Buying a Car Like Buying a Gun

What if buying a car was like buying a gun?  The Truth About Guns answers the question, at least for Californians. 

With the national debate of gun control again rearing its head, let’s do a quick comparison. Since vehicles kill or injure roughly three times more people a year than guns, let’s suppose we applied the same standards to vehicle operation that we do to guns. We will use California for example. Let’s start with purchasing a vehicle. You need a full background check, must be a citizen or legal resident and have no prohibiting factors in your history. Now you’re going wait 10 days to pick up your vehicle. If you’re buying used, you and the individual selling the vehicle must both go to the dealer for the transfer. Don’t forget the dealer’s fees; after all he has to make money too . . .

This is easy so far, inconvenient but easy. Your 10 days is up, time to pick up your vehicle and drive off. WRONG! Now you must have your vehicle transported to your home in an enclosed and locked trailer and stored in a locked garage. Your 10 gallon fuel tank must be EMPTY during transport, and you better make sure all your garage entrances are childproofed. Keep in mind you have now legally purchased a vehicle and stored a vehicle, your rights are not infringed at all.

That's just the beginning.  There's more.  A lot more.  Read the whole thing.

No politician would ever dream of proposing such onerous regulations for car ownership, because their constituents would never let them get away with it.  Americans love their cars.

But here's the irony.  Driving on public roads is not a right.  It's a privilege.  It's certainly not explicitly protected by the Constitution.

Gun ownership, and the carrying of said guns, is a right explicitly codified in, and protected by, the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights of the US Constitution.

Amendment II
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed 

Merriam-Webster's Dictionary defines "infringe" as follows:

in·fringe (verb) \in-ˈfrinj\
: to do something that does not obey or follow (a rule, law, etc.) ( chiefly US )
: to wrongly limit or restrict (something, such as another person's rights)

California's gun laws clearly do not obey or follow the highest law in the land - the US Constitution - and they wrongly limit or restrict Californian's Second Amendment Rights.  California's gun laws, then, infringe the right of the people of California to keep and bear Arms.

California's politicians proposed and passed those laws with the support of the majority of Californians.  That means that a majority of Californians would fight tooth and nail to keep their non-Constitutional privilege to drive, but paid politicians handsomely (politicians like the gun-trafficking Leland Yee) to violate their Constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

The same is true of voters from other states that similarly infringe on Second Amendment rights.

Crazy, isn't it?

Pres Obama: Government Makes Government Inefficient

Pres Obama explained why the Obamacare website is a lemon.

What is true is that, as I said before, our IT systems, how we purchase technology in

the federal government is cumbersome, complicated and outdated. And so this isn’t a situation where — on my campaign, I could simply say, who are the best folks out there, let’s get them around a table, let’s figure out what we’re doing and we’re just going to continue to improve it and refine it and work on our goals. 

If you’re doing it at the federal government level, you know, you’re going through, you know, 40 pages of specs and this and that and the other and there’s all kinds of law involved. And it makes it more difficult — it’s part of the reason why chronically federal IT programs are over budget, behind schedule. 

And one of the — you know, when I do some Monday morning quarterbacking on myself, one of the things that I do recognize is since I know that the federal government has not been good at this stuff in the past, two years ago as we were thinking about this, you know, we might have done more to make sure that we were breaking the mold on how we were going to be setting this up. But that doesn’t help us now. We got to move forward.

So, Pres Obama recognizes that excessive federal regulations make it far more difficult (in some cases impossible) and far more expensive (often prohibitively so) to accomplish anything.

But it never seems to occur to him that excessive federal regulations (like Obamacare, for example) do the same to businesses.  It never seems to occur to him that the cost (time, money, resources, man-hours) of complying with all those regulations makes businesses less efficient, less productive, and less able to hire employees and grow the economy.

And, unlike government, businesses can't just confiscate people's money.

Amazing, isn't it?

Interview: "The Frackers"

Prof Reynolds interviews WSJ reporter, Gregory Zuckerman, about his new book, "The Frackers".

Do watch the whole thing, but a couple things stood out to me.

First, the fracking revolution could have just as easily taken place in Russia, China, or a number of other places, but instead it happened in the US.  One reason for that is stronger property rights in the US than in other countries.  Most fracking in the US takes place om privately owned land.  In most states, the land owner also owns the mineral rights for his/her land.  That means they can make more money from allowing a fracking firm to drill on their land, which gives the land owner more incentive to do so.

It's a great example of how liberty leads to opportunity, which leads to prosperity.

Second, oil giants like ExxonMobil did not initiate the fracking boom.  Smaller firms, whose wells were drying up and didn't have the resources to explore abroad, were more willing to take risks because, essentially, they had nothing to lose.

Anti-fracking regulations "Liberals" demand wouldn't hurt ExxonMobil, but they would kill those smaller firms.

Unfortunately, no discussion on hydraulic fracturing is complete without addressing anti-fracking hysteria.  It's worth noting, then, that former DOE secretary Stephen Chu, no fan of fossil fuels, stated that fracking...

...is something you can do in a safe way,” former Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said while speaking in Columbus, Ohio, on Sept. 18. He also said that it was a “false choice” to say that the country can either preserve the environment or acquire cheap natural gas.

Former Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, stated that...

“I would say to everybody that hydraulic fracking is safe,” Salazar said during a conference in Las Cruces, N.M. He said that fracking was “creating an energy revolution in the United States.”

Chu and Salazar joined current Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, who in early September praised fracking as “a big contributor to our carbon reduction” and “a huge economic benefit.” 

