I was wrong about the Democratic Party #walkaway

A friend, Tom Wright, directed my attention to a very interesting video of one young woman's story of the toxic culture experienced by a Teach for America teacher in a government-run school and then as a registered nurse in Los Angeles, CA. She had been brought up a Democrat and had long believed that conservatives were simply bad people. She learned that the progressive Democrat program maintained, rather than solved problems. She realized that many Democrats had so identified themselves as heroes fighting the problems of society, whether racism, women's rights, and homophobia, that they could not actually allow the problems to be solved because then their hero status would disappear. Policies that proved ineffective or catastrophic were continued, despite their clear failure.

She realized that many of the Democrats attitudes were grounded on a belief that some minorities simply were incapable of having the character expected of other Americans. In other words, they were bigoted. She came to realize that the main stream media cherry picked facts, dropped the context of events, told stories in a way to misdirect people, and simply ignored stories they could not present in a manner to misdirect their listeners. For some time, she found herself understanding that the Democrat agenda was very bad for people, but she still had a hard time examining the ideas of conservatives. In time she managed to overcome the barrier that she had long believed that Republicans and conservatives were not the evil people the Democrats had portrayed them to be.

The story of her evolution in the development of an independent mind is very fascinating. It is well worth listening to. See Georgia's great video about how she developed an independent mind -- a beautiful mind.

Joe Biden's Infrastructure and Green Energy Jobs Will Force You to Join a Union

Joe Biden gave a talk to a few union workers in Eire, Pennsylvania today.  He spoke about the many jobs he was going to create as our next President.  His plan is simple and very simple-minded.  He will force us to spend huge amounts of money on "green energy."  This will create jobs.  He will spend huge amounts of money building government schools.  This will create jobs.  He will make college educations free, which will create jobs.  He will provide people up to $15,000 as down-payments on new homes.  This will create jobs.  He promises that these jobs will all require union wages.

He could also replace all the bulldozers with shovels and claim he was creating jobs.

Jobs that last are those that increase the productivity of people and raise our standard of living.  So-called "Green Energy" jobs that replace inexpensive, dependable, and in the modern era, clean, coal, oil, and natural gas energy with expensive, intermittent wind and solar energy, do not increase productivity and do not raise our standard of living.  As I have proven over and over, coal, oil, and natural gas energy are not bringing on catastrophic man-made global warming.  That hypothesis has failed to live up to its constant and determined hype by those who are always looking for an excuse to increase the power of governments in the micromanagement of our lives.  "Green energy" has only managed to increase the cost of energy to date and to make our power grids more vulnerable to blackouts.  By raising energy costs, it has reduced employment throughout our economy in all businesses that use electric power.  These reductions tend to be diffuse and hard to point at, but any requirement that raises the cost of doing business has to result in fewer jobs.

Having realized he might lose some states if he maintains his pledge of a few months ago to end fracking, Biden now claims he absolutely will not end fracking.  Though he will rejoin the Paris Climate Accord and eventually end the use of all hydrocarbon fuels, which does sound like the end of fracking to any rational thinker.  His current stance is that he will not allow it on federal lands and since he is largely against allowing pipelines to be built, he will limit its ability to get to markets.  Clearly, Biden cannot be trusted on the fracking issue.

What our education system needs is an infusion of the freedom to choose.  We do not need more government-run schools.  Government-run schools tend to become as well-managed as the Departments of Motor Vehicles, the Veterans Administration, the Social Security Administration, the Postal Service, or Fannie Mae.  We need better teachers.  We need more teachers who are not from the bottom quarter of college graduates.  We need better education curricula.  We need students to learn real history and economics -- not the hysterical fables the socialist left teaches.  We need to teach students to do math and to write coherently on serious subjects.  We need to encourage rational thought -- not simply promote stream of consciousness and to perpetuate childish feelings.

The government and most other schools too are in the hands of the socialist left, which is not surprising given that the vast majority of the educational establishment is in the hands of government.  As long as its center of gravity is the government, the thinking of education professionals will be dominated by those who want a never-ending increase in the power of government.  There is no surprise that those who want this are always seeking justifications such as group identity politics infused with critical race theory, peak resource production, claims that businesses only want to crush their customers, and predictions of catastrophic man-made global warming.  One has to scare the people into accepting being forced to comply with evermore mandates.

Jobs building more government schools will displace jobs in the private sector devoted to the goods and services individuals choose of their own free will.  It will ultimately take resources away from addressing the real needs of an educational system that would actually prepare students to become productive workers and freedom-maintaining citizens.  Those needs are best met by allowing the education system to become a vital part of the private sector.  Biden and the Democrats want at all costs to prevent that from happening.  The government-run school teachers unions are their strongest supporters.  

Accept a free college education and you are absolutely accepting a curriculum of propaganda approved by the government.  I should not have to say more to a freedom-loving individual.  Furthermore, that which is free, is not valued.  Free college educations will surely become an education in how to party.  Imagine what students will learn about binge drinking, drug use, and promiscuous sex.  All taxpayers should be delighted with the prospect of working hard in their jobs and giving a larger fraction of their pay up so more students can be educated in how they are mostly racist monsters (so-called whites), male chauvinists (all males), mean-hearted and selfish suppressors of the people (all who have above average income or wealth and are in the private sector), or Gaia rapists (all who use the resources of the Earth).  Nonetheless, private sector employers are expected to hire the partying experts and the private-sector business haters the free colleges will produce.  This is Biden's planned future.

New home down-payments up to $15,000:  In a fantasy world in which government can make anything and everything free without hurting everyone, why not?  Sure free education, free homes, free meals, free health care, free jobs  -- in exchange for our votes.  Actually, Biden claims all his freebies will only come from those making more than $400,000 a year, whatever that means.  This comes on the heals of massive, unnecessary business shutdowns in the Covid-19 scare and huge government relief bills that have run up our national debt already to otherworldly levels.  All of this has to be paid for and it will come out of our hides in the future loss of many other values we might have chosen as individuals.  This socialist free lunch is a fantasy with a deep and fearsome bite.

Those jobs Biden promises are promised to be good Union jobs.  Yes, he promised the union leaders he was talking to that he would ensure that the jobs he would create would be union jobs.  Most Americans do not want to be forced to join a union.  I, as an employer, do not want to be forced to share my management judgment with union leaders, almost all of whom are Mafia or Communists and none of whom are suitable partners in my business.  Your future with Biden and his socialist Democrat Party hosts is one of forced union dues and rules or the sharing of the management of your business with corrupt, inept union leaders.

With Biden as President, I see a future in we are all much more subject to the use of government force to make us do the bidding of the Socialist Democratic Party elitists.  Far more often, they will tell you which of your values you will be allowed to pursue and far more often they will take the resources from you that would have allowed you to pursue your own chosen values.  They will use those resources to pursue their values, which will often be designed to hurt you.  If you think that the people, who want the kind of power that characterizes the elite of the Socialist Democrat Party, care about you as an individual, you are incredibly gullible.

Government has a monopoly on the use of force.  This makes government the most dangerous institution we have to live with in our society.  When government takes on functions beyond those of protecting our freedom to exercise our many and broad individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, it necessarily starts choosing who it is going to hurt.  Its justification for hurting some is always couched in terms of helping others.  Most people accept that because they do not understand that the free market private sector is where relationships are based on mutual benefits, not one side wins and one side loses.  When government takes on massive numbers of functions, there are vast numbers of losers and some winners.  The winners are those who make a profession of cozying up to the government elite.  This is why the suburbs of Washington, DC are among the very richest in the nation.  The losers are most Americans, few of whom have any idea how much they have lost.

Contrary to the Washington Post, a Company Should Spend its Hard-Earned Income Based on its Own Judgment

The Washington Post's top of the Business Section article on Sunday, 16 December is headlined "How have corporations spent their tax cut windfall?"  Thomas Heath, the author, notes that many experts believe that corporations should spend the money no longer taken from them by force to build new facilities, buy equipment, invest in R&D, hire more employees, and pay their employees more.  Stock buybacks and higher dividends for stockholders are rather immoral and not in the spirit of the tax cut law.

You see, the government taxes a business, forcibly depriving it of the income it worked hard to earn in a competitive global economy.  The government thereby gains the moral right to expect the company upon the government's graciously deciding to take a bit less of the company income to spend that income according to the government's wishes.  Those wishes require that the company creates more and better jobs and does so in a way that is as obvious to the voters as possible.

