Commentary by James Shott
The number of notable people who behave as if they are endowed with special insight about the environment is an interesting element in the ongoing saga.
The most recent example of this is Secretary of State John Kerry, who fell off the diplomatic wagon and insulted millions of Americans he represents to the world who don’t agree with his narrow view of environmental issues by calling them members of the Flat Earth Society.
Arrogance of this magnitude from a public employee is not unheard of, but arrogance wasn’t Mr. Kerry’s only sin. He expressed the asinine belief that climate change is “the world's largest weapon of mass destruction, perhaps even, the world's most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.”
Tell that to the victims and their families of true terrorism, like the 9-11 attacks and in the Boston Marathon bombing.
President Barack Obama also asserts with absolute certainty that global warming/climate change is “settled science.”
Misters Obama and Kerry are no better than the rest of us non-scientists: they have chosen to believe one side of the argument about global warming, now renamed “climate change,” since the catastrophic warming trend we were warned about ad infinitum unexpectedly disappeared.
Some might expect that President Obama is better informed than everyone else. However, given the number of rather important events that he said he learned about from the media – the IRS abuse of non-profit applicants, the capture of the Boston Marathon bomber – he probably gets his environmental news there, like the rest of us.
But Mr. Kerry’s madness and Mr. Obama’s misplaced certainty aside, real scientists understand and will tell you that science is never settled. There may be general acceptance of a particular theory, but the possibility that someone will come across something that disproves an existing theory always exists.
On that subject Charles Krauthammer – who as a medical doctor has much deeper understanding of the scientific method than either Mr. Obama or Mr. Kerry – offers this example: “Newton’s laws were considered settled for 200 years until a patent clerk [Albert Einstein] in Switzerland turned them over with a single paper in 1903 — and that was pretty settled science. The idea that this is all settled is absurd.”
Saying that science is settled is simply a way to try to suffocate dissent, says columnist George Will. “When a politician, on a subject implicating science – hard science, economic science, social science – says the debate is over, you may be sure of two things: the debate is raging, and he is losing it.”
When scientists say science is settled, they are guilty of the same sin as journalists often are: allowing their political ideology to overpower their integrity and displace professional principles. And scientists often have the added motivation of filthy lucre: federal money to fund their research, totaling $68 billion from 2008 to 2012.
There are lots of scientists, climate scientists and others, who disagree with the manmade climate change theory, but that’s something Mr. Obama won’t learn from the media, because most of the agenda media don’t report much on topics that don’t fit their leftist ideals, like man-caused climate change.
Reality deniers ignore inconvenient evidence and cling to their views. Evidence like the email scandal from November 2009, where emails between International Panel on Climate Change participants suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of information, organized resistance to disclosure, data manipulation, and private admissions of flaws in their public claims, were exposed. A second round of email revelations occurred in 2011.
And the “hockey stick” graph created in 1998 purporting to show a dramatic increase in global temperatures in the 20th century, and was a major piece of evidence supporting manmade global warming. It was created by Penn State University’s Dr. Michael Mann.
The theory has come under suspicion for data manipulation. It is a complex story, but here’s a brief version: The graph relied heavily upon data taken from 252 trees on the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia. It used data from 12 trees that showed a warming trend, while a subset of 34 different trees showed no significant warming. Further, temperatures in the Middle Ages were missing from the Mann data. So, even if there was warming, temperatures from hundreds of years before the industrial revolution were warmer than those in the 20th century.
As a result, several individuals and publications challenged the veracity of the research, and Dr. Mann sued a number of his detractors for libel. However, it appears that the suits will not go forward because Dr. Mann refuses to release the details of his research, which is necessary for him to show the defendants actually defamed him.
These things cry out for attention, but are instead explained away.
Many people don’t know much about science, a point proven by a National Science Foundation study, which shows that one in four Americans believes the sun orbits the Earth, rather than the other way around.
So, many Americans trust scientists and elected officials to tell them the truth about important matters, and when they manipulate data, or sell a particular concept as “settled science,” many believe them anyway.
Cross-posted from Observations
Tampilkan postingan dengan label Big Government. Tampilkan semua postingan
Tampilkan postingan dengan label Big Government. Tampilkan semua postingan
Government is a poor mechanism for correcting societal problems
Commentary by James Shott
Most Americans think that helping truly needy people, whether they live here or in some other country, is a worthy objective. Looking at charitable contributions as a benchmark, Americans are the most generous people in the world, giving $316.23 billion to charitable organizations in 2012, about 2 percent of GDP, according to Charity Navigator, and preliminary figures for 2013 indicate a significant increase to $328 billion.
Double those numbers and it still would not be good enough for the federal government, which believes that if private sources don’t relieve every semblance of suffering for every single suffering American, the government must step in and do the job better.
Except that government can’t do it better, never has, and never will.
Government’s failure to achieve better results than normal people doing what normal people do has never been a deterrent to wasting billions of taxpayers dollars in a futile effort to try one more time to do so.
The most notorious failure was Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” which began 50 years ago in Mr. Johnson’s State of the Union message. From the beginning of the war on poverty until 2013, local, state, and federal spending on welfare programs totaled $16 trillion, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Currently, the United States spends nearly $1 trillion every year to fight poverty.
When the War on Poverty began, 33 million Americans were in poverty and the poverty rate was 19 percent. Today, approximately 46.5 million live in poverty and the poverty rate is 15 percent. Even though the poverty rate is lower than 50 years ago, because our population is much larger now than then, more people are poor today than in 1964. We have fought a long and expensive fight, and lost. Yet we still fight on.
