Third Digit Publishing

Obama Driving the Fiscal Getaway Car

2009-08-08T13:35:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama stood at a podium, doing his best Burgermeister Meisterburger impression and declared that “I don't want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way.” If he really means this, then Obama is going to have turn off the teleprompter, stop pre-empting the prime time lineup, and somehow get out of way himself. While he screams about the deficit that he was left with, he seems to omit the part about how he was an active participant in creating the debt that he inherited from George Bush.

A simple online trip to a site called “Project Vote Smart” will allow anyone to audit Obama’s voting record during his time in the Senate. It is true that he pretty much stopped voting in 2008 (he wouldn’t say “yay” or “nay” to any bill that was more controversial than one suggesting people should be allowed to biologically convert oxygen to carbon dioxide, or something about the prevention of kicking puppies), but he did manage to vote for well over a trillion dollars in spending that helped inflated the debt he seems to resent so much.

In an audit of the major bills he voted on, Barack voted “Yes” to 1.2 Trillion dollars in spending during his fly-by-night senatorial career. That number does not include the 700 billion in TARP funds he agreed to, or the failed legislative fiscal adventure to keep the auto companies out of bankruptcy. As we all know, GM and Chrysler went bankrupt anyway, and nobody really knows how all the TARP money was spent. Treasury Special Inspector General Neil Barofsky testified to the Oversight and Government Reform Committee that “taxpayers are not being told what most of the TARP recipients are doing with their money, have still not been told how much their substantial investments are worth, and will not be told the full details of how their money is being invested.” In fact, Tim Geithner actually rejected recommendations that those accepting TARP money, must disclose how they used the funds. So in truth, Barack probably doesn’t even know where the money went.

Military spending is not included in the audit of his votes. The word “provide” is only used in two contexts in the Constitution. The first is to “Provide for the common defense.” The other is to provide a constitutional successor if, for some reason, the President is not able to perform his duties. So when Obama cuts the F-22 program in favor of handing out grants for battery technology, he is actually acting way outside the constitution. (Anyone who wants to try to the “promote the general welfare” argument should be aware that the founders choose the words deliberately, and a “common defense” is the only thing they need to “provide” to the people.)

Barack screams about the “mess” he was left with, but fails to mention that he remains an unindicted co-conspirator to the freewheeling spending of the Bush era. In short, Obama was driving the getaway car as Bush was raiding the treasury. Even worse, his current fiscal crime spree has him spending more than all Presidents put together, from Washing all the way up to and including “W”. This mess is as much Obama’s as it is Bush’s, he just wants to make it worse without it all somehow being his fault.

John Conyers Being the Poster Boy for Illiteracy

2009-08-05T13:33:00.000-07:00

When a big chunk of the district you represent has an illiteracy rate that is near the 47% line, maybe being the advocate for not reading is not the direction you want to go. If he won’t read a bill that will dramatically change the lives of everyone in the United States, why should a Detroit teenager in Conyers district do the reading that was assigned to them during history class? To be like John all the teen needs to do is declare that his homework is too hard, and just make some guesses when it comes time to take the test. Of course this would result in answers like the Magna Carta was signed by P-Diddy at the conclusion of the East Coast/West Coast hip hop wars. The problem here is that when they don’t read, they will probably be condemned to a life of not being all they can be. When he won’t read, bad legislation that hurts us all gets passed. If the Health Care bill gets through an inevitably blows up in the face of the American people I am sure will try to absolve himself with the words “I didn’t know.”

Conyers missed an opportunity in this situation to both set an example and engage in little community outreach. With reading this particular bill becoming such a big issue, he could have joined with a literacy advocacy group such as RIF (Reading Is Fundamental), and gotten people or corporate entities to sponsor his reading of the Health Care bill. He could have even read selections from the bill on his wife’s local television show. All the money that could have been raised from this stunt could have gone to non-profits that help get kids excited about reading. He didn’t do this. Instead, he stubbornly insisted he doesn’t need to be educated about topics that he has a hand in imposing on the nation.

For whatever reason John Conyers doesn’t think reading bills is important. Maybe he sees this as some sort of bizarre solidarity with the chunk of his district who can’t even read this article. Maybe his next trick should be to pour out a forty-ounce on the streets of DC to honor his peeps that can’t get through “See Spot Run.”

The Price of Ignorance

2009-08-05T12:46:00.000-07:00

Most people have an informational void on the extremely big topic of our nation’s fiscal crisis. The problem with a void is that it is incompatible with nature. Nature hates a lot of stuff. It seemed to have shown a definite dislike toward dinosaurs and the city of Atlantis. It would also appear that she really had it in for the Titanic. What nature really hates though is a void. Where one of these exists, nature will do its best to fill it with something. In the case of knowledge, when there is a vacuum, it seems that the empty space is often filled with manure.

