The Breakthrough Israel-Palestinian Sinai Solution

More than anything else, the immutable underlying obstacle to a long term solution to the vexing Israeli-Palestinian conundrum is a real estate problem.

The solution: reimagine and build a new Palestinian homeland on the Sinai Peninsula, a massive, sparsely populated land with climate similar to the UAE, rich in mineral resources, ocean access and some of the most beautiful beaches in the region.

With collaboration between Arab states, the U.S. and the other NATO nations, and Israel, this Sinai Palestinian Homeland (SPH) can be transformed into a new Dubai.

• The SPHwould be secured—and neighboring Egypt's and Israel's security ensured—by an Egypt-led pan-Arab security force (PASF). An "MFO on steroids" patterned after NATO. The PASF would be funded primarily by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar and other wealthy Arab states, with supplement from and military coordination with the U.S.

• Centcom (whose U.S. Mideast presence and budget could be greatly scaled back) and NATO. In addition to the SPH, the PAS would have a strong presence in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank, which is far preferable to untenable Israeli occupation.

• A new de-terroristed government for the SPH would be constituted. All Hamas elements would be barred. The SPH government would be led by the remaining and new viable Palestinian leaders, under the auspices of Arab states, the U.S. and NATO.

• The SPH would be constructed with massive Saudi Arabia and rich Arab state investment (the Saudi PIF has $1 Trillion in assets; Aramco ~$100B annual Free Cash Flow) and Israeli cooperation.

• Egypt would be paid a portion of SPH income derived from exploitation of Sinai mineral resources, tourism and industry.

• Populating the SPH would not entail forced Palestinian migration from Gaza and the West Bank. Arab states and Israel would incentivize voluntary relocation by Palestinians to the SPH with free flights on state airlines and per capita cash payments to aid relocation and settlement. Because the SPH would be a safe, soundly governed showplace, with vastly larger land area and economic opportunities, it would be a magnet for Palestinians now crammed into corrupt tinderboxes of grinding poverty.

• Formation of the PASF and SPH would be a key element of the long-sought Israel-Saudi peace accord.

Deliverance from the Devastating Free Trade Hoax (Published 2018)

Those who criticize President Trump’s tough trade policies and the whole idea of import tariffs are ignoring economic history and woefully out of touch with reality. 

This poll from top Republican pollster Ed Goeas shows enormous public support for tariffs, even if they result in higher consumer prices. This support for tariffs is particularly pronounced in states where President Trump received 55%+ of the vote. Apparently, average Americans “get” the tragic trade reality that eludes the elites.

The hysterical claims that our trading partners will retaliate with their own tariffs is laughable. The U.S. has an $800 billion annual goods deficit – so any import tariff construct will be decidedly to our advantage, irrespective of what other nations do.

This ridiculous “trade war” trope is fed by Wall Street and C-Suite fat cats and their economist, pundit and politician lackeys in both parties. And, sadly, their alarmist drivel is lapped-up by journalists too lazy to do their own research or question the establishment's conventional wisdom. Here’s the truth: the United States is already in a trade war, and we've been losing, disastrously.

Conveniently left out of the elite’s perfidious defense of our horrific trade policies is that only seven other countries in the G20 have a goods trade deficit and only three of those - the UK, India and Turkey - have one as large as ours relative to GDP. And our yawning trade gap has continued, uninterrupted, for an appalling 40 years.

It’s time that we obliterate the economic mythology surrounding free trade once and for all.

The United States has lost 5 million manufacturing jobs since China entered WTO in 2001. And our country has a stunning $400 billion annual goods trade deficit with China. 


Even accounting for our relatively small surplus with China in services - about $40 billion – the overall U.S. trade deficit with that trading tiger is $360 billion. So our trade deficit with China is more than twice its $175 billion defense budget. A terrifying fact, given that China is emerging as our nation's primary strategic threat.

Imports from Japan, South Korea, Germany and Mexico are also sucking vast numbers of well-paying manufacturing jobs out of the U.S. The frequently touted savings American consumers have realized from cheap imports are more than offset by job losses and wage declines, enormous increases in outlays for SNAP (food stamps), disability (off the charts, despite dramatic improvements in workplace safety), welfare programs and skyrocketing suicide and Opioid addiction rates. 

The "free trade" paradigm was constructed after World War II, when the U.S. was the only major nation whose manufacturing infrastructure wasn't in ruins. So tariffs weren't necessary to protect American manufacturing jobs.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. tolerated trade imbalances to shore-up the economies of key allies and emerging economies as the Soviet threat loomed. Our trade deficits with NATO nations and Japan (though minuscule compared to the present day) were tantamount to an investment in national defense.

Today, we’re in a totally different world. The Soviet communist threat no longer exists. Our country is in a brutal economic battle with Asian and European export titans bent on maintaining trade surpluses, guarding their industrial bases and nurturing their factory workers. 

The mercantilist policies pursued by our trading partners certainly don't seem to have impaired their standard of living, much less imploded their economies. It's the U.S. whose middle class has been hammered as its factory towns have been hollowed out.

Japanese, Korean and German companies build high quality cars and myriad other products in the U.S. This begs the question: why is there any need for large scale manufactured goods imports?

Indeed, the one high-value imported consumer product that does have a significant tariff - 25% - pickup trucks, is a huge U.S. economic success story on every front. Pickups provide the lion’s share of profits for U.S. automakers. And they certainly aren’t too expensive for middle class Americans to afford, as pickups outsell every category of passenger car. The Ford F-Series, Chevrolet Silverado and Dodge Ram trucks are the three most popular vehicles in the country. In order to avoid this tariff, Toyota, Nissan and Honda, build their pickups here in the U.S., providing thousands of wonderfully recompensed jobs to American workers. This is a real-world example of tariffs on a hugely popular, major purchase item. 

What prevents this same import tariff paradigm from working across the board?

The incessant claim that import tariffs are "a tax on consumers" is mendacious. Any taxes a company and its employees pay is a cost of doing business that's embedded in the price of the products. Workers gauge their compensation based on net pay after taxes, so their wages must be grossed-up by the employer to account for those taxes - which is added compensation expense that's priced-in.  

Of course, companies can avoid the tariffs by doing what pickup manufacturers do - make it in the U.S.A. And unlike income taxes, consumers can avoid tariff costs by buying American!

President Reagan used to say that when you tax something, you get less of it. Tariffs (taxes) on imported goods will mean less of them over time - but more well-paying American manufacturing jobs and more domestic investment. As outlined later, even if all politically plausible spending cuts are enacted, the federal government will still need more revenue in coming years. Far better that it come from import tariffs than income taxes!

Import tariffs were the federal government’s primary source of revenue for the first 125 years America’s existence – during which we built the mightiest economy and highest standard of living in human history.

