So just the other day we were talking about where the big Democrat plan was they promised us to lower gas prices. Evidently, some Republicans in Congress are wondering the same thing.

Larry Kudlow has a great post at the Corner explaining why much of the economic hardship we are currently facing is self-inflicted.

Whether it’s energy, wheat, grain, corn, or whatever, since these raw materials are priced in dollars on global markets, a strong greenback will reduce commodity prices. And that, in turn, will lower both consumer and producer inflation. This would help corporate profits and would boost the purchasing power of wages.

In other words, a strong dollar would relieve gas prices and boost the economy. But so far as I know, the president never mentioned the dollar. And I don’t think any of the media people asked him about it.

Right now Mr. Bush should order his Treasury Secretary to appreciate the greenback and work with the G7 for concerted action that would send a strong signal to commodity and currency traders that they better close their short positions on the dollar and stop speculating on higher and higher commodity prices. Mr. Bush himself should adopt new rhetoric on a strong dollar. He should make it unambiguous.

Both Hank Paulson and Bush have beaten the drum loud and long on a “strong dollar” policy. Unfortunately that is all they have done and the US peso is now worth only $1.06 Australian, .5 Pound Sterling, $1.01 Canadian (!), .64 Euro, 103.4 Yen, and 1.03 Swiss Francs! This is beyond nuts it is only a course steered by someone with nothing left to lose. The reason we have crashed the value of the dollar is because that is the only way of keeping our ballooning national debt from taking away higher percentages of our GDP.

Now we are left with a weak US peso, inflation expectations of 6.8%, exploding food and fuel prices, an expanding national debt and greater federal spending than ever before. This is not how I expected the Bush years to end.

House Republican leaders on Tuesday challenged Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to release a plan to lower gas prices that they say Democrats touted when they were in the minority.“Two years ago this week, you stated that House Democrats had a ‘commonsense plan’ to ‘lower gas prices,’ ” the letter said. “In light of the skyrocketing gasoline prices affecting working families and every sector of our struggling economy, we are writing today to respectfully request that you reveal this ‘commonsense plan’ so we can begin work on responsible solutions to help ease this strain.”

The letter is signed by Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), Conference Chairman Adam Putnam (R-Fla.), Policy Chairman Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.) as well as other members of leadership: Reps. Kay Granger (R-Texas), John Carter (R-Texas), Tom Cole (R-Okla.) and Eric Cantor (R-Va.).

The Hill

It’s nice to see some resemblance of a spine back in the Republican leadership.

So let’s have it, Dems! Where is your big plan to lower gas prices for all Americans? One of the big issues you put forth in 2006 was how you were going to resolve the problem of high gas prices that are hurting working families. In September of 2006 the average price of gasoline was $2.62. Now, the average is about $3.50. That’s almost a dollar increase since the Democrats have taken control of Congress.

I guess we can mark this down as one more broken promise on a long list from the Democrats.

Republicans are feeling the heat from Democrats on the Hill and their constituents back home. Caving in to the pressure Senator Isackson (R - GA) is proposing a one time tax credit for new home buyers and homes in foreclosure.

Senator Isakson has introduced legislation (S. 2566) that would provide buyers of either a newly constructed house or one that is in foreclosure or default with a one-time, $15,000 refundable tax credit. The bill would apply to purchases made between February 28, 2008, and March 1, 2009. To qualify, newly constructed houses would have to have been built on or before September 30, 2007. Owner-occupied structures in default or foreclosure must have been in default prior to March 1, 2008, even though the actual sale would take place after that date, although there is no such restriction on foreclosed structures owned by a mortgage company or its agent.

Why is this a bad idea?

The proposal suffers from the following weaknesses:

* As a general principle, an explicit federal subsidy for the purchase of certain homes is both bad tax policy and bad housing policy.

* This subsidy rewards those who have been the most irresponsible. It would benefit homeowners at any income level who either irresponsibly borrowed all of their home equity or took out a loan that they could not repay but hoped to profit from by reselling the property in a rising market. However, those who have made the effort to pay their mortgages on time would not be assisted at all, regardless of their financial circumstances.

* Homebuilders who ignored signs that the market was slowing and built houses in hopes of finding a buyer would get assistance in selling houses that should not have been built in the first place.

