Back to Basics

The economy is scheduled to plunge off a cliff in January.

Back in the first two years after the Progressive’s November Revolution of 2008, the big government party enacted tax increases not scheduled to take place until after the 2012 elections. They also passed Obamacare which carries within it multiple tax increases, which are also scheduled to take affect after the 2012 election. Combine these with previous tax rollbacks scheduled to expire in January 2013 and we are looking at the major economic crisis the progressives have worked so hard to create so they can then work so hard to solve.

In 2010 the voters got a chance to let the central planners know what they thought of what had been done with the power entrusted to them in 2008. However, with only one house of Congress in Republican hands they were unable to reverse any of the changes made in the first two years of the Obama administration, so come January we hit the wall.

This manufactured economic crisis will be used by the triumphant Progressives as proof that capitalism doesn’t work. Then following their play book, since too much government wrecked the economy we need more government to fix the economy. They will tighten the already strangulating regulatory straight jacket. If Obamacare is upheld and implemented, within a few years it will kill the private insurance industry as company after company figures out it is cheaper to pay the fines imposed than purchase the insurance required. The flight of paying customers from the private insurance companies will force them into bankruptcy. Remember even if they used deceptive language at the moment of passing the bill President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid were on the record many times saying what they were aiming at was a single payer European type healthcare system. And we can all see how well that is working out for the Europeans.

They will also use the failure of the insurance industry as more proof that capitalism doesn’t work.

As President Obama travels around the country inciting class warfare with his constant attacks on the millionaires and billionaires which he tells us aren’t paying their fair share he continues to accept vast amounts of money from those same millionaires and billionaires. While his administration imposes regulation after regulation that every day makes it harder to start new businesses, maintain or expand small businesses he turns a blind eye to the continued casino like atmosphere at the largest banks: the ones that are too big to fail and which should be too big to bail.

The largest bank in the country, J. P. Morgan Chase just lost another couple of billions in risky credit derivatives that their own chairman says were ill-conceived, poorly executed, and not managed very well. This is the same bank that President Obama says is one the best run banks in America and the same chairman who has visited the Whitehouse at least 18 times since 2009.. The Chairman of the Board Jamie Diamom, the one in charge when all the poor execution was going on was just voted 23 million dollars in compensation while the stockholders take it in the wallet.

“Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes…”

*****

President Obama was quick to invite France’s Socialist president-elect to Washington for a visit, but the White House also had some rather perplexing advice for Francois Hollande:

President Obama’s spokesman warned the new socialist president-elect of France not to implement his campaign agenda of ending austerity measures, indicating that such a reversal could damage the world economy.

“A balanced approach . . . Both fiscal consolidation and efforts to boost the recovery is the right approach for Europe,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters today. “That’s an approach that he thinks ensures that the recovery continues while putting our fiscal house in order.”

Hollande campaigned on a platform of raising taxes on the wealthy and dramatically increasing domestic spending on stimulus and other programs. Sound familiar? So why would the Obama administration be worried that France might do more of the same thing we’re told will save America from a recession/depression and generations of insurmountable debt?

Ace at Ace of Spades a bead on the Obama administration’s primary concern in all this… which is of course the fate of the Obama administration:

If France crashes, it offers America a preview of where Obama’s policies will take us, so he… doesn’t want France to implement Obama’s policies. He doesn’t want that heads up. Not before the election.

In addition, of course, a second official recession would just about wrap things up for Romney.

On a related note, Hollande’s election, as many predicted, did indeed spook the markets.

Lunch is a nice meal and a free lunch is even nicer. The problem with free lunches is that someone always has to pay for them. Lunches don’t grow on trees, unless they’re fresh fruit, the ingredients have to be gathered, processed, shipped, mixed, prepared, packaged, shipped again and put on your plate by a waiter working in an establishment that has to pay rent, heating, electricity and salaries.

