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Predictions for the Next Four Years (Part 1 of 2)

Predictions for the Next Four Years (Part 1 of 2)

Well, Barack Obama will be President for a second term. It is now time to take a look around, and prepare for what is likely to happen next. Based on my observations and what I’ve learned over the years, these are my predictions:

No Housing Recovery

Commentators have been calling the bottom of the housing market – and screaming with increasing urgency that it was time to buy – since 2007. The Fed has cut interest rates to nearly zero, and through quantitative easing has flooded the financial system with new money. This will continue for the near future, especially since QE-infinity was announced earlier this year. There remains no recovery in the housing market, and there won’t be a recovery.

Bad monetary policy has left the productive bits of the economy in an absolute shambles, and now there simply aren’t enough jobs to allow a recovery in the housing market. This will get worse, not better.

Mass Layoffs

This one will happen sooner rather than later. In an economy that is as sedate as ours the likelihood of reduced unemployment is already pretty slim, and if you consider the looming Obamacare mandates, tax hikes on income, dividends, and capital gains, as well as another four years of an administration that has a penchant for change (breeding uncertainty), I predict that there will be large job losses coming in the very near future.

Growing Poverty

This one seems to fall into place as well, especially for those laid low by the layoffs which I think are coming. But, even those who keep their jobs will experience marked decreases in their standard of living. In an economy where consumption is king and production – or any sort of value-added economic activity – is outsourced, taxed, regulated, or outright banned, the remaining employment opportunities take on a sort of wistful irrelevance. Many will be nominally employed, but at the same time wholly unable to support themselves, let alone able to assemble savings.

Spike in Utility Rates

All forms of energy are likely to get more expensive over the next four years. Obama has explicitly stated that he intends to bankrupt the coal-generated electricity industry in favor of renewable energy kitsch which can only be financially feasible with massive increases in electricity prices. Expect some coal plants to be shut down in the next term, and expect to pay far more for electricity.

High Prices for Oil and Grain

In a past article, I pointed out that since 1990, the United States has run trade deficits in excess of $9 trillion. This despite the fact that in 1990 the supply of dollars (the M2 metric) was only $3 trillion. In an economy where we can buy foreign goods by printing money, there is no reason to manufacture much of anything. This dynamic will continue for the time-being, and we will import shiploads of consumer goods and pay for it with nothing but inflation. This will lead to even higher prices for oil and grain, which are inflation-sensitive commodities whose production cannot be outsourced.

Feeding grain to livestock is a value-added activity, however, and in an inflationary economy the price of grain will go up, and the ability of the public to buy meat will be reduced, so I am predicting a continued decrease in the number of farmers who bother to raise livestock, as well as a decline in the overall size of the livestock herds in the country.

College Tuition Spikes; Enrollment Begins to Fall

Obama’s attempts to reform the student loan industry had nothing to do with controlling the costs of college. The government runs most of the student loan industry, and interest rates have been kept very low for Federal loans. This is all designed to get more kids into college, regardless of what it costs, and with no real limit to the amount of credit available to the college-bound, there are no incentives for colleges to control costs.

The luster has begun to rub off of the whole college experience in my estimation. A college degree has become little more than a very expensive lottery ticket, and new college graduates will not see any discernable increase in their employment opportunities, incomes, or future prospects.

Even with the endless propaganda urging kids to attend college, the decision to attend college will not make financial sense for a large number of American kids, and we will begin to see a decline in enrollments, especially in full-time, traditional enrollments.

((To Continue Reading, Click Here To Go Straight To Part 2))

The post Predictions for the Next Four Years (Part 1 of 2) appeared first on The Conservative Reader.

In Latham vs. Boswell Congressional Race—The Candidate’s Voting Records Speak Volumes

In Latham vs. Boswell Congressional Race—The Candidate’s Voting Records Speak Volumes

Below is the full text of the “Letter to the Editor” I sent to several newspapers in Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District.  I believe it makes the case against re-electing Leonard Boswell in a concise fashion.  If there is anyone you know still on the fence in this race feel free to forward it to them.

