describing a budget,” Obama said during a speech on Tuesday. . . .

He may mock the Republican’s word choice, but can he defend an alternative to the budget Mr. Romney praised?  It doesn’t seem any member of his party’s congressional caucus can, given that not one U.S. Representative, not even a single Democrat, voted for his budget blueprint.

And the budget Mr. Obama presented won’t reduce the deficit below the “astounding” figure he, in 2008, equated to “living beyond our means” even ten years after the date of that statement.

As soon as the contest for the Republican nomination is settled, the focus will return to Mr. Obama and the job he’s been doing.  And then attacks on a man who supports a plan that can at least secure a majority of his party’s House caucus (well 94.2% to be exact) will resonate less than will an accounting of his record in office, including the fact that precisely 0% of his party’s caucus in the U.S. House voted for his budget.
——-

*in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Earlier today, Glenn linked a great post by the Cato Institute’s Daniel Mitchell which dovetails nicely with (& improves upon) my post on the failure of the president to meet his “moral responsibility” to present a fiscally responsible budget.

Obama said that Paul Ryan’s plan (whichallows spending to grow by an average of 3.1 percent per year over the next decade) is a form of “social Darwinism.”

But the proposal from the House Budget Committee Chairman only reduces the burden of federal spending to 20.25 percent of GDP by the year 2023.

Yet when Bill Clinton left office in 2001, following several years of spending restraint, the federal government was consuming 18.2 percent of economic output.

Read the whole thing!

Remember how Democrats railed against the immediate past president for his spendthrift ways, with one prominent politician telling us that under George W. Bush’s watch, we were “living beyond our means“.  Were it not for TARP [Troubled Asset Relief Program] (which Obama supported) just before W left office, federal expenditures during his tenure never exceeded 21% of GDP.

So, federal expenditures lower than 21% of GDP mean living beyond our means, but at 20.25% mean “social Darwinism”?

Seems one Democrat is more interested in criticizing Republicans than in offering consistent arguments.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Sonicfrog contends that we’re all

. . . missing the real significance of the “Social Darwinism” comment. Think about the term and how it’s been used over the last century and more. It has been justification for all sorts of atrocities and prejudices, from racism to eugenics to Nazism to state sterilization of the mentally challenged and infirm. I generally scoff at the notion that people use “code words”, which is usually an accusation tossed at Conservatives by Liberals to try and portray Conservatives as racists. Well, in this case, although he apparently isn’t that familiar with the aspects of Marbury v Madison, I think it’s hard pressed not to conclude that this was the “Unifier-In-Chief’s” veiled and half clever way of accusing Conservatives of wanting to off cleans society of the poor and minorities.

Yesterday, there were two big political stories, three if you count the reverberations from the president’s casting aspersions on judicial review, four, if you count the revelation (from the previous day) that once again the Obama campaign has disabled “AVS protections” from its donations pages such that Illegal Contributor could not only make a donation, but also (as of this posting) set up a contributions page on the Democrat’s own web-site.

Those big stories were Mitt Romney’s sweep of the day’s primaries, winning the District of Columbia, Maryland and Wisconsin and possibly all of the delegates at stake yesterday and the president’s luncheon speech to the AP.  From the incumbent’s opening “joke” through the question-and-answer session, the address lacked class.  The long and short of it was that he misrepresented the solutions Republicans were offering and failed to put forward a credible plan of his own, delivering bromides instead:

And yet, for much of the last century, we have been having the same argument with folks who keep peddling some version of trickle-down economics.  They keep telling us that if we’d convert more of our investments in education and research and health care into tax cuts — especially for the wealthy — our economy will grow stronger.  They keep telling us that if we’d just strip away more regulations, and let businesses pollute more and treat workers and consumers with impunity, that somehow we’d all be better off.  We’re told that when the wealthy become even wealthier, and corporations are allowed to maximize their profits by whatever means necessary, it’s good for America, and that their success will automatically translate into more jobs and prosperity for everybody else.  That’s the theory.

Now, the problem for advocates of this theory is that we’ve tried their approach — on a massive scale.  The results of their experiment are there for all to see.  At the beginning of the last decade, the wealthiest Americans received a huge tax cut in 2001 and another huge tax cut in 2003.

Well, we did see economic growth and job creation from 2003 until the recession hit a year after the election of a Democratic Congress in 2006.  He otherwise presents a cartoon version of Republican economics — which sounds more like a college activist’s impassioned critique of Reaganomics than an elected leader’s considered response to his rivals.

House Republicans have put forward a budget which slows the growth in federal spending; it passed the House.  The president offered a plan which couldn’t ever garner a single Democratic vote. (more…)

Another Obama Solar Company Goes Bankrupt …Taxpayers Lose $2 BILLION?

A California solar energy company that was unable to meet a deadline for an Energy Department loan guarantee last year has sought bankruptcy protection in Delaware.

