First thing is first- raising the debt ceiling, and how to do it, is a Policy Debate. In academic debate, this means that a change in the status quo is being called for. It could be phrased as a resolution, as we call them: “We should raise the debt ceiling.” Obviously, Obama and the Democrats are the Affirmative Team.

So, what are the burdens of the Affirmative? First and most importantly, the Affirmative always has The Burden of Proof. This means that they have to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt that the resolution is the best choice.  But how do you prove which choice is the best choice? Well, according to philosopher Immanuel Kant, the only way to tell if something is a good idea, is to put it into practice, basically meaning- you have to have a plan.

This is Obama’s biggest mistake- he has been trying to debate the resolution without providing a plan to be voted on. This happens in academic debate as well, and the most common excuse our opponents will give is that we have time constraints (only 3o min. of prep time before each round) and therefore not enough time to research and devise a plan. Unfortunately for Obama, he cannot use this excuse- this showdown has been looming for months, and he has a huge staff of so-called experts at his disposal, and hundreds of lawmakers, who could have submitted at least ONE plan by this time, to be voted on in the House or Senate.

Instead he has decided to do what many of my opponents do- vague promises, with no real direction. An example of this: in a tournament’s final round, I had opponent whose whole “plan” was reform. One word. Nothing else. As if he was Harry Potter and “reform” was a magic word that would make everything perfect. How can you vote on something that is not definite?Its like saying let’s vote on Health Care Reform, and not letting the judges know if you are talking about Obama Care, or the Republican Bill- how do you know whether or not it is acceptable unless you know exactly what is going to be done?

As of right now the only plan on the table is the “Cut, Cap & Balance” which has widespread support from the American people. So assuming that somehow Obama decides to read this and needs to know what to do next, here is the rest of how to win a policy debate: If Obama wants any chance of winning this debate (or re-election) he needs to step up to the plate and write his own plan. But just any old plan is not enough, there are burdens that the plan has to meet.

1. Show a Need

He has to prove to law makers, and the American people that there is a genuine need for a raise in the debt ceiling. And this may be hard when one looks at his own arguments just a few years ago in regards to President Bush requesting a (small) raise:

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here. Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.

So far, it seems that his best argument in favor of the raise, is scaring old people about not getting their Social Security checks, even though his administration is in charge of the Treasury Department, and would decide what bills and obligations would and wouldn’t get paid. Surely Obama would never allow his Treasury Secretary to withhold Social Security checks? Or tell him that it was okay to not pay members of the military? One would hope that it would be lawmakers much more substantial checks that would be delayed until a deal was reached, as well as the “advisers” who got us into this mess.

2. Get an Actual Plan

Seriously, a real one. Not a “promise” to cut unknown things “later”, not an “agreement” to some “fair” cuts to entitlement programs at some point in the future, and certainly not any vague call for over a TRILLION dollars in new taxes without any way of knowing exactly what taxes you will be raising, by how much, and who they will affect. Think back to Kant- how can you put any of that into practice in order to determine its value? How can think tanks, research firms, or even governmental agencies take that and run the figures to determine their impact on the American people and economy? They cannot. That is why there needs to be a real plan, written down, with numbers and dates, and real and binding words defining what will be done and how it will happen. Otherwise, it is like trying to follow a GPS that only says “turn” but doesn’t say when or in what direction- completely useless and confusing.

3. Prove Solvency

Solvency just means that the plan in question actually has to solve for the problems in the status quo. This is exactly why a plan must be specific, so that you can clearly demonstrate how it will fix our current situation. But… Obama told us already that kicking the problem of our nation’s spending problem down the road is not going to solve anything. He said we deserve better leadership than that. I, for once, am inclined to agree with him.

4. Prove Advantages through Cost Benefit Analysis

In order for a plan to be considered a good idea, it must be able to survive a Cost Benefit Analysis, or a CBA. All a CBA does, is weigh the costs of implementing the plan, with the benefits that solvency has shown will come of the plan. If the costs are greater than the benefits, the plan is a failure. Usually the Negative provides the costs to the plan, although Obama has given us a few already:

a. leadership failure

b. reliance on foreign countries

c. continuance of irresponsible fiscal practices

d. pushing the burden onto our children and grandchildren

So it is his burden to prove that he can overcome those significant costs to raising the debt ceiling, along with the other costs that will have to be determined based on what his plan actually calls for as far as cuts and taxes.

I have a considerable amount of doubt that this is possible, and as a voter, and therefore his judge in this policy debate, I would not be able to vote Affirmative. Obama loses for failing to meet his burdens as a debater, and most importantly, as a leader.

