With the recent personnel changes within the White House economic team including the departure of Larry Summers, there is one thing you can be certain of.  As long as private enterprise is under attack from the government  — as long as the government threatens more and more taxes, and more and more regulations – the economy will not get moving.   A new team won’t matter; it will be the same old wine in new bottles.

There used to be a consensus in Washington that tax cuts grew the economy and tax increases slowed the economy down.  President Kennedy lowered taxes in 1961 to get the economy moving; President Johnson pushed through a tax increase later in that decade because he was afraid the economy was growing so fast that it would cause inflation, and he wanted to cool the economy off.  Now President Obama is, on the one hand, supporting a tax reduction on small business investment – for the precise purpose of stimulating job creation – while also, and perversely, supporting an income tax increase on the very same small business people.

Yesterday, the Senate delivered yet another devastating blow to small businesses by failing to adopt an amendment (46-52) that would have repealed on onerous IRS paperwork requirement.

Tucked into Obamacare was a little known provision that required businesses to fill out at 1099 tax form with the IRS for all transactions with other businesses over $600. Thanks to this provision, rather than using already scarce resources to grow the company, business owners will be forced to spend money on burdensome paperwork requirements.  Increasing the number of forms businesses must submit to the IRS will not create new jobs or improve the access to affordable health care.  Why can’t Congress find the wherewithal to repeal it?

The Heritage Foundation did a full analysis on the true costs of this paperwork burden – its clearly an anti-jobs provision.

President Obama and liberal leaders in Washington claim that “politics” caused the demise of various government initiatives, they seem to have forgotten that good policy makes for good politics.  Policies that respect the genius of the private sector will make for good politics – and create jobs instead of growing the government.

An article today claims: Obama has added more to the debt than Washington to Reagan, COMBINED. What agenda is advanced by bankrupting the country?

The President has announced his new “jobs” package, the centerpiece of which is a small commitment to infrastructure spending.  I say a “small” commitment, because by most estimates the transportation infrastructure deficit in this country is in the trillions of dollars, and the President has proposed a $50 billion package of spending.  So this new proposal is not, and is not intended to be, a well planned, long term proposal to meet the transportation needs of the country.  If the President had really wanted to modernize our transportation system, he would have spent most or all of the first “stimulus” package on transportation in early 2009.  In fact, only a small percentage of that spending went for roads, highways, and rail, and none of it was used for the even more pressing responsibility of the federal government: defense.  None of the funds included in the first “stimulus” went toward buying new ships, planes, and vehicles for a military that is operating with an inventory of equipment that is aging and out of date.

Of all the sins of the Obama Presidency, the worst is the tremendous burden of the federal debt on the backs of every man, woman and child.  Americas is nearly $3 trillion dollars more in debt than we were before Barack Obama became President.  It certainly didn’t have to be that way.  In the twelve years that the Republicans controlled Congress, they made a start at getting the budget under control.  In three of those years, the budget was actually in surplus; the average deficit during that time was about $100 billion (approximately one/fifteenth of what it has been under Obama).  America suffered a deadly attack and a recession in 2001, and the deficit surged, but by 2006, when the Democrats took over the Congress, the deficit had been reduced and the government was actually projecting surpluses in the near future.  All of that progress has now been squandered; trillions more have been borrowed, and there is nothing to show for it.

I am an incurable optimist where the United States is concerned.  The voting public is about to act.  The new Congress will be very different from the current one.  We will begin the path back to greatness, and the inherent dynamism and genius of America is such that the recovery of our fortunes may well be faster than we have any right to expect.  Those in the world who wish us ill are going to be surprised, once again, at the resiliency of the United States.

But in the meantime, we must mourn the decline of our fortunes.  The illogic of this waste – the sheer stupidity of it – beggars description.

Climate change advocacy groups seem to be in denial of reality.

The “cap and trade” bill  was designed to raise the cost those forms of energy on which America depends:  coal and oil.  That was the point of the legislation:  to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by raising the cost of traditional fuels so high that the economy was effectively forced to use less energy.

Now here are some questions:  Will energy price increases be good or bad for economic growth?  When gas reached $4  per gallon, did that help or hurt the economy?  If utility bills went up by, say 25%, would that make you more or less likely to increase your purchases as a consumer?  If a business believes that it will have to buy much higher energy prices in the future, will that make the business more or less likely to hire additional employees now?  And if the same business has to pay such higher prices in the United States, but not in China, will that make the business more or less likely to move off shore or to lose customers to businesses that do move off shore?

The last two years have reminded the American people of an important truth.  We all depend on national prosperity to achieve our personal and political goals.  Whatever your place on the political spectrum, you need jobs and economic growth to get what you want:  opportunity, security, help for the poor – and environmental protection. Poor countries do not have strong environmental laws.  And prosperity depends, among other things, on access to affordable energy.

“Cap and trade” – like the health care bill, the high taxes, the huge deficit spending, the threatened card check legislation – is bad for the economy.  The voting public realizes that common sense truth, and that is what has stopped the “cap and trade” bill.  The groups quoted in this article are not fighting the oil companies, but a huge majority of the American people.  That is why they are losing, and why so many of their supporters will lose their seats this fall.

The headline here says it all: The Most Fiscally Irresponsible Government in U.S. History.  And it’s what we’ve been saying for the last year.  What is happening in Washington makes no sense from any coherent view of economics.  THAT is what the public realizes, and it’s why voters across the spectrum are abandoning the President.  Naturally many committed Democrats are still supporting the administration politically, and no one should begrudge them their loyalty to their Party.  But a significant number of these Democrats – when asked about the policies of the Administration rather than their support of the President himself – show a deep concern about the irrationality of, for example, deliberately driving up the deficit over the long term.  It would be an insult to liberalism to suggest that it embraces a “stimulus” that is really irresponsibility masquerading as policy.

We are right to be concerned about the deficit and the national debt, but more importantly – we should look at why these symptoms exist.  The national debt is about to top $13.4 trillion dollars because the government is simply spending too much.