The Obamacare Chronicles: 129 laid off from Missouri hospital due to wonderful new health bill

“But at least we won the election! Obama!!”

At this point, there’s not much we can do about it, folks. Losing a Supreme Court decision and the 2012 election guarantees that Obamacare will go into full effect on January 1st, 2014 — Happy New Year!

All we can do for now is observe and take note of the pain (some of it our own) as businesses make their plans to deal with the forthcoming train wreck, plans that include laying people off to cover the new, federally-imposed expenses:

From Channel 41 Action News (1), Kansas City, Missouri:

I’ve reported on the consequences of Obamacare before, and we’re going to see more and more as we approach 2014 and enter our Brave New World of government-controlled health care. The PPACA imposes immense burdens on businesses, and they will have to act rationally in response, whether by passing on costs to the consumer or cutting costs elsewhere — by layoffs, for instance.

People who voted for the Democrats since 2008 are, in effect, getting exactly what they voted for, even if they refused to see it at the time.  (2) To use the cliche, “elections have consequences.”

But so do bad laws, and the people can always fix their mistakes in the next election. Obamacare is the “Mother of Bad Laws,” and I predict its myriad problems are going to cost the Democrats dearly as voters harmed by Obamacare first get worried, then annoyed, then angry, and then royally ticked off. Democrats are already so worried that some are retiring to avoid facing the voters in 2014.

Elections have consequences for the ruling class, too.

via Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt

Footnotes:
(1) For any Obamacare apologists in the audience, before your knee jerks too much, note that Channel 41 is an NBC affiliate, not the evil FOX. When you’ve lost NBC…
(2) No, I’m not saying the people laid off in Missouri all voted for Obama and thus got what they deserved. Some almost certainly did, but we don’t know who or how many. Presuming innocence, they all have my sympathy.  But the broad electorate voted for people who used anti-constitutional means to pass a horrendous law in expectation of getting Free Stuff(tm), in violation of all the laws of economics. To them, I can only quote the words of the late, great Mayor Ed Koch: “The People have spoken … and they must be punished.”

(Crossposted at Sister Toldjah)

Lomborg: Californians are paying ridiculous subsidies for electric cars

Reblogged from Watts Up With That?:

 Guest post by Bjørn Lomborg

I've said electric cars get subsidized too much. Turns out I was wrong.

In California, they are subsidized ridiculously too much.

Tesla gets $45,000 for each car it sells in state and federal subsidies. The Tesla S starts at $69,000, so about 40% of its total cost is subsidies (Tesla isn’t making any big profits).

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Yet another "Green scam." Makers of fossil-fueled cars are forced to buy, in essence, "carbon credits" from Tesla to meet California's "zero emission" standards. You can bet those costs are passed along to the consumer.

The April jobs report and the part-time recovery

“But at least we won the election! Obama!!”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released it’s report for April today, showing numbers that should at least be slightly good news for the administration: unemployment down to 7.5% and 165,000 jobs added. Recovery!!

AEI’s James Pethokoukis says “not so fast:”

US job growth in April beat economist expectations as nonfarm payrolls rose 165,000, and the jobless rate fell to a four-year low of 7.5%. But the report contained worrisome signs that President Obama’s health care reform law is hurting full-time, high-wage employment.

While the American economy added 293,000 jobs last month, according to the separate household survey, the number of persons employed part time for economic reasons — “involuntary part-time workers” as the Labor Department calls them – increased by almost as much, by 278,000 to 7.9 million. These folks were working part time because a) their hours had been cut back or b) they were unable to find a full-time job. At the same time, the U-6 unemployment rate — a broader measure of joblessness that includes discouraged workers and part-timers who want a full-time gig – rose from 13.8% to 13.9%.

What’s more, there wasa  0.2 hour decline in the length of the average workweek. This led to 0.4 percentage point drop in the index of average weekly hours, “equaling the largest declines since the recovery began,” notes economist Dean Baker of Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Let’s see, more part timers and fewer hours worked. Economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin says what we’re all thinking: “This is not good news as it reflects the reliance on part-time work. … the decline in hours and rise of part-time work is troubling in light of anecdotal reports of the impact of the Affordable Care Act.”

Jim adds that, if the Labor Force Participation Rate were the same now as it was when Obama took office, then BLS would be reporting unemployment of between nine and ten percent. (And see this for a graphic chart of how the LFPR has gone down under Obama)

It’s not that unemployment is going down, it’s that the number of people who’ve given up looking for a job is growing, and an increasing number of those who have a job are limited to part-time work, thanks to Obamacare.

