Obama Wants Bigger Government on Top of This?

From his State of the Union address, it could not be more clear that Obama wants a much bigger government with much more spending and much more control over our lives.  He wants to impose this further growth upon the already unbelievable increases in government spending since 2002 as shown in this great graphic from the current issue of the magazine of the National Federation of Independent Businesses:

Of course there is no limit to the extraction of money, time, and other resources from the private sector for the use of the government sector in this fool's mind.  All of these programs have grown much faster than real, per capita income has in that time.  This has been especially true during the four years Obama has occupied the White House.  This is a huge problem he simply does not recognize, which means he is either incredibly dumb or incredibly evil.

Gen LaGreca's Long Awaited New Novel

I absolutely loved Gen LaGreca's first novel, A Noble Vision.  I reviewed it in this blog posting in November 2008.  I have been anticipating her second novel with great eagerness ever since.  It is a very rare time when one can experience as much pleasure in the company of a wonderful mind as I did when reading A Noble Vision.  Gen LaGreca's new novel is called A Dream of Daring.

Please visit Winged Victory Press to read more about it.  She promises that once again her novel is strong in plot, that noble ideas and ignoble ideas will clash, that it will be peopled with individuals of strong character, and that there is food for the romantic soul.

I have already downloaded it from Amazon to my Kindle, but I am afraid to start reading it immediately because I learned from A Noble Vision that once I start, I will not be able to stop.  I am trying to finish up a major new post explaining the baseline, equilibrium physics of the Earth's surface temperature and why the effect of carbon dioxide upon the surface temperature is a very, very small cooling effect.  So, I am forced to put off the pleasure, at great pain, of reading Gen LaGreca's new novel for a few days.  I will review it when I have read it, but there is no reason others should deny themselves the pleasure of reading a Gen LaGreca novel until then.

For now, I must get back to saving the world from the misuse and the misunderstanding of physics by the man-made global warming alarmists.  Then I will celebrate the completion of that work by reading A Dream of Daring by the incredibly wonderful Gen LaGreca.

Obama's Job Destruction Plan Illustrated

We have long been seeing updates of the graph that Obama and his henchmen used to illustrate the effect of their jobs creation plan with comparison to the jobs recovery with no such plan.  The effect of his distributing huge sums of printed and borrowed money among his campaign contributors and such of his constituents as he expected had purchasable votes is clearly shown in this most recent update of that graph.  The actual unemployment (actually understated) through the recession is shown with the red dots and this far exceeds the anticipated unemployment rate if Obama did nothing.

Surely we should assume that the difference between the original projected unemployment rate and the actual unemployment rate is the result of Obama's policies.  In other words, instead of improving the jobs situation, those policies clearly worsened it during this Great Socialist Recession.  They worsened it far worse than this plot implies too, since the actual unemployment rate is really much higher than the stated rate as I have many times pointed out.  This is due to the many people who have given up hope of finding employment and stopped looking for it.  It is also due to the many people who have become comfortable on food stamps, extended unemployment benefits, and on Social Security disability payments under Obama's inducements to do so.

Left Says GDP Contraction of 4th Quarter of 2012 Due to Government Austerity

We are being told that the reduction of the GDP by 0.14% in the Fourth Quarter of 2012 was due to a decrease in spending by the federal government.  What on earth are they talking about?

Here is current federal government spending by quarter at the annual rate with seasonal adjustment going back to the 4th Quarter of 2010 according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve Board:

2012 4th Quarter: $3,765.2 billion
2012 3rd Quarter: $3,760.6 billion
2012 2nd Quarter: $3,774.8 billion
2012 1st Quarter: $3,723.6 billion
2011 4th Quarter: $3,716.8 billion
2011 3rd Quarter: $3,743.3 billion
2011 2nd Quarter: $3,830.6 billion
2011 1st Quarter: $3,737.1 billion
2010 4th Quarter: $3,756.3 billion

Federal spending went up very slightly from the 3rd to the 4th Quarters of 2012, not down as we have generally and widely been misinformed.  What is more, going all the way back to the 4th Quarter of 2010, the rate of government spending has been relatively flat.

When government spending rates change, there are direct changes in the GDP because that figure includes all government spending.  But no change in government spending, or a very small increase as shown here, should have no effect on the quarter by quarter GDP, except that of an accumulating wearing down of the private sector growth by discouraging investment due to excessive extraction of wealth and income from the private sector.  That and the increasing effect of laws and regulations harmful to business and investment is surely what really caused the 4th Quarter contraction in 2012.

One really has to wonder at the remarkable dishonesty of the story we are being told by the left and the media outlets they control.

It makes more sense to monitor the Disposable Personal Income (DPI) as a measure of the economy's health, since that does not include the money spent and largely wasted by government.  According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the DPI for the last quarter of 2012 increased by 1.3%.

