Cranky-D

America before the entitlement state:

In the 19th century, even though capitalism had only existed for a short time, and had just started putting a dent in pre-capitalism’s legacy of poverty, the vast, vast majority of Americans were already able to support their own lives through their own productive work. Only a tiny fraction of a sliver of a minority depended on assistance and aid–and there was no shortage of aid available to help that minority.

But in a culture that revered individual responsibility and regarded being “on the dole” as shameful, formal charity was almost always a last resort. Typically people who hit tough times would first dip into their savings. They might take out loans and get their hands on whatever commercial credit was available. If that wasn’t enough, they might insist that other family members enter the workforce. And that was just the start.

“Those in need,” historian Walter Trattner writes, “. . . looked first to family, kin, and neighbors for aid, including the landlord, who sometimes deferred the rent; the local butcher or grocer, who frequently carried them for a while by allowing bills to go unpaid; and the local saloonkeeper, who often came to their aid by providing loans and outright gifts, including free meals and, on occasion, temporary jobs. Next, the needy sought assistance from various agencies in the community–those of their own devising, such as churches or religious groups, social and fraternal associations, mutual aid societies, local ethnic groups, and trade unions.”

What a novel idea: look to friends, family, and neighbors for help, because one day they might need your help.

Instead, we have a huge, faceless bureaucracy that costs a huge amount of our money just to maintain, and is incredibly impersonal in what it does. Ultimately it’s a source of destruction to the individual, not help.

Soon, it will destroy us all.

From the always relevant Victor Davis Hanson, we have a cautionary tale of a failing state.

I am starting to feel as if I am living in a Vandal state, perhaps on the frontier near Carthage around a.d. 530, or in a beleaguered Rome in 455. Here are some updates from the rural area surrounding my farm, taken from about a 30-mile radius. In this take, I am not so much interested in chronicling the flotsam and jetsam as in fathoming whether there is some ideology that drives it.

Last week an ancestral rural school near the Kings River had its large bronze bell stolen. I think it dated from 1911. I have driven by it about 100 times in the 42 years since I got my first license. The bell had endured all those years. Where it is now I don’t know. Does someone just cut up a beautifully crafted bell in some chop yard in rural Fresno County, without a worry about who forged it or why — or why others for a century until now enjoyed its presence?

The city of Fresno is now under siege. Hundreds of street lights are out, their copper wire stripped away. In desperation, workers are now cementing the bases of all the poles — as if the original steel access doors were not necessary to service the wiring. How sad the synergy! Since darkness begets crime, the thieves achieve a twofer: The more copper they steal, the easier under cover of spreading night it is to steal more. Yet do thieves themselves at home with their wives and children not sometimes appreciate light in the darkness? Do they vandalize the street lights in front of their own homes?

This is what a failing state looks like. When lawlessness becomes something that is ignored by the government, and when the victim pays all the costs, civilization will crumble.

I’m surprised that the farmers in question haven’t been shooting the thieves. I guess that’s what happens when you live in a state that doesn’t allow you to defend your property.

Read the whole thing.

“English doesn’t borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammer.”

From here via the comments section here and ultimately seen first here.

Update: the actual quote is:

“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that the English language is as pure as a crib-house whore. It not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary.”
—James Nicoll, can.general, March 21, 1992

There are some outtakes from Obama’s interview on Sixty Minutes you might be interested in. Go here to see the edited video, which is just the remarks in question.

The key quote, “I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in out first two years against any president - with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR, and Lincoln, just in terms of what we’ve gotten done in modern history.”

Wow. That’s some mighty ego he has, even more than I thought, though I shouldn’t be surprised. I guess his humility kept him from claiming that he’s the best President in history, which he very likely believes.

Here, Victor Davis Hanson punctures some of the mythology surrounding Obama:

Presidential historian Michael Beschloss, on no evidence, once proclaimed Obama “probably the smartest guy ever to become president.” When he thus summed up liberal consensus, was he perhaps referring to academic achievement? Soaring SAT scores? Seminal publications? IQ scores known only to a small Ivy League cloister? Political wizardry?

