John Stossel
FOX BUSINESS January 25, 2010 Obama's Bad Connection John Stossel Excerpts: In an appearance with ABC's George Stephanopoulos last week, there was little danger of the President being too hard on himself. (Perhaps he just didn't want to jeopardize that "good, solid B+" Obama gave himself last month.) Obama said it was his hard work creating public policy that caused him to lose a direct connection to Americans. “If there’s one thing that I regret this year it’s that we were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are..."Excuse me? We know what our core values are. It is presumptuous for a politician to presume that he must lecture us about them.
I'm surprised Stephanopoulos was able to keep a straight face. Blogger Denny Hartford asks, Obama needs to talk to us even more?
Full article=John Stossel Fox Business
REAL CLEAR POLITICS
July 22, 2009 ARROGANCE By John Stossel Excerpts: It's crazy for a group of mere mortals to try to design 15 percent of the U.S. economy. It's even crazier to do it by August. Yet that is what some members of Congress presume to do. They intend, as the New York Times puts it, "to reinvent the nation's health care system". Let that sink in. A handful of people who probably never even ran a small business actually think they can reinvent the health care system. Politicians and bureaucrats clearly have no idea how complicated markets are. Every day people make countless tradeoffs, in all areas of life, based on subjective value judgments and personal information as they delicately balance their interests, needs and wants. Who is in a better position than they to tailor those choices to best serve their purposes? Yet the politicians believe they can plan the medical market the way you plan a birthday party. Full article John Stossel Real Clear Politics
John Stossel on Glenn Beck REAL CLEAR POLITICS June 17, 2009 A Refreshing Spin on Cable TV
By John Stossel Few of us had heard of Glenn Beck a few years ago. Now the conservative talk-jock is everywhere. His radio show reaches eight million people. He's performing live before sold-out crowds on a comedy tour. He's had No. 1 bestsellers in both fiction and nonfiction -- plus a new book, "Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government" came out this week. And now he's host of his own Fox News show, which, even though it airs in the ratings desert of late afternoon, has a bigger audience than every show on the other cable news channels. Full article John Stossel Real Clear Politics
Privatize! Privatize! Privatize! REAL CLEAR POLITICS Sell the Roads! By John Stossel
Excerpts:
Under President Obama's stimulus plan, the government will spend billions of your dollars building new roads and fixing old ones. They say they'll do it efficiently. I say, bull; government has never before been efficient. It isn't going to start now. Need proof? How about rush hour? Rush hours from hell are not natural phenomena. They're manmade -- more precisely, politician-made. But what if commuting didn't have to be a horrendous experience? What if, for example, someone wanted to add some lanes to a road or build an entirely new road? Full article John Stossel REAL CLEAR POLITICS
ReasonOnline
'We Have a Lot of Work to Do' ABC's John Stossel on defending the market from within the liberal media Ted Balaker | April 2009 Print Edition Full article John Stossel ReasonOnline Excerpts:
John Stossel is the best-known libertarian in the news media. As the co-anchor of the long-running and immensely popular ABC News program 20/20, auteur of a continuing series of specials on topics ranging from corporate welfare to educational waste to laws criminalizing consensual adult behavior, and author of best-selling books such as Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity, Stossel brings a consistent message of liberty to millions of viewers on a weekly basis. It wasn’t always this way. Born in 1947, Stossel started out as a standard-issue consumer reporter, working in Oregon and New York before joining the staff of Good Morning America and, later, 20/20. He did scare stories about everything from pharmaceutical rip-offs to exploding coffee pots. Then, in the 1980s, he encountered reason, which radically changed his thinking about the benefits of laissez faire in economics and personal lifestyles. “It was a revelation,” he writes in his 2004 memoir, Give Me a Break. “Here were writers who analyzed the benefits of free markets that I witnessed as a reporter. They called themselves libertarians, and their slogan was ‘Free Minds and Free Markets.’ I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, but what they wrote sure made sense.”