The Lawless NRLB and Obama

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia just decided that Obama's three appointments to the National Labor Relations Board on 4 January 2012 were illegal because they were not approved by the Senate which had started a new session on 3 January.  Obama had claimed he was making recess appointments, which the Constitution allows when the Senate is in recess.  Obama claimed the right to determine when the Senate was in recess or not, despite the fact that Congress traditionally declares itself to be in session or recess.

In 2010, the Supreme Court had ruled that the NLRB could not make case rulings or undertake rule-making activities without a quorum of three of its usual five members.  One of the illegally added members, the sole Republican, had resigned long ago because of the very one-sided pro-Labor Union decisions against business owners.  One of these cases was the Boeing ruling in which they were trying to set up a production facility in South Carolina, a Right to Work state.  The NRLB had ruled that Boeing had to do more of that work than it wanted to in Washington, a Union Shop state.  With two of the remaining four NRLB members illegally appointed, hundreds of rulings should be considered to have no authority.  The NRLB Chairman, Mark Gaston Pearce, claims that only the single case actually decided upon by the Appeals Court is tossed out and that all of its other decisions remain in force despite a lack of quorum.  In addition, he claims that the NRLB will continue making rulings and rules with its current members, including those just ruled to have been illegally and unconstitutionally appointed by Obama in direct violation of the 2010 Supreme Court decision.

The initial appointments were a lawless act by Obama.  The determination of the NRLB, with only pro-labor union members, to continue with rulings and rule making without a legal quorum is stunningly lawless.  The fact that Obama has not ordered the NRLB to stop proceeding without a quorum is a renewal of his claim to be above the law.  Note that the claim that a violation of the quorum requirement only overturns one out of hundreds of rulings is absurd.  This means that a lawless federal agency can continue to abuse the People in every case in which the People do not have the money and the time to pursue their own case in the federal courts to at least the Appeals Court level!  It makes a mockery of justice and of individual rights and clearly mocks the idea that government is a servant of the people.

Obama also made a similar "recess appointment" of Richard Cordray as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Board, which was set up by the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill.  That bill was really an attempt to divert public attention from the fact that the 2008 financial crisis was primarily caused by the government.  Obama has just asked to have Cordray appointed again to be director of this CFPB.  Its activities under this illegally appointed director have also been challenged in the courts.

Obama's failure to order the Justice Department to produce the public documents they are required to produce on the Fast and Furious investigation and to require the EPA to produce documents it was required to produce on Lisa Jackson's hidden e-mail activities are other examples of his common lawlessness.  His providing billions of dollars of funding to his campaign contributors who set up flimsy green energy companies, while not providing federal funding to more sound green energy companies is another instance of his lawlessness.  Then what could beat his awarding exemptions from the requirements of ObamaCare to his union friends and to his contributors and those of other top Democrat leaders, when no such exemptions are a part of the law?  He has made similar unauthorized exemptions to the law through the programs of the Department of Education.

Obama is a very shady, lawless man and he likes to gather similar people around himself and put them in positions of power.  American federal government institutions have been rapidly degraded by this man and his regime of outlaws.

Obama and Bill Clinton Not Allowed to Own Guns

It is a popular belief that current gun laws should be better enforced.  Federal law already makes it illegal for any felon or anyone who has illegally used any controlled substance from owning a gun.  The penalty is five years of imprisonment, the same draconian punishment leveled at those who refuse to consent to having the ownership of their own bodies taken over by the government under the collectivist ObamaCare law.

Felons are a very broad category which more and more includes people who committed no crime of violence or even no crime against any known individual at all.  Federal and state laws have more and more made people felons for violating vague, unknown, and irrational laws and regulations aimed at anyone trying to make a living.  Business owners and business managers are particularly likely to be victims of such wrongheaded laws.  Those who have have been convicted under such specious laws are not allowed to own guns.

The prohibition of gun ownership to anyone who has illegally used a controlled substance is another draconian act that has the consequence that at least 40 million Americans are likely prohibited from owning guns if it were enforced.  Among those who are prohibited by federal law from owning guns are:

Obama
George W. Bush
Bill Clinton

Of course in our lawless land in which many people are deemed too important for the law to be enforced upon them, these people would not actually be denied a gun permit should they request one.  Law enforcement would definitely turn its head for them.  But, in a nation in which the use of a prohibited substance lands many others in jail, prevents them from holding many jobs, or is the excuse of law enforcement agencies to take their homes, cars, boats, and land from them without the need to get a conviction, this is a giant hypocrisy.  It is an act of great injustice.

Far from needing still more gun ownership prohibition and registration laws, we need to repeal some of the wrongheaded laws we already have that unreasonably infringe upon our sovereign and equal right to protect ourselves from harm by others, including tyrannical governments.  More of us than are presently allowed should be able to acquire the best in personal protection weapons so that we can protect ourselves, our families, and our friends and neighbors from the violence that the state proves unable and unwilling to prevent.  Proposed restrictions against large capacity, actually just reasonable capacity, magazines and semi-automatic fire weapons are clear infringements of our right to protect ourselves.

