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.
Actually, what would be great would be for Rice University’s Baker Institute to invite me to be a visiting professor for a semester, and teach an interdisciplinary (the kinds of fields Nourbakhsh identifies, plus law and law-and-economics) version of this for non-STEM students, a version for STEM students, and then a separate course on military robotics — strategy and policy, law, and ethics (UAVs, other battlefield robotics, targeted killing and the future of covert action using robotic and remote-directed systems, and the future of autonomous systems and autonomous weapons systems.
I don't care about income inequality. I care about the absolute condition of the poor--whether they are hungry, cold, and sick. But I do not care about the gap between their incomes, and those of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Nor the ratio of Gates and Buffett's incomes to mine. And I'm not sure why anyone should. Other than pure envy, it's hard to see how I could somehow be made worse off if Bill Gates' income suddenly doubled, but everything else remained the same.
But while I do not care about gaps and ratios, I do care about opportunity.
Easist way to reduce income inequality is to tax the top 10% to the point that they decide that working hard just isn't worth it. Easiest way to reduce asset inequality is to tax property and assets until people give up on owning anything or saving any money.
Big Labor’s victory over John Kasich’s reforms in Ohio is a reminder to conservatives that we’re still a long way from closing the deal. A majority of the citizenry seem to agree that the nation’s mired and that their homes and jobs and futures are sinking with it. But that same majority is not yet sold on transformative rollbacks of government and the public sector. They seem to think that out there somewhere there’s a way to get the good times back that’s more or less pain-free. More fool them – which is to say Obama & Co will have a pretty good shot at fooling them.
This afternoon I had lunch and a stroll along the ocean with a new friend, Jonathan Spyer. We struck it off immediately when he said the only organization he ever joined which he promised to obey was the Israel Defense Force. This mirrored my experience in joining the US Marine Corps. Our normally rebellious spirits matched.
Spyer was in San Diego to speak about his new book, The Transforming Fire: The Rise Of The Israel-Islamist Conflict. I’d read some reviews before, all laudatory, from the left-leaning Haaretz to the right-leaning Weekly Standard. After reading the book and talking with Spyer, although the focus is on what Israel faces and the book doesn’t delve deeply into US or European foreign policy, the book could have just as easily been sub-titled The Rise of the Western-Islamist Conflict But What Israel Realizes And The West Doesn’t.
Spyer’s motivation for writing the book was being blown out of the tank he was driving in the 2006 war in Lebanon, a draw that was poorly prepared for, poorly conceived, poorly executed but required the utmost – which was given – of soldiers on the ground. Spyer wanted to explore in depth what Israel is facing. Again we clicked, I having similar motivation after my tours in Vietnam.
Spyer brings to his book much more than being a frontline soldier, or his travels throughout the Middle East, or his fascinating return to Lebanon after the 2006 war. British-born Spyer has a PhD in Middle East politics from the London School of Economics, and served in the Israel Prime Minister’s Office. What makes his book interesting and not dry is his weaving of his personal experiences and observations into his learned descriptions of Middle East Politics.
At lunch, Spyer acknowledged that the current state of affairs in the Middle East is more negative than when he wrote the book. The “Arab Spring” unleashed violent animus toward Israel that is encouraged and supported by Iran, toppling formerly controlling, hostile but more benign toward Israel rulers in Egypt and Tunisia. Iran seeks to align a bloc with Hamas in control of Gaza, Hezbollah in control of Lebanon, and Syria as a client state of Iran as a funnel of training, arms and missiles to Hamas and Hezbollah. Saudi Arabia is comparatively weaker, as are Sunnis right now, but struggling to counter Iran’s Shia influence. For now, Iraq is slipping into Iran’s orbit, largely due to Iran’s cat’s paw there, Muqtada al-Sadr’s influence on the dominant Shia coalition in Baghdad.
Meanwhile, the US is withdrawing from its former predominance in the Middle East, and Europe continues pursuing its mostly economic interests there.
