Tag Archives: morality

Lies and Gun Control

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The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence released this video, cynically and dishonestly omitting a key phrase from Congressman John Barrow’s (D, GA) campaign ad: “to stop a lynching.”  Here’s Barrow’s original campaign ad.  Play them both to completion, and you can see further cynical editing and distortion of Barrow’s actual position.

Asked about the editing, CSGV spokesman Ladd Everitt said this:

We didn’t have time to run his entire campaign ad[.]

But they did have time to lie.

Here’s another…misleading…claim, this time by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D, CA).

Feinstein points to two studies by criminology professors Chris Koper and Jeff Roth for the National Institute of Justice to back up her contention that the ban reduced crime.  She claims that their first study in 1997 showed that the ban decreased “total gun murders.”

However,

…the authors wrote [about the ’97 study]: “the evidence is not strong enough for us to conclude that there was any meaningful effect (i.e., that the effect was different from zero).”

Moreover,

Messrs. Koper and Roth suggested that after the ban had been in effect for more years it might be possible to find a benefit.  Seven years later, in 2004, they published a follow-up study for the National Institute of Justice with fellow criminologist Dan Woods that concluded, “we cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence.  And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence.”

Never let the truth get in the way of a good yarn, eh?

How very Progressive of these two.

Americans, Deadbeats, and Bills

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President Barack Obama, the other day, announced that we’re a not a nation of deadbeats; we pay our bills.  What are the facts?

Brett Arends, in a recent Wall Street Journal Market Watch article offers some.

Far from paying our bills, the current generation of Americans—or some of them—have set records for default which probably have no parallel in the history of the human race.  During the last five years, US individuals have walked away from a staggering $585 billion in mortgages, credit card debts and other personal loans.  That works out at about $6,000 per household.

And if the numbers are to be believed, there is probably a lot more to come.

For instance,

According to the Federal Reserve, US household debts peaked five years ago at a gigantic $13.8 trillion.  Since then it has declined to $12.9 trillion—a decline of about 7%.  To put that in context, household debts today still exceed those seen at the end of 2006, near the peak of the bubble.  They are three times what they were in 1998.

The outcome includes

The total debt reduction from the peak, says the Fed, is $954 billion.  Loan write-offs [from those “walk aways”], at $585 billion, account for 60% of that.  In other words…in the last five years Americans have walked away from $3 in debt for every $2 they’ve paid off.

Does all of this make us a nation of deadbeats, though?  Let’s look at some more facts.  Arends notes

[T]his has occurred even while the federal government has bailed out bankrupt financial institutions, and flooded the economy with massive deficits, low interest rates and free money to make it all easier.

The policies have altered the incentives to make it easier to walk away from our debts.  But that’s not all there is to it.

Richard Vetter, in a same-day WSJ op-ed, offers some more facts.

From the mid-17th century to the late 20th century, the American economy grew roughly 3.5% a year.  That growth rate has since declined significantly.  When the final figures are in for 2012, the annual rate of real output growth for the first dozen years of this century is likely to be about 1.81%.

What accounts for the slowdown?  An important part of the answer is simple: Americans aren’t working as much today.  And this trend reflects more than the recession and sluggish economy of the past few years.

This chart, covering the last 65 years, illustrates the matter starkly.

Before continuing, a digression is in order.  Recall a couple of the dates Arends mentioned above.  Today’s household debt is greater than it was during the housing bubble peak in 2006.  At that time, we were already well on the way down in workforce participation, yet the Panic was still two years off.  Today’s household debt is three times what it was in 1998.  1998 is the 65-year peak in Americans’ workforce participation.  Fewer people are working today, relatively, than then, and that has nothing to do with our present economic malaise.

Back to the main program.  Vetter asked why fewer Americans are working today (after all, we have to earn an income in order to pay our debts.  Don’t we?).  After all,

[i]f today the country had the same proportion of persons of working age employed as it did in 2000 [the end of the peak in work force participation], the US would have almost 14 million more people contributing to the economy.  [Aside: so much for those 3-5 million jobs Obama’s policies have so proudly saved.]