Who was this Churchillian president so much smarter than the Renaissance man Thomas Jefferson, more astute than a John Adams or James Madison, with more insight than a Lincoln, brighter still than the polymath Teddy Roosevelt, more studious than the bookish Woodrow Wilson, better read than the autodidact Harry Truman?

Consider. Did Obama achieve a B+ average at Columbia? Who knows? (Who will ever know?) But even today’s inflated version of yesteryear’s gentleman Cs would not normally warrant admission to Harvard Law. And once there, did the Law Review editor publish at least one seminal article? Why not?

There’s a lot more good stuff in the article. You should read it.

Here is a video that outlines some things about The Frankfurt School that you should know.

In brief, the concepts of political correctness, the various “studies” (e.g. gender studies, women’s studies), and other things that are common in our society were invented by The Frankfurt School in order to bring about a communist society in the west, because the west as it existed was too resistant to communism.

This is not alarmist. This is not me foaming at the mouth. This is the simple truth.

I will try to write more on the subject soon.

I read this post and here’s a taste:

Well maybe a lot of people were, but not everyone was. From the 1990’s into the 2000’s, the dominant strain of Republicanism was neoconservatism, and here I am not talking about foreign policy, but domestic policy. Neoconservatism was invented by the original “neoconservatives,” who were in fact liberals who deserted the Democratic Party when it became a special-interest Sugar-Daddy soft-socialist creature.

…

In the case of Gingrich and Romney both: It is worth remembering that during the mid-90s to 2000s there was a widely agreed-upon urge that we must “do something!” (anything! do something!) “about health care.” And of course the hated individual mandate was created by the the conservative Heritage foundation, as a supposedly “conservative, market-based, no-free-riders, individual responsibility” initiative towards the general gauzy goal of “doing something!” about health care.

We all know how this think-tank idea went over when it was actually imposed on us, and we had the chance to examine it, and weigh the supposed benefits (no free riders on my health insurance policy, which is inflated in cost to pay for the uninsured) versus the serious objections to it (since when can government boss me around? Why are we further expanding government’s power to make up for the problems with its current exercise of power?).

Still, this was, in fact, considered a “conservative” response. Not everyone believed in it. Very few tried it. But it was bandied about as being “conservative.” And few objected when it was so characterized.

In fact, this proposition was in fact so non-controversial that most people don’t even remember it. There was not a big argument in the early-mid 2000s whether an individual mandate was “conservative.”

Point is, the party has changed, and the overton window has moved, significantly. Stuff that was a clear submission to the ever-growing socialist state was given a quick paint-job and branded a “conservative” solution.

Note that this does not give a complete picture of the post itself, or of the site’s editorial policy over the last few months. One of the things I think the site handled poorly was the accusations against Cain. There are ways of reporting what had occurred without jumping on the condemnation bandwagon. If there had turned out to be substantive proof, that would have been the time to lower the boom.

I wrote a comment in response the post, and to other posts on the topic. It isn’t great, but it has its moments:

Are you working out the kinks in what is basically a “He started it” or “He does it too” argument?

Won’t fly.

It no longer matters what we would put up with before. What does matter is if we continue to put up with it. At what point are we allowed to expect behavior more consistent with our principles without being labeled a crybaby?

From what I’ve seen with respect to the editorial policy here, that would be the day after never.

BTW, the one thing that makes Bachmann being “unelectable” a certainty is everyone decreeing it so. That goes for any other candidate. As long as you let the GOP establishment and the left control the language and set the narrative, nothing will ever change, and we will get squishes like Romney, who, by the way, will be destroyed by the left and the MBM in the general election, in the same way the other candidates have been destroyed one by one.

They all had flaws outside the ones the MBM pushed, of course, but that doesn’t matter because those flaws pale in comparison to the simple narrative the MBM has created and used as a bludgeon.

Cain, for instance, may have failed on his own, without the breathless repetition of accusations of harassment and infidelity without any vetting of the accusers. However, the fact that he was immediately condemned on the basis of accusations, with no proof beyond a he said/she said should be a cautionary tale to all. This technique will be used again, and successfully, because some are too afraid to stand up to the media onslaught and prefer to just go along with the narrative as set by the left.

Whoever thought what happened to Cain (or, earlier, Palin) was okay, you can bet your ass that your chosen candidate will be next. I will cherish your tears of frustration, as they will taste so sweet.

