IT'S THE SYSTEM STUPID

[philunderwood]

What Dems Must Ignore or Deny

By Mona Charen

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

To be a Democrat means to live in denial. Consider all of the things you must ignore or explain away.

The PIGS. Not the chauvinist pigs whose transgressions preoccupied 1970s feminists, but PIGS as in Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain — nations facing sovereign debt crises because they pursued exactly the sort of policies Democrats favor for this country. The PIGS share bloated government sectors (In Greece, the government employs 33 percent of workers.), generous unemployment packages, high minimum wages, dire pension obligations and a shrinking tax base. Each week brings fresh news of turmoil in the streets.

Here is a June account from CBS News that Democrats will want to ignore: "To see a country truly on the brink of financial ruin, look no further than Greece. On Wednesday, its parliament cut public services and raised taxes to fend off bankruptcy and probably spare the world another mass economic meltdown, at least for now. ... As parliament did what it could politically, protesters turned Athens into a war zone."

The protests are understandable (if not excusable). When debt-ridden states face bankruptcy, it is always at a time of economic distress. In good times, after all, tax receipts increase. So just when jobs are scarce and times are difficult, just when a greater than usual number of people are collecting unemployment and other benefits, the government is forced to impose austerity.

Would it have been better to have made smaller reductions in benefits earlier? Yes. Would it have been even more desirable not to accustom so many citizens to government largesse? Don't ask a Democrat.

Also in economic intensive care is Portugal. Here's the Los Angeles Times account: "Analysts expect that Lisbon will ultimately need up to $115 billion in loans and guarantees. The amount would be covered fairly comfortably by the bailout fund created by the EU last year to address the widening euro debt crisis, but would come with stringent conditions that Lisbon rein in public spending. Last month, Prime Minister Jose Socrates failed to win parliamentary approval for a fourth round of austerity measures within a year, which prompted him to resign and his Socialist Party-led minority government to collapse." Democrats will not want to dwell on the fact that the European Union will not be bailing out the United States. In fact, no one will be available to bail out the U.S.

Chile. At the other end of the economic spectrum, Democrats must ignore Chile's remarkable success with privatizing social security. Thirty years ago, facing a pension overhang similar to our own, Chile adopted a policy that nearly all Democrats regard with horror — they privatized their pension system. Not all at once. Those who were already retired were grandfathered into the existing system. New workers were required to participate in the private retirement account program. All other workers were offered a choice to remain with the old system or choose the new one. Ninety-three percent chose private accounts, conservatively managed.

How has it turned out? Over the course of three decades, despite ups and downs in the market as well as terrible earthquakes, these accounts have averaged returns 9.23 percent above inflation. Social Security, by contrast, averages returns of about 1 percent. In the United States, the elderly are wards of the state. Each Chilean, by contrast, has ownership of his account. He or she can pass any unused portion on to children and grandchildren. When New York Times reporter John Tierney worked out his own Social Security contributions on the Chilean model, he found that his privatized pension would have been $53,000 a year plus a one-time payout of $223,000. The same contributions paid into the American Social Security system would have paid him $18,000 a year.

Chile's free market policies have made it one of the wealthiest nations in the Western hemisphere, with the highest nominal GDP in Latin America. Their pension reform has so far been copied by 30 nations.

Perhaps Chile, so far from Washington, D.C., is too easy to ignore. But what about Galveston, Texas? It seems that 30 years ago, far-sighted leaders took advantage of an opt-out clause (since removed) in the Social Security law and put county employees into private pension accounts. Galveston's employees take home pensions with 7 percent annual return compounded over 30 years compared with Social Security's 1 percent.

Democrats must, simply must, deny that privatization provides far superior outcomes, because the truth is that independent, self-sufficient, non-needy citizens have little use for a party whose entire rationale is "Let Me Take of You" by taxing someone else.

[philunderwood]

The threat behind the debt

By Jay Ambrose

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

Some years back, I went to work in Washington D.C., not so sure I would like the city, but ultimately finding it fascinating. It hums with intellect, and, by some calculations, is the center of the world. You learn a great deal there, such as how that intellect is often put to ill use by people unbearably self-important. When you live in the center of the world, you get that way.

Lunches those days were usually at a Chinese cafeteria around the corner from the building where I worked. The place could get crowded, and you might have to share a table with strangers. Politeness consisted of pretending not to hear what was said, and that's what I failed to do one day when several regulators were plotting more regulation.

