Thursday, January 31, 2013

Jobs, not government spending, lift Americans out of poverty

Jobs, not government spending, lift Americans out of poverty:
jobs
During his inaugural address, President Barack Obama launched a defense of entitlement programs and spoke about income equality. But despite the rhetoric and increased spending on welfare programs during his first four years, the poverty rate in the United States hasn’t declined.
Writing at US News and World Report, Keith Hall, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, explains that government spending won’t lift people out of poverty, noting instead that Congress should pursue policies that create private-sector jobs to lift Americans out of poverty:
Since the start of the recession, the number of Americans in poverty has grown by 9 million. This increase has come at a time when government spending on the poor has also reached record levels. In 2011, more than 100 million people lived in households that received some kind of low-income government assistance; spending on these programs at the federal, state, and local level combined now exceeds $1 trillion annually. Government assistance for low-income families now equals a shocking 10 percent of all household spending.
It has been long recognized that recessions can increase the number of families in poverty, and over the past 20 years it has become clear that the rising and falling poverty rate correlates directly with the jobless rate. The graph below shows this relationship.
Obama and Democrats can talk about poverty and the need for welfare spending all day long, but until more Americans are able to find jobs, which will only happen when government gets out of the way and promotes pro-growth economic policies, we will not see poverty fall.

Why? because their only goal is victory and totalism

Why? because their only goal is victory and totalism: Only non-Leftists have to be civil


And a look at Self magazine's article, "Would you buy a gun?"
The article gives examples of women who accidentally (?) shoot husbands or have a mishap with a gun. The article points out that few women protect themselves with a gun. Really?

Why the soft propaganda?
I snarkily commented, "Because their hard-propaganda writer was on vacation." 

But the real reason is very simple: The Left believes in total victory by any means whatsoever. There is no tactic off limits, none that transgress the line of decency or civility because winning is the highest virtue of all. Their objective is nothing short of totalism, and whatever they must do to attain it is not merely acceptable, it is desirable.

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Women Liberated by Capitalism

Women Liberated by Capitalism:
Here’s a letter to TheAtlantic.com:
Emily Matchar correctly points out that the demise in home cooking was caused by industrialization and not by feminism (“Betty Friedan Did Not Kill Home Cooking,” Jan 25).  This point is important and it extends beyond the kitchen stove.  By raising women’s market wages – and by creating affordable products such as automatic clothes washers, wrinkle-free fabrics, and disposable diapers that dramatically lessen the time required for housework – women today are more free than ever to choose to work outside of the home.  (Families increasingly enjoy, therefore, all the benefits formally produced by full-time housewives plus the extra goods and services that can be bought with incomes earned by working women.)
A comment of a young woman (born circa 1969) in the 1999 BBC reality show 1900 House is germane.  Hired to work as a housemaid in a house fitted out to be like one that was typical for middle-class Londoners in 1900, this late-20th-century woman soon became frustrated by the ceaseless and arduous work required to keep the 1900 house clean.  She remarked in surprise to the show’s producers and audience that she now realizes that the actual source of women’s liberation wasn’t so much political activism as it was “the carpet sweeper and domestic appliances that gave women their liberty because it saves so much time at working.”*
Sincerely,

Donald J. Boudreaux

Professor of Economics

and

Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center

George Mason University

Fairfax, VA  22030
* See especially around the 6:35 mark in the video.

Taxpayers stand to lose $27B in bailout, watchdog says

Taxpayers stand to lose $27B in bailout, watchdog says:
Published January 30, 2013
Associated Press
A government watchdog says U.S. taxpayers stand to lose $27 billion from the 2008 financial bailout, up from an estimate of $22 billion made in the fall.
A report issued Wednesday by the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program says the estimate is higher because of increased losses for the Treasury Department on sales of shares in bailed-out companies.  Ally Financial, the former financial arm for General Motors, still owes $14.6 billion of the $17.2 billion in aid it received. The report says taxpayers can expect to lose $5.5 billion on that investment because of the company's losses on risky mortgages issued ahead of the financial crisis.
The report also criticized the Treasury for lacking a plan to unwind its investment in Ally. Taxpayers own 74 percent of the company.  Ally and GM together owe more than half of the $67.3 billion still owed U.S. taxpayers by companies that were bailed out during the financial crisis, according to the quarterly report to Congress by Special Inspector General Christy Romero…To Read More.....

