2+2 = 5

Appearing at a Boston rally for Democrat gubernatorial candidate Martha Coakley on Friday, Hillary Clinton told the crowd gathered at the Park Plaza Hotel not to listen to anybody who says that “businesses create jobs.”

“Don’t let anybody tell you it’s corporations and businesses create jobs,” Clinton said.

“You know that old theory, ‘trickle-down economics,’” she continued. “That has been tried, that has failed. It has failed rather spectacularly.”

“You know, one of the things my husband says when people say ‘Well, what did you bring to Washington,’ he said, ‘Well, I brought arithmetic,’” Clinton said, which elicited loud laughs from the crowd.

___________________________________________________

Big Lie or Big Stupid ... who can tell?  First these new Progressive wizards of smart have the unbridled intellectual audacity to portend that raising the cost of labor won't reduce demand (Minimum wage hike doesn't mean fewer jobs), that more food stamp recipients are good for the economy (More welfare creates more demand?), and now they proclaim that private capital investment isn't the best source for economic development (Guv can invest your money better than you?).  Thank God the crowd laughed, as laughing is the only commensurate response.  We can only hope they are laughing at and not with.  Maybe you and Bill should have 'brought algebra' to Washington Hillary....

M.D.T    10/14

Tea Anyone?

Conservative House members believe that Obamacare will ultimately bankrupt our country, whose debt has soared even more dangerously under Obama's presidency, and that to make no attempt to stop it or dramatically modify it, right now, would be both financially and morally unconscionable.  Fiscal rectitude is at the ideological heart of American conservatism.  The Right might feud over social issues and foreign interventionism, but is eternally wedded on the social and economic ill-effects of over-spending government and punishing debt. Would the left behave any more 'reasonably' than the House Conservatives if a national ban on abortion or the progressive income tax were passed into law? Governments make mistakes, and they need to be fixed.  And akin to misbegotten war, frequently there are few, if any, effective half-measure retreats.  Obamacare is such a mistake.... and a super-majority of American's now agree.

And for those of you who argue that Obama was reelected and the people voted for this and it was confirmed by the Supreme Court I ask you: would you empower a drug addict to define and create policy for the availability of illegal narcotics?  And what would you prescribe for a cure for a nation of drug addicts voting on those same measures? The majority of Americans have now become  addicts... and pusher-man-government programs are the narcotics.

What's it going to take to break our intractable, inexorable addiction to more and yet even more government spending?  I don't have a realistic answer and it very well may be pointless and tactically ill-timed to try to attempt to derail the Oblivion Express right now... around this issue.  But one shouldn't disparage, demean and excoriate a perhaps slightly overzealous, fiscally prudent and principled minority of citizens for trying.... and I can say with apodictic certainty that the requisite trillions of budget cutting required to maintain our nation's financial viability will never happen via reasonable discussion and compromise.

Might a default on the nation's debt now, by choice, perhaps prove ultimately less damaging than one by necessity later?


M.D.T.

Fanatic in Chief

After digesting the latest State of the Union address, it appears to me that Obama's lifetime goal just very well might be to be perceived as the most caring and morally indignant President in history irrespective of any and all lasting damage his policies might incur to the country's economic health and long term fiscal viability.  For him I believe it's always all about fairness and never effectiveness. His is, methinks, almost solely a moral crusade. What prudent, practical and rational person could believe that raising minimum wage won't destroy jobs and reduce employment opportunity? That national Head-Start will actually improve long-term educational performance? That fighting Quixotic global warming won't raise energy costs and undermine economic recovery? That imposing more taxes on top producers won't deter business investment? That extending state-subsidized health care to the uninsured and those with pre-existing conditions won't raise costs?  I contend that the President and his acolytes couldn't possibly be so stupid as to believe these programs can deliver as sold, but, in fact, they just can't bring themselves to stand by passively in a world, they perceive, whose wholesale inequities so deeply offend their delicate and refined supra-egalitarian sensibilities.* There appears to be no limit to neither their shotgun social solutions nor their willingness to print money.  Obama is, to date, among Presidents, perhaps our nation's boldest and most disconnected embodiment of morally intolerant liberalism run amok. It's difficult not to arrive at the conclusion that the more his policies fail, the more ardently he believes in them and the more of the same he advocates. We're, in effect, doubling and tripling down on failure.  And that, by any sane measure, is the very definition of ... fanaticism.

