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Obama touts right-to-work NC manufacturing?
Posted by hpayne on February 13, 2013
On his first post-State of the Union whistle stop, pro-union, anti-right-to-work President Obama came to Linamar Corporation outside Asheville, North Carolina. Somehow Obama’s advance team missed this: Linamar is a non-union shop in a right-to-work state.
“I believe we attract new jobs to America by investing in new sources of energy and new infrastructure and the next generation of high-wage, high-tech American manufacturing,” said the president to Canadian-owned Linamar’s 160 workers. “And that’s why I wanted to come down here to Asheville, because there’s a good story to tell here.”
But Linamar didn’t open in an abandoned Volvo plant two years ago because of Obama’s federal spending initiatives. It opened here because North Carolina is a right-to-work state – a fact that union puppet Obama and his party vehemently oppose. Indeed, Obama’s National Labor Relations Board has fought manufacturing firms like Boeing from moving to right-to-work South Carolina.
Linamar’s biggest North Carolina customer is Big Labor-enemy #1 Caterpillar Corporation which has brought a steady drumbeat of manufacturing jobs to the right-to-work south (part of a “southern strategy”that unions loath) – and away from Obama’s Big Labor Illinois Midwest. That should be a lesson not only to President Obama – but also to Michiganians who recently made their state more competitive with right-to-work legislation.
“Right to work is something we talk about in our marketing,” says Ben Teague, a spokesman for the Asheville Chamber of Commerce who confirms that both Caterpillar and Linamark officials like North Carolina’s labor climate. “We fell it is a competitive edge. It means you get workers that want to work at a reasonable wage.”
The president seems remarkably ignorant of this reality.
“I mentioned this last night — Caterpillar, which I know you guys supply, they’re bringing jobs back from Japan,” the president told the non-union Linamark crowd. “We’re seeing this trend of what we call insourcing, not just outsourcing. And the reason is because America has got outstanding workers. ”
Yes, outstanding workers – but in particular, outstanding NON-UNION workers in right-to-work states like North Carolina. That’s what’s driving insourcing.
Payne: Expand Michigan Medicaid … or else
Posted by hpayne on February 12, 2013
“The federal government isn’t going to protect the states that didn’t expand,” said Michigan Budget Director John Nixon last week in explaining before incredulous Michigan lawmakers why a Republican administration was partnering with the Obama White House to voluntarily expand the voracious Medicaid program to 133 percent of the poverty line.
The Snyder administration? The same nerds that made corralling long-term state liabilities their No. 1 budget priority have now embraced Medicaid expansion, the mother of all long-term liability threats?
But while Gov. Rick Snyder’s plan faces opposition from his own party, it is also a rational decision given the raw political power that Obamacare wields. That coercion is already on display in Washington’s forced insurance mandate on individuals and forced contraceptive mandate on religious institutions. Nixon’s candor exposes the further threat of nationalized health care to the bottom lines of state governments and businesses — and the staggering bill to the federal taxpayer as those entities offload their costs to Washington.
“This makes sense for the physical and fiscal health of Michigan,” said the relentlessly positive governor in announcing Medicaid expansion to 470,000 Michiganians. “Expansion will create more access to primary care providers, reduce the burden on hospitals and small businesses, and save precious tax dollars.” In truth, Snyder’s expansion is a political calculation to transfer costs to Washington (where money apparently grows on trees) and position the state for the inevitable cost overruns of the future.
Medicaid has long given states spending discretion, but nationalization is narrowing those options. For example, Michigan has opted to provide mental health coverage for Medicaid recipients even as it has only covered citizens up to 50 percent of the federal poverty line. By agreeing to Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, Michigan has negotiated to offload all mental health costs to Washington at a savings of $200 million a year (which Snyder would put in a savings account to cover its estimated $1.3 billion-by-2022 Medicaid expansion costs).
Furthermore, Washington will cover 100 percent of the costs of Michigan’s expansion of Medicaid to 133 percent of the federal poverty line for the first few years, but the state will have to pick up 10 percent of the costs by 2020. But that still leaves a “gap,” as state Medicaid analyst Farah Hanley puts it, of 250,000 residents caught between Michigan’s 50 percent of poverty coverage and the feds’ 100-plus percent.
No sweat. Washington picks up that tab, too — bringing the federal commitment for covering just Michigan’s expansion to a breathtaking $2.5 billion a year in perpetuity (and that’s assuming correct estimates in a program notorious for cost overruns. Example: In 1987, Medicaid’s bill for hospital relief program was projected at $1 billion by 1992. Actual cost: $17 billion).
Isn’t Snyder cautious about hooking up with such an unreliable business partner? After all, the White House has already floated the idea of welching on its 90 percent-by-2020 match for a “blended” share instead. The Heritage Foundation calculates that this would balloon Michigan’s commitment to $2.8 billion a year by 2022 instead of the anticipated $1.3 billion. Goodbye, Michigan savings account.
That’s where Nixon’s comment about the feds only protecting states that expand comes in. If and when costs explode, Michigan will need protection.
“Expansion will create more access to primary care providers, (reducing) the burden on hospitals,” says Snyder. But he surely knows that is unlikely. Indeed, Massachusetts has seen hospital visits increase since Romneycare brought a similar state Medicaid expansion. Why? Chronic doctor shortages — caused by Medicaid only reimbursing doctors at 60 cents on the dollar — force patients to emergency rooms for treatment.
Significantly, Snyder made his expansion announcement flanked by hospital and business representatives. Big Hospital was one of the primary lobbies behind Obamacare because — you guessed it — health care reform sends them more federal dollars. And Michigan businesses, like the state, are badly exposed to Obamacare’s mandates. If the state doesn’t expand Medicaid to 133 percent of poverty, businesses will be mandated to cover the costs.
