Clobamitons

It’s curious and hopeful that the voters of a Democratically dominated Washington State recently voted down a state millionaire’s surtax this election; a tax publicly supported by none other than Bill Gates Jr. and Sr. and Warren Buffet, the world’s most notorious billionaires. If one had to choose the single defining ideological tenet of the modern left’s Clintonian/Obamanistan, (Clobamitan?) worldview, it would have to be… tax the rich; the puerile belief that the nation can punitively tax the well-to-do without greater adverse economic consequence; that taking money from those who save and invest and giving it to those who empty their checking account weekly actually has a more stimulating effect on the economy than leaving it in the hands of those who know how to make it in the first place.

But could it be in Washington state that the Clobamitons are finally actually making the connection that if you want someone to hire you it might be prudent not to raise their taxes? That they, the well heeled, might just take it personally that they have been singled out to pay more, as if they had somehow cheated or done something wrong? Could it be that they, the 1% that pay 40% of the nation’s taxes*, might just decide to hell with it and leave their state or the country? That they’re sick of the all-pervading populist perception that they somehow didn’t earn or deserve what they’ve created through their extraordinary effort, decision making, risk taking and vision? That they, those ersatz Gatsbians with modest fortunes, might just decide that the amount of money they’ve accumulated is enough and take their ball and go home? Could it be that it makes no practical sense to these Fox News devotees to continue to shoulder immense responsibilities only to keep less of what they’ve earned and to be publicly reviled by the political elites? Or that having more employees to worry about, to provide benefits for and to listen to their problems and excuses and to potentially sue them might not be really worth it just to drive a car that costs twice as much or live in a house that’s twice as big? Could it be these Bristol Palin voters might just think why in the hell should they work harder and longer and take on ever more responsibility and risk just so the extra tax dollars they pay can shore up some public employee’s union pension who retired at 53, send 34 warships to India or fund some new multimillion dollar study on the nondiscriminatory sexual habits of yeast? Could it be? Could it be? Naaagghh! When presented ultimately with the fiscal necessity of potentially giving up their beloved entitlements it will be so much easier to go on believing that the golden geese have metal hearts and that there’s no limit to their avarice, no matter what the social price.**

M.D.T.

*Newly released data from the IRS clearly debunks the conventional Beltway rhetoric that the "rich" are not paying their fair share of taxes.
Indeed, the IRS data shows that in 2007—the most recent data available—the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 40.4 percent of the total income taxes collected by the federal government. This is the highest percentage in modern history. By contrast, the top 1 percent paid 24.8 percent of the income tax burden in 1987, the year following the 1986 tax reform act.
Remarkably, the share of the tax burden borne by the top 1 percent now exceeds the share paid by the bottom 95 percent of taxpayers combined. The Tax Foundation – Washington D.C.

** The owl of Minerva flies at dusk ( hopefully before the lights go completely out )

Wake Up Maggie

This time historical whimsy might be on our side. Bill Clinton walked serendipitously smack dab into the biggest technological bull market in world history and then retroactively claimed his policies and higher taxes on the rich triggered that economically beneficent time. Now, after two dark Decession years, the economy is poised for a rebound and with the return of the Republicans to power in the House and perhaps the Senate, the stupid party might similarly reap the rewards of that same whimsical historical mistress as the mere fact of their being elected and the predictable resulting modest restraints on spending get credit for the next recovery. The voters might, if we get real lucky, attribute the coming recovery, however anemic, to divided government and realize that, similarly, it was the Republican congress from 1994 'til 2000 juxtaposed with a Democratic president, and the resulting legislative gridlock then, that supplied the lack of magic ingredients for that prosperous period. But, it would clearly be too much to hope for, that the supermajority of voters will ever make the ultimate connection that gridlock is good because government can’t really do anything major to help the economy in the first place and the less they do, the better off economically we all are – that government tinkering and programs really have next to nothing to do with creating overall economic prosperity – that for every good thing they can impose or create, an equal or greater bad thing occurs – that succinctly, the government that governs least governs best.

