Monthly Archives: October 2015

Debt Limits

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The reason we need to raise the national debt limit is to be able to borrow to pay existing obligations. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew’s threats that he can’t won’t pay our veterans, soldiers, and retireds is nothing but politically motivated, dishonest foolishness. He can pay these; the tax revenues are plenty for that. What he won’t be able to pay are the payables to Federal contractors and a number of other bills. Those are legitimately owed, though, and they need to be paid.

There’s also plenty of money coming in to pay the interest on our national debt—so there’ll be no default, either. That’s just nonsense.

What’s unacceptable, though, is the Democrats’ refusal to go along with a debt-raise bill that includes spending cuts that will obviate the need to raise the debt ceiling next year and in the out years. President Barack Obama has even said he’ll veto a debt-raise bill that includes such preventive measures. He’s said it’s nonnegotiable.

That’s unconscionable. The Democrats’ addiction to spending—and it is an addiction—has got to be broken. If the only way to cut spending so we don’t need to increase our borrowings next year is to close the Federal government, so be it.

But the Republicans, including the right side, and their “communications” directors had better be able to sell the shutdown to the nation’s public. Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (D, MD) said it:

[T]hey ought to all be fired[.]

Unfortunately, he wasn’t looking in a mirror when he said it.

Turn the rascals out in a year and a month.

Lies of the Democrat

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Or of the proud Progressive who wants to be President.

From the just concluded Benghazi hearing interview of Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, we learned this:

At 11:12 pm on the night of the attack, Sept 11, 2012, Mrs Clinton emailed her daughter Chelsea that, “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al-Qaeda-like group: the Ambassador, whom I handpicked and a young communications officer on temporary duty w[ith] a wife and two young children. Very hard day and I fear more of the same tomorrow.”

And this:

…a State Department summary of Mrs Clinton’s call the next day, Sept 12, with Egypt’s Prime Minister. “We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack—not a protest,” Mrs. Clinton said. The call summary then blocks out a comment by the Egyptian, to which Mrs. Clinton replies, “Your [sic] not kidding. Based on the information we saw today we believe the group that claimed responsibility for this was affiliated with al Qaeda.”

Compare that with her public statements in the immediate aftermath that it was a YouTube video that was responsible, and compare that with her statements on meeting the coffins of the murdered Ambassador and three of those who tried to protect him, repeating her claim that it was a YouTube video that was responsible.

Remember that display of Clintonian…integrity…in a year and a month.

Minimum Wage Laws

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Some empirical data are starting to accumulate. The following graphs are from AEIdeas. The first one shows the apparent impact of Seattle’s minimum wage law, which hiked the minimum to $15/hr, with the first increment to $11/hr taking effect last April. The graph shows restaurant employment in the Seattle Metropolitan Statistical Area and Washington other than the Seattle MSA from 2010 through Sept 2015.RestaurantJobs

There are a couple of things of interest here. One is the headline comparison: Restaurant jobs went up nearly 6% since January (5,800 jobs added to an original value of 87,000 jobs), while the city’s restaurant employment fell those 700 jobs (a drop a skosh under 1%). The other is the trend. Since January, restaurant jobs have risen at a high month-month rate, while Seattle’s restaurant job growth rate has been flat.

There’s another tale in this graph.RestaurantJobsRecessions

The shaded area are recessions. Only one other time since 1990 has Seattle’s restaurant employment fallen outside of a recession. That was in the year leading into the dot-com bust, with Seattle being nearly as techy as California’s Silicon Valley.

Hmm….

Stimulus

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European Central Bank President Mario Draghi has indicated that he intends to expand the EU’s version of quantitative easing as economic stimulus: he’s looking to increase the ECB’s bond-buying program and cut even further the ECB’s already negative deposit rate.

His rationale for this is to boost economic growth in the EU, a growth that has been stunted since the global Panic of 2008.

No, Mr Draghi, adding to a failed program won’t convert it to a success, it’ll compound the failure and make digging out from under it the more expensive.

What you need to do is jawbone the EU governance bodies to do what they need to do: jawbone the sovereign (more or less) EU member nations to do what they need to do. What those governments need to do is to get out of the way of their national economies by cutting government spending and commensurately reducing taxing.

Leaving the people’s money in their hands will let them apply their money to their purposes, not government’s, and they’ll do that with far greater skill than even a well-meaning government can hope to do. Reducing government competition for goods and services by cutting government spending will further expand the reach of that private money left in those private hands.

Now, there’s a stimulus worth applying.

Food Processing Plant!?

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Progressives just can’t stand to see freedom of choice, just can’t stand to have any sort of enterprise not under their regulatory thumb. Case in point: Londonderry, NH, school district. The superintendent of schools pulled the high school out of the Federal government’s National School Lunch Program and to have the school’s cafeteria serve the school’s meals. You know—sort of like school cafeterias used to do before all this government intervention.

Having escaped regulation from the NSLP, though, which sent significant fractions of food served directly from the serving line to the garbage cans, the Department of Agriculture stepped in. Seeing an unregulated enterprise, the DoA has decided the school is a food processing plant—because the cafeteria does what school cafeterias did just find before regulation, it cooks the students’ lunch meals—and it must be regulated like one.

Remember this Progressive Democratic Party regulatory overreach in a year and a month.