In February, groups representing the auto parts suppliers asked for a $25.5 billion bailout from the Treasury. Yesterday, the Treasury announced parts suppliers will receive about one fifth of that through Troubled Asset Relief Funds: The Treasury Department announced a $5 billion program to aid struggling auto-parts suppliers, raising the likelihood the government will extend more aid to General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC. The assistance expands the government’s intervention in the auto industry, which was kicked off by Treasury’s $17.4 billion in loans granted to GM and Chrysler in …
• President Obama’s budget presented at the end of February painted a picture of a fiscal trainwreck. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) today confirmed what many had suspected – the fiscal consequences of the President’s policies would be much worse. • The President is calling for massive tax increases equal to about $150 B a year by 2019. • He raises taxes not just on upper-income taxpayers as he promised, but on all Americans through his misnamed “climate revenues”, and as his budget indicates, this is just a starter program. …
Earlier this week, Russia issued a radical call for the eventual replacement of the dollar as an international reserve currency, and its replacement by a new, fiat currency to be created by a global regulator. The prospects for agreement on this at the G-20 summit in April, to put it politely, did not look promising. But now another voice has been heard from: China. And their reaction has been surprising. With their vast holdings in dollar-denominated securities, you would think they would oppose anything that would weaken the dollar. But …
Congress is rumored to be considering passing a cap-and-trade plan through budget reconciliation, which is a process that is only completed if there are special instructions passed in the budget resolution and requires a simple majority, rather than a 2/3rds vote to pass the Senate. Unfortunately, this action sets a very low bar for a high-cost, big-government bill such as cap-and-trade, but fortunately the Blue Dogs, a group of fifty-one fiscally conservative House Democrats, have warned that the reconciliation strategy is a bad idea. The budget reconciliation “is utilized when …
Whom It Really Targets The Hit List: H.R. 1586 retroactively taxes AIG employees who are due deferred compensation and would tax that compensation at a 90% rate. A Much Broader Sweep: Going forward, the bill also imposes a 90% federal tax rate on anyone employed by a company receiving $5 billion in TARP funds who has a family income over $250,000, individual income over $125,000 (if single or married but filing separately), or performance pay larger than adjusted gross income. What Defines a Bonus? Under H.R. 1586, a “bonus” is …
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GoK0539Gl4[/youtube]As Congress builds its target list with any wage earner who makes over $250,000 and is even slightly tied to a company recieving TARP funds, let’s not forget who modified the $800 billion stimulus bill to formally recognize these bonuses in the first place. And this from Larry Kudlow: What it really shows is how the government has completely bungled the AIG takeover. Blame the Bush administration and the Obama administration. It also shows, once again, why the government shouldn’t run anything, because it cannot run anything. AIG should have …
That’s a bit of an exaggeration. No serious person can deny the importance of the global financial crisis. We can only hope that the U.S. and Britain don’t get swept away by its urgency and agree to a lot of European and Russian proposals that would make it worse, and themselves poorer and less sovereign. But as bad as the financial crisis is, it’s not nearly as bad as the coming entitlements one. That’s the message the IMF, in its latest paper on “The State of Public Finances: Outlook and …
In Thursday’s outraged House debate on the AIG bonuses, House Republicans rallied around a different approach. Members of both parties in the House and Senate have taken the tack of proposing to tax these bonuses through targeted, retroactive taxation. This is the substance of the bill that passed the House Thursday by a wide margin. This kind of oppressive use of government power to thieve private property is so unprincipled as to make the past behavior of Wall Street tycoons seem saintly in comparison. The House Republicans, including minority leader …
Testifying before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform yesterday, Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (RAT board) inspector general Earl Devaney noted: “Logic would suggest there’s going to be a loss of money to fraud and waste with this amount of money going around.” Devaney even put a number to that logic, noting that if just 7 percent of the stimulus money went to waste, that would be $55 billion. “The first time I took a pencil and figured that out, I was horrified to see it was $55 …
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKlYT2bseII[/youtube]Before the Tonight Show aired last night, President Barack Obama called Special Olympics Chairman Tim Shriver to apologize for making fun of Special Olympic athletes during his jovial performance on the late night comedy show. This was the correct course of action for a very un-Presidential remark during a very un-Presidential appearance. However, President Obama should have apologized for his new tax-and-spend policies which will make it nearly impossible for the Special Olympics to raise the money necessary to continue operating at their heroic level. The President is reducing charitable …
