Alex I’ll take “More government!” for 2 Trillion please?

Since American taxpayers practically bought themselves an unprofitable railroad they didn’t need (disguised as a pick-me up) and the government is already busy buying up a few hundred thousand mortgages for us, to save people from suffering at the hands of their own poor judgement, we can now claim significant ownership in two of the most more poorly planned, badly run, and grossly inefficient mortgage lenders in America; once again saving the Federal government from its own folly.  (Which also makes it our folly)

 

Freddie and Fannie are, basically, belly up.   And far too many federal agencies and committees—all competing to save their own butts—have been pointing fingers while the ship sinks, making things that much worse, vying to see who can spend the most tax payer dollars on a bail out, never considering that the government should not be in the business of anything but government in the first place.  (I actually read that somewhere.)

 

Senate “We can’t axe it so let’s tax it! ™” Democrats were already proposing to salvage their favorite mortgage twins with (you guessed it) a tax on mortgages of about 400-500 dollars each.  But that hardly seems responsible when all it would do is continue to stifle real price competition in the market by propping up another competition busting, incompetent federal behemoth.   They’ll do it anyway and justify taking more of our money to prop up something that’s already taking more of our money, but at a discount! 

 

What’s likely to happen?  Well, the feds will use our hard earned cash to save their construct, extinguishing all the bright ideas to woo Franken-Fannie and Franken-Freddie back from the ledge,  with of course promises of additional oversight in the future (at additional taxpayer expense of course).  We’ll buy this for some stupid reason because everyone knows that when the babysitter has been irresponsible the best thing to do is invite her back with a big fat raise.  The Democrats will blame republicans even though they have overseen the entire collapse of the housing market and our economy for the past two years, because small children rarely take responsibility when they can blame others. (While the chorus of left wing prayer continues its endless Gregorian refrain of ‘More Gov-ern-ment.”) And the government will still get bigger, fatter, and deeper, so that next time this happens it will just take more money and more government to fix it again.

 

More proof that government funded by the people, for other people, could soon perish financially, from this earth, if this garbage is not stopped.  But hey, there is that wacky election thing coming up.  Maybe the best investment voters can make now is to vote for the people who want less government.  You know who they are “Right?”

Conflicts of Interest

Shaheen has made some noise about conflicts of interest, but she has plenty of her own. 

Most obviously, she’s claiming to be fighting for middle class families, but all of her policies , particularly her pandering on energy policy, will remove massive amounts of wealth from of the economy just to give it to the government.  (Hiding behind words like taking profits or cutting funding is a smoke screen.  As we shall see she is in favor of all kinds of unnecessry funding.)  But without private profits we have no jobs.  Without jobs we become slaves to the federal welfare state she favors.  So how can she be for the middle class when all her plans will remove not just income potential, but the freedom of choice from the people she claims to be helping. (see here, here, here, here,….etc.)

 

Another conflict is her obsession with making government bigger which will, by default, enlarge government unions.   Jeanne gets plenty of campaign cash from Unions to support policies they favor, which would only add more government and more government employees to the Union rolls, all to be paid for by us.

 

Next up, Jeanne is a big favorite of trial lawyers, raking in heaps of cash from them.  And it is quite obvious that most of her “energy plans” (past present and future) will enrich lawyers from the state, government, and private and environmental groups, because she plans to use our tax dollars to put windmills all over our touristy New Hampshire landscape.   At $70,000 a piece (for windmills—the lawyers will cost us a lot more than that) you have to ask yourself who is best served by this plan, because it can’t be the taxpayers.  They get to pay whether we waste money on windmills or not.

 

Embryonic stem-cell research would get a 12 Billion dollar raise according to candidate Shaheen, tripling the budget of the government run National Science Foundation (NSF).  Stem cell research gets plenty of private funding already and adult Stem cell research has produced over 70 treatments while Embryonic Research has produced none.  The total failure of Embryonic Research should mark it for a  decreasing role at the NSF so why give them 12 billion more per year for no obviously good reason?  Continuing Embryonic stem cell research furthers the public perception that a human embryo is little more than laboratory tissue suitable for experimentation.  12 Billion (that’s $87,000 per year for every human in New Hampshire that survived past the Embryonic stage) buys a lot of perception, but would be much better served if left in the pockets of private citizens and industries who could then invest it themselves in things with a proven track record for success.   So where’s the conflict?  Jeanne Shaheen got half a million in cash from the abortion lobby during her 2006 run, and should do equally well this time around.  The abortion lobby stands to gain significantly from any increased public perception that takes the morality issue out of the debate.  A massive tax payer funded federal mandate to make embryo’s look more like a virus than a potential person would go a long way to taking the wind out of the Pro-life argument with people who are on still on the fence.

 

These policy positions have no short or long term benefit to New Hampshire or the taxpaying public in general but would each enrich the interests of groups who invest very heavily in Jeanne’s campaign.    Who does Ms. Shaheen really want to serve?  So far it looks like Unions, Trial Lawyers, and the Abortion Lobby.