Why I'm Libertarian-LEANING

My blog's subtitle says I'm "libertarian-leaning." A reader asked me what that means.

I believe the free market yields the best products and services for the most people. However, free-market capitalism in today's and especially tomorrow's global, high-tech, information-centric, high-IQ-requiring economy, will leave MOST people unable to compete and therefore, without receiving charity, destitute.

Socialist and liberal-democrat policies provide that charity, albeit with mind-boggling inefficiency. Part of that forced taxpayer charity, alas, likely includes our paying for an ever more bloated government, often hiring three low-performing people to what one reasonably competent, motivated person could do, work that may be only marginally beneficial to and even hurtful to society.

I cringe, for example, at the net effects of governments' massive regulatory and paperwork and financial requirements even of small business. A partial list: Workers Comp, SSDI, Social Security, ADA, FMLA , EEOC, MediCare, ObamaCare, Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodds-Frank--and then there are the state and local government mandates!

That virtually ensures that the U.S. will be--not withstanding blips--in a permanent jobless nonrecovery. How can U.S. companies compete with China, India, etc., when U.S. salaries are three times as high, and on top of that, all those government burdens?

Especially with the people most likely to be highly productive, non-violent citizens having the fewest babies, there are no really good solutions.

Is Yet More Government Regulation Worth It?

Yesterday, I turned on C-Span and heard members of the SEC try to explain why, despite multiple tips and indeed multiple recommendations from within the SEC, it didn't, for eight years(!) investigate massive Ponzi-schemer Allan Stanford, despite the SEC having a multi-BILLION-dollar budget.

Of course the SEC's failure to provide meaningful oversight even when tipped off shouldn't surprise me. After all, government regulatory agencies ignored multiple tips about another mega Ponzi-schemer Bernie Madoff, the tainted peanut plant, and two decades worth on the salmonella-ridden egg facility.

Then I turned to C-Span2 and heard members of a California state regulatory board try to explain how they didn't notice the $800,000 salaries paid to Bell, CA government employees.

Ah, government.

And now President Obama wants to spend more BILLIONS of our tax dollars to increase regulation and oversight--for example, to give an additional $1.1 BILLION to the SEC. And Obama has called for increased government regulation and oversight in many additional areas.

Can Mr. Obama honorably look the working- and middle-class taxpayer in the eye, the group that pays the most painful share of taxes, and say that it's a better use of their money to wrest it from them in taxes to pay for yet more government regulation and oversight than to leave it in the taxpayers' pockets?

U.S. Middle Class Shrinks

In an attempt to create positive perceptions, President Obama is proclaiming that "we're turning it around."

But using data from such sources as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Business Insider reports 22 statistics that indicate that the decline and fall of the American Empire is accelerating, with the middle class being the canary in the coal mine:

• 61 percent of Americans now "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck. That's up from 43 percent in 2007 and 49% in 2008.
• More than 40 percent of employed Americans now work in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
• The average time to find a job has risen to 35.2 weeks.
• For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Dept of Agriculture projects it to rise to 43 million in 2011.
• 21 percent of all U.S. children now live below the poverty line, the highest rate in 20 years.
• 43 percent of Americans now have less than $10,000 saved for retirement.
• 24 percent of American workers now say they have postponed their planned retirement age.
• The average federal worker now earns 20 to 60 percent more (different studies report different findings) than the average private sector worker. That is the most recent evidence of my assertion that now, because the federal government doesn't balance its budget and can--for the short-term at least--keep printing money, the federal government and federal contractors are, for all but star employees, the best source of employment.

As shocking and dispiriting as those statistics are, I was shaken even more when I read that when the Tacoma, Washington Utilities District posted a job opening for a single $17.76/hour meter reader job, 1,600 people applied.

These statistics provide yet more evidence that America is in a long-term jobless non-recovery.

Why Any Recovery Will Be Jobless

I recently read the summary of a panel presentation of leading employment attorneys, which made clear to me why an economic recovery, assuming we have one, will be a jobless one.

Why would an employer want to hire when he must incur all of the following:

• Pressures to hire, retain, and promote on factors other than merit: gender, race, sexual orientation, older workers, and people with disabilities. And now, efforts are accelerating to pass laws that would prohibit an employer from not hiring someone just because he committed a felony.

Even if an employer's intent is non-discriminatory, if an employer's decision to hire, promote, or terminate employees has "disparate impact," on a gender, racial group, or workers over 40, that may be grounds for a discrimination lawsuit against the employer.