That leaves Israel with the question of how to survive. Among militant Islamists is the illusion that Israel is ultimately doomed due to its smaller population and adherence to values and institutions less militant than theirs. On the contrary, Spyer points out, Israel is relatively militarily and financially stronger than ever. More important, Israel’s population has largely moved past its former Ashkenazic and Sephardic divisions, or its left-right divisions, and through common experience with failed hopes and ruthless adversaries molded a more united and nationalistic leadership and purpose. Remnants of the old left are still common in academia and media but depend on the attention they are granted by Western media although their internal influence is otherwise negligible.
Longer term, Spyer is optimistic. As Spyer ends his book, and still believes:
In all these areas, the challenges are immense. Nevertheless, eventual success is likely. Iran and its allies suffer from the fundamental problem that they cannot produce societies in which people want to live. Rather, they create immensely repressive internal arrangements, coupled with and endless repeat of acts of military theater, which then brings down retribution and suffering on the populations they control. The anger and sense of humiliation that they are focusing on is real. But once it becomes clear that they are not in fact able to bring the victory, they are likely to decline.
In the meantime, Israel must strike hard when necessary. Otherwise, patience is needed in the Middle East cold war with Islamists. Israel may pay harsh prices along the way, but an Iran-led Islamist encirclement will erode first. I’m reminded of our protracted conflict with the Soviet Union and all’s surprise when its walls fell.
What will follow, I asked Spyer. Most likely some sort of military-commercial elite regimes, like before, still hostile toward Israel and the West, still mired in backwardness, but a lesser threat to Israel. The transforming fire is a crucible in which weaknesses are revealed and the product strengthened. The ultimately stronger is Israel’s abilities and resolve based on Western values that too many in the West have abandoned.
David, I am sorry to inform you that Americans have no interest in being ruled by our betters. We just don't believe they are better, and have little evidence for it since after the founders.
William F. Buckley Jr:
I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.
Full Civic Literacy ExamAre you more knowledgeable than the average citizen? The average score for all 2,508 Americans taking the following test was 49%; college educators scored 55%. Can you do better?
Sowell on income inequality: Young people make less money than more experienced people, single-parent households have less income than two parent households. So what?
It's about greed and the Blue Food Bowl. The middle class of America is increasingly dependent on government money, directly or indirectly, rather than on private industry - and the financial industry is in with the whole program. There are good reasons for the financial industry to be almost entirely Democratic and in political alliance with the government food bowl.
What all three groups share is a burning desire for more: a hunger and demand for ever larger amounts of government revenue and power. Money and power for the government enable the upper middle class good government types to dream up new schemes to help us all live better lives and give government the resources for the various social, ecological and cultural transformations on the ever-expandable goo-goo to-do list that range from a global carbon tax to fair trade coffee cooperatives and the war on saturated fat. All these programs (some useful in the Via Meadia view, others much less so) require a transfer of funds and authority from society at large to well-socialized, well-credentialed and well-intentioned upper middle class types who get six figure salaries to make sure the rest of us behave in accordance with their rapidly evolving notions of correct behavior.
That is, in accordance with our betters.
and
The cops, the teachers, the firefighters, the sanitation and transit workers: these are most of what remains of the backbone of what used to be the organized working class. Many who don’t work directly for the government work for the health care industry, where government and private insurance payments have kept the blue model alive for employees. Others work for infrastructure and construction companies – much of whose business comes from government. Their ranks were once swelled by reasonably well-paid manufacturing workers and other private employees in what was once a job-rich metropolitan environment. A few private bastions of the middle middle class remain (workers in the cooperative buildings where the überrich live, for example), but these days the purely private sector middle middle class is in full scale retreat in cities like New York and public and quasi-public sector employees take the lead.
