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POPSReport: 237 millionaires in Congress
Senators’ estimated median reportable worth sunk to about $1.79 million from $2.27 million in 2007. The House’s median income was significantly lower and also sank, bottoming out at $622,254 from $724,258 in 2007. But CRP’s analysis suggests that some lawmakers did well for themselves between 2007 and 2008, even as many Americans lost jobs and saw their savings and their home values plummet. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) gained about $9.2 million. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) gained about $3 million, Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) had an estimated $2.6 million gain, and Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) gained about $2.8 million. Some lawmakers have profited from investments in companies that have received federal bailouts; dozens of lawmakers are invested in Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America. Vice President Joe Biden has often tagged himself as an original blue collar man. The CRP backs him up, putting his net worth at just $27,000.
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POPSWall Street celebrates bonuses, schools beg for supplies We see stories like “Recession Pinches Back-to-School Budgets” http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/10/03/eveningnews/main5361456.shtml and “School budgets dip, class sizes grow” http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32156424/ns/us_news-education/ along with reports of Wall Street reaping fat bonuses after being bailed out with taxpayer dollars. Sure, the bailouts were necessary to keep the economy afloat. Or so we are led to believe. And while the wisdom of a Wall Street bailout is being debated there is no debate about whether or not our schools need more money. Should public schools needs be ranked second to Wall Street because schools don’t turn a profit? Actually, if your head is on straight, you can clearly see how schools do turn a profit, but you need to value education above making money in order to see it. If you do, here’s an online charity that connects you to classrooms in need: http://www.donorschoose.org/
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POPSSocial Security Surplus Dwindling The treasury department has dipped into social security to pay off other programs since the Reagan years, in 1983, Reagan raised the social security tax to offset his deficits, taking more than $40 billion per year from the fund. Now with the all the unemployment, bailouts, and war spending, it may run out sooner than expected.
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POPSObama Taps Bernanke (too big to fail) For Second Term
Bernanke said that if confirmed again by the Senate, he will pursue a “solid foundation for growth and stability” during a second four-year term and promised to work “to restore a more stable financial and economic environment in which opportunity can again flourish.” What’s unstated, of course, is the fact that in reappointing Bernanke, Obama is once again embracing the failed policies of his predecessor in the Oval Office: In re-appointing Bernanke to another four year term as Fed chairman, President Obama completes his embrace of bailouts, easy money and deficits as the defining characteristics of his economic agenda. Bernanke, along with Secretary Geithner (then New York Fed president) were the prime movers behind the bailouts of AIG and Bear Stearns. Rather than “saving capitalism,” these bailouts only spread panic at considerable cost to the taxpayer. As evidenced in his “financial reform” proposal, Obama does not see bailouts as the problem,
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POPSCould We Be Near the Big Collapse? The U.S. Treasury must sell a record net $2 trillion in new debt in 2009 to fund a $1.8 trillion projected fiscal deficit, resulting from falling tax revenues, an economic stimulus package and sundry bank bailouts.
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POPSHappy Cost of Government Day As a result, taxpayers have to work 224 days out of the year just to meet the cost imposed by all levels of government. As in previous years, this year’s report seeks to shed light on the burden government imposes on taxpayers. A new feature of the report is a series of case studies taking a closer look at some of the more recent spending initiatives and other proposals that are currently threatening taxpayers. For a broader perspective, for the first time, we have included several narratives authored by lawmakers and think tank representatives analyzing the cost of government at the state level. The recent federal spending spree paints a bleak picture for taxpayers. It started with the passage of the financial market bailout and continued with the “stimulus,” the $410 billion earmark-stuffed “omnibus,” the $3.55 trillion budget, and more bailouts leading to current threats of a national energy tax and a government takeover of health care.
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POPSObama's "Read my lips. No more taxes." Then Obama's National Economic Council director Lawrence Summers likewise said when asked about the middle-class tax hike on "Meet the Press" that it was "never a good idea to absolutely rule things out, no matter what." That's because Geithner and Summers both know that Obama's health care proposal is not a stand-alone item. In addition to unfunded Social Security and Medicare entitlements, bailouts and stimulus spending have already pushed the national debt to $37,813 for every man, woman and child in America. According to the IRS, the top 5 percent - which includes households earning more than $160,041 - already pays 60 percent of all federal income taxes. Even former Clinton Treasury official Leonard Burman admitted in a New York Times oped that "this idea that everything new that government provides ought to be paid for by the top 5 percent, that's a basically unstable way of governing." White House spokesman Robert Gibbs furiously backpedaled Monday . . . . .