To be fair, the site is one of two I visit daily, and for the most part I haven’t had too much trouble with the content, but the election content has caused me (and a lot of other readers there) some annoyance. Still, I recommend it. I don’t read it for opposition research, since it’s branded as a relatively conservative site, I read it to see what the opinion shapers are saying.

I spend most of my time at protein wisdom, so you might want to check that site out, too.

I have been feeling pretty down about our prospects as a nation. I watched the character assassination of Herman Cain, my choice among those who are running for the Republican nomination (dammit, Sarah!), with chagrin. The GOP establishment wants Romney, who in my mind is no better than Obama, and we’re going to get him. And he will lose, because people like me will refuse to vote for another Statist Republican.

Given that, I was looking through all my open tabs and reading what’s in them so I can close them out. I came across this piece from the always observant Victor Davis Hanson:

We are in a fresh round of declinism — understandably, after borrowing nearly $5 trillion in less than three years and having very little to show for it. Pundit strives with op-ed writer to find the latest angle on America’s descent: We are broke; we are poorly educated; we are uncompetitive; we have gone soft; our political institutions are broken; and on and on. The Obama administration does its part, with sloganeering like “reset,” “lead from behind,” “post-American world,” and America as exceptional only to the degree that all nations feel exceptional.

This is not new. In the late 1930s, the New Germany and its autobahns were supposed to show Depression-plagued America how national will could unite a people to do great things. After all, they had Triumph of the Will Nuremberg rallies; we still had Hoovervilles. They flew sleek Me-109s; we flew lumbering cloth-covered Brewster Buffaloes. We, the victors of a world war, were determined never to repeat it; they, the losers, were eager to try it again.

In the 1950s, Sputnik and the vast spread of Communism through the postcolonial world were supposed proof of the efficiency and social justice of Communism and the rot of capitalism — the inevitable denouement of the 20th century. Sputnik soared, even as our ex-Nazi scientists could not seem to make our rockets work. They had Uncle Ho and Che; we had Diem and the Shah. Their guys wore peasant garb and long hair; ours, sunglasses and gold braid.

By the 1970s and 1980s, Japan Inc. was the next new paradigm of the post-American world. Even American “experts” lectured us on the need to adopt Japanese-like partnerships between corporations and government. They made Accords and Camrys; we made Pintos and Gremlins. We played golf at Pebble Beach; they owned it.

As Japan faded, the next great hope followed in the 1990s when the EU captivated the American Left. The Europeans’ loud moral declarations, their pacifism, cradle-to-grave entitlements, trains à grande vitesse — all of that was what a backward America should strive for. They crafted the Kyoto Agreement; we drove gas-guzzling Tahoes and Yukons. Their strong Euros bought in New York what our weak dollars could not in Paris.

Where are all those supposedly post-American systems now? Fascism was crushed; Communism imploded; Japan is aging and shrinking; the European Union is cracking apart. But, of course, there is China, which, we are told, is the next new replacement for America — a country with enormous demographic problems, a reputation for crude diplomacy and an outlaw approach to international commercial agreements, censored media and a complete lack of transparency, vast inequality, environmental catastrophes, and no stable political system to transition a rural peasantry into a postindustrial affluent citizenry. No matter — our jet-setting elites still whine that they have shiny new airports; we have grungy LAX and JFK. They have sleek bullet trains; we, creaking Amtrak.

I realize that’s not uplifting as much as it is a cautionary tale that following the example of other nations may not be wise. However, it’s this next bit that gives me hope:

American petroleum engineers over the last decade have discovered radical new methods of recovering previously unknown or unreachable reserves of oil and gas. Contrary to all conventional wisdom, America’s natural-gas and petroleum reserves just keep growing. Suddenly, we have enough known natural gas to supply 100 percent of our domestic needs for the next 90 years — a huge window of opportunity in which to transition to competitive renewable energy. That is on top of trillions of dollars’ worth of new oil finds offshore and in Alaska, the Dakotas, and the West, which will create millions of new jobs and help pay down the deficit — if we have the will to extract such energy resources. The real story is not the pathetic machinations surrounding Solyndra, a statist, corrupt model that will never produce competitive power, but a quiet revolution in North Dakota, which is emerging as the new Texas. Within 15 years, North America could reinvent itself as completely independent from Middle Eastern gas and oil. Indeed, from Calgary to Argentina and Brazil, new petroleum and natural-gas finds may soon make the Western Hemisphere the world’s new Persian Gulf. That fact will change the entire global geostrategic and financial landscape in ways that are scarcely imaginable.

