The elites ridiculed or ignored the first harbinger of rebellion, the recent tea parties. While it will be harder to ignore this massive anti-tax, anti-spending vote, they will attempt to do just that.It reminded me of life lesson number 3 above.
Voters in our largest state spoke unambiguously, but politicians and lobbyists in Sacramento are ignoring or rejecting the voters' will, just as they are in Albany and Trenton. The states with huge government machines have basically moved beyond the control of the people. They have become castles of corruption, favoritism and wastefulness. These state governments are run by lobbyists for the various unions through bureaucracies seeking to impose the values of a militant left. Elections have become so rigged by big money and clever incumbents that the process of self-government is threatened.
Sacramento politicians will now reject the voters' call for lower taxes and less spending and embrace the union-lobbyist-bureaucrat machine that is running California into the ground, crippling its economy and cheating residents. This model of high-tax, big-spending inefficiency has already driven thousands of successful Californians out of the state (taking with them an estimated $11 billion in annual tax revenue). The exodus will continue.
That's happening before our eyes. The Bush policies in the war on terror won't have to await vindication by historians. Obama is doing it day by day. His denials mean nothing. Look at his deeds.
A lot of preparing had gone into the trip. Conway Elementary teachers had been planning the trip for months, each child paid $20 for a seat on the chartered bus, and names were submitted to the White House for clearance.
Parents say they tried to make it on time, but their chartered buses hit heavy traffic that slowed them down substantially. They thought they were supposed to show up by 10:15, but they say they arrived at 10:25 instead, and couldn’t get in.
"The person who headed this White House trip up came out and said, 'I’m sorry, the White House tour's off.' There were a lot of crying kids," parent Barbara Stine said.
The White House tells a slightly different story. A spokesperson said the group was actually supposed to be there at 9:30, but they held the gates for the group until 10:30, 15 minutes longer than they told the group, but when they still hadn't arrived, they had to draw the line.
Paty Stine said the White House staff should have made an exception. She feels the kindergarteners were snubbed for the Steelers.
"Here we have President Obama and his administration saying, 'Here we are for the common, middle class people,' and here he is not letting 150 5- and 6-year-olds into the White House because he’s throwing a lunch for a bunch of grown millionaires," Stine said.
“Does that mean 2009 is not the year of the Bible?” mocked Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who is Jewish. “What is 2012 the year of? The Quran?”Okay so your "sources" are Frank who is a world-class ass, Nadler who is a hypocrit, and Progressive Puppy who clearly is the thinker of the bunch.
“That’s an endorsement of religion by the federal government, and we shouldn’t be doing that,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), even though he has introduced his own legislation dealing with religion.
“Republican lawmakers with apparently too much time on their hands and no solutions to offer the country are pushing a resolution that will not address the nation’s problems or advance prosperity or even untangle their previous governing mistakes,” blogged the Progressive Puppy.
A search of Thomas, the online congressional database, for “Bible” yields just one other bill: a resolution to have the “Lincoln-Obama Bible” on permanent display in the Capitol Visitor Center.While I respect everyone to have the right to their own religious (or nonreligious) views, the Bible, particularly the Old Testiment is the founding document of the three monotheistic world religions and only the most close-minded athiest would say the Bible has no value as a document considering it is the foundation stone of many philosophies too.
The resolution specifically asks the president “to issue a proclamation calling upon citizens of all faiths to rediscover and apply the priceless, timeless message of the Holy Scripture which has profoundly influenced and shaped the United States and its great democratic form of government.”
As for the economy, health care, global warming and all the other issues on Congress’ plate?
“While we must focus on fiscal policies that provide relief to families during these tough economic times, an endeavor I have been working tirelessly towards in this Congress, we must also not forget to protect and celebrate our fundamental freedoms that the Bible has influenced,” Broun said.
Broun has gathered 15 co-sponsors, all Republicans, but says he’s looking for more and hopes Democrats will sign on, as well.
