The Sad Limits of Realpolitik ("Realism" in politics)
Morality matters
Early in his service as President Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger paid a visit to his homeland. The West German government suggested to the press that Kissinger intended to visit some relatives. "What the hell are they putting out?" Kissinger vented to his aides. "My relatives are soap."
Blunt, and true. Kissinger had left Germany in August 1938 as a 15-year-old refugee, three months before Kristallnacht. His granduncle, three aunts and other relatives were murdered in the Holocaust.
So it is appalling to hear Kissinger, an epic life later, telling Nixon on a scratchy recording from March 1, 1973: "Let's face it: The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. It may be a humanitarian concern."
Some commentators have attempted to provide a psychological explanation for this incident, having to do with the struggles of a Jew in an anti-Semitic White House. But this effort is not necessary. Kissinger's words were not the expression of a quirk but of an argument. In 1969, he had publicly declared: "We will judge other countries, including communist countries, on the basis of their actions, not on the basis of their domestic ideologies." This is a commonplace assertion of a school of foreign policy called "realism" -- that only the external behavior of regimes really matters, that their internal conduct does not concern American interests. It is a view currently popular, even ascendant, among foreign-policy thinkers. Kissinger was merely being unsentimental in its application.
In response to the recent release of the recording, Kissinger said his words "must be viewed in the context of the time." That context was a debate over the Jackson-Vanik Amendment of 1974. The Soviet government -- which both practiced anti-Semitism and resented the brain drain of Jewish departures -- had imposed heavy fines on emigres. Sen. Henry Jackson and Rep. Charles Vanik, supported by American Jewish groups, responded with legislation that linked normal trade relations with the Soviet Union (and other "non-market" economies) to the freedom to emigrate.
Kissinger believed that detente with the Soviet Union was of overriding importance and that human rights issues should only be raised quietly, on an unrelated diplomatic track. "The Jewish community in this country, on that issue," he told Nixon, "is behaving unconscionably. It's behaving traitorously."
But Jackson-Vanik turned out to be a pivot point in the Cold War. After an initial drop in emigration, the legislation exerted two decades of pressure on Soviet leaders, eventually resulting in higher emigration levels. It pressed one of the West's most powerful ideological advantages against the Soviet Union by demonstrating the weakness of a system that must build walls to keep its people from fleeing. This emphasis on human rights inspired not only Jewish refuseniks but other groups and nationalities that inhabited the Soviet prison.
Jackson-Vanik was both a rejection of Kissinger's realism and a preview of Reaganism. It asserted that oppressive regimes are more likely to threaten their neighbors, placing human rights nearer the center of American interests. It elevated standards of human dignity that were direct threats to regimes premised on their denial.
Henry Kissinger is not a simple villain, because he is not a simple anything. Complexity is his creed. In other circumstances, he was a friend to the state of Israel. He skillfully navigated a difficult patch in the Cold War. In later writings, he has recognized the role of idealism in sustaining American global engagement.
This 37-year-old quote does not characterize an entire career. But it illustrates the narrowness of foreign policy realism. It has a sadly limited view of power, discounting American ideological advantages in global ideological struggles.
Realists often hold a simplistic view of great-power relations, asserting that any humanitarian pressure on Russia or China will cause the whole edifice of global order to crumble. This precludes the possibility of a mature relationship with other nations in which America both stands for its values and pursues common interests.
And from this historical episode, it is clear that repeated doses of foreign policy realism can deaden the conscience. In President Nixon's office, a lack of human sentiment was viewed as proof of mental toughness -- an atmosphere that diminished the office itself. Realists are often dismissive of Manichean distinctions between good and evil, light and darkness. But in the world beyond good and evil, some may be lightly consigned to the gas chambers.
SOURCE
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Looting Lorillard
A BOSTON JURY last week ordered Lorillard Inc., the tobacco company, to pay $71 million as compensation -- and another $81 million in punitive damages -- for the death of lifelong smoker Marie Evans, who died of lung cancer in 2002. Evans's son William, a Harvard-trained lawyer, claimed that Lorillard had hooked his mother on cigarettes by giving out free samples of Newports in the Boston neighborhood where she lived as a child in the 1950's and 1960's.
Lorillard denied the allegation, and apparently the only direct evidence for it was a videotaped deposition in which Marie Evans described how she began smoking at 13. But it doesn't seem implausible to me. The great majority of smokers take up the habit before turning 18, and even I can recall packs of cigarettes being handed out on Cleveland's Public Square in the late 1970's.
Yet even if it were true, how can it be just or moral to expropriate tens of millions of dollars from a company for distributing free samples of a lawful product? Why should Marie Evans's decision to smoke -- something she always knew was bad for her health -- entitle her son and estate to be showered with money? Reasonable people can debate whether cigarettes, already heavily regulated, should be banned outright. But it is not reasonable to hold tobacco companies liable for the foreseeable risks that smokers assume.
Lorillard never forced or tricked Marie Evans to use cigarettes; she became a smoker willingly. By her own account, she first received those free cigarettes when she was 9, and for years traded them for candy. Plainly it wasn't Lorillard that eventually got Evans to start smoking; if she could resist the lure of tobacco until she was 12, she could have resisted it at 13.
The demonizing of tobacco companies is popular, and who wouldn't rather think ill of Big Bad Tobacco than of a devoted mother who lost a terrible fight with lung cancer at the age of 54? But sorrow for Marie Evans and sympathy for her son don't alter reality: What turned her into a smoker was not a wicked corporation. It was a foolish choice she made as a teen-ager. People who willingly make foolish choices -- a category that includes most human beings, especially those of the teen-age persuasion -- ought not to be enriched for their foolishness.
Yes, smoking is addictive, but the addiction is not inescapable: Tens of millions of Americans have kicked the habit and nowadays most never start. Among those who do, there may conceivably be some so weak-willed, suggestible, or mentally deficient that they were literally incapable of refusing an invitation to smoke. Marie Evans -- a single mother who earned a degree from Northeastern University, rose through the ranks at Verizon to become a human-resources manager, and is described as "the determined one" by Michael Weisman, the lead plaintiff's lawyer in the suit against Lorillard -- was clearly not such a smoker.
"It's awful, what they did to my mom," Willie Evans told an interviewer this week. But "they" -- Lorillard -- did nothing very different from the countless other vendors who tempt us with products we would be well advised to resist, or at least to use in moderation. As a son who loved his mother and hated to see her suffer, Evans understandably hates the cigarettes that sickened and killed her. It's even understandable that he might hate the company that makes the cigarettes she favored. However, to turn her death into a legal pretext for looting that company does her memory no honor. Neither does Evans's claim that his mother "had no free will." Of course she had free will. And one of the ways she exercised it had tragic consequences.
What if Marie Evans had died from cirrhosis of the liver after drinking a six-pack of Budweiser every day for 40 years? Would her son be entitled to a fortune in damages from Anheuser-Busch? If she had been an incorrigibly reckless driver, who died in a crash caused by her speeding, would Willie Evans have sued the auto manufacturer whose commercials made fast cars so irresistible to his mother? If she had eaten her way to an early grave, would her son have gone after Nestle, Mars, and Hershey for getting her hooked on sweets long ago with a marketing strategy that targeted children?
The urge to blame others for our own self-destructive choices is as old as the power to choose. There is nothing admirable in yielding to that urge. Still less in rewarding those who do with $152 million.
SOURCE
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Why the persisting high unemployment?
The Fed and its failed theories
While the Fed has pumped huge quantities of liquidity into the economy, the U.S. is paradoxically facing a credit crunch. As the accompanying chart indicates, banks have utilized their liquidity to pile up cash and accumulate government bonds and securities.
In contrast, bank loans have actually decreased — a credit crunch. And since credit is a source of working capital for businesses, a credit crunch acts like a supply constraint on the economy. Even though it appears as though the economy has loads of excess capacity, the supply-side of the economy is, in fact, constrained by the credit crunch. It is not surprising, therefore, that the economy is not firing on all cylinders.
To understand why, in the Fed's sea of liquidity, the economy is being held back by a credit crunch, we have to focus on the workings of the loan markets. Retail bank lending involves making risky forward commitments. A line of credit to a corporate client, for example, represents such a commitment. The willingness of a bank to make such forward commitments depends, to a large extent, on a well-functioning interbank market — a market operating without counterparty risks and with positive interest rates. With the availability of such a market, even illiquid (but solvent) banks can make forward commitments (loans) to their clients because they can cover their commitments by bidding for funds in the wholesale interbank market.
At present, the major problem facing the interbank market is the zero interest-rate trap. In a world in which the risk-free Fed funds rate is close to zero, banks with excess reserves are reluctant to part with them for virtually no yield in the interbank market. Accordingly, the interbank market has dried up — thanks to the Fed's zero interest-rate policy — and, with that, banks have been unwilling to scale up their forward loan commitments.
In short, the Fed's zero interest-rate policy has created a credit crunch that is holding back the economy. The only way out of this trap is for the Fed to raise the Fed funds rate to, say, two percent.
The Fed's interest-rate strategy is not the only thing holding back the U.S. (and international) economy. Regime uncertainty is so thick that you can cut it with a knife. The Fed — by embracing more quantitative easing — has generated uncertainty. Bond market participants, among others, anxiously ponder how and when the Fed will eventually drain liquidity from the economy. Bankers are also nervous. They have been called on to beef up their banks' capital positions. This they have done. But, will there be more mandates to increase bank capital? And, if this wasn't enough, the all-important bank regulations that will accompany the new Dodd-Frank bank legislation will take years to be written and finalized. It's not surprising that bankers, instead of making loans, are piling up excess reserves....
We must not forget that the Fed's ultra-low interest rates have not only produced a U.S. credit crunch, but also picked the pockets of prudent savers. For example, with "low" returns (and "low" discount rates), the unfunded liabilities of state pension funds in the U.S. have exploded and are estimated to reach $1 trillion by 2013. In the United Kingdom, actuaries are also having sleepless nights because of "low" yields (and "low" discount rates). Over half of the companies in the U.K. are projected to face bankruptcy if government bond yields remain at current levels.
More HERE
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ELSEWHERE
Gaza: IDF fighter jets strike Hamas targets: "The IDF Spokesman unit on Tuesday confirmed that IAF aircraft attacked terrorist activity targets in the southern Gaza Strip. ... Palestinian sources claimed that the IDF attacked targets in the Gaza Strip belonging to the military wing of Hamas, Izzadin Kassam Brigade and eye witnesses reported that four people were injured during the attacks. The reports follow an incident in which a Kassam rocket landed near a kindergarten in a kibbutz near Ashkelon on Tuesday morning, injuring a 14-year-old girl."
After four decades, Harvard opens door to ROTC: "Harvard University will welcome ROTC back to campus now that Congress has repealed a ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in the military, university president Drew Faust said. The move will end a four-decade standoff between one of the nation’s most prestigious universities and its armed forces. The tension began over the Vietnam War and continued in recent years as university administrators, faculty, and students objected to what they saw as discrimination against gays and lesbians." [It will be a while before the change will be implemented so Harvard sound like they are racing to get a monkey off their backs]
Census result: "The population of the United States grew 9.7% to 308.7 million people over the past decade -- the slowest rate of growth since the Great Depression -- the Census Bureau reported on Tuesday. In the 1930s, the population grew by just 7.3%. Comparatively, the nation added 13.2% more residents during the 1990s."
NJ: Mortgage firms face possible foreclosure freeze: "The chief judge of New Jersey's highest court ordered six leading mortgage lenders and servicers to face a possible freeze on their foreclosures in the state due to problems in handling documents, the Associated Press reported. ... [Supreme Court Justice Stuart] Rabner's order follows a report to the Supreme Court citing depositions and court filings in other states. It portrayed a system rife with abuse in the filing of foreclosures that include 'robo-signing,' in which employees signed hundreds of documents without checking them for accuracy." [There have been a lot of bungles]
Murkowski the RINO: "One of Pres. Obama's biggest supporters in the Senate in the past week is not even a member of his own party: Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). Murkowski supported the president's position on the Senate's four biggest votes since last Wednesday. She and fellow Alaska Sen. Mark Begich (D) voted in favor of the tax cut compromise and to invoke cloture on New START treaty, the Dream Act and the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Both senators also voted in favor of the final repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell on Saturday. No Senate Republican voted for all four bills other than Murkowski."
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Thursday, December 23, 2010
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Monitoring America
Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators.
The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation's history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.
The government's goal is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work of the FBI, which is in charge of terrorism investigations in the United States.
Other democracies - Britain and Israel, to name two - are well acquainted with such domestic security measures. But for the United States, the sum of these new activities represents a new level of governmental scrutiny.
This localized intelligence apparatus is part of a larger Top Secret America created since the attacks. In July, The Washington Post described an alternative geography of the United States, one that has grown so large, unwieldy and secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs or how many programs exist within it.
* Technologies and techniques honed for use on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan have migrated into the hands of law enforcement agencies in America.
* The FBI is building a database with the names and certain personal information, such as employment history, of thousands of U.S. citizens and residents whom a local police officer or a fellow citizen believed to be acting suspiciously. It is accessible to an increasing number of local law enforcement and military criminal investigators, increasing concerns that it could somehow end up in the public domain.
* Seeking to learn more about Islam and terrorism, some law enforcement agencies have hired as trainers self-described experts whose extremist views on Islam and terrorism are considered inaccurate and counterproductive by the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies.
* The Department of Homeland Security sends its state and local partners intelligence reports with little meaningful guidance, and state reports have sometimes inappropriately reported on lawful meetings.
The need to identify U.S.-born or naturalized citizens who are planning violent attacks is more urgent than ever, U.S. intelligence officials say. This month's FBI sting operation involving a Baltimore construction worker who allegedly planned to bomb a Maryland military recruiting station is the latest example. It followed a similar arrest of a Somali-born naturalized U.S. citizen allegedly seeking to detonate a bomb near a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Ore. There have been nearly two dozen other cases just this year.
"The old view that 'if we fight the terrorists abroad, we won't have to fight them here' is just that - the old view," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told police and firefighters recently.
The Obama administration heralds this local approach as a much-needed evolution in the way the country confronts terrorism. However, just as at the federal level, the effectiveness of these programs, as well as their cost, is difficult to determine. The Department of Homeland Security, for example, does not know how much money it spends each year on what are known as state fusion centers, which bring together and analyze information from various agencies within a state.
More HERE
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Secrets Your Government Hides From You
Dave Gaubatz
Having worked for the U.S. government for twenty four and a half years and holding our nation’s highest secrets, I would be the first to say there are times information collected by the government should be classified and not released to the public. Having said that, it has been my experience as a counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence officer and analyst that only 10 percent of what is collected should be classified. The other 90 percent should be released to the public.
Why then would our government classify the vast enormous amount of intelligence collected and not openly provide this to the people? Readers should keep in mind the government works for the people, not the other way around. There are 3 primary reasons the government classifies information and only one of them is for legitimate reasons:
1: Legitimate reason: The release of certain information would cause ‘grave’ consequences for our national security and our military forces.
