“Democratic leaders should be asking themselves just how they have gotten to the point that their strategy is to amend a law that doesn’t exist yet by passing a bill without voting on it.”
Yuval Levin (National Review Online)
Lawyers Eat Their Young
Just in case it wasn’t already crystal clear to you before today, Nancy Pelosi has again reveals the dangerous mindset of the progressive liberal. They always know better and a federal government filled with them can manage your life far better than you can.
It took courage for Congress to pass Social Security and Medicare, which eventually became highly popular, she said, “and many of the same forces that were at work decades ago are at work again against this bill.”
If the last year has taught the average American anything, it is the reality of just how well the federal government has managed the Ponzi scheme that is Social Security, and just how well the federal goverment has managed Medicare. The average American now understands that both of them were unsustainable ideas from the beginning and that today both are essentially broke. But that doesn’t stop progressives.
“We’re not here just to self-perpetuate our service in Congress,” she said. “We’re here to do the job for the American people.”
“Time is up. We really have to go forth.”
So even though the American people have clearly said, no, Madame, we don’t want some more, the Speaker of the Nuthouse thinks it’s time for all the Democrat to join hands, damn the reelections, and full-steam ahead shove socialized medicine down America’s throat. She and her ilk continue to live in a fantasy world where we, the people, are just a bunch of drooling imbeciles, unable to comprehend what we read and see and to then form our own opinions about it.
“The Republican Party directs a lot of what the Tea Party does, but not everybody in the Tea Party takes direction from the Republican Party. And so there was a lot of, shall we say, Astroturf, as opposed to grassroots.”
And Congress wonders why over 75% of Americans now disapprove of them? And why Obama’s job approval rating is now running neck-and-neck with the number who disapprove of the job he’s doing?
They remind me of a bumper sticker I once saw. It read, “Lawyers eat their young.”
We Need A Party Of “NO”
Though the GOP continues to be portrayed by the mainstream media (as egged on by the Democrats) as a bunch of mean-spirited, miserly old white people whose favorite pasttime is saying “No” just for the sake of saying “No”, the polls show clearly that even the most average of Americans now feels that the federal government is way out of control and a clear majority disapprove of Congress. Everyone in Congress.
So it seems to me that just like any good employer whose employees have taken to holding open-bar tailgate parties and hosting strippers in their cubes, funding them out of the petty cash or charging them to their business credit card, the correct response to any further requests for any kind of non-essential spending is “No.” In fact, I’d to so far as to say, “Hell no. And while we’re talking, pack your personal things and don’t let the door hit you on the ass as this nice security guard escorts you out of my building.”
And as every a astute parent will tell you, “no” is a perfectly fine word. It is what shapes our world by helping us define our boundaries, it is part and parcel of the rules of any game. In the same way you don’t let your teenager head off in a car full of their friends if those friends are drunk by using the word, “no”, so, too, should the GOP and any reasonably sane Blue Dog Democrat be saying no every time the far left-wingnuts propose more “I won”-drunken and therefore dangerous spending.
One example is the so-called “jobs bill”. It’s nothing more than Obama’s coveted “second stimulus” in populist clothing. While our economy needs a big shot of tax breaks, cuts, and even those stinky little taxpayer loans to the feds euphemistically referred to as tax “credits”, these are easily accomplished by simply writing them up as such and passing them through Congress. It’s so simple even a child could do it.
Instead, what His Transparency has set forth is just one more charge against the already-unfathomable national debt. Sure, there are tax credits and a few tax breaks, but when the first unstimulating stimulus hasn’t even been spent, what the hell do we need to spend billions more for now on “shovel-ready” projects that mysteriously didn’t manifest the first time around? Particularly troubling is that some of it comes as a direct attack on the insurance companies, paid for with the tax dollars of future generations. He’s building then riding a wave of angst over what are in truth rather justifiable health insurance premium increases in a state so broke due to the expansiveness of its coddling entitlement programs that include illegal immigrants that even its IOUs aren’t any good any more in order to sneak into place another piece of the puzzle being put together to socialize American medicine. And if that’s too hard to get your brain cell around, just what does regulating the insurance companies have to do with creating jobs, anyhow? If anything, this will kill jobs in the insurance industry, aka the private sector and replace them with yet more federal bureaucrats.