And now the British government has reached the same conclusion.

“There are risks but they can all be mitigated” through monitoring and regulation, Neil Dhot, a spokesman in London, said today by telephone. The report, compiled by an independent consultant, is funded by the water industry, he said.

Everything we do involves risk - even doing nothing.  An honest risk analysis of hydraulic fracturing, I believe, demonstrates that the financial benefits of fracking far outweigh the potential risks.

UPDATE: Speaking of fracking, the Bakken formation of North Dakota & Montana is projected to produce about one million barrels per day next year.

The growth of crude oil production in the Bakken region is part of a longer-term trend in drilling efficiency gains and has led North Dakota to rank second in crude oil production in the United States, behind only Texas.

UPDATE: Prof Reynolds has another outstanding column in USA Today in his series about "the America that works and the America that doesn't", which contrasts the successes of the frackers with the "train wreck" of Obamacare.

As I've written here before, there are two Americas: One that works, produces value, and overcomes problems, and one that for the most part doesn't work, consumes wealth, and produces more problems than it solves. 

The America that doesn't work was very much in evidence this past week, as the Obamacare roll out continued to be -- in Democratic Sen. Max Baucus' memorable phrase -- a "train wreck." Writing in The New Republic, John Judis observed that the Obamacare fiasco should make fans of activist government angry, because it will damage big government's brand for decades to come. Well, if you support big government because you think that politicians are more competent or honest than the rest of us, yes, it's a big bummer. Then again, if you really think so highly of politicians, you have more serious problems than that.

Read the whole thing.

Feds Steal $35K From Small Grocer's Bank Account Despite Finding "No Violations" To Justify the Grab - Hit & Run : Reason.com

Feds Steal $35K From Small Grocer's Bank Account Despite Finding "No Violations" To Justify the Grab - Hit & Run : Reason.com

the feds sent the Dehkos a letter saying that “no violations [of banking laws] were identified.” 

And then, nine months later, the IRS emptied the Dehkos' bank acount of $35,000 without warning. 

In the Dehkos' case, the IRS used civil asset forfeiture, which requires no criminal action or proof of guilt on the part of a property owner to seize that property...

This, ladies and gentlemen, is legalized theft.  The 4th Amendment of the Constitution reads...

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

How can the Feds get away with such a clear violation of the 4th Amendment?

technically, it's a legal action against the property itself. 

I see.  So the feds are punishing the property, not the people who own it.  Makes perfect sense.

Not surprisingly, it's a hugely lucrative practice for government agencies and a hugely controversial one for everybody else. 

I bet.

But the use of asset forfeiture, both civil and criminal, soared at the federal level under the current administration, growing from $500 million in 2003, to $1.8 billion in 2011. 

Surprise!



If this doesn't piss you off, I don't know what will, because if this can happen to the Dehkos, it can happen to any of us.

Obamacare: Told You So (Continued)

Those of us who support economic liberty warned that Obamacare would result in an increase of part time employment, vs full time employment.  Obamacare supporters shrieked, "racist!" 

Told you so.

Employers around the country, from fast-food franchises to colleges, have told NBC News that they will be cutting workers’ hours below 30 a week because they can’t afford to offer the health insurance mandated by the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. 

“To tell somebody that you’ve got to decrease their hours because of a law passed in Washington is very frustrating to me,” said Loren Goodridge, who owns 21 Subway franchises, including a restaurant in Kennebunk. “I know the impact I’m having on some of my employees.”  

Goodridge said he’s cutting the hours of 50 workers to no more than 29 a week so he won’t trigger the provision in the new health care law that requires employers to offer coverage to employees who work 30 hours or more per week. The provision takes effect in 16 months.

Hey, now that they mention it, this couldn't possibly have anything to do with the report that 97% of jobs created in 2013 are part time, could it?

“Over the last six months, of the net job creation, 97 percent of that is part-time work,” said Keith Hall, a senior researcher at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center.

“That is really remarkable.” 

Hall is no ordinary academic. He ran the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency that puts out the monthly jobs report, from 2008 to 2012. Over the past six months, he said, the Household Survey shows 963,000 more people reporting that they were employed, and 936,000 of them reported they’re in part-time jobs. 

“That is a really high number for a six-month period,” Hall said. “I’m not sure that has ever happened over six months before.”

“There is something going on if such a large share of the hiring is part time,” Hall said. ... 

Hall speculated that the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, shorthanded as Obamacare, might be resulting in employers shifting workers to part-time status to avoid coming health care obligations. 

“There’s been so much talk about the effects of Obamacare on part-time work,” he said. “This is such an unusual thing to see.”

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/08/02/198432/most-2013-job-growth-is-in-part.html#.Uf-UcGRAS7g#storylink=cpy

 What?  You mean businesses respond to the economic incentives artificially created by government policies?  No way!  Of course, anyone with any understanding of economics - or common sense - would've seen this coming.  As Chris Conover wrote before the BLS report was published...

Denialism may be too strong a term.[1] But there seem to be a lot of people arguing that Obamacare has little or nothing to do with the rise in part-time employment. Some deny the rise is even happening, while others are content to deny that Obamacare is the culprit. Admittedly, it takes a little detective work, but if we systematically review the available empirical evidence in an even-handed fashion, the conclusion seems inescapable: Obamacare is accelerating a disturbing trend towards “a nation of part-timers.” This is not good news for America.

 So, is this consequence of Obamacare intended, or unintended?

