It is interesting to note the response to the president invoking the name of Jesus to justify higher taxes on the wealthier Americans. It seems that those who seem horrified at the use of Christian references in the political discourse when invoked from the right are suddenly quiet when such references are used to justify their own ideology.
Aside the fact that America is home to many religions that do not worship Jesus, this is the worst kind of political pandering. Does the pro-choice crowd really want to invoke Jesus to justify their position? How would they like it when the pro-life crowd uses the same justification as Obama to justify his confiscatory policy?
Would Jesus approve of taking money from families to reward political donors with tax money to invest in failed solar projects? Would Jesus distinguish between voluntary act of one giving his own money to help the needy as opposed to politicians taking it to spend as they wish? Would Jesus assume that all money spent by government is spent wisely, as opposed to how one would spend their own money?
To assume that all government expense benefits man while those who create the wealth do not is naïve and ignorant. In fact the very way that the government tries to help the poor does little to truly help them. We have spent trillions to help the poor, yet their number seems to increase. Perhaps there is better way to help them?
Those in government sell you on their altruism but their stock in trade is power. Congressmen use their office to enrich themselves , to use inside information, and pay themselves far greater amounts than those who pay their taxes are able to earn. Those who advocate government aid the most give the least from their own pocket. Biden’s charitable contributions should be embarrassing to any leader. They use the poor as a tool to gather power and riches for themselves.
“I’m in this race because I care about Americans. I’m not concerned about the very poor, we have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95% of Americans that are struggling.”
Mitt is being taken apart for this comment, both by the Democrats and by his Republican opposition.
There’s a half-century of creative conservative thinking on antipoverty transfer programs, and it’s too bad Mr. Romney didn’t mention some of it. One note to strike is about growing dependency on government and its corrosive effect on human dignity. Refundable tax credits, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, food stamps and the like are almost 50% more generous than they were in 2007. That increase is for individual recipients, not the rise in overall spending (which tripled) due to more people caught in the recession.
As these means-tested subsidies phase out, they often lead to very high or even infinite marginal tax rates—i.e., the less well off can lose more than a dollar from the government if they earn an extra dollar. Thus can poverty become a trap. Mr. Romney might have said that his goal is to reduce these dependency rolls over time by removing the disincentives to work as the economy improves.
Mr. Romney’s failures to communicate are common among businessmen and other normal people who have the right instincts but haven’t spent their lives thinking about politics.
HKO comment:
This furor over Mitt’s ‘insensitivity’ is plain BS. It is just noise. Do any of these moral supremacists really believe that Mitt does not care about the poor? Do they really believes he enjoys firing people, another supported gaffe (totally taken out of context) that had the hyper sensitive media frothing like fish to chum? These media pundits jump for joy at comments that when taken out of context and repeated seem to support their distorted view of reality. But they are so irrelevant to the greater issues that I doubt many viewers share their delight.
Mitt may have been ripe for attack, but the worker with a family of four who makes fifty or sixty thousand dollars, pays his taxes, but still has to shop frugally for his family while he watches grocery carts laden with items he can not afford paid for with Food Stamp debit cards- they understand Mitt just perfectly.
Neil Cavuto interviewed a woman on his show on 2/2/12 about how humor can be used effectively in campaigns as a retort to criticisms. Reagan was good at it. Perhaps Mitt should hire a few comedians.
Mitt may not be your first choice. It doesn’t matter. Similar attacks will follow whoever the GOP nominates. And we can lament Mitt’s lack of political sophistication that blinded him to how his every word and phrase can be blown into a political firestorm by an opposition that is far more clueless on how the world really works. It is far easier to attack the trivial and irrelevant that to face the failures of the current administration.
The GOP is split into four overlapping factions: the libertarians, fundamentalist theocrats, pragmatic Republicans and the Tea Party. It would be ideal that a leader would emerge that would unite the factions, but that will be unlikely. What is more likely is that Obama will unite these factions like only a common enemy could.
Newt, who filmed a global warming ad with Nancy Pelosi and bashed Mitt for being a capitalist is deemed the truer conservative than the man with experience in the private and public sector who actually got elected and governed as a GOP in a dominantly Democratic state. Men with records have something to shoot at. Both men have made attractive targets.
In a game of football you achieve points by moving the ball down the field. If you move it at least ten yards you get to keep moving. If you don’t move it ten yards you either hand the ball to the other side or kick it to them. You can go for the Hail Mary Pass, a desperate measure in the final minutes of the game, but if a desperate measure is a part of your early strategy you will not likely win.
Mitt is playing traditional football, moving the ball to the goal, one play at a time. Mitt understands a critical factor that the Tea Party seems to miss; there is opposition in the political game. It is easy to pontificate opinions as I do in this blog. It is quite another to govern; to pass bills and make changes when there is opposition.