Under Obamacare’s protection racket, states and businesses — which must balance their budgets — shift their costs to Washington. At least until 2045 when, Heritage calculates, entitlements consume all federal revenue. Then what?
State of warmed-over Obamanomics
Posted by hpayne on February 12, 2013
President Obama’s State of the Union address was billed as an economic call to arms, but the economic portion was curiously flat, lacking inspiration. Only when he addressed social issues – immigration, women in the military, gun control – did his voice gain feeling.
True to his activist roots, this is a president passionate about social justice – and cold to job growth.
Though America is in pain, suffering the worst recovery since WW2, stubbornly high unemployment, and record gas prices, Obama’s economic solutions lacked conviction – they felt rote, a re-warmed serving of four years of leftovers. He talked about more green money for his crony capitalist friends, about the upper class religion of global warming. Nowhere in his speech did he talk of the unemployed coal miner, or the Teamster driver who would benefit from the Keystone pipeline, or the small businessman crushed by Obamacare regulations (indeed, GOP Senator Marco Rubio did a much better job at connecting to the working man and the immigrant laborer who comes to America to escape big government).
Obama saved that compassion for the grieving family of a Chicago teen, killed in a drive-by gang shooting. That passion is important, as is his call for inner city fathers to step up to parenthood, and for better education.
But those are issues best addressed locally. Before all else, America needs Washington leadership on job-killing regulations and debt issues that are hurting the middle class to the tune of $4000 in lost wages since Obama became president.
President Flim Flam’s defining weekend
Posted by hpayne on February 2, 2013
A brief look in the rearview mirror, please.
It will forever be known as the weekend that President Obama played golf with Tiger Woods. But the jarring incongruity between President Hope vs. President Flim Flam will always define February 15-16 for this writer.
On Friday, February 15th, the president gave a speech in Chicago – three days after his State of the Union Address – in which he championed a 24 percent hike in the minimum wage to $9 an hour. The initiative was roundly panned by economists as the Minority Youth Unemployment Act (to borrow the Wall Street Journal’s memorable headline). Such is the experience of minimum wage hikes – it destroys opportunities for youth, especially teens in competitive labor markets like Chicago and Detroit.
Linda Gobler, President of the Michigan Grocers Association, says the president’s plan would be devastating to young people.
“Minimum wage hikes always hit our industry hardest,” she told me that week. “The retail food industry is a huge employer of young people. But it is an industry with 1 percent profit margins, so government wage hikes do a particular disservice to youth job opportunities. Grocers are the first employers of young people in school. We cringe when we see these increases in the minimum wage.”
No matter. President Obama surely knows these facts. The last such mandate in 2009 has led to record teen unemployment. But he wants the minimum wage as a political issue (62 percent of the public supports it and Big Labor demands it as a collective bargaining floor), not an employment issue.
Having thrown youth under the bus, Obama then jetted off to Florida to play golf with his One Percent cronies. Of course, that’s not how the media reported it. The White House press pool was in a snit over not getting celebrity pics of Obama’s golf date with Tiger Woods.
But as TCPalm.com reported, it was the White House that asked to use the exclusive Floridian golf resport in Palm Beach. Obama wanted some private vacation time to play with his rich pals – including Eric Whitaker of Chicago; Tony Chase, a Houston businessman and fundraiser for Obama; and Milton Carroll, a Houston energy exec who is also an Obama donor.
“We got a call a week or so ago and asked if we’d be receptive to having him there,” said Jim Crane, owner of the Floridian and the Houston Astros, told Major League Baseball.com. “And we said, ‘Certainly, it would be an honor to have him there.’” And who is Jim Crane? He is the founder of a private equity firm named Crane Capital.
Rhymes with Bain Capital.
From job-killing minimum wage advocacy to golfing at a resort owned by a private equity tycoon – a profession Obama demonized during the 2012 campaign. Forty-eight hours that define a cynical presidency.
– See more at: http://blogs.detroitnews.com/politics/2013/02/26/president-flim-flams-defining-weekend/#sthash.N8LgKs1s.dpuf
Detroit to Appalachia: Obama’s incomplete journey
Posted by hpayne on January 29, 2013
“Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia, to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for and cherished and always safe from harm.”
— President Barack Obama, second Inaugural address, Jan. 21, 2013
That line, delivered a week ago by President Obama at the emotional height of his speech has stuck with me.It was powerful; it was a nod on Martin Luther King Day to MLK’s iconic “I have a Dream” speech (“Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. . . “); it was a call to help the needy among us.
And it was totally empty.
The president’s tenure has been notable for his avoidance of the nation’s most pressing problems — the economy, inner-city violence — while forcing political goals —- national health care, global warming regulations. The “streets of Detroit” line is typical of this president’s rhetorical window-dressing fronting for a political machine hell-bent on consolidating Democratic power. Where has he been on violent inner cities? On coal families?
At its best, his administration has ignored these problems — at worst it has declared war on the coal miners of Appalachia.
The president couched his re-election campaign as important so “that the wealthiest corporations and individuals can’t take advantage of loopholes and deductions that aren’t available to most Americans.”
In truth, he has given disproportionate attention to big special interests. His signature health care law was written by the Big Hospital and Big Pharma lobbies. He has extended billions to politically-connected, green, mega-corporations such as LGChem and Solyndra, and so on.
This is indeed a historically significant president — not in the service of the “the little guy” but in uniting Big Government and Big Business to alter the country’s political balance of power.
