It’s Wednesday, February 29th, 2012….and before we begin, this just in:

Romney Wins Michigan and Arizona

Maybe now Rick will lose the sweater vest.

So without further ado, here’s The Gouge!

First up, the must-see video featured on yesterday’s home page (www.thedailygouge.com) which tells you all you need to know about the motivation behind the Dims’ disregard for the founding document of the Republic:

Liberalism’s a lot like Islam; it’s not just a belief, it’s a way of life.  And both are antithetically opposed to the America our Founding Fathers intended.

Next up, Bill Meisen and George Lawlor simultaneously sent this next item from the The Washington Free Beacon detailing how Team Tick-Tock’s intent on….

The few, the proud….the only ones who are keeping their oaths

to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States

The Obama administration’s proposed defense budget calls for military families and retirees to pay sharply more for their healthcare, while leaving unionized civilian defense workers’ benefits untouched. The proposal is causing a major rift within the Pentagon, according to U.S. officials. (But not big enough for any of the senior Brass to resign in protest.)  Several congressional aides suggested the move is designed to increase the enrollment in Obamacare’s state-run insurance exchanges.

The disparity in treatment between civilian and uniformed personnel is causing a backlash within the military that could undermine recruitment and retention. (Not that Team Tick-Tock would INTENTIONALLY undermine the U.S. Military!)

The proposed increases in health care payments by service members, which must be approved by Congress, are part of the Pentagon’s $487 billion cut in spending. It seeks to save $1.8 billion from the Tricare medical system in the fiscal 2013 budget, and $12.9 billion by 2017.

Many in Congress are opposing the proposed changes, which would require the passage of new legislation before being put in place. “We shouldn’t ask our military to pay our bills when we aren’t willing to impose a similar hardship on the rest of the population,” Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a Republican from California, said in a statement to the Washington Free Beacon. “We can’t keep asking those who have given so much to give that much more.”

Administration officials told Congress that one goal of the increased fees is to force military retirees to reduce their involvement in Tricare and eventually opt out of the program in favor of alternatives established by the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

Funny how Defense remains the one segment of the federal government subject to actual budget cuts.  Once again, they’ll violate established bankruptcy precedent to rescue the UAW (more on that follows), funnel billions via Project Porkulus to sustain the teachers, construction and public employee unions….but there’s not a dime to spare for the brave men and women who’ve volunteered to place themselves in Harm’s way.

So it should come as no surprise in keeping with their usual flair for the farcical, Team Tick-Tock and it’s lapdog lackies in the DoD have taken the famous battle cry of “Millions for defense, sir, but not one cent for tribute!” and stood it on its head; not one cent for Defense, but….

Guantanamo detainees get new $750G soccer field

….hundreds of thousands so terrorists can play soccer.  Can there be ANY question where this Administration’s priorities lie….any at all?!?

Turning now to The Obamao’s increasingly vociferous defense of the indefensible:

Obama to UAW: ‘Trying to Climb to the Very Top’ Is ‘Greed,’ Not What America’s ‘About’

President Obama – in a speech to the United Auto Workers union – said that “trying to climb to the very top” was not what America is “about,” saying that it was “greed” and that in reality “we’re all in it together.” “America’s not just looking out for yourself, it’s not just about greed, it’s not just about trying to climb to the very top and keep everybody else down,” Obama said at the UAW’s annual National Community Action Program Legislative Conference in Washington, D.C. (Unless of course, you’re President….and you’ve got yours.)

Instead, Obama – who climbed to the very top of American politics just three years ago – said that instead America was about being “all in it together,” and giving people “a hand up.” “When our assembly lines grind to a halt, we work together, and we get them going again,” he said. “When somebody else falters, we try to give them a hand up, because we know [that] we’re all in it together.”

Obama also attacked critics of his bailout policies who say that saving failed companies does not reflect traditional American values. (Let alone 200+ years of bankruptcy law!)

But trust him….

….HE reflects traditional Marxist….er,….Amerikan values.

Seriously; listen to this snippet of his speech and see how many outright lies and fabrications you can count.

We stopped counting at 20….mainly because we ran out of fingers and toes.