* Responsible homeowners who must move for a new job or for family reasons would suffer because the sale of their homes would not qualify for a tax credit, while those of their less responsible neighbors would qualify for one. The potential plight of responsible homeowners could be cited as a reason to expand this credit to all home sales, thus increasing the cost to all taxpayers.

* Since the credit is refunded only after the end of the next taxable year, the money would not be available at the time of purchase. In practice, this limits its effect to those buyers who have the money to make a purchase up front; i.e., upper-income homebuyers.

* By applying the credit only to homeowners in default before March 1, 2008, the bill leaves out those homeowners whose mortgage interest rate will reset after that date. This provision may be intended to reduce incentives for default, but it is so poorly written that it essentially rewards those who were irresponsible early while excluding those who were victims of circumstance after that date.

The natural urge is do something, doesn’t matter what that something is just do something so the people back home think you are doing something. That was a lot of somethings. My point is that Republicans need to stand on their conservative principles and not pass a bill just to pass a bill. If they are going to give a tax credit they need to give it across the board and not restrict it as Senator Isakson has done.

Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ) both appeared on This Week with George Stephanopoulos to discuss the state of the economy. Schumer, always the media whore, couldn’t resist invoking the Republican bogeyman, Herbert Hoover, and comparing him to Bush. Thankfully, Kyl was also on the show and didn’t let Chuck off the hook so easily.

Transcript provided by News Busters:

CHARLES SCHUMER: It shouldn’t have come to this. Had the administration acted more procatively earlier, particularly about the housing crisis, when many of us were asking them to, we wouldn’t have gotten up to this point. And unfortunately this administration has sort of a Herbert Hoover mentality: don’t do anything. And we’ve learned over 100 years of economic history that smart, measured government involvement, to try and deal with problems in the economy, particularly to prevent innocent people from getting hurt makes a great deal of sense, and yet every time we propose something, particularly on the housing market, which is the bullseye of this crisis, the administration says no.

And again:

SCHUMER: The things we’ve proposed, George, are much more modest, but the administration, with its sort of, again, Hoover-like, hands-off, no-government-involvement attitude, has said no.

Enter Kyl for the kill:

JON KYL: Well, first, I wondered how long it would take my friend, Chuck Schumer, to blame the Bush administration here. Of course, it wasn’t the Bush administration, as much as it was Democrats in congress, who were pushing the lending institutions to get out there and lend more money, even to unqualified buyers. To minorities, to the poor, to the young, so that everyone could own a home. The Bush administration was somewhat to blame for that, as well. But Democrats in congress were making that push. And as a result, a lot of people took loans who couldn’t qualify. In fact, they didn’t have to qualify. No money down. There was no credit reporting. And a lot of them, frankly, couldn’t afford it. So, let’s don’t blame the Bush administration for this.

 

And as to Hoover, it’s Senator Schumer and his Democratic colleagues who want to raise taxes, like Hoover did when he refused to allow the Coolidge tax breaks to stay in effect and put in the Smoot-Hawley [a tariff-raising law widely blamed as a cause of the Great Depression]. And they of course, are opposing the free trade agreements that the president’s trying to bring up. Let’s understand that the Bush administration is trying to be pro-active on the tax and trade fronts.

What Kyl said about the lending is 100% correct and it irritates me to no end how that has been ignored by the media. I even wrote about this several months ago. The Federal Government was the one that created this sub-prime meltdown going on. Just as Kyl said, it was pressure from Democrats in Congress and leftist groups like ACORN that pushed the lenders into granting mortgages for people who had obliterated their credit and wouldn’t, nor shouldn’t, have qualified had the standards not been relaxed. Then when the crap hits the fan who was the first to scream about it? Wouldn’t you know it was the same politicians who advocated for it to begin with and these jerks have the nerve to stand up and blame the mortgage companies and accuse them of predatory lending just to protect their own behinds at election time.

“Memo to Fed: Stop Those Rate Cuts”

This is exactly how I feel on the matter, and these two gentlemen who are much more learned than I am can explain it in fuller terms than I. The Fed needs to quit inflating our currency and just let our markets tough it out, because if they continue to make rate cuts they will only push inflation even higher and result in stagflation.

