Opher Banarie

Justice Breyer Commends Hamilton - Without Recognizing the Irony At All

2021-09-12T08:32:00.002-07:00

Justice Stephen Breyer gave this soundbite during today's (9/12/2021) Sunday Morning interview:

"I think, well, people understand to some degree why it’s a good idea what Hamilton thought. And he thought the court should be there because there should be somebody – somebody who says when the other two branches of the government have gone outside the confines of this document," Breyer said, referring to the Constitution. 

Justice Breyer, with all do respect, WHO will say when the Supreme Court goes outside the confines of the Consitution? How many more penumbras and emanations are yet to be found in the Bill of Rights by future Justices? What good is Federalism and States' Rights when five Justices can rule that their view of public policy should negate those of all elected legislators at all levels across the country? And, finally, at what point will you agree that past Court decisions are just as likely to be wrong as right, and that the only secure beacon for guidance is the language of the Constitution rather than any precedent of prior Courts?

If we really are a country of laws and not of men, the Rights of Citizens and the Limits on Government established by the Consitution must be the only measures of justice the Supreme Court should be guided by.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/supreme-court-justice-stephen-breyer-political-reforms 

Burying the Other Russia Story - WSJ Opinion

2018-11-12T07:05:00.002-08:00

Adam Schiff will shut down the probe that found FBI abuses.

By The Editorial Board
Nov. 9, 2018 7:34 p.m. ET

Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff in Washington, D.C., Nov. 30, 2017. PHOTO: JOSHUA ROBERTS/REUTERS

Arguably the most important power at stake in Tuesday’s election was Congressional oversight, and the most important change may be Adam Schiff at the House Intelligence Committee. The Democrat says his top priority is re-opening the Trump-Russia collusion probe, but more important may be his intention to stop investigating how the FBI and Justice Department abused their power in 2016. So let’s walk through what we’ve learned to date.

Credit for knowing anything at all goes to Intel Chairman Devin Nunes and more recently a joint investigation by Reps. Bob Goodlatte (Judiciary) and Trey Gowdy (Oversight). Over 18 months of reviewing tens of thousands of documents and interviewing every relevant witness, no Senate or House Committee has unearthed evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to win the presidential election. If Special Counsel Robert Mueller has found more, he hasn’t made it public.

But House investigators have uncovered details of a Democratic scheme to prod the FBI to investigate the Trump campaign. We now know that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee hired Fusion GPS, which hired an intelligence-gun-for-hire, Christopher Steele, to write a “dossier” on Donald Trump’s supposed links to Russia.

Mr. Steele fed that document to the FBI, even as he secretly alerted the media to the FBI probe that Team Clinton had helped to initiate. Fusion, the oppo-research firm, was also supplying its dossier info to senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, whose wife, Nellie, worked for Fusion.

House investigators have also documented the FBI’s lack of judgment in using the dossier to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant against former Trump aide Carter Page. The four FISA warrants against Mr. Page show that the FBI relied almost exclusively on the unproven Clinton-financed accusations, as well as a news story that was also ginned up by Mr. Steele.

The FBI told the FISA court that Mr. Steele was “credible,” despite Mr. Steele having admitted to Mr. Ohr that he passionately opposed a Trump Presidency. The FBI also failed to tell the FISA court about the Clinton campaign’s tie to the dossier.

This abuse of the FBI’s surveillance powers took place as part of a counterintelligence investigation into a presidential campaign—which the FBI also hid from Congress. Such an investigation is unprecedented in post-J. Edgar Hoover American politics, and it included running informants into the Trump campaign, obtaining surveillance warrants, and using national security letters, which are secret subpoenas to obtain phone records and documents.

Mr. Nunes and his colleagues also found that officials in Barack Obama’s White House “unmasked” Trump campaign officials to learn about their conversations with foreigners; that FBI officials exhibited anti-Trump bias in text messages; and that the FBI team that interviewed then Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn reported that they did not think Mr. Flynn had lied about his Russian contacts. Mr. Mueller still squeezed Mr. Flynn to cop a guilty plea.

All of this information had to be gathered despite relentless opposition from Democrats and their media contacts. Liberal groups ginned up a phony ethics complaint against Mr. Nunes, derailing his committee leadership for months. Much of the media became Mr. Schiff’s scribes rather than independent reporters. Meanwhile, the FBI and Justice continue to stonewall Congress, defying subpoenas and hiding names and information behind heavy redactions.

There is still much more the public deserves to know. This includes how and when the FBI’s Trump investigation began, the extent of FBI surveillance, and the role of Obama officials and foreigners such as Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic who in spring 2016 supposedly told Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos that Russia held damaging Clinton emails. When he takes over the committee, Mr. Schiff will stop asking these questions and bless the FBI-Justice refusal to cooperate.

Senate Republicans could continue to dig next year, but Mr. Mueller seems uninterested. Attorney General Jeff Sessions in March asked Utah U.S. Attorney John Huber to look into FBI misconduct, but there has been little public reporting of what he is finding, if he is even still looking. Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz is investigating, though that report is likely to take many more months.

***
All of which puts an additional onus on Mr. Trump to declassify key FBI and Justice documents sought by Mr. Nunes and other House investigators before Mr. Schiff buries the truth. A few weeks ago Mr. Trump decided to release important documents, only to renege under pressure from Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein and members of the intelligence community.

Mr. Sessions resigned this week and perhaps Mr. Rosenstein will as well. Meantime, Mr. Trump should revisit his decision and help Mr. Nunes and House Republicans finish the job in the lame duck session of revealing the truth about the misuse of U.S. intelligence and the FISA court in a presidential election.

Appeared in the November 10, 2018, print edition.

Reply to LeBron James Attack on President Trump by Hal Lundgren

2018-11-11T14:48:00.002-08:00

Re-posted (with a few edits) from Facebook:

LeBron James called President Trump a "Bum" and thinks that Obama was the best. His fans listen to him because he has a talent for basketball and buying big mansions. The letter writer below, a sports journalist, tells the truth and that truth applies to most celebrities on the left.

A GREAT Letter to LeBron James from former Houston news reporter Hal Lundgren. It’s a must read, and definitely should be distributed. Post it, send it. Whatever. People really need to know these things.

August 6, 2018
Mr. LeBron James
The Los Angeles Lakers
2275 E. Mariposa Ave.
El Segundo, CA 90245

Dear Mr. James,
No one in my circles discusses French Modernist artists. That comforts me. Such a conversation would expose me as an illiterate on French Modernism, just as I am an illiterate on how to cook.

When I know nothing of subjects, my mouth stays closed. That's at least one difference in us. You are an economics illiterate. You prove it often. The dishonest "reporters” who cover you want to be your buddy. They won't embarrass you by being honest journalists and treating your words as economics illiteracy.

When you call Trump "a bum," none of them will tell you that statistics rank him as one of our best presidents for black Americans. His tax cuts and freeing us from absurd regulations have resulted in -- after only 18 months -- the lowest unemployment numbers ever for Hispanic and black Americans, and one of the lowest numbers for women.

DURING THOSE 18 MONTHS, TRUMP'S POLICIES CREATED ABOUT FOUR TIMES OF THE MANUFACTURING JOBS CREATED DURING THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION’S LAST 18 MONTHS. Remember when Obama mistakenly told us "Our lost manufacturing jobs are not coming back.” Maybe manufacturing job growth depends on a president who knows what he's doing.

As a professional journalist, I cringe at some of Trump’s buffoonery, like repeating sentences and wearing us out with "great," “fantastic” and other empty adjectives. He is often coarse. He was not my candidate. But there’s no question his policies have helped many more minority Americans than Obama. It's not even close. Today, he’s working to free many black and Hispanic prisoners who, in his opinion, have been in prison too long for relatively minor offenses. Are you aware of that effort?

You need to look up Gross Domestic Product, adjusted for inflation, and learn what it means to everyday Americans. Learn what one GDP point means to employment, and see how Trump has kept the number climbing.

Your buddy Obama? In addition to being our worst foreign affairs president and worst military commander-in-chief, his economic numbers all deserved an "F." He is our ONLY eight-year president who failed to give us at least one 3% or higher year of adjusted GDP growth. EVERY other president achieved at least one year of 4.28% or higher growth. Aided by Vietnam spending, Johnson had an 8.48 year. The best peacetime year -- 7.83 -- belonged to Reagan. and Obama couldn't even score a 3!!! Look it up.

You say you would speak to Obama but not Trump? How tragically uninformed you are. Obama had BY FAR the worst debt accumulation record of all our presidents. His economic blunders added about $9 trillion to our debt. NO OTHER PRESIDENT EVEN CAME CLOSE. That indebtedness will fall to you and your children.

Poor families suffered most. Obama's awful job numbers forced a record number of people to take food stamps. Black household income under Obama fell steeply as black unemployment rose. Look that up, too.

But the worst part of what Trump inherited is that Obama, like Bush and Clinton before him, thought bribes and sweet talk were the best ways to deal with North Korea. As the North Koreans neared being able to wipe out Los Angeles with a nuclear-tipped missile, Trump became the first president to stand up boldly to the rogue nation. Notice North Korea, because of Trump, has stopped launching missiles over Japan? Notice North Korea has released political prisoners? Notice North Korea has begun to return remains of U.S. Service members? Absent sturdy spines, Clinton, Bush and Obama could not approach those major achievements.

Obama naively bribed the planet’s worst terrorist nation, Iran, with what was supposed to become a $150 billion handout. Did Obama not know many of those U.S. Tax dollars would help fund Hamas and Hezbollah terrorism? Of course he did. He just didn't care.

Remember the $800 billion of your and everyone else's tax dollars in his early stimulus for "shovel-ready jobs." Most of those tax dollars went to political cronies. He handed $500 million to Solyndra, a solar company run by boosters. The company soon went bankrupt. Our half-billion in tax money vanished with it.

Trump is often obnoxious, but people with courage can have that hangup. Obama always talked big, then feebly stood by when Putin infringed on Ukraine and annexed Crimea.

But Obama's most cowardly move came when he warned Assad not to cross "the red line" in Syria. When Obama’s warning was ignored, which Assad knew would happen, Obama did nothing. Does that make him a "bum?"

