Morning Bell: Americans Are Fleeing Obama’s Crony Capitalist Economy
http://blog.heritage.org/2011/01/07/morning-bell-americans-are-fleeing-obamas-crony-capitalist-economy/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
Today the Bureau of Labor and Statistics released its monthly jobs report showing that the U.S. economy added only 103,000 jobs this December. With the unemployment rate now at 9.4%, this marks the 20th month in a row that the unemployment has been over 9 percent, a post–World War II record. You are going to hear a lot of noise from the White House about how this drop from a 9.8% unemployment rate to 9.4% means the economy is in a strong recovery. This is false. The reality is that the only reason the unemployment rate dropped is because the U.S. labor force decreased by 434,000. More importantly 260,000 Americans dropped out of the labor force entirely. This means that the Obama economy is now driving Americans out of the labor force faster than it is bringing them.
This Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs tweeted out: “General Motors Co.’s sales were up 21 percent in 2010 for its four core brands.” Which is some interesting spin. As The Truth About Cars points out, GM’s retail market share for all of their brands actually fell a full 1.8 percent in 2010. So why is the President’s closest communication aide doing PR for what is, supposedly, a privately owned car company?
Yes, the Obama Administration did sell off a majority stake of their ownership of GM this November (at a $10 billion loss to taxpayers), but that still leaves them owning about a 37 percent share in the company. In other words, our government is still part owner of a supposedly private car company. And that is not the only continuing link between bailed-out GM and the Obama Administration. The Obama czar who oversaw the GM bailout, Ron Bloom, was just named the new czar for all of manufacturing policy at the White House’s National Economic Council (NEC). So we can expect to see continued favoritism for GM and its bailed-out brothers from the entire Obama Administration.
The manufacturing industry is not the only sector of the economy where the Administration has installed a bailout revolving door. Over just the last two months, the Obama White House has sent budget director Peter Orszag to Citibank ($306 billion bailout), taken in Gene Sperling as NEC director from Goldman Sachs (beneficiary of the $173 billion AIG bailout), and added former Fannie Mae ($135 billion bailout so far) lobbyist and JPMorgan ($12 billion bailout) executive Bill Daley as President Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff. There is a phrase for an economy that is so dependent on close relationships between business people and government officials: crony capitalism. And it is strangling our economic recovery.
There is a better way. Instead of relying on bailouts, subsidies, tax loopholes, and regulations to pick and choose which politically connected firms succeed or fail, government should unleash entrepreneurs to create jobs through true free enterprise policies. Specifically, Congress should:
•Rescind unspent stimulus funds;
•Reform regulations—specifically repealing Section 404 of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act—to reduce unnecessary business costs;
•Remove barriers to domestic energy production;
•Suspend the job-killing Davis–Bacon Act and prohibit Project Labor Agreement requirements on federally funded construction projects;
•Conclude the pending free trade agreements with Colombia and Panama, as well as the recently announced agreement with South Korea; and
•Reduce taxes on foreign earnings to encourage companies to repatriate the profits to America.
According to James Sherk, Karen Campbell, and John Ligon of the Center for Data Analysis, adopting these measures increase real gross domestic product by an average of $56 billion a year between 2011 and 2020, reduce the national debt by $305 billion by 2020, and increase job growth by 305,000 a year between 2011 and 2020.
This past June, marking the first anniversary of the Obama Administration’s destruction of our nation’s bankruptcy code, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels (R) warned: “The nation is not safe from crony capitalism. In the past year we’ve experienced the nationalization of the student loan industry and the passage of national health-care and financial-services regulation, each of which is rife with new opportunities for government favoritism and preferential handouts to favored corporations like Chrysler.” Our economy will never reach its full potential as long as the best way to succeed in business is to succeed in Washington.
© 2011, The Heritage Foundation
Conservative policy research since 1973
Showing posts with label Lobbyist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lobbyist. Show all posts
Friday, January 7, 2011
Monday, September 13, 2010
The Washington Examiner: Beltway Confidential
A White House tightly bound to lobbyists
By: Timothy P. Carney
Senior Examiner Columnist
Spokesmen in glass White Houses shouldn't throw stones.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs took such a liking to this weekend's NY Times story on House Minority Leader John Boehner and his lobbyist friends that Gibbs has posted about it on Twitter four times, beginning with one saying, "Headline says it all...A G.O.P. Leader Tightly Bound to Lobbyists."
The story is worth reading, as is Byron York's blog post on some interesting scuttlebutt about its original version making silly claims, but this White House is hardly in the position to chastise others for tight bonds to lobbyists.
Here are some of the strands of the Obama White House's intense ties to lobbyists:
50 lobbyists in administration: Obama and his underlings have named at least 50 ex-lobbyists to senior administration officials. Some highlights of the Obama Lobbyist Lineup:
Four cabinet-level officials are ex-lobbyists (Panetta, Sebelius, Harkin, & Holder)
The IRS general counsel is a former lobbyist for the Swiss Bankers Association
Mark Patterson, former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, is chief of staff at Treasury, and he never received a waiver.
