September 10th, 2010 by John Feehery
We live in a fine print world.
The devil is in the details, as the saying goes, and boy, the devil is having a field day these days.
You leave your phone on while you travel into a foreign country, and the next thing you know you are facing bankruptcy because of excessive roaming charges. When you complain, hey, you should know better. It’s in the fine print.
You pay a day late on your credit card; the bank slaps you with a huge late payment fee. When you complain, hey, you should know better. It’s in the fine print.
You have to change your flight because of a family emergency, but the airline makes you pay through the nose for privilege. When you complain, hey, you should have known better. It’s in the fine print.
You use a social networking site for fun, and all of sudden, you get deluged with all kinds of crazy advertisers. When you complain, hey, you should have known better. It’s in the fine print. Read more...
Tags: credit cards, government healthcare, rip offs, Social Media, the fine print
Posted in Government, Liberal Media, Media, Politics, Social Media, Theory, health care, spending | No Comments »
July 29th, 2010 by John Feehery
In 2001, right after President Bush took office, his people pushed hard for Speaker Hastert to pass through a huge tax cut. The economy was slowing down as the tech bubble burst, and the Bush team wanted a big enough tax cut to jump start economic growth.
Hastert was entering his third year as Speaker, and he had been through several different tax fights with Mr. Bush’s predecessor, Bill Clinton.
What Hastert learned in his fights with Clinton is that it is far better to talk about the actual policy than it is to talk about big numbers. In other words, it was better to talk about getting rid of the marriage penalty, getting rid of the death tax, lowering the cost of investment, giving families with kids help with a child tax credit, and branding business tax cuts as ways to create jobs.
The new Bush Administration wanted to push through a big tax cut early, but Hastert insisted that the House methodically communicate as it legislated by breaking up the big tax cut into its smaller parts. And on each one of its parts, a substantial number of Democrats joined with Republicans to enact the Bush tax cut agenda, not because they wanted to, but because they had to. Read more...
Tags: Bill Clinton, Congress, Democrats, Dennis Hastert, George H.W. Bush, Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter
Posted in Politics, spending, taxes | No Comments »
July 19th, 2010 by John Feehery
Jake Tapper Interviews Joe Biden on This Week / Photo via ABCnews.com
Sometimes, I just want to strangle Ronald McDonald.
From approximately 2 in the afternoon yesterday until about 8 o’clock yesterday night, my four-year old son had one message and one message only. He wanted to go to Old McDonald.
Old McDonald – as he likes to call the place where you get the Big Mac – serves Happy Meals, and apparently, the Happy Meal is the only thing that makes my son happy these days.
So, for every fifteen minutes, at various pitches and voice levels, my son requested that we go to Old McDonald’s and get a Happy Meal.
On one level, the discourse between my son and me was extraordinarily frustrating. I knew that he wasn’t going to get a Happy Meal yesterday, and he knew he wasn’t going to get a Happy Meal yesterday, but that didn’t stop him from requesting it on a fairly regular basis.
But on the other level, the message discipline that came from little Jack was very impressive. He stuck to his message, no matter how ineffective it turned out to be. Read more...
Tags: Bush administration, Democrats, economic stimulus, Jake Tapper, Joe Biden, McDonald's, Recovery Summer, Republicans, This Week
Posted in GOP, Government, Politics, spending | No Comments »
July 8th, 2010 by John Feehery
If you Google the search term “water main break,” you get close to 6 million hits.
In the Washington D.C. area, the suburb of Potomac is dealing with a huge water main break that has spewed water 50 feet in the air.
That is nothing compared to the water main break in Boston last month, which nearly created a panic for Red Sox fans everywhere.
Philly had a bad water main break, as did Los Angeles, Detroit, Muncie, Richmond, Hackensack, Atlanta, Cleveland, Stamford, and Pittsburgh. Odds are that a water main broke at a town near you.
Water is one of those things that we all need to survive.
Earth is about 75 percent water and muscles in the human body have about the same percentage, so without water, we are basically screwed.
Delivering water is an essential government responsibility. Governments that don’t come up with an effective water allocation plan are completely useless and tend to collapse quickly.
When a water main breaks, it puts a tremendous strain on local governments, especially these days when most of them are going broke anyway. Read more...
Tags: Atlanta, Barack Obama, Cleveland, Detroit, Federal budget, Hackensack, health care law, Los Angeles, Muncie, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Stamford, water, water main break
Posted in Government, Politics, spending | No Comments »
June 10th, 2010 by John Feehery
Greece / Photo credit: Ulamm
In actuality, there isn’t much in common between the United States and the Greeks.
That was the conclusion of a distinguished panel of economists hosted by the American Action Forum and led by former CBO director Doug Holtz-Eakin.
But if we don’t get our act together soon, things could get steadily worse for the economy and for the American people, and while we probably won’t default on our debt (because we can always print more money), it won’t be very pleasant around here unless we start making some fundamental changes
Senator Judd Gregg, a longtime deficit hawk and current ranking member of the upper chamber’s Budget Committee, keynoted the forum, wryly pointing out in his presentation that western Democracies founded on the Scottish Enlightenment philosophy of free market capitalism and representative government (which, of course, would include the UK, the US, and Japan) are having the hardest time dealing with debt.
Totalitarian regimes, like the Chinese and the Cubans, don’t have our debt problems, because in the case of the Chinese, they work hard and have a government that is immune to public opinion, and in the case of the Cubans, nobody sane would lend the large amounts of money in the first place. Read more...
Tags: Andy Busch, china, Cuba, Dean Baker, Debt, doug holtz eakin, Government, Greece, health care, judd gregg, Politics, spending
Posted in Economy, Financial Crisis, Government, health care, spending | 2 Comments »
May 26th, 2010 by John Feehery
Photo credit: Henry Brisse
In 2005, Paramount released a movie starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz called The Constant Gardener.