And now, as the late Paul Harvey used to say, the REST of the story you’ll never hear from the MSM, courtesy of the WSJ:

The Other GM Bailout

The $18 billion tax gift Obama didn’t mention.

President Obama appeared at a United Auto Workers tent revival meeting Tuesday, and he made several notable claims. Critics of the Detroit bailout of 2008-09 are motivated, apparently, by their antipathy to American workers. The alternative to a government rescue was letting the entire auto industry “die.” But one particular claim stood out. Mr. Obama said the bailouts succeeded not “because of anything the government did.”

The lacuna in this account is the $81.8 billion that taxpayers surrendered to General Motors and Chrysler, and we detailed the many other costs in a February 25 editorial “Halftime in Detroit.” As it happens, however, we missed one big thing the government did that deserves more attention: GM’s tax gift courtesy of the U.S. Treasury.

Corporations in the red, as GM was for years, are allowed to carry forward net operating losses that reduce their future tax liability when they are making money. GM had accumulated about $45 billion in such profit-shielding chits by 2008, with a book value of about $18 billion. When companies enter bankruptcy, carry-forwards disappear or are greatly limited under IRS section 382, which kicks in when ownership changes by more than 50 percentage points.

The point is to prevent companies from buying assets solely for tax arbitrage or tax avoidance. But starting in 2009, Treasury began to issue regulatory “notices” that suspend this law when it comes to Treasury-owned stock. The provisions also apply to AIG and Citigroup.

So when GM entered bankruptcy in June 2009, the government swapped the debt the auto maker owed it as a creditor for 61% of “new GM,” while handing another chunk to the United Auto Workers. But new GM also inherited the accumulated net operating losses that would have turned into a pumpkin in normal bankruptcy.

In a 2011 working paper, J. Mark Ramseyer of Harvard and Eric Rasmusen of Indiana University argue that by manipulating corporate tax rules by fiat, “Treasury gave the firm (and its owners, including the UAW) $18 billion more in assets.” Thus a Democratic Administration gave “a massive tax benefit to one of the party’s biggest supporters.” The other problem is that the move put Ford and GM’s other competitors at a disadvantage, as bailouts always do.

Mr. Obama crowed yesterday about GM’s “highest profits in its 100-year history.” We’d be interested to hear how its effective tax rate compares with Warren Buffett’s secretary’s.

Tell us again about that whole hopey-changey thing?!?  If Bush were truly in bed with Big Oil (which he wasn’t), America simply swapped a industry which actually contributes something to the economy for a pestilential parasite that feeds off the industry and effort of others; Big Labor.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch with The Gang That Still Can’t Shoot Straight, the AEI‘s Marc Thiessen suggests….

Republicans are losing the class warfare fight

No doubt Barack Obama would love to reprise Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America” reelection campaign, but the anemic economy is not cooperating. Without a robust recovery to trumpet, the president is betting his reelection on class warfare — focusing on “income inequality” and “fairness.” Class warfare is not a winning strategy, but it is the only card Obama has to play.

That’s the good news for Republicans. The bad news is: Right now, the GOP is blowing it.

This should not be a hard fight for the Republicans to win. Americans are less receptive to class warfare arguments after three years of hearing Obama make them than they were when he first took office. A recent Gallup poll found that Americans reject the view of this country as divided between “haves” and “have nots” by a 58-41 margin (in 2008, they were evenly divided 49-49).

Moreover, addressing income inequality is low on the American people’s list of priorities: 82 percent say it is extremely or very important to “grow and expand the economy” and 70 percent say it is extremely or very important to “increase the equality of opportunity for people to get ahead if they want to” (emphasis added). But only 46 percent say that it should be a priority to “reduce the income and wealth gap between the rich and the poor.”

In other words, a campaign focused on “fairness” should be a losing campaign. Yet somehow the leading GOP presidential contenders seem determined to turn Obama’s weak hand into a winning one. First, Newt Gingrich launches class warfare attacks on Mitt Romney that would make Obama blush. Then, Romney declares that he’s “not concerned about the very poor,” that “corporations are people,” and brags in economically depressed Detroit about owning four cars. Then, Rick Santorum steps up to defend income inequality, declaring: “There is income inequality in America. There always has been and hopefully — and I do say that — there always will be.”

