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.

Free Speech is Mostly Restricted in American Colleges and Universities

FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, has just produced its newest evaluation of the speech codes and policies of American Colleges and Universities.  FIRE has a list of the ten worst colleges and universities for free speech.  They are:

Mount St. Mary’s University  
Northwestern University, where a high school friend is an Economics Professor and Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education  
Louisiana State University  
University of California, San Diego  
Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota 
University of Oklahoma, from which a sister earned a BBA degree  
Marquette University  
Colorado College  
University of Tulsa, from which the same sister earned a Master of Taxation degree  
Wesleyan University

Because I have many family members and old high school friends who live in Oklahoma, the fact that the University of Oklahoma and the University of Tulsa are on this list is particularly distressing.  I would occasionally deal with the boredom of high school by playing hooky so I could spend 10 hours reading in the library of the University of Tulsa.  The Oklahoma State University also lowered its freedom of speech rating from a Yellow Light rating to a Red Light rating.  Apparently Oklahoma's academic professionals are playing catch-up with those of the longer established commitments to socialist elitist indoctrination, political correctness, and the belief that some groups are incapable of rational thought and forever governed by irrational emotions.

But, FIRE has been successful in creating a trend in the direction of more free speech in our colleges and universities.  The improvements have been slow and have required many a hard fight to bring about.  There are now 23 colleges and universities that have earned a good Green Light evaluation by FIRE of their speech codes, namely codes that guarantee free speech on the college campus.  This is up from 18 colleges and universities out of 440 which are evaluated.  Twenty-two are listed here, and the University of Maryland - College Park has just been added to those with a Green Light freedom of speech evaluation.  The good, free colleges are:

Arizona State University
Black Hills State University
Carnegie Mellon University
Cleveland State University, where my wife took some courses to prepare for a change of major for graduate studies
Eastern Kentucky University
George Mason University, with a great Economics Dept., but many scientists who want to suppress the free speech of scientists who reject the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis
Mississippi State University
Oregon State University
Plymouth State University
Purdue University
Purdue University Calumet
Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania
The College of William and Mary
University of Florida
University of Maryland
University of Mississippi
University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill
University of North Florida
University of Pennsylvania, the only Ivy League School with a free speech policy!
University of Tennessee – Knoxville
University of Utah
University of Virginia
Western State Colorado University

Unfortunately, the really awful Red Light evaluations still apply to 49.3% of the colleges and universities evaluated for the 2014-2015 academic year.  But this is a considerable improvement compared to the 75% of Red Light universities in the 2007-2008 academic year.  So, which American Universities that I have attended, my family members have attended, or my friends have attended are so inclined toward totalitarian free speech restrictions that they have landed on the FIRE Red Light list?

Brown University, where I earned my Sc.B. degree in Physics
Case Western Reserve University, where I earned my Ph.D. in Physics
Columbia University, where one of my daughter's earned her MBA
Franklin & Marshall College, where a colleague earned his B.S. in Chemistry
Georgia Institute of Technology, where a son-in-law earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and a niece is pursuing an engineering degree
Johns Hopkins University, where two colleagues earned their Ph.D. degrees in Chemistry or Materials Science and Engineering
Lehigh University, where a colleague from the past earned a Ph.D. in Chemistry
Ohio University, where a fellow graduate student is now a Physics Professor
Oklahoma State University, which two sisters and my brother attended, as well as many high school friends
Pennsylvania State University, where an old colleague teaches
Princeton University, where a friend from Brown University earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where a graduate student friend earned his B.S. in Physics
Ohio State University, where many of my wife's family earned their degrees
University of Cincinnati, for whose faculty and graduate students I have provided many analyses
Dartmouth College, where two high school friends earned undergraduate degrees
University of North Carolina - Greensboro, where a sister lives
University of Texas at Austin, from which a daughter earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering
University of Tulsa, from which a sister earned a Master of Taxation degree

When Brown University and Case Western Reserve University ask me for donations to their "educational" endeavors, it does not endear them to me that I know that they are not primarily interested in helping their students to learn thinking skills and to develop independent minds.  They are largely in the business of producing socialist elitists in a carefully controlled environment with very limited freedom of speech.  Neither does it give me a warm and fuzzy feeling to think of the fortune my wife and I spent to send a daughter to one of these schools.  She compounded the indoctrination problem by earning an MBA at another of these strictly controlled indoctrination schools.

At least the generally dismal condition of our American colleges and universities is slowly improving on the whole.  Instead of giving donations to Brown University and Case Western Reserve University, I will give the money I might have given to them to institutions interested in studies and educational efforts that benefit individuals who value liberty and rational thought.  FIRE is one such organization.