As President Trump pointed out during the campaign, tariffs were the keystone of the “American System” initiated by George Washington and Alexander Hamilton and bedrock Republican philosophy, beginning with President Abraham Lincoln.

It’s amazing how many politicians and journalists embarrass themselves by promulgating the Smoot-Hawley myth. That tariff increase – from levels already dramatically higher than today’s – had little, if anything, to do with The Great Depression. The collapse in world trade in the 1930s was an effect of that international economic calamity, not a cause. Dartmouth economics professor, author and trade expert Douglas A. Irwin writes : "most economists, both liberal and conservative, doubt that Smoot Hawley played much of a role in the subsequent contraction."  An opinion also held by Nobel Prize in economics laureate – and conservative icon – Milton Friedman.

The Great Depression came in the wake of a financial crash which was triggered by an obscenely over-leveraged stock market rife with fraud, and the near-collapse of our frightfully unsound banking system. What might have been a short cyclical downturn was grossly amplified by the Federal Reserve's stunningly maladroit monetary policy. It was further exacerbated by President Herbert Hoover's huge hike in income tax rates in 1932, ill-conceived, statist economic programs and a crisis in American confidence due to his political incompetence.

When Franklin Roosevelt took office, he revived America's collective psyche and moved quickly to rationally restore the American economy. FDR suspended the gold standard - allowing for desperately needed monetary expansion - shored-up and rebuilt confidence in the American banking system through implementation of deposit insurance and other measures, and spent a sizable sum on needed infrastructure (a far higher amount, on a relative basis, than did President Obama's 2009 "stimulus"). Tellingly, FDR's program didn't include a massive reduction in import tariffs. FDR wasn’t even given the authority by congress to change tariff rates until 1934 - all of which had to be reciprocal. As late as 1946, the average U.S. import tariff was still 25.3% - more than 10 times what it is today.

Despite little change in import tariffs, from 1934-36, U.S. economic growth exploded to more than 10% annually (exceeding China’s growth during its recent halcyon years), retracing most of the 1930-33 GDP decline. Only when, in his second term, FDR further increased taxes on higher incomes, began the Social Security payroll tax (without concomitant benefits payouts, as they didn't kick-in until several years), and fully implemented unprecedented government intervention into business and agriculture, did we enter a second severe recession in 1937. That recession ended in 1939, as our economy was substantially boosted by FDR's massive re-armament program leading up to World War II.

In all of American history, there is not one example of trade tariffs catalyzing an economic contraction - quite the contrary.

The hyperbolically named "Tariff of Abominations" in 1828 was followed by a multi-year U.S. economic boom, which was a major factor in President Andrew Jackson’s re-election in 1832.

The high import tariff regime championed by President William McKinley was instrumental in ending the crippling recession which followed the Economic Panic of 1893 – and it catalyzed a sustained period of robust economic growth.

The Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922, conceived by the greatest secretary of the treasury after Hamilton, Andrew Mellon, ushered in a seven-year expansion of unprecedented magnitude, "The Roaring '20s."

Mellon combined the tariff increase with significant income tax rate reductions, focused on the lowest income taxpayers. A great model for us to emulate today.

In addition to bringing tremendous prosperity, the Mellon regime slashed the federal government's enormous WWI debt by a whopping 40%.

As I wrote a few months before the 2016 election, an American economic horror story commenced in the late 1970s – when the United States began running trade deficits for the first time in the 20th Century:

The contraction in labor force participation, the collapse of salaries and wages as a percentage of GDP and the historically high level of profits, the dramatic distension of American income inequality – so often treated as a perfect storm of mysterious origin by economists and politicians – are, in fact, concomitant with our monstrous trade deficits.

The carnage wreaked by America’s catastrophic trade policies extends beyond the jobs lost directly to rampant importing and offshoring. Our nation’s middle class is trapped in a disastrous wage decline vortex.

Walmart has 1.2 million non-managerial employees, more than the total number of U.S. auto and auto parts manufacturing workers. The average wage for the Walmart workers? $14, with little or no benefits. The average American factory worker wage? $24, most with full benefits. That’s more than a $20,000 per year difference.

No wonder so many rich investors and corporate executives extol the free trade fantasy. It has vastly expanded corporate profits while American workers have been hosed. Meanwhile, a lot of the trade surplus lucre that piles up in foreign countries flows back to Wall Street banks to be invested - generating huge fee revenue while goosing stock prices. 

Our atrocious trade policies have hit African Americans particularly hard.

Henry Ford, the father of automobile mass production, was one of the first large employers to hire African American workers. The rest of the automobile industry followed, which contributed mightily to the massive migration of African Americans from the Jim Crow south to Detroit and other northern industrial cities in the early 20^th Century. This did much to germinate the black middle class in America. 

But the import-driven decline of American manufacturing has left many of the descendants of those who were part of the great African American migration in despair. In 1975, 40 percent of young Midwestern black men were employed in manufacturing; by 1990, that proportion had dropped to just 10 percent. 

Now, the company founded by Henry Ford is moving most of its small car production to Mexico, in a new $1.6-billion-dollar plant that will employ thousands of workers in that country – instead of more African American workers in our country. This outrage exemplifies how disastrous Wall Street-designed trade policies, favoring China, Mexico and many other countries, have ravaged the African American community.

Incredibly, many elites claim that the American importing and offshoring orgy is no problem because “manufacturing jobs are yesterday’s jobs.” Somebody’s human hands are making all those cars, car parts, flat screen displays, computer chips, machine tools and iPhones that are flooding into our country. Why can’t a lot more of them be Americans, during the long transition towards a more automated, 3-D-printed manufacturing future? 

Even if new U.S. factories are laden with robots, there will still be many well paid U.S. workers to manufacture and maintain the robots and oversee them in plants. The free trade prevaricators fail to note that China’s population is almost five-times ours; we don’t need to create nearly as many additional manufacturing jobs to have a dramatically positive impact on our middle class and overall economy.

And speaking of robots, a lot more of those Fanuc robots should be made on our shores and many more U.S.-based robotics companies should be in a position to compete with that Japanese behemoth.

Yes, the U.S. has surpluses with many countries on services. While that’s nice, it’s important to note that the services sector entails a much smaller proportion of well-compensated middle-income jobs than does manufacturing. Services include Wall Street banks and financial firms, where an inordinate percentage of the compensation flows to a tiny cohort of traders and executives that are among the top 5% in earnings and wealth (many in the top 1%). So, while services are important, they’re not America’s ticket to mass job and income expansion.

Our terrible trade policies have also imperiled American national security. Our military contractors are frighteningly reliant on other countries - including China, increasingly an adversary - for key components, largely because the deluge of cheap imports has forced so many U.S. suppliers out of business.

