A series of interesting links

Sometime this week I will post about why I'm not voting for Dear Leader (ooops, there goes one full paragraph) and a breakdown of the California state-wide ballot initiatives and the San Francisco ballot initiatives. But this posting, I just want to link to a number of articles.

From Michael Malone at ABC News:

The traditional media are playing a very, very dangerous game -- with their readers, with the Constitution and with their own fates.

The media have covered this presidential campaign with a bias and that ultimately could lead to its downfall.The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I've found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.

But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I've begun -- for the first time in my adult life -- to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was "a writer," because I couldn't bring myself to admit to a stranger that I'm a journalist. .....

If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as president of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography.

That isn't Sen. Obama's fault: His job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media's fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.

This article from the Wall Street Journal:

What a difference an election makes. "The choice you'll have," Mr. Obama warned of the McCain plan during one of the debates, "is having your employer no longer provide you health care." Sounds terrible. But wait, let's consult another one of Mr. Obama's advisers. David Cutler, the Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics at Harvard, put it this way: "Health insurance is not something that is made better by tying it to employment. As a result, essentially all economists believe that universal coverage should be done outside of employment."

Indeed. . .the article above notes that the fundamentals of John McCain's health care proposal is essentially the same as two of Obama's health care advisors' from before joining the Obama campaign. As the WSJ puts it, "These advisers know that Mr. Obama's claim that Mr. McCain will tax health benefits "for the first time in history" is particularly disingenuous."

Another one from the WSJ (at this point, I expect a comment about relying on right-wing newspapers, well, I bet they're getting this stuff out now before Congress passes laws to silence them), this one by Robert Carroll, who I've referenced previously: "[T]he McCain tax credit for the purchase of health insurance exceeds the value of the current exclusion for all income levels shown. Indeed, it generally provides more resources to purchase health insurance than the existing exclusion."

Since fraud has been an ongoing theme this month, there's this article on the differences on on-line campaign donations between the Obama campaign and the McCain campaign.

To test the campaigns' practices, this author bought two pre-paid American Express gift cards worth $25 each to donate to the Obama and McCain campaigns online. As required by law, the campaigns' Web sites asked for, and National Journal provided, the donor's correct name, location and employment. The cards were purchased with cash at a Washington, D.C., drugstore, and the campaigns' Web sites were accessed through a public computer at a library in Fairfax County, Virginia.

The Obama campaign's Web site accepted the $25 donation, but the McCain campaign's Web site rejected it.

Then, there's this article from the New York Post:

All of which prompted an enterprising citizen to test the controls put in place to enforce compliance with federal campaign law by the Obama and McCain campaigns. Last Thursday, he decided to conduct an experiment.

He went to the Obama campaign Web site and made a donation under the name "John Galt" (the hero of Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged"). He provided the equally fictitious address "1957 Ayn Rand Lane, Galts Gulch, CO 99999."

He checked the box next to $15 and entered his actual credit-card number and expiration date. He was then taken to the next page and notified that his donation had been processed.

He then tried the same experiment on the McCain site, which rejected the transaction. He returned to the Obama site and made three more donations using the names Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Bill Ayers, all with different addresses but the same credit card. The transactions all went through. By Saturday, he'd reported that the transactions had all posted to his credit-card account.

Finally, to prove that I do read other sources of information, there's this from the New York Times:

Economists believe the cost of health benefits is ultimately shifted to employees through lower wages. When wages cannot be lowered, layoffs may result. Katherine Baicker of Harvard and Helen G. Levy of the University of Michigan have projected that play-or-pay might push 224,000 workers into that category.

This article compares Obama's health care penalty to what is going on Massachusetts, and how businesses there have borne the brunt of the state's filling in of a deficit though these health care penalties. As the Times notes-

But the penalty in Massachusetts is picayune compared with what some health experts believe Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, might impose as part of his plan to provide affordable coverage for the uninsured. Though Mr. Obama has not released details, economists believe he might require large and medium companies to contribute as much as 6 percent of their payrolls.
.....
That, Mr. Ratner said, would be catastrophic to a low-margin business like his, which has 90 employees, 29 of them full-time workers who are offered health benefits.