Private Sector? Obama The Great Don't Need No Stinking Private Sector

Obama claimed that the American economy was surging into the future.  He said that 11 million jobs had been created since he became president and that the unemployment rate was the lowest in a very long time.  So how many Americans are employed full-time after six years of his regime?

Is Obama for real?  Is this the record he is claiming is so great and has established a record employment condition in America?  And surely by now most Americans know that the unemployment number is hardly meaningful, given that it is low because so many Americans have given up on finding a job.  The percentage of Americans working full-time is at a record low of 47.7%.  Median household income has fallen in each and every year of the Obama presidency from 2009 - 2012.  There was a small increase in median household income in 2013, but median income is still well below what it was prior to the Obama regime.  As of 2013, median household wealth was only 60% of what it had been in 2007.  This is the Obama legacy.

Obama claimed that energy independence is near.  He deserves credit for this in that he did not succeed in applying the brakes on fossil fuel energy development enough to prevent the private sector from this great achievement.  He did his best to prevent it, but he failed.  We are supposed to give him credit for this failure.

Obama said, "Let's put more money back in the pockets of the middle class."  I say let us leave more money in everyone's pockets and not take it in the first place!  Sending our money to Washington and allowing politicians and bureaucrats to decide who will get a fraction of that money back is hardly the way to improve the lives of most Americans.  It sure does improve the life of politicians and bureaucrats though.  It improves the lives of some special interests who have great influence in Washington also, but this is at the expense of most Americans.

Obama called for equal pay for equal work.  We really need to have government bureaucrats examining every business and determining what the work that contributes to the bottom line is and who is contributing what to that.  I can only imagine such a bureaucrat coming to my laboratory and trying to make this assessment in a rational way.  One brief visit and he will know exactly what each of my employees is worth.  Hot diggity damn.  It is so easy.  Bureaucrats must be the best managers anywhere.  They are truly a miracle.  Oh, and if women are to be paid equally to men, are short people to be paid equally to tall people also?  Are unpleasant people to be paid equally to pleasant people?  Are good analytical report writers to be paid as little as bad report writers?  Is the bureaucrat to make an accurate assessment of each employee's ability to sell our analytical services to a potential client when they call?  Mind you, this bureaucrat is probably not going to take up residence for weeks as required to do this, assuming he has the business and scientific background to do this in any amount of time.  Well, the fact that he works for government probably precludes any likelihood that he has such abilities.

Obama says that employees should have fair wages and be paid well for overtime work.  Somehow he forgot to mention that employers should have fair income and overtime.  Employees should have  paid days off he says, but he says nothing about paid days off for those who risk their investments to create jobs for those employees.  Somehow it is simply assumed that employers can both provide jobs and take on almost any costs related to employing people.  The politician decrees that which will provide him more votes and the employer must deliver.  Or, the employer shuts down his business, which is exactly why every year for the last six years more businesses have gone out of business than were started up.  Not so many people want to start businesses in this environment either.  This is a very important part of Obama's record on the state of the economy.

Obama wants to provide daycare tax credits.  Never mind the national debt and the deficit.  Never mind the fact that with so few people working full-time, many parents are home and able to care for their own children, except they have little income.  Never mind that the burden of paying for the costs of this "free" daycare benefit will fall upon the record small fraction of the people who are employed full-time.  Never mind that once government pays for daycare, it will likely want to regulate and control it even more.  Of course Obama wants to move daycare services out of the private sector into the government sector.  And we can be sure he wants it unionized.

Obama wants more Americans in unions.  Of course, union leaders provide the Democrat Socialist Party with a very large fraction of their campaign contributions.  Americans have plenty of opportunity to choose to be union members now, but in the private sector they have chosen to leave the unions in droves over the years.  But, that free vote by Americans must be overcome by the Great Socialist Leader.

Obama wants to upgrade skills with 2 years of free community college.  Community colleges are nearly free now.  They are also very much like grades 13 and 14 in a government-run education system which is not providing a very good education.  The inflow of money from the federal government for this additional subsidy will surely mean more control of education by the federal government.  This is what we need, more government indoctrination of youth about how many victims we have in our society and how big government is the means to the end of their victimization as it attacks any group that is perceived as better off than some other group.

As tradition demands, the socialist called for more job training on top of the many tens of largely spectacularly unsuccessful training programs created over the years.  Obama wants companies to train employees more and to offer paid apprenticeships at the higher minimum wage he is advocating.  Obama has no concerns whatsoever for the cost of labor to businesses.  In his world, organizations just naturally operate at a deficit forever.  Never mind that the businesses in the private sector cannot do that.

Obama claimed great success in helping veterans get jobs.  The fact that veteran unemployment is much higher than the general unemployment rate was not noted.

Obama does not want a single pipeline, but he wants more infrastructure spending.  How about allowing many pipelines to be built, not just one?  Obama and the Democrats generally have been slowing down pipelines all over the country.  The Bakken shale oil and the Marcellus Shale Oil and Gas formations are supplying more fuel than they are able to transport out through pipelines.