Sadly, it may be that government and the deficit are just too damn big now for gridlock to work by itself and it will be necessary to roll back government spending in proportion to GNP for the mojo to escape from the the bottle; a daunting proposition. Government’s effete efforts to stimulate a recovery with Keynsian shovel-ready spending obviously can’t work with debt levels as high as they are. Every borrowed stimulus dollar clumsily spent is a dollar that will not only have to be repaid with more borrowed money but money, more than likely, borrowed at a higher interest rate. We’ll be paying more to refill the hole than it cost to dig the hole. Or to phrase that in Obamaspeak, 'It will cost more to refuel the bus with green gas than it cost to fill it.' Or, ‘You business folk gonna have to ride in the back of the bus now while we drive!’ But then again, they don’t teach at Harvard Law that in the real world the drivers of the economic recovery bus are those that know that a better way is, and has always been, a cheaper way... a more efficient way. Or, in Taylorspeak, 'If you want to drive the big bus daddy, you first better pass driver's ed at a vocational school* that doesn't get any government subsidies, vis a vis, the school of hard knocks, aka, the free market.'

*Where's our Margaret Thatcher? Wake up Maggie I think I got something to say to you. It's early November and time to send the demos back to school.

M.D.T.

Go Ask Alice

The net result of the present Keynsian stimulus and government bailouts is that instead of the companies, agencies and individuals that made poor economic decisions losing a few trillion, we get those whom rightfully should bear the financial burden cushioned from their just desserts and the economic consequences of their by-in-large self-afflicted fiscal malfeasance spread injudiciously throughout the public at large. **The size and cost of the total loss is magnified by a negative multiplier effect as the ramifications of the borrowed stimulus dollars' unintended consequences ripple through market after market and the total pain is dragged out over many years instead of just a few quarters. (Does anyone anywhere, for even a minute, expect high speed rail to break even or government subsidized battery factories to pay taxes?) Tragically, the vast majority of Americans in 2013 will never make the correlation between a hypothetical 8% unemployment rate instead of 6% or 2.1% GNP growth instead of 3.3% and the government's economic decisions that were made in 2008 and 2009. By then they will, in all likelihood, be blaming it on the new Republican president, the Chinese or the immigrant population.

The American Dream hasn’t been flushed down the toilet, just slowly bled and borrowed to death by an insulated minority that would protect us from ourselves at no consequence to themselves. And they dare to call themselves compassionate! How can there be any genuinely altruistic action where there is no self-sacrifice? Now, if the public sector would voluntarily take a 10% pay cut, retire at 65 like the rest of us and accept the same fringe benefit plans as the average private sector employee to voluntarily assist in the spurring of a real economic recovery, now that would be compassionate. But the public sector making sacrifices for the private sector?* An oxymoron. It's positively twisted that economically 98% of the sacrifice is made within the private sector but it is they who are excoriated as being greedy and selfish. Or did I miss somewhere the headlines about hundreds of thousands of government workers being laid off? So how did those who make the largest economic contributions and sacrifice to society get morally flip-flopped with the least productive? Go ask Alice. I think she'll know.

* The majority of them see their entire professional lives as one big sacrifice...
**When California goes bankrupt, the Golden State’s woes will be nationalized and shared with the nation at large. As with everything from mortgages to credit cards, so it goes for states: the feckless must have their pathologies rewarded and the prudent get stuck with the tab. Mark Stein


M.D.T.

Ass Whupper in Chief

Clearly Obama’s latest 'kick ass' comment reflects a deeply ingrained sentiment that business is always cutting corners to make a buck - that without the punitive hand of government's stiff regulations and fines, business would run amok endangering lives en masse. Far left Democrats like Obama think that the pockets of the private sector are infinitely deep and there's no limit to what discipline can be inflicted upon them. They’ll always be there to fleece and humiliate. The Golden Goose is immortal. ‘Kicking ass’ is a childish way of dealing with that which they, the liberal elite, can make no constructive contribution to. Hell we don't know how to drill oil, make cars, develop drugs, treat sick people; we don’t really fix anything... but we do know how to punish those productive members of society that try and don't meet our penumbrious utopian standards. If one child gets sick a year in the whole country from some flavored fruit punch confectioneer, the answer’s always more regulation and a generous portion from a fresh can of 'Whoop Ass'. We really ought to thank Obama for finally openly verbally distilling the primary function of government down into a crude colloquialism that is easy for everyone to understand. Guess that makes the President Ass Whupper in Chief!

The discipline of the marketplace is and has always been a proven effective ‘ass-whupper’ and the financial losses, legal ramifications and potentially bankrupting effects of malfeasance are more than adequate in maintaining a commercial moral order. Additional government threats and the introduction of individual criminality can potentially have severely deleterious effects on the necessary incentives required to maintain a healthy private sector.