“This is not a partisan issue,” he said. “I want it to be bipartisan.”
Whether he’s successful or not — the same measure didn’t go anywhere last year — at least Broun and his fellow supporters can take heart in one fact: They already had a “year of the Bible.”
Ronald Reagan designated 1983 as one, with Congress’ blessing.
List of Criteria Used To Generate Rankings (no particular order)What I want to know is, what is the "wrong" answer to these questions. Is it a good thing or a bad think to have seat belt law.
1) Speed Traps Per Capita (# of speed traps listed on www.speedtrap.org indexed to population)
2) Does the state have "driver responsibility" fees?
3) Does the state have mayor's courts?
4) Does the state authorize the use of roadblocks?
5) What are the freeway speed limits?
6) Does the state have red-light cameras?
7) Does the state have speed cameras?
8) Are there toll roads in the state?
9) Is a jury trial available for traffic violations?
10) Is trial by declaration (asserting a defense in writing without appearing in court) available?
11) Is the state a member of the Non-Resident Violator Compact?
12) Is the state a member of the Driver's License Compact?
13) Are radar detectors banned in the state?
14) Does the state have a primary seat belt law?
15) Are there adult helmet laws in the state?
16) Are there move-over laws in the state?
17) Is cell phone use banned?
Seriously, isn't there a Portugese water dog re-gifted from Ted Kennedy that we can and should be talking about? (And btw, the one non-negotiable in a pet or a mistress for the Duke of Chappaquidick is swimmability; who says we can't learn from our past mistakes?).
I’m All Right, BarackOriginally posted at the National Review website which you can visit here.
The perils of a nationalized car maker.
By Iain Murray
President Obama’s takeover of General Motors is a disaster in the making. Not only is it bad for GM, it also sets terrible legal precedents and rewards the president’s political allies in a brazen display of political patronage. Taken as a whole, the so-called rescue belies the president’s promise to end politics as usual and undermines the values of the free-enterprise system that has fueled American prosperity.
Last year, GM’s management team argued strenuously that the company could not go through normal Chapter 11 bankruptcy, because no one would buy a car from a bankrupt company, and therefore a bailout was needed. This proved to be a terrible mistake. It was like an individual trying to avoid bankruptcy by going to a loan shark; the federal government has taken a shark-like, extortionate bite.
GM has been forced into a change of ownership by the administration’s auto task force, which was supposedly set up to negotiate a rescue plan but instead has imposed one of its own design. Virtually the first thing it did was to fire former GM chief executive Rick Wagoner. Since then it has done everything it can to impose political control over the company.
What we now face is a nationalized car maker, with the government owning 51 percent of the company and the United Auto Workers (UAW) union holding a stunning 38 percent of shares. Bondholders, who normally have first claim on a company’s assets, receive only 10 percent instead, and the current stockholders get the remaining 1 percent.
Consider that for a moment. The government and the current administration’s political fellow-travelers own 89 percent of an American company. This is a terrible precedent. Just ask the domestic British auto industry. Unfortunately, it won’t answer, because most of it went out of business when the British government tried the same tactic in the 1970s. The government attempted to save a dying domestic industry by nationalization and heavy investment in R&D to produce a “product-led” recovery. That recovery never emerged, because the unions put saving jobs before producing good vehicles (as I detail elsewhere). With the UAW now owning 38 percent of the company, should we expect anything different from GM?
The GM nationalization ignores the lessons of history, and its terms are plainly unjust. The UAW, acting for its members who are former workers and GM pensioners, did indeed represent something like $20 billion worth of GM’s liabilities. So the idea that the union should get an equity stake in return for that is fair enough. However, the UAW is getting three times as much as the bondholders, who represent $28 billion of GM’s outstanding liability. When the bondholders protested, the administration refused to meet with them.
