…and makes the case for privatizing health care.

Chavez, shown here with some of his friends.

More than a dozen of 34 radio stations ordered shut by the Venezuelan government went off the air on Saturday, part of President Hugo Chavez’s drive to extend his socialist revolution to the media.

Chavez defended the closures, calling them part of the government’s effort to democratize the airwaves.

President Obama’s reaction, or lack thereof will be quite telling over the next few days.

Dan Rather proposes the media should not only be in the pocket of the Obama administration but should now be digging into the pockets of the American taxpayer.

As if the relationship between the Obama Administration and the news media weren’t cozy enough already, former “CBS Evening News” anchor Dan Rather is calling on President Obama to “make recommendations” for the media on how to survive the economic downturn.

The media outlets that are failing financially are failing to be relevant.

According to the story, Rather said “corporate and political influence” on newsrooms had damaged the industry and was cause for concern.

…and a government bailout from the government will have no strings attached, right Dan?

PS Since when did Dan Rather get his credibility back?

Last month our Supreme Leader was quoted as saying “I’m not naive,” words that history will make famous some day. His advisors, being liberals, have only one lever to pull. Having pulled it harder than its ever been pulled before and to no avail, their advice?

The U.S. should consider drafting a second stimulus package focusing on infrastructure projects because the $787 billion approved in February was “a bit too small,” said Laura Tyson, an adviser to President Barack Obama.

“A bit too small.” Who are these people? Should it have had an “eency weency bit more pork?” Doubling it would not incent businesses to hire new employees right now or convince consumers to stop saving and start spending (hey, they’re smarter than the people they elected – maybe there is Hope^®).

The Obama stimulus already is the New Larger Size version of the failed Bush stimulus. Remember?

Hmm, what sort of policy would have incented hiring and spending? That’s a tough one. Anyone?

“The economy is worse than we forecast on which the stimulus program was based,” Tyson, who is a member of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory board, told the Nomura Equity Forum. “We probably have already 2.5 million more job losses than anticipated.”

Let me tweak that comment for you Ms. Tyson: “The economy is worse than we forecast because of the stimulus program.” Washington D.C. should be renamed “Ground Zero.”

The stimulus program will result in higher inflation and will require higher taxes. The anticipation of both is already putting pressure on businesses, who will continue to run as lean as they can for a long, long time. In fact, business owners are in fear of the government’s next move. Employees know this. The trickle-down effect is that even those that have jobs are hoarding cash and cutting expenditures.

Not very stimulating.

Maybe we should follow the MAC’s proposed signage plan and apply it to the economy. Let’s put up $2 Million signs everywhere “Be Happy. Spend Money.”

Tyson, 62, later told reporters that the U.S. can afford to pay for a second package, even as the fiscal deficit soars. She said the budget shortfall is “likely to be worse” than the equivalent of 12 percent of gross domestic product that the administration forecast for 2009 and the 8 percent to 9 percent it projected for next year.

We can “afford to pay” is an egregious choice of words given the fact that no one is “paying” – we are borrowing. I suppose her assessment is based on the fact that China hasn’t canceled our Visa card yet.

Tyson said the U.S. should shift away from its dependence on consumption to grow, and promote expansion through investment and exports. The dollar will need to weaken in the longer term to promote export-led growth, she said.

So, we shouldn’t consume, but let’s hope the rest of the world does? Remember kids what liberals mean when they say “investment?” I wonder how my Social Security “investments” are doing?

I think you’ve done enough to weaken the dollar in the long term Ms. Tyson. Thank you.

The Obama administration and its advisors are not naive; they know exactly what they are doing. They are holding the economy hostage until they get their way, executing an agenda despite its effects on the economy and leaving the “fixing” to the next administration.

Barack Obama’s liberal ideology, lack of economic acumen coupled with a growing gap between what he thinks America wants (or should want) and what it actually wants, puts him on a Highway to Heckfire^®.

The California morass has Democrats in Washington trembling. The reason is simple. If Obama’s health-care plan passes, then we may well end up paying for it with federal slips of paper worth less than California’s. Obama has bet everything on passing health care this year. The publicity surrounding the California debt fiasco almost assures his resounding defeat.

California offers us a glimpse. Obama calls it Hope^® and Change^®.

It takes years and years to make a mess as terrible as the California debacle, but the recipe is simple. All that you need is two political parties that are always willing to offer easy government solutions for every need of the voters, but never willing to make the tough decisions necessary to finance the government largess that results.

Oops. Too late. We’ve arrived. Obama and Company is on pace to do it in months and months.

