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31 May, 2012

What's the Matter With Manhattan?

Back in 2004, Thomas Frank wrote a famous book, "What's the Matter with Kansas?", in which he lamented working class white people's choices to vote their "values" rather than what -- in his not-so-humble opinion -- was in their "genuine" economic interests. Why didn't they identify as liberals and vote Democratic?

Frank's book was the midwife of President Obama's infamous "clinging to guns and God" remark on April 11, 2008:

The last few years have not been kind to Frank's or Obama's dogmatic assumptions that economic liberalism is in the interest of Kansas -- i.e., the working people of America.

The presumed tension between Kansans' economic interests and their social values appears increasingly fake.

But in the meantime, as Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker's dramatic heresy on Bain capital last weekend shows, the inverse divide is opening up in the Democratic base that could be called "What's the Matter with Manhattan?"

Liberals live in rich social enclaves with artistic, progressive values that are underwritten largely by the wealth that Wall Street and capitalism create.

A 2009 Quinnipiac poll notes that socially liberal values rise with income -- "support for same-sex marriage also rises with income, as those making less than $50,000 per year oppose it 54 to 39 percent, while voters making more than $100,000 per year support it 58 to 36 percent."

The very rich are disproportionately strong social liberals, whom Bill Clinton persuaded could safely vote for Democrats. Obama's attacks on private equity and the 1 percent are making them think anew: Why should Manhattan vote their values against their pocketbooks?

Manhattan (metaphorically speaking) is thinking hard about that:

In 2008 Obama carried the majority of the rather rich -- those making $200,000 or more per year -- earning 52 percent of the vote, which was 17 points more than John Kerry in 2004. The latest Quinnipiac poll shows Obama trailing among the more modestly affluent -- those making $100,000 or more -- 49 percent to 43 percent.

Raul Fernandez, part owner of the Washington Capitals and the Washington Wizards, donated $30,000 to Obama in 2008. He told The Washington Post last month to count him into the "anybody but Obama" camp. "They paint (wealth creation) with one big brush," Fernandez told the paper. "They are truly trying to make it evil."

And it's not just as donors that these people count.

According to the National Journal, more than one-third of Virginia voters make more than $100,000 per year, and 7 percent make more than $200,000 a year -- more than the coveted Latino voters in that state. In Colorado, another swing state, 8 percent of voters make $200,000 a year or more. Obama carried them last time around by double digits (compared to Bush's 66 percent of this vote in 2004).

If Manhattan -- or more to the point Aspen, Colo. -- votes its economic interests instead of its social values, Obama loses. "What's the matter with Aspen?" could become Thomas Frank's new rallying crime.

Meanwhile "Kansas," metaphorically speaking, is ever more unified against Obama:

Obama won just 40 percent of non-college-educated whites in 2008. Last week's Quinnipiac poll showed him winning just 32 percent of them against Romney.

In another swing state, Florida, a poll released this week shows Obama's deficit among white voters is growing, especially among those without a college degree; Obama now trails Romney 57 percent to 30 percent among less educated whites.

In Florida, the social issues are clearly helping Romney. Twenty-two percent of voters say gay marriage will be "very" or "extremely" important to their vote. They are breaking for Romney 2-1.

Liberals such as Frank thought that working class white voters were so dumb they were being fooled by Republicans into voting against their economic interests by "ginned up" social issues campaigns. Kansans knew better.

Obama is trying to borrow that model, to get affluent white voters to vote against their economic interests by ginning up social issue campaigns like the war on women or endorsing gay marriage.

Will Manhattan be as smart as Kansas?

SOURCE

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Public pension funds desperately need Romney

If you are getting 1% interest at the bank, why do you suppose those legislators you elect are still betting the return on pension funds will be 7.5% to 8%? The answer is simple. If they don’t project those rates the law they enacted forces them to currently fund the shortfall. Since legislators don’t have any money that means you, the ones who elected these politicians, will have to pay higher taxes or get fewer services or benefits.

In the article below we find that cities reducing the rate will have to currently fund millions and in some cases billions each year to comply with the law. That means these well-meaning politicians have screwed up royally and you dear taxpayer are going to pay through the nose because of their mistakes.

This problem is no longer a disaster waiting to occur it is a catastrophe. Cities, counties, states as well as teachers, unionists and others will be looking for the taxpayers to bail them out and pay those pensions out of increased taxes. You will note in the article that the union bosses who bankrupted so many companies and cities with higher wages, pensions and medical benefits are now attempting to force the legislators to pay those pensions by taxing the people.

Compounding this problem is the redistributionist policies of the present administration. They are preaching that profits are evil and as a result stock prices that make up the great majority of all pensions assets are languishing with the exception of the crony capitalists like GE. Their policies have now affected growth in the value of stocks in such a material way that pension funds will all go broke if governmental attitudes towards profits and free enterprise don’t change

All this can be changed by a rejection of the Democrat party at all levels in the November election. They are the ones preaching that capitalism is wrong while they attempt to tax that capital out of existence. Unfortunately we have imbeciles in Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington and elsewhere who have no clue that what they want is leading us into bankruptcy.

Rate of return is determined by the annual increase in the value of stock plus dividends held by pensions. Ever since the Democrats were returned to office in 2007 the stock market hasn’t even been a 1% affair (when it was not falling or recovering). Should the Republicans be returned to office this pension problem could be easily solved. That would happen because stock prices would soar with the repeal of Obamacare, Dodd Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley and the elimination of onerous regulations and policies like the EPA impose.

Rates of return are a funny thing. They respond to freedom of opportunity. When Clinton buckled under on Welfare in 1996 the S&P 500 went up 70% from 1-1-96 to 12-31-97. That‘s right 70%. Now we know what happened to that same stock index when it became apparent that Barack Obama would become President in September 2008. It fell 50% and caused a panic in the marketplace.

We can save the pensions and we can save those irresponsible politicians (or if you want to be more precise “ourselves”) if we throw out the redistributionist Democrats and elect Republicans who believe in free enterprise and market-based decision making. We could easily have a 70% increase in pension values and solve this pension problem. All we need to do is believe in ourselves and loosen the shackles of government.

A 1% return is pathetic and illustrates what a failure the Democrat party is. Under George W. Bush there were three years where the S&P 500 went up over 20% a year. And Barack Obama and leading Democrats say those were failed policies. They want us to believe 1% returns are better.

-- comments by retired accountant Dick McDonald

Few investors are more bullish these days than public pension funds. While Americans are typically earning less than 1 percent interest on their savings accounts and watching their 401(k) balances yo-yo along with the stock market, most public pension funds are still betting they will earn annual returns of 7 to 8 percent over the long haul, a practice that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg recently called “indefensible.”

Now public pension funds across the country are facing a painful reckoning. Their projections look increasingly out of touch in today’s low-interest environment, and pressure is mounting to be more realistic. But lowering their investment assumptions, even slightly, means turning for more cash to local taxpayers — who pay part of the cost of public pensions through property and other taxes.

In New York, the city’s chief actuary, Robert North, has proposed lowering the assumed rate of return for the city’s five pension funds to 7 percent from 8 percent, which would be one of the sharpest reductions by a public pension fund in the United States. But that change would mean finding an additional $1.9 billion for the pension system every year, a huge amount for a city already depositing more than a tenth of its budget — $7.3 billion a year — into the funds.

But to many observers, even 7 percent is too high in today’s market conditions.

“The actuary is supposedly going to lower the assumed reinvestment rate from an absolutely hysterical, laughable 8 percent to a totally indefensible 7 or 7.5 percent,” Mr. Bloomberg said during a trip to Albany in late February. “If I can give you one piece of financial advice: If somebody offers you a guaranteed 7 percent on your money for the rest of your life, you take it and just make sure the guy’s name is not Madoff.”

Public retirement systems from Alaska to Maine are running into the same dilemma as they struggle to lower their assumed rates of return in light of very low interest rates and unpredictable stock prices.

They are facing opposition from public-sector unions, which fear that increased pension costs to taxpayers will further feed the push to cut retirement benefits for public workers. In New York, the Legislature this year cut pensions for public workers who are hired in the future, and around the country governors and mayors are citing high pension costs as a reason for requiring workers to contribute more, or work longer, to earn retirement benefits.

In addition to lowering the projected rate of return, Mr. North has also recommended that the New York City trustees acknowledge that city workers are living longer and reporting more disabilities — changes that would cost the city an additional $2.8 billion in pension contributions this year. Mr. North has called for the city to soften the blow to the budget by pushing much of the increased pension cost into the future, by spreading the increased liability out over 22 years.

Ailing pension systems have been among the factors that have recently driven struggling cities into Chapter 9 bankruptcy. Such bankruptcies are rare, but economists warn that more are likely in the coming years. Faulty assumptions can mask problems, and municipal pension funds are often so big that if they run into a crisis their home cities cannot afford to bail them out.

More HERE

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Democrat rule of Northern cities is so bad that savvy blacks are moving to the SOUTH

Winston Churchill captured what this presidential election is about when he observed “the inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”

It’s why the young black Democrat mayor of Newark, NJ, Cory Booker, got high level repudiation from the Obama campaign, including from the president himself, when he insolently suggested that Bain Capital, the investment firm once headed by Mitt Romney, might actually do positive things.

Booker, an Obama campaign surrogate, went off script on Meet the Press when he refused to justify a campaign attack ad depicting the evils of Bain. “I’m not about to sit here and indict private equity….Especially that I know I live in a state where pension funds, unions and other people are investing in companies like Bain Capital.”

This was more than insubordination to Booker’s campaign handlers.

It was unmitigated heresy driving to the core of the Obama campaign message. The narrative, telescoping the theme of four years of this presidency, says that the American economy collapsed because of unbridled capitalism. To recover, the narrative continues, we must allow all knowing, all powerful, but compassionate political leadership in Washington to re-arrange the American economy and make sure businessmen never steamroller Americans again.

But Booker, educated at Stanford, Oxford, and Yale Law School, is a new breed of young black politician, who is actually trying to make a difference. And he is too close to realities on the ground to deny the truth he sees.

As mayor of Newark, he governs a city that is more than 50 percent black with a 25 percent poverty rate. It’s clear that what Newark needs is more business and investment, not more government.

George Mason University economist Walter Williams recently noted that America’s poorest cities with populations over 250,000 – Detroit, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Miami, St. Louis, El Paso, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Newark – have one common characteristic. For decades they have been run by liberal, Democratic administrations. The mayors of six of them have been black.

The big government, high taxation, overreaching regulation model of governing has been a saga of failure in America’s cities. And it certainly has not served well the black populations that disproportionately populate them.

And interestingly, in another paradox of black political behavior (I wrote last week about the stark contrast between the values that blacks embrace in church on Sunday and the values they vote for on Election Day Tuesday), blacks are voting with their feet against the same political regimes that they are supporting in the voting booth.

The New York Times reported last March that, according to new census data, blacks are departing our failed northern cities and heading south. Blacks may be pulling the lever for “blue” candidates, but they’re leaving the blue states and moving to the red ones.

Michigan, Illinois, New York, and other major Northern black population centers have shown net black population decreases over the last decade, and “among the 25 counties with the biggest increase in black population, three quarters are in the South.”

Professor of history Clement Price at Rutgers University in Cory Booker’s Newark says “the black urban experience has essentially lost its appeal with blacks in America.”

These black Americans on the move are young and educated – 40 percent between 21 and 40 and one in four with college degrees – and looking for opportunity.

And the places in America today with the growth and opportunity they seek are those areas that embrace freedom and entrepreneurship.

Cory Booker knows this. And he knows that fixing America’s blighted urban areas means pushing back on the smothering government that caused this decay and inviting in creative and courageous business minds and their investment capital.

So Booker’s defense of Bain and capitalism should come as no surprise.

SOURCE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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30 May, 2012

Magical Thinking in Liberal Land

Like fairy tales? If so, I’ve got some doozies for you. See if any of these ring a bell:

* The wealthy in America don’t pay “their fair share.”

* “If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan.”

* A dollar of government “stimulus” spending will cascade into multiple dollars of private income.

These are not your garden-variety fairy tales, however. Instead of being told to — and believed by — children, these and countless similar fables are told by — and believed in — by politicians of the genus liberalis. Grownups holding the reins of power actually believe these and similar notions, regardless of any historical or economic proof to the contrary.

Why? Why do people believe in things like ESP, alien abduction, or the economic sustainability of Medicare?

It’s easy for people who consider themselves “rational,” those who luxuriate in things like facts and proofs, to look down on those who cling to this type of magical thinking. But in his book, The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane, psychologist Matthew Hutson reminds us that belief in preposterous things is an ancient and species-wide condition, and therefore must have conferred some evolutionary benefit to our ancestors. In other words, believing in stupid things may make sense — at least some of the time:

Once you’ve accepted that the brain constructs reality and that the brain has evolved like any other organ to help its owner survive and reproduce, it follows that the brain constructs reality in the most useful way possible for its owner. The key word here is useful, which is not to say accurate. The brain doesn’t care so much what’s really out there, it just needs to stay alive and be replicated, which might involve telling us a white lie now and then.

In light of Hutson’s entertaining insight, liberal magical thinking on economic matters begins to make at least some sense. Liberal politicians believe and say these things because it helps them get elected; people like to be given free stuff, and they like to get it from the rich (those bastards!). Marxist and Keynesian economic prescriptions are always and everywhere disastrous wealth killers — but that is not the point. The only jobs they create are those of liberal politicians, but that is quite their purpose, after all. Magical economic thinking is a survival mechanism, and a very effective one for the likes of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Barack Obama.

The liberal brain couldn’t care less whether liberal ideas work in the real world — the real world has nothing to do with it. It has everything to do with telling the masses what they want to hear in exchange for wealth and power.

Libertarians and conservatives rejoice in charts and graphs and history; liberals in wishes, fear, and fables. A peak into the balance sheets of the the West gives a sense of which side is better armed for the long, Darwinian struggle ahead.

SOURCE

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Vampire Capitalism? Please

GST Steel would have failed much earlier without Bain.

This week the Obama campaign debuted its attack on Bain Capital, the private-equity firm Mitt Romney founded. Its two-minute ad purports to tell the story of GS Technologies, a Kansas City-based Bain investment that went bankrupt in 2001.

To hear the Obama campaign, this is a tale of greed: GST was a healthy, happy, quality steelmaker until Bain plundered its worth and stripped its 750 workers of their due. "It was like a vampire," laments one former employee in the ad. "They came in and sucked the life out of us."

GST is a tragic tale, though in a different way. The real story of GST is that of a private-equity firm trying to spark some life into a uncompetitive, over-unionized industry. Bain's crime here—if that's what you call it—was giving a dying steel plant an unexpected eight-year lease on life.

When Bain bought the Kansas City mill in 1993, steel was a scene of carnage. Global players were pouring out cheap products, and America's high-cost steel plants couldn't compete. The industry had lost 200,000 jobs in preceding years. In 1992 alone, the six largest U.S. steel mills had lost a combined $3 billion. Armco, the company Bain would buy the plant from, would lose $641 million in 1993.

The Kansas City plant was itself dying. At its 1970 height it employed 4,500; by the late 1980s it was down to 1,000. A year before acquisition, Armco had laid off another 75. Its equipment was old; it faced fierce competition at home and abroad.

B.C. Huselton, a vice president of the business at the time, tells me that in 1990 the Armco CEO held a meeting. "He told us, 'Look, we either try to sell it, or we've got to shut it down.'" Armco had shut down another Kansas City facility, Union Wire Rope, only a few years before.

The Kansas City plant had two product lines—high-carbon rods and grinding media (used in mining)—that it felt could give it a competitive edge. But it needed investment, and Armco was tapped out. Bain nonetheless saw some potential and in 1993 joined other investors to acquire it for $80 million. Management renamed it GS Technologies (which would become part of a larger GS Industries) and poured an additional $100 million into modernization.

The strategy worked for a time. The market firmed up and GSI became a U.S. leader in steel rods. In 1994 it felt confident enough to distribute a dividend to investors. In both 1996 and 1997, GSI would realize $1 billion in revenue.

And then came the tsunami. The late 1990s saw a new outpouring of cheap steel from elsewhere around the globe. The Asian financial crisis walloped the mining industry, cutting demand for GST products. The price of GST's electricity and natural gas skyrocketed. The union dug in, refusing to make concessions. By April 1997, it was on strike, shooting bottle rockets at guards. Labor costs spiked, and by 1999 GSI was reporting $53 million in net losses.

In 2001 it would become one of 31 steel companies that went bankrupt from 1993 to 2003. (Mr. Romney left Bain in 1999.) The steel crash was the economic drama du jour, with Congress railing about "dumping."

At the time, GST's union blamed the company's bankruptcy on the political class, for failing to hamstring imports. "We can't compete against the steel imports that are being sold under cost," said the president of GST's union in 2001. "Our pleas fell on deaf ears in the political arena." The Bush administration would ultimately slap on giant tariffs.

The bankruptcies were led by unionized companies that, like airlines and textiles and Detroit, had negotiated pay and benefits that helped drive their employers under. GST's pension benefits would get passed on to the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., which in 2002 received $7.5 billion in claims from the steel industry alone. The PBGC covered GST's basic pension payouts.

The Obama ad doesn't note that the broader company, GS Industries, employed 3,500 and that the Kansas City plant (with 750 workers) was the only one shuttered. Other plants were bought and operate today. Nor does it mention Bain's other steel investment in the early 1990s, in an Indiana start-up called Steel Dynamics. The firm touts innovative technology and a nonunion workforce. It today reports $6.3 billion in revenue—25 times what it claimed in its 1996 IPO—and employs 6,000.

A private-equity firm looking to quickly strip value from a company—to "suck" the life out of it—does not do so by investing $100 million in modernization and holding on for eight years, through bankruptcy. Bain has surely made its share of mistakes, and one may well have been trying to resuscitate a traditional steel firm in the grip of industry upheaval. The irony, says Mr. Huselton, is that this plant "wouldn't even be in today's news, if it hadn't been the opportunity that came with Bain. Those jobs would have been gone in 1993."

That's a more revealing story—of the pressures of a global market, the dangers of an inflexible workforce, and the opportunities that come with private equity and risk-taking. It's just not one Team Obama wants to tell.

SOURCE

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Vulture Capitalism? Try Obama's Version

A profit-driven economy is preferable to one run by political favoritism

President Obama is no fan of Mitt Romney-style "vulture" capitalism. So what's his alternative?

All those Republicans grousing about the president's attacks on private equity might instead be seizing on this beautiful point of contrast. Mr. Obama, after all, is no mere mortal president. Even as he's been busy with the day job, he's found time to moonlight as CEO-in-Chief of half the nation's industry. Detroit, the energy sector, health care—he's all over these guys like a cheap spreadsheet.

Like Mr. Romney, Mr. Obama has presided over bankruptcies, layoffs, lost pensions, run-ups in debt. Yet unlike Mr. Romney, Mr. Obama's C-suite required billions in taxpayer dollars and subsidies, as well as mandates, regulations, union payoffs and moral hazard. Don't like "vulture" capitalism? Check out the form the president's had on offer these past three years: "crony" capitalism.

The case study is the solar-panel maker Solyndra, which was part of a green-energy sector that even by 2009 was flailing. The president took one look at the industry's utter lack of both profits and sellable products, and yelled "that's my baby!" The stimulus bill shipped tens of billions of dollars to the Energy Department to pour into green companies via grants and loans. It promised five million jobs.

The Energy Department's nuclear physicists were admittedly a bit flummoxed by the whole P&L thing, but they got their venture-capitalism groove on and in 2009 handed Solyndra a $535 million loan guarantee. Even prior to disbursement, government accountants were warning that Solyndra was a lemon, but the White House didn't worry. After all, the IRS had only recently and conveniently tripled the tax credit (to 30%) for buyers of Solyndra products, which the government figured would help grease their start-up's skids.

Unfortunately, the physicist-CFOs overlooked that whole "global energy market" factor—easy mistake! Foreign competitors were already piling into Solyndra's niche. Unable to compete, the firm went bankrupt last year. And, oh, the carnage! It was kind of like . . . GST Steel! Only worse. Solyndra laid off 1,100 employees. It provided no severance, not even back pay due for vacation credits. But a bankruptcy judge would later approve $370,000 in bonuses for 20 employees.

Mr. Obama railed against the high-dollar Silicon Valley investors who lined up in front of government to "suck" the remaining "life" out of the bankrupt firm, even as employees were left to . . . Oh, wait. He said no such thing. He was probably too busy doing damage control on his other government-subsidized energy bankruptcies, from Beacon to Ener1. Or running down the latest report of a government-funded, instantaneously combusting electric car. (Karma, anyone? Now at the low, low price of $103,000. Fire extinguisher included.)

Speaking of cars, Detroit is the business venture Mr. Obama's team has been most flogging as a success. True, General Motors and Chrysler are still turning their lights on, though they'd have arguably been doing the same had they been left to go through normal, orderly bankruptcies like those that helped the steel and airline industries restructure to become more competitive.

To get to the same place, Mr. Obama's crony capitalism handed $82 billion in taxpayer dollars to the two firms. That bailout money went to make sure the unions that helped drive GM to bankruptcy (and helped elect Mr. Obama) did not have to give up pay or pension benefits for current workers. They were instead rewarded with a share of the new firm. The UAW at GM meanwhile used the government-run bankruptcy to bar some 2,500 nonunion workers who had been laid off from transferring to other plants. How truly vulture-like.

Contract law was shredded, as unions were given preference over other creditors, such as pension funds for retired teachers and police officers. Congressmen used political sway to keep open their weak auto dealerships, forcing layoffs at stronger ones (vulture . . . vulture . . . vulture). Political masters obliged the industry to pour resources into unpopular green cars. The political masters were obliged to offer $10,000 tax credits to convince Americans to buy them. (They still won't.) And the message to every big industry? Go ahead, run your business into the ground. The Capitalist-in-Chief has your back (especially if you are unionized).

So, take your pick. Mr. Obama's knock on free enterprise is that it is driven by "profit," and that this experience makes Mr. Romney too heartless to be president. The alternative is an Obama capitalism that is driven by political favoritism, government subsidies, mandates, and billions in taxpayer underwriting—and that really is a path to bankruptcies and layoffs. If the president wants to put all 3,545 green stimulus jobs he's created up against Bain's record, he should feel free.

Mr. Romney could make the comparison himself. Ronald Reagan ran against Jimmy Carter's own industrial policy, and to great success. Viewed in isolation, "vulture" capitalism has some PR downsides. Viewed against the alternative, it's a flat-out winner.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Senate panel cuts Pakistan aid over conviction: "A Senate panel expressed its outrage Thursday over Pakistan's conviction of a doctor who helped the United States track down Osama bin Laden, voting to cut aid to Islamabad by $33 million -- $1 million for every year of the physician's 33-year sentence for high treason. The punitive move came on top of deep reductions the Appropriations Committee already had made to President Obama's budget request for Pakistan, a reflection of the growing congressional anger over its cooperation in combatting terrorism."

The business of government: "It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly. Government should be repressive no further than is necessary to secure liberty by protecting the equal rights of each from aggression on the part of others, and the moment governmental prohibitions extend beyond this line they are in danger of defeating the very ends they are intended to serve."

High time to end corporate taxes: "In the latest installment of the long-running serial 'Super Rich Guy Calls for Higher Taxes,' hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer made a $20 million donation last week to an initiative to raise California's corporate tax rate. Steyer thinks local businesses aren't paying nearly enough into the state's coffers. ... Corporate taxes are inefficient. They're unfair. They smother economic growth. They exact a heavy cost on the middle class. And, here's the real kicker, the corporate income tax is such a drag on investment and economic growth there is good reason to believe that getting rid of it would actually raise total revenue to the government." [NOTE: There is no double taxation of dividends in Australia]

Should the bank’s loss be the law’s gain?: "The great thing about laws is that they protect us when we are unwilling and unable to do so on our own. Laws are great because they make sure no harm is done. So when it came to our attention that JP Morgan Chase just lost $2 billion because of risky investments and hedging, it may have seemed that what was needed was more and better laws, not personal responsibility. Of course this isn't true."

The moral case for organ markets: "There’s nothing wrong with putting a high value on equality. But if your vision of equality includes letting thousands of people die so we can be confident the poor aren’t being exploited by entering into voluntary transactions in which they’re paid for one of their kidneys, I’d argue that you’re putting far too much emphasis on equality. It’s true that we’re all equal when we’re dead. That doesn’t mean it’s a desirable outcome."

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

****************************

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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29 May, 2012

When 'minority' is a trick of definition

The facts Jeff Jacoby puts forward below are an important corrective but they still leave unmentioned important areas of concern about the Hispanic presence in the USA -- principally the high rate of gang activity and crime generally among the children of Hispanic immigrants. One normally expects the children of immigrants to assimilate to approximately the majority norm but the children of the majority of Hispanic immigrants are not doing that in important ways. Overall, they are in fact even more prone to crime than their parents. Clearly, the children of those who arrive illegally are perhaps unsurprisingly not strong on respect for the law

WHEN THE CENSUS BUREAU this month issued a press release headlined "Most Children Younger Than Age 1 are Minorities," the media snapped to attention. News outlets nationwide covered the announcement, hailing it as a "historic demographic milestone" (CNN), as the "dawn of an era in which whites no longer will be in the majority" (Washington Post), and as an "important turning point for the nation" (McClatchy) that would "starkly … change the face of America's next generations" (Time).

None of that was true.

None of that was new, either. The Census Bureau keeps dangling commonplace demographic data as if they were a dramatic racial revelation, and the press keeps taking the bait. The stories this month about minority births becoming the majority could have been recycled from a year ago, when the same thing was being reported -- and with the same air of history in the making. "For the first time," an AP story declared in June 2011, "minorities make up a majority of babies in the US, part of a sweeping race change … that could reshape government policies." Three months earlier, The New York Times had told its readers that babies born to minorities were "on the verge" of becoming the majority of all US births.

For years Americans have been hearing about the coming nonwhite majority. With every fresh tranche of census data, the issue is raised anew. "Minorities, now roughly one-third of the U.S. population, are expected to become the majority in 2042," the Census Bureau forecast in 2008, "with the nation projected to be 54 percent minority in 2050." Savor the absurdity of the phrase "54 percent minority." It isn't the only thing about this issue that is irrational.

To begin with, all the ballyhoo about America's impending metamorphosis from white to nonwhite makes sense only if white Hispanics aren't what they say they are. Census Bureau guidelines specify that "Hispanics may be of any race" and that "The federal government treats Hispanic origin and race as separate and distinct concepts." In the 2010 US Census, 50.5 million Americans identified themselves as ethnically Hispanic; of those, more than half -- 26.7 million -- were white. The only way to conjure up a looming nonwhite majority is to arbitrarily subtract whites of Hispanic origin from the nation's overall white population.

That "sweeping race change," in other words, is a trick of definition. Maybe you relish the prospect of whites becoming a minority of the American population or maybe you dread it -- or maybe, in an era when more newlyweds than ever are marrying across racial lines, you wonder why anyone is still obsessed with race and color.

But whatever your attitude, there is no point waiting up for The End of White America. It isn't coming. Drill down into the Census Bureau's latest population estimates, for example, and it turns out that of the 3,996,537 babies younger than age 1, nearly 72 percent are white. The only way to shrink that very hefty majority to less than half is to exclude the nearly 900,000 white babies whose ethnic background is Hispanic.

Rita Hayworth starred with Fred Astaire in the 1942 film 'You Were Never Lovelier.'

The same is true of the "54 percent minority" scheduled to arrive by 2050. What the data in the bureau's spreadsheets actually project is that white Americans, who now constitute nearly 80 percent of the population, will make up 74 percent by midcentury. Only if tens of millions of white Hispanics aren't counted as white will America in 2050 be anything other than a majority-white nation.

There may be those who simply refuse to regard Hispanics as white, perhaps because of bigotry or ignorance or because they never saw Rita Hayworth, Martin Sheen, Raquel Welch, or Andy Garcia. But then, there have always been Americans with curious ideas of who could and couldn't be "white." Benjamin Franklin was sure that German immigrants were not only non-white but unassimilable; Henry Cabot Lodge said the same thing about Russians, Poles, and Greeks. There was a time when US immigration policy classified Irish, Italians, and Jews as non-white, and when state laws required any resident with "one drop of Negro blood" to be listed as black.

To us, looking back, all those distinctions today seem ludicrous. A generation or two down the road, it will doubtless seem just as ludicrous that anyone would ever have thought of Hispanics as anything other than part of the broad, "white," American mainstream. Perhaps by then the very idea of race -- white, black, or anything else -- will finally have been discarded, and children will marvel at the idea that color of skin or shape of eye could ever have mattered so much.

SOURCE

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Greece is a nation of layabouts and crooks

That's not quite what the head of the IMF said but she got close. I've met a lot of Greeks and there are of course exceptions but they are generally a a very lazy and crooked lot in my experience. Like Ms Lagarde I have no sympathy for them. Only when working in their own businesses or under a very watchful eye do they make an effort

The IMF has no intention of softening the terms of Greece's austerity package, says Christine Lagarde. Photograph: Emmanuel Fradin for the Guardian

The International Monetary Fund has ratcheted up the pressure on crisis-hit Greece after its managing director, Christine Lagarde, said she has more sympathy for children deprived of decent schooling in sub-Saharan Africa than for many of those facing poverty in Athens.

In an uncompromising interview with the Guardian, Lagarde insists it is payback time for Greece and makes it clear that the IMF has no intention of softening the terms of the country's austerity package.

Using some of the bluntest language of the two-and-a-half-year debt crisis, she says Greek parents have to take responsibility if their children are being affected by spending cuts. "Parents have to pay their tax," she says.

Greece, which has seen its economy shrink by a fifth since the recession began, has been told to cut wages, pensions and public spending in return for financial help from the IMF, the European Union and the European Central Bank.

Asked whether she is able to block out of her mind the mothers unable to get access to midwives or patients unable to obtain life-saving drugs, Lagarde replies: "I think more of the little kids from a school in a little village in Niger who get teaching two hours a day, sharing one chair for three of them, and who are very keen to get an education. I have them in my mind all the time. Because I think they need even more help than the people in Athens."

