AMERICAN FUTURE

Thanks to the Supreme Court, their chances have improved.

After noting that just two dozen or so individuals, couples and companies have given more than 80 percent of the money collected by SuperPACs, the New York Times delves into the backgound of three of the biggest contributors:

¶Harold Simmons, a billionaire corporate raider, has given $1 million to Mr. Gingrich’s political action committee, $1.1 million to Rick Perry’s PAC, $100,000 to Mitt Romney’s PAC, and $10 million to American Crossroads, the super PAC advised by Karl Rove that is supporting many Republican candidates. Mr. Simmons’s companies make metals, paints and chemicals, among other things, and have gotten into trouble over lead and uranium emissions from previous decades. He also runs a radioactive waste dump in Texas that has clashed with environmental regulators over its proximity to a nearby aquifer. He controls Waste Control Specialists, which has contracts to clean up federal hazardous waste sites, including emissions from other companies he controls.

¶Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and an outspoken libertarian, gave $2.6 million to Ron Paul’s PAC. In 2009, he wrote that the 1920s were the last decade when one could be optimistic about American politics, lamenting the subsequent rise of the welfare state that he blamed in part on giving women the right to vote.

¶Foster Friess, who gave $1 million to Rick Santorum’s Red White and Blue PAC, is a mutual fund manager who recently declared that aspirin used to be an effective contraceptive when women put it between their knees. He is a former president of the Council for National Policy, a secretive club of some of the country’s most powerful conservatives, which opposes unions, same-sex marriage and government regulation.

If you’d told me that I would someday agree with Coulter on anything — anything! — I would have told you that you were out of your mind.

But it’s happened. She prefers Romney to Gingrich. So do I.

Here’s some choice excerpts from her column at townhall.com:

To talk with Gingrich supporters is to enter a world where words have no meaning. They denounce Mitt Romney as a candidate being pushed on them by “the Establishment” — with “the Establishment” defined as anyone who supports Romney or doesn’t support Newt.

Newtons claim Romney is a “moderate,” and Gingrich the true conservative — a feat that can be accomplished only by refusing to believe anything Romney says … and also refusing to believe anything Gingrich says.

. . . without the federal government, Gingrich would be penniless. He has been in Washington since the ’70s, first as a congressman, then becoming a rich man on the basis of having been a congressman. Most egregiously, he took $1.6 million to shill for Freddie Mac, one of the two institutions directly responsible for the housing crash that caused the financial collapse. (Or one of three, if you consider Barney Frank an institution.)

To act as if Obamacare is the same thing as “Romneycare” is just a word game, on the order of acting like a “gun” has the same properties as a “gunny sack,” or “fire” is the same thing as a “firefly” . . . For those of you who still think Romneycare is the worst possible sin a Republican candidate could commit — even worse than taking money from Freddie Mac as it destroyed the economy — that doesn’t help Gingrich: He supported Romneycare . . .

Now here’s something (among many other things) I didn’t know and that might be useful to Obama’s re-election campaign: “the nation’s leading conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, helped draft Romneycare. Indeed, Bob Moffit, Heritage’s senior fellow on health care issues, can be seen in the picture of the bill-signing ceremony, standing proudly behind Romney.”

Child of the sixties that I am, my reactions to this revelation (at least for me) are can-you-dig-it and far-out.

More from Coulter on Gingrich and Romneycare:

But Gingrich did more than support Romneycare. As former senator Rick Santorum has pointed out, Gingrich supported a FEDERAL individual mandate to purchase health insurance from 1993 until five minutes ago — i.e., at least until a “Meet the Press” appearance just last May.

She sums things up this way:

In a world where words have meaning, Mitt Romney is not the “moderate” in this race. He is the most conservative candidate still standing, with the possible exception of Rick Santorum, who is bad on illegal immigration . . .

