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Reality
May 16, 2012 9:14:34 GMT -5
Post by philunderwood on May 16, 2012 9:14:34 GMT -5
www.qando.net/?tag=realityReality is a great test of belief. Sometimes, the things you believe are confirmed by experience. Sometimes they aren’t. And sometimes, reality is so at odds with what people believe, they have to be complete dolts to keep believing it. But, I constantly see people who believe things that simply can’t be true, and it bothers me. Ultimately, reality tells you whether what you believe is true or not. And if reality conflicts with what you believe, it isn’t reality that’s got it wrong. The Stimulus Cheerleaders Basically, it’s the unreconstructed Keynesian crowd. Popularly led by Paul Krugman—who is a Nobel Laureate economist—they continue to argue that the problem with the economy is that the government simply didn’t spend enough to properly stimulate the economy. There’s so much wrong with that, it’s hard to know where to start. First, let’s accept that in a range of circumstances, it actually is true that the government can stimulate the economy via deficit spending. As long as there’s not too much debt in the economy as a whole, you can prime the economic pump through deficit spending, especially if you have a fiat currency. We’ve done it lots of times since WWII. So, up to a point, even if you have a credit bubble that collapses, you can re-inflate it by essentially transferring that debt to the Government via deficit spending. Up to a point. As I’ve mentioned previously, the newest ECB research indicates that, in developed economies, once you reach a government debt load of about 100% GDP, it begins to drag on the economy, reducing economic growth by about 1% annually. So, what should be 3% annual GDP growth becomes 2%. And as the debt gets bigger, the drag gets bigger, faster. Now, ever since Reagan and Congress began serious, constant deficit spending in the 80s, there have been worries that the government debt would begin to crown out private markets, and slow the economy. But it never happened. Well, until now, as we crossed that 1:1 GDP to debt ratio. Moreover, the idea that we haven’t spent enough to stimulate the economy is simply farcical. In 2008, the total national debt was less than $10 trillion. Now it’s over $16 trillion. So no matter whether or not we spent X amount of money marked "stimulus", we’ve spent so much money that we’ve added more than $6 Trillion in debt in just 4 years. That’s a lot of stimulus. Arguing that we needed to spend more is…counterintuitive. If $6+ trillion won’t do it, then it probably can’t be done. Besides, we already learned there was a fundamental problem with Keynesian economics when we had stagflation in the ’70s, which was supposedly impossible. The Greeks Here’s the thing about looting the system. Once you’ve looted it…it’s been looted. The Greeks seem utterly incapable of understanding that the system can’t continue to dole out benefits once you’ve looted it. It’s not the Germans that are making life difficult for the Greeks, by refusing to give them more money. It’s the Greeks that have made life difficult for themselves by spending themselves into a 1.28:1 Debt to GDP ratio. Austerity, of course, isn’t pleasant—at least not the way they’ve implemented it. What they needed was public sector austerity, i.e., spending cuts, not private sector austerity, i.e., tax increases. Instead, they got both. What they needed were massive spending cuts, and debt repayment. But, of course, in a country where practically every cop, teacher, and fireman is a unionized employee of the state, and half of the private citizens get some sort of cushy government benefit payment, much public sector austerity was a political non-starter. So they gave themselves a little public austerity and a lot of private austerity…and the economy collapsed. I mean, no matter what they did, they were in for a tough time, but they chose the most destructive path possible, then blamed it on the Germans. The thing is, the Germans are historically…impatient with foreigners that they find troublesome. But the Greeks have decided that, having looted their economy completely, it’s the Germans’ fault somehow. The Greek position is, "We want to stay in the euro without worrying about our deficits, borrow money from Germany, never pay it back, and tell anyone who questions this to go screw." The Germans, as are their wont, are unamused. Californians The list of odd things Californians believe that are directly contradicted by observable reality is, of course, far to long to be described here. A representative sample, however, includes: Maintaining a permanent class of illegal immigrants in modern-day helotage will not reduce employment among the minority citizenry. Giving them full access to state benefits and education will not strain the schools, medical system, or state budget. California must have the strictest environmental, tax, and employment regulation possible. This will not result slower economic growth, or a business exodus to another state. Similarly, stringent environmental regulation for the benefit of small fish or birds, and significantly reducing the water available for irrigation, will have no effect on farming in the central valley, and, hence, agricultural prices paid by consumers. It is completely possible to allow state employees to retire as young as 50, with an annual pension payment 85% of their highest salary, and fully meet our pension obligations, because the Dow will be at 24,000 by 2009, and 24,000,000 by 2099, thus making the latest round of pension increases perfectly sustainable through investment. If we’re taxing California workers 10% of their income, and we have a $16 billion budget deficit, the problem is that we obviously aren’t taxing enough. We should, therefore, tax higher income earners much more, because they can never leave California and move to Arizona. Or Texas. California is just Greece with movie stars. Conclusion I could go on and on, but, you probably get the point. The problem with reality is that it doesn’t care what you believe. It just is. The longer you ignore it, the more forceful it is when it re-asserts itself. But if I could point to one thing as the worst modern problem we have today, it would be an absolute refusal to acknowledge reality, accompanied by a steadfast refusal to recognize any of the warning signals it obligingly gives before it’s assertion becomes horrific, rather than merely unpleasant. If you make the decision to ride this thing down in flames, reality will be perfectly happy to let you do it. ~ Dale Franks
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Reality
May 22, 2012 6:51:39 GMT -5
Post by philunderwood on May 22, 2012 6:51:39 GMT -5
Rational People Fear Big Government, Not Big Business By Dennis Prager www.JewishWorldReview.com | You cannot understand the left if you do not understand that Leftism is a religion. It is not G0d-based (some Left-wing Christians' and Jews' claims notwithstanding), but otherwise it has every characteristic of a religion. The most blatant of those characteristics is dogma. People who believe in Leftism have as many dogmas as the most fundamentalist Christian. One of them is material equality as the preeminent moral goal. Another is the villainy of corporations. The bigger the corporation, the greater the villainy. Thus, instead of the devil, the left has Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Oil, the "military-industrial complex," and the like. Meanwhile, Big Labor, Big Trial Lawyers, and, of course, Big Government are leftwing angels. And why is that? Why, to be specific, does the left fear big corporations but not big government? The answer is dogma — a belief system that transcends reason. No rational person can deny that big governments have caused almost all the great evils of the last century, arguably the bloodiest in history. Who killed the 20-30 million Soviet citizens in the Gulag Archipelago — big government or big business? Hint: There were no private businesses in the Soviet Union. Who deliberately caused 75 million Chinese to starve to death — big government or big business? Hint: See previous hint. Did Coca Cola kill five million Ukrainians? Did Big Oil slaughter a quarter of the Cambodian population? Would there have been a Holocaust without the huge Nazi state? Whatever bad big corporations have done is dwarfed by the monstrous crimes — the mass enslavement of people, the deprivation of the most basic human rights, not to mention the mass murder and torture and genocide — committed by big governments. How can anyone who thinks rationally believe that big corporations rather than big governments pose the greatest threat to humanity? The answer is that it takes a mind distorted by leftist dogma. If there is another explanation, I do not know what it is. Religious Christians and Jews also have some irrational beliefs, but their irrationality is overwhelmingly confined to theological matters; and these theological irrationalities have no deleterious impact on religious Jews' and Christians' ability to see the world rationally and morally. Few religious Jews or Christians believe that big corporations are in any way analogous to big government in terms of evil done. And the few who do are leftists. That the Left demonizes "Big Pharma," for instance, is an example of left wing thinking. America's pharmaceutical companies have saved millions of lives, including millions of leftists' lives. And I do not doubt that in order to increase profits, they have not always played by the rules. But to demonize big pharmaceutical companies while lionizing big government, big labor unions and big trial law firms, is to stand morality on its head. There is yet another reason to fear big government far more than big corporations. ExxonMobil has no police force, no IRS, no ability to arrest you, no ability to shut you up, and certainly no ability to kill you. ExxonMobil can't knock on your door in the middle of the night and legally take you away. Apple Computer cannot take your money away without your consent, and it runs no prisons. The government does all of these things. Of course, the left will respond that government also does good and that corporations and capitalists are, by their very nature, "greedy." To which the rational response is that, of course, government also does good. But so do the vast majority of corporations, private citizens, church groups, and myriad voluntary associations. On the other hand, only big government can do anything approaching the monstrous evils of the last century. As for greed: Between hunger for money and hunger for power, the latter is incomparably more frightening. It is noteworthy that none of the twentieth century's monsters — Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao — were preoccupied with material gain. They loved power much more than money. And that is why the left is much more frightening than the right. It craves power.