This group doesn’t get paid as well or enjoy the prestige of the goo-goos, but they have built structures and institutions that secure them a middle-middle class existence. In the public sector at least they have done surprisingly well at passing their jobs and connections down to future generations. As the urban middle middle class shifted from a largely private sector group to a group primarily dependent on public sector spending and jobs, the political balance also changed. Like the goo-goos, the urban middle middle class needs more revenue from the rest of society: people in this group want the number of jobs in their institutions to grow and naturally enough they want to be better compensated: more take-home pay, better benefits, a younger retirement age with a more generous pension.
and
Threats to the food bowl both unite and divide the Party of Blue. All of them agree that federal revenues should be higher and that much of that money should flow to the cities and states. This preference helps hold the Democratic Party together and – combined with other groups (like big agriculture) that get fat subsidies – helps the Party stay competitive at the national level.
But when cuts must be made, or when limited resources must be divvied up, the groups divide. The goo-goos are willing to cut middle class entitlements and government pensions to fund upper middle class social priorities. Which, they will argue, is more important: to pay (excessive, irrational) pensions to superannuated firemen and cops. or to build a pathbreaking carbon cap and trade system that could save the planet? They are ready to sell state unions down the river, as Democratic politicians ranging from California’s Jerry Brown to Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel to New York’s Andrew Cuomo are doing as I write. But they prefer a peaceful and gradual approach that does not reduce the Democratic Party to a state of civil war and can present themselves to the unions as a lesser evil than Republican red staters who want to kill the unions altogether.
Government employees have a simpler point of view: they want the money and they want it now. They want it without reforms and they want it while they continue to enjoy their traditional privileges and perks.
It's not a Big Tent, it's a giant food bowl provided by a shrinking base of taxpayers. See Greece...
In brief, it's the old "This is a test of the emergency broadcast system" routine for radio & TV, albeit on a nationwide scale for the first time. The big dif is that the usual test lasts for a minute, whereas this is going to last for more than three.
Since I don't own a TV or have a radio handy, my only question is whether or not those loud emergency sirens are going to light off. We have a Coast Guard station not far from here and I presume they have one. After four articles, all I could come up with was this:
The test does not affect any planned tests of local outdoor warning siren systems or 911 callback systems.
Which doesn't really answer the question, in the sense that they could be planning on testing the sirens at the same time. You would think they'd want to, given the opportunity. But if they do light off those suckers, imagine the people who are unaware of the test and think it's just another 1-minute drill. And then it keeps going... and going. What a surprise when they suddenly conclude that there actually is a nuclear missile on the way.
Of course, if the Russians have planned their missile attack to coincide with the test (an insidiously clever plot, to be sure) and there really is a nuclear missile headed your way, simply do as we did in our school drills back in the 60's and crawl under your desk.
The lost Leonardo - London's National Gallery will exhibit 'Salvator Mundi' in a show of Leonardo da Vinci. The painting has attributes suggesting it's of the period, and experts have weighed in positively.
The big college scam - It's bad enough; the president's loan initiative will make it that much worse
"If it was a kill mission you don't need Seal Team 6; you need a box of hand grenades," he added, explaining they were forced to shoot Bin Laden as he reached for his AK-47.
...the chairman of the supervisory board of China Investment Corporation, the country’s sovereign wealth fund, put further distance between China and the eurozone bail-out, saying that Europe’s bloated welfare state meant that people did not work hard enough.
“I think if you look at the troubles which happened in European countries, this is purely because of the accumulated troubles of their worn out welfare societies,” Jin Liqun said in an interview with Al Jazeera television. “I think the labour laws are outdated – the labour laws induce sloth, indolence rather than hard working. The incentive system is totally out of whack.”
Eurozone leaders had been hoping that China would use some of its trade surplus to back the bail-out fund.
“I don’t know what I am going to do!” said Katchpole, a freelance account manager at a political consulting firm called Winning Over Washington. (Its main client is the progressive group MoveOn.org.) “I am going to have to defer my loans. I have no idea. Why should I be expected to pay them off now? Why are colleges charging interest on that stuff? Give us a break. Really.”
She is infantile. Purchases a service, but doesn't want to pay for it. Borrows money, but doesn't want to pay it back. Boo hoo.
Good grief. 44% of NY residents support these smelly low-life losers, bums, perverts, slackers, paranoids, anthropology majors, commie wannabes, community organizers, and potheads? I don't believe it.
