Archive for the ‘Economics’ Category
Barack…You’re 30% Right, but 100% Wrong!
“90 percent of this game is mental, the other half is physical”—Yogi Berra Like the fuzzy-math Team Obama uses to tell us that so many millions of jobs have been “saved or created” due to stimulus funds. Like the strange logic it uses to describe how appeasement and apologies lead to a sound foreign policy and like the show of “Noble Arrogance” it displays when telling American citizens “you just don’t understand things as well as we do…let us explain them to you because we know what’s best for you”, last night’s “you ain’t gettin’ the keys to the car back” comments by His Lordship Obama do not coincide with reality very well.
Posted in It’s really about controlling our lives
“Low carbon fuel standards” mean higher costs, few environmental benefits and less liberty
by Paul Driessen
Within days, Majority Leader Harry Reid intends to bring sweeping energy and climate legislation to the Senate floor. He won't call it cap-and-trade or cap-tax-and-trade, and certainly not a carbon tax.
“Those words are not in my vocabulary,” he says. “We’re going to work on pollution.”
Senator Reid’s twenty-pound bill will be laden with lofty language about “clean energy,” energy conservation, “green jobs,” reducing “dangerous” power plant emissions, ending our “addiction” to oil, creating a renewable economy, and saving the planet from “imminent climate disaster.”
Environmental euphemisms aside, however, the legislation is really about imposing national “low carbon fuel standards” (LCFS) and forcing dramatic reductions in the use of oil, natural gas and especially coal. It would expand on existing laws, regulations and decrees, like the Environmental Protection Agency’s ruling that carbon dioxide somehow “endangers human health and welfare,” EPA’s June 30 invalidation of flexible air quality permits for Texas refineries, Interior Secretary Salazar’s offshore drilling moratorium, multiple state and federal renewable energy standards and mandates, and various state and regional “greenhouse gas initiatives” that restrict emissions from power plants and industrial facilities.
The Battle Of The Ages — Words And Language Versus Thoughts And Ideas
Political language is designed to be deceptive. People need to do a better job of "looking past" the words and try to get to the ideas that the words represent. The words, themselves, are often designed to hide the real meaning.
Thoughts and ideas are expressed with words and language but there is too much meaning placed on the words and not enough exploration of the ideas that the words represent. If the words sound good, if they are soothing words that make people feel good about themselves then people are unlikely to explore the real meaning. Call it intellectual laziness; this conflict is the dictator's best friend.
Joseph Goebbels is known for having said "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." The rest of that quote is lesser known. He continued "The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."
The right to choose – for farmers in Haiti
Anti-corporate activists pervert “social justice” and perpetuate poverty in Haiti
by Paul Driessen
The Monsanto Company is learning a valuable lesson in Haiti: no good deed goes unpunished at the hands of radical anti-corporate elements of Western society.
Like so many other concerned citizens, Monsanto responded to the tragic January 12 earthquake that further devastated this impoverished country. It worked for months with Haiti’s Agricultural Ministry to select seeds best suited to local climates, needs and practices, and to handle the donation so as to support, rather than undermine, the country’s agricultural and economic infrastructure.
From Monsanto’s extensive inventory, they jointly chose conventionally bred hybrid (not biotech / genetically modified / GM) varieties of field corn and seven vegetables: cabbage, carrots, eggplants, onions, tomatoes, spinach and melons. Instead of giving the seeds to farmers, the company worked with the USAID-funded WINNER program, to donate the seeds to stores owned and managed by Haitian farmer associations. The 475 tons of hybrid seeds will then be sold to many thousands of farmers at steep discounts, and all revenues will be reinvested in local agriculture.
Other companies and donors are providing fertilizers, insecticide and herbicides that will likewise be sold at a discount. The companies, Agricultural Ministry, farmers associations and other experts will also provide technical advice and assistance – much as the USDA’s Cooperative Extension System does – on how, when and whether to use the various hybrids, fertilizers, and weed and insect-control chemicals.
The goal is simple. Help get the country and its farmers back on their feet, improve farming practices, crop yields and nutrition levels, and increase incomes and living standards.
