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Rachel Maddow exposes the monied interests pretending to be "average Americans" who are fueling the outrage at these "town halls gone wild". First up, Recess Rally, sponsored by Michelle Malkin, Smart Girl Politics, Redstate, but also American Majority, and as Rachel points out, this group is hardly made up of average Americans even though they tout themselves as being a non-profit, non-partisan organization.
The people behind American Majority; Ned Ryun, former George W. Bush speech writer, Lonny Leitner, Regional Field Director for Bush/Cheney '04, Shari Weber, former Republican State Legislator, Matt Pinnell, a former Washington conservative lobbyist.
Rachel notes that American Majority is an offshoot of another Recess Rally sponsor, The Sam Adams Alliance. Their President, John Tsarpalas, former Executive Director of the Illinois State Republican party, their Director, Joseph Lehman, former Dow Chemicals engineer and president of the nation's largest conservative state level policy think tank.
Another sponsor of Recess Rally, Let Freedom Ring. Their founder, the money man behind the television ad exploiting 9-11 to promote the Iraq invasion. Another sponsor, the swift boaters.
Yet another sponsor, Americans for Prosperity, and their subsidiary Patients First. Americans for Prosperity's Director, Art Pope, who has the headquarters of the North Carolina Republican party named after him since he's given them so much money. Their Chairman, David Koch, the 19th richest man in the world who runs Koch Industries, which is the largest privately held oil company in the United States.
To talk about these town hall events as some organic outpouring of average American folks who have concerns about health care is to be willfully blind to what is really going on, which is professional P.R. operatives generating exploitative, manufactured, strategically deployed outrage in order to line their own pocket.
This is professional, corporate funded Republican staffed P.R., and it should be reported as such.
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NPR.org, February 4, 2009 · With the annual U.S. government deficit recently projected at $1.2 trillion (not counting additional spending expected from the fiscal stimulus package now before Congress) and President Barack Obama warning about "red ink as far as the eye can see," government debt is once again near the top of the policy agenda. Which raises the question: What is government debt? And what's so bad about it? What Is Government Debt? For this article, we'll be talking only about debt issued by the federal government, not by state and local governments. Let's say the federal government projects that it will need $100 billion more than it's bringing in from its existing tax programs. The government could raise taxes by enough to cover the shortfall. But that could be politically unpopular. It would also leave people with less disposable income. As a result, they'd spend less, so businesses would make less, so they'd lay people off, so they'd spend less, and so on. This does not mean that it is never a good idea to raise taxes, only that it is not a reliable way to close budget gaps. Another way to close a budget gap is for the Federal Reserve to "print" another $100 billion or so, but that can lead to inflation. Imagine there were the same amount of stuff in the world, but suddenly everyone had twice as much money: The price of everything would simply double, and no one would be any better off. Instead, governments prefer to raise money in the credit markets, which means that they issue bonds, just like private companies. A bond is a promise to pay money in the future; for example, a 10-year bond is a promise to pay a flat amount (the face value) in 10 years, and a percentage of that flat amount each year until then. When a government issues bonds, investors bid to buy those bonds; the amount of money they pay is therefore the amount that the government raises. (For more on bonds and bond yields, see Interest Rates for Beginners.) Now that you understand what government debt is, it's time to ask: Is Debt OK? It is accepted among virtually all economists that some government debt, sometimes, is a good thing. In a recession, tax revenues fall, and you need more money for social programs such as unemployment insurance, so the government should go into deficit. Fiscal conservatives, however, would say that these deficits during hard times should be balanced by surpluses during good times, so that over the long term the government budget remains in balance. While this simple notion is appealing, there is no particular reason it must be true. Imagine that the government has some amount of debt, say 20 percent of its gross domestic product, or GDP, at the beginning of the year. Assume it retires none of the debt, but it does pay off the interest on the debt, and its budget is exactly balanced. The next year, debt will be less than 20 percent of GDP, because GDP almost always goes up. Clearly the government can sustain the same level of debt by running small deficits forever, as long as GDP is increasing, because GDP is a close proxy for the tax base. And the higher your level of economic growth, the more additional debt you can take on each year. There are some negative effects of government debt, to be sure. Government bonds compete with corporate bonds for investors' money, which pushes up interest rates for everyone. And if the government is absorbing a larger proportion of the capital available, there is less for the private sector. But debt is not necessarily all bad; as with households and companies, it depends on what you are doing with the money you borrow. For example, it can make sense for you to borrow money to pay for college or professional school, because higher education increases your lifetime earning potential. For many people, the increase in expected earnings more than compensates for the cost of the debt. The same logic explains why companies take on debt. If you want to build a new factory for your faster-than-light hovercraft, you don't want to have to wait 20 years until you've accumulated enough profits from your sub-light hovercraft