The Department of Free

A great new poem from Zombie.... #ocra #hhrs #sgp

The Department of Free

Years ago, a wiser man
than you or I devised a plan
to dole out goods at zero cost
to those of us whose jobs were lost.

It seemed benign, so nice and kind
the plan grew to include the blind,
the old the lame then you and me,
and they called this plan
The Department of Free.

It started as a helping hand
to needy folks across the land,
so those who could not make ends meet
would not be forced out on the street.

Unemployment benefits
were just a start, because now it’s
free food, free homes, free surgery,
rebates, bailouts, loans — all free.

Now half of us just stand in line
all day long and gripe and whine
about the stuff we feel we’re owed
the list of which has growed and growed.

The line wends hither, the line wends yon,
and by and by it comes upon
a door above which we can see
those magic words:
Department of Free.

Once inside: a shopping spree
of endless handouts: it’s all free!
Drunken on entitlement
we grab a meal, a house, a stent.

The other half? We’re all employed!
Hearing this, you’re overjoyed
to know that at least some of us
have jobs and never cause a fuss.

But one last thing you ought to know,
our economic Alamo:
The place where we all work, you see,
is in the accursed Department of Free!

I push papers,
while he counts beans.
She helps seniors
and they help teens.
It takes a village to raise a child;
it takes a nation to run hog-wild.

Paul pays Peter, and Peter pays Paul,
yet neither makes anything at all.
Round and round the money goes
but where it comes from no one knows.

It all runs out eventually,
can’t simulate prosperity.
The shopping spree was just a dream,
a baseless potlatch Ponzi scheme.

With nothing left to give away,
The Department of Free itself must say,
“We’re all laid off, the end is near.
There’s no point working, even here.”

The last employed man not offshore
has just one more remaining chore:
Switch off the lights
and turn the key
in the broke
Department of Free.

From Medicare and Medicaid
came Medicould and Medishould
now Medimust and we’ve gone bust
we’re trust-fund kids without a trust.

This Isn't Working - Pt 2

America, The Gulliver of Nations

Powerline posts a keen insight on how Great Britain's present, may become our future:

Once the federal government becomes so deeply involved in allocating health care, it will come to be a dominant focus of political discourse.

Over the years watching on C-Span the British Prime Minister's Question Time, I've observed that a large portion of this exercise is devoted to specific questions about the quality care provided by The National Health Service in members' districts. A question on the terrorists threats to the UK will invariably be followed by a passionate query from a Member asking the PM if he's aware of nurses being re-assigned at a hospital in Sheffield. The PM seems to spend as much time on parochial health care issues as on national security.

The politics of deciding who gets what in the way of medical treatment doubtlessly will push aside traditional affairs of state. Every member of Congress will need to hire several staff members just to manage constituents' complaints about their care. Elections will be won and lost on the basis of who can get the most in the way of health care for their districts.

We will become the Gulliver of nations, a great power whose leaders are tied up in strings as they spend much of their time addressing the medical complaints, valid and imagined, of their electorate.

We *will* become the Gulliver of nations. And it will not just be due to healthcare. The more our Federal government becomes so deeply involved in the regulation of anything and everything (education, the environment, banking, retirement, fishing, car manufacturing....etc), the more we tie ourselves down. The more the Liliputians UN bureaucrats will take advantage of us. The more we will make ourselves irrelevant.

The Pillage of the Future by the Present

City Journal is carrying a good read on the current addiction of the 'modern democratic state' to Keynesian-driven indebtedness, not from the normal American punditry, but in the context of the evolution of European states .

The thesis of German Peter Sloterdijk reminds us that we Americans are not alone when worried about our current 'financial unsustainability'.

The Grasping Hand
The modern democratic state pillages its productive citizens

[...]

The modern democratic state gradually transformed into the debtor state, within the space of a century metastasizing into a colossal monster—one that breathes and spits out money.

[...]

What is new is the gargantuan scale of public debt. Mortgaging, insolvency, monetary reform, or inflation—no matter, the next great expropriations are under way. Today, the state’s grasping hand even reaches into the pockets of generations unborn. We have already written the title of the next chapter of our history: “The pillage of the future by the present.”

