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#teaparty
Here’s some photos from the tax-day Tea Party held near South Park mall in Moline, Illinois
Moline Tea Party
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Tags: ayn rand, capitalism and freedom, Economy, free market capitalism, freedom, galt, government, Illinois, Moline, Money, prosperity, Quad Cities, socialism, tax increases, taxes, Tea PartyHere’s some photos from the tax-day Tea Party held at 4th and Main in Davenport, Iowa.
Silent No More
Tags: ayn rand, capitalism and freedom, Davenport, Economy, free market capitalism, freedom, galt, government, Iowa, Money, prosperity, Quad Cities, socialism, tax increases, taxes, Tea PartyAre you wondering why things aren’t improving, why you have that queasy feeling in your gut as you watch your fellow workers getting laid off. Are you losing sleep as you worry about what you will do if your position is the next to go?
The following column by Dick Morris may help you understand. Put yourself in the shoes of a business owner or CEO and see if you can relate.
OBAMA‘S WORST JOBS-KILLER
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published in the New York Post on April 1, 2009
More than anything else, business needs a predictable environment if it is to create jobs. Changes in the regulatory environment and the tax code make it almost impossible for businesses to make investments.
Yet President Obama seems to ignore this reality. Each day’s news brings another bold and far-reaching proposal to change the fundamentals of the US economy. And each time he indulges his personal ideology with such a pronouncement, businesses all over the world cut back on their planned investment until the dust settles.
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Tags: business owner, dick morris, federal reserve chairman, investments, JOBS-KILLER, obama, paul volcker, recession, tax consequencesHaving just read Atlas Shrugged, the similarities of today’s headlines are amazing.
Caroline Baum seems to agree in her article:
Obama Needs AIG’s Liddy, Not Other Way Around
Commentary by Caroline Baum
March 19 (Bloomberg) —
Somewhere John Galt is smiling.
The hero of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” is smiling because he’s seen it all before: the government’s intervention in the private sector; the constraints placed on business in the name of the people; the desperation on the part of government bureaucrats when they realize their leverage is limited; and — this part is still fiction — the decision on the part of business leaders to walk away from the enterprises they built.
That’s all I could think about when I read that American International Group Inc., recipient of $173 billion in taxpayer funds, was paying out $165 million in bonuses to employees of its financial-products group, the poster boy for risk and greed.
The Obama administration, Congress and the public are outraged taxpayer dollars are going to enrich the folks who got us into this mess. So am I.
Members of Congress want to blame Edward Liddy, the former chief executive officer of Allstate Corp., who was recruited by former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson in September to steer AIG away from the shoals.
Liddy is paid $1 a year for his efforts. “My only stake is my reputation,” Liddy said in a March 16 open letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
His only crime, as far as I can tell, is inheriting compensation contracts providing for retention bonuses for certain AIG derivative traders, some of whom have left the company, and listening to lawyers on his options.
‘Directive 10-289’
Why should Liddy endure the public’s wrath for the sake of his reputation, which lawmakers will destroy in a heartbeat to save their own hides? Youwalkaway.com isn’t an option just for homeowners who owe more on their mortgage than their house is worth.
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Tags: ayn rand, caroline baum, government bureaucrats, john galt, obama, taxpayer dollars, taxpayer fundsHere’s another interesting video from: www.freedomandprosperity.org
President Obama wants Congress to dramatically expand the burden of government spending. This CF&P Foundation mini-documentary explains why such a policy, based on the discredited Keynesian theory of economics, will not be successful. Indeed, the video demonstrates that Obama is proposing – for all intents and purposes – to repeat Bush’s mistakes. Government will be bigger, even though global evidence shows that nations with small governments are more prosperous.
Tags: bush, Economy, keynesian theory of economics, obama, policy, President Obama, stimulusBased on a theory known as Keynesianism, politicians are resuscitating the notion that more government spending can stimulate an economy. This mini-documentary produced by the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation examines both theory and evidence and finds that allowing politicians to spend more money is not a recipe for better economic performance.
Tags: economic performance, Economy, freedom, government spending, keynesian economics, Keynesianism, Money, politicians, prosperity, stimulusby Michael D. Tanner
Michael D. Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author of The Poverty of Welfare: Helping Others in Civil Society and other books.
This article appeared in the New York Post on February 13, 2009
“On the Dole Again”
Much of the “stimulus” bill is devoted to a backdoor undoing of one of Washington’s greatest achievements of recent years – welfare reform.
Tags: cato institute, Lyndon Johnson, michael d tanner, poverty rate, stimulus bill, war on poverty, welfare dependency, welfare reformHere’s an old (2000) article about the effects of the Community Reinvestment Act on Cities: “The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities”
The Clinton administration has turned the Community Reinvestment Act, a once-obscure and lightly enforced banking regulation law, into one of the most powerful mandates shaping American cities—and, as Senate Banking Committee chairman Phil Gramm memorably put it, a vast extortion scheme against the nation’s banks. Under its provisions, U.S. banks have committed nearly $1 trillion for inner-city and low-income mortgages and real estate development projects, most of it funneled through a nationwide network of left-wing community groups, intent, in some cases, on teaching their low-income clients that the financial system is their enemy and, implicitly, that government, rather than their own striving, is the key to their well-being.
The CRA’s premise sounds unassailable: helping the poor buy and keep homes will stabilize and rebuild city neighborhoods. As enforced today, though, the law portends just the opposite, threatening to undermine the efforts of the upwardly mobile poor by saddling them with neighbors more than usually likely to depress property values by not maintaining their homes adequately or by losing them to foreclosure. The CRA’s logic also helps to ensure that inner-city neighborhoods stay poor by discouraging the kinds of investment that might make them better off.
Read more here: “The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities”
Excerpts from the Wall Street Journal piece The Obama Rosetta Stone
The piece refers to “A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America’s Promise. The President’s Budget and Fiscal Preview” This is the U.S. budget for laymen, and it’s a must read.
Mr. Obama made clear in the campaign his intention to raise taxes on this income class by letting the Bush tax cuts expire. What is becoming clearer as his presidency unfolds is that something deeper is underway here than merely using higher taxes to fund his policy goals in health, education and energy.
I’ve been using TweetDeck to search for mentions of “Galt” in all the posts on Twitter. Coming up with some interesting stuff such as this post on the Motly Moose.
What, haven’t you heard? It’s the new thing. Thanks to Obama‘s crushing tax policies, America is now punishing awesomeness and success! What the hell are they thinking?? This is Econ 101 people, punish success and people will stop being successful. More specifically, I, and dozens of my brethren will stop being successful, on purpose, to prove how foolish these policies are!
See, this visionary, Ayn Rand, wrote a really prophetic book, where the brilliant, creative awesome overclass just got tired of carrying the “looters and moochers” (technical terms folks, shrug it off). These wunderkinds move away to a sort of uber-creative Shangri-La, and ROFL lustily while the leaderless, idea-strapped society crumbles behind them.
Check it out: turns out that some completely nonpartisan think tank, the Tax Foundation, figured out a way to tell who the moochers were, and summarized it in this brilliant chart:
Holy Grover Norquist, Batman! In a nutshell, anyone above about 60k is “carrying” anyone below 60k.
Read more at Motley Moose – gettin’ my Galt on
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