Economic Policy

Days of Labor in Camel-Not

Less government union Labor per Day, please

The original meanings of many American national holidays, including tomorrow’s Labor Day (originally celebrated on a Tuesday) with its and others removal to Mondays, have given way to the celebration of leisure, especially of the three-day weekend variety for federal employees.

Most Americans will be thankful that their Obama Administration rulers will take 24 hours off from promulgating new guidelines to “properly” direct our happiness pursuits, but if idleness defines the day for employed government bureaucrats, then over 25 million underemployed Americans and their families (50 million or 16.7% of Americans impacted directly) have been “celebrating” this day for two years, thus dwarfing even 12 days of Christmas.

Hard work worthy of an American holiday celebration didn’t first occur in 19th Century northern industrial sweatshops.

Its harder to organize and collectively bargain with fellow travelers on the Mayflower or cacti obstructing the way west than it is with New York City factory owners when the whistle blows at quittin’ time. Gotta be some nearby deep pockets to pick before one can avert their gaze from the Scripture-endowed labor required before eating.

No, those that labored to found a nation that would become wealthy enough to indulge Jimmy Hoffas didn’t insist on a day celebrating the work that made non-farm subsistence possible in the first place, much less UAW-GM pensions at age 52 that minimum wage Waffle House employees are now taxed to provide.

Fairness at the heart of the holiday

The labor movement that led to this holiday was, first and foremost, at least in the collective American mind, about fairness. Of course, as my Dad used to say to childish whinings about the cruel facts of life, “the fair comes in October,” but the large numbers of former garden-keepers that moved to cities had to eat, riot or starve, and so the movement began. Keep in mind that employers who became so via hard work away from farms had no movement in hard times except movements back to the farm or six-feet under.

But the same Holy Bible insisting on labor before lunch, also promotes one day of rest out of every seven even for its Creator author, and inspired a Constitution meant to preserve endowed and unalienable rights that include the right of free speech and association. Hence the choice of job-providers to bargain with collectives or go back to mules and plows.

Full disclosure requires that DeVine Law reveal his upbringing was enhanced by the relatively better wages earned by Southern Railway, Carmens union members I addressed as Pop and Daddy. I also represented the union and many members in the 1990s. I also listened to the complaints of Daddy about how union policies hurt the company over time by making it nearly impossible to fire incompetent and slothful employees.

Whose labor owns the day?

Even before Americans discovered the true meaning of John Edwards’ “Two Americas” mantra, I have called for Labor Day to be abolished as a national holiday every year since 2006.

Don’t get me wrong, I am all for allowing most all non-military, not postal employees (I like the 44 cents solution) every second Monday in September (and all other days of the year) off from work.

But I have a problem with the Leftist, Democratic Party, class envy definitions of whose labor is worthy of praise, and so I refuse to participate, except to the extent I celebrate the labors of whoever slaughtered the pigs for my bar-be-que, the hands that cook it and Exxon for drilling the oil that gets me to the pit.

Democratic Party contempt for Reagan and ObamaDem policies reveal their true feelings about labor and fairness

Then FDR-New Dealer-Truman Democrat Ronald Reagan essentially gave up Hollywood super-stardom and his marriage to save the Screen Actors Guild labor union he led as President from Communist infiltration, nearly 30 years before he became President of the United States and led the war against the Evil Empire that employed those agitators (community organizers?, but I digress).

Reagan was shot at twice while SAG leader; only once as leader of the Free World, as he operated within the American Rule of Law that made union organization possible. Yet, when he fired illegally-striking air traffic controllers, he was denounced by the same AFL-CIO division of the Democratic Party that never had an encouraging word for him before he faithfully executed the laws as per his Oath.

By the 1980s you see, privilege, not fairness, defined the “movement” (if you can call it that given its decline from 30% of the private sector in the 50s to less than 10% then and now) so much, that Kremlin conversations were abuzz that this Cold Warrior was cut from stronger cloth than Nixons, Kissingers and Carters, if he had the audacity to fire, much less enforce the law against supposed union masters.

Fast forward 20 years and the majority of union members now being paid by taxpayers not only don’t fear being fired thanks to jobs saved or created by ObamaDem “stimuli”; but if existing laws don’t suit them and and their GM counterparts, and Congress won’t or can’t change the laws due to timid blue dogs, Reagan’s successor will deem the law as he sees fit, so long as it fits the SEIU agenda.

America used to be prosperous and fair. Now its Camel-Not. (h/t Rush caller)

The labor movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries accomplished a lot of good, most of which has been enacted into law to protect the health, safety and minimum wages of all workers. Many individual unions have been a blessing too many an employee and kept the faith with owners and managers in not killing the goose that made golden eggs possible. UPS comes to mind.

In many ways, the drastic decline in the percentage of private sector union employees is a result of union and American success and unparalleled prosperity over the past 100 years.

I find the existence and recent growth of the government union movement to be insidious ( a subject for another day), but at least before President Barack Obama and super-majorities of Democrats started carving out special privileges for their labor union benefactors both in and out of government, one could say that the battles had been, on the whole, “fair”. Not so at Obama’s un-round table.

