Isn’t this special!

In the first six months of 2010, about 6,000 employees of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. will take a break from their spreadsheets and move across the southern tip of Manhattan to a new 43-story, steel-and-glass skyscraper.

The building was a bargain — and not just because the final cost is expected to be $200 million less than the $2.3 billion price the company had estimated when construction began in November 2005. Goldman Sachs also benefited from the government’s determination to avoid losing jobs in lower Manhattan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Building a new headquarters cater-cornered to where the World Trade Center once stood qualified the firm to sell $1 billion of tax-free Liberty Bonds and get about $49 million of job-grant funds, tax exemptions and energy discounts. Henry Paulson, then Goldman Sachs’s chief executive officer, threatened to abandon the project after delays in addressing his concerns about safety. To keep the plan on track, state and city officials raised the bond ceiling to $1.65 billion and added $66 million in benefits.

. . . .

Goldman Sachs, which set a Wall Street profit record of $11.6 billion in 2007 and may have earned $11.4 billion this year, according to the average estimate of 15 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg, won new and larger concessions from taxpayers in 2008. This time it was the threat of a financial meltdown that prompted the U.S. government, with Paulson as Treasury secretary, and the Federal Reserve to supply an unprecedented amount of aid to firms deemed critical to the financial system, including Goldman Sachs.

The 140-year-old company received $10 billion in capital, guarantees on about $30 billion of debt and the ability to borrow cheaply from the Fed. The Fed’s bailout of American International Group Inc., and its decision to pay the insurer’s counterparties in full, funneled an additional $12.9 billion to Goldman Sachs. (Read more from bloomberg.com)

From Thomas Babington Macaulay‘s brilliant and timeless 1830 essay “Southey’s Colloquies on Society”:

“It is not by the intermeddling of Mr. Southey’s idol, the omniscient and omnipotent State, but by the prudence and energy of the people, that England has hitherto been carried forward in civilization; and it is to the same prudence and the same energy that we now look with comfort and good hope. Our rulers will best promote the improvement of the nation by strictly confining themselves to their own legitimate duties, by leaving capital to find its most lucrative course, commodities their fair price, industry and intelligence their natural reward, idleness and folly their natural punishment, by maintaining peace, by defending property, by diminishing the price of law, and by observing strict economy in every department of the state. Let the Government do this: the People will assuredly do the rest.”

Feeling the spirit of the holidays?

You know, there’s a “Donate” button off the right. ;)

EDINBURGH — The expenses racked up by U.S. lawmakers traveling here for a conference last month included one for the “control room.”

Besides rooms for sleeping, the 12 members of the House of Representatives rented their hotel’s fireplace-equipped presidential suite and two adjacent rooms. The hotel cleared out the beds and in their place set up a bar, a snack room and office space. The three extra rooms — stocked with liquor, Coors beer, chips and salsa, sandwiches, Mrs. Fields cookies and York Peppermint Patties — cost a total of about $1,500 a night. They were rented for five nights.

While in Scotland, the House members toured historic buildings. Some shopped for Scotch whisky and visited the hotel spa. They capped the trip with a dinner at one of the region’s finest restaurants, paid for by the legislators, who got $118 daily stipends for meals and incidentals.

Eleven of the 12 legislators then left the five-day conference two days early.

. . . .

Ever since a corruption scandal in 2005 led to restrictions on privately funded travel, legislators have been taking more trips paid for by the government.

The cost they reported for such travel abroad was $13 million in 2008, a 70% jump from 2005, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of travel records. Lawmakers don’t have to report the cost of domestic travel when the government pays. The $13 million didn’t include the expense of flying on Air Force planes, which lawmakers don’t have to disclose.

Over the 2005-08 period, the cost of legislators’ privately funded travel, both domestic and overseas, fell 70%, to $2.9 million, according to LegiStorm.com, a Web site that tracks it.

Lawmakers must reveal only general information about the travel, such as countries visited. Several weeks after a trip, they report the overall cost, without a detailed breakdown. This account of congressional travel is based on trip itineraries provided by lawmakers, meeting schedules and what two Journal reporters saw. Mr. Tanner’s office and other lawmakers confirmed many details of the account and didn’t dispute the others.