Lagarde, predicting that the debt crisis has yet to run its course, adds: "Do you know what? As far as Athens is concerned, I also think about all those people who are trying to escape tax all the time. All these people in Greece who are trying to escape tax." She says she thinks "equally" about Greeks deprived of public services and Greek citizens not paying their tax.

"I think they should also help themselves collectively." Asked how, she replies: "By all paying their tax."

Asked if she is essentially saying to the Greeks and others in Europe that they have had a nice time and it is now payback time, she responds: "That's right."

The intervention by Lagarde comes after the caretaker Greek government met to discuss a sharp fall in tax revenues – down by a third in a year. Under the terms of the country's bailout, Athens has agreed to improve Greece's poor record for tax collection in order to reduce its budget deficit, and Lagarde's remarks are evidence of a growing impatience in the international community. Reports surfaced in Germany and France of preparations being made to cope with Greece's possible departure from the single currency after its election on 17 June.

Belgium's deputy prime minister, Didier Reynders, said it would be a "serious professional error" if central banks and companies did not prepare for an exit.

Jürgen Fitschen, joint head of Germany's biggest bank, Deutsche, described Greece as "a failed state … a corrupt state". Separately, however, there were reports suggesting that the chancellor, Angela Merkel, was dusting down the economic modernisation plan used to revive East Germany after the fall of communism in the belief that similar measures could be applied to Greece and other struggling eurozone countries. Today's Der Spiegel magazine says Merkel will present a six-point plan based on the East German blueprint as a growth strategy. It includes measures such as privatisation, looser employment law and lower tax rates.

Opinion polls are pointing to a close race between parties backing and opposing the terms of Greece's €130bn bailout, but neither Germany nor the IMF has demonstrated any willingness to water down Greece's austerity programme.

In her interview Lagarde says Greece is not getting softer treatment than a poor country in the developing world, and that the IMF does not find it harder to impose strong conditions on a rich nation.

"No, it's not harder. No. Because it's the mission of the fund, and it's my job to say the truth, whoever it is across the table. And I tell you something: it's sometimes harder to tell the government of low-income countries, where people live on $3,000, $4,000 or $5,000 per capita per year, to actually strengthen the budget and reduce the deficit. Because I know what it means in terms of welfare programmes and support for the poor. It has much bigger ramifications."

SOURCE

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Europe's fake austerity

There are tax increases but no austerity

The austerity vs stimulus debate is the focal point of attention once more, as the recent results of Greek and French elections show an increasing opposition against Europe’s unique type of redistributive austerity. But few understand what austerity really means. They refer to it as “painful cuts that are hurting growth”.

Even by phrasing the choice as 'austerity vs growth', it is obvious that people don't really understand what austerity is, and even less what their governments are doing.

Recent posts from the Mercatus Center, Cato Institute, Tyler Cowen and many others shed some light on this, and have pointed to the inconvenient fact that there is no real austerity in Europe, at least not the type that could theoretically help these economies recover. In fact, Tyler Cowen asks what austerity is, trying to come up with a precise definition in order to overcome the biases behind the term and its policy effects. Looking at Wikipedia and Investopedia he finds the following:

"In economics, austerity is a policy of deficit-cutting, lower spending, and a reduction in the amount of benefits and public services provided."

"A state of reduced spending and increased frugality in the financial sector. Austerity measures generally refer to the measures taken by governments to reduce expenditures in an attempt to shrink their growing budget deficits."

Defining the term is particularly important for policy reasons. As you can see, there is no mention of tax increases in any of the two definitions. However, governments do often tend to use tax hikes to lower the deficit. But the very definition of austerity implies cutting spending and cutting entitlements in order to create more scope for the private sector to grow on its own. In other words, to remove the dependency mentality from people and from businesses.

Then comes the following graph from Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center:



Where is the austerity here? Where are the significant cuts in spending necessary to address public and private sector dependency on the government and to reform the labour market? Particularly interesting examples are UK and France, where no signs of decreasing spending can be seen. In the UK, public spending to GDP has reached a 50-year historical high (46% of GDP). Some cuts have been made, but everything that was saved up was again used to steer the economy. And so Britain saw schemes that want to pick industrial winners, guide investment projects, subsidize housing, subsidize unemployed young people, and even control the amount and prices of loans in the economy. How do any of these address systemic dependency and how do any of these fit in the aforementioned austerity definition?

In France, the painful burden of redistributive austerity was one of the causes of Sarkozy's electoral defeat. The French were apparently fed up with it. Still, I'm struggling to see the actual austerity in France. I may be wrong, but maybe what's bothering the people in France is the same thing bothering people in the UK — taxes are going up, people are left with less and less disposable income, nothing is done to address the endemic dependency of the people or businesses to the state, private sector growth is unlikely, banks are in an uncertain position and refusing to lend.

In France, as a result, people are resort to radicalism, which was evident on both French and Greek elections where ultra-right and ultra-left parties won seats in parliament and got a dangerously significant portion of the votes.

The very idea of depicting the debate as austerity vs growth is wrong. This implies that the solution is the opposite of austerity — a monetary or fiscal stimulus to close down the nominal GDP gap.

Even if a short-term fiscal or monetary stimulus can temporarily boost growth, that isn't the way towards a proper restructuring of the economy. I know the logic behind these views: "let's just get the economy going and all will be better afterwards". The idea that it's much easier to do structural reforms after things are going well is a wrong approach, since no politician will have the power, strength or the courage to engage into painful but necessary reforms after what the world economy is going through at the moment.

We should expect austerity to be an unpopular policy. Its primary goal is to cut the dependency to the government. This does not come easily and will cost votes. But doing what the European politicians are doing currently has no chance of achieving growth any time soon, is constraining the population from spending (through tax hikes) and the businesses from investing (by causing uncertainty, sending bad signals, and offering no institutional support), and will result in a double loss — of elections and the recovery. As Margaret Thatcher once said: "If you want to cut your own throat, don't come to me for a bandage". This precisely sums up what Europe's allegedly austere governments are doing — cutting their own throats and hoping they stay alive. Not likely.

SOURCE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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28 May, 2012

Big Business Gets the Hollywood Treatment

Jonah Goldberg

Jack Andraka, a 15-year-old kid from Maryland, just won the world's largest high school science competition by creating a new test for pancreatic cancer, one of the nastiest and most lethal forms of the disease.

According to various news reports, the winning submission at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair is "28 times cheaper" than existing tests and far, far more accurate. Andraka received $75,000 for his efforts, and he's applied for a patent as well. That will probably earn him far more in the years to come.

This comes on the heels of another teen wunderkind. In December, Angela Zhang, 17, won the Siemens Science Competition for inventing a new way of finding and attacking cancer cells. Some people think it might actually lead to a cure for cancer some day.

Zhang and Andraka can probably spend the rest of their high school careers playing video games in the basement, given that their college search is going to be pretty stress-free from here on out.

But that's the real world for you. Impressive kids -- or grown-ups -- invent fantastic things, potentially benefitting millions of people, if not all of mankind. The inventors are rewarded, consumers benefit, and the economy grows. Woo-hoo!

Of course, the real world isn't the world many people imagine it to be. In the Hollywood version of this tale, Zhang would have disappeared when rumors of her invention hit the boardrooms and star chambers of Big Pharma. Bruce Willis would have to come out of retirement as the rogue agent willing to put his life on the line to keep Andraka safe from the goon-squad ninjas of Bristol-Myers Squibb or the wet work teams from Pfizer.

After all, cures and cheaper tests hurt the bottom line of those evil corporations, and we all know profit is all they care about. I mean, haven't you read or seen "The Constant Gardener," the John le Carré book and movie about evil corporations testing drugs on Africans and offing the whistle-blowers at every turn?

That's what corporations do, right? At least that's what my kid is taught. In "Beethoven," the evil munitions industry shoots Saint Bernards to test bullets. In "The Lorax," businesses hate trees. In "The Muppets," they hate Muppets (and love oil). I think that in nearly every movie involving cute woodland creatures ("Furry Vengeance," "Yogi Bear," et al.), businesses are always the bad guys.

When kids get older, they learn from John Grisham movies that big businesses kill people in order to get what they want. In "Aliens," the company wants to smuggle space critters that will likely wipe out all humanity, in the slim hope they'll eke out a bit more profit. In "Avatar," the Halliburton of the future slaughters intelligent aliens and rapes their planet just to make a buck.

At Cannes, where anti-capitalist movies are always a hit, Brad Pitt's newest venture, "Killing Them Softly," is touted as a seething indictment of the American system. "America isn't a country -- it's a business" is apparently the film's central insight. Set against the backdrop of the 2008 financial crisis, the film was reportedly financed by Megan Ellison, daughter of billionaire businessman Larry Ellison.

No wonder that when these kids grow up, some of them make documentaries about how vast conspiracies keep the electric car and, no doubt, the Everlasting Gobstopper off the market. Even more of them uncritically accept this stuff. After all, everyone knows big businessmen are evil.

So the ones getting involved in politics, at least Republican politics, must be the sorts of bad guys we've all seen in the movies.

Warren Buffett and George Soros can't be greedy; after all, they're simply trying to "give something back."

Now, truth be told, I'm no lover of big corporations, but not because I think they want to poison their customers or shoot my dog for target practice. My problem isn't that they're too rapaciously capitalistic.

Rather, it's that they're too opportunistic, too eager to abandon the free market and work with the government under the false flag of the greater good.

In a free market, businesses are in a relentless competition to improve products and satisfy the needs of the consumer. "A new test for pancreatic cancer? Great! Let's be the first to get it to market."

In the cozy world of government-business collusion, the state counts on the status quo existing far out into the future, for that's the only way to preserve and plan out "the system."

There's got to be a good a movie plot in there somewhere.

SOURCE

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New Study from U.K. Think Tank Shows How Big Government Undermines Prosperity

Daniel J. Mitchell

It seems I was put on the planet to educate people about the negative economic impact of excessive government. Though I must be doing a bad job because the burden of the public sector keeps rising.

But hope springs eternal. To help make the case, I’ve cited research from international bureaucracies such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and European Central Bank. And since most of those organizations lean to the left, these results should be particularly persuasive.

I’ve also cited the work of academic scholars from all over the world, including the United States, Australia, and Sweden. The evidence is very persuasive that big government is associated with weaker economic performance.

Now we have some new research from the United Kingdom. The Centre for Policy Studies has released a new study, authored by Ryan Bourne and Thomas Oechsle, examining the relationship between economic growth and the size of the public sector.

The chart compares growth rates for nations with big governments and small governments over the past two decades. The difference is significant, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The most important findings of the report are the estimates showing how more spending and more taxes are associated with weaker performance.

Here are some key passages from the study.

Using tax to GDP and spending to GDP ratios as a proxy for size of government, regression analysis can be used to estimate the effect of government size on GDP growth in a set of countries defined as advanced by the IMF between 1965 and 2010.

…As supply-side economists would expect, the coefficients on the tax revenue to GDP and government spending to GDP ratios are negative and statistically significant. This suggests that, ceteris paribus, a larger tax burden results in a slower annual growth of real GDP per capita. Though it is unlikely that this effect would be linear (we might expect the effect to be larger for countries with huge tax burdens), the regressions suggest that an increase in the tax revenue to GDP ratio by 10 percentage points will, if the other variables do not change, lead to a decrease in the rate of economic growth per capita by 1.2 percentage points.

The result is very similar for government outlays to GDP, where an increase by 10 percentage points is associated with a fall in the economic growth rate of 1.1 percentage points. This is in line with other findings in the academic literature.

…The two small government economies with the lowest marginal tax rates, Singapore and Hong Kong, were also those which experienced the fastest average real GDP growth.

The folks at CPS also put together a short video to describe the results. It’s very well done, though I’m not a big fan of the argument near then end that faster growth is a good thing because it generates more tax revenue to finance more government. Since I’m a big proponent of the Laffer Curve, I don’t disagree with the premise, but I would argue that additional revenues should be used to finance lower tax rates.

Since I’m nit-picking, I’ll also say that the study should have emphasized that government spending is bad for growth because it inevitably and necessarily leads to the inefficient allocation of resources, and that would be true even if revenues magically floated down from heaven and there was no need for punitive tax rates.

More HERE (See the original for links and graphics)

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Barack Obama is facing his Jimmy Carter moment

As Mitt Romney closes the gap, it is 1980 all over again for the man in the Oval Office

Until recently, Barack Obama’s re-election was regarded as inevitable – in the same way that summer follows spring. The president’s poll lead over Mitt Romney was strong, while the Republican’s character was assassinated by a primary fight that permanently spoiled the reputation of his party. To court the GOP’s conservative base, Romney was forced to adopt positions on abortion, contraception, health care and welfare that are thought to be unpopular among moderate swing voters. Obama, by contrast, is the man who killed bin Laden and toppled Gaddafi. A choice between Obama the moderate statesman and Romney the craven conservative is surely no contest at all.

But in the last two weeks, things have changed. Obama’s re-election is no longer guaranteed; some pollsters think it is unlikely. Day by day, the odds are improving that Mitt Romney will be the next President of the United States.

What changed? For a start, voters are getting gloomier about the economy. Joblessness remains high and debt is out of control. According to one poll released this week, only 33 per cent of Americans expect the economy to improve in the coming months and only 43 per cent approve of the way that the president has handled it. Voters think Obama has made the debt situation and health care worse. The man who conducted the poll – Democrat Peter Hart – concluded that “Obama’s chances for re-election… are no better than 50-50.”

The president has tried to distract from America’s economic misery by playing up the so-called culture war. Earlier in the year he decided that he would force Catholic employers to provide contraception to their employees through their insurance plans, and he followed that swipe at social traditionalism by endorsing gay marriage. This embrace of Sixties liberalism has backfired. While contraception and gay marriage often receive popular support in national polls, Americans are far more conservative in the voting booth. Thirty-two states have voted on gay marriage and all 32 have voted to outlaw it – even liberal California. Nor has the culture war rallied his party’s base. In presidential primaries held on Tuesday, 39 per cent of Arkansas Democrats and 42 per cent of Kentuckian Democrats rejected Obama’s re-nomination. In West Virginia, 41 per cent of the state’s Democrats voted for an imprisoned criminal rather than the president.

The result is that pollsters find Obama and Romney edging towards one another. Rasmussen puts Obama only one point ahead; Gallup calls it a tie. With Romney doing better than the president in key swing states North Carolina and Florida, Gallup has publicly stated that Obama now has a higher chance of losing rather than winning.

But it isn’t just Obama’s flaws that are making this race interesting. Mitt Romney might not be the most charismatic candidate, but that’s a hidden strength in an election that’s all about competence and getting back to the basics of what once made America work so well. This week, the pro-Obama journalist Andrew Sullivan wrote that with his wealth, good looks and apple-pie conservatism, Romney is like “a focus-group tested model president from 1965”. Sullivan obviously doesn’t realise how popular the TV show Mad Men is. Who wouldn’t warm to a candidate that represents an age marked by low unemployment, stable families and a laissez-faire attitude towards drinking at work?

In fact, the grey Mr Romney is repeating the same formula that won him the governorship of Massachusetts, an ordinarily Democrat state, in 2002. He pulled that off by motivating large numbers of Republicans to vote for him, breaking into the working-class vote and keeping turnout among Democrats fairly low. The unique genius of Romney was his ability to say very conservative things but in a manner that convinced many centrists that he didn’t really mean them. That’s happening again in 2012, as polls indicate that far more Americans think Obama is too Left-wing than believe Romney is too Right-wing.

Of course, Romney has his weaknesses. But they are fewer than Obama’s, whose charisma disguises a multitude of problems so great that it’s hard to imagine him overcoming them. Gallup makes the following observation: “Comparing today’s economic and political ratings with those from previous years when presidents sought re-election reveals that today’s climate is more similar to years when incumbents lost than when they won.” I would go one step further: Obama’s situation is actually worse than that of some of the incumbents who have lost in the past.

In 1980, Democratic president Jimmy Carter faced an uphill struggle for re-election. Yet, despite an index of inflation and unemployment far higher than Obama’s, he was actually doing slightly better in the polls. In March of that year, Carter led his Republican opponent, Ronald Reagan, by around 25 per cent. By May, Gallup gave him a lead of 49 to 41 per cent – higher than Obama’s today. Carter’s advantage evaporated in the months that followed, but he regained ground in October and by the last week he was running even.

None the less, Carter eventually suffered a landslide defeat. The scale of his humiliation was hidden by the fact that people were unwilling to commit themselves to the conservative Ronald Reagan until the very last minute. It was only when they went into the polling booth and weighed up all the hurt and humiliation of the past four years that they cast their vote against the president. It looks like Barack Obama will be the Jimmy Carter of 2012.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Reason-Rupe Poll on Wisconsin Recall: Walker Leads Barrett 50-42: "Gov. Scott Walker leads Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett 50-42 among those likely to vote in Wisconsin’s June 5 recall election, according to a new Reason-Rupe poll of 708 Wisconsin adults on cell phones and landlines. The Reason-Rupe poll finds voters overwhelmingly support many of the key changes Gov. Walker and the legislature implemented on public sector pensions and health care last year. Reason-Rupe finds 72 percent favor the change requiring public sector workers to increase their pension contributions from less than 1 percent to 6 percent of their salaries. And 71 percent favor making government employees pay 12 percent of their own health care premiums instead of the previous 6 percent.

When Government Privileges Trump the Rights of Citizens: "Democrats and Republicans in the California Legislature have once again broadcast this troubling fact: They are far more concerned about the ever-expanding demands of a relatively small group of public sector union members than they are about the public welfare of the citizens of our state. On May 17, the state Assembly voted 68-0 to support the most despicable piece of legislation that’s come through the halls in a while, which is saying a lot given the foolhardy proposals routinely on display in Sacramento. (It still requires approval by the Senate and the governor.) The bill, AB 2299, allows a broad swath of public officials—police, judges, and various public safety officials—to hide their names from public property records."

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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27 May, 2012

BOOK REVIEW: The politically incorrect guide to the Bible by Robert J. Hutchinson

A book has to be pretty good for me to read it, let alone review it but this book makes the grade. Perhaps a little surprisingly, it is not an evangelizing book. It is instead a work of solid scholarship. It wears down criticisms of the Bible, fact by fact, point by point.

Hutchinson uses his vast knowledge of Bible and church history to show how shallow are the points made by atheist critics such as Dawkins and Hitchens. He patiently goes through their criticisms and applies to them the full weight of Bible scholarship through the ages. When critics seem to think they are clever for having thought of some original criticism, Hutchinson sometimes quotes by way of reply something written a thousand years ago. He knows what the points of contention are and knows what the reply to each is.

I found his chapter on slavery particularly interesting. Leftists tend to say that the Bible encourages slavery -- quite ignoring that the people who ultimately destroyed slavery in the West were devout Christians such as Wilberforce. The Bible was of course written when slavery was a univrersal feature of human society but Hutchinson shows that what was called slavery varied a great deal from time to time and place to place and that the Bible has substantial prohibitions about its worst abuses in the OLd Testament and completely forbad it in the New Testament. The thing that most approximated slavery in our modern sense among the Hebrews was in fact punishment for crime. In the absence of prisons, punishment was "outsourced" to individuals.

The book does of course bring us up to date with archaelogical evidence for the accuracy of the Bible accounts and it is rather amusing that many things dismissed by scholars as obviously untrue every now and again turn up as archaelogically verified.

For Christians who enter into disputes with unbelievers, this book offers a host of good replies to almost all likely challenges. A very valuable aid in a skeptical world -- JR

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Religious liberty is the beginning of all liberties

Confronted with a "train wreck," the new archbishop of Baltimore implores us to "pray diligently as communities, as families and as individuals."

Coming from a man of the cloth, this wouldn't be breaking news, except the train in question is driven by President Obama and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. As part of the health-care overhaul, the administration is bent on forcing American employers to offer health-care coverage that includes contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs, regardless of any moral objections.

And so Archbishop William Lori's prayer is for religious liberty.

It's an ecumenical prayer that requires ecumenical labor. During a speech at a conference on religious freedom, Lori made clear that this religious liberty talk "is not about the Catholic Church wanting to force anybody to do anything; it is instead about the federal government forcing the church -- consisting of its faithful and all but a few of its institutions -- to act against church teachings."

We are confronted at this moment with a question of integrity, a question that goes right to the heart of the ethical and religious principles that shape us as a nation: Are we as committed to liberty as we say we are?

This question of integrity is why Georgetown University wins this year's competition for most audacious commencement ceremony: Having Sebelius speak on campus was a dereliction of moral duty, sending a message of complacency at a time that demands action from any American who values freedom. We have long been the place where people come to flee tyranny. But are we comfortable with it at home? It's not just another left-right squabble, this health-care fight -- it strikes at the core of who we are.

Drastic measures are being taken: Numerous institutions have filed lawsuits against HHS. More alarmingly, the Franciscan University of Steubenville announced that it would no longer provide student health plans. That the Ohio Catholic college found itself forced into this position is, as a letter protesting the Obama administration's actions put it, "unacceptable."

"It is simply a matter of integrity that what we teach in the classroom, advance in our student life and preach in the chapel is consistent with how we use our limited resources in regard to health care," says Michael Hernon, vice president of advancement at Franciscan.

"The question is whether, under Obamacare, students who want to attend an authentically Catholic university will be able to do so without being disadvantaged," is how Thomas Messner of the Heritage Foundation explains it on the organization's blog. He further points out that these predicaments about conscience "should lead those who care about religious freedom to ponder more deeply the ways that religious freedom goes hand in hand with the condition of freedom more generally."

He adds that the health-care legislation itself "represents an enormous intrusion by government into freedom of private choice and decision-making more generally." That the law "has already triggered" the deepest imposition on religious freedom our nation has known should come as "no surprise" given the nature of the beast. Messner isn't speaking as a good conservative think tank fixture hitting ideological talking points but as someone concerned about the future of civil society, noting: "A society that abandons its moral and political commitment to freedom in general will become less willing and indeed even hostile to protecting religious freedom in particular instances."

This is why Archbishop Lori, in his speech, said: "The HHS lawsuits, if successful, would only provide a Band-Aid solution to the greater problem of radical secularism that we face in this country."

It's a faulty foundation that the president is offering for a vote in November. We stand on this new platform at our peril.

SOURCE

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Figures Don't Lie: Democrats Do

Ann Coulter

It's been breaking news all over MSNBC, liberal blogs, newspapers and even The Wall Street Journal: "Federal spending under Obama at historic lows ... It's clear that Obama has been the most fiscally moderate president we've had in 60 years." There's even a chart!

I'll pause here to give you a moment to mop up the coffee on your keyboard. Good? OK, moving on ...

This shocker led to around-the-clock smirk fests on MSNBC. As with all bogus social science from the left, liberals hide the numbers and proclaim: It's "science"! This is black and white, inarguable, and why do Republicans refuse to believe facts?

Ed Schultz claimed the chart exposed "the big myth" about Obama's spending: "This chart -- the truth -- very clearly shows the truth undoubtedly." And the truth was, the "growth in spending under President Obama is the slowest out of the last five presidents."

Note that Schultz also said that the "part of the chart representing President Obama's term includes a stimulus package, too." As we shall see, that is a big, fat lie.

Schultz's guest, Reuters columnist David Cay Johnston confirmed: "And clearly, Obama has been incredibly tight-fisted as a president."

Everybody's keyboard OK?

On her show, Rachel Maddow proclaimed: "Factually speaking, spending has leveled off under President Obama. Spending is not skyrocketing under President Obama. Spending is flattening out under President Obama."

In response, three writers from "The Daily Show" said, "We'll never top that line," and quit.

Inasmuch as this is obviously preposterous, I checked with John Lott, one of the nation's premier economists and author of the magnificent new book with Grover Norquist: Debacle: Obama's War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future.

It turns out Rex Nutting, author of the phony Marketwatch chart, i>attributes all spending during Obama's entire first year, up to Oct. 1, to President Bush.

That's not a joke. That means, for example, the $825 billion stimulus bill, proposed, lobbied for, signed and spent by Obama, goes in ... Bush's column. (And if we attribute all of Bush's spending for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and No Child Left Behind to William Howard Taft, Bush didn't spend much either.)

Nutting's "analysis" is so dishonest, even The New York Times has ignored it. He includes only the $140 billion of stimulus money spent after Oct. 1, 2009, as Obama's spending. And he's testy about that, grudgingly admitting that Obama "is responsible (along with the Congress) for about $140 billion in extra spending in the 2009 fiscal year from the stimulus bill."

Nutting acts as if it's the height of magnanimity to "attribute that $140 billion in stimulus to Obama and not to Bush ..."

On what possible theory would that be Bush's spending? Hey -- we just found out that Obamacare's going to cost triple the estimate. Let's blame it on Calvin Coolidge!

Nutting's "and not to Bush" line is just a sleight of hand. He's hoping you won't notice that he said "$140 billion" and not "$825 billion," and will be fooled into thinking that he's counting the entire stimulus bill as Obama's spending. (He fooled Ed Schultz!)

The theory is that a new president is stuck with the budget of his predecessor, so the entire 2009 fiscal year should be attributed to Bush.

But Obama didn't come in and live with the budget Bush had approved. He immediately signed off on enormous spending programs that had been specifically rejected by Bush. This included a $410 billion spending bill that Bush had refused to sign before he left office. Obama signed it on March 10, 2009. Bush had been chopping brush in Texas for two months at that point. Marketwatch's Nutting says that's Bush's spending.

Obama also spent the second half of the Troubled Asset Relief Fund (TARP). These were discretionary funds meant to prevent a market meltdown after Lehman Brothers collapsed. By the end of 2008, it was clear the panic had passed, and Bush announced that he wouldn't need to spend the second half of the TARP money.

But on Jan. 12, 2009, Obama asked Bush to release the remaining TARP funds for Obama to spend as soon as he took office. By Oct. 1, Obama had spent another $200 billion in TARP money. That, too, gets credited to Bush, according to the creative accounting of Rex Nutting.

There are other spending bills that Obama signed in the first quarter of his presidency, bills that would be considered massive under any other president -- such as the $40 billion child health care bill, which extended coverage to immigrants as well as millions of additional Americans. These, too, are called Bush's spending.

Frustrated that he can't shift all of Obama's spending to Bush, Nutting also lowballs the spending estimates during the later Obama years. For example, although he claims to be using the White House's numbers, the White House's estimate for 2012 spending is $3.795 trillion. Nutting helpfully knocks that down to $3.63 trillion.

But all those errors pale in comparison to Nutting's counting Obama's nine-month spending binge as Bush's spending.

If liberals will attribute Obama's trillion-dollar stimulus bill to Bush, what won't they do?

SOURCE

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Cocooned Liberals Are Unprepared for Political Debate

It's comfortable living in a cocoon -- associating only with those who share your views, reading journalism and watching news that only reinforces them, avoiding those on the other side of the cultural divide.

Liberals have been doing this for a long time. In 1972, the movie critic Pauline Kael said it was odd that Richard Nixon was winning the election, because everyone she knew was for George McGovern.

Kael wasn't clueless about the rest of America. She was just observing that her own social circle was politically parochial.

The rest of us have increasingly sought out comfortable cocoons, too. Journalist Bill Bishop, who lives in an Austin, Texas, neighborhood whose politics resemble Kael's, started looking at national data.

It inspired him to write his 2009 book "The Big Sort," which describes how Americans since the 1970s have increasingly sorted themselves out, moving to places where almost everybody shares their cultural orientation and political preference -- and the others keep quiet about theirs.

Thus professionals with a choice of where to make their livings head for the San Francisco Bay Area if they're liberal and for the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex (they really do call it that) if they're conservative. Over the years the Bay Area becomes more liberal and the Metroplex more conservative.

But cocooning has an asymmetrical effect on liberals and conservatives. Even in a cocoon, conservatives cannot avoid liberal mainstream media, liberal Hollywood entertainment and, these days, the liberal Obama administration.

They're made uncomfortably aware of the arguments of those on the other side. Which gives them an advantage in fashioning their own responses.

Liberals can protect themselves better against assaults from outside their cocoon. They can stay out of megachurches and make sure their remote controls never click on Fox News. They can stay off the AM radio dial so they will never hear Rush Limbaugh.

The problem is that this leaves them unprepared to make the best case for their side in public debate. They are too often not aware of holes in arguments that sound plausible when bandied between confreres entirely disposed to agree.

We have seen how this works on some issues this year.

Take the arguments developed by professor Randy Barnett of Georgetown Law that Obamacare's mandate to buy health insurance is unconstitutional. Some liberal scholars like Jack Balkin of Yale have addressed them with counterarguments of their own.

But liberal politicians and Eric Holder's Justice Department remained clueless about them. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asked whether Obamacare was unconstitutional, could only gasp: "Are you serious? Are you serious?"

In March, after the Supreme Court heard extended oral argument on the case, CNN's Jeffrey Toobin was clearly flabbergasted that a majority of justices seemed to take the case against Obamacare's constitutionality very seriously indeed.

Liberals better informed about the other side's case might have drafted the legislation in a way to avoid this controversy. But nothing they heard in their cocoon alerted them to the danger.

Another case in point is Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's law restricting the bargaining powers of public employee unions. The unions and the crowds in Madison, which is both the state capital and a university town and which with surrounding Dane County voted 73 to 26 percent for Barack Obama, egged each other on with cries that this would destroy the working class. No one they knew found this implausible.

The unions had an economic motive to oppose the laws and seek to recall first Republican legislators and then Walker himself. The law ended the automatic checkoff of union dues, which operated as an involuntary transfer of money from taxpayers to union leaders.

But voters declined to recall enough Republicans to give Democrats a majority in the Senate, and Walker currently leads Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in polls on the June 5 recall election.

The Madison mob seemed unaware that there were attractive arguments on Walker's side.

Why should public employee union members pay less for health insurance and get fatter pensions than the taxpayers who pay their salaries? Why is it a bad thing for property taxes to be held down and for school districts to cut perks for union members enough to hire more teachers?

Beyond the Madison cocoon, in Wisconsin's other 71 counties, which voted 55 to 44 percent for Walker in 2010, such arguments are evidently proving persuasive. Maybe liberals should listen to Rush every so often.

