Category Archives: Business

Business, Political Commentary, Space

Have We Won?

19 Comments

Henry Vanderbilt is reporting that HR 5781 will not be put on the calendar this session:

HR.5781 is not on the House calendar for this week. Our sources tell us that at least in part due to a significant number of constituent calls late last week, the House Leadership does not (currently) intend to put HR.5781 on the calendar this session (at least not in its current form.) We hear that negotiations with Senate Authorizers continue, with the outcome (if any) now more likely to be based on the Senate bill. So, the battle is going well – to everyone who made a contact so far, thanks! But the battle over this NASA Authorization continues. We need to keep the pressure on, with the general message being, NASA Exploration R&D (including Commercial Crew and Cargo) is a good thing to fund, while NASA in-house booster developments (see numbers in the Generic reason below) are very likely to be massive wastes of scarce funds. Those of you who’ve already contacted your Representative might want to contact your Senators now too. Those of you who haven’t yet made a contact, why not? More when we know more.

The worst has been avoided, but the outcome could still be bad. Stay tuned.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Hating Everything That Congress Has Done

8 Comments

For the first time in my political life, I am in agreement with the majority:

The numbers: Bank bailouts, 61 percent disapprove versus 37 percent approve; national health care, 56 percent disapprove versus 39 percent approve; auto bailouts, 56 percent disapprove versus 43 percent approve; stimulus, 52 percent disapprove versus 43 percent approve. Only financial reform, with 61 percent approve versus 37 percent disapprove, is a winner for the representatives and senators seeking re-election.

OK, not entirely. I think that the financial reform was a mess, and will prove disastrous as well.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

The Tsunami Approaches

5 Comments

The coming deconstruction:

California once again leads the nation with a $26 billion budget deficit plus an unfunded pension obligation of $500 billion. Its current financial structure is clearly unsustainable. It has an operational structure that in ungovernable with often duplicative agencies, some collecting less in tax revenue than the agencies spend on collection. Wikipedia lists 500 existing public agencies for the State of California. California can no longer afford such a luxury. It must deconstruct these bloated inefficient government agencies, and rid itself of their chairman, staff, offices, cars, pensions and the overhead that such excess represents. A $26 billion dollar deficit is not something that can be corrected with a wage freeze or job furloughs. Bold leadership can lead California to deconstruct its 500 agencies down to 100 functional organizations. California is a classic example of what must change in the coming Great Deconstruction.

One Orange County city has already taken bold steps to correct its $10 million deficit. It may be a model for other cities and states across the country. Internally, it has decided it will not replace any city worker that dies, retires, moves or quits. The city will simply out source the employment to an outside service company and eliminate healthcare requirements and unsustainable pensions. Building inspectors will be out sourced as will city plan checkers, librarians and meter maids. Only essential services like top executives and cops will remain on the city payroll. The city staff will eventually decrease from 220 to approximately 35 personnel. This is the essence of deconstruction.

It’s going to get very ugly for the parasites. Let’s just hope they don’t end up killing the host.

[Update a few minutes later]

Business and unions meet to discuss upcoming pension disaster.

Business, Economics, Education, Political Commentary

That Bursting Higher-Education Bubble

16 Comments

More thoughts on this topic, from Michael Barone.

[Update a while later]

Roger Kimball notes another similarity with housing:

As I wrote in a piece for The New Criterion a few years ago,

“Many parents are alarmed, rightly so, at the spectacle of their children going off to college one year and coming back the next having jettisoned every moral, religious, social, and political scruple that they had been brought up to believe. Why should parents fund the moral de-civilization of their children at the hands of tenured antinomians? Why should alumni generously support an alma mater whose political and educational principles nourish a world view that is not simply different from but diametrically opposed to the one they endorse? Why should trustees preside over an institution whose faculty systematically repudiates the pedagogical mission they, as trustees, have committed themselves to uphold?”

Just imagine the sorts of sub-literate, ideologically charged nonsense that Women’s Studies debtor was battened on in her classes! The Australian philosopher David Stove, commenting on the Faculty of Arts at Sydney University, formulated a diagnosis that applies to the teaching of the humanities of most Western universities: It is, Stove wrote, a “disaster-area, and not of the merely passive kind, like a bombed building, or an area that has been flooded. It is the active kind, like a badly-leaking nuclear reactor, or an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle.”

There are incipient signs that a Great Recoiling from this intellectual disaster is beginning to form. It will be greatly aided by the economic disaster in which the institutional life of universities is embedded. “Why,” hard-working parents will ask themselves, “does it cost more than $50,000 a year to send Johnny to college.” Leave aside the question of what it is that Johnny is and isn’t learning in those ivy-covered walls. Why does his four-year furlough from the real world cost so much? One reason, of course, is that Johnny, assuming his parents are paying full freight, is paying not only for his own tuition: he is also helping to foot the bill for Ahmed, Juan, and Harriet down the hall. Colleges routinely boast about their generous financial aid packages, how they provide assistance for some large percentage of students, etc. What they don’t mention is the fact that parents who scrimp and save to come up with the tuition are in effect subsidizing the others. How do you suppose Johnny’s parents feel about that?

Honk if I’m paying your kid’s tuition.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Deluded Fantasy Life

6 Comments

…of David Brooks:

Many of the president-elect’s advisers had been reading histories of the New Deal. They had ambitious plans to address the crisis: federal jobs programs, new building projects, new spending initiatives. This was no time to worry about deficits, they said. This was an opportunity to address needs that had been neglected for decades.

Obama, in this fanciful version, held up his hand. He told his aides to put away the history books and reject the New Deal comparisons. Unlike in 1932, Americans today have a raging distrust of Washington, he observed. Living through a crisis caused by excessive debt, they will viscerally recoil at the prospect of federal debt without end. “Somehow,” Obama concluded, “we have to address the crisis without further terrifying the American people.”

The stimulus package, he continued, should rely heavily on cutting payroll taxes. This, he argued, will send a quick jolt to the economy without concentrating power in Washington. It will deliver a sharp psychological boost to the middle class. It might even be bipartisan. Obama noted that John McCain had a $445 billion stimulus plan along these lines and his fellow Republican senator, Mel Martinez, a $713 billion plan.

A fanciful version indeed. The frightening thing is that David Brooks actually believed (and perhaps, somehow, still does) that Barack Obama was ever ideologically capable of such a thing, or so wise. You and other bien pensants foisted him on us, David, despite our warnings, because you didn’t want your DC party invites to dry up. When will you admit that you quaffed too deeply the koolaid?