Columnist.
Everyone's blaming the collapse of oil prices and China's sliding economy for the rout in the stock market to start 2016. That's part of the story, but there may also be a policy explanation for the selloff. Call it the "Bernie Sanders effect." In the most recent Democratic presidential debate, the race was on to see who could raise taxes and punish businesses more. While Hillary Clinton was touting her income-tax surcharge on millionaires that could raise income taxes to near 50 percent (and her capital-gains tax hike), Sanders said that a 90 percent tax rate might be too high, but somewhere approaching that number is the target he'd shoot for. Bernie also talks about breaking up the banks, putting Wall Streeters in jail, a single-payer health care plan and adding trillions in new government spending.
The big fall-off-your-chair moment during President Obama's State of the Union address came when he proclaimed: "We've cut our imports of foreign oil by nearly 60 percent and cut carbon pollution more than any other country on Earth. Gas under two bucks a gallon ain't bad, either." Sure, Mr. President. Take a bow for the smashing success of the very domestic oil and gas industry that you have tried to destroy. Even Obama couldn't carry this off. The smirk on his face as he sang the praises of the oil and gas industry was unmistakable.
The great Jack Kemp used to say about politicians that "voters don't care what you know until they know that you care." Republicans say they care about the poor and minorities, but do they, really? We have a test case in front of us right now over whether the congressional leadership will renew the Washington D.C. school voucher program. The program's budget is only $25 million, or less than 0.1 percent of federal education spending. The scholarship program was created in 2004 and was the handiwork of John Boehner and President George W. Bush. The results have been uniformly positive for these families.
So President Barack Obama is back from Hawaii and the Los Angeles Times reports the president will trumpet his economic record. The Times reports: "Eager to stay on the offensive as new Republican majorities are seated in Congress, the president plans to take a more bullish economic message on the road next week in something of an early test drive of his State of the Union message. During stops in Michigan, Arizona and Tennessee, Obama plans to draw a connection between actions his administration took early in his presidency and increasingly positive economic trends in sectors such as manufacturing and housing."
"It would be hard to find anyone in all of America who has been more wrong on the American energy story than Barack Obama."
It would be hard to find anyone in all of America who has been more wrong on the American energy story than Barack Obama. Oil prices have fallen from $105 a barrel in the summer of 2014 to hovering at $35 a barrel today. That's a two-thirds reduction in the price, and the biggest factor is shale oil brought to you by fracking. In many areas of the country gas is now less than $2 a gallon, and it could fall further in the weeks ahead.
How's this for an early Christmas gift? Right before Congress left town for the holidays, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the Democratic whip, blew up a bill that would have provided Americans a permanent ban on the taxation of Internet service. Call it his "bah humbug" moment. Grinch Durbin has promised to hold this bill hostage unless he gets paid a ransom. He says he will only allow a permanent ban on Internet access taxes, if Congress votes to allow state and local sales taxes on Internet purchases.
It's hard to find a self-respecting liberal these days who doesn't denounce Donald Trump as "a fascist." If you Google "fascist," the first thing that pops up on the screen is a photo of Trump. University professors, Democratic pundits and members of the media who don't call him a fascist resort to over-the-top, sneering terms like "racist," "repellent" and even "Nazi."
Hillary Clinton seems to be in a race with Bernie Sanders to see who can spend and borrow the most taxpayer money. These days that's how you win the Democratic nomination for president. So far, Clinton's losing the spend-fest. But she's catching up. Clinton has just endorsed a $275 billion proposal for public works projects. No word yet as to whether these projects are "shovel ready." What is certain is that the proposal makes the unions and the construction lobby mighty happy.
President Obama has been mocked, and appropriately so, for his ludicrous comment that the upcoming climate change summit in Paris will be a "powerful rebuke" to the terrorists. No. This summit is a powerful rebuke to common sense. It says a lot about the lack of clarity and commitment to the growing threat of the Islamic State that the world leaders are gathering in the city where the murderous attacks just happened, with the blood barely dry, and the prime topic of discussion will be how to stop the rise of the oceans.
"A generation that has been drilled since pre-kindergarten that the highest virtue in life is tolerance has suddenly become the least tolerant in history."
Remember the campus unrest in the 1960s? Whether or not you agreed with the students, they were protesting about things of great consequence — civil rights, the military draft, the Vietnam War. They had chants such as "Hell no, we won't go." Those were the good old days. Now we are witnessing whiny college kids marching in the streets, screaming obscenities or taking over the university president's office, and for what? Feeling slighted? Having their feelings hurt? Talk about rebels without a cause.
Outside the massive Milwaukee theater, the venue of last Tuesday's fourth GOP presidential debate, were the noisy protesters marching for a hike in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. They held up signs that read, "Fight for $15." Inside the great hall, Donald Trump, who boasts of having a net worth as high as that of many small nations, is asked by debate moderator Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business Network whether he favors raising the minimum wage. Of course, the only sane answer to that is no.
Hillary Clinton got the laugh of the week when she said that President Obama doesn't get the credit he deserves for his economic performance. Oh, wait. She wasn't joking. Not many Americans agree with Clinton's charitable assessment. We just had a report of 1.5 percent growth in the most-recent quarter. Every poll for five years shows that voters are most concerned about jobs, falling incomes and the debt. (Climate change always ranks last or near last.)
Overshadowed by this week's CNBC-versus-the-Republican-presidential-nominees brawl was the release of Ted Cruz's flat tax plan. The Texas senator would impose a 10 percent tax rate on wage earners and a 16 percent tax on businesses, with no deductions. "Flatter rates," says Cruz, "will make for a more rapid-growth economy." He's right: in virtually all the cases of the last 100 years, lower tax penalties on working and investing have led to more jobs and higher incomes.
Halloween is looking especially scary this year. On Monday, Republican leaders in Congress declared an unconditional fiscal surrender to President Barack Obama and the left, negotiating a dangerous budget deal that eliminates all of the checks on Washington's spend-and-borrow binge by breaking the budget caps, ending the sequester and raising the debt ceiling by over $1 trillion.
Now that Hillary Clinton has, by default, sewn up the Democratic nomination, expect Democrats to play the gender card for all its worth. In August, Clinton lashed out at the GOP field: "extreme views on women, we expect from some of the terrorist groups ... but it's a little hard to take from Republicans who want to be the president of the United States."
It hasn't gotten much attention, but two big budget showdowns are looming in Washington in the weeks ahead. The first is what to do about raising the $18 trillion debt ceiling. And the second is whether to retain the spending caps/sequester cuts in the 2016 budget. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced last week that Congress will bump up against the debt ceiling in November.
My 13-year-old son told me at the dinner table the other day that Franklin Roosevelt was one of America's "greatest presidents" because "he ended the Great Depression." He's usually a good student, so I checked where he got this tripe, and sure enough, the fairy tale was right there in his American history book.
What is the price tag for the audacious Obamanomics experiment? How much has it all cost — the bailouts, the debt, the stimulus plans, the printing of cheap money, Obamacare and all the rest? The answer to that question is just shy of $12 trillion. That's the sum of the $8.3 trillion added to the national debt since Sept. 15, 2008 (the day Lehman Brothers filed bankruptcy) for all the government spending and the $3.5 trillion of easy money flushed into the economy by the Federal Reserve through the initial monetary expansion — QE1, QE2 and QE3.