“To all of a sudden whack 6 to 7 percent of payroll costs, forget it,” he said. “If they do that, prices go up and employment goes down because nobody can absorb that.”

Yet, somehow, despite all but declaring ala Walter Mondale that you're taxes going up, he's somehow winning. I guess, despite what Dear Leader has said, words in fact don't matter.

Excellence

From today's Wall Street Journal:

Sen. Obama is promising $500 and $1,000 gift-wrapped packets of money in the form of refundable tax credits. These will shift the tax demographics to the tipping point where half of all voters will receive a cash windfall from Washington and an overwhelming majority will gain from tax hikes and more government spending.

In 2006, the latest year for which we have Census data, 220 million Americans were eligible to vote and 89 million -- 40% -- paid no income taxes. According to the Tax Policy Center (a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute), this will jump to 49% when Mr. Obama's cash credits remove 18 million more voters from the tax rolls. What's more, there are an additional 24 million taxpayers (11% of the electorate) who will pay a minimal amount of income taxes -- less than 5% of their income and less than $1,000 annually.

In all, three out of every five voters will pay little or nothing in income taxes under Mr. Obama's plans and gain when taxes rise on the 40% that already pays 95% of income tax revenues.

The plunder that the Democrats plan to extract from the "very rich" -- the 5% that earn more than $250,000 and who already pay 60% of the federal income tax bill -- will never stretch to cover the expansive programs Mr. Obama promises.

What next? A core group of Obama enthusiasts -- those educated professionals who applaud the "fairness" of their candidate's tax plans -- will soon see their $100,000-$150,000 incomes targeted. As entitlements expand and a self-interested majority votes, the higher tax brackets will kick in at lower levels down the ladder, all the way to households with a $75,000 income.

After my last posting, I began to think about this exact same question, but in regards to the social security tax that Obama is proposing- the one that won't start for 10 years, but has Obama already including revenues from that tax today. Anyway, 10 years is a long time. Let's say there's an Obama supporter that is 23 years old, recent college graduate and single. Now, in 10 years, it's not outside the realms of reason to think that that person will be 33, married and have at least one child. I also don't think it's outside of reason to think that the combined income of that family is at least $150,000, if not more.

Now, as the WSJ opinion notes above, what's to keep progressives who believe in taxing the wealth from simply decreasing the floor as those above the floor are repeatedly squeezed for more and more money, to the point the government can't squeeze no more? At that point, the government must either 1) reduce taxes and cut spending or 2) lower the floor to get at those people who make just less than the floor. So, that person who today is supporting Obama may very well also be supporting his own tax increase in 4, 6 or 10 years (certainly as to Social Security); the same tax increase that today, as a new employee, making under $40,000, he or she is able to rationalize because he or she isn't rich and won't be affected; that same person who may be a beneficiary of Obama's tax credits today, but will see those credits disappear at some point in the future. It is easy to vote for a tax increase on the rich when, selfishly, you are the recipient of a government handout; the result of someone else's hard work.

In other words, the phenomenom that Obama's tax policy is, is predicated on squeezing and squeezing every last dime from those who make more than $250K in order to pay for these tax credits to everyone else, as well as his large federal spending increases. And when 40% of the people don't pay taxes, and another 11%, according to the article, will see their tax burden reduced to near zero due to tax credits, how can we expect this last 5% of rich earners to be the main funders of at least 50% of Americans and expect them to continue to create jobs and invest in this country? Those 5% will have an incentive to reduce their earnings until they fall below this floor, which means reductions in employment, reduction in investments, and reductions in production.

