Mitt’s Funny Side

7 Responses to Mitt’s Funny Side

1. Joseph says:

   Saturday, October 20, 2012 at 8:47 pm

   Jack, what the heck is going on with the comments in this blog? Some disappeared and some of mine never even appeared.

   And something really needs to be addressed. Did you see the hatchet job Mary Gulag did on Toby Schendelbeck in the CNR a couple of weeks ago? And the CNR also said that Sean Morgan was for a tourist tax which he isn’t.

   And this week it appears that they did not allow Toby to respond to the lies Mary said about him.

   I don’t want to tell you how to run your blog but I think you really ought to put this up:

   http://chicotaxpayers.wordpress.com/2012/10/17/toby-schindelbeck-responds-to-mary-goloff/

   I tell you, old Bobby Speer really knows how to run a newspaper, doesn’t he?

   And all you see in his rag are ads from the liberal candidates and articles telling us how wonderful they are.

   Let the liberals go Schwab themselves if that’s what they want. But the rest of us don’t want them micromanaging our lives.

   Reply
2. Rex Crosley says:

   Sunday, October 21, 2012 at 7:53 am

   If Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are elected, they plan to engineer the largest transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich in American history.

   http://www.eclectablog.com/2012/10/president-obamas-second-term-will-transform-america-in-favor-of-the-middle-class.html

   Reply
3. Post Scripts says:

   Sunday, October 21, 2012 at 9:28 am

   Joseph, this software we are given to use by the ER is pretty unstable, I’m hoping that’s all it is and nothing more. I heard something about Toby and Mary Gulaff, thanks for the reminder, I’ll take a look into that. Feel free to give us a nudge in the right direction anytime.

   Reply
4. Joseph says:

   Sunday, October 21, 2012 at 10:52 am

   Well, Bob Evans did have a very good mailer and ad that at least mentioned the pension issue and detailed the financial situation.

   And it is $63.7 million in unfunded liabilities and the state wants nearly $10 million in RDA money back!

   And it sounds like if the city can’t continue to raid it’s reserve funds it will be insolvent.

   This was all done under the Gang of 5. Let’s face it, Schwab, Hokum, the Grundler, Gulag and Walker have been calling the shots for years and this is where we are now.

   TIME FOR CHANGE! NOW!

   Reply
5. Tina says:

   Sunday, October 21, 2012 at 4:02 pm

   Rex: If Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are elected, they plan to engineer the largest transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich in American history.

   Rex I have no desire to convince you but I do invite you to consider that your assertion and fear, based on the information you provided, is misguided since it relies on opinion using half truths and distortions.

   There is nothing in the Ryan budget that will make you write a check to the wealthy. There is nothing in Ryans budget to force the government to take more from you to make up for the losses they believe will happen under the Ryan plan. The Ryan plan cuts middle class taxes and creates a positive environment for private money investment and risk that will make your chances to make money greater.

   The article you posted used words like gut to describe small decreases in spending increases. You read that right. A cut in Washington is no cut at all but rather a smaller increase to budgeted items. See CATO:

   http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/whats-really-ryan-budget

   The most important headline about the Ryan budget is that it limits the growth rate of federal spending, with outlays increasing by an average of 3.1% annually over the next 10 years. If spending is left on autopilot, by contrast, it would grow by 4.3% (or nearly 39% faster). If President Obama is re-elected, the burden of spending presumably will climb more rapidly.
   This comes as a surprise to many people since the press is filled with stories about the Ryan budget imposing trillions of dollars of “savage” and “draconian” spending cuts. All of these stories, however, are based on Washington’s misleading budget process that automatically assumes an ever-expanding government. The 4.3% “base line” increase is the benchmark for measuring “cuts” even though spending is rising rather than falling, and it’s only the rate of spending growth that is being slowed.
   Even limiting spending so it grows by 3.1% per year, as Mr. Ryan proposes, quickly leads to less red ink. This is because federal tax revenues are projected by the House Budget Committee to increase 6.6% annually over the next 10 years if the House budget is approved (and this assumes the Bush tax cuts are made permanent). Since revenues would climb more than twice as fast as spending, the deficit would drop to about 1% of gross domestic product by the end of the 10-year budget window.
   To balance the budget within 10 years would require that outlays grow by about 2% each year. Spending in the Ryan budget means the federal budget reaches balance in 2040. There are many who would prefer that the deficit come down more quickly, but from a jobs and growth perspective, it isn’t the deficit that matters.
   Rather, what matters for prosperity and living standards is the degree to which labor and capital are used productively. This is why policy makers should focus on reducing the burden of government spending as a share of GDP leaving more resources in the private economy.
   The simple way of making this happen is to follow what I’ve been calling the golden rule of good fiscal policy: The private sector should grow faster than the government. This is what happens with the Ryan budget. The Congressional Budget Office expects nominal economic output (before inflation) to grow about 5% each year over the next decade. So if federal spending grows 3.1% annually, the burden of federal spending slowly shrinks as a share of GDP.
   According to the House Budget Committee, the federal budget would consume slightly less than 20% of economic output if the Ryan budget remained in place for 10 years. This would be remarkable progress considering that the federal government is now consuming 24% of GDP vs. Mr. Clinton’s 18.2% in 2001. If Paul Ryan’s policies are social Darwinism, as Mr. Obama and his allies allege, one can only speculate where Bill Clinton ranks in their estimation.
   Spending restraint also creates more leeway for good tax policy. Regardless of what you think about deficits, the political reality is that it is difficult to lower tax rates if government borrowing remains at high or rising levels. If deficit spending continues at current levels, then higher tax rates are almost sure to follow. And higher tax rates can’t create an environment conducive to more investment and jobs.