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For the last ten years I have been represented in the U.S House by Rep. Leonard Boswell.  During this time I have often disagreed with his positions, but never have I been more convinced that he has grown out of touch with the challenges facing my fellow Iowans, and our nation at large, than I am this year.

The number one piece of evidence proving this has been his approach to our country’s fiscal matters over the last few years.  The reason I am so disappointed in Leonard Boswell is because I did something that has seemingly gone way out of style these days, something even nearly unthinkable actually—I looked up his voting record.  More unbelievable perhaps is that I didn’t stop there; I had the nerve to continue doing my civic homework by looking up the record of his opponent Tom Latham as well.

Anyone choosing to do the same will find out that since 2009, the self-proclaimed fiscally conservative “Blue Dog” Democrat Leonard Boswell has cast yes votes on the following pieces of legislation:

• Economic Stimulus Bill—over $800 billion added to the national debt, more than a trillion dollars with interest included (passed the House 246-183 on Feb. 13, 2009).

• Obamacare—price tag of $900 billion over 10 years at passage, most recent CBO scoring nearly doubled this amount to $1.76 trillion (passed the House 219-212 on March 21, 2010).

• Raising the debt ceiling—passed the House 218-214 on December 16, 2009.

• Cap and Trade—according to the Obama administration itself, would have cost Americans up to $200 billion a year (passed the House 219-212 on June 26, 2009).

Meanwhile in the same span he voted against the following measures:

• Cut, Cap, and Balance—passed the House 234-190 on July 19th, 2011

• Debt ceiling bill – This is the John Boehner version that would have raised the debt ceiling in exchange for limits on discretionary spending (passed the House 218-210 on July 29, 2011).

• Reducing spending to F.Y 2008 levels—passed the House 256-165 on July 25, 2011.

Two things of note here are, 1) Tom Latham had the foresight and fiscal decency to vote against all the above bills that Leonard Boswell voted for, and 2) Though Mr. Boswell may have been a fiscally conservative Democrat at some point during his career in Washington—over the last three years he has shown zero concern for the massive debt that has crippled this economic recovery.  In fact, he remarkably couldn’t even bring himself to support spending at the level we did just four years ago.

Besides being pleasantly surprised at how rock-solid Tom Latham has been on Federal spending, the thing I took away most from researching these two candidates is how disingenuous it is for Leonard Boswell to claim the mantle of “Blue Dog Democrat”.

The reason this should matter to voters of all stripes on November 6th is it invites the following question:  How can we expect our political leaders to do what they say they will once elected, if they are not even who they claim to be while running for office?

Especially since 2009, only one man in this race has had his eyes on the future fiscal health of this country, and by extension the next generation who will inherit this future—and that man is Tom Latham.

 

 

Iowa Senate Races: A Closer Look At The Leaners (SD 44)

Iowa Senate Races: A Closer Look At The Leaners (SD 44)

((Click for TCR: Iowa’s complete overview of the races that will decide the Iowa Senate))

The Candidates

Tom Courtney (D)  vs.  Bradley Bourn (R)

Tom Courtney is the incumbent in the race and currently serves as the Senate Majority Whip and as the Democrat Chair of the Government Oversight Committee.  Bradley Bourn retired from the military in 2009 after 24 years, and in that same year unsuccessfully ran for a seat on the Burlington City Council.  He has started a small business called Voil Fuel & Services, which produces biofuel from used cooking oil.

The District

Senate District 44 sits in the Southeastern corner of Iowa and is composed of Des Moines and Louisa Counties, and the Western half of Muscatine County.  The registered voter situation here is: (D-14,738) (R-10,220) (NP-12,526), which leaves a built in advantage of 4,518 potential Party voters for Senator Courtney.

The Race

Courtney, a former Burlington School Board member, was first elected to the Iowa Senate mid-term in 2000.  He won re-election in 2002 before winning the seat again in 2004 and 2008.  Throughout his tenure he has tried several times to raise Iowa’s minimum wage, most recently trying to pass a bill that would have increased it from $7.25 to $10.00.