Think about that for a moment. We have in our hands the ability to completely revitalize our economy and help make some very problematic nations irrelevant to our economy. All we need is some leadership to get us there. We need elected representatives who represent us and not their own interests.

This is entirely possible. It might take a collapse to get us there, but I think we have the ability to quickly recover from a collapse if we get some sane leadership in place afterwards.

We will recover from this mess we’re in. I’m not confident it will happen if Romney or Obama is president, but eventually it will happen, even if the people need to rise up and forcibly replace our purported representatives with new blood (though I think in that case the politicians would scramble to do the right thing before they ended up hanging from lamp posts, and could just be voted out instead).

Even when there is a revolution, people’s first instincts are to replace the government with something structured exactly like the old one. In our case, that’s not a bad thing. We just need a vigilant populace that doesn’t reward bad behavior with re-election. It’s too bad this couldn’t happen through more civilized means.

Tonight is the third time one of my comments was read on the Special Report Online show. I imagine the job offers will be pouring in any second.

From here:

Intellectually, Obama has always been a consumer, having left no record of formulating new ideas or of penetrating old ones. Politically, he is a follower and figurehead: having grown up in the ever branching stream of socialist voluntary organizations, he surfed its leftward eddies, never forming or leading a faction. He was handed a safe seat in the Illinois state senate, a nearly safe one in the U.S. Senate, and was surprised when Harry Reid informed him that influential Democrats wanted to run him for president. The Democratic campaign of 2008 pushed against an open door. As president, he rides his party’s center of gravity.

In short, Barack Obama himself is not that remarkable. He can give a rousing political speech, of course, but that is usually not sufficient to get oneself elected president. So, since he seems to have been reading from a teleprompter all his life, and since words certifiably his own are both few and opaque, it is most fruitful as well as relevant for us to focus on whom and what he has been following.

What accounts for his smooth, unlikely ascent? Both his advancement and his character seem most likely attributable to the network into which he was born, and out of which he never stepped for an instant. That network’s privileges, wealth, and intellectual-social proclivities always depended to some extent—and nowadays depend more than ever—on its connection with the U.S. government. Its intellectual and moral character, like that of modern government itself, has always been on the left side of American life and, as such, has undergone splits and transmogrifications surely the most important of which in our time combines upscale social norms with radical disdain for the rest of America. Barack Obama came of age through these.

Unfortunately, that liberal Establishment has placed key facts about itself beyond public scrutiny—more in the fashion of Chicago Sicilians than of Roman pontiffs. Here we examine some of the books and other research that shed light on Obama’s origins, note at least as many questions as answers, and try to distinguish between facts and spin. The results are necessarily conjectural, because of the nature of the available evidence.

The article goes on to produce sound evidence for Obama always being a member of the progressive elite, and hints at the likelihood of his rise as being heavily influenced and assisted by the radical left. Highly recommended.

Again I quote Jeff G. at Protein Wisdom:

John Chambers of S&P noted (click over to PW to follow a link to the article) that Cut Cap and Balance was the only proposal that, had it become law, would have avoided the HISTORIC! credit downgrade.

The Democrat-led Senate refused to vote on (and the President threatened to veto) CC&B after it passed the House in a bipartisan vote — a failure to compromise, in that CC&B agreed to raise the debt ceiling, as the Democrats were demanding, in exchange for taking serious measures to address debt and deficit, including a plan for a systemic fix, which Republicans were demanding.

Whenever you hear someone talk about the “tea party downgrade,” which is the meme being floated by progressives and the make-believe media (but I repeat myself yet again), tell them this. The people who decided that the downgrade was necessary have said exactly why they did it.

When you hear progressives complaining about how the tea party types wouldn’t compromise, point this out as well. This bill was a compromise in the truest sense of the word. The bill that actually passed was not a compromise at all. It had a few fig leaves to conservatism that will amount to jack squat, but otherwise it was a pure Democrat bill.

