May 4, 2012, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson reacted this morning to the U.S. Department of Labor’s report that the unemployment rate dropped to 8.1 percent almost solely due to more than half a million people dropping out of the labor force in the month of April.

“Obama’s idea of a recovery is when 522,000 Americans give up on getting a job, and drop out.  His claim that the unemployment rate has ‘dropped’ to 8.1 percent is either a delusion or a purposeful manipulation.  The truth is that there were 169,000 fewer Americans employed in April than in the previous month.  The truth is that there are more than 300,000 fewer Americans working today than when Obama took office.

Not shockingly, non-partisan independent groups that measure the unemployment rate like Gallup and ADP both say the unemployment rate is up, yet the Obama Administration’s counting team is continuing the charade that our nation’s unemployment rate is decreasing.

Even CNN/Money has noted that, ‘While it’s true that the unemployment rate is falling, that doesn’t include the millions of nonworking adults who aren’t even looking for a job anymore.  And hiring isn’t strong enough to keep up with population growth.’

It is literally dumbfounding that Obama and his Administration can get up with a straight face this morning and tout a drop in the unemployment rate when 169,000 fewer Americans are working.  Instead, they should be begging the people for forgiveness.”

Interview Availability: Please contact Rebekah Rast at (703) 383-0880 or at rrast@getliberty.org to arrange an interview with ALG President Bill Wilson.

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May 3, 2012, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson today responded to an Associated Press report predicting the nation’s jobless rate to drop to 7.9 percent by Election Day, which “would boost President Barack Obama’s prospects in November:”

“If the unemployment rate continues to drop, even to 7.9 percent, it will likely be on account of the continued decrease in the civilian labor force participation rate, which has dropped from 65.7 percent in January 2009 to 63.8 percent last month.

“That’s actually not good news. Almost 4.7 million Americans have dropped out of the labor force since Obama took office, because they have given up on looking for work. If they were included in the government’s measurement of unemployed, the rate would be closer to 10.8 percent, and the underemployed rate 17 percent based on April’s numbers. All together more than 27 million people cannot find full-time work in the Obama economy.

“Due to the drop in labor force participation the traditional jobless rate is meaningless as an economic indicator and does not reflect the economic misery facing the American public.

“Yet ‘leading’ economists predict continued drops in the jobless rate based on imaginary job growth rather than Americans giving up on the Obama economy. And this is supposed to help Obama? It seems likely those 27 million people will have some extra time on their hands come November 6 to let Obama know what they think of his economy.”

Interview Availability: Please contact Rebekah Rast at (703) 383-0880 or at rrast@getliberty.org to arrange an interview with ALG President Bill Wilson.

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May 1, 2012, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson issued the following statement on the Occupy movement May Day protests:

“While the Occupy movement shares the same frustration with the Tea Party that the political system is broke, corrupt, and destroying the country, they have failed to generate sympathy with their disruptive tactics or public support without a coherent message for their agenda of ‘change’. They appear more occupied with breaking stuff, camping out in parks, and sitting in front of buildings than actually accomplishing something politically.

“Compare that with the well-organized Tea Party that has mounted successful primary challenges in 2010 and appears poised to knock off long-time Indiana Senator Richard Lugar next week. They are engaged in a long-term campaign to reconstitute Congress — one seat at a time — with candidates that are more likely to take on the entrenched establishment. Whereas the Tea Party has worked successfully to a certain extent within the system while taking it on, the Occupy movement has taken the line that it cannot be fixed within, and so does not bother.

“To be fair, given the poor performance of Congress so far at reining in the unsustainable spending and economically destructive regulations in Washington, D.C., it is hard to argue with the assessment that our political system is no longer representative. Clearly winning primaries and elections is not enough to undo the administrative state. But nobody said this would be easy. To win, the American people have to play the long game.

“The frustration of the Occupy movement is understandable. When one in two recent college graduates cannot find work in this economy, when waste of the public treasury is at an all-time high, and when our monetary system is controlled by an unaccountable bank cartel, who isn’t frustrated?

“But their tactics are misplaced, juvenile, and at times criminal. Plus, and this is the key point, they’re missing the primary target, which are the government policies that created the credit bubble, wrecked the economy, and left future generations with a debt so large it cannot be repaid. Frustration misdirected is not a strategy for retaking the Republic, it is a recipe for anarchy.”

Interview Availability: Please contact Rebekah Rast at (703) 383-0880 or at rrast@getliberty.org to arrange an interview with ALG President Bill Wilson.

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April 30, 2012, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson today issued the following statement urging Senate adoption of S.J. Res. 37 that would overturn an Environmental Protection Agency regulation that would require coal-fired power plants to significantly reduce mercury emissions:

“Mercury is a natural part of the Earth’s environment. Thousands of tons of mercury are emitted annually through natural forces like volcanoes, deep-sea hydrothermal vents, geysers, and forest fires, and yet the EPA in its infinite wisdom has decided to target the relatively low amount of mercury that is emitted by coal-fired plants in the U.S. These regulations require these power plants to be retrofitted with new technologies that will cost tens of billions of dollars to implement, while failing to prevent more than 99 percent of mercury from being emitted into the environment. It is hard to find a costlier regulation that would achieve so little.”

