Saturday, December 12, 2009
Friday, December 11, 2009
Quote of the Day
“We can only save this great country by limiting politicians to two terms -- one term in office . . . one term in prison.”
Artificial Housing Respiration
No major newspaper seriously questions the truism that foreclosures destroy neighborhoods. No news network doubts that “troubled borrowers” are overwhelmingly good Americans who have been set back by a job loss or medical emergency. And what kind of anti-American Shylock would claim that you shouldn’t give bad borrowers government-backed loan modifications, cutting their mortgage payments by 20 percent?
The interesting new wrinkle on those old, false arguments is that real estate interventionists no longer pretend they have any real goal other than keeping house prices inflated. Even a year ago, the arguments for rescuing real estate prices were phrased in broad, spillover-style metaphors—“meltdown,” “implosion”—that suggested a concern for the common bystander. Today, the argument is a lot plainer: We need to keep existing homeowners (or home borrowers) from experiencing any further decline in closing prices. When I ask Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) to explain his support for extending exorbitant Federal Housing Administration loan guarantees even while the real estate market continues to cool, he replies, “The economy of Los Angeles would tank if prices fell another 50 percent.” Here’s how Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), in an October interview with The New York Times, justified his support for the agency’s shoddy lending standards: “I don’t think it’s a bad thing that the bad loans occurred. It was an effort to keep prices from falling too fast.” Economy.com front man Mark Zandi puts it even more bluntly. The housing market, he says, “is showing improvement only because it is on government life support.”
Life support is expensive. When that troubled borrower gets a 20 percent haircut, his bank has to take a loss, and the bank is compensated for the loss by you, through the $50 billion Home Affordable Modification Program. The Treasury Department has paid more than $100 billion to allow the failed government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to keep on guaranteeing questionable loans. Fannie and Freddie, in turn, have been expanding rather than reducing their loan portfolios—the opposite of what you’re supposed to do when you’ve got an unmanageable debt load. Read More Reason
Thursday, December 10, 2009
A Case for Secession – Taxation
We will begin with the area that was one of the primary motivations for the colonists to declare their independence from Great Britain – Taxes. Suffice it so say that the amount of taxes England sought to impose upon those Americans do not hold a candle to the taxes we already pay our imperial national government today. All governments require taxes to perform their functions and we all grudgingly admit the necessity of paying them. Our government has taken upon itself a myriad of functions it was never designed to perform and has therefore required large amounts of money. It is not the purpose of this section to debate the legitimate functions of government. Instead we will concern ourselves primarily with the morality and justice of taxing particular areas of human endeavor and for general purpose those taxes are utilized.
Thomas Jefferson stated that “government should not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.” All governments require money to operate. Obviously, the smaller the government, the less it will require. Consider, however, where the government gets this money. Again, obviously, it taxes its citizens and it is right to do so. Governments are a form of voluntary organization among free people to accomplish ends they are not able to do as individuals. Because these individuals have contracted together in such a fashion, there is the expectation that they will support their creation. However, the people retain the rights they received from their creator under the contract and the government has no right to infringe upon those rights. When it does, we consider it tyrannical. READ THE REST
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Quote of the Day, Maybe Year
"Dramatics abounded Monday in Salisbury: Dramatic talk, dramatic allegations, dramatic innuendoes, dramatic declarations. Everything but dramatic action."
Social Security Will Go Bust in 2010
For the third time in my life, the Social Security System will go belly-up.
The first time was in 1977 – well, almost. To head off the bust, Jimmy Carter got Congress to pass a major FICA tax increase – sorry, "contribution" increase – in order to save Social Security. The rate would be hiked in phases from 2% to 6.15% (times two: employee and employer). He promised: "Now this legislation will guarantee that from 1980 to the year 2030, the Social Security funds will be sound." http://tinyurl.com/ybksxs4
Carter's projection was off by a Georgia country mile. In 1983, the SSA program technically went bankrupt. Reagan signed a law that speeded up Carter's rate increases, added Congressional employees to Social Security, and delayed the age of eligibility.
Unless there is another Social Security tax increase in 2010, the system will go into red ink mode and stay there.
The public has not been informed of this, which comes as no surprise. There have been a few scattered stories on the Web, but nothing sustained. The media do not want to admit that the jointly operated Social Security program and Medicare program are going to bankrupt the Federal government if they are not cut back drastically.