to pay for it; you want to borrow the money now, build the factory, and use the gigantic profits from the faster-than-light hovercraft to pay back the debt. Whenever you hear someone say, "The government should be run like a company: Your revenues have to exceed the amount you spend," you should stop listening, because that's not how companies are run. On the other hand, government makes no distinction between expenditures that are productive investments bound to grow the tax base — roads, bridges, schools, school loans, basic research, etc. — and expenditures like entitlement programs. The new Troubled Asset Relief Program, designed to rescue American financial institutions, actually made things more complicated, because now there is another category of government expenditure. With TARP, the government is acting like a bank, or actually a private equity fund, buying shares in private-sector companies and paying for the investments with borrowed money. Those investments all have value, and the government is going to recover that value at some point by selling its shares back to the banks. But many people probably see TARP simply as $700 billion that is gone forever. The Congressional Budget Office projected the final loss at $180 billion (calculated as the amount Treasury is paying for the securities, minus the value of the estimated cash flows Treasury will get from them). The broader point is that there is a difference between borrowing money to drop it in large packages over other countries, borrowing money to invest in things we want our children to have, and borrowing money to buy assets that have real value. How Much Debt Is OK? The key issue is fiscal sustainability: the ability of a government to pay off its debt in the future, essentially by shifting its current obligations onto future taxpayers. (Again, borrowing money that your children will have to pay back is not necessarily a bad thing; it depends on whether you use it to improve the world they will live in.) Investors start getting worried when government debt looks like it will keep getting bigger (as a proportion of GDP), demographic trends look bad (with far more retirees than workers), and there seems to be no political appetite to confront the problem. If the debt gets too large, the government will eventually face a choice between several unpopular measures — including defaulting on the debt or imposing severe austerity in order to afford the debt payments. In the U.S., the last time fiscal sustainability was a major concern was the 1980s, when annual government deficits — the amount by which spending exceeded tax revenues in a given year — reached a post-World War II high of more than 6 percent of GDP (data, p. 316). Deficits began falling in the mid-1980s, and especially after the end of the 1990-91 recession and the beginning of the Clinton administration, but total debt — the cumulative amount owed by the government — kept growing (because even small deficits still add to debt) until it peaked in 1996 at 67 percent of GDP (data, p. 126). Still, the deficits that seemed so frightening in the 1980s were tamed by little more than a couple of moderate tax increases (by Presidents George H.W. Bush and Clinton) and the economic boom of the 1990s, to the point where the federal deficit faded as a political issue. And looking further back, even the World War II-related government debt — which reached 122 percent of GDP in 1946 — was paid down without much negative impact on the economy, thanks to strong demographic and productivity growth. In this decade, however, the 2001 recession, George W. Bush's two major tax cuts, the Iraq War, and of course the current recession have weakened the government's fiscal position. Now the Congressional Budget Office is projecting a 2009 deficit in excess of 8 percent of GDP, a new post-World War II high. That's before counting the Obama administration's stimulus plan. In addition, Social Security and Medicare are expected to face funding shortfalls totaling in the trillions of dollars, beginning next decade. No, Really: How Much Debt Is OK? There are two plausible ways of resolving the argument over the sustainability of government debt, neither of which is conclusive. The first is empirical economic research. Here, the world's appointed authority is the International Monetary Fund, which is especially interested in analyzing debt sustainability because it is the institution that will be called in when government debts risk becoming unsustainable. The IMF has concentrated most of its attention on emerging-market countries, because it has been assumed both that developed countries are less likely to default, and that even if they did there is little the IMF, with its limited resources, could do about it. That said, the IMF has done extensive research on debt sustainability, including attempts to estimate the sustainable debt levels for specific countries. Abdul Abiad and Jonathan Ostry, two IMF economists, have a paper on "Primary Surpluses and Sustainable Debt Levels in Emerging Market Countries" (this is their research, not official IMF policy), which outlines two analytical approaches to estimating debt sustainability — one based on a country's past performance at paying off debt, the other based on a model of economic fundamentals. Applied to a sample of 15 emerging-market countries, both the historical approach and the model-driven approach put the median sustainable debt level at around 30 percent of GDP (although across the sample the estimates range from less than 10 percent to more than 100 percent). It would be a mistake to apply this single number to a country like the U.S., though. For one thing, developed countries in general can sustain higher levels of debt than emerging markets, among other reasons because they have higher revenue-to-GDP ratios. The IMF's September 2003 World Economic Outlook has some charts comparing government debt levels in industrial and emerging-market countries. Industrial countries in aggregate had public debt levels above 70 percent of GDP for most of the 1990s; yet no industrial country has defaulted on its debt in the post-World War II period. Empirical studies have shown at most a weak correlation between