Buckley, If Not God, Returns to Yale-What the late, great controversialist would have said to Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and today's conservative talking heads.
The newly formed Spokes Council claims to adhere to the “statement of principles” adopted by the New York City General Assembly, including “direct-democracy, non-hierarchy, participation, and inclusion.” The Spokes Council differs from the NYC-GA, however, in three main respects: the Spokes Council has the power to exclude new groups that don’t receive a 90% majority vote for admission; in the NYC-GA, everybody technically has the right to speak, whereas in the Spokes Council each Working Group has a spokesperson, who can be recalled only by a 90% majority; and the NYC-GA allows one vote per person, whereas the Spokes Council operates more indirectly, granting each Working Group one vote.
When I pointed out the contradictions these differences present to the Council’s stated principles, the leaders of Sunday’s teach-in insisted that the Spokes Council was the most participatory, democratic organization possible—the same slogan they repeated last month about the General Assembly. I felt like I was watching a local production of Animal Farm.
"I think I have an ongoing conversation with God. Throughout the day I'm constantly asking myself questions about what I'm doing, why I am doing it." --Barack Obama
Confusing an inner dialogue with speaking with God is never a wise plan
If you haven't seen the movie Moneyball, then do. Jason and I had our Little League schedule interrupted by a rare rain in San Diego, so we went to see the film. It will rank as one of the top baseball films ever, the acting by Brad Pitt and all others excellent.
But, the movie is about much more than baseball, as is baseball itself. Jason and I discussed its lessons after, about deportment and courage in leadership, about relations among management and players in tough situations or conflict, about the practical uses of education, and so on.
One of the lessons isn't in the movie. The judo use of statistics by a team, the Oakland Athletics, far outspent by such rich teams as the Yankees, to find undervalued players was successful but once the success is shown, other teams adopted it. The niche was lost as many exploited it, which reduced its power by any one team. The traditional "art" of experience returned to the fore but adjusted by this innovation. That is, in a nutshell, the path of innovation, useful improvements that energize competition and up the play to everyone's benefit.
The US District judge who presided over the trial of of the "blind sheik" in 1995, later appointed the US Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, spoke at Hillsdale College's Constitution Day on September 15 about the Constitution in wartime and the legal challenges it faces. The speech is here.
Mukasey begins, "President Obama campaigned for office largely on the claim that his predecessor had shredded the Constitution. By the Constitution, he could not have meant the document signed on September 17, 1787. Article II of that document begins with a simple declaration: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Not “some” or “most” or even “all but a teeny-weeny bit” of the executive power. The President is vested with all of it." Mukasey addresses the Bill of Rights, and in between discussing Article II and the first ten amendments discusses US intelligence and prosecutions of Islamist terrorists.
It would be hard to find a better summary of the issues. That's the calibre found in the monthly Imprimis which Hillsdale College mails to over 2-million subscribers. If you want your copy, and promise to read it and not waste Hillsdale's postage, you too can subscribe at the above link to Mukasey's speech. The subscription is free but the charge is to pay attention and be informed. Intelligence is our first line of defense in all matters.
The next great realignment in American politics is very likely to be a Democratic realignment. It cannot be a Republican realignment, because the GOP has moved so far to the extreme right that it is now far outside the mainstream of American opinion.
I don't know. Many Americans talk conservative, but love their freebies.
NYT: Bleak Portrait of American Poverty Is Off the Mark, Experts Say
Poverty stats ignore government benefits and charitable contributions - and, of course, income from working off the books. Thanks to tax-payers, the US has eliminated serious poverty but, as a side-effect, created two generations of free-loaders. That can't be helped because any safety net also catches those sad souls who jump willingly into the net of dependency.
The Occupy Wall Street encampments in public spaces are a hodge-podge of activists, malcontents, crazies, homeless, and paid attendants from some leftist-directed unions and ACORN fronts.
The Occupy Wall Street encampments in major media are a coterie of self-referential, Internet connected, liberal and leftist journalists and columnists.
