Monthly Archives: April 2013

Of What are the Senate Progressives So Afraid?

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Or is it that, since they already know all the answers, they have no need for actual facts or discussion of them?

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D, VT) has decided that the massive immigration overhaul bill on which the Gang of Eight are working behind locked doors, only deserves a single hearing before the Democrats vote it up and send it to the House.

Shades of Obamacare.  How’s that working out for us?

Plainly, since Democrats are so embarrassed by this pending legislation that they don’t want it discussed in public in any serious form, it’s a bad bill and needs to be voted down.

“I Do Think at a Certain Point You’ve Saved Enough Money”

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Here we go, again.

President Barack Obama’s latest guess at a budget looks to cap Americans’ retirement accounts at roughly $3.4 million (never mind that what seems like a fairly substantial amount of money will shrink to insignificance in the coming Bernanke inflation).

On top of that, Obama wants to “return the estate tax to the parameters in place in 2009….  That move would drop the per-person exemption to $3.5 million (remarkably close to that retirement funding cap) from the present $5.25 million and increase the top tax rate on a deceased’s estate to 45% from 40%.

According to Obama, it isn’t really your money, and Big Government Knows Better what to do with it than you do, anyway.

Maybe We Should Take Instruction from Europe

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Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew’s trip to Europe demonstrates that this might be useful, given the apparent role-reversal between the US and the EU on matters related to economics.

Lew spent his time there lecturing his European counterparts on the “need” for further government stimulus, further government spending, the irrelevance of national debt, especially concerning the southern European nations—those who are bankrupt in all but name and needing…bailouts.

It was those European counterparts, though, who were holding out for spending and borrowing (and taxing) discipline on the part of those bankrupt nations.  European Council President Herman Van Rompuy had this to say:

The European economies face a high level of debt, deep structural medium-term challenges and short-term economic headwinds that we need to confront.  There is no room for complacency.

I’ve long decried the EU’s methods in addressing its problem, but they’re learning the need for fiscal discipline.  It would be good if the other side of the Atlantic followed that example.

In Which Die Tageszeitung Misses Badly

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Other, better writers have already eulogized the passing of Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Baroness of Kesteven, and LG, OM, PC, FRS.  As happens with all great men and women, she has come in for no small amount of criticism on the occasion of her passing, some of it simply, puerilely, shameful.

Other criticisms, though, demonstrate a broad misunderstanding of the lady’s accomplishments, the good she did for the UK and for the world.  Die Tageszeitung (The Daily Newspaper) is one such that badly misses.  This newspaper demonstrates its left-wing (the liberal Spiegel International Online‘s characterization, not mine) cred with these remarks, and I cannot let them go unanswered, even at this late date.

Very few people get a political ideology named after them.  Thatcherism stands for deregulation, privatization and the destruction of the welfare state, as well as of a sense of community.  No one divided British society as much as former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.  She is responsible for the destruction of the trade unions and the ruin of the public sector, and especially of the National Health Service.

Actually, they got the first part of this right.  But then they talk about her being the cause of the reduction of union power and of the public sector as though these were bad things.  Britain’s unionism and its then public sector were at the heart of British economic malaise and symptomatic of the nation’s retreat from the world stage—and of Britain’s willingness to lie prostrate in the face of Soviet expansionism, hoping to be passed by, unnoticed.

The failures, the rate death through negligence of children, pensioners, and ages in between while in the tender mercies of the NHS is legendary.  Thatcher’s attempts to rein in this travesty did not achieve enough, unfortunately; although it wasn’t, as DT backhandedly notes, for her lack of effort.

Thatcher got away with her authoritarian leadership style for a long time.  She publicly snubbed difficult colleagues, or just sacked them.  During her time in office she used up more than 100 ministers and surrounded herself with yes-men.  The hope that she, as the first female leader of a major nation, would fan a feminist wind into politics went unfulfilled.  She was never interested in the women’s movement, and only one women made it into her cabinet during her long tenure.

If you can’t effectively attack Thatcher’s policies, attack her person.  And demonstrate a lack of understanding of leadership, and of what it is to be a “yes-man,” to boot.  If a subordinate is being…insubordinate…he should be terminated.  Dissension and debate are required while decisions are being worked out, but refusing to get fully behind a decision once taken is inexcusable.

And as for DT‘s feminist claptrap….  Thatcher was “never interested in the women’s movement” because she was the embodiment of everything that “movement” claims to stand for.  She was a Briton and a PM who happened to be a woman.

It’s hard to imagine greater success.

Carbon Tax?

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Ex-Secretary of Labor, State, and Treasury George Schultz and Economics Professor Gary Becker say we should have one.  They even insist that it be revenue neutral.

The problem is, though, that they’re arguing from two false premises, and it’s unfortunate that two such well-educated men should be so caught up in drama rather than fact.

The first false premise is that any tax change (as the imposition of a carbon tax would be) must be revenue neutral.  This may, in fact, be needful for the politics surrounding imposing a new tax (or cutting old ones), but there’s no rational reason for revenue neutrality.  The economic necessity, given our exploding deficit (though President Barack Obama says his budget shrinks it, and, sure, he is an honorable man) and our even more explosive national debt, demands a reduction in spending with its associated reduction in borrowing.  Taxes need not be increased under any nearby circumstances, nor need the imposition of a new tax be “paid for” with an equal increase in spending or reduction in tax somewhere else.  With spending coming down to eliminate our deficit and further, taxes overall can be cut, too.

The second false premise is that carbon, or carbon dioxide, is a pollutant, the blatherings of the political bureaucrats at the EPA notwithstanding.  The climate facts here are that CO2—the primary product of, say, Schultz’ and Becker’s energy companies—is a lagging, a confirmatory, indicator.  The climate record demonstrates that CO2 increases in Earth’s atmosphere lags climate warming on a global scale by some hundreds of years.  Since CO2 “emissions” are primarily from plant and animal respiration—even adding in the output of those energy plants—that lag following planetary warming comes from increased plant and animal life on the warmer planet.  It’s a confirmation of the increasing health of the planet.  That’s not much of a pollutant.

We don’t need a carbon tax, though.  Come to that, we don’t need any tax at the levels at which they’re charged today.