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.
Heading up to Watch Hill (RI) tonite for a few days of boating, fishing, clam-eating, drinking, and skirt-chasing (despite the cold weather, fog, and rain). Hope all have a fine American weekend, wherever you may be on Gaia.
Honduran protesters bash Obama. Rightly so. He was on the wrong side, once again.
Back in 1912, when Woodrow Wilson successfully ran for the presidency, he told his compatriots, "We are in the presence of a new organization of society." Our time marks "a new social stage, a new era of human relationships, a new stagesetting for the drama of life," and "the old political formulas do not fit the present problems: they read now like documents taken out of a forgotten age." What Thomas Jefferson once taught is now, he insisted, quite out of date. It is "what we used to think in the old-fashioned days when life was very simple." Above all else, he hoped to persuade his compatriots to get "beyond the Declaration of Independence." That document "did not mention the questions of our day," he told them. "It is of no consequence to us. It is an eminently practical document, meant for the use of practical men; not a thesis for philosophers, but a whip for tyrants; not a theory of government, but a program of action"--once of use, outdated now.
Hmm. Wilson thought "whips for tyrants" were obsolete?
There's a very simple solution to all this. Mandate that individuals buy catastrophic health care insurance. Subsidize those who can't afford it. Let people save for health care costs using tax-advantagedindividual health care savings accounts. Let people who want to buy more comprehensive policies do so, but using after tax dollars. Let employers who want to provide more comprehensive group plans do so, but using after tax dollars. Then let's see whether the market is really fraught with adverse selection and moral hazard.
The disconnect between the person purchasing and paying for the service and the person receiving the service. This causes the most friction that piss people off (either against their insurance company or the government for not paying for something or limiting their flexibility). But is also tends to drive costs up, as people who are ultimately driving most of the health care choices have zero interest in how much it costs.
"Orwell was right. It was Wells who made it respectable, even before World War I, for liberals in England and America to demean their own native democratic culture in the name of an imagined antidemocratic World State. And it was Wells, with his stature as the prophet of the future, who taught upper-middle-class liberals that they were entitled to govern in the name of social evolution."
Readers know that we proud gun-and-Bible-clinging redneck Northeast Yankees hate it when Chardonnay-sippers who see themselves as our betters try to tell us how to live. We ain't stupid neither - cuz we been government-eddicated! At great expense!
BTW, we do love chevre - to the point that our editor wants to keep some goats. The meat is quite tasty, too. What's the PC term for a she-goat? A goatess? Goatette? Help me out.
George Washington's teeth. They look pretty good to me. I thought he had wooden false teeth. If you had decent teeth in middle age in those days, you were lucky.
Short of writing "get whitey," It's difficult to imagine how Judge Sotomayor could have fouled up the Ricci case any more than she did. Let's count the ways.
We're going to do great damage to the economy without actually reducing greenhouse gases, and we are going to create a massive new entitlement without actually restructuring the health care system. Much more of this and we will be done, and nobody, not even the president, seems to give a rat's ass.
John Carney has been doing a lot of blogging about the role of the CRA in the financial meltdown. That role is overstated by conservatives who are unwilling to admit that markets can have bad outcomes, but it is understated by liberals who are unwilling to admit that regulation, too, can produce hideous unintended consequences.
The CRA did not singlehandedly cause the meltdown. But the relaxation of credit standards that allowed the meltdown did start, as far as I can tell, with the CRA. And perhaps more importantly, the CRA, and the mentality behind the CRA, made regulators extremely unwilling to intervene. Everyone wanted to make credit more widely available to the poor. Well, the poor aren't good lending risks. So if you want to give them access to credit, you need to relax your lending standards. Any attempt to tighten lending standards on the part of the government would have resulted in a massive contraction in the credit available to core Democratic constituencies. Meanwhile, the Republicans were hoping that turning poor people into homeowners would make them more Republican.
From Mankiw in the NYT, who says the gummint could make it's own public option insurance today:
An important question about any public provider of health insurance is whether it would have access to taxpayer funds. If not, the public plan would have to stand on its own financially, as private plans do, covering all expenses with premiums from those who signed up for it.
But if such a plan were desirable and feasible, nothing would stop someone from setting it up right now. In essence, a public plan without taxpayer support would be yet another nonprofit company offering health insurance. The fundamental viability of the enterprise does not depend on whether the employees are called “nonprofit administrators” or “civil servants.”
Helping out California would open a Pandora’s box of policy headaches for the administration. How do you justify helping one state — even if it’s the biggest — when dozens of other state legislatures and governors have managed to make the wrenching budget cuts necessary? Granting special assistance could be seen as rewarding the worst actor – and set a dangerous precedent that might tempt other states to shrug off budget pain in hopes of getting a bailout.
Here's a fun photo caption contest at Wizbang. Should not be hard on him, tho. I love to look at maps too.
The UK continues to be hopelessly insane. Banning welcome mats. Not welcome mats for uncontrolled immigration, though. As we always say, "Grow a couple, and fix your own dang country." The Brits could try one of these mats and see if it passes the nanny's muster:
Michelle O says she wants a "purpose." How about raising your kids, weeding your garden, doing the dishes, helping out your friends, playing some tennis, cleaning the house or - if that's not enough self-importance for a hungry ego, how about a real job in the private sector? Good, productive, difficult work in the private sector is the best thing anyone can do for their country - after military service, that is.
Mr. Pastor, tear down this church. Please. The building sucks and, trust me, God hates it too.
ObamaCare: Not inevitable. But they feel they have to pass something, or they will lose their momentum for their laundry list. Related: Who will run your medical care if the bill passes? (You can be certain it won't be practicing docs - it will be policy wonks and economists - the same geniuses who invented HMOs.) Related:
The primary problem for Democrats is not stakeholders.It’s the general public.They were told “reform” would leave them alone if they liked their coverage — and their premiums would go down too by $2500 per year.But the bills the Democrats in Congress are now writing will increase costs for people with insurance and shift tens of millions of them out of the employer plans they generally like.That’s not the deal they are expecting to be offered, and they aren’t likely to agree to it anytime soon.