Obama wants more trade authority, but his own party is the primary opposition to new trade agreements.

Obama wants a Precision Medicine Initiative, but I thought he would have already eliminated disease all around the world as he pledged to do in his acceptance speech of the first Democrat Party nomination to run for the presidency.  Apparently, Obama the Great Healer has not yet carried out this pledge.

Obama claimed we are a nation of laws.  He said there is one set of rules for all.  Somehow, he is not one of "the all," given his obvious violations of the ObamaCare and immigration laws.  He is an exempted individual.  The rest of us must surrender our individuality and be blanketed with smothering laws and regulations in his worldview.  But he is the exception, because he swore he do his best to improve America when he became President.  I thought he swore to uphold and defend the Constitution, which is the People's mandate for a very limited government that implicitly recognizes that there are only a few things government can do without infringing upon our individual rights and those individual goals for our personal happiness.  But no, Obama thinks that it is best for America that he ignore the Constitution's limits on his power, on the scope of government power generally, and on the separation of powers.

He claims he wants a free and open Internet, despite his Federal Communications Commission making untiring efforts to gain more control over the Internet.

Obama say that Americans do not mind paying our fair share of taxes.  We need to eliminate loopholes by keeping companies from investing abroad and rewarding those investing here he says.  Well, yes more government control over businesses and their foreign investments is really likely to simplify the tax laws and make them more friendly to business prosperity!  Never mind that much of the increased company investment in overseas operations is due to lower taxes there, less smothering regulations in many cases, no ObamaCare there, and the uncertainties to business investors of the arbitrary and capricious actions of a mad socialist in the White House.

Obama wants to tax accumulated wealth.  So, we are to increase the death tax.  Yes, no one should be able to pass the fruits of a lifetime of productive labor on to his children and grandchildren.  That is just too awful to imagine.  No, such successful businessmen should give up their wealth to politicians and bureaucrats who will, of course, spend that money more wisely than will the progeny of the wealth producer.  Obama is sure of this.  We are not to question this.  We are not to think that many a businessman not able to pass on his wealth will stop creating wealth at an earlier age.  We are not to understand that the individual right to the pursuit of happiness surely includes the right to the happiness of knowing that one has helped ease life for one's children and grandchildren.  Socialists cannot understand this.

Obama wants to eliminate worldwide poverty.  The only way we can help to do that is by creating the example of a nation that lives by the American Principle of limited government dedicated only to protecting the equal, sovereign individual rights to life, liberty, property (wealth), self-ownership (denied by ObamaCare), and the pursuit of personal happiness.  To the degree that nations do this, they prosper.

Obama claimed 14 of the 15 hottest years were in this century.  He had his NOAA and NASA GISS manufacture this data.  Even the manipulated and forged data does not show anything like the increase predicted by the climate computer models that are supposed to be the basis for the claim that mankind is threatened by catastrophic man-made global warming.  In fact, while the temperature is supposed to be rising rapidly, it is stagnant.  Flat.  Going nowhere.  Proving that the computer models based on what Obama has called the "settled science" are simply wrong.  So, the "settled science," we must conclude, is wrong.  So, the rational man does not have the concern Obama does about an impending climate catastrophe.  Unlike Obama, the rational man will not take harmful actions against fossil fuels, those same fuels that have brought us close to the energy independence that Obama claimed was a strong point in our economy in this very speech.

Obama will responsibly shut down Gitmo by sending more of the detainees back to Yemen, whose capital has just fallen to violent, Islam-spreading terrorists.

Similarly, the rest of Obama's claims of success in foreign policy and defense are just too ridiculously inflated to spend further time pricking them with needles.

Obama wants a nation with a hugely dominant and controlling government sector and a weak, groveling private sector.  He wants a nation in which no one has an individual nature.  He does not want individuals choosing their own values.  He does not want lone wolf individuals managing their own lives and pursuing their own happiness.  No, he wants politicians and bureaucrats to tell us what our values must be and to micromanage our lives.  He is sure that self-management is beyond our competence.  He is sure that he and his allied Progressive Elitists will do a better job of managing our lives than we ourselves will.  He is religiously sure of this, even though he does not know any of us.  Can you imagine the unreality that soaks the mind of someone who is sure he is smarter than anyone else and so smart that he can manage the lives of 312 million or so Americans, none of whom he even knows?

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.

