by David Boaz

“Wealthy Face Higher Taxes.” That’s the headline that greeted two million American businesspeople Tuesday when they opened their Wall Street Journals. Inside, another banner head: “Big Firms Would Face Deeper Tax Bite.” Turn to the New York Times: “A Red-Ink Decade/Obama Budget Sees Years of Deficits.” The Financial Times: “Obama to target overseas tax breaks.” Investor’s Business Daily: “Higher Taxes for All in Obama Budget, $1.6 Tril 2010 Deficit.” And the Washington Post (not that many productive people get that on their doorstep): “Obama budget would spend billions more.”

And President Obama wonders why banks aren’t lending, employers aren’t hiring, and investors are holding back? As the Economic Policy Institute illustrates, this is the slowest recovery of any postwar recession.

Let’s hope the Obama administration soon learns that higher taxes, more regulation, a larger share of GDP shifted to government, fears of Fed monetization of soaring debt — not to mention newspaper reports of Obama budgeteers “flipp[ing] through the tax code, looking for ideas” — can only discourage employers, investors, and entrepreneurs. Robert Higgs has cited the role of “regime uncertainty” in prolonging the Great Depression, as investors worried about what FDR might do next. Will Wilkinson points to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s saying “businesses want certainty. They need certainty so they can make long-term plans today.” Unfortunately, Will says, “Creating completely irresponsible, economically chilling regime uncertainty would appear to be the basic modus operandi of the Obama administration.”

Taxes, regulation, and uncertainty — and Obama asks why businesses aren’t lending, investing, and hiring.

East Dundee Village Officials are entertaining offers to build an electronic bill board on Rt 72. The Village hopes ad revenue will offset the cost to build an operate the sign.

Crossposted on the Kane County Chronicle:

Local Republicans are confident the GOP will regain power at both the state and national level come November.

“I think we have the opportunity to have a clean sweep in Illinois and across the nation,” said State Sen. Randall Hultgren, R-Winfield, during Saturday’s Kane County GOP Unity party at Riverside Receptions in Geneva.

Hultgren won the GOP nomination in the 14th Congressional District Tuesday in a close race with Ethan Hastert, who was seeking his father’s former seat.

Hultgren will face incumbent Democrat Bill Foster of Batavia in the Nov. 2 general election.

Saturday’s event served as a way for Republicans to unite after the election, which turned testy after Hultgren’s campaign produced a mailer that alleged the law firm Hastert works for lobbies for companies that have a history of human trafficking.

Hultgren later apologized for the mailer, and praised Hastert during the event.

“I know you will make a huge difference in anything you do,” Hultgren said. “You will make us so proud.”

Hastert in turn has thrown his support behind Hultgren.

“We need to do everything we can to send him to Washington,” Hastert said. “Bill Foster has to go.”

Kane County GOP chairman Mike Kenyon also was upbeat about the Republican party’s chances in November.

“This is our time,” Kenyon said. “We’re going to get this state back in shape.”

Rasmussen has released its Superbowl Sunday version of its Presidential approval ratings and their report only tells part of the story. The report shows the president’s approval index down to a -17, but what it doesn’t show is that the depth of President’s recent slide is a direct result of the bloated budget he sent to congress almost a week ago.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday shows that 26% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-three percent (43%) Strongly Disapprove which gives Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -17

Overall, 44% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the President’s performance. That matches the lowest level of overall approval yet measured for this president. Fifty-six percent (56%) now disapprove.

The charts Rasmussen provides show the Presidents approval rating since his inauguration. The trends of which are well known:

But only when you isolate the past two weeks, as I have done below, is the full story exposed. (click on chart to see it bigger)

As you look through the numbers, realize that the daily Rasmussen Poll is actually a three day rolling average, so trends need a few days to work themselves out.

On the day the POTUS gave the State of the Union Address, he was at an overall approval/ disapproval disadvantage (46-53%) and the approval index (based on strong approval/disapproval) was at a -15.  Within a day or two of his speech the President’s numbers took a huge bounce. By this past Monday, his overall approval /disapproval numbers were almost even and his approval index reached its highest number since mid October -4.

This past Sunday reports about the President’s budget began to leak out. On Monday, the budget was officially released, and voters saw that all of the pretty fiduciary responsibility talk within the SOTU was just that, talk. With that Obama’s approval numbers dived faster than a congressman rushing to spend our last dollar. Each one of his approval numbers are now worse than they were the day of the State Of the Union.

