The majority of voters rejected the American Principle of limited, constitutional government whose purpose is the protection of our sovereign individual right to life, liberty, property, the ownership of our own bodies, minds, and labor, and the pursuit of personal happiness. Socialism and anti-human extreme environmentalism coupled with crony mercantilism and constant, blatant lying were chosen by the majority of voters within the boundaries of America.
I cannot say how unbelievably disappointed I am in half of the people of this country. I cannot even think of them as Americans due to their failure to value the American Principle. I cannot understand how so many could so radically embrace organized thievery, thinly veiled as redistribution in the interest of materialistic equality.
The voters have chosen four more years of such violations of economic rights that economic stagnation is assured. We are assured four more years of very high unemployment and decreased full-time employment thanks to ObamaCare and a weak economy. We are assured of the further destruction of whole industries, such as the coal, oil, and natural gas industries. We can count on continued high gasoline prices. We are assured of a government controlled medical system characterized by fleeing doctors, deteriorating medical service and expertise, aging medical equipment, lengthening waits for critical medical care, and of course much increased costs. Government-run schools will become still greater propaganda factories deceiving the minds of our children and college students with tall tales of how government control will solve most any problem. They will serve blue collar union teachers and not the children who will be deprived of real knowledge about American history and civics. The cost of this hollow education will continue to skyrocket. America's producers will be vilified for another four years and then taxed heavily, not to fill the gap between government spending and tax revenue, but to penalize the productive for being so productive.
Most voters say they want smaller government, but most voted for Obama. This is a total disconnect.
Most voters say they want less national debt, but they chose the debt champion of all Presidents.
The voters also chose to return a Democrat Senate so they could continue the Obama-Reid regime record of no budget for a total of 8 years, in violation of law.
They chose Obama and a Democrat Senate so they would continue to have the unpopular ObamaCare, really ObamaUncaringTax, shoved down their throats by rationing bureaucrats and IRS thugs.
Most voters cared not a wink about the cover-up of the New Black Panthers, Fast and Furious, and Benghazi. Most care nothing that Obama flushed tens of billions of dollars down the toilet of hollow green energy companies with no possible market run by his campaign bundlers to fill their pockets in a race to the company bankruptcy. Most voters did not mind the constant misrepresentations of the truth, the constant lies, and the fallacious arguments. They embraced their celebrity con man.
This con man and the Democrat Senate will not address the fact that the U.S. government spending on ObamaCare, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, Food Stamps, and the interest on the debt are unsustainable. We are hurtling down the road hacked out by Greece. Collapse of the government is coming. The only hope to avoid that was to free the economy and allow growth in it that exceeded that of the government. Most voters never understood this simple fact. Thanks to Obama and the Democrat Socialist Party and their most unworthy, unthinking supporters, collapsed government is our future.
06 November 2012
Vote No on Maryland Question 5 to Oppose Super Gerrymandering
Question 5Phrased this way, this seems like a reasonable Question to approve, but it is actually the approval of a Congressional districting plan which is so insanely incompatible with representative government that it is an embarrassment to the state once known as the Free State and also known as the Old Line State due to fielding the best unit of the Continental Army in the American Revolution. Even the Washington Post recommends voting against this extreme instance of Democrat Party redistricting. Here is the unbelievable gerrymandered map of districts set by the Democrats for Maryland:
Referendum Petition
Congressional Districting Plan (Ch. 1 of the 2011 Special Session)
Establishes the boundaries for the State’s eight United States Congressional Districts based on recent census figures, as required by the United States Constitution.
For the Referred Law
Against the Referred Law
I have the displeasure of being in Congressional District 3, which is shown in brown in this map. Democrat John Sarbanes of the infamous Sarbanes-Oxley Act is to be the Representative elected by Democrat design in this district weaving its flimsy tendrils through Montgomery, Howard, Anne Arundel, and Baltimore Counties, as well as Baltimore City. My long-time socialist Representative, Donna Edwards, is in the new District 4 in violet in Prince Georges and Anne Arundel Counties.
Any serious concern for good representative government would understand that such districts should be kept in a minimum number of counties and should have relatively small circumferences relative to the area to make as compact a region as is reasonable. This means the people in the district will have more in common and that they can get to a relatively central townhall meeting with their Congressman as easily as possible.
05 November 2012
Why Romney is Better for Small Businesses
Businesses that pay taxes at the individual income tax rate employ 54% of American workers. Obama wants to raise the marginal income tax rate of business owners making more than $200,000 a year, while Romney wants to lower this marginal tax rate by 20%. Obama will raise the marginal tax rate in the two highest income tax brackets from 35 to 39.6% and from 33 to 36%. He will add a 0.9% increase in Medicare taxes to people in these brackets and will increase the tax rate on dividends, interest, and capital gains by 3.8% beginning in January. He will reduce their deductions as well, which will make their marginal tax rate a real 44.8%.
As Obama says, these tax rates will not apply to 97% of small business owners, but they will apply to those who hire most of the new employees. In 2008, there were 27.28 million companies and only 18,469 had more than 500 employees. This means that about 27.26 million firms are small businesses or about 99.93% of all businesses are small businesses. 78.26% of all firms had no employees. Those with 4 or fewer employees accounted for 91.6% of all small businesses. The businesses that account for most of the new hiring employ from 20 to 499 employees and these are only about 2.3% of all businesses. Most of the high income business owners Obama wants to tax at 44.8% marginal rates are owners of such businesses. Such high marginal tax rates will serve as a strong disincentive to work so hard to grow a company.
Small businesses are the result of free associations of individuals in the private sector, not the government sector, or the falsely, but optimistically termed public sector. The owner(s) of the small business voluntarily formed the business to supply services or goods to others in voluntary trade. The owner(s) may hire employees, who voluntarily trade their labor for a wage or salary. The only necessary role of government is to prevent others from using force to interfere with these voluntary trades and associations. Small businesses are very much creatures of the private sector.
Large businesses are sometimes in a position to purchase politicians to bend the excessive powers of big government to provide them with special advantages, much as labor unions and trial lawyers do the same. Among the favorite tactic of such nefarious big businesses is the use of excessive regulations to reduce the ability of otherwise lean and determined smaller businesses to compete with them. The big business can readily hire several compliance lawyers and accountants, while hiring one of each is a huge expense for the competing small business. Of course, under Obama, the big business just has legislation passed that directly gives it an advantage, such as a mandate that people must use their product or service. The green energy companies and the Too-Big-To-Fail financial companies are the recipients of such advantages. So are ethanol producers. Almost any advantage an unethical big business gets with its political pull is harmful to most small businesses.
Small business owners tend to be more independent-minded and more individualistic than most people. They are willing to take on a greater amount of self-responsibility and the risks that manifestly come with trying to build a small business. They have to carefully identify their values and control their limited resources with wisdom and understanding. These are not the traits of people who wish to be dependents of government in its Nanny State guise. Small business owners tend to be willing to rise or fall based upon their own productivity.
Broadly speaking, the Democratic Party is more the champion of big government than is the Republican Party. In particular, it tends to be anti-economic rights in its viewpoint. Property rights, the right to earn a living, the right to hire employees exercising freedom of contract, the right to travel, the right to trade goods and services with others under the freedom of contract, and the right to create new ideas, goods, and services are all critical individual rights which small businesses require to flourish. It is the maximization of these freedoms, not special interest favors, that small businesses need most to have the opportunity to succeed.
That the greatest need of small businesses is economic freedom is seen empirically by studies that rank nations and states (here, here, and here) by their economic freedom and examine their economic growth. Generally, a small business does better when its customers are doing better, so targeted favors from government are of little use if your customer and suppliers are not doing equally well. Bigger and growing markets also tend to bring down the costs of its business inputs more as more innovation occurs and businesses can take more advantage of scale or find more niche markets adequate to their growth.
Independent-minded small businessmen should want this open field of a healthy and robust private sector to operate in. They are not equipped to field an army of lobbyists to protect themselves from politician's attempt to extort money from them. They are not able to come up with the campaign donation bribes to pay the game of seeking special interest legislation or regulations. The small business owner has his mind fully occupied by the business needs of his business and does not need a ton of government paperwork to do, hundreds of thousands of pages of government regulations to read and decipher, long discussions with politicians behind closed doors, and weeks of hearings and trials to attend. Neither does he want subsidies, credits, and deductions which are supposed to reward him for obeying the wishes of politicians. He is an independent businessman because he wants to do things his way, not as the manipulated serf of a politician.
Obama has been making the claim that he has lowered taxes for small businesses 18 times. Yes, he has manipulated small businesses with a number of small or short term tax breaks. My own small business has never benefited from any of these tax breaks. In the Obama economy, I have not been able to hire an additional employee, so I have not received the benefit of paying only 90% of the taxes owed on quarterly tax payments, with the rest to be made up at the end of the year. No, I have had no advantage from this also since my company pays payroll taxes every month in full. Small business owners are not allowed to deduct the cost of their health insurance premiums, but for one year (2010) Obama allowed relief from this nasty ill-treatment of business owners. In a couple of years, the amount of equipment one could deduct in the year of purchase was increased, but the usual lower amount is much more than most small businesses can purchase in a year anyway, so only a few small businesses can benefit from this tax break. Start-up costs of up to $10,000 for a new business can now be deducted instead of a paltry $5,000, but that is worth little unless the start-up business makes money quickly. And then it is still worth little.
Obama claims to have increased Small Business Administration loans. They come with incredible paperwork, long wait times, and are for relatively small amounts. It is easier to earn the money and pay for growth from earnings than to try to get money from the SBA. Or, many small businesses used to finance growth by taking money from the refinance of the owner's home, but the policies of big government that led to the sub-prime mortgage bubble have killed that option for capital seed money. Obama and the Democrats were especially prominent in support of the sub-prime loan bubble and its collapse. The SBA programs for which Obama increased funding are directed at sub-prime loans to small businesses. Many of them will fail when they cannot make their loan payments.
Obama's website for Small Business Owners claims that:
The SBA 7(a) Loan Program is ideal for businesses with less established credit histories looking to borrow up to $5,000,000. Great, but what responsible small businessman will borrow anything like $5 million when his business is not well-established enough that he can be sure to pay back so much money? I suppose the answer is a Democrat businessman, especially one who has bundled campaign contribution money for Obama.
The supposition of all of Obama's small business programs is that a small business wants to partner in some way with the government. Well, no, most of us just do not want government to view us as a source of income for wasteful government spending, such as on green energy subsidies. We do not want to pay higher taxes on our marginal income if we manage to generate a profit. We really just want government to stay off our backs and out of our way as we exercise the economic rights which legitimate government is supposed to protect, not violate.
As Obama says, these tax rates will not apply to 97% of small business owners, but they will apply to those who hire most of the new employees. In 2008, there were 27.28 million companies and only 18,469 had more than 500 employees. This means that about 27.26 million firms are small businesses or about 99.93% of all businesses are small businesses. 78.26% of all firms had no employees. Those with 4 or fewer employees accounted for 91.6% of all small businesses. The businesses that account for most of the new hiring employ from 20 to 499 employees and these are only about 2.3% of all businesses. Most of the high income business owners Obama wants to tax at 44.8% marginal rates are owners of such businesses. Such high marginal tax rates will serve as a strong disincentive to work so hard to grow a company.
Small businesses are the result of free associations of individuals in the private sector, not the government sector, or the falsely, but optimistically termed public sector. The owner(s) of the small business voluntarily formed the business to supply services or goods to others in voluntary trade. The owner(s) may hire employees, who voluntarily trade their labor for a wage or salary. The only necessary role of government is to prevent others from using force to interfere with these voluntary trades and associations. Small businesses are very much creatures of the private sector.
Large businesses are sometimes in a position to purchase politicians to bend the excessive powers of big government to provide them with special advantages, much as labor unions and trial lawyers do the same. Among the favorite tactic of such nefarious big businesses is the use of excessive regulations to reduce the ability of otherwise lean and determined smaller businesses to compete with them. The big business can readily hire several compliance lawyers and accountants, while hiring one of each is a huge expense for the competing small business. Of course, under Obama, the big business just has legislation passed that directly gives it an advantage, such as a mandate that people must use their product or service. The green energy companies and the Too-Big-To-Fail financial companies are the recipients of such advantages. So are ethanol producers. Almost any advantage an unethical big business gets with its political pull is harmful to most small businesses.
Small business owners tend to be more independent-minded and more individualistic than most people. They are willing to take on a greater amount of self-responsibility and the risks that manifestly come with trying to build a small business. They have to carefully identify their values and control their limited resources with wisdom and understanding. These are not the traits of people who wish to be dependents of government in its Nanny State guise. Small business owners tend to be willing to rise or fall based upon their own productivity.
Broadly speaking, the Democratic Party is more the champion of big government than is the Republican Party. In particular, it tends to be anti-economic rights in its viewpoint. Property rights, the right to earn a living, the right to hire employees exercising freedom of contract, the right to travel, the right to trade goods and services with others under the freedom of contract, and the right to create new ideas, goods, and services are all critical individual rights which small businesses require to flourish. It is the maximization of these freedoms, not special interest favors, that small businesses need most to have the opportunity to succeed.
That the greatest need of small businesses is economic freedom is seen empirically by studies that rank nations and states (here, here, and here) by their economic freedom and examine their economic growth. Generally, a small business does better when its customers are doing better, so targeted favors from government are of little use if your customer and suppliers are not doing equally well. Bigger and growing markets also tend to bring down the costs of its business inputs more as more innovation occurs and businesses can take more advantage of scale or find more niche markets adequate to their growth.
Independent-minded small businessmen should want this open field of a healthy and robust private sector to operate in. They are not equipped to field an army of lobbyists to protect themselves from politician's attempt to extort money from them. They are not able to come up with the campaign donation bribes to pay the game of seeking special interest legislation or regulations. The small business owner has his mind fully occupied by the business needs of his business and does not need a ton of government paperwork to do, hundreds of thousands of pages of government regulations to read and decipher, long discussions with politicians behind closed doors, and weeks of hearings and trials to attend. Neither does he want subsidies, credits, and deductions which are supposed to reward him for obeying the wishes of politicians. He is an independent businessman because he wants to do things his way, not as the manipulated serf of a politician.
Obama has been making the claim that he has lowered taxes for small businesses 18 times. Yes, he has manipulated small businesses with a number of small or short term tax breaks. My own small business has never benefited from any of these tax breaks. In the Obama economy, I have not been able to hire an additional employee, so I have not received the benefit of paying only 90% of the taxes owed on quarterly tax payments, with the rest to be made up at the end of the year. No, I have had no advantage from this also since my company pays payroll taxes every month in full. Small business owners are not allowed to deduct the cost of their health insurance premiums, but for one year (2010) Obama allowed relief from this nasty ill-treatment of business owners. In a couple of years, the amount of equipment one could deduct in the year of purchase was increased, but the usual lower amount is much more than most small businesses can purchase in a year anyway, so only a few small businesses can benefit from this tax break. Start-up costs of up to $10,000 for a new business can now be deducted instead of a paltry $5,000, but that is worth little unless the start-up business makes money quickly. And then it is still worth little.