Socialist Vermont Shoots Down Super-Expensive Single-Payer Health Care

Gov. Shumlin of the highly socialist state of Vermont shutdown the necessary request to the legislature for the taxes needed to fund the Green Mountain Care state health plan.  This Vermont single-payer health plan was going to require an 11.5% payroll tax on businesses and a 9.5% income tax in addition to the income tax the state already has on those making four times the poverty level income or more.  Vermont already has a top income tax rate of 8.95%, a 6% sales tax, and a 8.5% corporate income tax.  Shumlin reluctantly admitted that the state could not levy such heavy taxes without putting many businesses out-of-business and without many businesses leaving the state.  He said that given that Vermont was still feeling the effects of the Great Recession, this was a particularly bad time to implement a state-run single-payer health system.

Vermont had initially estimated an annual cost of $2.2 billion for the plan for its 627,000 citizens.  The state had received $45 million to study the implementation of a single-payer system from the Obama's Department of Health and Human Services, which hoped Vermont would pave the path to a national single-payer or totally socialized medical system.  William Hsiao of Harvard and Jonathan Gruber of MIT served as consultants.  A more careful look by Vermont accountants put the increased tax revenue needed at $2.6 billion.  Vermont's total tax revenues now are $2.85 billion, so total state tax revenues would have to almost be doubled.  Projected revenues had to be scaled back by $75 million a year due to the lingering effects of the recession.  The state realized it would get $150 million less in federal cost coverage than they expected to set up the system and that they would get another $150 million less in Medicaid assistance from the federal government than they had earlier thought they would.  Setting up the plan was estimated to cost an additional $500 million.

As I have pointed out many times, it is a fiction that the business paid payroll tax is not paid by employees.  All payroll costs are a cost of employment for employees.  They are all compensation for the labor of all employees.  The greater the payroll tax, whether it is Workman's Compensation, unemployment tax, Medicare, Social Security, a withholding tax, an ObamaCare tax, or a Green Mountain Care tax, the lower the compensation that can be offered an employee.  If an employee's addition to the company revenue is not enough to cover all of these tax costs, all of his take-home pay, and other operational costs incurred to provide him with a job, then the employee is not hired or is let go by any rational employer.  This Green Mountain Care plan in Vermont was going to require a 21% increased cost of employment for a company's most value employees minus whatever the employer might be currently paying into health care plans minus whatever wage decreases ensued.  Employees closer to the poverty level would cost somewhere between 11.5% to 21% more depending upon the progressive explicit tax on their income.

As Gov. Shumlin noted, it was particularly difficult to impose these costs given the failure to recover from the effects of the Great Recession.  What is more, any knowledgeable observer has learned that the cost estimates for new government programs are almost always too low.  They are usually much too low.

Of course, while acknowledging that there was no way to practically implement a single-payer health system in Vermont at this time, Shumlin, as a good Progressive Elitist, continued to maintain that it was the Ideal.  Progressive Elitists never actually consider the costs of their programs to be too high and they never ask what the costs displace in other options individuals might have for their time, effort, property, and money.  Their choices and dreams always take precedent over those of others and they are willing to use force to make sure that every individual accedes to that precedence.

All this for a health care system that is sure to deteriorate into another shabby equivalent of the Veteran's Administration System of an unavailable, highly rationed, low-quality, wait-forever, bureaucratic, vindictive, and dishonest morass that treats its patients like peons.  Of course, individuals who do not retain their individual rights are just that -- peons, serfs, begging servants and dependents of the state.

There must be a few individuals in Vermont who are much relieved by the failure of this Great Socialist Dream.  Indeed, Gov. Shumlin nearly lost his re-election bid to Republican Scott Milne, who ran against the Shumlin-backed Green Mountain Care.  Would Milne have won the election if the newer costs and tax estimates had been made available before the election?  Only 2,095 votes separated the two candidates for Governor.

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.

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.

Pisaturo: Obama Invests in People to Own Them

Ron Pisaturo has just made an excellent post entitled Policies of Obama Match His Socialist Rhetoric.  The very best part of this post is the final paragraphs where he discusses Obama's idea of investing in people so that government will own the productivity of the most productive Americans:

When Obama speaks of the government ‘investing’, he is of course perverting the meaning of the word; he is really spending wealth confiscated from others. But there is a sinister way in which his use of the word “investing’ is revealing and apt: the government is ‘investing’ in contrast to ‘lending’. When a creditor makes a loan, the creditor obtains a promise to repay the loan with interest; in contrast, when an investor makes an investment, the investor obtains ownership and a share of the profits.

Since, according to Obama, the government ‘invests’ in you—by paying for your schooling, etc.—the government expects not a repayment of a loan to you, but rather a share of the profits in you. For the most productive among us, that share is now more than half of all that you make; and that share is growing as the government’s socialist/fascist agenda expands. Moreover, the government—in keeping with the fascist version of socialism—expects in effect to own the majority of ‘voting stock’ in the ‘business’ of your life, deciding what you must or must not produce, whom you must hire or fire or work for, to whom you must sell, where you must and must not be located, and what methods of production you must and must not use. That is, it is ‘society’, not you, that owns your productive life.

