Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Payback Time: States’ Debt Woes Grow Too Big to Camouflage
Payback Time: States’ Debt Woes Grow Too Big to Camouflage: "High debt levels are causing states to take desperate measures to make their finances appear healthy."
Monday, March 29, 2010
Charles Krauthammer - Obamacare's next trick: the VAT
As the night follows the day, VAT follows health-care reform.
With the passage of Obamacare, creating a vast new middle-class entitlement, a national sales tax of the kind near-universal in Europe is inevitable.
Read the rest here: Obamacare's next trick: the VAT
Get ready to feel the pain. If you liked the Jimmy Carter years, you’ll love Barack Obama’s historic decimation of our rights, our freedoms and our wealth.
With the passage of Obamacare, creating a vast new middle-class entitlement, a national sales tax of the kind near-universal in Europe is inevitable.
Read the rest here: Obamacare's next trick: the VAT
Get ready to feel the pain. If you liked the Jimmy Carter years, you’ll love Barack Obama’s historic decimation of our rights, our freedoms and our wealth.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
The Bond Market and ObamaCare
The Bond Market and ObamaCare: "Michael Barone, Washington Examiner
Not many people noticed amid the Democrats' struggle to jam their health care bill through the House, but in recent weeks U.S. Treasury bonds have lost their status as the world's safest investment.The numbers are pretty clear. In February, Bloomberg News reports, Berkshire Hathaway sold two-year bonds with an interest rate lower than that on two-year Treasuries. A company run by a 79-year-old investor is a better credit risk, the markets are telling us, than the U.S. government. Buffett's firm isn't the only one. Procter & Gamble, Johnson &..."
Not many people noticed amid the Democrats' struggle to jam their health care bill through the House, but in recent weeks U.S. Treasury bonds have lost their status as the world's safest investment.The numbers are pretty clear. In February, Bloomberg News reports, Berkshire Hathaway sold two-year bonds with an interest rate lower than that on two-year Treasuries. A company run by a 79-year-old investor is a better credit risk, the markets are telling us, than the U.S. government. Buffett's firm isn't the only one. Procter & Gamble, Johnson &..."
Keynes was wrong, we need to get back to Adam Smith economics.
CNBC - Social Security to See Payout Exceed Pay-In This Year
“This year, the system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes, an important threshold it was not expected to cross until at least 2016, according to the Congressional Budget Office.” - Social Security to See Payout Exceed Pay-In This Year - CNBC
We are definitely not out of the woods yet.
We are definitely not out of the woods yet.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Dems Won This Battle, But They've Lost the War
Dems Won This Battle, But They've Lost the War: "Mike Flynn, Big Govt
Over the last several days, old friends and family around the country have contacted me with the same questions: 'Do they have the votes? What is going to happen?' Maybe they think that, living inside the Beltway, I get some secret newsletter that can divine what Congress will do. To all of them and you, let me be clear: I have no idea what is going to happen tonight. We have slipped well beyond any rational political thought or calculation. By any traditional analysis, this bill would have been buried long ago. So, while I don't know what is going to happen, it is worth..."
Over the last several days, old friends and family around the country have contacted me with the same questions: 'Do they have the votes? What is going to happen?' Maybe they think that, living inside the Beltway, I get some secret newsletter that can divine what Congress will do. To all of them and you, let me be clear: I have no idea what is going to happen tonight. We have slipped well beyond any rational political thought or calculation. By any traditional analysis, this bill would have been buried long ago. So, while I don't know what is going to happen, it is worth..."
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Iranians train Taliban to use roadside bombs - Times Online
Iranians train Taliban to use roadside bombs - Times Online
Obama insists on reaching out to the psychotic Iranian dictator, while ignoring the people of Iran who are being brutally repressed. This is the response that we get for his refusal to live in reality. Appeasement never works, and the longer Obama pretends that it does, the more American and other lives will be lost.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Welcome to Deemocracy -- By: Mark Steyn
Welcome to Deemocracy -- By: Mark Steyn: "On Thursday, the California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board voted to set up a committee to examine whether condoms should be required on all pornographic film shoots within the Golden State.
California has run out of money, but it hasn’t yet run out of things to regulate.
