February 4, 2012
Blog by John Steigerwald
Here’s a guy who knows how to talk to people -as opposed to reading to them from a teleprompter.
No teleprompter.
No script.
Whatever you think of his message, this is a great communicator.
It’s too bad he’s not running for president.
PART I
PART II
Ever heard of Jamie Gorelick?
She’s a good name for you to know if you are one of those people walking around with the idea that George Bush should be blamed for 9/11 and the economic collapse.
She’s famous for putting up the wall between the CIA and the FBI and possibly preventing the 9/11 plot from being uncovered and she encourged Fannie and Freddie to make more stupid loans so that they could be bundled and sold as securities –the cause of the collapse of the housing bubble and the economic meltdown.
“In 2001, Gorelick made the annoucement that Fannie was buying subprime loans encouraged by the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and bundling them as securitized financial instruments. Securities made from bundles of guaranteed mortgages were to contribute to the economic collapse in 2008. (H/T CNSNews)
“Fannie Mae will buy CRA loans from lenders’ portfolios; we’ll package them into securities; we’ll purchase CRA mortgages at the point of origination; and we’ll create customized CRA-targeted securities,” she said in 2001. “This expanded approach has improved liquidity in the secondary market for CRA product, and has helped our lenders leverage even more CRA lending. Lenders now have the flexibility to use their own, customized loan products.”
In remarks before the American Bankers Association on Oct. 30, 2000, Gorelick explicitly how the procress would work and what Fannie Mae would do to make it feasible for banks to lend to low-income applicants.
“We will take CRA loans off your hands–we will buy them from your portfolios, or package them into securities–so you have fresh cash to make more CRA loans,” she said. “Some people have assumed we don’t buy tough loans. Let me correct that misimpression right now. We want your CRA loans because they help us meet our housing goals.”
She also doctored the records at Fannie Mae to make it possible for her and several other executives to get bonuses. Her’s was worth $800,000.
“Here’s another “fun” Jamie Gorelick story. She was a member of the 9/11 commission but did not share her “wall memo” with anyone until, Attorney General John Ashcroft was blasted for the “wall” while he was testifying before the 9/11 commission and said:
“Although you understand the debilitating impact of the wall, I cannot imagine that the commission knew about this memorandum, so I have declassified it for you and the public to review,” he said. “Full disclosure compels me to inform you that its author is a member of this commission.”
The country will be debating the role of the federal government a lot for the next nine months.
I’ll be interested to hear if a politician is asked during the campaign if he/she thought that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison ever envisioned the federal government being involved in what school kids eat for lunch.
Michelle Obama and the Secretary of Agriculture announced new guidlines for school lunches today.
While they fight over the budget in Washington, maybe they can have a conversation about how many federal employees it will take to ensure that the kids at Penn Hills High School are drinking skim milk and not whole milk.
When did lunch become so tough?
When I was a kid, I took a brown bag. Inside the brown bag was a baloney or chipped ham sandwich, another sandwich bag with a few Wise potato chips and a sandwich bag with three or four of my Aunt Gertrude’s cookies.
My mother would work an apple in there once in a while and I almost always threw it away.
I seem to remember the other kids having the same kinds of things in their lunch bags.
No leafy vegetables (now required by Michelle Obama).
When I got home I was allowed to eat a few more cookies and then it was nothing until we sat down as a family to eat dinner.
I realize things have changed, but here’s something else I realize:
Kids aren’t getting fat from the food they eat at lunch.
They’re getting fat from eating too many meals away from home.
Go to any restaurant and see how busy it is between 5 and 6.
My family wasn’t rich but we weren’t poor, either. We probably ate no more than 20 meals out the entire time I was growing up.
There were no restaurants to take a family other than Eat ‘n Park (interestingly enough founded by my mother’s brother — my Unlce Larry.)
People ate at home. Mothers saw to it that we ate our leafy and un-leafy vegetables.
