• Section 4202: Healthy Aging, Living Well; Evaluation of Community-Based Prevention and Wellness Programs for Medicare Beneficiaries. This particular grant’s success will in part be determined by Medicare beneficiaries “reduc[ing] their utilization of health services and associated costs under the Medicare program for conditions that are amenable to improvement under such programs.”
• Section 4205. Nutrition Labeling of Standard Menu Items at Chain Restaurants. Restaurants with at least twenty franchises are required to post menu items’ calorie count, “a succinct statement concerning daily caloric intake,” and “ranges” or “averages” for trickier offerings, “such as soft drinks, ice cream, pizza, doughnuts, or children’s combination meals.”
The list continues for nearly as long as the transcript of a typical off-the-cuff Obama response to a straightforward question. And buried within each, you usually find a special clause requiring the secretary to further elaborate on whatever the preceding section actually meant. We can count on the Obama administration to elaborate with a vengeance.
What can Americans expect under ObamaCare? Who knows—the law grants powers so vast, almost no aspect of our personal autonomy is off-limits. Everywhere we look, every doctor’s visit, every shopping trip to the grocer, every romantic night at a restaurant, every trip to a vending machine, every IRS form, everywhere, we’ll confront the long, judgmental hand of Obama, pushing us one way or the other.
LOAN SHARKS
Health care is not the only area where Obama has sought to expand government authority. For much of the past three decades, liberals have insisted that home ownership is a right, not a privilege.
It became government policy to encourage and facilitate home ownership among those lacking the financial means. To ease the way, Washington mandated “relaxed lending standards” through laws such as the Community Reinvestment Act, which went through several iterations since its establishment in 1977, getting worse with each revision. Banks could choose to either be labeled racist—and incur very loud, angry, and public protests from the likes of ACORN—or lower standards and extend loans to homebuyers who couldn’t even afford a down payment.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the tax-exempt, government-insured firms charged with buying and securitizing mortgages, exacerbated the problem. Fannie Mae’s chief from 1991 to 1998 became the government’s main instrument in achieving racial justice through home ownership. All of this came to a head in 2008, when loan defaults started spiking. Turns out not every American is entitled to a home, nor qualified to take on the massive debt involved with purchasing one. The home mortgage fallout roiled the economy, as many banks were heavily involved in the subprime market. Fannie and Freddie have since been fully nationalized and provided, at last count, with a taxpayer bailout topping $200 billion.
And what of James Johnson, Fannie Mae’s chief during much of the lending boom, who infamously said, “Every American who wants to get a mortgage will have their [sic] loan approved”? He left Fannie in 1998, after taking home $6 million in his final year. At least that’s what he told shareholders. A 2004 congressional investigation found that during his tenure as CEO, Fannie secretly deferred pay, so that in 1998 he actually paid himself $21 million. So naturally Obama named him chairman of his vice presidential search committee. He bowed out after reports surfaced that disgraced former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozillo had given him a sweetheart loan.
HERE WE GO AGAIN
The horrendous collapse of the housing market notwithstanding, President Obama’s zeal for social engineering via home ownership was undiminished. On Tax Day 2009, Obama unveiled yet another gimmick: an $8, 000 giveaway plan to any first-time homebuyer. In many cases, this meant that purchasers needed no down payment whatsoever. Obama told a gathering at the Old Executive Office Building, “I think it’s wonderful to see that this is already prompting some willingness for people to go ahead and make the first-time purchase, where they thought maybe it was out of reach before.”
Yeah, it was out of reach because most of these people couldn’t afford their monthly cable bill, let alone a mortgage. You know what else is “out of reach”? Me buying a Gulfstream 550. Maybe Obama should create a First-Time Gulfstream Buyer Tax Credit, so that I get suckered into massive debt I can’t afford. If someone had just taught the president one simple lesson— Don’t buy what you can’t afford!—America might have been spared most of his harebrained schemes.
