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WASHINGTON WATCH
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Obama's Payroll Tax Extension a Disaster for Business, a Debacle for GOP
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The GOP’s Payroll-tax Debacle
The Republicans have fallen into President Obama’s trap.
December 23, 2011 12:00 A.M.
by Charles Krouthammer for the National Review
Now that Congress appears finally to have reached a compromise on what must be one of the worst pieces of legislation in years — the temporary payroll-tax-holiday extension — let’s survey the damage.
To begin with, what even minimally rational government enacts payroll-tax relief for just two months? As a matter of practicality alone, it makes no sense. The National Payroll Reporting Consortium, representing those who process paychecks, said of the two-month extension passed by the Senate just days before the new year: “There is insufficient lead time to accommodate the proposal,” because “many payroll systems are not likely to be able to make such a substantial programming change before January or even February,” thereby “creat[ing] substantial problems, confusion and costs.”
The final compromise appears to tweak this a bit to make it less onerous for small business. But what were they thinking in the first place? What business operates two months at a time? The minimal time horizon for business is the quarter — three months. What genius came up with two? U.S. businesses would have to budget for two-thirds of a one-quarter tax-holiday extension. As if this government has not already heaped enough regulatory impediments and mindless uncertainties upon business.
But making economic sense is not the point. The tax-holiday extension — presumably to be negotiated next year into a 12-month extension — is the perfect campaign ploy: an election-year bribe that has the additional virtue of seizing the tax issue for the Democrats.
When George McGovern campaigned on giving every household $1,000, he was laughed out of town as a shameless panderer. President Obama is doing exactly the same — a one-year tax holiday that hands back about $1,000 per middle-class family — but with a little more subtlety. Obama is also selling it as a job creator. This takes audacity. Even a one-year extension isn’t a tax cut; it’s a tax holiday. A two-month extension is nothing more than a long tax weekend. What employer is going to alter his hiring decisions — whose effects last years — in anticipation of a one-year tax holiday, let alone one that lasts two months?
This is a $121 billion annual drain on the Treasury that makes a mockery of the Democrats’ reverence for the Social Security trust fund and its inviolability. Obama’s OMB director took Social Security completely off the table in debt-reduction talks under the pretense that Social Security is self-financing. This is pure fiction, because the Treasury supplies whatever shortfalls Social Security faces. But now, with the payroll-tax holiday, the administration openly demonstrates bad faith — conceding with its actions that the payroll tax is, after all, interchangeable with other revenues and never actually sequestered to ensure future payments to retirees.
The House Republicans’ initial rejection of this two-month extension was therefore correct on principle and on policy. But this was absolutely the wrong place, the wrong time, to plant the flag. Once Senate Republicans overwhelmingly backed the temporary extension, that part of the fight was lost. Opposing it became kamikaze politics.
Note the toll it is already taking on Republicans. For three decades Republicans owned the tax issue. Today, Obama leads by five points, a twelve-point swing since just early October. The payroll-tax ploy has even affected his overall approval rating, now up five points in six weeks to 49 percent.
The Democrats set a trap and the Republicans walked right into it. By rejecting an ostensibly bipartisan “compromise,” the Republican House was portrayed as obstructionist and, even worse, heartless — willing to raise taxes on the middle class while resolutely opposing any tax increases on the rich.
House Republicans compounded this debacle by begging the Senate to come back and renegotiate the issue, thus entirely conceding the initiative to majority leader Harry Reid. But Reid had little incentive to make any concessions. House Republicans would have taken the fall for 160 million shrunken paychecks. Every day the White House would have demanded, in the name of the suffering middle class, that Republicans return from vacation and pass the temporary extension.
Having finally realized they had trapped themselves, House Republicans quickly caved, thanks to a fig leaf contrived by Sen. Mitch McConnell.
The GOP’s performance nicely reprises that scene in Animal House where the marching band turns into a blind alley and row after row of plumed morons plows into a brick wall, crumbling to the ground in an unceremonious heap.
With one difference: House Republicans are unplumed.
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Obama Mideast Foreign Policy Is In Shambles
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From Investor's Business Daily:
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/589188/201110241855/Mideast-Policy-In-A-Shambles.htm?src=HPLNews
Posted 10/24/2011
Diplomacy: As the U.S. careens from debacle to debacle, our policy in the Middle East is now in disarray. American influence is waning, as radical Islamists take over in nation after nation. The damage may be irreversible.