For a government regulatory hearing, the testimony was livelier than usual. The porn star Madelyne Hernandez recalled an especially grueling scene in which she had been obliged to have sex with 75 men. The bureaucrats nodded thoughtfully, no doubt contemplating another languorous 18-month committee assignment looking into capping the number of group-sex participants at 60 per scene. In future, if a porn actress finds 75 men waiting for her on the set, they’ll be bureaucrats from Sacramento’s Condom Enforcement Squad.
The committee will also make recommendations on whether the “adult” movie industry should be subject to the same regulatory regime and hygiene procedures as hospitals and doctors’ surgeries. You mean with everyone in surgical masks? Kinky. If you’ve ever been in the filthy, C. difficile- and MRSA-infected wards of Britain’s National Health Service, it may make more sense after the passage of Obamacare to require hospitals to bring themselves up to the same hygiene standards as the average Bangkok porn shoot.
One can make arguments for permitting porn and for banning porn, but there isn’t a lot to be said for the bureaucratization of porn. Hard to believe there will be dull, bespoke California bureaucrats looking forward to early retirement on gold-plated pensions who’ll be getting home, sinking into the La-Z-Boy and complaining to the missus about a tough day at the office working on the permits for Debbie Does the Fresno OSHA Office.
Meanwhile, Obamacare will result in the creation of at least 16,500 new jobs. Doctors? Nurses? Ha! Dream on, suckers. That’s 16,500 new IRS agents, who’ll be needed to check whether you -- yes, you, Mr. and Mrs. Hopendope of 27 Hopeychangey Gardens -- are in compliance with the 15 tax increases and dozens of new federal mandates the Deemocrats are about to “deem” into existence. This will be the biggest expansion of the IRS since World War II -- and that’s change you can believe in. This is what “health” “care” “reform” boils down to: fewer doctors, longer wait times, but more bureaucrats. And, when you walk into the Health Care Enforcement Division of the IRS, the staffing levels will make Madelyne Hernandez’s group-sex scene look like an Equity-minimum one-man play off-off-off Broadway.
Barack Obama, a man who not so long ago had time to jet across the world to make dreary Olympics-losing speeches about how his kind of town Chicago is, has now postponed his presidential visits to Indonesia and Australia in order to make sure “health care” passes this week -- or, at any rate, is “deemed” to have passed, which is apparently the way a quarter-millennium-old constitutional republic does things.
The president, his press secretary informs us, regrets having to postpone his trip for three months, but “passage of the health-insurance reform is of paramount importance.” Whereas Australia isn’t.
The visit had already been pared back to the bare minimum -- a quick refueling stop in Canberra, with a speech to Parliament and a grip’n’greet with the governor-general and the prime minister. Maybe the administration could simply “deem” the visit to have occurred, photoshop a souvenir snapshot, and stick it in the mail to their eminences. In much the same way, the Deemocrats are deeming their health bill to control costs rather than actually controlling them. Medicare doesn’t reimburse doctors the cost of treating the patient; it reimburses what the bureaucracy “deems” it to have cost. In a deemocracy, this works. In real life, it’s more problematic.
Investor’s Business Daily argues that the “health” debate is really a proxy fight on the size and role of government. According to their poll, 64 percent of people think the federal government has “too much power.” Correct. But a big chunk of that 64 percent voted less than 18 months ago for a man and a party explicitly committed to more government with more power, and they’re now living with the consequences. Obama is government, and government is Obama. That’s all he knows and all he’s ever known. You elected to the highest office in the land a man who’s never run a business or created wealth or made a payroll, and for his entire adult life has hung out with guys who’ve demonized (deemonized?) such grubby activities. Many of which associates he appointed to high office: Obama’s cabinet has less experience of private business than any in the last century. What it knows is government, and government’s default mode is to grow, and grow.
California is bankrupt: The dependent class and the government class that issues the checks to the dependent class have squeezed out the poor boobs in the middle who have to pay for it all. Everybody knows this. But a state that already has a Bureau of Home Furnishings cannot restrain itself from setting up a Bureau of Motion Picture Condom Regulation -- or, anyway, an impact study to study whether the Bureau of Impact Studies should study the impact of a Bureau of Motion Picture Condom Regulation.