The ship is going down, and the Democrats are using buckets to add more water, rather than to bail it out. The GOP establishment is right there with them in the bucket brigade.

In this post from the web site I always visit daily, a taste:

That the establishment GOP seems feckless in its attempts to get its message across is part of the Big Government kabuki dance: neither Republicans or Democrats who have become part of the career ruling class have any real desire to shrink government. The Republicans are willing to slow its growth occasionally — and they do believe in lower taxes; but as the Bush years should have taught us, they’re just as willing to spend as the Democrats, because giving gifts with other people’s money — and being praised for it — is the absolute easiest form of cheap grace on earth.

The entire establishment political class is corrupt. And it has declared open war against those Americans still left who believe in fiscal responsibility and a constitutional check on federal powers. Both the establishment Republicans and the Democrats (and their ancillary and parasitic attendants in the media and the inside-the-beltway political machinery) have shown themselves immediately willing to scapegoat the one anti-big government faction willing to insist on making the difficult choices necessary to save the country from the bloated, cynical, complacent pig class who presumes to run it in our name — though never in the way we wish. And that’s because party doesn’t really matter any longer, as I’ve been saying for years now.

Furthermore:

They can’t kill the TEA Party. Because the TEA Party can disband only as a descriptor. The attitude and beliefs that give it its most visible shapes, from time to time — be it as the revolutionaries who broke from a King, or as the Reagan Revolution, or as teh TEA Party — cannot be disgraced or marginalized. Because the attitude and beliefs that give rise to iterations like the TEA Party are the attitudes and beliefs that in a very real sense are this country and, insofar as we really do believe in the words of our own Declaration of Independence, are the beliefs and attitudes shared by all men and women who wish to break free of tyranny and live their lives not as subjects, but rather under a set of natural rights that governments exist solely to protect.

Perhaps I quoted too much, but you must go there and read it in its entirety.

I’ve mentioned previously that the progressives are at war with the Tea Party. The establishment GOP is also at war with the Tea Party. That’s because in both cases we are talking about people who like big government being at odds with an increasingly vocal section of the populace who do not like big government. Most people wanted the Cut, Cap, and Balance deal that would have made a serious dent in the spending over the next ten years. Most people, of course, except the politicians who are supposed to represent us. They didn’t like it one bit, because it would have decreased the amount of money they could use for favors to each other.

Ultimately their war will never succeed, because there is no Tea Party to destroy. There is no national leader, and there are no national meetings. It’s a spontaneous response to an out of control government that is hell-bent on our destruction, whether the politicians choose to believe it or not.

We aren’t going to change our minds, and we’re not going to be shut up. We’re here, and we are going to do our best change the way the Federal government works. Either that, or when we’re picking up the pieces after our financial collapse, we’ll make sure this kind of thing cannot happen again.

From The Telegraph:

The truly fundamental question that is at the heart of the disaster toward which we are racing is being debated only in America: is it possible for a free market economy to support a democratic socialist society? On this side of the Atlantic, the model of a national welfare system with comprehensive entitlements, which is paid for by the wealth created through capitalist endeavour, has been accepted (even by parties of the centre-Right) as the essence of post-war political enlightenment.

I think we can all conclude that the answer to that question is, “No.” At least, this cannot be done at the level it is being done.

As the EU leadership is (almost) admitting now, the next step to ensure the survival of the world as we know it will involve moving toward a command economy, in which individual countries and their electorates will lose significant degrees of freedom and self-determination.

“Command Economy” is another of saying fascism, by the way. And while I don’t know if there is such a thing as benevolent fascism, I do know that having that much concentrated power will always corrupt. It’s already corrupted our Federal government, and we don’t have a command economy. Yet.

We have arrived at the endgame of what was an untenable doctrine: to pay for the kind of entitlements that populations have been led to expect by their politicians, the wealth-creating sector has to be taxed to a degree that makes it almost impossible for it to create the wealth that is needed to pay for the entitlements that populations have been led to expect, etc, etc.

The only way that state benefit programmes could be extended in the ways that are forecast for Europe’s ageing population would be by government seizing all the levers of the economy and producing as much (externally) worthless currency as was needed – in the manner of the old Soviet Union.