Arab Spring has given way to Arab Fall, and things aren't going well. Not only is Israel, our best friend and only true ally in the region, under siege by its Arab neighbors, but we seem to be walking away from the problem.
Meanwhile, in country after country, those who hate the West in general and the U.S. in particular are making great strides. Increasingly, Iran seems to be the victor. It has long sought to replace the U.S. as the area's dominant influence. Now its hand has been strengthened by the feckless and self-defeating diplomacy carried out by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and, of course, President Obama.
Crudely, Clinton strode into Libya crowing, "We came, we saw, he died." And yes, Gadhafi was murdered, in part with our help. But what really died was U.S. power in the region — to be replaced by an ad hoc, improvised foreign policy based not on broad U.S. national interest, but on narrow domestic political gain.
Across the Mideast, U.S. interests are taking a beating:
Iraq: Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has asked the U.S. to pack up and leave, and Obama, hoping to shore up support with the anti-war left, agreed. Now, after more than 4,000 killed, and hundreds of billions of dollars spent, Iraq will be left with no significant continuing U.S. presence.
"The tide of war is receding," Obama says. Really? A new poll shows 73% of Iraqis fear a U.S. withdrawal will let Iran destabilize Iraq. It looks almost as if the U.S. is handing Iraq over to Iran — despite Clinton's empty vow to "stand with our allies and friends, including Iraq."
Libya: Even proponents of the Arab Spring were dismayed by the rebels setting on Moammar Gadhafi like a pack of feral dogs. It doesn't bode well for democracy or the rule of law. Libya's first post-Gadhafi leader, Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, wants Sharia to be the "basic source" for Libya's law, killing off any hopes for civil society in the country and dimming hopes for a moderate democracy to replace Gadhafi's tyranny.
Egypt: The White House earlier this year walked away from America's long-time support for Hosni Mubarak's regime, as Egypt became poster-boy for the Arab Spring. What did it bring us? A new, hard-line against Israel, and the strong possibility that the radical Muslim Brotherhood will take a leading role in the new regime — a major setback for Egypt and, despite $2 billion a year in aid, for U.S. influence.
Afghanistan: It was Obama who called this the war we needed to fight. Increasingly, though, as in Iraq, he seems inclined to cut and run. Despite the effective use of drones to kill suspected Taliban and other terrorist leaders, he is looking for a way out, signaling interest in talking to the Taliban.
Worse, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, whose democratic regime has been propped up by more than $55 billion in aid and 2,774 American deaths, said he would "stand by Pakistan" if it went to war with the U.S. Another diplomatic triumph.
Pakistan: Despite its ally status, it continues to shelter Taliban and al-Qaida remnants in its northwestern frontier. Formal defense ties with the U.S. belie the harsh reality: Pakistan's powerful ISI intelligence agency is almost openly pro-Islamist, with extensive ties to Islamic terror groups in the region.
Worse, there are growing signs Pakistan, the only country in the region other than India with nuclear weapons, is aiding other nations in the region to acquire "Islamic" nukes, possibly for use against Israel.
Turkey: The election of Tayyip Erdogan has heralded a major change. Once a staunch U.S. ally and still a member of NATO, the once-secular government has turned Islamist, with predictable results: It has embraced Iran and rejected its once-warm ties with Israel. Turkey's government let itself be used as a staging ground for a provocative, gun-running flotilla to break Israel's blockade on Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Because of inept U.S. diplomacy, Turkey can no longer be counted in the Western camp.
Tunisia: The place where the Arab Spring started, this is another country whose election this month, coming shortly after Gadhafi's death, was supposed to be a peaceful benchmark for democratic hopes. But as of Monday, that didn't appear to be the case.
The Islamist Ennahda party was leading in the polls. Its leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, wants to do to Tunisia what Erdogan has done to Turkey — Islamicize its legal system and government. So much for democracy and civil society.
Syria: The nation's Baathist leader, Bashar al-Assad, has launched a massive repression of protests — murdering hundreds for exercising their most basic rights. Amnesty International reports the regime has resorted even to torturing dissenters in the hospital.
Iran: We've saved the worst for last. U.S. policy toward Iran is almost entirely a botch. During the 2009 "Tehran Spring," the U.S. remained weirdly silent — though this was the one revolt that might have actually born democratic fruit. Today, Iran edges closer by the week to having a nuclear weapon, as it continues to deny its people basic rights and executes those who oppose it.
