Ron Paul Trounces Santorum on Foreign Policy in CNN Debate

Congressman Ron Paul roundly defeated Rick Santorum in a debate on free trade, entangling alliances and unconstitutional foreign policy.
by Jake Morphonios

On Thursday night, the four remaining GOP presidential candidates squared off in Jacksonville in the second of two Florida debates, hosted by CNN and moderated by Wolf Blitzer. While much of the debate time was again wasted on callow rhetoric between neo-con candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, Congressman Ron Paul indoctrinated the audience with principled lessons on liberty and the proper role of government.

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Internet freedom on the line

Written by Stephen Lendman

ACTA: Worse Than SOPA and PIPA - by Stephen Lendman

Internet freedom's on the line. SOPA and PIPA threatened Net Neutrality and free expression. So does ACTA. More on it below.

For now, the largest online protest in Internet history got Congress to abandon SOPA and PIPA for now but not permanently. Expect resurrection in modified form. Language may change but not intent. ACTA's worse.

Paul pursued strategy of publishing controversial newsletters, associates say

View Photo Gallery — Ron Paul: Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), who has built a loyal following among libertarians, is running for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

By Jerry Markon and Alice Crites

Ron Paul, well known as a physician, congressman and libertarian , has also been a businessman who pursued a marketing strategy that included publishing provocative, racially charged newsletters to make money and spread his ideas, said three people with direct knowledge of Paul’s businesses.
The Republican presidential candidate has denied writing inflammatory passages in the pamphlets from the 1990s and said recently that he did not read them at the time or for years afterward. Numerous colleagues said he does not hold racist views.

Think you know the GOP candidates for presidency? Test your knowledge in this matching game.

Global Main Street Depression

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Written by Stephen Lendman

Forecasting Economic Decline

by Stephen Lendman

Economic analyst Harry Dent's 2009 book, titled "The Great Depression Ahead" became a national bestseller. He predicted the current crisis and worse ahead.
His new book, co-authored with Rodney Johnson, predicts "The Great Crash Ahead." He calls it inevitable and sees protracted trouble worse than 2008. It's coming between 2012 and 2014 he believes.

Ron Paul calls for diplomatic relations with Cuba

By Alana Semuels

Ron Paul took a risky position in Florida in Thursday’s debate, calling for communication and diplomatic relations with Cuba, saying that people's positions have changed dramatically over the last few years.

Picket: (audio) Fireworks erupt between Gingrich spokesman and Rep. Chaffetz, a Mitt supporter, at Newt event

By Kerry Picket

Prior House Speaker Newt Gingrich taking the stage at a gathering for the Republican Jewish Coalition in Del Ray, Florida on Friday afternoon, his spokesman, R.C. Hammond, confronted Congressman Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican and Mitt Romney supporter (who was also with Romney supporter and conservative movement leader Bay Buchanan) for attending the Gingrich event.

American jihadists should be stripped of citizenship, then killed

U.S.-born radical Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen is on a U.S. list of militants to kill or capture. (Associated Press)

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights have brought suit against the Obama administration for ordering the targeted killing of American-born al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki, who is believed to be holed up in Yemen. These groups argue that the president doesn’t have the legal authority to order the assassination of American citizens. That’s right, so in order for the kill order to stand, Awlaki should be stripped of his citizenship.

Liberals vilify any notion that religion could help build stronger families

By Robert Knight

Illustration by Greg Groesch for The Washington Times

When I was a copy editor at the Los Angeles Times, a young reporter submitted an article about a single mother having trouble obtaining government checks.

Internecine warring could hand the victory to Obama

By Terry Michael

Illustration by John Camejo for The Washington Times

It’s seven months before their convention in Tampa, a lifetime in today’s five-minute-news-cycle politics. But the split decisions in the first three primaries and the personal attacks in the televised debates beg the question: Are Republicans divided into so many parts they are about to engage in 1964-style “politicide”? As a teenage Democratic political junkie, I watched TV with partisan glee as Goldwaterites booed Nelson Rockefeller at the Cow Palace in San Francisco in 1964. That was two decades before Jeane J. Kirkpatrick labeled those who nominated Walter Mondale “the San Francisco Democrats,” a year when my party, obsessed with identity politics and disconnected from the middle-class center, suffered a defeat as bad as Barry Goldwater‘s.

Fleeced by the Fed

By James A. Bacon

Illustration by Alexander Hunter for The Washington Times

The Federal Reserve Board announced plans last Tuesday to keep short-term interest rates at near zero for another three years and said it might embark upon another bond-buying program to drive down long-term interest rates. The stock market rallied and President Obama’s supporters hailed the rising stock market as a sign of his brilliance as a manager of the economy.