It makes me sad that you, as someone with a national voice would be so ignorant of economics, and also presidential decisions. I encourage you to do more reading and thinking as you watch the nation's GDP numbers rise and minority employment rise.

* Read about "Right To Try," which frees terminally ill people to sign a lawsuit waiver and take an experimental drug that might not be approved for many years. Democrats fought this sensible plan for years because it would cost them donations.
* Read about a Navy Obama left to Trump that struggled with about half its carrier aircraft unsafe to fly.
* Read about Trump's giving the VA the right to fire any employee who neglects or abuses a patient.
* Read about Trump's courage in challenging, actually demanding that, NATO partners to pay their fair share rather than keep mooching off the U.S.

You might also read the wisdom of two of the world’s brightest people, black intellectuals Dr. Thomas Sowell and Dr. Walter Williams. They have written many books. Sowell and Williams’ integrity, remarkable insights and clarity of expression cause their common sense to soar off the page to readers.

Or, you could ignore vital Trump decisions and remain an illiterate on both presidential achievement and economics. If you disdain knowledge and keep calling Trump or any other U.S. president a bum, people will begin to wonder who's the real bum.

Sincerely,
Hal Lundgren

CATO on "You Didn't Build That"

2018-11-11T13:12:00.000-08:00

Ever since Elizabeth Warren and President Obama went on their "you didn't build that" attacks on entrepreneurs and business in general, I've felt that there needed to be a logical counterpoint to show that the idea is garbage. So far, this is the best I have seen.

From CATO:

By DEREK BONETT

Ronald Reagan’s legacy-defining tax cuts passed through Congress in 1981 and 1986 with broad Democratic support. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 on the other hand, failed to garner a single Democratic vote before President Trump signed it into law. In the latter case, the lack of concomitant spending cuts might allow one to frame this opposition as an act of fiscal prudence on the part of the Democrats. But the counterfactual - that if the legislation had also included a scaling back of Medicare benefits and a partial Social Security privatization then the Democrats would have leaped on board - strains credulity.

More likely, Democratic opposition is motivated, at least in part, by an increasingly ideological commitment to a European style social welfare state. Many Western European governments collect 40% or more of their GDP in taxes, while the United States collects just over half of that figure. In urging us to emulate the European model, the progressive left wing of the Democratic party not only downplays the perverse economic effects of higher taxes, they have taken to morally justifying progressive taxation as the “fair share” owed to society by those who have been successful in the private sector, on account of the government-provided goods and services which undoubtedly necessary to that success.

In 2011, U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, now among the front-runners for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, made this argument explicitly during a campaign event:

I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.’ No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

In a 2012 campaign speech, President Obama reinforced this sentiment:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that.

These remarks no doubt build upon a foundation of truth: that some basic degree of public goods provision might be necessary to generate the conditions within which the private sector can thrive. But beyond illuminating a very basic economics insight, this line of argumentation falls far short of its goal: to justify progressive taxation as a part of the “underlying social contract” whereby private actors reimburse the government for the goods and services which they utilized en route to their success.

A Tale of Two Commuters

Imagine two commuters living equidistant from a downtown city law firm. One is an attorney at the firm, the other is her secretary. Each drives to work, thereby obtaining some value from the use of public roads. Each, in turn, imposes a roughly equal amount of depreciation on those roads, the cost of which must be defrayed via taxes. But what about the value “built” by each of them once they reach their office?

The attorney will almost certainly command a far higher salary than will her secretary. Insofar as these salaries emerge from a competitive market for labor, they reflect, at least within an order of magnitude, the respective marginal products of these commuters’ labor. But, crucially, the attorney’s higher salary is not attributable to a greater consumption of public goods. She traversed the same roads on the way to work as did her secretary. The two of them rely on the same police and fire departments. They may have even attended the same local, public K-12 schools. The attorney’s higher salary is instead attributable to her command over a set of skills and human capital which are more scarce - and more valuable - on the market than are secretarial skills. The salary differential, and the difference in productivity it reflects, cannot be explained by differential public goods consumption. In each case, some degree of public goods and services may be a necessary complement to these employees’ labor, but they are not sufficient to explain their differential success in earning taxable income. In what way is society justified in expropriating a greater percentage of the attorney’s income because her labor is more productive, and therefore commands a higher salary?

Imagine, next, two rival international shipping companies. They operate an identical tonnage of merchant ships. They make equal use of publicly subsidized port facilities. They make equal use of the protection of the U.S. Coast Guard, and each benefits equally from the placidity of international shipping lanes due to the presence of the U.S. Navy.

Company A has cultivated an efficient corporate culture: its CEO has designed an innovative process for acquiring talented managers, who in turn are capable of literally running a tight ship. Embezzlement and misfeasance are minimized. Company B, on the other hand, is dysfunctional at every level of analysis. The incompetence of its senior executives percolates into inept middle-management, who in turn fail to properly motivate their employees. For every ton of merchandise shipped, each relying to the same degree on the aforementioned public goods, Company B generates less taxable profit than Company A. But Company A’s greater tax burden cannot be attributable to greater public goods consumption by Company A. It is instead attributable to smarter management, more innovative practices, and an overall more functional corporate culture. In what way do Company A’s unique characteristics which make it competitive and profitable justify extracting from it a larger tax burden? These are not society’s contributions, for which the government is entitled to collect additional reimbursement.

The logic of “you didn’t build that” leads unavoidably to the following conclusion: few forms of proportional taxation, and certainly no progressive marginal rates, can be justified on the basis of public goods consumption. Not only does this line of reasoning fail in principle, but it would be utterly compromised during the actual practice of determining fiscal policy. Even if a wise philosopher-king were able to determine the precise percentage of a wealthy individual or a successful firm’s income which was attributable to their use of public goods, our Congress falls far short of that Platonic paragon. The statutory tax rates which emerge from the political process are a function of just that - politics. They reflect the relative balance of power at a moment in time between pro-tax and anti-tax constituencies, imperfectly filtered through their representatives and adulterated by a nauseating amount of interest-group influence. To expect them to reflect, instead, the amount of a person’s wealth which society helped “build” is simply fantasy.

The Forgotten Live Video Recording: Du Pré & the Dvořák Cello Concerto, 1968

2017-11-08T22:13:00.000-08:00

In August, 1968. Unless you lived through the events, have a PhD in world history, or happen to have family from Czechoslovakia, you may never have heard of the events of that time.

The USA was mired in assassinations (Martin Luther King Jr. in April and Bobby Kennedy in June), the Vietnam War had taken such a toll on President Johnson that he didn't run for re-election. The upcoming election would see Richard Nixon defeat Hubert Humphrey, with neither receiving a majority of the popular vote due to the candidacy of George Wallace.

In Central Europe the Cold War broke into hot fighting, known as the Prague Spring, as troops of the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia to halt a series of political reforms. The invasion was on August 21st.

While all of that was going on, the Moscow Philharmonic was on tour and in London, with cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, to perform the Dvořák Cello Concerto that night. (For those not familiar with his background, Dvořák was Czech, making all of the above prelude to a dramatic confluence of politics, music, human rights, East-West relations...and more.)

[I'll side-bar here to mention that a few months later, while the orchestra was on the same tour, I saw Rostropovich perform the Dvořák Cello Concerto in Los Angeles.]

Five days later there was another performance of the Dvořák Concerto in London. It had been put together quickly by Daniel Barenboim and the London Symphony Orchestra to raise relief funds for the Czech people, and the concerto was to feature his new wife, Jacqueline Du Pré.

Ms Du Pré, who would be diagnosed with multiple sclerosis five years later, was at the peak of her musical skills and talent.

The video recording of this concert was lost for decades, and was amazingly located recently and posted to YouTube only two weeks ago. Please follow the link to the CelloBello blog and read the full account of the days leading up to and the memories of people who were there for this historic performance.

As a book-end to the above, Rostropovich recording (no video of the concert) on YouTube.

The notes about this recording add some additional color to the events of the performance:

"On Aug. 21, 1968, Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring. This same day saw the Soviet State Symphony Orchestra's Proms debut, with Rostropovich scheduled to perform Antonin Dvorak's Cello Concerto, an ironic coinciding of events. A skirmish ran through the audience, which finally settled down with shouts of "shut up" out-yelling calls for the concert to be cancelled. Rostropovich performed with tears streaming down his cheeks as a terrified [Galina] Vishnevskaya [a Russian soprano opera singer who was his wife] hid in her box. The performance burns with Rostropovich's impassioned playing - an unforgettable evening when art coincided with human events to create one of history's momentous theatrical occasions."

The Obsolete Man

2017-09-12T20:14:00.000-07:00

In the mid-20th Century, in a medium almost forgotten and quaintly known today as "black and white network television", an iconoclastic collection of stories were told over a five-year period under the heading "The Twilight Zone".

Many readers of these posts may decry "ancient melodrama" and eschew networks and anything that's not HD 4K color. But they would be missing out on some of the most insightful, inciteful and thought provoking drama produced during the time between Shakespeare and our own.

All fans and most curious observers have a few favorite episodes of the series, or one of the many spin-offs that have graced various media over the years.

Today I'd like to bring one to your attention for it states, in 25 minutes, a concise summary of where the United States and much of Europe and the "civilized" world have gone, in terms of limiting the unalienable rights that have been the cornerstone of this nation.

[Please forgive the people who posted the video, I'm sure they did the best they could. If you have Amazon Prime Video (and there are other sources, too) you can watch a much better edition there.]

I give you, 'The Twilight Zone', Season 2, Episode 29 (what series produces 29 episodes a season any more?!) "The Obsolete Man" starring Burgess Meredith and Fritz Weaver.

Federal Spending Programs

2015-09-21T23:12:00.001-07:00

I originally posted this on Facebook as a response to a comment that "Common Core Was Forced On The States":

Well, hmmmmm, how to tackle this? Well, first of all, the law that established the Department of Education specifically required any curriculum established for state public schools to be "optional" - that the Department could not "force" the states to accept it.

Also, the Supreme Court has ruled that there is a line (although it's vague about specifics) beyond which Federal law cannot "force" (I believe their term was "coerce") state governments to act.

So, the Feds neither force nor coerce states to accept their programs. Instead, they put strings into incentives: IF you state governments want a share of this GREAT BIG PIE OF TAXPAYER DOLLARS (some of which came from YOUR state residents) then all you have to do is 'X', and 'Y', and 'Z'. Poof - no coercion.