These federal employees could not have been long out of college. I do not remember the specifics of their conversation, just the gist of it. They were talking about successes in cracking down on several industries, and then, one young woman chirped that she now wanted to pursue some really tough, hard-hitting regulations for another industry, thereby triggering my own interventionist spirit.

"Why don't you just leave them alone?" I asked.

You've heard of hell's fury, I guess, and I got a taste of it as the young woman advised me that she served the good of the country, conferred widely, studied hard and was attentively observant of her agency's legal parameters.

I nodded my head and left, and I belatedly apologize for my rudeness. But I do not apologize to an administrative state that betrays rule of law, reaches beyond obviously needed regulations, bollixes up businesses, makes us billions poorer, plays havoc with our liberties and sometimes increases dangers.

I do not apologize to a Congress that has abdicated its own responsibilities by voting in favor of good intentions and leaving it to bureaucrats to fill in the blanks, and I do not apologize to a Supreme Court that has let agencies get away with this dictatorial adventure.

I certainly do not apologize to presidents who, thinking you can wisely supervise the lives of 300 million people, happily advocate departments, agencies and commissions while increasing their power. This project, which started in the late 19th century, got a blunderbuss boost in the New Deal and has never slowed down much. If anyone thought it might retreat, they weren't counting on President Barack Obama, Obamacare and the army of new regulations for Wall Street that substitute quantity for quality. The only blessing is that no one will ever make sense of them sufficiently to execute all their likely harm.

This administrative state and the laws backing it lie behind the current wrangle over the national debt. It itself could be ruinous but is a symptom the real disease better understood by visiting for a second with Jeffrey Tucker, editorial vice president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. In a recent piece, he writes about the U.S. code that contains all the laws the government administers, some 356,000 pages "as elaborate and detailed as any set of laws that have ever governed any society in 'the history of the world." Nothing escapes their purview, not mattresses, not funeral homes — they are on your case from womb to tomb, no matter where you go, no matter what you do.

Cures suggested by think tanks and others include laws that leave nothing to bureaucrats, formal public procedures on each and every new regulation, a review of old laws that erase some of them and congressional approval of anything sweeping. One writer argues our administrative state has some pretty dastardly company, including the Chinese mandarins, European monarchs of yesteryear, Bolsheviks and Nazis. Our practitioners may be perfectly nice, maybe just a well-intended young woman sitting across from you at lunch, but the system is scarily out of whack and needs reform soon.

[philunderwood]

Misleading Words

By Thomas Sowell

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

Many years ago, the Saturday Evening Post was one of the best-known magazines in America. But somehow I learned that the Saturday Evening Post was actually published on Wednesday morning. That was a little disconcerting at first. But it was one of the most valuable lessons, that words do not necessarily reflect reality.

Recent statistics on the average wealth or net worth of blacks are a painful reminder that rhetoric favoring blacks does not mean that politicians using such rhetoric are actually helping blacks. The media seized upon the statistics published by the Pew Research Center to show that whites averaged far more net worth than blacks, and that this disparity was now greater than it was in years past. But what is even more revealing is that the net worth of blacks in 2009 was less than half of what it was in 2005.

What happened to cause such a sharp loss in such a few years? After all, the Republicans controlled both the Congress and the White House in 2005, and the Democrats had control by 2009. There was now a black President of the United States, with much of the media celebrating the beginning of a new era in race relations.

What happened was that the political words had no relationship to the economic reality. But few people judge any administration's effect on blacks by what actually happens to blacks under that administration.

A finer breakdown of the data on the net worth of blacks shows that the most drastic loss of net worth was in the value of the homes owned by blacks. This occurred after years of both Democratic and Republican administrations pushing policies designed to enable more blacks to buy homes.

Much of the media rallied behind the idea that there should be more home ownership by blacks. Editorials rang out across the land, denouncing statistical disparities between rates of home ownership by blacks and whites as showing racial discrimination in the private sector that needed to be corrected by the government.

Even when it was shown that blacks, on average, did not meet the same financial standards as whites, both politicians and the media denounced those standards as too stringent.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for example, called for "fairer mortgage-lending standards" and declared that "lending institutions are being far more conservative than they have to be in determining the creditworthiness of minorities." The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston likewise declared that "unreasonable measures of creditworthiness" were not "appropriate to the economic culture of urban, lower-income, and nontraditional consumers."

The New York Times reported that "even within the same income group whites are nearly twice as likely as blacks to get loans." Many in the media treated that as proof positive that racial discrimination explained differences in mortgage loan approval rates. They were not talking about racial differences in net worth in those days — much less taking note of the fact that blacks in the same income brackets as whites had far less net worth.

