Apr 10 2009

Killing the patient with care

Category: Congress,economy,energy,government,Obama,taxes — harmonicminer @ 8:37 am

An earlier version of this was posted Oct 21, 2008.  It has been edited slightly to reflect current conditions, but it is basically accurate still.
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The patient takes vitamins and minerals in doses recommended by most physicians, and gets plenty of exercise.

The patient eats a reasonably healthy diet. However, the patient depends to a large degree on imported food, which is often expensive, though the price goes up and down to a degree, and while the patient could grow plenty of home grown food, the patient hasn’t been planting enough lately to sustain present and future dietary needs. So the patient is hungry, and losing weight

The patient is mysteriously ill. Upon examination, it appears that the patient has been slowly poisoned. The patient’s immune system and general state of health might have been sufficient to cover the symptoms of the poisoning longer, except for the strain imposed by the recent hunger and weight loss. The symptoms have been coming on for sometime, but only recently have they become indisputable, as what seemed subclinical does of the poison accumulated in the tissues enough to cause big problems.

Some physicians suggest simply stopping the poison immediately, engaging in a crash program to feed the patient, and growing lots more food for the future, starting today. The basically healthy patient’s immune system and generally good habits will reverse the effects of the poison.

Some physicians suggest continuing the patient’s calorie restriction, cutting back on the vitamins and exercise, switching to a different poison (but reducing the dose) and using leeches to drain away the bad blood. When it’s pointed out that the vitamins and exercise are usually good things, and that poison is usually a bad thing, these practitioners assure the patient that the problem was an unexpected reaction between the nutritional supplements and the low grade poison dose, and the new poison is really a purgative to help clear the system of the effect of too many vitamins, and won’t do any harm. When these doctors are asked if the patient really shouldn’t be eating more, they say it’s good to be skinny, and research shows that skinny people live longer, anyway. They point to all kinds of studies that seem to prove all of this, and cite complicated sounding theories to justify the counter-intuitive nature of their prescriptions. Trust them: they’re the experts. And besides, even if the patient starts growing more food again, it will be many years before enough can be grown to adequately feed the patient (aren’t growing seasons usually annual things?). And even if the patient eats more, the patient will just start exercising more again, and burn the calories, and what good will that do?

I know which advice I’d follow, if I was the patient.

The patient, of course, is the US economy.

The vitamins and exercise are the tax cuts put in years ago by the Bush administration and Congress. Strictly speaking, the vitamins are the tax cuts (think antioxidants that prevent cross-linking), and the exercise is the additional economic freedom those cuts created for productive activity that drove the huge success of our economy for six years after 9/11, until the combination of oil prices and the housing/financial meltdown drug it down about a year ago.

Did you get the pun?  The housing/financial meltdown “drug” the economy down.  Ouch…

The diet is oil and energy, and we don’t make anywhere near enough of our own, which is part of the reason prices were so high not long ago.  Don’t be fooled!  Even though prices have fallen far off the $150/barrel highs, oil is still in short supply for an active, vibrant economy.  You can’t have a speculative bubble without an underlying “shortage,” and right now people are simply doing less that demands energy. But our access to energy is going to reflect itself in our ability to “rev up” the economy as we grow out of the recession.  The combination of a true structural energy shortage for a vibrant economy, plus the inflation that is going to result from the printing of new money, is going to result in higher oil prices than we’ve ever dreamed of, within a relatively short time, as the economy improves, demand goes up, and the worth of money goes down.

The mysterious poison (that “drug” we mentioned, the one with inevitably serious side effects) is government interference in the marketplace, particularly in trying to repeal the basic laws of economics. One of the main things that poisons do is to interfere with normal biological processes, and market interference is little different. There are many of these poisons, and when one of them is having an obviously negative effect on the patient, too many so-called experts suggest we try a different one. The problem is that all such interference is toxic for our economy. Some amount of government interference is probably inevitable; after all, we take medicines that are essentially poisons, because our overall organisms can handle it in small amounts, and the medicine sometimes helps resolve a short-term problem. But you will die young on a steady diet of high doses of all kinds of medicine, regardless of how beneficial some medicines are in short term use for very specific problems. A body can tolerate just a very few “maintenance” medicines for a long life, and they must have very mild side effects to be survivable.

A few years ago I had some blood tests that revealed serious problems.  My doctor couldn’t figure it out, and sent me to a specialist.  He looked at the list of medicines I was taking, and simply took me off everything but the absolute minimum.  My blood-work improved dramatically, as did my overall health.  What had happened was “medicine creep”, where the doctor prescribes one thing, then another to deal with the side effects of the first, then another, then another, and so on.  It took an expert to decide to do very little, while the mediocre practitioner tried to do too much.

