From Politico

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The news that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich folded like a cheap suit in the wake of a brazen political attack on the tea party movement was sad. But not surprising.

As far back as his second term in Congress, in 1980, Gingrich sided with big labor interests until brought to his knees by a National Right to Work education campaign. Contrary to his image, Gingrich has demonstrated throughout his political career that he possesses no real ideological mooring.

Now, his legitimizing the NAACP’s crass political attempt to play the race card reveals him to be nothing more than a rank political opportunist – a White House-aspiring demagogue who prefers looking good for the liberal legacy media to standing up for our rights as citizens and taxpayers.

Practically-speaking, Gingrich no more subscribes to the tea party ideals of limited government, individual liberty and personal responsibility than President Barack Obama. At least, that’s what one could infer from his endorsement of liberal “stimulus”-supporter Dede Scozzafava in upstate New York last year.

In fact, Gingrich previously dismissed the tea party as nothing more than the “militant wing of the Republican Party” — a crude diminution of a diverse group of freedom-loving Americans.

That’s why, when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People decided to play the race card against the tea party earlier this month, it wasn’t shocking to see Gingrich immediately raise the white flag and suggest that the Tea Party should give credence to this attack by co-hosting town hall meetings with the NAACP. Rather than rebuking this unfounded attack and exposing its political motivations, Gingrich chose to cave – again – in hopes of giving America a “teachable moment.”

This policy of appeasement had disastrous results in past. In fact, it is responsible for the GOP’s fateful retreat from its limited government roots after the “Republican Revolution” of 1994.

“When the Republican Party faced withering criticism during the government shutdown of 1995 to 1996, our leaders folded instead of standing their ground,” then-former Rep. Tom Coburn wrote in his 2001 book, “Breach of Trust.” “Rather than doing the hard work of explaining to the public, or even to rank-and-file Republicans, what was necessary to reduce the size of government, our leaders retreated.”

By taking the easy way out, and bowing to the altar of political-correctness, Gingrich established a pattern of appeasement that has defined the GOP to this day. Making matters worse, it was his arrogance which precipitated the costly sellout.

“He told a room full of reporters that he forced the shutdown because Clinton had rudely made him and Bob Dole sit at the back of Air Force One,” former House majority leader Tom DeLay later wrote. “Newt had been careless to say such a thing, and now the whole moral tone of the shutdown had been lost. What had been a noble battle for fiscal sanity began to look like the tirade of a spoiled child. The revolution, I can tell you, was never the same.”

Nor was the Republican Party — which from that moment began caving left and right to the Washington establishment it was elected to uproot.

In short order, Gingrich’s Contract with America gave way to bridges to nowhere and other big government spending outrages.

Now, in the hope of positioning himself as a legitimate presidential contender in 2012, Gingrich is again betraying the ideals of the limited government movement for his own political gains. Instead of calling NAACP leaders out as intellectual frauds, Gingrich is seeking to give their race-baiting views a national platform at the tea party’s expense.

Such appeasement is a recipe for disaster.

True limited government advocates should recognize both the NAACP and Gingrich for what they are – enemies in the fight for greater personal and economic freedom for all Americans.

That is the real “teachable moment” of Gingrich’s latest betrayal.

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• On Gingrich: A legacy of surrender

Contrary to Barack Obama’s rhetoric about protecting consumers, his new financial reform law represents a dangerous big government power grab that willfully ignores the true roots of the recent financial crisis.

It is also the latest example of America’s “march to Marxism,” the not-so-gradual implementation of a command economic system in which the free market is taxed and regulated into oblivion while new and expanded government bureaucracies wield unprecedented power. Like last year’s failed economic stimulus (which was nothing but a bureaucratic bailout) and this year’s health care reform law (the largest entitlement expansion in a generation), Obama’s latest Orwellian scheme is once again being sold to the public as a necessary, even responsible measure.

“Because of this reform, the American people will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street’s mistakes,” Obama said. “There will be no more taxpayer-funded bailouts, period.”

Of course as Obama was making this pronouncement, the taxpayer tab for bailing out government-owned mortgage behemoths Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac continued to soar. That bailout will now cost taxpayers at least $400 billion, according to the latest estimate from the Congressional Budget Office, although a deteriorating housing market could push the total above $1 trillion.

Among the chief culprits of the 2008 collapse, Fannie and Freddie became a central repository for much of the toxic debt associated with government-mandated, high-risk loans – like the $2.4 trillion pumped by the government into “mortgages for affordable housing” in 2000.

