Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Blumenthal Hits McMahon, Hides

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, secure in his bunker after it became known that he lied concerning his military service, has since ventured out briefly to attack Republican Party nominee Linda McMahon -- through a spokesperson.

McMahon, according to the title of a story written by Hartford Courant reporter Daniela Altimari, is really “Linda McBush”:

“Taking a page from the Democratic Party’s 2006 playbook, the Blumenthal campaign is looking to link Republican Linda McMahon with George Bush.

"’Linda McMahon paid a Bush economic advisor $20,000 to rewrite Bush's failed economic policies into her Back 2 Bush economic plan,'’ Mindy Myers, Richard Blumenthal's campaign manager, said in a press release this morning.

"’That means more runaway deficits, more corporate and special interest loopholes, and more tax breaks for people who don't need them, leaving working families paying the bill. I can tell you for free that there's nothing new about the Linda McBush plan. It isn't good for the people of Connecticut, it's good for her.’"

Should he succeed in replacing U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, Blumenthal will join a Democratic team that, far from solving the county’s solvency problems, has extended former President George Bush’s economic policy, adding to it new spending charges and programs that transfer jobs from the private to the public sector. When Bush retired from office, the national debt was $9.85 trillion, a great disappointment at the time to CBS news.

“On the day President Bush took office,’ the station noted at the tail end of the Bush administration, “the national debt stood at $5.727 trillion. The latest number from the Treasury Department shows the national debt now stands at more than $9.849 trillion. That's a 71.9 percent increase on Mr. Bush's watch.”
The federal debt has metastasized more rapidly under President Obama and the Pelosi congress. Obama’s legacy to Blumenthal’s prospective grandchildren is, in round numbers, a 14 trillion dollar unpaid bill.

The $14 trillion figure -- which represents the federal debt -- is only part of the national debt. State and local debt amounts to about $2.5 trillion, a good deal of it in pension funds owed to government workers, a pool of employees that has expanded greatly under the Obama-Pelosi economic prescriptions. Assuming reasonable investment returns, nearly half the nation’s state pension funds will be insolvent by 2025. The first city to run out of pension money for retirees, according to an eye-opening article in National Review, will be Springfield, Ill in 2018, a state that was the hotbed of much of the Obama administration. Pension funds in New Jersey, Indiana and Connecticut are expected to go belly up in 2019.

The Social Security “trust fund” (trust in God, all others pay cash) has no cash in it; which is to say, it is $106 trillion short. An 81 percent tax increase would be necessary to meet outstanding obligations. Add liabilities for the government’s guarantee of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac – Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank’s gift to Blumenthal’s grandchildren -- securities supported under the bailout plus state health care and other benefits, and the real national debt crests at about $130 trillion.

These are the kinds of figures that lend credence to Peter Schiff’s view that the solvency crisis in the United States has been caused by government meddling in a global economic market that is not free and rapidly losing its capitalistic characteristics.

Blumenthal may not be surprised to learn that corporate and special interest loopholes are likely to increase as the Dodd inspired national regulatory scheme rolls out into the future, because loopholes are inextricably tied to regulations, which have increased exponentially in the Obama administration. Blumenthal is no stranger to either regulations or special interests of a kind tolerable to Democrats.

Blumenthal has two immediate problems: 1) The comments here made by his campaign director suggest a basic misunderstanding of free market economics; and 2) the solvency problems besetting the United States are such as cannot be settled though methods usually employed by the attorney general. U.S. Senator Blumenthal, it may be assumed, would not be inclined to sue congresspersons, including Dodd, for having facilitated the fall of the housing market in the United States, a fate Canada escaped because its legislators refused to tinker with a market that even now closely resembles the U.S. housing market of years past, when bankers with standards lent money to prospective purchasers who could afford good faith down payments of up to 20 percent and whose incomes were such as to convince bankers that borrowers could afford to make monthly mortgage payments.

Now that Blumenthal has surfaced from his bunker, someone should try to arrange a debate between the three prospective U.S. senators – Blumenthal, McMahon and Schiff – centering on the question: Is the problem solvency, stupid?

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