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Reality
May 22, 2012 7:00:45 GMT -5
Post by philunderwood on May 22, 2012 7:00:45 GMT -5
Big Lies in Politics By Thomas Sowell www.JewishWorldReview.com | The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy them, and only in the short run. The current outbreaks of riots in Europe show what happens when the truth catches up with both the politicians and the people in the long run. Among the biggest lies of the welfare states on both sides of the Atlantic is the notion that the government can supply the people with things they want but cannot afford. Since the government gets its resources from the people, if the people as a whole cannot afford something, neither can the government. There is, of course, the perennial fallacy that the government can simply raise taxes on "the rich" and use that additional revenue to pay for things that most people cannot afford. What is amazing is the implicit assumption that "the rich" are all such complete fools that they will do nothing to prevent their money from being taxed away. History shows otherwise. After the Constitution of the United States was amended to permit a federal income tax, in 1916, the number of people reporting taxable incomes of $300,000 a year or more fell from well over a thousand to fewer than three hundred by 1921. Were the rich all getting poorer? Not at all. They were investing huge sums of money in tax-exempt securities. The amount of money invested in tax-exempt securities was larger than the federal budget, and nearly half as large as the national debt. This was not unique to the United States or to that era. After the British government raised their income tax on the top income earners in 2010, they discovered that they collected less tax revenue than before. Other countries have had similar experiences. Apparently the rich are not all fools, after all. In today's globalized world economy, the rich can simply invest their money in countries where tax rates are lower. So, if you cannot rely on "the rich" to pick up the slack, what can you rely on? Lies. Nothing is easier for a politician than promising government benefits that cannot be delivered. Pensions such as Social Security are perfect for this role. The promises that are made are for money to be paid many years from now — and somebody else will be in power then, left with the job of figuring out what to say and do when the money runs out and the riots start. There are all sorts of ways of postponing the day of reckoning. The government can refuse to pay what it costs to get things done. Cutting what doctors are paid for treating Medicare patients is one obvious example. That of course leads some doctors to refuse to take on new Medicare patients. But this process takes time to really make its full impact felt — and elections are held in the short run. This is another growing problem that can be left for someone else to try to cope with in future years. Increasing amounts of paperwork for doctors in welfare states with government-run medical care, and reduced payments to those doctors, in order to stave off the day of bankruptcy, mean that the medical profession is likely to attract fewer of the brightest young people who have other occupations available to them — paying more money and having fewer hassles. But this too is a long-run problem — and elections are still held in the short run. Eventually, all these long-run problems can catch up with the wonderful-sounding lies that are the lifeblood of welfare state politics. But there can be a lot of elections between now and eventually — and those who are good at political lies can win a lot of those elections. As the day of reckoning approaches, there are a number of ways of seeming to overcome the crisis. If the government is running out of money, it can print more money. That does not make the country any richer, but it quietly transfers part of the value of existing money from people's savings and income to the government, whose newly printed money is worth just as much as the money that people worked for and saved. Printing more money means inflation — and inflation is a quiet lie, by which a government can keep its promises on paper, but with money worth much less than when the promises were made. Is it so surprising voters with unrealistic hopes elect politicians who lie about being able to fulfill those hopes?
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Post by philunderwood on Jun 6, 2012 6:32:58 GMT -5
Uncertainty Paralysis By John Stossel www.JewishWorldReview.com | President Obama would do us all a big favor if he'd ask himself this: "Would I start or expand a business without knowing what regulations or taxes government will impose next year?" If he'd just stop and ask that, he'd have a sense of what's wrong with the economy. He'd understand why a country that must create 120,000 new jobs each month just to absorb newcomers created only 69,000 last month. Past recoveries were quicker. Something is different. What could it be? Let's remember that the economy — which is to say, us — is already burdened by byzantine bureaucratic impositions. Every week, the feds add another thousand pages of rules and proposals for rules. Local governments add their own. My mayor, in New York City, even proposes micromanaging the size of the drinks restaurants may sell. On top of the existing mountain of red tape, the Obama administration has piled on more, with more to come. Obamacare was less a specific prescription than a license for the Department of Health and Human Services to write new rules, lots of which are yet to be written. No one knows how the bureaucrats will micromanage health insurance. Then there's Dodd-Frank, the 2,300-page revamp of finance industry regulation. Again, the bill left the rule-writing to regulatory agencies. Who knows what they will come up with? Every year, Congress makes thousands of changes to tax laws. And no one can guess what will happen in 2013 if the 2001 and 2003 rate cuts expire. There is an irresistible temptation for politicians to "do something" whenever real or imagined problems appear. The number of on-the-fly programs in recent years (from attacks on unpaid internships to Cash for Clunkers) has been astounding. This uncertainty kills job creation. If you cannot tell what will happen next week, next month, next year, why make a significant commitment? The next law or executive order might make a mockery of your plans. America faces a humongous debt, and its trajectory is upward. If nothing changes, the whole budget would be consumed by interest payments. No politician wants that — if only because there'll be no money to buy votes. How will the problem be dealt with? Higher taxes? Massive inflation? Some combination? Where does that leave someone today who might, in a more stable policy environment, be eager to launch some big, long-term investment project? In the dark, that's where. Economist John B. Taylor of the Hoover Institution summed it up aptly: "Unpredictable economic policy — massive fiscal 'stimulus' and ballooning debt, the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing with multiyear near-zero interest rates, and regulatory uncertainty due to Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank financial reforms — is the main cause of persistent high unemployment and our feeble recovery." Historian Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute calls it "regime uncertainty." We should have learned the lesson during the Great Depression. Today's problems are nowhere close to the 1930s, but there is a similarity in Franklin Roosevelt's policy fog. Higgs writes: "The insufficiency of private investment from 1935 through 1940 reflected a pervasive uncertainty among investors about the security of their property rights in their capital and its prospective returns. ... The willingness of businesspeople to invest requires a sufficiently healthy state of 'business confidence,' and the Second New Deal ravaged the requisite confidence ... ." The solution? Taylor finds it in the writing of Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek: the rule of law. "Stripped of all technicalities," Hayek wrote in "The Road to Serfdom," "this means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand — rules which make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers in given circumstances and to plan one's individual affairs on the basis of this knowledge." If we are ever to get out of this hole the politicians have dug, we must disabuse them of the conceit that they improve our lives by spending more, guaranteeing investments or "jump-starting" industries. Only when politicians butt out, leaving us with simple, predictable rules, can the economy grow for us all.
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Reality
Jun 10, 2012 9:44:40 GMT -5
Post by philunderwood on Jun 10, 2012 9:44:40 GMT -5
www.qando.net/?tag=peggy-noonanHas Peggy Noonan finally recovered from her Obama swoon? Published June 9, 2012 | By Bruce McQuain Perhaps. It certainly seems so. She’s out with a column calling the Obama administration a “house of cards”. I’ll get to that in a minute, but there was something else she said in the column that caught my attention: Political professionals now lay down lines even before a story happens. They used to wait to do the honest, desperate, last-minute spin of yesteryear. Now it’s strategized in advance, which makes things tidier but less raggedly fun. The line laid down by the Democrats weeks before the vote was that it’s all about money: The Walker forces outspent the unions so they won, end of story. Two points – one, that “line” has been debunked, but Democrats continue to try to make that conventional wisdom (which is fine by me, because the CW hides the real truth that it was their message). But more importantly, point two, Noonan is right – political professionals try to shape the story before it happens, with their spin already being generated so that if they win their positive spin becomes CW and if they lose their negative spin becomes CW. In Wisconsin, the negative spin or excuse was Democrats were outspent and being outspent means losing. That takes us to the part where Noonan talks about Obama: President Obama’s problem now isn’t what Wisconsin did, it’s how he looks each day—careening around, always in flight, a superfluous figure. No one even looks to him for leadership now. He doesn’t go to Wisconsin, where the fight is. He goes to Sarah Jessica Parker’s place, where the money is. There is, now, a house-of-cards feel about this administration. It became apparent some weeks ago when the president talked on the stump—where else?