Month: June 2012

After the Supreme Court’s reading of its ruling on ObamaCare yesterday, I first thought that Chief Justice Roberts had betrayed Republicans, Conservatives, Libertarians, et al, by joining with the liberals on the court to uphold the individual mandate that requires all Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a fine.

In fact, I “tweeted” “et tu Roberts” to indicate I felt we had been stabbed in the back. Then I started to hear details.

While liberals were dancing in the street and high-level Democrats were posting vile, profane taunts to celebrate their victory, the reality of the majority ruling began to be clarified.

While the mandate was upheld, it was not upheld under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, but under the government’s right to tax. So now, it’s clear that Obama has broken his promise to not raise taxes on the middle class. And yet his supporters are celebrating!

The other side of the coin is that Roberts’ majority decision disallowed the mandate under the Commerce Clause, now setting precedent for LIMITING the use of that means of enlarging government and its control over the lives of individual citizens.

Until now, the Commerce Clause had been seen by liberals as a gaping hole in the Constitution through which they could drive Mac Trucks full of goodies for their supporters, making government bigger, more intrusive and more corrupt. With this ruling that can finally be curtailed. And yet, liberals are celebrating!

While at first I thought Roberts had stabbed us in the back, I now think he may have just set a precedent that will aid small-government conservatives and libertarians in protecting our freedoms in the future and at the same time caused liberals to praise him.

And tucked into the ruling was a message that he was not going to undo what could be done at the ballot box. In other words, see you in November.

Genius!

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Two things happened this week which, while nominally unrelated, paint a complete picture that gives insight into the Statist mind.

First was the Wisconsin recall election, in which several Republicans, but notably Governor Scott Walker, were challenged by the leftist, union forces of the state after Walker, by a vote of the legislature, made modest adjustments in the benefits and collective bargaining rights of the government employee unions in order to bring balance back to the state’s budget, which was threatening to sink beneath waves of red ink.

In spite of suspicious vote tallies equaling 120% of registered voters in some precincts (due to same-day registrations?), Walker was resoundingly reaffirmed with a larger percentage of the vote than in 2010, the shrill unions were repudiated, and his reforms stand.

I’m going to put aside speculation about ramifications for the November national elections, since the people of Wisconsin may have just been angered that better-than-average-paid government employees tried to recall a governor who hadn’t done anything criminal.

But something else happened this week that adds to our understanding of the Statist mindset. President Obama had a press conference.

Which immediately blew up in his face, because at one point he said, “The private sector is doing fine; the problem our economy has is in state and local governments.”

There are plenty of reasons to argue with the first part of that statement, and they are already being recited by Mitt Romney and others, but here in my corner of Georgia, residential housing is still down 75% from what it was during the Bush Administration. And we never really had a bubble. Anybody who doesn’t have a private jet, play golf every other weekend and hobnob with Hollywood realizes that the private sector is NOT “doing fine”.

But the second half of the obviously off-teleprompter statement is that state and local governments are the ones really hurting. Shortly after that he urged Congress to pass legislation(!) to FORCE states and municipalities to hire more (union) teachers.

Perhaps the big loss for his union cronies in Wisconsin was in the back of his mind, but the statement made it obvious that a couple of good days for the Dow Jones Index was enough for him to consider the “private sector” taken care of and he could again focus on his favorite thing: Government and making it bigger.

As has been said by many, both FDR and George Meany thought government employee unions were a bad idea, and the condition of many states’ budgets make it abundantly clear why. Politicians, especially Democrats, who receive a lot of money from unions for their campaigns, are on the “management” side of the table in public-sector union negotiations. The money being discussed in the negotiations is not the politician’s money, like it would be in a private business setting, but taxpayer money. And if the politician needs more money to pay the union workers who put him into office, he can simply raise taxes. No skin off his nose.

At least until the budget reaches the breaking point, as it did in Wisconsin.

So, my modest proposal is that, instead of politicians, there should be a Tax-Payer Advocate board in each state and at the Federal level which is unpaid and bi-partisan, but whose purpose would be to sit across the table from the union representatives to conduct the negotiations. As it is currently, the politicians are in sympathy with the unions because of all the campaign cash unions provide and they have no incentive to represent the interests of “we the people”.

Of course we would have to pay for body guards for the Tax-Payer Advocates. Just sayin’…

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Watching Fox News’ “Huckabee” Sunday night, I had two occasions to shout obnoxiously “I’ve said that!” The first was after the Governor’s monologue (previous post) and the second was during his interview of Ed Klein, whose book “The Amateur” has been number one on the New York Times bestseller list for two weeks.

