We have often discussed the incredible peril Network Neutrality poses when placed in the hands of government — it’s the incredible economic and First Amendment damage that can (and will) be done by the federal Leviathan once it gets its Net Neutrality tentacles around the World Wide Web. Nearly as pernicious, are the private big companies who benefit from big government generally – and the incredible Big Government power grab that is Net Neutrality specifically.

We’ve heard a little about Netflix – the gigantic pro-Net Neutrality Internet movie delivery company.  Netflix is pro-Net Neutrality because Netflix wants grandmothers to pay more to email their grandchildren so that they can continue to use tons and tons of Internet bandwidth to make tons and tons of money – and not pay for it. This is one of the terrible things Net Neutrality does: It prevents Internet Service Providers (ISPs) – the people who spend billions of dollars building and perpetually bettering the highways and byways of the World Wide Web – from charging people who use more bandwidth more money.

Let us disabuse ourselves of a pro-Net Neutrality myth – the Internet Superhighway is not a free ride (nothing, of course, is).  Roads cost money, whether to your house or to your computer and Net Neutrality allows some of the biggest riders to do so without paying for the privilege. Net Neutrality outlaws per-use pricing.  It’s like telling a grocery store they must charge people purchasing one steak the same price as people purchasing fifty. It’s Socialism for the Internet – and we’ll end up with everyone getting equal amounts of nothing. And as we go down, your Grandma’s – and your, and my – Internet prices shoot skyward so as to subsidize the incredible bandwidth hogs like Netflix and Google.

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The Barack Obama Administration has been absolutely atrocious in signing off on terrible legislation and policy prescriptions.

ObamaCare.  The $878 billion alleged “stimulus.” The $30 billion bump (to $50 billion) of the General Motors bailout.  Cash for Clunkers.  Cash for Caulkers.  Dodd-Frank.  Lilly Ledbetter.  And on, and on, and on…

Then there’s the stuff the Obama Administration tried–and failed–to rush through the Donkey Congress (2009-2011).  But because these things were also so heinous and because the Administration and Congressional Democrats had already reached their Heinous Maximus quotient, they were unable to pile them on We the People. There was Cap and Trade.  And Card Check.  And Net Neutrality.  And…

Being stopped in Congress didn’t stop the Administration.  It didn’t even slow them down.  As President Obama said, there’s more than one way to skin these cats. These ways aren’t Constitutional.  They are, in fact, dictatorial.  But this from all appearances doesn’t bother Obama a whit. He is using his every Department, Commission, Agency and Board to jam through these terrible ideas–and more–via executive branch regulatory fiat. All of this goes a very long way towards explaining why we remain mired in plus-9% unemployment and less-than-1% economic growth.

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Americans for Prosperity’s Phil Kerpen has released a new book: Democracy Denied: How Obama is Ignoring You and Bypassing Congress to Radically Transform America – And How to Stop Him.

In this work, Kerpen lays out the Obama Administration’s serial abuse–in fact, outright violation–of our Constitutional republican form of government. President Obama is using the panoply of federal Departments, Commissions, Agencies and Boards to illegally force feed us new “laws.” Yet they aren’t laws at all, as Obama is bypassing Congress and the legislative process.  They are being foisted upon us by executive branch regulatory fiat. This is not democracy but dictatorship, as Kerpen’s excellent tome exhaustively proves.

Here is but a sampling of the research he presents to make his case. Chapter II: Democrats can’t pass the energy sector-assault that is Cap & Trade?  No problem, President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will start imposing large swaths of it as if it has. Chapter IV: Democrats can’t pass the workplace-assault that is the Big Union-payoff Card Check?  No problem, President Obama’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)  and Department of Labor will start imposing large swaths of it as if it has.

