We Need A Movement To Stop Remaining Expenditures on Stimulus.

To date, only about one percent of the $787 Billion have been actually spent. It may be time to consider rolling back the 99 percent of this bill left to pay down the national debt, and save our economic wellbeing now. This action alone would put the Stock Market on a heavenly upward spiral, and our country would become the growth oriented world leader is truly is. We must become the economic engine for the world, as we have been, and we are not in that mode right now.

It is clear that President Obama is on a mission to completely alter and change drastically our government and economic system that has served us well for over 200 years. We were sold a political change that was not spelled out for the average American citizen and they are just now beginning to see the damage and negative change to each of us and our economic lives as a result. The Healthcare changes are but one of many changes President Obama has for America.

We can correct this terrible mess now by repealing the remaining Stimulus and moving forward again as a free nation without the carnage of the Obama plans.

Are there courageous people out there to sponsor this correction, and if so, let’s stop the madness and move back toward our free enterprise system of government and away from Obama’s socialist leaning government? Is there a Republican candidate out there to start this movement? We should be searching for that person right now.

Jim the Conservative

The President’s Road is Now Getting Rough…Very Rough Indeed

Obama has gotten himself in way over his head, and the country is reeling from the effect this has on our economy and future. He and his inner circle have taken extreme chances on their mission to clog the legislative calendar with so much extreme expenditure and complicated bureaucratic clutter that the citizens of this country have had more than enough. The fact that bills are being voted upon without legislators knowing what is contained in the bills they are forced to vote on, insures a terrible fall out for our President.

People know when their government is dealing poorly with their trust, and that is what is now beginning to happen, the President and his operatives are reaching that point where their credibility or lack thereof is becoming a huge problem.

The President has not lived up to his promises because he is driving at warp speed when he should be slowing down and working out compromises and negotiating on what he wants to accomplish. He is now lashing out at individuals in the Republican Party, which makes a President look wounded and weak and most of all unsure of himself or his policy initiatives. He has decided to go it alone without the Republicans and this will immediately put him in the spot light on the issues and if they fail, he fails hard. It will be his policies, un-tested with negotiation or tempered in any way. He alone will rise or fall on the way things work out.

The Administration has irritated many constituencies along the short road traveled, and it is not possible to retrace that road to make things better. It is what it is at this point, so this Administration has made its own bed to lay upon.

Healthcare reform Obama style is now questionable, if not as dead as was Hillary’s reform in 1992. Nothing was learned from the 1992 healthcare reform failure as applied to the current health reform failure. This Administration has scared the heck out of the elderly citizens, and they are sure to walk away from their AARP recommended path, and be most angry if they feel they have lost potential benefits to carry them on trough their golden years with existing benefits. That scare is real must be realized as a growing issue.

So it will be interesting to see where all of this leaves the President and his Administration. The new order of things will be that Barack Obama has to earn his way fully from this point forward, the country has been patient, but that is now over. The election honeymoon is over.

Jim the Conservative

Obama’s Plan Would Repeal Medicare

I found this posting this morning (Article Below), and by chance was listening to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius being interviewed by Liberal CNN Medical reporter Sanjay Gupta MD, who supports the Obamacare plan. In his interview he did ask Sebelius what would the Obamacare plan mean for a family with a elderly family member in the elder years who needed extraordinary care, would they get it. Sebelius gave a convoluted tortured response that went on and on about how the new plan would make the doctor and patient relationship better because the new plan would offer “best treatment recommendations and procedures” that would be available for the elderly that would include perhaps medications that might be more appropriate than surgery in many instances? Of course that left many more questions than clarity, but Sanjay Gupta simply accepted that answer and went on to another subject. I could just hear millions (oh forgot this is CNN) hundreds of people shouting at their TV sets saying ASK MORE FOLLOW UP QUESTIONS SANJAY, but sadly he could not hear them, nor was he inclined to do so anyway even if he had heard them.

Jim The Conservative

An excellent Article here for your review.

Obama’s Plan Would Repeal Medicare

Thursday, July 9, 2009 2:40 PM

By: Dick Morris & Eileen McGann

President Barack Obama’s healthcare proposal is, in effect, the repeal of the Medicare program as we know it. The elderly will go from being the group with the most access to free medical care to the one with the least access. Indeed, the principal impact of the Obama healthcare program will be to reduce sharply the medical services the elderly can use. No longer will their every medical need be met, their every medication prescribed, their every need to improve their quality of life answered.

It is so ironic that the elderly — who were so vigilant when President George W. Bush proposed to change Social Security — are so relaxed about the Obama healthcare proposals. Bush’s Social Security plan, which did not cut their benefits at all, aroused the strongest opposition among the elderly. But Obama’s plan, which will totally gut Medicare and replace it with government-managed care and rationing, has elicited little more than a yawn from most senior citizens.

It’s time for the elderly to wake up before it is too late!

In our new book, “Catastrophe,” we explain — in detail and in depth — the consequences the elderly of Canada are feeling from just this kind of program. Limited colonoscopies have led to a 25 percent higher rate of colon cancer, and a ban on the use of the two best chemotherapies are part of the reason why 42 percent of Canadians with colon cancer die while 31 percent of Americans, who have access to these two medications, survive the disease.

Overall, the death rate from cancer in Canada is 16 percent higher than in the United States and the heart disease mortality rate is 6 percent above ours.

Under Obama’s program, there will be a government health insurance company that gets huge subsidies of tax money. It will compete with private insurance plans. But the subsidies will let it undercut the private plans and drive them out of business, leaving only the government plan — a single payer — in effect.

Today, 800,000 doctors struggle to treat adequately the 250 million Americans who have insurance. Obama will add 50 million more to their caseload with no expansion in the number of doctors or nurses. Indeed, his plan will likely reduce their number by lowering reimbursement rates and imposing bureaucrats above them who will force medical decisions down their throats. Fewer doctors will have to treat more patients. The inevitable result will be rationing.

