Job Creation Weighs On Wonderboy's Re-Election In 2012

I'm effectively cross-posing from this post on my companion business blog today.

The "overtly political" passages which I elided from Schiller's piece were these,

"President Obama has urged us to be "patient" with this jobless recovery. But it's worth asking how long it will take to get back to the employment levels we experienced before the recession of 2008-09. How patient will we need to be?

The White House keeps hoping for monthly job gains of 250,000. But even gains of that magnitude—more than double the average gain last year— would not get America back to full employment until 2018."

Bubba Clinton's adviser, James Carville, authored the famous sign in his boss' campaign war room,

"It's the economy, stupid."

This job growth math ought to be scaring the pants off of Wonderboy and his campaigners.

It ought to cheer those of us who believe, despite Wonderboy's assertions in his interview with Bill O'Reilly that he's a socialist. With the First Rookie gone, the more job-killing 'accomplishments' of his administration, including excessive regulation, uncertainty regarding government intrusion into business, and health care legislation, could be reversed, and robust job growth once more unleashed in America.

Jim Webb's Retirement from the Senate

I was pleasantly shocked this morning to read of Jim Webb's (D-VA) announcement that he won't run for re-election to the Senate in 2012. I thought I heard it on some news program last night, through a drowsy haze.

Turns out it is true.

I haven't yet seen a reason for Webb's departure, but one wonders why he would have run, won, and then chosen to serve only a single term. Can he really be that concerned about being re-elected amidst a Virginia voter tide running toward the GOP? Or, as a moderate in an increasingly extremely liberal Congressional Democratic tribe, did Webb see a dark, uncomfortable future for himself in the Senate amidst such extremists?

Whatever the reason, pundits are already giving the seat back to George Allen. Citing a probable two-seat pickup for the GOP in the Senate due to Webb's and Kent Conrad's retirements, an LA Times article suggests that the four needed for a GOP majority is easily within reach. That would be insufficient to get to 60 votes, but enough to make Wonderboy's next term, if that occurs, either a pointless liberal nightmare, or force him unwillingly to the center, in order to avoid having nothing positive to show for two terms.

Carolyn Maloney's Lies About Wonderboy's Spending Plans

I wrote this piece a few years ago concerning New York Democratic Representative Carolyn Maloney's economic idiocy.

Sadly, it was on display on Tuesday of this week on CNBC. With GOP House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan co-hosing a few hours of the network's morning program, they invited Maloney to offer a few thoughts.

If Ryan needed anyone to make him look even more sensible and intelligent than he already does, Maloney was an ideal candidate.

Amidst a torrent of blame for long-departed Republicans for any current economic ills, Maloney then laughably claimed that Wonderboy's spending freeze is a big step forward for federal government restraint.

She must think viewers live on Mars.

We all know that the First Rookie's spending freeze proposal covers only a very narrow slice of the federal budget- part of discretionary spending- and then only on recent, elevated spending levels. It's nonsense. A mere $20B.

The real battles right now are over whether $100B is enough cutting for the next year. And it's not.

But for Maloney to think she can fool anyone by spreading Frisco Nan's lies is sad. Too bad this relic got re-elected last November.

States Enforcement of ObamaCare

Mitch Daniels, current governor of Indiana, wrote an editorial this week in the Wall Street Journal entitled An ObamaCare Appeal From the States.

Daniels, a Republican, wrote of several things he would like to have changed in the new health care legislation, suggesting that, without state participation in key areas, the federal government will founder.

For example, he noted that the government, in the absence of a "majority of states" participating, was unable to effectively create health care insurance exchanges for "high-cost, existing conditions." HHS had to do it. Daniels wrote,

"it went poorly, with costs far above predictions and only a tiny fraction of the expected population signing up."

So Daniels theorizes that, if enough states band together to refuse to help the federal government operate and enforce the new law, it simply won't happen. In a sentiment reminiscent of statements on Fox News of former Judge Andrew Napolitano, Daniels notes that the law simply assumed that the states would carry out the federal government's directives for free.

Daniels' editorial suggests to HHS that Indiana will only participate if the federal agency gets independent estimates of the administrative costs and agrees to fully reimburse his state for said costs.

It brings to bear an interesting point, i.e., can the federal government simply require states to spend money to comply with all of the costly provisions of legislation like ObamaCare?

Bill O'Reilly's Interview with Wonderboy Sunday 6 February 2011

In case, like me, you didn't see Bill O'Reilly's pre-Super Bowl interview with Wonderboy, you may view it here.

I can't, in good conscience, waste valuable hard drive space on this, given how much of it is comprised of the First Rookie's lies. For example, watch at 5:20, when he simply refuses to admit he's raised taxes! Then goes on to claim he does not seek to redistribute wealth and income in America.

Well, you get the idea. O'Reilly did a great job asking questions which forced Wonderboy to lie in order to look (re-)electable.

The Public Safety Net In A Small Society

One of the apparent longstanding immutable truths of federal government spending is that Social Security benefits can't be touched. No matter what happens to the working populace of the US, retirees are to be unaffected by any economic difficulties.

I wrote about how foolish this seems in a recent post. Building on the theme of that post, I wondered how social security would look in a community of, say, 10,000 people?

Suppose we imagine a typical Eastern US small town or village. The sort that is often found, cheek-by-jowl, among other similarly-sized small communities with a town council and various public services, e.g., schools, trash collection, police and fire protection.

If such a town were an entity unto itself, would it design, or be able to afford, a scheme like our Social Security system?

When you can see and name the recipients of a community's welfare payments, I suspect you, as a taxpayer and worker, get a lot more sensitive to sharing the pain of economic dislocations. You become more interested in fairness, as I noted in the prior linked post.

For example, suppose the town endures a crop failure, or the departure of a major employer? Or flooding which requires substantial infrastructure repairs?

These things would affect the total income of the town and, thus, its ability to meet transfer payment commitments to its older citizens.

Wouldn't such a small community be far more likely to pay its retirees a flexible, variable stipend that was a fixed percentage of the town's annual budget? And wouldn't that budget be a function of the community's ability to pay, in the absence of external funding?

I think it would. I don't think, in such a small community, anyone would expect to escape commonly-felt economic pain, especially if they didn't work, and everyone knew they survived on the taxes of their fellow citizens.

Just because Social Security is scaled up across the country, thanks to an historic mistake in 1935, doesn't mean its principles should be different than they would, were it designed as a community-based transfer payment system to provide a safety net to the aged.