The Senate today passed the compromise legislation to continue the Bush tax credits.  Within that legislation were production tax credits for bio-diesel and renewable diesel fuels, credits for steel industry fuel, alternative vehicle fuels, and an extension of the 45 cents per gallon tax credit for ethanol blending in gasoline.

This is not good policy, and conservatives who just booted this Congress to the curb should be outraged, and vocally so.  We just elected a conservative House and a less progressive Senate because we’re tired of this kind of governance, yet we’re sitting idly by while the lame ducks continue to push through their agenda!  This legislation should be voted down, and then taken up in the new Congress on a straight-up vote on extending, or making permanent, the Bush rates.  Our only hope now lies with Nancy Pelosi’s House.

Ethanol is good for only two things –

fraternity parties and corn farmers.  It is bad for automobiles, bad for the environment, bad for fuel economy, and bad for the Gulf of Mexico, where runoff from over-fertilized farms in the Midwest results in a dead zone that grows larger with each ethanol incentivized year.

Even Al Gore has admitted that the politics and promotions that supported ethanol utilization as a transportation fuel supplement are lies!

Why are conservatives sitting idly by and letting this happen?  Are we so enamored that Obama compromised on the tax deal that we don’t care what it includes?  Do we have so little confidence in the Congress we just elected that we’ll accept anything to get the tax credits extended?

It’s been said that “he who laughs last, laughs loudest.”  Terminated Representatives and Senators will be laughing all the way to their speaking engagements, book tours, guest spots on Letterman, and ambassadorships if we allow this excrement to go through.

Get mad, again!  The fight is not over, and our work is not done.  We can’t rest on our laurels to prepare for the 2012 election cycle.  The 2010 Congress has not gone home.

There is a way that the government could greatly improve its ability to find a green jobs initiative.

Drill 

The US government received $23billion in revenue from energy resource production on government lands in 2008.  Last year, with reduced leasing and drilling activity, those revenues dropped to $10billion.

Energy production companies not only pay royalties to landowners, but they pay taxes as well.  As their lots improve, so does the lot of the nation.  By allowing domestic production to resume and grow, there would not only be an increase in direct tax and royalty payments to the government, but there would be job creation accompanied by rising personal income tax payments to the government, reduced government borrowing, reduced service on that debt, and reduced dependence on foreign sources.

The federal government makes more off a gallon of gasoline than do the oil companies.  So, support green energy, and drill, baby, drill!

If anything, the global warmists are ramping up the rhetoric and the alarm. That seems to be the message this week in Cancun, where a little winter fun in the sun is being mixed with a conference on how to remedy something an increasing majority of people don’t believe is a problem.

The remedies now being discussed don’t exactly disprove accusations that global warming theory is nothing more than socialism in disguise.

In one paper Professor Kevin Anderson, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, said the only way to reduce global emissions enough, while allowing the poor nations to continue to grow, is to halt economic growth in the rich world over the next twenty years.

This would mean a drastic change in lifestyles for many people in countries like Britain as everyone will have to buy less ‘carbon intensive’ goods and services such as long haul flights and fuel hungry cars.

Prof Anderson admitted it “would not be easy” to persuade people to reduce their consumption of goods

He said politicians should consider a rationing system similar to the one introduced during the last “time of crisis” in the 1930s and 40s.

This could mean a limit on electricity so people are forced to turn the heating down, turn off the lights and replace old electrical goods like huge fridges with more efficient models. Food that has travelled from abroad may be limited and goods that require a lot of energy to manufacture.

“The Second World War and the concept of rationing is something we need to seriously consider if we are to address the scale of the problem we face,” he said.

Prof Anderson insisted that halting growth in the rich world does not necessarily mean a recession or a worse lifestyle, it just means making adjustments in everyday life such as using public transport and wearing a sweater rather than turning on the heating.

“I am not saying we have to go back to living in caves,” he said. “Our emissions were a lot less ten years ago and we got by ok then.”

The problem Professor Anderson and his ilk (like, for example, Bradley Schaefer at LSU) have is that developed countries generally function on democratic elections. Nobody will vote for zero economic growth in their home country. He also appears to have a problem with facts, as emissions in the developed world aren’t the problem anymore – the Chinese have admitted they’re the largest emitter of carbon on the planet, which is something that wasn’t the case before.

No one in Cancun seems to be suggesting China operate on a zero-growth philosophy.

