Today's post...

...is another guest post at The Bobo Files

Happy Easter!

The Free Lunch Myth

"Government is that fiction whereby everybody believes that he can live at the expense of everybody else."---Frederic Bastiat

The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture

Civil forfeiture is absolutely unconstitutional, but so is most of what the federal government does every day as far as I'm concerned.

The Flat Tax

What could possibly be bad about a lower tax rate on work, savings, investment, risk-taking, and entrepreneurship?

Why didn't they say something before!

From the WSJ:

In the wake of Washington's health-care overhaul, some companies are taking big one-time charges for anticipated costs, fanning tension with the administration over the legislation's impact on corporate America.

Three companies that were among vocal opponents of the legislation have warned they would see an immediate impact on their earnings as a result of the loss of deductions on tax-free subsidies they receive for providing retiree prescription-drug benefits.

On Thursday, Deere & Co. said it would take a $150 million one-time charge in the current quarter related to the loss of deductions. Earlier in the week, Caterpillar Inc. reported a $100 million charge and AK Steel recorded a $31 million charge.

Beginning in 2006, companies have received a 28% federal subsidy, up to $1,330 per retiree, tax-free, to help pay for prescription-drug coverage. Until now, companies could deduct the subsidy from their taxes, essentially getting a second benefit from the money. Under the new law, companies will no longer be able to deduct the subsidy, but it remains tax-free.

Although the changes don't go into effect until 2013, companies say they have to take the charge to earnings now, to reflect the loss of the future tax deductions. In all, the S&P 500 companies will take a combined hit of $4.5 billion to first-quarter earnings, estimates David Zion, an analyst with Credit Suisse.

Administration officials say companies are exaggerating the impact of the loss of the deduction because of their general unhappiness with health reform.

VH: Henry Waxman of California, chairman of the Oversight and Investigations panel, announced plans to hold a hearing on this issue. This means that he wants to put the CEO's of these companies under the hot lights and intimidate them. You have to love Chicago politics.

Assorted links and news

1) We keep hearing that our government wants "affordable" housing yet it continues to attempt to prop up housing prices by using money it doesn't have. What a waste. Let prices fall already. The sooner they do, the sooner the economy bounces back. Instead, we have the Obama regime trying to reverse a waterfall.

2) Fidel Castro endorses Obamacare. Great minds think alike.

3) If you haven't heard the latest from Venezuela, liberal icon and Code Pink fave, Hugo Chavez arrested Guillermo Zuloaga, president of Globovision Television, the only remaining television station on public airwaves critical of Hugo Chavez. Also arrested was lawmaker Wilmer Azuaje for being a critic of the Chavez regime.

Today's post...

Is a guest post at The Bobo Files.

Hoping for a rich uncle, part two

From the WSJ:

A sudden drop-off in investor demand for U.S. Treasury notes is raising questions about whether interest rates will finally begin a march higher—a climb that would jack up the government's borrowing costs and spell trouble for the fragile housing market.

For months, investors have focused their attention on the debt crisis in Europe, but there are signs the spotlight is turning to the ability of the U.S. to finance its own budget deficit.

This week, some investors turned up their noses at three big U.S. Treasury offerings. Demand was weak for a $44 billion 2-year note auction on Tuesday, a $42 billion sale of 5-year debt on Wednesday and a $32 billion 7-year note sale Thursday.

The poor demand, especially from foreign investors, sent the bonds' prices sharply lower and yields higher. It lifted the yield on the 10-year note to 3.9%—its highest since last June, and approaching the psychologically important 4% mark. That mark has been pierced only briefly since the financial crisis in 2008.

Investors' response marked a big shift from auctions in recent months in which major foreign buyers, such as central banks, had snapped up Treasurys. It could spell trouble for the U.S. housing market; the rates on many mortgages are linked to the yield on the 10-year note.

The move up in its yield coincides with the impending end of the Federal Reserve's program to support the mortgage market. The Fed has bought $1.25 trillion of mortgage-backed securities, bolstering their prices and thus holding down their yields.

Concerns about the U.S. budget deficit are beginning to hurt the Treasury market, says Steve Rodosky, head of Treasury and derivatives trading at bond giant Pacific Investment Management Co. He says he is increasingly worried about the U.S. fiscal outlook. "The government needs to take real action rather than pay lip service" to addressing the fiscal problems.

In all, the U.S. government is expected to sell $1.6 trillion in debt this year, including the $118 billion sold this week.

VH: Those little green pieces of paper that the government pumps out is looking a lot less attractive nowadays. Helicopter Ben must be thanking his lucky stars that Greece came in to save his arse. BTW, the latest news on Greece is that the responsible E.U. countries and the American taxpayer (surprise!) via the IMF are going to float the spendthrift Greeks some moolah if it fails to pay its debt. This is going to get interesting.

Hoping for a rich uncle

From Boston.com:

WASHINGTON — Social Security will pay more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes in the current fiscal year, six years earlier than expected, the Congressional Budget Office reported yesterday.

Last spring, Social Security trustees reported that expenses would exceed revenue beginning in 2016. Since then, applications for benefits have increased because people are retiring early due to the recession, and that, combined with high unemployment, means fewer workers paying taxes.

“There’s so much unemployment,’’ said Robert Pozen, chairman of Boston-based MFS Investment Management. “There’s less going in, and more people are taking early retirement.’’

The CBO projects that the trust fund will be $29 billion in the red during the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, and will run deficits for the next three years. After projected surpluses in 2014 and 2015, the trust fund again would have deficits from 2016 onward.

VH: I'm shocked.

Treasury yields are higher than Corporate yields. Opps!

From Bloomberg:

Two-year notes sold by the billionaire’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. in February yield 3.5 basis points less than Treasuries of similar maturity, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Procter & Gamble Co., Johnson & Johnson and Lowe’s Cos. debt also traded at lower yields in recent weeks, a situation former Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. chief fixed-income strategist Jack Malvey calls an “exceedingly rare” event in the history of the bond market.

