The debt debacle and the destruction of U.S. dollar savings now underway
A near-worthless dollar is a real possibility -- unless drastic steps are taken
Martin Hutchinson comments:
Fiscally, it is now clear that the United States’ record has been uniquely profligate. According to IMF figures, the U.S. bank bailout has cost only 3.4% of GDP, compared with Germany’s 10.7% of GDP, yet the U.S. budget deficit for calendar 2011 is estimated at 10.9% of GDP compared to Germany’s 2.3%. (Given that the principal asset problem lay in U.S. housing, and that Germany had no comparable housing bubble, it can also be concluded that German banks were uniquely stupid!)
Outside the Civil War and World War II, the United States has never run deficits of anything like this size. The 1979-82 recession was comparable to this one in length and severity, yet the budget deficit peaked at 6.3% of GDP in 1983, by which time the U.S. economy was growing rapidly.
U.S. monetary policy has however been even more extreme than fiscal policy. The zero Federal Funds rate, prolonged now for 2½ years, is not as negative in real terms as short term rates became on a number of occasions in the 1970s. Yet the psychological effect of a zero nominal interest rate is incalculable. It prevents savers from receiving any return on their money, unlike in the 1970s when their nominal returns were quite substantial.
You can argue all you like that the more negative real returns of the 1970s represented easier money, yet the effect on savers of receiving no return on their savings, or on borrowers of having to pay almost nothing for their money is huge. Savings are depressed as simple folk give up altogether...
The effects of ultra-easy money are everywhere. Notoriously, it has reduced the U.S. savings rate close to zero, while shrinking capital cost differentials between the U.S. and emerging markets, thus effectively de-capitalizing the U.S. economy.
At this point, it is becoming clear that the period of “debt deflation” which Reinhart and Rogoff forecast would be needed before the U.S. and global economies could expand again on a healthy basis has been nothing of the kind.
Rather than deflation, we are currently experiencing a rapid increase in inflation. Each month’s statistics show an acceleration in the pace of inflation. Producer prices have been increasing at an annual rate of 10.9% over the last six months, which suggests pretty strongly that we shall soon see a similar rate of increase in consumer price statistics. However this time, unlike in the gentlemanly 1970s, the excessive expansionism of fiscal and monetary policy will prevent inflation from being halted at or just above the 10% level, but will instead produce inflation rates much higher than that.
In today’s world economy, the losers from an unexpected burst of inflation are not primarily the banks – fortunately for the world’s taxpayers, who would have to bail them out again. Instead the losers are the major investors in dollar debt – hedge funds, Middle Eastern potentates and Asian central banks. There could not be an economically less damaging collection of losers – except that Middle Eastern and Asian losers who have been scammed through wild dollar inflation and currency depreciation will find some doubtless unpleasant way of obtaining their revenge.
The blissful phase in which interest rates in the U.S. and elsewhere are far below the inflation rate will not however be long-lived, although doubtless a desperate Bernanke and his hangers-on will try and prolong it as far as possible. At some point, probably around the time reported inflation passes 20% per annum, the Treasury bond markets, the politicians and the public as a whole will panic, seeing the possibility of a Weimar-style collapse.
If this happens at an inconvenient point in the 2012 electoral cycle (or if the present incumbents are encouraged by unexpected electoral victory) little will be done and hyperinflation will set in. That would solve the debt problem, all right, but wipe out the U.S. capital base altogether.
Since the United States is, like Australia, a lucky country, it is however more probable than not that steps will be taken to avoid this ghastly fate. They will involve a Federal Funds rate that is far above the rapidly accelerating level of inflation – say 50% -- and long-term bond rates also above the inflation rate, at about 25% or so. Any benefit the U.S. government and individual borrowers had gained from the preceding inflation would be quickly wiped out, except for those thrifty souls who had prudently taken out fixed rate mortgages.
The U.S. government would be forced to cut back spending not by a third, as is currently necessary, but by more than half, financing the remaining deficit offshore in yen, renminbi and Singapore dollars, the currencies of the thrifty and provident Asians. The squeals of the electorate subjected to this usurious brutality would be deafening, but they would be drowned fairly quickly by the roar of job creation, as desperate companies scrambled to sell their cripplingly costly capital assets and reinvest in suddenly cheaper labor.
In the long run, the United States will probably arrive at the place predicted by Reinhart and Rogoff: a long-delayed recovery, with living standards depressed by the costs of eliminating debt. However it will have chosen a bizarre and excessively painful way of getting there.
More HERE
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Righteous Indignation: Andrew Breitbart is out to save the world (and he just might)
You won’t find too many people who are indifferent toward Andrew Breitbart. But love him or hate him, you can’t ignore him. With his ever-growing collection of “Big” websites (Big Government, Big Hollywood, Big Journalism and Big Peace so far), Andrew has redefined how the political right views and uses the Internet. He makes no apologies for his “in your face” style, nor should he. That style has won him many victories and many enemies. He seems to occupy the time of a disproportionate number of left-wingers, including many employees of the ultra-left-wing censorship factory called Media Matters. Those “senior fellows” are about to have their weekends ruined as Breitbart moves from the virtual world to the book world with today’s release of Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World (2011 Grand Central Publishing).
Righteous is three books in one, each self-contained. Together, they weave a narrative that will remind many readers of their own lives. Even if you don’t share all of Andrew’s political beliefs, you will find yourself identifying with at least some of his story and conclusions. The book is part biography, part history lesson, and part manifesto, and it flows with clarity of purpose from one page to the next. It subtly draws you into a narrative, strung through the whole book, where he meticulously makes the case against the media and pop culture, which, he argues, help spread and normalize the liberal agenda. He also explains how to combat that agenda.
The first third of the book reads like a biography, but with a purpose. He writes about his first foray into the Internet, a place that would eventually become his home, in a way most of us who were late adapters missed. He touches on his discovery of Matt Drudge and his working relationship with a then-conservative firebrand named Arianna Huffington. But “touches” is the right word — both of those relationships deserve a book of their own, but he has a different purpose in Righteous, and he doesn’t get distracted from it.
The second part of the book is a history lesson on the progressive/liberal movement in America. It’s not nearly as detailed as Jonah Goldberg’s amazing Liberal Fascism, but it doesn’t need to be, and doesn’t aspire to be. This isn’t a history book; it has a different mission.
Nevertheless, this section plainly and calmly lays out the basic facts of how the progressive left-wing agenda first came to these shores with the help of many establishment people such as the vaunted Edward R. Murrow. Breitbart tells the history of how the Frankfurt School spread their radical ideals throughout the country.
But Andrew’s real praise is reserved for radical Saul Alinsky. Breitbart loathes Alinsky’s ends, but the genius of his means is hard to dispute. The story of how this Chicago radical took the dry teachings of the Frankfurt School elites and sold it to the masses is often told as a cautionary tale, but Breitbart sees it as an opportunity, which leads perfectly to the final third of the book.
The last part of the book reads like a manifesto, a call to arms. So much of establishment Washington, and more specifically the conservative movement, is predicated on niceties. This “go along to get along” is perfect if all you want to do is get along. Andrew Breitbart does not want to get along, he wants to win.
The manifesto section stops short of inspiring the reader to pick up a pitchfork and a torch, but just barely. What it does do is inspire those of us who have been afraid to speak out about our deeply held beliefs for fear of rejection or attack. Breitbart lays it on the table. “It is not just a political war, it is a cultural war, and our audacious goal is to change the big narrative,” he writes.
Righteous isn’t meant to simply inform; it’s meant to inspire. Andrew tells the story of his first appearance on “Real Time with Bill Maher.” He thought he’d done well, until he started to hear from friends who wondered why he hadn’t stood up for his beliefs. He was much more assertive the next time he appeared on Maher’s show. Passivity only leads to appeasement. Sharp elbows are needed if victory is truly your goal.
Of all the things Righteous Indignation does, perhaps its most important function is to pull back the curtain on the unholy alliance between all the cultural and media institutions and the left-wing industrial complex and expose how they fit together like puzzle pieces to advance an agenda. If you trusted the media or the entertainment industry before reading this book, your eyes will be opened. If you didn’t, you will know you are not alone.
More HERE
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Sarah Palin rocks Madison
She was feisty. She was bold. And she was gutsy. At a Tea Party rally in Madison, Wis., on Saturday, Sarah Palin pulled no punches.
The former Alaska governor and 2008 vice-presidential candidate credited the Tea Party with winning “an electoral victory of historic proportions last November.” She praised Scott Walker’s efforts toward fiscal discipline. She stood up to the GOP establishment. And she had a strong message for Barack Obama as we approach 2012: “Mr. President, game on!”
Palin, who stems from “a family of schoolteachers,” reached out to Wisconsin’s union members: “I’m here today as a patriot, as a taxpayer, as a former union member, and as the wife of a union member … A pension is a promise that must be kept. Now your Governor, Scott Walker, understands this. He understands that states must be solvent in order to keep their promises. And that’s what he’s trying to do. He’s not trying to hurt union members. Hey, folks — he’s trying to save your jobs and your pensions.”
She talked tough with respect to the watered-down budget compromise reached by President Obama, John Boehner, and Harry Reid, affirming, “That is not courage. That’s capitulation.” She added, “Now there is a lesson here — in the Beltway politico, something that they need to understand — the lesson comes from here in Madison. So, our lesson is to the GOP establishment first … if you stand on the platform, if you stand by your pledges, we will stand with you. We will fight with you, GOP. We have your back. Together we will win because America will win.”
“We didn’t elect you just to re-arrange the deck chairs on a sinking Titanic,” Palin continued. “We didn’t elect you just to stand back and watch Obama redistribute those deck chairs. What we need is for you to stand up, GOP, and fight.” She added, “Maybe I should ask some of the Badger women’s hockey team — those champions — maybe I should ask them if we should be suggesting to GOP leaders, they need to learn how to fight like a girl!”
Palin called out President Obama on his unsuccessful stimulus, big-government promoting SOTU address, and proclivity toward ignoring the will of the people via Obamacare, reckless spending, and proposals for tax increases on the middle class and job creators. She challenged his tendency to “apologize for America while you bow and kowtow to our enemies and you snub our allies like Israel,” as well as the manner in which “you [Barack Obama] cut off oil development here and then you hypocritically praise foreign countries for their drilling.”
“We the people, we rose up, and we decisively rejected the Left’s big-government agenda,” Palin asserted. “We don’t want it. We can’t afford it. And we are unwilling to pay for it.”
Palin’s distinctive humor emerged through such statements as “We’re flat broke, but he [Barack Obama] thinks these solar shingles and really fast trains will magically save us” and “Win the Future? WTF is about right.”
More HERE
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ELSEWHERE
Debt agency cuts US outlook to “negative”: "The Standard & Poor’s credit rating service Monday downgraded the U.S. sovereign long-term national debt from 'stable' to 'negative,' citing the failure of Congress to agree on a plan to 'reverse recent fiscal deterioration or address longer-term fiscal pressures.'"
NATO short on bombs, planes for Libya war: "Less than a month into the Libyan conflict, NATO is running short of precision bombs, highlighting the limitations of Britain, France and other European countries in sustaining even a relatively small military action over an extended period of time, according to senior NATO and U.S. officials. The shortage of European munitions, along with the limited number of aircraft available, has raised doubts among some officials about whether the United States can continue to avoid returning to the air campaign if Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi hangs onto power for several more months."
Finland: Election could derail bailouts in Europe: "A huge surge in support for a Finnish nationalist party that opposes eurozone bailouts is complicating Europe’s plans to rescue Portugal and other debt-ridden economies. The sharp rise of the True Finns in Sunday’s nation election represents a watershed moment in Finnish politics, which have traditionally been dominated by the Social Democrats, the Center Party and the conservative National Coalition party."
TSA security looks at people who complain about … TSA security: "Arrogant complaining about airport security is one indicator TSA officers consider when looking for possible criminals and terrorists,when combined with other behavioral indicators, it could result in a traveler facing additional scrutiny."
Ryan’s way is the better way: "Medicare cannot simply continue to promise paying for everything for everyone when it doesn't have the money to do so. The question isn't whether future seniors will have to pay more or get less. It is whether those choices will be imposed on them from above or whether they will be empowered to make those decisions for themselves."
Public safety hypocrisy: "South Carolina is up against an $800 million budget shortage these days. State lawmakers there need to raise more cash. So they cooked up a bright idea to get it from small time speeders, caught driving less than 10 mph over the limits, who want to avoid DMV points on their drivers’ licenses. Here’s how it works: A low-level speeder would be pulled over by the cops and given the option of paying a normal $15 to $25 fine, to be reported to DMV for the assessment of points; or a $150 fine, which is 10 times the current minimum, but no report to the DMV, and no assessment of points."
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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Tuesday, April 19, 2011
You can't fix stupid
How stupid is President Barack Hussein Obama? Let me count the ways.
Judging from the philosophical pose he struck during Wednesday's "debt-reduction" address, the president is so stupid as to believe that the "rugged individualism," "self-reliance" and "healthy skepticism of too much government" - all qualities he attributed to the American people in that speech - can survive in the shadow of his government.
During his two years in office, Mr. Obama has accrued more debt than any president in American history. Why, in the month of March alone, his souped-up civil servants spent eight times what they collected in tax receipts and revenues.
For every year their honcho has been in office, the Obama officials have devoured over a trillion dollars, and will put Americans in hock to the tune of $1 trillion in interest payments alone by the end of this decade, if not sooner.
How stupid is our president? So stupid as to believe that the governmental juggernaut over which he presides is what connects us as a nation, and ensures that "we . do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves."
How stupid is Obama? So stupid as to believe that America became a great country in 1935, which is when the earliest of the Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security entitlements was signed into law. Dummy did, after all, declare yesterday that, "We would not be a great country without [these programs]."
How stupid is the president of the United States? So stupid as to think that "the rich" are rich because their "country," by which he means the ruling clique, "has done so much for them," and that they must, therefore, be compelled "to give back a little bit more."
That's like claiming the tick created the dog! Production predates government predation. Government doesn't produce wealth - it only consumes riches created by others, Mr. President.
Besides, the individual is the basic unit of society, without whom there would be no collective. A cleverer man would know that ACORN is the creation of community agitators like himself, not the other way around.
Indeed, backward is our president for reasoning backwards. To wit, if B, then A: if "rich," then exploitative, but if poor, then exploited. That's a bad mistake.
Just how backward is Barack? Such an intellectual laggard is the country's commander in chief as to frame the massive spending he is directing as a "key investment in our future." The wherewithal for the largess exhibited by Mr. Obama's menagerie of moron has been siphoned off from the private economy (and from China).
How studiously dumb is our president? So stupid as to claim that the real "damage . caused to our nation's checkbook," a checking account he controls and we and our Chinese enablers keep in funds, is caused by tax cuts for the rich.
In other words, returning some stolen property ? that's what taxes are ? to its rightful owners is causing America to go under. That, and not the debt our overweening overlords have accumulated in the course of expanding their jurisdiction stateside and overseas.
A note to anyone who is as gormless as the president: Government is doomed to fail because it is bereft of the constraints private property imposes. The more funds funneled into an insolvent system, in which property is communally "owned" - the greater the squandering of these scarce, precious, appropriated resources.
Most of what the government currently does is financed by borrowing. President Obama spoke at length about his "vision for America." But if he must beg or steal to keep his vision alive, then there is something wrong with this "vision," and not with its victims.
But, as Ron White, that great satirist from the great state of Texas, teaches, "You can't fix stupid." "There is not a pill you can take, not a class you can go to. Stupid is forever."
SOURCE
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US budget "showdown"
For all the attempts to talk up the budget clash as a great historical drama, in truth it revealed the pathetic state of American politics. It looked like money for US government agencies would run out at midnight. But an hour before that deadline, congressional leaders and President Obama reached a budget deal that prevented a government shutdown and massive job lay-offs. The compromise cuts about $39 billion from federal spending this year.