In the wake of the assassination of her husband, former First Lady Jackie Kennedy referred wistfully to the 1000 days of America’s romance with JFK as like “Camelot”. Why did she echo the words of the legendary King from Excalibur after the end of the great prosperous fellowship of the Round Table (pictured) and Camelot:

” Let us remember, so that we may have it again.”

It, being a rule of law applying equally to Kings, Lords and Commoners. It, being the rights acknowledged by the Magna Carta. Sounds like America used to be doesn’t it. Sounds like the days before a President could kill prosperity with TRO-violating oil-drilling moratoriums, doesn’t it?

Looking forward to celebrating Labor fairness everyday, but first please, some labor

I believe most unelected Democratic voters care about labor, i.e. people. I also believe that bad dentists care about the patients who suffer from the pain they cause. But given the results of the leftist policies that have failed every time the Democrats had the votes and a President to impose them in the late 60s, late 70s and late 2000 naughts, one would be hard-pressed to gather enough evidence to convict them of caring about labor, jobs, the poor and middle class in a court of law.

Is it fair? Has it “worked”?

ObamaDems taxed non-government individuals and businesses and printed and borrowed trillions over the past 20 months, promising to “save and create”enough jobs to keep unemployment under 8%. Unemployment in the District of Columbia and many blue state capitols where government jobs were saved and created. Jobs that we will have to be taxed to pay for, forever.

Was that fair? Did it “work”?

Well, not if by “work”, you mean achieving the stated goal of less than 8% unemployment. Unemployment in non-Districts of the United States, called “states” (you know, the entities that formed a federal government of limited powers, and who are now slaves to the monster, Dr. Reid Pelosi Obama created, still hovers near double-digits as the underemployment rate approaches Great Depression numbers.

Beyond that is it fair that:

Pitchforks get sicked on companies that dare question pay czars, secured bond holders, doctors and insurance companies?

EPA issues regulations by executive fiat when Congress tires of the three-times-a-charm ObamaCare strategy on how a bill becomes a law?

Federal judges issue orders allowing some of the 25 million American Idles to labor in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Commander-in-Chief puts them out of work the next day with the threat of attacks by the Coast Guard instead of the usual Rahm Emmanuel steam room visit?

What of executive orders giving preference to unionized companies instead of low bids, regardless of unionization?

Where is Edison’s Bulb and Chevy’s Corvette and why isn’t the Ford Mustang also subsidized?

Fannie, Freddie and Dodd bills still impose racial quotas on mortgage lenders despite the bubble as mortgage-paying taxpayers fund the sloth, drinking tea through gritted teeth.

Bailouts for Ye Olde Obama’s union and other pals, but not for Thee, We the People.

And if you don’t like ObamaCare, take a painkiller and go home to die.

Sound fair? Didn’t think so.

So what do we celebrate on Labor Day 2010?

I’ll celebrate the labor of responsible labor unions, with my greatest praise reserved for those that created the jobs and the companies through their unsung labors in the first place.

I’ll celebrate the labors of the founders, the warriors and the slaves that built and eventually built and protected the City on a Hill.

Most of all, I will celebrate the labors of God Almighty, his son Jesus Christ and his followers of the past 2000 years.

Then, I will rest, but not for long, because the only way the City on a Hill will shine again, will be through countless man-hours of mostly, non-union, yet united, labor.

Mike DeVine

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

Charlotte Observer, The Minority Report and Examiner.com archives

www.devinelawvista.com

Sager knows Texas tea best for Florida-05

Oil made the sun shine on more than just gators in the Sunshine State

Land O’ Lakes  is a long way from New York City. New Yorkers vacationed in the Hamptons when horses and buggies were atop Dow Jones’ transportation index . The beaches Floridians understandably want to protect wouldn’t be an economic engine if oil weren’t drilled somewhere.

Moreover, given the puny effect of the recent “worst oil spill in American history”, and only the third newsworthy oil spill since it first gushed out of a Pennsylvania well in 1859, even “tanning king” George Hamilton couldn’t seriously argue against drill, baby drilling for the substance that fuels the modern world.

Yet, rarely do we find Florida politicians (and Democrats anywhere) who dare utter such obvious truths, even when they are nationally-known tea partier darlings named Marco Rubio. But, after this Gamecock combed the beaches south of our adopted Peach State roost with our DeVine-ing rod, we found a better brand of tea.

Fresh orange juice vs. Frozen-in-cans establishment-endorsed pulp

Political newcomer Jason Sager (CAN-R-FL-05) opposes President Barack Obama’s moratorium on deepwater offshore drilling, and thinks Florida and other Gulf Coast states should chase BP in federal court for damages related to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

By contrast, Hernando County Sheriff Rich Nugent, endorsed by outgoing incumbent GOP Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite, supported President Obama’s initial job-killing measure, as well as the administration’s Temporary Restraining Order-defying second oil drilling measure.

“Let’s find out what went wrong before we start drilling again,” Nugent said.

Nugent’s timid approach would have banned Model-T manufacturing until the nail was found that caused Great Gatsby’s first flat tire on the way to East Egg.

Who knew that a President could unilateral shut down the Pursuit of Happiness?

The liberty and rule of law promised in our founding documents made our young nation the greatest in the 5000-year recorded history of Earth. The greatest threat to our united trek was exposed by the 1861 firing on Fort Sumter by those intent on preserving the cheapest of all labor via involuntary servitude by rendering the City on a Hill asunder.

