U.S. Sinks to 10th Place in Economic Freedom Due to Regulation, Spending

U.S. Falls in Index of Economic Freedom Sharp increases in government spending and costly regulations contributed to this year's decline in the United States’ ranking in the annual Index of Economic Freedom published by The Wall Street Journal and The Heritage Foundation. Quick Hits 2012 Index of Economic Freedom   Podcast: Interview with Index Editor, Kim Holmes, Ph.D.    Video: The Role of Economic Freedom   A Step Backward for Economic Freedom in 2012  The U.S. fell from ninth to tenth place in economic freedom among 179 competing countries. It was the fourth straight year of decline in economic freedom for the United States. As recently as 2008, the U.S. ranked seventh worldwide, and was considered a “free” economy. Today, the U.S. is only a “mostly free” economy. Most worrisome is the U.S.'s drop in the category of freedom from corruption. Index editors say this stems from the growing perception of corruption associated with government bailouts of troubled industries, including automakers and investment houses. The perception of corruption also grew due to regulatory exemptions granted to politically well-connected companies and special-interest groups. More than 1,100 companies won exemptions from provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s signature health care legislation.   “Corruption is a growing concern as the cronyism and economic rent-seeking associated with the growth of government have undermined institutional integrity,” the editors write. The Index’s editors also attribute the U.S. decline to increases in government spending and  the dramatic growth of regulations, particularly in health care and finance.  Spending by government consumes 42.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), and total public debt now is larger than the entire the economy.   The regulatory burden also continues to grow. More than 70 major rules imposed since 2009 cost Americans nearly $40 billion last year – leading to the largest U.S. decline, in the fiscal freedom category.   The Index offers solutions, pointing to the policies needed to improve the U.S.'s score: reduce the size of government, overhaul the tax system, and transform costly entitlement programs. These solutions are critical for bringing down high unemployment rates and reducing public debt to manageable levels.   For interviews please call (202) 675-1761.   Experts: Kim R. Holmes, Ph.D. Vice President, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies, and Director, The Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies James Roberts Research Fellow For Economic Freedom and Growth   

A Little Humor 4 You!

  ___________________________________________________________________     A young New York City woman was so depressed that she decided to end her life by throwing herself into the ocean. But just before she could throw herself from the docks, a handsome young man stopped her. "You have so much to live for," said the man. I'm a sailor, and we are off to Italy tomorrow. I can stow you away on my ship. I'll take care of you, bring you food every day, and keep you happy."    With nothing to lose, combined with the fact that she had always wanted to visit Italy , the woman agreed to go. That night   the sailor brought her aboard and hid her in a small but comfortable compartment in the hold. From then on, every night he would bring her three sandwiches, and a bottle of red wine, and make love to her until dawn. Two weeks later she was discovered by the captain during an inspection.   "What are you doing here?" asked the captain.   "I have an arrangement with one of the sailors," she replied. "He brings me food and I get a free trip to Italy ."   "I see," the captain says.   Her conscience got the best of her and she added, "Plus, he's screwing me."   "He certainly is," replied the captain. "This is the Staten Island Ferry..."    

This man is a disgrace to our country in many ways. Here is one. Obama Removes American Flag from His Plane Before After Barack Obama recently finished a $500,000 total overhaul of his Boeing 757. And as part of the new design, he decided to remove the American flag from the tail. What American running for President of the United States would remove the symbol of his country? And worse, he replaced the flag with a symbol of himself. Please forward this if you're not ashamed of your country and our flag. If you do not forward this to everyone you know nothing will happen. If Obama is re-elected president of the United States we are in trouble. If you think the Liberals can lead our country just look what Pelosi and Reid have accomplished for us. If you have doubt about this message, check it out at SNOPES. (click below) http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/airplane.asp  

3 Who Destroyed the US Economy

Where are they now?   Read the answer at the end WHERE ARE THEY NOW?  Surprise.... Answer..   The three who brought down Wall Street.   Here's a quick look into the three former Fannie Mae executives who brought down Wall Street.   Franklin Raines was a Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at Fannie Mae.   Raines was forced to retire from his position with Fannie Mae when auditing   discovered severe irregularities in Fannie Mae's accounting activities. Raines left with a "golden parachute valued at $240 Million   in benefits. The Government filed suit against Raines when the depth of the   accounting scandal became clear.   Tim Howard - was the Chief Financial Officer of Fannie Mae. Howard   "was a strong internal proponent of using accounting strategies that   would ensure a "stable pattern of earnings" at Fannie. Investigations by federal   regulators and the company's board of directors since concluded that   management did manipulate 1998 earnings to trigger bonuses. Raines and Howard   resigned under pressure in late 2004. Howard's Golden Parachute was estimated   at $20 Million!   Jim Johnson - A former executive at Lehman Brothers and who was later   forced from his position as Fannie Mae CEO. Investigators found that Fannie   Mae had hidden a substantial amount of Johnson's 1998 compensation from the   public, reporting that it was between $6 million and $7 million when it fact   it was $21 million." Johnson is currently under investigation for taking illegal loans from Countrywide while serving as CEO of Fannie Mae.   Johnson's Golden Parachute was estimated at $28 Million. *****************************************************************************************   WHERE ARE THEY NOW?   FRANKLIN RAINES ? Raines works for the Obama Campaign as his Chief Economic Advisor.   TIM HOWARD? Howard is a Chief Economic Advisor to Obama under Franklin Raines.   JIM JOHNSON? Johnson was hired as a Senior Obama Finance Advisor and was selected to run Obama's Vice Presidential Search Committee.       Our government seems   to be rotten to the core !   Are we stupid or what?  Vote in 2012..it is the most important election of our lives.