Racial discrimination was where it was at, as far as liberal politicians and most of the media were concerned. And the familiar "solution" was massive government intervention in the market. Government agencies, from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to the Federal Reserve leaned on lenders to lower lending standards, and the Department of Justice threatened prosecutions for discrimination if the racial makeup of people approved for mortgage loans did not match their preconceptions.

It worked. In fact, it worked so well that many blacks got loans that they could not have gotten otherwise. Now the statistics tell us, belatedly, that blacks lost out, big time, from this "favor" done for them by politicians.

These lowered lending standards applied to many others besides blacks. Everybody lost out when the resulting risky mortgages led to a collapse of the housing market, followed by a collapse of the economy. Lofty words led to bitter realities.

The same mindset that led to these disasters is still prevalent in Washington. Indeed, the very people who spearheaded those political crusades — Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Christopher Dodd — crafted new legislation offering the same kind of "solution" to our current problems, namely more massive government intervention in the economy. Words triumphed again.

[philunderwood]

Cruel Laws

By Walter Williams

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

What does it take to be able to own and operate a taxi and earn $30,000, $40,000 or more a year? You need to purchase a used car and liability insurance. Compared with other businesses, the startup cost to become a taxi owner/operator is modest; that's until you have to come up with money for a license. In May 2010, the price of a license, called a medallion, to own one taxi in New York City sold for $603,000. As referenced in my recent book, "Race and Economics," New York City is not alone. In Chicago, a taxi license costs $56,000, Boston $285,000 and Philadelphia $75,000. It's not rocket science to understand the effect of laws that produce these prices: They discriminate against anyone getting into the taxi business who lacks tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars or bank credit to be able to get a loan.

Suppose you're a trucker with an interstate license to ship goods but you want to expand to shipping goods within your state. Is it fair for the government to permit your competition to show up at your hearing, with their attorneys, to protest that your services are not needed and therefore you are denied what's called a "certificate of necessity," which would allow you to ship goods within the state? Attorney Timothy Sandefur discusses this despicable process in his recent article "CON Job," published by the Cato Institute (summer 2011). "Certificate of necessity" monopolistic restrictions exist across the country, governing a variety of industries, from moving companies and taxicabs to hospitals and car lots. The intention and the effect of these laws is to protect incumbent practitioners from open market competition, enabling them to charge higher prices as a means to higher income.

Interior designing has almost no startup costs. Not so if you want to practice in Florida. State law mandates that anyone who wants to practice interior designing have six years of education and experience, including graduating from a state-approved interior design program and completing an apprenticeship under a state-licensed interior designer. Then the applicant must pass a state-mandated licensing exam. The sole purpose of the law is to keep the outs out so the ins can charge monopoly prices.

If interior designing is not for you, how about being a tour guide in Philadelphia or Washington, D.C.? Neither city will permit you to be a tour guide without a government-issued license.

In Phoenix, you could earn a living doing something as simple as shaping eyebrows, a safe and common practice known as "eyebrow threading." To do so legally, the Phoenix government requires you to take hundreds of hours of irrelevant training and spend thousands of dollars on classes. None of those classes actually teaches you how to practice eyebrow threading.

One would think that civil rights organizations, leftists and progressives would be fighting the battle for people's rights to earn a living. The fact of business is that they are often on the other side, and it's the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Justice that has been waging war against entrenched incumbents who use government to protect them from competition. In fact, the Institute for Justice has current court battles against restrictions on tour guides, eyebrow threading and interior designing, as well as several more found at its website (http://ij.org/economicliberty). The Institute for Justice has had remarkable success in lawsuits, breaking many economic barriers, such as those against hair braiding in Arizona, Minnesota, Mississippi, Ohio and California and taxi restrictions in Denver, Minneapolis, Cincinnati and Indianapolis.

Arbitrary licensing and permitting laws foreclose many occupations that are ideally suited to people of modest means, particularly minorities. Here's my bet: Ask any liberal politician, from the president and the Congressional Black Caucus to civil rights organizations and black local politicians, whether he'd take up the fight to eliminate these barriers to upward mobility. You'll get answers, but they won't be a simple yes. The reason is the ins contribute to their political campaigns and the outs don't.

[philunderwood]

www.qando.net/?cat=941

The growth of the regulatory state

Published August 22, 2011 | By Bruce McQuain

While President Obama vacations on Martha’s Vineyard, he is supposedly committing to paper a plan to boost employment. During the recession unemployment has remained high, near 10%, and with the economy slowing again, that number is likely to go higher.