The federal picture is so bleak because the Obama administration is the most fiscally irresponsible in the history of the U.S. I would imagine that he would be the intergalactic champion as well, if we could gather the data on deficits on other worlds. Obama has taken George W. Bush’s inattention to deficits and elevated it to an art form.

The Obama administration has no shame, and is willing to abandon reason altogether to achieve its short-term political goals. Ronald Reagan ran up big deficits in part because he believed that his tax cuts would produce economic growth, and ultimately pay for themselves. He may well have been excessively optimistic about the merits of tax cuts, but at least he had a story.

Obama has no story. Nobody believes that his unprecedented expansion of the welfare state will lead to enough economic growth. Nobody believes that it will pay for itself. Everyone understands that higher spending today begets higher spending tomorrow. That means that his economic strategy simply doesn’t add up.

Teleprompters don’t do math.

…stop by the Minnesota State Capitol grounds for the July 4th Taxpayers Tea Party!  It runs from three-ish until six-ish, I think – plenty of time to fit around cookouts and fireworks!
I’ll be there – I’m speaking, in fact; I’m fairly early in the lineup, which means it goes way uphill fast!

Hope to see you – and lots and lots of your friends – there!

Rasmussen sez  cap and trade not exactly lighting up the polls:

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that just 19% believe the climate change bill passed by the House on Friday will help the economy. Fifteen percent (15%) say it will have no impact, and 24% are not sure.A majority of both Republicans (56%) and adults not affiliated with either major political party (52%) think the bill will hurt the economy. Among Democrats, however, 30% say it will help the economy, 23% that it will hurt and 21% say it will have no impact.

I bet if they phrased the question “are you aware that this bill will flense any chance you have of keeping a job for the next couple of generations, and crate up American jobs and industries and ship them to China, India and Indonesia as fast as we can find ships to put ’em in?” the numbers would be even better.

…when going to Canada to escape the taxes was like going to Scotland for the cuisine.

Well, the American people had Hope, and boy, did we get Change:

In a clear indication that Canada is starting to be considered a low-tax place to do business, Tim Hortons Inc. announced yesterday plans to shift its base of operations from Delaware to Canada for tax purposes.

Further, analysts indicate this is also a sign of unease among corporations regarding the U. S. business environment, where taxes are likely heading upward to deal with trillion-dollar deficits and proposed health-care reforms and the White House is looking to crack down on companies that invest abroad.

Remember when Democrats used to whinge that the GOP was “exporting jobs?”

Of course, Cap ‘n Enslave won’t so much “export” them as put them out on the curb to be hauled off, but I digress:

In Canada, the federal corporate tax rate is headed to 15% in 2012, and the federal Conservative government has called on the provinces to get to a 10% business levy by the same time frame–for a combined 25% rate on corporate income. Alberta is already at 10%. British Columbia will be there in 2011, Ontario by 2013, and New Brunswick will go down further, to 8%, in 2012.

In the United States, the top corporate tax rate is in the mid-30% range. As a result, the United States now has about the highest combined corporate tax rate, second only to Japan, among industrialized countries.

“This is an indication that Tim Hortons has looked at the structure, and they think Canada has a competitive tax system … but I think it is forecasting into the future that Canada is likely to stay that way,” said Len Farber, senior tax advisor at law firm Ogilvy Renault and former top-ranking official at the Department of Finance.

Hm.  Maybe that’s why all those celebrities who promised to move to Canada back in 2004 didn’t actually do it; they realized that the US was going to become everything that Canada was, and vice versa.

(Via KB)

Its easy for the rest of America to disassociate with the fiscal crisis in California. After all, it represents a bigger-than-life culture of Hollywood, celebrities, extreme lifestyles and a Bush-era “conservative” Guvernator. Even more so in Minnesota where our culture and demographics make us an unlikely analog.

Nonetheless, we are subject to national policies now mirroring those of California and to think the results will somehow be different on an national scale is a predictable exercise of liberal insanity.

California, too, spent lavishly in the fat years and issued bonds when state revenues did not cover the costs, bringing its once-sterling credit rating down to the nation’s lowest. So, too, U.S. Treasury bonds, T-bills and the American dollar are now increasingly suspect.

California, like Minnesota has a mandatory budget-balancing provision in force and watching California comply is going to be a lesson in fiscal responsibility – the hard way.

with the state under a constitutional mandate to balance its budget, yet facing a $24 billion deficit this July, a chainsaw is about to be taken to state government.

