Tag Archives: Tea Party

Obama Responsible for Poor Jobs Picture: Bachmann

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Couldn’t agree more, but for different reasons.
(feel free to repost)

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Obama Responsible for Poor Jobs Picture: Bachmann

By Jeff Cox

July 8 (CNBC) — The dismal state of employment offers more proof that President Obama’s economic plan isn’t working, Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann told CNBC.

Agreed!

Speaking just after the government said unemployment rose to 9.2 percent last month, the firebrand Minnesota congresswoman and Tea Party leader delivered a blistering critique of the White House’s handling of the jobs picture, focusing specifically on the $800 billion stimulus that has failed to drive down the unemployment rate.

“The president’s own policies have clearly failed the American people,” Bachmann said. “The answer is not to double-down and continue to do more of the same. The answer is to work on what went wrong, to reverse course and have a pro-growth job agenda.”

The $800 billion did what it did- it added $800 billion in income and nominal savings to the economy- to the penny. It’s an accounting identity. If it didn’t add exactly $800 billion the accountants at the CBO would have to stay late and find their arithmetic mistake.

In fact, all entire deficit spending adds that much nominal savings to the economy. That’s where all the increased savings has come from. You could change the label of those deficit clocks to ‘world dollar savings’ and leave the numbers alone.

And note that treasury securities are functionally nothing more than savings accounts at the Fed.

Defying consensus estimates that the economy had merely hit a soft patch and was on its road to recovery, the latest jobs news instead shows just 18,000 jobs created in June and the unemployment rate when taking into consideration those not looking for work at 16.2 percent.

Right, the problem is the deficit is too small. I’ve proposed a full FICA suspension, federal revenue distributions to the state govts of $500 per capita, and an $8/hr federally funded transition job to anyone willing and able to work to facilitate the transition from unemployment to private sector employment.

Bachmann’s campaign has caught fire as polls show her in a virtual dead heat in Iowa with presumptive front-runner Mitt Romney.

In her live interview, Bachmann focused on the voices she has heard while campaigning and the angst among business owners about how Washington policies have hindered business growth.

“I have talked to business owners all across the nation,” she said. “They’re really paralyzed with fear right now. This won’t help hearing (the unemployment news) because it shows that Washington doesn’t have the solution.”

Agreed!

She spoke as Congress and the White House are locked in debate over whether to raise the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling. Bachmann dodged a question over whether the failure to increase the borrowing limit while drastically cutting spending would raise unemployment, but she said more taxes certainly aren’t the answer, either.

“We need to fundamentally restructure how government does spending,” she said. “We’re still operating under the principles of FDR and LBJ. We need to move into the 21st century so we embrace pro-growth policies. Unfortunately they’re tone deaf here in Washington, D.C. They think government is the answer, and the American people know it’s not true.”

I watched her explain how if they just do spending cuts to balance the budget that will create jobs in the long term. What she fails to understand is that with all of our ‘demand leakages’ and tighter lending standards, spending cuts have to be at least matched by tax cuts to not add to unemployment, and tax cuts have to be substantially larger than spending cuts to add to demand and reduce unemployment.

It’s a shame, because with the tea party standing for ‘taxed enough already’ the tea party candidates continue to propose balanced budgets that continue to grossly over tax us.

It’s also a shame that no one in the media has the knowledge of actual monetary operations to expose the gaping flaws in her logic. In fact, the have the same fundamental misunderstanding and tend to agree with her, including the entirely inapplicable analogy that we are in danger of becoming the next Greece.

So current odds have to favor her for the presidential nomination.

And only MMT stands between her and the presidency.

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Obama himself, talking like a true convert to the Conservative Party

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Looks like the media is getting on to a lot of what I’ve been saying since President Obama was a candidate?

These are not your father’s Democrats.

And they afraid we might be the next Greece, and so are on a path to turn us into the next Japan.

GDP is improving modestly, thanks to the 9% federal deficit. However, given the current credit environment and high productivity growth, it’s not enough to bring down unemployment in any meaningful way.

The near 0% interest rate policy continues to suppress private interest income and, along with it’s positive supply side effects, has helped the inflation indicators to continue to decelerate.

Increased exports evidence the more to reduced real terms of trade, with higher crude prices hurting as well. (we are exporting more and more just to ‘pay for’ the same amount of imported crude)

The last thing our standard of living needs is what the President threatened when he said something like ‘now that the worst of the recession is behind us, we can turn our attention to deficit reduction.’

LEFT TO WONDER IF HE’S ON RIGHT
By Charles Hurt
Publication: The New York Post
Date: Wednesday, January 26 2011

 
WASHINGTON – Stop spending! Cut taxes! Simplify the tax code! Expand free trade! Slice the deficit! Slaughter the pork!

