Archives for April 2013

April 24, 2013, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson released the following statement on attempts in the U.S. House of Representatives to pass HR 1549, a bill designed to extend an Obamacare program that has run out of money:

“House Republicans should abandon their latest attempt to fix Obamacare.  Rather than increasing funding for the Pre-Existing Conditions Insurance Plan that in spite of having lower than expected enrollment has been overrun with costs, the House should use their Constitutional power of the purse to defund it entirely.

“The fact that House leadership has refused to even consider defunding Obamacare to stop the implementation of this Frankenstein-like monster federal health law reflects poorly on their commitment to repeal the law in its entirety.

“The health care system concocted by Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi is going to fail under its own regulatory weight, and for House Republicans to attempt to prop up the system through piecemeal fixes at a time when even some labor unions are beginning to urge repeal, makes zero sense.”

Interview Availability: Please contact Robert Romano at (703) 383-0880 ext. 106 or at robert@getliberty.org to arrange an interview with ALG President Bill Wilson.

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April 24, 2013, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson today issued the following statement praising Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal for urging the Louisiana legislature to block Medicaid expansion under the new federal health care law in a recent oped, “Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion is bad for Louisiana”:

“If the Louisiana legislature listens to Governor Jindal, Louisiana taxpayers will save $337 million from 2014 through 2019, and federal taxpayers another $7.3 billion over the same period, according to a Kaiser estimate. They will be helping to defend taxpayers across the country from an unsustainable expansion of the entitlement state.

“While some governors have caved on this issue, Bobby Jindal has stood on principle, and for that, he deserves the thanks of every taxpayer in the nation. Hopefully the legislature will listen to him, but should members vote to expand Medicaid, we urge Governor Jindal to veto it.”

Interview Availability: Please contact Robert Romano at (703) 383-0880 ext. 106 or at robert@getliberty.org to arrange an interview with ALG President Bill Wilson.

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April 23, 2013, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government General Counsel Nathan Mehrens issued the following statement on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) attempt to throw sand in the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline through issuing a comment to the State Department’s draft review of the project that complained that the report included “insufficient information” on environmental issues:

“The Senate has overwhelmingly made it clear that they want the Keystone XL pipeline built and they want it built now.  The EPA’s attempt to further delay this project on specious grounds is evidence of just how far this rogue Agency will go, and how little they care about what Congress thinks.  It is time for the Senate to send a clear message to the EPA that they need to get out of the way.

“It is time for the Senate to reject the nomination of Gina McCarthy to be the EPA Administrator.

“This would send a powerful message to the EPA to rein in their radical policies, but would also be doing what needs to be done by rejecting McCarthy who appears to be failing up through the ranks of the EPA.

“Absent the EPA’s meddling in the Keystone XL issue, there have been multiple other serious and legitimate reasons to reject McCarthy’s nomination.

“It was McCarthy who was tasked with maintaining the nation’s air radiation monitoring systems. After, the Japanese nuclear power plant failure, it was discovered that McCarthy had failed to do her job as the system suffered near catastrophic breakdowns directly due to her apparent incompetence.

“Anyone else would have been fired in the wake of this failure, but Obama is attempting to promote McCarthy to lead the entire EPA.

“McCarthy also is actively encouraging American automobile manufacturers to use an air conditioning refrigerant that has proven to be dangerous under the guise of helping combat global warming.

“Gina McCarthy is a radical, extremist intent on expanding the power of the EPA.  This latest incursion into the Keystone XL pipeline debate is further evidence of how far the EPA’s tentacles extend, and the Senate needs to send the Obama Administration a direct and powerful message by rejecting Gina McCarthy’s nomination to be the EPA Administrator.

“Failure to reject McCarthy may effectively abdicate the last opportunity for Congress to rein in this power grabbing Agency that is sucking the life out of the U.S. economy.”

Interview Availability: Please contact Adam Bitely at (703) 383-0880 ext. 126 or at media@algnews.org to arrange an interview with ALG General Counsel Nathan Mehrens.

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April 11, 2013, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson today issued the following statement on the Obama budget’s economic expectations:

“The economic assumptions in the 2014 Obama budget are simply devastating. If true, nominal economic growth will never again reach its postwar historical 6.5 percent average rate of increase. Instead, it will only grow an average 4.8 percent a year this decade. This will have negative implications on the nation’s financial picture for a generation.

“The Obama economic team has already been proven wrong about everything. In 2009, it overestimated GDP by a whopping $1.046 trillion in its first term. It overstated revenues by $1.1 trillion. But for sequestration and the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing and low interest rate bailouts, the debt would be much larger today.

“Yet, despite those bailouts, in 2013, the national debt will grow by 7.5 percent — above its 7 percent historical growth rate. If sequestration over the coming decade is cancelled and/or if inflation strikes, forcing interest rates to spike, and if the low growth assumptions going forward prove correct, by 2042, debt to GDP could rise to be as high as 189 percent, if not higher.

“Until the economy starts growing faster than the debt, we are skidding down a slippery slope to certain insolvency.”

Attachments:

“Obama’s amateur budget,” By Robert Romano, Senior Editor, Americans for Limited Government, April 11, 2013 at http://netrightdaily.com/2013/04/obamas-amateur-budget/

“What will the debt be in 2042?” By Robert Romano, Senior Editor, Americans for Limited Government, March 15, 2013 at http://netrightdaily.com/2013/03/what-will-the-debt-be-in-2042/

Interview Availability: Please contact Adam Bitely at (703) 383-0880 ext. 126 or at media@algnews.org to arrange an interview with ALG President Bill Wilson.

