Forget Bain: Obama?????s equity record is the real scandal

[_Kevin Graham]

Obama's GM investment currently at a $16 billion loss.

Do you think the reason the federal government bailed out GM was to make a quick profit on the stock? In other words, do you think the government made this move with the motivation of a venture capitalist? If not, your headline here doesn't make any sense.

Precisely. I swear these guy are incapable of thinking in any other way. They look at the bottom line as if the government is supposed to be treated as a for-profit business, but this makes them completely blind to the fact that there are huge benefits to our economy that go well beyond a simple margin of profit. For example, the fact that saving GM saved tens of thousands of US jobs. Like a good businessman, Romney would have let GM fail because he doesn't really give a damn about American jobs.This is why he has no business pretending to be a viable Presidential candidate.

Sometimes I think the US government should do precisely what these hyper capitalists do. So the next time a government funded University comes up with another miraculous cure to a disease, they should market it and let the profits funnel into the tax coffers instead of tossing aside the profit motive as they do now by just quickly selling the patent rights to private companies like Merk so they can make all the profits. Maybe the government should charge corporations for using the internet, since it is essentially what they created. Let the profits funnel back to the taxpayers who actually provided that service for them, allowing their businesses to take off the way they have. Or maybe the government should charge every time someone uses their GPS. I mean it is the American way right? Let supply and demand in a free market drive the price and that makes all profits government profits just.

How in the world could the Right complain about it when they would be practicing a philosophy that is precisely what they claim to hold sacrosanct?

This reminds me of the nonsensical doctrine on the Right about how government cannot create wealth. What utter nonsense. The government actually creates wealth all the time, but it turns around and gives it away to the corporations with the highest paid lobbyists.

[_bcspace]

Obama's GM investment currently at a $16 billion loss.

Do you think the reason the federal government bailed out GM was to make a quick profit on the stock? In other words, do you think the government made this move with the motivation of a venture capitalist? If not, your headline here doesn't make any sense.

Doesn't matter. They invested the tax payer's money and made a huge loss. Even Obama's energy company investment losses (Solyndra etc.) with the tax dollar in and of themselves far exceed any losses Romney might have accrued as a percentage. Obama has no record of success (largely because his socialist modus operandi is to simply throw money at the problem). Romney does.

[_Drifting]

Doesn't matter. They invested the tax payer's money and made a huge loss. Even Obama's energy company investment losses (Solyndra etc.) with the tax dollar in and of themselves far exceed any losses Romney might have accrued as a percentage. Obama has no record of success (largely because his socialist modus operandi is to simply throw money at the problem). Romney does.

I think I agree with you.
Obama = putting money in
Romney = taking money out

[_MeDotOrg]

How much money in foreign aid do we continue to dole out during our own economic crisis?

Assuming your question is not rhetorical, the answer is that since the 1970's about 1% of our budget, a number that remains remarkably steady no matter which party is in power.

Which countries gives the highest percentage of their GDP to foreign aide? Oh, the usual culprits. Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland. You know, the Baltic Barons hell-bent on world domination.

One of the great misconceptions held by many Americans is that a large percentage of our budget goes to foreign aid. The reality is, that for a long time, it has been very small.

[_Drifting]

How much money in foreign aid do we continue to dole out during our own economic crisis?

Assuming your question is not rhetorical, the answer is that since the 1970's about 1% of our budget, a number that remains remarkably steady no matter which party is in power.

Which countries gives the highest percentage of their GDP to foreign aide? Oh, the usual culprits. Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland. You know, the Baltic Barons hell-bent on world domination.

One of the great misconceptions held by many Americans is that a large percentage of our budget goes to foreign aid. The reality is, that for a long time, it has been very small.

I suspect a number of politicians would include military expenditure on foreign soil as 'foreign aid'.

[_grindael]

Kevin, do you have a political blog?

[_Kevin Graham]

Kevin, do you have a political blog?

No, but I thought about it.

Why?

[_Droopy]

What this moron doesn't understand

This is how Red Kevin starts every post he makes. Its a Chatty Kevin doll. Pull the string and its blurts out Democratic Party fundraising literature.

is that Romney's experience as a corporate man means he is only experienced in working for the interests of a specific group of people: share holders. That is not the job of the President of the United States. Romney's job was to increase the value of a company's stock by whatever means, and rarely does that happen by hiring people.

I've seen economic illiteracy and class envy, ideology riddled minds in my time, but Graham is like a crash test dummy that just keeps coming back for more, so long as its still serviceable. Un-freaking-believable.

The President's job is to work in the interests of all Americans, not just those who have invested stock options. Why is this so hard to understand?

Here's the President's job:

http://www.heritage.org/constitution#!/articles/2

Romney's so-called experience as a job creator is pure myth. He's fired more people than he ever hired. Why in the hell would we want someone like that running a nation that is struggling to put people to work? He has a history of making profits for his company and himself, by firing workers.

Father Kevin Coughlin has spoken, and, as with most such characters, the comedic value is in direct proportion to the length of the paragraph.

