Quickies

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A round-up of news items, articles, columns and blog posts that caught our eye this past week.







A nice graphical representation of what the President has put on the table to avoid the fiscal cliff.

It doesn't appear that someone is dealing in good faith.


Related: Why have conservatives ceded to the left the term "revenue" to mean exclusively "raise taxes"? What about "pro-growth policies" as a means to generate revenue?



So, what should the Republican response be to the President's proposal? Guy Benson thinks the Republicans should embrace the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan.

Simpson-Bowles, for all its faults, was conducted in an open and transparent manner and brought disparate political players into a room to forge a serious compromise. It overhauls and streamlines our byzantine tax code, takes some important first steps on entitlements, and reduces and caps federal spending. On substance, I'd wager that it would be considerably better than anything Obama and Boehner might produce after weeks of behind-closed-doors acrimony with the proverbial gun to their heads. Politically, it paints Democrats into a tough corner. Republicans could make a grand show of reluctantly supporting Simpson-Bowles for the betterment of the country. Ideally, the press conference would be led by Paul Ryan, who might explain why he voted against the plan as a commissioner, but is now willing to set aside some of his strong ideological preferences to move the nation forward.

Remember, Simpson-Bowles was the President’s own idea and which had bipartisan support. Thus far, the President has not embraced a single part of the plan. We think it would be a brilliant stroke by the Republicans to put the Democrats back on their heels and have they and the President playing defense.

As Benson stated, Simpson-Bowles has its flaws, but we see it as a giving the Republicans a leg up both tactically and strategically because as it stands now, the Republicans, fair or not, are going to take the hit, P.R.-wise, unless they get the President to take a stand on a commission that he specifically requested and whose recommendations he has since rejected.






Salary.com on the 8 college degrees with the worst return on investments.

Yep, all the usual suspects: sociology, fine arts and nutrition are in the mix.




And Salary.com on the 8 college degrees with the best return on investment.








Atari's "Pong" turned 40 years old this past week.

Here's Buzzfeed's short history of the first video arcade game many of us played.









Warren Buffet has been out again pushing his soak-the-rich tax plan. As you are about to read, raising taxes on the rich isn't so much about improving the economy as it is about improving our... feelings.


From the TODAY Show:

MATT LAUER, TODAY: So bottom line, would raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans have a chilling effect on hiring in this country?

WARREN BUFFETT: No, and I think would have a great effect in terms of the morale of the middle class, who have seen themselves paying high payroll taxes, income taxes. And then they watch guys like me end up paying a rate that's below that, you know, paid by the people in my office.

This is an admission of naked class warfare aggression that, never mind the dismal state of the economy, we'll somehow feel better knowing that the rich are paying more in taxes than they did previously.

It's hard to see someone as independently successful as Buffett become such a hack and such a dishonest one at that. Again, if Buffett paid himself a salary above the $100,000/year he so nobly limits himself, he would land himself in a tax bracket that would make us all feel a whole lot better.








Remember, gang, these are the people that will be in charge of your compliance with ObamaCare:

South Carolina's governor faulted an outdated IRS standard as a contributing factor to a massive data breach that exposed Social Security numbers of 3.8 million taxpayers plus credit card and bank account data. Gov. Nikki Haley's remarks on Tuesday came after a report into the breach revealed that 74.7 GB was stolen from computers belonging to South Carolina's Department of Revenue after an employee fell victim to a phishing email. People who filed tax returns electronically from 1998 on were affected, although most of the data appears to be after 2002, Haley said during a news conference.

It's not just small businesses and restaurants that are doing it but now it appears that colleges are getting in on the act.

From College Insurrection:

Youngstown State University is the second institution to be public about cutting adjuncts’ hours to avoid Affordable Care Act-related costs.

The Ohio university announced its plans in a campuswide memo Thursday, hours after an internal department memo from an English professor warning colleagues about the cuts was leaked to the media.

“A provision under the [Affordable Care Act] requires employers to share in the responsibility of providing health insurance to full-time employees,” the campus memo reads. “Effective this academic year, part-time faculty will not be allowed to teach more than 24 hours over fall, spring and summer.”

Youngstown’s announcement comes just weeks after Community College of Allegheny County in Pennsylvania announced it was preemptively cutting hundreds of adjuncts’ hours to avoid an estimated $6 million in employee health care costs when the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate begins in January 2014.

Curious if the deranged left will now consider boycotting institutes of higher education.






