Government Incompetence

What’s This? Praise for Malaise?

American Thinker | Ken Blackwell | July 14, 2009

Recently, some misguided Republicans caucused and advised us all to “get over our nostalgia for Ronald Reagan.” Is that what they think it is? With such confusion all around, it’s no wonder that some liberals are poised to bring back Jimmy Carter’s “malaise.”

No kidding. This past weekend, the Washington Post’s Carlos Lozada favored us with a long book review in the paper’s Outlook section. Lozada finds much to praise in Prof. Kevin Mattson’s new book, What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President? It’s a lengthy study of President Jimmy Carter’s famous-or infamous-speech of July 15, 1979. That’s the address to the nation that came to be characterized as “the Malaise Speech” [Read more…]

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Stop The Madness That’s Killing Jobs

Investor’s Business Daily | July 2, 2009

Stimulus: More grim news — 467,000 jobs lost in June, with unemployment hitting a 26-year high of 9.5%. Some people are rightly starting to wonder: Where’s that stimulus we were promised?

The stock market’s reaction on Thursday said it all — with the major indexes plunging 2.4% to 2.9% on the news of a continued job hemorrhage. Despite some economic green shoots here and there, no one’s sure when jobs will start growing again. [Read more…]

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The Audacity of Conceit

American Thinker | Victor Volsky | July 10, 2009

Intelligent idiots, smart fools, multi-degreed morons – lots of monikers could describe a category of individuals dismayingly prominent in the ruling elites of the West. They are the people so divorced from reality, so engrossed in bookish pursuits that – for all their undoubted intellectual accomplishments and often as a direct consequence thereof – they invariably end up with egg on their faces whenever they try to engage in practical activities. [Read more…]

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California’s Nightmare Will Kill Obamanomics

Bloomberg | Kevin Hassett | July 6, 2009

With California mired in a budget crisis, largely the result of a political impasse that makes spending cuts and tax increases impossible, Controller John Chiang said the state planned to issue $3.3 billion in IOU’s in July alone. Instead of cash, those who do business with California will get slips of paper.

The California morass has Democrats in Washington trembling. The reason is simple. If Obama’s health-care plan passes, then we may well end up paying for it with federal slips of paper worth less than California’s. Obama has bet everything on passing health care this year. The publicity surrounding the California debt fiasco almost assures his resounding defeat. [Read more…]

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A Plan to Hurt You

FrontPageMag | Floyd and Mary Beth Brown | June 26, 2009

Imagine waiting for a year to have cancer surgery while the malignancy spreads – and then be told, “Sorry. You waited too long. Go home and die.” It happens in Britain and Canada because they have socialized medicine.

Now imagine a federal bureaucrat possessing the power to choose your doctor, tell doctors what treatments they can prescribe and which tests they can run. They decide at what age you are no longer eligible to undergo dialysis or receive an organ transplant or a CAT scan, even treatments as simple as antibiotics. [Read more…]

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Obama Tells American Businesses to Drop Dead

Bloomberg.com | Kevin Hassett | June 8, 2009

I’ve finally figured out the Obama economic strategy. President Barack Obama and his team have been having so much fun wielding dictatorial power while rescuing “failed” firms, that they have developed a scheme to gain the same power over every business. The plan is to enact policies that are so anticompetitive that every firm needs a bailout.

Once that happens, their new pay czar Kenneth Feinberg can set the wage for everybody and Rahm Emanuel can stack the boards of all of our companies with his political cronies. [Read more…]

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Revisiting Hayek

American Thinker | Andrew Foy & Brenton Stransky | May 25, 2009

To many who have watched the transition from socialism to fascism at close quarters the connection between the two systems has become increasingly obvious, but in the (Western) democracies the majority of people still believe that socialism and freedom can be combined. They do not realize that democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but that to strive for it produces something utterly different – the very destruction of freedom itself. As has been aptly said: ‘What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.’ – F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom [Read more…]

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It’s A Good Time To Work For Uncle Sam

CBS News | Declan McCullagh | May 12, 2009

President Obama’s call last year for “shared sacrifice” doesn’t extend to federal employees, at least based on the details of his administration’s 2010 budget released this week.

At a time when the official unemployment rate is nearing double digits, and 6.35 million people are receiving unemployment benefits, the U.S. government is on a hiring binge. [Read more…]

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