IQ is as much a measure of motivation as intelligence?
This is a rather silly study. Of course people who are not motivated to solve a puzzle will be unlikely to do so. And IQ tests are composed of puzzles. The only thing that is interesting is whether or not anything can be done to increase the scores of highly motivated people -- and there has been very little success at that
Scientists have shown that offering a financial reward for doing well can increase their score by up to 20 points on the scale where the average is 100 and Mensa membership is around 150.
The team at the University of Pennsylvania made the findings after setting out to prove [That alone makes their conclusions very dubious] that scores in the test were not just related to intelligence but also to motivation.
They looked at 46 previous studies of more than 2,000 children to see if monetary incentives had any bearing on the result. They found that on average a financial reward improved the score by 10 points but that higher values – above $10 (about £7) – could be rewarded with a 20 point increase. The size of the increase seemed to be proportional to the amount of reward offered.
A second study of 500 boys found that those who showed signs of boredom and lack of motivation – for example yawning or looking around during the test – scored lower test marks. [What a surprise!]
Angela Lee Duckworth, a psychologist who led the study, said: "IQ scores may predict various outcomes in life, but in part for reasons that intelligence tests weren't designed for. "I hope that social scientists, educators, and policy-makers turn a more critical eye to any kind of measure, intelligence or otherwise as how hard people try could be as important to success in life as intellectual ability itself."
SOURCE
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What Trump gets right
By THOMAS SOWELL
The boomlet for Donald Trump as a Republican nominee for president of the United States ought to be a wake-up call for Republican candidates and Republican Party leaders alike. Why has Trump surged ahead of other Republican candidates and potential candidates in the polls? It is not likely that his resurrection of the issue of Barack Obama's birth certificate has aroused all this support.
The birth certificate issue does more political damage to Obama's critics than to the president himself, because it enables the media to paint those critics as kooks. Nor are Donald Trump's political positions such as to create a stampede to his cause. Radio talk show host Mark Levin has rebroadcast Trump's varied and mutually contradictory statements on political issues and personalities over the years. It was a devastating revelation of Trump's "versatility of convictions," to use a phrase coined long ago by Thorstein Veblen.
What then is Donald Trump's appeal -- and why should it concern Republican leaders in general?
What Trump has that so many other Republicans are so painfully lacking is the ability and the willingness to articulate his positions clearly, forcefully and in plain English. Too many Republicans talk like the actor of whom a critic once said, "He played the king like he was afraid that someone else was going to play the ace."
What electrified so many Republicans about Sarah Palin in the 2008 election campaign was that she was such a contrast to the usual mealy-mouth talk that was more common among other Republican candidates, including Senator John McCain. Whether you agreed or disagreed with her position on the issues, you didn't have to wave your hand in front of her eyes to see if she was awake.
Donald Trump is dangerous in at least two senses. If, by some tragic miracle, he should become the Republicans' candidate for president in 2012, that would be the closest thing to an iron-clad guarantee of a second term in the White House for Barack Obama. That would be a huge setback for the Republicans -- and, far more important -- a historic catastrophe for this country.
What seems more likely is that Donald Trump as a candidate for the Republican nomination would use his superior articulation skills -- not to mention brash irresponsibility -- to trash all the other Republican candidates for that nomination, leaving them damaged goods in the eyes of the public, and therefore less able to gather the votes needed to prevent the reelection of Obama.
Why Republicans seem not to understand the crucial importance of putting the same time and attention into articulating their positions as the Democrats do is one of the enduring mysteries of American politics.
It was obvious that the Democrats coordinated their talking points and catch-phrases -- "social justice," "tax cuts for the rich," etc. -- even before the overheard and recorded statements of Senator Chuck Schumer about Democrats' plans to repeatedly use the word "extreme" to characterize Republicans. But how many Republican catch-phrases can you remember? Republican rhetoric tends to range from low key to no key.
Nor is there much evidence that Republicans have asked themselves how the left-wing of the Democratic Party gained such ascendancy in recent years, in a country where millions more people identify themselves as conservative than identify themselves as liberals.
In short, there is little or no evidence that most Republicans see any need to fundamentally change their approach to the public. But if they think that they can rely on Obama's declining popularity to win the 2012 election, they may be in for a rude shock. Worse yet, the whole future of this country and of western civilization will be in jeopardy, in a world where the likes of Iran and North Korea become nuclear powers, while we engage in empty talk at the U.N.
Barack Obama's declining support in public opinion polls make some conservatives feel that his reelection hopes are doomed. But Donald Trump can be Barack Obama's secret weapon in his fight to remain in the White House. The Donald can be his Trump card.
SOURCE
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The Welfare State and the Selfish Society
Capitalism teaches people to work harder; the welfare state teaches people to want harder. Which is better?
In the contemporary world, where left-wing attitudes are regarded as normative, it is a given that capitalism, with its free market and profit motive, emanates from and creates selfishness, while socialism, the welfare state, and the “social compact” as it is increasingly referred to, emanate from and produce selflessness.
Whatever its intentions, the entitlement state produces far more selfish people — and therefore a far more selfish society — than a free-market economy. And we have little evidence that this widespread selfishness can be undone once it catches on.
Here’s an illustration: Last year, President Obama addressed a large audience of college students on the subject of health care. At one point in his speech, he announced that the students will now be able to remain on their parents’ health-insurance plan until age 26. I do not ever recall hearing a louder, more thunderous, and more sustained applause than I did then. I do not believe that if the president had announced that a cure for cancer had been discovered that the applause would have been louder or longer.
It is depressing to listen to that applause. To be told that one can be dependent on one’s parents until age 26 should strike a young person who wants to grow up as demeaning, not as something to celebrate.
Throughout American history, the natural — or at least hoped-for — inclination of a young person was to become a mature adult, independent of Mom and Dad, and to become a grown-up. But in the welfare state, this is no longer the case.
In various European countries, it is increasingly common for young men to live with their parents into their 30s and even longer. Why not? In the welfare state, there is no shame in doing so.
The welfare state enables — and thereby produces — people whose preoccupations become more and more self-centered as time goes on:
How many benefits will I receive from the state?
How much will the state pay for my education?
How much will the state pay for my health care and retirement?
What is the youngest age at which I can retire?
How much vacation time can I get each year?
How many days can I call in sick and get paid?
How many months can I claim paternity- or maternity-care money?
The list gets longer with each election of a left-wing party. And each entitlement becomes a “right,” as the Left transforms entitlements into the language of “rights” as quickly as possible.
What handouts do, and what the transformation of handouts into rights does, is create a citizenry that increasingly lacks the most important character trait — gratitude. Of all the characteristics needed for both a happy and morally decent life, none surpasses gratitude. Grateful people are happier, and grateful people are more morally decent. That is why we teach our children to say “thank you.” But the welfare state undoes that. One does not express thanks for a right. So, instead of “thank you,” the citizen of the welfare state is taught to say, “What more can I get?”
Yet, while producing increasingly selfish people, the mantra of the Left, and therefore of the universities and the media, has been for generations that capitalism and the free market, not the welfare state, produces selfish people.
They succeed in part because demonizing conservatives and their values is a left-wing art. But the truth is that capitalism and the free market produce less selfish people. Teaching people to work hard and take care of themselves (and others) produces a less, not a more, selfish citizen.
Capitalism teaches people to work harder; the welfare state teaches people to want harder. Which is better?
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
When dictators fall, who rises?: "The secular despot Saddam Hussein protected the Christians. But the U.S. liberation brought on their greatest calamity since the time of Christ. Scores of thousands of those Iraqi Christians fleeing terrorism and persecution after 2003 made their way to Syria, where they received sanctuary from President Bashar Assad. Now, as the FT and Washington Post report, the Christians of Syria, whose forebears have lived there since the time of Christ, are facing a pogrom should the Damascus regime fall."
Don’t raise the debt ceiling: "The people running this government are never going to deal with this untenable situation unless and until it becomes untenable for them. The only way that will happen is if Congress refuses to raise the debt ceiling and forces the administration to prioritize payment of those obligations that must be paid to maintain our full faith and credit — for as Kevin and Veronique point out, this already perilous situation could be blown sky high if the interest rate we must pay to borrow spikes. Only when there is no way around it will we get serious consideration of what government should and should not do, and what kind of welfare state the public is willing to pay for."
The debt ceiling charade: "With respect to the debt ceiling, let me issue an easy prediction: The Republicans are going to cave. They are going to vote to raise the debt ceiling. Oh sure, there will be plenty of posturing. There will be expressions of anger and outrage over out-of-control federal spending, borrowing, and debt. There will be political tactics to gain electoral advantage, including threats to 'shut down' the government."
Governor moonbeam still spending: "After years of deficit financing, my state, California, is currently hurtling toward bankruptcy, the revenue from its savage personal income tax having been consumed, and over-consumed, by government employees' salaries and benefits. Yet in the midst of the budget turmoil, Governor Jerry Brown has just negotiated yet another Rolls Royce contract with one of the biggest beneficiaries of state government, the prison guards' union. The deal was so friendly that even the state's mainstream media began to criticize it."
MA: Insurers’ ambulance bill practice protested: "Cities and towns could be forced to sue their own residents, eliminate life support services, and pay higher health care bills unless the Legislature reins in an attempt by health insurers to slash ambulance costs, said lawmakers, fire chiefs, and municipal officials yesterday. ... At issue is a practice recently implemented by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts intended to cajole ambulance providers to join the company’s contracted network: Rather than pay for ambulance services provided by out-of-network companies, Blue Cross will cut a check to patients for the cost of their ambulance ride. That would leave it up to the ambulance companies to seek out their patients and collect the check."
ME: Three bills propose smaller legislature: "Sponsors of three bills to cut back the size of the Maine Legislature say it's time for the state to economize as lawmakers ask others to do the same. Republican and Democratic lawmakers say Maine has one of the smallest state populations, but the 10th largest legislature. ... Maine's Legislature now has 186 members, and the bills would reduce its size by different amounts."
SCOTUS: No to expedited healthcare hearing: "The US Supreme Court declined on Monday to immediately take up Virginia’s challenge to the constitutionality of the new health-care reform law. Virginia’s Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli had asked the court to bypass the usual appeals process by allowing the case to proceed directly from a district-court ruling to the nation’s highest court. The justices, without comment, refused the request. "
RomneyCare’s unhappy anniversary: "Higher costs and less accessible medical care has been the Massachusetts experience -- and will soon be the nation's. Earlier this month, the landmark Massachusetts health care reform law turned five years old. Democrats were quick to applaud the anniversary, as the Bay State law is the model for the federal health care reform package that passed last year. The anniversary has proved especially inconvenient for former Massachusetts Governor and probable Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who argued forcefully for his state's reforms."
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Hate, immigration and the NYT
I would normally put up the piece below on my IMMIGRATION WATCH blog but I think the story here is the NYT rather than immigration. It is of course zero suprise that an NYT article would make Dr. Goebbels proud but the article would seem to require some reply nonetheless. That reply has been provided by Jerry Kammer of CIS, one of the organizations smeared by the NYT. I put up a slightly abridged version of that reply below.
The main point to note is that Jason DeParle, the NYT journalist concerned, could find so little to pin on the anti-illegal crowd that he concentrated his spleen on just one man -- a Greenie! Greenies don't like people of any kind much and John Tanton appears to have been no exception. So he did make some fairly contentious utterances in his latter years.
It is of course true that Tanton was influential in founding several anti-immigration groups but he is now elderly, ill and not giving interviews so he is quite irrelevant to the present-day anti-illegal movement.
Jerry Kammer picks up the story, pointing out that there are many "Tantons" (unbalanced voices) on the other side of the debate too -- and that the other side is where the hate is to be found in the immigration debate of today:
The take-home message is that the three major organizations that seek to reduce immigration--the Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA, and the Center for Immigration Studies--are tainted by their association with nativist John Tanton.
DeParle describes Tanton's mounting frustration with the failure of 1986 immigration reform legislation. Congressional sponsors had touted the Immigration Reform and Control Act as a compromise that would impose order on the immigration chaos by combining amnesty for illegal immigrants with firm measures to stop future waves. It made the hiring of unauthorized workers a crime.
But, as DeParle notes, "the penalties proved ineffective and the amnesty was marred by fraud."
His story spills pools of ink detailing Tanton statements--most of them decades old--that demonstrate a shrill and tone-deaf dismay at the effects of uninterrupted mass immigration. Some are unfortunate. Some are disgraceful.
DeParle quotes a CIS report that criticized Tanton's "tin ear for the sensitivities of immigration." The report's next sentence, which DeParle does not quote, laments Tanton's "tendency to be unnecessarily provocative, a tendency that some have seized upon to change the topic from immigration to Tanton himself."
Therein lies the fundamental, journalistically fatal flaw of DeParle's story. His focus is so constricted that he produces a lopsided examination of extremism in the immigration debate.
It is one thing for DeParle to highlight Tanton's politically poisonous indiscretions. Tanton, who did more than anyone else to establish the modern movement to restrict immigration, has indeed done more than anyone else to undermine that movement.
But it is quite another thing for DeParle to fail to broaden his field of vision to observe the politically poisonous evolution on the other side of the immigration policy divide. DeParle's story is willfully blind.
Over the past several years, advocates of illegal immigration and ethnic organizations like the National Council of La Raza have taken as their battle cry the Southern Poverty Law Center's kangaroo-court, made-to-order 2007 designation of FAIR as a "hate group."
We at CIS issued a report that exposed the SPLC's multi-layered fraud and the "stop the hate" campaign it spawned. It is a vehement campaign of smear and character assassination directed against FAIR, NumbersUSA, and the Center for Immigration Studies.
As our report noted, the campaign sought to have all three organizations "shunned by the press, civil society, and elected officials. It is an effort to destroy the reputations of its targets. It also seeks to intimidate and coerce others into silence. It undermines basic principles of civil society and democratic discussion."
But who is DeParle's go-to guy for his only quote about the campaign? It's the campaign's principal spokesman, Frank Sharry.
Sharry's organization, America's Voice, is funded with millions of dollars from the Carnegie Corporation, the liberal, New York-based philanthropic foundation that righteously--and in this case ironically--touts its mission to "promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding."
During DeParle's visit to the CIS office, I provided him with our report. We spoke about it at length. It describes the Carnegie network and its own brand of extremism, which grew out of frustration at the 2007 collapse of "comprehensive" reform legislation.
In addition to America's Voice, the Carnegie funded participants include the Center for American Progress, Center for New Community, Center for Community Change, and the National Council of La Raza.
Last Saturday, in an email notifying me that the story was about to run, DeParle wrote this: "I used the Carnegie stuff, but it got cut. Maybe I can come back to it."
I think I can expect to see the Times' report on the Carnegie network about the time I see Porky Pig flying down Pennsylvania Avenue.
No reporter should allow his byline to sit atop a 2,900 word story about a highly controversial topic if that story has no room for an essential element of balance. Not when the void results in a story that is egregiously one-sided and indifferent to ongoing excesses. Not when those excesses are at least as poisonous to the national immigration debate as 20-year-old quotes from a 77-year-old man who has Parkinson's disease and is quietly fading from the scene.
Here are three more criticisms of the Times' story:
1) Shabby treatment of Roy Beck
DeParle feigns fair treatment by giving Beck the chance to deny that he's racist. He should have gone to the ample record that establishes his integrity. For example, in 1996 Francis Fukuyama observed that Beck had presented his restrictionist case "in a way that fosters serious debate rather than name-calling." He also wrote that Beck's arguments "are presented carefully and dispassionately and deserve serious answers." Fukuyama wrote that for the New York Times. I can't imagine that a Times staffer would dare such heresy.
