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.
Perhaps the 21st century will "belong to China and India", as many suggest. But the US has been written off many times before. The global industries that have done well in the past decade - particularly those in the digital economy - seem to reward risk-takers, iconoclasts and creative thinkers. For better or worse, the US is better known for those qualities than the likes of China or Germany.
However, CAP alone receives $25 million per annum, so in just two years it is in receipt of far more money than all of the “Islamophobic” groups it collectively names and condemns have made in a decade. As a 501 (3)(c) organization, CAP’s existence seems to be entirely connected to attempting to swing elections in the Democrat Party’s favor, which would appear to be a contravention of IRS guidelines.
The “originality” of claiming there is lucrative money to be made from confronting Islamism is already a stale cliché.
Being a lifelong critic of Islam, red flags popped up in my head at his purported cozy relationship with Islam and prompted me to look very closely at the governor’s record on this particular issue and at this specific time….Unless someone can come up with solid evidence to the contrary, I feel relieved that Governor Perry is not an Islamophile, he is not even an Islamic apologist, and he can be entrusted with the responsibility of guarding our nation’s priceless heritage of liberty against the assaults of Islamic fascism.
Liberal elites like Keller are haunted by the specter of right-wing theocracy. When they see Christian conservatives on the campaign trail, they envision inquisitions and witch hunts and the suppression of liberty. They dread the prospect of a president respecting any "authority higher than the Constitution," and regard ardent religious faith as the equivalent of belief in space aliens.
“We can be saved only by fighting,” Hitler told leaders of the armed forces in February of 1933. Normal rules of diplomacy saw as their ultimate aim the avoidance of conflict and the settlement of international disputes by negotiation. Hitler did not play by these rules, though he repeatedly tried to publicly reassure people that he intended to do so. It took other European statesmen a very long time to realize this. Their misjudgments form the heart of this important book.
…The best chance of success was now, before Germany’s enemies were fully prepared. And so began the greatest war in history, a war that was to last until 1945, a war in which more than 50 million people would lose their lives, a war that would end in the destruction of Germany and the collapse of the European overseas empires…
In the latest upset, four federal agencies known as the Interagency Working Group (IWG) have delivered a plan to drastically censor food advertisers with products deemed to be “too high” in sodium, sugar, or fat that cater to any viewing audience between the ages of two and 11….It’s not just Twinkies and cookies that will be affected, either. Anything deemed to have a little too much sodium or fat will be tested under the new rules, including foods whose very production requires a high sodium content (like pickles) and those that are naturally high fat (like peanuts). As Katz wrote, “Nutritional staples such as Cheerios, peanut butter, and yogurt are verboten under the proposed standards, which effectively constitute a government-regulated grocery list.”
Unions Try To Dis-invent Success for Poor Minority Students:
Only 11% of likely voters think government should invent income for the poor
President Obama doubles-down on inventing prosperity through Big Government-Big Business collusion
What have we learned about inventing prosperity in 2066 years?
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) “The budget must be balanced, the Treasury must be refilled, public debt must be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom must be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands must be curtailed, lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.” – Cicero, 55 B.C.
While Bastiat agrees that repairing broken windows is a good thing, encouraging the glazier's trade and income, he argues that it is quite different from the idea that breaking windows is a good thing, in that it would cause money to circulate and encourage industry in general. Why? Because a shopkeeper who spends money to fix broken windows cannot spend or invest that money on new ventures.
Obama Not Ready For Prime time : "Obama looks small. It was a juvenile move for a President to make and it shows he has a poor understanding of how to use the power of the presidency." + TV Speech by a Zombie:
In the last 2 1/2 years, we’ve had over 200 presidential talks about jobs, and now there’s going to be yet another one. It’s not just an ordinary one, but another giant showpiece, a speech to a joint session of Congress, and coincidentally at the same time as a previously scheduled GOP presidential debate. Congress is probably going to be told, as it has been over the last 2 1/2 years, that failure to enact this, that, or the other thing is irresponsible and inexcusable. But according to reports, there’s nothing new in the speech, certainly nothing that could be effective. Moreover, this latest rehash of same-old, same-old comes from a guy with support from Independents in the 30′s and whom over one in four Democrats want replaced as the top of the 2012 ticket. Even with the media carrying this guy’s water, we can’t see how this is anything other than a formula for electoral catastrophe. If you disagree, educate us please.
