Obama's Comrade Pants Act

I was recently commenting on the repeal of ObamaCare in response to an article on-line at the Foundation for Economic Education and said that ObamaCare was a sad case of one-size-fits all.  An anonymous pest named D G then called me stupid for not knowing that there are three plan levels in ObamaCare.  Of course, I did know that there are four plan levels, but one could say that I did somewhat exaggerate in the one-size-fits all.  But, really only a little bit as will be apparent in my discussion of how Obama, Reid, and Pelosi had planned to pass the Comrade Pants Act, but they lost control of the House and the Senate due to the reaction against ObamaCare before they could carry out their plans.

Recognizing that pants are very important to the welfare of Americans and that some people did not have pants of sufficient quality to meet the standards of Democrat politicians and bureaucrats, Obama and his party in Congress decided that something had to be done about this.  Of course they were quite busy with passing ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank so they were running badly behind schedule in pushing the Comrade Pants Act through Congress.  It was a race against time also, because they knew they were about to lose their legislative majorities, having sacrificed it to the principle that the government held ownership rights in everyone's mind and body, thus allowing them to dictate the means of maintaining everyone's mind and body.  Pants were important, but what could in principle be as important as that mind and body collective ownership principle?

So the Senate had had a thousand-page act thrown together by pants manufacturers, cloth makers, pants manufacturing equipment makers, haberdashers, egalitarian professional agitators, and their Senate staff members. None of the Senators had had time to read the act, but they knew there would be more time to do that after the act was passed.  Now there was a problem -- the act had tax penalties in it for anyone who wore pants that were not up to the standards set in the act.  Well, more precisely most of the standards were to be set up by federal government bureaucrats.  Those penalties would also have to be levied on anyone who did not purchase the required pants as well.  But constitutionally, all legislation levying taxes, tariffs, and other fees has to originate in the House of Representatives. So how could they satisfy this requirement without starting over, which time did not allow?  Simple.  They stripped out all but the bill number of a bill passed in the House to establish National Lollipop Day, changing the name of the bill to the Pant-wearer Protection and Affordable Pants Act, colloquially known as the Comrade Pants Act.  They poured the Senate act text into it and passed this act in the Senate after sufficient non-citizen votes were cast for Al Franken to allow the Senate to do so.  By then, the House did not have time to approve the act that resulted from reconciliation of the PPAPA and the National Lollipop Day texts.  Usually a reconciliation can be performed quickly, but the differences in the two texts were just a bit too much for the remaining time before recess.

While all of this legislative activity was carried out at a frenzied pace, Obama and Pelosi had been telling the American people over and over that if they liked their pants they could keep them.  It they liked their pants providers, they could keep them also.  They also said that because pant making equipment was to become standardized, as were the patterns and styles, the cost of pants would drop.  Everyone could efficiently examine them on on-line exchanges and purchase them there under competition among many pants suppliers, once they provided their social security numbers and credit card information to the government with its well-known regard for the security of their information.  People with qualifying incomes would receive subsidies for their critical pant purchases, while people with higher incomes would pay full price.  People who bought many pants with subsidies were thus supported by those who bought pants at full price, but of course those people who bought many pants must have needed them and it was recognized that need was an irrefutable claim on the labor and income of others.  Tax forms were to have a new line.  It was the shared pants responsibility line that one had to fill out proving that one had either purchased pants on-line from one of the pants exchanges or that pants from any other source met the specifications for what was deemed good pants by the Department of Health and Human Services.

The Democratic Party did not want to be criticized for forcing everyone to wear a single pant size, so they set up four levels of pants that one could purchase.  The Act itself was vague about what distinguished these pants levels, but the bureaucrats anticipated the House passing the legislation and rapidly filled out the requirements.

Platinum Level: 44-inch waist, 40-inch in-seam, wool cloth, gray, pockets both front and back, six pair a year.

Gold Level:  40-inch waist, 36-inch in-seam, linen cloth, cream-color, pockets in back only, four pair a year.