He has been in the news in the last two weeks for efforts to have Secretary of States Matt Schultz audited for using Help America Vote Act funds to purge Iowa’s voter rolls of non-eligible voters.  The success of this effort will likely not be known till after the election, and it will be interesting to see if the publicity this has earned him right before November’s vote will be an advantage or if it will be offset by motivating Republicans in this district to turn out.  Based on his voter registration edge, I probably would have advised him not to play this card, as the risk seems to outweigh the reward.

Besides his military background, Bourn is running as a staunch fiscal and social conservative.  Lowering state spending and taxes are his key issues, telling local media outlets that, “I worked hard all my life.  I paid a lot of taxes in my lifetime.  I know a lot of people, obviously, have and I’m tired of money just being thrown down the drain.”  Speaking on Iowa spending more money that it takes in each year he said, “That’s just unacceptable.  I’m tired of having productive people’s money being given to the unproductive”.

Bourn is likely to hit Courtney on spending issues and his Government Oversight Committee’s failure to detect and stop the Iowa Film Office’s massive scandal from a few years ago.  Though these lines of attack are effective, I have this seat in the end being won by Senator Courtney.  The main reasons are that Courtney has been an outspoken and active member of the Democrat Caucus, the voters know what they have in him, and he has not been unseated in three previous cycles.  On top of this he had five times more cash on hand than Broun as of July 19th.

What we have here is a classic Liberal vs. Conservative match-up.  Knowing that Bourn is a highly credible challenger will likely cause Democrats in the district to head out to the polls, and I see Courtney scoring a victory largely as a result of his voter registration advantage.

Further Information

Sen. Tom Courtney – Iowa Senate Page * Facebook Page

Bradley Bourn – Bourn4Senate.com

 

((TCR: Iowa’s Complete Overview of the Struggle for the Senate))

 

The Conservative Reader: Iowa Interview with Representative Kevin Koester (Part 1 of 2)

The Conservative Reader: Iowa Interview with Representative Kevin Koester (Part 1 of 2)

After easily defeating a primary challenger in June, Iowa House member Kevin Koester was kind enough to sit down with The Conservative Reader: Iowa to discuss his upcoming general election in November, as well as the many issues he will be dealing with should he earn a third term in the Iowa Legislature.

The Primary, The General Election, and the Pulse of House District 38

The process of winning re-election for Rep. Koester began even before the legislative session ended, as the first order of business was winning a primary challenge by Saylor Township resident Brett Nelson.  As the session ran long, Koester made several hundred phone calls in his downtime and began getting acquainted with the voters in his newly re-drawn House District 38.

He handily defeated Nelson 456 to 80, and took many positives away from the effort this challenge required, “I’m very grateful for both the margin of victory and for the experience of the primary because it really helped energize my campaign for November, and gave me a great familiarity with the new territory in the district.”  In an interesting aside, after not meeting or speaking to each other throughout the primary, the two have since met and Nelson even took up an offer by Rep. Koester to join him in a weekly bible study—a great, albeit rare, good ending to a primary challenge.

Talking to voters throughout this process affirmed to Rep. Koester that the dominant issues for his November show-down with Democrat John Phoenix will include the state budget, government over-spending, and the economy.  Besides these economic issues, the background of the two candidates, combined with the issues still facing the legislature, serve to telegraph the subject matter that will be front and center in this race—education reform and public sector unions.

While Koester has decades of experience with education in Iowa, Phoenix was elected to the Des Moines School Board where he served for six years.  In addition to this, Phoenix also has been a long-time union steward, has already been endorsed by the AFL-CIO, and strongly believes that “unions help make our country stronger and improve the lives of all workers.”

Speaking to these differences, Rep. Koester believes that, “because of his role and his voice on collective bargaining issues and union viewpoints, there will be plenty of distance between us to give the voters a clear choice”.  Given the fact that Mr. Koester is a strong Conservative Republican and Phoenix is a pro-union, former school board member who featured Des Moines super-liberal Ako Abdul-Samad at his first fundraiser—the gulf between the two is likely to be enormous on a long list of issues.  Here is a look at two of these issues, and where Rep. Koester stands on them.