I don’t know about you, but it makes my head spin. The one thing of which I am certain, however, is that if America is to survive we must have the word “No!” ringing out loud and clear. Every time something is proposed that requires more government employees (meaning, it costs money), the GOP and Blue Dogs should be standing up and shouting “No!”. That is what the majority of we, the people, desperately want. That is what this beloved country desperately needs. Contrary to the affirmatively-graduated Ivy League stated opinion that Americans somehow just don’t understand the elitist prattlings teleprompting their way down to the great unwashed masses from the upper levels of the federal government, the majority of American people are not stupid. Even if Congress doesn’t bother to read the legislation they slap together under cover of darkness, we do. And no matter how slowly you state your case, no matter what pretty words you use to try and put a positive spin on it, if it costs money and especially when it infringes on our privacy and our liberties, the bottom line is that we don’t want it.
That’s the big mistake that Scott Brown made. While no one expected a true, Constitutional Conservative to come out of the state of Massachusetts, his vote to end debate over President Walking Eagle’s “jobs bill” showed clearly that he doesn’t get it.
What we, the American people, want is NO.
- No more spending
- No more taxes
- No more pork
- No more entitlements
- No more closed-door deals
- No more special interests
- No more federal bureaucracy
And more importantly, no more lies.
If members of the GOP were wise, they would clean up their act and then wear every single “NO” as a badge of honor.
The Third Rail Of Obamacare
We all knew the first big, fat, unread “stimulus” bill shoved through by the Democrats last year would be useless and some had noticed it contained frightening encroachments upon American liberties. And even though all the money from the first “stimulus” hasn’t even been spent, the Democrats are ramming another one through Congress under the wolfskin guise of “jobs”. But this one is not only going to be more more wasted money, it is, in fact, the death blow to the foundation of freedom upon which this country was founded.
Starve The Beast
The annual tax filing season is in full swing again and most of us are going to get a refund from the federal government. But have you ever thought about just what that money represents? Tragically, it’s nothing more than your very own personal interest-free loan to the feds. Every week the federal government takes money out of your paycheck as an incremental payment against what you agree to pay them as a portion of your annual income to cover those things with which the Constitution charges the federal government to do (i.e. maintain the military). But for most of us, after just a few months of making those little incremental payments, we’ve satisfied our annual tax obligation. Yet for the rest of the year we continue to hand over our money to the federal government for no other reason than that’s just the way it’s always been done. Then we get all excited about the “big refund” we’re going to get come April 15th. Money that is nothing more than repayment of the money we have loaned the federal goverment, but for which they don’t even pay us interest.
Folks, that’s insanity. The federal government not only spends the money we agree to pay them on our income, they run off and spend all the money we loan to them, too. And they do this with every penny we will owe and will loan them years and years into the future. Right now they are spending money based on pure speculation of how much we’ll be obligated to pay them and how much we’ll be loaning them in the future. But as people continue to lose their jobs, the federal government collects fewer and fewer income taxes yet is still obligated to pay back those unemployed workers part of their money through unemployment benefits, just like they are obligated to return our loaned money to us. And that’s just one small, very simplistic example.
Let’s put it in real world terms. What would happen if someone gave you more money than they owed you and you spent it all? Your income doesn’t leave you with any extra money so when they come asking for it you’d have to borrow from Paul, wouldn’t you? If you didn’t cut back somewhere and save, but instead continued to spend money like you had all the original money given to you, when your loan from Paul comes due, eventually you’d end up robbing Peter to pay him. That kind of personal fiscal irresponsibility made headlines last year and created the slogan, “Your mortgage is not my problem”, yet that’s exactly how the federal goverment, Congress-driven, handles our country’s finances.
One more time: that’s insanity.
His Transparency and the Demons in Congress are now all a-buzz with what they are calling a “jobs bill”, which in truth is nothing more than a second stimulus package; no matter that the first stimulus was, for all intents and purposes, a failure and that much of it is simply being held back until later this year in order to try to force some of their “oops!”-derived numbers to go up right before the mid-term elections, hoping better numbers will help their cronies stay in office. Frankly, that kind of game at the expense of every hard-working American ought to be reason enough to vote the incumbents out of office, but I digress.
This second stimulus-aka-“jobs bill” contains no real help for ordinary Americans. It rides on various and sundry tax credits, but we all know (or we should all know by now) that tax credits are not the same as tax cuts; credits are just another form of that interest-free money loan by working Americans to the federal government. So instead of waiting for the mercy of Congress and the feds to let you keep that which you have honestly earned, it’s time for every Patriot to do their part and begin to starve the beast into proper submission.
