Just noting things that struck out to me, for further fodder.
“We defeated fascism.” No mention of Communism.
“Bold persistent experimentation.” Referencing Roosevelt policy that gave us a decade of high unemployment and no real recovery.
Category Archives: Business
Unsure Robots
…make better teachers than know-alls.
This doesn’t surprise me at all. I’ve always found that the best way to learn a subject is to teach it to someone else.
The Housing Bubble
Bill Clinton helped build that.
Yes. That needs to be part of the critique of the Romney administration.
That “You Belong To The Government” Video
…was no gaffe:
Later this summer, Obama notoriously argued that government created the environment for success through infrastructure spending. “If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that,” Obama told a crowd in Oakland. Obama later claimed he meant that businesses didn’t build the infrastructure that allowed them to be successful, and that government deserves the credit. But where did government get the capital to build the infrastructure in the first place? From the successful businesses that produced that capital, not from the Progressive Sunshine Forest.
The reference to churches in the video is another interesting point, although not one that Democrats want voters to notice. This administration imposed a mandate on employers to provide free birth control and sterilization to employees, even those employers whose religious values prohibit them from facilitating such access. Explicitly religious organizations such as schools, health care providers, and charities did not get an exemption, either. The message was very similar to what the video argued: you can join a church, but you belong to the government.
Yup.
The False Narrative Of The Obama Campaign
My thoughts on what the Romney campaign should do to combat Democrat lies about the economy in the last weeks of the election.
Ted Strickland
…and economic patriotism. As Kevin points out, another name for “economic patriotism” is fascism. But these clowns are so historically unaware that they have no idea how they come off those those who do understand both economics and history.
The Real “Deniers”
Matt Welch has thoughts on the willful blindness to fiscal reality by the Democrats:
…for me the biggest direct reveal of how current Democratic rhetoric leads to bad public policy was one of the evening’s honorary former Republicans, Cincinnati firefighter Doug Stern. “The Republican Party left people like me,” Stern complained. “Somewhere along the way, being a public employee—someone who works for my community—made me a scapegoat for the GOP. Thank goodness we have leaders like President Obama and Vice President Biden who still believe that public service is an honorable calling.”
It was classic major-party Manicheasm: Eastasians do bad things for the simple reason that their hearts are bad; Eurasians’ hearts are good, so they don’t do bad things.
In this idyllic landscape of Democratic magical thinking, there is no state and local budget crises, no unaffordable and underfunded defined-benefit public pension obligations, nothing at all standing in the way of “investing” in our public safety, except (in ex-Republican Stern’s words) “right-wing extremists.” Vallejo, California is not bankrupt because of public employee pensions, and the rest of the state is not following suit. It’s a hell of a place, this Democrat-land. Wish I could live there.
The problem is that so many vote do live there, in their minds.
American Character
A half-century of unfettered expansion of entitlement outlays has completely inverted the priorities, structure and functions of federal administration as these were understood by all previous generations. Until 1960 the accepted task of the federal government, in keeping with its constitutional charge, was governing. The overwhelming share of federal expenditures was allocated to some limited public services and infrastructure investments and to defending the republic against enemies foreign and domestic.
In 1960, entitlement payments accounted for well under a third of the federal government’s total outlays—about the same fraction as in 1940, when the Great Depression was still shaping American life. But over subsequent decades, entitlements as a percentage of total federal spending soared. By 2010 they accounted for just about two-thirds of all federal spending, with all other responsibilities of the federal government making up barely one-third. In a very real sense, entitlements have turned American governance upside-down.
It’s not just a fiscal problem, or a governance problem. It’s a moral problem, when so many think that they are literally entitled to live off the productivity of others. It can’t go on, so, one way or the other, it won’t.
Media Madness
…and the reckoning.
I don’t buy the polls, either. I think that we’re going to see a huge preference cascade, and it may already be happening.
Another Amusing Spam
Here’s my new favorite. This isn’t the subject, it’s the “From”: “Pubs may generate their own and submit for approval!”