Monday, September 5, 2011

On the Lighter Side

Thanks to Michael Grossman....

The recession has hit everybody really hard...
 
My neighbor got a pre-declined credit card in the mail.
 
CEO's are now playing miniature golf.
 
Exxon-Mobil laid off 25 Congressmen.
 
A stripper was killed when her audience showered her with rolls of Pennies while she danced.
 
I saw a Mormon with only one wife.
 
If the bank returns your check marked "Insufficient Funds," you call them and ask if they meant you or them.
 
McDonald's is selling the 1/4 ouncer.
 
Angelina Jolie adopted a child from America.
 
Parents in Beverly Hills fired their nannies and learned their children's names.
 
My cousin had an exorcism but couldn't afford to pay for it, and they re-possessed her!
 
A truckload of Americans was caught sneaking into Mexico.
 
A picture is now only worth 200 words.
 
When Bill and Hillary travel together, they now have to share a room.
 
The Treasure Island casino in Las Vegas is now managed by Somali pirates.
 
... finally, ....
 
I was so depressed last night thinking about the economy, wars, jobs, my savings, Social Security, retirement funds, etc., I called the Suicide Hotline and got a call center in Pakistan.  When I told them I was suicidal, they got all excited, and asked if I could drive a truck.

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Millionaires Go Missing

This is a repost from an Aug 17 2011 WSJ opinion piece. The numbers don't lie...

Millionaires Go Missing
There is nothing like a recession to level incomes.....

Speaking of "millionaires and billionaires" (see above), the real tax news is that there are fewer of both these days. This month the IRS released more detailed tax data for 2009, and the nearby table records the decline of the taxpaying rich.

In 2007, 390,000 tax filers reported adjusted gross income of $1 million or more and paid $309 billion in taxes. In 2009, there were only 237,000 such filers, a decline of 39%. Almost four of 10 millionaires vanished in two years, and the total taxes they paid in 2009 declined to $178 billion, a drop of 42%.

Those with $10 million or more in reported income fell to 8,274 from 18,394 in 2007, a 55% drop. As a result, their tax payments tanked by 51%. These disappearing millionaires go a long way toward explaining why federal tax revenues have sunk to 15% of GDP in recent years. The loss of millionaires accounts for at least $130 billion of the higher federal budget deficit in 2009. If Warren Buffett wants to reduce the deficit, he should encourage policies to create more millionaires, not campaign to tax them more.

The millionaires who are left still pay a mountain of tax. Those who make $1 million accounted for about 0.2% of all tax returns but paid 20.4% of income taxes in 2009. Those with adjusted gross income above $200,000 a year were just under 3% of tax filers but paid 50.1% of the $866 billion in total personal income taxes. This means the top 3% paid more than the bottom 97%. Yet the 3% are the people that President Obama claims don't pay their fair share. Before the recession, the $200,000 income group paid 54.5% of the income tax.


Editorial writer Mary Kissel on how Obama's taxes on "millionaires and billionaires" would hurt the middle class. Also, Bartley Fellow Charlie Dameron on Texas Governor Rick Perry's liabilities as a GOP presidential candidate.

For the past three decades, the political left has obsessed about income inequality. As the economy experienced one of the largest and lengthiest economic booms in history from 1982-2007, the left moaned that the gains went to yacht club members.

Well, if equality of income is the priority, liberals should be thrilled with the last four years. The recession and weak recovery have been income levelers. Those who make more than $200,000 captured one-quarter of the $7.6 trillion in total income in 2009. In 2007 the over-$200,000 crowd had one-third of reported U.S. taxable income. Those with incomes above $1 million earned 9.5% of total income in 2009, down from 16.1% in 2007.

It's an old story: The best way to produce income equality is to destroy trillions of dollars of wealth. Everyone loses, but the rich lose relatively more than the poor and the middle class. By that measure, if few others, Obamanomics has been a raging success.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Will it make news, or be buried....

A post like the one below, from Yahoo via Forbes via Nasa, is too important to be buried. However, I expect it to be buried. Basically, it is being reported that new NASA data directly refutes the whole theory of Global Warming via trapped greenhouse gases. I find this not suprising because the science around "global warming" (or do I need to say "Climate Change" so some can cover their basis) has had all the patterns of fake, phony, political and FAST. My number on data point is the violent reaction of any when you simply ask for the proof and data. "We are beyond that" they scream and assume my truth seeking is politically motivated (how?). Truth seeking is what we need to get beyond partisanship. I don't see any truth seeking from environmentalists. I also see the motive for "global warming" advocates, it gives them a) the key then need to promote big controlling government and b) a religion to help them deal with their secularism (fyi, I am not religious -- at least in a traditional sense). What do you think?

http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-data-blow-gaping-hold-global-warming-alarmism-192334971.html

Friday, July 15, 2011

The BEST take on the "debt crisis" I have heard

I have spent a lot of time watching and listening to the debate on the disagreement surrounding raising the debt limit. This is the best, short, analysis I have heard. This is Krauthammer, who gets it.

-- Storm

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/07/12/krauthammer_obamas_sudden_interest_in_cutting_debt_a_farce.html

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Happy Birthday Brokistan!

Great piece I saw in OC Register around Independence Day by Mark Steyn.

Dozens of countries have “Independence Days.” Nov. 25, for example: Independence Day in Suriname. In that instance, as in most others, the designation signifies nothing more than transfer of de jure sovereignty and de facto operational control from a distant European capital to a more local regime. 1975 in Suriname's case. They had the first military coup seven years later.

But in America “Independence” seemed as much a statement about the character of a people as a designation of jurisdictional status. The first Americans were British subjects who had outgrown a British king as benign and enlightened as any ruler on the planet. They demanded “independence” not from foreign rulers of another ethnicity but from their own compatriots with whom they had a disagreement about the nature of government. Long before the Revolutionary War, small New England townships governed themselves to a degree no old England towns did. “Independence” is not about the replacement of a king in London with a president in Washington but about the republican virtues of a self-reliant citizenry free to exploit its own potential.
Please, no snickering. The self-reliant citizen? In the damning formulation of contemporary American vernacular, he's history – as in over and done with, fuhgeddabouttim. What's left of that founding vision on this less than Glorious Fourth of July 2011 in the Brokest Nation in History? “You go talk to your constituents,” President Obama taunted Republicans on Wednesday, “and ask them are they willing to compromise their kids' safety so that some corporate jet owner continues to get a tax break?”

In the Republic of Brokistan, that's the choice, is it? Give me safe kids or give me corporate jets! No corporate aviation without safe kiddification! In his bizarre press conference on Wednesday, Obama made no fewer than six references to corporate jet owners. Just for the record, the tax break for corporate jets was part of the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009” – i.e., the stimulus. The Obama stimulus. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid stimulus. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Democratic Party stimulus that every single Republican House member and all but three Republican senators voted against. The Obama-Corporate Jet stimulus that some guy called Obama ostentatiously signed into law in Denver after jetting in to host an “economic forum.”