Listening to the media coverage, it seemed like a great political drama was taking place. CNN showed a countdown clock, with the minutes ticking away ominously towards the shutdown at midnight. In reality, though, the whole thing was an example of the pathetic state of American politics. The Financial Times was right to refer to the shambolic last-minute deal-making as 'banana republic machinations'.
Despite what the breathless news reporters said, this was not a battle over political principle. Yes, the US federal deficit is large, but this agreement was never intended to put even a small dent in it. Both parties had agreed to reduce spending, and the differences between them towards the end had boiled down to $1 billion or $2 billion, out of a total budget of $3,700 billion.
Following the deal, a beaming Obama said: 'Today, Americans of different beliefs came together.' Based on his enthusiasm, you could be forgiven for thinking that the agreement marked a landmark in American history. Of course it was simply the mundane business of government: passing a budget, something the federal government does every year. Not only that, but amid all the celebrations it is easy to miss the fact that the budget deal was well overdue, coming some six months into the fiscal year, and therefore this supposedly great achievement only sees them through another six months.
Rather than getting caught up in the 'high-stakes drama' of the 'countdown to shutdown', most Americans watched with bemusement and dismay. How could such a serious step - shutting down the basic institution of government, with significant implications for jobs and services - be risked when there was so little separating the two sides? The reality was that the brinkmanship was intended to sway both parties' respective members of Congress, not the public at large. John Boehner, Republican majority leader in the House, wanted to prove to his Tea Party caucus that he was going down to the wire to obtain the maximum spending concessions; Harry Reid, Democrat majority leader in the Senate, wanted to cover his tracks by reassuring his liberal wing that he was not going to give in to Republican social policy issues, like the bid to defund Planned Parenthood.
That the politicians would subject the public to such a circus, just to bring their own members in line, shows how self-absorbed they are. Before the budget showdown, both parties in Congress were held in low esteem, with approval ratings of less than 20 per cent. The latest spectacle of politicians acting like juveniles will certainly not improve perceptions of Congress's stature.
Of the two parties, the Republicans retained some semblance of coherence. Mostly united behind a push for spending cuts, they managed to set the agenda. But for all of Boehner's self-congratulation afterwards, the cuts represented only a tiny percentage of the total budget. At the same time, because they were heavily focused on so-called 'discretionary' welfare spending, the reductions will disproportionately affect the poor and working class. In addition, the Republicans' pursuit of issues that had nothing to do with the budget - like the ban on the financing of abortions in Washington, DC - made it appear that they were simply using the occasion to advance their pet project
The most ludicrous of Boehner's claims was that the deal would help the economy. 'We fought to keep government spending down because it really will in fact help create a better environment for job creators in our country', he said. To date, businesses have not been holding back from hiring more because of government spending, and the relatively small cuts in the latest budget deal will have little or no influence on whether to create more jobs. While the Republicans are obsessed with cuts, they have no answer for economic growth; and if the economy doesn't grow, even cuts in spending won't come fast enough to reduce the deficit.
On the other side, the Democrats appear aimless and adrift. The fact that the 2011 budget took this long is a poor reflection on them: they had majorities in both Houses of Congress when this process should have been completed six months ago, so they only have themselves to blame for failing to come to agreement within their own party.
It is hard to know where Obama stands on these issues. At times he calls for 'investments in the future', but he also stresses that cuts are necessary, using the analogy of a family tightening its belt when times are tough. His initially proposed budget called for a $40 billion increase in spending, and then he ended up agreeing to a $39 billion decrease - a swing of $79 billion. To an objective observer, that would appear to be a defeat. And yet afterwards Obama pretended he had won. He called the deal 'good news for the American people' and boasted about 'making the largest annual spending cut in our history'.
What is clear coming out of the budget agreement is that the Democrats are allowing the Republicans to set the agenda. No longer is there any talk about stimulus, even though Obama previously said the stimulus would be necessary until the economy fully recovered and unemployment came down to pre-recession levels. (Indeed, most economists think the US economy is not out of the woods, and have marked down growth forecasts as a result of the budget deal, because the economy has been so reliant on state spending.) Nor is anyone really talking seriously about Obama's 'investments', like his half-hearted proposals to increase spending on infrastructure, high-speed rail and green-energy technology.
Instead, all the talk is about where to cut next. Obama and the Democrats have managed an incredible feat: they have made the Republican scaremongering bean-counters appear like courageous truth-tellers who are willing to tackle unsustainable deficits.
It now looks like there will be other occasions for 'drama' in the near future. First, there will be a vote on raising the national debt limit, which will probably occur sometime between mid-May and early July. Boehner is insisting that they will go down to the wire again unless 'there is something really, really big attached' to raising the cap - meaning further spending cuts. The White House is warning that not raising the debt limit would have 'Armageddon-like' consequences for the economy.
Second, a debate has started about the 2012 budget. Last week, Republican Paul Ryan unveiled the House proposal, and on Wednesday night Obama is expected to announce his counter-proposal. The 2012 process looks likely to drag on like the 2011 did, especially given that neither party will want to be seen to be conceding too much in the run-up to the 2012 election (which is a presidential one).
While disagreeing on the means, it is clear that both parties agree on the end: austerity. Even though the costs of Social Security and Medicare are structural contributors to government deficits, a focus on them (and deficits generally) is myopic. At the moment, there is no fiscal crisis. The real issue that is neglected amid all the deficit discussion is whether the US economy can generate growth. With growth, the current deficits will be taken care of; without growth, the doomsday scenario that fearmongers peddle today could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Neither major party has anything of substance to say about creating growth in productive industries. Their consensus on austerity is mind-numbing and uninspiring. To be subjected to the spectacle of recurring pantomimes over budgets only adds insult to injury.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
A cancerous government: "Cancer cells grow and multiply like normal human tissue cells, but unlike normal cells, cancer cells suck up body resources without doing anything beneficial for the body. They eventually kill the body. The abnormal growth of government and government spending does exactly the same to civilizations. In the United States, government growth and spending has multiplied to the point where the draw down on productive contributors is starting to kill the host. There is little incentive to contribute values in the market place when the federal, state, and local governments are taking more than 50% of a taxpayer's income in many instances. Why work hard to create if the value will be confiscated?
AZ: Bill requires candidates to prove birth in US: "Arizona, which has shown little reluctance in bucking the federal government, is again plowing controversial ground, this time as its Legislature passed a bill to require President Obama and other presidential candidates to prove they were born in the United States before their names can appear on the state's ballot. If Governor Jan Brewer signs the proposal into law, Arizona would be the first state to pass such a requirement - potentially forcing a court to decide whether the president's birth certificate is enough to prove he can legally run for reelection. Hawaii officials have certified Obama was born in that state, but so-called birthers have demanded more proof"
Senate "Gang of Six" seeks accord on debt: "Days after President Obama called for forming a bipartisan group in Congress to begin negotiating a $4 trillion debt-reduction package, the parties have not even agreed to its membership. Yet six senators - three Democrats, three Republicans - say they are nearing consensus on just such a plan. Whether the so-called Gang of Six can actually deliver something when Congress returns from a recess in May could determine whether Democrats and Republicans can come together to resolve the nation's fiscal problems before the 2012 elections."
Obama tries to obstruct executions: "President Obama well may have begun another undeclared war -- this time on states that try to enforce their own death penalty laws -- on the dubious grounds that the Food and Drug Administration has not approved drugs intended to kill convicted killers. On March 15, the Drug Enforcement Administration seized Georgia's supply of sodium thiopental, the first drug given under the three-drug lethal injection protocol used in most of the country's 34 death-penalty states. The DEA also asked Kentucky and Tennessee for their sodium thiopental to aid its investigation."
The richer we get the more markets we need: "We can regard economic gr[ow]th as coming in two forms. There's catch up growth, such as what China is doing now and Japan did 50 years ago. What to do is largely known, for there are the examples of the richer, more advanced, economies that can be followed. ... However, once a place has got rich the problem changes. Catch up growth is no longer possible, for there's no one to catch up with. The economy has arrived at the technological frontier so there's no one to copy. Any further growth is going to come from innovation, new ways of doing things, rather than mobilising extant resources to simply do more. At which point governments can't do that planning and directing thing"
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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How stupid is President Barack Hussein Obama? Let me count the ways.
Judging from the philosophical pose he struck during Wednesday's "debt-reduction" address, the president is so stupid as to believe that the "rugged individualism," "self-reliance" and "healthy skepticism of too much government" - all qualities he attributed to the American people in that speech - can survive in the shadow of his government.
During his two years in office, Mr. Obama has accrued more debt than any president in American history. Why, in the month of March alone, his souped-up civil servants spent eight times what they collected in tax receipts and revenues.
For every year their honcho has been in office, the Obama officials have devoured over a trillion dollars, and will put Americans in hock to the tune of $1 trillion in interest payments alone by the end of this decade, if not sooner.
How stupid is our president? So stupid as to believe that the governmental juggernaut over which he presides is what connects us as a nation, and ensures that "we . do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves."
How stupid is Obama? So stupid as to believe that America became a great country in 1935, which is when the earliest of the Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security entitlements was signed into law. Dummy did, after all, declare yesterday that, "We would not be a great country without [these programs]."
How stupid is the president of the United States? So stupid as to think that "the rich" are rich because their "country," by which he means the ruling clique, "has done so much for them," and that they must, therefore, be compelled "to give back a little bit more."
That's like claiming the tick created the dog! Production predates government predation. Government doesn't produce wealth - it only consumes riches created by others, Mr. President.
Besides, the individual is the basic unit of society, without whom there would be no collective. A cleverer man would know that ACORN is the creation of community agitators like himself, not the other way around.
Indeed, backward is our president for reasoning backwards. To wit, if B, then A: if "rich," then exploitative, but if poor, then exploited. That's a bad mistake.
Just how backward is Barack? Such an intellectual laggard is the country's commander in chief as to frame the massive spending he is directing as a "key investment in our future." The wherewithal for the largess exhibited by Mr. Obama's menagerie of moron has been siphoned off from the private economy (and from China).
How studiously dumb is our president? So stupid as to claim that the real "damage . caused to our nation's checkbook," a checking account he controls and we and our Chinese enablers keep in funds, is caused by tax cuts for the rich.
In other words, returning some stolen property ? that's what taxes are ? to its rightful owners is causing America to go under. That, and not the debt our overweening overlords have accumulated in the course of expanding their jurisdiction stateside and overseas.
A note to anyone who is as gormless as the president: Government is doomed to fail because it is bereft of the constraints private property imposes. The more funds funneled into an insolvent system, in which property is communally "owned" - the greater the squandering of these scarce, precious, appropriated resources.
Most of what the government currently does is financed by borrowing. President Obama spoke at length about his "vision for America." But if he must beg or steal to keep his vision alive, then there is something wrong with this "vision," and not with its victims.
But, as Ron White, that great satirist from the great state of Texas, teaches, "You can't fix stupid." "There is not a pill you can take, not a class you can go to. Stupid is forever."
SOURCE
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US budget "showdown"
For all the attempts to talk up the budget clash as a great historical drama, in truth it revealed the pathetic state of American politics. It looked like money for US government agencies would run out at midnight. But an hour before that deadline, congressional leaders and President Obama reached a budget deal that prevented a government shutdown and massive job lay-offs. The compromise cuts about $39 billion from federal spending this year.
Listening to the media coverage, it seemed like a great political drama was taking place. CNN showed a countdown clock, with the minutes ticking away ominously towards the shutdown at midnight. In reality, though, the whole thing was an example of the pathetic state of American politics. The Financial Times was right to refer to the shambolic last-minute deal-making as 'banana republic machinations'.
Despite what the breathless news reporters said, this was not a battle over political principle. Yes, the US federal deficit is large, but this agreement was never intended to put even a small dent in it. Both parties had agreed to reduce spending, and the differences between them towards the end had boiled down to $1 billion or $2 billion, out of a total budget of $3,700 billion.
Following the deal, a beaming Obama said: 'Today, Americans of different beliefs came together.' Based on his enthusiasm, you could be forgiven for thinking that the agreement marked a landmark in American history. Of course it was simply the mundane business of government: passing a budget, something the federal government does every year. Not only that, but amid all the celebrations it is easy to miss the fact that the budget deal was well overdue, coming some six months into the fiscal year, and therefore this supposedly great achievement only sees them through another six months.
Rather than getting caught up in the 'high-stakes drama' of the 'countdown to shutdown', most Americans watched with bemusement and dismay. How could such a serious step - shutting down the basic institution of government, with significant implications for jobs and services - be risked when there was so little separating the two sides? The reality was that the brinkmanship was intended to sway both parties' respective members of Congress, not the public at large. John Boehner, Republican majority leader in the House, wanted to prove to his Tea Party caucus that he was going down to the wire to obtain the maximum spending concessions; Harry Reid, Democrat majority leader in the Senate, wanted to cover his tracks by reassuring his liberal wing that he was not going to give in to Republican social policy issues, like the bid to defund Planned Parenthood.
That the politicians would subject the public to such a circus, just to bring their own members in line, shows how self-absorbed they are. Before the budget showdown, both parties in Congress were held in low esteem, with approval ratings of less than 20 per cent. The latest spectacle of politicians acting like juveniles will certainly not improve perceptions of Congress's stature.
Of the two parties, the Republicans retained some semblance of coherence. Mostly united behind a push for spending cuts, they managed to set the agenda. But for all of Boehner's self-congratulation afterwards, the cuts represented only a tiny percentage of the total budget. At the same time, because they were heavily focused on so-called 'discretionary' welfare spending, the reductions will disproportionately affect the poor and working class. In addition, the Republicans' pursuit of issues that had nothing to do with the budget - like the ban on the financing of abortions in Washington, DC - made it appear that they were simply using the occasion to advance their pet project
The most ludicrous of Boehner's claims was that the deal would help the economy. 'We fought to keep government spending down because it really will in fact help create a better environment for job creators in our country', he said. To date, businesses have not been holding back from hiring more because of government spending, and the relatively small cuts in the latest budget deal will have little or no influence on whether to create more jobs. While the Republicans are obsessed with cuts, they have no answer for economic growth; and if the economy doesn't grow, even cuts in spending won't come fast enough to reduce the deficit.
On the other side, the Democrats appear aimless and adrift. The fact that the 2011 budget took this long is a poor reflection on them: they had majorities in both Houses of Congress when this process should have been completed six months ago, so they only have themselves to blame for failing to come to agreement within their own party.
It is hard to know where Obama stands on these issues. At times he calls for 'investments in the future', but he also stresses that cuts are necessary, using the analogy of a family tightening its belt when times are tough. His initially proposed budget called for a $40 billion increase in spending, and then he ended up agreeing to a $39 billion decrease - a swing of $79 billion. To an objective observer, that would appear to be a defeat. And yet afterwards Obama pretended he had won. He called the deal 'good news for the American people' and boasted about 'making the largest annual spending cut in our history'.
What is clear coming out of the budget agreement is that the Democrats are allowing the Republicans to set the agenda. No longer is there any talk about stimulus, even though Obama previously said the stimulus would be necessary until the economy fully recovered and unemployment came down to pre-recession levels. (Indeed, most economists think the US economy is not out of the woods, and have marked down growth forecasts as a result of the budget deal, because the economy has been so reliant on state spending.) Nor is anyone really talking seriously about Obama's 'investments', like his half-hearted proposals to increase spending on infrastructure, high-speed rail and green-energy technology.
Instead, all the talk is about where to cut next. Obama and the Democrats have managed an incredible feat: they have made the Republican scaremongering bean-counters appear like courageous truth-tellers who are willing to tackle unsustainable deficits.
It now looks like there will be other occasions for 'drama' in the near future. First, there will be a vote on raising the national debt limit, which will probably occur sometime between mid-May and early July. Boehner is insisting that they will go down to the wire again unless 'there is something really, really big attached' to raising the cap - meaning further spending cuts. The White House is warning that not raising the debt limit would have 'Armageddon-like' consequences for the economy.