And it is the elderly who rationing will most affect. Who should get a knee replacement, a 40-year-old or a 70-year-old? Who should get a new hip, a young person or an old person? Who should have priority in the operating room, a 70-year-old diabetic who needs bypass surgery or a younger person? Obviously, it is the elderly who will get short shrift under his proposal.

But the interest groups that usually speak up for the elderly, particularly AARP, are in Obama’s pocket, hoping to profit from his program by becoming one of its vendors. Just as they backed Bush’s prescription drug plan because they anticipating profiting from it, so they are now helping Obama gut the medical care of their constituents.

It is high time that the elderly of America realized what the stakes are in this vital fight to preserve Medicare as we know it and keep medical care open, accessible, and free to those over 65. It is truly a battle for their very lives.
© 2009 Dick Morris & Eileen McGann

Obama Administration Misreads Economic Situation? Really.

Sorry excuse of an administration, the Obama Administration, they misread the economic conditions of the US. Why in the world did many Americans vote for someone whose leadership is in a fog. Perhaps it is not in a fog, perhaps their priorities are all wrong, anyone consider that? You don’t pile taxes upon anyone in a recession, you don’t announce that existing tax reductions in the future will be cancelled, you don’t create stimulus packages that don’t stimulate the banking industry to lend, and that puts Trillions of new debt on the backs of the citizens of this country. The Obama people were all over the TARP conditions in the Fall of 2008, which they like to blame entirely on George Bush, and legislation for that package was left to Congress, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to develop and craft, therefore it could hardly be attributed completely to failures of George Bush with regard to how poorly crafted the TARP package happened to turn out. Nice try to shift blame, but it ain’t sticking. No, Joe Biden, you cannot get away as spokesman for the Obama Administration with the 130 day comment that the Obama Administration was only to be accountable for 130 days on the conditions of the TARP, and subsequent failure prone packages that the Obama Administration produced to date. They misread by their own admission on all of it. They continue to misread the entire scope and rationale regarding fixes necessary to get the credit extensions from the banking industry back on track. You cannot coddle the banks, you have to direct them, but then it comes down to a Obama appointed Treasury Secretary who is so arrogant that he continues to not want to staff up Treasury with competent people, but manages to continue with harebrained schemes to further the debacle we call recovery in this administration. The first corrections that were needed were to salvage the institutional banking institutions by direction not nationalization of banks, and putting the taxpayers money in realistic credit extending mode on the part of banks. That has yet to be accomplished. And we await the Obama team to figures out a proper course of action, and all they can say is they misread the economy? Even Colin Powell, an Obama supporter now slams Obama for the Stimulus packages designed by the Obama people. Jim The Conservative

http://blogs.abcnews.com/george/2009/07/biden-we-misread-the-economy-.html

AMERICAN’S ARE NOW “CHANGE WARY”

Valarie Jarrett, Assistant to President Obama is an arrogant woman who originally hired Michele Obama in a hospital system in Chicago, a woman who came up through the Chicago political machine, she appeared this morning on CNBC Squawk Box and when ask why Jack Welch, past chairman of GE commented that President Obama’s jamming so much down the throats of taxpayers in a huge rush will cause waste and bad decision making, she discounts him saying so. …She says to Jack Welsh…. Obama was elected and has a total mandate to invoke his vision for America. She says Jack Welsh; go away, you don’t know what you’re talking about? Jack Welsh of course is a great business man and Icon who built up GE to a respected and dynamic corporation in this country. He certainly has credentials to say what he did. I believe he spoke for far more than half of the voters in this wonderful country.

Valarie Jarrett is but one of all of the Chicago clan of Barack Obama that believe that they are invincible and can handle changing the complete landscape of what this county is, based on their perception of the so called Obama mandate. They have already put our country in the tank on debt obligations while they continue to push three new programs, Obama healthcare, Obama Cap and Tax, and Obama Immigration Gate. Any one of these let alone all three will certainly put a yoke of extreme debt obligation around the neck of the next three generations of citizen in this country, and put American as the largest debtor nation in the world, with status of a third world nation. Many economists claim with this kind of debt, America cannot sustain its self.

What Obama Administration people refuse to see and allow for is that they are planting the seeds of hatred of their policies through their steam-rollering of policy while they have a willing Congress to play out their fantasies, at the expense of terrible consequences that will befall our country.

I believe we will see a title wave of protestation and anger by a very large majority of Americans soon, at least when a true leader emerges if one does, representing the greater than half of Americans that are already “Change Wary” for change sake. The Change Wary folks have had it with all this talk by President Obama of apologizing for our way of life, our ethics and our leadership in the world landscape. We do not feel that we need to apologize for our success which is what Barack Obama seems to feel is appropriate.

The answer is NO, we don’t apologize, we applaud our 200 plus year history and that is that Barack Obama. You are not speaking for me or for all those Change Wary citizens of this great country. We do not need to change it into what Europe wants us to be, nonsense Barack Obama, we need to say we will fire you if you continue to apologize for our success and prosperity as demonstrated in the past. We need to get back to the order of business we have enjoyed prior to Barack Obama’s view of America. I for one find myself in disbelief of the tearing down of our way of life by a sitting President. Barack Obama, your change concept in the election said nothing of the socialistic and extreme left wing views that you are now forcing down our throats. That Sir is dishonest. Your claim that you are carrying out a so called mandate for extreme leftist policies is just deceitful. This is not where the bulk of American citizens are politically and you know it. You are tearing this country apart with your rush to change our way of life.
Jim the Conservative

Someone Is Looking At Your Salary

Today we see the results of Congress and a President that has put business on the ropes so to speak, and now the Liberals are having their day taking aim at corporate salaries, not just those that are ridicules, but within the whole corporate world of public companies. President Obama has little empathy for the corporate world and has taken a stance in his campaign and now as President that has and continues to drive a wedge between government and corporations across the land. Some see this as extending class division

The Feds are starting under Timothy Geithner’s direction to institute the kind of regulation that we saw with Sarbanes Oxley that cost countless corporations Billions and Billions of expenses that turned out to be totally un-worthy by most standards and captured few villains as it was intended to. Now we see Rep. Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd on a mission to instill earnings controls over all companies that are public companies (Stock Holder owned) across our land. I am researching stories of executives that have received bonus dollars or stock ownership that has been devalued and bonuses that were force to be given back even after executives had made investments and or purchased real estate with their bonuses and are now forced to sell such assets at huge losses as a result. Contract salary payments are no longer untouchable from the long arm of the regulators. As the article below indicates concern exists as to whether risk taking is going to be possible and whether we will see talent willing to work for public companies when they can set up small non public companies and earn the kinds of money they desire. There will always be work-a-rounds when government gets down to stifling executive pay.