—about an essay by a fellow who said spending growth is actually lower than that of previous presidents. This was startling to a lot of people, who looked into it and found the man had left out most spending from 2009, the first year of Mr. Obama’s presidency. People sneered: The president was deliberately using a misleading argument to paint a false picture! But you know, why would he go out there waving an article that could immediately be debunked? Maybe because he thought it was true. That’s more alarming, isn’t it, the idea that he knows so little about the effects of his own economic program that he thinks he really is a low spender. For more than a month, his people have been laying down the line that America was just about to enter full economic recovery when the European meltdown stopped it. (I guess the slowdown in China didn’t poll well.) You’ll be hearing more of this—we almost had it, and then Spain, or Italy, messed everything up. What’s bothersome is not that it’s just a line, but that the White House sees its central economic contribution now as the making up of lines. Any president will, in a presidential election year, be political. But there is a startling sense with Mr. Obama that that’s all he is now, that he and his people are all politics, all the time, undeviatingly, on every issue. He isn’t even trying to lead, he’s just trying to win. There’s so much packed into those few paragraphs. Apparently Noonan has shed the blinders that had her backing Obama in 2008 and sees him for what the rest of us saw him to be all along. An empty suit. She talks about the fact that his campaign has been “laying down the line” that it is Europe’s fault our economy is in trouble. Typical Obama. He’s failed miserably and, perfectly in character, is trying to blame it on another entity. Everything is political. Obama petulantly claimed that it was offensive to be blamed for the national security leaks that have been coming out of his administration. Question: who the hell else should be blamed? Most ominously, there are the national-security leaks that are becoming a national scandal—the "avalanche of leaks," according to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, that are somehow and for some reason coming out of the administration. A terrorist "kill list," reports of U.S. spies infiltrating Al Qaeda in Yemen, stories about Osama bin Laden’s DNA and how America got it, and U.S. involvement in the Stuxnet computer virus, used against Iranian nuclear facilities. These leaks, say the California Democrat, put "American lives in jeopardy," put "our nation’s security in jeopardy." But everyone of them served to burnish the Obama “Commander-in-Chief” record. Even DiFi recognizes where they’re coming from. As Noonan says, it has becomes clear that “he and his people are all politics, all the time” and those leaks simply serve that end. Finally Noonan talks about the absurd article Obama was waving around touting the equally absurd notion that he was the president who had spent less than any other president. You have to be a syphilitic inbred moron with a single digit IQ and totally unaware of what has happened these past 4 years to even begin to believe that. Yet he’s out there presenting it as “fact”. And then yesterday, he talked about the private sector “doing fine”. It is becoming increasingly clear the man has no grounding in or understanding of economics whatsoever. And so, the claim he’s “smartest man in the room” seems to be only true if the room is empty. What Noonan’s deconstruction of Obama signals though, in a larger sense, is the disenchantment of the big middle with Obama. She’s one of the bellwethers. You know E.J. Dionne is an Obamabot. You know Charles Krauthammer is anti-Obama. Noonan was among those who were nominally from the right but who endorsed Obama last cycle. It was cool to be for Obama last time. It was hip. It was in. Our first black president. A chance to show the world our racial differences have been put aside. And heck, what real damage could he do, right? So she touted his candidacy over McCain’s. Then reality bitch slapped her. She’s finally now come to the point where the adage “if you voted for Obama in 2008 to prove you’re not a racist, you need to vote against him in 2012 to prove you’re not an idiot” is staring her directly in the face. Credibility is in the balance. Over the next few months, a whole lot of marginal Obama voters are going to come to the same conclusion and in November, the Obama house of cards will collapse. ~McQ
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Reality
Jul 11, 2012 4:56:10 GMT -5
Post by philunderwood on Jul 11, 2012 4:56:10 GMT -5
Budget Insanity By John Stossel www.JewishWorldReview.com | Last year, Congress agreed to $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts, unless politicians find other things to cut. They didn't, of course. So now, with so-called sequestration looming in January, panic has set in. Even the new "fiscally responsible" Republicans vote against cutting Energy Department handouts to companies like Solyndra and subsidies to sugar producers. Many claim that any cut in military spending will weaken America and increase unemployment. It's another demonstration of the politicians' addiction to spending — and how we are complicit. "One more infrastructure bill" or "this jobs plan" will jumpstart the economy, and then we'll kick our spending addiction once and for all. But we don't stop. For most of American history, government was tiny. But since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and the promise that government would cure poverty, spending has gone up nonstop. This is not sustainable. Progressives say: If you're so worried about the deficit, raise taxes! But it's a fantasy to imagine that taxing the rich will solve our deficit problem. If the IRS grabbed 100 percent of income over $1 million, the take would be just $616 billion. That's only a third of this year's deficit. It's the spending, stupid. Even if you could balance the budget by taxing the rich, it wouldn't be right. Progressives say it's wrong for the rich to be "given" more money. But money earned belongs to those who earn it, not to government. Lower taxes are not a handout. That's the moral side of the matter. There's a practical side, too. Taxes discourage wealth creation. Even if you think — despite all evidence — that government spends money more usefully than people in the private sector, there is a limit to how much government can tax before people work less or flee. Progressives claim a small increase in tax rates won't stop the wealthy from producing. But some would stop. When the top marginal rate was 90 percent, actor Ronald Reagan worked just half the year. He said that woke him up to the damage that high taxes impose. Higher taxes give rich people and politicians more reasons to collude. The rich make contributions, and politicians pay the rich back by giving them tax loopholes. That's a big loss to America. That money and creative energy spent on figuring out taxes might have gone to build new products, make music, cure cancer or ... who knows what? Politicians promise to balance the budget by getting rid of what is wasteful, redundant or unnecessary. There's plenty of that, but they have promised to eliminate it for years. They cannot. It's just in the nature of the beast. Centrally planned monopolies do things that are wasteful, redundant and unnecessary. What will bankrupt us first are the wealth transfers to my generation: Medicare and Social Security When FDR started Social Security, most people didn't even live to age 65. Today, we average 78 — and we baby boomers demand all the cool new stuff that modern medicine invents: anti-cholesterol drugs, hip replacements, etc. And we don't want to pay for most of it because we've been trained by government to assume that we're entitled to these things for free, or nearly free. We paid into Social Security and Medicare for our entire working lives, and damn it, we're entitled to get our money back! Few of us realize that most of us get back up to three times what we paid in, that politicians have promised Social Security and Medicare recipients an impossible $46 trillion more than will exist and that our sense of entitlement will ruin America much faster than foreign aid, subsidies for NPR or foreign wars ever will. Amazingly, we could grow our way out of debt if Congress simply froze spending at today's levels. That would balance the budget by 2017. If spending growth were limited to just 2 percent per year, the budget would balance by 2020! But the politicians won't do even that. It's depressing writing this. But it's not hopeless. There are examples of fiscal sanity we can follow — if we have the will.
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Reality
Jul 13, 2012 15:04:18 GMT -5
Post by Ritty77 on Jul 13, 2012 15:04:18 GMT -5
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Post by philunderwood on Aug 7, 2012 7:33:27 GMT -5
Sports Versus Politics By Thomas Sowell www.JewishWorldReview.com | It has long seemed to me that there is far more rationality in sports, and in commentaries on sports, than there is in politics and in commentaries on politics. What has puzzled me is why this is so, when what happens in politics has far more serious effects on people's lives. To take one common example, there are many people who believe that if the market fails, the government should step in. But, if Robinson Cano strikes out, does anyone suggest that the Yankees should send in a pinch hitter for him on his next time at bat? Everyone understands that a pinch hitter can also strike out, and is less likely than Cano to get a hit or a home run. But the very possibility that the government can fail when it steps in to substitute for a failing market seldom occurs to many people. Even among some economists, "market failure" is a magic phrase that implies a need for government intervention. We could argue about the empirical evidence as to when government pinch-hitting is better or worse. But there is seldom even an argument at all in some quarters, where government intervention follows market failure as the night follows the day. Milton Friedman once pointed out, "A system established largely to prevent bank panics produced the most severe banking panic in American history." Many other examples could be cited where government intervention made a bad situation worse. But most discussions of the role of government never even reach the point of looking for empirical evidence. Today, for example, there is much gnashing of teeth in the media because Democrats and Republicans can't seem to get together to create a bipartisan plan for government intervention to solve our current economic problems. Those who cry out that the government should "do something" never even ask for data on what has actually happened when the government did something, compared to what actually happened when the government did nothing. That could be a very enlightening trip through the archives. Sports statistics are kept in a much more rational way than statistics about political issues. Have you ever seen statistics on what percentage of the home runs over the years have been hit by batters hitting in the .320s versus batters hitting in the .280s or the .340s? Not very likely. Such statistics would make no sense, because different batters are in these brackets from one year to the next. You wouldn't be comparing people, you would be comparing abstractions and mistaking those abstractions for people. But, in politics and in commentaries on political issues, people talk incessantly about how "the top one percent" of income earners are getting more money or how the "bottom 20 percent" are falling behind. Yet the turnover in income brackets over a decade is at least as great as the turnover in batting average brackets. In the course of a decade, the top 400 income earners include a couple of thousand people. The income received by the top 400 (as a statistical bracket) has risen, both absolutely and as a share of all income, even while the average income of the average person who was in that bracket at a given time has fallen by large amounts. How can this be? The short answer is turnover. Turnover in sports creates no such confusion. If players A, B and C all have batting averages in the .320s this year and, put together, they hit 100 home runs, while players X, Y and Z all have batting averages in the .320s next year, and together they hit 120 home runs, we could say that .320s hitters were increasing the number of home runs they hit. But A, B and C could easily be hitting less than 100 home runs next year. It all depends on whether you are talking about what is happening in statistical brackets or what is happening to actual flesh-and-blood individuals who were in those brackets at one time but not another time. We understand that when we talk about sports statistics. But not when we talk about statistics on political issues like income differences. Do our IQs just drop spontaneously when we turn to politics? Or are there many people in politics and the media with vested interests in misstating issues, and lots of experience in doing so? I think it is the latter, especially during an election year.