It openly aids terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas, while giving arms and cash to Islamic extremists who kill U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iran has all but declared war against the U.S., but Obama and congressional Democrats simply refuse to recognize the depth of Iran's enmity.
This is a long list of our recent failures, but by no means a comprehensive one. Increasingly, Obama has taken an arms-length approach to the region, preferring to use drones and proxies to get rid of those we dislike — Egypt's Mubarak, Libya's Gadhafi and, perhaps soon, Syria's Assad.
Unfortunately, the administration's weakness will leave a void for radical Islamists to fill.
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1,000 Days Under President Obama
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From The Heritage Foundation Morning Bell:
Today marks the 1,000th day of Barack Obama's presidency, and unfortunately for America, those days have been marked by deeper deficits, lost jobs, prolonged unemployment, and bigger government. Meanwhile, many of those charged with leading the federal government have all but abdicated their responsibilities.
The national debt stands at $14.9 trillion--$4.2 trillion of which has been added since Obama took his oath of office. Fourteen million Americans are unemployed--that's 9.1 percent of the workforce. The unemployment rate has been above nine percent for 840 of the 1000 days, and the average unemployed worker has been without a job for more than 9 months. All told, 2.2 million jobs have been lost under Obama's watch, despite the White House's claims that the President's $787 billion stimulus would create 3.3 million net jobs by 2010.
Unfortunately, instead of leading America toward fiscal sanity and a stronger economy, the President is taking the country in the opposite direction. Last week, his latest proposal to "stimulate" the economy with another $447 billion in spending failed to pass the Senate, but instead of recognizing that more taxing and spending is not what America wants or needs, he's redoubling his efforts. Today, the President is starting another bus tour to sell a different version of the same plan--this time broken up into pieces of taxing and spending still big enough to choke a horse. It's the same plan, only in different packaging. Former Congressman Ernest Istook explains the danger:
Even segmented versions of Obama’s $447 billion plan can be used to squeeze in those worst parts. That’s because it’s almost impossible to get both the House and the Senate to enact identical versions of a bill, thus requiring a conference committee to "work out the differences"--which sometimes includes adding distasteful details.
While it's good news that the Senate rejected the President's jobs plan, the bad news is that the Senate has utterly failed to help put America back on a strong fiscal path. Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) point out that it's been 900 days since Senate Democrats last adopted a formal budget plan, calling it "a national disgrace."
As required by law, House Republicans presented a budget in committee, brought it to the floor, and passed it earlier this spring. It was an honest, detailed, concrete plan to put our budget on the path to balance and our economy on the path to prosperity. But Senate Democrats, during this time of national crisis, failed even to present a budget plan — in open defiance of the law and the public they serve.
What we have seen from the Obama Administration is bigger government, more regulations, and massive amounts of government spending in the hopes of stimulating the economy. The trouble is that it hasn't worked, as the numbers show. Obama promised that his $787 billion stimulus would save or create 3.5 million jobs by the end of 2010. It didn't, and given the jobs that were lost, he came up 7.3 million jobs short of his goal. His health care plan, better known as Obamacare, did not reduce health care costs as promised and is in fact responsible for increasing costs in 2011. On top of that, the law will price many unskilled workers out of full-time employment.
And those are just the big-ticket items. Over the last 1,000 days, America has seen increased regulations, a 9,000-earmark omnibus bill, a government union bailout, a Wall Street reform bill that will do more harm than good, a nuclear arms treaty that is detrimental to missile defense, a refusal to expand domestic energy production, federal overreach into education, an undermining of the rule of law, and a dark cloud hanging over our military's future due to a failure to ensure adequate defense spending.
In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, James Freeman writes of an interview with billionaire Mortimer Zuckerman--Democrat, real-estate mogul, and New York Daily News owner. "Among business executives who supported Barack Obama in 2008, [Zuckerman] says, 'there is enormously widespread anxiety over the political leadership of the country.' Mr. Zuckerman reports that among Democrats, 'The sense is that the policies of this government have failed.'" Given the track record of the Obama Administration over the last 1,000 days, they would be right. Bigger government has not put America on a stronger fiscal path, it hasn't created jobs, and it hasn't built a stronger economy.