Jim The Conservative

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN1027275020090611

http://www.aflcio.org/corporatewatch/paywatch/ceou/database.cfm?tkr=AIG&pg=1

Fray on Pay
The battle over executive compensation and what it means for you.
Russ Banham, CFO Magazine
June 1, 2009
When it comes to the public outcry over executive compensation, the sounds of protest may have faded but the fury lives on. Bands of placard-carrying citizens have disappeared from lower Manhattan, but efforts to rein in what many perceive as outrageous paydays are, if anything, intensifying. From Capitol Hill to boardrooms across the country, efforts are under way to restrict the compensation of executives of all publicly traded companies, even those far removed from any form of bailout.
“People have been excoriating executive-pay practices for decades, and this is their ‘pitchfork’ moment, with mobs literally taking to the streets to protest the bonuses at AIG, Merrill Lynch, and other firms,” says Ira Kay, director of executive compensation consulting at Watson Wyatt.
Already the repercussions are being felt far and wide, from Silicon Valley, where Apple shareholders pushed through a “say-on-pay” proposal despite board members advocating for its rejection, to The Netherlands, where the CEO of ING made a “moral appeal” to executives to return their recent bonuses. A Watson Wyatt survey found that nearly two-thirds of board members believe companies need to change their executive compensation plans in response to current political and market pressures.
A Volatile Mix
It is political pressure in particular that has many observers, not to mention CFOs, seeing red. Soon Congress is expected to unveil a slate of executive pay legislation that could extend the government’s recent rules for companies receiving federal dollars from the Troubled Asset Relief Program to other publicly traded companies. “The sad thing about AIG and the TARP regulations on executive pay is that successful, careful companies will be painted with the same broad brush, affecting their ability to compete in the global marketplace,” says Jeffrey A. Burchill, senior vice president and CFO of FM Global, a large business-property insurer.
If the remarks coming from the two primary movers in Congress — House Financial Services Committee chairman Barney Frank (D–Mass.) and Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee chairman Christopher Dodd (D–Conn.) — are any indication, companies can expect substantive changes, although the full scope is anyone’s guess. “Specific caps on compensation are not very likely,” says Alexander Cwirko-Godycki, research manager at compensation benchmarking firm Equilar Inc., “but there is definite momentum behind say-on-pay provisions, mandates for wider clawback policies, and increased compensation disclosure requirements, among others.” It remains to be seen which of these, if any, will become law, but in Cwirko-Godycki’s view, “there has certainly never been a stronger case for these proposals to become reality.”
“Situations of excessive pay are not rampant,” says Brent Longnecker, chairman and CEO of Longnecker & Associates, a Houston-based compensation consultancy. “Only about 2% of companies have rewarded failure, but the government is keen to do something to appease the public’s outrage.” He is not alone in this view. “Nobody knows what the rules will be or how the Treasury Department will write the regulations, but they’re coming,” says Patrick McGurn, special counsel to the institutional shareholders services unit of RiskMetrics.
In a worst-case scenario, some or all of the compensation provisions in TARP would be extended to all public companies (see “Laying Out the TARP” at the end of this article). While that’s a long shot, even the possibility has many people raising a battle cry. “If companies don’t get out in front of this issue now, with their compensation committees leading the charge, the government will get in and make things worse,” says Ben W. Heineman Jr., former General Electric senior vice president and general counsel and currently a senior fellow at Harvard University’s schools of law and public policy. “This is not the time to go into the bunkers.”
“The question is how far Congress will go,” says Claudia Allen, chair of the corporate-governance practice at Chicago-based law firm Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg. “You have politics and the law getting stirred in the same pot, and it is a volatile mix.”
Many observers fear the law of unintended consequences, and point to the 1993 creation of Section 162(m) of the Internal Revenue Code as Exhibit A. The regulation forbade corporate tax deductions for salaries exceeding $1 million, but made an exception for performance-based incentive compensation, such as stock options vesting at a particular date. Not surprisingly, or so it seems now, companies shifted from high salaries to high stock options and bonuses, while also lifting the salaries of many seemingly underpaid CEOs and other senior executives to $1 million. Now the Obama Administration is considering revising 162(m) downward, disallowing tax deductions above $500,000 and closing the loophole for stock options. “As we’ve seen happen in the past with respect to executive pay, the government has a way of making things worse,” Longnecker says.
CFOs React
CFOs certainly seem disinclined to burrow into the bunkers. “This country was built on capitalism, on people wanting to better themselves, working long hours to achieve cherished dreams of success,” says Marc Rosenblum, CFO of cosmetics company Clarins USA. “Unlike socialist societies, people could become rich if their companies became successful. We have to be very careful not to make this country a place where dreams can no longer be realized.”