Read the whole thing...

Right Idea...Wrong Target

After a week of reality injection, you're getting warmer Mr. President, but you have chosen the wrong target for your "help".

Obama May Call for Freeze on Discretionary Spending

Jan. 23 (Bloomberg) -- There is a “fighting chance” President Barack Obama will propose a freeze in most discretionary spending by the federal government in his State of the Union speech next week, Senator Evan Bayh, an Indiana Democrat, said.

Gee, the last time I checked, our Federal spending problem wasn't a discretionary spending problem....



And of course, whenever you hear a democrat calling for a freeze/reduction in 'discretionary spending', you know what that really means....



How about we look at all that entitlement spending....yeah, fat chance, right Mr. President?

Google v. Intelligence

The London Telegraph asks the question "So Google is better than US intelligence?"...

So this means that the US government’s computers apparently don’t have an equivalent of Google’s “Did You Mean?” tool that picks up misspellings and finds results for similar words.

If it had been realised immediately that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab has a valid US visa then presumably the alarm bells would have begun to ring weeks before he actually flew – but they believed he had no visa because the State Department database or whatever database it was could only recognise a particular version of an Arabic name.

Of course, had the Telegraph used Google they could have discovered the following:

1) The FBI's Upgrade That Wasn't: $170 Million Bought an Unusable Computer System

"The nation's premier law enforcement and counterterrorism agency, burdened with one of the government's most archaic computer systems, would have to start from scratch."

2) Lawmaker: Terrorism info database troubled

"Severe technical troubles, poor management of contractors and weak government oversight have put the federal government’s efforts to enhance and upgrade its primary terrorist identity database at risk..."

3) Pink Slips, Spyblogs, and More New Year’s Resolutions for the Intelligence Community

"There is no practical reason why the IC could not immediately adopt a “living intelligence” model that gets vetted and valid intelligence into the hands of consumers in near-real-time — not weeks or months after-the-fact. Such a model would actually allow analysts more time to think about the problems at hand, rather than following dated, time-wasting protocols. What hinders progress in this area is Intelligence Community management that is more concerned with getting credit than serving the intelligence needs of consumers."

4) Credit Where It's Due

2010: The United States Government revokes Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's visa a mere 12 days after he tries to kill 300 people.

2002: The United States Government approves Mohammed Atta's visa six months after he's actually killed 3,000 people - and is, in fact, himself deceased.

So, is Google better than US Intelligence? I think a quick search of Google would point to the fact that has been public for a long time. Many of the agencies in question have had major problems using and improving new technologies to make their jobs easier. Free market internet companies will always have greater ability to out-perform government bureaucracies when it comes to these technologies.

So the answer to the semi-rhetorical quesiton is....YES!

Sand in The Gears

Instapundit offered commentary on people's opinion of the big government bailout for GM (or just bailouts in general):

"Lots of people have decided to be sand in the gears."

But I would remind everyone, there is no need to be the sands in gears that won't even mesh with each other.....

New TSA Rules for Public Travelers not Releasable to the Public

A new TSA terror crackdown has swung into immediate action....against some travel bloggers:

The Transportation Security Administration is going after bloggers who wrote
about a directive to increase security after the incident.

TSA special agents served subpoenas to travel bloggers Steve Frischling and
Chris Elliott, demanding that they reveal who leaked the security directive to
them. The government says the directive was not supposed to be disclosed to the public.

OK, perhaps I am just a simple knuckle-dragging idiot, but I need someone to explain this to me...

The government says that rules specifically targeted at the traveling public, and rules that must be publicly announced to the traveling public while in transit....are not supposed to be disclosed to the traveling public????

Huh?!?

Vital classified national security secrets to the NYT is no big whup, but unclassified rules for public citizens in the hands of those citizens is worthy of prosecution...This is not the transparency I was hoping for....