Romney is “moderate” only in demeanor — which is just another word game. His positions are more conservative than Gingrich’s, but he doesn’t scare people like Gingrich does. Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms were moderate in demeanor, too. No one would call them political moderates.

Romney is the most electable candidate not only because it will be nearly impossible for the media to demonize this self-made Mormon square, devoted to his wife and church, but precisely because he is the most conservative candidate.

Conservatism is an electable quality. Hotheaded arrogance is neither conservative nor attractive to voters.

Ann, I agree: if we’re to have a Republican president, let it be Mitt, not Newt.

Is this the kiss of death for Gingrich? Could be.

Any comment by me would be superfluous.

Well (as Ronald Reagan said on numerous occasions), it’s time for this blog to start focusing on American politics — a subject I’ve come close to ignoring since I started posting last June.

I’ll start with “Incoherent party, incoherent candidates” from the Economist, which hits the mark:

REPUBLICANS are clearly not too enthused about Mitt Romney. Nor are they wild for any of the alternatives . . .

Mitt Romney looks like a weak phony in this election campaign because he has to pretend to believe with all his heart in orthodox tea-party conservative positions that he transparently doesn’t really believe in. We know this because in the past, Mr Romney supported health-care reform including an individual mandate along the lines of the system he instituted in Massachusetts, essentially the same system as Obamacare. And in the past, he supported a cap-and-trade system for limiting greenhouse-gas emissions to address climate change. But at the time, both of those were orthodox Republican Party positions . . . There were very few established Republican politicians who hadn’t taken positions in the George W. Bush era (or the Newt Gingrich era!) that pose ideological problems for them in the tea-party era . . .

Republicans’ disenchantment with their current presidential candidates is not an incidental characteristic of this crop of candidates. It’s a structural feature of a contemporary Republican Party whose pieces don’t hang together. Pro-Iraq-war neoconservative Republicans cannot actually live with Ron Paul Republicans. Wall Street-hating anti-bail-out Republicans cannot actually live with Wall Street-working bail-out-receiving Republicans. Evangelical-conservative Republicans cannot actually live with libertarian, socially liberal Republicans. Deficit-slashing Republicans cannot live with tax-slashing Republicans. Medicare-cutting Republicans cannot live with Medicare-defending Republicans. These factions have been glued together over the past three years by the intensity of their partisan hatred for Barack Obama, and all of the underlying resentments that antipathy masks. Republicans have buried their differences by assaulting everything Mr Obama supports, and because Mr Obama is a pretty middle-of-the-road politician, that includes a whole lot of things that many Republicans used to support. They are disenchanted with their candidates because their candidates are incoherent, but their candidates are incoherent because the base is incoherent. If the GOP wins this election, the party’s leaders are going to be confronted with that incoherence pretty quickly.

He was for it before he was against it. From the New York Times:

A day after the Senate overwhelmingly approved legislation to extend a payroll tax cut for two months, House Republicans made clear Sunday that they would not support the measure.

Speaker John A. Boehner, who had urged his members on Saturday to support the bill, did an about-face on Sunday and said he and other House Republicans were opposed to the temporary extension, part of a $33 billion package of bills that the Senate passed Saturday . . . The measure would be effective through February.

But in an interview with NBC’s “Meet The Press” on Sunday, Mr. Boehner said the two-month extension would be “just kicking the can down the road.” “It’s time to just stop, do our work, resolve the differences and extend this for one year,” he said. “How can you have tax policy for two months?”

Mr. Boehner’s remarks on “Meet the Press” came less than 24 hours after a conference call in which he tried to sell the package to his rank and file, pointing to a provision that would speed Republican-supported construction of an oil pipeline, known as Keystone XL, from Canada to the Gulf Coast. But many Republican lawmakers were not buying what their leader was urging them to do, chiefly because they objected to the tax cut extension’s cost.

There’s only one possible conclusion: the rank and file — a.k.a. the Tea Party — has won another round. Can the approval rating of Congress drop below the recent 9 percent? It should.