Paradoxically, Obama and other Leftist government officials have recently been pushing to forgive loans to students for college and graduate school; such loans now total a trillion dollars. But if education via government funding is so crucial to an individual’s success, as Obama claims, why is the government willing to let students get off without paying? The answer is that student loans are not socialist/fascist enough for the Left. These loans entail too much individual choice (to request the loan), individual responsibility (to repay the loan), and individual justice (to be responsible to repay only one’s own loan and not the loans to others).

The Leftists think the government can afford to forgive student loans, because the government still has its student ‘investments’. Whenever any particular student in public elementary school or high school—or, for that matter, any particular individual who does not even go to public school—becomes very successful, the socialist/fascist government can claim its lion’s share of the profit on that successful ‘investment’ by taxing that individual’s wealth. One such very successful investment can pay for thousands of failures.

Obama wants to make even more ‘investments’ in us that we can’t refuse. His brazen socialist/fascist rhetoric is part of a campaign for even more ownership of Americans.

These are very perceptive comments and they help us to see deep into the evil mind and heart of the socialist beast that fully intends to be our slave-master.  When Obama uses the word invest, he means it as in a commonly used sense from medieval times:  Obama is investing the castle, as in subjugating the castle.

Do we Americans want productive self-managing Americans to be subjected to work slavery, or do we still have some appreciation for hard work, achievement, and the right to earn a living?  Do we want Americans to either be dependent upon the government beast or to be slaves to the government beast?  Make no mistake -- Obama wants us all to be cast as members of either the dependent or the slave group.  It is unacceptably degrading to be either.

Somebody Else Built My Business!

Speaking in Roanoke, Virginia on Friday, Obama said:



Obama also said:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

 If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

My response:

Somebody else invested the start-up money to buy laboratory equipment.  Somebody else had an income of only $10,000 in all of year 1.  Somebody else paid for a high deductible health plan for myself, my wife, and my three daughters.  Somebody else worked 80-hour weeks.  Somebody else acted as an unpaid tax collector for the federal, state, and local governments.  Somebody else paid real estate taxes and personal property taxes on my laboratory facility and equipment.  Somebody else trained employee after employee.  Somebody else developed thousands of customized materials analysis plans to solve my customers materials problems.  Somebody else slept on a cot into the night to be around to start up one more analysis or two through the night.  Somebody else worked many a 36-hour stretch straight through to meet a deadline.  Somebody else wrote thousands of analytical reports.

Somebody else paid my employees and only took their own pay when income was sufficient to provide it.  Somebody else guaranteed the laboratory lease.  Somebody else took the risk of being sent to jail for the possible violation of some one of thousands of regulations that cannot all be known and understood by any small business owner.  Someone else had to fire the occasional mistaken hire who could not perform his job.  Someone else went with less than a week of vacation time year after year after year.  Someone else worked weekend and holiday after weekend and holiday.

I sure am grateful to that Somebldy Else, even if I was mistaken in thinking it was me.  Now that I know otherwise, I am asking that Somebody Else to step forward and be acknowledged.

But, one thing I am really certain about is this:  I do not owe governments a penny more than they have already received from me and my business.  The first 30% of their spending used on legitimate government functions was worth my while paying, but the remainder was a giant rip-off.  Any penny more that I give government today is money they use to make my life and my family's lives just that much harder.  Much of that money is actually spent to violate more and more of our sovereign individual rights.

It is a good thing that Obama is so blatantly stating what this upcoming election is really about.  He is right that his vision of how our society and our government should operate is very different from that of those of his opposition who believe in the American Principle of a very limited, constitutional government whose only legitimate function is the protection of individual rights.

Those of us who believe in the American Principle readily acknowledge that we owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to those Americans who came before us and gave us a government that was at one time limited in scope and largely protective of individual liberty.  We are also grateful for those many productive Americans who made our society wealthy, robust, innovative, founded on mutual trust, reasonably benevolent, and comparatively independent-minded.  We have long had a society that expected Americans to be self-managers of their own lives and to live their lives responsibly.  There are tremendous benefits to all of us from this.  This is a society in which people have largely been able to reap many benefits from their accomplishments and productive work, while providing rich benefits to all of the rest of us in our society.

Our society has largely been based on a robust and rich private sector in which individuals were free to choose their own values and to associate freely with others of their own choice to pursue those values.  We have been a trader society which operates on the principle of voluntary exchanges of ideas, goods, and services.  I, for instance, could not operate without the many vendors who make and supply replacement parts for my laboratory equipment.  I am very grateful to them for offering me that critical service.  But, I also pay them well for providing that equipment and the replacement parts.  My customers pay for my services because I identity the causes of their materials problems and can often suggest how they can prevent the problem.  They are able to make more money because of the service I provide them.  But, our largely private sector society of free trade and associations provides the very mechanisms that allow us to acknowledge in appropriate ways the debts we have to others who supply us with valuable ideas, goods, and services.