2. Illegitimate reason: The release of certain information would cause major embarrassment to some government departments or leaders. In other words when government employees make serious mistakes the information is simply classified so the public will never know of the errors. One such example is ‘friendly fire’ incidents during war time. The government classifies these types of incidents so they can avoid having to answer to the families of the injured or killed military personnel. In addition many friendly fire incidents were in actuality ‘murders’ committed by our own troops against their fellow soldiers.
Many readers who know of my counter-terrorism research since leaving federal service are aware that my team and I have visited over 250 Islamic Centers in the U.S. I personally spent several days at an Islamic center in Knoxville, TN. The Mosque had hundreds of books and DVD’s pertaining to violence and the methodology of treason and sedition against the U.S. While at the mosque I had an opportunity to spend several hours with a senior Muslim worshipper. The man began explaining ‘friendly fire’ incidents in Iraq. He began by telling me his nephew was in a military prison because he had intentionally killed several of his fellow troops. Why? Because they were considered the enemy, not the Muslims fighting for Saddam Hussein. This Muslim man continued informing me that there are numerous such killings of American troops by American Muslim soldiers. He followed up by showing me numerous references in the mosque that justified this action. He said the media and U.S. government will not report these ‘murders’ because it could cause a backlash against American Muslim troops.
3. Illegitimate reason: The government collects information on U.S. citizens that are illegal under U.S. laws. How and why do they do this? Under U.S. laws it is illegal to collect intelligence on U.S. citizens without going through very stringent guidelines. The government knows how to use ‘loop holes’ to collect illegal intelligence on U.S. citizens. They simply make it a criminal case instead of an ‘intelligence’ case. The government can collect without restriction as much ‘mundane’ information on any U.S. citizen as long as they classify the investigation as criminal versus counter-intelligence or counter-terrorism. Little do the American people know that vaults and vaults of information is collected on citizens for possible future use against them, even when there is no legitimate reason for the intelligence to be collected. The information is classified and it literally takes an act of Congress to find out what information the government has collected on you.
Now for the ‘meat’ of this article. I will provide Americans three things they should know that is contrary to what the government informs you of:
1. In the U.S. we have several military installations that contain our country’s highest weapons programs and the technology for future weapons one can not even imagine to understand. What is kept from the American people is that scientists, engineers, and others are given access to these installations on a daily basis. My primary duties as a Federal Agent were the protection of our nation’s highest technology. Almost on a daily basis there are foreigners from Saudi, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, etc… who work on the sensitive U.S. military installations and have free access to ‘roam’ the bases: essentially they collect intelligence on our troops, weapons technology, and vulnerabilities. In turn they report the intelligence to their respective Embassies. Should Americans not know that our U.S. military bases are not as safe as the government wants us to believe?
2. Another ‘secret’ that should not be classified is that the U.S. government has major corporations such as Boeing, Northrop, Lockheed Martin and many others who work on ‘Top Secret’ programs. How many reports do the American people hear through our media and government officials that foreigners are caught on a regular basis ‘stealing’ classified information? Why would this type information be classified? The only reason it is classified is because our senior military and government officials would be put on the spot and have to answer some very embarrassing questions.
3. The Saudi government is not the friends of America. They support Al Qaeda and desire Sharia law implemented worldwide. The Saudi government is responsible for pouring thousands of pieces of ‘hate material’ into our public libraries and schools. They encourage the Maj. Hassan’s and Mohammed Mohamed (Oregon). Our government knows the Saudis’ intention is to destroy Israel and America, but Saudi Arabia pumps billions of dollars into our politicians pockets, our major media outlets, major universities, and into such organizations such as CAIR. While in Saudi Arabia a couple of months prior to ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ I was the lead collector of intelligence targeting Saudi Arabia. If the American people want the truth about Saudi Arabia they should demand a Congressional Hearing on this topic. The hundreds of reports my fellow Agents and I wrote about Saudi Arabia would astonish you…. and upset you to know we deal with Saudi Arabia as our friends, when behind the scenes they are educating suicide bombers to kill innocent Americans.
Now I believe it is important to explain why this article is being written. I had mentioned I worked for the government for 24.5 years. There are literally millions and millions of documents that are classified, but should not be. There are numerous people such as Maj. Hasan from Ft. Hood the government has information on and fully understand they are a serious risk to our national security, but due to political correctness and to avoid being labeled an Islamophobe, the information is classified and military members are warned (with the threat of possible court-martials) that to discuss these issues is prohibited. The murders committed by the 11 Sept. 2001 hijackers did not have to happen. There were literally thousands of intelligence reports revealing this attack, yet the reports remain sealed in vaults.
SOURCE
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A foretaste of totalitarianism
The first two years of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid administration has given most Americans a taste of what it is to live in a nation where the central government is run by people who do not give a damn for public opinion or the Constitution.
It took barely a year for Americans to come together in a Tea Party movement to oppose Obamacare. That hideous piece of legislation interposes the government between all Americans and their physicians, inflicting a bureaucratic nightmare that, if permitted to exist, will surely kill Americans denied timely care.
The members of the Tea Party are not just Republicans, not just Democrats, and not just independents. They are quintessentially Americans that swiftly concluded that a serious mistake was made when Obama was elected. On the anniversary of the original tea party, Sen. Reid was forced to make a humiliating retreat, dropping the $1.1 trillion "budget" bill intended to shackle the newly elected members of Congress and to impose still more debt and control over Americans.
The Obama administration is shot through with control freaks, nags and busybodies, not the least of whom is the First Lady, Michelle Obama. On the signing of a bill giving the governmental control over food in the nation’s schools she said that obesity is “not just an economic threat, it’s a national security threat as well.” That is just absurd. It is a feeble excuse to interpose the federal government between parents and the schools to which they are compelled to send their children.
“We cannot leave it up to the parents,” said Michelle Obama. Not surprisingly, a Rasmussen Reports poll revealed that 75% of those asked did not agree with the First Lady.
Hardly a day goes by when some member of the Obama administration doesn’t say or do something absurd. In mid-December, the U.S. Surgeon-General, Regina Benjamin, said “there is no risk-free level of exposure to tobacco smoke.”
She claimed that even occasional smoking or exposure to second-hand smoke “causes immediate damage to your body that can lead to serious illness or death.” That is not based in any valid analysis and it ignores the rising levels of life expectancy in America. It is just another piece of the hysterical anti-tobacco agenda of busybodies who have no right to tell anyone whether they should smoke or not.
The most dangerous thing Americans do every day is to get behind the wheel or be a passenger in an automobile. Auto accidents annually kill 40,000 or more.
Recently, at the Cancun, Mexico conference of global warming charlatans, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, said that “climate change is one of the greatest threats facing our planet” as if human beings had anything to say or do about it. He might was well have said that the United Nations must begin to control the Sun, the oceans, and the clouds.
Finally, after being banned by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1980, the agency decided that saccharin, a sweetener substitute for sugar, was neither toxic nor a cancer-causing agent, a fact determined in the late 1990s by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. The EPA routinely bans chemicals claiming they could cause cancer, ignoring the fact that too much exposure to any chemical, including salt or sugar, is unwise.
These and a thousand other examples are reasons to distrust the Obama administration in particular and the federal government in general. As it continues to grasp more and more power over lifestyle decisions that belong to individuals, it threatens the very reason America was founded.
More HERE
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ELSEWHERE
McConnell: Government will stay afloat: "Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said yesterday that he and the Democratic leader have agreed on a spending measure to keep the government running through March. Passing the bill would prevent the government from running out of money for daily operations and forcing a shutdown. McConnell of Kentucky said on CNN’s State of the Union that he and Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada reached a deal on the measure."
Are economic forces redrawing congressional map?: "New population data from the Census Bureau this week will reshuffle political clout among the states, and the power shift may be amplified by economic forces as well as demographic ones. Simply put, some states have been gaining people because they offer cheaper housing or more abundant jobs. ... Economic opportunities are one major factor behind those choices, researchers say."
Tax deduction for mortgage interest could be on the chopping block: "Perhaps the most sacred of all the sacred cows in the tax code, the home mortgage deduction has long been seen as crucial to a major element of the American dream — owning your own home. It has also been a boon to home builders, construction workers, the financial services industry and local governments that benefited from fatter real estate tax revenue. But nearly a century after coming into existence, the mortgage deduction may face a day of reckoning."
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators.
The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation's history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.
The government's goal is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work of the FBI, which is in charge of terrorism investigations in the United States.
Other democracies - Britain and Israel, to name two - are well acquainted with such domestic security measures. But for the United States, the sum of these new activities represents a new level of governmental scrutiny.
This localized intelligence apparatus is part of a larger Top Secret America created since the attacks. In July, The Washington Post described an alternative geography of the United States, one that has grown so large, unwieldy and secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs or how many programs exist within it.
* Technologies and techniques honed for use on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan have migrated into the hands of law enforcement agencies in America.
* The FBI is building a database with the names and certain personal information, such as employment history, of thousands of U.S. citizens and residents whom a local police officer or a fellow citizen believed to be acting suspiciously. It is accessible to an increasing number of local law enforcement and military criminal investigators, increasing concerns that it could somehow end up in the public domain.
* Seeking to learn more about Islam and terrorism, some law enforcement agencies have hired as trainers self-described experts whose extremist views on Islam and terrorism are considered inaccurate and counterproductive by the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies.
* The Department of Homeland Security sends its state and local partners intelligence reports with little meaningful guidance, and state reports have sometimes inappropriately reported on lawful meetings.
The need to identify U.S.-born or naturalized citizens who are planning violent attacks is more urgent than ever, U.S. intelligence officials say. This month's FBI sting operation involving a Baltimore construction worker who allegedly planned to bomb a Maryland military recruiting station is the latest example. It followed a similar arrest of a Somali-born naturalized U.S. citizen allegedly seeking to detonate a bomb near a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Ore. There have been nearly two dozen other cases just this year.
"The old view that 'if we fight the terrorists abroad, we won't have to fight them here' is just that - the old view," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told police and firefighters recently.
The Obama administration heralds this local approach as a much-needed evolution in the way the country confronts terrorism. However, just as at the federal level, the effectiveness of these programs, as well as their cost, is difficult to determine. The Department of Homeland Security, for example, does not know how much money it spends each year on what are known as state fusion centers, which bring together and analyze information from various agencies within a state.
More HERE
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Secrets Your Government Hides From You
Dave Gaubatz
Having worked for the U.S. government for twenty four and a half years and holding our nation’s highest secrets, I would be the first to say there are times information collected by the government should be classified and not released to the public. Having said that, it has been my experience as a counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence officer and analyst that only 10 percent of what is collected should be classified. The other 90 percent should be released to the public.
Why then would our government classify the vast enormous amount of intelligence collected and not openly provide this to the people? Readers should keep in mind the government works for the people, not the other way around. There are 3 primary reasons the government classifies information and only one of them is for legitimate reasons:
1: Legitimate reason: The release of certain information would cause ‘grave’ consequences for our national security and our military forces.
2. Illegitimate reason: The release of certain information would cause major embarrassment to some government departments or leaders. In other words when government employees make serious mistakes the information is simply classified so the public will never know of the errors. One such example is ‘friendly fire’ incidents during war time. The government classifies these types of incidents so they can avoid having to answer to the families of the injured or killed military personnel. In addition many friendly fire incidents were in actuality ‘murders’ committed by our own troops against their fellow soldiers.
Many readers who know of my counter-terrorism research since leaving federal service are aware that my team and I have visited over 250 Islamic Centers in the U.S. I personally spent several days at an Islamic center in Knoxville, TN. The Mosque had hundreds of books and DVD’s pertaining to violence and the methodology of treason and sedition against the U.S. While at the mosque I had an opportunity to spend several hours with a senior Muslim worshipper. The man began explaining ‘friendly fire’ incidents in Iraq. He began by telling me his nephew was in a military prison because he had intentionally killed several of his fellow troops. Why? Because they were considered the enemy, not the Muslims fighting for Saddam Hussein. This Muslim man continued informing me that there are numerous such killings of American troops by American Muslim soldiers. He followed up by showing me numerous references in the mosque that justified this action. He said the media and U.S. government will not report these ‘murders’ because it could cause a backlash against American Muslim troops.
3. Illegitimate reason: The government collects information on U.S. citizens that are illegal under U.S. laws. How and why do they do this? Under U.S. laws it is illegal to collect intelligence on U.S. citizens without going through very stringent guidelines. The government knows how to use ‘loop holes’ to collect illegal intelligence on U.S. citizens. They simply make it a criminal case instead of an ‘intelligence’ case. The government can collect without restriction as much ‘mundane’ information on any U.S. citizen as long as they classify the investigation as criminal versus counter-intelligence or counter-terrorism. Little do the American people know that vaults and vaults of information is collected on citizens for possible future use against them, even when there is no legitimate reason for the intelligence to be collected. The information is classified and it literally takes an act of Congress to find out what information the government has collected on you.
Now for the ‘meat’ of this article. I will provide Americans three things they should know that is contrary to what the government informs you of:
1. In the U.S. we have several military installations that contain our country’s highest weapons programs and the technology for future weapons one can not even imagine to understand. What is kept from the American people is that scientists, engineers, and others are given access to these installations on a daily basis. My primary duties as a Federal Agent were the protection of our nation’s highest technology. Almost on a daily basis there are foreigners from Saudi, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, etc… who work on the sensitive U.S. military installations and have free access to ‘roam’ the bases: essentially they collect intelligence on our troops, weapons technology, and vulnerabilities. In turn they report the intelligence to their respective Embassies. Should Americans not know that our U.S. military bases are not as safe as the government wants us to believe?
2. Another ‘secret’ that should not be classified is that the U.S. government has major corporations such as Boeing, Northrop, Lockheed Martin and many others who work on ‘Top Secret’ programs. How many reports do the American people hear through our media and government officials that foreigners are caught on a regular basis ‘stealing’ classified information? Why would this type information be classified? The only reason it is classified is because our senior military and government officials would be put on the spot and have to answer some very embarrassing questions.
3. The Saudi government is not the friends of America. They support Al Qaeda and desire Sharia law implemented worldwide. The Saudi government is responsible for pouring thousands of pieces of ‘hate material’ into our public libraries and schools. They encourage the Maj. Hassan’s and Mohammed Mohamed (Oregon). Our government knows the Saudis’ intention is to destroy Israel and America, but Saudi Arabia pumps billions of dollars into our politicians pockets, our major media outlets, major universities, and into such organizations such as CAIR. While in Saudi Arabia a couple of months prior to ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ I was the lead collector of intelligence targeting Saudi Arabia. If the American people want the truth about Saudi Arabia they should demand a Congressional Hearing on this topic. The hundreds of reports my fellow Agents and I wrote about Saudi Arabia would astonish you…. and upset you to know we deal with Saudi Arabia as our friends, when behind the scenes they are educating suicide bombers to kill innocent Americans.
Now I believe it is important to explain why this article is being written. I had mentioned I worked for the government for 24.5 years. There are literally millions and millions of documents that are classified, but should not be. There are numerous people such as Maj. Hasan from Ft. Hood the government has information on and fully understand they are a serious risk to our national security, but due to political correctness and to avoid being labeled an Islamophobe, the information is classified and military members are warned (with the threat of possible court-martials) that to discuss these issues is prohibited. The murders committed by the 11 Sept. 2001 hijackers did not have to happen. There were literally thousands of intelligence reports revealing this attack, yet the reports remain sealed in vaults.