Before you know it, Obama will dictatorially rule that the Founding Fathers only intended the citizenry to own muzzle-loaded muskets and that will be all we will be allowed to own.  Provided of course that we have not become felons for violating some line buried in hundreds of thousands of pages of federal laws and regulations or that we have not ever used a controlled substance illegally.

ObamaCare Reduces Employee Hours at Colleges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Senator Feinstein's Abuse of the Public Trust

Senator Diane Feinstein of California recently gave up her chairmanship of the Senate Military Construction Appropriations Subcommittee after many years of steering contracts for military construction, advanced weapons procurement, environmental clean-up projects, facility leasing, and quality of life issues for veterans to companies owned by her husband.

Richard C. Blum, her husband, owned majority shares of Perini Corporation and URS Corporation until late 2005.  Senator Feinstein had been voting approval of contracts to these corporations and to CB Richard Ellis, a commercial property leasing and building purchasing firm in which her husband had a major interest, since becoming the Chair of the Military Construction Appropriations Subcommittee in 2001.  That year, URS Corp. military construction income grew from $24 million to $185 million.  Its architectural and engineering military construction income rose from $108,000 in 200 to $142 million in 2001.  She had also voted money for Boston Scientific Corp. and Kinetic Concepts, Inc. for medical supplies when these companies stocks were heavily owned by her husband's financial companies.

At least $1.6 billion of income was steered to her husband's companies while Senator Feinstein served on the Military Construction Appropriations Subcommittee.  This makes all other Senatorial conflict of interest and theft of public monies cases small potatoes in comparison!  How abuse of U.S. citizens can go on for many years at this scale without the media raising a huge ruckus about it, is a very clear statement that the media, as well as the Senate, has no regard for the General Welfare of the People.

You can read more about this here: http://www.wnd.com/2007/03/40845/

Homicide Rates by Guns and Other Factors

There are often claims that there is an explosion of homicide by guns in the USA.  But the actual data are shown here for homicides and non-negligent manslaughter:

This data is from a report by the Congressional Research Service for Congress entitled Gun Control Legislation by William J. Krouse, dated 14 November 2012.  The murder rates and those committed with the use of guns are higher than one would like of course, but they are not exactly exploding.  In fact, they have been coming down.

If we just look at the murder rate by gun and exclude non-negligent manslaughter, the U.S. rate was 2.75 per hundred thousand in 2011.  But this rate varied greatly from state to state and region to region.  The list of states and DC with rates above 3.00 is given below from higher to lower rates:

District of Columbia, 12.46
Louisiana, 10.16
Mississippi, 7.46
South Carolina, 5.41
Michigan, 5.06
Maryland, 4.70
Missouri, 4.64
Arkansas, 4.39
New York, 4.12
Pennsylvania, 3.97
Georgia, 3.93
Tennessee, 3.92
North Carolina, 3.87
Oklahoma, 3.64
Ohio, 3.54
Indiana, 3.29
California, 3.25
Delaware, 3.09
Nevada, 3.07
New Jersey, 3.07

The cause of these major murder rate by gun differences by state and other local variations has not been much discussed.  There does not appear to be a simple and strong rule of thumb based on gun controls that explains this.  DC and Chicago both have severe gun control laws, yet both have very high murder rates by gun.  Maryland and New York have relatively strong gun control laws.  Many of the states in this list also have relatively weak gun controls.  Other factors are apparently at work and they ought to be identified and come under discussion.

One of the most important factors is also silenced by those who police the debate in terms of political correctness.  This chart makes it very clear that a critical factor relates to race and the use of guns in murders.

One of the popular exercises is to compare U.S. murder rates by gun with those of certain Western European countries and Japan and note that we compare badly.  The chart above localizes much of the reason for the bad comparison in the U.S. black population.  Gun control legislation that does not take this racial discrepancy into account is unlikely to achieve much.  One certainly cannot find a legal reason to infringe the 2nd Amendment Right to owning guns of black Americans, while allowing white Americans their individual right to gun ownership.  This is a problem that has to be addressed in a much broader context.

There is actually very little that can be done by legislation about the murder rate by guns.  The primary issues are deeply seated in various American sub-cultures.  Even such an issue as the effort to identify mentally ill people who should not have guns is a secondary issue.  It is one worth pursuing and trying to improve, but we should have no illusions that it will have a major effect in reducing the amount of gun murders in America.

14th Amendment Gives President Authority to Raise the Debt Ceiling: Another Socialist Taradiddle

Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Majority Whip Sen. Dick Durbin, Representative Peter Welch, and numerous Progressive Elitist columnists have called upon Obama to raise the debt ceiling himself using the 14th Amendment as the basis for his power to do so.  Examining this claim of presidential power by the socialist left will inform us greatly about their values and how seriously they take the Constitution.