America's trusted highway life line, AAA, not down with ethanol:

The AAA says the Environmental Protection Agency and gasoline retailers should halt the sale of E15, a new ethanol blend that could damage millions of vehicles and void car warranties.

AAA, which issued its warning Friday, says just 12 million of more than 240 million cars, trucks and SUVs now in use have manufacturers' approval for E15. Flex-fuel vehicles, 2012 and newer General Motors vehicles, 2013 Fords and 2001 and later model Porsches are the exceptions, according to AAA, the nation's largest motorist group, with 53.5 million members.

"It is clear that millions of Americans are unfamiliar with E15, which means there is a strong possibility that many may improperly fill up using this gasoline and damage their vehicle," AAA President and CEO Robert Darbelnet tells USA TODAY. "Bringing E15 to the market without adequate safeguards does not responsibly meet the needs of consumers."

BMW, Chrysler, Nissan, Toyota and VW have said their warranties will not cover fuel-related claims caused by E15. Ford, Honda, Kia, Mercedes-Benz and Volvo have said E15 use will void warranties, says Darbelnet, citing potential corrosive damage to fuel lines, gaskets and other engine components

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It's bad for your car, it drives up food prices and its production has a larger carbon footprint than does the extraction, refining and shipment of crude oil. It's the worst alternative energy idea ever created yet it continues because it is a subsidized cash crop in a state that is first up during primary season every 4 years.




OK, gang. That's it for today. We'll catch up with you all tomorrow.

Charts of the day

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Alternate headline: Dear, Liza...*


Illustrating the absurdity that Bush was responsible for spending deficits:

And via Hot Air, a look at federal spending per household since 1965 in inflation-adjusted 1965 dollars:


(click to enlarge)

We're constantly being beat over the head, especially at election time that we need to spend more on our schools (we'd be neglecting the children, otherwise), firefighters and infrastructure (bridges!).

OK, sure. We don't want to be the meanies but... what the hell? Where is all that our money going?

A 152% increase in spending for declining classroom performance and an evidently declining national infrastructure?



*Is there a hole in the bucket?

Quickies

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A round-up of news items, columns, articles and blog posts that caught our eye this past week:

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Here's some of that new civility we've been hearing so much about:

Calypso Louie Farrakhan brining it earlier this week at LeMoyne-Owens College in Memphis, TN.



Wonder to whom Louie was referring in that "started off good but got corrupted..." clause at the end of the clip.






Dude...









How do you know when a scandal is potentially hugely damaging to a sitting (Democrat) President? The legacy media virtually ignores it. While everyone is rightly up in arms over the shameless wastefulness of the GSA/Las Vegas dust-up and the sleazy unprofessionalism of the Secret Service hooker-gate down in Columbia, we don't recall anyone dying in those scandals in which there were no direct ties to the administration. We were not aware that lavish conferences in Vegas nor hiring prostitutes in Columbia were official administration policies as was the case in Fast and Furious, the widely successful gun-running scheme that put arms into the hands of drug cartels and which cost the lives of 2 U.S. officials as well as hundreds if not thousands of Mexicans.

One must imagine, then, the administration is actually breathing a sigh of relief seeing GSA and hooker-gate splashed across the front pages of the dead tree media. As if you haven't figured it out by now, this administration has been reduced to governing by distraction. The President admits that the Buffett Rule (which wouldn't even apply to Warren Buffet) to which he is hitching his campaign wagon, won't do a damn thing to lower the debt or deficit (distraction).
He admits his $52 million scheme to crack down on oil speculators won't actually lower the price of gas at the pump and in fact may actually backfire and raise the price of gas as this plan may serve to drive down the number of speculators in the market causing a monopoly effect (counter-effective distraction). And now these two latest non-administration-related distractions. Keep 'em coming says the administration and its water carriers.

And while governance by distraction is the current M.O., B-Daddy reminds us that it is merely a result of a mindset of resentment in the DNA of the Obama administration:

Scratch the surface of leftist complaint and you always seem to find resentment, whether about the general unfairness of society or the indifference to the harm done to the powerless. While unfairness and harm exist, the almost exclusive focus by the left on these perspectives stems from a psychology of resentment and learned powerlessness. Because most Americans are self-reliant and optimistic, the left does not usually win elections. 2008 was an anomaly, because the blatant unfairness of the bailouts and Republican duplicity made it logical for Americans to turn to the Democrats.

Ultimately, I think that Obama has chosen the politics of resentment as the key to electoral success. I may be wrong, but since he has launched attacks on Pau l Ryan and on the rich with the Buffett rule, his poll numbers already seem to be slipping. I believe that it is important to defeat him, but more important to educate Americans on the virtues of our positions.