I have seen stats that in some states, the total spend is 2/3 from FEDERAL sources, rather than the taxes of their own residents. This is EASY for politicians to do: Their voters get "benefits", "programs", etc. and don't have to pay the full costs.

It's also very DIFFICULT for politicians to say "NO" to this money: After all, their voters paid some of the tax money that went into the PIE and if they didn't claim "their fair share" that money would be spent in other states.

I think ALL of this is a scam! First of all, spending money this way means that no one in the cycle is interested in either the success of the program or the validity of the spending: It's all "other people's money" or "FREE money" that their voters won't vote against them for spending. Secondly, it ensures that tax rates at the Federal level will continue increasing forever (or the deficit continues to increase forever) because there is a bottomless pit of "need" when politicians get to spend "FREE money". Finally, no matter how "non-coercive" each individual program might be, (just like with entitlements each can be justified) the sum total of all this Federal money washing into state budgets means the concept of Federalism is being undermined.

An example: The Federal School Lunch program, which now serves three meals a day, sometimes seven days a week and sometimes throughout the year, and sometimes without any means testing of the recipients. Why are taxpayers in Florida paying for hungry students in Wisconsin? Why are taxpayers in Wisconsin paying for hungry students in Arizona? This is OBVIOUSLY a program with zero logic: If a state (or just a school district) has a poverty problem, the local or state government should step in to see what can be done to solve the problem. To have a one-size-fits-all Federal/National program means the needs of communities are not met, that there is much waste and overlap of administrative rules and regulations and that taxpayers have no way to VOTE for changes in those programs in their areas.

Sorry to go on so long, but there needs to be deeper understanding of how these programs work. EVERYONE likes each program idea. The sum total of them is that we're going BROKE - FAST!

What's Missing In Immigration Reform Legislation?

2013-04-23T22:04:00.000-07:00

Recently the "Gang of Eight" in the US Senate (four Democrats and four Republicans) worked behind closed doors to hammer out an immigration reform bill. The details were released earlier today and the analysis is flowing from all corners. I'm not going to get into the details, the pros or the cons. I don't get a vote and the odds are I won't bother trying to read the almost 1,000 pages of the bill.

But from what I am reading and hearing in the media, I have some concerns about what is not in the bill. Important issues which need to be debated, discussed and resolved before the USA can resolve it's immigration problems.

Here is how I see the problems:

The bill does not have a limit on the number of illegal immigrants who can apply for citizenship. Yes, there are supposedly 11 million illegals in the US today, and any who applies for the program needs to prove they were in the country prior to 1/1/2012. OK, but what does that mean? What if there are 15 million who are already in the country? Or 20 million? Or what if enough documentation can be forged to swell the number to 40 or 50 or 60 million? Why doesn't the legislation say "THIS MANY AND NO MORE"?
The bill states that applicants must have a job and not collect government benefits during the 10 years they wait to apply for citizenship. How will that be enforced? If there is another economic down turn, will they be denied unemployment benefits? Will the political class deny them food stamps? Will their children be turned away at the schoolhouse door?
How will any legislation deal with the "sanctuary cities" which currently flout the law? Why wouldn't they just continue their status quo?
Cato Institute and the ACLU are raising many concerns about e-verify and how it will work. It's a system which we assume the government will be 100% correct from day one. If they are 99% correct, that means 1.5 million Americans will be incorrectly precluded from working. This week we learned that one of the Boston bombers traveled to Russia without being stopped because DHS typed 'Tsarnaev' incorrectly...and THEY will manage the e-verify database! What will prevent (ie, what safeguards are in the legislation) someone from accessing or changing the information without proper authorization? Should we mention Joe the Plumber - and ask what happened to the state union employee who disclosed his personal information? How much time did she spend in jail? What if a jilted lover decided to flag his/her former partner as ineligible to work? What is to prevent e-verify from being used to enforce other programs - how about going after people who don't pay their spousal support, or don't support same-sex marriage? Oh, yes, the government has a track record of saying one thing and doing another: remember the income tax was to be only 1% on high earners? Remember that Social Security funds were to be in a lockbox? I could go on and on with examples, but that makes the point.

Recently I heard a twenty-something immigrant from India tell her story. She was 9 and her sister was 12 when they family applied for immigration visas for the US. The process took ten years of waiting patiently in India. When the approvals finally came through, she and her parents were allowed to immigrate - but her sister was older than 21 and was not allowed to travel on her parents' documents. The sister is still in India, and may wait another 8-12 years before being allowed to enter the US LEGALLY. Why - WHY - should people who happened to live geographically close enough to jump the border be allowed any advantage to be in the US before this girl who sits alone in India while her family is in the US legally?

I'm not against foreigners or immigrants. Heck, I'm an immigrant myself! But I think it's ridiculous to allow people who entered the country illegally - many given "sanctuary" in cities in violation of federal laws - to stay while millions who wait patiently for their legal entry must continue to wait. I don't know what the "solution" is, I just think the existing system is broken thanks to the inept politicians and bureaucrats at all levels.

The United States' Fiscal Cliff and Related Issues

2012-12-03T15:41:00.000-08:00

As I write this, the United States' political leadership is locked in a challenge the media has framed as "The Fiscal Cliff". (I recognize that linked pages will update over time, but I expect the elements will still be applicable to the points I make below. Just keep in mind that today is December 3, 2012, and the discussions are on-going and incomplete.)

The link above goes into this history and making of the current "crisis", so I won't dwell on that any more than to say the politicians who are elected to Congress to do the people's business didn't want to until after the November 2012 elections, so they created this "crisis" themselves to serve their own purposes. What these were/are, or what the consequences might be to the country is beyond any amount of speculation I care to do here. Instead, I'd like to talk about how this is being viewed by people in this country (at least, those who I am in contact with) and my views on their views.

To begin, a post on Facebook:

Barry: Actually, I honestly don't portend to know ALL the facts and truths behind these issues as you feel you do. You take what your side expuoses [sic] and run with it. I guess that's fine if it wasn't for the fact that so much of it on both sides is gobbitygook [sic]. Bottom line, I think those over $250K can and should pay a higher rate. It won't result in economic chaos, I don't believe in the concept of "trickle-down" economics. To me it sounds like a scam.

Well, Barry is certainly free to have and express his opinion. But this got several responses expressing disagreement on various points. Here is mine:

Opher: Barry, you don't believe in trickle down economics, but you believe in trickle down government spending? How is that any better? You think more money should go to Washington and they'll decide how best to spend it - like Solyndra and the Chevy Volt were good ideas!

Go to any hospital in your area and look at the list of donors who built it: Do you see any great political names? Any Kennedys or Daleys or Reids or Pelosis? No! The names are of local businesspeople and a few national organizations/foundations/philanthropists. Would you prefer their money went to Washington to decide what to build? THAT is what you are advocating - that Washington will do a better job of managing the money than those who earned it.

Let me put it this way: If you had a winning ticket to last week's Powerball Lottery and won $150 MILLION lump-sum payment, who would you want to assist you in managing it: Barack Obama or Mitt Romney?

This comment was popular with several who were critical of Barry, but I was trying to sway Barry directly, but based on his response he wasn't:

Barry: I've seen many abuses on the business side as well as on the Washington side. It's not as black and white as you would like it to be. I believe in a graduated income tax, period. If you want to throw slogans like "class warfare" at me, go ahead. People just dig in when you start that sort of name calling. As Bob D said so beautifully, "It's a restless hungry feeling that don't do no one no good/ and everything I'm a sayin you can say it just as good/ your right from your side and I'm right from mine/ we're both just one too many mornings and a thousand miles behind. "

The quote from "One Too Many Mornings" by Dylan may have been relevant to Barry, but he's not listening to people he disagrees with. Why not? What is at the root of his stubbornness? Another person in the thread pointed out that Barry was being "emotional rather than logical" about the crisis, and that reminded me of a point that Dennis Prager has made many times - that emotion cannot be the basis for public policy. So, this is what I wrote:

Opher: My view is that many on the left view much of this with emotion rather than logic. There is a time and place for emotion: your family, your community, etc. But when it comes to public policy (whether national, state, local, etc.) there is very - VERY - little room for emotion. For example - we can all agree that compassion is an important and special emotion. We try to teach our children to be compassionate to others, etc. But as soon as compassion is used to justify public policy, it fails: Being compassionate to one person/group BY DEFINITION means you are being un-compassionate to all other people/groups. For example, as soon as a government program is defined to give college financial aid to poor black kids, someone else will ask for a similar program for poor American Indian kids. Then another request to aid the poor Latino kids. A few years later, someone says "Hey, people of 'alternative' sexual orientation are under-represented in college, we should help them" and another program is created. After a few decades of this kind of thinking, we have programs for aid to the disabled and aid to the over-weight and aid for the female athletes and aid for short people and aid for tall people and there is never an end to it! The result is that college costs go up (after all, screening/applying/approving/reporting on all those programs must be done by professionals who understand all of that) and the fewer people who are actually paying the bill are being made to pay more and more in order to make it possible for all the others to get their aid! (Sorry this went so long, but it's all one thought for me.)

The result of emotion in public policy leads to all of these programs - each one totally justified on merits and good intentions - which have bankrupted the country. Aid to farmers who farm and aid to farmers who don't farm, aid to companies that hire more and aid to companies who want to hire more, aid to states that have too little rain and aid to states that have too much rain, aid to cities with too much pollution and aid to cities that want more industry to locate there. And now that we're talking about cutting government spending (read that as "Ending some of these programs") EVERYONE complains that the other guys' program should be cut, but not the ones that benefit me (or my group or the group that hires me to lobby for their program!).

The bottom line is that everything must be cut and everyone will be hurt by the cutting. If we try to make cuts emotionally, we will never cut anything. We must steel ourselves to the fact that people with legitimate needs will be hurt. I'm sorry. Too many people who did not need aid got it and now those who do need aid cannot. I am sorry. I'll give what I can to help those I can, but the government must stop being driven by these emotional appeals.

