Saturday, December 31, 2011

Robbery or recovery?

Gallup says 82 percent of Americans think it’s extremely or very important to “grow and expand the economy.”
That's not what the Obamacracy is doing. They are indulging in class warfare.
According to the same poll, 46 percent say it’s important to “reduce the income and wealth gap between the rich and the poor.”
That's less than half but higher than one would expect -- unless you accept the Obama solution, which is to make the rich poor as a means of equalizing.
Conservatives prefer to make the poor rich. That's what growth does. During the golden era of Reagan, all income segments saw rising incomes. Class warfare didn't work. Why worry about what someone else is earning, if you own paycheck is growing?
The question was poorly phrased because it left open how equality would be achieved.
Another question gives us more insight. Seven out of 10 people say it’s important to “increase equality of opportunity for people to get ahead.”
So, a vast majority of Americans think equal opportunity and growth are important. If so, they are conservatives.
Socialists think big government that robs the rich to pay the poor is more important than growth and prosperity.
Where they think the money for their scheme is going to come from is anyone's guess.
Maybe they actually believe the government's assumption under "static analysis" of tax proposals, which is that a 100 percent tax rate would produce a payment of 100 percent. In other words, people gladly would work all year and turn over their entire income to the government.

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Afterward

I'm reading a library book on my Kindle called After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. I recommend reading it, but not until Jan. 1. You don't want to spoil your Christmas.
It is pretty clear that on our present course, this country is doomed.
Sample: Within a few years, the interest on the debt we owe China alone -- which must be paid -- will be equal  to the cost of the Chinese military.
We will be financing the war machine of the only other superpower, and it is not a friend of America.
How we got here is simple: We elected politicians who have no regard for this country or its future.
The current president castigated George W. Bush for the irresponsible spending during his term -- and then increased the spending dramatically.
It wasn't an "investment" in anything. It was money borrowed and wasted. Yet, it must be paid back.
Nothing has been done to spur growth. It has been growth in the private sector that has paid for the wasteful government spending of the past 50 years. If growth stops, the party is over.
Author Mark Steyn says it is over. He offers little hope that any course correction we make now will return us to prosperity, and there is no course correction in sight. The current argument is over how much MORE to go into debt, not how to reduce the spending.
The two major parties don't matter. The Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 produced the Contract with America, which promised to eliminate a number of useless government programs. By 2000 spending on those programs had increased 13 percent.
That is why we have the Tea Party movement. They alone seem to recognize what we face.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Pray for your children.

Friday, December 16, 2011

Merit badges

Trying to follow the logic in the arguments against higher pay for good teachers can be perplexing.
For example, from a paper further south: "Some will receive merit pay, not all. Let's just hope it will be the right teachers and that the merit pay criteria has merit."
That was her conclusion after arguing, essentially, that there was no way to discern whether any teacher was better than another.
If that is the case, how can we tell whether the "right teachers" get merit pay?
Strangely enough, if you walk into any public school and ask someone on the faculty who are the best teachers, you probably will be given the names of several teachers. How do they know?
Years ago a professor at the University of Florida devised an assessment form that statistical testing showed was accurate. Still, the powerful special interests that protect the education monopoly managed to kill the merit pay system is use at the time, which was based on that assessment.
Teacher unions maintain that all teachers are created equal and do equal work and must get equal pay. Except that if they continue to live and breathe they should be paid more.
To return to the teacher's complaint that not all will receive merit pay.
All are the best?
Teaching is a job, not magic. We can tell who is doing a good job and those who do should be paid more, as they are in every other profession. Furthermore, those who are not doing the job should be terminated, as they are in any other profession where unions do not prevent good management.

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Poor us

Liberals, bless their compassionate hearts, want to eliminate poverty.
Well, it is possible to increase or reduce the level of poverty, because the poverty level is defined by the government. Change the definition and you change the amount of poverty.
But it can't be eliminated. Poverty describes a relative condition. Those who have less than most others are in poverty.
Thus, if most of us made $100 million a year, those who made a mere million would be in poverty.
Heritage Foundation has written often on this subject and documented that people said to be in poverty tend to have nice homes, autos, TVs, computers and other amenities. Hardly comparable to the wretched souls lining the streets of Calcutta holding begging bowls and asking for alms.
To eliminate poverty would require everyone to earn the same income. While that might resonate in some college dorm discussion, even Karl Marx knew it would not happen, and it never did in Communist Russia. There were always the haves -- high-ranking Party members -- and the have-nots: Everyone else.
What conservatives want is for everyone to have an education, a job and equal opportunity to increase his standard to living to whatever level he desires.
That is possible, unlike the dreams of the liberal idealists and Utopians.