The incoherence of the public campers, and violence by some, is increasingly clear to the wider public. This is despite the best efforts of the other journo-campers pitching tents upon the ground of the public campers. The journo-campers excuse and avoid examination of the real facts in the parks and streets. Instead, they use it as their launch-pad to repeat their leftist defenses of the direction that President Obama has taken the US into more European style socialism, or to bemoan that he hasn’t taken us further.
That’s good for several – already too many -- news cycles, but runs up against, again, facts on the ground, the most telling being that everything President Obama has promised or done has been an abject failure, indeed too often only enriching bureaucrats and cronies on Wall Street or in industry.
The kids will mostly wake up as they grow older and gain experience. Their parents already are waking up, as exhibited in polls showing an increased tilt against the romantic facades on the public campers erected by those in the major media.
Major media has further reduced its public esteem and influence. The prospects for President Obama’s re-election are further reduced, by the journo pimps declining impact on most Americans’ opinions, and by President Obama’s own embrace of the public campers and his own shallow and strident demagoguery.
That's the title of a piece by Kling. A quote from his fascinating essay about post-industrial work:
The recent trend in job polarization raises the possibility that gains in well-being that come from productivity improvements will accrue to an economic elite. Perhaps the middle-class affluence that emerged during the latter part of the industrial age is not going to be a feature of the information age. Instead, we could be headed into an era of highly unequal economic classes. People at the bottom will have access to food, healthcare, and electronic entertainment, but the rich will live in an exclusive world of exotic homes and extravagant personal services. The most popular bands in the world will play house concerts for the rich, while everyone else can afford music downloads but no live music. In the remainder of this essay, I want to extend further this exercise in imagination and consider three possible scenarios.
The people who used to be bank tellers are not the same people who design and build ATM machines. Clerical jobs are disappearing fast. Secretarial jobs have already disappeared. Sales and service jobs are entering the maw of the internet: people buy their insurance, cars, and books online. Semi-skilled jobs are disappearing. Soon, teaching jobs will shrink with digital education. Productivity (ie, fewer employees) abounds. Outsourcing of everything, including legal work, abounds. Heck, even Wall St. jobs are disappearing. (However, there will always be work for skilled labor: carpenters, painters, electricians, plumbers, gunsmiths, firemen, masons, etc)
Kling wonders what the immediate future might hold for people who want to work, but who, despite education, lack specific skills. As I have said often here, a gentleman's liberal arts education is a wonderful thing indeed and helps produce good dinner companions but it is not work-related. It was never meant to be.
As Vanderleun guotes:
The graduate with a science degree asks, "Why does it work?" The graduate with an engineering degree asks, "How does it work?" The graduate with an accounting degree asks, "How much will it cost?" The graduate with a liberal arts degree asks, "Do you want fries with that?" -- Jane Haddam
The current market on Wall Street is driven by a number of outrageous factors. Europe and U.S. Debt, Fed Quantitative Easing, Hot IPOs, and large scale fraud are headlines each day.
Last night, an interesting IPO was priced, and it could be a bellwether, as its movement may be indicative of market conditions.
The business plan was good. This was going to be a moneymaker. The problem with the deal was optics. Rendering is a nasty business.
So are businesses with low costs of entry. One of the sure signs of bubble behavior is herd mentality that becomes contagious and self-reinforcing.
Also via Insty: Have you considered the myriad difficulties associated with carrying concealed while shopping? Here are some great ways to overcome those issues.
Cain lacks the grounding and depth needed to be president. If he is serious about wanting to be president, he should be running for the U.S. Senate, or for a governorship, to prepare, because if anything is clear right now, it’s that experience matters. (By the way, it’s interesting to see how widely Republicans are responding to his avuncular warmth; my teenage daughters just love him in the debates, probably because we usually get hard-to-love cold fish, or raffish jerks, as our candidates.) Yes, he’d be better than Barack Obama as president. Much better. And yes, it’s nice that he’s black and conservative, and all these white Republicans are embracing him. But if the GOP’s goal is to win, Cain is a distraction. At the end of the day, if he is the candidate, we lose — even if it turns out that he had no behavior, ever, which could be confused with sexual harassment.