Mitch Daniels referred to RIMOs (Republicans In Mouth Only). These were Republicans who could talk a conservative pitch but were clueless to the realities of governing. He often found that when he tried to move the ball toward a more conservative goal, his biggest opposition was from fellow Republicans who complained that he was not moving the ball far enough down the field. Due to the opposition from his own party he sometimes failed to move the ball the ten yards toward the goal and ended up fumbling any progress.
The Tea Party keeps Twittering and Facebooking to their choir and have become blind to the political realities. We need candidates who can consistently move the ball ten yards at a time. In the NFL Roger Staubach (a Roman Catholic) said, “I closed my eyes and said a Hail Mary.” It may have worked for the Vikings in a 1975 playoff, but it will not win the White House.
The libertarian argument for keeping more of society in the private sector is not that there’s no self-interest or corruption in business; it is that the market system has more competition, more checks and balances, and more incentives to satisfy customers. You can make money in the private sector by cutting costs; government agencies that cut costs find their appropriations reduced. Businesses must constantly search for better ways to deliver goods and services lest customers move to their competitors. Government agencies are usually monopolies that forbid competition. With no owners seeking a profit on their investment, no financial reward for doing a good job, no penalty for wasting money, government employees have little incentive to deliver goods and services efficiently.
As Adam Smith suggested with his “invisible hand” metaphor, the competitive market system channels self-interest in a socially beneficial way — into the search for ways to attract customers — while the non-market system actually encourages pure self-interest. And one aspect of that is lobbying. Big government means big lobbying. When you lay out a picnic, you get ants. And today’s federal budget is the biggest picnic in history.
Lobbyists love spending bills. They also love a complicated tax system with myriad rates and exemptions. And they especially love complex regulations, which generate demand for consultants who can navigate the regulatory agencies. Just look at some of the lobbying stories from 2011: “Desperate to Stop AT&T [in Washington, not in the hearts and minds of consumers], Sprint Doubles Lobbying Spend.” “Google, facing an antitrust probe by federal authorities, boosted its lobbying expenditures.” “Goldman Sachs flexes its lobbying muscle.”
As Craig Holman of Public Citizen, an organization founded by Ralph Nader, told Marketplace Radio after a report on rising lobbying expenditures during the financial crisis, “the amount spent on lobbying … is related entirely to how much the federal government intervenes in the private economy.”
HKO
Lobbying is a by-product of regulation, yet the same people who decry lobbying the most are often the biggest pushers of new regulations. Political self interest is often more corrupting than economic self interest because they substitute the force of government rule for the force of market discipline. When wealth is sought from government connections rather than market service the economy becomes stagnant
The unemployment rate for workers with a college degree fell to 4.1% in December, which is the lowest jobless rate for that group since January 2009, almost three years ago. The number of employed college graduates is at an all-time high of 45.2 million, and more than 1.6 million above the December 2007 level when the recession started. In contrast, the jobless rate for workers with less than a high school degree jumped to 13.8% in December from 13.3% in November, and the employment level for those workers remains 1.24 million jobs below the December 2007 level. This contrast suggests that educational level might be an important factor in the labor market improvements and the drop in the jobless rate to 8.5%, with college-educated workers being the group that is gaining jobs during the recovery, while the least educated workers are the group finding it hardest to find jobs.
HKO comments:
This may not be very surprising, but it does point to changes that have caused this. Our economy has shifted from manufacturing production to information processing. Even in a modern steel mill, workers are scarce but the booth suspended in the air controlling quality and processing is governed by a worker sitting before an array of computer screens that look like the Starship Enterprise. It could also mean that current college grads have skills that may have been comparable to high school grads a generation ago.
Control room of a modern steel mill
Modern financial giants like Google and Facebook have a fraction of the workers that such a financial base would have required during the previous industrial era. A high school grad used to be able to get a decent job in an auto factory ora steel mill or with a construction company. Especially with the collapse of the housing market, construction jobs are substantially down. Even with government supportted tech schools teaching useful trades, the demand for these are substantially down.
All of this is made much worse by a huge jump in the minimum wage that occurred when the Democrats took control of the House in 2006, just before the financial collapse. To the extent that the mandated minimum wage is in excess of the market wage, this will show up in higher unemployment. Reducing the minimum wage may be sound economics but it is probably politically suicidal. We will like just have to wait until the market rate catches up to the mandated rate.
Lastly, one economist noted that each successive recession appears to have a longer period of unemployment. This may be due to the longer period of unemployment benefits. This is magnified at some point by a period of unemployment that is so long that it makes an employer skeptical of the work ethic of the prospect. The longer one is unemployed the more unemployable he becomes.
