Category Archives: Politics

Progressive Crack-Up

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The use of crude and violent language to condemn conservatives as enemies of the state, the gross manipulation of law to make the Constitution say whatever is politically expedient, and indifference to the actual arguments made by their political opponents—these are all-too-familiar progressive vices. They were exercised with abandon in the fury with which progressives responded to the complex questions raised by the Supreme Courts decision in Bush v. Gore, the detention of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, and the invasion of Iraq. Tea party hatred is the successor of and stems from the same sources as Bush hatred.

Of course, a good bit of progressive vituperation can be chalked up to the ordinary passions of democratic politics, which can be high stakes and is a contact sport. But in the debt-limit crisis, the hypocrisy of progressives reached truly breathtaking proportions.

How often they have haughtily lectured the nation on the vital importance of civility in public discourse, the urgency of constraining executive power under law, and the need for impartial expertise in public affairs to pragmatically weigh competing public-policy options. But in the debt-limit debate the virtues they profess could hardly have been more spectacularly absent.

Ouch.

via Peter Berkowitz: The Debt Deal and the Progressive Crack-Up – WSJ.com.

Double Standards…

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So, let me see if I get this straight:  the bad economy was BUSH’s fault (even though he had a solidly Democrat congress the last 2 years of his presidency) but when a Democrat is in the white house and the economy is bad… its not even the house Republican’s fault… but a tiny subset of the Republicans called the ‘tea party’ that is responsible.

If your name is John Kerry…. that’s totally logical.

I guess if you want to put this whole thing in axiom form it would be this:  Democrats are never responsible for bad economies.  Republicans, no matter how small a portion of government they control, always are.

Ask a rational person

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I’m really thankful we have people like Andy McCarthy on our side:

Ask any rational person: “When a government is so addicted to reckless spending that it has run up a crushing $14.3 trillion debt that it has no plan to pay back — when it is borrowing $180 million per hour because it has taken on more obligations than it could ever hope to satisfy — would it be better to extend that government’s credit line another $2.5 trillion so it can continue heedlessly along, or to take every available opportunity to force it to alter course dramatically?” There is only one right answer to that question.

via Against the Boehner Plan – Andrew C. McCarthy – National Review Online.

about those corporate jets…

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Jonah Goldberg pretty much decimates Obama’s whole “jet owners – vs – the rest of us” argument:

…Obama’s most recent budget calls for adding $9.5 trillion in new debt over the next decade. If you got rid of the “accelerated depreciation” of corporate jets, Reuters economics columnist James Pethokoukis calculates, it would save a whopping .03 percent of that total.

…No one asked the president why he suddenly cares so much about getting rid of a tax break he himself was for before he was against it. Indeed, no one asked why, if it is such an affront to the liberal conscience, it was part of Obama’s stimulus bill, which was passed without any Republican votes in the House and only three in the Senate (which means Nancy Pelosi voted for special tax breaks for corporate jets and the GOP didn’t).

When these are the facts… its kind of hard to take Obama seriously when he NOW comes out against the very thing he signed into law a few years ago.  And hypocrisy aside… Obama is simply being dishonest about the American people about what our choices and options are. His recent challenge to republicans to Republicans went something like this:  “You go talk to your constituents and ask them, ‘Are you willing to compromise your kids’ safety so some corporate-jet owner can get a tax break?’”

You see… in Obama’s world… the ONLY TWO CHOICES AVAILABLE TO US…. are making all kids completely safe (or at least giving willful dupes the impression this is even possible)… or giving some minor .03% tax cut to a business that is creating jobs (something he claims to want to do… something he claims a ‘lazer-like’ focus on…).  But this is simply not true.  No children are going to be ANY SAFER if a corporate depreciation tax schedule is kept in place or depreciated.  This is nothing more than partisan political posturing of the worst sort… the sort that insinuates that one’s political opponents want to harm women and children. Its as bad as the recent TV spot that insinuated that Paul Ryan wanted to push old ladies off of the edge of a cliff.  Where’s the civility Democrats are always begging for?

