LeftCoastBlues

One Week In...

noreply@blogger.com (Sid Herron) — Mon, 07 Oct 2013 23:56:00 +0000

So...let's review where we are one week after the government "shutdown," thanks to President Petulant:

The Park Service has been ordered to shut down numerous public memorials and monuments, including the WW2 Memorial, and the Vietnam Memorial. Most of these are open-air areas on the mall that people simply walk through, and are open 24 hours per day. It cost far more to send Park Service employees out with Barry-cades to close off access and stand guard than it would to simply allow people to walk through as they usually do. A Park Service employee, who asked not to be identified for obvious reasons, has been quoted as saying that the orders came directly from the White House, and told the Washington Times, "We have been told to make life as difficult for people as we can. It's disgusting."

Vice President Joe Biden tweeted his thanks to a Park Service employee for trying to stand up to those scary WW2 vets who were invading the WW2 memorial - saying that he was proud of her.

The National Park Service has also attempted to close part of the ocean. Charter Boat captains in Florida were informed that Florida Bay was "closed," and they were prohibited to take anglers into 1,100 square miles of open ocean. Fishing has also been prohibited at Biscayne National Park. Park Service rangers will be on duty to police the ban - once again spending more money on the closure than is normally spent when it is open.

The National Park Service forced the closure of the Blue Ridge Lodge in North Carolina - a privately-run establishment that happens to be in a leased building on federal land. The 51-room inn was booked solid for October. The Park Service forced patrons to leave, and blocked the driveways leading into the establishment. His 100 employees are now idled.

The National Park Service has been busily blocking the entrances to National Parks. At Mt. Rushmore, they not only blocked the entrance to the park, they also tried to block off access to turnouts on a public roadway to prevent people from pulling off the road to so much as take pictures of Mt. Rushmore.

The historic 18th century Virginial Colonial Farm has been ordered to shut down despite the fact that it receives no federal funding and uses no federal resources - because it happens to be on federal land. Again, the Park Service showed up to barricade the parking lots and force people to leave. It was NOT forced to shut down during the last federal shutdown in 1995. They've already lost about $20,000 from events they've been forced to cancel, and the survival of the facility is now in jeopardy. (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnmcAVupBHk&feature=share)

60 families have been forced to leave their privately-owned homes on Lake Mead, including an elderly couple that has owned a home on the lake since the 1970s.

The Amber Alert Web site was taken off-line for a time - attempts to go there were redirected to a DOJ page saying that the government was closed. That has since been reversed, and the Amber Alert site is back up at last check.

The GOP-led House has passed a number of bills that would fund specific portions of the government - the Democrat-led Senate refuses to consider any of them, insisting it's all or nothing. Dana Bash of CNN asked Senate majority leader Harry Reid about one such bill, which would have funded experimental cancer trials for children: "But if you can help one child who has cancer, why wouldn't you do it?" Reid replied, "Why would we want to do that?" and denounced the question as "irresponsible."

Meanwhile, Camp David remains open, as does the golf course at Andrews Air Force Base, because, hey, it's essential that the President be able to play golf when he wants to.

Also, the Washington Examiner is reporting that the Park Service has OK'd tomorrow's immigration reform rally that's scheduled to take place on the "closed" National Mall.

And the hits just keep on coming - just about every day brings another example of vindictive stupidity. Mark Steyn succinctly put it this way: "The thug usurpers of the bureaucracy want to send a message: In today's America, everything is the gift of the government, and exists only at the government's pleasure, whether it's your health insurance, your religious liberty, or the monument to your fallen comrades."

And those "glitches" on the healthcare.gov Web site? They may not be going away any time soon, according to http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/07/how-much-worse-will-the-obamacare-website-glitches-get/ - I loved the quote from the founder of a software firm regarding the underlying code architecture: "As a software developer, I’m embarrassed for my profession. If ever delivered such crap, I’d be personally inconsolable. This couldn’t pass an introductory computer science class." As Peter Suderman wrote in a Reason.com blog, "...if the administration knew that the problems were due to more than just traffic, and that they would not be resolved in the first week, then they weren’t telling the truth. And if the administration did not know, then that suggests they may lack the understanding or capability to easily resolve the technical flaws with the exchanges. Either way, at this point, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the administration is either intentionally misleading people, or incompetent, or both."

Harry Browne, who was the Libertarian Party's presidential nominee in 1996 and 2000, observed that "Government is good at one thing: It knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and say, 'See, if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be able to walk.'" That's never been more accurate than today.

Thinking About Boston

noreply@blogger.com (Sid Herron) — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 15:54:00 +0000

Several years ago, Microsoft held its Worldwide Partner Conference in Boston. I was there, and on Friday of that week, I had about half a day free before I had to head for the airport - so I decided to walk as much of the Freedom Trail as time would allow, starting from my downtown hotel, which was only a couple of blocks off the trail. It was my first and (so far) only chance to be a tourist in Boston, but I would go back in a heartbeat if I had a chance to spend more time there.

It is difficult to describe the feeling of standing by the graves of people whose signatures you've seen on the Declaration of Independence, or walking past a building and seeing a sign telling you that the Declaration was first publicly read aloud from the window above your head, or walking past Paul Revere's home (now a museum that, unfortunately, I had no time to visit), or the Old North Church (of "One if by land, two if by sea" fame).

But what really struck me was the realization that I was 3,000 miles from home, and yet I had no fear or hesitation about walking the city streets. I didn't have to worry about what the policeman on the corner might do to me. The guy I saw wrestling a keg of beer off a delivery truck would look just as natural on the streets of Seattle if you just replaced his Red Sox cap with a Mariners cap. I was surrounded by people going about their business just as they did in my home town.

And I realized more strongly than I ever had before what an incredibly amazing country this is, and how unique it is in the entire sweep of human history, that I could be so far from home and yet have so much in common with the people all around me...because we were all Americans. There is no other country on earth where this is true, and there never has been - and that makes it very special...and I thank God that I was fortunate enough to be born here.

Thanks for listening.

Who Changed the Talking Points?

noreply@blogger.com (Sid Herron) — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 21:32:00 +0000

Greetings from the Left Coast!

This Benghazi thing just gets curiouser and curiouser. CBS is reporting that the office of the Director of National Intelligence ("DNI" - run by James Clapper, who is an Obama appointee) changed the Benghazi talking points before they were given to Susan Rice for use in her circuit of the Sunday news talk shows 5 days after the attack. However, the DNI spokesperson also said: "The intelligence community assessed from the very beginning that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack." And according to the CBS report, "That information was shared at a classified level -- which Rice, as a member of President Obama's cabinet, would have been privy to."

So why did Clapper's office decide to make those changes? And are we to understand that Susan Rice simply took the talking points she was handed and headed out on the talk show circuit without knowing that they had been edited, even though, in the words of CBS, she would have been privy to the unedited version? Or was she, in fact, delivering a message that she knew to be false? Either of these alternatives would be cause for concern, although, obviously, the latter would be worse.

And what about the statements made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on September 14 to the relatives of the slain when the bodies came home? It strains credibility to believe that, if the intelligence community "assessed from the very beginning that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack," the Secretary of State would be ignorant of that four days after the fact. Yet, at that ceremony, she was still maintaining that the violence was due to "an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with."

And, as if that's not enough, a spokesperson for the House Intelligence Committee chairman stated that, "The statement released Monday evening by the DNI's spokesman regarding how the Intelligence Community's talking points were changed gives a new explanation that differs significantly from information provided in testimony to the Committee last week." (Emphasis added) "Chairman Rogers looks forward to discussing this new explanation with Director Clapper as soon as possible to understand how the DNI reached this conclusion and why leaders of the Intelligence Community testified late last week that they were unaware of who changed the talking points."

I'm also looking forward to finding out why the new statement doesn't match testimony given last week to a Congressional committee. There's a word for not giving truthful testimony when you're under oath - it's called perjury.

Thanks for listening.

And So It Begins

noreply@blogger.com (Sid Herron) — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 21:54:00 +0000

Greetings from the Left Coast!

Social media is ablaze with indignation over announcements by several businesses, many of them in the restaurant industry, who have now announced that they will be either cutting back on the number of employees or cutting back their employees' hours to less than 30 hours per week as a result of the impending employer mandates that are part of the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. ObamaCare). Many are urging boycotts of these businesses, which seems a bit strange, because a successful boycott would necessarily harm the businesses and therefore lead to even fewer people having jobs.

But let's take an objective look at the facts about what businesses are now facing:

As of January 1, 2014, all businesses that have more than 50 full-time employees must provide them with health insurance or pay a fine. And there will be no such thing as "basic" health insurance - all plans must conform to the government mandate in terms of what must be covered, and what the deductible and annual/lifetime limits can be. One of the things that all business owners who do provide coverage will have to do over the coming year is to review that coverage to make sure it measures up to the government requirements.

