Archive for October, 2010
Please, Don’t Help Me!
Harry is running hard…..away from Obama!
Temper Your Expectations for the Next Two Years
Posted by Tom in Business, Centrally Managed Economy, Economics, Employment, Government Regulation, Statism on October 29, 2010
One of the greatest restraints on economic growth is uncertainty. Business investment, the generator of growth and job creation, is risky even in the best of times. Uncertain times greatly increase the risk and often kill the decisions to invest, thus killing growth potential and job creation.
Obama and his leftist Congress with Pelosi and Reid in charge has added more uncertainty to the economy than any government in recent memory. Healthcare, financial regulation, cap and trade, tax policy and general expansion of government have added to the uncertainty. What direction will the legislation take, the regulations thereunder, the bureaucrats that make specific decisions pursuant to those regulations? And how will all of those affect my business investment?
Whether its consumer financial rule making, the EPA’s administrative imposition of emission limits on CO2, the health tzar’s specification of one-size-fits-all insurance policies, uncertainty abounds! Business will continue to stall and job creation will stall with it.
Charles Krauthammer in yesterday’s Washington Post op-ed, The great campaign of 2010, rightly predicts political paralysis if Republicans as predicted take the House and possibly the Senate. They can pass but Obama can veto. That means no repeal of Obamacare, nor of anything else for that matter.
Thus, center stage will be owned by the bureaucrats. By people like Kathleen Sebelius with Obamacare, Elizabeth Warren at the consumer financial protection bureau and Lisa Jackson at the EPA. These people can do real damage with or without legislation already on the books. Uncertainty will grow geometrically!
And costs to existing businesses will grow dramatically creating a further drag on the economy. For example, mid size real estate investment management companies will now be regulated by the SEC complements of Barney Frank’s financial regulation legislation. One company I know will be forced to spend $500,000 to set up the compliance accounting and controls, will be required to hire a compliance officer, will have all company emails for a running six year period scrutinized by the SEC and will require all principals and officers to have their home emails inspected for business content. Now this firm does not deal with the public, has no individual investors, and is owned by the individual partners. It deals in commercial and industrial real estate investments and invest for and advises major institutions. Not only will its costs go up but its business time will be diverted by this unnecessary compliance. Regulation for the sake of regulation keeps the bureaucrats in business.
In many respects this is the worst of all worlds. Political paralysis can be good, but not with bureaucratic uncertainty in full force. Lawless, unelected people with leftists agendas will govern unchecked. Regulation will be over done for the benefit of the regulators and little else. Remedies are limited and slow: court processes take years and further add to uncertainty. Impeachment for misconduct is rarely called for and more rarely used.
So the next two years will be a period of resistance on low-level, one-off battles and economic stagnation. We can take consolation in the fact that the bleeding from Obama’s more aggressive agenda will stop. And we can look forward to November 2012 for repudiation of his leftist, statist governance.
Meantime, KEEP SMILING!
Just Say No….Chris Christie Has the Guts To
Posted by Tom in Centrally Managed Economy, Democrats, National Character, National Debt, State Finances, Taxation on October 29, 2010
The Feds offer New Jersey a “free lunch” in the form of a railroad tunnel under the Hudson River to New York. This monster has grown from $5 Billion to $7.6 Billion in 2005 to $8.7 Billion in 2008 to somewhere between $10.9 Billion and $13.7 Billion last summer. The “catch” was that New Jersey would be on the hook for cost overruns!
These guys are the drug pushers. The “drugs” in this case are the taxes we pay from the money we earn. The pushers give the first few samples out for little or no cost. Gradually the users become addicted. They start using the rent money for drugs, the grocery money, then whatever they can steal. They are degraded, dependent, and despoiled. The pushers have complete control over them. Witness today’s Democrats and our entitlement dependent society. The symbiotic relationship keeps the pushers in power and the addicts fixed. Fixed with your hard-earned money.
It’s no different with dependent states and federal projects with their attendant union dependents. Governor Christie has the guts to say no. “I cannot place upon the citizens of the State of New Jersey an open-ended letter of credit,” said Garden State Governor Chris Christie yesterday. Yesterday’s WSJ editorial, Christie Gets Off the Train, appropriately recognizes this rare leader.
DOJ Wants Foreign Interpretation of U.S. Constitution
Posted by Tom in Constitution, Immigration, Judiciary, Justice, Legal, Presidency on October 28, 2010
Not only is Obama’s Department of Justice corrupt in voter fraud cases which it should prosecute but won’t, but it now doesn’t object to foreign countries advancing arguments to interpret the U.S. Constitution in its suit against a State of the Union!
One more example of how un-American Obama and Holder really are!
Scott Bullock’s Presentation
Posted by Tom in Justice, Legal, National Character on October 26, 2010
For those who missed the dinner Tuesday, here are the segments of Scott Bullock’s presentation on his work at the Institute of Justice. Warning: Long Video.
Slow Treck Toward Socialism…The NPR Example
Posted by Tom in Business, Centrally Managed Economy, Constitution, Government Regulation, Statism on October 24, 2010
Seth Lipsky’s WSJ piece, The Real Case for Defunding NPR, argues that government subsidy “casts a chill over markets in which entrepreneurs seek to raise capital for highbrow journalism.” He cites his own difficulty in raising money for independent journalism when the investor asks, “isn’t this already being done by public broadcasting?” There goes the investor, no market when similar programming is already being funded by the government.
It is a stretch to say that NPR is “being funded” by the government when only 1-3% of its budget comes from the taxpayers. But the other donations from foundations and subscribers are often tax deductible, so maybe that is not too big a stretch.