STIMULATING AMERICA?
Obama kicked off his presidency by taking out an $800 billion loan against our country’s future. Democrats promised that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would stimulate the economy, create jobs, and return Americans to work.
The “stimulus” bill consisted of three basic categories: federal spending projects of all types, expanding the social safety net, and tax cuts. Obama warned that without his “stimulus,” America’s unemployment rate could reach as high as 9 percent. But if we just spent $790 billion, he’d ensure unemployment remained closer to 8 percent. Unfortunately, what happened next was the worst of both worlds: as Washington recklessly wasted hundreds of billions of dollars, the unemployment rate skyrocketed past 10 percent anyway.
It has been an unmitigated, budget-busting failure. Ask yourself: What have I received from that $800 billion? Chances are, unless you work for the government, weatherized your home, or were already impoverished, the answer is: Nothing.
Because no meaningful statistics exist, it is impossible to say whether any of the jobs attributable to the “stimulus” bill were “saved,” “created,” “invented,” or merely just “theoretical.” Here is just a smattering of who and what was stimulated with our money:
• A $25, 000 check went to In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre in Minneapolis.
• Washington state’s Parks and Recreation Commission received $50, 000 for its Asian-style rod-puppet show, according to the New York Post.
• And the Pig Iron Theatre Company (a “dance-clown-theatre ensemble”) in Philadelphia received $25, 000 to help pay for its production of Welcome to Yuba City, which is a “cowboy/clown odyssey, presenting hilarious fragments of a mythic American desertscape.”
THE DIARY OF VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN
U.S. NAVAL OBSERVATORY
February 25, 2009
The Boss put me in charge of administering the “stimulus” money (whatever the hell that means). You know Barack just comes out and says these things, and it’s the first I’ve ever heard of it. Don’t get me wrong; he’s great with the public stuff—very complimentary. At the State of the Union, when he announced my new position (which is the same thing Jill calls me at home)— Stimulus Czar—I was flattered. “Nobody messes with Joe,” Barack said. Sure, I thought, trying to hold that smile on my face. Joe can mess it up all by himself because he doesn’t know what the hell you are talking about.
Next thing I know, around midnight, I get a one-page stimulus briefing and I find out they’re launching a website so the public can track how the money is being spent. I’m supposed to be in charge of this thing! I don’t even own a computer!
To tell the truth, aside from spending a s*#tload of money, I don’t see what this stimulus bill accomplishes. But like it or not, Barack sends me out to sell the spending plan in the a.m. I appeared on CBS This Morning (which, saints be praised, no one was watching), and Maggie Rodriguez (a spicy dish) asked me how the stimulus will “help small business.” “Sh#t if I know,” I wanted to tell her. But it’s a morning show and kids might have been watching, so I came up with some malarkey about how the stimulus is good because it’ll fix bridges and roads that allow people to reach small businesses. But the more I think about it, that’s like telling people that a tsunami is good because the flowers will get watered.
Other “stimulus” beneficiaries include people with no obvious need for taxpayers’ money. Nearly $6 million in stimulus funds went to two PR firms run by Hillary Clinton’s pollster, Mark Penn, to promote aware
ness of the switch to digital TV. The grant “saved” three jobs. According to the Hill, an advisor to Obama’s 2008 campaign, Alfredo Balsera, “received nearly $70, 000 to help alert viewers in difficult-to-reach communities that their televisions would soon no longer receive broadcast signals.” (You can see why this project was of particular importance to President Prime-time.)
There seems to be no end to the stimulus boondoggles. Consider the measly $5 billion weatherizing initiative. That’s a lot of weatherstripping. Improving home insulation would, in Obama’s reckoning, have two major benefits. First, it would put people back to work (gluing rubber stripping to windows and doors?), and second, it would advance Obama’s energy agenda by increasing home energy efficiency.
