We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Currently, the U.S. has the highest legal immigration in the world. Every year, we allow 750,000 immigrants to enter the country legally and make them eligible for citizenship within five years. Two hundred and fifty thousand aslyees are also permitted to enter annually. Those legal immigrants have the right to work and earn a living; the asylees are eligible to work six months after applying to work. If we need more immigrants, as many think we do to expand the workforce of our graying population, then we can easily increase the number of legal immigrants.
If we give the current illegals amnesty, you can be sure that 20 or so years from now, there will be a clamor for another amnesty bill as the illegals will continue to pour in.
I was watching TV clips of the Greek riots. The bottom line rationale of the Greek rescue effort is the transfer of known and predictable near-total losses on Greek debt from the investors, banks and governments holding that debt to the taxpayers of the EU and the taxpayers funding the IMF in order to try to protect the euro until the next crisis.
Kondratiev's predictions are:
1. There is no way Greece will ever repay the $146 billion; either (a) the austerity measures if accepted and complied with will plunge the country into deep recession, or (b) the general strikes that the austerity measures inspire will cause depression.
2. In either case, the Greek government will fall for agreeing to the austerity conditions, and the government that gets elected will repudiate both the austerity measures and the euro. Because the European Central Bank is not the issuer of euro notes and because that function has been left to individual countries, all Greece needs to do to "unpick" from the euro is to declare that each Greek-issued euro note (one with a serial number starting with "Y") is now a drachma note and will be exchanged 1-for-1 by the Bank of Greece.
3. Then Greece will go back to devaluing and inflating and devaluing and inflating just as it used to do.
The euro has been fabulous for European trade, but with a majority of Germans polled saying they opposed the Greek bailout, something will have to give. I hazard a couple of guesses, first that the euro might split into a soft euro for the PIIGS and a hard euro for the other countries, or that the rest of the PIIGS would follow Greece and return to local currencies.
Bottom line: if you are holding any "Y" euro notes, deposit them in your bank as soon as you can for their full face value.
Ten years ago, the European Union with great fanfare unveiled the “Lisbon Agenda”, a ten-year action plan to make the EU “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion”.
It flopped. Europe is less of a factor today than it was ten years ago in the high-tech world. Even before the crash the EU lagged behind China, India and the United States when it came to economic growth. It is emerging from the recession more slowly than the others and there are no signs that Europe has overcome the problems that have slowed its growth. As for ‘greater social cohesion’, look at the trade union riots in Greece. Look at the tensions with immigrants; look at the rise of extreme right-wing parties.
The June issue of Chief Executive magazine confirms that while my residence in California has wonderful climate and well-educated people, otherwise I live in a state ranked by 651 chief executives across the country as the worst state to do business.
How is it that the nation’s most populous state at 37 million, one that is the world’s eighth-largest economy and the country’s richest and most diverse agricultural producer, a state that had the fastest growth rate in the 1950s and 1960s during the tenures of Democratic Governor Pat Brown and Republican Governors Earl Warren and Ronald Reagan, should become the Venezuela of North America?
Californians pay among the highest income and sales taxes in the nation, the former exceeding 10 percent in the top brackets. Unemployment statewide is over 12.2 percent, higher than the national average. State politics seems consumed with how to divide a shrinking pie rather than how to expand it. Against national trend, union density is climbing from 16.1 percent of workers in 1998 to 17.8 percent in 2002. Organized labor has more political influence in California than in most other states. In addition, unfunded pension and health care liabilities for state workers top $500 billion and the annual pension contribution has climbed from $320 million to $7.3 billion in less than a decade. When state employees reach critical mass, they tend to become a permanent lobby for continual growth in government.
No surprise, the other states at the bottom of the barrel for governments deemed unfriendly to business: New York, Michigan, New Jersey, Massachusetts.The states whose business friendliness has declined most in the past five years: Illinois, Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin, New Jersey. The states most friendly toward business: Texas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Nevada.
With 2010 census reassignment of Congressional seats coming up, there are consequences:
Little wonder then that while Texas gained over 848,000 net new residents in the last 10 years, according to the Census Bureau, California lost 1.5 million. New York State’s net loss exceeded 1.6 million - the highest of any state. High-tax, big- government New Jersey ranked fourth, with a net loss of almost 460,000, enough to drop it from 10th to 11th place in population.
Good.
But not so good for taxpayers in the states unfriendly to business.
The political elites in the states that dismiss out-migration trends overlook the radical demographic adjustment underway. As higher-income earners leave, they are more often replaced by those with lower incomes and lower skills, many needing public assistance. Gone too are the entrepreneurs and risk-takers, off seeking regions where their job creating abilities are rewarded.
Another more daunting reality is in store. The so-called de-leveraging of America hasn’t reached government. U.S. cities and states have issued over $2 trillion in new debt since 2008, with another $1 trillion scheduled this year. The problem is that state revenues in real terms may not reach 2008 levels until late in 2012, according to John Thomasian of the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices. As he emphasizes in his paper, “The Big Reset: State Government after the Great Recession,” states will have to rethink and redesign government in terms of what is essential and what can be made more efficient if their citizens are to have much of a future.