This southerner thanks God that President Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t limit the Free World’s defense to a plain fruited with five Canadas instead of a Fruited Lower-Forty-Eight Plain.

Now, we face a great threat to our prosperity not from Palmetto States, but rather from latest successor to the Great Emancipator’s executive office. The problem is that Barack Obama wants only to emancipate government power at the expense of We the People’s power over our own lives.

Obama and the Democrats’ policies bail out banks, states and labor unions populated by their pals, but won’t let Americans bail themselves out, i.e. make money to eat!

Why has no oil company sued Obama for contempt of court?

After the BP oil spill attracted Obama’s attention as a potential crisis not to be wasted that could advance his high-energy tax agenda, he issued an executive order imposing a moratorium on deep-water oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

Federal law imposes strict standards on such draconian action that immediately puts people out of work. One must prove a likelihood of success on the merits when all the evidence is later presented to a trial court and that irreparable harm will result absent an immediate temporary restraining order (TRO).

The Obama Administration failed to meet those standards, resulting in a federal district court order lifting the moratorium. The Rule of Law seemed to have prevailed.

Then came the all-too-familiar-after-GM-CEO-firings and the like, Rule of Obama. Attorney General Holder’s Just-Us Department changed a few insignificant words in the first moratorium and issued a SECOND moratorium the day after they lost an appeal attempting to reimpose the first moratorium.

Significantly, no company harmed by the moratoriums have brought a contempt action against the administration. Instead, drilling companies are streaming out of the Gulf to points south and east. Why would that be?

Because whether the federal courts would stand up to Obama or not, they have seen his pitchforks sicked on other similarly-situated corporations daring to make a profit outside of legal processes, and figure that if they must operate in a world devoid of an American Rule of Law, they would just as soon risk the tender mercies of non-American Rule by Men happy to have the business.

This time, the attack on America is coming from Washington, D.C.

The only way it doesn’t end up requiring nullification, succession and massive reconstruction this time, is if we send people like Republican Jason Sagar to populate a Congress presently dominated by Democrats happy to have Obama impose the liberal will over their heads.

[h/t to Redstate's BigGator5]

Mike DeVine

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

Charlotte Observer, The Minority Report and Examiner.com archives

www.devinelawvista.com

And The Visigoths Engage In a Fratricidal Holiday….

It was Philosopher cum Theologian Belloc who pointed out the following with regards to barbarians.

The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being.

(HT: Catholiceducation.org)

Hilaire Belloc has long since passed. He does not now, nor at any time in the past work for NewsCorp or broadcast a show on Fox News. If he did, however, the quote he spoke above would aptly describe Pelosi’s latest spending debaucle.

It is the act of a people consuming the future of our economy for the sake of fending off ruin over a shorter and shorter time horizon. The desperate, final epistemological spasms of Keynesian thought (if any) can be seen this week in the recent actions and words of Speaker Pelosi and President Obama.

We examine this $26B “Baby Stimulus” passed through the incontinent intestines of the House of Representatives. This bill, purportedly designed to rush much-needed funding to school districts, is a vastly expensive, poorly targeted, propagandic exercise in venal corruption. Barack Obama gave out the predictable scare rhetoric to ram through the predictable “emergency bill” that we pass to deal with all the “unexpectedly weak” economic circumstances we repeatedly find ourselves in. Thus spake the POTUS.

“If we do nothing, these educators won’t be returning to the classroom this fall, and that won’t just deprive them of a paycheck, it will deprive the children and parents who are counting on them to provide a decent education,” Obama said in the White House Rose Garden shortly before the bill passed on Tuesday.

“This proposal is fully paid for, in part by closing tax loopholes that encourage corporations that ships American jobs overseas. So it will not add to our deficit,” he said. “And the money will only go toward saving the jobs of teachers and other essential professionals…I urge members of both parties to come together and get this done, so that I can sign this bill into law.”

(HT: Fox News)

The loophole-mongering corporate interests, getting their just desserts, just happen to be the food stamp recipients that we all know secretly control Wall Street from a secret cabal in the trailer parks and projects. I can’t think of anyone more capable of shipping American jobs abroad than your average High School drop-out dependent upon food stamps. We have elected a President with a genetic defect that prevents him from feeling shame while he prevaricates quite like the rest of the human race.

This bill pays for the desperate, stop-gap funding of the education profession by foreswearing billions of dollars of food stamp funding in future years. This obviously isn’t truly paid for, because large piles of feces will stick to the moon before the Progressive Caucus of the House allows Food Assistance Programs to fund other liberal interest groups.

The people who seriously WANT to see Progressives elected in large numbers are weighing in loudly.

“While we support the education initiatives (in the bill), we adamantly oppose using food stamps to pay for them,” said James Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center. “The raid on food stamps to pay for other things absolutely has to stop and stop now.”

(Ob. Cit: Fox News)

Congresswoman DeLaura of CT inveighed against the use of food stamp money to pay the teachers. It totally contradicts the classic FDR strategy of using the disbursement of Federal monies to build up electoral blocks. It gives the tribals too close a look at what will happen when there are more reavers in the raiding party than there is loot to purloin. The hangover the morning after the Visigoth Holiday is not a pleasant sight to behold.

