For ye have the poor always with you*

Today the Federal Government has 59 major welfare programs and spends more than $100 billion a year on them. What has all this money done? Well, too often it has only made poverty harder to escape. Federal welfare programs have created a massive social problem. With the best of intentions, government created a poverty trap that wreaks havoc on the very support system the poor need most to lift themselves out of poverty: the family. Dependency has become the one enduring heirloom, passed from one generation to the next, of too many fragmented families.

That from President Reagan and his January 1988 state of the union speech.

From 1964 to 2006, it is estimated that between $8-10 billion dollars have been spent on those poverty programs mentioned above by Reagan where we, no doubt, have tacked on two or three more in the two decades since that speech.

Just think of 10 massive Porkulus spending bills spread out the last 45 years or so and spent on the poor alone.

And yet, the Associated Press is freaked out that despite this war on poverty, the President and his party are going to take a beating in November, in part, because the poverty numbers are at near-record highs.

The number of people in the U.S. who are in poverty is on track for a record increase on President Barack Obama's watch, with the ranks of working-age poor approaching 1960s levels that led to the national war on poverty.

Census figures for 2009 - the recession-ravaged first year of the Democrat's presidency - are to be released in the coming week, and demographers expect grim findings.

It's unfortunate timing for Obama and his party just seven weeks before important elections when control of Congress is at stake. The anticipated poverty rate increase - from 13.2 percent to about 15 percent - would be another blow to Democrats struggling to persuade voters to keep them in power.

"The most important anti-poverty effort is growing the economy and making sure there are enough jobs out there," Obama said Friday at a White House news conference. He stressed his commitment to helping the poor achieve middle-class status and said, "If we can grow the economy faster and create more jobs, then everybody is swept up into that virtuous cycle."

(italics, ours)

There's nothing unfortunate about it whatsoever. Is the AP really that dense that they cannot detect a causal relationship between Obama's economic policies and the high unemployment rates and these new poverty numbers? To ask it another way: Precisely what has it been about Team O's economic policies that would lead you to believe that they would actually lower the poverty numbers?

Experts say a jump in the poverty rate could mean that the liberal viewpoint - social constraints prevent the poor from working - will gain steam over the conservative position that the poor have opportunities to work but choose not to because they get too much help.

"The Great Recession will surely push the poverty rate for working-age people to a nearly 50-year peak," said Elise Gould, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. She said that means "it's time for a renewed attack on poverty."

Terrific. Another war. Or more accurately, merely an extension of the 46 year slog in which we are currently.

And what are these social constraints Gould speaks of? As much as the statist fantasy mindset wants to believe, blacks and minorities are no longer facing Bull Connor's fire hoses nor are they denied access to equal public education as they were back in the 50s and 60s. That tired argument no longer holds water and the fact that we currently have a black man in the Oval Office should be the nail in the coffin for "social constraints" as an institutional issue here in America and specific regions of this country.

And from the files of Never let a crisis go to waste:

Beginning next year, the government plans to publish new, supplemental poverty figures that are expected to show even higher numbers of people in poverty than previously known. The figures will take into account rising costs of medical care, transportation and child care, a change analysts believe will add to the ranks of both seniors and working-age people in poverty.

Recall late 2007/early 2008 when an accomplishment-wanting junior senator from Illinois was panicked to get something, anything passed through Congress with his name on it, he latched onto a $845 billion dollar Global Poverty Act which thankfully never became an act.

Given the statist mindset for wanting to "do something" with respect to any and all of society's ills, the release of these new poverty numbers and Obama being rebuffed the first time around, well... you do the math.

As for Us? When we were back in high school in the mid-80s, a Russian film crew came over to do a documentary about poverty in America and particularly in the American inner cities to demonstrate just what capitalist "social constraints" do to blacks and minorities.

The film makers, of course, wanted to show American poverty in the most soul-crushing and bleakest of terms. What the Russian citizens saw instead was... Nike basketball sneakers and color TVs in most of the homes and apartments of the American poor. Russian citizens were more than ready for some capitalist-borne discrimination and poverty.

