Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/554144
GregStevens,Publisher Chip Thompson, Editor EDITORIALBOARD How to have your say: Letters must be signed and provide the writer's home street address and home phone number. Anonymous letters, open letters to others, pen names and petition-style letters will not be allowed. Letters should be typed and no more than two double-spaced pages or 500words. When several letters address the same issue, a cross section will be published. Email: editor@ redbluffdailynews.com Fax: 530-527-9251 Mail to: P.O. Box 220, 545 Diamond Ave., Red Bluff, CA 96080 Facebook: Leave comments at FACEBOOK.COM/ RBDAILYNEWS Twitter: Follow and send tweets to @REDBLUFFNEWS James Stanford Wanttoknowasecret?Con- gress isn't going to stop the Iran nuclear deal, and not be- cause of the merits, popularity or the fact that despite what everyone's telling you, they can't really stop it (more on that later). I can say with near cer- tainty that the Iran deal is a done deal because that's what an overwhelming majority of D.C. insiders are betting will happen. People in politics rarely put their money where their mouth is. Any numbskull— and I've been one of them fre- quently—can go on cable news to argue against their ideolog- ical counterpart. The "he said, she said" format encourages a childish dichotomy, even when discussing over adult topics such as the Iran nuclear deal. Nuance is thrown over in fa- vor of clear contrast as pundits turn gray area into black and white issues. That's the way the Iran deal is being portrayed: It's Obama versus Israel's Benjamin Ne- tanyahu, and Congress has 60 days to reject the deal. Every- thing is riding on Congress' say-so, according to, well, ev- eryone, and this popular mis- conception has turned this whole thing into something of a legislative doomsday clock counting down to a parliamen- tary apocalypse. It's this deal or war with Iran. The fate of the world hangs in the bal- ance. "If this deal is consum- mated, it will make the Obama administration the world's leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism," said Ted Cruz. Obama countered in a speech at American University, saying, "By killing this deal, Congress would not only clear Iran's path to a bomb, but would accelerate it." If you read your tealeaves on television, the outcome is unclear. One poll by Pew shows opponents outnumber- ing supporters by 12 percent. Another by Washington Post/ ABC News says a 56-percent majority of Americans support the deal. American Jews want Congress to support the deal, 53 percent to 35 percent, while 70 percent of Israelis oppose it. But I'm sure this sucker is good to go because 89 per- cent of people on Predic- tIt say so. PredictIt is a web- site where you can make—for money—predictions about cur- rent events. The price of your prediction is some portion of a dollar that depends on how popular the prediction is. If you turn out to be right, you win a whole dollar. For the folks in D.C. who do this stuff for a living, this is like finding money in old pants. On July 23, PredictIt posted the question "Will Congress override the Iran nuclear deal?" and the Yes proposi- tions shot to 18 cents and have been falling ever since. Right now, you can bet—sorry, pre- dict—that Congress will reject the Iran deal if you have as lit- tle as 11 cents. In other words, the Philadelphia Phillies, own- ers of the worst record in base- ball, have better odds to win the World Series. The people who know how Washington works say there's no way Con- gress rejects the Iran deal. How can that be so with the polls in doubt and Congress under Republican control? It's not complicated. To reject the deal, Congress would have to overcome a presidential veto, and 150 House members— more than needed to sustain a veto—have signed a letter sup- porting the Iran deal. This is a thriller with no suspense, and we already know the ending. It's also possible that the D.C. insiders putting their money on PredictIt know the dirty little secret about the Iran deal: If Congress passes a resolution disapproving the Iran deal, Obama can still sign it and ask the United Nations to lift international sanctions. All Congress controls is the sanctions put in place by the United States. The Iran deal isn't a treaty requiring Senate approval, and Obama still re- tains the power to negotiate for the United States. This deal is going to hap- pen. There were show trials in the Soviet Union with more in- tegrity than this process. Con- gress gets to act like it is fit to lead the country, and Obama gets to pretend he cares what Congress thinks. It's not a per- fect system, but now at least now you know the secret of how it works. JasonStanfordisaregular contributor to the Austin American-Statesman, a Democratic consultant and a Truman National Security Project partner. You can email him at stanford@oppresearch. com and follow him on Twitter @JasStanford. Commentary 89 percent sure Congress won't reject Iran deal Cartoonist's take To reject the deal, Congress would have to overcome a presidential veto, and 150 House members—more than needed to sustain a veto— have signed a letter supporting the Iran deal. This is a thriller with no suspense, and we already know the ending. StateandNational Assemblyman James Galla- gher, 2060 Talbert Drive, Ste. 110, Chico 95928, 530 895-4217, http://ad03.asmrc.org/ Senator Jim Nielsen, 2634 Forest Ave., Ste. 110, Chico 95928, 530 879-7424, senator. nielsen@senate.ca.gov Governor Jerry Brown, State Capital Building, Sacramento 95814, 916 445-2841, fax 916 558-3160, governor@governor. ca.gov U.S. Representative Doug La- Malfa, 507 Cannon House Of- fice Building, Washington D.C. 20515, 202 225-3076 U.S. Senator Dianne Fein- stein, One Post St., Ste. 2450, San Francisco 94104, 415 393- 0707, fax 415 393-0710 U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, 1700 Montgomery St., San Fran- cisco 94111, 510 286-8537, fax 202 224-0454 Local Tehama County Supervisors, 527-4655 District 1, Steve Chamblin, Ext. 3015 District 2, Candy Carlson, Ext. 3014 District 3, Dennis Garton, Ext. 3017 District 4, Bob Williams, Ext. 3018 District 5, Burt Bundy, Ext. 3016 Red Bluff City Manager, Rich- ard Crabtree, 527-2605, Ext. 3061 YOUR OFFICIALS Among