Yet this, increasingly, is what Progressive Politics has become. Nobody believes that Socialism really works. The Intellectual Left got personal insight in what it felt like to be a Chicago Cubs fan after rooting for the CCCP for lo the decades. It perhaps explains our current national CEO’s preference for The White Sox.

However, the band has stayed together after the death of their system of beliefs. Something drives them on further, beyond what they could get from Newtonian inertia. They are in it for the swag and because they have nothing else to do with themselves. What else is Bernadette Dorn going to organize her life around other than Progressive Theology?

But we see of in the hazy distance the end state to this Zombie Movie Left. The smoldering ruins of American Civitas are increasingly picked clean of rubies and opals. The loot only buys another few years or a few more less-insatiate months. The hunger gnaws and the comity among increasingly discordant political allies wanes.

Then these Progressives learn what else Hilaire Belloc knew about barbarians. Then we see the final and fatal endgame. Belloc describes it thus.

We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.

Remember this November. Vote Pelosi out while something still remains within the Pale to provide for our vouchsafe against the growing hordes.

99 weeks and Dems don’t care

Sung to the tune of Jimmy Crack Corn, even by crack New York Times, Nobel Prize-winning, liberal Democrat economist, Paul Krugman

[See chart above showing rising unemployment since Krugman's Democrats aka "ruling elites" took over Congress in 2007 and signaled to investors that taxes would not only not be cut, but would be raised.]

The lyrics of the famous song refer to a slave’s faux sorry over the death of his master that may have been caused by the supposed sorrowful slave. I was reminded of the song when recently accused of harboring excessive hatred of my former Democratic Party and upon hearing Democrats attack Republicans as not caring about the poor for insisting that unemployment benefit extensions to 99 weeks be paid for out of unspent stimulus funds.

The above was also accompanied by suggestions that Republican “fiscal conservatives” (including yours truly) want to “eliminate” the safety net for the truly needy, from two Democrat readers of my recent columns about fraudulent, so-called “Blue Dog” fiscal conservative Democrats (see tax raisers to balance a federal deficit quadrupled by those very Democrats and President Barack Obama) and the liberal  Georgia ‘journolist’-manufactured “split” between Karen Handel fiscal conservatives and Nathan Deal moral conservatives.

Caring means favoring Democrat bills

This was the first time in many years that I had heard the 40+ year old canard that Republicans don’t care about the poor, old, disabled weak and infirm since the Reagan days. I was a Democrat then, but always re-coiled from the claim that the GOP wanted to eliminate Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Unemployment Compensation.

Hearing that same claim last week, after Republicans have alternately controlled the White House and  Congress, as well as Georgia’s State House and General assembly over the past 30 years was quite shocking given that Republicans have never proposed reductions in the safety nets despite weilding the power to do so.

But the Democrats, when backed into a corner by their failed policies, still sing Jimmy Crack Corn and Republicans don’t care.

Witness for the defense

But now comes the out-of-tune-with-Democrats, Paul Krugman version substituting “ruling elites” for Democrats, so as to lessen the blow to those he voted for:

I’m starting to have a sick feeling about prospects for American workers — but not, or not entirely, for the reasons you might think.

Yes, growth is slowing, and the odds are that unemployment will rise, not fall, in the months ahead. That’s bad. But what’s worse is the growing evidence that our governing elite just doesn’t care — that a once-unthinkable level of economic distress is in the process of becoming the new normal.

And I worry that those in power, rather than taking responsibility for job creation, will soon declare that high unemployment is “structural,” a permanent part of the economic landscape — and that by condemning large numbers of Americans to long-term joblessness, they’ll turn that excuse into dismal reality.

Nobel prize winners can be quite dense, slow learners. Paul, high structural unemployment also means high structural welfare and food stamp victims dependent on Democrats for sustenance.

I realized the intent of my fellow Democrats since at least the early 90s when they opposed continuing Reagan-like tax rate cuts that triggered rising tides of federal revenue and rising tides of the formerly poor into the middle class.

Caring, for me meant leaving Dems for the GOP

I cared about the poor and middle class so much that I finally left the party of dependence (as well weakness on defense and abortion strength against the fetus) for the party that freed the slaves, opposed Jim Crow, defeated the Evil Empire, and saved the U.S. economy for Democrat misery indexes.

Unlike my Democrat friends, the GOP judge the hearts of Democrats just because they don’t favor conservative policies, but maybe we should. After all, by the Democrats own present “caring” criteria, one can’t care about the poor unless one favors at least 99 weeks of unemployment compensation. This means that Democrats that kept maximum benefits limited to 26 weeks from the 1930s through 2008 never cared!

For the record, the overwhelming majority of Republicans favor the major programs of the safety net for the truly needy and have, at least since Reagan coined the term in 1980. I favor the 99 week extension whether paid for by the stimulus funds or not.

My question for ObamaDems is why they didn’t care enough for the poor to spend all the flawed stimulus money last year, rather than save some to put up “Recovery Act” signs as part of the get out the vote drive this year while unemployment has risen? The question answers itself.

But let us be clear, even while we judge Republicans and Democrats by their actual actions over the last 40 years, rather than attempt “heart” readings:

One can care about the poor and have been opposed to the creation of the safety net, much less to its exponential expansion since the New Deal.