Silver Level:  36-inch waist, 32-inch in-seam, denim cloth, blue, pockets in front only, 2 pair a year.

Bronze Level:  32-inch waist, 28-inch in-seam, polyester cloth, pink, no pockets, 1 pair a year.

As you can see, this is not a one-size-fits-all law.  There is all the accommodation for different needs that any comrade might reasonably have.  All you have to do is sign onto the federal pants exchange in your state and choose your bronze, silver, gold, or platinum pant plan.  What could possibly be wrong with this?

To this day there are many Democrats who bemoan the failure to pass the Comrade Pants Act.  That act was so going to address everyone's pants needs and in the process make us all a little more equal.  Of course, this was just a second step in this quest for equality.  There were many more goods and services to which the Democratic Socialist Party planned to apply the same legislative methods.

20 Feb 2017 Update:  It has recently been suggested that the government having established the right to force individuals to buy a product or service should now force the People to buy Ivanka's clothing line.  As we know from ObamaCare, this requirement must be implemented without regard for the individual's sex, age, or personal needs.  So guys, line up and select your Ivanka clothing of choice!  The choices will only diminish with time.

ObamaCare - Death Sentence for the Seriously Ill

Betsy McCaughey answers that fool Senator Harry Reid's claim that the many horror tales of lost coverage and degraded care under ObamaCare for those with serious illnesses are simply lies.  Her short article is well worth reading.  The Obama and Democrat Socialist Party claim that ObamaCare will improved medical care, especially for those with pre-existing conditions is found to be another of the many lies they have made.

The Obama despotic change in February 2013 to suspend the cap on out-of-pocket expenses, originally set at $6,350, for an individual which was to begin on 1 January 2014, was a betrayal of the promises made of coverage for people with pre-existing conditions.  This is one of many changes and betrayals by Obama.  He had to be elected to find out what he meant by the Change and Transformation he intended to bring to America.

Obama and ObamaCare are just packed with Change and Transformation, which are more and more becoming transparent disasters for the American People.  More and more are finally understanding this.

The September Jobs Horror Story - As Dismal as Dismal August

In September, 204,000 fewer people were employed than in August.  In August, 215,000 fewer people were employed than in July 2010.  Meanwhile, the working age population has been growing.  The September working age population grew by 223,000 people compared to August, at least 60% of whom want jobs.  Yet the usually stated seasonally adjusted unemployment rate remained about the same as it has been for several months.  This is because the number of people the government thinks want work shrank by 619,000 people in September compared to August.  In August the number of people supposed wanting work shrank by 378,000 compared to the number looking for work in July.  As always in a long recession or depression, the shrinking numbers of people known to be looking for work do not mean that more people are not looking for work or wanting work which is hopelessly unavailable.  Obama's promised change has brought an end to the hope for employment.  Many people, especially many of the young people who are coming into the working age now or recently, face horrible odds in finding a job.  They should be attributing this to Obama's transformation of America.  His many anti-business attitudes have certainly had destructive consequences.

The table below presents the jobs numbers taken from the Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment report for September 2010.  The important ones are that the working age population is growing and so many new jobs need to be created for the majority of that increased number who want a job.  The next number of great importance is the number of people employed.  That needs to increase greatly simply to keep up with the population growth.  When it is falling, that is a disaster.  As noted above, it fell badly in both August and September.  The so-called unemployment percentage is not very meaningful in a long recession.  What is meaningful is the calculation of the number of jobs needed so that as large a percentage of the working age population has jobs as had jobs when the economy was in much better shape, such as in January 2000 when 67.49% of the work age population had jobs or were actively looking for them.  The unemployment rate then was only 4.04%, which was a figure with some meaning in those circumstances.  Of course some of the unemployed then were actually transitioning from one job or career to another and were anything but the long-term unemployed who dominate today's Obama World.