This injustice cannot be dismissed on the grounds that union retirees are poor and bondholders rich. There are over 10,000 GM bondholders, many of them individuals like Chris Crowe, who describes himself thus:I’m a retired electrician from Denver, Colorado. I’m not rich and I’m not a Wall Street bank. These bonds finance my son’s college tuition and my retirement. I’m actually very concerned about not getting a check on May 15 from my bonds because I need this money to pay my property taxes. When the administration refuses to meet with the bondholders or chooses to wipe them out, they’re wiping me out, and lots of others like me.
In many cases, the union retiree and the bondholder are one and the same. Take, for instance, Gary Thomas, a retired auto mechanic from Kingston, Tenn. He speaks for many when he says:I spent a good portion of my life working on GM cars and decided to buy bonds in GM because I believed they would be a solid investment for my future. I use the interest from the bonds for everyday living expenses and I cannot afford to see GM go bankrupt. After doing the math, I have realized that if I were to accept the administration’s current offer, I would only have $10,000 per year to live off of. That is barely enough to live a decent life and I doubt anyone would deny that.
What possible reason can there be for the administration to refuse to meet with these bondholders’ representatives after imposing such an unfair settlement? The only one that makes sense is simple political favoritism: rewarding political supporters and punishing private investors.
Britain became the “sick man of Europe” because of the cozy relationship between free-spending government and labor unions. The phrase “I’m all right, Jack” came to symbolize the auto unions’ attitude toward those who suffered by their actions. By the same token, when taxpayers and GM bondholders protest, the UAW can say, “I’m all right, Barack.”
— Iain Murray is director of projects and analysis and senior fellow in energy, science and technology at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
We are told that very expensive carbon regulations are the only way to respond to global warming, despite ample evidence that this approach does not pass a basic cost-benefit test. We must ask whether a "climate-industrial complex" is emerging, pressing taxpayers to fork over money to please those who stand to gain.
This phenomenon will be on display at the World Business Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen this weekend. The organizers -- the Copenhagen Climate Council -- hope to push political leaders into more drastic promises when they negotiate the Kyoto Protocol's replacement in December.
The opening keynote address is to be delivered by Al Gore, who actually represents all three groups: He is a politician, a campaigner and the chair of a green private-equity firm invested in products that a climate-scared world would buy.
Naturally, many CEOs are genuinely concerned about global warming. But many of the most vocal stand to profit from carbon regulations. The term used by economists for their behavior is "rent-seeking."
The world's largest wind-turbine manufacturer, Copenhagen Climate Council member Vestas, urges governments to invest heavily in the wind market. It sponsors CNN's "Climate in Peril" segment, increasing support for policies that would increase Vestas's earnings. A fellow council member, Mr. Gore's green investment firm Generation Investment Management, warns of a significant risk to the U.S. economy unless a price is quickly placed on carbon.
Even companies that are not heavily engaged in green business stand to gain. European energy companies made tens of billions of euros in the first years of the European Trading System when they received free carbon emission allocations.
American electricity utility Duke Energy, a member of the Copenhagen Climate Council, has long promoted a U.S. cap-and-trade scheme. Yet the company bitterly opposed the Warner-Lieberman bill in the U.S. Senate that would have created such a scheme because it did not include European-style handouts to coal companies. The Waxman-Markey bill in the House of Representatives promises to bring back the free lunch.
U.S. companies and interest groups involved with climate change hired 2,430 lobbyists just last year, up 300% from five years ago. Fifty of the biggest U.S. electric utilities -- including Duke -- spent $51 million on lobbyists in just six months.
The massive transfer of wealth that many businesses seek is not necessarily good for the rest of the economy. Spain has been proclaimed a global example in providing financial aid to renewable energy companies to create green jobs. But research shows that each new job cost Spain 571,138 euros, with subsidies of more than one million euros required to create each new job in the uncompetitive wind industry. Moreover, the programs resulted in the destruction of nearly 110,000 jobs elsewhere in the economy, or 2.2 jobs for every job created.