The ubiquitous assault on business prevalent in our present sociopolitical climate, I fear, succeeds in significantly reducing the prestige and social allure for those seeking a successful business career thereby possibly deflecting the entrance of many talented and ambitious citizens from lifestyles dedicated to economic innovation. In a word, it could create a private sector brain drain. The lure of higher compensation in many cases might not be sufficient to overcome the psychological fear of being branded as a social pariah. Success and happiness for most people is the combination of earned personal wealth with the earned admiration and respect of one’s fellows. The dominance of ubiquitous leftist anti-business sentiment may at this point have unfortunately succeeded in making too many of America’s most significantly required business careers morally repugnant. “I’d like to introduce you to my son Marvin. He’s a very successful oil driller. I don’t know where we went wrong. We really tried to direct him into a more meaningful vocation like urban planning or the environmental sciences but, in truth, he always did like picking the wings off flies.”

In short, I fear we’ve finally arrived historically at a point where the most attractive career option for the vast majority of the best and the brightest is working for the government. Looking at the lifestyles and retirements of the bulk of our federal and state employees it’s, unfortunately getting pretty hard to argue against - plus you'll never get your chicken-shit non-presidential ass whupped....


M.D.T.

2D or Not 2D

History sometimes coalesces around a few serendipitous events that momentarily converge to divulge a deeper social meaning. And so we witness today upon our national stage the spontaneous juxtaposition of the micro with the macro - the portentous with the inane. Can it be purely coincidental that Obamacare, legalized pot and the revival of big screen 3D pictures pop their Orwellian heads through our Spenglerian door collectively at just this precise moment in history? Maleficently imbued within this seemingly unrelated trio we could very well be witnessing a newly minted triumvirate for mass social control. Marijuana has clearly become the Soma* drug of modern America, lifting spirits and minds away from the arduous reality of the daily grind while simultaneously softening the wills and self-direction of its habitual users. At long last, Saint Alice B Toklas be praised, it looks like we’re going to finally have legalized pot in California, in all likelihood releasing a tide of similar legislation across the country as the billions of deperately needed tax dollars begin to flow into the coffers of our most profligate and fiscally irresponsible legislatures. But really, doesn’t it seems oddly convenient that the incipient smell of our nation’s first state sanctioned cannabis wafts woefully just as millions of Americans are propping cheap 3-D glasses on their soon to be collectively stoned and health-subsidized noses escaping into the fantasy world of Avatar ( Beam me up James C. to enviro-nirvana ), Alice in Wonderland ( Isn’t there a hookah smoking caterpillar in there somewhere? ) and Clash of the Titans ( Who needs God, let alone Gods )? Let's get 'em all stoned and send them off to see the latest politically correct Hollywood flaptrap!

And now with Obamacare it won’t be long before we can get Uncle Sam to pick up the tab for our prescription medical marijuana. After all, isn't marijuana abuse a disease like any addiction? How can it be purely accidental all this happening under the stewardship of our first self-admitted President that inhaled? Don’t you think health insurance should be required to cover my Zig-Zag rolling papers and bong pipes? Do you think it's possible that somewhere in that two thousand page health care bill there's a subsidy for Hollywood or 3D movie production? ( Hell, details are still leaking out what's in this thing ) Damn it all, I have a right to get high and see first-run 3-D pictures in Cinemax to relieve my clinical depression caused by my Bush-induced two and half years on unemployment through no fault of my own! I just can’t make up my mind whether I’d ultimately rather get high and live my state subsidized virtual life in the 3-D Pandora or the more visually passe’ 2-D Tolkien Hobbit's Shire?** Maybe I should ask my Facebook friends?

Do pot smokers ever get paranoid that the government they previously feared was going to bust them is now almost encouraging them to get stoned? What a long strange trip it's been.....

*Soma was the mythical drug prognosticated by Aldous Huxley in his famous dystopic novel Brave New World
** Damn I hope Peter Jackson's new Hobbit film is in 3D. That would really help to take my mind off my negative home equity!

M.D.T.

Zombie Nation

My take on the new 'health reform' bill? It is, literally, the proverbial straw. America's is now bankrupt. It just doesn't know it quite yet. But a good portion of the citizenry suspects it - feels it - viscerally. The country can't possibly shoulder the overwhelming weight of this latest multi-trillion dollar entitlement on top of our already egregiously underfunded Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and public employee pension plans. Just before the federal bailout of our largest banks last year there was talk amongst the financial community of the danger of creating 'zombie' banks; banks that could never stand on their own feet again; hooked up eternally to the life-sustaining I.V. of government subsidies. Or creating 'zombie' car companies like the once proud GM, now linguistically derided as our 'Government Motors', it's heart, the profit motive, ripped out of it's obese, dying no longer competitive carcass. Tragically, and I truly mean tragically, we, in time I fear are doomed to become, sooner rather than later, a 'zombie' nation, cursed to a kind of living dead status, perpetually failing, overspending and endlessly bailing ourselves out, like only a corrupt government and complicit federal reserve can do with its printing press. The price? Nothing less than the American Dream itself. Feel better now?