[Hat Tip: Confederate Yankee]

How Conservatives Are Made

#hhrs #tcot #rs #sgp
From The Corner:

"They Just Took My Money" [John J. Miller]
That's what my 8-year-old son said about the sales tax on the ride home from Borders a few minutes ago. He had a $10 gift card from Christmas, bought a Clone Wars book for $7.99, looked at the receipt, and wondered why he still didn't have a full $2.01 on it

This is how conservatives are made.

Congrats John, you must be very proud!

Pelosi-Care Holiday Anthem

Pelosi-Care
(to the tune of "Tannenbaum")

Pelosi-care! Pelosi-care!
It makes our health plans equal.
Pelosi-care! Pelosi-care!
I see a Commie sequel.

The current plan is just a start:
She'll take our freedoms all apart.
Pelosi-care! Pelosi-care!
Her chutzpah knows no equal.

Pelosi-care! Pelosi-care!
With Harry Reid's assistance,
Pelosi-care, Pelosi-care,
Will overcome resistance:

Oh, single payer's on its way!
The ghost of Marx will shout hurray!
Pelosi-care! Pelosi-care!
You'll buy at her insistence.

Pelosi-care! Pelosi-care!
The public is affrighted.
Pelosi-care! Pelosi-care!
Obama grins, delighted:

His leftist envy's proven pure;
His legacy is now secure!
Pelosi-care! Pelosi-care!
Some wrongs cannot be righted.

--Tom Riley

Stimulus Subterfuge

Its all a Stimulus Subterfuge, a Recovery Ruse, a GDP Gimmick.

In other words, the 'Great Obama Recovery'® that was announced earlier in October by the White House is all hogwash, a hoax, a fraud...a lie.

Sure, the economy was announced to have grown by 3.5%. However, that has now been revised down (GDP numbers are often adjusted) to 2.8%. 'What's so bad about that?' you might ask. 'Isn't any positive growth a good thing?' Normally, but as the blogprof points out, the only thing making this a positive number, is Stimulus cash....

That "robust" 3.5% GDP growth rate in Q3 that the AP heralded as the end of the recession sans actual jobs? That just got reduced. A lot. As in down to 2.8% now. Even that is deceiving as consumer spending, which comprises 70% of the economy, declined 0.5% during the same period (Positive GDP Fraud! Consumer Spending DOWN 0.5%. GDP Up Because Of MASSIVE DEBT!). So how is it that the GDP increased in the 3rd quarter after consumer spending decreased? Well, that's got everything to do with the 'G' in the GDP - gross. That includes consumer spending, government spending, in fact all spending. So if the consumer spending is down, one way to artificially inflate the GDP number is to increase government spending with money that the government doesn't, by the way, have. In essence, the GDP number is positive due to increased debt! It's purchased on a government card that has no credit limit.

So Stimulus cash, which is created out of thin air and injected into the economy to unknown effect, makes up 118% of the GDP growth....

So what this really means is that we will be seeing increasing GDP growth for many quarters to come, and thus a White House trumpeting a full-throated recovery, just in time for the 2010 elections.

Since only 22% of the Stimulus had been spent by the end of October, that means we have over $600 Billion left to be entered into that 'Government Spending' column that blogprof tells us about. Thus, unless consumer spending craters, this glut of Govt Spending spread over many quarters will prop up the GDP numbers for those quarters. And as it will most surely do, the White House will point to the string of positive quarters, and how their actions have saved the economy, despite the fact that it is really a Potemkin Village of economic figures...

The only problem will be the ever expanding unemployment roles....and the largest spike in employment will be found in GOP political campaigns.

[Hat Tip: Instapundit]

2009: The First Year of Global Governance

Mark Steyn distills our future succinctly:

"'Climate change' and 'health care' are different ends of the same stick: They're both all-purpose pretexts for regulating every aspect of your life..."

But to protest this is somehow dangerous....

Tyranny of the Minority Majority

#hhrs #tcot #rs
Some prescient thoughts on the results of last night...

Jennifer Rubin:

If Pelosi gets her 218 votes, it will be unprecedented. It is fair to say that never will a piece of legislation this sweeping (and damaging) have been passed over the opposition of so much of the electorate and on the votes of such a narrow ideological slice of the governing class.