As goes California, so goes the nation. Nowhere is this adage truer than in environmental policy, thanks to Democrats’ eagerness to impose the Golden State’s radical eco-agenda on all Americans. Yet it is exactly such policies that have helped lead California to financial ruin.
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California’s energy policy is an unmitigated disaster.
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On Tuesday, for example, President Barack Obama announced his intention to apply California’s fuel efficiency regulation to all 50 states. You might think that the Constitution reserves such lawmaking to Congress. After all, there is a robust interstate trade in automobiles and in 2007 Congress revised the Department of Transportation’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards to require cars and trucks sold in America to become 40 percent more fuel efficient by 2020.
The 2020 CAFE standards are ambitious—they require efficiency improvements at nearly two-and-a-half times the historical rate. Yet they weren’t ambitious enough for liberal California legislators, who passed a law to accelerate Congress’s time line by four years.
Of course, it doesn’t make any sense for automakers to conform to two different fuel efficiency regulations which is why the Bush administration refused to allow California to set its own standard. President Obama simply substituted Congress’s 2002 CAFE targets with California’s.
An automobile’s carbon footprint is proportional to vehicle weight, so the new regulation will make larger cars more expensive—work trucks will cost a lot more for blue collar Americans in the country’s heartland. But that’s of little concern to Prius-driving coastal urbanites.
At the same time that the president was announcing the Californication of the country’s automobile fleet, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) was working to push through an anti-energy bill designed to export the Golden State’s failed energy model to the rest of the country. The bill, the Clean Energy and Security Act, borrows liberally from California’s climate initiatives, including a cap-and-trade scheme, a renewable energy requirement, and a low-carbon standard.
That should worry all Americans, because California’s energy policy is an unmitigated disaster. California’s expensive energy has driven industries out of the state. According to the Energy Information Agency, California has some of the highest electricity prices in country, due in part to the laughably-misnamed “deregulation” of California’s electricity industry. Californians were actually left with an over-regulated energy supply that cannot deliver energy at the affordable prices the rest of the country can. No wonder, then, that it has exported most of it electricity generation to other states.
The Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was left bemused recently when it became apparent that he cannot even build a solar power plant in the middle of the Mojave Desert, due to the federal Endangered Species Act which prohibits any construction that disturbs the habitat of species designated as endangered. The state’s remaining hydro-power plants are offline because of the drought, so rolling blackouts like those of 2005 will be inevitable. This is the energy policy that President Obama in now trying to impose on the rest of the nation—to cut out all affordable sources of energy and cause bills to, as he once famously said, “skyrocket,” to encourage development of alternative energy sources.
The effect on California’s economy has been disastrous. Heavy manufacturing in the state is dead. The industries it has left—entertainment in Hollywood and technology in Silicon Valley—are not enough to supply the tax base the state needs to support its expansive social welfare programs, which in turn have seen demand spike because of high unemployment caused by the energy policy.
Voters have decisively rejected Proposition 1A, which would have raised taxes to cover spending. The Governator will therefore have to become the Terminator again if he wants to avoid the state going bankrupt.
In the past California certainly had some golden years, culturally and economically and America becoming more like California might once have been a good thing. If the president still believes that, he hasn’t been paying attention.
Iain Murray and William Yeatman are energy policy experts at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and contributors to Globalwarming.org.
Jerry, you and Corner readers might be interested in this review of the new Honda Insight from Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson — a man who has come in for a bit of stick here in the past. Some highlights:It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more...
The Honda’s petrol engine is a much-shaved, built-for-economy, low-friction 1.3 that, at full chat, makes a noise worse than someone else’s crying baby on an airliner. It’s worse than the sound of your parachute failing to open. Really, to get an idea of how awful it is, you’d have to sit a dog on a ham slicer...