It took us about 80 years to get here - since FDR started all of those alpha-bet soup agencies - and it may take us 40, 50, 60 or more years to get things back in order. Two or three generations will feel the hurt of cuts in programs and reductions in services. I'm sorry, but that's what it will take. It's a bleak vision, but the only other one I see will involve bloodshed. We had a terrible Civil War 150 years ago to solve one social problem - I hope we don't need another to solve this one.

Again, sorry to go on so long...and please tell me that you see a better way to get us out of this mess...

As I re-visit the post, there have been no comments giving us another solution. Forty, 50 60 or more years of cuts and reductions seems like a lot of pain. It will be. It may end up being a shorter period of time - we could have rampant growth of the economy, making it easier for government programs to be cut as individuals pick up the slack with their added earnings. It could be that fewer people will apply for assistance as they get better paying jobs and benefits with a growing economy. I can't predict all of that - but I can see that as things currently stand, it will be a long, painful road.

How the Tax System Works or Bar Stool Economics

2012-10-08T14:11:00.006-07:00

This has been going around for a long time, I just thought having a handy reference for it would be helpful.

Bar Stool Economics

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for a beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100.

If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:
The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.00.
The sixth would pay $3.00.
The seventh would pay $7.00.
The eighth would pay $12.00.
The ninth would pay $18.00.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.00.
So that’s what they decided to do.

The men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with arrangement, until one day when the owner threw them a curve. "Since you are all such good customers", he said, "I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily beers by $20.00." Drinks for the ten men now cost just $80.00.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get their fair share? They realized that $20.00 divided by six is $3.33.

But if they subtracted that from everybody ’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer.

The bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so:
The fifth man like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33% savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28% savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of 12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid 14 instead of 18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).
Each of the six was better off than before!
And the first four continued to drink for free.

But once outside the bar, the men began to compare their savings.

"I only got a dollar out of the $20", declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man, "but he got $10!"

"Yeah, that’s right", shouted the seventh man. "Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!"

"Wait a minute", yelled the first four men in unison. "We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!"

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn’t have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

For those who understand, no explanation is needed.

For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.

Note: While the author and original source of this column is unknown, the point made is still valid: Whenever a progressive tax system is revised so that taxes paid are cut, the wealthy - who already pay a disproportionate share of the taxes - will reap a disproportionate share of the reduction.

Interest Rates

2012-09-08T11:16:00.001-07:00

Here's another item that I've been thinking about: Interest rates. You know, if you went to a bank today and opened a savings account, you'll get something like 0.5% interest on your money. If you buy a home you'll pay around 3-4%. You can buy a car at 0%, but a lot of those loans are gimmicks from the auto companies. Regardless, we can all agree that these are days of record low interest rates.

And in these record low rates, our Federal Debt has crossed the $16 TRILLION level. That's $16,000,000,000,000.00 if you want to see all the digits. The best way I can put ONE TRILLION into perspective is this: if you used $1 to represent one second in time, ONE TRILLION seconds would be more than 31,709 YEARS. And we have sixteen times that amount of debt!

So, what is the United States paying in interest on all that debt? A mere $227 BILLION this year. That's INTEREST ONLY. Not paying down any of the principle - that just gets rolled over into new debt.

In fact, despite the total debt almost doubling since 2006, falling interest rates have meant that interest payments have remained practically unchanged.

Now, how long do you think rates will continue to be this low? A year? Two years? Three years?! And then what happens when it goes UP? Well, if the rate on Federal borrowing goes up one percent, the amount of interest paid will increase by $250 BILLION. Two percent means $500 BILLION more than today's payments.

That $722 BILLION would be more than the total budgets of many Federal Departments. And it wouldn't end there: When President Carter left office in 1980, the prime rate was 21.5% and the 6-month T-Bill rate was 7.5%. Today a 7.5% rate would produce an interest payment total of $1.688 TRILLION annually.

For anyone to say that our debt is not out of control is not only ignoring these at-the-surface numbers, but also ignores the deeper analysis, that points to "unfunded liabilities" for Social Security and Medicare that exceeds $100 TRILLION, plus unfunded Federal pensions and retirement benefits. And all that is just Federal - how many more TRILLIONs are in the books of state and local governments?

This is sounding like a very depressing post, but my point is that we STILL HAVE (SOME) TIME! While rates are low and we can still afford these interest payments, we must change course and prepare for rough seas. That means cutting spending, ending programs that have outlived their uses, limiting entitlements and growing the economy. These huge dollar amounts cannot be corrected by taxing the rich. They cannot be corrected by taxing EVERYONE!

We must cut spending.

We must all say "I am a special interest and I don't want anything from the government". We must take responsibility for ourselves and our families. We must join local communities and solve our problems ourselves. Looking to Washington, or our state capitols, or our city councils we no longer will find answers. We must do it ourselves and set this country back on course for freedom, prosperity, and liberty for all.

New call for Congress to spend more on infrastructure

2012-05-07T22:23:00.001-07:00

The mayor of St. Paul, MN, Chris Coleman (D) calls for Congress to spend more on infrastructure.

New call for Congress to spend more on infrastructure | Video | Fox News

Mayor Coleman is interviewed by Neil Cavuto, who usually does a good job of holding the line on tough questions. But for some reason, Coleman is able to wriggle away and repeat his do-good “If we don’t invest in these critical projects we won’t be able to grow the economy” line.

But, is this really something that Congress needs to get involved in? I mean, why do taxes collected in Florida and Texas and California and Arizona need to be spent on roads and bridges in St. Paul, MN? Oh, sorry Mayor Coleman, you don’t like using the “S-word” do you? You prefer to call it all “Investment”, right?

There is NO investment by government - the government has no money! It's SPENDING. SPENDING tax revenue on projects politicians think are important.

And what tax revenue do politicians enjoy spending the most? OTHER PEOPLES' taxes! Because politicians like to deliver "the pork" by bringing in tax money from Georgia and Florida and California and Texas to spend in St Paul. It's "Obama's Stash" as the media has repeated over and over.

That's EASY because the locals get the benefits of the SPENDING without having to pay for it out of their own pockets.

If it is so important for St. Paul to fix their roads and bridges, why don't they float a bond measure, raise their own property taxes, or add on some sales tax juice - and SPEND that money on their own projects?

THAT is what is most broken about our country - everyone wants someone ELSE to pay for the SPENDING, so everyone looks to Washington to make it happen.

The other problem with spending Federal tax dollars on local issues is that the Feds take a slice off the top. I have seen estimates that it costs from $.80 to $1.50 to deliver a dollar of value out of the Feds. Why pay for all that overhead?

If you can get this question to Mayor Coleman, I sure would like an answer: "Why should the people of Dallas pay to build roads and bridges in your city? Dallas has their own projects to pay for. Isn't it smarter for them to pay for their project and your citizens to pay for your project?"

Why An Obama Voter in 2008 Is Anti-Obama in 2012

2012-05-05T01:37:00.001-07:00

Listening to the Michael Medved show (May 3, 2012) a caller during the first 30 minutes explained why he wasn’t going to vote for Obama again. Identified as “Kevin in Chicago” his story is pretty simple…

Kevin: I voted for Obama last time, except for mine was mainly an anti-war, anti-bailout, anti-Patriot Act vote, thinking that, you know, with the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld and all that stuff…so mine was mainly an anti- vote last time, and there’s no way I’d ever vote for him again.

Same with my kids – I got kids in their twenties and them and all their friends got caught up in the kinda rock-star circuit with Obama last time and none of them are gonna vote for him again.

Medved: What’s been your biggest disappointment?

Kevin: Pretty much just that, you know, the extension of the wars, the Afghanistan War, the NDAA Act adding onto the Patriot Act, and the increase in the bail-outs. Seems to be that’s the main things. It just seems like there’s too much arrogance, too much arrogance in the whole way they do things, and this Fast and Furious thing that seems to be covered up, and just too much non-transparency. I mean, that was a big thing he ran on, “transparency this” and, you know, the rhetoric “well, if Congress isn’t going to do it then I’ll just take matters into my own hands and do it myself” that kind of talk.

Medved: I’m really glad to hear from you, are you planning to vote for Romney or have you just decided you’re not going to vote for Obama?

Kevin: Oh no, I’m going to vote for Ron Paul.

They went on to discuss the pros and cons of Ron Paul. But the important part of the call, to me at least, was the clearly lost “hope and change” dream of 2008 will not motivated people after seeing the repeated failures of Obama to be a credible leader and policy maker. Should make for a very exciting election season!

LA Riots–Twenty Years Later

2012-04-30T00:12:00.001-07:00

April 29, 1992 – twenty years ago today – I was working at ARCO in the downtown towers. Around 1PM the verdict was to be read in the trial of the LAPD officers charged with beating motorist Rodney King. At the time the Internet was not used for commercial purposes, and radio signals could not received in the building, so to get “live” updates on the verdict I used CompuServe. As the verdict was reported, one “not guilty” after another, I began to fear the worst. I walked down the hall to my managers office (Herb Gold) and told him about the verdicts. I suggested we should all leave the building and get out of downtown Los Angeles. Herb said we couldn’t make that decision on our own, but he would check with others.

By the time I had returned to my desk, a memo had been distributed: Go home, it said. Call the 800-number for details about when to return to the office. I was riding a company van pool at the time and called our driver. He, too, had received the memo and was preparing to call everyone to meet at the van.

The ride home was amazingly quiet. Very little traffic on the roadways and we made good time, listening on the radio to reports of scattered violence and statements by city officials for calm in the wake of the verdicts.

When I got home the TV news added images to the reports of scattered violence. I watched Reginald Denny have his head smashed with a brick. Fires started to erupt as the sun set.

I was on the verge of tears. Eden was six weeks shy of her fourth birthday. What kind of world had we brought a child into?

No one knew how long any rioting might last, or how much of the city would be affected. We decided to go to the market to buy some food, batteries for flashlights, candles, etc. Whatever would be needed for a few days so we would not have to go out of the house.

The scene at the market was something out of the Twilight Zone: It was packed full of people, all checkstands were open with long lines, but everything was totally quiet. No one was speaking, although we all knew why we were there. The sounds of the registers – clink, clinkity-clink, clink, clink – was heard as items were rung up for each customer, in silence.

