This is what dependecy looks like!
From the Occupy Atlanta folks, here's what's going on down South:
Tell me this isn't creepy? I'm not saying that everyone involved with the "Occupy" movement is at nutty as this crowd in Atlanta, but this is disturbing. No way around it.
Here's one response to the protesters that I believe many Americans concur with.
George Will: Poor Economy Should = Fewer Speeches
Washington Post columnist George Will, a rabid baseball enthusiast, would appreciate this metaphor: Dude knocked it out of the park with this, his latest piece in the Post.
WASHINGTON — In societies governed by persuasion, politics is mostly talk, so liberals’ impoverishment of their vocabulary matters.
Having damaged liberalism’s reputation, they call themselves progressives. Having made the federal government’s pretensions absurd, they have resurrected the supposed synonym “federal family.” Having made federal spending suspect, they advocate “investments” — for “job creation,” a euphemism for stimulus, another word they have made toxic.
Barack Obama, a pitilessly rhetorical president, continues to grab the nation by its lapels but the nation is no longer listening. This matters because ominous portents are multiplying.
He continues:
For two years, there has been one constant: As events have refuted the Obama administration’s certitudes, it has retained its insufferable knowingness. It knew that the stimulus would hold unemployment below 8 percent. Oops. Unemployment has been at least 9 percent in 26 of the 30 months since the stimulus was passed. Michael Boskin of Stanford says that even if one charitably accepts the administration’s self-serving estimate of jobs “created or saved” by the stimulus, each job cost $280,000 — five times America’s median pay.
The economic policy the “federal family” should adopt can be expressed in five one-syllable words: Get. Out. Of. The. Way.
Instead, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, whose department has become a venture capital firm for crony capitalism and costly flops at creating “green jobs,” praises the policy of essentially banishing the incandescent light bulb as “taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.”
Better to let the experts in his department and the rest of the federal family waste other people’s money.
Indeed.
Read the full column right here.
Steyn On Debt-Ceiling Debate
The debates in D.C. over how much more debt our government is to accrue are, sadly, necessary. Why are they necessary? Because those we've elected to represent us have (for far too long) spent money we don't have. They're forced to (finally) deal with this because our backs are to the wall.
What must not be lost in all of this is this fact: Not only have we let them, in most instances we've encouraged them. We've asked for this, even by all the things we didn't say. Perhaps, especially because of the things we didn't say to our congressmen, senators and presidents. At this point, most of us are so detached from the political process, from what it takes to run our country, that when serious fiscal matters like debt showdowns appear on our horizon we assume it can't be anything more than "politics as usual" in Washington.
I may be distilling the matter more than I should, but I believe it's truly that simple.
Mark Steyn, albeit it in a much more eloquently and informed way, agrees.
There is something surreal and unnerving about the so-called “debt ceiling” negotiations staggering on in Washington. In the real world, negotiations on an increase in one’s debt limit are conducted between the borrower and the lender. Only in Washington is a debt increase negotiated between two groups of borrowers.
Actually, it’s more accurate to call them two groups of spenders.
Steyn goes on to describe where each of the respective sides are coming from.
On the one side are Obama and the Democrats, who in a negotiation supposedly intended to reduce American indebtedness are (surprise!) proposing massive increasing in spending (an extra $33 billion for Pell Grants, for example). The Democrat position is: You guys always complain that we spend spend spend like there’s (what’s the phrase again?) no tomorrow, so be grateful that we’re now proposing to spend spend spend spend like there’s no this evening.
And from the Right?
On the other side are the Republicans, who are the closest anybody gets to representing, albeit somewhat tentatively and less than fullthroatedly, the actual borrowers — that’s to say, you and your children and grandchildren. But in essence the spenders are negotiating among themselves how much debt they’re going to burden you with. It’s like you and your missus announcing you’ve set your new credit limit at $1.3 million, and then telling the bank to send demands for repayment to Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s kindergartner next door.
He continues:
Nothing good is going to come from these ludicrously protracted negotiations over laughably meaningless accounting sleights-of-hand scheduled to kick in circa 2020. All the charade does is confirm to prudent analysts around the world that the depraved ruling class of the United States cannot self-correct, and, indeed, has no desire to.
You can read the full column here, and I highly recommend you do.
We may in fact have to end up raising the debt level. The cost of decades of horrifically irresponsible governance, call it. But when does the madness end? Republicans aren't saints in all of this, but one political party has as one of its core tenets the perpetual increasing of debt, size of government, and likelihood that the whole thing comes crashing down. If the people (Republicans) who promise to be fiscally responsible can be lured into spending money we don't have, what serious hope is there that the party promising to spend-and-tax more can be trusted with the governing of this nation?