But as usual, Obama’s ideas just don’t pan out. The Associated Press reported on March 28, 2010: “In Indiana, state-trained workers flubbed insulation jobs. In Alaska, Wyoming, and the District of Columbia, the program has yet to produce a single job or retrofit one home. And in California, a state with nearly 37 million residents, the program at last count had created 84 jobs.”
All this spending only added to our national debt. Reducing our crushing budget deficit requires a serious commitment to cutting spending. Obama lacks even an unserious commitment to cutting spending. But make no mistake: the president does have a plan to tackle the deficit—following the ingrained liberal instinct to raise taxes.
THE DIARY OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
THE WHITE HOUSE
February 18, 2010
I don’t need Congress to reduce the debt. We’ll do this the Chicago way. The Senate refused to establish a Debt Commission to get our financial house in order—fine. I just announced the appointment of my own Debt Commission! It’s good to be the president.
The eighteen-member bipartisan group was chosen entirely by me! Thank God there are still a few progressive Republicans out there willing to take up space around a table. If it wasn’t for Alan Cranston, we would have had to make Arlen Specter switch parties again. Here’s how this deal’s going to work: The commission will offer me their debt reducing ideas, and then I’ll force Congress to accept them before year’s end. Pelosi has already agreed to fast track all my the commissions’ recommendations during the lame-duck session. So even if we get our clocks cleaned at the ballot box in November, we’ll give those ungrateful voters something to remember us by.
Look, there’s only one way to knock this debt down: we need to suck more money from the wealthy and everybody else working for a living. With the spending contained in that healthcare bill and the ever-rising entitlements, we’re going to need to “spread the sacrifice.” (That may be my new slogan as I sell this to the people.)
Though we just announced the commission today, the report is already completed. My budget chief, Orszag, economic whiz Romer, and Rahm have been working on the report for months. After the commission meets for a few weeks, we’ll slip the report in their folders and they’ll rubber-stamp it. Most of the commissioners already know about the report anyway. It’s all in there: a value-added tax, a new national sales tax, we’re going to raise the Social Security age to seventy-two. And to really reduce spending: anyone who contracts a deadly disease after the age of sixty will get an all-expense paid, quickie visit (we hope) to the hospice. I know there’ll be gnashing of teeth over a few of these changes. But the voters need to listen more closely when I speak. I told them I wouldn’t raise income taxes on people making less than $250, 000 a year. I didn’t say anything about all the other taxes.
Obama loves to brag about the tax cuts he gave out as part of the stimulus. This is one of the biggest lies of his first year in office. These so-called tax cuts were as illusory as the jobs created by the “stimulus” bill. “More than a third of Obama’s ‘Make Work Pay’ goes to people who do not pay income tax,” the Heritage Foundation found, rendering it little more than glorified welfare. For those who do work, the “tax cut” amounted to eight to fourteen dollars a week. Most of us never even noticed the change in our paycheck. As for his four-hundred-dollar tax rebate in 2009, the important thing to note is that no tax rates are actually being cut.
If this is Obama’s new deal, we’ll take the old one. And speaking of FDR, Obama reportedly believes that the only reason that the New Deal failed was that it didn’t go far enough (i.e., the spending programs were too modest). He bemoaned the fact that Roosevelt “pulled back toward a balanced budget.” Perish the thought.
Thanks to Obama’s reckless economic policies, America’s national debt is skyrocketing. According to the Federal Reserve, the share of what we owe nationally now tops $690, 000 per family. And yet no matter how loudly we protest the policies fueling the debt, we are still forced to sacrifice our personal prosperity to help shoulder the government’s bills. There used to be a popular term for that: indentured servitude.
With so much of our money to burn, the administration also ordered the relaxation of rules to determine eligibility for federal food stamps. The Daily Caller unearthed a letter from the associate administrator for the food stamp program, Jessica Shahin, who instructed regional food-stamp distributors: “Applicants will not need to provide documentation verifying their resources . . . mak[ing] most, if not all, households categorically eligible for [food stamps].” Asset and gross income limits were tossed out the window. Who needs eligibility rules when we have a “stimulus” to implement?