And the American people have lost — again.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

If there were a dissembler-of-the-year award, my vote would go to Michele Bachmann. Just listen to this:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The next time you hear Newt trashing Fannie and Freddie, consider what he had to say about Government Sponsored Enterprises in April 2007, at which time the housing meltdown was already underway:

Certainly there is a lot of debate today about the housing GSEs, but I think it is telling that there is strong bipartisan support for maintaining the GSE model in housing. There is not much support for the idea of removing the GSE charters from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. And I think it’s clear why. The housing GSEs have made an important contribution to homeownership and the housing finance system. We have a much more liquid and stable housing finance system than we would have without the GSEs. And making homeownership more accessible and affordable is a policy goal I believe conservatives should embrace. Millions of people have entered the middle class through building wealth in their homes, and there is a lot of evidence that homeownership contributes to stable families and communities. These are results I think conservatives should embrace and want to extend as widely as possible. So while we need to improve the regulation of the GSEs, I would be very cautious about fundamentally changing their role or the model itself.

But when questioned during the November 9 Republican debate about his ties to Freddie, he said:

I offered them advice on precisely what they didn’t do. I have never done any lobbying, every contract that was written during the period when I was out of the office specifically said I would do no lobbying, and I offered advice. And my advice as a historian…I said to them at the time: This is a bubble. This is insane. This is impossible.

And a statement from his campaign said:

Gingrich advised that a business model that involved lending money to people with bad credit and no money down was unsustainable and a bubble, and that it was dangerous to buy securities made up of these mortgages.

Multiple choice question:

1. Gingrich liked GSEs before he disliked GSEs.
2. Gingrich disliked GSEs before he liked GSEs.
3. All of the above.

Presidential candidate Ron Paul (“the Fed bails out Europe“) is either misinformed or disingenuous. Then there’s Rick Perry, who, according to CNBC, reacted by saying that ”this action today shows that Chairman Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Geithner have proven that Washington insiders cannot be trusted to stop bailouts, protect taxpayers.”

As explained by Citi in a note (no link) published this afternoon,

“. . . it is important to note that these are currency transactions strictly between central banks, expresslyauthorized, in the U.S. case, by the Federal Reserve Act and established by the FOMC. The Fed’s arrangement is with the ECB or other central bank and the Fed is not a counterparty to any loan extended to private foreign banks. These actions are not a prelude to Fed support for foreign bond markets. Although the [central banks] have agreed to the pricing announced today, the actual terms of dollar funding that they provide will be their decision and the credit risk regarding collateral and institutions is on that central bank’s book. The central bank involved agrees to return the dollars swapped at the same exchange rate at maturity.”

In other words, the Fed is subject to neither credit risk nor currency risk. It’s not creating money. It’s not bailing out Europe.

Heaven help our — and the world — economy if either of these gentlemen were to become president.

My apologies to the Beatles and I’m not taking about candidate Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan.

I’m talking about the new New York Times/CBS News poll revealing that only 9 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. The disapproval toward Congress has risen 22 percentage points since the beginning of the year, when Republicans took control of the House.

• 89 percent of Americans say they distrust government to do the right thing.
• 74 percent say the country is on the wrong track.
• 49 percent say the economy is at a standstill and 36 percent say it is getting worse.
• 56 percent think that President Obama does not have a clear plan for creating jobs.

A great time for Republicans? Not so fast.