Obama wants to eliminate this voluntary trade and association.  He wants to kill the very mechanisms we have for acknowledging the value of the ideas, goods, and services that others in our society offer us.  He wants hordes of government central planners to choose our values for us and impose them upon us using the full force of government.  He says that because we have reaped some benefits from others and from having government, that we owe it to government to build it up even more.  This Obama prescription is the equivalent of the argument that if taking one aspirin for a headache is good, then taking 100 aspirins for that headache is better.  Or if drinking 8 ounces of water now is good, then pouring 10 gallons of water down your throat now is better.  There are many things which have an appropriate level, which when exceeded begin to cause harm and when greatly exceeded cause great harm.  Obama's argument is shear sophistry.  It is wifty logic.

I see that the spell checker does not recognize wifty.  OK, Obama has a great propensity for ditzy logic, which unfortunately works for many Americans today.  Apparently, that is the outcome of government-run schools that want to produce suitable subjects for a socialist tyrannical government.  The biggest ditz of them all, the perfect product of this educational system promoting socialism, is Obama.

Good is done when two or more people agree upon a voluntary exchange.  This may be in business or it may be in a non-commercial endeavor.  What is good for each of us is very different and we work out the complex evaluations of good in accordance with our personal values in the private sector.  While limited government is essential for the purpose of securing our individual rights, larger government can only compromise the individual values of most of us most of the time.  As government grows beyond its legitimate rights protecting function, it necessarily becomes an individual rights violator.  Government cannot do the complex calculus which 310 million Americans do in living and managing their own lives on a completely voluntary basis with others in all things with which government is not involved.  Of course, that assumes that government would even want to do good for each of us if it could.  The history of big governments in all times and places indicates that they do not want to do such good.  Good government, like good doctors, first does no harm.

The Missing Jobs in June 2012 are Unchanged from June 2010

This is the monthly update on the real unemployment situation in the USA based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics June 2012 Household Survey Jobs Data.  The data I will use will not be seasonally adjusted, so we will need to compare June of this year with the unemployment of June 2010 and June 2011 to see if any jobs recovery has occurred.  We will also calculate the number of missing jobs based upon the percentage of the jobs wanted in January 2000 relative to the working age civilian population available for work.  This excludes people in jail or in institutions for those in ill health.

The recent history of missing jobs is given in the following chart:

The number of missing jobs in June 2012 is slightly lower than the number of missing jobs in June 2011, but it is slightly higher than the number of missing jobs in June 2010.  Just as with every other month so far this year, if we compare the number of missing jobs to the same month a year and two years earlier, we find that essentially nothing has changed.

In contrast, the usual unemployment rate of June 2010 was 9.62%.  It fell to 9.32% by June 2011 and still further to the June 2012 rate of 8.43%.  But, this number means little due to the ever-increasing number of discouraged job seekers.  The number of the reported unemployed fell from June 2010 to June 2011 and again to June 2012.  The number of people employed also grew from June to June to June in that time.  However, the population of working age civilians also grew, so that the 12.80% of missing jobs in June 2010 had actually increased by June 2011 to 13.30%, before falling in June 2012 to almost the same percentage as in June 2010 at 12.74%.  A 0.06% decrease in the number of missing jobs in the last two years is no job recovery at all.  This has been the story consistently for the last two and half years.

The policies of the Obama administration are so wrongheaded that they have done great damage to the private sector economy and kept companies from hiring.  Government can do little to effectively increase hiring, but it is excellently capable of destroying jobs and keeping new jobs from being created.  Obama and his Democratic Socialist Party leadership have been working overtime finding ways to make the future ever more uncertain for business and in making labor so expensive that business cannot afford to hire.

John C. Goodman, CEO of the National Center for Policy Analysis, recently testified in the House of Representatives that ObamaUncaringTax will increase the cost of an employee by $6/hour.  The EPA is causing sizable increases in our electricity costs and a decrease in electricity reliability, which will cause great harm to many businesses and will reduce the money individuals can spend on other goods and services.  Many state governments are contributing to this problem with their mandates that green energy replace fossil fuels in the electricity supply of their state.  Despite a huge supply of oil and gas in the United States, the Obama administration has done everything it can to prevent the development of new fields on federal land and offshore.  The Dodd-Frank law has created great uncertainty and it has kept financial institutions from loaning to small businesses.  Obama and his union henchmen have interfered with employer-employee relations to the detriment of business.  The looming taxes of the ObamaUncaringTax will take a huge toll, which include a tax surcharge on individuals with higher incomes and on corporations, in addition to the penalty taxes.  This punitive taxation of higher income individuals is not enough for Obama and he wants to eliminate their low percentage decrease part of the Bush tax cuts.  All this is happening in the face of the start of the Baby Boomer retirements and the continued collapse of the housing market.