First there was the alcohol sales on Sunday debate, in which a bill to allow local communities to vote on the matter was gaining traction in the GA General Assembly only to be put to death by Gov. Perdue’s (a supposed Republican) announcement that he’d veto the bill if it reached him.

Now, the Guv decided to show us again his love of big government by opposing tax cuts for Georgians:

“I think the people of Georgia get the joke,” said Gov. Sonny Perdue, ridiculing a proposed constitutional amendment that passed the Georgia House of Representatives 166-5 last week to virtually eliminate the property tax on personal cars, trucks and motorcycles.

The joke? What joke? An aside, my source on this is Jim Wooten, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s token conservative writer, and he’s right on the money (pun intended, ha):

While there’s a legitimate debate to be had about how much of our money government “needs,” it’s clear that, like the Democrats before them, Republicans will find a worthy need for every dollar available. They don’t have the courage to accept for themselves the cap on spending that many legislators would impose as spending discipline on local governments. The only real option then is to fund essential needs — and then return the excess collections.

The line of money-seekers is endless when there’s money on the table. To force priorities, limit collections. The House of Representatives, with only five dissenting votes, did that this week. No joke.

Right on, Mr. Wooten.

This isn’t on YouTube as far as I can see, and I can’t embed code for the site this video comes from, but you should go here and watch the entire excellent speech Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) gave today on the Senate floor.

I linked to my class blog where I posted this originally, but it can’t be accessed without the username and password. So with the professor’s permission, I’m cross-posting it here.

As covered in an earlier post [note: this is referencing a post by another student], South Korea’s President-elect, Lee Myung-bak, is poised to take several measures in his move to push for expansion and growth in South Korea’s economy. He is going about this by encouraging domestic companies to invest more stateside, pushing for tax cuts and streamlining the government, and privatizing banks and other businesses while also seeking a public works project in the form of a canal system throughout his country.

Luckily for President-elect Myung-bak, the economic conditions in South Korea are ripe for expansion. The Bank of Korea reports that the South Korean economy expanded in the 4th quarter of last year, notably in exports and manufacturing. Economists point to this to suggest that South Korea could maintain its economy and be more than able to fare a global slowdown should the United States enter a recession, which is looking more likely by the day.

Along with this optimistic news on economic growth, South Korean stocks have gained in recent sessions which points to strength in the investment sector of the economy. This success in South Korea is also being shared by its neighbors in Asia, meaning in my opinion that geographically close trading partners are also in a good position, thus will be able to take South Korea’s exports even in a global slowdown.

These positive indicators of the South Korean economy, along with the economic plans of the incoming President, bode well for the economic future of South Korea. I feel that these strengths, along with the perennial strength of Korean microprocessors and other specialized goods, make the country well-prepared to thrive and experience economic growth even in the face of a worldwide crunch. I believe that with Mr. Myung-buk’s pro-growth proposals such as tax cuts and privatization combined with the current strength of the economy, at the very least the country will be able to weather an economic storm with better resilience than other countries with less economic success.

The accord came as the White House said Thursday an agreement was imminent.

Pelosi, D-Calif., agreed to drop increases in food stamp and unemployment benefits during a Wednesday meeting in exchange for gaining rebates of at least $300 for almost everyone earning a paycheck, including low-income earners who make too little to pay income taxes.

Families with children would receive an additional $300 per child, subject to an overall cap of perhaps $1,200, according to a senior House aide who outlined the deal on condition of anonymity in advance of formal adoption of the whole package. Rebates would go to people earning below a certain income cap, likely individuals earning $75,000 or less and couples with incomes of $150,000 or less.

Breitbart

I am certainly not going to complain about getting $300 of my hard earned money back from the Capitol Hill thieves, but let’s not kid ourselves here.  This move is nothing more than political cover.  Neither party wants to go into November squabbling back and forth over who is responsible for the slower economic gains and the sub-prime mortgage crisis we are experiencing.  These rebates are simply a feel good measure to try and quell the growing public concern towards the situation at hand.  It will resolve nothing in the long term.

