I am SO glad I voted for Mr. Obama!
He is MY hero! Yeaaaa!

Taxpayers should be more than a little scared

Maybe Jay Leno should host Meet the Press. Bowling and canine questions aside, Leno pressed President Barack Obama hard on the House’s vote to strip AIG employees of their retention bonuses via the tax code:

Well, here’s something that kind of scared me. Today they passed this thing that says we’re going to tax 90 percent of these bonuses. And the part that scares me is, I mean, you’re a good guy — if the government decides they don’t like a guy, all of a sudden, hey, we’re going to tax you and then, boom, and it passes. I mean, that seems a little scary as a taxpayer.

And taxpayers should be scared by this Administration. Especially considering Obama’s answer:

I think that the best way to handle this is to make sure that you’ve closed the door before the horse gets out of the barn. … The change I’d like to see in terms of tax policy is that we have a system, going back to where we were back in the 1990s, where you and I who are doing pretty well pay a little bit more to pay for health care, to pay for energy, to make sure that kids can go to college who aren’t as fortunate as our — as my kids might be. Those are the kinds of measured steps that we can take.

Translation: the only problem Obama has with Congress targeting specific groups for astronomical tax hikes is that they didn’t do it early enough! And there is nothing “measured” about the steps Obama wants the federal government to take. The Obama Administration budget: 1) increases government spending by $1 trillion over the next decade; 2) permanently expands the federal government by nearly 3 percent of gross domestic product; 3) raises taxes for 3.2 million taxpayers by an average of $300,000 over the next decade; 4) raises taxes on all Americans by $1.4 trillion over the next decade; 5) leaves permanent deficits averaging $600 billion even after the economy recovers; and 6) doubles the publicly held national debt to over $15 trillion.

When pressed earlier in the day at a rally in Los Angeles about whether the federal government’s borrow and spend policies might “create here a chance that we may follow in the footsteps of Iceland and one day just simply be broke” all Obama could do was attack the previous administration: “[W]hen I hear some folks from the other party in Congress start howling about the deficits, I’m starting to think, well, where have you been? What have you been doing?”

The Bush Administration and the Tom DeLay Congress will have to speak for themselves, but true conservatives fought against the explosion of Washington spending every step of the way. The Heritage Foundation was opposed to the idea that more federal spending and control were good for education. We opposed the idea that more federal spending and control were necessary for transportation. And we so opposed the idea the Medicare ought to be expanded to include prescription drugs that DeLay banned Heritage research from his office.

But enough about the past. Looking ahead to the future, both the Democrat controlled Senate Budget Committee and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office offered some stark reality to contrast with Obama’s Hollywood budget pitch. Senate Democrats say that Obama’s budget will push federal deficits “as much as $1.6 trillion higher” than the Obama Administration claims. The CBO places the number at $1 trillion. The Obama Administration is not going to cut any of its spending priorities. So yes Jay, you should be scared … you and every other taxpayer should be very, very scared.

Bonus outrage

Speaking to a crowd of 1,500 supporters in Costa Mesa, California, about the bonuses given to employees of 80% taxpayer owned AIG, President Barack Obama said: “I know a lot of you are outraged about this. I’m outraged, too.” We’ll leave for others to decide the level of Obama’s outrage, especially considering reports this morning that the Obama Administration found out about the bonuses on February 28, not March 10, as they originally claimed. But what we would like to see some genuine outrage over are the millions of taxpayer dollars going to executives at the taxpayer owned companies Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

Fannie and Freddie reported combined losses of about $108 billion last year. But the damage they caused the entire economy goes far beyond the losses on their balance sheets. Fannie and Freddie are at the core of the current economic meltdown. Although they were only recently fully taken over by the government; for much of their existence Fannie and Freddie were quasi-governmental agencies that made no actual home loans. Instead they buy loans from banks, and then bundle and repackage them as securities. For years Fannie and Freddie leveraged their government-sponsored advantages — including exemptions from state and federal taxes, lower capital requirements, and the ability to borrow at rates well below those paid by private companies — to create a co-monopoly in the housing finance sector.

Contrary to what the left claims, Fannie and Freddie were integral to the creation and expansion of the subprime loan industry. With Fannie and Freddie as their largest customer, subprime king Countrywide Financial grew from a tiny institution to the largest mortgage lender in the country. Fannie and Freddie’s subprime business was not isolated to Countrywide. Fannie and Freddie both bought subprime securities since 1995, and by 2004 they were purchasing $175 billion worth of such securities a year, or 44% of the entire market. From 2003 through 2006 Fannie and Freddie bought more than a half trillion dollars in subprime securities. That is more than any other purchaser in the entire world.

In 1991, following the Savings and Loan disaster, Heritage pushed for the full privatization of Fannie and Freddie, predicting that “maintaining secondary mortgage firms in a twilight zone between the public and private sectors … may be a recipe for an eventual taxpayer bailout.” We just didn’t realize how huge that bailout would be.

Back in California, Obama told his audience: “We’re going to do everything we can to fix it. So for everybody in Washington who’s busy scrambling, trying to figure out how to blame somebody else, just go ahead and talk to me, because it’s my job to make sure that we fix these messes, even if I don’t make them.” President Obama did not create the Fannie and Freddie disaster, but he is not fixing it either. Instead of learning from the disastrous consequences of Fannie and Freddie’s market distorting housing interventions, the Obama Administration is doubling down by making Fannie and Freddie a center piece of their housing plan. Now that is something to be outraged over.

Quick Hits:

* For the first time in Gallup’s 25-year history of asking Americans about the trade-off between environmental protection and economic growth, a majority of Americans say economic growth should be given the priority.
* Births to unwed mothers reached an all-time high of about 40 percent last year, with more than three-quarters of these women were 20 or older.
* Some of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners could be released into the United States while others could be put on trial in the American court system, Attorney General Eric Holder said on Wednesday.
* Holder also said the Justice Department has no plans to prosecute pot dispensaries that are operating under state laws in California and a dozen other states.
* President Obama said yesterday it’s important for longtime illegal immigrants to have a path to citizenship so they can join unions.

Pelosi says it is unamerican to enforce immigration law

AIG bonuses are .09% of the 173 BILLION Congress gave to AIG

Shep tells it like it is - the AIG bonus debacle

AIG blowing up in Obama's face

Obama is shifting the spotlight to the AIG executive bonuses, but his own hand-picked Treasury Secretary is responsible for far more of the AIG mess than Obama cares to acknowledge.

Tim Geithner is one of the architects of the fraud-ridden AIG black hole and other bailouts. He's been wrong for years and still is wrong, and so have all those around him who participated in this travesty.

Washington still has announced no definitive procedures to separate banks from their toxic assets, even though the FDIC procedures are readily available for this purpose and could be reasonably fair in zeroing out the equity and subordinate debtholders. The only Washington plan has been to bail out those crony banks and financial firms that have made loans to banks. These creditors deserve their losses. They brought them on to themselves by making such poor investments and not evaluating the risk of their counterparties.

The entire epsiode is the largest single fraud against taxpayers in history. Multi-billions are being and have been paid to AIG's creditors (counterparties), including hedge funds and banks. The millions paid as bonus money to executives need not have been paid anymore than the amounts paid to creditors because the company has been de facto bankrupt for months and would have been de jure bankrupt, had it not been for Geithner's folly, which is also the FED's and Washington's folly.