At arms length (a 2000-mile arm that is), California’s issues hold little import for Minnesotans, and probably won’t have an immediate effect on us here. We should count ourselves fortunate that our Governor is willing to take the heat by refusing to hike taxes and un-allotting what our legislature wouldn’t un-budget. What is troubling is California’s microcosmic prognostication for the rest of the country.

California and it’s economy are faced with the fallout of massive over-spending, immigration, health care and arbitrary and burdensome emissions regulations – which have failed by the way. Sound familiar?

Some 38,000 of 168,000 state prisoners may be released. As Barack Obama is pushing universal health insurance, California will cut Medi-Cal for the poor. Education will be slashed, resulting in a shortened school year, thousands of laid-off teachers, school closings and an end to summer programs in a system that has plummeted from the nation’s best to one of its worst, as measured by dropout rates and academic achievement.

The Obama administration represents the worst of fiscal liberalism as evidenced by the climate bill passed by the House, massive bailouts and a stimulus package that is nothing more than a veiled attempt to enlarge the federal government. Obama is making all the wrong moves, belying the lesson California’s fiscal train wreck offers the rest of us, and deservedly drawing comparisons to Jimmy Carter.

Under George W. Bush and Obama, the U.S. government has undertaken huge new responsibilities: No Child Left Behind, Medicare prescription drug benefits, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the takeovers of banks and auto companies, bailouts without end and national health insurance.

The “We Inherited it from Bush” plea will provide little cover as the Obama administration and virtually the same Congress that was in place during much of the Bush administration continue to ignore the signs. In six months they have done more damage to our nation’s solvency than Bush and Company did in eight years.

Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan carried California nine times. But the state is now a fiefdom of liberalism. John McCain’s share of the vote was smaller than Barry Goldwater’s. California today believes in Big Government, open borders, diversity, multiculturalism and the politics of compassion. But what liberalism has wrought in California, its native-born are fleeing.

The rest of us have nowhere to flee. We can’t all move to Florida.

One little factoid about the New Deal – buried in seventy years of media and education-establishment myths on the subject – was that it likely prolonged the Great Depression.

Getting a straight number out of economists is like getting a convincing “go ahead, punk, make my day” out of Clay Aiken – the best way to get thirty opinions about an economic issue is to put ten of them in a room together – but I’ve seen convincing cases that had the government kept their mitts completely off the economy, the Big One would have ended by sometime in the late thirties.  As it was, the New Deal and all the other government interventions pushed the Great Depression well into World War II, when the “Draft the Unemployed” program finally got everyone working and all the remaining factories humming.

As Bogus Doug notes, history repeats:

Of course reactionary cynics may note that it seems odd for the Obama administration to follow their prior attempt in “creating or saving” jobs by more of the same, when the economy actually shed 17% more jobs than said administration forecast would be lost if they did absolutely nothing to try to save them. This graph from Geoff at Innocent Bystanders illustrates this insolent observation of actual measurable employment numbers, rooted in the failed politics of the past which our Great Leader has promised to transcend:But happy members of Obama-nation know this ignores the important foundational work going on in delivering us into a new era of Hopeyness. Can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, as the saying goes, and you can’t “create or save” a few hundred thousand jobs without “collateral damage” to a few hundred thousand other jobs. That should just go without saying. I mean really people, does he have to spell everything out for you?

Read the whole cynical thing.

GM should have been allowed to go bankrupt months if not years ago, and without the “help” of Congress or the Obama administration. Now that it has finally come, an analysis of the distribution of the spoils reveals both method and motive.

GM’s bankruptcy pushes bondholders aside in favor of the U.S. government and the UAW. Though bondholders hold $27 billion in debt, they’ll get just 10% of stock.

How’s that compare with the other “stakeholders?” For spending $50 billion to bail out GM, the government will get 60% of the equity in the new GM; the UAW, which along with other unions gave millions to Democrats, will be repaid for its loyalty with 17.5% of the stock for $10 billion of unsecured debts.

Not unlike our nation’s financial crisis, those that caused the crisis employ more of the same and escape with the plunder.

They call it “restructuring.” We call it theft. Never in our memory has there been a more thorough, systematic effort to disenfranchise the shareholders and bondholders of a major American firm.

Has this happened before? Yes – well, almost. But these are different times – and a different judicial climate.

…in 1952, when President Harry S. Truman tried to seize control of the U.S. steel industry during a debilitating strike, the Supreme Court made him back down. And Truman had a real emergency on his hands: the Korean War.

By what authority is the Obama administration orchestrating this expedited bankruptcy and government takeover of a global corporate enterprise?