We are toxic with government economic medicine right now. The physicians who are prescribing it were wrong about the LAST ten prescriptions, with side effects they claimed we wouldn’t experience, and with frequent failure in the purpose of the medicine, even WITH the deleterious side effects. And they are planning to send us the bill for their professional services, anyway. The very best thing they could do is to withdraw all but the very minimum of economic medicine (meaning a tolerable toxicity), and let the body heal itself. It will.

But our president and Democrat congress have big plans. They want to put us on about a dozen VERY STRONG maintenance medicines for life, medicines with serious toxic side effects, medicines that have not ever worked for any other patient over the long term, and send our children the bill.

I wish politicians had to take the Hippocratic oath before taking office, which includes, if memory serves, this promise:

First, do no harm.

Unfortunately, instead of Hippocrates in office, we have hypocrites.

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Mar 06 2009

“Big government” equivalence is a smokescreen

Category: Congress,economy,media — harmonicminer @ 8:31 pm

Both parties love big government _ just different programs

Republicans say they’re outraged that Obama would “borrow and spend” his way to a new behemoth government. But they borrowed and spent their way through the ’80s and the current decade. And they love big government, when it’s at the Pentagon .

Democrats from Obama on down insist that they don’t like big government, that they’re just forced into a temporary spending spree by the recession. But Democrats love big government as well, when it’s for social programs such as universal health care.

“The basic difference between Democrats and Republicans in recent decades is which aspect of government spending they prefer,” said Steven Schier , a political scientist at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. “With the Republicans, it’s defense. With the Democrats, it’s education, environment, health care etc. That’s been the major difference between the two parties going back to Reagan.”

What a crock.

Without a strong military, a nation disappears, or must depend on some other nation for its defense. Who, exactly, would have defended the USA during the Cold War, if not the USA? Who, exactly, will defend the USA now against the various threats on the world stage? Bluntly, our biggest error has probably been letting OTHER nations subsist under the USA defense umbrella for so long, especially Europe and Japan, but that’s Monday morning quarterbacking at this point… After WW II, it seemed like a good idea for Germany and Japan not to be militarized.

But what happens if a nation does not provide nationalized health care and retirement programs, centralized education bureaucracies and regulatory agencies? Not much. People simply make other arrangements. The market works, except when government interferes with it, and then blames the market for the outcome of its own interference.

Defense is one of the two biggest absolutely required roles for government, the other being the maintenance of law and order in the interest of public safety.

In any case, the amount of money that has been spent on social programs since 1960 is ENORMOUS, and social spending remains 60% or more of the national budget. And Obama’s intentions in social spending make the Pentagon’s fondest wishlist look like chump change.

The Lefty media, of course, wants to pretend there is a moral equivalence between what a nation must do to survive, and what Left leaning politicians must promise in order to be re-elected.

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Feb 28 2009

Deficit reaction deficit

Category: Congress,economy,left,media,Obama — harmonicminer @ 9:27 am

Powerline points out, in an absolutely fantastic article, how the Left’s reaction to Bush deficits was panic and accusation, but its reaction to 4 or 5 times bigger Obama deficits is ho-hum, when it’s not out and out cheerleading.

Power Line

It’s no secret that there is no intellectual integrity on the Left, but it’s still hard not to be a bit shocked by liberals’ reaction to the budget proposal that Barack Obama unleashed yesterday. Let’s take the example of the New York Times, probably the most prominent voice of the Far Left in the U.S. Throughout the George W. Bush administration, the Times’ editorial board waxed eloquent about the terrible consequences to be expected from the Bush deficits.

There is a deficit in the Left’s reaction to the Obama deficit.

Read the whole thing at the Power Line link above.

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Feb 16 2009

The Keynes-stoned cops are in control now

Category: Congress,economy,government — harmonicminer @ 10:45 am

Read this next paragraph carefully.   If people who believe such things are ever in control of our government and you are not frightened by the implications, then you simply didn’t understand what you read.
Keynes Returns

“The time has already come when each country needs a considered national policy about what size of population, whether larger or smaller than at present or the same, is most expedient. And having settled this policy, we must take steps to carry it into operation. The time may arrive a little later when the community as a whole must pay attention to the innate quality as well as to the mere numbers of its future members.”

The problem, as is pointed out in the article at the link above, is that people who believe this ARE in control of government, right now. Read the whole article. Then pray.

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Feb 13 2009

Stimulus to bad behavior

Category: Congress,economy,society — harmonicminer @ 9:51 am

What gets rewarded is repeated. Everyone knows it, from parents to teachers to employers.

And disguised as a stimulus bill, the Stimulus Bill Abolishes Welfare Reform and Adds New Welfare Spending

Both the Senate and House stimulus bills are Trojan horses that deliberately exploit anxiety about the current recession to conceal their destruction of the foundation of welfare reform and a massive expansion of the welfare system. Since its enactment in the mid-1990s, such reform has proven to be a very successful policy that dramatically reduced welfare dependency and child poverty. The fact that the stimulus proponents seek to conceal the bill’s massive permanent changes in welfare is a clear indication that they understand how unpopular these changes would be if the public became aware of them. Far from an exercise in “unprecedented transparency”–as President Obama claims–the stimulus bills are an example of unprecedented deception.

