Measured Up

Mission Work
Private equity's impact on job creation has come to forefront over the last week of the Republican presidential candidate primaries, as critics took aim at Mitt Romney's Bain Capital career. Never in my memory have we had a political issue that so distorts reality in favor of emotion in an effort to gain office on an issue that has nothing to do with economic policy in this country. Private equity is a non-issue because capitalism is about generating returns for capital.  If you work outside of government, that is your mission. (Thomas J. White, American Banker, 1/12/2012)


At least someone understands the capitalist model. Unfortunately, those that work FOR government apparently do not.


Meritorious
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, directly confronting leaders of the teachers’ union, proposed on Thursday a merit-pay system that would award top performers with $20,000 raises and threatened to remove as many as half of those working in dozens of struggling schools. 


Bloomberg (rebounding from his dismal Occupy performance) proposes education initiatives and how do teacher union officials and Democrats react?


...the union’s president, Michael Mulgrew, conspicuously declined to applaud during education-related moments of the speech and declared afterward that the mayor was living in a “fantasy education world,” proposing ideas that he did not have the power to put into effect. The city’s public advocate, Bill de Blasio, called the education proposals “needlessly provocative,” and the Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer, said the mayor was taking “a lone ranger approach to education.”  (NYT, 1/12/2012)


Remember this the next time that Obama and Liberals talk about the desperate need to invest in "education." Teachers unions are a massive fund-raising arm of the Democrat party who do not want accountability for their performance.


Looking Good
“We think the fundamentals of the expansion going forward still look good,” Timothy F. Geithner, then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, told his colleagues when they gathered in Washington in December 2006....The transcripts of the 2006 meetings, released after a standard five-year delay, clearly show some of the nation’s pre-eminent economic minds did not fully understand the basic mechanics of the economy that they were charged with shepherding. The general consensus on the board, summarized by Mr. Geithner, was that problems in the housing market had few broader ramifications.... “We just don’t see troubling signs yet of collateral damage, and we are not expecting much,” he said at the September meeting. (NYT, 1/12/2012)


Where have we heard that name before? Oh, yes, isn't he the current Treasury secretary?


Here is another thing that we recently learned about the Geithners:


...Ann Dunham (mother of Barack Obama) was working on a microfinance program for the Ford Foundation that was overseen by Peter Geithner, the father of Timothy Geithner, the current  U.S. Secretary of the Treasury.... (Where's the Birth Certificate, Jerome R. Corsi Ph.D.)


The reason for Obama's loyalty to an ineffective Treasury secretary?


Fun Facts
One-third of the total US debt has been accumulated since President Obama took office. (Fox News, 1/13/2012)