Debt, Democrats, Economy, Education, Government, Republicans
Sen. Scott Brown (Mass.) joined five Republicans and 57 Democrats in voting to proceed on a $15 billion, so-called jobs-creation measure, which incorporates “extensions of unemployment insurance and COBRA health benefits,” reports the WaPo.
Barack Obama, Business, Debt, Economy, Energy, Free Markets, Government, Internet, Liberty, Socialism, Taxation, The State
In the introduction to F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, the late economist Milton Friedman put his finger on the backdrop to the growth of collectivism: “The argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument. The argument for individualism is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument.”
Friedman best articulated why idiots don’t understand freedom.
Obama is an idiot. The guy really doesn’t comprehend how it is that he can’t create jobs. He keeps sprinkling state star dust, but nothing happens. He honestly believes that as the head of an entity that only consumes wealth and has no means of producing it, he should, nevertheless, be able to generate viable jobs. Indeed, BO’s bewildered, because his are the economics of voodoo..
If it is to expand, nuclear power should be privately financed. But, as explained, BO has a hard time with the market place, being too dim to understand its workings. So today, instead of lifting the 40-year-old restrictions on the construction of nuclear plants and leaving the rest to an industry with skin in the game, BO has decided “to back the construction of two nuclear reactors with $8.3 billion in federal loan guarantees.”
By BO logic, a wave of the wand is bound to bring into being a viable industry.
Not quite.
“We are missing a historic opportunity to expand nuclear power the right way [through private financing] and instead settling for a handful of government-subsidized reactors,” says Jack Spencer, a research fellow for nuclear energy policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
The same species of dimness inflicts the First Lady. When Michelle O launched her Fat-Based Initiative, the FLOTUS showed that she too is inured to the workings of the market. MO was challenged as to whether she was not interfering in the lives of Americans, to which she answered that she agreed government should not meddle. Seamlessly, she went on to explain that “We,” as in the Royal We, needed to offer parents options… and educate them, etc.
MO had drawn a complete blank; unable was she to even fathom how information would disseminated outside the purview of government.
Update I: STIM TURNS 1 TODAY. Obama understandably defends it, but so do the Keynesians—proponents of centralized banking—at the Wall Street Journal. As I wrote, “How much to hand out; who to hand it to; which handout makes the best use of taxpayer money…—that’s the depth of the ‘philosophical’ to-be-or-not-to-be among Republikeynsians.”
No premise of central banking is more honored than the idea that the system needs a lender of last resort, without whom holders of good collateral can go belly up in a liquidity panic
Obama’s defense has far more credibility, given that he is a central planner, and the WSJ poses as pro-market:
Obama, in a White House speech, said he believed the stimulus will save or create 1.5 million jobs in 2010 after saving or creating as many as 2 million jobs thus far.
His point was to show that the stimulus, while admittedly unpopular, had the effect of keeping the U.S. economy from plunging into a second Great Depression.
‘Our work is far from over but we have rescued this economy from the worst of this crisis,’ he said.
Update II (Feb. 18): BEHOLD A COMMISSION. “Government commissions are where accountability goes to die.” It is for reason that “President Barack Obama named a bipartisan panel on Thursday to tackle exploding U.S. budget deficits and promised it broad leeway to recommend ways to put the country on a path to fiscal responsibility.”
A commission can do absolutely nothing about the debt and the deficits this president, like his predecessor, has wracked-up. What it can do is put distance between the president and the “tough decisions” the country he is bankrupting must make.
Taxes will be raised, despite Obama’s promise “during his campaign that families making less than $250,000 would not face tax increases.”
Fishy accounting, in the final analysis, will allow this smooth, slippery president to claim that he has tackled a problem Bush created and he exacerbated.
Quote: “There’s no doubt that we’re going to have to also address the long-term quandary of a government that routinely and extravagantly spends more than it takes in.”
Question: Are Americans the kind of meatheads that’ll accept BO’s version of events whereby he and his Big-Spender Government are two different entities, never the twain shall meet?
Barack Obama, Bush, Family, Government, Healthcare, Racism, The State, The Zeitgeist
For Bush it was the faith-based initiative; for the current First Lady it’s the Fat-Based Initiative. From where Michelle is perched, it’s nice to be able to have the president sign an order establishing a federal task force to tackle a problem she’s made her own. What power.
Michelle’s latest quest is to exercise Our Children, feed them healthier food and label foodstuff big and bold for their dopey parents. These busybody schemes comport perfectly with the Obamas view of the role of government (cutting back on spending can wait).
Question: Why no white butterballs in the press photo op?
Update: You get awards for being a meddlesome bore.
CNN: Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver on Wednesday called for an overhaul of America’s food system, saying the country’s poor decisions about what to eat are shortening life spans and increasing health care costs.
As I observed, “Idiots have come into their own in a big way, courtesy of depraved consumers, and complicit TV producers and publishers, of pixel and paper alike. The duller you are and the louder you crow in contemporary America, the better you do.”
Debt, Economy, Government, Labor, Regulation, Socialism, Taxation
My own version of the title’s maxim invoked “zero-sum economics, or parasite vs. host. The larger the parasitical sector gets, the weaker the productive host will grow. The first is sucking the lifeblood of the second.”
Peter Schiff expertly drives home the principle in his latest column:
“The fiscal 2011 budget proposed by President Obama contains $3.8 trillion in federal spending. Think of government as a cancer feeding off the private sector. The larger it grows, the more jobs it kills. Unfortunately, most politicians follow the misguided advice of economist John Maynard Keynes, who advocated government spending as a means of job creation. In reality, government spending merely results in government jobs replacing more efficient private sector jobs.”
Read on about the effects of regulation, subsidies and, yes, tax cuts when borrowing continues apace. As they bay for the tax-cuts panacea, I bet beautiful Sarah and her supporters have not figured out that:
“… a dollar borrowed kills more jobs than a dollar taxed. Therefore, cutting taxes and borrowing the shortfall kills more jobs then [sic] it creates. This is true because jobs require capital and government borrowing more directly crowds out private capital investment than taxes do.”
Bush, I noted in “Deficit Disorders,” cut taxes while “spending like there was no tomorrow—for every dollar that may or may not remain with its rightful owner, the president blew tens of non-existent bucks on brand-new spending.” And, “Each of the morally bankrupt parties has used tax cuts as a decoy to avoid addressing the cause of the deficit: government’s spending more than it steals.”