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

It's time we stood up to the vicious bullies of the 'caring' liberal Left

It's time we stood up to the vicious bullies of the 'caring' liberal Left: Who are the most unpleasant people on the internet? Obviously with so much competition, it is, to paraphrase Dr Johnson, like arguing the toss between lice and fleas. Nonetheless, after the recent experiences of critic and author Philip Hensher – which I describe in more detail here – I’d suggest that disability rights activists are [...]

Barack Obama Wants YOU --- to Pay $10,000 More To Maintain His Entitlement State

Barack Obama Wants YOU --- to Pay $10,000 More To Maintain His Entitlement State:
Entitlement spending is the driver of deficits, but entitlement reforms, such as raising the retirement age or converting Medicare to grants, collide with the core of liberal statist thinking. President Obama shows no sign of being willing to put entitlement reform on the table. If anything, the American Nanny State is too small. We must look to Europe to see it done right, those of the liberal persuasion believe.

The fiscal-cliff debunked Obama’s campaign myth that deficits would go away if the “rich paid their fair share.” CBO projections conclude that neither the $700 billion tax hike on the affluent nor the sequestration of discretionary spending will dent the trillion dollar annual deficits we face over the coming decade. With the Government Accountability Office declaring the current fiscal path unsustainable, the Obama administration must explain how it can contain the national debt without significant entitlement reform. So far its approach has been to pretend there is no problem.

go to forbes.com

Draft IPCC Report Shows 20 Years Of Overestimated Globull Warming

Draft IPCC Report Shows 20 Years Of Overestimated Globull Warming:
At one point, Warmists might have been actually interested in real science, but, that quickly switched to pushing junk science in order to move forward their Marxist ideas of people control
(Fox News) A preliminary draft of a report by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was leaked to the public this month, and climate skeptics say it contains fresh evidence of 20 years of overstated global warming.
The report — which is not scheduled for publication until 2014 — was leaked by someone involved in the IPCC’s review process, and is available for download online. Bloggers combing through the report discovered a chart comparing the four temperature models the group has published since 1990. Each has overstated the rise in temperature that Earth actually experienced.
“Temperatures have not risen nearly as much as almost all of the climate models predicted,” Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, told FoxNews.com.
The IPCC graph shows that the midpoints of the various models predicted that the world would warm by between about 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit and 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit between 1990 and 2012. Actual warming was much less than that: 0.28 F, according the data the IPCC cites.
Wow, .28F. Scary stuff. We’re doomed. Everybody panic. It’s no wonder Warmists fail to act like it’s a crisis with data like that.
Of course, the draft report tries to shift the blame for the failure of all their garbage in garbage out computer models on other processes, mostly natural ones. Weird how they never seem to consider that the warming since the end of the Little Ice Age is mostly or solely natural.
And, it is a draft report, so we can expect the UN IPCC to change things up and most likely remove any data that shows that they’ve been wrong all along, and add in all sorts of dire predictions which require vast amounts of money to shift hands (with a good chunk ending up in the hands of the UN) and loss of freedoms.
Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.
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The Stuff of Third World Tyrants

The Stuff of Third World Tyrants: President Barack Obama is not just a radical leftist; he is obviously so ensconced in his ideology that he believes -- or wants you to believe -- that anyone who opposes him must have sinister motives.