After a year of President Obama’s misdirection, lies and spin, American voters may be finally waking up. Its not that his wonderful prose doesn’t get him a nice bump, but voters are looking at the facts and realizing it tells a totally different story than the POTUS has laid out. The polling numbers show that the voters are not happy with the REAL story.

By Mitchell Langbert:

Many Americans are concerned about the loss of good jobs. In the manufacturing sector, especially, jobs have disappeared in favor of lower wage retail jobs. The reason is in the expansion of government indebtedness and increasing tax burdens.

In a free market money system such as existed under the gold standard and theoretically ought to exist today under the free floating currency system, if a nation imports an increasing amount, its currency ought to fall in value. Thus, if US plants close and move operations to Asia, then demand for the dollar declines and demand for the yuan or the yen increases. As the demand for the foreign currency increases, the foreign currency becomes more valuable and the dollar becomes less valuable. As the dollar becomes less valuable, it buys less foreign merchandise. Moving overseas becomes less attractive because goods sold in the foreign currency become more costly. So firms stop moving overseas and some return here.

That has not happened in the current Federal Reserve Bank/US treasury regime since the Reagan years. Rather, increasing trade and current account imbalances have not lead to a lower dollar. Rather, the yuan and other currencies have been stable against the dollar, resulting in increasing demand for merchandise manufactured overseas. As a result jobs have moved overseas. This is a process manufactured by the federal government and the Federal Reserve Bank in tandem with foreign central banks.

That is, there has been de facto pegging of foreign currencies against the dollar. This is done through purchases of the national debt. As the national debt is sold, foreign buyers including the Japanese, Chinese, Saudis and Europeans, purchase it, in so doing purchasing dollars with foreign currency in order to buy the debt. This keeps the dollar stronger. If foreign holdings of foreign debt were to be sold, the dollar would collapse. Or, if as seems to be happening now, foreign governments stop purchasing escalating quantities of debt, the dollar will weaken.

Because the dollar has been propped up, US jobs have moved out of the country to a greater extent than they would have were the dollar not propped up. The effect might be large. No one knows the damage that the de facto pegging has done to higher end US jobs.

Added to the mix is the Federal Reserve Bank’s persistent monetary expansion. Despite the ongoing purchase of the national debt by foreign dollar supporters, the Federal Reserve Bank also has been purchasing national debt. Inflation since 1980 has been close to 4%, which in earlier decades would have seemed very high but has resulted in the curious belief in recent years that 4% inflation = 0% inflation. The Republicans have not helped in this regard, mistakenly claiming that the monetarist policies of Paul Volcker were due to a choice made by Ronald Reagan. That is not exactly right, because Jimmy Carter appointed Volcker and Reagan was elected because the public was angry about economic declines brought about by Volcker’s monetary policies that ultimately stopped hyper-inflation. It is true that the Reagan administration permitted Volcker to continue these policies for two more years without forcing the Keynesian notion of “supply side economics” advocated by the Republican establishment in those years.

Inflation increases the degree to which foreign governments subsidize the US economy. This in turn facilitates consumption, which stimulates demand for retail sales and new homes. It does not stimulate sustainable business growth, though. Ultimately these policies will fail. In the long run, much of America will find itself unemployed, and it will take decades to rebuild a free economy, if all Americans haven’t been brainwashed by the ideologically socialist school system by then.

In 1970, the real hourly wage in the United States was roughly the same as it is today. This is a dismal performance, for before the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank and for five or six decades afterward real wages in the US increased 2 percent per year. This was especially true during the period when there was (a) no Federal Reserve or National Bank and (b) there was the highest amount of innovation in history, between 1836 and 1913. In contrast, the real wage became stagnant at the very time that President Richard M. Nixon (R) abolished all constraints on inflation and encouraged the Fed to inflate in order to boost the stock market and ensure his reelection. The boost-the-stock-market measure of the economy that began in the 1920s was perpetuated during the longest period of real wage stagnation in history, from 1970 through today.

Despite the stagnant real hourly wage, low population density regions such as the Hudson Valley and Catskills have seen massive construction of retail operations that in 1970 were primarily seen in dense suburban areas. That is, less profitable retail operations have been made profitable by two forces. The first, increasing efficiency due to Wal Mart’s, McDonald’s and other firms’ innovation, is very much in the tradition of laissez faire capitalism. The second, low interest rates due to the Federal Reserve Bank’s inflationary policies is more in the tradition of the Soviet Union’s central planning agency, Gosplan. The results of the second force will be the same as in the Soviet Union.