SOURCE
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A foretaste of totalitarianism
The first two years of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid administration has given most Americans a taste of what it is to live in a nation where the central government is run by people who do not give a damn for public opinion or the Constitution.
It took barely a year for Americans to come together in a Tea Party movement to oppose Obamacare. That hideous piece of legislation interposes the government between all Americans and their physicians, inflicting a bureaucratic nightmare that, if permitted to exist, will surely kill Americans denied timely care.
The members of the Tea Party are not just Republicans, not just Democrats, and not just independents. They are quintessentially Americans that swiftly concluded that a serious mistake was made when Obama was elected. On the anniversary of the original tea party, Sen. Reid was forced to make a humiliating retreat, dropping the $1.1 trillion "budget" bill intended to shackle the newly elected members of Congress and to impose still more debt and control over Americans.
The Obama administration is shot through with control freaks, nags and busybodies, not the least of whom is the First Lady, Michelle Obama. On the signing of a bill giving the governmental control over food in the nation’s schools she said that obesity is “not just an economic threat, it’s a national security threat as well.” That is just absurd. It is a feeble excuse to interpose the federal government between parents and the schools to which they are compelled to send their children.
“We cannot leave it up to the parents,” said Michelle Obama. Not surprisingly, a Rasmussen Reports poll revealed that 75% of those asked did not agree with the First Lady.
Hardly a day goes by when some member of the Obama administration doesn’t say or do something absurd. In mid-December, the U.S. Surgeon-General, Regina Benjamin, said “there is no risk-free level of exposure to tobacco smoke.”
She claimed that even occasional smoking or exposure to second-hand smoke “causes immediate damage to your body that can lead to serious illness or death.” That is not based in any valid analysis and it ignores the rising levels of life expectancy in America. It is just another piece of the hysterical anti-tobacco agenda of busybodies who have no right to tell anyone whether they should smoke or not.
The most dangerous thing Americans do every day is to get behind the wheel or be a passenger in an automobile. Auto accidents annually kill 40,000 or more.
Recently, at the Cancun, Mexico conference of global warming charlatans, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, said that “climate change is one of the greatest threats facing our planet” as if human beings had anything to say or do about it. He might was well have said that the United Nations must begin to control the Sun, the oceans, and the clouds.
Finally, after being banned by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1980, the agency decided that saccharin, a sweetener substitute for sugar, was neither toxic nor a cancer-causing agent, a fact determined in the late 1990s by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. The EPA routinely bans chemicals claiming they could cause cancer, ignoring the fact that too much exposure to any chemical, including salt or sugar, is unwise.
These and a thousand other examples are reasons to distrust the Obama administration in particular and the federal government in general. As it continues to grasp more and more power over lifestyle decisions that belong to individuals, it threatens the very reason America was founded.
More HERE
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ELSEWHERE
McConnell: Government will stay afloat: "Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said yesterday that he and the Democratic leader have agreed on a spending measure to keep the government running through March. Passing the bill would prevent the government from running out of money for daily operations and forcing a shutdown. McConnell of Kentucky said on CNN’s State of the Union that he and Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada reached a deal on the measure."
Are economic forces redrawing congressional map?: "New population data from the Census Bureau this week will reshuffle political clout among the states, and the power shift may be amplified by economic forces as well as demographic ones. Simply put, some states have been gaining people because they offer cheaper housing or more abundant jobs. ... Economic opportunities are one major factor behind those choices, researchers say."
Tax deduction for mortgage interest could be on the chopping block: "Perhaps the most sacred of all the sacred cows in the tax code, the home mortgage deduction has long been seen as crucial to a major element of the American dream — owning your own home. It has also been a boon to home builders, construction workers, the financial services industry and local governments that benefited from fatter real estate tax revenue. But nearly a century after coming into existence, the mortgage deduction may face a day of reckoning."
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Monday, December 20, 2010
The evil consequences of the Left's hate-filled class war
We often take the class warfare rhetoric of the Left for granted these days, inured to its wickedness by its ubiquity in the media and academia. For most on the Right the class and race warfare rhetoric espoused by leftists is simply another point to debate and an easy explanation for leftist political stances and social mores. But this ideology of hatred does more than affect tax policy, it costs lives. America’s streets run red with the blood of the innocent cut down by the foot soldiers of the secret war America’s Left has initiated.
Clay Duke, the man who opened fire on a Florida school board, was one such foot soldier. But he was also a victim. That the mentally ill Duke took his cues from leftist groups like Media Matters is verified by Duke’s own words. What shocked people more was the reaction of his supposedly sane wife who, having just heard that her husband committed suicide after attempting to murder several innocent men and women, told news crews that her mentally disturbed husband should be an example to all Americans. She called for a violent class war.
I may be unkind to point out the obvious here but it’s clear that this deranged man not only adopted the class warfare rhetoric of the Left, but was enabled by his radical wife. Fortunately for his would-be victims Duke only ended up killing himself, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a victim here. Duke needed help and those closest to him were so mired in their Marxist fantasy world that he ended up dead and his friends and supporters (yes, there are supporters of Clay Duke) continue their radical passion play.
But this has distracted attention from an even more disturbing story. In Cape Cod a series of fires are being blamed on an arsonist who leaves a very telling calling card. From the Cape Cod Times:
“F*@k the rich” is a common battle cry for radicals, including Libertarian Communists and Anarchists of all stripes, even ones who are admittedly well off themselves. But class warfare in America has little to do with actual class, it is simply a call for violence against those who oppose neo-Marxist policies. That is why these mighty “class warriors” tend to be the children of well-off families.
On May Day of this year there was a riot in Asheville, North Carolina organized by a Black Bloc cell. The very left-leaning city’s residents expressed surprise that their stores were attacked, going so far as to claim they were “on the same side” politically. Several people contacted me to tell me that the riot was organized by the local anarchists and socialists using radical bookstores for planning meetings and the dozen or so rioters arrested turned out to be local college kids.
A few months later an anarchist named Casey Brezik slit the throat of a Missouri community college dean in a blitz attack launched during a special event featuring Governor Jay Nixon. Brezik, like Duke, was mentally unstable and his family had declared him an endangered missing adult. While they worried about their missing loved one, local anarchists were providing Breznik with shelter and drugs and setting him loose on the public. It turned out that he had been arrested at the G-20 for assaulting a police officer, but Canada only held him for two days before deporting him back to us.
Like Duke, this “class warrior” was little more than a mentally disturbed weapon used by leftists to inflict as much destruction as possible on innocent Americans.
Racial division is a key strategy of class warfare, and the Left is adept at stirring up racial animosity. The recent riots in Oakland were organized by the Revolutionary Communist Party, who also played a hand in organizing violent clashes between police and illegal immigrants in Westlake, California. In both cases the RCP used racially charged incidents to stir up “revolution” and class war.
But protests turning into riots are the least consequence of the Left’s racially divisive class war.
Over the summer Des Moines was plagued with a series of racially motivated attacks at the Iowa State Fairgrounds where whites were attacked at random by black teens who police reported said it was “beat Whitey night.” Several police officers were attacked and in at least one incident a teen girl brazenly assaulted a woman in front of police for no reason other than her race.
A 4th of July “flash mob” in Philadelphia also included racially motivated assaults on random people.
In the once “up and coming” upper Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood, a 200 member strong Latino motorcycle gang has been terrorizing the well-to-do residents and the police have been powerless to stop them.
More disturbing were the 2007 murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsome. The young white couple was kidnapped, raped, and tortured in a racially charged murder many dubbed the Knoxville Horror. Christopher Newsome was sodomized then dragged to some nearby railroad tracks where he was shot and set on fire. Channon Christian then endured several hours of “horrific” sexual torture before being hog-tied and left with a plastic bag tied over her head in a dumpster where she slowly suffocated.
And while that case became the focus for racial debate the crime had more to do with class envy and the racial divisions promoted by the Left producing criminals with a sense of entitlement to their criminality if the victim is easily perceived as an “oppressor.” The Left stoked the fires of animosity by portraying calls for the five murderers to face hate crimes as racist themselves.
Too many on the Right have been lulled into complacency by the dreary pronouncements of the Left. We think that because there isn’t massive, sustained civil unrest that the Left’s class war is just an idea, a theory that drives the push to reinstate the death tax. But the class war dreamed of by the Left is here and its casualties are the thousands of mugging victims, rape victims and murder victims that we read a few lines about in the local crime blotters. Houses burned, Americans dead and whole sections of our cities given over to the near lawlessness and we still won’t accept that a “class war” has begun?
What will it take for America to wake up and see that the poison the Left has spewed into our culture is killing us?
SOURCE
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They Just Hate Rich People
by Michael D. Tanner
If the debate over the tax deal between President Obama and congressional Republicans has shown anything, it is that the American Left really hates the rich. But why?
Politicians often divide Americans between "the rich" and "working people," implying that the rich don't work for their money. Complaining about the tax deal, Rep. Jim McDermott (D., Wash.) contemptuously referred to the rich as "trust-funders," suggesting that most had done nothing to earn their wealth. But in reality, roughly 80 percent of millionaires in America are the first generation of their family to be rich. They didn't inherit their wealth; they earned it.
In fact, several studies indicate that the rich work very hard for their wealth. For example, research by professors Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst found that the working time for upper-income professionals has increased since 1965, while working time for low-skill, low-income workers has decreased. Similarly, according to a study by the economists Peter Kuhn and Fernando Lozano, the number of men in the bottom fifth of the income ladder who work more than 49 hours per week has dropped by half since 1980. But among the top fifth of earners, work weeks in excess of 49 hours have increased by 80 percent. Dalton Conley, chairman of NYU's sociology department, concludes that "higher-income folks work more hours than lower-wage earners do."
Research by Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman showed that those earning more than $100,000 per year spent on average less than 20 percent of their time on leisure activities, compared with more than a third of their time for people who earned less than $20,000 per year. Kahneman concluded that "being wealthy is often a powerful predictor that people spend less time doing pleasurable things and more time doing compulsory things."
The rich are not sitting by the pool, sipping their cocktails; they are sitting in their offices, working their behinds off.
And more important, their work often produces the goods, services, and technologies that make all our lives better. Nearly all of the modern technological marvels in our life, the things that help us live longer, reduce the amount of manual labor in our lives, or just entertain us, are the result of someone trying to become rich, and often succeeding.
We also hear constantly that the rich need to "pay their fair share." But the rich already pay a disproportionate share of taxes. The richest 1 percent of Americans earn 20 percent of all income in America but pay 38 percent of income taxes. The top 5 percent earn slightly more than one-third of U.S. income while paying nearly 59 percent of income taxes. One might suggest, therefore, that the wealthy already pay nearly double their "fair share." Of course other taxes, such as payroll taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, and the like, tend to be more regressive, mitigating this somewhat. But even if you include all types of federal, state, and local taxes, the wealthy pay a higher proportion of taxes than their share of income would warrant.
The rich give back involuntarily through taxes and voluntarily through charity.
Households with more than $1 million in income make half of all charitable donations in this country. That totaled more than $150 billion last year.
The Left also makes two other contradictory claims about the rich and their wealth. On the one hand, we are told that the rich spend their money frivolously. Perhaps some do, but this ignores the fact that frivolous expenditures often provide jobs and income for the rest of us. Back in 1990, for example, Congress decided to impose a "luxury tax" on such frivolous items as high-priced automobiles, aircraft, jewelry, furs, and yachts. The tax "worked" in a sense. The rich bought fewer luxury goods — and thousands of Americans who worked in the jewelry, aircraft, and boating industries lost their jobs. According to a study done for the Joint Economic Committee, the tax destroyed 7,600 jobs in the yacht-building industry alone.
On the other hand, we are told that lower taxes on the wealthy won't help the economy because the rich don't spend enough of their money. That old-fashioned Keynesian economics — which assumes economic growth is driven by consumer demand — ignores the fact that money not spent by the rich is not simply stuffed under millionaires' mattresses. The savings of the rich provides the investment capital that funds new ventures, creates new jobs, and spurs innovation. The money that the rich save and invest is the money that companies use to start or expand businesses, buy machinery and other physical capital, or hire workers.
No doubt there are dishonest or unscrupulous businessmen who have gotten rich by taking advantage of others. And it's hard to feel much sympathy for the Paris Hiltons of the world, flitting through life with a sense of entitlement that they haven't earned. But most wealthy Americans have worked hard for what they have, pay more than their fair share of taxes, give generously to charity, and, most important, drive the economic growth that all of us non-rich people rely on.
That's something to remember the next time that politicians start to beat the drums of class warfare.
SOURCE
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A dialogue with a young male abortion supporter
“Do you have any children?”
“Ah... no.”
“Have you even been through an abortion with, say, a woman you love in support of her right to choose?”
“Well, no.”
“I’ve been through two. The first was one that I supported. The second was one that I had deep misgivings about but didn’t oppose.
“Those were all long ago, but now I know that those were two children I didn’t have and will never know, and not a month goes by I don’t think about that and regret it.
"If it ever happens to you, you’ll agree at the time and then, years later, it will come back to you. It will come back to you that you are missing children in your life and it is partially your doing. And it will haunt you, the thought of the people they could have been.
“You’re young and deluded. You’re going to walk away and make this a story you’ll tell to the other kids out running your scam. Then you’ll forget all about it for years, maybe decades, and you’ll go off and have some abortions of your own.
"And then one day, years after that, you’ll come to know what I know now. That’s when you’ll remember me; a man who through his own vanity and foolishness, kept two children out of his life. “That’s when you’ll remember this moment. But like me, it will be too late for you.”
He walked away shaking his head, already moving into the forgetting. Some day, it will come back to him. I’ll be remembered as a stranger, but suddenly not all that strange.
More HERE
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ELSEWHERE
Common Is As Common Does: "There is a big discussion going on in Britain based on the fact that Kate Middleton, Prince William's fiancee, is a "commoner," i.e., not born of royal blood. Interestingly, Prince William has opined, as the linked story notes, that he likes America because here, snobbery is more about money than about bloodlines. But I don't think he's got it quite right. What I like about America is that here, one is defined by what one does, rather than by who one is. "Common" is as "common" does; a man identifies himself as a gentleman and a woman as a lady -- in the best sense of the terms -- by how they behave, not to whom they were born. Americans admire "money" less than they do the qualities that are often (though not always) associated with amassing it, i.e., diligence, enterprise, intelligence, self-denial, thrift."
Judicial hellholes kill jobs and redistribute wealth: "The most recent list of judicial hellholes has just been released by the American Tort Reform Association. It lists 'courts in Philadelphia; California’s Los Angeles and Humboldt counties; West Virginia; South Florida; Cook County, Illinois; and Clark County, Nevada, as some of the worst in the nation' for lawsuit abuse. The list is accompanied by an executive summary and a detailed report."