• Large and complicated payroll costs beyond salary: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Workers Compensation, Unemployment Insurance (now up to 79 weeks,) plus various state and local levies.
• Mandated leave: 12 weeks per year with rights of rehiring (the Family and Medical Leave Act) which may be expanded by the '"Healthy Families Act," which would mandate up to 56 hours of paid sick leave to take care of themselves or a family member very loosely defined: "anyone closely associated with an employee."
• The Americans with Disabilities Act, in addition to adding pressure on employers to hire people with physical and mental disabilities, requires employers to provide "reasonable accommodations" for all such employees.
  
• Laws granting plaintiffs lower burdens of proof regarding discrimination as well as sexual harassment. For example, an employer can be held liable for an employee's being harassed, even if the employer is unaware that the harassment occurred. The financial and human costs of defending such lawsuits are enormous.
• The proposed health care legislation will force employers to pay for the ever escalating health care costs.
  
• New legislation makes it easier for workers to organize into unions, which, of course, increases employer costs while making it often prohibitively difficult to fire even low-performing employees.

If you ran a business, wouldn't all those mandates make you want to hire as few people as absolutely possible--even if the taxpayers gave you $5,000 per? That certainly wouldn't seduce me-I'd rather stay small than endure all those burdens and increased risk of having to close down my business.

To the extent I'd have to hire, I'd feel forced to use independent contractors on a just-in-time basis, and would outsource/offshore as much as possible. I might, for example, find such workers using websites such as odesk.com, elance.com, guru.com, virtualemployee.com, ifreelance.com, and these that Tim Ferriss, author of The Four-Hour Workweek recommended when I interviewed him on my radio show yesterday: www.99designs.com, www.crowdspring.com, www.asksunday.com, and www.hiremymom.com

I believe that President Obama and the Democrats are truly trying to help employees but the inadvertent effect of their initiatives will ironically be to eliminate jobs, not create them.

The ObamaCare Questions I'd Ask at a Town Hall Meeting

President Obama, you've said, again and again, that ObamaCare would not cover illegals. Yet ObamaCare has no money allocated to verifying that a patient is a legal resident of the U.S.

And to the extent illegals wouldn't be covered under ObamaCare, you have repeatedly said you plan to make all illegals legal: the so-called "path to citizenship." So won't all these 13 to 20 million illegals become legal and thus covered under ObamaCare?

And is that fair? Today, every year(!), medical errors result in more than 100,000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of additional people who stay sicker or get sick because of those errors.

Indeed, two months ago, a dear friend, a healthy 54-year-old woman, went in for routine surgery and came out a near-vegetable--the surgeon nicked a critical blood vessel.

With the same number of doctors, nurses, MRI machines, and operating rooms, ObamaCare will attempt to provide health care for 47,000,000 additional people--a group with high health care needs and low ability to pay. Thus, many more medical errors will occur and so, many legal residents who took care of their health and paid into the system will die, get sicker, or stay sicker because you, Mr. President, are forcing us to share our health care with a cohort of 47,000,000 high-use people, whether they are legal or not, whether they pay or not.

I ask you, Mr. President, what would you say to those countless people who unnecessarily will get sick, or to the family members of those who die because you decided to provide health care without regard to people's legality or whether they paid their fair share?

Isn't it fairer to have a basic public plan for the poor and a much higher-quality plan for those who pay into the system? Isn't it unfair to make legal residents pay for illegals, thereby endangering those legal residents' lives?

And a final question: Do you really think that ultimately, we will have a more just country, a better life for our residents, when you force the responsible taxpayer to reward the lawbreakers (the illegals) the wild-risk-takers (people who borrowed beyond their means and the banks that lent to them) and the incompetent (the US car makers)?

Economic Armageddon, Here We Come?

The Obama administration admitted today that the federal debt will, over the next decade, grow wildly larger than it had previously said--so much for a recovery. Now the estimate is $9 trillion!

And that doesn't count the $1.0 to $1.6 trillion Congress is contemplating spending on ObamaCare.

Nor does it count the massive additional new spending Obama has promised, for example, legalizing the 13-20 million illegals, who will thereby become eligible for ObamaCare, increasing the debt further.

And Obama is considering "Stimulus" 3. For our trillion dollars, "Stimuli/Bailouts" 1 and 2 have resulted in the highest unemployment rate since 1983 and wildly accelerating debt, yet he contemplates Grandson of "Stimulus"/Bailout.

China owns ever more of America and the U.S. is becoming ever less creditworthy. Just the interest on the national debt is approaching the total budget for national defense!

And federal spending is accelerating?! Will we, not to mention our children and grandchildren, suffer profoundly from our government's profligacy?