Look around you, and take it all in. From now on, it gets worse. If you have kids, they’ll live in smaller homes, drive smaller cars, live smaller lives. If you don’t have kids, you better hope your neighbors do, because someone needs to spawn a working population large enough to pay for the unsustainable entitlements the Obama party has suckered you into thinking you’re entitled to. The unfunded liabilities of current entitlements are $100 trillion. Try typing that onto your pocket calculator. You can’t. There isn’t enough room for all the zeroes, and, even if they made a pocket calculator large enough, and a pocket large enough, you’d be walking with a limp. To these existing entitlements, Obama and his enforcers in Congress propose to add the grandest of all: health care, on a scale no advanced democracy has ever attempted.
Whatever is “deemed” to have passed in the next few days doesn’t end the debate but begins it. If you’re sick of talking about health care, move to Tahiti, because in the U.S. we’re going to be talking about it until the end of time, or at least until the Iranians nuke Cleveland.
It isn’t difficult. We need less government, with smaller budgets, fewer agencies, and vastly reduced numbers of public-sector union employees on less lavish remuneration. I’m confident the California Bureau of Condom Regulators can be retrained as porn-movie bit-players and once again make a useful contribution to society. But, if you’re not in favor of shrinking government, you’re voting for national decline, remorseless and ever accelerating.
Obama and Pelosi are strong-arming swing-state congressmen into taking one for the deem. It’s appropriate that it should take banana-republic maneuvers to ram this through, because it’s about government so powerful it can make up the rules as it goes along. Maybe regulators should roll a giant condom over the Capitol before it fatally infects the rest of us.
-- Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone. © 2010 Mark Steyn.
"
California has run out of money, but it hasn’t yet run out of things to regulate.
For a government regulatory hearing, the testimony was livelier than usual. The porn star Madelyne Hernandez recalled an especially grueling scene in which she had been obliged to have sex with 75 men. The bureaucrats nodded thoughtfully, no doubt contemplating another languorous 18-month committee assignment looking into capping the number of group-sex participants at 60 per scene. In future, if a porn actress finds 75 men waiting for her on the set, they’ll be bureaucrats from Sacramento’s Condom Enforcement Squad.
The committee will also make recommendations on whether the “adult” movie industry should be subject to the same regulatory regime and hygiene procedures as hospitals and doctors’ surgeries. You mean with everyone in surgical masks? Kinky. If you’ve ever been in the filthy, C. difficile- and MRSA-infected wards of Britain’s National Health Service, it may make more sense after the passage of Obamacare to require hospitals to bring themselves up to the same hygiene standards as the average Bangkok porn shoot.
One can make arguments for permitting porn and for banning porn, but there isn’t a lot to be said for the bureaucratization of porn. Hard to believe there will be dull, bespoke California bureaucrats looking forward to early retirement on gold-plated pensions who’ll be getting home, sinking into the La-Z-Boy and complaining to the missus about a tough day at the office working on the permits for Debbie Does the Fresno OSHA Office.
Meanwhile, Obamacare will result in the creation of at least 16,500 new jobs. Doctors? Nurses? Ha! Dream on, suckers. That’s 16,500 new IRS agents, who’ll be needed to check whether you -- yes, you, Mr. and Mrs. Hopendope of 27 Hopeychangey Gardens -- are in compliance with the 15 tax increases and dozens of new federal mandates the Deemocrats are about to “deem” into existence. This will be the biggest expansion of the IRS since World War II -- and that’s change you can believe in. This is what “health” “care” “reform” boils down to: fewer doctors, longer wait times, but more bureaucrats. And, when you walk into the Health Care Enforcement Division of the IRS, the staffing levels will make Madelyne Hernandez’s group-sex scene look like an Equity-minimum one-man play off-off-off Broadway.
Barack Obama, a man who not so long ago had time to jet across the world to make dreary Olympics-losing speeches about how his kind of town Chicago is, has now postponed his presidential visits to Indonesia and Australia in order to make sure “health care” passes this week -- or, at any rate, is “deemed” to have passed, which is apparently the way a quarter-millennium-old constitutional republic does things.