2) Fudging the Record on Barbara Jordan
DeParle notes that Beck's website includes a picture of Barbara Jordan. He identifies Jordan only as "a black civil rights leader and politician that (Beck) considered an ally." He fails to include the relevant contextual information that would illustrate the progressivism underlying Beck's concerns. In the 1990s, when Jordan directed a presidential commission on immigration policy, Jordan did not see immigration as such an undiluted blessing that only a bigoted, nativist fringe would want to restrict it. Indeed, she believed that immigration must be restricted in order to provide the civic and economic space for it to be successful. Said Jordan, "If we are to preserve our immigration tradition and our ability to say yes to so many of those who seek entry, we must also have the strength to say no where we must."
3) Fact-Free Zone
The story is stuffed with innuendo and thick with suggestions of bigotry on the part of anyone connected to any of the organizations that has ever been connected to Tanton. DeParle makes a quick pass at objectivity, acknowledging that there are "serious liberal arguments for lower immigration." Yet, he provides none of the easily available and plentiful evidence for that fact. He could easily have noted that legal immigration has steadily expanded since the 1970s, when an average of 449,000 immigrants were admitted into the country each year, to the just-completed decade, when the annual average was nearly one million.
More HERE
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Some more exegesis
Exegesis is the detailed examination of a text in its context -- usually a scriptural text. I became an exegete of a sort when I was about 13. It was then that I first read the Sermon on the Mount. I was thunderstruck to find that what Jesus taught was nothing like what Christians actually do. Where is the ambiguity in:
Can you get plainer than that? I can't imagine it. And I am still nearly as thunderstruck to this day about the gap between what the Bible says on the one hand and what Christians and Jews do, say and believe on the other hand. One would think that they would long ago have found a book that suited them better.
I still like Christianity as we have it today, however. I attended the Good Friday service at my old Presbyeterian church, for instance. See here. But it is a very poor reflection of the original faith.
I have continued to find exegesis fascinating, however, so I long ago started looking closely at what the rest of the scriptures actually say -- even delving into the original languages in which they were written where that seemed crucial. And over the years I have put up on this blog and on my scripture blog my findings about key doctrines -- including hellfire.
Rather to my amusement, however, I see that the NYT has just weighed in on hellfire. When the NYT is preaching the reality of hell, I feel that I should say a little more about some of the key scriptural texts involved.
Quick background: The word translated as "hell" in many Bibles is in the original Greek "hades", which simply means death or the grave. Translating it as "hell" is a theological statement, not a linguistic one. And knowing that wipes out most of the texts that are usually cited in support of the hellfire doctrine.
A couple of interesting texts remain, however, and today I thought I should look at one of Jesus's prophetic utterances in Matthew 25. An excerpt:
The "everlasting fire" into which the "goats" are cast certainly does sound like a clear formulation of a hellfire doctrine but that impression is partly an effect of a poor translation. The word translated as "punishment" is in Greek "kolasin" and it simply means "cutting off". It is the word a Greek gardener might use to describe the pruning of a tree. So it would be a defensible translation to say that the goats would be cut off and thrown away like the unwanted branch of a tree
So, when properly translated, we see that Christ was, as usual, offering the alternatives of life and death, not heaven and hell -- exactly as he does in the most famous verse in the Bible, John 3:16. The sheep get eternal life and the goats get eternal death. I guess I am a goat!
But where does the "everlasting fire" come in? To see that we have to note that Jesus was speaking figuratively for most of the passage, as he often did. His parables are famous. So is he really going to sit on a throne and muster billions of people on either side of him? If so, he would need to locate himself somewhere around Iran and even then the billions of goats would be crowded for room and many could well fall into the Mediterranean (presuming the throne was facing North).
And Jesus in fact makes it clear that he is aiming at vividness rather than precision when he notes: "as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats".
So we have to decipher what is behind the figurative language. We get a clue when we note another passage where he used the same expression. Matthew 18:
Again, however, we risk being misled by a quite mendacious translation. This is one occasion when the original Greek underlying the translation "hell" is NOT "hades". It is "Gehenna". And Gehenna was simply the municipal incinerator outside Jerusalem where the bodies of criminals were thrown.
So: Bingo! We now have it. We know what image of everlasting fire Jesus had in mind. He had in mind the continuously burning fire of Jerusalem's garbage incinerator. And, needless to say, the bodies thrown into Gehenna don't feel anything. They have simply died and been disposed of in an ignominious way. So both goats and the Devil are simply going to die -- but die in disgrace.
Jesus is however a careful teacher so makes sure we don't get him wrong by adding a plain language summary at the end of the Matthew 25 passage:
So the hellfire doctrine is another pagan borrowing. It is not Biblical.
A couple more points: Note that in the Matthew 25 passage Jesus speaks only of judging the "nations". There is no mention of the dead. So what about the resurrection of the dead and the judgment of them? Resurrection is the hope of an afterlife that is held out in both the Old and New Testaments but it is not mentioned there at all. That again tells us that Jesus was concerned to paint a vivid mental picture rather than make a precise doctrinal statement.
So, although the Bible is in general a very plainspoken book, we have to make sure that the translation is right and be careful not to take the figurative literally. And reading the whole passage is the usual key to that
Finally, the goats are on the LEFT! Did Jesus foresee the world today? (Just joking).
There is an interesting article here which describes some of the divisions in contemporary Christian thought about the nature of heaven and hell.
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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I would normally put up the piece below on my IMMIGRATION WATCH blog but I think the story here is the NYT rather than immigration. It is of course zero suprise that an NYT article would make Dr. Goebbels proud but the article would seem to require some reply nonetheless. That reply has been provided by Jerry Kammer of CIS, one of the organizations smeared by the NYT. I put up a slightly abridged version of that reply below.
The main point to note is that Jason DeParle, the NYT journalist concerned, could find so little to pin on the anti-illegal crowd that he concentrated his spleen on just one man -- a Greenie! Greenies don't like people of any kind much and John Tanton appears to have been no exception. So he did make some fairly contentious utterances in his latter years.
It is of course true that Tanton was influential in founding several anti-immigration groups but he is now elderly, ill and not giving interviews so he is quite irrelevant to the present-day anti-illegal movement.
Jerry Kammer picks up the story, pointing out that there are many "Tantons" (unbalanced voices) on the other side of the debate too -- and that the other side is where the hate is to be found in the immigration debate of today:
The take-home message is that the three major organizations that seek to reduce immigration--the Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA, and the Center for Immigration Studies--are tainted by their association with nativist John Tanton.
DeParle describes Tanton's mounting frustration with the failure of 1986 immigration reform legislation. Congressional sponsors had touted the Immigration Reform and Control Act as a compromise that would impose order on the immigration chaos by combining amnesty for illegal immigrants with firm measures to stop future waves. It made the hiring of unauthorized workers a crime.
But, as DeParle notes, "the penalties proved ineffective and the amnesty was marred by fraud."
His story spills pools of ink detailing Tanton statements--most of them decades old--that demonstrate a shrill and tone-deaf dismay at the effects of uninterrupted mass immigration. Some are unfortunate. Some are disgraceful.
DeParle quotes a CIS report that criticized Tanton's "tin ear for the sensitivities of immigration." The report's next sentence, which DeParle does not quote, laments Tanton's "tendency to be unnecessarily provocative, a tendency that some have seized upon to change the topic from immigration to Tanton himself."
Therein lies the fundamental, journalistically fatal flaw of DeParle's story. His focus is so constricted that he produces a lopsided examination of extremism in the immigration debate.
It is one thing for DeParle to highlight Tanton's politically poisonous indiscretions. Tanton, who did more than anyone else to establish the modern movement to restrict immigration, has indeed done more than anyone else to undermine that movement.
But it is quite another thing for DeParle to fail to broaden his field of vision to observe the politically poisonous evolution on the other side of the immigration policy divide. DeParle's story is willfully blind.
Over the past several years, advocates of illegal immigration and ethnic organizations like the National Council of La Raza have taken as their battle cry the Southern Poverty Law Center's kangaroo-court, made-to-order 2007 designation of FAIR as a "hate group."
We at CIS issued a report that exposed the SPLC's multi-layered fraud and the "stop the hate" campaign it spawned. It is a vehement campaign of smear and character assassination directed against FAIR, NumbersUSA, and the Center for Immigration Studies.
As our report noted, the campaign sought to have all three organizations "shunned by the press, civil society, and elected officials. It is an effort to destroy the reputations of its targets. It also seeks to intimidate and coerce others into silence. It undermines basic principles of civil society and democratic discussion."
But who is DeParle's go-to guy for his only quote about the campaign? It's the campaign's principal spokesman, Frank Sharry.
Sharry's organization, America's Voice, is funded with millions of dollars from the Carnegie Corporation, the liberal, New York-based philanthropic foundation that righteously--and in this case ironically--touts its mission to "promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding."
During DeParle's visit to the CIS office, I provided him with our report. We spoke about it at length. It describes the Carnegie network and its own brand of extremism, which grew out of frustration at the 2007 collapse of "comprehensive" reform legislation.
In addition to America's Voice, the Carnegie funded participants include the Center for American Progress, Center for New Community, Center for Community Change, and the National Council of La Raza.
Last Saturday, in an email notifying me that the story was about to run, DeParle wrote this: "I used the Carnegie stuff, but it got cut. Maybe I can come back to it."
I think I can expect to see the Times' report on the Carnegie network about the time I see Porky Pig flying down Pennsylvania Avenue.
No reporter should allow his byline to sit atop a 2,900 word story about a highly controversial topic if that story has no room for an essential element of balance. Not when the void results in a story that is egregiously one-sided and indifferent to ongoing excesses. Not when those excesses are at least as poisonous to the national immigration debate as 20-year-old quotes from a 77-year-old man who has Parkinson's disease and is quietly fading from the scene.
Here are three more criticisms of the Times' story:
1) Shabby treatment of Roy Beck
DeParle feigns fair treatment by giving Beck the chance to deny that he's racist. He should have gone to the ample record that establishes his integrity. For example, in 1996 Francis Fukuyama observed that Beck had presented his restrictionist case "in a way that fosters serious debate rather than name-calling." He also wrote that Beck's arguments "are presented carefully and dispassionately and deserve serious answers." Fukuyama wrote that for the New York Times. I can't imagine that a Times staffer would dare such heresy.
2) Fudging the Record on Barbara Jordan
DeParle notes that Beck's website includes a picture of Barbara Jordan. He identifies Jordan only as "a black civil rights leader and politician that (Beck) considered an ally." He fails to include the relevant contextual information that would illustrate the progressivism underlying Beck's concerns. In the 1990s, when Jordan directed a presidential commission on immigration policy, Jordan did not see immigration as such an undiluted blessing that only a bigoted, nativist fringe would want to restrict it. Indeed, she believed that immigration must be restricted in order to provide the civic and economic space for it to be successful. Said Jordan, "If we are to preserve our immigration tradition and our ability to say yes to so many of those who seek entry, we must also have the strength to say no where we must."
3) Fact-Free Zone
The story is stuffed with innuendo and thick with suggestions of bigotry on the part of anyone connected to any of the organizations that has ever been connected to Tanton. DeParle makes a quick pass at objectivity, acknowledging that there are "serious liberal arguments for lower immigration." Yet, he provides none of the easily available and plentiful evidence for that fact. He could easily have noted that legal immigration has steadily expanded since the 1970s, when an average of 449,000 immigrants were admitted into the country each year, to the just-completed decade, when the annual average was nearly one million.
More HERE
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Some more exegesis
Exegesis is the detailed examination of a text in its context -- usually a scriptural text. I became an exegete of a sort when I was about 13. It was then that I first read the Sermon on the Mount. I was thunderstruck to find that what Jesus taught was nothing like what Christians actually do. Where is the ambiguity in:
"Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away."
Can you get plainer than that? I can't imagine it. And I am still nearly as thunderstruck to this day about the gap between what the Bible says on the one hand and what Christians and Jews do, say and believe on the other hand. One would think that they would long ago have found a book that suited them better.
I still like Christianity as we have it today, however. I attended the Good Friday service at my old Presbyeterian church, for instance. See here. But it is a very poor reflection of the original faith.
I have continued to find exegesis fascinating, however, so I long ago started looking closely at what the rest of the scriptures actually say -- even delving into the original languages in which they were written where that seemed crucial. And over the years I have put up on this blog and on my scripture blog my findings about key doctrines -- including hellfire.
Rather to my amusement, however, I see that the NYT has just weighed in on hellfire. When the NYT is preaching the reality of hell, I feel that I should say a little more about some of the key scriptural texts involved.
Quick background: The word translated as "hell" in many Bibles is in the original Greek "hades", which simply means death or the grave. Translating it as "hell" is a theological statement, not a linguistic one. And knowing that wipes out most of the texts that are usually cited in support of the hellfire doctrine.
A couple of interesting texts remain, however, and today I thought I should look at one of Jesus's prophetic utterances in Matthew 25. An excerpt:
"When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world ...
Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels. And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal"
The "everlasting fire" into which the "goats" are cast certainly does sound like a clear formulation of a hellfire doctrine but that impression is partly an effect of a poor translation. The word translated as "punishment" is in Greek "kolasin" and it simply means "cutting off". It is the word a Greek gardener might use to describe the pruning of a tree. So it would be a defensible translation to say that the goats would be cut off and thrown away like the unwanted branch of a tree
So, when properly translated, we see that Christ was, as usual, offering the alternatives of life and death, not heaven and hell -- exactly as he does in the most famous verse in the Bible, John 3:16. The sheep get eternal life and the goats get eternal death. I guess I am a goat!
But where does the "everlasting fire" come in? To see that we have to note that Jesus was speaking figuratively for most of the passage, as he often did. His parables are famous. So is he really going to sit on a throne and muster billions of people on either side of him? If so, he would need to locate himself somewhere around Iran and even then the billions of goats would be crowded for room and many could well fall into the Mediterranean (presuming the throne was facing North).
And Jesus in fact makes it clear that he is aiming at vividness rather than precision when he notes: "as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats".
So we have to decipher what is behind the figurative language. We get a clue when we note another passage where he used the same expression. Matthew 18:
"Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire. And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire."
Again, however, we risk being misled by a quite mendacious translation. This is one occasion when the original Greek underlying the translation "hell" is NOT "hades". It is "Gehenna". And Gehenna was simply the municipal incinerator outside Jerusalem where the bodies of criminals were thrown.
So: Bingo! We now have it. We know what image of everlasting fire Jesus had in mind. He had in mind the continuously burning fire of Jerusalem's garbage incinerator. And, needless to say, the bodies thrown into Gehenna don't feel anything. They have simply died and been disposed of in an ignominious way. So both goats and the Devil are simply going to die -- but die in disgrace.
Jesus is however a careful teacher so makes sure we don't get him wrong by adding a plain language summary at the end of the Matthew 25 passage:
"And these shall go away into everlasting cutting off: but the righteous into everlasting life"
So the hellfire doctrine is another pagan borrowing. It is not Biblical.
A couple more points: Note that in the Matthew 25 passage Jesus speaks only of judging the "nations". There is no mention of the dead. So what about the resurrection of the dead and the judgment of them? Resurrection is the hope of an afterlife that is held out in both the Old and New Testaments but it is not mentioned there at all. That again tells us that Jesus was concerned to paint a vivid mental picture rather than make a precise doctrinal statement.