There is a better way. Heritage's Saving the American Dream plan charts a course that fixes the debt, cuts spending, and restores prosperity. It redesigns entitlement programs, guarantees assistance to those who need it, and saves the American dream for future generations. If Congress and the President want to move America forward, create new jobs, and spur businesses to grow and invest, then piling on debt, raising taxes, and increasing spending is not the answer--no matter how much Obama would like it to be.
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Solyndra Scandal Ends Green Jobs Myth
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From the Heritage Foundation Morning Bell
President Barack Obama's solution for America's unemployment woes has been a stubborn campaign to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on economic "stimulus"--much of it on so-called "green jobs." Report after report has shown the approach to be a total failure. And now, a new scandal involving Solyndra, a bankrupt solar panel company in California, should be the final nail in the coffin for the government’s meddling in the free market.
"[W]e can see the positive impacts [of the stimulus] right here at Solyndra," Obama claimed when he spoke at the company's newly unveiled factory in May of last year. He was correct that the results of his stimulus would be on display at that factory. But he was wrong that those results would be positive. Little more than a year later, the company has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and plans to lay off more than 1,000 employees.
The Solyndra factory where Obama spoke was built after the company received a $535 million loan guarantee from the Energy Department as part of the stimulus's green jobs push. "Through the Recovery Act, this company received a loan to expand its operations," Obama noted. "This new factory is the result of those loans."
But "everyone knew that the plant wouldn’t work," according to a former Solyndra employee. So why was the President so sure of the plant’s success when he spoke there? What's more, the company was built on "a model that says, well, I can build something for six dollars and sell it for three dollars," according to an industry analyst. That would normally be a red flag for investors. So why did the President claim that "the true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra"?
The answer to both of those questions: The government's decisions are driven by politics and ideology and are divorced from economic reality. Want proof? Take a look at a January 31 e-mail between Office of Management and Budget staff regarding "Solyndra optics" -- that is, how the issue looks in the public's eyes. "If Solyndra defaults down the road, the optics will arguably be worse later than they would be today," they wrote, adding:
In addition, the timing will likely coincide with the 2012 campaign season heating up, whereas a default today could be put in the context of (and perhaps even get some credit for) fiscal discipline / good government because the Administration would be limiting further taxpayer exposure letting bad projects go, and could make public steps it is taking to learn lessons and improve / limit future lending.
In other words, in January the Administration was essentially letting the 2012 campaign dictate decisions on the federal government's financial involvement with Solyndra. They were not responding to normal profit-and-loss signals, as they should. Had Energy Department bureaucrats been investing their own money, they might have been more careful. But it was others' money -- taxpayers' money -- at stake. Self-interested investors, who naturally weed out bad investments, were wholly absent. The result: Taxpayers are likely to lose up to $535 million, while the people who made the decision to throw money at Solyndra have, so far, been completely insulated from reprisal.
Much attention has been paid to accusations of cronyism in the Energy Department, given that a major Solyndra investor is also a big Obama donor. But the fundamental lesson of the Solyndra scandal is not that money buys political favors. That now goes without saying. The real takeaway is that government intervention in the economy is a fool’s errand, as Heritage’s Nicolas Loris notes:
Solyndra exemplifies the government’s abysmal track record of picking winners and losers in the marketplace, and the solar company is not the only example of energy stimulus struggles. With a number of targeted energy tax credits set to expire at the end of this year or next, industry groups are lobbying hard for extensions. Especially given the U.S. fiscal situation, this is a time to end all energy subsidies—not to extend wasteful, market-distorting policies. When the government decides to favor a technology with subsidies, it’s a good bet that subsidy 'winner' is a loser in the marketplace.
Indeed, at least four other companies to receive money from Obama's stimulus package have gone bankrupt, Fox News reports.
Even where companies do create jobs, they do so at such exorbitant cost that the effort cannot reasonably be considered a success. To date, The Washington Post reports, the Energy Department loan guarantee program from which Solyndra benefitted has created one new permanent job for every $5.5 million spent. Lend that kind of money to a private business in an industry that doesn’t rely on taxpayer support, and it will put hundreds if not thousands to work.
Government subsidies are invitations for political favoritism, of course. But more importantly, as engines of job creation, they simply don't work (just ask Spain). Sure, the Administration's "green jobs" program has led to allegations of corruption. But it has also failed even in its foremost task of creating jobs for an economy with a chronic unemployment problem. Columnist Jim Pethokoukis writes, "Solyndra is the logical endpoint of Obamanomics." Unfortunately, the American people are paying the price for getting us there.