Please do get to the link as B-Daddy does an excellent job on bridging the gap between the tea party/freedom coalition and liberals on several key policy issues


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So, what has Shane Atwell been up to? Reading. Reading and sharing:

I read Oleg Atbashian's Shakedown Socialism almost two years ago now. I remember it being an enjoyable short read on the evils of communism. I don't remember many details. But one quotation comes back to mind over and over, everytime I hear about the Left's supposed support for due process, or freedom of the press, or closing Guantanimo, or transparency in government (from the bottom of page 8):

In the words of prominent Party theoretician Nikolai Bukharin, "We asked for freedom of the press, thought, and civil liberties in the past because we were in the opposition and needed these liberties to conquer. Now that we have conquered, there is no longer any need for such civil liberties."

Shane's right, of course. There does indeed seem to be a certain convenience if not outright hypocrisy when it comes to liberalism circa 2010-2012 vs. liberalism circa 2005 with respect to trashing the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution Act when it came to our involvement in Libya and the indefinite detainment and wacking of U.S. citizens both here and abroad without traditionally recognized due process. Far less egregious transgressions had the left in full-blown garment-rending mode back when dissent was patriotic and it wasn't their guy calling the shots.






As seen on Facebook:

Fifteen years on and dude scores another internet/urban myth meme. Not too shabby.






drozz is naming names and compiling lists. Drop by and leave suggestions on how best to chronicle those who voted for ObamaCare as we ramp up to the elections in November. It's not just the Oval Office that needs turnover.


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Quick... before the news cycle expires on this: Sir Charles has a round-up of all media/blogosphere-related Obama ate dog goodies.




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Charles Krauthammer on the fall of NASA:

Is there a better symbol of willed American decline? The pity is not Discovery's retirement — beautiful as it was, the shuttle proved too expensive and risky to operate — but that it died without a successor. The planned follow-on — the Constellation rocket-capsule program to take humans back into orbit and from there to the moon — was suddenly canceled in 2010. And with that, control of manned spaceflight was gratuitously ceded to Russia and China.

We're torn on this one. Litterally running a shuttle service is pretty mundane stuff, but space exploration is inherently cool and was, at one time, the exclusive domain of this country, exemplifying our nation's exceptionalism. If there was one thing that could bring this country together, it was NASA and it's manned space flights. Now, we're broke... beyond broke and sadder perhaps than even that is the fact that effectively shutting down NASA is a result of the deficits in resolve, imagination and leadership of our political class.






So does this mean we are finally going to get to see Zeppelin live?


Dead for 16 years, Tupac... or rather a hologram of Tupac makes an appearance with Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre last weekend at the Coachella Music Festival (extreme language warning):









Chapman University demographer, Joel Kotkin on the California exodus:

California used to be more like Texas—a jobs magnet. What happened? For one, says the demographer, Californians are now voting more based on social issues and less on fiscal ones than they did when Ronald Reagan was governor 40 years ago. Environmentalists are also more powerful than they used to be. And Mr. Brown facilitated the public-union takeover of the statehouse by allowing state workers to collectively bargain during his first stint as governor in 1977.

Mr. Kotkin also notes that demographic changes are playing a role. As progressive policies drive out moderate and conservative members of the middle class, California's politics become even more left-wing. It's a classic case of natural selection, and increasingly the only ones fit to survive in California are the very rich and those who rely on government spending. In a nutshell, "the state is run for the very rich, the very poor, and the public employees."

There is an old, ribald saying regarding messing up a really, really good dream that would certainly apply here. Seriously, it would appear to take incompetence and not only incompetence but the Herculean effort of, day after day and year after year of actively applying that incompetence in order to screw up such a good thing as California. By damn, it looks like 35-40 years after it started, the job is nearly complete.


OK, gang. That's it for today. We will see you all tomorrow.

Law designed to lower health care costs and provide coverage to more people not doing a whole lot of either

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It turns out one of the things we are finding out about ObamaCare once we passed it is that not only is it turning out to cost a heck of a lot more than advertised 2-3 years ago, many of its new intended beneficiaries will be getting stiffed because of existing laws.

President Obama’s landmark health-care initiative, long touted as a means to control costs, will actually add more than $340 billion to the nation’s budget woes over the next decade, according to a new study by a Republican member of the board that oversees Medicare financing.