This “In” button will be distributed to all those who view his speech:
Zombie capitalism: No, You Can't Invest Like Warren Buffett: His Bank of America deal is a bargain no ordinary investor could get.
Zombie Terrorism: Abdul Hakiim converted to Islam, wore long robes, dreamed of paradise; He was arrested in July for trying to enter Britain with bomb-making guides and al-Qaida propaganda. "But his motivations remain a mystery"
Zombie Riot at amusement park over 'no hijab' rule
Zombie Love: The Rashid Khalidi whose tape with Barack Obama the Los Angeles Times refuses to release, has this to say about fellow zombie Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. going on a trip to Israel.
So, the vice president goes to China—and if that sounds like the beginning of a bad comedy routine, it’s because our current vice president has made it one. The man is a walking pratfall, a clown of the tongue-tied, stumbling kind, and only the media’s determined effort to shield the Obama administration from laughter has kept Joe Biden’s miscues, misunderstandings, and mispronouncements from becoming our long-running national joke.
[In] the state of Texas, we’ve created an economy here that leads the nation in job creation…What’s dumb is to oversee an economy that has lost that many millions of jobs, to put unemployment numbers over his four years will stay probably at 9 percent, to downgrade the credit of this good country, to put fiscal policies in place that were a disaster in the ‘30s and try them again in the 2000s – that’s what I consider to be the definition of dumb.
Thanks to the librarian at Bird Dog’s local library he is able to send us brief messages from the only computer working in town. Also, thanks to the local librarian, the line is long to use the computer, as middle-aged men dawdle to ogle. So, here again are some links for your evening perusal.
"The one common theme throughout these cases is that they were decided in favor of keeping the unions in power and blocking the ability of employees to challenge whether or not the unions still enjoy majority status," U.S. Chamber of Commerce Senior Vice President of Labor Randel Johnson said in an email.
This "miracle material" is simply a one atom thick flake of graphite, but at this nanoscale, graphite takes on exciting properties. Graphene is the strongest material, 200 times stronger than steel, and it is incredibly conductive. It is also very thin. Three million sheets of graphene stacked is just one millimeter high. These properties make graphene highly suited for use in the manufacture of electronic devices
…this survey suggests that extremists make up only a small percentage of American Muslims, but still make up a sufficient number that other American Muslims are worried about them.
We used to think that information is power and that the personal computer enabled lives. But, according to Jaron Lanier, things changed about ten years ago. He cites Apple, Google, and Walmart as some of the reasons….
... "The Apple idea is that instead of the personal computer model where people own their own information, and everybody can be a creator as well as a consumer, we're moving towards this iPad, iPhone model where it's not as adequate for media creation as the real media creation tools, and even though you can become a seller over the network, you have to pass through Apple's gate to accept what you do, and your chances of doing well are very small, and it's not a person to person thing, it's a business through a hub, through Apple to others, and it doesn't create a middle class, it creates a new kind of upper class. ... Google has done something that might even be more destructive of the middle class, which is they've said, "Well, since Moore's law makes computation really cheap, let's just give away the computation, but keep the data." And that's a disaster….
... What Wal-Mart recognized is that information is power, and by using network information, you could consolidate extraordinary power, and so have information about what could be made where, when, what could be moved where, when, who would buy what, when for how much? By coalescing all of that, and reducing the unknowns, they were able to globalize their point of view so they were no longer a local player, but they essentially became their own market, and that's what information can do. The use of networks can turn you from a local player in a larger system into your own global system.
... It can become such a bizarre system. What you have now is a system in which the Internet user becomes the product that is being sold to others, and what the product is, is the ability to be manipulated. It's an anti-liberty system, and I know that the rhetoric around it is very contrary to that.
How will parents react when they find out they will be expected to provide workers' compensation benefits, rest and meal breaks and paid vacation time for…babysitters? Dinner and a movie night may soon become much more complicated.
Assembly Bill 889 (authored by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, will require these protections for all “domestic employees,” including nannies, housekeepers and caregivers.
