This year, as the National Review’s editors remind us, is the fiftieth anniversary of the declaration of war on…poverty. 

Of course, poverty – which had been dropping steadily since the end of World War 2, as the US enjoyed an unprecedented period of economic supremacy after the war – rose after Johnson “declared war” as part of his “Great Society”, which was little more than an extension and expansion of the New Deal.  It dipped under Reagan, rose and then fell under Clinton, and has reached a new peak under Obama.

P.J. O’Rourke, in his classic book A Parliament of Whores, once half-joked that if we took the money our bureaucracy spends on poverty in all its forms – food assistance, housing assistance, medical aid, cash, WIC, all of it – and simply gave it to the poor, we could raise ever single American’s income to above the poverty line, and save money in the process. 

The problem, of course, is that the War On Poverty was never really designed to fight poverty.  Oh, there was an altrusitic motivation, to be sure – many Poverty Warriors do honestly believe their mission is to lead the poor out of perdition.

But as with all of the left’s big initiatives, it’s really about consolidating and extending power. And so while the war on poverty has been a miserable failure at ending the misery of being poor, it’s been a magnificent success at extending the reach of the “progressive” stranglehold:

No doubt programs such as Head Start were launched with a great deal of idealism, but as their ineffectiveness became apparent, it was not idealism that sustained them but political self-interest. Providing at best temporary relief to the poor, the permanent welfare bureaucracies benefit Democrats by creating thousands of well-paid positions for their political allies and subsequent campaign contributions for their candidates. Head Start today is a money-laundering program through which federal expenditures are transmitted to Democratic candidates through the Service Employees International Union, which represents many Head Start teachers. The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents, among others, the welfare bureaucrats at the Administration for Children and Families, is a large political donor that gives about 94 percent of its largesse to Democrats. This is not coincidental. The main beneficiaries of the war on poverty have not been and will not be the poor; the beneficiaries are the alleged poverty warriors themselves. The war on poverty is war on the Roman model in which soldiers are paid through plunder.

Perversely, the “War on Poverty” has institutionalized the things – single-parent households, terrible education – that truly entrench poverty. 

And as we head toward a legislative session (in many states including Minnesota) where the Democrats will move to drag business into the role of paying for the War via massive hikes to the minimum wage, it’s worth remembering this:

Democrats are scandalized that Republicans resist the expansion of welfare benefits, and Republicans are, or at least should be, scandalized that so many Americans need them. What looks like compassion in the short term is in the long term a refusal to deal with the problem: in some cases an inability to find sustaining work, in others a refusal to do so.

It’s tempting, and tantalizing, to wonder – what would have happened had America not squandered so much of its hard-earned treasure on a “war on poverty” that ended up only entrenching and expanding poverty, and reinforcing the party of poverty, the Democrats? 

How much more prosperous would be be today?  How much less misery would there be?

Read the NRO editorial.

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 York liberalism through a succession of centrist Mayors.  Even for all his nanny-state inclinations, Michael Bloomberg was (as we once noted) all that stood between the average Gothamite and an “army of liberal partisans who saw City Hall as Grand Central Station for a variety of socioeconomic engineering ideas.”

It should be of little surprise then that newly ensconced New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s campaign certainly looked like something engineered in a political science lab.  De Blasio’s “tale of two cities” rhetoric, his promises to end “income inequity” and repeal “stop and frisk” defined his candidacy as being in stark contrast to Bloombergian Era.  Despite Bloomberg polling at a 51% approval as he left office and his supposedly controversial police chief Ray Kelly at 64%, de Blasio won running directly against the accomplishments (and their architects) of prior two decades.  Voters who cared about crime and candidate experience – once centerpieces to any New York campaign – barely broke for Republican Joe Lhota, and constituted a paltry 15% of the vote.

De Blasio’s supporters haven’t minced words about the expectations his overwhelming election has created in liberal circles, calling his mayoralty a “progressive revolution.”  Such rhetoric, amplified by a litany of speakers at de Blasio’s inauguration that trashed Michael Bloomberg (with apparently with de Blasio’s consent, as he stated he was “very comfortable with all that was done”), glosses over what exactly entails a “progressive revolution”?

From the early previews, de Blasio’s “revolution” may resemble Michael Bloomberg’s in one key, and often criticized, factor – policy tinkering instead of major reforms.  Candidate de Blaiso talked on the campaign trail about affordable-housing projects, stopping hospital closures, and a tax on upper-income earners to fund, in part, universal pre-kindergarten.  The first act of Mayor de Blasio was to end the handsome cab, horse-draw carriages – a move that drew criticism left and right, and even speculation that the position was based on a campaign pay-off.