Charles Krauthammer did the math. If you eliminate the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Corporate Jet Tax Break, you would save so much dough that, after 5,000 years, you would have clawed back enough money to cover one year of Obama's debt.
I see some leftie at MSNBC has just been suspended for characterizing the president's performance Wednesday as that of a demotic synonym for the male reproductive organ. So I shall be more circumspect and say only that even being a hollow unprincipled demagogue requires a certain lightness of touch Obama can't seem to find.

Speaking of corporate jets, did the president fly commercial to Denver? Oh, but that's different! He's in “public service.” A couple of weeks before he flew Air Force One to Denver, he flew Air Force One to Williamsburg, Va. From the White House (well, via Andrews Air Force Base). That's 150 miles, a 30-minute flight. He took a 747 for a puddle-jump across the Potomac.

Oh, but it was for another “economic forum.” This time with House Democrats – the ones who voted for the Obama Corporate Jet Tax Break. “Economic forums” are what we have instead of an economy these days.

Aside from the Sultan of Brunei and one or two similar potentates, no other head of state goes around like this. In a self-governing republic, it ought to be unbecoming. But in the Brokest Nation in History it's ridiculous. And the least the beneficiary of such decadence could do is not lecture those who pay for their own transportation. America's debt is an existential crisis, and playing shell games with demonizable irrelevancies only advertises your contempt for the citizenry.
By the way, one way to cut back on corporate jettage would be to restore civilized standards of behavior in American commercial flight. Two weeks ago, a wheelchair-bound 95-year-old woman at Northwest Florida Regional Airport flying to Michigan to be with her family for the final stage of her terminal leukemia was made to remove her adult diaper by the crack agents of the Transport Stupidity Administration. George III wouldn't have done this to her.

Oh, c'mon, do you want to compromise your kids' safety in order to give grope breaks to dying nonagenarians? A spokesgroper for the Transport Stupidity Administration explained that security procedures have to be “the same for everyone” – because it would be totally unreasonable to expect timeserving government bureaucrats to exercise individual human judgment.
Oddly enough, it's not “the same for everyone” if you're Olajide Oluwaseun Noibi from Nigeria, who on June 24 got on a flight at JFK with a college ID and an expired boarding pass in somebody else's name. Why, that slippery devil! If only he'd been three-quarters of a century older, in a wheelchair and dying of leukemia, we'd have got him! He was arrested upon landing at LAX, and we're now going to spend millions of dollars prosecuting him. Why? We should thank him for his invaluable expose of America's revolting security theater, and make him head of the TSA.

What else isn't “the same for everyone”? A lot of things, these days. The president has a point about “tax breaks”. We have too many. And on the scale of the present tax code that's a dagger at the heart of one of the most basic principles of free societies – equality before the law. But, of course, the president is not opposed to exemptions and exceptions and special privileges on principle: After all, he's issued – what is it now? – over a thousand “waivers” for his own Obamacare law. If you knew who to call in Washington, maybe you got one. If you didn't, tough.
But that's the point. Big Government on America's unprecedented money-no-object scale will always be profoundly wasteful (as on that Williamsburg flight), stupid (as at the TSA) and arbitrary (as in those waivers). But it's not republican in any sense the founders would recognize. If (like Obama) you're a lifetime member of the government class, you can survive it. For the rest, it ought to be a source of shame to today's Americans that this will be the first generation in U.S. history to bequeath its children the certainty of poorer, meaner lives – if not a broader decay into a fetid swamp divided between a well-connected Latin-American-style elite enjoying their waivers and a vast downwardly mobile morass.

On Independence Day 2011, debt-ridden America is now dependent, not on far-off kings but on global bond and currency markets, which fulfill the same role the cliff edge does in a Wile E Coyote cartoon. At some point, Wile looks down and realizes he's outrun solid ground. You know what happens next.
That's all, folks!
©MARK STEYN

Can We Have Clarity Over Where We Disagree?

In the past I have made the claim that tyranny is all around us and that our freedoms are being eroded in a thousand little ways. Please watch the following. This is a fascinating back and forth on a congressional inquiry panel as broadcast on CSPAN. I don’t know who this congressman is (I assume he is a congressman) but he just became my favorite. A calmer Governor Christie. Note that the EPA (I assume) policy maker either A) did not understand the question or B) she refused to speak her truth. Either case is troubling. She started jibbering some answer that referenced bi-partisan backing and a partnership between the executive and legislative branches.(???). She missed it. What she should have said is that “we believe that if we let people do what they want they will make choices that we think are bad for society or the environment or both and we therefore think it is appropriate and better to forcefully limit the choices of the populace for the betterment of all — as to be determined by us — unelected officials of government agencies.” At least if she said that we could have clarity of disagreement and begin an important debate that this country so very much needs.


http://videos2view.net/smackdown.htm

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Off the Cliff With No Skidmarks

I had a recent debate with a friend who claimed that it was unassailable that BHO is "smart." Smart means context and wise choices, particularly important for a leader. Certainly a gifted orator who can read an audience and who has been well educated, in BHO I see a terribly misguided intelligence -- where I would take ANY of the republican contenders, RIGHT NOW, to better guide our country and its course. What does "smart" mean when it is a thinking and actions wheeling off course in increasing fashion. I am sure some of history's most awful tyrants and dictators were "smart" as they rose to power and were able to influence and audience and read and play emotions. I am not looking for these traits in a leader, I am looking for someone to represent my values and those of my country.

The following piece from today's National Review by Mark Steyn is a great, long, read. It represents information in context, and a real reading of the tea leaves. It is classic Steyn - choc full of facts and analysis amid the frolicking sarcasm of a sober observer watching a world gone mad.

TOO BIG TO WIN

Steyn on America
WEDNESDAY, 15 JUNE 2011
Why can’t America win wars? It’s been two-thirds of a century since we saw (as President Obama vividly put it) “Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur.” And, if that’s not quite how you remember it, forget the formal guest list, forget the long-form surrender certificate, and try to think of “winning” in a more basic sense.

The United States is currently fighting, to one degree or another, three wars. Iraq — the quagmire, the “bad” war, the invasion that launched a thousand Western anti-war demonstrations and official inquiries and anti-Bush plays and movies — is going least badly. For now. And making allowances for the fact that the principal geostrategic legacy of our genteel protectorate is that an avowed American enemy, Iran, was able vastly to increase its influence over the country on our dime.

Afghanistan? The “good war” is now “America’s longest war.” Our forces have been there longer than the Red Army was. The “hearts and minds” strategy is going so well that American troops are now being killed by the Afghans who know us best. Does being murdered by the soldiers and policemen you’ve spent years training even count as a “combat” death? Perhaps that’s why the U.S. media disdain to cover these killings: In April, at a meeting between Afghan border police and their U.S. trainers, an Afghan cop killed two American soldiers. Oh, well, wild country, once you get up near that Turkmen border. A few weeks later, back in Kabul, an Afghan military pilot killed eight American soldiers and a civilian contractor. On May 13, a NATO “mentoring team” sat down to lunch with Afghan police in Helmand when one of their protégés opened fire and killed two of them. “The actions of this individual do not reflect the overall actions of our Afghan partners,” said Maj. Gen. James B. Laster of the U.S. Marine Corps. “We remain committed to our partners and to our mission here.”

