Pro-abortion groups freak out over license plates

Unveiling the Government Car Warranty

And let’s not forget what this will do for Detroit’s competitiveness.  Now that warranties will get funded by Uncle Sam, what do you suppose will happen to them?  They’ll get shortened, and if they become uncompetitive, it will literally take an act of Congress to get longer warranties offered by Detroit.  But that’s not what will really happen.  If the Directorate of Auto Warranties discovers that the competition offers longer and more robust warranties, the Directorate will simply get Congress to pass laws outlawing them.  After all, we can’t have a bunch of furriners undercutting Uncle Sam, can we?   Why, that would be downright unpatriotic!

Government does not belong in the business of offering auto warranties.  Two years ago, that would have been so obvious as to elicit derisive laughter for even mentioning it.  But when we get a bunch of used-car salesmen in the White House and Congress, this is the result.

Last month before signing the Generational Theft Act of 2009, President Obama and Bozo the VP Joe Biden extolled a solar panel manufacturer that outfitted the Denver Museum of Science and Nature. I pointed out the generous government help the company received. Now, the Colorado-based Independence Institute provides the rest of the story — and it is an object lesson in the myth of “pay-for-themselves” green “investments.”

Maybe the Johnny-come-latelys at the AP will get around to reporting this in six months.

Economist: Obama’s not who we thought he was

More departures at AIG after bonus outrage

Gird your loins: North Korea stacking long-range missile on launchpad

Fumble! Geithner speaks, dollar dives

Empty Treasury wants power to confiscate firms

The regulatory oversight for banks exists in part because of the public-private relationship between the government and the banking industry for controlling monetary policy, and in greater part because of the banking collapse of the Great Depression.  The government acts as a guarantor for depositors up to a certain amount, keeping customers from conducting bank runs.  In exchange, the FDIC has the authority to seize a bank that threatens that system.

However, people do not deposit cash in hedge funds or insurance companies.  They invest in them, and assume certain risks when they do.  The Obama administration wants to socialize the risk by placing the government as a guarantor of sorts for the investors, but that will make people less likely to invest rather than more likely.  Part of the lure of investing comes from the potential reward of greater growth of funds than what can be found in bank accounts and bonds.  Limiting risk means limiting gains, and we can expect investors to shield themselves further than they may have in the past under those circumstances, while government spends more money in regulatory activity and the economy sags from lack of capital investment.

Chaput scolds American Catholics and the church

The leadership of the Catholic Church has abdicated its role in instruction and faith formation, which one can see in church life on a daily basis.  In part, they willingly surrendered both in exchange for broader appeal, and in significant part undermined it with the shameful role church leaders played in covering up for pedophiles within their ranks.  In order to have enough moral authority to instruct, the priests and bishops have to live their lives in a moral fashion.  One cannot lecture about protecting innocent life while keeping child molesters from justice and tacitly allowing them to continue preying on the innocents in the parishes.  Even if the percentage of priests molesting children was very small, the acts of church leaders in decades past to shuffle them around to keep them from accountability destroyed their credibility to lead the flock.

Cap-and-trade traded away?

In endorsing Obama last year, the Washington Post described the next president as "a man of supple intelligence, with a nuanced grasp of complex issues and evident skill at conciliation and consensus-building." This would be a good time to employ those talents. A show of leadership, including a firm pledge to veto any punitive tax legislation that reaches his desk, could help calm the storm that threatens to make the current crisis much more destructive.

Maybe Jay Leno should host Meet the Press. Bowling and canine questions ^[1] aside, Leno pressed ^[2] 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: ^[3] 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 ^[4]” all Obama could do was attack the previous administration ^[4]: “[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 ^[5]” than the Obama Administration claims. The CBO places ^[6] 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.

Article printed from The Foundry: http://blog.heritage.org

URL to article: http://blog.heritage.org/2009/03/20/morning-bell-taxpayers-should-be-more-than-a-little-scared/

URLs in this post:

[1] Bowling and canine questions: http://features.csmonitor.com/politics/2009/03/19/president-obama-makes-a-special-olympics-joke-staffer-apologizes/

[2] pressed: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123752189482892841.html?mod=article-outset-box

[3] The Obama Administration budget:: http://www.heritage.org/Research/Budget/bg2249.cfm

[4] create here a chance that we may follow in the footsteps of Iceland and one day just simply be broke: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/03/obama-text-la.html

[5] as much as $1.6 trillion higher: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-budget20-2009mar20,0,1486768.story

[6] places: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/20203.html