Category Archives: Economy

Man With The Reverse-Midas Touch

Barack Obama, Economy, Energy, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Free Markets, Government, Labor, Propaganda, Terrorism

The excerpt is from “Man With The Reverse-Midas Touch,” my new WND.COM column:

I’m really looking forward to hearing a speech by someone who is involved in innovation, knows America’s place in the world market and has fiscal responsibility. And I hope that Obama is listening very carefully when Steve Jobs speaks tomorrow.

“That was Penn Jillette on the eve of Barack Obama’s first, much-anticipated State of the Union address. The celebrity libertarian magician was making mischief with one of Larry King’s stock
questions.

It takes a magician to know one. On the day of Obama’s State of the Union sermon, Jobs, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., launched a magic mobile device called the ‘iPad.’ Perhaps Jillette thinks that the solution to America’s economic inertia lies in visionary producers like Jobs, and not in vain, profligate politicians like the president.

Technology is certainly a task for which Obama and minions are singularly ill-equipped. But that has not stopped them from tinkering – and attempting to bend industry in ‘green’ directions.

‘We should put more Americans to work building clean-energy facilities,’ Barack boomed last night. “You can see the results of last year’s investments in clean energy – in the North Carolina company that will create 1,200 jobs nationwide helping to make advanced batteries.’

Not according to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Against its politically correct instincts, the IEEE was forced to ‘cast stones at a wide selection of … poorly conceived technology projects.’ One of these was Government Motors’ Chevrolet Volt, ‘a car known as a plug-in hybrid because it will get most of its power from the wall socket in a garage.’

You see, unless the Big O issues a mandate compelling Americans to purchase the commie car, the Volt won’t be making money. …”

Read the complete column, “Man With The Reverse-Midas Touch.”

And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!

Updated: What? Government Debt Strangles The Economy? (& The Big Freeze Fallacy)

Debt, Economy, Government

You don’t say! Since when? The bundling by the Congressional Budget Office of government debt and economic stagnation is a newish thing. The so-called partisan patsies of the president’s office usually keep the two intertwined categories discrete and separate, leading the country to think that the one has nothing to do with the other, and that the economy is subject to the voodoo of “animal spirits.”

“The nonpartisan CBO said the deficit for the current fiscal year will come in at $1.35 trillion, a slight improvement over the $1.38 trillion it predicted last August. But it warned that rapidly rising federal debt could strangle the economy.” [My emphasis]

Reuters writers, on the other hand, are keeping it real with this subtle subterfuge:

“The U.S. budget deficit will remain at levels not seen since World War Two, congressional forecasters said on Tuesday in a report that lays out the stark challenge facing President Barack Obama as he seeks to boost the economy and cut spending at the same time.”

Did you spot the propaganda in the Reuters item? In order to amount to a half-honest lede, “Boost the economy” ought to have been followed with “by spending,” or replaced by those two words.

Update (Jan. 27): THE BIG (SPENDING) FREEZE; MY EYE!

WSJ: “In 2007, before the recession, federal expenditures reached $2.73 trillion. By 2009 expenditures had climbed to $3.52 trillion. In 2009 alone, overall federal spending rose 18%, or $536 billion. Throw in a $65 billion reduction in debt service costs due to low interest rates, and the overall spending increase was 22%.

In one year.”

CBO confirms that Democrats have taken federal spending to a new and higher plateau: 24.7% of GDP in 2009, 24.1% this year, and back to an estimated 24.3% in 2011. The modern historical average is about 20.5%, and less than that if you exclude the Reagan defense buildup of the 1980s that helped to win the Cold War and let Bill Clinton reduce defense spending to 3% of GDP in the 1990s. …
This means that one of every four dollars produced by the sweat of American private labor is now taxed and redistributed by 535 men and women in Congress. …
Compared to this gusher, Mr. Obama’s touted spending freeze for some domestic agencies is the politics of gesture. It would apply to only 17% of the budget, and these programs have already had a 22% increase in their annual appropriations in the past two years, and another 25% increase including stimulus.