During this recession, the number of missing jobs grew until it reached a maximum number of 23,108,000 jobs in January 2010.  The number of missing jobs then started to decrease and reached a minimum in July of 20,418,000 jobs.  Since then, the number of missing jobs has grown to 21,129,000!  The % Missing Jobs number is less important because that has a similarity to the usual unemployment number: it depends upon the number employed plus the number actively known to be looking for work.  It is of some significance however that that number is considerably higher than the usual unemployment number.

Here are a few interesting employment changes from August to September:

• The number of employed men fell by 633,000.
• The number of employed women increased by 461,000.
• The number of white Americans employed fell by 41,000.
• The number of black Americans employed fell by 161,000.
• The number of Hispanic Americans employed grew by 93,000.
• The number of full-time employed Americans fell by 1,123,000!
• The number of part-time employed Americans increased by 919,000.

It is clear that the changes were very unfavorable to full-time employment, to men, and to black Americans.  They were relatively favorable for women and for Hispanic Americans, though it is likely many of their gains were for the increased number of part-time jobs, rather than in full-time jobs.

This is the last jobs/unemployment report before the election.  Obama's, Pelosi's, and Reid's economic policies and anti-business policies have certainly had a transformative impact on employment.  The impact of ObamaCare on business costs has begun.  The cost of doing financial transactions due to the Dodd-Frank legislation is already going up.  We still wait for news on what taxes will be next year, which is already almost immediately upon us.  Will personal income tax rates go up, will capital gains taxes go up, and will the death tax be collected again as a mechanism to destroy businesses?  We know that the EPA wants to put draconian requirements and costs on using energy that generates CO2, but how expensive will that be in the near future and then in the longer term?  Will the Obama administration ever allow drilling for oil and gas again?  There are many, many business uncertainties and hurdles that the Democrat presidency and Congress have created.  The current dismal jobs situation is the very predictable result.

I will point out explicitly that men and black Americans should be especially eager to see the present Democrat tyranny replaced and punished in the up-coming election.  Most white men will do just that.  Someday, one cannot help but believe that black Americans will catch on to the fact that the Democrats are poison to them and understand that the free market is their only real friend.  Meanwhile, Obama continues to tell us that transferring wealth from the private sector to the public, government sector will somehow create more jobs.  How could he be more wrongheaded on this critical issue?  We are now in a situation in which local and state governments are letting their employees go because the private sector cannot supply the taxes it could in better times, before business fell prey to the Democrat super-majority in Congress and to Obama.

The Pro-Democrat and Socialism Washington Rally

Take a look at these photos from the pro-Democrat and Socialism rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, 2 October 2010.  They make clear the widespread open advocacy of Socialism and the determined anti-capitalism of many, many participants.  Notice the lack of handmade individualistic signs and the many manufactured, on-message signs of the sponsoring organizations who also provided many demonstrators with free bus fare, free Metro tickets, and food.  Afterward, notice the incredible amount of trash left strewn across the grass, which none of the Tea Party rallies I have been to has done.  We have always left the demonstration areas remarkably clean.  This surely indicates the sense of entitlement that socialists feel.  Why should they be bothered by carrying their signs home or putting them into trash cans?  It is easier to just drop them and leave the problem for someone else to take care of.  Just one of many indications of the ugliness of socialism and its believers.

I wonder that anyone is ever attracted to socialism.  The philosophy behind it is so childish, so full of envy, materialism, and factional divisiveness and hatred that I just cannot see its appeal.  Yet, it has a strong hold on the Democrat Party.  I believe the reason is that socialist motivational claims are needed to justify the big government and social engineering central ideas of the Democrats and because the Socialists are always relentlessly seeking power, they soon take up most of the positions as the foot soldiers and advisers to the Democrat political front men and women.  Over the years, virtually every Democrat politician has become very comfortable with these foot soldiers and advisers and more and more, they have come to think just like them, even as they maintain an appearance of being respectful of American values.  Since Obama has taken office, that appearance of respect has slipped.  More and more, being filled with a sense of their power and how unstoppable they were, the Democrat leaders made it clear they had no respect for the Constitution and its limits on their power.  They also made it clear that they were an aristocratic elite who were needed to correct our poor choices of our own values and to manage our lives, which they were sure we did badly as well.  In other words, they made it clear that they had no respect for the American People, who they said sadly and pathetically clung to their guns, religions, and prejudices.