The bill has already passed the Assembly and is quickly moving through the Senate with blanket support from the Democrat members that control both houses of the Legislature – and without the support of a single Republican member. Assuming the bill will easily clear its last couple of legislative hurdles, AB 889 will soon be on its way to the Governor's desk.
Under AB 889, household “employers” (aka “parents”) who hire a babysitter on a Friday night will be legally obligated to pay at least minimum wage to any sitter over the age of 18 (unless it is a family member), provide a substitute caregiver every two hours to cover rest and meal breaks, in addition to workers' compensation coverage, overtime pay, and a meticulously calculated timecard/paycheck….
Unfortunately, the unreasonable costs and risks contained in this bill will discourage folks from hiring housekeepers, nannies and babysitters and increase the use of institutionalized care rather than allowing children, the sick or elderly to be cared for in their homes. I can't help but wonder if that is the goal of AB 889 – a terrible bill that needs to be stopped.
He was imprisoned November 11, 1942 in German-occupied Poland in Stalag Luft III, of "The Great Escape" fame.Sconiers is the only American yet unrecovered from Stalag Luft III.
If the President’s intention was to win veterans’ votes today in his speech to the American Legion Convention, he failed miserably if the opinions I asked for from attendees are at all representative of veterans who heard the speech. The most common response when I asked folks gathered around the ashtrays and in the hallways after the speech what they thought of it was “He said everything we wanted to hear” but they aren’t convinced that the rhetoric matches the President’s intent.
Get ready for Friday afternoon. You can be sure that the Obama administration will release some bad news that can get lost or overlooked on the Labor Day weekend.
We calculate the present value of state employee pension liabilities using discount rates that reflect the risk of the payments from a taxpayer perspective. If benefits have the same default and recovery characteristics as state general obligation debt, the national total of promised liabilities based on current salary and service is $3.20 trillion. If pensions have higher priority than state debt, the value of liabilities is much larger. Using zero-coupon Treasury yields, which are default-free but contain other priced risks, promised liabilities are $4.43 trillion. Liabilities are even larger under broader concepts that account for salary growth and future service.
…the indictments have not provoked a political earthquake against Hezbollah, as many were hoping, especially as Lebanon's first deadline to apprehend the suspects passed without any substantial repercussion….At the moment, Hezbollah—in addition to its military strength—maintains a solid grip on the Lebanese political system and retains its ability to marginalize the political forces that had been behind the “Cedar Revolution” and the creation of the tribunal.
Bird Dog’s electricity is out due to the hurricane storm, and he can’t pedal fast enough on his tricycle to get enough power to his computer. So, here’s some morning links.
When Beverly Hills residents found out that many of their city’s 950 municipal and public safety employees were earning stunning salaries, 13 weeks of paid vacation, unlimited overtime and other tax-free retirement benefits, taxpayers were outraged and city officials rushed into closed-door sessions to figure out what to do….With a population of 34,000, Beverly Hills has one employee for every 34 residents, the highest ratio in California.
GOOD NEWS:
You did notice the healthy wheat crop, didn’t you?
Specialty Healthcare, in which the board is determining what constitutes an appropriate bargaining unit, is a full-frontal assault on long-established law.With this case, the board is not only trying to discern what is an appropriate bargaining unit within the healthcare setting, it is using the case to apply its interpretation economy-wide.It is expected the board will reach the conclusion that the traditional doctrine of “community of interest” will no longer apply and allow the establishment of “micro-unions.”
These micro-unions could be comprised of as few as two people and effectively cripple an employer’s ability to manage operations in an effective way.Imagine trying to run a manufacturing facility with separate unions representing custodial staff, assemblers, fitters, fabricators, maintenance and others?Each of those bargaining units would have the capacity to shut down production.This isn’t a very efficient model and employers are justifiably worried about having such a model foisted upon them by an un-elected board.
General Colin Powell's famous remark about foreign intervention, "If you break it, you own it", also applies to the truth. Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, in detail, exposes the blaring untruths by Colin Powell regarding so-called PlameGate, its damage to the Bush White House, and unfair prosecution of Scooter Libby. Colin Powell won't own up to owning his complicity.