The nickel for the battery has to come from somewhere. Canada, usually. It has to be shipped to Japan, not on a sailing boat, I presume. And then it must be converted, not in a tree house, into a battery, and then that battery must be transported, not on an ox cart, to the Insight production plant in Suzuka. And then the finished car has to be shipped, not by Thor Heyerdahl, to Britain, where it can be transported, not by wind, to the home of a man with a beard who thinks he’s doing the world a favour...
But let me be clear that hybrid cars are designed solely to milk the guilt genes of the smug and the foolish. And that pure electric cars, such as the G-Wiz and the Tesla, don’t work at all because they are just too inconvenient...
The only hope I have is that there are enough fools and madmen out there who will buy an Insight to look sanctimonious outside the school gates. And that the cash this generates can be used to develop something a bit more constructive.
Welcome to the worrrrrld of tomorrow!
It is government's job to make and enforce the rules that allow a civilized society to flourish. But it has a dismal record of regulating itself. Imagine, for instance, if a corporation, seeking to make its bottom line look better, transferred employee contributions from the company pension fund to its own accounts, replaced the money with general obligation corporate bonds, and called the money it expropriated income. We all know what would happen: The company accountants would refuse to certify the books and management would likely -- and rightly -- end up in jail.
The Washington Post reported last year on a study led by Alexandra Kalev, a sociologist at the University of Arizona, which comprehensively reviewed 31 years of data from 830 mid-to-large U.S. workplaces. The findings: Diversity training exercises at companies were followed by a 7.5 percent drop in the number of women in management. Black female managers declined by 10 percent, and black men in top positions fell by 12 percent, with similar numbers for Asians and Latinos.Now I'm all about variety being the spice of life but choking off someone's career for the sole sake of "diversity" doesn't seem all that smart.
California Voters Voice Outrage [Joshua Culling]
The results are finalized in California, and taxpayers finally took a stand. Propositions 1A through 1E were soundly defeated last night. Here’s a rundown:— Proposition 1A would have been the most damaging to taxpayers, as it would extend tax hikes on sales, income, and vehicles for two years, to the tune of $16 billion. It was disguised as a spending cap, but that cap was weak. Voters sniffed out the tax hikes and overwhelmingly opposed them 66-34.
— Proposition 1B didn’t fare much better, as it was rejected by a 62.5 to 37.5 vote. This measure was Gov. Schwarzenegger’s bow to the all-powerful teachers unions. It would have thrown an addition $9.3 billion toward education. It hoped to draw that money from the rainy day fund 1A would have established (so much for a spending cap). Thankfully for taxpayers, both measures were defeated.
— Proposition 1C would have allowed the state to borrow against future lottery revenues, about $5 billion. You have to give state government credit for creativity — they’re tops when it comes to new and innovative budget gimmicks that ignore the reality that they consistently spend outside their means. Voters recognized that Prop 1C ignored this fundamental reality and rejected it 65-35.
— Proposition 1D would have shifted almost $2 billion from the California Children and Families Program into the general fund to close the budget gap. This is more budgetary maneuvering that would have left taxpayers on the hook when the program’s funding was inevitably restored. It lost 66-34.
— Proposition 1E failed by the same 66-34. Like Prop 1D, it would have diverted funds from elsewhere in the budget to shore up general-fund overspending (about $230 million annually from Proposition 63 — a tax on the rich).
— Proposition 1F was the only measure to pass. It imposed a weak limit on pay raises for legislators, theoretically disallowing them during budget deficit years. Regardless of its actual teeth, the results show true populist outrage in California: The measure passed by a resounding 74-26.
While all of this was going on, Schwarzenegger, one of the most disappointing Republican governors of my lifetime, was biding his time in Washington, D.C. He refused to be in the same time zone during the certain bloodbath, and even cast a “last-minute absentee ballot.” He’s back in Sacramento today, holding closed-door meetings with the leadership of both parties on how to fix this mess. That’s the same leadership, mind you, that gave us this massive special-election failure.
Proponents of the measure, backed by teachers unions, spent $30 million to ensure its passage. They outspent those opposed 10 to 1.