Related: If you call everything a crisis, people begin to think the word means "one more issue we ought to think about some time. Viking:
Hysterical hyperbole of the day - Firedoglake: "The gravity of America's health care crisis is the moral equivalent of the 19th Century's bloody conflict over slavery. This is not hyperbole..."
When did the US renounce "Leadership of the Free world"? The Left rarely speaks of freedom, or seems to value freedom, except when it's about abortion "choice." Otherwise, standing up for freedom is evil, un-nuanced cultural imperialism, right?
Self-censorship and the "see no Islam" mindset. Brussels J
Obama is willing to risk some political capital and credibility, but only on domestic pushes for socialism. The world knows he's a single-minded one-trick pony and views anything that occurs outside the headlong drive for socialism as an inconvenient "distraction" that does not need to be solved, but merely bumped off the front page.
The dictators and terrorists know this. Even US allies in socialistic Europe know this. The only people who don't seem to know this are the US media and the American public, which is largely shielded from these realizations by a severe underreportage of such "distractions."
Bird Dog - Spent Friday morning fishing for striped bass with Pops and Mother's cousin. Caught our limit of six fish greater than 28 inches in about five hours. We fished out of Groton (and off Fisher's Island), aboard "The Otter" with Captain Bruce of www.captainbrucesportfishing.com.
The weather turned out fine, with moderate swells and no rain. Limited visibility kept most other boats in port. We trolled surgical hose with sandworms and our largest fish was 26 pounds, caught by Pops. We had three more striped bass, too small to keep and one bluefish, which Pops claims he will make into fishcakes.
With the 25+ pounds of filets, a great time was had by all.
The CDS --the "toxic assets" that AIG (most prominently) committed ritual suicide with --was specifically left unregulated by this guy in the yr 2000 financial reforms, when there were a few hundred million in CDS existent. By 2007, that number was sixty trillion. Denninger makes the case that complex structured assets are deceptive by design.
Waxman-Markey would be a very stupid bill even if it were true that 1) the earth is getting warmer, 2) human activity is mostly responsible for climate changes, and 3) a warmer earth would be a bad thing. Given that all three of these premises are false--we cannot, in fact, control the weather--Waxman-Markey is a suicidal monument to human folly.
Oh, it seems easy at first. The press is kind; the Congress is pliant; the country loves you. You’re a breath of fresh air after the previous administration’s excesses. Your first attempts at big-ticket legislation shoulder their way into law. The opposition party looks easily divided, easily co-opted and deeply out of touch.
But eventually the hard part arrives. For Barack Obama, it may have started last week, courtesy of the abacus-wielding wonks at the Congressional Budget Office.
Dick Morris' new book Catastrophe. Yes, he is a Dem.
Where did the US sit in 2007 (the last year of data in Table 1315)? Somewhat less socialist than the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) average, but well into the mix. In 2007, government spending in the US was 37.4% of GDP, or more than Australia, Ireland, Japan, Slovakia, South Korea and Switzerland. The OECD average was 40.4% and the European average was 46.2%.
In 2007, the federal government spent "only" 20% of GDP (the remaining 17.4% of GDP was spent by state and local governments). According to the Congressional Budget Office, President Obama will spend 28.5% of GDP in 2009. If states and localities have remained roughly constant, government spending is now about 46% of GDP, or almost exactly the European average in 2007.
We are as much in the thick of socialism right now as, say, Germany, Greece and the Netherlands.
But the trends in these figures tell an even more interesting story. Table 1315 lists 28 OECD countries. At some point prior to 2007, 16 of those governments were spending over 50% of GDP. The European average peaked in 1993 at 52.2%. But by 2007, only four governments spent over half of GDP: Hungary, Denmark, Sweden and France. The European average fell from 52.2% to 46.2%.
At one point, Sweden was the top socialist in the OECD states, at 70.9% of GDP. But by 2007, France was in the lead, at just 52.4%. Sweden's government had cut its spending by almost 20% of GDP between 1993 and 2007. That is the size of the entire US federal government as a fraction of GDP!
Because of the deadweight costs of taxation itself, costs that are not included in the propaganda we are increasingly being fed, we might well find that there is in fact, overall, no saving of money.
President George W. Bush concocted the connection between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein to justify the Iraq invasion. Now President Barack Obama is concocting an equally fantastical theory to justify a de facto government takeover of health care.
Ms. Feinberg recalled one 15-year-old boy from Long Island who told her: “Oh, we all hated Holden in my class. We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’ ”
"World cooling is here to stay and the new round of climate alarmism just announced by UK Government ministers and the Met Office of more extreme weather and warming in coming decades driven by mankind has no merit and is defied by the facts and front-line science”, said Piers as his forecast from three weeks ahead was confirmed for the formation of the first East Pacific typhoon of the season off Mexico.
What most Americans identify as government "welfare" are payments to single mothers, food stamps and (perhaps) Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for the poor. But that's not the half of it. Since 1960, government has changed radically. Then, 52 percent of federal spending went for defense, 26 percent for "payments for individuals" -- the welfare state. By 2008, 61 percent consisted of "payments for individuals," 21 percent for defense.
Social Security and Medicare -- programs for the elderly -- represented the lion's share: $1 trillion in 2008. Most Americans don't consider these programs "welfare," but they are. Benefits are paid mainly by present taxes; there's little "saving" for future benefits; Congress can alter benefits whenever it wants. If that's not welfare, what would be?
Pressures on private and public welfare won't abate.