If sociological reportage describes one main stream of commentary about Occupy Wall Street, yearning nostalgia describes the other. It turns out that 1960s radicals never die, they just turn rancid and say ridiculous things. They may long ago have lost track of their love beads and peace pins, but somewhere deep down there lives an unextirpatable feeling of solidarity with the Age of Aquarius. The New York Times has been one reliable source of the phenomenon. The columnist Nicholas Kristof, for example, took one look at the spoiled children and social misfits cluttering up Zuccotti Park and declared that it was “reminiscent of Cairo’s Tahrir Square.” Here’s a question: How many things had to go wrong in Mr. Kristof’s brain for him to make that comparison with a straight face? “Reminiscent of” implies “analogous to.” In what sense is an aggregation of permanent adolescents in a park in downtown Manhattan analogous to the regime-changing tumult that exploded in Egypt last winter? In no sense. Mr. Kristof’s heady tweet was nonsense.
It's a good piece, but I have grown weary of these clowns, half-wits, and sociopaths.
Deutscher was a fine example of the scholar who knew a lot and understood little (including, or especially, himself). A man may smile and smile and be a villain. A man may read and read, and experience and experience, and understand nothing.
If you're a mature, sophisticated adult (that is, over 50), then you remember Cracked magazine as being one of the staples of your early youth, right alongside Mad magazine and Playboy. Gotta get your education from somewhere, right?
Well, IMHO, Cracked has turned into the premiere comedy/parody/satire site on the Web. There are a handful of imitations around, but Cracked is the best-written and most polished. Some of their stuff is exceptionally clever.
I found the following Cracked article both revealing and insightful, and immediately confess to being guilty of a huge number at least one of the sins he mentions. My thought at the end was, anyone getting on the Internet for the first time should read this first.
Oh, before we start, would you mind if I asked a rather delicate question?
American life, as journalist Sebastian Junger observed in 1999, "has become staggeringly easy," even "vaguely unfulfilling." The context of Junger's remarks was an exploration into why some people deliberately seek danger nowadays, whether it's bungee-jumping from a high bridge or teasing grizzly bears in the (ultimately fatal) manner of Timothy Treadwell.
The political parallel to Junger's thesis is the oft-cited "solution in search of a problem," of which the Our Children's Trust lawsuit is but one example. (For others, I need only refer you to any Democratic Party political platform.) While it is certainly true that our water and air are not 100% pure (whatever that may be), the fact is that the goal posts keep getting moved back with every improvement in observation that we achieve.
Mayor Mike said this morning that if there is anyone to blame for the mortgage crisis that led the collapse of the financial industry, it's not the "big banks," but Congress.
He is an amateur. That's part of why people like him, but not a reason that people will decide to vote for him. Obama is still surprisingly popular.
Israel: A true ally in the Middle East - Israeli contributions to U.S. national interests, underappreciated by many, include enhanced counter-terrorism, intelligence and technology useful in urban warfare.
However, the science is settled (via Watts): there is probably or possibly a short-term (centuries) warming trend, if the data is worth anything (about which I am a skeptic). Nothing to think twice about unless you plan on bringing farming back to Greenland in 300 years:
Note the dramatic correlation with global CO2 emissions! None. Here's a better correlation which shows some real proof: Global temperatures caused by decrease of Mediterranean pirates.
QED - it's a linear inverse relationship This cause is therefore settled science, and the obvious solution to refrigerate ourselves is to import more pirates into the Med until we are cold enough.
The Reins Act is part of the Republican Jobs Bill, antithetical in most respects to the Democrats killing-jobs bills and regulations that we’ve suffered the past 3-years. There are 192 co-sponsors (text and sponsors) in the House, and growing. Check and see if your Congressman has signed on yet. The major media, of course, has not paid much of any attention to the Reins Act. President Obama would, of course, veto it, but he may not be in the position to do so after next year’s elections. Then, await the howls of the legions profiteering from the federal regulatory behemoth. But, Congress must be held accountable for regulations promulgated in its name.