First of all, by definition we are not in a recession, not yet anyway.  Could we be headed towards one?  Perhaps, but the economic minds have been making prediction after prediction of a recession over the past few years and it has yet to occur.  The sub-prime mortgage crisis alone is not an indicator of rough economic times ahead.  Lenders, through pressure of the Federal government and radical left wing groups like ACORN, lowered their standards and handed out mortgages to people who were simply not financially responsible, be it through bad credit histories or over extending themselves in the type of property they purchased.  When the interest rates went back up and the fixed term of these ARM loans expired why was anyone surprised that many of these people could not continue making the payments?  Amusingly the politicians expressed their hypocritical outrage at the lenders for “scamming” people into these loans despite the fact that it was they who were responsible for it to begin with.

Bailing out these lenders with corporate welfare and those who have defaulted on these loans will do nothing more than establish the government as a security blanket for corporate America and the public to turn to when they screw up.  It will not correct the behavior, but only encourage it further by abdicating responsibility on one’s self.  Both the lenders and the homeowners need to sink on their decisions and allow the market to correct itself and recover naturally.  Throwing a few hundred dollars out there at middle class and lower income wage earners is not going to resolve any looming economic crises and will only create a budget deficit of well over $100 billion, when we already experienced a similar deficit for 2007.  Furthermore, the problem with Pelosi’s insistence that the lowest wage earners get tax “rebates” on income taxes they never paid to begin with is another government forced shift of wealth from contributers to our economy to receivers.  These lowest wage earners don’t contribute to our economy, they suckle from it.

Don’t be fooled by these gestures of “good will” by the White House and Congress.  They are irresponsibly avoiding the problem and engaging in a smoke and mirrors magic show to cover their asses in an election year.

The Huckabee campaign accidentally revealed their aversion to Conservative principles:

His aides are wary of New Hampshire. “It’s all no tax, no government there,” said Bob Wickers, a top strategist. “It’s not ideal.”

Hat tip to Instapundit.

UPDATE: David Sanders has a good article in the Wall Street Journal today about Huckabee’s love of big government.

The Census Bureau has released its population estimates change for the year between July 1, 2006 and July 1, 2007. The 10 fastest growing states are those that have typically voted for Republican presidential candidates in the last 20 to 30 years and tend to have more fiscally conservative state governments. Most of the liberal northeast take up the anchor positions. Michigan and Rhode Island were the only two states to actually lose population, and for the second year in a row.

The top ten states for highest growth rate are:

1. Nevada
2. Arizona
3. Utah
4. Idaho
5. Georgia
6. North Carolina
7. Texas
8. Colorado
9. Wyoming
10. South Carolina

The full list with all figures can be found here.

I think this goes to show you that states that harbor economic freedom and lower taxes will thrive and those that stifle such freedom with over regulation, high taxes, and higher labor costs will remain stagnant or decline.

Paul over at Power Line lays out the problems with expanding SCHIP to include children of higher-income families than proposed by President Bush and the Republicans. This is a precise, easily-understandable article that depends not on rhetoric, but on crunching some numbers. I’d suggest everyone read it to get some data-oriented perspective on the dangers of expanding SCHIP and how it really is not feasible for the government or the families it claims to help.

Paul’s last word:

Why are the Democrats pushing so hard for a middle class entitlement program that will promote inefficiency and waste, wreck the private market, and become fiscally unsustainable by 2013 if not before? It looks like an effort to lure middle-class families into government-run health care.

Sort of like HillaryCare.

UPDATE: Grover Norquist has more on SCHIP expansion on NRO.

Rudy Giuliani kicked off a weekend of pitches from presidential hopefuls at the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference Friday night, telling 1,200 party activists that the solution to Michigan’s economic woes is lower taxes and less government.

“Michigan is going through a situation that to me looks like déjà vu all over again,” the former New York mayor told Republicans gathered in the ornate dining room of the island’s Grand Hotel. Giuliani said he faced the same problems Michigan now faces — job losses, an exodus of population — when he took over as mayor in 1994.

“There is a game plan for what you do when you have a budget deficit, people leaving, high unemployment: lower taxes, smaller government, less regulation,” Giuliani said….

