Category: Capitalism v Socialism
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Doakes Sunday: Glacial
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: My grandkids got school photos [a few] weeks ago. I received my prints a week ago and took the extra set to the UPS store to send to my parents, the Great-Grand Parents. Cheapest to send by US mail First class in a flat mailer so that’s what I did.…
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Low Expectations
Democrats are fond of trying to find statistics that try to show that the Obama Administration has not been a complete economic disaster. One way is via a blizzard of charts that claim to show a long series of months with job growth: Of course, as Mark Twain once said – and it’s a cliche…
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Our Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes To You
What do we really need for President? Jack Kemp. The former Bills quarterback and congressman from Buffalo was perhaps the most influential American politician who never became President; he was behind much of the “get out of the way” legislation that led us to the prosperity of the ’80s and ’90s. And he rose to…
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There’s Just No Way…
…anybody could have predicted this: Seattle workers whose minimum wage has been jacked up to 15 bucks an hour… …are now asking for fewer hours, so they don’t lose their housing subsidies. Naturally, the artificially-high minimum wage was supposed to cut welfare dependency, blah blah blah. So now we’ve got fewer jobs, and just watch – the…
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Austered The Wrong Way
To: National Public Radio News From: Mitch Berg, uppity peasant Re: Terminology Dear NPR: Over the weekend, while listening to one of your news programs, I caught a story about skilled workers emigrating from Portugal. Your story announced that the Portuguese economy was “recovering from austerity” Austerity was not the problem. Or, rather, austerity was, at…
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It’s A Start
Bloomington residents turn out against racketized trash hauling (emphasis added): Some angry residents want to take decisions on trash hauling out of the City Council’s hands. Residents are circulating petitions for both an initiative and a referendum that would allow citizens — rather than their elected officials — to have the final say on the issue.…
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Surplus Of Stupid
SCENE: Mitch BERG is ordering a Banh Mi sandwich at iPho on University. Avery LIBRELLE enters the store. LIBRELLE: Hey, Merg! After four years, Minnesota’s economy is rocking under Mark Dayton, while Wisconsin is sucking pond water! BERG: How do you figure? LIBRELLE: Minnesota has a $2 Billion surplus BERG: Right. After raising taxes…
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Chu Bad, So Sad
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: In 2008, Obama’s Energy Secretary Stephen Chu famously said American gas prices should jump to European levels at $9.00 per gallon, although President Obama sought a gradual increase, instead. Used my Cub Foods card at Holiday today. Eat your hearts out, lads. And it only took six years…
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Smarter Than Our Leaders
Back during the 2008 presidential campaign, John McCain was right about one thing, anyway; despite all of governments foul-ups the fundamentals of the American economy are basically strong. We have ideas, and entrepreneurial energy, I don’t labor force that (2008 and 2012 elections not withstanding) we’re pretty smart and capable, and one of the worlds…
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Low Information
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: I stopped for lunch at the Maid-Rite in St. Cloud. The St. Cloud Times article says Michele Bachmann is preparing to oppose Hillary’s run for president. The woman behind the counter wishes Michele Bachmann would just go away. “Obama could say snow is white and Bachmann would say it’s…
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Grounds For Optimism
It’s an easy time to feel pessimistic about America. Forget the fact that we have the worst president in history (althought that doesn’t help much). Part of the disaffected right would have you believe that our entire political class, GOP and Democrat, are about the same. I see your objection – Boehner’s depressing cave on…
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Mandated Equality
Two truisms at play in this story: If someone has to mandate your equal outcome [*], then you probably really aren’t equal. Economics 101: Forcing people to pay more or less for a good or service than they naturally would will distort the market. Force the price up, and you’ll get a black market. Force…
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It Was Twenty-Five Years Ago…
…that the Berlin Wall fell. But make no mistake; the Soviets won. The link is to an article about government’s role in the demise of medicine in America. The whole piece is a pull quote, and that is not “fair use” by any stretch. So read it. And then look at every other area of…
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Whose Time Has Come
It was fifty years ago today that Ronald Reagan gave one of the most important speeches in American history, and perhaps the most important speech in the history of American conservatism: A Time For Choosing. And it’s more vital now than it was, even then. You and I are told increasingly we have to choose…
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Impure!
One of the more galling facets of the 2012 Presidential campaign was watching Mitt Romney taking flak from the social right, the Rick Santorum crowd, on having been marginally impure on social issues, while at the same time getting beaten up from the fiscal purists (egged on by the left) for Romneycare, and the Libertarians…
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It’s A Mad World
Not only some rock stars, but indeed the Communist Peoples’ Republica of Vietnam gets free enteprise in a way that Mark Dayton, scion of a business family, to say nothing of “community organizer” Barack Obama, never can. Maybe the parts of the United States that value economic freedom need to launch a torpedo at a US destroyer…
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More Jobs!
…Inver Grove Heights-based CHS corporation is building a new fertilizer plant: CHS, a farmer-owned cooperative based in Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota, said its board of directors gave final approval of the project on Thursday. “With this decision, CHS is taking an important, strategic step on behalf of its membership owners by ensuring them reliable domestic…
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The Power Of Suggestion
To: Progressives (again) From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant Re: Scotland’s Independence Vote As someone who is of partly-Scottish descent (and it’s the part I have the most fun with), I’m looking at the potential Scottish independence vote (which is, according to some current polls, neck and neck, with the “leave the union” vote nosing ahead…
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Paul Krugman Hates The Poor
Beating up Paul Krugman – a Nobel Prize-winner who is a poster-child for “narrow expertise” – is a little like fact-checking Heather Martens; it’s easy, and there will never be a shortage of material. Rich Karlgaard at Forbes spells out yet another reason Krugman is jumping from Princeton in disgrace: Krugman says the rich sock…
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Accounting
Victor Davis Hanson has as detailed an accounting of the chickens Obama has sent forth, foreign-policy wise, that are now coming home to roost, as any I’ve seen.
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“The Clinton Years”
To: The American Electorate From: Mitch Berg, Guy Who Was Of Cognitive Age In 1992 Re: The “Clinton Years” All, Michael Barone, writing about the putative Hillary Clinton juggernaut: It seems that Clinton’s standing reflects less on current judgments of Obama and more on rosy retrospective ratings of the presidency of Bill Clinton. Voters may…
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Why Does The DFL Hate Poor Urban Single Mothers?
I saw this idea in “Think” “Progress”…: Five state lawmakers in Minnesota have decided to take on the “Minimum Wage Challenge” and live off of a typical budget for a worker who makes the federal minimum wage of $7.25. …and I thought “I loved that skit the first time I saw a bunch of upper-middle-class…
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When Grownups Run Things
On the one hand: Minnesota hikes taxes two billion dollars. The “surplus” rises about $200 million over what the Republican majority in 2011-2012 left. The DFL majority is currently arguing not so much over how to spend the “surplus’, but how many times over it shall be spent. On the not-stupid hand: Wisconsin under Scott…
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The Kids Are Kinda Not Alright
“Millennials” are rapidly approaching “Baby Boomers” as the most over-doted generation of all time. Since the baby boom is slowly ageing out of the demographic hogpile, I figure “millennials” will soon eclipse the Boom as the most hated generation in history around the time the peak of their demographic bell curve hits 45 or so.…
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Start the Revolution Without Me
New York is anything but blasé as de Blasio takes office. If Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis was correct that States are the “laboratories of democracy,” then perhaps America’s cities are the petri dishes – developing political cultures at a micro level. For 20 years, the Big Apple had largely quarantined the most aggressive tendencies of New…