Folks, time to pull out and declare victory in the war on poverty.


* Matthew 26:11

John McCain dodges a bullet....

… Nicaraguan President and unreconstructed Marxist, Daniel Ortega, endorses Obama. Article here.

If and when people get over their adolescent crush on the man, they may want to take a look at what this guy has been up to when he’s not out on tour feeding the hungry and healing the lame.

The Rock Star has sponsored something called the Global Poverty Act which will commit the U.S. taxpayers to $845 billion over what they already spend on foreign aid over a 13 year span which works out to $65 bil/year. The annual Foreign Appropriations Bill of ‘04 was over $20 billion dollars. And this does not even include military aid to our allies, government loans to developing countries, private donations made by citizens, HIV/AIDS money, work done by religious groups and overseas disaster relief performed by the military such as tsunami relief.

And people bitch about how much the War is costing. The War on Poverty, that is, which is 44 years old now and is one in which we have neither an exit strategy nor any end in sight. Yes, declaring war on global poverty is just a logical extension of this brilliant domestic strategy into which we have sunk $9 trillion as of 2004.

But we’d gladly pony-up for this tax if it prohibited all the other insanity to which this Act commits us. Its as if all the sovereignty-stripping wackiness of the International Left was wrapped up in one Big (bad) Idea. Its all there: The International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, etc. etc. What… no condemnation of Israel?

If we are guilty of an ever-reflexive defense of this nation’s sovereign wholeness its merely in response to what we see as an ever-reflexive impulse by our elected leaders to give away, bit by bit, this country’s collective self-determination. We can only hope our knee-jerk reaction then, is directed in such a manner that it results in a boot up the ass of those deserving it in Congress.

At least its one big fat juicy target that’s making its way through Joe Biden’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee as we speak.... easier to track. We’ll try to keep tabs on it and report out as necessary.

Quickies

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






More Bailout Nation Fail:

General Motors extended-range electric Chevrolet Volt had its worst sales month since August, as negative publicity over fire risks hurt vehicles sales in January.

GM sold just 603 Volts - above its sales in January 2011, but far below GM's best-ever sales month in December, when GM sold 1,529 Volts.

Last week, GM North America President Mark Reuss said sales of the Volt have been hurt by bad publicity.

Reuss said bad publicity from the government's investigation into fire risks of post-crash Volts is "definitely a component" of the decline in sales.

GM sold about 7,700 in 2011, below GM's target of 10,000. GM abandoned its sales target of 45,000 for 2012 last month, saying it would match "supply to demand."

(italics, ours)


It's amazing how a stone-cold dose of reality can return one to one of the most basic principles of market economics.







Mr. President, about that do-nothing Congress you intend on running against...

Over 1,000 days since the Senate passed a budget.

Looking on the bright side of things, however, do we really want a legislative body headed up by Harry Reid to do much of anything? Self-imposed gridlock is not such a horrible thing.







Ah, but there are some folks that are hard, hard, hard at work:

The United Nations wants a world tax imposed on all financial transactions to fund a global model of social services that will provide “needy people” with a basic income, free healthcare, education and housing.

The drive is part of the UN’s mission to create a “social protection floor” under the auspices of the Commission on Social Development, which began this week in New York. The SPF will become the UN’s primary focus from 2015 onwards when the Millennium Development Goals project concludes.

“The money to fund these services may come from a new world tax,” reports the Deseret News, quoting Jens Wandel, Deputy Director of the United Nations Development Program, who said that a long term funding plan for the project would center around “a minimal financial transaction tax (of .005 percent). This will create $40 billion in revenue.”

“No one should live below a certain income level,” stated Milos Koterec, President of the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. “Everyone should be able to access at least basic health services, primary education, housing, water, sanitation and other essential services.”