President Barack Obama’s cause du jour is income inequality, and it’s significant other, the minimum wage. And now that “reforming” the best healthcare system in the world is well underway, he wants to declare war against income inequality.
In no free or relatively free economic system can there be income equality, for two reasons. First, inequality is a fundamental part of life. Some people sing better than others. Some are better athletes than others. And some people make more money than others, and that’s because some people are better at their job than others and deserve higher pay, and some jobs require more skill and training than others, and pay better.
So, like poverty, another area that will always exist, we will always have income inequality.
Far more important, however, is whether there is the opportunity to move up from the lower income levels, and that is an area that has been fairly stable, according to The New York Times, which reported last month that “the odds of moving up — or down — the income ladder in the United States have not changed appreciably in the last 20 years….”
That means that people in the lowest quintile are not condemned to stay there, and people in the top quintile are not guaranteed to stay there, and there is substantial movement in and out of all quintiles.
It’s a favored piece of envy politics that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. But the data tell a different story. From 1967 to 2009, the real mean household income increased for every quintile, which means the poor became richer, not poorer. Americans in poverty could afford more goods and services in 2009 than in 1967, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
Other factors, like where people live, have an effect. Harvard University’s Raj Chetty reported “the probability that a child reaches the top quintile of the national income distribution starting from a family in the bottom quintile is 4.4 percent in Charlotte but 12.9 percent in San Jose,” and factors such as better primary schools and greater family stability also aid upward mobility, he wrote.
Larry Kaufmann, senior advisor at Pacific Economics Group, discussed findings of the Pew Charitable Trust, which showed that “Half of children born to parents with bottom-third income levels experience upward relative mobility when the parents remain continuously married; the figure falls to 26 percent when this is not the case,” he wrote.
The Pew study shows that the poverty rate among married couples is only 6 percent, and among married couples who both have full-time jobs the poverty rate is practically zero. The poverty rate among single dads and single moms, however, is much higher: 25 percent for single dads and 31percent for single moms.
Investor’s Business Daily Senior Writer John Merline notes that income inequality has increased faster since Mr. Obama took office than under any of the three previous presidents, and that inequality is now greater than at any time since the Census Bureau started recording it back in 1947.
The message from this is that to assist folks in moving up the income ladder, Mr. Obama should replace his administration’s policies that impede economic recovery, and seriously encourage the restoration of family values among Americans. That would accomplish far more than making people think they are victims, and fomenting division among Americans.
Cross-posted from Observations
Most Americans think that helping truly needy people, whether they live here or in some other country, is a worthy objective. Looking at charitable contributions as a benchmark, Americans are the most generous people in the world, giving $316.23 billion to charitable organizations in 2012, about 2 percent of GDP, according to Charity Navigator, and preliminary figures for 2013 indicate a significant increase to $328 billion.
Double those numbers and it still would not be good enough for the federal government, which believes that if private sources don’t relieve every semblance of suffering for every single suffering American, the government must step in and do the job better.
Except that government can’t do it better, never has, and never will.
Government’s failure to achieve better results than normal people doing what normal people do has never been a deterrent to wasting billions of taxpayers dollars in a futile effort to try one more time to do so.
The most notorious failure was Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” which began 50 years ago in Mr. Johnson’s State of the Union message. From the beginning of the war on poverty until 2013, local, state, and federal spending on welfare programs totaled $16 trillion, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Currently, the United States spends nearly $1 trillion every year to fight poverty.
When the War on Poverty began, 33 million Americans were in poverty and the poverty rate was 19 percent. Today, approximately 46.5 million live in poverty and the poverty rate is 15 percent. Even though the poverty rate is lower than 50 years ago, because our population is much larger now than then, more people are poor today than in 1964. We have fought a long and expensive fight, and lost. Yet we still fight on.
President Barack Obama’s cause du jour is income inequality, and it’s significant other, the minimum wage. And now that “reforming” the best healthcare system in the world is well underway, he wants to declare war against income inequality.
In no free or relatively free economic system can there be income equality, for two reasons. First, inequality is a fundamental part of life. Some people sing better than others. Some are better athletes than others. And some people make more money than others, and that’s because some people are better at their job than others and deserve higher pay, and some jobs require more skill and training than others, and pay better.
So, like poverty, another area that will always exist, we will always have income inequality.
Far more important, however, is whether there is the opportunity to move up from the lower income levels, and that is an area that has been fairly stable, according to The New York Times, which reported last month that “the odds of moving up — or down — the income ladder in the United States have not changed appreciably in the last 20 years….”
That means that people in the lowest quintile are not condemned to stay there, and people in the top quintile are not guaranteed to stay there, and there is substantial movement in and out of all quintiles.
It’s a favored piece of envy politics that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. But the data tell a different story. From 1967 to 2009, the real mean household income increased for every quintile, which means the poor became richer, not poorer. Americans in poverty could afford more goods and services in 2009 than in 1967, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
Other factors, like where people live, have an effect. Harvard University’s Raj Chetty reported “the probability that a child reaches the top quintile of the national income distribution starting from a family in the bottom quintile is 4.4 percent in Charlotte but 12.9 percent in San Jose,” and factors such as better primary schools and greater family stability also aid upward mobility, he wrote.
Larry Kaufmann, senior advisor at Pacific Economics Group, discussed findings of the Pew Charitable Trust, which showed that “Half of children born to parents with bottom-third income levels experience upward relative mobility when the parents remain continuously married; the figure falls to 26 percent when this is not the case,” he wrote.