SOURCE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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24 May, 2012

Is Calvin a Democrat?



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Government Propaganda Comes to America: What Took So Long?

By Oleg, a former Soviet citizen

The long-awaited Progressive World of Next Tuesday has just gotten closer with the passage of an amendment in Congress that legalizes government propaganda. What could possibly go wrong with that? It worked so well in the USSR!

Drawing simplified, two-dimensional people on a propaganda poster is the same as flattening individuals under an ideological press, squeezing out and discarding their humanity and leaving some single common trait - class, gender, race, profession, ethnicity - in order to establish a simplified, two-dimensional vision of the world in the minds of target audiences.

Complex, multi-dimensional ideas are not likely to spur large groups of perfect strangers to unite in a swift, coordinated action. That can only be accomplished with a simplified message that isolates a single common characteristic in different people and exaggerates it to the point of existential importance, while suppressing more essential individual characteristics. As the secondary characteristics become primary and vice versa - voila - the individual is being sacrificed to the collective.

As an added benefit, this amendment will feed all the progressive artists congregating at the NEA trough. It just so happens that, as a former Soviet citizen, I used to create motivational visual agitation posters for the Communist Party committee in Siberia. May I apply for a grant?

Here, I just created a few posters on spec. Let's see if the American public is down with such a self-image. Feel free to contribute!





More HERE (See the original for links)

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The looting of savers

Have you got money in the bank? You're going to be a patsy

By economic historian Martin Hutchinson

The French and Greek elections have made the “austerity” programs favored by Angela Merkel and other sensible policymakers seem politically highly unattractive (never mind that the spending cuts proposed by the austere have almost universally not happened, while tax increases have been onerous.) Consequently, Keynesians worldwide are recommending further bouts of government spending combined with partial repudiation of debt. Like the disgraceful monetary policies also peddled by these people, these recommendations amount to the wholesale looting of savers in favor of profligate borrowers and bloated public sectors. It’s worth reminding ourselves of the long-term consequences of such folly.

One of John Maynard Keynes’ principal crimes against sound economics was his demonization of savers. Calling for the “euthanasia of the rentier” he proposed the paradox of thrift, whereby savers in a recession are supposed to damage the ability for the economy to recover by depressing aggregate demand. Like Keynes’ equally spurious calls for increased government spending as a stimulus, this demonization of savers has been used by intellectually dishonest politicians of the left and squishy center to justify policies that have the effect of robbing savers, whether through inflation, excessive taxation or repudiation of government debt.

In reality, saving is the essential precondition for capital investment, and therefore for economic growth. Societies with inadequate savings cannot generally pull themselves out of poverty, however abundant their natural resources. You only have to look at the track record over the last half century of Asian societies, which mostly have a high cultural propensity to save, compared with Latin American societies that do not. Whereas countries like Argentina or Brazil were richer than Korea and Taiwan, little poorer than Singapore or Japan and far richer than China in 1960, today the comparison has reversed.

One of my major objections to the activities of the World Bank and the IMF is their downgrading of the importance of saving. Those institutions frequently propose high taxes on investment returns, and seem to be under the impression that the only way to start a new company is with a government grant or an investment by a major international private equity fund, such the World Bank’s offshoot the International Finance Corporation. As the Solyndra example in the United States showed, the government is an exceptionally bad venture capitalist. In addition, it can be stated with considerable confidence that enterprises that require $500 million up-front investments before having made a profit or even significant revenue are very unlikely to succeed in the long term.

Middle class saving is the key to enterprise formation in any society. Even when venture capital companies exist, as in the United States, they rapidly get drawn away from genuine venture capital towards the much easier money available in leveraged buyouts. Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, for example, began by providing genuine venture capital to Tom Stemberg’s Staples, but rapidly discovered that most such investments were too small and the returns too slow, and switched to leveraged buyouts. The vast majority of new ventures, innovative or not, depend on the savings of their founders and their founders’ network of relatives, friends and business contacts, to get going before institutional venture capitalists will look at them.

Nurturing middle class savings is thus the most important task of government. John Locke said “Government has no other end, but the preservation of property” and he didn’t overstate the position by much. Quite my most gratifying banking experience was designing a simple bond law for the Republic of Macedonia, which allowed 800,000 Macedonian savers, whose savings had been expropriated ten years earlier by the former Yugoslavia, to get most of their savings back immediately. The country’s improvement in economic performance following the implementation of that law has been marked, and extremely pleasing.

Worldwide monetary policies, in place now for almost 4 years, are uniquely unkind to savers. By forcing interest rates, both short-term and long-term below the rate of inflation, they force savers to receive a negative real return or take large risks to achieve a positive one. That’s the reason for the success of speculative bubbles like that in Facebook shares, which have created a market capitalization larger than General Motors off a stream of advertising revenue only 4% the size of the company’s market capitalization. One commentator described the Facebook IPO as the largest “pump and dump” in stock market history. It has a lot of company for that distinction (when normed by contemporary Gross Domestic Product.) Certainly the South Sea Company and the Mississippi Company, those twin British and French bubbles of 1719-20, had more commercial reality to them. After all Robert Knight, the South Sea Company cashier, who absconded to Antwerp with the company’s records, appeared before potential investors in a well-powdered periwig, not a hoodie!

The latest Keynesian solution to the unwillingness of debt markets to finance further bouts of government spending is to spend yet more money, but to finance it by monetary expansion and partial repudiation of debt. This would get debt levels down, but would close the markets to further debt issues, since investors are not so foolish as to lend to borrowers who have already defaulted on their obligations. Even Argentina, which has enjoyed a remarkable economic boom since defaulting on its debt in 2005, has not been able to return to the capital markets, much to the surprise of its leaders. Thus this approach, if undertaken directly, is unlikely to lead to success.

There is however an alternative approach, which currently appears more and more attractive to distraught Keynesians, and that is financial repression. Under this technique, which was most successfully applied by the British government to work down its excessive debt level at the end of World War II, regulations are used to prevent domestic savers from moving their money into international assets. Monetary authorities are then encouraged to promote inflation, to the extent that domestic interest rates are kept below the rate of inflation. Using this technique, governments can run deficits for a generation or more, while the value of their debts is reduced by inflation. Add in a stiff income tax, to penalize further the nominal interest returns of savers foolish enough to buy government debt, and the government’s debt position can be retrieved quite nicely over a 20-30 period – at the cost of the nation’s savings and the rest of the economy. Needless to say savers, especially those fool enough to believe in the government’s promises to maintain a sound currency, were robbed blind and ended their lives impoverished.

Repression is clearly in the sights of the left at this time – after all, savers generally tend to vote for the right. The idea of looting their political opponents to increase public spending, while having that looting proceed invisibly, so that their fingers are not on the weapon, is attractive to leftist politicians everywhere – it is in a sense THE central flaw of democracy. Of course, the most blame should attach to those politicians like Harold Macmillan, Richard Nixon and, it increasingly seems likely, David Cameron, who rely on savers’ votes to get elected and then betray their own supporters.

Fiscal austerity is needed, but as France and Greece have shown, it is unlikely to win its proponents much electoral support. That is particularly the case if, as in Britain the austerity consists primarily of tax increases, so that the economy declines while the deficit remains unaffected by the apparent austerity. In any case fiscal austerity alone is not enough. If it is not combined with sound monetary policy, savings rates will decline and the savings pool itself will be drained by negative real interest rates. In the long term, that can only lead to impoverishment; in a globalized world, the skills of Western employees are not so superior to those in emerging markets that they can expect to retain higher living standards without a healthy pool of capital to accompany them.

The need now is thus for a revolution in monetary policy, that raises the risk-free interest rate well above the rate of inflation, and allows savers at last to receive a real return on their money without investing in the likes of Facebook. It probably won’t happen until inflation gets seriously out of hand, so my advice to savers is this: make sure a substantial percentage of your money is in gold, in order that you will survive the painful burst of inflation that is needed before global monetary authorities are brought to their senses.

SOURCE

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What Should You Believe? Government Stats or Your Own Eyes?

Price inflation is running at an annualized rate of 4.8 percent, according to official data released Friday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That is more than double the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2 percent annual inflation. And as millions of Americans have come to learn since the government 40 years ago began playing games with this and other economic statistics to make things look better than they really are, there is good reason to take this latest report with a shaker or two of salt. Even if we accept the figure at face value, there are good reasons to scoff.

For instance, at the American Institute for Economic Research, the economists strip out seldom-purchased big-ticket items that the Bureau of Labor Statistics leaves in its calculations. The AIER’s Everyday Price Index studies the prices of things people buy daily, weekly, or monthly, such as groceries, prescription medicine, telephone and cable services, etc. That’s the inflation rate that most directly affects people.

The Everyday Price Index shows inflation climbing 8.1 percent over the last year. At an 8.1 percent rate of inflation, the purchasing power of the dollar falls by half in nine years.

More HERE

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Red Ink drowns economies rather than grow them

Headlines blared over the weekend that Obama was winning his way by convincing the G-8 countries (U.S., Germany, Japan, United Kingdom, Italy, France, Canada and Russia) to pursue a policy of “growth” rather than “austerity” in dealing with the crushing sovereign debt crisis in Europe and around the world.

In the Orwellian world we live in, “growth” means more spending, and “austerity” means painful cuts which destroy economies.

One would think that a simple survey of the U.S. economic shambles would put an end to the government spending = growth myth. CBS News reports that Obama has accumulated almost $5 trillion in new debt, exceeding the total of his predecessor’s eight years in office in just over three.

If growth followed massive government spending, then the U.S. economy should be humming along rather than the current anemic 2.2 percent in the first quarter of 2012. When adjusted for inflation in commodities, the real GDP for the first quarter stood at 1.7 percent, a far cry from the Obama predicted 3 percent rate for the year.

Our economy has an 8.1 percent unemployment rate that has dropped not due to job creation, but due to people dropping out of the workforce. In fact, 319,000 fewer Americans are employed today than when Obama took office — quite a record of growth for Europe to follow.

Obama’s “growth” agenda has been fueled by about $3 trillion in stimulus including the failed $800 billion fiscal stimulus and more than $2.5 trillion in monetary stimulus courtesy of Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve Bank.

Now, Obama is working on the European leaders to push them toward policies that would push down the accelerator on sovereign debt creation which has been proven to only make the overall debt crisis worse.

Ironically, the so-called “austerity” alternative that Obama is urging to be rejected has not even been tried as countries like Greece have not made the choice to cut their budgets enough to staunch the flow of red ink, so there is no baseline in the current crisis to show that budget balancing doesn’t generate growth.

The sad fact is that those who cling to the failed socialist policies of the past will not give up the illusion that Keynesian economics is anything more than a theory designed to gradually slip free people into the bondage of ever growing government debt.

As the world watches these leaders of the largest “democracies” on the planet engage in meetings designed to save the crumbling European socialist infrastructure and the banks that lent the money to enable it, we see the clash of national histories and cultures.

Germany, with its collective memory of the hyperinflationary despair caused by massive deficit spending after WWI which led to the rise of Adolph Hitler, chooses the route of fiscal responsibility. Even with this history, the German debt to gross domestic product has risen from 58.8 percent in 2002 to 81.2 percent in 2012.

The United States under Obama, has embraced fiscal recklessness under the mantle of “growth” and has seen our debt to GDP increase from 64.4 percent in 2008 to crashing the 100 percent mark in 2012.

Just so the U.S. doesn’t feel too lonely having our national debt exceed our total annual economic production, fellow G-8 member Italy has a GDP to debt ratio of 120 percent. Of course, Italy is considered a prime candidate for needing a bailout to prevent them from defaulting on their debts, so one wonders how wise it is to include them in the room when discussing whether the prudent economic policy is politically difficult budget cuts or an Alice in Wonderland spending spree. Not to be outdone, Japan has beaten everyone in the race toward fiscal insanity having blown past the 200 percent threshold and having twenty years of economic stagnation.

So, now Obama wants to try to sell the world on the concept of additional spending being the key to future economic prosperity. Hopefully, the rest of the world treats his economic prescriptions with the same respect that the U.S. Senate treated his budget and just says no.

No matter how hard Obama and the world’s creditors try to redefine the meaning of growth and turn common sense on its head, more government deficit spending can only further stagnate economic growth. After all, if deficit spending created economic growth, the U.S. debt to GDP would be shrinking in response to our unprecedented deficits, and not even Obama can argue that red ink is actually black.

SOURCE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

****************************

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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23 May, 2012

Big Lies in Politics

Thomas Sowell

The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy them, and only in the short run. The current outbreaks of riots in Europe show what happens when the truth catches up with both the politicians and the people in the long run.

Among the biggest lies of the welfare states on both sides of the Atlantic is the notion that the government can supply the people with things they want but cannot afford. Since the government gets its resources from the people, if the people as a whole cannot afford something, neither can the government.

There is, of course, the perennial fallacy that the government can simply raise taxes on "the rich" and use that additional revenue to pay for things that most people cannot afford. What is amazing is the implicit assumption that "the rich" are all such complete fools that they will do nothing to prevent their money from being taxed away. History shows otherwise.

After the Constitution of the United States was amended to permit a federal income tax, in 1916, the number of people reporting taxable incomes of $300,000 a year or more fell from well over a thousand to fewer than three hundred by 1921.

Were the rich all getting poorer? Not at all. They were investing huge sums of money in tax-exempt securities. The amount of money invested in tax-exempt securities was larger than the federal budget, and nearly half as large as the national debt.

This was not unique to the United States or to that era. After the British government raised their income tax on the top income earners in 2010, they discovered that they collected less tax revenue than before. Other countries have had similar experiences. Apparently the rich are not all fools, after all.

In today's globalized world economy, the rich can simply invest their money in countries where tax rates are lower.

So, if you cannot rely on "the rich" to pick up the slack, what can you rely on? Lies.

Nothing is easier for a politician than promising government benefits that cannot be delivered. Pensions such as Social Security are perfect for this role. The promises that are made are for money to be paid many years from now -- and somebody else will be in power then, left with the job of figuring out what to say and do when the money runs out and the riots start.

There are all sorts of ways of postponing the day of reckoning. The government can refuse to pay what it costs to get things done. Cutting what doctors are paid for treating Medicare patients is one obvious example.

That of course leads some doctors to refuse to take on new Medicare patients. But this process takes time to really make its full impact felt -- and elections are held in the short run. This is another growing problem that can be left for someone else to try to cope with in future years.

Increasing amounts of paperwork for doctors in welfare states with government-run medical care, and reduced payments to those doctors, in order to stave off the day of bankruptcy, mean that the medical profession is likely to attract fewer of the brightest young people who have other occupations available to them -- paying more money and having fewer hassles. But this too is a long-run problem -- and elections are still held in the short run.

Eventually, all these long-run problems can catch up with the wonderful-sounding lies that are the lifeblood of welfare state politics. But there can be a lot of elections between now and eventually -- and those who are good at political lies can win a lot of those elections.

As the day of reckoning approaches, there are a number of ways of seeming to overcome the crisis. If the government is running out of money, it can print more money. That does not make the country any richer, but it quietly transfers part of the value of existing money from people's savings and income to the government, whose newly printed money is worth just as much as the money that people worked for and saved.

Printing more money means inflation -- and inflation is a quiet lie, by which a government can keep its promises on paper, but with money worth much less than when the promises were made.

Is it so surprising voters with unrealistic hopes elect politicians who lie about being able to fulfill those hopes?

SOURCE

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Domestic propaganda OK?

An amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences is being inserted into the latest defense authorization bill….

The amendment would “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon, according to the summary of the law at the House Rules Committee’s official website.

The tweak to the bill would essentially neutralize two previous acts—the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987—that had been passed to protect U.S. audiences from our own government’s misinformation campaigns.
The bi-partisan amendment is sponsored by Rep. Mac Thornberry from Texas and Rep. Adam Smith from Washington State.

In a little noticed press release earlier in the week — buried beneath the other high-profile issues in the $642 billion defense bill, including indefinite detention and a prohibition on gay marriage at military installations — Thornberry warned that in the Internet age, the current law “ties the hands of America’s diplomatic officials, military, and others by inhibiting our ability to effectively communicate in a credible way.”

The bill’s supporters say the informational material used overseas to influence foreign audiences is too good to not use at home, and that new techniques are needed to help fight Al-Qaeda, a borderless enemy whose own propaganda reaches Americans online.

Critics of the bill say there are ways to keep America safe without turning the massive information operations apparatus within the federal government against American citizens.

SOURCE

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Should we obey all laws?

By Walter E. Williams

Professor of Economics at George Mason University
Let's think about whether all acts of Congress deserve our respect and obedience. Suppose Congress enacted a law -- and the Supreme Court ruled it constitutional -- requiring American families to attend church services at least three times a month. Should we obey such a law? Suppose Congress, acting under the Constitution's commerce clause, enacted a law requiring motorists to get eight hours of sleep before driving on interstate highways. Its justification might be that drowsy motorists risk highway accidents and accidents affect interstate commerce. Suppose you were a jury member during the 1850s and a free person were on trial for assisting a runaway slave, in clear violation of the Fugitive Slave Act. Would you vote to convict and punish?

A moral person would find each one of those laws either morally repugnant or to be a clear violation of our Constitution. You say, "Williams, you're wrong this time. In 1859, in Ableman v. Booth, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 constitutional." That court decision, as well as some others in our past, makes my case. Moral people can't rely solely on the courts to establish what's right or wrong. Slavery is immoral; therefore, any laws that support slavery are also immoral. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, "to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions (is) a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy."

Soon, the Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of Obamacare, euphemistically titled the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. There is absolutely no constitutional authority for Congress to force any American to enter into a contract to buy any good or service. But if the court rules that Obamacare is constitutional, what should we do?

State governors and legislators ought to summon up the courage of our Founding Fathers in response to the 5th Congress' Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. Led by Jefferson and James Madison, the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 and 1799 were drafted where legislatures took the position that the Alien and Sedition Acts were unconstitutional. They said, "Resolved, That the several States composing, the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government ... (and) whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force." The 10th Amendment to our Constitution supports that vision: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

In a word, if the Supreme Court rules that Obamacare is constitutional, citizens should press their state governors and legislatures to nullify the law. You say, "Williams, the last time states got into this nullification business, it led to a war that cost 600,000 lives." Two things are different this time. First, most Americans are against Obamacare, and secondly, I don't believe that you could find a U.S. soldier who would follow a presidential order to descend on a state to round up or shoot down fellow Americans because they refuse to follow a congressional order to buy health insurance.

Congress has already gone far beyond the powers delegated to it by the Constitution. In Federalist No. 45, Madison explained: "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite." That vision has been turned on its head; it's the federal government whose powers are numerous and indefinite, and those of the state are now few and defined.

Former slave Frederick Douglass advised: "Find out just what people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them. ... The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."

SOURCE

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Obama: Promises Broken, Promises Kept

President Obama has broken many of his promises aimed at the general public and jobless Americans, but he has kept promises to his left-wing base that involved divisive wedge issues.

He promised to create 7 million new jobs on seven different occasions in 2008. But these jobs have not materialized: “just 16 states have seen job growth since President Obama took office,” overwhelmingly conservative states like Texas that have rejected liberal economic policies. “The remaining states have lost a combined 1.4 million jobs since January 2009.” Unemployment has risen, despite the fact that many people have given up looking for a job, concealing increases in joblessness. (The broadest measure of real unemployment is 15.6 percent.)

President Obama promised to cut the deficit at least six times. He also promised a “net spending cut.” These promises were swiftly broken. In 2009, the president broke them in a big way with his very first proposed budget. It mandated such large increases in spending that budget deficits would rise by $4.8 trillion under it to $9.3 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

He has broken at least ten other campaign promises, including seven promises in signing the $800 billion stimulus package (which will shrink the economy in the “long run”), and one promise in signing the Lilly Ledbetter law and the SCHIP tax increase.


On the other hand, President Obama kept his pledge to federalize hate crimes, which were already prohibited by state laws, by signing into law a broad federal hate crimes law in 2009. (Obama promised to “place the weight of (his) administration behind the enactment of the Matthew Shepard Act to (federally) outlaw hate crimes.”) Since violent crimes were already prohibited by state law, and most states already had laws increasing penalties for crimes motivated by race or sexual orientation, the principal effect of the 2009 federal hate crimes law was to allow federal prosecutors to reprosecute people had previously been acquitted and found not guilty of a crime in state court, or were never prosecuted in state court because state prosecutors viewed the evidence against them as weak.

And, indeed, one of the purposes of the federal hate crimes law was to take advantage of a loophole in constitutional protections against double jeopardy. As interpreted by the Supreme Court, constitutional protections against double jeopardy prevent a state from reprosecuting a person who has been found not guilty in state court, but do not, owing to the loophole, prevent federal prosecutors from reprosecuting someone after they have been found innocent of the same crime in state court. This loophole is known as the “dual sovereignty” doctrine. The Obama administration may make use of this loophole in a recent high-profile, racially-charged case in Florida. The specter of such reprosecutions led the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and civil-libertarians like Nat Hentoff to oppose the federal hate-crimes law.

SOURCE

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Corruption from a Left-leaning court

Well the dust up about the million dollar meeting in Maui has finally registered with the judges planning on spending some quality meeting time in a tropical paradise. Here's what the court has to say:

As part of the Third Branch of government, the Ninth Circuit is fully aware of its responsibilities as a steward of public funds. The conference is authorized by law "for the purpose of considering the business of the courts and advising means of improving the administration of justice within the circuit." [§ 28 U.S.C. Sec. 333] The conference fully adheres to these goals, providing an exceptional educational program and the opportunity to conduct numerous business meetings that further circuit governance. Judges and other attendees take seriously their obligation to participate fully in the conference. Costs for lodging and air travel to attend the conference are comparative to those found at mainland venues. Any sporting and recreational activities are paid for by individuals and are not reimbursable.

Considering that attendees traveling on government funds will have around $200 a day to spare for meals an incidental expenses (as part of their per diem) which require no direct accounting, the last sentence, while technically true is a bit of misdirection.

But enough with the boring accounting details, let's get to an examination of the schedule. Below is an abbreviated listing of some of the advertised activities:

Saturday, August 11
12:00 p.m. - Conference Registration desk opens

Sunday, August 12
5:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. - Sport Fishing
12:00 p.m. - Golf Tournament

Monday, August 13
9:00 a.m. - Yoga
9:00 a.m. - Surfing Lessons
9:00 a.m. - Stand-up Paddle Board Lessons
12:00 p.m. - Welcome Luncheon & Book Review for Spouses & Guests
2:00 p.m. - Zumba
4:30 p.m. - Opening Program
6:00 p.m. - No-host Cocktail Reception
7:00 p.m. - Maui Dine Around

Tuesday, August 14
9:00 a.m. - Yoga
9:00 a.m. - Surfing Lessons
9:00 a.m. - Stand-up Paddle Board Lessons
1:00 p.m. - Tennis Tournament
2:00 p.m. - Floral Design Workshop (includes flowers & supplies)
7:00 p.m. - District Dinners

Wednesday, August 15
9:00 a.m. - Yoga
9:00 a.m. - Surfing Lessons
9:00 a.m. - Stand-up Paddle Board Lessons
9:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. - Day Trip and Tour of Upcountry Maui
11:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m. - Gemini Catamaran Snorkel Trip (includes gear & lunch)
2:45 p.m. - A special treat! Ice Cream Social
6:00 p.m. - The Aloha Experience

Thursday, August 16
9:00 a.m. - Yoga
9:00 a.m. - Stand-up Paddle Board Lessons

Oh sure the judges could attend boring meetings and lectures, but it looks like they've got those who want to play hooky covered as well...

SOURCE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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22 May, 2012

America's welfare mess

Every so often, an article crosses your desk that makes you feel like you’ve been hit between the eyes with a sledgehammer. Even if you have a solid understanding of the topic, and you notice that the facts at hand match your previous suspicions, somehow you still have to keep a grip on yourself because it is so staggering. That is what happened to me while reading Michael Tanner’s recent report for the Cato Institute on the American welfare system.

Tanner is a recognized expert on our welfare system, having written two books on the subject during the 1990’s, when people were actually making an effort to restructure the welfare state. In fact, his work helped form the philosophical basis for the landmark welfare reform enacted in 1996. Since then, Tanner has been studying other areas of public policy, but he recently returned to look at the current welfare structure. Tanner told me that even he was shocked at what he found.

To be fair, Mr. Tanner admits that some of the recent increases in welfare expenditures are due to the recession. But he also observes that the escalation in welfare spending has been far greater during the current recession than the previous ones. Furthermore, people have hung on to their welfare participation for a much longer period of time. That being said, our Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, was recently on Meet the Press and blamed the cause of the deficit on guess who -- the Bush Administration. Not according to Tanner’s study.

There are currently 126 separate federal anti-poverty (welfare) programs. That stupefying figure includes 33 separate housing programs run by four cabinet departments, 21 programs providing food or food assistance in three cabinet departments and one federal agency, eight health care programs in five different agencies within Health and Human Services, and, to top it off, 27 cash or general assistance programs spread throughout seven cabinet departments and six agencies. Tanner concluded that for at least the past 10 years, we’ve had more than 100 federal anti-poverty programs!

If you’re not already confused, let me fix that: the players change so often that ultimately you need a scorecard. In 2011, four obscure programs – Vista, Even Start, the Senior Companion Program (which used to be called grandchildren), and the Foster Grandparent Program – were eliminated. But of course, new ones were created. We now have the Capacity Building for Sustainable Communities Fund, the Emergency Homeowners Loan Program, and the Choice Neighborhood Planning Grants. (I probably qualify for this one because I’ve got some pretty choice neighbors.)

How much are we spending on all this? Well, pull up your socks. Tanner calculates that the federal government lays out $44,544 for a “poor” family of three, and that state and local governments throw in another $20,610 (some of which, I assume, comes from federal block grants). This means that a family of three can, in theory, get $67,154 from the government in housing, health care, food, and cash assistance. So here’s the big question: why bother working?

Then there’s the other big question: with all these handouts, why hasn’t poverty been eliminated? A family of three is considered below the poverty line when their income is less than $18,530, so how can anyone still be living in poverty in America when we’re paying out benefits equivalent to almost four times that amount? Certainly, a lot of the money goes to overhead. With 33 federal housing programs – not to mention the ones at the state and local level – there’s an army of middle-class government employees getting their pockets lined. Unfortunately, because of the complexity of the budget process (or lack of budget since the Senate has not passed one in three years), Tanner can’t quite nail down that overhead figure. But he does comment in his report on the people who profit from these programs, writing: “Anti-poverty programs are usually more concerned with protecting the prerogatives of the bureaucracy than with actually fighting poverty.”

What are we getting for our $668 billion a year? It’s certainly not a reduction in poverty. Combine the federal largesse with the $284 billion spent by state and local governments and we are handing out almost $1 trillion a year. Since the beginning of the Great Society in 1965, we’ve increased our combined anti-poverty spending threefold as a percentage of GDP, yet the overall poverty rate has stayed constant with only a modest dip during the mid-1990’s as a result of the welfare reform bill.

Because of the bizarre maze of federal and state programs, it’s nearly impossible to analyze due to the diffusion of the efforts through the multitude of programs. When Mitt Romney talks about reorganizing government, he should emphasize this chaotic situation as an example of how to streamline government and save billions. Massive elimination and consolidation of these programs would not only conserve precious tax dollars, but better serve the recipients of these programs. The tangled mass of programs – along with the lack of co-coordinated oversight – leads only to confusion and fraud, neither of which helps anyone (except the criminals.)

This report demonstrates (yet again) the inefficient disaster of our federal government. Mr. Tanner should be hired to advise the Romney campaign, because we all know that Mr. Obama will never effectively spearhead any change to this morass. And change we need or we will drown.

SOURCE

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Government waste

Most of my work on government stimulus focuses on economic theory and evidence. But every so often it’s a good idea to remind ourselves of the ridiculous ways that government wastes money. Here are some details from a boondoggle in West Virginia.

Nobody told Hurricane librarian Rebecca Elliot that the $22,600 Internet router in the branch library’s storage closet was powerful enough to serve an entire college campus. Nobody told Elliot how much the router cost or who paid for it. Workers just showed up and installed the device. They left behind no instructions, no user manual. The high-end router serves four public computer terminals at the small library in Putnam County. …The state of West Virginia is using $24 million in federal economic stimulus money to put high-powered Internet computer routers in small libraries, elementary schools and health clinics, even though the pricey equipment is designed to serve major research universities, medical centers and large corporations, a Gazette-Mail investigation has found. …The Cisco 3945 series routers, which cost $22,600 each, are built to serve “tens of thousands” of users or device connections, according to a Cisco sales agent. The routers are designed to serve a minimum of 500 users. Yet state broadband project officials directed the installation of the stimulus-funded Cisco routers in West Virginia schools with fewer than a dozen computers and libraries that have only a single terminal for patrons.

Sounds like the government could have bought every user a laptop and squandered less money.

It’s important to realize that this type of boondoggle is the rule, not the exception. Every so often, we see stories about absurd waste, such as the $423,000 study to find out that men don’t like to wear condoms, the Pentagon spending $900 on a $7 control switch, or a $100,000 library grant to a city without a library.

We should get upset about these examples. But remember that the cartoon below is exactly right. The waste, fraud, and pork that we find out about is dwarfed by what remains hidden.



SOURCE

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How Do You Compromise with a Progressive?

I forced myself to watch Bill Maher this Friday as I was trying to chart out this column. Thankfully I hadn’t just eaten.

It was sickening to listen as cerebral dwarves Maher and some not-so-bright jackass from the fascist rag The Nation talked about how Republicans and the Tea Party are evil and the cause of all our economic problems while Rhodes Scholar and former U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J. sat there smirking like a broken Muppet. The world in which progressives live makes the world J.K. Rowling created for Harry Potter seem normal.

And it wasn’t just the economy conservatives had wrecked. This august panel also blamed conservatives and the Tea Party for what they determined was the rebirth of racism in this country. More than that, they believe racism is worse now that at any time in recent history. The evidence of this, as is often the case with progressives, is their say-so. There’s nothing like being lectured by three wealthy white progressives about the plight of minorities in the world.