So, clearly, President Trump's aggressive trade stance is vital to both rebuild the American middle class and strengthen national defense. But a trade policy overhaul is also essential to avoiding an economic cataclysm. 

The Congressional Budget Office projects exploding government deficits – driving government debt to a Post-War high of 100% of GDP by 2028 – and a backsliding to sub-par GDP growth of below 2% beginning in 2020. Even if the Republicans’ rosiest scenarios come to pass over the next decade, hundreds of billions more in federal tax revenue will be required to rescue America from fiscal ruin.

To meet these daunting fiscal, economic and national security challenges, we should go a step further than the president already has by imposing a 15% a tariff on all imported goods.

This December 2016 Congressional Research Service analysis reinforces the President’s authority to impose such a tariff. Beginning with the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934, a cascade of laws and federal court decisions have provided the President with almost unfettered authority to impose import tariffs. Indeed, simply by declaring our nation's dire, unsustainable trade situation a "threat to national security," President Trump would gain the authority to impose the comprehensive 15% additional goods import tariff under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962.

This case is further reinforced by the point outlined earlier: our gargantuan trade deficit with China is funding a significant portion of its defense budget. So we are foolishly financing the military of the nation emerging as the greatest strategic threat to our country and our Asian allies.

This 15% additional tariff would yield $3 trillion in incremental revenue over 10 years, allowing congress to make the newly enacted Trump tax cuts for the middle class permanent. There would be sufficient remaining revenue to fund a real Obamacare repeal and replace, seed a massive public-private infrastructure bank and avoid the trillion-dollar-plus annual deficits currently projected.

In addition, over the long term, the upsurge in American jobs resulting from fewer goods imports would cut social welfare costs while increasing income and payroll tax revenues.

Let’s keep it real; we have two choices: an import tariff regime that will generate substantial additional government revenue - which is consistent with the policy America has had for most of its history - or, a huge hike in income taxes that would have to extend far beyond the wealthy, plus excruciating cuts in Medicare, Social Security and discretionary spending.

So, those who lambaste import tariffs must be asked: do you have a better plan? 

My proposed 15% goods imports tariff represents just a fraction of the 35% - 40% rate that candidate Donald Trump said would be appropriate, given the decades of job theft that’s been perpetrated by many of our trading partners. And it’s also a much lower tariff than the average from our nation’s founding until after World War II.

And what a coincidence – almost all of our non-China goods trade deficit is with “friends and allies” who’ve been taking advantage of the U.S. for decades by not paying their fair share for defense.

For Japan, South Korea and NATO countries, the 15% goods trade tariff will be far less financially onerous for them than if we push for those countries to spend as high a percentage of their GDP on defense as we do – which is not the 2% NATO obligation but 3½%!

And we couldn’t ask for a better macroeconomic environment in which to introduce these tariffs.

We’re in the midst of global disinflation. Near deflation (U.S. grocery prices are now actually declining). This, and our cutthroat international economy, will induce companies abroad and at home to slash costs and compress margins to minimize tariff-related price hikes.

One of the more ridiculous arguments against import tariffs is that they would raise costs to American manufacturers because so many components are made in other countries. That’s one of our biggest trade problems! The massive offshoring of component manufacturing – from auto and wind turbine parts to computer chips to flat screen displays – has had a devastating impact on American workers. As White House trade advisor Peter Navarro aptly stated, we must “Repatriate the American supply chain.” The Trump tariff will jumpstart that effort faster than anything else we can do.

Imposing the uniform tariff on all imported goods eliminates the need for our government to figure out and challenge the devious labyrinth of tariffs, imported goods regulations, currency manipulations, subsidies and other industrial policies our trading partners have put in place to stimulate their exports while stifling American imports.

My proposed uniform import tariff also takes our government out of the business of picking winners and losers among specific industries affected by imports.

The U.S. may have to demand an overhaul of the WTO rubric – or even unilaterally abandon provisions that preclude imposition of the goods import tariff. As President Trump has frequently said, no international body or agreement supersedes the interests of American workers or our national security.

The 15% imported goods tariff would be the greatest social program in at least a generation. It would catalyze creation of millions more well-paying American jobs - reducing welfare and Social Security disability outlays; stop the import- and offshoring-driven downward middle class wage vortex; foment an American manufacturing renaissance that would help rebuild our inner cities and bring hope to small towns in our rural areas; and supercharge domestic investment. 

This tariff would also be a fiscal savior, generating trillions in additional government revenue without raising income taxes.

America must finally stop kowtowing to the elites who have benefited so handsomely from the free trade hoax, and stop financing the increasingly menacing Chinese war machine.

My Requiem to Roger Ailes

Roger Ailes was, like the first president he helped elect in 1968, Richard Nixon, both brilliant and bedeviled. I'd known Roger since we both worked on the ill-fated 1980 presidential campaign of former Texas Gov. John Connally (the one shot alongside JFK) who later served as Nixon's treasury secretary. I was a kid; Ailes, an icon. Roger and I kept in touch and I visited him at Fox News Channel over the years; he was directly responsible for my being added to the commentator mix at FNC and Fox Business Network.
Roger reshaped politics as Nixon's and then many other Republican candidates' media guru; he recast business news as founding head of CNBC (then toppled it with his FBN); he revolutionized journalism by creating Fox News and leading it to dominance. Something inconceivable to all but perhaps Roger and Rupert Murdoch when the fledgling network premiered in '96.
What hit me this morning is that Roger's network made Donald Trump's election possible - long before providing Trump with one of his most important television platforms. It was Fox News that awakened "middle America," so long forced to consume most of their news from left-leaning outlets. FNC showed conservative and center-right voters that they not only had legions of cohorts but - as shown by the stratospheric ascent of FNC – could be a transformative force. That this network, which had been lampooned from launch, became a media colossus while reflecting their values and capturing their sensibilities demonstrated that outsiders really could “trump” the establishment and entrenched incumbents.
What Roger is alleged to have done to numerous women is evil. It's tragic that this revolting truth coexisted with the commendable. Roger advanced a multitude of great careers. His Ailes Apprentice program at Fox News enabled many young people of color to jump-start their journalistic vocation with an entity at the apex of the industry. Roger was a true American success story, a hemophiliac who rose from humble beginnings; a patriot, a visionary and inspiring leader, often a man of generosity.
Many might say it's sad Ailes didn't pass before his egregious transgressions were revealed; I believe the opposite. Roger's public shaming and career collapse left an indelible mark on American business and culture which will inure to the benefit of countless women to come. Ironically, that legacy will be as - or perhaps even more - consequential than Fox News.

How the GOP lost its nerve on tax reform (As published in POLITICO, December 5, 2013)

Link to story:  http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/tax-code-gop-leaders-100693.html?hp=t2_3

By: Brian Faler and Rachael Bade and Kelsey Snell and Lauren French
December 5, 2013 05:03 AM EST

The email blasting Rep. Dave Camp’s tax plan as “disastrous” arrived two days before a pivotal meeting between House Republican leaders and their chief tax writer.