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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We often take the class warfare rhetoric of the Left for granted these days, inured to its wickedness by its ubiquity in the media and academia. For most on the Right the class and race warfare rhetoric espoused by leftists is simply another point to debate and an easy explanation for leftist political stances and social mores. But this ideology of hatred does more than affect tax policy, it costs lives. America’s streets run red with the blood of the innocent cut down by the foot soldiers of the secret war America’s Left has initiated.
Clay Duke, the man who opened fire on a Florida school board, was one such foot soldier. But he was also a victim. That the mentally ill Duke took his cues from leftist groups like Media Matters is verified by Duke’s own words. What shocked people more was the reaction of his supposedly sane wife who, having just heard that her husband committed suicide after attempting to murder several innocent men and women, told news crews that her mentally disturbed husband should be an example to all Americans. She called for a violent class war.
I may be unkind to point out the obvious here but it’s clear that this deranged man not only adopted the class warfare rhetoric of the Left, but was enabled by his radical wife. Fortunately for his would-be victims Duke only ended up killing himself, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a victim here. Duke needed help and those closest to him were so mired in their Marxist fantasy world that he ended up dead and his friends and supporters (yes, there are supporters of Clay Duke) continue their radical passion play.
But this has distracted attention from an even more disturbing story. In Cape Cod a series of fires are being blamed on an arsonist who leaves a very telling calling card. From the Cape Cod Times:
Police and fire officials are investigating an arson fire in Sandwich that has a disturbing similarity with a suspicious incident in Barnstable.
In both cases, the arsonist left a calling card, the message, “(expletive) the rich” at the scene.
At 3:30 a.m. on Nov. 24, flames engulfed an unoccupied home still under construction at 16 Boulder Brook Road in Sandwich. Only the exterior of the house had been completed. The home, which was valued at $500,000, had a three-car garage and three bedrooms, but no plumbing or electric service, Sandwich Fire Chief George Russell said.
The heavy damage burned much of the evidence. But the state Fire Marshal’s Office was recently able to rule that an arsonist had set the fire, Russell said.
The following week, on Dec. 2, incendiary devices were found at 43 Trotters Lane in Marstons Mills, law enforcement officials said.
At Trotters Lane, the message “(expletive) the rich,” was clearly spray painted on a fence on the property, Barnstable police Det. John York said.
York said a similar message had been found at the Sandwich property. Sandwich officials have declined to provide details about that case.
“F*@k the rich” is a common battle cry for radicals, including Libertarian Communists and Anarchists of all stripes, even ones who are admittedly well off themselves. But class warfare in America has little to do with actual class, it is simply a call for violence against those who oppose neo-Marxist policies. That is why these mighty “class warriors” tend to be the children of well-off families.
On May Day of this year there was a riot in Asheville, North Carolina organized by a Black Bloc cell. The very left-leaning city’s residents expressed surprise that their stores were attacked, going so far as to claim they were “on the same side” politically. Several people contacted me to tell me that the riot was organized by the local anarchists and socialists using radical bookstores for planning meetings and the dozen or so rioters arrested turned out to be local college kids.
A few months later an anarchist named Casey Brezik slit the throat of a Missouri community college dean in a blitz attack launched during a special event featuring Governor Jay Nixon. Brezik, like Duke, was mentally unstable and his family had declared him an endangered missing adult. While they worried about their missing loved one, local anarchists were providing Breznik with shelter and drugs and setting him loose on the public. It turned out that he had been arrested at the G-20 for assaulting a police officer, but Canada only held him for two days before deporting him back to us.
Like Duke, this “class warrior” was little more than a mentally disturbed weapon used by leftists to inflict as much destruction as possible on innocent Americans.
Racial division is a key strategy of class warfare, and the Left is adept at stirring up racial animosity. The recent riots in Oakland were organized by the Revolutionary Communist Party, who also played a hand in organizing violent clashes between police and illegal immigrants in Westlake, California. In both cases the RCP used racially charged incidents to stir up “revolution” and class war.
But protests turning into riots are the least consequence of the Left’s racially divisive class war.
Over the summer Des Moines was plagued with a series of racially motivated attacks at the Iowa State Fairgrounds where whites were attacked at random by black teens who police reported said it was “beat Whitey night.” Several police officers were attacked and in at least one incident a teen girl brazenly assaulted a woman in front of police for no reason other than her race.
A 4th of July “flash mob” in Philadelphia also included racially motivated assaults on random people.
In the once “up and coming” upper Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood, a 200 member strong Latino motorcycle gang has been terrorizing the well-to-do residents and the police have been powerless to stop them.
More disturbing were the 2007 murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsome. The young white couple was kidnapped, raped, and tortured in a racially charged murder many dubbed the Knoxville Horror. Christopher Newsome was sodomized then dragged to some nearby railroad tracks where he was shot and set on fire. Channon Christian then endured several hours of “horrific” sexual torture before being hog-tied and left with a plastic bag tied over her head in a dumpster where she slowly suffocated.
And while that case became the focus for racial debate the crime had more to do with class envy and the racial divisions promoted by the Left producing criminals with a sense of entitlement to their criminality if the victim is easily perceived as an “oppressor.” The Left stoked the fires of animosity by portraying calls for the five murderers to face hate crimes as racist themselves.
Too many on the Right have been lulled into complacency by the dreary pronouncements of the Left. We think that because there isn’t massive, sustained civil unrest that the Left’s class war is just an idea, a theory that drives the push to reinstate the death tax. But the class war dreamed of by the Left is here and its casualties are the thousands of mugging victims, rape victims and murder victims that we read a few lines about in the local crime blotters. Houses burned, Americans dead and whole sections of our cities given over to the near lawlessness and we still won’t accept that a “class war” has begun?
What will it take for America to wake up and see that the poison the Left has spewed into our culture is killing us?
SOURCE
**************************
They Just Hate Rich People
by Michael D. Tanner
If the debate over the tax deal between President Obama and congressional Republicans has shown anything, it is that the American Left really hates the rich. But why?
Politicians often divide Americans between "the rich" and "working people," implying that the rich don't work for their money. Complaining about the tax deal, Rep. Jim McDermott (D., Wash.) contemptuously referred to the rich as "trust-funders," suggesting that most had done nothing to earn their wealth. But in reality, roughly 80 percent of millionaires in America are the first generation of their family to be rich. They didn't inherit their wealth; they earned it.
In fact, several studies indicate that the rich work very hard for their wealth. For example, research by professors Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst found that the working time for upper-income professionals has increased since 1965, while working time for low-skill, low-income workers has decreased. Similarly, according to a study by the economists Peter Kuhn and Fernando Lozano, the number of men in the bottom fifth of the income ladder who work more than 49 hours per week has dropped by half since 1980. But among the top fifth of earners, work weeks in excess of 49 hours have increased by 80 percent. Dalton Conley, chairman of NYU's sociology department, concludes that "higher-income folks work more hours than lower-wage earners do."
Research by Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman showed that those earning more than $100,000 per year spent on average less than 20 percent of their time on leisure activities, compared with more than a third of their time for people who earned less than $20,000 per year. Kahneman concluded that "being wealthy is often a powerful predictor that people spend less time doing pleasurable things and more time doing compulsory things."
The rich are not sitting by the pool, sipping their cocktails; they are sitting in their offices, working their behinds off.
And more important, their work often produces the goods, services, and technologies that make all our lives better. Nearly all of the modern technological marvels in our life, the things that help us live longer, reduce the amount of manual labor in our lives, or just entertain us, are the result of someone trying to become rich, and often succeeding.
We also hear constantly that the rich need to "pay their fair share." But the rich already pay a disproportionate share of taxes. The richest 1 percent of Americans earn 20 percent of all income in America but pay 38 percent of income taxes. The top 5 percent earn slightly more than one-third of U.S. income while paying nearly 59 percent of income taxes. One might suggest, therefore, that the wealthy already pay nearly double their "fair share." Of course other taxes, such as payroll taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, and the like, tend to be more regressive, mitigating this somewhat. But even if you include all types of federal, state, and local taxes, the wealthy pay a higher proportion of taxes than their share of income would warrant.
The rich give back involuntarily through taxes and voluntarily through charity.
Households with more than $1 million in income make half of all charitable donations in this country. That totaled more than $150 billion last year.
The Left also makes two other contradictory claims about the rich and their wealth. On the one hand, we are told that the rich spend their money frivolously. Perhaps some do, but this ignores the fact that frivolous expenditures often provide jobs and income for the rest of us. Back in 1990, for example, Congress decided to impose a "luxury tax" on such frivolous items as high-priced automobiles, aircraft, jewelry, furs, and yachts. The tax "worked" in a sense. The rich bought fewer luxury goods — and thousands of Americans who worked in the jewelry, aircraft, and boating industries lost their jobs. According to a study done for the Joint Economic Committee, the tax destroyed 7,600 jobs in the yacht-building industry alone.
On the other hand, we are told that lower taxes on the wealthy won't help the economy because the rich don't spend enough of their money. That old-fashioned Keynesian economics — which assumes economic growth is driven by consumer demand — ignores the fact that money not spent by the rich is not simply stuffed under millionaires' mattresses. The savings of the rich provides the investment capital that funds new ventures, creates new jobs, and spurs innovation. The money that the rich save and invest is the money that companies use to start or expand businesses, buy machinery and other physical capital, or hire workers.
No doubt there are dishonest or unscrupulous businessmen who have gotten rich by taking advantage of others. And it's hard to feel much sympathy for the Paris Hiltons of the world, flitting through life with a sense of entitlement that they haven't earned. But most wealthy Americans have worked hard for what they have, pay more than their fair share of taxes, give generously to charity, and, most important, drive the economic growth that all of us non-rich people rely on.
That's something to remember the next time that politicians start to beat the drums of class warfare.
SOURCE
**************************
A dialogue with a young male abortion supporter
“Do you have any children?”
“Ah... no.”
“Have you even been through an abortion with, say, a woman you love in support of her right to choose?”
“Well, no.”
“I’ve been through two. The first was one that I supported. The second was one that I had deep misgivings about but didn’t oppose.
“Those were all long ago, but now I know that those were two children I didn’t have and will never know, and not a month goes by I don’t think about that and regret it.
"If it ever happens to you, you’ll agree at the time and then, years later, it will come back to you. It will come back to you that you are missing children in your life and it is partially your doing. And it will haunt you, the thought of the people they could have been.
“You’re young and deluded. You’re going to walk away and make this a story you’ll tell to the other kids out running your scam. Then you’ll forget all about it for years, maybe decades, and you’ll go off and have some abortions of your own.
"And then one day, years after that, you’ll come to know what I know now. That’s when you’ll remember me; a man who through his own vanity and foolishness, kept two children out of his life. “That’s when you’ll remember this moment. But like me, it will be too late for you.”
He walked away shaking his head, already moving into the forgetting. Some day, it will come back to him. I’ll be remembered as a stranger, but suddenly not all that strange.
More HERE
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ELSEWHERE
Common Is As Common Does: "There is a big discussion going on in Britain based on the fact that Kate Middleton, Prince William's fiancee, is a "commoner," i.e., not born of royal blood. Interestingly, Prince William has opined, as the linked story notes, that he likes America because here, snobbery is more about money than about bloodlines. But I don't think he's got it quite right. What I like about America is that here, one is defined by what one does, rather than by who one is. "Common" is as "common" does; a man identifies himself as a gentleman and a woman as a lady -- in the best sense of the terms -- by how they behave, not to whom they were born. Americans admire "money" less than they do the qualities that are often (though not always) associated with amassing it, i.e., diligence, enterprise, intelligence, self-denial, thrift."
Judicial hellholes kill jobs and redistribute wealth: "The most recent list of judicial hellholes has just been released by the American Tort Reform Association. It lists 'courts in Philadelphia; California’s Los Angeles and Humboldt counties; West Virginia; South Florida; Cook County, Illinois; and Clark County, Nevada, as some of the worst in the nation' for lawsuit abuse. The list is accompanied by an executive summary and a detailed report."
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Sunday, December 19, 2010
Australia squares the circle
I am putting up below a large excerpt from an article which sets out data tending to show that Australia scores very highly both as one of the freest countries in the world and also as one of the most "equal" countries in the world.
This has a huge bearing on Left/Right political controversies. The Left generally argue for more economic equality while conservatives generally argue for more economic liberty.
So what the Australian example shows is that such competing claims are not entirely a zero-sum game. You can at the same time have more of what both Right and Left want. I think that is a finding of very far-reaching implications for other countries, such as the USA. There are already major similarities between Australia and the USA so a convergence on the Australian system by the USA should, at least in theory, be much easier than most other sorts of change.
I think the analysis is so important that I am going to put up nothing else here today. I hope that anybody coming by today will use their time here to read at least my excerpt below, if not the whole original article
On the one hand you can be a small government, inequality-tolerant country like the United States; on the other you can be a high taxing, egalitarian state like the Scandinavian countries, and all countries fit somewhere on this spectrum from right to left.
What is not appreciated, but has been demonstrated by recent research, is that Australia offers a genuine alternative to these models—a unique form of low-taxing egalitarianism—that is both more successful and more sustainable than other models.
This combination of freedom and fairness in Australia has provided an environment conducive to economic reform and can continue to do so in the future.
Freedom
Australia is one of the most economically free countries in the world, and has for some time been among the smallest governments in the developed world, with low levels of tax and spending. Last year, according to the OECD’s latest Economic Outlook, Australia was the Thatcherite’s number one performer, with not only the lowest level of government spending of all developed countries but also the lowest level of taxes of all developed countries (equal with South Korea).
Although it is easy to find waste in Australian governments, it is still a lean and small state when compared with other developed countries. In fact, Australia’s relative position in Chart 1 is likely to be enhanced through its very low levels of public debt -— the high levels of debt across most OECD countries imply higher future tax levels to repair severely impaired balance sheets.
The important point of this measure, though, is not a particular level and ranking in any one year but the general level, which shows Australia as a very low tax country among peers. Even when other indicators of economic freedom are included, Australia performs extremely well.
The US-based Heritage Foundation think tank compiles an annual Index of Economic Freedom, which measures each country over a broad range of economic freedom indicators, including tax levels, business freedom, trade restrictions, property rights and labour market flexibility, among others. The latest Index (2010) places Australia as the highest ranking developed country for economic freedom (ranking third overall after the city-states of Hong Kong and Singapore).
The smaller size of government in Australia is a key contributor to the dynamism and strong economic performance the nation has demonstrated over recent history. Treasury official David Parker is correct when he says pinning down a precise optimal size of government is difficult, but:
"[both] theory and empirical research by the OECD lend support to the notion that government expenditure, and the taxes required to finance it, can have negative effects on efficiency as governments become larger. Similarly, it appears that a larger government is associated with slow growth. So, it is reasonable to think that Australia has been well served by having a general government sector that is relatively small and stable compared with other OECD countries".
Obviously, there is a limit to how small a government can be without encountering significant drawbacks. Where that point is will be a matter of infinite debate, suffice to say that it is below Australia’s current level. As it is, Australia is a highly successful economy with one of the highest economic growth rates in the OECD over the last 20 years. It has very low government debt, it avoided the Asian Financial Crisis in the 1990s, and it was the only major developed country to have avoided a recession during the recent global financial crisis. It also has one of the highest standards of living of any country in the world.