The $2.59 trillion of Treasury Department sales since the start of 2009 have created a glut as the budget deficit swelled to a post-World War II-record 10 percent of the economy and raised concerns whether the U.S. deserves its AAA credit rating. The increased borrowing may also undermine the first-quarter rally in Treasuries as the economy improves.

“It’s a slap upside the head of the government,” said Mitchell Stapley, the chief fixed-income officer in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at Fifth Third Asset Management, which oversees $22 billion. “It could be the moment where hopefully you realize that risk is beginning to creep into your credit profile and the costs associated with that can be pretty scary.”

This of course means that our government is having to sweeten U.S. Treasury bonds to investors in comparison to corporate bonds; I don't know what this means in the short run but it is disconcerting since the federal government has run the credit card to very high levels. Something to think about.

Self-execution!

Maybe it should be the country in the hot seat.

The cost of "flimsy" lending

From the L.A. Times:

Though signs of recovery in the housing market are emerging, thousands of people throughout the Southland are still in a precarious position on the brink of foreclosure, struggling with monthly bills and mortgage payments.

Duchemin and Ashraf are an extreme example because they've gone through foreclosures on two homes and are in danger of losing a third. They aren't alone: Flimsy lending practices mean that thousands of other borrowers face the prospect of repeated foreclosures, mortgage and foreclosure experts said.

The problem is especially visible in areas that attracted speculative buyers during the boom. In Maricopa County in Arizona, which includes Phoenix, at least 283 individuals have received a foreclosure notice on two or more properties since 2006, according to data provided by RealtyTrac Inc.

Multiple foreclosures are "probably more common in this decade than they've ever been because everyone was running to get into the real estate investing business," said Rick Sharga, a senior vice president at RealtyTrac.

Clark County in Nevada, another area that attracted house flippers, had at least 179 buyers who were foreclosed on more than once over the same period, the data show...

Because people thought the price of real estate would keep climbing, O'Toole said, they figured that the more homes they bought, the more they'd earn eventually.

"In a lot of cases, you had folks in this gold rush mentality: 'Real estate is going up, the more houses I buy, the more money I'll make.' "

The article mentions "flimsy lending practices" but doesn't explain how the lending industry came to offer easy credit in which speculation was encouraged. Instead, it builds sympathy for the Duchemin's without really looking into the big picture, like the politicization of the mortgage lending industry in which lenders were coaxed into providing credit to borrowers it would never have under normal circumstances. Why anyone would lend the Duchemin's funds for three homes is beyond me. Also, notice how the article never mentions the Duchemin's bad decision to "buy" three houses?

Run out of oil, eh?

Shell discovers a large oil reserve in the Gulf of Mexico. Don't build those bunkers yet.

90 seconds to ObamaCare

The CBO scores the latest vesion of ObamaCare

1) 3.8% in new taxes for medicare unearned income.
2) Not indexed for inflation.
3) New Social Security tax to pay for ObamaCare.
4) Lot's of double counting too.

My lord, what a massive weight on our economy.

The "Jobs" Bill makes it through the Senate

From NPR:

Companies that hire unemployed workers will get a temporary payroll tax holiday under a bill that easily won final congressional approval Wednesday.

The bipartisan 68-29 vote in the Senate sends the legislation to the White House, where President Barack Obama has promised to sign it into law.

It will be the first of several election-year jobs bills promised by Democrats to be enacted into law, though there's plenty of skepticism that the measure will do much to actually create jobs. Optimistic estimates predict the tax break could generate perhaps 250,000 jobs through the end of the year, but that would be just a tiny fraction of the 8.4 million jobs lost since the start of the recession.

The measure is part of a campaign by Democrats to show that they are addressing the nation's unemployment problem...

Here we go again. More political running in place to "do something" about the weak job market. Congress sure has passed many laws to move the economy into a positive place with little, if not weak, results. But here we are again with half measures and soap box speeches. That's OK, it's not like they're spending their money anyway. And besides, the farce of "pay-go" was once again obliterated by reality. Liberal economists are hoping that a cyclical recovery and low interest rates by the Fed move the economy along--we can already see plenty of postive indicators--so that soon to be laws like the "Jobs" bill, will look like it was just the right thing to do. Sorry, but any recovery will not be due to a "Jobs law" or a massive pork program like the "stimulus." It will be due to the business cycle and the private economy. So for those that voted for this bill and the stimulus, thanks for nothing.

Welcome Back!

The Chef is back to blogging at The Economist's Cookbook. This is a great free-market blog and well worth visiting often. The more free-market bloggers, the better.

Does spending more on school lunches benefit kids?

Benjamin Burr at The Independent Bloghorn has first hand experience on this matter. Here is the crux of his argument:

...the government spends $2.68 a day per child, while only spending $.93 a day on food. The problem isn’t that the government isn’t spending enough money. $1.75 per meal per day on operations is an absolute pathetic joke that reflects an egregious example of government incompetence. When I was catering school lunches, we charged $2.50 (less then the government pays), spent $1.60-1.75 per meal on average on food, covered our operational costs including labor, and still made a decent profit. Sorry, Chef Ann Cooper, the problem isn’t that we aren’t spending enough money, the problem is that people like you fail to recognize the broken nature of this system, and despite its flaws still advocate that the government should be involved in something that clearly sucks at doing.

You are never going to increase the overall nutritional value of lunches as long as the Department of Agriculture, (a massive, entrenched, worthless government bureaucracy that has worn out its usefulness) uses the National School Lunch program for dumping all the excess commodities that it is responsible for creating through inefficient subsidies.

You want to see the quality of school lunches increase? Privatize the whole thing.

VH: I agree with Benjamin, privatize school lunches. The core mission of schools should be teaching and not running an expensive unionized cafeteria; Mr. Burr runs a school lunch software business that deserves your attention.

Where are the jobs?

Some California counties posting Depression era unemployment numbers. Where are the "green" jobs, Mr. Obama?