Libya? The good news is that we’ve vastly reduced the time it takes us to get quagmired. I believe the Libyan campaign is already in The Guinness Book of World Records as the fastest quagmire on record. In an inspired move, we’ve chosen to back the one Arab liberation movement incapable of knocking off the local strongman even when you lend them every NATO air force. But not to worry: President Obama, cooed an administration official to The New Yorker, is “leading from behind.” Indeed. What could be more impeccably multilateral than a coalition pantomime horse composed entirely of rear ends? Apparently it would be “illegal” to target Colonel Qaddafi, so our strategic objective is to kill him by accident. So far we’ve killed a son and a couple of grandkids. Maybe by the time you read this we’ll have added a maiden aunt or two to the trophy room. It’s not precisely clear why offing the old pock-skinned transvestite should be a priority of the U.S. right now, but let’s hope it happens soon, because otherwise there’ll be no way of telling when this “war” is “ended.”

According to partisan taste, one can blame the trio of current morasses on Bush or Obama, but in the bigger picture they’re part of a pattern of behavior that predates either man, stretching back through non-victories great and small — Somalia, Gulf War One, Vietnam, Korea. On the more conclusive side of the ledger, we have . . . well, lemme see: Grenada, 1983. And, given that that was a bit of post-colonial housekeeping Britain should have taken care of but declined to, one could argue that even that lone bright spot supports a broader narrative of Western enfeeblement. At any rate, America’s only unambiguous military triumph since 1945 is a small Caribbean island with Queen Elizabeth II as head of state. For 43 percent of global military expenditure, that’s not much bang for the buck.

Inconclusive interventionism has consequences. Korea led to Norks with nukes. The downed helicopters in the Iranian desert led to mullahs with nukes. Gulf War One led to Gulf War Two. Somalia led to 9/11. Vietnam led to everything, in the sense that its trauma penetrated so deep into the American psyche that it corroded the ability to think clearly about war as a tool of national purpose.

For half a century, the Cold War provided a kind of cover. At the dawn of the so-called American era, Washington chose to downplay U.S. hegemony and instead created and funded transnational institutions in which the non-imperial superpower was so self-deprecating it artificially inflated everybody else’s status in a kind of geopolitical affirmative-action program. In the military sphere, this meant NATO. If the rap against the U.N. Security Council is that it’s the World War II victory parade preserved in aspic, NATO is the rubble of post-war Europe preserved as a situation room. In 1950, America had a unique dominance of the “free world” and it could afford to be generous, so it was: We had more money than we knew what to do with, so we absolved our allies of paying for their own defense.

But 1950 ended. The Continental economies recovered, Europe got wealthy, and so did Japan and later the Asian tigers. And in Washington nobody noticed: We continued to pay, garrisoning not remote colonies but some of the richest nations in history. Thanks to American defense welfare, NATO is a military alliance made up of allies that no longer have militaries. In the Cold War, that had a kind of logic: Europe was the designated battlefield, so, whether or not they had any tanks, they had, very literally, skin in the game. But the Cold War ended and NATO lingered on, evolving into a global Super Friends made up of folks who aren’t Super and don’t like each other terribly much. At the beginning of the Afghan campaign, Washington invested huge amounts of diplomatic effort trying to rouse its allies into the merest gestures of war-making: The 2004 NATO summit was hailed as a landmark success after the alliance’s 26 members agreed to commit an extra 600 troops and three helicopters. That averages out at 23.08 troops per country, plus almost a ninth of a helicopter apiece. Half a decade of quagmire later, Washington was investing even larger amounts of diplomatic effort failing to rouse its allies into the most perfunctory gestures of non-combat pantywaist transnationalism: We know that, under ever more refined rules of engagement, certain allies won’t go out at night, or in snow, or in provinces where there’s fighting going on, so, by the 2010 NATO confab, Robert Gates was reduced to complaining that the allies’ promised 450 “trainers” for the Afghan National Army had failed to materialize. Supposedly 46 nations are contributing to the allied effort in Afghanistan, so that would work out at ten “trainers” per country. Imagine if the energy expended in these ridiculous (and in some cases profoundly damaging) transnational fig leaves had been directed into more quaintly conventional channels — like, say, identifying America’s national interest and pursuing it.

The Cold War casts other shadows. In Korea, the U.S. forbore even to cut its enemy’s Chinese supply lines. You can’t win that way. But in the nuclear age, all-out war — war with real nations, with serious militaries — was too terrible to contemplate, so even in proxy squabbles in Third World backwaters the overriding concern was to tamp things down, even at the price of victory. And, by the time the Cold War ended, such thinking had become ingrained. A U.S.–Soviet nuclear standoff of mutual deterrence decayed into a unipolar world of U.S. auto-deterrence. Were it not for the brave passengers of Flight 93 and the vagaries of the Oval Office social calendar, the fourth plane on 9/11 might have succeeded in hitting the White House, decapitating the regime, leaving a smoking ruin in the heart of the capital and delivering the republic unto a Robert C. Byrd administration or some other whimsy of presidential succession. Yet, in allowing his toxic backwater to be used as the launch pad for the deadliest foreign assault on the U.S. mainland in two centuries, Mullah Omar either discounted the possibility of total devastating destruction against his country, or didn’t care.

If it was the former, he was surely right. After the battle of Omdurman, Hilaire Belloc offered a pithy summation of technological advantage:

Whatever happens
We have got
The Maxim gun
And they have not.

But suppose they know you’ll never use the Maxim gun? At a certain level, credible deterrence depends on a credible enemy. The Soviet Union disintegrated, but the surviving superpower’s instinct to de-escalate intensified: In Kirkuk as in Kandahar, every Lilliputian warlord quickly grasped that you could provoke the infidel Gulliver with relative impunity. Mutually Assured Destruction had curdled into Massively Applied Desultoriness.

Here I part company somewhat from my National Review colleagues who are concerned about inevitable cuts to the defense budget. Clearly, if one nation is responsible for near half the world’s military budget, a lot of others aren’t pulling their weight. The Pentagon outspends the Chinese, British, French, Russian, Japanese, German, Saudi, Indian, Italian, South Korean, Brazilian, Canadian, Australian, Spanish, Turkish, and Israeli militaries combined. So why doesn’t it feel like that?

Well, for exactly that reason: If you outspend every serious rival combined, you’re obviously something other than the soldiery of a conventional nation state. But what exactly? In the Nineties, the French liked to complain that “globalization” was a euphemism for “Americanization.” But one can just as easily invert the formulation: “Americanization” is a euphemism for “globalization,” in which the geopolitical sugar daddy is so busy picking up the tab for the global order he loses all sense of national interest. Just as Hollywood now makes films for the world, so the Pentagon now makes war for the world. Readers will be wearily familiar with the tendency of long-established pop-culture icons to go all transnational on us: Only the other week Superman took to the podium of the U.N. to renounce his U.S. citizenship on the grounds that “truth, justice, and the American way” no longer does it for him. My favorite in recent years was the attempted reinvention of good ol’ G.I. Joe as a Brussels-based multilateral acronym — the Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity. I believe they’re running the Libyan operation.