Heartless Eleanor, Jack and Dick?

Do Democrats know that Eleanor Roosevelt and then Sens. Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy toured the nation in the 1950s trying to get their colleagues to drastically scale back the Depression era programs given that the Great Depression had been over for nearly a decade?

Did JFK and the feminist former First Lady “care” enough?

I believe that most Democrats I know, care about the poor. I also believe most are economic illiterates, misguided in their policy prescriptions, and useful idiots to their liberal leaders. Their policies cause capital to go on strike, killing existing jobs and those that would have been created absent their assaults on business creation. The misguided policies include those of so-called conservative budget deficit-hawk Democrats that merely seek to raise taxes to support their gargantuan, oppressive government. They seek to cut nothing except job producers’ incomes.

But I also believe that many of the leaders of the ObamaDems care more for garnering power via victim-dependent voters than about actually increasing their prosperity and I agree with David Horowitz that the GOP needs to be willing to wield the moral card against Democrats.

Given Democrats’ continuing advocacy of economic policies that have been proven failures since at least the mid-60s, I consider the burden of proof to be on Democrats to prove they care about the poor and middle class.

Got any evidence Democrats?

Paul Krugman is now a witness for the GOP.

Trial Date: Election Day 2010.

Mike DeVine

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

Charlotte Observer, The Minority Report and Examiner.com archives

www.devinelawvista.com

John McCain Should Be President. He Has Some Explaining To Do.

Today I again wish Barack Obama had lost the election of 2008. Again, I wish that John McCain were the president. Ironically, today at least, this has nothing to do with any particular disagreement I have with how President Obama is handling his duties. Today, at least, it has nothing to do with the fact that I admired the courage and grace shown by Sarah Palin as she was set upon by the vile and despicable denizens of JournOlist.

My desire for a fictitious John McCain Presidency comes from my desire to see him deliver a State of the Union Address next January. I want to see this man mount the podium in the teeth of the condign anger of the America he has made less safe and less prosperous. On the issues of taxation and immigration that John McCain has explaining to do.

We know well that 1 January 2011 marks the expiration of the tax cuts enacted under George W. Bush. We know this will not be a pretty thing. Deutsche Bank issued research regarding what would happen once the tax cuts lapsed.

The nascent US economic recovery would be halted in 2011 if Congress fails to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, analysts at Deutsche Bank said. …Deutsche said the drag on gross domestic product should they lapse could be as much as 1.5 percent, with the more likely impact at 1.1 percent.

(HT: Jeff Cox, CNBC)

This information becomes public against the leafy, green backdrop of the Commerce Department “re-issuing” three years of economic numbers in a shiny, red “Blame George Bush” collector’s edition. Details of the carnage follow below.

The Commerce Department, in revisions issued Friday, estimates the economy shrank 2.6 percent last year — the steepest drop since 1946. That’s worse than the 2.4 percent decline originally estimated. The economy’s plunge underscores why the unemployment rate surged to 10.1 percent in October, a 26-year high. The revisions in gross domestic product, or GDP, now show zero growth in 2008. That compares with a 0.4 percent gain previously estimated. The economy also grew less in 2007 (1.9 percent) than earlier thought (2.1 percent).

(HT: Jeannine Aversa, Rueters)

Keep in mind that it was Senator John McCain who spear-headed the demand to make the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts passed under President Bush expire in 2010. We would love to hear his perspective on how he would intend to “save or create jobs” in his own right in the face of a 1.5% down-step in American private sector wealth. This is your tidal wave, John McCain, explain to me why you would be better at allocating all of this wealth than a professional investor or industrialist. Explain to me why you and your fellow Senators have a moral entitlement to do so.

Taxes are not the only issue on which I’d love to see John McCain tap-dance on the hot stove of voter indignation. Federal Judge Susan Bolton last Wednesday struck down several portions of an Arizona law giving state authorities expanded authority and responsibility for enforcing Federal immigration laws. In her ruling, she disallowed a provision of Arizona SB 1070 that would have required officers to check the immigration status of suspected illegal immigrants.

“The number of requests that will emanate from Arizona as a result of determining the status of every arrestee is likely to impermissibly burden federal resources and redirect federal agencies away from the priorities they have established,” Bolton wrote. “Federal resources will be taxed and diverted from federal enforcement priorities as a result of the increase in requests for immigration status determination(s),” she said.

(HT: Waren Richey, Christian Science Monitor)

The question John McCain should have to answer involves why this situation ever reached the point at which actually enforcing a set of laws already on the books as a part of the USC could be construed as an impermissible burden to Federal resources. Why is this law against being in the US being so flagrantly violated? This is a question for John McCain because his legislative career has done nothing but aid and abet the problem.

In 2006, John McCain spear-headed a legislative attempt to give the 400,000 people illegally in the State of Arizona an attenuated path to citizenship. This attenuated path to citizenship would have leapfrogged every one of these lawbreakers ahead of anyone stupid enough to go through the INS and immigrate to the United States in the legally proper fashion. His legislative initiative told the lawbreakers that Washington was really on their side.

