How many times has federal spending ever declined?
…why exactly would anyone expect Congress to really cut spending down the road if it has shown essentially no ability to rein in spending in the near term? This is like a variation on the old joke about losing money on every unit sold but making it up in volume. Except it’s not like that at all. Or funny.
No, but it is business as usual. Until the economy implodes.
…are sexist, and waging a war on men.
What’s next?
Are they DOA? I visited Honduras back in the nineties. It could certainly use something like this. And I too find it bizarre that a court would find a constitutional amendment unconstitutional.
Apparently we had a very close call in 1883.
It’s amazing to me how unseriously we take this threat, at least judging by our policy choices.
Frank J. gives them what for:
…that’s the tough line the government needs to take with job creators: You will spit out those jobs we demand — and good ones with health-care benefits! — or we will destroy you and your businesses.
Raising their taxes by repealing the Bush tax cuts is just the start. We need even more taxes and punishing regulations. We need to treat these people like the scum they are, and if they don’t want to watch their companies burn, they’ll yield and finally expand their businesses and create more jobs — and not make any more profit or get richer when they do that, because we find that highly annoying.
We’ve had enough of your sickening greed, business owners, so give us everything we want, and give it to us now.
Right on.
Are we living the Hunger Games?
Washington is rich not because it makes valuable things, but because it is powerful. With virtually everything subject to regulation, it pays to spend money influencing the regulators. As P.J. O’Rourke famously observed: “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.” But it’s not just bags-of-cash style corruption. Most of the D.C. boom is from lobbyists and PR people, and others who are retained to influence what the government does. It’s a cold calculation: You’re likely to get a much better return from an investment of $1 million on lobbying than on a similar investment in, say, a new factory or better worker training.
So Washington gets fat, and it does so on money taken from the rest of the country: Either directly, in the form of taxes, or indirectly in the form of money that otherwise would have gone to that factory or training program.
I’m not the only one to notice this, or even to make the Hunger Games analogy. As Ross Douthat wrote, “There aren’t tributes from Michigan and New Mexico fighting to the death in Dupont Circle just yet. But it doesn’t seem like a sign of national health that America’s political capital is suddenly richer than our capitals of manufacturing and technology and finance, or that our leaders are more insulated than ever from the trends buffeting the people they’re supposed to serve.”
I always have a sense when I visit DC of a corrupt and decadent capital, bleeding the rest of the country, which it barely deigns to fly over, white.
[Update a while later]
Link was missing before. Fixed now, sorry.
…there’s an important difference between Apatow’s work and Dunham’s, and that is that Apatow tells and re-tells stories of growing up, while Dunham shows a group of women who stubbornly refuse to do so. Apatow shows characters learning the importance of responsibility and morality, while Dunham’s characters are largely devoid of the former and uninterested in the latter.
The show’s main character, played by Dunham herself, embodies all of this. In the first scene of the pilot, when her parents tell her they won’t be paying her bills any more, she loses it, and informs them that instead of pushing her out of the nest, they should be grateful she isn’t addicted to pills. Her friends are equally appalled by the prospect of a 24-year-old paying her own phone bills, and, for the most part, they’re equally reckless. For instance, in the second episode, one of them misses her abortion appointment because she’s busy having sex in a bar. And their romantic relationships — unsurprisingly — come in about every possible iteration of dysfunction.
…You can almost argue that Lena Dunham sees President Obama as the perfect surrogate for everything missing in her characters’ lives: He’s their gentle lover, supportive parent, and empathetic friend. He’s special. He won’t let them down. He’s Prince Charming. And that kind of defeats the purpose of feminism.
You’d think the feminist elevation of agency would result in women who take pride in being responsible for their own bodies. You’d hope that telling women that they can do whatever they want would imply that they’re responsible for what they do. You’d think serious feminists would argue that true empowerment is something you lay claim to, not something the federal government dispenses in all its benevolence. But for Dunham, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Because feminism was hijacked by the left back in the seventies, despite the fact that campus leftists were some of the biggest male chauvinist pigs around.
Unfortunately, we own a house in one. I’m wondering if we should sell while we have equity, and rent as long as we continue to live here. I wish we’d done that in Florida a few years ago.
…is the new Jim Crow.
It’s funny how so many “liberal” fetishes (e.g., gun control, minimum wage, legal and rampant abortions, welfare) have such devastating consequences on the people for whom they profess to care so much.
[Via Instapundit]
[UPdate a few minutes later]
Here’s another example. The moronic war by the “progressives” on Walmart, which has done more for poor people than any government program.