Obama's top food safety guy (Michael Taylor) is a Monsanto lobbyist, and his top agriculture trade guy (Isi Siddiqui) is an agri-chem lobbyist.
Joe Biden's chief of staff and deputy chief of staff are both former corporate lobbyists with clients including oil companies and Fannie Mae.
The Podestas' open door at the White House: Obama's transition director was John Podesta, who co-founded a lobbying firm with his brother Tony Podesta. Tony and John still have some overlap in partners and issues. Also, Tony is a top fundraiser for Democrats, frequently visits the White House, and is chummy enough with the administration to get Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to attend his birthday party.
Ex-Google lobbyist in White House collaborates with current Google lobbyists on policy: Andrew McLaughlin, formerly a VP for public policy at Google, is the No. 2 tech policy guy in the White House. Then why was he using his GMail account to discuss policy with current Google lobbyists?
White House hides lobbyist visits by holding them at Caribou Coffee: Robert Gibbs wasn't tweeting out this great New York Times expose.
The drug lobby wins with ObamaCare: Remember when Barack Obama wanted to "end the game-playing" in Washington, and he used drug lobbyist Billy Tauzin as the poster-boy for DC's destructive revolving door. Then remember how, once he got in the White House, Obama cut a deal with Tauzin, and the final "reform" bill gave the drug industry what it wanted -- and remember that the drug lobby spent more than any other industry? Yeah, that was kind of awkward.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/A-White-House-102744604.html
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/A-White-House-102744604.html#ixzz0zPR6ypv5
By: Timothy P. Carney
Senior Examiner Columnist
Spokesmen in glass White Houses shouldn't throw stones.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs took such a liking to this weekend's NY Times story on House Minority Leader John Boehner and his lobbyist friends that Gibbs has posted about it on Twitter four times, beginning with one saying, "Headline says it all...A G.O.P. Leader Tightly Bound to Lobbyists."
The story is worth reading, as is Byron York's blog post on some interesting scuttlebutt about its original version making silly claims, but this White House is hardly in the position to chastise others for tight bonds to lobbyists.
Here are some of the strands of the Obama White House's intense ties to lobbyists:
50 lobbyists in administration: Obama and his underlings have named at least 50 ex-lobbyists to senior administration officials. Some highlights of the Obama Lobbyist Lineup:
Four cabinet-level officials are ex-lobbyists (Panetta, Sebelius, Harkin, & Holder)
The IRS general counsel is a former lobbyist for the Swiss Bankers Association
Mark Patterson, former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, is chief of staff at Treasury, and he never received a waiver.
Obama's top food safety guy (Michael Taylor) is a Monsanto lobbyist, and his top agriculture trade guy (Isi Siddiqui) is an agri-chem lobbyist.
Joe Biden's chief of staff and deputy chief of staff are both former corporate lobbyists with clients including oil companies and Fannie Mae.
The Podestas' open door at the White House: Obama's transition director was John Podesta, who co-founded a lobbying firm with his brother Tony Podesta. Tony and John still have some overlap in partners and issues. Also, Tony is a top fundraiser for Democrats, frequently visits the White House, and is chummy enough with the administration to get Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to attend his birthday party.
Ex-Google lobbyist in White House collaborates with current Google lobbyists on policy: Andrew McLaughlin, formerly a VP for public policy at Google, is the No. 2 tech policy guy in the White House. Then why was he using his GMail account to discuss policy with current Google lobbyists?
White House hides lobbyist visits by holding them at Caribou Coffee: Robert Gibbs wasn't tweeting out this great New York Times expose.
The drug lobby wins with ObamaCare: Remember when Barack Obama wanted to "end the game-playing" in Washington, and he used drug lobbyist Billy Tauzin as the poster-boy for DC's destructive revolving door. Then remember how, once he got in the White House, Obama cut a deal with Tauzin, and the final "reform" bill gave the drug industry what it wanted -- and remember that the drug lobby spent more than any other industry? Yeah, that was kind of awkward.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/A-White-House-102744604.html
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/A-White-House-102744604.html#ixzz0zPR6ypv5
Monday, September 6, 2010
Morning Bell:
Labor Day Has Become Government Day
This Labor Day marks a milestone in the history of the U.S. union movement. It is the first Labor Day on which a majority of union members in United States work for the government. In January the Department of Labor reported that union membership in government has overtaken that in the private sector. Three times as many union members work in the Post Office as in the entire domestic auto industry. The face of the union movement is not a worker on the assembly line but a clerk at the DMV.
This is a dramatic shift for the union movement. The early trade unionists did not believe that unions had a place in government. They believed the purpose of unions was to redistribute business profits from owners to workers … and the government makes no profits. Not until the 1960s did unionizing government employees become widespread. Now government employees make up 52 percent of all union members.
So what? Why should Americans care if unions are now dominated by workers who get their paychecks from governments, instead of workers who get their paychecks from private firms? There’s one simple reason: private firms face competition; governments don’t.
