How Democrats kill them. While lying (perhaps even to themselves) about how they’re creating them.
Category Archives: Economics
Millennials
Is this the year they finally get fed up with big government?
These ads depict millennials as emotional, instinctive animals acting on appetites, impulses, and desires rather than moral and intellectual beings capable of acting according to reason and prudence. The liberal poster child is a product of the state, dependent on cradle-to-grave government support, to which free birth control is a higher end than a well-paying job or — heaven forbid — starting a family.
For many millennials, the scales have fallen. They realize that the future of Obamacare depends on their signing up to pay higher insurance premiums and deductibles. In the era of iPhones and PS4s, they realize that a government that can’t design a website can’t be expected to manage the intricacies of the entire health-care industry. In the wake of the news that the NSA collects mountains of metadata, they also fret that the government that wants you to talk about health care could (with a warrant) listen in on that very conversation.
Given the bleak reality for many millennials today, it’s obvious that the Democratic party can’t talk straight to them. Instead, it manufactures witty, tongue-in-cheek social-media campaigns and faux controversies like the “war on women.” (As with most faux liberal controversies, the data seem to suggest the opposite — in 2009 women became a majority of the work force for the first time ever, while 2013 saw women under 30 earn a higher median income than their male counterparts did.)
These tricks worked in 2008; they worked again, albeit to a far lesser degree, in 2012; but in 2014, it appears the magic has finally worn off. Many millennials see through the catchy rhetoric to the empty promises.
Let’s hope. As I’ve said in the past, I’d like to see a poll that asks if people would be more, or less likely to vote Republican if they promised to repeal and replace Barack Obama next year.
[Update a while later]
ObamaCare flops with the young.
Well, big surprise. What’s in it for them?
Income Inequality
Republicans should own the issue, with competition and markets, and fighting cronyism:
Well, no. Inequality has increased across advanced economies. Macro factors such as globalization and technology deserve most — but maybe not all — of the “blame.” Big Government loves to pick winners and losers in the private sector. Some lucky ducks owe their place in the 1 percent or 0.1 percent or 0.01 percent to federal favoritism. Conservatives shouldn’t mind at all when value-creating innovators and entrepreneurs strike it rich while crony capitalists do not. The precious tax breaks and subsidies that go to rent seekers, such as those in the agriculture and alternative-energy sectors, should get the ax. Sorry, Big Sugar and Big Solar.
Unfortunately, they don’t mind cronyism that much, as long at it’s their cronyism.
The Miracles Of Climate Change
Apparently, it turns women into hookers.
Our Prussian School System
More thoughts from Glenn Reynolds on the public-school disaster, over at the Daily Caller.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: Meanwhile, back in the Fatherland:
Got that? Let me repeat it just in case. A German judge took children away from their parents because “he family might move to another country and homeschool, posing a ‘concrete endangerment’ to the children.”
In August, 20 armed police, equipped with a battering ram just in case, arrived at the door of this Darmstadt family and forcibly took four children, ages 7 to 14.
Was there anything wrong with the children? Nope. The judge — whose name, by the way, is Marcus Malkmus, in case you have a voodoo doll handy or wish to burn him in effigy — the judge admitted that the children were 1) academically proficient and 2) well adjusted socially.
He just didn’t like homeschooling.
Why? Pay attention now: this takes us deep into the heart of a leftist: because he feared that “the children would grow up in a parallel society without having learned to be integrated or to have a dialogue with those who think differently and facing them in the sense of practicing tolerance.”
The invocation of “tolerance” is especially cute, don’t you think?
As Glenn writes: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. Gleichschaltung!”
Going Galt
America’s already done it:
The implications of this are actually terrifying. What are those nearly 92 million people doing with their time, other than sitting around depressed?. Many, of course, are on some version of welfare. Some are panhandling. We see the homeless on the streets of all our big cities. Others are moving into a shadow economy, much of it illegal (drugs, prostitution), not paying taxes on whatever they earn. It’s truly a sad situation. No wonder so many states are moving toward legalizing grass. Everyone wants to zone out.