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/08/02/198432/most-2013-job-growth-is-in-part.html#.Uf-UcGRAS7g#storylink=cpy

Obamacare: Told You So (Continued)

Just in case you thought it was only those evil businesses with their dirty profits cutting workers' hours to avoid Obamacare's penalties...

Community College of Allegheny County will cut the hours some instructors to avoid paying for their health insurance coverage under new Affordable Care Act rules.

CCAC President Alex Johnson announced in an email to employees last week that the school would cut course loads and hours for some 200 adjunct faculty members and 200 additional employees. The Affordable Care Act -- nicknamed Obamacare -- classifies employees who work 30 hours or more per week as full-time, and CCAC would be required under the new law to provide employer-assisted health insurance to those employees. Instead, temporary part-time employees, such as clerical, computer, seasonal and other positions, will be limited to working 25 hours per week, and adjunct instructors will only be able to teach 10 credits per semester. Permanent part-time employees, already eligible for health care coverage, will be unaffected. The Pittsburgh-based college estimates the move will save it from spending an additional $6 million. 

Expect to see much more of this in the near future.  Thanks, Obama voters!

California Running Out of Other People's Money

In the past, when I've written about how, "the trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money", I've used Greece as an example.  Although I still think Greece is the best example, several states in the US are doing their best to catch up.  California is arguably in the lead.

The real cause for California's fiscal crisis is simple: They spend too much money. Between 1996 and 2012, the state's population grew by just 15 percent, but spending more than doubled, from $45.4 billion to $92.5 billion (in 2005 constant dollars).

What are Californians getting for all this government spending? According to a new census report released Friday, almost one-quarter, 23.5 percent, of all Californians are in poverty. One-third of all the nation's welfare recipients live in the state, despite the fact that California has only one-eighth of the country's population. That's four times as many as the next-highest welfare population, which is New York [another "Liberal" bastion ~ OS]. Meanwhile, California eighth-graders finished ahead of only Mississippi and District of Columbia students on reading and math test scores in 2011.

Surely, California can solve all its problems by taxing the rich, right?  I mean, that's what Democrats always tell us.  Except, California has already tried that.

Despite Brown's historic tax hike, the California Legislative Analyst's Office announced this week that the state still faces a $2 billion budget deficit just for the next fiscal year. California's liberal electorate has already racked up an additional $370 billion in state and local debt over that last decade. That is more than 20 percent of the state's gross domestic product.

According to the California State Budget Crisis Task Force, that comes to more than $10,000 in debt for every Californian. And because the state's credit rating is so low, California taxpayers must fork over about $2 for every new dollar borrowed. In 2012 alone, the state budget included more than $7.5 billion in debt service -- more than most states' budgets.

Don't think for a second that California's chronic deficits are caused by low taxes. Even before last Tuesday's tax hikes, California had the most progressive income tax system in the nation, with seven brackets, and the second-highest top marginal rate. Now it has the nation's highest top marginal rate and the nation's highest sales tax. And the budget still isn't balanced.

What do Californians do when fed up with excessive taxation, regulation and debt?  Move to Texas.

Middle-class families that want actual jobs, not welfare, are fleeing California in droves. According to IRS data compiled by the Manhattan Institute, since 2000, almost 2 million Americans have left California for other states. Their most popular destination: Texas.

It isn't a tough move to make. Thanks to low taxes and simple regulations, Chief Executive magazine ranked Texas as the best state to do business in for 2012. Guess who ranked dead last? That's right, California. And not only does Texas (6.8 percent) have a far lower unemployment rate than California (10.2 percent), but, according to the Census Bureau, income inequality is worse in California than it is in Texas.

Again, this is a case of federalism at work.  States with low taxes, light regulation and a business friendly climate attract businesses (duh!), which create jobs, which attract people.  The opposite is also true.

From the Manhattan Institute's Civic Report of September 2012.

Note how the top "sender states" - the ones people are leaving in droves - are "Liberal" bastions, while the top destination states - the ones to which people and businesses are escaping - are largely Conservative.  This shouldn't surprise anyone.

What makes matters worse for California is that when they push people out of their state, those people take their money with them (duh!), which shrinks California's tax base.  California isn't just losing people to other states, it's losing money.

From the Manhattan Institute's Civic Report of September 2012.

So, California keeps raising tax rates on a smaller number of people, which causes more people to move out, which shrinks the state's tax base, so they raise tax rates...

California really should be the #1 place to live in the US.  The state's natural beauty, raw materials (petroleum and natural gas abound), fertile soil and weather should make it a great place to live and do business.  Instead, California's politicians, elected by California's people, keep making it increasingly difficult to make a living, so people move to Texas, where doing business is much easier.

So, which model do you think the US as a whole is currently following; California or Texas?  Which model should we follow?

Saudi Dakota? (Updated)

The US economy may be stagnant, but North Dakotans haven't noticed.  Recession?  What recession?

The “Economic Miracle State” continues to lead the nation with the lowest state unemployment rate at 3% in September, at almost five percentage points below the national average of 7.8%.  There were 11 North Dakota counties with jobless rates below 2.0% in September, and Williams County, which is at the epicenter of the Bakken oil boom, continues to boast the lowest county jobless rate in the country at just 0.7%.  The exponential growth in North Dakota oil production has fueled exponential growth in the state’s oil and gas jobs, which have more than tripled over the last three years.  Overall employment throughout the entire state increased 5.6% over the twelve month period through September; four times the tepid 1.4% pace of job growth nationally during that period.