Maher’s show is the hollowed-out tree for intellectual elves on the political left to gather and make themselves feel good about their failed ideas… outside of MSNBC, naturally. As such, these elfin academics took a moment to lament the primary loss of Sen. Richard Lugar, R-ish-Ind., to Richard Mourdock because Mourdock doesn’t support “compromise.” That got me wondering – How do you compromise with people like this?

Many progressives scoffed at the concept of a “War on Terrorism.” Many more equated the United States to the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. Still others subscribed to the stupidity that if only we’d talk with our attackers, find out what they want and negotiate with them we could avoid attacks in the future.

Putting aside the fact that these are the same people who demand terrorists at Gitmo get a presumption of innocence and due process yet simultaneously call for the head of George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin case, how do you negotiate with a terrorist?

Turns out it’s strikingly similar to negotiating with a progressive. You don’t. Not at all.

Chief amongst the desires of al Qaeda is us dead and Israel destroyed. Assuming your position is not wanting to be dead and not having Israel destroyed, which can be a lot to ask of far too many progressives these days, what do you compromise on? Allow them to murder some of us and destroy part of Israel?

Progressives’ goal is to raise taxes, spend more, grow government and make an ever-growing number of people dependent on government services, so those people will vote continually to keep them in power. Conservatives, though not necessarily Republicans, seek to bind the government to the Constitution, that pesky document that progressives all too often treat as a small speed bump on their way to their tyrannical Utopia.

Conservatives want less government involvement in people’s lives, smaller, constitutionally limited government and lower taxes for everyone. When two sides are pitted against one another, one side wanting higher taxes and more spending while the other wants lower taxes, or at least no increase, and less spending (or even just a decrease in the rate of increase) how do they compromise? Where is the middle ground?

It’s always the side that wants a bigger, more intrusive, ever-expanding government who wins in that compromise, no matter how much “compromise” there is, because they get more. And the goal is always “more.”

Progressives are like heroin addicts, only less honest. They both want “just one last fix” before they’ve finally had enough and will get serious about quitting. But a junkie will ask you for money for that next fix; progressives simply will deem a need for more of your money and then vote to take it. Neither is ever really done, and “just one more” is never enough with either.

The simple fact is there is no negotiating with terrorists or junkies just as there is no negotiating with progressives. “Compromise” might as well have six fewer letters when it comes to protecting individual liberty because there is simply no room for it anymore. We’ve already given away too much of our founding soul to give away any more and remain the nation, the people, we are meant to be.

There’s a reason all the people of the world who seek freedom and opportunity always try to come here. For them, and for our future, we can not allow politicians to negotiate that away any further in the name of compromise.

SOURCE

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What Air India tells us about state run and monopoly companies

A nice little story here about Air India. It illustrates the dangers of having either state run or monopolistic companies.

Some of the airline’s staggering losses are rooted in exceptionally generous staff benefits. Investigators discovered pilots insisted in staying in five star hotels in New York, Chicago and Mumbai during stop-overs instead of spending the night at cheaper airport hotels.

Significant losses in revenues are due to serving and retired pilots and crew taking business class seats ahead of paying customers. The practice was restricted in 2009 when its chief executive appealed to staff to co-operate and stressed there was no shame in traveling economy.

Despite the restrictions on staff using business class tickets, paying passengers were rejected to make way for Air India staff who were upgraded from economy seats. At one point, Air India’s business class ticket holders were shunted onto rival airlines — at Air India’s cost — because their own staff had occupied the seats.

The temptation for any group of insiders is to make use of that insiderdom to gain privileges. This is as true of CEOs as it is of airline pilots, as true of politicians as it is of scribblers for think tanks. It's simply human nature: when we talk about bureaucrats we call it public choice economics and when we talk about everyone else we call it the blindingly obvious.

The only cure we've got for this is competition: everyone needs to be put in fear of their livelihood about the success of the organisation. To consider that a business class airfare not paid by a customer makes that job more insecure: that the claim of a gargantuan pay deal for inhabiting the corner office makes losing that job more likely. And this really only can be done when the players in the marketplace are indeed playing in a market. One where such behaviour really does bring down a company and thus impose discipline on all others.

Which does pose problems with the politicians. For we've tried having competing governments in the Wars of the Roses and didn't like the result much. Perhaps we'll just have to revert to terminal violence in this difficult case?

SOURCE

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Hopeless Change for the Young

In 2008, Obama inspired legions of young Americans who bought into his "Change you can believe in" campaign message. According to the Pew Research Center, voters under the age of 30 supported Obama over John McCain 66:31 – by far the largest disparity between young voters and other age groups in any presidential election since exit polling began in 1972.

Sadly, three years later, it is more like Hopeless Change that millions of young Americans face. In exchange for that 2:1 vote of confidence they gave Obama in 2008, the 18-29 year-olds are feeling the brunt of the economic stagnation – often by twice the degree of all other age groups. According to the Wall Street Journal, "The U.S. labor market is in a malaise, but young adults are in crisis."

Unfortunately, what has happened is persistent unemployment, particularly long-term unemployment, depressed wages and purchasing power, massive depreciation of home values, doubling of gas prices, rapid increase in food and health care costs, and nearly stagnant economic growth. Virtually everyone and every sector have been negatively impacted, but young Americans just entering the workforce are suffering the most.

A new economic report by Gallup says 32% of 18-29 year-olds in the U.S. workforce were underemployed in April. That number is greater than the previous month of March (30.1%) and also higher than a year ago (30.7%), so nearly three years after the recovery supposedly began the trend is still worsening. Unemployment among this age group (13.6%) is nearly twice as high as any other age group, according to Gallup. Another 18.4% are working part-time, "but wanting to work full time." This trend is also worse than in March as well as April, 2011.

"Today's slow economic growth is a disaster for those unemployed and underemployed as they look for jobs when so few new jobs are being created. For younger Americans as a group, this is a particularly acute issue," summarized Gallup.

More HERE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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21 May, 2012

Another amazing example of the power of genetics

IDENTICAL twins Craig and Brenton Gurney, 38, were inseparable as children, shared a bedroom until they were 22, and have played in the same soccer team since they were five. They even ended up marrying women named Nicole. "We've always been really, really close," Brenton says.

If extrasensory perception exists between twins it was Craig who was the intuitive one. From 2700 kilometres away he once divined when his brother had a life-threatening mystery rash, and when he had dislocated a shoulder.

So the story of the Gurney twins is even more remarkable because it was Brenton who started getting the persistent headaches. It was Brenton who persuaded hale and hearty Craig to join a study of twins (looking into mental health and resilience) because it included an MRI scan.

The MRI test picked up no abnormalities in Brenton's brain. But Craig, who never suffers headaches, got the shock news: a massive and rare tumour in the base of his skull.

"I was hoping they had mixed up the MRI results and got the wrong twin," Brenton says.

When Craig underwent a complex 10½ hour operation to remove a 4.2-centimetre tumour, his wife and family in the waiting room cast meaningful looks at Brenton as if he were a barometer on his brother's progress.

"It was unspoken but everyone was looking at me," says Brenton, who had no sixth sense about the events transpiring on the operating table.

A year since the operation at Westmead Private Hospital, and following two months of intensive radiation therapy, Craig says: "Ultimately Brenton saved my life."

The twins - Brenton from West Pennant Hills, Craig from nearby Mount Colah - have participated in twin studies since their mother registered them with the Australian Twin Registry soon after birth.

SOURCE

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America really is polarizing politically

The article below is from a Leftist source but its statement of the facts seems accurate. The writer sees gridlock as the likely outcome but that could be no bad thing. Better no new legislation than bad legislation

The working assumption of many political commentators in Washington is that politics is more polarized than it has been in decades and that it’s the Republican Party’s rightward drift that’s to blame. The evidence bears this out—in part. But it also suggests a more complex story.

First, the electorate has polarized. Over the past two decades, the public’s ideological self-description has changed significantly. In 1992, when Bill Clinton campaigned for president as a reform-minded New Democrat, fully 43 percent of adults thought of themselves as moderate, compared to 36 percent conservative and 17 percent liberal. As the 2012 election got underway, the picture looked quite different. Moderates had declined by 8 points, to 35 percent, while conservatives and liberals had each gained 4 points, to 40 and 21 percent respectively.

As Alan Abramowitz has recently shown, a similar shift occurred among voters in presidential elections. In 1972, fully 71 percent placed themselves at or near the ideological midpoint, compared to 29 percent at or near the extremes. By 2008, the share of the electorate at or near the mid-point had fallen by 17 points—to 54 percent—while the share at the extremes rose to 46 percent.

Second, the parties have sorted themselves out along ideological lines. Since 2000, the share of Republicans calling themselves moderate or liberal has fallen from 37 to 27 percent, while the conservative share of Democrats has fallen from 25 to 20 percent. Republicans are more conservative than they used to be, and Democrats are more liberal. Conservatives have increased their share of the Republican Party by 9 points; liberals have increased their Democratic share by 10 points.

Over a longer period, Republicans have changed somewhat more than Democrats. Between 1972 and 2008, Abramowitz finds, Republican voters shifted rightward by 0.7 points on a seven-point scale, from 4.7 to 5.4. (On this scale, 1 means extremely liberal, while 7 means extremely conservative.) Meanwhile, Democratic voters shifted to the left by 0.5 points, from 3.7 to 3.2. Among Republican voters, the percentage of conservatives rose from 55 to 78 percent, while liberal voters among Democrats rose from 38 to 55 percent. Among party activists—the kinds of people who dominate grassroots organizations and presidential primaries and caucuses, the gulf between the parties has become even more pronounced.

The gap between voters and all adults—the former being more conservative—reflects age differentials in ideological commitment. Today, there a direct correlation: the older the person, on average the more conservative. And because older adults vote at much higher rates than young adults, the electorate is even more conservative than the population as a whole.

The story thus far is one of moderate asymmetry: both parties have shifted away from the center, Republicans somewhat more so than Democrats. But a simple fact has accentuated the difference: Because there are twice as many self-styled conservatives as liberals, ideological sorting is bound to produce a more predominantly conservative than liberal party—even if the percentage-point shifts are comparable. As recently as 2000, moderates outnumbered liberals within the Democratic Party by 44 to 29 percent. Today, even after a sharp rise in the liberal share, liberals and moderates are essentially tied, 39 to 38. In 2000, conservatives already outnumbered moderates and liberals by 2 to 1 within the Republican Party, and now it’s 3 to 1. So while there is a liberal Pelosi wing and a moderate Hoyer wing in the House Democratic caucus, among House Republicans we find only shades of conservatism. (That is not to say that differences among Republicans don’t matter; just ask John Boehner.)

So far I’ve left out Independents, whose share of the electorate is large and rising. But bringing them in doesn’t change the story very much. To be sure, Independents are the only major classification still dominated by moderates (41 percent of the total). But just since Obama carried the independent vote in 2008, conservatives have increased their share by 5 points while moderates have fallen by the same amount. Independents are moving with the tide, not against it.

These numbers don’t tell the whole story, however. There’s another key development: above and beyond their ideological disagreements, conservatives and liberals have come to understand the practice of politics differently. In a survey taken right after the Republican sweep in the 2010 midterm elections, 47 percent of American said that it was more important to compromise in order to get things done, versus 27 percent who thought it was more important for leaders to stick to their beliefs even if little got done. Liberal Democrats weighed in on the side of compromise, 58 to 16, moderate Democrats by 64 to 17. But conservative Republicans (the overwhelming majority of their party) favored sticking to their beliefs by 45 to 26. Ten months later, after the debt ceiling fiasco, an outright majority of adults favored compromise, including 62 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of liberals. But pluralities of Republicans and conservatives continued to favor leaders who stuck to their beliefs.

Unlike most other Americans, conservatives seem to believe that compromise represents defeat. It would take a subtle historian to explain why. Perhaps they think that because so many forces are pushing in the direction of bigger and more intrusive government, compromise will alter the pace of change but not the direction. If so, a politics of intransigence represents their only hope; never mind the risks.

There is nothing wrong with a frank and honest debate between two visions of our country’s future. But for the foreseeable future, neither party can definitively defeat the other. The only alternative to reasonable compromise—the sooner the better—is a level of gridlock that would paralyze our economy and eviscerate what is left of our reputation. All of those contributing to our current era of polarization would be wise to take heed.

SOURCE

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Two parties forever in the USA

by Jeff Jacoby

NEWS FLASH: The next president of the United States, like the last 29, will be a Republican or a Democrat.

That's not news, you say? But surely it must be. Haven't we been hearing for months from accomplished and influential people — people like former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, private-equity investor Peter Ackerman, and former New Jersey Governor Christie Whitman — that the post-partisan hour was finally at hand? Weren't legions of Americans said to be ready to turn their backs on the old two-party system, with all its divisiveness and ideological rigidity? Haven't tens of millions of dollars been donated to Americans Elect, the widely praised anti-special-interest reform group intent on anointing a genuinely bipartisan ticket — a presidential candidate from one party and a vice-presidential running mate from the other — and setting up a three-way race for the White House in November?

All quite true. And all quite irrelevant. Americans Elect has plenty of money, an elegant web presence, and such organizational savvy that as of last week it had qualified for the November ballot in 29 states, including California, Michigan, and Ohio. But it is not going to break, or even shake, the Republican-Democratic lock on the White House.

Dismay over the American two-party system is nothing new. It's so old, in fact, that it predates the federal constitution. "There is nothing I dread so much as a division of the Republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader and converting measures in opposition to each other," wrote John Adams in 1780. His great rival Thomas Jefferson agreed: "If I could not go to heaven but with a political party, I would not go there at all." Yet all their anti-partisan pieties didn't keep Adams and Jefferson from competing vigorously against each other as nominees of the first two American political parties, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans.

More than 225 years later, Americans by the millions follow the Adams/Jefferson pattern, lamenting partisanship in the abstract while sustaining it in practice.

In recent Gallup polls, more than half of respondents say the Republican and Democratic parties do such a poor job that the nation needs a third party. In an ABC News/Washington Post poll last November, voters by a 2-1 ratio responded favorably to the idea of an independent running for president against the major-party nominees. More than a few high-minded elites were certain the moment was ripe for a powerful centrist challenge to the long supremacy of Rs and Ds. "What Amazon.com did to books, what the blogosphere did to newspapers, [and] what the iPod did to music," gushed The New York Times's Thomas Friedman, "Americans Elect plans to do to the two-party duopoly that has dominated American political life — remove the barriers to real competition, flatten the incumbents, and let the people in."

But Americans Elect crashed and burned last week. Its much-hyped online primary process, touted as a way for any registered voter to take part in choosing a presidential ticket, achieved nothing. To survive the primary's first round, a candidate needed at least 10,000 clicks of support — hardly an insuperable bar in an organization that claims to have signed up more than 400,000 members. Yet no declared candidate came close. Former Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer, the Americans Elect frontrunner, managed to attract just 6,281 supporters. (Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff finished fourth, with 2,023.)

Chalk up another win for that "two-party duopoly."

Americans may claim they long for an alternative. Pundits tell them that the parties have never been more polarized, that gridlock has reached crisis levels, and that the nation desperately requires politicians more interested in solving problems than in winning elections.

Yet the two-party system remains deeply rooted in our political life, and for good reason. The broad struggle between Republicans and Democrats reflects, however messily, the ancient tension between America's two profoundest political goals -- liberty and equality. Ideological purists can lament that there isn't a dime's worth of difference between the two parties, and for those who feel that way, there are always alternatives. Segregationist George Wallace, deficit hawk Ross Perot, Socialist Norman Thomas, Libertarian Ron Paul, consumerist scourge Ralph Nader -- all ran for president on third-party lines, and all attracted some passionate supporters (and in Wallace's case, even some electoral-college votes) along the way.

None, however, made any lasting change in America's political landscape. For the vast majority of voters, political competition still comes down to Republicans vs. Democrats. Just as well: For a nation so profoundly divided, two parties are enough.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

AZ: Bennett seeks verification of Obama’s birthplace: "Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett says he's not a 'birther.' In fact, he says, he believes President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. Yet the state's No.2 elected official has waded into the highly charged controversy, asking the island state to verify the president's birthplace to ensure Obama can appear on Arizona's Nov.6 ballot. In doing so, Bennett, who is co-chairman for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's Arizona campaign, has reignited the birther debate coast to coast."

Is the TSA good for anything?: "Most head-shaking coverage of the TSA focuses on headline-worthy feel-ups of children and senior citizens, humiliating treatment of travelers, theft of or damage to valuables by federal agents, and the like. ... the inevitable comeback from the Feinsteins of the world is that these are relatively minor and unavoidable tradeoffs for saved lives and property. When you dig a little deeper, though, it's clear that year after year, the Transportation Security Administration not only engaged in these abuses, it has proven itself to be spectacularly bad at implementing programs it rarely makes any effort to demonstrate actually accomplish a damned thing."
br />VA lawmaker: “Sodomy not a civil right”: "A Virginia lawmaker who recently led the fight to block an openly gay man from becoming a judge General District Court judge in Richmond insisted on Thursday that the move had nothing to do with the nominee’s sexual orientation, but he was concerned about 'bias' in cases between 'a homosexual and a heterosexual.'"

Serbia: Nationalist Nikolic wins presidential vote: "Serbian political parties are expected to start negotiations on the formation of a new government Monday after the surprise win of nationalist Tomislav Nikolic in presidential polls. Nikolic upset the odds to defeat incumbent Boris Tadic on Sunday but vowed to pursue his predecessor's drive for the Balkans nation to join the European Union."

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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20 May, 2012

A Racial Revolution?

Thomas Sowell

Now that census data show -- for the first time in American history -- the number of white babies born exceeded by the number of babies born to non-white minorities the question is: What does this mean for the future of American society?

Politically, it means that minorities who traditionally vote overwhelmingly for Democrats can ensure that the country veers ever further to the left over the years, making America more like the welfare states of Europe, whose unsustainable spending led ultimately to financial crises and widespread riots.

But this is not strictly a matter of whites versus non-whites. Jews vote consistently, and almost as overwhelmingly, for Democrats as blacks do. Moreover, Asian Americans are by no means as likely as other non-whites to vote for the class warfare, tax and spend agenda of the Democrats.

Yet when all is said and done, the future political direction of the country seems painfully clear from these demographic trends, unless something happens to change the current correlation between race and political party affiliation. Moreover, even that may not be enough.

Even if Republicans can siphon off enough votes from groups that normally vote for Democrats to keep the two-party system alive, the preservation of the Republican Party is a trivial issue compared to the preservation of American society.

If Republican politicians save themselves by becoming Democrats under a different label -- and appeal to minorities as minorities, rather than as Americans -- the same policies and attitudes will have the same destructive effect on the American economy and society.

Refusing to cut back on entitlement spending, for example, means that the current generation can continue to enjoy government-subsidized amenities, at the expense of future generations, who can be left to struggle to get necessities, after the money runs out and government's promises can no longer be kept.

The growth of ever bigger and even more intrusive government means that the freedom, for which generations of Americans have fought and died on battlefields, around the world can be slowly but steadily lost within our own country.

Painful as such outcomes can be the dangers do not end there. A continuation of the current political tendency to take away the money required for national defense, and spend it instead on handouts that will win votes, means that our enemies around the world will have golden opportunities at our expense.

Again, the dangers may not be immediate. But they can be catastrophic when they catch up with us -- and catch us unprepared. We recovered from Pearl Harbor at enormous cost, including the needless deaths of American soldiers, fighting for their lives with obsolete military equipment against enemies with state of the art weapons.

But even such sacrifices, which brought us time to catch up during the Second World War, may not even be enough in a nuclear age.

What can be done now, to head off the many dangers in our current political policies and attitudes? There is not much we can do about demographic trends. But the changing composition of the American population is not, in itself, the fundamental danger. After all, vast millions of immigrants crossed the Atlantic for generations on end, and began the process of becoming Americans. Millions of black people likewise began that process after being set free.

Demography is not destiny. But the history of Balkanized and polarized societies in the 20th century is a history of horrors that we dare not ignore.

We are not at that terrible point yet. But that is the direction in which we are headed, under the spell of magic words like "multiculturalism" and "diversity," which have become substitutes for thoughts, even among those who pride themselves on being "thinking people."

Our whole educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities, is permeated with ideologies of group grievances and resentments, painting each group into the corner of its own separate subculture, instead of drawing them into the mainstream of the American culture that made this the greatest nation on earth.

Unless this fashionable Balkanization is stopped, demography can become destiny -- and a tragedy for all.

SOURCE

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Hating the Rich

My late father was a man of strong opinion. He despised phonies, cowards and liars. He named names -- sometimes in very close proximity to those being singled out. A veteran of World War II, he recognized a weasel when he saw one. But my dad never denigrated rich people in general.

We lived in Levittown, N.Y., where everybody had pretty much the same -- that is, not much. We ate tuna casserole, hot dogs and Hamburger Helper. My parents never owned a new car.

Ten miles away, my dentist, a college classmate of my father's, lived in Garden City. Lovely place, filled with rich people. My father often drove us through there and never said a disparaging word about the fine lawns and shiny foreign cars. America was the land of opportunity, and Garden City proved it.

But that was then. Today, many Democrats believe the wealthy are bad to the bone. A new Gallup poll asks: "Do you think the U.S. benefits from having a class of rich people or not?" An amazing 46 percent of self-described Democrats answered "or not."

When I asked two left-leaning pundits about this, they said it is all about "income inequality." They asked me whether my father would approve of that. I said he most likely would reject the entire concept of "income inequality" by giving the pundits the same advice he gave me: "If you don't like what they're paying you, work someplace else."

And I followed that advice, moving 10 times in 15 years on my way up the television news ladder. It wasn't easy, but if I thought my employer was hosing me, I began looking around.

That's how capitalism is supposed to work. America is mandated to provide "equal opportunity," not equal outcomes. The boss man can pay what he wants. It's our choice whether to take it or leave it.

President Obama doesn't seem to get that. He often puts forth that wealthy Americans are not paying their "fair share," that somehow the fix is in, and the rich folk are gaming the system at the expense of working people. But for two years, Obama had an adoring Democratic Congress that did absolutely nothing to further the concept of "income equality." The reason? It's unconstitutional. The feds cannot dictate salaries and benefits in the private marketplace. Obamacare is an attempt to breach that constitutional wall. We'll soon see what the Supreme Court says.

Capitalism is no beach day. The strong and sometimes ruthless prosper. The poorly educated and unfocused often fail. For many Americans, failure is unfair and unacceptable in a "just" society. But my dad knew and accepted the truth of capitalism: Some will win big, some will lose big, but most will live comfortable lives in the middle. Just as he did.

SOURCE

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Generation Pap

Jonah Goldberg

This is the season of generational twaddle. At graduation ceremonies across the country, politicians, authors, actors and businessmen take to the stage to tell young people they are fantastic simply because they are young. This year, the ritual is more pathetic than usual because there's a presidential election in the offing. And because the current occupant of the White House won in 2008 in no small part due to his success with the "youth vote," he is desperate for them to repeat their blunder.

At the all-women's school Barnard College, President Obama spoke to the audience as if they were an undifferentiated mob of "Julias." I'm referring to the banally creepy imaginary everywoman the Obama campaign has conjured on its website to show that Uncle Sam is now both sugar daddy and husband to the women of America. "Now more than ever -- now more than ever," the president repeated, "America needs what you, the Class of 2012, has to offer." By which he meant their votes for him, of course. But he couched it in all sorts of familiar platitudes.

But in terms of naked pandering, few can match Vice President Joe Biden. Last week, he told a group of college students visiting the White House: "You're an incredible generation. And that's not hyperbole either. Your generation and the 9/11 generation before you are the most incredible group of Americans we have ever, ever, ever produced."

Here's a tip: When you hear Biden say, "And that's not hyperbole," you can be sure it's hyperbole. Actually, here's an even better tip: If Biden's lips are moving, assume it's hyperbole.

The conventional response to this sort of thing is to claim that Biden is giving short shrift to some previous generation. What about the "Greatest Generation" of the World War II era? What about the self-proclaimed baby boomer secular saints of the '60s?

But such arguments are part of the problem. Sure, we can talk about age cohorts and make generalizations about them. But in a very important sense, there really is no such thing as "great generations."

I was born the same year as Brett Favre, one of the most successful quarterbacks in football history. I take no more pride in his record than I feel shame for being born the same year as Divine Brown, the porn star and former prostitute who was arrested for her work with Hugh Grant. Cult murderer psychopath Charles Manson, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, "Brady Bunch" mom Florence Henderson and that guy from NPR, Carl Kassel, were all born the same year (1934). What does one person's birth tell us about the life of another? Absolutely nothing.

Seriously, if your self-esteem is remotely dependent on the year you were born, or on the accomplishments of people who happen to be the same age as you, then you don't have a lot going for you. If you spend your days on your parents' couch, working through cases of Cheetos like they were so many equine feedbags, if bong maintenance marks the outer boundary of your personal responsibilities, then I'm sorry to say your inadequacies aren't mitigated one bit by the fact you were born the same year, never mind decade, as Mark Zuckerberg.

And yet that's the point behind so much generational piffle. Youth politics are the cheapest form of identity politics. At least black people are black their whole lives (Michael Jackson being the exception that proves the rule). Barring surgery, women stay women. But young people don't stay young. Moreover, we treat them as if they're geniuses precisely because they don't know much and have little life experience. Of course there are incredibly bright and knowledgeable young people. But as a rule we're all born stupid and ignorant, and that condition improves only as we become less young.

That politicians pander to anything that moves is hardly a shocking revelation. Nor is it stunning to see the White House treat young people as a homogenized blob they hope to flatter and bribe to the polls come November. To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, if there were a huge bloc of cannibals in this country, the Democrats would promise them tasty missionaries fattened at the taxpayers' expense.

What's dismaying is how much this sort of thing seems to work. Part of what's exciting about being young is the discovery that you are your own person, the captain of yourself. Cheering at the idea that you are a drone, expected to simply "act your age" is a sad declaration of your own self-worth.

SOURCE

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Out of Ideas

John C. Goodman

"Out of ideas; out of excuses." That’s Mitt Romney’s critique of Barack Obama. I’d like to second that indictment.

It’s not just the president who is out of ideas. It’s the entire political left. And that’s not a new development. I can’t think of an interesting, left-of-center public policy idea that has gained currency in decades.

How to get the economy moving and create jobs? The liberal answer is more government spending. Yet the "stimulus" package was basically wasted on pork barrel projects of little lasting economic value. One of every two people hired with stimulus money actually had another job before being hired! And the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the long term impact of the stimulus bill will be lower — not higher — national output.

Ditto for the Obama administration’s new budget. Granted, not a single Democrat in Congress supports it. The vote in the House of Representatives was 414 to zero! But suppose the Obama administration budget had become law? After all, the president is implicitly defending his budget ideas when he is out on the campaign trail. The CBO has projected that the latest Obama budget proposal would make our GDP lower, not higher, over the next five years.

Meanwhile, the economic uncertainty the administration is creating is undoubtedly making things worse. Business managers considering hiring new employees are surely burdened by the fact that they do not know what ObamaCare is going to do to their cost of health insurance, what Obama labor regulations are going to do to their other costs of labor, what Dodd/Frank financial regulation is going to do to their ability to borrow or what other regulatory agencies are going to do to their other costs of doing business.

As for entitlement reform, there really is no liberal solution to the financial problems of Social Security, Medicare, disability Insurance or any other entitlement. More than 30 countries have fully or partially privatized their social security systems by creating individual private accounts, by which each new generation of workers can save for their own retirement. But in the United States, a growing number of members of Congress have signed a pledge not to support any Social Security reform that involves the creation of private accounts.

As for health care entitlements, the Obama administration is quietly making war on the only workable solution on the horizon: private health insurance. About two-thirds of all Medicaid enrollees are now in private plans, as are one of every four seniors on Medicare. Nonetheless, there are few things the political left hates more than private enterprise in health care.

The Obama administration has refused to renew a waiver allowing Indiana to continue with its highly successful Health Saving Account plan for Hoosier Medicaid. And as part of Obama Care, several hundred billion dollars is going to be taken away from Medicare Advantage plans that provide seniors with private insurance, similar to the kind of insurance most non-seniors have.

The antipathy toward Medicare Advantage plans is especially hard to understand. President Obama has repeatedly said he wants to encourage electronic medical records, medical homes, integrated care, coordinated care and payment for quality not quantity. Yet the only place in the Medicare system where you can find the president’s ideas actually working are in the Medicare Advantage plans! Unwilling to accept private sector innovation, the administration has its own pilot programs and demonstration projects underway. In the president’s own words, "Let’s find out what works and then go do it." Unfortunately, government-sponsored pilot programs are no substitute for private entrepreneurship. The CBO has analyzed these programs in three separate reports here, here, and here and in each case found them to be not working at all or, at best, producing mediocre results.

As for the most important cause of inequality — our failing public schools — there is no liberal answer to that problem either. Virtually every innovative reform idea — from school vouchers to charter schools to merit pay for teachers — is being resisted by the teachers unions. But when is the last time you saw a liberal politician criticize the National Education Association? How about a liberal columnist? How about the pundits who complain most loudly about the unequal distribution of income?

It’s as though leftwing intellectuals have a tacit agreement not to criticize any group that provides electoral support for the Democratic Party.

So when Mitt Romney says the president is "out of ideas and out of excuses," I say Amen.

SOURCE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

****************************

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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19 May, 2012

Obama Mandate Forces First Catholic College to Drop Insurance

Franciscan University appears to be the first casualty of the new Obama HHS mandate that requires Catholic colleges, groups and businesses to pay for drugs that may cause abortions and birth control for their employees.

Although President Barack Obama declared “If you like your health care coverage you can keep it,” when it came to passing Obamacare, a Catholic college in Ohio has determined it will no longer offer a student health insurance plan.

“The Obama Administration has mandated that all health insurance plans must cover “women’s health services” including contraception, sterilization, and abortion-causing medications as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA),” the university says in a new post on its website. “Up to this time, Franciscan University has specifically excluded these services and products from its student health insurance policy, and we will not participate in a plan that requires us to violate the consistent teachings of the Catholic Church on the sacredness of human life.”