Take Detroit and Appalachia.
To Obama, Motown meant Big Labor and a key to securing Michigan and Ohio electoral votes. Meanwhile, he has ignored a metropolis that in 2012 recorded a staggering 52 murders per 100,000 citizens.
Underlying Detroit’s slaughter is a child illegitimacy crisis exacerbated by federal welfare programs. These programs also afflict Appalachia (this writer’s backyard). After a visit to rural Kentucky (where illegitimacy birthrates hover at 50 percent), liberal New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof observed:
“Antipoverty programs . . . discourage marriage: In a means-tested program like (Supplemental Security Income), a woman raising a child may receive a bigger check if she refrains from marrying that hard-working guy she likes. Yet marriage is one of the best forces to blunt poverty. In married couple households only one child in 10 grows up in poverty, while almost half do in single-mother households.”
From left to right, public policy activists tell me they dream that Obama, a model husband, would use his celebrity status to celebrate marriage. At a White House event honoring the NBA champion Miami Heat this week, the president made an off-hand comment about basketball stars like LeBron James and Dwayne Wade, who take “their roles as fathers seriously.” What if that was the basis of a public service campaign rather than a throw-away line at a Washington photo-op? Unaddressed, the illegitimacy crisis dooms another generation of children to poverty.
Worse for Appalachia, his administration has declared a War on Coal that is crippling working families. Thousands of miners have lost their jobs thanks to EPA anti-global warming regulations that all but eliminate future coal plant construction.
The tragedy of the Obama presidency has been that one of the most inspiring individuals in U.S. history has used that capital for political ends — not for addressing America’s most urgent problems.
Detroit Auto Show, Detroit Irony Show
Posted by hpayne on January 22, 2013
Call it the Most Ironic Car in Show.
In the north lobby of Cobo Hall, visitors to The Detroit Auto Show this week will find the VL Destino, a Fisker Karma with its electric motor guts ripped out. . . and a gas-guzzling, supercharged, 638 HP Corvette ZR1 engine bolted in its place. Silicon Valley’s green carmakers have boasted that they are the future — and Detroit automakers are dinosaurs. So the fact that successful Detroit industrialist Gilbert Villareal would take the politically correct Fisker — at a time when the overdesigned, overweight Karma is struggling with production — and make it MORE competitive in the four-door sports
car market against the likes of the Porsche Panamera and Aston Martin Rapide is rich in irony.
Even more delicious is that the “L” in VL is for Villareal’s partner Bob Lutz, iconic Detroit car guy and father of GM’s Chevy Volt plug-in electric car. Like the Karma, the sales-challenged Volt was hailed as the future. Is the Destino Lutz’s mea culpa? Is the notorious global warming critic (Lutz once called warming a “crock of s***”) thumbing his nose at coastal elites who have poured millions into electric startups like Fisker?
But the Karma-turned-Destino is just the tip of the irony iceberg.
The auto show’s opening also marks the first week of President Obama’s second term, a term gained in part on Obama’s class warfare against America’s upper class. In staring down the GOP at the fiscal cliff earlier this month, the president reiterated his campaign promise to bring “reforms to our tax code so that the wealthiest corporations and individuals can’t take advantage of loopholes.”
Yet the auto show reveals a Robin Hood presidency that has taken from the middle class and given to the rich.
Begin with Fisker founder Henrik Fisker, designer of chariots for the well-to-do, who, despite the struggles of the $100,000 Karma, gained a $529 million loan from Obama’s Energy Department to build the Fisker Nina, a $50,000 electric sedan aimed at consumers of the BMW 5-series. Buyers will get a further $7,500 subsidy for their new toy, just as wealthy celebrities like Leo DiCaprio and Justin Bieber did when they bought their six-figure Karmas.
The Volt’s wealthy consumer demographic, including Michigan’s own millionaire Senator Carl Levin, also get the $7,500 lollypop. The Volt shares a platform with the cheaper, 42-mpg, $20,000 Chevy Cruze Eco. But middle-class Eco buyers get no tax break for their fuel-sipping purchase.
Another electric carmaker, Tesla, occupies prime real estate at the Detroit show. Most show-goers won’t be able to afford its products but they are financing them nonetheless. Billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk, number 190 on Forbes list of wealthiest Americans with an estimated net worth of $2.4 billion, received a $465 million federal loan to build his $60,000 Model S luxury sedan.
The show floor is also littered with NASCAR models. NASCAR’s International Speedway Corp., which owns tracks including Michigan International Speedway, is a favorite of Obamacrats such as Michigan’s Senator Debbie Stabenow who snuck in a $78 million tax break for it in the fiscal cliff legislation. Indeed, the $68 billion in cliff tax breaks Obama helped shepherd to Big Businesses such as NASCAR, GE and Goldman Sachs will spend all of the $62 billion raised in 2013 by hiking taxes on incomes over $400,000.
The final irony? In 2007, candidate Obama came to Cobo Hall and predicted he would transform the automobile if elected president. “The auto industry is on a path that is unacceptable and unsustainable,” the Harvard lawyer lectured a roomful of auto executives. Five years later, and his expensive, taxpayer-funded electrics are struggling while the industry has ridden gas-powered SUVs and sedans back to profitability.
And Corvette engines are powering Fiskers.
State of the State: The Party of Big Business?
Posted by hpayne on January 17, 2013
“Who here would like to return to Michigan in 2009?” asked Governor Snyder to a silent House chamber in Wednesday’s State of the State address. Apparently, House Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer.
The Democratic Senate Minority Leader’s Democratic response was fiercely partisan – if apparently delivered from an alternative universe. “Unemployment has gone up, while paychecks have gone down,” she complained of Snyder’s two years in office.