Government programs (yes, Republican-initiated programs, for example, the Bush bailouts and the Iraq War, are equally at fault) are usually terribly inefficient. Think Amtrak, the Postal Service, the public schools, the nearly bankrupt Social Security and Medicare, the Bailouts, $85 hammers, the Bridge to Nowhere.

Many government programs are actually negative in effect. Consider, for example, Cash for Clunkers: dangling taxpayer dollars in front of people poor enough to own bad-gas mileage clunkers so they can go deeply in debt to buy a new car (80% of which have been foreign, by the way). And of course, dumping much of their toxic components and fluids into landfills is an environmental disaster. Plus, car dealers are screaming that they have laid out the $4,500 per car to customers and often have not yet been paid by the government, thereby killing their cash flow, a business's lifeblood. The government can't even write a promised check in a timely manner and it wants to run a "public option" health care system?

An individual and especially a nation in debt is at-risk. A nation that has assumed unprecedentedly, incomprehensibly mammoth debt is doomed. Even Keynes did not imagine this magnitude of government spending. To pay for its metastasizing number and scope of programs and interest on its soon-to-be $9 trillion debt, the government will, unchecked, continue to raise taxes and print ever more money, thereby decreasing the value of our life's savings and purchasing power.

As a result, American workers will likely end up joining most of the world's workers in earning a net $1 an hour. As reported in a recent blog post, we already work into August just to pay all the costs imposed by government. Does anyone really think we get fair value for the government's taking over half our money from us each year?

Our only savior is for us to demand that the government to return most our tax dollars to us and for government to live within its then more modest means: scale down so it can balance its budget and pay down its debt. Anything else is too likely to lead us to economic Armageddon.

A Permanent Solution to the Down Economy

The government cannot permanently spend our way out of recession. Its so-called investments will, on average, lose money. Otherwise, the private sector would have funded them. And such investments are, on average, unlikely to kick-start the private economy to the extent necessary to replace our tax dollars.

So eventually the tax dollars needed to fund those government schemes will run out and the government will have to stop the programs or print more money, reducing the value of our savings.

The long-term answer: Create a nation of ethical entrepreneurs: people who know how to identify unmet needs (for example, in-home companions for shut-ins) and develop and execute an ethical business plan for meeting that need.

That would not only improve society, it would increase the chances of millions more Americans, especially the not-academically-oriented, to make a good living. Today, so many such people struggle to pay the rent, spend so much time looking for their next job and after landing one, living in fear of getting laid off because of a personality dispute, it's a project job with a built-in end date, or that their job will be shipped to a low-cost country. Instead, a nation of entrepreneurs will be hiring themselves as their own business's CEO.

How to create a nation of entrepreneurs? From kindergarten through college, the curriculum should include hands-on opportunities to learn ethical entrepreneurialism. How would that fit into the school day? Lengthen the school day and school year, which brings the additional advantage of ameliorating the nation's child care problem. Also, pare elements of the existing curriculum that are less important than entrepreneurship. Does anyone want to defend that, for example, it's more important that all students know geometric theorems than learn entrepreneurship? How about understanding Shakespeare's arcana? The intricacies of the periodic table of chemical elements? How about all those wars from the Peloponnesian to the War of the Roses? The endless celebration of multiculturalism suffused throughout today's curriculum?

What do you think?

Today You Start Keeping What You Earn (It's Cost-of-Government Day)

Did you know that you worked for the government from Jan 1 to today, Aug 12 (224 days) to pay all the taxes, fees, and regulatory burdens the govt. imposes on you?

In other words, in 2009, the cost of government consumes 61.34 percent of national income, by far the highest percentage since this figure has been calculated. (See the chart.) HERE's the link to the report, which includes the calculations.

And remember that President Obama's big-government schemes are just now getting enacted.

A Pessimistic View of the U.S. Job Market

Observers such as Harvard's Tammy Erickson argue that, at least long-term, U.S. job seekers especially the educated, will find it easier to find employment.

I strongly disagree. While the Obama stimulus plan may short-term create some government and government-mandated jobs, I predict that the U.S. unemployment rate will, over the coming decade at least, continue to increase.

