Category Archives: America

UPDATED: The American People’s House? (Telling Juxtaposition)

America, Constitution, Elections, Foreign Policy, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, libertarianism, Middle East, Nationhood

It was an abomination when Mexican President Felipe Calderon was allowed to address the Congress in May of 2010, and it is an abomination for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to have been permitted to issue forth before a joint session of the American Congress. Calderon, you recall, was toiling tirelessly for the benefit of millions of Mexicans living in the US illegally. From the White House Rose Garden, and then again in an address to Congress, he chastised overrun Arizonans for “forcing our people to face discrimination.”

Netanyahu is not as bad as all that. And both these respective foreign leaders are patriots, looking out for their countrymen.

The American people’s representatives are the traitors here, for it is they who’ve permitted this reoccurring spectacle; it is they who’ve turned the American People’s House into a one-way exchange program for foreign dignitaries.

Whose House is it, anyway?

UPDATE (May 25): Bibi vs. “O’sissy,” via Pajama Media.

Bibi vs. "Osissy"

My Facebook comment in response to the predictable:

“Please quit the tinny robotic, liberal, moral equivalence about the mettle of men: Bibi vs. Obama; Bibi vs. socialist (alleged) rapist. The libertarian non-aggression axiom does not have to turn one into a sissy detached from reality. Or make one a moral relativist. The above image, via a facebook friend, says it all.”

European By Any Other Name

America, Europe, Journalism, Media, Socialism, The State, Welfare

The stock characters we see on TV have certain stock phrases. Triteness goes with the Talker’s territory. A variation on a theme is as follows: “We want to avoid becoming a welfare state like the European states.” Obama is “converting America into a European style social-welfare state.” This, in the teeth of a 160 percent debt to GDP, a figure easily arrived at by adding to US liabilities, not only the paltry “$14.5 trillion in federal debt,” but the $2.7 trillion in state and local debt, “plus the $6.5 trillion federal mortgage guarantees to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.”

These figures, cited here, don’t, I believe, fully account for the promises made on the Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security fiscal fronts.

How European is America? Peter Ferrara at Forbes.com has grappled admirably with a reality ordinarily avoided in our mummified media. “America’s welfare state is not a principality,” he writes. “It is a vast empire bigger than the entire budgets of almost every other country in the world.”

Hey, just like our military, which, as I’ve contended, “works like government; is financed like government, and sports many of the same inherent malignancies of government.”

Back to the “welfare/entitlement empire“:

Just one program, Medicaid, cost the federal government $275 billion in 2010, which is slated to rise to $451 billion by 2018. Counting state Medicaid expenditures, this one program cost taxpayers $425 billion in 2010, soaring to $800 billion by 2018. Under Obamacare, 85 million Americans will soon be on Medicaid, growing to nearly 100 million by 2021, according to the CBO.

But there are 184 additional federal, means-tested welfare programs, most jointly financed and administered with the states. In addition to Medicaid is the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Also included is Food Stamps, now officially called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Nearly 42 million Americans were receiving food stamps in 2010, up by a third since November, 2008. That is why President Obama’s budget projects spending $75 billion on Food Stamps in 2011, double the $36 billion spent in 2008.

But that is not the only federal nutrition program for the needy. There is the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), which targets assistance to pregnant women and mothers with small children. There is the means tested School Breakfast Program and School Lunch Program. There is the Summer Food Service Program for Children. There are the lower income components of the Child and Adult Care Food Program, the Emergency Food Assistance Program, and the Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP). Then there is the Nutrition Program for the Elderly. All in all, literally cradle to grave service. By 2010, Federal spending for Food and Nutrition Assistance overall had climbed to roughly $100 billion a year.