The subject line: “Republican tax plan threatens conservative talk radio and media localism.” It came from Lee Spieckerman, a Dallas-based Fox News commentator and media entrepreneur, who urged party leaders to stop House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Camp’s “kooky” tax “scheme.” The email, obtained by POLITICO, had been forwarded to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other conservative talkers.

It was the latest sign to Republican leaders that the timing is not right for tax reform.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and others pulled the plug last month on Camp’s long-standing vow to take up a tax overhaul bill this year, putting his three-year quest in limbo. The reversal shows how support for tax reform, even among Republicans, is broad but not deep. They routinely say they want to overhaul the Tax Code, but when the Michigan Republican pushed to take the first big step — putting out a bill — party leaders blinked.

The deferral of tax reform, at least for the foreseeable future, also reflects the enormous task Camp set for himself in pledging to overhaul the 70,000-plus-page Tax Code, which has not been revamped since 1986. No matter how small, every change would elicit cross-pressure on lawmakers, and any accomplishment would be a major feat even in a climate of bipartisan comity.

The back story on why Republicans held back Camp was compiled from interviews with dozens of lawmakers, aides and lobbyists. They cite a host of reasons, from jitters among interest groups to Camp’s failure to win support from rank-and-file lawmakers, but they all boil down to the same thing: Republicans are not ready.

Republicans say there will still be a markup — though no one can say when.

“I like the concept of getting tax reform done — the timing I leave to everyone else,” Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the third-ranking Republican, said in the days after the meeting.

“I’m not going to make a prediction,” Camp, who declined to be interviewed for this story, said at the time.
His spokeswoman, Michelle Dimarob, said, “the leadership has been really supportive about partnering together to make sure that noncommittee members have all the resources and tools they need.”

It was Camp’s bad luck to have been planning his markup just as Obamacare was blowing up. For Republicans who had just taken a beating over the government shutdown, the endless stories of Obamacare gone wrong were political manna.

Even some members of Camp’s panel saw no reason to give Democrats the chance to change the subject by introducing what would surely be a wildly controversial tax bill.

“We don’t want to get in front of that train,” said one House Republican lawmaker, who requested anonymity. “That’s got to run its course.”

The gist of Camp’s tax plan would be slashing rates while simplifying the code — which would entail curbing lucrative and popular tax breaks.

Camp, who had persevered through cancer treatments and was now facing term limits on his chairmanship, argued the Obamacare stories would not last forever. He said Republicans couldn’t be against everything and came armed with polling that showed tax reform could be a winning issue.

In the days before the critical Boehner meeting, Camp brought in former Secretary of State James Baker, who had also been President Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, to rally committee Republicans with war stories about the last major tax overhaul. Baker emphasized presidential leadership, recalling that Reagan helped clear a path for Congress. For some lawmakers that only underscored what they did not have: They and President Barack Obama did not even agree on the ground rules of any reform.

At one point, Baker went off script and suggested the time may not be ideal with Obamacare cratering, according to one lawmaker who was there.

Baker told lawmakers it would be a “waste of time” and “impossible” to attempt tax reform without the support of the president, said Baker spokesman John Williams. He said Baker also agreed with a lawmaker’s suggestion that tackling the issue now would only distract from Obamacare.

Beyond that, House leaders were concerned Camp’s plan would hand Democrats fodder in a separate budget fight. They wanted to ax tax breaks to pay for repealing sequestration, and if Camp put out his plan, Democrats would surely cherry-pick the parts they liked, plug them into a bill rescinding Pentagon cuts and dare Republicans to oppose it.

As one manufacturing lobbyist put it: Camp’s plan would become a “list of GOP-sponsored revenue increases.”

And as Baker’s talk underscored, they didn’t have the support of the White House. Their long-running dispute with Democrats over tax increases had scuttled budget efforts in recent years: the 2011 Obama-Boehner budget talks, the Biden group, the Supercommittee, Simpson-Bowles.

There were signs all along the GOP brass were skeptical of tax reform.

Despite Boehner earlier this year reserving the symbolically important H.R. 1 for Camp’s plan, leadership rarely talked up the idea beyond the usual platitudes. This hardly prepared their caucus, the public or, for that matter, conservative commentators for the unpopular choices they would face.

Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said, “the speaker and our entire House Republican team, remain committed to fundamental tax reform to lower rates, simplify the code and help create jobs.”
But the worries of that Dallas commentator, who feared losing a tax break for advertising costs, were just a hint of the interest group ire Republicans would have to battle.

“Unbelievably, a Republican — Camp — is now pushing a tax law change that would do more to impair talk radio than anything the Democrats could have ever dreamed of,” the email Spieckerman sent to leadership read.

He later told POLITICO the Camp plan was self-defeating since much of talk radio leans right: “It’s certainly the only media platform that’s pretty consistently aligned with conservatives and Republicans out there, other than the Fox News Channel, so to do anything that impairs that would be just lunacy.”

He was not the only one worried about losing breaks.

Camp had already shown he was not going to simply do interest groups’ bidding. His proposed tax rules for the financial industry set off alarm bells in New York earlier in the year. “The most feared man on Wall Street,” the New York Post blared, above a picture of the mild-mannered Camp. “He’s become Wall Street’s public enemy No. 1.”

What’s more, Republicans were committed to not raising the deficit, which meant they could not help one group without hurting another.

Lobbyists fretted they were about to become tax reform’s losers. Wholesalers worried about losing an accounting method that saves them big on taxes. The American Iron and Steel Institute was concerned about industry’s ability to write off equipment expenses.

“We are very concerned, however, that many of the tax reform proposals presently under consideration would raise the effective tax rate on U.S. manufacturers,” a letter from the iron and steel group to leadership in the days before the Boehner-Camp meeting said.

When one member of the Rate Coalition, major businesses publicly backing reform, couldn’t get assurances their favorite breaks would be spared, they bypassed Camp, going directly to Boehner to urge him to put off reform, according to a leadership aide.

Majority Leader Eric Cantor was widely believed to be particularly skeptical, and reform backers noticed when he left the issue off a September memo outlining House Republicans’ agenda for the rest of the year.
Tax reform was passed over again in October, in the battle over the debt limit. Reform advocates hoped Republicans would use it to force action, but when Republicans winnowed their list of demands, they settled on a delay in Obamacare. Tax reform was too divisive, lawmakers said.

Rewriting the entire Tax Code was always going to be controversial, but Camp and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan did not make it any easier on themselves.

They had promised at the outset to slash the top individual and corporate rates to 25 percent. It was a dramatic cut that could rally Republicans — even Reagan didn’t get rates that low. The top corporate rate is now 35 percent, with the top individual rate nearing 40 percent.

