United Liberty

The Senate passed Porkulus III by a vote of 70-28 with 13 Republicans demonstrating their party’s new found fiscal conservatism by crossing over to vote with every Democrat present for the bill. Like the first Porkulus signed by George W. Bush in 2008 and the Porkulus II passed last year, Porkulus III forks over billions of borrowed dollars to fund various special interest projects and tax gimmicks in the name of “creating jobs”.

The gimmicks funded in this lastest round of Porkulus include a tax holiday for the remainder of the year on Social Security payroll taxes, but only if the company hires someone out of work for more than 60 days. In addition, Porkulus commits to billions in in more mass transit spending and more highway projects (ie. more pork barrel spending).

The Senate’s version of Porkulus must be sent over to the House where it must be reconciled with the House’s much more expansive $154 billion Porkulus bill. However, the Senate plans to pass more items in the House’s bill one at a time so that Senate Majority Harry Reid and other Democrat leaders can find out how much the prices of the votes of “fiscally conservative” Republicans are.

Included are proposed Senate bills giving away corporate welfare to ethanol producers, which is expected to be supported by farm state Republicans. In addition, there is another planned Senate bill to keep Americans out of work longer by extending unemployment benefits and COBRA.

The RINOs who supported Porkulus III today are:

Part of our school day today included watching a DVD of the classic School House Rock cartoons that many of us grew up watching on Saturday mornings.  I was delighted when, after watching the one that talked about the wonderful opportunity we all have to pay our fair share of income taxes on April 15th, my daughter exclaimed, “Mom, this is wrong.  They’re saying that taxes are good!”

Music to my ears…

However, I found the next video interesting- Tyrannosaurus Debt- which compared the national debt to the appetite of a rather sizable dinosaur.  What surprised me was the direct correlation made between wartime and the increase of debt.

Classic parody of an infomercial offering common sense we could all benefit from.

Schiff points out that civil unrest is coming if the government continues to focus on the symptoms of inflation and not the solution.

For years liberals, conservatives, independents, DC, Main Street and Wall Street seemingly defied all normality and not only embraced, but nearly worshiped the same individual, Alan Greenspan. After rising in 1987 to the position of Chairman of the Federal Reserve, the most powerful financial position in the world, he presided over the most sustained period of economic growth in the history of America. He rode the wave of private sector technological achievements that created abnormally high productivity growth. To many it was his greatness that brought about the increase in income, increase in homeownership, increase in credit, increase in all things material — while still maintaining price stability.

While during these times of financial instability most of our attention turns to Wall Street and Washington, the fiscal policies that our individual governors persue can greatly lessen or worsen the situation within our given states. The Cato Institute recently released their 2008 Fiscal Report Card for American Governors. The criteria is fairly straight forward. Tax and/or spending increases lower the governors’ scores, while tax and/or spending cuts will raise them.

Today the Federal Reserve invoked “Emergency Powers” in order to further expand its reach into the economy. There are many inherent problems with central banking. There are even more problems with central management of the day to day workings of the economy. Seeing the recent devastation in the credit markets - which was mostly created by the FED - the FED has been trying desperately to contain the situation, but its traditional policies are just showing little to no results.