Second, a debate has started about the 2012 budget. Last week, Republican Paul Ryan unveiled the House proposal, and on Wednesday night Obama is expected to announce his counter-proposal. The 2012 process looks likely to drag on like the 2011 did, especially given that neither party will want to be seen to be conceding too much in the run-up to the 2012 election (which is a presidential one).
While disagreeing on the means, it is clear that both parties agree on the end: austerity. Even though the costs of Social Security and Medicare are structural contributors to government deficits, a focus on them (and deficits generally) is myopic. At the moment, there is no fiscal crisis. The real issue that is neglected amid all the deficit discussion is whether the US economy can generate growth. With growth, the current deficits will be taken care of; without growth, the doomsday scenario that fearmongers peddle today could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Neither major party has anything of substance to say about creating growth in productive industries. Their consensus on austerity is mind-numbing and uninspiring. To be subjected to the spectacle of recurring pantomimes over budgets only adds insult to injury.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
A cancerous government: "Cancer cells grow and multiply like normal human tissue cells, but unlike normal cells, cancer cells suck up body resources without doing anything beneficial for the body. They eventually kill the body. The abnormal growth of government and government spending does exactly the same to civilizations. In the United States, government growth and spending has multiplied to the point where the draw down on productive contributors is starting to kill the host. There is little incentive to contribute values in the market place when the federal, state, and local governments are taking more than 50% of a taxpayer's income in many instances. Why work hard to create if the value will be confiscated?
AZ: Bill requires candidates to prove birth in US: "Arizona, which has shown little reluctance in bucking the federal government, is again plowing controversial ground, this time as its Legislature passed a bill to require President Obama and other presidential candidates to prove they were born in the United States before their names can appear on the state's ballot. If Governor Jan Brewer signs the proposal into law, Arizona would be the first state to pass such a requirement - potentially forcing a court to decide whether the president's birth certificate is enough to prove he can legally run for reelection. Hawaii officials have certified Obama was born in that state, but so-called birthers have demanded more proof"
Senate "Gang of Six" seeks accord on debt: "Days after President Obama called for forming a bipartisan group in Congress to begin negotiating a $4 trillion debt-reduction package, the parties have not even agreed to its membership. Yet six senators - three Democrats, three Republicans - say they are nearing consensus on just such a plan. Whether the so-called Gang of Six can actually deliver something when Congress returns from a recess in May could determine whether Democrats and Republicans can come together to resolve the nation's fiscal problems before the 2012 elections."
Obama tries to obstruct executions: "President Obama well may have begun another undeclared war -- this time on states that try to enforce their own death penalty laws -- on the dubious grounds that the Food and Drug Administration has not approved drugs intended to kill convicted killers. On March 15, the Drug Enforcement Administration seized Georgia's supply of sodium thiopental, the first drug given under the three-drug lethal injection protocol used in most of the country's 34 death-penalty states. The DEA also asked Kentucky and Tennessee for their sodium thiopental to aid its investigation."
The richer we get the more markets we need: "We can regard economic gr[ow]th as coming in two forms. There's catch up growth, such as what China is doing now and Japan did 50 years ago. What to do is largely known, for there are the examples of the richer, more advanced, economies that can be followed. ... However, once a place has got rich the problem changes. Catch up growth is no longer possible, for there's no one to catch up with. The economy has arrived at the technological frontier so there's no one to copy. Any further growth is going to come from innovation, new ways of doing things, rather than mobilising extant resources to simply do more. At which point governments can't do that planning and directing thing"
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, April 17, 2011
Pastrami on rye
A recent posting on my personal blog is concerned with how best to serve Pastrami on rye. If anybody reading here has strong views on the matter, I would be delighted to hear from them.
*********************
HMS Sausage returns to port for the last time
Wait for it
To stop the video, click the bottom left-hand corner
More HERE
Cumberland sausage is well known in Britain -- hence the nickname of the ship
****************************
Are the good times really over for good?
An excerpt below from a book review in which both the author and the reviewer express optimism about America's economic future. Rather surprisingly, both overlook the role of an ever-expanding government. They acknowledge that the average American stopped getting richer decades ago but really have no explanation for it.
That all the gains from technological progress and innovation have been swallowed up by an ever-expanding bureaucracy they do not consider. You can't take more and more people out of the productive workforce and expect the supply of goods and services to grow. Sure, the bureaucracy does provide "services" of a kind but not ones most people value or would willingly pay for.
And the destruction of savings held in American dollars brought about by Obama's money-printing binge is mostly still to be felt. It is hard to see how the Obama legacy of a greatly expanded government and people with destroyed savings is going to allow for much bounce-back any time soon.
Unless of course America gets a President who abolishes all federal departments that cover matters already covered by the States. Abolishing the Federal Depts. of Health and Education would hurt no-one and the DEA, OSHA, EPA (etc.) also overlap and could readily go too
Cowen, a George Mason University economist, argues that since colonial times the American economy has benefited from "low-hanging fruit"—i.e., bountiful opportunities for growth. He singles out three in particular: free land, technological breakthroughs, and "smart but uneducated kids."
"Yet during the last forty years," Cowen writes, "that low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau and the trees are more bare than we would like to think. That's it. That is what has gone wrong." Cowen identifies the exhaustion of that low-hanging fruit as the main culprit behind the slowdown in growth during recent decades, rising inequality, the nastiness of present-day politics, and even the recent global financial meltdown. Looking forward, he admits the possibility that innovation and growth will pick up again, perhaps catalyzed by the rise of China and India. Cultural change would help, he argues. Specifically, his chief prescription is that we somehow raise the social status of scientists.
Cowen is hardly the first boy to cry wolf. In previous periods of deep economic distress, other prognosticators have grabbed attention by claiming that innovation and growth are at long last winding down. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the "secular stagnationists," led by Keynesian economist Alvin Hansen, argued that falling population growth and dwindling prospects for technological progress meant that "mature" economies could combat chronic underinvestment and unemployment only through massive government spending. And during the stagflation of the 1970s, the Club of Rome and many others warned that ecological constraints were finally imposing "limits to growth." So here we are: another macroeconomic crisis, another gloomy prophet.
We should remember, however, that at the end of this story the wolf actually does come. So could Cowen be right this time?
He certainly is correct in identifying a poorly understood phenomenon of fundamental importance: Innovation and economic growth are getting harder. During the last few decades, rapid growth in the number of scientists, engineers, and researchers has not resulted in a corresponding acceleration of economic growth or new inventions. Indeed, the number of patents per researcher has been falling steadily. "In each industry the most obvious ideas are discovered first," explained Paul Segerstrom of the Stockholm School of Economics in a 1998 American Economic Review article, "making it harder to find new ideas subsequently."
Cowen is also right that a big source of relatively easy growth during the 20th century—investment in education—has been exhausted. In 1900 only 6 percent of American kids graduated high school, and only 0.25 percent went to college. The high school graduation rate peaked at roughly 80 percent in the late 1960s and has slipped a bit since, while some 40 percent of college-age kids are now in college. Moving these numbers upward without cutting standards further may be possible, but it certainly won't be easy, and in any event the biggest gains in improving educational attainment are likely behind us.
But there is another side of the coin. Yes, pursuing any particular avenue of scientific research or technological development yields diminishing returns. But it is often the case that advances in one area open up entirely new avenues of progress in others. To put it another way, we keep discovering previously hidden orchards of low-hanging fruit. The microelectronics revolution of the last half-century is a spectacular case in point: Continuing exponential growth in information processing capacity has made possible sweeping innovations in a host of industries unrelated to silicon chips. Looking ahead, exciting developments in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence promise future waves of revolutionary innovation.
Furthermore, even as growth gets harder, our institutions of wealth creation have improved. The number of scientists and researchers has grown, and their tools keep getting better. American corporations have undergone wrenching restructuring in recent decades to make them more innovative and responsive to change. On the whole, government policies today are much more favorable to entrepreneurship and innovation than they were a half-century ago. And continued progress on all these fronts remains possible.
How do these countervailing forces balance out? My reading of the evidence doesn't support Cowen's sweeping historical narrative that centuries of easy progress are now behind us. Much of the force of his argument comes from contrasting America's glittering economic performance in the decades following World War II with the decidedly less impressive record in recent decades. But if you zoom out and look at the larger historical record, Cowen's "Great Stagnation" more or less disappears. And if you zoom in and examine recent trends in detail, the numbers likewise belie the claim that we have hit a "technological plateau."
Cowen correctly points out that median family income rose smartly after World War II, only to fall off sharply in the 1970s. Per capita GDP figures reveal the same trend, albeit a little less dramatically (because of the rise in income inequality, which means most of the income gains have come among higher earners). Between 1950 and 1973, the average annual growth rate of real GDP per capita was 2.5 percent; for the period between 1973 and 2007, the corresponding figure was only 1.9 percent.
More HERE
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Leftist haters don't know what "depleted" means
Read the bit of paranoia below and you can see how hatred of the world you live in can anaesthetize your powers of thought. "Depeleted" uranium is of course uranium from which the radioactive component has been removed. But the sad souls below still refer to it as "radioactive"
By most accounts, the U.S. has embarked on another humanitarian war, and its fifth one, using depleted uranium. In this compelling 2004 study, geoscientist and radiation expert Leuren Moret paints a bold picture of the pervasive and devastating effects of this "silent killer that will not go away". However, beyond its much-touted military advantages, Moret suggests that depleted uranium serves as a deadly instrument for furthering Washington’s unavowed geo-strategic agenda, as in Libya today.
The use of depleted uranium weaponry by the United States, defying all international treaties, will slowly annihilate all species on earth including the human species, and yet this country continues to do so with full knowledge of its destructive potential.
Since 1991, the United States has staged four wars using depleted uranium weaponry, illegal under all international treaties, conventions and agreements, as well as under the US military law. The continued use of this illegal radioactive weaponry, which has already contaminated vast regions with low level radiation and will contaminate other parts of the world over time, is indeed a world affair and an international issue. The deeper purpose is revealed by comparing regions now contaminated with depleted uranium — from Egypt, the Middle East, Central Asia and the northern half of India — to the US geostrategic imperatives described in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1997 book The Grand Chessboard.
The fact is that the United States and its military partners have staged four nuclear wars, "slipping nukes under the wire" by using dirty bombs and dirty weapons in countries the US needs to control. Depleted uranium aerosols will permanently contaminate vast regions and slowly destroy the genetic future of populations living in those regions, where there are resources which the US must control, in order to establish and maintain American primacy
More HERE
There is a tiny element of radioactivity left in DU but there is is a tiny element of radioactivity in lots of things -- granite, for instance. If the nutters above were in the real world they might perhaps have pointed to the fact that U-238 is a heavy metal and heavy metals have some health concerns surrounding them. But even the WHO (a UN body) has said that there is no evidence of adverse health effects from DU -- JR
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Obama's dismal assumptions
President Obama’s speech on the fiscal crisis was not merely political. It was also highly ideological. Despite how counterintuitive it may seem to pursue an expansion of government spending while a good bit of the world is seeking a government “downsizing” (including much of Europe), President Obama’s proposals fit with what we know about him.
The governing philosophy that leads our President to these sorts of proposals has been identified by many different names. Statism, Marxism, Socialism – the Obama agenda arguably contains elements of all of these philosophies, and more.
But rather than trying to connect President Barack Obama to somebody else’s pre-established political philosophy, it’s useful to examine what appear to be the philosophical assumptions with which the President operates. Here are just a couple of the assumptions that currently seem to have engulfed the President:
“Government always know best” – President Barack Obama seems to have very little confidence in the abilities of private individuals and groups to solve problems, and seems to view individual liberty as a problem to be “managed.” Thus, no matter what the dilemma – the rising cost of healthcare, the collapse of American automobile companies, or a proliferation of “bullying” on school campuses – the President’s instinctive responses are almost always the same.
Form a commission. Convene a summit. Appoint a Czar. Set-up a new “department.” The President seems to assume that with more oversight and control, government will always act benevolently and in the “collective interests” of all, whereas private individuals and organizations are almost always suspected of acting selfishly and destructively.
This philosophical assumption was absolutely entailed in the President’s remarks about our fiscal crisis. While Congressman Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee Chairman proposed to expand competition in the healthcare markets as a means of reducing Medicare costs, an indignant President Obama would have nothing to do with the idea (as the Wall Street Journal pointed out the President stopped short of calling this idea “murderous”).
The only means by which entitlement spending on Medicare can be controlled, so far as President Obama is concerned, is to have all Medicare coverage decisions routed through an un-elected commission in Washington so as to eliminate “unnecessary” Medicare payments (this approach also re-affirms his previously stated belief that greedy medical doctors have a proclivity to bill Medicare for unnecessary procedures, simply because they want the money).
“Private resources ultimately belong to the government” – President Obama is well known for his “spread- the-wealth-around inclinations, given his now famous run-in with the “Joe the Plummer” character during the 2008 presidential campaign. What often goes unnoticed, however, is that he frequently speaks not merely of government’s “right” to re-distribute private wealth, but of government’s ultimate ownership of it.
This philosophical assumption was apparent in the President’s fiscal crisis speech as well. When discussing the taxation rates imposed upon America’s top income earners, President Obama insisted that America “can’t afford” to leave these rates in place. Both explicitly, and implicitly, the President was saying that our government incurs a cost, when it does NOT take money away from private individuals.
How can this be? The government “loses” money, when it does not take money away from private citizens? President Obama has been using this line of reasoning for nearly all of the twenty-eight months of his presidency. It ultimately points towards a belief that your money, at the end of the day, belongs to the government, and it’s up to agents of government to determine how much you’re permitted to “keep.”
The President’s philosophical assumptions are not merely a matter of politics. They are a part of who he is. Can America withstand this?
More HERE
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Krauthammer on the budget
The most serious charge against Rep. Paul Ryan's budget is not the risible claim, made most prominently by President Obama in his George Washington University address, that it would "sacrifice the America we believe in." The serious charge is that the Ryan plan fails by its own standards: Because it only cuts spending without raising taxes, it accumulates trillions of debt and doesn't balance the budget until the 2030s. If the debt is such a national emergency, they say, Ryan never really gets you there from here.
But the critics miss the point. You can't get there from here without Ryan's plan. It's the essential element. Of course Ryan is not going to propose tax increases. You don't need Republicans for that. That's what Democrats do. The president's speech was a prose poem to higher taxes – with every allusion to spending cuts guarded by a phalanx of impenetrable caveats.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
A recent posting on my personal blog is concerned with how best to serve Pastrami on rye. If anybody reading here has strong views on the matter, I would be delighted to hear from them.
*********************
HMS Sausage returns to port for the last time
Wait for it
To stop the video, click the bottom left-hand corner
More HERE
Cumberland sausage is well known in Britain -- hence the nickname of the ship
****************************
Are the good times really over for good?
An excerpt below from a book review in which both the author and the reviewer express optimism about America's economic future. Rather surprisingly, both overlook the role of an ever-expanding government. They acknowledge that the average American stopped getting richer decades ago but really have no explanation for it.
That all the gains from technological progress and innovation have been swallowed up by an ever-expanding bureaucracy they do not consider. You can't take more and more people out of the productive workforce and expect the supply of goods and services to grow. Sure, the bureaucracy does provide "services" of a kind but not ones most people value or would willingly pay for.
And the destruction of savings held in American dollars brought about by Obama's money-printing binge is mostly still to be felt. It is hard to see how the Obama legacy of a greatly expanded government and people with destroyed savings is going to allow for much bounce-back any time soon.
Unless of course America gets a President who abolishes all federal departments that cover matters already covered by the States. Abolishing the Federal Depts. of Health and Education would hurt no-one and the DEA, OSHA, EPA (etc.) also overlap and could readily go too
Cowen, a George Mason University economist, argues that since colonial times the American economy has benefited from "low-hanging fruit"—i.e., bountiful opportunities for growth. He singles out three in particular: free land, technological breakthroughs, and "smart but uneducated kids."