The administration says that its stimulus investment has saved or created 225,000 jobs in the green energy industry, a pittance in an economy that has shed 7.5 million jobs since the recession took hold in December 2007.

$90 billion and 225,000 jobs.  When Republicans talk about cutting government waste, here’s where they need to start.  The cost/benefit to green job creation is phenomenally skewed in a negative direction.  Green job creation was never a policy designed to promote job growth, it was a left-wing idea pioneered to redirect the American economy into a new– and at the moment less productive– sector of industry.

Obama seems not to understandthat investment in green-jobs is not productive.  It does not produce job growth in a time when America’s unemployment rate hovers near 10%.  The reason for this lack of production is not complex, and Obama’s misundertanding is not a result of a lack of knowledge but a result of Obama’s desire to ignore simple economics:

The industry’s growth has been undercut by the simple economic fact that fossil fuels remain cheaper than renewables.

It’s really that simple.  Providing incentives for employment is all well and good, but what use is green-job training if the industry itself is unsustainable?  The Washington Post interviewed a man who had been left unemployed due to the implosion of the housing market.  Seeking a new job, he turned to Obama’s promise of green-job creation.  He is still unemployed:

“What is the point of giving somebody the tools to do something but to have nowhere to use them?” he asked. “I think it’s a great program, but I don’t see the connection with all the training and jobs. And I need a job.”

This man is no different than any other American struggling in these tough economic times.  The problem is that Obama has lured a large number of Americans into a sector of industry that is nearly as anemic as the economy itself.  3/4 of the graduates of this man’s job training program never receive a job offer.  Many of these people have been out of work since 2008 when the recession hit, and they turned to Obama’s promise of jobs in renewable energy only to find that this promise was one that could not be delivered.

We should not be diametrically opposed to prosperous renewable energy production.  We should be opposed to the government’s decision to dictate the type of energy that our industry should use, especially at a time when this energy is neither efficient nor effective.  At this point, renewable energy cannot compete with fossil fuel energy, and increased regulation over a once prosperous fossil fuel industry combined with subsidies for weak green energy production produces more losers than winners.  Policy that promotes inefficient industry is the exact reason that the government should not be involved in regulating economic policy.

The point is that investment in green-job training is pointless.  There is no industry to support it.  There is no industry to support it because the product that the industry provides is vastly inferior to competing alternatives.  It is simple economics, and Obama is trying to change the rules of capitalism by imposing his liberal agenda on market forces; it isn’t working.

One day technological advancement will allow green energy to be used in greater quantities with beneficial results, and market forces should decide that day, not government intervention.  Any policy to the contrary is counterproductive.

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Elected March 27th, 2010 and inaugurated this past July Robert Rose, Mayor of Leesville, LA has made tremendous headway in weeding out corruption and waste- giving him near superhero status with his constituents.

Mayor Rose inherited a 1.2 million dollar deficit with a total budget of $10.8 million and in the span of just 4 months Robert has begun the process of purging the city of the expensive baggage left by decades of political patronage.  Ranging from consolidating city offices, and closing a city owned golf course (which alone cost the city $12,000 a month and is located outside the city limits), to finding locals that were taking advantage of the city’s water and sewage yet not footing the bill- there is no sanctuary for frivolous spending in Leesville under the tenure of Robert Rose.

But if you think that’s all Mr. Rose has done, you’d be wrong!  If saving the city from a financial crisis wasn’t enough, Robert was also instrumental in helping uncover a corrupt gang of police officers selling prescription drugs that was being run by the Chief of Police of Leesville.  Now, with the FBI, DEA, ATF, and Louisiana State Police involved, Robert Rose is working to weed out the Leesville Police Department and bring good, responsible law enforcement back to the city.

Meanwhile cities like New Orleans, and our state legislature, continue to have trouble figuring out how avoid getting rid of the pork, instead of doing what Robert has done—recognize that government, be it city, parish, or state, should not be in the business of wasting tax payer money on needless projects like golf courses or pointless offices and boards, and cutting their funding accordingly.

If there was ever an example of a true fiscal conservative who believed in the value of transparency and serving the people, Robert Rose would be it and it would serve the citizens of Louisiana well if some of our other elected officials took pause to stop and see exactly how Leesville is getting the job done.

Celebrating the company’s Wednesday initial public offering, President Barack Obama last night called his government takeover of General Motors a “success story.” “American taxpayers are now positioned to recover more than my administration invested in GM,” he said. Left unsaid is the fact that if the Obama Administration keeps selling their GM stock at the IPO price, the U.S. taxpayer will lose $10 billion on the deal, and that does not include the loans GM still owes, cash for clunkers, the Chevy Volt subsidies, or the millions of unseen costs the unprecedented intervention has inflicted on our economy.

