EconomicCrisis.US

Every election campaign politicians promise change, yet despite the promises the general trajectory and the final destination that trajectory will ultimately take us remain unchanged regardless if the Democrats or Republicans are dominant in Washington — more and more government spending and indebtedness leading to economic collapse, and more and bigger government leading to total government. It is, of course, true that the Republican Party has positioned itself as the party of conservatives while the Democratic Party has appealed to liberals. But the difference between the two major parties has been much more rhetoric than substance. Consider the last presidential race, when Senators John McCain and Barack Obama appeared to take opposite positions on the question of whether the government should redistribute wealth (remember Obama’s response to “Joe the Plumber” and McCain’s embracement of Joe?). Yet during the heat of the fall campaign both voted for, and lobbied fellow Senators to vote for, the now-infamous $700 billion TARP bailout.
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The U.S. economy grew at a 1.7 percent annual rate in the second quarter, marking the start of a slowdown in growth that has concerned the Federal Reserve.

The revised increase in gross domestic product was more than the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News and compares with a 1.6 percent estimate issued last month, figures from the Commerce Department showed today in Washington. The world’s largest economy grew 3.7 percent in the first three months of the year and 5 percent at the end of 2009.
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President Barack Obama on Monday set new goals for improving the U.S. public education system, drawing a link between progress in strengthening the nation’s public schools and the health of the U.S. economy.

An appearance by the president on NBC television’s Today Show spotlighted the administration’s effort to recruit 10,000 new science, technology, engineering and math teachers during the next two years.

Since he was elected, the president has introduced major education reforms, including his “Race to the Top” initiative in which states compete to receive money from a $4 billion fund that is intended to encourage innovation and reform.
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Sen. Harry Reid has decided to end consideration of a bill to stop a massive tax increase on all Americans effective January. Instead he will have the Senate take up the “Creating American Jobs and Ending Offshoring Act,” which would, among other things, increase taxes and compliance costs for U.S. companies, forcing them to choose either raising prices or cutting jobs.

Reid wants a vote on this act to be one of the last, if not the last, action the Senate will take before hitting the road for a month of continuous campaigning. If he’s successful, U.S. companies would face new penalties for appropriately serving a global market, the driving reason for establishing and then growing international locations.
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