What has become of the money that companies are now able to keep since the tax cut last year?  Business investment by Standard & Poor's 500 largest public corporations on new equipment and factories is up 19% in the first three quarters of 2018.  Research and development spending increased by 34%.  A Federal Reserve statistic shows that independent businesses in general increased business investment by 16% so far this year, which is the highest increase since 1993.  For years, capital expenditure by business has been very weak and productivity growth has been less than 1% per year.  Private sector employee average earnings are up 2.8% in 2018, after many years of stagnation under the Obama Regime.

The 2018 increases in business capital expenditures, R&D, employee earnings, and the expected increases in productivity should make Americans very happy.  Unless you are a Democrat socialist, in which case you bemoan the fact that stock buybacks cost companies $579 billion in the first 3 quarters of 2018.  This will set a new record for a year, replacing the record of 2007, just prior to the Great Recession.  Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin says "It's just wrong for big corporations to pocket massive, permanent tax breaks and reward the wealth of top executives with more corporate stock buybacks, while workers are given pink slips and face layoffs."  Never mind that unemployment is at a record low, that millions of open positions cannot be filled with qualified workers, and that average employee earnings are up 2.8% this year.  Never, ever allow the facts to get in the way of a very emotional argument for the villainy of businesses.

The left also complains about the fact that dividends to shareholders this year will set a record previously set in 2017. 

There is a very unrealistic expectation in the criticisms of the Democrat socialists which we are not supposed to notice.  The management of a large corporation now able to keep enough of its earnings to contemplate building a new facility first has to evaluate a number of purposes for that facility, where it will be built, design it, get building and environmental permits, find and hire the people to build it, evaluate and purchase the equipment to put into the facility, and find and hire the people to be employed in the facility.  If you have just had a substantial change in the parameters under which your business operates, you are also likely to have to hire more managers to make all of these decisions and kick this whole process into gear.  How much of this process can be accomplished in the first 3 quarters of operations under the new tax conditions?

Consider R&D.  You have long been doing less R&D than your company should have been doing because too much of your company earnings were taxed away and the regulatory environment was too expensive.  During the Great Recession and the numbingly glacial recovery, you released many company scientists and engineers or did not expand their numbers.  Your company did not invest much in analytical equipment, your laboratories, the training of your technical experts, prototyping capabilities, and your forward-looking plans for R&D were scaled to your very modest means to do R&D.  Now conditions have changed.  You want to invest in R&D, but you have to figure out what directions to explore and develop with your greater R&D effort.  You consult with your technical people, make decisions on new directions based on evaluations of markets and technical possibilities, figure out what laboratory equipment is needed, evaluate the instruments available from vendors, prepare facilities for their installation, and hire more people to operate the equipment and to solve the technical problems.  By the way, the people with the brains, the dedication, and the training for these R&D tasks are hard to find.  What fraction of this process is likely to be completed within 9 months of a changed tax environment?

So, while your company is trying to become more productive and to offer new products and services, but is limited on the rate of its spending by these limits of time and resources, what do you do with your suddenly increased available funds?  Rationally, you use it for some combination of paying back debts, buying back stock, and offering improved dividends to your shareholders.

Not only is this rational from the company viewpoint, but it is hardly bad for the economy.  Lower company debt makes companies more able to weather future downturns and to minimize the layoffs of valuable employees when a downturn occurs, as they always will.  The buyback of stock, puts more money in the hands of investors who will then either spend that money or invest it in other firms that need that investment.  The increases in dividends help many investors to be able to spend more money in the economy and helps pension funds to be less unstable, as so many of them are.  To be sure, some of this money will go to foreign investors.  Some of these foreign investors will put their money back into US investments because our economy is about the best in the world.  Some will leave our economy.  But, if we suppose that money had been left in the hands of the government, what fraction of it would have been utterly wasted and gone to not only unproductive use, but to uses that cause our national productivity to have negative components?  Yes, the Democrat socialists believe that government spending is the Gold Standard for the good use of our money.  But you have to be loony to think that is the reality.

Repealing ObamaCare Costs How Many People Coverage?

Those who advocate the retention of ObamaCare are claiming highly exaggerated losses of coverage due to its repeal.  They assume that no new coverage will come into play upon its repeal.  HHS Secretary Burwell cited a claim that 30 million Americans will lose their coverage.  Many others are claiming that 20 million will lose their coverage.  These exaggerations are exactly as I predicted here.

First, as I noted here, only 11.1 million people were covered for the year in 2016, though 12.7 million signed up for coverage on ObamaCare health insurance websites.  They are very trusting people to sign up and to provide their social security numbers on those very incompetent exchanges.  But I digress.  The lower 11.1 million people number is found by adding up the monthly premium payments and dividing by 12.  But you can be sure that the advocates of ObamaCare use the 12.7 million number and have no regard for the fact that the 6 million who lost coverage due to ObamaCare are now proportional to the population growth as 6.1 million who would have been happy to stay on their old plans, especially now that they will have to soon make more changes due to the many instabilities that ObamaCare has introduced.  Subtract 6.1 million whose loss of insurance the ObamaCare advocates originally did not care about from 11.1 million and one has only 5.0 million on ObamaCare of new enrollees.

The ObamaCare insurance loss alarmists count all of the new enrollees on Medicaid compared to 2013 as being covered by ObamaCare as well.  As I noted here, of the 17 million new enrollees into Medicaid in 2014, only 3.3 million were newly eligible for coverage as a result of state expansions of Medicaid benefits as a result of ObamaCare.  It is clear that the claim that 30 million will lose their insurance comes from adding 17 million added people on Medicaid to 12.7 million who paid some portion of their premiums on ObamaCare purchased insurance in 2016.  It is also clear that this is a very dishonest number.

A more honest number is that of adding the additional 5.0 million insured under ObamaCare exchanges from the fully paid premium equivalent number to the 3.3 million added due to the expansion of Medicaid coverage by states under the ObamaCare law.  That gives us 8.3 million people.  But even that is dishonest.

Why?  One of the reasons this is dishonest because in 2014 alone employers dropped the health insurance coverage of 2 million people under their employer plans.  Small businesses alone dropped coverage for 2.2 million people as a result of ObamaCare and some unknown degree of reduction due to the super-extended poor growth Obama economy, some of which is also due to ObamaCare.  What is more, prior to ObamaCare, the number of people covered under employer plans had expanded year after year, so that growth in employer coverage was lost.  So, conservatively, we subtract another 2 million from the number of people who will lose coverage due to the repeal of ObamaCare.  We are now at 6.3 million people.

But in reality, these 6.3 million people will have the option to go without health insurance after the repeal, which may be wise if they are healthy or so rich that they can reasonably be self-insured.  In 2017, the wealthy will not be able to afford to lose 2.5% of their income to ObamaCare penalties, so they will have to buy ObamaCare health insurance no matter how little they need it, unless it is repealed.  Then ending ObamaCare will bring many employers back to offering insurance plans for their employees.  Many more cost effective private plans will come into existence, once the ObamaCare straitjackets are removed.  ObamaCare requires too many doctor visits and doctors offer much less treatment per visit since it was passed.  This is the usual practice with government-controlled health care.  It becomes very inconvenient, so people use it less and get less for the cost of the coverage.  Without ObamaCare, there will be a return to competition in the medical insurance market as well.  Most areas of the country now have only one or two insurers offering ObamaCare health insurance plans.  This is not good for costs.  High costs keep many from enrolling in health care insurance.

So, if the Republicans do nothing to replace ObamaCare, the net number of people losing health insurance will be fewer than lost it when ObamaCare was put in place.  If 6 million people happy with their insurance then did not matter, how can the advocates of ObamaCare claim that the less than 6 million people dependent upon ObamaCare will matter now.  In fact, the repeal of ObamaCare does not mean that those people added to Medicaid due to its expansion in some states will not continue to be covered by Medicaid in those states.  That 3.3 million people were almost entirely the responsibility of the states after 3 years under ObamaCare in any case.  2016 was the third year. Federal subsidy payments were scheduled to plummet in 2017 anyway.  This is why many states did not allow themselves to be hooked into expanding their Medicaid rolls.  So, the repeal of ObamaCare will actually result in fewer than 3 million people losing their health care insurance relative to the before ObamaCare number.

Only Democrat Socialists can get away with pretending that fewer than 3 million people are 30 million people or sometimes only 20 million people.  These are the same people who claimed that 47 million Americans were uninsured before ObamaCare and then in 2014 stopped counting the many millions of illegal immigrants as among those uninsured to make ObamaCare look as though it was much more effective in providing health insurance than it actually was.  Tricky Dicks, these socialists.  Too bad we do not have a free press willing to keep them honest.