The president, his press secretary informs us, regrets having to postpone his trip for three months, but “passage of the health-insurance reform is of paramount importance.” Whereas Australia isn’t.
The visit had already been pared back to the bare minimum -- a quick refueling stop in Canberra, with a speech to Parliament and a grip’n’greet with the governor-general and the prime minister. Maybe the administration could simply “deem” the visit to have occurred, photoshop a souvenir snapshot, and stick it in the mail to their eminences. In much the same way, the Deemocrats are deeming their health bill to control costs rather than actually controlling them. Medicare doesn’t reimburse doctors the cost of treating the patient; it reimburses what the bureaucracy “deems” it to have cost. In a deemocracy, this works. In real life, it’s more problematic.
Investor’s Business Daily argues that the “health” debate is really a proxy fight on the size and role of government. According to their poll, 64 percent of people think the federal government has “too much power.” Correct. But a big chunk of that 64 percent voted less than 18 months ago for a man and a party explicitly committed to more government with more power, and they’re now living with the consequences. Obama is government, and government is Obama. That’s all he knows and all he’s ever known. You elected to the highest office in the land a man who’s never run a business or created wealth or made a payroll, and for his entire adult life has hung out with guys who’ve demonized (deemonized?) such grubby activities. Many of which associates he appointed to high office: Obama’s cabinet has less experience of private business than any in the last century. What it knows is government, and government’s default mode is to grow, and grow.
California is bankrupt: The dependent class and the government class that issues the checks to the dependent class have squeezed out the poor boobs in the middle who have to pay for it all. Everybody knows this. But a state that already has a Bureau of Home Furnishings cannot restrain itself from setting up a Bureau of Motion Picture Condom Regulation -- or, anyway, an impact study to study whether the Bureau of Impact Studies should study the impact of a Bureau of Motion Picture Condom Regulation.
Look around you, and take it all in. From now on, it gets worse. If you have kids, they’ll live in smaller homes, drive smaller cars, live smaller lives. If you don’t have kids, you better hope your neighbors do, because someone needs to spawn a working population large enough to pay for the unsustainable entitlements the Obama party has suckered you into thinking you’re entitled to. The unfunded liabilities of current entitlements are $100 trillion. Try typing that onto your pocket calculator. You can’t. There isn’t enough room for all the zeroes, and, even if they made a pocket calculator large enough, and a pocket large enough, you’d be walking with a limp. To these existing entitlements, Obama and his enforcers in Congress propose to add the grandest of all: health care, on a scale no advanced democracy has ever attempted.
Whatever is “deemed” to have passed in the next few days doesn’t end the debate but begins it. If you’re sick of talking about health care, move to Tahiti, because in the U.S. we’re going to be talking about it until the end of time, or at least until the Iranians nuke Cleveland.
It isn’t difficult. We need less government, with smaller budgets, fewer agencies, and vastly reduced numbers of public-sector union employees on less lavish remuneration. I’m confident the California Bureau of Condom Regulators can be retrained as porn-movie bit-players and once again make a useful contribution to society. But, if you’re not in favor of shrinking government, you’re voting for national decline, remorseless and ever accelerating.
Obama and Pelosi are strong-arming swing-state congressmen into taking one for the deem. It’s appropriate that it should take banana-republic maneuvers to ram this through, because it’s about government so powerful it can make up the rules as it goes along. Maybe regulators should roll a giant condom over the Capitol before it fatally infects the rest of us.
-- Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone. © 2010 Mark Steyn.
"
Race to the Bottom
Race to the Bottom
Freedom of choice, but only as long as the unions' hegemony isn't threatened. Yet another case of cronyism overriding ideology.
These students deserve this lifeline out of the system, but they'll never get it from the Obama administration because the unions are calling the shots. Our education system is completely broken, but nothing is being done to fix it because of the lock that the teachers unions have on it. We'll never take back our country if we don't take back our schools. I've been saying for a while that our real, long-term challenge is education. We have to reconnect our children to their real heritage and history so that they understand why the principles that America was founded on are so important.
Freedom of choice, but only as long as the unions' hegemony isn't threatened. Yet another case of cronyism overriding ideology.