The following factors will dramatically reduce the need for U.S. employees:

Ever-accelerating automation fueled by dramatic increases in the cost of employing people. Most of these costs will come as the result of the already large but likely to grow still larger government-imposed mandates on employers. Here's just one example. The Family And Marriage Leave Act, because of its heavy fraudulent use by employees wreaks havoc on workplace. That burden will become even more onerous if it becomes paid family leave, which the Obama administration advocates. In addition, wrongful termination, sexual harassment, and racial discrimination grievances and suits grow as do demands for "accommodations" for everything from depression to hyperactivity (to conform to the Americans with Disabilities Act.) Health care costs will continue to grow and be cost-shifted to employers under Obama's plan--those costs will include paying for the 45 million uninsured, who are low-income or unemployed and thus would pay little or nothing into the system, leaving the employer and taxpayer to foot their health care costs.

Globalization. Ever more work product can be transmitted over the Internet, which increases the possibility of offshoring. And while offshoring 1.0 was only modestly successful, it is being re-pursued with a vengeance because companies are now armed with the knowledge it takes to do it successfully. A net saving of 35% is now standard and Accenture, for example, has a large and growing business in helping companies to offshore employees. The public is unaware of the extent of offshoring because companies saw the anger it engendered among the public even when unemployment was low. So, now offshoring is done with as little publicity as possible.

In addition, other countries, notably China, India, Russia, and Brazil, are producing ever more and better products and services, at a much lower cost that U.S. products and services.

The continued elimination of the 52-week-a-year/lifetime employee. Workers are becoming fungible work units, used only as needed. That will mean a dramatic reduction in the number of U.S. full-time-equivalent employees.

The greening of America. Environmental restrictions and voluntary de-emphasis on materialism will result in a contracting economy and, in turn, fewer jobs.

The tax increases on companies. The Democrats, which all signs suggest will be in power for a long time, want to fund their expansion of government by printing money and increasing taxes on companies, which will reduce the amount of real dollars companies have to hire people and to develop new products, which in turn, would have created more jobs.

All signs point to these being long-term and potent factors, so I cannot envision a realistic scenario under which the unemployment rate will decline except perhaps temporarily in late 2009 or early 2010.

The Unspoken Key Issue re Health Care Reform

The medical establishment already kills over 100,000 people every year as the result of medical errors. Countless more people stay sick longer or get sicker because of such errors. For example, someone just told me that because of an error in surgery, he became blind.

Under President Obama's health care proposal, we'll be providing health care for 45 million more people with the same number of doctors, nurses, hospitals, MRI machines, etc. That 45 million has greater-than-average health care needs while having lower average income, and thus will often get low-cost or free health care under the Obama plan. The result will be that even more of the people who do fully pay into the system will stay sicker longer, get sicker, or die.

From where I sit, the answer is a two-tier system: a basic level of care for everyone and a higher level of care for those who pay into the system. Alas, I doubt seriously whether the Democrats could ever support such a plan. Their core principle is that equality trumps merit.

"The Impending Demise of the University"

You're probably sick of my writing in my blog and elsewhere about the need to reinvent America's most overrated, overpriced product and icon: higher education.
For example, see my Chronicle of Higher Education article, America's Most Overrated Product: The Bachelors Degree.

So let me call your attention to someone else's work. Don Tapscott proposes what I think would be an excellent core for higher education's reinvention: replacing the professor with the Internet as the hub of learning. He makes that case in The Impending Demise of the University, which appeared first in The Edge and then summarized in today's Huffington Post.

Yet President Obama doesn't insist that colleges be more accountable or cost-effective. Instead he demands that we spend yet more of our tax dollars to increase student financial aid, which in fact, ends up putting money in college coffers while offering little help to students: Increased financial aid allows colleges to calculate, "Good! Now the students have more money, so we can raise tuition."

How Foolish Are We to Stand for Government Motors?

Wayne Root, who ran for VP on the Libertarian ticket points out that every time the government tries to run something, it's driven bankrupt or nearly so: Social Security, Medicare, Amtrak, education (large and mushrooming budgets yielding insignificant improvement). And now it's going to attempt to, with our tax dollars, run GM, allowing large amounts of car costs to go into union pockets instead of into increasing the quality of its vehicle parts and assembly. And we, like sheep, continue in our Obama-induced stupor and say okay to Government Motors. Here's Root's argument, which is an excerpt from his forthcoming book: The Conscience of a Libertarian.

Government Can't Run a Brothel
By Wayne Allyn Root

So we've just put government in control of General Motors? Well that should solve the problem. The same people that have run the American economy into the ground now think they can run an auto company. Has anyone thought this through? Government loses money at virtually everything it does and touches. Virtually every level of government operates at a loss (deficit). Government can't spell, let alone achieve, profitability at anything. Government is the most disastrous and inept failure at everything it does of any organization in the world. It only survives its colossal mismanagement of everything by raising taxes and therefore confiscating more money from the private sector- filled with people who are competent and do know how to run a business and achieve profitability. In other words, government only survives by confiscating money from smart people in the private sector to pay for its mismanagement, waste, corruption and nonstop failure and losses.

