Tag Archives: ethics

Lies of my President, Part 1

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Every politician makes promises in the course of his campaign for election, serious promises and frivolous, that go unkept for one reason or another.  Presidential candidates are no exception , and the promises made by the current Democratic Presidential Candidate, Barack Obama, during the course of his 2008 campaign are legion: his promise to keep unemployment under 8%, if Congress would only pass his $800 billion stimulus bill in 2009 comes to mind (unemployment rose above 10% within months of passage and has remained above 8% since), as does his promise to ban lobbyists from his administration (followed by his hiring lobbyists into his Executive Branch, including the president of a lobbying firm to be his envoy to the Afghanistan/Pakistan/India region).  So does his promise to be open and transparent, with legislation being written in public (followed by Obamacare and Dodd-Frank being written behind locked doors and back rooms so secretively that even then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) had to push for passage of Obamacare “so that we may know what is in it.”  And so on.

But I’m not concerned here with broken campaign promises.  Instead, I’m going to write about the outright lies that Obama has made since he took office, taking them in no particular order, but with some rough grouping by general topic.  With that, this is the first in a series of posts I’ll be making this month about the lies of my President.

First up, from Obama’s February speech at the University of Miami on “home-grown energy,” and Investor’s Business Daily‘s fact checking of some of his claims:

“We’re focused on production.”

Fact: While production is up under Obama, this has nothing to do with his policies, but is the result of permits and private industry efforts that began long before Obama occupied the White House.

Obama has chosen almost always to limit production.  He canceled leases on federal lands in Utah, suspended them in Montana, delayed them in Colorado and Utah, and canceled lease sales off the Virginia coast.

His administration also has been slow-walking permits in the Gulf of Mexico, approving far fewer while stretching out review times, according to the Greater New Orleans Gulf Permit Index.  The Energy Dept. says Gulf oil output will be down 17% by the end of 2013, compared with the start of 2011.  Swift Energy President Bruce Vincent is right to say Obama has “done nothing but restrict access and delay permitting.”

and

“The US consumes more than a fifth of the world’s oil.  But we only have 2% of the world’s oil reserves.”

Fact: Obama constantly refers to this statistic to buttress his claim that “we can’t drill our way to lower gas prices.” The argument goes that since the US supply is limited, it won’t ever make a difference to world prices.

It’s bogus. New exploration and drilling technologies have uncovered vast amounts of recoverable oil.

In fact, the US has a mind-boggling 1.4 trillion barrels of oil, enough to “fuel the present needs in the US for around 250 years,” according to the Institute for Energy Research. The problem is the government has put most of this supply off limits.

Here’s more concerning the “focused on production”…claim, via Power Line who quote from Greenwire, a New York Times specialty publication:

Domestic oil production may be at an all-time high nationwide, but the increase is primarily occurring on state and private lands rather than on federal land and waters, where production appears to have dropped significantly in 2011, according to the most recent government data.

Production of natural gas on public lands and waters in fiscal 2011 dropped 11 percent from the previous year, according to Interior Department data.  Oil production dipped nearly 14 percent…

Finally, here are four graphs that illustrate Obama’s lies about Federal “focus on production,” from the New Orleans Regional Economic Alliance.  They speak for themselves.  And nothing has changed in the year since they were formed.

 

 

 

 

 

Switzerland Giving up Its Tax Haven Status?

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Spiegel International Online has an article that discusses the possibility of Switzerland giving up a major portion of its banking secrecy laws under political pressure from the US and Germany.  Although the purpose of the article is to discuss the degree of importance (or lack) of the Swiss’ status as a tax haven to the Swiss economy, the discussion raises another question, immediately germane to our own economic condition, about tax havens generally.

Should we care if Switzerland remains a tax haven or gives that up?  If our own tax code weren’t so Byzantine, with such high rates, and with so many excused from taxes altogether (whether from the aggregate of subsidies, credits, exemptions, pick-a-loophole, or just from belonging to a protected class), Americans would have no need of tax havens.

If privacy is our concern, still we should be looking here at home, and reining in an overreaching government.  Sort of the kind of thing elections are for.

Who Skipped Out?