Inconvenient truth

The Prophet Al Gore sayeth that the Great Global Warming shall bring forth storms and hurricanes in ever-increasing intensity, spreading a swath of devastation across the land.
We have now gone six years without a Cat Three hurricane -- the longest period in more than a century that the U.S. has avoided a Cat Three storm or greater.
There has been no global warming in years.
Another release of emails among alarmists gives further evidence how far they go to strike down and shout out any science that does not agree with their fanciful theories.
The public gets it. Global warming ranks among the least of concerns Americans have, polls show.
Nevertheless, alarmists are meeting again next week to try to fashion some way to extort billions from industrialized nations, to be spread around among the tyrants and despots they favor.


Friday, October 28, 2011

Eek. The sea is rising!

Found this chart on a global warming alarmist site.
Note a couple of things. Over 120 years, the oceans rose 200 mm. That's less than 8 inches.
Also, that has occurred, according to this chart, at a fairly even pace, with half of it occurring long before autos and power plants were in large numbers.
It also followed "the little ice age," a cooling period when presumably the sea levels declined.
Those evil devices, as we know from alarmist hysteria, are to blame for the rapid warming of the planet they keep predicting, which is not taking place.
Barack Obama promised to halt the seas from rising, if elected. He also promised to increase employment.
Now, it turns out, those events will only happen during his second term.

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Selling the Brooklyn Bridge

Who's the bigger fool? Someone who thinks he is smarter than 350 million people collectively, or 350 million people who are increasingly seeing through the media smog?
Barack Obama recently declared that there are a couple of hundred bridges in the nation that are on the verge of collapse, and only passing his latest pork bill will save thousands of Americans from death.
You don't have to be an affirmative action graduate from Harvard to know that the Highway Trust Fund contains billions of unspent dollars and that bridges on the verge of collapse would be the top priority for that money.
In addition, you don't have to be a TelePrompter-reading orator to know that taxpayers were just raped to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars and THAT money was supposed to go to the nation's most important "shovel ready" projects.
Bridges groaning under the weight of vehicles and cracking from the strain are not important?
How is it that this national "emergency" is so far down in the pecking order? Who sets the priorities in the White House?
The $20 billion Obama extorted from BP would have paid for a lot of bridge repairs. Not to mention the billions spent to shore up labor unions and protect the jobs of government workers.
To get on national television and make such a transparent political statement shows one thing: utter contempt for the American people.

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Proud of ignorance

One of (many) infuriating things about liberals is how they speak so smugly about matters of public policy when they literally have no inkling of the situation.
For example, the pipeline the paper mill in Palatka is building to improve the health of the river.
Libs continue to insist that the mill is doing just the opposite, by introducing millions of gallons of poison that is not going into the river currently. (Many of them gain their ignorance from a local newspaper columnist who has demagogued this issue for years.)
Fact: The mill's discharge has been going into the St. Johns River for more than 50 years.
Fact: It is cleaner now than it was 50 years ago.
Fact: The only reason the pipeline is needed is because the environmental standards have been increased.
The mill has spent more than $100 million improving the quality of its discharge. It also spent some $20 million on alternatives to the pipeline that environmental wackos insisted would work. They didn't.
The burden of that cost will fall on the mill workers and its customers.
But the so-called environmentalists don't care about that. They hope to close down the mill and eliminate the jobs of more than 1,000 mill workers. Mother Nature is more important than the workers and their families.
That's liberal compassion. They are always willing to sacrifice YOUR livelihood for their fantasies.
All the environmental regulators agree that by moving the point of discharge to the middle of the river instead of letting it seep into the edge will improve the health of the river, because the solution to pollution is dilution.
Libs, of course, know better. They have total faith in their intellectual and moral superiority.