We aren’t aging as fast as Europe, but we are aging. Also, Obama has been forcing a European model on the U.S. while many European countries are trying to abandon it because it costs too much. So either Obama is really as smart as he thinks he is, and has a solution in mind, or he is so blinded by ideology that he will do what he thinks is proper no matter what the facts say. I tend to believe it’s the latter.

The hardest obstacle to overcome will be the idea that anyone who challenges the prevailing consensus of the past 50 years is irrational and irresponsible. That is what is being said about the Tea Partiers. In fact, what is irrational and irresponsible is the assumption that we can go on as we are.

This. The guardians of the great society are calling those of us who are against its continuation terrorists. They have become thoroughly unhinged.

There is a meme that is probably being spread right now on the Sunday chat shows calling the looming recession (you know, the one that they said we were out of, but are now headed back to) the “tea party recession.” Our debt rating was downgraded because of spending, not because of attempts to cut spending. The progressives, who are always in error but never in doubt, will continue to rail against any attempt to roll back the social programs they need to keep people voting for them.

The economy is in the crapper. How unexpected.

I saw this here, where I commented:

It’s all the fault of the Tea-Party Terrorists, you know. If they hadn’t delayed the increase in the debt ceiling, and forced all those draconian cuts, the economy would be just fine.

That will be the meme the Democrats and the MBM (but I repeat myself) are going to sell sell sell. Somehow, I think that only the true believers will buy it, and they are already all-in anyway.

Well, they increased the debt ceiling (right afterwards they borrowed some more money, and our debt is now greater than our GDP), and made “cuts” which amount to nothing, and have managed to blame the “cuts” on the “conservatives” and the “tea party terrorists.”

Why all the scare quotes? Because the “cuts” made to the budget are only miniscule decreases in a budget that was already going to increase. Plus, those “cuts” are mostly in the out years, and are not binding on the next session(s) of Congress, which means they will never happen. Count on it.

I put the scare quotes around “conservatives” because those who voted for this are anything but that. They are either looking to advance a political career (Alan West was such a disappointment here) or re-establishing their credentials as lovers of big government (Boehner, or as I usually call him, Boner). It will take a few more elections until they get the point. I want everyone primaried, even the so-called good guys.

Finally, the Progressives and their MBM (make-believe media) helpers are already doing their damnedest to push the blame for any future failure of the economy on the tea party. They have also taken to calling people of that persuasion “terrorists,” which is amusing because Progressives kind of like (or at least sympathize with) real terrorists. They are saying the cuts (which again, are not cuts at all) will destroy the economy. The fact is, they have already destroyed the economy, and now are trying to push the blame elsewhere when it doesn’t recover, which it will not as long as Obama is in the White House.

It’s who they are. It’s what they do. They lie.

Here:

Internet providers would be forced to keep logs of their customers’ activities for one year–in case police want to review them in the future–under legislation that a U.S. House of Representatives committee approved today.

The 19 to 10 vote represents a victory for conservative Republicans, who made data retention their first major technology initiative after last fall’s elections, and the Justice Department officials who have quietly lobbied for the sweeping new requirements, a development first reported by CNET.

I found this at Ace’s, where the writer pointed out:

It eliminates the warrant requirement.

ISPs would be required to store customer names, bank account numbers, IP addresses, credit card numbers and home addresses. In other words, a gigantic database will be created for any snooping purpose. And, let’s be clear, since there is no warrant requirement, law enforcement will end-up simply grabbing all of the information available, whether or not there is an ongoing investigation, and storing it permanently (emphasis in the original).

Republicans did this.

Hey, isn’t that great? All of your internet traffic, complete with names, addresses, and credit card information, will be required to be kept by ISPs for one year, and available to law enforcement at any time without a warrant.

I can just feel the goodness. Can’t you?

I stand for Liberty. This is illiberal. I don’t care about the intentions, I care about the results. The results from this will be terrible to behold. There is still a chance to defeat it, and it must be defeated.