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Post by philunderwood on Aug 8, 2012 7:17:52 GMT -5
Libs, Progressives and Socialists By Walter Williams www.JewishWorldReview.com | In Europe, especially in Germany, hoisting a swastika-emblazoned Nazi flag is a crime. For decades after World War II, people have hunted down and sought punishment for Nazi murderers, who were responsible for the deaths of more than 20 million people. Here's my question: Why are the horrors of Nazism so well-known and widely condemned but not those of socialism and communism? What goes untaught — and possibly is covered up — is that socialist and communist ideas have produced the greatest evil in mankind's history. You say, "Williams, what in the world are you talking about? Socialists, communists and their fellow travelers, such as the Wall Street occupiers supported by our president, care about the little guy in his struggle for a fair shake! They're trying to promote social justice." Let's look at some of the history of socialism and communism. What's not appreciated is that Nazism is a form of socialism. In fact, the term Nazi stands for the National Socialist German Workers' Party. The unspeakable acts of Adolf Hitler's Nazis pale in comparison with the horrors committed by the communists in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People's Republic of China. Between 1917 and 1987, Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and their successors murdered and were otherwise responsible for the deaths of 62 million of their own people. Between 1949 and 1987, China's communists, led by Mao Zedong and his successors, murdered and were otherwise responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese. The most authoritative tally of history's most murderous regimes is documented on University of Hawaii Professor Rudolph J. Rummel's website, at www.hawaii.edu/powerkills, and in his book "Death by Government." How much hunting down and punishment have there been for these communist murderers? To the contrary, it's acceptable both in Europe and in the U.S. to hoist and march under the former USSR's red flag emblazoned with a hammer and sickle. Mao Zedong has been long admired by academics and leftists across our country, as they often marched around singing the praises of Mao and waving his little red book, "Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-tung." President Barack Obama's communications director, Anita Dunn, in her June 2009 commencement address to St. Andrews Episcopal High School at Washington National Cathedral, said Mao was one of her heroes. Whether it's the academic community, the media elite, stalwarts of the Democratic Party or organizations such as the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, Green for All, the Sierra Club and the Children's Defense Fund, there is a great tolerance for the ideas of socialism — a system that has caused more deaths and human misery than all other systems combined. Today's leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from those of Nazi, Soviet and Maoist mass murderers. One does not have to be in favor of death camps or wars of conquest to be a tyrant. The only requirement is that one has to believe in the primacy of the state over individual rights. The unspeakable horrors of Nazism didn't happen overnight. They were simply the end result of a long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the quest for "social justice." It was decent but misguided earlier generations of Germans — who would have cringed at the thought of genocide — who created the Trojan horse for Hitler's ascendancy. Today's Americans are similarly accepting the massive consolidation of power in Washington in the name of social justice. If you don't believe it, just ask yourself: Which way are we headed tiny steps at a time — toward greater liberty or toward more government control over our lives? Perhaps we think that we are better human beings than the German people who created the conditions that brought Hitler to power. I say, don't count on it.
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Reality
Sept 25, 2012 10:44:18 GMT -5
Post by philunderwood on Sept 25, 2012 10:44:18 GMT -5
www.qando.net/?tag=chevy-voltMarkets vs. central planners … learning the lessons all over again Published September 25, 2012. | By Bruce McQuain. Here’s how markets work. From Toyota: It said today it will not release its proposed mass-market mini e-car, the eQ. The reason: there’s no demand for it, not while battery technology is failing to provide comparable range to a tank of petrol. The natural gas boom in the US has seen prices of the fuel plummet, in turn reducing the cost of electricity generated by burning it. The Japanese car maker said today it will release 21 hybrid gas-electric models in its line-up by 2015. Reality rules: “The current capabilities of electric vehicles do not meet society’s needs, whether it may be the distance the cars can run, or the costs, or how it takes a long time to charge,” said, Uchiyamada, who spearheaded Toyota’s development of the Prius hybrid in the 1990s. Here’s the market not working because of government intrusion (and ownership): Nearly two years after the introduction of the path-breaking plug-in hybrid, GM is still losing as much as $49,000 on each Volt it builds, according to estimates provided to Reuters by industry analysts and manufacturing experts. Cheap Volt lease offers meant to drive more customers to Chevy showrooms this summer may have pushed that loss even higher. There are some Americans paying just $5,050 to drive around for two years in a vehicle that cost as much as $89,000 to produce. [...] It currently costs GM “at least” $75,000 to build the Volt, including development costs, Munro said. That’s nearly twice the base price of the Volt before a $7,500 federal tax credit provided as part ofPresident Barack Obama‘s green energy policy. A pity these things have to be continually pointed out. But, of course, it won’t stop those who want government to decide what we should be driving instead of consumers and think subsidies will foster that desired behavior. Two non-partisan government agencies — the Congressional Budget Office in Washington, D.C. and Parliament’s Select Transport Committee — conclude that during the next decade at least, the giveaways will have little impact on sales of plug-in hybrid and all-electric vehicles, or on gasoline consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions. Their main beneficiaries: affluent purchasers who’d buy the vehicles anyway. “… during the next decade at least …?” Love that caveat, don’t you? They never work if it is something consumers don’t want. See current example for proof. In the case of the market, it’s moved on … and much faster than government can react. As usual, government has backed a loser. The frenzy over shale gas deep under Ohio and other states has the makings of a different kind of rush on the nation’s highways. Businesses, cities, metropolitan transit systems and even school districts across the nation are edging toward a switch from diesel and gasoline to natural gas. Converting cars and light trucks to use either gasoline or natural gas is expensive. And heavy trucks designed specifically for natural gas also cost more than conventional diesels. But at current prices, engines that can run on natural gas cut fuel bills in half or better. And GM has the Volt. You have to laugh at the fact that the central planners invariably always get it wrong. You’d have think we’d have learned that by now, wouldn’t you? ~McQ
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Post by philunderwood on Oct 2, 2012 9:08:53 GMT -5
drsanity.blogspot.com/Dr. Sanity Shining a psychological spotlight on a few of the insanities of life Tuesday, October 02, 2012THE VINDICTIVE TRUTH Wretchard has a great post talking about "The Fifth Kind of Man": The problem with an administration that relies upon spin is that it forgets how vindictive the truth can be. The truth bites back — and hard. But in an environment where politicized media and bureaucracy will tell its masters only what they want to hear the truth is concealed beneath the talking points until it is too late. In that regard, perhaps the Iranians should have the last word. A thirteenth-century Persian-Tajik poet, Ibn Yamin wrote that there were four types of men. One who knows and knows that he knows… His horse of wisdom will reach the skies. One who knows, but doesn’t know that he knows… He is fast asleep, so you should wake him up! One who doesn’t know, but knows that he doesn’t know… His limping mule will eventually get him home. One who doesn’t know and doesn’t know that he doesn’t know… He will be eternally lost in his hopeless oblivion! And then there’s the fifth type of man. The man who doesn’t want to know because he thinks it doesn’t matter. I differ a little from Wretchard on the last: it's not that he thinks it doesn't matter as much as it actually matters so much--and that is precisely why why he doesn't want to know about it. The truth is indeed vindictive--but in a horribly passionless way. Likewise, reality, the space where truth resides, has a calm persistence and patience that is unmatched by even the most desperate attempts by the human species to avoid it. Nevertheless, human ingenuity has discovered many ways of temporarily hiding from the truth; obscuring the truth; and when necessary, lying about the truth in order to avoid reality and its consequences. I have written extensively on the pervasive psychological denial of the political left (see here, here , here, and here, for example). And, I frequently point out that denial is an "equal opportunity" defense mechanism engaged in by all human beings; it is an involuntary, built-in psychic response designed to protect an individual from precipitously having to face unwanted, unacceptable or threatening feelings, thoughts or behavior. The mind simply blocks out reality and truth--and sees what it wants to see or becomes blind to reality. The consequences of denial can vary from extremely mild to extremely extreme. It depends entirely on what aspect of truth or reality is being denied. Let's consider some of the more negative consequences of psychological denial: • In the longer-term, denial requires a continued compromises with reality to maintain the pretense that "Everything is fine!" or "Nothing to see here, move along!" Eventually, delusional thinking, along with paranoia and its inevitable conspiracy theories begin to take the place of rational thought in those who deny reality for long periods of time. (see all the 9/11 conspiracy theorists for examples in our own country; or the more recent comments of former President Clinton--once considered a "moderate" democrat, who now fully adheres to the model that the Republicans have