The State Department last year tried to put off a decision about TransCanada’s first application until after the election, arguing it needed more time to study the issue. That move delighted the president’s environmental allies who fear a future catastrophe, but angered many of his labor union supporters, who say the pipeline will produce jobs.
Congress then passed a bill requiring the president to expedite his decision, and faced with the tighter deadline the State Department ruled against the application.
Now, Republicans said Mr. Obama has a do-over.
Indeed. As I’ve stated in prior posts, passage of Keystone Pipeline project is important because the very fact of a project of this magnitude moving ahead has an immediate effect on the markets by changing the traders’ expectations of future supply.
For the Obama administration, the development has been politically troublesome, pitting environmentalists opposed to increased fossil fuel use and pipelines through sensitive areas against unions and other Democrats who say it will create badly needed jobs in a shaky economy.
With this question coming up within 6 months of an presidential election, it will be interesting to see if Obama continues to pander to his environment base, or appeal to voters who wish to see job creation and economic recovery.
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) was seriously thinking about getting a budget on the table, but according to The Hill, he “bowed to pressure from fellow Democrats on Tuesday and postponed a committee vote on a 2013 budget resolution, most likely until after the November elections
the last time Senate Democrats passed a budget, a gallon of gas cost about half what it does now, the debt was $4.5 trillion dollars less than it is today, and ObamaCare was just a twinkle in the president’s eye,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).
Meanwhile, Katherine Revello over at Conservative Ntaews Daily, shared a picture from 4/18/12 from the Twitter account of the GOP Senate Budget Committee (@BudgetGOP) . The empty chairs at that meeting belong to the Democrat members of the Committee. Hard to get much done, I would think.
So, as of Sunday, April 29th, we will be officially 1096 days without a budget. 3 full years. Trillions more in debt.
First we had Energy Secretary Chu admit that high gas prices are a good thing. Now, we have the EPA — a darling agency of the Obama Administration — describe on video that the
EPA’s “general philosophy” is to “crucify” and “make examples” of oil and gas companies.
The video is below.
Senator Inhofe went on to remark that
the video provides Americans with “a glimpse of the Obama administration’s true agenda.”
That agenda, Inhofe said, is to “incite fear” in the public with unsubstantiated claims and “intimidate” oil and gas companies with threats of unjustified fines and penalties – then, quietly backtrack once the public’s perception has been firmly jaded against oil and natural gas.
This little gem came out today during the daily White House press briefing. Real Clear Politics is reporting that Ed Henry pressed Jay Carney about Obama’s vote in 2005 where he supported a bill which contained more than $2 billion in oil subsidies. This is one for which he didn’t vote “present”; he voted “yes”. Click here for the amusing video exchange.
Henry: Why did the President vote for the energy bill in 2005 as a Senator that had over $2 billion in tax breaks for the oil industry? They were making a lot of money then too.
Carney: What I can tell you Ed is that the oil and gas companies in this country are making record profits, now, in 2012. The price at the pump is very high and that is plenty of incentive for these companies to continue drill, to continue to explore, to continue to develop energy sources here in the United States and abroad. There is no reason for the American taxpayer to subsidize that activity.
Henry: So why’d he vote for it?
Carney: I haven’t examined the vote, or what the prices were at the time, or the whole bill it was attached to. What I know and what the President knows is that this year, 2012, when we are seeing high prices at the pump, high prices in the international oil markets and high profits for the oil and gas companies, there is no reason to continue these kinds of subsidies. Take that argument to the people, I don’t think they’ll go along with it.
In previous writings, I’ve noted how politicians decry oil’s “record-profits” — but coincidentally forget to mention how much money the oil companies have invested just to earn said profits.
Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget proposal was defeated Wednesday night in the House of Representatives by a vote of 414-0. Not a single Democrat supported it. This vote was reminiscent of the defeat of Obama’s budget last year in the Senate, by a vote of 97-0. No Democrats would put their name to that budget, either.
Clearly, considering that we are now 1065 days without a budget is result of the lack of any substantive and serious thought coming from the White House. Two years, two unanimous defeats in two different parts of Congress can only lead to one conclusion: Barack Obama’s economic ideas on taxes and deficit reduction are so vastly out of touch with both Republicans and Democrats that no one is willing to back them.
As I have written here before, the President has been able to effectively pass laws which Congress has not passed through the use of the Executive Order and his government agencies. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) seems to be one of his most popular. For instance, limitations on emissions were passed as a set of rules by the EPA, implementing almost the entirety of the cap-and-trade bill which failed in the Congress. Now the EPA strikes again!
long-awaited rules to limit carbon-dioxide emissions from new power plants that will effectively block the construction of new coal-burning plants and make natural gas even more attractive as a fuel for generating electricity.
New power plants have a emissions limitation of 1,000 pounds of CO2 per megawatt-hour of electricity produced. This affects new coal plants because they must be fitted with special equipment which catches the emissions and stores them. The cost to do so is extremely expensive, and a pilot program has shown it is not economically viable.
AEP pulled the plug last summer on a high-profile pilot program to capture emissions from one of its plants in West Virginia because the utility couldn’t recover the costs of the program from its customers.