Over the past few months we have heard overpaid commentators, politicians, and just about anybody else who could elbow their way in front of a camera, throw as many ,lies, misinformation, disinformation, myths, and foolishness as they can into the void. We have seen legislators target private citizens and play with the unconstitutional idea of crafting tax laws to punish specific, law abiding people. We have watched as the government use the auspices of the crisis to take over banks, and fire the CEO of one of the nation’s biggest companies. Whether they are spending trillions in “bailouts” or micromanaging the salaries of executives, none of it has had an actual impact on stopping the current fiscal crisis. In fact, there are many, including the non-partisan (though dominated by Democrats) Congressional Budget Office who have said that all of these moves will continue to make things worse. So why do it? Why not just cut taxes (a strategy that works every time it is tried), let the business community regain its strength, and watch the recession die a natural death? The cynic would say because the current government needs the people in a perpetual crisis mentality to achieve their legislative goals. Of course cynics aren’t always wrong.

Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel let this particular cat out of the bag. Mr. Emanuel said, soon after the election of his boss, “Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste. ... There are opportunities to do big things.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also echoed these sentiments when she told the European Parliament to “Never waste a good crisis … Don’t waste it when it can have a very positive impact on climate change and energy security.” The translation of these statements for those of you who are not fluent in the strange language of Washington DC is that by keeping the people in a crisis mentality, they will agree to just about anything. It doesn’t matter if the change has anything to do with the crisis or not. In this case, as long as the people can be made to believe moves by the government will help end the recession and free up credit, they will be on board with sweeping legislation. Not only are there factions counting on the ignorance of the people, but they are actually doing their best to encourage it. Knowledge is the antidote to any good crisis. In short, if you understand the crisis, the language, the terms, the history, and the simple truths behind what we are now commonly living through, nobody will be able to hand you a smallpox infected blanket while convincing you that they are just trying to help you stay warm during a hard winter.

If you listen to certain news networks, they make it seem like the current recession is either on par with the Great Depression of the thirties, or they behave like this is the first time in human history this sort of thing has happened. Neither of this is true. The nation is nowhere near repeating the hardships the depression of the thirties inflicted upon the populace, and in the long history of human civilization recessions have come and gone scores of times. Not only did every great civilization go through cycles of recession, what we are experiencing is not even unusual for our contemporary history. The current issues look much more like the Carter era malaise then they do a complete economic meltdown. What is unusual is the “Never allow a crisis to go to waste” mentality that the folks who run our government have already exhibited. This is inherently un-American. Instead of trying to fix the problem, they are taking advantage of the knowledge gap among the people, and manipulating a populace who is stressed out enough to try anything presented to them as a solution. Give it another six months and they can probably have a reasonable shot at getting people to trade the family cow for a bag of magic beans.

Lenin used a crisis and the desperation of a starving populace to take action against those pesky churches he loathed so much. While in the midst of a famine, the Communist grand poobah wrote the following statement; “It is precisely now and only now when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy.” He had no interest in figuring out a way to solve the hunger problems, because he knew that someone who was starving could be easily convinced to take actions against their own place of worship, if, in the absence of real facts, a connection could be made between sacking the church and the greater availability of ham and cheese sandwiches. Had they known that Lenin was actually fanning the flames of famine, perhaps they would have left their churches alone and just ate Lenin. Of course comrade Lenin’s exploitation of a crisis pales in comparison to that Adolph Hitler. After being appointed Chancellor in 1933, he became to the manipulation of an economic crisis what Billy Mays was to people living under the oppression of household stains.

During his pre Fuehrer years, when he was still just a lowly Chancellor who had to get his agenda passed by a parliament, Hitler decided that the national economic crisis that was plaguing the German people should not be allowed to go to waste, not when he could accomplish big things. So he and his cabinet crafted a piece of legislation called the “Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Nation”, or more commonly referred to as Enabling Act. What this Act did was give Hitler and his cabinet the power to make law without being bogged down with debate and votes in the Parliament. In effect, it was a law that made him the Supreme leader. For us this would be the equivalent of the President cutting Congress and the Supreme Court out of the equation, and the word from the Oval Office becoming the immediate, and unchallengeable law of the land.

In advance of parliamentary debate on this, he used a piece of national security legislation, the “Reichstag Fire Decree” (which was not ideologically that different from Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security memo that identified gun rights advocates, pro-life advocates, and returning war veterans as potential domestic terrorists) to arrest his political enemies. Once his strongest adversaries were now the unwilling guests of the German penal system, the rest fell into line pretty quickly. Many, while opposing the measure, didn’t want to be seen as ideological holdovers from a previous, unpopular administration. They went along with it despite their reservations.