REAL CLEAR POLITICS February 25, 2009 Judging Obama By John Stossel Full article John Stossel REAL CLEAR POLITICS Excerpts: How will we know if President Obama's must-have "stimulus" program succeeds? Politicians grab credit for everything, so we should come up with a way to measure success. Obama said, "I expect to be judged by results." Let's oblige him. It won't be easy. Obama promises to "save or create" 3.5 million jobs, but if the unemployment rate is unchanged in four years, do we credit Obama for saving 3.5 million jobs that would have been lost? If new jobs are created, should stimulus get the credit? If the gain is in the government sector or in areas fed by taxpayer money, how do we know that the job creation didn't crowd out the creation of more and more productive jobs? If the gain is in the private sector, Obama's boosters will claim credit on the basis of the "multiplier effect." It's a favorite theory of politicians and their court economists that government spending has a bigger economic jolt than cutting marginal tax rates does. But not everyone is so sure. (Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw, for one.
REAL CLEAR POLITICS February 19, 2009 Real Jobs Create Wealth By John Stossel Full article John Stossel REAL CLEAR POLITICS Excerpts: So President Obama got his stimulus bill. For a mere $787 billion, he has pledged to "save or create" 3.5 million jobs. That's only $224,857 and change per job! (If I still have my job next year, will he take credit for saving it?) But wait. Only 3.5 million jobs? Why so few? It's not like creating jobs is difficult. Egypt built more than 100 pyramids beginning sometime in the third millennium B.C. to house the corpses of the pharaohs and their significant others. Think of all the jobs that project created. I'll bet the unemployment rate was something any pharaoh could have proudly campaigned for reelection on -- if he faced election, that is. Pyramid building is one heck of a public-works project.
REAL CLEAR POLITICS
A False Sense of Security By John Stossel January 14, 2009 Full article John Stossel REAL CLEAR POLITICS"> Excerpts: The $50-billion investment scam allegedly pulled off by Wall Street insider Bernard Madoff has ignited predictable calls for more regulation. The "massive fraud ... was made possible in part because the regulators who were assigned to oversee Wall Street dropped the ball," said President-elect Obama. "This scandal underscores the need for a 21st century regulatory approach," writes Arthur Levitt Jr., former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), in The Wall Street Journal.
REAL CLEAR POLITICS February 11, 2009 Making a Bad Bill Worse By John Stossel Full article John Stossel Real Clear Politics Excerpts: How do you make a dreadfully bad piece of legislation -- the nearly $900-billion so-called "stimulus" bill -- worse? Simple -- add protectionism. The "Buy American" provision of the stimulus bill, which mandates the use of domestic iron, steel and manufactured goods even if imports are cheaper, makes our trading partners nervous. That created a problem for President Obama: "I think it would be a mistake ... at a time when worldwide trade is declining for us to start sending a message that somehow we're just looking after ourselves and not concerned with world trade," he said. But some members of his party were elected on protectionist platforms, and they are not about to blow this chance to reward their union and industrial constituencies. What was Obama to do?
REAL CLEAR POLITICS February 04, 2009 We Can't Spend Our Way to Prosperity By John Stossel Full article John Stossel REAL CLEAR POLITICS Excerpts:
Washington never changes, no matter who's in power. Give a gang of politicians a chance to spend our money, and they will spend it -- the more the better. An economic downturn is hog heaven; for now they have a justification to spend big time: "economic stimulus." Anything and everything can be proposed as long as it can be said to "inject money into the economy" and "create jobs." Does $819 billion sound like too much? Au contraire. It may not be enough. Ask Paul Krugman and the other Keynesians. The danger, they say, lies in spending too little. Not to worry. The Senate will probably throw in more money. And the Obama administration says this is just the beginning. "While many of the projects are a down payment on long-term goals, including energy policy reform, health-care reform and the expansion of infrastructure investment, the goal has never been to accomplish every legislative goal in one fell swoop," White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said (http://tinyurl.com/anrqht). House Speaker Nancy Pelosi thinks that hundreds of millions of dollars for family-planning services will stimulate the economy. My colleague George Stephanopoulos of "This Week" was incredulous. But Pelosi was ready for him: "Well, the family planning services reduce cost. ... The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now. ... [C]ontraception will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government" (http://tinyurl.com/dgqtjh).