Need tax revenue? Collect it from social security benefits! What fun!

A little–noticed law could soon result in smaller Social Security checks for hundreds of thousands of the elderly and disabled who owe the U.S. money from defaulted loans and other debts more than a decade old.

Social Security benefits are off–limits to creditors, such as credit–card companies and banks. But the U.S. can collect debts to federal agencies by "offsetting," or withholding Social Security and disability payments.

The Treasury currently withholds benefits of 3.1 million Social Security recipients to recover defaulted student–, farm– and small–business loans, unpaid income taxes, amounts veterans owe for health care, and other debts to the government.

Previously, the U.S. hasn't been able to withhold Social Security payments to recover most debts delinquent for more than ten years.

But a provision in the 2008 Farm Bill lifted the ten–year statute of limitations on the government's ability to withhold Social Security benefits in collecting debts other than student loans—for which the statute of limitations was lifted in 1997—and income taxes, where the limit remains 10 years.

A provision in the 2008 Farm Bill? I can only think that this was added as a revenue generator to offset the cost of Farm subsidies

This means that a person who defaulted on a small–business loan in 1995, for example, and who is receiving Social Security could be notified that his benefits may be reduced each month until the debt, with interest, fees, and penalties, is paid. The Treasury can withhold 15% of the benefit, though it can't be reduced to below $750. Tax debts have no floor.

The change will add more than $6 billion to the $75 billion in delinquent debt individuals owe the government, according to the Financial Management Service, the Treasury's debt collection unit.

In 2003, the U.S. began withholding $173 a month in Social Security benefits from Annie Brown, a paralyzed 75–year–old widow living in a nursing home to repay a defaulted $8,823 student loan the Education Department says she took out in 1989. The offset reduced Mrs. Brown's benefit to about $980 a month.

Mrs. Brown said a granddaughter had forged her signature on a loan application. Her daughter and a lawyer spent more than four years disputing the debt with the owner of the loan, United Student Aid Funds, a student–loan guarantor that also was acting as one of the Education Department's 21 debt collectors.

Read it all here.

VH: I don't know what to think about this except to repeat my thoughts on entitlement programs: Citizens that freely allow themselves to be wards of the state will reap what they sow. The state can and will hold your livelihood and well-being hostage to its greater political ends. Ask yourself, why the hell does the 2008 Farm Bill have anything to do with Social Security? It only does when one group is deemed worthless enough to be thrown under the bus for another group that is better connected and has better lobbying: The whims of the State change with the political winds. Who in their right mind wants to take a chance in their golden years with the state holding your livelihood in its grubby hands while listening to apologists for social security utter: "mistakes can happen, but over all, the process works?" I'm afraid too many. It is very sad that some of the senior citizens in this story have had to deal with the perniciousness of raw bureaucracy.

He is also fiscally challenged

A Disgruntled Republican asks, "Is Obama a Harvard educated financial illiterate?"

Let them fall

While defaults on homes rise (people are now just walking away from mortgages they can't afford), the Obama administration continues to burn through billions of taxpayer dollars to prevent the unavoidable. I say that if the government wants "affordable" housing as they have been telling us for decades, then let housing prices fall and stop blowing through tax payer funds in an attempt to buy votes by looking compassionate. Does anybody else notice that being "compassionate" with other peoples' money is far too easy for politicians?

Coming soon: The spin on raising taxes

From CNN:

If President Obama's 2011 budget were put into effect as proposed, the U.S. federal government would add an estimated $9.8 trillion to the country's accrued debt over the next decade, according to a preliminary analysis from the Congressional Budget Office.

Of that amount, an estimated $5.6 trillion will be in interest alone.

Yes, fiscal conservatives know that the budget proposal's from the Obama administration are simply not sustainable. But the analysis doesn't stop there:

The CBO cited two big contributors to the jump in debt.

One is the president's proposal to extend the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the majority of Americans. The other is the proposal to protect middle- and upper-middle-income families from having to pay the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT).

Together those proposals would cost $3 trillion between 2011 and 2020.

Ahh, here is the meat of the matter. You see, the Obama administration has skilfully had the CBO score their proposed budgets (with bloated new entitlements like ObamaCare and Cap and Tax) along with the Bush tax cuts. What a better way to explain to citizens that taxes must rise in order to avoid a fiscal train wreck sometime in the future.

The administration has also called the budget trajectory unsustainable and the president has created a fiscal advisory commission to recommend ways lawmakers can get annual deficits down to 3% of GDP by 2015.

Yes, a blue ribbon commision will tell us what we already know...that taxes must go up and the Bush tax cuts must end. The commision runs interference for the administration and for liberal democrats who hate anything George W. Bush did. Wait for it, folks...wait for it.

Milton Friedman - The Social Security Myth

Not an Austrian but still great.

The unpopular truth about ObamaCare

Jeff Perren writes the following regarding health care:

...the health care bill(s) are not bad chiefly because they're too costly. That's true, but far from fundamental. They're bad because they restrict liberty, they violate rights — to freedom, property, and voluntary trade.

They do so on the ever-useful excuse that it's morally mandatory to "help the poor obtain medical care," which is not merely false, but pernicious. We are no more obligated to "insure the uninsured" than we are to provide food, housing, or anything else to those who can't afford them.

Apart from all the other arguments that might be made, one has to wonder why altruists refuse to make any distinction between those who deserve assistance — even privately — and those who do not. All 'poor people' are somehow presumed to be that solely through no failure of their own.

But that, too, is not essential. Even those who find themselves in need of medical care they can't afford after trying their utmost have no moral or legal claim on the public coffers.

VH: Truer words have rarely been written on the subject: Health care is not a "right." In order for some to get it, others have to be compelled, by force, to provide it. There is no difference between bailing out AIG and ObamaCare. Additionally, in either case, we whistle down the primrose path towards fiscal ruin.

Williams with Sowell - Academic Intellectuals

Worth a listen.

Happy Birthday, Murray Rothbard

He would have been 84 today.