Even when de Blasio talks about broader political themes, such his obsession with reducing “income inequality,” it’s rarely followed by policy prescriptions that will address the issue.  Some of de Blasio’s proposals will require support from Albany to enact, including aspects of his desired pre-K and after-school programs, while others reek of desperation to find an agenda, regardless of impact or practicality.  De Blasio declared he would expand the Paid Sick Leave law…which was just passed months ago and hasn’t even been enforced yet.  De Blasio campaigned on a goal of “zero deaths” in New York –  a policy that sounds like it was crafted by King Canute the Great.

If de Blasio truly wanted to address “income inequality,” he could look at New York’s punitive tax structure.  A married couple with $60,000 in taxable income pays nearly $2,000 in taxes to the city alone.  That doesn’t include the 25% federal tax rate for a couple in that income bracket, or the State of New York’s $3,200 in taxes as well.  Without including property taxes, school board levies, and a host of other taxes (how about the city’s 8.875% sales tax?), a couple with $60,000 in earned income would be paying out over $20,000 in taxes in one of the most expensive cities in the world.  Is that “equality”?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

It’s the start of a new year, when Christians remember The Flight Into Egypt.  Suppose President Obama were to read about it in the Bible.  He might notice modern parallels.

The Wise Men were looking for a New King, someone to fundamentally change the government.  Herod was already King and didn’t want to be replaced.  He ordered all sons under the age of two, to be killed.

President Obama, reading this, might realize Jesus was predicted to oppose government.  That makes Him a bitter-clinging-religious-terrorist.  Herod’s Massacre of Innocents was simply an Executive Order preemptively issued for National Security reasons.

Suppose President Obama, inspired by historical precedent, issued his own Executive Order that all White-Males-Two-And-Under should die.  But since there are so many sons and so few federal government employees to kill them, suppose the Order included an Employer Mandate: all employers are required to kill the White-Male-Two-And-Under sons of their employees, or be fined out of business.

Suppose some employers claimed that a government mandate to kill children of employees violated the employer’s religious beliefs under some ancient fringe religion, something about “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”  And not just churches that employ janitors, but businesses that employ people to sell fried chicken or woodworking tools or cabinetmakers, suppose they objected, too.

If a Supreme Court Justice stopped the killing until the Court could hold a hearing, would the New York Times tut about threatening the security of the nation?

If the Employer Mandate didn’t require Employers to actually kill the sons, merely to hire someone else to kill the sons for them, would that be okay?

If the Department of Hunting Sons (DHS) issued a rule saying certain employers were exempt from killing one-and-two-year-olds, they only need to kill unborn sons to comply with the law, would that make it all better?

What’s it going to take to get these fundamentalist whackos to see The Light?

Joe Doakes

I’m going to start calling Democrats “Obama Fundamentalists”.

Maybe “Bitter, Obama-Clinging Fundamentalists”.

Our labor force participation rate is such that employment, for all the jabbering about the current ~7% rate, is scarcely better than it was in 2009.  Investment is still glacial (except in the stock market – which is not the same as “investing in the economy”. 

Kevin Williamson at the National Review may be the single best writer in America on the subject of government and its effect on the nation, the economy, and The People.  He combines off-handed humor with blistering, airtight analysis. 

And as such, I highly recommend you read his New Years’ wrapup, “A Year of Fear“.  The whole thing is worth reading.  But I’m pulling out the conclusion, about the effect  uncertainty has in crippling an economy. 

“But wait”, lefties say; “my pension fund is going great guns!  The Dow is over 15,000!”

Yeah, it is.  And that’s a little like seeing your car idling at 10,000 RPM and assuming that’s because it’s raring to go. 

The conclusion is the big beef, here; I’m adding emphasis:

The Obama administration has achieved a special distinction here: Investors are faced with considerable uncertainty vis-à-vis how it might interpret rules as compared with the Bush or Clinton administrations — and also about how it might interpret rules as compared with the Obama administration the day before yesterday. Now you see a mandate, now you don’t. And as bad as it is in 2013, the seething hostility of Elizabeth Warren is ascendant on the left, a fact that offers very little encouragement to entrepreneurs and investors considering illiquid, long-term positions — things like factories, stores, and buildings, as opposed to easily liquidated investments in financial instruments.

Another common lefty complaint?  “Companies are too focused on profits!”

Many on the left complain about the “financialization” of the U.S. economy, while unwittingly helping to encourage that very phenomenon. Given a choice between dividing up his investments between a couple of hedge funds and financial firms or locking it up for ten years in an assembly line in Indiana, a sane man will consider the question of uncertainty and predictability. And under current conditions, the assembly line is a risky bet.