“Had Fannie and Freddie not been there to buy these loans, most of them would never have been made,” writes Mark A. Calabria, director of financial regulation studies at the Cato Institute. “And had the taxpayer not been standing behind Fannie and Freddie, they would have been unable to fund such large purchases of subprime mortgages.”

Ironically, the chief author of Obama’s so-called reform bill – Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) – has had a front-row seat to this brewing crisis for years. Yet rather than correctly diagnosing and fixing the problem, he used his influence to block efforts that could have helped prevent the meltdown.

“Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” Frank famously said in 2003, accusing then-Treasury Secretary John Snow of “exaggerating” problems at the lending agencies.

Trillions of tax dollars later, it’s painfully clear that it was Frank who was exaggerating (dramatically) the sustainability of government-mandated lending.

Does Obama’s new “reform” legislation address this fundamental problem?

Of course not. In fact, in addition to imposing a slew of new regulations on banks that had nothing to do with the crisis, Obama’s new law maintains the same strict government-mandated lending quotas as before. Accordingly, while Main Street lenders (which provide capital to small businesses across America) are forced to navigate a maze of new regulations and restrictions, the real culprits of the disaster are not only going unpunished – they are being allowed to conduct business as usual while receiving a steady stream of taxpayer-funded bailout money.

Obviously, this is a recipe for an even bigger disaster in the future – as is the law’s “proxy access” provision, which will permit labor unions, environmental activists and “community organizing” groups to bypass existing state laws on corporate director elections and place their representatives on corporate boards of directors. And far from ending bailouts for private sector firms (as Obama has promised) the law’s “orderly liquidation” provision permits faceless bureaucrats at the FDIC to seize control of any firm the agency deems a threat to “financial stability” – opening the door to bailouts of companies that aren’t even asking for taxpayer largesse.

Make no mistake – this new law is a dramatic escalation of America’s “march to Marxism.”

It is also the latest example of legislation that must be repealed – and a governing philosophy that must be reversed – if America is to avoid being relegated to the ash heap of history.

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• Charlie Rangel is the Poster Child for Term Limits
• On Gingrich: A legacy of surrender

Ponzi schemes rely on people falling for promises that are literally too good to be true – but the outcomes are never really in doubt for the perpetrators of these scams, are they?

First they are playing with money that does not belong to them – which means they cannot lose. Also, when the scams finally unravel, the perpetrators have invariably moved on to their next group of unsuspecting victims –where the fleecing begins anew.

Sound familiar? It should. This is the modus operandi of governments all over the world in our current era of Keynesian excess – an era in which new taxes, fees and fines must be continually created and levied in order to pay for promises made in previous years. Of course these government promises are never actually “paid for,” the IOUs just keep mounting as the burden of repayment is extended further down the line to future generations of taxpayers.

Crisis compels the scammers to grow even bolder in their efforts to fleece the taxpayers. In fact, these “too good to be true” scams have only grown more expensive in response to the recent economic downturn.

Take the ongoing financial crisis in Greece, which has prompted a $144 billion bailout from the European Union and International Monetary Fund.This EU/IMF bailout – part of a larger $1 trillion “rescue” plan for the Euro – is nothing but a massive Ponzi scheme, as the leaders of fiscally reckless nations are basically saddling their debt onto the shoulders of their more responsible neighbors.

Not surprisingly, the root cause of the crisis that is threatening to bring down the global economy lies in the unsustainable expansion of the welfare state – which should be a lesson for American politicians of both parties.

First, let’s look at what’s happening in Greece.

“Greek governments have spent years buying social peace and votes with public spending, generous pensions, tax breaks, EU money and jobs for life, directed to an array of rent-seeking interest groups,”The Economist noted last month. “This sort of social contract, lubricated by endemic corruption and lax law-enforcement, has evolved to suit a country emerging from a vile civil war and years of dictatorship in which consensus was painfully absent.”

Also, let’s not forget that Greece sought for years to hide its growing debt problem from the rest of the world, paying hundreds of millions of Euros to various financial institutions in an effort to conceal the extent of its profligate borrowing.

Greece is now implementing several so-called “austerity” measures as a pre-condition of receiving the rest of Europe’s bailout benevolence. But what sounds “austere” to the Greeks is still quite excessive when compared to the government largesse being doled out elsewhere on the continent. In fact, at its heart Greek “austerity” amounts to little more than tinkering around the edges of the nation’s overextended entitlement culture, and in typical Ponzi fashion this political path of least resistance includes several new tax hikes that will only exacerbate the fundamental problem.