His vote for Carter’s Department of Education was an early sign

By Ambassador Gerald P. Carmen

Illustration by Alexander Hunter for The Washington Times

Because the Gipper is not here to say, “There you go again!” to Mr. Gingrich, and because the choice of a new president is so critical to the nation today, it falls on us who served with Reagan and are still around to tell America the truth about Mr. Gingrich and his repeated attempts to thwart Reagan’s cornerstone achievement: the defeat of global tyranny in the form of the Soviet Union and the final rejection of communism as a failed experiment.

Friends of the president are given billions in government largesse

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES

A worker leaves with a moving box Wednesday at Solyndra in Fremont, Calif. The solar-panel manufacturer, which received a $535 million loan from the U.S. government, has announced layoffs of 1,100 workers and plans to file for bankruptcy. A weak economy and strong overseas competition have proved insurmountable. (Associated Press)

Proposed settlement hides payoff to banks worth hundreds of billions

By Rebel A. Cole

Illustration by Alexander Hunter for The Washington Times

On Jan. 23, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun L.S. Donovan met in Chicago with several Democratic state attorneys general (AGs) in an attempt to strong-arm them into signing up for an administration-backed agreement to settle the “robo-signing” scandal. Wall Street would pay what sounds like a large fine ($25 billion), and in exchange, the state AGs would relieve the bankers of all legal liabilities related to the fraudulent mortgage-lending practices that led directly to the 2008 financial meltdown and a 30 percent drop in U.S. home prices.

Capital-gains tax misses the opportunity to spur the economy

By Emily Miller

Illustration: Warren Buffett by Alexander Hunter for The Washington Times

Each presidential candidate’s position on investment tax rates is a critical issue. The current rates, set by President George W. Bush, will expire at the end of this year, so whoever sits behind the desk in the Oval Office next January will have the power to stop the capital-gains tax rate from jumping to 20 percent and qualified dividends rising to 39.6 percent.

Panetta cites key intelligence on bin Laden raid. By Robert Burns

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is acknowledging publicly for the first time that a Pakistani doctor provided key information to the U.S. in advance of the successful Navy SEAL assault on Osama bin Laden’s compound last May.

Soaring rhetoric won't fix the economy.

Steven Greenhut |

Now, a return to the American values of fair play and shared responsibility will help protect our people and our economy. But it should also guide us as we look to pay down our debt and invest in our future.—President Barack Obama, State of the Union, January 24, 2012

President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday night was the latest reminder that the state of political discourse in America is shockingly low. I’m not singling out Obama for special condemnation, given that these addresses always are a potpourri of banalities, regardless of which president is offering them. Yet Tuesday’s address was a vivid reminder of the shoddy thinking so common at the highest level of the federal and state governments and why we are—in the more precise, but less lofty words of a former president—in deep doo doo.

Obama's Bogus Case for Tax Fairness Calling something just does not make it so. Sheldon Richman

In his State of the Union speech Tuesday night President Obama played the fairness card in calling for higher taxes on upper-income people. He said:

[W]e need to change our tax code so that people like me, and an awful lot of Members of Congress, pay our fair share of taxes. Tax reform should follow the Buffett rule: If you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes. [Emphasis added.]

And:

When Americans talk about folks like me paying my fair share of taxes, it’s not because they envy the rich. It’s because they understand that when I get tax breaks I don’t need and the country can’t afford, it either adds to the deficit, or somebody else has to make up the difference. . . . [Emphasis added.]

Is it unfair to compare the Obama and Reagan economic recoveries? No

By James Pethokoukis

Ronald Reagan inherited a Long Recession. The economy declined 0.3 percent in 1980, grew at a subpar 2.5 percent in 1981, and then plunged 1.9 percent in 1982. The lengthy downturn was really the culmination of more than a decade of bad economic policy. But the Reagan Recovery was stunning. GDP rose 4.5 percent in 1983 and 7.2 percent in 1984. It was Morning in America, and Reagan won reelection by a landslide.

How to Think about Private Equity

By Steve Kaplan

If the overall pattern is so positive—for investors, companies, and even employment—why is private equity so controversial?

Interest in the private equity business has exploded with the intense scrutiny of Mitt Romney’s experience as a private equity investor. Some of the discussion has been confused and confusing. In what follows, I briefly describe how private equity works and what the results have been. When all is said and done, the evidence from empirical research is that private equity funds have delivered strong returns to their investors, improved the operating performance of their companies, and had surprisingly small net effects on employment.

The Problem with Bambi-nomics

By Robert McHenry

On Mitt Romney, Bain Capital, and modern political discourse.