Such is the nature of the Obama “recovery,” the worst since the Great Depression.

(Crossposted at Sister Toldjah)

Unexpected Praise for Australia's Private Social Security System

Reblogged from International Liberty:

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As part of my "Question of the Week" series, I said that Australia probably would be the best option if the United States suffered some sort of Greek-style fiscal meltdown that led to a societal collapse.*

One reason I'm so bullish on Australia is that the nation has a privatized Social Security system called "Superannuation," with workers setting aside 9 percent of their income in personal retirement accounts (rising to 12 percent by 2020).

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Articles like this one are sometimes so frustrating; there are far better national pension systems than the one we have. In addition to Australia, discussed in Mitchell's article, Chile has a very good, very effective set up. But the statists in this country fight tooth and nail against any sensible reform, as if allowing people to keep their own money, build wealth, and live independently is some sort of horrific crime.

Hide your IRAs: Obama admin. — “We think you’ve saved enough!”

“We’re here for your fair share.”

Or maybe it’s the off-ramp to Cyprus.

Over at lefty blog Talking Points Memo (h/t Joel Gehrke), Brian Beutler has noted an interesting item in the White House’s latest budget proposal: a cap on the amount one is allowed to save in tax-deferred accounts. Anything over that is open to the taxman.

Per the budget, “Individual Retirement Accounts and other tax-preferred savings vehicles are intended to help middle class families save for retirement. But under current rules, some wealthy individuals are able to accumulate many millions of dollars in these accounts, substantially more than is needed to fund reasonable levels of retirement saving.”

But how would they close this loophole?

One way experts believe financial managers avoid the current annual contribution limit to IRAs is by using IRAs to participate in investments and assigning those investment interests a nominal value vastly below fair market.

Obama wouldn’t curb this practice directly. Instead his budget calls for an overall cap of about $3 million on the net balance across all of an individuals’ tax-preferred accounts. Only have one IRA? It can hold $3 million. Have three? Their holdings must sum to $3 million or less.

The $3 million figure is approximate. A formula would set the cap at a level just high enough to finance an annual distribution of no more than $205,000 per year in retirement for someone retiring this year.

Now, I can imagine TPM is just thrilled with this; it just reeks of class warfare disguised as “fairness.” We’ve got “reasonable levels” (Defined by whom? Oh, wait…) and the ever popular “loophole,” with its scent of someone getting away with something, cheating the rest of us.

What the administration is talking about, I believe, are self-directed IRAs  and other retirement vehicles that allow you to invest your money where you see fit (1). When you sell the stock and withdraw the funds, under the rules you’re taxed at a much lower rate. It’s a great vehicle for wealth creation and the encouragement of saving for retirement.

And that’s what they can’t stand. The rules as written prevent them from taxing this sheltered wealth to fund their bloated spending, so they’re going to change the rules. Oh sure, they say this is aimed the the “Romneys” of the world, those rich people who have sheltered more the $3 million, but how long do you think that barrier will last? About as long as it takes them to realize they need more.

Rocco always wants more.

This idea to tax sheltered money isn’t new; FDR, to whom Obama acolytes compare him, has his own undistributed profits tax, to punish businesses that were holding on to cash. (Look out, Apple!) That scheme blew up in Roosevelt’s face as business investment collapsed and the nation entered a new recession in 1937-38. You can bet a move like this would have its own unintended consequences, which the social engineers at Team Unicorn would blame on anyone but their own ham-handed, grasping, greedy policies.

This is progressivism showing its face as Leviathan. Forget that it was your skill and acumen and good habits that accumulated that wealth (and, through investing it, helped others by creating jobs, &c.); forget that this is, in the end, your money, yours to dispose of as you see fit, beyond that portion needed to fund the basic functions of government.

Forget all that.

The administrative state beloved by progressives knows what’s best. It has its plans and goals for us all, because it has divined the national will. Thus all the resources of the nation are at its disposal to meet those goals.

Including your retirement accounts.

This budget is dead on arrival, thank Heaven, but don’t think this scheme is going away. Oh, no. Once broached, it’s out there, waiting.

PS: I wonder if this is where Obama got the idea?

Footnote:
(1) You know: your money, your property, your liberty.