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POPSBankers Reaped Lavish Bonuses During Bailouts Mr. Cuomo, who for months has criticized the companies over pay, said the bonuses were particularly galling because the banks survived the crisis with the government’s support. “If the bank lost money, where do you get the money to pay the bonus?” he said. All the banks named in the report declined to comment.
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POPSWhat do you call an economic stimulus that isn’t?
The author calls it a ‘really expensive, depressing yawn’. In keeping with my reputation of not being quite so polite, I’ll call it a colossal rip-off of taxpayer dollars in keeping with business as usual. Tax payers earlier this year were given a promise of 3.5 million new jobs as a part of the pitch to support business and state government bailouts. According to the Heritage Foundation, that translates to a promise that June’s total US employment would climb to 135.9 million. Never happened. Total employment is currently around 131.7 million (and falling). The only thing DC politicians’ so-called stimulus has legitimately produced (besides those yawns) is a net jobs deficit of 4.2 million. At the rate that our do-nothing Democratically-controlled congress is ‘progressing’, Republicans won’t need to come up with a new strategy to get back into the White House, it will be gladly handed to them. Provided all parties involved manage to stay awake until next November.
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POPSThe Economic 9/11: September 11th 2008 "Changed Everything" The Big Secret: The Economic Terrorist Attack Sept. 11, 2008 in New York City. An "electronic run on the banks" that almost led to total American and global financial collapse. Who was the "someone" behind the "electronic bank run" that almost collapsed America's economy, in the New York City financial district, center of international trade as well, on Sept. 11, 2008, between the hours of 9am and 11am, on the very anniversary of the 9/11 attack in the same city, and at the very same time? The Bailouts have received all the attention without giving due attention to this "catalyzing event" on 9/11/08 that precipitated the Economic Crisis and subsequent government response. It is an unspoken, but fully documented event, that receives no attention. Why not?
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POPSHow Much Does It Cost Taxpayers To Hire a New Federal Employee? Click through for how they calculated it. It's amazing that people still think that Obama's "created jobs" will help stimulate the economy. Why doesn't the pay Czar focus on Federal employees who cost taxpayers money and let private businesses decide how they spend their own money. I know, I know, Bailouts. Maybe Bailouts were a BAD idea to begin with!
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POPSBernanke warns on deficit Interpretation: The Fed passes the toxic debt ball back to the government, and washes its hands. The interesting thing is that if government is stuck with all the debt, the only way it can do this is to radically curtail its own activities. Libertarians and anarchists (and other advocates of local self-govenment) could, ironically, be the winners. On the other hand, it could be the banks and the multinationals.
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POPSObama Offers Security at the Expense of Liberty of paying federal income tax and eligible for occasional rebates. As CNN reporter Susan Roesgen said, "Don't you realize that you're eligible for a $400 tax cut?" In other words, take the money and shut up. Which brings to mind Tocqueville's warning: "Every measure which establishes legal charity on a permanent basis and gives to it an administrative form creates thereby a class unproductive and idle, living at the expense of the class which is industrious and given to work." The Obama administration is assiduous in the protection of this administrative class. It offers $6,800,000,000 to the state of California on one hand, and then threatens to take it back because the state cut the pay of public employee union members by $74,000,000. The government gives JPMorgan Chase $25,000,000,000, and then insists that it give up in the Chrysler deal what it would ordinarily receive in bankruptcy proceedings and turn it over to fund the health care benefits of United Auto Worker retirees.
