Category Archives: morality

Americans Are Just Too Stupid

Posted on by
Reply

That’s what Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama is telling us.  We’re too stupid to manage our own fiscal affairs, so we need Know Betters in Big Government to do for us.

He’s using this argument on Social Security, in particular.  As you know, Social Security will be out of money in just a few short years, dependent solely on cash flow—incoming payroll tax revenue from current workers—to pay current retirees, and that cash flow is only sufficient (barely) to pay around 75% of the current benefits.  That’s how well the Know Betters in Big Government have done for us so far.

Obama’s solution? He promises to fight the privatization of Medicare and Social Security:

We’re going to keep the promise of Social Security by taking the responsible steps to strengthen it.  And that’s not by turning it over to Wall Street.

There are two insults to our intelligence here.  One is that he actually thinks we believe that any plan to privatize either of these does so by “turning them over to Wall Street.”  The other is, as I said, that we cannot manage our own affairs—we must rely on Know Betters to take care of us.

Now, before going further into Obama’s contempt for our intelligence, it’s useful to summarize the actual plans put forward by the Republican ticket and thereby expose the dishonestly presented red herring that is Obama’s straw man.  With regard to Social Security itself, Romney/Ryan are looking to gradually increase the retirement age and to slow the growth in benefits for higher income future retirees—the changes would not affect current or medium-term future (those already 55 years old) retirees.

For the Medicare aspect of the Social Security system, they propose fixed payments to future retirees (i.e., those younger than 55; there would be no change here, either, for current or medium-term future retirees), initially set equal to current Medicare payouts.  These folks then could use these funds to shop around for their own health insurance coverage and keep the money they save if they buy a policy that costs less than these payments.  The resulting competition also will bring down the cost of such coverage and improve the quality of the policies offered (magnifying future savings) since these folks, now with skin in the game, will shop aggressively.  Or they could stay in the existing Medicare program, which would remain unchanged.

There’s very little privatization here; certainly, there’s not enough to suit me.

But why does Obama object even to this little bit?  After all, private accounts (to take an earlier suggestion from Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan, but which is not in the proposal actually on the table today), created from a diversion of one-third of a worker’s current payroll tax payment, would let these workers earn a greater rate of return on those tax payments than Social Security provides them.  This would achieve a number of things: for one, it would give the workers a considerable measure of responsibility for their own futures, and this would let them shop around for the best investments—driving costs down through competition.  For another, it would let those workers set aside money for their own future (and ultimately for their own families’ future) and not have it all diverted for the current retirement of utter strangers.  For a third, it would allow these workers to satisfy their own moral obligation to “seek their own happiness” and to not be burdens on strangers, except temporarily and in the most dire conditions.

Opponents—Obama—object to this individual responsibility and freedom.   He says private accounts would make then-retirees dependent on volatile stock and bond markets.  And the move to private accounts would incur large transition costs, because tax payments diverted to the accounts are needed to pay benefits for current retirees.

The last is just a crude sophistry.  Transition costs are, by their nature, temporary—they are not permanent like, for instance, the cost of a failed, bankrupt social security system.  Moreover, the transition costs, while large (every dishonesty has a measure of truth in it, in order to achieve an appearance of plausibility) actually are easily borne.  A flatter (I say flat) and broader-based income tax system will bring in more revenue for the government through that broader base, fewer (I say no) deductions, credits, and the like, and through sharply increased economic activity which will generate increased income to be taxed.  This excess [sic] revenue can be used both to cover the transition costs and to pay down the debt (and exclusively to pay that debt once the transition is complete).

But more than this, a population that isn’t beholden to—isn’t dependent on—the incumbents aren’t a power base for those incumbents.  Obama’s Social Security and Medicare plans are just crass bread and circus vote pandering.  And they won’t solve the impending failures of Social Security and Medicare.

But Obama thinks we’re just too stupid.  Too stupid to manage our own affairs and too stupid to see through his empty rhetoric to the lie underneath.

Factual Errors

Posted on by
Reply

Democratic Vice Presidential Candidate Joe Biden had a stirring speech at last Thursday’s Democratic Party convention, touting his running mate’s strong nerves in dealing with our economy.  And it was full of…errors.  Fox News‘ Elizabeth MacDonald has a scorecard; here’s just one item, though.

On the Auto Bailout: “Conviction. Resolve. Barack Obama. That’s what saved the automobile industry.”