This is what Tait Trussell of the Acton Institute wrote in an article just last week:
“[I]n just three years from now, Social Security and Medicare will need one out of ten tax dollars, John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis points out. And just 11 years in the future—by 2020—Uncle Sam will need one out of every four income tax dollars to fund these programs for seniors. If we continue with all other government programs in operation today and raise the taxes to pay for Medicare, plus Medicaid—the health program for low-income folks—the Congressional Budget Office estimates a middle-income family by the middle of this century will have to pay two-thirds of its total income in federal taxes.”
This situation defines the term “unsustainable.” Why is not President Obama proposing a “fix” to avert this approaching catastrophe? Curiously enough, not only he is unconcerned, but he seems to think that the unviable entitlements constitute some sort of achievement. This is what he said about them in Chicago:
Presidents have called for health care reform for nearly a century…But while significant individual reforms have been made – such as Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children's Health Insurance Program – efforts at comprehensive reform that covers everyone and brings down costs have largely failed.
The president apparently believes that these failing federal programs already represent reform and that all that is needed now is to create something that would quickly become the mother of all entitlements – governmentally guaranteed universal healthcare.
Americans should really worry when their president fails to recognize the real dilemma we face as a nation: Either we reform entitlements or we let them drag us down the dark pit of insolvency.
They've been lying about the number of people without health care. They've been lying about whether the public is satisfied with health care. They've been lying about every aspect of health care.
They unleashed the slip-and-fall lawyers on the medical system, causing untold higher costs for medical practitioners. They've attacked the health care system relentlessly, driving up costs just like they've attacked the energy industry and the automakers.
And even when they have complete monopolistic control of a system, like the educational system in America, they want more control. It's never enough. They want more money, more regulations. More. They need to "invest". They need to raise taxes. They need to repress. They need to compel.
Because the Statist cannot make the imperfect perfect, even though he says he can. The Statist is more imperfect than anyone else.
Related: Labour is like our Dems: their perennial strategy is to make as many as possible dependent on the government. That way, they hope to have jobs and power forever. Via TimesOnline:
Labour lags behind on almost every indicator, save one: it is still regarded as the party more likely to protect public services. An Guardian/ICM poll last week revealed that 48% of voters think Labour will protect services, whereas 46% think the Conservatives will do the same. Labour has a positive score of 1%, ie, more people believe Labour will protect services than harm them. The Tories have a deficit of 3%.
An architect of new Labour whispers in my ear, and Gordon’s, that people do not yet have full confidence in the Tories. The position of Cameron is much better than that of his party; the opposition’s lead is shallow. “If you do not trust them on the public services,” he says, “it’s a reflection of a deeper distrust that they have not really changed.”
I have tried pointing Americans at the British example to show them what an appalling idea it is to have the state directing any industry, let alone medical care. But alas it is very hard to overcome that special kind of insular American optimism that does not think what happens in another advanced first world nation can teach them anything, because in the USA things will be different.
DON SURBER: Don’t Become West Virginia. “If poverty is so good, then why do we have anti-poverty programs? Using her logic, we should have pro-poverty programs.” Well, that’s pretty much what’s going on right now . . . .
We said we would not make fun of Michelle O's garden, but this is ridiculous. Didn't they just plant the seeds a few weeks ago? I want to know what magic fertilizer they use. Potemkin garden? Or is this a loaves and fishes deal?
Continual Iran updates at Gateway, whence the photo. We wish the best for all of the brave and lovely women in Iran's Lipstick Revolution.
Related: Driscoll notes that great powers always have a dog in the fight, because a posture of evenhanded neutrality always has non-neutral effects.
Related: Ace rightly notes that the O's refusal to stand strong with the protesters can damage future relations with Iran. The man is a pussy, a Prom Queen. The only things he gets tough with are Republicans, FOX news, and our international allies and friends like the Brits and Israel.
Obama himself gave us ample warning of his reckless grandiosity during the 2008 campaign. So we can’t say we weren’t warned. The situation has only gotten worse in the months since his inauguration. And there’s 3.5 years to go. Help!
Related: Medical care plan would not apply to Congress! Via Blue Crab:
From what is known about the tippity-top secret bill at this point, it appears that it is bad enough that Congress will not allow it to apply to themselves or the rest of the Federal government.
That should tell you all you need to know about this bill.
I agree that the "war against drugs" failed. It's been going on since Nixon. All it does is raise the cost of drugs and increase the crime. It's past time to re-think it. It's too bad that drug users generally have little interest in getting over it, but that's reality.
What the late lamented Milton Friedman said about medical care costs. He makes a number of excellent points, including that it is employee insurance that drives the prices up. h/t, Mankiw
The looming middle class tax increases. Even some Dems are waking up, like drunks after a bad binge. They have been drinking on our nickel since January.
The 48' Colin Archer above is for sale, but what we really need up here in the Northeast is an Ark. Almost up to 40 days and 40 nights of cold rain. Nobody is boating much yet. I call all crummy weather "climate change" now. Don't you? Aren't we entitled to nice weather? Why doesn't the government do something about it?
JOHN TIERNEY: U.S. Climate Report Assailed: “The new federal report on climate change gets a withering critique from Roger Pielke Jr., who says that it misrepresents his own research and that it wrongly concludes that climate change is already responsible for an increase in damages from natural disasters.”
Does academia believe that they all think alike because they're smarter than me? I do not think that they are. They just chose different careers. Everybody is a careerist, to some extent.
It is a foregone conclusion that the bill now getting marked up in the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee (HELP) is not going anywhere.
Note that the economy has seemed to stabilize, more or less, and well under ten percent of the stimulus money has been spent to date. Moving forward, if no further major programs will be put into place, how would you like to spend the rest of that cash?
Seriously.
But Tyler, that cash doesn't exist yet. It's debt. Debt isn't money - it's negative money.