Marriage and Party

There is an interesting post at the American Enterprise Institute on the correlation of the percentage of children raised by their biological parents by state and the correlation with Republican or Democrat states.  It has long been clear that college education results in a higher percentage of children being raised by their biological parents and a higher fraction of the population in the Democrat states has a college education.  It has been clear that having Asian ethnic parents provides the highest parental presence, followed by white parents, Hispanic parents, and finally black parents.  This study adjusted for the effects of college education and parental ethnicity to find that there was some residual positive correlation between Republican states and a greater percentage of children being raised by their biological parents.

This graphic was particularly interesting:

The reddest states, or those most consistently Republican, had the highest percentage of married adults.  The question is this:  Are people more likely to be married because they are Republican voters or they more likely to be Republican voters because they are married?  It is most likely more correct to say that whether someone is married or not is a significant factor in how that person votes.

We know that nearly 60% of self-identified Republicans are married and that two-thirds of unmarried women voted for Obama and Democrat Congressional candidates in the 2012 election (see here).  A majority of married women voted for Romney in 2012 (53% to 46% for Obama).  Overall, Romney won 56% of the married voter vote to Obama's 42%.  So, it is clear that a voter's marriage status significantly influences the party for which a person votes.  As a consequence, it is most likely more correct to say that a higher percentage of children are raised by their biological parents in Republican than in Democrat states because a higher percentage of adults are married in Republican states.

One may question this by noting that since the number of people with college educations is higher in the Democrat or Blue states, then the fact that a college education correlates with a greater likelihood of parents raising their children together may offset the difference in marriage rates.  This is where the adjusted data for education and ethnicity comes in.  The yellow bars show that adjusted data and the adjusted marriage percentages for adults are still higher in the Red states than in the Blue states.  It appears that marriage is more valued in the Republican states than it is in the Democrat states, consistent with the rhetoric of the respective parties.

Marriage can most certainly be of great value to those in a marriage.  It is a partnership that is much more loving and intimate than any other, with huge advantages in security and living efficiency as well.  Some Republicans claim that this makes traditional marriage the cornerstone of society.  In my evaluation, while traditional marriages are clearly extremely important, there is plenty of room for non-traditional marriage concepts to offer many of the same advantages to people who do not satisfy the limitations of the traditional marriage concept.  The advantages of marriage are a right which should be available for everyone to claim with willing adult partners.  This freedom will then make our society even stronger and better for the highly differentiated individuals of which it consists.

Republicans, who often claim they favor more individual freedom, should embrace an enlarged concept of marriage to be consistent with both equal individual rights and their acknowledgement of the many values gained with marriage.  Those values should not be limited to heterosexual couples.  Everyone has a very broad freedom of association which they may exercise in their private sector choices, whether in a business context or in the context of a domestic partnership.

Income Inequality and Government Policy

The very strongly socialist Democrat Party has made what it calls the problem of income inequality the cornerstone of their party platform.  It is the justification for calls for raising the minimum wage once again.  It justifies further and endless entitlement programs.

But is income inequality any more of a problem than are the inequality of the following characteristics of an individual?

• Intelligence
• Morality
• Energy
• Friendliness
• Athleticism
• Goal-Directedness
• Height
• Attractiveness
• Benevolence
• Sexual Prowess
• Humor
• Knowledge
• Loyalty
• Productivity
• Interest in movies and TV
• Interest in partying and drugs
• Interest in politics
• Interest in reading
• Interest in spending time with children

No.  A desire to reduce income inequality by the application of government force is very much similar to the desire to reduce the inequality of any of these other individual traits by the use of government force.  In all cases, the use of force for such a purpose is an attack upon individuality itself.  It is most certainly an attack on the freedom of the individual to make his own choices and to own and manage his own life.

Some people choose to work 30 hours a week and watch 40 hours of TV a week, while others choose to work 70 hours a week and watch little TV.  Perhaps instead of transferring the extra money earned by the 70-hour worker to the 30-hour worker, we should tax people for the income they did not earn while watching TV?  That is only fair, especially considering that the harder worker generally did more to improve the standard of living of his fellow Americans.

Yet it is also the case that we Americans are actually far richer than most other people in the world.  Consequently, if income inequality really were a problem that should be leveled by government, then it would have to be performed by ceding American governmental sovereignty to the United Nations.  Even poor Americans are too rich by world standards and should be deprived of much of their income to equalize the human condition with respect to income.  Look at the percentage of people in the world with higher incomes than the following incomes:

$1,400               48.1%
$20,000               3.6%
$25,000               2.0%
$32,400               1.0%
$35,000               0.81%
$51,939               0.28%, this is the median US household income in 2013, US Census Bureau
$75,000               0.11%
$100,000             0.08%
$125,000             0.07%

Only 0.28% of households in the world have incomes greater than the median household income in the USA.  So, let those who are serious about eliminating income inequality by a simple re-distribution of income give away almost all of their own income until that equality is achieved around the world.  As the income of the lower half, less than about $1400 a year is increased, the dividing line between the poorer half will rise and those Americans earning only $1400 a year will start to receive redistributed money.  But, those earning the outrageous sum of $20,000 a year will always be contributors in the self-sacrificial duty to raise the income of the poorer half of the world population.

Well, alright now, but many Americans are only thinking of income inequality as a problem within the confines of American, because its great usefulness as a political power tool is in the context of the Democrat Socialist and generally the Progressive Elitist effort to transform the USA.  Why would these people think of income inequality as a problem to be dealt with as a matter of principle.  No, it is just a convenient tool to increase the power of government and of those who wield great influence over the government.  The aim is not to achieve income equality even in the USA.  It is to pretend to redistribute some money in the name of reducing income inequality so the government can be made more powerful.  A more powerful government can do even more to make those who have pull in Washington still richer than the present special interest control over Big Governments makes these cronies of Big Government.  A real effort to eliminate income inequality would defeat the real purpose, just as offering a real education in government-run schools defeats the real purpose of having government and special interest control of the schools.

A very interesting study of income inequality was produced from U.S. Census Bureau data from 2012 which shows the Gini index of income inequality by congressional district in the US.  Those districts with Democrat representation are shown in blue, while those with Republican representation are shown in red.  The plot below shows the districts in order of Gini index, where a higher Gini index represents a greater income inequality:

It is immediately striking that congressional districts most dominated by Democrat Representatives are those with the highest income inequality.  At the lowest and highest levels of income inequality the rate of inequality changes the most.  Let us look at these two ends of the spectrum of American income inequality more closely:

Democrats represent 23 of the 25 most income unequal congressional districts, while Republicans represent 13 of the 25 districts with the least income inequality.  Republicans are predominant in those districts with more nearly normal distributions of income.  Now, we cannot immediately assume that Republican representation reduces income inequality.  But, we should at least be asking whether there are reasons why Democrat representation might be adding to income inequality.  The rational man wants to know.

We should attack this question with some knowledge of where Democrats hold representation in the House of Representatives.  The results of the 2012 election are shown in the map below:

The Democrats dominated the big cities of the Northeast and the Pacific coast, some highly Hispanic and Native American areas of the Southwest, the union strongholds in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Missouri, a few concentrations of black voters in the Southeastern states, and a complete dominance of New England.

I am pretty sure the highly Hispanic and the highly black concentrated districts are responsible for many of the least income inequality districts the Democrats hold.  These districts are often uniformly poor, which is not a good thing.  It would be wonderfully good if these districts had more higher income people, to state the obvious.  Any district would benefit from more higher income people, provided that income was obtained in the private sector.

But most Democrat districts tend to be the high density population districts of cities and their nearby metropolitan areas.  Good fences and low population densities make good neighbors, but these conditions are lacking in cities.  As a result, there is a tendency for city dwellers to want more control over their neighbors.  They cannot achieve this on their own, so they enlist government with its monopoly on force to perform this function.  They therefore vote heavily for Democrats.  There are few exceptions to this rule.

High population densities also lend themselves to making great fortunes.  The best CPA in Russell, Kansas will only have a very few well-off clients, while a CPA with no better ability in New York City might well have many wealthy clients.  A very good restaurant in Stilwell, Oklahoma, the Strawberry Capital of the World, with a population of 3,840 people, will make less money than will a restaurant of the same quality in many parts of Chicago or its suburbs.  The networking possibilities of a major metropolitan area and its financial institution advantages will lend themselves to extreme wealth creation for a least some people.  So, we cannot blame Democrats across the board for these advantages that contribute to income inequality, except where that networking is used to provide a greater than average influence to special interests over governments.  This is a big exception, because we know that this kind of pull is used to increase the fortunes of a few cronies at the expense of the many who have little or no such pull.

Among those who have no pull are those who live in the inner city and sometimes suburb school districts with notoriously bad decades-long Democrat control of the government-run schools.  These schools are run as holding pens for children, for the advantage of government employees who staff them and the labor unions that represent school employees, as indoctrination centers for the mythical wonders of Big Government, and very often for the advantage of cronies who provide excessively expensive services and goods to the school systems.