But lawmakers had no idea how they’d make the math work. It would be a mammoth task, forcing them to dig into big, popular middle-class tax breaks.

“There clearly is a difference between what members from both sides of the aisle say about tax reform and what they do,” said Clint Stretch, a former counsel at the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation now at the nonpartisan Tax Analysts. “What they’ve done is really avoided the hard-choice conversation.”

Exactly how Camp intended to make good on his pledges was a closely guarded secret. Aside from committee Republicans and select staffers, few knew the details. Very little leaked out, with even top tax lobbyists saying they could only surmise what Camp was planning. That secrecy allowed lawmakers to consider an array of controversial ideas, without having to worry about what their constituents thought, let alone Democrats or the special interest groups.

But it came with a cost. It was hard for Camp to proselytize when he wouldn’t say exactly what he was selling. Even aides to Republican members of his committee said they didn’t know what was going on. They were excluded from his closed-door meetings with their bosses, as what one aide called a “cone of silence” descended over deliberations.

They worried what their bosses might be agreeing to and whether they even fully understood the options. Many had been on the committee for only a few years.

Republicans outside the committee had little inkling of what Camp had in store. They could easily be blamed by Democrats for whatever he proposed, even if it never reached the House floor. More than a third of the caucus had been in office for less than three years, and many didn’t know the first thing about the trade-offs that would have to come. What would they say when their local factory owner complained about losing depreciation allowances?

A substantial number of Republicans didn’t even want to reform the income tax — they wanted to end it. About a third of the caucus had signed onto a bill promising a “fair tax” to repeal the income tax system, abolish the IRS and replace it with a national sales tax run by the states.

So at a Nov. 14 meeting in Boehner’s office, where party leaders met with Camp and other top committee Republicans to decide how to proceed, they urged him to focus on building support within their caucus and among business.

“They basically said, ‘If you can prove to us that this can pass, then we’ll work with you,’” said one lawmaker. “They’re having a difficult time marshaling votes to pass anything, and obviously this is something that’s big, so they’re very gun-shy.”

The committee had been trying to educate the rest of the caucus, but the conversations often didn’t move past the 30,000-foot level. There were questions about why the corporate income tax was even necessary and why they couldn’t simply slash rates. There was far more work to be done.

But how do you educate 200 lawmakers already distracted by dozens of other issues on the taxation of foreign subsidiaries of U.S. corporations?

“Everyone has a different level of understanding,” said Ways and Means member Tom Reed (R-N.Y.). It’s not surprising there would be an “educational curve for folks who haven’t been dealing with this like us on a day-to-day basis.”

“It’s still a work in progress,” he said.

It’s hard to see how the timing will get any better next year. Republican primaries will be under way by the spring, and for many House Republicans, that’s the only election to worry about. After that, there’s the midterms, where Republicans hope to retake the Senate. The 2016 presidential race will begin not long thereafter.

“It’s going to be exceedingly difficult,”said former Republican Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Archer. “Timing is a problem for him.”

But when the timing is finally right, H.R. 1 will still be waiting.


© 2013 POLITICO LLC

Obamacare Supreme Court Ruling - A Huge Opportunity for Romney Campaign

The Supreme Court has just provided Gov. Romney's campaign a huge opportunity, if he and his campaign plays it properly.

No question, complete vitiation of the mandate would have been catastrophic for Pres. Obama.  However, the dramatic dissonance between the rationale the SCOTUS used to uphold the mandate (as a tax) and Obama’s repeated insistence that the penalty for not obtaining health insurance under his bill was not a tax poses a significant political problem for Team Obama.

Now, we have Obamacare’s 25% increase in capital gains tax rates for households earning more than $250,000 (bringing those rates back to Clinton-era levels for higher earners, folks nowhere near “rich”) – which almost no news outlet has pointed out.  PLUS, a several thousand dollar tax on any American who doesn’t buy health insurance.

In addition, there will be dramatically less “improved access to health insurance” than Pres. Obama promised, as the SCOTUS scuttled the Obamacare provision which compelled states to expand Medicaid rolls to encompass those significantly above the poverty line.  In the wake of that opinion, several Republican governors have announced that they will not broaden Medicaid eligibility or initiate the insurance exchanges called for in the bill. 

It should be kept in mind that many employers may elect to drop health insurance  once Obamacare is fully implemented (the fine for not providing health insurance will be cheaper for them), dumping employees onto the open  insurance market.  Many of those folks left without employer-provided health insurance, who are in the lower-middle income group, may not be able to find affordable private insurance, even with the Obamacare subsidies.  Now, in many - perhaps most - states, Medicaid will not be an option for them.

Bottom line:  Gov. Romney should hammer-home two points based on the SCOTUS opinion:

“Obamacare – huge tax increases that Pres. Obama lied about.  The Supreme Court reveals the truth.” 

“Obamacare – massive cost and federal government micromanagement of your health care – but so poorly constructed that millions of working Americans who were promised health insurance won’t get it.  And many who had employer-privided health insurance will be left with none."

In addition,  Gov. Romney should continually remind Seniors that Obamacare sucks half-a-trillion dollars out of Medicare, already on the brink of insolvency, to fund Obamacare.

President's Campaign Happily Hitches Itself to the Post

President Obama’s campaign has been trumpeting Tom Hamburger’s June 21 article in The Washington Post, “Romney’s Bain Capital invested in companies that moved jobs overseas.” Since the Obama campaign is now lagging Gov. Romney’s in fundraising, Team Obama is obviously delighted that The Washington Post is working in its behalf, creating ad hominem campaign pieces masquerading as journalism.

Economists on the Left and the Right agree that new and small businesses are the linchpin of American job growth and innovation. The company Gov. Romney conceived and founded, Bain Capital, helped establish and grow hundreds of successful companies – often investing when no one else would.

Though unmentioned in the article, the contrast with President Obama’s record is striking.

Under the Obama Administration, America has had the fewest new business startups in 30 years. A just-released U.S. Chamber of Commerce survey of small businesses reveals that 75% are reluctant to hire due to President Obama’s disastrous policies. His ill-conceived, arrogantly enacted Obamacare, alarming increases in federal spending, debt and regulations and anti-business balderdash are imploding our entrepreneurial economy.

No wonder Axelrod & Co.are, once again, demonstrating that their ’08 campaign mantra, “Hope and Change” has morphed into “Demonization and Diversion.”

The Post article starts by describing the overall trend of American businesses expanding overseas manufacturing during the ‘90s, implying – with absolutely no data – that this strategy impaired the American economy and hurt American workers. The story then tries to lead readers to jump to the conclusion that Bain was somehow largely responsible for this“offshoring” phenomenon. Given that none of the alleged Bain “offshoring offenders” listed were major American companies or employers, this is nonsensical on its face.