(Crossposted at Sister Toldjah)

Defining madness: Obama administration encouraging sub-prime mortgages

Isn’t this how we got into the current mess?

The Obama administration is engaged in a broad push to make more home loans available to people with weaker credit, an effort that officials say will help power the economic recovery but that skeptics say could open the door to the risky lending that caused the housing crash in the first place.

President Obama’s economic advisers and outside experts say the nation’s much-celebrated housing rebound is leaving too many people behind, including young people looking to buy their first homes and individuals with credit records weakened by the recession.

In response, administration officials say they are working to get banks to lend to a wider range of borrowers by taking advantage of taxpayer-backed programs — including those offered by the Federal Housing Administration — that insure home loans against default.

Housing officials are urging the Justice Department to provide assurances to banks, which have become increasingly cautious, that they will not face legal or financial recriminations if they make loans to riskier borrowers who meet government standards but later default.

Officials are also encouraging lenders to use more subjective judgment in determining whether to offer a loan and are seeking to make it easier for people who owe more than their properties are worth to refinance at today’s low interest rates, among other steps.

Obama pledged in his State of the Union address to do more to make sure more Americans can enjoy the benefits of the housing recovery, but critics say encouraging banks to lend as broadly as the administration hopes will sow the seeds of another housing disaster and endanger taxpayer dollars.

Quick summary for those to whom this might look familiar, but not recall why: In the late 80s and early 90s, urban community organizing groups such as ACORN, particularly in the Chicago area (1), pressured banks from below to give easy credit to borrowers with bad credit or low incomes so they could buy homes.Because many were minority buyers, the groups would charge “racism” and levy bogus accusations of discriminatory “red lining” when banks (sensibly) resisted. These leftist groups found allies in progressive Washington Democrats, particularly the Clinton administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development headed by Secretary Andrew Cuomo, now New York’s governor.

To complement the interest group pressure from below, HUD put “carrot and stick” pressure on the banks from above: the stick was the threat of anti-discrimination lawsuits and the blocking of mergers that required government approval. The carrot was the willingness to have Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy these risky loans from the banks, then bundle them and sell them into the securities market backed by the full faith and credit of the US government, and therefore us.

This went on into the 2000s, with Democrats (2) fighting tooth and claw against any effort to fix the growing problem and rein-in these bad, dangerous, monstrously stupid practices. Finally the asset bubble collapsed in 2007-08, people lost their homes, banks collapsed, nearly a trillion taxpayer dollars were burned trying to stem the tide, and the world was thrown into a severe recession. All because of government engineering of the marketplace.

And now Obama wants to do it all again, because this time will be different? (3)

Madness!

Via Dan Mitchell, who has excellent explanations of why this kind of intervention is wrong, harmful, and doomed to failure.

Footnotes:
(1) Gee, whom do we know who came from there, and who, as a young lawyer, was an attorney for these same groups? Hmm…
(2) Yes, I know Republicans tried to take advantage of this, too. Home ownership was a big part of their “ownership society” spiel. But at least they saw the potential danger and tried to avert it, unlike the Democrats. Oh, and let’s not forget the Democrats’ corruption, either.
(3) Actually, to distract from the fact that his housing policies since coming to office have been miserable failures.

(Crossposted at Sister Toldjah)

Ranking the States for Economic and Personal Freedom

Reblogged from International Liberty:

Sometimes I myopically focus on fiscal policy, implying that the key to prosperity is small government.

But I'll freely admit that growth is maximized when you have small government AND free markets.

That being said, our goal should be to expand freedom, not merely to have the largest possible GDP.

Which is why the Freedom Index is a good complement to…

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This is a very interesting study. I'm sorry to say my beloved California comes in only at second place in "most un-free" states, behind New York. Come on, Sacramento! I'm sure you can do more to screw this place up! I have faith in you.

(Video) Canaries in the Coal Mine

Call this a follow up to my worries that Cyprus is a warning and this morning’s post about America being in danger of becoming Europe.

In this latest “Afterburner,” Bill Whittle warns us that, with the European Union lurching from fiscal crisis to fiscal crisis, and with the US headed by an administration enamored of many of the same foolish policies as the Europeans, the members of the EU are serving as “canaries in the coal mine:”

Prediction is a fool’s game, so I won’t guess what’s going to happen, but I’d feel much more comfortable if this man were in charge.

(Crossposted at Sister Toldjah)

Eurozone Chief: Cyprus was just the start

“EU bureaucrat at work.”

