‘Creating jobs’ explained

Creating ‘union government jobs’ isn’t what we had in mind

Maybe this explains why wages for federal employees have risen so fast: for the first time, the majority of union members work for local, state, or federal government.

This is not good. Unions act as clearing houses for political contributions to Democrats, and together they make deals to grow government. Now that most union members are now government workers, this is a huge conflict of interest.

So now we have a perfect storm: unionized government bureaucrats, whose salaries come from our tax dollars, and whose compulsory union dues are funneled (sometimes against their wishes) to Democrats for the purpose of growing a government that is already too big, too expensive, and a drag on the economy.

More, from the above:

Last month when the White House released its visitor log for the first six months of the Obama presidency, one name appeared far more often than any other: Service Employee International Union (SEIU) President Andrew Stern. Stern has every right to expect to be welcome in the Obama White House. He has repeatedly bragged about the fact that under his leadership, the SEIU spent $60.7 million to elect Barack Obama president. And what is Stern buying with his $60.7 million besides White House tours? Ever expanding federal government programs and state government bailouts which are rapidly bankrupting our country.

There was a time when unions protected working people from harsh, inhumane conditions. But do today’s government workers, who mostly sit in cubicles in temperature-controlled offices, need to be unionized? To protect them from what? Lower (and more realistic) wages?

Again, from the above:

Union membership has fallen to 7.3% of private sector workers – the lowest rate since Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act into law. But it is a completely different story in the public sector: 37.6% of government employees belong to unions, up almost a percentage point since last year. Those 7.9 million unionized government employees are 51% of all union members nationwide.

So when we hear Obama continually talking about “creating jobs”, we have to remember: he must mean creating government jobs. Because that’s the only kind his kind of economic policies can create.

The only government intervention that will drive the economy is “getting the hell out of the way”

I think I just found a new blog to love. It’s called Mean Street, at wsj.com, by a man named Evan Newmark. Here’s why.

He says we should be very careful about buying into this “the recession is over” stuff in A Sham GDP for a Sham Economy. Our GDP “growth” announced today is from government spending, much of it from cash for clunkers. This is just kicking the can down the road in the form of borrowing against the future. Remember how auto sales tanked horribly in September, after the program ended? That is not, by anybody’s definition, an “economic recovery”.

But even better, this post is a must-read: It’s Official — Obamanomics Isn’t Working.

You likely missed it. But Thursday’s Congressional testimony from Obama Council of Economic Adviser Chief, Christina Romer was the big story. She officially admitted what many of us already knew: Obamanomics isn’t working.

The $787 billion Obama stimulus package that was supposed to keep U.S. unemployment at under 8% will not only fail to keep it under 10%. But by mid-2010 “fiscal stimulus will be contributing little to further growth.”

As for President Obama’s big promise last January to create 3.5 or 4 million new American jobs. Forget it. “Unemployment is unlikely to end 2010 much below its current levels.”

Romer’s admission was startling. You’ll recall that it was her January 10th paper that outlined what a mighty job machine the Obama presidency would be. Every 1% boost in GDP would get a million new jobs.

Now here we are running stimulus-heavy budget deficits that will total almost $3 trillion over this year and next. GDP is on the rise again. And still, no new jobs.

What’s even more depressing, is that the Obama White House still hasn’t figured out why businesses aren’t hiring.

The White House seems pretty certain about how American businesses should behave. And it seems pretty certain that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, insurance companies and banks aren’t doing what they should be doing.

But all that joblessness? Who knows? Not Romer. It’s all a macroeconomic mystery of time-lags and GDP multipliers. In her testimony, she offers up seven different guesstimates on jobs created by the stimulus.

Does it ever occur to the White House to see the economy as businessmen do? Does it ever occur to the White House that America’s businesses aren’t hiring because they don’t trust Washington?

No. Business is E-V-I-L!

Just check out President Obama’s Saturday radio address on small business to see what I’m talking about.

The president paid tribute to small business, to “mom and pop stores and neighborhood restaurants we know and love.” Small business, he intoned, was the “engine of our economy,” “the heart of the American dream.”

So did the president propose new ways of cutting payroll taxes, employment costs and red-tape for the “engine of our economy?” Nope. Instead, he promised more federal SBA loans and health insurance reform courtesy of federal intervention and mandates.

How many small businessmen do you know that want government more involved in their business?

I know lots of small businessmen and I can’t think of one. I myself employ just one worker in New York City — and the amount of paperwork, fees, taxes and aggravation involved makes it feel like I’m employing a thousand.