“Additionally, the PPACA increased the mandated maximum coverage amount for student policies to $100,000 for the 2012-13 school year, which would effectively double your premium cost for the policy in fall 2012, with the expectation of further increases in the future,” FUS continues.

“Due to these changes in regulation by the federal government, beginning with the 2012-13 school year, the University 1) will no longer require that all full-time undergraduate students carry health insurance, 2) will no longer offer a student health insurance plan, and 3) will no longer bill those not covered under a parent/guardian plan or personal plan for student health insurance,” the college said.

Franciscan University says the current student health insurance plan will expire on August 15.

More HERE

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Will Homosexual Marriage Force Black Churches to Reconsider Democratic Party?

President Obama's affirmation of gay marriage threatens to undermine the near-monolithic black support Obama enjoyed in 2008. Several members of the black clergy now say they intend to sit out the presidential election. One poll from last November found black opposition to gay marriage at 58 percent, higher than the rest of the country, which is about evenly split.

The real question is this: What took black church leaders so long to reconsider their near blind support for the Democratic Party?

The historical strength of black churches has been that of a moral and spiritual refuge in a once-hostile country of legalized slavery and Jim Crow. This explains why so many civil rights leaders came out of the church. The moral cause was just and clear: Equal rights mean equal rights -- for everyone.

But equal rights and equal results are two very different things. The modern civil rights movement lost its way by failing to appreciate the difference. To achieve "equal results," the Democratic Party, among other things, demands redistribution of wealth, a government response to the "gap" between the rich and poor, higher minimum wages and higher taxes on the so-called rich.

The Democratic Party opposes education vouchers, despite polls showing that black and Hispanic inner-city parents want them. The Democratic Party is the party of race-based preferences and also opposes privatization of Social Security.

The Democratic Party is the party of the welfare state -- a neutron bomb dropped on the intact nuclear family. Author/editor/professor Marvin Olasky, in his book "The Tragedy of American Compassion," traces the growth of welfare. During a mere three-year period in the 1960s, welfare rolls increased nearly 110 percent. President Johnson established "neighborhood centers" whose workers went door-to-door, apprising people of their welfare "rights and benefits."

Until the so-called "War on Poverty," the poverty rate declined steadily. At the turn of the century, nearly 70 percent of Americans were poor. But by the time of the "War on Poverty," the rate stood at approximately 13 or 14 percent. What happened? Welfare created dependency and decreased the incentive of the welfare recipient.

The Heritage Foundation compared families on welfare versus families eligible for welfare but that, for one reason or another, refused to take it. The results were startling. Heritage reported: "Young women raised in families dependent on welfare are two to three times more likely to drop out and fail to graduate from high school than are young women of similar race and socioeconomic background not raised on welfare. Similarly, single mothers raised as children in families receiving welfare remain on AFDC longer as adult parents than do single mothers not raised in welfare families, even when all other social and economic variables are held constant."

The Democratic Party is the party of Roe v. Wade, even though blacks are more pro-life than whites. Former President Jimmy Carter, a religious man who called himself "twice born," thought the Democratic Party made a tactical and moral error by embracing abortion-on-demand as a federal right guaranteed by the Constitution: "I never have believed that Jesus Christ would approve of abortions, and that was one of the problems I had when I was president, having to uphold Roe v. Wade. ... But except for the times when a mother's life is in danger or when a pregnancy is caused by rape or incest, I would certainly not and never have approved any abortions. ... My position on abortion ... is to minimize the need or requirement for abortion and limit it only to women whose (lives) are in danger or who are pregnant as a result of rape or incest. I think if the Democratic Party would adopt that policy, that would be acceptable to a lot of people who are now estranged from our party because of the abortion issue."

The Democratic Party is the party of tax-the-rich. Never mind that Democratic Party icon President John Kennedy sounded downright trickle-downish when he said: "It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low -- and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut rates now. The experience of a number of European countries has borne this out. This country's own experience with tax reductions in 1954 has borne this out, and the reason is that only full employment can balance the budget -- and tax reduction can pave the way to full employment. The purpose of cutting taxes now is not to incur a budgetary deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous expanding economy which will bring a budgetary surplus."

The Democratic Party is the party of minimum wage. Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman said, "We regard the minimum wage as one of the most, if not the most, anti-black laws on the statute books."

For all these reasons, having nothing to do with gay marriage, black churches should have broken with the Democratic Party long ago. Better late than never

SOURCE

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The War Against Doctors

Imagine completing college, then 4 years of graduate school and finally working as a trainee for three to ten years while earning 3-4 times the Federal Poverty level. Then you are permitted to work on your own and go into business, but are unable to set the rates that you will charge your customers. You are required by the federal and state government to pay for the privilege of working, and have to comply with intrusive regulations making it more costly to conduct business with no ability to pass these costs along to your customers. You have almost a 100% chance of being sued during your career and in many cases cannot get insurance to protect you. Your job requires 60-80 hours per week and weekends and nights no longer belong to you. Your business is being threatened by individuals who have not gone down your path and want to get into your business “through the back door”, because they believe that they can do an equivalent job without all of the sacrifice that you have made. And they are getting this opportunity.

This is the reality for US physicians.

SD is a plastic surgeon who needed to leave her state and move across the country because it became impossible to meet overhead and to earn a salary. MB is a urologist in the southeast who could not afford her overhead because insurance companies slashed her reimbursements, so she had to move into an 1100 square foot office. RA is a surgeon in the north who faces the possibility of losing his entire referral base which the local hospital now controls, unless he cooperates with them. JS, an ophthalmologist and her husband, a surgeon, could not make ends meet in California because insurance reimbursement is so low and had to leave to provide for their family of 4.

At a time when it is trendy to invoke the term “war” against various groups, such as the contrived, GOP “war against women” or “war against seniors”, it may appear trite to say that there is a war against doctors; but there is. This has been going on for decades and cannot be blamed on President Obama or the Affordable Care Act (ACA), but sadly, both have facilitated an escalation of this war.

One might ask- is there a war against doctors? The simple answer is yes and it is all about money and control. There is no healthcare without doctors, who happen to be at the center of the myriad of healthcare events under their daily control. Healthcare is a $2.3 Trillion annual economy accounting for approximately 16% of our gross domestic product. There is tremendous incentive to control doctors and hence, the flow of huge dollars. Entities have unsuccessfully tried to do so in the past. Insurance companies in the 1980s tried doing so using capitated HMOs. Publicly traded Wall St. firms in the 1990s made a futile attempt to buy medical practices to squeeze out profits by controlling physician behavior.

The lessons of the past were not lost on the architects of the ACA, but it required a group assault on physicians, coming at them from different directions. The cabal of the hospital and the insurance industries, along with the federal government posed an almost insurmountable challenge. In exchange for the support of the American Hospital Association, the federal government gave hospitals a tremendous advantage, by outlawing physicians from opening their own hospitals, which would naturally compete against existing hospitals. Furthermore, the ACA promotes Accountable Care Organizations as a preferred reimbursement model for healthcare. This arrangement is like capitated HMOs, but on steroids. The third party payer issues a single payment for a hospitalization and leaves it to the ACO to divide the payment fairly (not likely). In anticipation of this change in reimbursement, hospitals are purchasing physician practices in an attempt to control healthcare market share. The likely outcome will be fewer doctors who are self-employed, as reported in the Wall St. Journal, and ultimately, the demise of the private practice of medicine.

The war against physicians is being waged on many fronts. Trial attorneys are fighting to preserve the status quo of the medical malpractice system, where they are the primary beneficiaries. It is coming from non-physician healthcare providers such as nurse practitioners or optometrists. They hire aggressive political lobbyists and spread around hundreds of millions of dollars to influence politicians who then create laws that confer physician status upon these allied healthcare professionals.

Public awareness of this war on their doctors is essential in order to understand the antipathy of doctors for Obamacare, and the concern that they have regarding the future of medicine in the US. It warrants a strong public outcry because when the doctors no longer work for their patients, but instead for some other entity, then heaven help our patients.

SOURCE

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New York Times Jumps the Shark With Anti-Capitalist Propaganda

We’ve come to a fork in the road: either we return to capitalism (i.e., voluntary exchanges based on mutual best interest) or we plunge the rest of the way into socialism (an economy based entirely on bureaucratic coercion, i.e., slavery). History has shown repeatedly that the former leads to wealth and dignity, the latter to poverty and tyranny. Here’s where the New York Times — official mouthpiece of the liberal ruling class — comes down on the issue:

A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are “clinical psychopaths,” exhibiting a lack of interest in and empathy for others and an “unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation.” (The proportion at large is 1 percent.) Another study concluded that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and break the law.

The only thing that puzzles me about these claims is that anyone would find them surprising. Wall Street is capitalism in its purest form, and capitalism is predicated on bad behavior. …

I always found the notion of a business school amusing. What kinds of courses do they offer? Robbing Widows and Orphans? Grinding the Faces of the Poor? Having It Both Ways? Feeding at the Public Trough? There was a documentary several years ago called “The Corporation” that accepted the premise that corporations are persons and then asked what kind of people they are. The answer was, precisely, psychopaths: indifferent to others, incapable of guilt, exclusively devoted to their own interests.

Demagoguery demonizing economic freedom couldn’t have gone any further over the top in the darkest days of Stalinist Russia. At least the mask is off, so that we know what we are up against. Liberal = communist.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Obama’s campaign slop to women: "Barack Obama is buying votes. The Paycheck Fairness Act (PFA) is a blatant sop thrown to a voting block on which his next presidency may depend: women, specifically, liberal women. Obama also hopes it will weaken Mitt Romney, who is trying to woo women himself and, yet, cannot endorse the PFA without alienating conservatives."

Uncle Sam or Uncle Sugar? "It seems that no matter which party is in power, the government always grows. Why is this? The answer is relatively straightforward. Politicians get attention -- and applause -- for doing things. When things are going poorly, people never call their congressman and scream, 'Don't just do something, sit there!'"

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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18 May, 2012

Ideology and "what works"

Like The "Progressives" of the early 20th century, President Obama and many of his fellow Leftists these days are quite fond of making the claim that they are simply motivated by "what works" and are not driven by ideology the way conservatives are. The philosophical emptiness of such claims is thoroughly amusing and I have always seen it as just too shallow to be worth a reply. Just how empty the claim is can be shown by a simple question: "How do you define "what works"?" -- or -- "When do you know that something has "worked"?"

The inevitable answer to that has to be in terms of ideology: "Whether something leads to greater economic equality", would certainly be a common Leftist answer to my question. But that simply shows that the Leftist subscribes to an ideology that economic equality is desirable.

In his latest book, however, Jonah Goldberg is marginally more respectful of the claim. He first documents the claim at some length but instead of wiping it off with a simple question, he devotes a whole chapter to refuting it. And his conclusion is that both Left and Right have ideologies -- but ideologies that are different.

Jonah does note however that in the past it was in fact conservatives who abjured ideology and customarily pointed to Leftists as ideologues. And I think that view is essential to understanding conservatism. In his book Inside Right, Ian Gilmour, once Lord Privy Seal of England under Margaret Thatcher, offers an historical study of conservatism and concludes that conservatives are "trimmers": People with ideas that change with circumstances without much in the way of pre-established doctrines or policy consistency.

In my own historical study of conservative thought I noted many instances of such claims from conservative thinkers and concluded that conservatism can only be understood as a psychological disposition -- a tendency towards cautiousness -- and that different policy responses may be generated by that underlying psychological conservatism from time to time -- though a desire for individual liberty is a common outcome of that psychological disposition.

So I side with the earlier conservative thinkers and say that it is conservatives who are the non-ideological ones. The Leftist claim on that distinction becomes mere trickery. They think that by claiming to be something that is really true of conservatives, they can gain some added respectibility for their policies and deflect attention from whom the real practical people are. It is a sort of reverse-projection: Instead of seeing their own faults in others, they see the strengths of others in themselves.

So I see Jonah as too kind to the Left. They are just crooks who will say anything if it will get them power. Conservatives should not let the Left get away with stealing our clothes. And the best way to do that is to keep asking them my questions above.

Conservatives don't have to make broad claims about standing for "what works". Rather we just deal with individual issues as they arise and point out what the consequences of a Leftist response to those issues is likely to be. The track record of socialism is so dismal that that is not hard to do. If anything engenders caution, it is socialism

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'Obama was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii': President's OWN literary agency promotional booklet from 1991 claims he WAS born in Africa

The simmering political row over President Obama’s heritage was dramatically reignited today as a 1991 booklet boldly announced that the Democrat was ‘born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.’

In the cover for a 1991 promotional booklet by Mr Obama’s then-publisher Acton & Dystel, he is as ‘the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, (who) was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.’

The information, which could be used as more ammunition against the incumbent, comes months before what will likely be a close campaign between Mr Obama and likely Republican nominee Mitt Romney.

The 36-page promotional booklet was exclusively obtained by Breitbart, and was sent out to colleagues within the publishing industry in the early 1990s.

A later biography, which can still be found on Acton & Dystel’s archives, reads: ‘Barack Obama is the junior Democratic senator from Illinois and was the dynamic keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. ‘He was also the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. He was born in Kenya to an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister and was raised in Indonesia, Hawaii, and Chicago. His first book, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, has been a long time New York Times bestseller.

The blue, teal, and silver booklet was printed in part to celebrate Acton & Dystel’s 15th anniversary, and also to display the breadth and depth of authors the imprint published.

Other authors featured include Ralph Nader, former Speaker of the House Thomas P. O’Neill, and pop group New Kids on the Block.

Miriam Goderich, who now works at partner company Dystel & Goderich, is listed as the pamphlet’s editor. An assistant for Ms Goderich told MailOnline that she was not commenting on the story at this time.

New York Magazine columnist Jonathan Chait writes that the ‘controversy’ was little more than the result of a ‘lazy literary agent.’

More HERE

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Number of babies born to ethnic minorities surpasses whites in U.S. for first time

America has reached a landmark point as, for the first time in its modern history, most of the babies being born there are non-white. White children aged under one are outnumbered by those from ethnic minorities including blacks, Hispanics, Asians and mixed race, US Census Bureau figures show.

Of the four million children born in the US in the 12 months to July 2011, 50.4 per cent were from ethnic minorities. That compares with 37 per cent in 1990.

The figures also reveal the prolonged impact of a weak economy, which is resulting in fewer Hispanics entering the U.S.

Roderick Harrison, a former chief of racial statistics at the Census Bureau who is now a sociologist at Howard University, said: 'This is an important landmark. This generation is growing up much more accustomed to diversity than its elders.'

In recent years, births have been declining for both whites and minorities as many women held off having children due to the economic slump, although the drop has been larger for whites.

Minorities increased 1.9 per cent to 114.1 million, or 36.6 per cent of the total U.S. population, lifted by prior waves of immigration that brought in young families and boosted the number of Hispanic women in their prime childbearing years.

But a recent slowdown in the growth of the Hispanic and Asian populations is shifting notions on when the tipping point in U.S. diversity will come - the time when non-Hispanic whites become a minority.

After 2010 census results suggested a crossover as early as 2040, demographers now believe the pivotal moment may be pushed back several years when new projections are released in December.

The annual growth rates for Hispanics and Asians fell sharply last year to just over two per cent, roughly half the rates in 2000 and the lowest in more than a decade. The black growth rate stayed flat at 1 per cent.

More HERE

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Health care: No, the state doesn't know best

by Jeff Jacoby

PRICES WERE OUT OF CONTROL at the end of 3rd-century Rome, and the Emperor Diocletian was determined to rein them in. In AD 301 he issued his famous Edict on Prices, a complex piece of legislation that banned speculation and established price ceilings for a wide range of goods and services. But the ambitious law failed. Though violators could be punished with death, inflation and speculation persisted. Goods were hoarded, or sold on the black market. The economic crisis worsened. Eventually the law was abandoned. Like countless rulers before and since, Diocletian discovered the hard way that price controls don't work. They worsen the problem they are intended to solve, leading to shortages, rationing, and even higher prices.

Yet the belief that government can control inflation by fiat never seems to lose its allure.

Which brings us to the "Health Care Quality Improvement and Cost Reduction Act of 2012," a 178-page bill introduced in the Massachusetts House this month amid jaunty predictions of cheaper insurance premiums for Bay State families and tens of billions of dollars in medical savings over the next 15 years. An even longer bill -- 235 pages -- has been introduced in the state Senate.

These bills aren't written in Latin and they don't impose the death penalty, but their core principle is not much different from Diocletian's: The state knows best. What fraction of the local economy should health care consume? How fast should medical spending rise? On what business model should provider networks be organized? How should hospital and doctors fees be calculated? Where should consumers get information on quality and cost of care? When are a provider's high rates justified? What penalty should it bear when they aren't? In the world these plans envision, decision after decision comes not through the voluntary interplay of doctors, patients, hospitals, and insurers, but from government agents who impose them from above.

Adding up the "dizzying and expansive" array of decrees in the House legislation, health-care analyst Joshua Archambault of the Pioneer Institute finds 941 instances in which the bill mandates that something "shall" be done. Among these are more than 25 kinds of penalties, fines, and surcharges, for price control and punishment always go hand in hand. Looming over all would be a new Division of Health Care Cost and Quality, a command-and-control behemoth that would dominate the state's medical and health-insurance landscapes, with the power to affect billions of dollars and millions of lives.

And would any checks and balances restrain this behemoth? In the language of the House bill, it "shall be an independent public entity not subject to the supervision and control of any other executive office, department, commission, board, bureau, agency or political subdivision." Throw in a toga, and Diocletian would feel right at home.

This is "Health Reform 2.0," as some on Beacon Hill are calling it -- the logical follow-on to Mitt Romney's 2006 overhaul. In practice, the RomneyCare model has meant less freedom, more tax-funded subsidies, surging growth in insurance premiums, longer wait times to see a new doctor, and undiminished reliance on emergency rooms. For those who deem such outcomes a success, more top-down interference with health care may seem like a splendid idea.

But those who regret having believed the exaggerated hype about "Health Reform 1.0" -- particularly Romney's 2006 assurance that everyone in Massachusetts "will soon have affordable health insurance and the costs of health care will be reduced" -- may want to take the latest rosy predictions with more than a grain of salt.

State Representative Steven Walsh, the Lynn Democrat who co-chairs the Legislature's Health Care Financing Committee, swears that this time "reform" will accomplish everything its advocates dream of. "Bring on the skeptics," he crows. "We're going to be a healthier community because of this in five years and we're going to save an awful lot of money doing it."

If only. Bureaucrats, no matter how well intentioned, cannot know how much medical services should cost or how insurance premiums should grow. Ham-fisted state intervention is responsible for much of what ails the Bay State's markets in health care and medical coverage. More ham-fisted intervention isn't the cure.

Many things have changed over time, but the laws of supply and demand aren't among them. Price controls invariably make economic problems worse. It was true in Diocletian's Rome. It's no less true in Deval Patrick's Massachusetts.

SOURCE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

****************************

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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17 May, 2012

Too Big to Manage

Yesterday I asked: If JPMorgan Chase’s loss of $2 billion shows the need for more bank regulation, what should the federal government’s $1.3 trillion deficit tell us? And Michael Cannon pointed out that in the private sector, people who make big mistakes tend to lose their jobs, unlike the public sector.

Today another theme is being heard, at the Wall Street Journal, on NPR, and many more places including even here at Cato@Liberty: banks like JPMorgan, which has annual revenue of $100 billion, are just “too big to manage.”

And again I have to wonder: if large banks are too big to manage, what should we think about the federal government? The federal government is the largest landowner, the largest insurer, the largest employer, the largest banker in the country. It operates everything from a judiciary to the most complex armed force in history to numerous health insurance programs to a retirement system to a highway system to a peanut subsidy program.

If JPMorgan is too big to manage, can we possibly expect competent management of such a massive operation that doesn’t even face the feedback of profit and loss?

SOURCE

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Review of The Death of Liberalism, by R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.

Review by HERBERT LONDON

The redoubtable R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. has done it again; he has written yet another penetrating analysis of the liberal establishment in his latest book, The Death of Liberalism, (Thomas Nelson, 2012)

Although this is a polemic with the biting attributes of Tyrrell's acid-like analysis, the points are critical, or as he puts it, fatal. For example, as he notes, the increase in the national debt is crushing and no amount of expropriation in the form of new and higher taxes can retire it.

At bottom Tyrrell, relying on a transparent admission by Herbert Croly in the Promise of American Life, maintains that liberalism is an expression of the belief "that the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat." Hence, the need for government social engineers who arrogantly do the necessary bidding for reform.

The new progressives invariably invoke the goals of justice and fairness, but their policy applications are anti-democratic and illiberal. They claim, as an example, that universal health care will engender low cost and high quality care, but overlook the fact that it entails stripping many Americans of cherished liberties.

Clearly statism of the kind promoted by the new progressives argues for aggressive legislation to right the wrongs of the past, from the unequal distribution of wealth to urban woe. In the process, liberty is compromised and the promised goals of this intellectual exercise prove elusive. As Tyrrell contends, liberalism is exhausted, a victim of failed policies going back to the New Deal.

He notes accurately, I believe, that the white working class believes in the nation, its history, Constitution, and customs. It is suspicious of elites and believes that the progressives have deserted them, despite rhetorical gestures made in their direction. The liberal schemes for the future are a composite of socialism, fascism, and American bred big government melded together in a brew that is designed to engender citizen dependency and infantilism.

When the Obama led government took over AIG, Chrysler, General Motors, and the banks that were deemed "too big to fail," the sign of progressive overreach was readily visible. This spectacular expansion of federal authority placed one-sixth of the economy under government control. What Tyrrell describes as socialism with "a friendly face."

As I see it, Tyrrell has effectively captured the liberal impulse for government's insinuation into every aspect of economic life. Where I hesitantly challenge Mr. Tyrrell is whether the evidence he has compiled leads inexorably to the death of liberalism. After all, communism died, but leviathan prevails. It might well be asked if the number of Americans seduced by government activity is not larger than those who do not feed from the public trough.

Consider for the sake of argument the fact that 45 million Americans are on food stamps (1.8 million in New York with a total population of 8 million); 50.5 million receive Medicaid; 46.5 million are on Medicare; 52 million receive Social Security benefits; 26 million are receiving earned income credit. These payments account for well over 70 percent of the federal budget and limits are not on the horizon.

Consider as well benefits to home owners, crony capitalism activity and the role interest groups play in deriving special treatment from government. It is one thing to say, as erstwhile President Clinton did, that the age of big government is over, and quite another matter to see it put into effect. Big government is not deleveraging because too many people have a stake in its retention.

Perhaps claims of The Death of Liberalism are exaggerated. But on the essential issue Tyrrell is correct-liberalism is draining energy from the body politic, forcing the United States into a crisis of unparalleled proportions. Of course, this may be a crisis that isn't wasted and restores the traditions that gave this nation vitality. As I see it, hope is the harbinger of appropriate change and Tyrrell may be on to something.

SOURCE

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Obama’s Jobless Rate Reality

For the third straight spring, the American economy is experiencing a “failure to launch.” Our nation’s unemployment rate continues to inch lower — from 8.2 percent in March to 8.1 percent last month – but it’s dropping for all the wrong reasons (i.e. people leaving the labor force). And despite the Federal Reserve’s optimistic projections of sustained job growth over the coming months, the fundamentals of the U.S. labor market remain weak.

Record numbers of workers are exiting the job market — 340,000 of them last month alone — and the ranks of the long-term unemployed continue to hover at elevated levels.

Since Barack Obama took office, America’s civilian non-institutionalized population has expanded by more than 8 million people — however there are 319,000 fewer Americans working today than in January 2009. As a result of this failure to create jobs, America’s labor participation rate is at a 30-year low of 63.6 percent — and still falling.

This largely unreported statistic translates into less productivity and a bigger burden for taxpayers, but it also means America has a much higher unemployment rate than the one Obama’s administration has been touting. In fact had America’s labor participation rate remained constant over the duration of Obama’s term, the current unemployment rate would be 11.1 percent.

More HERE

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Europe's high-taxing Right is headed for a fall

Nobody should be surprised if voters also give Angela Merkel and David Cameron the boot at the next ballot

Readers presumably understand that Europe's economic crisis is also the crisis of social democracy—of the idea that markets must be made to co-exist with high levels of taxation, regulation, unionization, welfare spending and subsidized health care and education. Eutopia may be nice in theory; it may even work for a while. But eventually social-democratic policies will lead to economic stagnation, policy paralysis and national bankruptcy on the continental scale we are witnessing today.

So, naturally, Germany's Social Democrats romped to a 13-point victory in Sunday's elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, the country's largest state.

"All politics is local," goes the cliché, and it would be tempting to read the German result that way, too. The state had long been a Social Democratic stronghold before tipping into the hands of Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats in 2005. Mrs. Merkel remains broadly liked as chancellor and doesn't face an election until next year. And the German economy is the envy of Europe.

And yet Mrs. Merkel's party keeps losing state elections: In its old stronghold of Baden-Würrttemberg last year; in her home state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Are Germans doing so well that they've decided to become politically flippant about their prosperity? Would Christian Democrats be doing a bit better politically if the economy were doing a bit worse?

The resurgence of the Social Democrats in Germany is of a piece with the strong showing of Labour last month in Britain's local council elections. It's of a piece with the pathetic showing this month of Greece's center-right New Democracy, and of the resurgence there of the hard left. It's especially of a piece with Francois Hollande's improbable rise to the French presidency, on the strength of economic ideas whose intellectual sell-by date was sometime in the mid-1970s.

Have the gods gone crazy? No. But maybe there's a message here for Europe's joy-fearing conservatives, who seem to have convinced themselves that managing an economy should be like running a 19th-century nunnery—an exercise in the stern suppression of animal spirits.

Take euro-conservative tax policy. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy responded to the euro-zone crisis by increasing some VAT rates to 21.2% from 19.6%, introducing a 3% surcharge on high incomes, and raising the effective capital-gains tax to 32.5% from 31.3%. In Britain, David Cameron raised VAT to 20% from 17.5% and kept the top marginal rate at 50% (now coming down to a still-exorbitant 45%).

Germany? Tax cuts Mrs. Merkel promised when she was re-elected never materialized, though corporate rates have come down. The new conservative Spanish government of Mariano Rajoy is raising the top marginal rate of income tax to 52% from 45%. In Holland, the right-of-center government increased the top VAT rate two percentage points to 21% and doubled the country's bank tax prior to its sudden collapse last month. Italy's technocratic administration of Mario Monti has imposed new levies on property, luxury goods and repatriated wealth.

No wonder the natives are stirring. Europe's right-of-center leaders came to office on the perception that they are better economic managers than their left-of-center counterparts. What they've mainly shown is that they are just as incompetent—only a lot more severe.

Raising consumption taxes in an otherwise flat-lining economy is especially galling if it's joined to the perception (accurate or not) that the government plans to lay off government workers. Why should Europeans be made to sacrifice on an altar of austerity whose benefits have so far failed to materialize, except perhaps as a slightly more palatable debt-to-GDP score? Just who is this thing called "the economy" meant to serve?

The astonishing political result is that it is now the left that has captured the language of growth. Never mind the precise formulas: blowout deficit spending, loose monetary policy, millionaire surcharges, a Tobin tax, euro bonds financed by anybody who can turn water into wine, a "mild" dose of inflation. At least the left is talking growth, not redistribution. That's a mark of political progress.

Here's something else the European left seems to be recapturing: the language of sovereignty and democracy.

For years, it was the right that had a corner on that particular market, with its suspicion of all things Brussels. But Mrs. Merkel and Mr. Sarkozy undercut that reputation with their serially ill-fated efforts to broker grand bargains for "saving" the euro zone. Their prescriptions were rubbish—Does Greece look like it's been rescued? Has Mrs. Merkel's fiscal pact held up?—but their arrogance was worse. Nobody wants their economic future dictated to them by leaders they didn't elect, in languages they probably don't understand. Yet that's exactly what "Merkozy" sought to impose.

Now it's gone, and good riddance too. The French will probably soon come to regret Mr. Hollande, but it's unlikely Mr. Sarkozy will be missed. Nobody should be surprised if voters also give Mrs. Merkel, Mr. Rajoy and Mr. Cameron the boot at the next ballot. At its best, the right should stand for the idea that the purpose of government is to allow people to flourish, mainly by getting out of their way. Today's European right stands instead for imposing penalties on people in order to atone for the sins of government. That's a right that deserves to lose, and will, until it learns that voters want freedom, not chastity.

SOURCE

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The Demise of Employer-Based Health Insurance

There is no question that the President wants a “single payer,” where hospitals and physicians are all paid from a single source, a single government-run program funded by general taxation. The fact that this leads to shortages, waiting lines, and rationing does not seem to concern those who have this single-minded goal.

Before he became President, Senator Barack Obama addressed members of the AFL-CIO. He stated:

"I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its gross national product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. Everybody in, nobody out-- a single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. That's what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we've got to take back the White House, we've got to take back the Senate, and we've got to take back the House."

The messy business of passing health care reform began in earnest as soon as President Obama took office. His party did have control of the House and Senate, but loud opposition began and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) was passed by the slimmest of margins in early 2010. In order to keep the semblance of continuity, the new law was built on the current system of employer-based health insurance. Americans have an independent streak and would not accept a government single-payer system in one fell swoop.

Employer-based health insurance has proven inadequate. It developed in a time when people were less mobile and the norm was to find a job and stay with it until it was time for the retirement dinner and gold watch. Now that people tend to regularly change jobs, getting into and out of health insurance policies leads to disruption of care as different doctors are in different plans.

Despite its drawbacks, 170 million Americans depend on employer-based coverage. What will happen if they lose it in the next two years, thanks to PPACA? The law was actually designed to discourage employers from covering their workers, as the penalty for not meeting the employer mandate is quite small, while the “minimum essential coverage” will be very expensive. The House Ways and Means Committee found that 71 of the Fortune 100 companies could save $422 billion from 2014-2023 by dropping insurance and paying the fine.

In addition, price limits on premiums with increasing mandated benefits will serve to drive the insurance companies out of business.