Huh? Michigan’s unemployment rate when Snyder took office was 11.7 percent (14.2 percent in 2009). Today it stands at 8.9. The state’s per capita income is up – growing at the 9th fastest pace in the union.
But Whitmer’s central theme – echoing the Obama- in-2012 campaign – is that the Gateway CEO-turned-guv has “favored the bottom line of corporations over the middle class.”
The evidence is otherwise. Under Jennifer Granholm, Democrats pursued an economic policy narrowly tailored to politically-connected Big Business. Tax breaks went to the few at the expense of the many: Big Wind firms, Big Battery companies like LGChem and A123 Systems, and Big Hollywood filmmakers (including a million smackaroos to 99 Percent advocate Michael Moore).
By contrast, Snyder’s tax breaks target all businesses: His repeal of the Michigan Business Tax, personal property tax, and onerous regulations (over 1000 eliminated in 2012 alone) have benefited all, not just the privileged few. Combined with right-to-work’s historic passage and Snyder has hung out a “Welcome Jobs” sign on Michigan’s front door.
State of the State: Snyder’s Detroit outreach
Posted by hpayne on January 17, 2013
Detroit pundits were quick to pounce on Governor Snyder’s apparent snub of Detroit in his State of the State remarks. True, Snyder steered clear of the city’s financial and criminal crises. No doubt, the state’s sensitive negotiations with the city over a financial manager had something to do with his decision. But a closer look at the speech reveals a governor very much engaged in solving the problems holding Detroiters back. Too bad that Snyder – like Mitt Romney before him – doesn’t understand their political value as well.
Both of Snyder’s guests of honor – young black men standing proud in the visitors’ gallery – highlighted education and job training initiatives essential to struggling Detroiters.
Snyder introduced young Kenta Roberts, a Detroit student who has benefited from One Tough Nerd’s controversial Education Achievement Authority (EAA), a program set up to isolate – and address – Detroit’s lowest-performing schools in order to better prepare their kids for college.
Despite the EAA’s efforts to help Detroit’s most vulnerable children, union-bound Democrats have fiercely resisted its reforms – including a Detroit school board vote to withdraw from the state-run authority. “I urge every legislator to take the opportunity early this year to visit the EAA schools, talk to students, parents and teachers, and see the transformation,” said Snyder in his address.
The governor also introduced Anton Stinson-Winters, an East Detroiter who has benefited from the Summer Youth Employment Initiative (SEI)- a state program designed to give underprivileged youth (in this case ages 16 to 19) employment opportunities.
Both programs are evidence that the ONLY party committed to changing Detroit’s status quo is the GOP. Yet, Republicans like Snyder have been shy to celebrate this fact. From charter schools to EAA innovation, GOPers would go a long way to changing black voters minds about Republicans if they trumpeted the stories of Kenta Roberts and Anton Stimson-Wintersevery single day.
State of the State: The Snyder model
Posted by hpayne on January 17, 2013
What was remarkable about tonight’s State of the State address from Governor Rick Snyder was how unremarkable it was.
The state’s budget is balanced without tricks or gimmicks, its long-term liabilities are under control, and there is $500 million in the state rainy day fund. Even the “controversial” portion of One Tough Nerd’s speech – that he wanted to raise road user fees – was not controversial (user fees are a dedicated revenue stream to pay for essential government services).
Yet just two years ago, the state could take none of these fundamentals for granted. Under Jennifer Granholm, the state budget was in perpetual budget crisis, its governor substituted class warfare for serious pension or health cost liabilities reform, and the state’s rainy day fund was nearly threadbare with just $2 million in the cookie jar.
What was once Michigan’s dysfunction is now the nation’s.
President Barack Obama has followed the Granholm formula to a tee, and today Washington is in perpetual crisis, steered by an executive more interested in scoring political points than government fundamentals. “We’re a role model,” cheered Snyder in his SOS speech. “Washington should follow the model we’re using here. We do things right.”
In truth, one-third of Washington is following the Snyder model – the Republican-controlled House, which has passed budgets as well as proposed solutions for long-term entitlement liabilities (typically, Nerd the Non-partisan refuses to give his own party credit). Meanwhile, President Granholm II and his Democratic Senate have failed to pass a budget in three years.
If America has wanted a Michigan model, it would have elected the Nerd’s twin, Mitt Romney.
Payne: Media-induced warming
Posted by hpayne on January 9, 2013
Just in time for the Detroit Auto Show, America’s news media is hysterically trumpeting “the hottest year ever” in the United States to advance a leftist agenda forcing ever more costly emissions regulations on vehicles – and the larger economy.
“The numbers are in: 2012, the year of a surreal March heat wave, a severe drought in the Corn Belt and a huge storm that caused broad devastation in the Middle Atlantic States, turns out to have been the hottest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States,” begins the relentlessly alarmist A1 New York Times story of January 9.
Whatever happened to global warming?
Just across the pond, England recorded the second coldest year since 1996 (behind the record-low temperatures of 2010) – including the unusually cold and wet weather of the 2012 London Olympics. Global freezing, anyone?
As the England weather indicates, the Times is cherry-picking weather facts to advance its climate agenda. In fact, as the Times less sensationalistic cousin, the London Telegraph reports, GLOBAL temperatures have stopped rising in defiance of the Left’s fevered predictions.
“A new scientific model has revised previous figures for the next five years downwards by around a fifth,” reports the paper. “This figure is little higher than the 0.40C recorded in 1998, the warmest year in the Met Office Hadley Centre’s 160-year record ” suggesting global warming will have stalled in the intervening two-decade period.”