REAL CLEAR POLITICS
January 22, 2009 Anything That's Peaceful By John Stossel Full article John Stossel REAL CLEAR POLITICS Excerpts:
This week the Left arrived in Washington, excited about the wonderful things it will do to us -- I mean, for us. They always do it for us. Liberals say that they, unlike those reactionaries who've held power for too long, want to give us more choices. Abortion-rights advocates want women to have the "right to choose." Gay-rights advocates want the choice of marrying someone of the same sex and serving in the military. Choice is good. As a libertarian, I'm all over choice. But strangely, today, liberals are mostly about what Americans should not be allowed to choose. The College Scam By John Stossel Full article John Stossel REAL CLEAR POLITICS Excerpts:
A college diploma is supposed to be the ticket to the good life. Colleges and politicians tell students, "Your life will be much better if you go to college. On average during your lifetime you will earn a million dollars more if you get a bachelor's degree." Barack Obama, stumping on the campaign trail, said, "We expect all our children not only to graduate high school, but to graduate college." Rachele Percel heard the promises. She borrowed big to pay about $24,000 a year to attend Rivier College in New Hampshire. She got a degree in human development. "I was told just to take out the loans and get the degree because when you graduate you're going to be able to get that good job and pay them off no problem," she told me for last week's "20/20". But for three years she failed to find a decent job. Now she holds a low-level desk job doing work she says she could have done straight out of high school. And she's still $85,000 in debt. This month she had to move out of her apartment because she couldn't pay the rent.
John F. Stossel is a consumer reporter and investigative journalist. Initially a firm believer that there was much wrong with the practices of business in America and that government was almost always a positive force that watches these "evil" business people, he set out to help the Americans know in more detail, just how much they really were being victimized by businessmen and business practices, especially the practices of big business.
It wasn't too long before Stossel's research and careful investigative practices started putting small doubts in his near certainty that a great deal of business mischief was taking place. Little by little, that suspicion turned more and more, against government and against the fact that government would help prevent abuses, into what became his current realization, eerily close to the famous Ronald Reagan belief--Government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem. Now his data gives solid evidence of how much the free-market works in the favor of consumers when not mired in the over-regulation, excessive taxation, and wasteful duplication of government meddling and often corrupt practices to serve the powerful bureaucratic machine in Washington D.C. and the statehouses of many states. John Stossel is the author of Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media This autobiography details his career and philosophical transition from believer in the helpfulness of government to the realization of the often unintended and harmful consequences of government entrance into the workings of the free-market.
The book explains his opposition to government regulation, his belief in free market and private sector achievement, his backing of tort reform, and belief in removing social services from a government responsibility to private charities. This book was a New York Times bestseller for 11 weeks.
-19 Emmy Awards -Excellence in Consumer Reporting-5 Times by the National Press Club -George Polk Award for Outstanding Local Reporting -Peabody Award John has plenty of company from others who once were mired in the absolute certainty that "government makes things better and fairer" and fairer for all of us. Each day we are learning more and more about how much politicians-especially Democrats-have come to thin of their next releection as far more important than what's good for America. The brainless Mainstream Media has invested so deeply, in the election of Barack Obama, their objectivity has disappeared. Like Don McNeil's huge 1970's hit The Day The Music Died, lamenting the death of rock and roll, the year 2008 could be called the day journalism died, since journalists who are supposed to report objectively, threw objectivity, research for facts, and getting a balanced report out the window, ignored all that, to get Barack Obama elected.
Now the Mainstream's are praising every act as essentially coming from heaven if it is done by their beloved MESSIAH' Broken promises by the president are coming at an almost torrential pace, but these are painted as "showing flexibility" in this case. Many of the same acts by President Bush were almost crimes against humanity, but they are heaven directed under Mr. Obama.
Bernie Goldberg John Stossel
John Stossel is an author, and co-anchor for the ABC News show 20/20.[1]
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