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S&P Downgrades the U.S.
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From the Heritage Foundation's Morning Bell:
On Friday evening, Standard & Poor's (S&P) downgraded the U.S. credit rating from AAA to AA+. As we and other conservatives warned, the spending reductions in the deal negotiated by President Obama to raise the debt ceiling were inadequate, and S&P reacted as we predicted but sooner. Neither Moody's nor Fitch, two other rating agencies, have downgraded federal debt yet, but they are not providing much rosier outlooks.
Decades of over-spending and over-borrowing by the federal government have damaged America's creditworthiness. Congress after Congress, President after President, the federal government spent every penny it took in—and borrowed over $14 trillion on top of that—to try to keep happy the voters to whom the government made promises it could not afford. The government kept shifting the burden of paying the bills forward onto future generations.
Well, the future has arrived, and it is bleak. Our economy is weak, millions of Americans are out of work, and America is so deep in debt that we have lost our good credit rating. Our nation needs to drive federal spending, including our ever-growing entitlement programs, down toward a balanced budget while maintaining our ability to protect America and without raising taxes. That is the sound path forward to a stronger economy with smaller government and more real jobs.
The White House's first reaction to this news was to blame S&P itself, claiming that their math was wrong as spokesmen pointed out S&P's past rating failures. Correcting the math didn't correct the problem, however, and so S&P went ahead with its downgrade. Debating S&P's credibility misses the more important point, which is there for all to see: Projected deficit spending properly raises questions about U.S. credit quality.
We cannot waste time shooting the messenger when the message itself is impossible to ignore: It's the spending.
Unsustainable entitlement programs have been built up over many Congresses and Presidents. Elected officials from both parties over many decades helped push us closer to this point. But the last chance to start correcting the problem before damage to America's credit occurred was during the recent debate over the debt limit.
Regrettably, President Obama and the Senate liberals refused to allow reforms to any entitlement programs and refused to make significant cuts in other federal spending unless they could raise taxes on America. Conservatives rightly resisted increasing taxes, which is a recipe for economic disaster during an economic slowdown. The resulting deal on the Budget Control Act brought little in the way of spending cuts and lots in the way of increased borrowing, and it was the last straw that cost America its top credit rating. President Obama and his liberal allies on Capitol Hill brought America's credit down
The White House claims that its tax-hike centered "grand bargain" would have prevented a downgrade, yet they still have not told us what was in that "bargain." Even as Senate Democrats are nearing three years without a budget, President Obama has offered to the American people rhetoric and class warfare, rather than solutions and responsible leadership.
Other liberals went out of their way this weekend to blame this downgrade on the Tea Party, with Senator John Kerry (D–MA) going as far as calling it the "Tea Party downgrade" on NBC's Meet the Press. Former Obama advisor David Axelrod echoed that coordinated spin on Face the Nation. Besides proclaiming for all to see that the liberals have no solutions themselves, this argument ignores the facts.
The Tea Party's primary focus is our nation's fiscal health. If it were not for the Tea Party's positive influence, Congress would still be spending, taxing, and borrowing with little regard for the burden it is placing on future generations. Only months ago, President Obama was demanding a so-called "clean" debt limit increase that would allow him to keep on borrowing without any cuts to spending.
As our colleague J. D. Foster points out in his expert analysis of Friday's downgrade, the debate over the debt limit was the substantive ideas of the conservatives versus empty political rhetoric of liberals:
In the course of negotiations on the debt ceiling, congressional Republicans tried tirelessly to get the President and Senate Democrats to get serious about cutting spending. All Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D–NV) could do was carp about symbolic tax hikes on the rich, oil companies, and their latest silly affection—corporate jets. To be clear, despite the perilous state of the nation's finances, the President's sole objective was ideological and symbolic: Even if Republicans had caved on tax hikes, which they wisely refused to do, the revenue gains would have been inconsequential compared to the spending cuts that are necessary. The President played politics while the nation's credit rating was set to burn, and now it has.
President Obama, congressional liberals, and their allies believe that if we remain silent on our fiscal future, then markets and credit agencies will not notice our perilous future. Thus we heard from liberal pundits and politicians who called the debt debate a "manufactured crisis"—as if everything would be fine with more blank checks. The problem of federal over-borrowing and over-spending was and is real, as the credit downgrade and market reactions reflect. Congress and the President must fix the problem and fix it now.