The study is set to be released Tuesday by Charles Blahous, a conservative policy analyst whom Obama approved in 2010 as the GOP trustee for Medicare and Social Security. His analysis challenges the conventional wisdom that the health-care law, which calls for an expensive expansion of coverage for the uninsured beginning in 2014, will nonetheless reduce deficits by raising taxes and cutting payments to Medicare providers.

The 2010 law does generate both savings and revenue. But much of that money will flow into the Medicare hospitalization trust fund — and, under law, the money must be used to pay years of additional benefits to those who are already insured. That means those savings would not be available to pay for expanding coverage for the uninsured.

(italics, ours)

Bummer, dude.

All those young, healthy millenials who were forced to sign up for ObamaCare as a means to help finance ObamaCare, thinking they will reap the benefits of ObamaCare will be getting squeezed by their Boomer grandparents. How do you say, "priceless"?

“Does the health-care act worsen the deficit? The answer, I think, is clearly that it does,” Blahous, a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, said in an interview. “If one asserts that this law extends the solvency of Medicare, then one is affirming that this law adds to the deficit. Because the expansion of the Medicare trust fund and the creation of the new subsidies together create more spending than existed under prior law.”

It certainly doesn't take an Ivy League economy degree to surmise that an expansion of benefits as contained within ObamaCare is going to cost quite a bit of money and may very well not be deficit-neutral.

Of course, those Ivy League economists retort:

Administration officials dismissed the study, arguing that it departs from bipartisan budget rules used to measure every major deficit-reduction effort for the past four decades (ed. note: and how has that been working out?) — including the blueprint offered last month by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).

“Opponents of reform are using ‘new math’ while they attempt to refight the political battles of the past,” a White House budget official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the report was not publicly available. “The fact of the matter is, the Congressional Budget Office and independent experts concluded that the health-reform law will reduce the deficit. That was true the day the bill was signed into law, and it’s true today.”

The CBO has done nothing of the sort and, in fact, projected ObamaCare to cost nearly twice as much over the next ten years than their 10-year projection just two years ago.



But let's talk some "double-counting", shall we?

Blahous acknowledged that his analysis departs from budget conventions, which, he said, make sense for the most part. He said that in this case, however, those rules do not fully illuminate the financial impact of the health-care law, since they permit what conservative critics have dubbed a “double counting” of proposed Medicare savings.

Medicare is financed in part through a trust fund that receives revenue from payroll taxes. Before Obama’s health-care act passed, the trust fund was projected to be drained by 2017 (later updated to 2016). Absent the health-care law, Blahous writes, Medicare would have been forced to enact a sharp reduction in benefit payments in the middle of this decade, or “other Medicare savings would have had to be found.”

Enter the health-care law, which provides about $575 billion in Medicare savings — enough to automatically extend the life of the trust fund through 2029, according to estimates at the time, and avoid a sharp cut in benefits.

But in cost estimates by the nonpartisan CBO, those savings also offset a dramatic expansion of Medicaid under the law, as well as new subsidies for uninsured people to purchase coverage.

Very simply, you cannot take additional revenue and count it equally towards two separate entities... even three but we now know those newly-insured millenials are screwed.


That this double-counting has, for years, been recognized as a standard, bi-partisan accounting practice in D.C. speaks volumes.



Still two years away from full enactment and this thing is looking like a fiscal train wreck of epic proportions.

The economic recovery by the numbers

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With a lapdog media panting over the prospects of the unemployment number holding steady at 8.3%, it begs to be revealed what some of the internal numbers are showing.


By the numbers:


49: the number of months since the country hit peak employment in January of 2008 surpassing the previous record of 47 months following the post-9/11 recession of 2001.


37: the consecutive number of months the unemployment rate has exceeded 8 percent. The longest streak in the post-WWII era.


63.9: the labor force participation rate in February - a near-historic low. Individuals who have stopped looking for work do not count toward the unemployment rate, masking the true extent of the jobs crisis.


5.4 million: the number of individuals looking for work for more than six months, double the amount from when the President took office in 2009.


8 million: the number of Americans working part-time despite wishing to work full-time.


19.1: the total underemployment rate in which Gallup combines the unemployment with underemployment and which has been steadily rising over the last several months.


14.1: the black unemployment rate which rose half a percentage point in February.


6.7 trillion: the amount of dollars the President has requested in additional deficit spending over the next decade.


229 billion: the amount of dollars to which the CBO says will be added to the deficit in February marking the 41st consecutive month the federal government has run a budget deficit. The previous longest streak was 11 months.


$45,000: the per capita debt in this country which is higher than in many of Europe's most financially distressed countries.


