President Barack Obama said,
[I]f there is even one life that can be saved, then we’ve got an obligation to try.
Having the firearm and magazine of my choice in a successful defense of my family or myself will save at least one life.
By golly, Obama is right.
With the effective date of the Obama sequester, with its defense cuts, approaching, Republicans are starting to waver. Congressman Tom Rooney (R, FL) of the House Armed Services Committee, for instance, now is saying he would rather compromise on taxes than allow the cuts to take effect.
If you were going to hold a gun to my head and say you had to pick one…my constituents would expect us to keep them safe. If it takes closing [tax] loopholes to get there, I would be willing to do that.
A carefully anonymous “senior GOP aide” confirms the growing softness of the Republicans. He’s saying that, with the cuts, Rooney’s position will gain support as more Republicans fold.
Republicans have already foldedcompromised on tax increases in the fiscal cliff negotiations just concluded. More “compromise” means more tax increases.
How, exactly, are Americans kept safe when ever more of their money is taken by the government as taxes, Congressman Rooney?
I also have to ask: has the Republican Party become the RINO Party?
With apologies to William Shakespeare, who knew more about politics and economics than generally is appreciated, here is a possible eulogy if we’re not very careful.
Friends, Americans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury liberty, not to praise it.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with individual liberty. The noble Obama
Hath told you it was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath it answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Obama and the rest—
For Obama is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men—
Come I to speak in liberty’s funeral.
It was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Obama says liberty is ambitious;
And Obama is an honourable man.
It hath brought morality home to America
Whose prosperity did the general coffers fill:
Did this in liberty seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, liberty wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Obama says it was ambitious;
And Obama is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the taxing
Men thrice reduced them,
Whence men did thrice prosper: was this ambition?
Yet Obama says “investment” is less ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Obama spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love liberty once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for it?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with liberty,
And I must pause till it come back to me.
…
But yesterday the word of liberty might
Have stood against the world; now lies it there.
And none so poor to do it reverence.
O masters, if I were disposed to stir
Your hearts and minds to mutiny and rage,
I should do Obama wrong, and Reid wrong,
Who, you all know, are honourable men:
I will not do them wrong; I rather choose
To wrong the dead, to wrong myself and you,
Than I will wrong such honourable men.
But here’s a parchment with the seal of liberty;
I found it in its closet, ’tis its will:
Let but the commons hear this testament—
Which, pardon me, I do not mean to read—
And they would go and kiss dead liberty’s wounds
And dip their napkins in its sacred blood,
Yea, beg a hair of it for memory,
And, dying, mention it within their wills,
Bequeathing it as a rich legacy
Unto their issue.
The Wall Street Journal described one.
The court of the European Free Trade Association on Monday said Iceland didn’t breach European Economic Area directives on deposit guarantees by not compensating UK and Dutch depositors in Landsbanki’s online savings accounts, known as Icesave accounts.
The beef was this:
The EFTA Surveillance Authority, or ESA, which brought the case against Iceland, had claimed that Iceland should have made sure UK and Dutch savers who lost money on Icesave got repaid from deposit insurance.
UK and Dutch authorities compensated their own savers.
The EFTA ruled that EEA directives don’t
lay down an obligation on the State and its authorities to ensure compensation if a deposit guarantee scheme is unable to cope with its obligations in the event of a systemic crisis[.]
And that’s entirely appropriate. A nation’s taxpayers should not be held liable for the failure of foreigners’ investment decisions, whether those failures stem from poor judgment, bad luck, or anything else. A nation’s taxpayers should not be held liable for the failure of its own citizens’ investment decisions, come to that.
Investing is a risk, and it’s the degree of that risk that prices the return on the investment. To destroy that pricing mechanism is both immoral and fiscally unsound.
Charles Duxbury and Charles Forelle do put up an interesting question in their article at the link above.
If deposit-guarantee programs don’t protect everyone, are they really effective? That issue was raised by the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, which joined the case against Iceland. European deposit-guarantee programs, if they have any funds at all, hold a tiny fraction of the insured deposits in the system.
The interest, though, is in the lack of understanding of the nature of insurance and of the distinction between insurance and welfare that the existence of the question exposes. Insurance is a risk-transfer for a fee proposition, and nothing else. The insurer agrees to assume a part of the risk surrounding an event (a decision to place funds with an external agency, in this case), and in return for that assumption, the insured pays the insurer a fee commensurate with the risk being assumed: how much of the value is to be repaid in the event of a loss and the likelihood of that loss. Of course, the fee to be paid varies with that risk. Want more protection—want to be made completely whole in the event of a loss? Pay a higher fee.
Welfare is the function of dinging taxpayers to make whole an individual who suffered a loss, regardless of the amount placed with an external agency (in this case) and regardless of the likelihood of any such loss. Welfare in this sort of case is nothing more than a “I hurt, and you have money—pay me” government-enforced demand.
Can the Progressives in this Congress and White House really be this…lacking in understanding?
The White House had suggested GOP willingness to let sweeping defense cuts take effect was the culprit [for the fourth quarter economic contraction just reported].
However, House Speaker John Boehner (R, OH) spokesman Brendan Buck had this:
These arbitrary, automatic cuts were a creation and demand of the White House in 2011. Twice the House has passed legislation to replace them with common sense cuts and reforms. If there was any uncertainty late last year about the sequester, it was because the Democratic-controlled Senate, per usual, never lifted a finger to pass a plan to replace it.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) chimed in:
…today’s disappointing GDP report [of fourth quarter 2012 contraction] is a direct result of the economic uncertainty created by House Republicans’ strategy of obstruction and manufactured crises.
An exploding deficit, a destructive debt, stagnant and too-high unemployment, and a failed recovery from the Panic of 2008 aren’t crises at all—these are normal. Congressman Sam Graves (R, MO), Chairman of the House Small Business Committee, noted
Is this stunt in economic growth really a surprise? Anti-growth policies and an anti-business White House produce just that—a lack of growth[.]
Congressman Kevin Brady (R, TX), incoming Chairman of the Joint Economic Committee added
The bottom line is that America’s economy continues to struggle primarily due to President Obama’s penchant for political brinkmanship and the pervasive uncertainty caused by his focus on higher taxes, regulation and ObamaCare.
Unfortunately, yes. And that’s to the severe detriment of our country.