The child victims too commonly do not graduate from high school.  Those who do often read at the third grade level, cannot write a coherent sentence, and know nothing about history, economics, science, and math.  Wonder of wonders, these city school children commonly have little ability to earn decent incomes as adults.  Very high percentages cannot finds jobs.  Many turn to crime and/or become dependent on drugs and/or welfare programs.  All of these income depressing effects are aided and abetted by the Democrat-controlled governments.

The problems do not end here.  The cities are more likely to have severe licensing laws for professions and jobs, which greatly limit entry into these jobs.  Those who start poor are more likely to be kept from becoming more wealthy by these restrictions.  Cities also produce a plethora of regulations, which hit small businesses especially hard.  This makes it harder for a poor person to succeed by creating his own small business.  Democrat city governments commonly favor labor unions, whose members add to their income by depressing the income of larger numbers of non-union members.  Once again, the Big Government model adds to income inequality, this time by suppressing the income of the poor.

Yes, Democrats might be more concerned that income inequality is common in America because it is more common in their districts.  So, they make more of it.  But, their governmental principles, insofar as they have any, embrace many policies that make income inequality greater.  They increase the income of those favored by the government, who are commonly not those they imply are favored in their speeches aimed at the poor and minorities to gain their votes.  They depress the future and present incomes of the poor and the minorities they claim to champion.  The governments they control are not righting wrongs of the private sector.  They are not righting wrongs of the government sector. 

This will not change no matter how often they pose as champions of income equality, because the wrongs their Big Government model does are inevitable by the nature of Big Government's need to sustain itself.  In comparison, competition and individual choice are very effective in limiting any injustices created in the private sector.  In the Big Government model, the government sector is characterized by force and a disrespect for the individual.  That lack of respect for the individual reduces the probability of individuals increasing their wealth all across the spectrum of incomes, but seems to act as a more severe depressant of the incomes of the poor who have no real pull in Big Governments.

CBO Says 2.5 Million Jobs May Be Lost Due to ObamaCare

The Congressional Budget Office announced on 4 February that by 2024 the equivalent of 2.5 million full-time jobs may be lost because of the so-called Affordable Care Act.  That act offers neither affordable medical care nor incomes upon which Americans can afford to live.  It is a cruel lie to call it the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  It is also an insult to the intelligence of Americans.  It is a hidden tax on work, which violates Obama's claim that he would not increase taxes on the Middle Class.  It is, however, a massive redistribution scheme, which Obama told Joe the Plumber he was intent on implementing.

Many Democrat Socialists responded with claims they are celebrating the fact that many people will have much more free time.  Of course, they are really celebrating because many more people will become dependent upon Big Government.

The hardship of the People is good for Democrat Socialists, so they work hard to see more and more hardship is distributed upon the American People.  The pretense of redistributing the income earned and developed by others is a cover for this actual increase in and redistribution of hardship.  This is why the War on Poverty has not reduced poverty in decades.  It is why all the talk about improving the education of children never results in children acquiring more learning skills, problem-solving skills, a desire to learn, or acquiring factual knowledge.  This is why the economic condition of Black Americans still leaves much to be desired.  The Democrat Socialists do not want to solve the problems they claim it is their purpose to solve using Big Government as the tool.  No, their power is dependent upon these problems remaining unsolved and remaining sore points that divide Americans.  For every pretense of help, there is a greater, less publicized, harm.

24 States Expand Medicaid Under ObamaCare

The CBO predicts that 9 million more people will go on Medicaid in the next year.  Most of this increase will be in the 26 states that expanded Medicaid under ObamaCare.  These states are shown in gold in the map below:

The states not expanding Medicaid coverage under ObamaCare have the number of additional people they would cover with coverage to 133% of the poverty level shown on them.  This represents a huge future savings for these states after 2022 for their state budgets when the federal government stops paying 90% of the bill for the added state dependents.  Those living in the states in gold had best have piles of gold to pay the tax bills after 2022 for all of the people on Medicaid.

The CBO is predicting that ObamaCare expansion of Medicaid will add 9 million people on Medicaid by the end of 2014 and 13 million by the end of 2020.  These additions and the future large increases in state budget costs will occur in the states in the above map in gold.  Of course, Progressive Elitists will complain that the added 5 million people who might have been added in the blue-gray states have been sadly neglected in this redistribution of wealth.  In fact, they like to complain that even more of those in poverty live in many of these blue-gray states.  See the map below from one of their websites:

So the states not expanding Medicaid have an average 9.1% of their populations qualifying as below 133% of the poverty level, while the national average is 8.0% of the population.  But one thing that is overlooked is that there is one single poverty level for the 48 contiguous states and higher levels for Alaska and Hawaii.  So, this map of those below 133% of the poverty level has to be compared to one for the cost of living.  Clearly, some people at 133% of the poverty level are much better off in low cost of living areas than are others at that level in high cost of living areas.  The cost of living map:

Now we see that the states that refused to raise their Medicaid dependency levels to 133% of the poverty level are mostly states with most of their population below or at the national average in the cost of living.  Most of the states that raised the Medicaid eligibility level to 133% have most of their populations living in high or average cost of living areas.  Of the 24 states not raising the Medicaid eligibility level to 133%, Wyoming, Montana, Florida, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Maine are the only ones mostly at the average or higher in cost of living.

There is a reason that Republican-dominated states tend to have lower than average costs of living.  The governments in those states mostly extract less from the private sector to use in unproductive ways in the government-sector.  Their present choice not to increase the eligibility for Medicaid in their states is a move to continue having a lower cost of living.  That means that people in those states above 133% of the poverty level will continue to be better off than will people in the expensive government states that mostly raised their Medicaid eligibility levels under ObamaCare.

After 2022, when those mostly above average cost of living states have to pick up the cost of the 13 million people added to Medicaid, their cost of living will shoot up even higher.  Their taxes will increase further and some of them will go bankrupt.  More and more people will migrate out of those states and move to the states that did not raise their Medicaid eligibility levels.  There will be a further easily seen lesson on the perils of redistribution and socialism.  Socialist transformation and change will have seriously damaged the middle class who will have to pay the bills in the mostly Democrat states that made this bad choice to expand Medicaid.

The Critical Factor in American Politics: Who Owns Your Body and Mind?

The critical question whose answer determines the balance of power in American politics today is: Who owns your body and mind?

There are three answers to this question which are given by significant numbers of Americans.  They are:

1) I own my own body and mind.

2) God owns my body and mind.

3) The collective, effectively the government, owns my body and mind.

The idea that an individual owned their own body and mind was essentially a cornerstone idea of the Enlightenment and one which played a critical role in the thinking of the minds of the Founders of the United States of America and the Framers of the Constitution.  The purpose of government was to protect the individual rights of  the people.  Only if an individual owned their own mind and body did such an idea make sense.  Only then could a person have a sovereign right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of his own happiness.

Yes, some of them thought that God also owned their minds and bodies, but that even then an individual had a right to acknowledge that or to deny that ownership.  The individual, in their minds, could either freely give themselves to God or they could sin.  They believed in free will.

Some who believed that God owned their minds and bodies believed the state must help God assert this ownership.  Many a nation had established a religion and was all too committed to using government power to force others to make value choices these people believed God wanted them to make.  In America, the early Pilgrims were such an example.  Later many Calvinists in New England had similar ideas.  The colony of Virginia had an established religion, The Church of England, which was funded by the colonial government.  In addition to establishing churches, the colonies frequently codified many of their religious beliefs into laws.  By the time of the American Revolution and in the decade that followed, many of the thinking Americans came to the conclusion that government should not play this role of trying to force people to act within the confines of religious beliefs.  The need for a broader freedom of conscience was becoming widely recognized by thinking Americans.

The idea that the collective owned one's mind and body has been around probably as long as people have associated in bands or tribes.  Medieval European city and nation states used this idea to build hierarchical societies in which the serf served the local aristocratic lord and that lord served the King.  The King pretended to serve God, built and protected the state, and pretended to be the caretaker for the poor, dumb serfs.  The serfs were to devote their lives to the nation, the King, and God. 

The socialists extended this ancient idea to the state alone with no particular pretense that they depended upon God's authority to take control of the masses of the people.  As socialists became more and more common, thanks largely to government controlled education, the demands of the state based on collectivist ownership increased.  The Prussian government began such an expansion of the state based on socialist ideas of collective ownership of the people's minds and bodies.  It provided schools, medical care, and retirement benefits to the people in exchange for fairly complete control of their lives.  The Marxists advanced their version of such claims, as did the fascists and the National Socialist German Workers Party.  The Progressives in America borrowed the idea of the socialist government-run state schools, heavy regulation of productive labor, control of medical care and retirement benefits, and have created their own socialist variant.