I haven’t read the book yet, but Klein said at one point that President Obama “doesn’t know what he doesn’t know”.

And I’ve said that too.

Actually, I’ve said “No one is more dangerous than someone with great power who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know”.

The reason Obama doesn’t know what he doesn’t know is that he has has never worked in the real world and has surrounded himself with people who have never worked in the real world. Barely eight percent of the people in the Administration have EVER had a private sector job. They’ve all worked in academia, government and nonprofit organizations, but 92% of the administration has NEVER had a real job in a productive for-profit company.

I’m not saying that being a college professor, a bureaucrat or an officer in a charitable organization isn’t real work. I’m just saying that one’s perception of what is required to generate wealth is skewed, because you don’t have to generate wealth in those jobs; in academia and nonprofits, you receive wealth from the government, other nonprofits like foundations, or people who work in the private sector. In government you simply confiscate wealth from those who create it.

People who work in the private sector generate the money, not just for their businesses, but for academia, government and nonprofits as well. But almost nobody in the Obama Administration understands that, least of all Obama himself, which was Ed Klein’s point.

A hilarious episode that illustrates this point occurred when none other than George McGovern left the Senate and decided to start a for-profit business. After a short period of time he actually admitted that he had no idea how government regulation makes things more difficult for business.

DUH!

McGovern was a war hero but after the war he was a college professor until he was elected to the House of Representatives in 1956. He graduated to the Senate in 1962. He ran unsuccessfully for president, then lost his seat in 1980 during the Reagan revolution. From the Senate he went back to teaching and eventually went to work for the United Nations(!). But in the midst of that time he operated a hotel for a while. It was a revelation.

“It was an eye-opening introduction to something most business operators are all-too familiar with,” McGovern said recently, “the difficulty of controlling costs and setting prices in a weak economy. Despite my trust in government, I would have been alarmed by an outsider taking control of basic management decisions that determine success or failure in a business where I had invested my life savings.” (more)

Again, DUH! He worked in academia and government for 60 years, but had no idea about the impact of the unnecessary and unjust hardships government places on business. Yet he had tremendous power to compel private business to do his bidding.

Perhaps if President Obama bought a restaurant…

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Last night on Fox News’ “Huckabee” show, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee reported in his monologue that 129,000 millionaires had lost so much net worth during the past year that they are now not millionaires at all. And the super rich have lost net worth as well. Their wealth declined by 2.4%, the largest drop for any single group.

This he attributed to President Obama’s policies, since the president has made it clear that he doesn’t think it’s “fair” that some people have so much more than others.

At the end of the monologue I shouted, “I’ve said that!” And I would say it again before the one-hour show was over.

What he said that I’ve also said in two blogs in this space (“At Least It Will Be Fair” and “Time For The Zero-Sum Game To Dir“) was that when the rich get poorer, the middle class and poor get poorer too.

The governor said it very well, and I’ll outline it again, as I did briefly on Tom Garcia’s “The American Hour“.

It’s pretty simple really. If a person has a lot of money, they will do one of two things with it: they will save it or they will spend it. If they save it (greedy blackguards!), they will at minimum put it in a savings account, where the bank will then loan that money to middle class people like you and me so we can buy home, cars, and fill our credit cards with creature comforts.

However, most of their money, wealthy people will invest where they can get a better return than with a passbook savings account. In that case they are buying stock, which will enable the companies whose stock they buy to hire additional poor and middle-class people, improving their financial status, and to make capital improvements such as building facilities, buying equipment and expanding their markets, which enhances the finances of construction people, retail sales people, etc.

Governor Huckabee’s point was that when a rich person has to cut back because they have lost income and/or net worth, it is the middle and lower classes that suffer, through lost revenue from the rich, which brings us to the second of the two things a rich person can do with their money: If they don’t save/invest it, they SPEND it.

This makes those jealous of the evil, greedy rich maddest because it is the most visible. But, Huckabee said, if a rich person decides NOT to buy a third home, who gets hurt? Certainly not the rich person. They already have two houses. It’s the real estate agent who would have sold the home and the contractor who can’t sell the spec home he’s put his money into. It may be the carpenters and plumbers who don’t get work building the home in the first place, etc.

And if rich people are forced to eat out at fancy restaurants less often, that doesn’t hurt them, but it does hurt the waitresses, cooks and bus boys who may be laid off because the restaurant’s traffic is down.

And if the very rich can’t buy their third luxury car that petty, envious people drool over, that doesn’t hurt the rich people, but there are factory workers, truck drivers, car salesmen and many more who will lose income.

There was another “I’ve said that” in the show last night, but that will have to wait.

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