Libertarians (And Fiscal Conservatives) Should Oppose Road Socialism

Libertarians and transport economists for decades have advocated tolling as an alternative to fuel taxes, which have always been a poor proxy for charging users and have since become obsolete. That’s why it was so disheartening to read Rachel Alexander’s recent Townhall article “Toll Roads and Double Taxation: The Left and Libertarians Converge.” Instead of bringing greater market discipline to road funding, Alexander pushes the view that perpetuating certain government subsidies is consistent with libertarian principles.

This argument is based on a faulty premise. Instead of asking, “How should we pay for roads?” we should be asking, “How should we be paying for roads?” This distinction may seem minor, but it is not. Alexander accuses libertarians of “agree[ing] with the left on double taxation.” In this context, “double taxation” is a buzzword for a myth propagated by the trucking industry, which wants to continue receiving government subsidies.

Tolling opponents argue that roads have already been paid for, so any further funding for their upkeep therefore constitutes “double taxation.” Construction has been completed, they claim, so why should we continue to charge users for something they’ve already paid for? The idea that roads, once they have been built, are paid for is absolutely false. The majority of costs associated with a given highway over time are operating, maintenance, and rehabilitation costs—not initial construction. In fact, tolling can make it possible for users to internalize the social costs of accidents and congestion.

Another favorite argument of the “double taxation” crowd is that we are already paying for roads through other means. This is technically true, but what are those other means? Primarily, it comes in the form of non-user taxes such as property taxes or general revenue bailouts of transportation trust funds. As Alexander highlights, the majority of road spending in the United States does not come from user fees. This is a problem; it means that federal, state, and local authorities are taxing everyone to subsidize the road use of some. The proper and pragmatic libertarian solution would be to expand tolling in order to shrink the share of non-user revenue and eventually phase it out completely.

The idea that tolling is too costly ignores recent research. A recent Reason Foundation study found that modern all-electronic toll collection costs were now broadly on par with collection costs for fuel excise taxes. And under all-electronic tolling, there is no need for costly and congestion-inducing manual tollbooth collection.

In contrast to the claim that public-private partnerships (P3s) are “essentially crony capitalism,” P3s are important tools to advance private-sector ownership and control of the road network. While long-term concessions based on a “design-build-finance-operate-maintain” model do not technically amount to full privatization, they do increase private sector involvement in infrastructure ownership and management. P3s also serve as demonstration models that could facilitate full privatization at the end of the concession agreements.

Alexander also repeats the “Lexus Lane” myth that toll lanes are only for rich motorists. On the contrary, lower-income commuters also need to get places on time and are often willing to pay for the ability to do so, as research findings show. Yet somehow, Alexander suggests that denying lower-income drivers the choice to pay for travel-time savings is consistent with libertarian principles. Equity concerns could be better addressed by offering lower-income drivers toll reimbursements or travel vouchers.

Furthermore, linking the monstrously irresponsible Central Artery project in Boston (widely known as “The Big Dig”) with tolling is disingenuous at best. The article she cites as proof of toll collection’s inherent evil focuses on engineering and construction mismanagement that led to shoddy infrastructure and out-of-control cost overruns. Nowhere is tolling mentioned—probably because Massachusetts’ limited use of tolling had absolutely nothing to do with The Big Dig disaster.

Concern over penalties for turnpike scofflaws and arguments to continue our current road subsidization schemes ignore the most important question: how should we be paying for roads? To transportation experts at national libertarian think tanks, including the Reason Foundation, Cato Institute, Independent Institute, and my own Competitive Enterprise Institute, the answer is clear: more tolling, more decentralization, and more private-sector provision of roads. And it isn’t just libertarians: conservative transportation analysts affiliated with the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute share our goal of curtailing road socialism.

Is it the case that virtually every libertarian transportation scholar in existence holds profoundly un-libertarian views regarding transportation and that their support for tolling is an egregious ideological sin? I suppose it’s possible, but Alexander’s case as presented runs against the overwhelming opinion of experts at some of the most renowned free-market think tanks in the United States

SOURCE

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Why Do Liberals hate Success?

There are many successful liberals, so why do so many of them wish to subsidize failure for the poor, instead of showing them how to succeed?

Take Dr. Ben Carson, as one example. Dr. Carson, the renowned neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Md., is enjoying a certain amount of celebrity unrelated to his profession for speaking his mind about how individuals and the nation might succeed if more Americans were less dependent on government.

Dr. Carson, who is African-American, has been denounced as insufficiently black because he won't toe the liberal line when it comes to big government and the implication that those in the African-American voting bloc, huge supporters of the Democratic Party, who fall below the poverty line, cannot succeed without it. The fact that many have not succeeded with government has apparently escaped the notice of his critics.

Speaking with Megyn Kelly on Fox News' "America Live" last week, Dr. Carson addressed some of the slurs tossed at him, saying they are what you might expect to hear "on a third grade playground." He appealed to his detractors to "move beyond" such rhetoric "and let's have a real discussion about the real facts. If somebody disagrees, let's talk about why they disagree, let's talk about the pros and cons, let's see if we can find some accommodation."

That is precisely what the left does not want to do, because to have such a discussion would expose liberalism's failure to solve the problems of poverty and education -- to cite just two examples -- through government.

MSNBC's Toure Monday has called Dr. Carson a token "black friend" to the Republican Party. I don't recall Carson ever saying he belongs to the Republican Party, do you? Even so, labels should not define the man. What Carson is saying and what he represents ought to be the beginning point for the discussion he is trying to initiate.

Dr. Carson dismissed one suggestion he might be an "Uncle Tom" this way: "Well, obviously they don't know what an Uncle Tom is because they need to read Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' You'll see that he was very, very subservient, kind of go along to get along type of person. Obviously, that's not what I'm doing."  Obviously.

In the Kelly interview, Dr. Carson hit his main point about liberal reaction on subjects ranging from Obamacare to higher taxes: "They feel that if you look a certain way then you have to stay on the plantation."

Isn't such a personal attack also a form of racism? All whites don't think alike, why should all African-Americans be expected to?

If government were the solution and not the problem, shouldn't we expect that the amount of money spent on anti-poverty programs -- $15 trillion since 1964, according to a CATO Institute analysis -- might have moved the needle on poverty? Instead there are nearly as many poor people today as there were 49 years ago. According to the Wall Street Journal, "Enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, as the modern-day food-stamp benefit is known, has soared 70 percent since 2008 to a record 47.8 million as of December 2012." Government as solution isn't working and Dr. Carson wants to discuss why. For this he is attacked?

The nightmare for liberals would be if Ben Carson became a role model for the poor instead of a target. If more of the poor had mothers like his (and maybe active fathers, which he didn't have), who focused on reading and discipline, more might grow up to be like him. They might reject the lie that they are incapable of succeeding because of their circumstances.

In addition to Carson's remarks about government dependency, he is also under attack for his unorthodox positions on same-sex marriage and evolution, which the National Review Online reports has led to a petition being circulated at Johns Hopkins Medical School asking that he be disinvited as commencement speaker. That would add censorship to racism.

SOURCE

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Bureaucratic Incompetence and the VA

Sadly, bureaucracy is a time-honored tradition in the United States government, but perhaps no greater bureaucratic juggernaut exists today than the Veteran’s Administration (VA) run by the Obama Administration.

The abject failure of the VA under the leadership of the three-ring circus we know as the Obama Administration is a case in point that increasing funding does little to inject competence or efficiency.

Recent documents from an Internal Veterans Affairs Department reveal some veterans actually die before receiving the care they need and others are forced to wait up to eight months to see a doctor, well beyond the VA’s standard of 14 days.

A House Veterans Oversight and Investigations committee appointed to look into the problem found evidence the VA is falsifying numbers and closing out veterans’ appointment requests in response to the backlog. According to the Military Times, the committee chairman, Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO), cites reasons for the closeouts include: “the request was years old, too much time had elapsed, or the veteran had died.”

A March 14, 2013 witness testimony by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) Health Care Director, Debra Draper stated no one actually knows how long veterans are waiting for care because “the reported dates are unreliable” -- a large number of VA appointment schedulers don’t know how to do their job, the whole system is obsolete, and dates are massaged to “show clinic wait times within VHA’s performance goals.”

I digress to note that similar complaints are also documented within Britain’s National Healthcare System where workers manipulate numbers to meet quotas to keep their jobs. If the VA can’t provide benefits to our nation’s veterans, how does the Obama administration plan to deliver healthcare for 30-plus million Americans?

Liberals would have us believe that a bloated federal government has the ability to play a meaningful role in nurturing people’s lives, but if they can’t get this one right, they just need to just fuhgeddaboutit. Case closed. Done.

Additionally, internal VA documents secured by the Center for Investigative Reporting found wait times for first-time disability compensation claims and other benefit claims are much longer than the VA cares to admit, with claims taking anywhere from 316 to 642 days.

In the first year of President Obama’s presidency, 11,000 veterans were on a claim waiting list for more than a year. Five years later, despite promises for improvement, and massive dollars “invested,” the situation has deteriorated.

Those on a one-year waiting list for claims rose by more than 2000 percent, to 245,000 in 2012. Currently, the average wait time for 900,000 veterans who have been willing to sacrifice life and limb for our freedom is 273 days. With that kind of malfeasance taking place under my watch, I think I’d do a little less golfing if I were president.

If you think this has something to do with “the mess Obama inherited,” then think again. The Center for Investigative Reporting found, “the average wait time for veterans filing disability claims fell by more than a third under President George W. Bush, even as more than 320,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans filed disability claims.”