An army has to wage war on behalf of something real. For better or worse, “king and country” is real, and so, mostly for worse, are the tribal loyalties of Africa’s blood-drenched civil wars. But it’s hardly surprising that it’s difficult to win wars waged on behalf of something so chimerical as “the international community.” If you’re making war on behalf of an illusory concept, is it even possible to have war aims? What’s ours? “[We] are in Afghanistan to help the Afghan people,” General Petraeus said in April. Somewhere generations of old-school imperialists are roaring their heads off, not least at the concept of “the Afghan people.” But when you’re the expeditionary force of the parliament of man, what else is there?

War is hell, but global “mentoring” is purgatory. In that respect, the belated dispatch of Osama bin Laden may be less strategically relevant than the near-simultaneous exposé by 60 Minutes of Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea. This is the bestselling book the Pentagon gives to Afghan-bound officers, and whose celebrity author has met with our most senior commanders on multiple occasions. And it’s a crock. Nevertheless, it’s effected a profound cultural transformation — if only on us. “It’s remarkable,” an Indian diplomat chuckled to me a while back. “In Afghanistan, the Americans now drink more tea than the British. And they don’t even like it.” In 2009, remember, the Pentagon accounted for 43 percent of the planet’s military expenditures. At this rate, by 2012 they’ll account for 43 percent of the planet’s tea consumption.

Nation building in Afghanistan is the ne plus ultra of a fool’s errand. But even if one were so disposed, effective “nation building” is done in the national interest of the builder. The British rebuilt India in their own image, with a Westminster parliament, common law, and an English education system. In whose image are we building Afghanistan? Eight months after Petraeus announced his latest folly, the Afghan Local Police initiative, Oxfam reported that the newly formed ALP was a hotbed of torture and pederasty. Almost every Afghan institution is, of course. But for most of human history they’ve managed to practice both enthusiasms without international subvention. The U.S. taxpayer accepts wearily the burden of subsidy for Nevada’s cowboy poets and San Francisco’s mime companies, but, even by those generous standards of cultural preservation, it’s hard to see why he should be facilitating the traditional predilections of Pashtun men with an eye for the “dancing boys of Kandahar.”

Which brings us back to those Three Cups of Tea. So the Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity is building schoolhouses in Afghanistan. Big deal. The problem, in Kandahar as in Kansas, is not the buildings but what’s being taught inside them — and we’ve no stomach for getting into that. So what’s the point of building better infrastructure for Afghanistan’s wretched tribal culture? What’s our interest in state-of-the-art backwardness?

Transnational do-gooding is political correctness on tour. It takes the relativist assumptions of the multiculti varsity and applies them geopolitically: The white man’s burden meets liberal guilt. No wealthy developed nation should have a national interest, because a national interest is a selfish interest. Afghanistan started out selfishly — a daringly original military campaign, brilliantly executed, to remove your enemies from power and kill as many of the bad guys as possible. Then America sobered up and gradually brought a freakish exception into compliance with the rule. In Libya as in Kosovo, war is legitimate only if you have no conceivable national interest in whatever conflict you’re fighting. The fact that you have no stake in it justifies your getting into it. The principal rationale is that there’s no rationale, and who could object to that? Applied globally, political correctness obliges us to forswear sovereignty. And, once you do that, then, as Country Joe and the Fish famously enquired, it’s one-two-three, what are we fighting for?

When you’re responsible for half the planet’s military spending, and 80 percent of its military R&D, certain things can be said with confidence: No one is going to get into a nuclear war with the United States, or a large-scale tank battle, or even a dogfight. You’re the Microsoft, the Standard Oil of conventional warfare: Were they interested in competing in this field, second-tier military powers would probably have filed an antitrust suit with the Department of Justice by now. When you’re the only guy in town with a tennis racket, don’t be surprised if no one wants to join you on center court — or that provocateurs look for other fields on which to play. In the early stages of this century’s wars, IEDs were detonated by cell phones and even garage-door openers. So the Pentagon jammed them. The enemy downgraded to more primitive detonators: You can’t jam string. Last year, it was reported that the Taliban had developed metal-free IEDs, which made them all but undetectable: Instead of two hacksaw blades and artillery shells, they began using graphite blades and ammonium nitrate. If you’ve got uniformed infantrymen and tanks and battleships and jet fighters, you’re too weak to take on the hyperpower. But, if you’ve got illiterate goatherds with string and hacksaws and fertilizer, you can tie him down for a decade. An IED is an “improvised” explosive device. Can we still improvise? Or does the planet’s most lavishly funded military assume it has the luxury of declining to adapt to the world it’s living in?

In the spring of 2003, on the deserted highway between the Jordanian border and the town of Rutba, I came across my first burnt-out Iraqi tank — a charred wreck shoved over to the shoulder. I parked, walked around it, and pondered the fate of the men inside. It seemed somehow pathetic that, facing invasion by the United States, these Iraqi conscripts had even bothered to climb in and point the thing to wherever they were heading when death rained down from the stars, or Diego Garcia, or Missouri. Yet even then I remembered the words of the great strategist of armored warfare, Basil Liddell Hart: “The destruction of the enemy’s armed forces is but a means — and not necessarily an inevitable or infallible one — to the attainment of the real objective.” The object of war, wrote Liddell Hart, is not to destroy the enemy’s tanks but to destroy his will.

Instead, America has fallen for the Thomas Friedman thesis, promulgated by the New York Times’ great thinker in January 2002: “For all the talk about the vaunted Afghan fighters, this was a war between the Jetsons and the Flintstones — and the Jetsons won and the Flintstones know it.”

But they didn’t. They didn’t know they were beaten. Because they weren’t. Because we hadn’t destroyed their will — as we did to the Germans and Japanese two-thirds of a century ago, and as we surely would not do if we were fighting World War II today. That’s not an argument for nuking or carpet bombing, so much as for cool clear-sightedness. Asked how he would react if the British army invaded Germany, Bismarck said he would dispatch the local police force to arrest them: a clever Teuton sneer at the modest size of Her Britannic Majesty’s forces. But that’s the point: The British accomplished much with little; at the height of empire, an insignificant number of Anglo-Celts controlled the entire Indian subcontinent. A confident culture can dominate far larger numbers of people, as England did for much of modern history. By contrast, in an era of Massively Applied Desultoriness, we spend a fortune going to war with one hand tied behind our back. The Forty-Three Percent Global Operating Industrial Military Complex isn’t too big to fail, but it is perhaps too big to win — as our enemies understand.