Oh.
Climate is a lot more complicated than hyperventilating reporters would have you believe. Yes, the world is getting hotter – as it emerges from the Little Ice Age of the mid-19th century. The Times wants you to believe that this is caused by SUVs. But separating natural climate variability from man-made contributions is very difficult indeed – with the 2oth century full of weather swings like the U.S. felt in 2012.
Most importantly, it doesn’t make a bit of difference. Even if the media’s U.N.-led objective of 80 percent CO2 cuts by 2050 were enacted, the estimated temperature rise would be reduced by a mere 7 percent – at crippling economic cost.
Payne: Stabenow’s cliff breaks for the rich
Posted by hpayne on January 7, 2013
Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow champions herself as a friend of the working class – but when it came to the fiscal cliff, she was saving her Big Business pals first.
Stabenow was first in line at the trough as the White House and Senate loaded the cliff bill with corporate goodies.
“Michigan Democrat Debbie Stabenow was able to retain an accelerated tax write-off for owners of Nascar tracks (cost: $78 million) to benefit the paupers who control the Michigan International Speedway,” reports The Wall Street Journal editorial page. Other beneficiaries included GE, Goldman Sachs, and Star-Kist Tuna.
While Stabenow also applauded the $400k individual tax rate hike, her corporate cronies were cheerleading with her – because small business people with Subchapter S Corps. are more likely hammered by such rate hikes. Meanwhile, publicly-traded Big Business got a break on dividend taxes – and all that yummy pork.
Alex Brill, a former aide to GOPers on the House Ways and Means Committee, explains that many questionable tax breaks – like the motorsports benefit backed by International Speedway Corp. and Stabenow (Debbie’s Michigan friends at Whirlpool and the biofuels industry also got breaks) – are often made temporary in such catch-all bills. Why?
“If you make them permanent, you get the campaign contribution once,” explains Bob McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice. “You do it every year or two, they have to ante up again and again.”
Oh, Debbie, we hardly knew ye.
Payne: Murder capital, fatherless capital
Posted by hpayne on January 3, 2013
While Barack Obama declared victory in the fiscal cliff theater, the mean streets of Detroit Friday brought a sobering reminder of the country’s biggest loss – and the president’s failure to address it.
Detroit is Murder Capital once more with a bloody 53 murders per 100,000 residents, returning to murder numbers not seen since the horrific 1970s (and soaring above 2006’s 47 per 100,000 rate when Detroit was last Number One).
If the president’s refusal to embrace Washington’s fundamental spending problems is irresponsible, his refusal to address Detroit (and inner city America’s) fundamental family implosion is a matter of life and death.
I do not mean to suggest that Detroit’s violence is solely a presidential responsibility – it is most immediately a local crime problem. Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy courageously points at Detroit’s police leadership for not putting in place more thorough crime tracking – the solution that Mayor Rudy Giuliani (another prosecutor) brought to out-of-control New York in the 1980s and that has helped reduce that city’s killing rate from 30 to just 6 per 100,000 today.
“It can be done,” an impassioned Worthy told The Detroit News editorial board in December.
But the long-term problem is a matter of cultural change – and the president has the unique status as a black man at the head of a nuclear family, a rarity in America’s impoverished inner cities.
The number one indicator of poverty in America is the lack of a two-parent family. Eighty percent of Detroit families are fatherless, seeding every social pathology from illiteracy to crime. In 1960, 25 percent of Detroit black residents were born to single mothers. By 1980, that number had climbed to 48 percent and the murder rate was shadowing it upward step-by-step. According to academic research, over 50 percent of black men in Detroit are high-school dropouts. In 2004, 72 percent of those dropouts were jobless. By their mid-30s, 60 percent have done prison time.
Yet, Obama has ignored this crisis and instead crossed the river to Canada to import another one: Nationalized health care. Sure, socialized medicine will consolidate his party’s power, but it does nothing to raise Detroit children from poverty.
Worse, Obama’s federal welfare expansion is exacerbating the problem. Lest you think this is a racial problem, read New York Times liberal columnist Nicolas Kristof who traveled to white, underclass Appalachia last year to find the same pathologies in a population with 50 percent, welfare-driven, illegitimacy rates:
Conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. . . . Some young people here don’t join the military (a traditional escape route for poor, rural Americans) because it’s easier to rely on food stamps and disability payments. Antipoverty programs also discourage marriage: In a means-tested program like S.S.I., a woman raising a child may receive a bigger check if she refrains from marrying that hard-working guy she likes. Yet marriage is one of the best forces to blunt poverty. In married couple households only one child in 10 grows up in poverty, while almost half do in single-mother households.
From Appalachia to Detroit, welfare-driven illegitimacy is trapping children in crime and poverty. It’s the family, stupid.
Where are you, Mr. President?
Payne: Obama does Detroit delusion
Posted by hpayne on January 2, 2013
DC is looking a lot like Detroit. How dysfunctional is Barack Obama’s Washington?
The president (and the GOP Congress) set an artificial deadline to take the country over the cliff a year ago, then did nothing to avert his man-made disaster until the 11th hour, and now claims victory for saving America’s middle class from another recession.
But if tax increases on all Americans are economically damaging, then how is Obama’s celebrated 4 percent hike on folks earning over $400,000 a year – many of them small businesses – economically beneficial?
Think of Detroit which is almost totally dependent on wealthy entrepreneurs these days for economic growth. Think of billionaire businessman Mike Ilitch who – as MIView estimated two years ago at the last fiscal cliff – will now send $10 million more a year down Washington’s ravenous entitlement piehole rather than investing that money here in his sports stadiums, pizza business, etc. Think of Quicken Loans billionaire Dan Gilbert who has been investing in Detroit real estate and businesses, but who will now have to send millions more to Washington’s inefficient bureaucracy.