Or, as the WSJ article notes:

The sequence is always the same. High-tax, big-spending policies force the economy to lose momentum. Then growth in government spending outstrips revenues. Fiscal and trade deficits soar. Public debt, excessive taxation and unemployment follow. The central bank tries to solve the problem by printing money. International competitiveness is lost and the currency depreciates. The system stagnates. And then a frightened electorate returns conservatives to power.

Obama's tax policy is nothing short of robbing from the rich to give to the poor, but ask for nothing in return; government creating a tax policy to punish people for being successful, then using that money to give away to the poor. We should not be using taxes to redistribute wealth and punish success; we should be lowering taxes to encourage people to succeed, and to not have the government step in and take away people's money and simply give it away to someone else. This not a recipe for success, this is a recipe for welfare. The Federal government is not a charity organization.

Exactly what we don't need

So, was talking to my wife's sister the other day. She's a junior at Wisconsin and she asked if I've come around and changed who I plan to vote for, and I said, Why would I? After the usual line about Palin this and Palin that, and Biden brings all this experience, blah blah blah, I then said, well, if it's experience, why aren't you voting for McCain? She then went in to a spiel about this and that, then said, and I'm gonna paraphrase, "Obama is like FDR, and that's what we need. When FDR became president, he wasn't very well known, and, sure some of his policies didn't work, but he was willing to try lots of things to get people to work." I had to stop her there- First, FDR's policies didn't work because they were unconstitutional, amongst other things (see below). Second, FDR was the Democratic nominee for Vice-President in 1920, a sitting governor of New York, former Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and, finally, the cousin of a guy named Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt got elected because he was able to convey to the American public that he could and would do something; well, he did do something all right. He turned a regular old recession into The Great Depression. Let's just say that if we need another FDR and Obama is him, I say No thanks. We cannot afford another FDR.

When FDR took office, unemployment was around 25%, but during the period until 1940, unemployment averaged above 17%, and didn't fall to under 10% until 1941, when it hit 9.9%- 6 years AFTER FDR took office. There is increasing economic evidence that BUT FOR FDR's New Deal policies, unemployment would have been much lower and the Great Depression would have ended well before U.S. entered World War II. As Walter Lippmann wrote: "the essence of the New Deal is the reduction of private corporate control by collective bargaining and labor legislation, on the one side, and by restrictive, competitive and deterrent government action on the other side.” In other words, the New Deal was nothing short of the federal government's taking over and managing the economy without a care as to the ability of businesses to conduct their affairs. As the authors of the UCLA study conclude: "Our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened." Or, as historian David Kennedy wrote in "Freedom from Fear," “Whatever it was [the New Deal] was not a recovery program, or at any rate not an effective one.”

Now, was FDR able to communicate with the common guy, sure; was his leadership on handling the lead up to World War II and other international programs effective, sure; but on the domestic front, his policies were an absolute disaster. When a panic hit the U.S in 1938, there was a spike in unemployment from 14.3% back up to 19%. As the UCLA paper posits- the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act, even though it was declared unconstitutional 2 years later, and FDR's keeping as close to that Act's goals as possible, still accounted for "60 percent of the weak recovery. Without the policies, they contend that the Depression would have ended in 1936 instead of the year when they believe the slump actually ended: 1943."

According to the UCLA analysts-

"President Roosevelt believed that excessive competition was responsible for the Depression by reducing prices and wages, and by extension reducing employment and demand for goods and services," said Cole, also a UCLA professor of economics. "So he came up with a recovery package that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to demand salaries about 25 percent above where they ought to have been, given market forces. The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies."

Using data collected in 1929 by the Conference Board and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Cole and Ohanian were able to establish average wages and prices across a range of industries just prior to the Depression. By adjusting for annual increases in productivity, they were able to use the 1929 benchmark to figure out what prices and wages would have been during every year of the Depression had Roosevelt's policies not gone into effect. They then compared those figures with actual prices and wages as reflected in the Conference Board data.