California taxpayers did the right thing yesterday. They sent a loud-and-clear message to Schwarzenegger and the legislature. Public hearings on how to fix the budget begin on Thursday. Grab some popcorn — this is going to get very interesting.
— Josh Culling is the state government affairs manager for the National Taxpayers Union.
Now there is evidence of repair facilities hiring low-wage mechanics who can't read English.
Twenty-one people were killed when U.S. Airways Express Flight 5481 crashed in Charlotte, North Carolina in 2003. The plane went wildly out of control on takeoff.
One reason for the crash, investigators found, was that mechanics incorrectly connected the cables to some of the plane's control surfaces in the repair shop. The FAA was cited for improper oversight of the repair process.
Repairing airplanes is a complicated business. Airplanes have many manuals. Typically, when mechanics repair a part, they open the manual, consult the book, and make the repair step-by-step, as if it were a recipe book.
They make a list of every action they take, so the next person to fix the plane (as well as the people who fly it) will know exactly what has been done.
If mechanics don't speak English, the international language of aviation, they can't read the manual and they can't record their activities.
There are more than 236 FAA-certified aircraft repair stations in Texas, according to the FAA's Web site. News 8 has learned that hundreds of the mechanics working in those shops do not speak English and are unable to read repair manuals for today's sophisticated aircraft.
Former FAA inspector Bill McNease told News 8 he regularly encountered applicants for pilots’ licenses who tried to pretend they could speak English — but could not.
"When I was based in Dallas, I had that happen every week," McNease said. "It was not uncommon at all to have foreign flight students. We had mechanics, but I handled the pilot end of it.... and I turned down people every week because they couldn't speak English."
"There are people [where I work] who do not know how to read a maintenance manual as they are spelled out, because they don't have a clue," said one certified aircraft mechanic who works at a Texas aircraft repair station. He wished to remain anonymous to protect his employment.
I would like to state that [Times reporter Stephanie] Strom was set to come to Washington where I planned to hand over emails that showed contact between ACORN and staff of the Obama campaign. I had started not to trust her and would only give them to her in person. I have forwarded them to [attorney] Heather Heidalbaugh and they offer evidence that would have substantiated my story.So why aren't we seeing more of this story?
"The era of apologizing for Republican mistakes of the past is now officially over," Steele will say in a speech to the RNC's 2009 State Chairmen's Meeting, according to excerpts obtained by CNN. "It is done. We have turned the page, we have turned the corner. No more looking in the review mirror. From this point forward, we will focus all of our energies on winning the future."Here's to hoping.
Congressional Republicans, who were loyal to President Bush throughout a majority of his two terms, largely sought to break with him in the 2008 elections because he had become a political liability.Over the past few months, GOP lawmakers have acknowledged that the party moved away from one of its core principles of smaller government and less federal spending during the Bush era.
Steele, who was elected to head the party in January, will say the GOP is now "beginning to rally" at the grassroots level after losing control of the White House and additional seats in the Senate and House in November.
There are two other aspects to the new CAFE regulations announced today. The first is that they are predicated on EPA actually making an endangerment finding related to greenhouse gases. That finding is currently open to public comment, so the administration is being particularly brazen in revealing that the comment period is actually a sham and that its mind is made up. Secondly, downsizing of the American fleet has contributed to around 2,000 extra deaths on the road at current CAFE levels, because smaller cars are generally less crashworthy. The National Academy of Sciences confirmed this finding a few years back. Certainly, cars are becoming safer, but they would be safer still if they were allowed to be bigger and consumers given the choice between safety and fuel efficiency. Using the methodology of this CEI study from a few years back, applied to today's fatality numbers in a back-of-the-envelope calculation, the new policy will lead to around 800 more needless deaths on the road each year. Blood for less oil, you could say.