Feel better?
Indeed, Detroit itself is a cautionary tale against Obama’s plan for the nation. Years of neglecting its long-term debt liabilities – even as the city raised its income and property taxes to record highs – has put Detroit on the brink of bankruptcy. As Detroit goes, writes The National Review’s Kevin Williamson, so goes the nation. Obama’s brazen refusal to acknowledge Washington’s spending problem at the fiscal cliff is an echo of Detroit’s bankruptcy cliff denial this past two years.
The media bears co-responsibility with Obama for misleading the public on the fiscal cliff calamity, virtually ignoring the spending side of the ledger which is what is driving us into Euro-style debt. While parroting Obama’s claim that trillion-dollar deficits could be plugged by tax increase on upper incomes, the MSM failed to inform its readers that the tax hikes will raise a mere $60 billion a year – a drop in the bucket compared to the $1.1 trillion deficits Obama is currently running.
As a result of this media malpractice, Obama got away with not committing to a SINGLE SPENDING CUT as part of the cliff deal, even nixing the small .2 percent decrease – from 1.6 to 1.4 percent – in Social Security benefit GROWTH that he and GOPers had agreed to. Detroit City Council would be proud.
“One sign of progress came as Republicans withdrew a long-discussed proposal to slow future cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients as part of a compromise to avoid the cliff,” reported AP on Sunday. “Democrats said earlier Sunday that proposal had put a damper on the talks, and Republican senators emerging from a closed-door GOP meeting said it is no longer part of the equation.”
Earth to AP: It’s not “progress” when you ignore your spending addiction.
The debt delusion continues this AM with AP claiming that “middle- and low-income families will pay higher taxes too” because the payroll tax will go up from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent as a result of the cliff deal. But 6.2 percent is where it has always been. The 2 percent “cut” – putting SS further into debt – was a momentary political gimmick to goose (it didn’t) the economy. The tax holiday is now over.
In the end the cliff was part of Obama’s long-term game to make government bigger. Given Washington’s ineptitude in this manufactured crisis, does anyone think that’s a good idea?
Payne: Happy Bulb Year
Posted by hpayne on December 31, 2012
Happy New Year, America, the lights are still on.
The EPA’s ban on the common light bulb has been staved off for another year thanks to Michigan Rep. Fred Upton and House Republicans. A year ago, Upton & Co. short-circuited the Obama administration’s elimination of the incandescent bulb by inserting language in the annual omnibus Appropriations Bill defunding federal energy standards that would have made the bulb illegal for sale.
And since the U.S. government runs on continuing resolutions these days (thanks to Senate Democrats’ inability to pass budgets), the language has survived the CR passed and signed before the election . That CR only gets us to March, sources say, but the bulb language should survive any CRs and appropriations bills for the rest of 2013.
The bulb ban, of course, is the poster child of Obama’s zealous War on Carbon.
It’s a war that dates back to the Bush Administration which originally targeted the bulb for the scrap heap – despite the fact that incandescents make for 85 percent of bulb purchases. Upton was Bush’s bagman for the bulb ban. But after a national outcry over the bulb’s looming elimination, Upton saw the, um, light – and did yeoman’s work in correcting his mistake.
Alas, the bulb’s salvation came too late for hundreds of American jobs that have been lost to China as the lighting industry moved jobs overseas in anticipation of making the more expensive incandescent replacement, the CFL (compact fluorescent light). Washington’s favorite crony capitalist, General Electric, had long lobbied for a bulb ban in order to force consumers to buy more expensive CFLs. Like the EPA’s War on Coal, green means job loss.
At least consumers can cheer. At my local Kroger’s grocery, 100 watt bulbs sell for $4.99 for a pack of four. Their CFL replacements, meanwhile, cost a whopping $4.99 EACH.
That is, the common bulb is four times cheaper than politically-correct CFLs. And CFLs don’t always last four times longer. Despite EPA & MSM claims (USA Today has been one of the most egregious mouthpieces for government propaganda) claims, CFLs do not necessarily last longer than common bulbs. CFLs work best in places where the lights stay on – turning them on and off frequently shortens their life span. Which is why consumers want bulb choice – not government mandates.
“We heard the message loud and clear from Americans who don’t want government standards determining how they light their homes,” said Michigan Congressman Upton in late 2011. Democrats are still deaf to America’s calls, but thanks to House GOPers – and the tireless efforts of activists like Myron Ebell of Freedom Action – the bulb lives.
Payne: Lisa Jackson’s holy war
Posted by hpayne on December 29, 2012
If it seemed like retiring EPA Chief Lisa Jackson carried out her job with a religious zeal, you’d be right.
Barack Obama’s pick as his first EPA administrator told a 2010 National Council of Churches conference in New Orleans that government and religious leaders must unite in their “moral obligation” to heal the planet and “build on the religious and moral reasons for being good stewards of our environment.”
“The question now is, ‘What we can do?'” the green-church devotee concluded, adding that her efforts were blessed by the White House’s Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnership.
Her legion of Washington media disciples — who would have condemned such moral bravado by the Religious Right — ignored her rhetoric. But in punishing those she deems carbon sinners, Lisa Jackson has done enormous harm to American workers.