I'm an Equal Opportunity Offender

Q. What’s the Cuban National Anthem?  A. Row, Row, Row Your Boat.    Q.  Where does an Irish family go on vacation?  A.   A different bar.    Q.  What did the Chinese couple name their tan, curly-haired baby?  A.  Sum Ting Wong.     Q.  What do you call it when an Italian has one arm shorter than the other?  A.     A speech impediment.    Q.  Why aren't there any Puerto Ricans on Star Trek?  A.     Because they're not going to work in the future either.    Q.  Why do Driver Ed classes in redneck schools use the car only on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays?  A.  Because on Tuesday and Thursday, the Sex Ed class uses it.    Q.  What's the difference between a southern zoo and a northern zoo? A.  The southern zoo has a description of the animal along with a recipe.    Q  How do you get a sweet little 80-year-old lady to say the 'F' word?  A.    Get another sweet little 80-year-old lady to yell, ' BINGO! '    Q. What's the difference between a northern fairytale and a southern fairytale???  A.   A northern fairytale begins ... 'Once upon a time...'       A southern fairytale begins ... 'Y'all ain't gonna believe this sh*t.' Q.   Why doesn't Mexico have an Olympic team? A.      Because all the Mexicans who can run, jump or swim are already in the United States   OH shut up ... Just pass it on!....

The Case for Military Action Against Iran Posted by Bruce Thornton Bio ↓ on Jan 10th, 2012  Print This Post A A A Iran’s 30-year war against the United States may be reaching its decisive moment. Signs of the worsening crisis abound. Iran just announced it has begun enriching uranium at the Fordo underground nuclear site, a key step to producing more quickly fissile material for a nuclear warhead. As Europe moves closer to embargoing Iranian oil, deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guard Ali Ashraf Nouri threatens, “ If enemies block the export of our oil, we won’t allow a drop of oil to pass through the Strait of Hormuz,” through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil passes. In support of this threat, the regime continues to stage war games in the area and to warn American warships from passing through the strait into the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile the U.S. and Israel have announced a joint missile defense exercise, as Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visits America’s enemies in Latin America, bearding the U.S. lion in its own hemisphere of influence. Iran may be just indulging bluster and bluff. Perhaps the mullahs recall the severe punishment inflicted on its navy in 1988 during the Tanker War, an earlier attempt to disrupt oil shipments transiting the Persian Gulf. That effort ended when Ronald Reagan retaliated for a missile attack on an American warship by eventually destroying two Iranian oil platforms, two Iranian ships, and six Iranian gunboats. Yet our current president has not shown as yet any of Ronald Reagan’s guts and nerve, and the mullahs may be calculating that the bluff will work. And why wouldn’t they? Iran has been killing Americans for 30 years with impunity, from the 241 military personnel killed in Beirut by a suicide bomber, to the hundreds more soldiers murdered in Iraq and Afghanistan by Iranian proxy terrorist outfits trained and armed by Tehran. Repeated rounds of sanctions, threats, U.N. Security Council resolutions, and deadlines for cooperating with the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors have been contemptuously ignored. Our citizens are arrested and held on trumped-up charges, our ally Israel is threatened with genocide, and incessant anti-American “Great Satan” rhetoric daily pours from Tehran. Just this week a former American Marine was condemned to death by an Iranian court for allegedly being a spy and a “mohareb,” or “fighter against God.” Yet Obama has answered this aggression against our security and interests with appeasing diplomatic “outreach” offered “without preconditions,” and pleas for “mutual respect” that the regime correctly interprets as a sign of weakness and failure of nerve. Given that Iranian aggression has so far provoked appeasement and empty threats, the mullahs very well could believe that since they are the “best of nations,” as the Koran has it, in any conflict Allah will protect the Islamic Republic and render insignificant America’s overwhelming military superiority. After all, Muslims for centuries have believed in their superiority based on Allah’s special regard for them, as aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry noted in 1939: “Their [Muslims] pride was born of the illusion of their power. Allah renders a believer invincible.” The mullahs today will remember what the Ayatollah Khomeini said in 1980, after America’s ill-planned and half-hearted mission to rescue the embassy hostages was ignominiously thwarted by a sandstorm that caused two helicopters to crash and burn: “Those sand particles were divinely commissioned. . . . [President] Carter still has not comprehended what kind of people he is facing. . . . Our people is the people of blood and our school is the school of Jihad.” Thirty years later, we still have not “comprehended” the nature of the Iranian enemy. We have continuously operated with a materialist calculus that ignores the spiritual motives that account for much of Iranian aggression. More depressing still, this is the same mistake the Carter administration made in 1979, when it ignored the religious roots of the Iranian Revolution, dismissed Khomeini as “nutty” and “a crazy man,” as Carter did, and assumed that the secular political parties and technical elites would eventually rule Iran and marginalize the mullahs, virulent Iranian hostility would wane, and “after a transition period common interests could provide a basis for future cooperation,” as an assistant to the Secretary of State reported. Similarly the West today has assumed that economic punishment, or the desire for “greater international integration,” as Obama put it, can change Iranian behavior. We still don’t believe what a member of the Revolutionary Council said a few months after the seizure of our embassy: “No individual, no official and no Muslim has the right to show forbearance or compromise toward an enemy who is not defeated and is not overthrown.” Continue reading page: 1 2 About Bruce Thornton Do you like this story? Tags: Iran, Israel, military action, Nuclear Weapons, Obama Related Posts Israeli Nuclear-Armed Subs Off Iranian Coast