I recently discovered that as a self-employed New Yorker I now have the pleasure of paying a new Metropolitan Commuter Mobility Transportation Tax. This measly 0.34% tax on wages is exactly the kind of stupidity that kills jobs. It’s the kind of tinkering that governments can’t resist. And it’s the very reason government terrifies businesses.

Read the whole thing.

How did we end up with a bunch of Keystone Cops in the White House?

 

Links and Aggravation

I really don’t know what the hell is going on with our country any more. I read all of these stories in ONE DAY …

Does Obama Believe in Human Rights? – When it suits him. And just in his speeches. Bret Stephens lists the failures: the Berlin Wall, China, Sudan, Iran, Burma. Quoted:

It takes a remarkable presumption of good faith, or perhaps stupidity, to imagine that the Burmas or Sudans of the world would reciprocate Mr. Obama’s engagement except to seek their own advantage. … It also takes a remarkable degree of cynicism—or perhaps cowardice—to treat human rights as something that “interferes” with America’s purposes in the world, rather than as the very thing that ought to define them.

Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast – Humans Rights Watch founder Robert Bernstein: “As the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group’s critics.” Finally, a sane voice in a human rights group.

What Singapore Can Teach the White House – Universal health care with individual responsibility seems to be working in Singapore. We aren’t following that model.

A Survival Strategy for Free Enterprise Over the Long Term – The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has rolled over on fighting a carbon tax: “what we need is a carbon tax.” No, we don’t. In fact, that is exactly what we don’t need. Are you freaking kidding me? A business group endorsing a tax on economic activity? This is the stupidest public comment I’ve heard in … hours.

Excuses wearing thin for Obama, media pals – And now we see why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has rolled over on fighting a carbon tax: “The MSNBC blast against the chamber appears to dovetail with what the Politico newspaper reports is a White House and Democratic effort “to marginalize” the business organization.”.

What the Limbaugh Quote Hoax Really Tells Us – Frankly, the demonization of conservatives really needs to stop. It’s become tedious. And frankly, it makes the Left look vapid, paranoid, and venal. Is that what they want?

This must be what it feels like to wake up in hell

“Health care reform” or, as I like to call it, “another stupid idea from Washington” :

In short, the plan sponsored by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus would almost certainly lead to a death spiral in many private health insurance markets.

Insurance death spirals occur when regulators force insurers to offer coverage (“guaranteed issue”) at premiums below the known risk of those they are insuring, without any assurance that the shortfall can be made up elsewhere. When insurers comply with these rules and offer relatively low cost health insurance policies to all comers, quite predictably, many sick people step forward to sign up. When the insurers then try to turn around and charge higher premiums to the relatively healthy to cover their costs, the healthy, also quite predictably, are more reluctant to enroll because they can see the premiums they would have to pay would very likely exceed their health-care costs. So they often say “no thanks” to the insurance and decide to take their chances by going without coverage instead. As more and more healthy people exit the marketplace, insurers are then forced to raise premiums for everyone who remains, which only further encourages the lower risks to opt out. This vicious cycle of rising premiums and an increasingly unhealthy risk pool is called a ‘death spiral’ because it eventually forces the insurer to terminate the plan.

This is not a hypothetical, textbook scenario of what might happen to a poorly run insurance market. It has happened before — many times and in many places. See, for instance, the experience in Kentucky, and in Washington state, and in Maine too. There’s no reason it couldn’t happen nationwide.

The Obama White House and congressional Democrats convinced themselves months ago that they could avoid the fate of these failed state reform efforts by forcing the young and healthy to buy insurance, whether they wanted it or not. And so, all of the bills under consideration in the House and Senate would make government-approved health insurance enrollment compulsory for all Americans. Those not complying would have to pay a new tax, collected by the IRS.

Will the last resident to leave Michigan please turn out the lights?

While you were out … the state of Michigan has turned into an economic hell-hole.

It’s too bad. Michigan is a nice place, with a lot of natural beauty, and Great Lakes on three sides. But the place is slowly being destroyed economically, due to a deadly combination of too much reliance on a very sick auto industry, and high taxes, and big government, and excessive union power.

So those who can leave, do. Every 12 minutes, a family leaves the state of Michigan. 5 families per hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Do the math. That’s 840 families every week.