These unnecessary regulations could spell the end of coal-burning plants, which admittedly, is a goal of the Obama administration. Obama is pushing natural gas as an alternative fuel for generating electricity. The demise of the coal industry, however, would be a huge loss of income and jobs for many states, something Obama fails to mention. Apparently, excessive regulations trump the economy. Glad we have the EPA to help us along!
Jay Carney, the White House Press Secretary, resorted to insults instead of information today, when asked about Paul Ryan’s new budget proposal. The Washington Examiner reports,
Carney concluded that “the budget proposed by Chairman Ryan and supported overwhelmingly already by Republicans suggests that those problems” — aggressive ignorance and diminished comprehension — “exist in the minds of the supporters of that plan.”
Instead of offering ideas and counter-points to Ryan’s proposal, we get name calling from the White House. Is it any wonder that we are now 1057 days without a budget?
New estimates released from the CBO suggest that ObamaCare will cost at least $1.76 TRILLION over ten years — up from the $900 Billion touted by Obama.
Democrats employed many accounting tricks when they were pushing through the national health care legislation, the most egregious of which was to delay full implementation of the law until 2014, so it would appear cheaper under the CBO’s standard ten-year budget window and, at least on paper, meet Obama’s pledge that the legislation would cost “around $900 billion over 10 years.” When the final CBO score came out before passage, critics noted that the true 10 year cost would be far higher than advertised once projections accounted for full implementation.
By this time next year, we’ll have the full ten years (2014 – 2023) time frame to get the truest estimate of cost, which is likely to exceed $2 trillion.
Philip Klein, the Washington Examiner correspondent who covered the above information, also released a corollary article that discusses the impact of employer health-care changes and the rising number of Medicare recipients on ObamaCare costs and coverage. And for those who love raw date, the entire CBO report can be accessed here.
admitted to a House committee that the administration is not interested in lowering gas prices.
Chu, along with the Obama administration, regards the spike in gas prices as a feature rather than a bug. High gas prices provide an incentive for alternate energy technology, a priority for the White House, and a decrease in reliance on oil for energy.
David Harsayni wrote about this very conundrum five days ago. Now we better understand why Obama nixed the Keystone Pipeline project. As I mentioned earlier, a project of this magnitude moving forward has an immediate effect on the markets by changing the traders’ expectations of future supply. Having more oil available in the marketplace contributes to lower prices for consumers. So when the project was tabled, the markets reacted accordingly.
I guess the White House knows what’s best for us better than we do.
A major theme of Obama’s reelection campaign is centered on taxes. On the one hand, he decries the unfair “Bush tax cuts for the wealthy”, while on the other, he creates new tax credits to purportedly help the recovery. Both are emotional appeals aimed to garner votes. Such policies reveal — once again — how economically ignorant our President is.
The rates currently in effect have been in force for more than 8 years, and what is now being urged by Obama is an increase in the highest marginal rates to what they were before the “Bush tax cuts of 2003”. Obama does not know his economic history. In what way was the 2003 change even a tax cut? It really wasn’t. At most, it was a very slight reversal of the major tax increases that had been put forth in the preceding fifteen years.
To put it into perspective, the last major change to the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) was a revenue neutral change in 1986, whereby the entire Internal Revenue Code was revamped. That brought down the tax rate, eliminated deductions and reduced tax shelter type benefits. This served as a flat tax adjustment which indisputably was responsible for the strong economic growth that followed, because, at that rate, it wasn’t worth the time, energy, and expense to shelter money elsewhere. But after we made this major positive correction, our legislators went right back to business as usual with new tax laws and changes.
The new 1986 IRC set the maximum tax rate at 28%. Through the government’s inability to keep promises (which was to reduce rates in lieu of changes to deductions), both the Democrats and Republicans participated in breaking promises in the ensuing years.
We saw the rate increase from 28% to 31%, as the first President Bush broke his“read my lips” promise. Through the Clinton administration, the maximum rate went from 31% to 35% and then to 39.6%. All in all, the maximum tax rate increased 40%. Bush’s tax cuts then, were not tax cuts at all – they were simply a reduction of the 40% tax hikes, down to a more modest 25% increase in the rates, from the base set made in 1986. The margin cuts of 2003 simply eliminated the last of three successive rate increases, each of which had broken the implicit pledges made in the overhaul.
Now in recent months, there has been a renewed call to clean up the tax code that has gotten out of hand in a mere twenty-five year span. What needs to happen is similar to what happened in 1986 — lower the rates, but get rid of deductions for special interests (such as special allowances for the oil and gas industry, “green” initiatives, and other crony tax benefits). In sum, make the code shorter, simpler, and more beneficial for economic growth.
The reality is that Obama will try to get reelected by saying that the economy is still weak, so he must do something about jobs. He has proposed a plethora of new credits to purportedly help the situation, such as employment credits, business credits, etc, but they’ll only worsen the byzantine code.
Even Obama’s commissions have argued in favor of cleaning up the tax code. Why make it more convoluted with more credits? Quite simply, they sound good to the average taxpayer, who will reward his “sensibilities” with their vote. What he doesn’t tell you is that such tax credits are merely government spending run through the tax code. More spending and deficit is only going to continue to hurt our anemic recovery. Unfortunately, such a fraudulent plan only puts his own ambitions ahead of the best interests of his country.