The Crux of the Biscuit is that we as a nation have tacitly and perhaps unconsciously collectively agreed to the idea that it's OK for government to instigate unproven, potentially economically disastrous and ill-conceived social experiments in the name of fairness and compassion: that our system is so malevolent and effete that at worst, radical measures are required  and at best, acceptable.  What beats the hell out of me is why anyone running around spending someone else's money while simultaneously getting rich themselves meets our standards for a Nobel prize or a distinguished seat in our nation's Pantheon.  But, then again, our standards are the most vital issue of all now ... aren't they?.


Why people with high levels of mental skills and rhetorical talents would tie themselves into knots with such reasoning is a mystery. Perhaps it is just that they cannot give up a social vision that is so flattering to themselves, despite how detrimental it may be to the people they claim to be helping.     Thomas Sowell
 


M.D.T.

Blame the Blamers

According to exit polls, 53% still blame Bush for our ongoing economic malaise. And that's exactly why some of we conservatives think that Romney losing may have been the best thing - because no meaningful national redirection can come about until Americans quit blaming the bogeyman and put the blame for what could be a decade plus long recession where it belongs: massive government overspending and borrowing - massive government direct and indirect capital misallocation  - unprecedented levels of regulation - government readopting historically dis-proven Keynsian monetary policy and - themselves. Or, in layman's terms: 1) guv spending way more than they take in 2) letting some guv-guys who can't lose their jobs or money invest your tax dollars 3) guv telling everybody what they can sell, where they can sell it and how they can sell it  4) guv printing money to pay for what they can't wring out of you or borrow from someone else and 5) your own bad self.

One can't rule out the frightening possibility that the majority of American's might never figure this out.  Especially now when you have these new Progressives in power, actually telling us the entire system is rigged. Blaming big-business and the rich is so much easier for those selling it and for those emotionally impaired enough to buy it.  As many banana boat nations have demonstrated, blame can become a way of life...it's always the imperialists!*  Gee. Let's see. Which is easier ...  blaming others or not looking quite as hard as you might for that new job to get off unemployment; blaming others or having to repay all of your student loan back as agreed; blaming others or admitting it was your own bad decision to buy a house costing twice what you could afford on an adjustable rate mortgage; blaming others or paying for your own birth control pills; blaming others or else admitting that your child's educational failure might be due to something besides underfunding; blaming others or giving up your hard lobbying-won tax deduction; blaming others or admitting that government green job creation is a black hole; blaming others or being too proud to take government handouts;  blaming others or taking responsibility for your own life  .... ad infinitum nauseum.

We've barely begun making the difficult, requisite changes required for a meaningful, long-term economic recovery... and it's no one's fault but they, the bloody, blaming 53%.  Sorry Mitt, Paul and Ron. You couldn't convince them. You were 4 years too early.  They just don't get it yet. Sadly, since it's still too early, it means it's probably too late. The Dems think they can just magically freeze the clock on the next perhaps even more debilitating financial meltdown by borrowing trillions...by propping up the less productive. But der ain't no magic dat change when da sun come up or when it go down. And the next time it goes down, odds are the night may get even darker and colder.  If the owl of Minerva ever flies, this time she'll fly at dawn, and it's only just past midnight... 'a long, long, long, long, time, before the dawn'.**

*Yankee go home!  Damn it all!  We're the Yankees and we are home!  All right then...China go home!  Mexico go home!  Tax the rich!  It's not my fault!

Incredibly enough Hugo Chavez, post mortem, blames gringos for his cancer!  Quote 'Claimed the socialist leader had been 'infected by imperialist enemies'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2288704/Hugo-Chavez-dead-Venezuelan-president-Hugo-Chavez-dies-severe-infection-battle-cancer.html#ixzz2MiU5YwxN
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**Speak out - You got to speak out against the madness - You got to speak your mind - if you dare
Crosby Stills & Nash - Long Time Gone

M.D.T. 