“If the government begins setting bright-line tests limiting compensation and enacts one-size-fits-all regulations,” says Holly Koeppel, CFO at Midwest utility American Electric Power (AEP), “it may change the perception and motivations of managers, ultimately rendering the organization less competitive.”
Rosenblum, however, concedes that some reforms are needed. “You cannot reward someone for sales volume without regard for whether or not it’s good for the business,” he says, taking a swipe at AIG. “I don’t blame traders there for getting bonuses — they should be compensated for bringing in volume. But it’s the CFO’s job to make sure that what they’re selling is not too risky.” He suggests, in fact, that CFOs should play a key role in bringing sanity to bear on compensation. “Abolishing bonuses isn’t the answer: managing risk is. As long as finance has a say, everybody wins.”
Koeppel agrees. “The issue is risk and how to align it with executive reward,” she says. “We lost our way when reward was linked to financial metrics that did not translate into cash flow.”
In Search of Better Metrics
There may be a lesson in that for compensation committees, which are now on a collective hot seat from which they are unlikely to extricate themselves any time soon. “The typically light agenda of summer committee meetings will be a distant memory,” says Myrna Hellerman, senior vice president at Sibson Consulting. “Committees will have to make [vital] decisions about what stays and what goes in 2010 compensation plans.” RiskMetrics’s McGurn agrees, adding that “AIG and other egregious examples of ‘pay-for-failure’ have served as a consciousness-raising exercise for boards and compensation committees.”
“I think that compensation committees should be in the crosshairs on this issue,” says Lester A. Hudson, chairman of the Human Resources Committee of AEP’s board (which also addresses executive-compensation policies), “and not the executives receiving incentive compensation. The problems reside with the directors; many just don’t understand the implications of their plans. It is their responsibility to ensure that incentive compensation doesn’t increase the risk level of the company, and some committees failed to grasp this.”
As for what such committees might do, Bruce Ellig, a compensation adviser and author of the revised and updated Complete Guide to Executive Compensation, echoes Koeppel’s comments on metrics in general and cash flow in particular. “There are a number of ways that boards can address these issues before the government [steps in],” he says. “For example, they may want to use both net income and cash flow as pay-for-performance measures, as opposed to just net income. Cash flow is much harder to fudge — you either have it or you don’t.”
FM Global’s compensation program links incentive compensation to three key metrics: profitability, customer retention (measured as revenues from the existing customer base), and new customers (measured as additional revenues). If profitability falls precipitously and the other two metrics rise, executive compensation suffers — the reverse of the equation used by AIG. “Of the three key metrics, profitability is the one weighted largest, accounting for 50%,” Burchill says. “Customer retention is 40%, and only 10% is new business. You have to have company results before you pay incentive compensation.”
Despite the uncertainty regarding legislation, many companies are addressing compensation issues already. The Watson Wyatt survey found that fully 55% have frozen salaries — 34 percentage points higher than the consultancy’s December 2008 survey recorded. Thirty-eight percent of respondents also are making changes to their annual incentive-plan performance measures and 30% are making changes to their long-term incentive-plan measures. About one-third have already shifted to time-based restricted stock and performance-based shares, and another third have changed or are considering changes to their executive-pay programs to address excessive risk.
Tensions and Checkpoints
Given that companies seem to be taking action, however belatedly, on this hot-button issue, many argue that no government intervention is needed. “I’m a firm believer that the current system is working,” says Mylle Harvey Mangum, chairman and CEO of IBT Holdings, a designer and builder of retail environments for bank branches. Mangum sits on several boards and currently chairs two compensation committees, at Haverty Furniture and Collective Brands (owner of Payless retail shoe stores). “Compensation committees are in the best and most knowledgeable position to address the perceived abuses,” she says. “Directors today are chosen by other board members and voted on by the shareholders. Nobody slips by anymore.”
To assure that executive pay is aligned with company performance, she says, compensation committees should consider scenario-planning exercises in which the key metrics governing an executive’s pay are put through different circumstances. On the two compensation committees she chairs, “we use tally sheets to plot the financial metrics against salary and performance-based compensation to see where things might end up down the line. Each company is different, which is why one-size-fits-all regulations just don’t work. You want to set up healthy tensions and checkpoints that encourage salespeople to sell like crazy, but then have a finance person who has to approve the pricing and margins before things get out of control.”

Such checks and balances also are in play at AEP. Koeppel assists the board in linking business outcomes with compensation metrics. “We take the board through new scenarios every year,” she says, noting that finance provided “a wider range of possible outcomes this year in light of the economy.”
AEP’s board has the discretion to make adjustments to the compensation plan if they perceive it to have negative unintended consequences. Directors did that earlier this year, when the company lowered its 2009 earnings guidance. The board changed AEP’s methodology for annual incentive compensation by increasing the threshold earnings per share needed to fund the program, moving it to the midpoint, rather than the low end, of the company’s earnings guidance. The board decided that “requiring employees to work harder to achieve incentive awards more-appropriately balanced employee and shareholder interests, since shareholders would be negatively impacted by the lower anticipated earnings,” Koeppel says.
Such best practices may be moot, however. “The die has been cast,” says Kay. “We’re in a deep recession and people are looking for victims. Executive compensation is number one on that list. The government is getting high marks from the public. For the time being, Corporate America cannot defend itself.”
Russ Banham is a contributing editor of CFO.
________________________________________
Putting More Claws in Clawbacks
One of the less controversial aspects of executive-compensation reform concerns clawbacks, or procedures for retrieving bonuses from executives whose managerial prowess was evident only for the very short-term, if at all. But current laws can make retrieving undeserved bonuses tricky. There isn’t much case law on the subject, with only one successful clawback to draw from — a 2007 settlement with William W. McGuire, former CEO of UnitedHealth Group, who was required to repay $468 million of his bonus for allegedly backdating stock options.
A spate of pending litigation may change that. In April the SEIU Master Trust, a consortium of pension funds with approximately $1.3 billion in assets, demanded that the boards of directors of 29 major companies in its investment portfolio investigate more than $5 billion of incentivized executive pay alleged to have been tied to poorly understood derivatives and other financial instruments. Since 2005, the top five most highly paid executives at the 29 firms, which include AIG, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, American Express, Goldman Sachs, and McGraw-Hill, received more than $3.5 billion in cash and equity pay and more than $1.5 billion in stock options. During that same period, the share prices of the 29 firms plummeted.
Meanwhile, corporate antipathy toward “say-on-pay” shareholder provisions seems likely to fade even though many experts say such policies lack nuance. “It’s a blunt instrument,” asserts Russell Miller, managing director of Executive Compensation Advisors, a division of executive search firm Korn/Ferry International. “Shareholders will be asked to vote either yes or no. It doesn’t give them the ability to vote on the merits or detractions of various elements within compensation programs, or to engage in any kind of meaningful discussion with management.” Then again, most such provisions are nonbinding anyway, which once again puts compensation committees on the line as they debate whether to act on such votes. — R.B.
________________________________________
Laying Out the Tarp
Notable executive-pay rules within TARP legislation include:
• A prohibition on cash bonuses and incentive compensation other than restricted stock for the top five officers and others
• A prohibition on bonuses to these top executives in excess of one-third of their annual compensation, until the TARP loans are repaid
• Stringent “clawback” provisions requiring TARP recipients to recover performance-based compensation awarded to the top executives if the bonuses were based on statements of earnings, revenues, gains, or other criteria that are later found to be materially inaccurate (The new rule stiffens the clawback provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which addressed only CEO and CFO pay.)
• A “say-on-pay” provision permitting shareholders to vote “for” or “against” a public company’s executive-compensation program
• An end to “golden parachutes,” as well as other restrictions on severance payments
• The effective banning of such executive perquisites as free country-club memberships and chic office remodels — R.B.

