Category Archives: Economics

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

The Latest Government-Caused Crisis

4 Comments

The Obama administration knew about the foreclosure irregularities?

it appears that the Obama administration chose to tolerate the irregularities that now threaten the housing market and the financial industry because it preferred that banks use their limited resources to focus on giving breaks to folks who couldn’t pay their mortgages, rather than on handling foreclosures properly.

I don’t know whether the irregularities in question justify an extended moratorium on foreclosures. But if they do — or even if they don’t, and we still end up with such a moratorium — then it looks like the Obama administration will bear considerable blame for the consequences.

This is the same economically ignorant mentality that was displayed yesterday on Fox News Sunday by Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, when she said that the highest priority was to “keep people in their homes.”

So the government creates the crisis by encouraging people to buy homes they couldn’t afford, and now it’s perpetuating it by insisting on keeping them in them, instead of allowing the market to finally clear. The country’s in the very best of hands.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

In Which I Agree With Bob Zubrin

32 Comments

Mostly because it’s not about space policy: End the 1099 tyranny.

There are doubtless a lot of other horrific things in the health-care deform that we couldn’t find out about until (as Queen Nancy said) we passed it, but this is so far the most egregious, if one ignores the mandate itself on a constitutional basis. It’s not unconstitutional, thanks to the odious Sixteenth Amendment, but it’s economically devastating.

Economics, Education, Political Commentary

The Last Thing That Public Education Needs

6 Comments

…is more money:

The stimulus bill devoted $100 billion to education (about $80 billion of it for K–12). As Reason magazine notes, that’s twice the Department of Education’s annual budget. “Race to the Top” is less than 5 percent of this staggering gusher of money. It’s not “Race to the Top” that is the Obama administration’s signature education initiative, but spending that the teachers’ unions would only have dreamed of two short years ago.

These funds have kept school systems from having to undertake wrenching changes, or any changes at all. They have helped goose federal spending on education from $37.5 billion in the last year of the Bush administration to $88.8 billion in the second year of the Obama administration, according to the calculations of Jay Greene of the University of Arkansas.

While the private economy has shed 8 million jobs in a work force of 150 million during the downturn, the $550 billon education system has added jobs. It’s the great wonder of the American economy, growing during recessions and regardless of its quality. If everyone in America were a teacher, we’d truly be a worker’s paradise.

The spending would be justified if it correlated with outcomes.

But it never does. It was just a huge payoff to a huge Democrat political contributor, with money that we don’t have, but we’ll have to pay for eventually.

[Update a few minutes later]

Uniting political adversaries — against the unions. Public employee unions should be outlawed. They’ve destroyed California.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

But Don’t Call Them Fascists

56 Comments

What were they thinking? It’s amazing to see them so willing to show their true totalitarian nature so blatantly. And it’s too late to pull it, despite the attempts. That’s the magic of the Internet.

[Update a few minutes later]

A comment that Iowahawk left at the Youtube page (and reposted on his FB page):

In order for your “No Pressure” advert to have been made, I am assuming several writers pitched a professionally-prepared storyboard to a committee, detailing shot-by-shot each second of …the film. The committee approved it, along with a minimum $250,000 budget to hire actors, director, & crew. Each scene probably took 3-10 takes, and weeks of post production by special effects wizards.

At no time did a single person involved in this clusterf**k say, “hey, maybe it isn’t the best PR to air our fantasies about detonating the people who don’t agree with us into a mist of blood meat and bone fragments.”

This has got to be the biggest FAIL in the entire history of the internet. Anyone remotely associated with the production of this film should forever be banished from any public institution in the English speaking world, and immediately referred for psychiatric evaluation.

I know what my evaluation would be.

[Update a while later]

More thoughts from a James Delingpole:

With No Pressure, the environmental movement has revealed the snarling, wicked, homicidal misanthropy beneath its cloak of gentle, bunny-hugging righteousness.

Again, what were they thinking?

They were thinking something like the things these people (who were finally brought to justice) were thinking. Because they’re all children of the first totalitarian, Rousseau. It’s what the left does.

[Update a few minutes later]

Spring time for Al Gore — the eco-Anschluss.