Posts

DC Continues Its Explosive Growth

/0 Comments/in , /by

spending

Photo Credit: 401(K) 2013

Adjusted for inflation, federal spending has gone up from an average of $882 billion every year in the 1980s to $1.48 trillion a year in the ’90s to $2.44 trillion a year in the first decade of the 21st century. It’s estimated that the government will have spent as much in the first four years of the new decade as it did in all of the 1990s.

Two crises — the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the so-called “great recession” — further propelled the growth of government in certain areas but without the commensurate cuts in other areas that earlier generations imposed in times of crisis.

“In the past when there were various crisis like World War II or the Korean War, non-defense spending was dramatically cut by 20 to 30 percent,” Schatz said. “That didn’t happen after 9/11, and it certainly didn’t happen after the financial crisis.”

Nothing typifies the expansion of government like the growing wealth of the Washington, D.C., area. The region has few natural resources and little manufacturing base to produce wealth, yet seven of the nation’s 10 richest counties surround Washington. The average government worker’s compensation now stands at over $126,000 a year. And the fact that Washington’s traffic congestion now ranks as the nation’s worst stands as more evidence of the region’s growth.

As the rest of the country suffered through the recession with layoffs and foreclosures, Washington’s work force and its home prices remained mostly stable.

Read more from this story HERE.

Feds Prepping To End Colorado’s Marijuana Party?

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Washington Post

The pot industry in Colorado is undergoing a massive makeover as it prepares to begin selling marijuana for recreational use legally under state law. Businesses are ramping up production, and trade associations are cleaning up their image, anticipating what could be a billion-dollar industry.

But the entrepreneurs who are hoping to cash in on the “green rush” starting next year are struggling with the unique challenges of conducting a business that the federal government considers a crime.

The state’s pot producers and retailers are having trouble securing business financing because banks won’t give them loans — and most of the time, not even an account.

State lawmakers are about to shake up the marketplace in unpredictable ways with regulations covering everything from the shape of containers to the labeling required for pot-laced brownies and other “infused products.”

And business owners say they’re anxious about the intentions of the federal government, which could seize millions of dollars they have invested or even send them to prison. At a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this month, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said that he would soon announce a response to the initiatives in Colorado and Washington last year legalizing pot for recreational use. The federal government, which deems marijuana a controlled substance, could upend the plans of Colorado entrepreneurs at any moment.

Read more from this story HERE.

Murkowski’s Folly: No Road For King Cove

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: U.S. Army Alaska

Alaska has long received more than its fair share of federal tax dollars, as evidenced by its perennial first place ranking in pork per capita according to Citizens Against Government Waste’s (CAGW) Congressional Pig Book. Now, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) wants taxpayers to pay for a road in her state linking the town of King Cove (about 750 year-round residents) to Cold Bay and the latter’s all-weather airport, purportedly for safety reasons. In February, Sen. Murkowski threatened to block the nomination of Sally Jewell to be Secretary of the Interior unless the road was approved.

Sen. Murkowski’s pet project had previously been rebuffed by the Department of the Interior because the road would run through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Environmental Impact Statement, the road would cost $22.7 million, but data from the Alaska Statewide Improvement Transportation budget projections from fiscal years 2010-2015 suggest that the cost of the road could exceed $80 million, or more than $2 million per mile. Undeterred, Sen. Murkowski stated on February 12 that she was “prepared to consider all actions available…to convince this administration that denying the people of King Cove reliable access to medical care would be a travesty.” This week, Sen. Murkowski struck a deal with the Interior Department to get the road proposal reevaluated and toned down her rhetoric regarding the nomination.

Predictably, it appears that commercial interests, not medical emergencies, are the primary driver of the project. According to a February 24, 2013 Washington Post article, “Originally, both area residents and state officials viewed the road as a way to bolster the region’s fishing industry. …when King Cove passed its first resolution calling for its construction, it did not mention safety concerns and instead called for the road to ‘link together two communities having one of the state’s premier fishing port/harbors.'” The “safety” defense emerged only after it appeared unlikely that the road would receive federal funds.

Read more from this story HERE.

Round Two Of Gun Control Battle: Extension Of Federal Background Checks

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Photo Credit: Christian Gooden/AP

In the early hours of Monday morning, James Seevakumaran pulled the fire alarm in his dorm at a Florida university, at the start of what he intended to be the latest mass shooting to horrify the nation. The plan was to force his fellow students out of their rooms, so he could “give them hell” with a military-style assault rifle equipped with a high-capacity magazine and plenty of back-up ammunition.