There is much more at the link above, including a brief review of the history of welfare reform, and an account of its successes. There is also a description of what the changes to welfare spending will be in the “stimulus bill”, and the Trojan Horse method Democrats have used to sneak it in.

Well worth reading.

Then check this out, and ask yourself why people who claim to be concerned about “social justice” don’t seem especially worried about creating conditions that encourage the proliferation of fatherless children, surely the single biggest predictor of everything from poverty to criminal behavior.

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Feb 12 2009

I give up. We’re doomed.

Category: Congress,economy,Obama — sardonicwhiner @ 10:48 am

Just to put really large numbers in perspective, it’s only about 25 trillion miles to the next STAR system, the Centauri system.

U.S. Taxpayers Risk $9.7 Trillion on Bailout Programs – Yahoo! News

The stimulus package the U.S. Congress is completing would raise the government’s commitment to solving the financial crisis to $9.7 trillion, enough to pay off more than 90 percent of the nation’s home mortgages.

The Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have lent or spent almost $3 trillion over the past two years and pledged up to $5.7 trillion more. The Senate is to vote this week on an economic-stimulus measure of at least $780 billion. It would need to be reconciled with an $819 billion plan the House approved last month.

Only the stimulus bill to be approved this week, the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program passed four months ago and $168 billion in tax cuts and rebates enacted in 2008 have been voted on by lawmakers. The remaining $8 trillion is in lending programs and guarantees, almost all under the Fed and FDIC. Recipients’ names have not been disclosed.

Store food. Store water. Heck, DRILL for water. PLANT food…. it may be all you have. Lay in a lifetime stock of antibiotics and pain meds, and anything else you need to stay alive. Consider purchasing large amounts of clothing from the Salvation Army local store. Enough to last the rest of your life.  Store gasoline.   Store fertilizer and diesel fuel.   Store AMMO.  Decide which of your neighbors look edible….  they’re doing the same for you.  Buy a nice stock of books on wilderness survival, farming the old fashioned way, medical care, lots and lots of medical supplies, and a nice commentary on the Bible.  Get a good old fashioned encyclopedia in book form.  And some basic educational texts in math, English, history, science, etc., so you can teach your children and grand children what the world used to be like.  Get a piano, and extra strings, and tuning gear.  And a guitar.  And more strings for it.

Oh, and a copy of the US Constitution you can waive in the air as the tanks roll over you.

Where is Mad Max when you need him?

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Feb 11 2009

The Freedom of Choice Act: trying to put lipstick on the pig

Category: abortion,Congress — harmonicminer @ 9:47 pm

There has been an increase in the number of articles by “experts” claiming that the Freedom of Choice Act, invalidating all state laws regulating any aspect of abortion at a stroke, is not really going to change things that much.  (Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.)  Outside of the observation that if this were true the pro-abortion forces wouldn’t be pushing it so hard, this isn’t even what its supporters claim about it, such as Planned Parenthood and NARAL, who are quite open about what its effects would be. Here is a great, sober accounting for The Legal Consequences of the Freedom of Choice Act. Much more at the link.

First, by banning state laws that in any way “interfere with” the choice of abortion before viability – a more abortion-protective standard than exists under present law and a central feature of the bill – FOCA would materially expand abortion rights in several ways. It would invalidate state laws that attempt to persuade women to choose not to have abortions by providing them with information about alternatives to abortion, about the ability of pregnant women to receive state assistance for support of their child, and about the condition and stage of development of the child at the point in pregnancy at which the abortion is sought. FOCA would also likely invalidate “informed consent” laws and 24-hour waiting requirements, on the ground that they “interfere with” the abortion choice. So too, almost certainly, would FOCA void the laws of many states that provide for parental involvement in minors’ abortion decisions. Finally, FOCA’s ban likely would eviscerate state “conscience” laws protecting the right of medical providers and individuals not to provide or assist in providing abortions. FOCA would also invalidate state constitutional provisions (including state constitutional protections of the freedom of speech or the free exercise of religion) protecting pro-life conscience in such fashion.

Second, FOCA also likely would invalidate state law bans on particular methods of abortion, like “partial birth” abortion, that sometimes may be prohibited under current law.

Third, FOCA appears to provide a new federal statutory right to equal state government funding of abortion, where a state provides resources or benefits that support the alternative choice of childbirth and child care and education.