The cost of a plan that does meet those requirements is estimated to average about $1.79 per hour per full-time employee. As Betsy McCaughey writes in today's New York Post, that's incidental if you're hiring neurosurgeons, but a significant incremental expense if you're hiring bus boys or sales clerks. In most cases, this will double the health care costs of employers in the retail and fast-food industries. Across all industries, for business of 101 - 1,000 employees, health care costs are expected to go up by about 9.5%. For businesses over 1,000, the increase will be roughly 4.5%.

According to a recent study by the McKinsey & Co. management consulting group, as many as a third of all employers are considering canceling their coverage altogether, because it will be less expensive to pay the $2,000 annual fine per employee than it will be to provide coverage that conforms to the government mandate. Those employees would then either go onto Medicaid (if they qualify), or purchase insurance through one of the state-run insurance pools. In the latter case, depending on their income, a portion of their premium would be subsidized by the government, paid for, in part, by those $2,000/employee fines. And, regardless of what you may have heard, part of the funding will also come from reducing payments to Medicare Advantage plans, and from slowing the growth in payments to Medicare providers such as hospitals, hospices, home health care agencies, and skilled nursing facilities - which is likely to make some of these providers less inclined to accept Medicare patients.

For some employers, hiring that 51st employee may turn out to be cost-prohibitive. Consider a restaurant with 50 employees, that currently pays minimum wage (not uncommon for employees that get a large portion of their income from tips) with few or no benefits. In fact, let's say this restaurant was paying more than Washington's minimum wage of $8.55/hour - let's say our restaurant is paying $10/hour, just to make the math simple. Today, hiring that 51st employee costs roughly $20,000 (2,000 hours x $10). But as of January 1, 2014, hiring that 51st employee would mean paying the $2,000 annual fine for employees 31 - 51: that's an additional $42,000. So hiring that 51st employee will actually cost the business $62,000, not $20,000. In all likelihood, that employer simply will not hire that 51st employee.

The other alternative, of course, is to reduce employee hours to less than 30 hours per week, which is the threshold under the ACA that defines a "full-time" employee. However, fines under the employer mandate also are imposed on workers who are not full-time, because a combination of employees working an aggregate of 120 hours per month will count as one full-time employee. This provision will be particularly painful for seasonal businesses, where it is often not cost-effective to provide insurance benefits to employees who will only be with the business for a short period of time.

Businesses have to make a profit or they don't survive, which means that all of their employees lose their jobs - which, by the way, is also the logical outcome of a successful boycott. When the government takes action that drives up the cost of doing business, something has to give, and not all businesses have the ability to simply raise prices to pass those costs on to their customers. The retail and fast-food industries in particular are extremely competitive. There is nothing in the ACA that requires a business to simply eat those increased costs, even if they are able to do so.

The most surprising thing to me is that anyone is actually surprised by this. Thanks for listening.

Four More Years? Some Predictions

noreply@blogger.com (Sid Herron) — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 17:14:00 +0000

Greetings from the Left Coast, which, once again, has lived up to its nickname by remaining solidly "blue."

Well, the people have spoken. And, incredibly, they have decided to give Barack Obama four more years. The second-guessing and what-went-wrong analyses will go on for at least that long. Certainly the media had a lot to do with it. If they had done their job in the first place, he wouldn't have been elected in 2008, let alone re-elected with the economy in the dismal shape it's in today. All you need to do is go back and review what the media said about the state of the economy in the run-up to the 2004 election, when, in fact, it was in much better shape than it is today, and compare it to their reporting this campaign season. Add to that their deliberate inattention to the Benghazi story, making it easy for their man to run out the clock, and Barack Obama becomes the first president in modern times to be re-elected with a smaller percentage of the vote than he got the first time around, despite having run the most despicable campaign I can remember in my 60 years on this planet.

In four years, we went from "hope and change" to seniors threatening to "burn this motherf***er down" and c**k-punch Romney if he won. We saw Obama follow precisely the path he accused others of in the last campaign: "When you don't have a record to run on, you paint the other guy as someone people should run away from." We saw the phoney "war on women," which was given legitimacy by a compliant media. We saw Romney falsely accused of indirectly killing a man's wife by being responsible for taking away her health insurance. We saw him falsely accused of wanting to take away women's access to contraceptives. Elect Romney, we were told, and he would overturn Roe v. Wade and completely eliminate "a woman's right to choose," which was patently ridiculous, because it is not possible for any president to simply overturn a Supreme Court decision. Republicans, we were told, were for dirty air and dirty water, and for letting autistic children fend for themselves.

But apparently enough voters believed all of that to put Obama over the top - a realization that saddens me. It isn't pleasant to realize that so many of my fellow citizens are that susceptible to lies and manipulation. We may have had an excuse in 2008 in that the media didn't do its job in telling us who Obama was and what he believed. But we've seen him govern for four years now, and we've seen that he is, as some of us tried to say in the beginning, an extreme left-wing ideologue who wants to reshape the nation to fit his ideology and has no desire to compromise. We've seen the results of his four years: continuing high unemployment, anemic economic growth, disdain for the separation of powers, and a willingness to simply ignore laws that he finds inconvenient to the pursuit of his goals. There is no excuse this time for not knowing who Barack Obama is. But we re-elected him anyway.

It's possible that we've finally reached the tipping point in the electorate that we've been warned about. When nearly 50% of the population pays no federal income tax, and 10% of the population pays 70% of all the federal income tax collected, we are in a dangerous place as a nation. Why shouldn't a large portion of the population vote for bigger government and more entitlements if they're not the ones who have to pay for it? If you add in those who simply can't be bothered to educate themselves on the issues beyond the 5-second sound bites on the six o'clock news, those people may now be in the majority. Only time will tell. And if you think I'm overstating the case, consider that the top Google search trend in the few days before election day was "who is running for president." Most of those searches came out of North Carolina, with Ohio and Pennsylvania coming in second and third, respectively. All three, of course, being "swing states" that were enormously important in the election, and that had been saturated by ads for months.

But, nevertheless, today's reality is that Barack Obama will be our President for four more years. So what should we expect? Here are some predictions that I really hope are wrong. We'll circle back in a few years and see how many I got right:

The Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. ObamaCare) is here to stay. (This statement really isn't a prediction, it's now a fact of life.) Four years from now, we will be much too far down that road to unwind things, or to do more than implement some minor tweaks. As Obama knew all along, by the time the majority of Americans find out they've been lied to about the cost of the program, their ability to keep their own insurance if they like it, etc., it will be too late. It only remains to be seen how much damage will be done to the economy from companies deciding not to hire new employees because of the cost of providing them with health care, or cutting them back to fewer than 30 hours per week so they aren't required to do so, or dumping their health plans altogether and pushing their employees to the health insurance exchanges because it's less expensive for the employers to pay the annual fine than it is to pay the premiums.
Sometime in the next four years, unless stopped by an Israeli attack, Iran will obtain nuclear weapons.
The Muslim Brotherhood will turn Egypt into an Islamist state and renounce Egypt's peace treaty with Israel.
At some point in the next four years, possibly as a result of increasing instability in the Middle East, the average price of a gallon of gas will top $5.00.
Unemployment will not drop below 6% in the next four years, unless the number is manipulated by more and more people giving up on finding a job and dropping out of the labor force. We will be told that this is the "new normal."
Economic growth will continue at its current anemic level of roughly 2% per year, which will not be enough to return us to pre-recession employment levels by the end of Obama's second term.
Federal deficits will continue to average $1 trillion per year.
Sometime in the next four years, America's credit rating will be downgraded again.
President Obama will continue to blame Republicans in general, and former President Bush in particular, for our ongoing economic problems.

As I said, I sincerely hope that I'm wrong on all of the above. We'll find out over the next four years. Thanks for listening.

Another Teachable Moment

noreply@blogger.com (Sid Herron) — Sun, 04 Nov 2012 21:20:00 +0000

Bill O'Reilly was widely criticized for his comments about Hurricane Katrina being a "teachable moment." But now, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, we find that many of the points he made after Katrina are still applicable, even though the other party is in power in Washington, and even though the disaster hit relatively affluent areas of New York and New Jersey rather than poor neighborhoods in New Orleans. He reiterates these points in a column yesterday on townhall.com:

Here's the big lesson from mega-storm Sandy: Mother Nature sneers at high tech, mocks modern convenience and couldn't care less about what kind of person you are. She will smack you if she wants to.

As we have become addicted to machines, many of us have forgotten about nature. We must have gizmos. Sandy laughed and took them away. Power, gone. Internet, dark. Cellphones, not happening. Even your landline phone, not available, because "all circuits are busy."

Suddenly, it's 1850 with one exception: battery-operated flashlights and radios.

So what is the lesson here?...

First: No government agency can help you when disaster strikes. Any assistance will be after the fact and painstakingly slow.

Second: In order to ride out any storm effectively, you should be self-reliant and resiliant. That means you have to anticipate problems and have some solutions at the ready.

Is the government helping storm victims? Yes, to the best of its ability - but anyone who reviews the myriad of stories coming out of New York in general,and Staten Island in particular, has to agree that the government aid has been, in O'Reilly's words, "after the fact and painstakingly slow."