That is, economic growth has not proceeded because of sustainable demand but because of monetary expansion. Thus, much of the American economy now depends on an unsustainable economic bubble. The bubble has been due not only to the Federal Reserve Bank but also due to foreign governments, who have bought into the curious idea that they benefit from having their workers work at very low wages in order to subsidize US consumption.

Income taxation re-enforces the lack of economic growth. Innovation depends on entrepreneurship, but entrepreneurship depends on the accumulation of capital. In the 19th century, entrepreneurs from low-income backgrounds like John D. Rockefeller could start from nothing and save a year’s pay in three years, as Rockefeller did. He used that seed money to purchase a store, and then sold the store to purchase an oil refinery. In the 21st century, half or more of a middle class person’s income goes to tax–sales tax, property tax, income tax, state tax, gasoline tax, etc., etc. As a result, the savings rate has been diverted to greedy teachers and bureaucrats who do not create value. Few “progressives” have ever compared the performance of Rockefeller and the American education establishment. Since 1970, literary, numeracy and other measures have declined as ever more money is thrown at government schools. Between 1865 and 1913, the per barrel price of oil fell dramatically as Rockefeller and his organization innovated relentlessly, vastly improving the American standard of living. It is the education establishment that is greedy. They destroy and do not produce. Rockefeller by comparison was an altruistic saint.

The misallocation of resources and people is vast. It is ironic that the Democratic Party, which is responsible for framing these policies under Franklin D. Roosevelt, is the same party that claims that there is no environmental “sustainability” due to the suburbs or that over-expansion of suburban malls harms the environment. This is the fruit of socialistic planning by the Federal Reserve Bank and the central government. A capitalist economy would have done a much better job of allocating resources between current and future generations. Americans today would be much better off and would have bright prospects, but would not have as wide an array of retail merchandise or jumbo homes.

Larry Schweikart is a professor of history at the University of Dayton, and best-selling author of many books, including A Patriot’s History of the United States. His latest book is 48 Liberal Lies About American History (That You Probably Learned in School).

Schweikart examined the top-selling U.S. history textbooks, along with other resources used in public schools, and found them seriously flawed.  Not only were liberal lies pervasive, so was a negative view of America.  As he writes in the book’s introduction, modern textbooks often portray America as “a racist, sexist, imperialist regime.”  Good news is often omitted, while America’s failings are emphasized.

My last column discussed the findings of the Bradley Project on America’s National Identity as outlined in its report, “E Pluribus Unum.”  Concerned that America is in danger of losing a sense of national identity, the Bradley Project calls upon educators to move away from highlighting what’s wrong with America over what is right, and to promote a shared sense of American identity rather than emphasize our ethnic, racial and religious differences.

But what about the additional issue of liberal bias in textbooks?

Schweikart writes that photographs and their captions can often be good indicators of whether a history textbook has a point of view.  In one of his chapters on Ronald Reagan, Schweikart shows a photo of the Reagans dancing at their inaugural.  Here’s his caption:  “Historians always attach a caption to a picture such as this that mentions how wealthy the Reagans’ supporters were, or how they ushered in a decade of greed.  But all presidents have had grand inaugural balls, and the 1980s witnessed the greatest boom in the nation’s economy for all groups in 60 years, thanks to ‘Reaganomics.’”

So I took a look through the textbook seventh-graders at a school in my area will be using this year to study American history — A History of the US: All the People Since 1945, written by Joy Hakim.

Sure enough, here’s the caption from that textbook under a photo of the Reagans at their inaugural celebration.  “Nancy and Ronald Reagan at one of their inauguration parties, held in Washington’s Air and Space Museum.  A black-tie, mink, and diamond affair, it was the fanciest, most expensive inauguration in American history, costing five times more than Jimmy Carter’s inaugural had.”

Contrast that with the caption under a photo of the Kennedys en route to their inaugural celebration:  “President Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, on their way to the inaugural ball.  Her glamour nearly stole the show.”  (For the record, JFK is in white-tie.)

And what about the Clintons’ inaugural celebrations?  Here’s how the caption reads under a photo of Bill Clinton playing the saxophone: “Newly elected President Bill Clinton plays his saxophone at one of the Inauguration Night balls.  Clinton loves music, especially jazz, and is a strong supporter of music education in public schools.”