No, that was not some Tea Partier or the battle cry of Republicans last night in response to President Obama’s State of the Union Address.

It was Obama himself, talking like a true convert to the Conservative Party.

The lefty liberal asked both parties last night to come together to eliminate the endless complexities in the tax code that has created a cottage industry for accountants but has been the bane of businesses and workers alike.

And he urged Congress to cut taxes. But not just any taxes.

The man many believe to be an all-out socialist whose policies have been hostile to businesses actually called on Congress last night to cut the corporate tax rate.

Few Republicans in these tough times have the guts to carry the banner of cutting this country’s corporate tax rates, which are among the highest in the world.

And it is truly astonishing to hear this from the leader of the party that is so completely devoted to trashing companies and corporate successes like Wal-Mart – even as Democrats claim to want to lower unemployment rates and foster a thriving economy.

Obama called for free trade with foreign countries, even as his fellow Democrats continue to insist that all free traders want to do is send jobs overseas.

And he hewed to a conservative line on cutting the deficit – a truly terrifying burden that just months ago Obama dismissed as insignificant as he added trillions of dollars to it.

The moment Obama really threw down the gauntlet came when he locked arms with conservative Republicans to denounce earmarks, those fat chunks of your money that lawmakers grab to pay for pet projects back home and plum favors for political supporters.

Obama explicitly vowed in no uncertain terms that if Congress sends him any piece of legislation with any earmarks in it, he will flat out veto it.

This was met with muted applause and just a small handful of decent politicians in the chamber leaping to their feet to applaud.

The question now is whether the President Obama we heard last night was genuine – or the speech was just another cynical political ploy by a Washington politician looking ahead to his re-election next year.

Will Obama actually follow through and lead his party to join Republicans to lower the corporate tax rate, dramatically cut the deficit and finally put an end to the political pork spending that politician after politician has proved is the “gateway drug” to corruption?

A glance at his record does not leave much room for hope.

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Press Release

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MOSLER FOR SENATE

Tea Party’s Economic Agenda Would Cause Next Great Depression
Says Former Tea Party Democrat



Waterbury, CT – August 30, 2010, Warren Mosler, Independent candidate for US Senate, former Tea Party Democrat, and frequent speaker at Tea Party rallies, lashed out today at the political movement for its ill-thought demands to balance the budget which he contends is based on abject ignorance and counter to true Tea Party values. “The Tea Party’s demands to balance the budget and reduce the Federal deficit aren’t merely misguided, but dangerous, and would cause the worst depression in history,” stated Mosler, a financial expert with 37 years of experience in monetary operations. “I have been, and continue to be, a strong supporter of the core Tea Party values of lower taxes, limited government, competitive market solutions, and a return to personal responsibility. However, their proposals to balance the budget are the same suicidal policies that caused the 6 horrible depressions in the U.S. over the past 200 years. At the worst possible time to take money out of the economy, the Tea Party’s proposals would remove an estimated $1 trillion and cause the worst depression in world history, destroying tens of millions of jobs and ruining our children’s future.”

Explanation of the Modern Monetary System
Modern money, after the demise of the gold standard, is akin to a spreadsheet that simply works by computer. As Fed Chairman Bernanke explained on national television on 60 minutes, when the government spends or lends, it does so by adding numbers to private bank accounts. When it taxes, it marks those same accounts down. When it borrows, it simply shifts funds from a demand deposit (called a reserve account) at the Fed to a savings account (called a securities account) at the Fed. The money government spends doesn’t come from anywhere, and it doesn’t cost anything to produce. The government therefore cannot run out of money, nor does it need to borrow from the likes of China to finance anything. To better understand this, think about when a football team kicks a field goal; the number on the scoreboard goes from 0 to 3. Does anyone wonder where the stadium got those 3 points, or demand that the stadium keep a reserve of points in a “lock box”?

Moreover, government deficits ADD to our savings – to the penny – as a fact of accounting, not theory or philosophy. This means the Mosler payroll tax (FICA) holiday will directly increase incomes and savings, thus fixing the economy from the bottom up. For example, if the Mosler tax cut amounts to $20 billion per week, that will be the exact increase in income and savings for the rest of us as anyone in the Congressional Budget Office will confirm. For the Federal government, taxes don’t serve to collect revenue but are more like a thermostat that controls the temperature of the economy. When it is too hot, raising taxes will cool it down. And in this ice-cold economy, a very large tax cut is needed to warm the economy back up to operating temperature.