As I have noted many times, ObamaCare is based on the assertion that the collective owns every individual's body and mind.  There can be no other basis for a governmental demand that each American must care for the maintenance of his or her mind and body in accordance with rules established by the government.  The government is claiming the right to have its property maintained.  It is telling Americans what medical care they must pay for coverage on in their insurance whether any particular individual has any need for that coverage or not.  The government is doing this very explicitly on a collectivist basis.  Someone needs that coverage and therefore every individual will pay for it.  This requirement is so important to the government that ObamaCare will actually cause many millions of individuals to lose the insurance they have and were happy with.  After all, there is nothing so important to the socialist as the principle of collective ownership and its assertion.  This is not actually being done for the sake of the welfare of each American individual.  No, it is being done to create a strengthened mandate that every individual's mind and body belongs to the government.

Of course this idea was asserted already in many other laws.  For instance, Progressive governments have long asserted that almost any activity that earns income or salary comes under its powers of regulation, control, and taxation.  American governments also believe they have the right to dictate minimum wages, which means they assert that they have the right to prevent individuals from earning a living at all.  Progressive governments have long levied taxes on an individual's pay from their own labor.  These are very blatant claims that an individual's labor belongs to the government.  Now what is your labor but one of the most critical ways you use your mind and body to support and maintain your own life.  Yet, these same governments pretend they are not violating anyone's right to life.  Controlling and taxing your labor is effectively a claim of ownership of your mind and body.

The balance of power in America today is the result of a two-party system in which one party, the Democratic Party, is wholly of the belief that every individual's mind and body belongs to the collective, or effectively to the government.  The other party, the Republican party, is more disparate in its parts.  It is composed of three major factions, which either hold that:

1) An individual's body is only self-owned.

2) One nominally owns one's own body and mind, but ought to give them to God of one's free will.

3) God owns everyone's body and mind, but God is too weak or lazy to force everyone Himself to obey his will and acknowledge his ownership, so the government must perform this task of forcing obedience for Him.

As far as the use of government power through its monopoly on the use of force is concerned, there is little friction and little difference between Factions 1 and 2.  The consequences on the use of force by government of Faction 3, however, are profound.  The most critical and common issues affected are government policies with respect to sex and procreation.  The portions of our society most directly affected are women and those who are lesbians, gay, bisexual, or transgender.  Many American women and LGBTs find the use of force by Faction 3 of the Republican Party to be extremely threatening.  More often than not, these groups find this threat more frightening than the broader and more equally applied, by gender and sexuality at least, threats to self-ownership of the Democratic Party.

I am fully in agreement that the use of government by Faction 3 for its purposes is highly immoral and highly irrational.  It is threatening.  But, I see the claim of collective ownership by the Democrat Party as even worse.

First, the collectivist agenda of the Progressives, in full control of the Democratic Party, has been very successful in getting the government to control our daily lives in many ways.  It dictates what values we are free to pursue and it takes many hours of our time and effort from each of us by force.  The amount of our labor it commands has steadily increased, but for secondary fluctuations such as major wars.

Second, more and more Americans, especially younger Americans, find the claims of Faction 3 to be wrongheaded, even as many of them embrace the idea of collective ownership of our minds and bodies.  Faction 3 has poor prospects of controlling the government to do its will on a national level, because many Republicans oppose them, as do all of the Democrats.  Only a very few states are so dominated by Faction 3 that there is a practical likelihood of their enacting their program.  At the national level, even when the Republicans controlled the House, the Senate, and the presidency, this faction was never able to accomplish much of anything toward their agenda.

Third, the range of those aspects of human life claimed as the purview of government control by force is much larger on the part of the Progressive collectivist agenda of Democrat Party.  It applies to everyone and to almost anything we do.  It is without any real boundaries at all.

Most Americans say they want smaller government, yet the dominion of government keeps growing.  The Republican Party is clearly the party of at least less massive government, though it is not really the party of smaller government as it ought to be.  Yet most Americans favor the Democratic Party in Generic Congressional Polls.  The reason is primarily due to the fear of many women and almost all LGBTs of the agenda of Faction 3 of the Republican Party.  If this agenda were to be put into effect, that fear would be well-justified, but it has almost no chance of being put into effect.  Yet because so many women and LGBTs vote for the Democratic Party out of this exaggerated fear, the less massive Republican Party is unable to attain enough offices to prevent the Progressive collectivist attack upon our individual rights which has been very successful in many ways.

At this time, the biggest issue of government is the repeal of ObamaCare with its takeover of 16 to 18% of the US economy, its many harmful effects on medical care and its cost to individuals, and its blatant claim of government ownership of our bodies and minds.  Most Americans recognize that ObamaCare is a massively troublesome program, even if most underestimate its harms.  Yet, we have seen anti-ObamaCare candidates for the Senate defeated by Democrat collectivists who favored ObamaCare and the rest of the Progressive collectivist agenda because women, young people, and LGBTs found the ideas of Faction 3 Republicans abhorrent.  And even though Ken Cuccinelli, a Republican candidate for Governor in Virginia, has vowed that he will not try as Governor to implement his previous Faction 3 agenda as required by his support from the Tea Party, he is likely to lose that election to a highly corrupt collectivist, Terry McAuliffe.

There are many who believe that the Tea Party is a movement of Faction 3 Republican types.  It is not so.  It is primarily people more aligned with Factions 1 and 2.  There are also a few Faction 3 types who have agreed that the threat of the Progressive collectivist agenda has become so great in America that they will give up trying to codify their religious beliefs in the law at least until the collectivist threat is defeated.  Ken Cuccinelli is a man who has made this pledge.  He has fought ObamaCare with more determination and effect than almost any politician.  He is strong in his support that we each own our own labor and should be free to cooperate with others to our mutual benefit in the private sector.  He understands that government should be smaller.  It should be dictating fewer of our values to us and less involved in our lives.  He is a strong Tea Party promoter and candidate who has agreed to live by the rules of the Tea Party to leave his religious beliefs in the private sector and not use the force of government to promote them.

It is a serious mistake to allow the Progressive collectivist Terry McAuliffe to become governor of Virginia.  His strong support of ObamaCare and all things collectivist will do serious harm to the people of the state of Virginia.  If you value your rights and you are voting in this election, it is a serious mistake to vote for McAuliffe or even to vote for the Libertarian candidate.  The Democrat will bring nothing but evil accomplices into the state government, while Ken Cuccinelli will bring in many Faction 1 and Faction 2 Republicans instead.  This will be very good for the people of the state of Virginia.

A Comment on the Constitution and its Role

I just left this comment on the Constitution and its legitimate role in a discussion in another blog:

Obama said he did not like the Constitution in a Chicago radio interview when he was a state Senator in Springfield, IL.  The reason: It did not allow the redistribution of income that he favored.  So of course, he and the other Democrat Socialists such as Justice Ginsburg, simply ignore the Constitution.

The Declaration of Independence clearly states that the legitimate purpose of government is the protection of individual rights, broadly defined as to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  The Preamble to the Constitution sets the terms of the contract the People have mandated that the government will observe, namely that the government will insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the General Welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity.  It then enumerates a very few powers of government designed to make its sphere of influence small and that of the individual in the private sector much, much larger.

This is consistent with a government just big enough to defend us, but not big enough to use a great deal of force, as is the essential nature of government, to control our lives and deprive us of our liberties.  Government was small so the use of force and the fight over the power that represents would not divide the People and cause the destruction of the domestic tranquility.  The General Welfare then was understood to mean that government was to function so that everyone's welfare was promoted, not just that of a majority, or that of the poor, or that of the middle class.  Everyone's interest, which was mostly in their liberties, was to be promoted.  That understanding of the General Welfare has been horribly corrupted.

Americans Have Become So Wealthy, the Middle Class is Disappearing

According to the constant theme of the Democrat Socialist Party, the American Middle Class is disappearing because more people are poor than ever.  Well, despite the best efforts of those who are constantly trampling upon our rights to earn a living, as I have pointed out before, the Middle Class is disappearing because many more Americans are rising up out of it.  A recent post at the AEI Ideas blog shows this very well:

This chart is based on Census Bureau income data which is given in constant 2009 dollars.  I would certainly question the idea that the lower bound of the Middle Income Group is $25,000 a year and would set that at least at $35,000, but that would not change the fact that the percentage of families in the Middle Incomes is dropping as those in the Upper Incomes rises.  There is a slight decrease in the number in the lower income group.  The data does not yet show the effects of the never-ending Great Socialist Recession as many families have been worn down over the last four years.