Elections of consequences. Perhaps it's time for a voters revolution, but this one doesn't require violence or protests or a war.
Merely an acceptance of the truth: it's not working, and "we the people" are the root cause. Our selfishness, our indifference, and our "hands off", "eat, drink, and be merry" approach to self-government and the protection of our fragile liberties has caught up with us.
Time to get involved, folks.
Sowell, Ground Zero, and a new blog-post?
Thomas Sowell almost never gets it wrong. Perhaps that is because I've agreed with nearly everything the man has ever written (that I have read), but I'd like to chalk it up to pure brilliance. His latest effort is a critique of the senseless TSA "safety" policies in American airports.
No country has better airport security than Israel-- and no country needs it more, since Israel is the most hated target of Islamic extremist terrorists. Yet, somehow, Israeli airport security people don't have to strip passengers naked electronically or have strangers feeling their private parts.
Does anyone seriously believe that we have better airport security than Israel? Is our security record better than theirs?
"Security" may be the excuse being offered for the outrageous things being done to American air travelers, but the heavy-handed arrogance and contempt for ordinary people that is the hallmark of this administration in other areas is all too painfully apparent in these new and invasive airport procedures.
Read that entire column here.
Moving right along...we learned this week that not only are the people who want to build the "Islamic Center" near Ground Zero in lower Manhattan being foolish in even attempting to build the thing where they want to build it, but it seems they also want to get earmark cash to help make the nightmare become a reality.
Obama’s Medicare/Medicaid Czar Is A Socialist
Dr. Donald Berwick, yet another Harvard elite, has been appointed by President Obama to oversee Medicare and Medicaid. The budget he will be in charge of is bigger than that of the defense department's. Instead of going through the normal vetting process and Senate committee hearings, the president has put Dr. Berwick in charge of hundreds of billions of dollars without so much as a teleconference with members of congress.
But that is not the real problem with this appointment, and more specifically, this appointee. Dr. Berwick, when it comes to health care, is a socialist. He is in favor of the "single-payer" system practiced in most European countries; the same one President Obama advocated for his entire adult life. Here Berwick is in his own words:
Why does this matter, you ask?
All I want you to get out of this story is this: the president has been lying about his deeply-held, far-Left views. He ran as a middle-of-the-road, moderate candidate who would bring races, colors, creeds, and ideologies together. He promised to run the "most transparent" administration in history. People voted for him because of these disingenuous promises of unity and transparency. When it came to health care debates in 2009, President Obama said he was not in favor of a single-payer, European-style system. He said anyone who claimed this was a fear-monger. And now, when it comes down to it, he puts a socialist in charge of our government's health care bureaucracy.
Please understand that this matters. Please understand that elections have consequences. Please understand that by sitting on the sidelines, we have given the control of our nation over to radicals.
I don't agree with a single word Dr. Berwick says about health care and the redistribution of wealth. Sadly, our president does.
Do Government Workers Deserve More?
There is "politics" and then there is "economics." Politicians use economics to garner votes from their constituents, but far too many Americans assume that those politicians have the fainest idea what they are doing when dealing in economic issues. I suppose I am being generous when I accuse our current batch of "representatives" in Washington D.C. as being clueless about fiscal matters, because in truth, many of them know exactly how disastrous their spending habits are yet ignore their consciences and push forward with their reckless agendas.
A perfect example is the obsession Democrats have with expanding the federal employee workforce. The Left knows that the more people working for the government, the more votes they can count on as they promise more and more increases in salary and benefits. Liberals pose this as a "political" issue, pitting their compassionate benevolence against the miserliness of cold-hearted conservatives and Republicans. but it is actually an ideological (and common sense) one more than anything else.
The Left believes in bigger government and redistributing wealth. The Right believes in economic freedom, the superiority of the private sector in creating jobs and generating wealth, and personal responsibility. The government cannot create jobs without taking money from people already working. Everyone agrees we need a certain number of public sector employees to guard our streets and maintain public utilities, but there is a limit to what any economy can fund. For the Obama administration to claim that they are "creating jobs" by putting more workers on the government's payroll is disingenuous at best.
