Besides rooms for sleeping, the 12 members of the House of Representatives rented their hotel’s fireplace-equipped presidential suite and two adjacent rooms. The hotel cleared out the beds and in their place set up a bar, a snack room and office space. The three extra rooms — stocked with liquor, Coors beer, chips and salsa, sandwiches, Mrs. Fields cookies and York Peppermint Patties — cost a total of about $1,500 a night. They were rented for five nights.
While in Scotland, the House members toured historic buildings. Some shopped for Scotch whisky and visited the hotel spa. They capped the trip with a dinner at one of the region’s finest restaurants, paid for by the legislators, who got $118 daily stipends for meals and incidentals.
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The tour provides a glimpse of the mixture of business and pleasure involved in legislators’ overseas trips, which are growing in number and mostly financed by the taxpayer. Lawmakers travel with military liaisons who carry luggage, help them through customs, escort them on sightseeing trips and stock their hotel rooms with food and liquor. Typically, spouses come along, flying free on jets operated by the Air Force. Legislative aides come too. On the ground, all travel in chauffeured vehicles.
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The cost they reported for such travel abroad was $13 million in 2008, a 70% jump from 2005, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of travel records. Lawmakers don’t have to report the cost of domestic travel when the government pays. The $13 million didn’t include the expense of flying on Air Force planes, which lawmakers don’t have to disclose.
– $430,000 to repair a bridge in Iowa County, Wis., that carries 10 or fewer cars per day.
– $800,000 for the John Murtha Airport in Johnstown, Pa., serving about 20 passengers per day, to build a backup runway.
– $219,000 for Syracuse University to study the sex lives of freshmen women.
– $2.5 million in stimulus checks sent to the deceased.
In the non-existent 14th congressional district alone, the Obama administration claims to have spent $617,848 in order to “create or save” five jobs. That is $123,569.60 per job, in a part of America that doesn’t even exist.
Victor Davis Hanson points out some important facts:
One of the oddest things is President Obama’s continuing surprise at the rising unemployment rate. Indeed, we now have a new Orwellianism of “jobs saved”: as jobs are lost, we are told that some of those who do have them were “saved” by President Obama (note the logic: you ignore the stats that quantify reality, but hype fantasy).
If you were a contractor, a car dealer, a dentist, or an accountant, and if you heard that we may/will/sorta raise federal income taxes, lift the tax caps off FICA, think about a VAT tax, impose a health care surcharge on the “wealthy”, have new mandatory fees for forced medical plans and green energy, and had you just got hit with new raised sales and state income taxes, why would you be secure about the future and gamble on it by hiring more employees.
Unemployment hits 9.4 percent. President Obama flies to France.
Joblessness reaches 9.7 percent. Obama jets off to Denmark.
The rate of those out of work soars to 10.2 percent. Obama packs his bags for Japan, Singapore, China and South Korea.
Faced with the worst domestic economy in decades, the president has responded — by setting a record for foreign travel.
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[…] Obama was safely over Canada when his Treasury Department announced another record monthly budget deficit.
“Unemployment is over 10%. It wasn’t supposed to get that high. TARP was supposed to fix that. . . . If the health care bill passes, it will fundamentally convert these United States into a different kind of popular democracy, which generally means rule by a unionized bureaucracy organized to vote. Once that much of the economy is run by government, economic recovery as many hope for will simply be impossible. Permanent unemployment at 7% or so; median income perhaps 10% higher than it is now, but not much higher; and a long period of stagflation. Reluctance to take on new employees, and great incentive to export jobs. Is this a picture of the future? We will have to see, as Congress debates the health care and carbon tax bills. . . . With Detroit a ruin and manufacturing industries on the ropes, small business is the only possible engine of recovery from what they don’t call a Depression; so the Congress is going to add an 8% tax on employing people. We already have the longest period of increasing unemployment since the Great Depression; I presume we are going for a really big record setting period of increasing unemployment. . . . The incentives are now to the job black market — hire illegal immigrants who don’t have to have health insurance — or to export the job if that can possibly be done.”
“I would have thought that the Obama administration is at least as responsible for the US response to the Swine Flu problem as the Bush administration ever was for the New Orleans response to Katrina, but the media are not reporting it that way. I wonder how those who stood in long lines for hours only to find that there is no vaccine feel about the government’s coming takeover of the entire health care system? Will the new health care system work more smoothly than does, say, FEMA? Is there any reason to think so?”
Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.
This helps explains California’s current unemployment rate of 12.2%.
This is the result of the far left policies of the California legislature. If it wasn’t for the Governator acting as a rational brake on their policies, California would be flirting with Michigan’s 15.2% unemployment rate.
One thing that is clear from the American space program is that it created high paying, high tech jobs that contributed to the health of the American economy and spin off technology that has not just benefited America, but humanity as a whole. I’m not talking just Tang and Velcro here folks. The GPS system and satellite TV just two examples of space program spin off technologies that are still driving growth industries today. The weather satellite system that makes it possible to produce enough food to make famine obsolete is also a product of the US space program.
Ya, I said enough food to make famine obsolete. Let’s be honest here people, any wide spread famine on this planet in the last couple of decades has been the result of politics and not the lack of ability to produce or deliver the food.
To recap, an additional $3 billion a year to NASA would once again put Americans on the Moon. It would also be highly beneficial to the US economy by fueling the high tech industry, putting skilled American engineers back to work and producing a very noticable “trickle down” (more like a monsoon) effect on the industries that support that high tech economy. It would also spark an renewed interest in the sciences in American schools and universities, and promote a sense of adventure in America in a positive and constructive endevor.
Instead, our Dear Leader and the s0-calleddemocrat “leadership” in Congress would rather pour that tax payer money down the drain by giving it to their political allies who are under investigation for massive vote fraud in multiple states.
The UK has their own version of the Cap and Tax bill already. It provides some interesting insight into what Americans can look forward to if our Dear Leader and the democrats in Congress get what they want.
Tens of billions of pounds will have to be raised through flight taxes to compensate developing countries for the damage air travel does to the environment, according to the Government’s advisory body on climate change.
Ticket prices should rise steadily over time to deter air travel and ensure that carbon dioxide emissions from aviation fall back to 2005 levels, the Committee on Climate Change says. It believes that airlines should be forced to share the burden of meeting Britain’s commitment to an 80 per cent cut in emissions by 2050.
Yup, the bottom line is the flow of money from the First World to the Third World.
Vice-President Joey Biden is spinning like a top, spreading the fantasy that the porkulus package is doing anything positive for the economy while hundreds of thousands of jobs are being lost each month.