Of course business is not hiring enough people to get Americans back to work with a jobs recovery to this never-ending recession.  With Obama destroying the business climate, nothing will change and nothing will change Obama.  He is a dyed-in-the-wool socialist.  He is fundamentally anti-business, with the exception of those who generously support his campaign fund.  Even then many of those companies have found him unbelievably treacherous.  The only hope for our economy and for Americans who want to be able to earn a living is the replacement of Obama with Romney.

Obama White House: 8% Unemployment Until 2013!

Obama's economic advisers believe the U.S. unemployment rate will continue to be above 8% until 2013.  We have already had 17 months of unemployment above 9%.  We have had 20 months of underemployment above 15%.  Now Obama and his team are saying we will have another 32 months or so of unemployment above 8%!

Obama and the Democrats have had a series of economic advisers who have been unable to prescribe any actions to take on the economy which have been beneficial.  Instead of the obvious beneficial recognition that taxes on businesses and the wealthy are too high, Obama and team have insisted on one tax increase after another.  Instead of recognizing that business needs the freedom to produce and to provide services, Obama, with his clueless socialist philosophy, has insisted that businessmen and women are all evil, conniving slime balls, who must be evermore intrusively regulated by government bureaucrats.  Since the phenomenal growth of the government's spending from 2000 to 2008 with an increase of 66.7%, was not enough, Obama stole huge measures of wealth from the private sector with huge additional spending and with huge mandates. The mandates require businesses to spend much more money and time to provide what Obama regards as social services, but does not want to add to the federal budget and deficit.

If you wonder how the huge increases in actual federal spending are a drain on the private sector, it is because that spending will be paid for by the private sector through a combination of:

• Higher future taxes
• The loss of present and future property values on buildings, equipment, and facilities
• The unavailability of money for present and future investment in new plant, equipment, facilities, and training
• Higher interest rates on borrowed money due to inflation and increased business risk brought on by growing government, which is always a threat
• The lower value of the dollar, making resources and supplies from abroad more expensive
• The lower growth of the economy due to money for political purposes doing nothing to increase the productivity of the American worker and businessman
• The mischief of using some of the money to subsidize very uneconomic products such as ethanol, solar power, wind energy generation, and mandated health insurance as a means to dump the costs of these lunacies upon the private sector
• Huge increases in the time to provide government with much more paperwork and to keep many more records for such things as ObamaCare, energy use, CO2 generation, financial activities, and recording and filing 1099 Forms for every person or company more than $600 was spent with

As a businessman trying to rationally plan your future investments, the blizzard of federal spending, mandates, regulations, paperwork, and taxes is mind-numbing.  You stop dead in your tracks and say "I do not understand what is going on.  Clearly Washington is trying to kill my business.  I have to stop making decisions until I can figure Washington out.  But I do not have enough copious free time to do that.  Is that even possible?  What they are doing is so clearly lunacy.  I will just hold as tight as I can until this mess is somehow straightened out.  If it is not, then it is time to retire."

 Meanwhile, one thing you will definitely not do is hire anyone.  So, remembering that the one thing we can count on from the Democrat socialists is that they have no understanding of the economy and even less of business, especially small businesses, who is crazy enough to believe that unemployment will come down to 8% in another 32 months under their management of a very meddlesome and ubiquitous government.  So long as a clueless government guided by the theories of Marx, Alinsky, Mao, Castro, Chavez, and Mussolini has its hands in everyone's every pocket and its fingers in everyone's personal apertures, the unemployment rate will never again be less than 8%.

Unless the government pretends to give everyone a job as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics used to do.  The good old USSR used to have three to six people watch one person work, but all were said to be employed.  Look where that got them.  That is not the fate Americans want.  The majority understand economics and the business of business better than do Obama and his economic advisers from academia.  They are about to overthrow his regime of childish and destructive control-freak meddlers into the workings of the very complex and very adult private sector of America.  The Socialist Party is going to lose 69 seats in the House of Representatives, giving the Republicans a substantial majority in the House and mercifully ending the Pelosi "You have to pass the bill to know what is in it" regime there.  The Republicans will come to have 49 or 50 Senate seats and look to end up with 33 or 34 governorships just in time for the decadal redistricting of House seats.

The Republicans, even given more resolve by Tea Party members, may not be able to undo all the ill-gotten gains of the socialists with only control of the House, but they can and should defund all of the mischief of that socialist program.  Will they have the guts and will the American People prove to be the Winter Soldiers who will stand with then to fight Obama?  It will come to that, because Obama is a committed socialist and his promise to fight viciously with fists and elbows is the only promise we will ever be able to count on from him.