SOURCE

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Faith in Freedom

 Rick Santorum
 
On Easter Sunday, Christians around the world celebrated the resurrection of the Lord, Jesus Christ. For us, it was a time of renewal -- a renewal of our baptismal promises, a rebirth of our faith in the Father, a moment to rejoice in our love for the church and its teachings. Also, our Jewish friends and neighbors recently observed Passover and hosted Seder dinners for family and friends.

It's a joyous time of year, and I'm grateful we live in a country where we are free to observe and celebrate our traditions and our faiths -- a country where people of different faiths can respect one another. It's something we often take for granted here in America, for the same cannot be said in many other parts of the world. Too often people endure daily slights for their religious beliefs -- or worse. In many cases, they live in fear of persecution, imprisonment or death for what they believe. Millions are denied what we believe to be a basic right: the right to live their faith freely in a free society.

Our Founding Fathers themselves were witness to much religious persecution and, therefore, sought to create a nation that treated freedom to worship as a fundamental right, the first freedom. In the Declaration of Independence, our founders highlighted our inalienable rights -- which come from our Creator, not government. As the leaders of free people around the world, it is my hope that we would advance our founders' vision and serve as voices for the millions around the world who are oppressed.

But sadly, I'm too frequently reminded that this is not happening. Either it has not been a priority or our leaders don't truly believe in protecting this first freedom. Either way, this is unacceptable. For example, on multiple occasions, President Barack Obama has chosen not to raise concerns with Chinese leaders about their frequent imprisonment of human rights advocates or treatment of Tibetan Buddhists, Uighur Muslims and Falun Gong members -- all of whom have been oppressed because the Chinese government views them as a threat. The administration also has chosen not to speak out on the one-child policy.

But notwithstanding the recent admission by the Chinese government that the country has aborted more than 336 million unborn children -- many by force -- over the past four decades, China's treatment of minority religions is nothing like the oppression suffered by millions in the Middle East today. A recent study by The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that just 4 percent of people in the Middle East and Africa are Christian, down from more than 20 percent a century ago. In the cradle of Christianity, nearly all of the Christians have fled. In Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Iran and Pakistan, among many others, there come reports of the tormenting and murdering of Christians. And we have basically abandoned them. Despite the president's now quite famous 2009 speech in Cairo -- in which he committed to upholding religious freedom around the world -- we have done almost nothing to help these people as radical and intolerant Islamist regimes come to power.

Throughout these Muslim countries, religious minorities are being purged from lands they have occupied for 7,000 years. In recent months in Nigeria, as many as 50 Catholic churches have been destroyed by Boko Haram, a militant Islamist group. They also reportedly have targeted and killed Christians and intend to "Islamize" the country. Across the region daily, reports such as the one from Egypt in which a family of eight was sentenced to 15 years in prison for converting to Christianity are very common. You probably won't hear much from our leaders or the mainstream media on this, though. But please know that not all enjoy the freedom to worship that we do.

During his recent trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories, President Obama said he would do his best to help the people of the Holy Land keep the Christian presence there. His visit was met with appreciation from Christian leaders in the region, one of whom described the visit as a "pilgrimage" to a place that is "important for the whole of mankind." Time will tell whether his words were more than hollow gestures. I pray that they are.

Throughout history, our great nation has confronted and defeated threats to human rights here at home and abroad. From civil rights to defeating the Nazis and liberating the concentration camps to going toe-to-toe with the Soviets, we've had leaders who, when they've seen injustice and egregious violations of human rights, have stepped up and, in the spirit of our founders, have protected our first principles and beliefs as a nation. It's time our leaders stood up for the equal treatment of women and the freedom of conscience of religious minorities around the world, for example. And we must stand up against violence in the name of religion. Perhaps more importantly, we also must recognize that religious liberty is under assault by not only Muslim radicals but also radical secularists who are intolerant of expressions of faith. Many of these secularists hold prominent public positions in Western nations.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena .  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for 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 Chart from Hell

On August 7, 2009 Barack Obama thumped his chest in the Rose Garden and proclaimed "We've rescued our economy from catastrophe."  Supposedly, the economic recovery had officially begun two months earlier.  

That was 1328 days ago.  But, try telling that to somebody that has to work for a living.  Median Household Income continues to fall.



While the President pretends that the end to life as we know it is near because of the incy wincy sequester cuts, families have been forced to live on less for years – and, it's still getting worse.

As reported by the New York Times:

"For the first time in over a year, median annual income fell by a statistically significant amount from the previous month, according to a report from Sentier Research.

Median annual household income in February 2013 was $51,404, about 1.1 percent (or $590) lower than the January 2013 level of $51,994. The numbers are all pretax, and are adjusted for both inflation and seasonal changes.

… The longer-run trends are even more depressing.

February’s median annual household income was 5.6 percent lower than it was in June 2009, the month the recovery technically began; 7.3 percent lower than in December 2007, when the most recent recession officially started; and 8.4 percent lower than in January 2000, the earliest date that this statistical series became available."

Note that these numbers are "pretax."  In January, the Payroll Tax was increased by 2 percent by Obama's $600 billion fiscal cliff tax hike.  On average, that tax increase will suck another $700 per year out of the wallets of 160 million Americans.

Little wonder that 6-in-10 Americans believe the economy is still in recession.  And, the really big hit from ObamaCare is right around the corner.  

And, what do we get from the White House?  Denial.  Last month, Joe Biden said Americans are "no longer worried" about the economy.

SOURCE

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1913 — the final days of the old regime in the United States

In 1913, exactly a century ago, the United States was a flourishing, economically advanced country. Its real output per capita was the world’s highest. It produced a great abundance of agricultural products and was a leading exporter of cotton, wheat, and many other farm products. Yet it also had the world’s largest industrial sector, producing as much manufactured output as France, Germany, and the United Kingdom combined. It brought forth new technological marvels almost daily, and its cities featured well paved and lighted streets, automobiles, modern sewerage and water-supply systems, central electrical-supply systems, skyscrapers, street cars, subways, and frequent intercity train service. During the preceding fifty years, its real income per capita had grown by about 2 percent per year, on average, and its total real output by about 4 percent per year, on average. All races, classes, and regions participated in this progress. In 1913, the rate of unemployment was 4.3 percent, and the price level was roughly the same as its average during the nineteenth century.

Yet the United States in 1913 had no federal income tax, no central bank, no social security taxes, no general sales taxes, no Securities and Exchange Commission, no Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, no Department of Health and Human Services, no National Labor Relations Board, no federal this, that, and the other as far as the eye can see. Except for restrictions on Chinese and Japanese immigration, nothing but perfunctory health examinations impeded the free flow of foreigners into the country, and hundreds of thousands arrived each year, mostly from Europe. All governments combined spent an amount equal to about 7 percent of GDP; the federal government’s part amounted to only about 3 percent of GDP. Local governments were the biggest actors in terms of regulations and expenditures. The average American had no regular contact with the federal government aside from the postman and little or none with the state and local governments aside from the school teachers and the public streets. The country was on an official gold standard. Gold and silver coins circulated as normal media of exchange, and gold certificates issued by individual commercial banks, as well as their checking accounts, served the public for making larger transactions.

Never before had so much prosperity been attained by a comparably large population, and never before had so many people enjoyed such spacious freedom to live their lives and go about their business as they chose in a context where voluntary transactions dominated economic affairs and governments were relatively inconsequential factors in the economy and society. Such was the garden in which the serpents of war would soon whisper in the ears of politicians and government officials, who shortly afterward would blast this auspicious scene to smithereens.

The Old Regime would then be lost forever, as the war’s pervasive legacies insinuated themselves permanently into economic and political life. Gone forever was a world that, notwithstanding its many defects and crying needs, had been traveling a sure road to improvements and remedies largely within a nurturing spontaneous order. Henceforward, the intrusion of politics and governments into ever more aspects of social and economic life would poison the people’s public affairs and turn them away from creative activity and self-responsibility toward more and more political conflict, suppression of freedom, and plunder of one another.

SOURCE

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The Left's Continuing War on Women

 Ann Coulter

The New York Times caused a sensation with its kazillion-word, March 17 article by Michael Luo on the failures of state courts to get guns out of the hands of men in domestic violence situations.

The main purpose of the article was to tweak America's oldest civil rights organization, the National Rifle Association, for opposing some of the more rash anti-gun proposals being considered by state legislatures, such as allowing courts to take away a person's firearms on the basis of a temporary restraining order.

It's a new position for liberals to oppose the rights of the accused. Usually the Times is demanding that even convicted criminals be given voting rights, light sentences, sex-change operations and vegan meals in prison.

Another recent Times article about communities trying to keep sex offenders out of their neighborhoods quoted a liberal saying: "It's counterproductive to public safety, because when you have nothing to lose, you are much more likely to commit a crime than when you are rebuilding your life."

But that was about convicted child molesters. This is about guns, so all new rules apply.

As is usually the case when liberals start proposing gun restrictions, they assume only men will be disarmed by laws taking guns from those subjected to temporary restraining orders. But such orders aren't particularly difficult to get. It doesn't occur to liberals that an abusive man could also get one against his wife, whether or not his accusations are true.

Rather than helping victims of domestic abuse, this -- and other Times' proposals on guns -- only ensures that more women will get killed. A gun in the hand of an abused woman changes the power dynamic far more than keeping a gun out of the hands of her abuser, who generally can murder his wife in any number of ways.

