Posted on 05/30/2006 11:20:11 AM PDT by boryeulb
The Senate should reject President Bush’s nomination of Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson for Treasury secretary. Under Paulson’s leadership, Goldman Sachs participated in ethically, and perhaps legally, questionable business practices. Paulson also supports the economy-killing Kyoto Protocol and has demonstrated little respect for private property rights.
On the ethical front, Paulson has refused to answer questions about his apparent use of Goldman Sachs’ corporate assets to advance his personal interests. In 2002, Paulson used at least $35 million of shareholder money to help environmental groups stop a “sustainable forestry” project in Tierra del Fuego, Chile. Environmental groups had delayed the project for years—to the point where financial stress on the project developer became acute and forced the sale of the land. Goldman swept in and bought the land, promptly turning it over to Paulson’s environmental allies.
The environmental groups involved in the transaction included The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the actual recipient of the land donation from Goldman Sachs. At the time of the transaction, Paulson was a member of the board of directors of TNC—after the transaction he was elevated to chairman. Paulson’s son is now listed on tax returns as a “trustee” of WCS’.
When I confronted Paulson with these accusations at the March 31, 2006, annual shareholder meeting, Paulson and Goldman Sachs attempted to deny the involvement of TNC in the “land steal.” At a very minimum, however, tax records indicate that Goldman Sachs paid TNC more than $144,000 in consulting fees related to the transaction. Moreover, the TNC acknowledges the WCS as one of its “organizational partners.”
On the legal front, the Washington Post reported just last week that Goldman Sachs participated in transactions with scandal-ridden Fannie Mae that “that improperly pushed $107 million of Fannie Mae earnings into future years. The aim, [said federal regulators], was always the same: To shape the company’s books, not in response to accepted accounting rules but in a way that made it appear that the company had reached earnings targets, thus triggering the maximum possible payout for executives…”
Aside from the potential ethical and legal issues surrounding Paulson, he has decidedly anti-economy and anti-property rights leanings.
Paulson supports economy-killing global warming regulation. Paulson transplanted TNC’s pro-Kyoto position into Goldman Sachs, an investment bank with no known expertise in climate science. Now Goldman Sachs not only supports greenhouse gas regulation, but has said it will lobby for such policies. No doubt this will be much easier, with Paulson as Treasury secretary.
Private property owners should also be unhappy with Paulson’s nomination. Paulson’s TNC is the world’s richest environmental group with $3 billion in assets and is a major opponent of private property rights.
A series of Washington Post articles in May 2003 exposed the Nature Conservancy as more than just a “land bank.” In the past it has also acted as a broker of too-sweet-to-be-true land and business deals for wealthy insiders and corporate supporters, often at taxpayer expense.
In one scheme reported by the Post, “…the Conservancy bought raw land, attached development restrictions and then resold the land to state trustees and other supporters at greatly reduced prices. Buyers then voluntarily gave the Conservancy charitable contributions roughly equivalent to the discounts, sums that were written off from the buyers’ federal income taxes. The deals generally allowed the buyers to build homes on the land.”
As Treasury secretary, Paulson will be in charge of the Internal Revenue Service. Should he be in charge of the government organization that has oversight over any tax problems that TNC might have?
With a Republican administration and Republican-controlled Congress in trouble for abandoning conservative principles and a scandal-ridden Washington, Hank Paulson as Treasury secretary is the wrong choice at the wrong time. Since the politically tone-deaf President Bush is unlikely to withdraw Paulson from consideration, it will be up to the Senate to do the right thing.
Mr. Milloy is executive director of the Free Enterprise Education Institute. He publishes JunkScience.com and CSRWatch.com. He is a junk science expert, an advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
I dare the Democrats to run on that ("We will raise your taxes").
But, you're right about the Republican Congress not being behind tax cuts. They're spending like there's no tomorrow.
Campaign Finance Reform
Harriet Miers (not Roberts or Alito)
Dubai ports deal
Immigration policy
Not vetoing a spending bill
Those are conservative disagreements. I don't disagree for the sake of it, I am just not afraid to say something. I'm pretty certain I agree with president Bush more often than I disagree.
I agree. The tax cuts are working, or was it the Fed all along?
Rockefeller & Morgan interests continue pulling the same old strings via their "philanthropies" and huge cash infusions to fellow traveling academics & media (which they own) - and the crony capitalist moniker is apropo, it's really facism Mussolini style after all.
If you read the historians that the MSM & Academe has done their all to supress for the last 100 years progressives have reigned, (and don't forget that 99% of Govt are unelected careerists who are pro big Govt for their duration), as the disparate facts coalesce, like Venona and who really faught for and won the ICC, Fedl Reserve & income taxes, SS, graduated taxes, etc, etc., and where those ideas originated, that one becomes very hard pressed to ignore, or refute, what those who wrote the articles I posted earlier about Big Biz's takeover of Govt for their own selfish devices.