Fairness
Fairness is an inherently subjective concept; nonetheless, it is critical to successful governance. In this article, economic fairness is used in the sense described by former Prime Minister John Howard above, that is, the avoidance of levels of inequality that impede cohesion and opportunity.
Some classical liberals, such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, believe that the only criterion of fairness is adherence to proper procedural norms, and that measures of income and wealth distribution are irrelevant. Peter Saunders (formerly of the CIS), describes this view of fairness:
"the liberal conception of fairness denies the relevance of any distributional principle, whether egalitarian or meritocratic. Fairness simply requires an open system governed by the rule of law; it is judged by procedures, not outcomes ... Provided these rules are followed, the result is ‘fair.’"
While this view correctly values rules-based procedures, ignoring the distribution of resources in society would be deeply unwise for policymakers. To begin with, high inequality can impair social cohesion and lead to civil unrest and riots.
History shows us that in extremis, wide income disparities have contributed to countless violent revolutions. Indeed, the University of Chicago has published research estimating the increased likelihood of revolution resulting from measured increases in inequality.
On a more mundane level, income inequality is a key source of populist economic policy. American libertarian judge and author Richard Posner has lamented some of the serious policy problems in the United States caused by a damaging level of inequality
Australia’s egalitarian-ness
Australia feels egalitarian, and many outsiders have also commented on the egalitarian nature of Australian society. In his book Down Under, the American-British travel writer Bill Bryson joined a long list of observers in describing Australians as ‘instinctively egalitarian.’ Apart from this strong sentiment (which is important in itself ), it is also interesting to consider a range of economic data released in recent years that shed new light on the extent to which our notions of egalitarianism translate into practice. The data below looks at how Australia compares in terms of wealth inequality and income inequality, and shows the extent to which the government policies have contributed to those levels.
When comparing the efficiency of reducing inequality, that is, how much inequality is reduced for the size of the welfare bill and tax levels, Australia ranks as the most efficient country. The highly egalitarian result for Australia is achieved through the most progressive transfer system in the developed world, coupled with one of the most progressive tax systems in the OECD.
We have very little government money going to higher income people and low levels of tax on lower income people. Chart 5 (page 8) illustrates this tight level of targeting, showing Australia as the means testing capital of the world, with the lowest percentage of government transfers going to the wealthiest half of the population of any developed country.
The tight targeting of government spending also means that Australia has the second lowest level of ‘churning’ among developed countries after South Korea (churning is the simultaneous payment of taxes and receival of benefits by households).
Mapping the freest and fairest
It is helpful to conceptualise the previous measures of size of government and inequality by placing them on charts (6 to 8), which we can call the freedom and fairness maps. (Note the year of tax levels has been selected to match the year of the inequality data, and some minor countries have been omitted to reduce clutter.)
The most desirable sector for a country to inhabit in a freedom and fairness map is the south-west quadrant. Economic liberty combined with egalitarian distribution shows us the freest and fairest countries, and the countries that best combine those two attributes will possess both domestic harmony and economic strength.
I call this combined quality of Thatcherite low tax government and relative equality of resources an egalitoryan quality (of course, some might consider this a bit cheeky when one considers the historic associations of Toryism).
The north-east quadrant—high taxing inequality—is the least desirable position to inhabit, and countries in this sector will exhibit social conflict and poor economic performance. The other two quadrants contain outcome tradeoffs.
Socialists, blithely unconcerned by high tax levels, would obviously prefer the northwest quadrant, while some libertarians might prefer the south-east corner of high inequality and small government. Classical liberals, according to the earlier definition, will have no preference for south-east or south-west, as long as it is south (and would similarly have no view on whether north-west is superior to north-east).
So who is the freest and fairest of them all? Australia is the only large developed country that occupies the south-west quadrant in both charts. (South Korea would possibly occupy the same region, but Warren did not assess Korean income inequality under the more appropriate methodology.)
Other countries that share the southwest sector in one respect fail in the other. Low-tax Switzerland is quite even on income distribution but has one of the worst wealth inequalities in the developed world. Low tax Ireland, whatever its positions on the charts at the time of measurement, has an economic crisis and all indicators lurching to the negative.
Both graphs make a reasonable case for Australia as the standout egalitoryan country. In cricketing terms, we are an excellent batsman, a first-class bowler, and possibly the best all-rounder in the world.
Certainly among the most relevant and comparable (high immigration, heterogeneous, Anglosphere) cultures, Australia stands out for its combination of small government and lower inequality. In fact, Australia’s position of relatively low inequality is probably even better than it looks on these charts because of its very low level of government debt. Most other OECD countries are likely to engage in regressive measures in coming years to repair their serious financial positions.
More HERE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
I am putting up below a large excerpt from an article which sets out data tending to show that Australia scores very highly both as one of the freest countries in the world and also as one of the most "equal" countries in the world.
This has a huge bearing on Left/Right political controversies. The Left generally argue for more economic equality while conservatives generally argue for more economic liberty.
So what the Australian example shows is that such competing claims are not entirely a zero-sum game. You can at the same time have more of what both Right and Left want. I think that is a finding of very far-reaching implications for other countries, such as the USA. There are already major similarities between Australia and the USA so a convergence on the Australian system by the USA should, at least in theory, be much easier than most other sorts of change.
I think the analysis is so important that I am going to put up nothing else here today. I hope that anybody coming by today will use their time here to read at least my excerpt below, if not the whole original article
On the one hand you can be a small government, inequality-tolerant country like the United States; on the other you can be a high taxing, egalitarian state like the Scandinavian countries, and all countries fit somewhere on this spectrum from right to left.
What is not appreciated, but has been demonstrated by recent research, is that Australia offers a genuine alternative to these models—a unique form of low-taxing egalitarianism—that is both more successful and more sustainable than other models.
This combination of freedom and fairness in Australia has provided an environment conducive to economic reform and can continue to do so in the future.
Freedom
Australia is one of the most economically free countries in the world, and has for some time been among the smallest governments in the developed world, with low levels of tax and spending. Last year, according to the OECD’s latest Economic Outlook, Australia was the Thatcherite’s number one performer, with not only the lowest level of government spending of all developed countries but also the lowest level of taxes of all developed countries (equal with South Korea).
Although it is easy to find waste in Australian governments, it is still a lean and small state when compared with other developed countries. In fact, Australia’s relative position in Chart 1 is likely to be enhanced through its very low levels of public debt -— the high levels of debt across most OECD countries imply higher future tax levels to repair severely impaired balance sheets.
The important point of this measure, though, is not a particular level and ranking in any one year but the general level, which shows Australia as a very low tax country among peers. Even when other indicators of economic freedom are included, Australia performs extremely well.
The US-based Heritage Foundation think tank compiles an annual Index of Economic Freedom, which measures each country over a broad range of economic freedom indicators, including tax levels, business freedom, trade restrictions, property rights and labour market flexibility, among others. The latest Index (2010) places Australia as the highest ranking developed country for economic freedom (ranking third overall after the city-states of Hong Kong and Singapore).
The smaller size of government in Australia is a key contributor to the dynamism and strong economic performance the nation has demonstrated over recent history. Treasury official David Parker is correct when he says pinning down a precise optimal size of government is difficult, but:
"[both] theory and empirical research by the OECD lend support to the notion that government expenditure, and the taxes required to finance it, can have negative effects on efficiency as governments become larger. Similarly, it appears that a larger government is associated with slow growth. So, it is reasonable to think that Australia has been well served by having a general government sector that is relatively small and stable compared with other OECD countries".
Obviously, there is a limit to how small a government can be without encountering significant drawbacks. Where that point is will be a matter of infinite debate, suffice to say that it is below Australia’s current level. As it is, Australia is a highly successful economy with one of the highest economic growth rates in the OECD over the last 20 years. It has very low government debt, it avoided the Asian Financial Crisis in the 1990s, and it was the only major developed country to have avoided a recession during the recent global financial crisis. It also has one of the highest standards of living of any country in the world.
Fairness
Fairness is an inherently subjective concept; nonetheless, it is critical to successful governance. In this article, economic fairness is used in the sense described by former Prime Minister John Howard above, that is, the avoidance of levels of inequality that impede cohesion and opportunity.
Some classical liberals, such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, believe that the only criterion of fairness is adherence to proper procedural norms, and that measures of income and wealth distribution are irrelevant. Peter Saunders (formerly of the CIS), describes this view of fairness:
"the liberal conception of fairness denies the relevance of any distributional principle, whether egalitarian or meritocratic. Fairness simply requires an open system governed by the rule of law; it is judged by procedures, not outcomes ... Provided these rules are followed, the result is ‘fair.’"
While this view correctly values rules-based procedures, ignoring the distribution of resources in society would be deeply unwise for policymakers. To begin with, high inequality can impair social cohesion and lead to civil unrest and riots.
History shows us that in extremis, wide income disparities have contributed to countless violent revolutions. Indeed, the University of Chicago has published research estimating the increased likelihood of revolution resulting from measured increases in inequality.
On a more mundane level, income inequality is a key source of populist economic policy. American libertarian judge and author Richard Posner has lamented some of the serious policy problems in the United States caused by a damaging level of inequality
Australia’s egalitarian-ness
Australia feels egalitarian, and many outsiders have also commented on the egalitarian nature of Australian society. In his book Down Under, the American-British travel writer Bill Bryson joined a long list of observers in describing Australians as ‘instinctively egalitarian.’ Apart from this strong sentiment (which is important in itself ), it is also interesting to consider a range of economic data released in recent years that shed new light on the extent to which our notions of egalitarianism translate into practice. The data below looks at how Australia compares in terms of wealth inequality and income inequality, and shows the extent to which the government policies have contributed to those levels.
When comparing the efficiency of reducing inequality, that is, how much inequality is reduced for the size of the welfare bill and tax levels, Australia ranks as the most efficient country. The highly egalitarian result for Australia is achieved through the most progressive transfer system in the developed world, coupled with one of the most progressive tax systems in the OECD.
We have very little government money going to higher income people and low levels of tax on lower income people. Chart 5 (page 8) illustrates this tight level of targeting, showing Australia as the means testing capital of the world, with the lowest percentage of government transfers going to the wealthiest half of the population of any developed country.
The tight targeting of government spending also means that Australia has the second lowest level of ‘churning’ among developed countries after South Korea (churning is the simultaneous payment of taxes and receival of benefits by households).
Mapping the freest and fairest
It is helpful to conceptualise the previous measures of size of government and inequality by placing them on charts (6 to 8), which we can call the freedom and fairness maps. (Note the year of tax levels has been selected to match the year of the inequality data, and some minor countries have been omitted to reduce clutter.)
The most desirable sector for a country to inhabit in a freedom and fairness map is the south-west quadrant. Economic liberty combined with egalitarian distribution shows us the freest and fairest countries, and the countries that best combine those two attributes will possess both domestic harmony and economic strength.
I call this combined quality of Thatcherite low tax government and relative equality of resources an egalitoryan quality (of course, some might consider this a bit cheeky when one considers the historic associations of Toryism).
The north-east quadrant—high taxing inequality—is the least desirable position to inhabit, and countries in this sector will exhibit social conflict and poor economic performance. The other two quadrants contain outcome tradeoffs.
Socialists, blithely unconcerned by high tax levels, would obviously prefer the northwest quadrant, while some libertarians might prefer the south-east corner of high inequality and small government. Classical liberals, according to the earlier definition, will have no preference for south-east or south-west, as long as it is south (and would similarly have no view on whether north-west is superior to north-east).
So who is the freest and fairest of them all? Australia is the only large developed country that occupies the south-west quadrant in both charts. (South Korea would possibly occupy the same region, but Warren did not assess Korean income inequality under the more appropriate methodology.)
Other countries that share the southwest sector in one respect fail in the other. Low-tax Switzerland is quite even on income distribution but has one of the worst wealth inequalities in the developed world. Low tax Ireland, whatever its positions on the charts at the time of measurement, has an economic crisis and all indicators lurching to the negative.
Both graphs make a reasonable case for Australia as the standout egalitoryan country. In cricketing terms, we are an excellent batsman, a first-class bowler, and possibly the best all-rounder in the world.
Certainly among the most relevant and comparable (high immigration, heterogeneous, Anglosphere) cultures, Australia stands out for its combination of small government and lower inequality. In fact, Australia’s position of relatively low inequality is probably even better than it looks on these charts because of its very low level of government debt. Most other OECD countries are likely to engage in regressive measures in coming years to repair their serious financial positions.
More HERE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Saturday, December 18, 2010
An apparent lie about Obama's birth certificate
I would have thought that a raised seal seen from the front would look like an incised seal from the back but the author below thinks otherwise. I think a comparison with an Hawaiian COLB known to be genuine would be needed to settle the matter
On August 21, 2008, Factcheck.org published an article, Born in the U.S.A. which they claimed contained “The truth about Obama’s birth certificate.” It turns out, however, that this article contains at least one enormous bold-faced lie.
In June of 2008, an image of an alleged Hawaii Department of Health (HDOH) issued Certification of Live Birth (COLB) belonging to U.S. Presidential candidate Barack Obama was posted online. In response to speculation that the alleged COLB did not contain a ‘raised seal’ or registrar’s signature, Factcheck.org published this article and in it, they wrote the following:
“We can assure readers that the certificate does bear a raised seal, and that it’s stamped on the back by Hawaii state registrar Alvin T. Onaka…We even brought home a few photographs.
In the same article, Factcheck.org provided links to photographs of the seal and signature found on the back of Obama’s alleged COLB. However, the photographs of the seal’s emblem and text do not show a “raised seal,” at all, they show an ‘incised seal’ – one that is cut into or impressed into the paper:
In fact, Factcheck.org posted links to photos of the back of the ‘incised seal’ found on Obama’s alleged COLB which can be seen on the front of the alleged COLB. These photos show the emblem has been pushed all the way through the paper leaving a raised reversed impression of the seal’s emblem and text on the other side.
Then, in the same article, Factcheck.org featured a cropped photo of the back of Obama’s ‘incised seal’ and they captioned it, ‘The raised seal.‘
Factcheck.org did not bother to feature a published photo of the front of the ‘incised seal’ found on Obama’s alleged COLB within their article on the ‘truth’ about Obama’s birth certificate. They only provided links to view the photographs separately from the article.
Factcheck.org makes the claim they “are a nonpartisan, nonprofit “consumer advocate” for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics.”
However, one request using open records law, a real tool of governmental and political oversight, would have shown Factcheck.org that the Hawaii Department of Health always certifies copies of birth certificates issued by their agency with a ‘raised seal’
More HERE (See the original for links & images)
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The useless TSA
TSA under fire after businessman boards international flight with loaded handgun
The effectiveness of security at U.S. ports is being questioned after a businessman accidentally travelled on a flight with a loaded handgun in his luggage.
Iranian-American Farid Seif was screened by Trasport Security Administration officials at Houston airport in Texas. His hand luggage was also X-rayed before he took off on his international flight.
It wasn't until Mr Seif arrived at his hotel several hours later that he realised that he had forgotten to unpack a loaded snub nose Glock pistol from his luggage before he embarked on his journey.
