Tag Archives: Infrastructure

02/28/17

THE PRESIDENT PROPOSED SOMETHNG RADICAL YESTERDAY…WHAT ABOUT TODAY

By: Kent Engelke | Capitol Securities

Will the President disappoint? Equities advanced on the premise of tax reform, the details that may be released today. As noted many times, the averages have been buoyed by great expectations of a Trump presidency that lowers regulations, simplifies the tax code, increases infrastructure spending and reduces the size of government.

Commenting on the above, increased infrastructure spending has bipartisan support. What about reducing the size of government?

Yesterday, the President announced his dictum that government agencies reduce their budget, but not in the Washington sense. For most organizations a 10% reduction in spending is a 10% reduction in spending. In Washington a 10% spending cut is historically a 10% reduction in the rate of growth. In other words, it is largely ceremonial.

The President’s spending cut is radical for Washington. He has proposed an actual reduction in spending, not a reduction in the the rate of a spending increase.

How will the bureaucracy respond? Probably disdainfully.

As stated above, many are expecting Trump today to announce his tax reform plans.

I have commented many times that globalism is on death’s bed. Yesterday it received another direct hit as Scotland stated it will vote to leave the United Kingdom. A similar referendum failed in September 2014. I will argue if this plebiscite is passed and if Le Penn is victorious in France, both of which is a distinct possibility, globalism has died a traumatic and swift death. Wow! Talk about the unexpected occurring.

If this does occur, the investing landscape has radically changed where yesterday’s rules no longer apply. Economic nationalism will dictate sovereign’s policies.

This implosion of an economic order coupled with perhaps the ending of a 30-year bull market for sovereign debt has and will continue to create uncertainty. How will such uncertainty be manifested in the markets?

Historically negatively, but again expect the unexpected where growth may exceed forecasts.

There is little to write about on yesterday’s market activity. Equities were flat, treasuries fell, the dollar erased losses as the odds of an interest rate next month rose past 50% and oil advanced to the highest level since July 2015.

Last night the foreign markets were mixed. London was up 0.03%, Paris down 0.05% and Frankfurt down 0.19%. China was up 0.40%, Japan was up 0.06% and Hang Sang was down 0.77%.

The Dow should open quietly lower. The 10-year is unchanged at a 2.36% yield.

07/28/16

The ‘Roads and Bridges’ Lie

By: Renee Nal | New Zeal

In order to restore the sovereignty of the states, Americans MUST demand that their state legislatures stop taking federal taxpayer dollars.

President Obama speaks about transportation infrastructure during a visit to the Tappan Zee Bridge

President Obama speaks about transportation infrastructure during a visit to the Tappan Zee Bridge

“From the beginning the constitutionality of appropriations for the construction of roads was warmly [adamantly] denied, and by none more steadily than by the successive presidents, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe. All of them refused to be convinced that the building of roads in different parts of the country was such a matter of ‘general welfare‘ as to justify the expenditure of the public moneys.” – American Political History, 1763-1876, Volume 1, By Alexander Johnston

During the financial crisis of 2008, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama assured Americans that some banks were “too big to fail.” Hard earned tax payer dollars were immediately needed to be used to bail out banks and then, the auto industry.

President George Bush was famously quoted as saying,

“I had to abandon free market principles in order to save the free market system.” – George W. Bush

Read more here…

01/28/15

We asked an expert: ‘What exactly is an EMP, and how much damage could it do?’ His response was terrifying.

By: Benjamin Weingarten
TheBlaze

In light of nuclear negotiations with Iran, the general conflagration in the Middle East, Russia’s march and a whole host of other chaotic situations worldwide, recently we sat down with an expert on national security, foreign policy and in particular nuclear proliferation, John Wohlstetter, to discuss the gravest threats to the American homeland.

Wohlstetter, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and London Center for Policy Research, two conservative think tanks, recently released an updated edition of his book on this very topic, “Sleepwalking With the Bomb,” and delivered a speech earlier in January titled “Rethinking the Unthinkable Why Failures of Imagination, Projection, and Strategy Court Nuclear Catastrophe” that piqued our interest.

During our interview with Wohlstetter, we had the chance to ask a very basic set of questions about what is potentially the most devastating of all weapons that could be launched at the market homeland: Electromagnetic pulse (EMP). Wohlstetter’s five minute primer, which you can find below, covers (i) What exactly an EMP is, (ii) How much damage it could cause in a worst case scenario and (iii) How an EMP attack might transpire:

What would the doomsday scenario of an EMP attack against an America whose infrastructure is not currently protected look like?

In a worst case scenario the detonation would be over Dorothy’s Kansas, in the center of the country. And at 300 miles altitude, you would have a circle, 360 degrees, with a radius of 1,470 miles…that covers the continental United States lower 48 states.

And in a worst case, you could see within a year 90% of the population die, as you don’t have electric power, nothing works, you can’t even get food to market. It would be catastrophic beyond belief.