So, although the Bible is in general a very plainspoken book, we have to make sure that the translation is right and be careful not to take the figurative literally. And reading the whole passage is the usual key to that
Finally, the goats are on the LEFT! Did Jesus foresee the world today? (Just joking).
There is an interesting article here which describes some of the divisions in contemporary Christian thought about the nature of heaven and hell.
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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There is no limit to Democrat and media dishonesty
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Obama's Regulatory Tsunami More Destructive than Taxes
As Obama travels about the country, speaking of the need for “shared sacrifice” and the need to increase taxes, he doesn’t say a word about the tsunami of new Obama regulations ranging from light bulbs to ozone pollution to painkillers to foreign travel to vending machines that is about to hit America. Their impact will be huge and do serious damage to our economy.
Obama's regulatory tsunami began during his first month in office and has continued relentlessly since. Each week, new, more intrusive rules are rolled out, some through Executive Order, but many issued from federal agencies, often without any fanfare or publicity. In every month since his inauguration, President Obama has heaped regulations on unsuspecting Americans, non-profit organizations, large and small businesses.
You can argue that some of these new regulations are not destructive to our economy, but just look at the number of regulations. Their range, their grasp and their intrusiveness into American life is staggering. And to think, several thousand new pages of new regulatory guidelines and added bureaucracy are still being drafted by the Obama Administration as required by healthcare, recovery act, financial reform, small business and TARP legislation. These new regulations will be piled atop the Mt. Everest pile of regulations Obama has already produced.
SOURCE
************************
Slacker America
America’s work ethic comes from our Puritan past. When we were an agrarian country, you either worked or starved. In the 19th and 20th Centuries, we developed into an industrialized nation, led by men with a solid work ethic, that became the strongest economy in the world. This attitude was essential to our victory in two world wars and our transformation into the globe’s sole superpower.
Regrettably, cultural attitudes have changed substantially, and we now often see derision of our traditional principles. Puritanism is now equated to a 1950’s society in which men were the breadwinners and women were stay-at-home moms. Whether that is true or not, working hard has nothing to do with anything other than the desire to become successful. Work equals money, and money comes from work. It is a simple, yet elegant, concept.
Today, however, we often see a different reality. And while it’s easy to recognize how rapidly-advancing technology has made our lives easier both at home and in the workplace, the change in the American work ethic has many causes and has not taken place overnight.
Many people have observed how this new generation is different from its predecessors, and much has been written about the rules under which they now wish to live. The most dismaying aspect is how pervasive this attitude has become. Not only is the average worker or college graduate unwilling to put forth the effort of prior generations, but so are the elite educated classes.
Several attorneys tell me how difficult it is to get young lawyers to work today. The young ones want what the older ones have, but don’t want to make the requisite sacrifices. This might be an aberration – if it weren’t for so many people telling me the same story!
One of my clients proudly told me about his son and daughter-in-law – newly-graduated attorneys working their way up the ladder at big, reputable firms. The next time we spoke, he informed me that they had resigned their positions to go on a worldwide vacation. And last month, he called to let me know that they were now both working for the government – with 9-5 jobs and built-in benefits.
22.5 million Americans – an utterly staggering number – now work for federal, state, and local government. Stephen Moore, in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, wrote that there are now twice as many people working for government than for manufacturers, and that more people now work for government than for several basic industries combined. Unfortunately, his excellent column failed to identify the most prominent reasons for this dismal situation.
Why do college graduates now seek jobs in government instead of private industry? It has largely to do with lack of ambition. Why take the risks inherent in the private sector when you can have a position that is virtually immune from layoffs, and for which you get vacations, sick days, health insurance, pensions, and every holiday on the calendar including imagined ones? Why accept a job requiring effort and productivity when you can get a government job in which your compensation and benefits have absolutely nothing to do with your performance? In fact, you may actually be discouraged from working too hard because it would embarrass your colleagues. Additionally, there is almost nothing that can cause you to be fired! So why take any risks in the private sector?
Ironically, the government then tries to force these same preposterous work rules onto the private sector – so that government doesn’t appear out of step with private industry.
The fact is that there is just too much government. Government now employs 16% of the current work force, amounting to 138.9 million people. That means that 116.4 million private- sector workers support this country of 308 million people. Government workers don’t help support the rest of us because the taxes they pay are just a reduction of the amount we pay them. They are just a drag on the private economy that needs to support them.
This economic model cannot sustain itself – especially with the current work ethic. When an ever smaller group of people is asked to support the rest of us, while the government hands out lavish employee benefits that far outstrip those found in the private sector, it’s no wonder that young people quickly conclude that a public-sector job is the perfect fit for their slacker attitudes.
While there are certainly exceptions, it seems that the generation now entering the workforce has been raised on the idea that hard work should take a back seat to lifestyle. They have seen – and sheepishly accepted – an ever-growing government sector making decisions for them. At this rate, there will soon not be enough private sector employees to support the government workers, the retired people, and the children of this society.
If we don’t change our current trajectory – and quickly! – then the next time my young Colombian friend comes to America, he will ask: “What the heck happened to this country?”
SOURCE
****************************
But Seriously, Folks
After the Republican presidential field in 2008 spent a year trying to agree with each other, this year's GOP contenders are showing early signs that they have real policy differences, and they're not afraid to debate them. And yet much of the media is too obsessed with vanity candidates and nonissues to cover the serious debate.
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour has begun his presidential campaign by questioning the necessity of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, a break with Republican policy over the last decade. And, while seeking the nomination of a party that largely denies man's impact on climate change, Barbour told a crowd in Iowa in March that it is "prudent" to "proceed as if global warming is an issue."
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney used his inaugural trip to New Hampshire last month to offer a defense of the state's health care plan, rather than backing away from an issue his opponents will certainly use against him. Jon Huntsman, who will explore a race once he returns from serving as ambassador to China at the end of the month, took stands on immigration, gay rights, and the environment that will set him apart from the field. Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty has said frequently that entitlements should be examined in an effort to rein in spending.
The 2008 campaign hardly presented these sorts of policy differences. In countless debates, Republican contenders used their 60 seconds to agree with each other and offer soundbites in hopes of distinguishing themselves from an ideologically homogenous field. Even former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose record offered the clearest opportunities for contrast, did his best to appear just like one of the guys. Only Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, stood out, and the rest of the field used him as a punching bag.
Refreshingly, serious candidates among the 2012 field are showing signs of substantive policy debates. Moderators at each of the early candidate gatherings have a chance to contrast Barbour's views on Afghanistan with Romney's, or with Pawlenty's, or with Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn. Journalists can ask serious questions about Commonwealth Care, its successes and failures, and the role it plays in Romney's legacy. Every candidate will be asked to respond to Rep. Paul Ryan's budget proposal, and to weigh in on whether and how entitlements should be cut to solve the debt crisis.
And yet it is the sideshows that dominate media coverage. Whether it's the pseudo-candidacy of Donald Trump, the fascination over Sarah Palin, or the obsession with anyone who wrongly believes President Obama was not born in the United States, the bulk of the presidential coverage in recent weeks has been profoundly unserious.
Perhaps, in an age of fragmented and increasingly partisan media, that is to be expected. After all, many outlets judge a story based on the clicks it drives to websites, rather than the content of the story itself. Birtherism has proven a popular traffic driver; on Wednesday, Matt Drudge led his site with a preview of a book authored by notorious anti-Obama conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi. Palin drives so much traffic that several national and Beltway publications devote staff time to writing up every television interview, Facebook post, and tweet emanating from her lakeside home in Wasilla, Alaska (For all her protestations that she despises the "lame-stream media," Palin has been very good for business. The worst thing she could do to harm the media is to stop being so popular among her conservative fans).
Trump is the most egregious case of a sideshow borne of the Washington-New York echo chamber. The bombastic businessman and shameless self-promoter has, at one time or another, espoused conflicting opinions on myriad issues, from the stimulus package to abortion. His ego is a source of great humor, as are his widely varying estimates of his own wealth (The only thing that doesn't vary about his bank balance is the trend line: He's always worth more than he was a few days ago, truly a financial feat of Lehman-esque accounting proportions).
And yet Trump is a near-daily fixture on cable television. In the past week, he has sat for extended interviews that aired both on ABC and NBC, and he appears weekly on Fox News. Trump is ratings gold, especially for NBC, which hosts The Apprentice and stands to benefit from any buzz Trump attracts.
Trump is also the source of a different kind of media attention, from exasperated columnists incredulous at the notion that Americans would pay attention to such an obvious blowhard. Just this week, columnists Charlie Cook, Jonah Goldberg, David Brooks, Richard Cohen, Matthew Continetti, Kathleen Parker, and Eugene Robinson have all devoted their time to The Donald. Unlike The Washington Post's Dana Milbank, who successfully went a month without writing about Palin, this column has had no such success in swearing off Trump-apalooza 2011.
Trump winning the Republican nomination, or even competing seriously, is beyond a remote possibility. Palin's hopes of winning aren't much better, and her absence from the national spotlight suggests she's not likely to try. And while rumors that Obama was born somewhere other than on Oahu, Hawaii, may drive traffic, facts, as John Adams lamented, are stubborn things.
There are serious and substantive differences between candidates seeking the presidency for reasons beyond personal gain and publicity. Sadly, the silly season means that's all being missed.
SOURCE
**************************
No security anywhere anymore
Congressman Paul Ryan, one of the least insane men in Washington, has a ten-year plan. President Obama, one of the most insane spenders in Washington, has a twelve-year plan.
At the world’s first “Presidential Facebook town hall meeting” on Wednesday, even Obama had a hard time taking his “plan” seriously. Sometimes he referred to it as a twelve-year plan, sometimes ten years, sometimes saving four trillion, sometimes saving two trillion. So will the Obama plan save four trillion over twelve years or two trillion over ten?
The president’s plan is to balance the budget by climbing into his Little Orphan Obammie costume and singing: “The sun’ll come out tomorrow / Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there’ll be sun.” We’ve already bet our bottom dollar and it’s looking like total eclipse. But Obammie figures if we can only bet Daddy Warbucks’s bottom dollar, the sun will shine.
That’s 2023. Go back 12 years. That’s 1999. Which, if any, politicians in that year correctly identified the prevailing conditions in the America of 2011?
Most of our problems arise from the political class’s blithe assumptions about the future. European welfare systems assumed a mid-20th-century fertility rate to sustain them. They failed to foresee that welfare would become a substitute for family and that Continentals would simply cease breeding. Bismarckian-Rooseveltian pension plans assumed you’d be living off them for the last couple of years of your life. Instead, citizens of developed nations expect to spend the final third of their adult lives enjoying a prolonged taxpayer-funded holiday weekend.
What plans have you made for 2023? The average individual attempts to insure against future uncertainty in a relatively small number of ways: You buy a house because that’s the surest way to preserve and increase wealth. “Safe as houses,” right? But Fannie/Freddie subprime mumbo-jumbo and other government interventions clobbered the housing market. You get an education because that way you’ll always have “something to fall back on.” But massive government-encouraged expansion of “college” led Americans to run up a trillion dollars’ worth of student debt to acquire ever more devalued ersatz sheepskin in worthless pseudo-disciplines.
We’re not talking about the wilder shores of the stock market — Internet start-ups and South Sea bubbles and tulip mania — but two of the safest, dullest investments a modestly prudent person might make to protect himself against the vicissitudes of an unknown future. And we profoundly damaged both of them in pursuit of fictions.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
The midnight ride of Standard & Poor’s: "Three cheers for Standard & Poor’s. On Monday, the rating agency issued a critical warning that America’s debt burden is growing too great. By doing so, it has helped make it less likely for the Washington budget debate to keep going down the path to national bankruptcy. We are now faced with a clear choice between a big-government, high-tax welfare state and a small-government, low-tax republic, such as the founders envisioned."
What are public sector unions for?: "If government, politicians, are indeed those wise and benevolent beings, then why should those who are employed by them need protecting from them? And if those who work for government need protection, shouldn't those of us subject to government also be protected?"
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
****************************
Obama's Regulatory Tsunami More Destructive than Taxes
As Obama travels about the country, speaking of the need for “shared sacrifice” and the need to increase taxes, he doesn’t say a word about the tsunami of new Obama regulations ranging from light bulbs to ozone pollution to painkillers to foreign travel to vending machines that is about to hit America. Their impact will be huge and do serious damage to our economy.
Obama's regulatory tsunami began during his first month in office and has continued relentlessly since. Each week, new, more intrusive rules are rolled out, some through Executive Order, but many issued from federal agencies, often without any fanfare or publicity. In every month since his inauguration, President Obama has heaped regulations on unsuspecting Americans, non-profit organizations, large and small businesses.
You can argue that some of these new regulations are not destructive to our economy, but just look at the number of regulations. Their range, their grasp and their intrusiveness into American life is staggering. And to think, several thousand new pages of new regulatory guidelines and added bureaucracy are still being drafted by the Obama Administration as required by healthcare, recovery act, financial reform, small business and TARP legislation. These new regulations will be piled atop the Mt. Everest pile of regulations Obama has already produced.
SOURCE
************************
Slacker America
America’s work ethic comes from our Puritan past. When we were an agrarian country, you either worked or starved. In the 19th and 20th Centuries, we developed into an industrialized nation, led by men with a solid work ethic, that became the strongest economy in the world. This attitude was essential to our victory in two world wars and our transformation into the globe’s sole superpower.
Regrettably, cultural attitudes have changed substantially, and we now often see derision of our traditional principles. Puritanism is now equated to a 1950’s society in which men were the breadwinners and women were stay-at-home moms. Whether that is true or not, working hard has nothing to do with anything other than the desire to become successful. Work equals money, and money comes from work. It is a simple, yet elegant, concept.
Today, however, we often see a different reality. And while it’s easy to recognize how rapidly-advancing technology has made our lives easier both at home and in the workplace, the change in the American work ethic has many causes and has not taken place overnight.
Many people have observed how this new generation is different from its predecessors, and much has been written about the rules under which they now wish to live. The most dismaying aspect is how pervasive this attitude has become. Not only is the average worker or college graduate unwilling to put forth the effort of prior generations, but so are the elite educated classes.
Several attorneys tell me how difficult it is to get young lawyers to work today. The young ones want what the older ones have, but don’t want to make the requisite sacrifices. This might be an aberration – if it weren’t for so many people telling me the same story!
One of my clients proudly told me about his son and daughter-in-law – newly-graduated attorneys working their way up the ladder at big, reputable firms. The next time we spoke, he informed me that they had resigned their positions to go on a worldwide vacation. And last month, he called to let me know that they were now both working for the government – with 9-5 jobs and built-in benefits.
22.5 million Americans – an utterly staggering number – now work for federal, state, and local government. Stephen Moore, in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, wrote that there are now twice as many people working for government than for manufacturers, and that more people now work for government than for several basic industries combined. Unfortunately, his excellent column failed to identify the most prominent reasons for this dismal situation.
Why do college graduates now seek jobs in government instead of private industry? It has largely to do with lack of ambition. Why take the risks inherent in the private sector when you can have a position that is virtually immune from layoffs, and for which you get vacations, sick days, health insurance, pensions, and every holiday on the calendar including imagined ones? Why accept a job requiring effort and productivity when you can get a government job in which your compensation and benefits have absolutely nothing to do with your performance? In fact, you may actually be discouraged from working too hard because it would embarrass your colleagues. Additionally, there is almost nothing that can cause you to be fired! So why take any risks in the private sector?