If you've ever flown, you've heard the pre-flight briefing that says that, in a depressurization event, you should put your own oxygen mask on first, before trying to assist those around you. That's so you'll be conscious so you can assist those around you! The same thing applies to emergency preparedness, whether you're in a hurricane corridor, or in earthquake country, or "Tornado Alley," or a low-lying area that's vulnerable to a tsunami, etc., etc. Do everything you can to be personally prepared for an emergency - you'll then be better able to help other people while you wait for other assistance to arrive.

There are some great planning resources at http://www.ready.gov, and at http://www.redcross.org/prepare. Businesses can find some great tips at http://www.readyrating.org on how to make sure their business, and their employees, are prepared for emergencies. And if you're just too busy to put together a personal survival kit, you can order them ready-made at http://lifegear.com/survival-kits.html. A couple of years ago, I saw one of their kits in my local Costco for only $79.99.

There was a great article in this morning's Everett Herald about how ordinary volunteers in New York are making a big difference in helping storm victims. A key point to remember is that those people couldn't be doing what they're doing to help if they were victims themselves.

When Did History Begin, Anyway?

noreply@blogger.com (Sid Herron) — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 04:20:00 +0000

Greetings from the Left Coast!

Another of the most annoying lies of this election season is the one about how poor President Obama can't get things fixed because of the evil, obstructionist Republicans. It's as though the first two years of his Presidency never took place - you know, those two years when the Democrats had a majority in the House, and a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate, and the Republicans were completely powerless to stop anything. We talked about that just yesterday. It's how we got the stimulus bill that didn't stimulate, because the shovel-ready jobs turned out not to be as shovel-ready as we'd thought, and the 2,700 page health care bill that we had to pass so we could find out what was in it.

Since the Republicans took back the House in the 2010 election, they've at least passed a budget bill. The Democrat-controlled Senate refuses to even debate the House budget bill while also refusing to pass one of it's own. We haven't had an actual federal budget since 2009. We've just been kicking the can down the road by passing a series of "continuing resolutions" that simply agree to keep funding everything at its current level for a few more months...hence the unending string of trillion-dollar deficits. The last two budget proposals President Obama sent up the Hill failed to get even a single vote from anyone in his own party.

The only good thing about that is that at least spending hasn't continued to grow astronomically as it would have if his budget proposals had been approved. So remember that when you hear the spin about how federal spending has been flat over the last three years under President Obama. It isn't for lack of trying on his part - it's because the Democrats in Congress are too irresponsible to actually pass a budget bill, and too afraid to go on record as supporting the level of spending that they'd really like to have. They'd rather blame the Republicans and hope that we're too stupid to figure out what's really going on.

If President Obama is looking for someone to blame, all he needs to do is invite Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid over for breakfast, then pull up a fourth chair and prop up a mirror in it.

How Long Can You Get Away with Blaming Bush?

noreply@blogger.com (Sid Herron) — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 04:29:00 +0000

Greetings from the Left Coast!

My rant of the day is against those purveyors of revisionist history that are maintaining that four years simply aren't enough for poor President Obama to clean up the gigantic mess that George Bush left behind.

Please. That doesn't fly with those of us who lived through it and were paying attention. For the benefit of those of you who didn't, or perhaps did but weren't paying attention (maybe you were just too young), here are the facts.

The economy is cyclical. Recessions come around every now and then, regardless of which party holds the Oval Office, and nobody has figured out yet how to stop them from happening. But what government does in response to them certainly can effect their severity and how long it takes to recover from them.

The economy was already in decline when George Bush took office in January of 2001. Before the end of the year, he was dealing with the double-whammy of the dot-bomb bubble burst and the aftermath of 9/11. Instead of whining about the horrible situation he had inherited from the Clinton administration, he took decisive action: he cut taxes. In response, by the beginning of 2002, the economy was growing again, and continued to grow through most of the rest of his term. Between 2001 and 2005, annual GDP growth averaged 2.8%. The number of jobs grew by an average of 6.5%. Median income increased. Average salaries increased. According to a report released by the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, the U.S. outperformed its "peer group of large developed economies" (Canada, the European Union, and Japan) over that period - it led in real GDP growth, investment, industrial production, employment, labor productivity, and price stability. All while we were fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The budget deficit peaked at $600 billion in 2004, and was on its way back down...until the Democrats took control of both Houses of Congress in the 2006 elections. They took office in 2007, passed the 2008 budget, and, for the first time in history (but, unfortunately, not the last) we ran a deficit in excess of $1 trillion. The fact is that most of Bush's years in the White House were pretty good years economically. When he left office, the average price for a gallon of regular gas was $1.79. I don't know about you, but I'd love to see that again.

I think that most of us understand that the late-2008/early-2009 recession was largely the result of the bursting of the housing bubble - and specifically, the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market, which took a lot of financial institutions down with it. Many will argue that this was Bush's fault, since it happened "on his watch." But I believe that the historians of the future will spread the blame more widely...and there is plenty to go around. Democrats had a very large role in fueling the growth of sub-prime mortgages by strong-arming lending institutions to make loans to low-income borrowers in the name of fairness and economic justice - low-income borrowers who, it turned out, were not capable of making their payments. The Congressional record is clear that the Republicans wanted more oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The hearings were filmed by C-SPAN, and are out there on YouTube for the world to see...as Democrat after Democrat expressed shock and outrage that anyone would imply that there was anything wrong with those fine institutions, particularly Fannie Mae under the direction of that outstanding leader Franklin Raines. That would be the Franklin Raines who ultimately took "early retirement" because the SEC was investigating accounting irregularities, which ultimately led to the filing of charges against him for cooking the books and overstating earnings by roughly $3 billion, helping him collect $20 million in compensation the last year he served as CEO. I'm still amazed that he and his two co-defendents aren't wearing orange jumpsuits.

But, be that as it may, the housing bubble burst, and the economy went off the cliff. That part certainly wasn't Obama's fault. But the cold truth is that pretty much nothing he has done since then has made things better. For the first two years of his Presidency, he could have done nearly anything. His party had a majority in the House, and a filibuster-proof "supermajority" in the Senate, rendering the Republicans completely powerless. But let us not forget the words of Rahm Emanuel: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." So we got a stimulus bill that was primarily a giveaway to the Democrats' union supporters - particularly public employees' unions - and large contributors (see "Solyndra") and that, as a result, didn't stimulate; and we got ObamaCare, which 2/3 of the country does not want, and which is suppressing job creation because employers don't know what the heck is coming at them next. We got more regulations, more government intrusion into our lives, and a virtual shutdown of the oil industry along the Gulf Coast. Yes, I know that the spinmeisters will point out that oil production is up these days, but that's because of increased production on private land, not public land. Production is up in spite of Obama's policies, not because of them, although he's still trying to take credit for it.

Unemployment is still above 8%, more than three years after the statistical "end" of the recession. And, if we had the same labor force participation rate today that we had when Obama took office, the unemployment rate would be over 11%. The only thing that's keeping it this low is the number of people who have given up looking for work and dropped out of the labor force (the labor force participation rate for men is now the lowest ever recorded). In August, the U6 unemployment rate, which includes people who would like to work but have given up looking, and those who are only working part time, but would like to work full time, was 14.7%. Median income has fallen during Obama's Presidency. Prices have soared. Businesses are afraid to invest. He will be, in all probability, the only President since the Great Depression to see fewer total Americans working at the end of his first term than were working when he took office.

Reagan arguably inherited a worse mess than Obama. Unemployment was higher when he took office, and inflation was running at over 10% per year. Yet by the third quarter of 1983, GDP was growing at an annualized rate of over 8%, and twice as many jobs were being created as are being created today - which had an even greater impact back then because the labor force was smaller. The average GDP growth during Reagan's 4th year in office was 7.75%. Where are we now? Oh, yeah, still struggling to break 2%.

The biggest problem is that Obama is an idealogue. He is philosophically incapable of changing course, which is why, in every speech he gives, he keeps trying to double down on the same policies that aren't working. Which, if I recall, is pretty close to Einstein's definition of insanity: continuing to do the same thing and expecting different results. If he somehow wins re-election, you can look forward to four more years of the same kind of economic stagnation, ballooning national debt, and growth in both the size of government and its intrusion in our lives as we've seen in the last four years. And I will get absolutely no pleasure out of saying I told you so.

August Jobs Numbers Are Out

noreply@blogger.com (Sid Herron) — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 03:50:00 +0000

The August jobs numbers are out, and it's not a pretty picture. Only 96,000 jobs were created, which was (surprise!) "lower than expected." Four times that many people gave up on finding a job and dropped out of the work force - which lowered the U3 unemployment number from 8.3% to 8.1%. (As we've discussed before, the U3 unemployment number, which is the one that's always reported, only counts people who are actively looking for work.) The labor force participation rate - that's the percentage of the working age population that is either working or looking for a job - is now 63.4%, the lowest it's been since 1981. For men, it's 69.8%, which is the lowest EVER on record.