It was only the sharp wits of Seevakumaran’s room-mate that spared the US another massacre. He locked himself in the bathroom and called 911; as the SWAT team arrived minutes later the would-be gunman turned his rifle on himself and, before he had the chance to take anyone else’s life, ended his own.

A few hours later, Harry Reid, the majority leader in the US Senate, called his fellow Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein into his office and gave her some disappointing news. He told her that the chances of success of the bill she had sponsored – a ban on the sale of the type of assault rifle that Seevakumaran had just come so close to using – were so remote that he had decided to drop it from the gun control legislation that he will be bringing to the Senate floor next month.

Reid’s dumping of Feinstein’s assault weapons ban marks the first stage in the epic political struggle over guns prompted by the Newtown school tragedy in December, in which 20 children and six teachers were killed. Round one goes to the pro-gun lobby and its cheerleader, the National Rifle Association.

Now, almost exactly 100 days after the Sandy Hook massacre, round two begins. The stakes are even higher. On Thursday night, Reid indicated that unlike the assault weapons ban, he would be including in his bill a provision to extend federal background checks to all gun sales.

Read more from this story HERE.

Ludicrous Federal Study Spends Hundreds of Thousands Examining Duck’s Private Parts

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: US Wildlife Service

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a $384,949 grant to Yale University for a study on “Sexual Conflict, Social Behavior and the Evolution of Waterfowl Genitalia”, according to the recovery.gov website.

The grant description says,“The project examines how reproductive morphology covaries with season, age, and social environment in a diverse sample of duck species that differ in ecology, territoriality and breeding system.”

The grant was made available through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the stimulus package.

The project has been receiving money from the NSF since 2009 and is slated for funding through July of this year.

“In the last quarter, we have prepared a manuscript for submission on the results of the first two years of experiments on social phenotypic plasticity in duck penis length in Lesser Scaup and Ruddy Duck. Experiments continued on genital social phenotypic plasticity in Mandarin Duck and Laysan Teal,” a 2010 fourth quarter recovery.gov update on the study says.

Read more from this story HERE.

Pelosi: George Washington Warned Us About Schemers Like Paul Ryan

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: jurvetson

You know, men who would dare to balance the federal budget within 10-28 years, who would ravage federal programs with modest slow-downs in their increased spending, who would bend cost curves to the breaking point…like, four degrees or so. Joel Gehrke reports:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., expressed misgivings about the efficacy of President Obama’s so-called “charm offensive,” saying that House Republicans seem “at war with [their] own government.”

“By and large, the approach the Republicans take is that they are there to shrink the role of government to the point where it really recalls to mind a statement of President Washington who cautioned about a political party at war with its own government,” Pelosi told reporters today in response to a question about the charm offensive.

Now that you’ve heard about the radicalism of Republicans, check out the modest goals of Democrats:

As for Democrats, Pelosi said that “we don’t want any more government than we need, but we respect the public role: public private partnerships, and putting a referee on the field . . . to monitor clean air, clean water, food safety; a cop on the beat for the protection of our neighborhoods.”

Here’s the real radicalism. If you ever need to know how committed Washington Democrats are to maintaining the current levels of spending their attendant increases, please refer to this quote. Just as with sequester, everything useful the federal government does manages to fall in the gap between the Democrats’ outrageously irresponsible budget (or, in years past, Obama speeches about budgets) and Ryan’s attempts at sanity. It is Nancy Pelosi’s belief, explicitly, that anything less than what exists at this very moment would be less “government than we need,” would disrespect the “public role,” and take the referee off the field and cops off the beat.

Read more from this story HERE.

Will Your Job Be ‘Reshored’ To A Federal Prisoner?

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: x1klima

Twelve million Americans are currently unemployed, according to the most recent Department of Labor statistics. Forty percent of the unemployed have been so for at least six months, and the average job seeker spends 36.9 weeks out of work.

The good news for the jobless? US industry is now in the throes of a “reshoring” trend: “Next year we’re going to bring some production to the US,” Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) CEO Tim Cook told Bloomberg Businessweek in December. “This doesn’t mean that Apple will do it ourselves, but we’ll be working with people and we’ll be investing our money.”

The bad news? The Bureau of Prisons is angling to have as many reshored jobs as possible filled by federal prisoners.