Join Rudy 2008

Rudy is no slouch on the economy, and failed governor, Jennifer Granholm, along with a Republican State Legislature has sure done a number on Michigan’s economy. Michigan has the highest unemployment rate at 7.2% and was one of only four states to lose population in 2005. Rudy has a proven track record of cleaning up economic black holes as his history in New York City clearly demonstrates. The Michigan politicians would sure be wise to take lessons from him.

Since quite a few of us on this blog are from or are blessed to live in Georgia I thought I would post this up. There is a new porkbusters blog specifically tailored to the state of Georgia and the hogs that inhabit Atlanta, www.gaporkbusters.org. It should be fun to watch the fat cats squirm in the coming months as their sweetheart deals and corruption is exposed.

Welcome to the Georgia Porkbusters!

The Porkbusters were started by Glenn Reynolds (aka the InstaPundit) and NZ Bear from Truth Laid Bear. You can read some of the history here.

The Georgia Porkbusters were created in 2007 in response to the Georgia House stuffing the 2007 Supplemental Budget with over $214 million in pork barrel spending. Our mission is to highlight how your money is wasted under the Gold Dome and who is responsible for the wasting.

The Porkbuster’s logo is copyright someone else. When I find out who they are I’ll credit them here.

The Club for Growth has organized a petition of 1028 economists that are united in their belief that new barriers to trade must not be enacted by this congress. They warn that new proposed tariffs imposed on our second largest trading partner China would have a ruinous effect on the economy not only of this country but of the entire world.

Why 1028 economists? Well that is the exact same number that signed a petition way back in 1930 to encourage President Hoover and congress not to enact the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. We all know how well that last petition worked out, let’s hope this country’s leaders have learned something in the last 77 years.

As an aside that is mostly relevant to Alex, Langley and myself two professors from Georgia Tech signed the petition: Li Haizheng and Christine Ries neither of whom I have heard of before, but will keep my eye out for from now on. As for the other alama maters of Save the GOP:

Drexel University: Bang Jeon and Joseph R. Mason
George Washington University: John Berthoud, Donald O. Parsons, Joseph Pelzman, Michael Wiseman, and Yang Jiawen

Some of the more prominent names to sign the petition include: Dick Armey, Daniel Drezner, Bryan Caplan & Arnold Kling, Mark Perry, Grover Norquist, Donald Luskin, John L. Barry, Eric Rasmusen, Don Boudreaux, Bill Conerly, Roy Cordato, Michael Cosgrove, Stephen Entin, David Gitlitz, John Goodman, Monty Graham, Wendy and Sen. Phil Gramm and their son Marshall Gramm, Robert Hall, Glenn Hubbard, Andrei Illarionov, Tim Kane, Raymond Keating, Larry Kudlow, Arthur Laffer, John Landon, Thomas Lenard, Philip Levy, Greg Mankiw, Lawrence McQuillan, Marc Miles, James Miller III, Adrian Moore, Ramon Myers, Richard Rahn, David Ranson, Michael Rizzo, Harvey Rosen, Paul Rubin, John Rutledge, Gary Shilling, George Shultz, Vlad Signorelli, John Silvia, David Tuerck, Richard Vedder, Alan Viard, Elizabeth Webbink, David Weiskopf, Brian Wesbury (PDF), Walter Williams, Richard Zecher, Benjamin Zycher, not to mention Nobel Laureates Finn Kydland, Edward Prescott, Thomas Schelling and Vernon Smith.

You may recognize some but not all of these names, but they are a mix of accomplished academics, think tank analysts, research consultants, investors, bloggers, free market advocates, businessmen, and former government officials who understand that when you artificially raise the price of the flow of goods between two countries you stifle economic growth in both lands.

Some interesting trivia emerged has I scanned over the list of economists who lent their names to the petition. Firstly, like I said before this was an eclectic mix of people, not merely economists at elite universities who are applying theory to a real world issue. This gives the petition more weight than if only professors had signed it, though their contribution was equally necessary.

Secondly, I was slightly surprised at the large number of economists with a Chinese or other East Asian background who had signed onto the free market statement. I wasn’t surprised that they existed, because Chinese and East Asian nationals, immigrants and Americans of such ancestry represent a large proportion of the modern academy both here and abroad. Nor was I surprised that they were willing to sign a petition supporting free trade, but the numbers were higher than I had expected.

