It was during the health care debate that the essential building block of the Democratic majority – Independent voters – began to crumble. It was evident in the generic ballot. It was evident in the President’s job approval numbers. It was evident in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.
What’s really amazing is the ongoing delusion (notoriously assisted by Bill Clinton) that once they passed it, it would magically become popular.
They used to say that Social Security is the third-rail of American politics, but given 1994 and this year, I think that health-care “reform” (at least democratic socialist style) is. And this time, the donkeys jumped on it with all four feet.
How much foam is there on top of this fiscal frappe? Treasury bond yields are down about 40 percent in the past six months, as Gross also notes — a frothy market indeed. But I do not think Gross is showing much guts in his proposed wager: True, the U.S. government probably is not going to default on its debt in the near future. (Probably.) And, sure, he’s right that the values of the bonds will fluctuate but “won’t double, and they won’t go to zero.” But here’s the thing: They don’t have to. The government doesn’t have to default, and the value of the bonds doesn’t have to double or go to zero to cause all sorts of havoc in U.S. finances. Interest rates are very, very low — but even as low as they are, we’re still piling on debt so quickly that any serious uptick in the government’s cost of borrowing — and no, it does not have to double — could send us into a Greek-style fiscal crisis, especially if it should coincide with, say, the second and even more painful decline in a double-dip recession. Or a financial shock caused by an international crisis in, oh, Iran. Those are the kinds of risks that the Leviathan-on-a-leash guys never really account for: “Oh, everything will be fine, so long as everything is fine.”
…to the moon. Thoughts from Dennis Wingo (who I’ll probably see in Anaheim this week — maybe even today).
This reminds me of Mike Griffin’s ridiculous comparison of Constellation to the Interstate Highway System (not to imply that Dennis’ analogy is in any way ridiculous).
The situation is a striking turnabout from 2007, when more babies were born in the United States than in any other year in the nation’s history. The recession began that fall, dragging down stocks, jobs and births.
“When the economy is bad and people are uncomfortable about their financial future, they tend to postpone having children,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University. “We saw that in the Great Depression the 1930s, and we’re seeing that in the Great Recession today.”
“It could take a few years to turn this around,” he added.
…in the Gulf. Well, duh. It helps a lot that Bush didn’t go out of his way to wreck the local economy with a senseless drilling ban based on fraudulent science.
We know that when it comes to the high life, Democrats believe in partying hardy, sending taxpayers every bill they can while living lives of luxury the rest of us can ill-afford. We know, too, that Democrats cheat on their taxes and wrangle government deals for their relatives with a feeling of entitlement that is sure to put the term “public servant” in disrepute for the next century. Thanks to the growth of government on the Lightworker’s watch, we have seen public employees now eclipse the earnings and benefits of private workers, with the only end in sight the fate of Greece.
Praise to the Lightworker and his fellow Democrats for teaching us these essential lessons, which reinforce our will to throw them all on the unemployment lines posthaste.
I’m hoping that in a few weeks, we’ll be taking them to school.
…James Madison, one of the chief architects of both the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, echoed Coke’s words: “That is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where arbitrary restrictions, exemptions, and monopolies deny to part of its citizens that free use of their faculties, and free choice of their occupations.” Similarly, Rep. John Bingham (R-Ohio), the author of the first section of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which applied the Bill of Rights and other unenumerated rights to the states, said that the 14th Amendment included “the liberty…to work in an honest calling and contribute by your toil in some sort to the support of your fellowmen, and to be secure in the enjoyment of the fruits of your toil.”
So what went wrong? According to Sandefur, the blame falls largely on the Progressives of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who believed that government action should be the primary agent of all social change. To that end, the Progressives enacted a mountain of new legislation that touched on every aspect of human life, from workplace regulations and antitrust statutes to alcohol prohibition, racial segregation, and eugenics.
This does not strike me as a story about how income inequality caused the financial crisis. Rather, this is a story about how policies intended to reduce inequality had the unintended consequence of precipitating America’s worst economic slump since the Depression. It’s very important that we’re straight on what the story is, since different stories may have very different implications for policy. If the story is that the level of inequality itself—and not our ideas about or political reactions to it—indirectly caused the crisis, then we may think that narrowing the gap is a matter of urgent necessity. But if the story is that an ill-conceived political attempt to reduce inequality—and not the fact of inequality itself—led to apocalyptic economic devastation, then we may well conclude that it is better to refrain from equalising initiatives unless we are quite certain they will not backfire.
It was always an obvious lie, except to the rubes.
I’m still amused at Bill Clinton’s prediction of how popular this would be once it passed, and I continue to wonder if he really believed it, or was setting up the Messiah for failure, in anticipation of 2012.