The reaction of anti-corporate activists was instantaneous, intense, perverse, patronizing and hypocritical. Monsanto wants to turn Haiti back into “a slave colony,” ranted Organic Consumers Association founder Ronnie Cummins. Hybrid and GM seeds will destroy our diversity, small-farmer agriculture and “what is left of our environment,” raged Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, leader of the Peasant Movement of Papaye.
Other self-anointed “peasant representatives” waded in. The seeds are genetically modified and “will exterminate our people.” Farmers won’t be able to afford the seeds or feed their children. The fertilizers are carcinogenic. Fungicides on the seeds are toxic poisons. “Seeds are the patrimony of humanity.” We support “food and seed sovereignty.” Traditional seeds and farming practices “provide stable employment” for the 70% of Haitians who are small farmers. And of course, “Down with Monsanto.”
Various U.S. churches and foundations chimed in. “Spontaneous” protests were organized in several Haitian and American cities. At one, hundreds of marchers wore identical shirts and hats, which even at a combined value of just $5 represented two weeks’ income for average Haitian farmers: 40 cents a day. One wonders how many would have shown up without these inducements.
Wrong Again
By Thomas E. Brewton
Senator Charles Schumer is either an economic ignoramus, or he is just performing the usual Democrat/Socialist Party obeisance to the welfare state and labor union extortion.
New York's Senator Charles Schumer wants to impose a punitive tax on all American companies that employ overseas call centers for customer support.
"English speaking workers, whether they are in Indonesia, Canada, the Philippines, South Africa, are willing to work longer hours for lower wages and as a result Americans lose their jobs," Schumer said.
How will job creation be improved in the United States by raising businesses' costs? Will businesses be more able to compete in global markets and protect jobs in the United States? How will consumers be helped when businesses have to raise their prices to cover the new taxes and related costs?
More fundamentally, Senator Schumer has the causation backwards.Jobs outsourcing would not have become a problem without the Democrat/Socialist Party's socialist welfare state. Americans don't lose jobs to outsourcing because foreign workers have lower wages.
We lose them because the political welfare state and socialist labor unions have driven the total cost of labor in the United States completely out of line with the rest of the world. The demise of our auto industry is the most egregious recent example.
The Limitations of Econometric Computer Models
By Thomas E. Brewton
Computer models were the tools employed to inflate the subprime mortgage balloon that precipitated collapse of our financial markets. And the same sorts of inherently faulty computer models are generating proclamations that President Obama’s near-trillion-dollar stimulus and mortgage protection programs will create millions of new jobs and restore the economy to prosperity.
The old saw is “garbage in; garbage out.” When the computer model is too complex and attempts to cover too wide a scope, its output is worse than useless; disaster is just around the corner.
Econometric computer models were at the root of the 1998 collapse of John Meriwether’s hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTC). That event led the Federal Reserve to pull out all the stops and flood the market with liquidity to prevent a possible world-wide financial meltdown. Long-Term Capital Management had too many huge financial commitments to and from the world’s major financial institutions. Allowing it to fail, so the Fed thought, would risk system-wide disaster.
Mr. Meriwether’s computer models had built in all of the assumptions of risks that humans then could foresee in constructing very complex trades involving very complex financial instruments. He and his colleagues were as intelligent and as well informed as any group of securities traders in the world. They were former “masters of the universe” at Salomon Brothers, when in the 1980s it was the world’s largest non-governmental trader of securities. And Mr. Meriwether was at the top of the Salomon Brothers trading heap.
Yet, an unanticipated confluence of market conditions effected a swift collapse of LTC’s house of cards.
$8.6 Billion of Stimulus Plan Earmarked for Pet Causes of Environmental Activists Should Be Jettisoned
$8.6 Billion of Stimulus Plan Earmarked for Pet Causes of Environmental Activists Should Be Jettisoned
Washington, D.C. – At least $8.6 billion of President Obama’s proposed $1.2 trillion stimulus plan is meant to fund dubious special interest policy initiatives of environmental activists and should immediately be jettisoned, says Deneen Borelli, full-time Fellow with the Project 21 national black leadership network.