Solar Trust of America’s Chapter 11 filing on Monday listed assets between $1 million and $10 million, and liabilities between $10 million and $50 million.

The filing comes amid the ongoing controversy surrounding Solyndra, a solar firm that received a half-billion dollar federal loan and was touted by the Obama administration before declaring bankruptcy last year.

At the same link you’ll find the text of an April 19, 2011 article reporting, “The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded a $2.1 billion loan guarantee to Solar Trust of America for a solar thermal power plant near Blythe, Calif.”

——-

*green companies taking federal subsidies and/or loan guarantees going bankrupt.

(H/t Instapundit.)

You know, when I think of these things, I really should just go ahead and post them right away…it’ll make me look more prescient and brilliant than simply linking:

This is something that’s been on my mind for quite a while, and Chris Wallace put great words to exactly what I’ve been thinking lately with regard to the Supreme Court’s ultimate decision on ObamaCare:

(sorry for the commercial, the discussion with Brit Hume starts at about 3:50)

The gist is that win or lose with SCOTUS, it’s a lose situation for Obama:

Either he loses his signature legislative victory because it’s unconstitutional, or the well-over 50% of Americans who hate it have no other recourse than to elect Republicans to both houses of Congress and the White House and Obama loses obviously in that case.

This, I think, lends itself to the point I was making earlier today that this is an opportunity for those of us who love Liberty and Independence to make crystal clear the choice we have before us this year: Do we continue down the path of governmental intrusion into and management of our lives, or do we assert ourselves and tell the dictators in Washington that, No thanks, we’ll take care of our own lives?

(Interestingly, Brit makes an excellent point that I’d not thought of: Basically, with our fiscal house in such disarray, ObamaCare cannot stand on its own failures anyway. That our debt and unfunded social liabilities are so massive that it doesn’t matter what happens with the Supreme Court or—it seems he’s suggesting—with repeal even through legislative remedies…that it will collapse simply because it cannot be afforded. Scary stuff, especially considering the likelihood that he’s wrong, and that the unaffordability of any mandate dating all the way back to the New Deal has never kept this country from burying itself in debt in order to continue to feed its appetite for mother’s milk from the teat of the government trough…if you’ll excuse my abusively mixed metaphors.)

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HQ)

. . .  and the media (and special interests) squawk about his supposed insensitivity to the plight of those dependent on federal largesse, the Republican can just say he inherited a debt problem from his predecessor.

It’s the deficit spending.

When I first heard that Mitt Romney had made this comment, I thought he was referencing the trouble young people have had finding jobs in this Obama economy, but then I took a listen. Interesting how he makes the comment, hesitates, then explains that young people should be concerned about the debt accumulated by this president and his party to pay for benefits to his generation, debt on which they’ll have to pay interest.

(H/t: Gateway Pundit.)

In 2008, many young people backed Obama not because of the particular policies he espoused, but because of the image he projected. Now that they’ve seen that his record in office has burdened their generation more than any other, perhaps they’ll have a change of heart this fall.

One can only hope for such a change.

The man who, as presidential candidate, pledged a “net spending cut,” has now, as president, overseen an increase in the national debt greater than that of a predecessor whom he derided for his profligate ways.  And Barack Obama did this in less than half the time George W. Bush was in office.

Tomorrow will mark the completion of the first 3 years and 2 months of the Democrat’s time in the White House.  The Republican served two full terms.  ”Over the weekend,” writes Jim Geraghty

Steve Eggleston checked the latest numbers from the Treasury Department and credited me for an accurate prediction: that upon the Ides of March, President Obama reached the milestone of raising the debt by $4.93 trillion since taking office.

On that day, the debt’s increase under Obama surpassed the amount it increased during George W. Bush’s two terms in office, $4.89 trillion.

In other words, Obama ran up as much debt in 3.15 years as Bush ran up in eight years.

The Ides of March, for those of you unfamiliar with Julius Cæsar, is the 15th of that month (on the Roman calendar). If our legacy media were even-handed, this story would receive more coverage than two men kissing at a Santorum rally.

ADDENDUM: Oh, and Jim asks us to remember that, on the campaign trail, “Obama said that adding $4 trillion in debt over Bush’s eight years was ‘irresponsible’ and ‘unpatriotic.””  (Just click on over to his post to watch the videos.)

Recall that contraception kerfuffle came to the fore the Friday before the president released his FY 2013 budget. Even then, the White House numbers forecast deficits in 2018 higher than the “astounding” figure Bob Schieffer cited in 2008, leading the then-Democratic nominee to reiterate his pledge of a “net spending cut” and vowing, not “to go back to our profligate ways.”

Well, it seems that Miss Rosy Scenario crafted those bleak figures in the White House budget:

President Obama’s 2013 budget would add $3.5 trillion to annual deficits through 2022, according to a new estimate from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

It also would raise the deficit next year by $365 billion, according to the nonpartisan office.