Perhaps 2014 will be the year in which we learn the value of predictability. Who can say?

Read the whole thing. 

Better yet, get an Obama supporter to read it.

Even as American progressives continue to ramp up their push to make our social welfare state as European as they can make it, the Europeans are actually getting smarter.

The Dutch are following the Swedes in tightening up their welfare system:

The Dutch have just announced a massive reform of their welfare system, designed to reduce dependency and put a new emphasis on work. For example, welfare applicants will now be required to prove that they spent at least 4 weeks actively searching for a job before they become eligible for any assistance. And once they begin to receive benefits they will either have to work or perform volunteer community service. Dutch welfare recipients would be required to take available jobs even if they had to move or commute up to three hours per day…According to the Dutch government, the reforms will ensure that welfare is seen as “a safety net, rather than a right.”

No word if “Occupy Den Haag” has reacted yet.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The number of Americans filing for unemployment dropped.  The headline makes this sound good but it’s actually not.

Look at it this way: suppose there are 100 people in the economy and 7 get laid off.  That’s an unemployment rate of 7%.

Now there are 93 people working.  If 7% get laid off again, that’s 6 more people out of work.  True – fewer people are getting laid off (only 6 instead of 7) but that’s because there are fewer people working to GET laid off.  The measure of a healthy economy is not how many people are out of work, it’s how many people who want to work, can find work.

The Labor Force Participation Rate has dropped so low that fewer than 63 people are working out of every 100 living in America.  The other 38 are out of work, out of unemployment benefits and have quit looking for work.  That’s the lowest percentage of working Americans since Jimmy Carter was in office.  That’s the tax base we’re expecting to pay for Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, Obama-care, student financial aid, foreign aid, farm aid, light rail and oh, yes, fighting wars in a dozen countries.

Joe Doakes

It is not necessary for people to return to work. It is necessary that the media make people think people are returning to work.

Thus racism.

October 14: delaying the individual mandate is “sedition”.

October 28: delaying the individual mandate was always a good idea, Winston.

Joe Doakes from Como Park sends me stuff via email.  LOTS of it.  I’ve offered to just let him be one of the staff writers here, but no, Joe prefers the email thing.  I’m fine with that.

But he sends me a ton of great stuff.  I usually keep to posting one of Joe’s things a day – because I’d hate to have it seen that my blog is largely written by someone who maimls it in.  But he writes a lot of great stuff.

So today I’m going to try to catch up, just a little bit, and clear out some of my Doakes backlog.

Anyway – Joe emails:

I put up a new screen saver yesterday to honor Congress re-opening the government.  It’s a photo of a guy kicking a can down the road.  A co-worker said he’d rather see them kick the can down the road than see the can crushed.

I asked if he thought adding half-a-trillion dollars debt every year was bad.  No, not if we need to do it to get over the hump.  In times of crisis it’s okay to borrow, as we did in WW II.  Keynes, you know.

But if we add trillions more debt, even at 1 or 2 percent interest, debt service is going to mount up.  We already can’t pay down the existing debt, in fact, we can’t even make our current payroll without borrowing.  Eventually, we won’t be able to service the debt at all, right?  True.

So is he willing to cut programs to balance the budget?  No, we’re at bare bones already.  Am I willing to raise taxes?  No, I’m Taxed Enough Already.  So what’s his plan?

He figures that if he can kick the can down the road another 30-40 years, something will come up that will make it all better.

But he has kids aged 2 and 4.  Isn’t he sticking them with the prospect of a mountain of un-payable debt or a collapsing world economy?  Yes, but there’s nothing that can be done about that.  They’ll just have to work it out.

Honestly, I was stunned.  I gave up and walked away.  He is intentionally condemning his own children to savagery after the collapse of civilization because he isn’t willing to stop giving Obama-phones to lay-abouts.

Joe Doakes

We’re surrounded by them.

Ryan Winkler (DFL St. Louis Park) is beating the bushes around Minnesota to try to gin up a push for a massive hike in the minimum wage (and cobble together some positive name recognition to try to rescue his rumored ambition to run for Secretary of State after the avalanche of negative publicity he got by calling Justice Clarence Thomas an “Uncle Tom” over the summer).

Now, Winkler is from a solid blue district.  He can demand a minimum wage of $20 an hour, and the voters in Saint Louis Park and most of CD5 will applaud and stomp their feet and send him back to Saint Paul with 20 point margins of victory.  Such is life. 

But outstate?  In parts of Minnesota with functioning two-party systems, where the majority don’t work for government?  Especially in parts of the state represented by extremely weak DFLers like Ben Lien?

Winkler, one of the most extreme demigogues in the entire Legislature, needs to try to appear “bipartisan”.

