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Michael Barone thinks Rick Santelli’s rant was the “founding document” of the tea party movement.
… How to explain something contrary to the New Deal historians’ teaching that economic distress increases support for big government? Clues can be obtained, I think, by examining what amounts to the founding document of the Tea Party movement, Rick Santelli’s “rant” on the CME trading floor in Chicago, telecast live by CNBC on Feb. 19, 2009.
That was less than one month into the Obama administration. The stimulus package had been jammed through Congress almost entirely by Democratic votes six days before, but the Democrats’ health care and cap-and-trade bills were barely into gestation. Chrysler and General Motors had received temporary bailouts, but their bankruptcies were months in the future.
“The government is promoting bad behavior,” Santelli began. The object of his scorn was the Obama administration’s Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan providing aid to homeowners delinquent on their mortgages.
“This is America!” Santelli declared. “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?”
Granted, the words are not as elegant as those of Thomas Jefferson or John Adams. But the thought is clear. Santelli was arguing that the people who, in Bill Clinton’s felicitous phrase, “work hard and play by the rules” shouldn’t have to subsidize those who took on debts that they couldn’t repay.
This was both an economic and a moral argument. Economic, because subsidies to the improvident are an unproductive investment. We know now that very many of the beneficiaries of the administration’s mortgage modification programs ended up in foreclosure anyway. Subsidies just prolonged the agony. …
Peter Schiff thinks that the second dip will be worse.
…Increased spending, financed by unprecedented borrowing, will prove to be just as temporary as a US census job (unless, in the name of stimulus, Obama decides to make “people counting” a permanent function of the US government.). When the bills come due, the next leg down will be even more severe than the last.
The swelling ranks of the government payroll, and the shrinking number of private taxpayers footing the bill, will guarantee larger deficits and a weaker economy for years to come. In addition, the artificial spending has prevented a much-needed restructuring from taking place, leaving our economy far less efficient than before the crisis began. …
One reason that we have thus far been spared the full wrath of Washington’s poor decisions is that we are still benefiting from problems abroad, particularly in the eurozone. As sovereign debt issues have temporarily caused a flight to the dollar, our economy has benefited from lower interest rates and restrained consumer prices. …
…Once the euro finally stabilizes against the dollar, I expect commodity prices to resume their rise, especially oil. Normally, the uncertainty created by the disastrous oil spill in the gulf, and the resulting moratorium on deep-water drilling, would have sent crude oil prices skyrocketing. However, fears of a global slowdown, euro weakness, and general risk aversion have held prices in check. As Asia continues its growth and Europe regains its footing, I expect a delayed surge in oil prices, which will put yet another obstacle on the road to US recovery. …
Michael Barone notes in one year the Social Security Trust Fund has gone from $31 billion surplus to just $2 billion. Way to go, Barack. Nice job, Nancy.
In Forbes, David Malpass shows some of the ways the government helps destroy businesses.
…The threat to profit is explicit in Washington’s evolving “economic justice” platform. Small businesses already face a high top marginal tax rate, horrendous tax complexity and layers of new taxes, yet the revenue-extraction process is intensifying. The jump in tax rates planned for the end of the year, the expansion of the Medicare tax and the threat of a value-added tax are just the transparent side of the tax shakedown. Under the surface, intense job-killing fights are being waged over sales taxes (New York is sending auditors statewide to demand more tribute), the taxation of capital gains and dividends (rates will jump), private equity (the government is redefining long-term capital gains into ordinary income) and foreign profits. Hillary Clinton upped the ante with her May 27 speech broadly linking underemployment with undertaxation: “The rich are not paying their fair share in any nation that is facing the kind of employment issues [we face].” …
…While Washington pays lip service to the challenges facing small businesses, it repeatedly chooses its own expansion over results. In effect, government has become a huge silent partner in all businesses, often taking a majority of the profits and forcing many unprofitable business decisions without the risk that it will be fired.
Karl Rove comments on the second term of Jimmy Carter.
…This pattern of being merely present has been apparent almost since the first days of the Obama presidency. He may unveil his mighty teleprompter to help pass what Congress has drafted, but this White House seems strangely disconnected from crafting legislation.
For example, last year’s stimulus was largely drafted by House Appropriations Chairman David Obey of Wisconsin, one of Congress’s most liberal members. As a result, what passed was a wasteful spending bill rather than an economic growth package.
And faced with a growing mountain of debt, Mr. Obama passed the issue off to an ineffectual commission whose report is due after the election. After growing the size of the federal government by a quarter in just over a year, he now says he’d like agencies to try to find 5% cuts in their budgets. …
The NRO staff posted Charles Krauthammer’s comments.