As Senator McCain did everything in his power to make Arizona prostate before an unstoppable wave of undocumented immigrants, his sycophantic two-star flunky, “Senator” Graham from South Carolina libeled opponents of the measure by announcing “We will not let the bigots win.” As Arizona lost $2B every year because of illegal immigration and the U3 (not U6 mind you, U3) unemployment rate in border cities, amongst legal US citizens approached 20%, they finally took action born of desperation, and passed SB 1070. This all took place while their own Senator, John McCain, sold them down the river so that he could be seen as a “Mavarick.”

So once again, I wish John McCain were President. This time, for a change, this has nothing to do with any personal discontent I have with Barack Obama. It’s because once a year, at the State of The Union Address, the President has to face America. In 2011, with the Bush tax cuts expired, and the Arizona immigration law felled by nefarious, political lawfare, I would not want to be on that podium.

But somebody deserves to have to stand up there and try explaining to America why their country had been so sordidly raped by its uncaring, elitist, political leadership. I would hate being the guy who had to do it. I would especially hate being the guy who had to do it if I had as much to do with that state affairs as John McCain has throughout his political career. Next year’s State of The Union Address may be the one time in his adult life when John McCain actually deserves to be The President of The United States.

Paul Ryan talks taxes & spending with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews

$4.8 trillion in specific spending cuts in the House Republicans’ Budget Alternative:http://www.house.gov/budget_republica…
$1.3 trillion in specific spending cuts offered by House Budget Committee Republicans:http://www.house.gov/budget_republica…
A plan to pay off our crushing burden of debt, reform our tax code to promote growth and job creation, and reform our entitlement programs to save these programs: http://www.americanroadmap.org/

Democrats’ plans to get a grip on the explosion of government spending, balance the budget (or simply offer a budget), promote economic growth and private sector job creation: ???

The Inevitable Endgame of Keynesian Chess

If you’ve ever played chess well, or for that matter, ever been pretentious like moi and wanted to convince others you could play chess well, you’ve studied a few openings and end games. You get these books which describe openings and end games that famous masters have played around the world. This tells you how to kick start your chess match and how to put your wily opponent down like unwanted puppy. It’s the part in the middle that always got me into check and then unceremoniously into mate. A similar analogy can be drawn to our current economic policies.

Our current Administration’s economic policy has a basic opening called Keynesianism. This involves identifying areas of our economy where private spending fails to stimulate sufficient aggregate demand and then “solving” this “problem” by pouring in the government as a super-consumer. The administration also has a vehicle to move past this opening known as stimulus. This involves borrowing vast piles of money to fuel government investments that are intended to provide the missing aggregate demand. What they seem to lack at present is any coherent sense of an end game.

Keynes doesn’t think in terms of end games. He wouldn’t. He was trained as an engineer. He wanted the economy to become a manageable system within reasonable control bounds. He wanted it to crank aggregate demand like a well-run and efficient assembly line.

To see what end game occurs from attempting to manage a 10,000 variable, meta-stable, intangible system the way Deming envisioned running a factory, we look to what is happening in Japan, where people first learned to run factories the way Deming proscribed.

Japan may not yet have hit the wall and been forced to concede, but their economy limits the moves they have available. Japan has experienced an asset deflation in real estate eerily similar to America’s subprime crisis. This put Japan’s economic vitality into check because of the negative impacts that this had on Japanese banks and insurers. Japan has attempted over a decade’s worth of Keynesian Stimulus as a way out of check.

This stimulus has become addictive, not remedial. It has become perpetual life-support. The Japanese central banks continue to pour money into government programs that achieve a temporary stasis rather than a regenerative growth. The population ages, capital and family formation fails to occur, the nation goes deeper in debt. And yet, move after desperate move, the credit markets respond to Japan with a simple and malevolent “check.”

Takahira Ogawa, is the director of sovereign ratings at Standard & Poor’s in Singapore. He tells Business Week that Japan must cut domestic spending, or the price of its sovereign debt will fall below par. This would result in the Japanese central bank having to pay higher interest rates on its bonds or get less money for them at sale than their face value. This process would be catalyzed by a downgrade in Japan’s debt rating from people like Ogawa at agencies like Standard and Poor’s.

Ogawa watches the Japanese elections with a pecuniary interest. He tells Business Week the following in an article entitled “Kan’s Loss May Be Negative for Japan’s Credit Ratings.”

The Democratic Party of Japan’s upper-house defeat yesterday is “potentially negative” because of legislative gridlock, Takahira Ogawa, director of sovereign ratings at Standard & Poor’s in Singapore, said in a phone interview today.

Prime Minister Kan faces troubles because he wants to raise more money so that he can borrow less in sovereign bonds. He plans on doing this through doubling Japan’s National Retail Sales Tax at the point of sale from 5% to 10%. The Japanese people do not want this and will be less inclined to support Prime Minister Kan as a direct result of this policy.

However, Prime Minister Kan doesn’t have viable options to do otherwise. A sovereign debt downgrade would cause debt service costs to crowd out the government spending necessary to provide all the good things that Japan Inc has promised its civilian shareholders. Telling an increasingly aged nation that the government was kinda’ sorta’ just kidding about all that healthcare they promised to Senior Citizens is not the road to political viability. Prime Minister Kan, like the chess player facing a badly tilted board, is increasingly constrained into making bad choices….