Actually, if we look at this data a bit more closely over the period from about 1998 through 2009, the fraction of families in each income group has been about constant.  I would maintain that the longer term trend for families to leave the Middle Income Group for the Upper Income Group has been successfully foiled by Big Government with its increasing impediments to economic freedoms over that period.  If we want to restore the trend for Middle Income families to increasingly become Upper Income families, we need much less government interference in the private sector than we have seen over the last 15 years.

My Response to a Democrat Politician's Wife Request on Father's Day

Karmen Walker Brown is the wife of Anthony Brown, the present Lt. Governor of the state of Maryland, who is now running for Governor.  Anthony Brown has served under the present governor of Maryland, Martin O'Malley.

O'Malley is a strong Obama supporter and has aspirations to run for the office of the President.  He has also strongly pushed applying the high state sales tax to gasoline sales, on top of the fixed cost gasoline tax now in place.  He has forced Maryland electric utilities to buy expensive alternative fuels and pass the costs on to the consumer.  He increased the sales tax by 20%, the top personal income tax rate by 16%, and the top corporate tax rate by 18%.  He pushed for and signed a gun control law that drastically infringes the right to bear arms in Maryland.  He even promoted and signed a rain tax on Marylanders that taxes them for any impervious surfaces on their property.  Before he became governor, he was mayor of Baltimore and presided over that city's horrendous public school system as it became even worse.  He headed the Democratic Governors Association from 2011 - 2013.

The Democrat Socialist Party has tight control of the Maryland state government.  It has large majorities in both houses of the legislature and it has controlled the governor's office for a long time.  The Democrats manage this dominance with a very touchy, feely approach.  Karmen Brown is playing this game now by requesting huge numbers of Marylanders to sign a Father's Day card for her husband Anthony.  Here is how this works:

If you asked Anthony what the most important thing is to him, I know what his answer would be: Family. Our kids mean the world to him.

Father’s Day is one of Anthony’s favorite days. It’s a time for our family – and families across Maryland – to come together and celebrate what’s really important.

With Father’s Day coming up this weekend, the kids and I are hoping you can help us out. We’re putting together a big card and we want you to sign it! I know he’d love hearing from his friends and supporters on such a special day.

Click here now to wish Anthony a Happy Father’s Day.

For Anthony, there’s no doubt that being a father is his most important job. You can see it in the way he helps the kids with their homework or asks about their day.

He’s as dedicated to them as he is to making life better for kids across Maryland. It’s why he works – every day – to improve schools, create jobs, and ensure that all families have access to the health care they need to thrive. He knows that this great state is only as strong as the families who call Maryland home.

That’s why the kids and I want to give Anthony a big Father’s Day surprise.

Can you take a minute to sign our card for Anthony? Click here to add your name.

Thanks and Happy Father’s Day,

Here is my response to Karmen Brown:

Karmen,

I vote on my conviction that there is no political value as great as that of the individual for his individual rights to life, liberty, property, the ownership of his own body, mind, and labor, and the pursuit of his personal happiness.  The individual has a very wide right to freedom of conscience and association, which is not to be infringed by the state.  Gov. O'Malley has been committed to almost constant infringement of individual rights, as indeed any big government advocate and user of brutal force for any purpose but the protection of individual rights must be.  Lt. Gov. Brown has been his ally in these tyrannical infringements of individual rights.  It is very unlikely that he will be able to convince me that he is the less wrongheaded and evil of the two thugs who will be running for Governor under the nomination of the two major parties.

I believe I was put on your list of favorably inclined people because I believe in marriage equality.  Yes, such a belief is implied by individual rights, but so is the belief that I own my own body and that as such I have the right to control my health care and health insurance.  ObamaCare claims that my body belongs to the government.  I reject that claim and I have no intention of selling my body to the government even at the cost of being sent to prison.  I defend all of the rights of the individual, including the right of some to say things that may hurt the feelings of others. Our right to bear arms shall not be infringed.  Bloggers and all writers have the same freedoms as are protected for newspapermen and for the same reason that we all have the right to use our minds and freely express our beliefs in speech, in writing, and in assembly.  We have the right to choose who we will hire, to choose our clients, to choose our friends, and choose our sex and domestic partners.

The rights of the individual are broad and the legitimate functions of government are narrow.  This was established in our earliest founding document, the Declaration of Independence.  The proclamation there established the basis for a People of sovereign individuals mandating the very limited powers of the Constitution and setting up a government which is not sovereign, but was only a legitimate means for sovereign individuals to protect their individual rights.  Note that the 9th and 10th Amendments of the Bill of Rights further inform us that the individual retains his sovereignty.

These issues are of such critical importance that they must be addressed by rational minds, not by feelings that seek to associate your big government thug with fatherhood and child-raising on Father's Day.  I too am a father and my greatest wish is that my three daughters will some day have federal and state governments that will protect, rather than violate, individual rights.  There is nothing else so important.  This is why many a man has fought for these rights and many have given up their lives to protect them.

In a society which protects individual rights, we are enabled to choose our own values and manage our own lives with all of the advantages of free trades in all aspects of our associations with other individuals.  Then and only then can we all pursue our dreams in a harmonious way.  Then and only then are we free to hope that the future will be good and better for us all.  Free minds are the most essential means for improving our standard of life, our security, and for achieving our happiness.

Charles

Charles R. Anderson, Ph.D.
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Oil and Gas Industry Tax Breaks: Lies by Democrats

For decades, I have been hearing about the massive tax breaks and subsidies that the government gives the oil and gas industry.  Obama has recently been repeating this wild-eyed claim.  On 2 November 2011, in a reply to a comment claiming the oil and gas industry was subsidized by $2 billion a year to my post North Dakota Oil, Truckers, Railroads, Jobs, I said:

There are frequent claims that the government is subsidizing the oil industry, but rarely does anyone actually attempt to describe what the subsidy is and how it is given to the oil industry. The oil industry gets four tax breaks, the domestic manufacturing break of $1.7 billion, the oil depletion break of $1 billion, the foreign tax credit of $0.85 billion, and the intangible drilling costs break of $0.78 billion. The first three tax breaks are given to every manufacturing company whether in the oil and gas industry or not. The oil depletion allowance is the equivalent of the depreciation of capital equipment, which is reasonable. The intangible drilling cost write-off allows drilling costs to be written off in the first year rather than over the entire time of the investment. This is probably most important to the very many small drilling companies and it is the only tax break really unique to the oil and gas industry.

Merrill Matthews recently had an Opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled About Those Tax Breaks for Big Oil... which notes how a bill submitted to the House of Representatives by the socialist Chris Van Hollen of Maryland is forced to insert special language aimed at the oil and gas industry to exclude that targeted industry from the same tax breaks or options held by and used by many other industries. Van Hollen's bill is the Stop the Sequester Job Loss Now Act and would increase tax rates on higher income individuals (soak the rich) and increase taxes on the oil and gas industry which has been doing yeoman work in keeping the economy from complete collapse.

In the best tradition of the Democrat Socialist Party the bill pretending to end job loss will actually increase job loss by depriving small business owners and investors of the money and incentive they need to hire people and by hobble the oil and gas industry which is one of the few job bright spots in our economy.  In Democrat Socialist logic, it is OK to blow away both feet as long as the bill that will do this has a title implying that it will put great shoes on both feet.  Upon passage of the bill and with its exercise, the people eventually have no feet and no great shoes.  The Democrat Socialists will then claim that is because of some fictional deregulation.

Matthews points out that the oil and gas industry reputed to be unfairly taxed (to Democrats this always means under-taxed) includes the two companies at the top of the company list of the biggest taxpayers, as well as the sixth biggest taxpayer.  Exxon Mobil paid $31 billion of U.S. income taxes in 2012.  Chevron paid $20 billion and ConocoPhillips paid $8 billion of U.S. income taxes in 2012.  These  three oil and gas companies paid more U.S. income taxes than did the remaining 7 companies in the top 10 list.  They did so using the same tax rules used by other industries.

So how does Van Hollen target the oil and gas industry?  His act

• limits the Section 199 deduction which sought to encourage domestic production activities in the American Job Creation Act of 2004.  This gave domestic manufacturers a 9% tax deduction from net income, except for the oil and gas industry, which only receives a 6% tax deduction because the Democrats have a vendetta against oil and gas.  So, the oil and gas industry gets less of a tax break than other U.S. manufacturers on this!
• denies the industry the use of the accounting method for inventory known as last-in, first-out or Lifo, which is widely used by all extraction industries.  It will remain an available choice for all industries except the oil and gas industry.
• denies only integrated oil and gas companies the deduction for many of the taxes they pay to foreign countries.  To avoid double taxation, all companies are allowed a credit for the taxes they pay to foreign countries.  Now, however, the integrated oil and gas companies would not be allowed to deduct the royalty payments they make to foreign countries, though other companies will continue to deduct royalties.