We whole-heartedly agree and that is why it is incumbent upon the various kleptocracies, dictatorships, military juntas and Islamist regimes littered about the planet and which are the cause of 99% of human poverty and misery on this planet to voluntarily disband and be replaced with constitutional-based republics possessing market-based economies. No amount of planetary wealth-redistribution, particularly any of that which is hatched by the brain surgeons at the U.N., is going to do a damn bit of good otherwise.

If any of this has a ring of domestic familiarity, it should as the economic illiterate currently residing in the Oval Office tried to commit this country to $845 billion in what was called the Global Poverty Act and which was to be his crowning legislative achievement while he was still a back-bencher from Illinois.






Hey, at least someone is hiring:

Economic woes have forced at least one city agency into a hiring spree -- adding more workers to process the demand for food stamps and other assistance.

The Human Resources Administration added more than 100 workers last July and plans to hire another 100 to serve the burgeoning number of New Yorkers applying for food stamps and rent assistance at their offices, according to the Daily News.

About 1.8 million New Yorkers are now on food stamps, which marks nearly a 65 percent increase from four years ago, according to city records. The increase in applicants has led to overcrowding at HRA offices throughout the city, and the agency said at a council hearing Tuesday that it had to hire scores of new workers and supervisors to manage the situation.

And about that 8.3% unemployment rate (down from 8.5% last month)... Don't let the smooth looks fool you, baby.

The January jobs report is out and it seems pretty strong, at least superficially. The unemployment rate fell to 8.3 percent from 8.5 percent, the lowest rate since February 2009. And the economy added 243,000 jobs, the most since April 2011.

But does anyone believe an “official” unemployment rate of 8.3 percent really gives an accurate picture of the U.S. labor market? Even though the unemployment rate fell, so did the labor force participation rate (as more Americans became discouraged and gave up looking for work). Here’s what that means:

1. If the size of the U.S. labor force as a share of the total population was the same as it was when Barack Obama took office—65.7 percent then vs. 63.7 percent today—the U-3 unemployment rate would be 11.0 percent.

2. But let’s not go all the way back to January 2009. In January 2011, the unemployment rate was 9.1 percent with a participation rate of 64.2 percent. If that were the participation rate today, the unemployment rate would be 8.9 percent, instead of 8.3 percent. As an analysis from Hamilton Place Strategies concludes, “Most of the shift of the past year is due not to the improvement in the labor market, but the continued drop in participation in the labor force.”

3. Now, to be fair, some of the decline in the participation rate is aging Baby Boomers dropping out of the labor force. But taking that into account still doesn’t get us very far, as HPS notes:

Demographic projections expect that participation rate to be at 65.3 percent. If that full participation rate is the goal, our economy is “missing” 3.8 million workers, up from the 3.4 million we noted in the white paper. The unemployment rate in that context has not budged at 10.4 percent.

4. Then there’s the broader, U-6 measure of unemployment which includes the discouraged plus part-timers who wish they had full time work. That unemployment rate is still a sky-high 15.1 percent.

Mathematically speaking, it's more about a shrinking denominator than a growing numerator.








They are indeed proud of how efficiently they can issue food stamps so it just stands to reason...

As a Bloomberg News commentary notes, large numbers of people who are not poor are getting food stamps, due to perverse incentives that encourage states to deliberately classify people as eligible in order to draw federal money to their state. People are eligible in some states even if they are not poor at all, but merely received an “informational brochure” for welfare, or a tiny amount of state money that the state deliberately gave them that they didn’t even need, in order to qualify them for food stamps.

Open Markets note that though the adminstration did not necessarily create the perverse incentives to get more people on the dole, it is necessarily cracking down on states that are cracking down on welfare fraud.

Laughable charges of racism aside, he really is the food stamp President. He's owning it.







And speaking of which... remember when dissent was patriotic. Man, weren't those the days?

"Newt Gingrich brought back the food stamps president thing — and then tonight, he went to ‘President Obama ought to stop singing, ought to stop being the Entertainer-in-Chief.’ Sort of caricaturing him in a way that calls out to minstrelsy," MSNBC's Rachel Maddow said tonight during her network's coverage of the Florida primary results.