This is by no means a new idea and we’re not the first to propose it but it’s very, very simple. If you normally get a federal tax refund, just adjust your W-4 to increase the number of dependents used to calculate the amount of money taken out of your paycheck to cover your federal tax obligation. Every increase in the number of federal dependents claimed on your W-4 (not the same as what you are allowed to put on your annual federal filing) will keep a few more of your own dollars in your pocket.* If every working American sent just a minimum amount less to the federal government by, say, increasing their number of W-4 dependents by a count of one, from my guesstimate calculations using the current number of employed Americans and the average annual income in the private sector, it would add up to a few billion dollars. A drop in the bucket compared to what they spend every day, sure, but it would give our government another clear sign we are tired of them spending what they don’t have and we will no longer loan them our hard-earned monies to use as some phantom hedge to promise more and more ridiculous entitlement programs. We’ll keep more of our money in our own pockets to help us pay our own obligations, which as every study of tax cuts shows, does the most to stimulate the economy.
* Reducing the amount taken out of your paycheck for federal taxes correspondingly decreases your federal tax refund the following year so don’t go crazy here because you will be penalized at tax time if at least a minimum amount isn’t automatically sent to the feds; consult a tax advisor if you have questions.
Health Care Jihadists
If one clings fervently to a particular ideology, we call them zealots. Those who go too far are called a terrorist. In the same way some Muslims wage their jihad, or “holy war” against America, so too does the current administration wage its own health care jihad against the American people.
Obama spent a great deal of time “explaining” the legislative nonsense that came out of the progressive liberal Democrats’ closets during his State of the Union address and all but demanded: “Do not walk away from reform. Not now. Not when we are so close.”
His front man, Robert Gibbs, said: “We’re still inside the five-yard line. We’re one vote away in the House of Representatives from making health care a reality. Health care reform a reality.”
And, of course, the Speaker of the Nuthouse talks about it in the squirreliest terms of all: “We go through the gate. If the gate’s closed, we’ll go over the fence. If the fence is too high we’ll pole-vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in but we’re going to get health care reform passed for the American people.”
No matter that poll after poll after poll shows the average American citizen backing further and further away from anything proposed about health care reform in the House or Senate and a solid majority now wish they’d drop the idea altogether; these progressive liberal zealots simply cannot shake free of their fanatical need to impose their will. While I cannot fathom this kind of insanity, I cannot help but wonder if there is perhaps a Divine hand at work keeping Gitmo from closing, for surely these people need to be locked away.
Maybe They’re Starting To Notice?
So many Americans have been raising their voices in a chorus ranging from displeasure to outright anger for a year now but time and time again the administration simply ignores them. Even when a million-odd citizens gathered on the Mall on 9/12 to protest the ever-increasing size of the federal government, the administration claimed they didn’t notice. Indeed, President Walking Eagle made it a point to leave town.
It’s discouraging, to be sure, when phone calls go unanswered, mail responses are simply canned campaign-like responses, and face-to-face encounters go unacknowledged except as an excuse for the mainstream media to show off the more vulgar side of their limited vocabulary. But there may be hope. For not only was the Massachusetts special election just too big to be ignored, but the reasons behind it may actually start to be sinking in. Though not exactly in a straight, forward direction.
David Axelrod stated that “in this weird political season, we have become accustomed to unusual outbursts” in the House during presidential speeches.
I suppose that if you’re of the opinion that Government Knows Best, then having your self-proclaimed authority challenged might very well be considered unusual. But I personally find it incredibly refreshing that ordinary citizens, like you and me, are finally beginning to participate more fully in the grand old glory that is the process of governing the Republic. Our unique system of checks and balances provides for debate and there isn’t a damned thing wrong with an honest rebuttal. But I suppose the key word there is “honest”. As we, the people, slowly regain our insight into the workings of our government, it is clear that honesty is decidedly lacking and the main purpose of debate has been reduced to little more than posturing for position.
His Transparency has even resorted to avoiding press conferences for fear reporters will ask questions that we, the people, want answered. The official spin is that the TOTUS prefers to instead give “interviews” (aka campaign ops).
And that spells not only Waterloo for His Transparency, but for all the progressive liberals in government and their dangerously socialist ideology.