And it’s no wonder. Taxes are a strong disincentive to invest, to run a business, to work or raise a family. Raising taxes chases away the people who pay into the system but get very little out of it, leaving behind those who depend on that system–government largesse–for their livelihood. It’s a recipe for failure.

And Illinois, which is right now facing some big financial burdens, has the same tendency to “raise taxes first and ask questions later”. So does the U.S. government.

They might want to take a look at Michigan’s situation. And you might, as well. If raising taxes to address budget problems works so well, why do they have to keep doing it?

Competition: Good. Regulation: Bad.

Ever wonder why health insurance costs so much?

Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute has some information for you about insurance regulation and the power of free markets: O’s Rx: Break It. Even with the silly title, it’s a must-read.

Here’s a bit of it:

The individual market is where people face the most choices and have the most choice — except in those states with Obama-style regulations. People are spending their own money and so must confront directly the value of more insurance protection versus other uses of their cash. Not surprisingly, they often opt for less generous coverage with less onerous premiums.

To discover this world of choice, just go to ehealthinsurance.org. Pop in your state, age and gender, and then ponder a myriad of choices to secure protection from catastrophic health expenses, the proper function of insurance.

A 55-year-old man in Allentown, Pa., can choose from 99 plans starting as low as $141 a month for hospital coverage. A zero-deductible HMO plan costs $418 a month. Or he can pick a more flexible PPO, with a higher deductible and pay less monthly out-of-pocket for the premium.

Young people, “the invincibles,” often skip insurance, because they have few assets to protect and little fear of getting sick. The congressional Democrats’ solution is a tax increase by another name: Force employers to keep paying for them on their parents’ expensive plans until age 26.

Yet the market has responded with products targeted at the needs of the young, such as Wellpoint’s Tonik, which offers excellent protection, prescription drugs and preventive care for less than $100 a month for the under-30 set.

So if 50-somethings can get a plan at less than $200 a month and youngsters can sign up for less than $100 a month, where’s the problem? Why, it’s in New York and New Jersey — precisely the states that have adopted Obama-style reform — restricting insurers from charging rates based on age and preventing them from saying no due to poor health.

Change the zip code from Pennsylvania to neighboring New Jersey, and choice plummets even as the cost per plan skyrockets. In New York, our 55-year-old has only 12 plans to choose from.

The reason is simple: When people can buy fire insurance after their houses are burning, only those with a fire in the attic apply for insurance. Soon, only those who expect a blaze can afford the high premiums.

Massachusetts enacted such a system in April 2006. A CEO of a major health network reports exactly this problem: Despite the state mandate that everyone buy and keep insurance, his company is experiencing a drastic increase in people who purchase new coverage, run up big bills that are fully covered and then drop the plan.

People are simply gaming the system. Since they can acquire insurance any time, regardless of health, why pay the premium in times of good health?

Read it all.

We’ve been hoodwinked into believing that Big Business got us into this mess, and that Big Government Meddling and Regulation will fix it. Sadly, Big Government Meddling and Regulation doesn’t fix anything. In fact, it makes it worse, just about every time.

Free economic markets usually do a pretty good job of sorting these things out. And that is because competition on price is always good for consumers. I.e., us.

Conversely, government regulation tends to limit supply of some essential good or service, and drive individuals and businesses away from that line of work, along with the innovation they may bring.

Limiting supply with constant (or increasing demand) always pushes prices up. Always.

So does artificially increasing demand. That’s how the whole mortgage mess started.

It’s just not smart to ignore the laws of economic markets. And this is true even if—especially if—you don’t understand them, or wish they worked differently.

Via No Left Turns.

Friday Links

Worth Mulling: A Late-Summer Reading List – a few books on this list I’d like to track down:

• Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World’s Problems by Michael Strong
• Meltdown by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
• The Housing Boom and Bust by Thomas Sowell

Bolt shreds 200m mark, sets second world record this week – 19.19 for the 200m. Sliced .11 off the old world mark of 19.30 he set in last year’s Olympics. This guy is amazing, and I hope he’s clean. We don’t need more reasons to be suspicious of athletic performances.

Giants’ owner and teammates say Burress jail term is an American tragedy – I’m not a Giants fan, I don’t care about Plaxico Burress, but it sure seems odd to me, the way that whole story has evolved. Two years in jail for a weapons violation? Wow. Whose interests are served by it?

Bus drivers reject paying red-light tickets – Issuing automatic $100 tickets for not stopping at some exact spot on a road is a DUMB idea. It annoys drivers who are doing nothing wrong, and is nothing more than a cash grab by cash-obsessed local governments. Just because technology enables a particular idea is NOT justification enough for implementing it. In fact, that might be an argument against it.