Education Reform

Like most Iowa Republicans, Mr. Koester was very disappointed in the progress made on education reform by the last General Assembly.  “The things we voted on last session were not reforms, they were Band-Aids.  We did not do surgery, and that is what is truly needed.”

After seeing countless specific and detailed proposals get torn apart by the opposing sides, he stands ready to work on a broad frame of reform that can be agreed on in principle and passed.  “What I have is a drive to dismantle the fluff, and no patience for the simple arguments that only serve to attack valid ideas.  We need to stop the nit picking and the warring, and come up with a product and move forward on it.”

Two realities in the current system that he sees as negatively affecting students are the lack of teachers being removed for poor performance and the practice of “last in first out”, which is the seniority structure that protects long-time teachers from being let go, in favor of removing less tenured teachers when staff sizes are cut.  This practice has long been under fire by Republicans because it refuses to take into account the skill level and effectiveness of each teacher.  “Last in first out is bad for kids.  We need to look at who is performing and have that be the prime focus, and not necessarily just who has the most experience.  A pay raise needs to be given for performing better, not just given out for coming back the next year and being a year older”.

In terms of the reforms needed to reverse our recent embarrassing trend in education, the crucial ingredient in Rep. Koester’s view is to quantify the performance of the employees in our education system.  He will not support any proposal without this component, and he concisely summed up his position on education by saying:

We will have meaningful and fundamental reform when we agree on how we are going to measure student learning, how we are going to measure each of our Principal’s leadership and influence in the classroom, and how we are going to measure teachers and instruction.  That is where the rubber meets the road on this issue.

Unions and Collective Bargaining

With Governor Branstad recently signaling a desire to look at their financial impact on the state, and John Phoenix’s close personal ties to them, there is little doubt that public sector unions and collective bargaining will be hotly debated in this race.

Rep. Koester has already taken several votes on this issue, all with the goal of bringing public sector unions more in line with the realities of the private sector, and attempting to prevent the payouts involved from breaking the bank as we have seen in several other states in recent years.

The votes he has taken include voting three times for employees of the Legislative branch, including himself, to pay a portion of their health insurance cost.  The first was for a contribution of $50 a month, the second for a $100 a month, and the third for $200 a month.  “I have gone on record every opportunity I have had insisting that Legislators are charged something, and I strongly believe that all state employees should help pay for the cost of their health insurance.”

He also voted in favor of the measure that went into effect July 1st, which changed the formula for calculating retirement benefits for state employees.  In the past payouts were figured using an average of an employee’s top three wage earning years, which has now been changed to take the average of the top five years.

In the larger picture, he supports having a policy ensuring that the number of government employees does not swell beyond what is needed and can be financially sustained in the long run.  To this end he favors implementing breaks on the growth of state government that ties the number of workers and salaries to the overall growth of our state economy, and prioritizes the issue the following way:

I want to start with how we plan for how many state jobs there will be.  You don’t grow the economy by growing the number of public jobs—that is socialism.  The second thing is then addressing the disproportions in the health insurance contributions and the retirement benefits.  The benefits are out of control compared to what the private sector is doing, and to what Iowa taxpayers are doing to take care of their families.  We need to get those things in line, and what is fair for the rest of Iowans should be fair for the public employees that they are paying for.

Next Stop: November

Anyone who talks issues with Rep. Koester immediately realizes that he has a deep grasp on nearly all of them, including all the moving parts involved with each.  On substance, he can go toe-to-toe with anyone and will shine in the public forums and debates with Mr. Phoenix.

As this contest slowly unfolds till November, the topics these two candidates debate along the way will be a roll call of every major issue facing the citizens of Iowa.  In particular, the colliding ideologies on taxes, education, and public sector unions will be a true foreshadowing of the debates that will consume the next General Assembly.

How strong a candidate John Phoenix will be remains to be seen, but Republicans throughout Iowa and HD 38 can be assured that Kevin Koester is up to the challenge—and will remain a strong Conservative voice for the Party in the coming years.