Mark Levin: Obama Isn’t Destroying the GOP, the Republican Establishment Is (+Audio)

Mark Levin: Obama Isn’t Destroying the GOP, the Republican Establishment Is (+Audio):
On Monday’s broadcast of Sean Hannity’s radio show, Mark Levin said the Republican Party is destroying itself from within.
“[I]s Obama destroying the Republican Party?” Levin said. “No, the Republican establishment is destroying the Republican Party.
The only reason they’re in the majority in the House is because of conservatives — conservatives across the country, the grassroots. They lost the Senate.
They like to point to two races, one in Missouri and one in Indiana. I can point to 10 races where there were liberal-to-moderate Republicans who lost, and of course they never mention that.”
Read more from this story HERE.
Mark Levin: Obama Isn’t Destroying the GOP, the Republican Establishment Is (+Audio)

America’s Role in a Darkening Age

America’s Role in a Darkening Age: by Patrick J. Buchanan












When, in the 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev said, “We will bury you,” and, “Your children will live under communism,” Eisenhower’s America scoffed.

By 1980, however, the tide did indeed seem to be with the East.

America had suffered a decade of defeats. Southeast Asia had fallen. The ayatollah had...
Read the rest at Taki's Magazine




Sen. Ted Cruz to House GOP: ‘Stop Reading The New York Times'

Sen. Ted Cruz to House GOP: ‘Stop Reading The New York Times':
January 28, 2013
Speaking Saturday at the conservative National Review Institute summit, Cruz said, “Let me give three concrete bits of advice to conservatives in Washington, and in particular let me address this to our friends in the House of Representatives, who I think for the next two years are the last bastion standing between us and oblivion,” the freshman senator told a gathering of conservatives at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C.  To Read More……  


$180 Billion Wasted On Head Start; Progressives Seek To Ban Private Schools And Homeschooling

$180 Billion Wasted On Head Start; Progressives Seek To Ban Private Schools And Homeschooling:
by Hans Bader on January 28, 2013 · 0 comments
The Head Start program has now wasted $180 billion, but it has no lasting effect on student achievement. In the long run, children who participate in the taxpayer-funded program do no better than similarly situated children who don’t. But even in the short-run, the benefits of participation are virtually non-existent, as a study earlier found:
“Head Start,” the flagship pre-kindergarten program introduced in 1965, has been a $166 billion failure. That’s the upshot of a sophisticated multi-year study just released by the Department of Health and Human Services.  To Read More….

Rand Paul: ‘Right and Wrong Have Become Subservient to Hedonism of the Moment'

Rand Paul: ‘Right and Wrong Have Become Subservient to Hedonism of the Moment':
January 25, 2013


 Paul (R-Ky.) told a crowd of thousands of pro-life Americans gathered at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for the 40th annual March for Life on Friday that America is a nation “adrift" where "right and wrong have become subservient to the hedonism of the moment."
“Can a nation long endure that does not respect the sanctity of life?” Paul asked. “Can a nation conceived in liberty carry its head high if it denies protection to the youngest and most vulnerable of its citizens? Can a country founded on God-given rights continue to thrive without understanding that life is a precious gift from our Creator?..To Read More....

Monday, January 28, 2013

Why Do Republicans Think Granting Amnesty Will Help Them Politically?

Why Do Republicans Think Granting Amnesty Will Help Them Politically?:

Watching Senator Marco Rubio on the stage with his fellow Senators McCain, Schumer, Durbin and Menendez this afternoon was depressing to say the least. Even more depressing is that so many conservatives have no problem with the bipartisan amnesty deal that is likely to pass the Senate without much resistance. Rather than doing the right thing, too many Republicans are bowing to political pressure, and ignoring the fact that rolling over on immigration won’t do them any good politically.
The most depressing moment of the conference came, perhaps not coincidentally, during a panel on immigration when radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt, representing the pro-amnesty side of the argument, announced that he really didn’t want to be debating immigration because it was bad for Republicans to talk about the issue — especially when those talking about it were middle-aged white guys like himself and his antagonist, Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies.
Undeterred by Hewitt’s disavowal, Krikorian recounted facts that ought to give pause to conservatives who, since November, have begun jabbering desperately about winning over Hispanic voters by adopting a pro-amnesty line. Krikorian noted a Pew Research poll from 2011 that found Hispanics have the lowest opinion of capitalism of any group surveyed. Only 32 percent of Hispanics hold a favorable view of capitalism, while 55 percent have a negative view. Even supporters of the left-wing Occupy Wall Street movement expressed a more favorable view of capitalism than did Hispanics. Insofar as the Republican Party promotes policies favorable to capitalism, then, it is at odds with the sentiments of the one group whom the pro-amnesty Republicans insist their policy ideas will win over to the GOP.
Facts are stubborn things, John Adams once observed, but perhaps even more stubborn is the sense of panic that has gripped Republicans since Obama’s re-election. No sooner had the votes been counted than shell-shocked Republicans began making a lot of earnest noise about “demographics” and “culture.” (Read More)
How many of these 11 million illegals will have the right to vote? How many of those will vote Republican? How does adding millions of Democrats to the voter rolls help the GOP with demographics? How many of these illegals will refuse to assimilate into American culture? Oh, I suppose many of them will assimilate into the decrepit culture pushed by Hollywood, but will they assimilate into the traditional culture that has made this country thrive?
Ah well, at least not all Republicans are on board. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) issued the following statement this evening.
I appreciate the good work that senators in both parties have put into trying to fix our broken immigration system. There are some good elements in this proposal, especially increasing the resources and manpower to secure our border and also improving and streamlining legal immigration. However, I have deep concerns with the proposed path to citizenship. To allow those who came here illegally to be placed on such a path is both inconsistent with rule of law and profoundly unfair to the millions of legal immigrants who waited years, if not decades, to come to America legally.
I guess the Hispanic junior Senator from Texas didn’t get the memo that it’s time to panic over demographics. He probably won’t get too many cocktail party invitations, either. But I’ll bet Marco Rubio will, at least for a little while.
Oh, and McCain and Rubio should be ashamed of themselves for standing on the stage with a child predator like Bob Menendez.
H/T The Other McCain

Subsidies Create Glut Of College Grads

Subsidies Create Glut Of College Grads: Higher Education: A new study finds almost half of Americans with college degrees are working at jobs that don't require one. It's the latest example of how federal subsidies are creating a massive higher-education bubble. The study, by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, found that an incredible 48% of college graduates -- about 13 million of them -- hold jobs that don't require a bachelor's degree. About 5 million have jobs that

Clinton's Angry Outburst On Benghazi Was Meant To Deceive--Not Enlighten

Clinton's Angry Outburst On Benghazi Was Meant To Deceive--Not Enlighten: An old-time trial lawyer once said, "When your case is weak, shout louder!" Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shouted louder when asked about the Obama administration's story last fall that the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. ambassador's quarters in Benghazi, Libya, was due to an anti-Islamic video that someone in the United States had put on the Internet, and thereby provoked a protest that escalated into violence. She shouted: "We had four dead

“One-Third of Fourth Graders are Functionally Illiterate”

“One-Third of Fourth Graders are Functionally Illiterate”: The U.S. education system is failing our kids and has been for decades. Thus, the first step towards solving this problem is admitting that we...

Sunday, January 27, 2013

Chart of the Week: Union Membership Continues to Decline

Chart of the Week: Union Membership Continues to Decline:

Union membership fell by 400,000 to the lowest level since the 1930s, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced this past week. As a percentage of the work force, union workers fell from 11.8 percent to 11.3 percent.
One reason for the decline is simply that workers don’t want to join a union when they have the choice. More states have been adopting right-to-work laws, which allow workers to opt out of mandatory unionization, including traditional union stronghold Michigan at the end of last year. Since right to work passed in Indiana last March, unions lost 56,000 members in the state.
Another cause of membership decline is that many former union workers are no longer working. Hostess’s shuttering due to unwavering union demands illustrates the point: when the bakers’ union refused to take a pay cut, the baked goods giant closed its doors and let its 18,000 employees go.
As Heritage President Ed Feulner wrote last fall, “Unions keep losing members as existing unionized firms shrink, and they can’t recruit enough new members to take their place.”
Elliot Gaiser is currently a member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation. For more information on interning at Heritage, please visit http://www.heritage.org/about/departments/ylp.cfm.
The post Chart of the Week: Union Membership Continues to Decline appeared first on The Foundry: Conservative Policy News Blog from The Heritage Foundation.