Government runs Social Security. It is fast approaching bankruptcy. Government runs Medicare. It is fast approaching bankruptcy. Government runs education. Education runs through tens of billions of dollars each year and yet somehow manages to produce worse results virtually every year (and always demands more as a reward for utter failure). When government took over education, America's children were ranked among the best in the world. Today our children's educational record is among the worst in the industrialized world.

Government took over Amtrak in the same way it took over GM, promising a quick return to profitability. Amtrak bleeds losses every year for the U.S. taxpayer. In 1970 when Amtrak was founded, $300 million was approved by Congress to run it. The government predicted profitability within 5 years. That was 39 years and over $30 billion dollars in losses ago!

Government is promising (again) a quick return to profitability. Yet these are the same government bureaucrats who have produced a deficit of $1.75 trillion per YEAR. These same government bureaucrats have produced a national debt of somewhere between $60 trillion and $100 trillion (depending on how many years out you predict the responsibilities of Social Security and Medicare). Our national debt is now larger than world GDP (every dollar created in the world each year). You actually think these same people (with the track record above) can takeover GM and turn a company that loses billions per year into a profitable company in a short period of time? We've now put the world's most inept and corrupt bureaucrats in charge of GM, and we expect improvement?

But here's the clincher. In my adopted home state of Nevada, prostitution is legal (and always profitable). It is impossible to lose money in the world's oldest profession. The most profitable brothel ever was the infamous Mustang Ranch. The owner earned so many tens of millions of dollars, that he grew fabulously wealthy. But he “forgot” to pay his taxes. He was indicted for tax evasion, escaped to Brazil, and is still today a fugitive from justice. The U.S. government took over the Mustang Ranch. The most successful and profitable brothel in America went bankrupt in one year under government management. That ladies and gentleman, no matter how you feel about brothels, tells you all you need to know about the ability of government to run a business.

One more “small problem” with the government's plans for GM. They are keeping unions in charge. Virtually nothing has changed. The same unions that destroyed GM with bloated salaries, pensions and healthcare for life go on running the workforce (with a few small changes for “show”). Yet the government is also demanding that GM change strategy and focus on building small cars with green technology. Those same smaller cars are the least profitable that can be built. There is very little profit per car. The big gas guzzling cars and trucks actually had the highest profit margin. Yet even these big trucks and SUV's could not pay for the bloated union compensation plan that destroyed GM and Chrysler. Now we have the worst of all worlds- companies run by Obama and his minions- all people with ZERO business experience- demanding that we keep paying unaffordable union wages, while we build small cars with lower profit margins. Are you starting to understand why our country is $100 trillion in national debt? Our country is run by people who couldn't run a lemonade stand. The only thing that Obama and his hand-picked executives are capable of doing successfully is fining or arresting the lemonade stand owner for not getting the proper government licenses.

The moral of the story? Nevada is a state where the constitution bans income taxes and politicians (we limit the time politicians can meet and serve), but welcomes guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens. We have common sense in plentiful supply. Here's my common sense tip of the day: If the federal government can't run a brothel, they certainly can't run GM. The same people responsible for massive deficit and debt, losses, waste and mismanagement on the federal level as far as the eye can see, should not be put in charge of any company. We are in deep trouble.

Is it Wise to Raise CAFE Standards?

On first blush, requiring car manufacturers to make vehicles get better gas mileage (the so-called CAFE standards) seems a no-brainer: It minimally restricts people's freedom while reducing air pollution and our dependence on Middle East oil.

But on second blush, I'm not so sure:

• If CAFE standards are raised, people will likely drive more thus emitting more exhaust because it's less expensive to drive: They'll spend less per mile on gas and the smaller high-gas-mileage cars (e.g., Toyota Corolla) cost less than larger cars (e.g., Toyota Camry.)
  
• Smaller cars have smaller engines, which have a shorter lifespan, which means more cars will sooner enter the landfills and require the building of more new cars, the creation of which is bad for the environment.
  
• Smaller cars are more dangerous--more people will die as a result.
  
• The new high-tech gizmos needed to improve gas mileage (for example, variable-interval valves) will cost the average buyer $1500 to $2500 more per car, which makes people less likely to buy a car, which will be yet one more nail in the U.S. automakers' coffin.
  
• And if people are still driving their old car, it's more likely to be a polluter, which will hurt air quality.
  