"It's outrageous that taxpayer money is slated to be used to fund the agenda of environmental special interest groups. These special interest groups are using global warming alarmism to fund dubious projects while discouraging the use of fossil fuels," says Borelli. "If liberal lawmakers really cared about stimulating the economy, they would remove rules and regulations that block the development of more fossil fuels. This would provide good-paying jobs and lower energy costs for Americans. Instead, they appear only interested in using their combined force of money, power and influence to fleece taxpayers of their money and their freedom."
Among the green earmarks in the bill legislation cited by Borelli:
Securing the Future, Not Aborting It
Why was a massive expansion of family planning (which inevitably includes abortion promotion) contained in a bill that is supposed to jump start the economy?
Consider that according to the Social Security Administration, in 1950 there were 16.5 workers for every retiree, while today it is 3.3 workers to 1 retiree. Within 40 years it will be 2 to 1. There will not be enough workers to pay the tab for all the government programs and benefits that the Speaker and others want to give away in return for political support.
In reality the Stimulus bill is more about pork and political payoffs than economic recovery. Billions are earmarked for groups like ACORN, that have recently been the subject of criminal investigations, and the politically connected like labor unions that supported the new administration in the recent election.
Read the whole story at The Hill's Congress Blog
Labor Union Perspective
By Thomas E. Brewton
As the proposed trade agreement with Colombia reveals, labor unions are organizations of self-centered greed, which disingenuously cloak themselves with pretense of God, country, and mom's apple pie.
President Bush, by calling for Congressional approval of the trade agreement with Colombia, is compelling liberal-progressives to choose between the high-flown, one-world internationalism to which they give lip service and kow-towing to organized labor.
Columnist Robert D. Novak described it this way in his April 4th article:
President Bush will send Congress a trade agreement next week forcing Democrats to make an unpleasant choice. Will they do the bidding of organized labor and reject a pact negotiated more than a year and a half ago with the country's strongest ally and best customer in South America?
…But to forget about a vote this year, as Pelosi wants, …would humiliate Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, a free-trader and a bulwark against the spreading influence in Latin America of Venezuela's leftist strongman, President Hugo Chávez.
Our liberal-progressive school system instructs callow youth that labor unions are agents of good and right. The facts are quite different.
The president of the United Auto Workers union has implicitly acknowledged the stark truth: industrial unions are killing American manufacturing jobs. Unions’ salvation, he says, must come from ukases promulgated by the commissars of a new socialistic, Democratic administration.
In a June 13, 2006, article by Jefrey McCracken, the Wall Street Journal reported:
United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger, acknowledging that his union confronts the toughest challenges in its 71-year history, told delegates to the UAW’s leadership convention that solutions to problems such as rising health-care costs or the rash of auto suppliers filing bankruptcy-law protection must come largely through the political process.
Union leaders expect a Democrat-socialist to win the presidency, and they expect a payoff via protectionist legislation that will reduce business profits, throwing non-union workers out of jobs and augmenting inflation, to the cost of the vast majority of citizens who are non-union members of the labor force.
Obama’s Excremental Economics
By Thomas E. Brewton
As prolongation of the 1930s Depression and stagflation in the 1970s demonstrated, Senator Obama’s announced policies are a prescription for economic disaster.
Keynesian economic doctrine, not under that name, but in substance, is back in the news in a truly menacing way. Senator Obama proposes to repeat the policies of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal that turned an ordinary two-year recession into an eight-year disaster, with unemployment rates continuously in the high teens.
The key elements of Senator Obama’s proposed economic policies, as in the New Deal and the stagflation of the 1970s, are much higher taxes, along with a pervasive increase of business regulations and price controls in healthcare and energy (which sharply depress business activity and employment rates), full-frontal embrace of labor unions (which will push up wages and benefits to levels deterring profitable expansion of industrial production), and massive new government deficit spending (which will accelerate the already dangerously high rate of inflation and devaluation of the dollar). Carried out as he proposes, Senator Obama’s polices will lead us again into the swamp of stagflation.
The basic thrust of Keynesianism is the belief that control of the economy must be collectivized at the Federal level, because private business is incapable of providing full employment, and because the proper goal of economic policy must be thwarting greedy businessmen to attain so-called social justice: equal distribution of income and wealth, without regard to merit, capability, or hard work.
Not surprisingly the New York Times editorial board and the Times’s propagandist Paul Krugman are prominent Keynesian enthusiasts.