Gary Edwards's Library tagged politics →  View Popular

Economic comparison that describes the prosperity differences between a Republican led congress and a Democratic controlled congress.

Excerpt: If you want to give Bill Clinton credit for economic results during his terms, you have to link those results to his policies.  If you want to give him credit for those policies, you must admit that they were virtually all in line with Republican rhetoric and antithetical to modern liberalism.

But here's what you can't do and remain intellectually honest:  praise Clinton and damn Bush, and then encourage Obama to do the exact opposite of what Clinton did and to add multiple trillions of dollars to Bush's spending and deficit levels.

Conservatives like me have always encouraged tax rate cuts, spending cuts, free trade and eliminating government programs like welfare and the byzantine farm program.  Reagan did what he could (with a Democrat-controlled House the entire time), and the economy grew 3.5% annually over his eight years.  Clinton did these things as well (with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress his last six years), and the economy grew 3.8% annually over his eight years.

This is not hard: cut taxes, cut spending, cut programs.  Oh, and elect Republicans to the Senate.  At least that's what the facts say.

www.americanthinker.com/...whose_mess.html - Preview

financial-crisis politics

How is it that anyone can claim with a straight face that the government will likely make money from its various bailout investments? We suspect that anyone saying this is completely out of touch with the size of the losses, bailout funds and emergency lending programs. Because if you add those up, as Bloomberg did today, they amount to more than $7.4 trillion dollars. And it's growing.

Where's all that money coming from?

clusterstock.alleyinsider.com/...our-7-4-trillion-bailout - Preview

economy financial-crisis politics

From the vantage point of November 15th, 2008, whilst the Washington, DC, summit is underway amongst the leaders of the G20 nations, it would appear that there are four distinct global economic scenarios that may unfold towards the tail end of this year, 2009 and 2010:

www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/...saturday_post_a.php - Preview

acta foremski cds credit-default-swaps finacial-crisis politics economy

There is a rising myth of the single bubble which suggests that The Great Unwind -- manifest as the global credit crunch -- is essentially about subprime mortgage default, a USD 1.5 trillion challenge. The truth is that there are as many as eight bubbles at play which are in the process of bursting, taking the form of deleverage on an unprecedented scale. Even 1929 pales in comparison. At a recent ATCA roundtable we posed the following questions for Socratic dialogue:

www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/...beyond_the_subp.php - Preview

acta foremski cds credit-default-swaps politics economy finacial-crisis

The Invisible One Quadrillion Dollar Equation -- Asymmetric Leverage and Systemic Risk
According to various distinguished sources including the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland -- the central bankers' bank -- the amount of outstanding derivatives worldwide as of December 2007 crossed USD 1.144 Quadrillion, ie, USD 1,144 Trillion. The main categories of the USD 1.144 Quadrillion derivatives market were the following:

www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/...the_size_of_der.php - Preview

acta foremski financial-crisis cds credit-default-swaps politics economy

Why are Markets still Falling? The Tsunami caused by Derivatives and Deleveraging
The invisible elephant in the room causing continuous falls in global financial markets is the link to the privately traded Credit Default Swaps (CDS) and the financial uncertainty they have created whilst synchronised deleveraging takes place across the world. ... Credit default swaps are unregulated financial derivatives which act as debt insurance on risky assets like mortgages, corporate and government bonds. But unlike a normal insurance policy, financial institutions that sell credit default swaps are not required to have enough funds in reserve should those risky loans turn bad. Since the US Congress in 2000 declined to regulate these contracts as it does insurance, the companies that guarantee the assets are not required by law to keep enough capital on hand to pay them off in the event of a default.

www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/...analysis_why_ma.php - Preview

acta foremski cds credit-default-swaps finacial-crisis politics economy

NYTImes Review of Soros Book: "The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means": At the start of this year, Soros, convinced (correctly) that the financial crisis was far from over, adopted a bearish investment strategy, which he describes thus: "short US and European stocks, US ten-year government bonds, and the US dollar; long Chinese, Indian, and Gulf States stocks and non-US currencies." Initially, some of these positions didn't pay off. Between January and March, US bonds rallied and Indian stocks tumbled, wiping out gains in other parts of Quantum's portfolio. Just how Soros has fared in the past few months of market turmoil may be known only to investors in Quantum, but it would be foolhardy to bet against him.