Crikey. A new poll has surfaced that reveals extreme public discontent with what Congress and the administration plan to do to our energy bills in the name of fighting global warming (or "aiding climate recovery" or whatever the new spin is). It should be online soon, but in the meantime, here's the headlines:* 78% of all respondents saying a $50 increase monthly in utility bills would be a hardship. A recent MIT study said household costs could exceed $3000 per year, or 5 times as much overall costs the $50 per month/$600 per year would mean.Meanwhile, Roger Pielke Jr rightly ridicules Paul Krugman's "it's the best we've got" argument.
* 58% of respondents say they are unwilling to pay any more than they currently pay for electricity to combat climate change.
* Respondents are aware that climate change legislation will likely cause their electricity rates to go up.
* In addition, one-half (50%) of the country opposes enacting a carbon tax to fund energy research, which represents an amazing 49-point shift (22% drop in agree; 27% increase in disagree) away from supporting a carbon tax for energy research in 2007.
* Interest in protecting the environment and fighting climate change has dropped from a low priority (8%) in 2007 to receiving virtually no attention (3%) in 2009.
Over at the DC Examiner, I argue that reforming Air Traffic Control will be a stimulus plan in itself, helping a struggling industry, reducing oil imports, and delivering real benefits to airline passengers. And, if that's the sort of thing you're into, it will also be extremely effective in lowering greenhouse-gas emissions. Sadly, it's also the sort of policy that will never get off the ground without a strong presidential push, so no wonder it hasn't been seriously advanced for over 20 years.
Human beings are as good at devising ex post facto explanations for big disasters as they are bad at anticipating those disasters. It is indeed impressive how rapidly the economists who failed to predict this crisis — or predicted the wrong crisis (a dollar crash) — have been able to produce such a satisfying story about its origins. Yes, it was all the fault of deregulation.You know the drill, read the whole thing.
There are just three problems with this story. First, deregulation began quite a while ago (the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act was passed in 1980). If deregulation is to blame for the recession that began in December 2007, presumably it should also get some of the credit for the intervening growth. Second, the much greater financial regulation of the 1970s failed to prevent the United States from suffering not only double-digit inflation in that decade but also a recession (between 1973 and 1975) every bit as severe and protracted as the one we’re in now. Third, the continental Europeans — who supposedly have much better-regulated financial sectors than the United States — have even worse problems in their banking sector than we do. The German government likes to wag its finger disapprovingly at the “Anglo Saxon” financial model, but last year average bank leverage was four times higher in Germany than in the United States. Schadenfreude will be in order when the German banking crisis strikes.
We need to remember that much financial innovation over the past 30 years was economically beneficial, and not just to the fat cats of Wall Street. New vehicles like hedge funds gave investors like pension funds and endowments vastly more to choose from than the time-honored choice among cash, bonds and stocks. Likewise, innovations like securitization lowered borrowing costs for most consumers. And the globalization of finance played a crucial role in raising growth rates in emerging markets, particularly in Asia, propelling hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
The reality is that crises are more often caused by bad regulation than by deregulation.
Just a joke about the power of the presidency. Made by Jay Leno it might have been funny. But as told by Mr. Obama, the actual president of the United States, it's hard to see the humor. Surely he's aware that other presidents, most notably Richard Nixon, have abused the power of the Internal Revenue Service to harass their political opponents. But that abuse generated a powerful backlash and with good reason. Should the IRS come to be seen as just a bunch of enforcers for whoever is in political power, the result would be an enormous loss of legitimacy for the tax system.I agree with Glenn. That joke was dumb, dumb, dumb. And as I said in a previous post, that joke is not only completely inappropriate for Obama to make but displays incredibly poor judgement.
With the Waxman-Markey global-warming "cap and trade" bill facing Henry's self-imposed deadline of reporting by Memorial Day (something Rep. Joe Barton says is sure to embarass the Energy & Commerce Committee), expect the usual suspects to be lauding the fact that Europe, which has a cap-and-trade scheme in place, reduced emissions last year.
Of course, the reason for the reduction has precious little to do with cap and trade. Here's the real reason.