$1.5 million: the amount of money an American born today will be required to pay off our current national debt which is $16 trillion and growing.



For a President that employs Keynesian gimmickry to "jumpstart" the economy, that adds unneeded complexity and additional regulatory burdens to the healthcare sector, that is attempting via bureaucratic fiat to regulate that which we exhale every second of our lives, that sinks billions and billions of dollars into a cronyistic green energy loan program and who sics his Labor Bureau on an airline company who is attempting to start up a brand new manufacturing facility, just to name a few examples... is it any small wonder then that despite the terrific news that the unemployment rate did not actually go up last month, that the long-term and behind-the-scenes numbers continue to remain absolutely dreadful?

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Video clip of the day

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It's almost becoming un-nerving: another conservative-themed video with higher-than-questionable production values?


From the office of Paul Ryan (R-Wisky) from whom we look forward to hearing a lot more in the future and in particular 2016:

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Traitor?

Mark Cuban, bazillionaire and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has got quite a bit of run from a blog post he put up few days ago where he exhorted everone to get rich so they can pay a lot of taxes.

Some excerpts:

Bust your ass and get rich.

Make a boatload of money. Pay your
taxes. Lots of taxes. Hire people. Train people. Pay people. Spend money on rent, equipment, services. Pay more taxes.

When you make a shitload of money. Do something positive with it. If you are smart enough to make it, you will be smart enough to know where to put it to work.
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So be Patriotic. Go out there and get rich. Get so obnoxiously rich that when that tax bill comes , your first thought will be to choke on how big a check you have to write. Your 2nd thought will be “what a great problem to have”, and your 3rd should be a recognition that in paying your taxes you are helping to support millions of Americans that are not as fortunate as you.
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I’m not saying that the government’s use of tax money is the most efficient use of our hard-earned capital. It obviously is not. In a perfect world, there would be a better option. We don’t live in a perfect world. We don’t live in a perfect time. We live in a time where the government plays a big role in an effort to help lead us out this Great Recession. That’s reality.

So I will repeat my point. Get out there and make a boatload of money. Enjoy the shit out your money. Pay your taxes.

It’s the most Patriotic thing you can do.

We like Cuban. We're praying for the day when he will be able to buy the Dodgers from that noxious pair, Frank and Jamie McCourt. And we're glad he appears to realize that private enterprise (such as his own) is far more efficient at taking care of the well-being and livlihood of people than the government (which begs for why it is he wrote this blog post in the first place) but saying paying your taxes is the most patriotic thing you can do? Got it.

After hearing stories of bravery and heroism displayed by our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan or remembering 9-11 and sacrifices made by the passengers of Flight 93 and the first responders at the World Trade Center, that has to be one of the most patently ridiculous statements we have heard in quite some time.

Our friend "Sherry" advised us that perhaps Cuban was referring only to the rest of us "civilians". Perhaps... but it's still ridiculous to assert that merely obeying the law is somehow patriotic. Hey there, Patriot, thanks for not jay-walking.

And if paying taxes is the most patriotic thing you can do, then Warren Buffet who grants himself a salary of only $100,000 should be guilty of treason.

Of course, liberals are just eating up what Cuban wrote because it's a narrative that fits quite nicely into the President's call for more taxes on the rich. But Obama’s call to raise taxes on the rich is so shamelessly cynical, it’s pathetic. He knows that he’s not going to come anywhere close to closing the deficit on the backs of the rich. Like Buffet, the rich will alter their behavior and/or use the tax code to legally shelter their assets so they won't have to pay those higher taxes. That is just how things work whether statists want to acknowledge it or not.

At the end of the day, whether the President actually believes taxing the rich will somehow improve our economic outlook and/or reduce the deficit is irrelevant. Like the story of the scorpion and the frog, “class warfare” is just what he does. He can’t help himself.

California dreamin'

So, what happens when you "balance" a budget but still come up $11 billion dollars short as California did just a couple of months ago? Not a problem... you just pencil in that $11 billion as "unanticipated revenue" and send it up to the Governor's office for a sign-off. What could possibly go wrong?

California's tax revenue plummeted in July, missing expectations by nearly $539 million and raising fears that deep education cuts will be needed to keep the state budget balanced.

The bad news, announced Tuesday, came less than two months after Gov. Jerry Brown and state lawmakers patched together a budget on the assumption that a budding economic recovery would produce a $4-billion revenue windfall. Those hopes are now fading.