"Yet during the last forty years," Cowen writes, "that low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau and the trees are more bare than we would like to think. That's it. That is what has gone wrong." Cowen identifies the exhaustion of that low-hanging fruit as the main culprit behind the slowdown in growth during recent decades, rising inequality, the nastiness of present-day politics, and even the recent global financial meltdown. Looking forward, he admits the possibility that innovation and growth will pick up again, perhaps catalyzed by the rise of China and India. Cultural change would help, he argues. Specifically, his chief prescription is that we somehow raise the social status of scientists.
Cowen is hardly the first boy to cry wolf. In previous periods of deep economic distress, other prognosticators have grabbed attention by claiming that innovation and growth are at long last winding down. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the "secular stagnationists," led by Keynesian economist Alvin Hansen, argued that falling population growth and dwindling prospects for technological progress meant that "mature" economies could combat chronic underinvestment and unemployment only through massive government spending. And during the stagflation of the 1970s, the Club of Rome and many others warned that ecological constraints were finally imposing "limits to growth." So here we are: another macroeconomic crisis, another gloomy prophet.
We should remember, however, that at the end of this story the wolf actually does come. So could Cowen be right this time?
He certainly is correct in identifying a poorly understood phenomenon of fundamental importance: Innovation and economic growth are getting harder. During the last few decades, rapid growth in the number of scientists, engineers, and researchers has not resulted in a corresponding acceleration of economic growth or new inventions. Indeed, the number of patents per researcher has been falling steadily. "In each industry the most obvious ideas are discovered first," explained Paul Segerstrom of the Stockholm School of Economics in a 1998 American Economic Review article, "making it harder to find new ideas subsequently."
Cowen is also right that a big source of relatively easy growth during the 20th century—investment in education—has been exhausted. In 1900 only 6 percent of American kids graduated high school, and only 0.25 percent went to college. The high school graduation rate peaked at roughly 80 percent in the late 1960s and has slipped a bit since, while some 40 percent of college-age kids are now in college. Moving these numbers upward without cutting standards further may be possible, but it certainly won't be easy, and in any event the biggest gains in improving educational attainment are likely behind us.
But there is another side of the coin. Yes, pursuing any particular avenue of scientific research or technological development yields diminishing returns. But it is often the case that advances in one area open up entirely new avenues of progress in others. To put it another way, we keep discovering previously hidden orchards of low-hanging fruit. The microelectronics revolution of the last half-century is a spectacular case in point: Continuing exponential growth in information processing capacity has made possible sweeping innovations in a host of industries unrelated to silicon chips. Looking ahead, exciting developments in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence promise future waves of revolutionary innovation.
Furthermore, even as growth gets harder, our institutions of wealth creation have improved. The number of scientists and researchers has grown, and their tools keep getting better. American corporations have undergone wrenching restructuring in recent decades to make them more innovative and responsive to change. On the whole, government policies today are much more favorable to entrepreneurship and innovation than they were a half-century ago. And continued progress on all these fronts remains possible.
How do these countervailing forces balance out? My reading of the evidence doesn't support Cowen's sweeping historical narrative that centuries of easy progress are now behind us. Much of the force of his argument comes from contrasting America's glittering economic performance in the decades following World War II with the decidedly less impressive record in recent decades. But if you zoom out and look at the larger historical record, Cowen's "Great Stagnation" more or less disappears. And if you zoom in and examine recent trends in detail, the numbers likewise belie the claim that we have hit a "technological plateau."
Cowen correctly points out that median family income rose smartly after World War II, only to fall off sharply in the 1970s. Per capita GDP figures reveal the same trend, albeit a little less dramatically (because of the rise in income inequality, which means most of the income gains have come among higher earners). Between 1950 and 1973, the average annual growth rate of real GDP per capita was 2.5 percent; for the period between 1973 and 2007, the corresponding figure was only 1.9 percent.
More HERE
***********************
Leftist haters don't know what "depleted" means
Read the bit of paranoia below and you can see how hatred of the world you live in can anaesthetize your powers of thought. "Depeleted" uranium is of course uranium from which the radioactive component has been removed. But the sad souls below still refer to it as "radioactive"
By most accounts, the U.S. has embarked on another humanitarian war, and its fifth one, using depleted uranium. In this compelling 2004 study, geoscientist and radiation expert Leuren Moret paints a bold picture of the pervasive and devastating effects of this "silent killer that will not go away". However, beyond its much-touted military advantages, Moret suggests that depleted uranium serves as a deadly instrument for furthering Washington’s unavowed geo-strategic agenda, as in Libya today.
The use of depleted uranium weaponry by the United States, defying all international treaties, will slowly annihilate all species on earth including the human species, and yet this country continues to do so with full knowledge of its destructive potential.
Since 1991, the United States has staged four wars using depleted uranium weaponry, illegal under all international treaties, conventions and agreements, as well as under the US military law. The continued use of this illegal radioactive weaponry, which has already contaminated vast regions with low level radiation and will contaminate other parts of the world over time, is indeed a world affair and an international issue. The deeper purpose is revealed by comparing regions now contaminated with depleted uranium — from Egypt, the Middle East, Central Asia and the northern half of India — to the US geostrategic imperatives described in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1997 book The Grand Chessboard.
The fact is that the United States and its military partners have staged four nuclear wars, "slipping nukes under the wire" by using dirty bombs and dirty weapons in countries the US needs to control. Depleted uranium aerosols will permanently contaminate vast regions and slowly destroy the genetic future of populations living in those regions, where there are resources which the US must control, in order to establish and maintain American primacy
More HERE
There is a tiny element of radioactivity left in DU but there is is a tiny element of radioactivity in lots of things -- granite, for instance. If the nutters above were in the real world they might perhaps have pointed to the fact that U-238 is a heavy metal and heavy metals have some health concerns surrounding them. But even the WHO (a UN body) has said that there is no evidence of adverse health effects from DU -- JR
*************************
Obama's dismal assumptions
President Obama’s speech on the fiscal crisis was not merely political. It was also highly ideological. Despite how counterintuitive it may seem to pursue an expansion of government spending while a good bit of the world is seeking a government “downsizing” (including much of Europe), President Obama’s proposals fit with what we know about him.
The governing philosophy that leads our President to these sorts of proposals has been identified by many different names. Statism, Marxism, Socialism – the Obama agenda arguably contains elements of all of these philosophies, and more.
But rather than trying to connect President Barack Obama to somebody else’s pre-established political philosophy, it’s useful to examine what appear to be the philosophical assumptions with which the President operates. Here are just a couple of the assumptions that currently seem to have engulfed the President:
“Government always know best” – President Barack Obama seems to have very little confidence in the abilities of private individuals and groups to solve problems, and seems to view individual liberty as a problem to be “managed.” Thus, no matter what the dilemma – the rising cost of healthcare, the collapse of American automobile companies, or a proliferation of “bullying” on school campuses – the President’s instinctive responses are almost always the same.
Form a commission. Convene a summit. Appoint a Czar. Set-up a new “department.” The President seems to assume that with more oversight and control, government will always act benevolently and in the “collective interests” of all, whereas private individuals and organizations are almost always suspected of acting selfishly and destructively.
This philosophical assumption was absolutely entailed in the President’s remarks about our fiscal crisis. While Congressman Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee Chairman proposed to expand competition in the healthcare markets as a means of reducing Medicare costs, an indignant President Obama would have nothing to do with the idea (as the Wall Street Journal pointed out the President stopped short of calling this idea “murderous”).
The only means by which entitlement spending on Medicare can be controlled, so far as President Obama is concerned, is to have all Medicare coverage decisions routed through an un-elected commission in Washington so as to eliminate “unnecessary” Medicare payments (this approach also re-affirms his previously stated belief that greedy medical doctors have a proclivity to bill Medicare for unnecessary procedures, simply because they want the money).
“Private resources ultimately belong to the government” – President Obama is well known for his “spread- the-wealth-around inclinations, given his now famous run-in with the “Joe the Plummer” character during the 2008 presidential campaign. What often goes unnoticed, however, is that he frequently speaks not merely of government’s “right” to re-distribute private wealth, but of government’s ultimate ownership of it.
This philosophical assumption was apparent in the President’s fiscal crisis speech as well. When discussing the taxation rates imposed upon America’s top income earners, President Obama insisted that America “can’t afford” to leave these rates in place. Both explicitly, and implicitly, the President was saying that our government incurs a cost, when it does NOT take money away from private individuals.
How can this be? The government “loses” money, when it does not take money away from private citizens? President Obama has been using this line of reasoning for nearly all of the twenty-eight months of his presidency. It ultimately points towards a belief that your money, at the end of the day, belongs to the government, and it’s up to agents of government to determine how much you’re permitted to “keep.”
The President’s philosophical assumptions are not merely a matter of politics. They are a part of who he is. Can America withstand this?
More HERE
*************************
Krauthammer on the budget
The most serious charge against Rep. Paul Ryan's budget is not the risible claim, made most prominently by President Obama in his George Washington University address, that it would "sacrifice the America we believe in." The serious charge is that the Ryan plan fails by its own standards: Because it only cuts spending without raising taxes, it accumulates trillions of debt and doesn't balance the budget until the 2030s. If the debt is such a national emergency, they say, Ryan never really gets you there from here.
But the critics miss the point. You can't get there from here without Ryan's plan. It's the essential element. Of course Ryan is not going to propose tax increases. You don't need Republicans for that. That's what Democrats do. The president's speech was a prose poem to higher taxes – with every allusion to spending cuts guarded by a phalanx of impenetrable caveats.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Budget Battle, Budget Prattle
Jonah Goldberg
I cannot remember a more depressing week in Washington. The Republicans boasted a heroic accomplishment: slashing $38.5 billion from the budget, purportedly the largest cuts in history. But the cake was made from sawdust. Strip away the gimmicks and shine a light on the shadows, and it turns out the real cuts amounted to $352 million, or less than 1 percent of what was promised.
America borrows $4 billion a day. So we likely borrowed more than we cut in the amount of time the GOP leadership spent bragging about its "victory."
It is a dismal, dreary, mope-inducing performance that makes one wonder what the point of the 2010 elections were. If this was the best deal possible, fine. Republicans control only one house of Congress, and you can only achieve what is achievable. But they should have said so, admitted it frankly, and sworn to do better. Instead, the leadership touted their salt cracker of a budget cut as a feast, causing many to doubt they really grasp what their own voters want.
But as depressing as the Republicans' performance was, at least they're fighting for the right cause, their sails pointed in the right direction. What can be said of President Obama's speech this week?
Vice President Joe Biden reportedly fell asleep during the president's address. It would speak better of the man if he closed his eyes not out of weariness but as part of a prolonged wince as he listened to his boss spew a farrago of distortions, self-righteous non sequiturs and ideological fatwas in the cause of extending his presidency at the expense of both the country and his honor.
Just two months ago, Obama introduced a $3.73 trillion budget that did nothing to address America's long-term fiscal problems and added $1.6 trillion in debt (an amount roughly equal to Bill Clinton's annual budgets). It was a great and glorious punt, a rhetorical can-kicking of historic proportions. But now the president throws his budget away, concedes the scope of our fiscal wound and then proposes applying a quack's poultice to heal it.
Entitlements, he admits, are gobbling up the budget; they must be "on the table." But even as he puts the plates on the table with one hand, he removes them with the other, insisting his cooks can save the meal with price controls and rationing.
And if that doesn't work, 12 years and three presidential terms from now, a series of fictional "failsafes" will kick in and some magical commission will genie-blink even more fictional cuts.
Obama prefers this to the Republican approach, which would introduce market forces into health care in order to save a calcified system from collapsing under the weight of state controls. Indeed, he couldn't even acknowledge this is the intent of Republican plan, preferring instead to recycle ancient barbs and insults about conservative cruelty and class warfare.
In a speech billed as being full of specifics, it had precious few save the president's passionate desire to raise taxes on "the wealthy." Rhetorically, Obama defines the "rich" as millionaires like himself or billionaires like Warren Buffet. But in reality he sets his sights considerably lower: households (and small businesses) that make more than $250,000 a year.
As for shared sacrifice, it is hard to find any in his proposal. Six out of 10 U.S. households receive more from the government than they pay in taxes. If "shared sacrifice" is the standing order of the day, where is theirs? The president suggests that repealing Bush's tax cuts will save the day. But the vast bulk of those cuts go to people making less than $250,000 a year. The president wants to keep those cuts as his idea while talking about shared sacrifice. Meanwhile, as The Wall Street Journal notes, if you taxed everyone who makes over $100,000 at a rate of 100 percent, you still wouldn't raise enough to balance president Obama's budget, never mind pay off any debt.
The only good news to come from all of this is that the battle is now joined. The president has staked his banner in the soil of reactionary liberalism. Good. By setting his fortifications so far to the left of the middle ground, he gives the forces of reform room to advance far.
The rank and file are ready for battle, with the tea parties at the forefront. The only question is whether the GOP's generals have the stomach for the fight. And that question raises as much dread as hope.
SOURCE
*********************
Obama Blows up the Bridge
"Rather than building bridges, he's poisoning wells," said Rep. Paul Ryan, after listening to Barack Obama's scathing attack on his deficit reduction plan as a shredding of America's social contract with the elderly and poor. Ryan is right. Yet, with Obama's partisan savagery, virtually calling the GOP plan immoral, we have clarity.
There will be no grand bipartisan bargain on taxes and spending. The two parties on Capitol Hill and the president will not be coming together to solve the gravest financial and fiscal crisis America has faced since the Great Depression. Between them today is a high wall and a deep ditch.
The heart of the Ryan plan is to turn Medicaid into block grants to the states, so each can decide for itself how best to use the funds, and to convert Medicare into a program where the U.S. government would provide citizens with the funds and freedom to chose whatever health insurance they wished to buy. Obama denounced both.
But if the Republican Medicare and Medicaid proposals are dead on arrival in Harry Reid's Senate and Obama's White House, Obama's plan to raise taxes is equally lifeless.
On MSNBC's "Morning Joe," this writer asked Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform exactly how many GOP members of the House had taken his pledge not to raise taxes. His response: "The commitment that 235 Republican members of the House and 40 Republicans in the Senate have signed is the Taxpayer Protection Pledge -- it says no raising taxes. So, taxes are off the table."
Seems clear. But if virtually every GOP member of the House and 40 GOP senators have signed a pledge not to raise taxes, how can they dishonor that pledge? How could they agree to raise the top U.S. income tax rate back up to the 40 percent of the Bill Clinton era, as Obama demands, then go home and tell voters they had no choice, that to get a deal with Reid and Obama they had to let the government take a larger share of the income of American citizens?
They cannot. Put bluntly, a vote by a Republican House to raise taxes as part of a big budget deal would be an act of collective suicide by the party of Speaker John Boehner.
And the Democrats? With the exception of the civil rights acts of the 1960s, no programs are more hallowed in party mythology than Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Are Democrats, after the "shellacking" of 2010, going to go home and tell their constituents they voted to cut Medicaid benefits?
Are they going to tell the old folks of the Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation and the retiring baby boomers that Medicare in the future will not be as generous as it has been in the past, that we are going to have to start rationing their health care?
The new Republican governors -- Scott Walker in Wisconsin, John Kasich in Ohio, Chris Christie in New Jersey, Tom Corbett in Pennsylvania -- all have resisted raising taxes, as has Andrew Cuomo, Democrat of New York, who enjoys remarkably high poll numbers for the times we live in.
The praise these governors are receiving, even when embattled, has also steeled the spine of congressional Republicans against any tax increase.
But if Democrats are not going to do even minor surgery on Medicare and Medicaid and Republicans are not going to raise taxes, there is no hope of big budget deal to cut a deficit now running at 11 percent of gross domestic product.