Obama claims to have increased Small Business Administration loans. They come with incredible paperwork, long wait times, and are for relatively small amounts. It is easier to earn the money and pay for growth from earnings than to try to get money from the SBA. Or, many small businesses used to finance growth by taking money from the refinance of the owner's home, but the policies of big government that led to the sub-prime mortgage bubble have killed that option for capital seed money. Obama and the Democrats were especially prominent in support of the sub-prime loan bubble and its collapse. The SBA programs for which Obama increased funding are directed at sub-prime loans to small businesses. Many of them will fail when they cannot make their loan payments.
Obama's website for Small Business Owners claims that:
When President Obama took office, American small businesses were struggling under the devastating effects of the recession, runaway health care costs, and a credit freeze created by the Wall Street meltdown.How interesting. Small businesses, especially most of those serving mid- and large-size businesses are still feeling a recession due to the $2 trillion that these companies have been hording rather than using to buy the services of small businesses. Our healthcare costs have only increased due to ObamaCare, or the ObamaUncaringTax according the Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts. The quote on our healthcare plan for my business went up 20% this year. We had to drop the benefit as many other small and larger companies have also done. Thanks to the Obama FDIC, the Federal Reserve, and the Dodd-Frank so-called financial reform law, it is still very hard for a small business to get a loan. Of course, who wants a loan when the economy is so bad and so variable that one cannot be sure one can make the payments on it?
The SBA 7(a) Loan Program is ideal for businesses with less established credit histories looking to borrow up to $5,000,000. Great, but what responsible small businessman will borrow anything like $5 million when his business is not well-established enough that he can be sure to pay back so much money? I suppose the answer is a Democrat businessman, especially one who has bundled campaign contribution money for Obama.
The supposition of all of Obama's small business programs is that a small business wants to partner in some way with the government. Well, no, most of us just do not want government to view us as a source of income for wasteful government spending, such as on green energy subsidies. We do not want to pay higher taxes on our marginal income if we manage to generate a profit. We really just want government to stay off our backs and out of our way as we exercise the economic rights which legitimate government is supposed to protect, not violate.
Last Electoral College Result Prediction on Presidential Election
I believe the most likely outcome of the Presidential election will be:
Of the generally recognized swing states, the only one that I believe is foolish enough to vote for Obama is Nevada. Nevada showed its perfidy by voting for Senator Harry Reid, who has refused to allow the Senate to obey the law and produce a budget ever since Obama occupied the White House. Harry Reid is wily, but a very wrongheaded man. The state that could send him over and over to the Senate has the good judgment of a Las Vegas labor union. In other words, Nevada is too much like California now, with which state it shares both an astronomical unemployment rate and home foreclosure rate. Sometimes, no oftentimes, the people of a given area suffer mass delusions. I know, I live in the Baltimore - Washington corridor, where mass delusion reigns supreme. I do think there is about a 40% chance that Nevada will vote for the much superior candidate, Romney.
There is about a 20% likelihood that one of the three states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota will vote for Romney. I believe Romney will win the election with a differential in the percentage total vote of between 2 and 4%. If I am wrong, I think a win by 5% is more likely than one by 1%. A win by 5% will mean that Romney will likely carry at least two of the states Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota. Both Pennsylvania and Michigan will be very hard hit by Obama's plans to shut down the coal-fired electric power plants and both will be hurt by his plans to discourage hydraulic fracturing to release shale oil and gas.
Most of the polls are underestimating the turnout of Republicans and those Independents who have had more than enough of Obama. They are overestimating the turnout of Democrats. This is even true of Rasmussen polls, which are among the best of the polls. The fact that Romney has a normal Republican lead with men and Obama has much less than the normal Democrat lead with women figures very big in my understanding of how this election will turn out. Another key factor is the fact that Independents are decidedly favoring Romney over Obama. There will also be substantially more crossover Democrats voting for Romney than Republicans voting for Obama in this election. These factors have to generally push all of the swing states, most of which are now mostly Republican at the state level, into the Romney column. The work of the Tea Party Americans in ensuring this is also underestimated. The Evangelicals have also become aroused.
Obama is left only with substantial majorities among young people, blacks, and Hispanic Americans. Each of these groups has suffered just unbelievably high unemployment. Falling incomes and rising prices, such as energy prices, have hit blacks and Hispanic Americans especially hard. The fraction of young Americans who favor Obama is high, but usually these young Americans do not vote in large numbers. We will see that many fewer of them will vote in this election than in 2008 and of those who vote, a very substantially larger fraction will vote Republican. The turnout of black and Hispanic Americans will also be lower. The decrease in the fraction who vote for Obama this time as compared to 2008 will be much smaller than that among the young, though it will be greater for Hispanics than blacks.
Now that Americans have had so much time to get to know Obama and to be angered so many times by his lies and deceptions, I am very disappointed that we are still in a situation in which nearly half of all Americans will vote for this con man and failed President. How anyone could want four years of constant attacks on our individual rights and the resulting economic stagnation, is very much beyond my understanding. Romney should have easily surpassed Obama with well over 300 electoral votes. It appears more likely that there are too many very foolish Americans for that to happen. At this point, it looks to me that Romney will get 295 electoral votes.
I will be heartened if Romney comes very close in Minnesota, my birth state, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, however. Coupling that with wins in Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio and the continued shift of the Midwest into the Republican column may be a good sign of things to come. We have already seen these states send more Republicans to their state houses and to the House of Representatives. They have been electing Republican governors as well. The private sector unions have been losing power as they have lost membership. More and more Mid-westerners are learning that if they are to have well-paying jobs, it is good that the governments not be anti-business. As Mid-westerners show more respect for economic freedoms, they will align more with the more reality-interested Republican Party than with the socialist Democratic Party. This re-alignment may take a couple more election cycles to be complete, but it sure is important to America's future freedom and prosperity.
There is about a 20% likelihood that one of the three states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota will vote for Romney. I believe Romney will win the election with a differential in the percentage total vote of between 2 and 4%. If I am wrong, I think a win by 5% is more likely than one by 1%. A win by 5% will mean that Romney will likely carry at least two of the states Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota. Both Pennsylvania and Michigan will be very hard hit by Obama's plans to shut down the coal-fired electric power plants and both will be hurt by his plans to discourage hydraulic fracturing to release shale oil and gas.
Most of the polls are underestimating the turnout of Republicans and those Independents who have had more than enough of Obama. They are overestimating the turnout of Democrats. This is even true of Rasmussen polls, which are among the best of the polls. The fact that Romney has a normal Republican lead with men and Obama has much less than the normal Democrat lead with women figures very big in my understanding of how this election will turn out. Another key factor is the fact that Independents are decidedly favoring Romney over Obama. There will also be substantially more crossover Democrats voting for Romney than Republicans voting for Obama in this election. These factors have to generally push all of the swing states, most of which are now mostly Republican at the state level, into the Romney column. The work of the Tea Party Americans in ensuring this is also underestimated. The Evangelicals have also become aroused.
Obama is left only with substantial majorities among young people, blacks, and Hispanic Americans. Each of these groups has suffered just unbelievably high unemployment. Falling incomes and rising prices, such as energy prices, have hit blacks and Hispanic Americans especially hard. The fraction of young Americans who favor Obama is high, but usually these young Americans do not vote in large numbers. We will see that many fewer of them will vote in this election than in 2008 and of those who vote, a very substantially larger fraction will vote Republican. The turnout of black and Hispanic Americans will also be lower. The decrease in the fraction who vote for Obama this time as compared to 2008 will be much smaller than that among the young, though it will be greater for Hispanics than blacks.
Now that Americans have had so much time to get to know Obama and to be angered so many times by his lies and deceptions, I am very disappointed that we are still in a situation in which nearly half of all Americans will vote for this con man and failed President. How anyone could want four years of constant attacks on our individual rights and the resulting economic stagnation, is very much beyond my understanding. Romney should have easily surpassed Obama with well over 300 electoral votes. It appears more likely that there are too many very foolish Americans for that to happen. At this point, it looks to me that Romney will get 295 electoral votes.
I will be heartened if Romney comes very close in Minnesota, my birth state, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, however. Coupling that with wins in Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio and the continued shift of the Midwest into the Republican column may be a good sign of things to come. We have already seen these states send more Republicans to their state houses and to the House of Representatives. They have been electing Republican governors as well. The private sector unions have been losing power as they have lost membership. More and more Mid-westerners are learning that if they are to have well-paying jobs, it is good that the governments not be anti-business. As Mid-westerners show more respect for economic freedoms, they will align more with the more reality-interested Republican Party than with the socialist Democratic Party. This re-alignment may take a couple more election cycles to be complete, but it sure is important to America's future freedom and prosperity.
04 November 2012
Allow Same-Sex Marriages as a Basic Individual Right
For centuries, most people of the Judeo-Christian tradition have believed that God frowns upon people of the same sex having sexual relationships. Indeed, for centuries they often thought God demanded that they execute, often very gruesomely, men thought to be having sex with men. This vision of morality has been transformed for the better, but translated into governments only recognizing opposite sex marriages. In recent times, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec, and then Massachusetts came to recognize same-sex marriages. Today in the United States, the District of Columbia, Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont recognize same-sex marriages. In addition, California, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin offer either civil unions or domestic partnerships to same-sex couples. Forty-one states forbid same-sex marriages, including North Carolina which just passed a ban by referendum earlier this year.
The referendum ban of same-sex marriage in California was challenged in federal court and was declared unconstitutional. This ruling is under appeal and is still working its way through the federal court system. Washington passed a law authorizing same-sex marriage and Gov. Chris Gregoire signed it earlier this year. The Maryland legislature also authorized same-sex marriage this year and Gov. Martin O'Malley has signed it into law. But, referendums to ban same-sex marriage in Washington and Maryland will be on the ballot in November. Maine, which presently bans same-sex marriages, has a referendum on the November ballot to allow them. Minnesota, which presently bans same-sex marriage by statute, has a referendum on the November ballot to additionally forbid same-sex marriage in their state constitution.
How does one rationally analyze the role of governments with respect to marriage and with respect to same-sex marriages in particular? We have to decide what marriage really is and why government has necessary and legitimate functions with respect to marriage. In the oldest Judeo tradition, marriage was commonly not a domestic partnership between one man and one woman. Each husband might have several wives. This was surely not marriage of the nature of those recognized by government in America today. Early Christians commonly did not marry, since many thought the end of the world was rapidly approaching with the return of Christ. After that brief period, Christian marriage was often a means of cementing favorable relationships between families, clans, tribes, aristocrats, and even nations. A young woman was pretty much the property of her father and the father eventually traded her to a man for a degree of allegiance and goodwill in many cases. She was now her husband's property. Marriage was not the spiritual union of two people in the way many think it is today. It was a commercial and political act in many cases. The church supported this viewpoint of marriage by providing a patina of spirituality, though spiritual connections between the husband and wife were very commonly missing.
Even today, the role of government is not to provide a spiritual content to marriage or even to assess whether such a spiritual basis for a marriage exists. An honest evaluation of marriage as provided by government license and contract is that every marriage is a domestic partnership and any spiritual meaning to the union is provided by the married partners independent of government. The domestic partnership that governments offer is a legal contract with legal implications for shared property, procreation and the raising of children, taxes, mandated time off work to care for one another, and permissions to make medical decisions for one another if one partner is unable to make such decisions.
The only case of such issues in which the sex of the partners may make any difference at all is with respect to procreation and the raising of children. In the modern world, adoptions may easily take the place of procreation, but many married partners also have no children and there is no title of aristocracy demanding an heir. Should children be adopted in the relatively rare case by two partners of the same sex, there is little reason for one having to be a high-earning man, since many women are now high-earners. The domestic partnerships that are formed by government marriage licenses are just as appropriate today for partners of the same sex as they are for partners of opposite sexes.
Each and every American adult competent to care for himself has a very broad sovereign right to life, liberty, property, the ownership of his own body, mind, and labor, and the pursuit of his own happiness. Legitimate government cannot violate that broad range of fundamental individual rights. There must be a strong presumption against laws that limit the exercise of personal actions which do not do harm to others. Legitimate government does not interfere with the association of one adult with other consenting adults, unless substantial harm is thereby done to others. Legitimate and individual rights-protecting government is highly limited and minimal government. If it acts to place limits on the relationships and associations of individuals, it must have a very substantial reason for such limits and a strong case for the harm those associations or relationships would do to others. The only way such harm to others occurs is if the partnership uses force to harm others, but there is no new issue here since initiated harm done by force by any individual to others is already prohibited. There is no more reason to prescribe the number and sex of domestic partners than there is to do so for a business partnership. Indeed, a domestic partnership is very much like a business partnership in all respects relevant to the role of government.
Not only is there no reason to place a prohibition on same-sex domestic partnerships, but because our individual rights are equal, we cannot limit marriage contracts to only those who desire a single partner of the opposite sex. While anyone may exercise their own freedom of conscience in the belief that same-sex domestic partnerships are immoral, abhorred by God, or simply biologically uninteresting to them, government and the People whose individual equal rights are to be protected by government cannot make such judgments in the political realm without violating the freedom of conscience of others with a differing viewpoint. They cannot legitimately use force to prevent others from exercising control over their own bodies and minds, from evaluating and choosing whose most intimate company they desire, and from pursuing their most personal and individual happiness.
Individual human beings are complex and highly differentiated. We are all different in the way our minds observe reality, analyze and evaluate it, and assess our own relationship to it and to others. Our biochemistries differ, our senses operate at many different levels, our nervous systems feel differently, our bodies take very different forms, and we respond very differently to other individuals. Among the most complex and highly differentiated aspects of an individual's nature is his or her sexuality. We cannot be serious about the individual right to pursue happiness if we have government place obstacles and unequal treatment in the way of individuals whose sexuality is different than that endorsed by a religion or just recent and local tradition.
It is a basic violation of individual rights for government to discriminate against individuals based on their sexuality. Legitimate government ought to provide same-sex marriage contracts which are equivalent to those it provides to couples of the opposite sex. It should even provide a more enlarged concept of domestic partnership contracts as broad in terms of the combination of adult individuals bound in the contract as is the case in small business partnerships. Government commonly interferes with our freedom of association in far too many ways. It is time that it stop interfering with that broad freedom of association in our domestic partnerships which it is the right of each and every adult individual to claim.
Understanding this, one should vote for Question 6 in Maryland to allow same-sex couples to marry in Maryland.
The referendum ban of same-sex marriage in California was challenged in federal court and was declared unconstitutional. This ruling is under appeal and is still working its way through the federal court system. Washington passed a law authorizing same-sex marriage and Gov. Chris Gregoire signed it earlier this year. The Maryland legislature also authorized same-sex marriage this year and Gov. Martin O'Malley has signed it into law. But, referendums to ban same-sex marriage in Washington and Maryland will be on the ballot in November. Maine, which presently bans same-sex marriages, has a referendum on the November ballot to allow them. Minnesota, which presently bans same-sex marriage by statute, has a referendum on the November ballot to additionally forbid same-sex marriage in their state constitution.