Today, thousands of coal miners are without work as her power plant regulations (backed by a president who embraced Jackson’s crusade, calling global warming “one of the greatest moral challenges of our generation”) have bankrupted mining companies such as Patriot Coal and forced others such as OhioAmerica and Alpha Natural Resources to downsize. An oil opponent, Jackson successfully lobbied the president to reject the transcontinental Keystone Pipeline,costing the U.S. some 20,000 jobs. Her global warming zeal extended to autos when she took the Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards (CAFE) away from the Transportation Department — mandating that auto companies meet a pie-in-the-sky standard of 54.5 mpg by 2025 in an attempt to eliminate the internal combustion engine (the industry is spending millions on lobbying to water down the rules).
Jackson’s holy war created a rogue agency unanswerable to Congress. Her coal and CAFE edicts were done without the input of America’s elected representatives, creating a backlash that has led to endless hearings before Congressional Republicans. Despite the House revolt, Jackson’s agency churned on with its wave of rules. The resulting job consequences were illustrated in a dramatic photo-op with coal miners and Mitt Romney during the 2012 campaign at a Murray Energy facility in Ohio — an event met with a near blackout by national media.
Rumors abound that Jackson’s resignation is the result of controversy over secret e-mails that Jackson authored exposing her War on Coal. But her public actions are scandalous enough. Having forced the shutdown of dozens of coal plants, the EPA chief dropped one final bomb before Election Day — announcing carbon caps that effectively end new coal plant construction in the U.S.
“This agency (knows) no bounds,” said Chris Hamilton, senior V.P. of the West Virginia Coal Association after the new rules were announced. “Their actions don’t take into consideration people’s livelihoods, jobs, or the existing liability of energy companies.”
With more regulations in the pipeline covering everything from “environmental justice” (Jackson subscribes to the radical theory that the location of industrial plants discriminates against poor minorities) to natural gas fracking, the reign of Jackson cannot end soon enough.
Payne: Rep. Camp back at the cliff
Posted by hpayne on December 26, 2012
“This is consensus on a very intractable issue: What do we do about expiring tax policy?” thrilled Michigan Rep. Dave Camp, incoming chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, two years ago when President Obama and new House Republican majority agreed to avert the fiscal cliff of 2010 by extending all the Bush-era tax cuts.
Camp was encouraged not only by the crisis diverted but by the hope for future tax reform “because of the process of coming together and reaching an agreement. I am very encouraged by what the president has been saying publicly. They do want to begin (tax reform) and that is a big thing.”
It was a misreading of his Democratic adversary.
In fact, Obama followed his 2010 compromise – signed in the face of the GOP’s landslide, tea party-led Congressional gains and ferocious Democratic opposition including Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow – by immediately hitting the campaign trail, rejecting the Simpson-Bowles tax reform commission, creating the 2011 debt talks crisis, and generally re-arming for the 2012 presidential campaign.
And so here we are back at the same fiscal cliff two years later.
As 2010 showed, the fiscal cliff solution is simple: Settle financial markets with a compromise extending Republican tax rates – and Democratic stimulus spending – and then return to the table once blood pressures have cooled for comprehensive budget-tax reform.
But this time, Obama is in no mood for compromise.
This is a smash-mouth presidency (not unlike the crisis-to-crisis Granholm gubernatorial years) about short-term political scores, not long-term solutions. And this time Obama has claimed the upper hand in the wake of his 2012 election win. Never mind that Republicans also won, maintaining the status quo that should augur for a 2010-style compromise.
“You get nothing. I get that for free,” Obama told compromise-minded Boehner after the House Majority Leader put $800 billion in tax revenue through closed loopholes on the table, reports The Wall Street Journal.
As in 2010, Republicans like Camp and Boehner are still operating under the assumption that President Obama wants long-term fixes – to the tax code, to the debt crisis, to trillion-dollar deficits.
But as the two years since 2010 prove, Obama is interested only in winning, not solutions (he has never put serious spending reductions on the table). And though his 2012 “win” was hardly as clear-cut as he claims – and certainly not the mandate the GOP had after the 2010 mid-terms – he and his media have declared it so. Together with Democratic rank-and-file resistance to another 2010-style compromise (then, Democratic leaders refused to even appear at the signing ceremony), Obama feels that he will win this round of brinkmanship (and he will if Republicans are thick enough to let tax cuts expire for everyone).
Rep. Camp may have thought he heard signs of bipartisanship in 2010 – but it was the sound of one hand clapping.
Payne: Mayan Apocalypse cancels Michigan classes (really)
Posted by hpayne on December 20, 2012
LaPeer public schools are cancelling classes due to unsubstantiated threats related to the Mayan apocalypse and the school shooting in Connecticut. We’re not making this up.
“The Connecticut school massacre and doomsday scenarios based on the Mayan calendar have prompted the closing of dozens of Michigan schools. . . for Thursday and Friday,” reports AP from Flint.
In a note to parents on the Lapeer website, Schools Superintendant Matt Wandriw actually went on the record about this nonsense.
“Good evening, I apologize for the timing of this message, but I have important information to share with you,” he wrote. “Given the recent events in Connecticut, there have been numerous rumors circulating in our district, and in neighboring districts, about potential threats of violence against students. Additionally, rumors connected to the Mayan calendar predicted end of the world on Friday have also surfaced. These rumors of violence have been thoroughly investigated and determined to be false. There have been no credible threats made against any of our students. However, these rumors have been a serious distraction for students, teachers, administrators, and parents. Therefore, given the significant disruption to the teaching and learning process, I have decided, along with my fellow superintendents of Lapeer County, to cancel school for both. On behalf of the Board of Education, teachers, administrators, and support personnel, I wish each of you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.”
In sum: Dude, let’s say we’re concerned about violence and blow off school to take an extended Christmas break!