The vast majority of rapists, for example, don't even bother using a gun because -- as renowned criminologist Gary Kleck notes -- they typically have a "substantial power advantage over the victim," making the use of a weapon redundant.

As the Times eventually admits around paragraph 400: "In fairness, it was not always clear that such an order (taking guns from the accused wife abuser) would have prevented the deaths."

No kidding. In one case the Times cites, Robert Wigg ripped a door off its hinges and heaved it at his wife, Deborah, after having thrown her to the floor by her hair.

Deborah Wigg moved out, got a protective order and filed for divorce. But doors were not an impediment to Robert Wigg. He showed up at her new house and, in short order, broke down the door and murdered her.

He happened to have used a gun, but he might as well have used his fists. Or an illegal gun, had the court taken away his legal guns. Or another door.

As her husband was breaking in, Deborah called her parents and 911. Her neighbors called 911, too. But the police didn't arrive in time. Even her parents got to the house before the cops did, only to find their daughter murdered.

The protective order didn't help Deborah Wigg; the police couldn't help; her neighbors and parents couldn't help. Only if she'd had a gun and knew how to use it -- after carefully disregarding everything Joe Biden has said on the subject -- might she have been able to save her own life.

Numerous studies, including one by the National Institute of Justice, show that crime victims who resist a criminal with a gun are less likely to be injured than those who do not resist at all or who resist without a gun. That's true even when the assailant is armed.

Liberals' advice to rape and domestic abuse victims is: Lie back and enjoy it. The Times' advice is: Get a protective order. The NRA's advice is: Blow the dirtbag's head off. Or, for the delicate: Resist with a gun, the only effective means to stop an attack.

Apparently a lot of abused women prefer not to lie back and take it. Looking at data from Detroit, Houston and Miami, Margo Wilson and Martin Daly found that the vast majority of wives who killed their husbands were not even indicted, much less convicted, because it was found they were acting in self-defense.

But the Times doesn't want abused women to have a fighting chance. Instead, it keeps pushing gun control policies that not only won't stop violent men from murdering their wives, but will disarm their intended victims.

SOURCE

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Disability abuse

In the U.S. we like to think we’re all about enabling people. We ban discrimination based on creed or color. We insist that facilities be accessible to the disabled. We brag about an America where anyone can climb the ladder of success.

We’re also a compassionate people, eager to help each other. That’s why there’s a generous safety net in place, to catch anyone who happens to fall while climbing the ladder. Welfare, Social Security, Medicaid, food stamps and many other programs are in place to help those who are down-on-their-luck.

The problem is when the safety net becomes an actual net, ensnaring people and preventing them from rising.

Consider the Social Security Disability program. Here’s a safety net built especially to catch those who are severely injured and simply unable to work. That’s been a problem throughout human history, of course. People get hurt at work, lose digits or limbs, or simply wear out after decades of hard labor. Many have needed some help over the decades.

However, in our time, most work is less physically taxing than it’s ever been. Rather than plowing the fields, most people ply computer keyboards. Rather than working with big industrial machines such as Stephen King’s “The Mangler,” most people work in safe office buildings. Even smoking on the job, once ubiquitous, is a thing of the past.

And yet, the share of the U.S. population on Social Security Disability almost doubled between 1985 and 2005. And that’s before the 2008 recession hit.

“A record 5.4 million workers and their dependents have signed up to collect federal disability checks since President Obama took office, according to the latest official government data, as discouraged workers increasingly give up looking for jobs and take advantage of the federal program,” Investor’s Business Daily wrote last year.

Not only are there more people filing for disability benefits, there are more people getting stuck on disability.

“Once people go onto disability, they almost never go back to work. Fewer than 1 percent of those who were on the federal program for disabled workers at the beginning of 2011 have returned to the workforce since then,” NPR’s Chana Joffe-Walt reports. “Disability has also become a de facto welfare program for people without a lot of education or job skills. But it wasn't supposed to serve this purpose; it’s not a retraining program designed to get people back onto their feet.”

Something scary is going on here. Far from enabling Americans to rise, we’re trapping millions at the bottom. And once they’ve gone to the government and announced “I can’t work,” the chances are slim that they’ll change their minds five or ten years later. “Going on disability means, assuming you rely only on those disability payments, you will be poor for the rest of your life. That’s the deal. And it’s a deal 14 million Americans have signed up for,” Joffe-Walt adds.

Disability programs can be mentally as well as physically disabling. A friend who used to handle worker’s compensation claims told me about a woman who “tested out” of the disability program. A third-party medical review stated she was fit to return to work, so her benefits were scheduled to end. The recipient was so upset she threatened to jump off her balcony. “That’s when I knew I had to leave that job,” my friend comments. Luckily, she left it for another job, not to go on disability.

The message of empowerment remains powerful in American politics. “We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else,” the president announced during his second Inaugural Address.

Set aside questions about whether that is true (it will simply never be possible to give a child born in “the bleakest poverty” the same opportunities that Bill Gates’ children enjoy). Instead, we should ask whether we’re really empowering poor children, and poor Americans in general, today.

Today’s bleak economy has many fathers, so there will be no easy solution. But as a starter we need to regulations and encourage companies to hire again. And we need to enable more Americans to work, by reducing the number stuck on disability. Only when we do that will we be true to our American creed.

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena .  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for 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 New York Times is a Crypto-Nazi Paper

The New York Times has become the official paper of Israel’s Western would-be eradicators.

Joseph Levine's latest oped argued that Israel has no right to exist and that history should be reversed: “I conclude, then, that the very idea of a Jewish state is undemocratic, a violation of the self-determination rights of its non-Jewish citizens, and therefore morally problematic”. The New York Times' relentless attacks could well play out in ways that indeed attempt to put an end to Israeli sovereignty.

According to Levine's racist belief, “native species” originate in a certain place and that is where they “belong.” Hence, Israel’s "colonization" threatens the “original” Arab environment. This is pure and simple Nazism. The New York Times’ Israel-bashers use a style similar to the language used by anti-Semites the world over: Israel is inferior and must not enjoy the rights accorded to other peoples.

The New York Times articles are not attacking the “occupation” anymore, but the very idea of a Jewish state. The Times' incitement against Zionism is compulsive, full of half-baked truths and ill-disguised hysteria. The Times just hosted  an oped by Rashid Khalidi, the PLO supporter and anti-Zionist militant from Columbia University. In his latest column, he charges Israel of being an alien, settler entity, comparing its existence to South Africa's apartheid.

At the Times there are also those who do not advocate eradicating Israel, but work to remove any shred of justification for supporting it by following some elementary rules: promoting the myth of Palestinian "moderation", whitewashing terror groups and demonizing the "settlers".

As in the 1930's, when the New York Times downplayed the Nazi genocide of European Jews in order to avoid being seen as a “Jewish” newspaper, today Thomas Friedman, Roger Cohen (the dupe of Tehran) and Nicolas Kristof are the Jewish journalists who have been leading the charge in demonizing Israel and unabashedly praising the "Arab Spring" and Iran's "pragmatism".

Thomas Friedman plays a major role in shaping Obama’s plan for Israel’s return to the pre-1967 armistice line, which the late Abba Eban dubbed the “Auschwitz borders”. It was Friedman who wrote that the White House is “disgusted” with Israeli interlocutors. The famous Jewish columnist has always been a militant suporter of the Palestinian cause. According to the US columnist, Israeli settlers are a “cancer for the Jewish people” and those who “collaborate” in the building of settlements are “enemies of peace” and “enemies of America’s national interest”, no less.

“What Israeli settlers and Palestinian suicide bombers have in common is that they are each pushing for the maximum use of force against the other side”, he wrote after the killing of young grade-schooler Kobi Mandell. For Friedman, building a home on disputed territory is apparently the moral equivalent of stoning Jews - even school age ones -  to death. To equate the two, as Friedman always does, is to create moral mush. At age fourteen, Kobi was immobilized and stoned to death as was his friend, his body hidden in a cave. The terrorists soaked their hands in the boy’s blood and smeared the walls of the cave with it.

Friedman also crossed the Rubicon when he opined that "Jewish money" (note not Israeli money) caused the standing ovations Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, gave the Prime Minister of Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu.

As far back as 1929, during the Arab riots, the local Times correspondent Joseph Levy boasted that he was a committed anti-Zionist. Eighty years later, when the Fogels were slaughtered in Itamar, the New York Times chose not to cover that event on the front page, nor to comment it.

And how to forget the "Pharisees on the Potomac” headline by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd on what she considers to be the moral hypocrisy of Republican Party?

Every morning, opening the New York Times, the reader finds very accurate stuff about the Holocaust, the most extreme demonstration of Jewish powerlessness, (ignored and put on the back pages of the Times while it was taking place) along with opeds like that of Peter Beinart titled “To Save Israel, Boycott the Settlements”.

The New York Times’ avid PLO supporters and propagandists are the descendamts of one of the most celebrated journalists of his time, the first New York Times Pulitzer Prize winner, Walter Duranty, who in the thirties fed the American public instantly-rewritten history of the famine in the Ukraine. By persuading the world that Stalin’s version of events was true, Duranty’s fairy tales cost thousands,if not millions,of lives.

The Times consistently ignores the genocidal anti-Semitism that governs Hamas and Hizbullah, described therein as "militant" groups concerned with the social welfare of Palestinians and Lebanese. The Times' articles from Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarem and Bethlehem during the Second Intifada could have been written about the Taliban in the Afghan caves. These depicted the Palestinian terrorists as freedom fighters meeting their noble fate.