Meanwhile, in America, the Paradigm plays out in similar fashion. American real estate crashed and burned. An American government pumped in the Keynesian stimulus. The stimulus produced wounded stasis; not healing progress and the nature of that stimulus has begun to morph from amelioration to addictive sustainment.

Stephen Spruill describes the process in a National Review Article entitled “Mechanical Failure.” Detail follows below.

From 2008 to now, the composition of the stimulus bills has changed, from mostly tax rebates intended to boost consumer demand to mostly income transfers from the employed to the unemployed and from the federal government to the states. Though the stimulus machine’s architects would be loath to admit it, this transformation represents the failure of its stated purpose, which is to create jobs and to jump-start sustainable economic growth.

In other words, so went Japan and now we follow in their footsteps like a pseudo-sapient zombie. It reminds me of a line from the movie The Matrix. As Trinity said to Neo: “Because you have been down there Neo, you know that road, you know exactly where it ends. And I know that’s not where you want to be.” (HT: IMDB)

Thus, we must pull out of our Keynesian death spiral. We must realign the fundamental role of government in our economy. It can referee, but it has no business suiting up and playing ball. The only way to accomplish this necessary realignment is the short-term political destruction of the Democratic Party. In November 2010, we’d better do everything in our power to make sure Neo takes the Red Pill, not the Blue.

Common Law trumps Obamatorium in Gulf

The Pusher Man

“I hope some of these folks who are hollering about deficits and debt step-up because I’m calling their bluff. We’ll see how much of that, how much of the political arguments that they’re making right now are real and how much of it was just politics.” – President Barack Obama, RealClearPolitics.com

Convinced that Al Capone was dead-on when he declared that you get more with a kind word and a gun, President Barack Obama has just offered a veiled threat to people who want less government spending. I’ll unveil it now and tell you what our Fearless Whinger just said. He’ll make YOU pay to balance the budget. The government programs that YOU like are too wasteful and too big. If you don’t buy that logic, YOU are just playing political games. As Vice pResident Bite-Me recently opined, “Don’t be a smart-ass!”

So why would a man with more Congressional power than any American President since Lyndon Baines Johnson feel the need to behave in such a hostile and menacing fashion? What makes the small businessman in search of a tax break a smart-ass rather than just another person offering self-interested but perhaps useful advice? Why couldn’t the US government actually roll back much of its spending and stop stimulating our way to junk treasury bonds?

To understand why these people have their chains yanked to asphyxiation by suggestions that the public sector should make like a struggling S&L and start de-leveraging, you have to understand what they have actually done with the Federal stimulus already tossed about the land. To get to this ratiocination, think of the stimulus money as “needle-ready” not “shovel-ready.” This money isn’t rebuilding America. This money isn’t even maintaining much stability. It simply allows idiots to continue with untenable, destructive behaviors without the leveling impact of condign and well-earned consequence.

Stimulus money is not building The Hoover Dam or re-blazing neglected sections of The Appalachian Trail. It is not modernizing our broken roadways or rails. South Korea’s Internet and telecommunications national backbones put ours to shame. They still will when the last dollar of stimulus gets tacked on to the last significant digit of our crippling national debt. It is only being used to keep stupid, frightened and confused people afloat above their own often self-inflicted miseries.

The HAMP program gives us an example of what Stimulus has been about under Barack Obama. The Federal Government intervenes to prop up homeowners who overpaid for housing and now stare default in the eye. The government does this to prevent further erosion in the housing and banking sector which would rip through financial markets and prolong our current recession.

The Federal Government feels it has to bail out these homeowners because they will otherwise “strategically default.” Quite simply, the people will mail the keys to the bank and go rent a shack somewhere once the bank finally gets around to serving them and repossessing. If it were one or two idiots, the easy default response is “So What?” Instead, this is an orchestrated, cheer-led threat against “banksters” guilty of lending these people more than they could reasonably borrow.

The Banksters in this dynamic play the role of “The Pusher” from a dope-marinated Steppenwolf song. Like the lyrics from Hoyt Axton describing the impact of a pusher, the banks are morally neutral and unconcerned about the outcome of the transaction after they get the loan underwritten. Axton’s indictment of The Pusher follows below.

You know, I’ve seen a lot of people walkin’ ’round/ With tombstones in their eyes. But the pusher don’t care/ Ah, if you live or if you die.

Completely absent from that rant is any possible suggestion that you, as a moral agent, have any obligation whatsoever to abstain from flying on the Doofus Weed. Further down in the song we see an even better indication of how the stimulus mentality and the drug use mentality are similar. Axton tells us not to get off the substance abuse, but instead, to buy it off a nicer guy. Frustrating moral obtuseness follows below.

You know the dealer, the dealer is a man/ With the love grass in his hand….

Like the drug-addled rock-groupies, Americans still want their McMansions on the Sanitation Engineering salary. They want to have their cake and not the trans-fats. The iniquity Axton saw on the part of The Pusher wasn’t that people bought drugs and trashed themselves, it was that The Pusher didn’t stick around and hang out in the crash-pad just to make sure the trip didn’t bum out. It’s a shame people in the sixties were not exposed to rap-music. The whole concept of “Don’t hate the playa, hate the game” would sure come in handy here.