It ain't no miracle.  It's a deliberate decision to allow free market forces to work and create wealth by accessing the state's natural raw materials, namely petroleum.

What’s especially impressive is the incredible exponential increase in North Dakota’s oil production over such a short period of time.  The state’s oil production has doubled in just the last 16 months, from 364,160 bpd in May of last year to 728,494 in September of this year.  Oil coming out of the state’s Bakken Formation is behind the huge increase, as that oil field in western North Dakota now supplies 91% of the state’s oil, up from only 78% of the state’s oil two years ago.  Bakken oil output has doubled in just the last 15 months, from 320,435 bpd last June to 662,428 bpd in September (see bottom chart above).  At the current pace of production increases, North Dakota’s oil production will surpass one million bpd by the end of next year.  And it’s the exponential increases in shale oil production in the Bakken region of North Dakota and the Eagle Ford Shale region of Texas that have the United States on a trajectory to become the world’s largest oil producer in the next eight years.

Considering North Dakota's economic boom due to "frackin' the Bakken", and that the US has more petroleum in the Green River Formation than all the world's known oil reserves, the federal government must be eager to allow more drilling and exploration on federal lands, right?

Not so much.

The Interior Department on Friday issued a final plan to close 1.6 million acres of federal land in the West originally slated for oil shale development.

The proposed plan would fence off a majority of the initial blueprint laid out in the final days of the George W. Bush administration. It faces a 30-day protest period and a 60-day process to ensure it is consistent with local and state policies. After that, the department would render a decision for implementation.

As I wrote before, "it's not as though, in this roaring economy, we need all that inexpensive energy or high-paying jobs".

The US is over $16,000,000,000,000 in debt and counting.  The federal government added over $120,000,000,000 to that debt in October 2012 alone and is on track to add another $1,320,000,000,000 to the debt by the end of fiscal year 2013.  Raising taxes will likely cause the economy to slow even more.  Even if the federal government were to cut spending drastically (good luck with that), we would need enormous economic growth to begin paying down our monstrous debt.

In other words, we need the kind of growth North Dakotans have enjoyed for years.

UPDATE (19NOV2012): The following charts demonstrate how hydraulic fracturing (fracking) has increased total US reserves of petroleum and natural gas by making previously unavailable reserves available.  Further technological advances will make the Green River Formation available.

From the Energy Information Administration

Making Health Care More Affordable

Have you ever walked into a doctor's office and seen a list of prices for the services they offer?  No?  Have you ever asked why not?  Every establishment that sells a good or service provides an up-front list of prices, or at least an estimate.  The one exception is health care providers.  The reason is insurance.

When you buy something for yourself with your own money, you naturally look for the highest quality at the best price.  That desire, and competition between providers, drives costs down and quality up.

When you buy something for yourself with someone else's money, you naturally look for the best quality, but not necessarily the best price.

That's what happens with health insurance, and why health care prices keep increasing. 

The "solution" you'll typically hear for this problem is to make health care 100% government-run.  But that makes the problem worse, because it introduces another layer of separation between the customer and the price.  When you buy something for someone you don't know or care about with other people's money, you neither care about the price nor the quality. 

Furthermore, that solution fails to take into account the fact that government caused the problem in the first place by placing price controls on the amount companies could pay employees back in 1942.  Companies then began compensating workers with health insurance packages, and the modern health care behemoth was born.  Believing that greater government intervention will cure a problem government intervention caused is like believing that a poisoned patient should drink more poison to save himself.

So, what's the solution?  Some doctors in Oklahoma believe they've found it.

The Surgery Center demonstrates that it’s possible to offer high quality care at low prices. "It's always been interesting to me,” says Dr. Jason Sigmon, “that in any other industry, tons of attention is devoted to making systems more efficient, but in health care that's just completely lost."

The bill, which is strictly for the hospital itself and doesn't include Sigmon's or the anesthesiologist's fees, totaled $33,505. When Sigmon performs the same procedure at the Surgery Center, the all-inclusive price is $5,885.

How can the Surgery Center offer the same procedure at 1/6 the cost of the hospital?

Three years ago, Dr. Keith Smith, co-founder and managing partner of the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, took an initiative that would only be considered radical in the health care industry: He posted online a list of prices for 112 common surgical procedures. The 51-year-old Smith, a self-described libertarian, and his business partner, Dr. Steve Lantier, founded the Surgery Center 15 years ago, after they became disillusioned with the way patients were treated at St. Anthony Hospital in Oklahoma City, where the two men worked as anesthesiologists.

The following is from the Surgery Center's website.

Transparent, direct, package pricing means the patient knows exactly what the cost of the service will be upfront. Fees for the surgeon, anesthesiologist and facility are all included in one low price. There are no hidden costs, charges or surprises.

None of this should come as a surprise.  Corrective eye surgery prices keep dropping because it's not covered by insurance.

"In every other field of medicine, the price is going up faster than consumer prices in general," said Dr. John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis.

"[But] the price of Lasik surgery, on average, has gone down by 30 percent." [this article is from 2006, whereas the chart to the right is from 2009 ~ OS] 

Prices dropped even though doctors pay for advertising. And while the procedure got cheaper, it also got better.

"When the lasers first came out, all they could treat was nearsightedness," Bonanni said. "[Today] the lasers are faster, more precise."

The same is true of most cosmetic surgery procedures.

So, the answer to ever-increasing health care costs is not more government intrusion, but less.  The answer, as usual, is the free market.

Which States Are Best for Jobs?

With thanks to Keith Bloom.