"These are — Newt Gingrich is many things, stupid is not one of them. He knows exactly what he’s saying, he knows exactly who he’s playing to, when you look at that map, when you deal with the northern border of Florida, which is southern Alabama and all of those states where they [sic] headed he knows what card he’s playing," Al Sharpton chimed in.

That's it. That's all they've got. When there is scant and dubious record of accomplishments upon which to run, of course the water-carriers, shills and hacks are going to play the race card at every single turn. That's all they've got. That's. All. They've. Got.







Sarah B. of Lipstick Underground celebrates Black History Month with a shout out to Alvin Ailey:

Ailey reveled in American themes, primarily of the Black experience, and celebrated the strength and power of faith, family and survival. He made the genre accessible and opened his groundbreaking company to artists of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Today the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is arguably the most celebrated Modern Dance company in the world.

"Ailey will rock your soul!" from AlvinAileyAmericanDanceTheater on Vimeo.

Lack of enthusiasm for any of the G.O.P. presidential candidates should not discourage our fight for House and Senate seats. Leslie at Temple of Mut has the details of Operation Counterweight, here.




And finally, and with respect to Bill Maher's former bunk mate (our take on breaking developments here) Leslie shared the following with us:

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Just the Facts, Ma'am.

Good article here regarding Michelle Obama’s “for the first time in my adult life I am really proud of my country" comment. Author does a good job of breaking things down the middle and we really liked her analogy of a hypothetical adult conservative circa 1980 saying something similar when after nearly two decades of receding influence of American institutions, social upheaval, the Vietnam War, Watergate, Jimmy Carter and of course, hippies… Ronald Reagan was elected President.

A friend of ours emailed yesterday and in referencing this incident called her an “Anti-American, ‘blame America first’ socialist, limousine liberal.” We responded by saying, "...at worst, she is who you say she is and at best it was a very poor choice of words for which she should clarify/apologize for in person and not through her flaks". Apparently, she has.

Though our red meat-eating brethren are really worked up about this, we can’t find the energy to get too excited about it. We chalk up this particular malaise to what we will coin the “Jane Fonda syndrome”

In years previous, we would get these forwarded emails that would detail Jane Fonda’s visit to a POW camp in North Vietnam and how during this visit she ratted out the American prisoners there who tried to pass her messages so that family back in the States would know they were still alive. We don’t know if those stories were true and we didn’t care because, frankly, it didn’t matter. Jane Fonda was/is(?) a traitor and a despicable human being for the things we know to be true. No amount of uncorroborated emails is going to make us think any less of her.

We know Obama has secured a deathgrip on the ranking as the most left-leaning/liberal Senator on the Hill based upon his public legislative record. This is fact. No amount of platitudes from him or verbal gaffes from his wife is going to make us think any different.

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Because what we’re concerned with is how the Senator intends for this country to pay for his Global Poverty Act?

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And what we really want to know is why is he sending on his behalf that personification of a foreign policy grease fire, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to Syria for talks with Assad?

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And for all his talk about compassion for the less fortunate, how does he square that with the fact that as an Illinois state senator he actively campaigned against and voted against a law that would’ve protected the survivors of unsuccessful abortions (aka infants)?

These are the facts and these are the issues. So let the woman alone so we can deal with her old man who has a few things to answer for himself.

H/T: Instapundit

Lockin' up the Short Bus Vote

Clap…. clap…. clap… Thank you for the fine speech Mr. Obama. You know, for all the help your FORMER! pastor and your wife have been to you and your campaign over the past month or so, we daresay you’ve been “victimized”. We’d suggest you play this angle in your campaign but hey…. you’re no Hillary.

For those of us who have been enraptured by Senator Obama’s oratory skills but still left scratching our head as to what the man is offering, we really need to pay a bit more attention… its out there but we all keep getting sidetracked.