While Mosler fully supports the Tea Party desire to cut taxes, and recognizes the need to cut wasteful and unnecessary spending – in fact, his economic proposals will save the government hundreds of billions of dollars of unnecessary interest expense – he also recognizes that tax cuts have to be much larger than spending cuts in order to ensure that less money is taken out of the economy, and not more as the Tea Party is currently demanding.

About Warren Mosler
Warren Mosler is running as an Independent. His populist economic message features: 1) a full payroll tax (FICA) holiday so that people working for a living can afford to buy the goods and services they produce. 2) $500 per capita Federal revenue distribution for the states 3) An $8/hr federally funded job to anyone willing and able to work to facilitate the transition from unemployment to private sector employment. He has also pledged never to vote for cuts in Social Security payments or benefits. Warren is a native of Manchester, Conn., where his father worked in a small insurance office and his mother was a night-shift nurse. After graduating from the University of Connecticut (BA Economics, 1971), and working on financial trading desks in NYC and Chicago, Warren started his current investment firm in 1982. For the last twenty years, Warren has also been involved in the academic community, publishing numerous journal articles, and giving conference presentations around the globe. Mosler’s new book “The 7 Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy” is a non technical guide to the actual workings of the monetary system and exposes the most commonly held misconceptions. He also founded Mosler Automotive, which builds the Mosler MT900, the world’s top performance car that also gets 30 mpg at 55 mph.
Learn more at www.moslerforsenate.com


Media Contact:
Will Thompson
(267) 221-6056
will@hedgefundpr.net

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Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated

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Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated

By Kate Zernike and Megan Thee-Brenan

April 14 (NYT) — Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and are no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

The 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45.

They hold more conservative views on a range of issues than Republicans generally. They are also more likely to describe themselves as “very conservative” and President Obama as “very liberal.”

And while most Republicans say they are “dissatisfied” with Washington, Tea Party supporters are more likely to classify themselves as “angry.”

The Tea Party movement burst onto the scene a year ago in protest of the economic stimulus package, and its supporters have vowed to purge the Republican Party of officials they consider not sufficiently conservative and to block the Democratic agenda on the economy, the environment and health care. But the demographics and attitudes of those in the movement have been known largely anecdotally. The Times/CBS poll offers a detailed look at the profile and attitudes of those supporters.

Their responses are like the general public’s in many ways. Most describe the amount they paid in taxes this year as “fair.” Most send their children to public schools. A plurality do not think Sarah Palin is qualified to be president, and, despite their push for smaller government, they think that Social Security and Medicare are worth the cost to taxpayers. They actually are just as likely as Americans as a whole to have returned their census forms, though some conservative leaders have urged a boycott.

Tea Party supporters’ fierce animosity toward Washington, and the president in particular, is rooted in deep pessimism about the direction of the country and the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich.

The overwhelming majority of supporters say Mr. Obama does not share the values most Americans live by and that he does not understand the problems of people like themselves. More than half say the policies of the administration favor the poor, and 25 percent think that the administration favors blacks over whites — compared with 11 percent of the general public.

They are more likely than the general public, and Republicans, to say that too much has been made of the problems facing black people.

Asked what they are angry about, Tea Party supporters offered three main concerns: the recent health care overhaul, government spending and a feeling that their opinions are not represented in Washington.

“The only way they will stop the spending is to have a revolt on their hands,” Elwin Thrasher, a 66-year-old semiretired lawyer in Florida, said in an interview after the poll. “I’m sick and tired of them wasting money and doing what our founders never intended to be done with the federal government.”

They are far more pessimistic than Americans in general about the economy. More than 90 percent of Tea Party supporters think the country is headed in the wrong direction, compared with about 60 percent of the general public. About 6 in 10 say “America’s best years are behind us” when it comes to the availability of good jobs for American workers.

Nearly 9 in 10 disapprove of the job Mr. Obama is doing over all, and about the same percentage fault his handling of major issues: health care, the economy and the federal budget deficit. Ninety-two percent believe Mr. Obama is moving the country toward socialism, an opinion shared by more than half of the general public.

“I just feel he’s getting away from what America is,” said Kathy Mayhugh, 67, a retired medical transcriber in Jacksonville. “He’s a socialist. And to tell you the truth, I think he’s a Muslim and trying to head us in that direction, I don’t care what he says. He’s been in office over a year and can’t find a church to go to. That doesn’t say much for him.”

The nationwide telephone poll was conducted April 5 through April 12 with 1,580 adults. For the purposes of analysis, Tea Party supporters were oversampled, for a total of 881, and then weighted to their proper proportion in the poll. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points for all adults and for Tea Party supporters.