Then there is federal housing assistance, totaling $77 billion in 2010. This includes expenditures for over 1 million public housing units owned by the government. It includes Section 8 rental assistance for nearly another 4 million private housing units. Then there is Rural Rental Assistance, Rural Housing Loans, and Rural Rental Housing Loans. Also included is Home Investment Partnerships (HOME), Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), Housing for Special Populations (Elderly and Disabled), Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS (HOPWA), Emergency Shelter Grants, the Supportive Housing program, the Single Room Occupancy program, the Shelter Plus Care program, and the Home Ownership and Opportunity for People Everywhere (HOPE) program, among others.

READ ON. And don’t listen to anything that comes out of the mouths of America’s Sino– and Europhobic bobbleheads, whose grasp of reality is tenuous at best.

UPDATED: When The Pleasure Principle Rules (Graft Vs. Genius)

America, Debt, Economy, Education, Pop-Culture, Psychology & Pop-Psychology

Our society runs on the pleasure principle: unless something is fun, it is discouraged as unworthy of pursuing. This is one reason why the many youngsters now entering the job market are so dumb, difficult ( and “dispensable”). They’ve been taught, falsely, that learning must be fun at all time: Unless you find a field of endeavor fun, don’t pursue it. (So you follow that advice and end up a surfer, a struggling “actor,” etc.)

Anyone who has studied seriously, or worked to master a craft, knows that nothing worth learning or mastering is easy or “fun,” unless you’re a genius (most of us are not), gifted at it, etc. With mastery comes fun. And mastery means hard work.

The principle extends to saving for future financial security. That’s not fun, because it means postponing immediate pleasure for the sake of solvency, or more ambitious future gains.

A survey by the National Foundation for Credit Counseling reveals that “more than half of all Americans say they don’t use a budget. Also, 26% of adults in the U.S. admit that they’re spending more than they did a year ago. And 40% of consumers are still battling unpaid credit card debt month to month.”

(“The rich,” after all, will be forced to take care of them.]

This “frugal fatigue” [sic: shouldn’t it be “frugality fatigue”?] has financial planner Lynnette Khalfani-Cox tailoring her advice to the pleasure principle: “The real problem is that relatively few of us can live happily — for any sustained period of time — on an overly restrictive financial diet.”

Ms. Khalfani-Cox’s advice is fit for infants: “Make the process of saving fun.”

UPDATE: GRAFT VS. GENIUS. Myron, didn’t I say that my recommendation did not include those who do not need to work hard b/c geniuses? On BAB, everyone knows Myron Pauli is a genius, and comes from a line of similar folks. Someone who is able to work smartly already forms a sub-section, which is a cut above the rest. Not everyone can reach a solution through abstract, creative thinking. Most have to master a method. If you discover your kid can do the former, lucky for you. But for the rest, it’s safe to assume you need to hard work.

Subsidizing “Freedom” for the Arab Street

America, Democracy, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, Government, Islam, Middle East, Military

“We are not part of the picture” [in Libya], Ehud Barack told Greta van Susteren, who recounted to him the familiar war-for-Israel-and-oil accusations circulating in some Arab quarters vis-a-vis the offensive in Libya. This, even as the US commits itself to furthering the whims of the seething Arab Street—whoever it comprises, wherever it is, and whatever it wants. American warriors, in arms and in armchairs, seem to believe that repeating the word “rebel” enough times will transform the shady ragtag factions we are fighting for as a princess’s kiss transforms a toad.

Ehud Barack, Israel’s Minister of Defense and Deputy Prime Minister (bio information), has politely applauded NATO and the US for rescuing the Libyans, but he also expresses a conscious thought about the feel-good operation, the kind of thought that will never be floated stateside:

“It’s up to the Arab people to struggle for their rights; to change regime or impose corrections and new procedures in their internal political life.”

My sentiments exactly:

If indeed we’re subsidizing “freedom” for [the Libyans] and are fighting their battles—then we’ve also increased their impotence and diminished their initiative. Subsidize individuals because you believe they are helpless—and you’ll get more learned helplessness.

Besides, what are these people? Wards of the American state? Whatever happened to fighting your own revolutions?