The Pew study shows that the poverty rate among married couples is only 6 percent, and among married couples who both have full-time jobs the poverty rate is practically zero. The poverty rate among single dads and single moms, however, is much higher: 25 percent for single dads and 31percent for single moms.
Investor’s Business Daily Senior Writer John Merline notes that income inequality has increased faster since Mr. Obama took office than under any of the three previous presidents, and that inequality is now greater than at any time since the Census Bureau started recording it back in 1947.
The message from this is that to assist folks in moving up the income ladder, Mr. Obama should replace his administration’s policies that impede economic recovery, and seriously encourage the restoration of family values among Americans. That would accomplish far more than making people think they are victims, and fomenting division among Americans.
Cross-posted from Observations
Going Rogue, Part X: Americans just don’t properly appreciate the EPA
Americans do not fully appreciate the efforts of government to protect them from a wide variety of threats to their health and safety. This effort occurs to some degree at the more local levels, but the real champion of this grand effort is the federal government.
While many federal agencies contribute to this effort, one goes far beyond the others at trying to keep us safe: the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA.
The EPA is so concerned for the safety and protection of the citizens of the U.S. that it has issued thousands of regulations requiring specific steps be taken to reduce or eliminate actual or potential harm. This agency is so concerned for our welfare that it has even required, under penalty of heavy fines, the use of things that are unavailable.
As part of the Renewable Fuel Standard the EPA required gasoline producers to use cellulosic biofuels, and in its paternalistic effort to keep us safe from threats real and imagined, the EPA fines producers for not using the required quantities of biofuel ingredients, even though those quantities are unavailable.
Not everyone is on board with the EPA’s magnificent efforts on our behalf, such as Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning, whose office is suing the EPA over greenhouse gas standards for new power plants. These standards are, according to the AG and the Senator, “impossible” to meet.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and energy industry groups have jumped on the anti-EPA band wagon by urging the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia last August to strike down a federal rule limiting mercury and other toxic emissions from coal- and oil-fired power plants, saying the Agency used flawed methods to create unachievable emissions standards.
Even the EPA’s fellow federal agency, the State Department, has shocked Americans by daring to disagree with the ideological environmental dogma of the Obama administration.
When the State Department was performing an environmental review of the Keystone XL pipeline project, the EPA intervened. The pipeline project would carry crude oil from Alberta, Canada to refineries in the U.S., which supporters say would provide a big step toward energy independence. The EPA argued, however, that this pipeline should be treated differently than every other pipeline ever constructed in the country.
The State Department’s report found that the project would create nearly 2,000 jobs lasting for two years and would support more than 40,000 jobs, and further finds that the pipeline provides enough positives to negate whatever negatives the EPA believes may result.
Even the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers found reason to criticize the EPA’s zealous efforts to protect us from every conceivable negative influence in our lives. The Boilermakers’ President Emeritus Charles W. Jones states in a commentary on the union’s Web site, “particle and ozone standards will damage the economy without significantly helping the environment.”
The EPA has moved to make ozone and airborne particle standards so strict, in fact, “that former EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus has called them ‘an impossible standard of perfection,’" the commentary continues. “So strict that many U.S. electrical power plants, pulp mills, cement kilns, chemical plants, smelters, and manufacturing plants are expected to close down rather than try to meet them. Thousands of American workers could lose their jobs. So strict that many of the scientists on the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) cannot support them,” Mr. Jones states, citing the effects on his organization’s members.
Thirty-nine Congressional Republicans led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R -KY) are attempting to use a rare legislative tactic to block planned Environmental Protection Agency greenhouse gas standards that would limit the amount of carbon new power plants can emit. The rarely used Congressional Review Act enables the filing of a formal resolution of disapproval that allows Congress to block executive branch regulations that it considers onerous.
Last month, a federal court dealt a serious blow to the EPA's renewable fuels push by ruling that the agency exceeded its authority by mandating refiners use cellulosic biofuels because of their commercial scarcity, a determination that should not require legal action.
It is encouraging to see opposition to the tyranny of the EPA growing, and at last see meaningful opposition coming from Congress. However, the majority of this opposition comes from Republicans, while the timid Democrats mostly sit on their hands, allowing the executive branch to run roughshod over the legislative branch, while their constituents get crushed under the federal boot.
The Democrats simply look the other way, likely because the lead perpetrator of this unconstitutional behavior is one of their own. They ought to think a little (for a change) and realize that someday it may be a Republican in the position to abuse the office, and the Congress.
It is doubtful that any of this will have much of a positive effect on this out-of-control agency, which, because of its ideological blinders and the infection of uncontrolled zealotry that is the hallmark of the Obama administration, ignores the damage its policies and regulations do to the country it is supposed to serve.
Federal government willfully breaches constitutional protections
Commentary by James Shott
On Aug. 16, 2012, Chesterfield County, Virginia police, Secret Service and FBI agents arrived at Brandon Raub’s home, asking to speak with him about his Facebook posts. Mr. Raub, a decorated Marine who has served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, uses his Facebook page like millions of other Americans, to post items and comments, including his political opinions.
Without providing any explanation, levying any charges or reading him his rights, law enforcement officials handcuffed Mr. Raub and transported him to police headquarters, then to John Randolph Medical Center, where he was forcibly detained in a psychiatric ward for a week against his will.
For having the temerity to express his opinions Mr. Raub was kept in custody for an evaluation based on the opinion of one Michael Campbell, a psychotherapist hired by local law enforcement that had never interviewed Mr. Raub, but somehow felt he was capable of determining that the former Marine might be a danger. Psychiatrists at the mental institution, however, found nothing wrong with him.