How does one rationally analyze the role of governments with respect to marriage and with respect to same-sex marriages in particular? We have to decide what marriage really is and why government has necessary and legitimate functions with respect to marriage. In the oldest Judeo tradition, marriage was commonly not a domestic partnership between one man and one woman. Each husband might have several wives. This was surely not marriage of the nature of those recognized by government in America today. Early Christians commonly did not marry, since many thought the end of the world was rapidly approaching with the return of Christ. After that brief period, Christian marriage was often a means of cementing favorable relationships between families, clans, tribes, aristocrats, and even nations. A young woman was pretty much the property of her father and the father eventually traded her to a man for a degree of allegiance and goodwill in many cases. She was now her husband's property. Marriage was not the spiritual union of two people in the way many think it is today. It was a commercial and political act in many cases. The church supported this viewpoint of marriage by providing a patina of spirituality, though spiritual connections between the husband and wife were very commonly missing.
Even today, the role of government is not to provide a spiritual content to marriage or even to assess whether such a spiritual basis for a marriage exists. An honest evaluation of marriage as provided by government license and contract is that every marriage is a domestic partnership and any spiritual meaning to the union is provided by the married partners independent of government. The domestic partnership that governments offer is a legal contract with legal implications for shared property, procreation and the raising of children, taxes, mandated time off work to care for one another, and permissions to make medical decisions for one another if one partner is unable to make such decisions.
The only case of such issues in which the sex of the partners may make any difference at all is with respect to procreation and the raising of children. In the modern world, adoptions may easily take the place of procreation, but many married partners also have no children and there is no title of aristocracy demanding an heir. Should children be adopted in the relatively rare case by two partners of the same sex, there is little reason for one having to be a high-earning man, since many women are now high-earners. The domestic partnerships that are formed by government marriage licenses are just as appropriate today for partners of the same sex as they are for partners of opposite sexes.
Each and every American adult competent to care for himself has a very broad sovereign right to life, liberty, property, the ownership of his own body, mind, and labor, and the pursuit of his own happiness. Legitimate government cannot violate that broad range of fundamental individual rights. There must be a strong presumption against laws that limit the exercise of personal actions which do not do harm to others. Legitimate government does not interfere with the association of one adult with other consenting adults, unless substantial harm is thereby done to others. Legitimate and individual rights-protecting government is highly limited and minimal government. If it acts to place limits on the relationships and associations of individuals, it must have a very substantial reason for such limits and a strong case for the harm those associations or relationships would do to others. The only way such harm to others occurs is if the partnership uses force to harm others, but there is no new issue here since initiated harm done by force by any individual to others is already prohibited. There is no more reason to prescribe the number and sex of domestic partners than there is to do so for a business partnership. Indeed, a domestic partnership is very much like a business partnership in all respects relevant to the role of government.
Not only is there no reason to place a prohibition on same-sex domestic partnerships, but because our individual rights are equal, we cannot limit marriage contracts to only those who desire a single partner of the opposite sex. While anyone may exercise their own freedom of conscience in the belief that same-sex domestic partnerships are immoral, abhorred by God, or simply biologically uninteresting to them, government and the People whose individual equal rights are to be protected by government cannot make such judgments in the political realm without violating the freedom of conscience of others with a differing viewpoint. They cannot legitimately use force to prevent others from exercising control over their own bodies and minds, from evaluating and choosing whose most intimate company they desire, and from pursuing their most personal and individual happiness.
Individual human beings are complex and highly differentiated. We are all different in the way our minds observe reality, analyze and evaluate it, and assess our own relationship to it and to others. Our biochemistries differ, our senses operate at many different levels, our nervous systems feel differently, our bodies take very different forms, and we respond very differently to other individuals. Among the most complex and highly differentiated aspects of an individual's nature is his or her sexuality. We cannot be serious about the individual right to pursue happiness if we have government place obstacles and unequal treatment in the way of individuals whose sexuality is different than that endorsed by a religion or just recent and local tradition.
It is a basic violation of individual rights for government to discriminate against individuals based on their sexuality. Legitimate government ought to provide same-sex marriage contracts which are equivalent to those it provides to couples of the opposite sex. It should even provide a more enlarged concept of domestic partnership contracts as broad in terms of the combination of adult individuals bound in the contract as is the case in small business partnerships. Government commonly interferes with our freedom of association in far too many ways. It is time that it stop interfering with that broad freedom of association in our domestic partnerships which it is the right of each and every adult individual to claim.
Understanding this, one should vote for Question 6 in Maryland to allow same-sex couples to marry in Maryland.
Obama's New Normal Part-Time Economy
Average hours worked for all non-farm private employees has been stuck at 34.4 hours for 4 months now. The average hours for non-farm private production and non-supervisory employees dropped 0.1 hours in October to 33.6 hours.
Real per capita GDP is $50,166 through the third quarter, but it would be $55,932 if long-term historical trends had not been replaced by the Obama "new normal." This loss of $5,766 per person is sorely felt. High unemployment and all-too-common part-time employment has kept the economy from expanding at historic rates.
As Mike Shedlock has noted, the recovery of hours worked following the period of nominal GDP contraction shown in the light blue region of the plot below has stalled out. The earlier rate of increase was substandard following a recession. For many months now, Obama's "new normal" has settled in. The question is, are Americans ready to settle for the Obama "new normal."
There is no reason at all to do so. The U.S. economy is more than ready to recover, if only Washington will stop doing everything it can to prevent business success. One of the big factors is the pressure that ObamaCare, really ObamaUncaringTax, is putting on businesses to convert full-time positions into part-time positions. ObamaCare defines full-time employment for the purposes of requiring health insurance coverage or the payment of a penalty by the business as a mere 30 hours of work a week. As a result, many businesses are putting a limit of 25 to 28 hours a week on their employees. The tax assessment on employees requires a look-back period of 3 months to a year, to be selected as an option by the employer. Consequently, companies have had to ensure that at the latest, many of their employees had less than 30-hour workweeks for more than the last 3 months of this year. The Obama "new normal" is a 25-hour workweek for many Americans.
Real per capita GDP is $50,166 through the third quarter, but it would be $55,932 if long-term historical trends had not been replaced by the Obama "new normal." This loss of $5,766 per person is sorely felt. High unemployment and all-too-common part-time employment has kept the economy from expanding at historic rates.
As Mike Shedlock has noted, the recovery of hours worked following the period of nominal GDP contraction shown in the light blue region of the plot below has stalled out. The earlier rate of increase was substandard following a recession. For many months now, Obama's "new normal" has settled in. The question is, are Americans ready to settle for the Obama "new normal."
There is no reason at all to do so. The U.S. economy is more than ready to recover, if only Washington will stop doing everything it can to prevent business success. One of the big factors is the pressure that ObamaCare, really ObamaUncaringTax, is putting on businesses to convert full-time positions into part-time positions. ObamaCare defines full-time employment for the purposes of requiring health insurance coverage or the payment of a penalty by the business as a mere 30 hours of work a week. As a result, many businesses are putting a limit of 25 to 28 hours a week on their employees. The tax assessment on employees requires a look-back period of 3 months to a year, to be selected as an option by the employer. Consequently, companies have had to ensure that at the latest, many of their employees had less than 30-hour workweeks for more than the last 3 months of this year. The Obama "new normal" is a 25-hour workweek for many Americans.
The More Flexible Obama EPA Post-Election Ambush
Obama has had several of the new rules promulgated by his radical EPA put on hold until after the election. Apparently, missile defense shields are not the only topic on which he will have more flexibility after the election. He is well aware that these rulings will cause the loss of many jobs and he does not want those job holders and their families to know this before the election. This is especially a dirty trick on the poor and those on fixed incomes that the Democrat Party used to pretend to champion. They are already spending about 24% of their very limited incomes on energy largely due to the out-of-control efforts of the EPA to raise energy prices for fossil fuels and to mandate the increased use of very expensive alternative energy sources. With friends like these, the poor need no enemies.
Senator Jim Inhofe has had a report written by the minority staff of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works which was published in October and documents the long list of new rulings that EPA is going to slam the American economy with after the election when Obama will be more flexible. The results of the EPA rulings on hold will be the virtual elimination of the use of our huge coal reserves which have provided Americans with the least expensive electricity and energy in general in the world.
This Obama administration is also intending to limit the use of oil, not just foreign oil, but also U.S. oil. This is the real reason that Obama prevented the building of the Keystone XL pipeline which would have brought a much needed supply of Canadian oil from Alberta and American oil from the shale oil deposits of North Dakota to Cushing, Oklahoma and to the Gulf of Mexico oil refineries which have been getting less and less oil from mismanaged nationalized oil companies in Venezuela and Mexico. Killing the Keystone XL pipeline cost us 20,000 jobs immediately and about 465,000 jobs total by 2035. That dependable supply of oil would have increased jobs in the Bakken shale oil formation of North Dakota, increased refinery jobs, increased other chemical industry jobs, and provided lower cost oil, gasoline, plastics, and fertilizer to all of the economic activities dependent upon them. Our exports of products would have been increased.
The Obama administration is planning to replace state regulation of tight shale oil formation fracturing with federal regulations so that oil and gas from our huge shale oil and gas formations can be reduced and made more expensive. Oil companies have been using hydraulic fracturing since 1949 when it was pioneered in Duncan, Oklahoma. Since then it has been used 1.5 million times without any proven case of water contamination, which has even been admitted by the radical EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. Yet, it is in the name that such contamination might happen that very expensive regulations are to be slapped onto frakking operations. The real reason is to prevent the use of fossil fuels because the Democrat Party has bought into the nonsensical hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming and has little care about how many jobs are eliminated and how much the cost of living rises as they chase that chimera.
The Obama administration has succeeded in reducing the production of natural gas on federal lands and in federal waters by 11% in 2011 compared to 2010. They decreased oil production from these areas by 14%. But oil and gas production on private land is regulated by the states and such states as Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Texas, Louisiana, West Virginia, Ohio, and Michigan have been allowing oil and natural gas production to boom. This has created a shale gas industry with 600,000 jobs, which is expected to grow to 870,000 by 2015. By 2035, there may be 1.6 million jobs in the industry. In 2010, this nascent industry was already adding $76.9 billion to the U.S. GDP. If re-elected, Obama and his many henchmen are determined to keep this wondrous development for jobs and our standard of living from happening.
According to an April study released by the U.S. Geological Survey, North America has 26% of the world's recoverable conventional oil resources. This excludes our rich shale oil, tight oil, and heavy oil resources, which are gigantic. We have 30% of the world's technically recoverable conventional natural gas resources. We have the largest coal reserves in the world. The oil and gas industries are already adding nearly a billion dollars a day to the economy and this is all that has keep us from falling back into a state of contracting GDP. American households have saved about $566 million a day in natural gas expenses due to the drop in natural gas prices due to hydraulic fracturing. All of this the Obama team wants to make useless and take away from Americans because they are foolish enough to buy into the unproven, and indeed failed, claim that CO2 emissions by man are catastrophically warming the planet.
What are the slew of new regulations intended to strangle Americans use of energy?
Greenhouse Gas Regulations: Intended to be worse than the Cap and Trade legislation that could not make even through the totally Democrat House and Senate of 2009 and 2010. The rules will cost $300 to $400 billion a year. Gasoline and home energy bills will go up greatly. Energy use in power plants, schools, restaurants, hospitals, churches, and farms will all be regulated, though they will be phased in so the frog will not jump out of the pot. The first restrictions implemented will kill most coal-fired electric power plants in keeping with Obama's promise to do that. At least 175 coal-fired power plants are on the chopping block. At least 37,000 farms and ranches will require greenhouse gas permits at an average cost of $23,000 a year. This will cause the cost of meat and dairy prices to rise.
Ozone Rule: The EPA places a low-ball cost on this rule of $90 billion a year. Others say it will cost $1 trillion a year and obliterate 7.4 million jobs. Why so much destruction? Because 650 additional counties will likely be placed in the non-attainment category for ozone limits. These counties will be prohibited from further development, so no new jobs can be created in them and existing plants will be forced to close.
Hydraulic Fracturing Regulations: 14 Obama administration agencies are trying to wrest control of hydraulic fracturing regulations from the states. These include the EPA, the Energy Dept., the Bureau of Land Management, the Center for Disease Control, the Dept. of Agriculture, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The cost for new permits and well workovers to bring them into compliance will cost from $1.50 to $1.62 billion. Added costs per well of $253,800 are estimated and bringing a well back into use to re-stimulate fracture will cost $233,100. Obama has efforts underway to apply the Safe Drinking Water Act, Toxic Substances Control Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Effluent Limitations Guidelines to shale gas extraction and to coal-bed methane gas.
Florida Numeric Nutrient Criteria: In 2009, the Obama EPA determined that it would set federal numeric nutrient water standards under the Clean Water Act for the state of Florida. The standard the EPA said it was going to set in 2010 was widely criticized as infeasible both technologically and economically. The state of Florida set its own standard and was upheld in doing so by a Florida administrative judge in June 2012. The state submitted its standard to the EPA and the EPA had to approve it in 60 days or disapprove it in 90 days by law. The EPA has done neither, once again demonstrating the lawlessness so common in the Obama administration. It appears that the EPA is just waiting until after the election in the important state of Florida before asserting its arbitrary will.
EPA Control of Water Sites: The EPA has proposed a new guidance document of April 2011 under the Clean Water Act that allows it to govern almost every body of water in the U.S., no matter how small. This is based on their reinterpretation of recent Supreme Court decisions. The EPA estimates that 17% of the non-jurisdictional determinations will be reversed under the new guidance. This new guidance was unable to pass the heavily Democrat House and Senate when it came up for approval. The new guidance would force state and local governments to perform many new duties many of them do not want to do.
Storm-Water Regulation: As part of the Chesapeake Bay Settlement Agreement in 2009, the EPA announced setting new nationwide storm-water rules. The proposed rule will establish a post-construction storm-water run-off standard and massive changes to storm-water systems. Green infrastructure techniques such as green roofs, rain gardens, and permeable pavement will be required. States, municipalities, and property owners will incur huge costs. This may be the most expensive rule in the EPA's history.
Tier III Gasoline Regulations: The current limit on sulfur in gasoline is 30 ppm and the new limit will become 10 ppm. The initial cost to achieve this in refineries will be $10 billion and the annual cost thereafter will be $2.4 billion. Gasoline cost may be increased by 9 cents a gallon.
Boiler Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) Rule: This rule would apply to about 200,000 boilers and their emissions of mercury, dioxin, particulate matter, hydrogen chloride, and carbon monoxide. They burn natural gas, coal, fuel oil, biomass, refinery gas, or other gas to produce steam used to heat buildings, produce heat for manufacturing purposes, or to produce electricity. The EPA claims the capital cost will be $9.5 billion, though IHS Global Insight did a study that concluded it will cost $20 billion. The Small Business Administration says it will cause a major increase in regulatory costs for businesses, institutions, and municipalities. The Department of Commerce says it would cause job losses of 40,000 to 60,000, which is much higher than EPA estimates. The Senate Minority Report says it will reduce GDP by $1.2 billion and destroy nearly 800,000 jobs, but that combination of costs and jobs lost does not make sense to me.