From here:

There is no doubt about why we are in a crushing economic disruption. Yes, the proximate cause is President Obama’s unprecedented spending spree — his follow-through on the campaign promise to change America fundamentally. But today’s Republican establishment shoulders plenty of the blame. In the first six years of the George W. Bush administration — when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, with Speaker Boehner then among the GOP’s House leaders — the debt ceiling went from $5.95 trillion to $8.97 trillion. It had taken a decade (from 1987 to 1997) to increase the ceiling by the $3 trillion it took to get to $5.95 trillion. Republicans took only six years to do it again. Under President Bush, who has reportedly whipped GOP lawmakers to vote for the Boehner plan, the national debt rose by almost five trillion dollars, to $10.6 trillion — i.e., it nearly doubled.

Bush’s profligacy pales by Obama standards. The current president is spending the nation into oblivion. He has taken less than three years to run up almost $4 trillion in debt.

There is plenty of blame to go around for this mess we’re in. We all need to admit that. However we got here, it’s time we stopped doing what’s killing us economically. We are currently borrowing 40 cents of every dollar we’re spending.

Adding $1 trillion to this country’s debt ceiling, with another $1.5 trillion to follow in short order, would be recklessly irresponsible. Does that mean the debt ceiling shouldn’t be raised at all? I think so. I am open, though, to arguments that the Titanic can’t be turned around on a dime, that some schedule of modest monthly tweaks — upward and downward — may be justified while we roll up our sleeves and do the hard work of dramatically scaling back. One would have to be convinced that the hard work is actually underway, but I could see the sense in such a plan.

In any event, every equation has two sides. In the debt/spending equation, we are obsessed with the wrong one. The blunt truth is that, while some increase in the debt ceiling may be necessary, a $2.5 trillion increase would be inexcusable. And to grant a $2.5 trillion hike for no better reason than that this is what Obama needs to avoid having his suicide spending spree re-examined before Election Day would be truly insane.

Our debt to GDP ratio is already over 98%. If our country were a person, it would be officially bankrupt. Adding even more to that will tip the balance and interest rates on that debt will have to rise. There is no other option.

The people, quite emphatically, want out-of-control spending dealt with. Their representatives have the power to effectuate that desire. The president can try to insist on borrowing and spending more, but the House gets to say no — and, on this matter, it is the president who should yield. That is not a constitutional problem; it is the Constitution in action.

The Republican establishment and the commentariat that claims it is time for conservatives to yield should stop posturing that their stance is about anything other than politics. They are worried that the media will blame Republicans if the debt limit is not raised, if spending is suddenly slashed, and if various constituencies in the dependency state are cut off cold-turkey from their federal goodies. They fear that President Obama — a class-A demagogue — will ride the ensuing chaos to reelection.

Those are not unrealistic fears. But they are secondary, and far from inevitable. It is entirely possible that the public already believes that spending has to be addressed now, that the crisis demonstrates like nothing else can how shockingly bloated the federal behemoth has become, and that President Obama — who is largely responsible for the mess — has to rein in his unceasing demands for more. It is entirely possible that people who don’t already believe these things can be convinced of them because they are true. It is entirely possible that, because conservatives in the House are doing what they were sent to Washington to do, the debt-ceiling crisis will be resolved on terms far more favorable to the American people — and future generations of the American people.

I think Republicans will get the blame no matter what. Someone has to be the real adult here and say, “no more spending money we don’t have.”

I think a lot more people know about how the Federal budget works these days than there used to be. The Federal budget for every program is designed to automatically increase every year. Our representatives don’t talk about this fact very much, because it allows them to talk about “cutting” the budget when they are doing no such thing. If spending were frozen at current levels, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) would score that as a $9 trillion dollar cut over the next ten years.

That is insane. In a normal world every department would have to justify increasing its budget every year. In government land, they automatically get more money, and you can bet that they do their best to spend all of it.

All those talks about cuts we’ve been hearing are cuts to a budget that will increase anyway. They are lying to us through omission of the facts. They have been doing that a long time.

The only way we can stop them is to not allow them access to more money. Even then, I’m not sure it would work, but it’s worth a shot.

Article is here

In order to make sure that this version of events sticks, little, if any, public mention is ever made of the depression of 1920–1921. And no wonder — that historical experience deflates the ambitions of those who promise us political solutions to the real imbalances at the heart of economic busts.