According to The Rutherford Institute, which is representing the former Marine, in a hearing on Aug. 20 government officials pointed to the Facebook posts as the reason for incarceration. While Mr. Raub stated that the Facebook posts were being read out of context, a Special Justice ordered that he be held up to 30 more days for psychological evaluation and treatment. But Circuit Court Judge Allan Sharrett ordered his immediate release a short time later because the concerns raised by the officers were “so devoid of any factual allegations that it could not be reasonably expected to give rise to a case or controversy.”
When the government’s case came before U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson in Richmond, Va., he dismissed it.
Mr. Raub then sued the officers for taking him into custody without sufficient cause and for his subsequent mistreatment. A request by the offending officers to dismiss the case against them has been rejected.
“Brandon Raub’s case exposes the seedy underbelly of a governmental system that continues to target military veterans for expressing their discontent over America’s rapid transition to a police state,” said John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute.
“While such targeting of veterans and dissidents is problematic enough, for any government official to suggest that they shouldn’t be held accountable for violating a citizen’s rights on the grounds that they were unaware of the Constitution’s prohibitions makes a mockery of our so-called system of representative government. Thankfully, Judge Hudson has recognized this imbalance and ensured that Brandon Raub will get his day in court,” he said.
Judge Hudson has ordered limited discovery allowing Rutherford to demand what information federal and local authorities knew about Mr. Raub before he was detained for a mental evaluation.
The Institute called the decision a victory for free speech and the right to be free from wrongful arrest and presented facts indicating that the involuntary commitment violated Mr. Raub’s rights under the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.
The complaint alleges that the attempt to label Mr. Raub as “mentally ill” and his subsequent involuntary commitment was a pretext designed to silence speech critical of the government.
A Richmond Times-Dispatch story noted: “Much of the information about Raub’s alleged mental condition was developed after his arrest and emergency mental assessment, but [Judge] Hudson notes in the opinion [allowing the suit against law enforcement officials] that “there is no indication that any defendant was aware of the specific contents of (emails and statements Raub was making) before Raub’s arrest."
Attorneys from The Rutherford Institute charge the seizure and detention were the result of a federal government program code-named “Operation Vigilant Eagle” that involves the systematic surveillance of military veterans who express views critical of the government, according to information on the Institute’s Web site.
Of “Operation Vigilant Eagle” the Wall Street Journal reports that “the Federal Bureau of Investigation [in 2009] launched a nationwide operation targeting white supremacists and ‘militia/sovereign-citizen extremist groups,’ including a focus on veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, according to memos sent from bureau headquarters to field offices,” and that “a similar warning was issued … by the Department of Homeland Security.”
So, the FBI and Homeland Security view military veterans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan like white supremacists and extremist groups, and then on flimsy or non-existent evidence, take them into custody and confine them for mental evaluation?
It will be interesting to see how the government and these agents defend their action at trial.
So, the FBI and Homeland Security view military veterans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan like white supremacists and extremist groups, and then on flimsy or non-existent evidence, take them into custody and confine them for mental evaluation?
It will be interesting to see how the government and these agents defend their action at trial.
Many, perhaps most Americans, are well served by state and local law enforcement that behave within the law and respect the privacy and freedom of those they serve until evidence is presented warranting arrest. However, those who initiated and carried out the persecution of Brandon Raub, including the psychotherapist, deserve to be strongly disciplined and perhaps fined and criminally charged for their illegal and unconstitutional behavior, and when the case is resolved, maybe they will be.
Such a resolution would likely get the attention federal officials who improperly unleash the force of government against innocent citizens, and restore respectful treatment of citizens by the government that exists to serve them.
Cross-posted from Observations
Cross-posted from Observations
As the New Year begins, government’s policies are still failing us
Commentary by James Shott
As the economic non-recovery crawls into 2014, the “good news” on the jobs front – that the unemployment rate dropped .3 percent in December to 6.7 percent – is far less impressive when you look beneath the surface.
The reason the unemployment rate dropped was not that a strengthening economy produced a sharply higher number of new jobs, as should be expected in a true recovery. December showed only a puny 74,000 new payroll jobs were added. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) indicates that the drop resulted because five times that many people – 374,000 – became discouraged that they couldn’t find work and dropped out of the labor force.
Adding even a small number like 74,000 to a smaller labor force misleads us into thinking things have improved.
The BLS identifies June of 2009 as the official end of the recession, at which time the labor force participation rate was 65.7 percent (162 million workers). At the end of December, the rate stood at a pitiful 62.8 percent (155 million workers).
Using the size of the labor force in 2009 and the adding back into the equation the 7 million who have dropped out, the unemployment rate is just under 11 percent.
We should not celebrate a drop in the unemployment rate to 6.7 percent when 7 million Americans have given up looking for work because the economy still has not produced jobs for them.
Hopefully, the New Year will bring an infection of fiscal responsibility to our national leaders. It is interesting how liberals see global warming/climate change – a widely popular but unproven theory – as a true crisis, but don’t see years of budget deficits near and above a trillion dollars, and a national debt of nearly $17 trillion, as a problem.
President Barack Obama’s first year in office, 2009, saw a deficit of $1.4 trillion, which gets credited to George W. Bush, but contained the contribution of nearly $200 billion from the Obama stimulus. But over the next four years Mr. Obama racked up more than $4.2 trillion in deficits – FY 2010: $1,294 billion; FY 2011: $1,300 billion; FY 2012: $1,087 billion; FY 2013: $680 billion. This fiscal year the projection is a deficit of $744 billion, and the FY2015 deficit is projected at $577 billion.
