I probably worked on many of these in my career. They’re the only kind I worked on. And that’s perhaps good, because many of them never should have flown. Not to imply that it was my fault, of course.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
ObamaCare
It’s going to cost almost twice as much as they said it would.
Yeah, I’m shocked too. And I still think the estimate is low.
[Update a while later]
Here’s a new post by Phil Klein on the revised CBO estimates. Of course, as we said a that time, CBO estimates are always garbage in garbage out, and a lot of garbage went into it while it was being debated.
[Update a couple minutes later]
More on the lies from Guy Benson, with a bonus mention of the growing deficits, which means that there will be another debt-ceiling fight in the fall, before the election, if not sooner. Hilarious, considering all of the lies and charades the White House went through last summer to avoid that.
Crowdfunding
Congress should make it easier, but leave it to Harry Reid to screw it up.
Rent Control
…the case against it. It’s not a new one, but we may be on the verge of seeing SCOTUS finally shut it down after decades of urban destruction.
What If George Bush Had Done That?
Political misses a few in this piece. Like what if George Bush had been president when his Justice Department ran guns to Mexico that killed Mexicans and a border agent, and then stonewalled Congress on it?
“If You Like Your Plan…”
“…you can keep your plan.” Wait, what?
What kind of fools really believed him when he said this? Was he so stupid as to believe it himself, or was he just lying? And which is worse?
More fodder for campaign ads in the fall.
The Entire Obama Presidency
…in one anecdote.
What kind of economic idiot is he? A blithering one.
Tolerant “Liberals”
Based on a lot of personal experience, I find the results of this study completely unshocking.
Adaptation
Some have said that the cost-effective solution to climate change is to adapt (I’m in this camp). But I think this may be going overboard:
Some of the proposed modifications are simple and noninvasive. For instance, many people wish to give up meat for ecological reasons, but lack the willpower to do so on their own. The paper suggests that such individuals could take a pill that would trigger mild nausea upon the ingestion of meat, which would then lead to a lasting aversion to meat-eating. Other techniques are bound to be more controversial. For instance, the paper suggests that parents could make use of genetic engineering or hormone therapy in order to birth smaller, less resource-intensive children.
What could go wrong?
And of course, it’s all about the liberty:
It’s been suggested that, given the seriousness of climate change, we ought to adopt something like China’s one child policy. There was a group of doctors in Britain who recently advocated a two-child maximum. But at the end of the day those are crude prescriptions—what we really care about is some kind of fixed allocation of greenhouse gas emissions per family. If that’s the case, given certain fixed allocations of greenhouse gas emissions, human engineering could give families the choice between two medium sized children, or three small sized children. From our perspective that would be more liberty enhancing than a policy that says “you can only have one or two children.” A family might want a really good basketball player, and so they could use human engineering to have one really large child.
Yes, that’s what we really care about — a fixed allocation of greenhouse emissions per family.
More thoughts from Mark Wilson at Ricochet.
The Heart Of Darkness
Mark Steyn, on his upcoming excursion of danger into the wilds of the Great White North.