And that raises another question. How long can the Federal Reserve continue financing these deficits? China, choking on U.S. debt, is reportedly beginning to divest itself of U.S. bonds. Japan will need to sell U.S. bonds to get hard currency to repair the damage from the earthquake and tsunami. And the Fed is about to end its QE2 monthly purchases of $100 billion in U.S. bonds.
Where is the Fed going to borrow the $125 billion a month to finance this year's deficit of $1.65 trillion, and another of comparable size in 2012? Bill Gross' Pimco, the world's largest bond fund, has sold all his U.S. bonds and begun to short U.S. debt. Pimco is betting that the value of U.S. Treasury bonds will begin to fall.
We may be about to enter a maelstrom. No big budget deal is brokered. The deficit endures, and another looms in 2012. To finance them, the Fed borrows at the rate of $30 billion a week wherever it can. But as countries begin to choke on U.S. debt, the market starts to dry up. To attract investors, the Fed must raise interest rates, which sends bond prices sinking and forces interest rates up across the economy.
With interest rates rising, gas prices rising and inflation rising, the squeeze is on, and there is talk of a double-dip recession. And if that happens, Obama is toast. But, then, so are we.
SOURCE
***********************
The New Health Law: Bad for Doctors, Awful for Patients
While much has been said about the recently passed health care overhaul law and a multitude of cogent arguments have been made as to why the legislation must be repealed, lengthy debates have failed to adequately address how the 2,800 pages will prevent patients from receiving the medical care that they need and want. In fact, in some ways the federal government already hinders the ability of doctors to provide their patients with good care. These trends will no doubt worsen under PPACA. In addition, new regulations and mandates will place unaccountable regulators in between physicians and their patients.
Medicare’s physician reimbursement regimen is fraught with underpayments and perverse incentives. During the health care debate, supporters of PPACA praised Medicare’s ability to exploit its size to obtain lower fees with providers. While it is true that Medicare can bludgeon down physician fees, this is not one of the program’s greatest strengths, but actually one of its greatest weaknesses. These underpayments are ultimately shifted to patients in the form of shorter visits, less doctor face time, quick hospital discharges, and compromised care. Rather than reforming the government’s flawed reimbursement regimen, PPACA merely expands its scope to more people.
PPACA establishes the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute to conduct research comparing the efficacy of medical and surgical interventions. The potential harm from this depends how it is used.
Federal regulators could easily use this research to ration care by financially punishing physicians prescribing these “less effective” treatments. This research coupled with reimbursement changes could easily pave the way for the government dictating to patients the medicines, tests, and procedures that they can and cannot have, regardless of willingness to pay and personal preference. This would replace the professional judgment of physicians with rigid rules set by regulators in Washington DC. This one-size-fits-all approach will limit choice and result in poor quality care.
The soon-to-be established health insurance exchanges will also give the federal government vast new control over physician practices. PPACA states that starting January 1, 2015, a qualified health plan can contract with a provider “only if such provider implements such mechanisms to improve health care quality as the Secretary may by regulation require.” Depending on the guidelines, this gives the federal government unprecedented new authority over not just those physicians accepting Medicare and Medicaid, but any provider accepting any third party payer offered through the exchange. Of course quality care is a good thing, but who should determine the definition of “quality?’ Who knows best? This regulation seems to be based on the notion that bureaucrats at HHS from afar know better than the doctor actually talking to and examining the patient. This will coerce physicians to practice medicine not the way they were taught, but the way the government tells them. Ultimately, this too will lead to poor quality, standardized care and restrict choice.
PPACA will strip away physician autonomy, drown doctors in bureaucracy, and drain job satisfaction. As the profession deteriorates, older doctors will retire while younger doctors will look to switch careers. Many young people considering a career in medicine will pursue other opportunities. The supply of providers will dwindle as demand for services reaches an all-time high. Ultimately, the consequences of the health overhaul law will be passed along to patients through restricted access, long wait for appointments, and rationed care.
The United States boasts the world’s premier health care system. With that said, of course there is room for improvement and efforts must be implemented to control spiraling costs. A better prescription for reform would be to build off the success of the current system while targeting its inevitable shortcomings.
Ultimately, there are only two ways to lower costs. One approach empowers bureaucrats to make tough decisions for doctors and patients. This has grave ramifications on quality of care and choice.
Unfortunately, the administration chose to pursue this route. Yet, patients would be better served if doctors were held more accountable by transparency and choice, rather than bureaucratic fiat. A more practical approach to lowering costs empowers and incentivizes patients to be smarter health care consumers. This entails solutions such as expanding health savings accounts, creating a national market for health insurance, and leveling the tax playing field. These could bend the cost curve down while simultaneously strengthening the patient-doctor relationship.
The time has come for a long-overdue, honest discussion on not just the impact that government will have on patients, doctors, and the practice of medicine, but the impact it already has had over the past forty-five years. The importance cannot be undersold as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is indeed bad for doctors, but it is always the patient that suffers the most.
SOURCE
**********************
ELSEWHERE
End the war on dying cancer patients: "Stopping all war is not just something we need to do in the Middle East. It is something we need just as badly here at home. When I say 'stop all war,' I’m not just talking about the bombing and fighting overseas; I’m talking about the wars that the U.S. Government wages against its very own citizens. I am talking about how bureaucrats kill Americans, not with guns and bombs, but with laws and regulations."
UN: More than thirty killed in Iraqi raid on Iranian Communists: "An Iraqi army raid last week on Camp Ashraf left 34 Iranian exiles dead, according to a U.N. spokesman who on Thursday offered the first independent death toll for the attack that drew sharp rebukes from Baghdad's Western allies. The April 8 raid targeted the People's Mujahedeen Organization of Iran, which seeks to overthrow Iran's clerical leaders"
Class warfare: "In his speech yesterday, Obama brought up income inequality to justify higher taxes on the rich: 'In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90% of all working Americans actually declined. The top 1% saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. And that’s who needs to pay less taxes?' But even if the numbers are accurate, Obama portrays a much more divided America that really exists, because ... today’s top income earners today are often completely different people from yesterday’s top income earners."
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)
****************************
Jonah Goldberg
I cannot remember a more depressing week in Washington. The Republicans boasted a heroic accomplishment: slashing $38.5 billion from the budget, purportedly the largest cuts in history. But the cake was made from sawdust. Strip away the gimmicks and shine a light on the shadows, and it turns out the real cuts amounted to $352 million, or less than 1 percent of what was promised.
America borrows $4 billion a day. So we likely borrowed more than we cut in the amount of time the GOP leadership spent bragging about its "victory."
It is a dismal, dreary, mope-inducing performance that makes one wonder what the point of the 2010 elections were. If this was the best deal possible, fine. Republicans control only one house of Congress, and you can only achieve what is achievable. But they should have said so, admitted it frankly, and sworn to do better. Instead, the leadership touted their salt cracker of a budget cut as a feast, causing many to doubt they really grasp what their own voters want.
But as depressing as the Republicans' performance was, at least they're fighting for the right cause, their sails pointed in the right direction. What can be said of President Obama's speech this week?
Vice President Joe Biden reportedly fell asleep during the president's address. It would speak better of the man if he closed his eyes not out of weariness but as part of a prolonged wince as he listened to his boss spew a farrago of distortions, self-righteous non sequiturs and ideological fatwas in the cause of extending his presidency at the expense of both the country and his honor.
Just two months ago, Obama introduced a $3.73 trillion budget that did nothing to address America's long-term fiscal problems and added $1.6 trillion in debt (an amount roughly equal to Bill Clinton's annual budgets). It was a great and glorious punt, a rhetorical can-kicking of historic proportions. But now the president throws his budget away, concedes the scope of our fiscal wound and then proposes applying a quack's poultice to heal it.
Entitlements, he admits, are gobbling up the budget; they must be "on the table." But even as he puts the plates on the table with one hand, he removes them with the other, insisting his cooks can save the meal with price controls and rationing.
And if that doesn't work, 12 years and three presidential terms from now, a series of fictional "failsafes" will kick in and some magical commission will genie-blink even more fictional cuts.
Obama prefers this to the Republican approach, which would introduce market forces into health care in order to save a calcified system from collapsing under the weight of state controls. Indeed, he couldn't even acknowledge this is the intent of Republican plan, preferring instead to recycle ancient barbs and insults about conservative cruelty and class warfare.
In a speech billed as being full of specifics, it had precious few save the president's passionate desire to raise taxes on "the wealthy." Rhetorically, Obama defines the "rich" as millionaires like himself or billionaires like Warren Buffet. But in reality he sets his sights considerably lower: households (and small businesses) that make more than $250,000 a year.
As for shared sacrifice, it is hard to find any in his proposal. Six out of 10 U.S. households receive more from the government than they pay in taxes. If "shared sacrifice" is the standing order of the day, where is theirs? The president suggests that repealing Bush's tax cuts will save the day. But the vast bulk of those cuts go to people making less than $250,000 a year. The president wants to keep those cuts as his idea while talking about shared sacrifice. Meanwhile, as The Wall Street Journal notes, if you taxed everyone who makes over $100,000 at a rate of 100 percent, you still wouldn't raise enough to balance president Obama's budget, never mind pay off any debt.
The only good news to come from all of this is that the battle is now joined. The president has staked his banner in the soil of reactionary liberalism. Good. By setting his fortifications so far to the left of the middle ground, he gives the forces of reform room to advance far.
The rank and file are ready for battle, with the tea parties at the forefront. The only question is whether the GOP's generals have the stomach for the fight. And that question raises as much dread as hope.
SOURCE
*********************
Obama Blows up the Bridge
"Rather than building bridges, he's poisoning wells," said Rep. Paul Ryan, after listening to Barack Obama's scathing attack on his deficit reduction plan as a shredding of America's social contract with the elderly and poor. Ryan is right. Yet, with Obama's partisan savagery, virtually calling the GOP plan immoral, we have clarity.
There will be no grand bipartisan bargain on taxes and spending. The two parties on Capitol Hill and the president will not be coming together to solve the gravest financial and fiscal crisis America has faced since the Great Depression. Between them today is a high wall and a deep ditch.
The heart of the Ryan plan is to turn Medicaid into block grants to the states, so each can decide for itself how best to use the funds, and to convert Medicare into a program where the U.S. government would provide citizens with the funds and freedom to chose whatever health insurance they wished to buy. Obama denounced both.
But if the Republican Medicare and Medicaid proposals are dead on arrival in Harry Reid's Senate and Obama's White House, Obama's plan to raise taxes is equally lifeless.
On MSNBC's "Morning Joe," this writer asked Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform exactly how many GOP members of the House had taken his pledge not to raise taxes. His response: "The commitment that 235 Republican members of the House and 40 Republicans in the Senate have signed is the Taxpayer Protection Pledge -- it says no raising taxes. So, taxes are off the table."
Seems clear. But if virtually every GOP member of the House and 40 GOP senators have signed a pledge not to raise taxes, how can they dishonor that pledge? How could they agree to raise the top U.S. income tax rate back up to the 40 percent of the Bill Clinton era, as Obama demands, then go home and tell voters they had no choice, that to get a deal with Reid and Obama they had to let the government take a larger share of the income of American citizens?
They cannot. Put bluntly, a vote by a Republican House to raise taxes as part of a big budget deal would be an act of collective suicide by the party of Speaker John Boehner.
And the Democrats? With the exception of the civil rights acts of the 1960s, no programs are more hallowed in party mythology than Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Are Democrats, after the "shellacking" of 2010, going to go home and tell their constituents they voted to cut Medicaid benefits?
Are they going to tell the old folks of the Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation and the retiring baby boomers that Medicare in the future will not be as generous as it has been in the past, that we are going to have to start rationing their health care?
The new Republican governors -- Scott Walker in Wisconsin, John Kasich in Ohio, Chris Christie in New Jersey, Tom Corbett in Pennsylvania -- all have resisted raising taxes, as has Andrew Cuomo, Democrat of New York, who enjoys remarkably high poll numbers for the times we live in.
The praise these governors are receiving, even when embattled, has also steeled the spine of congressional Republicans against any tax increase.
But if Democrats are not going to do even minor surgery on Medicare and Medicaid and Republicans are not going to raise taxes, there is no hope of big budget deal to cut a deficit now running at 11 percent of gross domestic product.
And that raises another question. How long can the Federal Reserve continue financing these deficits? China, choking on U.S. debt, is reportedly beginning to divest itself of U.S. bonds. Japan will need to sell U.S. bonds to get hard currency to repair the damage from the earthquake and tsunami. And the Fed is about to end its QE2 monthly purchases of $100 billion in U.S. bonds.
Where is the Fed going to borrow the $125 billion a month to finance this year's deficit of $1.65 trillion, and another of comparable size in 2012? Bill Gross' Pimco, the world's largest bond fund, has sold all his U.S. bonds and begun to short U.S. debt. Pimco is betting that the value of U.S. Treasury bonds will begin to fall.
We may be about to enter a maelstrom. No big budget deal is brokered. The deficit endures, and another looms in 2012. To finance them, the Fed borrows at the rate of $30 billion a week wherever it can. But as countries begin to choke on U.S. debt, the market starts to dry up. To attract investors, the Fed must raise interest rates, which sends bond prices sinking and forces interest rates up across the economy.
With interest rates rising, gas prices rising and inflation rising, the squeeze is on, and there is talk of a double-dip recession. And if that happens, Obama is toast. But, then, so are we.
SOURCE
***********************
The New Health Law: Bad for Doctors, Awful for Patients
While much has been said about the recently passed health care overhaul law and a multitude of cogent arguments have been made as to why the legislation must be repealed, lengthy debates have failed to adequately address how the 2,800 pages will prevent patients from receiving the medical care that they need and want. In fact, in some ways the federal government already hinders the ability of doctors to provide their patients with good care. These trends will no doubt worsen under PPACA. In addition, new regulations and mandates will place unaccountable regulators in between physicians and their patients.
Medicare’s physician reimbursement regimen is fraught with underpayments and perverse incentives. During the health care debate, supporters of PPACA praised Medicare’s ability to exploit its size to obtain lower fees with providers. While it is true that Medicare can bludgeon down physician fees, this is not one of the program’s greatest strengths, but actually one of its greatest weaknesses. These underpayments are ultimately shifted to patients in the form of shorter visits, less doctor face time, quick hospital discharges, and compromised care. Rather than reforming the government’s flawed reimbursement regimen, PPACA merely expands its scope to more people.
PPACA establishes the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute to conduct research comparing the efficacy of medical and surgical interventions. The potential harm from this depends how it is used.
Federal regulators could easily use this research to ration care by financially punishing physicians prescribing these “less effective” treatments. This research coupled with reimbursement changes could easily pave the way for the government dictating to patients the medicines, tests, and procedures that they can and cannot have, regardless of willingness to pay and personal preference. This would replace the professional judgment of physicians with rigid rules set by regulators in Washington DC. This one-size-fits-all approach will limit choice and result in poor quality care.
The soon-to-be established health insurance exchanges will also give the federal government vast new control over physician practices. PPACA states that starting January 1, 2015, a qualified health plan can contract with a provider “only if such provider implements such mechanisms to improve health care quality as the Secretary may by regulation require.” Depending on the guidelines, this gives the federal government unprecedented new authority over not just those physicians accepting Medicare and Medicaid, but any provider accepting any third party payer offered through the exchange. Of course quality care is a good thing, but who should determine the definition of “quality?’ Who knows best? This regulation seems to be based on the notion that bureaucrats at HHS from afar know better than the doctor actually talking to and examining the patient. This will coerce physicians to practice medicine not the way they were taught, but the way the government tells them. Ultimately, this too will lead to poor quality, standardized care and restrict choice.
PPACA will strip away physician autonomy, drown doctors in bureaucracy, and drain job satisfaction. As the profession deteriorates, older doctors will retire while younger doctors will look to switch careers. Many young people considering a career in medicine will pursue other opportunities. The supply of providers will dwindle as demand for services reaches an all-time high. Ultimately, the consequences of the health overhaul law will be passed along to patients through restricted access, long wait for appointments, and rationed care.