Chapter V: ObamaCare–which did get shoved, bribed and cajoled through Congress–left WIDE latitude for Health & Human Services (HHS) regulators to go to town on our health care sector. And here’s a shocker; they already are. Chapter VI: The Dodd-Frank financial sector-attack slipped through Congress under cover of economic crash-fueled panic and also left WIDE latitude for a host of regulatory agencies to go to town. Shocker– so are they. And the list goes on, and on, and on… (more…)

Just a little over a month ago, we reported that House Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee had called off a hearing on a natural gas boondoggle that would have lined the pockets of T. Boone Pickens and George Soros with taxpayer dollars. We were proud of the GOP for taking a step back and reconsidering a plan that could have been an unqualified disaster as government funds were directed not to programs that would assist in the development of market-friendly alternative fuels, but would have forced demand- and supply-side subsidies for natural gas, creating an unstable and unnatural market.

This week, unfortunately, House Ways and Means leadership has placed these energy subsidies and “tax credits” back on the agenda.

On April 6, 2011, Rep. John Sullivan (R-OK) introduced H.R. 1380, the New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions (NAT GAS) Act of 2011.  The bill currently has 184 bipartisan cosponsors, although a number of Members of Congress have removed their names as cosponsors.  Referred primarily to the Ways and Means Committee, H.R. 1380 includes tax credits related to compressed and liquefied natural gas (CNG and LNG), including credits for the fuels themselves, credits for the purchase and production of vehicles powered by CNG and LNG, and credits for refueling property related to CNG and LNG.  Whether such credits represent good energy policy or an intrusion into the free market has been the subject of vigorous debate.

In announcing the hearing, Chairman Tiberi said, “Energy security and comprehensive tax reform are two of the most important priorities we can pursue to create jobs and ensure the long-term strength of the U.S. economy.  As the committee with jurisdiction over energy tax policy, the Ways and Means Committee should examine whether there sometimes can be tension between these priorities, and how this Committee can design tax policies that achieve our energy security goals while also staying true to the principles of simplicity, fairness, and growth that drive the Committee’s tax reform agenda.”

Anyone paying attention to Big Government would know the “tax credits” contained within this act are only tax credits because Congress chooses to define them as such. These tax credits are really heavily disguised taxpayer subsidies, doled out to people who choose to make radical, impulse decisions about which engines they put in their large vehicles without considering the long term effects of their actions. One Washington report explained the bait-and-switch rather nicely:

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Those listening to President Obama’s speech in the Rose Garden yesterday may have been hoping for remarks outlining a comprehensive debt reducing package from the nation’s chief executive, but what they got was yet another class warfare screed.  Replete with admonitions that the wealthy need to pay their “fair share” (as defined by Him of course) and sprinkled with his patented scare tactics rooted in the fallacy of the false alternative (either hedge fund managers pay more or seniors will go hungry) the president to me revealed more of himself even than he has in the past about what really makes him tick, both philosophically as psychologically.

He is, at heart, an ardent believer that the wealth of a nation’s citizenry is in the end the property of their government into which the haves pay and bureaucrats then distribute out as social justice in the form or largess to the have-nots.  His increasing vibe of anger, that seems to conversely rise as his poll numbers fall, reveals to me a rather petulant man, unable to grasp the notion that he may not actually be the smartest guy in the room (despite the assurances of his orbiting satellites of sycophants in and out of  the MSM media) and that there are those who disagree with him not because they haven’t heard his message, but rather because they have and have found it wanting.

I found myself listening to his speech and thinking that I’d heard most of it before.  Most but not all.  One new tact that the historian in me found fascinating, and quite cynical, was his reaching down into the soil of Mount Vernon to summon the ghost of our most esteemed first president, George Washington, to help make his case.  Mr. Obama offered up this snippet from Washington’s September 19, 1796 Farwell Address to the nation to bolster his tax raising stance:

“…towards the payment of debts there must be revenue; that to have revenue there must be taxes; and no taxes can be devised which are not more or less inconvenient and unpleasant.”