The methodology for producing the requirements of this ruling is terrible. The initial ruling had 5,800 comments citing technical and statutory errors. 21 governors and more than 100 Congressmen had objections. EPA officials finally admitted they had failed to "calculate standards that fully reflected operational reality." The most current version of the proposed standard says that a boiler already in existence must have an average emission limit achieved by the best performing 12% of boilers in the given boiler category. A new boiler must have emissions equal to or better than the best existing boiler. There is a terrible catch here as well. The best is defined for each of the controlled substances. The best fuel and design to reduce mercury emissions may be very different than the best to reduce particulate matter, for instance. In fact, the best boiler for each of the six substances does not meet the new MACT standard for this reason. The standard is not technologically and economically feasible. What is more, four of the regulated substances meet the statutory requirements for health-based standards and were so treated in previous versions of boiler MACT rules. The proposed rule now establishes no threshold beyond which the emissions are thought to have no significant consequences. The EPA argues that they cannot set such a threshold, but this negates their argument that they can calculate the health benefits of their new proposed ruling. Furthermore, the EPA misstated the health benefits by assuming that all particulates, no matter their composition, have the same harmful health consequences. I have already discussed the issues relating to mercury emissions extensively here and here.
Cement MACT Rule: This EPA rule is expected to shut down 18 cement plants and cost up to 80,000 jobs. This will increase our importation of cement from China and increase the cement cost of construction of roads, bridges, and buildings by 22 to 36%.
316(b) Cooling Tower Rules: Provides for stricter protection of fish in cooling tower reservoirs. The costs are estimated to be between 384 and 460 million dollars a year. The value of the benefit is thought to be $17 million.
Coal Ash Ruling: The proposed EPA coal ash rule declaring coal ash a hazardous substance will cost from $79 to $110 billion over 20 years. It will destroy between 184,000 and 316,000 jobs with especially bad consequences for Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, and Missouri.
Farm Dust Regulations: The EPA is considering tightening its controls on farm dust under the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for coarse particulate matter (PM10). The new standard may require farmers and ranchers to stop many common practices and activities. Many businesses may have to decrease their output drastically and many may go out of operation.
Spill Prevention Control and Countermeasures Rule: Farmers and ranchers will be required to develop and implement costly oil and gasoline spill prevention plans.
The overall impact of these EPA rulings on the economy and on employment will be huge. If implemented at all in their present proposed or EPA-favored form, the economy will go into a recession of the GDP reduction kind. There is a pattern of EPA lack of concern for any rational weighing of the value of health or environmental consequences with economic and human consequences. Whether people are allowed to earn a living is of little concern to the EPA under Obama. Being responsive to radical environmental groups and to global warming alarmist groups is their top priority, aside from Obama's re-election. Since Obama will have much more flexibility after his last election, as he famously told the Russian Medvedev, many of these rulings by the out-of-control and radical EPA will haunt American consumers, workers, and producers under a second Obama term.
Senator Jim Inhofe has had a report written by the minority staff of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works which was published in October and documents the long list of new rulings that EPA is going to slam the American economy with after the election when Obama will be more flexible. The results of the EPA rulings on hold will be the virtual elimination of the use of our huge coal reserves which have provided Americans with the least expensive electricity and energy in general in the world.
This Obama administration is also intending to limit the use of oil, not just foreign oil, but also U.S. oil. This is the real reason that Obama prevented the building of the Keystone XL pipeline which would have brought a much needed supply of Canadian oil from Alberta and American oil from the shale oil deposits of North Dakota to Cushing, Oklahoma and to the Gulf of Mexico oil refineries which have been getting less and less oil from mismanaged nationalized oil companies in Venezuela and Mexico. Killing the Keystone XL pipeline cost us 20,000 jobs immediately and about 465,000 jobs total by 2035. That dependable supply of oil would have increased jobs in the Bakken shale oil formation of North Dakota, increased refinery jobs, increased other chemical industry jobs, and provided lower cost oil, gasoline, plastics, and fertilizer to all of the economic activities dependent upon them. Our exports of products would have been increased.
The Obama administration is planning to replace state regulation of tight shale oil formation fracturing with federal regulations so that oil and gas from our huge shale oil and gas formations can be reduced and made more expensive. Oil companies have been using hydraulic fracturing since 1949 when it was pioneered in Duncan, Oklahoma. Since then it has been used 1.5 million times without any proven case of water contamination, which has even been admitted by the radical EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. Yet, it is in the name that such contamination might happen that very expensive regulations are to be slapped onto frakking operations. The real reason is to prevent the use of fossil fuels because the Democrat Party has bought into the nonsensical hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming and has little care about how many jobs are eliminated and how much the cost of living rises as they chase that chimera.
The Obama administration has succeeded in reducing the production of natural gas on federal lands and in federal waters by 11% in 2011 compared to 2010. They decreased oil production from these areas by 14%. But oil and gas production on private land is regulated by the states and such states as Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Texas, Louisiana, West Virginia, Ohio, and Michigan have been allowing oil and natural gas production to boom. This has created a shale gas industry with 600,000 jobs, which is expected to grow to 870,000 by 2015. By 2035, there may be 1.6 million jobs in the industry. In 2010, this nascent industry was already adding $76.9 billion to the U.S. GDP. If re-elected, Obama and his many henchmen are determined to keep this wondrous development for jobs and our standard of living from happening.
According to an April study released by the U.S. Geological Survey, North America has 26% of the world's recoverable conventional oil resources. This excludes our rich shale oil, tight oil, and heavy oil resources, which are gigantic. We have 30% of the world's technically recoverable conventional natural gas resources. We have the largest coal reserves in the world. The oil and gas industries are already adding nearly a billion dollars a day to the economy and this is all that has keep us from falling back into a state of contracting GDP. American households have saved about $566 million a day in natural gas expenses due to the drop in natural gas prices due to hydraulic fracturing. All of this the Obama team wants to make useless and take away from Americans because they are foolish enough to buy into the unproven, and indeed failed, claim that CO2 emissions by man are catastrophically warming the planet.
What are the slew of new regulations intended to strangle Americans use of energy?
Greenhouse Gas Regulations: Intended to be worse than the Cap and Trade legislation that could not make even through the totally Democrat House and Senate of 2009 and 2010. The rules will cost $300 to $400 billion a year. Gasoline and home energy bills will go up greatly. Energy use in power plants, schools, restaurants, hospitals, churches, and farms will all be regulated, though they will be phased in so the frog will not jump out of the pot. The first restrictions implemented will kill most coal-fired electric power plants in keeping with Obama's promise to do that. At least 175 coal-fired power plants are on the chopping block. At least 37,000 farms and ranches will require greenhouse gas permits at an average cost of $23,000 a year. This will cause the cost of meat and dairy prices to rise.
Ozone Rule: The EPA places a low-ball cost on this rule of $90 billion a year. Others say it will cost $1 trillion a year and obliterate 7.4 million jobs. Why so much destruction? Because 650 additional counties will likely be placed in the non-attainment category for ozone limits. These counties will be prohibited from further development, so no new jobs can be created in them and existing plants will be forced to close.
Hydraulic Fracturing Regulations: 14 Obama administration agencies are trying to wrest control of hydraulic fracturing regulations from the states. These include the EPA, the Energy Dept., the Bureau of Land Management, the Center for Disease Control, the Dept. of Agriculture, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The cost for new permits and well workovers to bring them into compliance will cost from $1.50 to $1.62 billion. Added costs per well of $253,800 are estimated and bringing a well back into use to re-stimulate fracture will cost $233,100. Obama has efforts underway to apply the Safe Drinking Water Act, Toxic Substances Control Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Effluent Limitations Guidelines to shale gas extraction and to coal-bed methane gas.
Florida Numeric Nutrient Criteria: In 2009, the Obama EPA determined that it would set federal numeric nutrient water standards under the Clean Water Act for the state of Florida. The standard the EPA said it was going to set in 2010 was widely criticized as infeasible both technologically and economically. The state of Florida set its own standard and was upheld in doing so by a Florida administrative judge in June 2012. The state submitted its standard to the EPA and the EPA had to approve it in 60 days or disapprove it in 90 days by law. The EPA has done neither, once again demonstrating the lawlessness so common in the Obama administration. It appears that the EPA is just waiting until after the election in the important state of Florida before asserting its arbitrary will.
EPA Control of Water Sites: The EPA has proposed a new guidance document of April 2011 under the Clean Water Act that allows it to govern almost every body of water in the U.S., no matter how small. This is based on their reinterpretation of recent Supreme Court decisions. The EPA estimates that 17% of the non-jurisdictional determinations will be reversed under the new guidance. This new guidance was unable to pass the heavily Democrat House and Senate when it came up for approval. The new guidance would force state and local governments to perform many new duties many of them do not want to do.
Storm-Water Regulation: As part of the Chesapeake Bay Settlement Agreement in 2009, the EPA announced setting new nationwide storm-water rules. The proposed rule will establish a post-construction storm-water run-off standard and massive changes to storm-water systems. Green infrastructure techniques such as green roofs, rain gardens, and permeable pavement will be required. States, municipalities, and property owners will incur huge costs. This may be the most expensive rule in the EPA's history.
Tier III Gasoline Regulations: The current limit on sulfur in gasoline is 30 ppm and the new limit will become 10 ppm. The initial cost to achieve this in refineries will be $10 billion and the annual cost thereafter will be $2.4 billion. Gasoline cost may be increased by 9 cents a gallon.
Boiler Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) Rule: This rule would apply to about 200,000 boilers and their emissions of mercury, dioxin, particulate matter, hydrogen chloride, and carbon monoxide. They burn natural gas, coal, fuel oil, biomass, refinery gas, or other gas to produce steam used to heat buildings, produce heat for manufacturing purposes, or to produce electricity. The EPA claims the capital cost will be $9.5 billion, though IHS Global Insight did a study that concluded it will cost $20 billion. The Small Business Administration says it will cause a major increase in regulatory costs for businesses, institutions, and municipalities. The Department of Commerce says it would cause job losses of 40,000 to 60,000, which is much higher than EPA estimates. The Senate Minority Report says it will reduce GDP by $1.2 billion and destroy nearly 800,000 jobs, but that combination of costs and jobs lost does not make sense to me.
The methodology for producing the requirements of this ruling is terrible. The initial ruling had 5,800 comments citing technical and statutory errors. 21 governors and more than 100 Congressmen had objections. EPA officials finally admitted they had failed to "calculate standards that fully reflected operational reality." The most current version of the proposed standard says that a boiler already in existence must have an average emission limit achieved by the best performing 12% of boilers in the given boiler category. A new boiler must have emissions equal to or better than the best existing boiler. There is a terrible catch here as well. The best is defined for each of the controlled substances. The best fuel and design to reduce mercury emissions may be very different than the best to reduce particulate matter, for instance. In fact, the best boiler for each of the six substances does not meet the new MACT standard for this reason. The standard is not technologically and economically feasible. What is more, four of the regulated substances meet the statutory requirements for health-based standards and were so treated in previous versions of boiler MACT rules. The proposed rule now establishes no threshold beyond which the emissions are thought to have no significant consequences. The EPA argues that they cannot set such a threshold, but this negates their argument that they can calculate the health benefits of their new proposed ruling. Furthermore, the EPA misstated the health benefits by assuming that all particulates, no matter their composition, have the same harmful health consequences. I have already discussed the issues relating to mercury emissions extensively here and here.
Cement MACT Rule: This EPA rule is expected to shut down 18 cement plants and cost up to 80,000 jobs. This will increase our importation of cement from China and increase the cement cost of construction of roads, bridges, and buildings by 22 to 36%.
316(b) Cooling Tower Rules: Provides for stricter protection of fish in cooling tower reservoirs. The costs are estimated to be between 384 and 460 million dollars a year. The value of the benefit is thought to be $17 million.
Coal Ash Ruling: The proposed EPA coal ash rule declaring coal ash a hazardous substance will cost from $79 to $110 billion over 20 years. It will destroy between 184,000 and 316,000 jobs with especially bad consequences for Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, and Missouri.
Farm Dust Regulations: The EPA is considering tightening its controls on farm dust under the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for coarse particulate matter (PM10). The new standard may require farmers and ranchers to stop many common practices and activities. Many businesses may have to decrease their output drastically and many may go out of operation.
Spill Prevention Control and Countermeasures Rule: Farmers and ranchers will be required to develop and implement costly oil and gasoline spill prevention plans.
The overall impact of these EPA rulings on the economy and on employment will be huge. If implemented at all in their present proposed or EPA-favored form, the economy will go into a recession of the GDP reduction kind. There is a pattern of EPA lack of concern for any rational weighing of the value of health or environmental consequences with economic and human consequences. Whether people are allowed to earn a living is of little concern to the EPA under Obama. Being responsive to radical environmental groups and to global warming alarmist groups is their top priority, aside from Obama's re-election. Since Obama will have much more flexibility after his last election, as he famously told the Russian Medvedev, many of these rulings by the out-of-control and radical EPA will haunt American consumers, workers, and producers under a second Obama term.
02 November 2012
Historically Slow Jobs Recovery Trucks On Due to Determined Industry
The usually quoted unemployment rate went up from 7.8% to 7.9%, but this always quoted number is fairly meaningless in a very long recession, nearly never-ending recession. The unemployment rate went up because a few more people decided there might be hope of finding a job, so they renewed their effort to find a job.
American industry forced the economy slowly forward in October 2012 despite the full application of brakes by Obama and his henchmen. Industry added 973,000 jobs in October, perhaps in anticipation of a win by Romney on 6 November. If it was not that, then there are a lot of lunatics in American business, but history suggests otherwise. Government added 20,000 jobs, despite all of Obama's moaning that government has been hurt most by the recession. Government had hired madly in September.
Unincorporated self-employment in non-agricultural jobs fell by 172,000. The decrease in unincorporated self-employed is almost certainly further indication that the huge rise in unincorporated self-employment over the last couple of years was an act of desperation on the part of Americans who could not find jobs otherwise. Any self-respecting American creates his own job when he cannot get a job from someone else. But in a bad, Obama economy with no capital to invest in your business, being self-employed is really rough. Now that industry is hiring, these suffering Americans are shifting to the better jobs bigger companies can offer them.
Let us examine the household survey employment numbers:
The number of missing jobs is falling at a very slow rate. In October 2010, the percentage of missing jobs was 13.73% and this October is down to 12.53%, or 1.20% over two years. This is
an average rate of missing jobs recovery by the economy as abused by Obama of 0.60% a year. At this rate, it will take us more than 14 more years to lower the missing job rate back to the 4.04% rate of January 2000. Obama's new normal economy is one that takes a total of 18 years to recover from a recession. His braked economy is actually mired in a GREAT DEPRESSION, that being the only historical precedent for an 18 year recovery period in American history.