• 46 percent approve of  the job President Obama is doing.
• Two-thirds of the public said that wealth should be distributed more evenly. Nearly 9 in 10 Democrats, two-thirds of independents and just over one-third of all Republicans say that the distribution of wealth in the country should be more equitable, even as a majority of Republicans said they think it is fair.
• Two-thirds object to tax cuts for corporations and a similar number prefer increasing income taxes on millionaires.
• 71 percent of the public say that Congressional Republicans do not have a clear plan for creating jobs.
• In February, a CBS News poll found that 27 percent of the public said the views of the Tea Party movement reflected the sentiment of most Americans. In the current poll, 46 percent of the public said the same of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Regardless of who becomes the Republican nominee, he will — with virtual certainty — run on a platform that will oppose a more even distribution of wealth and higher taxes on millionaires and favor a reduction in the corporate tax rate. Their policies are out of joint with what the public wants. Sure, the nominee will move toward the center. But when he does, the Democrats will have an almost limitless collection of sound bytes with which to reply.

Sorry for the cliche, but Republicans shouldn’t count their chickens before they hatch.

“We should start moving toward fiscal responsibility by capping federal spending at 18% of our gross domestic product, banning earmarks and future bailouts, and passing a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution.”

– Rick Perry, “My Tax and Spending Reform Plan,” Wall Street Journal, October 25, 2011

In my view, this is the most important quote from candidate Perry’s op-ed in today’s Journal. While I have no problem with banning earmarks, I have serious reservations about limiting federal spending to 18 percent of GDP, banning future bailouts, and instituting a balanced budget amendment.

Let’s suppose that, when the financial crisis hit with full force in the fall of 2008, (1) Federal spending was capped at 18 percent of GDP, (2) it was illegal for the government to bailout the banks (or any other corporate entities), and (3) a balanced budget amendment was part of the Constitution. Keep in mind that no one, regardless of their ideological stripes, claimed then or claims now that the crisis was caused by out-of-control federal spending.

Under these conditions, the sequence of events would have been as follows:

• Without the TARP bailout, the world’s credit markets would have remained solidly frozen for an indefinite period of time. Not just Lehman, but other major financial institutions, would have gone under.
• Even with TARP, the financial crisis quickly spilled over into the real economy, resulting in a sharp contraction of economic activity and a surge in unemployment. Absent TARP, the economic contraction would have been even more rapid and the unemployment rate would have risen into the double-digits.
• With Federal spending limited to 18 percent of GDP, the decline in economic activity (which was made more severe by the no bail-out law) would have necessitated a reduction in federal spending. That reduction would have added to the downward momentum of the economy. Every decline in private sector activity would have led to a further mandated drop in public sector spending. The economy would have been trapped in a vicious circle.
• Watching the unfolding collapse of the economy, the President and the Congress would have eventually decided that it was time to reverse course by repealing the legislation limiting federal spending and preventing bailouts. But, because of the balanced budget amendment, repeal of these laws would have made no difference.
• Finally, there would have been a massive hue-and-cry for repealing the balanced budget amendment. The ratification process being what it is, that would have taken considerable time. In the meanwhile, millions more than are suffering now would be wondering why they had been abandoned by their government.

Nobody knows when the next financial and economic crisis will happen, or why it will occur. Absent such knowledge and knowing that the current crisis was not caused by excessive government spending, it is nothing short of insanity to put the government into a pro-cyclical straitjacket that would prevent it from responding to events that threaten the well-being of the American people.

If there’s a publication further to the right than the National Review, I don’t know about it. Here’s what an NR editorial has to say about candidate Cain’s tax plan:

Cain envisions his presidency as featuring a quick move to the 9-9-9 plan followed by an educational campaign about the virtues of the national sales tax. He will have to move fast, since he is counting on the massive economic boom he expects his plan to create to enable him to balance the budget in his first year. None of this sounds very achievable, but let’s indulge the candidate. Even if one believes, as we do, that the mortgage-interest deduction should be set on a path to extinction, does its immediate abolition in the midst of a weak housing market seem wise?

And while the plan promotes new savings, it attacks existing wealth. In particular, it is a plan likely to arouse the ire of retirees. They have paid income taxes their whole lives and would now have to pay additional sales taxes on their savings when they try to spend them. On balance, of course, retirees would continue to receive a large net transfer of funds from the federal government. But why fight them in a bad cause?