Liberals this week will try to equate revenue increases with tax hikes. But that is simply not factual. Government revenues increase when we have greater economic growth and more taxpayers in the workforce. That economic growth is impossible with job-killing tax hikes and increased regulation. Raising taxes on taxpayers earning $250,000 or more hits entrepreneurs, small business owners, and investors, thus slowing economic growth still further.
In the next 10 years, once the economy recovers, revenue will rapidly approach and will likely surpass its historical average of 18.5 percent of GDP, while spending is projected to shoot past its historical average of 20.3 percent to 26.4 percent of GDP. Government spending will have increased by 22 percent just on President Obama's watch.
Yet some liberals were still calling for more debt and deficits this weekend in the name of new "stimulus." On Friday evening, Obama's former economic advisor Christina Romer said the first failed stimulus she helped design should have been bigger and argued for a new and larger stimulus saying: "What I want is more now."
That is, more of what President Obama has given us in the past—fruitless new spending programs. This would give us a bigger problem, not a solution. With America and the world in the grips of an economic slowdown, we need action to create economic growth and jobs and restore America's credit. We do not need more government.
As dire is the domestic situation, as Foster notes, the consequences for the global financial crisis may be worse:
In today's global economy, however, the U.S. credit rating downgrade may prove catastrophic. Prior to the credit rating downgrade, Europe was already teetering on the brink. Last week European stock exchanges plunged 10 percent, their worst weekly losses since November 2008. The long-building government debt crisis in Europe, which had been so unsuccessfully papered over just a few weeks ago by its leaders, is reaching the boiling point, threatening to wash over not just the worst offenders like Greece and Portugal but also some of the pillars of the European Union like Spain and Italy.
We cannot improve domestic or global economic conditions by becoming more like Europe. America can do better by adopting better ideas.
Heritage has offered its fiscal plan, "Saving the American Dream," which would balance the budget in 10 years and lower our debt-to-GDP ratio to 30 percent (from the 100 percent it reached last week). It would accomplish this through responsible reform of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the tax code.
As Foster concludes:
A number of sound incremental reforms can garner strong bipartisan support and can substantially improve these program's sustainability and the nation's finances. The President must lead his party to join hands with Republicans in the joint select committee to embrace these reforms and be ready to enact them, saving far more than $1.2 trillion and far sooner than November 23. The objective for the nation, the President, and the joint select committee is clear: drive down spending—including and especially on entitlement programs—toward a balanced budget while protecting America and without raising taxes. Properly done, this would lead to economic growth, more jobs, less government, and a restoration of the nation's credit rating. It can be done.
It can be done.
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Obama's Jobless America
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Excerpted from the Heritage Foundation Morning Bell:
The economic news keeps getting worse for America. Last month, the unemployment rate went up to 9.1 percent, the economy added only 54,000 jobs, and the average length of unemployment rose to more than nine months, the longest since the Labor Department started keeping track in 1948. But despite all the writing on the wall, President Barack Obama wants you and the 13.9 million unemployed Americans to hang on for the ride.
In his weekly address on Friday, President Obama played down May's terrible unemployment numbers as mere "bumps on the road to recovery" and blamed America's latest economic woes on high gas prices (which he can do something about, but hasn't), the earthquake in Japan, and "unease about the European fiscal situation." Meanwhile, his chief economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, parroted his boss's "bumps on the road" line and, on Sunday, told America not to worry about the jobs report, remarking, "Don't bank too much of any one month's jobs report. You want to look at a little bit of a trend to get a more accurate barometer." Goolsbee announced his resignation yesterday.
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Events At A Glance
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Residents Forum
CANCELED
Jan 26, 2012
Residents Forum
American Legion Post 308
7338 Canby Ave
Reseda, CA 91335
7:00 PM to 9:00 PM
Make Your Voice Heard!!!
Feb 23, 2012
Mark Reed to speak at La Jolla Republican Women Federated
La Jolla Country Club
7301 High Avenue
La Jolla, CA 92037
March 29, 2012
(858) 454-2505
8:15 AM to 10:30 AM
Mar 29, 2012
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National Debt Clock |
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A million seconds pass in 12 days.
A billion seconds pass in 31 years.
A trillion seconds pass in 31,688 years!
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