We pored over Article II of the Constitution, known as the Executive Powers Clause. Nowhere is the White House granted the right to override the time-tested bankruptcy process, to use Treasury money raised by taxing Americans to buy or bail out companies, to fire CEOs, to micromanage corporate policy, or to abrogate lawful contracts made by private parties.

Arrogance and incompetence have taken the place of justice and precedent. Where’s the outrage now?

A select few Conservatives and even fewer media pundits have labeled the takeover and bailouts of several American corporate icons as Socialism manifest.

The first months of the Obama Administration have given rise to abundant talk about a U.S. drift into socialism. “We Are All Socialists Now,” a Newsweek cover declared in February. On May 20 the Republican National Committee approved a resolution calling on Democrats to “stop pushing our country toward socialism.”

Socialists in America say however that it isn’t so.

They say if the Obama Administration were establishing a true socialist state, we’d have at least a $15-an-hour minimum wage (instead of the current $6.55 federal minimum) and 30-hour workweeks. Every American would be guaranteed employment and health-care coverage. Oh, and homeless people would be occupying vacant office buildings in cities and vacant McMansions in the suburbs.

…as if Socialism exists on one side of a hash line but not on the other.

So apparently we’re not there yet.

Guaranteed employment, health-care and housing will come in Obama’s reelection campaign.

But that’s not really the point, is it?

Conservative Americans concerned for our future as a nation, as an economic power, fear the direction our country is headed and even more the lack of concern among our citizenry for what is quickly happening right under their noses. You can’t unbake a cake and so it is with big government and entitlements.

As our esteemed governor knows, reductions in either are historically very hard to come by. As the saying goes, a luxury becomes a necessity twenty four hours later not unlike new layers of government spending and regulation. Once in place, they tend to stay in place.

Socialists say the policies Obama has pursued are hallmarks of “democratic capitalist” states, not socialist ones. “None of the societies of Western Europe are socialist, but the political influence of their strong Labor, Social Democratic, and Socialist parties make their form of capitalism much more humane than our own,” says Frank Llewellyn, national director of the New York-based Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the largest U.S. Socialist party.

I don’t know how “humane” delaying the inevitable was to UAW workers at GM; thousands of which are soon to lose their jobs as GM declares bankruptcy under the weight of years of artificially-high labor costs and government over-regulation, despite an infusion of billions of taxpayer dollars and an inept CEO being fired by an even more inept President.

In the end, auto workers will discover their rightful economic value hard and fast. Taxpayers will own 70% of a corporation that should have been absorbed by the system. Capitalism should have been allowed to do what capitalism does – efficiently redistribute capital and talent to it’s highest and best use.

Something quite opposite capitalism has instead been deliberately and opportunistically brought to bear. Call it Socialism or Obamunism – labels don’t matter – the point is our government is violating domain it has historically been denied (and in many cases by law is prohibited) to venture.

Socialists say…the Obama team is…scrambling to rescue and preserve capitalism.

Deflection. Nice try. Capitalism can take care of itself, thank you very much.

If Socialism were to come to America, would it come quick like a thief in the night…or real…slow…like…so as to stay under the radar; take capitalism by surprise?

How do you cook a frog? In a pot of cool water; turn up the heat real slow.

By the time he realizes he’s cooked, it’s too late to jump out.

A commentator at Pravda says that Marxism has finally triumphed – right here in the USA:

The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their “right” to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our “democracy”. Pride blind the foolish.

The irony – a Russian chattering about people giving up their freedom, practically a Great Russian genetic trait – only partly counterbalances the fact that he’s got a point.

If someone were to develop an education system to create a generations-deep supply of ignorant, impotent sheeple, how would they actually change our system?

Minnesotans, The Frozen Chosen, celebrate a high quality of life and boast once people move here they never move away. That stickiness is a mystery to others around the nation, especially when viewing our winter weather forecasts in January and February from points even just a click or two South of here.

Residents and business owners have tolertated a fairly high cost of doing business in deference to that quality of life.

As our population ages however, and as our tax-and-spend lawmakers leverage their majority, we will find ourselves waxing nostalgically about the good old days when our economy was strong and diversified, our schools were world-class and our cities safe and clean.

Ever wonder why you see so many Florida license plates on the backs of Cadillac, Mercedes Benz and Lexus cars in Minnesota?

Soak the Rich, Lose the Rich

With states facing nearly $100 billion in combined budget deficits this year, we’re seeing more governors than ever proposing the Barack Obama solution to balancing the budget: Soak the rich. Lawmakers in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York and Oregon want to raise income tax rates on the top 1% or 2% or 5% of their citizens. New Illinois Gov. Patrick Quinn wants a 50% increase in the income tax rate on the wealthy because this is the “fair” way to close his state’s gaping deficit.