One of Obama's favorite campaign claims is that he has created, note the hubris, 5,000,000 jobs. Once again, employers did not do it. No, the government did. At least if it was good. If it was bad, then businessmen did it. This is a matter of big government definition.
Actually, there are 144,039,000 employed Americans now and there were 143,338,000 million employed in George W. Bush's last full month as President in December 2008. So, there are only 701,000 more Americans employed now than at the start of the Obama presidency. This is only 14% of Obama's claim, but as he says, he cannot do 7th grade math.
Meanwhile there are 8,948,000 more working age civilians available for work now than there were in Bush's last month. The added 701,000 jobs distributed among the 8,948,000 new potential workers is enough to provide a job for 7.83% of them. Pathetic. That is an employment rate which is lower even than Obama's super-high unemployment rate overall is. But this is the new Obama Normal.
American industry forced the economy slowly forward in October 2012 despite the full application of brakes by Obama and his henchmen. Industry added 973,000 jobs in October, perhaps in anticipation of a win by Romney on 6 November. If it was not that, then there are a lot of lunatics in American business, but history suggests otherwise. Government added 20,000 jobs, despite all of Obama's moaning that government has been hurt most by the recession. Government had hired madly in September.
Unincorporated self-employment in non-agricultural jobs fell by 172,000. The decrease in unincorporated self-employed is almost certainly further indication that the huge rise in unincorporated self-employment over the last couple of years was an act of desperation on the part of Americans who could not find jobs otherwise. Any self-respecting American creates his own job when he cannot get a job from someone else. But in a bad, Obama economy with no capital to invest in your business, being self-employed is really rough. Now that industry is hiring, these suffering Americans are shifting to the better jobs bigger companies can offer them.
Let us examine the household survey employment numbers:
The number of missing jobs is falling at a very slow rate. In October 2010, the percentage of missing jobs was 13.73% and this October is down to 12.53%, or 1.20% over two years. This is
an average rate of missing jobs recovery by the economy as abused by Obama of 0.60% a year. At this rate, it will take us more than 14 more years to lower the missing job rate back to the 4.04% rate of January 2000. Obama's new normal economy is one that takes a total of 18 years to recover from a recession. His braked economy is actually mired in a GREAT DEPRESSION, that being the only historical precedent for an 18 year recovery period in American history.
One of Obama's favorite campaign claims is that he has created, note the hubris, 5,000,000 jobs. Once again, employers did not do it. No, the government did. At least if it was good. If it was bad, then businessmen did it. This is a matter of big government definition.
Actually, there are 144,039,000 employed Americans now and there were 143,338,000 million employed in George W. Bush's last full month as President in December 2008. So, there are only 701,000 more Americans employed now than at the start of the Obama presidency. This is only 14% of Obama's claim, but as he says, he cannot do 7th grade math.
Meanwhile there are 8,948,000 more working age civilians available for work now than there were in Bush's last month. The added 701,000 jobs distributed among the 8,948,000 new potential workers is enough to provide a job for 7.83% of them. Pathetic. That is an employment rate which is lower even than Obama's super-high unemployment rate overall is. But this is the new Obama Normal.
30 October 2012
Romney is Going to Win the Election
The outcome of the 2012 Presidential election will be decided in the six swing states in light gray in the electoral map below. It is interesting that four of them are in the Midwest.
Romney only needs 8 more electoral votes to win, since a tie of 269 votes each will be decided by the Republican House of Representatives. I believe that Romney will win at least four of these six swing states. If so, Romney will add between 38 and 64 electoral votes depending on which combination of four states he wins. But Romney needs to win only one of Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan or both Iowa and Nevada to win the election. There is even a possibility that Minnesota is in play with its 10 electoral votes enough for Romney to win.
If Romney sweeps all of these swing states, which is not highly likely, but is also not out of reach, the situation would be:
This would be a most wonderful reassurance that the American People might occasionally lose their marbles, but they have a tendency to relocate them eventually. The amount of red in the county by county results will then be startling.
As I have noted before, the polls have weighted their results much too heavily toward Democrats by assuming there are either many more of them than Republicans or by assuming they are more likely to go to the polls to vote. I believe that the Rasmussen and more recent Gallup attempts to identify the relative numbers of Democrats, Republicans, and Independent voters are very close to the actual case and the 2008 breakdown of voter affiliations are not applicable. There are more Republicans than Democrats now and they will go to the polls in larger numbers than the Democrats will.
Romney still has a large, typical Republican advantage with male voters and Obama's 2008 advantage with female voters has almost disappeared. Romney has a large advantage with Independent voters. Obama is hoping for more black and Hispanic voters in this election than in 2008. This is not going to happen. In fact, there will be fewer black and Hispanic voters in this election. They have been hit much harder by unemployment and some are concerned with Obama's stances on issues of religious belief. His percentage of black voters voting will be lower. Also, more Democrats than last time and more than usual will crossover and vote for Romney. Republicans have a tradition of less crossover voting for Democrats and fewer than usual will do so this time. 18 - 29 year olds still favor Obama heavily by 55% to 36% of likely voters, but 9% of likely voters in that group are undecided. Only 48% of these young voters say they will definitely vote and those voting for Romney are more likely to vote.
While the economy, ObamaCare, energy policies, the level of government spending, and the deficit will all cost Obama most heavily, the last of the undecided voters are being well pushed toward Romney by the Obama disgrace in failing to protect the Ambassador and others in the Benghazi consulate and then lying about the situation. Those still undecided will almost all vote for Romney. Consequently, it now appears that Romney will win 4 to 6% more of the popular vote than Obama. That will translate into a substantial win in the Electoral College vote.
Romney only needs 8 more electoral votes to win, since a tie of 269 votes each will be decided by the Republican House of Representatives. I believe that Romney will win at least four of these six swing states. If so, Romney will add between 38 and 64 electoral votes depending on which combination of four states he wins. But Romney needs to win only one of Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan or both Iowa and Nevada to win the election. There is even a possibility that Minnesota is in play with its 10 electoral votes enough for Romney to win.
If Romney sweeps all of these swing states, which is not highly likely, but is also not out of reach, the situation would be:
This would be a most wonderful reassurance that the American People might occasionally lose their marbles, but they have a tendency to relocate them eventually. The amount of red in the county by county results will then be startling.
As I have noted before, the polls have weighted their results much too heavily toward Democrats by assuming there are either many more of them than Republicans or by assuming they are more likely to go to the polls to vote. I believe that the Rasmussen and more recent Gallup attempts to identify the relative numbers of Democrats, Republicans, and Independent voters are very close to the actual case and the 2008 breakdown of voter affiliations are not applicable. There are more Republicans than Democrats now and they will go to the polls in larger numbers than the Democrats will.
Romney still has a large, typical Republican advantage with male voters and Obama's 2008 advantage with female voters has almost disappeared. Romney has a large advantage with Independent voters. Obama is hoping for more black and Hispanic voters in this election than in 2008. This is not going to happen. In fact, there will be fewer black and Hispanic voters in this election. They have been hit much harder by unemployment and some are concerned with Obama's stances on issues of religious belief. His percentage of black voters voting will be lower. Also, more Democrats than last time and more than usual will crossover and vote for Romney. Republicans have a tradition of less crossover voting for Democrats and fewer than usual will do so this time. 18 - 29 year olds still favor Obama heavily by 55% to 36% of likely voters, but 9% of likely voters in that group are undecided. Only 48% of these young voters say they will definitely vote and those voting for Romney are more likely to vote.
While the economy, ObamaCare, energy policies, the level of government spending, and the deficit will all cost Obama most heavily, the last of the undecided voters are being well pushed toward Romney by the Obama disgrace in failing to protect the Ambassador and others in the Benghazi consulate and then lying about the situation. Those still undecided will almost all vote for Romney. Consequently, it now appears that Romney will win 4 to 6% more of the popular vote than Obama. That will translate into a substantial win in the Electoral College vote.
The Election Choice: Is Another Human Being a Burden?
If, as the Progressive Elitists say, we are all our brother's, neighbors, and unknown countryman's keeper and that keeping is to be performed by government using mandatory taxation and forced labor, then every newborn baby is an added burden to everyone. In this view, the needs and the wishes of each new person become the command that forces each of us to act to satisfy those needs and wishes. With no regulating principle to limit which needs and wishes will be satisfied, these needs and wishes will make very heavy demands on limited resources. This perhaps heightens the tendency of Progressive Elitists to see each new human as a threat to the Earth, to nature, and to the environment.
Indeed, instead of the effort required by a man to produce what he needs and wants in voluntary cooperation with others in the free market being the limit on the use of resources, the Progressive Elitist is required to find other means to place limits on both the requirements for action on the part of others and upon the use of resources. There are two major such limits:
1) Political power and the jockeying of factions for control of government, whose monopoly on the use of force to compel action by others to satisfy the needs and wants of controlling factions is fought for with warlike intent and ferocity. This vicious fight for power to control always limited resources is rarely acknowledged by more gentle supporters.
2) Claims, commonly exaggerated, that the resources of the Earth are limited justifies limits on demands on the government to compel too much effort from others to satisfy greedy demands. Protection of the Earth, nature, and the environment are to become regulators of greed which the Progressive Elitists refuse to allow free associations for purposes of cooperation in the pursuit of values in the private sector to pursue. This is also used to argue against the efficiency of the private sector and Capitalism in providing for individual needs and wants with the claim that the private sector uses too many of the Earth's resources and violates nature. Nature is seen as excluding mankind. These limits seem more amenable to gentler souls than do those of the raw exercise of government power for special interests or factions, yet these limits become added tools for warlike factions in control of government.
Whatever the limits on efforts to satisfy the needs and wants of each of our countrymen by these two Progressive Elitist principles, each person is an added burden. Each newborn child has a long future of educational expenses from Kindergarten through the 12th grade and then perhaps in college. Any sickness or genetic defect is a burden on everyone else. If the adult does not prove ready to be productive enough to produce a large stream of tax revenues for the governments, then the adult is a burden on all. Inevitably, no matter what, each person is a strain on the Earth and Mother Nature. Each person presents complex needs and wants, with critical differences in the timing of these needs and wants, which lawmakers and bureaucrats cannot understand and provide for. The individuality of each person must be suppressed and modeled out of existence for such a state to function. The problems that result make each individual a sore spot to be resented by the lawmakers, bureaucrats, and voting Progressive Elitists.
In a rich and vibrant private sector with a highly limited government only protecting individual rights, individuals choose their own values based on their own assessments of their needs and wants. They then arrange their voluntary associations with others to make trades of time, effort, money, and favors to pursue their values. These trades are made only as each participant sees some kind of advantage in cooperation for himself. All such relationships contribute to the value we see in one another. Aside from a few murderers and street thieves, everyone has at least some positive value to us as an actual trader, a potential trader, or just someone in the incredibly complex hierarchies of trades and interactions that infuse our society who is almost certainly productive at some level. In such a society, we come to see everyone as a value to us. Those few worthy people down on their luck for a time or really, really unfortunate in the chance of genetic problems or disease, we want to help care for voluntarily because they are still a part of our society of valued individuals.
Not so in the society of the Progressive Elitist. The characteristic ObamaCare program is already rationing medical care in Medicaid and Medicare by refusing operations and expensive drugs to those over 70, who are seen as an excessive burden to society. After all, not only do such people burden society with their medical costs, but they also take Social Security money. They produce little in the way of a tax revenue stream now. Similarly, newborn babies with severe problems are to receive less care in the frank acknowledgment that they will burden society with many years of education expenses before they will be generators of a tax revenue stream. Progressive Elitism robs us of our joy in the lives of others. It rubs the fact of our being forced to serve them in our faces. It forces us to become sullen slaves to their needs and wants. It forces us to become angry combatants for our own needs and wants. Among our own needs and wants is the avoidance of having to provide for the needs or wants of others if only because the hours of our own days and lives are limited. The Progressive Elitist society is suffused with stress and resentment. Everyone else becomes a burden upon us.
In the election on 6 November, we will be faced with many choices to either choose to enthusiastically embrace the Progressive Elitist viewpoint of society as Obama and Biden do, or to make a choice that recognizes at least a substantial part of the value of a limited government and private sector society more consistent with the American Principle put forth in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution as Romney and Ryan do. We all need to decide whether we want to live in a society that makes nearly everyone else a value to us or one which makes nearly everyone else a burden to us. We need to decide whether we want to cooperate with others or whether we want to fight others for government power or for the limited resources of the Earth. This is the nature of the conflict between government limited to protecting our rights and socialist government which is supposed to provide for everyone's needs and wants. This is the nature of the rich and vibrant private sector choice and the big government choice. We must choose to recognize the fact of a complex and highly differentiated individuality or to refuse to see it. We have to decide whether we are pro-human or anti-human.
Indeed, instead of the effort required by a man to produce what he needs and wants in voluntary cooperation with others in the free market being the limit on the use of resources, the Progressive Elitist is required to find other means to place limits on both the requirements for action on the part of others and upon the use of resources. There are two major such limits:
1) Political power and the jockeying of factions for control of government, whose monopoly on the use of force to compel action by others to satisfy the needs and wants of controlling factions is fought for with warlike intent and ferocity. This vicious fight for power to control always limited resources is rarely acknowledged by more gentle supporters.
2) Claims, commonly exaggerated, that the resources of the Earth are limited justifies limits on demands on the government to compel too much effort from others to satisfy greedy demands. Protection of the Earth, nature, and the environment are to become regulators of greed which the Progressive Elitists refuse to allow free associations for purposes of cooperation in the pursuit of values in the private sector to pursue. This is also used to argue against the efficiency of the private sector and Capitalism in providing for individual needs and wants with the claim that the private sector uses too many of the Earth's resources and violates nature. Nature is seen as excluding mankind. These limits seem more amenable to gentler souls than do those of the raw exercise of government power for special interests or factions, yet these limits become added tools for warlike factions in control of government.
Whatever the limits on efforts to satisfy the needs and wants of each of our countrymen by these two Progressive Elitist principles, each person is an added burden. Each newborn child has a long future of educational expenses from Kindergarten through the 12th grade and then perhaps in college. Any sickness or genetic defect is a burden on everyone else. If the adult does not prove ready to be productive enough to produce a large stream of tax revenues for the governments, then the adult is a burden on all. Inevitably, no matter what, each person is a strain on the Earth and Mother Nature. Each person presents complex needs and wants, with critical differences in the timing of these needs and wants, which lawmakers and bureaucrats cannot understand and provide for. The individuality of each person must be suppressed and modeled out of existence for such a state to function. The problems that result make each individual a sore spot to be resented by the lawmakers, bureaucrats, and voting Progressive Elitists.
In a rich and vibrant private sector with a highly limited government only protecting individual rights, individuals choose their own values based on their own assessments of their needs and wants. They then arrange their voluntary associations with others to make trades of time, effort, money, and favors to pursue their values. These trades are made only as each participant sees some kind of advantage in cooperation for himself. All such relationships contribute to the value we see in one another. Aside from a few murderers and street thieves, everyone has at least some positive value to us as an actual trader, a potential trader, or just someone in the incredibly complex hierarchies of trades and interactions that infuse our society who is almost certainly productive at some level. In such a society, we come to see everyone as a value to us. Those few worthy people down on their luck for a time or really, really unfortunate in the chance of genetic problems or disease, we want to help care for voluntarily because they are still a part of our society of valued individuals.