Here is how Mr. Obama’s speech-writers interpreted our first president’s advice,   Said our current president:

“It’s always more popular to promise the moon and leave the bill for after the next election or the election after that.  That’s been true since our founding.  George Washington grappled with this problem.  He understood that dealing with the debt is — these are his words – ‘always a choice of difficulties.’  But he also knew that public servants weren’t elected to do what was easy; they weren’t elected to do what was politically advantageous.”

I wonder if anyone in the Obama administration studied history because to reach back to Washington to support, in effect, raising already burdensome income taxes to sustain a massive federal bureaucracy and social welfare state is about as far a reach as one can stretch before toppling over into the abyss of utter nonsense.

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There has been news aplenty about the Solyndra solar power company.

The chock-full-of-Barack-Obama-Administration-cronies-and-donors corporation that received more than half a billion dollars in government-guaranteed loans to build the alleged future of energy.

Which President Obama hailed as such after the government-backed checks had cleared.

Which turned out to be totally untrue, and Solyndra’s solar folly an abject failure.  In fact, a bankrupt one.

Which anyone who knows anything at all about “green” energy knew would be the result long before it was even a glint in Obama’s Crony Socialist eye.

(This is Crony Socialism.  It has very little to do with – and is even less successful than – Crony Capitalism.)

And as it turns out, the those-in-the-know included the Obama Administration.  Who were repeatedly warned that the company was in hay-yuge trouble before the first check was cut, but pushed through the loan guarantees anyway.

And now the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has raided the joint, walking out with boxes and boxes of documents.  (We don’t yet know if this is the beginnings of a real inquiry, or a Clinton-esque move where the paperwork vanishes, only to turn up years from now in the White House residence wing.)

Was the Administration so hurriedly adamant – despite all the evidence screaming “Stop” – because of the company’s Obama cronies and their campaign cash?

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[Ed Note: This is the first post to run at BigGovernment. It was published two years ago today. It still seems relevant.]

In 1995, President Bill Clinton stood before the nation and proclaimed, “The era of big government is over.” The following year, the federal budget deficit stood at 1.4% of GDP. Thirteen years later, in 2008, the deficit had doubled, to just over 3% of GDP. This year, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the federal budget deficit will equal 11.4% of GDP.

As George Will would say, “Well.”

This is the real source of our “summer of discontent.” Yes, millions of Americans spent the month of August holding Tea Parties, attending town halls, organizing, marching and protesting against ObamaCare, i.e. Congressional and Administration proposals to reconstruct the entire health care sector. But to suggest that health care alone is at the root of this backlash is to miss the forest for the trees. To paraphrase Democrat strategist James Carville, “It’s the big government, stupid.”

Since last September when the financial markets stumbled, we’ve seen a Wall Street bailout, government takeovers of AIG, Citigroup, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, GM, Chrysler, and numerous banks. The Federal Reserve has opened its discount window to almost all-comers and has taken the unprecedented step of aggressively buying up the federal government’s own debt. Congress rushed through a “stimulus to nowhere,” moved closer to a “cap-and-trade” remake of the energy sector and openly talked about higher taxes and more regulation.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel famously said that, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Ronald Reagan said, “Government isn’t the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” The administration has turned this observation upside down, proclaiming that Big Government will lead us to a better world. In August, we heard America singing, “Enough!”

The mainstream media and politicos from both parties were caught flat-footed by the push-back from average citizens. Each news-cycle brought a new theory for the protests: “astroturf,” angry “mobs,” distortions and misinformation, kooks and conspiracy nuts, and, inevitably (and perhaps most offensively) racism (MSNBC amazingly even cut the head off a black man holding a gun to make the point that white racist extremism was behind the entirety the protests).  The elites have convinced themselves that, once Congress is safely cocooned on Capitol Hill, and engaged in some Kennedy-esque legislating—a tweak here, a nip-and-tuck there—ObamaCare will be back on track and the Administration can continue its march to reshape America.

