Story #1 is about the lack of a budget from the US Senate. Despite being required by law for passing a
budget each year, Harry Reid’s Senate has gone 1087 days without passing
one. #2 is about taxing the rich saying
they don’t pay their fair share. #3 talks
about how the young voters are not quite as enthused as they were four years
ago. His margin has fallen from 36% to 7%.
#4 has Montana’s governor raising the fact that Mitt Romney’s father was
born in a polygamist community. #5 Keystone
is back and looks like a loser for Obama.
Finally #6 has quotes from Thomas Sowell.
Today’s thoughts
President Barack Obama
holds a thin 46 - 42 percent lead over former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, according
to a Quinnipiac University national poll released yesterday. In that poll Democrats outnumber Republicans by 6% and the poll was heavily
weighted to youthful voters. You always
want to look at the Demographics.
The Deep Water Horizon anniversary is approaching (2 years ago) and they are supposed to look at the effort to
clean up (close the hole). It
appears government wants to skip that
to avoid embarrassing revelations.
The Obama campaign's perennial "Dinner with Barack" contest now includes a special guest: George
Clooney. It shows you how far Obama’s
popularity has fallen.
Paul Ryan comes through
with a great quote. “You can’t help poor people if America is poor.”
1. Just shy of 3 Years and still no
budget from the Democrats
Households make budgets. So do
businesses and nonprofits. There was also a time when Congress made them, but
those days are long gone -- 1,086 days
gone, to be precise. That's the last
time Democrats, who have controlled one or both houses of Congress this whole
time, passed a budget resolution through either the House or the Senate.
On April 15, 2010, both houses failed to meet the statutory
deadline for passing a budget for the first time ever. Although the Senate Budget Committee would later pass a plan out
of committee, Senate Majority Leader
Harry Reid, D-Nev., blocked it from the floor, going so far as to prevent even
a debate about the budget.
Asked to explain this bicameral
failure in the face of trillion-dollar deficits, House Majority Leader Steny
Hoyer said, "It's difficult to pass budgets in election years." Turns
out, it is also difficult to get re-elected when you don't pass budgets. Later
that same year, House Democrats lost 63 seats.
Senate Democrats lost six seats
in 2010 but managed to retain control of the upper chamber. Surely, in the
nonelection year of 2011 they would bring a budget to the floor, right? Wrong.
Reid told reporters at the time, "There's
no need to have a Democratic budget," adding, "It would be foolish
for us to do a budget at this stage." In July 2011, Reid's assistant
leader, Dick Durbin, D-Ill., went so far
as to claim on national television that Republican filibusters prevented a
budget from passing. He must have known he was fibbing -- under Senate rules,
budget resolutions can pass with a simple majority.
In fact, Democrats just wanted
to focus on attacking the "Path to Prosperity" budget proposed by
House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said,
"To put other budgets out there is not the point." As Treasury
Secretary Timothy Geithner would later say, "We don't have a definitive solution ... We just don't like
yours."…
This is a big issue as the Democrats think they can demonize
the Ryan Plan and the public will buy that even if they don’t have an
alternative. It’s worked in the
past. But with the economy like it is
and deficit spending through the roof, it will be interesting if the people
will throw the democrats out for irresponsibility.
2. The
Politics of Taxing the Rich
There is one project that
liberals never complete -- a task that is talked about all the time, especially
during campaigns, but for some reason just can't get done.
It is "making the rich pay their fair share" of
taxes. Somehow, even though President
Obama and his party found the time to write ObamaCare and a huge plan of spending
that included the Stimulus and Recovery Acts, taxing the rich for their fair share just slipped through their fingers.
The IRS reports that the top
10% of wage-earners pay 70 percent of the taxes, and the bottom half pay
nothing at all. So that leaves the middle class, those whose income places
them between the poor and wealthy, paying 30% of the overall income tax bill. The highest wage-earners seem to have been
stuck on that 70% share for quite a number of years. It's been relatively
constant.
One can then ask why the proportion paid by wealthy people
has been limited to 70%....
… The real reason why the
president will never tax the rich their full "fair share" is because
then he can no longer complain that they don't pay
their fair share. He stands to lose his "fair share" political card.
He needs a scapegoat…
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/04/the_battle_the_democrats_cannot_afford_to_win.html#ixzz1sZg3BeaB
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/04/the_battle_the_democrats_cannot_afford_to_win.html#ixzz1sZg3BeaB
The Buffet Rule illustrates
this. It would impose a minimum 30% tax
on millionaires, but would only raise .5% toward the deficit. It is worth much more to Obama as an issue
rather than as a solution, because anyone can understand it isn’t a solution to
anything.