In the three years following the implementation of Roosevelt's policies, wages in 11 key industries averaged 25 percent higher than they otherwise would have done, the economists calculate. But unemployment was also 25 percent higher than it should have been, given gains in productivity.

Meanwhile, prices across 19 industries averaged 23 percent above where they should have been, given the state of the economy. With goods and services that much harder for consumers to afford, demand stalled and the gross national product floundered at 27 percent below where it otherwise might have been.

"High wages and high prices in an economic slump run contrary to everything we know about market forces in economic downturns," Ohanian said. "As we've seen in the past several years, salaries and prices fall when unemployment is high. By artificially inflating both, the New Deal policies short-circuited the market's self-correcting forces."

Instead, what we need is a program that, as President Kennedy once described in an address to the Economic Club of New York (December 14, 1962): "In short, to increase demand and lift the economy, the Federal Government's most useful role is not to rush into a program of excessive increases in public expenditures, but to expand the incentives and opportunities for private expenditures." Further, President Kennedy insisted there should be a tax cut on "personal as well as corporate income taxes, for those in the lower brackets, who are certain to spend their additional take-home pay, and for those in the middle and upper brackets, who can thereby be encouraged to undertake additional efforts and enabled to invest more capital."

Obama's tax plan only gets half of it right- he's proposing to decrease taxes for "95%" of taxpayers (let's say lower and middle classes), nevermind that 30% of those taxpayers don't pay taxes anyway, which means they are not getting a tax cut, but are getting a government handout, in order to pay for those handouts, and other new programs, he also proposes to increase taxes on upper middle and upper class, plus proposes a huge increase in government spending, and, on top of all that, an additional increase in social security taxes on those who make more than $250,000; the same people who would be subject to the increase in personal income tax now get hit twice. (Note: Obama proposes that this increase in Social Security tax start in 10 years, but simply by saying that, he can start including revenues from the future to pay for current program costs- once again, the future is compromised to pay for the present.) All to pay for Obama's redistribution of wealth program. As Robert Carroll from the Tax Foundation says, "When Mr. Obama's full package of upper-income tax increases goes into effect, the top marginal tax rate would be nearly 50 percent, a incentive-destroying level we haven't seen since 1986." In a separate article, Carroll also notes that under Obama's tax plan, marginal tax rates go up, even on workers making as little as $30,000. As the article puts it: "Most low- and moderate-income couples would see their effective marginal tax rates rise, in some cases, significantly. Indeed, some low- and moderate-income taxpayers will see their marginal rates rise to more than 50 percent." These rates rise because "the combination of the phase-out of the [Earned Income Tax Credit], the "Making Work Pay" credit, and the child and dependent care credit pushes the effective marginal tax rate to as high as 51.7 percent. That is, the taxpayer who benefits from all these provisions at a lower income discovers that he gets to keep less than one half of every additional dollar of earnings in the roughly $30,000-to-$43,000 range." As a worker makes more money, he is entitled to less and less of his previous benefits, even if he only makes $40,000 a year. By the way, the Tax Foundation even notes that Obama's tax vision is to redistribute wealth.

So, where are we? We know that many of FDR's domestic policies "may not have worked," as my sister-in-law puts it, and there are very good reasons why they didn't work, but those that did work, hurt this country more than helped it. And that Obama, by using our present economic crisis to his political advantage, hopes to more fully realize those failed domestic policies of 80 years ago. Hope and change he may be, but hope is never a strategy and his view of change is something we cannot afford.

Only if the little man doesn't make that much money

Ruben Navarette:

With just a few weeks until the election, Obama made a major boo-boo that could cost him the race. What are Democrats and their simpaticos in the media supposed to do? They can’t turn back time. So instead, they turn on Joe the Plumber.

Read more here.