To help put this in perspective, The Weekly Standard noted back in November of 2012 that, “According to the White House OMB, we ran up $1.8 trillion in real (inflation-adjusted) deficit spending during fiscal years 1942-45,” and that “we’ve now run up $3.4 trillion in real (inflation-adjusted) deficit spending under Obama — in less time than it took us to fight World War II.”
If there is good news in Obama deficit numbers it is that the deficits are coming down, but real good news would be Congress and the president taking concrete steps to get spending under control.
That seems unlikely, given Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) opinion that “The cupboard is bare. There’s no more cuts to make,” a position gleefully adopted by most, if not all, Congressional Democrats.
In her view there is no waste, fraud or abuse, despite more than ample evidence to the contrary, and there’s no unnecessary spending, either.
Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) issues an annual report on government waste, and in “Wastebook 2013,” he lists 100 examples totaling $30 billion. Heaven only knows the total of all the wasteful spending of the federal government.
* The military has destroyed more than 170 million pounds of useable vehicles and other military equipment, approximately 20 percent of the total U.S. war material in Afghanistan, totaling $7 billion, rather than sell it or ship it home.
* The SuperStop is a $1 million bus stop complete with heated benches and sidewalks, and wireless zones for personal computers. Yet its roof doesn’t protect from the rain, snow, wind or blazing sun.
* One of NASA’s next research missions won’t be exploring an alien planet or distant galaxy. Instead, it is spending $3 million to go to Washington, D.C. and study one of the greatest mysteries in the universe — how Congress works.
* When officials at the Manchester Boston Regional Airport in New Hampshire installed new solar panels costing $3.5 million, they did not anticipate one quarter of them would not be used 18 months later because the reflection from the panels blinds pilots and controllers.
* The Treasury Department’s Inspector General for Tax Administration discovered the IRS paid up to $13.6 billion in false Earned Income Tax Credits in 2012.
* While millions of Americans continue to pay taxes on their hard earned wages, many federal employees are tax cheats, to the tune of $3.6 billion.
* The feds keep the lights on in empty and little used federal buildings, costing $1.5 billion.
* Out of the $33.5 billion in Pell Grants the federal government doled out last year, individuals posing as students took off with $1.2 billion.
When an elected public servant believes there can be no spending cuts in the face of such wanton waste, it speaks volumes about the integrity and motivation of that individual.
Federal spending is a giant problem that we had better address soon.
Cross-posted from Observations
As the economic non-recovery crawls into 2014, the “good news” on the jobs front – that the unemployment rate dropped .3 percent in December to 6.7 percent – is far less impressive when you look beneath the surface.
The reason the unemployment rate dropped was not that a strengthening economy produced a sharply higher number of new jobs, as should be expected in a true recovery. December showed only a puny 74,000 new payroll jobs were added. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) indicates that the drop resulted because five times that many people – 374,000 – became discouraged that they couldn’t find work and dropped out of the labor force.
Adding even a small number like 74,000 to a smaller labor force misleads us into thinking things have improved.
The BLS identifies June of 2009 as the official end of the recession, at which time the labor force participation rate was 65.7 percent (162 million workers). At the end of December, the rate stood at a pitiful 62.8 percent (155 million workers).
Using the size of the labor force in 2009 and the adding back into the equation the 7 million who have dropped out, the unemployment rate is just under 11 percent.
We should not celebrate a drop in the unemployment rate to 6.7 percent when 7 million Americans have given up looking for work because the economy still has not produced jobs for them.
Hopefully, the New Year will bring an infection of fiscal responsibility to our national leaders. It is interesting how liberals see global warming/climate change – a widely popular but unproven theory – as a true crisis, but don’t see years of budget deficits near and above a trillion dollars, and a national debt of nearly $17 trillion, as a problem.
President Barack Obama’s first year in office, 2009, saw a deficit of $1.4 trillion, which gets credited to George W. Bush, but contained the contribution of nearly $200 billion from the Obama stimulus. But over the next four years Mr. Obama racked up more than $4.2 trillion in deficits – FY 2010: $1,294 billion; FY 2011: $1,300 billion; FY 2012: $1,087 billion; FY 2013: $680 billion. This fiscal year the projection is a deficit of $744 billion, and the FY2015 deficit is projected at $577 billion.
To help put this in perspective, The Weekly Standard noted back in November of 2012 that, “According to the White House OMB, we ran up $1.8 trillion in real (inflation-adjusted) deficit spending during fiscal years 1942-45,” and that “we’ve now run up $3.4 trillion in real (inflation-adjusted) deficit spending under Obama — in less time than it took us to fight World War II.”
If there is good news in Obama deficit numbers it is that the deficits are coming down, but real good news would be Congress and the president taking concrete steps to get spending under control.
That seems unlikely, given Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) opinion that “The cupboard is bare. There’s no more cuts to make,” a position gleefully adopted by most, if not all, Congressional Democrats.
In her view there is no waste, fraud or abuse, despite more than ample evidence to the contrary, and there’s no unnecessary spending, either.
Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) issues an annual report on government waste, and in “Wastebook 2013,” he lists 100 examples totaling $30 billion. Heaven only knows the total of all the wasteful spending of the federal government.
* The military has destroyed more than 170 million pounds of useable vehicles and other military equipment, approximately 20 percent of the total U.S. war material in Afghanistan, totaling $7 billion, rather than sell it or ship it home.