Meanwhile, even more frightening is the likelihood that the financial woes in Greece presage a broader European solvency crisis – one that will spread to other nations that are similarly drowning in the red ink of unsustainable government welfare. Spain, for example, is on the verge of having to tap into hundreds of billions of Euros tied to the EU/IMF bailout, and even that may not be enough to stabilize its teetering economy.

Spain’s welfare state includes a socialist labor system that makes it nearly impossible to fire workers for any reason. And like Greece, its habit of dispensing unsustainable taxpayer-funded largesse has been propped up for years by government denials and deception. Most recently, Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero chose to deal with the brewing fiscal crisis by ignoring it and delaying long-overdue reforms in an effort to maintain his political positioning.

It’s the Ponzi mentality all over again.

Eventually, though, the scammers will run out of people to scam – and Spain could very well represent the last great heist. Spain represents 10% of the euro zone banking system and 16% of all net euro-zone loans, meaning that its collapse could very well bring the entire global house of cards tumbling down.

Such an outcome would clearly have disastrous effects on the American economy, which makes the aggressive expansion of the welfare state here in the United States all the more unexplainable. Greece and Spain (as well as Portugal and Ireland) are clearly cautionary tales – not examples for America follow.

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• Charlie Rangel is the Poster Child for Term Limits
• On Gingrich: A legacy of surrender

In its latest attempt to mitigate public outrage over out-of-control government growth, the administration of President Barack Obama has instructed a handful of federal agencies to cut their budgets by five percent.

That’s right – after trillions of dollars in deficit spending, several multi-billion dollar bailouts and a costly socialized medicine proposal, Obama now believes he can cast himself in the role of “cost-cutter.” How convenient. Five months before an election that could dramatically alter the balance of power in Washington, D.C., Obama and his congressional allies apparently think they can change public opinion by handing a few pennies back to the taxpayers they’ve mugged to the tune of trillions of dollars.

Of course despite the best efforts of the legacy media to perpetuate this scam, the reality is that Obama isn’t cutting anything – not a dime. In fact, his budget office is calling for the so-called “savings” accrued from these “cuts” to be pumped into additional government growth. Frankly, that makes this nothing more than an over-hyped transfer of funds.

“We are asking each agency to develop a list of their bottom five percent performing discretionary programs, as measured by their impact in furthering the agency’s mission,” White House budget director Peter Orszag said in announcing the plan. “In addition, to ensure that we can meet the president’s absolute insistence on a freeze for non-security agencies while funding priority areas, we are asking non-security agencies to specify how they would reduce their budgets by five percent.”

Obviously this isn’t the first time that Obama has employed such gimmickry in an effort to convince the public that he’s actually concerned about their bottom line.

In January – a week after Sen. Scott Brown’s epic upset in Massachusetts – Obama proposed his federal “spending freeze,” although it didn’t take long for voters to realize that the spending to be “frozen” amounted to less than one-sixth of the federal budget. The “freeze” also failed to address bailouts, runaway entitlement spending and interest on America’s ballooning debt.

Earlier this month U.S. Rep. John Spratt (D-South Carolina) introduced the so-called “Reduce Unnecessary Spending Act of 2010” at the behest of the Obama administration, a bill which basically fast-tracks presidential spending vetoes. Of course that legislation assumes Obama actually meets a spending item he doesn’t like and that the U.S. House actually passes a budget (which it has failed to do this year).

Speaking of the House, when the public first began to unite in opposition to Obama’s fiscal recklessness last April, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ordered Congressional Democrats to “conduct rigorous oversight of all aspects of federal spending and government operations to help achieve deficit reduction and long-term fiscal responsibility.”

Specifically, Pelosi demanded that hearings into “waste, fraud and abuse” be held, and that specific programs be targeted for elimination.

What came of this high-profile effort? Absolutely nothing. In fact, when questioned about the progress of the initiative a year later the Speaker’s office “declined to specify what recommendations Pelosi received from the various committees; whether every committee submitted a list of proposed budget cuts; how the recommendations she did receive were selected or ignored; and how much in savings was identified.”

In other words, it was all smoke and mirrors.