   Tell me Rex which would you prefer, a country with a huge government bureaucracy that encourages greater dependence and the need for ever higher taxation (our current unsustainable dilemma) or a country where the numbers of people inj need of government assistance declines because more people can find work and training, and have the ability to make and keep more of the money they earn? Which is better, the sick economy that has been created under current democrat policies, or a robust economy like that created under Reagan, Kennedy, and Clinton after the republicans defeated Hillarycare and took over the House and the budget in 1994?

   One last thing. The wealthy got wealthy because they know how to optimize investment returns. They got rich by being smart about spending and saving to maximize outcomes. That includes human capital outcomes. Romney and Ryan want to create that kind of opportunity for all Americans and at the same time preserve the programs that the truly needy require to keep them from lives of misery.

   Democrats are interested in preserving big government control. Their policies always favor growing the size of government. We are now experiencing the result of this thinking: enormous debt that continues to grow; more people on food stamps and living in poverty (the poor and minorities hurt the most); high gas prices and rising food prices; rising healthcare costs, high unemployment, businesses closing or barely hanging on, and a middle class being squeezed with few opportunities to better their circumstances.

   In this midst of this deplorable economic state the progressive left has the nerve to throw rocks at the Ryan proposal without offering a new direction of their own and without taking responsibility for the failures of their policies. That alone should make you highly suspicious of democrat criticism. They have done a lot of damage to the poor and middle classes in the last four years and they have added to the debt in greater amounts per year than did George Bush whom they criticized. Do they really deserve your vote?

   Reply
6. Jim says:

   Monday, October 22, 2012 at 8:35 am

   “Democrats are interested in preserving big government control. Their policies always favor growing the size of government.”

   I know that this is the traditional Republican talking point, however is isn’t true. Bush dramatically grew the size of government, and Romney has stated that he wants to increase government spending. Obama has done the opposite:

   On his watch, government employment has gone down, and federal spending has increased at the lowest pace in nearly 60 years.

   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/20/us/politics/fact-checking-obama-and-romney.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

   Reply
7. Tina says:

   Monday, October 22, 2012 at 10:37 am

   Jim both democrats and republicans have platforms. The democrat platform generally favors giving government greater control suggesting more regulation, higher taxes, expanding or adding programs, and downsizing the military. The republican platform generally favors limited government suggesting a strong military, reforming government programs, simplifying regulation and taxes, and empowering individuals and the private sector. Generally speaking, where the two parties come from is very different. Neither party is always able to accomplish its goals. I think you would agree that bipartisan cooperation has, over the last sixty to seventy years, favored the Democrat Party goals and we have seen the size and scope of government explode.

   There are many ways of looking at the size of government and how it has increased in size. The political trick to call a reduction in the size of an increase is one way to mask an increase or punish the opposition for gutting programs. There is the debt which is a fat indicator; Obama has increased the debt at a much greater rate than former presidents. See chart here:

   http://www.heritage.org/federalbudget/budget-create-deficits?gclid=ckrh7leslbmcfqscqgodkbkauq

   The following articles offer a few more opinions to consider:

   http://www.mygovcost.org/2012/02/16/the-growth-of-government-under-president-obama/