In Article 1, Section 8, the Congress is given its powers.  It says:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

To borrow Money on the credit of the United States; ....

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, ...

To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States; ....

Section 8 also goes on to describe its role in the defense of the country, including that of providing for military forces and placing a two-year appropriations limit on its doing so.

The powers of the President are given in Article 2, Section 2.  There is no mention of any power to appropriate money, to issue debt, to issue coin or bonds, or any other power pertaining to the use of the People's money.  This is not surprising given that control over money, taxes, and debt were the primary powers that the Congress was invested with for the purpose of limiting the power of the Executive.  We have to remember that Americans had just fought for their independence from a much too powerful King of England.  They had also faced too powerful governors in the colonies in most cases who ruled those colonies for the King's advantage, not the People's welfare.  The Executive under the Articles of Confederation had been nearly non-existent and was much strengthened under the Constitution, but was still subject to great distrust.  Were we as wise today, we would still view the Executive with great distrust.

The 14th Amendment was passed in 1868 to deal with issues resulting from the outcome of the Civil War.  In Section 4, it says:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.  But neither the United States or any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or the emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Section 5 of the 14th Amendment says "Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article."

So whatever power is granted here is granted to Congress.  There is no mention of the President.  What is more, the debt to be honored without question, was only such debt as had been authorized by law, which only Congress can do.  One can go further in understanding this amendment's requirement about the debt.  It is clear that it imposes an obligation upon Congress to pay its debts in full and without dilution.  A rational person would question repayment of a debt with a devalued currency, for instance.  Therefore, if Congress, or in our present condition, the Federal Reserve is printing money to make up the difference between tax revenues and government spending, then Congress itself is in violation of the 14th Amendment.  Any rational broad interpretation of the 14th Amendment would note that Congress is constrained in its spending to a sustainable debt.  It cannot default on the debt, but it also cannot allow the debt to rise to such heights that a rational person would question that it can be repaid in full with a fully valued coin.

As we see, it is a ludicrous taradiddle that the President can raise the debt ceiling without an act of Congress.  There is no such power in the 14th Amendment.  This is why even Obama has been disinclined to claim this power.  Even though he dislikes the Constitution and holds it in low regard, even he dares not traduce it is such a blatant manner.  Not only would he have to assert a power he clearly does not have, but he would also have to violate multiple acts of Congress, duly passed.  First, he would have to break the law setting the current debt ceiling, as Congress has been doing since 1917.  Second, he would have to violate the Antideficiency Act which states that the President or any government official must have an appropriation from Congress before he can authorize payments.  It could not be more obvious that the power of the purse belongs to Congress, not the President.

This being such an open and shut case, it is very revealing that so many of the top leadership of the Democrat Party are so eager to subvert the Constitution and support such an egregious taradiddle as the claim that the 14th Amendment gives their great socialist leader the power to raise the debt ceiling by himself.  This is an attempt to claim dictatorial powers.  If Republicans had made such a claim when the Democrats controlled one of the houses of the Congress, you can be certain they would have been screaming in opposition.  It is way beyond time for the American People to understand that their dominant party is one eager to subvert the Constitution and thereby the control the people exercise by choosing their representatives to the Congress.  There is an eagerness for dictatorship, so long as the dictator is a Democrat Socialist.  This is a predilection to be feared and against which we must stand in firmest opposition.

taradiddle: 1) a trivial or childish lie, a fib, or 2) pretentious nonsense.

Social Security Blahs

On the verge of the new year, 2013, let us consider some of the gloom due to the government Social Security Ponzi Scheme to be faced eventually in our future:

•  2012 deficit of SS was $48 billion, which was added to the national debt.
• SS beneficiaries hit new record of 56,758,185 people.
• People collecting disability payments hit new record of 8,827,795.
• 112.5 million full time workers in 2011 to support those on SS.  Only 94.7 million full time workers were in the private sector.
• 1.67 full time private sector workers support each SS recipient.
• 1.27 full time private sector workers support each SS recipient or full time government worker.
• 2012 is the third straight year that SS has spent more money than it received in tax receipts.
• Baby Boomers have barely begun to retire.
• The National Debt is now $16.42 trillion, in excess of the $16.4 trillion debt ceiling and the National GDP of 2012 estimate of $15.9 trillion.
• Politicians are almost universally happy to pretend there is no problem, as are the voters.

Have a happy 2013 in some Galt's Gulch of your own making, while the nation whistles its way merrily to self-immolation.  The nation is drunk, not just tonight, but everyday.  As long as the con man Obama and his henchmen entertain them with being conned, they are happy drunks, jobless or not.