© CFO Publishing Corporation 2008. All rights reserved.

Obama’s Dream for Healthcare Reform Will Reform Our Way of Life

Currently we understand we are at about 25 Percent of Gross Domestic Product now, as a result of Obama Administration expenditures, an increase just in the first part of Obama’s administration of a 5% increase over 2008. This does not include healthcare reform that will add substantially $1.4 Trillion per annum, and the calculation will probably move the 25% mentioned in the below article upwards toward 35% -to- 40% of GDP. This would be very unhealthy by many economic standards. It would put the US in a position never before realized and we would join with other socialistic countries and third world countries. The poor countries of the world often depended upon world wide services having been in part funded by the US through foreign aid. We have been the Daddy so to speak for the economic engines of the free world, but this will end abruptly and jarringly in the near future with the current and anticipated Obama expenditures. The US state budgets will increasingly be well underfunded in the US, and will have to be abruptly downsized immediately, services curtailed and many institutions will fail. While we have been living large by world standards, we will have to readjust our living standards dramatically downward, and then the issues will finally hit the general masses of citizens in America as to the cost of going socialistic under the populist leadership of Barack Obama while he goes forward unchecked with the two houses of Congress rubber stamping his every move.

Today reports from Donna Shalala, Clinton’s prior HHS Secretary, was interviewed this morning on CNN, when you listened carefully, she stated twice that much has to be discovered yet in how Obama’s plan for single payer healthcare nationally will be funded, but she indicated that his advisors will probably have to institute new taxes on the wealthy, and on middle class citizens based upon their healthcare utilization, and the Obama administration will simply have to work out the funding problems as they build the system. In other words Obama has no real way of paying for this system other than to lower living standards for each citizen of this country in order to obtain his dream and the dream of the liberal extremists to get to where they want to be. He is now quietly developing a VAT tax, that in earlier years was a kind of alternative to the IRS system in place now, but Obama is not talking about eliminated the IRS tax system, his Value Added Tax system would be on top of the existing national tax or IRS tax. This would be a 10% tax on raw materials, another 10% tax on the manufacturing process or services delivery like health care, and then we might have 80% of the new single payer healthcare system paid for. In other words, the Obama healthcare system on top of existing increased debt we now have may put us behind many third world countries and this is totally unacceptable. The below article however tells the story of how this might actually happen as a slight of hand due to the enormous popularity enjoyed by Obama by the public due to the fawning liberal press that is predominant today. The press is shaping the debate on behalf of Obama. Conservative press cannot even begin to get the message across to the vast majority of citizens, and we see our free enterprise system in jeopardy as a result. The question then is how do we educate the average citizens about the pending perils that are before us?

Jim the Conservative

http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN07272586 Opposition to Obama article link

http://healthpolicyandmarket.blogspot.com/ Large body of material on Obama’s plans for healthcare reform by Robert Laszewski

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/business/global/21yen.html Japan’s contraction at 15.2% past year, US to follow this kind of path if our spending keep increasing

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aj5HHIKfogR8&refer=worldwide Obama’s totally re-worked ideas as of yesterday, mandates to business to insure

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090606/D98L67500.html Is the liberal spending party backfiring?

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Obama infatuation not healthy for country or policies

BY ROBERT J. SAMUELSON
June 08, 2009
Washington Post Writers Group

The Obama infatuation is the great unreported story of our time. Has any recent president basked in so much favorable media coverage? Well, maybe John Kennedy for a moment; but no president since. On the whole, this is not healthy for America.

Our political system works best when a president faces checks on his power. But the main checks on Obama are modest. They come from congressional Democrats, who largely share his goals if not always his means. The leaderless and confused Republicans don’t provide effective opposition. And the press – on domestic, if not foreign, policy – has so far largely abdicated its role as skeptical observer.

Obama has inspired a collective fawning. What started in the campaign (the chief victim was Hillary Clinton, not John McCain) has continued, as a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism shows. It concludes: “President Barack Obama has enjoyed substantially more positive media coverage than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush during their first months in the White House.”

The study examined 1,261 stores by The Washington Post, The New York Times, ABC, CBS and NBC, Newsweek magazine and the NewsHour on PBS.

Favorable stories (42 percent) were double the unfavorable (20 percent), while the rest were “neutral” or “mixed.” Obama’s treatment contrasts sharply with coverage in the first two months of the presidencies of Bush (22 percent of stories favorable) and Clinton (27 percent).