The article’s inexcusably feeble factual underpinning is further betrayed by the fact that nowhere does it quantify the number of jobs allegedly “shipped overseas” by Bain portfolio companies – or provide the crucial context of how many jobs those firms added or maintained in the U.S.

In an apparently desperate search for malevolent morsels, the Post piece goes on to convey the startling news that other companies in which Bain invested expanded their operations in Mexico and Asia. Is it remotely possible that this might have been done to better serve customers in those markets? One would never know from reading this article, as no specifics are provided as to the number of jobs involved or how many, if any, were shifted from the U.S. Did these same companies simultaneously expand operations here in America? True to form, the article is silent on this essential empirical element.

The only jobs specifically cited in the article as having been “offshored” by Bain companies (again, we’re never told how many) were in bicycle manufacturing and at call centers. Yep, just the kinds of cutting-edge, high wage jobs on which Americashould base its economic future – bicycle making and telemarketing.

One industry that’s inarguably a pillar of American manufacturing and exports, now and (we hope) in the future, is commercial aviation. Yet, incredibly, the Obama Administration’s labor union-controlled NLRB attempted to force Boeing to shutter a nearly billion-dollar plant in South Carolina which would employ over 5,000 workers – and much of whose output would be exported. Why? Because the unions were apoplectic that South Carolina is a right-to-work state. (The fact that North Carolina is also a right-to-work state didn’t seem to bother Team Obama when it selected Charlotte to host this year’s Democratic Convention, but I digress…).

Meanwhile, President Obama stopped the Keystone Pipeline, which would have created tens-of-thousands of high-paying American jobs. These are non-government jobs that could never be“offshored.”

Yes, apparently this President believes that jobs in bicycle factories and call centers are more important to our economy than jobs making jetliners and enhancing American energy security.

Near the end of the article is its “blockbuster revelation”:

“Just as Romney was ending his tenure at Bain, it reached the culmination of negotiations with Hyundai Electronics Industry of South Korea for the $550 million purchase of its U.S. subsidiary, Chippac, which manufactured, tested and packaged computer chips in Asia. The deal was announced a month after Romney left Bain. Reports filed with the SEC in late 1999 showed that Chippac had plants in South Korea and China and was responsible for marketing and supplying the company’s Asian-made computer chips. An overwhelming majority of Chippac’s customers were U.S. firms, including Intel, IBM and Lucent Technologies.”

So, let me get this straight. After Romney left Baina Korean company bought a U.S.subsidiary that had already been producing its products overseas for some time, for a Who’s Who list of much larger companies that continue to employ tens of thousands of U.S.workers. I’ve read this paragraph a dozen times and I’m still trying to find how this company or this transaction, in any way, led to additional jobs being sent outside the U.S.

Of all the article’s deficiencies, this is, perhaps, its most obvious – and egregious: the piece asserts that Bain, under Mitt Romney, began its “foray into outsourcing” in 1993. It neglects to mention a much more momentous milestone that occurred that same year – the beginning of Bill Clinton’s first term.

Bill Clinton, the President so many Democrats lionize for having led an American economic renaissance, was an unrepentant champion of the very free trade and globalization policies that enabled and encouraged U.S. companies, like the ones in which Bain invested, to expand overseas. NAFTA and numerous other free trade agreements were ratified during the Clinton Administration.

If the “offshoring” this article and Obama attacks was so devastating to American workers, why did President Clinton allow it – indeed, abet it? Where are the Clinton speeches attacking these purportedly pernicious business practices that became rampant during his Presidency?

Clinton’s second term was winding down in 1999, the same year Romney left Bain to rescue the Salt Lake City Olympics. Few would disagree that the American economy was performing dramatically better then than it has under President Obama.

The Romney campaign itself has failed to point out the most salient and under-reported fact regarding Bain Capital’s success: the largest investors in Bain portfolio companies were…employee pension funds. Thus, the profits garnered due to Bain’s stupendous entrepreneurial and investing track record under Mitt Romney contributed mightily to the retirement security of hundreds of thousands of middle income workers, many of them teachers.

Here’s some more real news you didn’t see in this article or anywhere else in the Post: last week, Boeing CEO Jim McNerney, also chairman of the Business Roundtable, told Marketwatchthat U.S.companies face more regulatory barriers to growth than at any time in his long career as a businessman. He said regulatory agencies have crafted a host of new rules and enforced them more aggressively than prior administrations and that regulators often take a hostile approach to business; that the prevailing attitude is our companies“are guilty until proven innocent.”

Asked by a reporter if regulations are any worse now than in decades past, McNerney gave an emphatic yes. “It’s different today. The attitude is different,” he said. “Unless you live it it’s hard to see it.”

Perhaps the Postshould investigate the Obama Administration policies and attitudes that those who actually create American jobs say are so catastrophic to our economy –instead of aiding the Obama campaign’s Romney-demonization strategy with such puerile, transparently manipulative pseudo-journalism.

Lee Spieckerman Rejoinder to President Obama’s Weekly Address; June 16, 2012

(Spieckerman comments in bold)

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Over the last few weeks, I’ve been talking a lot about America’s economic future.

No, actually, you’ve been talking a lot about America’s economic past, blaming our catastrophic situation on previous Presidents instead of your ruinous policies. Your only “plan” for the future is an additional $6 trillion in federal government debt over the next decade vis-à-vis the Romney plan, more federal money to prop-up bloated blue state government budgets and fund Solyndra-like "Green Energy" schemes and more regulatory strangulation. What a wonderful prescription for economic growth!

I’ve told you how I believe we should go about creating strong, sustained growth; how we should pay down our long-term debt in a balanced way; and most of all, what we should do right now to create good, middle-class jobs, so people who work hard can get ahead.

Middle income households have $4,000 less in income each year than when you took office; their wealth has eroded nearly 40%.  We're in the midst of the longest stretch of 8%+ unemployment since World War II.  The African American unemployment  rate is nearly 15%.  53% of bachelors degree holders under the age of 25 are currently jobless or unemployed, the highest share in more than a decade. The only “class” that has benefitted from your policies has been the governing class. Federal employees' average compensation has grown to more than double what private sector workers earn.  The most robust housing market in America is the Washington, DC suburbs, where the politicians, bureaucrats and lobbyists live.

This isn’t some abstract debate or trivial argument.

It certainly isn’t, which makes your continued push for thoroughly discredited ideas and incessant attempts to incite envy and resentment all the more appalling.

I’ve said that this is the defining issue of our time, and I mean it.

Do you “mean it,” like you did when you said there aren’t red states and blue states, only the United States? Or when you promised to cut the federal deficit in half by the end of your first term? Or when you said that if you haven’t turned this economy around by the end of your third year in office, “this will be a one-term proposition”?