'It's just impossible to miss it, you know. I mean, this is not a small gun,' Mr Seif told ABC News. 'How can you miss it? You cannot miss it.'
According to ABC, security slip-ups in the U.S. are not rare. The news network claims experts have confided that 'every year since the September 11 terror attacks, federal agencies have conducted random, covert "red team tests", where undercover agents try to see just how much they can get past security checks at major U.S. airports'.
ABC added that, while the U.S. Department of Homeland Security closely guards those test results, those that have leaked have been 'shocking'.
Undercover TSA agents testing security at a Newark airport terminal on one day in 2006 found that TSA screeners failed to detect concealed bombs and guns 20 out of 22 times, the news network claimed.
And a 2007 government audit revealed that undercover agents were successful slipping simulated explosives and bomb parts through Los Angeles's LAX airport in 50 out of 70 attempts. At Chicago's O'Hare airport, agents made 75 attempts and succeeded in getting through undetected 45 times.
SOURCE
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Those Damn Rich People
Among other things, Frank Salvato below points to the large charitable activities of the rich. I am not in Obama's "rich" category but I am comfortably situated and have only small personal needs so I donate money to someone nearly every week. And I made my money by working for it. It was not given to me -- JR
Throughout the debate over the extension of the tax rates, aka the Bush tax cuts, we have witnessed a concerted effort by Democrats and Progressives to demonize the wealthy. This demonization has crossed over into the on-going argument over the Estate Tax, aka the Death Tax. At every turn we are made to feel that the wealthy have no right to “monopolize” all of their riches when government could use a goodly portion of that wealth to “help” the down-trodden, the disenfranchised and the less fortunate. Truth be told, the government can’t do anything equal to what the wealthy in the private sector do to “help” those individuals.
Before we get into the issue of the rich and their wealth, let’s dispense with the myth that government can create jobs. Oh sure, the government can create employment through expanding the reach of government; by expanding government as an entity, but those jobs require an increase in taxation on the rank-and-file citizenry in order to cover the paychecks issued to those government workers. Government – aside from the blood-money interest produced by TARP and the ill-gotten gains of government through the hostile takeover of General Motors – cannot create wealth, ergo; it does not have the ability to amass wealth in order to expand; in order to create jobs. Simply put, when government creates a job, that employee is paid by the taxpayer, not the government; that employee is paid by the private sector.
If we are to believe Progressive activists like Congressman Anthony Weiner (P-NY), who say, “...Does it make sense that people who get, who make a million or a billion dollars in income should get tax cuts and Social Security recipients shouldn’t get a cost of living adjustment,” then we would have to believe that an individual’s earnings – not just the wealthy, but anyone – are subject to an arbitrary and ever-changing threshold that determines who is wealthy and who is a common man. This threshold, consequently, is set by politicians who today do a damn fine job of using taxpayer dollars to grease the handles in the voting booths, if you get my drift.
Which leads me to a critical point; just what do Progressives and Democrats think that the wealthy people do with their money once they make it? Do they believe that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, Peter Lewis and George Soros, convert their money into gold coins and wallow in the massive piles of sparkling decadence? Well, they probably do – or at least they would like you to believe they do.
In reality, the wealthy always – always – deposit their earnings, their wealth, their riches, in a bank. They might take a portion of their earnings and buy stocks or bonds. The point is this; the money that the wealthy earn is literally reinvested into the private sector through their deposits and investments. Banks take the deposits and turn them into loans for the private sector, both for individuals and entrepreneurs. The money that the wealthy invest in stocks and bonds go to finance small and large businesses and corporations alike, and sometimes those corporations, especially the small businesses, use that capital to expand. And what does the expansion of small business mean? Jobs.
Conversely, when the government confiscates wealth from the wealthy it is not spent on the needs of those on Social Security (no COLA this year, again) or those on Medicare (cuts are already taking place), those funds go to establish behemoth, destined to fail programs like Obamacare or to extend, yet again, unemployment benefits and misappropriated benefits for illegal immigrants who shouldn’t have a seat at the US taxpayer’s teat.
And what of the greedy wealthy people with hearts of stone and their contemptuous manners? That’s the picture that people like Congressman Weiner want people to paint of the wealthy, isn’t it? The rich, the wealthy, the privileged are people unwilling to “pay their fair share”; people who always look down on those “less fortunate.” Isn’t that the class warfare rhetoric that we continuously hear from the Progressives and the Liberal Left?
True story. I know a couple that most people would consider rather well off; wealthy, in fact. They have more than one home and both are quite nice. They are able to travel when they like and they enjoy the finer things in life. The man worked very hard to make a success of a family business and has reached a plateau that few realize in life. Bottom line, he worked very hard for his success and that hard work came complete with the sacrifices that one has to make in order to achieve that success: issues that affected family, issues that found him working long hours and even hours that encroached on special occasions and holidays. But with that hard work and sacrifice and over a lifetime, they arrived at their station, and deservedly so.
Now, Congressman Weiner would have you believe that not only should my friends pay more in taxes than everyone else, seeing as they surpass Mr. Weiner’s threshold for being wealthy, but, and this is by Mr. Weiner’s own admission, they should pay more even after they die. When asked recently by FOX News’ Megan Kelly whether the Death Tax – the Estate Tax – was fair, whether it was immoral to tax a person’s wealth twice, Mr. Weiner callously exclaimed, “You aren’t paying anything in that case because you’ll be dead.” Wow!
Far from being the coldhearted cretins Congressman Weiner would have you believe rich people are, those who have achieved wealth – the American dream, by the way – are the ones who engage in philanthropy; they give to charities, to religious institutions, to private sector programs and sometimes, out of the goodness of their hearts, to other individuals, just because they see someone in need.
Every now and again – and it is more often than one would suspect – this husband and wife, this wealthy couple, these “coldhearted” millionaires, go to the bank and take out a sizeable amount of cash (at least to you and me) in $20 bills. They then go down to the USO at the international airport in their city and hand out all of the money to the soldiers who are in transit so that they can get themselves a meal, use the local Internet café, call their loved ones while they are on layover, etc., each time thanking each and every soldier for their service, their sacrifice and the sacrifices made by their families.
In addition, they help to fund organizations that provide medical care for sick children and organizations that quest to educate the public on Americanism and the threats to our country.
These are who the “wealthy” people in America are; patriots, job creators, philanthropists, Mothers and Fathers; excellent human beings who want what is best, not only for their children but for everyone’s children; honest hard-working people who would rather help someone by providing them the wherewithal to make a living than to see them sucked into the government abyss of cyclical dependency.
So, the next time you hear a Progressive like Anthony Weiner pompously spouting off about how the wealthy are evil and how the only savior for the down-trodden is government, ask yourself this question: who took money that could have created a private sector job for someone who is unemployed and, instead, spent it on sea turtle tunnels and salt marsh mouse sanctuaries?
Then think about how our soldiers feel when complete strangers come up to them in airports – perhaps during the Christmas season when they are far from their loved ones – and say, “Thank you for your service and your sacrifices...please, have lunch on me.” Who, I ask you, uses the money more appropriately?
More HERE
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Lies that the media eagerly slurp up
Facts and evidence have never bothered Leftists
Few have mastered the art of dissimilation more than long time Palestinian Arab spokesman, Saeb Erakat, who continues to be taken seriously by the ever gullible western media.
Now in his late middle age, Erakat continues to spew howlers as he has been doing for several decades, yet he still retains the confidence of mainstream western journalists and reporters – especially those of the Left. So, true to form, Erakat chose The Guardian newspaper, one of Britain’s most left leaning and anti-Israel dailies to let fly another howler.
According to Erakat’s recent Op-Ed in The Guardian, there are now seven million Palestinian Arab refugees. This is seven times the number of Arabs who foolishly left their homes in 1948 when ordered to do so by the corrupt Arab League, while at the same time seven Arab armies were invading the fledgling and re-born Jewish state with the intention of committing genocide against its Jewish citizens.
Incidentally, 850,000 Jewish refugees were systematically driven from their homes throughout the Arab world. Most found refuge in Israel. And the 200,000 Arabs (including some 100,000 who were later allowed by Israel to return) who ignored their leaders and remained in Israel now number 1.2 million; some 20% of the Jewish state’s population. But Erakat would never mention those facts.
The Arab leaders who call themselves Palestinians often accuse Israel of committing a “holocaust” against the Palestinian Arabs. At the same time, they inflate the numbers of these same Arabs in an almost precipitous and distorted bell curve. If only the Jewish victims of the real Holocaust would have suffered in such a fashion, there would not have been six million dead but - using Erakat’s bizarre mathematics - forty million additional Jewish souls alive today.
That is the extent of the lies, damned lies, and statistics that people like Erakat routinely spew. The tragedy is that so many in the West are ever willing to swallow such garbage
More HERE
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ELSEWHERE
The latest New York Times nonsense about Lincoln: "At the outset of the War to Prevent Southern Independence both Abraham Lincoln and the U.S. Congress declared publicly that the sole purpose of the war was to save the union and not to interfere with Southern slavery. Lincoln himself stated this very clearly in his first inaugural address and in many other places. This fact bothers the court historians of the Lincoln cult who have in the past forty years rewritten American history to suggest that slavery was the sole cause of the war.”
Have Uncle Sam buy you alpacas: "Politicians like Bernie Sanders promise that they will ’save family farming’ and ’strengthen family-based agriculture.’ The result: lots of special tax exemptions for farmers. Livestock owners don’t have to pay any taxes on income that they then spend on their business. They can write off property taxes. For breeding animals, they can pay capital gains tax (15%) instead of income tax, which may be 30%. Most people don’t want to run, say, a cattle farm. But there is an animal that qualifies for all the tax breaks — but acts more like a pet. It’s called the alpaca. Alpaca breeding has boomed since people found out about the tax benefits.”
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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I would have thought that a raised seal seen from the front would look like an incised seal from the back but the author below thinks otherwise. I think a comparison with an Hawaiian COLB known to be genuine would be needed to settle the matter
On August 21, 2008, Factcheck.org published an article, Born in the U.S.A. which they claimed contained “The truth about Obama’s birth certificate.” It turns out, however, that this article contains at least one enormous bold-faced lie.
In June of 2008, an image of an alleged Hawaii Department of Health (HDOH) issued Certification of Live Birth (COLB) belonging to U.S. Presidential candidate Barack Obama was posted online. In response to speculation that the alleged COLB did not contain a ‘raised seal’ or registrar’s signature, Factcheck.org published this article and in it, they wrote the following:
“We can assure readers that the certificate does bear a raised seal, and that it’s stamped on the back by Hawaii state registrar Alvin T. Onaka…We even brought home a few photographs.
In the same article, Factcheck.org provided links to photographs of the seal and signature found on the back of Obama’s alleged COLB. However, the photographs of the seal’s emblem and text do not show a “raised seal,” at all, they show an ‘incised seal’ – one that is cut into or impressed into the paper:
In fact, Factcheck.org posted links to photos of the back of the ‘incised seal’ found on Obama’s alleged COLB which can be seen on the front of the alleged COLB. These photos show the emblem has been pushed all the way through the paper leaving a raised reversed impression of the seal’s emblem and text on the other side.
Then, in the same article, Factcheck.org featured a cropped photo of the back of Obama’s ‘incised seal’ and they captioned it, ‘The raised seal.‘
Factcheck.org did not bother to feature a published photo of the front of the ‘incised seal’ found on Obama’s alleged COLB within their article on the ‘truth’ about Obama’s birth certificate. They only provided links to view the photographs separately from the article.
Factcheck.org makes the claim they “are a nonpartisan, nonprofit “consumer advocate” for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics.”
However, one request using open records law, a real tool of governmental and political oversight, would have shown Factcheck.org that the Hawaii Department of Health always certifies copies of birth certificates issued by their agency with a ‘raised seal’
More HERE (See the original for links & images)
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The useless TSA
TSA under fire after businessman boards international flight with loaded handgun
The effectiveness of security at U.S. ports is being questioned after a businessman accidentally travelled on a flight with a loaded handgun in his luggage.
Iranian-American Farid Seif was screened by Trasport Security Administration officials at Houston airport in Texas. His hand luggage was also X-rayed before he took off on his international flight.
It wasn't until Mr Seif arrived at his hotel several hours later that he realised that he had forgotten to unpack a loaded snub nose Glock pistol from his luggage before he embarked on his journey.
'It's just impossible to miss it, you know. I mean, this is not a small gun,' Mr Seif told ABC News. 'How can you miss it? You cannot miss it.'
According to ABC, security slip-ups in the U.S. are not rare. The news network claims experts have confided that 'every year since the September 11 terror attacks, federal agencies have conducted random, covert "red team tests", where undercover agents try to see just how much they can get past security checks at major U.S. airports'.
ABC added that, while the U.S. Department of Homeland Security closely guards those test results, those that have leaked have been 'shocking'.
Undercover TSA agents testing security at a Newark airport terminal on one day in 2006 found that TSA screeners failed to detect concealed bombs and guns 20 out of 22 times, the news network claimed.
And a 2007 government audit revealed that undercover agents were successful slipping simulated explosives and bomb parts through Los Angeles's LAX airport in 50 out of 70 attempts. At Chicago's O'Hare airport, agents made 75 attempts and succeeded in getting through undetected 45 times.
SOURCE
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Those Damn Rich People
Among other things, Frank Salvato below points to the large charitable activities of the rich. I am not in Obama's "rich" category but I am comfortably situated and have only small personal needs so I donate money to someone nearly every week. And I made my money by working for it. It was not given to me -- JR
Throughout the debate over the extension of the tax rates, aka the Bush tax cuts, we have witnessed a concerted effort by Democrats and Progressives to demonize the wealthy. This demonization has crossed over into the on-going argument over the Estate Tax, aka the Death Tax. At every turn we are made to feel that the wealthy have no right to “monopolize” all of their riches when government could use a goodly portion of that wealth to “help” the down-trodden, the disenfranchised and the less fortunate. Truth be told, the government can’t do anything equal to what the wealthy in the private sector do to “help” those individuals.
Before we get into the issue of the rich and their wealth, let’s dispense with the myth that government can create jobs. Oh sure, the government can create employment through expanding the reach of government; by expanding government as an entity, but those jobs require an increase in taxation on the rank-and-file citizenry in order to cover the paychecks issued to those government workers. Government – aside from the blood-money interest produced by TARP and the ill-gotten gains of government through the hostile takeover of General Motors – cannot create wealth, ergo; it does not have the ability to amass wealth in order to expand; in order to create jobs. Simply put, when government creates a job, that employee is paid by the taxpayer, not the government; that employee is paid by the private sector.
If we are to believe Progressive activists like Congressman Anthony Weiner (P-NY), who say, “...Does it make sense that people who get, who make a million or a billion dollars in income should get tax cuts and Social Security recipients shouldn’t get a cost of living adjustment,” then we would have to believe that an individual’s earnings – not just the wealthy, but anyone – are subject to an arbitrary and ever-changing threshold that determines who is wealthy and who is a common man. This threshold, consequently, is set by politicians who today do a damn fine job of using taxpayer dollars to grease the handles in the voting booths, if you get my drift.