Unlike Bush and Clinton, Obama received favorable coverage in both news columns and opinion pages. The nature of stories also changed. “Roughly twice as much of the coverage of Obama (44 percent) has concerned his personal and leadership qualities than was the case for Bush (22 percent) or Clinton (26 percent),” the report said. “Less of the coverage, meanwhile, has focused on his policy agenda.”

When Pew broadened the analysis to 49 outlets – cable channels, news

Web sites, morning news shows, more newspapers and National Public Radio – the results were similar, despite some outliers. No surprise: MSNBC was favorable, Fox was not. Another study, released by the Center for Media and

Public Affairs at George Mason University, reached parallel conclusions.

The infatuation matters because Obama’s ambitions are so grand. He wants to expand health care subsidies, tightly control energy use and overhaul immigration. He envisions the greatest growth of government since Lyndon Johnson. The Congressional Budget Office estimates federal spending in 2019 at nearly 25 percent of the economy (gross domestic product).

That’s well up from the 21 percent in 2008, and far above the post-World

War II average; it would also occur before many baby boomers retire.

Are his proposals practical, even if desirable? Maybe they’re neither? What might be unintended consequences? All “reforms” do not succeed; some cause more problems than they solve. Johnson’s economic policies, inherited from Kennedy, proved disastrous; they led to the 1970s’ “stagflation.” The “war on poverty” failed. The press should not be hostile; but it ought to be skeptical.

Mostly, it isn’t. The idea of a “critical” Obama story is a tactical conflict with congressional Democrats or criticism from an important constituency. Larger issues are minimized, despite ample grounds for skepticism.

Obama’s rhetoric brims with inconsistencies. In the campaign, he claimed he would de-emphasize partisanship – and also enact a highly-partisan agenda; both couldn’t be true. He got a pass. Now, he claims he will control health care spending even though he proposes more government spending. He promotes “fiscal responsibility” when projections show huge and continuous budget deficits. Journalists seem to take his pronouncements at face value even when many are two-faced.

The cause of this acquiescence isn’t clear. The press sometimes follows opinion polls; popular presidents get good coverage, and Obama is enormously popular. By Pew, his job performance rating is 63 percent. But because favorable coverage began in the campaign, this explanation is at best partial.

Perhaps the preoccupation with the present economic crisis has diverted attention from the long-term implications of other policies. But the deeper explanation may be as straightforward as this: most journalists like Obama; they admire his command of language; he’s a relief after Bush; they agree with his agenda (so it never occurs to them to question basic premises); and they don’t want to see the first African-American president fail.

Whatever, a great edifice of government may arise on the narrow foundation of Obama’s personal popularity. Another Pew survey shows that since the election both self-identified Republicans and Democrats have declined. “Independents” have increased, and “there has been no consistent movement away from conservatism, nor a shift toward liberalism.”

The press has become Obama’s silent ally and seems in a state of denial. But the story goes untold: Unsurprisingly, the study of all the favorable coverage received little coverage.

Whitehouse Healthcare Summit..No Republicans Allowed

 

There was a new spin as of yesterday in a Whitehouse summit on how to get government healthcare package sold to the public. The message will be Obama’s healthcare is great and it will put money in the pockets of families, but here is the problem.  Not one Republican was present for this meeting. The meeting was also a challenge to Democrats and of course one independent the Socialist Bernie Sanders to get this healthcare package in place as quickly as possible and work the details out later if necessary.  Note the language of the New York Times summary of report on the Whitehouse directives to Democrats. If you believe this plan will put $2,600. and up to $10,000. of new income to the average family of four, later, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale. This is dishonest and ranks with snake oil sales tactics to make promises like this. This meeting was secret to Republicans because it was the sales meeting directives from Obama to Congress how to sell this foul package. Obama believes he can run automobile companies, sell cars, run banks, so why not, he is now a huckster for a lame bill for government run healthcare.  One day they talk of a duel system, the next a single payer system. To be sure, we will end up with a Canadian or UK type system that will be terrible if he has his way. This is an outrage. Republicans have no clue as to what is going on. Transparency right????

 

This announcement copied below was put out Tuesday, reports Wednesday morning have no elaboration other than to say the existing healthcare system is terrible and our lives are at stake???? Bernie Sanders is talking to any live microphone he can find saying that the Canadian or UK healthcare system is far superior to our existing system, but he adds that Democrats have even better news, the new healthcare system will put money in the pockets of the average citizen in the USA.  So this is clearly the shell game they are using, to give out outrageous statements about a better healthcare system for all with extra money in family budgets?  I have never imagined a more dishonest administration. The Obama people believe the American public as gullible and stupid.

 

Jim The Conservative

 

Top Democrats to attend White House meeting on health care

NAIC NewsWire | 06/02/2009

President Barack Obama is scheduled to meet with top Democratic lawmakers this week to discuss health care reform options. The president will meet with the leaders of the Senate panels responsible for writing the health bill in order to urge them to move quickly in passing the legislation. Also this week, the White House released a report showing that Obama’s health care proposals would add $2,600 to the income of the average family of four by 2020, a figure set to increase to $10,000 by 2030. New York Times, The (06/01)

CAP AND TRADE ANOTHER OBAMA NIGHTMARE COMING OUR WAY

When ever the Obama administration talks new programs it most often translates into how he plans to put a dent in the ever expanding deficits he has created for every American family. This is particularly so in that Obama has indicated that half of the deficits will be paid back in his first four years. This is complete nonsense to suggest he can do this and we must focus like a laser on everything this man says from this point forward. He cannot be trusted and cap and trade is a perfect example. The trickle down cost to a typical family will be at or more than $3,000. per year in new energy costs. Obama will not pay back the deficit, we taxpayers will, and it will get worse because this is only one way the Obama administration will extract dollars out of your wallets.

Remember, when government develops and sells a new tax, and cap and trade is nothing more than a shell game, it is a new taxing method, the income derived will be spent, it will probably not go against the deficits, that is a pipe dream, as these schemes are developed by Obama’s spin masters to satisfy their spending plans.