The elites are whistling past the graveyard. The ground has shifted. It could just be that deficits above 10% of GDP are the new $4 a gallon gas, i.e. the tipping point that awakens the silent majority and recalibrates political dynamics. Americans are setting aside parochial self-interest and reaching to reclaim the legacy of the Founders.

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One of my life’s maxims is:

Education and knowledge are often mutually exclusive.

With the Barack Obama Administration’s all-out assault on the for-profit higher education industry, one of the books I have long intended to write is becoming ever more true:

College IS for Dummies.

We the People who closely follow politics have assuredly noticed an incessant trend on Talking Head TV.  Very often the Leftist debater is – a college professor.  Often teaching some very Leftist, completely pointless “scholastic” field.

For instance, National Review’s John Derbyshire rightly calls for an end to all collegiate programs that end in the word “Studies.”  Do a little Web search, and you’ll quickly reach the same conclusion.

The point being – college campuses are rife with hard Left ideologues posing as “educators.” Hiding there because their worldview doesn’t jibe with Reality.

And because they are paid handsomely to spout utter nonsense to the next generations – at a $100,000+ premium to the victims…I mean students.

The new meat can’t even get through orientation – the indoctrination is already underway.

Is this claptrap Leftist racket worth your time and considerable coin?  Hardly.

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For nearly three years as Americans have struggled through this Great Recession, President Obama has given speeches that relied on failed Keynesian economic theory and the politics of class warfare and envy. As his big government policies have spent this nation to the brink, the employment picture continues to worsen.

Tonight, President Obama will deliver a major economic address before a Joint Session of Congress. The MacIver Institute expects it will be more of the same rhetoric and promotion of government solutions we’ve been hearing for the last 3 years.

The timing of the speech also conflicts with the pomp and circumstance surrounding the kickoff of the 2011 NFL season. As a Packers’ fan and in the spirit of public service, I directed our staff to comb through the hundreds of speeches President Obama has already made to give you a concise two-minute preview of his latest ‘big speech.’

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From Reuters:

The powerful healthcare industry hopes a congressional “super committee” tasked with slashing America’s debt will fail and is lobbying instead for automatic spending cuts that will kick in if the panel deadlocks.

Much of the health sector believes the spending cuts, which will be triggered if the committee fails to find at least $1.2 trillion in savings over 10 years, will be less draconian than any deficit-reduction deal, according to lobbyists and healthcare groups interviewed by Reuters.

Under the trigger mechanism — a process called sequestration — automatic spending cuts of $1.2 trillion will begin in 2013. But programs such as the Medicaid healthcare program for the poor and the Social Security retirement program are totally protected from cuts, while Medicare, the healthcare program for the elderly, would face only a 2 percent cut to providers.

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Sarah Palin weighed in with a very important point in the policy debate about the role of government. Her Saturday speech, among other things, took a swipe at the country’s dilemma of booming crony capitalism:

[T]he permanent political class …[use] taxpayer dollars… to bail out their friends on Wall Street and their corporate cronies, and to reward campaign contributors, and to buy votes via earmarks. There is so much waste. And there is a name for this: It’s called corporate crony capitalism. This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk. No, this is the capitalism of connections and government bailouts and handouts, of waste and influence peddling and corporate welfare. This is the crony capitalism that destroyed Europe’s economies. It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest – to the little guys.

Amen. Immediately, the media and other Democrats, as well as some Republicans, pointed out that this label sticks to Texas Governor Rick Perry just as it does to President Obama and that, assuming Perry is the Republican nominee, it will have limited resonance in the 2012 debate.

There is an element of truth to this, though that seems to be as much an effort to dodge discussion (or Obama’s record) as it is to accurately represent matters.

First, about the phrase, ‘crony capitalism.’ After addressing it recently on television someone emailed me and asked if I would please deploy the term ‘cronyism’ since, after all, this is just corrupt abuse of taxpayer money and not at all capitalism. I get that. But you ride the waves that come in, and rhetorically, this practice is “crony capitalism” and will remain so barring a full airing of the practice’s true extent and insidiousness.