They are never cut back. They always expand.
Medicare's Hospital Insurance program has been in red ink mode for two years. The public does not know this, either. To cover the program's insolvency, the government is quietly funding the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund with bailouts from the general fund.
Politically, this creates a problem. When the Treasury taps the general fund, the expenditure appears on the budget – the on-budget budget – as an expenditure. This immediately adds to the deficit, meaning the visible deficit, the one that gets recorded on those wonderful U.S. debt clocks.
When revenues flow into the four Social Security and Medicare trust funds, the money is instantly handed over to the Treasury, which issues non-marketable long-term IOU's to the trust funds. These IOU's are listed as assets by the funds. But, through the wonders of government accounting, they are not listed as liabilities on the government's on-budget budget. They are liabilities only on the off-budget budget, which most Americans are unaware of. This chicanery has been going on ever since the Johnson Administration (Lyndon's, not Andrew's). Read the Rest
The Gatekeeper
How a little bureaucratic office became the biggest impediment to Barack Obama’s health care plans
As the new era unfolded in Washington, plans for overhauling one-sixth of the economy began to take shape. Health care reforms, Democrats vowed, would extend insurance to every American and be fully paid for without requiring middle-class tax hikes, all while cutting costs significantly enough to save the country from financial catastrophe. To sell these claims the party trotted out one of the most respected number-crunchers in town, Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag, a former Brookings Institution health care expert obsessed with cost cutting. With 60 votes in the Senate, nothing seemed to stand in the Democrats’ way.
Nothing, that is, except the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), a nonpartisan federal agency that until this year was run by none other than Peter Orszag. As drafts of various health care bills began to emerge on Capitol Hill, the CBO, responsible for devising Congress’ official legislative cost estimates (known as “scores”), released a series of reports that demolished key Democratic claims. According to the CBO, both the “tri-committee” bill proposed in the House and the bill proposed in the Senate Finance Committee would cost in excess of $1 trillion over 10 years, might leave tens of millions uninsured, and would not curb rising health care costs. Indeed, both would add substantially to the budget deficit in the long term. As the year progressed, the CBO proved a more effective check against key elements of the Democrats’ domestic agenda than anything concocted by Republican strategists or libertarian wonks. In an October article, The Washington Post concluded that the CBO had “essentially condemned two legislative proposals by slapping them with trillion-dollar price tags.”
Created as an afterthought and initially intended as a low-profile congressional calculation service, the CBO has quietly risen to a place of unique prominence and power in Washington policy debates. Widely cited and almost universally respected, it is treated as judge and referee, resolving disputes about what policies will cost and how they will work.
But the agency’s authority is belied by the highly speculative nature of its work, which requires an endless succession of unverifiable assumptions. These assumptions are frequently treated as definitive, as if on faith. In practice, this means the CBO is not merely an impartial legislative scorekeeper but a keeper of the nation’s budgetary myths, a clan of spreadsheet-wielding priests whose declarations become Washington’s holy writ. READ MORE REASON
So Much for the Peace Presidency
by Gene Healy
This Thursday, Barack Obama will swing by Oslo to pick up the Nobel Peace Prize — just over a week after he announced that he'd escalate the war in Afghanistan. Awkward.
When Obama won the prize in October, you had to wonder whether the self-esteem movement, where every kid gets a trophy, had made its way from little league to the Nobel Committee. Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr. — and a guy running two wars, who'd been president for two weeks when nominations closed?
Despite the committee chairman's defensive insistence that Obama "got the prize for what he has done," clearly it was awarded for what the committee hoped he might do (which is rather like giving a physics Nobel to a guy who hopes he'll invent cold fusion).
Well, if the committee hoped a pre-emptive prize would influence Obama's behavior, they must feel pretty silly right now. On Dec. 1, the former surge critic spoke at West Point, defending his decision to throw 30,000 more troops into an unpopular, unwinnable, and unnecessary war.
Sure, the president packaged the decision as part of a plan to "begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011." But that's not the beginning of a genuine withdrawal. It's, er, an "inflection point," according to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, at which, maybe, "some handful, or some small number" will be able to come home. READ MORE @ CATO
Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and the author of The Cult of the Presidency.