Government Suppression of Productivity in the Health Industry

Consider the non-farm business productivity growth history according to the BLS:

In comparison, the 1 - 7 December 2012 issue of the Economist in an article called Fighting fit - Start-ups in health care, claims that the health care industry accounted for 18% of the American GDP in 2010 and for 20 years has had a negative labor productivity of -0.6%!  Why is this one huge sector of the American economy performing so miserably?  The answer is mostly or entirely because this industry is one of the most heavily regulated industries in America and because half of all medical bills are paid by government.

Let us have some fun with numbers.  The average labor productivity of the total non-farm private sector grew at an average rate of

[10(2.1%) + 7(2.5%) + 4(1.8%)]/21 = 2.2%

over the last 21 years.  In the last 20 years, 18% of this part of the economy a rate of -0.6% in labor productivity growth.  Without this single depression of our standard of living by government, the rest of the private sector labor productivity growth rate, r, over the last twenty years can be calculated from the equation:

2.2% = (0.82)r + (0.18)(-0.6%), so r = 2.8%.

The difference between an economy with a labor productivity rate growing at 2.2% compared to one growing at 2.8% is very significant over a generation.  It used to be that a generation was taken to be about 23 years, but that is no longer even close to the case.  A generation is equal to the average age of all mothers giving birth to children.  I have not found a good number for that in the U.S. as a whole.  The state of New Jersey says that the median age was 30.5 in 2004.  Median and average are not the same and NJ may not be entirely typical, but let us take the length of a generation to be 30 years for our purposes here.

During a generation of 30 years, the labor productivity at a growth rate of 2.2% a year has cummulatively become 1.92 times what it was at the start of that period.  But, with a labor productivity growth rate of 2.8% a year, the labor productivity is 2.29 times what it was at the end of the generation or more than 19% greater.  This also is a component causing health care costs to rise at much higher rates than do those of other sectors of our economy.

Yet the suppression of our standard of living of the last 20 years by the health industry due to government interference compared to what it could do if free is a small depression compared to what the game-changing ObamaCare or ObamaUncaringTax will do to the economy!  The story for the next 30 years will be quite miserable in terms of lost labor productivity and hence our standard of living.

Secession and the Consent of the Governed

There are many people talking about secession of their states from the United States of America following the re-election of Obama to the presidency and renewed control of the Senate by the lawbreaking Democrat Socialist Party.  Though Obama won handily in the electoral vote and pretty handily in the popular vote, he did not carry a single county in the three states of Utah, Oklahoma, and West Virginia.  Romney won 72.8% of the vote in Utah, 69.3% in Wyoming, 66.8% in Oklahoma, and 64.5% in Idaho.  Obama failed to earn even 40% of the vote in 13 states: The five mentioned and Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky.  Many Americans believe that Obama and the Democrat Socialist Party are highly guilty of repeated constitutional violations of the limits of government power.  The manner in which the unpopular ObamaCare program was pushed through the Congress is still highly resented, though it was not much of a presidential election issue because of Romney's compromised position with the Massachusetts individual mandate health insurance law.

When the American colonies rebelled against King George III and the Parliament of Great Britain and seceded from their union with them, they had a real problem with replacing the once colonial governments with self-rule state governance.  They wanted representation in their own government, but they needed to establish legitimate governments to replace the governance of Great Britain, which the Declaration of Independence had declared illegitimate because it had violated the sovereign and equal rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  The Americans needed to establish governments with the consent of the governed and which protected and did not violate individual rights.  They assigned an essential role in the process of doing this to the making and acceptance of constitutions.  They created constitutions at the state level and at the federal government level.  The constitutions were needed to provide for a limited scope of government to which the people would readily give their assent to be governed.  Only a fool would consent to be governed by a government claiming unlimited powers or even just powers that violated individual rights.  Early Americans were not inclined to be such fools.

Good government must be highly limited government, if the highly varied character and interests of the people are not to be damaged by government.  Good government protects the people's right not to be coerced, so that they have a rich choice of options in a robust and free private sector to pursue their self-chosen values.  It protects them from coercion by other individuals, by gangs, by associations, and by anything more than legitimate and essential coercion by government itself.  Of course, government is used solely for coercion, but that use of coercion must be strictly limited by well-agreed principles so that government is not worse than thugs operating on their own out of avarice.  In such a society with such a limited government, individuals are free to exercise the many opportunities presented by a broad freedom of association with other individuals of their choice in the pursuit of values of their own choosing in voluntary cooperation.  State and Federal government constitutions were used by Americans to provide this wonderful society maximizing voluntary cooperation.  To such constitutionally limited governments, nearly everyone gave their consent to be governed.  This was the American Principle of government and society.

When this American Principle of government is violated by the government, any individual and any combination of them, have the right to secede.  No one is morally obliged to give up their sovereign individual rights to an unconstitutional, power-lusting government.  In practice, an individual can as yet leave the country as a form of secession.  But, there is no moral reason why an individual wanting to be free of government coercion in violation of his individual rights must leave his family, friends, and property behind in order to have the freedom that is his by right.  There is no moral reason why any size territory in which most of the people want to secede in order to constitute a legitimate government, as defined in the Declaration of Independence, cannot do so.