Much of the rest of those five days remains a dull blur to me. When I eventually returned to the office, I heard that two people had stayed in the building the whole time – a security guard and the manager of disaster planning - Stephanie Masaki-Shatz. She told me later that she had meticulously cleaned out every vending machine in the building – crackers, candy, gum, trail-mix, etc. had been all she had to eat while trapped in the building.

I recall the video of people looting, smashing windows, shop owners trying to protect their businesses from wild mobs who were stealing and destroying – not in the name of justice, but just because they could. Reporters who were brave enough to be on the streets would ask looters why they were there. None had heard of Rodney King – they were just going to take stuff because everyone else was.

The story I link to below discusses how much of the 1992 riot crimes are still unsolved. I had not been aware of this aspect of the riot, but it doesn’t surprise me. The chaos and turmoil of those days was unbelievable. I hope that justice will eventually come to these victims.

Twenty years ago, Los Angeles erupted in riots after four cops were acquitted in the videotaped beating of Rodney King, but during an uprising supposedly in the name of justice, some people got away with murder.

During the five "Days of Outrage," a disbelieving nation watched on television as looters broke store windows and emptied shelves, Korean grocers sat atop their stores with assault rifles and fires were set throughout South Central and other parts of the city. Beatings, including the brutal one administered to truck driver Reginald Denny, were captured on video by news crews.

“Can’t we all just get along?” pleaded King as the city was plunged into violent chaos. The phrase became a rallying cry for a city determined to heal after being torn apart by racial divisions.

The police were overwhelmed, and the National Guard was called in to help quell the violence. When the mayhem subsided five days later, nearly 1,600 buildings were destroyed or damaged and more than 2,300 people were hurt. The final cost of the riot was estimated at more than a billion dollars, including $735 million in property damage.

For 22 murder victims, LA Riots leave legacy of justice eluded | Fox News

Vogue Magazine Profile of Asma al-Assad

2012-04-28T07:02:00.001-07:00

Yes, it has been a long time since I have posted here regularly, but there is a breaking story that needs some immediate attention.

The February 2011 issue of Vogue Magazine contained a profile of Asma al-Assad, the wife of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. At the time, the “Arab Spring” had been rolling through the region. By mid-March a coalition of nations were bombing pro-Gaddafi forces in Libya. Shortly thereafter the call for Assad to resign went up in Syria, followed by the use of military force to quell the rebellion.

Suddenly this week, the article was removed from the Vogue website, leaving a “Page Not Found” error. The call has been put out for any archived copies of the article to be posted on the Internet so that this attempt to purge history does not succeed.

After doing a Google Search for the article I found alike titled “The Only Remaining Online Copy of Vogue's Asma al-Assad Profile” on The Atlantic’s website. The article linked to the elements below, posted at www.PresidentAssad.net, a “fan site” for the dictator. In order to preserve this article, I am posting it here as I found it, only removing the animated GIFs of the Syrian flag and dove bearing and olive branch.

Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert

by Joan Juliet Buck | photographed by James Nachtwey

Photographed by James Nachtwey

Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic—the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies. Her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment. She’s a rare combination: a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement. Paris Match calls her “the element of light in a country full of shadow zones.” She is the first lady of Syria.

Syria is known as the safest country in the Middle East, possibly because, as the State Department’s Web site says, “the Syrian government conducts intense physical and electronic surveillance of both Syrian citizens and foreign visitors.” It’s a secular country where women earn as much as men and the Muslim veil is forbidden in universities, a place without bombings, unrest, or kidnappings, but its shadow zones are deep and dark. Asma’s husband, Bashar al-Assad, was elected president in 2000, after the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad, with a startling 97 percent of the vote. In Syria, power is hereditary. The country’s alliances are murky. How close are they to Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah? There are souvenir Hezbollah ashtrays in the souk, and you can spot the Hamas leadership racing through the bar of the Four Seasons. Its number-one enmity is clear: Israel. But that might not always be the case. The United States has just posted its first ambassador there since 2005, Robert Ford.

Iraq is next door, Iran not far away. Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, is 90 minutes by car from Damascus. Jordan is south, and next to it the region that Syrian maps label Palestine. There are nearly one million refugees from Iraq in Syria, and another half-million displaced Palestinians.

“It’s a tough neighborhood,” admits Asma al-Assad.

It’s also a neighborhood intoxicatingly close to the dawn of civilization, where agriculture began some 10,000 years ago, where the wheel, writing, and musical notation were invented. Out in the desert are the magical remains of Palmyra, Apamea, and Ebla. In the National Museum you see small 4,000-year-old panels inlaid with mother-of-pearl that is echoed in the new mother-of-pearl furniture for sale in the souk. Christian Louboutin comes to buy the damask silk brocade they’ve been making here since the Middle Ages for his shoes and bags, and has incidentally purchased a small palace in Aleppo, which, like Damascus, has been inhabited for more than 5,000 years.

The first lady works out of a small white building in a hilly, modern residential neighborhood called Muhajireen, where houses and apartments are crammed together and neighbors peer and wave from balconies. The first impression of Asma al-Assad is movement—a determined swath cut through space with a flash of red soles. Dark-brown eyes, wavy chin-length brown hair, long neck, an energetic grace. No watch, no jewelry apart from Chanel agates around her neck, not even a wedding ring, but fingernails lacquered a dark blue-green. She’s breezy, conspiratorial, and fun. Her accent is English but not plummy. Despite what must be a killer IQ, she sometimes uses urban shorthand: “I was, like. . . .”

Asma Akhras was born in London in 1975, the eldest child and only daughter of a Syrian Harley Street cardiologist and his diplomat wife, both Sunni Muslims. They spoke Arabic at home. She grew up in Ealing, went to Queen’s College, and spent holidays with family in Syria. “I’ve dealt with the sense that people don’t expect Syria to be normal. I’d show my London friends my holiday snaps and they’d be—‘Where did you say you went?’ ”

She studied computer science at university, then went into banking. “It wasn’t a typical path for women,” she says, “but I had it all mapped out.” By the spring of 2000, she was closing a big biotech deal at JP Morgan in London and about to take up an MBA at Harvard. She started dating a family friend: the second son of president Hafez al-Assad, Bashar, who’d cut short his ophthalmology studies in London in 1994 and returned to Syria after his older brother, Basil, heir apparent to power, died in a car crash. They had known each other forever, but a ten-year age difference meant that nothing registered—until it did.

“I was always very serious at work, and suddenly I started to take weekends, or disappear, and people just couldn’t figure it out,” explains the first lady. “What do you say—‘I’m dating the son of a president’? You just don’t say that. Then he became president, so I tried to keep it low-key. Suddenly I was turning up in Syria every month, saying, ‘Granny, I miss you so much!’ I quit in October because by then we knew that we were going to get married at some stage. I couldn’t say why I was leaving. My boss thought I was having a nervous breakdown because nobody quits two months before bonus after closing a really big deal. He wouldn’t accept my resignation. I was, like, ‘Please, really, I just want to get out, I’ve had enough,’ and he was ‘Don’t worry, take time off, it happens to the best of us.’ ” She left without her bonus in November and married Bashar al-Assad in December.

“What I’ve been able to take away from banking was the transferable skills—the analytical thinking, understanding the business side of running a company—to run an NGO or to try and oversee a project.” She runs her office like a business, chairs meeting after meeting, starts work many days at six, never breaks for lunch, and runs home to her children at four. “It’s my time with them, and I get them fresh, unedited—I love that. I really do.” Her staff are used to eating when they can. “I have a rechargeable battery,” she says.

The 35-year-old first lady’s central mission is to change the mind-set of six million Syrians under eighteen, encourage them to engage in what she calls “active citizenship.” “It’s about everyone taking shared responsibility in moving this country forward, about empowerment in a civil society. We all have a stake in this country; it will be what we make it.”
In 2005 she founded Massar, built around a series of discovery centers where children and young adults from five to 21 engage in creative, informal approaches to civic responsibility. Massar’s mobile Green Team has touched 200,000 kids across Syria since 2005. The organization is privately funded through donations. The Syria Trust for Development, formed in 2007, oversees Massar as well as her first NGO, the rural micro-credit association FIRDOS, and SHABAB, which exists to give young people business skills they need for the future.

And then there’s her cultural mission: “People tend to see Syria as artifacts and history,” she says. “For us it’s about the accumulation of cultures, traditions, values, customs. It’s the difference between hardware and software: the artifacts are the hardware, but the software makes all the difference—the customs and the spirit of openness. We have to make sure that we don’t lose that. . . . ” Here she gives an apologetic grin. “You have to excuse me, but I’m a banker—that brand essence.”

That brand essence includes the distant past. There are 500,000 important ancient works of art hidden in storage; Asma al-Assad has brought in the Louvre to create a network of museums and cultural attractions across Syria, and asked Italian experts to help create a database of the 5,000 archaeological sites in the desert. “Culture,” she says, “is like a financial asset. We have an abundance of it, thousands of years of history, but we can’t afford to be complacent.”

In December, Asma al-Assad was in Paris to discuss her alliance with the Louvre. She dazzled a tough French audience at the International Diplomatic Institute, speaking without notes. “I’m not trying to disguise culture as anything more than it is,” she said, “and if I sound like I’m talking politics, it’s because we live in a politicized region, a politicized time, and we are affected by that.”

The French ambassador to Syria, Eric Chevallier, was there: “She managed to get people to consider the possibilities of a country that’s modernizing itself, that stands for a tolerant secularism in a powder-keg region, with extremists and radicals pushing in from all sides—and the driving force for that rests largely on the shoulders of one couple. I hope they’ll make the right choices for their country and the region. ”
Damascus evokes a dusty version of a Mediterranean hill town in an Eastern-bloc country. The courtyard of the Umayyad Mosque at night looks exactly like St. Mark’s square in Venice. When I first arrive, I’m met on the tarmac by a minder, who gives me a bouquet of white roses and lends me a Syrian cell phone; the head minder, a high-profile American PR, joins us the next day. The first lady’s office has provided drivers, so I shop and see sights in a bubble of comfort and hospitality. On the rare occasions I am out alone, a random series of men in leather jackets seems to be keeping close tabs on what I am doing and where I am headed.

“I like things I can touch. I like to get out and meet people and do things,” the first lady says as we set off for a meeting in a museum and a visit to an orphanage. “As a banker, you have to be so focused on the job at hand that you lose the experience of the world around you. My husband gave me back something I had lost.”