the impediments to having a truthful understand- ing America's economy and em- ployment situ- ation, no small role is played by the provable ly- ing by Emperor Obama. Particu- larly insightful is "Obama Tells An- other 'Whopper'— He Did Not Cre- ate 12.8 Million Jobs," by David Stockman, President Reagan's head of the Office of Manage- ment and Budget (Attention, liberals: bashing Stockman or Reagan disproves nothing). To the reliably higher-ed-ad- dled, uncritical brains of Uni- versity of Wisconsin students, Obama said, on July 1: "And the unemployment rate is now down to 5.3 percent. (Applause) Keep in mind, when I came into office it was hovering around 10 percent. All told, we've now seen 64 straight months of pri- vate sector job growth, which is a new record—(applause)—new record—12.8 million new jobs all told." Stockman describes that as "a pack of context-free fac- toids," and reasonably casti- gates "economically illiterate hacks—like those who work on the White House speech writ- ing staff." For the crass purpose of inflating numbers, they ig- nore the normal business cy- cle, with its peaks and troughs, and measure from a convenient point—the bottom of the V- shaped but momentary employ- ment trough early in Obama's tenure. "We are now 29 quarters from the pre-crisis peak and to- tal non-farm labor hours uti- lized by the U.S. economy are no higher than they were in Q4 2007…In other words, if you use a common unit of measure—la- bor hours rather than job slots which treat coal-miners and part-time pizza delivery boys alike—there have been no new units of employment at all." (Stockman) That's about 6 and- a-half years since pre-recession normalcy; Obama's economic recovery has yet to exceed those labor conditions. He finds, moreover, that the employment picture is only 1 percent better now than 2 cy- cles ago, in the spring of 2000. That compares unfavorably to the same time period af- ter the 1990 peak—a 12 per- cent increase in non-farm labor hours—and after the 1981 peak with a 17 percent increase in non-farm hours. "What is happening is that the Keynesian money printers at the Fed are fueling serial fi- nancial bubbles. This gener- ates a temporary lift in the dis- cretionary incomes of the top 10 percent of households, which own 85 percent of the financial assets, and the next 10-20 per- cent which feed off their win- nings." Hence, leisure and hos- pitality jobs for bar tenders, waiters, bellhops, etc. grow but not middle-income, family-sup- porting manufacturing jobs. However, Obama blathers on trying to take more credit: "And after a decade of decline, thanks to some of the steps we took…we've added nearly 900,000 new manufacturing jobs. Manufacturing is actually growing faster than the rest of the economy." Stockman: "But that one is not even a whopper; it's a bald- faced lie. There has not been one 'new' manufacturing job created during Obama's term in office; and, in fact, the 12.3 million manufacturing jobs re- ported for June was still 10 per- cent below the level of Decem- ber 2007, and nearly 30 per- cent lower than the 17.3 million manufacturing jobs reported in January 2000." It's even worse if you consider the entire high-productivity, high paying "goods production sector—energy, mining, man- ufacturing and construction," which, at 19.6 million jobs in June, was 5 million fewer than in January 2000. Unsurpris- ingly, the median real house- hold income has declined by 7 percent over the last 15 years. An otherwise positive area of job growth—health, education and social services, or HES— generated 48,000 jobs in June, slightly more than the 42,000 per month average since 2000; however, they pay an average of $35,000 per year. That is well short of what it takes for a fam- ily to depend on; it's not nearly enough for a one-income mid- dle class family after deduct- ing taxes. What's worse for the HES sector "is that these jobs are al- most entirely 'fiscally depen- dent' on public sector spending" while America is broke and the debt keeps climbing. "The 32.2 million jobs in the HES sector are funded by $1.5 trillion an- nually of Medicare, Medicaid and other health and social ser- vices entitlements." Add in (annually) $1 tril- lion of public education fund- ing, $200 billion of student loans and $250 billion in tax subsidies for health insur- ance and Obamacare tax cred- its. "The public sector borrows and taxes to create low pro- ductivity jobs within the na- tion's highly inefficient, waste- ful and monopolistic health and education cartels." Every- thing else—the higher, middle class income-generators—gets squeezed. The free market forces, that would ordinarily create a solid recovery, have been stifled and obstructed by "bailouts, expan- sion of entitlement programs, regulation of the economy, tax increases, and huge government deficits" (Economics professor, Dr. Tracy Miller). Bailouts si- multaneously kept capitol stuck in disfavored, inefficient and less-productive businesses and propped up those that deserved to go bankrupt. With a 25 percent food stamp benefit increase per recipient— and easier qualification—from 2007 to 2010, the number on that program rose (I'm shocked, shocked!) by over 7 million be- tween 2010 and 2012, while un- employment fell. Democrats slipped changes into the stim- ulus (ARRA) that made it more financially rewarding to collect unemployment benefits. More- over, Obamacare has measur- ably increased part time em- ployment at the expense of ad- ditional full time jobs. Only by replacing these Obama- crat policies with conservative, free-market Republican solu- tions will America be restored to abundance and full employ- ment. Don Polson has called Red Bluff home since 1988. He can be reached by e-mail at donplsn@ yahoo.com. The way I see it Obama lies — let bad policies die Don Polson It's even worse if you consider the entire high- productivity, high paying "goods production sector—energy, mining, manufacturing and construction," which, at 19.6 million jobs in June, was 5 million fewer than in January 2000. Unsurprisingly, the median real household income has declined by 7 percent over the last 15 years. OPINION » redbluffdailynews.com Tuesday, August 11, 2015 » MORE AT FACEBOOK.COM/RBDAILYNEWS AND TWITTER.COM/REDBLUFFNEWS A6