The danger liberalism poses to the American experiment comes from its disposition to deplete rather than replenish the capital required for self-government. Entitlement programs overextend not only financial but political capital. They proffer new “rights,” goad people to demand and expand those rights aggressively, and disdain truth in advertising about the nature or scope of the new debts and obligations those rights will engender. The experiment in self-government requires the cultivation, against the grain of a democratic age, of the virtues of self-reliance, patience, sacrifice, and restraint.
Drunk pedophiles in Canadian government? It hasn't been disproven.
Lots of smart people are bearish. Morgan Stanley's Roach certainly is. Kudlow, much as I enjoy him, is a perennially sunny optimist by nature, so you almost have to discount him.
Muscular prose reflects muscular thinking (Churchill, Reagan, GW). Flabby prose reflects flabby thinking (Chamberlain, Carter, Obama). Never use one metaphorically-charged noun or active verb when a string of colorless nouns and passive verbs will do.
Related: The "Public Option" is the Son of Medicaid. Henninger. He also explains why state legistators have become irrelevant, often corrupt clowns: they have nothing to do because most spending is mandated leaving them little room for their own fun spending of your money.
Why would anybody go into medicine if the government is going to make your decisions for you on a cost basis, if you are essentially on the government payroll and compensated on a money-losing basis (after overhead, Medicaid is a money-loser for doctors and Medicare pays them for office work at clerical rates), and yet you remain entirely vulnerable to lawsuits for every outcome?
The Liberal solution is always more government. Hubris and power-seeking are their problems. Their shame is their distrust in the peoples' ability to run their own lives: maybe some cannot or will not, but I do not like to be governed as if I were the lowest common denominator.
Is anything anybody does "Interstate commerce"? Montana and guns
Why the Dreamliner, Boeing's cool new plastic airplane, is two years late
Semi-related: This is a good time to be the market for an airplane. I wish. But I am an oppressed wage slave (wage + bonus slave) of the Capitalist System and thus will not get my own personal G4 until Obama gives me one. Still waiting.
...the strongest response Obama can muster to the blood in Tehran's streets is: "I am deeply troubled by the violence that I've been seeing on television." How bold, how manly, how inspiring . . .
Communism was never about crafting a Worker's Paradise; it was always about creating a place of unlimited power for those who craved it: not the toiler's Home, but the second rate intellectual's.
...you’re right to be wary of the strength of religion. Religion is the most powerful force in human affairs, bar none. Ideology alone doesn’t come close. Religion is the prime mover because religion forms the basis of a shared worldview. From this basic worldview grows culture and from culture societal structures are formed and the final fruits of this process are political systems. Our culture, social affairs and politics are ultimately anchored in morality and morality is anchored in the basic world view derived from religion.
Religion answers the primal question, what is the nature of reality? Do we inhabit a benevolent universe, a malevolent universe, or an indifferent universe? This is not trivial question and its answer determines the basis of all human interaction.
ELISABETH EAVES:Stop Worrying and Enjoy the Recession!Yeah, a recession can be nice if you’ve got steady income. And, of course, a recession under President Obama is surely a good thing for America and Americans! Under Bush it would have been a disaster of Steinbeckian proportions, but under Obama it’s a“purifying fire!”
Let’s see.Aloof, charismatic, obsessed with power, “absolutely certain” that he has a special personal destiny. This can’t end well. No, this can’t end well at all.
Over the years I noticed that rescuing friends from serial disasters of their own creation didn't encourage them to make smarter decisions. If anything, my interventions skewed the risk/reward calculation we use to select the best course from a range of alternatives. By stepping in and helping each time friends chose poorly, I made it harder for them to learn from their mistakes. They continued to do predictably self destructive things and then look for someone more responsible to bail them out.
Over time I realized I couldn't keep substituting my judgment for theirs. The natural world punishes bad decisions. This natural feedback mechanism helps us distinguish what works from what doesn't. But I was subverting the learning process; unintentionally rewarding bad decisions and encouraging more of the same. With the best of intentions, I had produced the worst of results.
And so I became a conservative. I embraced the idea that people make the most efficient and productive choices when they base their decisions on the way the world does work, not the way they wish it would work. I came to believe subjectivity, empathy, and tribalism make extremely poor foundations for building a society or governing one's personal conduct because they elevate subjective feelings over objective experience and morality. I learned to separate my personal feelings and loyalty from notions of right and wrong, responsible and irresponsible. I learned that even though I often chafed at them, rules are not always bad.
YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: $2.5 billion spent on “alternative medicine,” no cures. “Ten years ago the government set out to test herbal and other alternative health remedies to find the ones that work. After spending $2.5 billion, the disappointing answer seems to be that almost none of them do.” How did this happen?
he center was handed a flawed mission, many scientists say.
Congress created it after several powerful members claimed health benefits from their own use of alternative medicine and persuaded others that this enormously popular field needed more study. The new center was given $50 million in 1999 (its budget was $122 million last year) and ordered to research unconventional therapies and nostrums that Americans were using to see which ones had merit.
That is opposite how other National Institutes of Health agencies work, where scientific evidence or at least plausibility is required to justify studies, and treatments go into wide use after there is evidence they work - not before.
I can’t wait until Congress is in charge of all health care. Who knows better what’s good for you than “several powerful members” of Congress . . . .
By current CBO’s estimates Obama’s deficits will add some $10 trillion to our national debt in the next decade, nearly doubling it. This number, however, will also be revised upwards once the new deficit figures are factored in. Dreary as these figures are, things are likely to be worse. This is because the CBO calculations do not take into account the costs of some of the president’s most ambitious programs such as health care reform. Providing universal health insurance would effectively create the most far-reaching entitlement program in American history. The administration puts its cost at some $1.2 trillion over the next decade. Most experts, however, dismiss this figure as grossly understated. It is only enough to look at the exploding costs of Social Security and other entitlements to see how profoundly unrealistic the administration’s numbers are. But even if we take Obama’s estimate at face value, the resulting national debt would by 2019 stand at more than twice the level he inherited when he took the oath of office.