Thomas Jefferson (Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1805)
The suppression of unnecessary offices, of useless establishments and expenses, enabled us to discontinue our internal taxes. ... The remaining revenue on the consumption of foreign articles, is paid cheerfully by those who can afford to add foreign luxuries to domestic comforts, being collected on our seaboards and frontiers only, and incorporated with the transactions of our mercantile citizens, it may be the pleasure and pride of an American to ask, what farmer, what mechanic, what laborer, ever sees a tax-gatherer of the United States?
Thomas Jefferson
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
James Madison
The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.
P.J. O'Rouke
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
Benjamin Franklin
It would be a hard government that should tax its people one-tenth part of their income.
Ludwig von Mises
"The cyclical fluctuations of business are not an occurrence originating in the sphere of the unhampered (free) market, but a product of government interference with business conditions designed to lower the rate of interest below the height at which the free market would have fixed it."
John F. Kennedy saw much of the folly in our anti-capital formation tax policy when he said,
"The tax on capital gains directly affects investment decisions, the mobility and flow of risk capital . . . the ease or difficulty experienced by new ventures in obtaining capital, and thereby the strength and potential for growth in the economy."
Dante Alighieri (1265-1320) Italian poet
"For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?"
Ronald Reagan
If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.
The New York Times, in a 1909 editorial opposing the very first income tax.
When men get in the habit of helping themselves to the property of others, they cannot easily be cured of it.
Lenin
The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.
Barry Goldwater
The income tax created more criminals than any other single act of government.
Benjamin Franklin
The king's cheese is half wasted in parings; but no matter, 'tis made of the people's milk.
George Bernard Shaw
A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
Thomas Jefferson
From time to time, the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.
I don't doubt your analysis about tax reform passing. But would it have been so bad to appoint a clear spoken advocate for economic freedom?
Brady, O'Neill, Snow, Paulson.... Swing voters can be forgiven if they've gotten the idea that the Bush family looks after its business friends instead of them.
Did George W. know ANY of these men?
What exactly does the Treasury Secretary do? Monetary policy is set by the Fed and, other than having some influence on the dollar, Treasury pretty much goes along with administration policy on taxes and spending.
>>>Jorge wants a Kyoto liberal in his administration?<<<
Why not? Jorge is a liberal (well, he is a Rockefellar Republican, which is the same thing).
They will. And they might well might win on it. Of course, they'll falsely say they're only raising taxes on "the rich".
The public does not understand that low top rates soak the rich and fill the Federal coffers. I am 100% sure that Paulson will not enlighten them about that.
That they can't name ALL three branches of Govt is why.
And just where are the voices of free markets and limited Govt heard today, that the majority of Americans get to hear much less even understand it? In our public schools?
RWR had a Dem congress, but you are right.
Are you saying it's what we deserve, when we've had 100 years of the not inconsiderable progressive creed in Govt, MSM & Academe all for it?
Limited Govt is no longer a worthy goal?
Indeed. Even being dead 200 years, Hamilton is a better choice than Paulson.
Oh sure, it's a worthy goal, but there aren't many Americans who want to lessen the influence of government or shrink its size.
People like big government, and that includes religious right conservatives, who would like to use the power of government to instill its moral policies into law.
Did George W. know ANY of these men? What exactly does the Treasury Secretary do? Monetary policy is set by the Fed and, other than having some influence on the dollar, Treasury pretty much goes along with administration policy on taxes and spending.
He probably didn't know them. I'm guessing he went with the advice of misguided political tacticians. How the the public perceives them is another point.
As you say, the Treasury Secretary runs with the administration's economic program. But he is one of the key spokesmen. He is maybe the most important team leader for projecting the message to the public. A Wall St insider type, as has been proved several times in a row now, is not the right choice if the President is serious about economic reform.
I think we finally agree on something :)
Robert Rubin is viewed as a genius for having steered "Clinton's economy" through his second term, and there was no bigger Wall St. insider than Rubin.
I agree completely, if you insert the word "falsely" between "is" and "viewed".
I take your point that a Wall St type can help win elections, though it's never helped either Bush. But for what? So they can stay in power and enact policies designed to win more elections?
By the way, I think Rubin's popularity was entirely dependent on his being a Democrat. Brady esposed the same tax hike program for Bush Sr that Rubin did for Clinton, and never got a media love fest.
I'll just say that I opposed O'Neill for the same reason. Eventually the President had to accept that, and we got Snow. I opposed Snow for the same reason, and now here we are again. There may not be enough time left for the President to become disillusioned and dump Paulson, but I predict that he, like the others, will not leave office with respect or acclaim.
>>>investment guys aren't typically known to take the leftist position on these matters.
They want to trade the artificially-made differences: carbon credits, tax credits, increased property value from moving land off the market, government subsidies, no property taxes on land pushed to future generations.
"If you go to a poker game and don't know within 5 minutes who the mark is... you're the mark."
These are not stupid lefties like you see in Hollywood.
That's for sure. I worked in investments (commercial/real estate) for 10 years and remember well going to parties for our investment correspondents and I was the only woman. These guys play at a different level than most of us do.
I especially like the von Mises quote. Sadly, I think that's what the Bush administration economic policy is all about, with an eye to the election cycle.
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