A free lunch isn’t just free food, it’s the entire human and mechanical infrastructure needed to get it ready and subsidizing a free lunch means paying for that entire infrastructure. That’s one reason why some states and cities are slipping into bankruptcy like a man who has had too many martinis over lunch. It’s not just the free lunch that’s expensive, it’s the often inflated cost of the lunch delivery system that is killing everything.

The free lunch began as the Bread and Circuses which had its roots in a Roman bread dole. Free or subsidized bread is still a feature of political life in many parts of the world, including Egypt where the revolution had more to do with the price of bread than with democracy. The Muslim Brotherhood offered voters food giveways, turning Bread and Circuses into Bread and Beheadings, which is also a circus of sorts.

Free Egyptian bread started out as American subsidized aid. The world’s free lunch is still doled out in Washington D.C. where the Senate dining rooms had to be privatized after losing 18 million dollars. A government that can’t even run a cafeteria without losing millions of dollars can’t run anything else without losing billions or trillions doing it.

The logic of free bread is simple enough. It says that the people in power are stealing so much money that it’s worth it to kick a small piece of it back as subsidized food to avoid the people booting them out. That’s usually the way it is when people offer you free lunches bought with your own money, it’s because they’re stealing a hundred times the amount so they can afford to cover your lunch with some of the money they already stole from you.

That may be where the free lunch starts out, but that’s not where it ends. The popularity of free lunches makes the free lunch program politically untouchable, and that means it’s going to be rolled, stuffed and robbed forty times over. It means that whenever anyone wants to steal money, they’ll pass it through the Free Lunch program.

Whenever legislators complain that some vital program which people care about can’t be covered without a tax hike, invariably the reason that there’s no money is because the money that should have gone to the program was stolen. It wasn’t broken into in the middle of the night, the same legislators getting self-righteous about social security or the fire department or a dozen other things redirected the money to their own pet projects. They did that knowing that when the money ran out, the key programs could be used to justify more tax hikes.

The free lunch may start out free, but it ends up costing many times the market value of an ordinary lunch.

PHOTOS.COM

The industrious Little Red Hen wouldn’t share her cake with her lazy friends.

The yoke that is the welfare state has thoroughly infected America. If voters re-elect President Barack Obama, he will brainwash all Americans into thinking they are entitled to government handouts. Most Americans don’t understand that independent people are losing their way as the President crusades to build his Nanny Nation — a country so transformed that even the oral traditions that were taught for generations have been eradicated.

To be fair, it is not all Obama’s fault. In my lifetime, the United States has been moving away from its ideals of hard work, self-sacrifice and personal responsibility.

Bedtime Stories Our Children Never Hear

Some of you may remember “The Little Red Hen,” the bedtime story of an industrious chicken that lived with an indolent cat, a lazy dog and a mouse that behaved like a sloth.

I can still remember the story from half a century ago. My dad always had a glimmer in his eye, sitting at the head of the dinner table and telling us kids the fable of the cat that slept, the dog that napped and the mouse that snoozed. They only survived, said my dad, because the Little Red Hen worked so very hard.

One day, while busy in the garden, the Little Red Hen found some seeds of wheat. The hen asked her friends the following:

“Who will plant this wheat?”

“Who will cut this wheat?”

“Who will grind this wheat into flour?”

“Who will make a cake from the fine flour?”

To each question, her friends replied: “Not I.”

Finally, the Little Red Hen asked, “Who will help me eat this cake?” The cat, the dog and the mouse all shouted: “I will.”

“No, you won’t,” replied the Little Red Hen, “for I alone did all the work, so I alone will eat the cake.”

When I was a child, The Little Red Hen was a big hit at our house. But when I told the fable to my own children, they just didn’t seem to get it.

“Why wouldn’t the hen share, Daddy?” asked my little girl.

“Because she did all the work,” I replied.

“But my teacher tells us we are supposed to share,” she said.

“Sharing is good,” I told her, “but you can’t be lazy. You have to share in the work too.”

A puzzled look spread over her face. I remember being a bit exasperated, and I asked: “Don’t you read stories like ‘The Little Red Hen’ at school?”