the amount of U.S. government debt and the interest rate the Treasury Department has to pay to borrow money. The other way to see how much debt is too much is to ask the market. If investors think there is a risk that they won't be paid back, they will demand a higher interest rate, for the same reason that subprime mortgages have higher rates than prime mortgages. Interest rates on U.S. Treasury bonds are at historic lows, because people looking for a safe place to put their money are falling over themselves trying to lend to the U.S. government. The U.S. is able to borrow money cheaply despite everything we know about the recession, the government deficit, the Obama stimulus package and the looming retirement savings problems. So the short answer to the question of how much debt is sustainable is simple: We don't know. If we were close to the edge of some fiscal cliff, the market would warn us, under ordinary circumstances. But these are not ordinary times: Due to the upheaval in all markets, there is a level of demand for Treasuries that is . . . how shall we put this . . . probably not justified by economic fundamentals, and as a result market signals don't work as well as they should. Right now, the markets are saying that the U.S. government is as good a place to lend money as any and are implicitly giving us time to sort out our fiscal problems. At what point that will change, though, no one can predict.FULL SOURCE
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My fellow citizens: I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors. I thank President Bush for his service to our nation, as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition. Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often, the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents. So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans. That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet. These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land--a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights. Today, I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America--they will be met. On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord. On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics. We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit, to choose our better history, to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness. In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted--for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things--some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom. For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth. For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn. Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction. This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions--that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America. For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act--not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. All this we will do. Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions--who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage. What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them--that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works--whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account--to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day--because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government. Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control--and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart--not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good. As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: Know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more. Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with the sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint. We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort--even greater cooperation and understanding between nations. We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet. We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you. For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus--and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace. To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West--know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist. To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it. As we consider the road that unfolds before us, we remember with humble gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains. They have something to tell us, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages. We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment--a moment that will define a generation--it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all. For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate. Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends--honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism--these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility--a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task. This is the price and the promise of citizenship. This is the source of our confidence--the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny. This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed--why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall, and why a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath. So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America's birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people: "Let it be told to [the] future world ... that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive ... that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet" it. America: In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested, we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations. Thank you. God bless you. And may God bless the United States of America.
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During a press conference while visiting Iraq today President George W. Bush was attacked by a journalist throwing his shoes at him while screaming "This is the end!".
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