So on we stagger, with Cold War institutions, transnational sensibilities, politically correct solicitousness, fraudulent preening pseudo–nation building, expensive gizmos, little will, and no war aims . . . but real American lives. “These Colors Don’t Run,” says the T-shirt. But, bereft of national purpose, they bleed away to a grey blur on a distant horizon. Sixty-six years after V-J Day, the American way of war needs top-to-toe reinvention.

from National Review

Class Warfare, the latest version...

Expect our media to fall right in line on pitting "millionaires and billionaires" against everybody else as the Democrats try to shift blame to the Republicans over the coming debt limit showdown. The Great Uniter -- he is not.

Biden Digging for Tax Hike Deal
By Chris Stirewalt
Published June 15, 2011
| FoxNews.com

Dems Try to Retake High Ground on Economy


“The ‘Affordable Health Care Act’ was not as affordable as we expected.
The ‘Open Government Initiative’ was not as open as we expected.
The ‘stimulus’ was not as stimulating as we expected.”

-- Suggestions from the office of Speaker John Boehner for follow up “jokes” to the one President Obama made in North Carolina Monday that “‘shovel-ready’ was not as ‘shovel-ready’ as we expected.”

The lousy economy has helped push Democrats to the negotiating table in a bid to cut a deal to increase the federal government’s $14.3 trillion borrowing limit, but the blue team is still hoping to gain some leverage from the nation’s economic woes.
In order to keep their party’s rank and file on board, Democratic negotiators, led by Vice President Joe Biden, need to offer some kind of a tax increase as part of a package of cuts being negotiated with Republicans.
But if the deal includes a tax hike on incomes above $200,000, or anything else, Republicans won’t be able to deliver the seven Senate votes and 24 House votes needed to pass a plan that had unanimous Democratic support.
The gambit from the administration now is to offer an extension and expansion of President Obama’s payroll tax cut in a bid to spur hiring and to offer Republicans a trade off in favor of a tax hike on high-income earners.
An aide to one senior House Republican described the possibility of a tax rate increase in exchange for the extension of a temporary tax break on payrolls as “a non-starter,” but the administration is desperate to get a deal and look active on the economy.
The Republican complaint about the Obama payroll tax break is that it is too small to jolt the economy back on the wrong track. Obama has long favored the imperceptible tax break, like the one in his 2009 stimulus that put another $6 in the weekly paychecks of most workers. The theory is that the money is spent quickly helping the economy.
Republicans, meanwhile, favor low rates overall and lean toward shock and awe when it comes to tax cut stimuli. Recall that one Republican plan for the 2009 stimulus was to simply zero out the payroll tax for the remainder of that year, rather than a small adjustment.
Biden’s group meets again today. While there is new optimism about the size of the cuts that can be achieved, the looming question remains about taxes.
With Democrats taking a pounding over the condition of the economy and Republicans still denouncing Obama’s joke about the failures of his stimulus package, Democrats may eventually be convinced to drop calls for a tax hike.
But for now, the White House is still looking for a trade off. The president’s chances for getting his hike will be enhanced if Democrats can’t paint Republicans as protecting “millionaires and billionaires” while opposing a little more pocket change for the middle class.
The Democratic counterattack begins anew today.


Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/06/15/biden-digging-for-tax-hike-deal/#ixzz1PMOkl5vP

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Republican Debate

CNN should not be allowed to run a debate. They don't understand the issues facing the country, just their NY/Beltway narrative from a political framework. Mark Steyn penned this just after the debate ended....and I agree..... (courtesy www.steynonline.com)

Re: This or That
June 13, 2011 10:33 P.M.
By Mark Steyn
The trouble is it’s all “This or That”. As Newt pointed out, most of the questions posit ridiculous choices: Are you in favor of amnesty for illegal immigrants or are you in favor of deporting 20 million people? Are you in favor of seizing private property in New Hampshire for a Hydro Québec power line or are you in favor of continued oil dependency on psychotic dictators? The remainder fall into cutesie-pie stuff that John King lacks the personality to pull off, and the last embodied in its perfect post-modern stupidity the awfulness of these “debates”: “What have you learned during the past two hours?”

Hmm. What I learned is that John King makes Tim Pawlenty look like Lady Gaga. Other than that, I also got the distimct impression that this season’s debates seem unlikely to be effective forums even for acknowledging the profound and existential crises facing the nation, never mind addressing them.

But I agree with Rich that Michele Bachmann was very strong. (Here’s my favorite picture of her – I hope it doesn’t ruin her campaign.) I also agree that the answers on Afghanistan about deferring to the commanders in the field were pathetic – for a couple of reasons:

First, as I said in NR a couple of issues back, you can’t win a war unless you have war aims – and war aims are determined by a nation’s civilian leadership. So, if Romney & Co mean what they say, it helps explain why America has nothing to show either for a decade in the Hindu Kush or for three months over Tripoli.

Alternatively, if they don’t mean it, then they’re just pandering in a bumper-stickerish “I So Totally Support Our Troops I’ll Take My Orders From Them” kind of way. And this political season ought to be one not for panderers but for tellers of hard truths.

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Peggy Noonan's Insight

Over the weekend, Peggy Noonan wrote an interesting column on the skills and orientation of the President. As usual, it was insightful, and worthy of a re-post. She has high skill on her ability to read poeple...

To Lead us Out of Debt Crisis, President Will Need to Learn New Skills.
By Peggy Noonan from WSJ 6/5/11

The debate in Washington is serious as a heart attack: whether the United States should raise its debt ceiling so it can borrow more money to stay afloat. The statutory ceiling on our national debt—our legal borrowing limit—is $14.3 trillion. That limit was reached, according to the Treasury Department, on May 16. Treasury says it can make do until early August, when the ceiling must be raised by $2.4 trillion.

Congressional Republicans have made their stand clear: They will agree to raise the limit only if it is accompanied by spending cuts or reforms.

The Democrats want to raise the ceiling, period.

The Republicans are being hard-line because of the base, and the base is hard-line for two reasons. First, we are in an unprecedented debt crisis. Second, the past 40 years have taught them that if dramatic action is not taken to stanch spending, Congress will spend more. Something is needed to shock the system.

If Republicans can get the White House to cut where the money is—Medicare—then Medicare, and all controversy over the Ryan plan, will be taken off the table as an issue in the 2012 election. This would not be good for Democrats. Democrats in turn would likely make some cuts in spending if Republicans agree to some tax increases. But that would take a great Republican issue off the table.

This week the House voted 318-97 against raising the ceiling without cutting. The president and a group of House Republicans met this week to talk about the apparent impasse. There is a chance they won't come to any agreement by August.

If no agreement is reached, what happens? Nobody knows, because it's never happened before. But economists warn: The dollar could crash, interest rates spike, equity markets melt. Foreign investors would lose confidence that America is worth risking their money and that Washington is able to face and handle a crisis.

Princeton economist Alan Blinder has noted in these pages that the bills for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense and interest on the national debt amount to about two-thirds of all federal outlays. "At some point [Treasury Secretary Timothy] Geithner could wind up brooding over horrible questions like these: Do we stop issuing checks for Social Security benefits, or for soldiers' pay, or for interest payments to the Chinese government?”