One area that hasn’t suffered jobs losses during Obama’s time in office is the government regulatory regime. In fact, it has managed to add a significant number of jobs, all, unfortunately, at the expense of business. While most Americans feel some level of regulation is necessary by the Federal government, over-regulation is always a danger. When that danger is realized, it is businesses who bear the brunt of the cost of compliance. And, of course, businesses pass their costs on to consumers in the price of their goods. So regulation compliance costs drive the price of goods up.

In the past three years of the Obama administration we’ve seen an explosion of regulations. Investors Business Daily brings you the gory details:


Regulatory agencies have seen their combined budgets grow a healthy 16% since 2008, topping $54 billion, according to the annual "Regulator’s Budget," compiled by George Washington University and Washington University in St. Louis.

That’s at a time when the overall economy grew a paltry 5%.

Meanwhile, employment at these agencies has climbed 13% since Obama took office to more than 281,000, while private-sector jobs shrank by 5.6%.

Michael Mandel, chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute, found that between March 2010 and March 2011 federal regulatory jobs climbed faster than either private jobs or overall government jobs.

Those agencies have churned out new regulations and rules at an amazing rate:


The Obama administration imposed 75 new major rules in its first 26 months, costing the private sector more than $40 billion, according to a Heritage Foundation study. "No other president has imposed as high a number or cost in a comparable time period," noted the study’s author, James Gattuso.

The number of pages in the Federal Register — where all new rules must be published and which serves as proxy of regulatory activity — jumped 18% in 2010.

This July, regulators imposed a total of 379 new rules that will cost more than $9.5 billion, according to an analysis by Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo.

And much more is on the way. The Federal Register notes that more than 4,200 regulations are in the pipeline. That doesn’t count impending clean air rules from the EPA, new derivative rules, or the FCC’s net neutrality rule. Nor does that include recently announced fuel economy mandates or eventual ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank regulations.

As mentioned above, regulations and rules impose a significant cost on businesses which must comply with them. In a time when the economy is staggering, these increases in costs delivers another body blow to any recovery. And most of them have been imposed via the Executive Branch through its various Departments and not Congress. The agenda brought to the White House by Barack Obama is being serviced by regulators and the legislators are being left out


"Our economy is continuing to sink," Sen. Barrasso said, "and it’s being weighed down by regulations coming out of this administration."

By 2008, the cost of complying with federal rules and regulations already exceeded $1.75 trillion a year, according to a 2010 study issued by the Small Business Administration.

Worse, the SBA found that small companies — which account for most of America’s new jobs — spend 36% more per employee to comply with these rules than larger firms.

Of course the administration flatly denies what the reports above tell us is happening:


Cass Sunstein, who runs the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, denies the regulatory upsurge, writing recently that "there has been no increase in rule making in this administration." He also notes Obama ordered a comprehensive regulatory review in January that uncovered $1 billion worth of needless red tape.

As is always the case, never believe what the administration tells you, always look behind the curtain at the facts. And the facts are that 379 new rules have been imposed under this administration and it has 4,200 new regulations “in the pipeline” not counting the exceptions to that count noted in the IBD article. So, as usual, the numbers tell a different story.

If President Obama is serious about creating job opportunities, this is an area in which he obviously exercises direct control via the federal government and the executive branch. Rolling back the regulator regime, suspending all new rules until a comprehensive study can be made of their economic impact and generally getting regulators out of the way of businesses would be a very good start.

Somehow I doubt any of that will find its way into the jobs plan Mr. Obama presents after his vacation.

~McQ

[Ritty77]

From Sarah Palin's latest speech in Iowa:

[T]he permanent political class …[use] taxpayer dollars… to bail out their friends on Wall Street and their corporate cronies, and to reward campaign contributors, and to buy votes via earmarks. There is so much waste. And there is a name for this: It’s called corporate crony capitalism. This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk. No, this is the capitalism of connections and government bailouts and handouts, of waste and influence peddling and corporate welfare. This is the crony capitalism that destroyed Europe’s economies. It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest – to the little guys.

biggovernment.com/chorner/2011/09/05/will-the-real-crony-capitalist-please-stand-up/

[philunderwood]

Yea, but she’s such an airhead. (sarc)

[philunderwood]

Gov. Perry's Right About Social Security

By Walter Williams

www.JewishWorldReview.com | During the recent GOP presidential debate, Texas Gov. Rick Perry said that Social Security is a "monstrous lie" and a "Ponzi scheme." More and more people are coming to see that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, but is it a lie, as well? Let's look at it.