Hoo, boy. I just had a feeling that, once the the EUrocracy learned it could take depositors’ money at will without a total meltdown, the temptation to do it again (and again and again and again…) would be too great to  resist. Thus we read in the Telegraph:

Cyprus bail-out: savers will be raided to save euro in future crises, says eurozone chief

Savings accounts in Spain, Italy and other European countries will be raided if needed to preserve Europe’s single currency by propping up failing banks, a senior eurozone official has announced.

The new policy will alarm hundreds of thousands of British expatriates who live and have transferred their savings, proceeds from house sales and other assets to eurozone bank accounts in countries such as France, Spain and Italy.

The euro fell on global markets after Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch chairman of the eurozone, told the FT and Reuters that the heavy losses inflicted on depositors in Cyprus would be the template for future banking crises across Europe.

“If there is a risk in a bank, our first question should be ‘Okay, what are you in the bank going to do about that? What can you do to recapitalise yourself?’,” he said.

“If the bank can’t do it, then we’ll talk to the shareholders and the bondholders, we’ll ask them to contribute in recapitalising the bank, and if necessary the uninsured deposit holders.”

Ditching a three-year-old policy of protecting senior bondholders and large depositors, over €100,000, in banks, Mr Dijsselbloem argued that the lack of market contagion surrounding Cyprus showed that private investors could now be hit to pay for bad banking debts.

Don’t you just love how Dijsselbloem puts it? “We’ll ask them to contribute.” As if Manuel the Madrid taxi driver, who’s put his life’s savings into a bank he thought he could trust, will get any chance to say no. If he’s lucky, he’ll wake one morning to discover that his masters in Brussels have left him anything at all.

This is just immoral. Depositors in Cyprus are being robbed to cover for the bad borrowing decisions of governments and the equally stupid lending decisions of bankers, and now Dijsselbloom and his fellow mandarins are casting their gaze across Europe and seeing a smorgasbord filled with tasty accounts waiting to have a bite taken out of them.

Let’s review an old principle of (real) liberalism that’s more and more forgotten these days: your bank account is your property, as it represents the fruits of your labor. Security in your right to property is essential to your liberty; if you do not have the first, then you lack the second. If some bureaucrat can come and take your property via a diktat dressed in legal finery, then you are not a free human being.

Desperate to save their precious Euro at all costs, the Eurocrats and the national governments are all but guaranteeing a future bank run and financial panic as frightened people take their money and try to put it beyond the reach of grasping, blundering officials and quite possibly creating the very crash they’re trying to avoid.

With establishment politicians like these, is it any wonder people turn in frustration and anger to radical politics?

PS: And I wish the EU would stop giving Obama ideas…

via Bryan Preston

(Crossposted at Sister Toldjah)

Britain’s Green chickens are coming home to roost, as will ours, soon

Christopher Booker in last Saturday’s Telegraph: “It’s payback time…”

As the snow of the coldest March since 1963 continues to fall, we learn that we have barely 48 hours’ worth of stored gas left to keep us warm, and that the head of our second-largest electricity company, SSE, has warned that our generating capacity has fallen so low that we can expect power cuts to begin at any time. It seems the perfect storm is upon us.

The grotesque mishandling of Britain’s energy policy by the politicians of all parties, as they chase their childish chimeras of CO2-induced global warming and windmills, has been arguably the greatest act of political irresponsibility in our history.

Three more events last week brought home again just what a mad bubble of make-believe these people are living in. Under the EU’s Large Combustion Plants Directive, we lost two more major coal-fired power stations, Didcot A and Cockenzie, capable of contributing no less than a tenth to our average electricity demands. We saw a French state-owned company, EDF, being given planning permission to spend £14?billion on two new nuclear reactors in Somerset, but which it says it will only build, for completion in 10 years’ time, if it is guaranteed a subsidy that will double the price of its electricity. Then, hidden in the small print of the Budget, were new figures for the fast-escalating tax the Government introduces next week on every ton of CO2 emitted by fossil-fuel-powered stations, which will soon be adding billions of pounds more to our electricity bills every year.

Be sure to read the rest. Not only is the government in London heavily subsidizing uneconomic wind farms and granting needless subsidies in tribute to get nuclear plants built, but they’re doing all they can to drive coal plants out of business, even though coal plants are necessary as backup for those times when the wind doesn’t blow. Hence the warnings about blackouts in the dead of winter. Britain is looking at a new Dark Ages, one wholly of its own doing.