Ironically, the government then tries to force these same preposterous work rules onto the private sector – so that government doesn’t appear out of step with private industry.
The fact is that there is just too much government. Government now employs 16% of the current work force, amounting to 138.9 million people. That means that 116.4 million private- sector workers support this country of 308 million people. Government workers don’t help support the rest of us because the taxes they pay are just a reduction of the amount we pay them. They are just a drag on the private economy that needs to support them.
This economic model cannot sustain itself – especially with the current work ethic. When an ever smaller group of people is asked to support the rest of us, while the government hands out lavish employee benefits that far outstrip those found in the private sector, it’s no wonder that young people quickly conclude that a public-sector job is the perfect fit for their slacker attitudes.
While there are certainly exceptions, it seems that the generation now entering the workforce has been raised on the idea that hard work should take a back seat to lifestyle. They have seen – and sheepishly accepted – an ever-growing government sector making decisions for them. At this rate, there will soon not be enough private sector employees to support the government workers, the retired people, and the children of this society.
If we don’t change our current trajectory – and quickly! – then the next time my young Colombian friend comes to America, he will ask: “What the heck happened to this country?”
SOURCE
****************************
But Seriously, Folks
After the Republican presidential field in 2008 spent a year trying to agree with each other, this year's GOP contenders are showing early signs that they have real policy differences, and they're not afraid to debate them. And yet much of the media is too obsessed with vanity candidates and nonissues to cover the serious debate.
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour has begun his presidential campaign by questioning the necessity of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, a break with Republican policy over the last decade. And, while seeking the nomination of a party that largely denies man's impact on climate change, Barbour told a crowd in Iowa in March that it is "prudent" to "proceed as if global warming is an issue."
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney used his inaugural trip to New Hampshire last month to offer a defense of the state's health care plan, rather than backing away from an issue his opponents will certainly use against him. Jon Huntsman, who will explore a race once he returns from serving as ambassador to China at the end of the month, took stands on immigration, gay rights, and the environment that will set him apart from the field. Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty has said frequently that entitlements should be examined in an effort to rein in spending.
The 2008 campaign hardly presented these sorts of policy differences. In countless debates, Republican contenders used their 60 seconds to agree with each other and offer soundbites in hopes of distinguishing themselves from an ideologically homogenous field. Even former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose record offered the clearest opportunities for contrast, did his best to appear just like one of the guys. Only Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, stood out, and the rest of the field used him as a punching bag.
Refreshingly, serious candidates among the 2012 field are showing signs of substantive policy debates. Moderators at each of the early candidate gatherings have a chance to contrast Barbour's views on Afghanistan with Romney's, or with Pawlenty's, or with Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn. Journalists can ask serious questions about Commonwealth Care, its successes and failures, and the role it plays in Romney's legacy. Every candidate will be asked to respond to Rep. Paul Ryan's budget proposal, and to weigh in on whether and how entitlements should be cut to solve the debt crisis.
And yet it is the sideshows that dominate media coverage. Whether it's the pseudo-candidacy of Donald Trump, the fascination over Sarah Palin, or the obsession with anyone who wrongly believes President Obama was not born in the United States, the bulk of the presidential coverage in recent weeks has been profoundly unserious.
Perhaps, in an age of fragmented and increasingly partisan media, that is to be expected. After all, many outlets judge a story based on the clicks it drives to websites, rather than the content of the story itself. Birtherism has proven a popular traffic driver; on Wednesday, Matt Drudge led his site with a preview of a book authored by notorious anti-Obama conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi. Palin drives so much traffic that several national and Beltway publications devote staff time to writing up every television interview, Facebook post, and tweet emanating from her lakeside home in Wasilla, Alaska (For all her protestations that she despises the "lame-stream media," Palin has been very good for business. The worst thing she could do to harm the media is to stop being so popular among her conservative fans).
Trump is the most egregious case of a sideshow borne of the Washington-New York echo chamber. The bombastic businessman and shameless self-promoter has, at one time or another, espoused conflicting opinions on myriad issues, from the stimulus package to abortion. His ego is a source of great humor, as are his widely varying estimates of his own wealth (The only thing that doesn't vary about his bank balance is the trend line: He's always worth more than he was a few days ago, truly a financial feat of Lehman-esque accounting proportions).
And yet Trump is a near-daily fixture on cable television. In the past week, he has sat for extended interviews that aired both on ABC and NBC, and he appears weekly on Fox News. Trump is ratings gold, especially for NBC, which hosts The Apprentice and stands to benefit from any buzz Trump attracts.
Trump is also the source of a different kind of media attention, from exasperated columnists incredulous at the notion that Americans would pay attention to such an obvious blowhard. Just this week, columnists Charlie Cook, Jonah Goldberg, David Brooks, Richard Cohen, Matthew Continetti, Kathleen Parker, and Eugene Robinson have all devoted their time to The Donald. Unlike The Washington Post's Dana Milbank, who successfully went a month without writing about Palin, this column has had no such success in swearing off Trump-apalooza 2011.
Trump winning the Republican nomination, or even competing seriously, is beyond a remote possibility. Palin's hopes of winning aren't much better, and her absence from the national spotlight suggests she's not likely to try. And while rumors that Obama was born somewhere other than on Oahu, Hawaii, may drive traffic, facts, as John Adams lamented, are stubborn things.
There are serious and substantive differences between candidates seeking the presidency for reasons beyond personal gain and publicity. Sadly, the silly season means that's all being missed.
SOURCE
**************************
No security anywhere anymore
Congressman Paul Ryan, one of the least insane men in Washington, has a ten-year plan. President Obama, one of the most insane spenders in Washington, has a twelve-year plan.
At the world’s first “Presidential Facebook town hall meeting” on Wednesday, even Obama had a hard time taking his “plan” seriously. Sometimes he referred to it as a twelve-year plan, sometimes ten years, sometimes saving four trillion, sometimes saving two trillion. So will the Obama plan save four trillion over twelve years or two trillion over ten?
The president’s plan is to balance the budget by climbing into his Little Orphan Obammie costume and singing: “The sun’ll come out tomorrow / Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there’ll be sun.” We’ve already bet our bottom dollar and it’s looking like total eclipse. But Obammie figures if we can only bet Daddy Warbucks’s bottom dollar, the sun will shine.
That’s 2023. Go back 12 years. That’s 1999. Which, if any, politicians in that year correctly identified the prevailing conditions in the America of 2011?
Most of our problems arise from the political class’s blithe assumptions about the future. European welfare systems assumed a mid-20th-century fertility rate to sustain them. They failed to foresee that welfare would become a substitute for family and that Continentals would simply cease breeding. Bismarckian-Rooseveltian pension plans assumed you’d be living off them for the last couple of years of your life. Instead, citizens of developed nations expect to spend the final third of their adult lives enjoying a prolonged taxpayer-funded holiday weekend.
What plans have you made for 2023? The average individual attempts to insure against future uncertainty in a relatively small number of ways: You buy a house because that’s the surest way to preserve and increase wealth. “Safe as houses,” right? But Fannie/Freddie subprime mumbo-jumbo and other government interventions clobbered the housing market. You get an education because that way you’ll always have “something to fall back on.” But massive government-encouraged expansion of “college” led Americans to run up a trillion dollars’ worth of student debt to acquire ever more devalued ersatz sheepskin in worthless pseudo-disciplines.
We’re not talking about the wilder shores of the stock market — Internet start-ups and South Sea bubbles and tulip mania — but two of the safest, dullest investments a modestly prudent person might make to protect himself against the vicissitudes of an unknown future. And we profoundly damaged both of them in pursuit of fictions.
SOURCE
*************************
ELSEWHERE
The midnight ride of Standard & Poor’s: "Three cheers for Standard & Poor’s. On Monday, the rating agency issued a critical warning that America’s debt burden is growing too great. By doing so, it has helped make it less likely for the Washington budget debate to keep going down the path to national bankruptcy. We are now faced with a clear choice between a big-government, high-tax welfare state and a small-government, low-tax republic, such as the founders envisioned."
What are public sector unions for?: "If government, politicians, are indeed those wise and benevolent beings, then why should those who are employed by them need protecting from them? And if those who work for government need protection, shouldn't those of us subject to government also be protected?"
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Sunday, April 24, 2011
A message for Easter Sunday
There are moments in time and space when transitory issues fade in significance as things that seem to matter so much are trumped by what really matters most.
Today, as people around the globe gather to remember, honor, and reflect on events that happened some 2,000 years ago in a micro-spot on the world map, it is fitting, I think, to take a departure from the relentless, and at times tedious debate about politics and policies big and small. Let us, for a moment at least (hopefully a life-long moment), focus on a simple, yet profound scenario. One that can be described succinctly and received joyously—it is something called the Gospel.
The word itself comes from the idea of “good news” or “glad tidings,” and is intended to be a divinely directed message of hope. It is a reminder that there is hope, now and in the future. And though we get worked up into a regular lather over issues that polarize people—and I am not suggesting that these issues lack importance—as I read the Biblical record I find it endlessly fascinating that a small group of people, from ordinary backgrounds, and with few natural gifts, could make such a difference in their world and history itself.
They were the first to experience The Easter Effect. They lived, worked, and later died with a sense of fulfillment and joy because they never got over what they knew to be true, having seen it with their own eyes. They were dramatically changed people. We could use the word “converted” to describe it, completely transformed by an encounter with that aforementioned simple scenario involved in the Gospel. The Apostle Paul put it this way:
When he wrote this, and as first century Christians migrated and ministered en route to the uttermost parts of the earth, it was against the backdrop of the rule of Rome. Social, political, and cultural dynamics were arguably a bit more challenging than what we see in America today, but those pioneers of the faith once for all delivered were largely unmoved by what would seem to be a daunting challenge. This was because they grasped the concept that the message of the Gospel was more about redemption than reformation, more about individual salvation than solving social problems, more about a world to come than the world that was—or is.
This is not to say that these souls on fire were indifferent to cultural or political matters, but they knew that ultimate hope and change were never really possible via human means and methods. And when they did pray for those in authority—even those with tyrannical tendencies in Rome—they did so with the seemingly singular goal of desiring to be left alone in a sort of libertarian way:
Like the prayer for the Tsar in Fiddler on the Roof—that he may stay far away—this was a plea for freedom. But it was also a plea for a particular kind of freedom, to be able to live right and model and share the hope of the Gospel.
They were a generation under the influence of The Easter Effect—people who were changed from the inside out and who eventually turned the world upside down (See: Acts 17:6).
Happy Easter—He Is Risen!
SOURCE
***********************
US economy just a notch above Greece
US finances are in almost as troubled a state as the worst-hit members of the euro zone, economists say, underscoring the pressing need for Washington to reach agreement on how to reduce the deficit. A gauge of "sovereign risk" from economists at Deutsche Bank placed the United States just behind Greece, Ireland and Portugal among 14 advanced economies.
The report, from economists led by Peter Hooper, warned that a failure to make substantial political progress on deficit reduction "would substantially raise the risk of a bond market crisis".
The warning comes days after Standard & Poor's said that it may lower its AAA assessment of the US, amid a political log jam over debt reduction in Washington, and will intensify market concerns about Western governments' debts.
Last night George Papandreou, the Greek Prime Minister, strongly criticised credit rating agencies, saying that they were "seeking to shape our destiny and determine the future of our children".
The Finance Ministry in Athens has asked prosecutors to look into an e-mail sent by a London-based Citigroup trader that referred to market rumours of a restructuring of Greek debt as soon as this weekend. Citigroup has denied any wrongdoing.
Insurance contracts linked to Greek bond swaps suggest that the country has a 67 per cent chance of defaulting within five years, even after accepting a 110 billion euros ($149bn) emergency loan.
This week the implied cost of borrowing on its ten-year bonds rose to 15 per cent, while yields on Irish ten-year government bonds hit 9.8 per cent and yields on their Portuguese equivalents rose to 9.22 per cent.
Greece is one small element of wider sovereign debt concerns that have begun to encompass the US, the world's biggest economy. Capitol Hill has been consumed with political wrangling over whether to increase a $US14.3 trillion ($13.3 trillion) debt ceiling that is due to be breached next month.
If the US national debt hits that level, it would trigger a default.
Deutsche Bank's analysis acknowledged that the risk attached by financial markets to US debt remained very low, as demonstrated by the country's modest borrowing rates. That was in part due to the US dollar remaining the premier reserve currency for world governments.
However, the report noted: "Reputation and reserve currency status can be lost, and failure to move US fiscal policy off its currently unsustainable path would certainly increase the risk."
For the time being, though, Democrats and Republicans have been mired in mudslinging over the debt ceiling.
The White House yesterday accused Republican congressmen of risking a global recession by refusing to agree to raise the debt ceiling unless the move was paired with deep spending cuts.
Even if a deal is struck on time, that will not eradicate the risk of political deadlock over longer-term fiscal problems, such as spiralling healthcare spending.
Projections from the Congressional Budget Office suggest that the national debt could rise from 62 per cent of GDP to 100 per cent in 2025 and 200 per cent by 2040, compared with its 1946 high of 122 per cent.
SOURCE
*************************
The Kennedy Curve
For years, I have puzzled over the mystery of the liberal mindset. I have concluded that it makes no sense to ascribe the capacity of deductive reasoning to an adult American leftist.
The most distinctive display of this phenomenon that I have witnessed in my 55 years of life happened about seven years ago when I had the occasion to speak directly with Senator Ted Kennedy.
I had long wondered why Democrats did not act more strategically with tax rates in order to optimize their collection of revenues. I was about to meet the Democratic Party’s “Lion of the Senate” and I did not want to miss this opportunity. I had studied Arthur Laffer’s theory of the relationship between tax rates and economic behavior, famously coined the Laffer Curve. Dr. Laffer reasons that, once taxes exceed a particular rate, say 18%, revenue producers begin to pay more attention to protecting their earnings and less attention to growing their businesses. At some point, the burden of this defensive behavior results in larger pieces of much smaller pies and a net loss for the tax collector.
So, I began by citing the Laffer Curve and asked Senator Kennedy, “How do you calculate what would be an appropriate level of taxation?”
I recall him shaking his head positively at the words “Laffer Curve” as if to acknowledge that he knew just what I was getting at and he was ready to teach me before I could even finish asking the question.
Quoting directly from my video of the conversation, the Senator began his answer with, “I think the question is, do you have in balance a… Let me put it this way; I wish we had the same review of tax expenditures that we have in terms of spending. We add all kinds of incentives to the tax code. We rarely, if ever, review them or repeal them. … We ought to look at the spending and find out what are going to be the results of that spending. … I think it’s a fair question to ask. …. With this spending, what are we getting for it? … What the percentage is, whether its 16 or 18 percent, whatever … I think it really more has to do with what are we spending it on.”
I marveled at watching Ted Kennedy transform my engagement into a conversation that he would prefer to have.
SOURCE
****************************
Another Leftist fraud
He is clearly a psychopath. A lot of Leftists are but he is so bad that only a fellow-Leftist could believe him
The first tip-off that Greg Mortenson's memoir "Three Cups of Tea" has some credibility issues comes in the book's introduction. Co-author David Oliver Relin writes that as Mortenson is flying over Pakistan, the helicopter pilot marvels to Mortenson, "I've been flying in northern Pakistan for 40 years. How is it you know the terrain better than me?"
The pilot also confides, "Flying with President Musharraf, I've become acquainted with many world leaders, many outstanding gentlemen and ladies. But I think Greg Mortenson is the most remarkable person I've ever met." People don't talk like that. Books don't lead with that level of self-aggrandizement. Unless they want to induct you into a cult.