The Chinese community in America generally leans left, though this is a difficult statement to support at times because Chinese-Americans have very diverse histories and therefore have divergent interests. In a casual count, out of the 1028 economists listed, 75 had a Chinese surname or first name (usually just married women in this case) which I counted as having some cultural affinity at some level to China and the Chinese world abroad. This does not of course include women who had a western first name before they were married so there might be a bit of an undercount but I feel it is better to lean to the side of caution in this case. This only represents 7% of the petitioners but for an academically slanted group to begin with that is surprising amount of free market support on this issue.

When all East Asians are considered, with some Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese and Thai names thrown in, the numbers are even higher, though the Chinese names represent the greatest among them. Out of the 1028 economists, a rough total of 101 were of East Asian origin or 9.8%. I don’t know if these numbers are in or out of the norm, but they are food for thought.

So why am I even talking about this? Because this issue has brought non-traditional conservatives to the “right” side of a free market issue. Now I don’t think a single one of these economists with an East Asian background signed the petition because China (and other parts of East Asia) loomed large as places that would be devastated by stiff tariffs. I think they signed it because they believed in what was written down and nothing more. But I do think that this petition is a microcosm of what is happening in the country as whole in terms of attitude adjustments that are made based on self-interest but end up helping the general good as Adam Smith explained in 1776. When a group of economists who are Chinese/Korean/Vietnamese nationals look at this issue, even if they do lean slightly left, they are strongly compelled to respect reality and not support a policy that shoots their other interests (in this case economic growth back home) in the foot. This is more an issue with the general population than a tiny slice of an even tinier slice of economists, but it is nice to see nonetheless.

It is hard to read a lot of inside the beltway chatter without coming across the “new” conventional wisdom. The Republican Party’s domination of religious Americans is waning, evangelicals are now growing concerned with “social justice” and “environmental” issues as much as the life issue. The nascent premise being promulgated by many left of center Catholic, Protestant, and secular thinkers is that the social issues are in some way illegitimate “divider” issues but that issues of social justice and helping the poor are a moral imperative for Christians.

They are right on both counts, but in ways they probably don’t expect. Of course hot button issues like abortion divide people, but just because they divide people doesn’t mean they aren’t a moral imperative. Opposition to abortion has been a tenant of Christianity literally since the beginning. The Didache, basically the earliest Christian writing we have specifically condemns abortion. In fact, all of Christendom until the 1920s condemned all forms of birth control too (not that I am advocating for that as a government policy). So this premise that the Republicans invented this issues to win elections is farcical. There can be no doubt that it has been viewed as a moral wrong by Christians of every stripe since Christ walked the earth.

There second point is that Christians should care about poverty. They are 101% right and it is certainly true that conservatives don’t talk enough about helping the poor. The liberals then make the logical leap that caring for the poor equals big government programs, and thats where I and many other Christians jump off the bandwagon. We don’t oppose these programs out of some want to keep wealth to ourselves and keep the poor down. In fact, we as a group give much more in private charity than similarly wealthy liberal atheists. We just believe that big government programs do tremendous harm to society and have systematically made the poor worse off and destoryed the traditional institutions that used to aid them.

Sojurners and other of the progressive evangelical movement want us to move beyond abortion to social justice. I say that we should not move beyond abortion, as it is still the key human rights issue of our generation, but should talk about how our programs help the poor. As Fred Thompson recently pointed out, increased prosperity due to decreased government involvement in the economy has resulted in healthier, happier children. Prosperity is not a cure all for sure, but certainly time and time again it has proven a benefit.

Then there are stories like one back in Pittsburgh of an evangelical megachurch that has almost singlehandedly revived and entire neighborhood. Not through taxpayer dollars, but through building a true community and using that community to help their neighbors. No bureaucracy, no red tape, and yet an effect bigger than any of the proposals the “social justice” people are putting out their today.