If anyone is incapable of having a debate… if anyone is incapable of having a rational conversation… if anyone is incapable of compromise… it is President Obama.  What compromise is there to be had with someone who is this out of touch with reality?

via Corporate Jets and Tax Breaks by Jonah Goldberg.

God I love this woman…

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“This is why Conservatives don’t have humans as Gods… they are always going to disappoint you… we have a real savior”

[on the chapter on liberal's contradictory thinking] They will viciously attack Clarence Thomas for dubious (and obviously false) … allegations about engaging in verbal sexual harassment and then they are hysterical about sexual McCarthyism… Teddy Kennedy kills a woman at Chappaquiddick and then spend the rest of his life looking into other people’s past…

Failures of Governance

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I don’t have time for a full post today… but here’s some short quotes for further reading:

Turns out that Liberal welfare programs are so fiscally disastrous, paying for them would require the indefinite imposition of 80% income taxes:

The total present value of payments expected under Social Security and Medicare beyond what is expected to be collected under current tax laws is about $100 trillion. One way to put that amount of money in context is to note that it is about twice the amount of all the net private assets that exist in America today.

To answer cw’s question directly, the best back-of-envelope estimate is that meeting this unfunded portion of our Social Security and Medicare commitments would require roughly an immediate 80 percent increase in federal income taxes, sustained forever.

And yet Obama criticizes anyone trying to bring this disaster under control as unwilling to engage in an “adult” conversation.  Something tells me our economy will be even worse when 80% of the wealth produced by the economy is confiscated by third parties.  Why work?

In other news, Obama has borrowed as much in one month as Bush did during all of 2007.

In other news, The value of the dollar plunged to a 2 1/2 year low… causing investors to flee to commodities such as gold and crude… putting further upward pressure on Gasoline prices… and making everything, from corn to cotton, more expensive for consumers.  Think of this as a tax on the poor.

Standard & Poor’s just slashed the United State’s debt rating to negative from stable.  Probably all the Republican debt from the Bush era causing that reaction.  Anyway, Market Watch says the likely outcome is that:

A downgrade would push up interest rates on Treasurys, which are a benchmark for other consumer and business borrowing rates, raising the cost of credit throughout the economy.

Think of this as yet another tax on the poor and middle class… who rely most on credit.

Meanwhile, it is looking ever more likely that Gas will hit not only $4 a gallon, but $5 a gallon… which is caused by a severe loss of Dollar value as well as a constrained supply of oil… thank GOD we’ve opened the Gulf back up for drilling… O, wait, Obama hasn’t done that yet?  Oh… my bad.

And finally, it turns out Obama is arming Al Qaeda in Lybia.  I didn’t think it was possible either… but here we are.

The state of the economy… more than 2 years later

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Lets engage in a thought experiment.  Imagine that there are no such thing as term limits and that Bush actually won the election of 2009.  Fortunately, that’s the hard part of the thought experiment.  Now imagine that everything else remained exactly the same. The same health care bill, the same bailouts, the same massive debt, the same repeated statements about ‘focusing like a laser‘ on the economy followed by more than two years of a 10% unemployment rate, the same “kinetic military action” in Lybia, the same lavish trips to Spain, Rio, The Hamptons, the same 60 rounds of golf, the same ‘transparency‘.  Imagine if everything else that has happened had not changed one bit.

Now ask yourself this question:  can you imagine a media being as forgiving to Bush as they have been to Obama the past 27 months? Can you imagine the media giving Bush a pass on Abu Gharab #2?  Can you imagine them passing on the opportunity to paint the Lybian action as yet another wasteful failure of American power in the Middle East?  Can you imagine their condesention at Bush’s attempt to ‘brand’ the Lybian action as this rather Orwellian-sounding “kinetic military action“?  Can you imagine Bush being given a pass with unemployment still hovering around 10% over 27 months after he passed a trillion dollars in stimulus?  Can you imagine, given their reaction to how much the Iraq war cost, what their reaction would be to the biggest federal debt and deficits in history?  Can you imagine?