This video was shot by a Winkler staffer at a town hall in Moorhead recently.

So at the start, he says the support for his $9/50/hour minimum wage proposal from a House Select Committee on the minimum wage  is “bipartisan”.

Around the 90 second mark, a Town Hall attendee presses Winkler on the support his proposal is receiving – and whether the Republican members of the Select Committee on the Minimum Wage actually signed off on his presentation.

Winkler quickly answers “no” before moving right along.

No wonder why.  Here’s the presentation Winkler’s making:

Rep Winkler’s Living Wage Presentation

That it’s full of lefty puffery and junk stats about the minimum wage is no surprise.

But forget about the actual facts for a moment. 

Why would Winkler claim “bipartisan support?”  This would lmean the Republicans on the Select Committee –  Representatives Jenifer Loon, Pat Garofalo and Andrea Kieffer – supported his stance, and the points on his presentation.

Sources say Winkler’s repeating the claim at other town hall meetings where – unlike the Moorhead meeting in the video – nobody’s pressing him on the claim.

Pat Garofalo has spoken against Winkler’s proposal in the House.  I talked with Rep. Garofalo – he opposes the $9.50 minimum wage, and has not changed his mind one iota. 

And a source close to Representative Loon tells me that not only does Loon not support the $9.50 minimum wage, but that the DFL, possibly including some DFL members of the Select Committee, might not entirely support Winkler. 

Finally, I talked with Representative Kieffer.  She does not support Winkler’s proposal, and does not approve of the points in the presentation. She’s even written an op-ed on the subject, which has circulated to some local newspapers around the state; it’s below the jump.  It flenses Winkler’s claims about the minimum wage in general.

But here’s the money quote from Kieffer in re the “bipartisanship” of Winkler’s support:

First and foremost, the implication that there is “bipartisan” support for his presentation is disingenuous. During meetings that I attend, I consistently voice my concerns to the data presented, ask for more specifics, and maintain that the committee is focusing on the wrong part of the economic picture.

And Kieffer is right.

So why is Ryan Winkler misrepresenting the Select Committee’s position as “bipartisan” support for his proposal around greater Minnesota, when not only are the Republicans not on board, but even the DFL has qualms?

It’s not bipartisan.  It’s not even entirely monopartisan! 

(more…)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

EBT computer system in Louisiana went down for a few hours.  The EBT cards did not show a credit limit.  Shoppers were pissed so Wal-Mart management said “Ignore the limit, honor the cards.”

Shoppers went on a spree, cleaning out the store. You know they’ll never have to pay it back.

Question is: is that a particular cultural thing specific to Wal-Mart shoppers, or a portent of things to come when the US government no longer can pay its debts?

Joe Doakes

There are two iron clad rules of human behavior:

1. In a crisis, humans will exceed authority’s expectations.  Sometimes.
2. If it’s not a crisis, but merely entropy setting in?  All bets are off.

OK, so those aren’t so much “iron-clad rules” as they are signs I’m un-thrilled about the prospects.

Last Friday, the income tax celebrated its 100th birthday. 

John Fund “celebrates” the birthday:

Critics warned a century ago that the new tax would ultimately be ruinous. The income tax “will tax the honest and allow the dishonest to escape,” the New York Times wrote.

That’s right; a century ago, the New York Times stood against big, rapacious government.

“Even those who approve the tax despite its faults cannot contend that the same sums could not have been raised more certainly, more equitably, and with less trouble to both payers and collectors by a stamp tax.” The Times warned that in any emergency the tax rates would be sure to rise and that “its unpopularity will grow with its life.”

Since then, with rare exceptions, the income tax has grown like Topsy, fueled in large part by the kinds of emergencies the Times worried about. As journalist David Van Edema put it: “The government, using Americans’ sense of patriotism and duty, [has] found new excuses to not only raise taxes, but widen the range of who would pay for them, and how.”

While critics will note that America was not a perfectly libertarian country before October 4, 1913 – slavery was certainly a blot on that particular escutcheon – it’s hard to explain to  modern Americans that up until the early 1900s, Civil War aside, the federal government paid for itself with import duties and taxes on alcohol, tobacco and the like. 

And along with the skinny government went skinny federal ambitions, and skinnier government control over the lives of Joe and Jane Citizen. 

To someone whose entire frame of reference involves looking at pay stubs and seeing money siphoned off to pay for other peoples’ mortgage insurance and farm subsidies and pensions and goodness knows whatever other crap that generations of politicians felt was more important than my own plans for the money, it seems incredible.  Almost incomprehensible.  Few of us can imagine anything else.