In other words, it is very clear that the van Hollen act discriminates against and targets the oil and gas industry.  This is just a case of a bloodsucking parasite looking for a host with plenty of blood to suck, just as is its soak the productive rich campaign.  Willie Horton is ogling other people's money in the bank and he will steal their money if he thinks he can get away with it.

ObamaCare Reduces Employee Hours at Colleges

Sometimes Justice pays a visit to those who have most assiduously attempted to evade it.

Obama and his Collectivist Party have had extremely high support at our colleges and universities.  Recent college graduates, including many who cannot find jobs, voted for him overwhelmingly not just in the 2008 election, but in the 2012 election when any sane person would have known better.  The faculty and support staff of most colleges and universities have been even more fanatical supporters of the socialist president and the Democrat Socialist Party.  Most of them eagerly supported ObamaCare, the law no one read and most of which was subsequently written in reality by bureaucrats, who are still busy writing it.

The Justice is that most colleges are now under some financial pressure and finding it hard to allow their operational costs to exceed the inflation rate several times over for the first time in decades.  Many, in their mad quest to add more and more administrative personnel, had been scrimping on faculty for a long time.  In 1975, full time non-tenure track faculty and part-time adjunct teaching staff were 43% of the faculty at U.S. colleges.  In 2009, they had grown to 69% of the faculty.  Tenured and tenured track faculty have shrunk dramatically, which supposedly would mean that teaching skills have decreased as well.

It now turns out that ObamaCare is causing numerous colleges to reduce the hours of their long-growing adjunct professors to fewer than 30 hours a week so that they will not have to pay the penalty tax for not providing them with health insurance.  See the Wall St. Journal of 19-20 January 2013 for more on this.  They most certainly do not want to actually provide them with health insurance since the ObamaCare insurance requirements are causing the cost of health insurance premiums to skyrocket.  The worst of the cost increases are just about to land hard on employers everywhere.

Of course colleges are not just planning to reduce the hours of adjunct professors.  They plan to reduce the hours of many on their support and administrative staffs also.  Just as restaurant chains and retail chains are reducing the number of hours of their employees to less than 30 hours a week, so are many colleges planning to make such reductions.  In the ObamaCollectivistNation, fewer and fewer people will have full-time jobs.  It was really the same in the Soviet Union, where 12 people commonly stood around and watched as one or two people did some work.  Of course, there they pretended they all had part-time jobs, but they were paid in accordance with the work they did not do.

A Mr. Balla, an adjunct professor at Stark College in North Canton, Ohio, said after receiving a letter informing him of his reduced hours:

I think it goes against the spirit of the law.  In education, we're working for the public good, we are public employees at a public institution; we should be the first ones to uphold the law, to set the example.

 He says he will not be able to afford ObamaCare insurance on his own.  Poor special person!  Perhaps he should just suck it up and find a job in the private sector that he looks down his nose at and learns how hard it is to earn a living while carrying all the entitlees  and "public" employees on your back and obeying the flurry of unreadable and unintelligible regulations and the many irrational mandates of the local, state, and federal governments.  It really irks me that these people claim to be serving the "public" when they are so clearly serving themselves as privileged rulers over the brutes they think populate the private sector.  This guy claims his right to the Cadillac ObamaCare insurance provided by the taxpayer even as millions of private sector workers have their employment hours reduced because of his lovely ObamaCare tyranny.  He claims his special privilege as a worker for the public good even as tax revenues from the many with fewer hours worked in the private sector must go down.  But, our saintly educator must get his privileged health insurance despite any such inconvenient reality.  The Federal Reserve will surely just print the additional needed money and give it to the colleges.

The colleges have long failed to serve us well.  They are bastions opposed to the sovereign individual rights of each of us.  They have long favored collectivism and opposed the American Principle of limited government with powers so restricted that it could not violate individual rights.  Their man Obama just reiterated his allegiance to collectivism and his real opposition to our individual rights in his Second Inaugural Address.

What is more, they do not even do a decent job of preparing their students for work in the private sector.  They are turning out droves of young people too privileged to actually be willing to work hard.  Their student product is ignorant of civics and U.S. history, of economics, of business reality, of the climate, of fossil fuels and their use, of writing skills, of logic and the construction of rational thought, and of science.  Most fallaciously believe they are qualified to choose the values by which others shall be forced to live their lives and able to choose politicians who will micromanage our incompetent lives in the private sector.  They are so full of themselves and so very hollow in reality.  Just like our Mr. Balla.

Well, their support for ObamaCare is about to result in their shooting themselves in the foot.  At least unless the efforts of such college groups as the American Association of Community Colleges to get the IRS to write the rules to exclude colleges from ObamaCare's requirements works.  The Obama regime has a tremendous propensity for writing administrative rules that exclude their biggest supporters from the rule of law.  We have already seen them write massive exceptions for unions and for companies from Nancy Pelosi's district.

Speaking of unions, more and more of college adjunct professors are already in unions.  About 37% of part-time non-tenured faculty are in unions already.  The colleges are fearing that putting these people on fewer hours will cause even more of them to join unions.  It is very funny that unions and their Collectivist Party are nearly universally supported on college campuses,  until unions approach their lower paid faculty and threaten to make the colleges pay them more money.  Colleges are rather the ultimate joke when it comes to hypocrisy.  How ironic that the ObamaCare that they cannot afford will push more of their lower paid faculty into unions that will demand higher pay they cannot afford.  Yet the justice come home to roost upon these bastions of irrationality is really quite sweet.

Last Electoral College Result Prediction on Presidential Election

I believe the most likely outcome of the Presidential election will be:

Of the generally recognized swing states, the only one that I believe is foolish enough to vote for Obama is Nevada.  Nevada showed its perfidy by voting for Senator Harry Reid, who has refused to allow the Senate to obey the law and produce a budget ever since Obama occupied the White House.  Harry Reid is wily, but a very wrongheaded man.  The state that could send him over and over to the Senate has the good judgment of a Las Vegas labor union.  In other words, Nevada is too much like California now, with which state it shares both an astronomical unemployment rate and home foreclosure rate.  Sometimes, no oftentimes, the people of a given area suffer mass delusions.  I know, I live in the Baltimore - Washington corridor, where mass delusion reigns supreme.  I do think there is about a 40% chance that Nevada will vote for the much superior candidate, Romney.

There is about a 20% likelihood that one of the three states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota will vote for Romney.  I believe Romney will win the election with a differential in the percentage total vote of between 2 and 4%.  If I am wrong, I think a win by 5% is more likely than one by 1%.  A win by 5% will mean that Romney will likely carry at least two of the states Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota.  Both Pennsylvania and Michigan will be very hard hit by Obama's plans to shut down the coal-fired electric power plants and both will be hurt by his plans to discourage hydraulic fracturing to release shale oil and gas.

Most of the polls are underestimating the turnout of Republicans and those Independents who have had more than enough of Obama.  They are overestimating the turnout of Democrats.  This is even true of Rasmussen polls, which are among the best of the polls.  The fact that Romney has a normal Republican lead with men and Obama has much less than the normal Democrat lead with women figures very big in my understanding of how this election will turn out.  Another key factor is the fact that Independents are decidedly favoring Romney over Obama.  There will also be substantially more crossover Democrats voting for Romney than Republicans voting for Obama in this election.  These factors have to generally push all of the swing states, most of which are now mostly Republican at the state level, into the Romney column.  The work of the Tea Party Americans in ensuring this is also underestimated.  The Evangelicals have also become aroused.

Obama is left only with substantial majorities among young people, blacks, and Hispanic Americans.  Each of these groups has suffered just unbelievably high unemployment.  Falling incomes and rising prices, such as energy prices, have hit blacks and Hispanic Americans especially hard.  The fraction of young Americans who favor Obama is high, but usually these young Americans do not vote in large numbers.  We will see that many fewer of them will vote in this election than in 2008 and of those who vote, a very substantially larger fraction will vote Republican.  The turnout of black and Hispanic Americans will also be lower.  The decrease in the fraction who vote for Obama this time as compared to 2008 will be much smaller than that among the young, though it will be greater for Hispanics than blacks.

Now that Americans have had so much time to get to know Obama and to be angered so many times by his lies and deceptions, I am very disappointed that we are still in a situation in which nearly half of all Americans will vote for this con man and failed President.  How anyone could want four years of constant attacks on our individual rights and the resulting economic stagnation, is very much beyond my understanding.  Romney should have easily surpassed Obama with well over 300 electoral votes.  It appears more likely that there are too many very foolish Americans for that to happen.  At this point, it looks to me that Romney will get 295 electoral votes.

