Demise of the New York Times

Ten years ago, the common stock of the New York Times (symbol NYT) was priced at $52 a share. The price is now $7.66. Competition from electronic media didn’t help, of course. But the newspaper makes its financial condition worse by reporting news that’s not true and omitting news that is.

News Corporation, owner of the Wall Street Journal and many other papers, has also been subject to competition from electronic media. But News Corporation’s stock price (NWS) in ten years has nevertheless gone up from $13 to $22.27.

Liberal news anchors – which is most of them – look to the New York Times for stories. When the Times publishes misinformation, the anchors pass it right along. When the Times hides the truth, the anchors know nothing about it.

Eventually, the Times is likely to ascend to its liberal utopia in the sky, with the franchise acquired by conservatives or its stock price falling to zero. That will be a glorious day for America.

The liberal anchors will be confounded – a delight to witness. 

P.S. It’s better that Obamacare be reversed by 500 people in Congress rather than 5 people on the Supreme Court.

Federal Reserve Fairness

The cascade of new money the Federal Reserve is creating helps those who get it first and hurts those who get it last.

But first, here’s how the Federal Reserve creates money: Let’s say it buys $1 billion of financial assets. In payment, the Fed records $1 billion as a deposit in the seller’s bank account. That’s new money the seller can spend as he pleases. I’m not talking about the green stuff or metal we carry around in our pockets. No, over 90 percent of our money lies in bank deposits. If everyone tried to cash these funds, not nearly enough greenery would go around.

Okay, guess who gets the new money first: The big banks. The Fed overpays the biggies for their financial assets and lends to them on the cheap.

As to who gets the money last, there are two possibilities:

First, the mountain of new money would eventually cause higher prices, diminishing the purchasing power of regular folks, especially older ones on fixed incomes.

Alternatively, by selling the financial assets it holds, the Fed could pull the extra dollars out of the economy. This would cause a severe recession that would hurt the poor disproportionately. 

The Fed is helping the rich and hurting the poor. Actually, that’s what big government usually does.

Disability? The Government Itself is Disabled

At the risk of being excluded from doing business with the government, the Labor Department intends to require most businesses to adopt, in each job group, a hiring quota of 7 percent for disabled persons.

To Uncle Sam, “disabled” includes people with diabetes, depression, heart disease, and cancer. Also people who have trouble “standing, sitting, reaching, lifting, bending, reading, concentrating, thinking, communicating, and interacting with others.”  

Doesn’t this include just about everyone? On the face of it, companies should have no trouble meeting the 7-percent quota.

But no, the feds mean business. They debarred a Kentucky company from federal contracts for refusing to hire applicants suffering from serious back injuries and hernias for – get this – heavy-lifting jobs. They punished a Texas company for refusing to hire a man who suffered uncontrollable epileptic seizures to drive a truck full of hazardous waste. Loaded with common sense, those bureaucrats.

The government also wants companies to invite employees to label themselves disabled prior to being hired and once a year thereafter. We’re talking lawsuit city!

The government’s percentage of disabled employees, however, is only 5 percent, not 7 percent. The Labor Department’s percentage has decreased every year since Obama took office, despite hiring more employees. What’s good for the goose is good for the . . . oh well, forget it.

The Real Reason Liberals Want Gun Controls

It now appears that the federal Fast and Furious program to supply attack weapons to Mexican drug cartels was intended to generate unrest and crime which the U.S. government could then invoke to persuade Americans to tighten the gun laws. But Fast and Furious went awry, and two hundred Mexicans and one American were killed by the cartel. Those Washington reprobates weren’t controlling crime; they were creating it.  

Even if U.S. gun controls had been strengthened, crime wouldn’t have been reduced. The controls simply enable criminals to have their way with honest folks who cannot legally obtain guns.

Forget about gun controls cutting crime. The opposite is true: The more guns, the less crime. If most people carried guns on campuses, movie theaters, or elsewhere, a psycho wouldn’t be able to kill whole bunches of people. After the first shooting, he’d be killed himself by gun-toting good guys. The possibility of a quick demise might prevent crackpots from killing in the first place.

Anyway, for liberals, the main purpose of gun controls isn’t to control crime; it’s to keep people from resisting the growth of government. To liberals, government growth and the money that comes with it always come first. When government has the guns and citizens don’t, bingo, government gets bigger.

And even worse.

Is Obama Competent?

The liberal press now wonders whether President Obama is competent. 

In one sense, he is. In another, Lord, no.  