Last Sunday, "60 Minutes" reporter Steve Kroft ripped into Mortenson's claim of stumbling years ago into a Pakistani village as he descended from a K2 climb and meeting a young girl who asked him to build a school. While he refused Kroft's request for an on-camera interview, in a statement, Mortenson admitted his version of events was "condensed."
It seems Mortenson also fabricated a story of being kidnapped by the Taliban. Kroft interviewed Mansur Khan Mahsud, the research director of an Islamabad think tank, who was surprised to see himself in a photo that Mortenson had claimed showed his 1996 captors. In the statement, Mortenson explained that "Talib" means student of Arabic. And Khan wants to sue him for defamation.
The worst part: "60 Minutes" checked out 30 of the 141 schools that Mortenson's charity, Central Asia Institute, claimed to have built in Afghanistan and Pakistan "mostly for girls." Kroft reported, "Roughly half were empty, built by someone else or not receiving any support at all."
American Institute of Philanthropy President Daniel Borochoff found that in 2009, CAI spent more on "domestic outreach" -- largely advertising and travel promoting Mortenson's books, "like a book tour" -- than it spent overseas.
"Into Thin Air" author Jon Krakauer, who is mentioned in "Three Cups" as a CAI supporter, charged that Mortenson, who has made millions in book sales, used the charity "as his private ATM."
That revelation must have hit "Three Cups" fans in the gut. The memoir asserts that Mortenson made repeated sacrifices -- such as living in his car rather than pay rent -- because "every wasted dollar stole bricks or books from the school."
But there were so many other signals that the book was problematic.
In "Three Cups," Mortenson charmed his Taliban kidnappers by asking for a Quran and showing his devotion -- and so they let him go. Which is amazing.
More amazing was the claim that they gave him money, saying, "For your schools. So, Inshallah, you'll build many more." (It helps if you forget how bad the Taliban take on education for girls is.)
There were other signals. Writer Ann Marlowe questioned some of the "anti-military nonsense" in a 2008 Forbes commentary. Mortenson claimed that during his stint as an Army medic in Germany, Vietnam veterans were hooked on heroin and died "in their bunks and we'd have to go and collect their bodies." Marlowe suggested that readers take his tales with "three grains of salt."
Instead, he sold 3 million books. Why? Through the pouring of "Three Cups," Mortenson came to personify every liberal conceit. He pushed books, not bombs. He had a nuanced take on Islamic extremism. He's not afraid of terrorism; for him, "the enemy is ignorance."
Marlowe observed, "The implication is that this solitary do-gooder's work is a better model for helping the rural poor in areas that are a breeding ground for Islamic extremism." While to the contrary, the U.S. Army built more schools in just one Afghan province in 15 months than CAI built in a decade.
Listeners of KQED-FM's "Forum" last week were outraged and perplexed. On the one hand, Mortenson has done a lot of good for a lot of children. On the other hand, the "60 Minutes" story makes his fans look gullible.
A caller asked: How are we supposed to know a book is a phony? Hmmmm. If the cash-giving girls-school-loving Taliban tale doesn't ring a bell, if the constant reminders of Mortenson's greatness -- and modesty -- don't do the trick, maybe there is another warning sign. Global Fund for Women Vice President Shalini Nataraj warned about any memoir that hails "the white savior who's going to come in and save the local people."
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
There are moments in time and space when transitory issues fade in significance as things that seem to matter so much are trumped by what really matters most.
Today, as people around the globe gather to remember, honor, and reflect on events that happened some 2,000 years ago in a micro-spot on the world map, it is fitting, I think, to take a departure from the relentless, and at times tedious debate about politics and policies big and small. Let us, for a moment at least (hopefully a life-long moment), focus on a simple, yet profound scenario. One that can be described succinctly and received joyously—it is something called the Gospel.
The word itself comes from the idea of “good news” or “glad tidings,” and is intended to be a divinely directed message of hope. It is a reminder that there is hope, now and in the future. And though we get worked up into a regular lather over issues that polarize people—and I am not suggesting that these issues lack importance—as I read the Biblical record I find it endlessly fascinating that a small group of people, from ordinary backgrounds, and with few natural gifts, could make such a difference in their world and history itself.
They were the first to experience The Easter Effect. They lived, worked, and later died with a sense of fulfillment and joy because they never got over what they knew to be true, having seen it with their own eyes. They were dramatically changed people. We could use the word “converted” to describe it, completely transformed by an encounter with that aforementioned simple scenario involved in the Gospel. The Apostle Paul put it this way:
“Moreover, brethren, I declare to you the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received and in which you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast that word which I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He was seen by Cephas, then by the twelve. After that He was seen by over five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain to the present, but some have fallen asleep. After that He was seen by James, then by all the apostles. Then last of all He was seen by me also, as by one born out of due time.” (I Corinthians 15:1-8 NIV)
When he wrote this, and as first century Christians migrated and ministered en route to the uttermost parts of the earth, it was against the backdrop of the rule of Rome. Social, political, and cultural dynamics were arguably a bit more challenging than what we see in America today, but those pioneers of the faith once for all delivered were largely unmoved by what would seem to be a daunting challenge. This was because they grasped the concept that the message of the Gospel was more about redemption than reformation, more about individual salvation than solving social problems, more about a world to come than the world that was—or is.
This is not to say that these souls on fire were indifferent to cultural or political matters, but they knew that ultimate hope and change were never really possible via human means and methods. And when they did pray for those in authority—even those with tyrannical tendencies in Rome—they did so with the seemingly singular goal of desiring to be left alone in a sort of libertarian way:
“Therefore I exhort first of all that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be made for all men, for kings and all who are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence. For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus.” – (I Timothy 2:1-5 NIV)
Like the prayer for the Tsar in Fiddler on the Roof—that he may stay far away—this was a plea for freedom. But it was also a plea for a particular kind of freedom, to be able to live right and model and share the hope of the Gospel.
They were a generation under the influence of The Easter Effect—people who were changed from the inside out and who eventually turned the world upside down (See: Acts 17:6).
Happy Easter—He Is Risen!
SOURCE
***********************
US economy just a notch above Greece
US finances are in almost as troubled a state as the worst-hit members of the euro zone, economists say, underscoring the pressing need for Washington to reach agreement on how to reduce the deficit. A gauge of "sovereign risk" from economists at Deutsche Bank placed the United States just behind Greece, Ireland and Portugal among 14 advanced economies.
The report, from economists led by Peter Hooper, warned that a failure to make substantial political progress on deficit reduction "would substantially raise the risk of a bond market crisis".
The warning comes days after Standard & Poor's said that it may lower its AAA assessment of the US, amid a political log jam over debt reduction in Washington, and will intensify market concerns about Western governments' debts.
Last night George Papandreou, the Greek Prime Minister, strongly criticised credit rating agencies, saying that they were "seeking to shape our destiny and determine the future of our children".
The Finance Ministry in Athens has asked prosecutors to look into an e-mail sent by a London-based Citigroup trader that referred to market rumours of a restructuring of Greek debt as soon as this weekend. Citigroup has denied any wrongdoing.
Insurance contracts linked to Greek bond swaps suggest that the country has a 67 per cent chance of defaulting within five years, even after accepting a 110 billion euros ($149bn) emergency loan.
This week the implied cost of borrowing on its ten-year bonds rose to 15 per cent, while yields on Irish ten-year government bonds hit 9.8 per cent and yields on their Portuguese equivalents rose to 9.22 per cent.
Greece is one small element of wider sovereign debt concerns that have begun to encompass the US, the world's biggest economy. Capitol Hill has been consumed with political wrangling over whether to increase a $US14.3 trillion ($13.3 trillion) debt ceiling that is due to be breached next month.
If the US national debt hits that level, it would trigger a default.
Deutsche Bank's analysis acknowledged that the risk attached by financial markets to US debt remained very low, as demonstrated by the country's modest borrowing rates. That was in part due to the US dollar remaining the premier reserve currency for world governments.
However, the report noted: "Reputation and reserve currency status can be lost, and failure to move US fiscal policy off its currently unsustainable path would certainly increase the risk."
For the time being, though, Democrats and Republicans have been mired in mudslinging over the debt ceiling.
The White House yesterday accused Republican congressmen of risking a global recession by refusing to agree to raise the debt ceiling unless the move was paired with deep spending cuts.
Even if a deal is struck on time, that will not eradicate the risk of political deadlock over longer-term fiscal problems, such as spiralling healthcare spending.
Projections from the Congressional Budget Office suggest that the national debt could rise from 62 per cent of GDP to 100 per cent in 2025 and 200 per cent by 2040, compared with its 1946 high of 122 per cent.
SOURCE
*************************
The Kennedy Curve
For years, I have puzzled over the mystery of the liberal mindset. I have concluded that it makes no sense to ascribe the capacity of deductive reasoning to an adult American leftist.
The most distinctive display of this phenomenon that I have witnessed in my 55 years of life happened about seven years ago when I had the occasion to speak directly with Senator Ted Kennedy.
I had long wondered why Democrats did not act more strategically with tax rates in order to optimize their collection of revenues. I was about to meet the Democratic Party’s “Lion of the Senate” and I did not want to miss this opportunity. I had studied Arthur Laffer’s theory of the relationship between tax rates and economic behavior, famously coined the Laffer Curve. Dr. Laffer reasons that, once taxes exceed a particular rate, say 18%, revenue producers begin to pay more attention to protecting their earnings and less attention to growing their businesses. At some point, the burden of this defensive behavior results in larger pieces of much smaller pies and a net loss for the tax collector.
So, I began by citing the Laffer Curve and asked Senator Kennedy, “How do you calculate what would be an appropriate level of taxation?”
I recall him shaking his head positively at the words “Laffer Curve” as if to acknowledge that he knew just what I was getting at and he was ready to teach me before I could even finish asking the question.
Quoting directly from my video of the conversation, the Senator began his answer with, “I think the question is, do you have in balance a… Let me put it this way; I wish we had the same review of tax expenditures that we have in terms of spending. We add all kinds of incentives to the tax code. We rarely, if ever, review them or repeal them. … We ought to look at the spending and find out what are going to be the results of that spending. … I think it’s a fair question to ask. …. With this spending, what are we getting for it? … What the percentage is, whether its 16 or 18 percent, whatever … I think it really more has to do with what are we spending it on.”
I marveled at watching Ted Kennedy transform my engagement into a conversation that he would prefer to have.
SOURCE
****************************
Another Leftist fraud
He is clearly a psychopath. A lot of Leftists are but he is so bad that only a fellow-Leftist could believe him
The first tip-off that Greg Mortenson's memoir "Three Cups of Tea" has some credibility issues comes in the book's introduction. Co-author David Oliver Relin writes that as Mortenson is flying over Pakistan, the helicopter pilot marvels to Mortenson, "I've been flying in northern Pakistan for 40 years. How is it you know the terrain better than me?"
The pilot also confides, "Flying with President Musharraf, I've become acquainted with many world leaders, many outstanding gentlemen and ladies. But I think Greg Mortenson is the most remarkable person I've ever met." People don't talk like that. Books don't lead with that level of self-aggrandizement. Unless they want to induct you into a cult.
Last Sunday, "60 Minutes" reporter Steve Kroft ripped into Mortenson's claim of stumbling years ago into a Pakistani village as he descended from a K2 climb and meeting a young girl who asked him to build a school. While he refused Kroft's request for an on-camera interview, in a statement, Mortenson admitted his version of events was "condensed."
It seems Mortenson also fabricated a story of being kidnapped by the Taliban. Kroft interviewed Mansur Khan Mahsud, the research director of an Islamabad think tank, who was surprised to see himself in a photo that Mortenson had claimed showed his 1996 captors. In the statement, Mortenson explained that "Talib" means student of Arabic. And Khan wants to sue him for defamation.
The worst part: "60 Minutes" checked out 30 of the 141 schools that Mortenson's charity, Central Asia Institute, claimed to have built in Afghanistan and Pakistan "mostly for girls." Kroft reported, "Roughly half were empty, built by someone else or not receiving any support at all."
American Institute of Philanthropy President Daniel Borochoff found that in 2009, CAI spent more on "domestic outreach" -- largely advertising and travel promoting Mortenson's books, "like a book tour" -- than it spent overseas.
"Into Thin Air" author Jon Krakauer, who is mentioned in "Three Cups" as a CAI supporter, charged that Mortenson, who has made millions in book sales, used the charity "as his private ATM."
That revelation must have hit "Three Cups" fans in the gut. The memoir asserts that Mortenson made repeated sacrifices -- such as living in his car rather than pay rent -- because "every wasted dollar stole bricks or books from the school."
But there were so many other signals that the book was problematic.
In "Three Cups," Mortenson charmed his Taliban kidnappers by asking for a Quran and showing his devotion -- and so they let him go. Which is amazing.
More amazing was the claim that they gave him money, saying, "For your schools. So, Inshallah, you'll build many more." (It helps if you forget how bad the Taliban take on education for girls is.)
There were other signals. Writer Ann Marlowe questioned some of the "anti-military nonsense" in a 2008 Forbes commentary. Mortenson claimed that during his stint as an Army medic in Germany, Vietnam veterans were hooked on heroin and died "in their bunks and we'd have to go and collect their bodies." Marlowe suggested that readers take his tales with "three grains of salt."
Instead, he sold 3 million books. Why? Through the pouring of "Three Cups," Mortenson came to personify every liberal conceit. He pushed books, not bombs. He had a nuanced take on Islamic extremism. He's not afraid of terrorism; for him, "the enemy is ignorance."
Marlowe observed, "The implication is that this solitary do-gooder's work is a better model for helping the rural poor in areas that are a breeding ground for Islamic extremism." While to the contrary, the U.S. Army built more schools in just one Afghan province in 15 months than CAI built in a decade.
Listeners of KQED-FM's "Forum" last week were outraged and perplexed. On the one hand, Mortenson has done a lot of good for a lot of children. On the other hand, the "60 Minutes" story makes his fans look gullible.
A caller asked: How are we supposed to know a book is a phony? Hmmmm. If the cash-giving girls-school-loving Taliban tale doesn't ring a bell, if the constant reminders of Mortenson's greatness -- and modesty -- don't do the trick, maybe there is another warning sign. Global Fund for Women Vice President Shalini Nataraj warned about any memoir that hails "the white savior who's going to come in and save the local people."
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Reagan's Legacy and the Current Malaise: Lower taxes and a strong dollar could spur growth once again
Retired tax accountant Dick McDonald adds: "I suggest that the Revenue Act of 1981 that lowered the top marginal rate from 70% to 28% was a teaser but not the closer. It wasn't until his Revenue Act of 1986 when we closed down all the mainstream tax shelters and instead incorporated and used the ultimate in tax shelters -- the non-taxability of the appreciation in stock -- that we took off"
Reagan came into the White House facing an economy as troubled as ours-one that had even higher unemployment, catastrophic interest rates (18% for mortgages) and a stock market that in real terms had fallen 60% from its mid-1960s levels. When he left office eight years later, the U.S. had become an economic miracle: 18 million new jobs had been created; Silicon Valley had blossomed, becoming a global symbol for innovation; and the stock market was experiencing a bull run that, despite dramatic ups and downs, didn't end until the turn of the 21st century, after the Dow had expanded 15-fold. The expansion of the U.S. economy exceeded the entire size of West Germany's economy, then the world's third-largest.