I’ve said that this is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and I believe it.

You bet it is. That’s why we can’t afford to allow your wild spending, lack of accountability and anti-American energy, anti-jobs policies to continue.

The decisions we make over the next few years will have an enormous impact on the country we live in, and the one we pass on to our children.

Over the next few years? How about the disastrous decisions your administration has already made – adding 50% to our national debt; five trillion dollars; ramming through a health care bill that has made 75% of small businesses reluctant to hire; killing the Keystone Pipeline, depriving us of thousands of good-paying jobs; cutting oil exploration permits on federal lands by half and oil production on those lands by 20%, threatening our children’s energy security? Why should voters trust you to make any more decisions?

Right now, we’re still fighting our way back from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Another oft-repeated ObaMyth.  '08 was the worst FINANCIAL crisis since the Great Depression, but President Reagan was confronted with the worst ECONOMIC crisis - unemployment that peaked nearly a full percentage point higher than under this recession COMBINED WITH double-digit interest rates and double-digit inflation.

However, if we keep “fighting” with the same ill-conceived policies that we’ve been pursuing under this administration, our economic crisis could easily become the worst since the Great Depression.

The economy is growing again, but it’s not growing fast enough. Our businesses have created 4.3 million new jobs over the last 27 months, but we’re not creating them fast enough.

“Not growing fast enough”? A rare Obama Administration understatement. By the standard of every economic recovery since World War II, we should have created at least five million jobs over the past 27 months.

Despite the economic maelstrom President Reagan faced, by the time he’d been office as long as has President Obama, America was adding four times as many jobs each month as we have under Pres. Obama and economic growth was three times as fast.

The difference? Reagan, with a Democrat-controlled House (unlike this President, Reagan's party never controlled both houses of Congress), implemented low tax, pro-growth, deregulatory economic policies and celebrated American business and business people – while this administration has continually castigated them.  Under President Obama, we've had the fewest new business startups in 30 years.

And we’re facing some pretty serious headwinds – from the effects of the recent spike in gas prices, to the financial crisis in Europe.

Yes, gasoline does cost nearly twice as much per gallon as when you took office, despite the recent downtrend. Oil and gasoline prices are driven by the futures market, which is based on projected supplies months and years hence. This administration’s anti-American energy policies combined with its feckless dealing with Iran has added a significant “fear premium” into petroleum prices. Given America’s prodigious energy production capacity, this is inexcusable.

So far, there are no U.S. economic "headwinds" associated with Europe - quite the contrary.  Over the past three years, U.S. exports to Europe have actually increased (one of the few economic bright spots we have). While the international banking system can certainly cause financial crisis contagion, barring a severe financial implosion in Europe, it is unlikely that the U.S. financial system or economy will be significantly impaired. In fact, investors in European nations are flocking to invest in the U.S., which they see as a safe harbor in the international financial storm. With the right economic policies, we could benefit mightily from this increased external investment.

However, the sovereign debt crisis in many European countries is a harbinger of what will happen here in the U.S. if President Obama is re-elected.

But here’s the thing. We have the answers to these problems. We have plenty of big ideas and technical solutions from both sides of the aisle. That’s not what’s holding us back. What’s holding us back is a stalemate in Washington.

A “stalemate” that commenced when, during your first meeting with Congressional Republicans in 2009, you made the statesmanlike comment to Republican Leader Cantor, “We won. You lost.” That "spirit of compromise" continued when your nearly trillion-dollar “economic stimulus” (which turned out to be a sedative) and horrendous health care bill were arrogantly enacted with no Republican support. Not one “big idea” that didn’t include expanding government or emanate from a Democratic interest group or liberal economist has been adopted by this President. Even the thoughtful budget-balancing plan put forth by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission you created was completely ignored.

Last September, I sent Congress a jobs bill full of the kinds of bipartisan ideas that could have put over a million Americans back to work and helped bolster our economy against outside shocks.

As noted previously, the greatest “shocks” to our economy have not been from  the outside but from your administration. The few economic policy ideas you proposed that weren't completely loony (payroll tax holiday, extending Bush tax rates, a couple of free trade agreements, etc.) were enacted with broad Republican support. The truly dangerous, wasteful ones were, blessedly, stopped by the Republicans.

This administration has been engaged in an unrelenting War on Workers – unleashing a decidedly anti-energy EPA on the coal and natural gas industries and a labor union-controlled NLRB against one of America’s most successful and important exporters, Boeing and other businesses; forcing through Obamacare, which has demonstrably diminished hiring and promising to increase taxes on investors and employers.

A just-released Heritage Foundation analysis shows that the Obama-ballyhooed auto industry bail-out cost taxpayers over $25 billion more than it would have with the kind of “managed bankruptcy with government funding” Gov. Romney proposed. Not one single existing UAW worker was forced to take a pay cut. Meanwhile, thousands of non-UAW blue collar and white collar workers were sacrificed. Chrysler bondholders (primarily pension funds for middle income workers) got nothing – while UAW-controlled pension funds were topped-out with government funds.

Even Obama’s own “car czar,” Steve Rattner, admits that the Obama Administration was far too generous to his UAW friends.

By the way, the $25 billion taxpayers overpaid for the auto bail-out is enough to build the entire remaining border fence with Mexico (at $15mm per mile). Not only would this greatly reduce illegal immigration and increase national security – it would be the very kind of “job creating infrastructure” the President so fervently advocates and provide the essential political predicate to make comprehensive immigration reform possible.

I sent them a plan that would have reduced our deficit by $4 trillion in a balanced way that pays for the investments

This illusory “deficit reduction” is in comparison to the trajectory of the grossly inflated federal budget enacted when the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress in ’09 and is riddled with accounting gimmicks.  It does nothing to reduce the looming explosion in entitlement spending, dangerously diminishes U.S. national defense and massively increases taxes under the current atrocious income tax system instead of radically reforming it.

we need by cutting unnecessary spending

You bet we need to cut unnecessary spending – and, as demonstrated by the GSA scandal, billions blown on Crony-Capitalist “green energy” companies and an abject failure to even consider the Simpson-Bowles Commission recommendations, this is NOT the President who will get it done.

and asking the wealthiest Americans to pay a little bit more in taxes.

Beyond the fact that even left-wing economists acknowledge that raising taxes on higher income Americans would be a drop in the ocean when it comes to reducing our deficit and debt, it would also be enormously detrimental to middle income Americans.

First, higher capital gains taxes would reduce after-tax income on investments, encouraging investors to seek lower-risk investment options instead of the young, growing companies that create the most new jobs and are the vehicle that is most responsible for enabling “average folks” to become prosperous.