Ah, Unions...

The transportation union in San Francisco is doing what unions do best--drive the city into bankruptcy.

The terror of Global Warming

A suicide pact hatched by parents that feared Global Warming. Why do the children have to suffer this insanity?

Make your vote count

Grade Obama on his job performance thus far. So far, the results are as I expected.

The Fannie Mae monster needs to burn more cash

OK, hang on to your hat's, dear friends. The vacuum cleaner known as Fannie Mae is about to swallow gobs of taxpayer dollars again---$15 billion worth of it:

Fannie Mae needs another $15.3 billion in federal assistance, bringing its total to more than $75 billion. And worse, the mortgage finance company warned that its losses will continue this year.

The rescue of District-based Fannie Mae and sister company Freddie Mac is turning out to be one of the most expensive after-effects of the financial meltdown. The new request means the total bill for the duo will top $126 billion.

And the pain isn't over. Fannie warned Friday that it will need even more money from the Treasury, as unemployment remains high and millions of Americans lose their homes through foreclosure.

Fannie Mae reported Friday that it lost $74.4 billion, or $13.11 a share, last year, including $2.5 billion in dividends paid to the government. That compares with a loss of $59.8 billion, or $24.04 a share, a year earlier.

Fannie Mae, which was seized by federal regulators in September 2008, has racked up losses totaling $136.8 billion over the past three years.

The WaPo article fails to mention that Fannie Mae debt is NOT added to the federal budget. So it is essentially "off the books." Anyone that is following the financial crisis in Greece knows how dangerous and dishonest it is to have massive government debt hidden away from public view.

BTW, remember how Barney Frank defended Fannie Mae? Now, he wants to eliminate Fannie and Freddie. Incredible.

George Will at CPAC

SBVOR has three great video's of George Will giving his CPAC speech.

Bankruptcy, thy name is Greece

The next time someone tells you that they trust the way government handles finances or they are A-OK with tax hikes because they benefit the common good, tell them about a little country called Greece:

Concerns that Greece and other struggling European nations may not be able to repay their debts are focusing investor attention on another big worry: Economies across the Continent have used complex financial transactions—sometimes in secret—to hide the true size of their debts and deficits.

Investors long turned a blind eye to European governments' aggressive bookkeeping, aimed at meeting the euro zone's fiscal ceilings. Countries using the euro currency have a rich history of exotic maneuvers aimed at meeting rules requiring members to cap debt levels at 60% of their gross domestic product and their annual budget deficits to no more than 3%. Despite criticism, European leaders deemed many of these moves acceptable as they sought the long-planned currency union...

...Portugal classified subsidies to the Lisbon subway and other state enterprises as equity purchases. After learning that, Eurostat made Portugal redo its accounting in 2002. The country revised its 2001 deficit from €2.76 billion, or 2.2% of GDP, to €5.09 billion, or 4.1%—well over the limit.

France arranged a deal with the soon-to-be privatized France Telecom in 1997 under which the company paid the government a lump sum of more than €5 billion. In return, France agreed to assume pension liabilities for France Telecom workers. The billions from France Telecom helped narrow France's budget gap to around €40 billion in 1997; it reported a deficit for that year of 3% of GDP—right on the target, and helping it to join the euro.

Even Germany, Europe's largest economy, tried to reappraise gold reserves for a fast fix in 1997, though it backed off after resistance from the country's central bank.

Wanna bet something like this will happen here?

Last man on the totem pole

They are more alike than many would like to know

Bush and Obama---cut from the same cloth? You decide.

Markets in everything

Perky jerky: Jerky with caffeine!

And here come the price controls

From The Washington Post:

President Obama will call for new government power to regulate insurance-rate increases as part of comprehensive changes to the health-care system that the White House will unveil on its Web site Monday, senior officials said.

The proposal -- part of a package that a top official said will serve as a "starting point" for the bipartisan health summit Thursday -- comes as Obama has pointed to recent rate increases as evidence that his proposed changes are necessary.

Last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius drew attention to a California health insurance company, Anthem Blue Cross, which planned rate increases of up to 39 percent. Obama mentioned the increases in his weekly radio address and at a town hall in Nevada.

The new proposal, which a White House official described Sunday night, would give Sebelius new authority to oversee, and potentially block, rate increases that are deemed unfair.

VH: I'm sure that this will work out like other price control schemes have since time immemorial---It will fail miserably. It will make insurance premiums even more unaffordable. You would think that all those Ivy league economists that buzz around the White House would have a clue.

Let the bad investments die already

From the Mercury News:

LAS VEGAS — President Obama unveiled a $1.5 billion program to aid the states hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis, a small but targeted effort to address a housing problem that continues to resist government solutions.

The program, which administration officials called an "innovation fund," is modest in size and reach and comes as the administration's chief foreclosure-prevention program faces criticism for not doing more to help borrowers.

Speaking to the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, Obama said the program would allow states to find new ways to help struggling homeowners. "That means that here in Nevada, we're going to be able to prevent some foreclosures that otherwise would have happened," he said Friday afternoon. "The goal is to target communities at the center of the crisis and to empower local agencies that know these communities best."

Obama made the same promise at a town hall meeting earlier in the day, telling about 1,700 people in Henderson, a suburb near Las Vegas, that "government has a responsibility to help deal with this problem."

VH: Here we go again. The Federal government riding the white horse over the hill to "help" out distressed homeowners. So instead of letting these bad investments go quickly to bankruptcy and clearing out the housing market, we have a vain attempt to prop up a market that shows very little signs of improvement. I don't see how this helps people who, after this small injection of public funds, will most likely lose their homes because they can't find a job or the value of their homes are much lower than what they are shelling out each month in mortgage payments. The irony in all this is that it was the Federal government that led all of these poor people down this path of destruction by implementing all sorts of "affordable housing" incentives. If the Feds want affordable housing now and they want a quick recovery of the housing market, why not let prices drop to their equilibrium? Instead, we get more public funds thrown at lost causes.