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April 5, 2013, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson today issued the following statement on the latest job numbers:

“663,000 Americans dropped out of the workforce last month.  206,000 fewer Americans were employed.  290,000 more Americans were unemployed.

“Yet, the headline will be that the unemployment rate dropped in March to 7.6 percent.

“Never has the lie of the improving Obama economy ever been more starkly revealed than in today’s March unemployment report, where the consequences of the destruction of the American workforce by policies that promote government dependence over work are hidden behind a statistical drop in the percentage of workers who are unemployed.

“At this rate, Obama may just make history by achieving a 0 percent unemployment rate because nobody’s in the workforce. You might just call that full unemployment. ”

Interview Availability: Please contact Adam Bitely at (703) 383-0880 ext. 126 or at media@algnews.org to arrange an interview with ALG President Bill Wilson.

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April 4, 2013, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson today issued the following statement blasting a push by the Obama Administration and the Federal Reserve to once again loosen mortgage lending standards to increase the pool of eligible homebuyers:

“To suggest that lowering credit standards is the solution to the financial crisis is to ignore the past 20 years of history. The fact is, borrowers can already get loans from Fannie and Freddie for as little as 3 percent down, and from the Federal Housing Administration for as low as 3.5 percent down. Prices have not been this low since 2003. And interest rates have never been this low.

“The problem in the housing market is not a lack of lending capacity, which is virtually limitless as banks are sitting on $1.6 trillion of excess reserves. It’s that even with it as easy as it is to get a loan, demand is still very low in the weak economy, and therefore it’s not easy enough for the central planners, so the push becomes to lower credit standards.

“The same thing happened after the 1991 recession when credit slowed down. By 1992, Congress had agreed to institute and expand the GSE ‘affordable’ housing goals, which required an increasing percent of government-backed mortgages to be of lower quality, which contributed substantially to the housing bubble. Since the economy is addicted to credit expansion, in order to grow, the incentive is for lending standards to become progressively weaker over time. By 2007, when the bubble popped, those goals had expanded from 30 percent of Fannie and Freddie’s portfolios to 55 percent.

“This is what happens every time the government wants to facilitate credit expansion to bolster asset prices. After the stock of available borrowers based on current credit standards is exhausted, the only recourse left to policy makers is to weaken credit standards. When this leads to asset bubbles and credit collapses, as it already has, then the American people are told that the banks that made the loans must be made whole through bailouts whether from Congress or the Federal Reserve. We’ve seen this movie before. It is a fraud and it will only lead to a repeat of the 2008 meltdown.”

Interview Availability: Please contact Adam Bitely at (703) 383-0880 ext. 126 or at media@algnews.org to arrange an interview with ALG President Bill Wilson.

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April 2, 2013—Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson today called on the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Monetary Policy and Trade to take up legislation that would begin the formal process of removing the U.S. from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Wilson’s call came after the IMF produced a study calling for the U.S. to implement a $500 billion a year carbon tax on consumers to offset what it calls “underpriced” oil, coal, and other energy products.

This “mispricing” is supposedly leading to “excessive energy consumption,” which is “accelerating the depletion of natural resources” and contributing to climate change.

“The IMF is lobbying on behalf of environmentalist radicals, arguing that not implementing a half-trillion dollar a year carbon tax is a de facto energy subsidy,” Wilson wrote in a letter to members of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Monetary Policy and Trade.

The IMF study, published on Jan. 28, states, “Consumer subsidies include two components: a pre-tax subsidy (if the price paid by firms and households is below supply and distribution costs) and a tax subsidy (if taxes are below their efficient level)… The efficient taxation of energy further requires corrective taxes to capture negative environmental and other externalities due to energy use (such as global warming and local pollution).”

Wilson also criticized the IMF for bailing out Greece, Portugal, and Ireland with $86.6 billion of bailouts, which the U.S. has contributed about $17 billion to, and the IMF’s role in levying a €5.8 billion savings deposit tax in Cyprus.

Wilson said the U.S. “should have nothing more to do with this radical outfit,” and called on Congress to reject the Obama Administration’s budget request to double the nation’s quota subscription in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to $130 billion from its current $65 billion level, converting part of the nation’s current $100 billion line of credit to the IMF.

If the Obama request was fulfilled, it would keep the nation’s total stake in the IMF at $165 billion.

“Not only should that request be rejected, but Congress ought to withdraw our quota subscription altogether, along with the $100 billion line of credit,” Wilson added in his letter to the House subcommittee, concluding, “Taxpayers should not be propping up bankrupt socialist states and the banks that fund them, let alone financing the lobbying efforts of radical environmentalists.”

Attachments:

ALG Letter to House Financial Services Subcommittee on Monetary Policy and Trade, April 1, 2013 at http://getliberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/IMFLetter-4-1-13.pdf

“Energy Subsidy Reform: Lessons and Implications,” International Monetary Fund, Jan. 28, 2013 at http://www.imf.org/external/np/pp/eng/2013/012813.pdf

Interview Availability: Please contact Adam Bitely at (703) 383-0880 ext. 126 or at media@algnews.org to arrange an interview with ALG President Bill Wilson.

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