The lesson in all of this is that every time the government takes an action, there are likely enormous and often unanticipated side effects. In this case, I sense (and I don't think anyone can be sure,) that when the government restricts people's freedom to buy the vehicle they want and says that the government knows better than vehicle manufacturers how to make the right ones, when the smoke clears, we're, net net, worse off.

Government Waste, Yet Again

Will we never learn? Because government is so unaccountable for its use of money, so incapable of policing whether our taxpayer dollars are spent properly, our tax dollars nearly always buy far less than what we could get if we rather than the government decided how to spend it.

This latest example is reported in the current (May 4) issue of Time magazine.

"In an April 21 report to Congress, the special inspector general overseeing the government's $700 billion financial bailout offered some grim news and a stern warning. Neil Barofsky said he had begun 'almost 20 preliminary and full criminal investigations' into allegations of fraudulent use of bailout funds. He urged the government to revamp the bailout rules so it can better track spending. According to Barofsky, the bailout's Public-Private Investment Partnership program, in particular, is 'inherently vulnerable to fraud, waste and abuse.'"

More Evidence That Going Green is Very Risky

My friend, Jeffrie Givens, sent me this new study on "green jobs" in Spain. It finds that for every green job created by the government, 2.2 jobs were lost by the private sector. The study goes on to report that the financial costs and the loss in jobs are not unique to Spain and that only one in ten jobs created were permanent jobs.

Will America's green job mandate do this to America too? A 2009 report by the Institute for Energy Research predicts that indeed it will. Here's an excerpt:

"It is highly questionable whether a government campaign to spur “green jobs” would have net economic benefits. Indeed, the distortionary impacts of government intrusion into energy markets could prematurely force business to abandon current production technologies for more expensive ones. Furthermore, there would likely be negative economic consequences from forcing higher-cost alternative energy sources upon the economy. These factors would likely increase consumer energy costs and the costs of a wide array of energy-intensive goods, slow GDP growth and ironically may yield no net job gains. More likely, they would result in net job losses."

Indeed, I am finding, in my career coaching practice, that most of the new green jobs are short-term, temp project work. When the government stimulus runs out, the sense is that these jobs will evaporate. And most of them are not good jobs, even if they did last. For example, the stimulus package includes $5 billion to weatherize low-income homes. Well, those jobs usually include such unpleasant activities as crawling into tight attic spaces to blow (and breathe) treated-cellulose insulation.

And now let's turn to whether trying to stop climate change is worth it. Ever more scientists are saying no. For example, to have even a trivial impact on global warming would require the world to reduce its carbon footprint by a politically unrealistic 70(!) percent. Those scientists argue that it's far wiser to spend the far more moderate amount of money needed to adapt to global warming than to attempt to cool the planet.

We must stop treating environmentalism like a religion but rather as one of many possible areas for expenditure that society must, in a clear-eyed way, decide whether to fund and to what extent. To spend massive sums on a boondoggle means that many, many other initiatives go unfunded, and in turn, unimaginable and avoidable human suffering will occur.

For example, while the massive green spending and incursions into freedom being contemplated are of truly uncertain benefit, it is a certainty that giving that sum of money directly to the African people could save millions of lives and dramatically improve the standard of living of millions more. Yet we're making the largest bet in world history that "going green" will be worth the costs and opportunity costs. I truly do not understand.

I must be wrong. Indeed, most nations, led by the extraordinarily respected Barack Obama are betting so many chips on Green. But what, in fact, am I not understanding?

The Government Warrantees U.S Cars?!

Just when I think the Obama administration couldn't do anything more unwise, he announces that the government will ensure that all American-made cars receive warranty coverage.

Why do I believe that's so unwise?

1. Can you just imagine: The government will have to set up inspection centers to verify, for example, that a balky engine is caused by a factory defect rather than the need for new spark plugs, which is the owner's responsibilty.

2. As with many government giveaways, many people will fabricate claims. Think of how much fraud exists in, for example, welfare and Medicare.

Is it really worth yet more of our tax dollars to create yet another bureaucracy to prop up an industry that makes bad, overpriced cars, thereby stifling competition from new companies that might build excellent ones?

Obama Ignores Domestic Violence Against Men

This excerpt is from Cathy Young's recent article in Reason:

As for combating violence against women, it is, of course, a worthy goal. But plenty of men and boys are victims of family violence as well. The same federal study which found that one in four women in the United States have been assaulted by a partner at least once also found that nearly 40 percent of domestic assault victims every year are men. Women face higher risk of injury due to disparities in size and strength; but the problem of abused men, though largely neglected, is hardly negligible.