According to the "Jobs Gap" calculator at http://www.hamiltonproject.org/jobs_gap - which calculates the amount of time it will take to return to pre-recession employment levels while also absorbing the people who enter the labor force each month, at that rate of job creation, the Jobs Gap won't be closed until sometime after 2025. To put that in perspective, five years after the start of the last three recessions ('82, '90, and '01), private sector employment levels were well above their pre-recession levels.

We need to be creating jobs at the average rate of about 325,000/month to close the gap in the next four years - but, over the last 30 months, we've only created an average of 157,000/month. (Feel free to click through to the calculator, and play with the numbers. You can enter any number greater than 88,000 and it will tell you how long it will take at that rate to close the jobs gap.)

But, hey, the good news for the President is that if enough additional people give up looking for work and drop out of the labor force, the reported U3 rate might actually be under 8% by election day!

Comment Reveals Obama's Priorities

noreply@blogger.com (Sid Herron) — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 02:05:00 +0000

Greetings from the Left Coast!

Much has already been written and said about President Obama’s recent remark that the private sector is “doing fine,” and that the real drag on the economy is the public sector. But I think the most important thing about this comment is that it reveals his priorities. He is a big government liberal. He truly believes that there is no problem that government can’t solve, provided government has enough resources at its disposal.

Heck, look at how the stimulus bill was crafted: The majority of the money went to state and local governments so they wouldn’t have to make the painful cuts in services that they would otherwise have needed to make because of the reduction in tax revenue. So what happened? State and local governments didn’t make the painful cuts they should have made, the economy didn’t recover, they still don’t have enough money, and, absent another stimulus bill, will have to make the cuts anyway. This is precisely why the stimulus didn’t have the lasting effect it was intended to have.

One of the first academic studies of the effects of the stimulus bill was published in October, 2010, by Timothy Conley of the Department of Economics of the University of Western Ontario, Canada, and Bill Dupor of the Department of Economics of Ohio State University. (The study was revised and updated in May of 2011.) They concluded that the bill created or saved about 450 thousand government sector jobs, and destroyed or forestalled about a million private sector jobs. For the math impaired, that’s a net loss of 550 thousand jobs.

But private sector jobs are not his priority – in some degree because he’s so closely tied to public employee’s labor unions, but also because he just doesn’t get that, ultimately, it’s the tax revenue derived from the private sector jobs that fund the public sector.

I've shared the following three points before, but I think it's appropriate to share them again:

The government cannot give anything to anybody without first taking it from somebody else.
When someone receives from the government that which they did not work for, it means that someone else worked for it, but didn't receive it.
The government cannot create wealth - it can only redistribute it.

When a family’s income goes down, that family often has to make painful adjustments. Continuing to fund the previous lifestyle via credit cards only lasts so long, because the credit cards have limits. When tax revenues fall, governments have to do the same thing. It’s unfortunate, it’s painful, but they have to make the adjustments necessary to live within their means…unless we’re talking about the federal government, which has a magic credit card with a limit that gets automatically increased every time it is reached. But that’s a post for another day.

The bottom line is that President Obama values government jobs more than he values private sector jobs, and that came through loud and clear in his recent comment.

Thanks for listening.

What Really Happened In Wisconsin

noreply@blogger.com (Sid Herron) — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 05:54:00 +0000

Greetings from the Left Coast!

To really understand the implications of the failed attempt to recall Gov. Scott Walker, you must first understand the scope and severity of a huge financial time bomb that’s looming on the horizon: unfunded public pension liabilities. By “unfunded public pension liabilities,” I mean retirement benefits, health insurance benefits, etc., that state and local governments have an obligation to pay to current and former workers, but which have no identified source of funding. When the bills come due, it will be a scramble to figure out how to pay for them.

How big is the problem? The Pew Research Center estimated that it was at least $1 trillion at the end of fiscal 2008. Orin Kramer – a Democrat, and the former chairman of New Jersey’s pension fund – said it was $2 trillion at the end of 2009, and $2.5 trillion at the end of 2010.

How did we get into this mess? Because public sector unions contribute huge sums of money to help elect politicians who will be sympathetic to their contract demands. These politicians then give the unions what they want, thus insuring that the unions will continue to contribute huge sums of money to their next re-election campaign.

In the private sector, there is a built-in limit to what a union can extract from a business, because there is a limit to what the business can afford to pay. Beyond that limit, the business fails, and everybody loses, including the union workers, who no longer have jobs. But in the public sector, “management” is not negotiating with its own money – it is negotiating with other people’s money: specifically, the taxpayers’ money. There is no down side to giving the unions what they want, because, by the time the bills come due, either those politicians will be long gone, or enough time will have passed that they can avoid being associated with the fiscal train wreck that will ensue. So politicians have continued to kick this can down the road, and we’re now looking at as much as $2.5 trillion in unfunded public sector pension liabilities with no idea of how we’re going to pay for them.

For years, even the champions of the labor movement were opposed to the idea of collective bargaining by public sector unions. In August, 1937, FDR wrote the following to Luther Steward, the president of the National Federation of Federal Employees:

“…meticulous attention should be paid to the special relationships and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government.

“All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.

“Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that ‘under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government.’”

In 1955, George Meany, the former president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., stated, “It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government.”

In 1959, the Executive Council of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. stated, “In terms of accepted collective bargaining procedures, government workers have no right beyond the authority to petition Congress – a right available to every citizen.”

But, over time, greed overcame common sense, as it often does in the political arena, and the vicious circle of union dues -> campaign contributions -> recipients of the contributions give concessions to the unions -> unions collect more dues (often from workers who have no choice about whether they want to be union members, and who have the dues automatically withheld from their paychecks) -> more campaign contributions -> repeat ad infinitum has become commonplace. Both parties are guilty, but it is, in fact, more of an issue with Democrats, because the Democrats have chosen to align themselves closely with the unions, and, in return, 80% - 90% of union's political contributions go to Democrat candidates. In the case of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, that number is closer to 95%.

As a result, public employees in general often have higher compensation than their private sector counterparts. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as reported in USA Today in March, 2010, federal workers in 2008 earned an average salary of $67,691 for jobs that existed both in government and in the private sector – the average pay for the same jobs in the private sector was $60,046. According to other BLS reports, government entities spend 1.7 times as much on health care per employee-hour worked, and nearly twice as much on retirement costs. Public sector workers are far more likely to have “defined-benefit” pensions that are guaranteed to pay out for the remainder of a retiree’s life.

What is happening is that, across the country, voters are realizing that this is simply unsustainable, and something must be done to defuse that huge, ticking fiscal time bomb. And, in Wisconsin, that time bomb was about to explode. When Scott Walker took office, the state was looking at a $3.6 billion deficit between 2011 and 2013.

According to another USA Today article in February, 2011, Wisconsin was one of 41 states where public employees earned higher average pay and benefits than private workers in the same state. The average Wisconsin public school teacher may have only made $50,000 in wages, but s/he also received $45,000 in benefits. The school districts paid the entire cost of their pension plans, the entire premium for their medical and vision benefits, and half of the cost of dental coverage. Family health care coverage for a public school teacher was costing the state an average of $26,844 per year.

What Gov. Walker did, that earned him the eternal hatred of labor unions everywhere, was to restrict – not eliminate entirely – collective bargaining rights. Public sector unions could no longer bargain for benefits, and wage increases were limited to the rate of inflation. He also eliminated the automatic deduction of union dues from workers’ paychecks and required public unions to re-certify annually. He also asked public school teachers to pay 5.8% of their pension costs and 12.6% of their health care costs. That’s still substantially less than the national average for government workers, as well as substantially less than what private sector workers pay on average – if they have pensions at all.

While all of that made the public sector unions go ballistic, it struck the citizens of Wisconsin as being eminently reasonable. And despite the best efforts of his union opponents, Walker retained his governorship…and it wasn’t even close.

Meanwhile, out in the People’s Republic of California, both San Diego and San Jose passed ballot measures that cut public-sector pensions. San Diego’s passed with roughly two-thirds of the vote, and San Jose’s passed with 70% of the vote – proving that even here on the Left Coast, in the bluest of the blue states, the folks are starting to understand the magnitude of this problem and show their willingness to do something about it. I find that quite encouraging.

Thanks for listening.

UPDATE 6/8/2012: In his syndicated column this morning, Charles Krauthammer addressed this same issue - arguing that this is nothing less than the beginning of the end of public sector unions. As evidence, he reports that, since the Wisconsin government stopped forcibly collecting union dues from employees' paychecks, making membership truly voluntary, membership in the state's largest public-sector union has dropped by more than 50%. And, in neighboring Indiana, where a similar reform was enacted by Gov. Mitch Daniels via executive order seven years ago, government-worker union membership has fallen by 91%! Clearly, even their members don't like what the unions are doing.

Stick a Fork In France - It's Done

noreply@blogger.com (Sid Herron) — Wed, 09 May 2012 00:38:00 +0000

You can stick a fork in France - it's done. A majority of French voters are not willing to give up their entitlements, have taken an abrupt left turn back toward socialism, and elected as president someone who is promising a 75% tax on millionaires.