On President Obama’s remarks on the passage of U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iran:
“…This is an unmistakable message about the fecklessness of the U.S. and the international community (which in and of itself is a fiction anyway). The sanctions are totally watered down by Russia and China to be almost meaningless. To achieve even this, it took 16 months of administration labor . . . producing a mouse.
And last, the three sanctions resolutions that the Bush administration [passed] — without apology and without concessions — were approved unanimously. And this one received 12 of the 15, with opposition by allies Turkey and Brazil and abstention from Lebanon.
So if anything, it is a clear demonstration of a collapse of the international effort — to the extent that it ever existed — under this administration’s policy, as Senator Kyl said, of appeasement and apology. And the president of Iran is exactly right that this is a flea, it’s meaningless. And everybody in the administration, I think, knows that. …”
Jennifer Rubin posts on Mid-East policy.
The inanity of Obama’s Middle East diplomacy was on full display yesterday. Obama has a knack for getting both the macro and the micro wrong.
On the macro, we now are pressuring Israel to relax the Gaza blockade, thereby giving up a grand-slam home run to the team from Hamas — the ones responsible for the Gaza war and the oppression of the Palestinians under its thumb. This, of course, also redounds to the benefit of their state sponsors, the mullahs, who will take a break from whooping it up over the pathetic UN sanctions in order to gloat about this triumph.
Moreover, this also undercuts Obama’s Fatah clients, whom he has worked so strenuously to bolster and shield from blame for their own rejectionism and incitement. As Jonathan pointed out, Obama now has roped Mahmoud Abbas into cheerleading for a Gaza/Hamas diplomatic coup (i.e., relaxation of the blockade) despite the obvious ill effects it will have on Abbas’s standing. As a former U.S. official explains, “Today the whole Arab world, the U.S. and the EU are talking about poor Gazans and the mean blockade, so what choice does he have? Whatever his private view he has to join the chorus.” After all you can’t be more reasonable than Obama and the UN and still retain your standing with the Palestinians. …
Peter Wehner posts on dismal approval ratings.
President Obama’s Gallup approval/disapproval rating is now 44 percent/48 percent, a new low.
As a reference point, Obama’s three-day average was 52 percent when Chris Christie beat Jon Corzine in New Jersey and Bob McDonnell destroyed Creigh Deeds in Virginia. And Obama’s approval/disapproval rating on January 20, 2010 — when Republican Scott Brown shocked the political world by winning the Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy — Obama’s three-day average (January 19-21) was 49 percent/45 percent (it was 47/47 on January 20). …
Jennifer Rubin also blogs on the problems that come with electing an inexperienced executive.
…There is a reason why the public is upset with Obama. It’s not merely a function of the unrealistic expectation that the president can solve all problems. The president looks fickle, confused, and erratic. Let’s have a drilling ban. No, let’s lift it and make BP pay for all the people we threw out of work! It becomes alarming with each passing day as we see how out of his depth the commander in chief (oh yes, he commands the armed forces too) is.
Harvard Law Review and a crease in the pants don’t signal readiness to be president. The voters have found out the hard way the price of electing someone who thought governing was just like campaigning and who had never run a city, a state, a military unit, or a profit-making firm.
Tunku Varadarajan ponders race and the rise of two Indian conservative politicians in the deep south. It is amazing how Americans have moved on.
Nikki Haley, née Nimrata Randhawa, is almost assured of the Republican nomination for governor of the state of South Carolina. And if she does win her runoff on June 22, she is almost certain to be elected governor in November, which would give rise to the remarkable fact that two deeply conservative Southern states—South Carolina and Louisiana—will be home to governors of Indian descent, one the son of Hindu immigrants, the other the daughter of Sikhs.
What explains the success of Jindal and Haley in their respective states? In posing this question, I hint, of course, at the South’s lingering reputation for racial intolerance; and who can deny that the two states in question have not always been at the forefront of America’s historical striving for racial amity? …
David Harsanyi looks at the tea party folks the left is trying to paint as “nut jobs.”
Any impartial national media type will tell you as much: A bunch of half-baked zealot nutjobs have emerged from the Republican primary field. Folks like Nevada’s Sharron Angle and California’s Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman are all throwing around frighteningly out-of-step opinions.
Let’s start with Angle, who believes it would be prudent — get this — to start de-funding the Department of Education. The Department of Education!
You must be aware that the vast majority of Americans were unable to write or use basic arithmetic before the prestigious bureaucracy began operating in 1980. …