Federalism is part of the genius of the Constitution, which gives the federal government very clear, limited powers, and leaves all other "rights and powers" in the hands of "the people and the various states".  All states face similar problems; crime, unemployment, natural disasters, etc.  But each state devises different solutions to those problems.  Some work better than others.  Some are worse than the problems they're supposed to fix.

When one states' solution works well, other states follow suit, although usually with local variations.  When a solution fails miserably, the smart states learn from their neighbors' mistakes and stay away.  States are also more responsive to their residents than is the federal government, mostly because they have fewer people to please. 

Finally, if a person is unhappy with his/her state, at worst they can move to a state they think does things better, which is a whole lot easier than moving to another country.  Trust me.  I've done both.

And that is what makes Federalism work; competition between states. 

One area in which states compete is the job market.  Some states make it easier than others for businesses to create jobs, which means more businesses move to those states, which means more people move to those states looking for work.  Which states make it easiest for businesses to create jobs?



40% of the US population created 75% of new jobs.

 Since the recession ended in June 2009, almost three out of every four jobs added to U.S. payrolls have been in Right to Work states (1.86 million out of 2.59 million), even though those 22 states represent only 38.8% of the U.S. population (120 million).  In contrast, only about one of every four new jobs were created in forced-unionism states (730,000), even though more than 61% of Americans live in those 28 states (189 million).  Relative to their population, the Right to Work states have been job-creating powerhouses during the recovery, and forced union states haven’t even come close to “carrying their weight” in terms of their share of the population.  Adjusting for differences in population, Right to Work states created four new jobs for every one job added in forced union states, because those 21 RTW states created 2.54 times more jobs even though forced union states have 1.6 times as many people.

That means that, since June 2009, 40% of the population created about 75% of the new jobs in the US.  So, which are these right-to-work, job-creating power houses?

States with right-to-work laws, and forced union membership laws.

You know what?  That map looks kind of familiar.  It looks a lot like the map of...

States with Republican (red) and Democrat (blue) governors since 2010.

But what about state legislatures?

State legislatures by political party

So, is there a correlation between a business-friendly climate and job growth?  If so, which party's policies lead to the most job growth?  Judge for yourself.

Here are the top 20 most-friendly business states according to CNBC:

1.Texas
2.Utah
3.Virginia
4.North Carolina
5.North Dakota
6.Nebraska
7.South Dakota
8.Colorado
9.Georgia
10.Wyoming
11.Minnesota
12.Iowa
13.Idaho
14.Indiana
15.Kansas
16.Tennessee
17.Wisconsin
18.Oregon
19.New Hampshire
20.Arkansas

So, naturally, American voters elected a president with a similar pro-growth, pro-jobs agenda, right?  Not really.

President Obama, speaking at an AFL-CIO conference in April this year, “I believe when folks try to take collective bargaining rights away by passing so-called right-to-work laws, which might also be called ‘right-to-work for less’ laws, that’s not about economics, that’s about politics.”

 Is it any wonder the US economy has been stagnant since 2009?  Pres Obama should thank all those Republican governors and legislators, because without them, he'd have no "jobs created or saved" to brag about.

Ronald Reagan said that "the best social program is a job".  He was absolutely right.  Government welfare programs don't lift people out of poverty.  Jobs do.  Businesses create jobs.  Demonizing businesses and weighing the down with excessive regulation and taxation doesn't work.

But Republican-led states demonstrate what does.

Energy: Told You So

Pres Obama likes to take credit for the increase in petroleum and natural gas production in the US over the last four years.  What he leaves out is that, as Mitt Romney pointed out during the debates, the Obama administration cut drilling permits on federal lands by 36%.  The increase comes from private and (some) state lands.  Now that he doesn't need to run for re-election, Pres Obama plans to cut federal drilling permits even further.

The Interior Department on Friday issued a final plan to close 1.6 million acres of federal land in the West originally slated for oil shale development.

The proposed plan would fence off a majority of the initial blueprint laid out in the final days of the George W. Bush administration. It faces a 30-day protest period and a 60-day process to ensure it is consistent with local and state policies. After that, the department would render a decision for implementation.

It's not as though, in this roaring economy, we need all that inexpensive energy or high-paying jobs.  In fact, it's probably a good thing that the layoffs have already started in the icky energy sector.

A Utah coal company owned by a vocal critic of President Barack Obama has laid off 102 miners.

The layoffs at the West Ridge Mine are effective immediately, according to UtahAmerican Energy Inc., a subsidiary of Murray Energy Corp. They were announced in a short statement made public Thursday, two days after Obama won re-election.

The layoffs are necessary because of the president's "war on coal," the statement said. The slogan is one used frequently during the election by Murray Energy CEO Robert Murray, who was an ardent supporter of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

In its statement, UtahAmerican Energy blames the Obama administration for instituting policies that will close down "204 American coal-fired power plants by 2014" and for drastically reducing the market for coal.

"There is nowhere to sell our coal, and when we can, the market prices are far lower," the statement said. "Without markets, there can be no coal mines and no coal jobs."

Then-Sen Obama did promise in January 2008 that his policies would "bankrupt" coal power plants and cause energy prices to "necessarily skyrocket".  So credit him with one promise kept.

Democrats' Plan for the Debt Crisis

I've asked this question of several "Liberals" and, so far, received exactly zero answers.  What is the Democrats' plan to avert America's approaching debt crisis?  Does anyone out there have an answer?  Anyone?  Bueller?