“Not really,” she said. “Most of the stories we read are about helping each other.”

I realized that the values held sacred by my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents were not even contemplated by my children or most of their generation.

Obama is accelerating America’s welfare revolution. He is finishing what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt started when he introduced the New Deal 80 years ago. Three generations later, there are fewer Little Red Hens and far too many cats, dogs and mice.

I fear that the welfare creed has become so ingrained in our culture that America will probably never extricate itself from its growing socialist grip. That may have been FDR’s intention from the start.

The fundamental question that a people must ask is whether they want to be independent of their government, or dependent on it?. Is government to be a tool that we use when we need it and put away when we don’t, or a master that oversees our affairs and uses us as its tools.

The question is not a new one though it continues to be asked over and over again, as each generation comes into its own, and examines what it is they want of government. Most people want there to be limitations on government, but at the same time they want government to carry out certain functions for them. The tipping point between tool and master kicks in when government gains the ability to expand its own parameters independently of the people. It’s that moment when Mickey Mouse realizes the brooms aren’t going to stop and Dr. Frankenstein realizes the monster isn’t going to sit down and have tea with him after all. It’s that moment when the thing you’ve created takes on a life of its own.

Most of our parables along those lines deal with people who wanted convenience, a shortcut, only to invoke magical powers that they cannot control. The sorcerer’s apprentice wanted to get his chores done without all the hard work. We want the same thing, except we don’t use enchanted brooms, we use government on the understanding that since government works for us anyway, why not put it to use?

But how does a tool become a master? Through dependency. Dependency shifts the source of power turning the user into the used. The more dependent you are on something, the more power it has over you. Addicts use drugs as a tool to feel good, until the power shifts and the only way they can feel good is through the drug, and then finally they need the drug not as an means to feeling good, but as an end in and of itself.

That is how dependency locks in its users, by turning the means into the end. So too socialism may begin by promising to be a means to achieve certain ends on behalf of the users, only to turn itself into the end. And when a socialist system fails to get any of the ends done, the nationalized health care system is broken, poverty is on the rise, violent crime is out of control, the economy is stagnant and unemployment is climbing– it’s much too late to protest that this isn’t what you wanted. Because government itself has become the end. The end of everything.

Like all tools, socialism seems like a tempting solution. A shortcut to solving problems by loading them on the backs of elected officials and giving them a generous budget to handle the whole thing. And then we go away and do something else and let them take care of it. Why not? Isn’t that what we pay them for.

But like all shortcuts, socialism depends on creating a new thing. Primitive man was afraid of magic, because magic was said to take a part of him and place it into a thing. A thing which then takes on a life of its own. Which moves about and acts under our orders…

“We are five days away,” the future President famously said in October of 2008, “from fundamentally transforming the United States of America…”

So how does Barack Obama’s “fundamental transformation” look to you now?

If the world seems chaotic to you, you’re not alone. President Obama promised “change” during his first campaign for the presidency, and in less than one full term he’s delivered.

American foreign policy, historically devoted to protecting American interests and championing liberty, is now focused on “outreach” to people who want to destroy us. But the “transformation” has not just impacted America’s place in the world.

Your private world – your day-to-day environment and the cultural norms that order that environment – is changing as well (so is mine). And while it’s difficult to measure people’s changing attitudes, there is clear evidence that Americans are increasingly developing a negative attitude towards work, productivity, and success.

Depending on what poll you’re reading, roughly half of the American population agrees with President Obama’s assumption that “rich” Americans need to be taxed at a higher rate. Concerns about undermining people’s incentive to achieve just don’t matter to many of us – making “somebody else” pay makes a lot of us feel better.

There also seems to be a change in Americans’ attitudes towards working. And while there are far too many of us who are earnestly trying to find work and cannot, there nonetheless appears to be growing numbers of us for whom working is just not a priority.