‘Obama’ is how you spell relief   By Wesley Pruden Conservatives are fractured, split and mad at each other, brawling like Democrats. There’s only one man who can unify the movement. Fortunately for the Grumpy Old Party, Barack Obama is available, ready and eager. By mid-March, we’ll have muddled through most of the primaries and caucuses (cauci?), and by then the Republicans will know who their nominee will be, even if he won’t be crowned until the party meets in convention assembled in Tampa in late August. Soon the cannibalism will abate, and the fun begins. The venom will be aimed at the president, who will fire back with toxins of his own. The camps of the candidates, each heavily armed, will be evenly matched. The weight of President Obama’s fantasies keeps the economy mired in a mud of low expectations. “It’s the economy, stupid,” but even Stupid can see the economy against a backdrop of presidential incompetence at home and timidity abroad. Over the weekend, Newt Gingrich continued to pound Mitt Romney, to “slow him down” so he could “expose” him (though not necessarily by stealing his pants). Ken Starr, the Watergate prosecutor, scolded anyone who won’t vote for a Mormon just because he’s a Mormon, and pointedly said he wasn’t endorsing Mr. Romney. He must have been talking about Jon Huntsman, who scolded his fellow Mormon for injecting “partisanship” into the campaign. Horrors! Partisanship in an election campaign? Who would have thought it? Ron Paul was chased out of Moe Joe’s Diner in New Hampshire by scrambling reporters intent on doing harm. Dan Rather (remember him?) says Barack Obama would lose the election if it were held today. The silly season is hard upon us, and it’s only January. But soon we’ll have to take ourselves seriously, and the economy will still be job one. The government’s numbers continue the dreary downward trend Mr. Obama introduced soon after his inauguration three years ago, and the weight of his fantasies keeps the economy mired in a mud of low expectations. The latest numbers revealed 200,000 new jobs for Americans last month, and the jobless rate, which was bumping 10 percent only a few months ago, dropped for the second month in a row. Any good news is better than bad news, but the news hidden in the government’s numbers for December was bad indeed. The unemployment number is the least reliable indicator of the health of the economy. Over the past 30 months, the number of available workers has declined by more than 840,000—dropping by 170,000 in just the past two months. The number of Americans employed or looking for work—what the economists call “the labor force participation rate”—has fallen to 64 percent of the population. Adjusted for this unusually unhappy rate, the unemployment figure is more than 11 percent. No good news here. There’s even worse news in the small print, which is why the remorseless stock-market indicators declined when the numbers came out on Friday. The Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates a “real unemployment rate,” which includes workers with part-time often ragtag jobs, and the workers who have simply given up the job search, at 15.2 percent. This is not bad news, but catastrophic news, not just for the discouraged and underemployed but lethal for an incumbent president organizing his re-election campaign. The skeptical Wall Street reaction to the news recalls Ronald Reagan’s famous definition of a struggling economy: “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. A recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.” Update that and you can see the rock and the hard place squeezing Barack Obama. This is the killer issue the Republicans must exploit to win when they finally find their man. There’s no sign of a happy warrior in sight, among either the Republicans or the Democrats, but soon, when primary and caucus have produced a nominee by relentlessly eliminating the chaff from the wheat, it will be game on, and a very different game than the one we’ve seen. Alan Krueger, the president’s top economic adviser, spins the new government figures as providing “further evidence that the economy is continuing to heal,” that only the failed Obama economic policies can help the country “dig our way out of the deep hole.” Alas, the only thing anyone can accomplish by digging to get out of a hole is a deeper hole. In fact, the only way Mr. Obama can make mediocre economic news look good, observes Investors Business Daily, is to set expectations “so low that even a tiny step forward seems like a giant leap.” That’s not much of a strategy. Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.