manufactured a culture of fear in order to fool the American public into thinking we are at war (read the transcript linked below). See here and here for some examples in the Muslim world, which is rife with conspiracies and which could not exist as a cohesive society without them). • The denier must then place the blame for the unacceptable reality on someone else and that leads to increased conflict between those who are in denial and those who aren't. Efforts to maintain their denial consumes them and will lead them to escalate their anger, rage and attempts at external blame the denial becomes untenable and ever more obvious. • The denier will begin distort language and logic to rationalize and justify their behavior(examples of this are too numerous to mention, but I have discussed it here , here and here) . Eventually, cognitive strategies and rational argument will be abandoned altogether by the denier, because those strategies are not sustainable and are unable to convince others; at which point the person in denial will simply refer to his feelings or emotions as the sole justification. • The denier will feel justified in acting out against those who threaten the peacefulness of their fantasy (just ask Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the filmmaker behind "Innocence of Muslims"). Remember, for example, the attacks and attempts to silence authors like Mark Steyn because his book , America Alone, discusses the genocidal demographic trajectory of Europe as they refuse to acknowledge or deal with the reality of Islamic immigration. Nevertheless, the degree of denial engaged in by the the Obama Administration and their supporters on the political left has been boundless and very creative. Usually, I give the political left and its more clueless adherents the benefit of the doubt, and assumed that their unwillingness to face reality was unconscious; and was so pronounced and pervasive because they could not accept the truth that history and the real world had revealed about their beloved and bankrupt ideology. That ideology, whether it is called Marxism, communism or socialism is fundamentally anti-human . What happens when psychological denial ceases to be unconscious and becomes a deliberate, willful, and consciously evil behavior-- in spite of all the accumulated evidence of its malignant impact on real people in the real world? At that point we can safely assume that we are no longer dealing with a purely defensive structure in the psyche; we are dealing with aggressive, unadulterated sociopathy. I believe that last statement accurately describes the Obama Administration. The traditional definition of sociopathy is a personality disorder characterized by a lack of social responsibility and failure to adapt to ethical and social standards of the community. If we think about that definition for a moment, we can perhaps begin to understand what is going on in our world today; and the reason that a huge number of people have embraced a sociopathic lifestyle. Under the pervasive influence of postmodern philosophy and rhetoric, the ethical and social standards of the community have, unfortunately, been slowly evolving and eroding. In western culture, ethical and moral standards used to be anchored to the real world (i.e., to reality); but in the postmodern wilderness in which the political left and most of its most visible spokespeople--i.e., leaders in the Democratic Party-- wander aimlessly, ethics and morality are relative and "anchored" to feelings and whim; which inevitably unleashes the baser and more vile aspects of human nature. The 20th century became the playground (and litter box) for the narcissist; and by the time the 21st century rolled around, malignant narcissism was not even considered deviant, it had gone mainstream. Since psychopathology continually evolves and worsens if it is not confronted and dealt with, what we have now in our culture, particularly the political system, is the endstage of psychological evolution under postmodernism: the sociopath who disguises his or her sociopathy by selflessness (it used to be marketed as "Hope and Change", now even that has been changed to "[Ignore the truth and reality of what my policies have brought about in the economy and the world, and let's just move] FOWARD!" These selfless sociopaths are people who couldn't care less about the individual human being. Individual human beings are expendable; even vast numbers of them--as long as they stand in the way of the implementation of the sociopath's great ideas and compassionate execution of those ideas. They are the fodder that can be used to build "great" societies, utopian fantasies and collectivist wet-dreams. It used to be that with the rise of civilization, political sociopaths--both selfiash and selfless-- were (thankfully) few and far between. Even so, when they appeared in history, they wreaked havoc and destroyed lives with great abandon for "the greater good". Needless to say, a central aspect of the 'greater good' was always the advancement of their own glorious self and their ideas. We can thank primarily the political left and its useful idiots for the persistent, unyielding, and willful celebration of--and ultimately mainstreaming of--malignant narcissism. We have entered the age of postmodern sociopathy and nihilism. What does it matter if the lives and freedoms of so many individuals are sacrificed to the murderous oppressors of the world? If you "kick out the wealthy" then you have the wonderful socialist paradise of Cuba; or the magnificent utopia of North Korea with all their misery, poverty, oppression and leftist enlightenment! We will all watch with wonder and awe as France implements the ultimate redistributionist fantasy of a 75% tax on the "wealthy". Is there anyone who can possibly believe that this will solve France's financial problems? Believe me, the next phase will be the demands for a 100% tax on those evil rich people who cause all the worlds problems with their wealth. Under the "enlightened" and "progressive" left, wealth will be redistributed until there is nothing left to redistribute; at which point the human mind will be completely enslaved and even more scapegoats will be deivered to the altars of progressivism--but so what? As the eminent leftist and quintessential nihilist Joseph Stalin once remarked, "Death solves all problems - no man, no problem." In the long run we are all dead anyway, right? Now there's a vindictive truth for you....
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Post by philunderwood on Oct 3, 2012 6:47:34 GMT -5
Capital Gains Taxes By Thomas Sowell www.JewishWorldReview.com | One of the many false talking points of the Obama administration is that a rich man like Warren Buffett should not be paying a lower tax rate than his secretary. But anyone whose earnings come from capital gains usually pays a lower tax rate. How are capital gains different from ordinary income? Ordinary income is usually guaranteed. If you work a certain amount of time, you are legally entitled to the pay that you were offered when you took the job. Capital gains involve risk. They are not guaranteed. You can invest your money and lose it all. Moreover, the year when you receive capital gains may not be the same as the years when they were earned. Suppose I spend ten years writing a book, making not one cent from it in all that time. Then, in the tenth yea r, when the book is finished, I may sell it to a publisher who pays me $100,000 in advance royalties. Am I the same as someone who has a salary of $100,000 that year? Or am I earning $10,000 a year for ten years' work? It so happens that the government will tax me the same as someone who earns $100,000 that year, because my decade of work on the book cannot be documented. But the point here is that it is really a capital gain, and it illustrates the difference between a capital gain and ordinary income. Then there is the risk factor. There is no guarantee to me that a publisher will actually accept the book that I have worked on for ten years — and there is no guarantee to the publisher that the public will buy enough copies of the book to repay whatever I might be paid when the contract is signed. Even the $10,000 a year — which is less than anyone can earn on an entry level job — is not guaranteed. If my years of work produced an unpublished manuscript, I would not even have been among the first thousand writers who met this fate. Very similar principles apply to businesses. We pay attention to businesses after they have succeeded. But most new businesses do not succeed. Even those businesses that eventually turn out to be enormously successful may go through years of losing money before they have their first year of earning a profit. Amazon.com spent years losing money before turning a profit for the first time in 2001. McDonald's teetered on the edge of bankruptcy more than once in its early years. Desperate expedients were resorted to by the people who ran McDonald's, in order to just keep their noses above the water, while hoping for better days. At one time, you could have bought half interest in McDonald's for $25,000 — and there were no takers. Anyone who would have risked $25,000 at that time would be a billionaire today. But there was no guarantee at the time that they wouldn't be just throwing 25 grand down a rat hole. Where a capital gain can be documented — when a builder spends ten years creating a housing development, for example — then whatever that builder earns in the tenth year is a capital gain, not ordinary income. There is no guarantee in advance that the builder will ever recover his expenses, much less make a profit. There are whole industries where no one can expect to make a profit the first year — publishing a newspaper for example. Virtually every major American airline has lost money in some years, and some of the biggest and most famous airlines have ended up going bankrupt. If a country wants investors to invest, it cannot tax their resulting capital gains the same as the incomes of people whose incomes were guaranteed in advance when they took the job. It is not just a question of "fairness" to investors. Ultimately, it is investors who guarantee other people's incomes in a market economy, even though the investors' own incomes are by no means guaranteed. Reducing investors' incentives to take risks is reducing the jobs their investments are likely to create. Business income is different from employees' income in another way. The profit that a business makes is first taxed as profit and the remainder is then taxed again as the incomes ofon error resume next people who receive dividends. The biggest losers from politicians who jack up tax rates are likely to be people who are looking for jobs that will not be there, because investments will not be there to create the jobs.
