Posts Tagged ‘Economy’
August 19th, 2010 by John Feehery
US Soldiers in Iraq
I was talking to my good friend Alex Mistri, a man who spent a year working for the military and the State Department in Iraq, and I asked him what he thought about departure of combat troops from that beleaguered country.
He told me he was deeply ambivalent. He wished that the president had a just a little more patience to give the Iraqis a chance to get their coalition government together. On the one hand, he was happy to see that our policies over there have worked and that many of our troops are coming home knowing that they did a good job. On the other hand, he is deeply apprehensive that the cake isn’t ready yet, and by leaving, we give extremists a chance to destabilize the country.
I share Alex’s deep ambivalence. I share Alex’s pride in the job our combat troops did in battling terrorists and stabilizing large sections of a country that has been in constant turmoil for almost a decade. But this thing is not over, and I hope that the president didn’t rush this for political reasons. Read more...
Tags: Alex mistri, Barack Obama, Democrats, Economy, George W Bush, Iraq, Republicans, war
Posted in Politics, Theory, war | No Comments »
August 4th, 2010 by John Feehery
It is unclear whether the paddy wagon got its name from the Irish who were hauled off in police wagons in the late 19th century or from the Irish cops who threw them in there in the first place.
What is clear is that when the Irish descended upon America starting in the 1840’s, it created social disruption, political chaos, and a crime wave for a generation.
My great great grandfather on my father’s side was one of those Paddys who came to New York fleeing a desperate potato famine in the 1840’s, and while I don’t know for sure if old Tom Feehery ever ended up in a paddy wagon, I know for sure that some of his friends probably did. Tom Feehery was a legal immigrant, but old Joe Hurley (my mother’s grandfather) probably wasn’t.
The No-Nothing Party was founded as a reaction to the Irish masses. It didn’t do much to stop them though, and pretty soon the Irish were running the big cities, dominating the police forces and fire departments, and making in-roads into the Democratic party North of the Mason-Dixon line. Read more...
Tags: America, Arizona, Economy, George W Bush, illegal immigrants, Immigration, Woodrow Wilson
Posted in Economy, Foreign Relations, GOP, Government, Theory | No Comments »
July 14th, 2010 by John Feehery
One of my wife’s favorite hobbies is taking out the laptop and shopping online. She can buy clothes for my son, she can shop for shoes, she can get great deals at a variety of stores, and she can do it without paying pesky local taxes.
That is because under U.S. law, local and state government can’t collect taxes on Internet sales. That may start to change under the Democrats in Congress.
As Congress left to go on the 4th of July recess, Representative Bill Delahunt, a Democrat from Massachusetts, introduced a bill that requires small businesses to collect sales tax on Internet transactions.
Delahunt announced that he was retiring at the end of the year, which may explain why he is taking the lead on this unpopular issue.
The bill was referred to the Judiciary Committee, because while this bill concerns taxes, it is first and foremost a bill about federalism.
Does a locality have the right to tax a business that isn’t located in its jurisdiction?
Does a state have the right to raise taxes on companies that don’t do anything other than import products into the state? Read more...
Tags: Economy, internet, shopping, small business, taxes
Posted in Economy, taxes | 1 Comment »
June 24th, 2010 by John Feehery
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Like many college students, I struggled mightily to understand what the hell Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was trying to say in his very dense philosophical texts. Since I don’t read German, I wouldn’t say that I ever really got there.
But what I got out of Hegel was the Hegelian dialectic. Now, many philosophers say that the Hegelian dialectic wasn’t really Hegel’s at all, but Kant’s. That may be true, but I don’t care, because I still call Hegel’s dialectic Hegel’s.
And from what I remember from my college philosophy class from Hegel is that the march of history starts with a proposition, known as the thesis, and from that proposition comes the counter, known as the antithesis, and from the conflict of the thesis and the anti-thesis comes the synthesis, which symbolizes progress.
Hegel used the French revolution as an example. First, you have the revolt against the French monarchy. After the revolution came the Reign of Terror. And only after the Reign of terror, came a Constitutional society that values the rights of individual citizens.
I was thinking about the Hegelian dialectic in the context of the current political climate in America. Read more...
Tags: Barack Obama, Democrats, Economy, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegelian dialectic, Republicans, White House
Posted in Government, Politics, Theory | 1 Comment »
May 27th, 2010 by John Feehery
Planet getting eaten (Credit: ESA/C Carreau)
I was watching television this morning and CNN was alternating between video of the great Gulf leak and a video from the Hubble telescope of a planet getting eaten by a bigger star.
So, the message is if we don’t all kill ourselves, well, then a big star is going to eat us all any way.
On that cheery note, let me add another.
America is doomed. At least, that is the message that we get all too often from both the left and the right.
We are going broke. Our workforce isn’t competitive. People in the rest of the world hate us. We can’t plug the damn hole. We have too many immigrants coming into this country. Crime is too high. Our military is stretched too far. We are too fat. We are too old. We are too young.
And of course, we better all start speaking Chinese soon, because the Chinese are so rich, they work so hard, they are so smart, and there are so many of them, that we really can’t compete. America is doomed.
Really? Put me down as an America-is-doomed skeptic. Read more...
Tags: Al Gore, Barack Obama, Brazil, china, Chinese, Christian right, Conservatives, Economy, Europe, India, Politics, poor, Tea Party, Tom Friedman, USA, WASP-12b
Posted in Economy, Financial Crisis, Foreign Relations, GOP, Government, Politics, Theory | 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 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 13th, 2010 by John Feehery
My golf game is terrible. I would like to blame my 4 year old son for the fact that my game has deteriorated so rapidly over the past five years, but as Jimmy Buffett might say, “Some people say that there’s a little boy to blame, but I know, it’s my own damn fault.”
I had a chance to play golf with a guy earlier this week whose golf game is just as bad as mine. I had never seen more shanks in my life than I saw from Brendan Quinn, a friend of mine, whose game is in pretty lousy shape. But he has an even better excuse than I do. He has five kids, one who was just born a couple months ago.
Brendan has a lot on his mind, his fivesome being just part of the story. He is the successful owner of a concrete block company (they make concrete blocks), and as he said during the game, he is lucky to live in our nation’s capital, where business is still pretty good. Read more...
Tags: Congress, dollar, Economy, lending, small business
Posted in Economy | No Comments »
April 28th, 2010 by John Feehery
Martin Michael Lomasney, a Boston politician from the 19th Century, once said: “”Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink.”
Being from Chicago, I was taught that lesson by more a few political types. The Washington corollary to that admonition is: “Never write down anything that you wouldn’t be happy to see on the front page of the Washington Post.”
I bet you that the fabulous Fab, the Goldman Sachs wunderkind, Fabrice Tourre, wish he would have remembered those golden nuggets of advice.
It was the fabulous Fab who wrote in an email: “The whole building is about to collapse any time now. Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab . . . standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstrosities!!!”
That Fab is a cad goes without doubt.
But he isn’t the only one who failed to heed the advice of fabulous Martin Michael Lomasney.
Think of Tiger Woods. If he wasn’t text crazy, there would be no reason for his wife Elin to beat him with a seven iron, because Elin would have been none the wiser. No text, no bruise, no crash, no rehab, no problem. Read more...
Tags: CDO, Economy, Fabrice Tourre, Fabulous Fab, Goldman-Sachs, Jack Abramoff, Justice Department, Martin Michael Lomasney, tiger woods
Posted in Financial Crisis, Politics, Theory, corruption | No Comments »
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