A very small nuclear power plant

Here's what to do with all that nuclear waste.

Another Canadian chooses American medical care

From The Canadian Press:

An unapologetic Danny Williams says he was aware his trip to the United States for heart surgery earlier this month would spark outcry, but he concluded his personal health trumped any public fallout over the controversial decision.

In an interview with The Canadian Press, Williams said he went to Miami to have a "minimally invasive" surgery for an ailment first detected nearly a year ago, based on the advice of his doctors.

"This was my heart, my choice and my health," Williams said late Monday from his condominium in Sarasota, Fla.

"I did not sign away my right to get the best possible health care for myself when I entered politics."

The 60-year-old Williams said doctors detected a heart murmur last spring and told him that one of his heart valves wasn't closing properly, creating a leakage.

He said he was told at the time that the problem was "moderate" and that he should come back for a checkup in six months.

Eight months later, in December, his doctors told him the problem had become severe and urged him to get his valve repaired immediately or risk heart failure, he said.

His doctors in Canada presented him with two options - a full or partial sternotomy, both of which would've required breaking bones, he said.

He said he spoke with and provided his medical information to a leading cardiac surgeon in New Jersey who is also from Newfoundland and Labrador. He advised him to seek treatment at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami.

VH: It's nice that Mr. Williams had the option to come to the U.S. for his treatment; he was wise not to sit and wait before it was too late. It must be comforting to have an option even if it means leaving your country.

Tea Party challenges Keith Olbermann

He will never show up.

Markets in all things

You can get cozy in this bear sleeping bag.

John Stossel on alternate energy subsidies

Is Boone Pickens "rent seeking?" I say yes.

The U.S. government poisoned people during Prohibition

This can only be logical to the mind of a politician: The federal poisoning program.

Coming to California some time soon?

From Associated Press:

Greek drivers lined up for gas at the few stations still open Friday as a customs strike against government austerity measures left many pumps running dry.

The fuel shortage was the first serious consequence of growing labor protests against the Socialist government's emergency spending cuts program, aimed at easing the debt crisis in Greece and shoring up market confidence.

Customs workers have extended their strike against salary freezes and bonus cuts through next Wednesday, when unions across Greece will hold a general strike that is set to bring the country to a standstill.

European finance ministers have told Athens it must demonstrate signs of fiscal improvement by March 16 or it will be ordered to impose even tougher budget cuts. Greece has promised to slash its deficit from an estimated 12.7 percent of gross domestic product to 8.7 percent this year.

Finance Ministry officials say they are under EU pressure to ax the public servants' so-called "14th salary." Greek workers get their annual salary divided into 14 payments, with two of them given as holiday bonuses, in a measure originally designed to alleviate those with low incomes.

"We would consider cutting the 14th (salary) to be an act of war," said Yiannis Papagopoulos, leader of Greece's trade union umbrella group, the GSEE.

VH: Aren't unions great? They would rather destroy their own country than to agree to austerity programs. This isn't the first time (or the last) that unions have held the public hostage and I'm not just talking about Greece either. The recent $60 billion giveaway to Big Labor for ObamaCare is still a fresh wound. In California, Big Labor rules. And they will crush anyone that gets in their way. Heck, they made mince meat and a lame duck of Arnold Schwchenneger when he tried to curb their power back in 2005. With a $20 billion fiscal hole that California needs to deal with, just wait until there has to be some real cutting of public services and jobs around here. All hell is going to break loose with public unions being at the head of the screaming mob.

Cash for caulkers is a money pit

From the L.A. Times. Read it and weep:

Who could forget the $5 billion in Obama administration stimulus money that was going to rapidly create nearly 90,000 green jobs across the country in these tough economic times and make so many thousands of homes all snuggy and warm and energy-efficient these very snowy days?

Well, a new report due out this morning will show the $5-billion program is so riddled with drafts that so far it's weatherized only about 9,000 homes.

Based on the initial Obama-Biden program promise that it would create 87,000 new jobs its first year, that would be about 10 jobs for each home weatherized so far. Makes for pretty crowded doorways.

Print your own money!

From MSN Money:

Last year, two Detroit tavern owners were sitting at the bar, sampling their beverages and bemoaning the local economy -- no one in the city had cash, and when they did, they spent it in the suburbs. Then the pair hit on a solution: Print their own money.

It is, after all, perfectly legal for anyone to issue currency, as long as it doesn't look too much like a U.S. dollar. Thus was born the Detroit cheer, a local scrip accepted by a handful of city businesses, including a pizzeria, an electrician and a doggy day care center.

Residents can also exchange it at a few area bars for greenbacks, but the cheer is vastly more colorful. It features a chiseled, naked Greco-Roman superhero (the Spirit of Detroit) towering Godzilla-like over the city skyline, cupping a tiny family in one hand and a sunburst representing God in the other. He's a lot more fun than George Washington.

And Detroit isn't the only city sporting its own currency. Since the market tanked nearly 18 months ago, there's been an interest in local scrips not seen since the Great Depression.

VH: I find it interesting that this is another example of people having coordinated to create and use a viable currency without an over arching government authority. It's not the first time that this has happened and it won't be the last. Also, this all really says something about the general distrust of the Dollar and our governments profligate spending habit---people are really spooked and with good reason.

"Where did that right come from?"

Blue state blues

Harrison Price has a nifty list of states with the highest unemployment rates. They also tend to be heavily Democrat.

It may come to pass--means testing for social security benefits

Bryan Caplan tackles means-testing for entitlement programs (social security mainly) and Dave Henderson retorts.

Social Security funds low

From USA Today:

WASHINGTON — Social Security's annual surplus nearly evaporated in 2009 for the first time in 25 years as the recession led hundreds of thousands of workers to retire or claim disability.

The impact of the recession is likely to hit the giant retirement system even harder this year and next. The Congressional Budget Office had projected it would operate in the red in 2010 and 2011, but a deeper economic slump could make those losses larger than anticipated.