It comes back to incentives.  The Obama administration’s Progressive policies encourage Americans to not work.  Some of those destructive policies are these:

Food stamps. Above all else, people work to eat.  If the government provides food, then the imperative to work is severely reduced.  [Food stamp program use] has grown considerably, but especially so in the 21st century: There are over 30 million more Americans receiving food stamps today than in 2000.
The sharp rise in food-stamp beneficiaries predated the financial crisis of 2008: From 2000 to 2007, the number of beneficiaries rose from 17.1 million to 26.3 million, according to the Department of Agriculture. That number has leaped to 47.5 million in October 2012.  The average benefit per person jumped in 2009 from $102 to $125 per month.
… But more is going on here.
Compare 2010 with October 2012, the last month for which food-stamp data have been reported. The unemployment rate fell to 7.8% from 9.6%, and real GDP was rising steadily if not vigorously.  Food-stamp usage should have peaked and probably even begun to decline.  Yet the number of recipients rose by 7,223,000.  In a period of falling unemployment and rising output, the number of food-stamp recipients grew nearly 10,000 a day.

Social Security disability payments. The health of Americans has improved, and the decline in the number of relatively dangerous industrial production and mining jobs should have led to a smaller proportion of Americans unable to work because of disability.  Yet the opposite is the case.
Barely three million Americans received work-related disability checks from Social Security in 1990, a number that had changed only modestly in the preceding decade or two.  Since then, the number of people drawing disability checks has soared, passing…6.5 million by 2005, and rising to nearly 8.6 million today.  In a series of papers, David Autor of MIT has shown that the disability program is ineffective, inefficient, and growing at an unsustainable rate.

Pell grants. Paying people to go to college instead of to work is traditionally justified on the grounds that higher education builds “human capital” that is vital for the country’s economic future.  But a study Christopher Denhart, Jonathan Robe and I did for the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (that will be released soon) shows that nearly half of four-year college graduates today work in jobs that the Labor Department has determined do not require a college degree.  For example, over one million “retail sales persons” and 115,000 “janitors and cleaners” are college graduates.
In 2000, fewer than 3.9 million young men and women received Pell Grant awards to attend college.  The number rose one-third, to 5.2 million by 2005, and increased a million more [one-fifth] by 2008.  In the next three years, however, the number grew over 50%, to an estimated 9.7 million.  … The result is fewer people in the work force.  Meanwhile the mismatch grows between the number of college graduates and the jobs that require a college education.

Extended unemployment benefits. Since the 1930s, the unemployment-insurance system has been designed to lend a short-term, temporary helping hand to folks losing their jobs, allowing them some breathing room to look for new positions.  Yet the traditional 26-week benefit has been continuously extended over the past four years—many persons out of work a year or more are still receiving benefits.

We don’t pay our bills.  But we’re not deadbeats, either; Progressive policies have simply altered the incentives.  It’s the rational (if not moral) choice to go the cheaper route—the route that welfare programs and Progressive excusals incentivize—the route of not working, and “walking away” from our debts.  Even bankruptcy itself has lost its moral stigma.  (That failure is on us, though, not our government.)  Obama is right—we’re not a nation of deadbeats.  But he’d like us to become a nation of government dependents for whom the rational, if not moral, choice is continued dependency.  And that makes it tough for us to pay our bills—individually or as a nation.

Some Thoughts on Negotiating with Terrorists

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Rick Richman, writing in Commentary Magazine, has some.  He outlines some of the outcomes of such…negotiations:

  1. the barbaric terror war against Israeli civilians, commenced after the first Israeli offer of a state;
  2. the Palestinian rejection of the Clinton Parameters, after Israel formally accepted them;
  3. the Palestinian failure to carry out even Phase I of the three-phase Roadmap;
  4. the transformation of Gaza into Hamastan after Israel withdrew every settler and soldier
  5. the election of Hamas in 2006 and the Hamas coup in 2007;
  6. two rocket wars from Judenrein Gaza, and the continuing prospect of more;
  7. the year-long negotiation in the Annapolis Process that produced still another offer of a state, from which Abbas walked away;
  8. Abbas’s announcement in 2009 that he would do nothing without a construction freeze, followed by his doing nothing after he got one;
  9. the continual “reconciliation” attempts by Abbas with the terrorist group he promised to dismantle;…
  10. the violation of their express Oslo commitments[.]