She slips behind the wheel of a plain SUV, a walkie-talkie and her cell thrown between the front seats and a Syrian-silk Louboutin tote on top. She does what the locals do—swerves to avoid crazy men who run across busy freeways, misses her turn, checks your seat belt, points out sights, and then can’t find a parking space. When a traffic cop pulls her over at a roundabout, she lowers the tinted window and dips her head with a playful smile. The cop’s eyes go from slits to saucers.

Her younger brother Feras, a surgeon who moved to Syria to start a private health-care group, says, “Her intelligence is both intellectual and emotional, and she’s a master at harmonizing when, and how much, to use of each one.”

Photographed by James Nachtwey

In the Saint Paul orphanage, maintained by the Melkite–Greek Catholic patriarchate and run by the Basilian sisters of Aleppo, Asma sits at a long table with the children. Two little boys in new glasses and thick sweaters are called Yussuf. She asks them what kind of music they like. “Sad music,” says one. In the room where she’s had some twelve computers installed, the first lady tells a nun, “I hope you’re letting the younger children in here go crazy on the computers.” The nun winces: “The children are afraid to learn in case they don’t have access to computers when they leave here,” she says.
In the courtyard by the wall down which Saint Paul escaped in a basket 2,000 years ago, an old tree bears gigantic yellow fruit I have never seen before. Citrons. Cédrats in French.

Back in the car, I ask what religion the orphans are. “It’s not relevant,” says Asma al-Assad. “Let me try to explain it to you. That church is a part of my heritage because it’s a Syrian church. The Umayyad Mosque is the third-most-important holy Muslim site, but within the mosque is the tomb of Saint John the Baptist. We all kneel in the mosque in front of the tomb of Saint John the Baptist. That’s how religions live together in Syria—a way that I have never seen anywhere else in the world. We live side by side, and have historically. All the religions and cultures that have passed through these lands—the Armenians, Islam, Christianity, the Umayyads, the Ottomans—make up who I am.”

“Does that include the Jews?” I ask.

“And the Jews,” she answers. “There is a very big Jewish quarter in old Damascus.”

The Jewish quarter of Damascus spans a few abandoned blocks in the old city that emptied out in 1992, when most of the Syrian Jews left. Their houses are sealed up and have not been touched, because, as people like to tell you, Syrians don’t touch the property of others. The broken glass and sagging upper floors tell a story you don’t understand—are the owners coming back to claim them one day?
The presidential family lives surrounded by neighbors in a modern apartment in Malki. On Friday, the Muslim day of rest, Asma al-Assad opens the door herself in jeans and old suede stiletto boots, hair in a ponytail, the word happiness spelled out across the back of her T-shirt. At the bottom of the stairs stands the off-duty president in jeans—tall, long-necked, blue-eyed. A precise man who takes photographs and talks lovingly about his first computer, he says he was attracted to studying eye surgery “because it’s very precise, it’s almost never an emergency, and there is very little blood.”

The old al-Assad family apartment was remade into a child-friendly triple-decker playroom loft surrounded by immense windows on three sides. With neither shades nor curtains, it’s a fishbowl. Asma al-Assad likes to say, “You’re safe because you are surrounded by people who will keep you safe.” Neighbors peer in, drop by, visit, comment on the furniture. The president doesn’t mind: “This curiosity is good: They come to see you, they learn more about you. You don’t isolate yourself.”

There’s a decorated Christmas tree. Seven-year-old Zein watches Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland on the president’s iMac; her brother Karim, six, builds a shark out of Legos; and nine-year-old Hafez tries out his new electric violin. All three go to a Montessori school.

Asma al-Assad empties a box of fondue mix into a saucepan for lunch. The household is run on wildly democratic principles. “We all vote on what we want, and where,” she says. The chandelier over the dining table is made of cut-up comic books. “They outvoted us three to two on that.”

A grid is drawn on a blackboard, with ticks for each member of the family. “We were having trouble with politeness, so we made a chart: ticks for when they spoke as they should, and a cross if they didn’t.” There’s a cross next to Asma’s name. “I shouted,” she confesses. “I can’t talk about empowering young people, encouraging them to be creative and take responsibility, if I’m not like that with my own children.”

“The first challenge for us was, Who’s going to define our lives, us or the position?” says the president. “We wanted to live our identity honestly.”

They announced their marriage in January 2001, after the ceremony, which they kept private. There was deliberately no photograph of Asma. “The British media picked that up as: Now she’s moved into the presidential palace, never to be seen again!” says Asma, laughing.

They had a reason: “She spent three months incognito,” says the president. “Before I had any official engagement,” says the first lady, “I went to 300 villages, every governorate, hospitals, farms, schools, factories, you name it—I saw everything to find out where I could be effective. A lot of the time I was somebody’s ‘assistant’ carrying the bag, doing this and that, taking notes. Nobody asked me if I was the first lady; they had no idea.”

“That way,” adds the president, “she started her NGO before she was ever seen in public as my wife. Then she started to teach people that an NGO is not a charity.”

Neither of them believes in charity for the sake of charity. “We have the Iraqi refugees,” says the president. “Everybody is talking about it as a political problem or as welfare, charity. I say it’s neither—it’s about cultural philosophy. We have to help them. That’s why the first thing I did is to allow the Iraqis to go into schools. If they don’t have an education, they will go back as a bomb, in every way: terrorism, extremism, drug dealers, crime. If I have a secular and balanced neighbor, I will be safe.”

When Angelina Jolie came with Brad Pitt for the United Nations in 2009, she was impressed by the first lady’s efforts to encourage empowerment among Iraqi and Palestinian refugees but alarmed by the Assads’ idea of safety.

“My husband was driving us all to lunch,” says Asma al-Assad, “and out of the corner of my eye I could see Brad Pitt was fidgeting. I turned around and asked, ‘Is anything wrong?’ ”

“Where’s your security?” asked Pitt.

“So I started teasing him—‘See that old woman on the street? That’s one of them! And that old guy crossing the road?

That’s the other one!’ ” They both laugh.

The president joins in the punch line: “Brad Pitt wanted to send his security guards here to come and get some training!”
After lunch, Asma al-Assad drives to the airport, where a Falcon 900 is waiting to take her to Massar in Latakia, on the coast. When she lands, she jumps behind the wheel of another SUV waiting on the tarmac. This is the kind of surprise visit she specializes in, but she has no idea how many kids will turn up at the community center on a rainy Friday.

As it turns out, it’s full. Since the first musical notation was discovered nearby, at Ugarit, the immaculate Massar center in Latakia is built around music. Local kids are jamming in a sound booth; a group of refugee Palestinian girls is playing instruments. Others play chess on wall-mounted computers. These kids have started online blood banks, run marathons to raise money for dialysis machines, and are working on ways to rid Latakia of plastic bags. Apart from a few girls in scarves, you can’t tell Muslims from Christians.

Asma al-Assad stands to watch a laborious debate about how—and whether—to standardize the Arabic spelling of the word Syria. Then she throws out a curve ball. “I’ve been advised that we have to close down this center so as to open another one somewhere else,” she says. Kids’ mouths drop open. Some repress tears. Others are furious. One boy chooses altruism: “That’s OK. We know how to do it now; we’ll help them.”

Then the first lady announces, “That wasn’t true. I just wanted to see how much you care about Massar.”

As the pilot expertly avoids sheet lightning above the snow-flecked desert on the way back, she explains, “There was a little bit of formality in what they were saying to me; it wasn’t real. Tricks like this help—they became alive, they became passionate. We need to get past formalities if we are going to get anything done.”

Two nights later it’s the annual Christmas concert by the children of Al-Farah Choir, run by the Syrian Catholic Father Elias Zahlawi. Just before it begins, Bashar and Asma al-Assad slip down the aisle and take the two empty seats in the front row. People clap, and some call out his nickname:

“Docteur! Docteur!”

Two hundred children dressed variously as elves, reindeers, or candy canes share the stage with members of the national orchestra, who are done up as elves. The show becomes a full-on songfest, with the elves and reindeer and candy canes giving their all to “Hallelujah” and “Joy to the World.” The carols slide into a more serpentine rhythm, an Arabic rap group takes over, and then it’s back to Broadway mode. The president whispers, “All of these styles belong to our culture. This is how you fight extremism—through art.”

Brass bells are handed out. Now we’re all singing “Jingle Bell Rock,” 1,331 audience members shaking their bells, singing, crying, and laughing.

“This is the diversity you want to see in the Middle East,” says the president, ringing his bell. “This is how you can have peace!”

February 25, 2011 9:03 a.m.

http://www.vogue.com/vogue-daily/article/asma-al-assad-a-rose-in-the-desert

What good does it do us to hate Scott Peterson?

2011-01-23T15:20:00.001-08:00

This may be the most difficult blog post I have ever written. Not for what it contains, but for what it implies.

I’m reading “The 7: Seven Wonders That Will Change Your Life” by Glenn Beck and Keith Ablow, more due to my respect for the authors than any specific interest in the topic. The fourth “wonder” in the book is Compassion, and Ablow shares this story:

You may remember the story of Scott Peterson, the Modesto, California, man who, on Christmas Eve of 2002, reported his pregnant wife, Laci, missing, then led the search for her. In fact, Peterson had killed Laci and disposed of her body in San Francisco Bay. He’d been having an affair at that time with a massage therapist...

What other explanation could there be for a man killing his pregnant wife on Christmas Eve other than being born with pure evil inside?

In my book Inside the Mind of Scott Peterson, I think I provide a much more credible answer. Scott Peterson was taught that human life—including his own—had no value. Back in 1945, his maternal grandfather was murdered for about five hundred dollars by a disgruntled former employee. Peterson’s mother, Jackie, was only two years old at the time. Despite her own mother still being alive (though widowed), she was placed in an orphanage that has since been called a “cesspool of pedophilia.”

When she left that orphanage as a teenager she gave birth to two children out of wedlock and quickly put them up for adoption. She didn’t give it a lot of thought. She finally married Lee Peterson, a man who had divorced his wife partly because he didn’t like the kids they’d had together. Together, Lee and Jackie had a baby. They named him Scott.