Which leads me to a critical point; just what do Progressives and Democrats think that the wealthy people do with their money once they make it? Do they believe that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, Peter Lewis and George Soros, convert their money into gold coins and wallow in the massive piles of sparkling decadence? Well, they probably do – or at least they would like you to believe they do.
In reality, the wealthy always – always – deposit their earnings, their wealth, their riches, in a bank. They might take a portion of their earnings and buy stocks or bonds. The point is this; the money that the wealthy earn is literally reinvested into the private sector through their deposits and investments. Banks take the deposits and turn them into loans for the private sector, both for individuals and entrepreneurs. The money that the wealthy invest in stocks and bonds go to finance small and large businesses and corporations alike, and sometimes those corporations, especially the small businesses, use that capital to expand. And what does the expansion of small business mean? Jobs.
Conversely, when the government confiscates wealth from the wealthy it is not spent on the needs of those on Social Security (no COLA this year, again) or those on Medicare (cuts are already taking place), those funds go to establish behemoth, destined to fail programs like Obamacare or to extend, yet again, unemployment benefits and misappropriated benefits for illegal immigrants who shouldn’t have a seat at the US taxpayer’s teat.
And what of the greedy wealthy people with hearts of stone and their contemptuous manners? That’s the picture that people like Congressman Weiner want people to paint of the wealthy, isn’t it? The rich, the wealthy, the privileged are people unwilling to “pay their fair share”; people who always look down on those “less fortunate.” Isn’t that the class warfare rhetoric that we continuously hear from the Progressives and the Liberal Left?
True story. I know a couple that most people would consider rather well off; wealthy, in fact. They have more than one home and both are quite nice. They are able to travel when they like and they enjoy the finer things in life. The man worked very hard to make a success of a family business and has reached a plateau that few realize in life. Bottom line, he worked very hard for his success and that hard work came complete with the sacrifices that one has to make in order to achieve that success: issues that affected family, issues that found him working long hours and even hours that encroached on special occasions and holidays. But with that hard work and sacrifice and over a lifetime, they arrived at their station, and deservedly so.
Now, Congressman Weiner would have you believe that not only should my friends pay more in taxes than everyone else, seeing as they surpass Mr. Weiner’s threshold for being wealthy, but, and this is by Mr. Weiner’s own admission, they should pay more even after they die. When asked recently by FOX News’ Megan Kelly whether the Death Tax – the Estate Tax – was fair, whether it was immoral to tax a person’s wealth twice, Mr. Weiner callously exclaimed, “You aren’t paying anything in that case because you’ll be dead.” Wow!
Far from being the coldhearted cretins Congressman Weiner would have you believe rich people are, those who have achieved wealth – the American dream, by the way – are the ones who engage in philanthropy; they give to charities, to religious institutions, to private sector programs and sometimes, out of the goodness of their hearts, to other individuals, just because they see someone in need.
Every now and again – and it is more often than one would suspect – this husband and wife, this wealthy couple, these “coldhearted” millionaires, go to the bank and take out a sizeable amount of cash (at least to you and me) in $20 bills. They then go down to the USO at the international airport in their city and hand out all of the money to the soldiers who are in transit so that they can get themselves a meal, use the local Internet café, call their loved ones while they are on layover, etc., each time thanking each and every soldier for their service, their sacrifice and the sacrifices made by their families.
In addition, they help to fund organizations that provide medical care for sick children and organizations that quest to educate the public on Americanism and the threats to our country.
These are who the “wealthy” people in America are; patriots, job creators, philanthropists, Mothers and Fathers; excellent human beings who want what is best, not only for their children but for everyone’s children; honest hard-working people who would rather help someone by providing them the wherewithal to make a living than to see them sucked into the government abyss of cyclical dependency.
So, the next time you hear a Progressive like Anthony Weiner pompously spouting off about how the wealthy are evil and how the only savior for the down-trodden is government, ask yourself this question: who took money that could have created a private sector job for someone who is unemployed and, instead, spent it on sea turtle tunnels and salt marsh mouse sanctuaries?
Then think about how our soldiers feel when complete strangers come up to them in airports – perhaps during the Christmas season when they are far from their loved ones – and say, “Thank you for your service and your sacrifices...please, have lunch on me.” Who, I ask you, uses the money more appropriately?
More HERE
***********************
Lies that the media eagerly slurp up
Facts and evidence have never bothered Leftists
Few have mastered the art of dissimilation more than long time Palestinian Arab spokesman, Saeb Erakat, who continues to be taken seriously by the ever gullible western media.
Now in his late middle age, Erakat continues to spew howlers as he has been doing for several decades, yet he still retains the confidence of mainstream western journalists and reporters – especially those of the Left. So, true to form, Erakat chose The Guardian newspaper, one of Britain’s most left leaning and anti-Israel dailies to let fly another howler.
According to Erakat’s recent Op-Ed in The Guardian, there are now seven million Palestinian Arab refugees. This is seven times the number of Arabs who foolishly left their homes in 1948 when ordered to do so by the corrupt Arab League, while at the same time seven Arab armies were invading the fledgling and re-born Jewish state with the intention of committing genocide against its Jewish citizens.
Incidentally, 850,000 Jewish refugees were systematically driven from their homes throughout the Arab world. Most found refuge in Israel. And the 200,000 Arabs (including some 100,000 who were later allowed by Israel to return) who ignored their leaders and remained in Israel now number 1.2 million; some 20% of the Jewish state’s population. But Erakat would never mention those facts.
The Arab leaders who call themselves Palestinians often accuse Israel of committing a “holocaust” against the Palestinian Arabs. At the same time, they inflate the numbers of these same Arabs in an almost precipitous and distorted bell curve. If only the Jewish victims of the real Holocaust would have suffered in such a fashion, there would not have been six million dead but - using Erakat’s bizarre mathematics - forty million additional Jewish souls alive today.
That is the extent of the lies, damned lies, and statistics that people like Erakat routinely spew. The tragedy is that so many in the West are ever willing to swallow such garbage
More HERE
*********************
ELSEWHERE
The latest New York Times nonsense about Lincoln: "At the outset of the War to Prevent Southern Independence both Abraham Lincoln and the U.S. Congress declared publicly that the sole purpose of the war was to save the union and not to interfere with Southern slavery. Lincoln himself stated this very clearly in his first inaugural address and in many other places. This fact bothers the court historians of the Lincoln cult who have in the past forty years rewritten American history to suggest that slavery was the sole cause of the war.”
Have Uncle Sam buy you alpacas: "Politicians like Bernie Sanders promise that they will ’save family farming’ and ’strengthen family-based agriculture.’ The result: lots of special tax exemptions for farmers. Livestock owners don’t have to pay any taxes on income that they then spend on their business. They can write off property taxes. For breeding animals, they can pay capital gains tax (15%) instead of income tax, which may be 30%. Most people don’t want to run, say, a cattle farm. But there is an animal that qualifies for all the tax breaks — but acts more like a pet. It’s called the alpaca. Alpaca breeding has boomed since people found out about the tax benefits.”
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Friday, December 17, 2010
Center/Right Sweden shows the way
The ebbing away of socialist dominance came just in time for Sweden
Not everything in the European Union is rotten. A few countries stand out for grounding their economic model on sounder foundations in the second part of this waning decade. They show the rest of Europe the way.
Sweden is one such case. In the last quarter, this Scandinavian kingdom achieved an Asian-style rate of economic growth—6.9 percent—compared to last year. Although the reforms of the governing “bourgeois” bloc—the Moderates, the Centrists, the Liberals and the Christian-Democrats—are more gradual than bolder spirits would want, Sweden has been steadily paring down the statist excesses of the socialist era that for most of the 20th century was eponymous with the country. This is why the coalition was re-elected three months ago.
Before and after the financial crisis of 2008, the government maintained a prudent fiscal policy, substantially reducing the debt in times of plenty. Even in the aftermath of the bursting of the housing bubble, when government stimulus was the universal policy du jour, Sweden incurred a deficit of barely 1 percent of the size of the economy (the fiscal purse will soon be in the black again). In the last four years, taxes, especially those that hampered job creation, came down while subsidies that encourage idleness were slashed. In turn, private banks, which had lent heavily in the Baltic states, have weathered the financial storm thanks to the rebound of that region.
By contrast, economic growth in the troubled eurozone will average between zero and 1 percent this year, while the markets continue to bet, despite the bailouts, that Greece and Ireland will default on their sovereign debt; that Portugal will be the next theater of financial drama; and that Spain, struggling under government deficits and private debt, is too big to fail and too big to be rescued.
It is particularly ironic that the shining star in this dark firmament is Sweden, long regarded as a socialist paradise. Sweden ceased to be that a long time ago, as many scholars have explained. This is a country where education and health care underwent the type of reform—the adoption of choice and competition, a decentralization that returned power to parents, students and patients—that causes howls of protest in the United States and other European nations. In 2009, the government expanded the reforms: Patients are now free to choose their care centers, and private companies are free to enter the system as primary health providers.
Over the years, Sweden did a much better job publicizing its multinationals—Ericsson’s technology, Ikea’s furniture, Volvo’s luxury cars, SCA’s paper products, etc.—than its gradual break from the socialist myth that fed the imagination of intellectuals and politicians.
The Swedes were able to build a highly interventionist model during part of the 20th century because they had accumulated, since the 19th century, an extraordinary amount of capital due to their innovative businesses. Their entrepreneurial rise had in part been rooted in a history of bottom-up structures—a rule-of-law tradition and a peasantry steeped in private property—that spared Sweden the feudal legacy that preserved stark class distinctions in other parts of Europe. The subsequent socialist era consumed part of the capital and sapped a big deal of the productive energy. But once it reached a crisis point, it was gradually reformed during part of the last couple of decades. The current government has gone further.
Will Sweden continue to succeed despite the rigors of the European environment in the years to come? After all, there is $2 trillion of sovereign debt outstanding in so-called peripheral countries of the EU—and most of the creditors are European banks. Sweden’s prime minister, the popular 45-year-old Fredrik Reinfeldt, is convinced that some countries, particularly Britain, where painful remedies are being adopted, will be successful. Sweden, half of whose industrial output is related to engineering and whose economy is geared toward worldwide trade, should continue to play a salient role in global technology.
However, the Swedish government is also highly pessimistic about Spain. And if it is right in its prognosis, it is hard to see how the general European environment will not directly challenge Sweden. Given its economic magnitude, a Spanish crisis of the Greek and Irish kind would probably impair the chances of recovery for the European Union for years to come.
SOURCE
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Liberals Love Death Panels
Know why society never has that conversation, Bill? Because when conservatives point out that liberals want to do something unpopular, like kill old people by withholding medical treatment in order to save money, liberals deny that's what they believe. Hell, PolitiFact, which is a left-wing organization that pretends to be a right-down-the-middle outfit, actually declared that 'Death Panels' was the "Lie of the Year" for 2009. Certainly that wasn't true! Certainly that could never happen! Yet, the bill passed, and suddenly liberals are trying to lay the groundwork to kill Grandma because we can't have everyone else paying for her medical treatment.
Of course, the extra cost of paying for that medical treatment is built into the current system and it's one of the reasons prices have risen so fast. Could we cut the costs of medical treatment in the United States dramatically by cutting back on the amount of end-of-life medical treatment that we give people? Absolutely.
However, most Americans don't like this idea because they're good hearted people and also because they know that those they love may very well be in that position one day and they don't want to see them denied medical treatment. Conservatives tend to like the idea even less than the average American because we put a particularly high value on innocent human life. We're not the pro-life party for nothing. Liberals, on the other hand, kind of like the idea of letting old people die to save money for the state, but when it was time to make the case, they didn't have the guts to argue for what they believed in. So instead, they denied that was what they wanted to do, they put it in the bill anyway, and now they're trying to prepare the public for it while they hope some nameless, faceless, unelected committee full of bureaucrats will just force it on the American people.
Heck, if all you "useless eaters" out there who are a net drain on the state could be so kind as to go ahead and die, liberals like Hanna Rosin at Slate will even go so far as to call you a "hero" for it,
If you choose not to get medical treatment to try to extend your life when you're very ill, that's your choice. Some people who are sick and in a lot of pain may look at the quality of their life and decide it's not worth it. I respect that decision. But, it doesn't make you a hero and honestly, it's sick to applaud a woman for ending her own life in order to "get out of the way" of the government's health care plan.
SOURCE
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All cancer patients are not the same
But in good Leftist style, the Obamabots pretend they are
Avastin is a cancer-fighting drug that works by starving tumors of vital nutrients and oxygen. Although Avastin doesn’t cure cancer, it can improve quality of life by slowing the disease’s spread. The Food and Drug Administration approved its use for colon cancer (2004), lung cancer (2006), and advanced breast cancer (2008).
But now the FDA is on the brink of rescinding that last approval, relegating breast cancer to the category of an “off-label” use. In our semi-socialized health care system, that’s significant because government-funded insurance plans (such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Tricare, which serves the military) refuse to reimburse off-label prescriptions, and private insurers generally follow their lead.
Since an Avastin breast cancer regimen costs as much as $88,000 annually, withdrawal of FDA approval would, in effect, lock the medicine cabinet and throw the key onto a high shelf, unreachable by many desperately sick patients.
The FDA is slated to decide whether to follow the advice of its own Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee, which back in July voted 12-1 that Avastin does not “represent a favorable risk/benefit analysis.” Does that mean the drug fails to help any woman more than it hurts her? Not at all — many individual women benefit from the drug. But the FDA regards such facts as sentimental distractions, to be deliberately ignored when deciding the fate of a drug like Avastin. The FDA’s idea of a risk/benefit analysis deals with health in the aggregate, as revealed in statistics involving large populations, not with the health of individuals.
But can risks and benefits really be weighed at the level of society as a whole? A society is only a collection of individuals. A society doesn’t enjoy life, or suffer — only individuals do. Metaphors aside, a society doesn’t get sick and die — only individuals do. To appreciate the difference, consider how a rational patient with breast cancer decides whether to undergo drug treatment.
Such a patient weighs (among other things) the statistical likelihood of a favorable result against the statistical likelihood of painful side effects. At all times, her judgment is individual and personal: How will my life improve if these tumors temporarily stop growing? How might side-effects interfere with my enjoyment of life? How much better will I feel if the results are above average — or how much worse, if the results are below average? How much is an additional year, month, or week of relatively normal life worth to me?
The FDA’s experts take professional pride in refusing to allow such individual considerations to influence their decisions. Instead, they float among the statistical clouds, observing that Avastin delays tumor growth by only 3 to 12 weeks on average and that some patients actually get worse after taking the drug. From behind a veneer of scientific respectability supplied by charts and graphs that ignore the individual patient, these experts then ask a question to which no rational answer can be given: What is the meaning to society of one month in an individual’s life?
At this point, you may be sympathetic to these women’s plight and yet also concerned about the national economy. Won’t cancer patients spend us into bankruptcy with expensive drugs like Avastin? Well, that’s the kind of question that arises only when health care is collectivized by such programs as Medicare, Medicaid, and ObamaCare.
The antidote is to challenge the notion that health care is a right, to be funded by shoving everyone’s wealth into one big pot and spreading it among those in need. On a free market, in which health care is purchased by a combination of private insurance, savings, and charity, your neighbor’s decision to take an expensive drug like Avastin will be no more concern of yours than his choice to wear an expensive watch or drink an expensive wine.