The American Principle has long been violated and the extent of its violation has accelerated and been maximized under the Obama regime.  There has long been a failure to understand that democracy coupled with a government with few limits, is simply another form of tyranny and one which is inherently unstable.  For a time, the common sense of the people may keep a democracy from being as bad as an out and out dictatorship or totalitarian government, but the common sense of the people degrades with time and their understanding of what the government is doing does also.  Soon, big government is simply too big for the people to manage it or even for the politicians they choose to manage it competently.  Worse, special interests with time and money on their hands, take over the controls of the government.  Under the Obama regime, the federal government has reached an apogee of power-lust, pretentiousness of knowledge and morality, corruption, and incompetence.  The federal government is very tyrannical in its abuse of our equal, sovereign individual rights.  This Obama regime ignores the law, including the Supreme Law of the Land, the Constitution.  It is clearly a highly illegitimate government as defined by own Declaration of Independence.  It is certainly not a government that seeks the nearly uniform consent of the governed.  It is a government that is eager to do harm to many Americans so that it may steal their wealth and redistribute it to the poor and to the unethical such as labor unions and campaign contributors operating flimsy green energy companies with no real markets.

Even when operating within the limits of a constitutional and legitimate government, good government does not pass laws on which there is no widespread agreement.  The Obama government recognizes no such wise restraint.  This is not surprising.  Socialism is highly irrational at its core.  It pretends to be concerned and driven by the welfare of the greater number, but it ignores the essential fact of human nature that we are complex and highly differentiated individuals.  Our individual values have complex and highly differentiated hierarchies at any time and these hierarchies change considerably over time.  No government can adequately know and provide for our individual needs and dreams.  We must have the freedom to do so ourselves in a vibrant private sector.  The Obama regime has failed to provide for individual needs in the last four years and will continue to fail on an even grander scale over the next four years.  The long history of socialism has confirmed this inability of socialist government to substitute itself for the role of self-responsible and self-managing individuals operating freely ino the private sector.

Only fools can think that the Obama regime can provide a different outcome.  To date, it has stripped us of many of our liberties, most especially our economic and freedom of association liberties.  It has stripped us of our ownership of our very bodies and minds under ObamaCare.  It has diminished the private sector as the federal government has grown to take 25% of the entire economy in terms of its spending and far more with its regulations.  It is taking over control of huge sectors of the economy such as medical care, health insurance, financial, energy, and auto-making.  It has heavily beaten up employers and made it very difficult for them to generate profits and to hire employees.  This is especially true for many small businesses which do not have the resources to lobby power-hungry politicians and bureaucrats so they will to do them no harm.  As businesses throughout the nation are damaged and their costs of operation increased, consumers have to pay higher prices for the goods and services they want.  Excessive government coercion is lowering our standard of living as people are making less and having to pay more to meet their needs.

It is no surprise that many Americans are now so fed-up with governmental disregard for their individual rights, the limits of the Constitution, and for their General Welfare, that they are now talking about secession.  Much as the heroes of Atlas Shrugged left a socialist, unconstitutional, and unlimited government-dominated society to retire to Galt's Gulch until it collapsed, many now are talking about secession or about the revival of a legitimate government when the present Welfare State and Kleptomaniac Government falls.  Whether it was already too late in this last election to reverse the course of unsustainable government or not, I do not know.  I had hoped it was not.  I strongly suspect that if the American people manage to learn enough from the pain of the next four years added to that of the last four years, that their attempt to reform to prevent governmental collapse will either prove to be too late or little better than actual collapse.

There are well enough managed states that should they secede, they would be able to avoid much of the pain of the collapse of the federal government, not to mention the present harm it does to the People.  One might argue that if a state secedes, its people will lose Medicare and Social Security benefits they have paid for.  This is not a valid argument.  Their money has already been spent and those programs, contrary to a false claim a Democrat made today on Fox News, are already taking money from the general tax revenue bucket as the programs cost more than the payroll taxes dedicated to them provide.  The people of a seceding state with a more limited and more responsible government lose nothing, except a once proud tradition of the United States of America.  But that tradition has been betrayed by a long-time and growing lack of adherence to the American Principle.  That rule of legitimate and good government needs to be revived and if one no longer believes it can be revived throughout the entire nation at a reasonable cost, then secession is a rational choice of action.

Unfortunately, Obama admires Lincoln and it is clear that what he admires is his use of force in a fairly ruthless national purpose.  Obama would unleash the Dogs of War happily to create Civil War to prevent any state or area of the present nation from seceding.  Ayn Rand identified the most functional way to oppose such a tyrannical government: retire or slow down one's economic activity to speed up the collapse of government and await its fall.  That collapse is inevitable unless government undergoes a remarkable transformation toward a much more limited role of protecting individual rights and dismantles the Welfare State and the Kletocracy.