President Obama’s goal was to suppress private enterprise and bring on bigger government. His most important goal was national healthcare, a half-century quest by liberals. Since almost everything people do has health ramifications, nationalized healthcare enables government to become involved in almost every aspect of their lives.  

In terms of achieving Mr. Obama’s objectives, the enactment of healthcare was a triumph. The takeover of student loans, encouragement of clean energy, stimulus, bailouts, and tougher regulations were all successful implementations.

But larger and more-intrusive government makes life worse for most people. When government takes over student loans, the cost rises and the quality falls. Shifting to clean energy has no benefit but much higher costs. Stimulus, bailouts, tougher regulations – all do far more harm than good.

Obama did not expect the miserable results his policies engendered. It’s the role of government, he believes, to force solutions to social and economic problem. No other approach does he know. His intention to double down on failed policies displays incompetence in the extreme.

Barack Obama’s track record makes him the worst president in American history. No one else comes close.

The Right Kind of Austerity

Austerity can be good or bad.

The bad kind: Government increases spending, increases tax rates, makes it hard to start businesses, increases regulations, and greatly expands the money supply. The private sector suffers, not the government. This kind is now being imposed in America and even more in many nations of Europe. Mr. Obama likes the European approach.

The good kind of austerity: Government cuts spending, fires bureaucrats, lowers tax rates, encourages business startups, reduces regulations, protects private property, encourages freedom, and limits money creation. This is the better kind. Austerity is suffered by the government. Everyone else flourishes.

At the center of U.S. power, the U.S. Congress’s budget scoring system disregards whether spending decisions are made by private sector or the government. To take an extreme, even if the scoring system assumed that government taxed 100 percent of everyone’s wealth and spent 100 percent of the nation’s economy, the system would project the same economic growth rate as if the government spent and taxed less and the private sector did most of the spending.

Members of Congress who set up such a ridiculous model should be thrown out of office. Next year, with a bit of luck, perhaps they will be.

A Sweet Deal for a Few

The U.S. Senate has voted to continue the federal sugar program. Thanks a bunch, guys.  

The sugar program imposes quotas and price supports that restrict the supply of lower-priced sugar. The beneficiaries are fewer than 5,000 wealthy beet and sugar-cane producers, to the tune of an extra $1.4 billion a year - $280,000 apiece, on average. Lobbyists grease the wheels of Congress to keep this gravy train rolling.  

But Americans consumers pay about 50 percent more than the world price of sugar. We’re talking an extra $2.8 billion, which is twice as much as the government gravy to the sugar producers. The average American pays an extra $9 a year, which Congress knows you won’t notice.

This hidden tax is regressive, because the poor pay a larger percentage of their income for sugar.

The program also costs jobs. If U.S. sugar prices fell to the world price, food processors, bakeries, and candy makers would hire about 20,000 additional workers – more than the number of agricultural jobs supported by the government help.  

Concentrated benefits to a few, rich producers, with the costs spread widely to all Americans: There are scores of these horrendous policy distortions. Members of Congress who vote for them and receive campaign gifts for them should be retired.

The Law of the Sea is a Bum Deal

The Law of the Sea, a treaty the United States is being urged to sign, adds nothing the U.S. doesn’t already have and diminishes U.S. sovereignty.

The treaty codifies freedom of navigation, ocean overflights, and rights to passage through territorial waters and international straits. But through long-standing legal principles, international laws, and persistent naval operations, the United States already has these rights.

The U.S. enjoys full sovereignty over its continental shelf and can claim clear title to all the oil & gas and mineral resources that lie under the shelf. The royalties collected by the government from the exploitation of these resources need not be shared with any other nation.

But if the United States approves the Law of the Sea Treaty, it would be required to send a portion of the royalties to the International Seabed Authority in Kingston, Jamaica, which would distribute it, without U.S. input, to nations of the “developing world.”  

We’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars - an invitation to graft. Some of this boodle would go to corrupt dictatorships and state sponsors of terrorism.

Never mind the treaty; the best guarantee of U.S. rights on the high seas is a strong navy.

Man-Caused Global Warming is a Crock

The earth is not warming. It stopped doing so fourteen years ago, in 1998.

From 1940 to 1975, the earth cooled. Global-warming proponents predicted we were doomed from the cold. Fossil fuels were the cause, they said, and bigger government was the solution.

From 1975 to 1998, the earth warmed. Global-warming proponents predicted we were doomed from the heat. Fossil fuels were the cause, they said, and bigger government was the solution.