Some of my columns here at Maggie's Farm are also carried by Family Security Matters. Last year I wrote a 9/11 column for FSM about what was going on in my life on 9/11, 9/11 With My Son. This year, FSM has produced a moving video for 9/11, and invites anyone to send in their reflections on 9/11 for possible publication. Go here for the video and the invite. I know that Maggie's Farm readers have much to add.
This video is less than 6-minutes long. The US can be virtually energy independent, and cut our trade deficits dramatically, if not even reverse them, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in the US. Wonder how? Listen.
I just sent an email to Bird Dog, and received an automatic reply that the Bird Dogs are expecting to lose electricity due to Hurricane Irene. Then, I got this photo of how they plan to cope.
President Obama's Magical Misery Tour million-dollar bus hit an outhouse on Wednesday. A farmer complained about the complexity of agricultural regulations.
Obama’s advice was simple: “Contact USDA.” “Talk to them directly. Find out what it is that you’re concerned about,” Obama told the man. “My suspicion is, a lot of times, they’re going to be able to answer your questions and it will turn out that some of your fears are unfounded.”
The reporter for Politico tried to take the president's advice. Nine phone calls later, over two days, being bounced from one organization to another, guess what: NO ANSWER. Politico experiences that the president is only good for manure in farm country, as in the rest of the country.
If you are a carnivore, like the rest of us Maggie's Farmers, you've seen the prices rise as corn goes in gas tanks rather than gassing us up, and you've seen new names on cuts of beef at the market. So, here's a handy interactive site where you can get descriptions of all the cuts of beef and cooking tips.
A friend sent me this YouTuber, from 1952. As I said, only the names and the dates change.
The YouTube notes are fascinating, below. Remember the ditty, Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor On The Bedpost Overnight?
Myrtle Eleanor Cooper (December 24, 1913--February 8, 1999) and Scott Greene Wiseman (November 8, 1908--January 31, 1981),[1] known professionally as Lulu Belle and Scotty, were one of the major country music acts of the 1930s and 1940s, dubbed The Sweethearts of Country Music.
Cooper was born in Boone, North Carolina; Wiseman was from Spruce Pine, North Carolina. Lulu Belle and Scotty enjoyed enormous national popularity thanks to their regular appearances on National Barn Dance on WLS-AM in Chicago, a rival to WSM-AM's Grand Ole Opry. Barn Dance enjoyed a large radio audience in the 1930s and early 1940s with some 20 million Americans regularly tuning in.
The duo married on December 13, 1934, one year after Wiseman became a regular on Barn Dance (Cooper had been a solo performer there since 1932). The duo is best known for their self-penned classic "Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?", which became one of the first country songs to attract major attention in pop circles and was recorded by many artists in both genres. Cooper was the somewhat dominant half of the duo with a comic persona as a wisecracking country girl. Her most famous novelty number was "Does Your Chewing Gum Lose It's Flavor On The Bedpost". In 1938, she was named Favorite Female Radio Star by the readers of Radio Guide magazine, an unusual recognition for a country performer.
Lulu Belle and Scotty recorded for record labels including Vocalion Records, Columbia Records, Bluebird Records; and Starday Records, in their final sessions during the 1960s reprising their old hits. They were among the first country music stars to venture into feature motion pictures, appearing in such films as Shine on Harvest Moon (1938), County Fair (1941) and The National Barn Dance (1944).
The couple retired from show business in 1958, excepting occasional appearances, going on to new careers in teaching (Wiseman) and politics (Cooper). Cooper served two terms in the North Carolina House of Representatives as the Democratic representative for three counties. In 1977, she gave a memorable speech in which she revealed that she had been raped on the country music circuit.[2]
Wiseman was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1971. After his death in 1981 from a heart attack in Gainesville, Florida, Cooper married Ernest Stamey in 1983; and in 1985 recorded her first album in 20 years for a small traditional music label.
I'm not an expert about the rioting and looting in England, but I take the reporting from there with a grain of salt. Why? Editors usually have a theme they impose upon stories. The scale of England's will require careful and honest examination.