If PPACA is not overturned or repealed, President Obama will probably get his wish.

And would Americans get “fair” and “equal” care? On George Orwell’s Animal Farm “all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” Under socialism, the ruling elite never seem to have to abide by the rules that they so methodically craft for the rest of us. President Obama knows that his wife and daughters will be immune to the downside of single payer, while the rank and file will suffer greatly. The people will beg for relief from excessive taxation and access to better medical care, but will they be able to find it?

Rather than moving toward single payer, it would be better to eliminate any middleman in most encounters between patient and physician. Allow the patients to pay for routine care and purchase their own health insurance plans with the least government meddling. Big government stifles initiative and punishes achievement.

Our Constitution envisioned citizen legislators who would create laws that are so fair they are happy to live by them. It is what Americans really need. Let’s hope the Supreme Court completely voids PPACA and we can have a system based on liberty, personal initiative, and freedom to access the best care at the lowest cost. Only when the government gets out of medicine will we ever achieve that goal.

SOURCE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

****************************

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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16 May, 2012

Obama Is the Extremist, Not Conservative Talkers

Some conservatives believe that other conservatives, on talk radio and Fox News Channel, are damaging the cause of conservatism by dishonestly overstating their case against President Obama to increase their ratings and profits.

More reasonable Republican politicians, they argue, would like to cooperate with Obama on bipartisan solutions but don't have the power to resist these extremists with the megaphones and so have buckled in lock step to their demands and become the party of "no" and the purveyors of gridlock.

The problem is that the presuppositions underlying those allegations are wrong. There may be some exceptions, but the large majority of leading conservative voices are doing their very best to save this nation from Obama's policies, which they believe are leading to the nation's financial, cultural and national security ruin. Obama is a leftist, very extreme by historical standards. To compromise with his positions would not be in the best interest of the nation but would advance the cause of leftism, so any pressure conservatives can bring to bear on Republican politicians to strongly oppose his agenda is laudable.

I can't conceive of too many situations in which splitting the difference with Obama has advanced or would advance the cause of conservatism or constitutional liberty. We wouldn't reduce our debt, for example, by agreeing to reduce the levels of increases in spending. We couldn't improve the quality, cost and availability of health care by agreeing to more government intervention when we believe in free market solutions. We couldn't prudently agree to a half-measure stimulus package when we believe stimulus spending not only doesn't stimulate the economy but does further increase the debt. We couldn't agree to some compromise reductions in our nuclear and conventional forces if we believe that even these lesser cuts would jeopardize our national security. We couldn't agree to meet Obama halfway on energy policy by signing on to policies that punish conventional energy only half as much and waste just half as many billions on quixotic green energy debacles.

We can get mired in a semantic argument over whether Obama is a card-carrying communist, a European socialist, an admirer of Hugo Chavez's and Daniel Ortega's or, as he says, a fierce advocate of the free market, but such quibbling is more misleading than the labels themselves.

Perhaps Obama doesn't technically favor ushering in Karl Marx's "dictatorship of the proletariat" en route to the "withering away of the state" and the promised utopia. But the issue isn't whether Obama subscribes to this or that brand of socialism -- Marxism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, Leninism, democratic socialism or whatever. The point is that he's a radical leftist who subscribes to the radical leftist worldview, and many of us believe that if left unchecked, he would go much further than he's gone to undermine our Constitution and our freedom tradition. Considering the degree to which he has thwarted and circumvented the Constitution and the rule of law -- and otherwise abused his executive authority during his first term -- despite facing re-election in 2012, there is no telling how radical he might become with four more years in lame duck status.

I do think a strong case can be made that he has Marxist leanings and thus believe the term is warranted as a general descriptor. For 20 years, he belonged to a church that emphasized race and materialism more than it did Christian theology. He appointed radical czars, some of whom self-identify as Marxists, and others support Chavez's track record in oppressing media freedom. He constantly demonizes the "wealthy," business and "excess profits." He obsesses over redistributing wealth. He seems to subscribe to the Marxist theory of surplus value, believing labor never receives its fair share and often abusing his executive authority to remedy that perceived injustice. He is in favor of ever-increasing government control of business and industry -- not just health care -- and has a manifest distrust of the market.

Call him what you want, but don't tell me he isn't an extreme leftist by American standards. He might be a moderate in Europe, but not here.

If not for strong conservative voices opposing his radical agenda, he would have gone much further: larger and more stimuli, much greater deficits and debt, even higher percentages of people on the welfare rolls and not paying income taxes, an even more lawless Justice Department, a single-payer health care system, the consummation of the war on conventional energy and further wasteful green energy experiments, a more progressive income tax code, a possible value-added tax, more liberal activist judges, greater unilateral disarmament, further relaxation of border control, more government control over business -- and more.

Thank God for conservative talkers and other voices on the right who aren't deterred from doing what is right for fear of being called extremists themselves.

SOURCE

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Myths About Inequality

Because they do not seem to have any real solutions to real problems, the leftwing in this country has become fixated on a non-problem: inequality. In the process, people who harp on this idea often get their facts wrong. The following is my attempt to set the record straight.

Myth: Those at the bottom are worse off because the rich are better off.

"The rich are sucking up all the income," said Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs on Morning Joe. Surveying the past two decades, Brian Wesbury gives this answer:

Yes the top 1% saw its share of that income rise from 8.5% to 16.9%. And, yes, the bottom 50% saw its share fall from 17.7% to 13.5%, but that smaller share in 2009 was $1.05 trillion, a 265% increase… In other words, it is true that incomes at the top have risen faster than average incomes, but it is not true that any group has been made worse off. Incomes and living standards for all Americans, including those in lower-income brackets, are up. At the same time, tax burdens for those in lower-income groups have fallen substantially.

Myth: The rich are not paying their fair share of taxes.

In fact, higher income taxpayers pay a considerably larger share of the tax burden than their share of personal income (see the chart here):

* The top 1% of the income distribution earns 18% of personal income, but pays 27% of total federal tax liabilities.

* The top 10% earns 31% of the income, but pays 44% of the taxes.

* By contrast, the bottom 60% of the population receives 25% of the income, but pays only 14% of the taxes.

Myth: The income of the rich has been rising relative to everyone else.

In fact, a large part of the apparent growth in income inequality is simply the result of differences in the way Americans pay taxes. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Phil Gramm and Steve McMillan explain it this way:

In 1986, before the top marginal tax rate was reduced to 28% from 50%, half of all businesses in America were organized as C-Corps and taxed as corporations. By 2007, only 21% of businesses in America were taxed as corporations and 79% were organized as pass-through entities, with four million S-Corps and three million partnerships filing taxes as individuals.

Because of those changes, over the past 20 years the share of income of the top 1% of taxpayers coming from S-corporations tripled. Similarly, lowering the rate on capital gains encouraged taxpayers to realize gains and pay taxes on them. The lower rates on dividend income encouraged companies to pay dividends to individuals instead of keeping the funds as corporate retained earnings. Overall:

If the share of income coming from businesses, capital gains and dividends had remained at the levels before the tax rate changes of 1986, 1997 and 2003 respectively, the income of top 1% filers would have been 31% lower in 2007.

Myth: The U.S. tax system is less progressive than the tax systems of other countries.

In fact, the United States has the most progressive tax system of all developed countries. According to the most recent report from the OECD, the United States "collects the largest share of taxes from the richest 10% of the population." As Gramm and McMillin explain:

When the U.S. collects 16.1% of GDP in income taxes, the top 10% of taxpayers pay 7.3% and the other 90% pick up 8.9%.
In France, however, they collect 24.3% of GDP in income taxes with the top 10% paying 6.8% and the rest paying a whopping 17.5% of GDP. Sweden collects its 28.5% of GDP through income taxes by tapping the top 10% for 7.6%, but the other 90% get hit for a back-breaking 20.9% of GDP.

If the U.S. spent and taxed like France and Sweden, it would hardly affect the top 10%, who would pay about what they pay now, but the bottom 90% would see their taxes double.

Myth: Income is the best measure of well-being.

Many wealthy people live modest lives. And many low-income families take advantage of anti-poverty programs that furnish them with housing, Food Stamps and medical care. Surely the best measure of well-being is not what people earn, but what they consume. As it turns out, there has been very little change in inequality of consumption over the past 25 years. As Diana Furthgott-Roth explains:

Government data on individual spending patterns show that the ratio of spending between the top and bottom 20 percent of the income distribution, measured on a per person basis, was essentially unchanged between 1985 and 2010. In 1985 people in the top quintile had spending that was 2.5 times that of people in the bottom quintile. By 2010, this ratio was 2.4.

SOURCE

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Why are All the Leftist Politicians Who Hate the Rich…So Filthy Rich?

Have you ever noticed how almost all the leftist politicians who hate and want to punish the rich with draconian tax increases…are filthy rich themselves? Confusing, isn’t it?

Actually, once you know the truth it's really quite easy to understand.

Take France’s new Socialist President Francois Holland. He never stops talking about his dislike and disgust for the rich. He is almost more obsessed with hate for the rich than Obama is. Yet it turns out Holland is…drumroll please…filthy rich himself.

That’s right. Socialist Holland owns not one, not two, but three homes in Cannes on the French Riviera. Unbelievable.

In America let’s think of the biggest haters of the rich. Obama is now filthy rich. He has been since selling his autobiography after getting elected to the U.S. Senate, and buying a $2,000,000 Chicago home (with help from a convicted felon). Once Obama leaves the White House (hopefully soon), he’ll spend the rest of his life getting paid millions for books and $200,000 a pop for speeches to the business groups he hates so much.

Bill and Hillary Clinton hate the rich. They left the White House broke and owing millions in legal fees. After quickly capitalizing with books, speeches and foundations they turned zero into an $80,000,000 fortune in a few short years. I’ve never heard of a job like that. I’m not referring to being President. I’m referring to hating the rich. It seems to magically make you…filthy rich.

Al Gore is far richer than his old boss Bill Clinton. Gore the bore is worth about one billion dollars from his TV network, documentaries and stock options. All of that wealth is based on disliking the rich, and trying to tax them to death in order to save the world from global warming. But Gore uses more energy on one trip in his private jet than all of us do in a decade of driving. And Al’s 20,000 square foot mansion uses more electricity in a year than most of us pay for rent in a decade. And, don’t forget Gore started out the privileged son of a U.S. Senator.

Or take New York’s disgraced ex-Governor Eliot Spitzer. The great anti-business, anti-Wall Street crusader never bothered to disclose that his daddy owns half the buildings on Manhattan’s Fifth Ave. I’ve never owned one building in my life, yet I fight for capitalism every day. I am a capitalist evangelist. Yet someone whose daddy practically owns the world’s most exclusive avenue takes great pleasure in putting self-made rich men in prison. Do you see the irony there? Do you see the pattern?

These people are hypocrites of the highest order. They are angry and guilty for having never earned a dime of their own fortunes. By dumb luck they were dropped down the right chimney, lucky sperm club members who had everything handed to them.

So, they hate self-made rich people. Self-made men and women remind them of what they are not. They remind them of the wealth they never earned. Remind them of the deep-seated guilt they feel every day of their lives. Remind them, but for the grace of God, they could (and probably would) be riding a bus in the Bronx, headed to a blue collar job.

That’s why leftist politicians (and lawyers, media and the Hollywood elite) hate the self-made rich so much. Because they never earned their own money- and they know it.

I figured it out 30 years ago in college. I was Obama’s classmate at Columbia University, Class of ’83, a blue-collar, middle class, S.O.B. (son of a butcher) surrounded by filthy-rich, spoiled brats. Almost all my classmates were sons and daughters of privilege. They went to the fanciest prep schools, vacationed in Europe, lived in mansions on leafy streets in legendary towns from Great Neck to Sutton Place to Beverly Hills. Yet they all hated the rich. They wanted to bring down capitalism.

“Woe is me.” They were pitiful and pathetic in their white guilt. Their act to make believe they weren’t the luckiest, most spoiled, and privileged bunch in the world made me ill.

Nothing has changed in 30 years. The rich kids I met at Columbia hated the rich because they were embarrassed by the tens or hundreds of millions they had without deserving or earning it. Today they are the mainstream media, the leftist D.C politicians, and the donors that support them.

They still hate the rich. They just never disclose to anyone how rich they were on the day they were born, how every door has been opened, how everything has been handed to them their entire lives, and how every failure has been papered over with mommy and daddy’s money.

That’s the secret. Show me a self-made man or woman and I’ll show you a fiscal conservative. I'll show you someone that is proud of their success and feels they deserve to keep more of their own money.

But show me a leftist politician who hates the rich, and 95% of the time I'll show you spoiled brats who inherited their wealth, power and connections.

And the other 5% of leftists (like the Obama's and Clintons) got filthy rich by attacking the rich. That turns out to be a very lucrative business.

SOURCE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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15 May, 2012

"Liberals" in America today are just socialists

Calling socialists liberals is as deceptive as calling goose gizzards foie gras. It fools no one but the epistemologically blinkered. The term liberal allows liberals to pose as concerned, generous and forward-thinking individuals and to act under what was once an honorable term for anyone who advocated or endorsed liberty. And as any well-read American knows, liberals do not advocate liberty. Quite the opposite.

The subject here is the devolution of the term liberal, not its evolution.

Even out-and-out communists are called liberals. President Barack Obama is called a "liberal." The late Senator Ted Kennedy was called a "liberal." Barney Frank is a liberal. Obama's cabinet is largely staffed by liberals (unless outed, as self-confessed communist Van Jones was). Communism and socialism still carry a bad reputation, so everyone, including the Main Stream Media, and even well-intentioned pundits and commentators friendly to liberty, use the term liberal. The MSM, however, does it to dodge the reputation. Others use it from habit or ignorance, or because calling liberals socialists or communists in drag might open a can of worms they couldn't handle. This is courtesy carried to a fault. Underlying the fault is a fear of the inevitable clash between those who advocate freedom, and those who do not.

Obama's campaign slogan, "Forward," is simply a Progressive marching order. "Forward" to what? To socialism. To communism. To a command economy and a slave state, one half governed by bureaucrats, the other half by an alliance of Islam and quivering religionists of various stripes, willing to pay jizya to Islam in order to be granted their "religious freedom."

The Washington Post trumpeted "Forward" with no reservations or even curiosity about its Communist and Nazi origins. But then the Washington Post has been in the Saul Alinsky camp for over a generation.

One Alinsky benefactor was Wall Street investment banker Eugene Meyer, who served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1930 to 1933. Meyer and his wife Agnes co-owned The Washington Post. They used their newspaper to promote Alinsky.

Agnes Meyer personally wrote a six-part series in 1945, praising Alinsky's work in Chicago slums. Her series, called "The Orderly Revolution," made Alinsky famous. President Truman ordered 100 reprints of it.

In 1989, The New York Times waxed poetic about Alinsky's powerful friends, and also provided some important information in the course of a review of a biography of Alinsky by Sanford D. Horwitt:

By the end of World War II Alinsky had won a measure of national renown. His ''Reveille for Radicals'' (1945) hit the best-seller list, and he secured the fervent support of important liberals like Agnes E. Meyer of The Washington Post and the retail magnate Marshall Field 3d. Though it undercuts his larger portrait, Mr. Horwitt shows that much of Alinsky's acclaim rested upon his promise that social reform and a democratic revival could take place through what Meyer called an ''orderly revolution,'' which would bypass the new power of the unions and reject the growth of an intrusive New Deal state. Thus ''Reveille for Radicals,'' which ostensibly celebrated social conflict, was panned by most of the left but acclaimed by Time, The New York Times and other mass circulation publications.

Neither Time, nor the Washington Post, nor the New York Times has changed its tune. If anything, they have grown more shrill from the standpoint of endorsing not just Alinsky but socialism. But they repress that term socialism, and deny they are of the Left. They'll admit only that they're "progressive" because, you see, they're "humanitarians." Well, so were Pol Pot, and Mao, and Stalin, and Lenin, and Hitler. So are Robert Mugabe, and Hugo Chavez, and Ahmadinejad, and all the Kings of Saudi Arabia.

But, what are uncountable millions of dead of humanitarianism, when "progress" has been made, and man has been nudged "forward" into impoverished, straight-jacketed societies?

Let's set the record straight. Liberals are fundamentally collectivists. Specifically, either socialists or communists. Their policies and programs are demonstrably socialist or communist, whether one is speaking of Social Security, Medicare, the Federal Reserve, the income tax, and innumerable regulatory and confiscatory programs and policies, practically every bit of legislation that has been entered into The Congressional Record and The Federal Register for the last one hundred years. The term liberal should be retired, put out to pasture, and substituted with the appropriate and correct terms.

Here is a sampling of definitions of the term liberal:

1. Having, expressing, or following political views or policies that favor civil liberties, democratic reforms, and the use of government power to promote social progress3. Of, designating, or belonging to a political party that advocates liberal social or political views, esp. in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. The American Heritage Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin Company) 1985. (This is the first definition. Root meanings connected with generosity, open-mindedness, tolerance, etc., follow it. This is a significant order.)

6a. Of, favoring, or based on the principles of liberalism. 6b. Of or constituting a political party advocating or associated with the principles of political liberalism; esp. of or constituting a political party in the United Kingdom associated with ideas of individual esp. economic freedom, greater individual participation in government, and constitutional, political, and administrative reform designed to secure those objectives. Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (G. & C. Merriam Company) 1967. (Meanings connected with generosity, tolerance, etc. precede the political meanings.)

II. 1. Any person who advocates liberty of thought, speech, or action; one who is opposed to conservatism: distinguished from radical. 2. Liberal party, a party in English politics formed by the coalition of the Whigs and Radicals about 1830: opposed to Tory. The Practical Standard Dictionary of the English Language (Funk & Wagnalls Company) 1939. (Meanings connected with generosity, etc. precede the political ones.)

And finally:

3. (Polit.) Favorable to democratic reform and individual liberty, (moderately) progressive (the Liberal Party). The Concise Oxford Dictionary, Sixth Edition, 1976. (Here, too, meanings connected with generosity, etc., precede the political definition. This is an acceptable condensation of the term from the two-volume Compact edition of the OED, 1971, whose entry is about half a foot in length in very tiny print, most of whose information is not relevant to my purpose here.)

Notice that the older the dictionary, the more liberty-linked the definition is. The American Heritage definition marks the end of the road for the term liberal, stressing the use of government power to promote social progress. Social progress is a catch-all euphemism for the collectivization of society and the assumption of more and more power by the government. It does not mean the liberation of men from other men's alleged needs or claimed "rights," but the forced or legislated chaining of all men to each other's alleged needs or alleged, government sanctioned "entitlements." It is the devious and misleading byword for incremental socialism, or Progressivism.

You will never hear Brian Williams of NBC or Bob Schieffer of CBS counter George Will or Charles Krauthammer with a statement, "But, we the Left don't think that's a good policy" You will never hear them admit that they are of and for the Left. That would be "telling," as a con artist's "tell" is a warning that he's about to scam you.

More HERE

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Why unions hurt the middle class

Big Labor is Fighting UsBy David Nace — For decades we have been told that unions help the middle class. We have heard it from unions, from politicians that receive union contributions and from a sympathetic media. However, when one examines the facts, this claim is completely false.

How can an organization that represents a small minority the workforce, just over 10%, but whose actions force the other 90% to pay higher prices for everything they purchase and in addition, higher local, state and federal taxes, claim they are helping the middle class? Yet that is exactly the claim that unions and their political supporters have made for decades.

Even in times of greatly expanding union membership, the middle class paid a price for union expansion through higher unemployment and higher prices. Starting in 1933, FDR used the National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA) to encourage companies to establish cartels in most industries and set the minimum prices that could be charged in exchange for favorable unionization policies in their companies. These policies more than doubled the number of union members in just one decade. The Supreme Court ruled that the NRA was unconstitutional 2 years later, but the damage had already been done.

The NRA increased the cost of products by 40% at a time when few people could afford higher prices. Consequently, industrial production fell by 25% after the NRA was enacted. To put this into perspective, by 1930 the economy had already started to recover from the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Unemployment which was 5% before the crash had spiked at 9% in the winter of 1929 and then started to fall. Once the Smoot Hawley Tariff, NRA and other progressive policies were enacted, however, unemployment rose from 9% to 20% and stayed above 15% for the rest of the decade. It was not until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and 12 million people were inducted into the military, that employment returned to pre-Stock Market Crash levels.

Today, union membership is a far cry from its peak in the 1950’s when 30% of the workforce was unionized. Only about 10% of the workforce is unionized and approximately half works for local, state and federal governments.

When unions in a manufacturing company make wage or benefit demands or impose restrictive work rules, they raise the cost of products that the company makes. If few other companies make that product, the other 90% of the middle class is forced to pay higher prices. However in many cases, suppliers in other countries are able to provide that product at a lower cost. This eliminates American middle class jobs. The demise of the steel and auto industries is a perfect example of what happens when union demands exceed the realities of the market place. When an entire industry is decimated by the exorbitant wages and benefits of a few unionized companies, the middle class is hurt by lost jobs throughout that industry.

Unions in the public sector are even more damaging to the middle class. As the result of unions using member dues to help elect both Democratic and Republican politicians that will support union wages and benefit demands, only 10% of the workforce is able to impose costs that the other 90% of taxpayers must pay for. When these same politicians allow extravagant retirement benefits in union contracts, but fail to fund the benefits to avoid making the taxpayers aware of the true costs, the middle class is hurt even more. Many states will not allow the modification of union retirement benefits regardless of the extravagance of the benefits or the cost to the taxpayers. The middle class taxpayer is ultimately left to fund the benefits promised by union supported politicians but never funded.

Unions have done an excellent job of portraying themselves as the defender of the middle class. In reality, whether the union concentration is 30% or 10%, the only people that have benefited from unionization are union members and union leaders, to the detriment of the rest of the middle class.

SOURCE

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'Taxmaggedon' Is a Real Threat

Next year's scheduled increases on dividends and capital gains will retard investment and derail the recovery

Nine years ago this month Congress passed President George W. Bush's Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act. That bill's lower rates on capital, as well as the continuity in tax policy it established, have helped make our economy far more resilient.

The legislation's centerpiece was a reduction in the taxation of dividends and capital gains to 15%. Unfortunately, the 2003 tax rates, including those on capital income, are due to expire at the end of the year.

Capital warrants special tax treatment because of the central role it plays in generating economic growth and jobs. Capital is the very lifeblood of the market economy, the mainstay of innovation, and the foundation for future prosperity. As more of it is put to work today, labor output and wages will rise tomorrow. An appreciation of that critical relationship should guide how the tax system treats earnings from capital.

The double taxation of dividends—with corporate earnings first taxed 35% at the corporate level and then, when paid out to shareholders, taxed again—has been a long-standing and well-recognized distortion in the tax code. It favors debt financing over equity capital formation, because interest is deducted as a cost of doing business and lowers taxable income, while dividends are taxed twice.

The preference for debt financing and leverage shortchanges shareholders and is not healthy for corporate decision-making. Double taxation penalizes dividend payments and discourages managements from making them.

Congress did not eliminate the double taxation of dividends in 2003, but it substantially ameliorated the distortion. Dividends are now taxed at 15%, rather than the typically higher income-tax rates paid by shareholders. Importantly, the 15% tax rate was applied to capital gains as well. Capital gains previously had been taxed at 20% with special rates for assets held five years or longer. This symmetry between dividends and capital gains harmonized and simplified the regime for the taxation of capital and still stands today as a key achievement in modern tax policy.

Corporations responded to the lower rates on dividends by paying out more of their profits, which raises the returns to those holding stock and thus increases equity prices. Both trends strengthen Americans' retirement savings. As recent actions by Google, Apple and scores of other companies attest, corporations today find it more difficult to sit on cash instead of rewarding shareholders with dividend payouts.

With the expiration of the 2003 tax law at the end of this year, taxes—not only on capital earnings but also on ordinary incomes—will return to the much higher levels that previously existed.

This would be devastating to the fragile economic recovery, and to every American still looking for work. Combined with the expiration of temporary payroll tax relief, the United States faces what has now been labeled "taxmageddon"—a fiscal headwind so strong that it threatens a swift return to recession.

What seems to be lacking is a clear path to the future. Here are some suggestions for policy makers.

First, remember the principle that you always get less of anything you tax. For this reason, society discourages undesirable activities by imposing so-called "sin" taxes. By the same token, high marginal tax rates discourage work, risk-taking and capital formation.

Second, tax rates should be held as low as possible, consistent with maintaining fiscal balance. Low tax rates are not in conflict with fiscal sanity if the rate of government spending as a fraction of gross domestic product is reduced, or if the tax base is broadened with more fundamental tax reforms. It is encouraging to see so much interest gathering in support of changes to the tax code that would scrap many special tax breaks in favor of deeply lower marginal tax rates.

Third, marginal tax rates should be as neutral as possible across different types of economic activities. Otherwise the tax code distorts behavior in ways that sap economic strength, as market participants rely less on market price signals and more on government commands to decide how economic resources are used. Social engineering through the tax code comes at a very high cost.

Finally, policy makers should remember to "do no harm." A reversion to the kind of drastically higher marginal tax rates that existed in the past would be bad enough. It would only add insult to injury to use the economic crisis as an excuse to raise the tax burden on capital formation and thus reduce the lifeblood of America's job creators.

Unfortunately, we face that real prospect, as prominent proposals by the administration would triple the top dividend tax rate to nearly 45%, while doubling the top rate on capital gains to 30%. If one intended to cripple job creation, depress stock prices, and lower the value of retirement savings for working Americans, these proposals would be just what we should choose.

As taxmageddon looms, let's hope we choose wisely.

SOURCE

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

****************************

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)



14 May, 2012

The New Radicals: Democrats

My new piece at Daily Caller looks at how the Democratic Party’s approach to tax policy has changed over the decades.

The piece was prompted by a recent article from Norm Ornstein and Tom Mann claiming that needed bipartisan reforms are being blocked by the new “ideologically extreme” Republican Party.

Baloney. It’s the Democrats who have changed. The party’s leaders have moved far to the left on economic issues.

As evidence, I point to this Cato Journal article from 1985 by Democrat Richard Gephardt, who was a leader on tax reform. As a free-market guy, I agree with the great majority of what Gephardt said, yet I agree with virtually nothing that modern Democratic leaders say about tax policy.

Regarding ridding the tax code of special breaks, Gephardt says, “I confess that I am not qualified to act as a central planner and I do not know anybody on either committee who is.” Amen!

And Gephardt says, “We in Congress take pride in the free market system.” When was the last time you heard a Democratic leader say something like that?

SOURCE

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The Average White Guy Vote

CANTON, Ohio-Rudy is the quintessential average white guy, right down to his last name. "It literally is Guy," he said, laughing at the irony.

Born in New Eagle and raised in Charleroi in Pennsylvania's Monongahela Valley, Guy comes from a long line of Democrats. "My grandfather worked at Corning Glass, my father worked in the mines, the steel mill and finally at Corning," he recalled. "The family always had union ties, and that usually meant a tie to the Democratic Party."

That's no longer true for him, however: "As my life started to improve financially, I realized that unions seemed to be damaging the economy and Democrat legislation always seemed to impact my wallet."

Guy lives in a Canton suburb lively with soccer fields, businesses, car cruises and recycling programs. He has a blended family of six daughters and one son; his wife, Cheryl, is a nurse and a registered Democrat.

His story is not much different than that of those West Virginia Democrats who protest-voted for a convicted felon over a sitting president in last Tuesday's state primary.

The problem for President Barack Obama and down-ticket Democrats on November's ballot is that average white guys aren't just found in West Virginia; they're in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and other states, too, and they can tip this fall's election.

According to Gallup's latest battleground numbers, Obama's main electoral strengths are with voters who are nonwhite, nonreligious, single or postgraduates. Republican Mitt Romney's strength is with white voters, particularly men, those who are religious, and those who are 30 or older.

Romney leads Obama with white male and female voters and does significantly better among men, 59 percent to 32 percent.

Among white women, Romney leads by nine points, 50 percent to 41 percent.

Rudy Guy says Obama has lost his registered-Democrat wife's vote: "Cheryl and I pretty much see eye-to-eye on the Republican Party's legislation direction."

Some Democrats like to portray the GOP as a party of white, middle-class, married Christian men. Interestingly, the president, who ran as someone who would unite the nation, has disconnected with the next largest plurality in the electorate behind women - white guys, men who once were the backbone of the Democratic Party.

These are the men whose skills include fixing the wiring in your home, mining the coal that supplies 82 percent of Ohio's and 48 percent of Pennsylvania's electrical power, and running the small businesses that keep our communities (and other small businesses in them) rolling along.

They make the widgets and fix the computers we use, own the lawn-care companies that tend to our neighborhoods and schools, volunteer as our children's coaches, and attend church probably less often than they would like because of work or community commitments.

They are the sons, grandsons and great-grandsons of European immigrants whose commitment to work, family and God all held equal priority. College either was not an option or was skipped so that they could use their hands and their ingenuity to become gainfully employed.

Many also are employees of what today appears to be the next great economic frontier - the energy industry. Yet, oddly, they are ignored by Democrats, or used by the president to sell class warfare in his re-election campaign.

They did vote for him in 2008 - but the polls suggest they are not coming back this time.

The loss of the average white guy is why you see President Obama devoting so much effort on trying to encourage the college-educated young to vote, said Mark Rozell, political-science professor at George Mason University. "He needs to offset substantial losses among predominantly white, non-college-educated men who are a big component of those left behind by the struggling economy," Rozell explained.

And the quintessential example of that is Canton's Rudy Guy.

"It seems to me that Obama is intent on punishing anyone who is employed with a job over minimum wage," Guy said. "In the last three years, I've seen my spendable income drop, my cost for health-care insurance go up, and my benefits go down.

"Three years ago the question was, 'Are you better off now than when Bush took office?' Most of us weren't. But am I better off today than when Obama took office?"

His answer is simple: "No."

SOURCE

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The real solution to high gas prices

In these tumultuous times, Americans seem to have trouble finding common ground. But it’s safe to say that most of us can agree that gasoline, at around $4 per gallon, is uncomfortably expensive.