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POPSOklahoma Claims Sovereignty: House Bypasses Governor’s Veto and the Democratic-controlled Congress, would not jeopardize federal funds but would tell Congress to "get back into their proper constitutional role.” The resolution states the federal government should "cease and desist” mandates that are beyond the scope of its powers. Key said many federal laws violate the 10th Amendment, which says powers not delegated to the U.S. government "are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” The Constitution lists about 20 duties required of the U.S. government, he said. Congress should not be providing bailouts to financial institutions and automakers, he said. "We give all this money to all these different entities, including automakers, and now they’re talking about, ‘Well maybe it’s better to let them go bankrupt,’” Key said. "Well, maybe we should have let them go bankrupt before we gave them the money.” To view video click on link: (1:00) http://feeds.newsok.tv/services/player/bcpid4659235001?bctid=22316113001
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POPSThe Real Culture War Is Over Capitalism 
, small business owners who don't want corporate welfare and bankers who kept their heads during the frenzy and don't need bailouts. They were the people who were doing the important things right -- and who are nowwatching elected politicians reward those who did the important things wrong. Voices in the media, academia, and the government will dismiss this ethical populism as a fringe movement -- maybe even dangerous extremism. In truth, free markets, limited government, and entrepreneurship are still a majoritarian taste. In March 2009, the Pew Research Center asked people if we are better off "in a free market economy even though there may be severe ups and downs from time to time." Fully 70% agreed, versus 20% who disagreed. The government has been abetting this trend for years by exempting an increasing number of Americans from federal taxation. My colleague Adam Lerrick showed in these pages last year that the percentage of American adults who have no federal income-tax liabi
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POPS Anatomy of A Meltdown It is important for people who believe in the free market and in a free society to know how to defend themselves, to know what the arguments are, in order that we might resist the expansion of government power that will take place using this crisis as a pretext. hen we are being told that free-market economists must have egg on their face because their cherished system has collapsed, it was followers of Ludwig Von Mises, F.A Hayek - the great so-called Austrian economists of the 20th Century - who were mostly likely to have predicted this crisis. Hayek won the Noble prize in economics for showing that government-established central banks like the Federal Reserve are an intervention into the free market. They are destabilizing, not stabilizing. And by tampering with interest rates and the free market system they cause entrepreneurs and consumers alike to commit massive errors that eventually hit the economy in the form of a major bust. http://www.thomasewoods.com/
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POPSQuestions I'd like 'Teabaggers to answer
clipped from Matt Taibbi's blog-he also went on to state that a number of people wrote and complained that the only reason he wasn't seeing eye to eye with them is that he has no children and therefore doesn't care about debt burden in the future-he went on to state that the only reason that children are in the debate at all is because about 95% of the people protesting the tax outrage will actually be getting a tax break-and til the question of why future government debt burdens didn't bother them during the last 8 years of massive deficit spending- the whole "O the children!" b.s. needs to be put on the back shelf-or why? is it ok to spend billions handing out soccer balls in the Anbar province-but a waste when we build bridges in Peoria and Tulsa-Matt wants to know-and i would like an answer to this as welland while most 'teabaggers are hypocrites-it doesn't necessarily make them wrong to question Obamas budget-just loose the victims of fascism and tyranny-or threats to secede
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POPSNYT Sues Fed and Treasury The Times accuses the government of violating FOIA by requiring an upfront agreement on fees and by not abiding by the time limits set under the Act.
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POPS GOP Gloves Off For Budget Brawl The principles in the Republican budget will sound familiar: “limits the federal budget from growing faster than the family budget, ... provides universal access to health care and secures entitlements, ... lowers taxes, ... keeps energy and fuel costs low, ... ends the bailouts and reforms the financial system, ... keep the cost of living low.” Pence and the other Republicans at the news conference rapped Democrats and Obama for offering housing proposals that are no more than “failed policies that reward bad behavior and massively expand government programs.” “Contrary to the administration’s straw man diversions, Republicans do have our own ideas,” Pence said. “These are solutions that are complementary and in some cases can replace what we believe are misguided attempts to try to do the same thing.”
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POPSEnd the Bailouts and Protect Capitalism Earlier this month, Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) forced a vote on the elimination of Congress’s automatic annual pay raises. After some political gamesmanship, the Senate tabled his amendment. Last week, though, senators rethought their opposition and passed Vitter’s bill by voice vote. Taxpayers cannot claim victory yet, though -- House leaders seem disinclined to take up the measure. Somehow I can picture Pelosi speaking to Reid about this, behind closed doors of course.
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POPSBailout fatigue The cumulative deficit during the same years would amount to $9.3 trillion, or $2.3 trillion more than the White House estimates. That should scare everyone, however we already know just how carefree the far left are, nothing frightens them except water boarding.
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POPSThere's Some Good News Despite The AIG Outrage than this crazy mark-to-market accounting would have us believe. Sharp-eyed banking analyst Dick Bove has argued that most bank losses have been non-cash — i.e., mark-to-market write-downs. Take those fictitious write-downs away and you are left with a much healthier banking picture. This is huge in terms of solving the credit crisis. In a column last week I suggested that not one more dime of government money is necessary for the banks. Instead, the marriage of the cash-flow valuation of bank assets and the upward-sloping Treasury yield curve will do the trick. Net interest margins are rising as banks purchase money for near-zero interest and loan it out at profitable rates. And the new mark-to-market reform will allow banks to hold their toxic assets for several more years and work them out — just as they did back in the 1990s.
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POPS13 firms receiving bailouts owe back taxes "The revelation is sure to spark outrage on Capitol Hill, where the House is expected to vote Thursday on a bill that would impose steep taxes on employee bonuses at firms that have received bailout money." "To date, the Troubled Asset Relief Program has paid out more than $300 billion to private companies, with billions more on the way."
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