Scholars Agree: High Tax Rates Do Harm Growth

Scholars Agree: High Tax Rates Do Harm Growth:
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) stirred controversy last year when it released a study claiming that tax rates do not influence economic growth. Predictably, those who favor higher taxes used the flimsy report to bolster their backward argument that raising tax rates, as Congress and President Obama did with the fiscal cliff deal, would not further slow our economy.
The CRS report was not based on robust statistical analysis, but on simple correlations that reveal little about the impact of tax rates on the economy. The weakness of the CRS report brought well-deserved criticism.
CRS pulled the report after the controversy but subsequently re-released it with minor changes.
In December, in response to the controversy regarding the CRS report, William McBride of the Tax Foundation published a review of the scholarly literature on taxation and economic growth. McBride reported that the empirical work of economists agrees overwhelmingly that higher tax rates slow economic growth and he concludes that “the U.S. tax system is a drag on the economy.”
Their findings are no surprise. It has long been known that higher tax rates slow the economy because they reduce the incentives to work, invest, and take new risks. These academic studies succeed in confirming this because, unlike the CRS report, they conducted rigorous statistical analysis to isolate the impacts of tax rates on many economies during many different time periods.
Surveying 26 scholarly studies dating from 1983, McBride finds that 23 of the studies—and every study in the past fifteen years—corroborated the finding that higher taxes negatively affected growth.
For example, Young Lee of Hanyang University and Roger Gordon of the University of California at San Diego in a 2005 Journal of Public Economics paper estimate that cutting the corporate tax rate by 10 percentage points would induce one to two percentage points higher growth every year.
Moreover, in a forthcoming paper in the American Economic Review, Karel Mertens of Cornell University and Morten Ravn of University College London find that cutting the personal income tax rate by one percentage point would cause per capita gross domestic product (GDP) to increase by 1.8 percent in the first nine months.
Taxes do not all have the same economic effects: Some taxes create more distortions in markets and the economy than others. McBride notes:
[C]orporate and personal income taxes are the most damaging to economic growth, followed by consumption taxes and property taxes…. Our current economic doldrums are the result of many factors, but having the highest corporate rate in the industrialized world does not help.
The hard data and econometric analyses highlighted by McBride underscore an important policy lesson: increasing taxes, both personal and corporate income tax rates, will impede the growth of the U.S. economy.
The post Scholars Agree: High Tax Rates Do Harm Growth appeared first on The Foundry: Conservative Policy News Blog from The Heritage Foundation.

The Oncoming Human Rights Crisis...Caused by the LGBT Movement

The Oncoming Human Rights Crisis...Caused by the LGBT Movement: It started, as so many human rights disasters do, in the name of love. What it's become is the new Middle Passage.

The Moral Force of Fatherhood

The Moral Force of Fatherhood: Although conceived in compassion, programs such as AFDC had the perverse consequence of driving the male from the home and causing the role of provider to fall upon Uncle Sam.

Saturday, January 26, 2013

Where Islam spreads, poverty rises and economies are devastated

Where Islam spreads, poverty rises and economies are devastated:
From Eric Dondero:
Amazing video coming out of the French Press. Native Malians living in the occupied north tell of deteriorating conditions under Muslim rule.
Of particular note, one woman describes how living conditions have become unbearable.
All the prices have gone up. You can't get anything. Money doesn't get in or out anymore. Everyone's poor. Very soon everyone will die because there's nothing left to eat.