Friday, September 2, 2011

How to destroy your own argument

Political consultant (and not a very successful one) Bob Beckel is supposed to be one of the smarter liberals. And, of course, libs are smarter than the rest of us anyway.
Yet in a discussion on The Five, on Fox News, Beckel displayed his own ignorance vividly.
As other libs have been doing, he tried to excuse the rant by a Muslim congressman, who accused other members of Congress who are supported by the Tea Party of being racists.
It is inexcuseable and the lib talking points call for them to admit he went over the line.
Then, they follow it up by excusing him because the Tea Party and other conservatives want to balance the budget.
To balance the budget, they want to limit the increase in spending -- without increasing taxes and thereby impeding growth.
Libs equate this to racism on the grounds, as Beckel tried to explain it, that "the most vulnerable" would be harmed by not continuing to increase spending as much as libs want to.
By the most vulnerable, they mean Americans of African ancestry who are poor. Libs imagine they would "suffer" if federal spending increases of the past few years were not further increased.
But, then, out of the blue, Beckel spoke the truth!
"You know, most people on welfare are white," he said.
This is true. But Beckel is so dense he did not realize he had just shot down his own argument. Unfortunately, the other members of the panel did not pick up on it either.
How can it be racist to support limits that would harm more white people than black people?
This could only be true of black politicians. It was a black politician who made the allegation. But he is one who opposes the spending limits.
White conservatives who want to help blacks by producing jobs for them cannot be called racist for wanting sane budget limits that harm mostly white people (if, indeed, they harm anyone).





Thursday, September 1, 2011

Stearns is plugging away

U.S. Rep. Cliff Stearns of Northeast Florida is a low-key guy. I've known him for about 20 years and he is not a headline hunter, but he is a plugger.
As head of the House Energy Committee's oversight subcommittee, he has been investigating the Solyndra deal that just went bust.
In throwing cash all over the nation, the White House tossed a half-billion dollars at Solyndra, which makes solar panels. You know: "green" jobs and all that.
Well, Solyndra just went bankrupt. And 1,100 jobs went down the drain.
The deal smelled fishy from the start, which is why venture capitalists wouldn't put money into it. But one of the investors was a big Democrat cash-bundler. The company got a $535 million loan guarantee from the government.
Stearns has learned that the Office of Management and Budget, which is supposed to recommend a stimulus project before it goes forward, never made a recommendation on Solyndra. It took a while to find this out because the administration stonewalled the congressional effort to get the information.
Yes, that's the same administration that promised to set the highest standards for "transparency." Instead, it has been one of the most secretive and least cooperative.
The Government Accounting Office also has looked at the deal and found that several required steps in the process were leapfrogged.
Now the taxpayers apparently are out the money and Stearns wants to hold hearings to find out how much more of the trillion dollars in stimulus was hurried out the door without proper vetting.
No problem, the White House says. It knew all along that some of the programs weren't going to be a success.
Really?
 

Monday, August 29, 2011

Early warning signs?

Members of Downtown Rotary still are buzzing about a bizarre appearance by Mayor Alvin Brown a couple of weeks ago.
One said the speech -- full of platitudes and mush -- was the "worst speech I ever heard," and this person has heard many.
Yet, it was a prepared speech -- not one off-the-cuff, which might be excused.
On top of that, Brown applauded himself throughout the speech, while members of the audience stared in disbelief.
Since taking office, Brown has announced an "economic summit," which is kind of busywork with no clear reason or purpose. He also has expounded on the need for "downtown development," which has been a theme of every mayor for the past six decades.
The frosting on his cake is a plan to spend $70 million on a trolley.
This is just an old newspaperman's hunch: Before 2015 the RINOs -- I mean "prominent Republicans" -- who helped defeat a competent conservative candidate are going to be offering excuses for their foolish actions.

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Changing times, and minds

In 2008 candidate Barack Obama said President Bush was "irresponsible" and "unpatriotic" because the national debt had increased by $4 trillion during Bush's eight years in office.
President Obama has added more debt in three years than Bush did in eight. Twice as many people are unemployed.
That's not all. The stock market is in turmoil. We have more military involvement in foreign lands than under Bush. China is closing the military gap with us, rapidly.
Yet in an Orwellian comment, the White House press office says the mounting debt is a "validation" of the sagacity of Obamanomics.
How much hypocrisy and chicanery will the American people take? Will they re-elect Obama in 2012 when he is still blaming Bush for all his failures, four years later?
There is a virtual certainty that if the election were next week and there was a 100 percent voter turnout, Obama would be chased from office.
But it is way too early to say what will happen in November 2012.
Obama already is trying to pose as a tax cutter and spending hawk. With the media's help, he might be able to sell that bill of goods to people who don't know the facts or don't care about them.