* The SuperStop is a $1 million bus stop complete with heated benches and sidewalks, and wireless zones for personal computers. Yet its roof doesn’t protect from the rain, snow, wind or blazing sun.
* One of NASA’s next research missions won’t be exploring an alien planet or distant galaxy. Instead, it is spending $3 million to go to Washington, D.C. and study one of the greatest mysteries in the universe — how Congress works.
* When officials at the Manchester Boston Regional Airport in New Hampshire installed new solar panels costing $3.5 million, they did not anticipate one quarter of them would not be used 18 months later because the reflection from the panels blinds pilots and controllers.
* The Treasury Department’s Inspector General for Tax Administration discovered the IRS paid up to $13.6 billion in false Earned Income Tax Credits in 2012.
* While millions of Americans continue to pay taxes on their hard earned wages, many federal employees are tax cheats, to the tune of $3.6 billion.
* The feds keep the lights on in empty and little used federal buildings, costing $1.5 billion.
* Out of the $33.5 billion in Pell Grants the federal government doled out last year, individuals posing as students took off with $1.2 billion.
When an elected public servant believes there can be no spending cuts in the face of such wanton waste, it speaks volumes about the integrity and motivation of that individual.
Federal spending is a giant problem that we had better address soon.
Cross-posted from Observations
What do minimum wage demographics say about raising the wage?
There has been a lot of uproar in the media lately about raising the minimum wage so that those people earning it would earn a “living wage.” But what do demographics about those earning the minimum wage tell us?
According to the Current Population Survey (CPS), which is a joint effort of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, 3.7 million workers reported earning the minimum wage of $7.25 or less per hour. Now 3.7 million is a lot of people, but when looking at the entire workforce, it’s a small portion – only 2.9 percent. Slightly more than half of them are aged 16 to 24, and 62 percent of that group are students.
Nearly 80 percent of those earning the minimum wage work part-time jobs and belong to families that earn nearly triple the poverty level for a family of four at $65,900 a year, while only 22 percent live at or below the poverty line. Three percent have finished college and obtained a degree, and 5 percent are married.
Many of those aged 25 and older work in jobs where they also earn tips, like restaurant workers, so their total pay most nearly always exceeds the minimum wage. While most do not live in middle- and upper-income families, they also are not living in poverty, having an average family income of $42,500, just less than double the $22,350 poverty line level for a family of four.
Advocates of raising the minimum wage – and many minimum wage earners who respond to the hype those advocates produce – complain that you can’t raise a family or even live a decent life on the minimum wage, so therefore it should be raised to provide a “living wage.”
When you realize that only 3 of every 100 workers earn the minimum wage, the problem doesn’t seem as dire as the advocates for a wage hike want you to believe. And when you look at the kinds of work that minimum wage earners perform, and who minimum wage earners are, it seems even less dire. These jobs require little education or training, and are overwhelmingly held by young people living at home.
Based upon the demographics, there’s no economic reason for a higher minimum wage.
You won’t find trained and educated people like electricians, mechanics, carpenters, plumbers, nurses, pilots or teachers, or lawyers, doctors, CPAs, engineers, and others who have gotten an extensive education and additional training making minimum wage, or anything near it.
But more importantly, the number of minimum wage employees who really need a “living wage” because of family or unusual personal needs is very small, and there are better ways to help them.
Assuming all minimum wage employees worked 20 hours a week, a $2 increase in the minimum wage would cost employers $2,080 a year for each employee, plus increased payroll taxes. For all 3.7 million workers, the increase would cost $7.7 billion a year, plus increased payroll taxes. Those working more than 20 hours a week adds even more costs.
Additional costs arise when those making between the old and new minimums get increases to get them to the new minimum, and when those making close to the new minimum get increases to keep them proportionately higher than the new minimum. The costs would be substantially higher than $7.7 billion. And guess who bears that cost? Employers? No.
Consumers will pay higher prices, producing reduced sales, and those higher prices will also affect those who just got a raise.
A Heritage Foundation research report released last February notes that while many advocates of higher minimum wages suggest a higher wage “to help low-income single parents attempting to survive on just a minimum-wage job … just 4 percent of minimum-wage workers – or 148,000 – are single parents working full-time, compared to 5.6 percent of all U.S. workers.”
To add billions in increased consumer costs to benefit a relative few doesn’t make sense. They need to become qualified for better paying jobs, and if that is difficult or impossible for them, and if government is going to provide welfare, those people should receive help.
“Contrary to what many assume,” the Heritage report notes, “low wages are not [the] primary problem [of the poor], because most poor Americans do not work for the minimum wage. The problem is that most poor Americans do not work at all.”
The faction promoting a higher minimum wage consists primarily of two types of people: those who do not understand or don’t care about the most basic concepts of business economics, and politicians who benefit from pandering to minimum wage earners.
Current government policies are designed for purposes other than to help people escape poverty; therefore government needs to start encouraging job creation so that people in poverty have better opportunities to take control of their own lives and work their way out of poverty.
Returning America to the land of opportunity it used to be, where people were able to go as far in life as they were able, should be President Obama’s major goal.
According to the Current Population Survey (CPS), which is a joint effort of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, 3.7 million workers reported earning the minimum wage of $7.25 or less per hour. Now 3.7 million is a lot of people, but when looking at the entire workforce, it’s a small portion – only 2.9 percent. Slightly more than half of them are aged 16 to 24, and 62 percent of that group are students.