All together now - Megan McArdle has a great post explaining how a government health care program largely depends on getting young, healthy workers to subsidize less-healthy participants. Also, the bureaucracy will be mind-blowing.
I'm sick and tired of the government telling me what to eat, when to eat it and what's good or bad for me. I can figure this out on my own. I take care of my body, am in excellent shape for my age and am 25 pounds less than when I graduated high school. While I enjoy some fatty foods and alcohol in moderation, I know what I can handle and pay attention to my doctors.
I don't need a government spending program to monitor my diet. Stay out of my business!
Local Math Wars. h/t, RW Prof. My view? Just make 'em learn to use it. Even geniuses don't necessarily understand the depths of math, much less the rug rats.
I thought Hartford would be on the list, but I guess there's nobody left to rob there. Top 15 crime cities in the US. Note absence of NYC.
Cruel and unfunny, Dave. She visited NYC to raise $ for autism, for heaven's sake.
John Quincy Adams, at Anchoress. Remarkable to me that we have a photo of him, in old age. Young country we have here.
Guy started spying during Carter, but they blame Bush anyway. Just one more greedy, money-hungry Leftist.
I cannot believe the Brits take this sort of thing lying down. What's the matter with them? How did our bold ancestors become so limp? Is it the food? They are becoming an embarassment to their descendents by behaving as if they have no penises.
... last week, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer came to Washington to announce what Microsoft would do if Obama’s multinational tax policy is enacted.
“It makes U.S. jobs more expensive,” Ballmer said, “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S.” If Microsoft, perhaps our most competitive company, has to abandon the U.S. in order to continue to thrive, who exactly is going to stay?
At issue is Obama’s policy to end the deferral of multinational taxation.
The U.S. now has about the highest combined corporate tax rate, second only to Japan among industrialized countries. That rate is so high that U.S. firms have an enormous disadvantage versus competitors. The average corporate tax rate for the major developed countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in 2008 was about 27 percent, more than 10 percentage points lower than the U.S. rate.
Now that the cameras have been put away and the media is no longer watching, their secret emerges: They are going to cut medical costs by cutting medical care. Right now, they cite four targets. They plan to:
1. Cut diagnostic imaging tests like MRIs and CAT scans. 2. Reduce the use of antibiotics. 3. Perform fewer Caesarean sections. 4. Cut care for management of chronic back pain
These decisions will not be medical but financial. They will not be based on a doctor’s opinion of what his or her patient needs, but a bureaucrat’s and an accountant s opinion of what the new health care system can afford.
My opinion? I think much of medical "wasted spending" is to avoid lawsuits. "Please tell the jury, Doctor, why you didn't bother to get an MRI for Mrs. Jones' heachaches?" "Please tell the jury, Doctor, why you decided to do this when some recent studies show bla bla bla." In the end, "wasteful medical spending" is always the spending on somebody else - not on yourself.
The effects of the proposed Weather Tax. Just the most recent excuse for another tax on the American economy to expand government's dominion over our lives. Governments are power-sponges, and I do not know why. Perhaps it's about their job security, since they probably can't do anything else.
Why would they blame Harvard for this? Sheesh. All Harvard did was to give her the chance of a lifetime, and she acted like a normal teenaged idiot.
The administration is determined to prop up GM as a jobs program for the UAW and Midwestern states rich in electoral votes. This frenzy will intensify as the administration's decisions deepen the debacle.
The Kennedy bill would force employers to pay for medical insurance. More on the Dems' medical care plans, and how they want to pay for it (we will pay for it, of course). Their plan is to subsidize this "insurance" with tax dollars in order to drive private insurors out of business, and to reimburse docs and dentists and hospitals at Medicare rates - which will drive them out of business. I would term this a very aggressive Socialist plan to politicize medical care and to place medical care completely in the hands of the government, with their expert, cost-conscious panels deciding what you can do based on the data du jour and cost-effectiveness. By the way, this is "insurance" in name only - it's supposed to pay all of your medical expenses. That ain't insurance - it's an entitlement.
In short, Obama reminds me a little of myself — at 26. I had left the farm for 9 years to get a BA in classics, PhD in classical philology, and live in Athens for two years of archaeological study — all on scholarships … I had forgotten much of the culture of the farm where I spent years 1-18.
Then after the requisite degrees I left academia, and returned to farm 180 acres with my brother and cousin — and sadly was quickly disabused of the world of the faculty lounge.
Summary: The boundary between the public and private sectors can be defined on the basis of ownership of institutional units. Nonmarket government-owned entities and corporations that are owned or controlled by government units belong to the public sector. “Economic ownership” is more important than majority ownership. Joint ventures, public-private partnerships, and social insurance funds (including for public employees) can be unambiguously allocated to the public or private sector on the basis of international public sector accounting standards. Boundary problems within the public sector are just as acute as those between the public and private sectors, mainly because of ambiguities in distinguishing “market” from “nonmarket” activities.
May I ask a question? Where does President Barack Obama's agendacomefrom?
Just a generation ago, you will recall, Reagan revitalized the nation, and then the Soviet Union, long calcified and staggering, at last collapsed. Free markets were good; statism, futile. Didn't everybody learn that lesson? Didn't it prove, in some utterly basic way, decisive?
The most troubling aspect of international security for the United States is not the killing power of our immediate enemies, which remains modest in historical terms, but our increasingly effete view of warfare. The greatest advantage our opponents enjoy is an uncompromising strength of will, their readiness to “pay any price and bear any burden” to hurt and humble us. As our enemies’ view of what is permissible in war expands apocalyptically, our self-limiting definitions of allowable targets and acceptable casualties—hostile, civilian and our own—continue to narrow fatefully. Our enemies cannot defeat us in direct confrontations, but we appear determined to defeat ourselves.