If you’ve got a decent imagination, very quickly you would see that there is an incredible double-standard at work, not only in the mainstream media, but in what Liberals find objectionable on any given day.  And what concerns me the most is their utter lack of interest in the economic hardships the American people are facing… and the lack of interest Obama has in doing anything to fix this problem more than a year after it became apparent that his original plans to simulate had failed.

I don’t know about you, but when I read headlines like “Gallup Finds U.S. Unemployment Rate at 10.0% in March“… I swallow rather hard… because it is quite apparent that we are still in the midst of an economic cricis.  And make no mistake, 2 years of stagnant growth and 10 percent unemployement is a cricis… regardless of how many times the mainstream media tells you were ‘in a recovery’.  If you look at the details, its shocking how bad a position we are in.  Even the unemployment figures don’t tell the whole story:

The percentage of the overall population that is employed in March 2010 was 58.6 percent. One year later, the total percentage of overall population  employed is… 58.5 percent.  Conclusion: In a growing population we have produced fewer jobs than the number that the population grew. (For the record, the number of Civilian non-institutionalized population was 237.2 million in March 2010, and is 239.00 million in March 2011.)

The number of people who were “not in the labor force” In March 2010 was 83,264,000 (seasonally adjusted). In March 2011, it was 85,594,000 (seasonally adjusted). If you want to know how unemployment dropped a point, look no further than this statistic.

Bottom line… overall REAL unemployment hasn’t changed one bit… regardless of what statistics the Office of Labor releases.  The only thing that has been keeping the unemployement figures as low as they have been… has been due to some rather arbitrary accounting — magically rounding the overall workforce number down to make the same number of unemployed seem like a lower percentage.

Furthermore, we find ourselves in this position even after spending trillions of dollars of debt-spending on ‘stimulus’.  I don’t know about you, but for a trillion dollars… I expected the streets to be paved with gold…. not barely paved.

What has become clear to me is that Obama has no clue what causes economic growth… and has doubled down on  a failed Keynesian ideology despite the overwhelming evidence of its ineffectiveness.

And to make matters worse, as the recent ballooning budget crisis hit state governments, we have slowly begun to realize that all that money that was promised to simulate ‘main street’ mom-and-pop stores… actually was spent protecting union members and federal workers from the pain of economic downturn.  Look at the breakdown on the Business Insider website:

  • $36.9 billion for Aid to People Affected by Economic Downturn (YAY!)
  • $48.4 billion for Education (Think teachers unions)
  • $324 million for Accountability (Think federal employees)
  • $58.4 billion for Aid to State and Local Governments (Think public sector state unions)
  • $41.4 billion for Energy
  • $13.1 billion for Science and Technology including $2.5 billion to National Science Foundation research and $4.7 billion to National Telecommunications and Information Administration… 400 million to NASA (think federal employees)
  • $18.8 billion for Health Care (almost half of which went to federal agencies)
  • $870 million for Business ($646 of which went to Small business loans)
  • $98.3 billion for Transportation and Infrastructure (think Union jobs)
  • $48.3 billion for Infrastructure (Jobs for Main Street Act, the purpose of which was “To poach previously allocated TARP funding and funnel the money into creating jobs in targeted sectors of the US economy [including] mass transit, schools, public housing, and clean water initiatives while adding jobs in these fields.
  • $26.7 billion for Public Service Jobs (ironically titled “Jobs for Main Street Act”)
  • $79 billion for Emergency Relief for Families (good, but hardly ‘stimulus’)
  • $34 billion for the Extension of Unemployment Benefits

Just look at the mysterious lack of anything beneficial for the 80% of the country that is a) not unionized or b) not a federal worker!  Oh, and any ‘stimulus’ that DID go to the the non-unionized private sector was in the form of government LOANS… all of which are to be paid back… basically creating a wash in dollar terms.

I mean seriously, did anyone really expect any of this to work??!!  Can we all agree that whatever this was… it was NOTHING a true stimulus should have been?!  What DID go to the private sector in ‘free’ money was only to help people WITHOUT jobs manage… not help the businesses they work at CREATE NEW ONES. To all my friends on the left: do you not see the sad reality here… the lack of any real solution for most of the middle class in this country… despite Obama’s “laser-like-focus” on jobs!!!??? Doesn’t anyone notice this?  I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!