The $10 billion figure is actually a lot better than the $38 billion figure we’d been hearing. But virtually everybody says the stock price has to go to $47-50 per share or else we take a bath.

Feel good about this? Oh – and let’s not forget that the UAW is making $4 billion off the IPO. The UAW’s cash outlay? Nada. 

Heritage continues…

No matter what you hear from the President’s defenders, always remember that it did not have to be this way. As late as April 30, GM’s bondholders were willing to take a 58 percent equity stake in the company in exchange for canceling their $27 billion in unsecured GM bonds. But under their deal, the federal government would have had no control over this new company, while the United Auto Workers union would have received a minority share of the company and the taxpayers would have been protected as a secured creditor. An even better outcome would have been for the federal government not to have supplied taxpayer cash at all and let all creditors take their lumps from an unbiased bankruptcy judge. But President Obama just couldn’t keep his government out of it.

So he publicly bullied the GM bondholders into accepting a much worse deal. Under the White House plan, the federal government was awarded a 60 percent stake of GM, the Canadian government got 12.5 percent, and GM’s unions got 17.5 percent while the bondholders walked away with just 10 percent. Defenders of the bailout say all this was worthwhile because the effects of a failure of GM would have been catastrophic. But that ignores both the deal the bondholders first offered the unions and the possibility of an expedited—but non-political—bankruptcy proceeding.

Before this week, taxpayers put $49.5 billion into GM and held a majority stake in the company. The IPO allowed the Treasury to sell about a quarter of this at $33 per share, raising $13.6 billion. That leaves taxpayers, post-IPO, with $35.9 billion “invested” and about a 37 percent stake in the company. At $33 per share, that leaves taxpayers still almost $10 billion in the hole. The shares would have to jump to $51 for taxpayers to break even, a price level considered by most analysts to be unlikely.

But perhaps the biggest danger of all is the prospect of the GM “success” being used to justify future bailouts of other firms. That would be the true catastrophe. As George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux wrote:

The chief economic case against the bailout was not that huge infusions of taxpayer funds and special exemptions from bankruptcy rules could not make G.M. and Chrysler profitable. Of course they could. Instead, the heart of the case against the bailout is that it saps the life-blood of entrepreneurial capitalism. The bailout reinforces the debilitating precedent of protecting firms deemed “too big to fail.” Capital and other resources are thus kept glued by politics to familiar lines of production, thus impeding entrepreneurial initiative that would have otherwise redeployed these resources into newer, more-dynamic, and more productive industries. The “success” of the bailout is all too easy to engineer and to see. The cost of the bailout—the industries, the jobs, and the outputs that are never created—is impossible to see, but nevertheless real.
The legal and political chicanery used by the White House to produce the GM “success” story is also exactly why the United States fell from the ranks of the economically “free,” as measured by The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom this year. From Fannie Mae to Freddie Mac, from GM to Chrysler, from AIG to Citibank, our government continues to subvert the established rule of law. This lawlessness creates uncertainty in the business environment, and it is a huge reason why our economy is not recovering as it should be.

Letting GM go into bankruptcy would have been a painful process. But if the federal government had gotten out of the way – and we mean ALL THE WAY OUT OF THE WAY, as in suspending or repealing regulations like the CAFE standards – then the market would have been able to respond and sort out the auto industry.

GM’s fundamental problem was that it made union contracts which inflated its cost per vehicle past the point where it was viable. Foreign automakers operating non-union plants in places like Mississippi, South Carolina and Alabama were saving more than $25 per hour in labor costs, and that was the difference between profitability and bankruptcy. Perhaps the solution would have been to break GM up into its component parts and allow investors to enter into the market. A perfect example of how this might have worked if the government had gotten out of the way would have been the Hummer brand; Hummers were perfectly profitable for GM, but the Obama administration didn’t want to see the brand continue. In a normal market, a failing company with a profitable line could have sold that line to someone else to raise capital necessary to restructure itself. But someone wishing to enter into the marketplace and buying Hummer to operate as auto company all to itself couldn’t do that – because of the CAFE standards.

Meanwhile, we hear the Big Three are beginning to show signs of life – and that’s good. But the fundamental problems which caused it to take a dive in the first place haven’t been solved, so it’s probably a matter of time before we’re going to be asked to rescue Government Motors again with more money we don’t have.