The law of supply and demand would seem to suggest an effective solution to our problem. An increase in long-term supply would lead to a long-term drop in prices.

But that’s far too cut-and-dried for President Obama. “There are politicians who say if we just drill more, gas prices will come down,” he told reporters recently. That won’t work, he insisted, because Americans “use more than 20 percent of the world’s oil and we only have 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves.”

His preferred approach: greater federal intervention in oil markets.

The president wants to spend more than $50 million to hire more bureaucrats at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Obama calls that putting more “cops on the beat.” Here’s the problem with that approach: you can have as many cops as you want, but unless someone’s breaking the law, there’s nobody for them to arrest.

And there’s no evidence anyone is manipulating gas prices.

Last year, for example, the nation’s “top cop,” Attorney General Eric Holder, empaneled a working group to “explore whether there is any evidence of manipulation of oil and gas prices.” Holder hasn’t bothered to release a report, but it’s safe to say that he would have done so if his task force had identified any potential wrongdoing.

Just about every time gas prices go up, lawmakers demand an investigation into “price gouging.” And the results, time and again, come back negative. For example, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Trade Commission investigated and “found no instances of illegal market manipulation that led to higher prices during the relevant time periods.” Other federal investigations over the years have reached the same conclusion.

Oil prices go up, and they come back down again. The increases are usually driven by a jump in demand, and the decreases are usually triggered by a jump in supply.

In early 1998, for example, oil-exporting countries ramped up production in the belief that prices were destined to remain high and that they could earn even higher profits by producing more oil. Instead, a recession in Asia led to an oversupply of crude, and the price tumbled to about $10 per barrel.

Over the years prices increased again, until something similar happened four years ago. The rise of China and years of economic growth drove the price of oil higher and higher. Crude topped $147 per barrel in July of 2008. Then, in the face of worldwide recession, it plunged. By Christmas it was as low as $32 per barrel.

So while prices are indeed high right now, it seems likely that, by the time Obama’s extra bureaucrats could even be hired, gas prices will have cycled down again.

In fact, it’s federal intervention that tends to foul up markets. In his book “The Quest,” energy expert Daniel Yergin explains that price controls, implemented under Richard Nixon in the early 1970s, didn’t help consumers.

“They did succeed in creating a whole new federal bureaucracy, an explosion in regulatory and litigation work for lawyers, and much political contention,” he writes. “But the controls did little for their stated goals of limiting inflation – and did nothing for energy security.” Not surprisingly, oil prices tumbled after President Reagan lifted price controls, which he did with his first executive order.

President Obama is certainly correct that drilling more today wouldn’t instantly decrease oil prices. It takes years, after all, to bring a new well online and begin generating oil from it. As former Shell Oil president John Hofmeister puts it, oil companies think in “energy time,” while our national leaders think in “political time.”

By blocking construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and by limiting offshore oil exploration, for example, the Obama administration has shown it’s more interested in rewarding its radical environmentalist supporters than in adding to future oil supplies.

The entire country will pay more for fuel because of those decisions in the years ahead: that’s “energy time.” Meanwhile, attacking non-existent price gougers happens in “political time.” Will voters allow the president to get away with such transparent pandering? Only time will tell.

SOURCE

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Employers could save billions by switching workers onto Obamacare (and the taxpayer)

A new survey of Fortune 100 companies finds that the health care overhaul, contrary to the claims of its authors, created some perverse incentives for employers to drop workers from company insurance plans.

Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee surveyed the top 100 companies about how much they spent on health care -- a total of 71, covering 5.9 million employees, responded. The results suggested it would be far more attractive for companies to drop workers from those plans than keep them.

Even after paying a penalty of $2,000 per employee, the companies stand to save $28.6 billion in 2014 alone by shifting employees to health insurance exchanges governed by strict federal standards. The companies stand to save more than $422 billion over the first 10 years of the law by doing this.

"The penalties for the employers who drop coverage are very low, and the subsidies for the workers in the exchanges are very high," said James Capretta, with the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

If the companies indeed take this step, the move would fly in the face of pledges by the law's backers, including President Obama, that U.S. workers would not lose their employer-provided health plans.

Shifting over to the insurance exchanges, while potentially a hassle for employees who had that decision mostly taken care of at their jobs, might not necessarily be a bad thing. The new exchanges would offer several choices of plans, and workers would get generous federal subsidies -- which only phase out at about $88,000 income.

The exchanges could be attractive to both employers and workers. That is especially true of small employers. Many companies would not want to be the first to drop coverage, but if a competitor did, others might feel compelled to follow suit, causing a snowball effect.

The higher cost of subsidies, though, would fall on the taxpayers.

SOURCE



13 May, 2012

You can't make this stuff up

President Barack Obama has a new campaign slogan: "Forward."

Obama's re-election team unveiled its new motto in a video released Monday morning. The seven-minute video begins by recalling the grim state of the nation's economy when Obama took office, then ticks through what the campaign says are the president's accomplishments, both on the economy and other issues.

The video tries to make the case for Obama's re-election by saying there is still more work to do going forward.

SOURCE

"Forwards" (Vorwaerts) was of course the song of the Hitler Youth. See here

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The Left’s Seven Tragic Terror Lies

by RALPH PETERS

If they did not put our troops, our citizens and our country at risk, the Left's fantastic lies about terror and terrorists would be hilarious. The Left's self-righteous nonsense in this sphere has no grounding in empirical or historical reality, but, then, reality has long been a greater threat to the Left than Islamist fanatics (the last thing any Leftie wants to do is to face the vast human wastage generated by the addictive, enervating and morally debilitating hook-the-poor social programs of the last five decades).

So, when it comes to addressing the real and deadly terrorist threat, the American left responds in the best Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Chavista and community-organizer traditions: When the facts aren't palatable, make up new "facts." And political correctness has worked its poisonous tentacles so deeply into the American body politic that not even our generals challenge the ludicrous claims the Left hurls at us in its neo-Bolshevik bullying mode of shouting down every last unwelcome truth.

Of course, the left's lies are countless, but the hard left has mastered the art of reducing the most complex human challenges to bumper-sticker slogans as nonsensical as they are reassuring to the herd (the wildly counter-factual prize probably goes to a leftie favorite, "War never changes anything." On the contrary, war has always changed a great deal, which is why we have wars). These happy-face mantras never rise above intellectual flatulence, but the massed sheep on the Left enjoy the aroma ("Yes, we can!").

The problem, of course, is that many of our national leaders have been brainwashed with the same slogans. The Left has mastered another technique dictators forged long ago: Repeat a lie often enough and it will be taken as truth. And, of course, our media play along.

So let's give the slogan-hucksters a brief time-out and dissect just seven of their favorite lines:

One: Killing terrorists only turns them into martyrs. Nope. Killing terrorists turns them into dead terrorists. Of all the terrorists we've killed since 9/11, how many are celebrated as martyrs in the Muslim world today? Remember the Butcher of Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi? The Left solemnly warned us that killing him would turn him into a martyr and mobilize the Muslim world against us. Didn't happen. Instead, his fellow Arabs spit upon his grave. And what about the big lad, Comrade Osama? We heard no end of grave pronunciamentos from "public intellectuals"and other fellow travelers that killing him would not only make him a martyr, but lead to an explosion of Muslim fury. Well, check it out: Not a single serious demonstration marked the one-year anniversary of his death (by the way, I'm growing confused: Were any SEALs actually in bin Laden's compound, or did President Obama take down Osama alone, with his bare hands? That seems to be the White House position of late).

Killing terrorists doesn't create problems. It eliminates specific problems and reduces others. What creates problems is capturing terrorists. That's when they become martyrs, inspiring kidnappings and other attacks to free them, and leading Leftists to champion them as "prisoners of conscience" and victims of vile American oppression. Witness the recent courtroom circus at Guantanamo, where monstrous terrorists (men who should have been dead at least eight years ago) have been granted a global platform for their cause.

As a former intelligence officer, I sympathize with those who believe we need more interrogations, but I'm still for killing every terrorist we can find right on the spot-until a grown-up president revives serious clandestine operations in which the CIA can capture, strenuously interrogate then execute known terrorists without it ever becoming public knowledge. The only problem with waterboarding is that somebody told.

Two: We can't kill our way out of this. Actually, we've been killing our way out of "this" with great success. In fact, killing terrorists has been the only thing that has worked. And one thing Obama-terrified of a terror attack on his watch-has gotten right has been to increase the number of lethal attacks on terrorists and to favor killing them over capturing them (Obama did learn the real lesson of Guantanamo-kill, don't capture--although he isn't going to inform his base). Had Bush killed as many terrorists with drone strikes and special ops as Obama has, the Left would have cried out for him to be tried as a war criminal. And what do you think Obama's base would have had to say if Bush had authorized killing Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen? (Just to be clear, I'm glad Awlaki's dead.)

Leftists (see Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, etc.) don't really object to war and violence. They just want to be in charge of it. For the left, it's rarely about what's done, but about who's doing it: The left's moral compass realigns on command.

We have 2,000 years of documented history of insurgencies led by religious fanatics (in every religion, by the way). In those two millennia, there is not a single example of a faith-fueled rebellion or terrorist movement that did not require extensive bloodshed to defeat it. Not one example in 2,000 years. And, indeed, resolute powers proved very, very good at killing their way out of it.

More HERE

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Obama now in the forefront of the Culture War

It took Joe Biden's public embrace of same-sex marriage to smoke him out.

But after Joe told David Gregory of "Meet the Press" he was "absolutely comfortable" with homosexuals marrying, Barack Obama could not maintain his credibility with the cultural elite if he stuck with the biblical view that God ordained marriage as solely between a man and woman. The biblical view had to go.

Obama had to move, or look like a malingerer in secularism's next great moral advance into post-Christian America.

Consider. Obama had an appearance coming up on "The View," where Whoopi Goldberg would have demanded to know why he lacked the courage of Biden's convictions. He has a $40,000-a-plate fundraiser at George Clooney's, where the Hollywood crowd would want to know why he does not end discrimination against homosexuals.

He has appearances lined up before gay activists raising millions for his campaign. Monday, his press secretary was pilloried for his feeble defense of Obama's now-abandoned position.

His hand was forced. Yet the stand Obama took could cost him his presidency. Same-sex marriage may yet be a bridge too far, even for a dying Christian America.

On the plus side for Obama, his decision is producing hosannas from the elites and an infusion of cash from those who see same-sex marriage as the great moral and civil rights issue of our time.

But Obama may also have just solved Mitt Romney's big problem: How does Mitt get all those evangelical Christians and cultural conservatives not only to vote for him but to work for him?

Obama, by declaring that homosexual marriages should be on the same legal and moral plane as traditional marriage, just took command of the forces of anti-Christian secularism in America's Kulturkampf. And Nov. 6, 2012, is shaping up as the Antietam of the culture war.

Obama's second problem is that he may soon be seen as America's champion of same-sex marriage, but an ineffectual advocate. For Obama can do nothing, as of now, to impose homosexual marriage on the American people.

Thirty-one states have voted to outlaw it. A constitutional amendment supporting same-sex marriage could not win a majority of either house of Congress, let alone the necessary two-thirds of both.

Hence, Obama is going to spend six months winning cheers by calling for same-sex marriage. But the price of those cheers will be the rallying of millions of opponents of homosexual marriage, who will fight this battle where they are winning it, at the state level.

Only six states have approved homosexual marriage, while 30 have imposed a constitutional ban. In North Carolina, a ban not only on same-sex marriage but also civil unions, though opposed by Obama and Bill Clinton, carried on Tuesday with 61 percent of the vote.

Republican turnout in North Carolina's primary was up half a million, the highest in history. And this is a state Obama carried in 2008, a state whose largest city, Charlotte, will host Obama's convention.

Even in liberal California in 2008, while John McCain was getting a smaller share of the vote than Barry Goldwater in 1964, Proposition 8, restricting marriage to men and women, won.

How does Obama propose to win this battle? He has one path to victory -- the Supreme Court.

The New York Times, declaring that homosexuals' right to marry is "too precious and too fragile to be left up to the whim of states and the tearing winds of modern partisan politics," is looking to the court as the last, best hope to impose same-sex marriage on the nation.

Can't trust voters, can't trust elected legislators, can't trust Congress. Homosexual marriage, says the Times, is too important to be left to democratic decision. The republic must be commanded to accept it by unelected judges who serve for life and against whom the people have no political recourse.

More HERE

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Obama's New Nomenklatura

(The Nomenklatura were the secretive elite of the old Soviet system}

Socialism is a rich man's game. Oh, sure, random overheated (sometimes impoverished) Occupiers agitate for their version of economic equality, possibly gumming up the works at the Lincoln Tunnel, but the real financial justice action comes from the wealthy — or so it would seem.

And I'm not just talking about Hollywood, where George Clooney is full steam ahead on a putative record-breaking $10 million fundraiser for Barack Obama, or the laughably meretricious theatrics of the "Buffett Tax" that no one would pay anyway, but across the nation.

According to a book about to be released, "The Rise of the President's Perpetual Campaign" by Brendan J. Doherty, Obama has held more fundraisers than all presidents since Nixon combined.

What does this have to do with socialism? A lot, really, because what Obama promises — especially in his second term — is a socialism of permanent elites, a kind of new, very American, version of the old Soviet-style nomenklatura. And those who are in it will get to stay in it (via government support) as social mobility, aka the American Dream, diminishes or disappears.

This was what socialism ultimately was all about, indeed is all about — the preservation of nomenklaturas, whether of Hollywood, the media, union and bureaucratic leadership or what remains of selected industry. Keep hoi polloi out.

All those fundraisers and bundlers, from Clooney to the considerably more anonymous, know this on one level or another. It's certainly not subtle, and those too clueless to understand were reminded by the quasi-blacklisting of potential Romney supporters. A warning shot was fired. No elite status for them.

Being part of this new nomenklatura is particularly crucial in hard times and even more so in hard times that look to be long-lasting and possibly permanent.

Seemingly disastrous undertakings, like the overweening government support of the feckless solar company Solyndra, therefore can actually have what would appear to be a reverse effect, reassuring elites that they will be protected, even cosseted, in their most irrational enterprises. Just stay on the team, and all will be well.

It's a pessimistic view of life and a cowardly one — and quite conservative in the emotional sense. No wonder we see the left in our country in a sour mood. (Even the professionally cautious Jay Leno admitted recently that Democrats were lacking in humor and unable to mock themselves. Reviews of Obama at the White House Correspondents' dinner were not good.)

But this grim atmosphere does not mean the left will lose. Quite the contrary. Like a determined politburo, they will hang on to their perquisites at all costs. The terms of the battle have just been ratcheted up. Issues like global warming, the war on women, racial contretemps, etc. will be ginned up for the preservation of their power.

I admit that using this Soviet terminology ... nomenklaturas, politburos ... is perhaps excessive. We all know that could not happen here. The gray rigidity of the Soviet lifestyle seems antithetical to sunny American optimism and flare.

But we could have our own way of adopting such things. They could come in through the back door ... or the front pages of a newspaper ... or the way someone sings the national anthem at the Staples Center or how we look at the fireworks display (all made in China) on the Fourth of July. In other words, it could happen here.

SOURCE

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Medicare Liabilities Are Worse than They Look

Sixty-three trillion dollars. That’s the sum of unfunded liabilities for both Social Security and Medicare, according to the latest trustees report. In fact, the shortfall is almost twice as large as that. This is because when the Affordable Care Act was signed, more than $50 trillion dollars of future Medicare spending was cut from that entitlement program. But this would result not in a reduction of future spending, but in a shift away from seniors and toward younger people. It’s difficult to believe that Congress would muster the political will to sustain reductions in Medicare spending, according to Independent Institute Research Fellow John C. Goodman.

“In fact, the possibility of ‘Obamacare’ policies cutting Medicare’s unfunded liability in half is so unlikely that Medicare’s chief actuary, Richard Foster, provides an ‘alternative’ report, in addition to the official trustees report, in which he projects much higher levels of Medicare spending,” Goodman writes in his latest op-ed for Politico.

Meaningful reform of Medicare, Goodman argues, would require changing it from a pay-as-you-go system into one in which workers pay their own way. Employees (and employers) would need to save 4 percent of payroll in order to reach a point at which each generation of retirees pays for most of their post-retirement healthcare without an increase in payroll taxes. The boost in private savings would bring significant additional benefits: it would support increases in physical capital and higher wages, as Independent Institute Research Fellow Burt Abrams explains on MyGovCost.org. In contrast, the pay-as-you-go Medicare system (like Social Security) reduces the incentive for people to save for their retirement years, robs young people of their own earnings, and slows the rise of the standard of living.

SOURCE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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12 May, 2012

Update on my health

First let me say thanks to the 100 or more people who have wished me a speedy recovery and who have welcomed my return to blogging. That has helped to keep my spirits up and helped my resolve to battle on.

But I am far from out of the woods. I appear to have acquired an antibiotic-resistant urinary tract infection while I was in hospital and my wellness varies a lot from day to day. I pee a lot of blood and am often in acute pain for short periods. I have tried both the usual antibiotic preparations used to treat UTIs so the way forward is not at all clear. I am pretty sure that I will have to go back to hospital soon, where I will probably be put on an antibiotic drip.

And, yes, I am drinking a lot of Cranberry juice. It does help with UTIs

So although my blogging has begun to return to normal in the last couple of days, I cannot predict whether or not that will continue. I will however try to let people know if I seem likely to be temporarily off blogging.

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Drumming up class hatred

by Jeff Jacoby

THERE IS NOTHING NEW under the sun, including politicians who seek to win votes by milking the gap between rich and poor.

Today it's Barack Obama, demanding a "Buffett rule" and decrying the harm caused when "the gap between those at the very, very top and everybody else keeps growing wider and wider and wider and wider." Not so long ago it was John Edwards, intent on riding his "Two Americas" stump speech ("One America does the work while another America reaps the reward") all the way to the White House. Earlier still it was FDR, lambasting the wealthy who "did not want to pay a fair share" and boasting that he'd "increased still further the taxes paid by individuals in the highest brackets" because that was "the American thing to do."

Indeed, presidential candidates have been picking at the income-inequality scab since at least 1840. That was the year William Henry Harrison, running against incumbent Martin Van Buren during a recession, accused the president of pursuing policies "directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer." (Harrison won, but died a month after taking office.)

Those who peddle class resentment can always find ready takers; otherwise politicians wouldn't keep selling the same rug. But the demand for it is never as great as the demagogues imagine. Most Americans don't hate the rich, or even the very rich, and they don't despise the economic system that makes great wealth possible. "That all men are created equal" goes to the core of our national creed; its undeniable moral force led Americans to fight a horrific Civil War over slavery in the 19th century, and to embrace the legal and social upheaval of the Civil Rights movement in the 20th.

But what Americans honor is equality in the eyes of the law, political equality -- not equality of income or material circumstances. The two kinds of equality are inherently in conflict, as every effort to impose egalitarianism eventually proves. "There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal," wrote Friedrich Hayek in 1948. The fact that some people make much more money than others has never convinced the American people that a fundamental overhaul of society is necessary or even desirable. For all the extravagant claims made last year about Occupy Wall Street's significance, is anyone surprised that the movement has fizzled?

For months President Obama has been calling income inequality "the defining issue of our time," but relatively few Americans agree. In a recent Gallup poll, only 2 percent of respondents identified the gap between rich and poor as their top economic concern. Even among the Democrats in Gallup's survey, inequality didn't show up as a major worry.

Armed with a bully pulpit and backed by a liberal media chorus, Obama may have good political reasons to keep hammering away at the wealth gap. No doubt he can mobilize some voters with his suspect claims about billionaires paying a 1 percent tax rate, or the charge that Republicans want "everybody left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules."

But most voters understand intuitively that in a free society, unequal productivity will generate unequal wealth. Incentives and rewards are powerful motivators of work and risk-taking; and the greater the potential rewards, the more an economy will achieve. A Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Sam Walton is far more likely to flourish in a nation where people can become millionaires and billionaires -- and to enrich all of us in the process of enriching themselves.

"In a democratic, capitalist society, gaps in income are inevitable," write Peter Wehner and Robert Beschel Jr. in the current issue of National Affairs. "Yet it is worth noting that democratic capitalism has done far more to create wealth, advance human flourishing, and lift people out of destitution than any other economic and political system.. A policy agenda that has as its top priority the elimination of income gaps . not only encourages resentment but also threatens the American economy - because a narrow focus on closing gaps tends to go along with reduced overall growth."

There is no fixed limit to the wealth a society can produce, and today's "1 percent" produce an amazing amount of it. But their wealth takes nothing away from the other 99 percent. We are all free to rise as high as talent, education, and hard work will take us. Wealth is not theft. Productivity is not zero-sum. If economic disparity is a problem, then the way to solve it is by raising those who are stuck near the bottom, not tearing down those who have climbed to the top.

SOURCE

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Obama Invents Phony Right, Attacks Constitutional Rights

"I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages." -- Barack Obama, February 1996

"What I believe is that marriage is between a man and a woman." -- Barack Obama, October 2004

"At a certain point, I've just concluded that for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married." -- Barack Obama, May 2012

President Obama's "evolving" stand on the issue of same sex marriage, an evolution that led him from his original position favoring same sex marriage, to one opposing it and then back to his original support for this new "right" is a classic example of liberal "say whatever it takes to get elected" hypocrisy.

That liberals will say whatever it takes to get elected and Obama will pander to liberal homosexual pressure groups is no surprise, nor dangerous in and of itself.

What is dangerous is Obama's penchant for finding new "rights" that have no basis in the Constitution, while actively attacking the rights clearly articulated in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Obama's willingness to attack the First Amendment freedom of religion of those who oppose abortion, his EPA's regular trampling of property rights, and his invention of the right to medical care in Obamacare show that the rights Obama and his liberal allies invent to get elected all come with a strong mandate for federal government coercion and the end of freedom of conscience.

Now that Obama has come out in favor of same sex marriage, his attack on the freedom of conscience of military chaplains who oppose same sex marriage and his refusal to defend laws that prohibit the recognition of same sex marriage is starting to look more and more like the first step toward a federal mandate for the recognition of same sex marriage.

This of course would throw the First Amendment and the Tenth Amendment out the window.

As Obama and his liberal allies create phony new "rights" to secure votes from liberal pressure groups, they are actively attacking and undermining the fundamental rights the Constitution was intended to protect - such as freedom of religion and property rights. In their eagerness to create new "rights" and obtain the votes of the homosexual lobby, Obama and his liberal allies are set to once again ignore the Constitution as the "law that governs government," and that is the real danger in Obama's embrace of same sex marriage.

SOURCE (See the original for links)

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'Paycheck Fairness' Will Mean a Pay Cut for Men

Wage discrimination is already illegal. So what? Get ready for another phony debate.

Team Obama calculates that its road to victory is paved with the votes of women, so the American people are now subject to a coordinated effort to cast GOP opposition to expanding government power as an assault on the weaker sex. But few women view public policy as a battle between the sexes. Women whose husbands, brothers and sons are struggling to find jobs find no comfort in women's comparatively low unemployment rate.

Next up in the Democratic campaign is the Paycheck Fairness Act, supposedly necessary to achieve "equal pay" for women. Never mind that it's already illegal to pay women less than men for the same work. Democrats say that failure to support this bill is akin to greenlighting workplace discrimination. In reality, women aren't the primary beneficiaries of the Paycheck Fairness Act. Lawyers are, since it encourages more litigation, increases potential lawsuit payouts, and makes it more difficult for companies to defend themselves.

Under the act, the government would also collect more information about compensation practices and establish a national award for employers deemed best in advancing "pay equity." These are distractions companies don't need.

Feminists have long wanted enlightened government officials, rather than the indifferent market, to determine salaries. Information collection and government-compensation guidelines today could easily become regulations and mandates tomorrow.

Such meddling would be disastrous for the economy, but men particularly should be warned: Bureaucrats micromanaging compensation standards will mean many male workers should expect a pay cut.

We've seen how this works. Soon Democrats will celebrate the 40th anniversary of Title IX as a triumph for women's equality, but mothers of would-be wrestlers and male gymnasts know this well-intentioned law has a darker history.

Title IX amended federal education law to require that schools receiving federal funding couldn't discriminate on the basis of sex. However, enforcement procedures have morphed this antidiscrimination statute into a de facto quota system for athletics. Many colleges have eliminated men's teams, and some male sports are now all but extinct at the collegiate level, such as men's gymnastics.

Colleges' struggle to meet Title IX's proportionality requirement speaks to a larger issue: Women increasingly outnumber men on campus, earning an estimated 57% of bachelor's degrees. Against this backdrop, Title IX's enforcement policy seems particularly ill-conceived. Female students out-participate men in just about all activities other than sports, from theater programs to student government. Why are sports the sole target of Title IX?

It turns out that the law's champions-including the Obama administration's Title IX Interagency Working Group-do want to expand its reach to academics, specifically to science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the few disciplines in which men's enrollment continues to outpace women's.

Of course, statistics about young men's troubling prospects shouldn't be used to justify a new set of intrusive government programs to bolster boys' self-esteem or curb women's success in pursuit of gender parity. But they should encourage greater awareness of how policies sold as protecting women can be used to bludgeon men, and they should spur greater skepticism of the idea that women need bigger government to succeed.

The War on Women rhetoric may be intended to derail specific candidacies, but it also derails needed public-policy debates. With trillion-dollar deficits, we need to make tough choices about funding priorities. Calling attempts to control government's costs an assault on women will only make deliberations less productive.

Americans had a preview of how this tactic stifles debate during the recent reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell saw this law, known to be riddled with waste and fraud, as a politically toxic issue. So instead of pushing for needed reforms, he surrendered, declaring, "We're all in favor of the Violence Against Women Act. . . . There's nothing to fight about."

Women cannot be a political shield that prevents rigorous debate about the direction of our country.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

FL: Church defies produce stand order: "A Florida town is ordering a church to move a produce stand where the needy can get free food grown by the faithful, saying its location violates zoning laws. Members of the Believers' Fellowship Word of Faith Church in Lakeland started a garden on the 6-acre church grounds two years ago, growing everything from zucchini to onions to watermelons. At first, they gave the food out for free. But when demand outpaced supply, they added inventory donated by other local growers, expanded the tent to the roadside and began taking optional donations. All proceeds (500 in a typical week) go back into the garden for seeds, fertilizer and more."

Occupy's organized anarchy: "The 'Occupy' movement, which the Obama administration and much of the media have embraced, has implications that reach far beyond the passing sensation it has created. The unwillingness of authorities to put a stop to their organized disruptions of other people's lives, their trespassing, vandalism and violence is a de facto suspension, if not repeal, of the 14th Amendment's requirement that the government provide 'equal protection of the laws' to all its citizens. How did the 'Occupy' movement acquire such immunity from the laws that the rest of us are expected to obey"

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

****************************

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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11 May, 2012

Some justifiable cynicicism from Ray Kraft

Politicians do not want to solve problems. If they solve a problem, they can no longer run against it, they can no longer blame it on anybody else, they can no longer promise to fix it. Problems have fantastic political value. Solved problems have no political value.

That is why Politicians are forever unsolving problems.

They have a vested self interest in unsolved problems. That's what gets them elected. Unsolved problems are infinitely useful. Solved problems are politically useless.

One glaring example: Ted Kennedy. Ted Kennedy kept getting re-elected for decades. Quick, what problem did he ever solve, as a Senator?

Yeah, I couldn't think of any either. Now, insert any other member of Congress for Ted Kennedy.

All the political problems we have today, we have because over the last fifty years all the members of Congress and every President have failed to fix them, a vast left and right wing conspiracy of incompetence.

Received via email

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A dolphin with sharp teeth

The Israeli Navy's new Dolphin submarine is the ultimate tool of warfare. Forget everything you knew about submarines, most of which is probably from watching war movies. This is something entirely different. We will not list all the measures installed onboard the submarine. This is in part because not all is known to us, and also because parts of it are classified. However, according to foreign publications, the submarine has two systems from which one can deduce about its capabilities.

The first system is an advanced and impervious SATCOM satellite communication system, which gives the military brass the ability to be in direct, secured contact with the submarine's command at all times.

The second is a system of 650mm torpedo tubes. According to foreign publications, these are not ordinary torpedo tubes, but rather sophisticated launchers from which various weapon systems can be launched, including cruise missiles equipped with nuclear warheads.

Foreign sources can tell that the submarine is capable of launching Rafael's advanced Popeye Turbo missile. This is a variant of an air-to-surface missile developed by the company which is no longer used in its original form. According to the same foreign publications, the US Navy monitored a test of such a cruise missile from an Israeli submarine in the Indian Ocean.

Take the following imaginary scenario for example – an Israeli navy submarine is cruising somewhere near Iran. In a moment of religious fervor, the Ayatollah regime decides to launch a nuclear missile at Israel after the world has failed in its efforts to halt Iran's nuclear program.

The IDF's HQ in the Kiriya base understands what is happening and decides to launch a severe counterstrike. A secure satellite communication system enables direct contact with the submarine commander. He is called to enter a state of strike readiness. The launch command, however, is not given via verbal communication - the submarine commander gets that order via special codes which change randomly. The code is sent, along with the preferred target.

The initial target is a large military facility near Tehran. After several seconds, a long object emerges from the ocean, rises to a height of several hundred meters and begins its flight towards the Iranian coast. Iran's radar systems do not detect the missile as it makes its subsonic way towards the target.

More HERE

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Truth Is Major Obstacle to Obama's Re-election

So we need to get that truth out

President Obama formally kicked off his re-election campaign in Richmond, Va., and Columbus, Ohio, Saturday, and his theme was certainly not, shall we say, "it's morning again in America" -- President Ronald Reagan's optimistic re-election slogan in 1984.

Obama's central message was more like: "Hey, I realize things look bad, and I'm not going to pretend you want four more years of this. But just think how much worse it would have been without me and how much worse it's going to get if you get rid of me."

Interestingly, mainstream media journalists Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake were certain enough that Obama wasn't sufficiently forthcoming in his speech that they co-wrote a piece for The Washington Post "parsing" it. Without a whiff of disapproval, they said, "This being politics, Obama said less than what he meant. But, that's where we come in." The two then set out Obama's "most quotable lines" and followed each with their "translation of the message he was trying to send."