The simple point is that any taxpayer subsidy is an unnecessary use of public money. Government does not belong in the business of business. At least, not in a free, capitalistic market.
Of course this runs counter to the recent call for more taxpayer money to be poured into the losing media businesses:
“A small chorus is tuning up to demand not that the government get out of the way but that it actually step up its funding of the press. Last year a report—written by a former editor of the Washington Post, Leonard Downey, and issued under the auspices of the Columbia Journalism School—called for siphoning funds from the Federal Communications Commission’s surcharge on phone bills into a Fund for Local News that would underwrite “worthy initiatives in local news reporting.”
“The president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, has emerged as a leading voice for pouring more government money into news gathering. How badly would that chill the capital markets for those who dream of privately funded news gathering, completely independent of oversight by Congress?”
Don’t forget the Communists methodology was to first control the media and educational systems. This a logical takeover of society. Given the unfettered liberalism of our schools and universities and the obvious liberalism of the main stream media, we are well on our way to the leftist, socialistic, communistic takeover. Pick one.
So to Lipsky’s point, government interference in a marketplace, any marketplace, chills independent investment. This for a logical reason, how can private capital compete with the entity that prints the money! That chilling appears to be the goal of the leftists, witness the government ownership of and detailed interference in major private industries.
Simply put, investment in businesses is not a proper role for government. Constitutionally, it is ultra vires, that is legally beyond the legitimate power of government.
Two Perspectives on Leftists
Posted by Tom in Centrally Managed Economy, Democrats, Politics, Statism on October 24, 2010
P.J O’Rourke is at the top of his game today in his Weekly Standard piece, They Hate Our Guts…and they’re drunk on power. In it he posits a unifying theory on Democratic behavior; after opening with analogy contrasting a few cockeyed (tea-party) muts running the dog pound with Michael VicK, he blast away:
“I take it back. Using the metaphor of Michael Vick for the Democratic party leadership implies they are people with a capacity for moral redemption who want to call good plays on the legislative gridiron. They aren’t. They don’t. The reason is simple. They hate our guts.
“They don’t just hate our Republican, conservative, libertarian, strict constructionist, family values guts. They hate everybody’s guts. And they hate everybody who has any. Democrats hate men, women, blacks, whites, Hispanics, gays, straights, the rich, the poor, and the middle class.”
He goes on with a litany of hates, other Democrats, success, productivity, stay-at-home spouses,and the military to name a few. And all this hate for a love, obsessive love, of power. No professed high-minded ideals, just raw power. Power that keeps the masses uneducated and suppressed, complements of brokers like the teachers unions.
Charles Murray takes a different tack in his Washington Post article, The tea party warns of a New Elite. They’re right.” In well-researched, well-reasoned fashion he demonstrates that the “elites” are indeed different from the rest of us. “What sets the tea party apart from other observers of the New Elite is its hostility, rooted in the charge that elites are isolated from mainstream America and ignorant about the lives of ordinary Americans.”
Murray goes on to show that the elites by and large have attended prestigious schools, come from comparable social economic circumstances, associate with other elites, intermarry with other elites, work in prestigious jobs, and live in the same costal areas. “With geographical clustering goes cultural clustering.” In effect elites beget elites and are separate from the rest of us.
“There so many quintessentially American things that few members of the New Elite have experienced. They probably haven’t ever attended a meeting of a Kiwanis Club or Rotary Club, or lived for at least a year in a small town (college doesn’t count) or in an urban neighborhood in which most of their neighbors did not have college degrees (gentrifying neighborhoods don’t count). They are unlikely to have spent at least a year with a family income less than twice the poverty line (graduate school doesn’t count) or to have a close friend who is an evangelical Christian. They are unlikely to have even visited a factory floor, let alone worked on one.”
O’Rourke concludes with a throw-the-bums-out cry calling this election a restraining order to end the power that has been “trapped, abused and exploited by Democrats.” Murray concludes observing that the new elite includes far too many people who have influence on the course of the nation. “They are merely isolated and ignorant…(and they) may love America, but, increasingly, they are not of it.”
Both O’Rourke and Murray have valid perspectives. Each of those perspectives call for a complete house cleaning in November 2010 and November 2012.
WaPo 17 Months Late in Reporting Holder’s DOJ Bias
Posted by Tom in Justice, Law, Morality & Religion in the Public Square, Legal on October 23, 2010
It’s old news for most of us that Attorney General Holder’s Justice Department dismissed a default judgement against proven Black Panther voter intimidation. But now it’s been confirmed by that liberal bastion, The Washington Post. Now WaPo churlishly reports that the initial reporters were conservatives, as if that were an excuse to dismiss the story. But the paper, to its credit, did dig deeper to turn up additional, confirmatory DOJ evidence of Holder’s discrimination against whites in enforcing voter intimidation cases. Andy Breitbart one of the first to break the initial story gives a magnanimous tip of the hat to the Post:
“This is a devastating piece of work by the Washington Post. This is a rare moment where the old print media has returned to the higher standards of years past, and reported facts. A week from an election, it couldn’t have come at a worse time for Eric Holder.”
That said, it is clear that from the very top the Department of Justice is tainted, and well, unjust. There is nothing more dangerous in a free society than to have the chief law enforcement officer corrupt the law.
Politics Not Economics–White House Rebutted
Posted by Tom in Economics, Employment, Fiscal Policy, Politics, Stimulus/Bailout on October 23, 2010
CEA Chairman Austan Goolsbee blames Bust and extolls Obama’s job creation. Unfortunately his chart is more polemic than economic. Keith Hennessey counters the arguments point by point. Warning, this is over 14 minutes long, but since we are about economics, this is definitely worth the time.