That favorable press in the New York Times encourages the Arabs to believe they can get away with murder is a given. By reinforcing the Islamic claim that those who died on the Temple Mount were martyred defenders of holy places, mowed down by savage, unprovoked Israeli authorities, the New York Times also helped inflame millions of Muslims against Israel. By calling the area “Muslim compound” and omitting any mention of the Temple Mount or its Jewish connection, the New York Times convinced the world that Ariel Sharon had intruded upon a site holy solely to Islam, helping to trigger the second Intifada.

As the latest Levine's oped shows, the New York Times is a crypto-Nazi publication whose message is, plain and simple, “Jews, go home, again”. There is a Klezmer [Jewish traditional music] festival in Krakow this year.

SOURCE

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The Bloody Company Hollywood Keeps

Michelle Malkin

Bleeding-heart liberal Robert Redford is already the subject of early Oscar buzz. His much-hyped new film glamorizing the lives of Weather Underground domestic terrorists, "The Company You Keep," will be released in the U.S. next week. But peace-loving moviegoers should save their money and take a stand.
Hollywood's romanticizing of murderous radicals is an affront to decency. Redford and Company's rose-colored hagiography of bloodstained killers defiles the memory of all those victimized by leftwing militants on American soil.

Tinseltown cheerleaders can't stop gushing about Redford's paean to gun-toting progressives, of course. Variety called the flick an "unabashedly heartfelt but competent tribute to 1960s idealism." The entertainment daily effused: "There is something undeniably compelling, perhaps even romantic, about America's '60s radicals and the compromises they did or didn't make." One of the film executives promoting the Weather Underground movie slavered: "This is an edge-of-your-seat thriller about real Americans who stood for their beliefs, thinking they were patriots and defending their country's ideals against their government."

Compelling? Romantic? Real Americans? Patriots? The movie plot centers on a 1970s Michigan bank robbery perpetrated by fictional Weather Underground members Sharon Solarz (portrayed by bigwig Democratic activist Susan Sarandon) and Jim Grant (played by Redford). The group shoots and kills one off-duty police officer working as a bank security guard. Grant goes on the lam and assumes a fake identity; decades later, a reporter launches an investigation into his role in the crime. The movie drums up "unabashedly heartfelt" sympathy for Grant as he works to exonerate himself.

Moviegoers would be better served by educating themselves about the real-life bank robbery and murder on which the movie is loosely based. In 1981, rich-kid Weathermen ideologues and lovers Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert joined forces with Black Liberation Army thugs and other ragtag commie revolutionaries to hold up an armored Brink's vehicle in Nyack, N.Y. Their booty: $1.6 million to fund their violent activities. Before taking up her assignment as the getaway vehicle driver, Boudin dropped off her toddler son, Chesa Boudin, at a babysitter's house.

Two of the holdup victims gunned down in the botched Brink's robbery were police officers. One was a private security guard. All three were veterans from working-class backgrounds. Their names: Waverly Brown, Edward O'Grady and Peter Paige.

Boudin and Gilbert were convicted and sent to prison. Prior to her arrest in Nyack, she had been an 11-year fugitive from justice after an accidental homemade bomb explosion at her New York City townhouse resulted in the death of three people. At the time of her arrest in Nyack, Boudin gave police one of many false identities she had used to evade the law.

Boudin was paroled in 2003 after convincing parole board members that she acted nobly out of "white guilt" to protest racism against blacks. Never mind that one of the officers killed, Waverly Brown, was black.

While Redford glorifies his fictional Weather Underground murderers as "patriots," he ignores the patriotic legacy of the victims of Weather Underground violence. And while Redford lionizes the Weather Underground zealots as compassionate parents, where are his passion and compassion for the children of the Weather Underground victims?

Brown served in the Air Force after the Korean War and had two grown daughters and a teenage son when he died in the brutal shootout. O'Grady, who served in the Marines and did two tours of duty in Vietnam, left behind a wife and three children -- 6, 2 and 6 months old. Paige, a Navy veteran, also left behind a wife and three kids -- 19, 16 and 9.

The sons and daughters of those gunned down by Weather Underground killers have lived in obscurity. Meanwhile, as I first reported more than a decade ago, Chesa Boudin has lived a pampered life surrounded by tenured academics and celebrity friends. His adoptive parents? The infamous pals of Barack Obama, Weathermen organizers Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

Refresher course: Dohrn declared war on "AmeriKKKa," helped stage the "Days of Rage" in Chicago, when Weathermen blew up a memorial statue to police officers and rioted violently, leaving 75 policemen wounded and one permanently injured in a wheelchair, and then spent years as a fugitive from justice before settling into a comfy post as director of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University.

Ayers remains in the limelight after celebrating the Weathermen bombing the Pentagon and flitting from campuses to socialist regimes and back preaching education as the "motor force for revolution."

Chesa Boudin attended Yale, won a prestigious Rhodes scholarship, shilled for Hugo Chavez, wrote books and keeps a busy speaking schedule. He still stands by the Weathermen's revolutionary agenda: "My parents were all dedicated to fighting U.S. imperialism around the world. I'm dedicated to the same thing."

Cinematically and metaphorically, Redford manufactures the same stance that unrepentant Weather Underground criminals and apologists still hold of themselves today: Not guilty.

SOURCE

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A nation suckered

Bilking billions from the government

No doubt you were shocked, shocked to learn that Jeffrey Hillman, the “barefoot beggar” who famously received a free pair of boots from a kindly NYPD cop, turned out to be a scam artist who preys on the kindness of strangers to provide him with an apartment, money and plenty of footwear — as a Post investigation discovered.

That’s right — someone pretending to be in dire straits turns out to be a) not destitute, b) not homeless and c) not shoeless.

But then, Hillman’s just a piker when it comes to the rising culture of sham dependency that is rapidly turning this country from a nation of self-reliant citizens to shuffling pseudo-mendicants and conniving criminals who have one hand extended to collect government largesse while the other is busily picking your pocket.

Consider the numbers:

* The Government Accountability Office estimates that improper — i.e., fraudulent — Medicare payments amount to at least $17 billion per annum. Other independent estimates run even higher — as much as one-fifth of total federal health-care spending (about $550 billion), according to one Harvard analyst.

And that’s before ObamaCare fully kicks in.

* A fresh source of abuse is the Bush-era prescription-drug benefit, which one physician’s publication has called “staggeringly complicated and largely incomprehensible to the very population it was intended to help . . .the drug program’s very complexity is a source of fraud.”

* The jobless recovery may equal misery for millions of Americans, but it’s created a boom in Social Security disability claims, many of them no doubt sheer gold-bricking via “personality disorders” and other imaginary illnesses.

Nearly 18 million people — one in 20 Americans — are collecting some $170 billion a year in disability payments, a record high, and the government estimates that fraud and other improper payments account for $25 billion of disability spending over a recent four-year period.

Like the “barefoot beggar,” who only needs to take his shoes off to get free stuff, Dependency Nation has learned how easy it is to take the government for a ride. In many cases, it’s simply a matter of correctly — if fraudulently — filling out the right forms and sending them in.

Unseen by human eyes, claims are processed by computer and checks go flying out in return; Medicare alone handles some 1.2 billion such claims annually.

Another tactic is fictitious patients and procedures: One dentist a few years ago bilked New York’s Medicaid program of more than $1 million in part by claiming she performed 991 procedures in a single day.

Organized crime has horned in on the act as well, setting up sham companies to fool the feds, stealing drugs meant for AIDS patients and getting kickbacks on unnecessary items such as motorized wheelchairs that Medicare is only too happy to shell out for.

In 2009, the Government Accountability Office catalogued examples of waste, fraud and abuse in just about every federal do-gooder program, including school lunches ($1.4 billion), children’s health insurance ($800 million, or roughly 15 percent of the total), the Earned Income Tax Credit ($12 billion), plus housing subsidies, child-care, unemployment insurance . . . You name it, and some sizable chunk of it is a scam.

In all, the cost to the taxpayers is estimated at some $100 billion a year.And things are only likely to get worse.

Take Social Security and Medicare, which together accounted for a whopping 36 percent of total federal expenditures in fiscal 2011. Everyone knows they’re unsustainable at current funding levels, so expect higher taxes. Yet more money going to the feds inevitably means more waste, fraud and abuse — because as famed robber Willie Sutton said of banks: That’s where the money is.

But in a kind of bureaucratic Catch-22, greater oversight would also mean more regulations and soaring enforcement costs, thus redirecting resources away from the very people the programs were meant to help — while still allowing the scam artists to enrich themselves.

Just ask Jeffrey Hilman, the “shoeless” man who, as it happens, has at least 30 pairs of shoes and boots — courtesy of the suckers.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena .  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for 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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When did I miss the “tipping point”?

This is really the sort of country I long for as articulated by Troy Senik:

"I want a “leave me alone” society — one where Christian schools can turn people away for rejecting their doctrine, just as gay rights groups can reject those who don’t share their beliefs. I don’t want us all to get along — not because I’m misanthropic (well, not just because I’m misanthropic), but because I know that “consensus” is usually a fancy word for muting minority viewpoints. I want us all to be free to be annoyed with each other from our separate corners. Is that too much to ask?"

Apparently.  Ask Sarah Conly (I still can’t get over the title of her book [“Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism.”] and the implication it carries which, if she even realizes it, should chill her to the bone).  Ask Mayor Bloomberg.  Ask most of the left and a good portion of the right.