Of course Obama doesn't apologize for saying that redistribution of wealth is a good thing- why should he, that's what's accepted and promoted in his elitist circles. Although, it's again worth noting that those same circles also give far less of their income to charity than other groups. . .that's how we end up with Sarah and Todd Palin giving 8 times as much money to charity than the Biden's, despite making half of what the Biden's make; government is their charity.

Btw, from Andrew Sullivan, we learn that Joe Biden is a tee-totaler. I'm guessing Biden isn't going into the bar with all the other plumbers after work to have their reward for a long day of work- an ice cold beer.

Finally, the media acknowledges their complicity is not researching or writing stories detrimental to Obama's ascendancy to his throne. An exchange between Mark Halperin and Howard Kurtz on CNN:

KURTZ: Mark Halperin, we learned this morning that Barack Obama in the month of September raised $150 million, the early estimates had been about $100 million. They always kind of leak a lower figure so they can exceed it.

If a Republican had not taken public financing and had raised all that money, and the Democrat was struggling financially, wouldn't we see a lot of stories about one candidate essentially trying to buy the election?

HALPERIN: We would. We'd also see a lot of stories about his going back on his word saying that he would accept the public money and would reach out to Senator McCain to try to work out a deal. So I think this is a case of a clear, unambiguous double standard, and any reporter who doesn't ask themselves, why is that, why would it be different if it's a Republican? I think is doing themselves and our profession and our democracy a disservice.

From Instapundit

I suspect most journalists don't care.

Indeed

If only I was as smart or as good a writer as Peter Wallison. . .from yesterday's Wall Street Journal:

by his own account, Mr. Obama wrote a letter to the Treasury Secretary, allegedly putting himself on record that subprime loans were dangerous and had to be dealt with. This is revealing; if true, it indicates Sen. Obama knew there was a problem with subprime lending -- but was unwilling to confront his own party by pressing for legislation to control it. As a demonstration of character and leadership capacity, it bears a strong resemblance to something else in Sen. Obama's past: voting present.

But, let's not forget, one-time and future Obama advisor Austan Goolsbee defended these sub-prime mortgages in this editorial from 2007.

You can read his editorial at the link, but I want to quote his concluding line: "For be it ever so humble, there really is no place like home, even if it does come with a balloon payment mortgage."

The ubiquitous balloon payment. Seeing that line reminded me of the old Simpsons episode where they bought a Canyonero. In that episode, Homer wants to buy a large SUV, despite not being able to afford it. So, the car dealer comes up with a ludicous payment schedule: down payment, monthly payment, weekly payment, and the crippling balloon payment, or CBP. As Homer noted though, "But that's not for a while." What does this have to do with anything? The Simpsons were making fun of those people who go out and buy something despite being unable to afford them, instead, relying on these outlandish payment schedules, culminating in a CBP. Now, Austan Goolsbee defends these subprime mortgages as getting people who wouldn't ordinarily be able to afford a house, but for Homer-like payment schedules, also culminating in a CBP. At some point, it was accepted that owning a home was a dream, a life-time of saving; instead, it became something available to those who shouldn't own a home, for whatever reason. I mean, there's a reason why there is a rental market.

So, Obama and Biden can blame deregulation all they want (even though Biden voted for Gramm-Leach-Bliley), but simply because you keep repeating it does not make it true.

By the way, I would be remiss if I didn't note that a certain organization that's been in the news recently waged a very vocal (and at times intimidating) campaign to loosen credit requirements for the secondary housing market to allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac purchase and repackage these loans. For a history, you can read this Stanley Kurtz article. As he noted-

"Unless Fannie and Freddie were willing to relax their credit standards as well, local banks would never make home loans to customers with bad credit histories or with too little money for a downpayment. ... ACORN had come to Congress not only to protect the [Community Reinvestment Act] from GOP reforms but also to expand the reach of quota-based lending to Fannie, Freddie and beyond. By steamrolling the GOP that March [1995], it had crushed the last potential barrier to 'change.'"