The Bush White House was often assailed for building its policies on ideological myths rather than facts and 'reality-based' thinking. So far, the Obama administration's initiatives on women are not exactly reality-based.

Women Earn 78 Cents on the Dollar... NOT!

I've written about this frequently, but here's a recent summary of the research from nationally syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker. She wrote it in response to President Obama's announcement of a White House Council on Women and Girls:

There isn't space here to fully critique each statistic mentioned by the president, but here's just one: Women still earn 78 cents for every dollar earned by men.

As has been often explained, apparently to deaf ears, this figure is derived by comparing the average median wage of all full-time working men and women without considering multiple variables, including the choices women and men make. A more accurate picture comes from a 2007 report prepared for the U.S. Department of Labor by the CONSAD Research Corp.

Although women do not lead as many Fortune 500 companies (only 3 percent, according to Obama), they account for 51 percent of all workers in the high-paying management, professional and related occupations, according to the study. Women outnumber men, for example, as financial managers, human resource managers, education administrators, medical and health services managers, and accountants and auditors.

Otherwise, wage differences can be explained by "observable differences in the attributes of men and women," including, among many, the fact that a greater percentage of women than men take leave for childbirth and child care, which tends to lead to lower wages. Also, women may place more value on "family-friendly" workplace policies and prefer non-wage compensation, such as health insurance or flexibility.

The statistical analysis, which included these and other variables, produced an adjusted gender wage gap between 4.8 percent and 7.1 percent. The gap shrinks to almost nothing when men and women of equal backgrounds and tenure are compared, according to another study of young, childless men and women.

While no one would argue that women shouldn't be compensated as well as men for the same work, it isn't quite accurate to suggest a widespread problem of wage discrimination.

Or, as the Labor Department labor study warns against, to justify policy-level correctives.

Whatever imbalances remain should be self-correcting as women and men achieve educational parity, but that's if boys get some help. Indeed, men and women reached educational parity with college graduation rates in 1982. Today, women receive 58 percent of bachelor's degrees and represent half of graduates in medical and law school.

Boys, meanwhile, are the ones dropping out of school or being expelled. They're the ones failing, abusing drugs and committing suicide. What kind of men do we expect them to become, assuming they survive?

Cathy Young, in a recent article in Reason, added this: "Numerous studies show that when differences in training, work hours, and continuity of employment are taken into account, the pay gap all but disappears. Most economists, including liberal feminists such as Harvard's Claudia Goldin, agree that while sex discrimination exists, male-female disparities in earnings and achievement are due primarily to personal choices and priorities. Women are far more likely than men to avoid jobs with 60-hour workweeks and to scale down their careers while raising children. They are also more likely to choose less lucrative but more fulfilling jobs."

I do not understand why liberals are so eager to be unfair to men.

We ARE All Socialists Now....Whether We Like it or Not

The government lets us keep no more than 25 cents of every dollar we earn.

Lest you think I exaggerate, consider this list of what you're forced to give to the government:

Federal income tax

State income tax

Local income tax

Social security tax

Capital gains tax

Medicare tax

Disability tax

Corporate tax (passed on to you in the form of higher prices)

Tariffs on foreign goods (passed on to you in higher prices)

Sales tax

Property tax

Local business tax (Where I live, in Oakland, California, I must pay $3.60 for every thousand dollars of GROSS income.)

Utility taxes (phone, gas/electric, garbage, water)

User fees, for example, public college tuition, mass transit fares, park entrance fee

Excise taxes (for example, on tires, alcohol, cigarettes, soft drinks, blank recording media, even vending machines)

Car rental taxes

Hotel occupancy tax

Parking lot usage tax

Gasoline taxes

Bridge, tunnel, and road-use tolls

Passport fee

Airplane ticket taxes

Car registration fee

License fees (from profession to your pet, from a hunting/fishing license to a license to run a radio station)

Gas guzzler tax

Parking meters

Real estate conveyance taxes (when you buy or sell, in addition to the aforementioned capital gains tax.)

Driving citations: The fees for parking and moving violations have become usurious: Where I live, $45 for a parking ticket, $250 for not coming to a full stop at a stop sign, and dare you get caught driving under the influence: $6,000 is the average cost.

Other citations: I got a $250 ticket for having my dog off-leash in an empty park!

Beverage container "deposit" (5 or 10 cents per bottle and can in most states--and who bothers to return them to reclaim the deposit?)