The United States boasts the world’s premier health care system. With that said, of course there is room for improvement and efforts must be implemented to control spiraling costs. A better prescription for reform would be to build off the success of the current system while targeting its inevitable shortcomings.
Ultimately, there are only two ways to lower costs. One approach empowers bureaucrats to make tough decisions for doctors and patients. This has grave ramifications on quality of care and choice.
Unfortunately, the administration chose to pursue this route. Yet, patients would be better served if doctors were held more accountable by transparency and choice, rather than bureaucratic fiat. A more practical approach to lowering costs empowers and incentivizes patients to be smarter health care consumers. This entails solutions such as expanding health savings accounts, creating a national market for health insurance, and leveling the tax playing field. These could bend the cost curve down while simultaneously strengthening the patient-doctor relationship.
The time has come for a long-overdue, honest discussion on not just the impact that government will have on patients, doctors, and the practice of medicine, but the impact it already has had over the past forty-five years. The importance cannot be undersold as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is indeed bad for doctors, but it is always the patient that suffers the most.
SOURCE
**********************
ELSEWHERE
End the war on dying cancer patients: "Stopping all war is not just something we need to do in the Middle East. It is something we need just as badly here at home. When I say 'stop all war,' I’m not just talking about the bombing and fighting overseas; I’m talking about the wars that the U.S. Government wages against its very own citizens. I am talking about how bureaucrats kill Americans, not with guns and bombs, but with laws and regulations."
UN: More than thirty killed in Iraqi raid on Iranian Communists: "An Iraqi army raid last week on Camp Ashraf left 34 Iranian exiles dead, according to a U.N. spokesman who on Thursday offered the first independent death toll for the attack that drew sharp rebukes from Baghdad's Western allies. The April 8 raid targeted the People's Mujahedeen Organization of Iran, which seeks to overthrow Iran's clerical leaders"
Class warfare: "In his speech yesterday, Obama brought up income inequality to justify higher taxes on the rich: 'In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90% of all working Americans actually declined. The top 1% saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. And that’s who needs to pay less taxes?' But even if the numbers are accurate, Obama portrays a much more divided America that really exists, because ... today’s top income earners today are often completely different people from yesterday’s top income earners."
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)
****************************
Do the Scriptures need interpreting?
As an atheist I of course have no religious interest in the scriptures but I was for many years paid a lot of money by a leading Australian university to teach sociology so I hope I may be excused for taking a sociological interest in them.
My interest is very much motivated by the historic power of the Judeo-Christian scriptures. They have been enormously influentual and I like to look at why. And in looking at why it seems important to see exactly what they say. So for a while I ran a daily Scripture blog which pointed out what they actually say -- and observed that what they say is a long way from what Christians generally believe today.
It was the Christianity of the first century that gave the huge initial impetus to the worldwide spead of Chistianity in subsequent centuries so it would seem to be that version of Christianity which is of greatest interest -- rather that the watered-down and paganized version we encounter today. And it is first century Christianity that is recorded in the Bible.
And my Scripture blog gave chapter and verse (as it were) in showing exactly where current Christianity is paganized and watered down from the first century original. And the fact that Christianity still has great influence despite being paganized and watered down is surely further testimony to the great power of the original. Even a little bit of the original Gospel is still helpful to many people.
Something that I have so far neglected to do, however, is to look at the claim made by the Catholic Church and some orthodox Jews (such as the aggressive Mr Kelley) to the effect that the Bible is THEIR book and only they can interpret it correctly. The Protestant Reformation was of course built around rejection of that claim. Most of the early Protestants said that they could read the Bible for themselves perfectly adequately and rejected any need for authoritative or learned interpretation.
I am a product of fundamentalist Protestant culture so that basic Protestant idea seems instinctively right to me. I am however a little saddened when I note that most Protestants talk the talk but don't walk the walk. Most Protestants still accept, for instance the quite mad doctrine of the triune God, which has absolutely no basis in scripture but which revives the doctrines of ancient Egypt rather well. The first person of influence to advocate it was Athanasius, an Egyptian. So I like to see what we find when we do walk the walk.
And it is my contention that the Bible is in fact very straightforward most of the time and that it therefore CAN easily be read and understood by almost everyone -- without any need for guidance from special authorities. But my asserting that is of little consequence unless I can give evidence of it. And I thought that I might today make a small start in that direction by comparing two historic pieces of religious expression. The first:
The second:
It is my submission that the first is as clear as crystal and the second is as clear as mud. So what are those passages? The first is from the Bible (Ecclesiastes 9) and the second is from the 39 Articles of Religion of the Church of England. The Bible beats theology any day.
But the Bible is TOO clear for most people. Ecclesiastes could hardly have expressed more plainly and emphatically that when you are dead you are dead: No mention of immortal souls flitting about. So that is when people start scrabbling for "interpretations". They say (for instance) that the Ecclesisstes passage is only talking about the body and that there is some mystical "soul" that lives on as well.
And if people need the comfort of that belief so be it. But the original teaching is clear. The Hebrews of Old Testament times were earth-oriented and the only aferlife they looked forward to was resurrection to life on earth at the time of the coming of the Messiah. And Jesus believed that too: "Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done ON EARTH, as it is in heaven".
So it's not the Bible that needs interpretation; it is the reluctance of people to accept its teachings that gives rise to the need for interpretation.
And the passage above from the 39 articles is an example of that too. It is an attempt to reject the plain words of Ephesians chapter 1 while appearing to accept them. Ephesians says quite plainly that being one of God's chosen ones was "predestined" from "before the foundation of the world", which no doubt seems rather unfair. At the time the Calvinists (mostly Scottish Presbyterians) accepted that but the Anglicans didn't like it, presumably because it made their sacraments look rather superfluous.
And that applies equally well to Jews and Christians. The following command in the Torah (Leviticus 20:13) is crystal clear: "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them." But Rabbinical teachings have "interpreted" that out of existence too.
******************************
Those heartless Israelis
Wait for it
Is there anything lower than a Palestinian?
***************************
Leftist pro-Palestinian activist finally gets a lesson in reality that he can't ignore
A SALAFIST group of radical Islamists killed an Italian activist after kidnapping him in Gaza, a Hamas security official said today. "The Italian was killed by suffocation and his body was found in a street of the city of Gaza," a spokesman for the Islamist movement which controls the Gaza Strip said.
Foreign aid workers in the enclave earlier named the man as Vittorio Arrigoni and said he was an activist with a pro-Palestinian group called the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), who was also working as a journalist and writer.
More HERE
*************************
Vocal critic of the US intervention in Iraq convicted of sex offense
He always seemed like a weak character. Now we know
A FORMER UN weapons inspector has been convicted of having unlawful contact with a minor, after being nabbed in an online sex sting. Scott Ritter, 49, exchanged explicit messages with a detective posing as a 15-year-old girl and masturbated even after the undercover officer stressed during the chat that he was a minor, prosecutors said.
A jury in the US state of Pennsylvania found Ritter guilty on six counts today, with sentencing set for next month.
Mr Kohlman acknowledged in his closing argument that jurors were likely "troubled and offended" by the graphic chat and video of Ritter that prosecutors played to the court, but said they were required to put aside their personal distaste because "this is not a referendum on whether anybody in the courtroom approves of adult chat rooms".
After the verdict, Assistant District Attorney Michael Rakaczewski said the jury reached the right decision. "They saw the case for what it is and the defendant for what he is and what he did," he said.
Ritter was one of the UN's chief weapons inspectors in Iraq from 1991 to 1998.
More HERE
**************************
Meet My Benefactor
By pure luck, I happened to sit down next to a man last week who has been my benefactor for my entire life and the large part of his, and yet we had never met. In fact, though he has been serving me faithfully for three decades, looking after my well-being and trying to improve my standard of living, he didn't even know my name. Actually he still doesn't, because it is slightly odd to get too personal with the guy in the next seat on a plane. We all know this. And yet I did tell him of my deep gratitude for all he has done.
This man is in charge of marketing for one of six manufacturing plants in North America that makes oriented polypropylene for packaging materials. This substance is called OPP for short. He goes around to companies that make stuff like drinks and candies and other products and explains to them the advantages of OPP — about which more in a bit.
This man is on the road constantly and has a stack of airline-rewards cards to prove it. He is like the George Clooney character in the movie Up in the Air — a seasoned traveler married to his work. His work is to be the eyes and ears of the company as it deals with its product purchasers. His life is lived in the B2B — the business-to-business transactions that are invisible to the consuming public.
His vocabulary is industry specific, filled with neologisms that no one outside of the packaging world could understand. He can tell you the chemical properties of a bag from five feet away. He can explain why a bag is easier to tear one way and harder the other. He knows the history, the process, the competition, plus the name of every large-scale bag-purchasing manager in North America, and he is happy to talk about it all.
What is his function? He is the man who makes the inventions and the productions part of our lives. Without the person on the front lines actually selling the product, everything that went into the invention and production is pointless. He is the interface between the raw materials and the final product, the man who has to have all the answers that link the great chain of the structure of production from first to last.
As for his product, you and I both know OPP well, though we probably didn't know what it is called. It is the stuff that is used to make potato-chip bags. It is the reason that the contents stay crisp no matter what the temperature outside. You can dip the bag in water and it changes nothing. The air can be hot or cold, and still the chips inside are unchanged. The same material wraps candy like Snickers and the effect is the same.
It is also the reason that these bags can be so beautiful. OPP loves printing. It is a perfect template for designers. The results never rub off on your fingers. Nor does the printing fade in the sun. It can accept even the most subtle gradations in color. You could print a work of Michelangelo on OPP and hang it in a museum.
It turns out that potatoes fried in oil are super vulnerable to becoming rancid. Maybe you thought it was chemical preservatives (up with those too!) that prevented this. That is part of the answer but not the whole answer. The real reason is OPP. This is what stops the degenerative process. This is not a problem for other fried items, like pork rinds, which is why they often come in see-through bags. OPP is not see-through, and that is good. The product inside doesn't like the light. OPP keeps that out too.
OPP has other nice features. It has a very low "dead-fold" capacity, which is why, when you wad up a potato chip bag, it bounces right back to its original shape. This is to protect the contents inside. That's why, in the 1960s, potato chips came with crumbled contents but today they are mostly intact and perfect. You thought it was just because it was filled with air? Well, ask yourself why the air doesn't escape. The answer again: OPP. It seals perfectly. This stuff is impenetrable.
And get this: this is a petroleum product. That's right, it is made of a material derived from oil. So the price of the stuff fluctuates according to the price of oil. When the price of oil goes up, your chips become more expensive, due mainly to the packaging, which is also why the OPP industry is firmly attached to the idea of liberalizing the regulations on the discovery and refining of oil. My benefactor marketing manager is very interested in this.
Now, all of this is pretty cool and wonderful. But let's get down to the core rationale here. What is all the fuss about? Why was OPP invented, and why is it marketed, and why it is used so much around the world? Why does this man spend his life on the road and follow every bit of industry news? What is the point of all of this?
It is for one reason: my well-being. Yours too. It is to please us and make our lives that much better. It is for the consumer that the producer produces, and it is for the consumer that everyone in all stages of production strives to make an ever-better product. It all comes down to that bag of chips you pick up with your submarine sandwich. This is why millions of people in the OPP industry around the world dance the dance. It is why the potatoes are grown, chopped, fried, bagged, and shipped to millions and millions of places.
The heck of it is that these people get no credit. No bag of chips says: this bag is made by Joe's OPP factory. No, they are anonymous benefactors of society. Hardly anyone thinks of them. And yet, if you bought a bag of chips that is full of rancid crumbs, you would know the difference. You would be annoyed at the store that sold them, at the company that made them, and maybe even at the economic system that allows people to profit from selling bad stuff. Private OPP producers prevent this from happening, millions and millions of times per day.
You and I are running this show, and we didn't even know it. The producers of these bags are serving us slavishly every day, and we don't know or care. And somehow it all happens without a central planner, without government mandates, and without state-owned factories or smart people at the top directing the process from beginning to end. All that needs to take place to bring about this complex and brilliant system is that we have to have a desire: a desire for a good potato chip. The rest happens on its own — a self-managing system that responds to the tiniest of signals.
So, I would like to send a message to my benefactor who has devoted his life to explaining to food producers the merits of OPP. My message is, thank you. I suspect that I might be the first consumer who has ever said so, but in my ideal world, billions of people would be giving thanks to you and everyone else like you. You are all servants of the great cause of making the world a better place to live.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
As an atheist I of course have no religious interest in the scriptures but I was for many years paid a lot of money by a leading Australian university to teach sociology so I hope I may be excused for taking a sociological interest in them.
My interest is very much motivated by the historic power of the Judeo-Christian scriptures. They have been enormously influentual and I like to look at why. And in looking at why it seems important to see exactly what they say. So for a while I ran a daily Scripture blog which pointed out what they actually say -- and observed that what they say is a long way from what Christians generally believe today.
It was the Christianity of the first century that gave the huge initial impetus to the worldwide spead of Chistianity in subsequent centuries so it would seem to be that version of Christianity which is of greatest interest -- rather that the watered-down and paganized version we encounter today. And it is first century Christianity that is recorded in the Bible.
And my Scripture blog gave chapter and verse (as it were) in showing exactly where current Christianity is paganized and watered down from the first century original. And the fact that Christianity still has great influence despite being paganized and watered down is surely further testimony to the great power of the original. Even a little bit of the original Gospel is still helpful to many people.
Something that I have so far neglected to do, however, is to look at the claim made by the Catholic Church and some orthodox Jews (such as the aggressive Mr Kelley) to the effect that the Bible is THEIR book and only they can interpret it correctly. The Protestant Reformation was of course built around rejection of that claim. Most of the early Protestants said that they could read the Bible for themselves perfectly adequately and rejected any need for authoritative or learned interpretation.
I am a product of fundamentalist Protestant culture so that basic Protestant idea seems instinctively right to me. I am however a little saddened when I note that most Protestants talk the talk but don't walk the walk. Most Protestants still accept, for instance the quite mad doctrine of the triune God, which has absolutely no basis in scripture but which revives the doctrines of ancient Egypt rather well. The first person of influence to advocate it was Athanasius, an Egyptian. So I like to see what we find when we do walk the walk.
And it is my contention that the Bible is in fact very straightforward most of the time and that it therefore CAN easily be read and understood by almost everyone -- without any need for guidance from special authorities. But my asserting that is of little consequence unless I can give evidence of it. And I thought that I might today make a small start in that direction by comparing two historic pieces of religious expression. The first:
For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun.... Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest
The second:
Predestination to Life is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby (before the foundations of the world were laid) he hath constantly decreed by his counsel secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen in Christ out of mankind, and to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation, as vessels made to honour. Wherefore, they which be endued with so excellent a benefit of God be called according to God's purpose by his Spirit working in due season: they through Grace obey the calling: they be justified freely: they be made sons of God by adoption: they be made like the image of his only-begotten Son Jesus Christ: they walk religiously in good works, and at length, by God's mercy, they attain to everlasting felicity.
As the godly consideration of Predestination, and our Election in Christ, is full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort to godly persons, and such as feel in themselves the working of the Spirit of Christ, mortifying the works of the flesh, and their earthly members, and drawing up their mind to high and heavenly things, as well because it doth greatly establish and confirm their faith of eternal Salvation to be enjoyed through Christ, as because it doth fervently kindle their love towards God: So, for curious and carnal persons, lacking the Spirit of Christ, to have continually before their eyes the sentence of God's Predestination, is a most dangerous downfal, whereby the Devil doth thrust them either into desperation, or into wretchlessness of most unclean living, no less perilous than desperation.
Furthermore, we must receive God's promises in such wise, as they be generally set forth to us in holy Scripture: and, in our doings, that Will of God is to be followed, which we have expressly declared unto us in the Word of God.
