Power Line – Unemployment in the Great Recession
What Is Different?
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Category Archives: tea parties
What He Said.
RealClearMarkets – A Federal Budget That Insults All Budgets
The government has no resources. Everything it spends was created by private individuals and still belongs to taxpayers. All government can do is take from the industrious, the inventive, the hard-working and the frugal to dispense on the inefficient, the lazy, or the irresponsible. Government spending bites the very hand that feeds it.And these resources no longer exist. We’re now over $12 trillion in debt. Including future unfunded liabilities and those Washington assumed as a result of assorted bailouts and other mischief, the average family owes $471K and counting courtesy of government. The resources are gone.
Democrats wasted them on silly, self-defeating welfare programs and Republicans wasted them on silly, self-defeating foreign policies. Sometimes in fits of bipartisanship, they combined to waste them on even greater concepts. Government has no remaining resources, but to our peril it does have a printing press.
No matter what grandiose terms our elected leaders couch it under, there are only three ways to pay for this largesse. Certainly they can deprive productive enterprise of the resources necessary to generate economic growth via confiscatory taxes. But the disincentives ensconced in progressive taxation render it self-defeating. Washington can borrow, thus diverting capital from those endeavors actually prospering society. Another economic retardant. Or, they can inflate their way out of the mess by debasing our currency.
But remember; “Things appear to be the darkest just before they go completely black.”
It’s going to be like the 2008 crash. No one will see it coming until it’s here. Then it will seem obvious.
Yeah, it’s Bush’s fault. As well as every President since Herbert Hoover. We heard the story of killing the golden goose but never understood it.
Heck’ava Job Obama.
Obama unveils 2011 budget with $3.83T in spending
US deficit to hit record 1.56 trillion dollars in 2010
TaxProf Blog: President Obama’s Budget Contains $1.9 Trillion in Tax Increases
US consumer spending is weaker than expected in December
Construction spending drops sharply in December
US economic rescue failing to meet key goals:auditor
Conclusion: We Are So Screwed
This Cannot Continue.
If you read my posting about the relationship between the Public and Private sector you should be able to see right away why this cannot continue.In fact, if you have any Common Sense you should be able to see why this is unsustainable even if you have not read my posting.
You cannot pick a bucket up by the handle if you are standing in it, and you cannot sustain a government where there are more bureaucrats than there are producers.
We can’t keep borrowing or printing money, and with the Public sector being larger than the Private sector we cannot generate enough tax revenue to support the bureaucracy, especially if you throw in all the people who are getting subsidies from the government.
You would think this would be obvious, but I guess it’s not.
Uhh…Not Exactly
William M. Daley – Keep the Big Tent big – washingtonpost.com
That success happened for one major reason: Democrats made inroads in geographies and constituencies that had trended Republican since the 1960s. In these two elections, a majority of independents and a sizable number of moderate Republicans joined the traditional Democratic base to sweep Democrats to commanding majorities in Congress and to bring Barack Obama to the White House.
Actually the Democrats won the House and the Senate in 2006 because a good number of fiscal conservatives sat on their hands during the election due to the profligate spending habits of the Republican Congress. Independents were upset about both spending and ethics.
The election of Obama in 2008 was largely because the propaganda war that the Democrats had waged on George W. Bush had taken its toll. With their allies in both the print and TV media they had made good progress in painting everything about the Bush administration as corrupt. This in spite of the fact that there were much fewer ethics problems in the Bush administration than there were in the previous Clinton administration.
Obama won the Presidency and the Nobel Peace Prize primarily for not being George W. Bush.
The Democrats will continue on their journey to the left. Any success they have, they have primarily because they have been blessed with the Republicans as opponents.
Since Third Parties are the best way to elect your opponents, what needs to happen is a take over of the Republicans by the “Tea Party” movement. The Democrats will continue their assault but their snarky “tea bagger” comments do not go over well with most Conservative or Independent voters and may cost them votes. Then the “tea party” movement will have to elect Republicans and keep them aware of who it is that elected them.
Hosts and Parasites
When I read news stories of the government’s (State and Fed) attempt to “create” jobs by funding public works and protecting the jobs of government workers, I have to shake my head in disbelief. Do they really thing that they (the government) have a back room full of jobs that they hand out to people?
The truth, of course, is that they do and they don’t. They don’t actually have jobs to hand out, but they do have the ability to encourage others to create jobs.
A Capitalist free economy, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, is the worst system for managing an economy, except for all the others.
A Free Market encourages people to innovate, take risks and is able to offer products where they are needed, at a “reasonable” price without employing unaccountable central planners. If someone in a free markets systems offers the wrong products to the wrong set of customers, at a price they can’t afford, they lose.
The Free Market economy is the engine that makes America work.