 

 

2012 Legislative Session Ends Minus Tax Deal: Analysis and Governor’s Statement

2012 Legislative Session Ends Minus Tax Deal: Analysis and Governor’s Statement

After failing to reach a compromise on tax reform for the second consecutive session, today the Iowa Legislature adjourned until next year.  In the end the Governor-backed House proposal on property tax reform failed to even see a vote in the Senate, as Senator Gronstal refused to bring it to the floor.

We will have analysis on this in the coming days, but my gut tells me that privately many Republicans, especially those in the 2010 crew, are more than willing to gamble on a majority in the Iowa Senate after November.  This is not to say that they did not want to put something on the books this session, but there are multiple reasons why this conclusion was advantageous.

First, considering the alternative, the optics couldn’t of turned out much better.  Some in the Republican caucus had even publicly hinted that not getting a deal may be the best deal, and if they had pushed walking away from the session a week ago it could have easily been pinned on them.  Instead the way it ended, with the Senate majority leader failing to bring up the already passed House bill, Democrats were left holding the bag–and the blame.  Making matters worse for Gronstal and company is the fact that they lost two Democrats in the final vote on the Senate version, which means their own plan did not even pass the Democrat controlled Senate.  With the House passing a tax reform plan that the Senate chose not only to ignore, but to ignore in favor of holding a losing vote on their own plan, there is almost no way for this to be spun as a Republican inspired log-jam.

Second, from a strictly long-term strategic viewpoint, Republicans waiting till after November is also a win-win.  The reason for this is simple.  There is no policy downside in waiting till next session because, even if Republicans fail to take the majority in the Senate, there is absolutely no way the Democrats will put a smaller tax reduction plan on the table next session.  They have already staked out their ground politically on this issue and they can only agree to either the same level of cuts or more cuts than they proposed this session.  Can you imagine what would happen if they came back next session and put an offer on the table of less tax relief?…point made.  The upside for Republicans however is potentially huge–a majority, in which case they would get what they had on the table this session, and probably then some.

There is certainly more to come on the session wrap in the near future, including Republican reaction, but for the time being below is the full text of Governor Branstad’s official statement on the end of the 2012 session.

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In January, the lieutenant governor and I brought forward a bold agenda focused on the dual goals of job creation and transformational education reform.  I want to thank the General Assembly for considering our priorities and for adopting a significant number of them to help move our state forward. [See list below.]

Legislation passed by this General Assembly will provide our Iowa Economic Development Authority with additional tools to help meet our administration’s ambitious goal to create 200,000 new jobs.  We have made significant progress on that goal during this first year and a half and the High Quality Jobs Incentive Fund and Employee Stock Option Plan legislation will help accelerate those efforts.

I am also pleased that this General Assembly took a first important step toward our goal of transformational education reform.  While these initial steps may be considered by some as small, our new early childhood literacy initiative, in particular, will have lasting effects on the lives of thousands of Iowa children and significantly improve their chances of future academic and career success.  We also enhance teacher accountability by requiring annual reviews.

However, the 2012 session may be remembered as much for what failed to be accomplished as for what actually was accomplished.  Despite the best efforts of my office and a bipartisan majority in the Iowa House, the inability of Senate Democrats to adopt serious property tax reform has put Iowa taxpayers in jeopardy of seeing significant property tax increases in the coming year.

The Senate failed to support legislation based on the framework I believe was agreed to as a roadmap to finding a compromise between my office, the House, and the Senate.  They failed to pass a meaningful step forward in our goal to make Iowa’s tax system more competitive or assist with our critically needed job creation goals.

As a result, Iowa taxpayers face yet another year with property taxes that are scheduled to grow nearly $2 billion over the next eight years.  This is absolutely unacceptable and Iowa voters will have an opportunity to resolve this impasse in November.

Lt. Governor Reynolds and I are proud to work with all members of the Iowa General Assembly and proud to serve our citizens each and every day.   We will continue over the next seven and a half months of 2012 to travel the state, promote our ambitious agenda, and work aggressively toward the achievement of our four goals:

1.      200,000 new jobs for Iowans;

2.      25% increase in personal incomes;

3.      Reduce the cost of government by 15%; and

4.      Provide our children with the nation’s finest education.

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