KT does a nice job here providing a wrap-up of his O-ness’s juvenile military and foreign policy that sounds like it was lifted from a pamphlet scrawled-out by the bake-sale-for-bombers crowd. (Obama foreign policy vid here) .

And here we spoke of Obama’s legislative crown jewel, the Global Poverty Act. You know, the one his equilibrium-challenged supporters are anxiously awaiting to be made law so that in addition to the glazed-over facial expressions, there will be actual words instead of drool running out their mouths when asked to name the Senator’s accomplishment(s). The one that puts us on the hook for $65 bil/year over the next 13 but satisfies the liberal/Republicrat desire to “do something” by simply throwing money at a problem.

Of course, all you brutish and uncaring conservatives can take heart as his universal healthcare plan will leave 15 million people uninsured if Clinton Inc.’s charges are to be believed so there may be some hope for the man yet.

But for all his talk of change and his audacity of hope, he is very much cut from the cloth of his Party… the Party that champions the poor, the weak, the dispossessed. Afterall, how else would you explain his leading the charge against legislation that would’ve provided governmental assistance to survivors of abortion (for those of you confused by some of the Roe v. Wade legalese there, this term is also commonly referred to as “infants”) while an Illinois state senator?

Even now, he has cynically changed his tune on the matter of Terry Schiavo, allowing he made a mistake in voting for a law that granted federal judicial review of the Schiavo case, saying Terry’s fate was a “family matter” and not one to be left to bureaucrats or politicians. (Given the chance, we still would never be so impolite as to ask the Senator where he stood on “parental notification” given his obvious commitment to limited government). All for the better, though, as this “change” of heart puts him back in lock-step with his own Party’s commitment to protect the defenseless.

You all know we haven’t had many nice things to say about John McCain or his politics to be precise but we’ve got to hang our hats on something. Its shaping up more and more that this “something” is going to be “character” and “fundamental decency”, vague and pliable terms to be sure but to paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart, "we'll know its not in a candidate when we see it".

H/T: Foxfier

Update #1: We're sure Camp Obama has to be stoked about this: Palestinians cold-calling Americans to vote for Barack. We suppose it will be too much to ever wish that one day these poor people will figure out that their biggest problem isn't America, isn't Israel, isn't George Bush but all those (PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah, et al) that treat them as pawns and don't give a rat's ass about their welfare. H/T: Weasel Zippers.

Quickies

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







Here's some more of that "new civility" we've been hearing about... in the wake of the announcement that Gabby Giffords (D-AZ) will be stepping down from her seat in Congress, no less.

California Rep. Henry Waxman, the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the coauthor of the 2009 cap-and-trade climate change bill, decried efforts by the GOP to force the Obama administration into approving a permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline.

"They want to use legislation as a way to act like terrorists. They hold things as hostage," Waxman said. "We almost couldn't fund the government because Republicans wanted to hold that idea hostage, we almost couldn't pay our debts because the Republicans wanted to hold that legislation hostage to their extreme agenda, and I wouldn't be surprised if they scuttled this conference by trying to hold us hostage."

We know exactly where we will be looking to adjudicate blame upon the next act of violence against a public figure.





Did someone say "unexpectedly"?

Sales of new U.S. homes unexpectedly declined in December for the first time in four months, capping the slowest year on record for builders.

Why, yes, and this editon's winner is Bloomberg News.









B-Daddy (drunk-?) blogged the State of the Union address by POTUS this past Tuesday night so you wouldn't have to. Some high-lights:

Opening 75% of offshore resources to oil exploration. The same 75% you previously closed?


Apparently, Obama discovered the oil coming out of the ground in North Dakota. Now he is in favor of natural gas, oh wait, he's not; proposing new regulations for natural gas producers.



He keeps using the line, "send me a bill." No, you already sent us the bill.


Now he's going to interfere in the housing market and interfere in sound lending. Directing the banks to renegotiate mortgages? Welcome back from the dead, Juan Peron.
[Post speech note; Romney can hammer on the theme that government caused this housing bubble in the first place, more intervention props up a market that still needs to deflate.]