That Perry, like it seems most politicians, has some things to answer for on this front seems hardly enough to neuter Obama’s awful exposure to the charge (see, e.g., his many waivers from ObamaCare going 50% to union members who only represent about 7% of the workforce, as well as “Obama’s Enron“, the $535 million green jobs boondoggle Solyndra).

It is axiomatic that crony capitalism and similar corruption is rampant, in many forms, among businesses that would not exist but-for largesse transferred to them, by politicians, from taxpayers. Such industries, and the practice of propping them up in the name of one or another fads or theories, invite this.

The increasingly popular “green jobs” schemes — the White House claims more than $80 billion of the $800-plus billion ’stimulus’ went to these, whatever their  definition encompasses — are therefore rife with moral hazard. After all, they exist for reasons other than their economic s or their merit; their pitch is “unless you give me this preference, mandate or bag of money why, I’ll disappear”.

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Reason’s Matt Welch, coauthor of the new book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong With America, talks with Emily Ekins, Reason’s polling director, about what the new Reason Rupe Public Opinion Survey tells us about how Americans think about federal spending, and debt.

Ekins argues that Americans primarily want to cut spending, not raise revenue, to deal with the debt crisis.

“[Americans] believe that [cutting spending] will…do more to help the economy than hurt,” Ekins says. “Fifty-seven percent believe that, where as only 20% believe that it would mostly harm the economy.”

The Reason-Rupe survey is online here and here (pdf).

This Reason Foundation project is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation.

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We have spent the last three-plus years in the Third Age of Bailout.

During which we have spent trillions of public dollars trying to create (“or save”) private sector jobs.

The results have been simultaneously disastrous and completely ineffectual.  And utterly predictable.

We on the Right were all along explaining that we have historical evidence aplenty that the public sector stealing money from the private sector to

1. Waste a goodly portion thereof (as government always does) and then
2. Slosh the remainder around to political supporters and cronies

is not the way to create jobs.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt deepened and deeply prolonged the Great Depression by so doing.

President Lyndon Baines Johnson increased and ensconced permanent, intergenerational poverty – by declaring War on and setting us up to spend trillions of dollars subsidizing it.

For resisting this serial economic and governmental folly, the Left has incessantly accused the Right of not having a plan to create jobs.

This ludicrous charge simultaneously reveals two immutable truths:

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In his first on-camera interview since his August announcement that he would not run for President, Paul Ryan sits down discusses what went into his decision making process and what his political future may hold.

Congressman Paul Ryan sat down in his Janesville, Wisconsin district office with MacIver News Service’s Bill Osmulski for this exclusive one-on-one interview.

• What went into his recent decision to not run for President in 2012?

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You’ve heard the expression “building on success.”

Where you identify something that’s working – and work to maximize and further broaden its fruition.  In large part by determining what’s working – and seeking to replicate it.

The Left has always remained blissfully unfamiliar with this concept.

Probably at least in part because they are perpetually too busy building instead on failure.

Take the Barack Obama Administration and their D.C. Leftist cohorts.

They in 2009 spent nearly $1 trillion on an alleged economic stimulus.  Which would, we were told, keep unemployment below 8%.

Oops.

That having failed miserably, the D.C. Leftists built upon their failure by spending more “stimulus” coin on Cash for Clunkers, Cash for Caulkers and a whole host of other pitifully failed attempts at publicly invigorating the private sector.

Oops.

Building on failure.

We all now anxiously await September’s latest-in-a-long-line of famous President Obama problem-solving speeches.  In which, we are told, he will focus like a laser on creating the jobs they have thus far failed miserably at creating with their top-down, centrally-planned borrowing and spending.

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The transformation of General Motors (GM) to Government Motors (GM) has cost a lot of Americans a lot of money.

Many, many of them under questionable and in fact illegal circumstances.

Let us begin with the $50 billion ‘We the People’ were forced to “invest” in General Motors – including a $30 billion Barack Obama bump so as to give his Administration greater sway in how things would subsequently go down.