Bear in mind that France's public debt currently stands at 80% of its GDP (we're at 67% and rising fast). Their government spending equals 55% of their GDP, and their total tax burden is roughly 42% of total domestic income. They haven't had a balanced budget since 1974. But none of that matters - the citizens want more government spending.

But the thing about millionaires is that they're much more mobile than lower-income people. There are already indications that the wealthy are making plans to leave France rather than pay a 75% tax rate. This isn't a new thing for France - even back in 2006, it was estimated that, on average, one millionaire per day left the country. When Sarkozy was elected, he made a public plea for them to return and help rebuild the country. So much for that idea.

M. Hollande's election has also emboldened the Greek left, which is not at all happy about the austerity measures that had been put in place to control their own sovereign debt problem - which stood at 143% of their GDP back in 2010.

Odds are that our own next President will have to deal with the worldwide financial crisis that will result when Greece defaults on its debt, and is followed over the cliff, lemming-like, by Italy (public debt of 119% of GDP in 2010), and then France. It ain't gonna be pretty, folks, but that's what happens when a majority of voters feel that they are entitled to more than their government can afford to give them. And we're not far from that point ourselves.

Some Inconvenient Facts (About Unemployment)

noreply@blogger.com (Sid Herron) — Fri, 04 May 2012 23:19:00 +0000

I was fascinated by an article in this morning's local paper about how the economy was in a "virtuous cycle," and that 32 economists who were polled by the AP expect unemployment to drop below 8% by election day. This is, no doubt, cause for rejoicing at the White House, where the fondest dream is to have the reported rate below 8% by election day. But here are some inconvenient facts:

As CNBC recently reported, although 115,000 jobs were added in April, the total employment level actually dropped by 169,000. In other words, more jobs were lost than were created. How, then, did the unemployment level fall from 8.2% to 8.1%? Because another 342,000 people gave up and stopped looking for jobs, which means they are no longer counted as part of the "U-3" unemployment rate, which is the one that is always reported. The labor force participation rate fell to 63.6%, which is a 30-year low. The "Persons Not in Labor Force" number has risen to over 88 million. That's up roughly 8 million people since President Obama took office, and the trend shows no sign of leveling off.

The U-3 unemployment rate has now been above 8% for the longest continuous period of time since the Great Depression. But it would be even worse if we still counted those people who have given up and stopped looking for work. As zerohedge.com points out, government forecasting agencies, including the CBO, assume that the labor force grows by about 90,000 people every month as the US population continues to increase. Yet the U-3 number that is constantly being reported is based on an ever-shrinking labor force. The "U-6" unemployment rate, which includes people who are neither working nor looking for work - but would like to work and have looked for work sometime in the last 12 months, and also people who would like a full-time job but have had to settle for part-time work, is at about 14.5%.

Personally, I think those 32 economists were correct, and that the reported U-3 unemployment rate will be below 8% by election day...but it will not be because of economic growth and job creation - it will be because the Obama Administration will continue to lower the labor force participation number until they can report the number they want. As the old saying goes, "Figures don't lie, but liars figure."

NOW Do We Get To Say "I Told You So?"

noreply@blogger.com (Sid Herron) — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 15:26:00 +0000

"If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan." - Barack Obama, August 11, 2009.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck/3 (video available as of the date of this post): "Linda Douglass of the White House Office of Health Reform debunks the myth that reform will force you out of your current insurance plan or force you to change doctors."

"...if you've got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. Nobody is talking about taking that away from you." - Barack Obama, July 16, 2009.

"If you like your current insurance, you keep that insurance. Period. End of story." - Barack Obama, weekly address to the nation, July, 2009.

Associated Press, August 25, 2011:

"Nearly one of every 10 midsized or big employers expects to stop offering health coverage to workers after insurance exchanges begin operating in 2014 as part of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul...another one in five companies are unsure about what they will do after 2014. Another big benefits consultant...found in a June survey of large and smaller employers that 8 percent are either "likely" or "very likely" to end health benefits after the exchanges start.

"The surveys, which involved more than 1,200 companies, suggest that some businesses feel they will be better off dropping health insurance coverage once the exchanges start, even though they could face fines and tax headaches. The percentage of companies that are already saying they expect to do this surprised some experts, and if they follow through, it could start a trend that chips away at employer-sponsored health coverage, a long-standing pillar of the nation's health system.

"'If one employer does it, others likely will follow,' said Paul Fronstin of the Employee Benefit Research Institute...former insurance executive Bob Laszewski said he was surprised that as many as 8 or 9 percent of companies already expect to drop coverage a couple of years before the exchanges start."

NOW do we get to say "I told you so?"

Yet Another Big Lie

noreply@blogger.com (Sid Herron) — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 03:59:00 +0000

Greetings from the Left Coast.

There are several Big Lies that I'm getting really tired of hearing, but very near the top of the list is the one that says we could address our budget problems if only the "rich" would pay their fair share. If they were only willing to pay a little more, we could solve this thing - but those evil Republicans keep "coddling" them, to use Warren Buffett's words. The trouble is, the math just doesn't work.

Let's set aside, for the moment, the point that if Warren Buffett really thinks his taxes are too low, he could send a check to the U.S. Treasury at any time, and look at the facts and figures provided by the Internal Revenue Service.

According to the IRS, in 2009, 235,413 people filed tax returns reporting a million dollars or more in income. In aggregate, those people earned $726.9 billion. The federal deficit in 2009 was roughly $1.4 trillion. That means if you had taken all of the reported income away from those 235,413 people who made a million dollars or more, it would only have covered about half of the federal deficit for that year.

I'm not sure exactly how much more in taxes Mr. Buffett thinks he should be paying, but I seriously doubt that he is willing to contribute 100% of his income. So the fact of the matter is that making the rich (or better yet, the "super-rich") pay just a little bit more would be a proverbial drop in the proverbial bucket compared to our current level of deficit spending.

Here's another tidbit to think about. If you make $160,000 or more, you're in the top 5% of earners in America. You and your fellow five-percenters already pay almost 60% of all income taxes collected. (And the other 95% of taxpayers would like to thank you for your disproportionate contribution, especially the bottom 50% who paid almost nothing.) In aggregate, you and your fellow five-percenters earned slightly under $3 trillion. Therefore, if the government had taken all of your money, it wouldn't have been enough to cover Obama's budget.

So let's be honest about this. If you want to punish the rich people for being so successful by taking more of their money away, if that would somehow make you feel better, just say so. If you believe in income redistribution - that money should be taken from people who have earned it and given to people who have not earned it - just say so. But stop pretending that this is will somehow magically solve our massive deficit problem. It's class warfare, plain and simple. As many others have observed, we don't have a deficit problem because taxes are too low - we have a deficit problem because spending is too high. And "taxing the rich" won't solve the problem, because all of the rich people put together don't earn enough money to eliminate the deficit even if we took all of it! Don't buy into the Big Lie.

Thanks for listening.

Connecting the Dots...

noreply@blogger.com (Sid Herron) — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 19:29:00 +0000

"President Obama's economic advisers estimated Thursday that the economic stimulus package has saved or created about 1 million jobs...Republicans called the White House estimate unreliable, pointing to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures showing...a net loss of 2.4 million jobs since Obama signed the stimulus law in February." - USA Today, 9/13/2009

"With unemployment hovering near 10 percent nearly two years after President Obama signed his economic stimulus package, Mr. Obama is acknowledging that, despite his campaign promises, 'there's no such thing as shovel-ready projects.'" - CBS News, October 13, 2010.

"The White House doesn't create jobs." - White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, August 3, 2011

Um...we've noticed that, Jay. Too bad it's taken you almost three years to figure it out.

Here's Another Prediction I Hope Is Wrong

noreply@blogger.com (Sid Herron) — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 02:19:00 +0000

Greetings from the Left Coast!

Last week, I heard Arthur Laffer interviewed on a national radio program. Laffer is a pretty bright guy who, by the way, supported President Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 because of Clinton's conservative fiscal policies. He's the guy who reportedly drew the "Laffer Curve" on the back of a cocktail napkin during a 1974 meeting with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. The Laffer Curve basically states that at a 0% tax rate, and at a 100% tax rate, tax revenues would be zero. Therefore, somewhere between those two extremes is a point where tax revenues are maximized. Therefore, raising tax rates beyond that point will actually reduce revenues, and if rates are beyond that point, lowering them will actually increase revenues.

This absolutely worked during the Reagan administration, despite what you may have been told. Every time in modern history that federal taxes have been reduced, federal tax revenue has actually increased. The problem is that Congress is congenitally unable to stop itself from spending more money than it has - so even though tax revenue went up, spending went up even more, and debt increased. But I digress.

Back in June, Laffer wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal predicting what would happen if the "Bush Tax Cuts" were allowed to expire. This is now almost certain to happen, for reasons I'll explain later. Here are the salient points of Laffer's column:

If people believe that taxes are going to be higher next year, they will attempt to shift production and income into this year if possible. This was demonstrated in the early 1990s when "high income taxpayers" shifted income into 1992 to avoid the expected increase in the top tax rate in 1993, then again at the end of 1993 to avoid the increase in Medicare taxes that went into effect in 1994.
It is entirely likely that at least part of the reason that the economy is looking as good as it is in 2010 is because that's already happening.
"When we pass the tax boundary of Jan. 1, 2011, my best guess is that the train goes off the tracks and we get our worst nightmare of a severe 'double dip' recession."