Many American voters who vote for these useful idiot Democrat politicians do so because they just cannot imagine the evil of the people behind the scenes who largely control them.  When the Democrats in our Congress in these recent sessions voted to pass major, life-changing bills they had not read, who do you think wrote these bills and did read them?  It was those controlling advisers and foot-soldiers highly committed to socialism!  They are the ones who knew what the bills were about and what their long-term purpose is.  They are the ones who understand how the Obama-Pelosi-Reid strategy, which was really theirs, will prepare the way for an ever-enlarged government which will respond to every failure of newly imposed socialism with a proposal to fix the problem with more socialism.  Soon, the problem will be fixed as well as it was in Castro's Cuba, in Stalin's USSR, and in Mao's China.

Unless we are truly awake to their threat against our individual rights and our lives and vote their useful idiot political front men and women out in the November 2010 and 2012 elections, that is.  It is all up to the American People to defend their own liberties, their rights, and their lives by forcing the politicians to return to constitutional law-making within their very limited powers.  There is no Democrat who understands this and has the courage to stand up in the fight against the socialists.  Yes, there are some Republicans who are hardly the stout defenders of individual rights they ought to be, but many of them will have some use as useful idiots in the meantime and we will replace them in future elections.  We have made a start by eliminating many of them in the Republican primaries already in this election go-around.  We will replace many more of them in the 2012 election in the primaries as well.  This crusade to revive American ideals will require our high-level attentiveness for many years and more attention than Americans had given it for about 100 years forever into the future.

Harry Reid Complains About Slow Senate

Under Senator Harry Reid's term as Majority Leader this last couple of years, the Senate has buillt up a backlog of 400 items passed by the House of Representatives that the Senate has not taken up.  Despite the large Democrat majority, the Republicans have been able to keep the Senate from passing these 400 bills which are surely mostly further Progressive attempts to micro-manage the lives of the People.

In particular, Reid has recently complained about how Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma, has kept the Senate from passing legislation to overhaul how the FDA controls our foods.  Reid claims to have spent the whole Congress on this FDA food control bill.  Senator Coburn thinks the Senate should say how it is going to pay for the new bill and that its merits should be discussed on the Senate floor.  Apparently, Reid believes a bill which some staffers have spent a whole session of Congress working up, which no Senators have read, and which has not been discussed on the Senate floor, is ready for passage.  He wants to use the Democrat's favorite trick of hurry up and pass this bill so we can find out what is in it.  Senator Coburn is a bad guy for standing in his way.

It is clear to me and I am sure to most Americans now, that Senator Coburn is protecting our individual freedoms and our General Welfare by opposing the tyrant Reid.  Can you even begin to imagine how much worse off we would be if the Senate had passed those 400 bills of new mischief and power aggrandizement that the huge Democrat majority in the House enabled them to pass.  The laundry list of socialist mandates and spending in those 400 bills is probably staggering.

Tom Minchin - Hope is Dead - Long Live Optimism

Tom Minchin in yesterday's TIA Daily discussed how we ought to go forward in the face of the coup scored by America's fascist socialists on ObamaCare.  Here are a couple of quotes from his post:

You need a way to maintain your morale—to counter the effects of dispiriting circumstances. In short you need a solid basis to expect a better future. 

What can provide it when the news headlines fill you with revulsion? 

The virtue of optimism.

The virtue of what? Optimism. But this is a very particular type of optimism. It is not wishful thinking, and it is not mere hopefulness or even assuredness based on favorable circumstances—an assuredness that vanishes with the first real adversity. It is confidence in one's own potency, and it has to be maintained and fought for like any virtue.....

Holding optimism as a virtue begins with understanding what it is and is not. Optimism in its most basic sense is "confidence in the future." And that kind of confidence is only possible to a rational man. As Ayn Rand wrote in "Epitaph for a Culture," the Apollo space program was the supreme demonstration, for it "has shown us the precondition of self-confidence, optimism, and progress, like skywriting left in the wake of those rockets: rationality." That bears repeating: the pre-condition of optimism is not faith, good fortune or wishful thinking. It is rationality. 