All of this sounds fairly catastrophic, especially considering this week's evidence that America's economic recovery is stalled. Housing prices are down, job creation weak, manufacturing growth slowed, factory activity down. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 280 points on Wednesday.

So this would seem to be a bad time to be playing chicken.

Democrats think if push comes to shove and an agreement is not reached, public opinion will go against the Republicans. This may be true. Republicans think if agreement is not reached, responsibility will redound on the president. They may be true too.

But again, this isn't a good time to play Let's Find Out.

Democrats are right that the debt ceiling must be raised. Republicans are right that the decision to raise the debt ceiling must be accompanied by reforms or cuts to spending that equal or exceed the amount of the raise, $2.4 trillion. Here's why.

Default is unthinkable. We are the United States of America, and we pay our bills.

Raising the ceiling without attempting to control spending is a depressing and wearying thought. It will avert crisis, yes, but there would be no gain in it beyond that. It would demonstrate to the world that we are not capable of taking necessary steps to dig our way out of the spending mess. It would mean things just continue as they are.

But cutting and reforming—showing we can make tough decisions in a crisis—will reassure the world, and our creditors. It will increase faith in the United States, and increase an American sense of well being: "We can do this, we can make it better." It would be very good to leave the world saying, "My God, the Americans are still competent."

Washington should forget taxes for now—fight that out later. The polls are all over the place, and no feasible amount of new revenue is going to make a difference. Cutting is what matters. And the president could play it so that he doesn't lose. A crisis would have been averted—on his watch. He could claim to have been conciliatory, looking out for the national interest. The left won't like it, but the center will. And he will have shown he can work closely and in good faith with Republicans, who control the House.

On that, a word. Talks on the debt ceiling will no doubt continue, but there is an Obama problem there, and it's always gotten in the way. He really dislikes the other side, and can't fake it. This is peculiar in a politician, the not faking it. But he doesn't bother to show warmth and high regard. And so appeals to patriotism—"Come on guys, we have to save this thing"—ring hollow from him. In this he is the un-Clinton. Bill Clinton understood why conservatives think what they think because he was raised in the South. He was surrounded by them, and he wasn't by nature an ideologue.

He absorbed not the biases of his region but of his generation and his education (Ivy League). He had ambition: Liberalism was rising and he'd rise with it. And on the signal issues of his youth, Vietnam and race, he thought the Democrats of the 1970s were right. But that didn't mean he didn't understand and feel some sympathy for conservatives, and as a political practitioner he had a certain sympathy for the predicaments of his fellow pols. That's why he could play ball with Newt Gingrich and the class of 1994: because he didn't quite hate everything they stood for. He had a saving ambivalence.

Barack Obama is different, not a political practitioner, really, but something else, and not a warm-blooded animal but a cool, chill character, a fish who sits deep in the tank and stares, stilly, at the other fish.

He doesn't know how to confuse his foes with "outreach," with phone calls, jokes, affection. He doesn't leave them saying, as Reagan did, "I just can't help it, I like the guy." And because he can't confuse them or reach them they more readily coalesce around their own explanation of him: socialist, destroyer.

This isn't good, and has had an impact on the president's contacts with Republicans. And it's added an edge to an emerging campaign theme among them. Two years ago I wrote of Clare Booth Luce's observation that all presidents have a sentence: "He fought to hold the union together and end slavery." "He brought America through economic collapse and a world war." You didn't have to be told it was Lincoln, or FDR. I said that Mr. Obama didn't understand his sentence. But Republicans now think they know it.

Four words: He made it worse.

Obama inherited financial collapse, deficits and debt. He inherited a broken political culture. These things weren't his fault. But through his decisions, he made them all worse.

Friday, June 3, 2011

Is Winning Winning?

Many Republicans are pontificating on how their nominees should win the election. In Today's WSJ Dorothy Rabinowitz writes that we need to move away from "ideals" and get to "pragmatic" concerns like creating jobs. The article is well written and has some good thoughts. And, it might even be correct. However, I disagree.

I am not in favor of pragmatism or the number “jobs” created by the next executive branch. As a Republican, Libertarian and Tea Party member I am most concerned with what we choose to be our philosophy and concept of government, and want the debate to be about what is the proper long term role for the master -- and correspondingly whom will be the fodder. This is all I care about. Business cycles will come and go, and I continue to believe that separation of state and economy is best and that the debate has to be about the size and role of government. For, if you win on a “pragmatic” message, how do you have any authority to do any good? This was the problem with the last set of Republicans to control the White House and legislature. How soon we forget that a very short time ago Republicans were in total control of the government.

"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
-- Thomas Jefferson

Here is Article from Dorothy....

By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ (WSJ June 2011)

To win the presidency in 2012, the Republican candidate will require certain strengths. Among them, a credible passion for ideas other than cost-cutting and small government. He or she will have to speak in the voice of Americans who know in their bones the extraordinary character of their democracy, and that voice will have to ring out steadily. That Republican candidate will need, no less, the ability to talk about matters like Medicare and Social Security without terrorizing the electorate.

Americans already have plenty of cause for fear. They have on one side the Obama health-care plan now nearly universally acknowledged as a disaster. A plan that entails huge cuts in health care—$500 billion cut from Medicare—that will nevertheless cause no pain, according to its architects. As the polls on ObamaCare show, this grand scheme appears mostly to have alarmed Americans.

From the Republican side comes an incessant barrage of doomsday messages and proclamations that the nation is imperiled by the greatest crisis in a generation—not, as we might have supposed, by our ongoing, desperate unemployment levels, but by spending on social programs. No sane person will deny the necessity of finding ways to cut the costs of these programs. But it's impossible not to hear in the clamor for boldness—for massive cuts in entitlements—a distinctly fevered tone, and one with an unmistakable ideological tinge. Not the sort of pragmatism that inspires voter confidence.

Thinking about all this, a physician friend recalls a lesson that experienced doctors learn: A patient comes in with symptoms—is it angina? Will it lead to a heart attack? Patients whose doctors show deliberation and care in the choice of their treatment, he observes, tend to have increased faith both in the treatment and the doctor. That is a point of some relevance to politicians.


The Republican who wants to win would avoid talk of the costs that our spendthrift ways, particularly benefits like Social Security, are supposedly heaping on future generations. He would especially avoid painting images of the pain Americans feel at burdening their children and grandchildren. This high-minded talk, rooted in fantasy, isn't going to warm the hearts of voters of mature age—and they are legion—who feel no such pain. None. And they don't like being told that they do, or that they should feel it, or that they're stealing from the young. They've spent their working lives paying in to Social Security, their investment. Adjustments have to be made to the system, as they now know. Which makes it even more unlikely they'll welcome handwringing about the plight of future generations.

The Republican who wins will have to know, and show that he knows, that most Americans aren't sitting around worried to death about big government—they're worried about jobs and what they have in savings.