The problem with socialism is that sooner or later they run out of other people's money.... Margaret Thatcher

M.D.T.

An Eruditious Antinomy

Though it's certainly cynical to believe that both political parties just take all our taxes, and then some, to pay off their own individual constituencies, it’s worth at least considering that at least when the Republicans are in power and cut taxes for the wealthy and funnel billions to the military that the country at least benefits economically by creating new jobs, higher GDP, more rich people plus arguably slight economic improvements over time for the middle and lower classes. But when the Democrats are in power and raise taxes and funnel billions to their constituency of unions, public employees, the educational system, politically correct scientists and the downtrodden, both real and imagined, the economy stagnates and no one does any better economically except those with a government job or those receiving grants, subsidies or stipends of some nature from Uncle Sam. I think it was H.L. Mencken who touched eruditiously on this antinomy when he said,* ‘Democracy is an exercise in pillage and each election is a referendum on future stolen property.’ The antinomy being that from a flawed system driven by a ostensibly single underlying, corrupting, political process, the greater economic common good is better served by the one party favoring self-interest and the more productive elite minority.

Voting for Democrats is, at least in respect to America’s economy, quite simply throwing out the good in pursuit of the perfect - the practical for the ideal. Americans seem to have a terrible time these days accepting that timeless colloquial maxim, that everything in politics is a choice between the lesser of two evils. Sorry guys, but just because you don’t like either Party very well, you still gotta choose. So you might as well be practical and choose the one that at least has a vague recollection how to balance a checkbook, has the 'immoral' constitution necessary to terminate an underperforming employee and knows how to create something other than a government job.

Politicians who believe they can 'fix everything' historically and inevitably do more damage than good. This widespread belief that America is broken and needs to be overhauled is dangerous. We’d all be a lot better off if our leaders and our citizenry were content with making small improvements over time. I apologize for raining on many of the idealistic Obamanista’s parades out there, but as far as our economy is concerned, trickle down is better than nothing and there is no 'third way'.

*I very well might be the first person in human history to use those two words together in the same sentence.

M.D.T.

Was Santa Clause a Conservative?

Thank you Doug. You and I have concertedly for most of a year now strived our utmost to throw light on the most perplexing issues of our era. I now propose to you and our listeners that we not only have a cultural war on our hands, but worse yet, a ‘Santa Claus Crisis’! It all goes back to that ‘naughty or nice’ thing. Have recent generations really been rewarded differently when they were children dependent upon their individual good or bad behavior? I know I had my doubts early on, since even though I was clearly the more exemplary child in every respect, my two brothers enjoyed consistently equal holiday compensation.

Did Santa Claus ever deny a child a present because they were just plain rotten? Did drugs? Cheated at school? Tortured the family cat?

I’d like to think that at one time, a long time ago, it made a difference to Santa and others how kid’s behaved. But clearly today that would be impossible since it would require making an actual personal judgment about what is good or bad, naughty or nice. Plus we’d have to hold children responsible for their behavior. Just think of the irreparable psychological damage that could be done if we denied one of our children a Christmas present for any reason! It’s bad enough that some children get lavish, expensive gifts while others receive only menial K-Mart trinkets! On the grounds of the need for achieving higher self-esteem for young people everywhere I propose immediate emergency national legislation to equalize the monetary value of Christmas gifts to all children under 18, even those in prison. None should receive a gift worth more than $29.95, the national mean average for a Christmas present! ( Price check by Amazon.com )

Yes, friends and listeners, we have a Santa Clause crisis. Are we a nation where wealth and position are determined by virtuous behavior and individual judgment, or a ‘St. Nickocracy’ where all benefit equally irrespective of their individual hard work, free decisions and self-restraint? Can we ever agree again, as a people, on what behaviors should or should not be rewarded?

Alas, I’m afraid Santa is no longer a conservative. Though at one time I think that he most certainly was. If he hadn't been, he would never have imposed such ridiculous conditions like being “naughty or nice” as a prerequisite for judicious Christmas remuneration in the first place.

MERRY CHRISTMAS FREEDOM FORUM LISTENERS AND THANK YOU FOR TUNING IN TO OUR PROGRAM!

FREEDOM FORUM – 12/18/99


M.D.T.