The reality of Americans choosing to not work – or, at a minimum, choosing to work less – would seem to be a very intentional consequence of President Obama’s agenda. Indeed, it has long been the belief of the President’s science adviser John P. Holdren that the world would be a better place environmentally if “Americans worked, produced, and earned less.”

This may seem counter-intuitive, yet the numbers don’t lie. As the unemployment rate has recently dropped a bit, so also has the “labor force participation rate” – the statistic that represents the ratio between the labor force itself, and the overall population. Assuming that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is telling the truth, participation in the labor force has dropped to a 30 year low, as roughly 1.2 million Americans recently chose to exit the labor market.

It’s difficult to deny that the decline in the number of people who want to work correlates with the President’s agenda. At the very least, one has to admit that this change corresponds on the timeline with Mr. Obama’s presidency.

Yet within his first three years as our President, we’ve seen the amount of direct federal payments to individual households – both direct payments for specific usages, and for “unrestricted” usages – skyrocket by more than $600 billion. One might argue that these direct payments rose out of necessity because of the recession, although President Obama has slated for another $500 billion worth of annual increases in direct payments between now and 2016. If the trend continues, within the next four years direct payments will account for two-thirds of all annual federal government spending.

But wait, there’s more. A record forty-nine percent of all American homes have somebody living in them who is receiving some sort of federal benefit.

The usual battle cry on the SS Hope & Change: Damn the optics, full steam ahead!

Michelle Obama went to Aspen for another vacation, stayed at the home of a billionaire donor, and then went to Cincinnati to tell everybody else they should share their wealth:

First lady Michelle Obama has joined her husband’s bandwagon to hit the rich and spread the wealth, questioning how well-off families can feel good if others are struggling.

To about 300 supporters wealthy enough to pay $300-$10,000 to attend the mid-day event, the first lady said, “If a family in this country is struggling, we cannot be satisfied with our own families’ good fortune.”

She also rapped the rich, as has her husband. “Who do we want to be?” Obama asked. “Will we be a country where success is limited to the few at the top? This country is strongest when we are all better off.”

If Michelle wanted her audience to share the wealth with the less fortunate, why didn’t she ask them to give the $10,000 to charity instead of accept it on behalf of her husband’s campaign? After all, Team Obama will only burn that money trying to get re-elected so they can continue to pile up an unprecedented debt burden on the “less fortunate” they claim to want to share the wealth with.

I see the Obamas and their cronies sharing a lot of debt with Americans… but the wealth, they keep that between each other.

(h/t American Glob)

The old totalitarian paradigm was guns or butter. The Soviet Union could provide its people with the basic food groups or it could run a military race to conquer as much of the world as possible. As a totalitarian ideology, it naturally chose the latter.

The modern incarnation of the hammer and sickle, the liberals who took it slow, working from within the system instead of seizing the reins and executing anyone who got in the way, isn’t big on guns. The Clinton and Obama administrations both inflicted massive cuts on the military because it was extraneous to their domestic goals. They didn’t want guns, but they didn’t want butter either. They wanted a third thing.

The Obama Administration is about as interested in creating jobs as the denizens of the Kremlin were in making sure that every Russian family had plenty of milk and butter on the table. Totalitarian ideologies don’t care about individual welfare and they certainly are not interested in individual empowerment. An improved economy would weaken the left, it would undermine its central program of promoting fear and dependence on a social safety net and a rights infrastructure administered by them.

The left is not very good at discussing the economy. Ask its leaders to apportion blame for economic problems and they are right there with denunciations of the banks, corporations and a thousand other factors. But ask it how to repair an economy and after some mumbling the answer is usually to fund a bunch of its pet projects that have nothing to do with the economy and everything to do with its social agenda.

The left’s goal is to transform society, not to empower individuals to make their own choices. That is why an arena like birth control is its natural territory. A society with state subsidized birth control has a low birth rate, low marriage rate, high demand for social subsidies and a high demand for immigrants to compensate for the low birth rate and pay for the social subsidies. Now whether or not you think such a society is a good thing, it is the kind of society that the left wants.