It will not do anything of the sort under Obama.  His call for much higher taxes and spending over the last few days is clear indication that he is true to form.  ObamaCare will speed the collapse greatly, as will Obama's war on fossil fuels, the financial industry, and his determination to suck the profits and cash flow out of companies so that they cannot invest in new equipment, new plants and facilities, the hiring and training of employees, product improvement, and R&D, quality control, and process improvements.  Not only will we see a failure of the economy to expand in the next four years, but we will see more periods of contraction.  The only way the nation was going to be able to sustain Medicare and Social Security programs back in 2008 was if the economy grew rapidly.  Its failure to grow well in the last four years will be added to another four years of no growth, leaving these programs, the added detritus due to ObamaCare, and the backbreaking interest on the national debt without the required funding to meet liabilities.  Obama is bringing his beloved socialist transformation of America to a more rapid failure.  He is quite analogous to President Thompson of Atlas Shrugged, but without even the minimal intelligence to ask John Galt to save the country.

What Age Were the 10 Million Missing Voters

I noted in this earlier post that nearly 10 million white voters did not vote in the presidential election and that about a million black voters also did not, compared to their numbers in the 2008 election.  What were the ages of the missing voters?

From the CNN exit polls for each election:

2008:

18-29 years old, 18% of voters, 66% voted for Obama, 32% voted for McCain
30-44 years old, 29% of voters, 52% voted for Obama, 46% voted for McCain
45-64 years old, 37% of voters, 50% voted for Obama, 49% voted for McCain
>= 65 years old, 16% of voters, 45% voted for Obama, 53% voted for McCain

2012:


18-29 years old, 19% of voters, 60% voted for Obama, 37% voted for Romney
30-44 years old, 27% of voters, 52% voted for Obama, 45% voted for Romney
45-64 years old, 38% of voters, 47% voted for Obama, 51% voted for Romney
>= 65 years old, 16% of voters, 44% voted for Obama, 56% voted for Romney

So, the only major change in the percentage of voters by age was the decrease in the 30 - 44 year old group who favored Obama in both elections.  They favored Obama by 6% in the 2008 election and by 7% in 2012.  The 18 to 29 year olds increased from 18% to 19% of the voters, but their preference for Obama fell from a 34% differential to a 23% differential.  I expected a sizable decrease here due to the very high unemployment of young adults.  Overrall, the changes in these two age groups did not help Obama relative to 2008.

The 47 to 64 year olds increased in percentage of voters from 37 to 38%.  They had favored Obama by a 1% differential in 2008, but they favored Romney by a 4% differential in 2012.  Those 65 and older were 16% of the voters in both elections.  They had favored McCain by 8% in 2008 and they favored Romney by 12% in 2012.  The changes for both of these age groups helped Romney do better than McCain did.

It is clear though that there were large decreases in the number of voters in each of these age groups, with the biggest decrease among 30-44 year olds who supported Obama.  The relative decrease among 18 - 29 year olds and among 45-64 year olds was slightly less than that for those 65 and over.

There is no simple explanation for the Romney loss based on age.  The lower turnout in this election has a much greater racial make-up than it does an age make-up.  Insofar as it has an age based effect, the harm to Obama was greater than that to Romney.

By age considerations, the reason Romney lost is because he did not get a high enough percentage of the vote in any age group to win.  Yes, the older and wiser the voter, the better Romney did.   No question it would have helped him greatly if 18-29 year olds had massively failed to vote relative to older voters.  I had expected their percentage of all voters to drop in this election relative to 2008, but that sure did not happen.  Apparently, though their absolute numbers dropped greatly, so did those of all of the other three age groups.

As yet, Romney's failure to motivate white voters to vote is still looking like his main, but not his only, problem.  The explanation that many are offering that he simply did not seem to differ in policy enough from Obama for voters to get enthusiastic about him  and come out to vote for him makes a lot of sense.  They decided to stay with the guy they did not like or agree with very much instead of trying someone else they were not sure they liked or agreed with very much.

The Fed Projects 3% Growth in 2015, But Be Wary

Bill Wilson of Americans for Limited Government has written an interesting review of the predictions for GDP growth by the Federal Reserve through this never-ending Great Socialist Recession.  He notes that the Federal Reserve is now predicting 3% GDP growth in 2015.  Let me summarize the story of the Federal Reserve predictions for real GDP growth and the actual real GDP growth with the numbers he gives and those I have added:

2008:
January 2008:  Prediction of 1.3 to 2.0%
October 2008: Prediction of 0.0 to 0.3%

Actual 2008: -0.3%


2009:
January 2008:  Prediction of 2.1 to 2.7%
October 2008: Prediction of -0.2 to 1.1%
January 2009:  Prediction of -1.3 to -0.5%