"Things are a little bit worse than had been expected," says Stephen Goss, chief actuary for the Social Security Administration. "Clearly, we're going to be negative for a year or two."

Since 1984, Social Security has raked in more in payroll taxes than it has paid in benefits, accumulating a $2.5 trillion trust fund. But because the government uses the trust fund to pay for other programs, tax increases, spending cuts or new borrowing will be required to make up the difference between taxes collected and benefits owed.

VH: Social Security turns citizens into wards of the state with all of the implications that this imposes---like the raiding of funds for use in other government programs and being held hostage to the whims of the political class who will change eligibility requirements and benefit amounts when they deem necessary. Politicians that have and continue to push for entitlement programs like Social Security, always fail to mention the downsides to such programs.

Lastly, I continue to be amazed at the amount of times that the government actuaries tend to be wrong in their long term projections. You would think that the American public would be more cynical about their projections.

IPCC begins to acknowledge mistakes in its reporting

From the WSJ:

Some top officials of a Nobel Prize-winning climate-science organization are acknowledging the panel made some mistakes amid a string of recent revelations questioning the accuracy of some of the information in its influential reports.

Officials of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations-sponsored network of scientists whose reports strongly influence global policy on greenhouse-gas emissions, initially played down some of the allegations. Increasingly, however, they are acknowledging the panel's mistakes and saying it needs to tighten its procedures.

VH: Since the IPCC is used by AGW advocates as a "scientific" international agency that legitimizes their position and which is used as justification to steer policy (re: billions of American taxpayer dollars) towards mitigating "climate change," one would hope that their reporting should be held to a higher standard. Apparently not.

He lost the data?

Climate Change scare monger, Phil Jones, admits to have misplaced climate data:

Prof Jones stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s climate change unit in December after leaked emails appeared to show academics were manipulating data to bolster claims that global warming is caused by humans.

Now the academic has admitted he may have lost track of some of the data used to produce the famous “hockey stick” graph, which uses climate readings from worldwide weather stations to show a sharp rise in global temperatures.

The Climate Research Unit formerly headed by Prof Jones is responsible for analysing data from hundreds of weather stations to produce "evidence" of global warming which is used by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Prof Jones also admitted that his own lack of organisation had contributed to his reluctance to share crucial data with climate change sceptics, but denied that he deliberately distorted the evidence.

VH: Yes, Mr. Jones. I'm sure that Steve McIntyre roundly exposing your "hockey stick" theory as a farce had nothing to do with your "lost" data.

Crony capitalism lives on with Obama

John Stossel on crony capitalism, regulatory capture, "green jobs," and the farce of the "Recovery Act."

Take the news quiz

Test your news IQ in this Pew Research Center quiz. I got 10 out of 12.

HT: Carpe Diem

You just can't trust the IPCC

According to this piece in the WSJ, the IPCC routinely omits the positives of Global Warming in their reports:

According to a 2004 paper by British geographer and climatologist Nigel Arnell, global warming would likely reduce the world's total number of people living in "water-stressed watersheds"—that is, areas with less than 1,000 cubic meters of water resources per capita, per year—even though many regions would see increased water shortages. Using multiple models, Mr. Arnell predicted that if temperatures rise, between 867 million and 4.5 billion people around the world could see increased "water stress" by 2085. But Mr. Arnell also found that "water stress" could decrease for between 1.7 billion and 6 billion people. Taking the average of the two ranges, that means that with global warming, nearly 2.7 billion people could see greater water shortages—but 3.85 billion could see fewer of them.

The IPCC's much-shorter "Summary for Policy Makers" is even more one-sided. It is riddled with warnings of warming-induced drought and—while acknowledging that a hotter Earth would bring "increased water availability" in some areas—warns that rising temperatures would leave "hundreds of millions of people exposed to increased water stress." Nowhere does it specify that even more people would probably have more water supplies.

VH: After reading the article, who can believe that the IPCC is even handed in its treatment of climate issues? The IPCC is essentially a mouth piece for AGW advocates.

Markets in all things

Anti-theft lunch bags.

My Friend Sarah

If only this really happened in our institutions of higher learning...

Don't try to cover your tracks, Barney

Barney Frank is one of those politicians that always makes my head shake in disbelief when I hear him speak on T.V. This guy spent years pimping government subsidized home loans and protecting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Now Frank has the audacity to tell us "the Poor Should Rent, Not Own." ARRRGGGHHHH!

Milton Friedman on Steel Tariffs and Trade

This was back in 1978; it could easily apply to today.

Michael Mann cleared of charges

From The Guardian:

The American scientist who produced the "hockey stick graph" showing a sharp rise in global warming was largely cleared of misconduct by an academic investigation today.

The board of inquiry at Pennsylvania State University said it found no evidence that Michael Mann, a leading climatologist, had suppressed or falsified data, tried to destroy data or emails, or misused information. It will convene a second panel to investigate whether he had violated academic practices, including those governing exchanges between scholars.

VH: Note that this does not mean that Mann's "Hockey Stick" was proven to be scientifically correct as it was implied in this CBS story. Secondly, is anyone surprised that a Penn State panel exonerated Mann? Thirdly, this does not mean data was not suppressed at all by someone.

Change?

While Barack Obama slams lobbyists, the lobby industry in Washington has grown by leaps and bounds.

Glenn Beck on Che Guevara

Liberals hate Beck but the man nailed the cult of Che appropriately and honestly.

Around The Horn

Jeff Perren asks: Is Obama a Pragmatist?

Harrison Price: If Canada’s healthcare is so great…

The IPCC error campaign continues

The IPCC's beleaguered climate report faces the prospect of still more errors, as Dutch authorities point out factual inaccuracies about the Netherlands.

Dutch environment ministry spokesman Trimo Vallaart has asked the U.N.'s climate change panel to rethink its assertion that more than half of the Netherlands is below seal level. Dutch authorities explain that, in fact, only 26 percent of the country is below sea level.