These students deserve this lifeline out of the system, but they'll never get it from the Obama administration because the unions are calling the shots. Our education system is completely broken, but nothing is being done to fix it because of the lock that the teachers unions have on it. We'll never take back our country if we don't take back our schools. I've been saying for a while that our real, long-term challenge is education. We have to reconnect our children to their real heritage and history so that they understand why the principles that America was founded on are so important.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Virginia Politics Blog - Cuccinelli's office confirms Virginia will sue over health care
Virginia will sue... Cuccinelli's office confirms Virginia will sue over health care
It’s time for all of the state Attorneys General to do this, and for the state legislatures to start shutting out the federal government until it gets its act together. Our federal government is out of control, and the cooks in charge are radical ideologues who are determined to “fundamentally transform” America. They should all be removed from office, and many of them belong in jail. America needs to restore our founding principles, not throw them out the window.
Monday, March 15, 2010
"Mark to Fantasy" - Why we're not out of the woods yet.
NOW FASB Wants To Do The Right Thing? - The Market Ticker
It doesn’t matter how you cook the books, the reality is still the same. Our government has continued to waste Trillions of dollars in a vain attempt to protect the people who have destroyed our economy from being held accountable for their actions. These are the crony capitalists. It seems that there are some in our government who would welcome a collapse of our system so that they can replace it and put themselves in power over us. These are the statists. Both groups of people represent a house built on shifting sand that is doomed to fail. A brief review of history would show them that all too quickly. Many of them know the history, but they delude themselves into thinking that somehow they are different. Our Constitution is the house built upon the rock which will never fail us as long as we hold true to it. That is because it is based upon historical precedent and Christian principles. The sooner we realize that, the better off we’ll be.
Neither crony capitalists nor statists believe in the free market system, and both of them tend to demonize it endlessly to justify why we need more government intervention in our lives. More government is the problem, though, not the solution. It is what enables these groups to destroy economies in the name of saving them. Both groups ultimately seek their own power over free men. Our Constitution is designed to keep government in check and to protect free men. The free market is one of the keys to preserving our freedom because it allows all men the opportunity to succeed regardless of their social status.
There will always be men who seek power and control, and it is up to free men to be vigilant for them and to stop them from enslaving us.
It doesn’t matter how you cook the books, the reality is still the same. Our government has continued to waste Trillions of dollars in a vain attempt to protect the people who have destroyed our economy from being held accountable for their actions. These are the crony capitalists. It seems that there are some in our government who would welcome a collapse of our system so that they can replace it and put themselves in power over us. These are the statists. Both groups of people represent a house built on shifting sand that is doomed to fail. A brief review of history would show them that all too quickly. Many of them know the history, but they delude themselves into thinking that somehow they are different. Our Constitution is the house built upon the rock which will never fail us as long as we hold true to it. That is because it is based upon historical precedent and Christian principles. The sooner we realize that, the better off we’ll be.
Neither crony capitalists nor statists believe in the free market system, and both of them tend to demonize it endlessly to justify why we need more government intervention in our lives. More government is the problem, though, not the solution. It is what enables these groups to destroy economies in the name of saving them. Both groups ultimately seek their own power over free men. Our Constitution is designed to keep government in check and to protect free men. The free market is one of the keys to preserving our freedom because it allows all men the opportunity to succeed regardless of their social status.
There will always be men who seek power and control, and it is up to free men to be vigilant for them and to stop them from enslaving us.
Monday, March 8, 2010
How to destroy small businesses 101
AP Source: Health bill to affect part-time workers
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Democratic aide says a new provision in the health care bill will require businesses to count part-time workers when calculating penalties for failing to provide coverage....
Yet another reason to kill this bill.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Democratic aide says a new provision in the health care bill will require businesses to count part-time workers when calculating penalties for failing to provide coverage....
Yet another reason to kill this bill.
Are public advocates for animal rights needed? Switzerland says no. / The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com
Are public advocates for animal rights needed? Switzerland says no. / The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com
I'm proud to report that the Swiss still seem to have retained a little bit of common sense. Maybe they can start spreading some of it around the rest of Europe. Can you believe that anyone even takes Mr. Goestsche seriously? Maybe he's just doing their version of the Red Green Show. Either way, it looks like lots of folks are laughing at him, and that is definitely a good thing in my book.