Not so in the society of the Progressive Elitist. The characteristic ObamaCare program is already rationing medical care in Medicaid and Medicare by refusing operations and expensive drugs to those over 70, who are seen as an excessive burden to society. After all, not only do such people burden society with their medical costs, but they also take Social Security money. They produce little in the way of a tax revenue stream now. Similarly, newborn babies with severe problems are to receive less care in the frank acknowledgment that they will burden society with many years of education expenses before they will be generators of a tax revenue stream. Progressive Elitism robs us of our joy in the lives of others. It rubs the fact of our being forced to serve them in our faces. It forces us to become sullen slaves to their needs and wants. It forces us to become angry combatants for our own needs and wants. Among our own needs and wants is the avoidance of having to provide for the needs or wants of others if only because the hours of our own days and lives are limited. The Progressive Elitist society is suffused with stress and resentment. Everyone else becomes a burden upon us.
In the election on 6 November, we will be faced with many choices to either choose to enthusiastically embrace the Progressive Elitist viewpoint of society as Obama and Biden do, or to make a choice that recognizes at least a substantial part of the value of a limited government and private sector society more consistent with the American Principle put forth in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution as Romney and Ryan do. We all need to decide whether we want to live in a society that makes nearly everyone else a value to us or one which makes nearly everyone else a burden to us. We need to decide whether we want to cooperate with others or whether we want to fight others for government power or for the limited resources of the Earth. This is the nature of the conflict between government limited to protecting our rights and socialist government which is supposed to provide for everyone's needs and wants. This is the nature of the rich and vibrant private sector choice and the big government choice. We must choose to recognize the fact of a complex and highly differentiated individuality or to refuse to see it. We have to decide whether we are pro-human or anti-human.
29 October 2012
Denying Islamic Terrorism and the Death of Americans in Benghazi
Obama has a long-standing inability to acknowledge Islamic terrorism and consequently has severe weaknesses in dealing with it. That he has a wrongheaded determination to refuse to identify it was long ago made clear by the failure to designate the attack on the military recruiting station near Little Rock, Arkansas as a terrorist attack, despite the knowledge that the attacker was trained by jihadists in Somalia and claimed that he performed the attack and murders as a jihadist act. This was followed by the designation of Major Hassan's terrible attack at Ft. Hood as an instance of workplace violence. Obama claims that no Islamic terrorism has occurred on American soil under his watch!
Obama's inability to recognize and deal with the reality is a result both of Progressive Elitist political correctness and his own upbringing as a Muslim. Obama clearly has a strong allegiance to that faith, though his viewpoint is a hybrid of Islam and many western influences, so let me make it clear that I am not saying that he is essentially and at his core a believer in Islam. There is, however, much about Islam that he does admire and even seems to long for. I do not share his admiration or his longing, either for Islam or for Progressive Elitism.
Obama refuses to see that violence as a means to spread Islam and to cower those who are unbelievers is central to Islam. Muhammad made it a central policy of Islam as soon as he and his followers were powerful enough to overcome those around him in the primitive Saudi pennisula of the 7th Century. Before that time of strength, he often spoke of peaceful coexistence, but that was clearly just a strategy to bide his time until he was strong enough to take what he wanted by force. Islam is perhaps the religion most compatible with a vision of strong and relatively unlimited government. One can well imagine how this religious viewpoint meshes with Obama's Progressive Elitism to make him a largely lawless President by the standards of American law and our American Principle of legitimate government limited to the protection of our equal, sovereign individual rights to life, liberty, property, the ownership of our own minds, bodies, and labor, and to the pursuit of our personal happiness.
Despite months of general chaos followed by months of mounting attacks focused on western groups in Benghazi, the Obama administration so badly wanted to pretend that his policies in this Muslim area were a success, that only we Americans officially ignored the reality on the ground. Other western groups pulled out, including the British after an attack upon their ambassador in Benghazi. The commander of an American security force asked for reinforcements and was denied them. The Ambassador to Libya repeatedly noted the lack of sufficient security forces. The Obama State Department then actually pulled out a large part of the American security force and left the Embassy and Consulate staffs much weaker yet. A couple of attempts to bomb the Benghazi American Consulate were ignored. The Ambassador was nearly frantic in his pleas for more security, yet bravely determined to complete his mission, which was apparently largely to get the many weapons left by the fall of Gaddafi under responsible control.
The attack on the American Consulate began about 9:40 PM and fighting continued either there or in a CIA Annex about 1 mile away until at least 4 AM. [Update 3 Nov: It is now known they were under attack until 5:26 AM.] Throughout this time, Americans under attack or nearby were in communication with Washington. A drone was quickly dispatched to fly overhead and watch the fighting. The Obama administration will not say whether the drone and its replacement were armed or not. [Update: The drone was unarmed and arrived at 11:11 PM.] After a long period in which Obama would say nothing about what he knew, he now claims that he pledged whatever assistance was needed for the defense of the Americans under fire. Only a small security group at the Embassy at Tripoli was flown into the Benghazi airport and they were kept waiting for Libyan transportation for 45 minutes after arrival. [Update: The flight was 45 minutes long. They arrived at the airport in Benghazi at 11:15 PM and cannot leave the airport there until 4:30 AM.] A major security force in Sicily, Italy that could have been brought in was never moved in. They perhaps might not have been able to arrive fast enough to save the American Ambassador Chris Stevens and Sean Smith who died at the Consulate, but they surely could have been brought in to eliminate the mortar that killed Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty at 4 AM. [Update: The time of their death was incorrectly reported. The mortar attack did not begin until 5:15 AM. The first two mortars missed the target and the next three hit the roof, killing Woods and Doherty. The attack was over by 5:26 AM.] They had previously marked the mortar with laser only needed a gunship, aircraft, or maybe an armed drone to take it out. [This was also an error of earlier reports. They had marked some groups of attackers earlier, but had not marked the mortar. Libyan relief forces finally arrived at 6:00 AM.]
Their requests for support were denied, yet CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood claims no requests were denied. Then Secretary of Defense Leon Panneta told us that the situation on the ground in Benghazi was too unknown to send in help! Yet, Obama claims to have pledged whatever help was needed. Indeed. What were the caveats he attached to that pledge which he is not telling us? It is clear that neither he nor Panneta nor Clinton will tell us how he pretended to provide the support which he did not provide until after the 6 November election.
The initial Obama plan to cover up his ignoring the security needs of the Ambassador and his American staff in Libya so that he could pass Libya off as a success of his policies and keep evidence of a resurgence of al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist organizations out of the news was to pretend that a spontaneous street protest against a video made in American which was unfavorable to Muhammad was the cause of an attack, which the administration could not have had any warning about. There was no such demonstration and Washington knew before midnight that an al Qaeda affiliated organization had launched a coordinated and powerful attack against our Consulate and Annex. The story about the street demonstration and the video protest was entirely a cover-up and an effort to mislead the American People prior to the election. Obama long kept it hidden that he had even been informed about the attack and had issued some kind of order to have security forces provided for the protection of our Americans at the Consulate and Annex in Benghazi. We would all like to read that supposed order.
I expect the State Department and the administration had been unhappy with Ambassador Stevens as the nagging messenger that all was not well in Libya and that American security there for the Benghazi Consulate and for the Tripoli Embassy was inadequate. I would not be surprised given the childish nature of the Obama administration that they wanted to shoot the messenger themselves. In that light, these childish bureaucrats and politicians may well have made the decision not only to deny the Ambassador more security forces when he had earlier requested them, but to also remove a large part of the force he had had there.
As for the Panetta excuse that the situation was too unknown to send in the highly trained Special Operations forces, that excuse makes sense when you have time available. If the Ambassador had been captured and was being held for ransom, or some such case, taking more time to understand all you could about the forces holding him and the lay of the land might well make sense. This however was an active firefight. Time was not available. A force had invaded the United States of America by overrunning our Consulate. They had killed Americans or were clearly trying to, depending upon which moment for decision we are talking about. The fact that the fighting lasted 6:20 [7:46] hours, says that the forces arrayed against us were not insurmountable. A gunship alone would have made all the difference. The two Special Operations Forces that could have been brought in would have made a world of difference.
Obama believes that America should basically turn the other cheek to Islamic terrorists. Muslims have a huge disdain for such weakness. They have a macho culture, altough it is a weak macho culture when actually challenged by determined and rational Americans. The way to control their violent impulses against Americans is to embarrass them when they make their weak pretenses of being manly men with violence. The few Americans present in Benghazi fought bravely and several died as real men would. Their President did not prove a worthy Commander-in-Chief however. Obama was a shrinking violet who let these brave Americans down. He will do all he can to delay that investigation into what happened that he promised when he seemed not to even know what part he had played in our ineffectual response to this terrorist attack on the United States of America. We need a firmer man in the position of Commander-in-Chief. We need someone who can see things as they are, rather than as he wishes they were.
Obama's inability to recognize and deal with the reality is a result both of Progressive Elitist political correctness and his own upbringing as a Muslim. Obama clearly has a strong allegiance to that faith, though his viewpoint is a hybrid of Islam and many western influences, so let me make it clear that I am not saying that he is essentially and at his core a believer in Islam. There is, however, much about Islam that he does admire and even seems to long for. I do not share his admiration or his longing, either for Islam or for Progressive Elitism.
Obama refuses to see that violence as a means to spread Islam and to cower those who are unbelievers is central to Islam. Muhammad made it a central policy of Islam as soon as he and his followers were powerful enough to overcome those around him in the primitive Saudi pennisula of the 7th Century. Before that time of strength, he often spoke of peaceful coexistence, but that was clearly just a strategy to bide his time until he was strong enough to take what he wanted by force. Islam is perhaps the religion most compatible with a vision of strong and relatively unlimited government. One can well imagine how this religious viewpoint meshes with Obama's Progressive Elitism to make him a largely lawless President by the standards of American law and our American Principle of legitimate government limited to the protection of our equal, sovereign individual rights to life, liberty, property, the ownership of our own minds, bodies, and labor, and to the pursuit of our personal happiness.
Despite months of general chaos followed by months of mounting attacks focused on western groups in Benghazi, the Obama administration so badly wanted to pretend that his policies in this Muslim area were a success, that only we Americans officially ignored the reality on the ground. Other western groups pulled out, including the British after an attack upon their ambassador in Benghazi. The commander of an American security force asked for reinforcements and was denied them. The Ambassador to Libya repeatedly noted the lack of sufficient security forces. The Obama State Department then actually pulled out a large part of the American security force and left the Embassy and Consulate staffs much weaker yet. A couple of attempts to bomb the Benghazi American Consulate were ignored. The Ambassador was nearly frantic in his pleas for more security, yet bravely determined to complete his mission, which was apparently largely to get the many weapons left by the fall of Gaddafi under responsible control.
The attack on the American Consulate began about 9:40 PM and fighting continued either there or in a CIA Annex about 1 mile away until at least 4 AM. [Update 3 Nov: It is now known they were under attack until 5:26 AM.] Throughout this time, Americans under attack or nearby were in communication with Washington. A drone was quickly dispatched to fly overhead and watch the fighting. The Obama administration will not say whether the drone and its replacement were armed or not. [Update: The drone was unarmed and arrived at 11:11 PM.] After a long period in which Obama would say nothing about what he knew, he now claims that he pledged whatever assistance was needed for the defense of the Americans under fire. Only a small security group at the Embassy at Tripoli was flown into the Benghazi airport and they were kept waiting for Libyan transportation for 45 minutes after arrival. [Update: The flight was 45 minutes long. They arrived at the airport in Benghazi at 11:15 PM and cannot leave the airport there until 4:30 AM.] A major security force in Sicily, Italy that could have been brought in was never moved in. They perhaps might not have been able to arrive fast enough to save the American Ambassador Chris Stevens and Sean Smith who died at the Consulate, but they surely could have been brought in to eliminate the mortar that killed Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty at 4 AM. [Update: The time of their death was incorrectly reported. The mortar attack did not begin until 5:15 AM. The first two mortars missed the target and the next three hit the roof, killing Woods and Doherty. The attack was over by 5:26 AM.] They had previously marked the mortar with laser only needed a gunship, aircraft, or maybe an armed drone to take it out. [This was also an error of earlier reports. They had marked some groups of attackers earlier, but had not marked the mortar. Libyan relief forces finally arrived at 6:00 AM.]
Their requests for support were denied, yet CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood claims no requests were denied. Then Secretary of Defense Leon Panneta told us that the situation on the ground in Benghazi was too unknown to send in help! Yet, Obama claims to have pledged whatever help was needed. Indeed. What were the caveats he attached to that pledge which he is not telling us? It is clear that neither he nor Panneta nor Clinton will tell us how he pretended to provide the support which he did not provide until after the 6 November election.
The initial Obama plan to cover up his ignoring the security needs of the Ambassador and his American staff in Libya so that he could pass Libya off as a success of his policies and keep evidence of a resurgence of al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist organizations out of the news was to pretend that a spontaneous street protest against a video made in American which was unfavorable to Muhammad was the cause of an attack, which the administration could not have had any warning about. There was no such demonstration and Washington knew before midnight that an al Qaeda affiliated organization had launched a coordinated and powerful attack against our Consulate and Annex. The story about the street demonstration and the video protest was entirely a cover-up and an effort to mislead the American People prior to the election. Obama long kept it hidden that he had even been informed about the attack and had issued some kind of order to have security forces provided for the protection of our Americans at the Consulate and Annex in Benghazi. We would all like to read that supposed order.
I expect the State Department and the administration had been unhappy with Ambassador Stevens as the nagging messenger that all was not well in Libya and that American security there for the Benghazi Consulate and for the Tripoli Embassy was inadequate. I would not be surprised given the childish nature of the Obama administration that they wanted to shoot the messenger themselves. In that light, these childish bureaucrats and politicians may well have made the decision not only to deny the Ambassador more security forces when he had earlier requested them, but to also remove a large part of the force he had had there.
As for the Panetta excuse that the situation was too unknown to send in the highly trained Special Operations forces, that excuse makes sense when you have time available. If the Ambassador had been captured and was being held for ransom, or some such case, taking more time to understand all you could about the forces holding him and the lay of the land might well make sense. This however was an active firefight. Time was not available. A force had invaded the United States of America by overrunning our Consulate. They had killed Americans or were clearly trying to, depending upon which moment for decision we are talking about. The fact that the fighting lasted 6:20 [7:46] hours, says that the forces arrayed against us were not insurmountable. A gunship alone would have made all the difference. The two Special Operations Forces that could have been brought in would have made a world of difference.