To get the 2/3rds majority he needed to pass the legislation, Hitler negotiated with the Centre Party’s chairman, Ludwig Kaas, for his party’s support of the measure. Kaas agreed to deliver the votes from his party members, as long as Hitler agreed to put certain constitutional guarantees in writing. Hitler happily said yes to this request. While over a nice mug of dark beer and schnitzel, Hitler may have even did a “pinky swear” to the requested guarantees, they were never put into writing and on the day of the vote, all Kaas had was Htiler’s word. Because of the political pressure brought on by the national economic conditions of the day, Kaas voted for the Enabling Act anyway, despite not having anything in writing from Hitler that promised he wouldn’t use his absolute power to become a monster and kill millions of innocent people.

The few opponents who were left tried to put up a procedural roadblock in parliament to prevent the vote from going forward, but the parliamentary President, Hermann Göring, simply changed the rules to eliminate any potential delays to the vote. Finally, amid a room full of SA Brown Shirts (these pre-Gestapo thugs were there merely as spectators and wouldn’t have thought of intimidating potential dissenters) and politicians who were afraid of the political ramifications of voting against a bill that was sold to the German people as the only way to put an end to their fiscal woes, Chancellor Hitler became the Fuehrer. The Nazi era, and all the horror that came with it, was not ushered in with the sound and fury of Blitzkrieg, but rather with the pttffffffff of legitimate politics.

So are we are on the verge of a gaggle of dishonest people using the current financial crisis to cement their power? Its hard to say, ever since the Federal Trade Commission took Ms. Cleo’s crystal ball away, I don’t have any guides into a future that goes beyond the time it takes for Domino’s pizza to deliver my dinner. What is certain is that this will not even be a possible future if the people who are generally exploited for political gain during a crisis have enough information to know when the wool is being pulled over their eyes.

Magic Beans and New Cars

2009-08-03T09:56:00.000-07:00

By now most of us are aware of the Cash for Clunkers program that bubbled up through sewage pipes of government and sat like a gator waiting in the toilet for an unsuspecting and extremely vulnerable victim. After less than week, the program went bankrupt. This is par for the course for a bunch of politicians who think using a chubby intern as a cigar snipper is well within the bounds of OSHA regulations. The problem is that the rampaging pack of societal Dr. Mengeles that is the Democrat party seems to be are considering throwing a few more billion tax payer dollars into this program. While nobody brings up the fact that there is nothing in the constitution that gives the government the power to subsidize the purchase an automobile, there are problems with the program that go beyond this. Ultimately Cash for Clunkers is not even helpful to a big chunk of the people who are supposedly benefitting from it.

This is a program that promises to give people $4500 if they trade in their older cars in favor of a newer, more ecologically friendly car. In short, people can trade in that 2000 Impala with the V-6 engine and the “No Fat Chicks” bumper sticker in order to buy a brand new Chevy Aveo or silly little Toyota Prius. On the surface this looks like a good deal but in reality this is the worst trade off since the time that a detention hall regular named Jack traded the family cow for a handful of beans. In the case of the “Cash for Clunkers” program, there is no giant vine leading to a magic world where a golden egg laying goose is waiting to solve all your financial problems, but a giant may step on you.

Anybody who falls for this “cash for clunkers” scam may as well write a letter to the Federal Penitentiary that Bernie Madoff calls home and ask him to handle their retirement nest egg. Let’s start with the fact that most of the cars that fall into the governments “clunker” category are probably paid off. The Obama administration is asking people to trade a life without car payments for a measly $4500. Seeing as one of the stated goals of this program is to help sell one million “new” cars, chances are that the strings attached to the money will prevent people from trading that 2000 Impala for a used 2003 Ford Explorer, or 1998 Mustang. The truth of the matter is that you will be “encouraged” to buy one of those cars that more closely resembles a roller skates with an engine. That sort of vehicle may get a thumbs up from the Sierra Club, but crash test information continually proves that they make you and your family less safe on the highways. Once your $4500 has covered the down payment, you will still be on the hook for at least another $17,000. The buyer is now deeper in debt for the privilege of driving a new car that makes them less safe and that they probably won’t like. Add to that the fact that the insurance payments on a new, financed car is much higher than that of a paid off, older vehicle that was traded in, and the $4500 suddenly looks really small compared to the increase in your monthly bills.

There are lots of dumb people who will fall for this scam. It was probably unethical for the government to tempt folks into making a financial move they probably won’t be able to afford in the long run. If this is what Washington is going to call sound fiscal policy, perhaps everyone in America would be better off if they just stuffed all their extra cash in a mattress until the Obama Administration goes away.