Our Corpse Man Of The Apocolypse
Everyone makes mistakes. But when your life is the stuff of fiction created by a legend in your own mind and you misrepresent issues, if not flat-out lie about them, every time you open your mouth yet pridefully accept the mantle of Messiahnic Orator while shaking your scolding finger at those who so obviously know far, far less than you…well, some mistakes become just another example of why mama always admonished us to not spit too high.
Perhaps the stupidest thing yet to come out of the mouth of His Transparency to date was to mispronounce the word, “corpsman” at this year’s National Prayer Breakfast. Saying it as if it were two words, “corpse man”, would be funny if it wasn’t said by the Commander in Chief of the United States military. Truth is that it’s just another pathetic demonstration of both Obama’s ignorance and his disdainful disrespect for the military.
It also hints at those ever-popular Freudian slips; what with all the destruction this naked Emperor is wreaking on our beloved country, calling to mind the calls to “bring out your dead!” that rang through cobbled streets during the Middle Ages.
The rest of us had better keep praying.
Tainted TARP Tingle-Tales
So you know what your government is doing? If you only listened to the mainstream media you’d think we were almost out of the woods. But the SIGTARP’s quarterly report to Congress was released this morning. And in direct contrast to President Walking Eagle’s tingle-tales about the program’s effectiveness in saving America from the mess he inheirited because of the actions of his predecessor and the Congress of which he, himself, was a part, Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for TARP, didn’t have anything good to say.
The long story short is that TARP has provided little more than a taxpayer-funded safety net and basically nothing has been done to curb the underlying causes of the recent financial meltdown. The program is fraught with abuse and fraud and bailouts have, as many of us predicted, simply encouraged the continuation of the wrong kinds of risk-taking and, in Mr. Barofsky’s educated opinion, even more dire straits lay ahead.
“Even if TARP saved our financial system from driving off a cliff back in 2008, absent meaningful reform, we are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car.”
Some highlights from the report itself:
It is hard to see how any of the fundamental problems in the system have been addressed to date.
Many of TARP’s stated goals, however, have simply not been met. Despite the fact that the explicit goal of the Capital Purchase Program (“CPP”) was to increase financing to U.S. businesses and consumers, lending continues to decrease, month after month, and the TARP program designed specifically to address small-business lending — announced in March 2009 — has still not been implemented by Treasury. Notwithstanding the fact that preserving homeownership and promoting jobs were explicit purposes of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (“EESA”), the statute that created TARP, nearly 16 months later, home foreclosures remain at record levels, the TARP foreclosure prevention program has only permanently modified a small fraction of eligible mortgages, and unemployment is the highest it has been in a generation. Whether these goals can effectively be met through existing TARP programs is very much an open question at this time. And to the extent that the Government had leverage through its status as a significant preferred shareholder to influence the largest TARP recipients to carry out such policy goals, it was lost with their exit from TARP.
• To the extent that huge, interconnected, “too big to fail” institutions contributed to the crisis, those institutions are now even larger, in part because of the substantial subsidies provided by TARP and other bailout programs.
• To the extent that institutions were previously incentivized to take reckless risks through a “heads, I win; tails, the Government will bail me out” mentality, the market is more convinced than ever that the Government will step in as necessary to save systemically significant institutions. This perception was reinforced when TARP was extended until October 3, 2010, thus permitting Treasury to maintain a war chest of potential rescue funding at the same time that banks that have shown questionable ability to return to profitability (and in some cases are posting multi-billion-dollar losses) are exiting TARP programs.
• To the extent that large institutions’ risky behavior resulted from the desire to justify ever-greater bonuses — and indeed, the race appears to be on for TARP recipients to exit the program in order to avoid its pay restrictions — the current bonus season demonstrates that although there have been some improvements in the form that bonus compensation takes for some executives, there has been little fundamental change in the excessive compensation culture on Wall Street.
• To the extent that the crisis was fueled by a “bubble” in the housing market, the Federal Government’s concerted efforts to support home prices — as discussed more fully in Section 3 of this report — risk re-inflating that bubble in light of the Government’s effective takeover of the housing market through purchases and guarantees, either direct or implicit, of nearly all of the residential mortgage market.
…the Government has done more than simply support the mortgage market, in many ways it has become the mortgage market, with the taxpayer shouldering the risk that had once been borne by the private investor.