Secondly, if tax rates are raised on CEOs, movie stars and top pro athletes (all of whom benefit from the savviest of financial advice and have enormous economic power), they will simply demand a “gross-up” in their compensation to offset the higher tax rates. Where will those extra dollars to pay these “big shots” come from? Pay and benefits for those lower on the pay scale. Thus, “The Buffett Rule” will have exactly the opposite effect of what’s intended (as is almost always the case with attempts to legislate “fairness”).

The most “unfair” part of our income tax system isn’t tax rates (the top 1% of earners already pay 40% of all income taxes; the top 10%, nearly 90% - while the bottom 50% pay no income taxes) but the tax law itself. The wealthy and big business have the money to pay lobbyists to ensure that the tax code will be advantageous to them – and to pay lawyers and accounts to then minimize their taxes under that system. The vastly simplified tax system with lower rates proposed by Gov. Romney would do more to “level the playing field” on taxes than anything else – and free up billions now spent on tax lobbying and compliance, which would be reallocated to investments in businesses that innovate and create productive jobs.

If Romney is smart, he’ll say, “Under my plan, we’ll get MORE taxes from the rich – and have a system that, at long last, is fair and understandable for everyone else!”

Since then, Congress has passed a few parts of that jobs bill, like a tax cut that's allowing working Americans to keep more of your paycheck every week. But on most of the ideas that would create jobs and grow our economy, Republicans in Congress haven’t lifted a finger.

The Democrat-controlled Senate hasn’t “lifted a finger” to even pass a budget in over three years! The President’s budget was voted-down 99-0. How can any employer or investor have the confidence to risk more hiring in the midst of this alarming and unrelenting governmental malpractice?

They’d rather wait until after the election in November. Just this past week, one of them said, “Why not wait for the reinforcements?” That’s a quote. And you can bet plenty of his colleagues are thinking the same thing. I think that’s wrong. This isn’t about who wins or loses in Washington. This is about your jobs, your paychecks, your children’s future. There’s no excuse for Congress to stand by and do nothing while so many families are struggling. None.

President Obama has hosted 150 campaign fundraisers for fat-cats - more than his three predecessors combined.  If Mr. Obama had only spent 75 of those days with his sleeves rolled-up, working with Congress LBJ-style - leading, instead of blaming - imagine what might have been accomplished.

Clearly, given the above-described failures of this administration to encourage job creation and reduce government spending, we need a new team to get it done. While unfortunate that we’ll have to wait until January of 2013, far better than allowing this maladroit governance to continue another four years. Then it really will be too late.

Right now, Congress should pass a bill to help states put thousands of teachers, firefighters and police officers back on the job.

I have a better idea. Instead of shoveling even more borrowed federal dollars to spendthrift state governments like California and Illinois, force states to lay-off unneeded bureaucrats and bad teachers and keep the firefighters, police officers and good teachers.

They should have passed a bill a long time ago to put thousands of construction workers back to work rebuilding our roads and bridges and runways.

Really? Then why did your nearly trillion-dollar “economic stimulus” only spend SIX CENTS of EVERY DOLLAR on infrastructure? Again, a much larger percentage was spent propping-up bloated blue state government budgets to preserve the jobs and rich benefits of unionized bureaucrats. And Keystone was a huge energy infrastructure project that would have yielded tens-of-thousands of high-paying jobs, without costing taxpayers a penny, but was deliberately stopped by this administration.

If the President simply followed the common sense advice of economists and business people aligned with both political parties, it would allow the $1.6 trillion corporations have parked overseas to be brought back to the U.S. with a one-time tax of 5%. If only half of those overseas profits were repatriated - $800 billion - it would generate $40 billion in government revenue – enough to fund the “infrastructure” portion of the President’s new jobs bill without increasing anyone's tax rates.

And instead of just talking about job creators, they should give small-business owners a tax break for hiring more workers and paying them higher wages.

Unfortunately, the President’s total lack of experience in the private sector precludes him from understanding that no company hires a new employee based on a short-term tax incentive. Unlike politicians, businesses think years in advance, not just to the next election.

As noted previously, Obamacare, alone, has caused 75% of small businesses to limit hiring. Unrelenting anti-business rhetoric and policies, out-of-control government spending and looming tax increases have further sapped confidence among all businesses and investors.

This President's War on Workers hasn’t hurt the movie stars, hedge-funders and Wall Street bankers Mr. Obama continues to court and garner donations from – but it’s been a tragedy for America’s workers and entrepreneurs.

A late 2010 major IMF study of the impact of alternative government economic policies around the world concludes that a commitment to “consolidation” (reducing government spending) actually INCREASES private sector economic activity by instilling confidence – and that reductions in government spending are much less contractionary than are increases in taxes. Furthermore, the study finds that infrastructure spending (the part that Obama only devoted six cents of every dollar to in his “stimulus” bill) is, economically speaking, the most beneficial governmental outlay.

Right now, Congress should give every responsible homeowner the opportunity to save an average of $3,000 a year by refinancing their mortgage.

Having witnessed the failure of every one of its programs designed to staunch the housing market's hemorrhaging, one would think this administration might try something new. The biggest problem with the housing market is underwater mortgagees walking away from their homes and unemployed homeowners being unable to pay their mortgages. A $3,000/year refi saving will not begin to address those issues. Housing prices are a function of incomes which are based on JOBS. The area where this President has been most woefully deficient.

They should extend tax credits for clean energy manufacturers so we don’t walk away from 40,000 good jobs.

Perhaps if ALL current tax rates were extended (as that right-wing extremist, tool-of-the-rich Bill Clinton suggested before he was forced to recant his heresy), these credits could be included, pending a complete overhaul of our egregious tax system.

And instead of giving tax breaks to companies who ship jobs overseas, Congress should take that money and use it to cover moving expenses for companies that are bringing jobs back to America. There’s no reason to wait.

Wow, covering moving expenses – now that’s what I call a visionary, ambitious policy proposal. A few more big ideas like that and we’ll be out of this economic malaise in no time!

Every problem we face is within our power to solve. What’s lacking is our politics. Remind your Members of Congress why you sent them to Washington in the first place. Tell them to stop worrying about the next election and start worrying about the next generation.

Yes, Obama’s uplifting “We won. You lost.” political paradigm – if only all of Congress would get on-board! The Republican members of Congress that have prevented even more economic damage from being inflicted on our country have certainly done what they were sent to Washington to do!

I’m ready to work with anyone – Republican, Democrat, or Independent – who is serious about moving this country forward. And I hope Members of Congress will join me.

Given the deliberately partisan manner in which Pres. Obama has chosen to govern, this comment would be laughable if our nation’s situation wasn’t so dire. Regrettably, Mr. President, that ship has sailed.

Thanks, and have a great weekend.

If spending your weekend in a futile search for a job or a sufficiently well-paying job – or fretting about the future – constitutes a “great weekend,” we most assuredly will.