Which is what makes it so diabolical.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Part of my job is signing cover sheets attached to batches of documents submitted for recording.  This morning I’m busy.  I have to write my name on, like, ten separate sheets of paper.

If I were a pro ball player, my autographs would be worth $100 each.  Of course, our office charges $100 each for approvals.  But do I see any of that money?  NO!  It goes to the County Treasurer.

Oh sure, they claim it’s used to pay my salary and insurance and benefits but I’m not buying it.  I think management is getting rich off the backs of labor and stealing the fruits of my toils for their own greed, just like it says in this Public Employee’s Union Poster.

I need a union to protect me from being ground under the iron heel of management making me work indoors, in air conditioning, risking paper cuts every moment of an entire 40-hour week with only a few breaks for lunch, coffee and cigarettes.  I’m a slave, that’s all I am, just an indentured servant.  I am being cheated, I deserve a raise, I demand a raise and a bigger pension and better insurance, if I don’t get them, I’m going on strike and bring the entire system to its . . . . . .

///slap///

Thanks, I needed that.

So do these people.

Joe Doakes

By the way, as a tax-paying Minnesotan I have to hope that nobody in the Messinger Dayton Administration was reading the WaPo piece about the Mexican townspeople that are resisting the narcotraficantes with their illegal firearms; they might start getting ideas:

The area’s lime growers, for example, were taxed by metrics that included acreage, limes harvested and crates packed. The meager wages of the lime pickers were also taxed, along with the bus fares that they paid to get to the groves. Gang members taxed sacks of corn and the tortillas made from them. A man installing a floor in his house soon had a gang member at his door, demanding a fee. A man who ran a restaurant said the cartel began taking a cut of the coins in his jukebox.

“The DFL Majority:  Like cartel sicarios, in Priuses!”

I’ve been doing radio for a while.  I’ve interviewed a lot of people – Senators, Congresspeople, State Legislators, Governors, candidates for all of the above, Miss Minnesotas, authors, public intellectuals, fake intellectuals, Princesses Kay of the Milky Way, plate-throwers, journalists, bloggers, athletes, coaches – you get the picture.

And almost every time when I walk into an interview, I know more or less what I’m going to hear. 

Now, I don’t normally do a ton of interview prep.  I like to approach a subject from the same perspective that the audience has, from a complete white slate; it’s one of the best bits of interviewing advice Larry King ever gave.  That being said, I’m rarely surprised by what I hear in an interview.  I blog a lot, so I’ve had my mind on a lot of different subjects over the past 12 years. 

But last Saturday was a huge exception.  During the second hour on the NARN, I interviewed Linda Bell and Kirsten Block, from Minnesotans Against Common Core. 

Now, I figured I was going to hear more talk about national standards.  I oppose them, by the way – I don’t think the federal government should be telling the nation how to educate its children. 

But it’s worse than that.  In fact, it’s so much worse that for one of very, very few times in all of my years of interviewing people, I was actually dumbfounded by what I was hearing.  It was so much worse than I – a cynic who expects nothing good from our national education system – expected that I was nearly speechless. 

Standardized Poltroonery:  If you listen to some of the GOP’s talking heads who’ve come out in support of Common Core, you might think that’s the extent of it; the idea that a national set of standards will help ensure that our children all get a better education (because that worked so well with “No Child Left Behind”).

It’s wrong, of course.  When you nationalize standards, you accede to having them set via a political process, and political processes don’t work any better for allocating expectations in education than they do for allocating resources in an economy. 

That, alone, is reason to fight the Common Core. 

But it gets so much worse than that.

Orwellian:  Indeed, very little about the “Common Core” has much of anything to do with “Core” educational subjects at all. 

From the Fact Sheet at MACC’s website:

• It’s unconscionably intrusive: National student database – over 400+ data points collected (at a minimum – and likely many more).  Medical Histories?  Religion?  Guns in the house?  Bureaucrats’ impressions of your family life, gathered from mandatory home visits?  On top of the Obamacare Health Insurance Exchanges, the NSA will be the least of most of our privacy concerns. 
• We’re From Washington, And We’re Here To Get You To Shut The F*** Up:  the program is mandated by the feds.  Parental control? Parental input?  Dream on, peasant. 
• Richard Trumka Has Always Been A Great Man!:  The curriculae for Common Core programs will be written by bureaucrats – not teachers.  And not just the curriculum specialists who clog your local school systems today – the ones in Washington.  Or the ones that work for the big textbook companies.  Pardon the redundancy. 
• Shakespeare Out; Ginsburg In:  Western literature will be greatly de-emphasized. 
• Ryan WInkler Won’t Be The Only Innumerate State Rep:  The math standards are a disaster. 
• Teaching To The Test Didn’t Work.  Let’s Do More:  One of the worst traits of No Child Left Behind was that it gradually drove teachers and schools to “Teach to the Test” – since the tests were the measure of achievement.  Common Core will be worse – and thus, so will your kids education. 
• We Had To Pass It To Know What Was In It:  The State of Minnesota’s version of Common Core was adopted by the bureaucracy when the state wanted the federal money that comes with it, four years ago.  Neither Congress nor the Legislature had the foggiest clue what was in it.  They still largely don’t – which is why you see people like Jeb Bush supporting it.