The Heritage Foundation has an interesting new study on the whole matter of "public vs. private sector" workers and job creation. Here's an excerpt:
Salaries and benefits—for identical jobs—are 30 percent to 40 percent higher in the federal government than in the private sector. Claims that this dramatic discrepancy in compensation is warranted because of government workers’ high skills are unjustified, as this study shows. Equally unjustified is the fact that federal workers can rarely be fired, no matter how poor their job performance. Congress should align federal salaries and benefits with market rates—a simple, and fair, move that could save taxpayers nearly $47 billion in 2011. Heritage Foundation labor policy analyst James Sherk provides detailed data on why Congress should not overtax all Americans to overpay the privileged workers in the civil service.
Read the full report here, and please send it to 10 friends or family members. This isn't some peripheral issue: it gets to the heart of the differences between Right and Left in this country. It involves the economic solubility and future of our economy (and way of life).
My New Hero, Chris Christie
Republican Chris Christie (R-NJ) shocked the political world by winning the New Jersey gubernatorial race last fall. He is a man who does not mince words, and has no problem cutting budgets, reducing taxes, and standing up to the entrenched union and bureaucratic powers that have dominated New Jersey for decades.
For a small glimpse of what a candid, honest, and un-compromising Republican actually looks (and sounds) like, PLEASE watch this:
Preach it, brother!
I love how the first lady who complained said that, in her mind, she wasn't making enough money...and when reminded by Gov. Christie that, like the rest of society, she "didn't have to" pick the line of work she was in, suddenly remembered that she (and all teachers) only do their jobs because they want to and they love it.
Oh, and by the way, that woman's name is Rita Wilson, and she works in the Rutherford School District...and makes $86,000 per year.
The point here is not that teachers aren't as valuable to society as say a professional baseball player, but simply that the state (and federal government) is not an endless supply of funds as the governor pointed out. You can't run a budget based on emotional outbursts form angry women in a townhall meeting. School choice, something I would have thought open-minded liberals would love, is the best alternative for well-qualified, hard-working teachers, as I'm sure Ms. Wilson is. I WANT good teachers to be rewarded, but when the unions (who are also the single biggest contributors to the political campaigns of Democrats) rule a state like they do in New Jersey, California or Illinois, we're forced as a society to pay the horrendous ones more and more as well. This is unsustainable.
Everyone loses when there is no competition and people are guaranteed jobs for life.
Unions “Uber Alles”?
The American public feels it is drowning in red ink. It is dismayed and even outraged at the burgeoning national deficits, unbalanced state and local budgets, and accounting that often masks the extent of indebtedness. There is a mounting sense that taxpayers are being taken for an expensive ride by public sector unions. The extraordinary benefits the unions have secured for their members are going to be harder and harder to pay.
Mort Zuckerman is the Editor-in-Chief of US News & World Report, and was an initial supporter of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2009. But lately, Mr. Zuckerman has changed his tune as he (and America) has watched the president, Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid throw economic caution and fiscal responsibility to the wind.
In his latest column, Zuckerman makes the critically important point that there is rampant and nefarious collusion between the public employee unions and the politicians they work tirelessly to elect.
The business community and a growing portion of the public now understand the dynamics that discriminate against the private sector. The public sector unions organize voting campaigns for politicians who, on election, repay their benefactors by approving salaries and benefits for the public sector, irrespective of whether they are sustainable. And what is happening with California is happening in slower motion in the rest of the country. It must be one of the reasons the Pew Research Center this year reported that support for labor unions generally has plummeted "amid growing public skepticism about unions' power and purpose."
There has been a transformation in the nature of our employment. Labor is no longer dominated by private sector industrial workers who were in large part culturally conservative and economically pro-growth. Over recent decades public sector employment has exploded and public workers have come to dominate the labor movement. These public sector employees have a unique and powerful advantage in contract negotiations. Quite simply it is their capacity to deliver political endorsements and votes for the very people who are theoretically on the other side of the negotiating table. Candidates who want to appear tough on crime will look to cops, sheriffs' deputies, prison guards, and highway patrol officers for their endorsement.
The point here isn't to pile blame on every union and every member of those unions. But to deny that there is a conflict of interest for the politician who marries his or her campaign to the same union workers that are being paid (exorbitantly) with the tax dollars that this same politician will have some control over.
City government was developed to serve its citizens. Today the citizenry is working in large part to serve the government. It is always hard to shrink government spending. It is particularly difficult when public sector unions have such a unique lever of pressure.
We have to escape this cycle or it will crush us. One way is to take labor negotiations out of the hands of vulnerable legislators and assign them to independent commissions. They would have a better shot at achieving a fair balance between appropriate salary increases and the revenues and services of local municipalities. The electorate won't swallow any more red ink.
Free markets aren't perfect, but state-controlled economies, the kind we're seeing implode in Greece, always lead to societal collapse.
"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."
-Alexis de Tocqueville
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