The plunge occurred before the recent Wall Street gyrations that wiped away many of the year's stock-market gains. If the economy remains sluggish and the $4 billion does not materialize, cuts in public schools, universities, libraries, child care, and services for the elderly and frail will automatically take effect.

"Every drop in revenues puts us closer to the drastic trigger cuts that could be imposed next year," state Controller John Chiang said in a statement accompanying his July revenue report.

(italics, ours)

If you're wondering where that downgraded expectation of $4 billion in unanticipated revenue came from, we're just as confused as you are as that $11 billion figure was the one reported out in back in June.

And, it is duly noted that while California's political class were "missing expectations", we're curious about just what it is about California's economic/poltical climate that would be cause for any expectations to be missed.

More than most states, California depends upon revenue generated from capital gains on the wealthy but if you create a hostile business climate where the evil rich are moving out of the state and taking their businesses with them, what would you expect?

Again, more evidence of the completely amateurish and un-serious nature of California's ruling class.

Video clip of the day

Winner of the Power Line prize


Of squirrels and nuts...








Tangentially related with respect to the deficit, spending and the debt-ceiling battle, Ed Driscoll comments on the WaPo's Richard Cohen leveling the "totalitarian" charge against the tea party:

Incidentally, nice bit of Orwellian doublethink to call the grass-roots, libertarian-oriented Tea Party “Totalitarian.” This has to be the first “Totalitarian” movement in the history of mankind that, if it gets everything it wants…will leave you the hell alone.

"Governing for the next generation...

... not the next election." (unlike some other people we know)


One of the under-reported elements of the electoral tsunami of the 2010 mid-terms (What? Too soon?) was the fact that 680 seats changed hands from (D) to (R) at the state level. And what this has resulted in, in Wisconsin's case at least, is turning a $3.6 billion deficit into a $300 million surplus and 9,500 new jobs created in June alone which accounted for over half of all the new jobs created in the entire nation.


Alexis Garcia of PJTV has a chat with Rebecca Kleefisch, the Lt. Governor of Wisconsin on Wisky's public employee union battles and its amazing turnaround in this near-double-dip economy.

Dereliction of duty: thy name is the Senate...

... and the office of the President if you're scoring at home.


Good lord. Some truly epic smack from, based upon what he was running on the floor of the Senate last night, a person we hope will be running for President come 2016.

Marco Rubio (D-Florida) expresses yet another reason why this debt-ceiling deadline of August 2nd is complete bu#@sh%t as the Senate has not even proposed let alone passed a budget in over 820 days. Now we're supposed to get serious about passing a budget?

Revel in it, brothers and sisters, as Rubio name-drops and calls out tea-party radicals for their extrmist ways.

Let me tell you how ridiculous the (President's) budget was... not a single member of the Senate including the Democrats voted for it.

97-0.

Where's the (President's) plan? We haven't seen it.

3:23 : Did he just toss his notes onto the floor? Awesomeness.

Entitlement programs by the numbers...

... but first this from Michael A. Walsh:

Forget all the numbers being tossed around in Washington -- the millions and billions and trillions of dollars being taxed, borrowed, printed and spent as the country approaches the Aug. 2 debt-ceiling deadline.

Forget the political jockeying for position between a president desperately seeking re-election in 16 months and a Congress equally desperately seeking not to be blamed for spending even more money that we don't have.

Forget the fact that such "entitlements" as Social Security and Medicare -- social-insurance programs that the public long thought to be actuarially sound -- have been exposed as little more than legal Ponzi schemes, paying today's benefits out of tomorrow's borrowed receipts.


Instead, just ask yourself this simple question: When did it become the primary function of the federal government to send millions of Americans checks?

For this, in essence, is what the debt-ceiling fight is all about -- the inexorable and ultimately fatal growth of the welfare state. If you don't believe it, just look at President Obama's veiled threat to withhold Grandma's Social Security benefits if Congress doesn't let him borrow another $2 trillion or so to get himself safely past the 2012 election.

(italics, ours)

Now some numbers:

43 : the cents borrowed by the Feds for every dollar they spend.

1/2 : the amount of the federal budget ($3.8 trillion) consumed by Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and debt interest.

12 billion : What they said, back in 1966, Medicare would cost in 1990 adjusted for inflation.

107 billion: What it actually cost.

5 : The number of workers for every Social Security recipient in 1960.

3 : The number of workers for every Social Security recipient today.

No wonder the trustees of the system themselves -- including three Obama Cabinet officials -- warned in their most recent report on the health of the entitlement system: "Projected long-run program costs for both Medicare and Social Security are not sustainable under currently scheduled financing, and will require legislative corrections if disruptive consequences for beneficiaries and taxpayers are to be avoided."

