Monday, September 24, 2012

Classic Quotes, Shaw

"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."
- George Bernard Shaw

Sunday, September 23, 2012

Will: The Fed


“Quantitative easing is the government printing money,” Will said. “It’s part of not mission creep, but mission gallop on part of the Fed, which is on its way to becoming the fourth branch of government — accountable to no one and restrained by nothing, as far as I can tell, in exercising both monetary and fiscal policy.”
“The Fed] used to have one mandate: protect the currency as a store of value, prevent inflation,” Will said. “Then we added a second mandate: maximize employment. Now we have forgotten the first and concentrated solely on the second to produce trickle-down economics. The whole point is to drive people out of bonds and into riskier assets such as equities. Great effect on the stock market, where the equities are owned by a tiny portion of the American people in the hope that the wealth effect, as the stock market goes up, will cause wealthy Americans to spend and invest. And the result will, guess what – trickle down to the rest of us. Now, banks have $1.5 trillion in reserves. Companies have $2 trillion of cash sitting on the sidelines. Who in America is not buying a house because of 30-year mortgage at 3.5 percent is too high? Who is not hiring workers because lending is too expensive now?”


Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/09/16/george-will-fed-on-its-way-to-becoming-the-fourth-branch-of-government/#ixzz27J0t9S1a


Another reference to "trickle down economics" which, like the unicorn, has no actual connection to reality.



Dr Barbara Bellar: ObamaCare in One Sentence

WashPost: The Tangled Web of Conflicting Rights

By definition, we can't have the "right" to something that another person has the "right" to.

To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-f-will-the-tangled-web-of-conflicting-rights/2012/09/14/95b787c2-fddc-11e1-b153-218509a954e1_story.html?wpisrc=emailtoafriend

Can you have a right to a service from a company?  Can the company and its owners have a right to their opinions and political views?  If one - not the other.

It's Always Changing, Sometimes For the Better


In this, one of the most racially and culturally homogenous states, the only uninteresting thing about Love is that she is black. This is not just progress; it is the destination toward which progress was directed during the brisk march to today’s healthy indifference to the fact that Love would be the first black Republican woman ever in the House. Some “stalemate.”
In March 2008, in the speech ostensibly explaining the inexplicable — his 20 years in the pews of the raving Rev. Jeremiah Wright — candidate Barack Obama referred to “a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years.” Hardly.
He was then eight months from winning 43 percent of the white vote — two points more than John Kerry won four years earlier. Obama carried three states — three more than Kerry — of the Confederacy (Florida, Virginia and North Carolina). In states outside the South, Obama received substantially more white votes than any Democratic candidate since Lyndon Johnson in 1964 — more than Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton or Al Gore. This is part of the “racial stalemate” in which Mississippi has more black elected officials — not more relative to population; more — than any other state.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-utahs-mia-love-and-the-myth-of-the-racial-stalemate/2012/09/21/a41da834-0348-11e2-8102-ebee9c66e190_story.html

Point Taken About Taxes


If the welfare claimants that Mr Romney has in mind were to move into low paid jobs, they would begin paying federal income tax at 10 per cent on the first $8,700 of taxable income (after the standard personal deduction of $5,950), or if they were married and filing jointly, on $17,400 (with a joint deduction of $11,900).
That means a single person moving from welfare to work would pay only 10 per cent tax on an income of $14,650, and a married couple could earn $29,300 per year and still pay only 10 per cent income tax. The next tax bracket is 15 per cent, and that applies to married couples earning up to $70,700 a year.
So there is nothing like the tax disincentive to go from welfare to work in the US, as there has been in Britain, where even a quite low wage could involve losing a quarter of your earnings in tax.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/mitt-romney/9559659/Mitt-Romneys-message-is-good-it-just-needs-restating.html
This is such a non-inspiring election, there's almost no good writing out there on the topic.  "None of the above" should be able to defeat this President.  Bewildering.