   If we go by President George W. Bushs final Fiscal Year 2009 budget, in which the average amount of federal government spending for each year through Fiscal Year 2013 was projected to be $2.732 trillion (in terms of inflation-adjusted, constant 2005 U.S. dollars) and compare that value to the average amount of federal spending that President Obama is currently projecting for both 2012 and 2013 of $3.185 trillion (also in terms of constant 2005 U.S. dollars), we find that President Obama has effected a permanent federal government spending increase of at least $452 billion.
   Or in other terms, President Obama has permanently grown the size of the U.S. federal governments budget by 16.5% during the four years he will have been in office by the end of his first term in office. The federal governments spending is one-sixth bigger today than it was projected to be at this point four years ago.

   http://spectator.org/archives/2012/07/20/why-business-supports-romney

   Despite absurd claims that he has reduced federal spending since his first year record pace, Obama has greatly increased the size of government. His story has changed drastically from 2008, when he initially called the deficit left from President Bush “unpatriotic.” But in the past four years, he has increased that deficit by $5 trillion. Channeling funds into the public sector does not add value to the economy nor does it create anything other than government jobs.
   Next, Obama has suffocated businesses further by increasing red tape. A report released on March 13 by the Heritage Foundation details how 106 Obama administration rules have added $46 billion per year in new costs for Americans exceeding the Bush-era comparable time period by four times the number of rules at more than five times the cost. More, hundreds of new rules are being actively considered. Every one of these is a huge cost on business and a jobs killer.

   http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2012/06/14/president-obama-the-biggest-government-spender-in-world-history/2/

   Even with the Reagan defense buildup, which, remember, won the Cold War without firing a shot, total federal spending as a percent of GDP declined from a high of 23.5% of GDP in 1983 to 21.3% in 1988 and 21.2% in 1989. Thats a real reduction in the size of government relative to the economy of 10%, a huge achievement.
   In sharp contrast to Reagan, Obamas first major legislative initiative was the so-called stimulus, which increased future federal spending by nearly a trillion dollars, the most expensive legislation in history up till that point. We know now, as thinking people knew at the time, that this record shattering spending bill only stimulated government spending, deficits and debt. Contrary to official Democrat Keynesian witchcraft, you dont promote economic recovery, growth and prosperity by borrowing a trillion dollars out of the economy to spend a trillion dollars back into it.
   But this was just a warm up for Obamas Swedish socialism. Obama worked with Pelosis Democratic Congress to pass an additional, $410 billion, supplemental spending bill for fiscal year 2009, which was too much even for big spending President Bush, who had specifically rejected it in 2008. Next in 2009 came a $40 billion expansion in the SCHIP entitlement program, as if we didnt already have way more than too much entitlement spending.
   But those were just the preliminaries for the biggest single spending bill in world history, Obamacare, enacted in March, 2010. That legislation is not yet even counted in Obamas spending record so far because it mostly does not go into effect until 2014. But it is now scored by CBO as increasing federal spending by $1.6 trillion in the first 10 years alone, with trillions more to come in future years.
   After just one year of the Obama spending binge, federal spending had already rocketed to 25.2% of GDP, the highest in American history except for World War II. That compares to 20.8% in 2008, and an average of 19.6% during Bushs two terms. The average during President Clintons two terms was 19.8%, and during the 60-plus years from World War II until 2008 19.7%. Obamas own fiscal 2013 budget released in February projects the average during the entire 4 years of the Obama Administration to come in at 24.4% in just a few months. That budget shows federal spending increasing from $2.983 trillion in 2008 to an all time record $3.796 trillion in 2012, an increase of 27.3%.
   Moreover, before Obama there had never been a deficit anywhere near $1 trillion. The highest previously was $458 billion, or less than half a trillion, in 2008. The federal deficit for the last budget adopted by a Republican controlled Congress was $161 billion for fiscal year 2007. But the budget deficits for Obamas four years were reported in Obamas own 2013 budget as $1.413 trillion for 2009, $1.293 trillion for 2010, $1.3 trillion for 2011, and $1.327 trillion for 2012, four years in a row of deficits of $1.3 trillion or more, the highest in world history.

   Jim you can beat Bush over the head with that drug plan all day but it cant compare to the incredible spending and increase in government that has occurred under Obama or the addition of government programs and spending that democrats have given us over the years.

   Clinton was successful because the 1994 republican’s were determined to restrain the size of government. They did reform welfare and sent him budgets that gave him the positive record he enjoys. He declared “the era of big government over” but had he and Hillary retained democrat control of Congress and succeeded with their original plans (Hillarycare) his would have been one of the worst presidencies in terms of spending and growing the size of government.

   It makes sense to me to keep or put in power those who will attempt to restrain spending and make government more efficient while encouraging and empowering Americans to succeed in their own lives, jobs, and investments. Strong individuals will make a strong America.

   Reply