Collective bargaining, the anti-trust exemption at the heart the labor movement’s power, was created to help workers seize their “fair share” of business profits. But if a union ends up extracting a contract from a private firm that eats up too much of the profits, then that firm will be unable to reinvest those resources and will lose out to competitors. But when a union extracts a generous contract from a government, there is no check on that spending. Instead of being forced out by more efficient competitors, the government just raises taxes.
The shift from private to public sector has fundamentally changed organized labor’s priorities. Unions used to support policies that would help their private sector employers grow. But now that they are largely dependent on the government, the only growth that unions are interested in is the growth of government. So unions push for tax increases across the country. Consider recent union activism:
•Illinois. Unions want state lawmakers to increase the state income tax from 3 percent to 5 percent and to expand the sales tax to cover some services. In April 2010 they organized rallies of government workers outside the state capitol shouting “Raise my taxes! Raise my taxes! Raise my taxes!” At that rally, a government union member was caught on camera chanting “Where’s the money?” and “Give up the bucks!”
•Montana. The Montana teachers union openly sees itself as a supporter of tax and spend politics. Its President boasts, “Were it not for us almost any one of the … anti-tax and spend ballot issues proposed in the last 25 years would have passed.”
•New Mexico. Unions lobbied the state’s legislature to raise taxes to deal with its budget deficit. The union got its wish, but it was not the wealthy who paid – the legislature imposed a 2 percent sales tax on food.
•Washington state. Washington state has no income tax, and unions want to change that. They have placed an initiative on the November ballot creating a state income tax and are among the top donors to the campaign to pass it.
Government unions are the backbone of the Obama dependency economy. Taxpayers should not have to subsidize union campaigns, much less those that call for tax increases. At the very least Congress should end the automatic payroll deduction of union dues.
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/09/06/morning-bell-labor-day-has-become-government-day/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning+Bell
This Labor Day marks a milestone in the history of the U.S. union movement. It is the first Labor Day on which a majority of union members in United States work for the government. In January the Department of Labor reported that union membership in government has overtaken that in the private sector. Three times as many union members work in the Post Office as in the entire domestic auto industry. The face of the union movement is not a worker on the assembly line but a clerk at the DMV.
This is a dramatic shift for the union movement. The early trade unionists did not believe that unions had a place in government. They believed the purpose of unions was to redistribute business profits from owners to workers … and the government makes no profits. Not until the 1960s did unionizing government employees become widespread. Now government employees make up 52 percent of all union members.
So what? Why should Americans care if unions are now dominated by workers who get their paychecks from governments, instead of workers who get their paychecks from private firms? There’s one simple reason: private firms face competition; governments don’t.
Collective bargaining, the anti-trust exemption at the heart the labor movement’s power, was created to help workers seize their “fair share” of business profits. But if a union ends up extracting a contract from a private firm that eats up too much of the profits, then that firm will be unable to reinvest those resources and will lose out to competitors. But when a union extracts a generous contract from a government, there is no check on that spending. Instead of being forced out by more efficient competitors, the government just raises taxes.
The shift from private to public sector has fundamentally changed organized labor’s priorities. Unions used to support policies that would help their private sector employers grow. But now that they are largely dependent on the government, the only growth that unions are interested in is the growth of government. So unions push for tax increases across the country. Consider recent union activism:
•Illinois. Unions want state lawmakers to increase the state income tax from 3 percent to 5 percent and to expand the sales tax to cover some services. In April 2010 they organized rallies of government workers outside the state capitol shouting “Raise my taxes! Raise my taxes! Raise my taxes!” At that rally, a government union member was caught on camera chanting “Where’s the money?” and “Give up the bucks!”
•Montana. The Montana teachers union openly sees itself as a supporter of tax and spend politics. Its President boasts, “Were it not for us almost any one of the … anti-tax and spend ballot issues proposed in the last 25 years would have passed.”
•New Mexico. Unions lobbied the state’s legislature to raise taxes to deal with its budget deficit. The union got its wish, but it was not the wealthy who paid – the legislature imposed a 2 percent sales tax on food.
•Washington state. Washington state has no income tax, and unions want to change that. They have placed an initiative on the November ballot creating a state income tax and are among the top donors to the campaign to pass it.
Government unions are the backbone of the Obama dependency economy. Taxpayers should not have to subsidize union campaigns, much less those that call for tax increases. At the very least Congress should end the automatic payroll deduction of union dues.
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/09/06/morning-bell-labor-day-has-become-government-day/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning+Bell
Friday, July 16, 2010
The Dodd-Frank Financial Regulation Bill.....Securing Jobs for Lawyers and Lobbyist
The Dodd-Frank Financial Regulation Bill.....Securing Jobs for Lawyers and Lobbyist
http://www.resistnet.com/forum/topic/show?id=2600775%3ATopic%3A2379360&xgs=1&xg_source=msg_share_topic
http://www.resistnet.com/forum/topic/show?id=2600775%3ATopic%3A2379360&xgs=1&xg_source=msg_share_topic
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