Treasury’s failure to discover the scope and scale of AIG’s executive compensation obligations, in particular at AIGFP, potentially resulted in a missed opportunity to avoid the explosively controversial events surrounding the AIGFP retention payments and the considerable public and Congressional concern that followed. Although SIGTARP saw no indication that Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner (the “Treasury Secretary” or “Secretary Geithner”) had personal knowledge of the AIGFP bonuses until shortly before they were paid, this too suggests a failure of communication. In light of the political sensitivities associated with the bailout of AIG, in his role both as then-President of FRBNY and subsequently as Treasury Secretary, it was necessary that Secretary Geithner be informed by his staff, in a timely manner, of such sensitive and significant information so that he could have sufficient time to explore possible solutions.
Through December 31, 2009, SIGTARP has opened 86 and has 77 ongoing criminal and civil investigations. These investigations include complex issues concerning suspected TARP fraud, accounting fraud, securities fraud, insider trading, bank fraud, mortgage fraud, mortgage servicer misconduct, fraudulent advance-fee schemes, public corruption, false statements, obstructionof justice, money laundering, and tax-related investigations.
On October 22, 2009, the Special Master, who was appointed without the advice and consent of the Senate, made determinations concerning executive compensation within AIG, Bank of America, Chrysler Financial, Chrysler, Citigroup, GM, and GMAC. …on November 2, 2009, SIGTARP requested from the Chief Counsel of OFS an explanation of Treasury’s legal position regarding the constitutionality of the position of the Special Master. A copy of that request is included in Appendix G: “Correspondence.” Treasury has not yet responded.
Although Treasury has projected an overall profit from CPP , any such profit will be diminished by billions of dollars in losses in certain CPP investments in which the banks have closed or reorganized. Three TARP recipients — CIT , UCBH, and Pacific Coast National Bancorp — have declared bankruptcy. Although there were two different paths to the organizations’ bankruptcies, the result for taxpayers appears to be the same — total or near-total loss of their investment.
As detailed in prior quarterly reports to Congress, one of SIGTARP’s most important recommendations with respect to PPIP has been that Treasury require strict information barriers or “walls” between the PPIF managers making investment decisions on behalf of the PPIF and those employees of the fund management company who manage non-PPIF funds trading in the same kinds of securities. For various reasons, Treasury has decided that requiring such walls “is simply not practical in the context of PPIP,” and has refused to adopt this recommendation. …a series of unusual trades undertaken in one of the PPIFs just weeks after trading began has highlighted the problems that can arise in the absence of a robust conflict-of-interest wall.
Of the $84.8 billion invested in Chrysler, GM, and their finance companies, $3.3 billion has been repaid. …According to the TARP Financial Statements, Treasury projected that, as of September 30, 2009, the AIFP investments will result in a $30.5 billion loss to U.S. taxpayers.
On November 9, 2009, the Federal Reserve announced that, of the 10 bank holding companies identified through its stress testing as needing additional capital, only GMAC failed to raise enough funds to meet the requirement.
From its inception, SIGTARP’s most fundamental recommendation with respect to basic transparency in the operation of TARP has been that Treasury should require all TARP recipients to report periodically on their use of TARP funds. …For the first time, Treasury will be collecting and publicly reporting this data on an institution-by-institution basis. Although regrettably delayed, SIGTARP believes that Treasury’s decision to provide this basic transparency will give meaningful information to the public and to policymakers on whether the TARP programs have met their goals and, as a result, may enhance the credibility of TARP. If implemented as described, Treasury’s plan on this front will constitute an adoption of SIGTARP’s recommendation and will finally give the American people the basic transparency they deserve in these investments.
On December 30, 2009, Treasury announced that GMAC met its SCAP capital requirement upon receipt of an additional $3.8 billion from AIFP. Treasury received $2.5 billion in trust preferred security plus $1.3 billion in MCP in exchange for this investment. Treasury also received warrants to purchase $127 million of trust preferred securities and $63 million of MCP, which it exercised immediately. In addition, Treasury is converting $3 billion of the MCP it acquired under previous TARP investments to common stock. As a result of these transactions, Treasury’s ownership of GMAC’s common stock increased from 35.4% to 56.3%, and it holds an additional $2.5 billion in trust preferred securities and $11.4 billion in MCP.