How did this happen? You could make the case that Reagan's economic miracle had its origins at a Washington, D.C., restaurant in 1974. That December night, 34-year-old University of Chicago professor, Art Laffer, scribbled a single-and now legendary-curve on a cocktail napkin to illustrate to a group of President Ford's advisers why a proposed plan to raise taxes would not increase government revenues. Mr. Laffer posited that deep cuts in existing tax rates would stimulate the economy and ultimately lead to far higher government revenues. Conversely, increase the tax burden and government receipts would fall below expectations because of a weaker economy.
Mr. Laffer's curve headed off the tax boost, but the Ford people did not accept the conclusion that big reductions in tax rates were just what the anemic U.S. economy needed. However, when Reagan met with Mr. Laffer and other like-minded thinkers several years later, he quickly grasped the Laffer Curve's fundamental message.
The concept that a free market unencumbered by barriers, government regulation and taxation will create the most growth-friendly economic environment was simple but radical. After taking the oath of office, Reagan went to work to convince the American people of the benefits of supply-side economics: lower taxes, less regulation, and less government spending, as well as a monetary policy focused on ridding us of the seemingly incurable disease of ever-rising inflation.
Reagan's program was a resounding success. Its centerpiece was the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, which dramatically cut income tax rates for everyone. He managed to pass the bill during his first eight months in office, with bipartisan support in a divided Congress.
Critics howled that Reagan was being financially irresponsible, but the president pressed on. Once his cuts were fully phased-in and the hard fight against inflation was won, the economy took off like a rocket. Reagan's achievements set up a great, long boom in the U.S. and the world that didn't end until the economic crash in 2007. (Yes, there were periods of slower growth rates before that year, but none can be compared to the crash of 2007.)
At the same time, Reagan's British counterpart, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was accomplishing similar feats by taking an axe to Britain's draconian tax system. Almost overnight, Britain went from being Europe's economic weak link to being the continent's most vibrant large economy.
Unfortunately, Reagan was unable to permanently rein in domestic spending and many of his reforms were undone by his successors. Washington politicians slid back into their bad habits, cluttering the tax code with new brackets, exemptions, deductions, phase-ins, carve-outs and special breaks for special interests. And the crucial importance of a strong dollar has been forgotten during the last decade, with terrible results. Today we are once again beset by a Carter-esque malaise, wherein we must accept abnormally high unemployment and the notion that printing more dollars is the way to recovery.
Yet Barack Obama's 2011 State of the Union address was sprinkled with Reagan-like phrases, full of the 40th president's trademark confidence. "The future is ours to win," Mr. Obama said. "But to go there, we can't just stand still." He pledged to "knock down barriers that stand in the way of [American companies'] success." We were told that the president had held meetings with Reagan administration officials, and that he'd even read Lou Cannon's biography of Reagan during his winter vacation.
It's true that both men came into office facing turbulent economies. But there the similarities end.
Reagan aggressively embraced free-market, supply-side principles that empowered the American people to rebuild and creatively expand our economy and standard of living. In contrast, the Obama administration has expanded the powers of government over us and our economy on a scale never before seen in peacetime American history. President Reagan understood, and fervently believed in, the American spirit of free enterprise. So far, President Obama hasn't shown that he does. Mr. Obama still has time to learn the real lessons of Reagan's success. Will he?
SOURCE
*************************
Obama desperate to protect thug unions
National Labor Relations Board says Boeing can't build plant in South Carolina
By Rick Manning - In a stunning move well beyond the scope of their legal mandate, the Obama Administration appointee controlled National Labor Relations Board is suing Boeing Corporation for, get this, building a second production line for their new Dreamliner passenger plane in South Carolina rather than in Washington state.
At a time when corporations like General Electric are busily shutting down U.S. production facilities that manufacture items like light bulbs, in favor of Chinese made products, Boeing had the audacity to decide to create jobs in America. Although maybe the Obama appointed NLRB members missed the part of U.S. history class where the Confederacy lost, and South Carolina remained a part of the U.S.?
Rightfully, Boeing is going to fight the NLRB decision to sue them. One irony of the case is that Obama's recently appointed Chief of Staff, Bill Daley, served as a member of Boeing's Board of Directors when the company decided to create jobs in South Carolina by building a production line in the right to work state.
And that is the heart of the matter. South Carolina is a right to work state whose voters this past November overwhelmingly amended their state's constitution to ensure that a worker has the right to vote on whether they want to be represented by a labor union. The workers at the Boeing plant in South Carolina have also taken the bold step of booting out the union that represented them, effectively ending the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers stranglehold on Boeing production.
Now, Obama's NLRB is attacking Boeing's job creation in South Carolina as "union retaliation" directly related to a 2008 labor strike which crippled Boeing's production in Washington state.
This isn't the first time that the NLRB has targeted South Carolina, as earlier this year they had threatened to use taxpayer dollars to sue the state, along with the states of Utah, South Dakota and Arizona, because their citizens had the audacity to put a workers right to a secret ballot vote in union elections into their respective state constitutions. In direct response to the NLRB lawsuit threat, Congressman Jeff Duncan of South Carolina has introduced legislation prohibiting the NLRB from proceeding with the lawsuit, and has already been joined by 30 co-sponsors.
On top of the dramatic overreach on behalf of the labor union directed board, which was designed by Congress to be a neutral arbiter in labor/management disputes, an astounding 176 members of the U.S. House of Representatives recently voted to completely defund the agency in an amendment offered by Rep. Tom Price of Georgia this past February.
The ultimate irony of the NLRB decision is that this government agency is attempting to tell a company where they can locate a plant in the United States. If successful, other U.S. companies will take note, and not make the mistake of building plants in right to work states, instead opting for more desirable overseas locations that are beyond the reach of Obama's union zealots.
Can anyone wonder why U.S. job creation has been virtually non-existent?
SOURCE
*************************
An example of how high tax rates work
At 35 percent, America's corporate tax rates are among the world's highest -- but such rates may well collect the least
General Electric, the nation's largest corporation, paid no federal taxes in 2010. The profitable company, which shaved 20 percent of its U.S. work force in less than a decade, should inspire a hard look at corporate tax rates and how taxes are collected and avoided. Cash-strapped working Americans are paying GE's bill.
OUTRAGE and envy still ripple from a report in The New York Times that General Electric, the nation's largest corporation, paid no U.S. corporate taxes in 2010.
Zero. Zip. Nada. Indeed, the company, with $14.2 billion in worldwide profits, claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion from Uncle Sam.
GE did not break the law, but the bill it successfully avoided was picked up by the rest of us, or put on the national credit card.
The top U.S. corporate rate is 35 percent, but virtually no one pays that. GE's tax rate is about a third of what other companies pay, and that the company is vulnerable to pay any taxes is hypothetical. GE would have to return profits to these shores from places it set up to avoid taxes.
Policymakers in Washington, D.C., need to reassess rates to bring them into line with the financial realities of the nation and basic equity. Set lower, unavoidable rates that do not complicate job creation, and have a statutory imperative to collect them. As it is now, the higher the rate, the more creative the credits, shelters and loopholes to avoid compliance.
GE has a team of 975 gilded tax-avoidance professionals in a department working to ensure that the rest of America picks up its tab. Oh, and that default jobs-creation rationale? The Times report also noted that since 2002, GE has eliminated a fifth of its work force in the U.S.
Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson, a veteran financial journalist, would cut corporate tax rates, not increase them, and make up the difference by increasing individual tax rates on corporate dividends and capital gains, which he sees as a giveaway to the rich.
U.S. corporate rates are chasing profits offshore, and the only jobs created are for tax lawyers. Set and collect realistic rates.
SOURCE
**********************
Progressive Media and the War on the Unborn
A pathetic blogger at the left-wing blog Wonkette made fun of Sarah Palin's son Trig, who has Down syndrome. Dana Loesch of Andrew Breitbart's Big Journalism website has exposed this whole sordid affair, noting, "This is what happens when a little-known blogger who edits the literary equivalent of the bathroom wall in Walmart isn't clever enough to either write satire or convey why he doesn't like the Palins. And this is considered acceptable by progressives."
What drives a left-wing blogger to mock a little boy with a disability? Is it just hatred for Sarah Palin, a pro-life mother who exposes what is at stake in the battle over the "right to choose?" Or is it that a mother would bring a child with Down syndrome into the world?
This controversy is important because of what it says about the progressive mentality. The progressives, who like to think of themselves as guardians of the most vulnerable and defenseless among us, do not have any sympathy for people they believe should not exist or be born. They believe that a mother should terminate the life of a baby with potential defects. This is not only because of their belief that women's rights always trump the rights of the unborn, but because it is too costly to take care of them, once they come into the world. They support Big Government and higher spending, except on babies whose visible and active lives would make left-wing feminists, a key part of their constituency, feel uncomfortable.
The Wonkette controversy goes far beyond a blogger with bad taste and no conscience. It tells us a lot about the mentality of the progressives in charge of the federal government who are moving ahead with implementation of Obamacare.
It is a fact that when government takes more and more control over the health care of the people, the government will inevitably take over more and more decisions about who lives and who dies. This is the obvious danger that confronts us as Obamacare unfolds. However, in the U.S., at least for the time being, we can make most of those decisions for ourselves. The news is breaking that "Baby Joseph" has returned to Canada, after receiving medical treatment from U.S. hospitals that he couldn't get in his native country, which has socialized medicine. The costs of the medical operation, which left the child free from tubes and machines, were borne by Priests for Life.
In New Zealand, which also has socialized medicine, the situation is even more dire, as the government promotes the screening and killing of unborn children diagnosed with Down syndrome. As I noted in a previous column, "The new government policy in New Zealand was preceded by the completion of a report on the `cost effectiveness' of aborting Down syndrome babies. It was determined that it was just too expensive to allow these babies to live."
However, it appears that "60 Minutes"-the version that airs in New Zealand-may be turning a critical eye on what the government has been doing.
Mike Sullivan, a professional engineer in New Zealand, is the father of an almost-three-year-old girl with Down syndrome and an advocate for the rights of the handicapped. He says the upcoming New Zealand "60 Minutes" show covers the government's "quality improvement" program that was introduced last year and targets unborn babies with Down syndrome for eradication through preventing births. "For those who are not aware of this issue," he says, "the government's screening program is preventing the births of 75 percent of people with Down syndrome and is a gross form of discrimination against this group of people, treating these people as less human than others."
He says the documentary will cover these areas:
* The legal action that is being taken out by 23 parents and Right to Life of New Zealand against the government of New Zealand for crimes against humanity.
* Evidence that the government deliberately avoided public consultation on the new program and has excluded people with Down syndrome in their decision making.
* Evidence that the government understood the consequences of the program would be to reduce the number of births of people with Down syndrome.
* Presenting the everyday lives of people with Down syndrome, who are just "getting on with life like the rest of us."
Sullivan says that while it is not entirely confirmed, it looks like "60 Minutes" of New Zealand will air the story next Wednesday, April 27. While the audience is in New Zealand, the program could be a warning of what could happen to America's most vulnerable under Obamacare.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Retired tax accountant Dick McDonald adds: "I suggest that the Revenue Act of 1981 that lowered the top marginal rate from 70% to 28% was a teaser but not the closer. It wasn't until his Revenue Act of 1986 when we closed down all the mainstream tax shelters and instead incorporated and used the ultimate in tax shelters -- the non-taxability of the appreciation in stock -- that we took off"
Reagan came into the White House facing an economy as troubled as ours-one that had even higher unemployment, catastrophic interest rates (18% for mortgages) and a stock market that in real terms had fallen 60% from its mid-1960s levels. When he left office eight years later, the U.S. had become an economic miracle: 18 million new jobs had been created; Silicon Valley had blossomed, becoming a global symbol for innovation; and the stock market was experiencing a bull run that, despite dramatic ups and downs, didn't end until the turn of the 21st century, after the Dow had expanded 15-fold. The expansion of the U.S. economy exceeded the entire size of West Germany's economy, then the world's third-largest.
How did this happen? You could make the case that Reagan's economic miracle had its origins at a Washington, D.C., restaurant in 1974. That December night, 34-year-old University of Chicago professor, Art Laffer, scribbled a single-and now legendary-curve on a cocktail napkin to illustrate to a group of President Ford's advisers why a proposed plan to raise taxes would not increase government revenues. Mr. Laffer posited that deep cuts in existing tax rates would stimulate the economy and ultimately lead to far higher government revenues. Conversely, increase the tax burden and government receipts would fall below expectations because of a weaker economy.
Mr. Laffer's curve headed off the tax boost, but the Ford people did not accept the conclusion that big reductions in tax rates were just what the anemic U.S. economy needed. However, when Reagan met with Mr. Laffer and other like-minded thinkers several years later, he quickly grasped the Laffer Curve's fundamental message.
The concept that a free market unencumbered by barriers, government regulation and taxation will create the most growth-friendly economic environment was simple but radical. After taking the oath of office, Reagan went to work to convince the American people of the benefits of supply-side economics: lower taxes, less regulation, and less government spending, as well as a monetary policy focused on ridding us of the seemingly incurable disease of ever-rising inflation.
Reagan's program was a resounding success. Its centerpiece was the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, which dramatically cut income tax rates for everyone. He managed to pass the bill during his first eight months in office, with bipartisan support in a divided Congress.
Critics howled that Reagan was being financially irresponsible, but the president pressed on. Once his cuts were fully phased-in and the hard fight against inflation was won, the economy took off like a rocket. Reagan's achievements set up a great, long boom in the U.S. and the world that didn't end until the economic crash in 2007. (Yes, there were periods of slower growth rates before that year, but none can be compared to the crash of 2007.)
At the same time, Reagan's British counterpart, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was accomplishing similar feats by taking an axe to Britain's draconian tax system. Almost overnight, Britain went from being Europe's economic weak link to being the continent's most vibrant large economy.
Unfortunately, Reagan was unable to permanently rein in domestic spending and many of his reforms were undone by his successors. Washington politicians slid back into their bad habits, cluttering the tax code with new brackets, exemptions, deductions, phase-ins, carve-outs and special breaks for special interests. And the crucial importance of a strong dollar has been forgotten during the last decade, with terrible results. Today we are once again beset by a Carter-esque malaise, wherein we must accept abnormally high unemployment and the notion that printing more dollars is the way to recovery.
Yet Barack Obama's 2011 State of the Union address was sprinkled with Reagan-like phrases, full of the 40th president's trademark confidence. "The future is ours to win," Mr. Obama said. "But to go there, we can't just stand still." He pledged to "knock down barriers that stand in the way of [American companies'] success." We were told that the president had held meetings with Reagan administration officials, and that he'd even read Lou Cannon's biography of Reagan during his winter vacation.
It's true that both men came into office facing turbulent economies. But there the similarities end.
Reagan aggressively embraced free-market, supply-side principles that empowered the American people to rebuild and creatively expand our economy and standard of living. In contrast, the Obama administration has expanded the powers of government over us and our economy on a scale never before seen in peacetime American history. President Reagan understood, and fervently believed in, the American spirit of free enterprise. So far, President Obama hasn't shown that he does. Mr. Obama still has time to learn the real lessons of Reagan's success. Will he?
SOURCE
*************************
Obama desperate to protect thug unions
National Labor Relations Board says Boeing can't build plant in South Carolina
By Rick Manning - In a stunning move well beyond the scope of their legal mandate, the Obama Administration appointee controlled National Labor Relations Board is suing Boeing Corporation for, get this, building a second production line for their new Dreamliner passenger plane in South Carolina rather than in Washington state.