Last week, House Speaker Boehner said of pending job-killers, “Today there are 219 such rules that are sitting in these agencies ready to come rolling out and to impose new costs on a private sector that’s struggling to keep its head above water and to create jobs.”
Amity Shlaes points out that in 1933 President Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration “had generated more paper than the entire legislative output of the federal government since 1789.” (The Forgotten Man) In 1935, the US Supreme Court found the NRA unconstitutional for infringing on the separation of powers by delegating powers to the executive properly those of the legislative branch.
Firm action by Congress to rein in costly regulation is sorely needed. Over the past few years, the cost and number of new regulations have increased dramatically. This increase did not begin with President Obama, but it has accelerated markedly during his tenure. From inauguration day 2009 through March of this year, regulatory agencies imposed some 75 major new regulations (defined as those costing $100 million or more), imposing some $38 billion of new costs annually on the economy and consumers.[1]
This is on top of the continuing burden of the existing stock of red tape, which has been estimated at some $1.75 trillion per year.[2] This burden not only increases costs for consumers but hinders enterprises from growing and jobs from being created.
[A] bill to increase legislative control over and accountability for federal regulatory policy. The central provisions of the REINS Act provide that new “major rules” – those regulations expected to cost over $100 million annually – may not become effective unless a joint resolution of approval passes Congress. The Act would further create an expedited review process designed to ensure that there is a prompt up-or-down vote in each house of Congress on all new “major” rules, which represent less than five percent of the 3,000-plus federal regulations promulgated each year….
The question is not whether we would have “more efficient and more effective regulation” but whether we would have regulations that more closely follow the value preferences of the American people. Existing regulatory decisions are not made by “scientists and engineers” who have regulatory authority due to their independent expertise, but by executive and independent agencies that are headed by political appointees who are granted regulatory authority by Congress. Their regulatory decisions are informed by scientific and technical information, but the ultimate regulatory choices are based on normative judgments – whether it is worth imposing X amount of costs for Y benefits, whether it is fair to impose particular costs, risks or burdens on particular segments of the population, whether environmental gains in one area are worth safety or environmental losses in another, and so on. These are legislative policy judgments for which legislators should be held accountable.
Critics of the Rein Act say it will gum up the works. But, as Heritage points out, there are not hundreds but a few dozen such regs a year, "hardly an unmanageable number." And, surely more worthwhile for Congress to analyze and act upon than much else that it does. -- Regulatory threats led to the housing values meltdown. Next Friday, in what's billed as a major speech, Mitt Romney will address government spending at Americans For Prosperity Tribute to Ronald Reagan dinner. Americans For Prosperity supports the Reins Act. Let's see if Romney does.
Shanghai Gets Supersized - Boasting 200 skyscrapers, China's financial capital has grown like no other city on earth – and shows few signs of stopping
Are Twentysomethings Expecting Too Much? - They were raised to believe they could do anything, and now they’re demanding more from work than previous generations ever did. Will they change the world or have to lower their sights?
Right now we have what the Left so fervently desires — an us-against-them Tocquevillian nightmare that can only exacerbate the class warfare currently being whipped up in Washington.
In many parts of the country prospective homebuyers will pay almost as much in property taxes as in mortgage interest! No wonder the residential real estate market can’t come up for air, and why the American middle class feels that it is fighting for its existence
The fair-lending task force’s original policy paper undercuts the notion the financial crisis was all about banker “greed,” though it certainly played a role after the fact. Rather, it offers compelling evidence that the crisis evolved chiefly from government mandates and threats to increase lending to applicants who could not afford them.
Have you heard about this?
10 Unbelievable Things the Chinese Believe
How New York City 
Learn How to Break Down a Door (Without Hurting Yourself)
If you're a mature, sophisticated adult (that is, over 50), then you remember Cracked magazine as being one of the staples of your early youth, right alongside Mad magazine and Playboy. Gotta get your education from somewhere, right?
SC Sheriff