There was just one small problem: they had a funny habit of leaving him behind in places like a neighborhood restaurant, where the manager would have to call out to them, “Jackie! Lee! You left Scott!”

That’s just one part of Scott Peterson’s ugly biography. Sound like the kind of life story that leads a person to value a mother? A baby? Or does it sound like the kind of life story that leads to the creation of a person who instinctively despises new life?

What good does it do us to hate Scott Peterson?

I hated Scott Peterson as the story of his crime played out in the media and courtroom in 2002-2004. I hated Scott Peterson for killing a beautiful woman who had agreed to be his wife “for better or worse”. I hated Scott Peterson for killing a baby he never met. I hated Scott Peterson for having an affair and using some warped logic to justify (if that’s the right word) murdering his wife and unborn son in order to be with the other woman.

But after reading the above background of Scott Peterson, what good does it do to hate him? The hatred yesterday was at a much lower level than it was when his picture was in the news every day, but it was there. Today, after reading the above, I cannot sense any hatred. I don’t what the emotion I now carry is. Pity? Fear? Anger?

Ablow continues, with an explanation:

None of our views on compassion should be taken to mean that we advocate forgiving people for harming others without them facing the consequences of their actions. Compassion does not mean that justice need not be served. We can be compassionate about the traumas suffered in childhood even by someone who, in part because of those traumas, grows up to become a murderer. But that does not mean the murderer goes free. Much to the contrary, once we look honestly at the horribly fractured psyche in that individual or someone who rapes or someone who abuses children or someone who blows up a building full of innocent people or someone who defrauds others of their life savings, we realize the very real danger such people represent in society and the very real need to contain them—sometimes forever. But when we do so, we must not hobble ourselves by hating them.

You can pity someone and still punish that person. You can forgive someone and still resolve to keep yourself safe from any further injury from that person’s pathology.

Yes, I now pity Scott Peterson. He was raised by people who didn’t teach him a value for life. He grew up without a sense of joy and love for others. He was narcissistic and interested only in his own good time. That doesn’t mean that society shouldn’t punish him for his crimes. But it makes me think of how many other people are out there, being raised by people titled “parents” but have no interest in doing that job? How many more crimes will be committed by these people over the years? What can society do to protect itself from these people and, more importantly, break the cycle that causes them to turn out this way in the first place?

Taxation: The People's Business by Andrew Mellon

2011-01-16T22:08:00.001-08:00

I recently read a reference to Andrew Mellon’s plan for tax reform of 1924, published as a book titled Taxation: The People’s Business.

The history of taxation shows that taxes which are inherently excessive are not paid. The high rates inevitably put pressure upon the taxpayer to withdraw his capital from productive business.

If you’d like to buy a copy, I found one for sale on Amazon.com for $400. Wow!

$400 sounds like a collector's price for a museum quality edition...Would you prefer to get it for free? If so, go to Barnes and Noble and download their Nook ebook reading application for whatever device you own. Then, use the application to Shop for the book, and you'll find that it is FREE to download.

The ebook is obviously scanned (poorly) from a hardcopy that used fonts the OCR software was not properly correcting for. Sometimes you need to read a sentence over a few times to determine what one or two words are supposed to be. Also, the included charts and tables are so poorly formatted, they are useless.

That said, the text is fantastic, and should be required reading by every person involved in tax policy. As you can see from the quote above, Mellon latched onto the key concept behind the Laffer Curve almost 60 years before Arthur Laffer published that concept.

I will post some interesting quotes from the book over the next few days, but wanted to have this post available for anyone who wanted to get the book to read or reference.

Solar Panel Maker Moves Work to China

2011-01-14T19:15:00.001-08:00

NYTimes.com has an amazingly candid look at a company moving to China…and leaving 800 unemployed in Massachusetts:

Beyond the issues of trade and jobs, solar power experts see broader implications. They say that after many years of relying on unstable governments in the Middle East for oil, the United States now looks likely to rely on China to tap energy from the sun.

Evergreen, in announcing its move to China, was unusually candid about its motives. Michael El-Hillow, the chief executive, said in a statement that his company had decided to close the Massachusetts factory in response to plunging prices for solar panels. World prices have fallen as much as two-thirds in the last three years — including a drop of 10 percent during last year’s fourth quarter alone.

So, $45 Million in “assistance” from the state of Massachusetts, and who know how much in Federal aid (tax breaks, “stimulus” dollars, etc.) has gone down the drain as another company moves out of the US.

Ever since Jimmy Carter started the flow of tax dollars to subsidize the development of “alternative energy” producers, the only reason these companies existed was to suck up those subsidies until something better came along. There is no economic reason for them to exist, so these companies float from one government subsidy to another, searching for better terms for land or taxes or their own energy needs at each location.

It makes sense for these jobs to go to China: The advantage China has over the US is a huge labor pool which is available for much lower costs than in the US. Labor intensive jobs will move there, or anywhere the costs of labor are lower, as long as the total costs of the final product are lower than they are if built in the US.

The lesson the US politicians must learn is that they cannot change the tide by passing a law – the Laws of Economics are much more powerful and they always win. We’re almost 40 years into the lesson plan for this industry, and Obama is still talking about “investing in green energy”. The professor has not learned this lesson.

75% Want Health Care Law Changed - Rasmussen Reports™

2011-01-14T09:50:00.001-08:00

The word from Rasmussen Reports is that the health care law as written is popular with only 18% of survey respondents.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 75% of Likely U.S. Voters want to change the law, while only 18% want it left alone. Those figures include 20% who want the law repealed and nothing done to replace it, 28% who want it repealed and then have its most popular provisions put into a new law and 27% who say leave the law in place but get rid of the unpopular provisions.

It is worth noting that a majority (55%) take one of the middle ground approaches—repeal and replace or leave it and improve.

What concerns me is the fractured nature of the 75% who want it changed – how do we reach agreement on what needs to be changed, how to change it, and what to do first? While others have written about this already, I have a few ideas of my own….

I think there are several ‘clusters’ of repeal/replace options which should be debated independently of each other. This would allow creation of alliances of support for changes in one area that may not area on changes in another area. Separate bills for each change would enable legislators with different political philosophies to work together as needed to make the most change possible.

Here are some of the clusters I can envision:

Dropping elements of the current bill which are bad ideas in hind sight. This one should be an easy winner, since even Obama agrees that some requirements in the original legislation (like the small business 1099 reporting requirement) were bad ideas.
Eliminating much of the bureaucracy that current bills calls for. Everything from IRS reviews to HHS tribunals, there is too much in the law which is intrusive, unjustified and disruptive of the doctor-patient relationship. Not only that, the requirements for things like electronic record keeping and direct payments from checking accounts are unreasonable given that the government is unable to keep military or State Department secrets, and has utterly failed in restraining identity theft and use of forged Social Security numbers.
Adding things that Democrats generally don’t like. This would be difficult given the current make-up of the power arrangement in Washington (more on that later), but it should be part of the discussion. The two key elements here are tort reform and buying insurance across state lines, but the discussion should include other “competition” topics such as publishing prices for medical procedures, publishing data on hospital and doctor results for common procedures, etc.
Encourage intelligent planning and competition in the healthcare industry. In the past, the government has operated as an obstacle to competition, and this is one of the best examples: In the 1970s, as hospitals were looking at costly expansion to cover cardiac care, burn units, trauma units and more, the four major hospitals in Phoenix decided that rather than each adding all of these services, they would specialize and refer patients to the hospital capable of offering advanced services as needed. The Justice Department stepped in and threatened to sue them for restraint of trade, price fixing, etc. unless they dropped those plans and each developed all of the services. The result is that there is no way each hospital can cover the costs of all of these services, resulting in higher costs for all patients in order to make up the difference. Intelligent planning would allow for regional hospitals to specialize as long as the population base would have access to all required services.

I’m sure there are other clusters, these are just a few to start the dialog. As the Rasmussen Reports survey indicates, those under 30 want to leave the bill in place and modify it, while those over 50 want to repeal the bill and start from scratch. We need to find a middle path, and I’m hoping this post assists in clarifying what that path might look like.

Ending the War on Drugs Will Do More for Blacks Than Marching

2011-01-13T16:42:00.001-08:00

John McWhorter, Professor, The Languages of America, Columbia University, Contributing Editor, The New Republic and City Journal, has a proposal: End the War on Drugs so the black men will be required to seek legal employment. He rambles on over a variety of other topics, but this is the inner kernel of his argument:

The War on Drugs discourages young black men from seeking legal employment. Because the drugs' illegality keeps their price high, there are high salaries to be made in selling them…

You can find a podcast of him reading a longer article on the same topic at the CATO Institute website (search for January 11, 2011).

Regardless of the arguments he presents, I think that McWhorter is being too optimistic about what would happen if drugs – including cocaine, heroin, meth, etc. – were legal and cheap. He claims that, since the profit will be taken out of drug dealing, the gangs, the turf battles, the guns and violence that hangs over black communities around the country would end.

I’m not a social scientist (and I don’t believe McWhorter is, either) and I haven’t done much more than read the newspapers over the years to develop my sense of criminals in the US. But I’m thinking that the scenario he presents is unrealistic. If a gang hierarchy existed to distribute illegal drugs and that source of income disappeared, I suspect they will move on to another source of income. Just like the bootleggers of Prohibition moved on to bookmaking, illegal gambling, prostitution and other income sources once liquor became legal again.

What might these newly de-profited gangs move into? How about “protection rackets” – where a shopkeeper is threatened with arson or vandalism if he didn’t pay the gang? How about car theft and chop-shop operations? Why not counterfeiting tickets for sporting events? It would seem to me that the expected logical result of making drugs legal and cheap would be for those involved in the illegal side of the drug trade to move into other illegal operations. Why is that not reasonable to expect?

Maybe not. Maybe the dealer who was making $1,000 a day selling drugs wouldn’t be satisfied making $400 a day selling counterfeit tickets. OK, but McWhorter thinks he would be satisfied making $150 a day working at Wal-Mart! Really? Why does that make sense? Maybe I’m the one missing an obvious response to ending the war on drugs…help me find it by leaving your comments below.

Volt wins Car of the Year honors

2011-01-10T18:53:00.001-08:00

Will someone explain to me how Government Motors pulled this off?