...the fiery madness is fueled by a number of complicit and self-serving groups. First and foremost, the thousands of scientists that depend upon government grants to fund their climatology research, which would disappear should they fail to find either a human connection to or some new negative impact of climate change. Then there are the environmental organizations that depend upon sounding the alarm to keep the donation coffers full. And the journalists who see a “free ride” to nab front-page newspaper positions by echoing the alarmists. And the Capitalists who see, well – capital, prompting huge corporations to jump on board to exploit renewable energy subsidies and R&D grants from the federal government. Meanwhile, politicians see a great opportunity to posture about “knowing something about science” and to appear concerned for the long term and about public health and environment. And that, explained Heartland’s president and CEO, is what we’re up against in battling the bad-legislation-breeding hysteria.
Double standard? Today's 9.4% unemployment rate "fueled hopes" that the economy was recovering, but 4.6% unemployment rates during the Bush administration were characterized as "job growth slowing to a crawl."
Yes, that's Obama all right—"standing above the world." Good Lord. Reporters are often compared to teen-age girls with crushes on Obama, but, as the father of three present, former or about-to-be teen-age girls, I object to the analogy. I personally have never seen a teen-age girl make a fool of herself over a boy the way many—most—mainstream reporters have over Barack Obama.
Totaljob losses in Maywere 345,000 which put the unemployment rate at 9.4%. You have todig a little furtherto find out that there were 70,000 jobs created in May by the government, not the private sector. Private sector employment fell by 611,000.
Upper image: A Wigwam (technically a Tepee) Village in Horse Cave, KY (story here, via Thompson) Lower image: Stolen from Am Digest, where there are many good things
The big one – The Corner: "On Tuesday, President Obama sent a letter to Senators Kennedy and Baucus outlining what kind of bill he wants and will support. And what he wants is a government takeover of American health-care, plain and simple." This will be the largest expansion of entitlements since Medicare and Obama doesn't have the slightest idea how to pay for it.
...the leftist bon mot “respect diversity” is but a twisted joke. The radical’s concept of diversity is limited to encountering someone of a different sex or hue who feels exactly the same way about politics as they do.
To the left there is no such thing as a loyal opposition. Any contact with conservatives must be avoided. We are morally unclean and they fear contamination via exposure to our speech.
Their malignant mindset poses serious obstacles for those who work alongside them. Political correctness and the sanctimoniousness of Democrats have made interactions with them a truly nauseating experience.
In Chicago, there’s no getting around all the pseudo-liberals. Despite dwelling in a city and state rendered broke and dysfunctional by a corruptDemocratic Partymachine, statists remain as ubiquitous as broken glass on the sidewalk.
The domestic cat is no more "natural" than a cow in a field. Why wildlife-lovers hate house cats:
People who wouldn’t dream of taking a shotgun and blasting a bird out of a tree let their cats outside, which accomplishes the exact same thing but in a slower and more horrifying way. The cat doesn’t need to tear the bird to pieces, either: one tiny nick will of a cat’s claw or tooth will subject the bird to enough bacteria to kill it, only it will take the bird one or two days to die. If the bird is a single parent feeding nestlings, they will all starve to death.
Precautionary measures simply do not work. During an 18-month period, a single cat roaming a wildlife experiment station killed over 1,600 birds and small mammals. A study in England showed that cats wearing bells killed more birds than cats without them; during a study in Kansas, a free-roaming declawed cat killed more birds than the cats with claws.
The president's error is in attributing "Islam" to the accomplishments of the Arab world of a thousand years ago. The president couldn't be more wrong.
It was Arabs qua Aristotelians and not Arabs qua Islamists who are responsible for the accomplishments described by the president.
Boob bait for the burkhas?
Also, what's with the moral equivalence between the Holocaust and the Palis? "on the other hand..." That isn't buttering them up - it's bending over, dude.
The Maggie's Farm fun-loving and amoral fact-checking and bookkeeping staff invite you to play the ancient traditional New England festive Springtime game called Name That Tractor:
The thing that absolutely drives me up the wall about the argument that California's biggest problem is a process problem -- the two-thirds rule to adopt budgets and raises taxes -- instead of an inability to live within its means is that the process argument implies that California has been governed in a starve-the-beast mode. In other words, that minority Republicans in the Legislature have managed to keep taxes absurdly and unrealistically low.
Instead, the truth, of course, is that California has the highest gas and sales tax; the highest- or second-highest income tax; and the highest corporate tax rates in the West. Our property taxes are about average nationally, thanks to Prop. 13.
How can anyone look at this picture and make the starve-the-beast argument? How come no one ever points this out on the news pages of the L.A. Times or Sac Bee?
It's not a tendentious, impossible-to-document claim. It's a simple fact: Whatever the barriers are to higher taxes, California has still indisputably ended up with high taxes.
For our hard-earned billions, what do we get from GM? Bupkus. Even Nader thinks it's nuts. And the kid they put in charge has no biz experience, when what is called for is an expert analyst of distressed manufacturing assets.
Samuelson on The Obama Infatuation. Of course the press hasn't reported on their own sexual fantasies. Why would they report on them when they can simply enact them with virtual oral and anal sexual activities?
Who is going to want to buy a Chrysler or GM car now? Chrysler is now Italian, and GM is Government Motors, from the folks who brought you the DMV and the post office.
Our friend Jules bids us summertime blog adieu with many Brit Civil War links. (I will betcha the wife and kids padlocked his machine and threw the key into Boston harbor.)
..foreigners have gone from owning $1.3 trillion (of US debt) at the beginning of the decade to now owning $3.3 trillion of such securities — a $2 trillion increase. More important and interesting than that, of the $2.8 trillion in net new issuances of Treasury securities during this decade, foreigners have bought $2.0 of the $2.8 trillion, a stunning 71%. (China alone appears to have bought over one third of the total of foreign purchases.) Who will purchase the debt to fund the upcoming $10 trillion in deficits is anyone’s guess, as the bond market seems to have figured out.