No sober or rational person can deny that significant structural changes will need to be made to our entitlement programs if we as a country wish to remain solvent yet no one, and most importantly, including the American public, seems willing to eat our peas, to borrow a phrase, with respect to accepting the inevitable.

Walsh finishes with this:

The preamble to the Constitution talks about promoting the general welfare, not the welfare state. For the welfare state is incompatible with the rest of the preamble, which concludes: "and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." By definition, dependents are not free.

He's right. How can we be called "free" if we have allowed ourselves to be taken hostage by debts and deficits brought on by government programs of our own doing?

Video clip of the day

Here's Veronique De Rugy on taxes/revenues and debts and deficits.

"Auto-pilot programs"

"Even if we raised taxes as much as we wanted, it would never be enough..."

Mark Steyn and math

But first, a related slice-of-life in England article for context:

MIDDLESBROUGH, England — It is by far the largest employer in town, accounting for one out of every two jobs. Its workers are teachers, doctors, museum curators and social workers whose salaries range from £21,000 to £210,000 a year.

The employer is the government, and the responsibility of its 17,000 employees here has been to work the levers of Britain’s expansive welfare state. Now, for the first time in a generation, this public colossus is shrinking — threatened by rising levels of government debt and the political bent of the Conservative Party government — and many of the jobs are being cut.

Throughout Britain, austerity will result in many thousands of lost public jobs, compounding the blow from reduced entitlements. But the cuts will be most keenly felt across the iron and steel belt of this country’s depressed northeast, in places like Middlesbrough, which in many ways is a British version of Detroit.

And now, Mark Steyn trying to clue in a person to the obvious:

Still, on balance I prefer the class-war thugs trashing the joint, who at least have the courage of their convictions. The “nice” people bussed in from the shires struck me as some of the most stupid people I’ve ever met anywhere on the planet. One elderly lady from Yorkshire told me she was there because her grandson’s university fees were likely to go up. I was in a cranky mood because I hadn’t had my coffee. “You can protest all you like,” I said. “But this country’s broke, so all you’re doing is postponing its reacquaintanceship with reality, and ensuring that your grandson and his contemporaries are going to be stuck with the tab because you guys spent their future.” I pointed out that in her part of the world – northern England – as in Wales and Northern Ireland, the state accounts for three-quarters of the economy. And it’s still not enough for the likes of her and her pals.

All the rioting in the world is not going to make budget deficits and unsustainable entitlement obligations disappear. The math will prevail in the end.

Playin' hooky: Wisconsin style

It's come to this...

... but weren't you almost expecting it?

Doctors handing out sick chits to truant teachers in Madison.

A little street theater via Ann Althouse who has been all over the Wisconsin situation. Click at the link and scroll.




And this from Pundit Press:


(if embed no worky, please go to the link)

Reporter asked, "Do you think you could get in trouble?" Dr. Kathy Oriel said, "Certainly, we think its worth the risk to support the people, and we feel very strongly these are officials who would really like to be in school, and in their classes, but they're put in a position where they really have no choice."

Wondering just how down for the cause Oriel and the other doctors are going to be when their asses are hauled before the state's medical review board for this fraudulent behavior.

Then they came for the who?

The Heritage Foundation sent their cameras to Madison, Wisconsin to see what was happening on the ground there at the state capitol.





Time was a comparison to California was usually meant in a favorable light. No longer.


Also, Governor Scott Walker was on Fox News Sunday and had this to say:

“My hope is that cooler minds will prevail,” Walker said. “Democracy is not about hiding out in other states.”

Walker acknowledged that his battle against the public-sector unions has “large ramifications” for the rest of the country, especially as fellow governors grapple with their own budget gaps. “For us, we have to do this,” he said. “For decades, we had leaders who pushed off the problem.

Walker also had a gentle admonition that perhaps the President ought to worry about his own debt problem.



And this is what they must mean when they talk about the "new civility".

Video clip of the day

Here's New Jersey Governor, Chris Christie, at the American Enterprise Institute yesterday addressing the subject of Social Security reform.

As one can readily see, entitlement spending makes up the lion's share of the budget and until meaningful Social Security and Medicare reform are addressed, we're all just nibbling at the margins to negligible effect.

The President abdicated any real leadership in his budget proposal to that end so it's going to have to fall to the party that tried to address it six years ago and got clobbered for their troubles. To be fair, it was President Bush who offered up some modest proposals like privatizing up to 10% of one's Social Security account which was viewed as a violation of some sacred public trust by the left and very tepidly even by many in his own party.