The conventional wisdom holds that in the absence of government countercyclical policy, whether fiscal or monetary (or both), we cannot expect economic recovery — at least, not without an intolerably long delay. Yet the very opposite policies were followed during the depression of 1920–1921, and recovery was in fact not long in coming.

The economic situation in 1920 was grim. By that year unemployment had jumped from 4 percent to nearly 12 percent, and GNP declined 17 percent. No wonder, then, that Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover — falsely characterized as a supporter of laissez-faire economics — urged President Harding to consider an array of interventions to turn the economy around. Hoover was ignored.

Instead of “fiscal stimulus,” Harding cut the government’s budget nearly in half between 1920 and 1922. The rest of Harding’s approach was equally laissez-faire. Tax rates were slashed for all income groups. The national debt was reduced by one-third.

The Federal Reserve’s activity, moreover, was hardly noticeable. As one economic historian puts it, “Despite the severity of the contraction, the Fed did not move to use its powers to turn the money supply around and fight the contraction.”[2] By the late summer of 1921, signs of recovery were already visible. The following year, unemployment was back down to 6.7 percent and it was only 2.4 percent by 1923.

The government intervention we have suffered the past few years was always a waste of time. It has been tried before, by FDR, and failed spectacularly. On the other hand, Harding did what classical liberals want done now, and it worked very well.

I don’t believe that our current government wants a recovery. I think they want a bad economy so they can seize even more power. For instance, the current head of the EPA has put regulations into place that will cripple if not destroy our coal industry because of that awful pollutant, CO2. The result will be widespread power outages and skyrocketing energy prices, and of course the government will again have to step in to “fix” this problem. Repeat ad nauseum.

Actually, I’m already nauseous.

I think a good start to fixing things would be to reverse every policy Obama has put in place, either by signing bills or by executive fiat. I think the economy would start to recover immediately, even in the face of the massive debt he helped create.

Article here. Note that the article references all “western” nations as being superior, but I think the Judeo-Christian ethic that got us to where we are is the most important piece in the puzzle, and certainly Jewish tradition is at the core of it.

The world’s more than 1.5 billion Muslims have produced a total of nine Nobel Prize winners. Of these we can dismiss outright the Peace Prizes given to terrorist Yasser Arafat and also Anwar Sadat; it was hardly an achievement for the latter to sign a peace treaty after losing a war he started. (We dismiss Menachem Begin’s Peace Prize for the same reason, as he simply made peace with a defeated aggressor.) This leaves seven legitimate Muslim Nobel Laureates of whom at least one, Shirin Ebadi, was persecuted by her Muslim-majority nation for the activities that earned her the Peace Prize.

The world’s 15 million Jews have meanwhile produced about 160 Nobel Laureates, or more than 22 times as many as the Islamic world. This is a 2,200 to 1 ratio on a per capita basis. It comes as no surprise that Islamic supremacists hate Jews as living daily reminders of their culture’s inferiority, and they also hate the Christian world for earning almost 100 times as many Nobel Prizes as their own. “My bully can beat up your honor student” summarizes their attitude but the world’s honor students fortunately have enough advanced weapons (per Hansen and Volkman) to keep the bullies in their place. Bullies whose most imaginative use of construction cranes is to hang gay people, women, and Baha’is don’t invent things like stealth bombers, Chobham armor, and Predator drones.

I was very surprised to learn that there are only about 15 million Jews in the world. I guess that’s what happens when you end up surrounded by people who cannot accept the responsibility for their own relative lack of success, and instead are always on the hunt for someone to blame. Historically the result has been a lot of killing of Jews, and yet somehow the situation of the killers did not improve but instead got worse.

Funny, that.

This is just a gentle reminder that the world is coming to an end tomorrow. The Rapture will soon be upon us, and we will be judged on our sins.

I’m in serious trouble.

I bought a bottle of Tullamore Dew Irish Whiskey today, so I’ll be ready for the end. Or at least I’ll be medicated for the end, which tends to make me calmer.

All that money I owe won’t have to be paid back. So, there’s an upside.

Update: Oops, it looks like the Rapture is tomorrow, but the end of the world is actually on October 11. My bad. Plus, it looks like I should have bought more whiskey.

I’m not happy with the last three entries. The quality is not good. I’m out of practice it seems.