Put it another way. The US government is grossly negligent in creating the conditions that necessitate America’s importing up to 70% of its oil, making the country dependent on countries that are strategic adversaries. Now we also import 70% of the financing of the US government’s budget deficits, again making America dependent on potential adversaries or enemies. This can’t end well. Where are the serious men to address these strategic vulnerabilities?
Epiphanies are a dime a dozen among congressional Democrats as they discover urgent new reasons to experience the almost erotic pleasure of commandeering other people's money. For example, freshman Rep. Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat whose district includes Disney World, was recently there and was inspired.
The world, he realized, would be a sweeter place if Congress mandated that all companies with 100 or more employees provide a week of paid vacation to those who work at least 25 hours a week. After three years, they would be entitled to two weeks, and companies with more than 50 employees would have to start providing a paid vacation week. Grayson would not mandate that paid vacations be spent at Disney World. With the welfare state approaching insolvency and businesses sagging, this is an odd time to augment Americans' entitlement mentality. But the travel and tourism industries think that Grayson's idea is neat.
The White House press corps is now completely supine, utterly shameless in its groveling cowardice. Stalin himself couldn't have wished for a more slobbering press corps. Rather than mailing them nice little Lipton tea bags, millions of sane Americans might consider sending air sickness bags to our Reigning Media.
But not, thank haven, across the broad Atlantic. There free speech and even laughter are still alive, among the well-lubricated scribblers of Fleet Street. The journos of Britain show little respect for American Presidents regardless of race, creed or color. They laugh hysterically at all of them. Not that it takes much imagination.
The Telegraph has done the awesome, and called Michelle's wardrobe "frumpy."
PEOPLE TEND TO REBEL AGAINST EXCESS NANNYING, EVEN WHEN THE NANNIES ARE RIGHT: Healthy Lifestyles On Decline In United States. Then, of course, there’s the way the advice tends to change over time.
Liberty is not a built in -- much less universal -- value, and I think you can see how this is a major part of understanding the motivations -- or shall we say, the deep structure -- of leftism. Classical liberals wonder why leftists don't value freedom, but they shouldn't.
Rather, the question is why we do value it, because it is an obvious aberration in the human race. Most humans value security over liberty, predictability over change, conformity over individuality, and authority over self-rule. So when we see that leftists hate freedom and progress but love authority and comformity, we shouldn't be the least bit surprised, for it is true of most rank-and-foul humans. Political correctness, statism, micromanagement of our lives -- these are all the natural consequences of a dread of liberty.
To finish up with Prager's thought, he noted that it was God who wanted humans to have freedom, not humans. For the vast majority of human beings, liberty is not a particularly important value, much less the most important one. They would just as soon barter it away for security, as they have done in western Europe.
Nora ____ e-mailed me earlier today; she was terse: "How do you sleep at night justifying policys [sic] that make incomes more unequal???"
My first response is to say "grow up." As long as Mr. Smith earns his income rather than steals it, Mr. Jones ought not care. Envy is an ugly sentiment, and becomes ghastly and dangerous whenever it is manifested in government policies.
Your Wall of Bacon brekky above brought to you by Mr. Free Market. Too bad he doesn't deliver, because I could go for some blood sausage, bacon, and runny eggs right about now.
Please do not peruse these Tuesday morning links until you have caught up on our posts over the past few days, as I just have done on my return from the sea to hard reality (drove a boat up from Cape May to Rhode Island with a few stops for gas and beer - including one at good old City Island for fried clams and another at Northport for more fried clams and fried oysters). The posts are jam-packed with inneresting stuff.
Libs wonder how they lost on guns and Gitmo. Welcome to America, where we are not quite a dictatorship yet.
What lady would not want to be a MILF, despite the crudeness of the appellation? And what red-blooded male has not a filthy mind? To my eyes, MILFs are a dime a dozen around my neighborhood. Photo borrowed stolen from Tiger's piece:
When things get too hot in the kitchen, pols run away. Pelosi picked China for her Memorial Day weekend. Nice. Hope they taught her something about Capitalism.
The politics of the modern redistributionist state is founded on the assumption that politicians can buy votes by promising voters ever more munificent entitlements - from federal deposit insurance against bank failures to government-subsidized medical care - with the money for these things always somehow being painlessly extracted from somebody else.
Once voters have agreed to forget that every single dollar of tax revenue is extracted from the productive economy by threat of force (including corporate taxes, which are then passed along as higher prices), there is no incentive for any politically favored interest group to do anything but eat subsidies as fast as it can, before all those less deserving other interest groups get a snout in. The demand for entitlements, income transfers, and subsidies will, accordingly, rise without limit. And why not, when “somebody else” is paying?
For this con game to continue working on the suckers voters who buy it, there always has to be a “somebody else” from which more money can be painlessly extracted. It’s “the rich” or “corporations” or (when governments borrow money against future tax revenues) ourselves in the future.
But what happens when there is no “somebody else” left?
I will be boating to celebrate summer's global warming, and out of intertube range for a few days. Will burn many gallons of gas to help prevent global cooling. Life is short, but I want to do what I can to help.
According to the Tax Foundation, officials in Sacramento have been on a wild spending spree since 2000, the last time California’s budget was balanced without borrowing or resorting to one-time accounting gimmicks. Between 2003 (when Schwarzenegger took office) and 2007, state spending ballooned 31 percent – far beyond inflation (12 percent) and population growth (5 percent). Californians have seen this train wreck coming for many months.
Why should I pay California's bills? I have my own problems and, frankly, I don't give a damn. Related, at Betsy.