The writers are obviously sympathetic to Obama's agenda and, as fellow liberals, share his end-justifies-the-means sleight of hand -- whatever it takes to keep this federal juggernaut barreling along. Let's look at just a few of the quotes they highlighted.

Obama said: "I don't care how many ways you try to explain it: Corporations aren't people. People are people." The writers said Obama was responding to Mitt Romney's earlier remark that "corporations are people," and they said Obama intended to send this message: "Romney is the business candidate. I am the people's candidate."

Well, Romney is right. Most corporations (excepting holding companies and the like) are owned and operated by people. But Obama must depersonalize them because it makes his attacks on business seem less personal, which brings us to another point. Obama has denied he is anti-business, but everything about him screams otherwise, and even many of his liberal defenders, from these two writers to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to Fareed Zakaria, have been hard-pressed to deny that he either is anti-business or sends unmistakable signals that he is.

Notice also how Obama framed the issue, which is revealing both as to his attitude toward business (mildly adversarial to hostile) and as to his general political worldview (us against them). He gratuitously drew a line of demarcation between corporations (read: business) and people. This is a false choice. Why can't we be pro-corporation and pro-people? Shouldn't an American president be bullish on both? The answer is yes, but Obama can't be; his class-conscious ideology forbids it, and electoral imperatives demand that he demonize his political opponents, which is why his hype about all of us coming together as one rings so hollow and disingenuous.

If you still doubt Obama's mindset, you should consider another quote: "We came together because we believe that in America, your success shouldn't be determined by the circumstances of your birth." Is there any way to read this statement apart from the drippingly bellicose class warfare resentment it connotes?

Obama also said, "Osama bin Laden is no longer a threat to this country." Not to dabble in ancient Greek philosophy, but I dare say that the influence of a human being, especially one who has been as pivotally important to al-Qaida's ongoing jihad against the United States and its allies, can live well beyond the grave.

What's more naive and even dangerous about the statement is that it implies that bin Laden's death justifies the false hope that the enemy is less determined to destroy us than before and that we may now relax our guard. Yes, we get that Obama wants to keep reminding us that he issued the kill order for bin Laden, but let's not give him the further leeway of overblowing the significance of the kill to the war on terror.

This whole issue is a bit spooky when you consider Obama's double-minded approach to the war. On the one hand, he would have us believe it's darn near over; he's replaced our so-called jingoistic rhetoric with such gems as kinetic military actions and overseas contingency operations, and he seems to believe his overt efforts to reach out to the Muslim world, including flowery panegyrics to Muslim culture and the construction of Gitmo basketball courts, have mitigated Islamist hatred toward America and the West. (Polls emphatically say otherwise.) On the other hand, he's operating assassination drones like a repressed schoolboy with new toys and indulging in indefinite detentions of enemy combatants, as if wholly unaware of what the other half of his split personality has been preaching.

I've just scratched the surface, but the inescapable conclusion is that Obama cannot spin his domestic and foreign policy records enough to conceal the truth of his actual record. Indeed, the stubborn truth will be his greatest obstacle in November.

SOURCE

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It's only business that is being subjected to austerity

Which has it exactly the wrong way around if jobs are the issue

By mainstream media accounts, the presidential election in France and parliamentary elections in Greece on May 6 were overwhelming verdicts against “austerity” measures being implemented in Europe.

There is only one problem. It is a lie.

First off, austerity was never really tried. Not really. In France for example, according to Eurostat, annual expenditures have actually increased from €1.095 trillion to €1.118 trillion in 2011. In fact spending has increased every single year for the past decade. The debt there increased too from €1.932 trillion €1.987 trillion last year, just as it did every year before.

Real “austere”. The French spent more, and they borrowed more.

The deficit in France did decrease by about €34 billion in 2011, but that was largely because of a €56.6 billion surge in tax revenues. Again, there were no spending cuts. Zero.

Yet incoming socialist president François Hollande claimed after his victory over Nicolas Sarkozy that he would bring an end to this mythical austerity: “We will bring back Europe on a track for jobs, growth and the future… We’re no longer doomed to austerity.”

This is just a willful, purposeful distortion. What the heck is he talking about? Certainly not France.

If not France, then where?

In Italy and Spain, which have been dependent on tens of billions of cash infusions from the European Central Bank (ECB) to refinance their debts, cuts are hardly anywhere to be found either. In Spain, spending was cut by just €11 billion in 2011, a mere 2.3 percent reduction. In Italy, spending actually increased by €4.3 billion.

Both countries borrowed an additional €117 billion last year alone, raising their combined debts to €1.939 trillion. So, no austerity there. Just debt slaves.

Hollande might have been referring to the budgets of debt-strapped Ireland, Greece, and Portugal that have depended on over €290 billion of refinance loans from the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

But even there, the cuts are rather miniscule. In Greece, spending was cut by just €6.3 billion from 2010 levels. In Portugal, just €4.8 billion. Ireland only trimmed €2.2 billion off its 2009 levels, discounting its massive bank recapitalization in 2010 that blew up its budget by €25.7 billion.

The real point is that none of them even came close to balancing their budgets, with over €47 billion of combined deficits for 2011. More debt slaves.

Yet that is not stopping pundits like New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman from claiming otherwise, who said recently, “All this austerity is actually self-defeating. We’re seeing countries slash spending and drive their economies into a ditch.”

What austerity? These countries are all debt addicts. They’re not addressing the root of the problem. So, what should they do? Just borrow more?

Where’s the growth? Au contraire. Although all of this government largesse and excessive borrowing is supposed to be economic stimulus by Krugman’s account, these European economies are still stuck in a ditch. We tried the same thing here.

More than $3 trillion in fiscal and monetary stimulus since the financial crisis began — all to no avail. Well, some things did happen. We lost our AAA credit rating. And the debt is now larger than the entire economy.

But leaving that aside, based on analyses like Krugman’s, one might get the idea that the sovereign debt crisis in Europe was caused not by too much borrowing, but by not enough of it.

No, Krugman, Hollande, et al., this really is a debt crisis. The government’s demand for borrowing is so voracious that it far exceeds even the financial system’s capacity to lend. The crisis has reached such critical proportions these countries cannot find a way to grow their way out of it.

Hollande’s idea of “growth” is just more government spending and waste in a new wrapper — more education funding, more pensions, more health care, and other soft socialist programs. Because the illness is being misdiagnosed, the solutions being proposed only threaten to exacerbate the symptoms.

If France and other European countries were truly interested in growth, they’d be cutting taxes on business. Yet, Hollande wants a 75 percent levy on the “rich” and to increase social spending. Socialists like Hollande and their ilk do not wish to save the private sector — they want to soak it. Very well.

But this is a true delusion. There is no painless way to solve the systemic imbalances caused by bloated political promises made to dependent classes of citizens. The rich are not rich enough to pay for the level of government we have.

There is no easier, softer way to stop the bleeding. Spending must be cut, budgets balanced, and debts paid down. Europe is nowhere near that right now. Nobody is.

But that’s not all that must be done. To alleviate the painful transition — and make no mistake it will be painful — real fiscal reform must be accompanied by pro-growth policies.

Here in the U.S., systemic unemployment and slow growth in the private sector could be addressed on the supply side. Capital gains and corporate taxes could be eliminated to encourage investment in U.S. companies. Environmental regulations that increase the cost of energy and of doing business here could be rescinded.

We could let banks fail when they make bad investments, and restore a sound money system to ensure price stability and an end to “too big to fail”.

More HERE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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10 May, 2012

The Two Lefts

Steven Plaut refers below to the "Satanic" and the "stupid" Left. I don't think he is far wrong and I have made a similar distinction here. Not being religious, however, I would refer to the "evil" rather than the "Satanic" Left

It is impossible to understand politics in the world today without grasping the fundamental fact that there exist two different lefts. I propose that the two be referred to by everyone as the Stupid Left and the Satanic Left. The two are very different, although they work together. People who are part of the first are simply stupid people. People who are part of the second may in fact be quite shrewd, but are evil and nefarious. There is no third type of leftist.

Over time, the Stupid Left has been losing its numbers, as many Stupid Leftists either become smarter or morph into Satanic Leftists, and so desist from being mere Stupid Leftists. So a process of selection is occurring whereby the strength of the Satanic Left within the overall left grows. The "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrations and their kin in Europe are attended by and contain both kinds of leftists, although they are increasingly organized by Satanic Leftists. Almost all the BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions vis-à-vis Israel) guttersnipes are Satanic Leftists.

Both the Stupid Left and the Satanic Left demonstrate together against the United States, in favor of Iran and Islamofascism, in favor of destroying Israel, and in favor of Palestinian terrorism. But for different reasons. The Stupid Left really thinks that if the U.S. leaves Iran alone, it will refrain from developing weapons of mass destruction. The Satanic Left supports Iran precisely because it knows that Iran will develop them and use them!

The Stupid Left is anti-American because it thinks people in America are oppressed, poor, and mistreated, and that America is an evil country. The Satanic Left is anti-American precisely because it knows that the opposite is the case.

The Stupid Left hates America because it thinks America promotes evil, oppressive regimes around the world. The Satanic Left hates America because America gets in the way of the evil, oppressive regimes that the Satanic Left promotes.

The Stupid Left denounces capitalism and globalization and supports communism because it really believes that people are poor and oppressed under capitalism but free and happy under socialism. The Satanic Left denounces capitalism and supports communism precisely because it knows that the opposite is the case.

The Stupid Left does not know that communism produces gulags. The Satanic Left supports communism precisely because it produces gulags, and also because members of the Satanic Leftists presume that they will be placed in charge of the gulags.

The Stupid Left wants a Palestinian state because it thinks that such a state will pursue peace alongside Israel. The Satanic Left wants a Palestinian state precisely because it knows that such a state will launch a war of destruction against Israel and endless atrocities against the Jews.

The Stupid Left thinks that Israel mistreats Arabs. It does not know that Arab regimes mistreat Arabs. The Satanic Left knows that Israel does not and the Arab regimes do. The reason it wants Israel destroyed is not because it thinks Israel is unjust, but rather because it hates Jews.

The Stupid Left opposes Israeli armed force being used to suppress terror because it thinks that terror can be resolved through dialogue and negotiations. The Satanic Left opposes Israeli armed forces being used to suppress terror because it supports terror against Jews.

The Stupid Left is convinced that most Arabs seek peace, are moderate and decent people, and have legitimate grievances against the West. The Satanic Left supports Arab aggression and terror precisely because it knows that this is not true.

The Stupid Left thinks that Palestinian leaders and Arab nationalists are progressive and liberal. The Satanic Left supports the same people precisely because it knows they are fascists.

The Stupid Left is under the impression that Arab states have elections and freedom and enlightenment. The Satanic Left supports Arab regimes because they want to destroy Israel and murder Jews.

The Stupid Left thinks the West should not place its Arab residents under surveillance because they are decent people and loyal to their adopted countries. The Satanic Left opposes such surveillance because it wants more bin Ladens.

The Stupid Left thinks that Israeli settlements are an obstacle to peace. The Satanic Left wants the settlers evicted or killed because they are an obstacle to the Palestinian ambitions of destroying Israel.

The Stupid Left thinks the Middle East conflict is about Arab human rights. The Satanic Left knows that the Middle East conflict is about suppressing Jewish human rights. Satanic Leftists support this suppression.

The Stupid Left thinks the Middle East conflict is about land and borders. The Satanic Left knows that it is about Israel's existence. The Stupid Left thinks Israel is a discriminatory apartheid country. The Satanic Left wants Israel destroyed so that the Arabs can impose an apartheid regime directed against the Jews and any other non-Moslems.

The Stupid Left believes that it is trying to reform and change America. The Satanic Left wants to destroy America.

The Stupid Left thinks socialism works. The Satanic Left wants socialism because it knows that socialism does not work.

The Stupid Left thinks it is opposing racism. The Satanic Left's fundamental urge is to impose its own mode of racism and anti-Semitism on the world.

The Stupid Left thinks Zionism is a form of racism. The Satanic Left supports anti-Zionism precisely because anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism. The Stupid Left chooses its political positions on the basis of the desire by leftists to make their parents angry. So does the Satanic Left, but Satanic Leftists really hate their parents.

The Stupid Left says it favors equality. The Satanic Left favors transferring power to itself so that it can oppress others.

The Stupid Left supports Marxist groups all over the world because it thinks these are nonviolent and favor pluralism. The Satanic Left supports them because they know these are violent and totalitarian.

SOURCE

The Left’s National Vote Fraud Strategy Exposed

This report reveals the Left’s vote fraud strategy for the 2012 elections. Like a KGB operation, it is thorough, multi-faceted and redundant. It has overt and covert, illegal and legal elements, the latter of which are designed, at least in part, to facilitate illegal activities later. It is a deliberate, premeditated, comprehensive plan to win the 2012 presidential election at all costs, and is in keeping with the organizational methods, associations and ethics of the Community-Organizer-in-Chief, Barack Obama.

The Left seeks fundamental structural change to our entire form of government. In keeping with their amoral, means-justifies-ends philosophy, they will register any voters, dead or alive, legal or illegal, who will then vote as many times as possible, in order to establish a “permanent progressive majority.” As two New York Democrats recently caught in a vote fraud scandal told police, “voter fraud is an accepted way of winning elections…”

Low income individuals are the perfect dupes for this strategy. An expanding welfare state makes them increasingly dependent on government benefits, a development that guarantees their vote for liberal-left candidates. At the same time, people with marginal attachment to society may be less inclined to report illegal activity at the polls—or actually participate. The “victim” narrative promoted in popular culture and press may even encourage such behavior. Meanwhile, a growing tax burden and public debt suck private enterprise dry—pushing ever more people onto the dole.

Politicians of both parties are not above engaging in vote fraud. But this kind of corruption is relegated to individual campaigns or areas where corrupt political establishments have been able to develop unchallenged. It is not a systematic component of overall national strategy, as it is with the Left.

This strategy has been under development for decades. They have constructed an entire industry devoted to this task and pursue a multifaceted strategy to accomplish it:

1. Swamp election officials with overwhelming numbers of registrations at the last possible minute, a huge proportion of which are deliberately fraudulent, in order to create systematic chaos. This accomplishes numerous goals:

* Makes verification of registrations difficult, given the small size and limited budgets of state and local election offices.

* Provides multiple opportunities for vote fraud.

* Throws the entire voting process into question, providing pretext for lawsuits where concessions may be obtained from election officials.

* When election officials challenge registrations, they are accused of “voter suppression.” This in turn serves complementary goals:

* Charge of “voter suppression” reinforces the Left’s narrative about America as an oppressive, “racist” country.

*Publicity and lawsuits intimidate election officials, who settle on terms favorable to the Left.

2. Activists sue state authorities for “voter suppression,” creating further chaos and pressuring them to become de facto taxpayer-funded voter registration operations;

3. Eric Holder’s Justice Department tacitly supports voter intimidation tactics, sues states and backs private lawsuits, and resists reform as “voter suppression.”

4. Leftist echo chamber discredits allegations of vote fraud, supports “suppression” theme, and promotes advantageous legislation.

The ultimate goal is a systematized, taxpayer-funded voting machinery that will guarantee maximum participation from the Left’s voting demographic while undermining the ability to manage elections and prevent fraud.

More HERE

Liberal pundits play pretend on European austerity

Incumbent governments overseeing wobbly economies are falling apart across Europe. In the Netherlands, Prime Minister Mark Rutte tendered his government's resignation after he failed to produce a budget. In France, socialist Francois Hollande ousted President Nicolas Sarkozy in Sunday's vote. And in Greece, the two parties that supported last year's European Union bailout suffered significant losses at the polls.

The source of voter discomfort is no mystery. While not technically in a recession, Europe is heading for a severe slump. Average unemployment in the European Union is at 10.2 percent, and the European Commission predicts that its economy will shrink by 0.3 percent in 2012.

American liberals have been quick to diagnose the source of Europe's economic problems. "Blame it on austerity economics," Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich writes, "the bizarre view that economic slowdowns result from excessive debt, so government should cut spending."

The New York Times' Paul Krugman added Monday, "Claims that slashing government spending would somehow encourage consumers and businesses to spend more have been overwhelmingly refuted by the experience of the past two years. Spending cuts in a depressed economy just make the depression deeper."

To hear them describe it, you'd think European austerity was just about spending cuts. Quite the contrary. Although Krugman curiously fails to mention the word "taxes" in his latest column, tax increases have most certainly played a part -- and in many cases the largest part -- in the European austerity packages he is decrying.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development reports tax hikes made up 47 percent of France's deficit-reduction package -- €21.5 billion out of €46 billion. In Greece, 54 percent of their austerity package came from higher taxes, and in Portugal, the breakdown was 62 percent tax hikes and only 38 percent spending cuts. Such reliance on tax increases is the exact opposite of what economic history recommends. As a recent OECD report concluded, "International experience shows expenditure-based fiscal consolidation tends to be more successful" than increasing taxes.

But Reich, Krugman and President Obama all favor a large tax increase for the United States. Both Reich and Krugman have recently endorsed a 70 percent top marginal tax rate. Obama is doing nothing to prevent the $494 billion "taxmageddon" that is set to occur automatically on January 1, 2013, when the Bush-era tax rates expire under current law.

Austerity packages, no matter how constructed, are always painful for at least some segments of the population. They are more or less painful depending on how dependent a population has become on government financial assistance. This is why it is so vitally important to deal with the problem early, as House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan proposes in his Path to Prosperity. If Congress reforms these programs now, it will not only empower Americans to make more of their own health and retirement decisions; it will also help the nation avoid reneging on unrealistic promises later. The alternative is playing out across Europe now.

9 May, 2012

Big Tea Party win

Richard Mourdock has defeated longtime Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana in the Republican primary, according to an Associated Press projection, ending the career of one of the Senate’s most pragmatic politicians

Mourdock, state treasurer in Indiana, campaigned as a conservative alternative to Lugar. He became a darling of the tea party movement after he began a legal challenge to the terms of the Obama administration’s bailout of Chrysler.

Mourdock was endorsed by Sarah Palin and Rep. Michele Bachmann, and Lugar had the backing of the party establishment, including Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

Mourdock will face Democratic Rep. Joe Donnelly, a three-term congressman from the South Bend area, this fall. The matchup is the preferred outcome for Democrats, who view Lugar’s ouster as an opportunity to pick up a longtime Republican seat.

Lugar had warned Indiana voters that choosing Mourdock would thwart Republican efforts to take control of the Senate. Democrats will be defending 23 Senate seats in November – compared with 10 for the GOP – but just a handful are considered truly up for grabs.

Lugar, known as one of the more centrist members of the Senate, was befriended by Barack Obama during his time in the Senate. Obama touted the friendship during his 2008 campaign for president, angering some of Lugar’s constituents.

The Senate’s longest-serving Republican, Lugar also suffered a blow earlier this year when a panel in Indiana ruled that he was ineligible to vote in his former home district because he no longer lived there.

SOURCE

Some optimism for November

In assessing the Romney vs. Obama campaign for the presidency, let's step back and look at the big picture. The Republican nominee will win in November, and here's why.

Mitt Romney is currently running about even with Barack Obama in reputable polls. Tied, or even a few points behind, in May is the ideal position for the challenger.

Romney's vote minimum is McCain's 47% -- and he will certainly do much better than that. Obama's vote maximum is his previous 53% -- and he will certainly do much worse than that.

Romney has the discipline to stay in message.

Romney wants to win more than McCain did in 2008.

Romney has better strategists than McCain had in 2008.

Romney is not afraid of Obama.

Romney has firmed up his support among conservatives more effectively than some had feared.

Romney's campaign funding will be better than McCain's was in 2008.

The RNC is much stronger than it was in 2008.

Republican activists are using the internet more effectively than in 2008.

Obama and congressional Democrats are clearly to blame for the dismal economy.

Obama can boast of few positive achievements in office.

Obama is becoming an object of ridicule.

Obama has needlessly created political enemies among the electorate.

Obama has lost support among the moderates who still remain within the Democratic Party .

Obama's background is at last being examined.

Voters are tired of media claims that he is a messiah, a uniter, above politics.

Democrats are not as motivated as they were in 2008.

SOURCE

Voting with their feet after a socialist victory

Wealthy French eye move across the Channel. London is already home to about 200,000 French people

Wealthy French people are looking to London as a refuge from fresh taxes on high earners pledged by candidates in the country’s presidential elections.

The “soak the rich” rhetoric that has punctuated the presidential campaign has prompted a sharp rise in the numbers weighing a move across the Channel, according to London-based wealth managers, lawyers and property agents specialising in French clients.

François Hollande, the new Socialist president, wants to impose a tax rate of 75 per cent on income above €1m and at the launch of his bid in January said: “My true adversary in this battle has no name, no face, no party ... It is the world of finance.”

Inquiries from French clients had risen by roughly 40 per cent since the speech, says David Blanc, a partner at Vestra Wealth, a London-based wealth manager. “I have definitely seen strong interest in what could be done to protect assets both for people resident in France but also for French nationals who are UK resident,” said Mr Blanc, a former UBS executive.

The prospect of a Gallic diaspora of high earners was backed up by Knight Frank, the property agent, which said numbers of French web users searching online for its prime London properties online in the past three months had risen 19 per cent compared with the same period last year. The equivalent figure for Europe as a whole fell 9 per cent.

“The election seems to have pushed a growing number of wealthy French to consider their options for where they are likely to base themselves in the future,” says Liam Bailey, head of research at Knight Frank.

London’s status as an international finance hub as well as its proximity to France make it a natural choice for French professionals. Enclaves of French expatriates are firmly established in areas such as Belgravia and South Kensington, close to the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle, a popular secondary school.

The departure of France’s business people, entrepreneurs and the young for opportunities overseas is not a new phenomenon. When Nicolas Sarkozy visited London in 2007 he called for its French residents to return to a reformed France under his presidency.

Mr Blanc says some French clients were even contemplating acquiring British or other nationality in order to safeguard assets from fears that France could move to collect more tax from citizens overseas. “A lot of people are extremely worried,” he said.

Alexandre Terrasse, a partner in corporate and property law at Jeffrey Green Russell, says he had seen a 25 per cent rise in activity from French clients over the past six months, “The 75 per cent tax is clearly a sign that the politicians will hit the wealthy and they don’t want to have to deal with that.”

Bernard Grinspan, managing partner of the Paris office of Gibson Dunn, an international law firm, says: “Some of our clients are very seriously discussing relocation – not only to London but also Singapore and New York. There’s a lot of uncertainty.”

SOURCE

Tweedledum and tweedledee -- and both wrong?

The article from Britian below was written just before the final French elections. My libertarian inclinations make me sympathetic to it but I think I should add that even small differences can be important.

To maximize their vote all successful politicians have to be fairly centrist. It is only very rare personalities like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher who can shift the whole political spectrum rightwards

Left and Right politicians like Francois Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy, and Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson, sing from same hymn sheet. But political 'debate' ignores the fact that the market economy can't afford enormous social security programmes.

To listen to the excitable coverage, you might think that we were in the midst of a jolly stimulating election season in three separate countries. France, the US and London (a country within a country) would all seem to have been pitched into good old-fashioned struggles between Left and Right. One might be inclined to conclude that, after a generation of middle-ground consensus, there has been a revival of substantive debate about ideology on this side of the Atlantic, and even a startling move towards something of the kind in America - where true ideological differences between parties are almost unknown.

In London and in France, the contests were apparently between socialist adherents of the Old Faith (or historical throwbacks, if you prefer) and proponents of the market theory of wealth creation who were undaunted by the recent troubles of the capitalist system. Ken Livingstone and Fran‡ois Hollande represented the politics that time had once forgotten: unashamedly committed to the power of the state and to belief in the virtue of public spending. In the opposing corners, Boris Johnson positioned himself clearly and explicitly to the Right of his own party leadership, and Nicolas Sarkozy defended both free markets and foreign interventionism.

Meanwhile in America, a seemingly fundamental debate is taking place between the most Left-wing president in living memory and a Tea Party-dominated Republican Party that has moved significantly to the Right. So we are back to profound arguments about basic political philosophy, right? We now have serious differences of principle between parties (or at least between prominent candidates). Is there, at last, something more intellectually satisfying to fight over than the fiddly details of how little regulation, or how much taxation, is needed to hit just the right balance?

No, there isn't. This whole confrontation is overblown and illusory. All of the voices and personalities who come remotely close to power in mainstream political life in all these countries actually co-exist within the same narrow centrist spectrum. There is no Left of the old school - threatening to seize the means of production and the levers of the economy in the name of the proletariat. Not even Mr Livingstone advocates renationalising Britain's industries or the wholesale confiscation and redistribution of private property. And Mr Johnson, while he is certainly a more forthright spokesman for business interests and lower taxes than David Cameron, would not deny the need to regulate the banks or protect the disadvantaged.

The difference between the Centre Right and the Centre Left (for they are all that remains of the two sides of that old titanic struggle) is now almost entirely rhetorical. The CR wants a free-market economy with an entitlements programme attached to guard against social unrest. The CL wants an entitlement society with free-market activity attached to provide the necessary funds. The argument about the mix is very much confined to the margins - and about how you describe it. The actual differences being so slight (and there being so much flexibility needed to cope with fluctuating reality) that it is necessary to lard the descriptions with emotive, absolutist language to generate some faux passion.

So in the course of their bare-knuckle "debate" last week, Mr Hollande said to Mr Sarkozy, "I protect the children of the Republic, you protect the most privileged", thereby encapsulating the sentimental moral blackmail of modern CL-ism. And Mr Sarkozy retorted, "You want fewer rich people. I want fewer poor people," which pretty much sums up the view of CR-ism that only free markets can produce prosperity for the mass of the population.

In short, the CL more or less accepts that real wealth can only be produced by free-market economics but it still behaves as if it hates wealth creators. It continues to talk as if "profit" was an obscene word, deliberately confounding the idea of "profit-making" with "profiteering". Note the horrified reactions when there is any possibility of private profit being made through investing in public services such as health and education. Such services must remain free of the taint of the profit motive (which is to say entirely government-funded) even if that means they remain inefficient and in the grip of vested interests.

The CR, on the other hand, accepts the need for what EU spokesmen call "social solidarity": what amounts, in practical terms, to a more-or-less comprehensive welfare system which promises to ensure that no one can fall into poverty (as defined by government statistics) whatever life choices he may make. However much it may talk of "making work pay" and cracking down on benefit dependency, no official spokesman for the CR will actually repudiate the principle that it is the state's business to eradicate poverty.

So no, there is no ideological war here. The serious differences between these supposedly enemy camps - however much vitriol and personal abuse they may fling at one another - are minimal and mainly a question of labels and packaging.

Well, you may say, that's not so bad, is it? Everybody is in basic agreement about some very important things: free-market economics (for all its recent upheavals) is accepted as the only way to create wealth. And we all accept that we have a moral responsibility to reduce poverty. If politicians want to pretend that there is more differentiation between them than there really is in order to inject a bit of excitement into the electoral process, what's wrong with that?

Just this. In all the phoney ardour and heat, no one is paying any attention to the two facts that make nonsense of this supposed debate - which is not a debate. The first is that the assumption which all the principal parties have chosen to share is wrong. Relying on the free market to support a vast system of entitlements (whichever of the two you choose to make your first priority) is not sustainable. The market economy simply cannot afford the enormous cost of the social security programmes that are now regarded as politically untouchable in Europe and in the US - as both of their political elites are painfully discovering.

The second, and even more critical point, is that the economy has become so globalised that it is beyond the control of any national government, and therefore outside the reach of democratic accountability.

Politicians running for office may squabble and insult one another for all they are worth - but the economic future can now escape their grasp altogether.

SOURCE

8 May, 2012

Bibi outmaneuvers them all again

Definitely one smart guy

In a surprise turnabout, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has decided to cancel the early elections he had called just 24 hours before and instead form a unity government with the opposition party Kadima, Israeli officials said Tuesday.

The decision shocked much of Israel's political establishment, which was gearing up to dissolve the parliament, or Knesset, and launch campaigns for a Sept. 4 vote.

By joining the government coalition, newly elected Kadima Chairman Shaul Mofaz avoids facing voters amid polls indicating that his centrist party would lose more than half its Knesset seats. Just a month ago, Mofaz declared he would not join the government and vowed to unseat Netanyahu.

In exchange, Mofaz has been promised a ministerial position in the government, officials said. His predecessor, Tzipi Livni, had rejected calls to join Netanyahu's government, saying it was not serious about reaching a peace deal with Palestinians.

For Netanyahu, the deal means he can retain his government, which many consider to be one of the nation's most stable, and reduce his dependence on smaller nationalist and religious parties, whose conservative agendas have dominated his coalition.

The primary loser will be the recently reformed Labor Party, which polls suggested was preparing to make a big comeback in the September vote to become the nation's second-largest party.

As they woke up Tuesday to the news, other political parties condemned the deal, calling it a cynical power grab that would backfire with Israeli voters.

Labor lawmaker Isaac Herzog called the new unity government an "alliance of cowards.... This is a golden opportunity for Labor to lead the people on a different course from that of Netanyahu and Mofaz, if not now, then in 2013," he wrote on his Facebook page, referring to next year's regularly scheduled vote.

There were questions about how long the unity government would last given the stark differences over certain issues, such as Palestinian peace talks. Mofaz is expected to push for a more aggressive effort to restart negotiations, which some right-wing members of Netanyahu's Likud are already warning could hurt West Bank settlement expansion.

One particularly divisive issue is a plan to begin drafting fervently-Orthodox young people into the army. Netanyahu and Mofaz both support the move, though the religious party Shas is staunchly opposed and had threatened to quit the coalition if the government adopted it. With the votes Kadima brings to the new coalition, such threats would not bring down the government as feared.

Hanan Crystal, a political commentator for Israel Radio, predicted Tuesday that the new unity government would allow Netanyahu to pursue a more centrist policy in dealing with Palestinians and other social issues in Israel. He called it the "move of a super-statesman."

Source

BOOK REVIEW of Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People By Harry Ostrer Oxford University Press, 288 Pages, $24.95