Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Don's Tuesday Column (DP: sorry for late posting--my oversight)

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   2/17/2015

Oregon scandal; lousy recovery

Every so often, spending time in California’s liberal soul mate to the north (Oregon motto: Keep Portland Weird) provides a front row seat to an occasional unraveling of the progressive experiment. “Experiment” would be the operative description of a century long effort to prove that Americans’ lives, needs, wants and finances can best be “guided” by illuminated oversight: government-centric, top-down, one-size-fits-all solutions. Whether it’s health care, energy usage, population growth, residential/commercial development, transportation or even the Internet—central government regulatory control is their answer. Trust me that the governing, academic and intellectual left has no limiting principles to their redistributionist, cradle-to-grave welfare society.
Back to Oregon, Governor John Kitzhaber won reelection last November in spite of having presided over the biggest failure of an Obamacare state exchange in the nation, complete with a website that never successfully registered anyone. Way to show taxpayers how effectively state government can blow through hundreds of millions of dollars. Officials resigned in embarrassment over Oregon’s failed efforts to socialize health care.
Investigations pointed no culpable fingers at anyone beyond the administrators involved, allowing Kitzhaber to skate blame-free. Voters should have overcome their infatuation with their multi-term, cowboy boot wearin’ Ted Turner look-alike liberal-in-chief and fired Kitzhaber.
The resignation of Oregon’s Gov. John Kitzhaber is both a classic and contemporary morality tale involving the corrupting influences of government money dedicated to the chimera of “green energy,” the politically incestuous back-scratching between consultants, advocates and providers of said “green energy” projects—and the close proximity of a greedy “significant other.”  Since there is no free market use or demand for exorbitantly priced wind and solar power, only mandates and ill-advised goals enable all of this.
John Hinderaker, in “Requiem for a Governor” (powerlineblog.com), summarized it: “In this case, the woman is Kitzhaber’s fiancé, Cylvia Hayes. The problem is that Ms. Hayes is a wheeler-dealer in her own right, in the field of green energy. To make a long story short, she has traded on her unique access to Oregon’s governor by earning consultant’s fees (DP: $200,000+) from various ‘green’ energy organizations who stand to benefit from the state’s support.
“To make matters worse, she apparently failed to report some of those consulting fees on her tax returns. There are other embarrassments, too: she once accepted $5,000 to enter into a sham marriage with an African who needed a legal basis to stay in the U.S.—a marriage that she forgot to mention to the governor. Also, she bought, or tried to buy, Oregon real estate for the purpose of running a marijuana farm. Before it was legal.” Perhaps blinded by love, Kitzhaber heeded bipartisan calls to step down.
On the economy, there is more to the story of the weakest recovery since WWII. Wall Street Journal writers assembled “The State of the Economy, in Eight Charts” on Jan. 19. The good: Gas prices are in the $2+ per gallon rather than the mid-$3 range (which is widely recognized as having occurred in spite of Obama’s anti-drilling policies). Also, about 7 million jobs have been added to “Professional services,” “Education and health,” “Leisure and hospitality” and “Retail trade.” The loss of over 600,000 jobs in federal, state and local government is a gain as government at all levels is overcompensated relative to the private sector (up to 2x for much of the federal sector) and can do what is truly needed with less people.
Bad: Manufacturing and construction jobs have declined by almost 750,000. The Obama-promoted gain of manufacturing jobs is illusory—that sector (a core, high-wage factor in a rising middle class) hasn’t increased as either a share of employment (under 9%) or as a share of GDP (12%).
More bad: Obama mouthpieces proclaim lowering deficits as proof of an improving fiscal picture but the reality is that the massive Obamacrat deficits have doubled America’s debt and, at over $400 billion this year, will only rise dramatically as entitlement programs grow. Current levels of both debt and deficits cannot be other than a massive drag on our economy going forward. Private sector growth requires a ready pool of investment and startup capital which, in a vicious cycle, is less likely to be offered when investors see government as a taxing, regulatory and borrowing anchor on the economy.
Here’s the really ugly side: The unemployment rate, at 5.6%, is still higher than the 5% rate under President Bush in early 2008. Obama’s “underemployment” rate, including part time workers wanting full time work and those who’ve given up looking, is still over 11% (Bush’s rate was only 9%). More on unemployment next week—it is uglier than you thought and most of you “Don’t buy Team Obama’s claim unemployment improving” (Economist/YouGov poll).
The worst part of Obama’s pathetic economic recovery is simply this: The pre-recession median income under Bush was $56,436 and was $54,059 when Obama took office. At 2013’s end after almost 5 years of Obama’s policies, that median income level (half of incomes above, half below) had declined to $51,939. Americans are almost $4,500 poorer than pre-recession; they are over $2,000 poorer than when Obama took office—again, the worst recovery in modern times.

Tea Party Patriots will have as guests Sally Rapoza and Sylvia Milligan for an important program on California Air Resources Board with DVD.

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