...correcting the error had been "on the agenda several times" but had never actually happened. Vallaart told the AFP that he regretted the fact that proper procedure was not followed, adding that it should not be left to politicians to check the IPCC's numbers.

Milton Friedman - Monopoly

Brilliant.

More babies, please!

Despite what you hear from environmentalists and "population bomb" scare mongers, in more and more countries, women are having fewer children than the number required to keep populations stable. The fertility rate has fallen below replacement level all across Europe, Russia, and Japan. The Malhusian catastrophe doesn't seem to be unfolding as many continue to predict.

It is time to sober up

Aside from not trusting administration officials on their estimates, the big question that should be on everyone's mind is what happens when the stimulus funds are withdrawn? Eventually they will. What happens then? We will be left with a massive fiscal hangover, I bet.

One thing is for certain: The first jobs tally, which showed 640,000 jobs were created, contained numerous errors. After that October report, the administration changed the criteria for counting stimulus-funded jobs. The goal was to make it simpler for recipients to accurately report headcounts.

Recipients no longer have to determine whether a job was "created" or "saved" by stimulus funds, only that it was "funded" by the Recovery Act. Also, the reports only track jobs on a quarterly basis instead of keeping a running total.

Even with these changes, it's still a challenge to determine exactly how many jobs stimulus has funded, experts said. It will come as no surprise if more mistakes are found.

Also, the little piggies that are benefiting from feeding at the public trough are going to squeal once it comes time to wean:

Gov. Deval Patrick, a Democrat, touted stimulus' impact on the alternative energy sector, saying the state will increase wind power 10-fold and solar power 15-fold by next year. The number of solar companies has quadrupled and their employment doubled.

Hayek vs. Keynes

This rocks!

Michael Moore loves subsidies for his films

That's right. The man that loves to rail against capitalism is indeed himself a crony capitalist.

The party of NO!

Speaking of being obstructionists, environmental groups are masters of the block.

The Green Utopia

From The San Francisco Chronicle:

It's an environmental catch-22. California needs to meet its aggressive goals for renewable-energy production, but solar and wind farms require lots of space. The farms' land gobbling can conflict with one of Californians' most cherished values: the preservation of pristine wilderness and animal habitat. As the state gets serious about increasing its renewable-energy portfolio, there's going to be tension.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein is learning that the hard way. As the author of the 1994 California Desert Protection Act (which established the wildly popular Joshua Tree National Park), she was the natural author for the California Desert Protection Act of 2010. The bill would place nearly 1 million acres of the Mojave Desert off limits for development.

It would also fund a new renewable-energy permitting office and seek to expedite permitting for renewable-energy projects on lands deemed more suitable for development, but those changes seem like small potatoes when compared to the vast amount of land that will suddenly be off limits. The Bureau of Land Management is currently evaluating about 120 solar and wind projects in the region, and a handful of those would have to be tossed out under Feinstein's bill. The developers are crying foul.

VH: The "green" utopia is going to be a lot more elusive and expensive than what environmentalist's have sold to the gullible California public. The state of California is already one of the most expensive places to live and to do business. What do you think is going to happen when more land is set aside from being developed and there are less and less corridors to carry power from one point to the next? Cha-ching.

Stimulus II: A Sequel America Can't Afford

Dan Mitchell with another great video. Is stimulus #2 on it's way?

Thomas Sowell - Intellectuals and Society

I received a Kindle, a fantastic device, for my birthday and I will be downloading Sowell's new book: "Intellectuals and Society." The above is a small snipet of Sowell discussing the book.

Depressing Charts

From the Dallas Federal Reserve. Not for the faint of heart.

HT: Cafe Hayek

Oh, that crazy Chavez!

From the Associated Press:

CARACAS, Venezuela – President Hugo Chavez says there's too much capitalism on Venezuelan TV. So he's urging producers to start making films and TV shows that stress socialist values.

Chavez says producers should be making "socialist soap operas."

He said Sunday he recently visited Cuba "and they have soaps there. But they're not capitalist soap operas."

LOL!!!

"I forgot he was black"

Chris Matthews inserts foot in mouth.

Being "compassionate" with someone else's money

From Carpe Diem: Watching Obama and Biden on TV and hearing Obama talk proudly about their "leadership," I can't help but remember how relatively uncharitable and uncaring they have been in the past when it comes to spending their own money.

VH: This is not an unfair criticism of an administration that wants to take one group's money (usually groups that are branded as bad) to give to another group in an attempt to "spread the wealth" and which is supposed to then mean that government is therefore being "fair" or "compassionate." They want to be "compassionate" with other people's money. Ah, government.

Will ObamaCare pass?

The prediction market at Intrade is bearish.

UAW meeting goes wrong

"Teamsters, so surly and lazy."---Homer Simpson

Super Mall!!

The largest mall in the world is in China. It looks more like a theme park to me. Can you imagine how much carbon is emitted from this place?

It burns cleanly and there is a lot of it...

My question today is this: Why aren't we allowing energy companies tap into our vast natural gas resources? It's clean burning and abundant.

Every few weeks, it seems, fresh news arrives telling of impressive discoveries of oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico, an area that, until recently, was viewed as well worked over and unlikely to yield any new bonanzas.

Last September brought word of a giant Gulf oil field reeled in by British Petroleum. And the latest Gulf headline-maker is a potentially major gas play offshore Louisiana that appears likely to add new trillions of cubic feet of gas to growing domestic reserves of the cleanest-burning carbon fuel.

Drill, drill, drill!!!

Around The Horn

Posts of worth and note!

From Shaving Leviathan: Ted Kennedy Dies, Saves Country Five Months Later.

From A Disgruntled Republican: Dear global warming scientist, I am not as smart as a global warming scientist but I think that I am as smart as a fifth grader.

From Watts Up With That: The scandal deepens-IPCC AR4 riddled with non peer reviewed WWF papers.

Here we go again

Hold on to your recycling bins, Global Warming causes methane gas to increase! Alert Al Gore!

Cut federal spending?