www.nybooks.com/21934 - Preview

soros marxism socialism politics financial-crisis economy hedge-funds obama

A YouTube montage of Peter Schiff's comments and predicitons on Fox Business News startign back in 2006. Peter called it exactly right, correctly identifying that mortgages and falling home values would cause a global economic collapse. Incredible foresight.

andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/...vindication.html - Preview

soros economy politics financial-crisis Peter-Schiff

President Bush's speech at the Manhattan Institute defending Capitalism . All i can say is, it's about time someone stood up for American Capitalism.

"All this leads to the most important principle that should guide our work: While reforms in the financial sector are essential, the long-term solution to today's problems is sustained economic growth. And the surest path to that growth is free markets and free people.

In the wake of the financial crisis, voices from the left and right equate the free-enterprise system with greed and exploitation and failure. It's true this crisis included failures -- by lenders and borrowers and financial firms, and by governments and independent regulators. But the crisis was not a failure of the free-market system. And the answer is not to try to reinvent that system. It is to fix the problems, make reforms, and move forward with the free-market principles that have delivered prosperity and hope to people all across the globe.

Capitalism is not perfect. But it is by far the most efficient and just way of structuring an economy.

online.wsj.com/...SB122670648178429695.html - Preview

politics socialism capitalism marxism

The most significant features of the U.S. Constitution are the establishment of the rule of law, the creation of a federal system with a supreme national government, the separation of governmental powers into three branches that check and balance each other, its flexibility and the establishment of a republican form of government.

www.thisnation.com/constitution.html - Preview

politics constitution

Executive Orders (EOs) are legally binding orders given by the President, acting as the head of the Executive Branch, to Federal Administrative Agencies. Executive Orders are generally used to direct federal agencies and officials in their execution of congressionally established laws or policies. However, in many instances they have been used to guide agencies in directions contrary to congressional intent.

www.thisnation.com/...040.html - Preview

politics constitution executive-orders

Oouch!. good article:: "There should no longer be any dispute that Barack Obama’s aim is to socialize the American economy — as he vaporously puts it, to bring about “redistributive change.” The real question is how he’ll go about it. Very likely, the answer lies in a potentially cataclysmic treaty that has gotten virtually no attention during the campaign: the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights...... Obama sought to prove his point by citing the justices’ failure to take on “the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society............ Of course on the latter occasion, when Obama spoke of planning to “spread the wealth around,” it was a slip. The candidate is far more guarded now than he was in 2001, just as he was more coy in 2001 than in his mid-Nineties incarnation — when he first sought to represent an extremely left-wing district and embraced his endorsement by the radical Chicago New Party (ACORN’s electoral arm with ties to the Socialist International). ..."

article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZWY3ZDkyNWJiMThmNjNlN2RjOTczYTc1MWI5ZmEzOWU= - Preview

politics obama socialism

The Heritage Foundation has put together an extensive list of articles on the Housing and Financial Markets Crisis. There are three issues of great concern. We need to get to the bottom of what caused this crisis and why? We need to understand how we got here before locking into to long term economic proposals that ignore the political root causes! We also need to understand how our government has managed to compromise the constitutional principals that served this country so well for so long. This page of articles and commentaries is a great place to start.

www.heritage.org/...HousingandFinancialMarkets - Preview

politics socialism capitalism usa-constitution founding-fathers liberty marxism european-socialism property-rights

So where is the new Obama administration likely to take us? Seven things seem certain:

The U.S. military will withdraw from Iraq quickly and substantially, regardless of conditions on the ground or the obvious consequence of emboldening terrorists there and around the globe.
Protectionism will become our national trade policy; free trade agreements with other nations will be reduced and limited.
Income taxes will rise on middle- and upper-income people and businesses, and individuals will pay much higher Social Security taxes, all to carry out the new president's goals of "spreading the wealth around."
Federal government spending will substantially increase. The new Obama proposals come to more than $300 billion annually, for education, health care, energy, environmental and many other programs, in addition to whatever is needed to meet our economic challenges. Mr. Obama proposes more than a 10% annual spending growth increase, considerably higher than under the first President Bush (6.7%), Bill Clinton (3.3%) or George W. Bush (6.4%).
Federal regulation of the economy will expand, on everything from financial management companies to electricity generation and personal energy use.
The power of labor unions will substantially increase, beginning with repeal of secret ballot voting to decide on union representation.
Free speech will be curtailed through the reimposition of the Fairness Doctrine to limit the conservative talk radio that so irritates the liberal establishment.
These policy changes will be the beginning of the Europeanization of America.

online.wsj.com/...SB122504438328069963.html - Preview

politics obama socialism pete-dupont

Stephen CalaBresi of the Federalist Society describes Obama's view of the Constitution, and what he means by "negative liberties" and "economic and social justice". Calabrese also discusses the situation with judicial appointments and how these opportunities for the socialists will move us towards Obama's dream of replacing the rule of law and equaility before the law with the law of Obama empathy.

Calabrese's conclussion, "Nothing less than the very idea of liberty and the rule of law are at stake in this election. We should not let Mr. Obama replace justice with empathy in our nation's courtrooms".

online.wsj.com/...SB122515067227674187.html - Preview

wsj politics obama socialism marxism

What follows is by no means comprehensive, but it does shed some much-needed light on a number of Obama’s positions, statements, and associations about which he has been less than honest. We’ve attempted to boil each issue down to a succinct explanation with an accompanying, brief video clip—often starring Barack Obama in his own words. Before pulling the lever for someone who hopes voters will ignore his paper-thin resume, unsavory associations, and hard-left voting record, each citizen has a duty to do his due diligence.

hotair.com/...-argument-against-barack-obama - Preview

politics obama socialism marxism

The "change" he peddles is not new. We've seen it before. It is change that diminishes individual liberty for the soft authoritarianism of socialism. It is a populist appeal that disguises government mandated wealth redistribution as tax cuts for the middle class, falsely blames capitalism for the social policies and government corruption (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) that led to the current turmoil in our financial markets, fuels contempt for commerce and trade by stigmatizing those who run successful small and large businesses, and exploits human imperfection as a justification for a massive expansion of centralized government. Obama's appeal to the middle class is an appeal to the "the proletariat," as an infamous philosopher once described it, about which a mythology has been created. Rather than pursue the American Dream, he insists that the American Dream has arbitrary limits, limits Obama would set for the rest of us — today it's $250,000 for businesses and even less for individuals. If the individual dares to succeed beyond the limits set by Obama, he is punished for he's now officially "rich."

corner.nationalreview.com/post - Preview

politics obama socialism marxism

All three liberal waves have transformed American expectations of the state. The spirit of the age is: Ask not what your country can do for you, demand it. Why can’t the government sort out my health care? Why can’t they pick up my mortgage?

article.nationalreview.com/?q=Nzk5MWY5YjU0MDI0ODFkYTZjMDQ2MjlhZDM0MjAwNTA= - Preview

politics socialism obama

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7o84PE871BE">Quote from Obama</a>: “I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems. [snip] I will set a goal of a world without nuclear weapons. To seek that goal, I will not develop new nuclear weapons. I will seek a global ban on the production of fissile material. And I will negotiate with Russia to take our ICBM’s off hair-trigger alert.”

Wow.

Is Barack Obama planning a unilateral drawdown of U.S. forces? He says that’s what he wants, and he sounds pretty clear about it to me.

article.nationalreview.com/?q=MTBhZDlhZDQ0ODhlOGI0YTZiZWU1NDY3ZTYxZWY4MDU= - Preview

politics socialism appeasment obama

Speaking on a call-in radio show in 2001, you can hear Senator Obama say things that should profoundly shock any American — or at least those who have not taken the time to dig deeply enough into this man’s beliefs and affiliations. Read the text or <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iivL4c_3pck">Hear it for yourself!</a>

article.nationalreview.com/?q=YmFhYzIzMGQ1Y2FlMTA4N2M1N2VmZWUzM2Y4ZmNmYmI= - Preview

politics socialism obama marxism