Additional taxes. For example, where I live, there are additional taxes for libraries, mosquito abatement, schools, ambulances, etc. Should not these basics already have been covered by the myriad other taxes we pay?

And, when you die, managing to still have some bucks, there's estate tax.

I’m sure we pay other taxes I’m unaware of or can't think of.

And President Obama wants even more of our money. He’s already pledged to increase taxes on the wealthy and he wants yet more from everyone. For example, he wants to increase the number of toll roads and his carbon tax (pleasantly called "Cap and Trade") will increase the cost of anything that contains carbon, which is practically everything: for example, plastics, gasoline, even skin cream.

Most neutral observers insist that Obama’s mammoth deficit budget and projections for yet more bailouts and “stimulus” spending will force further tax increases, including to the middle class.

By one estimate, President Obama's current budget will cost the average taxpayer $25,573.48 in federal income tax alone.

In addition, as the New York Times reported today, the Obama administration is printing money "at the fastest rate in its (the Feds') history" to, today alone, "pull vast sums of money ($1 trillion) out of thin air." This deflates the value of every dollar we manage to have saved.

Do you feel you receive fair value for giving the government 3/4 of what you earn? Do you believe the nation as a whole derives fair value or do you suspect that large gobs of your money go to bureaucratic waste and pork-barrel spending that few taxpayers would support if given a choice?

To help you answer that question, let me tell you about the one little corner of government spending I'm familiar with because my wife is a superintendent of schools: the education bureaucracy. Enormous sums of our tax dollars are spent every year devising, implementing, monitoring, and often litigating regulations: “No, Regulation 43.77659 B in Section 654.37D in the California Ed. Code states that the county should get the money." "No, Federal ruling 25.7736b says the district, not the county should get the money.” Only pennies on your dollar go to actually helping kids learn. You'll be amazed to see how absurdly labyrinthine even one set of rules governing one little pot of money is. Here, for example, are the rules governing just one portion of the additional tax dollars Obama is giving to state education departments.

So here’s a thought experiment: All government is hereby dismantled and all tax and fee dollars are returned to the taxpayers. Tens of thousands of dollars would be returned to the average family each year, which adds up to over a million dollars(!) over their lifetime. Thus, individuals could spend and save that fortune as they saw fit.

Companies would thus sprout up to provide services the public would be willing to pay for: roads, mass transit between highly-traveled places. The public would likely be willing to give the government some carefully monitored money to provide national defense and law enforcement and probably a safety net for people truly unable to support themselves on their own or through private charities. Schools, like most services currently provided by the government, would likely be private--no massive bureaucracy, which means most dollars would go directly to the classroom. Social Security probably wouldn't exist--a recent survey found that, if given a choice, half of people would opt out and simply rely on themselves to save money in a better investment vehicle than Social Security. (which is not hard to find.)

So imagine an America in which we got to keep 90% of what we earned rather than 25% and in which we had more choice in what services would be publicly or privately provided. Do you believe America would be better or worse than the America Obama is creating?

A Summary of My Environmental Views

Today, I received an email inviting me to join an environmentalist organization. Here was my response:

I would not join such an organization. I am distressed at how environmental policy has become "religion," going well beyond the science, claiming consensus where it doesn't exist, and censoring the hundreds of dissenting, responsible scientists.  (They had to create their own annual conference because they were shut out of the UN/IPCC's, which these scientists blast as politically motivated.) Here is Reason Magazine's coverage of this year's conference, which concluded today.

Especially in these tight economic times, we should not be doing what Obama and the Al Gore-led ExtremeGreens want to force us to do--divert massive amounts of our precious fiscal and human resources in a (vain) attempt to cool the earth.

Nor do I support the onerous restrictions on our lives that Obama and his ExtremeGreen-packed team plan to force upon us in an attempt to obtain energy independence, for example, pressuring us onto time-wasting mass transit by building no new freeways and converting existing ones into toll roads. Meanwhile, TeamObama is  wildly spending our tax dollars on physics-delimited solar and wind power and his green allies are throwing as many roadblocks as possible in front of building nuclear plants, which Europe and China wisely recognize as core to the energy-independence solution. 

If America intentionally were trying to destroy itself, it could hardly do a better job than Obama and his ExtremeGreens are doing, powerfully promulgating policies most of which, at their root, are based on bailing out bad and irresponsible businesses and individuals with money from the good and the responsible. He generally follows Marx's core tenet: from those who have to those who don't. Per the fall of the Soviet Union, all the Eastern bloc countries, and Cuba, that's a formula for a society's demise. 

When our children grow up, they will shake their heads wondering what we did to America.