Obama believes that America should basically turn the other cheek to Islamic terrorists. Muslims have a huge disdain for such weakness. They have a macho culture, altough it is a weak macho culture when actually challenged by determined and rational Americans. The way to control their violent impulses against Americans is to embarrass them when they make their weak pretenses of being manly men with violence. The few Americans present in Benghazi fought bravely and several died as real men would. Their President did not prove a worthy Commander-in-Chief however. Obama was a shrinking violet who let these brave Americans down. He will do all he can to delay that investigation into what happened that he promised when he seemed not to even know what part he had played in our ineffectual response to this terrorist attack on the United States of America. We need a firmer man in the position of Commander-in-Chief. We need someone who can see things as they are, rather than as he wishes they were.
28 October 2012
American Thinker Article Quoting Me on Principled vs. Pragmatic Government
While this is not new news, I just became aware of an American Thinker article called Government of the Elites, by the Elites and for the Elites by Monty Pelerin with a significant quote from my post entitled Principled Versus Pragmatic Government. I recommend that you read the Monty Pelerin article and re-read my article and think about them prior to this election.
I am not quite convinced that a collapse of government is required to re-set government as principled, limited government as Monty Pelerin concludes, but given the bias toward pragmatic government and against principled government now thoroughly imbuing our education system and most of the media, the road back to principled government is a very difficult and perhaps even an unlikely one. Aspects of the Tea Party Movement and the increased awareness of the thinking of Ayn Rand offer us some hope that a revival of demand for principled and limited government might be eventually embraced by the majority of the People. I hope we can avoid that very painful collapse of government yet, but we very well may not.
I am not quite convinced that a collapse of government is required to re-set government as principled, limited government as Monty Pelerin concludes, but given the bias toward pragmatic government and against principled government now thoroughly imbuing our education system and most of the media, the road back to principled government is a very difficult and perhaps even an unlikely one. Aspects of the Tea Party Movement and the increased awareness of the thinking of Ayn Rand offer us some hope that a revival of demand for principled and limited government might be eventually embraced by the majority of the People. I hope we can avoid that very painful collapse of government yet, but we very well may not.
27 October 2012
Obama Calls for More Spending on Education, But Does More Spending Improve Education?
In the last debate, Obama said that a cornerstone to recovery from the never-ending Great Socialist Recession was an increase in federal spending on education. This he says is critical to improving the economy.
Now, we can all agree that an American population of thinking individuals with a broad and accurate knowledge base and excellent problem-solving skills would be a major economic factor. One can even imagine an education system based on sound principles which might do a better job of educating the People if it had more money. However, the present American education system gives no evidence that spending more money on education has any beneficial effect upon the knowledge base of Americans and on their development of critical thinking skills. Let us examine the recent history of total spending on education:
Since 1981 there has been an almost 6-fold increase in education spending in the U.S. To be sure, if we believe that education spending should be proportional to the GDP, then this is only a 23% increase in spending as a proportion of GDP. In 1981, education spending was about 6.4% of GDP and in 2010 it was 7.9% of GDP. However, the student population has not grown at anything like the rate of the growth in GDP, so one should be able to expect an equal level of educational results with a decreasing fraction of the GDP being devoted to education. The trend is clearly in the wrong direction.
There are very fundamental reasons why the massively increased spending on education and on a per pupil basis has not resulted in any significant increase in student knowledge and thinking skills. In almost every community, the local school labor unions assemble a slate of Board of Education members who appear to have good education credentials and their election is backed by lots of union money. This slate wins almost every position on the school boards. Because of this and the power of the teachers unions in also greatly influencing the election of city and county officials, the schools are managed for the benefit of the teachers labor unions, not for the education of the children. Increasing the pay and benefits of teachers who are blue-collar union members unable to even negotiate their own pay and benefits with their employer, guarantees that few of them will have the teaching skills, knowledge, self-confidence, and managerial skills needed by a professional educator. Union members are not picked and not rewarded for their teaching professionalism. Of course, as so often happens when a con is being performed, teachers present bogus certifications proclaiming them experts in teaching.
We have government-run schools specifically because Progressives saw them as a means to indoctrinate children to believe that big and socialist government was needed and moral. Of course a government-run school could be counted upon to advance the never-ending quest of governments for power. Such government schools could be counted upon to subvert the American Principle that government should be highly limited and only act to protect the equal, sovereign rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, the ownership of one's own mind, body, and labor, and to the pursuit of personal happiness. Thus, government-run schools have become increasingly anti-American even as they became the dominant force in the education of American children. The general viewpoint of American government-run school teachers is well-aligned with the socialist and extreme environmentalist viewpoints of Obama. It is opposed to a healthy and robust private sector in which Americans should be free to exercise their freedom of association to cooperate with others to achieve their self-chosen goals. The government-run schools are generally bastions of Progressivism and opponents of Capitalism.
Despite the large increases in education spending, we have not seen an increased ability of American young people to perceive reality and understand it. In fact, they are more and more removed from reality and less and less capable of performing real productive work in the private sector without more and more massive training efforts by private businesses. Few students graduate with a proper respect for those with the skills and motivation to produce in our society. Few are able to communicate well and solve problems well. Despite our spending more and more and spending far more of our GDP on education than does almost any other country, we keep losing ground to other countries in rankings of educational attainment. It could not be more clear that we are throwing our education dollars into a black hole.
Marcos Cordero in an article called The Link Between Unemployment Rates and the Lack of Qualified Professionals in America notes that
A very fundamental reform of American education is desperately needed and it will not come from government. Governments are only eager to increase their power and politicians are easily bought by the massive teachers union money accumulated as the government automatically deducts union dues from teachers paychecks. Labor unions and government increasingly see their interests to be largely in common and the interests of students and good governance are not now able to compete with them. Only when the People understand these problems and massively rebel will there be any real hope of fixing this problem.
But most of the American People are largely in a feel good mode on education. Because labor union members provide children with inflated grades, most parents think their child is doing well in school and they are inclined to assume that that means that they are actually learning. The labor union policy of easy grading and of placing few demands on students lulls the parents and students to sleep. Until parents and students wake up to the fact that they are being poorly educated and heavily indoctrinated in socialism and extreme environmentalism, America will continue to go downhill. Obama is happy to push us down that hill.
Now, we can all agree that an American population of thinking individuals with a broad and accurate knowledge base and excellent problem-solving skills would be a major economic factor. One can even imagine an education system based on sound principles which might do a better job of educating the People if it had more money. However, the present American education system gives no evidence that spending more money on education has any beneficial effect upon the knowledge base of Americans and on their development of critical thinking skills. Let us examine the recent history of total spending on education:
Since 1981 there has been an almost 6-fold increase in education spending in the U.S. To be sure, if we believe that education spending should be proportional to the GDP, then this is only a 23% increase in spending as a proportion of GDP. In 1981, education spending was about 6.4% of GDP and in 2010 it was 7.9% of GDP. However, the student population has not grown at anything like the rate of the growth in GDP, so one should be able to expect an equal level of educational results with a decreasing fraction of the GDP being devoted to education. The trend is clearly in the wrong direction.
There are very fundamental reasons why the massively increased spending on education and on a per pupil basis has not resulted in any significant increase in student knowledge and thinking skills. In almost every community, the local school labor unions assemble a slate of Board of Education members who appear to have good education credentials and their election is backed by lots of union money. This slate wins almost every position on the school boards. Because of this and the power of the teachers unions in also greatly influencing the election of city and county officials, the schools are managed for the benefit of the teachers labor unions, not for the education of the children. Increasing the pay and benefits of teachers who are blue-collar union members unable to even negotiate their own pay and benefits with their employer, guarantees that few of them will have the teaching skills, knowledge, self-confidence, and managerial skills needed by a professional educator. Union members are not picked and not rewarded for their teaching professionalism. Of course, as so often happens when a con is being performed, teachers present bogus certifications proclaiming them experts in teaching.
We have government-run schools specifically because Progressives saw them as a means to indoctrinate children to believe that big and socialist government was needed and moral. Of course a government-run school could be counted upon to advance the never-ending quest of governments for power. Such government schools could be counted upon to subvert the American Principle that government should be highly limited and only act to protect the equal, sovereign rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, the ownership of one's own mind, body, and labor, and to the pursuit of personal happiness. Thus, government-run schools have become increasingly anti-American even as they became the dominant force in the education of American children. The general viewpoint of American government-run school teachers is well-aligned with the socialist and extreme environmentalist viewpoints of Obama. It is opposed to a healthy and robust private sector in which Americans should be free to exercise their freedom of association to cooperate with others to achieve their self-chosen goals. The government-run schools are generally bastions of Progressivism and opponents of Capitalism.
Despite the large increases in education spending, we have not seen an increased ability of American young people to perceive reality and understand it. In fact, they are more and more removed from reality and less and less capable of performing real productive work in the private sector without more and more massive training efforts by private businesses. Few students graduate with a proper respect for those with the skills and motivation to produce in our society. Few are able to communicate well and solve problems well. Despite our spending more and more and spending far more of our GDP on education than does almost any other country, we keep losing ground to other countries in rankings of educational attainment. It could not be more clear that we are throwing our education dollars into a black hole.
Marcos Cordero in an article called The Link Between Unemployment Rates and the Lack of Qualified Professionals in America notes that
The Defense Department found that 75 percent of Americans age 17 to 24 are not qualified to serve in the armed forces. In fact, 30 percent of the high school graduates who take the Armed Forces Qualification Test, a test of basic reading and math skills, fail it.
A very fundamental reform of American education is desperately needed and it will not come from government. Governments are only eager to increase their power and politicians are easily bought by the massive teachers union money accumulated as the government automatically deducts union dues from teachers paychecks. Labor unions and government increasingly see their interests to be largely in common and the interests of students and good governance are not now able to compete with them. Only when the People understand these problems and massively rebel will there be any real hope of fixing this problem.
But most of the American People are largely in a feel good mode on education. Because labor union members provide children with inflated grades, most parents think their child is doing well in school and they are inclined to assume that that means that they are actually learning. The labor union policy of easy grading and of placing few demands on students lulls the parents and students to sleep. Until parents and students wake up to the fact that they are being poorly educated and heavily indoctrinated in socialism and extreme environmentalism, America will continue to go downhill. Obama is happy to push us down that hill.
26 October 2012
The 1920s Whose Economic Policies Obama Dislikes
In the last debate with Mitt Romney, Obama said, "When it comes to our foreign
policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the
1980s, just like the social policies of the 1950s and the
economic policies of the 1920s." Let us review the economic policies of the 1920s a bit. We will learn some very important lessons.
Amity Shlaes called Obama out on this. She notes that real GDP grew by an average of 4% a year in the 1920s. High unemployment in 1921 at 11.7% was brought down to 2.4% in 1923 while cutting federal spending. In time, government spending as a percentage of real GDP was cut in half. 80,000 patents a year were being issued on average in the 1920s, which was not again matched until the 1960s. The 1920s were a decade of growth in technology and for the economy generally.
Now, Obama can not abide by cuts in federal spending. President Harding cut tax rates as advised by Andrew Mellon, and we know that Obama greatly dislikes that idea. The income tax marginal rate under the bloated government of Woodrow Wilson for those with an income of $100,000 or more was 60% when Harding took office in 1921. Under Wilson, those with an income of $1 million or more had paid a marginal tax rate of 77%. The marginal tax rate for those with income over $100,000 was lowered in 1922, 1923, 1924, and then again in 1925 under President Coolidge, with a final marginal rate of 25%, until 1929 when it was dropped to 24%. Not only did the economy grow well as noted, but the share of income taxes paid by those with incomes of $100,000 or more steadily and rapidly increased from 1923 to the end of the decade. The total amount of income tax paid by these higher income taxpayers increased rapidly also. In 1920, those making over $100,000 a year paid 29.9% of all income taxes. In 1928, they paid 61.3% of all income tax collected.
Income tax revenues from those making $10,000 or less decreased greatly and stayed much lower throughout the decade. For those making $25,000 to $100,000, very wealthy people then, the collected tax revenues went down considerably before rising later in the decade to about the level at the start of the decade. See Tax Rates and Tax Revenue: The Mellon Income Tax Cuts of the 1920s by Veronique de Rugy of the Cato Institute. The fact that total income taxes decreased somewhat for several years before growing back to levels exceeding that of the start of the decade was fine because the Republican Presidents Harding and Coolidge reduced the size of the government considerably.
Arthur Laffer and other supply side economists have often said that the Mellon tax cuts resulted in both economic growth and an increase in tax revenues. Actually, with such severe tax cuts for all income tax brackets, this is not a sufficiently accurate portrayal of what happened. However, the income tax revenue collected from those with incomes over $100,000 more than doubled! Large tax cuts for higher earners result in large tax revenue increases because these taxpayers are much more likely to devote great effort to avoiding paying high income tax rates, including exercising their greater ability to retire early or simply to work fewer hours. They are also more likely to invest their money in businesses when taxed at lower rates, causing the economy to grow more rapidly, which also adds more to both income tax total revenues in time, but also to other types of taxes as people generally earn and spend more.
It is an interesting fact that if high earners were taxed at lower marginal tax rates than lower earners are, total revenues collected by the government by the income tax would increase and increase specifically from the higher earners. There is even a very good moral argument that this is the way things should be. Government legitimately serves only to protect our equal, sovereign individual rights from those who would initiate the use of force to deprive people of their rights. If one man earns 10 times what another man earns, does it really cost government 10 times as much to protect the rights of the bigger earner? I do not think so. Some legitimate costs of government overall scale with the population, some with the area of the country, and some with its GDP. The area of the U.S. is not changing and the population is growing at a rate of only about 1% a year. Only a fraction of the legitimate costs of government are left as proportional to the GDP. Total government spending should increase at a rate greater than that of population growth, but less than that of the GDP. For both moral reasons and for the purpose of maximizing tax revenues, marginal tax rates should decrease with higher income rather than increase. Such a tax scheme would guarantee that everyone's effective and marginal tax rates could be reduced with time.
Thus we see that the current highly progressive income tax scheme serves only an ideological purpose of egalitarianism. It makes the primary purpose of the income tax code that of punishing higher income earners, rather than maximizing the income of the government with a minimum of harm to the People. It sacrifices economic growth. It sacrifices maximizing income tax revenues at minimal pain. It means that those many tax revenues that grow with the economy will increase more slowly. But this highly irrational progressive income tax system is much beloved by Obama. Therefore, it should be no surprise that Obama hates the tax and economic policies of the 1920s. Rational Americans should learn from that period of history and at the least greatly reduce the progressive marginal tax rates of the present insane system. If we had the wisdom to go further and adopt an income tax code that is regressive, we would all benefit greatly in relatively short order.
Amity Shlaes called Obama out on this. She notes that real GDP grew by an average of 4% a year in the 1920s. High unemployment in 1921 at 11.7% was brought down to 2.4% in 1923 while cutting federal spending. In time, government spending as a percentage of real GDP was cut in half. 80,000 patents a year were being issued on average in the 1920s, which was not again matched until the 1960s. The 1920s were a decade of growth in technology and for the economy generally.