Christie says time's are different. Maybe they are. We have seen now the Greece fires raging in Europe and the imminent implosions of state budgets stateside because of unsustainable future obligations. We need leadership but we also need to accept the pain that will be required to set ourselves on a sustainable path.


H/T: Hot Air and Left Coast Rebel

Video clip of the day

Via the Blaze, 4 and a half minutes of simultaneous lefty hand-wringing/cheerleading regarding the revolution of the underclass.



As we were watching this a few things crosssed our mind. Despite the breathless promotion of this clip (we've seen it on FaceBook two-three times now), isn't this what these Marxist always say? Aren't they always warning against/goading a revolution which can only be prevented by a revolution or something.

We're not saying the overall fiscal conditions of this state, our country and many countries in southern and northern Europe are not in dire circumstances but the solution to these coming "food stamp riots" always seems to be... more food stamps.

In watching this, something else with respect to public perception, at least that in the political class, struck us. Reality has set in over in Europe and when the government attempts to install even modest austerity measures, thousands of people take to the streets rioting and destroying the properties and businesses of the very people, the producers, who have made their heretofore Euro-lifestyles possible. They want their free lunch, dammit! And the reaction over here is a general shoulder-shrug. Yep, that's what those Euros do when faced with the prospect of having to work an extra couple of years. They riot.

Meanwhile, over here, a few hundred people gathering peaceably in public places throughout the country demanding No more free lunch! - well then, that's an entirely different story. It's a sign of the decline of the Republic. Fiscal responsibility and fidelity to the Constitution are now just dog-whistle terms for the bigots and racists out there.

And what has the political class clearly freaked-out by these amiable flag-wavers is that they don't riot but they sure do vote and what this past November will hopefully prove is that change can be effected via the ballot box. And if the new leadership can govern in a manner that leads to a robust economy while also reforming/revising the structural budget burdens faced both at the state and federal level, then that will do more to restore this nation's standing with other nations than any manner of speechifying.

Of snow storms, debts and tipping points

Via Left Coast Rebel, a time-lapsed photo-log of the storm that hit the East Coast last week.

From Belmar, New Jersey:





And in other related news, KT has a fine post regarding the conflation of politics, public grants and the agendas of the faith-based AGW crowd and the resulting house of canards, here. KT wraps up his post with the following:

The end result of all of this will be cynicism from the press, the politicians and the public. Anyone standing with the global warming alarmists will end up looking like a fool, just like the UK MET Office.

This raised eyebrows in the comment section as some were wondering if the public was not standing alone in its skepticism of the mess the AGW crowd has left themselves.

The press and the pols may not be there yet but it's only a matter of time. Take this 60 Minutes piece (please!)
from a couple weeks back featuring New Jersey Governor, Chris Christie, talking about the fiscal disasters awaiting the states.







Would we have seen something like this 10 years ago? Hell, would we have seen it 2 years ago? The flagship magazine program of the Tiffany Network acknowledging that we have a debt crisis?... a spending problem?

Every situation or crisis has its tipping point where no longer can an agenda or bias obscure the truth of the matter.

And strange as it seems, in our humble opinion, it was not even the run-away spending at the federal level that was cause for this sudden state-side awareness but rather the debt crisis in the EuroZone where the "California = Greece" narrative took hold.

No matter. By whatever impetus, the gig is up for the big spending days of the states and the faith-based AGW zealots' days are numbered as well.

The 111th's Christmas gift to America

Before the most woeful, inept and sorry excuse for a Congress in modern history officially ends business and leaves town for the holidays, let's take a look at the big steaming pile of an omnibus bill that's under the tree and which they are trying to get passed and put on the President's desk.

By the numbers:


1,924: number of pages in said spending bill.


1.2 Trillion: The dollar amount of the spending bill.


11: The number of months Congress had to work on it before it became such an emergency and something everyone has to vote yes on or else face certain disaster.


1.1 Billion: The dollar amount tabbed to start cranking up ObamaCare.


6,630: The number of earmarks in this bill.


8 Billion: The dollar figure for those earmarks.


0: The chances the President who claimed just a few days ago that one of the lessons he learned from the 2010 midterms was to take more seriously the public's disapproval of - and his pledge - to oppose earmarks, will veto the bill.



And to put a nice big red bow on things, let's take a look at how they've done over the past two years when they've had control of both chambers and the Oval Office.





Good riddance.