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On Saturday, during his periodic radio address, Democratic Presidential Candidate bellyached about Congress adjourning before his precious addenda had been carried out.

Last week, without much fanfare, members of the House of Representatives banged a gavel, turned out the lights, and rushed home, declaring their work finished for now.

He added

See, when they skipped town, members of Congress left a whole bunch of proposals sitting on the table—actions that would create jobs, boost our economy, and strengthen middle-class security.

This from the guy who thought it more appropriate to attend his fundraiser and party in Las Vegas than to be in the White House dealing with the attacks, vandalism, and flag desecration at our Cairo embassy and the attacks, destruction, and murders at our Benghazi consulate.

This from the guy who has time to sit face to face with the Ladies of the View but who has no time to meet with world leaders—even those who explicitly ask for such a meeting.  “Give me a call on the telephone,” he says through his press rep, Jay Carney, and his campaign advisor, Robert Gibbs.

This from the guy who, for three years, has declined to present a serious budget proposal to Congress, instead proposing exploding spending, increasing deficits, and deepening debt—disingenuous proposals the last two of which couldn’t even get a single Democrat’s vote.

This from the guy whose Democrat-controlled Senate is sitting on 38 House-passed jobs-related bills without even permitting their discussion, much less an actual vote.

Who is it, really, who’s skipped town?  And been out of town all these years?

Welfare, Work, and the Stimulus

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It turns out Obama’s HHS waiver of the work requirement for welfare (in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, signed into law by President Bill Clinton) wasn’t the first Obama waiver of the work requirement.  No, it’s just one more instance of the wealth redistribution in which Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama believes so much.

The Congressional Research Service has a new report out, albeit one done at the behest of an Evil Republican, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (the report can be found here or here).  This report demonstrates that the Obama Stimulus Package, drafted up shortly after his inauguration in 2009 and passed just after that also waived the requirement for work in order to get welfare.

Typically the food stamp program requires that group [“able-bodied adults” between 18 and 49 years old who have no dependents] to work or participate in a training program at least 20 hours a week to continue receiving benefits after three months. The stimulus law, though, allowed states to suspend the rule from April 2009 to October 2010—and most states did.

The CRS study showed that in fiscal 2010, the last year for which data was available, the number of food-stamp recipients in that group was at nearly 3.9 million. That’s up from 1.9 million in 2008.

Though food-stamp enrollment was already rising at the time in part due to the recession, the study noted the number in this group “increased more rapidly than the overall caseload.”

Their percentage of that caseload grew from 6.9 percent in 2008 to 9.7 percent in 2010.

This was no effort to accommodate spiking unemployment, though.  Indeed, it never was intended to—unemployment would never rise above 8% and would fall back to 5.5% by the end of 2009 with the stimulus, Obama promised us.  The waiver was, nevertheless, extended beyond 2010.

The latest CRS report noted that while the stimulus law lifted the food stamp work requirement until late 2010, the law allowing extended unemployment benefits likewise allowed most states to waive those work requirements in 2011 and 2012.

Bread and circuses.

Controlling Religion

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Last Sunday on CBS’s 60 Minutes, reports The Weekly Standard, the Democratic Party’s Presidential Candidate, Barack Obama, was asked this question by Steve Kroft:

Have the events that took place in the Middle East, the recent events in the Middle East given you any pause about your support for the governments that have come to power following the Arab Spring?

Obama gave this answer, in part [emphasis mine]:

…I was pretty certain and continue to be pretty certain that there are going to be bumps in the road because—you know, in a lot of these places—the one organizing principle—has been Islam. The one part of society that hasn’t been controlled completely by the government.

So, in this man’s eyes, Islam—and by extension, all religion?—must be under government control, and not left to the individual consciences of the men and women involved?

He seems to have implemented this view with his attacks on religion here at home—his HHS ruling on contraceptives and abortifacients, for instance; his VA’s attacks on prayer in our National Cemetery System; his Justice Department’s lack of support for (if not outright obstruction of) defending military memorials because some of the symbology looks like religious icons; his attempted omission of any reference to God from the Democratic Party platform, until public outcry forced him into a square-filler insertion of a passing referent; and so on.

Hmm….