Fourth, and perhaps most significantly, FOCA would serve to entrench abortion rights, in two ways. First, FOCA would provide a federal statutory right to abortion that protects legal abortion at least as much as (indeed, more than) the Supreme Court’s constitutional abortion doctrine under Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. In the event the Court were to overrule, limit, or cut back on those decisions, FOCA would provide equivalent or greater legal abortion rights. Second, by so doing, FOCA likely would prevent the Court from ever having the occasion to reconsider (and thus overrule or modify) Roe and Casey in the first place, by rendering such reconsideration unnecessary and pointless. Because a federal statute would in any event protect the abortion right to an equal or greater degree, it would never be necessary for the Supreme Court to “reach” the question of whether the Constitution protected such a right, under usual principles of judicial restraint and avoidance of decision of constitutional questions.

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Feb 08 2009

Words that rhyme with stimulus… sort of

Category: Congress,economy,Obama — harmonicminer @ 10:53 am

Words and phrases that rhyme with stimulus (well…  sort of).

under the bus —  Where Obama has thrown all his big talk about new energy investment making the USA energy independent in ten years.  No nuclear.  No exploration.  No drilling.  No tens or hundreds of billions for research into alternate energy sources.  No “Manhattan project” for energy.  (If not now, when?)  Nothing but overpriced “green” cars for the government that no one else can buy, or wants to.

incubus —  Don’t open your door to strangers, whether or not they claim to be elected.

succubus —  Ditto.

upper crust —  What all the congress critters think they are

full of pus —  Well, the “stimulus” does stink, to put it politely.

makes me cuss —  when I think about how much my kids and grandkids will spend paying back this payoff to Democrat-supporting special interest groups.

In God We Trust —  But for some folks, not lately.

money lust —  ’nuff said

no muss no fuss —  Obama’s idea of “bi-partisanship” is “give me what I want because I won the election.”

tremulous —  The feeling I have when I think about how disastrous the “stimulus” plan is for our future.

C++ —  The object oriented computer programming language that will be used to calculate how much money the stimulus will REALLY cost.  Consider:  when you buy a house over thirty years you may pay as much as three times the actual cost of the house when you include interest on the loan, at common interest rates.  More, much more, if the rates go up.  The stimulus package is going to cost two or three times its face value before it’s paid back.  In essence, we’re “borrowing” (well, stealing) a couple trillion from our kids and grandkids so we can have congress give away a trillion today.

There’s no rush —  to pay it back.  So they want us to believe.

minibus —  what I’ll have left to live in when it’s all over.  I call shotgun.

moondust —  the street name for the substance some of our congress creeps have been ingesting?

necklace —  The very latest in multicultural jewelry.  But you have to buy extra carbon credits to wear it….  or give it as a gift.

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Feb 06 2009

Another really, really inconvenient truth

Category: Congress,economy,politics — harmonicminer @ 10:25 am

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Feb 05 2009

The “stimulus” again

Category: Congress,Democrat,economy — harmonicminer @ 10:09 am

Today the Senate defeated, on a party line vote, a proposal by John McCain and some others to modify the “stimulus” plan.   Since more than half of the “stimulus” spending is planned for more than two years from now, by which time a recovery of the economy is likely even if very little is done, and since much of that spending is on pet projects and interest groups that Democrats had wanted to spend money on for quite some time, but couldn’t quite find the excuse, the Republican proposal was simply this:

If two quarters of consecutive growth in the economy are experienced after the “stimulus” plan is passed, then further spending plans in the “stimulus” bill would be cancelled, as being obviously no longer “necessary”.    Specifically, this would apply to all plans to spend money more than two years in the future, obviously too late to be a “stimulus” for us now, anyway.

The proposal was defeated 54-42, with two Democrats joining all the Republicans voting for it, and only Democrats voting against it.

That’s because they’re determined to take this chance to do spending they’ve wanted to do all along, and are just burying tons of it in this giant, steaming piece of half-boiled pork of a “stimulus bill”, without regard for whether it wil actually stimulate the economy in any sustainable way, or not.

Of course, what produces sustainable stimulation is anything that encourages businesses to expand, and to spend money themselves on equipment/supplies (which creates/maintains employment for the providers of those) and to directly hire people themselves.

Spending tons of money on tons of entitlements, giveaways, etc., doesn’t stimulate the local small business (where 2/3 of US jobs are) to hire another person, or buy more equipment, or expand a store, or advertise more, or whatever.  What stimulates business is tax cuts, changes in tax rules that allow them to totally expense equipment purchases (instead of having to depreciate over 5 or 7 years), relaxations in the rules surrounding hiring new employees (some states have regulated small business into outer space, and there are lots of federal rules, too), maybe a flat three month tax holiday, maybe some direct tax credit for hiring new employees, etc.

But the Democrats, too many of them hostile to business for ideological reasons, I guess, aren’t interested in any of those things.  They want to reward their interest groups, pure and simple.

As before:  I told you so.

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