This article appeared in the DC Examiner on December 8, 2009.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
LP Monday Message: Global Warming LP Poll Results
Dear Friend of Liberty,
Last week we sent a poll asking for your opinions on global warming. If you haven't already taken it, you can still take the poll here.
The poll has proven to be popular. Below is the poll question, responses, and results after one week.
Which of the following statements best matches your view of global warming?
* 28% (1785 votes) This whole global warming thing is a hoax.
* 6% (347 votes) I don't know whether global warming is real, but the government should limit carbon dioxide emissions just to be safe.
* 10% (639 votes) Global warming is real, it's a threat, and the government should limit carbon dioxide emissions.
* 27% (1676 votes) Whether or not global warming is real, it doesn't justify more taxes or regulations.
* 29% (1835 votes) Global warming is mostly natural and there's not much we can do about it.
6,282 votes total
Several people sent comments about the poll. People asked why they couldn't select multiple answers. One person suggested the questions were biased.
For those of you skeptical about our poll, I'll be the first to admit it is an unscientific poll written by a biased author (me).
My natural inclination is to distrust politicians' proposals that grow government. I also distrust the scientists who live off government grants and benefit from generating hysteria over global warming.
However, just because I distrust politicians and government funded scientists doesn't mean I'm inclined to trust the business community. I certainly understand that big oil companies have an incentive to mislead the public about the impact their products may have on the environment.
This poll question was interesting to me because even though Libertarians generally agree that government should not gain new powers because of popular global warming worries, we don't always have exactly the same reasons.
In any case, I think the vast majority of you agree with me that government should not start restricting people's energy use, whether it's "cap and trade" or some other scheme.
We will continue to advocate against these kinds of schemes for government growth. I'd like to ask you to help support us by making a donation. When you donate, let us know if we're communicating the issues you want to hear about.
Sincerely,
Wes Benedict
Executive Director
Libertarian National Committee
Monday, December 7, 2009
Interesting Comment by Bill Harris
One need not travel to China to find indigenous cultures lacking human rights. America leads the world in percentile behind bars, thanks to ongoing persecution of hippies, radicals, and non-whites under prosecution of the war on drugs. If we’re all about spreading liberty abroad, then why mix the message at home? Peace on the home front would enhance global credibility.
The drug czar’s Rx for prison fodder costs dearly, as life is flushed down expensive tubes. My shaman’s second opinion is that psychoactive plants are God’s gift. Behold, it’s all good. When Eve ate the apple, she knew a good apple, and an evil prohibition. Canadian Marc Emery is being extradited to prison for selling seeds that American farmers use to reduce U. S. demand for Mexican pot.
Only on the authority of a clause about interstate commerce does the CSA (Controlled Substances Act of 1970) reincarnate Al Capone, endanger homeland security, and throw good money after bad. Administration fiscal policy burns tax dollars to root out the number-one cash crop in the land, instead of taxing sales. Society rejected the plague of prohibition, but it mutated. Apparently, SWAT teams don’t need no stinking amendment.
Nixon passed the CSA on the false assurance that the Schafer Commission would later justify criminalizing his enemies. No amendments can assure due process under an anti-science law without due process itself. Psychology hailed the breakthrough potential of LSD, until the CSA shut down research, and pronounced that marijuana has no medical use, period. Drug juries exclude bleeding hearts.
The RFRA (Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993) allows Native American Church members to eat peyote, which functions like LSD. Americans shouldn’t need a specific church membership or an act of Congress to obtain their birthright freedom of religion. John Doe’s free exercise of religious liberty may include entheogen sacraments to mediate communion with his maker.
Freedom of speech presupposes freedom of thought. The Constitution doesn’t enumerate any governmental power to embargo diverse states of mind. How and when did government usurp this power to coerce conformity? The Mayflower sailed to escape coerced conformity. Legislators who would limit cognitive liberty lack jurisdiction.
Common-law must hold that adults are the legal owners of their own bodies. The Founding Fathers undersigned that the right to the pursuit of happiness is inalienable. Socrates said to know your self. Mortal lawmakers should not presume to thwart the intelligent design that molecular keys unlock spiritual doors. Persons who appreciate their own free choice of path in life should tolerate seekers’ self-exploration.
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Bill, thank you so much for your comment.