The CBO estimate is in sharp contrast to White House claims last month that the Obama budget would reduce deficits by $3.2 trillion over the next decade.

No, wonder his team is trying to drag out the Democratic narrative of an Republican War on Women.  Only “32% of women say they will definitely vote for Obama in 2012“.  And since 36% of women plan to definitely vote against them, they need to try to sway the remaining 32%.  And demonizing Republicans is a lot easier than defending an irresponsible federal budget.

Linking the latest Washington Post/ABC News Poll, headlined, Gas prices sink Obama’s ratings on economy, bring parity to race for White House, Glenn Reynolds, quips, “This is why they want people talking about birth control.”  In his piece on the very same poll, Jim Geraghty challenges the conventional wisdom about Obama’s inevitability, ABC/WashPost Poll: Unstoppable Incumbent Now Trails Romney Again.

“It seems,” Ed Morrissey writes looking at the poll . . .

. . . that Obama’s dismissive advice last week that gas prices are always “spiking up” this time of year didn’t do anything to set minds at ease.  Rapid gas price hikes and the resulting increase in food prices quickly erode buying power in working-class and middle-class households, which means that fewer people will have money for vacations and impulse spending in 2012.

And there we have (again) the specter of higher food prices, an increase felt more acutely by those who do the grocery shopping which, in heterosexual households, tends to be women.  No wonder the Obama campaign is making “an intensified effort this week to build support among women“.  Distraction, anyone?

UPDATE:  Have voters comes to expect incompetence from Obama?  Conflicting responses (which Geraghty noted) to the same question posed just shy of six years ago when George W. Bush was president offers a clue that they might: (more…)

This report sure suggests as much, Obama to intensify defense of health care reforms:

The White House is preparing a campaign to publicly defend President Obama’s health care reforms just weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court weighs arguments on its constitutionality — a case that could redefine the scope of the 2012 election and mobilize voters on both sides.

Now, to be sure, this campaign is related to the coming arguments before the Supreme Court (shouldn’t they then be trying to sharpen their legal arguments rather than appeal to the public?), but said campaign will once again put the unpopular initiative into the spotlight.

Last time, Obamacare came to the forefront of our national discourse, Republicans won big in congressional elections:

It’s not easy to lose 63 seats in a House election. Before 2010, the last time it had been done was when Joe DiMaggio was still patrolling center field for the New York Yankees. It’s even harder to pull off such a feat when exit polling shows that Americans were inclined to blame the prior president (a member of the other party) for the poor economy. This raises a question that Democrats and the media have been avoiding for the past 16 months: Just how did the Democrats do it?

A new academic study says the answer can likely be reduced to one word: Obamacare. The study, which was conducted by scholars from Dartmouth and elsewhere, finds that “supporters of health care reform paid a significant price.”  (more…)

“The best 12 months” for job creation “in the post-war period”, reports economist Danielle Hall, “were September 1983 to August 1984 when 4.9 million jobs were added.”  In September 1983 alone, “the US economy under President Reagan created 1.1 million jobs.”  Keep that figure in mind when you hear the media trumpet the latest employment figures.  In the past five months, the US economy under President Obama created fewer jobs than the economy under Ronald Reagan did in the ninth month of the third year of his presidency.

That said, the employment numbers are reasonably good, if not enough to keep pace with the administration’s projections in promoting the “stimulus” or to keep pace with a population growth.  (That link via Instapundit.)

That stimulus, in fact, has helped push our our debt and deficit to all time highs.  (Last link also via Insta.)  Yesterday, Jim Geraghty reported that, “The total U.S. public debt will probably hit $15.5 trillion today“, finding further that it increased by $4,872,146,580,769.36 since Barack Obama took office.  ”For comparison,” he noted, “the national debt increased $4.9 trillion — $4,899,100,310,608.44, to be precise — during the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush”:

In other words, when the debt increases another $27 billion — $26,953,729,839.08 — Obama will have run up as much debt in three years and a couple of months as Bush ran up in eight years. Obama will reach that milestone in a few days. (Back in August, I predicted Obama would hit this milestone on the Ides of March.)

On that score, he was more prescient that yours truly who contended we would reach that milestone well before Memorial Day, now more than two months hence.

California slipping toward bankruptcy, again:

California is going broke. Again. The state controller has estimated that the state will run out of money sometime this month. California will need to find $3 billion in cuts or revenues to keep the state in the black through the rest of this fiscal year.

And next year looks even worse. California’s Legislative Analyst Office projects that, even with billions in one-time revenues from Facebook’s impending IPO, Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget will run a $6.5 billion deficit.

Must be George W. Bush’s fault.

RELATED: Victor Davis Hanson, In California, Whom Will They Blame?