Instead of defending income inequality, Republicans should be turning Obama’s income-inequality attack around on him. They should be saying: Mr. President, your policies exacerbate income inequality. Since you took office, 2.6 million Americans have fallen beneath the poverty line. Government dependency is at an all-time high. Nearly 13 million are unemployed, and millions more are under-employed — working part time because they can’t find a full-time job. Still others have simply given up on finding a job and dropped out of the work force entirely. Our problem isn’t income inequality; it’s income stagnation. The message should be: Mr. President, you’re responsible for this. You are making income inequality worse.

Unlike the president, conservatives don’t want to divide up a shrinking economic pie more equitably. We want to grow the pie so everyone gets a bigger slice. We want to see everyone’s income rise. And truth is, when the economy is growing, and incomes are rising, no one cares about income inequality. That is the kind of problem we wish we had in the United States today. Republicans should make the case that the GOP will promote upward mobility and grow the economy for all Americans, while Obama’s policies have given us downward mobility and economic stagnation.

Unfortunately, Republicans seem terrified that Obama will succeed in painting them as defending the rich. How else to explain why Mitt Romney limits his capital gains tax cut to those making less than $200,000? There is no economic rationale for this. And in announcing his tax plan last week, Romney made a point of distinguishing between deductions for “middle income families” (which he’d protect) and those for the “top 1 percent” (which he won’t). Why is a GOP candidate even using the term “top 1 percent”? That is the language of Occupy Wall Street.

Instead of fearing Obama’s class warfare attacks, Republicans should go on the offense, pointing out that it is the GOP that want to means-test government spending and take away the billions of dollars in government benefits, taxpayer subsidies and corporate welfare the wealthy receive each year and do not need. Republicans should propose a “Buffett rule” of their own: Warren Buffett does not need Medicare. And Republicans should make clear that they will end the government handouts that Obama has been giving to his wealthy backers. As Hoover Institution scholar Peter Schweizer has pointed out, 71 percent of Energy Department grants and loans went to President Obama’s political cronies, who raised $458,000 for his campaign and were, in turn, approved for grants or loans of nearly $11.4 billion. Apparently, Obama’s idea of class warfare is that the rich pay more taxes, but they can have it back in spades if they contribute to his presidential campaign.

Sadly, Republicans are not fighting on those terms right now. They had better start soon or it could cost them the election.

Moving from Republicans to RINOs, we learn….

Snowe announces she won’t seek re-election

Thus ends the political career of the single individual who enabled the enactment of Obamascare; don’t let the door hit your bony backside on the way out!  Senator Snowe will be missed about as much as a severe case of crabs.  We can only hope Senators Graham, Collins and McCain quickly follow her lead.

And since we’re on the subject of Obamascare, the WSJ‘s Holman Jenkins offers his thoughts on….

Conservatives and the Mandate

ObamaCare is a specific instance of a broader truth about America’s health-care policy: It’s grossly regressive.

ObamaCare’s individual mandate, it turns out, is no more popular with the public than it is with the GOP hopefuls. A USA Today poll this week finds that 72% of voters believe the mandate to be unconstitutional.

Only fools and angels, then, might tread forth to defend a now-embarrassing history of conservative support for the unpopular mandate. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum, in a blog post, courageously applauds pundit Ann Coulter for a similar act of courage. “It’s not as if we had a beautifully functioning free market in health care until Gov. Mitt Romney came along and wrecked it by requiring that Massachusetts residents purchase their own health insurance,” Ms. Coulter wrote, in a sort-of defense of Mr. Romney.

From a more ecumenical perspective, Businessweek happily observes of the debate: “President Barack Obama never tires of noting [that] the notion that the government should require individuals to carry health insurance was first pushed by Republicans, encouraged by the conservative Heritage Foundation. . . .”

Context is everything. Barack Obama says his mandate is about extending health care to the uninsured. But look closely. It’s also partly about forcing the young, healthy and otherwise uninclined to overpay for health insurance so the money can be used to pay for heavy users of the health-care system.