Rebuttal: And lots of taxpayer money, $80 billion  to start. GM and its financing arm still owes  US taxpayers $25.1 billion, and taxpayers still own just under a third of GM, or 500 million shares, which remain underwater.  The stock must trade at around $53 a share for taxpayers to breakeven; they currently trade at around $21.  This past August, the Treasury Dept. revised higher the cost of the auto bailout by $3.4 billion, up from the prior estimate of $21.7 billion, an old estimate that had been revised higher over the past year.  GM continues to struggle, as the White House has pressured it to manufacture fuel efficient Chevy Volts, a line of cars GM has pulled the plug on.

Not mentioned in the Vice President’s speech, either, was the Administration’s pressure to pull the plug on car dealerships.  The Obama Administration pressured GM and Chrysler to halt relations with about 2,200 dealers—each one with roughly 50 employees.  That equals to about 110,000 jobs lost.

Notice that careful elision.  That’s 110,000 jobs, wholly unrelated to GM’s bad leadership, that steely-eyed Obama tossed into the can.  Because Big Government knows better than private enterprise—even one like GM—how that private enterprise should run its business.

RTWT.

Politics and Israeli Security

Posted on by
Reply

The Washington Examiner‘s Philip Klein reported last Monday that Democratic National Committee Chairwoman and Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D, FL) said to a training session for Jewish Democrats just before the Democratic Party Convention,

We know, and I’ve heard no less than Ambassador Michael Oren say this, that what the Republicans are doing is dangerous for Israel.  They’re undermining Israel’s security….

Wasserman Schultz denied this, saying her remarks were “deliberately” misrepresented.  She insisted, through an unnamed spokesman, that what she really said was this:

What jeopardizes Israel’s security is the suggestion, for partisan political gain, that the election of either political party would weaken the long-standing relationship of the United States and Israel….

(In response to her denial, Klein posted the audio of Wasserman Schultz’ remark.)

Then we have the 2012 Democratic Party Platform saying this about Israel: no mention of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, which is a radical change from 2008 where the DNC acknowledged Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.  And party’s 2012 platform says this about Iran:

President Obama believes that a diplomatic outcome remains the best and most enduring solution.

At the same time, he has also made clear that the window for diplomacy will not remain open indefinitely and that all options—including military force—remain on the table[.]

This is another radical walk-back from their 2008 platform, which said

The world must prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

When questioned about these changes, Wasserman Schultz’ DNC said this in its responding statement:

This is just another attempt by the Romney campaign to turn our support for Israel—which has always been bipartisan—into a partisan wedge issue by playing politics. This is both cynical and counter-productive to Israel’s security.

Hmm….

The Progressives once again ask us to choose between them and our lying eyes.

Update:  On Wednesday, in response to an enormous public outcry over this abandonment of Israel by the Democratic Party, the Democrats altered their rules for their platform content, and they reinserted language averring Jerusalem to be the Israeli capital.  Language concerning a nuclear Iran remains missing.

This is naked vote pandering.  The Democrats told the truth about themselves the first time.

“How Democrats Made America Exceptional”

Posted on by
Reply

Indeed.  But not in a good way.  Alan Colmes has an op-ed of this title in The Wall Street Journal; let’s look at some of his claims.

Conservatives blast the left for not appreciating “American exceptionalism”—even though Barack Obama is the only president to have ever used that phrase, at least in the past eight decades or so.

Which Democratic Presidential Candidate Obama did pejoratively:

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.

Sure.  Our exceptionalism is just one among 20.  Or 192.  But this is a minor quibble.

Here’s the important stuff.  Here’s Social Security, for example.

Roosevelt created Social Security [wrote Colmes], a program that today keeps 40% of seniors above the poverty line and helps families with disabilities and those who have lost loved ones.

FDR did this at a time when there were seven American workers for every retiree, and the retirees had a life expectancy of five years in retirement.  Moreover, FDR designed it as a supplemental income program, with the retirees still expected to look to their families for any additional support needed.  Today, Social Security has three workers for every retiree, and the retirees have a life expectancy of fifteen years in retirement.  And today’s family man is taxed for the current retirement support of utter strangers.  He’s not allowed to set that money aside for his own retired parents in particular, or for his own future retirement.  Under these demographic facts, Colmes objects to redesigning Social Security, so that the promise of a safety net can be kept—if under different guise.

[Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan] wants to dismantle that same Social Security program.

No, let’s just leave it alone, and let it fail completely.

Food stamps.  Ah, yes.