Richman summarizes the futility of negotiating with terrorists at the outset of his piece:

…four years of the “Palestinian Terror War (mistakenly called the second intifada),”…disabused Israelis of the idea that the Palestinian leadership wanted a deal, and the fact that Arabs have become ever more candid about their ultimate goal, with Mahmoud Abbas telling Egyptian TV “he would never, in a thousand years, recognize a Jewish state.”

Negotiating with terrorists just gets more innocents killed.  Yet our SecDef nominee wants to “engage” with them, saying that Palestinian terrorists are misguided victims.  Our SecState nominee has said folks like al-Assad and the mullahs of Iran can be negotiated with.

On the other hand, there’s this:

A mouse is trying to argue with owls.  The mouse thinks their ways are wrong.  They think the mouse is dinner.

 

h/t Power Line

More on the Racism of the Left

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Eliana Johnson, in National Review Online, had some remarks about former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s shameful “defense” of current Secretary of Defense nominee, Chuck Hagel.  She starts off by quoting Powell on Hagel’s on “insensitive” remarks about Hagel’s hated “Jewish” lobby:

“That term [“Jewish lobby”] slips out from time to time,” he told NBC‘s David Gregory [Johnson posted the entire interview at the head of her article; however, it’s now labeled “This video is private”]. “So Chuck should have said ‘Israeli lobby,’ not ‘Jewish lobby,’ and perhaps he needs to write on a blackboard a hundred times ‘It is the Israeli lobby.’

Then she notes

Powell’s bizarre defense of Hagel took an even more troubling turn as he decried the “dark vein of intolerance” in some parts of the Republican Party.  In particular, he singled out former Alaska governor Sarah Palin and former New Hampshire governor John Sununu for their racial insensitivity, charging that they “look down on minorities.”  Palin attacked the Obama administration for withholding information on the Benghazi scandal, accusing the president of doing a “shuck and jive”; “That’s a racial-era, slave term,” Powell said.  Sununu slammed the president’s first debate performance against Mitt Romney, calling Obama “lazy and detached”; “Now, it may not mean anything to most Americans, but to those of us who are African-Americans, the second word is ‘shiftless’ and then there’s another word that goes along with it.”

And

One might think that a modicum of self-awareness would prevent Powell from making such charges after flippantly dismissing the concerns raised by many in the Jewish and pro-Israel communities.  Don’t such remarks just—woopsy daisy!—“slip out from time to time?”  And if Powell finds the use of slave-era terminology offensive, one wonders why he has difficulty understanding that, among Jews, the imputation of dual loyalties rankles, even if “it may not mean anything to most Americans.”

Let’s leave aside Powell’s blatant hypocrisy concerning the “slipping out” of terms being minor accidents of phrasing when applied to some groups but are seriously racist when applied to his favored group.

As Powell notes, the terms he’s chosen to find offensive are ancient in their original usage (“racial era, slave”).  Languages, as a man of Powell’s evident intelligence surely knows, evolve, and American English is no different.  Today as Powell also notes, the terms don’t mean much of anything “to most Americans” beyond their actual, dictionary meaning (“lazy,” for instance, simply meaning “unwilling to work” and implying nothing at all to anyone beyond the individual being referenced).  With regard to slang phrases, Powell, as the father of a son and two daughters who were teenagers once, also surely knows slang evolves even faster than its base language (“shuck and jive,” for instance, today means nothing more than being cynically evasive “to most Americans”).

The only reason these terms have any racial overtones at all (and the same applies to the “Jewish” lobby—except I don’t see very many Hebrew-Americans being as strident about “dual loyalty” as Powell is being about his imagined slurs) is because guys like Powell actively seek to keep those overtones alive, for their personal use.  See, for example, the evolution of the colonial slur “Yankee” applied to us by those nasty 18th century Brits.

This is just another example of the Left manufacturing a race problem to mask their inability to form a substantive position in a discussion.

Note: the Gregory-Powell interview’s transcript can be read here (so far), and the video of the interview is at the same location.  Apparently, MSNBC just doesn’t want the material in the hands of those they can’t control.