A good many wealthy Minnesotans have figured out how to live in Florida – and more recently in my professional experience, South Dakota and Arizona – 181 days of the year, and if we raise taxes again, I’d say a good many more are going to give it a go.

…from 1998 to 2007, more than 1,100 people every day including Sundays and holidays moved from the nine highest income-tax states such as California, New Jersey, New York and Ohio and relocated mostly to the nine tax-haven states with no income tax, including Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire and Texas. We also found that over these same years the no-income tax states created 89% more jobs and had 32% faster personal income growth than their high-tax counterparts.

Examining data from a 2008 Princeton study on the New Jersey tax hike on the wealthy, we found that there were 4,000 missing half-millionaires in New Jersey after that tax took effect. New Jersey now has one of the largest budget deficits in the nation.

Have you seen those commercials and heard those radio ads here that equate the Governor’s directive to not raise taxes with the suffering of students and teachers and firefighters and law enforcement?

Those who disapprove of tax competition complain that lower state taxes only create a zero-sum competition where states “race to the bottom” and cut services to the poor as taxes fall to zero. They say that tax cutting inevitably means lower quality schools and police protection as lower tax rates mean starvation of public services.

They’re wrong, and New Hampshire is our favorite illustration. The Live Free or Die State has no income or sales tax, yet it has high-quality schools and excellent public services. Students in New Hampshire public schools achieve the fourth-highest test scores in the nation — even though the state spends about $1,000 a year less per resident on state and local government than the average state and, incredibly, $5,000 less per person than New York. And on the other side of the ledger, California in 2007 had the highest-paid classroom teachers in the nation, and yet the Golden State had the second-lowest test scores.

Texas, recently threatening secession, seems to have the right formula.

Texas created more new jobs in 2008 than all other 49 states combined. And Texas is the only state other than Georgia and North Dakota that is cutting taxes this year.

The Texas economic model makes a whole lot more sense than the New Jersey model, and we hope the politicians in California, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota [emphasis mine-JR] and New York realize this before it’s too late.

Given the current economy and already-high taxes, we may be near a tipping point where raising taxes now could accelerate an exodus of the wealthy and more importantly, business owners, taking their jobs and consumption with them.

Surely New Jersey didn’t think they would ever be a cautionary tale. Let’s not let Minnesota be the next.

Remember this?

The Car The People have been Waiting For®

Now this:

The 2012 Pelosi GTxi SS/RT Sport Edition

HT Dr. Chris

In the wake of last night’s blasphemous-but-hilarious South Park, George Will’s piece on Obama’s emerging authoritarianism on the economy is perfectly-timed.

…the Obama administration, judging by its cavalier disregard of contracts between Chrysler and some of the lenders it sought money from, thinks contracts are written on water. The administration proposes that Chrysler’s secured creditors get 28 cents per dollar on the $7 billion owed to them but that the United Auto Workers union get 43 cents per dollar on its $11 billion in claims — and 55 percent of the company. This, even though the secured creditors’ contracts supposedly guaranteed them better standing than the union.

That’d be some of the “change” for which some of President Obama’s supporters had “hope”; the law no longer means what it says it means.

Among Chrysler’s lenders, some servile banks that are now dependent on the administration for capital infusions tugged their forelocks and agreed. Some hedge funds among Chrysler’s lenders that are not dependent were vilified by the president because they dared to resist his demand that they violate their fiduciary duties to their investors, who include individuals and institutional pension funds.

Not only trampling the law himself, but demanding that the hedge fund managers do the same?  In for a penny, in for a buck, I guess.

This is not gross, unambiguous lawlessness of the Nixonian sort — burglaries, abuse of the IRS and FBI, etc. — but it is uncomfortably close to an abuse of power that perhaps gave Nixon ideas: When in 1962 the steel industry raised prices, President John F. Kennedy had a tantrum and his administration leaked rumors that the IRS would conduct audits of steel executives, and sent FBI agents on predawn visits to the homes of journalists who covered the steel industry, ostensibly to further a legitimate investigation.

It’s appropriate that President Obama is paying homage to the last president who was more demigogic legend than fact.

I’ll add emphasis on the home stretch:

The Obama administration’s agenda of maximizing dependency involves political favoritism cloaked in the raiment of “economic planning” and “social justice” that somehow produce results superior to what markets produce when freedom allows merit to manifest itself, and incompetence to fail. The administration’s central activity — the political allocation of wealth and opportunity — is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption.