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Post by philunderwood on Oct 6, 2012 7:17:01 GMT -5
www.qando.net/?p=14002Unemployment rate at 7.8%? If you believe that, you probably believe the presidential polls … Published October 5, 2012. | By Bruce McQuain. Here are a few fast facts (from BankruptingAmerica.org) to put today’s absurd announcement into persepctive: The real unemployment rate stayed at 14.7%. This includes the underemployed and those who have given up looking for work. 23 million Americans are still looking for work. In January 2009, that figure was 22 million. Of the 12.1 million Americans unemployed, more than one third (4.8 million) have been looking for work for over six months. Two out of every five Americans looking for work have been out of work for more than six months. 3.4 million Americans have been out of work for a year and are still looking for work. 802,000 Americans have stopped looking for work In January 2009, the average amount of time spent unemployed was 19.8 weeks. Today, the amount of time has doubled, rising to 39.8 weeks. 46.7 million Americans are on food stamps, a record high. Nearly one in six Americans are living in poverty, the highest number in two decades. Manufacturing employment edged down in September by -16,000 jobs. If you’re wondering why the drop, it simply means another massive group of Americans have come to the end of their extended unemployment benefits and are no longer counted. In reality, the only numbers that count are listed above. The labor participation rate essentially remains unchanged. Those who are celebrating 7.8% are only fooling themselves. Those who are unemployed certainly know who they are and when it comes time to enter the voting booth and pull the lever aren’t going to be thinking about this “improved number”. They’re going to be dealing with the fact they don’t have a job. Wonder who they’ll blame? ~McQ
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Reality
Oct 23, 2012 10:31:09 GMT -5
Post by philunderwood on Oct 23, 2012 10:31:09 GMT -5
drsanity.blogspot.com/Dr. Sanity Shining a psychological spotlight on a few of the insanities of life Monday, October 22, 2012IRAN IS VOTING FOR OBAMA ! WHAT A SURPRISE And, sadly, the President actually thinks this will help him in the big debate on Foreign Policy tonight. Ira Strauss comments on the latest October Surprise: It’s from Iran again, an October move that could throw the election, and this time it’s for real. Iran is near to agreeing to hold direct nuclear talks with the U.S. It throws a big bone to Obama, on the eve of his final foreign-policy debate with Romney. Plainly, it does not want to face a Romney presidency. It’s not something dreamed up after the fact, as in the 1980s “October Surprise.” This time around, the story comes from the parties that stand to benefit from it, and it’s out there in real time — indeed, with exquisite campaign timing. And, guess what! Israel is out of the loop! Just Us and the Iranians, all cozying up for yet another little chat. Obviously, both the Mullahs of Iran and President Obama think the American public is pretty stupid. And they may well be right. I've said it before on this blog, and I'll say it again: the Iranians have got all their religious ducks in a row to actually use nuclear weapons they likely already possess or anticipate possessing (remember Pakistan?). That is my psychological interpretation and it dovetails with the arrogant, smirking demeanor that always accompanys the calculated baiting of the West by Ahmadinejad, the Iranian Psychopath-in-Chief. Just last month, that same psychopath made his apocalyptic intentions crystal clear to the world. Whether it is making suggestive remarks about the state of Israel and its future demise; or speculating on the 12th IMAM who will usher in a New World Order (no wonder he wants Obama to win the Presidency!), Ahmadinejad always tries to appear to be a beacon of reason and nuanced diplomacy. He reminds me a lot of many of the paranoid patients I have dealt with over the years. All the behavior and rhetoric of the past five years strongly suggest that the Iranians will certainly use their nuclear weapons capability at a moment of their own choosing--negotiations and diplomacy be damned. Of course, they would want that moment to be a grand, heroic, Islamic gesture. They would need such a gesture to maximize their sense of Arab honor while simultaneously shaming their hated enemy, the Jews. They would need for the gesture to come at exactly at the moment when they can most appear to be the enlightened purveyors of "peace" and "brotherhood". The hapless intellectual leaders of the West will continue to bend over backwards and even engage in desperate contortions to appease and mollify the sociopathic bullies of Islam; but that will only escalate their violent behavior and give them the rationale they need to press on, more self-righteously convinced that they are superior. This is the completely predictable psychological response to appeasement, solicitation, and compassionate understanding. It's simple really. Bullies will always push the envelope of bad behavior when they think they can get away with it. They think they can get away with it when Obama is the leader-from-behind of the Free World. And they are getting away with it, aren't they? Remember the sense of relief and jubilation with which the recent NIE was received by almost everyone. Whew! We don't have to worry about Iran any more! Isn't that great? Except, we now know it was a lie. Just as the latest manipulation 2 weeks before the election is a lie. Don't you wonder exactly who the liars are? The whole October Surprise is designed to bring a transient sense of safety and security that is only possible with psychological denial. Osama bin Laden is dead and Al Qaeda is on the run! (escept they're not as 9/11/12 proves). Iran wants to negotiate! (except they really don't and have shown no motivation to actually negotiate ANY of the times they have agreed to sit down and talk). No rational person wants to believe that Iran could be so crazy and suicidal that they would really try to "wipe Israel off the map." The 2006 NIE was tremendously reassuring because it suggested that the religious fanatics of Iran are really motivated by rational considerations, just like us! They abandoned the quest for nuclear weapons in 2003! They want peace, after all! Wrong. They clearly don't want something to happen that would interrupt or put a premature end to achieving their ultimate goal. And logically, rationally, they will do whatever they need to make sure of that. It's their ultimate goal that's the problem. Don't forget that reason and logic can--and frequently are--used to promote the most illogical, irrational and insane of objectives. In the end, reason and logic are only intellectual tools and their usefulness depends entirely on the reality and truth of the premises for which they are being used. If the premises or objectives for which they are being used are bogus; or if they are not what you think they are; or the opposite of what your own would be under the circumstances; then it hardly matters that the Mullahs and Ahmadinejad give the appearance of being reasonable fellows negotiating rationally with the West. I can easily imagine Ahmadinejad rubbing his hands together like The Simpson's Mr. Burns, cackling, "Exxxxcellent!" as they promise one thing even as they do the opposite--which logically and rationally proves to them the superiority of Islam and the inevitability of Allah's will. It's no use saying that by pursuing the development of a nuclear warhead they would use against Israel doesn't make any sense and would be completely irrational, not to mention downright suicidal. They have repeatedly stated they think it would be worth the human price. Just think of Ahmadinejad as the ultimate, high-tech suicide bomber who has wrapped that nuclear bomb belt securely around his entire country. I have said before that I hope I am wrong in this assessment, but all my psychiatric instincts continue to tell me that this is a situation where we are facing imminent suicidal and homicidal behavior. And, the lives of millions are in the balance.... UPDATE: And then there's this: Iranian media say that Romney will steal the election and that riots are expected.... And this, from the UN (guess who they want to win?): The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights has warned Americans not to elect Republican Mitt Romney in next month’s presidential election, saying that doing so would be “a democratic mandate for torture.” I can't think of a worse torture than to have to live under Obamanomics and Obama foreign policy for another 4 years.
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Post by philunderwood on Nov 6, 2012 7:30:05 GMT -5
Gross Misconceptions By Thomas Sowell www.JewishWorldReview.com | This country is at a historic crossroads, and the path we choose can determine our future far beyond the next four years. Our children and grandchildren may someday bless us or curse us for what we do this Tuesday. Against that background, it is painful to see the petty talking points and gross misconceptions that seem to dominate this year's election campaign. Take the question of jobs. How many times have we heard about how many jobs have been added during the Obama administration? Yet few people bother to find out whether these are net additions to jobs — which is what is crucial. The government can always increase some jobs, either directly by hiring more people or indirectly by policies that increase employment in particular industries or regions. But the real question is whether the government's actions create more jobs than they destroy — that is, whether there is any net addition to jobs. Yet who in the media even asks that question? Instead, they focus on the unemployment rate. But people who have given up looking for a job are not counted as unemployed. The proportion of the working age population that is not working is higher now than it has been in many years. Another gross misconception on the job front is that jobs created during a given administration are a result of the policies of that administration, as are any other signs of economic recovery. But this assumes that the economy is incapable of recovering on its own, without government intervention. Yet the American economy recovered from downturns on its own for more than a century and a half, until President Herbert Hoover intervened after the stock market crash of 1929. Indeed, this was one of those bipartisan interventions so much hoped for by the media — and the results were catastrophic. The media misconception today is that what we need to speed up economic recovery is to end gridlock in Washington and have bipartisan intervention in the economy. However plausible that may sound, it is contradicted repeatedly by history. Unemployment was never in double digits in any of the 12 months following the stock market crash of 1929. Only after politicians started intervening did unemployment reach double digits — and stay in double digits throughout the 1930s. There is nothing mysterious about an economy recovering on its own. Employers usually have incentives to employ and workers have incentives to look for jobs. Lenders have incentives to lend and borrowers have incentives to borrow — if politicians do not create needless complications and uncertainties. The Obama administration is in its glory creating complications and uncertainties for business, ranging from runaway regulations to the unknowable future costs of ObamaCare and taxes. Record amounts of idle cash held by businesses and financial institutions are a monument to the counterproductive effects of Barack Obama's anti-business policies and rhetoric. That idle money could create lots of jobs — net jobs — if politics did not make it risky to invest. We often hear that President Obama inherited the worst recession since the Great Depression. But just how do you define that? By how high the unemployment rate went? By how long the recovery takes? Or don't you bother to define it at all? The annual unemployment rate was as high under Ronald Reagan as it has been under Barack Obama. The difference is that Ronald Reagan did nothing, despite media cries for action, and Barack Obama did virtually everything imaginable, to the cheers of the media. The economy recovered a lot faster under Reagan. If this is "the worst recession since the Great Depression," it is the worst solely in terms of how long it is taking to recover. But how long this has lasted is precisely what critics of Barack Obama are complaining about. Yet clever political rhetoric turns Obama's failure into an excuse for failure. Contrary to political and media spin, President Obama did not "inherit" his unemployment from President George W. Bush. The annual unemployment rate never got above 6 percent during the eight years of President George W. Bush's administration. Unemployment has never been that low under President Obama. Passing the buck backwards is a very poor excuse — especially for someone using "forward" as his campaign slogan.
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Reality
Nov 15, 2012 9:28:18 GMT -5
Post by philunderwood on Nov 15, 2012 9:28:18 GMT -5
So how’s it going in Sandyland?
Published November 14, 2012. | By Bruce McQuain.
