Monthly Archives: December 2017

When I Get Around to It

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Senator Al Franken (D, MN) announced on the Senate floor—where, among other things, nothing he said would be actionable in a court of law—that he would resign from the Senate as a result of the plethora of women’s accusations of him sexually abusing and assaulting them.

When will he resign?  When he feels like it (my words).  In the coming weeks (his words).

Franken also said he appreciated the

irony that I am leaving while a man who bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval Office, and a man who preyed on young girls runs for Senate with the full support of his party

With a couple minor details that give the lie to everything Franken says.  We have hard evidence of Franken’s assaults, and we have his confessions, and we have in his own words what he thinks about his own apologies.  What we have on Franken’s tape is Trump’s bragging about the ability to assault women, not about any actual assaults.  Franken knows this.  Franken also knows full well that Ray Moore, the candidate he was afraid to name, has been accused, but there’s no evidence of wrong-doing—only the unseemliness of a 30-year-old man dating teenaged girls, after first asking and receiving the parents’ permission.

The Progressive-Democratic Party members of the Senate (and of the House, come to that) know this, full well, too.  We’ll see in short order how soon or far away that Party’s leadership thinks “in the coming weeks” should really be.

The Fed’s Interest Rates

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In a Letter to the Editor in a recent Wall Street Journal, was this remark:

[A] major reason for doing this [artificially suppressing interest rates] is an attempt to raise inflation to their sacrosanct 2% level.

Interest rates are inherently inflationary, since they raise the cost of money. If the Fed were serious, they’d set their benchmark rates at levels historically consistent with 2% inflation, and then they’d sit down and shut up.

One factor keeping the Fed interfering, though, is universal to all bureaucracies—the bureaucrats can’t sit down and shut up, they think they have to be constantly doing or yapping.

Sometimes it’s necessary to clean out the whole rat’s nest, not just go through the motions with scheduled rotations of the political appointees at the top.

Minimum Wage in San Francisco

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City Supervisor Jane Kim, in a recent Letter to the Wall Street Journal Editor sang huzzahs for the city’s $15/hr minimum wage and touted a tax on robots that were replacing those low-skilled workers priced out of the labor market by that minimum wage.

The minimum wage isn’t a pathway to the middle class; it is a safety net to prevent destitution.

And

[A] “robot tax” is a practical way to smooth the transitions caused by automation….

She’s wrong.

I’m sure the robots and kiosks that are replacing those low-skilled workers appreciate being saved from destitution.

However, a true safety net would be a vasty reduction in San Francisco’s runaway regulatory regime and usurious tax scheme.  Then one of the most expensive cities in the nation could become affordable for the low-skilled and other poor.

Instead, the Supervisor wants to tax those robots and reduce them to similar jobless poverty.

Confirmation

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…of Palestinian lack of interest in peace with Israel.  Here’s Hamas Politburo Chief, Ismail Haniyeh:

We should call for and we should work on launching an intifada in the face of the Zionist enemy. …  We want the uprising to last and continue to let Trump and the occupation regret this decision.

And

…10 Palestinians were arrested in East Jerusalem overnight after Molotov cocktails were thrown.

Notice that: this isn’t just protestation of a decision with which the Palestinians disagree.  This is deliberately violent protest.  The decision with which these terrorists disagree is nothing more, in their minds, than an excuse to murder Israelis.

Why Not All of Them?

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President Donald Trump wants Congress—which is to say, Republicans, since the Progressive-Democrats in Congress want nothing to do with any Trump or Republican generally proposal—to take up welfare reform as the next major Government revamp after tax reform goes through (assuming, of course, a few Republican ego-riven snowflakes don’t blow that up).  However, Louise Radnofsky, who wrote the WSJ piece at the link, seems not to understand the scope of the problem.  Commenting on a speech concerning the matter that Trump gave in Missouri a bit ago, Radnofsky wrote this:

The president didn’t offer specifics about which of the dozens of welfare programs he was seeking to change….

How about all of them, Madam?

As Trump put it in that speech,

I know people that work three jobs and they live next to somebody who doesn’t work at all.  And the person who is not working at all and has no intention of working at all is making more money and doing better than the person that’s working his and her ass off….

Now, it’s certainly true that there are welfare queens who are too lazy or too greedy to do actual work when they can get OPM for free.  They’re a small majority, though; most folks have enough self respect to want to work for their living and earn their way.  However, it far too often makes no economic sense whatsoever for them to do so.

Too many folks are trapped in the Progressive-Democrat welfare cage because they don’t have the skill sets needed to get jobs that pay as well as their aggregated welfare checks—and those that would work anyway are steadily being priced out of the low-skill jobs they would take by spreading minimum wage laws that require employers to pay more than the work available is worth.

Then there’s the welfare cliff.  Far too often, getting a job or a better job than the one currently held, or even simply accepting a pay raise, would put the person into a high(er) income bracket that would result in a cut in welfare payments greater than the value of the job, the better job, or the pay raise.  This net reduction in income would be lunacy, except for its effect on keeping folks trapped and voting for the politicians who control the handouts.

Reform all of the welfare programs, reform our welfare system as a system, and reform it extensively.  Go down, Trump and Congress, and let these people go.