And before we cluck our tongues at our cousins’ folly, this is just the future Obama and the environmentalist movement would lead us to:

Booker is right that Britain’s energy policy is insanity. But what can we say about a nation –us– that sits atop almost unimaginably immense energy resources, enough to restore the cheap energy needed for prosperity and make us nearly energy independent, and yet fights tooth and nail  against developing it in the name of battling a problem that does not exist?

Madness!

(Crossposted at Sister Toldjah)

Obama By-Passes Gas

Reblogged from Watts Up With That?:

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Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

President Obama continues his Global War on Cheap Energy™, this time under the guise of avoiding "spikes" in gasoline (petrol) prices.  He wants to pass gas without regrets and move post-haste to electricity and biofuels, although both are more expensive than gasoline and diesel for road and rail transport. According to the Associated Press, in a speech at the Argonne National Laboratories Obama said:

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This administration's energy policy is giving me gas, but not the right kind. It amazes me that so many voted for him, when his policies are so clearly harmful. Such is the power of wishful thinking, I guess.

Three Cheers for Governor Bobby Jindal's Plan to Abolish the Income Tax

Reblogged from International Liberty:

Two months ago exactly, I appeared on TV to talk about the concept of eliminating the personal and corporate income tax in Louisiana.

Now Governor Jindal has unveiled a specific proposal.

The plan will eliminate two major tax types: personal income tax and corporate income and franchise tax. Eliminating income taxes in a revenue-neutral manner and improving sales tax administration will dramatically simplify Louisiana’s tax system and reduce administrative problems for families and small businesses.

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An illustration of why Jindal is my front-running choice for POTUS in 2016.

Inequality, Redistribution, and Class Warfare

Reblogged from International Liberty:

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I've spent a lot of time debunking class-warfare tax policy, and I've certainly explained 'til I'm blue in the face that big government facilitates a pernicious form of corruption that enriches powerful and well-connected insiders.

But I haven't spent much time addressing the topic of income inequality, which is connected to those two other issues.

U.S. News & World Report…

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Try as I might, I just cannot get some of my liberal friends to understand that punishing productive behavior with higher taxes is just bad policy. They just fall back behind their magic word, "fairness." Sigh.

Let's Shed a Tear for those Under-Appreciated Bureaucrats Who Get Lavish Pensions and Live in $700K Homes

Reblogged from International Liberty:

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When I first read this story in the Washington Post about supposedly under-appreciated federal bureaucrats, I was tempted to focus on the sentence referring to "the sledgehammer of budget cuts scheduled to hit today."

Is the Washington Post so biased and/or clueless that reporters really think that a 1.2 percent reduction in overall spending for the current fiscal year (which means the…

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The horror. I weep for our poor, oppressed bureaucratic mandarins.

“Democrats” — Where the “D” stands for “Denial”

President Obama and the congressional Democrats bear the lion’s share of the responsibility for our metastasizing national debt, but don’t you dare remind them of that:

During a House Financial Services Committee hearing Tuesday on the budget, two Democrats complained after House Financial Services Committee chairman Jeb Hensarling instructed that two monitors in the hearing room display a real-time running national debt clock.

California Rep. Maxine Waters and Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison both issued complaints about the displays, according to video of the hearing.

“Clearly it is a political prop designed to message ideologically,” Ellison said.

Waters asked that the debt clock not be on display whenever Democrats spoke, Hensarling said during the hearing.

“At the request of the ranking member, the national debt clock will not be put on the screens during Democratic time,” said Hensarling, a Texas Republican.

Follow the link for video of this sterling moment in political courage.

Congresswoman Waters, of course, is a California Democrat who recently skated on corruption charges. She also famously supported nationalization of the oil industry in 2008, but you’re a racist if you call her a Socialist.

Congressman Ellison (D – MN), on the other hand, is the well-known representative for the Muslim Brotherhood, and had a long association with Nation of Islam leader (and antisemitic fruitcake) Louis Farrakhan.

But reminding them of their party’s role in the United States’ looming debt disaster is somehow offensive to these two fine, upstanding people.

I guess the old saying is right: Truth hurts.

RELATED: My blog-buddy ST has declared a “whine alert.” And here’s an article on Ellison’s meltdown on last night’s “Hannity.”

Which Nation Has the Most Per-Capita Government Spending on Healthcare: France, Italy, the United States, Sweden, Canada, Greece, or the United Kingdom?

