This is for all my right wing, pro-life, Catholic friends, so they can think I am being converted. Kidding aside Mr. Roeser is often very insightful. You may not agree with him but he gives you strong logic from another viewpoint. There is much to learn from his essays.
Thomas F. Roeser, chairman of the editorial board of Chicago's first internet newspaper, The Chicago Daily Observer, www.cdobs.com is radio talk show host, writer, lecturer, teacher and former vice president of The Quaker Oats Company of Chicago. A former John F. Kennedy Fellow, Harvard and Woodrow Wilson International Fellow, Princeton, N. J., Roeser is the author of the book Father Mac: The Life and Times of Ignatius D. McDermott, Co-Founder of Chicago's Famed Haymarket Center. In addition he is Chicago correspondent of The Wanderer, the oldest weekly national Catholic newspaper and writes on his own blog www.tomroeser.com
He is a former assistant to the Secretary of Commerce and formed the nation's first program to assist minority entrepreneurs (now the Minority Business Development administration). He initiated and ran the government relations department for Quaker Oats, many of them as vice president. His teaching career includes service as adjunct professor of public policy at the Wharton School of Finance, University of Pennsylvania; the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University; Loyola University Chicago; DePaul University; the University of Illinois-Chicago; Roosevelt University, Chicago and St. John's College, Oxford University.
Obama May be a One-Termer
Sounds implausible? Pay attention. Barack Obama needs expansive economic growth to justify his budget projections and to fund his surrealistically idealistic expansion of government. There is very little chance he will get that growth. Several reasons. One is "cap-and-trade" the program that would reduce emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere... but which is a Rube Goldberg creation-requiring all companies to participate in an auction to secure the right to emit the gas with the total emissions strictly limited.
It can't work. Obama's budget says the carbon tax will bring in $78.7 billion in 2012 but the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) also run by Democrats says $300 billion. Obama says by 2012 this tax will be the sixth largest source of revenue. Wildly speculative. Listen, the Obama budget foresees a furious expansion of economic growth from 2011-`13. And this will be enough to cut the deficit of $1.75 trillion in half as he expects? In Obama's dreams. Cap-and-trade will stunt growth: John Steele Gordon says it will act very like a governor acts on a steam engine, "resisting any increase in revolutions per minute." The supply of licenses to allow carbon dioxide to escape will be fixed, right? So the price of permits will inevitably rise as the economy starts to chug upward... meaning heightened demand will hike the price of energy which in turn will tamp down demand: as the economy tries to rev up, the harder the carbon tax will work to hold it down.
There's a built in self-contradiction... as there is with hiking the tax on the rich who pay most of the taxes and who hire.
Can't work, my friends. The only thing I worry about is that just as with Franklin Roosevelt, the populace will get resigned to low-voltage economy, shrug and say sluggish economy is inevitable. That saved Roosevelt... along with his undeniable charm... until World War II. But the same political determinants existing now were not present in Roosevelt's time. The media in Roosevelt's time... aside from Colonel McCormick and a few others... were overwhelmingly in his camp. Not so today with Fox News, talk radio and the Internet.
To read more of Tom’s thoughts go to: http://www.tomroeser.com/