It is my submission that the first is as clear as crystal and the second is as clear as mud. So what are those passages? The first is from the Bible (Ecclesiastes 9) and the second is from the 39 Articles of Religion of the Church of England. The Bible beats theology any day.
But the Bible is TOO clear for most people. Ecclesiastes could hardly have expressed more plainly and emphatically that when you are dead you are dead: No mention of immortal souls flitting about. So that is when people start scrabbling for "interpretations". They say (for instance) that the Ecclesisstes passage is only talking about the body and that there is some mystical "soul" that lives on as well.
And if people need the comfort of that belief so be it. But the original teaching is clear. The Hebrews of Old Testament times were earth-oriented and the only aferlife they looked forward to was resurrection to life on earth at the time of the coming of the Messiah. And Jesus believed that too: "Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done ON EARTH, as it is in heaven".
So it's not the Bible that needs interpretation; it is the reluctance of people to accept its teachings that gives rise to the need for interpretation.
And the passage above from the 39 articles is an example of that too. It is an attempt to reject the plain words of Ephesians chapter 1 while appearing to accept them. Ephesians says quite plainly that being one of God's chosen ones was "predestined" from "before the foundation of the world", which no doubt seems rather unfair. At the time the Calvinists (mostly Scottish Presbyterians) accepted that but the Anglicans didn't like it, presumably because it made their sacraments look rather superfluous.
And that applies equally well to Jews and Christians. The following command in the Torah (Leviticus 20:13) is crystal clear: "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them." But Rabbinical teachings have "interpreted" that out of existence too.
******************************
Those heartless Israelis
Wait for it
Is there anything lower than a Palestinian?
***************************
Leftist pro-Palestinian activist finally gets a lesson in reality that he can't ignore
A SALAFIST group of radical Islamists killed an Italian activist after kidnapping him in Gaza, a Hamas security official said today. "The Italian was killed by suffocation and his body was found in a street of the city of Gaza," a spokesman for the Islamist movement which controls the Gaza Strip said.
Foreign aid workers in the enclave earlier named the man as Vittorio Arrigoni and said he was an activist with a pro-Palestinian group called the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), who was also working as a journalist and writer.
More HERE
*************************
Vocal critic of the US intervention in Iraq convicted of sex offense
He always seemed like a weak character. Now we know
A FORMER UN weapons inspector has been convicted of having unlawful contact with a minor, after being nabbed in an online sex sting. Scott Ritter, 49, exchanged explicit messages with a detective posing as a 15-year-old girl and masturbated even after the undercover officer stressed during the chat that he was a minor, prosecutors said.
A jury in the US state of Pennsylvania found Ritter guilty on six counts today, with sentencing set for next month.
Mr Kohlman acknowledged in his closing argument that jurors were likely "troubled and offended" by the graphic chat and video of Ritter that prosecutors played to the court, but said they were required to put aside their personal distaste because "this is not a referendum on whether anybody in the courtroom approves of adult chat rooms".
After the verdict, Assistant District Attorney Michael Rakaczewski said the jury reached the right decision. "They saw the case for what it is and the defendant for what he is and what he did," he said.
Ritter was one of the UN's chief weapons inspectors in Iraq from 1991 to 1998.
More HERE
**************************
Meet My Benefactor
By pure luck, I happened to sit down next to a man last week who has been my benefactor for my entire life and the large part of his, and yet we had never met. In fact, though he has been serving me faithfully for three decades, looking after my well-being and trying to improve my standard of living, he didn't even know my name. Actually he still doesn't, because it is slightly odd to get too personal with the guy in the next seat on a plane. We all know this. And yet I did tell him of my deep gratitude for all he has done.
This man is in charge of marketing for one of six manufacturing plants in North America that makes oriented polypropylene for packaging materials. This substance is called OPP for short. He goes around to companies that make stuff like drinks and candies and other products and explains to them the advantages of OPP — about which more in a bit.
This man is on the road constantly and has a stack of airline-rewards cards to prove it. He is like the George Clooney character in the movie Up in the Air — a seasoned traveler married to his work. His work is to be the eyes and ears of the company as it deals with its product purchasers. His life is lived in the B2B — the business-to-business transactions that are invisible to the consuming public.
His vocabulary is industry specific, filled with neologisms that no one outside of the packaging world could understand. He can tell you the chemical properties of a bag from five feet away. He can explain why a bag is easier to tear one way and harder the other. He knows the history, the process, the competition, plus the name of every large-scale bag-purchasing manager in North America, and he is happy to talk about it all.
What is his function? He is the man who makes the inventions and the productions part of our lives. Without the person on the front lines actually selling the product, everything that went into the invention and production is pointless. He is the interface between the raw materials and the final product, the man who has to have all the answers that link the great chain of the structure of production from first to last.
As for his product, you and I both know OPP well, though we probably didn't know what it is called. It is the stuff that is used to make potato-chip bags. It is the reason that the contents stay crisp no matter what the temperature outside. You can dip the bag in water and it changes nothing. The air can be hot or cold, and still the chips inside are unchanged. The same material wraps candy like Snickers and the effect is the same.
It is also the reason that these bags can be so beautiful. OPP loves printing. It is a perfect template for designers. The results never rub off on your fingers. Nor does the printing fade in the sun. It can accept even the most subtle gradations in color. You could print a work of Michelangelo on OPP and hang it in a museum.
It turns out that potatoes fried in oil are super vulnerable to becoming rancid. Maybe you thought it was chemical preservatives (up with those too!) that prevented this. That is part of the answer but not the whole answer. The real reason is OPP. This is what stops the degenerative process. This is not a problem for other fried items, like pork rinds, which is why they often come in see-through bags. OPP is not see-through, and that is good. The product inside doesn't like the light. OPP keeps that out too.
OPP has other nice features. It has a very low "dead-fold" capacity, which is why, when you wad up a potato chip bag, it bounces right back to its original shape. This is to protect the contents inside. That's why, in the 1960s, potato chips came with crumbled contents but today they are mostly intact and perfect. You thought it was just because it was filled with air? Well, ask yourself why the air doesn't escape. The answer again: OPP. It seals perfectly. This stuff is impenetrable.
And get this: this is a petroleum product. That's right, it is made of a material derived from oil. So the price of the stuff fluctuates according to the price of oil. When the price of oil goes up, your chips become more expensive, due mainly to the packaging, which is also why the OPP industry is firmly attached to the idea of liberalizing the regulations on the discovery and refining of oil. My benefactor marketing manager is very interested in this.
Now, all of this is pretty cool and wonderful. But let's get down to the core rationale here. What is all the fuss about? Why was OPP invented, and why is it marketed, and why it is used so much around the world? Why does this man spend his life on the road and follow every bit of industry news? What is the point of all of this?
It is for one reason: my well-being. Yours too. It is to please us and make our lives that much better. It is for the consumer that the producer produces, and it is for the consumer that everyone in all stages of production strives to make an ever-better product. It all comes down to that bag of chips you pick up with your submarine sandwich. This is why millions of people in the OPP industry around the world dance the dance. It is why the potatoes are grown, chopped, fried, bagged, and shipped to millions and millions of places.
The heck of it is that these people get no credit. No bag of chips says: this bag is made by Joe's OPP factory. No, they are anonymous benefactors of society. Hardly anyone thinks of them. And yet, if you bought a bag of chips that is full of rancid crumbs, you would know the difference. You would be annoyed at the store that sold them, at the company that made them, and maybe even at the economic system that allows people to profit from selling bad stuff. Private OPP producers prevent this from happening, millions and millions of times per day.
You and I are running this show, and we didn't even know it. The producers of these bags are serving us slavishly every day, and we don't know or care. And somehow it all happens without a central planner, without government mandates, and without state-owned factories or smart people at the top directing the process from beginning to end. All that needs to take place to bring about this complex and brilliant system is that we have to have a desire: a desire for a good potato chip. The rest happens on its own — a self-managing system that responds to the tiniest of signals.
So, I would like to send a message to my benefactor who has devoted his life to explaining to food producers the merits of OPP. My message is, thank you. I suspect that I might be the first consumer who has ever said so, but in my ideal world, billions of people would be giving thanks to you and everyone else like you. You are all servants of the great cause of making the world a better place to live.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Thursday, April 14, 2011
The myth of 'Herbert Hoover economics'
Leftist dishonesty knows no bounds. They reverse history
by Jeff Jacoby
TO CONVEY THEIR DISDAIN for the ongoing Republican pressure to reduce federal spending -- pressure that led to the recent agreement with President Obama for $38 billion in cuts in the current fiscal year -- critics have been reaching back eight decades for what they seem to regard as the ultimate in fiscal put-downs.
"Watching the debate in Washington," write Douglas Cohn and Eleanor Clift in a recent column, "it's like Herbert Hoover versus John Maynard Keynes, and sadly Hoover is winning." Hoover, they explain, "was curiously passive" in the face of the Great Depression and "he responded with a renewed focus on balancing the budget."
Populist Jim Hightower blasts Republicans for enabling Hoover to make "what looks to be a full comeback to power," complete with a return to Hoover's economic prescription: "Insist on reducing the size and spending of governments. . . . 'The deficit is the devil,' cry the New Hooverites, as they wildly slash spending and try to kill federal programs."
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof asserts that "one of the most basic principles of economics is that when an economy is anemic, governments should use deficit spending as a fiscal stimulus." A lawmaker who "believes that the response to a weak economy is to slash spending," he says, "is embracing the approach that Herbert Hoover discredited 80 years ago." Last month, Kristof's colleague Paul Krugman scorned House Speaker John Boehner "for declaring that since families were suffering, the government should tighten its own belt." That, Krugman snorted, is "Herbert Hoover economics."
If there is one thing most people have learned about Herbert Hoover, it is that his timid response to the financial crisis of 1929 brought on the Great Depression. Instead of slashing federal spending and clinging to laissez-faire economics, the received wisdom goes, Hoover should have done just the opposite: plowed more money into the economy, relying on deficit spending to stimulate growth.
The only thing wrong with that narrative is that federal spending under Hoover didn't plummet. It went through the roof.
Hoover was sworn in as the 31st president of the United States on March 4, 1929. By the time his term ended four years later, federal outlays had climbed more than 50 percent in dollar terms; they had almost doubled when measured in purchasing power; and they had tripled as a fraction of national income. "If stimulus is the solution to high unemployment," remarks Santa Clara University economist and law professor David Friedman, "the Great Depression should have ended almost before it began."
Following the Wall Street crash of 1929, the Hoover administration went into spending overdrive. Real federal expenditures climbed by 4.7 percent between 1928 and 1929, but over the next three years they rose, respectively, 8 percent, 17.2 percent, and 15.7 percent. Exclude military outlays, and spending under Hoover exploded by a phenomenal 259 percent. Looking back at the federal government's growth during the 1920s, economist Randall Holcombe points out that in percentage terms, expenditures grew more in the four Hoover years than they would during the first seven years of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidency.
FDR is remembered today, of course, for the vast expansions of the New Deal. But as the Democratic standard-bearer in 1932, he lacerated Hoover as a big-spending Republican. "For three long years," Roosevelt said in accepting his party's nomination, "I have been going up and down this country preaching that government . . . costs too much. I shall not stop that preaching."
Stop that preaching he didn't. He accused Hoover of presiding over "the greatest spending administration in peacetime in all our history . . . an administration that has piled bureau on bureau, commission on commission." He slammed the Republican's record of "reckless and extravagant" spending, and of thinking "that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible." He mocked those who thought "a huge expenditure of public funds" was the best way to grow the economy of succumbing "to the illusions of economic magic." His running mate, Texas Congressman John Nance Garner, even warned that Hoover was "leading the country down the path of socialism."
For his own part, said FDR, "I ask you very simply to assign to me the task of reducing the annual operating expenses of your national government." Indeed, he promised to enforce "absolute loyalty to the Democratic platform and especially to its economy plank." That plank called for "an immediate and drastic reduction of governmental expenditures by . . . not less than 25 per cent."
In its zeal to cut today's multi-trillion-dollar budgets, the GOP is certainly fair game for critics. But those critics might want to think twice before blasting contemporary Republicans for their Hooverian impulses. Herbert Hoover can be fairly faulted for many things, but rolling back the federal budget isn't one of them.
SOURCE
*************************
The hot air administration
On 12.3.2009 Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said that "revving up the economy and get companies to start creating jobs again was Job No.1" The article can be found here. During the ensuing 2 years the federal government was the primary creator of jobs and those jobs, due to the project centric nature of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act were transitory in nature. In other words the job only existed during the duration of the project. Now that most of those projects are winding down, it should be expected that those jobs will be eliminated. Once that occurs, unemployment will revert to an essentially unchanged level at the mid 9% range or higher.
On 3.10.11 Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said that President Obama's administration was "focused like a laser beam" on gas prices. The article can be found here. The article goes on to say that in Thursday of that week gas was at $3.59. In February it had been $3.17 and in March of 2010 the price had been $2.76. As I write this 4/12 the price is $4.00. Three months before the last election, then Senator Obama called for release of fuel from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which had recently reached $4.11. The source can be found here. So I don't get it, if he is focused like a laser beam, he makes several speeches over a two week period that have no effect, he doesn't take the action that he advocated a previous President take and then he moves on with no effect to show for the effort.
To some extent President Obama is our creation. We as a people, and here I am stereotyping, have attention spans comparable to gerbils. Our ADD President was hired by us primarily because of his ability to entertain us not because of his track record of doing anything. Did we really expect that a Senator whose major accomplishment during his tenure in Illinois was to vote "present" was going to suddenly learn to roll up his sleeves and stick with problems until they are resolved?
If past behavior is indicative of future behavior, what behavior and results should we expect from this President? I think today's announcement by Michelle Obama is a good case in point. The template seems to be that a close advisor (Treasury Secretary, Transportation Secretary, First Lady) makes an announcement that some issue pressing to the populace has risen to the President's attention (Unemployment, Oil Prices, The state of military families). The President then makes a speech or speeches indicating that 1) He feels our pain 2) He will make it a high priority (Job No.1, Focus like a laser etc.). The "focus" and by this I mean speeches, last for about two weeks and then he moves on to NOT solve another problem.
I've given you examples from the past, I gave you an example from the present, now let me predict the future. In the next few days some close advisor to the President will announce that it has come to the attention of the President that the Federal Debt, associated interest payments and tax burden are strapping middle-class and poor people. That the President will focus like a laser on this problem. For two weeks (until the Federal Debt Ceiling is raising by another Trillion dollars) we will hear speeches indicating his knowledge and caring on the problem, how he is "rolling up his sleeves" and "locking arms with Republicans" and other such crap and then our attention will wane and he will move on.
SOURCE
*************************
The Fed Obliterates the Savings Ethic
Depression babies learned early that "saving for a rainy day" was not something one hopes to do but a requirement. The saying originated when most people worked on the farm. And when it rained, the fields were too wet to plow, and the farmer — not to mention the hired hands — made no money.
Of course, my grandfather was the diligent sort who would use rainy days to do required maintenance on his implements, noting with derision other farmers who spent rainy days at the bar in town. He believed they would surely end up with broken equipment when the sun would reappear, keeping them from making hay.
So the idea of savings is not necessarily the return one receives on the money that's socked away, but the piece of mind that, when the weather doesn't cooperate, the saver has a little stash to tide him over. Of course, the vast majority of us don't have to worry about the weather.
But an economic storm hit a couple years ago and plenty of people have not had work, rain or shine. Those who took heed of that old saw have no doubt weathered the storm better than those who didn't. Most financial advisors recommend that a person have three month's worth of living expenses saved — and some say six months worth, just in case. But how many people heed that advice?
There is no caveat to the counsel that says, "Keep six months of savings around if the money is earning at least six percent." Even if the money sits there all shiny, not earning a thing, it's the liquidity and insurance against the unknown that's the issue.
Unfortunately, a central bank's debauchery of the currency serves to raise people's time preferences and impair their judgment. In a blog post recently, I highlighted the advice of life coach and author John P. Strelecky, who advises people to spend their tax refunds on an experience they will remember forever, rather than saving the few hundred or thousand dollars that the IRS may be giving back.