Any school, public, private, charter or home, that gets any shred of federal assistance will be subject to the rules.

Common Core is an abomination, and needs to be repealed. 

I’m a small fish in a small pond – but I will actively work against any and all politicians who don’t condemn and work to repeal the Common Core as it is currently slated for implementation; with the intrusions, the lack of local involvement, the continued centralization of public education (and private and home-schooled education, as well. 

Whatever their party.

A “koan” is a paradoxical riddle, more or less.

Here’s an example: “If you have ice cream, I will give you ice cream.  If you have none, I’ll take it away”.  (It’s an “ice cream koan”). 

As Pejman Yousefsadeh points out, the paradoxical riddles about Obamacare aren’t nearly as amusing, to say nothing of sweet and creamy.

To: Representative Ryan “Beavis” Winkler”
From:  Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  Your Minimum Wage Thing

Rep. Winkler,

Here’s what technology has to say about your minimum wage hike.  Read it and think. 

That is all.

PS:  No, it’s not.  I know you’re not paid to think about these things; yours is not to reason why.  But those who support you?  Maybe not in your stu-foresaken district, but in the rest of Minnesota?  There might be hope.  And so I write.

The inevitable result of across-the-board minimum wage hikes?  Fewer minimum wage jobs.

Case in point; as minimum wages around the country rose during the 2000s, McDonalds started pre-cooking its hamburger patties, so they’d only need to be reheated in the stores.  This got rid of most of the traditional “burger-flipper” jobs, the ones that liberals sneered at but provided hundreds of thousands of opportunities for teens and others entering and re-entering the workforce to learn how to show up for work on time and do a good job at something. 

But there was always the front counter.  Right?

Maybe not; McDonalds is testing thousands of touch-screen kiosks in France:

The move is designed to boost efficiency and make ordering more convenient for customers. In an interview with the Financial Times, McDonald’s Europe President Steve Easterbrook notes that the new system will also open up a goldmine of data. McDonald’s could potentially track every Big Mac, McNugget, and large shake you order. A calorie account tally at the end of the year could be a real shocker.
The touch screens will only accept debit or credit cards, adding to the slow death knell of cash and coins. This all goes along with an overall revamp of McDonald’s restaurants worldwide aimed at projecting a modern image as opposed to the old-fashioned golden arches…

Winkler is spending his between-session time agitating for a minimum wage hike bill. 

Minnesota’s young and poor should ask him to stop doing them any more favors.

Maybe if there was a touch-screen kiosk of some kind…

 Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the left’s current ascendancy, across the US but especially in currently-single-party Minnesota, is the complete control they have of the long-range planning bodies that control the spending of so very, very much money in our society. 

And Katherine Kersten is onto the biggest and baddest such body in Minnesota, and their real aim – to take control of life as we know it in Minnesota.

The goal – from the Obama administration all the way down to the State of Minnesota – is to view metropolitan areas as “Regions”, and plan those regions so as to start funnelling people, by means subtle and brash, from the outskirts back into the cities. 

It’s called Regionalism, and it’s not merely for your and society’s own good; it intends to set things straight:

Regionalism is driven by a core ideological conviction: The cause of the poverty and social dysfunction that bedevil America’s cities is the greed and racial bigotry of suburbanites — especially those in prosperous, outer-ring suburbs, which are viewed as unjustly excluding the poor. Regionalists believe that financial aid for the inner ring won’t remedy this injustice. A profound change in governance is required.

It’s an authoritarian approach to building Utopia.  And like all such attempts throughout history, it requires a villain. 

What sort of change? The title of a book by regionalist guru David Rusk puts it bluntly: “Cities without Suburbs.” In regionalists’ view, suburbs with their own tax bases are, by definition, a menace to cities, and the distinctions between the two must be wiped out as completely as possible.

Regionalists’ strategy to effectively merge cities and suburbs turns on two ideologically freighted buzzwords: “equity” and “sustainability.” “Equity” is code for using public policy to redistribute wealth and to engineer economic equality among demographic groups.