And if you do it over the Eastern seaboard, you could center an explosion at a lower altitude, say 20-30 miles up over Pennsylvania. And you would cover about, if you centered it there…375 miles…And what you would do with that is take down the Eastern interconnection which supplies 70% of the country’s electric power.

Given that our infrastructure is not protected against this attack today — an infrastructure that Wohlstetter argues could be hardened for a figure of around $10 billion — are there at least contingency plans in place?

If the Congressional panel that looked at it was correct, in a worst case…you could see 90 percent or 100 percent of the network taken out. And if that happens, you can’t recover. It’s not like out of a disaster like a hurricane where you have edge recovery — communities that bring in supplies, rebuild for you, house people who have been displaced as happened after Katrina for example. You don’t have that edge recovery. In the case of the network, there are some transformers in big systems that take several years when you order them to bring them in and put them online. And…at least on what is know publicly, we do not have an adequate supply [of them]. [Link ours]

During the interview, which you can find below, we also had the chance to discuss several other critical topics including:

  • The biggest threat to American national security today
  • Why the nature of the threat of a nuclear weapon is far more worrying today than during the Cold War
  • The knock-on effects of a nuclear Iran
  • The strength (or lack thereof) of America’s missile defense system
  • How an EMP could be launched above the U.S.
  • Why the concept of mirror imaging is essential to understanding America’s foreign policy failures
  • And much more

Rethinking the Unthinkable Why Failures of Imagination Projection and Strategy Court Nuclear Catastrophe by…

 

Note: The link to the book in this post will give you an option to elect to donate a percentage of the proceeds from the sale to a charity of your choice. Mercury One, the charity founded by TheBlaze’s Glenn Beck, is one of the options. Donations to Mercury One go towards efforts such as disaster relief, support for education, support for Israel and support for veterans and our military. You can read more about Amazon Smile and Mercury One here.

01/28/15

Agenda 21: Obama commits to helping India build ‘smart cities’ (Video)

By: Renee Nal
New Zeal

President Obama discusses the U.S. commitment to build ‘smart cities’ in India via YouTube [WhiteHouse.gov] Screenshot

President Obama discusses the U.S. commitment to build ‘smart cities’ in India via YouTube [WhiteHouse.gov] Screenshot

During his trip to India, President Obama declared America’s commitment to “help design smart cities” and “bullet trains” in the country.

The main selling point for “smart cities” is that they are “sustainable,” a vague but applauded term that often used in context of combating what this author strongly believes is a non-existent problem: man-made climate change.

During a speech at the Siri Fort Auditorium in India, Obama, who met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the tour, declared:

We are ready to join you in building new infrastructure…roads and airports, the ports and bullet trains to propel India into the future. We are ready to help design smart cities…

President Obama declared that taxpayers will foot the bill for $4 billion dollars in “investments and loans” as reported at Reuters.

Obama’s visit was discussed on Twitter under the hashtag #ObamaInIndia.

Smart cities are a part of the United Nations Agenda 21 plan and are defined in “fuzzy” ways as acknowledged at Wikipedia, which highlights several vague definitions. Some of the biggest common threads is “smart governance,” “smart technology,” “smart mobility,” and of course, “sustainability.”

Although rarely discussed, it seems that the ongoing “open data” initiative is heavily intertwined with the concept of “smart cities” (see here, here, here, here and here).

“Open Data” is a benign-sounding initiative dedicated to “transparency” in data, but falls under the “Open Societies” concept of global governance as promoted by billionaire George Soros, who “proposes that the open societies of the world should form an alliance for the dual purpose of fostering the development of open society within individual countries, and to lay the groundwork for a global open society by strengthening international institutions and rules of behaviour,” according to an Amazon description for his book “Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism.”

Under President Obama, OpenData.gov was born.

The Economic Times in India laid out the involvement of the U.S. Taxpayers in India’s smart cities,

…the United States Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) signed Memorandums of Understandings (MoUs) with Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh for cooperation to support the development of three smart cities.

The cities are Allahabad, Ajmer and Visakhapatnam. Under the MoUs, the USTDA will contribute funds for feasibility studies and pilot projects, study tours, workshops or trainings and other projects that would be determined mutually.

The Times of India reported:

As per the agreements, USTDA will collaborate with other US government agencies like the Department of Commerce, the US Export Import Bank and other trade and economic agencies to promote greater US-India infrastructure development cooperation and to support development of smart cities.

USTDA will enable US industry bodies to mobilize private sector expertise and resources to address important aviation and energy related infrastructure connected to developing smart cities.

The USTDA twitter feed promoted the initiative and posted a press release on the effort:

In the above tweet with the embedded video, President Obama further discusses the American “investment” into India’s “smart cities.” It should be noted that through the USTDA, taxpayers fund similar initiatives around the world.

Part of the award to India will involve financing of small business loans.