Actual 2009:  -3.1%


2010:
January 2009:  Prediction of 2.5 to 3.3%
January 2010:  Prediction of 2.8 to 3.5%

Actual 2010: 2.4% 


2011:
January 2009:  Prediction of 3.8 to 5.0%
January 2010:  Prediction of 3.4 to 4.5%
January 2011:  Prediction of 3.4 to 3.9%
June 2011:  Prediction of 2.7 to 2.9%

 Actual 2011:  1.8%


2012:
January 2010:  Prediction of 3.5 to 4.5% 
January 2011:  Prediction of 3.5 to 4.4%
January 2012:  Prediction of 2.2 to 2.7%

Actual 2012 So Far:  1.76% 
 

2013:
January 2011:  Prediction of 3.7 to 4.6%
January 2012:  Prediction of 2.8 to 3.2%
September 2012:  Prediction of 2.5 to 3.0%

2014:
January 2012:  Prediction of 3.3 to 4.0%

September 2012:  Prediction of 3.0 to 3.8% 

2015:
September 2012:  Prediction of 3.0 to 3.8%

Clearly, the Federal Reserve does not understand how the economy and businesses work.   It clearly consistently underestimates how much growth control of the economy by the government and the Federal Reserve itself is destroyed by their actions.  The Federal Reserve has been the eternal optimist in its real GDP forecasts for years now.  The closer they get to a year or its completion, the lower their estimates become, but never as low as the actual result.

The Missing Voters, The Missing White Voters

In the 2008 Presidential election, the vote outcome was (ignoring minor parties):

Obama, 69,456,897
McCain, 59,934,814
Total, 129,391,711

In the 2012 Presidential election, the vote outcome was (ignoring minor parties):

Obama, 61,164,405
Romney, 58,159,408
Total, 119,323,813
Difference between the candidates, 3,004,997

There were 10,067,898 fewer votes cast for the two major party candidates in the 2012 election despite a growing population.  If the same proportion of the population had voted in 2012 as did in 2008, there should have been about 15.2 million more votes cast in 2012 than in 2008.

The difference in votes for the Democrat and Republican presidential candidates in 2012 compared to 2008 was:

Democrat, Obama, lost 8.29 million votes
Republican, lost 1.76 million votes
Total Lost Votes, 10.05 million votes

According to the CNN exit polls, the vote by race in 2012 was:

White, 72%, down from 74% in 2008
Black, 13%, same as in 2008
Latino, 10%, up from 9% in 2008
Asian, 3%, up from 2% in 2008

The number of white votes can be calculated for each year and we find that there were 9.84 million fewer white voters in 2012 than in 2008.

2008 White Vote:
Obama, 43%
McCain, 55%

2012 White Vote:
Obama, 39%
Romney, 59%

There was a 20% differential in this election of white voters for Romney.  If the 9.84 million white voters who stayed home had voted in the same percentages for Romney and Obama as those who voted did, then Romney would have had (0.20)(9.84 million) = 1.97 million more votes.  This would have only been two-thirds of the difference in the vote for Obama and Romney, but it would be very interesting to understand why nearly 10 million white voters stayed home.  In fact, while white voter numbers are not increasing as fast as are black and Latino numbers, they did increase somewhat, so this analysis understates the Republican problem with potential white voters.

Demographically, Republicans do have a serious need to win Latino votes.  But it is just as bad a problem that they could not motivate many white voters to come to the polls and vote and did even worse this time than they did with the very lackluster Senator John McCain.  Those who say that the Republican problem is simply that they only got 27% of the Latino vote are missing another critical part of the puzzle.  The 1% increase in the Latino voting percentage among about 10 million fewer voters, means there were only about 0.3 million more Latino votes.  Obama's 71% portion of that added vote gave him about 0.2 million more votes.  As a result, Obama's advantage due to more Latino voters was only about 0.1 times Romney's loss of votes due to not turning out white voters.

To have actually won the election, Romney would still have needed to get a significantly larger percentage of white and/or Latino votes.  The percentage of black voters stayed the same and given the lower number of total voters, the actual number of black voters decreased compared to their number in 2008.  The actual number was about 1.3 million fewer black voters.  Those black voters who voted, voted 91% for Obama.  Thus, a lower turnout of black voters may have cost him about 1.2 million votes.  So, Latino voters increased very slightly and white voters decreased hugely compared to 2008.

Summarizing the effects of voter turnout by race alone, and recognizing that using percentages only to the nearest 1% causes large errors, we have:

Obama's lost votes, 1.2 million black votes minus 0.2 million Latino votes = 1.0 million lost votes.

Romney's lost votes, 2.0 million white votes

So Romney nominally lost twice as many votes as Obama did due to the changes in numbers of voters choosing to vote, assuming each race voted in the same percentage as those of that race who turned up to vote.  Admittedly, that may very well not be a good assumption.  Nonetheless, it makes it clear that much more than just changing demographics is responsible for the sorry showing of Romney.