Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
If I ever had hospitable feelings toward this sentiment coming out of Washington that us rubes here in flyover country need to participate in some “shared sacrifice,” this is the point where I’d reconsider.
President Obama demanded again yesterday that Republicans raise taxes in return for giving him the debt-limit increase he’s also demanding. Nice of him to be so accommodating. He has in mind, oh, something in the neighborhood of $1 trillion. But it turns out he’s a piker compared to Senate Democrats, whose budget leader has announced that his tax target is $2 trillion.
Mr. Obama said yesterday it’s time to “eat our peas,” and $2 trillion is a lot of peas.
Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad emerged from his months at an undisclosed fiscal location yesterday to denounce Republicans, the rich, corporations, George W. Bush and anyone else he could blame for the ugly reality of a $1.4 trillion deficit 30 months into a Democratic Presidency and two years into an alleged economic recovery.
He didn’t release an actual budget outline, as he is obliged to do under the law but which he hasn’t done in two years. Instead he trickled out enough details to assess his rough priorities. Of the $4 trillion in alleged deficit reduction over 10 years, about half would be from tax increases, mostly on what he called “abusive tax shelters and tax havens” and families “sufficiently fortunate to be earning a million dollars a year.”
Hmmm. In 2008 about 320,000 Americans reported income of more than $1 million, or about 0.3% of all income tax returns. They paid about $250 billion in taxes that year. Mr. Conrad is going to get nearly $2 trillion more from them without damaging the economy? That should be some trick.
Forget all the debates about whether a nation can tax itself into prosperity, like Churchill’s man in a big bucket pulling himself up by the handle. Just don’t even get that complicated with it — these jackwagons aren’t even doing fifth-grade math.
They aren’t even coming up with plans. Rather, they’re running a mad, circuitous route on an irrational impulse. Tax more, spend more, then go back, Jack, and do it again.
Remember the “stimulus,” or, as it was officially titled, the Recovery Act of 2009? It was President Obama’s first major legislative initiative, enacted the month after he took office with only Democratic votes in the House and just three Republicans in the Senate (one of whom was a Democrat by that summer). The price tag was huge, some $800 billion, or 50 times the size (in nominal terms) of the stimulus Bill Clinton proposed at the outset of his presidency. Congress killed the $16 billion Clinton stimulus because it was too expensive.
Unemployment that January was 7.6%, and Obama’s economic advisers warned that it could rise as high as 8% without the stimulus. With the stimulus, it rose as high as 10.2% in October 2009. Last month’s rate was 9.2%, still 1.2 points higher than the level the stimulus was supposed to prevent us from ever reaching. By contrast, in January 1993 unemployment was 7.3%. Without the Clinton stimulus, it had declined to 6.5% by the end of that year.
:
One school of thought is that the so-called stimulus failed because it was, as former Enron adviser Paul Krugman puts it, “woefully inadequate.” This is the economic analogue of the Kagan Principle, which liberal Supreme Court justices would use to limit freedom of speech: The more stubbornly corrupt the government is, the more justified it is in curtailing fundamental liberties in the name of preventing corruption.It’s a common refrain among those who lust to increase government’s size and power: Every failed measure justifies more of the same. Poverty programs make it harder to escape poverty? We need more poverty programs! Racial preferences heighten racial division? We need more racial preferences! And a diversity manual for every janitor in the country! When ObamaCare ends up driving the costs of medicine up and the quality and availability down, you can bet the people who created that monstrosity will claim it failed only because it didn’t go far enough.
Let’s generalize this into the First Rule of Liberalism: Government failure always justifies more government. As Obama said today, complaining about Republican pressure to cut spending: “I’d rather be talking about stuff that everybody welcomes–like new programs.”
Question: Do we get to eighty-six the old programs when we come up with these new programs? I’ve got a feeling I already know the answer to that one.
I think the President, like all good liberals, has His own definition in mind for the word “everybody” and it is not the classical meaning for that word. Or perhaps when He is compelled to meet with people who are not like-minded, like in these budget deals for instance, He still doesn’t see a lot of disagreement because the Republicans are thinking “yeah, go ahead and run on that next year, I can’t wait.” It’s certainly the first thought in my mind. Be honest in 2012. Tell us what You’ll be doing in the next four years — that You and Your friends don’t think we’re taxed enough and You and Your friends never will, nor will You and Your friends ever think we’re spending enough on government programs.
Be the drunk, pushing the last few minutes before final call, obviously over-served and clamoring incoherently “Whaddya gotta do to get a drink in this place??” And then let we, The People — the nation’s bartender — hold a vote on it.
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They keep using that word. I don’t think it means what they think it means. 🙂
- philmon | 07/12/2011 @ 14:36