We were originally told – by Obama himself – that we would make money on the bailout.  Now we’re told we’ll lose somewhere between $11 and $14 billion (and given the stock price’s long, slow slide, maybe even more).

And about which we were lied to by the Administration.  Which said this titanic loss of coin is less than they were expecting – just seven months after Obama his own self said we’d turn a profit.

Then there was the 2009 GM bankruptcy filing (which we were told our $50 billion would forestall – oops).

Through which the Obama Administration’s new toy car company eviscerated existing law to benefit their union, campaign-funding cronies at the illegal expense of GM bond holders – who should have by law received preferred treatment.

The ripped off didn’t take too kindly to being the Administration’s latest dupes:

We believe the offer to be a blatant disregard of fairness for the bondholders who have funded this company and amounts to using taxpayer money to show political favoritism of one creditor over another….

No kidding.

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America is in shambles from sea to shining sea. Unemployment is at Great Depression levels. Real Estate is collapsing. The stock market is crumbling. Retail sales are vanishing. Consumer confidence is plummeting. Inflation is skyrocketing (on the products that matter- energy and food prices). And of course, our U.S. Triple A credit rating is gone for the first time in history.

America is staring at economic disaster- Obamageddon. We are the Titanic, headed straight for the iceberg. Even delusional 500 point up days on Wall Street will not change the frightening long term picture. The iceberg is straight ahead.

Obama and his socialist cabal have channeled Hoover and FDR, who turned an ordinary bust into The Great Depression with a toxic strategy of more government, more spending, more debt, more entitlements, more rules and regulations strangling business, higher minimum wages, more power to unions, higher taxes, more printing of money by Fed, and trade tariffs. This is the Obama blueprint squared.

Here’s where the story gets downright frightening. This time the results are going to be dramatically worse than 1929. This time we are facing The Greatest Depression ever. Obamageddon.

Why? Because The Great Depression had NONE of problems and obligations we are now facing.

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This WaPo article — “Obama tries to change subject back to green jobs” — is an instant classic of a new, Obama-era genre: cheerleading for expensive schemes which exist solely due to political whimsy and consideration, and are therefore little more than make-work.

The item begins, “After spending weeks talking about topics he probably would have preferred to avoid — debt limits, deficits, a plunging stock market — President Obama will hit the road Thursday to talk about jobs. Specifically, about how his administration is trying to create more of them.”

The green ones. Which schemes failed where the president used to tell us to look but no longer does because the failures were exposed. As his spokesman admits “the White House doesn’t create jobs”.

And his critics say he’s out of ideas! But, hmm. Yes. I suppose that ‘green jobs’ thing went over well last time he led with it. Still, if ending up as a punch-line is victory, what does defeat look like?

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I interviewed Congressman Connie Mack (R-FL), via telephone, about his new “Mack Penny Plan,” which is gaining considerable support from both House and Senate Republicans, and even some Democrats.

Congressman Connie Mack did not vote to raise the debt ceiling before the August recess. He was looking for a long-term solution to the nation’s deficits, which are leading to unsustainable debt.

After working with some grass-roots groups, Mr. Mack designed the “One Percent Spending Reduction Act,” or, the “Mack Penny Plan,” which, he says, will cut and cap federal spending, and balance the federal budget in eight years.

In short, the “Mack Penny Plan” would:

• Cut federal spending by 1% each year for 6 years
• Cap spending at 18% of GDP in the 7th year
• Balance the federal budget in the 8th year
• Save taxpayers $7.5 trillion over 10 years

“What’s different about this plan,” the Florida congressman says, “is that it’s pretty simple. We freeze spending at the 2011 level- about $3.6 trillion- and cut 1% of spending for six years- that’s one penny out of every dollar. Everyone has had to cut at least one penny out of every dollar, whether in family or business budgets, so that’s not too hard for the federal government to do.”

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