Nearly 80 percent of those earning the minimum wage work part-time jobs and belong to families that earn nearly triple the poverty level for a family of four at $65,900 a year, while only 22 percent live at or below the poverty line. Three percent have finished college and obtained a degree, and 5 percent are married.
Many of those aged 25 and older work in jobs where they also earn tips, like restaurant workers, so their total pay most nearly always exceeds the minimum wage. While most do not live in middle- and upper-income families, they also are not living in poverty, having an average family income of $42,500, just less than double the $22,350 poverty line level for a family of four.
Advocates of raising the minimum wage – and many minimum wage earners who respond to the hype those advocates produce – complain that you can’t raise a family or even live a decent life on the minimum wage, so therefore it should be raised to provide a “living wage.”
When you realize that only 3 of every 100 workers earn the minimum wage, the problem doesn’t seem as dire as the advocates for a wage hike want you to believe. And when you look at the kinds of work that minimum wage earners perform, and who minimum wage earners are, it seems even less dire. These jobs require little education or training, and are overwhelmingly held by young people living at home.
Based upon the demographics, there’s no economic reason for a higher minimum wage.
You won’t find trained and educated people like electricians, mechanics, carpenters, plumbers, nurses, pilots or teachers, or lawyers, doctors, CPAs, engineers, and others who have gotten an extensive education and additional training making minimum wage, or anything near it.
But more importantly, the number of minimum wage employees who really need a “living wage” because of family or unusual personal needs is very small, and there are better ways to help them.
Assuming all minimum wage employees worked 20 hours a week, a $2 increase in the minimum wage would cost employers $2,080 a year for each employee, plus increased payroll taxes. For all 3.7 million workers, the increase would cost $7.7 billion a year, plus increased payroll taxes. Those working more than 20 hours a week adds even more costs.
Additional costs arise when those making between the old and new minimums get increases to get them to the new minimum, and when those making close to the new minimum get increases to keep them proportionately higher than the new minimum. The costs would be substantially higher than $7.7 billion. And guess who bears that cost? Employers? No.
Consumers will pay higher prices, producing reduced sales, and those higher prices will also affect those who just got a raise.
A Heritage Foundation research report released last February notes that while many advocates of higher minimum wages suggest a higher wage “to help low-income single parents attempting to survive on just a minimum-wage job … just 4 percent of minimum-wage workers – or 148,000 – are single parents working full-time, compared to 5.6 percent of all U.S. workers.”
To add billions in increased consumer costs to benefit a relative few doesn’t make sense. They need to become qualified for better paying jobs, and if that is difficult or impossible for them, and if government is going to provide welfare, those people should receive help.
“Contrary to what many assume,” the Heritage report notes, “low wages are not [the] primary problem [of the poor], because most poor Americans do not work for the minimum wage. The problem is that most poor Americans do not work at all.”
The faction promoting a higher minimum wage consists primarily of two types of people: those who do not understand or don’t care about the most basic concepts of business economics, and politicians who benefit from pandering to minimum wage earners.
Current government policies are designed for purposes other than to help people escape poverty; therefore government needs to start encouraging job creation so that people in poverty have better opportunities to take control of their own lives and work their way out of poverty.
Returning America to the land of opportunity it used to be, where people were able to go as far in life as they were able, should be President Obama’s major goal.
Obama and taxing the rich, and another deadly school shooting
Commentary by James H. Shott
Running for reelection in 2012, President Barack Obama claimed, “The rich are not paying their fair share of income taxes.” Playing to the baser instincts of voters is a tried and true technique, and if Mr. Obama does nothing else very well, he is a master at dividing people from one another and creating class discord.
However, so much of what the president says just ain’t so, as we have seen so dramatically and with such terrible consequences with the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Mr. Obama’s signature legislative initiative. He is so closely related to this fiasco and has invested so much political capital in it that the ACA is now routinely called by his name.
However, Mr. Obama’s effort to tar and feather the rich as being stingy taxpayers falls on its face in a new study released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
The CBO study “The Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2010” shows that the top 40 percent of households, as determined by pre-tax income, paid 106.2 percent of the nation’s income tax in 2010.
How can any group of Americans, or even all Americans together, pay more than all of the income taxes received? Read on.
The study also showed that the lowest 40 percent of households paid “negative income tax,” meaning that they paid no federal income tax, but instead received on average $18,950 in government transfer payments. Within this group the CBO said that the lowest fifth of income earners paid an individual income tax rate of minus 9.2 percent, and the second lowest group paid minus 2.3 percent.
Presumably, Mr. Obama would like the “rich” to pay not just “all of the income taxes,” and not just “more than all the income taxes,” but still more than that.
The study shows that the redistribution of wealth that Mr. Obama and his progressive cronies so strongly favor is well underway. But, of course, it still isn’t enough, and won’t be enough until everyone shares equally in the misery, because in their quest for the unachievable goal of financial equality, the progressives will have made it impossible for hard working Americans to enjoy the fruits of their labor, and will dampen the enthusiasm for earning, causing a collapse of the system.
In other news, as the nation observed the passage of one year since the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings that resulted in the death of 20 children and six adults, another school was in the news over an incident involving another young person determined to hurt innocent people.
Upset with the debate team sponsor and librarian at Arapahoe High School in a Denver, Colorado suburb who had disciplined him recently, the high school senior wearing a backpack with three Molotov cocktails inside it, a bandolier and carrying a pump-action shotgun entered the school and headed for the library.
The librarian got a warning and left the building. In this rampage the shooter fired five shots, two randomly down hallways that hit no one, and one more random shot that claimed no victims, but two other shots that each injured one student, one of them critically. He also set off one of the Molotov cocktails in the library that fortunately injured no one. And then he killed himself.