Quote of the Week

From commenter Brian Frederickson to this John Fund piece “When in Doubt, Attack Your Critics” at the Wall Street Journal:

You don’t have to be rabid, right-wing or an extremist to have a basic understanding of economics. Adding 46 million people to the ranks of the insured will drive up demand for healthcare and, thus, the price. Conversely, controlling costs (while trying to add to the number of insured) will require limiting access to care. An insurance program subsidized by the Treasury will drive private insurers out of business and force more people into the government plan. These facts are irrefutible, and the President can’t get upset when people call him out by stating the obvious.

That’s all you need to know, and if you relied on the news to tell you all this, you’d wait forever.

It’s just basic economic knowledge on how markets work. It has nothing to do with partisanship.

Government Meddling Led to Financial Crisis? Who Knew?

Well, well, well. Lookee here. Congress agrees with me, and blames today’s financial crisis on “federal government intervention in the U.S. housing market”:

The housing bubble that burst in 2007 and led to a financial crisis can be traced back to federal government intervention in the U.S. housing market intended to help provide homeownership opportunities for more Americans. This intervention began with two government-backed corporations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which privatized their profits but socialized their risks, creating powerful incentives for them to act recklessly and exposing taxpayers to tremendous losses. Government intervention also created “affordable” but dangerous lending policies which encouraged lower down payments, looser underwriting standards and higher leverage. Finally, government intervention created a nexus of vested interests – politicians, lenders and lobbyists – who profited from the “affordable” housing market and acted to kill reforms. In the short run, this government intervention was successful in its stated goal – raising the national homeownership rate. However, the ultimate effect was to create a mortgage tsunami that wrought devastation on the American people and economy. While government intervention was not the sole cause of the financial crisis, its role was significant and has received too little attention.

In recent months it has been impossible to watch a television news program without seeing a Member of Congress or an Administration official put forward a new recovery proposal or engage in the public flogging of a financial company official whose poor decisions, and perhaps greed, resulted in huge losses and great suffering. Ironically, some of these same Washington officials were, all too recently, advocates of the very mortgage lending policies that led to economic turmoil. In a number of cases, political officials even engaged in unethical conduct, helping their political allies, family members and even themselves obtain lucrative positions in the mortgage lending industry and other benefits. At a time when government intervention in private markets has become alarmingly common, government “affordable housing” initiatives offer important lessons about the dangers of government efforts to manipulate or conjure outcomes in the market.

Via Doug Ross’ Twitter feed. and the Carpe Diem blog.

First Rule of Financial Holes: Stop Digging

You have to wonder if maybe Illinois wouldn’t be in such a big budget crisis right now if the state legislature didn’t routinely, and for many years, approve new programs without funding them.

Seems a little risky, no?

In a business, or even a family, non-essential expenses are the very first thing you evaluate. It’s called “cutting the fat”, and it’s how sane people try to balance budgets.

But not in government! Governments have these wonderful ATM-like things called “taxpayers”.

Governments think taxpayers are awesome because taxpayers are too busy leading their lives to learn much about how completely they get ripped off by their governments. And the media likes taxpayers too, as long as they are kept in the dark about how markets work and what taxes do to an economy.

Isn’t it funny how none of the politicians or news stories mention any of this when the going gets tough? No, it’s all about yanking food right out of the mouths of starving children.

Gee thanks, but I’m trying to cut down on my big-government platitudes and insulting emotional appeals meant to trip my trigger and open my wallet.

The Economist notes how widespread it is :

Despite allocations of federal aid to states, services are being cut, state employees are being laid off, and taxes are being raised in order to balance the budgets of local governments constitutionally unable to run deficits. It’s not at all clear that the federal stimulus will entirely compensate for state-level fiscal tightening, which means that American fiscal policy could, on net, be contractionary.

Q: Is there anybody in the room who dares to ask the obvious? That, maybe, just maybe, we’re overspending?

A: Sadly, no. Doing that would require cutting programs that benefit special-interest groups. And the media, which frames the discussion about the role of government in our lives, believes all government spending is inherently a Good Thing.

And so on and on we go. Giving government more and more power by relying on it to fix things for us.

How’s that working out so far?