Of course, I can choose to be rational, but will other Americans make the same choice?  I can be certain that I will not waver in my own rationality and be confident that if it is up to me, America will not commit to this fascist socialist doom that Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and their many followers are trying to force upon us.  But, can I count on my fellow Americans to rally to the cause of the rights of the individual and to name their importance to us all as the central American value?  The Tea Party Movement, the many commentators who have realized that this is the central issue, and the 38 states either passing laws to prevent the federal government from forcing their citizens to purchase a government-dictated health insurance product or launching constitutional court challenges, have given me a sound basis for thinking enough Americans are up to the task, or coming up to the task, to turn back the bloodthirsty horde of cutthroats who are presumptuous enough to claim they control our lives, our fortunes, our bodies, and our health or death.  This will not happen, not in America!

Prof. Phil Jones Admits No Significant Warming since 1995

Following the ClimateGate e-mail and documents dump scandal, the then director of the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, was asked to step down while an investigation of such things as his refusal to provide data requested under a freedom of information act was underway.  Phil Jones was a principal author on the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007.

In an interview on the BBC on 13 February 2010, Phil Jones admitted that (here and here):

• There has been no "statistically significant" warming since 1995.
• The warming periods of 1860 to 1880, 1910 to 1940, and 1975 to 1998 were very similar and could all be explained by natural forces.
• The data and papers the hockey stick graph used prominently in the last two UN IPCC reports is based on has been lost.  The hockey stick temperature record was the basis for a claim of unprecedented warming recently, which was attributed to man's CO2 emissions due to using fossil fuels.
• The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) may have been warmer than now and recently, but there is insufficient data from the tropics and the southern hemisphere to be sure of that.  He says the MWP is best expressed in North America, the North Atlantic and Europe, and parts of Asia.

Wow, is Phil Jones' fall from being a top global warming alarmist scientist amazing evidence of the collapse of this scientific foolishness, or what?

Strangely enough, though Phil Jones concedes that the warmings from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998 are remarkably similar and may be entirely natural events and he says that no statistically significant warming has occurred since 1995, he also claims that only man-made warming effects can explain the warming since 1998!  Now this is a simple breakdown of logic and reveals how strongly the religion of man-made global warming has its claws sunk into him.

Note also that the warmth of the MWP can hardly be ignored for the North Atlantic,  Europe, and parts of Asia, because there are plentiful human records of the crops grown, the extent of glaciers, and the natural flora and fauna of the time from those areas.  North America and many of those areas have been particularly subject to scientific studies as well.  But, there is much less land in the Southern Hemisphere, especially if the unpopulated Antarctica is discounted, and none of it was settled by advanced civilizations that kept significant written records.  His claim that warming in the tropics should also be shown before the MWP is thought of as a global warming is actually showing ignorance of the science of the Earth's climate.  When the Earth warms from temperatures similar to those we have now, the temperature in the tropics is hardly changed at all.  The reason is that water evaporates so much more quickly there with any warming.  In evaporation, the absorption of heat from the environment to turn liquid water into vapor has a counteracting cooling effect.  This effect is large, since it takes a lot of heat to vaporize water.  As a result, the temperature of the tropics tends to be quite stable even when the warming at higher latitudes is significant.

Prof. Phil Jones wrote in a dumped e-mail that he would destroy the temperature data before he would turn it over in response to freedom of information act requests.  Is losing the data the same as destroying it?  Maybe he lost it in a trash dumpster in Northumberland.  He claimed in the interview that his office was so piled with papers that maybe it was lost there.  He admitted that he was not a good record-keeper.

Dr. Benny Pieser, director of the skeptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, noted that Prof. Phil Jones had shared his data with colleagues and 'mates', so the claim that he had lost the data did not ring true.  He went on to say that this was Phil Jones' first admission that the science of global warming was not settled.