Between 2000 and 2011, wages in Asia have nearly doubled, according to the International Labour Organization. The Chinese government is planning to increase the minimum wage by 13% annually until 2015. Labor unrest, formerly unheard of in Asia, has become more frequent, with companies routinely raising workers’ pay after strikes. At the same time, wages paid to federal inmates working in prison factories across the United States have remained flat, ranging from $0.23 to $1.15 an hour.

Federal Prison Industries — also known by the trade name UNICOR — is a self-sustaining, self-funding company within the US Bureau of Prisons. It is owned wholly by the US government and was created by an act of Congress in 1934 to function as a rehabilitative tool to teach real-world work skills to federal inmates. These inmates were historically limited to producing goods for government use, such as furniture, uniforms, even, believe it or not, components for Patriot missiles.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Feds Want Your Retirement Accounts

/3 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: American ThinkerQuietly, behind the scenes, the groundwork is being laid for federal government confiscation of tax-deferred retirement accounts such as IRAs. Slowly, the cat is being let out of the bag.

Last January 18th, in a little noticed interview of Richard Cordray, acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Bloomberg reported “[t]he U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau [CFPB] is weighing whether it should take on a role in helping Americans manage the $19.4 trillion they have put into retirement savings, a move that would be the agency’s first foray into consumer investments.” That thought generates some skepticism, as aptly expressed by the Richard Terrell cartoon published by American Thinker.

Days later On January 24th President Obama renominated Cordray as CFPB director even though his recess appointment was not due to expire until the end of 2013.

One day later, in the first significant resistance to President Obama’s concentration of presidential power, a three judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington DC unanimously said that Obama’s Recess Appointments to the National Labor Relations Board are unconstitutional. Similar litigation testing the Cordray appointment to the CFPB is in the pipeline.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) created by the 2,319 page Dodd-Frank legislation is a new and little known bureau with wide-ranging powers. Placed within the Federal Reserve, a corporation privately owned by member banks, the CFPB is insulated from oversight by either the President or Congress, its budget not subject to legislative control. It is not even clear that a new President can replace the CFPB director on taking office.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Plays Extortionist-In-Chief

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Allison Harger At the end of 1995 and stretching into January 1996, the federal government “shut down” because of an impasse between President Clinton and House Republicans led by then-Speaker Newt Gingrich. The issue was increased taxes vs. less spending. Sound familiar? The government re-opened when a bipartisan agreement was reached to balance the budget by 2003. It wasn’t balanced by then, for reasons that included but were not limited to two wars. Now the national debt is racing toward an unsustainable $17 trillion.

This time around it isn’t about closing government. It’s about “sequestration,” which President Obama, the Democrats and their big media toadies are styling as economic Armageddon.

On Tuesday, following another vacation and a round of golf with the disgraced Tiger Woods, Obama appeared in the Eisenhower Executive Office building next to the White House. Behind him on risers, looking like a church choir but without the robes, was his usual Greek chorus of potential victims should Republicans cut spending by a single dollar.

The president said the cuts from sequestration would be “brutal” if lawmakers allow “this meat-cleaver approach to take place.” Military readiness would be hurt, he claimed, if these cuts were allowed to happen. Investments in energy curtailed, medical research impaired, teachers laid off (I wasn’t aware the federal government paid teacher salaries) and emergency responders couldn’t respond.

Once again, the president offered up the old bait and switch: “targeted spending cuts” along with “closing tax loopholes.” As has happened before, if Republicans agree to this (and they had better not if the party is to survive) they’ll likely get inconsequential “cuts,” if any, but tax hikes will occur right away. More importantly, any new revenue will likely not reduce the debt because Democrats in Congress are noted for spending new revenue and they won’t deal with the major reason for the debt: entitlements.

Read more from this story HERE.

Feds Admit: Gun Laws Won’t Slow Crime

/18 Comments/in , , /by

Photo Credit: WNDA study by the Department of Justice’s research wing, the National Institute of Justice, has the feds admitting that so-called “assault weapons” are not a major contributor to gun crime.

The study also concluded those weapons are not a major factor in deaths caused by firearms, nor would an “assault weapons” ban be effective.

“The existing stock of assault weapons is large, undercutting the effectiveness of bans with exemptions,” it said. “Therefore a complete elimination of assault weapons would not have a large impact on gun homicides.”

The report finds no significant link between “assault weapons” and murders.

“Since assault weapons are not a major contributor to U.S. gun homicides and the existing stock of guns is large, an assault weapon ban is unlikely to have an impact on gun violence,” the report said.

The document, titled “Summary of Select Firearm Violence Prevention Strategies,” also sees no epidemic of mass shootings.

Read more from this story HERE.