Court Blocks EPA Biofuels Mandate

Court Blocks EPA Biofuels Mandate:
The big news on court decisions was about the Obama violating the Constitution when he made 3 recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (which made Lawyers, Guns, and Money’s Scott Lemieux go barking moonbat with his headline). Yet, another was just as important but slid under the rada
(Daily Caller) A federal court delivered a serious blow to the Environmental Protection Agency’s renewable fuel agenda, ruling that the agency exceeded its authority by mandating refiners use cellulosic biofuels, which isn’t commercially available.
The court sided with the country’s chief oil and gas lobby, the American Petroleum Institute, in striking down the 2012 EPA mandate that would have forced refineries to purchase more than $8 million in credits for 8.65 million of gallons of the cellulosic biofuel. However, none of the biofuel is commercially available.
“[W]e agree with API that EPA’s 2012 projection of cellulosic biofuel production was in excess of the agency’s statutory authority,” reads the court decision.
The problem here is that cellulosic biofuel doesn’t exist commercially
“We are glad the court has put a stop to EPA’s pattern of setting impossible mandates for a biofuel that does not even exist,” API Group Downstream Director Bob Greco said in a statement. “This absurd mandate acts as a stealth tax on gasoline with no environmental that could have ultimately burdened consumers.”
Instead of dealing with real environmental issues, the EPA has gone rogue (not something really new) and has over-involved itself in creating fuel mandates that provide no benefits for motorists (and can harm engine systems along with providing reduced power) and would increase the price of fuel, all in the name of “climate change”. And let’s not forget that all these biofuels tend to use massive amounts of water, increase the cost of food, and, in some cases, increase greenhouse gas output. In this particular case it was about mandating the purchase and use of a biofuel that didn’t exist.
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Kathleen Parker: Women On The Front Lines Is A Bad Idea

Kathleen Parker: Women On The Front Lines Is A Bad Idea:
Surprisingly, Kathleen Parker makes some salient points
(Washington Post) It must be true what they say about women — that they are smarter, stronger, wiser and wilier than your average Joe.
How else could one explain the magical thinking that apparently has prompted Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to abandon all reason and lift the ban on women in direct combat?
This is a terrible idea for reasons too numerous to list in this space, which forces me to recommend my 2008 book, “Save the Males,” in which I devote a chapter to the issue. The most salient point happens to be a feminist argument: Women, because of their inferior physical capacities and greater vulnerabilities upon capture, have a diminished opportunity for survival.
Kathleen points out that the arguments against women in front line combat roles has “nothing to do with courage, skill, patriotism or dedication.”
We’re potentially talking about 18-year-old girls, notwithstanding their “adult” designation under the law. (Parents know better.) At least 18-year-old males have the advantage of being gassed up on testosterone, the hormone that fuels not just sexual libido but, more to the point, aggression. To those suffering a sudden onset of the vapors, ignore hormones at your peril.
Now, hold the image of your 18-year-old daughter, neighbor, sister or girlfriend as you follow these facts, which somehow have been ignored in the advancement of a fallacy. The fallacy is that because men and women are equal under the law, they are equal in all endeavors and should have all access to the same opportunities. This is true except when the opportunity requires certain characteristics. Fact: Females have only half the upper-body strength as males — no small point in the field.
You’re also placing women and men in situations that could be very uncomfortable and cause issues with field unit cohesion. There is a difference in the biology of men and women (something that often has to be made clear to liberals). Of course, we do have to wait and see what the plan is for combat unit inclusion for women. We’ll surely see female inclusion in air units, particularly those flying over the field of combat (women typically can take more g forces than men, a benefit in a fighter jet) and in units such as artillery. But, what people like Parker and others are discussing is women in field combat units where they’re carrying a gun and assaulting the enemy directly. It can be simple things like being out on patrol and nature calling.
If the enemy is all around you — and you need every available person — that is one set of circumstances. To ask women to engage vicious men and risk capture under any other is beyond understanding. This is not a movie or a game. Every objective study has argued against women in direct combat for reasons that haven’t changed.
And the military should not be a setting to test social programs for political expediency and points.
Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.
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