You may remember, prior to the election but after Hurricane Sandy hit the Northeast, that the New York Times pronounced that “A Big Storm Requires A Big Government”. Of course, in the time since that pronouncement, we’ve seen “Big Government” show us that big bureaucracies are still just as unwieldy and unresponsive as they ‘ve always been, regardless of attempts to build a myth to claim otherwise. Or said another way, FEMA’s response to Sandy has not been particularly impressive nor has it at all validated the New York Times editorial claim. Of course, NE unions haven’t covered themselves in glory either:
Barry Moline, executive director of the Florida Municipal Electric Association, said Long Island could have received 125 additional workers from utilities across Florida as soon as two days after the storm if a dispute about the letters had been resolved sooner. He said most of the crews from Florida who were available were nonunion and refused to join Local 1049 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, even if only temporarily. [snip] Crews that could have come to Long Island went instead to Pennsylvania, Moline said. “We could have been there on Wednesday, and instead we arrived on Sunday,” he said, after the union rescinded the requirement. [Emphasis added.] But again, the story here is “Big Government” in general and FEMA – Big Government’s representative – in particular. How has FEMA done? Not as well as you’d expect, given the supposed failures of Katrina and the claimed lessons learned from that storm. It appears those lessons are still being learned. For instance:
It took days for FEMA to hit the ground in hard-hit parts of NYC. More than a week after the storm, FEMA representatives were just getting on the ground and opening temporary offices in New Jersey. When a nor’easter blew in, several of their offices shut down because of— wait for it— severe weather. Huh. A week after the storm? Where’s the outcry? Where are the news crews with weeping reporters telling us how horrible it is for the poor residents of Staten Island and spreading rumors about rape and murder? Nowhere to be seen. But back to FEMA. FEMA is a bureaucracy, folks. A big bureaucracy. And big bureaucracies are neither responsive nor quick. It’s just a fact of bureaucratic reality. Expecting that to change is, well, simply a denial of reality. So, you read stories like this:
“FEMA hasn’t done anything else. The inspector came out and he inspected the damage and that was it. He said he was going to forward it to his headquarters and I will hear from them, that’s it.” When asked if he has heard from anyone? Daily quickly responded, “No.” And remember the promise to cut red tape?
“You have to get a copy from your landlord saying that it was your living space,” Jones said. “If you get denied (from flood insurance), get a letter in writing saying what (your insurance provider) won’t cover. Then submit that letter to FEMA and FEMA can send an inspector to inspect your home.” In reality, it’s even worse than that:
Over the weekend, a source (who wishes to remain anonymous) reported that contractors contracted—as well as, generators, water, and other supplies paid for—by FEMA are being idled at New York’s Floyd Bennett Field by “red tape” requirements, while unions deploy their members and many storm victims sit in the dark. While there are about 4,000 National Guardsmen at Bennett Field, there are hundreds of out-of-state contractors for FEMA, many of them linemen and electricians, that are not being deployed to help turn power pack on for residents because of the red tape. On Sunday, out of the 400-500 workers available, according to the source, only three crews went out. Crews, he said, are usually two-man teams. The union crews, the source stated, are free to come and go as they please, yet the non-union FEMA contractors are being held back because of red tape requirements. The red-tape bottleneck, he said, comes from the Corps of Engineers. They get work orders in (places that need help), but the work orders don’t come out as they should. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” the source said over the weekend. On Sunday night, FEMA contractors put in one generator for a 14-floor building. Just one. And:
Immediately after the storm, beer maker Budweiser converted its beer lines in Georgia to produce water—44,000 cases of water. That water was trucked into the storm ravaged area, but much of it is still sitting as residents in across Brooklyn and in Far Rockaway, Queens continue to boil their water as of Saturday. Even the NY Times hasn’t been able to completely ignore the debacle:
Two weeks. Monday was the 14th day since Hurricane Sandy upended lives on the Eastern Seaboard, the longest two weeks of many people’s lives. Plastic bottles. Warming buses. Charging stations. These are just a few of the signposts in a changed world. Help is coming, the people are told, but some have lost the desire to trust. “I don’t believe,” said Lioudmila Korableva, 71, a resident of a darkened Coney Island building project filled with older people. Meanwhile, smaller and more flexible and mostly private organizations have stepped in to try to make a difference. Yup, a big storm needs a big government doesn’t it? Sandy again proves the point that such thinking is simply wishful and has no basis in real fact. Meanwhile the press is on to sex and tittilation. The Obama/Sandy photo op has passed and so has their interest in following up on the disaster, even though the parallels are amazing:
So: late warnings, confused and inadequate responses, FEMA foul-ups and suffering refugees. In this regard, Sandy is looking a lot like Katrina on the Hudson. Well, things go wrong in disasters. That’s why they’re called disasters. But there is one difference. Under Katrina, the national press credulously reported all sorts of horror stories: rapes, children with slit throats, even cannibalism. These stories were pretty much all false. Worse, as Lou Dolinar cataloged later, the press also ignored many very real stories of heroism and competence. We haven’t seen such one-sided coverage of Sandy, where the press coverage of problems, though somewhat muted before the election, hasn’t been marked by absurd rumors or ham-handed efforts to push a particular narrative. But hey, pointing that out now would destroy the “big storms require big government” myth, would it? And besides, we all know the election’s over. Screw the victims. The photo op is done. It’s the preservation of the myth that’s important. ~McQ
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Reality
Nov 20, 2012 7:56:35 GMT -5
Post by philunderwood on Nov 20, 2012 7:56:35 GMT -5
Democracy and Majority Rule By Walter Williams www.JewishWorldReview.com | President Barack Obama narrowly defeated Gov. Mitt Romney in the popular vote 51 percent to 48 percent. In the all-important Electoral College, the difference was larger, with Obama winning 303 electoral votes and Romney 206. Let's not think so much about the election's outcome but instead ask: What's so good about democracy and majority rule? How many decisions in our day-to-day lives would we like to be made through majority rule or the democratic process? How about the decision to watch a football game or "Law and Order"? What about whether to purchase a Chevrolet Volt or a Toyota Prius? Would you like the decision of whether to have turkey or ham for Thanksgiving dinner to be made through the democratic process? Were such decisions made in the political arena, most of us would deem it tyranny. Democracy and majority rule give an aura of legitimacy and decency to acts that would otherwise be deemed tyranny. Most people would agree that having our decisions on what television shows to watch, what kind of car we'll purchase and what we'll eat for Thanksgiving dinner made through the democratic process is tyranny. Why isn't it also tyranny for the political process to determine decisions such as how much should be put aside out of our paycheck for retirement; whether we purchase health insurance or not; what type of light bulbs we use; or whether we purchase 32- or 16-ounce soda containers? The founders of our nation held a deep abhorrence for democracy and majority rule. The word democracy appears in neither of our founding documents: our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. In Federalist Paper No. 10, James Madison wrote, "Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority." John Adams predicted, "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." Edmund Randolph said, "…that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy." Chief Justice John Marshall observed, "Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos." In a word or two, the founders knew that a democracy would lead to the same kind of tyranny the colonies suffered under King George III. Our founders intended for us to have a republican form of limited government where political decision-making is kept to the minimum. Alert to the dangers of majoritarian tyranny, our Constitution's framers inserted several anti-majority rules. One such rule is that election of the president is not decided by a majority vote but instead by the Electoral College. Nine states have more than 50 percent of the U.S. population. If a simple majority were the rule, conceivably these nine states could determine the presidency. Fortunately, they can't because they have only 225 Electoral College votes when 270 of the 538 total are needed. Were it not for the Electoral College, presidential candidates could safely ignore less populous states. Two houses of Congress pose another obstacle to majority rule. Fifty-one senators can block the designs of 435 representatives and 49 senators. The Constitution gives the president a veto that weakens the power of 535 members of both houses of Congress. It takes two-thirds of both houses of Congress to override a presidential veto. To change the Constitution requires not a majority but a two-thirds vote of both Houses to propose an amendment, and to be enacted requires ratification by three-fourths of state legislatures. Today's Americans think Congress has the constitutional authority to do anything upon which they can get a majority vote. We think whether a measure is a good idea or a bad idea should determine its passage as opposed to whether that measure lies within the enumerated powers granted Congress by the Constitution. Unfortunately, for the future of our nation, Congress has successfully exploited American constitutional ignorance or contempt.
