…from Paul Ryan. I really, really wish he was running.
[Late afternoon update]
How to make it in America.
[Update Thursday morning]
More math lessons for the political class in general: why Washington will collapse. When something can’t go on, eventually it doesn’t.
[Update a while later]
Seven reasons Obama is wrong on income inequality.
[Bumped]
Bill Whittle’s thoughts on the children of Wall Street.
Is on its way back? I’ve long thought that it was just a matter of time.
Could hammer the US, particularly housing prices.
…exposed. I’m just shocked, shocked that the reports were written by Greenpeace, WWF and other watermelon activists. Not.
Looks like Paul Ryan is going to deliver a much-needed speech tomorrow.
[Update a few minutes later]
“That’s not class warfare. It’s math.”
Forget math. This guy can’t even do basic arithmetic. And apparently neither can anyone on his staff. Can we see his grades, now?
[Update a few minutes later]
A follow-up for those attempting to defend the president’s math.
…for Gerard Van der Leun.
Liberals, especially, should be almost desperate to shrink government to a size that’s sustainable in the long run. Here’s a graph–one of many documenting the public’s declining faith in government efficacy, in this case that of the federal government. It shows that in 1986 Americans estimated that the government wasted 38 cents of every dollar it raises. Now they estimate it wastes 51 cents. It’s not hard to read the inevitable death of even Clinton-style liberalism in the rising slope of that chart, and others like it. Surely at least part of the voter’s disdain for government comes from their (accurate) perception that it’s bloated and keeps bloating, with new agencies and inefficiencies simply layered in on top of the old ones. Meanwhile, the private sector has used computer technology to streamline itself, eliminating layers rather than adding.
Democrats, as the party of government, need to turn that perception around by. Obama, by dedicating his stimulus to preserving bureaucracy as we know it, has by and large missed this opportunity. (Clinton would not have missed it.)
Public sector employment is also pretty much the worst sector to stimulate if you care about government deficits, since the unnecessary jobs saved will linger after the recession ends, protected by powerful public worker unions, where they will add to government’s long term costs. If we stimulate the construction industry, the tire industry or any other private sector industry, there’s not that same budgetary downside. If all those jobs linger after the recession ends, so much the better.
Even direct government employment in new WPA-style jobs would be better in this respect, I think, than simply paying to preserve existing government jobs. It’s easier to wind a WPA down, when recession ends, than it is to shrink the entrenched education bureaucracy.
One of the few things that Franklin Roosevelt got right was that government employees should not be allowed to unionize. It has been a disaster for the nation.
…and you destroy civilization.
It’s sad that these spoiled children have put themselves so deep into debt for educations that are worthless, both in the marketplace and in understanding how the world works. They rage against the wrong machine.
[Update a couple minutes later]
They’re also not materially poor. But they do suffer from a poverty that is worse in many ways:
These young people also suffer from a vast intellectual and moral poverty. One of the things that shines through when we interview the people taking to the streets is that so many are woefully ignorant, and that they wallow in a sea of relativism that allows for no morality other than that gained by intense navel gazing. They are the antithesis of the original American revolutionaries, whose leaders were men of exceptional erudition and thoughtfulness, and whose followers knew at the very least their Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress. Revolutionaries of old were shaped by philosophy, known science, literature, practical life experience, and a deep sense of morality and justice. Today’s little park piddlers are shaped by an aching sense of unfairness, a terrible fear of human-kind (that would be the AGW shtick), and a morality shaped by Oprah and whichever fabulously rich Hollywood Leftist happens to grab the microphone on any given day.
These self-styled 99%-ers are not poor, not by any known standard, either today or in the history of the world. They are intellectually and emotionally bereft, but otherwise awash in material benefits.
Fortunately, they’re not, as they delude themselves, the 99%. If they were, the Republic would be lost.