National Default on the National Debt

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President Barack Obama and his Senators keep saying that House RepublicansCongress must raise the debt ceiling or the US will go into default.  The latest example of this claim came when Obama, through his White House Press Secretary, Jay Carney, said in response to the idea that the administration could simply mint a $1 trillion coin and then spend that,

There are only two options to deal with the debt limit: Congress can pay its bills or it can fail to act and put the nation into default[.]

Here’s what the Constitution says on the matter (you might recall that bit of paper—a document that Progressives insist ought to be scrapped or that already is useless and non-binding; maybe its inconvenient limits on government are why).  From Article I, Section 8, in relevant part:

The Congress shall have Power…to pay the Debts…;

To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;

Thus only the Congress can borrow—or create the conditions for paying what it has borrowed.  The President, as with all laws (nearly all of which, by the way, have his signature on them—he’s actively agreed with them, except in those very rare cases where his veto has been overridden), has only to execute them—here, to spend the money authorized, to collect the taxes authorized, to borrow according to the Congress’ budget and borrowing limit.  He’s Constitutionally, and by his oath of office, required to faithfully execute those laws.

(Incidentally, a later clause in that Section 8 says this:

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof….

Thus, only Congress can mint a $1 trillion coin, not Treasury.)

The 14th Amendment, which some Progressives like to cite as a means for Obama to bypass Congress on the national debt, says in relevant part:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.

Notice that confusing part—it being more than 100 years old—”authorized by law.”  The clause not only says that the US’ debt must be paid—no getting around that—but the only debt that must be paid is that authorized by law—that budget thing (from an even older and apparently even more confusing part of the Constitution), which must be passed by Congress and signed by the President or his veto overridden.  The president cannot (not may not—cannot) create debt on his own recognizance.

On the first part above, then, Obama has it right—Congress can agree to continue spending and borrowing, or it can decide not to act (or anywhere between the two extremes: cut spending enough to fit it into current revenues, thereby eliminating the deficit and stopping the growth in borrowing altogether, or cut spending to fit within projected revenues and raise the debt ceiling somewhat, with a view to gradually reducing spending, eliminating the deficit over time, and ultimately stopping the growth in borrowing altogether, for example).

What are the practicalities of the matter?  Say the debt ceiling is not raised; what results?

The interest on our current national debt (some $16+ trillion at the end of 2012, an explosion of 60% in Obama’s first four years) ran to $220 billion.  Total revenue collected from various tax sources (including payroll taxes for Social Security, et al.,) by the Federal government was $2.5 trillion—a shade over 10x those interest payments.

In short, there is no risk of default from Congressional inaction.  There is plenty of money with which to pay the interest, thereby keeping our debt current and not in default.  There’s plenty of money with which to roll existing debt that’s coming due—essentially to refinance by paying off that old debt with new borrowing—within the current debt ceiling.  This is the same as us refinancing our homes, which we must do within our own debt ceilings, values our lenders determine based on our credit rating.  There’s even plenty of money with which to begin in aggregate paying down that debt, reducing it below those $16 trillion, and to reduce it further in subsequent years.

Thus, if Congress declines to raise the debt ceiling at all, there would be spending cuts, but no default.  Federal spending in 2012 ran to $3.7 trillion, rather more than those $2.5 trillion in collections.  Progressive (and Conservative) favored programs would be drastically curtailed.  Welfare programs like food stamps, subsidies for “green” energy companies, farm price supports, and the like would be severely curtailed.  Entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid transfers to the States would be greatly circumscribed.  Withal, no default, and not even very many existing programs eliminated.

However, if Obama and his Senators truly are concerned about “not paying for our spending on the backs of our seniors and the middle class” (and the poor—that group these Progressives have been ignoring right along), they’ll get serious about spending cuts, the deficit, and the debt.  The cuts then could occur in a deliberate, controlled manner, across programs about which Conservatives and Progressives compromise on curtailing.

Obama and his Senators know what the Constitutionally mandated priorities are.  They simply are lying when they make their claim of debt default, and the NLMSM are complicit in the claim’s spread.  What these Progressives really mean is that, absent a debt ceiling increase, they will default on their vote buying promises.  And that terrifies them, since among those to whom they “owe” their vig are unions.