Today the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps, feeds one in seven Americans. The program was established in 1939 by FDR’s then Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace.  Recipients are not all lazy bums sitting on their posteriors….

The only ones talking about food stamp recipients being lazy are Progressives trying to distract by denying a charge that isn’t being made.

More importantly, though, Colmes actually recites that food stamp dependency ratio like it’s a good thing that government policies have reduced 15% of Americans to such straits.  But why do we have a food stamp program at all?  FDR, via the National Labor Relations Act, put a floor under the wages employers were allowed to pay—at the height of the Depression, with 20+% unemployment—thus making it too expensive for employers to hire.  On top of this, he put a floor, with his Agricultural Adjustment Acts, under the price of food at which farmers could sell, ensuring that all of those out of work Americans—too many now unemployable by law—could not afford their daily bread.  Enter FDR’s food stamps, in an attempt to enable the artificially priced out of work to buy their food at those artificially inflated prices.  And those CCC and WPA programs of which Colmes is so proud?  Well-intentioned, to be sure.  But they worked in concert with FDR’s price and wage floors to crowd out the private employers that otherwise would have done the hiring—with the private economy’s far greater impact.  Indeed, these New Deal policies, far from providing relief from the impact of the Depression, prolonged it.

“Reproductive rights.”  Colmes has this to say:

The fight for women’s rights continues, as regressives try to put an end to already-established reproductive rights. Even if you don’t believe that 98% of Catholic women have used birth control, as a 2011 Guttmacher Institute study showed, the overwhelming majority has[.]

and

If Messrs. Romney and Ryan have their way, reproductive rights would be overturned and millions of Americans denied health-care coverage.

Here Colmes is cynically conflating the right to choose to have children—or not—with insurance coverage for the birth control mechanisms and abortifacients that facilitate that choice.  And he insists that it’s OK to force people or their religious institutions to pay for these even when it goes against their religious beliefs.  The fact that so many of us are sinners, anyway, somehow excuses this.  More, Colmes conflates objection to being forced to pay for something that violates one’s conscience with denial of availability altogether.  This is just more cynicism.  There’s nothing wrong with birth control for those who want it.  Insurance policies even exist that cover the incredibly cheap contraceptives as well as the abortifacients.  The problem is when the user is, by law, allowed to force others to pay for her contraceptives, her abortifacients, instead of buying them with her own money.

Colmes’ Progressives want the wrong type of exceptionalism for America.  They don’t want the old, foundational exceptionalism of self-reliance, individual responsibility, and a limited government that recognizes both the fundamental wisdom of Americans and that it has no standing to do for us for our own good.  They want Big Government acting in our stead.

Another Thought on Government

Posted on by
Reply

One line from Michelle Obama’s speech on the opening day of the just concluded Democratic Party’s convention jumped out at me, and it did so because it epitomizes the difference between Progressive and Conservative views of government and responsibility.

[W]hen you’ve worked hard, and done well, and walked through that doorway of opportunity, you do not slam it shut behind you.  You reach back and you give other folks the same chances that helped you succeed.

Indeed, conservatives not only believe this, we live it.  Arthur Brooks, the author of Who Really Cares, says:

[W]hen you look at the data, it turns out the conservatives give about 30 percent more.  And incidentally, conservative-headed families make slightly less [6% less] money.

and

…conservatives are 18 percent more likely to donate blood.

Here are some more numbers from Brooks, via George Will:

In the 10 reddest states [in 2004], in which Bush got more than 60 percent majorities, the average percentage of personal income donated to charity was 3.5. Residents of the bluest states, which gave Bush less than 40 percent, donated just 1.9 percent.

There are notable exceptions to this.  The Clintons and Obamas, on the other hand, gave significant per centages of their income to charity.  But these exceptions demonstrate the truth in the data.

Conservatives already are, as a matter of course, reaching back and helping others.  We’re reaching sideways and helping others with current problems, too.  And we reach forward—we pay it forward [emphasis added]:

…lower income people give more [than those better off] because they think they are more likely to need charity or know someone who needs charity.

We don’t need government to force us to do our duty.  We don’t need government to dictate to us what our charities will be, or the mechanisms by which we will help.

Progressives, though, do need government to prod them, apparently, as they project this shortcoming of theirs onto all Americans.  From Brooks (Will), again [emphasis in the Will cite]:

People who reject the idea that “government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality” give an average of four times more than people who accept that proposition.

Mrs Obama was, in fact, preaching to the choir.  She was just in the wrong church.