The parents inconvenienced by this irresponsible shirking of education responsibilities should be outraged. Hard-working parents. Single moms that must scramble for daycare, etc.
Ho ho horrible.
Payne: Taxpayers take a Government Motors bath
Posted by hpayne on December 19, 2012
Now we know the reason why the Obama administration spurned General Motors’ offers to buy back U.S. Treasury stock until after the election.
In fact, we have 13 billion reasons.
A month after Obama’s re-election – an election won in part due to the Obama campaign’s boast that it saved GM and Chrysler – GM announced today that it would buy back 40 percent of Washington’s stock at just half the price needed for taxpayers to break even on their investment. That’s at least a $13 billion loss according to The Detroit News (AP pegs the loss at $21B when remaining shares are sold).
Ironically, the GM losses will not negatively impact the TARP program’s bottom line, because the banks that also received TARP money have paid back their loans with profit to the taxpayers. That is, the Wall Street banks that Obama demonized for his class warfare strategy are covering his keister on GM losses.
We can’t make this stuff up.
GM’s losses, however, do not include the billions lost by Delphi salaried workers whose pensions were gutted by the White House (even as UAW Delphi pensions were made whole) and billions more lost by pensioners (including Indiana teachers and firefighters) when Obama’s White House Task Force illegally gave preference to Democrat-donating Big Labor over secured bondholders.
Though GM has been desperate to unload federal shares for the past year to escape the “Government Motors” stigma, the losses would have been a nightmare for an Obama campaign that claimed its bailout was an unmitigated success. Indeed, selling the shares during the campaign would have exposed Obama (and Obamedia’s) Big Lie that he did not let GM go bankrupt. GM’s stock price suggests that Obama’s managed Chapter 363 bankruptcy was a less efficient solution for taxpayers than Mitt Romney’s managed Chapter 11.
The share price further reflects a GM that continues to struggle against more efficient rivals unburdened by union contracts (not to mention the drag of Obama model-Euro unions on Opel) – and with government mandates forcing it to sell unprofitable green vehicles. The National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) reports that GM pension obligations are about $24 billion under-funded meaning the General will likely have to issue more stock to pay UAW obligations – further cheapening the 19 percent of GM shares that taxpayers still own.
“Almost a year and a half ago, Treasury could have sold taxpayers’ GM stake for about $30 a share. They wouldn’t. Shares are now down about 20 percent from then, resulting in an additional loss in value of about $3 billion for taxpayers,” reported NLPC in scolding the White House decision last September not to sell immediately. “Treasury will continue to gamble taxpayer money on GM and continue to stay invested as they market-time their exit.”
“Unfortunately for America,” they continue, “the gains they seek by the gamble are political rather than monetary.”
Payne: Monaghan sues Obamacare
Posted by hpayne on December 18, 2012
Domino’s Pizza founder Tom Monaghan, a Michigan business titan and devout Roman Catholic, filed suit in a Michigan federal district court against Obamacare Friday over the law’s forced coverage of abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization.
Joining a raft of legal complaints from religious groups against the controversial law, Monaghan’s federal suit cites a violation of his First Amendment rights – and claims the law violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the Administrative Procedure Act as well.
The filing was almost competently ignored by Michigan’s establishment media.
“The government intentionally declared war on a specific religion using the HHS mandate as its weapon,” said a representative for the Thomas More Law Center which which represents Monaghan. “Because Mr. Monaghan believes it is his religious duty to provide insurance coverage for his employees and their families, he will not abandon them. Yet he intends to show his vehement opposition to this unconstitutional mandate which threatens the religious liberties of all Americans.”
He now runs Ava Maria University in Florida, the Ava Maria Mutual Funds, and other interests after selling Michigan-based Domino’s in 1998 to Bain Capital. The suit also lists as a plaintiff Domino’s Farms, a Michigan office park complex that Monaghan still owns.
Like many Catholic-run institutions, Monaghan’s companies offer health insurance to employees that excludes contraception and abortion on religious grounds. Obamacare’s violation of religious freedoms became a hot issue in the 2012 presidential campaign – and was distorted by Obama & Media as a “war on women.” In addition to Catholic suits, the law has also provoked concern among Michigan counties and Michigan food service companies that they won’t be able to afford Obamacare’s expensive coverage mandates.
The MSM’s refusal to cover the religious and business storm around Obamacare does a disservice to a public that will soon be feeling its effects.
Payne: The Weiser hit job, Part 2
Posted by hpayne on December 17, 2012
Ron Weiser is drawing “objections from critics who say he disrespected and stereotyped Detroit because of its large African-American and low-income population. . . . The Rev. David Bullock, Michigan chairman of the Rainbow Push Coalition, said Weiser’s comments are racist, classist and disheartening,” smeared The Detroit Free Press this weekend in its attempt to marginalize ex-Michigan GOP Chair Ron Weiser for spearheading Michigan right-to-work legislation.
But in their gleeful, 800-word hit job, the Freep and their Democratic Party allies forgot a couple of important points: The Jewish Weiser is himself an ethnic minority – and a major giver to black causes.
Indeed, Weiser is not just a prominent philanthropist who has been involved in Detroit’s resurrection – but he is a former chairman of the board of the United Negro College Fund in Washtenaw County (where he lives).
Details, details.
“We have a major Republican figure in Michigan and nationally who is making racist stereotype remarks about voters in Detroit,” Michigan Democratic Chairman Mark Brewer told The Freep.
Does the Democratic Establishment really believe that? Or is it so desperate to smear RTW that it will ruin the reputation of anyone associated with it – even one of Michigan’s most respected Jewish citizens?