'A Senate Friend':

If the only thing bipartisan is the opposition, and a party with an overwhelming majority is scrambling to get it over the first hurdle, it sure says something about the bill.

I believe that this is what might be called the 'Tyranny of the Minority Majority'...

Why Are Voters Angry?

#tcot #hhrs

"Bait-and-Switch - There is a growing sense of a “we’ve been had”, bait-and-switch....the Obama swing voter thought he was getting a 21st-century version of pragmatic, triangulating Bill Clinton—and instead got something to the left of 1970s Jimmy Carter."

In his latest effort, Prairie Fire Anger, Victor Davis Hansen does a fantastic job outlining the "cascading anger at a new sort of left-wing elitism and hypocrisy"

Another example:

"A well educated technocracy—we see such figures in the emblematic Timothy Geithner, Eric Holder, or Barack Obama himself —have most of their lives served in government, largely regulating, overseeing, organizing, auditing, and sermonizing far more productive and capable others. One of the worst flaws of this species of utopian technocrat is the notion that he wishes to curtail in others the very things he wishes to enjoy without constraint himself.

Thus we sense that a Geithner does not wish to pay the taxes he hikes on others. A Holder wants to destroy through subpoena and litigation the Bush lawyers, but pleaded once for mercy for his own shenanigans involving the crooked Clinton pardons. And Obama lectures about the inequality of wealth and the burdens of racism while his wife’s salary climbed as his political influence grew."

How much longer do they think they can hide behind the failings of President Bush?

The Cost of Growing Old

#tcot #hhrs
Where would you cut health care costs?

Lets play a hypothetical game....after an extended period without a job, and enjoying the new magically unending unemployment benefits (also known as Pelosi bucks!), you manage to land a mid-level position at the new National Health Administration, headquartered at the new Robert C. Byrd Federal Building in Charleston, West Virginia.

You are quickly assigned to the "Efficiencies" division, where you are given the task of helping reduce the operating costs of the new National Health Program. You are told that reducing costs due to waste and fraud will be handled by another division, located at the other Robert C. Byrd Federal Building located on the other side of Charleston.

In order to get your project kick-started, you are told to use the following graph, representing per-capita health care costs across a number of categories, to help decide where to cut costs.



Looking at this graph, there are obviously a few categories that contain significantly higher costs than the others. It is obvious to you and all the other newly hired bureaucrats around the Robert C. Byrd Conference Table that these categories are ripe for cost savings. Problem solved! By reducing those categories down to the levels of the other categories, not only can you hit your cost-savings targets, but you can instantly make health care spending 'fair', as all the categories would be relatively equal.

Who knew being a federal employee could be this easy??

Now lets come back to reality.... Sure that example is fairly simplistic, but he point is when you hear Democrats talk about achieving cost-savings with their nationalized health care proposals, those savings they talk about will come from the operational areas that contain the highest costs. If we know anything about government bureaucracy, it will tend to solve its problems not through tough choices, but through the "easy" choices. For bureaucrats, the easy choice is to reduce your highest cost.

Now lets take another look a at that graph, but this time using its proper sorting and labels.


(Numbers are from Canadian data, but is similar to US and other country's data as seen here and here)

This look makes it plain where those highest health care costs lie....with those Americans who are 65 and older. This makes perfect sense, as some of the most expensive medical procedures are those that have allowed us to extend our life expectancy over the last few decades.

So, if the goal of your plan is to provide the highest quality health care for everyone, you won't care if the costs spike at the end. But if the goal of your plan is to provide adequate health care to everyone at the least possible cost, then you will quickly begin to eye those outliers at the right end of the graph as the road to your budgetary salvation.

For those who protest that the suggestion that Obamacare would shortchange seniors is just scaremongering by an unruly mob, lets take a look at those countries that the Democrats want us to emulate (Sorry Mr Moore, Cuba is not on this chart...)