Stupid Is as Stupid Does

And Waxman-Markey thinks YOU are stupid enough to support this dumb idea:

Now Congress is trying to pass a new law called ‘Cap and Trade,’ which is really just another new energy tax. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the new tax could cost you between 61 cents and $1.60 for every gallon of gas you buy. Economists think this could cost the average family $3,100 a year. I’m working hard to defeat this new tax.

Funny how that huge tax increase on everybody who drives doesn’t seem to resonate in the media. Huh.

I have a feeling it would resonate with the consumer.

That passage above is from this link at the site of my congressman, Peter Roskam (Ill.). I sent him an email today requesting that he vote no on that legislation, before I knew how strongly he already opposed it. He doesn’t like the Waxman-Markey bill. He is a smart man.

You can also find this graphic at that link, reflecting the cost of gas in Chicago, which already pays the highest prices in the nation, and which could increase by up to $1.60:

http://roskam.house.gov/Issues/Issue/?IssueID=4291

Thanks, but no. Sorry … I’m really trying to cut down.

Like a Giant IQ Test … That Much of the World is Failing

Thomas Sowell, discussing Angelo Codevilla’s new book “The Character of Nations”:

While nations differ, particular kinds of behavior produce particular kinds of results in country after country. Moreover, American society in recent years has been imitating behavior patterns that have produced negative— and sometimes catastrophic— consequences in many other countries around the world.

Among these patterns have been a concentration of decision-making power in government officials, an undermining of the role of the family, a “non-judgmental” attitude toward behavior and a dissolution of the common bonds that hold a society together, leading to atomistic self-indulgences and group-identity politics that increasingly pits different segments of society against each other.

It would appear that stupid ideas have bad consequences. Who knew?

A little more awesome news for those of who think that those patterns are the wrong way to go:

Those among the intelligentsia who say that we should “learn from other countries” almost invariably mean that we should imitate what other countries have done. Angelo Codevilla argues that we should learn from other countries’ mistakes, especially when those same mistakes have repeatedly produced bad results in many countries and among many very different peoples, living under very different political systems.

Putting ever more economic decisions in the hands of those with political power is just one of those mistakes with a track record of painful repercussions in many countries around the world. These repercussions have included not only serious economic losses but, even more important, a loss of personal freedom and self-respect, as ever wider segments of the population become supplicants and sycophants of those with the power to dispense largess or to make one’s life miserable with legalistic or bureaucratic harassment.

Other than all that bad stuff, though? Puppies and rainbows for everyone!

That bolded text above, in a nutshell, explains why I don’t pay much attention to the “news” any more: it’s because the “news” actively pushes back from the other side on every one of those points in bold above by Mr. Sowell and Mr. Codevilla. It isn’t “news” at all, it’s activism. And it’s on the wrong side of history.

That giant sucking sound? Son, that’s what we used to call ‘The Economist’.

Too bad.

Used to be a nice magazine. As in, “intelligent”, “well-informed”, “fairly centrist”, “not as loony as Newsweek”. I’ve bought it a few times, and subscribed for a while.

Seems to have turned into just another in a long line of “Big Government is Good For You” media shills.  Soon lining a bird-cage near you!

Statism. It even sounds ugly, and the meaning is uglier:

stat-ism [stey-tiz-uh m] -
1. the principle or policy of concentrating extensive economic, political, and related controls in the state at the cost of individual liberty.

Because that’s always worked so well before!

I’ve got a crazy idea. How about another magazine that advocates for—hold on, this is pretty revolutionary—more individual liberty!

Not less Liberty. More Liberty. M-O-R-E.

More Liberty, both economic and personal.

Free markets and free people. I’ve heard it works pretty well.

Creating “Green” Jobs that Serve No Market? Good Plan!

Spain tried the “green jobs” thing:

“The U.S. should expect a loss of at least 2.2 jobs on average, or about nine jobs lost for every four (green jobs) created,” Alvarez wrote in his 41-page study of Spain’s own green-job revolution.

“An examination of Europe’s experience” in trying to green the economy, which dates back to 1997, “reveals these policies to be terribly economically counterproductive.”

Oh. Well, I’m sure it will work much better for us: we’ve got a cool President. Economic markets bow at his feet!

Hmmm. Seems to me the Soviets tried this kind central planning to “create” jobs, and the end result was that they produced too many razor blades and not enough toilet paper.

But never mind all that. “Green” is the hot marketing trend right now. And we know how well economic markets always follow hot marketing trends!

When Did I Wake Up in Hell, Economics Edition

You know it’s a crazy world when China gives free-market economic advice to the U.S.