…infusions to AIG are linked inextricably: more than half the total amounts paid to counterparties in connection with the CDS portfolio retired through Maiden Lane III did not come about through the Maiden Lane III CDO purchases, but rather from AIG’s earlier collateral postings that were made possible in part by the original FRBNY loan, which was, in turn, paid down with TARP funds. Because of this linkage, the ultimate costs to the Government and the taxpayer cannot be measured in isolation. Stated another way, regardless of whether FRBNY is made whole on its loan to Maiden Lane III, the ultimate value or cost to the taxpayer cannot be calculated until the likelihood of AIG repaying all of its assistance can be more readily determined. Treasury’s recent suggestion to the contrary is, at best, incomplete.
…simply by purchasing comparatively tiny thrifts, Hartford and Lincoln [insurance companies] — companies whose primary businesses (unlike other CPP participants) have little to do with lending to consumers and businesses — gained access to more than $4.3 billion in taxpayer funds, an amount that is many multiples of the thrifts’ total assets.
It’s time to throw in the towel here. Oops. I mean, the TARP.
Michigan Taxpayers Subsidize Michael Moore’s Anti-Capitalism
As a poster child for Democratic compassion, the state of Michigan, long known as the home of the auto industry, continues to show little signs of recovery. Despite massive infusions of taxpayer money (that will never be paid back) and business plans created by those “best and brightest” affirmatively-graduated Ivy Leaguers, the only American auto company that is turning a profit is the only one who didn’t knuckle under the government’s spell in the first place. Ford.
Michigan’s unemployment rate was the highest in the country at 14.6% as reported for December 2009, with the metropolitan Detroit area at 15.4% in November. Of course, the underemployed and those who’ve simply given up looking for work mean the real numbers are much higher.
So what does a true-blue state do when faced with such dire straights? They follow the lead of other lame-brain losers like California. In this case, by courting the film industry. So what, you say? Sure, jobs are jobs and everyone needs the escape provided by a movie every now and then. But unfortunately, the only escape with this feel-good endeavor is its disconnect from reality.
The Michigan Film Incentive is a state economic development program whereby state government offers large tax credits and outright cash subsidies to filmmakers who make some portion of their films here. The program rebates up to 42 percent of a filmmaker’s Michigan expenses. The amount that exceeds the filmmaker’s state business tax liability is reimbursed by a check from the Treasury and signed by John Q. Taxpayer.
Now guess who has directly profited from this? You guessed it, Michael Moore. That raving anti-capitalist who went rabid against big business in his last film apparently has no problem sticking his hands into the pockets of the taxpayers on Main Street to pad his personal coffers. Just like those big, evil firms on Wall Street.
He is a current member of the Michigan Film Office Advisory Council, a state organ created to advise the Michigan Film Office, which is responsible for approving applications for Michigan’s film incentive program.
There’s a whole lot of other “perceptions of impropriety”, aka old boys’ network and cronyism at work here as well, which in the end makes it little more than yet another Democratic grab at the wallets of the very people they claim they are trying to help while the only ones making any real money are they and their buddies.
Recently, Michigan Film Office Director Janet Lockwood was given a role in a movie — “Wild Michigan” — that had been approved by her office for subsidies. Lockwood blithely dismissed conflict of interest questions from my colleague, Kathy Hoekstra*, by arguing that the she had not been paid. But as an actress she was in fact paid; paid with the opportunity to appear on the Silver Screen – an honor for which many actors would themselves pay.
Former state Rep. Bill Huizenga (now a congressional candidate) helped shepherd the Michigan film incentive program to passage in the Legislature. He did so while sitting on the Board of Compass Film Academy, a Grand Rapids-based film school. Lockwood called Huizenga — who was apparently given the moniker “Hollywood Huizenga” for helping muscle the film incentive through the Legislature — “our hero.”
But, but, but it can’t be all bad because regular people in Michigan worked on these films, right? Sure. Yet what they received in pay was merely another insidious transfer of wealth:
Michigan hiked taxes $1.4 billion just months before creating the film program to redistribute a portion of it to lucky filmmakers. At best, this creates a jobs wash, not new economic growth.
We’ve said before that Michael Moore is an insufferable hypocrite who should be shipped off to someplace like Venezuela. But the truth is that he and his kind continue to be enabled by the compassionate Democrats running the state of Michigan.
* no relation to Michigan State representative Pete.
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