Mitt Romney's difficulty with his history at Bain Capital may be our most nearly perfect example of how ignorance and misunderstanding, willful or otherwise, render our political discourse impotent.
Businesses that do what Bain does are sensitive about the common analogy comparing them to scavenger species in nature. In large part this is owing to how we are trained from childhood to think of nature in terms of postcard vistas, pettable furry things with large eyes, and the romantic notion of some sort of sweetly cooperative community of creatures. We tend not to teach children about vultures, fungi, slime molds, or maggots. More importantly, we do not teach them why such things are every bit as important to the ecology as Bambi. Without them, the world would soon be tree-deep in corpses, large and small, and life would become impossible. With them, the soil is constantly enriched with recycled nutrients, and life continues abundant. But this kind of comparison clearly doesn't help Bain's image very much.

Fixing Student Loans: Let’s Give Colleges Some ‘Skin in the Game’

By Alex J. Pollock

What lessons on student loans can be learned from the searing national misadventure with mortgages?

There are provocative parallels between student loans and the mortgages that created the disastrous housing bubble. In both cases, the government promoted plausible goals— higher education and home ownership—to excess, through the overexpansion of debt to levels beyond the repayment ability of a large percentage of borrowers. In both cases, the government guaranteed much of the credit, putting the ultimate risk of bad debts on taxpayers. In both cases, debt expansion drove the price of the object being financed (colleges and houses) to heights sustainable only if debt could always be increasing. In mortgages, it could not, and the subsequent collapse raises the question: will there be a similar outcome with student loans?

Professor Richard Vedder, considering the question of a student loan bubble, recently concluded that the worst idea ever “was the creation of federally subsidized student loans in the first place.” Can any lessons from the searing national misadventure with mortgages be usefully applied to student loans? I believe so.
A principal lesson from mortgages, nearly universally agreed upon, is that those who create the mortgages should retain a material part of the credit risk. Such “skin in the game” obviously aligns the incentives of the originator of the loan with taxpayer guarantors to control excesses in debt expansion. For mortgages, this “skin in the game” concept was adopted by the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010. More importantly, its advantages are displayed by one of the highest quality mortgage portfolios that exist today: the Mortgage Partnership Finance (MPF) mortgages of the Federal Home Loan Banks. All of these MPF mortgages have credit risk retained by the originator, with excellent results for their credit performance. This program has been operating for more than 14 years.
Let’s apply this mortgage lesson to student loans.

Colleges are the effective originators, the promoters, and the chief financial beneficiaries of student loans.

Who are the most important parties to have “skin in the game” in student loans? The colleges themselves, of course! They are the effective originators, the promoters, and the chief financial beneficiaries of student loans. It is their rising costs which result in ever more debt and more risk of default for student borrowers and for taxpayers.
The federal student loan programs should simply compel colleges which get proceeds from the programs to maintain a 10 percent first-loss share in the credit performance of the loan. This puts a material risk of excessive and un-repayable debt and of high college costs on those who are promoting the loans. The colleges would stand to take losses on bad loans before the taxpayers, as they should—they would, in financial parlance, be subordinated or “junior” to the taxpayers. A highly desirable improvement in financial structure and incentives!
So, just as for the mortgage lenders, let’s give the colleges some “skin in the game.”
Alex J. Pollock is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He led the creation of the MPF program during the 1990s when President and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago.

Dining with Vultures: Rent-to-Own, the Feds, and the Housing Sector

By Jay Weiser

Distressed asset buyers are either ruthless or go bust, and government entities have no business co-venturing with them.

Rent is suddenly the rage for solving the housing debt crisis—and vulture capital with it. But the ambivalence conjured up by private equity magician Mitt Romney, who has simultaneously restructured himself into the leading Republican presidential candidate and America's most reviled business leader across the ideological spectrum, suggests that the housing crisis requires free and clear, as-is sales, even if they increase short-term losses. The federal government should exit the real estate business and let vulture investors convert busted planned communities into rentals.

The New Theories of Moral Sentiments

By DALIBOR ROHAC

London
Deirdre McCloskey certainly leaves an impression. With her robust frame, hoarse voice interspersed with an occasional stammer, and extraordinary charisma, she is anything but your typical economic historian.
On a recent trip to England, she gave a talk at Hartwell House in the heart of Buckinghamshire that felt like a good stand-up comedy show, on par with the better performances of Eddie Izzard or George Carlin. But humor and witticisms aside, the talk revealed her conviction that economists should not shy away from the subjects of love, friendship or virtue.

sábado, 28 de enero de 2012

Internet freedom on the line

By Jerry Markon and Alice Crites

Global Main Street Depression

American jihadists should be stripped of citizenship, then killed

Liberals vilify any notion that religion could help build stronger families

Internecine warring could hand the victory to Obama

His vote for Carter’s Department of Education was an early sign

Friends of the president are given billions in government largesse

Proposed settlement hides payoff to banks worth hundreds of billions

Capital-gains tax misses the opportunity to spur the economy

Soaring rhetoric won't fix the economy.

Friday, January 27, 2012

By DALIBOR ROHAC

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