How did we ever wander away from that direction and end up on the one where a major news organ, the NYT, even gives a forum to crypto-fascists like Conly?  What a horrifying person she is.  Imagine someone as cavalier about your rights actually in a position of power.  Imagine the possibilities.  Oh, that’s right, we don’t have too, do we.  We have history to provide the examples.  Tons of them.

And yet here is this supposed “learned” academic parroting the same authoritarian themes in a soothing voice designed to lull you into feeling good about giving everything away to the authoritarians (or at least enough so that at some point they can just take the rest).

I want what Senik wants.  I don’t have a problem with most discrimination.  Yeah, I know – that’s heresy isn’t it?  Look, if someone wants to discriminate let them – and let them pay the “stupid tax” for doing so.  But here’s the point – you should be free to do that.  You should have the right to be stupid and to do stupid things (with the usual caveat that it’s only okay as long as your stupid acts don’t harm others or violate their rights). You should have the right to fail, get fat, smoke, drink, and be an ignorant slob without the do gooders deciding they have to save you from yourself and the only way to do that is to take your freedom away.  Or to tell you how to act, talk, or interact with penalties for not being politically correct.

Why is it that the Sarah Conlys of the world are published in the NYT and the ideas of the Troy Seniks of the world have to settle for blogs?  When did Senik's idea, which was once very main stream in this country, become extremist while what was once not only extremist, an anathema to America,  but thoroughly discredited throughout history somehow gain respectability again?

When you boil it all down, it is that dilemma which amply describes why we’re in the awful shape we’re in and why we see our freedoms under constant assault and slowly being taken away.

I’m just wondering when the tipping point occurred.

SOURCE

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Mike Bloomberg, Liberal Fascist

That’s New York City’s nasty little fascist mayor, the ersatz and erstwhile “Republican” who used the party to sneak into Gracie Mansion in the wake of the Giuliani administration’s successful war on street crime, and then double-crossed the GOP in his bald-faced but successful attempt to subvert term limits, lecturing David Gregory in his Boston honk that he knows what’s best for New Yorkers — and us.

Yes, it’s the Soda Jerk himself, tossing his pint-sized weight around as he attempts to remain politically viable after his reign as the successor to such corrupt and incompetent wretches as Jimmy Walker, William O’Dwyer, Abe Beame and David Dinkins mercifully comes to an end. Let’s unpack a little of what the Terror of Tinytown had to say.

We’re not banning anything.  All we’re saying is, we want to show you just how big the cup is. If you want 32 ounces, take two cups to your seat. If you want 64, carry four. But our hope is, if you only take one, you won’t go back.

If you believe that, Bloomberg has a bridge to Brooklyn to sell you. And to which the only proper response — the one that until New York turned into a city of Upper West Side conformist sheep he would have justly received — is (to quote Kurt Schlichter) “bite me.”

Note how piously the unctuous Nanny Bloomberg claims he’s not “banning anything,” when in fact that’s exactly what he tried to do until a New York state judge drop-kicked his assertion of unfettered government authority and bureaucratic oversight through the goal posts of personal freedom — a concept that is itself under direct attack by fascists like Bloomberg, who has married his $27 billion personal fortune to his power as NYC mayor in an attempt to impose his will on the residents of the five boroughs and beyond.

Our job is to educate .., all we’re trying to do is educate.

No, yer honor, your job is to manage the city government, to make sure the snow gets shoveled and the trash gets picked up, not to lecture the rest of us and use the power of City Hall to impose your particular life-style choices on everybody else. But that’s what happens when conservatives let the Left seize the narrative and promote governmental mission creep. Once government “addresses” a problem by throwing taxpayer money at it, it’s only a short hop to government claiming — as Bloomberg does in the clip — that because government spends money on a “problem,” it now has the right to dictate personal behavior. Sheer genius, really.

By now, the notion that government from the feds on down has the “right” to interfere in every aspect of American life is well-established and nearly unquestioned. Two generations of red-diaper babies have grown up with visions of the Frankfurt School dancing in their heads; they’ve adapted Marxist tactics to the capitalist system in the furtherance of their world-view — George Soros, take a bow — but their goal remains the same: power, disguised as “compassion.”

The collapse of free societies doesn’t start with the Vandals’ assault on the gates of Rome. It starts with “reasonable” restrictions on freedom, “carve-outs” and “exemptions” to constitutional principles, “temporary” taxes and suspensions of civil liberties — all designed to inure the public to the destruction of bedrock guarantees ( i.e. “Congress shall make no law…”) in the name of what’s good for them.

Gregory asks, “Where’s the line? Where is too far for government to go?” Bloomy’s comforting answer: "I do not think we should ban most things."  And to think this man still harbors a desire to run for president.

UPDATE: His Bloominess is launching another capitalism-financed regressive assault on the Second Amendment this very day:

[A] $12 million ad blitz targeting senators wavering on gun control will be just the beginning, Mayor Bloomberg warned Sunday.

“I have a responsibility … to try to make this country safer,” Bloomberg said on “Meet the Press” when asked if he’d spend big-time in next year’s elections to target the National Rifle Association and members of Congress for opposing gun restrictions.

“If I can do that by spending some money, and taking the NRA from being the only voice to being one of the voices, so the public can really understand the issues, then I think my money will be well spent and I think I have an obligation to do that,” he said.

SOURCE

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“Me too” Republicans

by Thomas Sowell

Many ideas presented as "new" are just rehashes of old ideas that have been tried before – and have failed before. So it is no surprise that the recent "Growth and Opportunity Project" report to the Republican National Committee is a classic example of what previous generations called "Me too" Republicanism.

These are Republicans who think that the key to winning elections is to do more of what the Democrats are doing. In effect, they say "me too" on issues such as immigration, in hopes of gaining more new votes than they lose by betraying their existing supporters.

In the wake of last year's presidential election debacle for the Republicans, the explanation preferred by "moderate" Republicans has been that the GOP has been too narrowly ideological, and needs to reach out to minorities, women and young people, rather than just to conservatives.

In the words of the "Growth and Opportunity Project," the problem is that conservative Republican candidates have been "driving around in circles on an ideological cul-de-sac."

But the report itself says that the Republicans' election problems have been at the national level, not at the state level, where a majority of the governors are Republicans. Are the Republican moderates suggesting that the reason Mitt Romney lost in 2012 is that he was driving around in a conservative cul-de-sac? Romney was as mushy a moderate as Senator John McCain was before him – and as many other Republican losers in presidential elections have been, going all the way back to the 1940s. The only Republican candidate who might fit the charge of being a complete conservative was Ronald Reagan, who won two landslide elections.

The report to the Republican National Committee is on firmer ground when it says that national Republican candidates have not articulated their case very well – that "we too often sound like bookkeepers." Republican candidates "need to do a better job talking in normal, people-oriented terms."

Absolutely. It doesn't matter how good your case is, if you don't bother to articulate it so that voters understand you.

The heart of the report, however, is the argument that Republicans need to reach out to minorities, women and young people. With Hispanics and blacks becoming a growing proportion of the American population – and both groups voting overwhelmingly for Democrats – the Republicans are obviously in big trouble in future elections if they don't do something.

But if they do what this report advocates, they could be in even bigger trouble. Here again, facts seem to mean nothing to those who wrote this report.

They propose going through such organizations as the NAACP to reach black voters, as if the NAACP owns blacks, in violation of the 13th Amendment. Not only is the NAACP virtually a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party, the kind of black voters that the Republicans have some hope of winning over are unlikely to be enthralled to the NAACP, and many of them may see through such race hustlers.

Or do all blacks look alike to those who wrote this report?

It is the same story with Hispanics and Asian Americans. The Republicans are supposed to go through these groups' "leaders" as well – mostly leaders tied to the Democratic Party ideologically or otherwise. You might think that a Republican Party that talks about individualism would try to appeal to individuals.

Individuals whom the Republicans have some chance of winning over may well be a small minority within these groups. However, if the GOP can reduce the Democrats' 80 percent of these groups' votes to 70 percent, that can swing elections.

But a shotgun approach to minorities won't do it.

When it comes to minority votes, the Democratic Party is much like Eastman Kodak during the long period when it sold the vast majority of the film and cameras in the country. How did its competitors manage to drive Kodak into bankruptcy?

Not by saying "me too" while trying to imitate Kodak and trying to outdo Kodak with better film and better film cameras. They went digital instead. But that approach requires a lot more thought than apparently went into this report. Polls and focus groups are not a substitute for thought.

SOURCE

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Democrat extremism

The American left cares so much for humanity that it even expends copious draughts of compassion toward us, toward you and me, toward suave, degage conservatives. The left's members really fret over how elements of the "extreme right" are undermining the Republican Party, consigning it to oblivion.

The latest moral colossus to perform this exemplary task is Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, but there are many more from all the precincts of the left. This past weekend, I even detected this concern for us from the pollster, Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center. Writing a piece on the future of the Republican Party, he expressed his concern that advocates of "staunch conservatism" have left the Republican Party "estranged from America." If moderate Republicans do not smarten up and presumably rid the party of these "staunch conservatives," the party will go so far to the right that it will be replicating the political suicide of Senator George McGovern and his McGovernite zealots back in 1972.

If you are old enough you may remember how in 1972 the left was apoplectic that McGovern was leading the Democratic Party out into the wilderness. You do not recall it that way? You have forgotten? It did not seem like that at the time? The left in 1972 was full of its usual brag and bounce that crazy George was on the right side of history, and victory was only months away. Is Kohut mistaken?