Laffer's estimate is that if the Bush tax cuts expire, Americans will see an average 3% tax increase. If you take away an additional 3% of people's disposable income through added taxation, it's logical to conclude that spending will drop by at least that 3%. Since the economy is currently growing at less than a 3% annual rate, if spending drops by 3% next year, we're back in recession - and that doesn't even take into account the effect the higher tax rates will have on investment and job growth.

The Democrats already chose to kick the ball down the road, and recess for their last-ditch campaign efforts without passing a tax cut extension. It probably won't get any better when they reconvene after the election, either, and here's why.

Even if the Republicans do see a sweeping victory on election day, they won't take office until next year. So the "lame duck" Congress that reconvenes after the election will be the same Congress that we have today. And here's what the math looks like. Nancy Pelosi already has in her hands a letter from 31 Democrats saying that the tax cuts should be extended for all Americans. So, although Pelosi is committed to extending the tax cuts only for the middle class, and allowing the "tax cuts for the rich" to expire, she may not have the votes to pass such a bill. So here is Laffer's prediction of what she'll do:

House rules allow her to bring a bill to the floor under "suspension" of debate, meaning that an immediate up or down vote must be held on the bill, without any debate taking place. However, such a bill requires a 2/3 majority for passage, which the Speaker does not have. So she will bring to the floor, under "suspension," a bill that extends the tax cuts only for the middle class, knowing she doesn't have the votes to pass it. Then, when it fails to pass, she will immediately blame the Republicans for voting against tax relief for the middle class. And if the economy does go off the rails next year, as Laffer predicts, she will blame the Republicans for that, too.

You see, for the Democrat leadership, it's all about their power. They were perfectly willing to see America lose the war in Iraq and come home in disgrace, as long as they could blame the Republicans for it. (Remember Harry Reid's "This war is lost?" And Obama's comment after he took office and saw that the surge was clearly working that, even knowing what he knew now, he would still have opposed it?) And they're perfectly willing to see the economy go off the rails, no matter how many Americans are hurt, as long as they can blame Republicans for it.

Thanks for listening.

Liberal Myth Number...Oh, Heck, I Lost Count...

noreply@blogger.com (Sid Herron) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 03:07:00 +0000

Greetings from the Left Coast!

One of the many liberal talking points that just won't die is how our economic problems and ballooning deficit are due to all the spending on those "illegal" wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I recently had the following comment exchange with one of my Liberal Facebook Friends ("LFF"):

ME: (...Facebook status update grumping about references to the "cost" of tax cuts, as though our tax money was something the government is entitled to, and it's some kind of sacrifice for them to take less of it...)

LFF: "I think they want the top 2% to start paying their part so we can get out of debt or something like that."

ME: "I think if you run the numbers, you'll find that you could tax the top 2% at a 100% tax rate and we still couldn't get out of debt at the current level of spending. But that's another issue - I was objecting to the use of the word 'cost' in the context of a tax cut."

LFF: "Good point.... Sadly. I hate to think how long it will take to pay off these wars and all the bailouts. None of which have done any good for the [people] of America."

ME: "According to the Congressional Research Service, the cumulative cost of the War On Terror, from 9/11 through the FY2010 defense appropriation, is approximately $1 Trillion. That includes all of the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan operations. This year's budget deficit alone is more than that. So it ain't the wars that are causing all the budget problems. (See http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf)"

LFF: ...(recap of how government debt grew from 2000 - 2007...) "Increased spending was needed last year to boost the economy out of recession. There are plenty facts to support that this is working. To ensure the economy did not falter, spending has continued this year. So by 2011, deficit spending should be reduced. The most recent budget forecast from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) showed the budget deficit at $1.3 trillion in FY 2011, more than the $1.17 trillion deficit for FY 2010, but down from the $1.7 trillion deficit for FY 2009."

LFF: "By the way… Babyboomers paid extra into Social Security to ensure there would be enough funds to support our retirement. Well it’s all gone and do you know what it was spent on? Yep. the stupid, winless wars all about greed."(...more stuff on the Social Security mess...)

ME: "I think you're making my point for me. The single-year budget deficits in FY2009, FY2010, and projected deficit for 2011, are all greater than the total amount spent on Iraq and Afghanistan in the last nine years. The War On Terror represents only a small part of the spending problem."

LFF: (Silence)

Now you, gentle reader, have no doubt spotted a number of other points in LFF's comments that could have been challenged:

Reference to the top 2% "paying their part." For the love of God, the top 1% of income earners already pay nearly 40% of all income taxes collected, and the top 5% pay over 50%, while 47% of households pay no income tax at all. How much do they have to pay before they're "paying their part?"
The comment that none of the wars and bailouts have done any good. I'm tempted to agree on the bailouts, but the wars haven't done any good for the people of America? That comment alone is worth several blog posts.
The comment that increased spending was needed last year to boost us out of recession. Really? Can I see a show of hands of all of you who feel boosted out of the recession?
There are plenty of facts to support that this is working? Care to share any of them?
By 2011, deficit spending should be reduced. Yes, I believe it will be, but only because so many Democrats are going to be kicked out of office in November.
The "stupid winless wars" were all about greed. That's odd, because I thought they were all about terrorist attacks on American soil that killed thousands of our fellow citizens.

And that, gentle reader, illustrates one of the biggest challenges of talking to your liberal friends: it's difficult to stick to one subject, because so many fallacies get dumped on you so quickly that your first reaction is to just walk away shaking your head and wondering what universe they've been living in for the last several years. Be patient with them, and try to stick with whatever the original point was without getting sidetracked. If that doesn't work, you can always walk away shaking your head.

Thanks for listening.

And They Call Themselves Christians...

noreply@blogger.com (Sid Herron) — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 03:26:00 +0000

Greetings from the Left Coast!

I have several Facebook Friends who are, shall we say, quite a ways to the left side of the political spectrum. Wonderful people otherwise, but definitely part of the group for which the Left Coast is named. On several occasions, I've seen conservative political views criticized as lacking basic human compassion, and heard some variation of, "And they call themselves Christians? What must Jesus be thinking now?" This has always bothered me at a visceral level, but it took me a while to figure out exactly why:

Jesus taught that we should care for the needy personally. He never taught that we should turn that job over to government and let government do it for us. I believe there are two good reasons why personal involvement is better than government involvement.

First, Jesus never taught that anyone should be forced to care for the needy. There is no spiritual benefit in doing the right thing because you are forced to do it. That, in fact, is the essence of the doctrine of human "agency" - that we are free to choose to do what God asks of us, or not to do so. But when the government forcibly takes money from someone (which, after all, is what taxation fundamentally amounts to), even for the best of causes, that person's agency had nothing to do with it. Left to his or her own devices, that person might or might not have chosen to give to the cause in question...but it's a moot point. That person won't get the opportunity to make that moral judgment, for better or for worse.

Second, and this is possibly more subtle, by shifting the responsibility to the government, we don't have to take any responsibility ourselves. We don't have to personally face the poor, the orphan, the widow, the sick, the dying. We can, in fact, ignore them and go on with our lives, because, after all, there's a government program to take care of them.

So I submit that it is not at all a violation of Christian principles to want to place limits on government-imposed income redistribution and the creeping expansion of the "Nanny State." And I find it interesting that conservatives, who tend to want those limits, are, statistically, more charitable personally than liberals. Conservative families give more than liberal families, across the board, in every income bracket. Republicans, statistically, are more charitable than Democrats. "Red" states are more charitable than "blue" states. The residents there volunteer more, both for religious and secular causes. They're even more likely to donate blood.

Does that mean that we should remove all government safety nets? No, not at all. But if I had to judge which philosophy was more consistent with the teachings of Jesus - to say, "We need to raise taxes so we can fund another government program," or to say, "No, it's not the government's job to do this, it's my job, and I'll put my money where my mouth is!" - I would have to say it's the latter.

Thanks for listening.

Thanks, Newsweek, Now I KNOW I'm Gonna Love It!

noreply@blogger.com (Sid Herron) — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 14:39:00 +0000

Greetings from the Left Coast!

When I woke up this morning and first launched my browser, two things caught my eye on the msn.com home page: first, a big headline that said "GOP Pledges to Cut Taxes, Spending." Hmmmm. Republican leaders are circulating a draft of a new "Pledge to America." OK. A couple of lines below that? Another link that said, "Analysis: 'Pledge' Unlikely to Inspire Voters," that led to a Newsweek article that - surprise, surprise - didn't think much of the new Pledge.

Since I am somewhat familiar with the political slant of Newsweek, i.e., if you offered me a free copy, I wouldn't bother to walk across the street to get it, that suggested to me that I might, indeed, find this new pledge inspiring.

So I did what I would urge everyone to do - I read it for myself. It's only 21 pages long (less than 1% the size of, say, the ObamaCare bill), so it didn't take me all that long.