If Obama and his allies were serious about cutting spending, here are a few ideas: They could rescind the estimated $300 billion currently sitting in the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) fund. They could axe a proposed $23 billion public employee bailout. They could refrain from putting taxpayers on the hook for as much as $165 billion to bail out union pension funds. Finally, they could stop wasting billions each year by insisting that Amtrak become self-sufficient, a goal it was supposed to have achieved in the 1980s – and then again in 2003.

On a smaller scale, Obama might consider refraining from spending $70 million on a shrine to former Senator Ted Kennedy – which includes $20 million taken directly from the Defense Department budget.

Of course those decisions would involve prioritizing government functions and perhaps even reaching the determination that there are certain things government shouldn’t do – concepts that have historically been anathema in Washington D.C. no matter which party is in charge.

• D.C. Voucher Students: Higher Graduation Rates and Other Positive Outcomes
• Official calls for eminent domain
• Oklahoma making strides in education reform
• Charlie Rangel is the Poster Child for Term Limits
• On Gingrich: A legacy of surrender

Of all the myths helping to sustain the unsustainable status quo in Washington, D.C., among the most widely accepted is the belief that a politician’s seniority translates into tangible economic benefits for his or her district. In fact, this perception works hand-in-glove with another central government myth — the one about politicians being able to create private sector jobs with your tax dollars in the first place.

Perpetuated by aspiring elected officials at all levels of government (and parroted by an intellectually incurious mainstream media), these Keynesian pillars have gone virtually unchallenged for years — allowing government to continue devouring additional chunks of private sector industries it claims to be strengthening.

In recent years, however, public distrust of government has fueled renewed skepticism regarding these two myths — although the academic appetite to challenge them theoretically has been predictably lacking.

In fact, the research that could end up blowing these myths out of the water seems to have come about accidentally — or at least as an afterthought. Three professors at Harvard Business School — Lauren Cohen, Joshua Coval and Christopher Malloy — were examining the correlation between politically-connected firms and powerful legislative committee chairmen when they stumbled upon something “unexpected.”

What did they discover? Something free market advocates have known for years: Government spending kills jobs.

“It was an enormous surprise, at least to us, to learn that the average firm in the chairman’s state did not benefit at all from the increase in spending,” says Coval. “Indeed, the firms significantly cut physical and R&D spending, reduced employment, and experienced lower sales.”

The study — which examined government earmark and budget data from the past four decades — found this trend to be consistent across all variables. Specifically, it affected both large and small firms in large and small states, and it followed the ascension of committee chairmen in both the House and Senate. Also, the study found that the damage to the private sector was “partially reversed” when the committee chairmen either lost their seats or gave up their gavels.

Talk about turning conventional Washington “wisdom” on its ear.

“Fiscal spending shocks appear to significantly dampen corporate sector investment and employment activity,” the researchers state plainly.

In other words, government spending directly supplants private sector investment — substituting expensive, cumbersome bureaucracies where efficient, profit-driven companies would have otherwise operated. Needless to say, this “crowding out” of the private sector not only costs jobs — it also comes at a tremendous up-front cost to the taxpayers.

Unlike other studies into the effects of government spending on private sector activity, this research’s focus on committee chairmanships provides a unique “exogenous” (or independent) variable.

“We show that becoming a powerful committee chair results in a significant increase in federal funds flowing to the ascending chairman’s state,” the report reveals. “Thus, a congressman’s ascension to a powerful committee chair creates a positive shock to his or her state’s share of federal funds that is virtually independent of the state’s economic conditions.”

That critical consideration has been routinely ignored by numerous prior studies — most of which have returned “inconclusive” findings regarding the extent to which government growth has been cannibalizing the free market.

These results could not have come at a more opportune time for limited government champions.

Across America, hundreds of incumbent politicians are currently facing the fight of their political lives. In years past, these incumbents would have no doubt relied on their seniority and their ability to secure government funding for their districts as central planks of their reelection platform. Fortunately, the scales are falling from the public’s eyes regarding these so-called “economic development” expenses.

In fact, a recent Rasmussen Reports poll found that only 18 percent of voters believe additional government spending will improve the economy. Conversely, two out of three American voters believe that cutting taxes is the best way to stimulate economic growth.

Voters clearly no longer want politicians who promise to “create jobs,” they want politicians who promise to get out of the private sector’s way.

Read more at NetRightDaily.com: http://netrightdaily.com/2010/06/politicians-cause-downsizing/#ixzz0qTsRM2yo