The 2011 Chevrolet Volt got another marketing jolt Monday, when it was named the North American Car of the Year at the North American International Auto Show at Cobo Hall.

And it’s not just this show/award:

It's the latest in a string of accolades for the Volt, which went on sale in limited markets in December and costs $40,280. It was named the Green Car of the Year at the Los Angeles Auto Show in November and Motor Trend and Automobile Magazine named the Volt the 2011 car of the year the same month.

What was the criteria for these awards? The article says that “…Forty-nine auto journalists from the U.S. and Canada made the picks. The vehicles are judged on innovation, design, safety, handling, driver satisfaction and value.” Really? So let’s think about this. If the six categories are given equal weight, what is so unusual about the Chevy Volt?

Innovation? Hardly! I suspect you could have built a car capable of 40 miles on battery power and a gas engine backup about 40 years ago. Certainly 20 years ago.
Design? I don’t know…lots of other four-door compacts out there. It looks like a Toyota, Nissan, BMW, Volkswagen, all-alike. I see nothing noteworthy.
Safety? Sure, it’s safer than a car you would have built 40 years ago, but what makes it any better than any other compact being manufactured today?
Handling? It has a steering wheel, four tires and a rear-view mirror. How different/better than average is it? (Ah, and most American cars fail, Fail, FAIL in handling compared to imports, so maybe the Volt is “as good” as an import…)
Driver Satisfaction? They’ve delivered about 300 of them in the last six weeks, so how much satisfaction can the drivers have? Call me back when the average Volt has 50,000 miles on it and let me know.
Value?! VALUE?! Hell no! What “value” is there in an average car with 40-year old technology and sells for $40,280?? A brand new loaded Prius sells for $25,000 – and it really uses new technology!

So, PLEASE someone – anyone – tell me why this car wins any awards other than “Taxpayer Boondoggle of 2010”?

Update: Some want to know why I’m not recognizing that Government Motors has paid back (some) of the taxpayer money it received, and has re-issued stock to the public. OK, fair question: They haven’t paid back the taxpayers for the opportunity costs of the BILLION$ they were given. And they probably never will. Giving taxpayer money to any private company has a totally incalculable impact on the financial markets and economy of the country. But no one talks about those opportunity costs and the choices made by competitors, suppliers, dealers, customers, etc., etc., and the implications of those choices. So, no, the fact that they have repaid a tiny amount of what they were given (without anywhere near enough transparency, review, hearings or approvals) does not dissuade me from referring to them as Government Motors.

Obama to hand Commerce Dept. authority over cybersecurity ID

2011-01-08T18:35:00.001-08:00

CNET News is reporting that…

President Obama is planning to hand the U.S. Commerce Department authority over a forthcoming cybersecurity effort to create an Internet ID for Americans, a White House official said here today. [emphasis added]

Really? The same government that can’t be bothered with reports of people using Social Security numbers that belong to others is going to create Internet IDs for everyone?

And what is an Internet ID? Another email address? A logon and password to www.irs.gov? An entry in some government database…for…what…purpose?

I don’t know the details and it already seems like a bad idea. What are your thoughts on this?

California Gov. Jerry Brown's new budget: the pain for L.A. city and county

2011-01-04T21:47:00.001-08:00

Not thirty minutes after my prior post and the Los Angeles Times posts this new column:

Take, for example, just three of the proposals local officials confirm they expect to see in Brown's first budget: drastic cuts to Medi-Cal and the CalWORKS welfare-to-work program, and the diversion of so-called low-level offenders from the state prison system to local jails.

[Los Angeles] County Chief Executive William T. Fujioka told me this week that his office has been in talks with Sacramento for a couple of weeks on how to handle the staggering additional costs Los Angeles will be forced to assume. "They're just pushing these problems down to the local level with no real thought about the consequences, and I find that amazing," said Fujioka, who, at 60 and a veteran of both city and county politics, is no stranger to bitter budget warfare.

Fujioka expects Sacramento to pay 40 cents out of every dollar of additional costs the County will incur with regard to additional prisoners in County jails.

Local officials are also expecting Brown to eliminate Community Redevelopment Zones and Enterprise Zones. These are special tax districts that allow revenue generated to stay in the Zone rather than flowing to Sacramento. By eliminating them, Brown will have more money to spend while leaving less money for the cities that established those Zones.

[Los Angeles’] 32 districts pumped $178 million in direct investment into the city's economy. Although $100 million of that went to encouraging job-creating businesses, $50 million paid for more affordable housing across the city. Moreover, according to Essel, because every dollar spent by the CRA generates an additional $5 to $6 in private investment and payrolls, abolition of the CRA would take at least $890 million out of the city's economy in the new state budget's first year.

And so it starts. Sacramento will tell cities and counties to take on these services, but keep the money that local taxpayers assume will be used to pay for those services. The best part is how the column ends:

Both Essel and Fujioka, like other local officials with whom I spoke this week, believe that the brutal cuts Brown is proposing are meant to set up the anticipated spring election in which the governor will go to the people and ask them to approve the extension of existing tax surcharges. Playing chicken with voters whose own finances are, in many cases, stretched to the breaking point could be a dangerous proposition.

But that's what Governor Moonbeam is planning. Does he have a back-up plan? Heck, why should he? I doubt any of Jerry’s wealth is tied up in California investments!

Jerry Brown: California's new governor takes a hard look at Prop. 13

2011-01-04T21:12:00.001-08:00

If you live in California and are not paying attention to the rhetoric (as reported by the Los Angeles Times) of Jerry Brown, I hope your wallet is in Nevada:

Brown said implementation of the property-tax limits that Californians hold dear has contributed to the state's financial mess. The new governor said his budget proposal next week would include plans to return to cities and counties many government functions that Sacramento took over after Proposition 13 passed.

The measure "started the centralization of power," Brown told reporters before entering the closed-door meeting. Afterward, he expanded on that idea, saying Proposition 13 "took away the power of counties to tax, for the most part; it sent the decisions up to Sacramento. So we want to redistribute all that."

Now, I don’t claim to have perfect recall of the events of 1978, but notice how the Times words this sentence: “…government functions that Sacramento took over after Proposition 13 passed”. It’s not that Prop 13 put those functions in the control of Sacramento, it’s that the politicians took over those functions.

The power of politicians, in large part, is measured by their ability to send (taxpayer) money to their districts. So even if the money was in the district and stayed in the district, by being able to legislate that X dollars would go to their constituents allowed the politician to crow about the achievement come re-election time.

There are several things wrong with this political calculus: First, the original tax collection in the cities and counties allowed the revenue to be tagged for specific purposes, whether schools or fire department, libraries or parks, etc. When the money went to Sacramento those labels were wiped off and the money was re-distributed as block grants, that the local politicians were able to distribute as they saw best, not necessarily as the voters had intended. (This was recently demonstrated in Orange County when voters passed a special tax to fund police, fire and prosecutorial services. The politicians gave none to the fire department once the money started pouring in, and voters are still unclear about why.)

Second, the process of collecting money locally, sending it to Sacramento and then re-distributing to local districts costs money. It doesn’t matter if it’s 1%, 0.1% or 0.01% – the amount that the process costs means the taxpayers in the district are getting less than they paid for – because they didn’t plan to pay anyone in Sacramento for the handling of their tax dollars.

Also, what about the sticky fingers of the “senior” politicians in Sacramento? Certainly they have the clout to re-direct some money from several districts to aggregate a larger total for their own special projects. Or what if they felt that a comparatively prosperous school district, such as Beverly Hills, wouldn’t miss a few million dollars that would make a significant improvement in Downey or San Diego or Oakland? Who would argue that the rich “should pay their fair share” in making schools better elsewhere?

So why should taxpayers be concerned that Governor Brown wants to undo this power grab? Well, let me count the reasons:

There is no guarantee that programs re-authorized to the cities and counties will receive all the funding associated with those programs. In other words, the “overhead” applied in Sacramento might still be charged.
Who will decide which programs stay in Sacramento and which are “returned” to local control? In the same Times article, Brown admits will be a "complex reordering" of government that would address some of the problems the measure created. Why only some of the problems? Well, further in the article Brown explains that his proposal would meet stiff opposition. "It will be controversial, and it will be a struggle," he said. He said this before unveiling any of the details – what does he know that he won’t tell the public?
One of the key provisions of Prop 13 was the two-thirds legislative majority needed to increase tax rates, and this provision has been in the craw of Sacramento politicians for over 30 years. I have no doubt that Brown will want to gut this requirement, and if that happens no wallet in the state will be safe. The two-thirds requirement ensures that Republican legislators must be willing to agree with any tax plan the Democrats offer. Two years ago several Republicans who were not going to be re-elected because of term limits were bribed by Democrats to support their budget/tax plans. That was a rare occurrence, but removal of the two-thirds majority requirement will ensure that tax rates will be increased ceaselessly.
And, since when does a politician propose taking away the power of politicians? No, until I see the written plans and the analysis of the impact, I will not cheer anything that Moonbeam Brown proposes to “fix” the power grab in Sacramento.

In the next few weeks there should be a budget proposal from the Governor, and a statement about what his special election plans are. We should all read the fine print before applauding anything – because the details will mark the difference between recovery in California, or additional movement toward the cliff that looms ahead.

Headline From The Past: Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending

2010-12-28T21:09:00.001-08:00

On September 30, 1999, the New York Times sounded a (muted) alarm about a change in how Fannie Mae was going to treat the mortgage lending market:

In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's.

I found the link to this story in a comment on the Los Angeles Times story about the Gray Davis recall in California. I’m surprised others have not dug out this (in retrospect) very interesting story.

Reading it in the rear-view mirror of the past 20 months, it reads like a very cautionary report on a major shift in policy at Fannie Mae.

In July [1999], the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed that by the year 2001, 50 percent of Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's portfolio be made up of loans to low and moderate-income borrowers. Last year, 44 percent of the loans Fannie Mae purchased were from these groups.

I believe that by the time the roof caved in (pun intended), around 80% of Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s mortgage portfolio was from “sub-prime” lenders. Much more about the post-mortem statistics on the housing bubble can be found in Thomas Sowell’s excellent book “The Housing Boom and Bust”, which is now only $9.98 in hardcover from Amazon.com.

I really can’t add any more – read the story and reach your own conclusion.