Of the 18 percent of Americans who identified themselves as supporters, 20 percent, or 4 percent of the general public, said they had given money or attended a Tea Party event, or both. These activists were more likely than supporters generally to describe themselves as very conservative and had more negative views about the economy and Mr. Obama. They were more angry with Washington and intense in their desires for a smaller federal government and deficit.

Tea Party supporters over all are more likely than the general public to say their personal financial situation is fairly good or very good. But 55 percent are concerned that someone in their household will be out of a job in the next year. And more than two-thirds say the recession has been difficult or caused hardship and major life changes. Like most Americans, they think the most pressing problems facing the country today are the economy and jobs.

But while most Americans blame the Bush administration or Wall Street for the current state of the American economy, the greatest number of Tea Party supporters blame Congress.

They do not want a third party and say they usually or almost always vote Republican. The percentage holding a favorable opinion of former President George W. Bush, at 57 percent, almost exactly matches the percentage in the general public that holds an unfavorable view of him.

Dee Close, a 47-year-old homemaker in Memphis, said she was worried about a “drift” in the country. “Over the last three or four years, I’ve realized how immense that drift has been away from what made this country great,” Ms. Close said.

Yet while the Tea Party supporters are more conservative than Republicans on some social issues, they do not want to focus on those issues: about 8 in 10 say that they are more concerned with economic issues, as is the general public.

When talking about the Tea Party movement, the largest number of respondents said that the movement’s goal should be reducing the size of government, more than cutting the budget deficit or lowering taxes.

And nearly three-quarters of those who favor smaller government said they would prefer it even if it meant spending on domestic programs would be cut.

But in follow-up interviews, Tea Party supporters said they did not want to cut Medicare or Social Security — the biggest domestic programs, suggesting instead a focus on “waste.”

Some defended being on Social Security while fighting big government by saying that since they had paid into the system, they deserved the benefits.

Others could not explain the contradiction.

“That’s a conundrum, isn’t it?” asked Jodine White, 62, of Rocklin, Calif. “I don’t know what to say. Maybe I don’t want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security.” She added, “I didn’t look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I’ve changed my mind.”

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Tea Party Plan for Dems- Cut to the Front with Tax Cuts

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Tea Party Plan for Democrats — Cut to the Front with Tax Cuts

At Saturday’s Tea Party conference in Dallas I’ll be outlining how Tea Party Democrats can run against Obama administration policies that are counter to both Tea Party and traditional Democratic values. It is the Washington elite that have moved away from the ideals of Jefferson and Jackson with policies that are, at best, regressive, elitist, and destructive to our quality of life. And who’s benefiting? Not the millions who voted Democratic who are losing their jobs and their homes. And with GDP now moving higher while unemployment rises, all that additional wealth is flowing up to the top. This Democratic President and Congress was not elected to enrich the bankers, insurance executives, drug companies, and union leaders at the expense of the rest of us, in a perversion of true core Democratic values. Unfortunately, the so-called economic experts have confused themselves and their political masters with contrived explanations for the way the economy works, and their limited vision has limited the range of policy choice. The result has been a monumental economic and social disaster caused by an obvious shortage of aggregate demand. The spending power needed to make mortgage payments, car payments, and do a bit of shopping- all of which would fix the economy and end the financial crisis- just isn’t there.

The answer is a full payroll tax holiday, where the US Treasury would make all FICA payments for both employees and employers that regressively remove 15% of every pay check from dollar one up to $106,800 of income. The take home pay of a husband and wife with a combined income of $100,000 per year would increase by over $650 a month, and quickly restore output and employment. Rather than funding the banks from the top down with an improbable trickle down theory that would have made Reagan blush, this tax cut restores the incomes necessary to support all economic activity from the bottom up. Instead of funding the financial sector with $trillions, the payroll tax holiday instead simply stops taking $trillions away from people working for a living.

Unfortunately, the Democratic elite has been not only against this kind of tax cut, even though it is a tax so regressive that no self respecting Democrat should tolerate for a single moment, because they think the Federal Government has to actually get revenue to be able to spend. However, that anachronistic gold standard reality has long been replace by our current, non convertible currency regime and floating exchange rate policy. Chairman Bernanke told Congressman Pelley exactly how the Federal Government spends today last May:

(PELLEY) Is that tax money that the Fed is spending?
(BERNANKE) It’s not tax money. The banks have– accounts with the Fed, much the same way that you have an account in a commercial bank. So, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed.

Our govt has only one way to spend- they ‘mark up’ numbers in bank accounts. The funds don’t ‘come from’ anywhere any more than the 6 points for a touchdown posted on scoreboard at a football game ‘come from’ anywhere. Nor does govt. get anything when it taxes- the IRS just changes numbers down in our bank accounts.