Folks, it is much worse than that.  Phil Jones was one of the most cited scientists in the scientific literature as an authority on catastrophic man-made global warming.  Now, he clearly has no evidence for any warming since 1995 and he has said the earlier warming from 1975 to 1998 was no different than that from 1910 to 1940, so there is simply no longer any late 20th Century warming that can be claimed to be unprecedented and/or due to man's use of fossil fuels!  Whether he lost the hockey stick data or not is now irrelevant with respect to the catastrophic man-made global warming argument.  He has already logically admitted that the hockey stick temperature graph is wrong!  And prior to this, every effort was made by the scientists in his alarmist cabal to erase the Medieval Warm Period, but now we have his confession that he is not at all sure that it can be erased!

The catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (AGW) science house of cards has collapsed very rapidly.  Unfortunately, it is hanging in there in much of the media and in the Democrat Party.  The Economist and even Forbes Magazine have had recent articles assuming its truth.  The EPA has failed to reopen consideration of its foolish recent declaration that CO2 is a pollutant which it must regulate tightly under the Clean Air Act.  The Obama administration has announced the formation of a new department under NOAA to serve as a central government advocate for catastrophic man-made global warming, though they name it as simply a climate research and study department.  The momentum of the religious movement for catastrophic AGW rumbles on, even after its obvious scientific collapse.

But, fewer independents and fewer Republicans now believe in it.  Even among Democrats, some have now become atheists or agnostics.  It will take time for the media and the politicians to correct themselves, but most of them will either do so or simply stop advocating it.  I am sure the latter option will be the more popular.  We can expect to hear few apologies from those who so strongly advocated shutting off our inexpensive fuel supplies, making our electricity system much less reliable and much more expensive, causing coal miners and oil refinery and pipeline workers to lose their jobs, many a manufacturing industry to move abroad, and many homes and workplaces to be cold in the winter and hot in the summer.  The false claims of catastrophic AGW will simply fade away.  Eventually.

We should remember who took the wrong side on this very important issue.  People such as Obama, Biden, Pelosi, Reid, Markey, Waxman, McCain, Lieberman, Bayh, Boxer, Feingold, Gillibrand, Inouye, Leahy, Mikulski, Murray, Schumer, Specter, Wyden, Edwards, Hoyer, Kratovil, and Van Hollen should all be thrown out of office as soon as possible.  Meanwhile, Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma has been a long-time foe of the hypothesis of catastrophic AGW and this should be remembered to his advantage.

Harry Reid's Dire Re-Election Prospects

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada and Senate Democrat Majority Leader has to push through the Democrat socialist agenda in the Senate.  This makes it impossible for him to pretend to Nevadans that he is a centrist or anything but a committed socialist.  The other Nevada Senator is the Republican John Ensign.  Obama did narrowly beat McCain in the 2008 election, but the voters are remorseful now.  In fact, they are very remorseful.  Obama had a favorable rating in Nevada of 55% in May, 44% in December, and for 5 - 7 January it was down to 34%.  His unfavorable rating is now 46%, up from 30% in May.

According to the Nevada Secretary of State's Voter Registration and Active/Inactive voter lists, the breakdown on Nevada's active voters is:

Democrat   494,316
Republican   410,198
Non-Partisan  174,663
Independent American  47,112

There are additional minor parties such as the Green Party (848) and the Libertarians (6,666).  The Independent American Party was until 1998 the Utah Independent American Party.  It is a Constitution-loving and conservative party, which endorsed the presidential candidate of the Constitution Party in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.  Some members of this conservative party may find it worthwhile to vote for a Republican in order to get rid of Reid.

