Tag Archives: political parties

Some Economic Data

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From the October jobs report as summarized by The Wall Street Journal.

  • 131,000 new jobs
    • exceeded expectations
    • despite some 42,000 jobs lost to the union strike against General Motors
  • upward revisions of 95,000 jobs in August and September
  • job growth averaged 176,000 in the last three months, more than the 167,000/mo for all of 2019
  • overall labor force participation rate rose to 63.3%, which is rising despite baby boom retirements
  • employment ratio for prime-age workers, age 25 to 54, rose to 80.3%, highest since January 2007—since before the Panic of 2008
  • jobless rate for African-Americans fell again to 5.4%
    • new low since records have been kept
    • third successive month at 5.5% or lower so it’s not a statistical anomaly
  • labor participation rate for Hispanic-Americans reached 67.3%, best since September 2010
  • rise in average hourly earnings averaged 3% over last year
  • index of weekly payrolls rose more than 4% over last year, faster still for production and nonsupervisory workers

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), though, says these positive data

offer[] further evidence that the Republicans’ disastrous special interest agenda is hollowing out the middle class while enriching the wealthy and well-connected.

Do we really need someone so disconnected from reality in the people’s House?

Or is it that her impeachment hysteria is clouding her ability to interpret simple economic data?  In which case: do we really need someone whose judgment is so easily confused in the people’s House?

Policing the World

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D, HI) had an interesting campaign advertisement op-ed in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal.  One campaign promise she made in it jumped out at me.

A Gabbard presidency would mean the end of trying to police the world….

Who does Gabbard think would police the world if we don’t? Can she really believe that a police-less world would be benign, or that our enemies won’t divide up the policing among themselves explicitly for their benefit and just as explicitly for our detriment?  Or that their squabbling among themselves over the spoils won’t spill over into serious regional or even global conflict?

Doctorings

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And we have to learn about this from a German newspaper.  Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council functionary in the Trump administration, appeared in Congressman and Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff’s (D, CA) Star Chamber earlier.  Among other things, he claimed, on the matter of asking Ukraine to investigate corruption, including Burisma’s and the Bidens’ possible roles in the corruption,

was “inappropriate.” It “had nothing to do with national security,” he said he told [US Ambassador to the EU Gordon] Sondland.

Because, to this NSC staffer, everything looks like a national security thing.  There couldn’t possibly be any other purpose to a suggestion, like, say, a law enforcement thing, where ordinary corruption might involve American citizens.

But here’s the bit that we have to read about in other nations first because the American NLMSM didn’t want to mention it until Congressman and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D, CA) leaked it from Vindman’s official secret testimony:

He [Vindman] added that he had tried to fill in the word “Burisma” which was omitted from the White House’s rough transcript of the telephone call.

Vindman confessed to trying to doctor the transcript of the call. And we’re supposed to believe his testimony.

Aside: there’s nothing “rough” about the transcript; it is a plain transcript, made from notes taken during the telecon and from notes made immediately after it with the express purpose of producing a transcript. That Vindman had access to it for his attempted doctoring is a demonstration that the transcript was circulated among those present at the telecon to confirm its accuracy. Just like a trial court transcript is agreed by both defense and prosecution/plaintiff council.

Impeachment

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has released her impeachment resolution, and with it she has confirmed the kangaroo court nature of this sham, and from that confirmed that the Progressive-Democrats’ effort is nothing but a continuing smear in their effort to prejudice the 2020 elections.  The resolution can be read here; these are the key highlights.

The resolution, which I expect to be voted up Thursday on strictly partisan lines, will confirm the House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D, CA) and his committee as the lead on the House “inquiry” with Schiff as the sole lead on the process.

Republicans will be able to subpoena witnesses—so long as Schiff agrees.

Republicans will be able to examine and cross-examine witnesses—so long as Schiff approves the questions.

Republicans can see any documents, transcripts, and so on that they wish—so long as Schiff approves the requests.

Republicans can appeal Schiff’s rulings to the Intel Committee as a whole—which has a Progressive-Democrat majority membership.

The Ranking Republican on the committee will get the same amount of time to question witnesses (within the above limits) as the Committee Chairman, but the rest of the Republican committee members will see their time limited relative to the time allotted the Progressive-Democrat members.

There’s more, but these alone eliminate even a veneer of equal access to relevant witnesses.  This resolution is a sham, and nothing more.

Fiscally Sound Socialism

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Richard Rubin posited, in his Wall Street Journal article, some hypotheticals for how Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) might pay for her Medicare-for-All plan. He suggested that one of the ways toward this goal of Medicare-for-All that all the Progressive-Democrats running for President need to do was to

find[] ways to reduce health-care costs

Were Progressive-Democrat candidates serious about this, though, they’d stop conflating health care costs with health care coverage costs, get government out of the way of both industries, and put them both (back) into competitive, free market environments.

Rubin also asked whether

(I) would…support Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Medicare-for-All plan if she presented a fiscally sound option to fund it[.]

The question as phrased is a bit of a non sequitur since it’s virtually impossible for such a thing to be funded in anything remotely approaching a fiscally sound manner.  Leaving that aside, though, no, I would not support her or her “fiscally sound” plan.

Warren’s plan, as with her other plans, are fundamentally socialist. There might—might—be a way to make such a thing fiscally sound, but socialism can never be economically or morally sound.

Socialism can never be economically sound because it caps the performance of the most successful, reducing the incentive to work to one’s potential, and so leads to erosion of output, both individually and in the aggregate across a national economy. Beyond that, socialism puts government in control of production, sales, and purchasing decisions, and government can never be as efficient or as prompt in responding to changing conditions as the totality (or subsets of the total) of private citizens acting on their own needs and wants.

Nor can socialism ever be morally sound. By transferring the responsibility for those production, sales, and purchasing decisions to government and away from the individuals who otherwise would make them, socialism eliminates personal initiative and personal responsibility, indeed, the very concepts of personal initiative and personal responsibility.  Instead of letting men be moral actors in their own right, socialism simply reduces them to wards of the socialist state—which is to say to subjects of the men who populate the socialist state from time to time.