Meanwhile, a New York Times reporter who covered the riot, violence and looting in Brooklyn's Crown Heights in 1991 just finally broke silence about the shoddy and misleading theme imposed by the NYT editors. It's worth reading: Telling It Like It Wasn't.
Bird Dog is returning from a brief vacation, and asked me to do today’s morning links. I’ve mostly been on a staycation the past month (actually, better than that; wife and sons off in Europe visiting family; P-A-R-T-Y!), so I’ve been spending relatively little time following the news and blogs. If one skips the newspaper for days or weeks, it’s largely true that only the names and the dates change. The stories are much the same. But, current events and developments taken together are some of the most negative for the US that I’ve experienced in my 63-years, about 50 of which I’ve closely followed the happenings. As President Obama’s former chair of his Council of Economic Advisors admits, we're "pretty darn f—ked." -– Met up with a Black guy, Rich, who went through Parris Island same time I did. Both still USMC green, not Black or White. He’s now retired from the Corps. He from poverty in No. Carolina, me from NYC. Agreed that following our grandparents’ rule to be frugal and save, don’t gamble, and keep moving forward is best advice we ever received and what we try to pass on to our children.
Last year’s choice by my alma mater CUNY’s Brooklyn College of the sole Common Reading book distributed to all incoming students for discussion and work in required English classes was particularly marred by the author’s additionsof anti-US and anti-Israel comments and statistics that were radical and fraudulent. I had a rolein raising the issue to national attention and criticism.
This year’s choice – Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat -- probably won’t raise as many hackles, as the focus is less a prominent political hotspot, Haiti. That may indicate welcome increased sensitivity by the selection committee, but this year’s choice still suffers most of the deficiencies as last year’s.
The book’s primary theme is the author’s upbringing in Haiti, separated from her parents who had immigrated to the US, she and brothers later joining them, and the relations among the extended family. However, the book’s critical attitude toward the US role in Haiti’s sad history of violence, poverty and instability, and the death in immigration detention of the author’s aged uncle, are strong secondary themes that provide the mileau for the tale.
One may argue that these are the author’s acquired views in this personal narrative. But, the prominence of those secondary themes brings the book, and the college, directly into major current political arguments over broader US foreign and immigration policies. This slant is in stark contrast to the author’s reflections exclusion of gratitude to the US for the youngsters’ success in the US. She is an acclaimed writer, her brothers also established in white collar jobs at the time of writing the book. Further, the book does not provide enough political context to allow a better understanding of the author’s criticisms of US policies in Haiti or US immigration practices.
In short, the book is part of the “victimology” and Leftist memoir literature so popular among our liberal elite, compared to earlier immigrants’ books about thankfully escaping repression and poverty in their countries of birth, then struggling and succeeding in the freedoms in the US.
That isn’t to say there isn’t enough in the book to show the horrible conditions in Haiti, that reading between the lines shows the youngsters’ success in the US, that an autopsy of the 81-year old uncle’s death revealed the cause as a previously unknown pancreatic condition, or that the author’s grandfather and uncle had been rebels and the family’s politics aligned with critics of the US in Haiti.
The book is still a poor choice for launching discussion of the political issues raised by the author. It is marred by the underlying anger of the author and her lack of appreciation of the US, her presentation of the US as an oppressive presence in the consciousness of her family, and the lack of underlying contextual details about US foreign and immigration policies. The incoming student will likely read or hear in the classroom discussions little else about the issues from broader or conflicting perspectives or facts.
Amongthe laudatory comments by some Brooklyn College faculty for the book, a senior professor there – Robert Cherry -- raises some of the problems with the book:
Family Tales in the Service of a Political Agenda
Brother, I’m Dying has little about the daily life of Haitians; their jobs, social and cultural institutions. Instead, Danticat focuses on violent episodes in Haitian history: Trujillo’s killings on the Dominican border; U.S. occupation, Duvalier’s Tonton Macoutes repression, and Haitian riot policy behavior. Rather than providing the reader with detailed information, Danticat chooses to promote emotional outrage by presenting tales of family members that accompany each of the episodes.
How true are the tales she has been told? How much has she embellished these accounts? What we do know is that telling these tales as first‐person accounts make them seem factual and puts faces and lives onto important episodes in Haitian history. In particular, Brother, I Am Dying uses Danticat’s family’s tales to invest its reader with emotional outrage at U.S. Haitian policy.