The Nevada Review Journal had a poll of Nevadans taken by the Mason-Dixon pollers by telephone from 5-7 January and Reid is in deep trouble.  625 registered Nevada voters were interviewed and the mragin of error is 4%.  49% viewed Ried unfavorably, while only 38% thought favorably of this 4-term Senator.  Each of the three top-running Republicans would beat him according to the poll results in the 2010 election.  Sue Lowden, the Republican Party chairwoman of Nevada, would beat him 50% to 40%.  Danny Tarkanian, a businessman and former UNLV basketball star, would beat him 49% to 41%.  Sharron Angle, a former Reno assemblywoman, would beat him 45% to 40%.  Note that in each case, he gets about 40% of the vote, despite the fact that Sharron Angle is very little known in the state.  In other words, he gets the die-hard Democrat vote, but not much else.  In each of these three match-ups, Reid only gets about one-quarter of the independent vote.  Lowden gets 59%, Tarkanian gets 56%, and Angle, the unknown, gets 53%.  In other words, the independent voters want nothing to do with Harry Reid!  They do not even have to know the person running against him.

It may not be over for Harry Reid, however.  He is expected to have a $25 million war-chest.  But he will have to be very successful in buying all the votes that money can buy.  Such a war-chest is a lot more effective when the People have not already decided that they do not like the politician backed by the money.  So, let us hope that Reid has Tom Daschle disease.  Daschle was the Democrat Leader of the Senate whom the People of South Dakota threw out in 2004 after he proved more socialist in his leadership role than they could stand.

The Villainy of Businessman T. Boone Pickens

One of the great problems with a mixed economy having a substantial private sector and an overblown government sector, is that businessmen lacking in morals can readily use the government to grant them profits through the government monopoly on the use of force that the businessman cannot gain in competition in a free market. In particular, there are many such immoral businessmen taking advantage of the many energy subsidies and mandates that Congress has been giving out for a very long time. For example, there is the egregious case of the ethanol subsidies and mandates that I have often harped about.

T. Boone Pickens has joined the Orren Boyle and James Taggart crowd of Atlas Shrugged. Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner's Lobbying Editor, has written an excellent column on Pickens and "the Pickens Plan," called Congress gives your money to T. Boone Pickens. The small Washington Examiner has become a very good paper for excellent columnists, while the once very good Washington Times has lost much of its value since undergoing a change of editors.

Senators Robert Menendez (D, New Jersey), Orrin Hatch (R, Utah), and Harry Reid (D, Nevada) introduced a bill this last week to provide a $100,000 tax credit for the construction of each natural gas filling station and to double the very big subsidy for buying a natural gas car.

The methane-powered Honda Civic costs nearly $10,000 more than the regular Civic. The savings from using natural gas rather than gasoline does not begin to pay for this initial purchase cost difference. Natural gas cars are already subsidized, since the 2005 energy bill already gives tax credits for natural gas cars. The House version of the bill provides $30 million per year for research on natural gas cars.

Pickens founded and partly owns Clean Energy Fuels Corp. It builds natural gas fueling stations and it is a leader in transporting natural gas. He also has invested in V-Vehicle Company, which makes natural gas cars. Pickens is a wind generator investor as well and that industry also exists on subsidies and mandates. Since 1992, he has been lobbying Congress for natural gas subsidies.

Timothy P. Carney is a columnist worth following. Let me offer some quotes that indicate clearly how he thinks:

Perversely, his recent shift—from selling stuff (such as oil) that people want to buy, to selling stuff (like gas cars and wind power) that people buy only when it’s subsidized or mandated—has elevated Pickens’ reputation from greedy capitalist to world-saver.

“Hostile takeovers” is an inaccurate term for what Pickens used to do. The management didn’t like them, sure, but the transactions in question consisted of shareholders voluntarily giving their stock to Pickens in exchange for Pickens’ money.

Pickens’ new bid actually is hostile. I don’t want to fund his windmills or methane cars. But if I refuse, the IRS will come after me. But instead of“greed” it’s dubbed as “green.”

