Recipes for Disaster

Obama's plan for a green economic recovery began to emerge today. Far from creating burgeoning recovery, this plan will throttle the private sector and thwart real, sustained growth. Part of the plan will be to green two million homes. People worrying about where their next meal is coming from aren't going to be overly concerned with solar panels. What is needed is a lower capital gains tax, lower marginal tax rates or a flat or fair tax or a national sales tax with Federal income tax eliminated, and Bush's other tax cuts made permanent. Corporate taxes could be done away with to end double taxation. No wage or price controls are needed. No massive New Deal-style WPA programs need to be initiated. The private sector will create plenty of jobs if America lowers the capital gains tax rate which is already the second highest in the world or eliminates capital gains tax altogether. Energy supplies need not be green just cheap and reliable and this could be accomplished by allowing more oil drilling domestically and more refineries to be built, clean coal-fired plant construction and new nuclear plants. Jobs would thus be created in useful public projects rather than make work. Boutique-blend gasoline, now tailored with dozens of specific blends forced to be sold in different areas, should be eliminated with one standard across the country to enable refineries to produce a consistent fuel available everywhere and with lower costs associated with not having to duplicate effort. The fourteen(14) states that Obama is going to allow to mandate their own air-quality standards will only put paid to the American automotive industry as private enterprise just as having different weight and measure standards would make it impossible to operate business across state lines. Another formula for international disaster is being propounded by Jimmy Carter who simply refuses to recognize that good and evil exist and that the world's jihadists will stoop to any degree of savagery and barbarism to defeat the West. Israel is one of the front lines in the battle against Muslim extremism which is only willing to make temporary compromises to advance Jihad and has absolutely no interest in enduring peace. Carter, who unleashed this demon by not backing the Shah of Iran and permitting the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini, does not see any moral distinction between those who seek to live in peace with all their neighbors and those who would gladly cut their neighbors throat because the neighbor would not adopt Islam. Judaism does not seek to convert anyone, has never converted by the sword, and does not murder people for apostasy. The Iranian Shias are caught in an end-time cult that wants to bring back the Mehdi by sparking destruction and chaos similar to that envisioned in the Book of Revelations, and the Sunni Wahhabis, who spawned al Qaeda and gave us Bin Laden, will use all measure of violence to convert or kill those who believe differently. Jimmy Carter is no innocent abroad, he is an active ally of evil who seems to hold the same particular disdain for Jews that his brother Billy did.

Collapse Is Inevitable

The bell is tolling for the US economy and any bailout now will only postpone the day of reckoning. Only after bad debt and economic chicanery (as in Madoff) are purged and the catharsis of cleansing takes place can true recovery begin. Until then, TARP and the automobile company (UAW) bailout are forestalling catastrophe but in so doing, feeding inflation with the potential even for hyperinflation approaching levels of Wiemar Germany or Zimbabwe. The financial institutions simply could not be allowed to fail because they underpin the entire economy. The financial system had to be buttressed to sustain all the other industries which were contingent on it. Inconsistency in saving some firms but allowing others, as in the venerable Lehman Bros. to fail, fed the instability. Markets need predictability and investors can't afford chaos. Foreclosures are in some cases the sole fault of the borrowers, but other unwary home buyers were duped and deserve some consideration from government. As for GM and Chrysler, they had such legacy costs that the UAW had to make concessions. There may be a case for some level of protectionism where currency manipulation as in the Chinese Yuan has taken place and where the American worker faces competition from what is essentially slave labor. Automotive workers and others laboring in manufacturing can and should not be expected to work for slave wages such as those provided by companies in China, Vietnam, and even Mexico. The green and New Deal-type measures Obama is proposing have no prospect of bringing the nation out of recession and Obama's suggested tax cut is too small and directed too narrowly to cure what ills.