The rampage might have resulted in many more casualties had it not been for the quick response of a deputy sheriff who was working as a school resource officer, Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson told CNN. He praised the deputy’s response as “a critical element to the shooter’s decision” to kill himself, and lauded his response to hearing gunshots. “He went to the thunder,” he said. “He heard the noise of gunshot and, when many would run away from it, he ran toward it to make other people safe.”
A student who had a class with the alleged shooter told The Denver Post that, "He had very strong beliefs about gun laws and stuff." The classmate added that she had heard that he was bullied a lot.
The alleged shooter described himself on Facebook as "Keynesian,” one advocating government monetary and fiscal programs, and also attacked Republicans: "You republicans are so cute," he wrote, and posted an image that read: "The Republican Party: Health Care: Let 'em Die, Climate Change: Let 'em Die, Gun Violence: Let 'em Die, Women's Rights: Let 'em Die, More War: Let 'em Die. Is this really the side you want to be on?"
Two other students told The Post, “He had political views that were ‘outside the mainstream.’”
We must not ignore the message from Sheriff Robinson that he clearly believes the presence of an armed and trained individual at Arapahoe High School, and the shooter’s knowledge of that person’s presence had a positive influence on this situation.
Making schools and other public buildings “gun-free zones” means no opposing force will be there when a criminal carrying a weapon shows up.
As we have seen at Sandy Hook and other places, this is a prescription for carnage and pain, whereas at Arapahoe High School, the county sheriff thinks the presence of an armed resource person prevented even more death, pain and suffering.
Cross-posted from Observations
Do Social Security and Medicare show that Obamacare can be successful?
The loyal defenders of President Barack Obama and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) keep pointing to Social Security and Medicare as examples of successful government programs whenever someone points out that government doesn’t do anything very well. The nearly perfect record of dismal performance in federal programs is a key reason that critics doubt that the massively flawed rollout of health insurance reform lovingly referred to as “Obamacare” will eventually turn into a success.
Liberal commentator Juan Williams proudly notes how “popular” both Social Security and Medicare are, citing them as having received 70 percent support among those asked whether they like the programs or not. But just because lots of people like a given federal program doesn’t mean it is a beneficial or successful program.
It is certainly true that Social Security and Medicare are very popular and proponents vigorously oppose balancing the budgets of the two programs by reducing benefits. But, again, by the “popularity” standard, programs that create dependency like welfare, food stamps, and free cell phones are successes, too.
However, reality paints a far different, and much less rosy picture of Social Security and Medicare.
These programs are not giveaways funded by taxpayers, they are funded primarily by payroll taxes on employers and the employees who benefit from them. Even so, because of mismanagement and a failure to adapt to changes in demographics, both programs are broken and broke, running annual deficits.
This is the typical sort of success we find in “successful” government programs, and we have to wonder if there isn’t a better solution to most problems the government thinks it can solve. And the answer is, “yes, there is.” The private sector can do it better, as evidenced by multitudes of successes over our 230-plus-year history.
What too often happens is that when government sees the private sector not completely solving a problem, it thinks it can do better, and a new federal program is born. But the ultimate result is that the federal government does no better at trying to solve the problem than the private sector, and often does much worse.
In contrast to the self-funding process involving the beneficiaries of Social Security and Medicare, other programs give handouts to both those who need help and to those who really don’t need it, and these recipients pay little or nothing in taxes to support the giveaways.
These programs are rife with waste, fraud, and abuse, because government does not manage them efficiently. You can make a very good argument that government is inherently unable to manage these expansive programs competently.
Giving people money is one of the first priorities of politicians; it’s how they buy popularity, which translates to votes.
But as examples go, Social Security and Medicare, while intended to be self-sustaining without support from general tax revenue, are not examples of good government programs because they have been mismanaged and neglected.
Social Security began running a deficit in 2010, will run a deficit near $75 billion this year and the projected deficit will reach $344 billion in 2035 if something isn’t done. Social Security is beginning to fail in its ability to take care of seniors because government has failed to properly operate the program.
A panel determines Medicare reimbursements, a panel that meets in secret and relies heavily on the recommendations of the American Medical Association. Many doctors already do not treat Medicare patients because the low reimbursements don’t cover costs. Medicare providers have to balance low Medicare payments by shifting lost dollars to insured patients.
So that’s a brief glimpse into Juan Williams’ idea of successful government programs. Is this what the ACA also promises, or will it somehow be different?
Even if we believe the ACA is a good idea, even if it had been competently designed and implemented, and even if we overlook the disgraceful manner in which it was created and jammed through Congress before being read by the Democrats who enacted it, it is still a government program that supposes it will be more effective at running 18 percent of the nation’s economy, and one of the most important personal concerns Americans have, than the private sector.
And now $716 billion will be taken out of Medicare to fund Obamacare, meaning reimbursements and senior care will suffer, or the deficit will increase.
Obamacare attempts to do by force what Republicans attempted to do by choice through initiatives focused on the problem areas of the then-current system, and Democrats opposed and defeated those efforts.
Despite Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ phantasmagoric redefining the fines imposed by Obamacare as taxes, the U.S. Constitution did not intend for, and does not authorize government to commandeer one-sixth of the economy.
Those who think government is the answer to everything need to remember that the only reason there is a government of the United States of America is because the people – remember “of the people, by the people, and for the people?” – created it by assigning government limited powers in certain specific areas.
It is perverse in the extreme for the people now to be controlled by that which they voluntarily created.
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