Here's what the 1936 government pamphlet on Social Security said: "After the first 3 years — that is to say, beginning in 1940 — you will pay, and your employer will pay, 1.5 cents for each dollar you earn, up to $3,000 a year. … Beginning in 1943, you will pay 2 cents, and so will your employer, for every dollar you earn for the next 3 years. … And finally, beginning in 1949, twelve years from now, you and your employer will each pay 3 cents on each dollar you earn, up to $3,000 a year." Here's Congress' lying promise: "That is the most you will ever pay."

Another lie in the Social Security pamphlet is: "Beginning November 24, 1936, the United States government will set up a Social Security account for you. … The checks will come to you as a right." Therefore, Americans were sold on the belief that Social Security is like a retirement account and money placed in it is our property. The fact of the matter is you have no property right whatsoever to your Social Security "contributions."

You say, "Williams, you're wrong! We have a right to Social Security payments." In a U.S. Supreme Court case, Helvering v. Davis (1937), the court held that Social Security is not an insurance program, saying, "The proceeds of both (employee and employer) taxes are to be paid into the Treasury like internal revenue taxes generally, and are not earmarked in any way." In a later Supreme Court case, Flemming v. Nestor (1960), the court said, "To engraft upon the Social Security system a concept of 'accrued property rights' would deprive it of the flexibility and boldness in adjustment to ever-changing conditions which it demands."

Belatedly, the Social Security Administration is trying to clean up its history of deception. Its website (http://www.ssa.gov/history/nestor.html) says, "Entitlement to Social Security benefits is not (a) contractual right," adding, "There has been a temptation throughout the program's history for some people to suppose that their FICA payroll taxes entitle them to a benefit in a legal, contractual sense. … Congress clearly had no such limitation in mind when crafting the law." That's the SSA's dishonesty. After all, it was the people in that administration who said, in their 1936 pamphlet, that "the checks will come to you as a right."

There's more deceit and dishonesty. In 1950, I was 14 years old and applied for a work permit for an after-school job. One of the requirements was to obtain a Social Security card. In bold letters on my Social Security card are the words "For Social Security Purposes — Not For Identification." According to the SSA's website, "this legend was removed as part of the design changes for the 18th version of the card, issued beginning in 1972." That's a shameless, unadulterated lie. Because we're idiots, we're asked to believe that the sole purpose for the removal of "Not For Identification" was for design purposes. The fact that our Social Security numbers were going to become a major identification tool had nothing to do with getting rid of the statement.

Aside from these lies, Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. The major difference between Social Security and Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme is his was illegal. Three Nobel laureate economists have testified that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. Dr. Paul Samuelson called it "the greatest Ponzi game ever contrived." Dr. Milton Friedman said it was "the biggest Ponzi scheme on earth." Dr. Paul Krugman predicted that "the Ponzi game will soon be over."

Three cheers to Gov. Rick Perry for having the guts to tell us that Social Security is a monstrous lie and a Ponzi scheme.

[philunderwood]

The ‘Ponzi’ Sound Bite

By Thomas Sowell

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

Many in the media and in politics have gone ballistic over the fact that Texas Governor Rick Perry called Social Security "a Ponzi scheme."

Although many act shocked, shocked, as if Rick Perry had said something unthinkable, Governor Perry is not even among the first thousand people to call Social Security a Ponzi scheme. Not only conservatives, but even some liberals, have been calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme for decades.

Moreover, neither the media nor the politicians who are carrying on over the use of the words "Ponzi scheme" show the slightest interest in any hard facts that would tell us whether Social Security is or is not a Ponzi scheme. It is a "gotcha" moment, and that is apparently what some people live for.

What makes this nonsense become fraud is the insinuation that calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme means advocating that people who are depending on Social Security be abandoned and left with nothing to live on in their retirement years. That is the big scare — and the big lie.

People getting Social Security checks are going to keep on getting those checks. Nobody has advocated anything else, or would dare to cut off a financial lifeline for millions of people.

What is at issue is the particular mechanism through which people can be provided for in their retirement years. Some politicians loudly proclaim that they want to "save Social Security." But programs exist for people — and it is the people who should be saved.

Whether or not the checks that retirees continue to get say "Social Security" is beside the point. The point is that they keep on getting the money they need to live on, whether that money comes from a different institution or from Social Security.