Food prices spike again and, surprise surprise, government policies bear much of the blame. Here's two separate experts commenting on the role of the pernicious ethanol mandate:[Bill Lapp] 1. Reduced availability of corn: Based upon Agriculture Department estimates released on May 12, corn supplies will decline to the lowest level (relative to usage) in 14 years. This largely reflects a 35 percent increase in the use of corn for the production of ethanol over the past two years.We're in a recession. People need to pay less for food. Instead, we have a harebrained fuel policy that pays people to burn corn, which Congress is happy to let lie so that next year we'll pay more taxpayer money to burn more corn. We need a Bread Party or two to go alongside the Tea Parties.
2. Battle for acreage: As more corn is needed to meet ethanol demand, acreage devoted to other crops, such as wheat and soybeans, is reduced, leading to higher prices for those crops as well. A hiccup in weather this summer could drive prices significantly higher for corn, wheat or soybeans.
[Michael J. Roberts] For food prices, specifically, a big factor is whether the U.S. sticks with current (and in my view, ill conceived) ethanol policy. My own research suggests that prices of key food commodities — like corn, soybean, wheat and rice — are about 30 percent higher as a result of U.S. corn-based ethanol production.
"Lying to the Congress of the United States is a crime," Boehner said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” "And if the speaker is accusing the CIA and other intelligence officials of lying or misleading the Congress, then she should come forward with evidence and turn that over to the Justice Department so they can be prosecuted."If lying to Congress is a crime, what about lying to the American people?
He added: "And if that's not the case, I think she ought to apologize to our intelligence professionals around the world."
...it strikes me that in the depth of this severe political crisis, there is a genuine opportunity for the conservative movement in Britain. We can capitalize on the anti-politician sentiment most effectively if we adopt, explain and push a series of policies that reduce the power of politicians and their opportunity, not to put too fine a point on it, to rob us blind.It's Time For The Plan
At least 39 people were taken into custody on trespassing charges, police Sgt. Bill Redman said. Among those arrested were Norma McCorvey, the plaintiff identified as "Roe" in the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion. She now opposes abortion.
One does not have to be a hyperventilating tabloid columnist to expect better behaviour than that which has been revealed.Read the whole thing.
Revealed, we should remember, by the unlovable press. Michael Schudson, among the best of the academic writers on the media, has seen in the raucousness and hype of newspapers a pearl beyond price: the instinct to create trouble for the establishment, the panjandrums – them. In this collection of essays, the central one – which shares the book’s title – lays out four elements of necessary unlovability. These are: a love of the unplanned and the disruptive; an even greater love of conflict and dissent; a scepticism about the claims of politics; and a willingness to name names and connect the names with crimes and misdemeanours.
Schudson writes: “That is what serves democracy: the irresistible drive of journalists to focus on events, including those that powerful forces cannot anticipate and often cannot manage.” Thus when Matt Drudge began his subsequently richly rewarded career by showing, from his bedroom laptop, that President Bill Clinton was an adulterer; or when bloggers uncovered a speech made in 2002 by Trent Lott, the former Senate majority leader, which pointed to racist views; or, more recently, when Paul Staines, a British blogger operating under the incendiary nom de guerre of Guido Fawkes, uncovered a sleazy plan on the part of prime ministerial aides to tar leading Conservatives with sex scandals – in all of these cases, the people glorying in their ill-gotten power and tearing down the powerful did well by us.
They fulfilled one of the necessary prerequisites of the free press: that it is free. In the words of Walter Meers,a veteran AP reporter quoted in another of Schudson’s essays: “There are too many excursions into trivia,too much play for the public opinion polls, too many words about who’s ahead and who’s behind. There’s a reason. That is what people want to know.”
But here is the rub. Schudson is writing of American newspapers.
She discussed the explosion of public outrage over the scandal in what is understood to have been a candid exchange of views when she met the Prime Minister for their weekly audience at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday.(italics mine)
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