A quick look shows that overall costs for the younger portion of populations is not all that different, regardless of the country. However, in every other country, money spent on those over the age of 65 is significantly lower than in the US. Is there some magical European secret to providing the same health care to seniors that we do and a greatly reduced cost? No...they simply don't provide their seniors the quantity nd quality of care that we do. But hey. it saves them loads on money. The Democrats always trot out the stat that the US has the highest health care costs of any developed nation. Of course we do, because we spend 50-100% more than any other developed country on the medical quality of life for our seniors. It is good to grow old in the US, but it sucks to grow old in Europe.

To me it is quite obvious, that if Obamacare becomes the diktat of the land, there is one place where penny pinching bureaucrats will go to find their easiest possible savings. And if that is the future it will soon suck to grow old in the United States as well.

Nanny State Weekend

Congratulations America, this is what you voted for.... View how little the left thinks of you...

Taxes:
On whether the Obama Administration will break its pledge not to raise taxes on 95% of Americans in order to pay for Trillions in new spending, Tim Geithner said:

"We’re going to have to do what’s necessary.”

That's reassuring! I think that this can be translated as "We are going to do whatever we want to get the money", since most Americans don't see all the spending as "necessary".

Health Care:
With public opinion turning against the health care proposals in Congress, the left reveals that they think they know better than everyone else.

"47% of people who have coverage don't want change, they don't like what they are hearing. Now, they may not know what is good for them..."

Thanks Andrea. There is an executive position waiting for you at the HHS Public Affairs office...

Personal Freedom:
Individual liberties? Personal responsibility? Anachronisms of a different era. Welcome to the age of the coddling Nanny State in New Hampshire....

"Our State portrays an unfriendly message that every individual has to succeed on their own, rather than count on a support system for assistance (Live Free or Die is not a friendly, supporting message that appeals to young people)."

Hmmm....if the message is considered "unfriendly" by government bureaucrats now, I wonder how much longer it might be before expressions of personal freedom could be considered hate speech? Or at least incompatible with the common good....

This is the Nanny State you voted for. Revel in it....but not too loudly, or by consuming anything with transfats...

States of Disrepair

We can learn lessons from state's failed 'Progressive' programs.

Most good conservative thinkers make the Federalist argument that we should strive to limit the power and reach of the federal government, and instead leave most matters to be handled by the individual states.

However, recent events might give many conservatives pause concerning this cornerstone philosophy, given that some states have been acting like teenagers who have been handed the keys to the liquor cabinet and family car on the same key chain.

Take for instance articles from today concerning three of the most prominent 'Blue' states.

New York - The Obsolete New York Model: Where a tax-eating majority votes itself a permanent income....Struggling under the accumulated burden of eight decades of “progressive” government, we New Yorkers can serve as a warning to our fellow Americans as President Obama, following the New Deal playbook, seeks to use the current financial crisis to provide a new rationale and legitimacy for the gargantuan machinery of the federal government.

California - Following Calif. Off A Green Cliff: Climate Change: A 2006 California law meant to lead the way on global warming looks like an economic disaster in the making. So far, Congress and Obama have ignored the warnings.

Massachusetts - Bay State Rationing: Health Care: Massachusetts' universal medical program is no longer universal. Coverage is being dropped for 30,000 because not enough money is around to pay for everyone. There's a lesson in this for Congress.

The running theme here is that these states have implemented unsustainable government largesse, and show us exactly what President Obama's proposed programs will bring us on a national scale. They are the cure that makes the disease worse.

Of course, one only need compare these examples to other states that have fared much better. To be parochial, I will trumpet my adopted home state....

Texas - Going Alamo: Why jobs and companies are flocking to a big small-government state. If you want to know where the future is headed, look where the people are going. And if you want to know where the people are going, check with U-Haul. Here's an interesting indicator, first noted by the legendary economist Arthur Laffer: Renting a 26-foot U-Haul truck to go from Austin to San Francisco this July would cost you about $900. Renting the same truck to go from San Francisco to Austin? About $3,000. In the great balance of supply and demand, California has a large supply of people who are demanding to move to Texas. There's a reason for this.

God help me if I ever get orders to PCS to California!