This post has absolutely nothing to do with that movie.
I was thinking about gardening when I was sweeping up the berries from my neighbor’s obnoxious tree, which spews smelly, ugly, messy berries every spring.
Like gardening, it requires constant work to keep my back patio clean.
To be a successful gardener (and believe me, I am not a successful gardener), you have to be constantly working to keep the flowers properly watered and pruned. You also have to constantly work to fight off the weeds. If you don’t, the weeds will eventually take over the garden, and the garden will be lost.
This isn’t a column about gardening. It is a column about government growth.
Like a garden, the government requires constant pruning. The weeds of government (or wasteful, Washington spending) can take over the whole government if there isn’t a constant gardener who is working to prune and cut and pull out the bad spending.
But there isn’t a constant gardener in the federal government, whose sole job is to get rid of wasteful spending. Read more...
Tags: Congress, Congressional Budget Office, Economy, General Accountability Office, K Street, Lobbyist, Office of Management and Budget, Politics, spending
Posted in Government, Politics, Theory, spending | No Comments »
May 19th, 2010 by John Feehery
Photo credit: Jamie Adams
It was interesting to go to a Ways and Means Committee meeting on the possibilities and pitfalls of online gambling in the aftermath of Rand Paul’s huge victory in Kentucky.
Paul is a libertarian, and by definition should be in favor of doing away with the prohibition of online gambling. His father, Ron Paul, is a co-sponsor of legislation that would do just that.
Paul also has ample reason to change the current Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. The law could have a negative impact on para-mutual horse race betting, an industry important to the home state of Churchill Downs.
The hearing exposed both the philosophical and practical problems with the current law. Philosophically, as Republican primary voters are clamoring for more freedom from the federal government, this law says simply that American adults are not capable of handling the temptation of Internet gambling.
Now, that may be true for a small percentage of Americans. And it may be true that a small percentage of Americans can’t handle the temptation of sniffing glue. But we don’t ban glue because of those fateful few whom have decided that sniffing it is the best use of glue. Nor should we use the resources of the federal government to throw people in jail because they want to play poker in their own homes. Read more...
Tags: Kentucky, Libertarian, online gambling, Rand Paul, Ron Paul, Ways and Means Committee
Posted in Capitalism, Economy, Politics, election, spending | No Comments »
May 17th, 2010 by John Feehery
“Every golf shot makes somebody happy.”
I thought about that old sport adage when driving in this morning and listening to a radio commercial about foreclosures. This ad wasn’t about how to avoid foreclosure. It was about how to take advantage of somebody else’s foreclosure.
Foreclosures are an unhappy reality in today’s struggling economy. It is an unhappy circumstance for those who can’t afford their mortgage payments and are getting kicked out of their house.
It is an unhappy circumstance for the bank which has to kick the non-payers out of the house and then take a bath on the remainder of the loan, which won’t be paid off.
And it is an unhappy circumstance for the neighbors, who see a foreclosed property and immediately assume that the neighborhood is going to the dogs.
But it is not an unhappy circumstance for those who are looking for a house bargain.
And who would that be?
A new family who couldn’t buy a house in the overheated market five years ago. A new retiree who is looking to downsize. An expanding family that needs more space for all the kids. Read more...
Tags: Economy, foreclosures, golf, housing, loan, market, mortgage
Posted in Economy, Politics, Theory, housing crisis, spending | No Comments »
May 14th, 2010 by John Feehery
In 1921, the Congress first started thinking about doing a budget. It passed the Budget and Accounting Act legislation that first directed the President to submit a budget. It also created the General Accounting Office (which a couple of years ago changed its name to the General Accountability Office), an agency tasked with making certain that federal dollars were spent wisely.
When in the 1970’s, Richard Nixon decided he had the power to impound funds that he didn’t want to spend (his version of the line-item veto), Congress reacted by passing the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, legislation that created the Congressional Budget Office and created the modern budget process, if you can call it a process.
Under this law that passed more than three decades ago, the Congress is supposed to pass a budget resolution, to outline how it is going to spend money and raise revenue for the next half decade or so. The budget resolution is not a law because it is not signed by the President, but the purpose of it is law-like. The budget is not just a set of suggestions. Sure it can be waived in emergencies, but they have to be big ones (like war, pestilence or natural disasters, that kind of thing). Read more...
Tags: Budget, Congress, Congressional Budget Office, Economy, election, Greece, spending
Posted in Financial Crisis, Politics, Theory, election, spending | 1 Comment »
May 11th, 2010 by John Feehery
A little more than 2300 years ago, Alexander the Great rampaged out of Greece into Asia Minor, and Greek civilization reached its largest sphere of influence. A few centuries later, the Romans followed suit, and Western civilization would forever be formed in the minds of the Europeans and the world.
After Roman civilization declined, Europe went through some murky times in the Dark Ages, but soon the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the ideas of free market capitalism, industrialism, scientific progress, democracy and financial innovation made Western nations the most powerful in the world. The Spanish, the Portuguese, Dutch, the French, the English, the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians all took turns establishing different spheres of influence and empires of different sizes and shapes.
The 20th Century was tough on the Europeans. Two world wars decimated its wealth and vibrancy (and growth, especially population growth), and for the last half of the century, the continent was dominated by two non-European powers (the Americans and the Russians). The once dominant European powers were pawns in a Cold War chess match that featured a former colony squaring off against a backward, Communist behemoth. Read more...
Tags: Austro-Hungarians, debts, Dutch, English, European Union, French, Germans, Germany, Greece, Greek civilization, Portuguese, Spanish
Posted in Financial Crisis, Foreign Relations, Theory, spending | No Comments »
We live in a fine print world.
Loading ...