The problem with Hoyt Axton was that he blamed the guy who dipped his joint in formaldehyde rather than recognizing that it probably wasn’t very wise to have smoked an obscure, quasi-medicinal herb with unpredictable effects on the human brain in the first place. The problem Barack Obama hopes most Americans have is similar. People all want huge houses and they all expect to do so without having to be captains of industry or genius inventors. Nobody can understand why they shouldn’t get $300 – $500K mortgages based on a $45K Annual salary.

Then, when the deal blows up in the borrower’s face like a joint with seeds rolled into the reefer, he gets mad at the guy who sold the defective spliff. He ignores the fact that the banker didn’t just hand out $500K. Bankers like getting paid, and if the likelihood of that happening kind of sucks, they will charge a risk-premium in addition to the usual interest rate. Then, when the borrower can’t be bothered with paying, the bank takes the house away and the “strategic default” tantrum ensues.

At that point, Congress and The President pass HAMP and become The Dealer-man with the Love Grass in their hands. They also own your (redacted). They don’t tell you this until some freak named Santelli gripes about the terms of the deal. Then the reveal what was true all along. They are truly no different that The Pusher over at Wells Fargo or B of A. So don’t be a smart-ass.

To Hoyt Axton’s credit, his final lyric suggests that the fog of street pharmaceuticals has lifted and he understands what needs to happen next. The next time some politician offers “stimulus” as a vacation from personal and financial responsibility, we, as an electorate, should follow Hoyt Axton’s advice below.

Well, now if I were the president of this land/ You know, I’d declare total war on The Pusher man. I’d cut him if he stands, and I’d shoot him if he’d run/ Yes I’d kill him with my Bible and my razor and my gun.

God D— The Pusher Man.

I Don’t Blame Orszag For Quitting

Word has it that White House budget director, Peter Orszag will be quitting this July to go join a Think Tank. He should do so. It would be the condign response to what has been a gross dereliction of duty on the part of the House of Representatives. Politico.com describes the details of his career change below.

Officials have said for some time that Orszag was trying to decide between leaving this summer and early next year, after the next budget is released. “He went back and forth and couldn’t quite commit,” said a senior colleague. Top aides had pressed him for a decision, and he decided on sooner rather than later, the officials said. Hans Nichols of Bloomberg News first reported the planned departure.

Orszag’s job involves the construction of the Presidential Budget on behalf of the executive branch of government. He can propose this spending, but only the House of Representatives can enact it. Thus, when NRO.com whacks Orszag for leaving behind $Tr budget deficits, this criticism is only partially fair. The saddest thing about Orszag’s departure is the extent to which the whole thing has been considered mundane.

Orszag should not have left to have more family time with his new fiancé and his illegitimate child. He should have left in order to protest the Constitutional Crisis brought on by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her inability to quell the political cowardice of her overwhelming majority. The House of Representatives has a Constitutional responsibility to control the spending of America’s government. This involves putting together a comprehensive, detailed, honest and informative budget resolution so that the country has a plan.

Since the founding of The United States of America, the House of Representatives has had the power of the purse. With that power, as even Spiderman could attest, comes great responsibility. The Framers of The Constitution spoke frequently on the importance of a sound financial process occurring in The House of Representatives.

The U.S. Constitution declares: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” The power of the purse, James
Madison noted in Federalist Paper no. 58, represents the “most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.” In Federalist Paper no. 48, Madison said “the legislative department alone has access to the pockets of the people.”(HT: House Budget Committee)

But instead of the wise stewardship envisioned by James Madison at the inception of The Great American experiment, we get gamesmanship. We get alternative budget measures. The type where you get to spend the money, but don’t have to confess how much the expenditures will cost.

House Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt (D-S.C.) said the alternative would be the “functional equivalent” of a full-fledged budget. But because it won’t be a traditional budget resolution, it will be silent on future deficits, which are expected to average nearly $1 trillion for the next decade.

Another convenience of an alternate budget resolution, is that it gets to ignore Glorious and Sanctimonious PAYGO. The Democrats composing Pelosi’s majority loved PAYGO when they campaigned on it in 2006. Living within its limitations hasn’t been as popular. The neutered House of Representatives version, which would be in effect absent an approved Federal Budget, would allow the Congress to declare all spending they didn’t wish to control emergency spending. Thus we get fiascoes such as this.

Both PAYGO measures require new tax cuts or that entitlement programs be paid for with tax increases or spending cuts, but the House PAYGO rule, in place since before the law was enacted, can be more easily bypassed than the PAYGO law. Spratt said the budget may be attached to an upcoming supplemental spending bill, which will provide funding for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, domestic disaster aid and possibly fiscal aid to states and local governments to retain public workers.

Why the dither? Why the delay? Democrats are afraid to make choices. They are afraid dealing with problems will make them unpopular. They attach the waste, the earmarks and the pork barrel spoils to the war funding. Democrats have learned to love the war. It forces us all to swallow all of Jim Moran’s earmarks and do it for The Troops.™

So Orszag’s decision to resign and enter the Kiddy-Pool section of some left-leaning think tank is appropriate. If Congress can’t be bothered with doing their job, it’s not as if he has any reasonable expectation of successfully accomplishing his. Peter Orszag is not much of a guy and won’t be missed, but if his decision to leave town calls attention to the stupid games being played with our nation’s financial future, than his exit from public service was both proper and condign. For that, at least, he should be commended.