Here's a little background.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told the House Budget Committee Thursday that President Obama’s fiscal year 2013 budget — “the most expensive in United States history” — would “put the U.S. on an ‘unsustainable’ course” if enacted.

Geithner also told committee Chairman Paul Ryan that although the Obama administration doesn’t have a “definitive solution” to the debt crisis, it definitely knows it doesn’t like the Republican solution. ...

“We have millions of Americans retiring every day, and that will drive substantially the rate of growth of health care costs. You are right to say we’re not coming before you today to say we have a definitive solution to that long-term problem. What we do know is, we don’t like yours,” Geithner said.

The Nanny State Fails the Sandy Test

What's wrong with bloated, morbidly obese government?  As if the expense and violation of basic rights wasn't bad enough, it turns out that big government doesn't do it's job.  Take New York City, for example.

With an almost eerie foreshadowing, the dangers laid out by scientists as they tried to press public officials for change in recent years describes what happened this week: Subway tunnels filled with water, just as they warned. Tens of thousands of people in Manhattan lost power. The city shut down. . . .

“A fair question to ask is, have we been as focused as we need to be for emergency preparations,” said the former official, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize ties to the administration. “We’ve just been lucky. We need hardening for the risk we’ve always faced. Until things happen, people aren’t willing to pay for it.”

Government has important, limited, legitimate functions in society.  Infrastructure is one of them.  So, why didn't New York City build the infrastructure that could have prevented the destruction caused by Super Storm Sandy? 

Here in New York we have a very busy government. It’s worried about the kinds of fats we eat and the size of the soft drinks we buy, and there is no shortage of regulations affecting businesses, street vendors, and individuals. But in all this exciting fine tuning, nobody seems to have bothered to think about the much greater task of keeping floodwaters out of the subway system. Admittedly, getting public support and finding the money for flood protection would be hard, but it is exactly that kind of hard job that governments are supposed to do. Leadership is getting the important things done, not looking busy on secondary tasks while the real needs of the city go quietly unmet.

Every law, every regulation, every tax requires enforcement, and that requires resources.  When government gets busy regulating every aspect of people's lives, there are no resources left to do what it's supposed to do.  The result is what's happening now at Staten Island.

Even as the city and feds rushed food, water and generators to the borough, residents and their elected officials fumed that Staten Island was being prepped as the starting line for Sunday's New York City Marathon, even as the rest of the island is left to deal with the aftershocks of the mega-storm.

"The notion of diverting even one police officer, one first responder, one asset away from this carnage is beyond irrational,” Councilman James Oddo told the Daily News. Earlier, Oddo called the idea of hosting the marathon as “idiotic” on his Facebook page.

Obviously, NYC's government has its priorities backwards.  But that shouldn't come as a surprise.  That's what happens when government tries to do too much.

UPDATE (04NOV12): The inimitable Mark Steyn puts is far better than I ever could.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/

Even in those few parts of the Northeast that can legitimately claim to have been clobbered by Sandy, Big Government made it worse. Last week, Nanny Bloomberg, Mayor of New York, rivaled his own personal best for worst mayoral performance since that snowstorm a couple of years back. This is a man who spends his days micromanaging the amount of soda New Yorkers are allowed to have in their beverage containers rather than, say, the amount of ocean New Yorkers are allowed to have in their subway system – just as, in the previous crisis, the municipal titan who can regulate the salt out of your cheeseburger proved utterly incapable of regulating any salt on to Sixth Avenue. Imagine if this preening buffoon had expended as much executive energy on flood protection for the electrical grid and transit system as he does on approved quantities of carbonated beverages. But that's leadership 21^st-century style: When the going gets tough, the tough ban trans fats.

Then he relates it to our federal government's inaction in Benghazi.

Back in Benghazi, the president who looks so cool in a bomber jacket declined to answer his beleaguered diplomats' calls for help – even though he had aircraft and Special Forces in the region. Too bad. He's all jacket and no bombers. This, too, is an example of America's uniquely profligate impotence. When something goes screwy at a ramshackle consulate halfway round the globe, very few governments have the technological capacity to watch it unfold in real time. Even fewer have deployable military assets only a couple of hours away. What is the point of unmanned drones, of military bases around the planet, of elite Special Forces trained to the peak of perfection if the president and the vast bloated federal bureaucracy cannot rouse themselves to action? What is the point of outspending Russia, Britain, France, China, Germany and every middle-rank military power combined if, when it matters, America cannot urge into the air one plane with a couple of dozen commandoes? In Iraq, al-Qaida is running training camps in the western desert. In Afghanistan, the Taliban are all but certain to return most of the country to its pre-9/11 glories. But in Washington the head of the world's biggest "counterterrorism" bureaucracy briefs the president on flood damage and downed trees.

However, even within big government, common sense sometimes wins.  Mayor Nanny Bloomberg finally canceled he NYC Marathon.  But he failed to even get that right.

Fresh off his flight from San Francisco Friday afternoon, Leland Kim had just picked up his numbered marathon bib and registration packet at the Javits Center and was headed to the ING New York City Marathon Expo.

Then he got a text message from a friend: "We're so sorry the marathon got canceled."

Confused, Kim asked someone working at the expo about it, and was told the marathon was still going on. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg had been saying so all week. And Kim had already spoken to runners who'd come from New Zealand, Argentina, Russia and Ireland.

The Road We Really Traveled

President Obama's 8-minute re-election infomercial, produced by Davis Guggenheim (Waiting for Superman, An Inconvenient Truth) and narrated by Tom Hanks, gets the Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Pop-Up Video treatment (simultaneously!) from Andrew Klavan and Bill Whittle.