For me, this became clear when she placed Uncle Joseph’s childhood tale after this chilling account of his death in a US immigration detention center. Danticat writes, “Fearing that he might be captured by the Americans to work in the labor camps … Granpe Nozial ordered him to never go down the mountain.” Family illness, however, forced Joseph to seek medicine in town where he sees [US Marines] “white men …kicking the thing on the ground as though it was a soccer ball to one and other with the round tips of their boots. Taking small steps to stand the same distance away as other bystanders, my uncle finally saw what it was: a man’s head.” Thus, from the beginning of his life until its end, Joseph experienced first hand the inhumanity of U.S. policies towards Haitians.
While I sympathize with her pain, and even sympathize with her political agenda, it does not negate my concerns. Absence its political agenda, the book offers little to inform us about the Haitian experience. Brother, I’m Dying should be supplemented by panel discussions of the important issues it raises: U.S. Haitian policy, Immigration Detention Centers, and the issues children face when they are reunited with their parents in the U.S. when they are teenagers.
Professor Cherry informs me that the English Department is considering such discussions. If so, one may expect the Left and liberal leanings of the English Department faculty to emphasize the charges of economic imperialism prompting the US occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934, but notthat the dominance of its economy by German immigrants was feared in the midst of WWI, the huge building of infrastructure there by the US, or that its liberal constitution was written by then Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt.
One may expect the criticisms by pro-immigration lobbies that detention practices are substandard and harsh, but not that the deaths from all causes in detention are a tiny fraction of detainees (about 107 out of over 2.5 million, about 5 per 10,000, during 2003-2008; even the January 2010 New York Times reportof critics says, “In August, litigation by the civil liberties union prompted the Obama administration to disclose that more than one in 10 immigrant detention deaths had been overlooked and omitted from a list submitted to Congress last year.”). The Center for Immigration Studies, opposed to liberal immigration policies, contendsthis is a much lower rate of death than in US prisons. The comparison, however, raises many apples and oranges measurement difficulties that need to be clarified. Both sides agree that many improvements to detention policies and practices have been made in the past six-years, after the author’s uncle died in detention, and both sides agree that there is much – if differing – that needs to be done. – Of note here is that the author’s 81-year old uncle, with a valid visa to enter the US, was fleeing gangs that wanted to behead him and asked for temporary political asylum instead of just entering the US on his visa and overstaying it as so many do, so he entered the detention-adjudication system for a few days, dying there from a previously unknown pancreatic condition despite blood/urine and scan tests provided.
I’ll add a personal note. The apartment that the author’s parents lived in was in my Flatbush neighborhood in Brooklyn, less that 20-years later. I walked a mile to Prospect Park. Their apartment was a block away from the park. The apartment buildings where her parents lived were considered much better than the one in which I was raised. The author’s father was a tailor who in the US became a gypsy cab driver. He raised and educated successful children. My poor immigrant grandparents were, also, tailors, who sewed until retirement for poor health in their ‘60s, and raised and educated a successful family (my aunt was in the first classes at the new Brooklyn College). I drove a cab on graveyard shifts while at Brooklyn College, and like the author’s father was mugged. We were raised to be appreciative of the freedoms and opportunities in the US. It seems that the author of Brooklyn College’s 2011 Common Reading is less so. That is a distinct problem plaguing colleges and the US today.
The deal between the Congressional leadership and the President is much ado about nothing, in that – contrary to the kudos, rationalizations or moans – it actually does and will do little to affect the rapidly rising federal deficits and debts. It is less than trivial in the next year that it actually affects and almost entirely a lie over the next decade as future Congresses and presidents work around or ignore it.
The deal will cause increased demoralization among the citizenry both over its lack of real content and as politicians wrangle vigorously over scraps treated like whole cloth. It will also cause a new sobriety, already in painful motion, among the citizenry who have lesser prospects than before this deep recession and little reason to believe the future will personally be much better. Consumption will be restrained.
It is clear that the status quo is continued, for now at least and likely into the foreseeable future.