At a time when corporations like General Electric are busily shutting down U.S. production facilities that manufacture items like light bulbs, in favor of Chinese made products, Boeing had the audacity to decide to create jobs in America. Although maybe the Obama appointed NLRB members missed the part of U.S. history class where the Confederacy lost, and South Carolina remained a part of the U.S.?
Rightfully, Boeing is going to fight the NLRB decision to sue them. One irony of the case is that Obama's recently appointed Chief of Staff, Bill Daley, served as a member of Boeing's Board of Directors when the company decided to create jobs in South Carolina by building a production line in the right to work state.
And that is the heart of the matter. South Carolina is a right to work state whose voters this past November overwhelmingly amended their state's constitution to ensure that a worker has the right to vote on whether they want to be represented by a labor union. The workers at the Boeing plant in South Carolina have also taken the bold step of booting out the union that represented them, effectively ending the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers stranglehold on Boeing production.
Now, Obama's NLRB is attacking Boeing's job creation in South Carolina as "union retaliation" directly related to a 2008 labor strike which crippled Boeing's production in Washington state.
This isn't the first time that the NLRB has targeted South Carolina, as earlier this year they had threatened to use taxpayer dollars to sue the state, along with the states of Utah, South Dakota and Arizona, because their citizens had the audacity to put a workers right to a secret ballot vote in union elections into their respective state constitutions. In direct response to the NLRB lawsuit threat, Congressman Jeff Duncan of South Carolina has introduced legislation prohibiting the NLRB from proceeding with the lawsuit, and has already been joined by 30 co-sponsors.
On top of the dramatic overreach on behalf of the labor union directed board, which was designed by Congress to be a neutral arbiter in labor/management disputes, an astounding 176 members of the U.S. House of Representatives recently voted to completely defund the agency in an amendment offered by Rep. Tom Price of Georgia this past February.
The ultimate irony of the NLRB decision is that this government agency is attempting to tell a company where they can locate a plant in the United States. If successful, other U.S. companies will take note, and not make the mistake of building plants in right to work states, instead opting for more desirable overseas locations that are beyond the reach of Obama's union zealots.
Can anyone wonder why U.S. job creation has been virtually non-existent?
SOURCE
*************************
An example of how high tax rates work
At 35 percent, America's corporate tax rates are among the world's highest -- but such rates may well collect the least
General Electric, the nation's largest corporation, paid no federal taxes in 2010. The profitable company, which shaved 20 percent of its U.S. work force in less than a decade, should inspire a hard look at corporate tax rates and how taxes are collected and avoided. Cash-strapped working Americans are paying GE's bill.
OUTRAGE and envy still ripple from a report in The New York Times that General Electric, the nation's largest corporation, paid no U.S. corporate taxes in 2010.
Zero. Zip. Nada. Indeed, the company, with $14.2 billion in worldwide profits, claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion from Uncle Sam.
GE did not break the law, but the bill it successfully avoided was picked up by the rest of us, or put on the national credit card.
The top U.S. corporate rate is 35 percent, but virtually no one pays that. GE's tax rate is about a third of what other companies pay, and that the company is vulnerable to pay any taxes is hypothetical. GE would have to return profits to these shores from places it set up to avoid taxes.
Policymakers in Washington, D.C., need to reassess rates to bring them into line with the financial realities of the nation and basic equity. Set lower, unavoidable rates that do not complicate job creation, and have a statutory imperative to collect them. As it is now, the higher the rate, the more creative the credits, shelters and loopholes to avoid compliance.
GE has a team of 975 gilded tax-avoidance professionals in a department working to ensure that the rest of America picks up its tab. Oh, and that default jobs-creation rationale? The Times report also noted that since 2002, GE has eliminated a fifth of its work force in the U.S.
Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson, a veteran financial journalist, would cut corporate tax rates, not increase them, and make up the difference by increasing individual tax rates on corporate dividends and capital gains, which he sees as a giveaway to the rich.
U.S. corporate rates are chasing profits offshore, and the only jobs created are for tax lawyers. Set and collect realistic rates.
SOURCE
**********************
Progressive Media and the War on the Unborn
A pathetic blogger at the left-wing blog Wonkette made fun of Sarah Palin's son Trig, who has Down syndrome. Dana Loesch of Andrew Breitbart's Big Journalism website has exposed this whole sordid affair, noting, "This is what happens when a little-known blogger who edits the literary equivalent of the bathroom wall in Walmart isn't clever enough to either write satire or convey why he doesn't like the Palins. And this is considered acceptable by progressives."
What drives a left-wing blogger to mock a little boy with a disability? Is it just hatred for Sarah Palin, a pro-life mother who exposes what is at stake in the battle over the "right to choose?" Or is it that a mother would bring a child with Down syndrome into the world?
This controversy is important because of what it says about the progressive mentality. The progressives, who like to think of themselves as guardians of the most vulnerable and defenseless among us, do not have any sympathy for people they believe should not exist or be born. They believe that a mother should terminate the life of a baby with potential defects. This is not only because of their belief that women's rights always trump the rights of the unborn, but because it is too costly to take care of them, once they come into the world. They support Big Government and higher spending, except on babies whose visible and active lives would make left-wing feminists, a key part of their constituency, feel uncomfortable.
The Wonkette controversy goes far beyond a blogger with bad taste and no conscience. It tells us a lot about the mentality of the progressives in charge of the federal government who are moving ahead with implementation of Obamacare.
It is a fact that when government takes more and more control over the health care of the people, the government will inevitably take over more and more decisions about who lives and who dies. This is the obvious danger that confronts us as Obamacare unfolds. However, in the U.S., at least for the time being, we can make most of those decisions for ourselves. The news is breaking that "Baby Joseph" has returned to Canada, after receiving medical treatment from U.S. hospitals that he couldn't get in his native country, which has socialized medicine. The costs of the medical operation, which left the child free from tubes and machines, were borne by Priests for Life.
In New Zealand, which also has socialized medicine, the situation is even more dire, as the government promotes the screening and killing of unborn children diagnosed with Down syndrome. As I noted in a previous column, "The new government policy in New Zealand was preceded by the completion of a report on the `cost effectiveness' of aborting Down syndrome babies. It was determined that it was just too expensive to allow these babies to live."
However, it appears that "60 Minutes"-the version that airs in New Zealand-may be turning a critical eye on what the government has been doing.
Mike Sullivan, a professional engineer in New Zealand, is the father of an almost-three-year-old girl with Down syndrome and an advocate for the rights of the handicapped. He says the upcoming New Zealand "60 Minutes" show covers the government's "quality improvement" program that was introduced last year and targets unborn babies with Down syndrome for eradication through preventing births. "For those who are not aware of this issue," he says, "the government's screening program is preventing the births of 75 percent of people with Down syndrome and is a gross form of discrimination against this group of people, treating these people as less human than others."
He says the documentary will cover these areas:
* The legal action that is being taken out by 23 parents and Right to Life of New Zealand against the government of New Zealand for crimes against humanity.
* Evidence that the government deliberately avoided public consultation on the new program and has excluded people with Down syndrome in their decision making.
* Evidence that the government understood the consequences of the program would be to reduce the number of births of people with Down syndrome.
* Presenting the everyday lives of people with Down syndrome, who are just "getting on with life like the rest of us."
Sullivan says that while it is not entirely confirmed, it looks like "60 Minutes" of New Zealand will air the story next Wednesday, April 27. While the audience is in New Zealand, the program could be a warning of what could happen to America's most vulnerable under Obamacare.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Friday, April 22, 2011
The Rich Aren’t Getting Richer
Actual super-wealthy households saw their income decline
Are the rich really getting richer? That’s a pretty standard line from the Left. This is not true.
The numbers generally cited in support of this argument do not actually tell us much about what has happened to the incomes of wealthy households over time. That’s because the people who are in the top bracket today are not the people who were in the top bracket last year. There’s a good deal of socioeconomic mobility in the United States — more than you’d think. Our dear, dear friends at the IRS keep track of actual households (boy, do they ever!), and sometimes the Treasury publishes data about what has happened to them. For instance, among those who in 1996 were in the very highest income group isolated for study — the top 0.01 percent — 75 percent were in a lower income group by 2005. The median real income of super-rich households went down, not up. The rich got poorer. Among actual households, income grew proportionally more for those who started off in the low-income groups than those that began in high-income groups.
That wasn’t even an unusually good decade in terms of mobility. During the horrible, horrible Reagan years, as National Review noted back in 1991, the average income growth for actual households in the lowest income bracket was 77 percent over the course of a decade; income growth for actual households in the top group was only 5 percent during those same years. Of those who were in the poorest fifth in 1979, 85.8 percent had moved to a higher bracket by 1988, and 14.7 percent of them moved to the top bracket — which is to say, the poor of 1979 were more likely to be the rich of 1988 than to be the poor of 1988. The poor got richer, and some of them got a lot richer. Reagan’s record has not been matched — Ronald Reagan was the champion of the poor, as it turns out — but economic mobility has been pretty stable for the past 20 years: About 50 percent of U.S. households move from one income group to a different one every decade, and actual households initially in the low-income groups see proportionally more income growth than do actual households initially in the high-income groups.
When somebody says that that top 1 percent saw its income go up by X in the last decade, they are not really talking about what happened to actual households in the top 1 percent. Rather, they are talking about how much money one has to make to qualify for the top 1 percent. All that really means is that the 3 million highest-paid Americans in 2010 made more money than did the 3 million highest-paid Americans in 2000, the 100,000 highest-paid Americans this year made more money than did the 100,000 highest-paid Americans made in 2000, that the 50,000 highest-paid Americans made more money this year than did the 50,000 highest-paid Americans made in 2000, that the 1,000 highest-paid Americans this year made more money than did the 1,000 highest-paid Americans made in 2000, etc., which is not shocking. But, as the Treasury data show: They are not the same people.
* Income mobility of individuals was considerable in the U.S. economy during the 1996 through 2005 period with roughly half of taxpayers who began in the bottom quintile moving up to a higher income group within ten years.
* About 55 percent of taxpayers moved to a different income quintile within ten years.
* Among those with the very highest incomes in 1996 — the top 1/100 of one percent — only 25 percent remained in the group in 2005. Moreover, the median real income of these taxpayers declined over the study period.
* The degree of mobility among income groups is unchanged from the prior decade (1987 through 1996).
* Economic growth resulted in rising incomes for most taxpayers over the study period: Median real incomes of all taxpayers increased by 24 percent after adjusting for inflation; real incomes of two-thirds of all taxpayers increased over this period; and median incomes of those initially in the lower income groups increased more than the median incomes of those initially in the high income groups.
Or, as the authors of the study put it: “While the share of income of the top 1 percent is higher than in prior years, it is not a fixed group of households receiving this larger share of income"
More HERE
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Poverty Is Easy to Explain
There is very little either complicated or interesting about poverty. Poverty has been man’s condition throughout his history. The causes of poverty are quite simple and straightforward. Generally, individual people or entire nations are poor for one or more of the following reasons: (1) they cannot produce many things highly valued by others; (2) they can produce things valued by others but they are prevented from doing so; or (3) they volunteer to be poor.
The true mystery is why there is any affluence at all. That is, how did a tiny proportion of man’s population (mostly in the West) for only a tiny part of man’s history (mainly in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries) manage to escape the fate of their fellow men?
Sometimes, in reference to the United States, people point to its rich endowment of natural resources. This explanation is unsatisfactory. Were abundant natural resources the cause of affluence, Africa and South America would stand out as the richest continents, instead of being home to some of the world’s most miserably poor people. By contrast, that explanation would suggest that resource-poor countries like Japan, Hong Kong, and Great Britain should be poor instead of ranking among the world’s richest places.
Another unsatisfactory explanation of poverty is colonialism. This argument suggests that third-world poverty is a legacy of having been colonized, exploited, and robbed of its riches by the mother country. But it turns out that countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were colonies; yet they are among the world’s richest countries. Hong Kong was a colony of Great Britain until 1997, when China regained sovereignty, but it managed to become the second richest political jurisdiction in the Far East. On the other hand, Ethiopia, Liberia, Tibet, and Nepal were never colonies, or were so for only a few years, and they rank among the world’s poorest and most backward countries.
Despite the many justified criticisms of colonialism and, I might add, multinationals, both served as a means of transferring Western technology and institutions, bringing backward peoples into greater contact with a more-developed Western world. A tragic fact is that many African countries have suffered significant decline since independence. In many of those countries the average citizen can boast that he ate more regularly and enjoyed greater human-rights protections under colonial rule. The colonial powers never perpetrated the unspeakable human rights abuses, including genocide, that we have seen in post-independence Burundi, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Central African Empire, Somalia, and elsewhere.
Any economist who suggests he has a complete answer to the causes of affluence should be viewed with suspicion. We do not know fully what makes some societies richer than others. However, we can make guesses based on correlations. Start out by ranking countries according to their economic systems. Conceptually we could arrange them from more capitalistic (having a larger free-market sector) to more communistic (with extensive State intervention and planning). Then consult Amnesty International’s ranking of countries according to human-rights abuses. Then get World Bank income statistics and rank countries from highest to lowest per capita income.
Compiling the three lists, one would observe a very strong, though imperfect, correlation: Those countries with greater economic liberty tend also to have stronger protections of human rights. And their people are wealthier. That finding is not a coincidence, so let us speculate on the relationship.
Rights and Prosperity
One way to gauge human-rights protection is to ask to what extent the State protects voluntary exchange and private property. These signify the rights to acquire, keep, and dispose of property in any fashion so long as one does not violate the rights of others. The difference between private property rights and collectively held rights is not simply philosophical. Private property produces systemically different incentives and results from collective property.
Since collectivists often trivialize private property rights, they are worth elaborating. When property rights are held privately the costs and benefits of decisions are concentrated in the individual decision maker; with collectively held property rights they are dispersed across society. For example, private property forces homeowners to take into account the effect of their current decisions on the future value of their homes, because that value depends, among other things, on how long the property will provide housing services. Thus privately owned property holds one’s personal wealth hostage to doing the socially responsible thing—economizing scarce resources.
Contrast these incentives to those of collective ownership. When the government owns the house, the individual has less incentive to take care of it simply because he does not capture the full benefit of his efforts. It is dispersed across society instead. The costs of neglecting the house are similarly spread. You do not have to be a rocket scientist to predict that under these circumstances, less care will be taken.
Nor is nominal collective ownership the only force that weakens social responsibility. When government taxes property, it changes the ownership characteristics. If government were to impose a 75 percent tax on a person selling his house, it would reduce his incentive to use the house wisely.
This argument applies to all activities, including work and investment. Whatever lowers the return from or raises the cost of an investment reduces incentives to make that investment in the first place. This applies to investment in human as well as physical capital—that is, those activities that raise the productive capacity of individuals.
To a significant degree the wealth of nations is embodied in their people. The starkest example of this is the experience of the Germans and Japanese after World War II. During the war, Allied bombing missions destroyed nearly the entire physical stock of each country. What was not destroyed was the human capital of the people: their skills and education. In two or three decades, both countries reemerged as formidable economic forces. The Marshall Plan and other U.S. subsidies to Europe and Japan cannot begin to explain their recovery.
Proper identification of the causes of poverty is critical. If it is seen, as is too often the case, as a result of exploitation, the policy recommendation that naturally emerges is income redistribution—that is, government confiscation of some people’s “ill-gotten” gains and “restoration” to their “rightful” owners. This is the politics of envy: bigger and bigger welfare programs domestically and bigger and bigger foreign-aid programs internationally.