The candidate would do well to give time and all due detail—the material is rich—on the activities of the Justice Department under President Obama, the most ideologically driven one in U.S. history. He would make the connection between the nature of this Justice Department and the president's view of the American nation.

That view was made clear early, in candidate Obama's repeated reference to that happy time ahead when America would once again be worthy of respect—which we had presumably lost through our immoral policies—and when we would regain the trust of friends and allies around the world. That vision, still alive and well two and a half years into his administration, has been nowhere clearer than in Attorney General Eric Holder's determined effort to give 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the benefit of a trial in an American court, with full constitutional protections. Only with such a trial, Mr. Holder argued, could America prove to the world the fairness of its justice system.

The Republican candidate would have to make clear just how far removed from reality, how alien to the consciousness of most Americans, is this reflexive view of the nation as morally suspect, ever obliged to prove its respectability to a watching world. The attorney general still refuses to drop charges against two CIA employees accused of using enhanced interrogation techniques to extract information from terrorists—notwithstanding the recommendations of investigators looking into the case that the charges merited no prosecution.

The candidate will have to speak clearly on foreign policy—and begin, above all, by showing he actually has one. The near silence on the subject among Republicans consumed by domestic policy battles has been notable. Not till President Obama delivered his speech relegating Israel to pre-1967 borders did outraged Republicans come to roaring life—as Democrats, too, largely did—about a foreign policy issue.

The Republican candidate might bear in mind, for use on the campaign trail, the grand irony in the spectacle of candidate Obama holding forth on the stump about our friends and allies whom the United States had so alienated under George W. Bush—allies who would have to be won back. Fast forward to September 2009, when the Obama administration virtually overnight cancelled the planned missile defense system that was to be established in Poland and the Czech Republic—a shock to both allies but a gift to the Russians. The Kremlin was indeed grateful.

In March 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton let it be known that the United States no longer supported the British in the matter of the Falkland Islands, which have been British territory since 1833, and that "negotiations" with Argentina were in order. P.J. Crowley, then the State Department's spokesman, expressed the new neutral stance of the U.S. by referring to the Falklands and then adding, with his usual ostentation, "or the Malvinas"—the Argentinian name—"depending on how you look at it."

The Republican who wins the presidency will have to have more than a command of the reasons the Obama administration must go. He will have to have a vision of this nation, and its place in the world, that voters recognize, that speaks to a sense of America they can see and take pride in. He can look at the film of the crowds, mostly of young people, who gathered at the White House to wave the flag of the United States when bin Laden was captured and killed. Faces of blacks, whites, Asians—of every ethnic group.

At Louisiana State University not long after that, a student who planned to burn an American flag had to be rushed from the campus for his safety, much to his shock. Students by the hundreds had descended on him in rage, waving their own banners and roaring "USA! USA!" at the top of their lungs. It was a shout that spoke for more than they could say.

After all the years of instruction, all the textbooks on U.S. rapacity and greed, all the college lectures on the evil and injustice the U.S. had supposedly visited on the world, something inside these young rose up to tell them they were Americans. That something lies in the hearts of Americans across the land and it is those hearts to which the candidate will have to speak.

Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of The Journal's editorial board.

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

HealthCare -- What is quality?

It should be amazing that the following is not discussed more often. It is a meaningful, and perhaps the most meaningful measure of "quality of healthcare." Too often "life span" is a measure, but convenience has to be more relevant measure.

In addition I often hear "16% of GDP is too much to spend on healthcare!" Too much for whom? By what measure? What is the appropriate amount? Is 16% too much of a spend for flat screen TVs or electronics? What about transportation? Education? -- Blank out. No Answer, just ignore the obvious question. No questions from our journalistic 'watchdog' media.

A recent "Investor's Business Daily" article provided very interesting statistics from a survey by the United Nations International Health Organization.

Percentage of men and women who survived a cancer five years after diagnosis:

U.S. 65%
England 46%
Canada 42%

Percentage of patients diagnosed with diabetes who received treatment within six months:

U.S. 93%
England 15%
Canada 43%

Percentage of seniors needing hip replacement who received it within six months:

U.S. 90%
England 15%
Canada 43%

Percentage referred to a medical specialist who see one within one month:

U.S. 77%
England 40%
Canada 43%

Number of MRI scanners (a prime diagnostic tool) per million people:

U.S. 71%
England 14%
Canada 18%

Percentage of seniors (65+), with low income, who say they are in "excellent health":

U.S. 12%
England 2%
Canada 6%

Republican Budget Items

I think this list needs some more detail to be considered legitimate, but I assume it is close. (i.e. what it needs is to clarify how much savings over what time frame, which is offered for some items but not for all).

These are all the programs that the new Republican House has proposed cutting. Read to the end.
· Corporation for Public Broadcasting Subsidy. $445 million annual savings.
· Save America 's Treasures Program. $25 million annual savings.
· International Fund for Ireland . $17 million annual savings.
· Legal Services Corporation. $420 million annual savings.
· National Endowment for the Arts. $167.5 million annual savings.
· National Endowment for the Humanities. $167.5 million annual savings.
· Hope VI Program.. $250 million annual savings.
· Amtrak Subsidies. $1.565 billion annual savings.
· Eliminate duplicative education programs. H.R. 2274 (in last Congress), authored by Rep. McKeon, eliminates 68 at a savings of $1.3 billion annually.
· U.S. Trade Development Agency. $55 million annual savings.
· Woodrow Wilson Center Subsidy. $20 million annual savings.
· Cut in half funding for congressional printing and binding. $47 million annual savings.
· John C. Stennis Center Subsidy. $430,000 annual savings.
· Community Development Fund. $4.5 billion annual savings.
· Heritage Area Grants and Statutory Aid. $24 million annual savings.
· Cut Federal Travel Budget in Half. $7.5 billion annual savings
· Trim Federal Vehicle Budget by 20%. $600 million annual savings.
· Essential Air Service. $150 million annual savings.
· Technology Innovation Program. $70 million annual savings.
· Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) Program. $125 million annual savings.
· Department of Energy Grants to States for Weatherization. $530 million annual savings.
· Beach Replenishment. $95 million annual savings.
· New Starts Transit. $2 billion annual savings.
· Exchange Programs for Alaska , Natives Native Hawaiians, and Their Historical Trading Partners in Massachusetts. $9 million annual savings
· Intercity and High Speed Rail Grants. $2.5 billion annual savings.
· Title X Family Planning. $318 million annual savings.
· Appalachian Regional Commission. $76 million annual savings.
· Economic Development Administration. $293 million annual savings.
· Programs under the National and Community Services Act. $1.15 billion annual savings.
· Applied Research at Department of Energy. $1.27 billion annual savings.
· FreedomCAR and Fuel Partnership. $200 million annual savings.
· Energy Star Program. $52 million annual savings.
· Economic Assistance to Egypt . $250 million annually.
· U.S. Agency for International Development. $1.39 billion annual savings.
· General Assistance to District of Columbia . $210 million annual savings.
· Subsidy for Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. $150 million annual savings.
· Presidential Campaign Fund. $775 million savings over ten years.
· No funding for federal office space acquisition. $864 million annual savings.
· End prohibitions on competitive sourcing of government services.
· Repeal the Davis-Bacon Act. More than $1 billion annually.
· IRS Direct Deposit: Require the IRS to deposit fees for some services it offers (such as processing payment plans for taxpayers) to the Treasury, instead of allowing it to remain as part of its budget. $1.8 billion savings over ten years.
· Require collection of unpaid taxes by federal employees. $1 billion total savings.
· Prohibit taxpayer funded union activities by federal employees. $1.2 billion savings over ten years.
· Sell excess federal properties the government does not make use of. $15 billion total savings.
· Eliminate death gratuity for Members of Congress.
· Eliminate Mohair Subsidies. $1 million annual savings.
· Eliminate taxpayer subsidies to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. $12.5 million annual savings
· Eliminate Market Access Program. $200 million annual savings.
· USDA Sugar Program. $14 million annual savings.
· Subsidy to Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). $93 million annual savings.
· Eliminate the National Organic Certification Cost-Share Program. $56.2 million annual savings.
· Eliminate fund for Obamacare administrative costs. $900 million savings.
· Ready to Learn TV Program. $27 million savings..
· HUD Ph.D. Program.
· Deficit Reduction Check-Off Act.