3. Young
Voters Shy Away from Obama
In 2008,
Obama won the millennial vote 68 percent to 32 percent over John McCain. However, among current college-age millennial voters, Barack Obama only holds a seven point lead
over a generic Republican candidate.
The majority of millennials (76 percent) cite jobs and
unemployment as the critical issue facing the country.
45 percent
of millennials identify as independents, which is 13 points higher than the
general population.
This poll also only surveyed those between the ages of 18
and 24, which probably pushed its results leftward. It is quite likely that
millennials between the ages of 24 and 30 would have appeared even more
receptive to conservative economic policy, since they have suffered from the
vicissitudes of the current job market that the younger half of the generation
has not yet endured.
It’s
all coming together. Obama is losing
strength everywhere, but among the young the drop is significant. Going from a 36% lead to a 7% lead is
enormous. But I predict the number of
young voters will also drop off and most of those will be Obama supporters so
at the election Romney may take this group.
4.
Desperation by the Democrats
The Daily Beast contacted the office of Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer today
to talk about whether his state would be in play in the 2012 presidential
election. About a half hour later, the governor called back, and he had a lot
to say. He didn’t think that Montana would be a swing state, but the Democrat did say that Mitt Romney could
have issues nationally because his father was “born on a polygamy commune in
Mexico.”
I
wonder if anyone is going to bring up Barack Obama Sr. was a drunk and died in
an auto accident driving drunk and was himself a polygamist? But this does show
you how desperate the democrats are.
5.
Keystone is back
The president has put his feet in cement in opposition to
the Keystone oil pipeline. But on Capitol Hill, more and more Democrats are joining Republicans to force approval of
the pipeline, whether Obama wants it or not.
The latest action happened Wednesday, when the House passed
a measure to move the pipeline forward. Before the vote, Obama issued a veto
threat. The House approved the pipeline
anyway -- by a veto-proof majority, 293 to 127. Sixty-nine Democrats abandoned
the president to vote with Republicans. That's a lot of defections.
When the House voted on the pipeline in July of last year,
47 Democrats broke with the president. Now that it's an election year and the
number is up to 69, look for Republicans to hold more pipeline votes before
November. GOP leaders expect even more
Democrats to join them.
Then there is the Senate. Democrats are using the filibuster
to stop the pipeline, which means 60 votes are required to pass it. (Some
Democrats who bitterly opposed the filibuster when Republicans used it against
Obama initiatives are notably silent these days.) In a vote last month, 11 Senate Democrats stood up against Obama
to vote in favor of the pipeline. Add those 11 to the Republicans' 47
votes, and the pro-pipeline forces are
just a couple of votes away from breaking Harry Reid's filibuster.
"We're right around the corner
from actually passing it," says a well-informed Senate source.
"Two-hundred-ninety-three votes in the House is a gigantic number. People
want this thing."…
Another sign of BHO’s weakness and what it might mean in
November. Just think of it, an actual
bipartisan bill!
6. Thomas
Sowell Quotes
Thomas Sowell is not
only one of the finest columnists in the business, he's a prolific author, a
brilliant economist, and he has an incomparable knack for simplifying complex
concepts that few other human beings can match. Enjoy the distilled wisdom!
25) "Since this is an era when many people are concerned
about 'fairness' and 'social justice,' what
is your ‘fair share’ of what someone else has worked for?"
23) “Four things have almost invariably followed the imposition of
controls” to keep prices below the level they would reach under supply and
demand in a free market: (1) increased use of the product or service whose
price is controlled, (2) Reduced supply of the same product or service, (3)
quality deterioration, (4) black markets."
20) "The poverty rate
among black married couples has been in single digits ever since 1994. You
would never learn that from most of the media. Similarly you look at those
blacks that have gone on to college or finished college, the incarceration rate
is some tiny fraction of what it is among those blacks who have dropped out of
high school. So it’s not being black; it’s
a way of life.”
19) "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is
never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to
disregard the first lesson of economics."
16) "No one will really understand politics until they
understand that politicians are not
trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems —
of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever
is number three is far behind."
12) "We seem to be moving steadily in the direction of a society where no one is responsible for
what he himself did, but we are all responsible for what somebody else did,
either in the present or in the past."
7) "Much of the social history of the Western world, over the
past three decades, has been a history of replacing
what worked with what sounded good.”
2) "In short, killing
the goose that lays the golden egg is a viable political strategy, so long
as the goose does not die before the next election and no one traces the
politicians’ fingerprints on the murder weapon."
1) "There are no
solutions; there are only trade-offs."
These
were my favorites out of the 25 picked by the author. The one that was most impactful on me was
#20.
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