Not on Facebook

My perception is that this long paralyzing decession has sapped much of the animal spirits out of the entrepreneurial class in America - a class whom with each passing year, methinks, is growing smaller as a percentage of population and who is becoming increasingly discouraged about their future prospects. We've more Americans that want to make a difference, but fewer with the intellectual autonomy, character and drive to do so. President Obama mirrors this new emerging, less competitive, individualistic and independent national character.  The majority of people now either want or need to be taken care of to some greater or lesser degree.  The people who drive our economy, the people who create jobs and aspire to make life better for the many, the people who pay 40% of the taxes, the people who end recessions see an America, the bulk of whose citizens are shunning responsibility and in respect to fixing the country's most serious problems, have no sense of practicality whatsoever: they see an America that is made up of more people looking to procure aid from the system than not, who care more about being green and narcissisticaly feeling good about themselves than working long hours*, doing what free markets dictate needs to be done, or getting materially ahead and raising a family.

There are now two generations of Americans most of whom don't even desire the American Dream as it has been known in the past; a house in a good neighborhood, two or three beautiful kids, a job with a solid and respected company ( not many of those left by their measure! ) Virtually all of their scarce disposable dollars are being spent on $4 coffees, the next generation of smart phones, Netflix subscriptions, video games, gym memberships and sun glasses.  They have been conditioned to be deeply suspicious about the profit motive. They believe greed is the primary economic mal de force. An America with nominal economic growth is OK by them.  Materialism just ain't chic. Better no economic growth than driving more carbon-fueled cars around, fracking our beloved terra firma, increasing the population, suppressing anti-democratic uprisings around the world, bio-engineering our food supply, having uninsured citizens, consuming a greater share of the world's resources, or increasing inequality.  These are our new national values.  These are the values Obama mirrors.  These are not the values required to build a new and prosperous America.  These are the values of national economic decline. 

The only thing sustainable about sustainability is stagnation...

*Speaking of working long hours have we ever had a President that works less than this one?  


M.D.T.

Monsters From the Id

It's more than likely impossible to reasonably explain mass societal self-delusion on an historical scale.  Our present toxic, socio-psycho-cultural-economic declinations reminds me a great deal of a central  theme from the great classic sci-fi film, Forbidden Planet, where we, like the advanced Krell civilization, are having the foundations of our free society destroyed by our own unconscious 'monsters from the Id'. How much personal liberty are we willing to relinquish and how much economic and intellectual self-punishment are western societies willing to self-inflict to absolve themselves from their original sin.... the God-given gift/curse of self-consciousness.... and the accompaning both enviable and pitiable awareness that we, as a species, forever and intractably, stand alone outside of the natural order and all of creation looking in - that we can never truly understand our role in the natural order - that we'll forever be, from ourselves, at our very essence ... intruders.



Wyatt Earp: What makes a man like Ringo, Doc? What makes him do the things he does?  Doc Holliday: A man like Ringo has a great empty hole through the middle of him. He can never kill enough, or steal enough, or inflict enough pain to ever fill it.  Wyatt Earp: What does he need?  Doc Holliday: Revenge.  Wyatt Earp: For what?  Doc Holliday: Being born.

From the movie Tombstone

M.D.T.

Ultimate Libertarian Bumper Sticker

SO WHAT'S YOUR LATEST PLAN FOR ELIMINATING ALL OF HUMAN SUFFERING?

M.D.T.

A Reckoning

It occurs to me as we watch the slow and painful spectacle of European disintegration unfolding that ultimately the productive members of society will have to pay back every penny of that squandered and borrowed by the unproductive and that the only way to separate the productive from the unproductive is with markets. Those wizards of smart, our social, political and financial elite, in their vainglorious  attempts to subvert and manipulate markets, ultimately will have no choice but to numbly stand by and watch as the irrepressible economic tsunami of the previously sublimated fiscal reckoning engulfs all the western democracies and beyond.* Markets can never be truly subverted, only diverted. The books will be balanced and the 'unseen hand' cares little about the morality of whom it chooses to be injured or spared in a crisis.  Markets operate consciously and unconsciously, manipulated and non-manipulated, ethically and non-ethically ... whether anyone recognizes them or not.  And as petty as it might sound, our economic future is by-in-large determined, disproportionately and unfortunately, by those other than whom we have in almost every historical instance, collectively chosen to blame.

*How many cans are there at the end of the road?

M.D.T.

It Can't Happen Here

Mr. America, walk on by your schools that do not teach Mr. America, walk on by the minds that won't be reached Mr. America try to hide the emptiness that's you inside But once you find that the way you lied And all the corny tricks you tried Will not forestall the rising tide of hungry freaks daddy!