I think he is. Actually, this grave concern by the left over the projects of the "staunch conservatives" within the Republican Party is one vast sham. A similar concern by the left for the extremist tilt of the Democratic Party is never apparent, and the reason is obvious. The concern does not exist. Yet the Democratic Party over the years has, for a certitude, gone left, far left. Review the evidence. On issue after issue -- from social policy to fiscal policy -- the Democrats have moved leftward. With the help of their amanuenses in the media, the left is never forced to talk about it, but it is a fact. With the leftward rush of the party proclaimed in the Prophet Obama's State of the Union address, it is the Democrats who are extreme. Their day of reckoning will come on Nov. 4, 2014.

The left's sham is not without its effects on weak-kneed Republicans and independents, however. Senator Ted Cruz, Texas's latest gift to American politics, is reportedly stunned by his wobbly-legged Republican colleagues, who patter up and down the halls of the Senate. Apparently, they believe that the American left really has the best interests of the Republicans at heart. Of course, they are wrong.

Perhaps one has to live out in the states and the congressional districts to see how wrong the left and susceptible Republicans are. Out across the fruited plain, a majority of governors' mansions (30) are controlled by the Republicans. The Republicans also control a majority of state legislatures (Republicans 27, Democrats 17). Back in Washington, the Republicans control the House of Representatives, and as of yesterday, five Senate Democrats are stepping down in 2014. The upper chamber is very delicately balanced now and will probably shift to the Republicans in 2014. Then there is one additional element to give the Republicans something to smile about. Back in 2012, the year that gave the left so much reason for hope, the Prophet Obama won 3,591,303 fewer votes than in 2008. The Democrats suppressed the Republican turnout in 2012 by rendering Mitt Romney an oligarch. What is more, they had a splendid ground game that got out theretofore non-voting minorities in the swing votes. But 2014 will be different.

Then, thanks to the cost and confusion of Obamacare and the ongoing economic malaise, the same issue will be salient that was salient in 2010, the economy. Roughly 42 percent of the American electorate is conservative compared to 18-20 percent that is of the left. Roughly 35 percent of the electorate is independent. The majority of the independents, provoked by the sour economy and by budget overruns, voted with the conservatives in 2010 and 2012. If the "staunch conservatives" turn out to vote in 2014 it is going to be another landslide on the order of 2010 ... and you know who won that landslide.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena .  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for 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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Francois Hollande lurches Right in historic U-Turn to save French economy

The U.S. Democrats have a love affair with Europe in general and France in particular. Will they absorb the French lesson below?

French president François Hollande has bowed to massive pressure for business tax cuts to pull France’s economy out of slump and stave off industrial decline, ditching a core element of his socialist platform.

Company taxes will fall by €20bn a year equal to 1pc of GDP, to be phased in gradually by 2015 under a convoluted system of rebates.

Premier Jean-Marc Ayrault said it amounted to a 6pc cut in unit labour costs, enough to close the gap with eurozone rivals. "France is not condemned to a spiral of decline, but we need a national jolt to regain control of our destiny," he said.

The mid-rate of VAT for restaurants and services will jump from 7pc to 10pc. The top rate will rise slightly to 20pc. Spending cuts will plug the revenue gap in order to meet the EU’s 3pc deficit target.

Critics call it the most humiliating U-turn in French politics since François Mitterrand abandoned his disastrous experiment of "Socialism in one country" under a D-Mark currency peg in 1983.

Mr Hollande came to office vowing lower VAT rates to protect the buying power of workers, and called business tax cuts a "gift to the rich". He imposed €10bn of fresh taxes on firms just weeks ago in his 2013 budget, a move that set off a revolt by business leaders.

The French National Assembly was in uproar on Tuesday as Gaulliste deputies derided the volte-face as a confession of misrule for the past six months.

His plan comes a day after French industrialist Louis Gallois delivered a report calling for "shock therapy" to halt the relentless decline of France’s eurozone export share, and the loss of 60,000 industrial jobs each year. He recommended deep cuts in payroll levies to bridge the gap in labour costs with Germany.

"President Hollande is finally starting to back away from some of his economically dangerous campaign promises," said Christian Schulz from Berenberg Bank.

Mr Schulz said the French leader has faced his "Schröder moment", reaching out like Germany’s Social Democrat Chancellor Gerhard Schröder a decade ago to a respected businessman to provide cover for reform.

Less clear is whether Mr Hollande will try to tame the Leviathan state, now Euroland’s biggest at 56pc of GDP. Such a move would entail a head-on clash with the socialist party base. "The new measures do not come anywhere close to what France would need to do to arrest its trend decline. He will need to go much further to end the maladie française," said Mr Schulz.

Pressure is mounting from all sides. The International Monetary Fund warned this week that France risked being left behind by Italy and Spain as they embrace root-and-branch reforms.

Mr Hollande appears to have been stung by accusations that his government is "anti-enterprise". The corporate lobby MEDEF said last month that investment was collapsing, and warned of capital flight in tones reminiscent of attacks on Leon Blum’s leftist Popular Front in 1936.

The new plan adopts most of the 22 proposals in the Gallois Report, including a state bank to steer cheap credit to exporters, though it falls short of Mr Gallois’ call for a €30bn cut in payroll levies.

Jean-François Copé, the Gaulliste leader, said the Hollande package was "hyper-complex, bureaucratic, and wholly inadaquate". Business leaders said it helps but comes too late reverse a collapse in profit margins as recession looms.

The tax reform aims to switch the burden from wealth creation to consumption, a trick used by Germany to carry out its "internal devaluation" within EMU. The policy was pioneered by Margaret Thatcher, a detail that France’s socialists prefer to keep quiet.

For Mr Hollande, it has been a painful wake-up from the utopian reverie of his first months in office. "Exercising power today is very hard. You don’t get any breaks, of any kind," he confessed.

 SOURCE

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Cyprus has finally killed myth that European Monetary Union is benign

The punishment regime imposed on Cyprus is a trick against everybody involved in this squalid saga, against the Cypriot people and the German people, against savers and creditors. All are being deceived.

It is not a bail-out. There is no debt relief for the state of Cyprus. The Diktat will push the island’s debt ratio to 120pc in short order, with a high risk of an economic death spiral, a la Grecque.

Capital controls have shattered the monetary unity of EMU. A Cypriot euro is no longer a core euro. We wait to hear the first stories of shops across Europe refusing to accept euro notes issued by Cyprus, with a G in the serial number.

The curbs are draconian. There will be a forced rollover of debt. Cheques may not be cashed. Basic cross-border trade is severely curtailed. Credit card use abroad will be limited to €5,000 (£4,200) a month. “We wonder how such capital controls could eventually be lifted with no obvious cure of the underlying problem,” said Credit Suisse.

The complicity of EU authorities in the original plan to violate insured bank savings – halted only by the revolt of the Cypriot parliament – leaves the suspicion that they will steal anybody’s money if leaders of the creditor states think it is in their immediate interest to do so. Monetary union has become a danger to property.

One can only smile at the denunciations of Eurogroup chief Jeroen Dijsselbloem for letting slip that the Cypriot package is a template for future EMU rescues, with further haircuts for “uninsured deposit holders”.

That is not the script. Cyprus is supposed to be a special case. Yet the “Dijssel Bomb” merely confirms that the creditor powers – the people who run EMU at the moment – will impose just such a policy on the rest of Club Med if push ever comes to shove. At the same time, the German bloc is lying to its own people about the real costs of holding the euro together. The accord pretends to shield the taxpayers of EMU creditor states from future losses. By seizing €5.8bn from savings accounts, it has reduced the headline figure on the EU-IMF Troika rescue to €10bn.

This is legerdemain. They have simply switched the cost of the new credit line for Cyprus to the European Central Bank. The ECB will have to offset the slow-motion bank run in Cyprus with its Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA), and this is likely to be a big chunk of the remaining €68bn in deposits after what has happened over the past two weeks.

Much of this will show up on the balance sheet of the Bundesbank and its peers through the ECB’s Target2 payment nexus. The money will leak out of Cyprus unless the Troika tries to encircle the island with razor wire.

“In saving €5.8bn in bail-out money, the other euro area countries will likely be on the hook for four to five times more in contingent liabilities. But, of course, the former represents real money that gives politicians a headache; the latter is monopoly central bank money,” said Marchel Alexandrovich, from Jefferies.

Chancellor Angela Merkel will do anything before the elections in September to disguise the true cost of the EMU project. It has been clear since August 2012 that she is willing let the ECB carry out bail-outs by stealth, as the lesser of evils. Such action is invisible to the German public. It does not require a vote in the Bundestag. It circumvents democracy.

Mrs Merkel can get away with this, provided Cyprus does not leave EMU and default on the Bundesbank’s Target2 claims, yet that may well happen.

“I wouldn’t be surprised to see a 20pc fall in real GDP,” said Nobel economist Paul Krugman. “Cyprus should leave the euro. Staying in means an incredibly severe depression.”

“Nobody knows what is going to happen. The economy could go into a free fall,” said Dimitris Drakopoulos, from Nomura.

The country has just lost its core industry, a banking system with assets equal to eight times GDP, and has little to replace it with. Cyprus cannot hope to claw its way back to viability with a tourist boom because EMU membership has made it shockingly expensive. Turkey, Croatia or Egypt are all much cheaper. Manufacturing is just 7pc of GDP. The IMF says the labour cost index has risen even faster than in Greece, Spain or Italy since the late 1990s.