Live your life for today, says the life coach — a couple thousand bucks isn't going to matter anyway. I posted to the Mises Blog to point out how ludicrous this advice is. But most who commented sided with Strelecky:
That's just what central bankers like to hear. They are worried about deflation. A few months ago, the Chicago Fed's Charles Evans said,
Lord Keynes was constantly worried that people were saving too much and consuming too little — thus the need for more and cheaper money to stimulate the economy. Mr. Bernanke is nothing if not a good Keynesian, and his low rates make even the savviest question whether to forgo consumption.
And likely no retiree, when contemplating leaving the workforce, figured 1 percent interest rates (or less) into their retirement cash-flow planning. In a front-page article, the Wall Street Journal took a look at "retirees who find themselves on the wrong end of the Federal Reserve's epic attempt to rescue the economy with cheap money."
The WSJ rightly points out that the Fed's low rates have been a windfall for banks and borrowers, but a problem for those needing income from their savings to live on. People who thought they played the game right, worked hard, saved money, and now want to take it easy, are panicked that money-market funds are throwing off but 24 basis points. "That's one-tenth the level of late 2007 and the lowest on records dating back to 1959," the Journal reports.
As bad as the Fed-engineered low rates are for those trying to live off past savings, reporter Mark Whitehouse makes the point that the low rates keep young people from building up funds for the future — whether it's for emergencies or retirement. Working Americans put less money into financial assets last year than at anytime on record — except 2009, when people pulled money out. And while the Department of Commerce says the personal savings rate has risen to 5.8 percent, Whitehouse explains, "That's in large part because it counts reductions in personal debt, such as mortgages and credit-card balances, as savings." But most debt reduction, Whitehouse writes, has been driven by defaults, rather than saving.
The Fed's interest-rate policy also leads people into taking more risk with their savings than they should. "That's why most of us are in the stock market, because there's no place else to go," says 70-year-old John Lehman, who would rather have his money in bank certificates of deposit but must resort to speculating. "I hope my assets don't run out before I die."
Many retire with next to nothing as it is. According to AARP, 16 percent of Americans have not saved a dime for retirement, and nearly half have saved less than $50,000.
Those with no savings are more dependent on government and others when the unexpected occurs, whether it's job loss or the washing machine quits. Professor Paul Cantor reminds us in his article, "Hyperinflation and Hyperreality: Mann's 'Disorder and Early Sorrow,'" that "money is a central source of stability, continuity, and coherence in any community. Hence to tamper with the basic money supply is to tamper with a community's sense of value."
When the Fed makes saving seem futile and immediate pleasure seem rational, the world has been diabolically turned upside down. Just one step away from hyperinflation, the central banks' actions are threatening "to undermine and dissolve all sense of value in a society."
"Thus inflation serves to heighten the already frantic pace of modern life, further disorienting people and undermining whatever sense of stability they may still have," Cantor explains.
The social order is upended in Mann's story as wealth is transferred from those who diligently saved all of their lives to speculators. As it was in the Weimar Germany that Mann describes, so it is today, as people believe it futile to sock away a little money here and there, and instead feel compelled to either speculate or just blow what they have on good times.
And while the retirees mentioned in the WSJ article are being crippled financially, Cantor points out that Mann's portrayal of hyperinflation uncovers "something psychologically more debilitating happening to the older generation." Impetuous, high-time-preference behavior displayed by the young appears rational in an inflationary period, while prudence and conservatism appear to be not even quaint but downright silly.
As Mann described so long ago, the world of inflation is the illusion of wealth, created by the government's printing press, distorting everything we see and perverting our judgment. Meanwhile the cry for stimulus continues, while our culture and values are buried under a pile of paper.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Leftist dishonesty knows no bounds. They reverse history
by Jeff Jacoby
TO CONVEY THEIR DISDAIN for the ongoing Republican pressure to reduce federal spending -- pressure that led to the recent agreement with President Obama for $38 billion in cuts in the current fiscal year -- critics have been reaching back eight decades for what they seem to regard as the ultimate in fiscal put-downs.
"Watching the debate in Washington," write Douglas Cohn and Eleanor Clift in a recent column, "it's like Herbert Hoover versus John Maynard Keynes, and sadly Hoover is winning." Hoover, they explain, "was curiously passive" in the face of the Great Depression and "he responded with a renewed focus on balancing the budget."
Populist Jim Hightower blasts Republicans for enabling Hoover to make "what looks to be a full comeback to power," complete with a return to Hoover's economic prescription: "Insist on reducing the size and spending of governments. . . . 'The deficit is the devil,' cry the New Hooverites, as they wildly slash spending and try to kill federal programs."
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof asserts that "one of the most basic principles of economics is that when an economy is anemic, governments should use deficit spending as a fiscal stimulus." A lawmaker who "believes that the response to a weak economy is to slash spending," he says, "is embracing the approach that Herbert Hoover discredited 80 years ago." Last month, Kristof's colleague Paul Krugman scorned House Speaker John Boehner "for declaring that since families were suffering, the government should tighten its own belt." That, Krugman snorted, is "Herbert Hoover economics."
If there is one thing most people have learned about Herbert Hoover, it is that his timid response to the financial crisis of 1929 brought on the Great Depression. Instead of slashing federal spending and clinging to laissez-faire economics, the received wisdom goes, Hoover should have done just the opposite: plowed more money into the economy, relying on deficit spending to stimulate growth.
The only thing wrong with that narrative is that federal spending under Hoover didn't plummet. It went through the roof.
Hoover was sworn in as the 31st president of the United States on March 4, 1929. By the time his term ended four years later, federal outlays had climbed more than 50 percent in dollar terms; they had almost doubled when measured in purchasing power; and they had tripled as a fraction of national income. "If stimulus is the solution to high unemployment," remarks Santa Clara University economist and law professor David Friedman, "the Great Depression should have ended almost before it began."
Following the Wall Street crash of 1929, the Hoover administration went into spending overdrive. Real federal expenditures climbed by 4.7 percent between 1928 and 1929, but over the next three years they rose, respectively, 8 percent, 17.2 percent, and 15.7 percent. Exclude military outlays, and spending under Hoover exploded by a phenomenal 259 percent. Looking back at the federal government's growth during the 1920s, economist Randall Holcombe points out that in percentage terms, expenditures grew more in the four Hoover years than they would during the first seven years of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidency.
FDR is remembered today, of course, for the vast expansions of the New Deal. But as the Democratic standard-bearer in 1932, he lacerated Hoover as a big-spending Republican. "For three long years," Roosevelt said in accepting his party's nomination, "I have been going up and down this country preaching that government . . . costs too much. I shall not stop that preaching."
Stop that preaching he didn't. He accused Hoover of presiding over "the greatest spending administration in peacetime in all our history . . . an administration that has piled bureau on bureau, commission on commission." He slammed the Republican's record of "reckless and extravagant" spending, and of thinking "that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible." He mocked those who thought "a huge expenditure of public funds" was the best way to grow the economy of succumbing "to the illusions of economic magic." His running mate, Texas Congressman John Nance Garner, even warned that Hoover was "leading the country down the path of socialism."
For his own part, said FDR, "I ask you very simply to assign to me the task of reducing the annual operating expenses of your national government." Indeed, he promised to enforce "absolute loyalty to the Democratic platform and especially to its economy plank." That plank called for "an immediate and drastic reduction of governmental expenditures by . . . not less than 25 per cent."
In its zeal to cut today's multi-trillion-dollar budgets, the GOP is certainly fair game for critics. But those critics might want to think twice before blasting contemporary Republicans for their Hooverian impulses. Herbert Hoover can be fairly faulted for many things, but rolling back the federal budget isn't one of them.
SOURCE
*************************
The hot air administration
On 12.3.2009 Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said that "revving up the economy and get companies to start creating jobs again was Job No.1" The article can be found here. During the ensuing 2 years the federal government was the primary creator of jobs and those jobs, due to the project centric nature of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act were transitory in nature. In other words the job only existed during the duration of the project. Now that most of those projects are winding down, it should be expected that those jobs will be eliminated. Once that occurs, unemployment will revert to an essentially unchanged level at the mid 9% range or higher.
On 3.10.11 Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said that President Obama's administration was "focused like a laser beam" on gas prices. The article can be found here. The article goes on to say that in Thursday of that week gas was at $3.59. In February it had been $3.17 and in March of 2010 the price had been $2.76. As I write this 4/12 the price is $4.00. Three months before the last election, then Senator Obama called for release of fuel from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which had recently reached $4.11. The source can be found here. So I don't get it, if he is focused like a laser beam, he makes several speeches over a two week period that have no effect, he doesn't take the action that he advocated a previous President take and then he moves on with no effect to show for the effort.
To some extent President Obama is our creation. We as a people, and here I am stereotyping, have attention spans comparable to gerbils. Our ADD President was hired by us primarily because of his ability to entertain us not because of his track record of doing anything. Did we really expect that a Senator whose major accomplishment during his tenure in Illinois was to vote "present" was going to suddenly learn to roll up his sleeves and stick with problems until they are resolved?
If past behavior is indicative of future behavior, what behavior and results should we expect from this President? I think today's announcement by Michelle Obama is a good case in point. The template seems to be that a close advisor (Treasury Secretary, Transportation Secretary, First Lady) makes an announcement that some issue pressing to the populace has risen to the President's attention (Unemployment, Oil Prices, The state of military families). The President then makes a speech or speeches indicating that 1) He feels our pain 2) He will make it a high priority (Job No.1, Focus like a laser etc.). The "focus" and by this I mean speeches, last for about two weeks and then he moves on to NOT solve another problem.
I've given you examples from the past, I gave you an example from the present, now let me predict the future. In the next few days some close advisor to the President will announce that it has come to the attention of the President that the Federal Debt, associated interest payments and tax burden are strapping middle-class and poor people. That the President will focus like a laser on this problem. For two weeks (until the Federal Debt Ceiling is raising by another Trillion dollars) we will hear speeches indicating his knowledge and caring on the problem, how he is "rolling up his sleeves" and "locking arms with Republicans" and other such crap and then our attention will wane and he will move on.
SOURCE
*************************
The Fed Obliterates the Savings Ethic
Depression babies learned early that "saving for a rainy day" was not something one hopes to do but a requirement. The saying originated when most people worked on the farm. And when it rained, the fields were too wet to plow, and the farmer — not to mention the hired hands — made no money.
Of course, my grandfather was the diligent sort who would use rainy days to do required maintenance on his implements, noting with derision other farmers who spent rainy days at the bar in town. He believed they would surely end up with broken equipment when the sun would reappear, keeping them from making hay.
So the idea of savings is not necessarily the return one receives on the money that's socked away, but the piece of mind that, when the weather doesn't cooperate, the saver has a little stash to tide him over. Of course, the vast majority of us don't have to worry about the weather.
But an economic storm hit a couple years ago and plenty of people have not had work, rain or shine. Those who took heed of that old saw have no doubt weathered the storm better than those who didn't. Most financial advisors recommend that a person have three month's worth of living expenses saved — and some say six months worth, just in case. But how many people heed that advice?
There is no caveat to the counsel that says, "Keep six months of savings around if the money is earning at least six percent." Even if the money sits there all shiny, not earning a thing, it's the liquidity and insurance against the unknown that's the issue.
Unfortunately, a central bank's debauchery of the currency serves to raise people's time preferences and impair their judgment. In a blog post recently, I highlighted the advice of life coach and author John P. Strelecky, who advises people to spend their tax refunds on an experience they will remember forever, rather than saving the few hundred or thousand dollars that the IRS may be giving back.
Live your life for today, says the life coach — a couple thousand bucks isn't going to matter anyway. I posted to the Mises Blog to point out how ludicrous this advice is. But most who commented sided with Strelecky:
I think his advice is spot-on, at least given the constraints of the times in which we live. What's the point in saving if inflation will ravage whatever you manage to accumulate?
You play by the rules of the game. Your savings growth will be puny due to pathetic interest rates, erased by inflation, and confiscated by a rapacious state. So go ahead, enjoy the "money" now, while it still has some value.
Most people don't really have a better place to put the money than into a pleasurable experience, which is all you will want in the end.
Gotta agree with the comments. Maybe not trips or other "experiences." But I feel safer with stuff than I do with Federal Reserve notes going forward.
That's just what central bankers like to hear. They are worried about deflation. A few months ago, the Chicago Fed's Charles Evans said,
It seems to me if we could somehow get lower real interest rates so that the amount of excess savings that is taking place relative to investment is lowered, that would be one channel for stimulating the economy.
Lord Keynes was constantly worried that people were saving too much and consuming too little — thus the need for more and cheaper money to stimulate the economy. Mr. Bernanke is nothing if not a good Keynesian, and his low rates make even the savviest question whether to forgo consumption.
And likely no retiree, when contemplating leaving the workforce, figured 1 percent interest rates (or less) into their retirement cash-flow planning. In a front-page article, the Wall Street Journal took a look at "retirees who find themselves on the wrong end of the Federal Reserve's epic attempt to rescue the economy with cheap money."
The WSJ rightly points out that the Fed's low rates have been a windfall for banks and borrowers, but a problem for those needing income from their savings to live on. People who thought they played the game right, worked hard, saved money, and now want to take it easy, are panicked that money-market funds are throwing off but 24 basis points. "That's one-tenth the level of late 2007 and the lowest on records dating back to 1959," the Journal reports.
As bad as the Fed-engineered low rates are for those trying to live off past savings, reporter Mark Whitehouse makes the point that the low rates keep young people from building up funds for the future — whether it's for emergencies or retirement. Working Americans put less money into financial assets last year than at anytime on record — except 2009, when people pulled money out. And while the Department of Commerce says the personal savings rate has risen to 5.8 percent, Whitehouse explains, "That's in large part because it counts reductions in personal debt, such as mortgages and credit-card balances, as savings." But most debt reduction, Whitehouse writes, has been driven by defaults, rather than saving.
The Fed's interest-rate policy also leads people into taking more risk with their savings than they should. "That's why most of us are in the stock market, because there's no place else to go," says 70-year-old John Lehman, who would rather have his money in bank certificates of deposit but must resort to speculating. "I hope my assets don't run out before I die."
Many retire with next to nothing as it is. According to AARP, 16 percent of Americans have not saved a dime for retirement, and nearly half have saved less than $50,000.
Those with no savings are more dependent on government and others when the unexpected occurs, whether it's job loss or the washing machine quits. Professor Paul Cantor reminds us in his article, "Hyperinflation and Hyperreality: Mann's 'Disorder and Early Sorrow,'" that "money is a central source of stability, continuity, and coherence in any community. Hence to tamper with the basic money supply is to tamper with a community's sense of value."
When the Fed makes saving seem futile and immediate pleasure seem rational, the world has been diabolically turned upside down. Just one step away from hyperinflation, the central banks' actions are threatening "to undermine and dissolve all sense of value in a society."
"Thus inflation serves to heighten the already frantic pace of modern life, further disorienting people and undermining whatever sense of stability they may still have," Cantor explains.
The social order is upended in Mann's story as wealth is transferred from those who diligently saved all of their lives to speculators. As it was in the Weimar Germany that Mann describes, so it is today, as people believe it futile to sock away a little money here and there, and instead feel compelled to either speculate or just blow what they have on good times.
And while the retirees mentioned in the WSJ article are being crippled financially, Cantor points out that Mann's portrayal of hyperinflation uncovers "something psychologically more debilitating happening to the older generation." Impetuous, high-time-preference behavior displayed by the young appears rational in an inflationary period, while prudence and conservatism appear to be not even quaint but downright silly.
As Mann described so long ago, the world of inflation is the illusion of wealth, created by the government's printing press, distorting everything we see and perverting our judgment. Meanwhile the cry for stimulus continues, while our culture and values are buried under a pile of paper.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
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