The 90% Axis Powers Tax

The Obama - Pelosi - Reid Axis Powers combined and voted a 90% retroactive tax on the bonuses of employees earning more than $250,000 who work for firms receiving more than $5 billion in Federal bailout money. Some of these companies were basically forced by the government to take bailout money, even many which were in no danger of failing. Others were failing companies which should have been allowed to go bankrupt, which would have terminated the contracts that required the failing companies to pay out the bonuses now being paid out. Obama, Geithner, Chris Dodd, Pelosi, and many others in the Democrat administration and Congress were well aware of these bonuses, but pretended they were not. They were caught in this transparent lie. They had foolishly circumvented the system long established for dealing with failing companies whose management had proven that they did not warrent bonuses, benefits, and other remuneration they would have had by contract if they had done their jobs well. Bankruptcy properly terminates such contracts as now have to be honored, though that is clearly unfair to the taxpayers.

The government is clearly incapable of running these companies and should clearly have stayed out of their business. The more healthy companies have learned now just how critical it is to try to get out from under the smothering, oppressive weight of the government. Those that would have squeaked through the banking problems without government help are now likely to fail as they lose all of their best employees. No capable manager will tolerate working under the oppressive, mean-spirited dictatorship of this government.

Legislation applied to prior events is clearly unconstitutional, yet this is not the first time that retroactive laws have been allowed to stand despite that fact. The Supreme Court does not enforce the Constitution's limits on the power of the Federal government and neither the Congress or the President take their oaths of office to uphold the Constitution at all seriously. Our politicians are very rarely men of principle.

Walter Williams - Congress's Financial Mess

Walter E. Williams, professor of economics at George Mason University, has written another interesting commentary on the current financial crisis called Congress's Financial Mess. He notes that the new media have repeatedly insisted that the current financial crisis was caused by deregulation and free markets. He goes on to show that this is not at all the case.

Professor David Henderson, research fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, studied how regulation has grown in general over the last few decades. He published his results in "Are We Ailing From Too Much Deregulation?" in Cato Policy Report (Nov/Dec 2008). He examined the Federal Register for its lists of new regulations.

• 1977-1980, Carter, annual average of 72,844 pages of new regulations
• 1981-1988, Reagan, annual average of 54,335 pages
• 1989-1992, Bush, annual average of 59,527 pages
• 1993-2000, Clinton, annual average of 71,590 pages
• 2001-2008, Bush, annual average of 75,526 pages

Employees in government regulatory agencies:

• 1980, 146,139 employees
• 2007, 238,351 employees, an increase of 63%

[How do you measure the efficiency of a regulatory agency employee? Is it by the number of new pages of regulations per employee? If so, in 1980 there were 0.50 pages of new regulations per employee and this had dropped by 2007 to about 0.32 pages per employee! Apparently, the more employees, the less efficient they become.]

Regulatory spending by the banking and finance industries:

• 1980, $725 million
• 2007, $2.07 billion, an increase of 286%
  

Under the recent George Bush, there was no hesitation at all in creating new regulations. In fact, the Bush administration specifically wanted to tighten down on risky mortgage and other loans by banks, but Congress would not allow it. The most outspoken critics of tighter credit controls in Congress were Democratic leaders and committee chairmen, including Rep. Barney Frank and Senator Harry Reid.

The Clinton administration made a concerted effort to force Fannie Mae to expand mortgage loans to low and moderate income people in 1999. They used the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act to make the banks make high-risk loans they otherwise would not make. Banks not submitting were fined and their mergers and branch expansion plans were denied or held-up.

In 2008, about $5 trillion of mortgages outstanding were owned or securitized by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, the Federal Housing, and the Veterans Administration. This was one-third of all such mortgages.

[Government also encouraged the inflation of home and property values with extremely low interest rates through inflation of the money supply by the Federal Reserve Board over the last several years.]

To make matters still worse for us taxpayers, Bush gave the auto industry a bailout of $17 billion in addition to about $700 billion in bailouts to banks and financial institutions. Now, the presidents of 36 state government universities are asking for a bailout. State governors and local governments are readying proposals for bailouts, with California $15 billion in the red, Florida $5 billion negative, and Michigan shutting down a prison to save money.

Williams notes that the news media is insulting our intelligence! Unfortunately, they appear to be right about the intelligence, or at least the attention span, of the average voter.