Over the coming days and weeks, lots and lots of people are going to try to tell you what it says and why it should, or shouldn't, matter. Ignore them all and read it for yourself, then draw your own conclusions.

My personal reaction to it? If I could have presented a document to Congress in a big red binder labeled, "PLEASE - just do these things for me, and I'll be content!" this is the document I would have written. Yes, I know it's only a draft at the moment. Yes, there's a little, cynical voice in the back of my mind that whispers, "Yeah, it sounds good, but will they really follow through?" But it's being drowned out by the louder voice that's saying, "My God, if they actually do these things, it will make such a difference!"

OK, OK, here are a couple of teasers:

In a self-governing society, the only bulwark against the power of the state is the consent of the governed, and regarding the policies of the current government, the governed do not consent...

We pledge to honor the Constitution as constructed by its framers and honor the original intent of those precepts that have been consistently ignored – particularly the Tenth Amendment, which grants that all powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people...

The American people know that to boost the economy, spending must be slashed, tax increases must be prevented, and small businesses must have certainty that the rules won’t change every few months so they can get back on their feet. The constant threat of new taxes and new regulations prevents investors and entrepreneurs from putting capital at risk. These private sector employers must be given the certainty that if they take a risk to expand their company or hire a new employee, Washington won’t yank the rug from under their feet...

We will ensure that bills are debated and discussed in the public square by publishing the text online for at least three days before coming up for a vote in the House of Representatives. No more hiding legislative language from the minority party, opponents, and the public. Legislation should be understood by all interested parties before it is voted on...

We will require each bill moving through Congress to include a clause citing the specific constitutional authority upon which the bill is justified....

Got your interest yet? By the way, Newsweek really didn't like that last point, for the very convoluted reason that it somehow encroached on the power of the judiciary, which is supposed to determine whether or not legislation is constitutional. But, dang, if I didn't know better, I'd think they (the GOP, not Newsweek) had been reading this blog!

Please. Just read it. Don't take anybody else's word for it - not even mine. Read it for yourself, then make up your mind.

Thanks for listening.

Why Political Parties Are Important

noreply@blogger.com (Sid Herron) — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 04:24:00 +0000

Greetings from the Left Coast!

All his life, my father was an independent voter. He never joined a political party, and took pride in voting "for the man, not the party." When I became old enough to vote, my first inclination was to do the same. But in the forty years since then, I've discovered why my father was wrong:

First, after politicians get into office, they generally vote the way their party tells them to vote. This has never been more obvious than in the last 18 months. Why? Well, there isn't much of a future for a freshman Senator or Congressman who opposes his party leadership. You don't get the choice committee assignments that way. In fact, you may find that you don't even get any help the next time you're up for re-election. So you may think that you're voting "for the man," but you're really voting for the party, whether you intended to or not.

Second, with the sole exception of the Senate Ethics Committee (a.k.a. the Oxymoron Committee), the membership of every committee in each house of Congress is determined by the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in that house. E.g., if the House of Representatives is 60% Democrat, then the Democrats will also have 60% of the seats on each and every House committee. Moreover, the majority party will also hold the chairmanship of each and every committee.

And that's where the work gets done. The committees determine what legislation gets drafted, and are largely responsible for drafting it. The committees determine whether a particular piece of legislation even gets brought to the floor of the chamber for a vote. When the Senate and House pass slightly different versions of a bill, a joint reconciliation committee tries to come up with an acceptable compromise.

In short, the committees are where the power resides. Yet there is little or no personal accountability for the members. Everybody knows who the President is - he's an easy target. But can you name even one member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce? This lack of personal accountability explains why, although the overall approval rating of Congress is lower than the proverbial snake's belly, individual incumbents keep getting re-elected over and over again.

The takeaway from all this is clear: if you want to change the direction of the country, you must change the party that controls Congress. It's just that simple.

Thanks for listening.

Flash: The Great Recession Is Over!

noreply@blogger.com (Sid Herron) — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 05:45:00 +0000

Greetings from the Left Coast!

Well, it's official: the Great Recession is over! In fact, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, it's been over for more than a year - the economy has been expanding since June, 2009! Don't you feel better now? You don't? Hmmmm. Maybe that's because, although we may have been expanding since June, 2009, it's been at a snail's pace. And when unemployment is still hovering around 10%, and you're upside down on your home mortgage, it sure doesn't feel like a recovery. Economists estimate that the economy needs to grow at twice the rate that's expected for this year in order to reduce the unemployment rate by a single percentage point.

But let's talk a little about this thing called an economic recession. If you've been in the work force for less than 10 years, this recession probably came as a real shock to you, because you had never seen anything but prosperity. In fact, throughout our nation's history, long periods of economic expansion have been the exception, not the rule. Until the early 1960s, it seemed like a recession came along every 2 to 4 years. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_United_States for details.) The nearly 9 years of sustained economic growth from February, 1961, to December, 1969, was the longest uninterrupted period of growth ever up to that point in time.

And the last 30 years or so have really been remarkable. Between the recession that ended in November, 1982, and the one that started in December, 2007 - a span of just over 25 years, the economy was in recession a total of only 16 months. And had it not been for the September 11 terrorist attacks, we might have avoided the 2001 recession altogether (provided you weren't in the high-tech sector, which suffered the double-whammy of the dot-bomb bust and the inevitable dropoff in corporate technology spending that followed the Y2K spending spree).

The fact is that good times never last forever. Economic contractions happen. Honest men differ over what causes the contractions - whether they're caused by outside "shocks" to the economic system, or whether they're simply an inevitable part of economic growth and adjustment. But recessions happen. They happen when Republicans are in the White House. They happen when Democrats are in the White House. It's a safe bet that no one will ever completely eliminate them. And despite what you hear from politicians on either side, it's seldom the "fault" of the person in the Oval Office - he's just the most convenient target. Which is not to say that government policies can't make things worse. Obviously, they can, and we're living through that right now.

The burning question of the moment is what, if anything, government should do when a recession hits, to mitigate the effects as much as possible and encourage a return to growth. Again, honest men differ. The current administration obviously adheres to the Keynesian theory that the right thing to do is to spend massive amounts of money to get things moving again. Unfortunately for President Obama and his fellow Democrats, it doesn't seem to be working any better this time than it's worked in the past.

Obama sees himself as a modern-day Franklin Roosevelt. Unfortunately, he's taking all the wrong pages from FDR's playbook. FDR was a brilliant public speaker who lifted everyone's expectations with his promises of how great the New Deal was going to be. He blamed his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, for being the "greatest spender in history." He promised to reduce the federal budget by 25%, and work toward a balanced budget. Yet, by the time his first term ended, federal spending had doubled. In May, 1939, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau told a congressional committee: "We are spending more money than we have ever spent before and it does not work... We have never made good on our promises...I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started...and an enormous debt to boot."

Does any of this sound familiar? (For more on the parallels between Obama and FDR, I'd recommend an excellent article on thenewamerican.com written by William P. Hoar back in February, 2009, when Obama had barely taken office.)

An objective look at history will tell you two things:

First, when people are allowed to keep more of their own money, consumer spending will generally increase. And when wealthy people are allowed to keep more of their own money, they will tend to invest it in ways that create jobs. Yes, that means that we need to stop playing this stupid class-warfare game that crys about "tax cuts for the wealthy." As we've written here before, the wealthy already pay a disproportionate share of all income taxes. It would therefore be impossible to craft a meaningful tax cut that wouldn't disproportionately benefit the wealthy.
The one thing business hates more than anything else is uncertainty. Whether it's the small business down on the corner trying to decide whether they can afford to add one employee, or a large business trying to decide whether to invest in a new factory, new equipment, or a branch office, not having a predictable business climate will delay or kill those plans. And right now nothing is certain. The current administration's behavior can only be interpreted in one of two ways - either they're totally clueless about how the private sector operates, or they're hostile toward it. Business people don't know whether they're going to be the next group demonized by the Obama administration. They don't know what kind of tax is going to hit them next. They don't know what's going to happen to their energy costs. They don't know what their health care costs are going to be. And until that changes, you're not going to see substantial growth in the private sector.

In the recession of 2001, the Bush Administration and Congress acted quickly to cut taxes, and reassure businesses. Despite the threat of terrorism, and the fear of where the terrorists might strike next, the recession lasted only 8 months, GDP (Gross Domestic Product) contracted by only 0.3%, and unemployment topped out at 6.3%.

In early 2008, hampered by a hostile Democrat-controlled Congress that cared more about winning back the White House than anything else, there were limits to what the Bush Administration could do. Still, if we are to believe the National Bureau of Economic Research, the decline in GDP bottomed out in June of 2009 - far too soon for any of Obama's actions to have had any material effect on it - but jobs continued to be lost at an alarming rate even while the economy was, technically, beginning its anemic growth. In July, 2010 (a year after the recession supposedly ended), the unemployment rate of people who were seeking full-time employment stood at 10.2%. The "U6" rate - which also counts "discouraged workers" who have given up looking for work, "marginally attached" workers who "would like" to work but have not looked for work recently, and the underemployed who are working part time but would like to work full time if they only could - was at 16.7% last month (August).