Why Government Spending Does Not Stimulate Economic Growth: Answering the Critics
Despite decades of repeated failure, President Obama and Congress continue to promote the myth that government can spend its way out of recession. Heritage Foundation economic policy expert Brian Riedl dispels the stimulus myth, lays out the evidence that government spending does not end recessions--and presents the evidence for what does end recessions. Hint: It's not another "stimulus package."
Why Government Spending Does Not Stimulate Economic Growth: Answering the Critics
Why Government Spending Does Not Stimulate Economic Growth: Answering the Critics
Cash for Closing - Upside down on your house? Obama to the rescue...sort of.
Short-Sale Program to Pay Homeowners to Sell at a Loss
This makes perfect sense if you live in LaLaLand with the people in the Obama administration. To the rest of us here on planet Earth, this is just another in a string of bad policies based on out-dated and disproven theories.
If my math is correct, the government is now proposing to give up to $3,500.00 of our money to pay banks and home owners to agree to sell these houses for less than the current values of the loans on them (short sell). At least some of the TARP bailout was paid back, this is just a handout with no expectation of repayment or remuneration. How exactly does this help the housing industry or market?
According to recent reports Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac already own half of the mortgages in the U.S., and that means that those mortgages are effectively owned by the American taxpayer. So, are we paying ourselves to take a loss? On what planet does that make sense?
Is there any rational thought left in Washington, D.C.?
This makes perfect sense if you live in LaLaLand with the people in the Obama administration. To the rest of us here on planet Earth, this is just another in a string of bad policies based on out-dated and disproven theories.
If my math is correct, the government is now proposing to give up to $3,500.00 of our money to pay banks and home owners to agree to sell these houses for less than the current values of the loans on them (short sell). At least some of the TARP bailout was paid back, this is just a handout with no expectation of repayment or remuneration. How exactly does this help the housing industry or market?
According to recent reports Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac already own half of the mortgages in the U.S., and that means that those mortgages are effectively owned by the American taxpayer. So, are we paying ourselves to take a loss? On what planet does that make sense?
Is there any rational thought left in Washington, D.C.?
Sunday, March 7, 2010
One Year Later: Where's the Energy?
It's almost a year after Newt delivered this message and we're still not drilling. How much longer can we wait?
Saturday, March 6, 2010
If anyone doesn't understand why we have to stop 'Health Care' now, read this.
It's About Government, Not Health Care -- By: Mark Steyn
Mark is absolutely right about this. Obamacare is about nothing less than a complete government takeover of our lives. It’s unacceptable, and we had better get some folks in Washington, D.C. who understand what’s at stake.
Mark is absolutely right about this. Obamacare is about nothing less than a complete government takeover of our lives. It’s unacceptable, and we had better get some folks in Washington, D.C. who understand what’s at stake.
Friday, March 5, 2010
Charles Krauthammer - Always On Point
Onward with Obamacare, regardless
So the yearlong production, set to close after Massachusetts's devastatingly negative Jan. 19 review, saw the curtain raised one last time. Obamacare lives...
So the yearlong production, set to close after Massachusetts's devastatingly negative Jan. 19 review, saw the curtain raised one last time. Obamacare lives...
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Obama Flashback: "You Need 60 Votes to Get Something Significant to Happen"
President Obama seems to have a lot of “do as I say, not as I do” moments.
Obama Flashback: "You Need 60 Votes to Get Something Significant to Happen"
These government takeovers (health care) may just go down as the worst legislation in history. Everyday more Americans are standing up and saying “NO”, and yet the president and congress keep trying to shove it down our throats. At this rate, they won’t have the political capital to name a post office by the end of 2010.
Obama Flashback: "You Need 60 Votes to Get Something Significant to Happen"
These government takeovers (health care) may just go down as the worst legislation in history. Everyday more Americans are standing up and saying “NO”, and yet the president and congress keep trying to shove it down our throats. At this rate, they won’t have the political capital to name a post office by the end of 2010.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)