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Reality
Nov 21, 2012 10:09:55 GMT -5
Post by philunderwood on Nov 21, 2012 10:09:55 GMT -5
www.qando.net/?tag=blue-state-modelSo what would happen if Dems got all they want? Published November 20, 2012. | By Bruce McQuain. California, of course: “The California Republican Party is functionally dead. And how is California doing, now that liberals have successfully terminated the state’s remaining conservatives?” #1 in debt, #1 in welfare, #1 in taxing the rich. And hoping for a federal bailout, I suspect. As is Illinois, which is in similar straits for similar reasons. “One-third of all the nation’s welfare recipients live in the state, despite the fact that California has only one-eighth of the country’s population. That’s four times as many as the next-highest welfare population, which is New York. Meanwhile, California eighth-graders finished ahead of only Mississippi and District of Columbia students on reading and math test scores in 2011.” You can warn people till you’re blue in the face (no pun intended) how the blue state model is going to end up, but sometimes it is instructive to just let it happen. Of course that assumes that those observing the train wreck try to understand how it happened and work to avoid it elsewhere. I’m not so sure that’s the case in this nation. But fair warning, given the fiscal road we’re on California is as much in our future as Greece: “For a century or so, guided by brilliant private sector leadership, California was a beacon to the world, a land of opportunity such as never had existed in human history. Unimaginable wealth was created. Yet it required only 40 years of liberal governance to bring the whole thing crashing down. Today, California is the most spectacular failure of our time. Its government is broke. Productive citizens have been fleeing for some years now, selling their homes at inflated prices (until recently) and moving to Colorado, Arizona, Texas and even Minnesota, like one of my neighbors. The results of California’s improvident liberalism have been tragically easy to predict: absurd public sector wage and benefit packages, a declining tax base, surging welfare enrollment, falling economic production, ever-increasing deficits. Soon, California politicians will be looking to less glamorous states for bailout money. Things have now devolved to the point where California leads the nation in poverty.” California is a state which has modeled blue government for decades, despite warning of where it’s continuance would lead. And, shockingly to the left, it has ended up right where it was predicted it would end up. Yet, they blindly and willfully continue to march along as though the reality will change and economic laws will disprove themselves if they just persist in their actions. California is our future. Our near future. See, it’s pretty much as simple as this: If a country runs a deficit (as a percentage of GDP) that is equal to its growth rate, the debt level will remain constant. This year U.S. GDP will be a little less than $16 trillion, and its historical growth rate is 3.25%. That works out to what we might call a “safe” deficit of $520 billion, or even $600 billion if you allow for a little inflation. Last year, however, the U.S. deficit was $1.1 trillion — or roughly $500 billion too much. That gap could be closed by ending all tax cuts, tax breaks and stimulus payments for everyone, according to the Tax Policy Center. But two-thirds of the burden would fall on the middle class — something both political parties want to avoid. All the proposed tax increases on the wealthy, however, even combined with the end of the payroll-tax cut, would raise only $295 billion. So unless there were spending cuts twice as big as the ones currently scheduled, the deficit would still be too large. Those sorts of cuts aren’t even being discussed. Imagine, if you would, radical cuts in the size and scope of our current federal government. Imagine subsidies of all sorts being eliminated. Imagine backing government out of many of the areas it has no business. Imagine simplifying the tax code and giving business a warm fuzzy feeling about the business atmosphere by freezing regulation and in some instances rolling them back. Imagine all of that, because none of it is going to be done. Instead, the solution is to “tax the rich”. So let ‘em have it (only if they repeal the Hollywood tax cut). Tax the rich. And when it doesn’t work, and it won’t (in fact, I’m not sure what “work” means in this particular case since the amount to be collected is a mere drop in a 1.6 trillion dollar ocean of debt that’s planned each year for the foreseeable future), they’re left with a lot fewer excuses, huh? Not that they won’t try to point fingers when their grand plan crashes. Yup, in the end it all looks like we’re headed to California. Apparently we’re going to have to recreate that debacle on a national level before the blinders come off of the public and the realization that you can’t spend more than you have forever finally sinks in. Whether or not it will too late to salvage the country at that point, remains to be seen. ~McQ
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Post by philunderwood on Dec 5, 2012 9:26:55 GMT -5
Food Bunk By John Stossel www.JewishWorldReview.com | With America's "fiscal cliff" approaching, pundits wring their hands over the supposed catastrophe that government spending cuts will bring. A scare newsletter called "Food Poisoning Bulletin" warns that if government reduces food inspections, "food will be less safe ... (because) marginal companies ... (will) cut corners." We're going to die! Most people believe that without government meat inspection, food would be filthy. We read "The Jungle," Upton Sinclair's depiction of the meatpacking business, and assume that the FDA and the Food Safety and Inspection Service are all that stand between us and E. coli. Meatpacking conditions were disgusting. Government intervened. Now, we're safe! A happy ending to a story of callous greed. The scheming lawyers behind the "Food Poisoning Bulletin" argue that without regulation companies will "cut corners." After all, they say, sanitation costs money, so lack of regulation "creates a competitive disadvantage for companies that want to produce quality products." But that's bunk. It's not government that keeps E. coli to a minimum. It's competition. Tyson Foods, Perdue and McDonald's have brands to maintain — and customers to lose. Ask Jack in the Box. It lost millions after a food-poisoning scandal. Fear of getting a bad reputation makes food producers even more careful than government requires. Since the Eisenhower administration, our stodgy government has paid an army of union inspectors to eyeball chickens in every single processing plant. But bacteria are invisible! Fortunately, food producers run much more sophisticated tests on their own. One employs 2,000 more safety inspectors than government requires: "To kill pathogens, beef carcasses are treated with rinses and a 185-degree steam vacuum," an executive told me. She also asked that I not reveal the name of her company — it fears retaliation from regulators. "Production facilities are checked for sanitation with microbiological testing. If anything is detected ... we re-clean the equipment. ... Equipment is routinely taken completely apart to be swab-tested." None of that is required by government. Government regulation may help a little, but we are safe mostly because of competitive markets. Competition protects us better than politicians. But people don't trust companies. So it is easy to scare people about food. And the news media know that finding "problems" makes reporters look like crusading journalists. Earlier this year, my old employer, ABC News, "alerted" the public to a new threat, ground beef made with "pink slime." It sounds awful! ABC's reporting frightened most school systems so much that they stopped using that form of meat. The food company lost 80 percent of its business. But the scare is bunk. What ABC calls "pink slime" is just as appetizing as other food. "Bunk is the polite word," Dan Gainor of the Media Research Center says. "ABC went on a crusade. Three nights in a row back in March, they pounded on this." Well, why shouldn't they, if there's something called "pink slime" in beef? "Because it's not pink slime. It's ground beef." Then how did this all get started? "A couple activists who used to work for the FDA didn't like this really cool scientific process that separates the beef trimming so you get the remaining ground beef. So they coined this term deliberately to try to hurt this company." The company, Beef Products Inc., does something unique. It takes the last bit of trim meat off the bone by heating it slightly. That saves money and arguably helps the environment — not using that meat would waste 5,000 cows a day. In 20 years, there is no record of anybody being hurt by what ABC and its activists call "pink slime" — what the industry just calls "lean beef trimmings" or "finely textured beef." "Everybody constantly says, 'You should eat leaner beef.' So when we try to eat the leaner beef, then they take that away from us, too," Gainor said. "The company ... has received awards for how good a job they do for consumer safety. It was just one constant hit job." An effective one. After ABC's reports, Beef Products Inc. closed three out of its four plants. Seven hundred workers lost jobs. Scientifically illiterate, business-hating media will always do scare stories. Don't believe them. Most of them, anyway.
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Post by philunderwood on Dec 5, 2012 9:52:33 GMT -5
Future Generations By Walter Williams www.JewishWorldReview.com | Is there any reason for today's Americans to care about what happens to tomorrow's Americans? After all, what have tomorrow's Americans done for today's Americans? Moreover, since tomorrow's Americans don't vote, we can dump on them with impunity. That's a vision that describes the actual behavior of today's Americans. It would be seen as selfish, callous and ruthless only if it were actually articulated. Let's look at it. Businesses, as well as most nonprofit enterprises, by law are required to produce financial statements that include all of their present and expected future liabilities. On top of that, they are required to hold reserves against future liabilities such as employee retirement. By contrast, the federal government gets by without having to provide transparent and honest financial statements. The U.S. Treasury's "balance sheet" does list liabilities such as public debt, but it does not include the massive unfunded liabilities of Social Security, Medicare and other federal future obligations. A conservative estimate of Washington's unfunded liabilities for the year ending in 2011 is $87 trillion. That's more than 500 percent of our 2011 GDP of $15 trillion. Former Congressmen Chris Cox and Bill Archer have written an article — "Why $16 Trillion Only Hints at the True U.S. Debt," The Wall Street Journal (November 26, 2012) — pointing out our dire economic straits. They say, "When the accrued expenses of the government's entitlement programs are counted, it becomes clear that to collect enough tax revenue just to avoid going deeper into debt would require over $8 trillion in tax collections annually. That is the total of the average annual accrued liabilities of just the two largest entitlement programs, plus the annual cash deficit." Let's analyze that. Washington would have to collect $8 trillion in tax revenue, not to pay off our national debt and have reserves against unfunded liabilities, but just to avoid accumulating more debt. Recent IRS data show that individuals earning $66,000 and more a year have a total adjusted gross income of $5.1 trillion. In 2011, corporate profit came to $1.6 trillion. That means if Congress simply confiscated the entire earnings of taxpayers earning more than $66,000 and all corporate profits, it wouldn't be enough to cover the $8 trillion per year growth of U.S. liabilities. Given this impossible picture, the message coming out of Washington, especially from our leftist politicians and the news media, is that we solve our budget problems by raising taxes on the rich. If Americans were more informed, such a message would be insulting to our intelligence. There are not enough rich people to satisfy Congress' appetite. In 2011, Congress spent $3.7 trillion. That turns out to be about $10 billion per day. According to IRS statistics, roughly 2 percent of U.S. households have an income of $250,000 and above. By the way, $250,000 per year hardly qualifies as being rich. It can't even buy a Learjet. Households earning $250,000 and above account for 25 percent, or $1.97 trillion, of the nearly $8 trillion of total household income. If Congress imposed a 100 percent tax, taking all earnings above $250,000 per year, it would bring in about $1.9 trillion. That would keep Washington running for 190 days, but there's a problem because there are 175 more days left in the year. The profits of the Fortune 500 richest companies come to $400 billion. That would keep the government running for another 40 days, to mid-July. America has 400 billionaires with a combined net worth of $1.3 trillion. If Congress fleeced them of their assets, stocks, bonds, yachts, airplanes, mansions and jewelry, it would get us to at least late fall. The fact of the matter is there are not enough rich people to come anywhere close to satisfying Congress' voracious spending appetite. The true tragedy for our future is that there are millions of uninformed Americans who will buy the political demagoguery and treachery that our problems can be solved by taxing the rich.
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