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Published January 24, 2017
DISCLAIMER: THE FOLLOWING "Cost of Freedom Recap" CONTAINS STRONG OPINIONS WHICH ARE NOT A REFLECTION OF THE OPINIONS OF FOX NEWS AND SHOULD NOT BE RELIED UPON AS INVESTMENT ADVICE WHEN MAKING PERSONAL INVESTMENT DECISIONS. IT IS FOX NEWS' POLICY THAT CONTRIBUTORS DISCLOSE POSITIONS THEY HOLD IN STOCKS THEY DISCUSS, THOUGH POSITIONS MAY CHANGE. READERS OF "Cost of Freedom Recap" MUST TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR OWN INVESTMENT DECISIONS.
HOUSE SHAKE UP; HOW HOUSE GOP REVOLT WILL IMPACT TAXPAYERS
Steve Forbes: They are going to have more imagination and more good parliamentary maneuvers in battling with President Obama on taxing and spending. Some big things like the debt limit are coming up again in the next few months. People like Paul Ryan, Jeb Hensarling, a Congressman from Texas, these guys are into policy, but they’re also going to set the foundation for the post 2016 election. These people who are going to succeed Boehner and the leadership in the house are very interested in policy. They’re going to push the next president if he or she doesn’t do it on their own. So it’s good all-around for tax payers.
Bruce Jaspen: The people who ousted Boehner and apparently ousted McCarthy, they didn’t want to do anything and they haven’t really accomplished anything. If they would have gone along with the Grand Bargain with the president, you’d have lower corporate taxes right now. I don’t know what they’re going to do because they haven’t accomplished anything.
Mike Ozanian: Well the reason why they’re having this uprising is because when they were elected to Congress, they haven’t done what the people who elected them asked them to do, which was to put a stop to Obama’s reckless spending and his contempt for the constitution. You get somebody like Jim Jordan in there, a man of principal, a man who did not vote for that crazy spending bill last year that went right through the debt limit and added to the deficit then you start to see more money go to the private sector and you start to get this economy back on track.
Rich Karlgaard: It’s good because McCarthy would have been a disaster, we know already that he can’t communicate very well and that brings up the point: You not only need to have great policy as Steve talked about, and principal people as Oz talked about, you have to have people who can articulate why this matters to the American people and connect it to economic growth.
Elizabeth MacDonald: We’re talking about sequestration and the success of what was going on in 2013, which really didn’t hit the Republicans hard at all. They were successful in 2014 in the midterms. The budget deficit is coming down, it’s still sticking at 426 billion down from about 680 billion in 2013. Here’s the problem with what is going on, the federal government is way too big, we can’t afford it. The American people know that, that’s what they’re angry about. That’s what the freedom caucus knows about. The House was seating the constitutional power of the purse to the president, that’s the problem. So the American people know our taxes will go up in this very costly government. So it’s not that they weren’t doing anything, the House members were saying, hey wait a second, what’s going on is totally wrong.
Sabrina Schaeffer: That’s why I think we have to keep our eye on the long term. Conservatives if they want to really reign in the progressive state, and implement more free market policies, they need to have both the White House and Congress. So this kind of chaos is good up until a point, right? At some point it’s no longer good because you’re going to lose the confidence of the American people and I think if conservatives or Republicans can’t demonstrate that they can work out some of these internal factions, they are going to alienate huge swaths of the American public that do want them to cooperate with Democrats.
PRESIDENT OBAMA URGES INCREASE IN UNIONS TO EMPOWER WORKERS; SPARKS DEBATE
Mike Ozanian: They’re going to lead us to the French model and France has had the worst economy of all the major industrial nations in Europe since 1990. We do not want the French model. It creates an environment where people don’t want to invest in businesses, and it removes incentive for workers to produce.
Bruce Jaspen: The president is going back to his roots here in Chicago where he was a big supporter of the healthcare workers, which they raise benefits and they raised salaries in the lower paid healthcare workers and they also worked to improve quality of hospitals with better policies to control infections.
Rich Karlgaard: Union membership and private companies is trending down, he’s concerned about that. There’s a reason why it’s trending down, the American people are glad that it is. Even FDR thought that public sector unions should be against the law because they pitted Americans against their own government. But look, he’s trying to stop this great trend. In France, we also saw earlier this summer people overturning Uber cars, in the United States, we embrace Uber cars because we’re more entrepreneurial.
Steve Forbes: That kind of unionization just shreds any kind of flexibility and innovation. You saw it in this country in the auto industry. Detroit shackled, rest of the country not. The auto industry in the rest of the country in terms of manufacturing did very well.
John Tamny: I just think the point here is that President Obama shouldn’t have an opinion on this matter at all. There’s this fiction that persists that presidents create jobs, they do no such thing. In this case, Obama’s stance should be, he would protect the rights of individuals to contract with any kind of business. If that includes joining unions, fine. The president should not have an opinion.
Elizabeth MacDonald: Steve is right, we had it in Detroit. What we have right now is, union workers in the government. You can’t reorganize your office furniture without calling in a union official. They even unionize audio visual workers over in France, watch what’s happening here. We have government workers working from home on union issues, and they’re doing things like surfing the internet or doing the laundry.
REPORT SUGGESTS EPA RUSHED TO JUDGEMENT IN BLOCKING MASSIVE AK MINING PROJECT
Rich Karlgaard: It’s not only wrong, it’s dictatorial and it’s poisonous. In the earlier segment, we were talking about France. One of the problems with France is that entrepreneurs feel like they have to seek permission before they do even step one in a project. Americans do stuff, and then they ask for forgiveness. But this is really changing the game in a bad way.
Bruce Jaspen: In this instance, I don’t think the EPA did a bad thing because there is a large run of salmon 150 miles upstream in this bay area and it supports hundreds if not thousands of jobs. I think that they’ve been transparent about it, you might not like it, but I think they’ve at least been transparent about it.
Sabrina Schaeffer: They went against normal processes where someone could then present the alternative side. Instead they used this not used often, veto power that they have. I think one of the big problems is that we have these huge bills like the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act that give the EPA sort of this endless rule where they can act sort of as god choosing who will flourish and who will fail, but this is very bad. I want my kids to have clean water and jobs.
Elizabeth MacDonald: Mines are really dirty, polluting things. I’m with Bruce there is a lot of fishing business up there that would be affected by it, but the EPA is overstepping its regulatory powers invading the state’s regulatory powers, especially with coal.
John Tamny: I think we give them way too much credit. These regulators wouldn’t know a good project from a bad project. When we’re talking about regulation, we’re talking about people who could not get jobs in the industries they want to regulate.
Steve Forbes: It is a rouge agency. They are waging a jihad against mining. They’re waging it against coal, natural gas, oil and they are just making the law up as they go. That’s going to change, but right now we just gotta get through the next year or so.
Elizabeth MacDonald: Weyerhaeuser Co. (WY)
Mike Ozanian: iShares Silver Trust (SLV)
https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/conservative-gop-revolt-good-for-taxpayers