I don’t know what Mamie Eisenhower and Jackie Kennedy were doing back then but they weren’t worrying about what kids were eating.
It’s not just the kids who are fat. Look around. Everybody is fat.
I’m fat.
You’re probably fat.
I’m losing weight now. Charles Barkley got me with those Weightwatchers for Men ads.
I’m 15 pounds overweight because I had been eating like a pig. And I don’t go to school.
The kids are getting fat because their parents are fat and the parents are fat because they eat out too much.
So, if Michelle and Barack really want to do something for the children, they should send out the National Guard and shut down about 90% of the restaurants in America.
Let’s hire federal agents to knock on people’s doors during the dinner hour and make sure that they’re eating home cooked meals. No take out. No pizza.
The scary thing is, I think they might consider that if they thought they could get away with it.
It would make as much sense as spending billions of dollars supervising school cafeterias.
Joe Biden and Barack Obama like to talk a lot about looking out for the less fortunate.
They think you should be forced to help out your fellow man.
But they (and Al Gore –remember him?– ) like to be charitable with your money- not their own.
“USA Today broke it down here. In 2007, the Obamas gave more than $240,000 to charity, about 5.7 percent of their income. The Bidens gave an average of $369 to charity a year for the decade before he moved to the Naval Observatory – about 0.3 percent of their income. Back in 1997, then veep Al Gore and his then wife Tipper gave $353.
Since becoming veep, Biden hasn’t become much more generous. In 2010, he gave $5,350, about 1.4 percent of income. That same year, Romney gave some $3 million. The national average is about three percent.”
The moral of the Mitt Romney tax return saga is –or should be — that how much money we make should be nobody’s business but our own and especially not the government’s.
If the fact that Rommney’s tax return took 550 pages isn’t enough to show how ridiculous our tax system is, we’re all doomed.
Here’s some more information for class envy fans from the Wall Street Journal:
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“When Mitt Romney releases his tax returns, as he is expected to do on Tuesday, thousands of green eyeshades will pour over every line. One of the most important revelations, however, may be overlooked. When double taxation of investment income is taken into account, Mr. Romney most likely underestimated his effective tax rate on the campaign trail.
The former Bain Capital CEO and Massachusetts governor caused a brouhaha last week when he estimated the tax rate on his investment income at 15%. “How unfair!” pundits exclaimed, noting that the top marginal rate for wage income is more than 30%.
The tax rate on investors is unfair, but for the opposite reason. Our tax code layers taxation of dividends and capital gains on top of a top corporate tax rate of 35%—which even President Obama acknowledges is one of the highest in the world.
This is ironically the embodiment of the “corporate personhood” legal doctrine otherwise so decried by the left. The law taxes corporations as if they were separate beings from the shareholders who own them and then levies a separate tax on shareholder payouts and gains. This double taxation brings the effective tax rate on investment income to as much as 44.75%.
In other words, after the combined top tax rates hit $100 of corporate income, $55.25 remains for the investor. And this figure doesn’t even include various state and local taxes, or the death tax. Moreover, like the rest of us, Mr. Romney paid income taxes before investing, except on pretax contributions such as an IRA or 401(k). ► Read the entire op-ed, Romney and the Burden of Double Taxation.
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Call me crazy, but I think a guy, who makes over $20 million a year from his investmentS, has a pretty good idea of how the economy and business work.
The Class Envy Crowd will be whining that he made too much money and that it’s “unfair.”
Despite the whining, I still don’t know what the CEC proposes to do about it.
To me, it’s criminal that the government is given the power to take almost half of what someone earns.
There are people out there who think that almost half isn’t enough.
So, how much should he get to keep — 25%?
How about capping his income at $15 million and forcing him to give every dime over that number to the government?
After seeing the return on Romney’s investments, how could anyone think that it would be better if the money he would invest would go to the federal government?
Based on those numbers, I have a feeling that Romney has created more jobs and done more for the economy than any politician in Washington.