The fact is, the US Government never has nor doesn’t have dollars. It’s the scorekeeper for the dollar. It just changes numbers in bank accounts.

So why tax? To regulate aggregate demand. Taxation is the thermostat. When the economy is too hot, raise taxes to cool it down. When it’s too cold, like it surely is today, a payroll tax holiday will warm it back up to operating temperature.

The Democratic elite have it wrong and their wrongheaded ways are doing serious damage to the US economy and the people struggling under their failed economic agenda. And their latest moves towards what they call ‘fiscal responsibility’ will only cut demand further and make things worse.

Tea Party Democrats can lead the way towards true fiscal responsibility, which means setting taxes at the right level needed to sustain output and employment. And today that means a full payroll tax holiday.


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Obama speech

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Obama: Bank Regulators May Have Gotten Too Tough

Jan. 22 (AP) —President Barack Obama said on Friday that regulatory oversight of the country’s banks might now be erring too much on the side of caution, potentially hindering the flow of credit to small businesses.

This is definitely the case. It’s called regulatory overreach, as previously discussed on my website.

“The banks feel as if regulators are looking over their shoulder, discouraging them from lending,” Obama told a town-hall style meeting in Elyira, Ohio during a trip to promote his jobs and health care policies.

Obama said it was not his intention to interfere with bank supervision. But he had told Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to make sure that the country has not “seen the pendulum swing too far”, with regulators now being too tough after being too slack in the past.

Including the risk weight rules that require non senior impaired securities to functionally be marked at 0.

On other issues, it was a combative Obama that exhorted Congress to pass a new job-creation bill, taking a populist appeal to America’s recession-racked Rust Belt in an effort to recapture the excitement of his campaign.

Obama weaved us-against-them rhetoric into his appearances, telling a town hall audience that he “will never stop fighting” for an economy that works for the hard-working, not just those already well off.

He said a jobs bill emerging in Congress must include tax breaks for small business hiring and for people trying to make their homes more energy efficient — two proposals he wasn’t able to get into a bill the House passed last month.

He also pitched fiscal responsibility and deficit reduction. Not sure how he proposes to do both, as below.

And he used the word “fight” or some variation of it over a dozen times. The House-passed $174 billion stimulus package faces a stern test in the Senate, in part because it is financed with deficit spending.

He strongly defended unpopular actions he has taken to bail out banks and insurers and to rescue automakers from collapse. Such measures have not gone over well in many quarters, and have been derided as moves that expanded government intervention and swelled the deficit.

The measures were seen as a helping hand for Wall Street while many on Main Street walked the unemployment lines.

Obama said that propping up the financial industry was as much about regular Americans as wealthy bankers. “If the financial system had gone down, it would have taken the entire economy and millions more families and businesses with it,” he argued.

As before, he states his belief in a top down solution.

Similarly, allowing GM and Chrysler to go under might have satisfied calls to force businesses to reap the consequences of bad decisions.

Cleaning up Chrysler to hand it over to Fiat to import Fiats to compete with GM seems a confused strategy to me.

But he also said, “Hundreds of thousands of Americans would have been hurt, not just at those companies themselves, but at other auto companies and at their suppliers and dealers, here in Ohio, up in Michigan, and all across this country.”

Missing the macro benefits by seeing only the very micro results in sub optimal solutions.

“He’s done a lot, but they are all negative things,” said Ray Angell, 65, of Twinsburg, Ohio, a conservative active in the anti-tax Tea Party movement, mentioning the stimulus package and climate change proposals.


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Jan 18 update

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Update

The tea party organizers have invited me to meet with them in Dallas to discuss tea party support of my candidacy for US senate in the democratic primary in Connecticut where Chris Dodd has announced he won’t be running.

Also to be discussed is tea party support for my economic agenda which expresses their core economic values of lower taxes, promotion of competitive market forces for further public purpose, full employment, and limiting and focusing government in support of further public purpose.


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Quincy Herald Whig

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>   
>   (email exchange)
>   
>   On Mon, Sep 14, Michael wrote:
>   

Tea Party speakers rally Quincy crowd with call to ‘take back your country’

Warren Mosler, an economist who came to Quincy from St. Croix, said the Tea Party movement is gaining momentum as the situation in Washington deteriorates. Unless politicians take notice, he expects the campaign to keep growing.

Made some good progress with some now former deficit terrorists, thanks.
Some I spoke to the night before at dinner told me they altered their presentations accordingly.

Thanks for sending this link to the

Video


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