Having been a pubescent Frank Zappa devotee in 1966 when these lyrics from Hungry Freaks Daddy resonated through the fertile psyche of the nascent underground counter-culture movement, I'd like to think Frank, had he lived, today would have been aghast to see that the movement which he served to spearhead has done more to undermine individualism and critical social thinking than anything. The tie-dyed kids who danced lyrically and spasmodically to his music have now infested professionally the corridors of our schools and government and spare no effort in protecting their sinecures and all pervasive, unchallengable, enviromental, politically correct, faux-compassionate, big-government mass-conformist worldview. (Step out of line and they'll take you away. It's time to stop, hey what's that sound ...) Veritable Hawthornian ostracism for those amongst you who dare to don the socially ignominious status of being ....a denier! Be forewarned. You're never going to get to 1000 Facebook friends if you persist with those viscerally dis-settling notions about the behavioral and artistic levelling effects of the Nanny State. Why, just look at all those little Rembrandts and Shakespeares our public school system and politically correct culture gestates on a regular basis. It's OK to stand out, but not too much..... Not so much it might make someone else feel inferior. Venerating individual achievement has frequently become perceived as a form of bullying.

Frank was the consumate individualist. Mocking and satirizing what he saw as the Stepford Wife, nine-to-five, American middle-class culture of the 1950's. I think he would have been equally critical of today's tattoo ridden, neo-grunge, quasi-illiterate, texting addicted, hip-hopping monolithic teen culture that dominates today's contemporary scene. I suspect too that he might have been highly critical of the nuevo-baby-boomer, share-the-wealth, don't keep score communalism that ameliorates the veneration and compensation justly due Mr. America's most individualistic wealth and artistic creators. And surely someone as perspicacious as Frank would have discerned the inherent destructive consequences to economic growth of the greenest generation's acquiescence to big-government's insinuation into almost every aspect of our lives. For after all, isn't every rule at some level a limitation of individual freedom? And isn't individual freedom of thought and expression the wellspring of all creativity both economic and artistic? Can there be true artistic freedom separate and distinct from economic freedom? Ever hear of Solzhenitsyn?

But probably most of all Frank would have been horrified that his children of the Mothers of Invention have created an American culture where nothing could shock anyone, no matter how disgusting, violent or perverted; where the guiding tenet of civility had become non-judgment; the blind acceptance of any viewpoint as legitimate; where civilization itself would potentially risk annihilation rather than risk offending someone.

Sorry Frank. Wish you were to here to see that despite your radically individualistic, creative admonishments on your tour de force debut album Freakout, it can happen here*... and we are Freaking Out, new sustainable, come together, non-offensive establishment style, somewhere in Kansas...and Minnesota... and Rome... and...


* 'It can't happen here' was another lyric from this influential album


M.D.T.

Pelosian

I've surely plenty of company with those whom when the year 1984 passed by quietly without major event, we somehow felt a small pang of disappointment. Well, better late than never! Endless similes have been made to Orwell's fabled, literary, distopian slogan, "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength", but probably none more viscerally quizzical and unsettling, til now, than Nancy Pelosi's equating the Tea Party's staunch opposition to increasing the country's debt limit as 'acting like terrorists'; essentially denoting that Fiscal Prudence is Terrorism. Or to express it more Pelosian... Government borrowing good, balanced budgets un-american. The pigs have moved into the farmhouse, are sleeping in the human's beds and we're all supposed to work harder and pay more taxes to make them comfortable and keep our mouth's shut. There are now two sets of rules; one for our leaders and another for us.

Not beyond a stretch of the imagination that we might soon see, in our neo-orwellian America, a new bumper sticker on leftist's cars, Expand Guantanamo ..... to make room for the Tea Party, the new terrorists.  After all, hasn't our would be patriotic American left already labeled Christians the American Taliban?

Unfiddlable

We’re against higher taxes not because you shouldn’t raise them in a recession but because you shouldn’t raise them EVER. This endless fiddling with the tax code is one of the major sources of economic uncertainty in the country and just leads to one party fiddling with the code to benefit their friends and preferred interests while they’re in power and vice versa. What’s worse is that allowing the government to perennially mess with it, in effect, necessitates, for appearances sake, a higher tax rate than would otherwise be required. A fairer, flatter, lower and consistent tax rate creates more revenue for individuals and the government via increased economic activity. We (the few, the proud, the rational) are against the Obama tax hikes because they will slow the economy and the net negative effect of a slower economy on government revenues is greater than the amount of extra money that might be garnered from higher rates.* Tax revenue soars when the economy is good. Lower, flatter, fairer, unfiddlable rates are good for the economy, whether we’re in recession or not.