What are the odds that Democrats would actually adopt Republican Senator Tom Coburn's amendment? I won't be holding my breath:

The Senate is debating a $1.9 trillion increase in the nation's debt limit that would lift Treasury's legal borrowing ceiling to $14.3 trillion. After a $290 billion debt-limit raise last month, this giant new increase is intended to get Democrats past November's election without another reminder to voters of how much debt their spending is piling up.

Mr. Coburn has a better idea: Cut spending to a level that would allow the government to stay beneath the current debt ceiling for a few more months. President Obama promised in his campaign to eliminate "unnecessary redundancy" in government, so Mr. Coburn is calling for at least $20 billion in spending cuts on programs that are duplicated across federal agencies. That's about 4% of nondefense discretionary spending, and Mr. Coburn's amendment identifies at least 640 programs that could be consolidated.

A few examples: A 2009 Government Accountability Office report found 69 early education programs, administered by nine different agencies. A 2003 GAO report found 44 job training programs, also administered by nine agencies. The Department of Education runs 14 separate programs for foreign study exchanges. Taxpayers spend more than $300 million annually on at least nine Agriculture Department programs to develop biofuels. Too bad we can't pay for all this with wood chips.

Another Climate Panel Problem

After a week down with the flu, I'm back.

Here's an interesting piece I found in this week's issue of The Economist. Once again we see how fallible the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) really is:

The idea that the Himalaya could lose its glaciers by 2035—glaciers which feed rivers across South and East Asia—is a dramatic and apocalyptic one. After the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said such an outcome was very likely in the assessment of the state of climate science that it made in 2007, onlookers (including this newspaper) repeated the claim with alarm. In fact, there is no reason to believe it to be true. This is good news (within limits) for Indian farmers—and bad news for the IPCC.

And shameful news for publications (like the once vaunted Economist) that parroted the IPCC warning without proper due diligence. What has happened to healthy skepticism? It seems that with the subject of Global Warming any pretense to question the science is seen as sheer heresy or a mark of stupidity. But again we see another example of where the IPCC, supposedly an authority on this matter, fails to properly carry out a simple review process. Quite frankly, no government should put any trust into anything the IPCC publishes.

Simply odd

Everyone has heard about Pat Robertson's comment on Haiti, but I think that the strangest comment comes from actor Danny Glover. Yesterday, Mr. Glover uttered the following bit of stupid:

Actor Danny Glover says the earthquake in Haiti is a result of global warming. Glover told GRITtv that it could have happened to any of the Caribbean island nations: "They are all in peril because of global warming."

Then, he lamented the failure of the climate summit in Copenhagen. As a result of that failure, he says, "this is what happened."

Wow. What a nutcase.

In other strangeness, it seems that Scott Ritter, a former U.N. weapons inspector that is somewhat of an iconic fiqure for anti-Bush types has been charged in an online child-sex case. This is the second time and this time he was caught on camera!

Is Health Care a right?

Californians will foot the bill

I am not a big fan of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger but his latest statement on national health care reform accentuates what I and other fiscal conservatives have been saying for months now. Gov. Schwarzenegger, who had endorsed national reform, now says the following:

"You've heard of the bridge to nowhere? This is health care to nowhere...the current structure and the proposed expansion of Medicaid under health care reform are unsustainable for California."

Many Liberals in California thought that national health care "reform" was going to be free! If you just tax the rich guys and the insurance companies, we'll be just like France. Little did they know that they were footing the bill for everyone else...including the hated RED states. You see, because wages and earnings tend to be higher in California than the rest of the country, the "rich guy" is them. I guess unicorns don't exist after all.

Progressive Utopia: Detroit

Coming to a city near you.

Milton Friedman - Case Against Equal Pay for Equal Work

Milton Friedman was a master in being able to explain difficult concepts in a breezy, easily understood manner. In this video he tackles a subject that is still being discussed today--equal pay for equal work.

HT: Liberty Pen

More than you bargined for...

Government programs tend to slowly evolve and grow beyond their original intention and mandates. Will ObamaCare be any different?

HT: Life, Liberty, and Property

Best post I've read today--Cartoons

Rod Williams has a great collection of Christmas cartoons on his blog. Here is one of them.

John Mackey on health care reform

Best post I've read today

Jeff Perren on the morality of Progressive thought:

Selling your power for a buck (or more power) is immoral, to be sure. Enslaving 95% of the country in perpetuity while pretending it's for the benefit of the other 5% is far worse. But corrupting your soul and demanding that others corrupt theirs - and calling it the height of virtue - is pure evil.

GMAC will get more tax dollars

Congratulations, dear sucker...er, citizen. Can you hear the toilet flushing? According to the political elites that have decided to "save" society for us, returning GMAC back to profitability using tax funds is the right thing to do to avert disaster. But, isn't the red alert over already? Corporatism remains as strong as ever in Washington.

A 14 Trillion dollar economy

I find that many people really do underestimate how large the U.S. economy is compared to other countries. The chart below, provided by Mark Perry at Carpe Diem, replaces the names of states with the name of a country that has a similiar GDP.

You can look up the data for U.S. states here
and for foriegn countries here.

Wow! What a surprise!!

A new study found that banks that received bail out funds had strong political ties and great lobbyists. I'm shocked.

"Profits are evil!"

One of the best rants against the anti-profit crowd I have read in a long time. Here's a quote:

Greed is a vice that only affects other people; the beneficiary of a rent-controlled apartment is not being greedy in expecting to pay a below market rent, but merely collecting her due. It’s her landlord who’s avaricious in thinking he might make a market return on his investment.

The perversion of the interstate commerce clause

Interesting video on the interstate commerce clause and the decision by the Supreme Court to weaken it; this affects more than just wine sales to other states, it also negatively impacts the sale of health insurance policies across state borders. Since some states have imposed community rating and community issue mandates on the health insurance sold in their states, this has exacerbated the fiefdom and oligarchy of insurance companies that never have to worry about competition from other companies in other states.