Attachments:

“The Myth of Killer Mercury,” By Willie Soon and Paul Driesson, Wall Street Journal, May 25, 2011 at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703421204576329420414284558.html

Interview Availability: Please contact Rebekah Rast at (703) 383-0880 or at rrast@getliberty.org to arrange an interview with ALG President Bill Wilson.

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April 27, 2012, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson issued the following statement on the latest report from the Bureau of Economic Analysis showing the growth in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at just 2.2 percent in the first quarter:

“This is the time in the political cycle when voter attitudes are cementing, and right now, the Obama economy stinks. Unemployment is still above 8 percent, which the Administration said would never happen if the ‘stimulus’ was passed. Growth is still quite sluggish, only coming in at 2.2 percent in the first quarter, despite promises of a V-shaped recovery. 25 percent of that can be explained by higher commodity prices in non-durable goods and in services, meaning without the inflation, growth might be more like 1.7 percent.

“In fact, the Obama Administration was projecting 3 percent growth this year, so their rosy projections are once again way off. In 2011, they projected 3.1 percent growth and only got 1.8 percent. As their growth projections prove to be way off once again, revenues will fall short of expectations, and the national debt will continue to grow that much faster.

“Also, now the $15.6 trillion national debt is officially larger than the entire $15.4 trillion U.S. economy, growing at an annual rate of over 10 percent. No nation can long sustain itself when it takes on debt at nearly five  times the rate its economy grows.

“Couple that with almost $4 a gallon for gasoline, food prices once again increasing, home values continue dropping into a double-dip recession, 1 in 2 recent college graduates cannot find full-time work to pay off hundreds of billions of student loan debt, and the election outlook for Obama must look quite gloomy. This is Jimmy Carter all over again — only worse. This is Mitt Romney’s election to lose.”

Interview Availability: Please contact Rebekah Rast at (703) 383-0880 or at rrast@getliberty.org to arrange an interview with ALG President Bill Wilson.

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April 26, 2012, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson issued the following statement on the withdrawal of an amendment offered by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee to the “Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act”(CISPA) that would have authorized the Secretary of Homeland Security “to acquire, intercept, retain, use, and disclose communications and other system traffic that are transiting to or from or stored on Federal systems:”

“It is a good day for liberty when an Orwellian amendment so horrific that it would have authorized the Secretary of Homeland Security, a political appointee, to monitor the nation’s entire digital infrastructure and in the process, spy on Americans, was withdrawn from consideration. This police state on steroids amendment by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee was a thuggish thrust at authoritarian control on all Americans.

It is likely the amendment was about to go down to a spectacular bipartisan defeat. And deservedly so.

“However, major problems remain with the legislation. Much of the debate surrounding CISPA has focused on provisions creating a right of service providers to decide whether or not they wish to share user data with the government.  In the process, everyone has been pretending or assuming that the government is not already collecting and storing this data through various intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency.

“Recent disclosures by former NSA official William Binney on Democracy Now challenge that assumption in an alarming fashion. By Binney’s account, not only has the government been gathering intelligence domestically on U.S. citizens for some years now by monitoring the entire network, but that it has already developed a vast database of most every electronic communication in the world. CISPA does not address these concerns at all.

“If Congress wishes to truly address intelligence ‘sharing’ with the government by communications companies, it must first outlaw these existing NSA and other surveillance programs and order the destruction of the data already in the government’s possession. Then it might have more teeth, and the American people could have certainty their sensitive private data is actually secure.

“But pretending that this pointless debate now taking place in Congress will have any effect on whether data on everybody will continue to be collected by the government is not the solution. It only creates a false veneer of privacy.”

Attachments:

“Cyber intelligence sharing vote raises broader constitutional questions,” ALG President Bill Wilson, April 25, 2012 at http://netrightdaily.com/2012/04/cyber-intelligence-sharing-vote-raises-broader-constitutional-questions-2/

Interview Availability: Please contact Rebekah Rast at (703) 383-0880 or at rrast@getliberty.org to arrange an interview with ALG President Bill Wilson.

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April 26, 2012, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson issued the following statement in support of legislation by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) that would prohibit lame duck presidents from issuing costly regulations after an election they either lose or are in their final term through Jan. 20:

“Americans for Limited Government strongly supports Sen. Johnson’s ‘No Sore Loser Act’ that will stop presidents from issuing eleventh hour costly regulations after they lose reelection. Sometimes outgoing administrations like to smash everything to pieces, so to speak, on their way out the door. And there’s no reason the economy should suffer any more at the hands of this Administration than it already has.”

Interview Availability: Please contact Rebekah Rast at (703) 383-0880 or at rrast@getliberty.org to arrange an interview with ALG President Bill Wilson.

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