Economy & Budget

Why are black middle-class conservatives ashamed of the traditional conservative values that account for their success?

Most successful middle-class American blacks are from families that value education, hard work, religion and a traditional family. Yet many middle-class blacks seek to justify the culture of the dysfunctional segments of the black community that are failing academically and economically in America.

Is it guilt for their own success, or do they really believe that there is a virtue in the failing subculture of a predominant number of black Americans?

Ron Paul deserves credit (if you pardon the pun) for raising the question of monetary policy among the general electorate. We must examine the wisdom of its independence from congressional oversight. A more moderate view, one we should all be able to agree on, is that the Federal Reserve must be subject to a public audit of its activities. Surely no one on either side of the aisle thinks it wise to put so much power in the hands of so few without any check or balance.

In case you haven't noticed of late, New York state is in serious financial trouble. Not unexpectedly, New York state and New York City depend on the success of Wall Street for their budgets. Wall Street activities account for 20 percent of state tax revenues and 13 percent of New York City revenues before the recession.

These revenues have significantly dropped, 14 percent and 7 percent, for state and city, respectively. The state also lost 28,000 high-paying employees in the securities industry. In 2011 the bonus pool dropped 14 percent. No matter your thoughts about Wall Street, its golden goose is being severely wounded, if not completely destroyed.

The mainstream media is reporting that the stock market is rallying, because Wall Street insiders are encouraged and energized that President Obama will be reelected.

Come on, readers, and tell us if you know anybody on Wall Street that would buy stock because of Obama's reelection. The tax dividends on stocks will increase 300 percent if President Obama is reelected in November 2012. Why would an investor buy stock when his after-tax return is being cut from 85 percent to 55? Someone with a modicum of common sense would say the stock market is surging because they see the president losing the 2012 election.

Liberalism decreases economic mobility. The minimum wage prevents unskilled young workers from obtaining necessary jobs and thereby skills that allow upward mobility in the world. The public education system perpetuates poor academic performance among disadvantage Americans. Without a good education, these disadvantaged students are crippled for a lifetime in their pursuit of the American Dream.

Human Events political editor John Gizzi got an interesting sidestep by Obama deputy press secretary Josh Earnest on Friday. When queried about Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers’s (R-Wash.) legislation that would rescind the IMF’s ability to access $100 billion directly from the U.S. Treasury without any congressional approvals, he feigned ignorance of the legislation, agreeing with Gizzi’s statement that “additional tax dollars are off the table.”
 
Congress needs to take the White House at its word immediately and bring the McMorris Rodgers legislation to the floor, forcing the president to either support a massive raid on the U.S. Treasury to bail out Greece and other socialist countries in Europe or allow the funds to be rescinded.

President Obama has called for a major reform of our corporate tax system. The good news is that this will reduce the marginal corporate tax rate to 28 percent.

This would put the U.S. corporate income tax in line with most of our global competitors.

When Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew brought his country from Third World to be the most prosperous country in the First World, he first had to deal with the West: “I had to come to terms with American power without a British buffer,” he has written. “The British enforced their will with a certain civility. The Americans were different, as I could see from the way they dealt with South Vietnamese leaders.”

Lee was likely referring to the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, president of South Vietnam, in 1963, but as the World Bank chief position opens up again today, it might be asked if, in Lee’s words describing that period, America still had “bulging muscles and a habit of flexing them.”

If the Federal Reserve didn't keep interest rates abnormally low, the federal deficit would soar by nearly $500 billion in the first year.

The arithmetic is simple: Rates are 2 to 3 percent lower than they should be; the outstanding federal debt is $15 trillion; 3 percent additional on $15 trillion is $450 billion additional deficit.

It was a Super Bowl ad that told a super-truth about the revival of the American auto industry because of the successful policies of President Obama. No doubt Ron Paul can dig up some Austrian economists to disagree, Mitt Romney can say he would have preferred his approach of massive layoffs and a wave of bankruptcy filings throughout the auto sectors, and Newt Gingrich can claim it was about black people on food stamps.

In my last column, “A tale of two Romneys,” I suggested that George Romney, a great governor and auto-industry CEO, would have supported President Obama's successful policy and deplored the vulture-capitalist alternative offered by his son, Mitt.