Of course we will always remember these whoppers:

• I will cure disease throughout the world, stop the warming and stop the rise of the oceans.
• I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
• I will not increase your taxes unless you make more than $250,000 a year.
• If you like your health insurance, you can keep it.
• The health care reform bill will decrease the cost of your insurance premiums.
• The Stimulus Bill will keep unemployment below 8%.
• There are no earmarks in the $787 billion Stimulus Bill.
• The health care package will pay for itself.
• The ObamaCare fee is not a new tax.
• We have run out of places in the U.S. to drill for oil.
• I will not rest until the BP Oil Spill stops.
• The Finance Bill will provide transparency and end the risks and abuses that nearly collapsed the financial system.
• The health care bill will not increase the deficit by one dime.

We can count on him adding greatly to the list over the remaining two sad years of his occupancy of the White House.  The man is a joke and a tragedy.

If only the first black American President had been Prof. Walter E. Williams and his wife had retracted her promise to assassinate him if he ran for the presidency!  With his good understanding of economics and the limits of legitimate government, what a President he would have been.  With advice from his friends Dr. Thomas Sowell and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, that triumvirate would have saved America much misery and would have demonstrated why you do not write anyone off on the basis of identity politics.

California's Coming Massive Wealth Transfer to State Retirees

Among the many states which have promised state employees more in retirement benefits than they can reasonably deliver is the very Democrat state of California.  My last post discussed this problem broadly, but it did not examine the huge scale of the problem for California specifically.  That state is piling up future obligations which will come crashing down on the heads of California taxpayers more and more forcefully over the next decade.  It will act to force many more California businesses to relocate to less burdened states, such as Texas, which has created more than half of the new jobs in the country since the Socialist Recession began.

What California government admitted as of 2008 conditions was:

• The California State Teacher's Retirement System is short $40.5 billion.
• The California Public Employee Retirement System is short $35 billion.

Stuart Buck, a Distinguished Doctoral Fellow at the University of Arkansas has found that losses in the pension funds investments since 2008 has left them an additional $44 billion in the hole.  Worse yet, the state has been assuming that their investments for the pension funds will earn 7.75% to 8% per year return.  Given that we have had a decade of virtually no return on the stock market and given the huge problems which continue to plague the economy such as:

• the continuing home foreclosure crisis
• the further cost of bailing out Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac of about $300 billion
• the many states with hugely underfunded state pension funds totaling about $700 billion
• the many union multiemployer defined benefit pension funds with unfunded liabilities of about $700 billion which will destroy many unionized companies
• the much increased costs of ObamaCare which will increase everyone's premiums, increase medical taxes, greatly increase business costs, and put a huge strain on state budgets
• the increased costs of financial transactions due to the Dodd-Franks financial "reform" bill
• the increased costs of energy use planned by the EPA under its declaration that CO2 is a pollutant
• the increased costs of energy use due to ethanol, wind power, and solar power mandates, which California eagerly pushes forward
• government moves to force more unionization onto companies
• the ever increasing costs of more and more government regulations on businesses and those who pay the higher costs for their products and services
• our corporations will have the world's highest corporate tax rates beginning in 2011 and they are going up to help fund ObamaCare

the 7.75 to 8% rates of return imagined by the California accountants is totally unreasonable.  Unless the state of California is going to invest all of its pension funds in China, their wishful rate is much too high!  So, Buck says that using the more realistic rates of return used by private pension funds, the California pension funds will be $282.2 billion short.  This should be corrected for the current market values, so the real shortage is about $326.6 billion.  It turns out that the retiree health benefits program is also underfunded, by $51.8 billion.  The total shortfall for retirees health and retirement is then $378.8 billion.   This is about half the scale of the shortfalls on liabilities that caused the Socialist Recession that has brought down the entire U.S.!  This would be a disaster if the California Gross State Product were half of the GDP of the U.S.A.  It is a large fraction for a single state, indeed the largest state fraction, but it was only 12.7% in 2008.  This would imply that California will suffer for its state pension fund shortfall about 4 times more than it is suffering from the pain of the current Socialist Recession spread over the entire U.S.

When this entire burden falls on the Democrat-dominated state of California, the People of that state will know the Grim Reaper is among them.  Actions and choices have their consequences despite a peoples' refusal to foresee those consequences.  The California perpetual Christmas for retired state employees will have the characteristic of mass destruction for the people and companies of California.  Currently, the state is spending about $180 billion in 2010.  The unfunded pension liability is the equivalent of 2.1 times the annual state budget now.  If the state of California were to try to rectify the shortfall in these pensions it has a legal obligation to pay, it would require a large increase in tax revenues, which it will be hard to come by due to growth since people and companies are fleeing the already over-taxed state now.  Further tax increases will only accelerate the rate of abandonment.  The Democrats have put the people and the companies of the state of California into a very unforgiving vise, thanks to their many vices.