And then I read this article by Stephen Moore explaining that its worse:

Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million).

It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers. Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees. Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay their bills?

And while some of this discrepancy has happened because of real productivity gains in manufacturing…  the government sector has grown by multiples… and has shown decreasing productivity:

Over the period 1970-2005, school spending per pupil, adjusted for inflation, doubled, while standardized achievement test scores were flat. Over roughly that same time period, public-school employment doubled per student, according to a study by researchers at the University of Washington. That is what economists call negative productivity.

We are spending twice as much on education… and getting worse results.   GREAT.

This is a real disaster we are experiencing…  lets hope the next president can fix things before its too late.

Wisconsin & Unions

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As many of you who follow the news are probably aware, Scott Walker recently won a victory of sorts against the unions in Wisconsin.  I’ve hesitated to give running commentary during the negotiations themselves, as whatever I wrote would undoubtedly be immediately outdated… but now that we have a result in that ideological battle, I think some commentary is justified.

Courtesy of: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thehardestpart/5460477085/What has been interesting to me is that, even for many liberals I talked with, the real issue with many on the left was not necessarily that teachers were being asked to contribute to their pensions… but that the unbelievably important right to engage in collective bargaining was being taken away.  I emphasize “unbelievably important” because of all the things to protest, I’m still wrapping my head around why this right was so important to many on the left.

Now, I should point out that, contrary to the running narrative in the mainstream media, the bill that passed the Wisconsin legislature did not completely remove the right to collective bargaining.  There will still be unions… and many of the various protections and benefits incurred by union membership (including the right to collectively bargain for wages) will continue after the bill’s passage.  The only significant downside for unions seems to be the inability to collectively bargain for health care and pension benefits.

Now, what I find interesting here is that these same union protestors (many of whom lean democrat) who completely support Obama’s rather unilateral intervention into the health care market — those who cheered the notion of the federal government arbitrarily changing all the rules of the health care system… limiting what kinds of plans we can have and punishing people with fines (even jail time)… now all of a sudden are getting really up-tight when the rules all of a sudden change on them.

Even so, to focus on the minutia of this particular loss of union bargaining power is problematic because at its core, I think the underlying issues go much deeper.  What is driving the protests is the fear of a loss of political power, and not just any political power, but a loss of power over the people of Wisconsin.  After all, these unions are not fighting some evil corporation undermining their livelihood, they are bargaining against the very taxpayers they claim to serving.  For decades, this ‘bargaining’ was not really bargaining at all, but was instead a series of political pay-offs by Democrat politicians to the unions who had generously funded their campaign efforts through union dues.  While I think Peter Robinson summed up the problem best on the Ricochet Podcast when he said:

“In effect, it [permitting collective bargaining rights for public employees] makes no sense for an economic point of few [or] from a bargaining point of view. Its not bargaining; they sit on both sides of the table. The union sits on one side… the officials they help to get elected sits on the other side of the table…. the officials vote the unions more money… the unions have the states collect their dues which then go into enormous funds which they spend getting more of their officials elected. It is an outrage and a sham. “

Whatever bargaining was going on… It had not been ‘bargaining’ in the classic sense of the term.  For too long, union interests dominated Wisconsin politics and were at least partially responsible for a crushing budget deficit.  Public unions had been waging political war against the Wisconsin republican establishment for decades by bank-rolling Democrat candidates… and the people of Wisconsin, by electing Scott Walker, have finally gotten tired of this broken bargaining system… and wanted their interests to be represented… for a change.  I don’t think the analysis of the Wisconsin situation is really much more complicated than that.

I am not arguing here that unions do not deserve to be able to bargain collectively, or that all unions deserve this sort of criticism… but I think that the will of the people of Wisconsin should be heard in this case.  Regardless of which side of this debate is really in the ‘right’… I think the most important principle from which every state should begin when addressing these issues is this:  The public does not exist to serve the interests of its public employees… but rather public employees exist at the will of the people who pay their salaries. The tension in wisconsin at its heart, is between those who agree with this principle and those who do not.