If poverty is correctly seen as a result of the unwise government intervention and lack of productive capacity, more effective policy recommendations emerge.
SOURCE
*********************
Obama vs. Palin
The contrast between the speeches they gave last week suggests that when the 2012 presidential campaign begins in earnest, the news media will have difficulty maintaining the story lines they've been pushing about Barack Obama and Sarah Palin.
Mr. Obama is "a great leader in the mold of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt," we were told during the last presidential campaign.
The journalists who assured us of this based their assessment on Mr. Obama's oratorical skills rather than upon his actual accomplishments, which were meager.
His opponents agree Mr. Obama is a better speaker than he is a president. But the fiscal policy speech he made at George Washington University last Wednesday (4/13) -- during which Vice President Joe Biden nodded off -- indicates he's not that terrific an orator, either.
The speech "was not just weak, but pitiful,' a "waste of breath," said Clive Crook, editor of the Atlantic magazine.
Comedian Stephen Colbert thought the speech was "boring." Comedian Jon Stewart mocked the tortured manner in which Mr. Obama tried to avoid describing the tax increases he was proposing as tax increases.
And these are supporters of the president.
Mr. Obama went to GWU to make up for an earlier failure of leadership. In February, he submitted a proposed budget so frivolous no one paid attention to it. This permitted House Republicans to capture the initiative in the debate with the very substantial budget plan authored by Rep. Paul Ryan.
The president invited Rep. Ryan to attend the speech, which he did, expecting to hear a serious counterproposal. What he heard instead was "the sort of harangue one would expect from a rabidly devoted partisan hack, with no relation whatever to the thoughtful appeals to reason and common values that historically have characterized presidential leadership," said the Washington Examiner.
Mr. Obama grossly misrepresented Mr. Ryan's plan and called him names, but offered no real plan of his own to reduce our $14 trillion national debt.
The president's speech was "dishonest even by modern political standards," said the Wall Street Journal.
It was churlish of the president to invite Rep. Ryan to the speech, and then to attack him from the podium. It was also cowardly to attack a political opponent in a forum in which he could not respond.
Barack Obama these days speaks only before friendly audiences. On Saturday (4/16), Sarah Palin journeyed to Madison, Wisconsin where she braved snow, cold, and union protesters who tried to disrupt her Game On! speech by beating drums and blowing whistles.
"Sarah Palin rides to the sound of the guns," noted Reuters columnist James Pethokoukis.
After her surprise selection as John McCain's running mate and subsequently, many in the news media have described the former Alaska governor as an ignorant bumpkin with extreme views.
Ms. Palin sure didn't sound that way in Madison. In a 15-minute speech Mr. Pethokoukis described as "powerful, pugnacious and presidential," Ms. Palin vigorously defended Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in his battle with public employee unions; slammed President Obama for his attack on Paul Ryan, and criticized Congressional Republicans for being too timid in opposing Mr. Obama's spending.
"She was feisty. She was bold. She was gutsy," said Jedediah Bila in the Daily Caller.
Ms. Palin was also concise and funny. Of President Obama's budget, she said: "We're flat broke and he thinks these solar shingles and really fast trains will save us. So now he's shouting ‘all aboard' his bullet train to bankruptcy. Win the Future? WTF is about right."
"If Sarah Palin's not running for president, what a terrible waste that would be of the best stump speech I've heard since, well, Palin's ‘08 convention speech," said John Nolte of Big Government.
Ms. Palin scores low in polls today, chiefly because of how thoroughly the news media have maligned her. But the Sarah Palin on display in Madison was nothing like the media caricature. As more Americans see that Sarah, her numbers will change.
Barack Obama also is nothing like the news media's description of him. As Americans see more of the detached, petulant, clueless and spiteful little man on display at George Washington University, his numbers will change, too.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Actual super-wealthy households saw their income decline
Are the rich really getting richer? That’s a pretty standard line from the Left. This is not true.
The numbers generally cited in support of this argument do not actually tell us much about what has happened to the incomes of wealthy households over time. That’s because the people who are in the top bracket today are not the people who were in the top bracket last year. There’s a good deal of socioeconomic mobility in the United States — more than you’d think. Our dear, dear friends at the IRS keep track of actual households (boy, do they ever!), and sometimes the Treasury publishes data about what has happened to them. For instance, among those who in 1996 were in the very highest income group isolated for study — the top 0.01 percent — 75 percent were in a lower income group by 2005. The median real income of super-rich households went down, not up. The rich got poorer. Among actual households, income grew proportionally more for those who started off in the low-income groups than those that began in high-income groups.
That wasn’t even an unusually good decade in terms of mobility. During the horrible, horrible Reagan years, as National Review noted back in 1991, the average income growth for actual households in the lowest income bracket was 77 percent over the course of a decade; income growth for actual households in the top group was only 5 percent during those same years. Of those who were in the poorest fifth in 1979, 85.8 percent had moved to a higher bracket by 1988, and 14.7 percent of them moved to the top bracket — which is to say, the poor of 1979 were more likely to be the rich of 1988 than to be the poor of 1988. The poor got richer, and some of them got a lot richer. Reagan’s record has not been matched — Ronald Reagan was the champion of the poor, as it turns out — but economic mobility has been pretty stable for the past 20 years: About 50 percent of U.S. households move from one income group to a different one every decade, and actual households initially in the low-income groups see proportionally more income growth than do actual households initially in the high-income groups.
When somebody says that that top 1 percent saw its income go up by X in the last decade, they are not really talking about what happened to actual households in the top 1 percent. Rather, they are talking about how much money one has to make to qualify for the top 1 percent. All that really means is that the 3 million highest-paid Americans in 2010 made more money than did the 3 million highest-paid Americans in 2000, the 100,000 highest-paid Americans this year made more money than did the 100,000 highest-paid Americans made in 2000, that the 50,000 highest-paid Americans made more money this year than did the 50,000 highest-paid Americans made in 2000, that the 1,000 highest-paid Americans this year made more money than did the 1,000 highest-paid Americans made in 2000, etc., which is not shocking. But, as the Treasury data show: They are not the same people.
* Income mobility of individuals was considerable in the U.S. economy during the 1996 through 2005 period with roughly half of taxpayers who began in the bottom quintile moving up to a higher income group within ten years.
* About 55 percent of taxpayers moved to a different income quintile within ten years.
* Among those with the very highest incomes in 1996 — the top 1/100 of one percent — only 25 percent remained in the group in 2005. Moreover, the median real income of these taxpayers declined over the study period.
* The degree of mobility among income groups is unchanged from the prior decade (1987 through 1996).
* Economic growth resulted in rising incomes for most taxpayers over the study period: Median real incomes of all taxpayers increased by 24 percent after adjusting for inflation; real incomes of two-thirds of all taxpayers increased over this period; and median incomes of those initially in the lower income groups increased more than the median incomes of those initially in the high income groups.
Or, as the authors of the study put it: “While the share of income of the top 1 percent is higher than in prior years, it is not a fixed group of households receiving this larger share of income"
More HERE
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Poverty Is Easy to Explain
There is very little either complicated or interesting about poverty. Poverty has been man’s condition throughout his history. The causes of poverty are quite simple and straightforward. Generally, individual people or entire nations are poor for one or more of the following reasons: (1) they cannot produce many things highly valued by others; (2) they can produce things valued by others but they are prevented from doing so; or (3) they volunteer to be poor.
The true mystery is why there is any affluence at all. That is, how did a tiny proportion of man’s population (mostly in the West) for only a tiny part of man’s history (mainly in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries) manage to escape the fate of their fellow men?
Sometimes, in reference to the United States, people point to its rich endowment of natural resources. This explanation is unsatisfactory. Were abundant natural resources the cause of affluence, Africa and South America would stand out as the richest continents, instead of being home to some of the world’s most miserably poor people. By contrast, that explanation would suggest that resource-poor countries like Japan, Hong Kong, and Great Britain should be poor instead of ranking among the world’s richest places.
Another unsatisfactory explanation of poverty is colonialism. This argument suggests that third-world poverty is a legacy of having been colonized, exploited, and robbed of its riches by the mother country. But it turns out that countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were colonies; yet they are among the world’s richest countries. Hong Kong was a colony of Great Britain until 1997, when China regained sovereignty, but it managed to become the second richest political jurisdiction in the Far East. On the other hand, Ethiopia, Liberia, Tibet, and Nepal were never colonies, or were so for only a few years, and they rank among the world’s poorest and most backward countries.
Despite the many justified criticisms of colonialism and, I might add, multinationals, both served as a means of transferring Western technology and institutions, bringing backward peoples into greater contact with a more-developed Western world. A tragic fact is that many African countries have suffered significant decline since independence. In many of those countries the average citizen can boast that he ate more regularly and enjoyed greater human-rights protections under colonial rule. The colonial powers never perpetrated the unspeakable human rights abuses, including genocide, that we have seen in post-independence Burundi, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Central African Empire, Somalia, and elsewhere.
Any economist who suggests he has a complete answer to the causes of affluence should be viewed with suspicion. We do not know fully what makes some societies richer than others. However, we can make guesses based on correlations. Start out by ranking countries according to their economic systems. Conceptually we could arrange them from more capitalistic (having a larger free-market sector) to more communistic (with extensive State intervention and planning). Then consult Amnesty International’s ranking of countries according to human-rights abuses. Then get World Bank income statistics and rank countries from highest to lowest per capita income.
Compiling the three lists, one would observe a very strong, though imperfect, correlation: Those countries with greater economic liberty tend also to have stronger protections of human rights. And their people are wealthier. That finding is not a coincidence, so let us speculate on the relationship.
Rights and Prosperity
One way to gauge human-rights protection is to ask to what extent the State protects voluntary exchange and private property. These signify the rights to acquire, keep, and dispose of property in any fashion so long as one does not violate the rights of others. The difference between private property rights and collectively held rights is not simply philosophical. Private property produces systemically different incentives and results from collective property.
Since collectivists often trivialize private property rights, they are worth elaborating. When property rights are held privately the costs and benefits of decisions are concentrated in the individual decision maker; with collectively held property rights they are dispersed across society. For example, private property forces homeowners to take into account the effect of their current decisions on the future value of their homes, because that value depends, among other things, on how long the property will provide housing services. Thus privately owned property holds one’s personal wealth hostage to doing the socially responsible thing—economizing scarce resources.
Contrast these incentives to those of collective ownership. When the government owns the house, the individual has less incentive to take care of it simply because he does not capture the full benefit of his efforts. It is dispersed across society instead. The costs of neglecting the house are similarly spread. You do not have to be a rocket scientist to predict that under these circumstances, less care will be taken.
Nor is nominal collective ownership the only force that weakens social responsibility. When government taxes property, it changes the ownership characteristics. If government were to impose a 75 percent tax on a person selling his house, it would reduce his incentive to use the house wisely.
This argument applies to all activities, including work and investment. Whatever lowers the return from or raises the cost of an investment reduces incentives to make that investment in the first place. This applies to investment in human as well as physical capital—that is, those activities that raise the productive capacity of individuals.
To a significant degree the wealth of nations is embodied in their people. The starkest example of this is the experience of the Germans and Japanese after World War II. During the war, Allied bombing missions destroyed nearly the entire physical stock of each country. What was not destroyed was the human capital of the people: their skills and education. In two or three decades, both countries reemerged as formidable economic forces. The Marshall Plan and other U.S. subsidies to Europe and Japan cannot begin to explain their recovery.
Proper identification of the causes of poverty is critical. If it is seen, as is too often the case, as a result of exploitation, the policy recommendation that naturally emerges is income redistribution—that is, government confiscation of some people’s “ill-gotten” gains and “restoration” to their “rightful” owners. This is the politics of envy: bigger and bigger welfare programs domestically and bigger and bigger foreign-aid programs internationally.
If poverty is correctly seen as a result of the unwise government intervention and lack of productive capacity, more effective policy recommendations emerge.
SOURCE
*********************
Obama vs. Palin
The contrast between the speeches they gave last week suggests that when the 2012 presidential campaign begins in earnest, the news media will have difficulty maintaining the story lines they've been pushing about Barack Obama and Sarah Palin.
Mr. Obama is "a great leader in the mold of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt," we were told during the last presidential campaign.
The journalists who assured us of this based their assessment on Mr. Obama's oratorical skills rather than upon his actual accomplishments, which were meager.
His opponents agree Mr. Obama is a better speaker than he is a president. But the fiscal policy speech he made at George Washington University last Wednesday (4/13) -- during which Vice President Joe Biden nodded off -- indicates he's not that terrific an orator, either.
The speech "was not just weak, but pitiful,' a "waste of breath," said Clive Crook, editor of the Atlantic magazine.
Comedian Stephen Colbert thought the speech was "boring." Comedian Jon Stewart mocked the tortured manner in which Mr. Obama tried to avoid describing the tax increases he was proposing as tax increases.
And these are supporters of the president.
Mr. Obama went to GWU to make up for an earlier failure of leadership. In February, he submitted a proposed budget so frivolous no one paid attention to it. This permitted House Republicans to capture the initiative in the debate with the very substantial budget plan authored by Rep. Paul Ryan.
The president invited Rep. Ryan to attend the speech, which he did, expecting to hear a serious counterproposal. What he heard instead was "the sort of harangue one would expect from a rabidly devoted partisan hack, with no relation whatever to the thoughtful appeals to reason and common values that historically have characterized presidential leadership," said the Washington Examiner.
Mr. Obama grossly misrepresented Mr. Ryan's plan and called him names, but offered no real plan of his own to reduce our $14 trillion national debt.
The president's speech was "dishonest even by modern political standards," said the Wall Street Journal.
It was churlish of the president to invite Rep. Ryan to the speech, and then to attack him from the podium. It was also cowardly to attack a political opponent in a forum in which he could not respond.
Barack Obama these days speaks only before friendly audiences. On Saturday (4/16), Sarah Palin journeyed to Madison, Wisconsin where she braved snow, cold, and union protesters who tried to disrupt her Game On! speech by beating drums and blowing whistles.
"Sarah Palin rides to the sound of the guns," noted Reuters columnist James Pethokoukis.
After her surprise selection as John McCain's running mate and subsequently, many in the news media have described the former Alaska governor as an ignorant bumpkin with extreme views.
Ms. Palin sure didn't sound that way in Madison. In a 15-minute speech Mr. Pethokoukis described as "powerful, pugnacious and presidential," Ms. Palin vigorously defended Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in his battle with public employee unions; slammed President Obama for his attack on Paul Ryan, and criticized Congressional Republicans for being too timid in opposing Mr. Obama's spending.
"She was feisty. She was bold. She was gutsy," said Jedediah Bila in the Daily Caller.
Ms. Palin was also concise and funny. Of President Obama's budget, she said: "We're flat broke and he thinks these solar shingles and really fast trains will save us. So now he's shouting ‘all aboard' his bullet train to bankruptcy. Win the Future? WTF is about right."
"If Sarah Palin's not running for president, what a terrible waste that would be of the best stump speech I've heard since, well, Palin's ‘08 convention speech," said John Nolte of Big Government.
Ms. Palin scores low in polls today, chiefly because of how thoroughly the news media have maligned her. But the Sarah Palin on display in Madison was nothing like the media caricature. As more Americans see that Sarah, her numbers will change.
Barack Obama also is nothing like the news media's description of him. As Americans see more of the detached, petulant, clueless and spiteful little man on display at George Washington University, his numbers will change, too.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
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