The arrogant abuse of government power to ignore laws and manipulate the economy?

Finally, a problem the Administration can’t blame on the previous one…

After running a campaign that harped on “vision”, Obama’s administration desperately lacks it:

President Barack Obama is about as visionary as the guy who invented Dippin’ Dots, Ice Cream of the Future. Far from sketching out a truly forward-looking set of policies for the 21st century, as his supporters had hoped, Obama is instead serving up cryogenically tasteless and headache-inducing morsels from years gone by.On issue after issue, Obama has made it clear that instead of blasting past “the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long,” (as he promised in his inaugural address), he’s moving full speed ahead toward policy prescriptions that already had less fizz than a case of Billy Beer back when Jimmy Carter was urging us all to wear sweaters and turn down our thermostats. Instead of thinking outside the box, Obama is nailing it shut from the inside.

My theory – and I’ll stand by it – is that much of Obama’s electorate is too young or too complacent about politics to know that “different from Bush” isn’t really “different” in the great scheme of things.

Obama’s big schtick so far seems to be counting on populist Macguffins  both vague (“hope and change”) and specific (“green jobs”, “raising taxes on the wealthy”, “high speed trains”) for his actual policy substance:

Consider the president’s recent “major” speech about transportation, yet another Castro-like exhortation in which Obama boldly rejected the failed policies of the past in favor of the failed policies of the future.

“Our highways are clogged with traffic,” he noted, before unveiling his big fix: Shiny new trains that go almost twice as fast as cars. Forget that, as urban historian Joel Garreau has long documented, our country has been decentralizing its living and working patterns for decades now, migrating from virtually all urban centers (except maybe for booming Washington, D.C.) to relatively low-density suburbs. In a big, spread-out country where individualized service at the coffee stand, on cable TV, and in your computer is the new normal, our chief visionary officer is talking about a one-size-fits-all solution that will surely bomb even bigger than NBC’s Supertrain.

It’s an axiom of economics that “making someone pay more or less for a good or service than they would on their own causes grievous unexpected consequences”.  I suspect that the same holds true for trying to chivvy, shame or coerce people into living where they ordinarily won’t would work about the same.

Non-survival of the dumbest for example.

Drivers and front-seat passengers in Florida may be cited for not wearing seat belts when a new law takes effect on June 30. Known as a “primary” seat belt law, the law allows enforcement officers to pull vehicles over solely for a belt violation

Sounds reasonable enough, right?

Signed into law by Gov. Charlie Crist earlier this week, the legislation makes Florida eligible for up to $35 million in federal grant money created in 2005 as an incentive for states to establish seat belt laws.

Thanks for holding firm to the principals of conservatism there Chuck. It’s my pleasure to pay federal income taxes and see them spent in Florida to incent some dufus to wear his seat belt.

Leave aside for a moment the question of whether Porkulus is actually going to help or hurt the economy; for purposes of discussion, let’s say it’ll “help”, in the long term (and, equally plausible, let’s presume I’m going to be squiring Scarlett Johannsen around down this weekend).

Let’s also presume, for a moment, that the individual states have both the responsibility and the right (according to the Tenth Amendment) to set their own budgets and run their own business.

So should the government be holding up the “good” of the stimulus because  a state is balancing its budget by cutting pay for union workers?  As opposed to, say, firing them all?:

The Obama administration is threatening to rescind billions of dollars in federal stimulus money if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state lawmakers do not restore wage cuts to unionized home healthcare workers approved in February as part of the budget.

Schwarzenegger’s office was advised this week by federal health officials that the wage reduction, which will save California $74 million, violates provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Failure to revoke the scheduled wage cut before it takes effect July 1 could cost California $6.8 billion in stimulus money, according to state officials.

The World Health Organization is half right.  We have an pandemic of Pork Flu in this country.

Mitch “The Other Mitch” Pearlstein writing in the MinnPost:

Then there’s an old but still important George McGovern op-ed. Writing in the Wall Street Journal in 1992, the South Dakota Democrat talked about how he had bought an inn in Connecticut four years earlier, but which had gone bankrupt in the interim. “In retrospect,” he acknowledged, “I wish I had known more about the hazards and difficulties of such a business, especially during a recession of the kind that hit New England just as I was acquiring the inn’s 43-year leasehold.”Even more candidly and impressively, he wrote, “I also wish that during the years I was in public office, I had had firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day. That knowledge would have made me a better U.S. senator and more understanding presidential contender.”

Pearlstein notes that Minnesota wants to raise income taxes on “the rich” to between 9 and 9.25%.