If I Wanted America to Fail

"If I wanted America to fail, I wouldn't change a thing."

Exactly.  We're headed toward a cliff.  We have been for a long time, and politicians from both major parties have been driving us toward that cliff.  Some have driven faster than others, but the direction is the same.

I don't think it's too late to change course, but eventually it will be.  How soon?  I don't think anyone knows that for sure, but I suspect it won't be long.

Fisker Karma: Your Tax Dollars at Work

Recently, I wrote about the Obama Administration's wasteful "investing" of billions of dollars into unproductive "green" business ventures.  To be clear, I oppose all government subsidies for private businesses.  Government inherently "invests" in failure, because when a business is successful, there's no need for government to prop it up with tax money.  A successful business's profits keep it afloat just fine.  That begs the question; why would we want government to prop up a failing business?  Answer; we don't.  So why do we citizens continue to allow it?

One of those businesses is Fisker, makers of the Karma, a luxury electric car with a range-extending, four cylinder, turbocharged generator made by another failed business in which the Obama Administration invested; GM.  Consumer Reports bought a Karma for $108,000 for testing and immediately had serious trouble with it.  After a trip to the dealership, CR finally got their car back, completed their road test report and found that many other customers are having similar issues.  Video and some text follow.

Normally when we have a car like this at our test facility, it has no problem accumulating break-in miles. After all, big luxury sedans lend themselves to road trips. But the Fisker is languishing in our lot, going out mostly for short commutes that remain well within cell-phone coverage in case of trouble--a concern in the rural area surrounding our track. Just this weekend, for example, the speedometer and energy meter display disappeared when driving, on top of having several other rogue warning indicators appear last week. It is expected we'll be revisiting the dealership soon. We've had cars in the past that have been troublesome, but never anything like this. 

From CR's report on customer issues:

Reading comments on our recent blogs, posts to owner forums, and searching the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) complaints database, we have found several notable issues reported. While there are not a high number of complaints, it does show we are not alone. And remember, there have been only about 500 cars sold, according to Fisker, and the owners skew to the affluent, meaning the Karma is not the typical owner's only car and miles have likely been modest thus far.
Examples of complaints include:

My Karma (with less than a thousand miles on it) had a mysteriously worn-down coupling between one of the motors and the wheels. This will require a completely new differential. As of today... my Karma [has been] "in the shop" longer than I have driven the car. And the prospect of having it in the shop for another 2 weeks (or possibly longer) is making me really unhappy...

Great.  So the Obama Administration spent half a billion of your dollars and mine to subsidize a lemon for exceptionally wealthy people who want to be absolved of their sins against Gaia.

Again, if Pres Obama and his worshipers want to waste their own money on a venture like this, that's their problem.  But I don't have a lot of disposable income to flush down the "green" toilet.  Do you?

Lying About Petroleum

Yesterday, I pointed out how Pres Obama lies about the amount of petroleum we have right here in the US.  Investors Business Daily had already pointed out that fact earlier this week.

When he was running for the Oval Office four years ago amid $4-a-gallon gasoline prices, then-Sen. Barack Obama dismissed the idea of expanded oil production as a way to relieve the pain at the pump. 

"Even if you opened up every square inch of our land and our coasts to drilling," he said. "America still has only 3% of the world's oil reserves." Which meant, he said, that the U.S. couldn't affect global oil prices. 

It's the same rhetoric President Obama is using now, as gas prices hit $4 again, except now he puts the figure at 2%. 

"With only 2% of the world's oil reserves, we can't just drill our way to lower gas prices," he said. "Not when we consume 20% of the world's oil." 

But the figure Obama uses — proved oil reserves — vastly undercounts how much oil the U.S. actually contains. In fact, far from being oil-poor, the country is awash in vast quantities — enough to meet all the country's oil needs for hundreds of years. 

The U.S. has 22.3 billion barrels of proved reserves, a little less than 2% of the entire world's proved reserves, according to the Energy Information Administration. But as the EIA explains, proved reserves "are a small subset of recoverable resources," because they only count oil that companies are currently drilling for in existing fields.
When you look at the whole picture, it turns out that there are vast supplies of oil in the U.S., according to various government reports.

Contrary to Pres Obama's dire estimate, various federal agencies, (including the US Geological Survey, as I pointed out yesterday), the US contains over 1.5 trillion barrels of recoverable petroleum.

Again, these are Federal Government reports.  Is Pres Obama not a member of the Federal Government?  Are these reports unavailable to Pres Obama, but available to me and IBD?  Is Pres Obama incapable of reading them?

So, Obamaphiles, is your messiah lying to you, or is he ignorant?  Because those are the only two possible reasons he keeps repeating the 2% myth.  So, which is it?

No Religious Liberty For You (Continued)

The Obama Administration announced late Friday that they will go ahead with rules (not legislation, mind you; all that constitutional separation of powers stuff is so old fashioned) that will force all employers and universities that offer insurance to cover contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs, even if doing so violates their religious beliefs.

Officials at the Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Labor, and the Treasury today took the next step in the Obama administration’s effort to ensure women access to recommended preventive services while respecting religious liberty.  The Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking issued today outlines draft proposals to implement the policy announced by President Barack Obama and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Feb. 10, 2012. This policy will provide women with access to recommended preventive services including contraceptives without cost sharing, while ensuring that non-profit religious organizations are not forced to pay for, provide, or facilitate the provision of any contraceptive service they object to on religious grounds.
...
“The President’s policy respects religious liberty and makes free preventive services available to women,” said Secretary Sebelius. “Today’s announcement is the next step toward fulfilling that commitment.” 