I will be heartened if Romney comes very close in Minnesota, my birth state, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, however.  Coupling that with wins in Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio and the continued shift of the Midwest into the Republican column may be a good sign of things to come.  We have already seen these states send more Republicans to their state houses and to the House of Representatives.  They have been electing Republican governors as well.  The private sector unions have been losing power as they have lost membership.  More and more Mid-westerners are learning that if they are to have well-paying jobs, it is good that the governments not be anti-business.  As Mid-westerners show more respect for economic freedoms, they will align more with the more reality-interested Republican Party than with the socialist Democratic Party.  This re-alignment may take a couple more election cycles to be complete, but it sure is important to America's future freedom and prosperity.

Creating a Republican Senate

As a libertarian, albeit one often in disagreement with the defense policy of the Libertarian Party, I am well aware that the best check on the growth of the federal government has been to have a Republican President and a Congress with one house in the control of each party.  In the upcoming election, the House of Representatives will remain solidly Republican.  My prediction that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan will replace Obama and Biden because the American people would finally get over the celebrity status of Obama and see him and Biden as the empty socialist suits they are is finally clearly happening.  In ordinary times, it might be best that the Democrats retain a narrow control of the Senate, but this is not an ordinary time.

It is absolutely essential that ObamaCare, really the ObamaUncaringTax, be repealed.  It is also very important to repeal the Dodd-Frank Too-Big-to-Fail Crony Mercantilism Act.  It is essential to reform and control the EPA and finally kill the myth of catastrophic man-made global warming.  We must free business to develop our huge oil and gas deposits and to make use of our rich supply of coal.  We must end the waste of taxpayer dollars fed into uneconomic green energy companies with no viable markets and the electricity mandates for green energy that are driving up our electric bills and making our electricity supply unreliable.  We also need to push back the government employee unions, the abuses of the Obama National Labor Relations Board (NRLB), and try to provide national Right to Work legislation.  We need the opportunity to replace one or more of the five Supreme Court Justices who so falsely read the Constitution that they could vote to uphold ObamaCare.  To accomplish this critical mission, we have to have a Republican Senate for the next two years.

According to the present Rasmussen Reports on the state of the Senate contests in the November 2012 election, the situation is:

Held by Republicans, not up for re-election, 37
Safe Republicans, up for election, 6
Leaning Republican, 4
Toss-ups, 5
Leaning Democrat, 6
Safe Democrat, 12
Held by Democrats, not up for re-election, 30

If all of the safe and leaning Senate races go as Rasmussen predicts, then the Republicans will have 47 seats and the Democrats will have 48 seats in the Senate.  Consequently, the Republicans have to win 3 of the 5 toss-up seats for there to be a 50-50 split of the Senate, with tie votes to be decided by Paul Ryan.  Of course, it would be much better for the Republicans to win at least four of the five toss-up races.  These toss-up races are:

Massachusetts, Scott Brown (R) v. Elizabeth Warren (D)

Montana, Denny Rehberg (R) v. Jon Tester (D)

Ohio, Josh Mandel (R) v. Sherrod Brown (D)

Virginia, George Allen (R) v. Tim Kaine (D)

Wisconsin, Tommy Thompson (R) v. Tammy Baldwin (D)

Scott Brown (R) and Elizabeth Warren (D) have generally been running a very close race for the Massachusetts Senate seat for a long time.  She is an ultra-socialist who likes to say to small business owners that they did not create and build their businesses, the government and maybe the community did.  She is mad to redistribute as much income as she can.  Of course, she is determined to keep Americans from developing the new riches in oil and gas deposits that fracking has opened up.  She is also aligned with Obama in determination to kill the coal industry.  If she wins, she will be developed as a likely 2016 presidential candidate.  So, though Scott Brown is a moderate Republican who is often a friend of big government, she is a much greater danger as a friend of huge government.  This is an election contest which the Republicans can win.  Please support Scott Brown with a strategic contribution.

The Montana Senate seat race has incumbent Jon Tester (D) against Denny Rehberg (R), with the momentum in Rehberg's favor.  Rehberg is a rancher and small businessman who has long served as Montana's soul member of the House of Representatives.  In the 2011 Club for Growth Ratings of the financial responsibility of House members, Rehberg's rating was a rather low one for Republicans at 58%.  However, almost no Democrats scored more than 20% and not one came close to getting a 58% rating.  In the Club for Growth Senate Ratings, Jon Tester had a 17% score.  Denny Rehberg would be a decided upgrade and he is needed badly to repeal ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, and to reset the EPA and the NRLB.  A donation to his campaign would be a wise and strategic investment in America.

The Ohio Senate race features Josh Mandel (R)  running against incumbent Sherrod Brown (D), who is commonly called the most socialist Senator, now that Obama is no longer the most socialist Senator.  Supporting Josh Mandel has the effect of also adding to ads and get out the vote efforts that will help push Romney over the top in this critical swing state.  Josh is all about good government.  Please read his bio, which is a hard-nosed description of what he has done as Treasurer of the state of Ohio and when he was in the Ohio House.  This is not a fluff politician.  He won his election as Treasurer as the biggest vote-getter in the state, winning 80 of 88 counties in Ohio.  Standard and Poor rated his $4 billion government investment fund with its highest rating.  His General Obligation bond fund has Fitch's highest rating.  He expanded the Ohio liquidity portfolio by $2.3 billion since he took office.  Josh is pro-free enterprise and a strong supporter of the Constitution.  He has the strongest possible endorsement from the Club for Growth.  Josh Mandel will be a super good Senator.  In comparison, Sherrod Brown had a 2011 Senate Club for Growth rating of 0%.  Donating to the campaign of Josh Mandel is a super strategic investment in good government!

In Virginia, George Allen (R) is pitted against Tim Kaine (D), a former spend-thrift governor who left the finances of the state of Virginia in disarray.  Virginia is a swing state, so supporting Allen will tend to also support Romney.  George Allen is not the strongest Republican candidate, but the election is starting to swing in his direction.  The people of the state of Virginia are beginning to wake up to the sad state of the Obama economy, though their very highly populated northern Virginia Washington suburbs have benefited greatly from the mindless federal government spending under Obama.  They are beginning to also learn that the Defense sequestration of budgeted funds to run DoD and the armed forces looming to take effect in January is going to shatter defense contractors and leave DoD employees without pay for about two months.  Government spending reductions by all other government agencies are being spread out over a period of time to minimize the impact of the upcoming spending reductions, but DoD has been told by Obama that it has to continue spending its allocations of funding at the originally specified rate and take all of the hit in January on the sequestration.  In other words, DoD is to take a nose-dive over the cliff onto the rocks below at Obama's command.  Since deployed armed forces cannot be stood down, this means that incredibly drastic cuts in money going out to contractors and to civilian DoD employees has to occur.  This will shatter the economies of Northern Virginia, Norfolk, Virginia Beach, and Hampton Roads.  In addition, Obama has ordered the defense contractors, who are required by law to notify employees 60 days prior to termination, to ignore the law.  The termination notices are due the week before the election.  The government has promised to pay the fines that the companies will be subjected to for ignoring the law.  This is completely lawless behavior by Obama to help his re-election chances.  Tim Kaine is very supportive of Obama in this dastardly and destructive plan.  George Allen, for all his limitations, will be much the better Senator and he is critically needed to repeal ObamaCare and the other accumulated mischief of the Democrats over the four years from 2007 through 2010 when they controlled both houses of Congress.  Again, please make a strategic donation to George Allen.

The Wisconsin Senate race features Tommy Thompson (R) against Tammy Baldwin (D).  Tommy Thompson was a former Wisconsin governor and cut income and property taxes and eliminated the inheritance tax.  Tammy Baldwin is a Madison liberal who serves in the House of Representatives.  Her Club for Growth rating in 2011 was a miserable 9%.  Giving Tammy Baldwin one of the contested Senate seats would be an unmitigated disaster.  Making a donation to Tommy Thompson is another strategic investment toward turning the ship of state enough to avoid an imminent crash upon the socialist rocks.

Despite my materials analysis laboratory small business being in the fourth year of greatly reduced company earnings due to the never-ending Great Socialist Recession, I have just made donations to each of the Republican Senate candidates above in these toss-up races.  I hope that the recent rise in the polls of Romney and the rise of a number of these Republican candidates in their states, will result in the combination of Senate control with a Republican President needed to undo most of the damage done by a Democrat Congress for four years, followed by a Democrat Senate with four years of a Democrat President.  May the healing begin.