So why if lower tax rates increases government revenue does the left stake they're credibility on this issue above all others? Their consuming obsession with fairness. They'd rather have their constituency make do with less than have a small minority do appreciably better. In numerical terms, if there were 10 people in the world they'd rather 9 have $1 and one have $2 than 9 have $2 and one have $100.

*And that my friends, summarized in a single concise statement, is what has been universally disparaged as voodoo economics in distinct contrast to the stonehenge economics practitioned by the Democrats which can be neatly summarized in their nothing short of pathological fallacy, more taxes equals more money.





M.D.T.

How to Stop Worrying and Love the Rich

It would seem to be a no-brainer that if the left believes that the rich should pay the lion’s share of taxes, as in fact they do, then they would similary agree that policy should support creating the greatest number of rich possible; that it would actually be a good thing if economic inequality were increasing? Wouldn’t it be better, hypothetically, if 10% of the people made over $1,000,000 a year and paid 60% of the total tax burden rather than having, say, 20% paying 50%? Clearly that would provide beau coup billions more revenue to the treasury.

When the country was founded, extremely minimal taxes never provided for taking care of individuals that slipped through the Republic's cracks. It took 150 years for our country to buy into the idea that it was government's job to take care of people. Taxes started going up dramatically as the burden of caring for the destitute and the aged poor became a shared value. Clearly in America we'll never allow these aforementioned groups to suffer so the problem should simply become - what’s the best way to practically fund their requisite additional assistance? More rich people paying more taxes creates more revenue to help the needy. Simple right?

The vast majority methinks would agree with this syllogism but for a pervasive mass perpetrated popular delusion; that if the rich have more then the rest of us as a result must have less. This is a truly one of the most dangerous economic myths and contributes mightily to decreased productivity, social unrest, resentment and class warfare. Now I'm only going to say this once so please pay attention. Just because Bill Gates has billions it doesn’t necessarily follow that any of us have one dime less. His billions didn’t come out of everyone else’s pockets. His wealth was created, not moved. It’s not a zero sum game. The pie got bigger. Capitalism is a wealth creating system. What? Your social studies teacher never told you that?

The truth is that the wealthy in the USA are paying the biggest share of total taxes in our history even at the Bush tax levels and it's entirely possible that if their rates were lowered that their share might actually increase. It's unarguable that since the early 80's when tax levels were reduced on high earners their share has increased. So if it costs us, the less than rich, nothing to have more millionaires, ( kindly review the previous paragraph ) it would incontrovertibly behoove us as a society to adopt policy that creates as many rich people as possible so they can pay an even greater share! Now is there a clinically sane person in the country that would make the argument that higher taxes on the rich will create more millionaires? You'd have to be an intellectual to believe such a thing...

But why stop with having them pay only for 40% of the tax burden*? If we have enough of them they can pay for everything! Imagine.. no taxes unless you make over 100K... or 200K! We should be teaching Napoleon Hill in the 3rd grade. Does Trump get invited to talk to grade schoolers and high school graduates? Imagine all the people... living off the rich. But as for me fellow Americans, I don’t care how many billionaires there are in this world as long as they’re paying for my health care and social security... and why not green's fees. Love them rich folks! Maybe we should stop denigrating them and start thanking them? They might work even harder.....

*The last government reported share of taxes paid by the top 5% of wage earners.

M.D.T

It Wasn't My Idea

It’s official. We’ve opened a new front in the War on Crazy Arabs in Libya to ‘protect civilians’ and ... ‘we’re not leading this’ according to S.O.S. Clinton. How ingenuous. At least have the guts to state clearly the reasons for getting involved. 'Protecting civilians'? Securing and stabilizing the oil markets and preventing a mass exodus of Islamic refugees to Europe rings truer for me somehow. How about you? If saving civilians were justifiable cause, we'd be fighting in a 100 countries. This deliberate obfuscation and disavowal of some credible and meaningful rational is insulting, demeaning and distasteful if not outright dangerous and unlawful. We appear, at this time, to be fighting in multiple theatres with no clear, guiding higher national purpose. At least Bush had the dignity and respect for our national heritage to frame our heroic adventures and misadventures alike under the idealistic maxim 'universal freedom and democracy for all'.