Spending is not reduced. It only promises a reduction in the present trendline of forecast spending, a fraction of the increases that will actually occur. And, there is little reason to believe that either Medicare or defense spending will be more than trimmed slightly in 2012. Part of that trendline, as scored by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is a $multi-trillion increase in taxes as the Bush tax-cuts are allowed to expire right after the 2012 elections. There is little reason to believe that such a drastic increase in taxes will be allowed to occur. Longer term, even if a trillion$ or three-$trillion dollars of spending were most optimistically avoided over the next decade, that’s a hundred to three-hundred $billion per year, a small fraction of federal spending.
If, as seems likely, the 2012 elections result in a Republican president and both houses of Congress, there will be more trims to spending, a good thing surely but likely to increase the howls of real and defensive pains and hardly likely to actually reduce the deficits significantly. The Cut, Cap and Balance that the Republican House passed is likely, and decidedly a better thing, yet as tides and lobbies weigh in will be weakened and end-run over time.
Fears about the crash of the dollar are overblown, as there is no viable alternative in a euro-myth euro or speciously corrupt Chinese renminbi. Lenders will demand higher interest rates and that will increase the deficits worldwide. Fears about more global conflict are not overblown. Enemies of order or Western civilization will continue to probe and attack. Reducing mental and defense preparedness by the US will encourage such foes and increase the needs to confront, which will be less successful and more costly to servicemembers and foregone goals.
So, long story short, the status quo will continue. It will be perceived as or really be painful for all, even under the best of circumstances.
One can argue that far more severe governmental actions or changes would reverse this. They are unlikely to occur. There will be more restraints on deepening the hole, but the hole remains. We’ve already dug it by a generation or two of profligacy and excuses. Only a generation or two of serious reduction in personal and government spending, plus economic recovery that must depend upon lessened government regulation and interference, will begin to maybe return us to realistic optimism.
I predict that the demoralization will be temporary and the new sobriety will ultimately triumph and set us right. The path will be long and hard to dig out of several generations of delusions that we could spend our seed-corn, requiring perseverance and sacrifice of self and illusions, but it is well marked.
BTW, I'm encoraged that the cautious and knowledgeable Mitt Romney is opposed to the debt deal, both as an economic realist and political positioner. The debt deal will pass anyway but he will be demonstrated as correct during the coming election season. That may not win him enough points to score, but does indicate a will among Republican moderates that together with the more conservative and Independent centrists -- as polls presently show -- will lead to the next vital step up with a Republican White House and Congress. The road of a thousand steps begins with the first. We've taken the first and 999 remain.
An overwhelming majority of those polled would not want to be 20 again. The question: “Knowing no more than you did then, would you want to be 20 again?” The key is in making the choice knowing what the respondents do now.
This wasn’t a scientific poll but was random across almost anyone I met and had a conversation with during the past month, successful in whatever field from business to arts to teaching; economically stressed from illegal immigrants to trades people to clerks to unemployed; politically conservative, liberal, somewhere in between, indifferent; married, single, happy, sad.
About 20% said they’d choose to be 20 again, about half confident and about half wanting to feel free like when they were 20. About 30% didn’t want to repeat the same or similar early errors, feeling their personalities would be the same. Then, half of the respondents just believe that it would be far tougher to get ahead now than whenever then was when they were 20. Those with grown children went on about how difficult it is for their sons and daughters to even get a toehold, and those with young children remarked about what they are seeing around them and deeply worry about their children’s future prospects.
Delving a little deeper into my respondents’ concerns about their children’s futures: Our children’s future being heavily mortgaged is at the core of the current Washington wrangles, and that is recognized although feeling powerless to affect it or almost hopeless that real reforms will happen. Another core issue is, as one respondent commented, “even with a professional degree, my kid is going to have to be working for the government.” Directly or indirectly through burdensome, intrusive and nitpicking regulations.
I’d be interested in hearing your comments.
Meanwhile, here’s a video shot for PowerLine’s contest, called “Child Abuse.”
If you are a carnivore, like the rest of us Maggie's Farmers, you've seen the prices rise as corn goes in gas tanks rather than gassing us up, and you've seen new names on cuts of beef at the market. So, here's a handy