If we want to help the poor it starts at home. Donating to charities, volunteering time, and building institutions that will help them without Big Brothers wasteful arm involved. From a government level if we want to help poverty lets start with lwoering taxes so people have more money to donate and then lets remove the red tape that 501(c)3 non-profits have to jump through. How much money do non-profits spend every year just to comply with Uncle Sam that could actually be spent feeding the hungry, or building camps for disadvantaged kids, or any number of other worthy causes that instead go to legal fees just to keep Uncle Sam from shutting the operation down.

Then lets deal with the big poverty issue of today: marriage. I am not talking about gay marriage, lets forget about that for now, but talk about regular marriage and how the public policy solutions of the 60s combined with cultural changes have destroyed the #1 anti-poverty organization there is: the nuclear family.

Now unlike the other side, I don’t think that the good brothers and sisters in Christ over at Sojurners are evil or have some grand scheme to hurt the poor. I think they genuinely want to show Christ’s love for the poor, but unfortunately have chosen methods that actually hurt the people they are trying to help. But I would love to discuss the issue rationally, instead of the current situation where opposition to big government programs gets one lableled heartless and anti-poor. We should be able to dialogue not demagogue on this issue.

From Jim Wooten in my hometown newspaper:

The Senate bill, grandiosely and falsely dubbed the Renewable Fuels, Consumer Protection and Energy Efficiency Act of 2007, should come with a section prohibiting price gouging — by Congress. The legislation “could result in significantly higher prices for gasoline consumers,” according to Heritage Foundation researchers. “A review of S. 1419, including the just-completed section on tax changes, reveals that the bill could increase the price of regular unleaded gasoline from $3.14 per gallon (the early May national average) to $6.40 in 2016 — a 104 percent increase,” write Heritage Foundation researchers William W. Beach and Shanea Watkins.

“Gas consumers can expect to pay between $3.16 and $3.79 a gallon for gas in 2008 after adding in the estimated impact of the Senate energy bill. By 2016, all states can expect gas prices in excess of $6. As a result of S. 1419, consumers would spend an average of $1445 more per year on gasoline in 2016 than in 2008,” they write.

With the the concurrence of the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, Charles Grassley of Iowa, and others (Gordon Smith of Oregon, Olympia Snowe of Maine and Pat Roberts of Kansas, all Republican), the committee is proposing $29 billion in new taxes on oil companies. The tax is to subsidize wind and solar power, hybrid vehicles and biofuel. The bill calls for a sharp increase in the use “renewables,” including heavily-subsidized ethanol, up from 8.5 billion gallons next year to 36 billion gallons by 2022. And it requires, too, that utilities would be required to buy at least 15 percent of their energy from wind, solar and other “renewable” sources.

Ethanol requires more energy to produce than it generates as fuel, to say nothing of the water required for irrigation in areas like drought-stricken South Georgia. It’s subsidized by taxpayers with a 51-cents per gallon tax credit, and it’s subsidized again at the pump with a 54-cents-a-gallon tariff on imported ethanol. Go figure.

RedState scooped this one (ok, it’s the first site I saw this on). Today Jeb Hensarling, the leader of the conservative Republican Study Committee in the House, held a conference call with several bloggers to announce a new effort by the RSC to redefine the fiscal troubles this country faces and what conservatives want to do to solve them. The American TABOR, I guess you could call it, boils down to 4 conservative beliefs:

1. Taxpayers have a right to have a federal government that does not grow beyond their ability to pay for it.
2. Taxpayers have a right to receive back each dollar that they entrust to the government for their retirement.
3. Taxpayers have a right to expect the government to balance the budget without having their taxes raised.
4. Taxpayers have a right to a simple, fair tax code that they can understand.

You can read more of the RSC’s plan in the brief pdf file here. And as RedState notes, the RSC chose to release this to bloggers first, then deal with the mainstream media second… pretty cool in my book. Some people realize who their constituents are and are actually working hard to uphold their best interests. It’s nice to be reminded of that every now and then.

Reason magazine has a great post about something I had totally missed in this Walter Reed hullabaloo. The same people going ape over the admittedly appalling conditions at Walter Reed are the same folks pushing for universal, socialized health care. Wait for it….

Oh yeah we already have a socialized health care system, its called the VA…

So next time some lefty wants to lecture you about socialized health care ask him if he wants to start going to the VA hospital next time he gets sick.