With the gates to the public feeding trough thrown open to all comers, Obama added $17 billion to the 2010 budget (a mere 30 percent of the entire federal food stamp program!).
GOVERNMENT TO THE RESCUE!
The way Obama tells it, he’s never been much of a fan of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (aka TARP), the $700 billion bank bailout. In his 2010 State of the Union address, he told America, “We all hated the bank bailout. I hated it. You hated it. It was as popular as a root canal.” So why has his administration been so obstinate about keeping TARP alive? So he could use the money for all manner of liberal mischief, that’s why.
Remember what then-senator Obama promised taxpayers would happen once TARP completed its goal? In a fall 2008 Senate debate, he said, “This is not a plan to just hand over $700 billion of taxpayer money to a few banks. If this is managed correctly, we will hopefully get most of, if not all of, our money back—and possibly even turn a profit—on the government’s intervention, every penny of which will go directly back to the American people.”
Fast-forward to December 2009. Obama told an audience at the Brookings Institution that after all’s said and done, TARP will “only” cost $141 billion. That rules out taxpayers making a “profit” off TARP. But hey, things could have been worse—we could have lost the entire $700 billion, right? We consumers should start trying similar gimmicks. The next time you’re eyeing a purchase but just can’t afford it, put something even more expensive on your shopping list. When you prudently come to your senses and realize there’s no way you can afford that more expensive item, presto! You just “saved” enough money to buy whatever was originally on your shopping list.
These TARP “savings” were obviously burning a hole in Obama’s pocket, so he decided to pour billions into other projects. When Obama bailed out Chrysler and GM, he used TARP funds, despite clear legislative language restricting funds to banks only.
In October 2009, with the congressional battle over ObamaCare heating up, the administration announced a new idea for TARP. Below-market loans would be extended to small banks with ideas for expanding lending to small businesses (never mind that small banks are by definition not “too big to fail,” the supposed criteria for TARP funds).
Not surprisingly, a study by two University of Michigan economists, released on December 21, 2009, found that banks that shelled out the most money for political contributions and lobbying received more federal cash. Banks located in the district of a House Financial Services Committee member are also 26 percent more likely to receive TARP funds.
The one obst
acle to the administration’s use of TARP as its own socialist piggy bank was the TARP inspector general, Neil Barofsky. Charged with monitoring the ongoing administration of the program, he was reviled by the Obama economic staff for his brutal assessments. So the White House quickly moved to neutralize him. No longer would he have oversight of the small business loan program. This “curious change,” Barofsky wrote to the Treasury Department, “would be terribly wasteful and lead to duplicative efforts and, at worst, could lead to significant exposure to waste, fraud and abuse.” Mission accomplished!
THE DIARY OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
THE WHITE HOUSE
February 24, 2010
Spoke to the Business Roundtable guys today. When I looked out at the roomful of CEOs at the St. Regis, I thought to myself, These guys think they’re so special, running multibillion-dollar companies. Big whoop. I could do that in my sleep! I’m running an enterprise worth trillions! They all seem a little cocky to me.
Axe and Rahm said that I needed to appear more “business-friendly” before we bring the hammer down on these people. But I think we’re going way overboard with the sweet talk. Today, I actually became physically ill at a few points during my speech. “I am an ardent believer in the free market. I believe businesses like yours are the engines of economic growth in this country.” And the gushing didn’t stop there! “You create jobs. You develop new products and cutting-edge technologies. And you create the supply chains that make it possible for small businesses to open their doors.” At this point, even Mr. T (one of my pet names for my old friend the teleprompter) started to break into a digital sweat. “So I want everyone in this room to succeed.” Well, there is some truth to that. I need them to make money . . . so they can send the bulk of it here to Washington!
The Obama Diaries Page 13