WaPo Lies about the Rich and Taxes

Today the Washington Post ran an editorial that had a lede ('The Deep-Pockets Mirage: House Democrats would have us believe that the rich can pay for it all') that would make you believe that it might opine against higher taxes, but in the end it was the same old call for a "more progressive" tax system. In other words...tax the rich.

THERE IS a serious case to be made that the U.S. income tax system should become more progressive. The average rate paid by the top 1 percent of households shrank from 33 percent in 1986 to about 23 percent in 2006. At the same time, the share of adjusted gross income claimed by that highest-earning sliver of American society doubled, from 11 percent to 22 percent. So, in principle, higher taxes for the well-heeled could make sense -- as part of a broader rationalization of the unduly complex tax code.

Now, I don't mind if newspapers hold opinions about the way our country is run (as long as they keep them confined to the Editorials like this one), but why do they have to use wholly incorrect and unattributed numbers to try to make their point??

In the citation above, WaPo say that the tax rate paid by the 'Top 1%' shrank from 33% to 23% between 1986 and 2006. And they also state that during the same time period, the share of gross income for the same people doubled from 11% to 22%.

However, these numbers do not match up with those recently published by the Congressional Budget Office (Hat Tip: Heritage Foundation). Given that the WaPo doesn't cite any source for their numbers, it is hard truly judge, but I don't think I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

In their report, 'Data on the Distribution of Federal Taxes and Household Income', the CBO's numbers show the following:

- Between 1986 and 2006 the 'Effective Tax Rate' on the Top 1% rose from 25.5% to 31.2%...a 22% increase, rather than the 31% decrease that WaPo claims.

- Between 1986 and 2006 the 'Average Household Income' of the Top 1% did rise from $880k to $1.75mil (a doubling), but the 'Share of Income' rose from 14% to 18.8%...a 34% increase vice the 100% that the WaPo suggests.

Now, before digging into the numbers, I had intended to simply point out how the WaPo had conveniently ignored the total amount of the tax pie that the Top 1% and Top Quintile actually pay.

Since the WaPo seems to want to suggest that since the mid-80s that the rich have gotten richer and also paid less taxes at the same time, lets stick with that same time frame.

The CBO's numbers also show the following about who really shoulders the burden of the tax system:

- Between 1986 and 2006 the 'Share of Total Federal Tax Liabilities' paid by the Top 1% increased from 17.1% to 28.3%...an increase of 65.5%

- Between 1986 and 2006 the 'Share of Total Federal Tax Liabilities' paid by the Top Quintile increased from 57.5% to 69.3%...a 20.5% increase

So what we can see here is that, yes, the rich have gotten richer, but they have also already paid more and more taxes. In fact the share of taxes for every Quintile except the "Rich" has decreased, even though every Quintile has seen its average income rise....

Ultimately we already have a very progressive tax system, and it keps on getting more progressive. The fact that the WaPo wants to make it even more so means that it probably won't be happy until the 'Share of Total Federal Tax Liabilities' on the Top Quintile is 100%.

Methinks a lot of that Quintile will begin hanging out in a hidden valley with John Galt.....

Independence Day v. Dependence Day

Thanks to Dinocrat (via Larwyn), we can read and compare the first Fourth of July speeches given by the last two Presidents.

I took the liberty of putting the two transcripts into Wordle, to see what might pop out.

So you tell me, which of the following word clouds actually looks like it's subject is 'Independence Day'?





Maybe some speechwriters have a different feel for what words people associate with Independence Day, but I have to tell you, word cloud #1 does not jump out at me. Word cloud #2 does.

I leave it up to you to figure out which speech was given in 2001 and which in 2009....

Speakeasys of Capitalism

I think I need to start up business plans for a network of speakeasys where people can talk about and practice capitalism....

"This is America. We have a free enterprise system that has worked spectacularly for us for two hundred plus years. When it fails it fixes itself. Most importantly, it is not an owned lackey of the oval office to be scolded for disobedience by the President."

Read the whole thing here.

Two Hundred & Thirty Three years....well, it was a good run....

Hat Tip to Peter Robinson and Instapundit.