As usual with the Obama Administration, that's a lie.

[B]y drawing a distinction between actual churches and church-operated businesses like hospitals and schools, the administration effectively appropriated for itself the power to determine what constitutes ministry.

So these employers will still have to provide the health insurance, and the health insurance must cover the contraception and abortifacients.  

The White House apparently wants to pretend that the funds for these outlays will come off of the Unobtanium Tree, where insurers find money to cover mandates. This exposes once again a stunning ignorance of risk pools and how costs are passed along to consumers. 

Let’s just take this one step at a time.  

Where do insurers get money to pay claims? They collect premiums and co-pays from the insured group or risk pool.  No matter what the Obama administration wants to say now, the money that will cover those contraception costs will come from the religious organizations that must now by law buy that insurance and pay those premiums.  Their religious doctrines have long-standing prohibitions against participating in contraception and abortion, and nothing in this “accommodation” changes the fact that the government is now forcing them to both fund and facilitate access to products and services that offend their practice of religion. Basically, the Obama administration told religious organizations to stop complaining and get in line.  This “accommodation” only attempts to accommodate Obama’s political standing and nothing more.

But, hey, they can always refuse to provide insurance at all, pay a fine under the Obamacare law and dump their employees onto Federally provided insurance, right?

Great.  So then, people who are religiously opposed to contraception and abortion still have to pay for both with their taxes.  See how that works?

No matter how you slice it, Pres Obama's rules violate religious people's right of conscience.  But this isn't just about religious liberty, and we religious people shouldn't only argue on religious grounds.

This is about liberty in general.  The government has no right to force anyone, religious or not, to offer any coverage at all.

If employers think they need to offer certain coverage to their employees to attract the best workers, they have the right to do so.  If employees prefer to choose certain employers because of the coverage they offer, they have the right to do so.  But government has no right to interfere in those transactions.

Christians; if you don't yet understand why we should all oppose bloated, morbidly obese government, I don't know what it'll take.

Making Things Worse (Continued)

Recently I posted empirical evidence that Pres Obama, far from saving us from economic Armageddon as his worshipers claim, actually made things worse through bad policy.  This time we'll take a look at one of those bad policies and its outcomes (so far).

Before Obamaphiles get in too big a tizzy, let's all acknowledge that then-Senator Obama actually warned us back in January 2008 that his policies would do exactly that.



Everything - absolutely everything - we do in the economy requires energy, so if energy prices "necessarily skyrocket", that would obviously choke off economic growth.  One way to decrease the price of energy is to increase supply.  And that's exactly what Pres Obama prevented by denying the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline Expansion from Alberta to Texas.

President Obama, denouncing a “rushed and arbitrary deadline” set by congressional Republicans, announced Wednesday that he was rejecting a Canadian firm’s application for a permit to build and operate the Keystone XL pipeline, a massive project that would have stretched from Canada’s oil sands to refineries in Texas.

Yeah.  "Rushed and arbitrary".  He only had over two years to make a decision.  In fact, he made the decision over the objections of his own "Jobs Council". 

“Continuing to deliver inexpensive and reliable energy,” the council reported, “is going to require the United States to optimize all of its natural resources and construct pathways (pipelines, transmission and distribution) to deliver electricity and fuel.” 

It added that regulatory “and permitting obstacles that could threaten the development of some energy projects, negatively impact jobs and weaken our energy infrastructure need to be addressed.”  

 Duh.  Seems pretty obvious, doesn't it?  Not if your name is Obama, apparently.

Who gets hurt worst by "skyrocketing" energy prices?  Obviously, poor people do.

“Lower-income families are more vulnerable to energy costs than higher-income families because energy represents a larger portion of their household budgets,” according to the study, which relied on Energy Information Administration data. 

Energy costs this year will represent 24 percent of after- tax income for families earning $10,000 to $30,000, up from 14 percent in 2001. Families with after-tax income from $30,000 to $50,000 will spend 7 percent of their earnings on electricity, according to the study.

Why does Pres Obama  hate poor people? 


But hey, at least Pres Obama's billionaire patron, Warren Buffet, benefited from it.

As it turns out, oil is already moved from northern latitudes, such as the booming oil fields of North Dakota, down to the Gulf of Mexico by rail of the old, low-speed variety.

As it happens, 75 percent of the oil currently shipped by rail out of North Dakota is handled by Burlington Northern Santa Fe LLC… which just happens to be a unit of Warren Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway Inc.  What a coincidence! 

And now the Chinese will benefit from Pres Obama's decision.

The prospect of Canada entering free-trade talks with China is suddenly being discussed, as Chinese leaders indicated during Prime Minister Stephen Harper's visit that they are prepared to head down that path — even though Canadian officials aren't so sure this country is ready for the jump. 

The development came as China and Canada declared Thursday that bilateral relations have reached "a new level" following a series of multibillion-dollar trade and business agreements to ship additional Canadian petroleum, uranium and other products to the Asian superpower

To make matters worse, while Pres Obama dithered for two years, refusing to make a decision on a privately-funded project that would obviously generate tens of thousands of jobs (no big deal, according to Democrats) and help boost the economy, Pres Obama spent billions of tax payer dollars on "green" tech failures like Solyndra and Fisker.

So, Obamaphiles; still insist that The One rescued us from the next Great Depression?  Of course you do!  Your adoration was never based on facts, reason or logic, after all.