Now, remember – most small businesses, including the ones that put so many Minnesotans into “the rich” category the DFL so wants to mug – are Subchapter S corporations.  If you’re a small but successful business – a consultant, a freelance software architect, run a small but successful store, any kind of small business that is unlikely to ever “go public” and sell stock – you are probably an “S Corp”.  Which means you pay your “corporate” taxes on your personal tax return.  Which makes you “rich”, according to the Minnesota Department of Revenue, while still being “kinda in between” in the real world.

Minnesota wants to make life about 25% harder for those people – in a state whose taxes already verge on confiscatory:

I’m not unmindful of how difficult it is to balance a biennial budget that’s almost $5 billion out of whack. But I’m more mindful and admiring all the time of what it takes to run a successful business and how dependent we are on the men and women who do so here — as opposed to the overwhelming majority of other states with lower tax burdens. (Note: The personal income taxes of many business owners are based on their companies’ revenues.)

So two impertinently pertinent questions:

Do these proposals sound as if they were designed by people who truly know what it takes to conceive, create, and run a business?

Even more to the point, do these plans sound like promising ways of encouraging entrepreneurial people to set up shop in Minnesota and then stick around?

Both of them are rhetorical questions.  The DFL’s big stakeholders – the big public employee and teachers unions – are run by people who’ve never had the faintest shred of entrepreneurial interest; indeed, many of them (like my guest on last Saturday’s NARN show, union organizer Alan Maki) actively detest entrepreneurs.

We have government of, by and for big institutions in Minnesota today.

It’s hard to find solid attribution for the quote “Democracy can only survive until the people discover they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury”.  PJ O’Rourke in Parliament of Whores attributed it to De Tocqueville, if memory serves…

…but it really doesn’t matter.  Whomever said it – or even if it was entirely manufactured by the Libertarian Party back in the seventies, for that matter – the old, utterly true saying is getting a whole new chapter, nationwide and according to the new Minnesota Poll, amongst ourselves.

Minnesotans oppose new taxes – on themselves.  They do support more for that amorphous “The Rich” that seems to have all the money:

When it comes to a broader increase — income tax hikes for most Minnesotans — nearly 60 percent said that would be unacceptable.Half of the poll respondents said they think the state should use a combination of unspecified tax increases and spending cuts to help erase the state’s $4.6 billion deficit, while another 40 percent said the balancing should be achieved primarily through spending cuts alone. Only 4 percent favored squaring the books primarily with tax increases.

Most respondents favored tax increases on “The Rich” rather than “Me”, according to the poll results.

Given that the MNPoll routinely grossly oversamples DFLers – the party built on Robbing From “The Rich” And Giving To Government – this makes perfect sense; in the DFL’s world, there’s always someone else with money to take.

Let’s see how many leftybloggers try to use this “poll” has justification for a spending orgy, shall we?

Ten and a half Trillion dollars have been committed by our government for bailouts and stimulus.

The USA’s GDP is around 14 Trillion dollars and according to the CIA, our current debt as a percentage of GDP is around 60%. The fact that Japan is near the top of the global rankings at 170% does not bode well for us.

This may foreshadow our fate: protracted economic stagnation for the US, as we follow in near lockstep with the Japanese by going dangerously deeper into debt and allowing our government to send (print) good money after bad.

Ultimately, delay may be the sole result as efforts to bail out financial institutions, insurance companies, and manufacturers will end in the bankruptcies that should have been allowed to happen by now.

To anyone currently under the age of 55: your retirement plans are hereby revised canceled.

“They” being the Obamanistas running our nation. Government doesn’t grow like grass growing on a peaceful prairie; more like a brain tumor.

Would-be Obama Administration Commerce Secretary Judd Gregg speaks out on why he turned around and walked back out the door, embarrassing the President yet gain with another failed or controversial cabinet appointment (I’ll bet he pays his taxes) and even more so with his postmortem.

[Obama] may be “a charismatic person” with “a very strong understanding of who he is and what he wants to do,” but when it comes to the substance of what Mr. Obama seeks to accomplish, Mr. Gregg is less charitable. “They have a goal,” the senator says, “and he’s very open about it. They are going to grow this government.”

Why? Because that’s what liberals do. Why? Because they got nothin’ else in their quiver. Big government is to be made bigger for its own sake. How does that bode for the future?

“We’re headed on an unsustainable path. The simple fact is these [budget] numbers don’t work and the practical implications of them are staggering for the nation and the next generation.”