Now, you could say that it's unfair to quote from a noted conservative writer. But from this 1992 NY Times article, it's clear that this organization had set its next target:

Yet at present, the three Philadelphia banks seem responsive. They have lobbied with Acorn in Washington to find ways to make it easier to package these mortgages and sell them in the secondary market. This would reduce the banks' risk and free up more money to lend.
The biggest buyer of mortgages is the Federal National Mortgage Association, known as Fannie Mae, which resells them to investors. But Fannie Mae has been reluctant to buy such unconventional mortgages. Acorn hopes that large commitments like that of Nationsbank will help bring pressure on Fannie Mae.

[Courtesy of No Quarter]

It's perhaps not at all surprising to know that through ACORN's intimidation tactics at silencing Republican attempts to reform the CRA, and Democrats unwillingness to step up against ACORN (see Obama, Barack; Frank, Barney), the very same people ACORN purports to represent are the very same people bearing the brunt of mortgage failures. And you and I get to bail them out.

Dear Leader for 8th graders

Imagine if this was John McCain.....

Apparently a brand new literature book for 8th graders in Wisconsin comes with a 15 page section on Obama. It's a repeat of his 2004 Democratic convention speech. How convenient to have it come out just in time for the election. Once again, coincidence rears its ugly head. I mean, what other purpose would someone publish in its entirety, with pictures, Obama's speech than to get 8th graders ready for an Obama presidency. This is a really bold foray into indoctrination. You wonder why people are worried about Obama becoming president; children are now being taught the wonders and promise of Dear Leader Obama. I mean, he hasn't even been elected, and a textbook already contains 18 pages on Obama; considering the lead time in preparing and printing a text book, you think the person responsible for the book expects Obama to lose?

It's even worse than thought

CNN reports that 5,000 voter registration forms gathered by ACORN in Lake County, Indiana are all under suspicion as the first 2,100 all turn out to be fake.



Transcript available here.

The Indiana Secretary of State is asking for an investigation of this massive attempt at voter fraud and flat out voter registration fraud.

Also, once again, ACORN blames "lazy" employees and election officials, in this case, they blame election officials for not prosecuting previous voter registration fraud so that ACORN "could tell our employees that no, this isn't just a firing offense, but this is an offense that could lead you to jail. Then we could then put that in the ready room where we train people." I can imagine the winking nods going on in ACORN training when going over the legality of voter registration fraud. Perhaps ACORN should be more focused on who it hires, I mean, we already know they've hired felons in Wisconsin, who's to say they haven't done that in other states.

Finally, I will simply point out that Lake County was the home of suspected shenanigans during the Democratic Primary, with the Mayor of Hammond, Indiana, a Hillary supporter, calling out the Mayor of Gary, an Obama supporter, on it.

On the topic of these angry republicans, Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit notes:

So we've had nearly 8 years of lefty assassination fantasies about George W. Bush, and Bill Ayers' bombing campaign is explained away as a consequence of him having just felt so strongly about social justice, but a few people yell things at McCain rallies and suddenly it's a sign that anger is out of control in American politics?

And Michael Barone:

Obama supporters who found the campuses congenial and Obama himself, who has chosen to live all his adult life in university communities, seem to find it entirely natural to suppress speech that they don't like and seem utterly oblivious to claims that this violates the letter and spirit of the First Amendment. In this campaign, we have seen the coming of the Obama thugocracy, suppressing free speech, and we may see its flourishing in the four or eight years ahead.

It looks to me that as much as Republican's are being portrayed by the media, color me shocked (the LA Times almost wistfully pats Republican bloggers on the head telling us, "Bless your hearts, the media is in on it and there's nothing you can do"), all of sudden as angry, it's the Democrats and Obama supporters who are doing the most damage and have shown their true colors: to get their candidate elected, no matter the cost. If Obama gets elected, I fully expect an emboldened left to go out "and get" those who disagree with them, and it won't take 40 pieces of silver to do it.