Grasping at straws, the proponents now say we’re doomed from extremes of weather. Fossil fuels are the cause, of course, and bigger government is the solution.

In the year 1000 AD, the world’s temperature was warmer than it is now. This was when Greenland was given its name. It was warm enough for the Vikings to grow grapes, when not a single SUV could be found anywhere – imagine that!

While Arctic sea ice has recently been minimal, the ice sheets surrounding the Antarctic have been historically wide.  

And those forlorn polar bears? A recent survey from the government of Nunavut, a northern Canadian territory, found that the polar bears in northern Canada are flourishing and may be more numerous than they’ve ever been.

Global-warming proponents masquerade as scientists. At heart, they are promoters of bigger, more intrusive government.

Redistribution City

Wealth is created only by entrepreneurs and others who work in the private sector. The government creates no wealth. It redistributes wealth instead and creates a morass of rules and regulations, especially against the bedraggled entrepreneurs.

Here’s how well the federal government has redistributed wealth: Out of the ten wealthiest counties in the United States, seven are in the suburbs of Washington, DC.

Yes, the feds have done a great job of redistribution . . . to themselves.

There are two Americas, as presidential candidate John Edwards put it. But the salient groups are the private sector and the public sector. Unfortunately, liberals have fought so ardently for over a century that the public sector has won, hands down.  

The rematch, however, has only just begun. Wisconsin’s recent election was a solid punch to the jaw by the good guys. It’ll be a tough fight, but the struggle will take less time than the last one, and the private sector will prevail.

Why Can’t We Just Get Along?

We can’t. Liberals live in a phantasy world where businessmen are bad and government employees are good. Liberals solve problems by force, striving for everyone to be equally poor. They believe that wealthy, heterosexual, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant men are responsible for their actions. Everyone else is a victim.

In 2009, the top 1 percent of taxpayers, ranked by Adjusted Gross Income, paid 36.7 percent of personal income taxes. The bottom 50 percent paid only 2.3 percent. This is outrageous; people who make twice as much should pay twice as much tax, not most of the tax.

People should be held responsible for their actions. They won’t have equal results, but they should have equal opportunities.

When problems are solved by force, rich people can game the government-imposed system while poor people can’t. The bigger the government, the greater the gap between rich and poor. Take North Korea, for example.

In a free-market, capitalist economy, competition keeps people relatively honest and helps the poor more than the rich.

Don’t compromise with liberals. Relegate them to a permanent minority. Also amend the civil service laws, so that thousands, perhaps millions, of bureaucrats may be fired.   

Will Taxing the Rich Go Over Well in November?

President Obama certainly hopes so. But here’s relevant polling data: 

In a 2008 poll conducted by the Tax Foundation, 68 percent favored abolishing the estate tax; only 19 percent opposed. Note that just 2 percent of Americans – rich people all – are subject to estate taxes. A great majority of those polled voted against the tax anyway.  

Fully 69 percent of likely votes believed that if someone earns twice as much, he should pay twice as much income tax. This implies a flat tax rate. Only 13 percent believe that those earning twice as much should pay more than twice as much tax, as exemplified by our current, “progressive” tax system.

In 2011, Rasmussen found that 74 percent of Americans believed that no one should pay more than 20 percent of income in federal, state, and local taxes combined.

Rasmussen also found that 68 percent of Americans prefer a government with few services and lower taxes.

These look like majorities to me – sweeping majorities.

Too-Big-to-Fail: a Huge Failure (II)

The federal government is identifying more than 50 large banks and non-bank financial companies as too big to-fail. These would receive taxpayer funds to prevent failure, and they would also be heavily regulated. 

That part about regulation is a laugh (when you can stop crying). The feds didn’t foresee the 2008 real estate crisis. The Madoff ponzi scheme occurred right under regulator noses. So did the Stanford ponzi scheme and the MF Global debacle.

Financial transactions are too complicated for the government to codify what’s safe and what isn’t. Instead, Congress has authorized the regulators to use their gut instinct. But regulatory gut instinct is less reliable than that of the company executives being regulated.

The regulators hold the power, however. It’s the blind leading the sighted – probably over a cliff.

There’s no limit on how far the regulators will thrust their grasping paws. Large industrial companies use financial products to lock in the prices for future delivery of raw materials. They also offer financing to vendors. Such financial activities may pull these large industrials companies into the too-big-to-fail quagmire, raising problems and costs for everyone.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the biggest failure of all? The obese federal government.