Reblogged from International Liberty:

What government spends the most on health care?

• Is it Canada or the United Kingdom, which are famous (or, if these stories are any indication, infamous would be a better description) for single-payer healthcare systems?
• Is it Sweden, the home of the cradle-to-grave welfare state?
• Or France, the land of the world's most statist people?
• How about Italy…

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And we're going in very much the wrong and harmful direction.

Sunday Links Fiesta: Takin’ the day off edition

It’s a beautiful day here in Southern California: sunny, not too warm, and a bright cloudless sky. A good day for getting out and about and maybe having a late lunch down by the beach.

Or just taking the first of several naps. 

But, fear not! You’ll not be bereft of reading material today! Below are several links I think you’ll find interesting:

Our dangerous neighborhood:

Most everyone’s heard about the near miss Earth had with a good-sized asteroid recently, and the fireball that crashed down near Chelyabinsk, Russia. There was even a fireball over San Francisco Friday night. JoNova asks a good question: are we watching for the next one? Someday, one of these is going to come down in  a populated area, with horrific casualties likely. Rather than wasting time and energy on the man-made global warming nonsense, we should be spending more to track the real hazards in our planet’s path and figuring out ways to divert or deflect them.

The Democrats’ dangerous economics:

Fausta presents a chart and analysis demonstrating very clearly how the President’s proposal for a $9 minimum wage would shaft teens and other people entering the workforce for the first time: “The Young and the Jobless.” Meanwhile

Meanwhile, in the “we tried to warn you” department, young workers will very likely see their insurance premiums double, thanks to Obamacare. Democrats are desperate to avoid the blame for this, but the nature of the PPACA’s passage makes it all theirs.

Mixing pseudo-science with bad economics, Christopher Monckton at WUWT writes that the Boxer-Sanders “carbon tax” bill, yet another “solution” for a problem that doesn’t exist, will cost America 15 time more than if we simply let warming happen. Of course, the real goal of such a bill isn’t fighting “climate change,” but getting their hands on more money to redistribute to their favored clients and cronies.

The Democrats’ dangerous politics:

The Democrats (and some Republicans) are scared of Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), just as they were of Sarah Palin: both represent forces that put truth above “just going along,” and both refuse to, as Palin once put it, “sit down and shut up.” You can tell because, just two months after taking office, the hit pieces against Cruz have already begun. Politico reports on how he has upset his Senate colleagues for speaking out (Cue the world’s smallest violin!), and the New York Times has gone birther against the Senator. Matt Vespa has more on this coordinated assault.

In a Valentine’s Day love letter to President Obama, the always must-read Michael Barone claims victory: Obama’s actions as president prove he is running a gangster government, holding itself above the law. Not a good thing for a nation that prides itself on the Rule of Law.

The assault on the Bill of Rights marches on. Colorado Democrats have taken the first step toward passing another useless gun-control bill that does nothing but punish law-abiding citizens. Meanwhile, Democrats holding hearings on their gun-control proposals before the Minnesota legislature walked out, rather than hear evidence contrary to their beliefs. They might as well have clapped hands to ears and shouted “WE CAN’T HEAR YOU!!” Finally, the Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby has an interesting article on how crime soared in Massachusetts after the passage of its 1998 gun law.

And, the miscellany:

Daniel Hannan, a Conservative MEP and a genuine small-government conservative, points out again something the Left just hates to hear: the Socialist origins of Fascism. Sad thing is, the Left’s dominance of the media culture is so thorough that most people just assume what they’re told, that Fascism is a demon of the Right.

At PJ Media, my friend Michael Ledeen wonders what happened to Obama’s “three valkyries” and their beloved “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine of foreign affairs and concludes, cynically but accurately, that the real Obama Doctrine is something else, altogether.

At the USDA, they’re holding some fairly creepy training indoctrination sessions.

Finally, Charles Krauthammer writes in defense of Obama’s drone-war policy.

Enjoy your day, folks. 

(Crossposted at Sister Toldjah)

Quote of the day: Message to Obama from Cicero

“Time for a lesson, Barack.”

And I don’t mean Cicero, Illinois, but the great Roman lawyer and orator, Marcus Tullius Cicero (1):

“Whoever governs a country,” Cicero wrote in On Duties,  “must first see that citizens keep what belongs to them and that the state does not take from individuals what is rightfully theirs. . . . Indeed, the chief reason we have a constitution  and government at  all is to protect individual property. Even though nature led people to come together into communities in the first place, they did so with the hope that they could keep what rightfully belonged to them.”