To put a round guess-estimate on it, people who might consume $900 worth of health care in a year will be asked to buy $5,000 policies so the money can be used for somebody else.

We won’t try to synthesize what Newt Gingrich, the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute and others once had in mind when they championed a mandate in a now-disavowed past. But as a general rule conservatives have supported a mandate to take care of a “free rider” problem—that is, to make people pay for their own health care, not as a tax to pay for someone else’s.

This is a distinction, as they say, with a big difference, and, as we’ll see, a conservative mandate is all but meaningless unless part of a larger body of reforms.

Let’s step back. ObamaCare is a specific instance of a broader truth about America’s health-care policy: It’s grossly regressive. The giant tax subsidy for employer-provided health insurance is most rewarding to those in the highest brackets. Medicare is regressive: It transfers money from working people, with few assets, to the elderly, who own most of America’s wealth. Even Medicaid, the program for the poor, is morphing into a program for helping the middle class shield its assets from long-term care bills.

The cumulative impact of these interventions has given us the health-care system we have. Because it subsidizes third-party payership, it destroys any hope of price-value comparisons by consumers. Because it commits the cardinal economic impossibility of trying to subsidize everybody, the end result is not better health but higher costs in the form of rising prices and the provision of services of questionable value.

Now to worry about a free rider problem, as conservatives have done, is almost pointless when everybody is getting a subsidy. Those who don’t buy private insurance and don’t qualify for Medicaid simply receive a different kind of subsidy, through emergency room bills transferred to the rest of us. Think of it this way: Such a person is merely recapturing a bit of the subsidy he’s been paying through his taxes to support health care for people who are mostly richer. Yes, his actions distort the market, but it’s a drop in an ocean.

But suppose the policy bias in favor of third-party payership were corrected. Suppose insurance became insurance again, i.e., protection against large, unpredictable costs. Suppose patients began paying for a bigger share of health care out of their own pockets. Suppose providers responded by putting price-tags back on medical services and competing to offer value-for-money.

A young, healthy person might still choose to skip insurance and rely on the emergency room. But the problem would be a small one, because many fewer people would be voluntarily uninsured, because insurance would no longer be an overpriced luxury to anybody not benefiting from a direct subsidy.

By the way, this critique of health-care policy is not a conservative critique, but was once shared by Bill Clinton and plenty of Democrats. Nor are the policy difficulties insoluble: The solution can be summarized as “stop subsidizing the unneedy” (and a well-conceived tax reform would go a long way toward doing just that).

In a sense, ObamaCare, RomneyCare and George W. Bush’s major legislative efforts were but revisitations of a single question: Are we ready to act? So far the answer has been no, with the tiny exception of President Bush’s promotion, in his otherwise execrable Medicare drug act, of health savings accounts.

Why politicians like to shovel benefits at the capable, self-sustaining majority is not a mystery—that’s where the votes are. Yet notice that what little progress has been made in corralling health insurance costs in recent years has come from corporate America, using health savings accounts and other tools to make subsidized users cognizant of the value (or lack thereof) of the services they consume.

Speaking of politicians who like to shovel benefits at the already-rich….

Sen. Schumer, Who Opposed Keystone XL, Calls for More Saudi Oil Production

Responding to record-high gas prices and a potential for further disruptions in supply, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on Monday requested that the State Department pressure Saudi Arabia to increase its oil production. The senator’s concerns are twofold: “Schumer called on the State Department to press the Saudis to publicly commit to meet their capacity potential to offset any current or future Iranian manipulation and bring down gas prices, worldwide,” reported a local broadcaster in Buffalo, NY.

This is the same senator who opposed construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which could have worked toward both of Schumer’s ostensible objectives: reduced reliance on Iranian oil, and lower gas prices through an increase in crude supplies.

Schumer avoided some of the more heated rhetoric of his colleagues in discussing the pipeline, but his state director informed constituents on Feb. 14 that the senator “will be voting against the proposed amendment that includes Keystone XL and is working with Majority Leader Reid to defeat the amendment.”

So here’s to you, Chuckie….

On the Lighter Side….

Magoo