This ongoing Avastin travesty pits a cancer-fighting drug against a drug-fighting cancer — an out-of-control federal agency whose mission unashamedly includes choking off patients’ access to vital drugs. Reform should start by targeting the FDA’s power to substitute collectivized decisions for individual choice.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
Reid abandons omnibus bill amid GOP opposition: "With Senate Republicans uniting against a massive $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill and threatening to demand a time-consuming oral reading of the 1,924-page measure, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tonight elected to ditch the controversial bill. In recent days, Republicans blasted the $8.3 billion of earmarks in the measure and vowed to force an oral reading of it on the Senate floor.”
And So the Bias Begins again: "The Washington Post yesterday chose not to report results of its own poll revealing ObamaCare's lowest popularity ever -- but today was perfectly happy to trumpet the news that the"public is not yet sold on the GOP" (who haven't even taken control yet)! This kind of reporting, frankly, is just the shape of things to come for the Republicans. If they are going to succeed in actually getting things done and changing the way Washington does business, they are going to have to be willing to put up with predictable, relentless criticism from left-leaning MSM which knows -- and likes -- Washington as it has always been. It's a remarkable double standard, though, isn't it?"
An unhealthy mandate: "If you don’t want to pay the minimum wage, you can refuse to start a business. If you don’t want to buy car insurance, you can take the bus. But if you don’t want to buy health insurance, your only options are to leave the country or depart this vale of tears. The question in this case is not just whether this part of the health care reform will stand. It’s whether there are any limits on the powers of the federal government in matters economic.”
Former FBI agent to be top Republican on House Intel Committee: "Rep. Mike Rogers, a former FBI agent and vocal critic of the Obama administration’s dealing with terrorists, will head the House Intelligence Committee when Republicans take control of the House next year. Incoming House Speaker John Boehner announced Wednesday his choice of the Michigan Republican to lead the panel which oversees the secret work and the budgets of the 16 agencies and departments which make up the intelligence community.”
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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The ebbing away of socialist dominance came just in time for Sweden
Not everything in the European Union is rotten. A few countries stand out for grounding their economic model on sounder foundations in the second part of this waning decade. They show the rest of Europe the way.
Sweden is one such case. In the last quarter, this Scandinavian kingdom achieved an Asian-style rate of economic growth—6.9 percent—compared to last year. Although the reforms of the governing “bourgeois” bloc—the Moderates, the Centrists, the Liberals and the Christian-Democrats—are more gradual than bolder spirits would want, Sweden has been steadily paring down the statist excesses of the socialist era that for most of the 20th century was eponymous with the country. This is why the coalition was re-elected three months ago.
Before and after the financial crisis of 2008, the government maintained a prudent fiscal policy, substantially reducing the debt in times of plenty. Even in the aftermath of the bursting of the housing bubble, when government stimulus was the universal policy du jour, Sweden incurred a deficit of barely 1 percent of the size of the economy (the fiscal purse will soon be in the black again). In the last four years, taxes, especially those that hampered job creation, came down while subsidies that encourage idleness were slashed. In turn, private banks, which had lent heavily in the Baltic states, have weathered the financial storm thanks to the rebound of that region.
By contrast, economic growth in the troubled eurozone will average between zero and 1 percent this year, while the markets continue to bet, despite the bailouts, that Greece and Ireland will default on their sovereign debt; that Portugal will be the next theater of financial drama; and that Spain, struggling under government deficits and private debt, is too big to fail and too big to be rescued.
It is particularly ironic that the shining star in this dark firmament is Sweden, long regarded as a socialist paradise. Sweden ceased to be that a long time ago, as many scholars have explained. This is a country where education and health care underwent the type of reform—the adoption of choice and competition, a decentralization that returned power to parents, students and patients—that causes howls of protest in the United States and other European nations. In 2009, the government expanded the reforms: Patients are now free to choose their care centers, and private companies are free to enter the system as primary health providers.
Over the years, Sweden did a much better job publicizing its multinationals—Ericsson’s technology, Ikea’s furniture, Volvo’s luxury cars, SCA’s paper products, etc.—than its gradual break from the socialist myth that fed the imagination of intellectuals and politicians.
The Swedes were able to build a highly interventionist model during part of the 20th century because they had accumulated, since the 19th century, an extraordinary amount of capital due to their innovative businesses. Their entrepreneurial rise had in part been rooted in a history of bottom-up structures—a rule-of-law tradition and a peasantry steeped in private property—that spared Sweden the feudal legacy that preserved stark class distinctions in other parts of Europe. The subsequent socialist era consumed part of the capital and sapped a big deal of the productive energy. But once it reached a crisis point, it was gradually reformed during part of the last couple of decades. The current government has gone further.
Will Sweden continue to succeed despite the rigors of the European environment in the years to come? After all, there is $2 trillion of sovereign debt outstanding in so-called peripheral countries of the EU—and most of the creditors are European banks. Sweden’s prime minister, the popular 45-year-old Fredrik Reinfeldt, is convinced that some countries, particularly Britain, where painful remedies are being adopted, will be successful. Sweden, half of whose industrial output is related to engineering and whose economy is geared toward worldwide trade, should continue to play a salient role in global technology.
However, the Swedish government is also highly pessimistic about Spain. And if it is right in its prognosis, it is hard to see how the general European environment will not directly challenge Sweden. Given its economic magnitude, a Spanish crisis of the Greek and Irish kind would probably impair the chances of recovery for the European Union for years to come.
SOURCE
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Liberals Love Death Panels
When Sarah Palin correctly pointed out that Obamacare had built in death panels that would ultimately lead to needed medical treatments to seniors being cut to save money, the Left flipped out. They claimed that it was crazy to suggest that there was something like that in the bill and they assured everyone that they would never, ever, ever back something like that, and that they were offended that Palin even suggested it.
Of course, there was one problem with that assertion: Liberals have no qualms about lying to the American people. They do it all the time. That's how they deal with the fact that many of their views are unpopular: They just lie about what they want to do. It's such a common occurrence that liberals often just assume liberal politicians who say things that differ from the liberal line are lying. For example, do you ever wonder why liberals, for the most part at least, give Barack Obama a pass for being against gay marriage? There's a simple reason for it: They think he's lying.
That's how it is with death panels. When a bill with death panels in it was in front of the American people, liberals claimed to be against death panels. But isn't it funny that since Obamacare became law, stories about liberals who support death panels keep dribbling out?
See, that's how it works. They lie to get you to support their position, then they start talking about it a little bit, and then eventually, liberals start talking about it en masse like everyone knew what they were getting into right from the start.
Want some examples?
Currently, Medicare is not allowed to deny a treatment based on cost alone, but in the coming years, "it will be difficult to sustain coverage of these very costly procedures considering the Medicare program is facing a huge long-term deficit," Howard says.
"Ten years, 20 years down the road, Congress is going to have to rewrite the law to allow cost to play into coverage decisions." -- David Howard, assistant professor in the department of Health Policy and Management at Emory's Rollins School of Public Health.
"Some years down the pike, we're going to get the real solution, which is going to be a combination of death panels and sales taxes. It's going to be that we're actually going to take Medicare under control, and we're going to have to get some additional revenue, probably from a VAT. But it's not going to happen now." -- Paul Krugman
That's a tradeoff society is making because of very, very high medical costs and a lack of willingness to say, you know, is spending a million dollars on that last three months of life for that patient, would it be better not to lay off those ten teachers and to make that tradeoff in medical costs. But that's called a death panel and you're not supposed to have that discussion. -- Bill Gates
Know why society never has that conversation, Bill? Because when conservatives point out that liberals want to do something unpopular, like kill old people by withholding medical treatment in order to save money, liberals deny that's what they believe. Hell, PolitiFact, which is a left-wing organization that pretends to be a right-down-the-middle outfit, actually declared that 'Death Panels' was the "Lie of the Year" for 2009. Certainly that wasn't true! Certainly that could never happen! Yet, the bill passed, and suddenly liberals are trying to lay the groundwork to kill Grandma because we can't have everyone else paying for her medical treatment.
Of course, the extra cost of paying for that medical treatment is built into the current system and it's one of the reasons prices have risen so fast. Could we cut the costs of medical treatment in the United States dramatically by cutting back on the amount of end-of-life medical treatment that we give people? Absolutely.
However, most Americans don't like this idea because they're good hearted people and also because they know that those they love may very well be in that position one day and they don't want to see them denied medical treatment. Conservatives tend to like the idea even less than the average American because we put a particularly high value on innocent human life. We're not the pro-life party for nothing. Liberals, on the other hand, kind of like the idea of letting old people die to save money for the state, but when it was time to make the case, they didn't have the guts to argue for what they believed in. So instead, they denied that was what they wanted to do, they put it in the bill anyway, and now they're trying to prepare the public for it while they hope some nameless, faceless, unelected committee full of bureaucrats will just force it on the American people.
Heck, if all you "useless eaters" out there who are a net drain on the state could be so kind as to go ahead and die, liberals like Hanna Rosin at Slate will even go so far as to call you a "hero" for it,
Ann Hulbert’s late mother is my new hero. In this lovely essay in the American Scholar, Ann describes how her mother, in her last months, turned down radical medical intervention of dubious value. She did not do this because she googled a million medical sites and called in favors from doctor friends who weighed the evidence. She did it in order to stay true to her temperament and her philosophy.
Here is the exchange between Ann’s mother and the doctor:“If geezers like me have lots of tests and treatments,” she told the doctor, “there isn’t going to be enough money to spend on the other end. This health-care mess isn’t going to be fixed if we aren’t ready to get out of the way.” Nonplussed on his little stool, he shook his head and raised an eyebrow. “Well, I’ve heard that view before, but never from someone in your situation. People generally change their tune when it suddenly applies to them.”
If you choose not to get medical treatment to try to extend your life when you're very ill, that's your choice. Some people who are sick and in a lot of pain may look at the quality of their life and decide it's not worth it. I respect that decision. But, it doesn't make you a hero and honestly, it's sick to applaud a woman for ending her own life in order to "get out of the way" of the government's health care plan.
SOURCE
***********************
All cancer patients are not the same
But in good Leftist style, the Obamabots pretend they are
Avastin is a cancer-fighting drug that works by starving tumors of vital nutrients and oxygen. Although Avastin doesn’t cure cancer, it can improve quality of life by slowing the disease’s spread. The Food and Drug Administration approved its use for colon cancer (2004), lung cancer (2006), and advanced breast cancer (2008).
But now the FDA is on the brink of rescinding that last approval, relegating breast cancer to the category of an “off-label” use. In our semi-socialized health care system, that’s significant because government-funded insurance plans (such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Tricare, which serves the military) refuse to reimburse off-label prescriptions, and private insurers generally follow their lead.
Since an Avastin breast cancer regimen costs as much as $88,000 annually, withdrawal of FDA approval would, in effect, lock the medicine cabinet and throw the key onto a high shelf, unreachable by many desperately sick patients.
The FDA is slated to decide whether to follow the advice of its own Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee, which back in July voted 12-1 that Avastin does not “represent a favorable risk/benefit analysis.” Does that mean the drug fails to help any woman more than it hurts her? Not at all — many individual women benefit from the drug. But the FDA regards such facts as sentimental distractions, to be deliberately ignored when deciding the fate of a drug like Avastin. The FDA’s idea of a risk/benefit analysis deals with health in the aggregate, as revealed in statistics involving large populations, not with the health of individuals.
But can risks and benefits really be weighed at the level of society as a whole? A society is only a collection of individuals. A society doesn’t enjoy life, or suffer — only individuals do. Metaphors aside, a society doesn’t get sick and die — only individuals do. To appreciate the difference, consider how a rational patient with breast cancer decides whether to undergo drug treatment.
Such a patient weighs (among other things) the statistical likelihood of a favorable result against the statistical likelihood of painful side effects. At all times, her judgment is individual and personal: How will my life improve if these tumors temporarily stop growing? How might side-effects interfere with my enjoyment of life? How much better will I feel if the results are above average — or how much worse, if the results are below average? How much is an additional year, month, or week of relatively normal life worth to me?
The FDA’s experts take professional pride in refusing to allow such individual considerations to influence their decisions. Instead, they float among the statistical clouds, observing that Avastin delays tumor growth by only 3 to 12 weeks on average and that some patients actually get worse after taking the drug. From behind a veneer of scientific respectability supplied by charts and graphs that ignore the individual patient, these experts then ask a question to which no rational answer can be given: What is the meaning to society of one month in an individual’s life?
At this point, you may be sympathetic to these women’s plight and yet also concerned about the national economy. Won’t cancer patients spend us into bankruptcy with expensive drugs like Avastin? Well, that’s the kind of question that arises only when health care is collectivized by such programs as Medicare, Medicaid, and ObamaCare.
The antidote is to challenge the notion that health care is a right, to be funded by shoving everyone’s wealth into one big pot and spreading it among those in need. On a free market, in which health care is purchased by a combination of private insurance, savings, and charity, your neighbor’s decision to take an expensive drug like Avastin will be no more concern of yours than his choice to wear an expensive watch or drink an expensive wine.
This ongoing Avastin travesty pits a cancer-fighting drug against a drug-fighting cancer — an out-of-control federal agency whose mission unashamedly includes choking off patients’ access to vital drugs. Reform should start by targeting the FDA’s power to substitute collectivized decisions for individual choice.
SOURCE
**************************
ELSEWHERE
Reid abandons omnibus bill amid GOP opposition: "With Senate Republicans uniting against a massive $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill and threatening to demand a time-consuming oral reading of the 1,924-page measure, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tonight elected to ditch the controversial bill. In recent days, Republicans blasted the $8.3 billion of earmarks in the measure and vowed to force an oral reading of it on the Senate floor.”
And So the Bias Begins again: "The Washington Post yesterday chose not to report results of its own poll revealing ObamaCare's lowest popularity ever -- but today was perfectly happy to trumpet the news that the"public is not yet sold on the GOP" (who haven't even taken control yet)! This kind of reporting, frankly, is just the shape of things to come for the Republicans. If they are going to succeed in actually getting things done and changing the way Washington does business, they are going to have to be willing to put up with predictable, relentless criticism from left-leaning MSM which knows -- and likes -- Washington as it has always been. It's a remarkable double standard, though, isn't it?"
An unhealthy mandate: "If you don’t want to pay the minimum wage, you can refuse to start a business. If you don’t want to buy car insurance, you can take the bus. But if you don’t want to buy health insurance, your only options are to leave the country or depart this vale of tears. The question in this case is not just whether this part of the health care reform will stand. It’s whether there are any limits on the powers of the federal government in matters economic.”
Former FBI agent to be top Republican on House Intel Committee: "Rep. Mike Rogers, a former FBI agent and vocal critic of the Obama administration’s dealing with terrorists, will head the House Intelligence Committee when Republicans take control of the House next year. Incoming House Speaker John Boehner announced Wednesday his choice of the Michigan Republican to lead the panel which oversees the secret work and the budgets of the 16 agencies and departments which make up the intelligence community.”
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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