The Chief Executive magazine report follows last year's alarming "Manufacturing 2.0" study by California's Milken Institute. It showed California suffering a collapse of its manufacturing sector on a magnitude of the one that killed Michigan's economy.
California's long-term job losses are downright ugly. Since 2001, while politicians dither and spend, 634,000 factory jobs have disappeared along with 34% of the industrial base. From 2003 to 2007 alone, according to the Milken report, 79,000 jobs were lost due to excessive regulation and too-high taxes.
But if California's private companies are suffering, its public sector sure isn't. From 2001 to 2009, California lost 235,000 net private-sector jobs, but gained 163,700 government jobs. Those cushy union jobs also pay more than comparable private jobs and provide gold-plated benefits. Now Californians find they actually have to pay for this foolishness.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, astute and able as he is in tempering the more extreme elements within the Obama administration, may still be enabling while trying to slow the rot in our hull.
Gates points are well made: both our Navy and Marine Corps must rely less upon traditional large ships and subs, and landing craft, respectively, to meet the capabilities and challenges from missiles and killer subs. Gates points out that the US Navy has more sea and air assets than the rest of the world combined, but is somewhat vulnerable to dangers from swarming speedboats, for example. The Navy and Marine Corps should, instead, gear more toward agility and effectiveness in countering and overwhelming the threats from or within smaller nations.
Gates is correct.
However, the premise is, while realistic, shortsighted.The premise is that in a time of tight budgets, our defense cannot afford the same, not to mention larger, levels of defense spending, especially when current and proposed arms are so expensive.
US defense spending, in sum or by comparison to the rest of the world, is larger than all others combined.Yet, it is also at the lowest point as a portion of GDP, excluding 1999-2000, since the end of the Cold War.
Meanwhile, it is other federal expenditures, mostly of the welfare and entitlement varieties, that has exploded.
Meanwhile, other nations, like Britain, cut their defense spending, while others, like China, greatly increase theirs.
There is obviously high need for other nations allied with the US, or of complementary interests, to increase their spending and coordination, and to stop free-riding upon the US.Still, there is no other nation than the US with reach and will to keep the sea lanes open and nations in the lee of expansionist powers, like China and Iran, from being swept aboard their crafts.And, other nations are more likely to follow the US lead in whether they increase or decrease their own contributions to global defense objectives.
Gates is on target that a failure to reform and modernize US arms priorities may result in future defeats as well as waste.
However, reform should not turn into a rout in which we abandon needed capabilities to meet larger adversaries and arms. With Obama at our helm, the big question is to what extent is Gates maneuvering or enabling.
Nature/nurture is always a fun topic. Why aren't identical twins identical mentally and emotionally? It's only around 50%. Or, does parenting make any difference at all in who the adult turns out to be? Probably not too much, barring massive trauma.
Well, it is all complicated, and getting more complicated as we learn more about how the brain develops. The noise matters. A degree of messiness is built-in.
In the end, however, I do not think will-power is built-in. It is a choice, a daily choice.
What matters are historical experiences, cultural attitudes, child-rearing practices, family formation patterns, expectations about the future, work ethics and the quality of social bonds.
Researchers have tried to disaggregate the influence of these soft factors and have found it nearly impossible. All we can say for sure is that different psychological, cultural and social factors combine in myriad ways to produce different viewpoints. As a result of these different viewpoints, the average behavior is different between different ethnic and geographic groups, leading to different life outcomes.
Taking offense, these days, seems to confer the moral authority of sacred victimhood rather than to identify one as a hypersensitive twit, as a disguised bully, or as a manipulative schemer.
A new Tom Lehrer DVD. The promo video with interview isn't embeddable, but it's here.
A new Cormac McCarthy, The Road. I didn't realize he had a new one (h/t, SDA). I read all of his stuff. Does he still live in a fleabag motel in New Mexico?
The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office.
It is telling that scientists are so thoroughly steeped in knee-jerk male bashing that they do not even ask whether there might be something positive about having less oxytocin.
Americans love Big Government. But it's not a blind love — it all depends on the direction the arrow is pointing on the cashflow chart. Ask George W. Bush, who got himself cruficied for trying to reform Social Security. Ask anybody who has touched Medicare, or even idly thought aloud about doing so. Ask a farmer or anybody marching in the Small Business Administration pork parade.
If the best place to hide a book is in a library, then the best way to hide a favor for a contributor or a quiet little power grab is in a bill 2,000 pages long.
If Obama is an enigma today, it's because of the contrast between his remarkably open disdain for his domestic rivals and opponents on the one hand and his obsequious approach to the nation's foreign adversaries on the other. As enigmas go, however, this one is more troubling than puzzling.
...the fury directed against Palin by leftists is so overwrought, and at times maniacal, precisely because her innate common sense is so powerful and effective when she dares to declare that the emperor of government economic planning has no clothes. Like Mises and Reagan, Palin understands with utter (and to leftists, frightening) clarity that leftist utopias have no practicality or viability, but are, in Mises' words, "illusory fantasies."
Like most people, self-important intellectuals don't like their cherished dreams and aspirations dismissed as fantasies.
I was watching TV clips of 
High water 
Egypt: 
The unofficial bio of 