(ed. note: we blogged about further government intervention into the housing market here. Some people just never learn)

Millionaire bashing, no real new ideas here. Yes, sir, I am calling this class warfare, because it is built on a foundation of lies. The rich pay twice, first on corporate taxes then on gains. He envisions a nation of dependents, whose lives depend on taxes from the rich. What a poverty of imagination, if that were true we would truly be a nation in poverty.


Going after the cloture rule in the Senate? Really? Don't recall him being for that when he was in the Senate. Asking for a simple up or down vote on nominees? Be careful what you ask for, there will be a Republican President some day.


I think he's finishing. Terrible speech. Nope, back to taking credit for being Commander-In-Chief. Hey, where's the talk about engagement in Iran? Now he's talking Arab Spring and whacking Ghadaffi. He's going to whack Assad too? Who'd have thunk it, a dude named Barack Hussein Obama is all about whacking Arabs?

From B-Daddy's summation, it appeared he talked about de-regulation just as much as the need for further regulation. Incoherency, plain and simple.

Neither he nor the people working for him have a clue. Remember, these are the same people who gush all over themselves with respect to how many food stamps they've been able to issue as an indicator of economic success.

At any rate, thanks for falling on that grenade, bro. So, that others may live!





Shane Atwell reviews the movie Ayn Rand and the Prophecy of Atlas Shrugged.

Do I recommend seeing the movie? Only if you want to know everything you can about Rand and Atlas or if you want to know very little. In the latter case the movie will give you a smattering of information on several aspects of Rand's life and the book with little effort. But you really should just read the book.

tea party girl goes solar!

“The polar bears can suck-it!”

Yep. That’s what I had to tell most of the solar vendors visiting our home. It’s not that I actually have anything against polar bears, they’re pretty efficient seal hunters. But I was shopping for cheaper fixed-priced energy. Period. I still think the concept of man-made global warming is a bunch of fabricated junk-science cr*#. I found that trying to ask a bunch washed out mortgage brokers re-trained as solar salesmen to fast forward past the green B.S. is like asking an overseas customer service rep to think for themselves.

Heh.








For those of you tired of the nagging and whining regarding "fairness" and income inequality from an administration that is the very epitome of the 1% and whose personnel rotate between it and Wall Street with the greatest of alacrity, you'd be pleased to know that 36 members of the President's executive staff owe over $800,000 in back taxes. For those of you scoring at home, that works out to about $23,000/person.

We know we are opining naive but how jaded and cynical does one have to be to go on the "fairness" offensive when one's own outfit is the most egregious violator of this completely undefineable* notion of fairness.

(* undefineable by our standards, not theirs)





Sir Charles at Doo Doo Economics has a SLOBs home page primer/how-to post here. Who are the SLOBs (San Diego Local Order of Bloggers)? It's a coalition of area bloggers committed to free markets, limited government, personal liberty and constitutional fidelity. We've got Randian objectivists, registered Democrats, Ron Paul supporters, libertarian-leaning conservatives (sage-brush conservatives?**) socially-conservative evangelicals and Catholics and independents.

All the world's problems are solved at our all-too-infrequent beer summits where we take a small amount of pride in steering a few of the SLOBs into that wondrous universe that is the San Diego craft beer scene.

As you might imagine, we don't do "group think" very well so if you want some fresh thinking and ideas that run counter to the narrative that is spoon-fed to you from the government-media complex, we certainly encourage you to bookmark the SLOBs and give us a "like" if you wouldn't mind. Thanks!




And speaking of SLOBs, Leslie at Temple of Mut has a great round-up of news and views herself, including that of the Scorpion Queen, Governor Jan Brewer, faith-based global-warming insanity and a potential SLOBs endorsement of Carl DeMaio for SD mayor? Go on over and check it out.



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




** A nod to Barry Goldwater and the fact that the libertarian strain runs a bit deeper in the conservatives of the West/Southwest than other geographic regions of this great country.


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