The fundamental problem of Social Security is that the irresponsible way its finances are set up, and the changing demographics of the country, mean that there is simply not going to be enough money in its trust fund to pay today's young people what they are legally entitled to, when time comes for them to retire.

The money is just not there, some of it having been spent for unrelated purposes. Making up a growing shortfall, as baby boomers stop paying into the system as they retire, and start drawing money out of the system, would mean ever-increasing burdens on the taxpayers that the taxpayers are unlikely to put up with.

Social Security worked fine when the small generation from the 1930s received pensions from the money being paid in by the larger and more prosperous "baby boom" generation that followed. It worked fine when the average life expectancy of the first generation was not long enough for most of them to collect Social Security checks for more than a few years — if at all.

Declining birth rates and greatly increasing lifespans have created havoc with Social Security's finances, which are based on having the first generation's pensions paid with money collected from the second generation — and the second generation's pensions paid by the next generation, etc.

Any private financial scheme set up in a similar way would be illegal. That is why Charles Ponzi went to prison.

The politically expedient way of dealing with the situation is to "save Social Security" with short-term fixes that kick the ever-growing shortfall down the road for some later Congress to deal with — or to be overwhelmed by, when voters refuse to pay ruinous tax increases to keep the system going.

Another way to deal with the problem is to give younger workers the option to set up privately-owned retirement accounts instead. These accounts would be beyond the reach of politicians, and based on each generation setting aside money for its own retirement. Studies have shown that private accounts would pay retirees far better than Social Security.

Meanwhile, people currently depending on Social Security can continue to get what they were promised, even if that requires taxpayer subsidies for the current generation of retirees — as distinguished from subsidizing unending generations to come.

These are the kinds of options that need serious discussions, instead of "gotcha" sound bites. Sound bites are usually not very sound, and they are an irresponsible way to discuss serious issues.

[philunderwood]

www.qando.net/?cat=57

Reconnecting the DC GOP to reality

Published September 26, 2011 | By Billy Hollis

I remember giddy Republicans in early 2001. At last they had won the Presidency and both houses of Congress. They were like football fans whose team had just won the SuperBowl.

What exactly did we get out of that wonderful deal, again? Oh, yeah, a higher rate of spending than under Clinton. A new entitlement we couldn’t afford. Intrusion of the federal government into education. A blatantly unconstitutional law limiting free speech during elections.

However, it was a good time for DC Republicans. There were lots of jobs and lots of opportunities to get on the talk shows.

I suppose I understand, then, why DC Republicans look at elections more like a football game. If their team wins the game, there are goodies to go around.

However, the rest of us, including many disaffected Republicans, have realized that the rah-rah, go team approach to politics is a pointless waste of time, money, and energy. This is shown in the Tea Party’s character, for example. They want to discuss issues, and they’re not dazzled by nice hair, experience in the establishment political world, or all the other characteristics that political consultants find so important when they rate candidates.

One would think that the establishment GOP would have enough self-awareness to understand that it’s time to change their view on candidates and elections. I’d like to think these people are intelligent enough to read the charts and realize that the time for playing games is past. We are very probably approaching a worldwide financial crisis that will rock the very foundations of Western society.

Unfortunately they don’t seem to notice, as I was reminded this weekend when I read this piece on The Corner quoting Mary Matalin:


…Republicans should get over their puppy love, she said, and realize that no candidate is going to be perfect. The important thing is that they can beat President Obama.

No. That’s not the important thing. That statement may sound wise and obvious to DC political types, but it’s absolutely wrong, and there are two ironclad reasons why.

First, if it gets us a Nixon or a G.W. Bush, then it actually makes things worse. Suppose we expend our limited opportunity to reverse our current headlong rush to catastrophe by electing such a person. Then suppose the catastrophe comes on their watch.

The result is that it’s probably then the last chance the GOP will ever get to fix things. The left-leaning media will pin all the blame on the Republicans, and contort every fact they find to make it look like the Democrats can fix things.

An observant, rational person might note that the notion of the Democrats fixing anything about large, intrusive, expensive, debt-ridden government is laughable. But the media will sell that ridiculous notion, and clueless moderates will buy it, just as they did in 2008. The GOP brand will then be tarnished for a generation (“See, those Tea Party types just make things worse!”), and there will be plenty more fiddling while the country burns. The Tea Party types will likely try a third party, and given the structural problems in our system, that’s highly unlikely to work fast enough to make a difference.