This idiot who wrote this piece just runs through common hit points designed by bored Right Wing bloggers who like to create mountains from molehills; pointing out where public investment didn't quite pan out the way they had hoped. But they all ignore the fact that the bulk of the money used to save GM, the banks and ultimately the economy, turned out to be a massive success.

There are two possibilities here; the first being that this is a bald lie, and the second being that this the passing on of fantastic, intelligence insulting whoppers from other liars by someone who simply doesn't care whether or not he's lying. Amazing! Graham's knowledge of economics is effectively at sub-zero levels. Its cryogenic ignorance. This kind of intellectual deterioration is alarming, but not at all unusual for the leftist true believer.

How do we know Kevin is full of Cool-Whip? Easy. Consulting the laws of economics, we find that government stimulus spending does not create new, net wealth, does not - and cannot - produce economic growth, and only benefits the industries and entities who receive it. "Stimulus" spending is not creation of wealth, but only redistribution of wealth, period. It is not the creation of new wealth and the expansion of the economic pie. With an utter dearth of empirical evidence facing him, and the worst economy since the Great Depression, Kevin has only the following ad hoc defense to bring to the table.

But the point is stimuls funding has worked and served its intended purpose. There can be no argument that we were on the brink of depression and that was circumvented by the stimulus.

There can be no argument that this has been debunked a thousand times ten thousand over the last few years and that it has no empirical or rational basis.

But to totalitarian statists who worship the golden calf of power and who's meaningless lives can only be assuaged by exercising control over the lives and destinies of others, this kind of ideology is the nectar of the gods itself.

Unemployment was reaching levels not seen since Reagan,

At this level of delusionality there is really little that can be said. No intellectually honest, educated person believes this kind of twaddle.

This silly Right Wing notion that billionaires are in the business of creating jobs is just a myth. It is something more and more billionaires are coming to admit: http://ed.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/2 ... eator?lite

So, let me get this straight, there is a way to create wealth for oneself without:

1. Creating jobs directly as a matter of one's own business infrastructure needs.

2. Creating jobs indirectly by investing in the productive economic activities of others.

Hanauer is either a liar or a knave, and no educated, intelligent American is going to listen to this leftist Obama shill talk this kind of condescending nonsense sober. David Horowitz has been dealing with these kind of elite, up-scale New Class leftists for decades. Millionaires and billionaires who have indulged themselves in radical chic since the sixties and who have formed the core of the cultural elitist support for socialism, Soviet communism, Castro, the sexual revolution, the Black Panthers, and the anti-capitalist mentality since the thirties.

This man is intelligence insulting in the extreme, and either doesn't understand economics (and many businesspeople don't, beyond their own business concerns) or has sold his intellectual honesty to the golden calf of statism.

Let's take a look at what this tool has actually written. I'll italicize for emphasis. Anyone with an actual understanding of free market economics, beware:

I’m a very rich person. As an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, I’ve started or helped get off the ground dozens of companies in industries including manufacturing, retail, medical services, the Internet and software. I founded the Internet media company aQuantive Inc., which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. in 2007 for $6.4 billion. I was also the first non-family investor in Amazon.com, Inc.

Even so, I’ve never been a “job creator.” I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.

That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be.

1. Wrong. If people do not like the crap you're producing, they will not buy it and you will go out of business. Most people will be able to afford what you are producing, if they want to purchase it, so long as government does not destroy and corrupt the productive processes of society.

2. Middle class consumers only demand what is on the market, and they do not demand that which does not exist. Only when new, innovative, or new varieties of existing products enter the maket is new demand created. Further, each consumer is also a participant in production, otherwise, he could not consume, and much of that production, and the jobs that produce those products and/or services, are created by people like Hanauer.

Hanauer's arguments are so logically fatuous and economically illiterate that only the contemporary Democratic party would have him as yet another one of their ultra-rich leftist lap poodles who do not think that they personally will ever be affected by ever expanding taxes and business regulation no matter how excessive it gets (Hanauer is worth hundreds of millions).

Look at this last sentence:

An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be.

If this were the case, it would mean that Hanaeur, a man worth hundreds of millions, consumes less than the average middle class blue or white collar worker at any given time.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-1 ... nauer.html

Read the rest of this sanity-wrenching verbiage. Hanaeur is a guilty rich liberal statist who wants to concentrate ever more money and power in government. He's clearly "in the system" somewhere, and believes that a leviathan government that controls the economy with some combination of socialist/fascist manipulation of economic behavior is the wave of his own future.

It will be interesting to watch him in the future, to see where he turns up.

[_EAllusion]

Most US foreign aide is also thinly disguised bribe money for falling in line with US policy desires. Humanitarian foreign aide, which is what I imagine Ajax is really thinking of, is a much smaller piece of the pie.

[_EAllusion]

The beauty of Media Matters is that they almost always rely on the most credible sources on any given political point.

Media matters is thoroughly partisan in what they cover and commentary, but as far as sourcing of claims goes, they are generally very good. If they report some rightwing hack saying something awful, you can trust he said it. You get a lot of links to credible sources or just (in context) recordings of facts. It's not at all like the right-wing blogosophere where dubiously sourced claims and misuse of information are the norm. I would prefer that this wasn't the case, but that's where we are.