Given a choice between universal birth control and universal free market jobs, the former is a priority and the latter a threat. It’s not just birth control, there are any number of elements, which may be benign in and of themselves, but which fit into a larger picture of the kind of society it wants.

The Communist era left thought big. If there was hunger, they would grow more wheat. If there weren’t enough jobs, they would create more factories. It was a grandiose insanity that eventually brought down Communism, but it was healthier than the post-human left which is declinist. If there is hunger, then their solution is to raise the price of food with a tax that will subsidize meals for the poor. If there aren’t enough jobs, the solution is for more people to go on the dole and for everyone to make do with less.

From a distance this looks like wealth redistribution, but it’s actually a program for teaching everyone to make do with less.

If it wasn’t so tragic it would be hilarious watching Greece collapse under the weight of their own undoing. Socialism is a bitch. When over 60% of the slaves work for their government master, where exactly is the money going to come from? I guess from a fantasy world where tourism pays you to do nothing.

Greece is a cautionary tale for America. The Heritage Foundation reports that 50% in the U.S. do not pay a single dime into the system. One in five Americans rely on a government handout for food, housing, education, etc. 67.3 million Americans receive subsidies from Washington.

What happens when the United States finances hits the fan? Dependency on the government cannot be sustained. Nor should it be tolerated. Unfortunately our incompetent statist DC leaders like it this way.

After occupying the headlines for far too long, Occupy Wall Street was dispersed by a combination of inclement weather, mayoral irritation and having served their purpose. Occupy Oakland will go on doing what it can to depress the economy of an already economically depressed city by attacking its ports. The other Occupations are being moved along back to the Starbucks that spawned them.

As committed Warmists, the Occupiers might have expected that temperatures in the northeast and the midwest in November and December would feel just like a day at the beach in Santa Monica. But while the manipulated hockey stick graphs might have been on their side, the weather wasn’t. Neither were the already overstretched urban budgets turned inside out by having to pay for police overtime, electrical generators and cleanup duty. But most of all they had served their purpose as a launching pad for the Obama 2012 campaign.

The job of the Occupiers was to move the 99 and 1 percent memes into public consciousness, which in between the homeless camps, the rapes and the cardboard signs, they managed to do. Or the media did it for them. Around the time when well-meaning idiots began wearing 99 percent buttons, I thought of getting a 100 percent button. But the 100 percent button wouldn’t have been very accurate. It implies that we’re all in the same boat which is not the case.

The percentage debate is so much nonsense because the issue isn’t class, it’s position. OWS wanted the rest of the country to pay for a small government subsidized middle-class that would either work directly for the government or in occupations supported by government funding. The rich weren’t being pitted against the poor. University grads were pitting themselves against the remnants of the aspirational working class.

Optimists see the glass as half-full and believe that with some effort it can be filled up all the way. Pessimists see the glass as half-empty and want to drink it all, before someone else does. Economic pessimists are also redistributionists, striving to secure their position within a shrinking economy. Economic optimists believe that wealth can come from outside the existing system and don’t see the need for redistribution.

The economic pessimists of the left are acting like stranded castaways who keep bringing up cannibalism as the only way. OWS and Obama 2012 sound like the Donner Party, campaigning on who should get eaten first. Rarely has an incumbent campaigned on economic pessimism. It’s all the more startling when a candidate who ran on hope is now running on hopelessness, but the only way to beat the call for change is to convince people that change is hopeless. That change will leave them even worse off. Economic pessimism is the ideal tool for the job.

The Republicans claim that things will get better while the Democrats whisper that they will only get better for people who aren’t you. Forget about opportunity and vote for someone who will cut you a big slice of the leftovers so you can ride out the decline and fall of the West.

Obama 2012 and OWS is about patronage and their 99 percent slogan broadens the promise of patronage to everyone. Like Ivory’s 99/44 clean or most other 99 percent advertising slogans, it’s a clever fraud.