And crazier still? It’s good advice.

Note to Obama and Congress:  government spending grows government, not the economy.

Plus, big business is not the enemy, despite lame attempts to offload anger at Congress onto AIG and the paltry amount of $165M … that Congress explicitly approved, and already knew about. Which means Obama and Geithner had to know, too.

Nice try, chumps. We may be dumb, but we aren’t stupid.

No Way!

Um, Way

Next time you hear anybody — say, a man on the street, your neighbor, the President of the United States — trying to blame the current financial mess on the Bush administration, tell them to look at this post at the great Doug Ross @ Journal:  Meltdown.

In fact, maybe you should read it too.

“Facts:  We R Stubborn.”

And from reading Doug’s post, you’d almost think Congress was corrupt or something!  Srsly!  Crazy, huh?

Blame It On Quants, Don’t Blame It On Me

A few weeks back I wrote about our Economic Reckoning. I wondered how so much bad debt, in the form of credit default swaps backed by risky mortgage debt, could get rated in the AAA tranche by the various rating agencies.

I might have that answer now.

This article, Recipe for Disaster: The Formula that Killed Wall Street by Felix Salmon, explains the story of an industry deathly afraid of unquantified risk, that fell in love with a new formula, and bet the ranch on it.

And lost.

This new formula is called a Gaussian copula function, and it attempts to assign a discrete number X to represent a complete picture of the risk of insanely complicated financial instruments.

A simple, beautiful, and, in my mind, ultimately vain concept.

Impossibly, insanely complicated financial instruments.  Built on layers of other impossibly, insanely complicated financial instruments.  All with basically an unknown level of risk.  These had been confounding Wall St. for years.  But using this new formula enabled entire new markets to open up, which means more revenue.  Lots and lots of revenue.

Unfortunately, it was all based on a correlation model.

Even the credit rating bureaus, like Moody’s and Standard & Poors, bought into it.  A correlation model.

Turns out, there were flaws in that correlation model. Imagine that.

Must Watch, Must Read

I love the smell of napalm in the morning: UConn coach Jim Calhoun eviscerates a young clown “reporter”.  That guy would have fit in perfectly as an economics reporter at the AP.

The current crisis is caused by government intervention, not free markets: Thomas Sowell explains how, in Upside Down Economics.  A must read.

The world economy is in deep, deep trouble, according to Niall Ferguson. Another must read. His new book is called The Ascent of Money. I think I need to get that one. Oh, and by the way, he blames government intervention, too.

But at least all this gubmint pork — which is how we got here in the first, and which we can’t afford, and which will lengthen the recession, not shorten it — is helping grow Washington’s “economy”!  Sweet.

This Just In … California Government Spends Like Drunken Sailors on Leave … Film at Eleven …

California’s budget deficit is predicted to reach $42B by 2010.

Forty.  Two.  Billion. Dollars.

$42,000,000,000.00

Plus, the state is losing population — a.k.a. “taxpayers” — at alarming rates.  Businesses, too, are fleeing the state because of tax burdens and regulation.  In the face of this declining tax base, California welcomes illegals with open arms and provides them with services like education, health care, and other local services.

A sensible person would look at this economic equation, and within 10 seconds decide it was unsustainable.  Which is exactly why there are so few sensible persons in politics.

Random Thoughts

(1)
Every time you read a story headlined “Worst Recession in 25 Years”, remind yourself that our economic growth was huge from 1983-2007, and so the statement itself doesn’t say much.  Call me back when we start hitting recessions like we had in the 1970s, and then we can haul out loaded terms like “depression”.

(2)
The rate of mortgage foreclosure during the height of the Depression?  50%.  Just because our period of “irrational overexuberance” is stalled right now doesn’t mean our lives aren’t still pretty good, generally speaking.

(3)
And besides, the best fiscal stimulus is pretty much not spending 800 kajillion dollars on pork. How about cutting taxes?  It has always worked before.

(4)
And one more thing: government can’t “create” jobs, except the useless, “stealing capital from the economy” kind. Which we already have quite enough of.

(5)
Apparently people will still pay to see movies they want to see; this January, we bought 16% more movie tickets than last January (141M vs. 121M). The first billion dollar January in history. Reading between the lines a little bit … if during the last 4 years Hollywood had made movies people like, instead of preachy anti-American-military propaganda like “Redacted”, maybe all that “war fatigue” that was blamed for keeping them away, and saving their money, would have melted away. Funny how that whole “free market” thing works.