Knife death good; gun death bad. I prefer my killing when I use a baseball bat. The skull crunch is so satisfying.
Unions are fraudulent children. They want money and goodies without responsibility. UAW doesn't want Chrysler stock. How could they complain? Who would they negotiate with? How would they sell their unwanted products? Thus the lameness of modern unionization is exposed for what it is.
Read my lips: I'm not asking for national health coverage. I don't want it. So don't tax my "risky lifestyle choices" to pay for something that's going to break the federal piggy bank as a back door means of giving the Nanny State carte blanche to tell me how to run my life.
I stopped smoking when I was 14. Idiocy like this just makes me want to start up again.
I suggest Merit Menthol Lights. They won't kill ya, but they are pleasant enough. But, of course, there is nothing sexier than a gal smoking a ceegar.
If you believe President Barack Obama, he's working overtime to save American capitalism.
"I strongly believe in a free-market system," he told reporters in London, "and...in America, at least, people don't resent the rich; they want to be rich. And that's good." The market, he declared, "is the most effective mechanism for creating wealth...that history has ever known."
Which would you say was more responsible for the death of American newspapering? The “descent into tabloidization”? Or the dreary monarchical deference of American liberalism’s insipid J-school courtiers? The king rode in the park. He was riding his videographer in the shrubbery, but you don’t need to know that.
I do not want Susan Gill protecting my home and family. The blogger notes:
Let us for a moment look past her sincere ignorance and the fact that there have been precisely two murders documented with legally-owned machine guns since 1934, that children are already barred from purchasing all manner of firearms, that "harmonious living" never stopped a hardened criminal, and that criminals should not circumscribe your freedoms. We'll look past all that to focus on what all too many outside of her moonbeams-and-unicorns world view also misunderstand about what our nation is, and the role firearms were intended to play.
A good dose of poverty ought to solve that crisis easily, especially if everybody quits their credit cards.
Light rail: pretty idea, but not practical. We never should have gotten rid of the trolley cars, which every town in the USA had until the 1950s - when the gummint began subsidizing buses and put the trolleys out of business.
I am tired of reading about Narcissism at Dr. Sanity and Shrinkwrapped, but I must admit that the topic is relevant to our decadent, spoiled, entitled "Gimme" society. As Shrinkwrapped says:
The Utopianism inherent in Socialism appeals to those who feel that life is unfair and that it should be more fair. What child hasn't, at one time or another, uttered that immortal phrase that so many parents have so much troubling resisting, "Its not fair!" By the time the youngster begins to support him or herself, in modern Western cultures usually by the age of 30 or 40 (pardon the mild hyperbole, though there are efforts afoot to increase that age to never) they begin to recognize that the world is, in fact, not fair. The Universe does not care if you are a good person or a bad person (leaving religion out of the mix) but only whether or not you can support yourself and those who depend upon you. Modern liberal capitalist states have become so incredibly wealthy over the last century that we can now afford to support a growing dependency cohort which naturally evokes the infantile wish among the dependent to be treated more fairly, ie, that to each according to his needs should be the rule. The upshot is that there is an inherent tension in our society between those who pay and those who are dependent. This can and does create cognitive dissonance among those who have incorporated the ethos of Socialist compassion without spending time and energy understanding the far greater moral imperative of personal responsibility and freedom (tow inextricable values.)
The last century's grand experiments in Communism and Socialism led to the impoverishment of millions, authoritarian and totalitarian rule and the deaths of millions. History has rendered its verdict and Communism and Socialism have failed. This has led to a crisis for the Left.
Yeah. The crisis is what do you do after you crush all of the producers? Where does the money and wealth come from? The sky?
We wish these folks luck "working together" with the Obama auto-design team. One thing seems certain by 2016: Taxpayers will be paying Detroit to make the cars Americans don't want, and then they will pay again either through (trust us) a gas tax or with a purchase subsidy. Even the French must think we're nuts.
Would somebody please explain to me how electric cars reduce fossil fuel use? Since, thanks to the enviro-nazis who block nuclear power, our electricity comes mostly from coal...
MIT: We're all gonna die. Despite 10 years of global cooling, computers insist on apocalypse. Doesn't direct observation trump computer modeling? I guess not. How come nobody is paranoid about Hal living in those MIT computers?
The people spoke: California must cut budget. Schwartzenegger went to DC to say "We need help." Help yourself, tough guy. Don't be a pussy-man. From the link:
Schwarzenegger joined with liberal Democrats and the California Teachers Assn., the group that helped defeat a 2005 ballot package championed by the governor. Foes of Proposition 1A, meanwhile, included several unions, which didn't like the effect spending limits could have on the state workers they represent, and anti-tax groups that hated its extension of tax increases.
Gummint to hand GM to the unions. Brilliant. That means the gummint forced me to buy GM debt - something I never would have done. Thanks, geniuses. And yes, I do know that it's a political union pay-off. Chevy, I hardly knew ye. Chevy - and GM - is DOA.
In a recent interview with Trina Hoaks, the atheist blogger for the Examiner.com website, Dawkins described religious believers as follows: “They feel uneducated, which they are; often rather stupid, which they are; inferior, which they are; and paranoid about pointy-headed intellectuals from the East Coast looking down on them, which, with some justification, they do.”
Yep, that pretty much sums me up. How did he know me that well?
Gaia doesn't give a rat's ass 
In a good mood? 
Wood tennis racquets 
Enjoyably humorous 
Continual Iran updates at 
US public 
Urban 
Photo: Pres. Bush jumps from 10,000 feet for his 85th Birthday. His comment: "I don't feel a day over 84"
On reading difficult books. 
Photo is Pvt. Long. 
John Quincy Adams, 
Image on right via Driscoll's 
Via the IMF: 
The man who cried "Doom" - 
Today is 
Photo of cute toes from Theo -
Mr. Sun 
Maybe we should 
Re