Regionalists view metrowide “economic integration” as one of government’s primary responsibilities. Their plan to accomplish it is twofold: Disperse urban poverty throughout a metro area via low-income housing and make suburban life so inconvenient and expensive that suburbanites are pushed back into the city.

So the suburbs – and suburbanites – are the enemy, the Emanuel Goldsteins against whom the Regionalists will muster their side’s ignorant rage. 

“Sustainability” means policies that would override market forces to ensure that in the future, the great majority of new jobs, economic development and public works projects are funneled into the metro area’s urban core and inner ring — where, not coincidentally, regionalists’ own political base is concentrated. “Sustainable” policies promote high-density, Manhattan-style living, and attempt to wean us away from our cars and push us to walk, bike or use public transit to get to work.

As one critic — speculating on MSP 2040’s likely outcome — lamented: “Do we all have to live in a 1,500-square-foot condo above a coffee shop on a transit line?”

That’d be the goal. 

Of course, if you’re a conservative – at least, a libertarian-conservative – you know that allocating society’s resources via political means, especially to promote political ends, is the least-efficient way to do it.  And it’s Economics 101 to observe that “making people pay more, or less, than they naturally would for a good, or service (or, by extension, government) is the road to wrenching unintended consequences”. 

But that’s the point – making society, or at least the less-favored part of it, pay the bill for utopia:

Suburbanites will disproportionately shoulder the costs of this socially engineered transformation, paying more in taxes and getting less back in infrastructure and public services…Regionalists’ strategy for imposing their agenda hinges on giving regional bodies like the Met Council the ultimate trump: the power of the checkbook. The Obama administration’s “Sustainable Communities Initiative” (SCI) provides a model. SCI channels federal funds for land use, transportation and housing projects through regional bodies. The catch is that, to participate, municipalities must embrace redistributive “equity” goals.

Kersten doesn’t mention – because it’s outside the scope of the piece – that the “unintended consequences” of this sort of gigantistic destruction of the free market toward political goals are always, always vastly worse than planned.  Trying to force people and jobs back into cities at a time when the market is obsoleting the central core city – a concept that never actually occurred in human history outside of the 200-year window of the Industrial Revolution, a period that is drawing to a close even as we speak – is going to cause huge problems. 

Kevin Williamson may have been dead right; it may well be that the faster the Federal government goes broke, the better.  At least it’ll stymie this sort of authoritarian meddling.

The income gap has gotten worse under Obama. 

Much worse:

In his speech in Illinois last week, and at events since, Obama described income inequality in the starkest terms. “This growing inequality is morally wrong,” he said, and “undermines the very essence of America.”

To be sure, income inequality is a standard trope for liberals, who always use it to advocate more wealth redistribution.

And Obama’s latest focus neatly coincides with his plans to push for more federal spending and taxes on the “rich” in coming budget battles.

But what Obama conveniently leaves out of his sermons is that income inequality has grown faster on his watch than any time in the past two decades, at least.

Research by University of California economist Emmanuel Saez shows that since the Obama recovery started in June 2009, the average income of the top 1% grew 11.2% in real terms through 2011.

The bottom 99%, in contrast, saw their incomes shrink by 0.4%.

As a result, 121% of the gains in real income during Obama’s recovery have gone to the top 1%. By comparison, the top 1% captured 65% of income gains during the Bush expansion of 2002-07, and 45% of the gains under Clinton’s expansion in the 1990s.

 Who’da thunk it – the party whose entire compaign is aimed at gulling “the 99%” is the one that’s dedicated to screwing “the 99%”.

Couldn’t see that one coming.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Minnesota Department of Education is pulling ads because a DJ made jokes about schools (actually, pretty good jokes).

Worse, these are Public Service Announcements, which run for free. The station is giving away free air time, and the dept is pulling those spots. Did the station management see this coming and set it up to be able to sell that time to a paying account?

And seriously, does anybody believe running a radio ad saying “read more books” will do anything to overcome the centuries-old legacy of slavery, poverty, despair, neglect, crime and Liberalism that is the root cause of illiteracy and ignorance in Minnesota?

This dust-up is proof positive the Department of Education has too little to do and too much money to do it with. Abolish it.

Joe Doakes

More proof they have too much money? Spending literacy money at a top-40 station like KDWB, a station devoted to making people dumber.

I expect conservatives and libertarians to be exercised over the news that the White House is establishing a “Nudge Squad” – a group of behavioral scientists who will work with the government bureaucracy to try to help shape citizen behavior:

“Behavioral sciences can be used to help design public policies that work better, cost less, and help people to achieve their goals,” reads the government document describing the program, which goes on to call for applicants to apply for positions on the team.