Now, Obama can not abide by cuts in federal spending. President Harding cut tax rates as advised by Andrew Mellon, and we know that Obama greatly dislikes that idea. The income tax marginal rate under the bloated government of Woodrow Wilson for those with an income of $100,000 or more was 60% when Harding took office in 1921. Under Wilson, those with an income of $1 million or more had paid a marginal tax rate of 77%. The marginal tax rate for those with income over $100,000 was lowered in 1922, 1923, 1924, and then again in 1925 under President Coolidge, with a final marginal rate of 25%, until 1929 when it was dropped to 24%. Not only did the economy grow well as noted, but the share of income taxes paid by those with incomes of $100,000 or more steadily and rapidly increased from 1923 to the end of the decade. The total amount of income tax paid by these higher income taxpayers increased rapidly also. In 1920, those making over $100,000 a year paid 29.9% of all income taxes. In 1928, they paid 61.3% of all income tax collected.
Income tax revenues from those making $10,000 or less decreased greatly and stayed much lower throughout the decade. For those making $25,000 to $100,000, very wealthy people then, the collected tax revenues went down considerably before rising later in the decade to about the level at the start of the decade. See Tax Rates and Tax Revenue: The Mellon Income Tax Cuts of the 1920s by Veronique de Rugy of the Cato Institute. The fact that total income taxes decreased somewhat for several years before growing back to levels exceeding that of the start of the decade was fine because the Republican Presidents Harding and Coolidge reduced the size of the government considerably.
Arthur Laffer and other supply side economists have often said that the Mellon tax cuts resulted in both economic growth and an increase in tax revenues. Actually, with such severe tax cuts for all income tax brackets, this is not a sufficiently accurate portrayal of what happened. However, the income tax revenue collected from those with incomes over $100,000 more than doubled! Large tax cuts for higher earners result in large tax revenue increases because these taxpayers are much more likely to devote great effort to avoiding paying high income tax rates, including exercising their greater ability to retire early or simply to work fewer hours. They are also more likely to invest their money in businesses when taxed at lower rates, causing the economy to grow more rapidly, which also adds more to both income tax total revenues in time, but also to other types of taxes as people generally earn and spend more.
It is an interesting fact that if high earners were taxed at lower marginal tax rates than lower earners are, total revenues collected by the government by the income tax would increase and increase specifically from the higher earners. There is even a very good moral argument that this is the way things should be. Government legitimately serves only to protect our equal, sovereign individual rights from those who would initiate the use of force to deprive people of their rights. If one man earns 10 times what another man earns, does it really cost government 10 times as much to protect the rights of the bigger earner? I do not think so. Some legitimate costs of government overall scale with the population, some with the area of the country, and some with its GDP. The area of the U.S. is not changing and the population is growing at a rate of only about 1% a year. Only a fraction of the legitimate costs of government are left as proportional to the GDP. Total government spending should increase at a rate greater than that of population growth, but less than that of the GDP. For both moral reasons and for the purpose of maximizing tax revenues, marginal tax rates should decrease with higher income rather than increase. Such a tax scheme would guarantee that everyone's effective and marginal tax rates could be reduced with time.
Thus we see that the current highly progressive income tax scheme serves only an ideological purpose of egalitarianism. It makes the primary purpose of the income tax code that of punishing higher income earners, rather than maximizing the income of the government with a minimum of harm to the People. It sacrifices economic growth. It sacrifices maximizing income tax revenues at minimal pain. It means that those many tax revenues that grow with the economy will increase more slowly. But this highly irrational progressive income tax system is much beloved by Obama. Therefore, it should be no surprise that Obama hates the tax and economic policies of the 1920s. Rational Americans should learn from that period of history and at the least greatly reduce the progressive marginal tax rates of the present insane system. If we had the wisdom to go further and adopt an income tax code that is regressive, we would all benefit greatly in relatively short order.
24 October 2012
Obama's Glass House: His Investments Abroad
Obama and Biden like to claim that Bain Capital had the companies it invested in make investments abroad, especially in China or Mexico. It turns out that they count heavily on the main stream leftist media to protect their glass house from stone throwers.
Thanks to Obama's insistence that the government take a big stake in the bankrupt GM after its restructuring as a government and union owned company, it is fully fair to look at its investments abroad if one is going to cast aspersions on those of Bain Capital abroad.
According to China Daily, GM is expanding its investment in China from its current $1 billion a year to $1.5 billion a year to make a total investment in China's 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015) of $7 billion. GM hopes to increase its sales in China from 2.35 million vehicles in 2010 to 5 million by 2015. To do this, it is designing and developing new models in China. GM production plants in China are joint ventures with the Chinese Communist Government.
GM announced in 2011 the investment of $540 million in a plant in Mexico to make engines. In July of this year, it announced the planned investment of $420 million in two factories to make the Chevrolet Trax and full-sized trucks.
How about Obama's promise to create American jobs of the future in green energy? This effort was promoted by Section 48C Advanced Energy Manufacturing Tax Credits. 41% of its awards went to foreign-based companies who were awarded an average of $20 million compared to an average of $11 million for U.S.-based companies! 17 of the 25 foreign-based companies receiving Obama awards are or have plans to set up wind or solar manufacturing facilities in low-wage countries. Those 17 foreign-based companies manufacturing in low-wage countries accounted for $406 million, so a super premium award averaging $23.9 million goes to those manufacturing in low-wage countries. Six of the U.S.-based companies with awards are also planning to manufacture their products in low-wage countries.
As almost everyone now knows, Obama only picks the loser green energy companies for awards. As these companies have gone bankrupt, their assets are often picked up on the cheap by foreign investors or companies.
Miasole, a U.S. solar energy company, received $101.8 million in tax credits. In October 2012, it was sold to China's Hanergy Holding Company for a mere $30 million.
Ener1 was approved for $118.5 million of 48C tax credits in 2009 for its batteries. Biden toured its plant in Indiana just after Obama announced his plan to have 1 million electric vehicles operating by 2015. In January 2011, the same month as the Biden tour, Ener1 entered into a joint venture with Wanxiang Electric Vehicle Co. to make lithium-ion batteries for Chinese cars. Ener1 moved some of its engineers to China along with some of its manufacturing equipment to ramp up the Chinese production. In 2010, Ener1 lost $165 million. In January 2012, Ener1 declared bankruptcy. Its remains were bought by a Russian businessman with close ties to the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who Obama patted on the knee and told he would be more flexible after the election. Perhaps in addition to giving the Russians what they want on missile defense, he also plans to give them more American green energy businesses nurtured on 48C tax credits.
Smith Electric Vehicles was awarded $32 million of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money. Its losses since 2009 have been $128 million. In February 2011, it teamed with Wanxiang Electric Vehicle Co. to make school buses. Their agreement had Wanxiang make a $25 million equity investment in Smith Electric Vehicles and an investment of $75 million to develop and manufacture school buses and other electric vehicles in China.
Cardinal Fastener received $480,000 from Obama's 48C tax credit program to make fasteners for wind energy generators. Obama visited their factory in Bedford Heights, Ohio and promised American green energy jobs, as he always does. Soon afterward, Cardinal Fastener released 12% of its workforce. In June 2011, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Germany's Wurth Group acquired it in January 2012 for a mere $3.9 million.
Remembering Obama's not so ready shovel-ready infrastructure projects, some wound up being managed and supplied by foreign companies. ABC News highlighted a $400 million bridge renovation project in New York, the new $7.2 billion Bay Bridge from San Francisco to Oakland, and a $190 million project in Alaska which were to be managed by foreign firms. Parts of the San Francisco - Oakland bridge were manufactured in China. The state of California had to reject some of the federal money so they could keep their Chinese contractor.
Finally, if you want to encourage American companies to invest in plants and facilities abroad and to train workers there rather than in the U.S., leave the developed world's highest corporate tax rate where it is as the trend in the rest of the developed world is to decrease corporation taxes. You can export even more jobs by raising the long-term capital gains tax from an already high 20.0% to 23.8% as required by ObamaUncaringTax in 2013. Add a 4.7% tax increase for Medicare to high paid managers so small and medium businesses will be discouraged from expanding operations in the U.S. Follow this up with another 80,000 pages of new business regulations and add the regulations of ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank Too-Big-to-Fail to that. Then throw in a slew of EPA rulings to take effect after the election, several of which are designed to keep us from using coal for anything, thus driving up our electricity costs and making vital electricity less dependable. Export American jobs so they can use cheap coal-fired power plants abroad.
To top this all off, the gift for a 10-year veteran of the Obama Veterans Administration is a pen set made in China.
Obama's complaints about Bain Capital foreign investments are a case of incredible hypocrisy. Obama is a con man, but how he can even dream that this level of hypocrisy will go undetected by Americans is beyond me. Or maybe not. He does think we are incredibly, stone-like stupid. For that reason alone, we should vote him out of office.
Thanks to Obama's insistence that the government take a big stake in the bankrupt GM after its restructuring as a government and union owned company, it is fully fair to look at its investments abroad if one is going to cast aspersions on those of Bain Capital abroad.
According to China Daily, GM is expanding its investment in China from its current $1 billion a year to $1.5 billion a year to make a total investment in China's 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015) of $7 billion. GM hopes to increase its sales in China from 2.35 million vehicles in 2010 to 5 million by 2015. To do this, it is designing and developing new models in China. GM production plants in China are joint ventures with the Chinese Communist Government.
GM announced in 2011 the investment of $540 million in a plant in Mexico to make engines. In July of this year, it announced the planned investment of $420 million in two factories to make the Chevrolet Trax and full-sized trucks.
How about Obama's promise to create American jobs of the future in green energy? This effort was promoted by Section 48C Advanced Energy Manufacturing Tax Credits. 41% of its awards went to foreign-based companies who were awarded an average of $20 million compared to an average of $11 million for U.S.-based companies! 17 of the 25 foreign-based companies receiving Obama awards are or have plans to set up wind or solar manufacturing facilities in low-wage countries. Those 17 foreign-based companies manufacturing in low-wage countries accounted for $406 million, so a super premium award averaging $23.9 million goes to those manufacturing in low-wage countries. Six of the U.S.-based companies with awards are also planning to manufacture their products in low-wage countries.
As almost everyone now knows, Obama only picks the loser green energy companies for awards. As these companies have gone bankrupt, their assets are often picked up on the cheap by foreign investors or companies.
Miasole, a U.S. solar energy company, received $101.8 million in tax credits. In October 2012, it was sold to China's Hanergy Holding Company for a mere $30 million.
Ener1 was approved for $118.5 million of 48C tax credits in 2009 for its batteries. Biden toured its plant in Indiana just after Obama announced his plan to have 1 million electric vehicles operating by 2015. In January 2011, the same month as the Biden tour, Ener1 entered into a joint venture with Wanxiang Electric Vehicle Co. to make lithium-ion batteries for Chinese cars. Ener1 moved some of its engineers to China along with some of its manufacturing equipment to ramp up the Chinese production. In 2010, Ener1 lost $165 million. In January 2012, Ener1 declared bankruptcy. Its remains were bought by a Russian businessman with close ties to the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who Obama patted on the knee and told he would be more flexible after the election. Perhaps in addition to giving the Russians what they want on missile defense, he also plans to give them more American green energy businesses nurtured on 48C tax credits.
Smith Electric Vehicles was awarded $32 million of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money. Its losses since 2009 have been $128 million. In February 2011, it teamed with Wanxiang Electric Vehicle Co. to make school buses. Their agreement had Wanxiang make a $25 million equity investment in Smith Electric Vehicles and an investment of $75 million to develop and manufacture school buses and other electric vehicles in China.
Cardinal Fastener received $480,000 from Obama's 48C tax credit program to make fasteners for wind energy generators. Obama visited their factory in Bedford Heights, Ohio and promised American green energy jobs, as he always does. Soon afterward, Cardinal Fastener released 12% of its workforce. In June 2011, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Germany's Wurth Group acquired it in January 2012 for a mere $3.9 million.
Remembering Obama's not so ready shovel-ready infrastructure projects, some wound up being managed and supplied by foreign companies. ABC News highlighted a $400 million bridge renovation project in New York, the new $7.2 billion Bay Bridge from San Francisco to Oakland, and a $190 million project in Alaska which were to be managed by foreign firms. Parts of the San Francisco - Oakland bridge were manufactured in China. The state of California had to reject some of the federal money so they could keep their Chinese contractor.
Finally, if you want to encourage American companies to invest in plants and facilities abroad and to train workers there rather than in the U.S., leave the developed world's highest corporate tax rate where it is as the trend in the rest of the developed world is to decrease corporation taxes. You can export even more jobs by raising the long-term capital gains tax from an already high 20.0% to 23.8% as required by ObamaUncaringTax in 2013. Add a 4.7% tax increase for Medicare to high paid managers so small and medium businesses will be discouraged from expanding operations in the U.S. Follow this up with another 80,000 pages of new business regulations and add the regulations of ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank Too-Big-to-Fail to that. Then throw in a slew of EPA rulings to take effect after the election, several of which are designed to keep us from using coal for anything, thus driving up our electricity costs and making vital electricity less dependable. Export American jobs so they can use cheap coal-fired power plants abroad.
To top this all off, the gift for a 10-year veteran of the Obama Veterans Administration is a pen set made in China.
Obama's complaints about Bain Capital foreign investments are a case of incredible hypocrisy. Obama is a con man, but how he can even dream that this level of hypocrisy will go undetected by Americans is beyond me. Or maybe not. He does think we are incredibly, stone-like stupid. For that reason alone, we should vote him out of office.
Why Obama Did Not Answer Romney's Oil Drilling Permits on Federal Land Question
When Obama claimed that oil production was up due to his policies, Romney pointed out that the Obama administration has been approving many fewer permits than Bush had. Obama evaded a direct response to the number of oil drilling permits he was approving. He was really doing a most obvious bit of squirming to avoid answering the issue. Romney correctly pointed out that oil production was up only because it had gone up greatly on private land while going down on federal land and offshore.
Update of Chart originally posted, since the original chart not only was not plotted with a zero baseline, but also had proportionality problems with the length of the bars. In other words, it was incompetently plotted. This chart, provided by Dr. Francisco Santiago, is accurate:
[The original bad plot of the permit situation from a CFACT report is shown below:
Note that the baseline in this graph is not zero.]
The failure of the Obama administration to approve more oil drilling permits will cause increasing decreases in oil production from federal lands for some time after permits approved rises under Romney. It will take awhile for production to catch up with an increase in permits, so this problem will be with us for awhile. This was a missed opportunity to provide Americans lower gasoline prices, which we know is contrary to the Obama policy that high gasoline prices are desired.
Update of Chart originally posted, since the original chart not only was not plotted with a zero baseline, but also had proportionality problems with the length of the bars. In other words, it was incompetently plotted. This chart, provided by Dr. Francisco Santiago, is accurate:
[The original bad plot of the permit situation from a CFACT report is shown below:
Note that the baseline in this graph is not zero.]
The failure of the Obama administration to approve more oil drilling permits will cause increasing decreases in oil production from federal lands for some time after permits approved rises under Romney. It will take awhile for production to catch up with an increase in permits, so this problem will be with us for awhile. This was a missed opportunity to provide Americans lower gasoline prices, which we know is contrary to the Obama policy that high gasoline prices are desired.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