The Republicans would do well to tie in the cap and trade to the plans that Obama has to reduce the deficits, and this is how they can either defeat or make the cap and trade so undesirable to Obama’s people that they abandon it totally. At the same time they must get the message out that new expenses will impact each family as a result of cap and trade taxes. The Republicans must call cap and trade a tax which is what it is.

How did this idea get started, and the answer is switch and bate by Democrats, and their issue is carbon emissions. If you talk to real scientists, you will learn that Carbon has been around for billions of years, it is not destructive, in fact carbon is the foundation of much of the basis of life, and we might even harm nature if we remove carbon by any meaningful amount. We cannot do that, so this is nothing but a myth generated by Al Gore who probably generates more carbon footprints in his jet and massive home in Tennessee than any 100 families in America combined. This save the earth stuff is creating opportunities for snake oil salesmen and that is what this is all about. It is good that Republicans are doing energy summits but they need to tie in the actual truth of what the carbon issue is all about. It is about taxing the day lights out of each American family.

Now this Whitehouse tax machine is adding into cap and trade carbon emissions “AND OTHER GREEHOUSE GASSES”. This is because the argument has been raised that carbon is not as evil as the Whitehouse experts have suggested. So you see, the tax machine (Obama Whitehouse) has had to expand the notion beyond carbon as insurance against declining scientific evidence that carbon is not that harmful. Other gasses give them insurance that they have some kind of reason to tax the living daylights out of each citizen of this country when the carbon issue dies. Unbelievable how these spin machines reinvent their missions and there are endless new crisis ideas they will create to continue this bait and switch machine.

Of course this is elementary, but carbon is being blamed for global warming, but the concept of global warming is under attack as a non-provable problem, as seen in the literature of recent. Cycles can explain the ebb and flow of warming and cooling over a wide demographic period, therefore we are looking at a cap and trade program that may not be needed. There is no science yet that says carbon is harmful to humans or the earth other than it is blamed for man’s recent claims of global warming. Now because that myth is being questioned, why move forward with a cap and trade program that most likely will prove to be nonsense also.

The cap and trade would cost jobs, lots and lots of jobs, 2.3 Million to be expected, but this is a conservative figure, it could be more like 3.5 to 5 Million jobs lost, and these are permanent losses according to The Charles River Associates report in the WSJ referenced article below.

All of the Cap and Trade has to be viewed in context of a continuing Kyoto Protocol decision yet to be made, that is the next bomb to drop on global warming, so the Democrats are not discussing the Kyoto issue now, that is laying in wait for another day, a massive negative issue that will raise up again after the Democrats either get the Cap and Trade passed or not, another way to insult the American family with needless cost and economic hardship if Kyoto is passed in this country. Kyoto is the vehicle of most of the survivors of the communistic rulers who have lost their positions in USSR and Kyoto types of groups are their new home to pillage the world of economic dollars and benefit with their own personal wealth.

Of course what the public is not being educated on is that the Obama administration has lied and is shutting down any chance of meaningful exploration, discovery and drilling for existing petroleum within our borders, which is utter stupidity, at a time when we could be looking for new energy sources, but keeping our economy moving forward at the same time while using existing petroleum resources effectively. The Obama spin masters are practicing massive government re-engineering of the American economic system to extract what they will say is the payback tax needed to continue their appetite for spending massively.

And now a new Democratic initiative to hit your wallets, Value Added Taxes, 25% on goods and services, a European type tax is now being considered by Obama, an additional tax because he has to come up with some way to pay for his Universal Health Care plus the massive debt load already on the books. This alone will be devastating to families, and it would be on top of cap and trade, and other taxes that are planned. A VAT tax is evil more so because it is a stealth tax not seen by the public, it is added onto the price of goods and services and does not show up in a sales slip. European counties have imposed a VAT tax for years, and the public in Europe has become accustomed to it, but that does not make it viable in the USA.

I will have a new posting on this evil VAT Tax plan next. We can only deal with a certain amount of bad news in a given day. I am exhausted just with what I covered in this posting, I cannot take any more today.

Common sense seems to be a forgotten commodity in Washington these days.

Jim The Conservative

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/how-much-will-cap-and-trade-cost/

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123655590609066021.html

http://nordhaus.econ.yale.edu/dice_mss_091107_public.pdf

Thomas Wigley, “The Kyoto Protocol: CO2, CH4 and Climate Implications,” Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 25, No. 13 (1998), pp. 2285-2288.

http://www.upi.com/Business_News/2009/05/27/National-sales-tax-debate-begins-to-stir/UPI-41781243442014/

Timely Article On Freedom of Speech

As an inkling of where the more conservative bunch are here is an article by David Limbaugh, yes the Brother of Rush, but a credible journalist appearing in many newspapers nationally and a lawyer of good reputation. I send this recent article to you to expose you to what a major body of American voters think, and my view is that there is much to be learned in this article. When I say the more conservative bunch, I am talking not only of Republicans, but inclusive and of a wider percentage of the American voters than you might consider at first, including many very recent converts to more conservative views as a result of what is going on in Washington in the last three months. There are signs of many people moving more to the conservative side of things, or at a minimum to a more right position recently due to perceptions that Obama and his inner circle are and have been administering well to the left of his voters. In other words many who voted for change were angry at President Bush, but are now realizing that their anger at Bush for what ever reason justified or not has resulted in a much more leftist world then they imagined when they entered the voting booth in November of 2008. Obama has used these prior more conservative votes to his advantage and not to the advantage of moderates and conservatives generally.