Smart people, those Romans.

via Roger Kimball

Footnote:
(1) And whose prose tormented me in Latin classes. Caesar, Livy, Tacitus, Virgil… no problem! But Cicero? That man broke every rule of grammar you ever learned and made you thank him for it. That’s probably the real reason Marc Antony had him killed.

The progressive war on the middle class: Kansas vs. California

A few days ago, reactionary liberal E.J. Dionne wrote a piece in The Washington Post, part of which he devoted to bashing states that implement conservative fiscal and governance policies. And he singled out Kansas, the state with perhaps the most “Tea Party” government, for a ritual “two minutes hate:”

In some states where Republicans control all the levers of power, they are rushing ahead with astonishingly right-wing programs to eviscerate government while shifting the tax burden toward the middle class and the poor and away from the wealthy. In trying to build the Koch brothers’ dystopias, they are turning states in laboratories of reaction.

As Neil King Jr. and Mark Peters reported in a Wall Street Journal article on the “Red State model,” Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback has slashed both income taxes and spending. This drew fire from moderate and moderately conservative Republican legislators, whom he then helped purge in primaries.

Note the requisite invocation of the demon Koch brothers, lest any of the progressive faithful miss the clue that these conservative reforms are EVIL!!!

Anyway, Washington Examiner columnist Conn Carroll read Dionne’s screed and did something increasingly unusual for journalists these days: he looked for facts before turning on his word-processing program. Imagine that.

So, first looked at how things are going in Mordor Kansas:

If Dionne were to bother to visit Kansas, he would find a state with an unemployment rate of 5.4 percent, a full 2.5 points below the nation’s 7.9 percent average. Despite “eviscerated” state government spending, Kansas’ fourth- and eighth-graders beat the national average in both math and reading scores. The state’s 11.2 percent poverty rate is also well below the national 15.8 percent national average. And despite all those evil tax cuts for the rich, the gap between Kansas’ wealthiest and poorest citizens is also much smaller than the national average.

The most recent Jayhawk Poll showed Brownback enjoying a 55 percent to 37 percent approval rating. But I’m sure the backlash Dionne predicted is just around the corner.

Then he compared it to the progressive Paradise, my beloved California, where Democrats control the governor’s office and have super-majorities in the legislature:

At 9.8 percent, unemployment is a bit higher in the Golden State then in Kansas — or the rest of the country, for that matter. Despite California spending far more per student than most states, its fourth- and eighth-graders perform far worse on reading and math proficiency scores than the average American students. A third of all the welfare recipients in the United States live in California, and the Census Bureau reports that the state also has the nation’s highest poverty rate. Almost one-quarter (23.5 percent) of Californians live below the poverty line.

And there is plenty of wealth to go around in California, but it also has one of the nation’s highest levels of income inequality. According to the Census Bureau, it is getting more and not less unequal.

Oh, and Governor Brown’s claims that our budget is at last balanced turned out to be a total lie, too. No word about Kansas’ budget, but I’m willing to bet they’re in better far fiscal shape than we are. Even Albania is.

Anyway, based on just this brief comparison of two states that most embody, respectively, what Walter Mead has called the Red and Blue models of government, if anyone is waging a war on the middle class, it’s the liberal/progressive/statist Democrats. Instead of looking at conservative states and shrieking “My God, what are you people doing,” Dionne should look to places where “his way” rules and ask “My God, what have we done?”

PS: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. That California isn’t yet in flaming ruins after decades of progressive misrule is evidence of just how powerful this state’s natural economy was and could be, again, if only the oligarchs in Sacramento would pull their heads out of their collective backsides — and their hands out of our wallets.

(Crossposted at Sister Toldjah)

Another Hypocritical Leftist Caught with His Hand in the Tax-Haven Cookie Jar

Reblogged from International Liberty:

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I'm a huge fan of so-called tax havens. I've been working for more than 10 years to protect and promote the values of tax competition, fiscal sovereignty, and financial privacy.

The bureaucrats at the OECD even threatened to have me tossed in a Mexican jail because I was advising representatives of low-tax jurisdictions on how best to resist fiscal imperialism.

Read more… 625 more words

An example of something pointed out years ago by Peter Schweizer: When conservatives betray their professed principles, they hurt themselves; when the left betrays their principles, they benefit.