So if the Saudi princes were to violently suppress a democratic revolution would we attack them with cruise missiles and drones to save civilian lives? Apparently only if we don’t have to lead, there's no guiding higher ideological purpose and the U.N. says 'let's roll'. Ostensibly our latest, successive Democratic president's rationalizations have devolved from the encapsulating, edifying and inspiring maxim of “ I didn’t inhale” to “It wasn’t my idea”. Or does that depend on what your definition of my is? Just who's leading this whatever-you-want-to-call-it again?

Who hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword? What truth is marching on?

It's frightening and confusing to watch an administration with no moral tether to either America's bedrock founding principles nor to any discernable traditional religious value system wage noncommittal war under the banner of relativistic secular humanism. Even an infidel, methinks, would rather be led into battle by someone who believes in something strongly enough to die for it...

4/11/11 M.D.T.

Locophelia

Please. Someone tell me. Am I losing my mind, or did our President just propose a 53 billion dollar federal downpayment on new bullet trains to financial oblivion? Clearly Obama and his ilk must honestly believe that we're all playing some kind of game with play money. Trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see and we're going to build the new George Jetson Orient Express? How could this lefty locomotive leviathan end up being anything else but Amtrak on steroids? Subsidies and yet more subsidies. You don't have to be Edgar Cayce to forsee the thousands of environmental lawsuits, a whole new federal department of Choochanomics, cataclysmic cost over-runs, and endless delays. Maybe we should commission a dozen or so feasability studies to research if government is even capable of building anything of this magnitude? Could they even get through their own labyrinth of city, state, county and federal permits, environmental impact studies, union strikes and death and injury lawsuits ? Hell, we can't even rebuild Ground Zero in a decade. Bullet trains could take 100 years! But then again, maybe that's the whole idea. Bullet trains are just like government; they'll devour money at even greater speeds than ever before, create prevailing wage, politically correct jobs for new age John Henry's for untold decades, and never have to justify their existence on any pragmatic, fiduciary level, and of course provide unparalleled myriads of photo-ops for politicians nationwide. Government's become nothing more than a jobs program floating upon an influential minority's collective, delusionary, futuristic vision. At least Disneyland was built with private capital. If we can't cope with any of our real day to day problems, at least we can dream! Fiscal conservatives just aren't 'young at heart'.

I think the left's romantic obsession with trains mirrors their subsurface yearnings for a totally planned economy, a compulsory society where the 'trains run on time'. (Could Denzel Washington's new runaway train movie, Unstoppable, be a serendipitous, national subliminal metaphor for the runaway train as the American experiment gone out of control?) But it will take more than 30 years of Denzel's cinematic rail-yards practical experience, ingenuity and individual heroism to stop this latest 21st century socio-politico-enviromento-cultural bullet train to oblivion. It will require the leadership of a superhero of mythical proportions. Who was it again that was 'more powerful than a locomotive?'*

*Even if we find our Superman or Superwoman wasn't it green kryptonite that could kill them? Hope theyve saved some of Reagan and Thatcher's DNA for the first successful human clone. That's what I'd call a bonofide Sputnik moment.


George Will writing in Newsweek, Feb. 27:
Generations hence, when the river of time has worn this presidency's importance to a small, smooth pebble in the stream of history, people will still marvel that its defining trait was a mania for high-speed rail projects. This disorder illuminates the progressive mind. . . .
Forever seeking Archimedean levers for prying the world in directions they prefer, progressives say they embrace high-speed rail for many reasons—to improve the climate, increase competitiveness, enhance national security, reduce congestion, and rationalize land use. The length of the list of reasons, and the flimsiness of each, points to this conclusion: the real reason for progressives' passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans' individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.
To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables. Automobiles encourage people to think they—unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted—are masters of their fates. The automobile encourages people in delusions of adequacy, which make them resistant to government by experts who know what choices people should make.
Time was, the progressive cry was "Workers of the world unite!" or "Power to the people!" Now it is less resonant: "All aboard!"

M.D.T.

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.