Updated: Tax Credits = Social Engineering (Tax Talk)

Barack Obama, Democrats, Economy, Political Economy, Taxation

H. L. Mencken called elections “a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.” As he ramps-up for an election season, BO proves once again that he has perfected the art of robbing Peter to pay Paul. The president’s next gambit is “tax credits” for the middle class.

These are “subsidies disguised as tax cuts. In other words, they are spending in the form of direct transfers from the treasury to individuals, except that they are administered by the tax authorities rather than the agencies usually responsible for welfare.”

Social engineering is what tax credits are, as they target certain constituencies to the determinant of other, less politically powerful ones. Basically, “taxpayers can receive a raft of tax credits if they engage in various government-specified activities.”

You need very few brains to err on the side of growth and usher in, “lower tax rates for everybody.”

Update (Jan. 26): The familiar demand that I abandon a discussion on tax policy because I stand for abolishing the 16th, “The Number of The Beast,” is a position I’ve denounced again and again. This is what goes for libertarianism in many quarters; you sit on the fence, make nothing but tinny, tedious, purely theoretical arguments, and congratulate yourself on retaining your political purity. To repeat, this is nothing but sloth. It’s also boring, foolish and uppity without being superior.

Yes, taxation is immoral and naturally illicit. And yes, tax policy needs to be debated among the handful of intellectually curious, clever, engaged individuals, and yes, the fact that one wishes to see a return to natural justice does not preclude a pragmatic support for, say, a flat, low tax. Let the poor set the rate.

Updated: Hooray Hillary!

Economy, Hillary Clinton, IMMIGRATION

HILLARY CLINTON, SECRETARY OF STATE: “We are not going to be accepting into the United States Haitians who are attempting to make it to our shores. They will be interdicted. They will be repatriated.”

You most certainly never heard the aforementioned from “W,” whose open-border policies made Bill Clinton’s immigration enforcement look like Operation Wetback. Here’s Hillary on Haitian immigration:

“The United States will enforce its own laws and repatriate any Haitians who illegally enter US territory while fleeing quake-hit Haiti, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Thursday.

“Ordinary and regular immigration laws will apply going forward, which means we are not going to be accepting into the US Haitians who are attempting to make it to our shores,” Clinton told reporters.

“They will be interdicted, they will be repatriated,” the chief US diplomat said when asked what could be done to prevent Haitians from fleeing the country in the first place. [AFP]

Writes Roy Beck of NumbersUSA:

This kind of message is especially important after the Obama Administration offered TPS (Temporary Protected Status) to hundreds of thousands of Haitians who already are in the U.S. illegally. Otherwise, Haitians back in their own earthquake-ravaged country could easily assume that they also could get work permits and legal status if they could just manage to illegally enter the U.S.

The problem:

“Pres. Clinton and Pres. Bush — and now Pres. Obama — have repeatedly shown that they lack the will to ever end Temporary Protected Status. Once the status is given, it gets renewed over and over again, long after the original reason for it has passed. Unless we get a different kind of President than the last three, the TPS issuance this week is a de facto amnesty for the illegal aliens who will be allowed to live and work here the rest of their lives.”

Just in case Haitians jump on boats, LT. CHRIS O’NEILL of the U.S. COAST GUARD has warned: “It’s very, very dangerous and dynamic. And I can’t stress enough how important it is for people in Haiti to stay home, stay safe, help rebuild your country. And we’ll help you rebuild it.”

Things must be bad when even the US coastguard has an urgent and acute sense of the economic desperation in … America.

Update (Jan. 25): Settle down naysayers. Hillary gets full praise for merely speaking the unspeakable; for saying what no other pol would dare say in the face of suffering in an undeveloped country. Underplay what Hilary said, and you underestimate or misunderstand the immigration taboos we immigration patriots face.