Second, the very idea that we can predict who can or can’t beat Obama is just silly. I remember when Reagan “couldn’t beat Carter” because he was just a B movie actor. Bill Quick is fond of saying that his Pomeranian could beat Obama, and if things continue to move in the direction they’re going now, he’s clearly on target.

Just to pick out someone, let’s look at Hermann Cain. By conventional wisdom from establishment types, he can’t possibly beat Obama.

Well, why the hell not? He won the Florida straw poll decisively, so he seems to have something in his tank to motivate the base. Given that he’s black, suppose he changes the voting in that population from 90-10 Obama to 70-30 Obama. That alone would be enough to tie him even if Obama did as well among all other groups as he did in 2008. And Obama isn’t going to do nearly as well in most groups except for those firmly on the left wing.

I’m not endorsing Cain here. I’m just pointing out that playing the “who can beat Obama” game is silly, and could even cause catastrophic long term damage to the very party these people belong to.

Contra Mary Madalin, the important thing is to find a candidate who understands the depth of the crisis we face and has the courage to go to the wall against dozens of special interest groups to fix it. Without such a person, winning the White House is pointless and possibly counter-productive in the long term.

Of course, I’m not sure the DC establishment types care much. Matalin was married to James Carville last I heard, so if there was ever a couple deeply invested in business-as-usual in DC, it’s them. They and the other DC establishment types probably expect to be safely ensconced in their nice houses, drawing a guaranteed check, so they won’t suffer as much as the rest of us when TSHTF.

But that means we need to ignore anything and everything these people have to say.* We’ve been paying attention to them for decades, and where has it gotten us? The old saw about doing the same thing over and over comes to mind.

It’s time to throw the dice and try something different. It might not work, but it has a chance, and that’s better than the certain failure of DC politics as usual.

(*) The folks at National Review are some of the main ones who need to pay attention to this. The time for standing athwart history, yelling stop, is past. Only a serious U-turn will do us any good now. And we’ll never, ever get that from establishment GOP types.

[philunderwood]

Government the Job Killer

By John Stossel

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

President Obama says government will have to build the nation out of the economic trough.

"We're the country that built the intercontinental railroad," Obama says. "So how can we now sit back and let China build the best railroads?"

Ironic that he mentions the Chinese. Progressives used to complain that to build the railroad, bosses abused Chinese workers — called them "coolies" and treated them badly. Now this is big success?

I guess Obama doesn't know that the transcontinental railroad was a Solyndra-like Big Government scandal. The railroad didn't make economic sense at the time, so the government subsidized construction and gave the companies huge quantities of the best land on the continent. As we should expect, without market discipline — profit and loss — contractors ripped off the taxpayers. After all, if you get paid by the amount of track you lay, you'll lay more track than necessary.

Credit Mobilier, the first rail construction company, made enormous profits by overcharging for its work. To keep the subsidies flowing, it made big contributions to congressmen.

Where have we heard that recently?

The transcontinental railroad lost tons of money. The government never covered its costs, and most rail lines that used the tracks went bankrupt or continued to be subsidized by taxpayers. The Union Pacific and Northern Pacific — all those rail lines we learned about in history class — milked the taxpayer and then went broke.

One line worked. The Great Northern never went bankrupt. It was the railroad that got no subsidies.

We need infrastructure, but the beauty of leaving most of these things to the private sector — without subsidies, bailouts and other privileges — is that they would have to be justified by the profit-and-loss test. In a truly free market, when private companies make bad choices, investors lose their own money. This tends to make them careful.

By contrast, when government loses money, it just spends more and raises your taxes, or borrows more, or inflates. Building giant government projects is no way to create jobs. When government spends on infrastructure, it takes money away from projects that consumers might think are more important.

When government isn't killing jobs by sucking money out of the private sector, it kills jobs by smothering the private sector with regulation. I talked to Peter Schiff about all this. Schiff is a good authority because he was one of the few people to warn of the housing bust. Now he's had a run-in with the federal government over job creation.

Schiff, who operates a brokerage firm with 150 employees, recently complained to Congress that "regulations are running up the cost of doing business, and a lot of companies never even get started because they can't overcome that regulatory hurdle."

Schiff claims he would have hired a thousand more people but for regulations.

"I had a huge plan to expand. I wanted to open up a lot of offices. I had some capital to do it. I had investors lined up. My business was doing really well. But unfortunately, because of the regulations in the security industry, I was not able to hire."

So if he wants to hire an analyst, he can't just hire him?

"I had to get permission to publish their research, which I didn't get for years. And so I can't pay analysts if I can't sell their research.