Trevor Loudon, author of “Barack Obama and the Enemies Within,” and his latest jaw-dropping book, “The Enemies Within: Communists, Socialists and Progressives in the U.S. Congress” told the author that he believes the ultimate goal of Agenda 21 (smart cities) is to move the populations of the world into small urban areas.

A population confined to “concentrated areas,” Loudon explained, would make citizens much more manageable. In his view, it is a part of an age-old battle between the “collective versus the individual,” a concept that can be illustrated in ideologies as far back as Plato and Aristotle, who both advocated for what they believed was “the superior role of the collective and the relatively inferior position of the individual.”

In an article at Forbes magazine, author Sarwant Singh wrote glowingly of “smart cities” in light of “urbanization.” Singh’s organization Frost & Sullivan “identified eight key aspects that define a Smart City: smart governance, smart energy, smart building, smart mobility, smart infrastructure, smart technology, smart healthcare and smart citizen.”

It should be noted that while the term “Agenda 21” has been progressively scrubbed from America’s newsrooms as it became marginalized in America, the plan lives on throughout the country in “sustainable” city planning initiatives.

An interesting discussion of smart cities can be found here from an Alternative Media source, TRUTHstreammedia:

Are Americans happy about their tax dollars going toward such a venture? Does Congress even have a say anymore?

Listen around the 52:00 minute mark:

This article has been cross-posted at Broadside News.

01/3/15

‘Economics professors’ trash entrepreneurs, argue for taxing the rich

By: Renee Nal
New Zeal

Occupy

Photo Source: commons.wikimedia.org

An OpEd posted at the Tampa Bay Times by Economics professors William L. Holahan and Charles O. Kroncke (retired) begins with the sentence: “It is a common misconception that entrepreneurs create jobs.” Instead, they argue, taxpayer funded “investments” into education and infrastructure is what empowers the “true job creator: the workings of the market.”

The roads and bridges argument has been used by President Obama in his infamous “You didn’t build that” speech, where he argued that entrepreneurs are powerless without the help of others:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

He continued to tout the power of the government:

The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

This is a common argument used by advocates of big government and yes, contrary to the Constitution.

The federal government has no business spending money on local roads and schools. At least if one considers the Constitution, which many do not, of course. After a law passed for federal funding to build the Erie Canal, for example, President James Madison said that although the project was needed and valuable, he was “constrained” by the Constitution and he vetoed the bill.

But the canal was still built anyway. How?

…the New York State legislature took the matter into its own hands and approved state funding for the canal in 1816, with tolls to pay back the state treasury for upon completion.

As professor of history at Hillsdale College Burt Folsom observes:

The Constitution does not grant Congress the right to appropriate funds for infrastructure. Therefore, the Founders usually argued that states or private companies should do the work; neither good government nor just results occurred when the people in Georgia could be taxed to pave a road or build a canal in New York.

While speaking of the size of government, James Madison wrote in Federalist 48,

It will not be denied that power is of an encroaching nature and that it ought to be effectually restrained from passing the limits assigned to it.

The authors continue,

The fixation on the ‘job-creator’ myth also distorts recession-fighting measures. For example, cutting business taxes when the problem is inadequate demand will not encourage employers to restore lost jobs or to hire more people.

If the problem is “inadequate demand,” the employers should be a bit more entrepreneurial… or fail. That is the beauty of the free market and why government intervention in industries always (always) fails. If an individual can provide a good or service that fulfills a need, he or she is on the way to job creation despite the federal government, which helps to keep innovators from success with their endless regulations and tax requirements. The government, in other words, only serves as an obstacle to true entrepreneurship.

While testifying that the website for the Affordable Care Act was getting closer to being fully functional, Kathleen Sebelius, former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said something very telling:

While there is more work to be done, the team is operating with velocity and effectiveness that matches high performing private sector organizations.

The private sector simply does it better.

The economists quote Nick Hanauer, billionaire venture capitalist and strong supporter and higher taxes, as saying:

Taxing the rich to make investments in the middle class is the single smartest thing we can do for the middle class, the poor and the rich.

Hanauer loves taxes, as evidenced by this recent tweet:

Holahan and Kroncke have written several articles previously and co-wrote the book “Economics for Voters.” In September, the dynamic duo also argued for a minimum wage increase, which has been found by numerous studies to have a negative effect on low-skilled workers. As reported at Politifact,

The last three federal minimum wage increases (2007, 2008 and 2009) were followed by significant job losses, but that was all taking place amidst the global financial crisis. [emphasis added]

It is not a stretch to consider that raising the wage is really just a political ploy, consequences be damned. The double bonus for the federal government (with their unpaid interns, exempting themselves from the Fair Labor Standard Act), is that minimum wage increases equate to higher taxes. Big government supporters continually and desperately attempt to justify the value of big government, but continually come up short.

This article has been cross-posted at Broadside News.