Give me a break.  And while such clear bias may be evident when comparing such items side-by-side, as it were, students coming across each captioned picture separately would be left with a different impression.  They would have “learned” that the Reagans socialized with rich people and spent way too much money on their inaugural balls, Jackie Kennedy was glamorous, and Bill Clinton supported music in schools!

Lie #9 in Schweikart’s book concerns the credit given to Mikhail Gorbachev for ending the Cold War, and the almost non-existent credit given to Reagan.  Schweikart quotes from a textbook called Unto a Good Land:  “Perhaps more important [than Reagan], under a new, younger leadership, the Kremlin allowed long-dormant forces of change to emerge and drive the USSR toward democracy and a market economy.”

In that seventh-grade textbook children in my area will be studying this year, there is a chapter called “The End of the Cold War.”  In the discussion of how communism failed as a political and economic system, the only mention of Ronald Reagan is this sentence – in parantheses no less!  “(Trying to keep up with Reagan-era military might have helped do it.)”  So how and why exactly did communism end?  “When the Russian people had had enough, they just threw communism out.”

The textbook tenth-graders will be using in another nearby school is much the same.  Glencoe World History, by Jackson J. Spielvogel, is shocking in the credit it gives to Gorbachev for ending communism.  Listen to this blatant falsehood:  “When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union, the Cold War suddenly ended.  His ‘New Thinking’ — his willingness to rethink Soviet foreign policy — led to stunning changes.”

What are the actual facts which these seventh- and tenth-graders will not learn?  Information from Reagan’s personal diaries makes it clear that he believed communism was repressive, cruel and inhuman. Again, from his diaries, one aspect of it he found particularly repugnant was its denial of religious freedom. So he and his advisers plotted and planned for years with the goal of lifting the yoke of communism from the backs of millions of people peacefully.

What about the National Security Decision Directives the Reagan administration issued in 1982 to bankrupt the Soviet system?  What about the Reagan-approved CIA plan which allowed the Soviets to “steal” high-tech equipment for their oil pipeline, equipment specially designed to fail when it went online?  Talk about a story young students would find fascinating!

As Schweikart puts it:  “Across the board, using American banks and bullets, money and missiles, technology and diplomacy, the United States put a full-court press on the Soviet Union.”   The Soviet economy didn’t just fail.  The fall of communism didn’t suddenly happen.  And the Berlin Wall didn’t crumble of its own accord.  But our children won’t learn the whole truth in school, thanks to the blatantly biased textbooks they study.

But if you really want to get incensed, read what that seventh-grade textbook says about Bill Clinton and Ken Starr.  “When Whitewater didn’t produce any evidence of wrong-doing, special prosecutor Ken Starr turned the investigation from one direction to another.  In the process of doing that, he ignored long-cherished legal traditions – such as the privacy of lawyer-and-client confidences – with chilling power.  But he did find Clinton’s flaw.”

The textbook then sets up Clinton’s eventual impeachment, and his affair with Monica Lewinsky, with this excuse: “Bill Clinton was president when we were still trying to understand new attitudes about morality and sex.  Television and films were bombarding us with images that had once been seen only in private.”  It then lays blame at the feet of Ken Starr and the press:  “In the case of President William Jefferson Clinton, the special prosecutor and the press went far beyond the bounds of good taste or legal necessity in describing the president’s relations with a woman who worked in the White House.  We learned details of his private life that no one wanted to know.  But the dangers of a runaway prosecutor seemed less important than something the president did.  When faced with disturbing accusations about his personal life, Clinton was not honest.”

And trust me, those few examples are only the tip of the iceberg.  The list goes on and on.

So you might want to take a long, hard look through your children’s history textbooks and then prepare for a long, hard fight with the Board of Ed.

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Visit Marcia Segelstein’s blog — she values your comments and ideas!

from State Rep. Bob Pritchard’s (R-Sycamore) weekly newsletter:

The Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago concludes that Illinois is insolvent and may be reaching a tipping point where it will be extremely difficult to reverse the tide of debt and budgetary shortfalls.  Legal experts say the protections of the federal bankruptcy code are available to cities and counties, but not states.

So while a state can’t go bankrupt, we fit the classic definition: Illinois’ liabilities far exceed its assets, while we have an inability to generate enough cash to pay our bills.