What people seem to misunderstand is the relationship between the government and the Free Market.
The relationship is that of a parasite and the host. That is not necessarily a bad thing and it doesn’t mean that government employees are bloodsuckers. Our bodies contains many parasites, some of which are necessary for life.
The Private Sector is the host. It goes on and on, enriching some, beggaring others. The government is the parasite that is supposed to prevent the host from destroying itself with its own excesses. The government (the parasite) takes what is necessary to to do its job from the host.
The problem arises, not because the parasite exists, but because it takes too much from the host. In nature this manifests itself in anemia or other health problems. It is invariably weakens the host and can lead to death.
Think it can’t happen here?
When I was in Grade School back in the 1950’s I can remember being told (probably at one of those assemblies for Washington’s or Lincoln’s Birthday back when holidays were supposed to mean something) about the Voltaire quote that was supposed to have said “I may disagree with what you say; but I will defend to the death your right to say it”. (Yeah, I know it is probably bogus, but that’s not the point)
The point is that we were having it smacked into our mushy impressionable brains that in America the right to free speech included speech that you didn’t like.
Now we have “Hate Speech”, which is basically speech that some victim group or politician decided that they didn’t like.
How far is that from defending to the death your right to speak? We, our parents and our teachers thought that such a thing couldn’t happen here. But it did and it has.
Think of how many things that American’s used to believe was their heritage that are now discounted and reframed as somehow illegitimate?
The parasite is now in charge and we’re being reduced from patriots to husks that still mumble the words but have been so weakened that there is little time left to react, and even if we do, the poison is in our bloodstream .
Can we be saved? Maybe…maybe not. Time will tell.
The government is getting some help in gutting the Private Sector…Unions.
Good Old Fashioned Politics
Big Hollywood » It’s A Wonderful Bill
(with deep apologies to Frank Capra)
**************
Scene 14: Christmas Eve, inside Bedford Falls Town Hall. Senator George Bailey confronts an angry mob of constituents protesting his vote on the new health care bill.
MAN #1
Come on Bailey, you can’t hide forever! Let us in!WOMAN #1
Yeah, what is this mandatory insurance nonsense? Stop cowering behind that podium George! We want answers!crowd erupts into shouting
GEORGE BAILEY
Now now now, everybody calm down, see? If you’ll, well, see, just let me explain…
The Consent of the Governed
The vital role of consent in the structure of a just government is one of the most powerful ideas ever advanced by the human race. On the other hand, the belief that consent can be manufactured by democratic majorities is one of the most cherished illusions of activist government. The dissent of a minority is not rendered irrelevant by victory in a popular vote… but the health-care debate in the Senate proceeds on the assumption that victory in a parliamentary struggle between a hundred elected officials will compel the consent of the millions of citizens – now a sizable majority of the population, based on the latest polls – who strenuously object to ObamaCare. If Senate Democrats win this debate, huge amounts of your liberty will be destroyed, and vast sums of money will be seized from taxpayers… and you will not be allowed to object. Any attempt to withhold your consent from this economy-shattering, life-changing radical legislation will end with you sitting in a prison cell.
“Consent of the governed” seems to be one of those old fashioned concepts that the government, both Democrat and Republican, but more Democrat, seems to have decided to scrap as outdated. If you can get one vote more than the other guy then you’re awarded dictatorial powers over everyone.
Our present government seems to want to emulate the European Union, where decisions are made by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats that can’t be investigated or removed by the citizenry. That might work in Europe. They have a long history of domestication. The concept of “Consent of the governed” has never held much sway there.
But American are different than Europeans. They’re much more fractious (and armed) than the Europeans. They have a sense of fairness that doesn’t mix well with pronouncements on high. If you think the “tea party” movement is loud and obnoxious now, just wait until you try to cram something lie this Health Care monstrosity down their throats. Congressmen will have to sneak back into their districts.
I can’t see anything good coming from any of this.
Iowahawk Gathers The (Barely) Rejected Stories About The Ft Hood Shootings
Iowahawk had gathered the first submissions of various newspaper stories in different markets. Most were heavily changed before publication, others not so much.
As usual, Iowahawk provides the answers to questions we never asked, but wish we had.
(Danger! Satire being used on site. May be harmful to those who take themselves much too seriously)
Waters:Unleash The Thought Police!!!
The media should investigate the racial views of conservative activists like the ones who descended on Washington last weekend, one liberal congresswoman said Wednesday.
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said that it’s not enough for African-Americans to levy allegations of racism against the right-leaning protesters, and that the media must look into their views.
Since the MSM has decided to act as an adjunct to the White House and DNC press offices, I would say she has a good chance of getting what she wants.
The news media is deathly afraid of being called ‘racist’.