· TOTAL SAVINGS: $2.5 Trillion over Ten Years

I think this shows how things get into the budget. Something as small as $10MM dollars is not taken seriously. That, in addition to the process in Washington, means this is how our rulers play the game. They play power politics with our money. Think about the taxes you paid last year -- would you be pleased to know that your entire tax bill went to pay for a subsidy to Ireland?

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Mark Steyn on Demographics and Decline

This post from Mark Steyn caught my eye. Enjoy.

Steyn on Culture
TUESDAY, 24 MAY 2011
Mitch Daniels has wrapped up his "To be or not to be" routine, and, according to Paul Rahe, left the GOP looking like a hamlet without a prince. Paul is upset. I'm less so. As I said on the radio some months back, one should never underestimate the Republican Party's ability to screw up its presidential nomination. The GOP had a grand night last November only because the entire party establishment was more or less absent from the 2010 election dynamic. It would be unreasonable to expect that luck to hold, and a presidential year requires a single frontman for the party that makes election season less friendly to decentralized insurgency Tea Party-style.

And in any case doesn't last November seem an awful long time ago? A transformative Tuesday night, followed by an entirely untransformed Wednesday morning after. There is the Paul Ryan plan, but last year's hero Scott Brown has come out against it. And he won't be the last if NY-26 goes south. And the Ryan plan itself is, in the grand scheme of the looming abyss, extremely minimal and cautious.

Governor Daniels' long tease over the Presidential race will be remembered mainly for one thing - the "truce" he called for over so-called "social issues". This was depressing on two fronts: First because Republicans spend too much time pre-emptively conceding and agreeing to play on the left's turf - and, if ever there were an electoral cycle when that should be unnecessary, it's this one. And secondly because the social issues are not separate from the debt crisis. The collapse of the American family is a fiscal issue: Unwed women are one of the most reliable voting groups for big government.

Steven Hayward suggests Daniels proposed the wrong truce, and that the one implicit in the Ryan plan is closer to what's needed: Both Republicans and Democrats accept the current obligations of the welfare state, and figure out a way to make them work. I'm inclined to agree with Michael Tanner at the Cato Institute - that the GOP would get suckered:

T]here is no evidence that if conservatives agree not to try to roll back the welfare state, liberals will agree to restrain its growth. More likely, conservatives will simply become involved in a bidding war, in which they will inevitably look like the less caring party.

You don't need to hypothesize about that. In essence, it's the "truce" accepted by so-called "right-of-center" parties (Jacques Chirac) in post-war Europe. And all it means is that the troika of permanent bureaucracy, government unions, and a vast dependency class gets to carry on bankrupting the nation even under nominally "conservative" government.

Out there in Insolvistan life goes on. Detroit, a city that has the functioning literacy rate of a West African basket case, has just renovated its library with designer chairs from Allermuir costing $1,000 apiece. Any books to go with the chairs? Who cares? "How about the young mother with several children that looks forward to a weekly trek through the snow/sleet to improve their reading skills and are hopeful that a spot near the fireplaces will be open, because the warmth provided is greater than what they experience at home?" argues Allermuir sales rep Paul Gingell in a Dickensian vignette that warms the heart of my bottom almost as much as his chairs do. God forbid any Detroiter should be required to "improve their reading skills" without a thousand-dollar seat to sink their illiterate posteriors into. What matters is to keep spending at all costs. Three chairs for Detroit!

Who will pay for Detroit, and California, New York and the rest? New Hampshire? Wyoming? Mitch Daniels can demand a "truce" from conservatives on social issues, and Democrats can demand a truce from Republicans on the welfare state, but the real fault-lines on which this nation will fracture are not half so clubbable. How many citizens of the remaining relatively solvent states are prepared to pick up the tab for Detroit's Allermuir chairs for the privilege of keeping 50 stars in the flag? The spendaholics are setting up conditions for serious secession movements.

What of those states that feel at home in a spendaholic America? Mainly as a result of government policy, the south-west has undergone one of the fastest and most dramatic demographic transformations ever seen in a settled, self-governing nation. As a consequence, there is a widening divergence between young and old in states such as California: The old are very white (with some black), and the young are very Hispanic (with some Asian). The principal beneficiaries of the mid-20th century entitlement programs are honky geezers. The fellows expected to fund them are increasingly Latino. That doesn't sound a recipe for social tranquility. The welfare state developed in small ethnically homogeneous northern European nations with a strong sense of intergenerational solidarity. That model applies less and less on an Islamizing Continent, and it makes just as little sense for southern California. When the Democrats' dependency culture collides with their immigration policies, it isn't going to be pretty. Eighty-three per cent of Medicare recipients are white; 70 per cent of births in Dallas' biggest hospital are Hispanic. The speed of transformation represented by those numbers would be difficult to manage at the best of times. In the brokest nation in history, the chances of pulling it off smoothly are zero.

Daniels' "truce" is irrelevant measured against the likelihood of any truce between solvent and insolvent states, young and old, private sector and government retiree. We're approaching the point of no return. If you scuttle the Ryan plan, the next one will be far more convulsive. Assuming there is a "plan" at all, rather than simply societal disintegration. From Scott Brown to Mitch Daniels, from the post-November business-as-usual to a potential Democrat upset in NY-26, it's starting to look as if the political institutions of the republic are impervious to course correction. I always cite the Milton Friedman argument: What matters is not electing the right people (Scott Brown was "the right people" just a year ago), but creating conditions whereby the wrong people are forced to do the right thing - ie, whatever squishes and opportunists emerge as the Scott Browns of November 2012, we've moved the meter sufficiently in the broader public discourse. Otherwise, the president who takes office in January 2013 will be presiding over the early stages not of American decline but of collapse.