The document was emailed by Maya Shankar, a White House senior adviser on social and behavioral sciences, to a university professor with the request that it be distributed to people interested in joining the team. The idea is that the team would “experiment” with various techniques, with the goal of tweaking behavior so people do everything from saving more for retirement to saving more in energy costs.

The document praises subtle policies to change behavior that have already been implemented in England, which already has a “Behavioral Insights Team.” One British policy concerns how to get late tax filers to pay up.

On the one hand, it all sounds very Orwellian.  And it is; using the government to shape peoples’ behavior is a short and utterly undefineable step away from using it to shape peoples’ thought.

On the other hand?  Precisely what has the public education system been since its inception?

Sometime today, The One will be giving his second speech (in Chattanooga) of his tenth attempt, give or take, to “pivot to the economy” in the past five years.

I’ll invite you to read this short but deep piece by Richard Epstein at the Hoover Institution, about the shallowness of Obama’s understanding – he’s more of a sloganeer, really – of how economies actually work, and how it’s manifested itself in a middle class that’s been largely bludgeoned into submission.

Read the whole thing, but here’s the conclusion:

Indeed [President Obama] constantly thinks of his greatest regulatory failures as his great successes. No other president has “saved the auto industry,” albeit by a corrupt bankruptcy process, or “taken on a broken health care system,” only to introduce a set of unworkable mandates that are already falling apart, or “investing in new technologies,” which tries to pick winners and ends up with losers like Solyndra. The great advances in energy have come from private developments, most notably fracking, and not from the vagaries of wind and solar energy, which no one has yet figured out how to store for future use when needed.

The President seems utterly incapable of seeing the downside to any of his policy choices. They are announced from on-high as all gain and no pain. In the face of stagnant growth, weak corporate earnings, and continued high unemployment, he shows not the slightest recognition that some of his programs might have gone amiss.

It is easy to see, therefore, why people have tuned out the President’s recent remarks. They have heard it all countless times before. So long as the President is trapped in his intellectual wonderland that puts redistribution first and regards deregulation and lower taxation as off limits, we as a nation will be trapped in the uneasy recovery that will continue to dog us no matter who is chosen to head the Federal Reserve.

If there were ever a time for someone to come onto the scene – or re-emerge, perhaps – with something on the order of “A Time For Choosing”, this would be it.

From the City of Minneapolis website, with emphasis added:

Regular meeting of the Minneapolis City Council Committee of the Whole standing committee and Intergovernmental Relations subcommittee.
Municipal Utility: 10:00 a.m. public hearing to consider authorizing the establishment of a municipal electrical utility and authorizing the City to own, operate, construct, and extend electric facilities and to purchase and acquire the property of any existing electrical public utility operating within the City of Minneapolis for the purpose of providing electrical and related services.
10:30 a.m. public hearing to consider authorizing the establishment of a municipal gas utility and authorizing the City to own, operate, construct, and extend gas and similar facilities and to purchase and acquire the property of any existing gas public utility operating within the City of Minneapolis for the purpose of providing natural gas and similar services.

Minneapolis’ unofficial motto: “100 Years of Socialism: Someday It Might Work”

Oh, yeah. Excel will shut down its Minneapolis headquarters if the city takes over the city’s power business.

More government union jobs, I guess.

Almost three in four small businesses plan to lay off workers, cut hours, and replace full-time employees with part-timers due to Obamacare:

“Small businesses expect the requirement to negatively impact their employees. Twenty-seven percent say they will cut hours to reduce full time employees, 24 percent will reduce hiring, and 23 percent plan to replace full time employees with part-time workers to avoid triggering the mandate,” said the Chamber business survey provided to Secrets.

Under Obamacare, just 30 hours — not the nationally recognized 40 hours — is considered full-time. Companies with 50 full-time workers or more are required to provide health care, or pay a fine.

I’m wondering if Obama’s apologists in the media have figured out that if the unemployment rate is “dropping” but the underemployment rate is rising, something might be going wrong?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The US Bank building in downtown St. Paul was foreclosed last year. The River Park Plaza building across the river from downtown St. Paul also was foreclosed last year. I don’t know how many more are in the pipeline.

St. Paul Class A office space vacancy rate is 12%. As last report, Class B was 24% and Class C was 19%, for an overall rate of 21%.

This, five years into the “recovery.” This is not your grandfather’s recovery. It’s more like your grandfather’s Great Depression.

Joe Doakes

And that’s after the State of Minnesota rented a hog-pile of empty and underutilized space.

And, I’ll guess, before the whole “Vacant Macy’s” gets counted, to boot.  It’s not “office” space, after all; just a vacant block.

More “recovery” like this and Saint Paul might need to try to find oil under some of those refrigerated ice rinks Mayor Coleman just had to have.