This is rapidly approaching a a pre-revolutionary condition, but not for a revolution many of us would want to undergo. To avoid it, a massive change must occur at the federal level. But Barack Obama, mired in a dead ideology, doesn’t seem prepared to do anything but prolong the situation with highly conventional liberal solutions that have failed for decades, maybe even centuries.
And yet there is so much he could do. The most obvious, many of us know, is to unshackle the energy industry. He should dismantle much of the bureaucracy as well. There’s a lot more, of course. But the point now is to realize that when you have nearly 92 million people deserting the labor force in a country of 317 million (many of who are children too young to work), you have a catastrophic problem on your hands.
Even if he’s capable of realizing that, he’s ideologically incapable of changing.
[Update a few minutes later]
This is a recovery only in the narrow, technical sense of growth in GDP. But it’s not growing anywhere near fast enough to provide jobs for those who want and need them. It’s the worst economy since the Great Depression, brought on by similar foolish policies.
[Late-morning update]
December probably wasn’t a one-off:
The smiley-face crowd’s next line of defense is that December was a one-off — some are even blaming inclement weather, which is pretty pathetic, given that those who predicted seasonally adjusted job additions of almost 200,000 already knew what the month’s weather was like — and that the generally upward trajectory seen during most of 2013 will resume. There are many reasons to question that optimism.
I think a lot of wishful thinkers are underestimating the destructive effects of uncertainty in health insurance on hiring.
Spain’s Solar Pullback
The rent-seeking green-energy scam continues its collapse.
[Update a few minutes later]
I love this: “‘It seemed so safe,’ he said recently. ‘It was a government guarantee.'”
“Income Inequality”
…and the Left:
Just like the apparatchiks of the socialist regimes, the wealthy — including those who most yell about the injustices of income inequality — take very expensive vacations. They don’t opt for a day trip close to home or stay at a Holiday Inn a few days near a crowded public beach. Nor do they decide to give what they planned to spend on a luxury trip to the poor, so they could all have a vacation instead of staying at home the week or two they are off from work.
We know that these folks are hypocritical, and hope that no one will call them on their personal behavior. When they say that all their goals could be covered by higher taxes on the rich, they probably also realize that even if they raised the tax rate phenomenally for the truly wealthy, the amount they would raise would not cover any of the expenses for all the programs they support. Eventually, the category of “rich” will be lowered to those who earn, let’s say, $150,000 yearly in a big city, in which living expenses are so high and mortgages and rents also outrageously so. Such an income for a family of four puts one squarely in the mid ranges of the middle class.
They still believe that if inequality exists, redistributing the wealth is the only way to address the question. It reminds me of a cartoon I saw decades ago in The New Yorker, in which a king announces to the crowd that he wants an educated populace, so he’s awarding every subject a Ph.D. What the socialists who seek to make policy want is the equivalent: create equality by essentially making everyone more poor, so no one will have enough to go around.
Like equating “health care” with health insurance, leftists like to equate fighting poverty with erasing income inequality, because no one would argue that we shouldn’t fight poverty, while worrying about income inequality allows them to indulge in one of their favorite sins: envy.
But the two things are not the same. One can eliminate poverty (which in many ways we in fact have in America, as measured by the traditional definition (no or poor shelter, limited access to food and clothing and basic necessities) and still have income inequality. In fact, in America the “poor” have cell phones and fancy sneakers, and as others have noted, we are the first society in human history to have poor people who are obese. So curing poverty does not, in itself, end income inequality.
Similarly, one can eliminate income inequality by the very simple measure of impoverishing all. Which is what socialism and income redistribution tends to do, historically, for very good reasons. Well, except for the apparatchiks, who will always have theirs.
The American Energy Boom
…booms on:
As Daniel Yergin puts it, “the shale-energy revolution [provides] a new source of resilience for the US and enhances America’s position in the world.”
It’s the one bright spot in the American economy, and it’s happening despite, not because of, “progressive” policies. Of course, they’ll take credit for it, though.
And the Left just hates it. I’d like to see to what degree the anti-frackers and anti-Keystone people are being funded by the Saudis.
NASA’s Unneeded Test Stand
Here’s a story on the Stennis boondoggle, with a quote on pork from Yours Truly.