People don't appreciate the number of regulations entrepreneurs face. Schiff pays 10 people just to try to figure out if his company is obeying the rules.

"You can't just act very quickly, because everything has to be done through this maze of compliance. Even my brokers ... find out that maybe 20 percent, 30 percent of their day is involved in compliance-related activity, activity that is inhibiting their productivity. ... All around the country, people are complying with regulations instead of producing, instead of investing and growing the economy. They're trying to survive the regulations."

This is no way to create jobs or wealth. Keynesian pundits and politicians can't understand why businesses sit on cash rather than invest and hire unemployed workers. It's really no mystery. Government is in the way.

[philunderwood]

The Administration Slithers Away From Reality

By Tony Blankley

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

No one should miscalculate America's resolve and commitment to helping support the Iraqi democracy.

- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton (Oct. 23, 2011)

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

- George Orwell (May 1945)

[W]e are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue … the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

- George Orwell (March 22, 1946).

I offer up George Orwell's second quote in possibly partial defense of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's assertion on "Meet the Press" Sunday that as the United States government orders the final, complete retreat from Iraq, the U.S. government remains resolved to support Iraqi democracy.

Are Mrs. Clinton's words designed to make lies sound truthful, or does she actually believe things she knows to be untrue?

Her statement is undeniably untrue. Our government has quite specifically given up its "resolve and commitment" to Iraqi democracy and to our own national security interests in the region. We have given up our armed force to resist the emerging armed forces of Iran and Turkey, and of Iraq's Kurds, Shia and Sunni militias. The Turks already have sent 10,000 troops into Iraq's Kurdish region to attack Kurdish terrorists.

As a prescient Washington Post editorial pointed out in April, if all U.S. troops leave Iraq by the end of 2011 as agreed, "next year Iraq will lack critical defense capacities: It will be unable to defend its airspace or borders, protect oil shipments or platforms in the Persian Gulf, or partner with U.S. special forces in raids against al Qaeda. Perhaps most seriously, American soldiers who have been serving as de facto peacekeepers in the city of Kirkuk and along the sensitive border zone between Iraqi Kurdistan and the rest of the country will disappear. Many experts believe that in their absence, violence could erupt between Kurds and Arabs."

In the place of U.S. armed forces as a material expression of our "resolve and commitment," Mrs. Clinton offers as a substitute a "support and training mission similar to what we have in countries from Jordan to Colombia. … We will also have a very robust diplomatic presence." This isn't "resolve and commitment." This is the withdrawal of our resolve and commitment. It is, in fact, the grave-digging of Iraqi democracy.

But the question Orwell's quotes raise - Are Mrs. Clinton's words designed to make lies sound truthful, or does she actually believe things she knows to be untrue? - goes to an even more important matter than the Obama administration's heartbreaking decision to just throw up its hands and give up, reversing its own decision of only last month to keep 3,000 troops in Iraq past the end of the year.

It goes to whether the administration - and many senior GOP politicians as well - are merely capable of deceiving the public or they have succeeded in deceiving themselves about the dire circumstance in which our nation finds itself: Our debt and deficit crisis, our position vis-a-vis China, and our deepening national security vulnerabilities around the globe.

As Gore Vidal wrote of a presidential candidate in his play "The Best Man": "Y'know, it's not that I object to your being a bastard, don't get me wrong there. It's your being such a stupid bastard that I object to."

My fear is that Washington politicians (and commentators as well) have been denying Washington's utter failure to confront and resolve the dire threats to our national existence for so long that we have deceived ourselves into believing the dangers do not exist - or are only on the distant horizon.

For example, whatever happened to the U.S. deficit and sovereign debt crisis? Just in July (a whole three months ago) we had a blazing - and necessary - fight about our deficit and the raising of the debt ceiling. Then we passed a phony bill that will not remotely avoid the upcoming crisis, and both parties promptly went back to sleep.

Even as the kindling flames lick up under Europe's potentially apocalyptic debt and banking crisis, Washington does not stir itself. Even as total U.S. public and private debt - about $50 trillion, according to Federal Reserve statistics - rises to more than 300 percent of gross domestic product - Washington mentally slumbers.

Worse than a straight-out lie about our dangers, I suspect that Washington is succumbing to a gluttonous taste for self-delusion and denial. Thus, perhaps Mrs. Clinton actually believes we have maintained our "commitment and resolve" in Iraq - even as we slither away.

George Orwell once warned, "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." In that struggle, too, Washington has lost its commitment and resolve.