This real shift will cause a massive shift back more toward the center in the next few years and must be recognized. The Obama inner circle are awakening to this and will do nothing short of illegal, if not taking morally bankrupt actions to nullify the message to the center and right of the center political world. This will include the FCC Targeting Conservative Radio, as well as using our taxpayer monies to bailout the leftist media that has lost readership due to the apparent leftist message they have been spewing to the dismay of a majority of Americans. Electronic media (Radio and Television) has shown in the last few years, but more so in the last few months a remarkable increased listenership while liberal electronic and more importantly print media has taken a dramatic nose dive and this is worthy of significant finding in the eyes of the Pew Foundations for Public Opinion and many other reliable sources. Capitalism is under direct attack by the far left, and this shakes the foundations of many Americans who understand that Capitalism has made this country the most successful country on earth, and they don’t want that jeopardized in any way shape or manner, and the Obama administration is perceived to be throwing dirt upon the capitalist concept daily. The tide is turning very quickly and will be growing as a large force in the very near future. The newly awakened moderates and conservatives will activate more forcefully against the far left policies of the Obama administration because they see damage developing to the business world and thus the capitalist world, damage that must be stopped.

It is clear that we are now seeing a President that understands how to divide the political spectrum far better than President Clinton attempted to do, Barack is grounded in his entire shaping and development in the far left world from childhood through adulthood. Unlike Clinton, Obama really hates this country and what it stands for, and his ardent leftist popularity is evidence of that, and this assessment of Obama is beginning to be seen for all to see at this point. Many are beginning to see his mythology in stating his disinterest of the Fairness Doctrine, then out of the shining light of openness he exacts the policy he wants without public knowledge. He knows how to manipulate far better than typical politicians. He claims openness and transparency, but he has in reality shown contempt for these concepts. People are becoming afraid of the major shift from the free enterprise and capitalist heritage we have seen for our generation as a working and successful venture overall not to be judged on the basis of one five or ten year period of time. This hard time will pass, but do we really need to massively change our country as Obama is attempting to do? I think not.

Jim The Conservative

Newsmax
FCC Chief Targeting Conservative Radio
Tuesday, May 12, 2009 10:13 AM
By: David Limbaugh Article Font Size

Of the dozens of reasons to be concerned about the ever-growing and unchecked power of the federal government under President Barack Obama, the upcoming assault against conservative talk radio may surpass them all.

It’s not enough that liberals dominate the executive and legislative branches, liberals are poised to control the judiciary, and, at liberals’ direction, government is absorbing ownership and control of large chunks of the private sector. They also must shut up the opposition.

We have genuine cause for alarm on multiple fronts — and actual alarm indeed exists among increasing numbers of people, not all of whom are predisposed to excitability.

The government has declared war on innocent life in the womb in the name of “free choice.” It is spending unconscionable amounts of money it doesn’t have and can’t possibly acquire without taxing the primary producers in this nation into abject servitude. It’s set to impose “cap and trade” taxes in the name of protecting an environmental threat that exists mostly in the data-resistant prisons of their ideological minds, which will yield no environmental benefit but will cause irreparable economic harm.

It has passed constitutionally repugnant and morally odious legislation, carving out new crimes for violent acts motivated by “hate” against certain protected groups. Neither military veterans nor conservative males are among the protected groups, but pedophiles very well may be.

The proscribed “hate” under the statute may not be “hate” at all, but mere political or theological disagreement with the view of the dominant media culture and the ruling class on, for example, the normalcy of homosexual behavior.

Meanwhile, this same ruling class and its enablers, who are so selectively indignant about certain majority opinions they mischaracterize as “hate,” openly bask in the kind of behavior no one can dispute rationally as hateful at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

The government, through President Obama, has trotted the globe, painting the United States, the most magnanimous nation in the history of the world, as an international pariah and disgrace for which he must presume to apologize.

The government would have prosecuted officials of the previous administration for conducting enhanced interrogation techniques they reasonably believed were legal (and the lawyers who furnished the legal opinions approving the techniques) until it discovered, with egg on its face, that in a recent case, an appellate court (and the Justice Department, in another) had endorsed the previous administration’s definition of torture.

The government threatens and intimidates creditors into transferring wealth to the administration’s friends in labor. It uses taxpayer money to fund nefarious enterprises, such as ACORN, to engage in widespread illegal activities designed to corrupt and skew the census, elections and other democratic processes as we watch, with mouths agape, seemingly powerless — for now — to stop it.

The government is a heartbeat away from nationalizing healthcare based on deliberate misinformation about the nation’s uninsured and despite the 100 percent failure rate of such fantastic reforms elsewhere on the globe.

This government has declared a false moral equivalence between the respective behaviors of democratic Israel and Palestinians committed to the extinction of Israel. It will attempt to force the Israelis to accept the twin suicidal concessions of relinquishing strategic real estate vital to its security and agreeing to the “return” of millions of Palestinian refugees. It appears to have abandoned any pretense of preventing Iran, a nation also committed to Israel’s extermination, from acquiring nuclear weapons while encouraging Israel, instead, to disarm.

But of all the unfolding outrages, I doubt any will ignite true patriots more than the imminent resurrection of the government’s war on conservative talk radio. If we can’t even express political dissent, the nation we’ve known as a bastion of individual liberty will be no more.

President Obama, in classic misdirection, has proclaimed that he will not support efforts to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine, through which the government would silence conservative talkers in the name of achieving “balance.”

But he doesn’t have to support the Fairness Doctrine to accomplish the same sinister goal when Congress and the Federal Communications Commission will do his dirty work for him. WorldNetDaily reports that Michael J. Copps, acting FCC chairman, has denounced the lack of racial and gender diversity in the broadcast industry as “a shameful state of affairs.” Unsurprisingly, his proposed corrective is to force the transfer of station ownership to greater numbers of minorities, who are statistically more likely to carry liberal talk shows.

Let the record reflect emphatically that conservatives never have tried to use government to shut down the liberal media monopoly in network television and major newspapers, under the deceitful pretense of achieving balance or otherwise.

Let the record also acknowledge that, if this administration presses forward with this overreach, it finally might jolt the complacent among us out of their stubborn naiveté and apathy.

David Limbaugh is a writer, author and attorney.