And as a result of all that spending, “You see the size of government growing from 21% [of gross domestic product] to 22%, to 23%, 24%, 25% . . . toward 30%.”

For the sake of credibility let me remind you liberals, this is the guy that Obama picked for his cabinet.

We post on torture and war and our liberal readers go ape. We post on Tea Parties and liberals argue semantics rather than addressing the fiscal crisis behind them. Why aren’t both sides freaking out about what liberal politicians, both Democrat (mostly) and Republican (sadly) are doing to our country financially?

I suppose liberals aren’t enraged because they’ve been sold on all these Hopey Changey concepts like wind-powered scooters and affordable health care for everyone without weighing the costs – costs beyond what we can afford as a nation – unless we borrow. Costs that without any market forces keeping them in check will make the current health care “crisis” look like the panacea liberals are looking for. But liberals in both parties have no aversion to borrowing and spending other-people’s money so long as the cause is “noble” enough – so for them, problem solved!

For Mr. Gregg, this is like living a nightmare. He has been a hard-nosed advocate for government spending restraint since his days as a Congressman (1981-87) and governor of New Hampshire (1987-93). At times, his commitment to fiscal responsibility led him to oppose tax cuts when they weren’t matched by spending restraint. Those stances incurred the ire of his Republican colleagues, but he always stuck to his fiscal-responsibility guns. Now he’s staring down a spending explosion that makes those battles look picayune.

What hope have we that prefer our nation not become completely insolvent?

…the runaway spending and growing pile of debt, could yet set the stage for a Republican comeback, and sooner than most pundits would predict. Mr. Gregg will not run for re-election when his current term ends next year. Republicans, he says, “became very clouded as to what we stood for under the Bush presidency.” But now they’re getting their “definition” back.

Once again, liberals will have screwed up our nation’s finances so badly that conservatives will be called back in to restore confidence. When will America learn?

That is the percentage Obama is proposing to cut from the budget to reduce the deficit.

A senior administration officials says President Barack Obama is ready to ask federal department and agency chiefs to find $100 million to cut from the budget when he holds his first formal Cabinet meeting.

Now before you jump to the conclusion that this is some sort of PR stunt on the part of Jimmy Carter II, consider this:

If you were applying the same reduction to the purchase of a $50,000 car, it would amount to $1.41. If you were applying the same reduction to a family’s monthly budget of $4000 per month, it would amount to 11 cents per month. (!!!)

OK – go ahead and jump to the aforementioned conclusions now.

As for me, I can’t wait to get home tonight and tell my kids that our government is mortgaging their future a wee bit less than we thought!

Government (or pseudogovernmental) actions have unintended consequences; these consequences are often worse than the original problem.

History is full of such examples. Peter Huber in City Journal Bdemonstrates how Obama’s “Green Economy” is going to screw up the ecology even faster than whatever’s happening now.

Snip:

Ten countries ruled by nasty people control 80 percent of the planet’s oil reserves—about 1 trillion barrels, currently worth about $40 trillion. If $40 trillion worth of gold were located where most of the oil is, one could only scoff at any suggestion that we might somehow persuade the nasty people to leave the wealth buried. They can lift most of their oil at a cost well under $10 a barrel. They will drill. They will pump. And they will find buyers. Oil is all they’ve got.Poor countries all around the planet are sitting on a second, even bigger source of carbon—almost a trillion tons of cheap, easily accessible coal. They also control most of the planet’s third great carbon reservoir—the rain forests and soil. They will keep squeezing the carbon out of cheap coal, and cheap forest, and cheap soil, because that’s all they’ve got. Unless they can find something even cheaper. But they won’t—not any time in the foreseeable future.

Read the whole thing; it’s Economics 300, which to be fair seems to be about 200 farther than the Administration ever got.

in unrelated-yet-germane news, Charles Gasparino at the NYPost looks into the role Elliot Spitzer’s “investigation” (which, according to the story, was mostly a repackaging of AIG’s own internal probe) played in turning a former pillar of good, sober management into financial chum and a not-so-funny punchline of the current economic crisis.

Conclusion:

THE former AIG executives I’ve been interviewing lately say many people deserve blame for the tragedy that is AIG: Sullivan, for taking his eye off the growing exposure; Greenberg, for hanging onto power as CEO even in his 80s and for creating the financial-products group without grooming a competent successor — and, of course, the guys who directly ran the credit-default-swap business.

But they save their harshest criticism and contempt for Eliot Spitzer for how his investigation, as trivial as it was, so consumed AIG’s management at possibly the most important time in its history — and for nothing more than a few cheap headlines.

The whole thing is worth a read.