What saved Iceland from mass unemployment after its banks blew up – or saved Sweden and Finland in the early 1990s – was a currency devaluation that brought industries back from the dead. Iceland’s krona has fallen low enough to make it worthwhile growing tomatoes for sale in greenhouses near the Arctic Circle.

If Cyprus tries to claw back competitiveness with an “internal devaluation”, it will drive unemployment to Greek levels (27pc) and cause the economy to contract so fast that the debt ratio explodes.

The IMF’s Christine Lagarde has given her blessing to the Troika deal, claiming that the package will restore Cyprus to full health, with public debt below 100pc of GDP by 2020.

Yet the Fund has already been through this charade in Greece, and her own staff discredited the doctrine behind EMU crisis measures. It has shown that the “fiscal multiplier” is three times higher than thought for the Club Med bloc. Austerity beyond the therapeutic dose is self-defeating.

Some in Nicosia cling to the hope that Cyprus can carry on as a financial gateway for Russians and Kazakhs, as if nothing has happened. RBS says the Russians will pull what remains of their money out of Cyprus “as soon as the capital controls are lifted”.

The willingness of the Cypriot authorities last week to seize money from anybody in any bank in Cyprus – even healthy banks – was an act of state madness. We will find out over time whether this epic blunder has destroyed confidence in the country as a financial centre, or whether parts of the financial and legal services sector can rebound.

Yet surely there is no going back to the old model, even though the final package restricts the losses to the two banks that are actually in trouble. Savers above €100,000 at Laiki will lose 80pc of their money, if they get anything back. Those at the Bank of Cyprus will lose 40pc.

Thousands of small firms trying to hang on face seizure of their operating funds. One Cypriot told me that the €400,000 trading account of his father at Laiki had just been frozen, leaving him unable to pay an Egyptian firm for a consignment of shoes.

The Cyprus debacle has taught us yet again that EMU has gone off the rails, is a danger to stability, and should be dismantled before it destroys Europe’s post-War order.

SOURCE

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Repeal Obamacare

Liberals had hoped, and some conservatives had feared, that the legislative Frankenstein’s monster known as Obamacare would become more popular as its sundry measures were implemented. But the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is no more popular now than when it was passed, as Americans have come to realize that it will neither protect patients nor provide for affordable care. While full repeal of the law is not within the realm of short-term political reality — the presence of Barack Obama in the White House and a Democratic majority in the Senate ensures that — repeal should nonetheless remain the end goal, either one piece at a time for now or root and branch.

The price tag for Obamacare has gone from shocking to preposterous. In March 2010, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the ten-year cost of the law at $898 billion; by February 2013, that number had climbed to $1.6 trillion, and it is likely that further revisions will be in the upward direction. That is a very high price to pay for a system that will, by the admission of its own supporters, leave some 30 million Americans uninsured. Long gone is the fiction pronounced by President Obama and repeated by his media enablers that the law will not add “one dime” to the deficit; the latest estimate is that Obamacare will add as much as $6.2 trillion to the long-term national debt, according to the Government Accountability Office. No thinking person takes President Obama seriously on fiscal questions, but those alleged experts and pundits who argued for Obamacare on fiscal grounds should be regarded as thoroughly discredited.

As mind-boggling as its price tag is, expense is not the main reason to repeal Obamacare. What is not sufficiently understood is that Obamacare does not reform or regulate health insurance: It effectively abolishes health insurance. Health insurance functions by creating pools of beneficiaries large enough that the incidence of particular health-care expenses — for everything from heart attacks to injuries in car accidents — can be predicted by actuaries with some statistical reliability, thus enabling costs to be distributed among beneficiaries over time. Obamacare demands that all insurance beneficiaries be offered identical rates regardless of health-related variables, and severely restricts the kinds of plans that may be offered. The most important variable is, of course, the question of whether somebody already is sick. Under Obamacare, an uninsured person who develops a serious illness can demand that he be insured at a rate no different from that of a person who had been purchasing insurance for decades before he became ill.

The “individual mandate” was supposed to prevent that problem by requiring all Americans to purchase health insurance, but it is a mandate that manages to be both too invasive and too lax at the same time: The mandate will invite the micromanagement of individuals and businesses by the federal government, but Americans will in many cases find themselves financially better off paying the tax for not getting insurance (as Chief Justice Roberts has reformulated the mandate) until they become sick and need insurance. Because of that defect, the main rationale for Obamacare — bringing all Americans into a large insurance market that can then be regulated and subsidized to bring it into accord with the tastes of the central planners in Washington — will prove impossible to realize.

Obamacare proposes to control health-care costs by empowering a small panel of unaccountable political appointees — the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) — to keep a lid on medical costs by imposing price controls. We have two relevant bodies of experience from which to draw insight on how this is likely to play out: Medicaid payments are subject to similar price controls, and doctors have responded to low rates of reimbursement by refusing to see Medicaid patients. Medicare is supposed to be subject to similar price controls, but, because the elderly are more politically influential than the poor, Congress has declined to actually cut payments to Medicare doctors, year after year after year, knowing that doing so would make doctors just as unwilling to take Medicare patients as they are to take Medicaid patients. The result in the former case is price controls that work by hurting Medicaid’s intended beneficiaries, who often have worse health-care outcomes than those with no coverage at all; the result in the latter case is price controls that do not work, period.

During the debate over Obamacare, the president and his supporters promised that enacting the law would cause insurance premiums for the typical family to decline by some $2,500 a year. In fact, premiums have continued to go up, now at an accelerated pace. In 2008, the year Barack Obama was elected president, health-insurance premiums rose by 0.6 percent. In 2009, the year Obamacare was passed, they rose by 1.3 percent. In 2011, they rose by 9.6 percent, or 16 times as quickly as they did the year before the law was passed. Expenses are expected to rise the most severely for young and healthy people. Because of the perverse incentives the law creates, the CBO estimates that the number of people insured through the subsidized health-insurance exchanges will begin to decline quickly after 2018 as the young and healthy realize that paying the fine is more economical than paying ever-higher insurance premiums. That means that those remaining in the insurance pool will be on average older and sicker, which is why the CBO estimates that the cost of subsidizing them will grow by almost 6 percent a year. Put another way, the cost of subsidizing the exchanges is expected to double every twelve years.

In short, the system created by this ill-advised law would prevent the emergence of normally functioning markets in medical services and health insurance. Instead, it establishes a top-down system of price controls and subsidies that will discourage healthy people from buying insurance in the first place, reward those who exploit the system’s defects, and discourage doctors and other health-care providers from extending their care to those who most need it.

Obamacare is too flawed in in its basic conception to be improved through reform. It must be replaced, either all at once or step by step. Replacement remains a viable option because the law is still unpopular and still unlikely to work. Indeed, the next phase of its implementation promises to be a chaotic enterprise that will further undermine the standing and credibility of the law and its architects. Republicans can and should begin taking it apart and building something better on the ruins.

 SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena .  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for 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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Devout Jews detained for attempted animal sacrifice

This is thoroughly obnoxious.  By what strange logic are Jews to be denied equal rights in Israel? Muslims can do whatever they like on the temple mount.  Animal sacrifice is clearly commanded in the Torah.  Is the Bible the book of the Jews or is it not?  If Jews renounce continuity with the Israelites of old, their entitlement to the land of Israel becomes very shaky



A lamb and two humans were detained by police in Jerusalem on Monday as they were making their way to the Temple Mount.

The humans, hard-right political and religious activists Noam Federman and Arye Sunnenberg, intended to go to the Temple Mount and carry out the Jewish ritual of the Passover Sacrifice, involving the slaughter of a lamb.

The sacrifice is an important commandment within Jewish law, which some religious authorities argues does not require the existence of a Temple for its performance.  It must, however, be conducted on the Temple Mount.

Federman and Sunnenberg are both associated with several Temple Mount organizations that insist on the right to Jewish prayer and worship at the holy site.

Both men were released a short time later although as of Tuesday night, the lamb remained in police custody.

Federman was stopped by the police close to the city center with the lamb in his car.

He said that since he had not been conducting any criminal activity, the police had detained him for infracting an Agriculture Ministry ordinance prohibiting the transport of livestock without a permit from a veterinarian.

Federman claimed that since he had made public his intentions to perform a Passover Sacrifice on the Temple Mount, the police had conducted a search in the city for his vehicle.

The Joint Association of Temple Organizations said it was concerned that the police intended to keep the lamb in administrative detention for another month, to prevent it from being brought as a sacrifice at the latest possible date, a month after the first day of Passover.

Although the Supreme Court has upheld Jewish prayer rights on the Temple Mount, the court allows the police to prevent prayer and other forms of worship if they believe that such activity will cause a disturbance of the public order.

The Wakf Muslim religious trust which administers the Temple Mount is fiercely opposed to any non-Muslim prayer there.

Speaking to The Jerusalem Post, Federman said that for the police to prevent Jews from carrying out a central Jewish commandment like the Passover Sacrifice was extremely troubling.

“It’s unbelievable that Arabs are allowed to do whatever they feel like on the Temple Mount, yet Jews are forbidden from doing a mitzva which, according to Jewish law, if someone doesn’t perform incurs the punishment of spiritual excommunication,” he said.

Yehuda Glick, the association spokesman, said the Temple Mount organizations felt that that there needed to be some kind of protest at the infringement of the freedom of religion that prohibiting the performance of the Passover Sacrifice constitutes.

Asked whether the concern for public disturbance was reasonable given Muslim sensitivities, Glick said that the police exaggerate the threat and impose a de facto blanket ban on prayer and worship regardless of the situation.

