Monthly Archives: October 2013

Economic Incompetence Continues

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We must increase our debt limit so that we can pay our bills.

This is the thrust of President Barack Obama’s insistent demand that our debt ceiling be raised, and that it be done with no strings attached.  The graph below, via Zero Hedge, however, illustrates the foolishness of continually expanding our country’s debt.  It shows government debt as a percentage of GDP compared to the annualized rate of change in economic growth.

It’s hard to get any clearer than this demonstration of the inverse relationship between government debt growth and economic growth.  It’s not just that growing debt impedes economic growth; the reverse is true, also: reducing government debt (not just reducing debt growth rate) allows the economy to grow.

If you borrow money to pay your bills, you aren’t paying your bills, you’re just changing creditors.  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: it isn’t sufficient simply to raise our debt ceiling.  Any raise must be coupled with commensurate real spending cuts—that is, cuts in current year spending, not pseudo-cuts in the out years.  It’s only by reducing current spending below current revenues that the current deficit can be reduced—which by itself still isn’t enough.  The current deficit must be reduced to the point it disappears, and a current surplus is generated.  Year after year.

Current deficits, after all, are current borrowings, and these only add to existing debt.  The only way we can reduce our country’s debt, and so to eliminate the need to raise the debt ceiling—the only way—is to cut current spending to levels below current income.  Any junior high student on an allowance understands that.

A Typical Bureaucracy

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Via the Washington Examiner comes this Obamacare bureaucracy organization chart.  Maybe it’s satirical.

This damning charge about Obamacare preparation by that bureaucracy comes from the same link:

Federal officials did not permit testing of the Obamacare healthcare.gov website or issue final system requirements until four to six days before its Oct 1 launch, according to an individual with direct knowledge of the project.

How does that work, exactly?  Oh, wait—maybe the WE is overstating the case a bit—does any bureaucracy with that organization look like it’s capable of making any decision more complex than whether to get a cup of coffee on the way back from the rest room?

Plus this: The officials running the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services decided they would act as the systems integrator, the central coordinator for the entire program.  Pay no attention to the fact that the CMS is, itself, an agglomeration of lots of disparate organizations.  Or that the officials “in charge” there have no concept of organizational, much less systems, organization.

But RTWT.

And this, from The Wall Street Journal, on President Barack Obama’s Rose Garden version of a Shamwow Infomercial pitch–Operators are standing by! [I stole that line from Chris Stirewalt]–and his touting his 800 number as the fix to all the…kinks…in his Obamacare:

[W]e called the hotline on Monday and the automated menu redirected us to Healthcare.gov, which in turn told us to get in touch with someone at the call center.

Yeah.

The Mendacity of Zero-Tolerance Policies

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Here’s another example.  A 17-year-old high school student (and volleyball player) in the North Andover Public Schools system, Erin Cox, was texted by a friend at a (underage) drinking party who needed a ride home.  Notwithstanding the judgment that brought the friend to such a gathering, this young lady retained the good sense to ask for help, recognizing that she was too drunk to drive herself.  Cox answered the call.

Shortly after she arrived to pick up her friend and bring her home, though, the police also arrived and made a number of arrests—not including Cox.  The police involved absolved her of any wrong-doing, recognizing she was there to help a friend and not a party participant.

That wasn’t good enough for Superintendent Dr Kevin Hutchinson, though.  He has a “No tolerance policy for drugs and alcohol.”  He suspended Cox for five games for her involvement in the party.  “No tolerance” apparently includes no tolerance for helping drunken friend who retained the judgment to call for help rather than trying to drive herself—since giving that help necessarily involved the alcohol that help-requesting friend had ingested.

Cox spoke a few days later to The Boston Herald.

I wasn’t drinking.  And I felt like going to get her was the right thing to do.  Saving her from getting in the car when she was intoxicated and hurt herself or getting in the car with someone else who was drinking. I’d give her a ride home.
…
I just feel very defeated.  When you’re in high school you’re supposed to stay perfect and be perfect, but everyone makes mistakes.

No.  This young woman made no mistake.  Her school’s “leadership” did.

Divisiveness

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President Barack Obama often is called one of the most, if not the most, divisive Presidents in American history.  Now some pundits are saying that, in the aftermath of the just-postponed debates over funding the government and over the debt ceiling, Obama must put his divisiveness aside and bring opposing parties together by December and January, when the CR and the debt ceiling raise expire, to negotiate.  He must now compromise, goes their argument.

Why, though?  What’s Obama’s incentive to do that?  Aside from the fact that “bringing people together” or compromising aren’t in his nature, I mean.

His “legacy?”  His legacy will be that of having been the President who fundamentally changed America, who single-handedly rewrote the terms of our social compact, who reduced us to one-party rule.  Obamacare, vast spending and borrowing, “stimulus” are merely his tools for doing that.  And he’s already brought them to bear.

He had too much trouble in the just postponed debates?  He won, rather resoundingly.  He didn’t get the spending or tax increases he wanted, but that’s not where the victory lies.  He succeeded in damaging the Republican Party, with the active help of their own foolish tactics, to the point they have very little left with which to…bargain.  He’s now in a much stronger position to get his spending and tax increases in the “negotiations” surrounding the end of this year.

His second term agenda?  This is the biggest part of the outcome of his divisiveness.  I’ve written often about Republican and Conservative tactical and communication incompetence (they can’t sell water in a desert, it seems).  Obama will prosper from that incompetence to the point of expanding his hold on the Senate and regaining the House in just a bit over a year.  Finally, there’s nothing of intrinsic value in his agenda; it’s just another tool, now to be applied to consolidate one-party rule.

Why should Obama become a uniter now in the short term, when his divisiveness is working so well in the medium term?  He has no interest in uniting; he has no need to compromise.

If Conservatives and Republicans are to defeat this Progressive rush to dominance, they must address their failings, and do it promptly.

A Censoring Press

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How does this work, exactly?  The Los Angeles Times has decided that it will no longer publish letters to its editorial staff from “climate change deniers.”

The Times‘ letters editor, Paul Thornton, wrote, with no trace of irony,

Simply put, I do my best to keep errors of fact off the letters page; when one does run, a correction is published.  Saying “there’s no sign humans have caused climate change” is not stating an opinion, it’s asserting a factual inaccuracy.

No statement of an opinion, here.  Mm, mm.  Thornton is a newspaper man.  Each of his statements a Truth.

Here’s what Thornton is demonstrating with his censorship.  When someone is unable to make a coherent argument for his case, when he’s unable to concede the possibility of the error of his case, when he lacks the integrity to concede the possibility of that error, he does his best to prevent the opposing case from being spoken—either through ad hominem attacks against the opposing case’s presenters or, as Thornton does here with his control over speech, through outright censorship of the speech with which he’s unable to dispute coherently.

I can’t hear you, indeed.