The inescapable truth is that just about every economic move the Obama Administration has made has made things worse, not better, yet their only response is to want to do more of it. We need to, first, take Congress away from the Democrats so there will at least be some check on Obama's blind ambition. Then, in 2012, we need to turn him into former President Obama. If he still wants to push hope and change, maybe he can team up with former President Carter and help build houses for some of the people who have lost theirs to foreclosure while historians argue over which of them was the worst President since World War II.

Thanks for listening.

The Summer of Recovery Draws To a Close

noreply@blogger.com (Sid Herron) — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 04:53:00 +0000

Greetings from the Left Coast!

As the "Summer of Recovery" draws to a close, we have the chance to reflect on what an amazing summer it was. The Democrat juggernaught that looked unstoppable only a few months ago is coming apart at the seams, as the American public begins to realize that, in a brief spasm of credulity, they have managed to put the fox in charge of the chicken-house. President Obama's approval ratings have fallen through the floor: as of today, according to Rasmussen's Daily Presidential Tracking Poll, 44% of the nation's voters "strongly disapprove" of his performance, with only 27% strongly approving - an "approval index" of -17. In fact, President Obama has more people in the "Strongly Disapprove" column than George W. Bush did in his last full month in office - President Bush was only at 43%!

Why? Because the American people have discovered that nearly everything he claimed to be, he is not:

He was supposed to be the post-racial candidate, yet he and his supporters are the ones who pull out the "race card" regularly and predictably. Apparently it is not possible for anyone to be opposed to President Obama's policies, any opposition to his agenda must be racism.
He was supposed to be the great uniter - the one who would reach across the aisle and bring us all back together. Put an end to the partisan bickering. But his actual approach to bipartisanship, once his party actually controlled both houses of Congress, amounted to, "I won, you lost. So either fall in line, or sit down and shut up."
His adminstration was to have been a paragon of openness. Yet we have seen multi-thousand-page bills crafted entirely by Democrats behind closed doors, and rammed through with not only no opportunity for Republicans to participate in the process, but without even the opportunity for the rest of the country to know what the bills actually said.
His health care bill is now being exposed as the debacle that it is. Health insurance premiums are going up substantially across the board as insurance companies are being forced to comply with all of the new requirements. And that's just the beginning - there's not enough room in this post to do justice to the subject.

And, in the minds of many voters, it has become obvious that his administration has absolutely no clue how to actually make the economy better. All they've done is to spend money like proverbial drunken sailors, and distort every market they touch:

State and local governments across the country have been spending beyond their means for years. Obama's stimulus package allowed them to dodge taking responsibility for their irresponsibility by pouring billions of tax dollars into preserving public sector jobs...for a while. Now the money is spent, and those state and local government budgets are still upside down, because it's the private sector economy that has to pay for those public sector jobs, and the private sector is still on its lips.
The "Cash for Clunkers" program did indeed boost new automobile purchases...until the money ran out. Then automobile sales dropped through the floor again. Moreover, the used car market was hurt, and the auto repair business was hurt, because of regulations that required that cars traded in had to be junked. And the engines had to be deliberately ruined by replacing its engine oil with a sodium silicate solution and running it for a while - which meant that engine blocks and parts like pistons couldn't be sold by automobile recyclers. (The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again.)
Subsidies for new home purchases boosted home sales for a while...until the program ended. New home sales in May dropped off 32.7% compared to April, and were 18.3% below the May 2009 figure.

In fact, the main effects of the automobile and home purchase experiments were to prove - if it needed proving - that if you offered free money, a lot of people would take it (gee, who would have guessed that?), and to distort the markets by artificially boosting demand for a short period of time, followed by a drop off in demand to a lower level than it was in the beginning.

The one thing that apparently has never occurred to them is that letting people actually keep more of the money they earned might be a good thing. If they got to keep more of it, they just might spend more of it. And if the people who had money to invest - you know, those evil "rich people" - got to keep more of their money, they might invest more of it in ways that created private sector jobs. But, as John Kerry famously said last year, there's no guarantee that, left to our own devices, we would invest in the right things - which is why government has to do it for us.

And that's proven to be the last straw. The American people are just plain tired of having things rammed down their throats by the federal government that they don't want, and being told in the process that it's for their own good and they're just too stupid to realize it. We're tired of being called names like "racist," "hater," "islamophobe," or all of the above, ever time we disagree with something.

This whole American experiment in self government got started nearly 250 years ago over the issue of taxation without representation. And the Democrats are about to discover that there is no better way to feel the wrath of the American voter than to ignore the fact that they work for the people, not the other way around. Many of them are already trying to run from the tsunami of voter disapproval that's coming. In the next couple of months, you're going to hear more and more Democrats start sounding like Republicans. They're going to continue to try to distance themselves from Obama's policies. They're going to start talking about how unwise it would be to raise taxes on anybody while we're still mired in recession. Don't you believe it. If they somehow manage to hold onto power, they'll be right back to their old ways in a heartbeat.

If you want to change the direction the country is headed in, you must change who is in control of Congress this November. It's just that simple.

Thanks for listening.

A Message to that Lucky 47 Percent

noreply@blogger.com (Sid Herron) — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 01:06:00 +0000

Greetings from the Left Coast, where we here at Left Coast Blues do the heavy thinking for those who just can't be bothered.

NEWS FLASH: The Associated Press has apparently just discovered that nearly half of all Americans will pay no federal income tax this year! And that almost 40% will actually get money from the government! And that 73% of all federal income tax collected comes from only 10% of the population! Wow! Who knew?

Well, you did, if you've been following this blog, because we've written about this before. But, now that it's actually being reported by the national press, I'd like to point out a few things that should be intuitively obvious:

First of all, it's obviously unfair (and if you've been listening to Obama and the rest of the Democrat leadership, you know they care deeply about fairness) that 73% of the tax burden should be paid by only 10% of the people, and that nearly half of the population should pay nothing toward services that benefit everyone.

Second, this should, once and for all, settle the issue of whether or not the government is advocating the redistribution of income. If a small portion of the population is shouldering a disproportionate share of the tax burden, and a large portion of the population is being given (not refunded) money that they didn't pay into the system, that is redistribution of income. End of story.

Third, we are getting uncomfortably close to the point where a majority of the electorate has nothing to lose by voting for higher taxes and spending, because (they will think) the tax burden is going to be paid by somebody else (the "rich").

But here's where it all falls down. The federal budget deficit is now so unimaginably huge that you could tax "the rich" at a rate of 100% and still not cover it. Even liberal Democrats are now saying that it is unsustainable and must be brought under control. This, of course, would be laughable if it wasn't so tragic for the nation, since they are largely the ones who created it. And, of course, their solution isn't to bring it under control by reducing federal spending...they want to raise your taxes - hence the recent trial balloon regarding a "value-added tax."

So, just for a moment, let me talk directly to the 47% of my fellow Americans who aren't paying any federal income tax. You should know that federal income taxes account for only about half of the government's revenue. You're paying a big chunk of that other half in ways you never see - like Social Security taxes that are not going into some kind of "trust fund," but in fact are being used to run one of the biggest Ponzi schemes ever perpetrated. Oh, I know you see the portion of Social Security taxes that are taken out of your paycheck, but you never see the matching amount that your employer pays (unless you're self-employed, in which case you get to pay both halves). That's money your employer doesn't have available to give you a raise, or some other kind of benefit, because it's going to the government. You're also impacted by other kinds of taxes levied on businesses, who ultimately pass the costs along to you when you buy their products.

Here's an example everyone should be able to understand: Let's say that a loaf of bread costs $2.00, and you've got $4.00 in your pocket. You can buy two loaves of bread. If the federal government directly levies a $2.00 tax on you, you can now buy only one loaf of bread. That's easy to understand - everybody gets that. But if the federal government, through some other policy decision, causes the price of bread to rise to $4.00 per loaf, that also results in your being able to buy only one loaf of bread. So there is no difference in terms of the effect it has on your life.

There are many ways for this to happen. One is to simply keep up that deficit spending until inflation kicks back in. And, if we stay on the path we're on, it will - with a vengeance. Another is to pass laws that cause the cost of energy to go up - thereby increasing the cost of plowing, planting, and harvesting the wheat, transporting it to market, milling it into flour, baking it into bread, and delivering the bread to your local grocer. In fact anything the government does that increases the cost of doing business is ultimately going to get passed along to you, the consumer, in the form of higher prices. What's the difference between seeing your purchasing power erode because of higher prices, and seeing your purchasing power erode because you're paying more taxes? None. Either way, your standard of living goes down.

It has been said that, while capitalism may be the unequal distribution of wealth, socialism is the equal distribution of misery. We are already on that slope, and it's slippery as hell. We have to elect leaders who will reverse course, before it's too late, or our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will look back and curse us for being so selfish and short-sighted.

Thanks for listening.

noreply@blogger.com (Sid Herron) — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 01:06:00 +0000