He added that the police considerations should not come at the expense of freedom of religion.

SOURCE

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The day the Euro banks became bank robbers

By Robert Romano

How can deposits in Cyprus be unavailable for withdrawal, and yet somehow available for taxation?

This has been a burning question for me as I have observed the banking crisis in the Mediterranean island nation — where banks have faced heavy losses on Greek sovereign debt, European officials proposed a levy on Cypriot bank deposits, and all the while banks were shut down to prevent withdrawals.

So I asked an expert, Mike “Mish” Shedlock of Mish’s Global Economic Analysis fame to reconcile the seeming contradiction. If there’s no money in the banks, how can deposits in them be taxed?

Mr. Shedlock even kindly created a blog post to answer the question publicly, wherein he wrote, “I believe that’s a rhetorical question. Robert knows the answer. Even with the EU kicking in 10 billion euros (a loan not a gift), the money is not there. If the banks were sufficiently capitalized, there would not be a need for capital controls.”

To be fair, when I wrote my letter, I was legitimately baffled. But as it turned out I was simply in denial. I had answered my own question.

So, now that Cyprus has agreed to confiscate up to 30 percent of the savings of those with uninsured deposits over €100,000, many from Russia, where did the money go?

Technically, it went nowhere — as it had already been lent out by the Cypriot banks. It was lost the moment they lent the money to Greece by purchasing their bonds. When Greece defaulted, it put the Cypriot banks who lent them the money effectively into default as well.

What is occurring now is that the banks are writing off a liability — some €4.2 billion of uninsured deposits they owe — effectively defaulting on their obligations to those depositors. A move that in reality does not require any funds to be transferred anywhere.

If it makes it simpler to think about, the money is effectively being destroyed. The Cypriot banks will no longer show losses on Greek debt, and the uninsured depositors’ account statements will be now €4.2 billion lighter.

In fact, in this latest deal, there was no deposit tax levied by the Cypriot parliament. There was no vote to do so. The legislation that did ultimately pass Cyprus’ parliament provided for the restructuring of the banks there.

As German finance minister Wolfgang Schauble explained, “The Commission informed us today that the necessary legislation to implement these points has already been passed… Additional legislation would only have been necessary if a levy on uninsured deposits would have been raised but (not) for restructuring of the banks in question.”

Such a move was a necessary precondition for those banks to receive €10.7 billion of recapitalization loans from the so-called Troika: The European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund.

In short, to “avert” a bank collapse in Cyprus, the banks there are defaulting on depositors’ savings. Which, basically means they collapsed anyway — and will be reconstituted using new Troika loans.

A similar result occurred in Iceland in 2008 when the Icesave bank collapsed and British and Dutch depositors were not covered under Iceland’s deposit insurance regime. The reason that had to be so was because the banking system — which was up to 10 times larger than Iceland’s economy — was too big to save.

In other words, when financial institutions bet everyone’s savings on the roulette wheel landing on red, and it lands on black, somebody has to end up holding the bag. In that case, Iceland guaranteed domestic depositors, devalued its currency, and utilized some capital controls. And then when the United Kingdom and the Netherlands came looking for their citizens’ money, the Icelanders told them to go pound sand. As well they should have.

What made the original deposit tax in Cyprus so outrageous — and even the latest deposit write-off — is that although it falls on foreign depositors, any Cypriot with more than €100,000 in savings is taking it on the chin, too.

At least Iceland protected its own citizens, who were the government’s primary concern there. It let the banks fail themselves. Whereas in Cyprus, the banks are being saved — and the euro itself — at the expense of the wealthy.

Both cases underscore something that everyone should have already known: Uninsured deposits are, well, uninsured. If the bank that holds them goes kaput, so do the savings.

The key takeaway now is that anyone who keeps uninsured deposits in the Eurozone — or anywhere else for that matter — is doing so at their own risk.

Already, this “one-off” is being discussed as a template to resolving the sovereign debt crisis across Europe.  Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem said after the Cyprus episode that if a bank cannot meet capital requirements, “then we’ll talk to the shareholders and the bondholders, we’ll ask them to contribute to recapitalizing the bank, and if necessary the uninsured deposit holders.”

Can you say, “bank run”? Why should any depositor keep their funds in Eurozone banks if they are subject to seizure at any moment?

Dijsselbloem’s comments have since been walked back by the Eurogroup which stated “Macro-economic adjustment programmes are tailor-made to the situation of the country concerned and no models or templates are used.”

Nonetheless, even the prospect of deposit seizures raises serious questions about the nature of bank deposits and the relationship between depositors and banks. No longer an asset to be protected, deposits — especially large deposits — can readily be seized and converted into bank capital at will at any time without warning.

That would be bad enough. But this episode also raises troubling questions about property rights. Whether officials care to admit it, the door is now open even for insured deposits to be seized as well.

And since it is practically impossible to live in today’s society without participating in the banking system, this exposes a fundamental shift in the social contract. The fruits of our labor can be taken from us without a moment’s notice at the state’s whim in order to shore up the solvency of a financial institution.

This turns the notion of the government as the protector of property rights on its head. There can be no property rights if the people do not even have a right to keep their own money after taxes.

How can the people trust the government or the banking system to protect their assets when the Cyprus precedent turns the government and the banks into bank robbers with an open vault. Something to think about.

SOURCE

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Why Harry Reid is ashamed of the Senate budget

By Rick Manning – Hell must have frozen over this past weekend as the U.S. Senate broke a four year record of intransigence and failure as it unleashed a blizzard of votes that culminated with the passage of a budget document that reveals the plans and priorities of the 50 Democrats who supported it.

It was no mistake that the big reveal by Senate Democrats was that they had no plan whatsoever to ever bring the budget into balance came on Friday evening going into pre-dawn Saturday morning.  Harry Reid and crew clearly were embarrassed by their budget and hoped to avoid widespread media coverage by scheduling votes when they would receive the least amount of attention.

Ironically, Democrat Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) actually had the audacity to complain that it was irresponsible for the Senate to be considering major foreign policy decisions at 3 am on Saturday, referring to a budget amendment that passed putting the Senate on record as opposing the United Nations Small Arms Treaty which the Obama Administration is currently negotiating.

Menendez’s complaint should have been with Majority Leader Reid who deliberately scheduled the vote-a-thon in the wee hours of the morning to keep the results cloaked from real time reporting as much as possible.

But the rationale behind Reid’s Hide the Budget Act makes perfect sense.

The Senate Democrats claimed that their budget was “balanced” a grand total of 230 times as noted by Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) in spite of their voting for a budget that never even gets close to balance.

In spite of these rhetorical claims, every Democrat Senator with the exception of West Virginia’s Joe Manchin voted against sending the budget back to Committee with instructions that it balance within ten years.  The motion to recommit by Sessions was defeated by a 46–53 margin with Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) not voting.

The significance of this admission by 53 Democrat Senators — 50 of whom voted for final passage of the budget — that they have no intention of ever bringing the budget to balance cannot be overstated.

No matter their orchestrated protestations to the contrary, and their attempts to spin the American people by perverting the definition of balancing the budget, their votes do not lie. The budget that was passed by the Senate Democrats creates $7.3 trillion in new debt over the next ten years despite a $1.5 trillion tax increase.

It immediately increases the budget deficit and grows federal government spending by 60 percent over the next ten years.  Even more stunning, the growth of means-tested spending increases by 80 percent — i.e spending on those who are the poorest amongst us.

This last point is a bald admission that the Democrats who voted for this budget do not believe that their big government policies will work. Nor do they think their budget will grow the economy or ween people away from government dependency, but instead they project that the very dependency that sucks the self-respect from the least of these, will dramatically increase. Incredibly, the Senate Democrats actually budgeted for the failure of their policies.

To put an exclamation point on the devastating impact that the Senate Democrat vision for federal government taxing and spending would have on American’s who want a job, the Heritage Foundation found that if passed into law, it would cost our nation an average of 853,000 jobs per year for the next ten years.

That’s 8.5 million jobs that either won’t be created or would go away entirely if the Senate Democrats’ vision for America became a reality.

That’s 8.5 million Americans consigned to perpetual dependency rather than developing the kind of sustainable careers that our nation’s workers have traditionally been able to depend upon.

That’s 8.5 million disappointments, tears and putting off a vibrant future for another day as American workers are stuck in a cycle of Democrat Senate induced dependency rather than being able to stand on their own two feet to determine their own futures based upon their ability and hard work.

That’s simply unacceptable and inexcusable.  Yet, it is the consequence of a Senate Democrat vision that dramatically increases government, puts another $7 trillion onto the national debt, all the while sucking an additional $1.5 trillion in new taxes out of the economy.

Thankfully, one of the positives from the Senate budget debate is that our U.S. Senate went on the record on a number of other issues, producing mixed results.

Beyond the UN Small Arms Treaty vote, another of these was the vote of support by 56 Senators in favor of illegal immigrants having access to free taxpayer funded health care should they become legal under a future immigration reform bill.

Another vote that is good news for those who believe in free markets but bodes ill for those in the Obama Administration who hope to pass a carbon tax, as 53 Senators rejected this holy grail for the environmental left on a bi-partisan basis.

This past weekend was indeed momentous for not only the Senate Democrats being forced to actually do their jobs and lay out their budgetary vision for the country, but also for the 47 votes taken that put every Senator on record on many of the other critical issues facing our nation.

It is just too bad that Harry Reid was so ashamed of the product his Budget Committee produced that he attempted to hide their work behind a late night curtain.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena .  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for 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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