The blending of business and pleasure on the trip to Scotland was typical, aides and lawmakers say. In August, two Republican senators, Richard Shelby of Alabama and John Cornyn of Texas, went to Europe with their wives and aides to meet with banking regulators and industry executives. Military officials picked up Mr. Shelby’s luggage at his office. A separate government car drove him and his wife to the airport. “That is typically how the military handles departures on congressional delegations,” said a spokesman for the senator. (Read more from online.wsj.com)

Isn’t that special!

Peter Schiff’s economic analysis continues to be spectacular:

Here’s the Jim Roger’s statement Peter Schiff alludes to:

Swiss banking group Credit Suisse has agreed to pay a $536m (£329m) fine for violating US sanctions against Iran.

Settlement papers say Credit Suisse systematically hid the identity of its Iranian clients when moving millions of dollars on their behalf.

. . . .

In January, British bank Lloyds-TSB paid a fine of $350m to US authorities after prosecutors accused it of faking records so clients in Iran, Libya and Sudan could do business with US institutions.

The US government has the power to take proceedings against foreign financial institutions – even for actions involving other countries – if they do some of their business in America.

US government papers filed in the latest case said: “Credit Suisse’s internal communications showed a continuous dialogue about evading US sanctions spanning approximately a decade.” (Read more from news.bbc.co.uk)

Climategate may be just the tip of the global-warming iceberg according to the Washington, D.C.-based Competitive Enterprise Institute, which says the next weather-science scandal may erupt right here in the United States.

For nearly three years CEI, a free-market, public-interest organization, has pursued a series of Freedom of Information Act Requests intended to force NASA’s climate-science division to hand over e-mails it says could reflect the same sort of pro-warming bias seen in the recent e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of East Anglia University.

One reason NASA’s unresponsiveness is drawing attention: For years, the CRU stonewalled a request filed through the British information-act process, before information was “hacked” and posted on the Internet in November.

“They have resisted and haven’t wanted to turn anything over,” CEI Energy and Global Warming Policy Director Myron Ebell says of NASA. “. . . So this looks like climategate all over again to us.” (Read more from newsmax.com)

The DOE hopes to lend or give out more than $40 billion to businesses working on “clean technology,” everything from electric cars and novel batteries to wind turbines and solar panels. In the first nine months of 2009, the DOE doled out $13 billion in loans and grants to such firms. By contrast, venture-capital firms — which have long been the chief funders of fledgling tech firms, taking equity stakes in the start-ups that will pay off if they go public — poured just $2.68 billion into the sector in that time, according to data tracker Cleantech Group.

Thus, while much attention has been focused on the federal government’s involvement in banking, Washington also is gaining sway in another swath of the economy. By financing clean-tech ventures on a large scale, the government has become a kingmaker in one of technology’s hottest sectors. (Read more from online.wsj.com)

A travesty.

Many Austrian Economic principles come up in this talk. Government cannot create jobs, it can only redirect them. Estate taxes destroy accumulated capital.

Peter Schiff more on death tax, and the disaster of our healthcare legislation.

I’m very impressed with Peter Schiff.

America’s health-care system has problems — all traceable to government intervention — but it could be worse. And if the so-called reform emerging in Congress is enacted, it will be worse.

The nub of the plan is that everyone must have health insurance and that all but the smallest employers should provide it. If someone doesn’t have coverage, he’ll be penalized. Low-income people will be subsidized by the taxpayers. Government will determine what’s covered, which will set off a lobbying frenzy by providers of “indispensable” services and products. (This already goes on in the states, where “mandated benefits” include coverage for drug and alcoholism treatment, in vitro fertilization, and other less-than-widely-used services.) So people will be forced to have coverage they may not want.

Insurers will not be able to deny coverage or charge higher premiums to people already ill, that is, with so-called pre-existing conditions. The mandate to insure everyone and charge the same price regardless of health means that some will be forced to subsidize others. People of whatever income level whose insurance premiums would have been lower without the mandate will have to spend more because risk-based premiums will be illegal. That is not insurance; it’s welfare. (Read more from campaignforliberty.com)